Heiser-The-Facade - Sparkling Eyes

CHAPTER 16"I know that neither Russia nor this country has anything even approaching suchhigh speeds and maneuvers. Behind the scenes high ranking officers are soberlyconcerned about UFOs, but through official secrecy and ridicule many citizens are led tobelieve that the unknown flying objects are nonsense . . . To hide the facts, the Air Forcehas silenced its personnel."—Admiral Roscoe HillenkoetterformerDirector of the CIA,1962 NICAP press conference in Washington D.C."I'D LIKE YOU to turn to page fourteen in your notebooks," the major began."My goal is to introduce you to how we've been able to cloud public judgment on UFOs,both in terms of debunking evidence when it did escape our protection, and by means ofthe creation of phony public inquiries into UFOs whose conclusions were quitepredetermined. In short, we've historically made it our business to publicly `address' theissue and so inform the masses that UFO's were explainable by a variety of means, and ofno national security concern, while secretly and simultaneously maintaining UFOs andtheir occupants as our highest classified national security priority.""That sounds contradictory," Father Benedict opined. "You've told us before howcertain things have been put before the public as a sort of `conditioning' process, andthen, simultaneously, you claim to have resisted disclosures, even resorting to deliberatedisinformation. It makes me question not only your words but your motives.""Let me explain, Father," the major paused. "Initially, the military wanted nodisclosure at all. As you'll see momentarily, most of what we've done in terms of`conditioning' the public has been recent—since the late Seventies. It was at that time thatcertain events within and without our intelligence network, such as FOIA slipups,convinced the Group that disclosure would be inevitable—so we wanted to be in controlof it.""That's understandable.""We also couldn't lose sight of the fact that we must not panic the public. Wefigured that by keeping up our public resistance to the notion of UFOs, we would appearto be consistent to the public, and by discreetly releasing leaks and enlisting popularcultural media, such as Hollywood, we could make disclosure gradual and to our liking.The public could be conditioned to the idea over time, in preparation for the inevitable—but we would string the process out indefinitely through continued denial. The issue wascontrol.""You mentioned Hollywood," noted Melissa. "What's that all about?""Surely you've noticed the spate of extraterrestrial movies since the lateSeventies," the major responded. "We decided back then that the popular culture wouldbe especially susceptible to being molded through this medium, so we had our ownagents go under cover to befriend script writers and pass certain ideas onto them. In a fewcases we even solicited studio executives directly, paying them for their services and their141