Conversations with Major Donald Keyhoe - UFO Evidence Article/Document: Conversations with Major Donald Keyhoe Bob Pratt original source | fair use notice Summary: Donald Edward Keyhoe was one of the most prominent people in the world of UFOs in the 1950s, 60s and 70s. His influence on ufology was great. His five books and numerous magazine articles about UFOs convinced countless thousands of people that UFOs are real. Because of him, many of those readers became UFO researchers themselves who are still active today. This article by Bob Pratt recounts his conversations with Donald Keyhoe. Donald Edward Keyhoe was one of the most prominent people in the world of UFOs in the 1950s, 60s and 70s. His influence on ufology was great. His five books and numerous magazine articles about UFOs convinced countless thousands of people that UFOs are real. Because of him, many of those readers became UFO researchers themselves who are still active today. A prolific writer on many subjects, his books on UFOs were The Flying Saucers are Real (1950), Flying Saucers From Outer Space (1953), The Flying Saucer Conspiracy (1955), Flying Saucers: Top Secret (1960), and Aliens from Outer Space (1973). Keyhoe was born in Iowa in 1897. In 1920 he graduated from the U.S. Naval Academy with a commission as a second lieutenant in the Marine Corps. He flew balloons and airplanes for a few years but was injured in a crash in Guam. He retired, worked for the government for some time and eventually began a career as a freelance writer. During World War II he was recalled to active duty with the rank of Major and served in the Pentagon. Contacts that he made there were to prove valuable to him years later when he became interested in UFOs. After the war he returned to private life and began writing again. He also test flew and evaluated airplanes for True magazine. From his early flying days on, he came to know many pilots, both civilian and military. Two years after Kenneth Arnold reported seeing “flying saucers” in 1947, True magazine assigned Keyhoe to look into claims of UFO sightings. He was skeptical of such reports, but he interviewed numerous pilots and military officers and discovered that many of them had had sightings and close encounters. He soon became convinced not only that UFOs were real, but that they came from outer space and that the government was trying to cover up the truth. In January 1957, Major Keyhoe became director of the newly formed National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomena (NICAP). Under his direction, NICAP sought to bring public pressure on the government to reveal what it knew about UFOs. He was ousted as NICAP’s director in December 1969 but he remained on the board of governors. By then, government agents reportedly had infiltrated NICAP, and the character of the organization changed greatly in the following years. NICAP became little than a report collection agency, many members resigned, and in 1980 it was shut down for good. I never met Keyhoe. I did see him at a UFO conference once but didn’t get to talk to him. However, I did speak to him by phone several times in the late 1970s when I was a reporter for the National Enquirer. By then, he was in his early 80s, living with his wife near Luray, Virginia. He was still active, keeping an office nearby where he went for several hours a day. He died in 1988 at the age of 91. We talked five times in 1977, 1978 and 1979 for thirty to fifty minutes each time. The first call was on October 7, 1977. I was trying to learn something about an Air Force general named Ramey. Ramey’s name meant nothing to me at the time and it was only two years later when I began looking into the 1947 Roswell incident that I learned much about him. (By odd coincidence, less than a month later I went to Puerto Rico to look into UFO sightings near the town of Aguadilla on the western coast of the island. I spent one or two nights in a converted military building on a base that had once been known as the Ramey Air Force Base.) Below are excerpts from that and subsequent conversations, edited to eliminate pauses, redundancies, re-starts and the like, and to avoid boring the reader with endless and sometimes awkward ellipses. Please note: Anyone familiar with Major Keyhoe and his books and magazine articles about UFOs will probably find little new in these transcripts. RAMEY AND THE JULY 1952 UFO FLAP (I had phoned Major Keyhoe because I had seen a reference to Ramey in one of his books and after introducing myself, we talked about Ramey and who he was.) KEYHOE: . . . Ramey was the chief of the Air Defense Command. PRATT: Did you ever talk to him personally? KEYHOE: Yes, I did, after the conference was over . . . [A UFO flap occurred over a period of eleven nights in 1952. Between 2 A.M. July 18 and 5 A.M. July 29, UFOs were seen and/or tracked on radar over the Washington, D.C. area at least 17 times, with some of the witnesses being military personnel or airline pilots. The UFOs were tracked on radar eight times with as many as 10 to 12 objects being detected at a time. Jet fighters were scrambled at least twice from bases in nearby Delaware and New Jersey. The incidents attracted considerable publicity, and at 4 P.M. on July 29 – just eleven hours after eight to twelve UFOs were tracked by radar – the Pentagon staged a large Washington press conference to debunk the flood of UFO reports. Major General Roger M. Ramey participated in the conference, as did Major General John A. Samford, the chief of Air Force Intelligence. Ramey and Samford were referred to as the Air Force's top two saucer experts] KEYHOE: . . . and Ramey was very polite and certainly very smart. He managed to evade the pointed nature of each question and somehow seemed to be covering it anyway (Keyhoe chuckled), but of course that was because he had to. He was under orders like all the rest of them, but after that time I don’t recall having any other contact with him. PRATT: Somebody told one of our editors or the publisher that he was an acquaintance of Ramey’s back in the ’50s. The man who gave us this was a former brigadier general himself, I believe. But he was under the impression that Ramey very definitely believed these (objects) were from outer space. Whether he would say that publicly, he didn’t know, but – KEYHOE: Well, there were lots of them that did believe it, even at that big press conference. They, naturally, evaded these things, but I wouldn’t be a bit surprised. I did ask the senior public information officer there, Albert M. Chop, who also believed although he wouldn’t admit it until after he resigned. But he believed they were interplanetary. But he said, “Well, I’m not going to give you any names but there are several pretty high ranking officers, including generals.” And I said, “Brigadier, major general?” He just grinned and said, “Generals, let’s just go with that.” . . . RUPPELT RENEGES UNDER PRESSURE PRATT: I know Ruppelt’s book mentioned that several officers in the Pentagon seemed to be believers but he didn’t name anybody. [Air Force Captain Edward J. Ruppelt was a bombardier on a B-29 in World War II, serving in China and the South Pacific. After the war he went to college but was recalled to active duty when the Korean War started. He was assigned to the Air Technical Intelligence Corps at Wright Field (later Wright-Paterson Air Force Base) near Dayton, Ohio. For about two years he was in charge of Project Grudge, the Air Force’s investigation of UFOs, and later, when its name was changed, Project Blue Book. He left the service in 1953 and three years later he published the widely read book, The Report On Unidentified Flying Objects.] KEYHOE: Yeah, well, too bad about Ruppelt. See, he came out with that book and it caused the Air Force a lot of trouble. He had made some statements in public, articles and so forth, and newspaper interviews, and they put the heat on him. Well, after he had gone on inactive, he got a job with an aerospace company, and the Air Force put the heat on him and also the company. If he didn’t renege on some of these things he said, they were not going to have anything more to do with the company. So he added three new chapters to the (revised edition of the) book . . . and he completely reneged on the whole thing and said there was no evidence. It was a ridiculous thing and all that which crucified him. He died of a heart attack shortly after that, and I think that had a lot to do with it. In the three chapters he added, he takes a crack or two at me, and before that he’d been very carefully giving me inside information. He managed to get about 50 cases, really important cases, cleared for me right after that big (July 29, 1952) conference. (General) Samford, who tried to explain away the whole thing, must have been privately in favor of getting it out because shortly after that he allowed headquarters to release all these cases to me with a definite clearance and a statement they were all unexplained, unsolved . . . THE PENTAGON ‘LOSES’ RAMEY PRATT: All right, this is Major General Roger M. Ramey. Is that correct? KEYHOE: Yeah. PRATT: And he was chief of the Air Defense Command at that time? KEYHOE: That’s right. PRATT: Son of a gun. An Air Force public affairs guy (at the Pentagon) went through his list of generals the other day and could find no reference to any such man (Ramey). KEYHOE: Oh, for– (laughs) PRATT: That’s curious. But he said the list was almost complete but not quite. I’m not quite sure what that meant. He had all living and dead generals but he couldn’t come across any by that name. KEYHOE: Well, it’s possible, since you were inquiring about top figures connected with UFOs, that they may have just simply decided not to give you that information. What kind of an article, if you don’t mind, are you planning to do on this? PRATT: Well, this came down from the publisher who said, this guy (Ramey) if you can find him, he used to believe that UFOs came from outer space. Why don’t you find him and talk to him? Well, I have to find out first what his real name is and then find out if he’s still living and, if so, where he is living, and then if he’ll talk to us about such things. So many high-ranking former officers just will not talk about UFOs, if they believe anything, you know? KEYHOE: Yeah. That’s true, although quite a number of them have broken over lately and while they ask that their names not be used, they’ve come out and admitted the whole thing. [Nothing ever came of my attempt to speak to General Ramey. He had died years before.] BEHIND THE GOVERNMENT’S SECRECY KEYHOE: It’s incredible that they (the military) have gotten away with this for 30 years. I’ve been on this subject longer than any other writer on UFOs and sometimes I wished to hell I’d never heard of it, because I was a writer on various different subjects and even selling pictures now and then, and I was really living a very relaxed life. I can’t explain all this but I have been working on something which could put this thing into the open. If it doesn’t get into the open, the public will know what was turned down. It’s a plan that I have been told by my insiders at the Pentagon, that headquarters would consider seriously. (There are) three things that would keep them doing all the denials, and one of them is they’re sure they’re going to catch holy hell if they come out and admit they’ve been misleading the public and being really harsh in some of their attacks on some of the witnesses for 30 years. The next one is they are afraid they will scare a lot of people if they admit that these things are interplanetary and that some of the accidents on record were caused by UFOs, not proof of hostility but they were caused by it. And mainly because we’ve been chasing and shooting at them. And the third one is – and this one I can’t accept it – is that there is a very terrible answer to all this, and the CIA and the Air Force and the national defense security council are agreed that they must fight to the last inch to keep this from coming out because it would cause panic all over the world. (Some) of these things are Above Top Secret. I know a case, well several cases in that grouping, and one of the chief witnesses told me privately that he was told at the Pentagon that they would like to have the copy of his report (on his UFO sighting). He wasn’t supposed to have a copy anyway. He was supposed to make a single copy without any carbon or anything, and he told them, “You know, I was instructed not to make any copy of it, and I didn’t.” And they said, “Well, that’s too bad because we’ve mislaid or lost your copy,” and I happened to know every damned thing that was in that because I got, not a verbatim copy, but a copy of all the facts concerned. And this officer told me, “I know of at least 10 other retired Air Force officers who have been involved in rather strong UFO cases who have been given the same story.” And he says they’re getting ready in case Carter does decide to order this thing released, all of a sudden everything will be “lost” or burned. So, it’s really a very, very tough and amazing situation. [In 1976 at a stop during the presidential election campaign, a fellow National Enquirer reporter asked candidate Jimmy Carter: “You once saw a UFO. If you were President, would you re-open the inquiry into UFOs?” Carter replied: “Well, I would make the information we have about those sightings available to the public. I never have tried to identify what it was I saw. It was a light in the western sky. It was very unique. There were about twenty of us who saw it. None of us could figure out what it was. I don’t think it was anything solid. It looked to me like it was just a light. It was a very peculiar aberration. But I don’t make fun of people who say they’ve seen unidentified objects in the sky.” The reporter then asked: “The United States used to have a body that investigated UFOs, but that’s been discontinued. Would you re-open it?” To which, Carter replied: “I don’t know yet.” Carter then moved on with his entourage. When Carter became president, pro-UFO people hoped he would carry through on his pledge to release all documents. Other people, particularly in the Pentagon, were afraid he would.] PRATT: I had an interview by phone with an Assistant Secretary of Defense about 10 days ago, and he confirmed that the military forces have never stopped reporting UFOs to the Pentagon – KEYHOE: Well, that’s right. PRATT: – and if you can point out the time and place where one of these occurred, and go through the FOI (Freedom of Information) Act, you can get the information on it. KEYHOE: Well, you will unless it happens to be one of those Above Top Secret ones. In that case, you’re going to find yourself up against a stonewall . . . PILOTS ALLOWED TO TALK, SAYS OFFICIAL PRATT: This guy, the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Public Affairs, his name is Donald Ross, when I asked him if there is any penalty for a serviceman or former serviceman to talk about these things, he says: “No. Of course, providing there is no security or vital classified information involved.” Of course, that’s the key. Now, if classified data IS involved and they talk about it, then they do risk being penalized. KEYHOE: I know that because I know two very close friends of mine who have been on UFO investigations with me, and one of them did have a very dramatic sighting with several Air Force witnesses and he will not confirm or deny anything. I told him what I had heard, and I am positive that what I heard was right, and from the way he looked at me and he said, “Well, I can’t confirm or deny anything. Please don’t ask me any more about it.” But there are enough people fighting it. I’m amazed that [Senator Barry] Goldwater didn’t follow up on what he told me he was going to do. He decided that it was wrong what’s being done, harming responsible, honest witnesses. And there’s another angle because if this thing does start partway to breaking, then the Air Force and CIA blocks it. I think that if some of these people who are sore as the devil at the way they have been discredited could get together – quite a number of them were pilots or connected with high military sections or divisions – I think it would go right on the front pages and out on the air with a special broadcast . . . THE TERRIBLE FIX THE AIR FORCE GOT ITSELF IN KEYHOE: I have realized more and more the hell of a situation the Air Force is in, mainly because of the early years when that policy was carried out of discrediting witnesses and so forth and denying and making it so completely negative. (They’re) going to catch hell for it and the people who started it are either dead or long retired. And so many times they’ve been in a spot they didn’t know what to do and they hate to crucify anybody and yet some of their top Air Force officers have been accused of being absolutely deluded, and they’re damned sore about it . . . You say you have a story coming out and on the NASA angle? PENTAGON RULES REQUIRE REPORTS ON UFOS PRATT: Yes, we’ve got a story on the NASA thing and I have written a story about the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Public Affairs admitting that they have been reporting these things all along, they never stopped and all that, and giving some details on JANAP 146E, you know– [JANAP is the acronym for Joint Army-Navy-Air Force Publication, the regulations for reporting intelligence sightings of unidentified aircraft, missiles, vessels and so on. 146E is that version of the procedures, superseding earlier versions. These regulations specifically include sightings of “Unidentified flying objects” and what to report about them.] KEYHOE: Is that still in effect? PRATT: Still in effect. You know, it has two and a half pages of details on what to report on unidentifiable objects and things like that . . . Part of it all stems from a classified report on that Iranian UFO incident a year ago. That was finally declassified and released just a month ago. I’ve been trying to get a hold of it from various sources in Washington, the White House and so on down the line, and I kept getting told there was no such thing. And then some other guy, an American who lives in Berlin, using the FOI Act, he was working for the past five or six months and he finally succeeded, and they finally released the darned thing and declassified and released it. Right up to that time they were absolutely denying it. What we got was just a simple Telex message from a defense attaché (in Tehran) running maybe 500 or 600 words. (But) the interesting thing was that it came in to the DIA [Defense Intelligence Agency] and then was re-transmitted to the White House, the State Department, the NSA, the CIA and on down the line, and they kept telling me there was no such thing. Somebody was lying and they knew it. KEYHOE: I’ll tell you, I don’t see how it can go on much longer without being broken because so many people in influential positions or whoever with a good name have been keeping still because– airline captains have been told by the top airline officials to keep your mouth shut, don’t be talking about this thing. WHAT EDDIE RICKENBACKER SAID ABOUT UFOs PRATT: That’s interesting. I talked to half a dozen airlines the other day to see what their policy was on UFOs because this guy in the Pentagon told me, I’d asked him if airline pilots are required to report UFOs and he said, “No, but they are requested to.” So I went to the airlines to see if they had a policy on this and they said they didn’t, that it was up to the individual crews to report such things if they saw fit. But I didn’t think to ask them if they were told to be quiet about it. KEYHOE: Well, I don’t think it’s a written order. I used to know Rickenbacker . . . [Eddie Rickenbacker, a top fighter ace in the f… truncated (37,607 more characters in archive)