From: Stig Agermose, 9 May 1998
(UFO UpDates, Toronto,
Canada)
Quote from the article:
“General Curtis E. LeMay
Commander, Strategic Air Command
By William E. Jones
MUFON
State Director for Ohio
General LeMay made at least one public statement about
flying saucers, this in his 1965 book written with MacKinlay Kantor entitled Mission
With LeMay – My Story. The statement appears on pages 541 through 543.
Interestingly, the subject of flying
saucers and UFOs doesn’t appear in the book’s index.
The most interesting comments made by the General are
as follows: ‘Here, for what they are worth, are my own comments on the subject.
Naturally I am not quoting any Classified information. I am giving the
straightest answers I can give... The bulk of the
[flying saucer] reports could be run down. Some
natural phenomenon might usually account for those sightings which had been
seen and reported, and thus explain them. However, we had a number of reports
from reputable people (well-educated,
serious-minded folks - scientists and flyers) who
surely saw something.
‘There is no question about it: these were things
which we could not tie in with any natural phenomena known to our investigators.
‘Many of the mysteries might be explained away as
weather balloons, stars, reflected lights, all sorts of odds and ends. I don’t mean to say that, in the unclosed and unexplained or unexplainable instances,
those were actually flying objects. All I can say is that no natural phenomena
could be found to account for them.
...
‘Unfortunately there is a current belief, on the part of the public as a whole – the intelligent public – that the United States Air Force has made and is still making a deliberate effort to discount all reported sightings. Furthermore, if they couldn’t actually discount a certain case by referring to hallucination, inexperience, or mass hysteria – to disregard it completely.
‘It is alleged also that there have been attempts, by
word of mouth or by directive to newspapers from the Air Force, to hush the
whole thing up. To muzzle the press...People who believe these rumors are
clinging to a falsehood. It is absolutely untrue that any such directive was
ever put forth. I never heard of it in 1947, when the first saucer accounts
were published; I never heard of it after I came to command SAC; never heard of
it when I was in the Pentagon...We must have had a bad public relations program
in this particular area, to let such an impression get out.
...
‘Let me repeat: to my knowledge, there’s never been
any directive or effort from the top, in the Air Force, to control the public attitude
toward UFOs.
‘And repeat again: there were some cases we could not
explain. Never could.’ ”
In their book, The
UFO Cover-Up, Lawrence
A. Fawcett and Barry J. Greenwood also report on General LeMay’s UFO comments
(Page 211). The authors do not agree with LeMay’s
comment that the U.S. Air
Force did not muzzle/influence the press’/media’s reporting of UFOs. Fawcett
and Greenwood
write that an enormous body of evidence support this view.
Wikipedia article: “Curtis LeMay”:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curtis_LeMay
The late General Curtis E. LeMay, U.S. Air Force
(wikimedia.org photo)
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