| UFO UpDate: Lawyer To Sue For Release Of Real X Files | |
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From: Mark Hall To: updates@globalserve.net Subject: Lawyer To Sue For Release Of Real X Files Date: Sun, 22 Aug 1999 22:44:23 +0100 UK Sunday Telegraph Aug 22nd 1999 Sunday 22 August 1999 Lawyer to sue for release of 'real X-Files' By James Langton in New York The truth is out there, and Peter Gersten believes that he knows where to find it. As director of the Citizens Against UFO Secrecy he will launch a lawsuit this week against the United States government, claiming that its refusal to hand over secret documents on the existence of flying saucers is a violation of his constitutional rights. While the authorities, including the Department of Defence and the CIA, continue to insist that they are not concealing details about alien incursions, their denials are undermined by growing evidence of real-life X-Files. The British academic journal Intelligence and National Security last week published an official CIA report that documented attempts by the agency to uncover the truth behind UFO sightings over half a century. It revealed that the CIA operated its own team of UFO investigators and that, like the television series The X-Files in which secret agents probe extra-terrestrial activity, the agency was plagued by sometimes bitter divisions between sceptics and those who believed in flying saucers. Mr Gersten and his organisation hope that their latest lawsuit will force the authorities to reveal what they know about a large number of well-documented sightings of large triangular craft seen over Arizona and New Mexico in recent years. The objects, some many times larger than a jumbo jet, have been observed by tens of thousands of people. One was filmed over Phoenix two years ago but later interpreted by the air force as a series of flares dropped in a training mission - an explanation few accepted. "People have a right to the truth," says Mr Gersten, a lawyer from Scottsdale, Arizona, who believes that extra-terrestrials are trying to contact us through crop circles. "I believe that the authorities have evidence and that I can prove it in a court of law." While such extreme opinions are only shared by a tiny minority, most Americans believe that their government knows more than it will say. Opinion polls show that more than half now believe in UFOs. And after years of denial, almost all branches of the American military now admit that they carried out their own secret investigations into flying saucers, particularly in the 1950s when UFO fever peaked. The CIA report, by its official historian Gerald Haynes, says that the agency eventually concluded that most reports could be explained and that there were no little green men. While some CIA agents believed that there was evidence of genuine UFO activity, the official version attributes at least half the sightings to secret US Air Force reconnaissance aircraft such as the U2 and Blackbird. Dr Bruce Maccabee, one of America's leading UFO experts who regularly met CIA agents from 1979, believes that the "real X-Files" are in the vaults of the air force and FBI. The air force also maintained Project Blue Book in which it documented nearly 13,000 sightings between 1951 to 1969, all but 700 of which it was able to explain as conventional aircraft or natural phenomenon. The air force has also attempted - with very limited success - to end speculation that it recovered the remains of a spacecraft which crashed near Roswell, New Mexico, in 1947 and several alien bodies. It has released previously classified files which claim that the "saucer" was actually a weather balloon used to monitor nuclear tests and that the "aliens" were crash test dummies for parachute prototypes. Among UFO diehards, however, such "explanations" are seen only as evidence of a further cover-up. Mark Hall UFO Community On MSN http://communities.msn.com/ufo/ CSETI www.cseti.org UFOStudies http://ufostudies.oaktree.co.uk/ \_______________________________________________/ UFO UpDates - Toronto - updates@globalserve.net A UFO & Related Phenomena E-Mail List operated by Errol Bruce-Knapp - 416-696-0304 UFO UpDates Archives are available at: http://www.ufomind.com/ufo/updates |
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