Documents / FOIA release
This CIA FOIA release, approved for release in 2025, holds Larry W. Bryant's June 5, 2006 appeal to the CIA Records Release Panel. He challenges the agency's handling of two requests: one on former Army captain John Joseph McCarthy Jr., for which no records were found, and one on Philip J. Corso, where his news media fee status was questioned. Included are the CIA's May 2006 letters from Scott Koch and Bryant's April 2006 UFO magazine column on the FBI dossier on Philip J. Klass.
U . I :1 1 ? | » l ll 2 I l t I 1 I Approved for Release: 202 offer of facilities for holding a UFO-research conference, on the grounds tl1at some of the anti-UFO-secrecy confer- ees might have communistic leanings? As one of those conferees, l’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 would- be “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-dis- missed. 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 be- ing more important for what it excludes than for what it includes. In particular, where’s all the Klass-related docu- mentation 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 Redfem’s article “MI-12 and the Bureau" in the Iune-Iuly 2003 issue (Vol. 18, No. 3] of UFO Magazine. "According to [author Howard] Blum,” writes Redfern, “on Iune 4, 1987 UFO skeptic Philip ]. Klass wrote to William Baker, assistant director of the [FBI’s] Office of Congressional and Public Affairs: ‘I am enclosing what pur- port to be Top Secret/Eyes Only documents, which have not been properly declassified, now being circulated by William L. Moore, Burbank, California 91505.’ ” Most of us familiar with Klass’s nasty tactics for coun- tering his ufological opponents view his letter to Baker as just another example of his obsessive, desperate campaign to smear, intimidate, and assault the opposition. Savor this irony: here we have Klass-himself an un- abashed, pants-down-caught publisher of leaked defense 5/ 06/10 C01333876 Q u n u u u o u u on 0 on cocoon loose u Icooloosaooooloolo information-—parading around town with his flag of righ- teous indignation over certain ufologists‘ receipt of alleged documentation confirming and exposing the government cover-up of the Deepest Secret. If his dossier settles anything important, it’s this: No agency in its right mind would’ve hired him for so much as file-clerldng, much less for leading any counterintel- ligence effort to deflect researchers’ coming too close to The Secret. 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 H 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. um From his home in Alexandria, Virginia, Larry W. Bryant directs the Washington, D.C. office of the pub- lic-interest group Citizens Against UFO Secrecy. His book UFO Politics at the White House: Citizens Rally ‘round Iimmy Carter’s Promise is available from Galde Press, Inc. (www.galde ress.com ). He welcomes communication from the pubfic at his email address: overtci@cavtel.net American Demonology continued from page 75 wall<ing—without a net—over a potentially consciousness- shattering military secret—are not diflicult 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 new- est 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 ha, 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 phenom- enon. As a history of our own militz-u'y's bewildered re- sponse to interlopers from another world, An American Demonology is an instant and essential classic. we An American Demonology: Flying Saucers Over the White House, by Colin Bennett, is available from Headpress, U.K., on the web at https://secui-ehost2.zen. co.uk/headpress/default.asp u|=o April zooe Approved for Release: 2025/06/10 C01333876 77
FOIA release, from the cia-readingroom collection. The PDF is mirrored here; the original link is above. 10 pages are in the text index: search them above, or from the library's search.