NBC's 'The Event': POTUS Uninformed and the Missing Times.

The surprise premise of NBC's highly anticipated fall series "The EVENT" is that the President of the United States, Elias Martinez, (Blair Underwood) upon acquiring unexpected access to a highly classified dossier that CIA Director Blake Sterling (Željko Ivanek) never intended for him to see, realizes that the government of the United States is holding in captivity nearly a hundred non-human beings.

After meeting with the non-human leader Sophia Maguire (Laura Innes) at the Mount Inostronka detention camp, President Martinz decides to hold a press conference to inform the American public that we are by no means alone. This event would signal the many other nations of the world who have disclosed UFO reports that the United States was finally joining the rest of the world in acknowledging a very disconcerting truth.

It would also send a signal to those within his administration who feel continued secrecy is justified that their time is over.

The decision provokes an attack on his life.

A key moment comes when the President confronts the CIA Director in the oval office and exercises his authority to place himself on the 'Need to Know' list. He is then duly informed.

"So this is all true?" he asks, incredulous at the personal paradigm shift he is experiencing.  When assured that it is, he utters one single word:

"Unbelievable."

It's a fair statement. To a well-educated but ill-informed segment of the American population, the UFO issue is not even plausible, much less believable.  This prevailing attitude in our society is by design.

Whether or not the viewer will buy into the new series depends upon one thing—their estimation of how plausible it is that the President of the United States (POTUS) could be out of the loop on an issue of this magnitude.

Turns out it is quite plausible.  Particularly so if the President is a Democrat.

Bear in mind that Vice-President Harry Truman, a week after taking office upon Franklin Roosevelt's death was shocked when informed that a secret program that he was totally unaware of as Vice President—a weapon of unimaginable power had been perfected through the combined efforts of a secret city of scientists and engineers hidden in the New Mexico desert. Truman was suddenly faced with the decision to deploy the atomic bomb, which days earlier he did not imagine could exist. His decision vaporized two Japanese cities and brought the Second World War to an abrupt end.

What the Vice President did not know when he became the President and found out became a pivotal point in our history.

And if you believe the promotion, how President Martinez handles the information he is given will change everything.

Which is exactly what UFO disclosure advocates have been saying since the 50's—this understanding will change everything.

• • •

Veteran researcher Grant Cameron is an authority on Presidential awareness of the UFO secrets maintained by the national security apparatus. He's spent more than a decade combing Presidential libraries for documentation that would indicate Presidential knowledge of the most tightly guarded secret in human history.

According to Cameron, documentation that Presidents from Truman to Clinton may have been told anything about the UFO issue — one of the most often searched keywords on Google after sex — is conspicuous by its absence. There is, Cameron says, basically nothing to be found on official record. One can only conclude that either the POTUS was never briefed on the issue, or that any records to that effect have been withheld from public access.

Either possibility is troubling to a society that prides itself on a free press and an administration that campaigned on the platform of transparency and openness in government.

It is quite possible that the current occupant of the Oval Office does not know all there is to know about an issue not in the campaign playbook.

Outside the formal public record, however, there are suggestions that at least some of those who have held the office of Chief Executive knew some part of the truth at some time. There is official documentation that the U.S. Government considered the UFO issue more sensitive than the Atomic Bomb.  So if the the Manhattan project was kept from the Vice President, what is being kept from the President?

A key piece of documentation is a declassified memorandum of 21 November 1950 that Wilbert B. Smith, an official with the Canadian Government’s Department of Communication wrote to the Department of Transport. Smith stated in his proposal that the Canadian Government should be prompted to establish an official UFO investigation project. The basis of his request was information gleaned on an official visit to Washington D.C.

I made discrete inquiries through the Canadian Embassy staff in Washington who were able to obtain for me the following information;

• a. The matter is the most highly classified subject in the United States Government, rating higher even than the H-bomb,
• b. Flying saucers exist.
• c. Their modus operandi is unknown but concentrated effort is being made by a small group headed by Dr. Vannavar Bush.
• d. The entire matter is considered by the United States authorities to be of tremendous significance.

 -- Wilbert Smith via majesticdocuments.com

• • •

The possibility that the President did know something goes back at least as far as FDR, possibly earlier.  In a widely reported incident in early 1942, shortly after America's entry into the Second World War, an unidentified object floated silently over portions of Los Angeles. The army expended 1,400 rounds of anti-aircraft shells in a half hour attempt to bring the object—later claimed by the army to be a balloon—down. The barrage had no effect and in due course the object departed unharmed.

Known as the Battle of Los Angeles the event is the subject of an upcoming motion picture. Promotion for the film, one of a barrage of alien contact projects in the pipeline, concerns itself with the actual event, not the movie, which fits into a hypothetical pattern of disclosure with a small 'd' that may be underway.  

If so, something fundamental has changed in the way the American public's perception of the UFO issue is being managed.

• • •

In the spring of 1947 an apparent reconnaissance of United States industrial and military capabilities was performed by a number of silvery disk shaped objects, provoking nationwide headlines. Discs were seen in every state of the union but one.

That reconnaissance proceeded down the west coast and passed through Phoenix before arriving at Roswell, New Mexico, home base of the 509th Bomb group—the only unit at the time equipped with the atomic bomb.  Whereupon one or two of the objects allegedly crashed.

Seems more plausible in context that they may have been forced down, but that is conjecture at best. According to Whitley Strieber, by the next day, everyone from Truman on down knew that the United States was dealing with an extraterrestrial presence.

At that point the decision was taken to take the whole matter into deep secrecy. And the debris from Roswell became parts of a weather balloon with a radar reflector.

The remainder of the discussion of what President may have known what and when can be found on Cameron's website presidentialufo.com.

• • •

So is it plausible that later Presidents may never have known what the Director of the CIA or others knew at the time?

Yes.

When asked on September 14, 2005 about his knowledge of the issue, Bill Clinton claimed that he had tried to find out if there were any secret documents on the UFO issue.  "If there were", he said, "they were concealed from me, too".  He then went on to say that "I wouldn't be the first President that underlings had lied to or that career bureaucrats waited out."

"I wouldn't be the first President that underlings had lied to or that career bureaucrats waited out." — President Bill Clinton

From the point of view of career intelligence agency professionals, Cameron explains, the President is a rotating form of middle management. In that context his knowing too much can be seen as a potential security risk. They may well believe in their hearts and minds that it's in the best interest of the country—and their career prospects, not to put too fine a point on it—to make sure the President remains uninformed if he does not already know anything upon taking office.

Cameron points out that the POTUS is a very busy man.  He is briefed constantly on an immediate basis on just the matters that his staff feel merit his attention. If the Secretary of Defense has a dozen pressing issues to discuss with the President in a 15 minute time slot and an unsolvable problem in regards to the reality of UFO activity and alien life on earth is number 23 on the list, the matter is not going to come up in conversation.

The POTUS and the Press Secretary prepare studiously for any questions that may come up in a press conference or interview. But it is a safe bet no reporter is going to risk their professional career or White House Press Pass asking what everyone knows is an irresponsible question about UFO activity.

The reason for this is discussed in some detail in the best selling new inquiry into the field 'UFOs: Generals, Pilots and Government Officials Go On the Record' by investigative reporter Leslie Kean.

In early 1953 the CIA convened and conducted a largely unpublicized conference on the issue known as the Robertson Panel.

The official history states:

In January 1953, H. Marshall Chadwell [CIA Director of Scientific Intelligence] and H. P. Robertson, a noted physicist from the California Institute of Technology, put together a distinguished panel of nonmilitary scientists to study the UFO issue. It included Robertson as chairman; Samuel A. Goudsmit, a nuclear physicist from the Brookhaven National Laboratories; Luis Alvarez, a high-energy physicist; Thornton Page, the deputy director of the Johns Hopkins Operations Research Office and an expert on radar and electronics; and Lloyd Berkner, a director of the Brookhaven National Laboratories and a specialist in geophysics.  — majesticdocuments.com

Page would later participate with Carl Sagan in the writing of a book that served largely to defuse the credibility of the UFO issue.

The only professional scientist with experience working on the issue, Dr. J. Allen Hynek, observed but was not invited to participate. Hynek said in a television interview that he could see at the time that the conclusion of the panel was forgone before it was convened.

That conclusion — which became de-facto formal United States information policy ever since  — was the the reports of UFOs were a bigger problem to the orderly function of the body politic than the UFOs themselves were.

Think about that statement for a minute.

The official history states that 'continued emphasis on UFO reporting might threaten "the orderly functioning" of the government by clogging the channels of communication with irrelevant reports and by inducing "hysterical mass behavior" harmful to constituted authority."'

The response was a two-fold effort to educate the American public into a state where the memes of 'flying saucers', 'little green men' and indeed the term UFO itself were understood to be by definition, ridiculous. Thus anyone taking the matter seriously enough to make a UFO report or discuss the issue in polite company was a fool. As a result, thoughtful discussion of the 5% of UFO sightings that remain genuinely unexplainable was effectively shut down in our society.

This is precisely the effect the CIA intended to achieve.

One prong of the effort was to influence mainstream media to downplay, suppress or ridicule any reports or UFO activity that threatened to become news. A member of the Robertson commission worked with the most respected television journalist of the time, Walter Cronkite, the most trusted man in America, to develop a television special investigation that came to the conclusion that where UFOs were concerned, fantasy was no substitute for facts.  

Those reporting the UFO were subjected to ridicule in order to suppress discussion of a phenomenon that would neither go away nor come fully out into the open, but persists to this day on a semi-covert and enigmatic basis. The effect of the social stigma is apparent in James Fox's film "I Know What I Saw" when a gas station owner tells a reporter that "If one of the damn things landed right across the street, I wouldn't tell anyone about it."

• • •

If anyone has any question as to the power of the CIA to influence broadcast news in the fifties, when the UFO receded from newspaper headlines into B-movie science fiction plots they only need read 'The Mighty Wurlitzer: How the CIA played America'. Starting with Operation Mockingbird in the 1950's, the CIA has had all the control it needs over what is presented as news or documentary in America.

The US made it a point of pride during the cold war to have a free and open press as compared to the state controlled media of the Soviet Union.  Pravda, the state-run news agency was synonymous with Propaganda. America had a free press. Or so we thought. It turns out the intelligence community in America was simply a lot more adroit and subtle in its control of what could and could not be presented to the public.

The CIA did not want the American public to take the subject seriously enough to talk about it. And soon, no one did.  Peer group pressure kept the lid on rational discussion.

The real reason why was explained in 1979 by Victor Marchetti, former Special Assistant to the Director of the CIA, in a paper titled “How the CIA Views the UFO Phenomenon,” in which he said:

“The U.S. government, in collusion with the other national powers of the earth, is determined to keep this information from the general public. The purpose of the international conspiracy is to maintain a workable stability among the nations of the world and for them, in turn, to retain control over their respective populations.

Thus, for these governments to admit that there are beings from outer space, with mentalities and technological capabilities obviously far superior to our own, could, once fully perceived by the average person, erode the foundations of the earth’s traditional power structure. Political and legal systems, religions, economic and social institutions could all soon become meaningless in the minds of the public.

The national oligarchical establishments, even civilization as we now know it, could collapse into anarchy. Such extreme conclusions are not necessarily valid, but they probably accurately reflect the fears of the ruling classes of the major nations, whose leaders, particularly those in the intelligence business, have always advocated excessive government secrecy as being necessary to preserve national security.” — Victor Marchetti
 

The CIA knew how to play the media and thus define prevailing public opinion. The UFO became a taboo subject for academia, business and the media. UFO researchers and groups were systematically marginalized. Project Blue Book laundered the least viable reports for public consumption while the real solid cases when elsewhere: until the Michigan Swamp Gas debacle made the flimsy excuses look absurd.

In response, according to Majestic Documents website's history of congressional investigations,

"The House Armed Services Committee convened the first such hearing in 1966 in response to widely publicized UFO sightings and repeated public and media criticism of the Air Force’s Project Blue Book. The hearing had the noted support of former U.S. President, Gerald Ford, the House Minority Leader. However, the only witnesses who testified were allied to Project Blue Book."

                             — Majestic Documents

The official history continues with this quote:

In 1969, the Condon Committee published its findings. According to the director of the project, physicist Dr. Edward U. Condon, no scientific evidence existed in support of a genuine UFO mystery for UFO. The result? It was recommended that Project Blue Book should be terminated. Critics of the Condon Report have noted, however, that no less than 30 per cent of the cases investigated by the committee defied explanation. According to the critics, such as Dr. J. Allen Hynek, Dr. Condon's conclusions were politically oriented rather than scientific: the Air Force wanted Blue Book closed at the earliest opportunity.  — Majestic Documents

The Condon Comission Report ran some 1400 pages and contained some of the most significant and unexplained cases the University of Colorado team could get their hands on. But all the media read when it came out was the opening summation written by Condon himself that came to the nonsensical, paradoxical conclusion that Unidentified Flying Objects were not a security threat to the United States and thus the Air Force should stop taking reports of them.

The Air Force is tasked with the security of the airspace over the United States.  It defies logic that an unidentified object operating in that airspace is not a potential security threat--if it is truly unidentified. The fact that the Air Force could dismiss the phenomenon implies that it knew full well what it was, but was at an impasse to do anything about it other then to deny its existence when asked.

Following the release of the Condon Report, Project Blue Book was set for termination, with an announcement to that effect made in March 1969. A formal directive was finalized in December of that year by Air Force Secretary Robert C. Seamans, Jr. According to Seamans:

"The continuation of Project Blue Book cannot be justified either on the ground of national security or in the interest of science.”  — Majestic Documents

As a result, Project Blue Book was shut down and the entire U.S. Government, NASA, DoD, FAA, Congress and the President was out of the business of even taking questions on the matter.

• • •

And there the situation stands to this day.

Which is why no one has to brief the POTUS on the UFO issue: He will never take a serious question — or a question he has to take seriously — about UFOs or the existence of alien life operating in Earths biosphere.  It is taboo.

In the conduct of his position as spokesman advocate for administration policy, the POTUS has no need to know anything about UFOs.

There is no administration policy on UFOs because for 50 years the unwritten social understanding — imprinted by CIA design — is that it is a non-issue, discussion of which is to be avoided by right-thinking people.

In addition to managing mainstream media reporting the CIA funneled money to fund the National Enquirer and soon stories of UFOs, little gray men, Elvis flipping burgers in Michigan, Jesus returning as a cab-driver and other drivel were on newsstand racks in every supermarket in America.  This is documented in The Missing Times.

The premise of "The Event" is indeed valid. The President of the United States has no technical need to know certain information that the CIA or other institutions don't want him to know — the media, and specifically the Washington press corps, will never ask him about it.

But what would happen if they did?

And doesn't he have a moral reason to know, if he is indeed the leader of the most advanced country on the planet?

And how would a well-educated but ill-informed society educate itself through a paradigm shift of equal magnitude to that of the copernican revolution?

Next:  This way to the Exit Strategy.

Recommended reading:

• Mighty Wurlitzer: How the CIA played America
  
• The Missing Times
• UFOs: Generals, Pilots and Government Officials Go On The Record
  
• The UFO Experience: A Scientific Inquiry

Links:

• Presidential UFO Website
  
• Majestic Documents Website
  
• I Want to Know - Disclosure
  
• The Secret even the President does not know
  
• The debate over The EVENT
  
• Predicting 'The EVENT'

This is article two of a five part series discussing the possibility that the NBC television series 'The EVENT', which will premiere on September 20, 2010 is part an effort to begin to inform the American public of the reality of the UFO and alien life on Earth. This article will serve as a briefing document for mainstream journalists and media.