Page Content (OCR)
Systems Evaluation Group in the office of the secretary of defense, the group also had working group member Dr. Lloyd Berkner, a physicist and one of the directors of the Brookhaven National Laboratories, as one of its members. The Robertson Panel spent the next three days reviewing case histories of UFO sightings assembled for them by Air Force Intelligence and saw two films that contained footage of alleged flying saucers. The panel concluded there was no threat to the United States and recommended that the government should start debunking UFO sightings in general. This, the CIA reported as late as 1988, was the only official government response to UFO sightings. Just over a year later, the White House agreed that it was necessary to have some sort of policy governing the telease of UFO information to the press. In order to keep lower-level officers from releasing unauthorized information - and by unauthorized the National Security Council advising the President meant only that information cleared by the working group - Gen. Nathan Twining, now the airforce chief of staff, signed off on Air Force Regulation 200-2, which said that it was permissible to release reports to the media only when the object was identifiable, like swamp gas or a meteorite. But only the Air Technical Intelligence Center could determine which objects were identifiable and which weren't. In other words, only the ATIC could authorize the release of any information about UFOs, and they did so only when the objects were clearly identifiable as common phenomena and not flying saucers. Throughout the 1950s, | witnessed the government become more and more secretive about UFOs even though privately | thought that they would get better information if they were more open about it. But | was also a military officer and understood the necessity of keeping information confidential until you understood what it was. Besides, the Soviets were making great strides in the race to get into space and we didn't know if they were getting cooperation from the EBEs. There truly was a war on, and | followed orders on the White House staff even as | watched the officers in the cover-up begin to trip over their own feet time and again. The darkness was closing in all around us. In 1961, the air force began two secret projects that, in effect, had been in operation since 1947 but had not been committed to policy. "Moon Dust" had to do with the establishment of recovery teams to retrieve and recover crashed or grounded "foreign" space vehicles. But for all intents and purposes, as far as the public was concerned the air force was looking for Soviet satellites that had fallen out of the sky and landed on Earth. But in reality the air force was establishing a recovery of UFOs program just like the army had pulled the crashed UFO out of the New Mexico desert fourteen years earlier. Then in Project "Blue Fly, " the air force authorized the immediate delivery of foreign crashed space vehicles and any other item of technical intelligence interest to Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton, Ohio, for evaluation. It was a repeat of General Twining's retrieval of the Roswell space vehicle from the 509th to Wright Field in 1947. In 1962, one of the assistants to the secretary of defense, Arthur Sylvester, told the press at a briefing that if the government deemed it necessary for reasons of national security, it would not even furnish information about UFOs to Congress, let alone the American public. Now | was at the Pentagon and | fully understood how the air force was moving to take control of the entire UFO situation. NASA had the mandate from the President to manage space exploration, but the military still had to defend against the UFO threat even though we were being hampered at every turn. Air Force projects "Saint" and "Blue Gemini" years later were outgrowths of USAF 7795, a code number for the USAF's first antisatellite program, an aggressive operation designed to locate, track, and destroy enemy surveillance satellites or, and more importantly, orbiting UFOs. Using the technology we had developed at R&D, the air force, and then the army, was taking the initial steps to defend the U.S. missile system against Soviet attacks from space and defend the planet against UFO intrusions. lock was in place, Blue Gemini, the killer’ satellite, would move in. One of the projects developed by Hughes Aircraft, a prime air defense contractor and satellite builder, Blue Gemini was the military version of NASA's manned Gemini capsule. Its mission, purely and simply, was to swoop in from a higher orbit and kill or disable an enemy satellite or a UFO. If possible, the Blue Gemini would try to "capture" a UFO in orbit by rendering it immobile and waiting for a manned military astronaut mission to "space walk" over and retrieve whatever we could. Both of these weapons, under the cover of other missions, of course, were eventually deployed, and today they form one of the lines of defense in an antimissile and anti-UFO surveil-lance system. 113 "Saint" was an orbital UFO inspector satellite, a version of a standard Agenda B satellite that the CIA had been using, that had an onboard TV camera and tracking and targeting radar system. Its job was surveillance. Find a potential enemy satellite or UFO lurking in orbit and lock onto it with a TV camera and with radar. Once the