In 1994, Senator Barry Goldwater told me that the secrecy surrounding the ET subject was “a damn mistake then and a damn mistake now.” I am inclined to agree with the Senator here, but the drive for secrecy was not and is not altogether rooted in stupidity. Rather, I see it rooted in fear and a lack of trust.
While I generally dislike psycho-babble, I believe the psychology of all of this is important. It is my belief that secrecy, especially extreme secrecy of this degree, is always a symptom of illness. If you have secrets in your family, it is a sickness born out of fear, insecurity and distrust. This, I feel, can be extended to communities, companies, and societies. Ultimately, the drive for secrecy is a symptom of a deeper malaise derived from a fundamental lack of trust, and an abundance of fear and insecurity.
In the case of UFOs and ETs, the early days of the 1940s and 1950s were a time of fear and uncertainty. The Soviet Union was expanding its empire and arming itself to the teeth with bigger and deadlier nuclear weapons: they had launched Sputnik and were beating us in the race into space. Now along come extraterrestrial spacecraft, which are retrieved along with deceased (and one living) life form. Panic. Fear. Confusion. Countless unanswered questions arise, all tinged with fear.
Why are they here? How will the public react? How can we secure their technology and keep it from our mortal enemies? How can we tell the people that the most powerful Air Force in the world cannot control its airspace? What will happen to religious belief? To the economic order? To political stability? To the keepers of current technology?
It is my opinion that the early days of secrecy were predictable, even understandable, and possibly even justifiable. But as the decades rolled by, and especially with the end of the Cold War, fear alone does not fully explain the secrecy. After all, 2017 is not 1947―we have been to space, landed on the moon, detected planets around other star systems, found the building blocks of life in far-away space, and about half the population believes UFOs are real. Plus the Soviet empire has collapsed.
I believe three significant factors are now in play: Greed and control, and the inertia of decades of secrecy.
Greed and control are easily understood; the bureaucratic inertia of large secret operations is yet another matter. After decades of operations, lies, public deceptions and worse, how does such a group unravel all the webs it has weaved? There is a certain addictive allure to secret power for some types of people; they are charged by having and knowing secrets. And there is the specter of a sort of cosmic Watergate, with all manner of people calling for this head or that. It becomes easier to maintain the status quo, something all bureaucracies are adept at doing.
And even now there is fear. Not just fear of being exposed in the age of social media, but a rather xenophobic and primitive fear of the unknown. Who are these extraterrestrials, why are they here; how dare they enter our airspace without our permission! Humanity has a long tradition of fearing and hating that which is different, unknown, from elsewhere. Witness the still-rampant racial, ethnic, religious, and nationalistic prejudice and hatred that ravage the world of humanity. There is an almost ingrained xenophobic response to the unknown and that which is different. And it is certain that the ETs are more different from us than, say, Protestants are from Catholics in Ireland.
I once asked a physicist involved with military and intelligence operations related to UFOs why we were attempting to destroy these spacecraft with advanced space-based weapons. He became agitated and said, “Those cowboys running this thing are so arrogant, so out of control, that they view any entry by a UFO into our air space as an offense worthy of a hostile response. And they are going to get us into an inter-planetary conflict if we are not careful…”
And so it goes. Fear of the unknown. Greed and control. Institutional inertia. These are a few of what I see as the current animating forces driving the continued secrecy.
But where do we go from here? How can we transform this situation from extreme secrecy to disclosure?
There is an old Chinese proverb that says, “Unless we change directions, we are likely to end up where we are going.” How true. And where we are going in this area is immensely dangerous. Extreme secrecy, especially on something this far-reaching and important, undermines democracy, subverts the constitution, concentrates enormous technological power in the hands of the unelected few and puts the entire planet in harm’s way.
The secrecy must end―the masses must demand full disclosure.
Activities are compartmentalized into super-secret USAPs―Unacknowledged Special Access Projects, which means that they are not acknowledged to anyone, even those senior in the chain of command.
NRO (National Reconnaissance Office)
NSA (National Security Agency)
CIA (Central Intelligence Agency)
Military Intelligence divisions (Army, Air Force, Navy)
AFOSI (Air Force Office of Special Investigations)
DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency)
FBI (Federal Bureau of Investigation)
Space Commands and others
Northrop Grumman
Boeing Aircraft Company
Lockheed Martin (various facilities including Denver research center)
BDM (Formerly Braddock, Dunn & McDonald)
E-Systems, Inc.
EG&G, Inc. (Edgerton, Germesauausen & Grier, Inc.)
Wackenhut Corp.
Village Supercomputing, Phoenix AZ
Phillips Laboratory
McDonnell Douglas
TRW, Inc.
Rockwell International
Booz-Allen and Hamilton, Inc.
MITRE Corp.
SAIC (Science Applications International, Inc.)
Bechtel Corp. and others
[See Appendix 13 for a complete listing of Projects and Facilities Related to the UFO/Extraterrestrial Matter and the listing of Private Corporate Entities Believed to be Involved.]
John Maynard was a Military Intelligence Analyst for the Defense Intelligence Agency. While at the DIA, he became familiar with the compartmentalization process of maintaining secrecy.
The NRO, National Reconnaissance Office, is basically run by the Air Force. The Reconnaissance Office, from my understanding from people that I’ve had contacts with since I retired, has taken on a lot more responsibility―particularly toward the UFO and extraterrestrial activities.
You could say that they picked up where Blue Book dropped off. Blue Book was basically an Air Force project for themselves, but those activities finally fell under the purview of the National Reconnaissance Office.