CBS News & The U.S. Airforce: A Couple of Cozy Co-conspirators?
The U.S. Air Force (USAF) turned 75-years-old recently. You know the branch of the military entrusted with safekeeping the skies. That would include so-called UFOs/UAP, right? If you’re keeping score, however, the storied USAF has been completely AWOL in recent years as the U.S. congress continues to hold private briefings and public hearings on this topic (one to date with more in the wings, or in this case, on the wing). Oddly, the Navy has been in the spotlight as congress and media and the plebes on the street who actually care work toward some comprehensive understanding of what these things are. Or aren’t.
But historically, it’s the men and women in Air Force blue – and the org itself -- who have regularly played the leading characters in this never-ending story. And CBS News has – historically – often played in parallel the news arbiters on the UFO topic. Looking at some highlights though, it’s a long record of not-so-great reporting, with some serious carbuncles that needed lancing long ago and today.
Recently, Billy Cox, the Florida newspaper guy (marked safe from the ravages of hurricane Ian) and my comrade in long-trolling both the UFO subject and those who report on it, took to his Life in Jonestown blog to throw some well-deserved punches at the big news enterprise with the all-seeing logo. I’ll bring up the rear, as they say, down below….
“In a segment marking the 75th anniversary of the U.S. Air Force, Gayle King, Tony Dokoupol, and Vladimir Duthiers had a chance to make serious headlines during a studio interview with USAF Secretary Frank Kendall,” Cox writes. “What they served up instead were leftovers that haven’t changed recipes since Bill Murray was singing “Close Encounters of the Third Kind.”
Frankly, Cox is too kind.
The All-Seeing Eye of CBS
Given the chance to probe Kendall with hard-hitting queries like, “Where the hell have you mofos been since the Tic Tac videos have been live streaming for 5 years in the mainstream media?!,” the anchors let slide the Secretary’s dodge, as if he were the favorite old uncle who doesn’t track too well these days.
The Sec. says basically during the softball conversation that he worries about more serious stuff.
Huh?
Wouldn’t sky-bound and undersea craft that can defy physics and blow aviator and sailor minds qualify as serious business at the USAF? Or is the USAF already well informed on what this is all about and just doing what they have done for decades, playing the longest games of charades and dodgeball ever?
Meanwhile, Back in 1958, CBS – and the Air Force – Censor a Marine Corps Officer Live On Air
Travel with me now to 1958 to a CBS News studio where Mike Wallace, soon to become in the ‘60s, one of the news brand’s rock stars on 60 Minutes, goes mano a mano with Donald Keyhoe, one of the earliest UFO activists and best-selling “UFO authors” to challenge the government’s line and lies. Keyhoe was no slouch and nobody’s fool, but a former Marine Air Corps Major and subsequently the director of the National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomena (NICAP). His books sold well. He knew his stuff. And he didn’t fold in the face of stinging pushback from military wags or newshounds like Wallace. And he got censored live on air!
The brief summary of their conversation is captured by the Harry Ransom Center at the University of Texas at Austin where the digital version of this exchange resides: “Former Marine Air Corps Major Donald Keyhoe, director of the National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomena, conducted an investigation of the existence of Unidentified Flying Objects (UFOs). Keyhoe talks to Wallace about the United States military, reports of UFO sightings, the various theories explaining UFOs, government cover-ups, and the possibility of interplanetary war.”
(credit The Harry Ransom Center)
But you can watch the entire interview, cigarette-smoking Wallace and the seriously chiseled Keyhoe and all, on the omni-present YouTube, which is giving traditional TV network business models like CBS the blues big time:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CQtw_J74bQ4&list=PLEFB4381B11AC0210&t=1s
As succinct as the above summery is about the Wallace-Keyhoe smackdown, I readily prefer the reporting of Richard Hall, who was a regular contributor to UFO Magazine back in the day, with affiliations elsewhere in UFOland. Hall’s writing here however is taken from the Journal of UFO History in 2005.
Hall writes: “In one of the more bizarre incidents of UFO history, a major CBS Television broadcast about UFOs, sponsored by a large corporation, was cut off the air when Maj. Donald E. Keyhoe, USMC (Ret.) departed from the script and started to ad lib.
The ‘Armstrong Circle Theater,’ sponsored by the Armstrong Cork Company of Lancaster, Pennsylvania, was a popular program at that time. The UFO discussion, broadcast on Jan. 22, 1958, was titled UFOs: Enigma of the Skies. It had been carefully scripted under the strong influence of the Air Force.
Frustrated by the continued efforts of the Air Force to control what he wanted to say, Maj. Keyhoe started to announce that NICAP (the National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomena, which he directed) had been working with a Senate committee to investigate UFO secrecy, when the sound level of the audio - very obviously -- was abruptly cut.
When CBS-TV was deluged with phone calls, letters, and telegrams protesting what appeared to be overt censorship, CBS justified the action by stating: ‘This program had been carefully cleared for security reasons....public interest was served by the action taken by CBS.’”
CBS Television letter of January 31, 1958
Hall, working himself into a good, justifiable lather, continues:
“This strange explanation was given at a time when the Air Force regularly claimed that there was nothing at all to UFOs, that the Air Force had nothing to hide, and there were no UFO-related national security implications. This being the case, what exactly did they (and CBS) fear that Major Keyhoe might say that could possibly justify their action? Why did the Air Force quite literally demand complete control over the script? Major Keyhoe's ad lib comments actually were innocuous (see following text).
The entire episode is very revealing about official attitudes and beliefs at that time. As the program neared the scheduled broadcast date, some of the prominent participants dropped out, including Kenneth Arnold (famous UFO sighting witness) and Edward J. Ruppelt (former chief of the Air Force UFO project), rebelling against the (from their viewpoint) emasculation of the script, and the rigid controls being placed by the Air Force and the complicit program producer on what they could say.
On Jan. 28, 1958, Major Keyhoe sent a form letter to the NICAP membership list informing them that what he was about to say when he was cut off the air was:
In the last six months, we (NICAP) have been working with a Senate committee investigating official secrecy on Unidentified Flying Objects. If open hearings are held, I feel it will prove beyond doubt that the flying saucers are real machines under intelligent control.
One can only conclude that Major Keyhoe's credibility was such that someone feared a panic. Certainly the notion that one man's opinion would somehow violate national security or cause any sort of panic among a public eager for more information about UFOs seemed very strange at the time, and makes no more sense in retrospect.”
Of course, anyone who’s read Chapter 7 of THE SPACE PEN CLUB, -- Under the Volcano with CBS’ 48 Hours, Give or Take a Day or Two – also will find CBS at the heart of the chapter, screwing up reporting from Mexico’s volcano zone when CSETI allowed a team from “48 Hours” to shadow us. Caveat – the reporter and producer were only onsite for 24 hours after their car allegedly broke down 20 miles away from our sky watch area. There, in an area with high UAP/UFO sightings, a hired camera guy and soundman, both from LA, captured on tape the UFO that we interacted with the first night out, without reporter Harold Dow and his producer on location.
What’s odd – and circumspect – is that when the show aired, the show used the videotape of the object signaling back to us but never provided any context for it. Got Journalism 101?
CBS and the Air Force – tight AF? Or just a couple of occasional cozy co-conspirators happy to propagate the notion that the American public and global citizens “can’t handle the truth?”
