UFO'S of UAP'S, ASTRONOMIE, RUIMTEVAART, ARCHEOLOGIE, OUDHEIDKUNDE, SF-SNUFJES EN ANDERE ESOTERISCHE WETENSCHAPPEN

On July 28, 1995, the U.S. Government Accountability Office’s report on the Roswell affair surfaced from its National Security and International Affairs Division. The GAO’s report did not provide any smoking-guns – such as old B&W photos of dead bodies and wreckage at the crash-site on the Foster Ranch, New Mexico. The report did, however, provide something interesting and controversial. And it’s something that has been misinterpreted for years. During the course of their search for records to try and better understand what had taken place at Roswell in early July 1947, the GAO learned that the entire outgoing messages from the Roswell Army Air Field generated during the period that the event occurred were missing. Vanished. Gone. And under circumstances that could not be fully determined and proved. Nor could the year in which the files went missing be confirmed. Maybe the late-forties. Maybe the fifties. The seventies? Who knows?

This, inevitably and very understandably, led certain Roswell researchers to proclaim that this was evidence of a significant event of UFO proportions having occurred. An event which certain elements of officialdom were determined to keep forever hidden from the populace, the media, and the UFO research community – and possibly, even, from anyone else in government who might dare to come looking, such as investigators of the GAO. Maybe, that’s precisely what happened. But, the story is not quite as straightforward as that. Matters are seldom straightforward when it comes to Roswell. Time and again, I have heard UFO researchers say, words to the effect of: “Because the 1947 files are missing, this must mean the government or the Air Force pulled them years ago, so no-one could get the files on the aliens.” Sure, that’s not impossible. But, there is another issue. The files in question that are unavailable to us do not cover just the key period of the Roswell affair. Rather, they extend as far back as March 1945 and as late as 1950.

(Nick Redfern)

Don’t get too exited: cool models at Roswell, New Mexico

We are led to believe that if aliens crashed a couple of hours’ drive from Roswell, then it was an event that occurred out of the blue, with little or no advance notice, and certainly not something that had been anticipated for a significant period of time. So, that being the case, why the need to pull files from as early as March 1945 to hide something that is said to have occurred, without much warning (if any at all), in the summer of 1947? Proponents of the notion that aliens crashed not too far from the city of Roswell might say that the government was just being overly careful, and wanted to make sure that (a) nothing was left behind, and (b) nothing had been misplaced in an earlier collection of material, or indeed, within a later collection of material, possibly held in secure safes at the base. So, they chose the best and quickest option available to them and scooped up pretty much everything that covered approximately two years or so before, and up to two-and-a-half years after the crash. And, maybe, that is exactly what happened. On the other hand, one can make a valid argument that the vanished files issue has no bearing on Roswell from an extraterrestrial perspective, because the documents that are missing include papers dating from two years before the event even took place. This also offers a theory (and, granted, that’s all it is) that there was another reason for the large-scale loss of material that the GAO sought to uncover. Let’s see what the GAO had to say about this matter of missing messages in its 1995 report:

“In addition to unit history reports, we also searched for other government records on the Roswell crash. In this regard, the Chief Archivist for the National Personnel Records Center provided us with documentation indicating that (1) RAAF records such as finance and accounting, supplies, buildings and grounds, and other general administrative matters from March 1945 through December 1949 and (2) RAAF outgoing messages from October 1946 through December 1949 were destroyed.” When the GAO demanded to know the reasons behind this development, they got an answer, as GAO files note: “According to this official [the Chief Archivist for the National Personnel Records Center], the document disposition form did not properly indicate the authority under which the disposal action was taken. The Center’s Chief Archivist stated that from his personal experience, many of the Air Force organizational records covering this time period were destroyed without entering a citation for the governing disposition authority. Our review of records control forms showing the destruction of other records – including outgoing RAAF messages for 1950 – supports the Chief Archivist’s viewpoint.”

(Nick Redfern)

At the crash site on the Foster Ranch, a few words about the legendary incident

So, in other words, we have yet another explanation that does not include high-level conspiracy to explain the loss and destruction of files, but which says far more about bureaucracy. So, what’s my point in all this? Well, this is my point: Yes, it certainly is intriguing that half-a-decade of certain files are missing from the old Roswell Army Air Field, and it may even be an issue of deep conspiracy to hide the remains of dead aliens and their craft. Or, it may not be. If UFO / Roswell researchers wish to maintain that the missing files from 1947 point to a specific cover-up of the Roswell event – and Roswell occurred out of the blue in July of that year – then they have to provide a viable reason as to why documentation dating back as far as March 1945 was pulled too, and why additional documentation remains missing from as late as 1950. Saying that “the outgoing Roswell messages from July 1947 are missing” is absolutely true, and it opens eyes and it catches the attention of ufologists and Roswell disciples everywhere. Noting that, in reality, the files actually cover 1945 to 1950, and also cover general administrative issues at the base, is far less attention-grabbing.

Ironically, the fact that the files which have vanished (files which still cannot be found) span 1945 to 1950, actually adds weight to the idea that Roswell was a military experiment. Just about everyone I spoke with while writing Body Snatchers in the Desert told me that the human experimentation began in 1945 and ended in the late 1940s – with a few additional tests having occurred in the early fifties. Pulling 1945-era files for a one-off event that didn’t occur until the summer of 1947 makes zero sense. Pulling certain 1945-era files that might have compromised the handful of pre-Roswell experiments – had they reached the public domain, of course – makes perfect sense. The same goes for the decision to make the 1948-1950 files vanish, too. The fact is that six years of files are missing, not just files from the time of the Roswell crash. This is indicative of a fairly lengthy series of ongoing tests that had to be hidden – not the out-of-the-blue crash of one solitary alien spacecraft midway through 1947.

(Nick Redfern)

“UFO Capital”

It should also be recalled that President Clinton’s Advisory Committee on Human Radiation Experiments revealed that “…a number of potentially important collections could not be located and were evidently lost or destroyed [italics mine]. Similarly, the Committee reveals, a number of those same document collections related to experiments undertaken in the fields of biomedicine, defense and space exploration; and in the great majority of these cases only fragmentary data remained. Where programs were legitimately kept secret for national security reasons, states the Committee, the government often did not create or maintain adequate records [italics mine], thereby preventing the public, and those most at risk, from learning the facts in a timely and complete fashion.” All of this is highly suggestive of an agenda to make Roswell go away – permanently.

The world of UFO and extraterrestrial study and disclosure has never had a better proponent that former Nevada Senator and Senate majority leader Harry Reid, who passed away on December 28th at the age of 82. Other media sources will detail his remarkable life and long political career, but many are leaving out the impact he had on the paranormal world by approving secretly a fund for UFO studies and publicly pushing for more.

Harry Reid

“One day in 1996, I received a call from George Knapp, an investigative reporter at KLAS-TV, the CBS affiliate in Las Vegas, and a friend of mine. “Harry,” he said, “there’s something you have to attend.” He invited me to an upcoming conference that would focus on what the U.S. government generally refers to as “unidentified aerial phenomena,” but what most other people simply call U.F.O.s, a subject Mr. Knapp had, and still has, a particular interest in.”

George Knapp indeed still has an interest in UFOs and we’re forever indebted to him for introducing then Nevada Senator Harry Reid to the subject, as was Reid in his 2021 New York Times article on the subject. It seems strange that the Senator representing Area 51 had little interest in UFOs, but that conference and his friendship with fellow senator and former astronaut John Glenn led Reid to ‘cross the aisle’ in 2007 and join forces with Republican Senator Ted Stevens of Alaska and Democrat Daniel Inouye of Hawaii (Reid was Senate majority leader at the time) to put $22 million in the Pentagon budget for what became known as the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (ATTIP).

“I think it’s one of the good things I did in my congressional service. I’ve done something that no one has done before.”

Reid stated in 2009 that ATTIP made “much progress” with the “identification of several highly sensitive, unconventional aerospace-related findings” that will “likely lead to technology advancements.” It ended in 2012 but was continued secretly continued, and become famous through the work of Luis Elizondo, its former head, and the release of the videos of the now famous Tic Tac UFOs encountered by US Navy pilots and ship personnel.

“I think that I have opened the door to people not being afraid to talk about it. I know that when I first got involved in this, people in the military were afraid to mention it for fear of it hurting their promotions. But now the Pentagon has told them they should report all these things that they see that are unusual. So we made a tremendous amount of progress.”

Progress indeed! Senators Marco Rubio of Florida and Kirsten Gillibrand of New York picked up where Reid left off after retiring and were instrumental in passing an amendment to the Fiscal Year 2022 National Defense Authorization Act to establish an “Anomaly Surveillance and Resolution Office” which, among other things, will reverse-engineer UFOs. That’s a long way from the dreams of Harry Reid, who said that has a young boy in rural Searchlight, Nevada, he often looked up at the shooting stars. That interest continued until the day he died – Reid both pushed for more public interest in UFOs and pushed governments – ours and others – to be open about them.

“I believe that there is information uncovered by the government’s covert investigations into unidentified aerial phenomena that can be disclosed to the public without harming our national security.”

In his powerful position, Reid was a witness to what the covert investigations had found and, though sometimes misquoted, was always honest about it.

“The truth, disappointing as it may be, is that there’s still a great deal we don’t understand. It’s unclear whether the U.F.O.s we have encountered could have been built by foreign adversaries, whether our pilots’ visual perception during some encounters was somehow distorted, or whether we truly have credible evidence of extraterrestrial visitations. There may be other, as yet unknown explanations for some of these strange sightings.”

Harry Reid

Harry Reid had no problem with those who believed as a matter of faith that UFOs bore extraterrestrials from other worlds, but he always pushed to “lead with the science“ and get away from “conspiratorial theories and quack ideas.” He often said he finally came to “know Area 51 quite well” and “know what they’ve done there.” He had no reason to ‘storm’ it, but he respected the security surrounding the advanced testing going on there in his home state.

The last line of one of his last articles would make a fitting tombstone epitaph for the late Senator Harry Reid – the best friend UFOs ever had.