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UFOgate |
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A lone chemist’s quest to expose the UFO cover-up In the late 1950s, chemist Leon Davidson worked at Los Alamos, the research facility where the atomic scientists had endeavoured to control the force of the atom. But atoms were not the main thing on this scientist’s mind. Davidson was interested in UFOs and hunted down the then top secret CIA Robertson Panel report. This led him to the conclusion that the CIA were actively promoting UFOs as ETs, a conclusion few have been able – or willing – to accept since. Philip Coppens
Allen Dulles At the time, a lot of emphasis was placed on UFO sightings that were confirmed by radar – as late as 1989 and the Belgian UFO wave, specific emphasis continues to be placed on this “technological confirmation”. But Davidson pointed out that as early as 1945, mechanical countermeasures against radar had become publicly known – and used. It was known that these could cause blips on the radar screen, resulting in incorrect range, speed, or heading. This was called Electronic Countermeasures and Davidson believed this method of counterintelligence was used to present the myth that “UFOs” existed. Davidson drew the infamous equation: ECM+CIA=UFO, suggesting that the CIA were creating ECM signals on radars, so that people would believe in the presence of UFOs, as they confirmed eyewitness accounts of anomalous objects in the sky. Furthermore, the anomalous blips were a perfect mechanism to distort the true capabilities of any new aircraft that was being test-flown – occasional sightings of which were passed off as UFOs too. Publicly,
Davidson identified two incidents that were instrumental in forming
this opinion. When he wanted to have access to the Grudge report
(one of the first official government reports on the subject)
and visited Lt. Smith on May 17, 1950, it turned out that instead
of forwarding more data to Los Alamos, the Air Force took back
the Los Alamos copy of the Grudge report. Davidson added: “The
Los Alamos Lab. officials also ceased then to support our saucer
research efforts.”
1952 Washington UFOs Such
evidence convinced Davidson that the US government was behind
the “flying saucer myth” – a position that he
shared with many of his peers, such as Keyhoe and Ruppelt, but
which in more recent years has been seriously downplayed when,
as Davidson would no doubt agree, the CIA campaign to accept UFOs
as ET had come to fruition – and public acceptance. But
back then, things were different.
It
should not come as a surprise that Davidson suffered persecution
by the CIA. This is extremely telling when compared to the lack
of action taken against other researchers who claim that the CIA
and other agencies are engaged in a massive cover-up concerning
alien contact. So it’s okay to say that the CIA is hiding
little green men, but when you say the CIA has concocted the story
of little green men, the CIA hunts you down…
George Adamski
All of this, he traced back to Allen Dulles, another Director
of the CIA: “During 1950 Allen Dulles became actively involved
with the CIA work on saucers, and saw the psychological impact
which they had. He started a plan to build them up as a psychological
warfare weapon. Ruppelt’s book clearly shows the steps the
CIA took. Project Bluebook was warmed up in 1950-51, Ruppelt was
selected by a screening process and groomed for the job of public
relations cats-paw (without his knowledge), and a series of ‘incidents’
was planned and carried out involving regular military units,
which led to cases considered as authentic evidence of saucers.” Davidson
felt that the in retrospect “ridiculously” looking
UFO contactee period of the 1950s, in which people reported meeting
aliens from Venus and having rides on their space ship, was equally
part of a government campaign: “By Fall of 1952, the CIA
had laid out its plans for the ‘landing’ and ‘contact’
stories. The warmup for this had been the fabricated and planted
stories about ‘little green men’, such as the famous
lecture at the University of Denver in March 1950, described in
Scully’s book ‘Behind the Flying Saucers’. This
was a psychological test, and showed that about 50% of college-level
people would believe a well-presented story.” Betty & Barney Hill The
second UFO case for which Davidson is remembered occurred in 1957,
when he was working on a case involving a strange tape recording
made by Mildred and Marie Maier of Chicago. The sisters taped
a “space message” and other ham radio operators claimed
to have heard the same. This tape had been analyzed by the CIA’s
Office of Scientific Intelligence (OSI), which reported that it
was “nothing more than Morse code from a US radio station.”
When Davidson wrote to Dewelt Walker, the CIA officer who had
contacted the Maier sisters, Walker continued his pretence that
he worked for the Air Force. In retrospect, he did succeed. The incident was used by government historian Gerald K. Haines in his report on how the CIA was interested and involved in UFO investigation and government UFO policy from 1947 until 1990. Haines argues that all of this was merely the CIA being “inadequate” in properly dealing with issues and that “inadequacy” is all there is to it: “Thus, a minor, rather bizarre incident, handled poorly by both the CIA and the Air Force, turned into a major flap that added fuel to the growing mystery surrounding UFOs and CIA’s role in their investigation.” This is true, but the big lie is that at the time, the CIA was not officially involved at all. So if Davidson would have had absolute proof that the CIA was indeed running the show, with the Air Force mere hired actors, Davidson would have broken down a big lie. Some decades later, Haines, however much he played it down, did actually confirm what Davidson had been saying all along. Davidson himself concluded that every aspect of the mystery led back to the CIA. He argued that they had deliberately concocted the major UFO reports and fed them into the public arena as a cover for experimental aircraft and rocket tests at best and psychological warfare experiments practiced on its own citizens at worst. This was, at the time, a radical overhaul of the status quo, which argued that UFOs seemed to be extra-terrestrial and that the US government had suppressed evidence of their existence. Davidson went against this and wrote that the CIA “was solely responsible for creating the Flying Saucer furore as a tool for cold war psychological research.” But in this battle, however Davidson may be right, he lost and the CIA won: today, the extraterrestrial interpretation of UFOs is the most commonly proposed and accepted explanation, with a benign alien presence if not on than at least “near” Earth here to help us. And Davidson, though known, is ill-understood by most UFO researchers and either accidentally or knowingly misrepresented by even more writers on the subject. What Davidson predicted, has come true. |
Davidson
was born on October 18, 1922 in New York and received his doctorate
of chemical engineer from the University of Columbia in 1951.
As early as 1949, when he started work at Los Alamos Scientific
Laboratory, Davidson was interested in UFOs. His interest, however,
was not that he wanted to have physical proof of UFOs as extra-terrestrial
devices. He suspected the truth was quite the opposite. Later,
Davidson would write: “It became clear [to me], early in
the 1950’s, that the CIA, specifically Allen Dulles, had
used legitimate ‘flying saucers’ events […]
as a tool in the Cold War. Dulles wanted Russia to waste effort
on defences against objects having the extreme capabilities implied
by the public saucer stories. […] Dulles also adopted a
concept from his old friend Carl Jung, and co-opted the myth that
benign aliens have visited Earth for millennia. He used magicians’
illusions, tricks, and showmanship to blend in sightings, landings,
and contacts, with the legitimate military test sightings. The
public perception grew (from comic book to TV show) that space
travel was a real possibility, easing Congressional appropriations
for the ‘moon race’ with Russia. Later, Dulles found
the saucer believers and their clubs an ideal propaganda vehicle.”
The
second series of events that persuaded Davidson was the “Washington
invasion” of 1952, in which several UFO sightings occurred
above the US capital. Davidson was working in Washington that
year and saw classified photographs of a certain Navy guided missile
which in itself disproved the Air Force denials that the US had
no devices that looked like UFO sightings reported by the public.
He also questioned several “incidents” that occurred
during the “invasion”: jet interceptors were removed
from Andrews Air Force (4 miles from Washington) to New Castle
Delaware (90 miles) in the time framework of the sightings, so
that no confirmation was possible. Did someone make use of this
window to stage a UFO wave? Furthermore, Ruppelt, chief investigator
of UFOs for the Air Force, was prevented from travelling around
Washington to speak to eyewitnesses – all cars suddenly
were required for other duties. He then proposed he would use
taxis to visit the eyewitnesses, but was told that he would not
be reimbursed for such expenses. 
Today,
Davidson himself is best remembered for two incidents: Report
#14 and one case in which his insistence brought the Air Force
and CIA in serious disrepute. 
For
Davidson, it was self-evident that the CIA was behind it all:
“It delegated the Air Force to act as the official ‘investigator’
to stave off public enquiry. It secretly sponsored the formation
of saucer study groups and contact clubs, including NICAP (under
T. Townsend Brown, with whom, incidentally, I have had voluminous
correspondence.) The CIA set up many saucer publishers, sponsored
the publicity received by Adamski’s books and others, and
sponsored the wave of saucer articles in 1952 in ‘Life’,
‘Look’, etc.”
Later
on, Davidson also noted problems with the UFO abduction scenario.
In the preface to the fifth edition of his book (1976), he wrote:
“In 1956, Long John Nebel was the first to publicize this
book, over WOR Radio, New York. […] In 1972, Long John married
Candy Jones of NBC Radio “Monitor”, who in the 1960’s
was a CIA courier to the Bahamas. […] Candy was also unwittingly,
used by the CIA in hypnosis experiments in 1961 […] Candy’s
story, although not about saucers, has many similarities to Betty
Hill’s story of being hypnotized in 1961 […] by men
from a flying saucer. (Would you believe CIA employees?) Both
books refer to strange sounds inducing hypnosis […] Both
hypnotized women were victimized by men ‘playing doctor’.”
As to
how Davidson handled the situation himself: he told the CIA officer
that “he and his agency, whichever it was, were acting like
Jimmy Hoffa and the Teamster Union in destroying records which
might indict them.” Believing that any more contact with
Davidson would only encourage more speculation, the Contact Division
washed its hands of the issue by reporting to the DCI and to ATIC
that it would not respond to or try to contact Davidson again.
In short, Davidson was out to catch the CIA red-handed and he
was succeeding.