Post by auntym on Jan 6, 2015 21:15:31 GMT -6
www.theufochronicles.com/2015/01/cia-dumped-phony-17-year-old.html
Tuesday, January 06, 2015
“CIA Dumped a Phony, 17-Year-Old Disinformation Exercise Back Into the News Cycle"
NPR joins the comics
By Billy Cox
De Void
1-6-15
Can’t let 2014 get away without taking a parting shot at that little year-end CIA dustup last week, the UFO click monster cited by the Agency as its most widely circulated tweet of 2014.
This is one of those instances where you can’t really blame the spooks for turning a non-story into the cacophony of urgent drivel it became. I mean, they weren't even trying this time around, and these are pros who've been so adept at drenching UFOs in polecat stank since Ike was president. Misdirection, marginalizing variables they’re not on top of, supplying facts to fit a narrative — it’s just what we pay the Langley crowd to do. But don't blame them for this one.
"You mean to tell me the CIA has been using UFOs to cover up its spy planes 50 years ago? And the story came out when Clinton was president? By god, I want a scoop, Parker, and I want it YESterday!"/CREDIT: vinylmationkingdom.com
To recap: Last Monday, the Agency announced its most popular tweet of the year was a link to an old report titled “The CIA and the U2 Program, 1954-1974.” (At least they said it was. But can we really be sure?) Anyhow, it's a largely unremarkable accounting of the secret spy planes that snooped on the commies for a generation. It's so unremarkable there's no way in Hades it would've made 2014's top tweeted item were it not for a couple of buried throwaway graphs about The Great Taboo. You can probably quote the key clause by heart now. Without providing any statistics to support its argument, official history blamed “more than half of all UFO reports in the late 1950s and most of the 1960s” on high-altitude surveillance birds. The assertion was immediately challenged upon its release in 1997. Chief among its critics was former Navy physicist Bruce Maccabee who, after receiving a review copy, actually decided to do some research. He compared the CIA's unsubstantiated pronouncement with Air Force records. The results prompted him to label the Agency's claim “preposterous.” He noted how, except for a five-incident rise in reports during a single month in 1955 -- the year the U-2 went operational -- UFO incidents logged during 10-month spans directly before and after the U2 launch began showed no uptick in sighting reports.
“Even if all of the increase of five reports was a resut of reports of the U-2,” Maccabee stated, “it would be nowhere near ‘half of all reports.’” He added, “If flights of the U-2 were to add to the basic average sighting rate before the U-2 started flying, 43 per month, surely there would be a noticeable increase in the sighting rate after the U-2 started flying, but there is no indication of an increase during the 10 months after the start of U-2 flights!”
Actually, multiple critics pounded the CIA's credibility, not the least of whom were retired Air Force officials themselves. As veteran Bill Coleman — a former Project Blue Book agent who went on to become the USAF's top PR flack — restated the obvious for De Void in 2007, “I don’t know how you could make a claim like that, because (spy planes) flew so high and were so seldom seen.”
CONTINUE READING: devoid.blogs.heraldtribune.com/15049/npr-joins-the-comics/
Tuesday, January 06, 2015
“CIA Dumped a Phony, 17-Year-Old Disinformation Exercise Back Into the News Cycle"
NPR joins the comics
By Billy Cox
De Void
1-6-15
Can’t let 2014 get away without taking a parting shot at that little year-end CIA dustup last week, the UFO click monster cited by the Agency as its most widely circulated tweet of 2014.
This is one of those instances where you can’t really blame the spooks for turning a non-story into the cacophony of urgent drivel it became. I mean, they weren't even trying this time around, and these are pros who've been so adept at drenching UFOs in polecat stank since Ike was president. Misdirection, marginalizing variables they’re not on top of, supplying facts to fit a narrative — it’s just what we pay the Langley crowd to do. But don't blame them for this one.
"You mean to tell me the CIA has been using UFOs to cover up its spy planes 50 years ago? And the story came out when Clinton was president? By god, I want a scoop, Parker, and I want it YESterday!"/CREDIT: vinylmationkingdom.com
To recap: Last Monday, the Agency announced its most popular tweet of the year was a link to an old report titled “The CIA and the U2 Program, 1954-1974.” (At least they said it was. But can we really be sure?) Anyhow, it's a largely unremarkable accounting of the secret spy planes that snooped on the commies for a generation. It's so unremarkable there's no way in Hades it would've made 2014's top tweeted item were it not for a couple of buried throwaway graphs about The Great Taboo. You can probably quote the key clause by heart now. Without providing any statistics to support its argument, official history blamed “more than half of all UFO reports in the late 1950s and most of the 1960s” on high-altitude surveillance birds. The assertion was immediately challenged upon its release in 1997. Chief among its critics was former Navy physicist Bruce Maccabee who, after receiving a review copy, actually decided to do some research. He compared the CIA's unsubstantiated pronouncement with Air Force records. The results prompted him to label the Agency's claim “preposterous.” He noted how, except for a five-incident rise in reports during a single month in 1955 -- the year the U-2 went operational -- UFO incidents logged during 10-month spans directly before and after the U2 launch began showed no uptick in sighting reports.
“Even if all of the increase of five reports was a resut of reports of the U-2,” Maccabee stated, “it would be nowhere near ‘half of all reports.’” He added, “If flights of the U-2 were to add to the basic average sighting rate before the U-2 started flying, 43 per month, surely there would be a noticeable increase in the sighting rate after the U-2 started flying, but there is no indication of an increase during the 10 months after the start of U-2 flights!”
Actually, multiple critics pounded the CIA's credibility, not the least of whom were retired Air Force officials themselves. As veteran Bill Coleman — a former Project Blue Book agent who went on to become the USAF's top PR flack — restated the obvious for De Void in 2007, “I don’t know how you could make a claim like that, because (spy planes) flew so high and were so seldom seen.”
CONTINUE READING: devoid.blogs.heraldtribune.com/15049/npr-joins-the-comics/