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Back to the future
May 18, 2009
by Billy Cox
Herald Tribune.com

Sometimes the banal and arbitrary nature of government censorship can look pretty dumb. Take last week’s partial declassification of a briefing summary of a famous case known as Citizens Against UFO Secrecy vs. the National Security Agency.

Back in 1980, CAUS sued America’s code-crackers for access to what it was learning about the phenomenon outside our borders. The Agency admitted it was sitting on 239 documents, 156 of which were communications intelligence reports (eavesdropping) gathered from 1958-1979.

Arguing that releasing more than a few breadcrumbs of this stuff would compromise sources and methods, the NSA’s Office of Policy Chief Eugene Yeates submitted a 21-page summary of its reasoning in federal court. CAUS sued for release of Yeates’ synopsis. In 1982, a federal judge ruled that releasing an unredacted summary would undermine national security.

What CAUS ultimately got its hands on were so many blacked out pages — each one stamped “Top Secret Umbra” — the feds’ insistence it wasn’t hiding anything about UFOs became a laughing stock on the lecture circuit. Most prominently exploiting the incongruity was investigator Stan Friedman, who turned the docs into prominent visual aids.

“Remember, these were the early days of FOIA,” Friedman recalls from his home in New Brunswick, Canada. “In their arrogance, they never thought anybody was gonna fight back.”

In 1997, censors started stripping away the black tape and, sure enough, much of what came out involved the protection of intelligence acquisition sites and modes of operation. What also became a little clearer was that elusive bogeys exhibiting advanced technology were violating sovereign airspace across the world. The NSA scarfed up reports of “luminous spheres,” “balls of light” and an “elongated ball of fire” capable of being observed and tracked.

The latest public installment of the Yeates briefing — http://www.governmentattic.org/2docs/NSA_YeatesInCameraAffidavit_1980.pdf, released last Tuesday — is a shadow of its portentious original incarnation. Words, phrases, paragraphs and entire pages now confront taxpayers who subsidized its darkest secrets.

Since its last version came out in 2005, we now know that the NSA — created in 1952 to gather cryptologic intelligence — was spying on “foreign governments,” including the “Soviet Union.” We now know many of those texts were “decrypted” from “ground” radio operators and “ground” radar stations, that some targets were “military” and some were “non-military.”

What we didn’t know in 2005 is that “soldiers” from a still unnamed foreign country reported seeing a UFO somewhere. Equally shocking is that public disclosure of our “third party arrangements” could erode the “confidence in the capability of the U.S. officials to keep secrets.” (Remember — this explosive revelation has been on ice since 1982.)

Perhaps most amazing is how, on page 13, the article “the” has now been declassified prior to describing some still-censored passages — not once, not twice, but three times. On a single page. Unfortunately, since our last episode four years ago, the word “in” has been reclassified on page 20, and the word “two” was reclaimed by the censors in a passage on page 12.

Friedman, who has filed in vain for the closeted raw UFO data, doubts we’d learn a whole lot even if the NSA were to dump everything he’s asking for into the public domain. “I imagine what they’re sitting on is duller than hell,” he says. “The Russians have got good UFO cases, just like we do. So what?”