Carl%20Sagan%20-%20The%20Demon%20Haunted%20World
Carl%20Sagan%20-%20The%20Demon%20Haunted%20World Carl%20Sagan%20-%20The%20Demon%20Haunted%20World
THE DEMON-HAUNTED WORLD hightail it out of there. (Or, as a control experiment, a unit of US high-performance aircraft is sequestered and sent in unannounced sorties to determine how porous American air defences are.) In such a case, there may be combined visual and radar sightings by military and civilian observers and large numbers of independent reports. What is reported corresponds to no known aircraft. The Air Force and civilian aviation authorities truthfully state that none of their aircraft was responsible. Even if they've been urging Congress to fund a southern Early Warning System, the Air Force is unlikely to admit that Soviet or Cuban aircraft got to New Orleans, much less Memphis, before anybody caught on. Here again, we have every reason to expect a high-level technical investigating team, Air Force and civilian observers told to keep their mouths shut, and not just the appearance but the reality of suppression of the data. Again, this conspiracy of silence need have nothing to do with alien spacecraft. Even decades later, there are bureaucratic reasons for the Department of Defense to be close-mouthed about such embarrassments. There is a potential conflict of interest between parochial concerns of the Department of Defense and the solution of the UFO enigma. In addition, something that both the Central Intelligence Agency and the US Air Force worried about then was UFOs as a means of clogging communication channels in a national crisis, and confusing visual and radar sightings of enemy aircraft - a signal-to-noise problem that in a way is the flip side of spoofing. In view of all this, I'm perfectly prepared to believe that at least some UFO reports and analyses, and perhaps voluminous files, have been made inaccessible to the public which pays the bills. The Cold War is over, the missile and balloon technology is largely obsolete or widely available, and those who would be embarrassed are no longer on active duty. The worst that would happen, from the military's point of view, is that there would be one more acknowledged instance of the American public being misled or lied to in the interest of national security. It's time for the files to be declassified and made generally available. Another instructive intersection of the conspiracy temperament and the secrecy culture concerns the National Security Agency. This organization monitors the telephone, radio and 84
Spoofing and Secrecy other communications of both friends and adversaries of the United States. Surreptitiously, it reads the world's mail. Its daily intercept traffic is huge. In times of tension, vast arrays of NSA personnel fluent in the relevant languages are sitting with earphones, monitoring in real time everything from encrypted commands from the target nation's General Staff to pillow talk. For other material there are key words by which computers cull out for human attention specific messages or conversations of current urgent concern. Everything is stored, so that retrospectively it is possible to go back to the magnetic tapes and to trace the first appearance of a codeword, say, or command responsibility in a crisis. Some of the intercepts are made from listening posts in nearby countries (Turkey for Russia, India for China), from aircraft and ships patrolling nearby, or from ferret satellites in Earth orbit. There is a continuing dance of measures and countermeasures between the NSA and the security services of other nations, who understandably do not wish to be listened in on. Now add to this already heady mix the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). A request is made to the NSA for all information it has available on UFOs. It is required by law to be responsive, but of course without revealing 'methods and sources'. NSA also feels a deep obligation not to alert other nations, friends or foes, in an obtrusive and politically embarrassing way, to its activities. So a more or less typical intercept released by NSA in response to an FOIA request will be a third of a page blacked out, a fragment of a line saying 'reported a UFO at low altitude', followed by two-thirds of a page blacked out. The NSA's position is that releasing the rest of the page would potentially compromise sources and methods, or at least alert the nation in question to how readily its aviation radio traffic is being intercepted. (If NSA released surrounding, seemingly bland, aircraft-to-tower transmissions, it would then be possible for the nation in question to recognize that its military air traffic control dialogues are being monitored and to switch to communications means - frequency hopping, for example - that make NSA intercepts more difficult.) But UFO conspiracy theorists receiving, in response to their FOIA requests, dozens of pages of material, almost all of it blacked out, understandably deduce that the NSA possesses 85
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THE DEMON-HAUNTED WORLD<br />
hightail it out of there. (Or, as a control experiment, a unit of US<br />
high-performance aircraft is sequestered and sent in unannounced<br />
sorties to determine how porous American air defences are.) In<br />
such a case, there may be combined visual and radar sightings by<br />
military and civilian observers and large numbers of independent<br />
reports. What is reported corresponds to no known aircraft. The<br />
Air Force and civilian aviation authorities truthfully state that<br />
none of their aircraft was responsible. Even if they've been urging<br />
Congress to fund a southern Early Warning System, the Air Force<br />
is unlikely to admit that Soviet or Cuban aircraft got to New<br />
Orleans, much less Memphis, before anybody caught on.<br />
Here again, we have every reason to expect a high-level<br />
technical investigating team, Air Force and civilian observers told<br />
to keep their mouths shut, and not just the appearance but the<br />
reality of suppression of the data. Again, this conspiracy of silence<br />
need have nothing to do with alien spacecraft. Even decades later,<br />
there are bureaucratic reasons for the Department of Defense to<br />
be close-mouthed about such embarrassments. There is a potential<br />
conflict of interest between parochial concerns of the Department<br />
of Defense and the solution of the UFO enigma.<br />
In addition, something that both the Central Intelligence<br />
Agency and the US Air Force worried about then was UFOs as a<br />
means of clogging communication channels in a national crisis,<br />
and confusing visual and radar sightings of enemy aircraft - a<br />
signal-to-noise problem that in a way is the flip side of spoofing.<br />
In view of all this, I'm perfectly prepared to believe that at least<br />
some UFO reports and analyses, and perhaps voluminous files,<br />
have been made inaccessible to the public which pays the bills.<br />
The Cold War is over, the missile and balloon technology is<br />
largely obsolete or widely available, and those who would be<br />
embarrassed are no longer on active duty. The worst that would<br />
happen, from the military's point of view, is that there would be<br />
one more acknowledged instance of the American public being<br />
misled or lied to in the interest of national security. It's time for<br />
the files to be declassified and made generally available.<br />
Another instructive intersection of the conspiracy temperament<br />
and the secrecy culture concerns the National Security<br />
Agency. This organization monitors the telephone, radio and<br />
84
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