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The pilots immediately received an intelligence debriefing and were ordered not to discuss the matter, even among themselves. But hundreds of Redmond citizens had heard the jets, some had seen the interceptors, and a few had made reports about the unknown object. Forced into an explanation, the air force said the flight was a routine investigation caused by false radar returns. Excitable witnesses probably imagined the glow.

Word soon leaked out, however, that the FAA was checking for abnormal radioactivity where witnesses saw the object hover and “blast off.” This made it difficult for people to swallow the air force explanation. Why would the FAA check for abnormal radiation if the whole event was illusory? As a result, the air force changed its solution: the object everyone had seen was probably a weather balloon. It did not bother to explain how a weather balloon could outdistance jets flying at 600 mph.

When offering this explanation, the air force did not know that the nation’s leading civilian UFO group—the National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomena—had obtained certified copies of FAA logs. This was an unexpected coup, as the FAA logs described the UFO and its maneuvers in great detail, including its evasion from the interceptors. The logs also included air force confirmations of radar tracking, scrambling of Portland jets, and a report from Klamath Falls.

When this information became public, the air force promptly denounced the FAA for issuing false information and maintained its balloon answer. After more pressure from NICAP and several legislators, however, the air force finally announced the “true” explanation: the witnesses had seen the planet Venus.³

THE NATIONAL SECURITY STATE

“We think we’re Luke Skywalker,” says a friend of mine, “when we’re actually Darth Vader.” America is a country with a bad conscience, nominally a republic and free society, but in reality an empire and oligarchy, vaguely aware of its own oppression, within and without. I have used the term “national security state” to describe its structures of power. It is a convenient way to express the military and intelligence communities, as well as the worlds that feed upon them, such as defense contractors and other underground, nebulous entities. Its fundamental traits are secrecy, wealth, independence, power, and duplicity.

1. Secrecy

Nearly everything of significance undertaken by America’s military and intelligence community in the past half-century has occurred in secrecy. The undertaking to build an atomic weapon, better known as the Manhattan Project, remains the great model for all subsequent activities. For more than two years not a single member of Congress even knew about it, although its final cost exceeded the then-incredible total of $2 billion. During and after the Second World War, other important projects, such as the development of biological weapons, the importation of Nazi scientists, terminal mind-control experiments, nationwide interception of mail and cable transmissions of an unwitting populace, infiltration of the media and universities, secret coups, secret wars, and assassinations all took place far removed not only from the American public, but from most members of Congress and a few presidents. Indeed, several of the most powerful intelligence agencies were themselves established in secrecy, unknown by the public or Congress for many years.

2. Wealth

Since the 1940s, the U.S. Defense and Intelligence establishment has had more money at its disposal than most nations. In addition to official dollars, much of the money is undocumented. From its beginning, the CIA was engaged in a variety of off-the-record “business” activities that generated large sums of cash. The connections of the CIA with global organized crime (and thus de facto with the international narcotics trade) has been well established and documented for many years.⁴ In addition, the CIA maintained its own private airline fleet which generated a tidy sum of unvouchered funds primarily out of Asia. Indeed, much of the original money to run the American intelligence community came from very wealthy and established American families, who have long maintained an interest in funding national security operations important to their interests.

3. Independence