Reagan Administration

The first disclosure initiative within the Reagan administration came only days after Ronald Reagan came into office. The offer to provide pieces of the UFO mystery was made to researcher Bill Moore. Moore had made a name for himself in the UFO community with co-authorships in two best selling books “The Philadelphia Experience” and “The Roswell Incident.” During a book tour for “The Roswell Incident” Moore was contacted twice with an offer “to help.” It was a story that went on for ten years. Greg Bishop, a researcher and close friend of Moore, described how the story began, 

As a result of these books, and him going on some kind of publicity tour for them, he was called at a couple places on his trip by somebody at a nearby Air Force Base. Once in Omaha Nebraska, and once when he was in Albuquerque. And it turns out that the person who called him when he was in Albuquerque and said “You know we think you really know what you are talking about and we would like to talk to you.” -that person was Richard Doty it turns out to be. He set up a meeting with Bill Moore. What a lot of people don’t know is that the first time they met. He met in an Albuquerque restaurant with this guy that became known as the Falcon, and he will still not divulge this person’s real name. Neither will Richard Doty or anyone else.

This guy (Falcon) who turns out to have worked for the DIA – Defense Intelligence Agency which is like the military CIA. He presented Moore with a deal. He said, “If you will cooperate with us,” (and he didn’t tell him what that cooperation was- the nature of it) “then we will give you what you are looking for which is UFO information from the government – as much as we can release to you, and we will do that over a period of years if you cooperate with us.”

And he (Moore) said “well OK, I guess so - it sounds good – sure.” 

For the next 10 years Moore ran around meeting intelligence and military people. They offered him information that sometimes, in the end, appeared to be a mixture of good and bad information. It became almost impossible to distinguish what was the truth. Moore left the field figuring he had gotten as far towards solving the mystery as anyone would get. Some researchers rejected Moore and everything he said after he admitted in a July 1989 speech that he had helped the Air Force Office of Special Investigation provide disinformation to Dr. Paul Bennewitz, a physicist who lived just outside of Kirkland Air Force Base. Bennewitz believed that he had made contact with aliens and had detected an underground base they were using at Dulce, New Mexico.

 Moore introduced a number of new concepts into the UFO community, such as the idea that a live alien had been recovered in a crash and held by the American government, that there had been an interaction between the government and the aliens, that the Air Force was only a pawn in the UFO game and that the real players were in the NSA and DIA. The most important concept that was introduced by Moore was the concept of a group known as MJ-12 that controlled everything to do with UFOs. This Moore did by releasing the MJ-12 document that had been mailed to his partner Jamie Shandera in December 1984. In the end the document was generally rejected within the UFO community as flawed, but the concept of MJ-12 and almost everything else in the document became a part of the ufological interpretations of historical events.

 It is my interpretation that this is what was supposed to happen. Liberals within the control group in 1973 decided that they wanted material released in order to acclimatize the UFO community and the public to an alien presence. They however, realized that the information could quickly get out of hand, and therefore chose the method of mixing chaff with the wheat so it would not be taken seriously by media or congressional sources who could force the entire story out into the open.

The MJ-12 document was a major piece of the disclosure puzzle, and its release was done perfectly. Many UFO researchers have come forward with evidence supporting the existence of the group, but none have found the piece to start the avalanche of knowledge demanded by the UFO community. The MJ-12 concept got out, and the cover-up remained intact. That was the plan, and it worked.

In 1985, during the same time as Moore was receiving information from Falcon about the inner working of the UFO cover-up, Robert Emenegger was again being contacted by Bill Coleman, now retired, about doing another UFO documentary for the government. Two key officials at the Defense Audiovisual Agency (DAVA) unit at Norton Air Force Base fronted for the project this time. They were quite eager to get some classified UFO film into the public. Strangely, according to Emenegger, the UFO films being offered did not include the Holloman film that was being pushed during the Nixon administration. Emenegger recounted the encounter,

You do now – I don’t know if it was in the book maybe not – that during the Reagan administration I met with Bob Scott and Miller. At Norton, and they wanted another program like we had done, and we spent a lot of time discussing it. Bob Scott was a Reagan appointee. He was the head of USIA when I first met him – Bruce Hershenson – I don’t know if you know who Bruce was in Washington. That’s how I knew him. Then he popped up as the head of DAVA – that film repository. He had a Glen E. Millar retired General as his aide, or second in command. We spent a lot of discussion. There was a lot of stuff in the vault that he wanted to get out. I even had General Miller come to our house to meet Hynek and his group to take them out to Norton so they could look around. Miller was, interestingly enough, was head of one of the first studios in Hollywood – one of the old ones, and got Reagan his first contract.  

Anyway, after Hynek came here, and he wanted to see UFO footage, and I think they started pulling it out, and Shartle came in stepped in – now I hope you have the characters correct. Miller said to him, “I want you to show Hynek all the UFO footage.”

 Shartle told me that he said, “I’m sorry, Sir, you know – you will have to give me a written request for that.   

The answer came back, “Listen, I’ll have your ass. You’re going to do it.”  

I was not there to know all the craziness that went on, but I do know that three months later Casper Weinberger sent a telegram relieving both Scott and Miller of their posts. Why I don’t know. I don’t even know if it was related.  

Just after Emenegger, Jacques Vallee, and Hynek were contacted, a source inside the NSA was leaking another UFO story to a key investigative reporter at the New York Times. Howard Blum, who was working on a book about the Walker spy case, related how his NSA contact was very concerned that he look into UFOs. While on the Larry King show Blum described the NSA leak.

I stumbled on to this really by accident. I am a reporter as you said by training, and by personality I am a skeptic and a cynic. I was working on the Walker spy case – a book on that - and I was meeting with a man from the National Security Agency and I was trying to  interview him and he was trying not to talk too much, trying to distract me and say “What you really should look into is this hot shot group of experts who are looking into UFOs. The government is back in the UFO business.”

Blum did investigate the UFO lead and produced a book called “Out There.” In the book Blum said told about a group known as the UFO Working Group, who had been brought in to try and get to the bottom of the UFO mystery.

 

Actually the group was known as the Advanced Theoretical Physics Conference. It was held at the EDM McLean Secure Facility in May 1985. It was classified Top Secret. A number of prominent scientists and intelligence people were involved.

 

The story created a great stir when it came out. However, like every other glimpse of disclosure, it lacked the concrete proof that was needed for an open disclosure. Like all efforts that preceded it, the story died when some inconsistencies where discovered in Blum’s facts. As had happened with other UFO glimpses of the past, new facts about the cover-up were released, and the cover-up remained intact.

In April, 1983, Linda Moulton Howe, who had just produced an excellent documentary about cattle mutilations called Strange Harvest, was contacted. At the time she was working on a new script for Home Box Office on UFOs. The night before the contact she met with researcher and attorney Peter Gersten. Gersten, who had played a prominent role as an attorney forcing out UFO documents using the Freedom of Information Act, told Howe that he had met with the same person that she would meet with - Richard C. Doty, an AFOSI agent at Kirtland AFB. 

When Howe got to Kirtland, Doty took her to a small office where he handed her a brown envelope and said, "My superiors have asked me to show you this." He withdrew several sheets of white paper from an envelope, and handed them to her. She could not keep them or take notes, but she could read the pages and ask questions.

The document was titled Briefing Paper for the President of the United States of America. It described UFO crashes, alien bodies, and an alien who survived one of the crashes. The paper listed several government UFO projects. Linda described being given the document to read,

He (Doty) said my superiors have asked me to show you a document that you can read. You cannot take notes, and I want you to move from the chair you are sitting in – I want you to move to the chair in the center of the room…but as I look at that page which was dramatically all caps, typing where the type is in the paper. It said - each line was centered on the page- “BRIEFING FOR THE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA ON THE SUBJECT OF UNIDENTIFIED AERIAL VEHICLES.”  

 In addition to showing her the document, Doty said he and his superiors were willing to release several thousand feet of government held UFO footage for the HBO UFO documentary she was working on. Included with the footage was the Holloman Air Force Base film where the aliens had landed and met with base officials. In the late 1980s Linda told me,

The government intended to release to me several thousand feet of color and black and white film taken between 1947 and 1964 showing crashed UFO discs and extraterrestrial bodies in historic footage to be included in the HBO documentary supported with official government confirmation.  

Linda, like Bill Moore had made a name for herself in Ufology with a documentary called “A Strange Harvest.” It had won a local Emmy in Denver, and dealt with the large rash of cattle mutilations that had been occurring for years in Colorado and other western states. It was partly for this reason that I believe the government chose to talk to Linda.

Like all the other glimpses of disclosure Linda never did get the UFO footage from Richard Doty and the others she dealt with. There were many excuses for the delays and in the end no film was turned over. The HBO documentary she was working on shut down. As soon as the HBO documentary was put on hold, Doty and his superiors made a new offer to Linda. They stated that they wanted a documentary through PBS rather than HBO because they had more control over PBS. Linda described part of what was involved in this offer.

They don’t want me to go forward with HBO. They want me to go forward with PBS. Well in this process he is saying how much would you take, and would you be willing to work exclusively on a military base?

And I remember saying, “Look, if you guys want to hire me to edit film and be part of a production that says this is a production of the United States government, I’m happy to do that. But I’m not going to put my name on a film that I have done if everything about it is 100% controlled by the United States government. I can’t do that. 

Not only was Linda Howe offered movie footage for public documentaries, she was even offered an interview with Jerome Hunsacker, the last living member of the MJ-12 committee, a group rumored to be in control of the UFO situation. 

Well I think he was an original MJ-12er, and I believe he would have been the last on the list of the original twelve. That is my understanding of who somebody was trying to get me to meet with. I am saying I was supposed to have had a dialogue with one of the original MJ-12.

In addition to this historic invitation, Linda was offered a chance to interview a U.S.A.F. Captain who had lived with a captured live alien. The alien had supposedly been captured in a 1949 crash, and the Captain lived with the alien, (known as an extraterrestrial biological entity (EBE), until 1952 when the alien died. Linda recalled the event,

It was in all these discussions about my being able to go to where this man was in a hospital in Texas with prostrate cancer to talk with him directly, because I said even if I could tape record him, this is too valuable. Those were real discussions. In that process this man was identified as one of people so valuable because he was able to get these telepathic thoughts. 

Q: This was an offer made to you. Is Richard Doty making you this offer? 

No it came in a completely different way. It came in a Fedex proposal to me – where I would go – who would meet me – How I would be able to interview a man who was dying and who had stayed with the Eben at Los Alamos.

I got an airline ticket! I had an airline ticket!  

Q: You bought it, or they bought it?

I bought it. He was dying of prostrate cancer in a hospital in Texas, and I was so serious from this communication that I got an airline ticket – paid for it to go. It was I think the night before the morning I was to leave I got a call that said “We’re sorry – he says it’s off.”

And I said “Why?” 

And he says “He just says it’s off.”

 Another prominent UFO researcher who was approached and given a glimpse of disclosure was Whitley Stieber, a prominent novelist, who had entered the UFO field after having abduction types experiences which led him to write the book Communion in 1988. He like Howe, Moore, Emenegger, Vallee, and Hynek was offered a whole rage of UFO disclosure offers. 

I was approached by a retired officer from the Air Force Office of Secret Intelligence with all kinds of stories, about how the government had taken 16mm film of an alien that they had done an operation on in 1952 which enabled it to talk through otherwise atrophied vocal cords. A story that struck me as . . . I wouldn’t have written it as fiction because it was too ridiculous. They tried to make me believe that aliens had claimed that they had something to do with creation of Jesus Christ and all sorts of ridiculous things which if I had gone out into the public with would have make me look like a fool.

Strieber’s story paralleled the offer that Linda Howe had described about getting an interview with the captured alien’s keeper. It also paralleled an offer that had been made to him by Paul Shartle who had been the keeper of the Holloman and other UFO films at Norton Air Force Base. In a phone interview Emenegger told me  about the offer made to him by Shartle to actually meet the alien himself.

That’s not right. You’re right. Someone did say you can meet an alien down in New Mexico. 

Paul Shartle once asked me if I would be interested in going down to like New Mexico, to meet with you know some alien. This sounds like what you are talking about, although it never came about.

Bill Moore was also talking about the alien, and a videotape was being sold purporting to be an interview with the alien. Just before Reagan left office a leak surfaced stating Reagan was going to make the big disclosure in a live TV broadcast. The rumor went on to say that the live alien would appear with him. It was a wild time in the UFO community.

 The Alien Invasion

 Some have interpreted President Reagan’s constant statements about the alien invasion as an attempt to disclose by Reagan. I feel that these statements were simply statements made by a president who was fascinated with the paranormal, and who loved to tell stories. They are interesting and numerous so I will quickly review them.

The Reagan presidential records show many times when the Reagan talked about UFOs and other paranormal items. For example, Steven Spielberg gave a White House screening of “E.T. –The Extraterrestrial” in late June 1982. Near the end of the movie Reagan leaned over to Steven Spielberg and shocked him by saying, “I bet there aren’t six people in this whole room who know how true this whole thing is.”

A few months Reagan appeared at the old Roswell Army Air Base, and there outside the famous west hanger, where it is rumored the 1947 alien bodies were stored prior to the flight out, gave a speech in which he made a joking reference to E.T. As well as talking about aliens Reagan often talked about the White House ghost and Armageddon. Judi Buckalew, a White House aid actually stated that there were people whose job it was to keep the president away from school kids who would ask the president all manner of questions following speeches to schools.

The staff was very afraid of what the president would say in answers to questions directed his way. As Marlin Fitzwater, Reagan’s Press Secretary stated, “The goddamndest things would come out of his mouth.” Lt. Gen. Colin Powell was Reagan’s last National Security advisor. He told presidential biographer Lou Cannon that it was his job to keep the alien invasion remarks out of Reagan’s speech. Despite this many alien remarks got into speeches, starting with a toast in Geneva during the November 1985 Summit. Reagan raised his glass and said: “If the people of the world were to find out that there was some alien life form that was going to attack the Earth approaching on Halley’s Comet, then that knowledge would unite all the peoples of the world.”  Reagan adlibbed the same remark at the end of a speech to Fallston High School in Fallston, Maryland just after returning home from Geneva.

In 1987, Reagan added the alien invasion remark to a speech that was being made to the United Nations General Assembly. Possibly embarrassed by aliens at the U.N. Reagan speech writers took it out of the speech, only to have Reagan request that it be put back in. The writers complied. The line was put back in with only a couple changes. The stage was set for the President of the United States to stand up in front of the United Nations and say: “I occasionally think how quickly our differences worldwide would vanish if we were facing an alien threat from outside of this world. And yet I ask - is not an alien force already among us? "

 Lastly in 1988, Reagan took a question at a speech in Chicago and again adlibbed the alien invasion remark. It was a concept that Reagan believed in strongly, and was not afraid to talk about. The Chicago alien invasion remark, for example, was made the day after the story broke in the Washington Post about the Reagan White House using astrology to set up the president’s schedule.

Clinton Administration Effort

 Like Jimmy Carter before him Bill Clinton ran for president as a Washington outsider. His campaign was established him as running against the Washington insiders who had caused all the evils within government. Bill and Hillary did not even hide the fact that they were standing up against the insiders. If you read “Inventing Al Gore” you will see that Clinton referred to them as the “Fucking Washington Crowd”. It may have been the same crowd that Hillary referred to as the right wing conspiracy. Like Jimmy Carter both Bill and Hillary were interested in UFOs. The word inside the CIA was that they “were looking.

The Clinton administration role in disclosure was not one of leaking elements of the UFO story into the UFO community as had been done in the Nixon and Reagan administration. This was because the Clinton administration was cut off just like the UFO community. A prime example of this came when White House reporter Sarah McClendon asked Bill Clinton why he didn’t do something about the UFO phenomena. Steven Greer gave Clinton’s reply in a conversation with radio host Art Bell.

You know Bill Clinton leaned over and told Sarah McClendon, who hosted up at the National Press Club on May 9^th – this is a story I haven’t told, and I’m going to tell you now. She told me this. Bill Clinton leaned over to her and said, because she brought up this issue to Bill Clinton saying “Why don’t you do something about what Dr. Greer and this group are trying to do?” He bent over and he said, “Sarah, there’s a secret government within the government, and I don’t control it.

 The way the Clinton administration approached UFO disclosure was to open up all government files to disclosure. His chief of staff John Podesta, known while he was in the White House as the X-files man, led the fight. The effort was extremely successful for document disclosure and not so successful for UFO disclosure. Over the five years the Clinton Executive Order was in place, 800 million pages of classified documents were released. This was compared to 150 million pages of documents declassified in the 15 years previous. No significant UFO documents however were part of the 800 million pages of declassified files. 

There were examples where Clinton officials did attempt to specifically shake loose UFOs documents. According to 1,000 pages of documents that were released by the Office of Science and Technology Policy inside the Clinton White House Melvin Laird, former Secretary of Defense under President Nixon, was called in to brief Clinton’s first Secretary of Defense Les Aspin on UFOs. One of these was an effort by his first CIA director James Woolsey to get some answers on UFOs. Woolsey and his wife Suzanne (at the time a ranking official at the National Academy of Sciences) had in the late 1960s reportedly had a daylight UFO sighting in New Hampshire. If true, they were naturally interested.

 In December 1993, only months after Clinton took office, Dr. Steven Greer sat with the CIA director, his wife, and another couple and discussed UFO and disclosure. According to Greer John Petersen, a close friend of Woolsey’s had followed Greer for four lectures listening to his presentation. This, according to Greer, had been done at Woolsey’s request. Finally, at a presentation in Fort Collins, Colorado, Petersen approached Greer and said, “I know a few folks in Washington who I think you need to meet with.” When Greer asked whom in particular, Petersen mentioned Woolsey. Greer was asked to provide information to Woolsey that would help Woolsey on a search through the CIA files looking for UFO documents. He also got the opportunity to talk to Woolsey on December 13th for three hours. Most people know the story of how Woolsey and Petersen denied Greer’s version of events. This denial, however, didn’t come until almost 5 years after the event when Greer published a book which referred to the event.

Rather than rehashing the story and reviewing the definition of briefing let me mention a couple 

points that clearly show that an attempt was being made from within to get UFO information out.

1.      Greer did meet with James Woolsey and John Petersen, and it probably was for three 

hours as no one has denied the length of the meeting. Meeting privately with the Director of 

all of the United States Intelligence agencies is no small feat. Most people, no matter how 

powerful, would be lucky to get the DCI to answer a letter. If the CIA Director meets with a 

member of the public it is at the bequest of the director and not the member of the public. 

The tail does not wag the dog when it comes to the CIA Director.

2.      Woolsey did order a study of all UFO files. This supports Greer’s story that he was asked 

to provide information to aid in a search. I have unquestionable evidence that both the classified 

and unclassified records were checked. Once Woolsey left the CIA did put out a new report on 

their involvement in the UFO mystery.                                 

3.      Greer was not the only member of the public who was contacted  by Petersen and Woolsey 

in connection with an attempt to get information moved into the public forum. C. Austin Fitts, a 

former Assistant Secretary of Housing and Urban Development in the Bush administration has 

also come forward claiming that she had contacts with Petersen and Woolsey. She was to aid 

with a project set up “to help the Navy adjust their operations for a world in which it was 

commonly known that aliens exist and live among us.”

Petersen denied the Fitts story when he learned that I might put it on my website. Months later I sent the denial to Fitts for her comment and she replied in length that she stood behind her story on every point. It appeared to be one of those Holloman stories that seemed to disappear when you tried to grab it.

 The first of the attempts to disclose UFO documents came when Laurance Rockefeller approached the Clinton White House to get all UFO documents declassified. Laurance, who had graduated with a philosophy degree from Princeton became very interested in UFOs after seeing a documentary on the supposed crash of a UFO at Roswell New Mexico. Rockefeller’s attempt to bring the issue to the President was handled by Clinton’s Science Advisor and by Hillary Clinton. Gibbons told Rockefeller that the request to declassify all UFO files would be impossible if the cover-up was as widespread as Rockefeller was claiming. Gibbons proposed taking one case and trying to get it declassified. They would then have a pattern to follow.

 Rockefeller thought about it and said that this idea would be fine. He told Gibbons that he was choosing the Roswell case as the test case. Thus began a move to get the facts on Roswell. Gibbons passed on the request and the USAF began their study on what really happened in 1947. When the Air Force was done they were unable to come up with anything new except to discover that a bunch of the original Roswell documents were missing. They filed their report “The Roswell Report: Fact vs. Fiction in the New Mexico Desert.” with the White House stating that there was nothing to the alien spaceship theory.

 

President Clinton was not amused. In a speech on November 30, 1995 he answered back to the USAF. It was a speech given in Belfast Northern Ireland in front of 80,000 people, and I can assure you after a couple weeks at the Reagan Library studying how presidential speeches are put together, the reference to Roswell was intentional. Nothing gets in a presidential speech that is not there for a specific reason. There had been a letter writing competition in Northern Ireland. School children wrote letters to the visiting U.S. president and the two winning letter writers were on the stage with Clinton during his speech. Neither of their letters, however, was read. Instead, Clinton answered a letter from Ryan who was asking about Roswell. This is what Clinton stated:

 I got a letter from 13-year-old Ryan from Belfast. Now, Ryan, if you're out in the crowd tonight, here's the answer to your question. No, as far as I know, an alien spacecraft did not crash in Roswell, New Mexico, in 1947. And, Ryan, if the United States Air Force did recover alien bodies, they didn't tell me about it, either, and I want to know.

With his public rebuke, Clinton effectively forced the USAF to go back and reinvestigate the question of the bodies. It didn’t help much because in 1997 the USAF decided the screw the President with yet another Roswell report, this one called “The Roswell Report: Case Closed.”

 Answering the President’s order that he wanted to know about the bodies, the Air Force spend much of the report dreaming up the bizarre notion that dummies dropped in 1953 clearly explained why people in 1947 were reporting bodies in connection with the Roswell crash.

Conclusion

 These are the key glimpses of disclosure that have occurred over the past fifty-seven years. There are dozens of other examples that I could have used but left out for the sake of time. Once Clinton left office there were some strong indications that George W. Bush might make further UFO disclosures. These hopes faded shortly after he entered office, and after 911 it appeared that the complex issue of disclosure may have been put on the back burner while other issues dealing with terrorism were dealt with. At the present time, the only effort I see to provide glimpses of disclosure is the material being provided to Bob and Ryan Wood through the many documents they are still receiving. This is a complex story that I will allow them to tell in their own way.

 

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 Grant Cameron became involved in extraterrestrial-related phenomena research in May 1975 with a personal sighting near Carman, Manitoba about 25 miles north of the Canada-US border. Over the next 18 months hundreds of sightings were reported, and Grant spent months photographing a series of strange objects and interviewing hundreds of witnesses who were involved. Thus began a 28 years commitment to the subject. After composing a manuscript about the 1975-76 sightings, he moved on to research the work of the legendary Wilbert B. Smith. Smith headed up the Canadian government’s flying saucer investigation known as Project Magnet, which ran from 1950 to 1954. During the Smith research Grant learned of the former Penn State University president Dr. Eric Walker, who was identified by Dr. Robert Sarbacher as a key person inside the Cover-up. Cameron teamed up with T. Scott Crain to research and write UFOs, MJ-12, and the Government published by MUFON. Cameron then turned his research interests to the relationship of U.S. Presidents to the extraterrestrial issue. He made 13 trips to the U.S. National Archives and most of the Presidential archives looking for relevant documents. A major contribution of his work was a FOIA submission to the White House Office of Science and Technology which yielded nearly 1,000 pages of disclosure documents from the Clinton administration. He has lectured in Canada and the U. S. on the 1975-76 Manitoba sightings, Wilbert Smith and the president/UFO connection. He lives in Winnipeg, Manitoba, Canada. His principal website is: www.presidentialufo.com

 

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