Eisen-Suppressed-Inventions-and-other-Discoveries-True-Stories-of ...

356 Suppressed Inventions and Other Discoveries
exotic than the planet Venus is not tenable. As a graduate in nuclear physics
who served as a line officer on U.S. Navy nuclear submarines, Carter would
not have been fooled by anything so prosaic as Venus, and in any case he
described the UFO as being about the same size as the Moon.
"If I become President," Carter vowed, "I'll make every piece of information
this country has about UFO sightings available to the public and
the scientists." Although President Carter did all he could to fulfill his
election pledge, he was thwarted, and it is clear that NASA had a hand in
blocking his attempts to re-open investigations. When Carter's science
adviser, Dr. Frank Press, wrote to NASA administrator Dr. Robert Frosch
in February 1977 suggesting that NASA should become the "focal point
for the UFO question," Dr. Frosch replied that although he was prepared
to continue responding to public enquiries, he proposed that "NASA take
no steps to establish a research activity in this area or to convene a symposium
on this subject."
In a letter from Colonel Charles Senn, Chief of the Air Force Community
Relations Division, to Lieutenant General Duward Crow of NASA,
dated 1 September 1977, Colonel Senn made the following astonishing
statement: "I sincerely hope that you are successful in preventing a reopening
of UFO investigations." So it is clear that NASA (as well as the
Air Force and almost certainly the CIA and National Security Agency) was
anxious to ensure that the President's election pledge remained unfulfilled.
DR. JAMES MCDONALD
Dr. James McDonald, senior physicist at the Institute of Atmospheric
Physics and Professor in the Department of Meteorology at the University
of Arizona, who committed suicide in unusual circumstances in 1971,
tried unsuccessfully to persuade NASA to take on primary responsibility
for UFO investigations. He reported in 1967:
Curiously, I have said this both in NASA and fairly widely reported public
discussions before scientific colleagues, yet the response from NASA
has been nil. . . . Even attempting to get a small group within NASA to
undertake a study group approach to the available published effort
seems to have generated no response. I realize, of course, that there
may be semi-political considerations that make it awkward for NASA to
fish in these waters at present, but if this is what is holding up serious
scientific attention to the UFO problem at NASA, this is all the more reason
Congress had better take a good hard look at the problem and
reshuffle the deck. ... I have learned from a number of unquotable
sources that the Air Force has long wished to get rid of the burden of the
troublesome UFO problem and has twice tried to "poddlo" it to NASA—
without success.