According to one security analyst it was not the little green men that were threatening our national security apparatus, it was rather the folks who thought they were tracking UFO's who on some occasions unwittingly penetrated otherwise secure projects, such as stealth.

Although some government secrets were inadvertently leaked to the public as a result of these penetrations, there were no known instances, according to this analyst, where any foreign agents were directly involved in this type of penetration. Perhaps we were just lucky.

Thus it was that UFO's indirectly became a major concern to the higher levels of the intelligence community. Some of these security headaches may also have been the unintended fall-out from unauthorized use of ufo disinformation by overzealous field agents, thinking that popular myths of ufo's could provide a convenient cover for legitimate government projects.

Such isolated instances are partly to blame for the considerable efforts that various agencies and departments have expended in filling the FOIA requests from citizens chasing ET's in the corridors of government. As to whether our government might have found ufo disinformation as a generally useful ploy in the collection of foreign intelligence, this analyst declined to speculate.

This past experience with ufo's may point up an inherent weakness in maintaining legitimate government secrets in a post cold-war, post modern open society. Suppose that a paranoid and fanatical segment of the public could be persuaded that Jesus is being held prisoner at 'Area 51,' for example. One could conceive of a general melt-down of public authority if such thinking were to become more prevalent. Concerns about such problems might become part of the rationale in the downsizing of government secrecy.

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rev. 7/8/97