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groups. 167 SPECIAL EFFECTS to the intelligence community. I asserted that other groups were under similar surveillance. American UFO research was not willing to listen to such simple truth: the book was hastily rejected by the believers. It took another ten years for the assertions it contained to be vin- dicated. As the full text of the 1953 Air Force panel—which gathered Louis Alvarez and other scientific luminaries—was finally understood, it became apparent that the real sponsor had been the CIA, and that one of the secret recommendations targeted the infiltration of the UFO The deeper lesson, however, has not yet been learned. It has become a favorite game among ufologists to sue various gov- ernment agencies under the Freedom of Information Act and to ponder the thousands of pages released through this process. Many of the documents that have come to light in this way during the Eighties are papers that I remember having read in the Sixties as Dr. Hynek's associate. How did they find their way into classified files retrieved under the FOIA? The answer, once again, is strikingly simple. Twenty years ago I used to sit in Dr. Hynek's study in Evanston to read two-page telex messages sent to the Foreign Technology Division at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base. They would originate in such places as the control tower at Okinawa Air Force Base and would be directed to FTD and a bewildering series of other addressees that included CIA, NSA, JCS (Joint Chiefs of Staff), the White House, State Department, and a dozen other places. At the very end of the dispatch would be the sighting itself: "Mrs. Brown has reported a strange light." I would show the piece of paper to Hynek and I would ask him, "Allen, why on earth do the White House and the NSA need to know that Mrs. Brown has seen a light?" He would laugh and explain to me that the Air Force could not leave it to some low-ranking telex operator to decide who should receive a particular piece of information. Anything that originated from the