Carl%20Sagan%20-%20The%20Demon%20Haunted%20World

Spoofing and Secrecy
doing their collusive best to hinder and obstruct my efforts?
Why were stories true one day, and false the next? Why all
the tense, unyielding secretiveness? Why were military intelligence
agents spreading disinformation, driving UFO believers
mad? What had the government found out there? What
was it trying to hide?
Of course there's resistance. Some information is classified legitimately;
as with military hardware, secrecy sometimes really is in
the national interest. Further, military, political and intelligence
communities tend to value secrecy for its own sake. It's a way of
silencing critics and evading responsibility for incompetence or
worse. It generates an elite, a band of brothers in whom the
national confidence can be reliably vested, unlike the great mass
of citizenry on whose behalf the information is presumably made
secret in the first place. With a few exceptions, secrecy is deeply
incompatible with democracy and with science.
One of the most provocative purported intersections of UFOs and
secrecy are the so-called MJ-12 documents. In late 1984, so the story
goes, an envelope containing a canister of exposed but undeveloped
film was thrust into the home mail slot of a film producer, Jaime
Shandera, interested in UFOs and government cover-up, remarkably,
just as he was about to go out and have lunch with the author of
a book on the alleged events in Roswell, New Mexico. When
developed, it 'proved to be' page after page of a highly classified
'eyes only' executive order dated 24 September 1947 in which
President Harry S. Truman seemingly established a committee of
twelve scientists and government officials to examine a set of crashed
flying saucers and little alien bodies. The membership of the MJ-12
committee is remarkable because these are just the military, intelligence,
science and engineering people who might have been called to
investigate such crashes if they had occurred. In the MJ-12 documents
there are tantalizing references to appendices about the nature
of the aliens, the technology of their ships and so on, but the
appendices were not included in the mysterious film.
The Air Force says that the document is bogus. The UFO
expert Philip J. Klass and others find lexicographic and typographic
inconsistencies that suggest that the whole thing is a hoax.
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