9/11’s Potemkin Village
As
the nation pauses for 9/11, let us also remember that, despite billions
of dollars invested in a new security bureaucracy, American airspace is
no more secure today than it was seven years ago.
Federal
Aviation Administration radar records indicate that the U.S. Air Force
was powerless to stop a mysterious aerial incursion from surging toward
President Bush’s ranch in Crawford, Tex., in January. The 77-page
analysis posted by the Mutual UFO Network in July has been neither
challenged nor rebutted by military officials. Nor have any scientists
emerged to take issue with any of the technical points raised by the
MUFON study.
Nor have government authorities bothered to refute
last year’s study assembled by the National Aviation Reporting Center
on Anomalous Phenomena. That 155-page report described how a UFO parked
itself over the United Airlines terminal at Chicago’s busy O’Hare
International for 18 minutes while ground crews watched the object burn
a circular hole in the cloud cover upon its departure.
Our
government’s refusal to acknowledge these meticulously detailed
reconstructions, along with the media’s failure to press for answers,
creates a vacuum that can only be filled by vigilant taxpayers
demanding accountability from this Potemkin Village. Maybe the citizens
of Arizona are best positioned to elevate this conundrum into what it’s
been all along — a political issue.
Long before the “Phoenix
Lights” incident drew international attention in 1997, Arizona Sen.
Barry Goldwater made repeated and now well-publicized attempts to flesh
out the UFO mystery. But not even the lion of modern conservatism could
get past the locked doors of Gen. Curtis LeMay, the former Air Force
Chief of Staff.
Several months after countless Arizonans were
startled by the massive UFO cruising their skies 11 years ago,
Goldwater’s successor, John McCain, defended the military cover story
that warplanes were conducting routine maneuvers that night in a letter
to a constituent (at
http://bp2.blogger.com/_PXeDY3KOwgA/R7XBpEcLPnI/AAAAAAAABic/XiYKW7nikQU/s1600-h/Phoenix+Lights+McCain+Ltr+Pg+(1).jpg):
“I
believe that these exercises, culminating in the release of many flares
simultaneously, provide a reasonable explanation for the appearance of
the peculiar lights that evening.”
Several years later, however,
when asked at a press conference about UFOs, McCain wasn’t laughing
(see http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-4686586251683588658): “I
think it’s of great interest. I would point out to you that there was a
case a couple of years ago in Arizona of some lights that were seen
over Arizona and that has never been fully explained.”
So which is it? What does McCain know?
In
2007, fellow Republican Fife Symington, the former Arizona governor who
initially ridiculed the Phoenix Lights, admitted he’d seen the damned
thing himself. He called it “enormous. It just felt otherworldly. In
your gut, you could just tell it was otherworldly."
It’s time for
the “maverick” presidential candidate to figure out what’s going down
in his own back yard. There’s never been a better moment for the folks
who put McCain in office to demand a little more straight talk at the
next town hall forum.
