CHENNAI: News reporters and people from the academia find it hard to believe that a global phenomenon like UFOs could be easily covered up by a small group of individuals within the American government. As a matter of fact the extraterrestrials themselves would be wondering that they have been coming to Earth in huge numbers — 150 million sightings in the last 70 years — but still people have been kept in a state of denial and confusion with regard to their presence here.

I have been asking the same question myself since the 1990s, but only in recent times got an answer, thanks to an extraordinary book written by science journalist and UFO researcher Terry Hansen who is no more. Even though it’s no longer in print, UFO researcher Robert Hastings was generous enough to give me a free copy.

Hansen’s book The Missing Times: News Media Complicity in the UFO Cover-up details the science and methodology behind UFO cover-up. How does one get information about any incident — whether it’s in the next street or half way across the world? Through the media — newspapers, radio, TV and now internet. So if you want to deny people information or guide their views in a particular direction — like UFOs are not real, then the instruments you use is propaganda and control the flow of information.

Newspapers have reporters to cover the local news, but anything outside the state or country they rely on news agencies or wire services — organisations that gather news reports and sells them to newspapers, magazines and radio and TV broadcasters. When the CIA decided to debunk UFOs the first thing they did was to take control of news agencies and made sure any UFO incidents however serious and authentic did not make it to the national media but stayed only locally. Between 1947 and 1966 alone there were around one million UFO news published in the American local papers. According to Lucius Farish publisher of UFO Newsclipping Service, the wire services pick up less than one per cent of all UFO news reported in local papers. This should not be surprising because this is exactly what the CIA sponsored Robertson panel recommended in1953.

In 1967 the local newspapers in Montana reported 130 UFO sightings near ICBM missile silos but none of them reached the national media while they were occurring. It took four years for the news to go from Montana to Washington. As Walter Lippmann explains, in order to conduct a successful propaganda there must be some barrier between the public and the event. Access to the real environment must be limited, before anyone can create a pseudo-environment that he thinks is wise or desirable. In this case, the real environment refers to local papers reporting true UFO incidents, while the pseudo-environment of UFO denial was created by American intelligence agencies and promoted by the so called elite national media like New York Times, Time and CBS.

Even though one must despise these intelligence agencies for denying the UFO presence to the world, you can’t but marvel at the extraordinary efficiency with which they have been carrying out UFO denial for the last 70 years — systematically, scientifically and effectively. Even the ETs themselves would think so, 1952 UFO wave over Washington, 1967 Montana, 1984 Hudson, 1987 Gulf Breeze and 1989-90 Belgium sightings, wave after wave of UFO sightings, still the human race is kept in the dark.

The most disturbing aspect is that UFOs have been showing extraordinary interests in our nukes as described in detail in Robert Hastings book, but still the US government remains silent. The question that I have raised in my upcoming book is what would happen when these UFOs show the same interest in Indian and Pakistani nuclear missiles.

(The writer is the Director of INSETS-Indian Society for Extraterrestrial Studies and author of Accidental Apocalypse )