"The search was a sham," says Peter A. Gersten, the Arizona attorney who founded and directs Citizens Against UFO Secrecy (CAUS).
Gersten has just learned what "keywords and identifiers" the Department of Defense used in its search for information on the huge, black triangular-shaped object that thousands of people have reported seeing around the country for the past couple of decades, most notably in Illinois in January of this year, in Phoenix in March of 1997, and in the Hudson Valley area of New York in February of 1982.
| Words of Encouragement |
| After the hearing last month, Gersten received a congratulatory email from Will Miller, retired commander of the U.S. Naval Reserve: |
"I am certain that the documentation you seek exists [...] At the sametime, I firmly believe that many senior government officials, such as the director of DIA with whom I recently met on this subject, are 'protected and isolated' from knowledge of this subject and from data gathered by their own Department of Defense intelligence organizations." |
"The military leadership has both interest in and concern about the UFO phenomenon. If there are any 'keepers of the keys' they reside in DOD middle management and civilian DOD contractors (BDM, SAIC, Boeing, Lockheed-Martin, etc.and the comptrollers who monitor the flow of money to certain classified and Special Access Programs [SAPs]) Unfortunately in many cases the DoD folks charged with looking for information may themselves not know where to look." |
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Last year's DOD search, performed on the heels of a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit filed by Gersten on behalf of
CAUS, had produced no records on this rather too obvious object, despite the fact that Gersten had provided them with 33 affidavits from eyewitnesses around the country, including sketches and a photo.
But when the DOD tried to have the case dismissed last month in Phoenix, U. S. District Court judge Stephen M. McNamee ordered the DoD to first provide CAUS with the specifics of the government's search. That's where today's "keywords and identifiers" come in.
"It's obvious the Department of Defense treated the suit like an ordinary request for UFO information," says Gersten.
Looking for more than just flying saucers
In their search for information from Joint Chiefs of Staff (JCS) and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency (DARPA), the DOD used a whole grab bag of terms, including "UFO, unidentified flying object, spacecraft, alien craft, flying saucer, v-shaped, delta, boomerang, triangular, triangle, football field, big, large, float, hover, soundless," and such general words as "house, appear, underneath, underside, bottom, red, centered, multiple, trailing" to describe the object.
"If they had to use all these words to come up with a match, I'm not surprised they didn't come up with anything," says Gersten. "On the other hand, if just one word could trigger a record, how could they not come up with something? Besides, I never mentioned the words 'alien craft.' and I specifically told them not to use the word 'UFO.' They never focused in on this object."
"But the fact is that DOD must have information on something so obviously within their responsibility of intelligence and security," says Gersten incredulously. "It's absolutely inconceivable that the DOD would have no information about a soundless, hovering, low level, football field sized triangular object--no matter what its origin or identity."
"How can the Defense Department not collect this information? We are not talking about something that crashed 53 years ago in Roswell, we are talking about something being seen in this country today."
A lack of good faith?
Gersten will ask Judge McNamee to deny the Department of Defense's Motion for Summary Judgment in the case.
"Their search obviously wasn't done in good faith," he says.
Most curious of all was the Form 472 item signed by DOD declassification specialist Betty M. Goode, who apparently first checked the "Records Found" box, then blacked it out and checked the "No Records" box instead.
"I'm not saying it wasn't an honest mistake," says Gersten, "but it's surprising that she didn't just destroy the 'incorrectly' marked form and fill out a new one. Why have an ambiguity? Is someone trying to tell us something? Some people think that within the Department of Defense there are good guys who are for disclosure and bad guys who aren't and sometimes they give us little messages. Could this be one of them?"
Gersten is thoroughly puzzled by the DOD's treatment of this case.
"I thought the DOD would have come forward and said, 'yes, we have information, we have 62 documents-they're protected by national security.' No judge, nobody would ever question that. The agency has complete discretion to determine national security. But they didn't do that. Why?"
Secret origins of a UFO lawyer
This case is just the latest in Gersten's bulging briefcase of UFO-related lawsuits. It was during his 25 years as a criminal attorney in New York City that Gersten's interest in UFOs led him to represent a private UFO group called Ground Saucer Watch in 1978 in its FOIA suit against the CIA.
The case produced spectacular results, leading to the release of nearly a thousand pages of UFO documents from the CIA, DIA, Air Force, Navy, Army, and other government agencies. The documents confirmed a widespread suspicion on the part of UFO buffs that despite official denials, the CIA and other government agencies did indeed have a long, often secret, interest in UFOs.
Four years later Gersten was standing before the US Court of Appeals in Washington DC arguing on the behalf of CAUS for the release of 156 UFO documents being withheld by the National Security Agency.
But when the agency produced a 21-page top secret affidavit explaining its reasons for withholding the documents, the judged dismissed the suit. The heavily blacked out affidavit did nothing to squelch the suspicions of UFO buffs, however.
Then Gersten was hired by Texas UFO witnesses Betty Cash and Vicki Landrum following their encounter in December of 1981 with a mystery object that supposedly caused radiation-related injuries. But the attempt to place the blame on the government crumbled when efforts to track down the gaggle of helicopters the witnesses claimed had followed the object on its departure failed.
The can of worms
Most of Gersten's UFO-related lawsuits eventually hit a dead end -- sometimes literally.
Like the suit against the Army for the autopsy reports on the alien bodies from the Roswell crash which Col. Philip Corso, as chief of the Army's Foreign Technology Division, claimed to have seen in 1961, according to his book The Day After Roswell. Corso died last year in the midst of the suit.
"The Army didn't say Corso was lying," notes Gersten, "they just said they didn't have any documents."
Surprisingly Gersten is rather pessimistic about ever seeing any official disclosure on the UFOs.
"It would be like opening a can of worms," he says. "They couldn't control it. The media would be all over the story. People would want to know why the government lied to us in the past. The hysteria would dwarf that of the OJ trial and the impeachment hearings."
"There would be an insatiable desire for information: What about Mars? What about the Moon? I got abducted last night, aren't you going to protect us? Oh, there's the object again! It would jam everything up, just like the 1953 CIA Robertson Panel said would happen. So the bottom line is that there will never be an official disclosure. It's a practical impossibility. It will never happen. "
But that won't keep Gersten from trying.
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