Unacknowledged: An Expose of the World's Greatest Secret

In the late 1960s, there was quite a bit of publicly exposed information about UFO events. One day my boss told me General Shreever, the guy who invented the ICBM, was retiring and the Air Force wanted to have sort of a symposium for him. Each of the contractors, including us, received an assignment to predict what the future would hold over the next ten years. Our assignment was to talk about going to space and back.

I knew my boss was really oriented toward nuclear propulsion, and everybody was tired of hearing about it, so I said, “Gee Ray, why don’t you tell them about how the UFOs allegedly do it?” He loved the idea and asked me to work on it.

I became interested in subscribing to the various journals and met Jim McDonald. He convinced me that I had a story that I could tell to my management, since I had concluded that the UFOs were real. One day when I was driving to work, I said, “There’s no other solution. They’re clearly real; they’re clearly extraterrestrial; and they work somehow. I think we ought to figure out how they work, because I wouldn’t want to be the last aerospace company to discover gravity control. I think we ought to be the first.”

I took a briefing to my management, who were very supportive. I was offered a very modest project to look into this problem, so we did some things like seeing whether we could change the speed of light via a large magnetic field.

The classified program I was working on was at the code word level, and it had to do with our ballistic missile defense program. It’s very common for intelligence agencies like the CIA to ask contractors who have an expertise in one area to study the enemy’s expertise in that same area―so this program was to study the Soviet ballistic missile defense program. And you had access to special libraries, so one of the things that we could do is go up to the library that the Air Force ran and sort of paw through top-secret material.

When I had to use their library, I’d see what they had on UFOs. For about a year I was getting quite a few hits on the subject from various reports. Then one day the entire UFO subject just vanished.

The librarian in our group that I was working with said he’d been in that vault for twenty years and had never an entire subject just vanish.

I was encouraged to go see the Condon Committee and tell them what we were doing. So I wrote them a nice letter saying that our company had been looking into the subject of UFOs, and did they want to hear what we were doing?

I got a courteous invitation back from Condon. We prepared a briefing that explained how you could take a loop of superconducting material and establish a strong magnetic field in one direction, and then charge it at the same time, so it could float in the electrostatic field of the Earth. The bottom line was that we were just about a factor of ten away from having superconducting current capacity enough to do this. Of course, our team thought, “Gee, only a factor of ten―we’re going to be there in a couple of years.”

Condon’s lack of interest in this subject was quite in contrast to his own group. He called his group together, who sat around and listened to our briefing. When he said, “Therefore you can’t do it,” they all looked at him in amazement and said, “But it’s only a factor of ten.” So I became friendly with several of them: Roy Craig and a couple of the others. I concluded that this Condon Committee was not an objective study.

I wrote a letter to Condon suggesting that it might be helpful if he were to establish his group in two parts, and have one of believers and one of disbelievers, and let both of them go to work with their angles. I said, “I am taking the liberty of sending a copy of this letter to every member of your group,” whose addresses I had received from them privately.

He was so furious that he called up James S. McDonnell, who was at that time the chairman of the newly-merged Douglas and McDonnell aircraft companies, and tried to get me fired!

Regarding Jim McDonald… I liked the guy―he was really an energetic physicist and wouldn’t let any grass grow under his feet. Once, when I was traveling through Tucson where he lived, I had a two-hour layover and he came out to the airport to have a beer with me.

He said, “The ETs… I think I’ve got it.” I said, “What do you think you got?” He said, “I think I got the answer, but I can’t tell you yet. I have got to be sure.”

It was six weeks after that that he tried to shoot himself. A couple months after that he finally died.

Knowing what I do about the persuasive skills of our counterintelligence people, I think we had the capacity to convince him to do it himself. I think that's what happened…