Plausible Deniability Synopsis: Robertson Panel: The Robertson Panel findings on unidentified flying objects debunked the UFO phenomena but has been accused of a cover-up. Part II Violations Part IV of the Robertson Panel’s report concluded, "reasonable explanations could be suggested for most sightings … By deduction and scientific method it could be induced (given additional data) that other cases might be explained in a similar manner." The Panel also concluded that there was "no evidence of a direct threat to national security in the objects sighted" and that "the absence of any ‘hardware’ resulting from UFO sightings lends a ‘will-of-the-wisp’ nature to the ATIC problem. Although the panel members agreed that there was no evidence of direct threat from the sightings, it also agreed that dangers might be inherent from misidentification of actual enemy artifacts by defence personnel; overloading of emergency reporting channels with ‘false’ information and subjectivity of public to mass hysteria and greater vulnerability to possible enemy psychological warfare." The Robertson Panel therefore recommended the following strategy be adopted to deal with the UFO phenomena. "The ‘debunking’ aim would result in reduction in public interest in ‘flying saucers’ which today evokes a strong psychological reaction. This education could be accomplished by mass media such (as) television, motion pictures and popular articles. Basis of such education would be actual case histories which have been puzzling at first but later explained. As is the case of conjuring tricks, there is much less stimulation if the ‘secret’ is known. Such a program should tend to reduce the current gullibility of the public and consequently their susceptibility to clever hostile propaganda. The panel noted that the general absence of Russian propaganda based on a subject with so many obvious possibilities for exploitation might indicate a possible Russian official policy." The panel further recommended; "a) That the national security agencies take immediate steps to strip the Unidentified Flying Objects of the special status they have been given and aura of mystery they have unfortunately acquired. That the national security agencies institute policies on intelligence, training and public information designed to prepare the material defences and the morale of the country to recognise most promptly and to react most effectively to true indications of hostile intent or action.

We suggest that these aims may be achieved by an integrated program designed to reassure the public of the total lack of evidence of inimical forces behind the phenomena, to train personnel to recognise and reject false indications quickly and effectively, and to strengthen regular channels for the evaluation of prompt reaction to true indications of hostile measures."

This recommendation (paragraph 4a) was accepted and reflected the subsequent sceptical/debunking attitude towards UFOs since that time.

However Dr. Allen Hynek, an associate member of the Robertson Panel, expressed criticism of it later, stating: "I was dissatisfied even then with what seemed to me a most cursory examination of the data and the set minds implied by the Panel’s lack of curiosity and desire to delve deeper into the subject." (18).

Another of those interviewed by the Robertson panel, was Captain Edward Ruppelt, Chief of ATIC’s Aerial Phenomena Branch and later head of Project Blue Book.

He stated that the CIA ordered the Airforce to debunk sightings and discredit witnesses. "We’re ordered to hide sightings when possible, but if a strong report does get out, we have to publish a fast explanation – make up something to kill the report in a hurry, and also ridicule the witness, especially if we can’t find a plausible answer. We even have to discredit our own pilots." (19).

An example of ‘killing the story’ occurred on 29^th July 1952 when Marine Corps photographer, Ralph C. Mayher, shot 40 feet of 16mm film of a bright object streaking over Miami in Florida, USA. Mayher contacted the Marine Air Station and later met with a Lt. Aldridge who left with the roll of film who took it to the Air Force for analysis. When Mayher later made enquiries he received a letter dated 13^th April 1954 which stated "This is to advise you that a search of the ATIC files has failed to show that the Air Force has ever received the film you mentioned. It is our belief that since this film was originally submitted to a Naval Base, it must still remain with Naval Intelligence." (20). 1st Lt. R. C. White signed the letter.

Mayher then contacted the Marine Corps Air Station in Miami where he was stationed as a service photographer the night he took the film of the bright object in the sky. He received a reply dated 19^th April 1954 which stated "Saucer film turned over to Air Force, July 31, 1952." (21). Colonel T. G. Ennis, Commanding Officer of the air station, sent the telegram.

Ruppelt had long since tired of official denial of the UFO phenomenon, and in his 1956 book, ‘The Report on Unidentified Flying Objects’. He scorned the ongoing quest for proof asking, "does a UFO have to land at the river entrance to the Pentagon near the Joint Chief of Staffs’ Office? Or is it proof when a ground radar station detects a UFO, sends a jet to intercept it, the pilot sees it, and locks on with his radar, only to have the UFO streak away at a phenomenal speed. Is it proof when a jet pilot fires at a UFO and sticks to his story even under the threat of court martial." (22).

Dr. David R. Saunders, a member of the 1960s University of Colorado’s UFO Committee (Condon Report) also believed the Robertson Panel Report was no more than a cover story "conceived and executed for the dual purposes of confusing foreign intelligence and reassuring the cadre of our own establishment. There is ample precedent for the use of such double and triple layers of security in connection with really important projects. For example the mere existence of the Manhattan Project was a secret, but the nature and importance of that project was an even bigger secret." (23).

Despite the Robertson Panel’s attempts to kill off the speculation, the matter could hardly rest as sightings of UFOs continued, with a hard core of UFO believers that the entire phenomenon was being covered up. The agencies themselves certainly didn’t help when trying to cast off this tag of a cover-up as a couple of well-publicised incidents in the 1950s demonstrate.

The first incident was triggered in 1955 when two elderly Chicago sisters, Mildred and Marie Maier, reported in the ‘Journal of Space Flight’ that they had tape recorded what appeared to be a radio signal from a ‘flying saucer’. It wasn’t, or at least, it probably wasn’t.

So how did the CIA respond this time? They didn’t, merely drawing a veil of silence over the matter by declaring that any more contact with Davidson would only encourage more speculation and that they would not respond to any further communications with him again (31).

Events of the night of 22^nd January 1958 added to the growing perception of a cover-up. On that evening, CBS Television presented a programme devoted to UFOs on its ‘Armstrong Circle Theater’ show. Major Donald Keyhoe, Director of NICAP (National Investigations Committee on Arial Phenomena), was invited on to the show given his sources of information from within military circles. Keyhoe was a graduate of the US Naval Academy and a former Marine Corps pilot. He was also renowned for his frequently stated view that the US Government was withholding the facts on UFOs in order to avoid widespread panic.

Several Air Force spokesmen were also due to appear on the programme, however they would only agree to do so if they were allowed to see Keyhoe’s script in advance along with an assurance that he would not deviate from it during the programme. Keyhoe (below) duly forwarded his script, only to have it returned with most of the points he wanted to make removed. Even the statement Keyhoe retained was later forbidden from being aired;

"There is an official policy, believed in the best interests of the people, not to confirm the existence of UFOs until all the answers are known. Captain Edward J. Ruppelt, former chief of Project Blue Book, has confirmed the existence of four important documents that should be noted.

"In 1948, in a ‘Top Secret’ estimate, the [Air Technical Intelligence Center] concluded that UFOs were interplanetary spaceships. In 1952, an Air Force Intelligence analysis of UFO manoeuvres brought the same conclusion… interplanetary. In January 1953 a report by a panel of top scientists at the Pentagon reached this conclusion: There is strong circumstantial evidence, but no concrete proof that UFOs are spaceships." (32).

The show did go ahead, but was not exactly the programme originally planned. After the Air Force spokesmen had reeled off a number of anecdotal stories designed to ridicule the UFO belief, Keyhoe came on for his agreed piece. However, after a few moments, he suddenly veered from the script on the teleprompter and managed to squeeze in "and now I’m going to reveal something that has never been disclosed before… for the last six months we have been working with a congressional committee investigating official secrecy about UFOs…" before the audio was cut, taking Keyhoe off air. The public never heard his planned concluding statement that "if all the evidence we have given this committee is made public in open hearings it will absolutely prove that the UFOs are real machines under intelligent control. (33)"

NICAP later received a statement from the CBS Director of Editing, Herbert A Carlborg, confirming that Keyhoe was cut off the air, but only in the interests of national security. "This programme had been carefully screened for security reasons", Carlborg wrote, "therefore it was the responsibility of this network to ensure performance that was in accordance with predetermined security standards. Any indication that there would be a deviation from the script might lead to a statement that neither this network nor the individuals on the program were authorised to release." (34).

However, the damage had been done, and the idea of a cover-up began to be securely planted in the minds of those who wanted to believe in it and others who had been more ambivalent up to that time.

Slowly, those involved in the alleged cover-up started to ‘leak’ information. Former CIA Director (1947-50) Vice Admiral Roscoe Hillenkoetter (right) decided to go public when he made the following signed statement to Congress dated 22^nd August 1960:

"It is time for the truth to be brought out … behind the scenes high ranking Air Force officers are soberly concerned about the UFOs.

But through official secrecy and ridicule, many citizens are led to believe that unknown flying objects are nonsense … I urge immediate Congressional action to reduce the dangers from secrecy about unidentified flying objects (35)."

Victor Marchetti, a former Special Assistant to the Executive Director of the CIA also acknowledged the phenomenon was real in an article written for Second Look entitled ‘How the CIA Views the UFO Phenomenon.’ In this article Marchetti states "We have, indeed, been contacted – perhaps even visited – by extraterrestrial beings, and the US government, in collusion with other national powers of the Earth, is determined to keep this information from the general public (36)."

Colonel Joseph J. Bryan III, founder and first chief of the CIA’s Psychological Unit and former Special Assistant to the Secretary of the Air Force as well as aviation advisor to NATO, confirmed that information was being covered up in a letter to Donald Keyhoe dated 1960. "Information on UFOs, including sightings reports, has been and is still being officially withheld. This policy is dangerous, especially since mistaken identification of UFOs as a secret Russian attack might accidentally set off war (37)."

That the CIA does not hold a good track record on honesty and integrity is a matter of public record. Captain George Hunter White, a Narcotics agent, wrote of his CIA escapades in a letter to Dr. Sidney Gottlieb. "I toiled wholeheartedly in the vineyards because it was fun, fun, fun… where else could a red-blooded American boy lie, kill, cheat, steal, rape and pillage with the sanction and blessing of the all-highest?" (White ran ‘Operation Midnight Climax’ - a project run in the 1950s in co-operation with the CIA and the Army Chemical Corps, wherein unsuspecting male bar patrons in New York and San Francisco were given cocktails spiked with LSD, and thereafter taken by prostitutes to designated hotel rooms with their sexual acts filmed by U.S. intelligence agents from behind a two-way mirror.)

A retired agency caseworker with twenty years experience stated of his work, "I never gave a thought to legality or morality, Frankly I did what worked."

William (Wild Bill) Donovan, President Roosevelt’s Co-ordinator of Information (Appointed 11 July 1941 by Roosevelt to this post, and later as Director of Strategic Services, 13 June 1942. Placed on active duty and appointed Brigadier General in US Army, 24 March 1943; Promoted to Major General, 10 November 1944), recruited a Cornell graduate from Boston named Stanley Lovell. Lovell described his work as follows: "What I have to do is to stimulate the Peck’s Bad Boy beneath the surface of every American scientist and say to him, ‘throw all your normal law-abiding concepts out of the window. Here’s a chance to raise merry hell. Come help me raise it (38)."

Even President Truman went on record as stating about his own creation: "I think that it was a mistake. And if I’d known what was going to happen, I never would have done it … but it got out of hand … now as nearly as I can make out, those fellows in the CIA don’t just report on wars and the like, they go out and make their own and there is nobody to keep track of what they are up to. They spend billions of dollars on stirring up trouble so they will have something to report on. They’ve become … it’s become a government of all its own and all secret. They just don’t have to report to anybody … The people have got a right to know what those birds are up to. … You’ve got to keep an eye on the military at all times, and it doesn’t matter whether it’s birds in the Pentagon or the birds in the CIA (39)."

Crisman’s activities can then be traced to 21^st August 1947 when the FBI carried out a security check on him for an unspecified position with the Atomic Energy Commission – although Crisman never took up the post according to the files. (Note: There was an alleged UFO crash on the Mexican side of the Texas/Mexican border on 6^th December 1950. The object hit the ground at such high speed that very little wreckage could be found but what was found was taken to the Atomic Energy Commission.)

His life then became something of a confusing puzzle. He was involved in a government programme helping gypsies, (and it is interesting to note that some of the scientists brought to the US under Operation Paperclip had used gypsies for experimentation.) He was later listed as the president of a car lot and an official of at least half a dozen companies that could not be traced to any given addresses; he held a right-wing talk radio show on KAYE Radio in Puyallup, WA, under the pseudonym Jon Gold (the same name he used to write a semi-autobiography novel ‘Murder of a City’). He is recorded as having been an industrial psychologist for Boeing and he was a bishop in the ‘Universal Life Church’, a shady organisation which seems to have had ties with the CIA, and whose members included old Bay of Pigs veterans such as David Ferrie. (Jim Garrison, District Attorney of New Orleans, believed this ‘church’ and others was merely a front for the CIA, a theme he expanded upon in a memo he wrote to Jonathon Blackmer, an investigator for the select House Committee in the 1970s into Kennedy’s assassination.)

In 1968, Garrison, subpoenaed Fred Crisman for his investigation into President Kennedy’s death. Garrison strongly believed that Crisman was connected in some crucial way to the men Garrison was trying to indict for Kennedy’s assassination.

This subpoena identified Crisman as a radio announcer in Tacoma and its associated press release stated "Our information indicates that since the early 1960s [Crisman] has made many trips to the New Orleans and Dallas areas in connection with his undercover work for that part of the warfare industry engaged in the manufacture of what is termed, in military language, a ‘hardware’ – meaning those weapons sold to the US Government that are uniquely large and expensive (45)."

When Gary Cornwell, Bob Buras and Mike Ewing for the Select Committee on Assassinations interviewed Garrison on 11th August 1978 at his office at the Federal Courthouse in New Orleans, Garrison stated that he viewed Crisman as an important figure, who he would like to investigate further. He stated that Crisman had apparent CIA connections, as well as important right wing connections – and money.

Crisman was later interviewed for four hours by Garrison’s team. In the 95^th Congress at the hearings into select committee on assassinations it was suggested that Crisman was one of the three tramps at Dealy Plaza (46).

Garrison later recorded his conclusions about Crisman in a lengthy hand-written memo to Blackmer. "I suggest the only reasonable conclusion is that he was (and probably is, if still around) [he wasn’t, having died on 10^th December 1975], an operative at a deep cover level in a long-range, clandestine, intelligence mission directly (in terms of our national intelligence paranoia) related to maintaining national security… Crisman emerges as an operative at a supervisory level … acquired by the apparatus to carry out the menial jobs that are needed to push a current mission forward, a middle man - in the final analysis – between the mechanics who eliminate, and the handy men, who otherwise support a termination mission, on one hand, and the distant, far removed, deep submerged command level on the other."

Operation Paperclip did not become public knowledge until 1973, but Garrison almost compromised it when he arrested a contact of Crisman’s, Clay Shaw, on charges of conspiracy to murder President Kennedy. Major Clay Shaw, formerly of the OSS (the forerunner of the CIA), the spy who went on to become general manager of New Orleans’s International Trade Mart, an import-export concern with a number of former European war criminals on its board of Directors. 

Shaw, who after the Second World War rose to deputy chief of staff at a detainment camp for Nazi POWs, met Werner von Braun after von Braun abandoned Peenemunde and travelled south to join the American forces in Germany close to the French border. Clay maintained his relationship with von Braun over the years through their mutual connection with the ‘Defence Industrial Security Command’ (DISC), an operational arm of the counterespionage division of the FBI and his involvement in Operation Paperclip.

At Shaw’s trial Garrison was unable to provide clear evidence that he had ties to the CIA, and also had his star witness, David Ferrie found dead just before he was to testify. Shaw was subsequently acquitted on 1^st March 1969 by a Grand Jury. He died on 14^th August 1974, in what Garrison considered mysterious circumstances.

Documents that became available in 1977 confirmed that Shaw had worked for the CIA since 1949. He had also been in business with former Nazis and European fascists involved in several CIA-supported covert operations throughout Europe. As noted above, there is strong evidence that he had been a member of the OSS, and he certainly worked for a senior OSS officer who was involved in Operation Paperclip.

It appears that Crisman and Shaw knew each other well. Certainly that is what Garrison believed. One of Garrison’s informants stated that Crisman was "the first person Clay called after being told he was in trouble." The same source claimed that Crisman "flies to New Orleans steadily. 1964, eleven times. 1965, 17 times, 199, 32 times, 1967, 24 times ... he seems to have no income and certainly spends a large sum of money on air travel."

It seems remarkable that a man who was working for the forerunner of the CIA, then a special investigator for the State of Washington, reduced to scavenging for salvage, then was almost employed by the Atomic Energy Commission (which had covert UFO connections), before becoming involved in other covert CIA activities, and later being seen as having a role in the assassination of President Kennedy, could have been an innocent bystander to the alleged UFO incident at Maury Island. More likely he used his information regarding Paperclip to get back into the covert intelligence operation. It is likely that it was Crisman who was contacting the press to alert them to Arnold’s presence and the nature of his enquiries.

UFOs continued to be reported throughout this period. Then, during the first three nights of August 1965, literally millions of people in Texas, Oklahoma, Kansas, Nebraska, Colorado, Wyoming and neighbouring states witnessed one of the most spectacular wave of UFO sightings ever recorded (47).

These events were not only observed in the sky, but were also tracked by radar and witnessed by jet liners. Of course the official debunking strategy was swiftly set in place: the sightings were merely "four stars in the constellation of Orion (48)." Unfortunately, this explanation was cobbled together too hastily for, as astronomers pointed out, Orion was not actually visible at that time in the Western Hemisphere. Oh.

Then the lights went out over an area of 80,000 square miles, followed by another blackout on 9^th November 1965 termed the ‘Great Northeast Blackout.’ UFOs had already been reported that night over Niagara, Syracuse and Manhattan, and it was subsequently muted that this activity might have tripped the relay at the Ontario Hydro Commission (49).

In January 1966, the USAF continued to make expensive credibility mistakes. There had been a sighting of a UFO over Wanaque Reservoir in New Jersey. "A special Helicopter with a bright light on it" explained the Air Force. "A special helicopter with a bright light on it?" challenged the press. "No." The Air Force admitted, actually there hadn’t been any helicopter – let alone one with a bright light on it - in the Wanaque area that night (50).

The Air Force’s credibility continued to slump, with increasingly obscure explanations being offered for reported incidents. On one occasion on 25^th March 1966 a truck driver, Frank Mannor, and his family witnessed seeing an object with pulsating lights hovering over a swamp behind their house. Patrolman Robert Hunawill arrived at the scene and confirmed that a "strange lighted object" hovered over his patrol car before joining three other "objects" moving across the swamp (51). The object was then observed by 52 independent witnesses, including a dozen police officers.

Project Blue Book sent in its top scientific advisor, Dr. J. Allen Hynek, to investigate. "Its swamp gas [known as ‘foxfire’]" he declared. Mannor retorted "I’m just a simple fellow, but I seen what I seen and nobody’s going to tell me different. That wasn’t no old foxfire or hulla-billusion. It was an object (52)." (Hynek later stated that this contrived explanation marked the lowest point in his career.)

This episode fuelled growing concern at all levels that the Air Force and the CIA were conspiring to conceal the truth about UFOs from the American public. One of Michigan’s state representatives in Congress, minority leader Gerald Ford, later to become President on the impeachment of Richard Nixon, returned to Washington in March 1966 and demanded a ‘full-blown’ congressional investigation of events. The ‘Christian Science Monitor’, a journal with no previous involvement in the UFO phenomena considered that the Michigan sightings had "deepened the mystery" of UFOs and it was "time for the scientific community to conduct a thorough and objective study of the ‘unexplainable’".

TAGS: Robertson Panel, The Robertson Panel, Robertson Panel Findings, Unidentified Flying Objects, UFO Phenomena Debunked, UFO Cover-Up