religion forbids me to believe in UFOs,” so I said, “Fine,” and got ready to leave.
When I arrived back at FAA headquarters, I gave Administrator Engen a quick briefing of the playback and showed him the video of the radar scope synchronized with the voice tapes. He watched the full half hour, and then set up a briefing with President Reagan’s scientific staff, and told me my function was to give them a dog-and-pony show and hand this operation off to them, “since the FAA does not control UFOs.”
At the briefing, we looked at the data printouts and played the video for the people there two or three times—the participants turned out to be the CIA, the president’s scientific group, and a bunch of grunts. We talked for an hour and half or so, and the scientists asked a number of questions—very intelligent questions, in fact. They wanted to know things like the speed of the radar antenna, the frequency and the bandwidth, and the algorithm for the height-finding equipment. The FAA people we brought into the room were technical engineers—hardware and software specialists—and they gave those answers like they were high school math coaches. They spit that stuff right out; it was really amazing to watch these FAA experts work.
At the end, one of the three people from the CIA said, “This event never happened; we were never here. We’re confiscating all this data, and you are all sworn to secrecy.”
“What do you think it was?” I asked the CIA person.
“A UFO, and this is the first time they have over thirty minutes of radar data to go over,” he responded. They—the president’s scientific team—were very excited to get their hands on this data.
“Well, let’s get a Twix out and advise the American public that we were visited by a UFO,”[163] I suggested.
“No way. If we were to tell the American public there are UFOs, they would panic,” he informed me.
And that was it. They took everything that was in the room—and in those days, computer printouts filled boxes and boxes. These FAA printouts were titled “UFO Incident at Anchorage, 11/18/86,” written on the front cover. The printouts provided ample data for an automation specialist to be able to reproduce everything the controller saw on a chart.
A few weeks later, an FAA technician brought in the FAA’s report of this event that never happened. I had him put it on a little table in the corner of my office, and said, “Leave it there. When the CIA wants the rest of the data, I’m sure they’ll come and get it.” Some time passed and someone brought in the voice tapes from the incident, and we put that next to the report on that table, waiting for the CIA to come and make a pickup.
The chart produced at the Tech Center also came to my office, where it remained for a year and a half, along with the detailed FAA report and the voice tapes, which had been placed on that corner table waiting for the CIA. No one ever came and got them. When I was leaving for retirement in August 1988, one of the branch managers, in a hurry to get me out, packed everything that was hanging on the walls and sitting in the office, put it in boxes, and shipped it to my house. I’ve had this data and the video in my possession ever since.
Now, more than twenty years later, it’s become very clear to me that most people, including FAA controllers, really aren’t familiar with how the FAA radar system works and why all aircraft traveling through our airspace are not caught on radar or displayed on the controllers’ PVD. The system and organization of the FAA are not configured to identify and track these aircraft types. In short, current FAA equipment will not paint a “spaceship” unless the aircraft has slowed to a speed similar to current aircraft.
The reasons are simple: The UFOs appear to have no transponder; they are often too big for the automation system to be considered an aircraft, so the radar thinks they’re weather (radar readings with an unrecognizable signature are often automatically sent out through a second system as weather); or they’re too fast for the radar to get a hit on before they’re out of range. If something is hovering, as it was at O’Hare Airport in 2006, it often doesn’t show up, or if it did it would be a small dot and FAA controllers would not give it much concern.
During the playback of the 1986 event I clearly observed a primary radar target in the position reported by the Japanese pilot. But the radar signals were intermittent because the UFO was painted as an extremely large primary target and so the FAA computer system treated the UFO radar return as weather. Regardless, the target could be seen near the 747 off and on for thirty-one minutes.
So we have a problem. Because of these radar deficiencies, when pilots report seeing an unusual object, the FAA will not investigate unless the object can be identified by an airborne pilot, and instead the FAA will offer a host of weak explanations. If the FAA cannot identify the object within FAA terminology, then it doesn’t exist. Another cliche we sometimes used: For every problem there is a solution. The FAA seems to believe that the converse is also true: If there is no solution, there is no problem.
The Alaska UFO investigation is a case in point. The final FAA report concluded that the radar returns from Anchorage were simply a “split image” due to a malfunction in the radar equipment, which showed occasional second blips that had been mistaken for the UFO. Thus the FAA would not confirm that the incident took place.
Yet all three controllers engaged with the pilots during the extended sighting filed statements that contradict this finding. “Several times I had single primary returns where JL1628 reported traffic,” wrote one. “I observed data on the radar that coincided with information that the pilot of JL1628 reported,” stated another.
The FAA spokesman at the time, Paul Steucke, said it was just a “coincidence” that the split image happened to fall at the right distance and the same side of the aircraft where the object was reported visually by the pilot. And the final report simply outright ignored the three visual sightings with all their details and drawings, as if the event really had never happened. Remember, no one flying an aircraft can see a split image.
So, who are you going to believe, your lying eyes or the government?
CHAPTER 23
Government Cover-up: Policy or Myth?
The CIA’s directive that “this event never happened,” as reported by former FAA official John Callahan, may be familiar to those who have read statements from American military witnesses to UFO events. Many have been told more or less the same thing by their superior officers: Do not speak to anyone about the incident that you just experienced. In later years, some say they still cannot speak publicly because they’re bound by security oaths, and no doubt there are many others who, out of fear of breaking such oaths, have not even hinted of their involvement in a UFO event while in the military. But a number of fearless men and women have, years later, spoken out in spite of orders or oaths, without repercussions.
This repeated demand for silence, coupled with the overzealous classification of government documents and the furtive misidentifications issued by Project Blue Book, and later the FAA, has led to much speculation about whether government agencies are involved in some kind of cover-up—a widespread, carefully orchestrated policy, hidden from almost everyone, to keep secret “the truth” about UFOs. While publicly ignoring and avoiding the UFO issue, underneath the surface and unbeknownst even to those issuing the orders muzzling subordinates, a small yet powerful core group is actively hiding explosive knowledge, such as the extraterrestrial origin of at least some UFOs. At least this is what many—even conservative—analysts have come to believe.
As far-fetched as it sounds, this radical supposition cannot be dismissed out of hand. Documents prove that the UFO phenomenon became a concern to the Air Force, the CIA, and the FBI as long ago as the late 1940s, thereby giving U.S. authorities ample time to collect the best data and study physical evidence. Obviously the military would have been extremely interested in the technological capabilities demonstrated by these objects, if they could ever get access to them. We must consider the possibility that enough concise data—even physical material retrieved from crashed UFOs—could have been obtained and studied in secret. If our government officials were hungry to discover some of the keys to these exotic new technologies, or thought we were on the verge of unearthing a new physics, something from another space-time perhaps, these discoveries could give America unimaginable new capabilities.
Of course, such a study would have been daunting and could take decades. No matter how intense, scientists might still not be able to figure out very much about the workings or origins of UFOs, given the sophisticated, perhaps undecipherable technological systems, so remarkable that they seem almost like magic to us. The analogy has been made to a group of cavemen suddenly coming into possession of a television set, before even understanding the fundamental concepts of electricity or radio waves. Of course, this is pure speculation. But even if our covert scientists made very little progress on understanding what we had, it’s not a stretch to imagine
