Operation Trojan Horse - John Keel-pages

Page 263 of 287

Page 263 of 287
Operation Trojan Horse - John Keel-pages

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Project Blue Book’s published record clearly illustrates the official attitude of genuine disinterest. In the 1955 Project Blue Book Special Report No. 14, the only accurate summary of AF statistics, 689 sightings were listed as “unknown.” Fourteen years later, the Air Force was claiming that a total of 701 sightings were ‘‘unidentified,”’ an increase of only 12 over the 1955 total. Air Force statistics were shamelessly juggled year after year, and even the columns of figures were incorrectly added. On December 17, 1969, Air Force Secretary Robert C. Seamans Jr., announced the termination of Project Blue Book, and Blue Book’s files were retired to the archives at Maxwell Air Force Base in Alabama. Thus ended an era of almost unbelievable irresponsibility, on the part of both the Air Force and the UFO enthusiasts who had set themselves up as critics of the Air Force’s noninvestigations. Because the phenomenon is partly reflective, it had played the censorship game in earnest and had worked to manipulate the cultists into believing that some great official conspiracy was under way. Mystery men appeared in flap areas and warned, even threatened, witnesses into silence. Some of these men appeared in Air Force uniforms, and when fragments of these stories reached the cultists, they howled even more about ‘suppression of the truth.”’ I have investigated many of these cases myself, and I quickly discovered, to my amazement, that these ‘“‘Air Force officers”’ all looked alike. They were slight, olive-skinned men with Oriental eyes and high cheekbones. Some witnesses said they looked like Italians; others thought they were Burmese or Indian. I reported this to the Pentagon and found that other cases had been turning up, and that military intelligence, and even the FBI, were involved in investigating some of them. Early in 1967, I published a newspaper feature on these Air Force impersonators, and it was reprinted around the world. “Three men in black” have repeatedly driven up to the homes of witnesses in their shiny black Cadillacs to frighten the people into silence. In nearly every case, these men have been described as short, dark- skinned Orientals. For years many of the UFO cultists have believed that these men in black were CIA and Air Force agents, just as they believed that the government was tapping their phones and censoring their mail (much UFO mail seems to go astray). Recently New York’s District Attorney Frank Hogan revealed that it takes six men to maintain a full surveillance on a single phone. Phone tapping is a very expensive procedure, and we can seriously question the need or justification for the Air Force or CJA maintaining taps on the phones of teen-agers and little You Can't Tell the Players Without a Scorecard / 261