Carl%20Sagan%20-%20The%20Demon%20Haunted%20World

THE DEMON-HAUNTED WORLD
extensive information on UFOs and is part of a conspiracy of
silence.
In talking not for attribution with NSA officials, I am told the
following story: typical intercepts are of military and civilian
aircraft radioing that they see a UFO, by which they mean an
unidentified object in the surrounding airspace. It may even be
US aircraft on reconnaissance or spoofing missions. In most cases
it is something much more ordinary, and the clarification is also
reported on later NSA intercepts.
Similar logic can be used to make NSA seem a part of any
conspiracy. For example, they say, a response was required to an
FOIA request on what the NSA knew about the singer Elvis
Presley. (Apparitions of Mr Presley and resulting miraculous
cures have been reported.) Well, the NSA knew a few things. For
example, a report on the economic health of a certain nation
reported how many Elvis Presley tapes and CDs were sold there.
This information also was supplied as a few lines of clear in a vast
ocean of censorship black. Was NSA engaged in an Elvis Presley
cover-up? While of course I have not personally investigated
NSA's UFO-related traffic, their story seems to me very plausible.
If we are convinced that the government is keeping visits of
aliens from us, then we should take on the secrecy culture of the
military and intelligence establishments. At the very least we can
push for declassification of relevant information from decades
ago, of which the July 1994 Air Force report on the 'Roswell
Incident' is a good example.
You can catch a flavour of the paranoid style of many UFOlogists,
as well as a naivete about the secrecy culture, in a book by a
former New York Times reporter, Howard Blum (Out There,
Simon and Schuster, 1990):
I could not, no matter how inventively I tried, avoid slamming
into sudden dead ends. The whole story was always lingering,
deliberately, I came to believe, just out of my grasp.
Why?
This was the single, practical, impossible question that was
balanced ominously on the tall peak of my mounting suspicions.
Why were all these official spokesmen and institutions
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