As Kirkpatrick pursued his investigation, he started to uncover a hall of mirrors within the Pentagon, cloaked in official and nonofficial cover. On one level, the secrecy was understandable. The U.S., after all, had been locked in an existential battle with the Soviet Union for decades, each side determined to win the upper hand in the race for ever-more-exotic weapons. But Kirkpatrick soon discovered that some of the obsession with secrecy verged on the farcical. A former Air Force officer was visibly terrified when he told Kirkpatrick’s investigators that he had been briefed on a secret alien project decades earlier, and was warned that if he ever repeated the secret he could be jailed or executed. The claim would be repeated to investigators by other men who had never spoken of the matter, even with their spouses. It turned out the witnesses had been victims of a bizarre hazing ritual. For decades, certain new commanders of the Air Force’s most classified programs, as part of their induction briefings, would be handed a piece of paper with a photo of what looked like a flying saucer. The craft was described as an antigravity maneuvering vehicle.

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Notices where this attachment appears