US Air Force Space Command Records Show Interest Over Famed Australian Book
I didn’t envisage writing a piece that
was essentially non-UFO related, but, I found something during the course of my
research that was too hard to pass up. After the United States Air Force (USAF)
shut down the deplorably under-resourced and uninterested investigative study
of the UFO matter, there was left a hefty void. American civilians were left
reporting serious events to private UFO groups, city police departments and sheriff’s
offices, bemused aerodrome staff and other outfits who were unequipped to deal
with anything that fell outside their immediate obligations. On the flipside,
UFO reporting within military
channels was buried underground and became shielded from pesky Congressmen and
tabloid journalists – a spectacle that still goes on to this day. I believe
that this issue – and not just in the USA, but throughout the western world – constitutes
one of the greatest mysteries of our time.
It’s time to blow the lid on this
charade, and I am doing just that.
This work has already begun in the form my
“NORAD and the UFO Smokescreen” series, and a handful reports about the Royal
Australian Air Force’s (RAAF) 41 Wing. This is the tip of a very large iceberg.
I will, this year and next, be presenting all new findings regarding the old US
Space Command (USSPACECOM); the current US Strategic Command (USSTRATCOM) and
the respective Air Force, Army and Navy space components that make up its
functionality, including the subordinate Joint Functional Component Command for
Space (JFCC-SPACE); the Fourteenth Air Force (14 AF)/Air Forces Strategic
(AFSTRAT); the Federal Aviation Administration, and a lot more. To embark on
any of this, one has to studiously search for official governmental records. One
particular component of the USAF that is coming under my extreme scrutiny is
Air Force Space Command (AFSPC). I will be dedicating entire blog pieces to
AFSPC in due course. While searching through a well-hidden, on-line archive of military
publications relating to US efforts in space, I came across what is known as a “History”.
All military bodies – from mighty Unified Combatant Command’s down to small squadrons
or companies – produce regular histories which contain generalised information
spanning 2 or 6 months, or sometimes a year. These publications enclose broad
budget and fiscal records, organisational diagrams, lists of visiting
dignitaries, the implementation of new projects, special events, and such like.
These publications are written by a resident historian or administrative committee,
and are rarely classified very highly. Recently, I came across the 1987 History
of the AFSPC, and it contains two pages that, while not related to the UFO
matter, may be of considerable interest to a fair few Australian researchers of
varying disciplines.
Who remembers the book “A Base for Debate: The US Satellite Station
a Nurrangar” by Australian academic Desmond Ball? The book debated the risks
of Australia hosting the USAF operated Nurrangar facility near Woomera. The
base was a key US Defence Support Program (DSP) node until its closure in 1999.
Politically, it became a symbol of US–Australian relations, attracting
controversy year-in, year-out, and raised fears that the site would encourage a
Soviet nuclear attack on Australian soil. Ball recommended either prompt
closure of the Nurrungar facility, or, stringent conditions on its nuclear
war-fighting role. With this in mind, I suppose it shouldn’t have come as a
surprise to me when I stumbled across mention of Ball’s controversial book in
the official 1987 AFSPC History. Feast your eyes on the below front cover.
The section realting to “A Base for Debate: The US Satellite Station
a Nurrangar” by our man starts a third of the way down:
“1987
was an eventful year for the ground station network as it maintained a close
watch on the sensor constellation, underwent technical upgrades, and weathered
the winds of political contention at home and abroad. The OGS aroused sustained
interest among both the command and its foreign hosts on several counts. In the
early spring the Australian Department of Defence (ADOD) and Minister of
Defence issued official statements regarding the evolution of the United
States-Australian relationship in the joint management of Nurrangar and the
other sites in the country. These documents, although uncritical of the
American presence and missions in Australia, served as useful background to the
discussion engendered by the 21 August release of Dr Desmond Ball’s study, A
Base for Debate: The US Satellite Station a Nurrangar.
Dr
Ball, an articulate critic of the American military presence in Australia,
published A Base for Debate as a compilation of information about and a
critique of Australia’s cooperation with the United States in operating the
Joint Defence Space Communications Station (JDSCS) at Nurrangar and the United
States DSP system. He concluded in his study that the Americans should be given
notice that the facility at Nurrangar must be closed in 1989. This action
should be taken because, in his view, DSP did not require an Australian ground
station for its operation and because the system's capabilities were
“increasingly extending further from the essentially unobjectionable mission of
early warning to the support and enhancement of US nuclear war-fighting
capabilities.” He went on to charge the Australian government with attempting
to deceive the citizenry about the true nature of the operations conducted at
Nurrangar.
Australian
Minister of Defence Beazley respond to Ball’s charges in a television interview
conducted on the same day as the book’s public release, defending both the
legitimacy of the OGS mission and the Australian government’s role in it.
Public interest was further piqued when the Canberra Times published a series
of excerpts from the book over the period of 22-24 August. Minister of…”
I have imaged this page below.
The next page, with “X X X X’s” representing
national security redactions, continues:
“…Defence
Beazley subsequently requested the assistance of the United States Department
of Defence in framing an authoritative official response to Ball’s charges.
Headquarters USAF Space Command DSC’s for Plans and Operations were involved in
framing the American contribution to the document, which was planned for
release to the Australian parliament in September. By that time public interest
in the issue had begun to wane, and the Australian press was devoting more
coverage to the possible linkage of trade negotiations and the joint defence
facilities in negotiations with the United States and the continuing decline of
the domestic “Peace” movement than to any sustained discussion of the Ball
book. Despite the failure of the book to generate any groundswell of the public
opinion against the presence of OGS, the command continued to weigh its options
in retaining or discarding the installation as the DSP system evolved.
The
big news at the OGS in 1987 was not the Ball book, but rather the conduct of
the peripheral Upgrade Program (PUP). This technical upgrade replaced the
computers, peripherals, display and display scoped at the facility while adding
a new Satellite Operations Centre. X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X X
X X X X X X X X X X X
X X X X X X X X X X X X X
X X X X X X X X X X X
X X X X X X X X X X X X X
X X X X X X X X X X X
X X X X X X X X X X X X X
X X X X X X X X X X X
X X X X X X X X X X X X X
X X X X X X X X X X X
X X X X X X X X X X X X X
X. The PUP installation began at OGS on 12 April and was certified as completed
and operational by the command on 25 September 1987. The upgrade process did
have a major impact on the site’s daily operations, for it was allocated eight
hours a day of downtime for operator/maintainer training and familiarization on
the new equipment during the period of the upgrade’s installation, testing, and
certification. This necessitated the deployment of a Mobile Ground Station to
the SPS for an extended period to give that facility a “dual string” capability
with which to control and monitor the DSP East sensor while the OGS was
inoperative. (See the discussion which follows in this chapter.)”
This page is imaged below.
In a nutshell, while trawling thousands
and thousands of pages of US records concerning space warfare, space object
tracking, satellite decay, etc, for the sole purpose of finding unseen “UFO
files” I discover the above AFSPC History discussing an amazing Australian! One
really hopes that when a military historian or aerospace enthusiast is reading though
decades old records relating to his or her field that they will publish any
UFO-related material they find. So few people do what I do – ie scan boring paperwork for hours – that I know for a fact that we a missing vital finds. So… Who wants to do this kind of research? Lara
Elliott does. She helped me with this blog piece while taking a break from
supplying overlooked Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) UFO records to Fran
Ridge’s NICAP effort. Lara – who is just 17 – also reads Ruppelt and Hynek while others grovel in
youtube-hosted videos of plastic bags passed off as “scout ships”. So, if
anyone wants to help us rummage through the archive (and there are others) where I found the above
discussed material, here is the place: https://archive.org/details/MilitaryInSpace
Nested within the UFO literature are all kinds of World War II, Cold War and Space Age mysteries. No historian seems to have the guts to tackle what they think is an "X-Files" mess. So much for bravely seeking the TRUTH wherever it leads.
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