Documents / FOIA release
This CIA FOIA release contains a June 5, 2006 appeal from independent writer Larry W. Bryant to the CIA Records-Release Panel. He challenges the agency's no-records finding on former Army captain John Joseph McCarthy, Jr., whom he says was assigned to the clandestine Vietnam-era Project CHERRY. He also disputes fee denials on his request for records on Philip J. Corso. Attached are Scott Koch's May 2006 replies and Bryant's UFO magazine column on the FBI dossier on Philip J. Klass.
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offer of facilities for holding a UFO-research conference, on the grounds that some of the anti-UFO-secrecy conferees might have communistic leanings? As one of those conferees, I'll always remember my own close encounter with Klass in the public square during that period. It came as we both accepted the invitation of a Baltimore TV talk show to present a point-counterpoint segment on the UFO issue. In the Green Room as we were preparing to go on stage, Klass tried his best to display his cordial side, as if he merely were a harmless garden snake sunning himself amidst the marigolds. His small talk focused on querying me about where I'd attended school and who's my current employer. Uh-oh, I said to myself; here comes the (expected) tactic by which he's planning to, some day, subject me to the same harassment he'd visited upon the late UFO-oriented scientist Dr. James E. McDonald, whose effects from being thus Klassi-fried became tragic. Things went downhill swiftly. During my brief slide-show presentation of some key cases from ufological history, Klass seethed with anger and accusatory remarks, labeling each case a hoax without providing any evidence thereof. During a commercial break, the show's staffers tried to coax me into arguing Jerry Springer-style with this wouldbe "expert on the UFO myth." I declined, preferring to just laugh at him whenever he deigned to ply his role as professional bully. I needn't have bothered to laugh, because the audience already had summed up the event as a case of Klass-dismissed. I still have a videotape of that show, and I hope it'll fetch some big bucks when my daughter puts it up for auction on eBay.com upon my own demise. Some day, historians might view Klass's dossier as being more important for what it excludes than for what it includes. In particular, where's all the Klass-related documentation fueling the controversy over the 1980s-leaked information about the so-called Operation Majestic-12, the alleged supersecret twelve-member panel of high-ranking military personnel and senior scientists set up by President Truman in 1947 to conceal and technologically exploit various knowledge/artifacts retrieved from one or more crash-landed flying saucers? In this regard, see Nick Redfern's article "MJ-12 and the Bureau" in the June-July 2003 issue (Vol. 18, No. 3) of UFO Magazine. "According to [author Howard] Blum," writes Redfern, "on June 4, 1987 UFO skeptic Philip J. Klass wrote to William Baker, assistant director of the [FBI's] Office of Congressional and Public Affairs: 'I am enclosing what purport to be Top Secret/Eyes Only documents, which have not been properly declassified, now being circulated by William L. Moore, Burbank, California 91505.' " information-parading around town with his flag of righteous indignation over certain ufologists' receipt of alleged documentation confirming and exposing the government cover-up of the Deepest Secret. Most of us familiar with Klass's nasty tactics for countering his ufological opponents view his letter to Baker as just another example of his obsessive, desperate campaign to smear, intimidate, and assault the opposition. If his dossier settles anything important, it's this: No agency in its right mind would've hired him for so much as file-clerking, much less for leading any counterintelligence effort to deflect researchers' coming too close to The Secret. Savor this irony: here we have Klass—himself an unabashed, pants-down-caught publisher of leaked defense Perhaps the most charitable conclusion we can draw from his dossier is that Klass, clueless about the value of legitimate UFO research and classless in his interpersonal relations, had become a caricature of scientism. As such, he would have fared well in the Bush II administration, making Karl Rove look like an angel. Alas, he rightfully merited no respect from true scholars and real gentlemen. Within that big cranium of his was housed, along with an obviously high IQ, the smallest, meanest of minds—one that jinxed any chance he might have had toward achieving greatness. uro From his home in Alexandria, Virginia, Larry W. Bryant directs the Washington, D.C. office of the public-interest group Citizens Against UFO Secrecy. His book UFO Politics at the White House: Citizens Rally 'round Jimmy Carter's Promise is available from Galde Press, Inc. (www.galdepress.com ). He welcomes communication from the public at his email address: overtci@cavtel.net ## American Demonology continued from page 75 walking without a net over a potentially consciousness shattering military secret are not difficult to imagine. In An American Demonology, Bennett raises Ruppelt to a mythically heroic level, as he did previously with Adamski and Fort, in part by the often extremely poetic use of language and the skillful sketching in of relevant historical background that fixes Ruppelt's story firmly in those more innocent early days of Ufology. In terms of the sheer beauty of his writing style, Bennett has few equals in the field of UFO studies, and it's a shame that this newest book is only a scant 166 pages. Did Captain Edward Ruppelt knowingly conceal the truth about UFOs from a gullible American public in his time as head of Project Blue Book? And did he, as the book's dustcover claims, "try desperately to convince the American Air Force that UFOs were real?" While Colin Bennett cannot answer those questions completely, he can at least entertain and inform us in a voice uniquely his own, and offer us a fresh perspective on a sorely neglected figure in American history, one who may who have held the key to so many of the mysteries of the UFO phenomenon. As a history of our own military's bewildered response to interlopers from another world, An American Demonology is an instant and essential classic. uro An American Demonology: Flying Saucers Over the White House, by Colin Bennett, is available from Headpress, U.K., on the web at https://securehost2.zen. co.uk/headpress/default.asp
FOIA release, from the cia-readingroom collection. The PDF is mirrored here; the original link is above. The text was read from the page images by GLM-OCR; expect the odd misread word. 10 pages are in the text index: search them above, or from the library's search.