Page Content (OCR)
advisors, to include academics, scientists, and retired military officers, would meet regularly with the staff to offer input and help coordinate the public release of information. Ideally, information about UFOs that may currently be withheld by U.S. intelligence agencies would be released to the office and the public. Details of the mission and structure of the agency would obviously have to be carefully worked out, but experienced people are ready and available to assist in that process and make sure the mistakes of Project Blue Book are not repeated. This new plan would initiate a fundamentally different organization from that of Blue Book, because it would be committed, with public oversight, to properly investigate cases and to work with other countries. It would be the opposite of our previous Air Force agency—a controlled public-relations mechanism covering up the unsolved cases— that existed in the 1950s and ‘60s. In November 2007, twenty-two distinguished individuals, including six retired generals, from eleven countries signed a formal request for such an agency to be established. The "International Declaration to the United States Government," which I drafted in cooperation with members of my group, the Coalition for Freedom of Information (CFi), includes most of the writers for this book along with five others, and is posted on the CFi website. The document is signed by current and former military and government officials and pilots, each of whom, while on active duty, "has either been a witness to an incident involving an unidentified flying object or has conducted an official investigation into UFO cases relevant to aviation safety, national security, or for the benefit of science." [3] The declaration states that the current level of disengagement by the American government with important UFO sightings, such as the Phoenix Lights and the O'Hare sighting, "represents both a missed opportunity and a potential risk." The call to action asks the U.S. government to "join in cooperation with those governments which, recognizing the reality of unidentified flying objects and related aviation safety concerns, have already set up their own investigative agencies." It suggests that the U.S. Air Force or NASA serve as the location for such a research effort and ends with a final request: "We call on the United States of America to engage with us and with currently active officials around the world to address this problem in an ongoing dialogue." The credentials of the names making this request are impressive. As a result, the document received wide coverage in the press when it was endorsed by former governor Fife Symington and released at the November 2007 press conference in Washington, D.C. But nothing has changed as a result. Our group sidelined this initiative during the build-up to the 2008 presidential election, which fully occupied the country, and in the time following when the new Obama administration first took office and was faced with numerous engrossing and urgent challenges. Yet we remain as convinced as ever that this is not too much to ask. It is something governor Fife