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UFOs and the Media
People Magazine
May 9, 2002
National Media Sidestep
UFOs
By Billy Cox
There was a big subculture buzz in Washington, D.C., a year
ago this week when a group called the Disclosure Project
launched a bid to end government secrecy surrounding
unidentified flying objects. The goal: Open congressional
hearings. The hook was to invite 20 witnesses, some
bolstered with government documents, with testimony so
compelling the media couldn't possibly freeze it out.
No doubt, some of
the panelists who showed up at the National Press Club
offered detailed glimpses into the national-security
ramifications of the phenomenon. Retired Air Force Capt. Bob
Salas, for instance, revealed how UFOs had knocked 10
Minuteman nukes off-line at their Strategic Air Command
silos in Montana in 1967. Former Federal Aviation
Administration chief of Accidents and Investigations John
Callahan showcased photocopies of incident reports seized by
the CIA concerning a half-hour jetliner/UFO encounter off
Alaska in 1986.
The ensuing failure of
the national media to respond came as no surprise to a
couple of journalists who've spent years monitoring these
dynamics. What most Americans fail to understand, contend
Terry Hansen and Patrick Huyghe, is that when it comes to
national security issues, the facade of big-media outfits as
combative public watchdogs has always been fragile. Throw
UFOs into the mix and that facade becomes a myth.
From the World War II-era
recruitment of Scripps-Howard executive editor John Sorrels
and publishing magnate John Knight by the U.S. Office of
Censorship to The New York Times' quashing its own field
reports about the 1954 CIA coup in Guatemala, Hansen's The
Missing Times: News Media Complicity in the UFO Cover-up
chronicles repeated patterns of sometimes avid collusion
with conventional covert operations. That such duplicity
should extend to UFOs shouldn't be terribly surprising, and
yet, it is.
Take, for instance, a
correspondence discovered at the Smithsonian Institution in
1997 between former members of the CIA-sponsored Robertson
Panel. Formed in 1953 to marginalize UFOs after a vexing
volume of reports began receiving media attention, the panel
recommended smearing witnesses as a way to stanch the flow.
In 1966, shortly after a
"CBS Reports" investigation on UFOs portrayed witnesses as
delusional or unreliable, Robertson panelist Thorton Page
wrote former group secretary Fred Durant that he "helped
organize the CBS TV show around the Robertson Panel
conclusions." The host of that show: Walter Cronkite, aka
The Most Trusted Man In America.
From his home in
Bainbridge Island, Wash., Hansen says formulaic thinking
still permeates the old-guard media. "Th(e Disclosure
Project) was a remarkable story, with men at a high level
breaking their security oaths," Hansen says. "Local and
regional media around the country treated it as a
straightforward item, but the national networks, PBS, they
virtually ignored it.
"This story could be
covered right now. '60 Minutes' could blow the lid off it by
interviewing retired airline pilots who aren't afraid to
talk about incidents and near-misses. But the major media is
waiting for the green light from the White House or the
Pentagon."
However, Patrick Huyghe,
author of The Swamp Gas Times: My Two Decades on the UFO
Beat, says news-gatherers may eventually have to confront
the phenomenon, whether they want to or not. He cites the
July 15 UFO reports near Carteret, N.J., as a potential
scenario.
Shortly after midnight,
FAA radar at nearby Newark International Airport began
tracking more than a dozen airborne lights that appeared to
fly in shifting formations. Motorists on the New Jersey
Turnpike pulled over to watch the air show; more than 100
witnesses were identified. A Freedom of Information Act
request by the National Institute for Discovery Science in
Las Vegas discovered none of the objects on the radar scopes
had transponders.
"Now, imagine if
something like that had happened over a major metropolitan
area two months later, after 9/11, when we were all on a
heightened state of alert," says Huyghe from his home in New
York. "At least during the Cold War, the Soviets never
struck us on American soil. The terrorists have demonstrated
their capacity to do just that. When we have another
Carteret-type incident, can the media afford to throw it off
and say, 'Oh, it's just UFOs'? I don't think so."
Even in that event,
Hansen suspects the security apparatus would remain
intractable: "It may just come down to the fact that they
don't know what's going on, that maybe this is happening and
they can't do anything about it. But that's an unacceptable
public position when you're trying to project an image of
being in control. We found out on Sept. 11 they're
not."
 
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