Suppressed Inventions and Other Discoveries (54 page)

At this point, as it usually does whenever a UFO incident occurs that is difficult to explain away in conventional terms, the U.S. government brought NASA expert (or establishment hatchet man, according to your point of view) James Oberg into the controversy to make a statement. Mr. Oberg stated authoritatively that what everyone had seen was fuel being dumped from a rocket on the Japanese satellite, as the rocket boosted the satellite into orbit, and that was that. Although this explanation left many questions unanswered (in particular, concerning the incidents in Clark County, Kentucky, and Syracuse, New York), it was accepted tamely without protest by the entire news media of this great nation as the final solution to the mystery of the night.

A lady named Lorraine Whitaker in Lanesboro, Pennsylvania, got a clear photograph of what had been visible in the sky over her area on the night of August 12, which depicts a sharply defined, intensely bright cigar shape, emitting a swirling cloud of luminous gas.

Paul Oles, who is the Planetarium Director at the Buhl Science Center in Pittsburgh, made the following statement: "We know what it wasn't,

*NorthAmericanAir DefenseCommand
but we have no idea what it was. Our most logical explanations have been totally ruled out. It now falls into the category of an unidentified sighting." However, only one newspaper even mentioned the statement by Mr. Oles. Every other newspaper nationwide that carried the story featured the statement by Mr. Oberg of NASA as definitive.

On the night of August 15, 1986, three days after the incidents I have just described, Angelo and Grazia Ricci of Verona, Italy, were abducted while on a summer vacation camping trip near Belluno, Italy. They were taken aboard a UFO by two humanoids, each about six feet, six inches tall, who were dressed in gray coveralls that left only their heads exposed. Their heads were long and hairless and had very pale skin. Their eyes were phosphorescent. They had pointed ears, a normal nose, and a narrow slit where the mouth should be. Mr. and Mrs. Ricci were subjected to medical examinations and various tests for about three hours before being released.

A series of events comparable in importance to those of August 12 occurred on September 23, 1986. They began at daybreak, when two brothers fishing on a lake near Daventry, England, reported that shortly after dawn they had seen six UFOs flying in formation behind a large UFO. Within the next few hours, thousands of people (including police) reported UFOs flying in formation and performing maneuvers, during which they left behind multi-colored vapor trails over West Germany, Holland, Belgium, Luxembourg, and France. In Paris, whole crowds of people driving to work during the morning rush witnessed a fleet of fifteen UFOs flying in formation. Simultaneously a ball of fire was seen over Amsterdam; what was described as a "flying machine" was reported by a staff member of the Royal Observatory in Belgium; "a very luminous object shaped like a rocket, three times as large as an airplane" as well as "a cluster of five or six luminous green objects" were reported from Luxembourg; and "a bright flying object with a luminous tail" was reported from West Germany. There were also similar reports from Derbyshire and Leicestershire in England.

The fifteen UFOs seen over the Montreuil region of Paris were described as silver-colored, but over the Chatelet region of Paris witnesses perceived them as intensely luminous green and turquoise blue, some of them emitting green flame. Over Paris they were traveling at a leisurely pace, about the speed of an airplane during an air show.

The nearly simultaneous occurrence of such phenomena over six of the nations of Western Europe on the morning of September 23, 1986, has all the characteristics of a carefully orchestrated and deliberately ostentatious display, obviously intended to bring about widespread recognition of the reality represented by UFOs among the intelligent citizens of these key countries.

What was the result?
It is hard to know whether to laugh or cry over the incorrigible hypocrisy with which the news media handled this story. How did the journalists deal with this unprecedented manifestation of high strangeness in the skies of Europe? They understandably requested an explanation from NORAD. However, when NORAD explained that what everyone had seen was debris from a Soviet booster rocket, an explanation that was directly contradicted by the observations the journalists had themselves recorded, this implausible explanation was instantly and uncritically accepted by the news media, which abdicated all pretense of independent reasoning and parroted it ad nauseam as the only rational solution to the enigma of what had happened that morning throughout six nations of Western Europe.

The next example of a deliberate and ostentatious UFO display did not occur over a heavily populated area, but northeastern Alaska is certainly a sensitive military zone. The report did not reach the U.S. news media until January 1, 1987, though the incident happened on November 17, 1986. The time lag between the date of the incident and the date the report was made public supports the hypothesis of covert censorship of the news media.

This case bears a remarkable resemblance to the case officially announced by the Soviet Academy of Sciences in 1985, in which a Soviet airliner was followed by a UFO for approximately 800 miles.

The case of November 17, 1986, involved the pilot, co-pilot, and flight engineer of a Japan Air Lines cargo jet that was making a return trip from Iceland to Anchorage, Alaska. The crew members first became aware of the three UFOs in the vicinity of their jet while over northeastern Alaska. Two of the UFOs were small, but the third was enormous, twice the size of an aircraft carrier. The UFOs followed the cargo jet for about 400 miles, during nearly an hour. They emitted flashing amber, green, and yellow lights. They played games with the jet: disappearing, reappearing, moving at incredible speeds, and hovering. At one point, the two smaller UFOs maintained positions directly in front of the cockpit of the cargo jet at close range, pacing the jet for several minutes at a distance of only a few feet in front of the cockpit, although the jet was traveling at 570 miles per hour at the time.

The large object appeared on the radar screens of Federal Aviation Administration flight controllers, who gave the Japan Air Lines pilot permission to attempt evasive action. Veteran pilot Captain Terauchi carried out evasive maneuvers, but was not able to shake off his pursuers. The UFOs later abandoned the pursuit of their own accord, without having taken any hostile action.

FAA officials interviewed the crew members upon their arrival at Anchorage and issued a statement saying that the crew was "normal, professional, rational, and had no drug or alcohol involvement."
Suppression of UFO Technologies and Extraterrestrial Contact 323

At first the FAA confirmed the sighting, then a few days later decided that one air traffic controller had mistakenly interpreted a split image of the cargo plane as a separate object. Establishment hatchet man Phil Klass was then called in to kill the story by announcing that Captain Terauchi, despite twenty-nine years of experience as a pilot and a hitherto impeccable record, had mistaken the planet Jupiter for a UFO. The fact that the large UFO had been witnessed not only visually by all crew members, but also on the jet's radar screen, and that neither Jupiter nor any other planet appears on radar screens, was ignored by Philip Klass. Hal Bernton, a reporter for the Daily News of Anchorage, Alaska, conducted an interview with the air traffic controller in question, Sam Rich, which was printed on January 9, 1987. Sam Rich's testimony contradicted the FAA's version of the event in several important ways.

Rich, who has worked with the FAA for over a decade, denied categorically that he was the only air traffic controller to have seen the radar track of the UFO. The two other controllers who were working that shift also saw it. The track was not very strong, but neither he nor his two colleagues thought that it could be a split image, a possiblity they considered at the time. Right after spotting the track, Rich phoned the Military Regional Operations Control Center, and "they informed me that they had the same radar track."

Rich confirmed that double images often occur on the FAA radar screen but said that the JAL plane was not in the area where these split images usually occur. Also, over the past decade there have been about half a dozen reports by pilots of unidentified lights in the region where the JAL plane sighted the UFOs.

To all this, I can now add the fact that there have been several sightings from the area of the JAL encounter since the incident took place, reported both by airplane pilots and by people on the ground. So who are we to believe—the air traffic controller who was actually on the job at the time of the incident, or the professional disinformation agents?

Another interesting aspect of the Japan Air Lines story is that although the incident occurred over Alaska on November 17, 1986, no U.S. media coverage of it took place until January 1987. When this six-week delay in making the story public was investigated, it turned out that the story never would have been made public at all in the United States if a family member of one of the JAL crew had not leaked the news to journalists in Japan. Once the story had entered the public domain in Japan, the U.S. authorities could no longer pretend that nothing had happened.

Yet another major development in the story of this case, which apparently just refuses to die, occured at the end of August 1987 when MUFON* researcher T. Scott Crain Jr. revealed (in an article ent i t l ed

* Mutual UFO Network

"New JAL Sighting Information," California UFO, vol. 2, no. 3) that there were indications that the images on the radar tapes had been tampered with. The FAA officials in Anchorage, Alaska, had sent the radar tapes to the main FAA office in Washington, D.C.—but they had not sent them directly. The tapes had traveled an indirect route, making an unexplained detour via the FAA Technical Center at Atlantic City, New Jersey. Researchers suspect that it was during this brief sojourn at the FAA Technical Center that the images on the tapes were altered. The Freedom of Information Act request that Mr. Crain sent to the FAA Technical Center was answered evasively.

So once again, the story of the way this case has been handled by the authorities provides a detailed demonstration of how the covert censorship enforces the UFO cover-up.

What this prolonged series of deliberate ostentatious displays appears to add up to is a reinforcement schedule, discreetly but firmly making the presence of extra-terrestrials undeniably obvious, puncturing the balloon of the big lie that has been foisted on U.S. citizens and the world for over 40 years, deflating it gradually in a manner that is calculated to oblige public recognition while avoiding public panic.

Another important case that just refuses to die is that of the "Westchester Wing," which was described in the Appendix of my previous book and which continues to be persistently reported. A major incident occurred on March 17, 1988, when hundreds of reports came in from northern New Jersey, New York City, and up the Hudson River Valley past Ossining to Mahopac, New York. As usual, the same old implausible explanation was spewed forth by the authorities: pranksters in ultralight aircraft. Attempts have been made, presumably by the authorities, to bolster the acceptability of this nonsense by sending up a fleet of ultralights now and then to imitate the Westchester Wing, but the imitations are so obviously different from the genuine sightings that this desperate ploy has been a complete flop.

Scientists at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, who examined a videotape of the Westchester Wing made in 1984, gave their "unofficial" opinion in the form of a letter that the lights are on a single, solid object—thereby ruling out formations of ultralight aircraft. They would not, of course, go on record with an official opinion, being employees of the same authorities who continue to maintain, despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary, that what huge numbers of people in greater New York have been seeing for the last ten years is pranksters in ultralight aircraft. This unprecedented series of sightings over the same area, the first of which took place on December 31, 1982, remains ongoing.

According to UFO researcher Rosemary Decker:

In pointing out that the vast majority of contemporary humanity feels threatened or terrified by any unprecedented divergence from conventionally accepted norms of reality, you are presenting a powerful argument in favor of governmental silence and media low-profiling. In view of the fact that government agencies are already acutely aware of the fear problem, we should be willing to see that some degree of reserve and silence is appropriate. There is no good reason why everyone should be entitled to know all there is to know on an immediate and widespread scale, as most of the population could not handle it, though it would be unwise to try to tell them so directly.

The behavior patterns of our visitors indicate that they also must be aware of the dangers of sudden wide-spread publicity concerning their presence. Otherwise why would they consistently manifest in waves within specfic limited areas for specific periods of time, build gradually to peaks, and then withdraw from these areas for long periods?

Discriminating reserve and caution on the part of officialdom are appropriate. However, blatant lying, deceit, and silencing of witnesses by ridicule or personal threats are deplorable. Such tactics are undermining both national and international security. The population of the entire world has by now received absurd explanations and outright lies from their respective governments for so many years that distrust of governments has reached epidemic proportions on a global scale.

If, during the 1940s or early 1950s, the official agencies had agreed among themselves on a policy of gradual and cautious, but honest presentation of the facts known to them, with the humility to be able to say 'We don't know' at times, the situation would not have gotten so completely out of hand, as it now is. Ever since 1947, officialdom has suffered from disagreements between agencies, between individuals within a given agency, and from differences in direction as key UFO policy personnel were toppled from office and replaced. Part of the problem of inconsistency in policy has been due to varying degrees of fear of public reaction, but is also due to the individual fears of those in office, as office-holders.