Some Notes on the 2nd "PURSUE" Drop
And interesting facts about former Sandia Commander, Brig. Gen. Robert M. Montague, Sr. aka the original MJ-11
Hello everyone,
Like many of you, I have been curiously anticipating the PURSUE disclosure drops. I am trying my best to wait and withhold my overall judgment until they’ve released everything. In the meantime, I don’t intend to cover every aspect of every document in every drop on this Substack. There are other places online for that.
Instead I will cover only what I have both (1) read and (2) found interesting. The “DOW-UAP-General_Correspondence_Of_Sandia” file is mostly concerned with the LaPaz green fireball study. As I read it, however, some things quickly came to mind...
LaPaz and Green Fireballs: Project Twinkle Redux?
I was most surprised at how much of the 116-page “General Correspondence of Sandia” file concerned Dr. LaPaz’s “green fireball” study, which was originally given the apt codename, Project Twinkle. The irony, of course, is that this research was not especially secret then, and is not especially secret now. Time Magazine interviewed Dr. LaPaz about the green fireballs in its November 12, 1951 issue. I do not recall Time interviewing Dr. Vannevar Bush in 1943 regarding the OSRD’s uranium research.
Which is just to say this document does not contain anything remotely earth-shattering. Nothing in this file—or in any of the PURSUE releases to date—materially changes our historical understanding of what happened between 1941 and 1954. The government is not declassifying a buried revelation. It is dressing up old furniture and asking the public to admire the new upholstery.
Pages Publicly Disclosed… OVER 50 YEARS AGO!
When I looked through this doc, the file number “(24-8)-28” on page 20 stood out, as if I had seen it before.1 So I looked through my files, and realized that several pages in this new file were actually already declassified many decades ago (screenshots below for reference).
Take page 20 of 116 in the new file, for example. The below screenshot includes two different copies of this page. On the left is the “new” disclosed version, in color, and on the right is the original version, in black and white, which the USAF originally declassified on December 4, 1975—over fifty years ago!
Below is a zoomed-in screenshot confirming that the USAF originally declassified this report on “4 DEC 1975.” Note the original “25 May 1950” date is also partially obscured by the USAF Historian’s declassification stamp here:
Another zoomed-in screen shows that this report was declassified by a USAF Captain, whose title is shown here as “Capt, USAF Historian.”2
Likewise, note that page 21 of 116 was also already declassified over 50 years ago:
Along with page 22 of 116, as shown in the below screenshot.3
I don’t know whether any other pages in this 116-page pdf were previously declassified. At a minimum, three pages were originally declassified over 50 years ago, on December 4, 1975. This was disappointing, but (unfortunately) not too surprising.4
The government wants applause for declassifying this now. The problem is that the Air Force’s own historian reviewed the same material in 1975, during the Cold War, and found no compelling national-security reason to keep it classified. So this is not unprecedented transparency. It is a fifty-year delay being sold as courage.
USAF: When In Doubt, Reclassify?
I could write for hours about some of the issues here—for example, how (1) over-classification, (2) reclassification, and (3) the liberal use of various exemptions and exceptions from declassification have undermined accountability and eroded public trust in our government institutions. Understand that in 2006, the United States Archivist and Information Oversight Office Director (ISOO) published an audit that examined federal agency records reclassification from 1995 through 2006. During this 10-year period, at least 25,315 publicly available records were reclassified and withdrawn. Guess which USG agency “withdrew” the most records. It’s not even close.
The USAF reclassified 17,702 of the 25,315 total records withdrawn during the audit period. That is roughly 70 percent of all reclassified federal records—by one agency. Even worse, the USAF audit period covered only those records the USAF reclassified from 2002 through January 2006, meaning these figures do not account for any records the USAF reclassified and withdrew from 1995 until 2002.
For what it is worth, I do not enjoy picking on the Air Force. I simply do not understand, however, why the USAF has seemingly chosen to emulate Navy Secretary Frank Knox after the Battle of Los Angeles as the ideal model for public communication. The people of Los Angeles respected War Secretary Henry Stimson because he acknowledged that something was in the sky that night in February 1942. They sharply criticized Knox, however, because he condescendingly insisted that it had all been their imagination. That is not a public-trust strategy. It is a case study in how institutions teach citizens to distrust and resent them.
Here are a few contemporaneous headlines for context. I have deliberately omitted the meanest 1942 coverage of Knox, out of respect for both him and the USAF.
Back to PURSUE…
A couple of notes regarding page one:
Page one of this 116-page pdf actually has nothing to do with Sandia Base or Project Twinkle. Instead, it concerns a letter from the USAF “Special Reporting Group” to the Commanding General at Sandia Base dated April 7, 1949. Can you guess who that was in April 1949? Brigadier General Robert Miller Montague, as confirmed in the April 5, 1949 article in The Albuquerque Tribune shown here:
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