This talk is about the ways the many components of governments interact and respond to challenging and anomalous events–highly relevant to hacking by all definitions and at all levels. If you don’t know the lay of the land, you can not engage in appropriate research and reconnaissance, counter-measures, and operations. The proliferation of reliable reports of unidentified flying objects from the 1940s forward represented just such a challenge. The phenomenon was anomalous, well-documented, and certainly challenging—because, as Major General John Samford said, “credible people have seen incredible things.” The UFO History Group includes some of the best researchers in the field. Richard Thieme was privileged to be invited to join the group and their project which resulted, after nearly 5 years of work, in “UFOs and Government: A Historical Inquiry,” an outstanding work of historical scholarship that nevertheless reads like a fascinating detective story. In almost 600 pages and with nearly 1000 citations, the work illuminates the response of the government since the early 1940s. how and why policies were set, and how they were executed. The book has been recommended by CHOICE, the primary resource for academic libraries, for inclusion by libraries at all levels because the book stands out as “an exception” in a field filled with speculation (there is virtually none in this book). Other reviews say, “this is the best book about the UFO phenomena that was ever written” and “UFOs and Government is a triumph of sober, conscientious scholarship unlikely to be equaled for year s to come.” You have never heard a talk like this – about a subject that has been ridiculed and marginalized intentionally for sixty years as a matter of policy and politics. As Don Quixote said, “insanity is seeing things as they really are.” This speech uses UFO phenomena as dye in the arteries of “how things really are.”
| Name | Type | Role | |
|---|---|---|---|
| Richard Thieme | Guest Star |