There is significant evidence that the US government has covered up the alien presence through misinformation, distortion, obfuscation, and ridicule. UFO experts, Stanton Friedman and Kathleen Marden joined George Knapp for the full program to discuss the wealth of archival documents that clearly demonstrate a cooperative disinformation effort between the mainstream media and government. In their latest research, the two also examined the lives and work of professional skeptics, such as the late Philip Klass, to understand their motivations.
Marden looked at Klass' archival files, as he'd been a particularly ardent critic of her aunt, Betty Hill, in regard to her testimony of a UFO encounter and abduction along with her husband Barney, in 1961. Klass' FBI file shows at one point he was under suspicion of espionage, and it's possible that the government had something on him and used that as leverage to get him to do their bidding when it came to debunking UFO reports, and harassing witnesses, Marden conjectured. She detailed how he tried to diminish the testimony of Travis Walton, by bringing up an arrest for a crime he committed as a teenager. One of the first UFO debunkers, the scientist Donald Menzel, had a long association with the NSA, Friedman added.
The Betty and Barney Hill case was featured in Project Blue Book, but the Air Force ended up revising the Hill's testimony about lateral and vertical movements of the craft, and declared that "there was no evidence presented to indicate it was due to anything other than natural causes" such as an advertising searchlight, the planet Jupiter, or a strong temperature inversion, Marden said. She believes they fabricated information in a concerted attempt to cover-up the story so the American public would not be fearful of possible alien visitations.
One of the arguments against the UFO cover-up is that the government can't keep secrets, but Friedman cited the 156-page release of NSA top secret UFO documents that were completely whited-out except for about one sentence per page. "I think there was a major effort...to ridicule, to raise an eyebrow, to make sure people thought the wrong things about what was really happening in the flying saucer situation," Friedman continued. They also spoke about Carl Sagan's skeptical comments on UFOs, when he'd originally been more open on the topic. Marden found a letter in Sagan's archives from Donald Menzel saying he thought Sagan had a bright career ahead of him, but he should toe the party line about UFOs.