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Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs) Block Programs - Classified Heritage

 By Charles P. Vick (All Rights Reserved)

Senior Technical Analyst, Globalsecurity.org

06-08/12-11-2008

Disclaimer: The materials reviewed here in are solely the author’s and should not be construed to reflect those of any government agency, company, institution or association. It is based on public information, circumstantial evidence, conjecture, and declassified U.S. intelligence community documents. This analysis is subject to revision.

Introduction

In a recent discussion with James T. Westwood, senior consultant, Military Science and Defense Analytics, Unionville, VA., Westwood spoke at length about the only real, secret flying saucer (UFO) hardware and operations program of the U.S. government. His discussion with this author was in the context of UFOs reported in the international media over Iran's nuclear sites in December, 2004.

 UAV Classified Heritage

It is clear that to this day the highly successful U.S. UAV programs heritage remains as a series of public military programs and a series of classified programs still in use from their Cold War origins. They are assigned two-word code names over the various programs that have had their hardware continually modernized. There are the publicly-known military programs dramatically seen in recent decades and the unacknowledged programs that remain “black”.

One is moved to ask the non-obvious question: where did this recent explosion in UAV technology come from without having an untold heritage? These UAV-UFO programs did not just come from out of the blue with “little green alien beings visitations”, from nowhere, but have a long Cold War heritage technologically advanced than previously.

Westwood said that this black program goes back in intelligence history to a USAF project (GRUDGE) that issued its final report in 1949 and to a subsequent CIA project of 1952-1953, both of which found that the flying saucer phenomenon had inherent potential for both Soviet and U.S. psychological warfare operations, at the time ramping up on both sides of the early Cold War.

By about 1965, the U.S. was researching and developing its initial hardware and operations concepts capabilities. During the Kennedy Administration, airborne "experiments" run by CIA’s Desmond Fitzgerald flew flying saucers inside remote airspace of the Peoples’ Republic of China during the PRC’s construction of the Lop Nor nuclear weapons proving ground. These flying saucers operations gave tentative indications that such a program might prove useful. What this involved, Westwood said, were, by current standards, primitive, pre-microelectronic, remotely-piloted, aerial vehicles forward staged, delivered clandestinely. Through the end of the 20 th century the Air Force and Joint air transportation commands played prominent role in deploying the UFO lookalikes.

By the mid-1960s, four, cooperating military aerospace and electronics contractors were developing and testing hardware. The earliest, successful program, which was a nuclear weapons "sniff er”, was code named COMPASS ARROW. It crashed in a test flight inside the secure perimeter of Los Alamos National Laboratory in 1969. COMPASS ARROW was a remarkable technology at the time, the first RPV with an al1-digital, air-to-ground, telecommunications link for control and feed-back in real time.

Westwood went on to say that in 1967 and again in 1975 the program was live-tested over some of the U.S. Air Force's former Strategic Air Command (SAC) bomber and ICBM bases in Montana, Michigan and Maine. This was a strategic C3CM application intended to shut down Soviet ICBM sites in situ.

Over the years, according to MSDA's senior consultant, the program, which began as a scare and diversionary tactic of psychological warfare, developed additional capabilities, most notably strategic reconnaissance and strategic, counter-command and control measures (C3CM) warfare. Basically, that involved reconnoitering Soviet and Chinese nuclear weapons sites and related nuclear industrial complexes. On the other hand, the complimentary thrust for this "UFO” hardware was to develop a so-called "strategic reserve" capability to conduct non-lethal C3CM against ICBM complexes inside the former Soviet Union.

The overall capability depended on three overlapping propositions or capabilities: (1) stealth of operation (e.g., the silent, no-noise aspect as in numerous flying saucer reports), (2) devising and packaging a light-weight, high-powered microwave emitter in an uninhabited aerial vehicle, and (3) successfully taking advantage for C&D (cover and deception) using the world-wide UFO or flying saucer craze, the incredible lore and lure of Earth visited by extraterrestrial spaceships. This, Westwood said, took full cognizance of the original USAF and CIA deliberations about the psychological warfare potential of flying saucers coming to Earth from distant planets, nowhere more classically employed by the Air Force than in July, 1947, in New Mexico. This myth, Mr. Westwood said, worked very well for decades, being revealed for the psychological warfare ploy that it was by a clever British UFO researcher earlier in this century, the redoubtable Nicholas Red fern.

The counter C3 capability, it turned out, tested so well in 1975 against "friendly" ICBMs, according to Westwood, that the ultimate effect was disastrous. What that meant, he said, was, to the USAF, not at all funny. Guidance and control circuits of Minuteman ICBMs were so thoroughly "cooked" that an emergency contract had to be let to repair and replace critical components of the ready strategic force.

UFOs over Iran, as both military and media-reported events, originated in September, 1976, and recurred in 1978. At that time, the U.S. and Iran were on friendly terms prior to the overthrow of the Shah of Iran and the Iranian Revolution of 1979. Iran hosted a number of sophisticated, U.S. "listening posts" directed at emanations from inside the USSR, and the U.S. was launching reconnaissance and other "UFOs" into the USSR from Iran, a clandestine program. When the Imperial Iranian Air Force re-acted to one of those U.S. UFO flights, indeed, "over-reacted," a later, infamous, USAF general. (then, an "air commando" colonel) flew secretly to Tehran for a conclave with Iranian Air Force senior officers.

By the early 1980s, U.S. joint operations organizations at national and regional levels were organized as "special technical" units to manage and control the black flying saucer program. In the hot wash-up of the Gulf War of 1990-1991, this group would make bold claims among the cognoscenti that it "won the Gulf War." According to Westwood, there is a measure of truth to this claim because it really did "put the lights out" in Baghdad in early 1991. During that brief conflict, the joint special technical organization was known colloquially as "Starship Enterprise." Some boasting, said Westwood is a part of military morale, though this boast has preservation-of-security implications.

In an Air Force sub-program kicked off in the mid-1980s at Wright Patterson AFB, the special technical flying saucers included a then new aero form development that was responsible for awesome UFO sightings inside the former Soviet Union’s airspace in 1989 and 1990, appropriately over strategic alternate and main command posts, deep in the former USSR’s interior. These are covered in Jacques Vallee’s book, UFO CHRONICLES OF THE SOVIET UNION. In 2001, during performance of an MSDA flying saucer consultation, Valle told Westwood that he (JV) did not know the cause of UFO’s. Westwood said there are many causes but only these successive black programs constitute the actual, real-world “MJ-12”.

A few years ago, this analyst and MSDA’s Westwood consulted on information uncovered in the Manuscript Division of the Library of Congress showing that the flying saucer black program was operating “aerial vehicles” inside the former USSR airspace as early as 1968. Early in the programs, the USSR’s Border Guards came into possession of U. S. flying saucer hardware which one of its generals characterized as “flying mattresses and portable helicopters.” According to James Oberg another cause of flying saucer reports inside the former Soviet Union included identifiable Soviet space launches and reentry events.

Senior Technical Intelligence Analyst Vick points out that this black program seems first may to have been revealed in a book by Andrew, Tully, The Super Spies, New York: William Morrow (1969).

In closing his conference with this author, Mr. Westwood pointed out that there is nothing at all in what he discussed that is not long on the public record, including many properly declassified, formerly security classified, Defense Department and CIA records about UFOs.