Legends, Hoaxes and the Big Lie: Company Hearsay, Ufological Heresy

The term “hearsay” denotes the practice of telling someone that somebody else said something. One can easily imagine that one engaging in hearsay might not have heard the first person’s words correctly, or comprehensively. Thus there could be some distortion in the retelling, like there is in the party game of telephone where one person passes along a message to another, who then tells another, and so on. Consequently, the message you start off with often bears little resemblance in meaning to the original message.

Most important, hearsay allows people to put words in the mouths of others. Sometimes, as in political ads, people do this in order to discredit someone.

Whether steeped in good intentions, or deliberately used to defame someone, hearsay provides very weak evidence, even if the retelling of a story is accurate. Thus, courts of law, with a few exceptions, dismiss hearsay evidence.

Weak or not, hearsay is still evidence. Although we have to take it sometimes with a truckload full of salt, we still have to deal with it, especially if it comes into conjunction with other evidence. It is in this light that we have to deal with a rather thorny subject brought up by other UFO researchers in conjunction to Dr. Bruce Maccabee’s handling of the Gulf Breeze incident and Ed Walters’ photographs.

In July 1993, UFO magazine received a report from a collection of researchers calling themselves The Associated Investigators Group (AIG).  The report cast aspersions on the nature of Dr. Maccabee’s involvement with the UFO community, stating quite baldly:

One of the nation's leading sponsors of UFO research and investigation, the Fund for UFO Research [FUFOR], has had a long-standing secret relationship with the CIA and the U.S. Intelligence community. Dr. Bruce Maccabee, an optics and laser specialist with the Naval Surface Weapons Laboratory near Washington, D.C., one of the Fund's founders and member of the group's Executive Committee, has been secretly meeting with CIA officials since 1979, briefing them about various UFO matters and investigators.

W. Tod Zechel, one of the co-founders of Citizens Against UFO Secrecy (CAUS), and the only admitted author of the AIG report, explained that he received word of Dr. Maccabee’s connection to the CIA from none other than Dr. Maccabee himself. Zechel said that when he directly asked Maccabee if he worked for the CIA, the optical physicist replied “You might say that.” This naturally set off alarms within ufology:

One of the concerns we had with all this was that Maccabee felt more loyalty to the CIA than he did to his friends at the Fund. [FUFOR] ...One of the inferences that you can draw from the situation is that before 1979 Bruce was quite cautious, seemingly afraid that he might lose his government classified research job, and after 1979, when he began meeting with the CIA, he seemed to abandon all these cautions and got involved with a lot of things that *seemingly* (were) going up against the government.

The report said that Dr. Maccabee began his cooperation with the CIA in 1979, and has since worked under a number of handlers, among them Dr. Christopher Green (called ‘Kit’ by friends), and Dr. Ron Pandolfi. Further implications are obvious. In such cases as the Gulf Breeze incident, this revelation would paint Dr. Maccabee with the stigma of UFO disinformation specialist, and thus explain more fully his actions in championing Ed Walters’ hoax, which was obvious to anyone who looked carefully at it.

The extent and scope of Dr. Maccabee’s connection to the CIA is, in many respects, a matter of hearsay. The most damning evidence exists of statements purportedly made by Maccabee to Zechel and other ufologists. So in this case, it’s not the actions themselves, but rather the implications that they raise that constitute the weakness of the evidence against Dr. Maccabee as a CIA UFO disinformation specialist. After all, a responsible researcher goes to the horse’s mouth when he or she has the opportunity. If Dr. Maccabee had a chance to ask questions of importance to the CIA from someone within the CIA, then that seems like a fairly reasonable thing to do.  In a written response to the AIG report, he purportedly gave a more mundane and innocent explanation of his connection the Agency:*

I never contacted any companies. What I did was tell Jack Acuff, Director of NICAP at the time, that I would like to speak to experts in the field of radar. He, in turn, put me in contact with a scientist, Dr. Gordon MacDonald, at the MITRE corporation. I was invited to discuss the NZ sightings with him and several other scientists at MITRE in McLean, Va. and I did (and they generally agreed with my conclusions). Then, a week or so later, I learned that MacDonald had contacted a man at the CIA who contacted me and offered to provide technical consultation if I would provide a briefing to some CIA employees. At first I was leery of doing anything with the CIA, but I knew they had radar experts, so I stipulated that if they would give me some feedback I'd tell them what I know. So I briefed them and I received some helpful comments... 

After I discussed the NZ case one employee, Dr. Christopher "Kit" Green (KG), invited me to visit the CIA again a week or so later to have a general UFO discussion with him and a couple of other employees...

After that last meeting with KG in the spring of 1979 I didn't see him again and had no contact with the agency until June, 1984 when I was contacted by Dr. Ronald Pandolfi regarding my Navy work. He had been tracking developments by the "other side" in that field of research and wanted to know what the US state of the art was.

As to whether or not Dr. Maccabee actually wrote the above passage (see footnote), I cannot determine. Yet, I would guess that he actually wrote it. After all, in this account Drs. Green and Pandolfi are hardly handlers, but simply two, unconnected CIA connected people. The first gave him rather sensitive information in exchange for information about the UFO community, a quid-pro-quo deal. The second simply asked him an offhand question, which he answered off-the-cuff. While ufologists might understandably be somewhat leery in his divulging information regarding its members to someone who has the ear of Langley, one could certainly see this exchange in a non-conspiratorial light. So while the rumors that the CIA (wittingly or unwittingly) compromised Dr. Maccabee are intriguing, they’re highly speculative and could very well be untrue.

While Dr. Maccabee’s actual connection to the CIA, not to mention the scope of his involvement with the Agency, is questionable, one thing is not: Dr. Maccabee spent his professional career with the United States Navy as an optical physics researcher. In this light, we can see him as another person employed by the United States’ military and/or intelligence services who has disseminated information about unidentified flying objects. Like the military officers–Sgt. Richard Doty, Captain Robert Collins, Cols. William Coleman and George Weinbrenner, Gen. Robert Scott and Glenn Miller, and so on-- responsible for perpetuating the MJ-12 story, Dr. Maccabee’s work on the Gulf Breeze case and elsewhere upholds a certain orthodoxy regarding UFOS: (1) the craft are real; (2) of intelligent extraterrestrial origins; and (3) are known to, or perhaps working with, officials in US Intelligence.

Most important, the Gulf Breeze encounter would have serious repercussions within ufology. Furthermore, had the ruse remained intact, someone might have used the Gulf Breeze sightings to set the table for something larger, something even more sinister.  As Jacques Vallee wrote in his 1992 book Revelations:  Alien Contact and Human Deception:

But the most curious chapter in the sleazy chronicles of Gulf Breeze was still to be written. It exploded suddenly in a very unexpected form. This time, the US intelligence community was right at the center of the controversy.

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*If you note I qualified this statement by saying that Dr. Maccabee “purportedly” wrote the statement in question. I saw this statement, or references to it, in a number of different webpages that documented it with this link to Dr. Maccabee’s official website. If you click on it yourself, you’ll arrive at a page discussing CIA involvement in ufology, but nothing close to what’s quoted here. So, either this is another example of false attribution due to hearsay, or Dr. Maccabee later edited the page’s content to omit the statement.