TEACHERS HAVE TAUGHT US THROUGH THE AGES - THEY ARE WATCHING US NOW - THE COSMOS IS THEIR OCEAN...

Imagine that one day a new city is constructed somewhere on Earth, a "Universe City", where a spacetime port is established as a centerpoint of interaction among Earth-dwellers and visitors from elsewhere.

Imagine a place of learning in such a city where every classroom is a different world's history book, and every field trip, a voyage to another planet. What are the kinds of things we would learn at such a place?
 

Their Technology

Dr. Hal Puthoff, a respected theoretical physicist, had the following to say about a book titled Unconventional Flying Objects by Paul Hill:

"To the degree that the engineering characteristics of UFOs can be estimated by empirical observation, in my opinion the above-referenced, recently-published book provides the most reliable, concise summary of engineering-type data available. The data were compiled over decades of research by a Chief Scientist-Manager at NASA's Langley Research Center who acted as an informal clearinghouse for UFO-related data.

 

The strength of the compilation lies in its thoughtful separation of wheat from chaff, and the analysis of the former into coherent patterns, including detailed calculations. Perhaps surprising to the casually interested, under careful examination the observations, rather than defying the laws of physics as naive interpretation might suggest, instead appear to be solidly commensurate with them, as the following discussion shows.

One of the most consistently-observed characteristics of UFO flight is a ubiquitous pattern in which they tilt to perform all maneuvers. Specifically, they sit level to hover, tilt forward to move forward, tilt backward to stop, bank to turn, and descend by "falling-leaf" or "silver-dollar-wobble" motions.

Detailed analysis by Hill shows that such motion is inconsistent with aerodynamic requirements, but totally consistent with some form of repulsive force-field propulsion. Not satisfied with paper analyses alone, Hill arranged to have various forms of jet-supported and rotor-supported circular flying platforms built and tested. Hill himself acted as test pilot in early, originally-classified, versions, and found the above motions the most economical for control purposes. Pictures of these platforms are included in the text.

In an effort to examine the force-field propulsion hypothesis yet further, Hill analyzed a number of cases involving near-field interactions with an apparent craft in which some form of force was in evidence. These include examples in which a person or vehicle was affected, tree branches were parted or broken, roof tiles were dislodged, objects were deflected, and ground or water were disturbed.

Under close analysis the subtleties of these interactions combine to point unequivocally to a repulsive force field surrounding the craft, while discriminating against propulsion mechanisms involving jet action, pure electric or magnetic effects, or the emission of energetic particles or radiation (although the latter may accompany the propulsive mechanism as a secondary effect).

Further detailed investigation indicates that the particular form of force field propulsion that satisfies observational constraints is what Hill labels a directed acceleration field; that is, a field that is, in general, gravitational-like in nature, and, in particular, gravity-canceling. Such a field acts on all masses in its sphere of influence as does a gravitational field. Corollary to this conclusion is that observed accelerations ~100 g's relative to the environment could be sustained without on-board high-g forces.

One of the consequences of the above identification of field propulsion type by Hill is his conclusion, supported by detailed calculation, computer simulation and wind-tunnel studies, that supersonic flight through the atmosphere without sonic booms is easily engineered. Manipulation of the acceleration-type force field would, even at supersonic speeds, result in a constant-pressure, compression-free zone without shockwave in which the vehicle is surrounded by a subsonic flow-pattern of streamlines, and subsonic velocity ratios.

An additional benefit of such field control is that drops of moisture, rain, dust, insects, or other low-velocity objects would follow streamline paths around the craft rather than impact it.

Another puzzle resolved by Hill's analysis is that craft observed to travel continuously at Mach 4 or 5 do not appear to generate temperatures sufficiently high to be destructive to known materials. In other words, UFOs appear to prevent high aerodynamic heating rates, rather than permitting a heating problem, then surviving it with heat-resistant materials as is the case of the Shuttle whose surface temperatures can reach 1300 °C.

The resolution of this potential problem is shown by Hill to derive from the fact that the force-field control that results in the prevention of shockwave drag as discussed above is also effective in preventing aerodynamic heating. In effect the airflow approaches, then springs away from the craft, depositing no energy in the process.

A further example of the type of correlation that emerges from Hill's analytical approach is provided by an analysis of the economy of various flight-path profiles. It is shown that high-angle, high-acceleration departures on ballistic-arc trajectories with high-speed coast segments are more efficient than, for example, intermediate-level, horizontal-path trips, both in terms of required impulse-per-unit-mass and time-of-flight parameters. This he correlates with the observation that UFO departures are of the dramatically high-angle, high-acceleration type.

Also of interest is Hill's analysis of the spectra and intensity of an apparent plasma sheath surrounding such craft, the details of which correlate with what one would expect in terms of it being a secondary effect associated with the propulsion system, for example, a blue shift and intensity increase during a "power-up" phase, and the opposite during hover or landing maneuvers.

An additional fine point that emerges from this analysis is resolution of the paradox that observation on a direct line-of-sight to a near part of the craft can reveal a metallic-like structure while the attempt to observe the outline of the craft, necessarily by an oblique line-of-sight, results in an indistinct blur. Analysis shows this to be a reasonable outcome of an expected re-absorption of reflected light by the surrounding plasma in the longer-length path associated with the more oblique view.

Another typical nugget of information is found in Hill's discussion of the results of the analysis of a possible UFO artifact, the famous Ubatuba magnesium fragments claimed to have originated from an exploded unidentified craft near Ubatuba, Brazil. Laboratory analysis of the samples found the magnesium to be not only of exceptional purity, and anomalous in its trace composition of other elements, but 6.7% denser than ordinary pure magnesium, a figure well beyond the experimental error of the measurement.

Hill's calculation shows that this observation can be accounted for by assuming that the sample contained only the pure isotope Mg26, rather than the naturally-occurring distribution among isotopes Mg24, Mg25 and Mg26. Since the only isotope separation on a significant scale in terrestrial manufacture is that of uranium, such a result must be considered at least anomalous, and possibly as evidence for extraterrestrial manufacture.

Additional calculations concerning the parameters of interstellar travel (including relativistic effects), and the energetics of such travel, have been performed and are included in tabular and graphical form. The wealth of material in these sections, along with discussion of the broad implications of this material, reveal the dedication and thoroughness of Hill's approach to his self-assigned task.

In the final analysis, one must conclude that Hill has assembled as good a case as can be made on the basis of presently available data that the observation of some "unconventional flying objects" is compatible with the presence of engineered platforms weighing in at something around 30 tons, which are capable of 100-g accelerations and 9000-mph speeds in the atmosphere.

Perhaps more important for the technical reader, however, is Hill's supporting argumentation, based on solid analysis, that these platforms, although exhibiting the application of physics and engineering principles clearly beyond our present-day capabilities, do not appear to defy these principles in any fundamental way.
 

Their Science

"Any technology sufficiently advanced is indistinguishable from magic."
--Arthur C. Clarke

What must the sciences be for life forms perhaps millions of years evolved beyond humanity?

Perhaps their sciences might be blanketed by a new science of generalist studies called omniscience, defined as a discipline for and belief in establishing the truth among the experiences of life. It would qualify as a religion because it demands faith in one tenet above all, that a love for truth is enshrined as the path towards betterment. It qualifies as a science, because its hypotheses are readily and objectively testable.

Omniscientists would test hypotheses made from learning the secrets of the specialists seeking fact and the studies of the generalists seeking meaning. Indeed, in such a vision, truth would be the product of fact and meaning.

Whatever they call their sciences and their faiths, what we will learn from them will boggle our minds.

The first visitors to our world must have mastered the science of space-time.

With space-time as their mechanism, whether they be strictly mechanical or not, the spacecraft of these beings must have the ability to move by warp propulsion, yielding travel effectively at arbitrary superluminal velocities. Their craft slip through the fabric of space-time as if they are gravitationally falling towards their destination. They travel into the depths of space-time, leaving the present of their point of origination and voyaging towards the present of their destination.

They can leave Earth and travel among worlds as we do among cities on vacations and business trips. At the mid point of their voyages, if they stop, they witness the literal past of both their source and destination, in the form of old light just then reaching their point in space-time. With a sufficiently powerful telescope pointing back at Earth, they could resolve and record events occurring as they did hundreds of years ago here. But they probably wouldn't need to, because there can be little question that at least some visitors to this world somehow recorded at least several important moments in Earth history. Is it possible that we could one day watch a 3-dimensional film of a real tyrannosaur on a hunt for food? Or the crucifixion of Jesus?

But when exploring space, this view of the past of your destination is useful, for it teaches you about a place before you ever reach it. Crafts are equipped to examine the light striking them from their destination, for all kinds of navigation and scientific processes.

With spacetime machines, these beings have acquired the means to tap the vacuum of spacetime for unlimited and ecologically cost-free energy. Basketball-size generators are sufficient to power gravitational spacecraft, or any other machinery and electronics requiring energy. Every home is lit, every shower is warm, every vehicle is fueled, and there are no dangling powerlines, burning gasolines, or constipating dams.

They may even have developed the ability to employ control of space-time to accomplish such wonders as teleportation or replication – essentially through some kind of Xerox machine for patterns in space-time. Perhaps even the ability to communicate over cosmic distances instantly and in real time.

Their biological sciences will be even more astounding. They will have the ability to work DNA as a sculptor forms clay. Imagine equipping a college biology student with a new kind of bioengineering tool like "Visual Basic for DNA" and you'll glimpse the awesome power and responsibility of such knowledge.

If it is ethical to do so, these beings have created all kinds of new plants, animals, and perhaps even servants, through bioengineering the double-helix. They may have even done so on this planet itself in the past.

They have engineered the ability to heal bodies, most likely either through patterned growth stimulation or temporal biological damage reversal.

They have engineered the ability to control their home world environments through managed weather, and form communities in harmony with balanced ecosystems.

They have very possibly engineered entire worlds, and planned world histories for promising young species such as we.

The greatest question I have of their science is where the natural and ethical balance exists between biology and technology.
 

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TEACHERS HAVE TAUGHT US THROUGH THE AGES. THEY ARE WATCHING US NOW. THE COSMOS IS THEIR OCEAN AND THEY HAVE BEEN MINDFUL...

If the hypothesis of this work is correct, then at some point in the foreseeable future the teachers from our faiths will return to Earth in a formal and open way. The process of actually doing so would be sophisticated and long ago generally planned. How would it managed?

Earth's recorded history is replete with examples of why it is absolutely impossible for primitive and advanced intellectual civilizations to come in contact with one another without damage to the lesser developed society. Thus, I believe an endoculturization process would be required to mitigate the otherwise potentially lethal shock to foundations of human thought and existence built over thousands of years, confronted with beings from another world. Such a process could easily require half a century.

But why would the beings above wish to keep even their existence formally hidden? Their craft have been buzzing around our skies for years, but they've "never landed on the White House lawn". And how could such a secret possibly be kept from public view within an open government like ours?

If my hypothesis is correct, our passage through the kairos is imminent, and we are advised to look to both science and scripture for advice on our reaction to the phenomenon we are witnessing.


Keeping A Secret This Big?

How could a secret such this be kept, even by a small group? Let us review an era during which rose the pinnacle of the institutions of secrecy, the CIA's Black Operations, from 1945 to 1998

Secrets and the culture of secrecy are the lifeblood of the intelligence business. For secrecy is the cloak that allows deeds with the dagger to go unnoticed, and often unchallenged. In wartime, there is little argument that secrecy is essential to protect the lives of those going into battle. For the intelligence community, there is little difference between peace, as the public understands it, and war, which is what the spies feel they are constantly waging.

But it was war and not peace that has set the tone for American intelligence over the past 50 years. Prior to World War II, the United States had almost no functioning intelligence service of any kind and while code breaking was in its infancy, spying in the cloak and dagger sense was largely left to the diplomats, who usually find the concept of deception and seduction anathema.

The failure of American intelligence at the beginning of World War !! did not mean that the nation had no appreciation of the value of intelligence. On the contrary, from the very beginnings of the Revolutionary War against the British, the colonists showed a keen appreciation of the value of spies. The Sons of Liberty, what the British would have described as terrorists, by modern standards, waged covert war against the Crown before the Revolutionary War.

Thomas Jefferson used a mercenary force under William Eaton to try to topple the pasha of Tripoli; President Madison used undercover operations to stir up trouble for the Spanish in Florida. Several other presidents were to follow suit, including Theodore Roosevelt when he encouraged the Panamanian revolt against Colombia that ultimately led to Panama's independence.

Yet by the arrival of World War 2, such episodes had had little impact on America's military culture. The black arts of espionage and subversion were viewed with suspicion and disdain by the military establishment, and formed no part of standard training in either the Army or the Navy. And while the Navy's codebreakers had worked wonders in reading Japanese signals traffic in the 1930's in an operation codenamed Magic, there was no system for analyzing the product to provide sophisticated assessment of its import. Pearl Harbor was the result.

As a dismayed British Admiral reported back from Washington to Winston Churchill in London in 1941: "There is no U.S. Secret Intelligence Service. Americans are inclined to refer to 'their SIS', but by this they mean the small and uncoordinated for of 'Special Agents' who travel abroad on behalf of one or another of the Governmental Departments. These 'Agents' are, for the most part, amateurs without special qualifications and without training in Observation. They have no special means of communication or other facilities and they seldom have a clearer brief than 'to go and have a look.'"

The bombing of Pearl Harbor in 1941 taught Washington and the Defense Department a painful lesson. If there had been adequate intelligence and competent analysis, the ships and their sailors could have been moved from a sheltered and largely defenseless harbor out to the open sea.

To understand what could be done, the America looked to Britain which had been leading the fight against the Nazis in Europe. By 1941, the British Special Operations Executive (S.O.E.) was already running a very effective secret war against the Nazis in Europe and the Japanese in Asia. Running arms and trainers to guerrilla groups, taking an active part in sabotage and intelligence operations and operating extremely sophisticated propaganda and disinformation campaigns, the SOE became the model for what became the Office of Strategic Services, or OSS.

When Franklin D. Roosevelt ordered the creation of the Office of the Coordinator of Information (COI) in 1941, he laid the foundation for America's first truly modern intelligence organization, it was to be not a creature of the military but of civilians. Its head was William J. Donovan, a World War One hero, a Wall Street lawyer and a Republican who happened also to be a Columbia Law school contemporary, and firm friend, of the Democrat FDR.

He had demonstrated a flair for intelligence gathering on several informal missions in Asia and Europe, beginning with his own honeymoon in Japan in 1919, and seemed the natural choice to lead the COI. He was also the enthusiastic choice of the British who had been working hard behind the scenes to try and get a man they considered their close friend into a position of such power.

Donovan was not a man to make the military chiefs any more comfortable about the creation of a civilian intelligence agency beyond their purview. His initial recruits were drawn from the same East Coast Ivy League establishment that produced him. One of his first was Archibald MacLeish, the librarian of Congress. Academics such as historians James Phinney Baxter III, William L. Langer and Conyers Read, and economist Calvin Hoover formed the initial team at COI.

It was at this point that the divisions, compartmentalization and competition that have so characterized America's modern intelligence and military establishments had its roots. Although COI was formed in the summer of 1941, Donovan was never let in on the existence of the Magic codebreaking operation.

As he began to work more closely with British intelligence on joint operations in Europe, and importing some of their centuries-matured skills in subversion and deception, military heads started to be suspicious of his growing power base. Even J. Edgar Hoover at the FBI grew nervous. So while COI was performing a function the military had avoided, and was operating at the direct behest of the president, moves were made to kill the infant that was starting to flex its muscles beyond the oversight of the military brass.

Donovan saw this, and headed off the challenge by proposing to place COI under the control of the Joint Chiefs of Staff in June 1942, at which point the outfit assumed the name of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS).

As OSS grew, so did the ranks of Ivy Leaguers who staffed it. OSS became a mocking acronym for Oh So Social, as senior personnel who were as comfortable in Wall Street law offices, banks, or genteel East Coast drawing rooms developed the business of covert warfare. The men and women generally came from the same background, understood the same traditions and were outside the traditional culture of Washington.

They were distrusted by the insiders and, like many intelligence officers, relished the role of elitist outsiders and so a culture that continues to this day was born. It was a culture that produced the future DCI, and president, George Bush. The DCI under Ronald Reagan, William Casey, was one of the early members of OSS, so the tone of these early days was to be perpetuated decades later.

There was another important foundation stone laid at this time too. The early intelligence community founded and run in wartime, did whatever was necessary to achieve strategic goals or tactical missions. There was little regard to the niceties of the law or the constraints of morality, merely a constant requirement to achieve the mission and to do so in utmost secrecy.

Wartime is like that, of course, but peace is a very different world. It would be many years before the American intelligence community embraced the difference between peace and war and understood the distinctions between legal and illegal, moral and immoral. In this, American intelligence was little different from the Soviets, the British or the French but the huge growth of American intelligence during the Cold War combined with its elitist heritage and unchallenged operational ethos created a remote and unsupervised community that, for a democratic society, operated with unusual freedom.

Elitist or not, OSS performed well, cooperating closely with Britain's SOE in running covert operations throughout the war, harrying the Nazis and the Japanese and contributing significantly to the Allied victory. As the end of the war approached, and as Donovan proposed plans for transforming the OSS into a peacetime intelligence agency, the whole operation was very nearly derailed by a black propaganda campaign wielded, it is thought, by J. Edgar Hoover.

Newspaper articles alleging the creation of a US Gestapo -"Sleuths Would Snoop On U.S." one read, a superb irony if indeed Hoover was behind the leaks of Donovan's plans -provoked public outrage, and with FDR now dead, Donovan's fate, and that of the OSS, was sealed, victims of inter-agency in-fighting and bureaucratic jealousy.

Donovan's legacy would live on, however. President Harry Truman may have decided to disband OSS, but he believed in the value of a functioning intelligence service, and on January 22nd 1946 issued the directive that created the National Intelligence Authority (NIA), which would oversee the operation of the Central Intelligence Group (CIG).

The first head of the CIG was Sidney W. Souers, a businessman from the Mid West like his friend, President Truman. He was swiftly succeeded by Air Force General Hoyt S. Vandenburg, a man whose diplomacy and background Truman felt would help the fledgling outfit meld gracefully with the military establishment. Vandenburg proceeded to build the CIG into a reasonably sized outfit numbering some 800 officers, largely by taking back responsibility for clandestine operations from the War Department, which had briefly taken control after the disbanding of OSS.

It was the National Security Act of 1947 that took CIG from being an agency that operated at the behest of the Presidency into a fully-fledged, and legitimate, part of the American government under the new name of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA). it was also this Act that created the loophole through which the CIA has used to justify a swathe of morally, legally and ethically questionable operations, underpinned by the same culture of wartime secrecy that pervaded OSS during the war.

This loophole consisted of a phrase tacked onto the end of the CIA's laundry list of legislated responsibilities.

These included,

"advising the NSC (National Security Council) on intelligence, making recommendations on related matters, producing intelligence estimates and reports, performing 'additional services of common concern' for the government-wide intelligence community and performing 'such other functions and duties related to intelligence affecting the national security as the National Security Council may from time to time direct.'"

The phrase "such other functions", turned out to be the perfect cover or any covert operation the CIA wished to run.

At the time the CIG transmuted into the CIA, both America and the Soviet Union were trying to consolidate their post-War positions in the rubble-strewn continent of Europe while at the same time trying to undermine that of the other. Economies were in a shambles, social infrastructure virtually non-existent and political systems in Germany and the now-occupied states of Eastern Europe beholden to the military administrations of the Four Powers, America, Britain, France and Russia.

The fear and suspicion of this era, fuelled by the existence of nuclear weaponry, created the battlefield on which the new CIA would be waging its covert war for the next forty years. Whether it was in the Soviet Union, its European satellites or in countries that actually were, or were perceived to be, Soviet surrogates the world over, the Cold War defined the CIA.

The transition from the 'Hot War" against Germany and Japan to the Cold War against the Soviet Union and its allies was virtually seamless for many in the intelligence community. Fresh from the defeat of the Nazis, here was a new and just as threatening enemy who allied leaders, such as Winston Churchill, were warning could pose a clear and present danger to the democracies in Europe and America. It was a convenient justification for business as usual.

This is not to deny that in the late 1940's and early 1950's that there was no reason for fear. The acquisition of nuclear power by the Soviet Union created the specter of devastation on a scale even more horrific than that visited on Hiroshima and Nagasaki being inflicted on the American homeland. Even children talked of the "Commies" and the "Red Menace", fall out shelters were common and schoolchildren were taught to hide under their desks in the event of a nuclear attack.

In Europe, diplomatic hostility between the Soviets and the other major powers led to increasing isolation of the Soviet controlled sector of Germany from the west, and the ultimate blockade of Berlin. In Asia, America was soon to be at war again, fighting under the flag of the United Nations against North Korea and the Red Chinese.

The CIA had found its raison d'etre, and in President Dwight D. Eisenhower it had found a sponsor whose vast battlefield experience taught him the value of high-grade intelligence. Eisenhower had the vision to take an area of intelligence operations, such as SIGINT (signals intelligence) and move it to a significantly higher level. Under his watch, the National Security Agency, founded on the day of his election in 1952 (although actually signed into law by President Truman in one of the last acts of his Presidency), became a huge organization whose web of listening posts crisscrossed the globe, pouring unprecedented amounts of intelligence into the US.

The NSA was to grow into the most powerful intelligence agency in the world with responsibility for all US communications security and for Signals Intelligence (SIGINT). Some simple statistics give a measure of its size. Inside the thousand acre headquarters compound at Fort Meade is around 2 million square feet of office space, seven acres of main frame computers housed underground, 7,560,000 linear feet of telephone wire and 70,000 square feet of permanently sealed windows.

The NSA currently employs more than 20,000 people and has a budget in excess of $3 billion. Since its inception, tens of thousands of people have worked at Fort Meade at a cost well in excess of $100 billion and yet such was the culture of secrecy that its very existence remained a secret until the publication of James Bamford's book, The Puzzle Palace, in 1982. Even so, inside the intelligence community, the joke that has lasted through the decades remains current: NSA actually stands for No Such Agency.

NSA is just one of several striking examples within the American intelligence community of the culture of secrecy that has inculcated the democratic process for much of this century. From the day it was founded until the present time, very little is known about the detailed workings of the Agency.

Even those with inside knowledge will rarely, if ever, talk about what they know and the exact capabilities of the NSA continue to be one of the best kept secrets of our time. Those who have read the raw intelligence produced by the NSA talk with awe about its ability to apparently listen to any telephone conversation anywhere in the world but the details remain thin.

Eisenhower also accelerated the development of computer technology through Project Lightning, a $25 million research project overseen by the NSA at its new HQ in Fort Meade, Maryland, and employing the brightest brains from corporations such as IBM, RCA, Sperry Rand, Philco, GE and from educational institutions like MIT.

Project Lightning was one of the best investments in intelligence ever made. The sheer telecommunications and computing power it placed in the hands of the NSA dwarfed anything anyone else in the world could come up with, and made the United States the pre-eminent gatherer of electronic intelligence in the world. It was also instrumental in giving the NSA a dim, but significant picture of the strengths and weaknesses of Soviet air defenses, through the use of "ferret" missions flown by airborne reconnaissance units which deliberately triggered Soviet radar emissions, which were in turn analyzed by the NSA.

An intelligence official who was connected with these missions called their achievement "one of the great secrets of the Cold War", adding, "We could have launched a strategic bomber attack over the polar icecap and the Russians would never have known".

The CIA had no need to feel blind-sided by the creation of the NSA. Eisenhower's other pet project was aerial reconnaissance. While the ferret missions could nibble at the skirts of Soviet airspace, they could not provide detailed information on what was happening deep inside the country. Eisenhower was frustrated the ease with which Soviet officials could easily learn about America's military geography through publicly available information while he was almost blind to what was happening there. His frustration was deepened in August 1953 when the Soviets detonated a hydrogen bomb without the United States having an inkling that it was about to happen. Out of this frustration grew the U-2 spy plane program, developed as a result of a task force led by James R. Killian, president of MIT, with the input of Dr. Edwin H. Land, the inventor of the Polaroid camera.

Land immediately saw the possibilities of combining the newly-developed high-flying U-2 aircraft with the latest in photographic technology, and suggested to Allen Dulles at the CIA that the agency pitch for the job of developing a reconnaissance program based on high-altitude spy photography. Dulles saw the potential immediately, and he, Land and Killian presented the concept to Eisenhower in 1954.

The president signed off almost at once, but with chilling prescience closed the meeting by saying,

"I believe the country needs this information, and I'm going to approve it. But I'll tell you one thing. Some day one of these machines is going to be caught and then we'll have a storm."

From the beginning, the U-2 program outperformed expectations. From 70,000 feet the aircrafts' cameras took pictures of stunning clarity and detail and Eisenhower rejoiced in the intelligence they delivered.

His fears about capture were allayed by his faulty understanding that Soviet air defenses could not reach that high and by CIA officials who assured him that the flimsy nature of the U-2 would guarantee that even if one was to be hit, or to suffer a systems failure, it would disintegrate into so many pieces that the Soviets would not be able to work out what had happened. It was a classic bit of disinformation by the CIA, who gave the pilots parachutes and cyanide capsules against the very real possibility they would survive either an attack or systems failure.

On May 1st 1960, a U-2 piloted by Gary Powers was shot down over the Ural Mountains. Soviet leader Nikita Kruschev cleverly leaked the news out in two parts, at first revealing only that an American spy plane had been shot down inside Soviet territory. The Americans assumed the plane and pilot were completely lost and developed a cover story that was immediately blown apart by Kruschev revealing that not only had the plane been shot down, but it was also still virtually intact, and that the pilot was alive and in custody. White House bitterness at being misled by the CIA spilled into outrage.

The president's son, who worked on his father's staff, would later fume,

"The CIA promised us that the Russians would never get a U-2 pilot alive. And then they gave the SOB a parachute!"

The debacle was the signal for the shifting of responsibility for secret aerial reconnaissance from the CIA to a new agency that was brought into creation five days after Gary Powers was sentenced to ten years in jail by a Soviet court. The National Reconnaissance Office was handed responsibility for the design, procurement and operation of all American reconnaissance satellites.

So secret was the NRO that from the outset its budget was hidden within those of other agencies, a complete cover organization was established to disguise its existence and for 13 years even the existence of the NRO was kept totally secret. It was only a slip in a document prepared by a Congressional committee that included the acronym NRO that led reporters from the Washington Post to speculate about the existence of an organization that employs around 4,000 people with an annual operating budget of around $5 billion.

That first article did little to lift the veil of secrecy and the existence of the NRO was not officially acknowledged until 1992.

The culture of secrecy was such that the NRO had been able to operate with minimal oversight despite the size of its budget and the thousands of people who worked there and the truly priceless intelligence its satellites were able to deliver to successive Presidents. In 1990, the NRO bought 14 acres more than was needed for a new complex near Dulles airport outside Washington DC.

The surplus land was intended for two other buildings that the NRO planned to sell or lease. This piece of property speculation was done without the authority of the Pentagon or the Director of Central Intelligence. In addition, congressional investigators discovered that the $304 million cost of the new building was 30 per cent higher than was necessary. Finally, they learned that the NRO had quietly stockpiled $4 billion in surplus cash -more than the State Department's total annual budget.

The result was the eventual demise of the NRO and the creation of a new National Imagery and Mapping Agency.

Like the NSA, the NRO with its huge budget, thousands of employees and stunning product that was used by thousands of other members of successive administrations, was able to operate beneath a shroud of total secrecy. While this undoubtedly helped the NRO do its work more effectively, it also demonstrated once again just what can happen when there is little oversight. It also showed how, despite having one of the most open societies in the world, America is able to host enormous secrets and keep them.

The brilliance of the technology behind the NRO's satellites, coupled with the advances being made in SIGINT by the NSA, fostered an almost evangelical belief in technical intelligence gathering among those at the highest levels of government that was to pervade the administration of American secret agencies for years to come. It would take decades for the United States to realize that not every picture is worth a thousand words, that cameras can be made to lie by shrewd opponents and that old-fashioned human intelligence (HUMINT) should not be totally ignored.

Coincidentally, it was in the field of HUMINT that things were going nothing like as smoothly as they were at the NSA and NRO, Gary Powers notwithstanding.

The CIA's first forays into covert operations using human assets were under the control of Frank Wisner, a veteran of the OSS and just as much a product of the East Coast Ivy League nexus as was his OSS boss Bill Donovan. Wisner was appointed to run the Office of Policy Coordination (OPC), a bland name for an outfit that ran some of the most daring operations in early CIA history.

Wisner was the brains behind the establishment of Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty, the propaganda front organizations that did so much to feed western viewpoints to people behind the Iron Curtain. He was also behind the scheme that floated balloons carrying printed propaganda into Eastern Europe. Most critically, he negotiated with the Army to create the first paramilitary training of CIA operatives at Fort Benning, Georgia and established the precedent that his OPC would coordinate and conduct covert operations behind enemy lines.

He saw the time as ripe for such operations, as did the British. There was serious dissent against Soviet rule in the Baltic states and the Ukraine, and both the British and Americans saw the potential for operations similar in style and content to the Jedburgh missions they had both run in France during the war to assist and expand the efforts of the Resistance.

The operations had very limited success, and in human terms were a disaster. British and American agents were lost by the dozen, emigres that they had trained and re-infiltrated were caught and shot. Of course they could not know at the time that much of what was being planned was also reported directly back to Moscow by the British traitor Kim Philby and the Canadian spy Gordon Lonsdale.

This also led to the debacle in Albania where a British and American covert operations against the Communist leader Enver Hoxha, with a view to reestablishing the monarchy under King Zog, proved abortive and costly.

They were to find more success elsewhere, notably in Iran in 1953 and Guatemala in 1954, where covert action by the CIA led to the establishment of pro-western, and most notably pro-American governments. In neither case was paramilitary force used; the results were achieved through quiet diplomacy, deal-making and promises of financial aid.

Whatever the moral and ethical implications of the CIA intervening in this way, they demonstrated that the global game of chess between the forces of free market capitalism and the Communists was under way with a vengeance. Emboldened by these successes, the CIA came to believe that it could run world events according to its own set of rules and make large portions of the world unattainable to Communism; the exact reverse, in other words, of the game being played from Moscow. (Of course winning the game in Iran was crucial not just for that reason. Potential oil revenues were tremendous, and by undercutting similar efforts by the British, the CIA did much to expand American influence in the Middle East.)

After Iran and Guatemala, the CIA's covert plans went badly awry.

The Bay of Pigs was the greatest fiasco of all, probably of all time, not only for the ham fisted manner of its execution but also because it demonstrated that the glamorous young president John F. Kennedy was not infallible. JFK was a firm believer in paramilitary covert ops from the start of his presidency, and on February 1st 1961 had ordered the NSC to concentrate more effort on the development of "counter guerrilla forces". By this time he was well briefed on the Bay of Pigs invasion, which took place, calamitously, on April 17th.

The debacle was the end of Allen Dulles, the legendary spymaster, who appeared broken by the failure. After a reasonable grace period JFK sacked him. The most important fallout was that Kennedy shifted responsibility for paramilitary operations from the CIA to the Defense Department, and on October 1st 1961 approved the creation of the Defense Intelligence Agency, another set of initials to add to the growing panoply of three letter agencies adorning the American national intelligence landscape.

The DIA's main task was to coordinate the intelligence and paramilitary activities of the various branches of the armed services. It was crippled from the start by too many conflicting demands; the top brass wanted a broad strategic intelligence service, commanders on the ground wanted tactical intelligence. A Defense Department review panel reported in 1970, "The principal problems of the DIA can be summarized as too many jobs and too many masters."

At the CIA, the air of failure deepened as campaigns in Indonesia and Vietnam failed; so did attempts to assassinate Fidel Castro and the Congolese leader Patrice Lumumba. Operations started to spiral into fantasy land with the fabled plots of Operation Mongoose to make Castro's beard fall out, poison him with a diving suit exposed to a bacteriological agent and provoke uprisings against him by declaring him the Anti-Christ.

The diving suit fiasco was especially bizarre. James A. Donovan, the lawyer who had negotiated the spy swap of KGB agent Rudolf Abel for Gary Powers, had also managed to secure the release of 1,179 paramilitaries who had taken part in the Bay of Pigs operation. The CIA arranged for Donovan to give Fidel Castro a new diving suit, but not before the CIA Technical Services Division had impregnated the lining of the suit with a fungus that would cause an extremely unpleasant skin condition, and laced the breathing tubes with the germ that causes tuberculosis.

It was a stunning bit of treachery, given that Donovan had negotiated in good faith. For whatever reason, the Donovan assistant assigned to carry the diving suit replaced it with one he had himself bought. Whether he knew, or instinctively mistrusted any gifts the CIA might bring, the lawyer disrupted one of the Cold War's strangest operations.

While the overall picture of CIA operations during this period is one of incompetence, there is an argument, certainly endorsed by the CIA, that use of covert action to influence political events, as opposed to achieving intelligence gathering, was successful beyond Iran and Guatemala.

They point to influencing the election of moderates in Portugal in the 1970's and the support for the mujahadeen in Afghanistan with Stinger missiles, a vital part of a campaign that eventually led to the Soviet withdrawal in 1988. Not so worthy was the orchestration of President Allende of Chile in 1973, a democratically elected leader whose policies just happened not to coincide with the CIA's.

In 1975, the Church Committee dragged all these events under the microscope of Senate hearings, in one of the most embarrassing 12 month periods (The Year Of Intelligence) that the Agency has ever lived through. The next year, Senator Frank Church was to wonder that the CIA was directing covert action against "leaders of weak countries that could not possibly threaten the United States....(N)o country was too small, no foreign leader too trifling, to escape our attention." This did the CIA become the scapegoat for subversive actions real or imagined the world over.

Intelligence gathering operations fared somewhat better. After seeing the success of a British operation in Vienna in 1949 code name Silver, in which a tunnel was built under Soviet military headquarters and the phones tapped, the Americans decided to do the same in Berlin, giving it the code name Gold. It was a brilliant scheme in conception, flawed in execution, dotted with near-farcical mistakes and doomed from the start by treachery.

As a feat of engineering, it was a marvel that engineers could clandestinely get so close to their target and tap into the enemy's phone wires. It was farcical that the heaters in the tunnel would melt the snow on the road above, causing near heart failure among the operatives, who switched off the heaters and rushed refrigeration units into the tunnel.

And it was doomed because from the start of the intelligence gathering in February 1955 to when it ended in April 1956, because the Soviets knew exactly what was going on thanks to the treachery of the British spy George Blake.

Where the Soviets made a mistake was in thinking the Americans could not decipher any of the coded traffic intercepted by Gold. There was so much of it, that planeloads of tapes were flown from Berlin to Washington to be decrypted by a team of CIA analysts, and it was not until 1958, two years after the Soviets shut the tunnel down by pretending to trip over it by accident that the last of the tapes was processed.

The intelligence haul was impressive, and provided a key piece of intelligence, almost by omission, that indicated the Soviets did not intend to launch an aggressive attack on Europe. No other indicator of the degree to which secrets are kept hidden from public view is needed than to report that all of the data mined by Gold in the 1950's remained classified well into the 1990's, and much remains secret to this day.

Operation Gold was the model for a similar, but much more sophisticated operation, that took place in the Soviet Union itself in 1979. In an operation code named TAW, the CIA planted a bug on underground telecommunications cables at Trpoitsk, which lies 25 miles southwest of Moscow. A CIA asset had managed to join the construction team that was laying cables for the KGB First Directorate's new HQ at Yasenevo.

These cables connected the building with the heart of the communist party power base in Moscow itself. For six years, until the operation was exposed by US spy Edward Lee Howard, the CIA mined real gold from TAW.

Former KGB general Oleg Kalugin called it,

"The CIA's greatest coup. They heard every conversation. Everything."

Two other illustrations might be helpful to understand the degree to which operational intelligence can be kept secret over long periods. In 1952, the American Navy began deploying the first of a complex worldwide undersea surveillance system known as SOSUS or Sound Surveillance System.

Acoustic sensors linked to miles of cables were able to detect Soviet submarines hundreds of miles away. The network of sensors stretched from the Atlantic, to the Pacific and the Mediterranean and involved NATO submarines and surface ships, thousands of civilian contractors and thousands more analysts who delivered intelligence assessments on the SOSUS products. Although the system was officially acknowledged in 1960 virtually nothing is known about it today even though it remains active and two new systems are being deployed to improve the detection capabilities.

In the mid-1970s, the CIA ran an operation codenamed IvyBells which involved the laying of a waterproof pod on top of a Soviet communications cable in the Sea of Okhotsk. The pod was able to intercept all the top secret communications between the Soviet submarine and naval bases on the Kamchatka peninsula and other Soviet commands.

The pod was serviced by special nuclear submarines that picked up the tapes and replaced them. Ivy Bells worked perfectly for six years until the operation was betrayed by Ronald Pelton, a Soviet spy. Once again, it was an example of hundreds, perhaps thousands, of people intimately involved in a top secret intelligence operation for several years without any compromises.

Keeping secret the intelligence gathered in old wars is a hallmark of both British and American attitudes towards secrecy. The operation at Bletchley Park where during World War 2 British scientists cracked the Nazis' Enigma code was not revealed until over 25 years later, and even then details were not complete.

To understand just how closed American thinking on secrecy remains, one need only examine the historic meeting between CIA Director Bob Gates and his KGB counterpart Yevgeni Primakov in Moscow on October 15th 1992. In a post-Cold War gesture of goodwill, Gates had accepted (at the encouragement of President George Bush) Primakov's invitation to meet and discuss a more cooperative future relationship.

Gates was in no mood to fall for any Soviet romancing, and cautioned against any undue openness.

"The problem with our people is that they want to say too much," he later recalled. "At the slightest prompting they want to show off how much they know and how they know it. So I had agreed a very limited agenda and a clear structure to the meeting so that we would give a little and if they responded then we would give a little more. But if we gave a little and got nothing, then we would leave."

On the face of it, that was reasonable caution. The "little" that Gates chose to offer involved intelligence findings about the North Korean nuclear program. It was bound to be more than the Russians knew, he reasoned, but did not involve anything really sensitive. In other words, it was a pretty thin offering. In return, he was handed a bounty of intelligence on the North Korean chemical and biological weapons program, demonstrating it to be far more advanced than the CIA's own intelligence had suggested.

To illustrate further Gates' state of mind as he approached this historic, and highly secret meeting: he asked his staff to come up with a nugget of intelligence that he could offer the Russians as a gesture of goodwill. What they gave him was Project Jennifer, the 1974 operation to lift a sunken Soviet nuclear Golf-2 submarine from the Pacific seabed.

With the help of Howard Hughes who leased the specialist salvage vessel Glomar Explorer to the Agency, they attempted to lift the vessel. It broke in half on the way up, but the bit they were able to keep held two nuclear torpedoes and a wealth of intelligence. Gates thought that by revealing details of this operation, describing how the bodies of six dead Soviet sailors had been buried at sea with full honors and that the submarine's flag would be handed over to President Boris Yeltsin, he would somehow be demonstrating a new commitment to openness.

The trouble was his news was as stale as could be. Not only had Operation Jennifer's cover been broken by columnist Jack Anderson, requiring the bid to retrieve the broken half from the seabed to be called off, but former DCI William Colby had written and spoken about it extensively. Yet still the CIA thought that this was an historic admission.

The defeat of the Soviets should have created a new culture of openness. Secrets have been spilling out, flooding out even, from Russia and the former Eastern Bloc. The history of the recent past is being rewritten on the basis of the actual documents relating to some of the greatest moments of the post-war years. But the American side of the story remains to be told.

Because the United States still considers itself to be at war -or at least the country's intelligence agencies do -the deeply-ingrained culture of secrecy remains in place, ensuring that secrets relating to events that happened many years ago will remain secrets for many years to come. As recently as July this year the CIA broke a long standing promise to make public secret documents relating to 11 paramilitary operations that took place during the Truman, Eisenhower and Kennedy presidencies, involving anti-Communist efforts in Europe, Asia, Africa and the Caribbean.

The promise had been made by two former DCI's, Robert Gates and James Woolsey, but even so, when it came down to it, the CIA reneged, citing budget constraints, a significant irony for an agency that takes a large slice of the $26.6 billion annual intelligence budget.

DCI George Tenet said the CIA had "a responsibility to the American people, and to history, to account for our actions and the quality of our work." But, he added, the agency did not have the money or the personnel to do the job. He said that the CIA had, a requirement of law, released 227,000 pages on the Kennedy assassination and a stack of files to be used in compiling the State Department's official history of foreign relations in the 1950's and 1960's.

The 150 strong CIA unit, made up mainly of retired CIA personnel, tasked with sifting these documents for sensitive data, was simply overwhelmed. When asked how much the sifting operation costs, a spokeswoman said she could not reveal that; it is a secret.

What did emerge in July was a smattering of documents relating to the Bay of Pigs and the overthrow of the Guatemalan government in 1954, but in the case of the latter they accounted for less than 2 per cent of the available files. This is not the first time in recent years that the CIA has promised to release important historical data then failed. In 1992 the agency promised to release the files on the 1954 coup in Iran. Then last year it was revealed that someone had burned most of those files in the early 1960's and even kept that a secret.

When he discovered it, then DCI James Woolsey called it,

"a terrible breach of faith with the American people and their ability to understand their own history."

Woolsey's words are a fitting epitaph for the culture of secrecy which has so permeated the intelligence industry since World War 2. But there is a broader lesson to be drawn from America's intelligence history in the second half of the twentieth century. A nation that prides itself on its openness, on the accountability of its institutions and its strong democratic foundations has a dark love affair with secrecy.

No nation in the world has protected its secrets as well as the United States as the history of the NSA and the NRO demonstrate, Despite congressional oversight of other agencies, there have been remarkably few leaks and a bounty of very well kept secrets. The culture of Need to Know, the institutionalizing of compartmentalization of information combined with an acceptance in successive governments of the overriding need for secrecy has ensured that large parts of the most open society in the world have remained firmly closed.

Little has changed in this culture since the end of the Cold World. Where the files of the Stasi, East Germany's secret police, have been opened for all to see, where many of the KGB's files have spilled out of dark corners, very little of substance has surfaced from American intelligence.

Even now, as intelligence moves into cyberspace to create a new generation of offensive and defensive weapons, the billions of dollars being spent are hidden from public view. As we move forward into the new century, America seems certain to carry with it the culture of secrecy that has been so much a part of the present century.

With that culture comes secrets we shall never know, secrets we should know and secrets the intelligence community will work very hard to ensure we have no need to know.
 

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TEACHERS HAVE TAUGHT US THROUGH THE AGES - THEY ARE WATCHING US NOW - THE COSMOS IS THEIR OCEAN AND THEY HAVE BEEN MINDFUL OF OUR NEED TO DEVELOP...

At what moment in the history of a young, blue world would teachers choose to openly reveal themselves to a brash, adolescent race? One thing seems certain: it has happened many times before across the reaches of time, and the knowledge of how to make open contact work well is likely to be found in the history books of the gods.

All factors considered, the most plausible scenario is probably akin to the popularly termed "Prime Directive" in Gene Roddenberry's space science fiction legacy, Star Trek.

The Prime Directive demands of spacefaring beings that emerging civilizations be given the opportunity to grow on their own, continually learning at a visceral, species level the fundamental lessons of responsible consciousness. Without such species-wide childhood, the ethical judgment simply cannot exist to deserve empowerment with the fire of the heavens – the ability to travel anywhere with whatever good or ill you bear. No one would argue that a neanderthal should be equipped with a nuclear weapon.

So why should humanity be equipped with the power of space-time itself, unless we are good and ready?

In the vision of Star Trek, its Prime Directive accommodates no contact between those traveling in space and life forms developing below on new worlds. But, clearly in our case, we see significant evidence of highly controlled interaction with our species, over many thousands of years. In my view, it is probable that the concept of religion is a fundamental part of the process that underlies the process of contact within the whatever real Prime Directive is out there. And is it possible that the real Prime Directive does allow for an intentional or accommodating seeding of "alien" technology at just the right moment, to help give budding science a push, and to evaluate how the civilization responds?

If the hypothesis of this book is correct, would beings as sophisticated as those planning and implementing our seminal religious events be so clumsy as to allow their technology to "accidentally" fall into our hands? Perhaps, and perhaps not.

Nature has a way of keeping her secrets just outside the reach of those who completely lack the ability to employ them wisely, or no life would exist in the Cosmos. But nature also provides guidance and a vision of the future for developing beings. So must be the situation facing humanity: a controlled process of education, and increasing exposure in response to our successful absorption of the most important lessons of advanced life.

If the hypothesis of this book is correct, then there is a threshold of advancement beyond which a young species may earn the right to membership in a cosmic civilization. Because of the high risks of civil disintegration to an immature culture as described in previous sections, open contact between human civilization and visitors from other worlds could only plausibly occur after several cornerstones of civilization were in place.

What are these cornerstones most likely to be?

I believe there are at least seven key graduation requirements, all of them based upon the presumption that cosmic civilizations are generally founded upon principles of peaceful and harmonious coexistence.

A first test must be the ability of the species to think and act as a group coherently, so that community and order is maintainable as colonization of space is initiated.

A second test must be the ability to interact with more advanced beings without experiencing paralyzing fear, and without projecting the hatreds and paranoia from our primitive and clouded view of reality upon them.

A third test must be the advancement of knowledge to the point of comprehending the science and implications of a new technology as seminal as fire: the use of spacetime itself, even if such knowledge was prompted through "seeding" from above. The new technologies we're dealing with will include gravitational propulsion, overunity "vacuum" energy sources, and a new appreciation of the physical power of conscious thought.

A fourth test must be acknowledgement and action respecting the total power and majesty of life --understanding that biology and natural evolution are forces of wondrous growth to employ peacefully, never to be fought or used with hostility.

A fifth test must be the ability to preserve historical knowledge with fidelity and permanence, ensuring that the cumulative experience and wisdom of the species is perpetuated for all generations that follow, and enabling a connection into a universal system of knowledge.

A sixth test must be a scientific comprehension of the vital role of religion in human history, and vice versa. Perhaps this book can play one small part in bringing the two closer together.

A seventh test must be a deep comprehension of the importance and sacred nature of truth, love, wisdom, knowledge, and the awesome creative power of intent.

Whatever the ultimate graduation exam may be, we know that we have now crossed one key hurdle: a growing number of us know how the major facts of the human saga can plausibly fit together. To go the rest of the distance and learn the rest of the answers, we must realize, learn, and live in the absolute conviction that truth simply must be an essential principle of highly evolved beings.

As you will find in the utterly fascinating pages that follow, in the past 10 years humanity has come upon discoveries, made inventions, and reached levels of intellectual maturity that strike to the heart of each of the seven tests I propose.

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