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of the working group would be free to research the real flying disk phenomenon as they deemed appropriate. But through it all, Twining stressed, there had to be a way of maintaining full deniability of the flying disk phenomenon while actually preparing the public for a disclosure by gradually desensitizing them to the potential terror of confronting a more powerful biological entity from a different world. It would have to be, General Twining suggested, at the same time both the greatest cover-up and greatest public relations program ever undertaken. The group agreed that these were the requirements of the endeavor they would undertake. They would form nothing less than a government within the government, sustaining itself from presidential administration to presidential administration regardless of whatever political party took power, and ruthlessly guarding their secrets while evaluating every new bit of information on flying saucers they received. But at the same time, they would allow disclosure of some of the most farfetched information, whether true or not, because it would help create a climate of public attitude that would be able to accept the existence of extraterrestrial life without a general sense of panic. "It will be, " General Twining said, "a case where the cover-up is the disclosure and the disclosure is the cover- up. Deny everything, but let the public sentiment take its course. Let skepticism do our work for us until the truth becomes common acceptance." Meanwhile, the group agreed to establish an information gathering project, ultimately named Blue Book and managed explicitly by the air force, which would serve public relations purposes by allowing individuals to file reports on flying disk sightings. While the Blue Book field officers attributed commonplace explanations to the reported sightings, the entire project was a mechanism to acquire photographic records of flying saucer activity for evaluation and research. The most intriguing sightings that had the highest probability of being truly unidentified objects would be bumped upstairs to the working group for dissemination to the authorized agencies carrying on the research. For my purposes, when | entered the Pentagon, the general category of all flying disk phenomena research and evaluation was referred to simply as "foreign technology. " CHAPTER 6 The Strategy there is an old story | once heard about keeping secrets. A group of men were trying to protect their deepest secrets from the rest of the world. They took their secrets and hid them in a shack whose very location was a secret. But the secret location was soon discovered and in it was discovered the secrets that the group was hiding. But before every secret could be revealed, the men quickly built a second shack where they stored those secrets they still kept to themselves. Soon, the second shack was discovered and the group realized they would have to give up some secrets to protect the rest. So they again moved quickly to build a third shack and protect whatever secrets they could. This process repeated itself over and over until anyone wanting to find out what the secrets were had to start at the first shack and work their way from shack to shack until they came to where they could go no further because they didn't know the location of the next shack. For fifty years this was the very process by which the secrets of Roswell were protected by various serial incarnations of an ad hoc confederation of top-secret working groups throughout different branches of the government, and it is still going on today. Were you to search through every government document to find the declassified secrets of Roswell and the contact we maintained with the aliens who were visiting us before and have been doing so ever since, you would find code named project after code named project, each with its own file, security classification, military or government administration, oversight mechanism, some form of budget, and even reports of highly classified documents. All of these projects were started to accomplish part of the same task: manage our ongoing relationship with the alien visitors we discovered at Roswell. However, at each level, once the security had been breached for whatever reason -even by design - part of the secret was disclosed through declassification while the rest was dragged into a new classified project or moved to an existing one that had not been compromised. It makes perfect sense, especially to those of us who understand that the government is not some monolithic piece of granite that never moves or reacts. To those of us inside the military’government machine the government is dynamic, highly reactive, and even proactive when it comes to devising ways to protect its most 33