ByBilly Cox
De Void
9-28-10
The Air Force is in a pickle. It can't refute the seven veterans who told a National Press Club audience on Monday that UFOs had been surveilling and even disabling portions of America's nuclear missile arsenal since the 1960s. Not without calling these guys liars. And maybe even having to conduct prosecutions for security-oath violations. So on Tuesday, it resorted to the old buzz-off gimmick that's always worked before.
"This is what our position is," said Vicki Stein on the Air Force press desk at the Pentagon. "And we're standing by it."
She e-mailed De Void a rigid "fact sheet" that hasn't switched gears since 1969, the same one that retired USAF captain Robert Salas held up as a fraud Monday afternoon. Last reissued in 2005, the press release informs taxpayers that "No UFO reported, investigated and evaluated by the Air Force was ever an indication of threat to our national security."
No need to rehash the details of yesterday's press conference here; De Void has written about the subject before, and the testimony is all over the Internet now. After he and his colleagues - including a former base commander, and combat crew commander, and a missile-targeting officer - finished up, Salas charged the same document "is clearly misleading, it is false, based on our testimonies."
Unpolished, a tad nervous, often reading from prepared statements, their names - Charles Halt, Robert Jamison, Jerry Nelson, Patrick McDonough, Bruce Fenstermacher, Dwynne Arneson and Salas - deserve to be mentioned again because what they did took stones. Not only did they contradict the longstanding policy of the agency responsible for their pensions, with nothing to gain they stood up to face a glib media ensemble which has proven historically incapable of reporting this issue.
Although CNN, to its credit, streamed the conference live, none of the big boys bothered to staff it. As Washington Post columnist John Kelly (who had the integrity to admit he only showed up for the cookies) noted, the media turnout was largely fringe or obscure.
Try to imagine USAF veterans with all the proper DD-214s coming forward to discuss the crippling of our nukes by any other means - saboteurs, freak atmospherics, design flaws, whatever - during a period when we and the Soviets were spring-loaded to obliterate each other. At least two questions would demand answers: 1) How does the Defense Department respond to these allegations, and 2) What counter-measures have since been enacted to guarantee the security of our nuclear stockpiles? But neither of these issues were raised, because the A-Team didn't show.
Although a few outfits like Stars and Stripes played it straight, most of the coverage was as predictable as fleas on dogs. "I don't take this stuff at face value (to say the least), but I do love a grand yarn," blogged Brian Caulfield of Forbes magazine. "That's right," added Wired's Spencer Ackerman. "Earth is being monitored by intergalactic hippies." Popular Science: "Paging Fox Mulder."
The event, staged by UFO researcher/author Robert Hastings, will dissipate within a news cycle or two. An Air Force policy position that hasn't changed since U.S. troops were being blown apart in Vietnam will see to that. But for an hour and a half on Monday afternoon in the nation's capitol, long after their military careers ended, seven veterans who've had their fill of avoidance and denial proved to the world they still know how to serve their country.
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See Also:
UFO NEWS VIDCAST: UFOs & Nukes Author/Researcher, Robert Hastings Discusses UFOs & The Extraterrestrial Hypothesis with CNN
UFO NEWS VIDCAST: Fox News Interviews Robert Hastings " />
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