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Examples of Leslie Kean's CFI Communiqués and Investigative Reporting on UFOs
From the Corpus Christi, TX Caller-Times
December 14, 2002
Out of this world
What is the government hiding about the close encounters with UFO's
By Leslie Kean
As Steven Spielberg's series "Taken" raises interest in government secrecy about UFOs, The Washington Post reports that Attorney General John Ashcroft has tightened the lid on the Freedom of Information Act. Ashcroft gave federal officers a green light to ignore the FOIA if they withhold records, and he'll even defend them in court.
The American people are already frustrated. Two-thirds of them believe that the government is withholding information about UFOs and 60 percent of adults want the information declassified if it is not a national security risk, according to a September Roper Poll.
So far, declassified records show that some UFOs are not science fiction. Unexplained objects have been well-documented by trained observers, such as pilots and military personnel. Some have landed and left ground traces in England, France and the United States.
"People have been digging through the files and investigating for years now. The files are quite convincing. The only thing that's lacking is the official stamp," says Apollo 14 astronaut Dr. Edgar Mitchell.
As a result, the Sci Fi Channel is publicly calling for the declassification of government documents on UFO activity. "It is important to separate science fiction from science fact, a line which is becoming increasingly blurred," says Bonnie Hammer, the network's president.
In October, Hammer joined President Clinton's former chief of staff John Podesta to support a new FOIA initiative by me and the Washington law firm of Lobel, Novins and Lamont.
"I think it's time to open the books on questions that have remained in the dark, on the question of government investigations of UFOs," Podesta said at a Washington news conference. "We ought to do it because it's right. We ought to do it because the American people can handle the truth, and we ought to do it because it's the law."
The FOIA request seeks documentation on the crash of an object of unknown origin in Kecksburg, Pa., in 1965. The U.S. government denies anything fell from the sky, despite the signed affidavits of firefighters, radio journalists, dozens of witnesses at the scene, and newspaper reports to the contrary. [ CLICK HERE for more information about the Kecksburg UFO crash from Stan Gordon. ]
These records are more than 25 years old. They should be declassified and we should be able to see them for ourselves.
In 1969, the U.S. Air Force stated that "no UFO reported, investigated and evaluated by the Air Force has ever given any indication of threat to our national security" to justify closure of its investigation. The government still takes this position despite the fact that it routinely refuses to comply with FOIA requests about UFO cases on the basis of national security. In fact, some UFO incidents have
obvious national security implications, although this would not appear to justify the withholding of information about them.
According to North American Aerospace Defense Command logs, U.S. fighter jets attempted to pursue UFOs in 1975. Defense Department reports state that UFOs were also pursued after hovering over three supersensitive nuclear missile launch sites that same year.
And as recently as last July, two F-16s from Andrews Air Force Base were scrambled after radar detected an unknown aircraft. Military officials said they do not know what the jets were chasing, because whatever it was disappeared.
Earlier this month, the British Ministry of Defense released files on a famous multiple-witness case at Bentwaters Air Base in 1980. A memo by U.S. Deputy Base Commander Lt. Col. Charles Halt, as well as a tape recording at the scene, detail the landing of a glowing triangular craft that left three circular depressions and radiation 10 times higher than normal in a nearby forest.
Echoing the U.S. line, the British government also dismisses the phenomenon by claiming that the event was "of no defense significance." However, Britain's former Chief of the Defense Staff, Adm. Lord Hill-Norton, says that whether this represents the hallucination of men with the responsibility for guarding nuclear
weapons or "the entry of a vehicle from outer space," it "cannot fail to be of defense interest."
There is no longer an acceptable justification for the withholding of reports on UFO incidents decades old, whether they are of defense interest or not. Nor is it acceptable for the attorney general to refuse to enforce FOIA. The American people should not have to rely on science fiction for answers.
Leslie Kean is a reporter for Pacifica radio. She is research director of the Coalition for Freedom of Information, www.freedomofinfo.org.
She can be reached by e-mail at
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Copyright 2002, Caller.com. All Rights Reserved.
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