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INTRODUCTION
Whitley Strieber
1944: a clear afternoon over northern Italy, hard light, empty sky. American bombers are coming in high over the Po valley on a mission to attack German defensive positions. Below, die Luftwaffe scrambles a few ramshackle Me-109s. As the German fighters ascend, the pilots notice glowing balls of light pacing them just off their wingtips. Meanwhile, the American flyers above see the same thing—balls of light darting among their formations.
Pilots from both sides watch the objects warily. All assume that they are some sort of enemy secret weapon or tracking device.
It is not until after the war that it is realized the “foo-fighters,” as the Americans called them, were not created by either side. Early investigation of the objects led nowhere, and the matter was forgotten.
Then came June 24,1947. Kenneth Arnold was flying his single-engine airplane near Mount Rainier in Washington State, when he was startled by a flash. He then observed nine silvery craft slipping through the air, approaching Mount Rainier at a rapid rate of speed.
His report caused a sensation in the nervous postwar United States. It was the beginning of a sighting wave so massive that it was attributed by an uneasy press to hysteria. However, the Air Force was not so quick to dismiss the sightings. Indeed, at high levels there was considerable concern. Air Force intelligence was informing high command that the observations were “not at all imaginary.” And that “something is really flying around.”
Answers were needed, and a project was devised to get diem. Thus, in 1948 began Project Sign, and with it the start of the UFO controversy. Sign was inconclusive. It was followed by Project Grudge. In 1955 the Air Force released a study of 3,200 UFO reports, saying that almost half were unexplained. It continued with its study, this time under the name Project Blue Book. In 1967 it contracted with the University of Colorado to produce a study of the thousands of cases it had now accumulated.
When this study was released, its conclusion was that the UFO mystery was not worth scientific investigation. This was a startling and unexpected outcome, especially in view of the fact that thirty percent of cases had continued to defy explanation.
Members of the Blue Book Committee resigned in protest. There were books written to refute the conclusions in the report. But its recommendations became official policy. The Air Force ceased to collect UFO data. Scientific institutions declined to address the matter.
Nevertheless, UFO waves continued. Through the seventies and the eighties, sightings became more numerous and detailed. People began to claim close encounters with apparent aliens. But nobody knew the truth because there was no systematic study taking place. The question of whether UFOs were even real, let alone spacecraft from other planets, was officially ignored as a matter of national policy.
Not everybody was convinced that this was an appropriate posture, and there was continuous pressure for the government to get back into the UFO-reporting business and for science to take another look at the situation.
It reached a point, by the mid-nineties, when the issue was effectively forgotten by science.
The community of professional UFO researchers was concerned not only that this crucial issue was being ignored but also that a valuable resource of new knowledge was being debased and confused by wild public speculation. A decision was made to attempt to preserve the record and reintroduce the issue into the court of world opinion.
It was determined that a good approach might be to create a compendium of the best cases in history and send them to everyone who might make a difference. Publication was to be restricted to a small group of highly placed officials and scientists only.
Thus was born the UFO Briefing Document. It quickly became a matter of legend. What cases did it cover? Why was it thought to be so convincing? What secrets did it reveal?
It was funded by Laurance Rockefeller and prepared under the supervision of his associate Marie Galbraith. Longtime UFO investigators Don Berliner and Antonio Huneeus, acknowledged to be two leading experts in the field, assembled the cases. The BSW Foundation produced and distributed the document.
It was sent to prominent politicians, world leaders, and scientists in 1996. Rockefeller and his group waited expectantly for a response, but it was virtually ignored by the community of leaders who received it.
The document offers powerful evidence that UFOs are real. Indeed, the evidence presented here is overwhelming. Every skeptical objection is met: There are ample professionally trained witnesses involved; there are multiple witnesses; there is photographic support in some of the cases.
The document does not ask the reader to “believe in” UFOs. What it asks for is official recognition of the fact that the phenomenon is not understood and an appropriate scientific effort to explain it.
Some of the cases are truly startling, and one comes away from reading them with a deep sense of concern over why such an obvious mystery draws only official silence. It turns out that many highly skilled professional observers have seen UFOs and that there is almost irrefutable physical evidence associated with some UFO events.
A UFO chase is recorded on radar. Naval personnel photograph an apparent alien spacecraft. UFOs cause air-base alerts. An astonishing sighting wave stuns an entire country.
So why isn't this phenomenon—undeniably real and undeniably mysterious—treated like other unknowns? It isn't that the techniques of analysis are unavailable. There are dozens of different ways to detect and analyze UFO activity, most of which have never been tried. For example, either satellite or ground-based cameras or both could do continuous sky searches that would detect and record essentially everything in motion. Cameras capable of this already exist, and a ground-based system that would cover the entire United States could be deployed for under two million dollars. Satellites that are easily capable of photographing objects in space are already in place. All that would be necessary is to make relatively minor changes in their orientation and adjustments to accomplish complete monitoring of near-earth space. In addition, the North American Air Defense Command possesses an electro-optical monitoring system that is capable of detecting an object the size of a Ping-Pong ball at a distance of fifty thousand miles in space, even a fast-moving one.
So if all the equipment is so readily available, why is nothing being done?
The reason is that even well-informed scientists disbelieve the UFO information so completely that they do not consider it worth pursuing. Their ignorance is supported by a government that remains as secretive as it was during the Cold War. Virtually all the major Cold War acts—the National Security Act of 1947, the National Space Act of 1958, and a host of other secrecy acts and executive orders— remain the law of the land. Although a declassification process exists, there is evidence that an effort has been made to actually hide UFO information, to move it outside the system altogether in order to shield it from declassification.
The UFO Briefing Document presents damning evidence of government secrecy, narrowing the whole matter down to a single, extremely telling court case that makes it all but impossible for a thinking person to deny that the government keeps some UFO documents very, very secret.
Because of government secrecy, scientific indifference, and fifty years of press debunking, the whole UFO question has been marginalized. The Unidentified Flying Objects Briefing Document seeks to reopen it, and the proof that it assembles is overwhelmingly convincing. UFOs are real. To all appearances they are under intelligent control. And they come close to us at times, as some of the most shocking photographs in this document reveal.
The important question is not whether or not UFOs exist but why our society has responded in such a strange and inappropriate manner to their presence. The United States Air Force has not acted in a reasonable manner, especially in view of the fact that adequate equipment existed during the term of Project Blue Book to answer definitively the question of whether or not the objects were real. However, Blue Book was exclusively directed toward sighting reports. No effort was made by the Air Force, nor has such an effort ever been made, at least not publicly, to go out into the field and gather evidence in an organized and scientifically sound manner.
This should certainly have been done prior to dropping the question. The fact that the phenomenon is elusive and hard to photograph is not a realistic obstacle for determined, well-equipped investigators. High-speed cameras that could cover large areas of sky were developed in the forties and were readily available in the fifties. But no Air Force project ever made use of them for the purpose of attempting to track UFOs then, and nothing is being done now.
Because we have failed to apply proper scientific resources to this issue, we remain in a state of ignorance about UFOs. All we do know is that they are enough of a physical phenomenon to leave not only eyewitness reports but a substantial body of photographic and video evidence and reports of electromagnetic effects such as those that appear in the Briefing Document.
Since they give every evidence of being under intelligent control, and quite possibly being alien spacecraft, it would seem that an investigation is imperative. But it does not happen. Why not?
Superficially the answer would appear to be that fifty years of official denial has caused a cultural bias to develop against the phenomenon. The refusal of the government to admit that UFOs are a genuine unknown has resulted in a parallel refusal by funding organizations to pay for the sorts of scientific studies that would be required to solve the mystery and has caused the National Academy of Sciences to actually prohibit such studies in institutions under its authority.
Because of the official denials and the lack of scientific study, there has developed a bias against the subject within the intellectual community and the media. UFO-related stories, no matter how extraordinary, do not generally achieve coverage beyond the level of local newscasts, if at all. The bias against UFO reporting is stronger in the print than in broadcast media, to the point that it is highly unusual when anything related to UFOs gets coverage in newspapers and magazines, except to be rejected and debunked.
