THE UFO “WHY?” QUESTIONS (2/3) |
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Think of all the people going through O’Hare Airport in a year and the
huge variety of reasons for travel. To get the ball rolling, here are some
reasons for coming here. I am sure the reader can think of more:
A. Graduate students doing their thesis work on the development of a primitive
society, on a planet where, amazingly, there is no planetary government, and where
there are many different languages; on various strange biological specimens, or on
genetic variations of the intelligent beings.
B. Broadcasters with weekly shows such as “Idiocy in the Boondocks.”
C. Mining engineers similar to those who went to California and the Klondike
and Australia for gold, or to Texas and the Middle East for oil. As it happens,
the earth is the densest planet in the solar system, so would be expected to
have more of the rare but very important very heavy metals such as gold,
uranium, rhenium, platinum, tungsten, osmium, etc. These are all much denser
than lead. We know from studying star spectra that they are rare. They also
have very special properties.
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Phobos NASA | D. Mining engineers extracting more common metals from the nodules on the bottom of
the ocean and from the asteroids between Mars and Jupiter. We have been talking
about doing this. Obviously war is much more important than ocean mining to us,
so we build nuclear submarines to stay in the depths of the ocean carrying
their multitude of nuclear tipped missiles. There are also abundant supplies of
so-called rare earths, many used in the electronics and nuclear industries. It
should not be forgotten that a century ago the primary use for uranium was to
prepare yellow glazes for pottery. Zirconium and titanium were essentially
worthless. Now nuclear navies use zirconium based alloys because of their
splendid nuclear and anticorrosion properties. Titanium is used in aircraft
like the SR-71 because of its high strength and low density.
E. Operators of refueling and rest and relaxation centers on the back side of
the moon or in the depths of the ocean or in the asteroid belt.
F. Visitors checking on old colonies established by their ancestors.
Perhaps there were many different ones which might explain why we have black,
brown, red, yellow and white races.
G. Jailers. This may be a penal colony on which aliens dropped off their bad boys and
girls and that is why we are so nasty to each other. Georgia and Australia were
first settled by convicts. Letting the convicts go bother other civilizations
who, unlike us, have learned to live peacefully, may be a no-no in the galactic
rule book.
H. Vacationers. This may be a recreation center. Notice how many people visit Hawaii and Las
Vegas and Orlando. If the travel wasn’t easy, how many would venture forth to
see Mickey Mouse or gaming tables or surfing beaches?
I. Specimen gathererers for ET zoos and aquariums. We are still
finding new specimens.
J. Local galactic horticultural societies collecting specimens for
their displays and genetic cross breeding.
K. Medical researchers. They may have to evaluate the genetic material of loads of
specimens to find genetic defects or super-special genes. There are a number of
conditions whose frequency in the population is quite small (for example, only one person
in 14,000 has hemophilia) so many specimens must be checked.
L. Honymooners. Perhaps this is the honeymoon capital for this corner of the neighborhood.
Special rates for a week on Earth… side trips to the moon and Mars…
M. Cartographers. Local neighborhood maps may describe, for example, the
equivalent of English coaling stations in the 19th century.
N. Sports enthusiasts. There may be special excursions to observe various such events. Don’t
forget that a World Championship Chess match was held in Iceland.
O. Scouts seeking the best site for a new amusement park in the solar system.
P. Weapons inspectors. If we make the eminently reasonable assumption that every advanced
civilization is concerned about its own survival and security, than we would
expect that our development of Weapons of Mass Destruction and the means for
delivering them in the local neighborhood would be of great concern. Clearly
after World War II it should take less than a century for us to master fission and
fusion and other new technologies to allow us to take our brand of
friendship/hostility… out there. Thus, a logical reason to visit is to
quarantine us until we develop a technique for learning to live at peace with
each other. No galactic federation new-member committee would allow us to join.
Too primitive.I suspect that the SETI cultists think they would be welcome
guests. Not very likely.
Q. Producers. Having worked on a lot of motion picture documentaries at many locations, I
would suggest perhaps some visitors are planning epic fiction and factual
movies for film companies at home… shooting on location hither and yon.
4. WHY is the government not
telling what it knows?
Are they afraid of War of the Worlds panic? I hardly
think so. After all, New Jersey was being destroyed by Martians. What could we
do against them? Panic was not inappropriate. First we have to recognize there
is a Cosmic Watergate and a long history of government lies about UFOs such as
I described in Ref. 1, which lists lies from the FBI, CIA, USAF, NSA, etc.
Some want to insist that (A) governments can’t keep secrets, and (B) the real
secret is that they don’t know what is going on and can’t admit that either.
I disagree with both. A few examples of secret-keeping that have leaked out: The
Manhattan Engineering District employed 130,000 people to develop the atomic
bomb at a cost of several billion dollars in total secrecy during World War II. The
Allies broke the German code during World War II and had 12,000 people working at
Bletchley Park in the UK intercepting, decoding and translating German military
communications. If the secret had come out, the Germans would have changed
their codes. There was really nothing in public until 25 years later despite
the obviously great improvements in technology. We also had broken the Japanese
military codes — again in secret. With regard to B, note that the military
agencies have monitoring systems that provide far more information than we
civilians can obtain — and in secret.
The Naval Research Laboratory finally admitted in 1995 that it had launched a |
bunch of Corona electromagnetic intelligence satellites to monitor Soviet radar
and communications systems starting in 1960, after 12 secret failures. The
first one that worked provided more data than all the previous secret U-2
flights that preceded it. The Soviets knew about the U-2, but dared not admit
that they couldn’t do anything about it. The American people had not been
informed. Similarly the Soviets had shot down a number of military
reconnaissance aircraft probing Russia, North Korea, and China causing the
loss of 166 crew members. Their families were lied to: unfortunate accident,
crashed at sea, etc. It was not until 2001 that the USA had a meeting with families
of the crew members that they were told what happened, even though most of the
losses occurred in the 1940s, 50s, and 60s. Medals were distributed.
William Burrows tells the story in his book By Any Means Necessary (Ref. 2).
The National Reconnaissance Office first admitted in 2005 that it had launched
7 Poppy satellites between 1962 and 1971. Their function was to conduct very
sophisticated monitoring of electronic and radar installations on Soviet ships.
Thousands of people were involved.
So yes, indeed, secrets can be kept. The annual US Black Budget is estimated at
30-40 billion dollars. That is a lot of secrecy.
So WHY keep UFOs secret?
A. All major countries and many terrorist groups would
very much like to duplicate the flight technology of the saucers. They can
literally fly circles around our vehicles, move at very high speed, make right
angle turns, move straight up and down — typically with little noise, no visible
engines, no exhaust. They would make wonderful weapons delivery and defensive
systems. Since we have recovered wreckage at least as early as 1947 (see
Crash at Corona, Ref. 3) we would have set up a highly classified project
(call it Operation Majestic 12 as described in my book TOP SECRET/MAJIC (Ref.
4)) to try both to evaluate the wreckage and to obtain measurements of flight
characteristics using airborne and spaceborne and earth-based radar sets,
cameras, electromagnetic sensors, and other instrumentation. Surely governments
have very much more sophisticated instruments and observation platforms than do
private individuals. The key rule here is that one can’t tell one’s friends
without telling one’s enemies. It appears that there have been many UFO crashes
including ones overseas (Varginha, Brazil, for example). There is a long
history of countries gathering and evaluating crashed vehicles of their
enemies. This does not require a conspiracy; everybody has the same self
interest concerns.
B. Each country worries about its enemies determining the secrets of saucer
technology before they do and must be concerned about how to defend against new
vehicles and also how to learn what the other guy has already learned. Soviet
spies at Los Alamos apparently shortened the time it took the Soviets to test
their first A-bomb (1949) by at least a year.
C. What if an announcement were made, by highly trusted individuals around the
world, such as the Queen and the Pope, saying that indeed SOME UFOs are ET
spacecraft? Here are some things I believe would happen:
(1) Church attendance would increase.
(2) Mental hospital admissions would increase.
(3) The stock market would go down; uncertainty is always the enemy.
(4) Based on my more than 600 college lectures, the younger generation, which,
unlike me, was never alive when there wasn’t a space program, would push
for a new view of ourselves as EARTHLINGS instead of as Americans, Canadians,
Greeks, Peruvians, etc. Many would think that would be great. But I know of no
government on Earth that wants its citizens to owe their primary allegiance to
the planet (where it belongs) instead of to individual national governments.
Nationalism is the only game in town. I believe that alien visitors — they may
be our landlords, for all we know — think of us as earthlings even though,
because of our military traffic, they would be well aware of different ruling
groups in different places.
D. A small group of religious fundamentalists (Jerry Falwell and Pat Robertson
come to mind) have already loudly proclaimed that UFOs are the work of the
devil and there is no other intelligent life outside Earth. What an insult to
the notion of an all powerful GOD! They would be up the creek without a
religious paddle if an announcement were to be made. They have had a great deal
of political clout.
E. Making an announcement would require that governments admit they have been
lying through their teeth for decades. I don’t know of any government that
wants to do that.
F. If an announcement were carefully made without the scare mongering of “War
of the Worlds”, a lot of people would think that surely, aliens, who can come
here, must be far more advanced technologically than are we, since we can’t go
out there. This would strongly suggest that soon there would be new methods of
energy production, air and ground transport, computers and communication
systems, i.e. economic chaos. We are not very good at large scale economic
changes in a hurry. Think of the Soviet Union which, at our strong demands, had
democracy, elections, freedom, capitalism. On the average, except for the high
price of oil, are Russians better off today than they were 17 years ago??
G. Because I am convinced that military pilots in many countries have been
disintegrated or “disappeared” by UFOs, I think governments would all be very
resistant to telling their citizens that we tried to attack UFOs and they
returned the favor — only they succeeded. The head of the American Rocket
Society in 1952 took President Truman to task for the attack orders. Frank
Feschino Jr. (Shoot Them Down) has gathered hundreds of reports of supposed
airplane crashes in the USA and overseas in the early 1950s. Three military
pilots, each of whom flew over 100 missions in Korea where they had to deal with
marauding MIGs, crashed when they came back home. That seems very suspicious
to me.
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