Attempts at UFO disclosure in the Clinton white house

ufo disclosure efforts in the Clinton white house

UFO Disclosure Efforts
in the
Clinton White House

“I wouldn't be the first American president that underlings have lied to, or that career bureaucrats have waited out..." Bill Clinton talking in a 2005 Hong Kong speech about his White House UFO inquiries.

In the years since Bill and Hillary Clinton left the White House it has generally been accepted by most UFO researchers that UFOs did play some role in events during the Clinton administration. Most accounts tell a story of Bill making some inquiries but that nothing really happened.

A close investigation, however, shows that “UFO Disclosure” was an issue that the Clintons did seriously try to push behind the scenes during their time in the White House. When a list of their efforts is made, it makes an impressive list.

It appears that the Clintons may have had an interest in the subject before coming to the White House which led to their attempts to get to the UFO secrets out into the public. Where that interest arose is not quite certain. One possibility comes from a story I was told following a lecture in Arkansas a few years ago by a woman who clearly spelled out to me her relationship to the Clintons. I was told of a late 1970s sighting by “either the Clinton’s or someone very close to them” at Bill Clinton’s favorite McClard’s Barbeque Restaurant in Hot Springs. When the woman did not provide the exact details by mail as she promised it was impossible to confirm the sighting.

No matter where the interest arose, stories abound about how Bill Clinton started looking for UFO answers once he arrived in Washington. William LaParl, a Maine UFO researcher, for example, was in contact with the CIA in 1993 when the Clintons came to the White House. He stated, "It was known among the high CIA people, and the people who had contact with these people, that the Clintons were on the prowl for UFOs. Bill Clinton had been asking anyone who would listen to him, to tell him the secret. You know, he would get some Admiral in there, and say "By the way, tell me the UFO secret." They would just look at him like "What planet are you from?"

Hillary appeared to have had the same interest. "She was almost an equal mover with him on this," Laparl said. "I would not give him any more weight at all on this UFO thing. If anything she may have slightly been pushing it more than he was. That’s the way I read the situation. She was particularly interested at one point, and she was asking a lot of questions."

Admirals were not the only military people that the Clintons were delegating into the search for UFO answers. Dr. Steven Greer, an emergency room physician, who had become very active in Washington on UFO disclosure efforts at the time stated, “Some very good friends of the President became cognizant of what we were doing and urgently wanted us to get information to the President, to his science advisor, as well as to some of the senior military intelligence people in his administration after he got elected in 1993.”

Dr. Greer contacted many high ranking military officials during the Clinton years. One of the senior military people in the Clinton administration who was contacted and did try to help was Vice Admiral Tom Wilson, who was J2, head of Intelligence for the Joint Chiefs of Staff. In 1988 Greer provided Wilson a series of documents, code names, and numbers. Greer stated, “He took them and made inquiries at the Pentagon into these projects, and he hit pay dirt. He actually located these projects. When he made an inquiry, wanting to know what these projects were doing, he was flat out told, ‘Sir, you don't have a need to know’…  They told him he didn't have a need to know. He was furious.”¹

Greer also provided citizen UFO briefings to a number of members of the Clinton administration. The most significant of these was the meeting he had with Clinton’s first CIA Director James Woolsey in December 1993 just months after the Clintons entered the White House.

Woolsey was already interested in UFOs prior to being brought in as DCI by Clinton. He and his wife Sue Woolsey, Chief Operating Officer of the National Academy of Sciences, had reportedly experienced a daylight sighting of a UFO in New Hampshire during the late sixties.

Woolsey had been looking for UFO answers inside the CIA, perhaps on instructions from Clinton. Despite the public position of the CIA that they were not involved in the subject of UFOs, Woolsey initiated a “review of all Agency files on the subject of UFOs." which in 1997 eventually produced a new CIA report on UFOs. It was titled The CIA’s Role in the Study of UFOs, 1947–90. It was first published in Studies in Intelligence, a classified journal published quarterly for the intelligence community.

For whatever reason, it was Woolsey who contacted Dr. Greer to provide information on UFOs. Woolsey had just appeared on Larry King Live claiming that the Clinton administration was planning, “"to disclose historical material in a spirit of new openness," so the meeting with Greer might have been related.

The UFO meeting was set up by Woolsey’s friend John Petersen who ran the Arlington Institute in Washington. Petersen followed Greer to a series of his lectures and then approached him at a presentation at Colorado State University, in Fort Collins, Colorado telling him he had, ” a few folks in Washington who I think you need to meet with.”

The meeting with Woolsey took place in December 1993 and it lasted three hours. Dr. Greer set out his view of what was going on based on UFO documents he had brought along. Greer encouraged Woolsey to bring UFO disclosure to the American public.

Woolsey, however, appeared to have considered that option, telling Greer, “They have all told me nothing. They told me, well we had Project Blue Book, but the Air Force closed it in 1969.”

Woolsey went on to tell Dr. Greer the Clinton administration could not disclose the UFO secret, because no one in the Clinton administration could get to the information. “Dr. Greer, how can we disclose what we are being denied access to? What would that say to the world?"

Over in the Justice Department Bill Clinton had assigned a close friend to work the UFO disclosure effort for him. Clinton had appointed Webster Hubbell, a long time Arkansas friend, and Hillary Clinton associate at the Rose Law Firm, as Assistant Attorney General. Along with the Justice appointment came the UFO assignment.

Hubbell described what Clinton had requested from him in his 1997 bookFriends in High Places. Hubbell recounted Clinton’s instructions, “If I put you over at Justice I want you to find the answers to two questions for me. One, who killed JFK? And two, are there UFOs?” Hubbell continued, “Clinton was dead serious. I had looked into both, but wasn't satisfied with the answers I was getting."

The request for Hubbell not only pointed out Bill Clinton was looking for an UFO answer, it showed clearly that he did not believe the official government position on either UFOs or the Kennedy assassination.²

The official government position on UFOs had been spelled out in 1969 when the USAF released its final report on its 21 year investigation of 12618 UFO cases called Project Blue Book. The report concluded,

1. No UFO reported, investigated, and evaluated by the Air Force has ever given any indication of threat to our national security.
2. There has been no evidence submitted to or discovered by the Air Force that sightings categorized as "unidentified" represent technological developments or principles beyond the range of present day scientific knowledge.
3. There has been no evidence indicating the sightings categorized as "unidentified" are extraterrestrial vehicles.

According to Dr. Greer, the official Blue Book conclusion was presented to Bill Clinton when he requested a briefing on the subject of UFOs after taking office. President Clinton knew he was getting the runaround and was not happy.

One quoted comment of the President’s frustration came following a private meeting with Laurance Rockefeller in August 1995 where Rockefeller presented the UFO material Project Blue Book had ignored. After returning from Rockefeller’s ranch to the White House a friend of Bill Clinton quoted the President’s frustration at not being given the truth, “I know this is all true, but God damn it, they won’t tell me a thing. Not a God damned thing.”³

While Webster Hubbell was off at Justice trying to uncover UFO secrets from such agencies as NORAD, Clinton’s first Secretary of Defense Les Aspin also appeared to be busy searching for answers to the UFO secrets. Only weeks before Clinton took office Laurance Rockefeller, Melvin Laird (former Secretary of Defense for President Richard Nixon) and Aspin were exchanging letters on the “question of declassification of any government projects that might have been associated with unidentified flying objects.”

Laird agreed with the idea that best way to get the necessary declassification on UFOs would be to go through President Clinton’s Science Advisor Dr. John Gibbons. “I am sure,” wrote Laird, “Dr. Gibbons will cooperate fully on this matter.”

Dr. Gibbons did cooperate. In an August 4, 1995 memo from Gibbons to the President Clinton Dr. Gibbons detailed his role;

You will probably see Mr. Rockefeller on your vacation to the Tetons. He will want to talk to you about his interest in extrasensory perception, paranormal phenomena, and UFOs…Soon after you were inaugurated, Les Aspin and Melvin Laird referred Laurance to me regarding the famous “Roswell Incident”…I persuaded Rockefeller not to bother you with this issue but instead let me talk to defense officials if there was anything to this story…I told him that you strongly favored openness in government and we need his help to push for strong support for science and technology investments that the Congress is cutting. He knows that we are trying to be helpful in responding to his concerns about UFOs and human potential—and that we are keeping an open mind about such matters…⁴

The role of Clinton’s science advisor in working for UFO disclosure would last three years and would become known as the Rockefeller UFO Initiative to the Clinton White House.  Dr. Gibbons did what he could to help billionaire philanthropist who was determined that President Clinton should disclose the UFO secret.

Gibbons claimed that knew little about the UFO issue so the first thing he did was to bring the CIA into situation. He contacted the CIA liaison office in the White House and requested a UFO briefing. They in term contacted Dr. Ronald Pandolfi, a top scientist in the CIA, and also the man who was rumored to be running the CIA Weird Desk (where all the paranormal and UFO files were controlled).

Dr. Pandolfi was in a box. The CIA agency that Clinton had inherited, had long been telling the public that they did not investigate UFOs, and like the USAF they were saying there were no ETs and no threat to national security. Aware that this Rockefeller-Clinton UFO story would go public, Pandolfi knew the CIA had to continue to play dumb and uninvolved when it came to UFOs.

What Pandolfi did to solve the problem was to contact a private UFO investigator to provide the briefing for President Clinton’s Science Advisor. The man that Pandolfi picked for the job was Dr. Bruce Maccabee, an optical physicist employed by the U.S. Navy. Maccabee had researched UFOs in his spare time outside of work.

This ingenious idea would provide Dr. Gibbons some information but not an official briefing which Gibbons had requested. Therefore, once the story became public, the CIA could still maintain the agency was not involved, and there still were no ETs. The information was being provided by a private citizen who had nothing to do with the CIA.

Once Gibbon’s got his citizen briefing, he and Rockefeller discussed how the Clinton White House could help. Rockefeller made the argument that the government UFO cover-up was massive and complex. In reply to this Dr. Gibbons suggested that if the cover-up was as massive and complex as Rockefeller maintained, perhaps the effort of the Clinton administration should be to declassify one UFO case, and once that was successful to go after all the others.

Rockefeller thought about it and agreed. The case he offered up to the Clinton White House for declassification was the reported crash of a flying saucer near Roswell New Mexico in July of 1947. Gibbons agreed and Clinton’s USAF was tasked by Clinton’s science advisor to begin a new investigation of the Roswell crash.

Gibbons later wrote the President about what he had done.  “I conferred with Sheila Widnall (Secretary of the Air Force) and she arranged for a complete revisiting by the Air Force of pertinent records, guaranteed ‘amnesty’ to anyone who felt constrained to talk etc.”

In addition to ordering an investigation of Roswell, an amnesty for all Roswell witnesses was ordered. Tom Carey, a key Roswell crash researcher, described what happened.

It (the amnesty) was offered during the Clinton Administration in the form of a written letter to potential Roswell witnesses who believed that the Roswell information they possessed might still be classified or that they themselves might be subjected to security oaths, etc. It was dated May, 1994 and signed by then Secretary of the Air Force, Sheila E. Widnall. A copy of it was part of the Appendix of the Air Force's 1994 Roswell report [the first of three Roswell reports]. This was done facilitate the flow of information from "reluctant" witnesses and to head off expected criticism directed at them for allegedly not permitting the witnesses to talk.⁵

The preliminary report of this investigation was completed in 1994 but the final report did not arrive on the President’s desk until November 1995. The report called The Roswell Report - Fact vs. Fiction in the New Mexico Desert. It concluded that nothing extraterrestrial had occurred in the New Mexico desert in 1947. It could all be explained by a formerly unreported Top Secret spy balloon which could explain all the witness stories.

Gibbons and the USAF thought that they had addressed the inquiry into Roswell but they were about to find out that Bill Clinton was not happy with the conclusion. On November 30, 1995 in a carefully worded speech in Belfast, Northern Ireland, Clinton took a shot at the Air Force for the fact that they had not addressed the issue of witnesses reporting small bodies at the Roswell crash scene and in the Roswell Army Air Force Hospital. He did it in a way that the Air Force would know what he was saying but the public wouldn't.

This is how it was done. There had been a letter writing competition in Ireland for students to send letters to the visiting President. The two students who won the competition were on stage with President Clinton but their letters were not read. The letter read by the Clinton, which the Clinton Library later said they couldn’t find, was one from Ryan. The President carefully read from his prepared speech,

“I got a letter from 13-year-old Ryan from Belfast. Now, Ryan, if you're out in the crowd tonight, here's the answer to your question. No, as far as I know, an alien spacecraft did not crash in Roswell, New Mexico, in 1947. And, Ryan, if the United States Air Force did recover alien bodies, they didn't tell me about it, either, and I want to know.

Clinton’s mention of not being told of bodies was a direct challenge to the Air Force’s 1995 Roswell report which completely left out the many eyewitnesses who described small alien type bodies.

The Air Force was forced to do a third report. It quietly went back to work and in 1997 they publically released the third Roswell report titled The Roswell Report – Case Closed which focused on the veiled challenge Clinton had made in Belfast regarding the reported alien bodies. The report was broken into two sections 1) Flying Saucer Crashes and Alien Bodies 2) Reports of Bodies at Roswell Army Field Hospital.

The Air Force study concluded that the body reports from Roswell were accounted for by experiments the Air Force had conducted in the early fifties where they had dropped dummies from aircraft, and lies. Those who claimed to have remembered bodies at the 1947 crash were simply witnesses of the dummy tests and were confusing the date. Others were just making up stories.

The presidential challenge had been met by the Air Force, and Clinton was now stuck defending the three Roswell UFO crash debunking reports that he had green-lighted. Moreover, he was forced to defend the conclusions even though he did not believe them, such as during the 2008 Hillary election campaign when he stated, “when we celebrated the anniversary of that event (1997) out in New Mexico, I actually got all the government documents and read them and I'm convinced there wasn't a UFO there.”

We know that there was little chance Clinton believed what he was saying because a couple months earlier he had spent five minutes with Hollywood writer and producer Paul Davids at a fundraiser in the Hamptons for Hillary Clinton’s presidential campaign.

There Davids had presented Bill with the latest book on the Roswell crash called ”Witness to Roswell”, as well as some other Roswell UFO material.According to Davids, who had in 1995 provided Bill with an earlier Roswell UFO crash book which was later confirmed to have been among the books Bill kept in his White House library, Bill Clinton was fascinated with the latest Roswell research. He told Davids as he stared at the book, “you know, I’ve always been really interested in this stuff, and I’m going to read this.” He took the whole bag of Roswell material from Davids and thanked him.

The efforts by Clinton’s Science Advisor were not limited to the two Roswell reports. The 1,000 pages of documents recovered from the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy describing the Rockefeller UFO Initiative show that efforts were also being made to get the classified UFO documents out as part of President Clinton’s 1995 Executive Order 12958 This EO sought to restore a proper balance of "openness in government" vs. "unthinking secrecy."

The EO basically set out that all government documents would be declassified after 25 years except in exception circumstances. It changed the rules on secrecy and was described by Steven Aftergood, who directs a project on Government secrecy for the Federation of Independent Scientists as representing "a distinct improvement over the current system."⁶

Documents from the Rockefeller UFO Initiative shows that both Rockefeller and the administration hoped that the new EO would release many if not all the secret UFO files held by the government. In the end it released none of them.

As part of the effort to force UFO documents out through EO 12958, Clinton’s Science Advisor also initiated an expanded amnesty program for military witnesses who were afraid to come forward about classified UFO information they might possess.

In 1996 the Clinton’s Science Advisor contacted the CIA, Air Force, and NASA on the proposed extended amnesty program.⁷ The goal of the effort was spelled out in a letter from Henry Diamond (Laurance Rockefeller’s lawyer) to the Dr. Gibbons, and in an attached draft letter to President Clinton that Diamond stated First Lady Hillary Clinton and her staff had helped to edit.⁸

The draft letter to the President was titled, “Lifting Secrecy of Information about Extraterrestrial Intelligence as Part of the Current Classification Review.” On page two of the letter the proposed new amnesty was spelled out how “amnesty” should be extended to all government agencies to protect those who had been sworn to secrecy on UFOs by government agencies. The letter read;

“Make it known through federal agencies such as those mentioned above (Department of Defense, the Air Force, CIA, NASA, and other parts of the intelligence community) that anyone having information about ETI or UFOs will be granted amnesty from relevant oaths or other government constraints.”⁹

As mentioned above Hillary Clinton and her staff met with Rockefeller to edit the letter related to “Information on Extraterrestrial Intelligence.” The editing by Hillary appeared to be part of a role she had  in moving UFO related information between the President and his science advisor on one side and Laurance Rockefeller and the private UFO groups he was associated with on the other side.

A February 6, 1996 letter written by Rockefeller to Dr. Gibbons outlined the role of Hillary Clinton’s office in the passing of UFO information back and forth.

You indicated that you will keep the First Lady’s office informed and we shall as well.

In January 2008, at a fundraising event at the Beverly Wiltshire Hotel in Los Angeles, radio talk show host and UFO researcher Rob Simone talked to Hillary Clinton and asked her about her rumored role in the Rockefeller UFO Initiative that had occurred from 1993 – 1996. Hillary confirmed that she did in fact play a role. She had deal with Laurance Rockefeller and did talk to the President about what was taking place. She pointed out to Simone her efforts were part of the Clinton administration’s effort to have a transparent government.

This contention of a transparent Clinton administration is supported the previously mentioned Executive Order 12958 – Classified National Security Information which was ordered to open up as much classified material as possible from government vaults.

This EO allowed 800,000,000 pages of former classified documents to finally see the light of day, far ahead of any administration in history. The newly disclosed documents included the admission that the US government had funded high-classified research into the paranormal subject of remote viewing.

In another case where the Clinton administration went looking for UFOs and found nothing came in the case of an astronaut who had approached William Cohen, a Republican who served as Secretary of Defense for President Clinton from 1997- 2001. The story of what happened is told by Dr. Steven Greer.

“An astronaut,” said Greer, “had during his career been in possession of a very specific piece of incontrovertible piece of evidence related to UFOs. It is something that if disclosed would clear and definitive. This astronaut described how he had approached and worked directly with President Clinton’s Secretary of Defense William Cohen to look into and retrieve from classified projects this specific piece of evidence - of that which he had all the specific details. . . the words used by this astronaut to me were ‘there was an inordinate large amount of money and personal time by the Secretary of Defense William Cohen was spent to locate this evidence, and he was never given access to it.’"

With so many government officials inside the Clinton administration unsuccessfully trying to uncover the UFO secret, it is no surprise that the Clintons resorted to going into the UFO community for answers.

There are a number of researchers who report that when the Clinton’s couldn’t get the UFO answer from inside the government, they started to approach UFO researchers through intermediaries. I know this to be true because I was briefly and indirectly involved in one of the cases.

Two of the contacts were made by Hillary using an intermediary. William LaParl described his encounter of Hillary looking for UFO information. “Hillary even kind of tried to indirectly get me involved, “stated LaParl, “as kind of like an outside researcher. She was putting out feelers that she needed help and stuff like that. They (the Clintons) were open to any kind of input along these lines.”

Later UFO researcher Darrel Sims would tell me almost an identical story of a woman claiming to be a friend of Hillary’s coming to him asking for research videotapes he had produced that would be taken to Hillary and the President. Later the woman returned stating Hillary and the President enjoyed the video material, and that Hillary was particularly interested. The woman explained that she had a proposal for Sims work to receive funding. Sims, however, turned down what was proposed.

The final item that shows the Clintons effort to bring openness to the subject of UFOs is that they never denied what they were doing. The lack of knowledge about their efforts both openly and behind the scenes comes from the fact that no one has really asked them the about the subject. Every time they have been asked they were very open about what happened during the Clinton years.

Not only has Bill Clinton been open about what went on, he has actually talked about his efforts to investigate the Roswell crash and Area 51 when the question he was asked did not even have to do with UFOs. Such was the case in a 2005 Hong Kong Q & A when the question had to do with secrets passed from departing Presidents to incoming Presidents. Bill Clinton replied,

"Well I don't know if you all heard this, but, there was actually, when I was president in my second term, there was an anniversary observance of Roswell. Remember that? People came to Roswell, New Mexico from all over the world. And there was also a site in Nevada where people were convinced that the government had buried a UFO and perhaps an alien deep underground because we wouldn't allow anybody to go there. And uhm… I can say now, 'cause it's now been released into the public domain.... This place in Nevada was really serious, that there was an alien artifact there. So I actually sent somebody there to figure it out."

"I did attempt to find out if there were any secret government documents that revealed things. If there were, they were concealed from me too. And if there were, well I wouldn't be the first American president that underlings have lied to, or that career bureaucrats have waited out. But there may be some career person sitting around somewhere, hiding these dark secrets, even from elected presidents. But if so, they successfully eluded me…and I'm almost embarrassed to tell you I did (chuckling) try to find out." (extract from video below)

Bill also didn’t avoid telling reporters what was going on. In a story told by Dr. Greer Clinton responded to a question by White House reporter Sarah McClendon about why he didn’t do something about UFO disclosure. It was one of the only times that Bill Clinton or any other President for that matter has faced a UFO question by a White House reporter. Clinton replied, “Sarah, there’s a government inside the government, and I don’t control it.” The reply provided further evidence for the fact that Bill Clinton had done what he could to bring about disclosure and was unable to get answers.

When he was questioned by MSNBC reporter Tom Brokaw about the movie Independence Day a couple of days after its release in 1996, Bill Clinton not only did not evade the question he took the opportunity to point out the moral of the  alien invasion theme that Ronald Reagan had made famous in his 1987 speech to the United Nations.¹⁰ In reply to the question whether he thought we could win against an alien invasion like in the movie Clinton replied.

Yes, I think we'd fight them off. We find a way to win. That's what America does ‑‑ we'd find a way to win if it happened… And it made me wonder if I should take flying lessons.. .The good thing about Independence Day is there's an ultimate lesson for that -- for the problems right here on Earth. We whipped that problem by working together with all these countries. And all of a sudden the differences we had with them seemed so small once we realized there were threats that went beyond our borders. And I wish that we could think about that when we deal with terrorism and when we deal with weapons proliferation -- the difference between all these others problems. That's the lesson I wish people would take away from Independence Day."

When asked by the Big D and Bubba radio show when will we ever know the truth about UFOs, Bill Clinton openly admitted he had requested and read the files on the 1947 Roswell UFO crash:

Wednesday, February 6th 2008 Big D and Bubba Welcome Former President Clinton LOS ANGELES, February 6, 2007 - Former President Bill Clinton joined The Big D and Bubba Show this week to discuss the Presidential primary elections. After discussing the hot topics, Bubba asked this tough-hitting question… BUBBA: "When will we ever know the truth about UFOs?" CLINTON: "It's interesting that you said that because when we celebrated the anniversary of that event out in New Mexico, I actually got all the government documents and read them and I'm convinced there wasn't a UFO there. On the other hand, you shouldn't give up hope because just a couple months ago, our government astrophysicists spotted a planet revolving around a star that is one of the closest to our solar system that they believe has conditions close enough to earth that it might contain life. Unfortunately, it's 20 million light years away so unless you, your kids and your grandkids, and maybe one more generation, want to take a trip for us, we'll have to wait for them to come to us. And then we'll know the truth."

The Clintons made many references to UFOs, aliens, and outer space in their speeches. This has continued right up to the present presidential campaign by Hillary where she raised the alien invasion concept in a speech during the Iowa caucuses. UFOs is a subject they have not pushed, but they haven’t avoided dealing with it.

Recent FOIAs filed at the Clinton Library show that there are thousands of more pages of documents that will detail the role of officials in the Clinton administration related to the UFO phenomena.

The Clinton administration was clearly trying to deal with the subject of UFOs. Perhaps the Clintons realized the significance role the President plays. That role is that it is up to the most powerful person in the world to deal completely and correctly with the most important subject in the world – the interaction of extraterrestrials with the human race.

SOURCE: http://www.hillaryclintonufo.net/index.html