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179 man lied to the American people when you assured them there was no reality to UFOs? You might like to, but you know that once you concede even the remote possibility that UFOs are anything more than mistakes and imagination, you will have opened the floodgates to a million awkward questions that will demand answers you simply are not prepared to give. Do you admit that there are unexplained vehicles flying through American skies, knowing you will then have to ex- plain why you don't know whose they are? And why, after more than forty years, the world's greatest air force remains power- less to interfere in any way with their activities? Such an admission of impotence (and, by implication, ineptitude) in the face of what could easily be seen as a threat to national secu- rity, would cast into disrepute the entire American air defense system. This would not please the taxpayers, who remember shelling out tens of billions of dollars in the expectation that they would be protected from above. You might admit that a few unexplained craft have over- flown the country, while claiming they constitute more of a curiosity than a threat. But the simple admission that even a few UFOs exist could well pop the cork out of the bottle. The noisy, but so far ineffective, private UFO community has for decades been claiming UFOs were real. By conceding this sin- gle point to them, you would have raised their stature and quite possibly elevated them to the status of authorities on a subject sadly lacking in reliable sources of information. After years of bashing their heads against a stone wall erected by your own intelligence services, they might suddenly become experts whose opinions would be eagerly sought by TV network an- chormen. And be responsible for even more gray hairs on the head of your press secretary. And if there are confirmed Unidentified Flying Objects over- head, as the amateurs had long insisted and the government had just as long denied, couldn't the scarier claims of close- range sightings also be true? As long as those in authority— government leaders, scientists—agreed that not a single so- called UFO had ever been seen, such far-out concepts as UFO IMPLICATIONS