Klaatu barada nikto

Last night on episode 3 of “You’ll Know When You’re Dead,” my co-host Gabe and I discussed last week’s UFO-Nuclear Facility press conference that was held at the National Press Club. In case you missed it allow me to catch you up, although you should really check out the episode for yourself.  Last week a group of retired military officials lead by Robert Hastings gathered in Washington DC to discuss their UAP experiences that took place while they were stationed at Nuclear Facilities during the Cold War. A UAP (Unidentified Aerial Phenomenon) is a term that NARCAP (National Aviation Reporting Center on Anomalous Phenomena) coined in an attempt to avoid the cultural baggage associated with the more common term UFO. The hope was that together with this new, less loaded term and the weight of the ex-military officer’s testimonies that perhaps some credibility could finally be given to this topic by both the public and the media.

                As with the majority of Ufological or Fortean phenomena, the only thing we have is anecdotal evidence and the testimonies of the witnesses. In this case the testimonies should have been given far more credence by the media than they were. If any of you paid attention to the mainstream news sources it’s unlikely you had heard anything at all about this press conference. Take a minute to let that sink in, I mean here we have retired military officials whose job was to basically baby-sit nuclear missiles telling us that they sighted objects that they were unable to identify that shut down those same missiles. Now this was the height of the cold war when these guys would have been almost constantly on high alert. It wouldn’t be a stretch of the imagination to assume that with these officers would have been trained to sight anything that would or could have been flying in the air at the time.

                Yet here we had six retired officers standing up and publicly admitting that they were unable to identify these crafts. It seems to me that this should have been taken far more seriously than it was especially if their stories are to be believed.  The short version of the story goes basically like this, while the officers were underground in the nuclear silos, UAP’s would appear instantly above the ground over the base. While there the UAP would be sighted by the ground crews and occasionally would be picked up on radar. As these objects were hovering they would knock offline all of the nuclear missiles simultaneously. This was not an easy feat to accomplish as the missiles were specifically designed in such a way as to ostensibly prevent such a thing from occurring. The missiles would be reactivated the minute that the UAP were seen to be flying away. This occurred at countless classified nuclear facilities around the country.

                If these stories are to be believed then someone is lying. Look at the Militaries official position on the subject. Concluding in 1969 the Air Force’s Project Blue Book basically said that reports of UFO’s or UAP’s didn’t constitute a threat to the National Security of our nation. But wait weren’t UAP’s seemingly able to disarm very sophisticated and dangerous weaponry located at highly sensitive locations apparently whenever they wished. So who’s telling the truth? Well it’s hard to say for sure. Obviously UAP’s in general present a conundrum for the Military whose job it is to protect us from enemies foreign and domestic. At the same time there is no real incentive for these gentleman who are all retired from the military and apparently still getting retirement checks from the same place to publicly go against their conclusions.

                The military hasn’t come out to my knowledge and acknowledged these allegations beyond citing the same Project Blue Book conclusion stated earlier. My belief is that they realize that the measures set forth in the Robertson Panel are still in place. As a short little background in 1953 after reviewing the available UFO data, a panel of scientists headed by H.P. Robertson (a CIA employee), concluded that there was no scientific data to be gained from studying UFO phenomena. Furthermore they stated that the Air Force should embark on debunking campaign that would hopefully lead to a reduction in a public interest in the phenomenon. One of the methods offered was that the mass media could be used as a means to ridicule publicly all reports of UFO’s. Did it work? You tell me below are two examples of the few media outlets that decided to look into this press conference at all. Wired . Washington Post .

                So hopefully you took a moment to read over the articles, if not allow me to quickly sum them up. UFO’s are dumb and if you believe in them you’re dumb too. Ok so maybe that’s not exactly what they said but you get the idea. It would seem that no matter the level of credibility of the witness, in this case retired military officials, nor the PR facelift of the term, from UFO to UAP, this topic may not ever be taken seriously enough for anything to be done about it.  I guess it’s like the old saying goes what we don’t know, or won’t admit to, can’t hurt us. Right? Let’s hope so.