Secrecy News Stories

Excerpts of Key Secrecy News Stories in Major Media

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Note: This comprehensive list of news stories is usually updated once a week. Explore our full index to revealing excerpts of key major media news stories on several dozen engaging topics. And don't miss amazing excerpts from 20 of the most revealing news articles ever published.

It's an age-old question: Are we alone in the universe? Now, 60 years after the reported crash of a UFO in Roswell, N.M., and with the French government releasing its UFO archives, there are new efforts to prove alien spacecrafts really exist. James Fox, the producer of [the documentary] Out of the Blue, says that aliens are out there. He also believes that they have incredible technical ability, saying that they can "fly rings around our fastest jets." Out of the Blue is an attempt to weed out the wackos and present credible witnesses who say they saw what looked like alien spacecraft. Witnesses like former President Carter, who said, "I saw one, but I don't know where. It just disappeared." And Mercury astronaut Gordon Cooper, who says he saw "this typical saucer shape, double-cylindrical shape, metallic." The subject of UFOs is one of those things that never gets a satisfactory answer, and never quite seems to go away. The documentary begins with an ... incident that occurred in Phoenix in March 1997, known as the "Phoenix Lights." Hundreds and possibly thousands of people, many of them looking at the Hale-Bopp comet, reported seeing an array of lights and an enormous delta-shaped craft. The first report of a strange flying object came about 8:20 p.m. from a former police officer in Paulden, Ariz. Over the next 40 minutes, people gave similar reports of an object along a 20-mile route south to Phoenix and Tempe. Among other claims, Fox focuses on a 1980 report of UFO sightings at an American air force base in England — the so-called "Bentwaters" incident. Three former Air Force security officers told Fox about actually touching a small, strange craft that landed outside the base.

Note: To watch the engaging 15-minute clip of this ABC News report, click here. For media articles on the Phoenix Lights, click here. To watch the full astounding documentary Out of the Blue free online, click here.

Sixty years ago one of the most enduring mysteries of modern times burst into the public arena. It was the Roswell incident, the reported crash of a flying saucer. The U.S. military says it's all a misunderstanding caused by a downed weather balloon, but the official story keeps changing, and the Roswell legend won't go away. On July 5th, sixty years ago, a New Mexico rancher named Mac Brazel gathered up a pile of strange debris and headed into town. His find led to an astonishing announcement by our military that a flying saucer had been recovered. Even the strongest supporters of the crashed saucer can't agree on the basics. And the U.S. military has really muddied the waters, perhaps on purpose, by issuing four different "official" versions of the story. For one man, in particular, the search for the truth is personal. Dr. Jesse Marcel, Jr., Roswell eyewitness, said, "It's the degree of strangeness of the material and my dad's excitement that really made an impression upon me. It would be pretty difficult to forget what I saw." Jesse Marcel is a Montana surgeon. In 1947, his father, Major Jesse Marcel, was the intelligence officer for the 509th Bomb Wing stationed at Roswell's Army air base, the only atomic bomb wing in the world. "He was the intelligence officer for the group, which meant he wasn't a fly-by-nighter. Members of the 509th were handpicked for their credibility, their intelligence. It was his job to brief the crews that dropped the bombs on Japan," Marcel explained. His father's credibility is one of the main reasons Marcel Jr. wrote a new book, The Roswell Legacy. Over the years, his father has been attacked as a liar, even a traitor, by those seeking to discredit the flying saucer story.

Festivities are in full swing in Roswell, New Mexico, celebrating the 60th anniversary of a mysterious crash in the desert that some believe involved a UFO. The U.S. military has told four different versions of the Roswell story over the years but now denies that anything alien was ever recovered. Eyewitnesses say otherwise. Now, there is new testimony, including that of a surprise witness. A new book, Witness to Roswell, lists dozens of witnesses who've come forward in the past few years including military police who guarded the debris field and high-ranking officers who admit it was a cover up of something alien. In 1947, Lt. Walter Haut was the base information officer. He issued the release about a recovered flying saucer, then helped with the cover story about a weather balloon. But Haut saw a lot more. In 2002, he signed a sworn affidavit to be released after his death. He died in 2006. The statement admits that Haut handled the strange debris, that he personally saw the crashed saucer along with the bodies of aliens -- not crash test dummies as the air force tried to imply in the 1990's. Former Lt. Bob Shirkey backs up Haut's story. He too saw the debris being loaded onto a B-29. Shirkey's friend Glenn Dennis, the town mortician, says he was contacted by the base and was asked to supply all the youth-sized caskets he had. The pilot who flew the transport plane saw the wreckage and the bodies but told his wife he'd been threatened to keep silent. Physicist Stan Friedman, who started the Roswell investigation in the late 1970's, says the military threatened others too. "The military told them, if you ever talk about what you saw, we will kill you and we will kill your family," said ... Friedman.

Note: For a treasure trove of hard-hitting evidence of UFOs, click here.

A Montreal senior who survived Cold War-era brainwashing experiments picked up a cheque for compensation from the [Canadian] federal government on Tuesday. Janine Huard, 79, accepted an offer to end her class-action lawsuit against the federal government, which jointly funded the experiments with the [U.S.] Central Intelligence Agency. The terms of the settlement are confidential, but Huard says it will allow her to live out her days in peace, with some peace of mind. "I was really so exhausted from fighting for so many years,'' Huard told The Canadian Press in an interview. Huard was a young mother of four suffering from post-partum depression when she checked herself into McGill's renowned Allen Memorial Institute in 1950. On and off for the next 15 years, she was one of hundreds of patients of Dr. Ewan Cameron subjected to experimental treatments that included massive electroshock therapy, experimental pills and LSD. The patients were induced into comas and exposed to repetitive messages for days on end to brainwash them. Cameron pioneered a technique called psychic driving, which he believed could erase harmful memories and rebuild psyches without psychiatric defect. The idea intrigued the CIA, which recruited him to experiment with mind control beginning in 1950. Until 1964, Cameron conducted a range of experiments at the McGill institute, often without the knowledge or the permission of his patients. The experiments were part of a larger CIA program called MK-ULTRA, which saw LSD administered to U.S. prison inmates and patrons of brothels without their knowledge. Huard said the treatment left her unable to care for her children. She suffered memory loss and migraines for many years.

Note: For a powerful summary of MK-ULTRA and other CIA mind-control experiments, click here.

Sixty years ago ... military authorities issued a press release, which began: "The many rumors regarding the flying disc became a reality yesterday when the intelligence officer of the 509th Bomb Group of the Eighth Air Force, Roswell Army Air Field, was fortunate enough to gain possession of a disc." The headlines screamed: "Flying Disc captured by Air Force". Yet, just 24 hours later, the military changed its story and claimed the object it had first thought was a "flying disc" was a weather balloon. The key witness was U.S. Army Maj. Jesse Marcel, the intelligence officer who had gone to the ranch to recover the wreckage. He described the metal as being wafer-thin but incredibly tough. It was as light as balsa wood, but couldn't be cut or burned. These and similar accounts of the incident have largely been dismissed by all except the most dedicated believers. But last week came an astonishing new twist to the Roswell mystery. Lt. Walter Haut was the public-relations officer at the base in 1947 and was the man who issued the original and subsequent press releases after the crash on the orders of the base commander, Col. William Blanchard. Haut died in December 2005, but left a sworn affidavit to be opened only after his death. Last week, the text was released. It asserts that the weather-balloon claim was a cover story and that the real object had been recovered by the military and stored in a hangar. He described seeing not just the craft, but alien bodies. He wasn't the first Roswell witness to talk about alien bodies. Local undertaker Glenn Dennis had long claimed that he was contacted by authorities at Roswell shortly after the crash and asked to provide a number of child-sized coffins.

Note: This article abridged by FOX News was originally published in the U.K.'s popular Daily Mail. It was written by the staff at the U.K.'s Ministry of Defense (MOD) assigned to investigate UFO phenomenon, Nick Pope. To see his website, click here. Note also that Walter Haut revealed the cover-up before he died. For more on this, click here. For a concise summary of highly credible reports of UFO evidence, click here.

[Walter] Haut is the only one of the original participants to claim to have seen alien bodies. Haut's affidavit talks about a high-level meeting he attended with base commander Col. William Blanchard and the Commander of the Eighth Army Air Force, Gen. Roger Ramey. Haut states that at this meeting, pieces of wreckage were handed around for participants to touch, with nobody able to identify the material. Haut also spoke about a clean-up operation, where for months afterward military personnel scoured both crash sites searching for all remaining pieces of debris, removing them and erasing all signs that anything unusual had occurred. This ties in with claims made by locals that debris collected as souvenirs was seized by the military. Haut then tells how Colonel Blanchard took him to "Building 84" — one of the hangars at Roswell — and showed him the craft itself. He describes a metallic egg-shaped object around 12-15 feet in length and around 6 feet wide. He said he saw no windows, wings, tail, landing gear or any other feature. He saw two bodies on the floor, partially covered by a tarpaulin. They are described in his statement as about 4 feet tall, with disproportionately large heads. Another military witness who claimed to know that the Roswell incident involved the crash of an alien spacecraft is Colonel Philip J. Corso, a former Pentagon official. Corso died of a heart attack shortly after making these claims, prompting a fresh round of conspiracy theories. Corso's story ... has support from a number of unlikely sources, including former Canadian Minister of Defence Paul Hellyer, who spoke out recently to say that he'd checked the story with a senior figure in the U.S. military who confirmed it was true.

Note: WantToKnow.info does not normally summarize articles from the British tabloid Daily Mail. This excellent article, however, was written by former U.K. Minister of Defense researcher Nick Pope, and was republished by FOX News in an abridged form. To read Col. Corso's fascinating tell-all book The Day After Roswell, click here. For a concise summary of highly credible reports of UFO evidence, click here.

Long-secret documents released Tuesday provide new details about how the Central Intelligence Agency illegally spied on Americans decades ago. Known inside the agency as the “family jewels,” the 702 pages of documents released Tuesday catalog domestic wiretapping operations, failed assassination plots, mind-control experiments and spying on journalists from the early years of the C.I.A. The papers provide evidence of paranoia and occasional incompetence as the agency began a string of illegal spying operations in the 1960s and 1970s, often to hunt links between Communist governments and the domestic protests that roiled the nation in that period. Yet the long-awaited documents leave out a great deal. Large sections are censored, showing that the C.I.A. still cannot bring itself to expose all the skeletons in its closet. And many activities about overseas operations disclosed years ago by journalists, Congressional investigators and a presidential commission — which led to reforms of the nation’s intelligence agencies — are not detailed in the papers. The 60-year-old agency has been under fire ... by critics [of] the secret prisons and harsh interrogation practices it has adopted since the Sept. 11 attacks. Some intelligence experts suggested ... that the release of the documents was intended to distract from the current controversies. And they and historians expressed disappointment that the documents were so heavily censored. Tom Blanton of the National Security Archive, the research group that filed the Freedom of Information request in 1992 that led to the documents’ becoming public, said he was initially underwhelmed by them because they contained little about the agency’s foreign operations. But Mr. Blanton said what was striking was the scope of the C.I.A’s domestic spying efforts.

Note: The entire body of the CIA's "Family Jewels" documents have been posted online by the National Security Archives, and can be read by clicking here.

Easily lost, on page 425, in the mass of the CIA's notorious "Family Jewels" files is a short paragraph outlining "potentially embarrassing Agency activities". "Experiments in influencing human behaviour through the administration of mind- or personality-altering drugs to unwitting subjects." Of all the heinous acts committed by the CIA in the name of national security, these experiments, done on the agency's behalf by prominent psychiatrists on innocent victims - including children as young as four - may be the darkest. "We have no answer to the moral issue," former director Richard Helms infamously said when asked about the nature of the projects. The release of the Family Jewels documents revealed the CIA handsomely funded these real-life Dr Strangeloves and engaged pharmaceutical companies to help its experiments. The agency appealed to Big Pharma to pass on any drugs that could not be marketed because of "unfavourable side effects" to be tested on mice and monkeys. Any drugs that passed muster would then be used ... on volunteer US soldiers. The Family Jewels files do not provide further detail into the numerous mind-control programs, such as MKULTRA, covertly propped up by the agency. In 1953, MKULTRA was given 6 per cent of the total CIA budget without any oversight. The nature of the experiments, gathered from government documents and testimony in numerous lawsuits brought against the CIA, is shocking, from testing LSD on children to implanting electrodes in victims' brains to deliberately poisoning people with uranium. "The CIA bought my services from my grandfather in 1952 starting at the tender age of four," wrote Carol Rutz of her experiences.

Note: The entire body of the CIA's "Family Jewels" documents have been posted online by the National Security Archives, and can be read by clicking here. And for a 10-page summary of Carol Rutz's riveting book on her experiences as a government-created Manchurian candidate, click here.

In the early 1970s, as Vietnam War-era protests swirled around the Washington area, local police borrowed riot equipment and received intelligence training from an unusual source: the CIA. The agency, which is barred from domestic law enforcement, provided gas masks, stun guns, searchlights and protective vests. CIA specialists trained more than 20 officers ... in surveillance photography, countersabotage and surreptitious entry. The CIA-local nexus was included in hundreds of pages of documents released yesterday by the agency that detailed a quarter-century of CIA history. The records said the agency recruited officers primarily to protect CIA facilities from attack by protesters. "A conscious decision was made . . . to utilize the services of local police to repel invaders in case of riot or dissension," a top CIA official wrote in May 1973. But the documents make it clear that the intelligence agency also wanted to keep tabs on the mammoth antiwar demonstrations in Washington from 1969 through 1971. The D.C. police department, for example, was given a communications system "to monitor major anti-Vietnam war demonstrations," the records said. The CIA aid also extended to basic law enforcement. Police officials in Montgomery County told The Post in 1973 that they received CIA surveillance training to combat street crime. The agency also gave Arlington and Alexandria a substance it had developed to detect whether someone had recently handled metallic objects, such as firearms.

Note: The entire body of the CIA's "Family Jewels" documents have been posted online by the National Security Archives, and can be read by clicking here.

The Freedom of Information Act requires a federal agency to provide an initial response to a request within 20 days and to provide the documents in a timely manner. But the oldest pending request uncovered in a new survey of 87 agencies and departments has been awaiting a response for 20 years, and 16 requesters have been waiting more than 15 years for results. The survey, to be released on Monday, is the latest proof of a fact well-known to historians and journalists who regularly seek government documents: Agencies often take months or years to respond to requests for information under the law, known as FOIA, which went into effect on July 4, 1967. “The law is 40 years old, and we’re seeing 20 years of delay,” said Thomas S. Blanton, director of the National Security Archive, a research group at George Washington University. The survey will be posted at nsarchive.org. The survey found that 10 federal agencies had misrepresented their backlog of FOIA requests in annual reports to Congress, misstating the age of their oldest pending request. It found that the State Department accounted for most of the oldest unanswered requests, with 10 requests filed in 1991 or earlier still awaiting responses. The public interest in some aging government documents was vividly illustrated last week, when the Central Intelligence Agency released the so-called family jewels, papers that described illegal wiretaps, assassination plots and other agency misdeeds from the 1950s, 1960s and early 1970s. The papers were first requested by the National Security Archive in 1992, and a cover letter accompanying the C.I.A. release identified that request as the intelligence agency’s oldest still pending.

Part One: 'A Different Understanding With the President': In less than an hour ... Cheney's proposal had become a military order from the commander in chief. Foreign terrorism suspects held by the United States were stripped of access to any court -- civilian or military, domestic or foreign. They could be confined indefinitely without charges and would be tried, if at all, in closed "military commissions." "What the hell just happened?" Secretary of State Colin L. Powell demanded ... when CNN announced the order that evening, Nov. 13, 2001. National security adviser Condoleezza Rice, incensed, sent an aide to find out. Even witnesses to the Oval Office signing said they did not know the vice president had played any part. "Angler," as the Secret Service code-named him, has approached the levers of power obliquely, skirting orderly lines of debate he once enforced as chief of staff to President Gerald R. Ford. He has battled a bureaucracy he saw as hostile, using intimate knowledge of its terrain. He has empowered aides to fight above their rank, taking on roles reserved in other times for a White House counsel or national security adviser. And he has found a ready patron in George W. Bush for edge-of-the-envelope views on executive supremacy that previous presidents did not assert. Over the past six years, Cheney has shaped his times as no vice president has before. [The] relationship [between Bush and Cheney] is opaque, a vital unknown in assessing Cheney's impact on events. Officials who see them together often, not all of them admirers of the vice president, detect a strong sense of mutual confidence that Cheney is serving Bush's aims.

Note: This is an important, in-depth investigation of the Cheney vice-presidency. It is highly revealing and well worth reading it its entirety.

Ken Silverstein says he lied, deceived and fabricated to get the story. But it was worth it, he insists. Those on the receiving end don't agree. As Washington editor of Harper's magazine, Silverstein posed as Kenneth Case, a London-based executive with the fictional Maldon Group, claiming to represent the government of Turkmenistan. He had fake business cards printed, bought a London cellphone number and created a bogus Web site -- all to persuade Beltway lobbying firms to pitch him on representing Turkmenistan. "For me to deny, or try to shade the fact that I tricked them would be stupid," Silverstein says. "Obviously we did. If our readers feel uncomfortable, they're free to dismiss the findings of the story." Says Harper's Editor Roger Hodge: "The big question in our mind was whether anybody was going to fall for it." They did. According to Harper's, executives at the Washington firm APCO Worldwide laid out a communications plan that included lobbying policymakers -- possibly including a trip for members of Congress -- and generating "news items." Senior Vice President Barry Schumacher told Silverstein the firm could drum up positive op-ed pieces by utilizing certain think tank experts. The proposed fee: $40,000 a month. Another Washington firm, Cassidy & Associates, asked for at least $1.2 million a year and touted a proposed trip to Turkmenistan for journalists and think tank analysts. Hodge says the caper is part of "a long history of sting operations" by journalists. But that undercover tradition has faded in recent years. No newspaper today would do what the Chicago Sun-Times did in the 1970s, setting up a bar to entrap crooked politicians. Fewer television programs are doing what ABC did in the 1990s, having producers lie to get jobs at a supermarket chain to expose unsanitary practices.

Note: To read the hard-hitting, in-depth article in Harper's magazine, click here.

President Bush has turned the executive branch into a two-way mirror. They get to see everything Americans do: our telephone calls, e-mail, and all manner of personal information. And we get to see nothing about what they do. Everyone knows this administration has disdained openness and accountability since its first days. That is about the only thing it does not hide. But recent weeks have produced disturbing disclosures about just how far Mr. Bush’s team is willing to go to keep lawmakers and the public in the dark. That applies to big issues — like the C.I.A.’s secret prisons — and to things that would seem too small-bore to order up a cover-up. Vice President Dick Cheney sets the gold standard, placing himself not just above Congress and the courts but above Mr. Bush himself. For the last four years, he has been defying a presidential order requiring executive branch agencies to account for the classified information they handle. When the agency that enforces this rule tried to do its job, Mr. Cheney proposed abolishing the agency. Since the 9/11 attacks, Mr. Bush has tried to excuse his administration’s obsession with secrecy by saying that dangerous times require greater discretion. He rammed the Patriot Act through Congress with a promise that national security agencies would make sure the new powers were not abused. But on June 14, The Washington Post reported that the [FBI] potentially broke the law or its own rules several thousand times over the past five years when it used the Patriot Act to snoop on domestic phone calls, e-mail and financial transactions of ordinary Americans.

The White House defended Vice President Cheney yesterday in a dispute over his office's refusal to comply with an executive order regulating the handling of classified information as Democrats and other critics assailed him for disregarding rules that others follow. White House spokeswoman Dana Perino said Cheney is not obligated to submit to oversight by an office that safeguards classified information, as other members and parts of the executive branch are. Cheney's office has contended that it does not have to comply because the vice president serves as president of the Senate, which means that his office is not an "entity within the executive branch." Cheney is not subject to the executive order, she said, "because the president gets to decide whether or not he should be treated separately, and he's decided that he should." Democratic critics said Cheney is distorting the plain meaning of the executive order. "Vice President Cheney is expanding the administration's policy on torture to include tortured logic," said Senate Majority Whip Richard J. Durbin (D-Ill.). "In the end, neither Mr. Cheney or his staff is above the law or the Constitution." The dispute stems from an executive order ... establishing a uniform, government-wide system for protecting classified information. Cheney's office, like its predecessor, filed reports about its handling of classified information to the National Archives and Records Administration oversight office in 2001 and 2002 but has refused to do so since. His office also blocked an on-site inspection to examine its handling of classified data.

The White House said ... that, like Vice President Dick Cheney's office, President Bush's office is not allowing an independent federal watchdog to oversee its handling of classified national security information. An executive order that Bush issued in March 2003 ... requires all government agencies that are part of the executive branch to submit to oversight. Although it doesn't specifically say so, Bush's order was not meant to apply to the vice president's office or the president's office, a White House spokesman said. From the start, Bush considered his office and Cheney's exempt from the reporting requirements, White House spokesman Tony Fratto said. Those two offices have access to the most highly classified information. Fratto conceded that the lengthy directive, technically an amendment to an existing executive order, did not specifically exempt the president's or vice president's offices. Instead, it refers to "agencies" as being subject to the requirements, which Fratto said did not include the two executive offices. "It does take a little bit of inference," Fratto said. Steven Aftergood, director of the Federation of American Scientists' government secrecy project, disputed the White House explanation of the executive order. He noted that the order defines "agency" as any executive agency, military department and "any other entity within the executive branch that comes into the possession of classified information" — which, he said, includes Bush's and Cheney's offices.

The CIA will declassify hundreds of pages of long-secret records detailing some of the intelligence agency's worst illegal abuses -- the so-called "family jewels" documenting a quarter-century of overseas assassination attempts, domestic spying, kidnapping and infiltration of leftist groups ... CIA Director Michael V. Hayden said yesterday. The documents ... also include accounts of break-ins and theft, the agency's opening of private mail to and from China and the Soviet Union, wiretaps and surveillance of journalists, and a series of "unwitting" tests on U.S. civilians, including the use of drugs. The documents have been sought for decades by historians, journalists and conspiracy theorists and have been the subject of many fruitless Freedom of Information Act requests. In anticipation of the CIA's release, the National Security Archive at George Washington University yesterday published a separate set of documents from January 1975 detailing internal government discussions of the abuses. Those documents portray a rising sense of panic within the administration of President Gerald R. Ford that what then-CIA Director William E. Colby called "skeletons" in the CIA's closet had begun to be revealed in news accounts. "It's surely part of [Hayden's] program now to draw a bright line with the past," said National Security Archive Director Thomas S. Blanton. "But it's uncanny how the government keeps dipping into the black bag." Newly revealed details of ancient CIA operations, Blanton said, "are pretty resonant today."

William E. Colby faced an uneasy decision in late 1973 when he took over the Central Intelligence Agency: whether to make public the agency’s internal accounting, then being compiled, of its domestic spying, assassination plots and other misdeeds since its founding nearly three decades earlier. Mr. Colby decided to keep the so-called family jewels a secret, and wrote in his memoir in 1978 that he believed the agency’s already sullied reputation ... could not have withstood a public airing of all its dirty laundry. So why, at a time when the agency has again been besieged by criticism, this time for its program of secret detentions and interrogations since the Sept. 11 attacks, would the current director, Gen. Michael V. Hayden, decide to declassify the same documents that Mr. Colby chose to keep secret? General Hayden said it was essential for the C.I.A. ... to be as open as possible in order to build public trust and dispel myths surrounding its operations. The more that the agency can tell the public, he said, the less chance that misinformation among the public will “fill the vacuum.” It was this outlook that General Hayden, whose public relations skills are well known in Washington, brought to an earlier job. There, as director of the National Security Agency, he tried to overhaul the N.S.A.’s public image — that of the shadowy, menacing organization portrayed in the movie “Enemy of the State” — by inviting reporters to briefings and authorizing its officials to speak to the author James Bamford for his book on the agency, “Body of Secrets.”

Note: For a brief summary of and links to further information about James Bamford's important book on the NSA, Body of Secrets, click here.

Osama bin Laden was suspected of chartering a plane that carried his family and other Saudis from the United States shortly after 9/11, according to FBI documents released yesterday. One FBI document referred to a Ryan Air 727 plane that left Los Angeles on Sept. 19, 2001, carrying Saudi nationals. "The plane was chartered either by the Saudi Arabian royal family or Osama bin Laden," according to the document obtained by Judicial Watch. The flight made stops in Orlando, Washington, D.C. and Boston, and terminated in Paris. Asked about the documents' assertion, an FBI spokesman said, "There is no new information here. Osama bin Laden did not charter a flight out of the U.S."

Note: To read an excellent article on the implications of this brief report, click here.

The Bush administration ... has quietly killed off a Labor Department program that tracked mass layoffs by U.S. companies. The statistic ... comprised an easy-to-understand overview of which industries are in the greatest distress and which workers are bearing the brunt of the turmoil. Sharon Brown oversaw compilation of the mass-layoffs number at the Bureau of Labor Statistics in Washington. "This was a high-quality program, producing timely information on important developments in the labor market," Brown said. The $6.6 million in annual funding for the mass-layoffs program ... was channeled through the Labor Department's Employment and Training Administration. When that agency decided it needed more cash ... the Bureau of Labor Statistics was told to look elsewhere for its budget needs. Apparently no extra money was to be found anywhere within the Labor Department, which had a total budget of $44.4 billion last year, up from $39.2 billion in 2001. The same conclusion was reached in 1992 when the first President Bush canceled the Mass-Layoffs Statistics program. Now Bush the younger is following in his father's footsteps, once again deciding that the American people have no real need to know how many mass layoffs are made each month.

The experiment looks like some ingenious test of mental telepathy. Seated inside a small isolation booth with wires trailing from the helmet on her head, the subject seems deep in concentration. She does not speak or move. Suddenly, a little white dot hovering in the center of the screen comes to life. It sweeps to the top of the screen, then it reverses itself and comes back down. After a pause, it veers to the right, stops, moves to the left, momentarily speeds up and finally halts — almost as if it were under the control of some external intelligence. In fact, it is. The unusual experiment, conducted at the Stanford Research Institute in Menlo Park, Calif., is a graphic display of one of the newest and most dazzling breakthroughs in cybernetics. It shows that a computer can, in a very real sense, read human minds. Although the dot's gyrations were directed by a computer, the machine was only carrying out the orders of the test subject. She, in turn, did nothing more than think about what the dot's movements should be. Brainchild of S.R.I. Researcher Lawrence Pinneo, a ... neurophysiologist and electronics engineer, the computer mind-reading technique is far more than a laboratory stunt. The key to his scheme: the electroencephalograph, a device used by medical researchers to pick up electrical currents from various parts of the brain. If he could learn to identify brain waves generated by specific thoughts or commands ... he might be able to teach the same skill to a computer. Pinneo does not worry that mind-reading computers might be abused by Big Brotherly governments or overly zealous police trying to ferret out the innermost thoughts of citizens.

Note: This research conducted in 1974 shows that the capability for computers to respond to human thought was developed decades ago. The subject was classified top secret and continued to be developed secretly by the military and government, but kept well-hidden from public view. For more on this important topic, click here.

Important Note: Explore our full index to revealing excerpts of key major media news stories on several dozen engaging topics. And don't miss amazing excerpts from 20 of the most revealing news articles ever published.