- General Reading
- Completed Beyond Cloak and Dagger: Inside the CIA, by MIles Copeland. (1974).
- “C” – The Secret Life of Sir Stewart Menzies, Spymaster to Winston Churchill, by Anthony Cave Brown. To p. 362 of 830.
- Spies: The Epic Intelligence War Between East and West, by Calder Walton. To p. 33 of 672.
- The Red Hotel: Moscow 1941, The Metropol HOtel, and the Untold Story of Stalin’s Propaganda War, by Alan Philps. To p. 19 of 451.
- (Starting). Secret Empire: Eisenhower, The CIA, an the Hidden Story of America’s Space Espionage, by Philip Taubman.
- Topics Recently Studied
- Close Encounters of the Third Kind (Movie).
- Reading Close Encounters of the Third Kind: The Making of Steven Spielberg’s Classic Film, by Ray Morton.
- Close Encounters of the Third Kind (Movie).
- Continuing to review and index the Barry Greenwood MJ-12 file. Viewing the second installment of document images.
- Change In Approach
- Rather than work through topics one by one in the prospective book, Tom has started the first chapter and will work through the manuscript of the book in coming months.
- There will be no further postings of topic content or chapters in future blog postings. Rather, there will be one commentary each week regarding Tom’s thoughts on the general UFO subject and on pertinent developments in the UFO public.
Commentary – How To Sleep At Night…
Persons concerned with the subject of UFOs fall into two categories: Believers and Skeptics/Debunkers. Both of these have plenty of information supporting their respective positions.
Believers have over 75 years of UFO history to fall back on. Thousands of sighting reports, Air Force investigations, reputed landings, contacts with UFO occupants, abduction experiences and even rumored saucer crashes and secret government programs fill out the “belief system”. Sighting reports don’t stop, and rumors of government collusion continue. It’s all an abundance of material to work with if you want to take UFOs seriously.
Skeptics and Debunkers also have lots of information on which to rely: discredited contactee groups, Air Force debunking and public exiting from the UFO issue, the negative Condon Report, mainstream media blackouts on the subject, the government’s “Roswell Report” and Roswell, Case Closed, the GAO communication on the Roswell records search, and even the latest narrative from AARO. Almost every “whistleblower” going public gets refuted in one way or another. And most important of all, absence of “proof”.
One other approach is to ignore the UFO problem altogether. If so, you can probably live your life without ever seeing a flying saucer or being affected by the controversy.
Each of these approaches are watertight with “Confirmation Bias”, i.e. only looking for what supports your theory and ignoring anything that doesn’t.
UFO believers disregard debunking assertions, and skeptics delight in the absence of hard evidence.
So take your pick. Either way, there is plenty of “evidence” that will enable you to sleep at night.
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