Documents / FOIA release
This is a July 27, 2021 FOIA response from NASA's Office of Communications to John Greenewald, Jr. It covers records from Leslie Kean's lawsuit against NASA seeking Kecksburg documents. NASA released 207 pages in full, 7 in part and withheld 31, noting that most of the lawsuit case files had been destroyed under records retention rules. The enclosures include court declarations, a 2003 appeal decision ordering a broader search, a 2019 FOIA response, and Stan Gordon's account of the missing NASA fragology files.
Statement Of Lee E. Helfrich Lobel. Novins & lamont October 21, 2003 My name is Lee Helfrich, and I'm a partner at the law firm of Lobel, Novins & Lamont. I am, of course, the lawyer on Coalition for Freedom of Information's Kecksburg team and have been overseeing CFi's Freedom of Information Act initiative, which was announced nearly a year ago. CFI is currently seeking access to documents related to the Kecksburg incident from the Department of Defense, the Army, the Air Force and the National Aeronautics and Space Administration - NASA. Before rattling my legal saber and announcing a charge into court, I think its worthwhile to emphasize that neither I nor my clients had any delusions CFi's FOIA initiative was going to be anything other than an uphill battle. Many of you have probably suffered from FOIA frustration. And, thanks to the many dogged reporters and investigators out there, CFi knew what to expect in terms of the government's response to its FOIA requests. CFi was not disappointed - for over a year it received various versions of "go away" from various different Departments and sub- agencies. Because of CFi's parallel investigative effo~ it was prepared in advance to play that game. But before sharing FOIA anecdotes, I think its important to underscore that CFi's FOIA initiative had another strike against It at the start - the conventional wisdom about "UFOs". When CFi first came to my firm with its proposal, my first response was to laugh. In my dictionary, those three letters - UFO - spelled ridicule. I didn't spend three years in law school, a year at Harvard doing graduate work on the First Amendment, and 20 years in practice to become known as "ET's lawyer." If it weren't for the credibility, talent and support of the people who were Involved - John Podesta, leslie Kean, Ed Rothschild, History Associates, the Sci Fi Channel, among others - I would not have given this proposal a second thought. No one I know of has ever gotten rich off litigating FOIA cases. There is no doubt that a lot of the stuff out there on the "UFO phenomenon" is hard to swallow. For example, to this day, I still fall within that category of people who think "crop circles" are the product of pranksters with way too much time on their hands. But, let's face it, you can't pick up a newspaper today without being reminded that the line between official fact and fiction isn't all that bright. The Freedom of Information Act was intended to give the public access to all the facts 50 that they could draw the line themselves. As summarized in a recent Washington Post Op-Ed, the govemment is not entitled to "promulgate an official version of history and to deride as untrustworthy any challenges to their account." The conventional wisdom about UFOs - that it concerns small, green alien creatures - is historically inaccurate. For at least 20 years, the United States Air Force - from the late 1940s 3 Ii·
FOIA release, cited by the archive. The PDF is mirrored here; the original link is above. 223 pages are in the text index: search them above, or from the library's search.