The Science Advisor Briefing
by Bruce MaccabeeINTRODUCTION
(written November, 2000 for this web presentation) What you are about to read is a briefing paper written for Dr. John Gibbons, the Science Advisor to President Clinton. Before I present the document I will discuss how it came about, the structure of the document and the choice of information content. I was at home, Tuesday afternoon, April 13, 1993, taking some time off from work to catch up on "chores" around the house when the phone rang. It was Ron Pandolfi, a CIA employee whom I had known for about 10 years. He explained the reason for his call: he wanted me to write a UFO briefing for the President's science advisor. "WHAT? You MUST be kidding!" Something like that was my initial response. First of all, I was surprised that the science advisor would want such a briefing in the first place, but then I was stunned by the request that I should do it. At the same time, I was excited. Not everyone get's a chance to present such a high level briefing on this subject! Naturally I expected I would have a week or more, well, several days at least, to get a briefing ready, assuming Ron wasn't pulling my leg. After all, I had to collect information, write the briefing document and back it up with visual aides such as slides and viewgraphs and so on. For the science advisor it had to be a real production. Apparently one shock was not enough. "It has to be ready by tomorrow morning." "WHAT? You MUST be kidding." Well, at least it would be late in the morning, right? After all, I was more than an hour driving time from Washington. If I had to visit the science advisor at least I should have time to travel to DC. Two shocks were not enough! "He needs it by 8 AM!" "WHAT?.....(you know the rest!) I do not now recall my immediate response but it must have been one of excitement combined with fear or dread. How could I get a UFO briefing ready in less than 20 hours! The basic requirement was that I had to fax whatever I wrote to the CIA officer who was detailed to the science advisor's office by 8 AM the next day and he would give it to Dr. Gibbons. Of course, anything I said would not be based on still classified information. Knowing this, I asked Ron why he didn't give it himself. After all, he was aware of the hundreds of released documents. Morevoer, he, unlike I, would be aware of any still classified documents if there were any. His response, as I recall was somewhat diffuse, indistinct, nebulous, not clear...that is, a mumble response. He didn't want to do it because he didn't know much about the subject, or something like that. (Subsequently I learned that he did discuss the subject with Gibbons, but after I had submitted my briefing paper.) Anyway, when I hung up the phone I knew that I had been offered a great opportunity and also a hot potato. How to write something that was both brief and convincing...and get it done by tomorrow morning, early! Needless to say, the rest of my day and evening were taken up with this project.You may well wonder (a) why the science advisor wanted such a briefing and (b) why I was chosen to be on the "hot seat." (a) Ron explained that Laurence Rockefeller and Scott Jones had managed to arrange a time early Wednesday morning to discuss the UFO situation with John Gibbons. This was apparently as a result of the political "connections" of Rockefeller and the fact that Jones and Gibbons were well acquainted. I knew Scott Jones. I did not know Laurence Rockefeller. And I did not know that they were attempting a "UFO putsch" at the beginning of the Clinton administration in order to get some official government interest in the subject, if possible. So, this came as a complete surprise to me. It wasn't a surprise to Ron, however. He had known of the upcoming meeting with Jones and "Rocky" for quite some time. So, why did he wait until the last minute to ask me to prepare a briefing? I don't know. Perhaps he thought the meeting would never take place. Or perhaps he decided (or was directed?) not to give the briefing himself to keep direct CIA involvement out of it. Or perhaps he really felt that he didn't know enough about the subject. Anyway, whatever the reason he handed me a "fire drill" type of situation. (b) Why me? I first met Ron Pandolfi when he took an interest in my Navy work with high energy lasers used to generate underwater sound "way back" in the early 1980's. He had discovered, essentially from a literature search, that the Russians had written a lot of papers on the subject, papers written by scientists who were working at various Russian/Soviet government research laboratories. By comparison, the number of "free world" publications was small. Ron worried about this "laser sound generation gap" and its relation to antisubmarine warfare. Did this give the Soviets an advantage over us? His search of the U.S. government literature turned up papers that I and another scientist working for the Navy had written. So he called me up to learn the status of our research. We discussed the subject and then he was going to call again. The second time he called we discussed the laser generated sound and then there was a definite switch in the topic. Ron had found out from some other CIA employees that I had provided a briefing on the New Zealand UFO sightings of December, 1978. That briefing had been in the spring of 1979 and had led to a few brief contacts with CIA employees at that time. However, by the time Ron called in 1983 I had not had any CIA contacts for over 3 years, and I was not about to reinitiate such contacts. As far as I was concerned, CIA interest in the UFO subject was an issue that seemed to have been settled about four years earlier. (Note: in December, 1978, the CIA released, as a result of a lawsuit by Ground Saucer Watch, nearly 1,000 pages of UFO-related documents; this after arguing in court that the total UFO involvement amounted to several dozen pages associated with the Robertson Panel review of the UFO situation in early 1953.) I did not bring up the subject. Ron did. Subsequently we discussed the subject occasionally over the years. Ron was in charge of what could be called the "weird desk" at the CIA...he kept track of, but did little actual work in, paranormal subjects and UFOs. (The CIA was involved along with other agencies in paranormal or "psychic" research, including remote viewing, back in those days. This I learned many years later.) Nowadays we might say that Ron was the "Dana Sculley" of the CIA (not Fox Mulder, because, so far as I could tell, at least, Ron was not a "true believer.") Anyway, a few years later, in 1987, after the MJ-12 document release, the publication of the widely read books Communion (Streiber) and Intruders (Hopkins) and after the 40th International Symposium of the Mutual UFO Network that took place in July at American university in Washington, DC, Ron asked me to provide a lunchtime briefing for CIA employees! This was arranged and when I arrived at the briefing room it turned out to be the directors conference room (if I recall correctly) and it was packed with people...standing room only! I would guess there were around 50 employees attending the lecture. You'll never guess what I told them, so I won't keep you waiting. I told them about their own documents. Yes, that's right. Most CIA employees did not know that the agency had released hundreds of pages of material nearly 10 years before. I discussed the history of CIA involvement and some of the interesting cases contained therein. Sometime later Ron told me that my lecture had created a lot of "spies" within the agency, that is, employees who were using their "tickets" (clearance levels) to nose around and try to find UFO-related secrets. Whether any secrets were found or not I do not know. At least no one told me! (Note: my lecture was ostensibly for the entertainment of the employees. There were no security procedures in effect at the time. Also, the agency often invited guest lecturers on various topics. Once I heard Tom Clancy speak there on how he conceived of and wrote "The Hunt for Red October" which made many allusions to a secret underwater sound listening system that was dedicated to antisubmarine warfare.) That was in the summer of 1987. A year or so later I gave a lecture on the then-hot Gulf Breeze sightings and I also took part in another lecture that was about agriglyphs (so-called "crop circles"...but by this time they were much more than just circles!). The point of this preceeding short discussion is that by 1993 Ron knew that I was well informed about the open literature on the UFO subject. So, if anyone could write a briefing based on the open literature, I could do it. (Note: "open literature" is that which anyone can read. This is contrasted to the classified or "closed" literature which is not available to the general public but only to military and civilian persons who have the required classification and "need to know.")
Now you know how this briefing document came about. I will now discuss the format, which may seem peculiar, and the choice of information. I knew that the typical government format for briefing high level officials was to write a document with the basic important information, the summary or "bottom line" information, right "up front." This is because the "briefee" is assumed to have very little time to read the document. On the other hand, the briefing document must be substantive, with a discussion that justifies the statements made in the first page or two. Since I didn't have time to write a complete document with a long discussion I chose the "tab" format in which the summary information (the "bottom line") was in the the first page or two and there were references to "Tabular Information" or "Tabs" that contained the explanations of the statements in the first page. Thus you will read a statement followed by "See Tab ....". In a real briefing book (which I did not have time to prepare) the tabs would actually be small protruding "tabs" that are attached to the first pages of each of the explanatory sections. In this case, I simply labelled the explanatory paragraphs as "Tab A" "Tab B," etc. I tried to compress the important information, the "whole story," into one page, but was not able to do so. It actually ran about 1 1/3 pages. In the presentation below I have numbered the pages so you can see the way it was presented to Dr. Gibbons. It was not "pleasant" to write because I did not have time to write the tabs as I wrote the first page summary statements. Instead, I had to guess what I would write in a Tab statement. More typically one would write each tab explanation along with the "front page" reference to the tab so there would be a good correlation between the summary statements on the first page and the explanatory statements within the tabs. It took several hours to write the summary pages because at each step of the way, for each statement of fact, I had to look up information that would support the statement so I could refer to it in a Tab. This included information that I thought would indicate there were U.S. government actitivies, information about UFO related activities of other governments and some information that would show that UFOs are real based on government, hence "official," information. But because of the time constraint combined with the knowledge that whatever I wrote had to be supportable, I could not throw in everything including the ufological kitchen sink. I had to be selective and accurate. I could imagine the science advisor asking me to justify something I had written: "You wrote this. Prove it!" The toughest part was, of course, the conjecture about the possibility of a crashed disc at Roswell. I could hardly ignore the information that had been accumulated in the ten years before this briefing, yet I could not point to any guaranteed government documents. Therefore I had to take a tentative approach, beginning with the title which says "the Government approach to the UFO problem AS DETERMINED by civilian UFO investigators during the last twenty years." In other words, this was based on information obtained by civilians, information that was outside of government classification channels. This was not a case of the government (a government employee) itself preparing an official briefing based on knowledge of everything that the government might be doing about UFOs. (Note: two and a half years after this the Air Force released its "Mogul" explanation of the reports of a crashed saucer near Roswell and about 2 years after that, the "dummy drop theory" to explain the reports of alien bodies.) Anyway, what you will read below is what I came up with in less than a day. I completed the summary pages (page one and page two) and faxed it to the office of the President's Science Advisor at 7:59 AM on Wednesday. Note that Ron Pandolfi had exactly no input to what I wrote and, in fact, didn't find out what I had written until some time later that day after I faxed a copy to him. It took me another day to complete the section on "Tab" data, which I faxed on Thursday morning Now comes the disappointment, so characteristic of government programs (e.g, just as a program becomes successful it is cancelled). I learned from Ron later that day that the Jones/Rockefeller/Gibbons meeting had taken place..... AT 7:30 AM, 1/2 hour before I had faxed the briefing!!! HAHAHAHAHAHAHA. Gotcha! Apparently, because of Gibbons' schedule of meetings on other (more important!) topics, the UFO meeting time had been changed late Tuesday afternoon. Ron didn't know about the time switch, and I certainly didn't. Thus Gibbons had not read my briefing document by the time of the UFO meeting. Whether or not it would have had an impact on the outcome of that meeting is now a moot point. I was told subsequently that Gibbons did eventually read what I had written, at least the first page and a half. I never had any direct correspondence with him, however, and never got any expression of interest in the topic.
EPILOGUE
Several years later I learned that some UFO researchers had obtained, through the Freedom of Information Act, documents held by the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy (OSTP) that referred to the Gibbons meeting. In August 1996 I requested the documents (write to Executive Office of the President, Office of Science and Technology Policy, Washington, DC 20502). I received a letter indicating that they had found 44 documents related to Rockefeller's attempts to get John Gibbons or President Clinton (or Mrs. Clinton) or someone to do something about UFOs. I was amused to find that, although many letters to Gibbons on the subject of UFOs were included in the document release, my briefing document was not included.(page 1)
BRIEFING ON THE U.S. GOVERNMENT APPROACH TO THE UFO PROBLEM AS DETERMINED BY CIVILIAN RESEARCHERS DURING THE LAST TWENTY YEARS
During the early summer of 1947 hundreds or thousands of people including military saw shiny circular objects flying through the sky. Civilian researchers over the last 15 years have learned from several former Air Force officers that during this time the Air Force retrieved, from the desert near Roswell, New Mexico, debris with unusual physical properties, which evidently came from a non-man made device that crashed. Based on the testimony of numerous witnesses and government documents some civilian researchers now believe that the government, with top level authorization, took a two pronged approach to the problem. On the one hand the Air Force set up an intelligence collection program at the Secret Restricted level run by the Air Material Command (AMC) at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio. (TAB A, TAB B) On the other hand, the government at the compartmented level carried out analysis of the retrieved material and attempted to correlate this with sighting information collected through official channels. The compartmented project was completely independent of the collection effort. Subsequently the Air Force set up three consecutive publicly-known projects to collect and analyze civilian and military sightings which did not involve debris (Project Sign, 1948-49; Project-Grudge, 1949-1951; Project Blue Book, 1952-1969). In 1952 the Battelle Memorial Institute, under Air Force contract, began a statistical study of over 3,000 sightings between 1947 and 1952. (TAB C) The statistics showed that on the average about 20 % were not explained and that of the best sightings (best witnesses, most complete reporting) over 30% were unexplained. The report included several examples of unexplainable sightings. (TAB D) In 1967 the Air Force, at Congress' direction, supported an independent investigation at the University of Colorado. (TAB E) After about a year and a half the Director of the investigation concluded that "nothing had been learned" and that the Air Force should end its involvement. However, the Colorado investigators couldn't explain about 30 of the about 90 sightings it investigated. The American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics pointed out that the large percentage of unexplained was justification for continuing the investigation. (TAB F) In 1969 the Air Force closed Project Blue Book and has not maintained a publicly known investigation since. However, the Air Force does admit to investigating sightings over Air Force Bases. (TAB G)page 2
Since 1969 there have been thousands of sightings worldwide. Some have involved the US military. (TAB H). One sighting was investigated by the Federal Aeronautics Administration. (TAB I) Other governments have taken a more open attitude toward the subject and some have set up official investigating groups. (TAB J) The recent (1989- 1990) sighting flap in Russia and Belgium involved military Russian and Belgian jet "chases" of UFOS. General Igor Maltsev, in charge of the Air Defense of the Moscow Area, reported publicly that he had "more than 100 visual observations" compiled by military commanders concerning a UFO that was flying near Moscow and was detected on radar (TAB K). Later, General Ivan Tretyak, Chief of all the Russian Air Forces, confirmed Maltsev's report and hinted that Soviet developments to counter Stealth might provide further information about UFOS. (TAB L) Gorbachev, during a speech to workers in the Urals in the spring of 1990 said that UFO reports should be studied. (TAB M) Serious investigators of this subject have concluded that some unusual phenomena have, in fact, been observed visually and on instruments (TAB N). Furthermore, combining the early history of the Air Force approach to the subject with numerous documents and "leaked information" some investigators have concluded that there has been a compartmented study of debris and bodies from at least one crash of an alien craft.(page 3)
SUMMARIES OF TAB-REFERENCED INFORMATION
TAB A:
A letter of 23 September, 1947, was sent from Lt. Gen. Nathan Twining, Commander of the Air Materiel Command (AMC) at Wright Field (later Wright-Patterson AFB) to Brig. Gen. George Schulgen, Chief, Air Intelligence Requirements Div., USAF. The letter describes certain characteristics of "flying saucers" as reported by military and qualified civilian witnesses and states that, after confering with several laboratories at Wright Field, it is the opinion of AMC that "the phenomenon reported is something real and not visionary or fictitious." The letter recommends that Headquarters, Army Air Forces "issue a directive assigning a priority, security classification and Code Name for a detailed study of this matter" by the Army Air Force along with the Navy, the Atomic Energy Commission, the Joint Research and Development Board, the Air Force Scientific Advisory Group, the National Advisory Committee on Aeronautics (predecessor of NASA), the RAND Project (Research Applied to National Needs) and the NEPA Project (Nuclear Energy for the Propulsion of Aircraft).TAB B:
A document entitled "Intelligence Requirements on Flying Saucer Type Aircraft" issued by General George Schulgen on 30 October, 1947. This was circulated to continental intelligence agencies and to military attaches throughout the world. It requested any and all information on craft that resembled flying saucers and which had unusual characteristics such as "absence of sound when operating under high performance conditions, a plan form approximating that of an oval or disc with a dome shape on the top surface, the ability to disappear by high speed or complete disintegration, the ability to appear without warning as if from extreme altitude (and) the bility to clear a path through clouds." The agents were requested to supply information on craft that had the above characteristics and which were constructed of lightweight, strong material like :composite or sandwich construction utilizing various combinations of metals, metallic foils, plastics and perhaps balsa wood or similar material." (Note: "metallic foil" and "like balsa wood" were terms used by former Air Force officers to describe debris found near Roswell, New Mexico in July, 1947.) The agents were also instructed to provide information on propulsion of special design including nuclear powered craft "which would be characterised by lack of fuel systems and fuel storage space" and craft in which "the power plant would ... be an integral part of the aircraft and could possibly not be distinguished as a separate item."TAB C:
Project Blue Book Special Report # 14, Project 10073 (Project Stork); text - 94 pages; tabulated statistical data.- 170 pages. (see page TAB C -1)
The classified version was completed in late 1953; a declassified version was published for government use only in 1955 by the Air Technical Intelligence Center. Although the unclassified report does not name the contractor, other documents in the Blue Book file make it clear that the contractor was the Battelle Memorial Institute, probably because of its proximity to Wright-Patterson Air Force Base ("home" of the Air Technical Intelligence Center, the parent organization of Project Blue Book) and because of its uniquely large (at that time) computing facility. The project carefully analyzed 3,201 sightings that occurred between June, 1947 and December, 1952. Numerous characteristics of these sightings were converted to IBM card format and statistically processed by the computer. Of these 3,201, 21.5%, were listed as "unknown." The
(page4)
sightings were ranked according to credibility of the observer and quality of the information supplied. Four classification were used: Excellent, Good, Fair, Poor. Of the 213 Excellent sightings, 33% were "unknown" whereas for the 435 Poor sightings only 17% were "unknown." (see TAB C -2)
(Note: this contradicts expectation, which is based on the idea that flying saucers or UFOs are not truly extraordinary phenomena but are conventional phenomena which were misperceived by the witness(es). If UFOs are explainable, then the Excellent sightings, made by better witnesses who supply, on the average, better descriptions of the phenomena than the Poor sighting witnesses, should have a lower percentage of unexplainable sightings ("unknowns") as compared to the Poor sightings. The actual statistical result reported by Battelle indicates that the witnesses have, in fact, seen extraordinary phenomena.)
TAB D:
The Battelle study found 12 sightings which were so detailed that they could not be explained by any amount of rationalization. One of these, Case 10 (Rogue River, Oregon; May 24, 1949) was reported by five witnesses, two of whom reported it to the Security Office at the Ames Research Laboratory where they worked (see page TAB D - 1).