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CIA CLAIMS 1947 BUDGET RECORDS ARE “MISSING”:

IS ROSWELL THE REASON?

 

(originally published Sept 2013)

 

 

A noted activist against government secrecy has encountered a wall of silence in his FOIA requests to find out about the Central Intelligence Agency budget figures for 1947/8. The agency claims that they “are unable to locate” such fiscal records. Is the reason that they are “missing” because this was the very same time frame as that of the UFO crash near Roswell in July of 1947? There is now solid reason to support that there was a deliberate attempt at that time to hide operational expenditures that related to the crash. This included funds and allocation of capital resources for investigations, retrieval, transport, storage, security and study of the crash debris and bodies. Just as this author has found (as reported in books and in an online article series here on the “memory metal” debris) that there exists a technical paper trail related to the crash, there must also be a fiscal paper trail. And in both cases it appears that there were early and active efforts to make it difficult for anyone to follow these trails.

 

CIA SAYS: “WE CAN’ T FIND THE RECORDS”

 

Steve Aftergood is a published engineer and directs the Federation of American Scientists “Project on Government Secrecy”.  He has spearheaded efforts at government records declassification and in reforming government secrecy and privacy policy for decades. He was instrumental in filing historic Freedom of Information Act lawsuits which led for the first time to the declassification and publication of total intelligence budgets under FOIA request.  But when Aftergood filed FOIA requests with the CIA for its budget records for 1947/8, the agency’s initial reply was that his request was denied. The agency cited applicable FOIA exemptions to such requests, including national security-related exemptions. Over several years in the 2000s, Aftergood filed several complaints and appeals to compel the CIA to release this fiscal year budget information. It had prior released other requested years and time spans, but strangely denied this specific request for the Roswell-year budget records.

 

Changing about-face on what it had originally stated, the CIA finally wrote to Aftergood, “We are unable to locate a document containing, or a series of documents from which we may deduce, the US intelligence budget for Fiscal Year 1947.” They indicated that the same holds true for the year immediately after the crash, 1948.  This was an active, post-Roswell year. This was the year that the military was letting contracts to Battelle Memorial Institute to study Roswellian “memory metal” (see prior articles) and the year that other outside studies were likely begun that required fiscal expenditure.

 

A decade on from Aftergood’s last FOIA action on this, the CIA’s last response seems to be their final. And it appears that Aftergood has now exhausted all of his administrative remedies to gain access to the requested records. In dialog with this author, Aftergood indicates that he believes now that the reason for the missing budget information is due to “poor record management” and “over-classification.”  But there are clues that can be culled from a careful review of the testimony made by those who were administrators at the Roswell base in 1947. And these clues – which have nothing to do with mismanagement – tell of a different reason, and they help us to understand the real reasons why these CIA fiscal records may remain unavailable to the public.

 

ROSWELL OFFICERS MUDDIED FINANCIAL WATERS

According to three officers confirmed to have been at Roswell Army Air Field (RAAF) in July of 1947, they deliberately destroyed, omitted or otherwise ‘changed up’ expenditures, disbursements and other “paper trails” that related to the crash.  And obviously this was done under orders.

 

Richard Clayton Harris


Richard Harris was the Budget and Fiscal Officer at RAAF, including that 1947 summer of the crash. Many years later, before his death, Harris opened up that it was in fact a “spaceship” that had fallen to earth. He confessed that there were bodies temporarily stored in a hangar, and that Walter Haut, the officer who issued the press release on the crash event, knew the true nature of the craft, telling Harris in front of the hangar holding the crash debris, that it was

Roswell Army Air Field (RAAF) sign

extraterrestrial and that it was piloted.

 

In an interview some time ago with author and Roswell research team member Kevin Randle, Harris confirmed that the crash was of an alien vehicle. Harris’ daughter Ann states that her father had “allotted funds necessary for the cleanup and cover up. Dad allotted the funds to pay for housing and food for extra personnel, and for extra fuel for unscheduled flights out to Ft. Worth and to Wright.”  No such expenditure records have ever been found – and were made not to be found by someone.

 

According to Ann, her father was found murdered in his home just six months after his appearance on TV with Kevin Randle. She states that in addition to Albuquerque Police, there were CIA agents investigating the incident as well.

 

Col. Patrick Saunders

 

Colonel Patrick Saunders was the Base Adjutant at RAAF in the summer of 1947. As administrative Adjutant, he must have known and worked with Richard Harris.  Many years ago when reached by researchers, Saunders laughed of the crash incident, later telling them illusively, “I can’t specify anything.”  After her father’s death, Saunder’s daughter wrote to Kevin Randle saying of her father that:  “At one point he bragged to me about how well he covered up the paper trail associated with the clean-up.”

 

Claire Miller

 

Claire Miller was stationed at the US Army Counter Intelligence Corps (CIC) Washington, DC headquarters in July of 1947. CIC officer Sheridan Cavitt is confirmed to have made an investigation with Major Jesse Marcel from RAAF at the Foster ranch where the object had fallen. When Miller (who likely knew Cavitt) was reached by author Karl Pflock in 1980, Miller was evasive, chuckled and tried to change the topic away from Roswell.  In a follow-up letter to Pflock, the former CIC administrator curiously wrote, “I have no recollection relating to the Roswell/Corona crash case. I was stationed in Washington, DC at the time. I may have approved investigative expenditures relating to that case, but that was 46 years ago of water under the bridge and my mind is blank!” Blank indeed. In his reply, Miller is tacitly admitting financial oversight involvement.

 

HIDDEN PAPER TRAILS

Paper trails – written evidence – can prove to be a very tricky maze to find, and to navigate once found.  It took years of circling back and making connections from various journals and contracts to discover that Battelle was retained by Wright-Patterson to work on memory metal in the months following the Roswell crash. A similar financial forensic analysis may prove to be equally productive. Dealing with the enormity of fallen ET craft and creatures costs money – it necessarily involves expenditure. Is it mere coincidence and mishandling that accounts for the CIA’s account of why they can’t come up with budget information for that critical period of time, but they can – and do – for other years? Given what the Roswell officers quoted above have said, I think not. There has to be some indication somewhere of a “Roswell financial paper trail” of funding, expenses and disbursement associated with 66 years of keeping the alien secret.

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