UFOs - Generals, Pilots And Governmant Officials Go On

Page 78 of 229

Page 78 of 229
UFOs - Generals, Pilots And Governmant Officials Go On

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propaganda, to "debunk," or ridicule, UFOs. Public interest in UFO incidents was to be strongly discouraged and diminished through these tactics, and intelligence operatives could make sure that the facts were kept from leading researchers through disinformation. In the name of national security, the subject was fair game for the entire U.S. intelligence apparatus. All of these recommendations were written in black and white by the CIA panel and then classified, and the public did not have access to the full report until 1975, when the explosive Robertson Panel Report was finally released in its entirety. When the CIA convened its selected group of scientists in 1953, astronomer J. Allen Hynek had been working for a number of years as consultant to the U.S. Air Force's Project Blue Book. Formerly director of Ohio State University's McMillan Observatory and later chairman of the astronomy department and director of the Lindheimer Astronomical Research Center at Northwestern University, Dr. Hynek had been hired in 1948. He sat in on most of the Robertson Panel meetings and observed the predetermined agenda unfold, noting that the best UFO evidence was not given proper attention. "The implication in the Panel Report was that UFOs were a nonsense (non-science) matter, to be debunked at all costs," Hynek revealed later. "It made the subject of UFOs scientifically unrespectable."[11] Project Blue Book had been set up as a repository for UFO cases and a place for people to call and file reports of sightings, but in reality it was an understaffed, amateurish public relations operation focused on explaining away UFO sightings, no matter how farfetched the explanation. Throughout his career as popular public representative of Blue Book for the duration of its operation, Hynek was well aware of the integration of the "training and debunking" tactic within the Air Force program, but ironically, as one of the implementers of the Robertson Panel agenda, he was part of the problem himself. Years later he admitted that "for nearly twenty years [of Project Blue Book, 1951-1970] not enough attention was paid to the subject to acquire the kind of data needed even to decide the nature of the UFO amateurish focused an on but to phenomenon." [12] Hynek was the only consistent presence at Blue Book and the sole scientist. The office was staffed mainly by an ever-changing stream of low-ranking officers with no particular training to prepare them for this line of work, and often little interest in it. Hynek brought some respectability to the Air Force project, though it was never equipped to solve the problem and official prejudice kept it that way. Despite his eventual transformation after two decades of work with the Air Force, Hynek had earlier stretched logic to its limit in order to explain away as many UFO reports as possible. In his landmark 1972 book The UFO Experience: A Scientific Inquiry, he acknowledged that debunking was what the Air Force expected of him. "The entire Blue Book operation was a foul-up based on the categorical premise that the incredible he that Hynek revealed later.