Usually, when I study a UFO related topic, I offer a full, foundational treatment, complete with in-text-referencing from primary sources, images of old records, and a complete chronological history of whatever matter I’m exploring. The subject I aim to discuss here, however, is not worth such a laborious or scholarly effort. In fact, dealing with it at all brings my conscience out in a rash.

A four-page document, which purports to be a top-echelon “Special National Intelligence Estimate” (SNIE) has been circulating, and gaining traction, within the UFO community. Pretending to have been completed on the 5th of November, 1961, the SNIE is titled “US INTELLIGENCE COMMUNITY AND MJTWELVE OPERATIONS A SPECIAL NATIONAL INTELLEGENCE ESTIMATE” and was purportedly prepared for the President’s Foreign Intelligence Advisory Board (PFIAB) by a handful of high-level national security entities. The subtitle of this discombobulated mess is “Critical Aspects of Unidentified Flying Objects and the Nuclear Threat to the Defense of the United States and Allies”, and the supposed serial number is “No. 1-61-E”. Briefly, the subject matter relates to the retrieval of crashed UFO’s, and the risks of nuclear war with the Soviet Union after such events. Researchers Danny Silva and Joe Murgia have presented the document here, here and here. The Black Vault dealt with some of the technical points to the document here.

I first saw this document quite some time ago, and it was the spelling and grammatical errors which immediately caught my attention. The word “Israelis” is misspelt as “Israelies”. The word “parody” should be the word “parity”. And, most outrageously, in the capitalised title, the word “Intelligence” is misspelt as “Intellegence”. Are we expected to believe that senior intelligence officials cannot even spell the very word that their life-long craft is based on? The grammar is just as bad. The phrase “In pursuant to…” should be “In pursuance to…”. The phrase “misguided suspicions…” should probably be “misplaced suspicions…”. And what the hell are “…CIA and DoD postmortem studies…” for a nuclear war that has never occurred? Also stated is that “…It is doubtful that China has a nuclear attack capability at the present time…”. One would think that real authors, being at this level of national security governance and critical intelligence evaluation, would have had a better handle on China’s  nuclear weapons status, or total lack-thereof, by 1961. In fact, China didn’t conduct its first atomic test until October, 1964, and any “nuclear attack capability” came nearly a decade later. There are half a dozen similar historical problems with the obviously problematic SNIE document, but there’s only so much time one can spend raising them all.

To read more, click here.