SUBJECT: GOVERNMENTS BATTLE WITH UFO WITNESSES               FILE: UFO1943



LINCOLN CO. NEWS, Carrizozo, NM - Aug. 30,1990


GOVERNMENT'S BATTLE WITH NEW MEXICO UFO WITNESSES

   by Kate MacGregor



     To hear Robert Lazar tell it, the government sent him to
a top-secret base located in the corner of the Nevada Test
Site where he was assigned to examine the power sources of
spaceships.
     But to hear the government tell it, Robert Lazar does
not exist.
     A scientist who claims a background and credentials in
physics and electronics, including a degree from MIT, Lazar
has come forward with a story both bizarre and controversial:
As a civilian employee for the US Navy in 1984, he was
transferred from Los Angeles to a site called Area 51 in the
southern Nevada desert, where, he contends, several alien
spacecraft are housed.
     His job was to disassemble the flying saucers in hopes
of identifying and understanding the advanced propulsion
techniques used to fly them.
     Unwilling to keep hidden what he considered the greatest
story in the history of the world-that some physical contact
has been established with another intelligence in the
universe-Lazar eventually went public despite a shroud of
government secrecy. Last fall KLAS-TV the CBS affiliate in
Las Vegas, NV, interviewed the scientist, at length, before
producing a carefully researched nine-part "special report"
about his claims.
     Asked about Lazar this week, personnel officers at Los
Alamos told Sunmount Syndicate they could find no record that
he was ever employed at that laboratory. Nonetheless, a
reporter's check revealed Lazar's name listed in an official
1982 laboratory phone directory, and a 1982 news article,
apparently about the same time Robert Lazar appeared in the
Los Alamos 'Monitor.'
     While tales of UFOs are fascinating and newsworthy,
however, neither the sightings nor even the credibility of
witnesses like Robert Lazar tell the whole story.
     Equally intriguing is the concerted, sometimes extreme
measures apparently taken by various arms of the US
government to discredit, ridicule, harass, suppress, and even
intimidate individuals who claim any knowledge about, or
experience with, UFOs.
     Such tactics are not new to New Mexico residents, who
constitute one of the largest groups of UFO witnesses. In the
late 1940's and 1950's, there were more reported UFO
sightings in the state of New Mexico than anywhere in the
world. Since New Mexico was then the nexus of the most
sophisticated military activity of the era, many of the
individuals who reported the sightings were military
personal associated with the 509th Bomb Group at Roswell, the
White Sands Missile Range near Alamogordo, or with Los Alamos
where the atomic and hydrogen were spawned.
     According to many of those witnesses, they were
frequently ordered by their government superiors not discuss
their experiences. Their reports were often classified, which
prevented public dissemination. Some were even threatened
with loss of retirement or subjected to outright
discrimination if they made what the government considered
"indiscreet" comments about what they had seen.
     Much of the documented suppression tactics centered
around the 1947 crash in Roswell, New Mexico of what the Army
originally called a flying saucer. Photographs taken by the
Roswell DAILY NEWS, a venerable and respected New Mexico
paper, were splashed across newspaper pages throughout the
US, and, according to Jack Swickard, the former editor of the
RECORD, the words "flying saucer" were published for the
first time by that paper.
     More than 100 witnesses to that explosion are still
alive, and some have waited 40 years before admitting that
they were ordered to falsify their reports. Some of those
interviewed by Sunmount Syndicate:
     WALTER HAUT, a retired Army lieutenant who acted as the
official press liaison at the time of the incident, wrote the
original press release announcing that the US Army Air Force,
as it was then called, had recovered the crashed remains of a
"flying saucer." Immediately inundated by press inquires from
around the world, Haut was ordered by a general to retract
his earlier release and identify it as a government weather
balloon instead.
     Haut now says he was told by his commanding officer
never to mention the term "flying saucer" again. Haut
resigned his commission less than a year later.
     Among the officers associated with the government's
infamous investigation of UFOs called "Project Blue Book" was
an Air Force Major named Milton R. Knight. Yet the Air Force
reportedly eradicated Knight's records when he was suspected
of discussing his activities with the media. Even though
Walter Haut himself and others had served with Major Knight
for many years, and knew Knight's serial number the Air Force
insisted that no such individual existed.
     LT.BOB SHIRKEY was a flight operations officer for the
US Army Air Force at the time of the Roswell crash. He told
KLAS-TV that he had been dispatched to a local funeral home
to obtain caskets for the bodies of alien creatures that had
died in the crash. Contacted at his Roswell home recently
Shirkey refused to discuss, over the telephone at least,
various government efforts to silence him.
     MAJOR JESSE MARCEL, a former Army intelligence officer
who has since died, was in charge of loading the New Mexico
wreckage onto a transport plane and flying it to Ft. Worth
Army Base in Texas. According to Swickard, who is now editor
of the Farmington DAILY TIMES, Marcel is said to have made a
deathbed admission that the remains he saw in the New Mexico
countryside in 1947 were "not of this earth."
     Not surprisingly, interest in the Roswell crash has not waned in the 43
years since its occurrence, nor has the federal government revised its policy
to downplay the incident. Cory Beck, publisher of the Roswell DAILY RECORD,
says documents about the crash remains classified by the Army and Air Force.
Beck continues to receive inquiries from interested parties around the world,
and a major film company is currently considering producing a movie about the
bizarre crash.
     The crash was depicted in a 1980 non-fiction book entitled, THE ROSWELL
INCIDENT which, according to Beck, was widely read in the community. The
television series "Unsolved Mysteries" featured the crash in a late 1989
episode, and camera crews and journalist from both the US and abroad routinely
request information from the DAILY RECORD.
     William Moore, the Los Angeles-based author of the Roswell Incident says
the government has not attempted to discredit his journalistic credentials or
to censor the book. He has, however, been approached by various government
agencies, including the Air Force Office of Special Investigations, which has
given him what he calls "disinformation."
     "UFOs are a magnet for every crackpot in the country," cautions Moore.
"So be very careful in analyzing documentation. Certain agencies stir the UFO
pot, for some reason, and there is a tremendous amount of disinformation and
phony documents circulating in the UFO community. Some are extremely
sophisticated, and some are merely diversions from the truth."
     More recently, an Army sergeant, based in Roswell and assigned to the New
Mexico Military Institute reported another UFO sighting. His veracity
immediately came under attack from colleagues, moving him to file a
discrimination lawsuit against the US Army. By believing in flying saucers, he
contended, he was, in effect, labeled a "UFO nut" which jeopardized his
military career.
     If the US government has officially undertaken the mission of "debunking"
of UFO mythology, as many published reports suggest, then the process seems to
have backfired. In 1947, 90 percent of the US public had heard about UFOs,
according to a Gallup Poll. By 1966, not only had 96 percent of the public
heard about them, but more than five million Americans had seen one or more
UFOs.
     Both witnesses and skeptics agree that beliefs in flying saucers is a
personal matter and should not expose anyone to personal or professional
ridicule. But then in places like Roswell, crediting the existence of UFOs has
always been more than a matter of casual opinion.
     
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