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AREA 51 Blue Book. purposes? 77 friend Fred Beckman, who knew Hynek equally well, reminds me that it isn't until the Seventies that Hynek coined the term close encounter. As for "Colonel" Friend, he was barely a major when he headed Project Report 13 is a despicable fabrication. A single basic question remains. Given that all the stories about aliens, MJ-12, and crashed disks are delusionary, are we dealing simply with a spontaneous epidemic of strange beliefs among overly imaginative amateurs frustrated by the lack of progress in their research? Or is there a more sinister force at work, using them to purposely disseminate such spurious data to serve its own A JOURNEY TO DREAMLAND If you cannot force a train to slow down, there is another way of stopping it: you can speed up the locomotive until it goes crazy and jumps the track. Was that sort of action deliberately taken against UFO researchers when it became obvious that censorship and cover-up were no longer effective? Was that the reason for the leaking of false revela- tions, the deliberate fomenting of absurd beliefs in crashed saucers, alien autopsies, and Short Grays? Intelligence agencies and those they employ to monitor the UFO problem have an unfair advantage over the rest of us: they can disregard many laws in the name of national security, they enjoy access to sophis- ticated sensors and to large data bases, and they have little concern for individual privacy. They can use networks of informants to pick up rumors and they can use provocateurs to plant false ones. They can send independent researchers on a wild goose chase for weeks or months. In spite of this unfair advantage, however, the intelligence agencies also suffer from certain biases and weaknesses that make them vulnera- ble to the cynical outsider: they are often blinded by their own profes- sional arrogance and by the pride of knowing certain things that they wrongly assume no one else knows—or guesses. They tend to forget that