Softly Easing Toward Roswell: Howard Blum and the Government's UFO Working Group

Howard Blum used to write for the NY Times and the Village Voice.  Wikipedia claims he is a contributing editor for Vanity Fair.  He has written about ten books and a few have become best sellers.
In 1987 he was winding up research for a book on the "Walker spy family" when a source he was trying to keep talking said, "Lot of talk around the NSA about outer space, weird stuff, UFOs."  Blum decided to find out what was going on.  He talked to 212 people and says the story he tells is the truth.  Here are tidbits from his book, Out There (1990, Simon and Schuster).

On an icy December eve in 1986, Sheila Mondrian, crew chief at the US Space Surveillance Center, came to work already bored.  Her team monitored the southern border of the US going up 15,000 feet into the atmosphere.  Then there were 7087 known objects in space around the Earth.  On this shift, her crew found #7088.  It was like no day ever while Mondian worked there.  In the sky above Texas something unknown came across the monitoring "fence."  It didn't fit into any of the usual four categories of objects, nor did its orbital characteristics fit any known pattern.  No reason for a military "bird" to fly like this one was flying.  Looking at the computer screen, Mondrian saw a lazy double-helix-like set of loops, then spiky lines showing crash dives followed by sudden climbs at astonishing speeds . . . rapid changes of inclination at speeds and altitudes that were impossible.  The airman at the monitor, pressed by Mondrian for an opinion, said, "Looks like we got someone joyriding up there."   Mondrian called an alert for Norad, usually leading to worry over possible war.  This time the commanders and orbital analysts had an air of puzzlement.  No spacecraft orbits in such a random manner.  Then it disappeared, not to be found again.  Gone.
Pres. Reagan got a note about this in his daily brief.  Seriously he said that he'd been in a plane while seeking the governor's job in Calif and saw a flying saucer right outside his window.
See, even the President can sound kooky when reporting a UFO sighting.

Colonel Harold Phillips of the Defense Intelligence Agency had seen a UFO as a child, probably before 1950, on a clear summer's night in an Iowa cornfield.  He and his dad walked along when they saw what seemed a dome-shaped ship as big as a bus and bright as a Broadway marquee.  After he got a report about the Dec 1986 sighting, he convened a secret working group to see what they could learn about nonEarth sources coming to Earth, including an Army and three Air Force generals, an Army colonel, three from NSA, DIA scientists, a CIA supervisor and a technical team--17 in all.  They met in "the Tank," a supersecure conference facility in the Pentagon.  p. 43

"Remote Viewing" by US Gov


Back to fall, 1985.  Office of George Keyworth science adviser to Pres Reagan has a meeting on the third floor of the old Exec Office Bldg right across from the White House.  It feels like an opening night crowd.  Two Stanford Research Inst. scientists said they had a "viewer" sitting at a small table in the front.  He smiles as the scientists say they are going to demonstrate a "perceptual channel."   Certain people can perceive remote data not using any known sense.  It's not remote viewing because that takes concentrating on a given person, while this new method has the "viewer" focus on a place cited by longitude and latitude.  They speak out the coordinates and the viewer bows head and minutes pass.  He finally says, "I see a house, big, mansion, pillars."  He draws what he has seen and it's passed around.  One scientist pulls out a photo and passes it around.   It shows a house "identical in shape"  to the sketch just drawn in front of them.   The officer tells the group that it is satellite photo and shows the country dacha of Mikhail Gorbachev.   Now the scientists beam and say this is information through what we call "scannate."
Next he's shown several photos of submarines and "scans the globe  and seems to find them readily.  Then he seems scared and breaks his trance and says he found the last submarine and also something else that that location, something hovering over it,  He draws a wingless aircraft and agrees when his questioner asks if it's a flying saucer.
They tabulated his accuracy in answering at 46%..  The DIA got busy scanning like this for Soviet submarines.  Over the next 14 months they happened across more than one "flying saucer" per month above the submarines.  Aside (not from Blum's book):  new-age sources claim the nuclear explosion abilities developed by humanity about 60 years ago are source of grave concern by beings who are not going to let us see them and who may be 'willing and able' in certain circumstances to stop or suppress such detonations.  They claim such explosions may destabilize things about Earth that we haven't taken into account.  Juicy rumor, eh?   National Enquirer stuff.

Back to Blum's history.  Colonel Phillips talked the "scan scientists"into getting three "reliable viewers" to look at the location where the "southern fence" had been tripped over, of all places, Lake Kickapoo, Texas, apparently also the source of Kickapoo Joy Juice, since this is the only place named Kickapoo I've run into.  Good combo:  somebody drinks the joy juice and then takes the "craft" out joyriding and Officer Mondrian's radar spots it?  The three "scanners" worked separately to respond to question:  Can you sense anything there in the last 48 hours?   Phillips got faxes that day of three rounded wingless aircraft drawn by different hands.  p. 40 and before, Out There.

Army Intelligence in the 1980s contracted with the Monroe Institute to study relieving stress through "advanced states of consciousness," apparently most of them out of the body, since that is the Monroe Institute's pet project and the one it writes most of its books about.

Let me say there's no reason to believe, in Blum's first 80 pages, that these investigators have heard much about Roswell, on the inside.  Blum finds the Gov running down a lot of inconclusive leads.  Something is seen or otherwise detected, but clear evidence for what causes it is not found.