From: jrblack@teal.csn.org (Roger Black)
Subject: Menzel and UFOs
Followup-To: alt.alien.visitors
Keywords: ufo
Organization: Colorado SuperNet, Inc.
Date: Wed, 14 Oct 1992 23:50:24 GMT

In article <gdavis.719083919@griffin> gdavis@griffin.uvm.edu (Gary Davis) 
writes:

>The first volume I selected was the 1977 publication by DoubleDay,
>"The UFO Enigma", Donald Menzel, Harvard Astronomer.
>It is a good book for beginners since its scientific hubris is over
>powering. Menzel is critical of all UFO sightings and at times uses
>quite good science to ferrit out fraud and misperception.
>Perhaps the one element I found disturbing was his implication that
>unless one is a scientist at the Ph.D. level, one is probably unable
>to distinguish fantasty from reality,a liar until proven otherwise,
>in need of publicity or serving some psyhic drive for money,publicity
>and so on. He laments that only a few Ph.D. have reported UFO and this
>fact alone is taken as prima facie evidence that the whole issue is
>suspect.

Menzel should be taken with a very large dose of salt.  A number of the
people who dealt with him in the early years of ufology (such as E.J.
Ruppelt, the head of Project Blue Book from 1951-53, and J. Allen
Hynek, the science adviser to Blue Book for many years) apparently
considered Menzel to be arrogant, devious, and dishonest.  Many of his
"scientific" explanations of UFO sightings were so outlandish that even
people who were sympathetic to his conclusions were embarrassed by his
arguments.  People on both sides of the UFO controversy had a great
deal of difficulty understanding why such an intelligent and capable
scientist was so determined to make an ass of himself in public when it
came to UFOs.

Stanton Friedman may have found the answer to that question after
Menzel's death, when he obtained access to Menzel's personal papers and
discovered that Menzel led a double life:  Academic scientist by day,
intelligence agent by night.  Over the years he apparently worked for
both the CIA and the NSA, as well as a number of military agencies and
industrial concerns, and he held a Top Secret Ultra clearance.  Given
the history of the intelligence community's systematic subversion of
UFO organizations and their repeated efforts to spread confusion and
disinformation on the subject, Menzel's ties to that community are more
than a little suspicious.

In any case, for the most part his activities in these areas were kept
secret from the public, his academic and scientific colleagues, his
closest friends, and even his family.  But they do seem to have been
known to the author(s) of the so-called "MJ-12" UFO documents, who put
Menzel's name on an otherwise plausible list of government officials in
the alleged UFO control group.  This is, in fact, one of the strongest
arguments that the MJ-12 documents, while almost certainly bogus,
originated from somewhere within the bowels of the U.S. intelligence
community instead of some lone hoaxer's basement.

For further information, see the article on Menzel in Volume 1 of 
Jerome Clark's "UFO Encyclopedia" (Detroit:  Apogee Books, 1990).

(Followups to alt.alien.visitors!)

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 James Roger Black                                    jrblack@csn.org
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Newsgroups: sci.skeptic,alt.paranormal