THE UFO INSTITUTES
2/2013
I just saw a picture of a small, dried out creature that was about 9” tall, and is reputed to be a dead alien. This can be seen on Dr. Steven Greer’s blog website. This specimen was discovered in the Atacama Desert in Peru, and has actually been handled by a couple of medical doctors, one of whom is Dr. Greer himself. It would be a bit difficult for a fake creature or an actual dried out animal to fool an experienced medical doctor like Dr. Greer, so we can conclude that the investigation of this specimen is off to a good start and is worthwhile. On Oct 18, 2012, Dr. Greer reported that DNA had successfully been extracted from the specimen, and in mid December, he reported that the DNA test setup had been completed and was then ready to start on the analysis. This is kind of surprising, given that many DNA test facilities already exist throughout the world, so why would a new test facility have to be created? Furthermore, for something of potential importance like this test could turn out to be, why not submit a second sample to another independent test lab as well? After all, scientific teams are well known to contain scientists who, when confronted with things that may conflict with their mainstream belief system, become non-scientific nut jobs who throw science out the window (think of the Shroud of Turin investigations, for example, or those scientists who believe in intelligent design.) Anyhow, the specimen is now in the possession of an “Institute” which I presume is in South America.
This “Institute” was not named, but the use of this word piqued my memory that throughout the history of UFOs, several institutes have been involved.
But first, some background is in order about “institutes” in general.
There are thousands upon thousands of institutes in the world. From Wikipedia, an institute is an organizational body created for a certain purpose. In the British Isles the term "institute" is a protected word and companies or other organizations may only use the word if they are "organisations which are carrying out research at the highest level or to professional bodies of the highest standing". Furthermore, if a company is carrying on a business under a different name to the company name, that business name must comply with the Business Names Act. Use of the title "institute" requires approval from the British Secretary of State. Failure to seek approval is a criminal offence. In some countries, such as South Korea and Japan, private schools are sometimes called institutes, rather than schools. In Spain secondary schools are called institutes. In some countries, including the USA, they can be an educational body; for example, the Illinois Institute of Technology. An institute can also exist as part of a university; for example, there exists Stanford Research Institute which did a lot of work on remote viewing which is reputed to be a practice which keeps bumping into UFOs. An institute can also be a professional body. An institute can be a research organization created to do research on specific topics. Therefore, one can conclude that throughout the world, an institute can be simply a special purpose unregulated, unprofessional organization all the way up to a large, regulated very professional organization. In the USA, this whole range of institutes exists.
There used to be (and maybe still is) the Spontaneous Human Combustion Institute. I stumbled across the Lulu Institute for Portable Explosives located in Syria, but this “factoid” is from a website that occasionally makes up humorous stories, kind of like the Onion does. If it were to exist, it would be appropriate for that neck of the world. There is also the Institute of Meteoritics at the University of New Mexico, for whom Dr. Lincoln La Paz worked as director back in the early fifties while he analyzed the early green UFO fireball sightings.
I believe that all “think tanks” are institutes. Two broad categories for institutes are research institutes and policy institutes. In the history of UFOs, both types have been used to provide research. The policy institutes are the ones that are less credible in that they offer up opinions to those who hire them that are usually in line with what the employers want. Otherwise, they won’t be rehired for anything else. In what follows, some of an institute’s employees may have independently written about UFOs as a personal hobby, and this has caused their institute to bear some responsibility for what they have written in the mind of the public, perhaps unfairly so. By the same token, this may have caused that institute to have reacted unfairly to that employee.
Cato Institute: Charles Koch, one of the Koch brothers of Tea Party fame, helped found The Cato Institute in 1977. It espouses libertarian and Tea Party principles and is recognized as about the fifth most influential think tank in Washington. It is probably unfair of me to point out the oxymoron of it being a Tea Party think tank, and they do criticize both major political parties. Plus they have written favorably about same sex marriage and drug decriminalization. They did have an employee in the role of a 20 year adjunct scholar named Don Armentano who has always been interested in UFOs, so in 2008 he wrote and published a paper which advocated UFO Disclosure by the government. He was fired the next day with his boss telling him, “…for now this strikes us as not an issue that we want to have as part of Cato’s research agenda.” So much for government transparency and free speech, which are supposedly the cornerstones of Cato’s founding.
RAND Corporation: The most well known UFO related publication by RAND Corporation (stands for Research ANd Development) is one that they do not officially take responsibility for. It is entitled, UFOs: What to Do?, and it was written in 1968 by George Korcher. On page 3 of this publication, it says, “This paper was produced as an internal document; it was not prepared for or delivered to any of RAND’s clients. Peer review has not been undertaken, nor has it been edited for publication. It is being released at this time as a matter of public interest.” It is only 42 pages of text and is very well written. Apparently, George Korcher was very interested in UFOs and wrote this paper on company time on his own without being asked to by his employer. At least, that is what RAND wants you to believe. Because it was written on company time, it is the property of RAND, it is in their archives, and RAND is selling copies of it for $18.40. It was written just before the long awaited Condon report was released. As you know, Condon did a great disservice to UFOs and truth in general, and the media fell for it hook, line and sinker as they always do. You can read this paper for free on the internet at
http://www.rand.org/content/dam/rand/pubs/drafts/2007/DRU1571.pdf
Anthony Bragalia discusses RAND’s involvement with UFOs on his excellent website, The Bragalia Files, in his archived report, “Deep Secrets of a UFO Think Tank Exposed”, published in 2007. The aforementioned paper, he reports, was stamped “’for RAND Use Only.” It further instructs on its cover page: “Do not quote or cite in external publications or correspondence.’” The website that I referenced which contains this paper does not have those revealing comments on the paper. One has to admit that it is odd for a company to allow an employee to write a hobby paper on company time that obviously took at least a few man-months of effort to complete unless, of course, the company wanted the paper written in the first place. Bragalia’s article shows that RAND has a deep history with UFO that precedes this 1968 paper by about two decades.
Battelle Memorial Institute: Battelle is a research institute, not a policy institute. I once worked for a company that used Battelle to do some research, and as a result I have a very high opinion of them. Battelle is the institute that wrote Project Blue Book Special Report No. 14 for the Air Force in 1955. Stanton Friedman sells this report so I bought one. I have to take his word for it that Battelle wrote it because I can’t find the word “Battelle” in it anywhere. Mr. Friedman also includes a copy of the press release (not written by Battelle) that attended its publication. The press release is clearly a bunch of lies intended to fool the public as to the actual contents of the report. Evidently, the Air Force knew of the laziness and gullibility of the journalism community as far back as 1955 when the report was published. The UFO researcher Anthony Bragalia has presented evidence which shows that Battelle was also the research body which was supplied Roswell crash material for analysis, resulting in the patents for Nitinol memory metal. Given that Battelle did so much work on UFOs, it is likely that they also authored the permanently missing Project Blue Book Special Report No. 13 which only about two people ever claim to have seen, and which therefore may never have existed. It probably did exist because why skip number 13 in the numbering sequence? It is likely that Battelle did write report number 13 because they did write number 14. Number 13 allegedly contained absolute proof of alien visitation because it contained pictures of UFO crashes and aliens. If there ever was a report number 13, the only reason that I can think of that Battelle may not have written it is that the Air Force did not want any single outside organization to learn too much about the alien contact that was occurring so they farmed out no. 13 to a different research organization. My opinion is that there was indeed a Special Report Number 13, and that Battelle wrote it.
Another involvement with UFOs by Battelle was with an early UFO project called Project Stork, which ran from 1947 until at least 1954. The project was known to both Edward Ruppelt and J. Allen Hynek and appears to duplicate the effort of Project Grudge and early Bluebook. It was run by Battelle. This project collected UFO sighting data on preprinted forms and did a UFO survey of astronomers. Not a whole lot is known about Project Stork.
Brookings Institution: In 1960 NASA commissioned the Brookings Institution to write a report which was named “Proposed Studies on the Implications of Peaceful Space Activities for Human Affairs”. This report, usually referred to as the “Brookings Report”, generally gets bad publicity in the early annals of ufology because many people blame it for the justification of the coverup of UFOs. In reality, the report contains many scenarios of possible reactions and responses to those reactions of hypothetical discoveries of our space exploration activities. The 219 page report clearly presents its ideas on each scenario as possibilities and leaves it at that. It can be read at http://www.nicap.org/papers/brookings.pdf . It mentions the words “saucer”, “UFO”, “unidentified flying object”, “sighting”, and “alien” zero times. Because this report was written toward the end of the “golden age of UFO sightings”, to me it has the appearance of avoiding the real issue of alien visitation (or at least keeping it at arm’s length) and that this certainly had to have been a conscious decision. Negativity arose in the UFO world when subsequent journalists emphasized a couple of statements in the report which mentioned withholding information as a way to contain any reaction to the discovery of alien life.
Brookhaven National Laboratory: All English speaking people who are interested in UFOs certainly have heard of the Robertson Panel, whose ignorant recommendations set progress back in ufology even to this day. All the members of this body, which met for 4 days in January of 1953, were physical scientists of one sort or another, yet the most damaging of their recommendations pertained to controlling the thought processes of the American public. This certainly was not their area of expertise. The USA would have gotten better results from consulting the local dog catcher or milk man. This panel simply regurgitated the goals of their founder (the CIA) back to the CIA, and then disbanded. One of the members of this infamous group was nuclear physicist Samuel Abraham Goudsmit, an employee of Brookhaven National Laboratories. It presently has 3000 permanent employees and is co-operated by Battelle Memorial Institute and Stony Brook University according to Wikipedia. Back then, however, it was operated by Associated Universities, Inc. (Notice that the word “institute” is not in its title although it performs pretty much the same work as Battelle. “Brookhaven Institute” is another organization altogether.)
Brookhaven was also implicated in a UFO crash that allegedly occurred very close to the labs on 11/24/1992. Supposedly Brookhaven personnel were witnessed being given special access to the cordoned off crash site, and the wreckage was removed to the labs. This event, now believed to be a hoax, was given special coverage on 5/20/2009 on the now defunct UFO Hunters tv show.
In conclusion, this blurb shows that the government readily used private sector resources to find answers to the UFO question even in the earliest days of the phenomenon. It also suggests that when a UFO leak by an institute occurs, it is probably just the tip of an iceberg of extensive history and deep UFO files that probably still reside at that institute
