1987- 1989
Possible Target or Courier – Howard Blum
New Concepts Introduced – A secret working group called together in 1987 to study the hidden government aspects of the UFO phenomena.
According to award winning New York Times reporter Howard Blum, "a senior official at the National Security Agency" gives him a strange lead. The official was helping him with a book he was doing at the time about the Walker spy case. The lead was "there’s been a lot of talk around the NSA about outer space. Weird stuff. UFOs. Heard they got some kind of all-star working group or something. A panel of hotshots zeroing in on UFOs. Going to get the truth at last."
He approached Pulitzer winning New York Times reporter Seymour Hersh for help on the story. Hersh was upset that Blum would pursue such a story and appeared not to be interested. Two days later, however, he phoned Blum to confirm there was some secret working group working on UFOs but that Blum would have to get the story on his own.
Blum managed to find one of the NSA members who sat on the super secret inside group called the UFO Working Group. Blum is able to piece together the story from there.
The UFO Working Group was a spin-off of the remote viewing program and more specifically the "coordinate remote viewing" CRV program. One version of the story as told by Blum states that the whole thing started during a meeting held in the secure vault of President Reagan’s Scientific Advisor George Keyworth in the fall of 1985. Dr. Hal Puthoff, then running the SRI remote viewing program, explained that Ingo Swann, a viewer, would demonstrate " A new perceptual channel through which individuals are able to perceive and describe remote data not presented to any known sense."
A short series of precise geographical coordinates were read to Swann and he proceeded to describe a building that once the target was revealed turned out to be the country dacha of Mikhail Gorbachev.
Following this, a demonstration took place to show how the displayed "scannate" technology could be used in antisubmarine warfare. Swann was shown a series of pictures of submarines, some American, some Soviet, some in dry dock, some not built yet. His job was to provide the exact coordinates of each submarine.
As he was set to call up the coordinates of a Soviet Delta-class submarine in one of the photographs, he stopped and reported that he saw something above the submarine. Asked to draw it on a piece of paper he drew a classic image of a flying saucer.
A report was made by the SRI team of the incident and sent to the DIA who was the "primary client." About this same time money from the Army for the CRV program was withdrawn, and the entire program moved to DIA.
The Swann submarine incident led to a DIA/Navy Intelligence sponsored program to use scannate to search for soviet submarines. According to Blum’s information, the DIA was able to detect at least 17 UFO objects connected to Soviet submarines over the next 14 months. The project was called Project magnet and the DIA Directorate for Management and Operations supervised it.
More importantly, the incidents of the "hovering UFOs" around submarines provided an inspiration to Col. John Alexander, then Director, advanced concepts US Army Lab. Command, Aldelphi, MD. He proposed that the DIA Project Aquarius viewers should view an area above Kickaboo, Texas. It was there that NORAD reported an unknown object had tripped a manmade electromagnetic fence extending up to 15,000 miles above the earth.
The three viewers all were asked to view anything unusual at that latitude and longitude in the last 48 hours. By the end of the day all three CRV viewers had send back drawing of a UFO. With this addition evidence in hand Alexander convinced the DIA to set up a "top-secret working group to investigate the possibility that extraterrestrials were making contact with this planet."
Based on this psychic confirmation of a UFO event obtained by radar, the UFO Working Group was formed in February 1987. Col. John Alexander sent out the invitations for others he had chosen to generate a top-secret review of the UFO situation.
Armen Victorian who squared off with Alexander during the period Howard Blum was researching the UFO Working Group, described Alexander’s role, and the start-up of the group this way,
John Alexander's position as the Program Manager for Contingency Missions of Conventional Defense Technology, Los Alamos National Laboratories, enabled him to exploit the Department of Defense's Project Reliance "which encourages a search for all possible sources of existing and incipient technologies before developing new technology in-house" to tap into a wide range of exotic topics, sometimes using defense contractors, e.g., McDonnell Douglas Aerospace. I have several reports, some of which were compiled before his departure to the Los Alamos National Laboratories when he was with Army Intelligence, which show Alexander's keen interest in any and every exotic subject--UFOs, ESP, psychotronics, anti- gravity devices, near-death experiments, psychology warfare and non-lethal weaponry.
Having received a lead on the group Blum decided to investigate the UFO Working Group. The story of what he discovered was written up in a widely distributed 1990 book, "Out There: The Government’s Secret Quest for Extraterrestrials."
One UFO newsgroup reader described the Blum book as "the interesting process of turning bull sh** into history." Many other UFO researchers quickly echoed that assessment, and the book ended up receiving little support from with the UFO community. In reality, those who claim to have been involved, claim the book is 90% accurate. These are the same people who were in the secure vaults when the 1987 meetings occurred.
Blum described the UFO Working Group as a group trying to "settle this UFO question once and for all". The men trying to settle the question were a group of men who had each had some contact with black budget programs and government security.
There are three views as to exactly what the UFO Working Group was. The first view is that they were a group who knew much more than the average researcher, but they were not the top-level group Blum made them out to be. They were a group scientists, military personnel, and intelligence analysts who basically sat around a table and shared anecdotal information and scuttlebutt they had heard directly or second hand through the black budget community or through the chain of command. They looked at the relationship of various programs to UFO program that all believed existed somewhere in the black budget of the United States government.
The second view, exemplified by Howard Blum’s account is that the group was a highly classified compartmentalized group working inside the Defense Intelligence Agency’s Directorate of Management and Operations which had been given great power to attack the UFO problem.
The DIA Connection
Blum makes a number of references in his book as to the UFO connection to the UFO Working Group. This DIA tie-in is interesting because it parallels stories being told at the same time by Bill Moore and others about the key role in the UFO hierarchy played by the DIA. (complete story)
The third view is the one put forward by researchers like Jacques Vallee who believed that "the Colonel Phillips secret group is not the real secret group. It is only the latest carrot dangled in front of a public always eager for new revelations . . . There is clearly an endless supply of such stories, and they are always volunteered to people who are prone to believing them but have no ability to check them."
The UFO Working group, according to all accounts, was able to field CIA assets under cover to investigate UFO sightings. Blum pointed out one case in Wisconsin where two CIA officers were sent impersonating NASA engineers. This type of internal CIA investigation was possible because of President Ronald Reagan’s signing of Executive Order 12333, which allowed the CIA to operate within the United States under certain conditions.
The UFO Working Group was a "group of insiders who were looking for the insider group." They were desperately seeking the crashed flying saucers, and MJ-12 group just like the rest of Ufology. They believed, according to some, that there was an unknown mysterious engineering project run by either Admiral Bobby Ray Inman or General John J. Sheehan. A lot of black budget money was known to be flowing in that direction. No one, however, seemed able to get anything concrete on the group.
They had an advantage in seeking the answer in that they knew some of the black secrets of the government. In addition, they were able to talk to other high-ranking people who would speak to them because of their backgrounds.
The UFO Working Group came together to work on the UFO problem, knowing that together they could share and achieve more than by working alone. They worked on four main problems;
1. Investigating UFO Reports
2. Investigating the MJ-12 Documents
3. Investigating the scuttlebutt of UFO crashed saucer stories being told by insiders and witnesses
4. Investigated global US intelligence assets being used to detect UFOs
Many of the 17 men in the UFO Working Group would go on to become members of another top-secret chat group known as the Aviary. In fact, the UFO Working Group might just have been how the Aviary came together.
This informal group became famous for their connections to researcher Bill Moore in the late 1980s and early 1990s. They went by bird names that allowed them to talk among each other without everyone knowing who they were. At least that was the plan.
Many of UFO Working Group, turned Aviary, went on to become members of the National Institute of Discovery Sciences (NIDS), started up by Nevada billionaire Robert M. Bigalow. NIDS like the other two groups provided the members to share their common goal of understanding the truth of the UFO mystery.
The head of the UFO Working Group given the name "Col. Howard Phillips" by Blum was actually Col. John Alexander (Penguin). Alexander was former director of non-lethal weapons testing at Los Alamos National Laboratories in New Mexico. This is a fact that has been posted on UFO discussion boards only months after the book came out in 1996.
Other members of the UFO Working Group included former CIA scientist Dr. Christopher "Kit" Green (Blue Jay); USAF Colonel Ron Blackburn, former microwave scientist and specialist at Kirkland Air Force Base; Dr. Hal Puthoff (Owl), former member of the NSA and one of the original researchers who developed the protocols for remote viewing with Ingo Swann; Dr Jack Verona (RAVEN), one of the Department of Defense initiators of the DlA's Sleeping Beauty project which aimed to achieve battlefield superiority using mind-altering electromagnetic weaponry;Ronald Pandolfi, chief scientist for the CIA (Pelican); Dr. Robert Wood at McDonald Douglas who would go on to become the chief researcher of the 3700 pages of documents leaked in the 1990s from six different intelligence sources; Hal McConnell from the NSA; and Major General Albert Stubblebine, the Commander of the Army’s Intelligence and Security Command.
Ninety percent of the UFO Working Group meetings took place in the BDM secure vault in McCLean, Virginia. This is because group member General Stubblebine was the Vice-President of BDM at the time. Only one meeting occurred in the Defense Intelligence Agency secure vault.
They were trying to become an official government sponsored group looking for the answer, but failed to get the funding. "They seem like a loose-knit, unofficial discussion group called together on the authority of Phillips, a self-appointed UFO guru within the agency," says Larry W. Bryant, who directs the Washington, DC, office of Citizens Against UFO Secrecy (CAUS)
When ten sessions had been completed of the UFO Working Group John Alexander compiled the information they had gathered in a briefing book. It was presented to the then ready to retire defense authority. He, however, did not want the controversy. He denied the request to officialize the UFO Working Group into a formal government funded and operated group. The UFO Working Group folded but most of the members continued to interact in what became known as the Aviary.
In the end of his book Blum concluded based on the material he had been fed, that he had not found the conclusive proof for UFOs. The actual UFO working group arrived at this same conclusion. In fact Blum became convinced that much of the governments silence was due to the vast amounts that it did not know.
http://www.presidentialufo.com/disclosure_1985-90.htm
