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children. 169 SPECIAL EFFECTS in the third section of this book, the process continues to work, because it pushes some obvious psychological buttons. Clever intelligence operations are structured with concentric layers, like an onion. The data we have already reviewed show that the top level of the onion is designed around the official assertion that there is no UFO phenomenon at all. This is the level most skeptics and most scientists have chosen to believe. In my opinion the evidence is very strong that a genuine UFO phenomenon exists, but serious, dedicated, and aggressive research is required to peel away this first layer and to find the real facts. The second layer is exemplified by MJ-12. It claims that there is a large conspiracy to hide the information, but that the government—the wise white father in the White House—knows the truth. In his kind- ness he does not tell us, presumably because he wants to protect his I have shown that this notion was hard to believe. The UFO phe- nomenon is a major challenge to the entire edifice of our physics, and there is nothing the President can do about it. There may be a lot of buried data in Washington, there may be a large research project secretly trying to decipher it, but there is no secret truth! Again, data is not information. (Similarly, we have all the data in the world about cancer, but we still do not know precisely what mechanism causes it, or how to prevent it, in spite of the billions of dollars spent on research over the last half century.) The third layer of the onion comes to us courtesy of Messrs. Lear and Cooper. It claims that the aliens are here and they rule the world. Perhaps the third layer is ludicrous, but it works. The entire thrust of American UFO research has been destabilized by this drivel which would certainly not make it as science-fiction. The inescapable conclusion is that the people who claim so vocally to expose the cover-up may be the ones who constitute the cover-up itself. Somebody is going to a lot of trouble to convince us of the reality of extraterrestrials, to the exclusion of other, possibly more important hypotheses about UFOs. To get closer to the actual truth, as I try to do, we must patiently