Fascinating CIA Panel Discussion About UFOs and Area 51
When
current and former CIA employees got together to talk about the Area 51
military base at a public forum, it was probably inevitable that the topic of
UFOs would come up.
“There's nothing secret about Area 51," said former Area 51 CIA agent Gene Poteat.
The panel of current and former CIA staffers who spoke at the Atomic Testing Museum October 9 had their tongues in their cheeks when talking about Nevada's rock star of military bases: Area 51. No secrets here, they told the crowd. It's all out in the open.
“I can neither confirm nor deny that secrets can be kept,” said CIA chief historian Dr. David Robarge.
It's been nine years since Robarge was assigned to declassify information about the amazing aircraft built for the CIA and tested at Area 51.
T.D. Barnes, a longtime CIA radar expert at Area 51, helped spread the word by posting photos and documents about the work that helped win the Cold War.
CIA's Role in the Study of UFOs, 1947-1990
The fact is, secrets can be kept, and the CIA has always been good at it. Barnes says he couldn't tell his own wife where he worked.
“If you didn't have a need to know, you didn't get in,” he said.
For more than half a century, CIA has grappled with secrecy concerning UFOs. After a nationwide wave of sightings in 1952, the agency convened the so-called Robertson Panel, which spent all of 12 hours studying UFO cases and concluded UFOs are not a threat to national security.
But, the panel found the reporting of UFOs might be, so the agency recommended a policy of debunking UFO sightings. For years, the CIA denied any interest in UFOs at all, but it now admits that was a lie. Documents obtained via public records laws show it continued to collect UFO information at least into the 1970s.
