The Australian pilot
====================

Having noted that fears of public panic over unidentified craft had proved unfounded, John Kiriakou offered a case he had seen referenced several times the previous day.

The account

"Yesterday was the anniversary of the disappearance of this Australian pilot," he said, a man in his early twenties, "I think he was 23 years old," flying on 10 September 1978.

The pilot reported an object above his aircraft: "a silver cylinder above his plane, flying at exactly the same rate of speed." Kiriakou reconstructed the radio traffic: "There's this thing. It's right on top of me and it's flying the same rate of speed. I don't know what it is." The pilot described it as silver and shiny.

Then came the assessment that Kiriakou treats as the decisive detail, the pilot came back and said, "It's not an aircraft."

"And then there was this loud sound of like electronic interference," Kiriakou said. "Nobody ever saw him or heard from him again. They never found him. They never found the plane. They never found anything."

The use he makes of it

Kiriakou does not draw an extraterrestrial conclusion from the case. His question is about secrecy: "So why keep that secret? Why not just say, 'Hey, look, there's something up there. We don't know what the heck it is'?"

Ted Rall supplied the point Kiriakou was driving at, that "unidentified" does not mean alien, only unidentified, and Kiriakou agreed.

The argument it sits inside

The anecdote comes at the end of a longer complaint about disclosure. Kiriakou had said he could not understand "why the Pentagon doesn't just release this information, or why the White House doesn't just declassify" it, why it has to leak, and why serving personnel must testify to Congress as whistleblowers, risking imprisonment under the Espionage Act, simply to say that they saw something they could not identify.

He noted that the historical justification for withholding, that the public would panic, had been tested and failed: "the word leaked out and nobody gave a damn. There was no panic." Rall's gloss, that officials once credited the public with more of a pulse than it turned out to have, drew Kiriakou's agreement twice over.

See also

- CIA and the UFO question
- Kiriakou's UFO sighting
- Luis Elizondo
- Area 58
- Espionage Act
