Ironies upon ironies: During a public appearance at the National Atomic Testing Museum retired Air Force Col. Charles Halt, a former spokesman for the Air Force’s now defunct UFO “investigation” arm, Project Blue Book”, stated that the government is engaged in a cover-up regarding the existence of UFOs:
“Folks, there is an agency, a very close-held, compartmentalized agency that’s been investigating this for years, and there’s a very active role played by many of our intelligence agencies that probably don’t even know the details of what happens once they collect the data and forward it. It’s kind of scary, isn’t it?
“In the last couple of years, the British have released a ton of information, but has anybody ever seen what their conclusions were or heard anything about Bentwaters officially? When the documents were released, the timeframe when I was involved in the incident is missing — it’s gone missing. Nothing else is missing,” he said.
While it’s pretty much a fact that the government has covered up UFO reports for many years – even from their own people – most UFO buffs know that Project Blue Book itself was actually devoted to disinformation and aggressive “debunking” instead of investigation. Even the staff astronomer, Dr. J. Allen Hynek, complained of the extraordinary lengths to which the Air Force would go to discredit sightings. Of course, Hynek waited until his involvement was over to do so.
Anyone interested in exploring the tangled mess that rival intelligence agencies, foreign powers and various civilian groups made of the UFO phenomenon during the height of the Cold War would probably enjoy Mark Pilkington’s Mirage Men: An Adventure into Paranoia, Espionage, Psychological Warfare and UFOs.