Mr. Premise
The Living Force
Nice bit of history from the 1970s from Jeff Wells's Rigorous Intuition (http://rigorousintuition.blogspot.com/2006/02/gods-must-be-crazy.html):
"The Carter presidency inherited George Herbert Walker Bush as Director of Central Intelligence. In one of Bush's early briefings with the President-Elect, Carter reportedly told his DCIA, "I want to have the information that we have on UFOs and extraterrestrial intelligence. I want to know about this as President." Bush turned him down. The information existed on "need to know," and "simple curiosity on the part of the President wasn’t adequate." This according to Marcia Smith, then Science and Technology analyst at the Congressional Research Service, which was then tasked by Carter to deliver what the CIA refused.
"Carter, rightly judging he could not trust Bush, shortly replaced him with his Annapolis classmate Stansfield Turner. (Bush later wrote about Carter, "beneath his surface cool, he harbored a deep antipathy to the CIA.") Turner triggered the so-called "Halloween Massacre" which eliminated 800 field positions. This was a milestone in the privatization, and deep criminalization, of the covert assets of US intelligence, which then clustered out of government around their champion, George HW Bush.
"Smith drew into her project Daniel Sheehan, then General Counsel to the United States Jesuit National Headquarters who went on to found the Christic Institute.
"According to Sheehan,
"[Smith] asked me if as Legal Counsel for the Jesuit Headquarters whether I could get access for the Library of Congress from the Vatican library. The Vatican library has a fairly large section concerning the issue of extraterrestrial intelligence, and UFOs. I undertook to contact the Jesuit who actually runs the Vatican library, and much to my shock, they said we couldn’t have access to it.
"A second request to the Vatican library failed, even though Sheehan stressed he was acting on behalf of a department the Library of Congress and it was the President himself who requested the information. (Interestingly, Smith later asked Sheehan to address the scientists of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory on the topic of the potential religious implications of alien contact.)"
"The Carter presidency inherited George Herbert Walker Bush as Director of Central Intelligence. In one of Bush's early briefings with the President-Elect, Carter reportedly told his DCIA, "I want to have the information that we have on UFOs and extraterrestrial intelligence. I want to know about this as President." Bush turned him down. The information existed on "need to know," and "simple curiosity on the part of the President wasn’t adequate." This according to Marcia Smith, then Science and Technology analyst at the Congressional Research Service, which was then tasked by Carter to deliver what the CIA refused.
"Carter, rightly judging he could not trust Bush, shortly replaced him with his Annapolis classmate Stansfield Turner. (Bush later wrote about Carter, "beneath his surface cool, he harbored a deep antipathy to the CIA.") Turner triggered the so-called "Halloween Massacre" which eliminated 800 field positions. This was a milestone in the privatization, and deep criminalization, of the covert assets of US intelligence, which then clustered out of government around their champion, George HW Bush.
"Smith drew into her project Daniel Sheehan, then General Counsel to the United States Jesuit National Headquarters who went on to found the Christic Institute.
"According to Sheehan,
"[Smith] asked me if as Legal Counsel for the Jesuit Headquarters whether I could get access for the Library of Congress from the Vatican library. The Vatican library has a fairly large section concerning the issue of extraterrestrial intelligence, and UFOs. I undertook to contact the Jesuit who actually runs the Vatican library, and much to my shock, they said we couldn’t have access to it.
"A second request to the Vatican library failed, even though Sheehan stressed he was acting on behalf of a department the Library of Congress and it was the President himself who requested the information. (Interestingly, Smith later asked Sheehan to address the scientists of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory on the topic of the potential religious implications of alien contact.)"