History | Page 231

organization researching UFOs. They did this at no cost to the United States Air Force or any other governmental intelligence service. There were no official records, and no accounting trail. And best of all those doing the work and volunteering the intelligence would pay for the privilege in the form of dues to maintain the organization. If there is any question in the reader's mind as to whether MUFON (Mutual UFO Network) has been co-opted, ask yourself this question: would the intelligence services of the United States government allow the largest civilian intelligence gathering agency in the world to operate within its purview without at least monitoring it? Of course the answer is a resounding "no". This is one reason why MUFON is allowed to remain in operation within the USA without attempts to discredit it. Given this sophisticated government intervention, would it not be a simple matter not only to manipulate the incoming sightings data, but to spin and confuse the debate concerning the origins of UFOs, even setting the agenda for the entire inquiry? Perhaps this is the reason MUFON has taken such a negative view of terrestrially originating UFOs and of the German origin of UFOs in particular. In the early 1990s, this writer was told via telephone from his home in Texas by the head man of MUFON himself that: "We investigated that a long time ago and found nothing to it". The "that" referred to was German saucers. As an aside, he further went on to say that the idea of a German origin would for UFOs would not even be on the table for discussion if it were not for one, Vladimir Terziski, who, "is the guy pushing it", to directly quote this individual. Mr. Terziski has formed his own ideas about German saucers which he has never been afraid to share, and, to his undying credit, he stood up and lectured on this topic to the faces of MUFON in the very temples of the alien world, UFO conferences, worldwide. Mr. Terziski, almost alone, forced these facts into those conferences and subsequently forced all those UFO magazines to deal with the subject of German flying discs. And although he never got credit for it, he also supplied the technical assistance for a world famous Japanese television producer to bring an hour of this German saucer story to Japan in prime-time. Mr. Terziski, almost single-handedly, opened up two continents to this UFO reality. MUFON's successful existence is tied to their implicit and explicit assumptions of UFOs as alien machines. The greatest appeal the extraterrestrial hypothesis has for the government is that this hypothesis is simply not testable. MUFON does not even try to test anything. Instead, they chase sightings. They train their followers to take meaningless celestial measurements accompanying these sightings and then analyze this "data" into gibberish. MUFON then lends itself to endless rambling speculation involving increasingly more exotic alien scenarios. It is not MUFON's rank and file membership which is to blame. The individuals I have met are honest and sincere as are 99% of 236