The G.R.E.P.I. makes

the C.I.A. go public

One should never loose hope!

Two weeks after the G.R.E.P.I. let the World know of his message addressed to the Agency, which honored the memory of early deceased ufologists on the occasion of the C.I.A.'s 50th anniversary, the former responded by going public in a 11-page report (plus 7 pages of foot-notes), showing for the first time a slight opening in the cover-up policy it had been constantly applying since the Roswell events in 1947.

This report, signed by Gerald K. Haines, is accessible on the C.I.A official web site, in the Studies In Intelligence page, Vol. 01 N°1, 1997 (http://www.cia.gov/csi/studies/97unclass/ufo.html) or on our site . Referring to books such as Timothy Good's Above Top Secret(!), the author admits that the Agency "closely monitored the Air Force effort" to persuade the public that UFOs were not extraordinary, and that the CIA was behind the Robertson Panel, a scientific committee whose 12-hour study in January 1953 concluded that flying saucers were not a "direct threat to national security", and that there was no evidence "that the objects sighted might be extraterrestrials"... but that "UFO reporting might threaten the orderly functioning of the government by clogging the channels of communication with irrelevant reports and by inducing hysterical mass behaviour harmful to constituted authority".

Concrete consequences have followed after the panel advised the National Security Council to "debunk UFO reports and institute policy of public education to reassure the public of the lack of evidence behinds UFOs", a political rather than scientific position which would enventually end in the closing down of most of the private UFO research associations in the US and beyond in 1953... (But the '97 report seems to ignore that point).

All the next Air Force UFO reports would eventually follow the way opened by the Robertson Panel. From Hynek's swamp gas to the thoroughful analyses by the Condon Committee, CIA officials always had a look on the Pentagon's communication policy, although they claimed to have no interest in UFOs.

The just released report is somehow balanced: no further commitment can be found about C.I.A.'s involvement in UFO monitoring and debunking - however, what is confessed here goes far beyond all previous official statements. But the author has not eluded some references to the presumed reality of UFOs: quoting a British study stating that these were "misrepresentations of natural phenomena", Haines nevertheless mentions the sighting of a "perfect flying saucer" by R.A.F. pilots and senior military officials.

If a certain kind of honesty is to be recognised in the C.I.A. report, it should be noticed that it remains vague as far as the dramatic recent UFO related events are concerned. The report looks to be an attempt to minimize the deep interest the US governement maintained in the UFO phenomenon "in connection with US psychological warfare efforts"... Moreover, Haines doesn't find it worth to take valuable UFO testimonies into account: were former Presidents Carter and Reagan also victims of "mass hysteria"?

Haines mentions a letter from a CIA's Information and Privacy Coordinator named Wilson, observing that he "was ill informed" - allowing us to simply wonder if Haines himself had access to a complete information of the CIA's UFO files.

By the way, we are surprised to see so many official reactions 50 years after Frank Scully invented a rumour...

Last minute: we just learned from a reliable source that this report was already about for years. Two paragraphs only (mentioning political involvement with other countries) were recently declassified.It seems that we are victims of a coincidence...
The G.R.E.P.I. should not be the Tiger of Paper it imagined?!?

Read the commentary by Dr Bruce Maccabee on the site of UFO Folklore! It's worth a look.

 

Thanks to Thierry Wathelet of UFOCOM for providing the report's URL