UFO, page 37
For much of his life, Reagan had been fascinated by science fiction and dramas of the skies, seeing the stories not so much as fiction but as a roadmap to the outer bounds of human imagination and future utopias. He loved the drama and mystery of the Kennedy-era space race, and the novels of Edgar Rice Burroughs about a Martian warlord named John Carter. His service in World War II had brought him into the motion picture unit of the Army Air Forces, and later as an actor, he’d starred in countless films focused on military operations, as well as a couple of science fiction–oriented productions, including Murder in the Air, in which he played a government agent who is asked to impersonate a dead spy in order to destroy a US Navy dirigible and stop a death ray.
Like his predecessor, Reagan, too, had seen a UFO personally, while flying in a private Cessna Citation near Bakersfield, California, in 1974. Reagan’s pilot that night, Bill Paynter, later recounted noticing a strange object several hundred yards behind their plane, “a fairly steady light until it began to accelerate. Then it appeared to elongate. Then the light took off. It went up at a 45-degree angle at a high rate of speed. Everyone on the plane was surprised,” he said. “The UFO went from a normal cruise speed to a fantastic speed instantly. If you give an airplane power, it will accelerate—but not like a hot rod, and that’s what this was like.” Reagan himself was in awe: “It went straight up into the heavens,” he recalled.
Now, upon his election to the presidency in 1981, he had pulled together a space advisory council that included leading sci-fi writers, a team he’d kept in place even after the presidential transition was complete, and governed through anecdotes and experiences from movies.I He had long loved the message of the 1951 invasion movie The Day the Earth Stood Still, that the nations of the world could set aside their differences and unite against a common foe. In the heady postwar era, he’d even joined the United World Federalists, a North Carolina–based utopian group that advocated for a single peaceful global government.
Such feelings of hope and optimism were sorely needed, as the Soviet Union appeared to be on the downslide, and fears of a nuclear war caused out of desperation persisted. Despite a hawkish first year in office, Reagan had quickly intuited that in the nuclear age, when Armageddon beckoned, the heroes were no longer the warriors—the heroes were the peacemakers. The Cold War, he realized, was like a Western—two quick-draw gunslingers facing off at high noon, but he knew that both would fall in any shoot-out. There would be no hero left standing once the ICBMs launched. Peace, instead, was the heroic option. And he, very much, very very much, wanted to be the hero on the global stage, just as he’d long been on-screen. In 1983, influenced in part by his emotional reaction to a TV movie called The Day After that depicted the fallout of a nuclear Armageddon in graphic visuals, the president began a campaign for a new missile defense system called the Strategic Defense Initiative that was quickly nicknamed, pejoratively, “Star Wars,” and as his second term began, met with Soviet leader Mikhail Gorbachev on the banks of Lake Geneva for a summit. Midway through, they took a private stroll outside, accompanied only by their interpreters.
As Gorbachev later recounted about their walk, “President Reagan suddenly said to me, ‘What would you do if the United States were suddenly attacked by someone from outer space? Would you help us?’ I said, ‘No doubt about it.’ He said, ‘We too.’ So that’s interesting.” To the US president, the question was an opportunity to recognize a shared desire to protect humanity on Earth, a species that might very well succumb to the horrors of nuclear war. If they’d act to protect Earth from aliens, maybe they should act now to protect the planet from similar destruction at home.
Later, Reagan would use the same analogy in a speech to the United Nations, saying, “Perhaps we need some outside, universal threat to make us recognize this common bond. I occasionally think how quickly our differences worldwide would vanish if we were facing an alien threat from outside this world. And yet, I ask you, is not an alien force already among us? What could be more alien to the universal aspirations of our peoples than war and the threat of war?”II
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While to some, the American leader’s focus on the extraterrestrial beyond might have seemed juvenile or unnecessary, it turned out to be more relevant than ever. As the Cold War entered its final chapter, both the US and Soviet governments were once again hard at work, trying to pin down whether any such invasion might be coming—and, specifically, what the other’s government knew about the reality of the UFOs.
As the president pursued his own line of alien-inspired policy, a Pentagon official named Colonel John AlexanderIII did the same, launching a personal and largely unsanctioned inquiry into the government’s knowledge of unidentified flying objects. A former Green Beret who had served in Vietnam, Alexander had spent his postwar years at the edge of research in army intelligence, working specifically on New Age mysticism, physic abilities, and paranormal activities.IV In 1980, after spending time on a team seeking to develop next-generation weapons systems, he’d written a boundary-pushing article for the journal of the army’s Command and General Staff College titled “The New Mental Battlefield,” which considered how psychic abilities might be applied to military operations. (It’s “out there” ideas attracted the attention of some media, including Washington investigative columnist Jack Anderson, who sarcastically referred to the “Voodoo Warriors of the Pentagon,” in an article about the potential practice.)
He also met with a Lockheed executive at Skunk Works to discuss Area 51 and its then cutting-edge work on stealth technology and the F-117—a conversation that eventually shifted to the men’s shared interest in UFOs. Both, as it turned out, assumed that someone somewhere in the government was hard at work on the subject, especially when it came to the Roswell case. Knowing the ins and outs of how government operated, Alexander theorized that a crack team of government scientists had examined the downed crash, but lacked the sophisticated understanding of physics and engineering behind it, and then set it aside in a “Raiders of the Lost Ark scenario,” a reference to the final scene of the Indiana Jones movie when the Ark of the Covenant is crated up and wheeled into a giant anonymous government warehouse to be hidden (and forgotten) amid all manner of other uncertain lost treasures. Presumably, the government reconvened a team every decade or so, with updated science, to see what it could glean from the alien craft. The executive and the official also figured that the US probably had at least two UFO efforts currently in operation—one run by the air force, and another by a group of agencies that brought in the relevant scientific and intelligence components. Since they wouldn’t bust the case wide open, maybe Alexander and his new ally should be the ones to try.
Together, they began assembling a cross-agency team Alexander called the Advanced Theoretical Physics Project, a name purposely obtuse and uninteresting so as to evade any scrutiny or interest. To ensure they remained off any bureaucratic radar and avoided leaks, Alexander demanded that no written records be kept, and that the group assembled to do the work be, in his words, “literally an old boy network” of established and trusted contacts. Everyone involved would have to at least have a minimum security clearance of “TS-SCI at SI-TK,” the government notation for people cleared for top secret information and the even more restrictive “sensitive compartmented information,” including so-called communication intelligence, known as “special intelligence,” or SI, and Talent Keyhole intelligence, the designation for imagery from the nation’s spy satellites.
The first meeting, held at the offices of the defense contractor BDM in Tysons Corner, Virginia, consisted of more than a dozen officials from the army, air force, DIA, NSA, and CIA, as well as several major aerospace manufacturers like Lockheed and McDonnell Douglas. Together they discussed the knowns and unknowns of the UFO phenomena and the extent of the government’s involvement—but as their day progressed, it became clear everyone had only the same second- or thirdhand knowledge. “Everyone from an organization that seemed a likely candidate—either from the US government or aerospace industry—thought it was some other agency or group that was conducting the research,” Alexander explained in his memoir.
Over the next two years, from 1985 to 1987, the group met at least four times, according to a schedule later obtained by ufologist Richard Dolan. In one meeting, they examined old classified government reports about UFOs, including original sightings reports, stunned by how little meaning the classified material contained. “What civilian UFO researchers did not know was that 99 percent of the material was actually in the public domain,” Alexander recalled, and therefore either sanitized or inconsequential. When they got into the Tehran incident, for instance, they found that the only reason the government’s records were classified was to protect the fact that US intelligence personnel had spoken directly to the Iranian pilots—the US didn’t want it to leak back to the Shah that it had sources directly inside his military. They were also surprised at how shoddy and intellectually incurious previous efforts like the Condon Committee had been; contrary to public signs that the government had been running a highly classified UFO cover-up, the Advanced Theoretical Physics Project found mounting evidence that the government had never cared that much about UFOs in the first place.
For the next two years, Alexander and his colleagues kept searching for more answers, approaching engineers, officials, and agencies that would typically be kept in the loop about a secret UFO effort for information—at one point, Alexander even met with Ben Rich, the president of Lockheed’s Skunk Works, arguably the most prestigious position in American aviation engineering. Rich had been intimately involved in the SR-71 and F-117 stealth fighters and helped invent the very idea of stealth technology, but now he professed ignorance about UFOs, and showed Alexander his own wish list for cutting-edge technologies that Lockheed wanted to crack. Rich confessed that he’d had the same suspicions that Alexander did—surely someone else was working on UFOs—and had assigned one of his own Skunk Works to conduct a hunt for rival UFO projects at other defense contractors. The project hadn’t secured any evidence. As a courtesy, he introduced Alexander to the former deputy director of the Pentagon’s research and engineering effort, who also seemed to be clueless about any black projects. One by one, quiet, trusted, high-level inquiries at other likely government UFO homes struck out—not NORAD, not the DIA, not the CIA, not the NSA had any information or answers. NORAD personnel walked Alexander through their once- or twice-monthly encounters with “uncorrelated objects,” e.g., UFOs, on their continental early-warning radars, but explained that such things weren’t usually reported up the chain of command. “The emphasis of the computer codes was to distinguish threat from no threat,” Alexander said. “Extraneous data were generally rejected, meaning that if the incoming objects were not following a predicated path that indicated a threat, it was rejected.”
One of the key participants at ATP was a longtime NSA employee named Howell McConnell, who had come over the years to be the signals intelligence agency’s unofficial in-house UFO expert. If anyone was in a position in the US government to have detected signs of a real covert UFO intelligence program—in the US or the Soviet Union for that matter—it was McConnell. In 1968, he’d authored a position paper for NSA leaders about the UFO phenomenon, and in the years since, colleagues had regularly sent relevant intelligence caught in its global information dragnet his way. McConnell had become something of a figure in UFO circles and had even befriended Jacques Vallée over the years, the two men bonding over long philosophical conversations about UFOs and religion. (In one conversation recounted in Vallée’s diaries, McConnell had tried to reassure him that the intelligence community was, perhaps counterintuitively, too risk-averse to hide the truth about UFOs. “Bureaucrats are just like your scientists,” McConnell told the astronomer. “I work for a bunch of bureaucrats whose tendency, too, is to deny. But an agency like ours can take no risks. So we keep an eye on things. If something does happen, they’ll be able to say they were aware of the situation, that one of their analysts was informed, his documentation up to date.”) Nothing McConnell had ever found, heard, or read shook him from that belief or led him to suspect there was a secret US government project.
By late in Reagan’s presidency, Alexander’s work had finally reached a point where real funding was needed, and so he approached the Pentagon’s Star Wars effort, which seemed well-suited to house a nascent UFO study program—as Alexander saw it, SDI (the Strategic Defense Initiative) was about reducing the chances of nuclear war, and a mistaken UFO sighting or fleet of UFOs could very well trigger that kind of event. Though SDI was interested in Alexander’s work, it made clear there was no budgetary room for it. He tried again, this time with the Army Science Board, which was more receptive, but at a cost: Alexander’s efforts, apparently, had ruffled the wrong feathers high in the Pentagon, and so while the ASB was inclined to back his work, Alexander was informed he was being transferred out.
Instead of accepting a new dead-end role, Alexander retired, settling at the Los Alamos National Laboratory to continue his quest for the project-that-never-was. The location was no coincidence: if, Alexander thought, the Roswell crash had been real, it made more sense that the downed craft would be taken to the home of the Manhattan Project, rather than the Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, which may have been an important bureaucratic hub, but was hardly a fount of innovation. “The scientific capability at LANL would have exceeded that of the US Air Force,” Alexander surmised. “My guess was that if the Roswell crash was real and only a very few people had been in the loop, Dr. Teller, the father of the atomic bomb, would have been one of them”V—yet, when Alexander finally met with the aging Teller, he did not appear to be familiar with the Roswell incident at all. After Alexander filled him in, Teller agreed that, had any craft been recovered, the likeliest home for the follow-up research at the time would have been Los Alamos.
In the end, Alexander and his team came to accept that there were no caves of hidden flying saucers or facilities filled with preserved alien bodies. They had given the government too much credit—it could barely even manage to collect existing UFO sightings and data in an organized way, much less possess the capability to be secretly holding alien crafts. “The key assumption across all agencies was that somebody else was charged with responsibility for UFOs,” Alexander recalled later in his memoir. “The ultimate answer appears to be that nobody does have that responsibility.”
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Despite having trouble answering its primary question, Alexander’s team did find success in understanding how the Soviets felt about UFOs. While the NSA had precious few answers to give Alexander’s team about any true origins, it was able to offer information and conclusions gathered from various conversations—namely, that the Soviets were just as baffled as US officials were when it came to extraterrestrials. In one briefing, Alexander learned that Felix Yurievich Ziegel, the so-called “Father of UFO Studies” in the Soviet Union, had felt that, in many cases, “the sightings demonstrated indisputably artificiality, strangeness, and intelligence,” and that “to explain these events by natural causes is senseless.” Another NSA report cited Ziegel’s mention of “unusual speed and kinematic movements, luminescence, invulnerability, and paralysis of aggressive intentions,” comments that seemed to US ears to indicate that the Soviet military had attempted to intercept or even attack at least one UFO unsuccessfully.
Whatever the truth, it was clear that both amateur and official ufology was alive and well behind the Iron Curtain, perhaps as much as it was in the West. Strange sightings had steadily accumulated over decades, beginning not long after Arnold’s first sighting in the US, and the Soviet government had studied the topic in fits and starts while the mythology had spread nationwide, thanks in part to public science-education lectures. The government-sponsored events had originally intended to debunk and educate audiences about the facts of science and dispel conspiracies, but it was the engaging stories and colorful, mysterious anecdotes that had attracted lasting interest. (“Ufology penetrated the Iron Curtain as if it didn’t exist at all,” Russian scholar Alexey Golubev said. “The audience got introduced to not just facts but also storylines from the popularizers.”) Ziegel, a noted astronomer and groundbreaking textbook author, had gotten hooked on the subject after reading the Russian translation of Donald Menzel’s Flying Saucers, and back in 1967, just as the US had been convening the Condon Committee, he had led one of the first official “Soviet UFO Study Groups” with Major General Pyotr A. Stolyarov under the cosmonautics committee of the defense ministry.
Speaking on Soviet Central Television about his new effort, Ziegel had proclaimed, “Unidentified flying objects are a very serious subject which we must study fully. We appeal to all viewers to send us details of any observations of strange flying craft seen over the territories of the Soviet Union.” The statement and subsequent investigations turned up hundreds of sightings and provoked a stronger response from the public than officials were comfortable with at the time; in response, they shut it down. Efforts made by the Condon Committee and other UFO groups to interface with the Soviet study group were met with silence. Ziegel, however, never lost interest and continued to collect every sighting he could, ultimately amassing more than three thousand.VI To his core, he was convinced the phenomena was real. In 1981, he told an Italian publication, “We have seen these UFOs over the USSR; craft of every possible shape: small, big, flattened, spherical. They are able to remain stationary in the atmosphere or shoot along at 100,000 kilometers per hour. They move without producing the slightest sound, by creating around themselves a pneumatic vacuum that protects them from the hazard of burning up in our stratosphere. Their craft also have the mysterious capacity to vanish and reappear at will. They are also able to affect our power resources, halting our electricity-generating plants, our radio stations, and our engines, without, however, leaving any permanent damage. So refined a technology can only be the fruit of an intelligence that is indeed far superior to man[’s].”
