Black SAPs, taking agency, & Gen. Leslie Groves
On re-taking the initiative in the UAP conversation
A problem of agency
I feel the UAP community demanding disclosure, if it really wants results, needs to take proactive steps to achieve its aim. This is because demanding disclosure is a fundamentally weak position. It lacks the ability to exercise agency to a branch or branches of parastatal government that are, by design, unresponsive to democratic oversight processes.
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The keepers of the secrets - the folks behind the black SAP projects - seem very much at ease to fight a U.S. Congress that for once seems to be *on your side* in demanding disclosure. Therefore in order to support disclosure-advocating reps in Congress (in addition to calling our congresspeople of all stripes!) I feel we need to induce the recalcitrant among the black-SAP project folks to fight a rearguard action, and hopefully, suffer some strategic information exposure along the way.
I make my call-to-action clear:
Call to action
We need to initiate a process of 1) investigating, as citizens, centers of UAP reverse engineering activity, and 2) doxxing those black SAP project people who don’t want to disclose.
I don’t feel comfortable saying that 2nd part; advocating for doxxing feels like a dirty thing, like a witch-hunt. But in this case I feel it’s appropriate, and an investigation can only yield value where the individuals who’ve perpetrated a crime are identified, i.e., doxxed. Note I don’t think every single person working on a UAP black project is working against disclosure - indeed some of the black project participants are opening up to the likes of Grusch and Congress. So I urge applying some extent of nuance to the situation of identifying & outing black project participants.
Benefit
Rather than just being a crowdsourced investigative action that yields only costs till an uncertain outcome is reached, what I offer is actually something positive here & now. I hate obsessively refreshing reddit and news aggregators for any and all fresh morsels on the topic of UAP. Because I feel I can’t do anything about it; I can’t accelerate any would-be disclosure that will probably anyway disappoint me (based on experience from the lab-leak debate). What I offer would-be crowdsourced investigators then is your own sense of agency. Forget refreshing reddit subs. Instead, make the subs reflect what your own efforts have yielded. It’s a much more sanity-preserving approach than F5-refreshing on UAP-related keywords in the news all the time.
My 70% | 55% belief
So with that, I would like to release a volley: I wish to provide a *possible* lead on starting to dox the relevant SAP black project participants.
Where to begin? How does one even *start* to identify those who’ve poured enormous resources over most of the past century into keeping their activities under-the-radar?
Well, ever since the Grusch revelations, I’ve been intrigued by the nuclear angle because, to my mind, it was the easiest context within which to process the 1933 Magenta, Italy UAP crash he reported on. Independently, I began researching into the Manhattan Project. It struck me, that two individuals in particular would basically *have* to be read-in on, or tacitly familiar with, the Roswell crash. Those individuals are Vannevar Bush, and Gen. Leslie Groves. Vannevar Bush may be the subject of a future article, but of course his putative role is already very familiar to the ufology community thanks to the Majestic documents (which I had not read prior to forming my belief), so I don’t need to focus on him. Rather, this article is about Gen. Groves.
Let me say out the door - even as the person writing this, (and in light of the belief structure I wrote about recently I give it around a 70% A-probability of being correct [recall that an A-probability is my private belief as an individual], and like a 55% B-probability of being correct [B-probabilities are something I would be willing to put the imprimatur of my real-life personal brand behind in propagating to others in my social network and online].
Here it is:
At the beginning of this past summer, the film Oppenheimer came out. I’d been eagerly anticipating ever since I researched for my first two articles in the wake of the Grusch revelations. Now, I’m subject to recency bias & the primacy effect as much as anyone, but those articles dwelled a lot on nuclear physics, and I had to bone up superficially on the fundamentals of nuclear-physics to be able to write them. And the history of nuclear physics is inextricably intertwined with the history of the Manhattan Project, which is of course the subject of the Oppenheimer film. So now I put down a belief I give A|B format weights to, after which I will provide the support I have for it.
“Deceased former army general & celebrated MP head Leslie Groves was an early and key UAP black project participant” 70% | 55%
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My statement, which remember I only believe 70% in the correctness in, even in the full comfort of online anonymity, is based on the following:
Astronaut Edgar Mitchell’s testimony that he spoke with White Sands staff, who told him that UAP
interfere with their weapons tests. are sighted over White Sands 95% | 60% [During an early draft of this article, I recall an online video of him saying they interfered, I can no longer find the video].The recorded history of Leslie Grove’s post-WWII career 90% | 100%.
reinforcement from Grusch in the American Alchemist podcast that Oppenheimer was likely read-in to the program. (this upgraded my probabilities from even less certainty earlier) 80% | 70%
(note that the bullet asserting Grove’s biography features an A percentage that is actually less than my B percentage. This is because Grove’s biography is a matter of widely-accepted historical record, i.e. not my own investigative passion-project. For the reasons I am going to go into here I think that record may be incomplete & even slightly inaccurate. Hence my slightly lower A-probability than the more socially-acceptable B-probability).
And finally,
(To a lesser extent) UAP spatial analysis report ( from Reddit user ufospatial ) highlighting Arizona’s Maricopa county as one of the top-five population-normalized hotspots for UFO sightings 75% | 60%
Background
You’ll recall that Leslie Groves was the character played by actor Matt Damon in Christopher Nolan’s recent epic film, Oppenheimer. (For what it’s worth, I think Damon did an excellent job portraying him). Let’s take a moment to remind ourselves who Leslie Groves is. An MIT graduate, he was part of the Army Corps of Engineers, he designed the Pentagon, and was appointed to lead the Manhattan Project (MP for short). All the secrecy associated with MP is his design. For example, having famous Nobel Prize-winning physicists operating under assumed names as just one example of the MP’s storied security measures.
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I figured, if Groves was so driven, accomplished, and atop the most important, most secret engineering complex the world had ever seen, then if there were UFO crashes in his operational back-yard within two years of the end of the war, would he not be reported-to about it? Given Grusch’s testimony that there has been a crash recovery effort for more than 80 years, wouldn’t he have played a significant role in it? Or would he have sat on his laurels as the most ontologically-shocking, engineering-intensive event ever to befall mankind before was taking place?
The best source on Leslie Grove’s post-WWII career I could find is in “Racing for the Bomb” by Robert S. Norris, which happens to be the most recent biography of Groves to date. All of two chapters cover his post-WWII life. Apparently, Groves’ post-Army career is notable for its absence of any very significant information about his activities besides giving talks about the Manhattan Project. That is odd when one understands Groves' character. He is an *exceedingly* driven human being, and absolutely not one to rest on his laurels. His 1948 missive to his son (reproduced below) after the war demonstrates that he fully intends to continue advancing the cause of national security. Outside of his (largely delegated) leadership of the UNIVAC computer development in Remington-Rand, he has one significant act under his stewardship in the public record, an act which I illustrate through this article’s timeline below.
Even if Groves was read-in, why should anyone care?
Right, so this is where it gets interesting. In my telling, Groves isn’t just someone who’s “read-in“ - he’s the one who creates the process of who else gets “read-in”. He’s simply continuing the activity he excelled in during the atom-bomb-focused Manhattan Project. He is the top ofall the stovepipes. Whenever someone sees a UAP around nuclear processing or storage during the MP, it bubbles up to him without fail because he is the head-honcho for all things security, first-and-foremost.
The “recorded-history” timeline of relevance for Groves as leading to a potentially useful investigative lead is:
Timeline
• Feb 28th 1947 - appointed chief of AFSWP (Armed Forces Special Weapons Project, associated with Sandia Base). [RFTB] Note from BlockedEpsitemology: Mapping the postwar apportioning & growth of resources between military control, via AFSWP, and civilian control, via AEC/DoE, is an exercise in itself. Los Alamos, Z division, Sandia Base, Sandia Labs, and White Sands all are unique entities with dynamic relationships with each other over time. It is recommended to UAP sleuths to study these differences and their evolution carefully.
• Jan 30th 1948 - meets with Eisenhower who makes clear that Groves will not have MP-like influence in the future. Groves announces his retirement days after. [RFTB]
• Feb 11th 1948 - cryptic letter to his son: “..more value to the security of the US outside the Service than in.” [RFTB]
• Feb 29th 1948 - last day in the army - [RFTB]
• Mar 1st 1948 - to be in charge of R&D of office equipment at Remington-Rand's Laboratory of Advanced Research in South Norwalk, CT [RFTB]
• basically just name-association being the value of his activity [RFTB]
• Eckert and Mauchly of ENIAC fame would report to Groves [RFTB]
• 1952 - Gen. Douglas MacArthur becomes Remington Rand’s chairman of the board [Source]
• 1953 - Groves becomes company director - corporate administration & formulation of policy [RFTB]
• 1955 - Sperry acquires Remington-Rand [Source]
• 1955 - becomes VP of Remington Rand when it became a division of Sperry Rand. Gen. Douglas MacArthur chairman, James Rand vice chairman, Henry Vickers made CEO [RFTB]
Note: About this time “early 1950s” the Sperry Gyroscope Co, along with other companies with a large presence on the East coast, decided to disperse their facilities to lessen the risk from nuclear attack. [Source] Note from BlockedEpistemology: whether this was prosaic or a cover, this strikes me as a very ‘Leslie Groves’ thing to do.
• 1956-57 Sperry opens its Arizona company [1957 but personnel were there by 1956 for 'Sperry Systems']. [Source]
• Operating as Sperry Rand, the company established the Sperry Phoenix Division, manufacturer of flight systems equipment, in 1957" [Source]
• 1961 - resigns on his 65th birthday [RFTB]
• 1967 - Sperry Phoenix Company becomes Sperry Flight Systems [Source]
• July 12th, 1970 - dies, old age, age 73 [RFTB]
• late 1970s - Sperry’s Phoenix division employs more than 4,100 people [Source]
end-timeline
In other words, the most significant public act to take place under Groves’ purview is the creation of a division of Sperry in Phoenix, AZ. Given that this is Groves we’re talking about, he certainly could have done a lot more under the radar outside of this act; but I believe we are provided this one public lead into his possible scope into post-Manhattan-Project UAP-related activity.
(By the way, perhaps it is only tangential to note that the would-be author of Racing for the Bomb, Stanley Goldberg, who had accumulated much material on Groves, “died suddenly” (current author Norris’ words) in October 1996 before he could begin writing the Groves biography.
Summary
Groves was a master of crafting security architecture. (It is said that the Manhattan Project’s security architecture became the blueprint for post-WWII national security architecture) He was also a master of building excellent teams, and orchestrating the mobilization of enormous resources. He was ushered out of the US military by Eisenhower. The remainder of his career sees him pair up with retired Gen. Douglas MacArthur (who referred to ‘ultimate conflict between a united human race and the sinister forces of some other planetary galaxy’ in his famous West Point speech) to split off a division of Sperry from Long Island to Arizona. I suspect this division exercised a significant component of the 1950s-era UAP reverse engineering effort.
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Counter-narratives
I take this opportunity to identify alternative narratives that would explain Groves’ postwar career history in an unremarkable, prosaic fashion.
• Furthering the cause of national security in his letter to his son could have been accomplished by the development of computers which would go on to be used in simulating nuclear explosions. ENIAC’s usage was relevant to nuclear weapons development in the context of national security - but compared with the history of computing in general, nuclear test simulation was very much a sidebar effort - -
• Having Eckert and Mauchly report to him could have been a sufficiently “busy” use of his time. Again, without diminishing ENIAC’s importance to history, its development hardly involved Groves’ firsthand effort.
• He really had decided to be at peace with resting on his laurels, and maybe thought that talking about the Manhattan Project and the lessons it offered was an oblique way of furthering national security. RFTB says: “He often mentioned to his wife that hedid not want to run anything again. … Somewhat uncharacteristically, he seemed content to accept the situation.” Uncharacteristic indeed. If you can believe this about Groves, then you can happily disregard this entire article. I give this a 10%|10% on my probability scale.
Even if true, what to do with it?
For anyone preparing to deploy open source intelligence OSINT tools toward disclosure-like efforts, the identification of Sperry as a likely center of UAP reverse-engineering provides a much-needed, accessible lead for investigation. If I were leading such an effort, I would look at finances, real estate, hard assets, and of course, personnel. I would rigorously catalog how these resources moved through the aerospace industry’s infamously bewildering acquisition history. I would look for signs of unduly redacted or removed records. I would even recommend HUMINT in the form of encouraging leaks from former employees & their heirs. Throughout, I would rigorously avoid data collection efforts relating to black projects limited to prosaic technologies, focusing only on those that are likely to be reverse-engineered from UAP.
By the way, I haven’t alluded to this yet in the article, but Sperry isn’t the only place I’d look vis-a-vis Groves. Postwar, Groves, with the support of his XO James B. Lampert, and an appointed Col. Gilbert M. Dorland, had had a weapons assembly group commissioned in Sandia Base called the “Sandia Pioneers”. (per RFTB, this appears to be the 2761st Engineer Batallion). I would look for personnel in that group, and especially any associations between that group and Sperry.
Postscript
Groves had an odd way of writing to those familiar to him, but one that will ring familiar to anyone in ufology having to decode utterances from officials. This excerpt from his 1948 letter to his son two weeks after his Eisenhower meeting.
“If you should happen to meet anyone who knows me and be asked as to why I am retiring, you can merely state that you don’t know but you imagine that I felt the long-continued strain was not conducive to a long life - the strain was continuing instead of stopping and that I had always believed that youth should lead the Army and that I saw no reason to change my mind now just because I was becoming an old man in the military sense. you might add if you feel it desirable that I assured you I felt I could be of more value to the security of the Unite States outside the Service then in.” [Source: RFTB]
It’s like he’s giving intelligence instructions to someone on how to plausibly deny knowledge of something sensitive - - this to his own son - on a matter that isn’t even overtly national security related..! Remember, we are living with the legacy of this man in our national security state through to today.
Going forward:
I’ve found Twitter to be a useful tool for disseminating, highlighting, and cheerleading the work of others and building on the work of others. As @blockedepistem , I’ll be using the hashtags #uaptwitter #enduapsecrecy and when I want to make some more noise, #ufotwitter . I will be avoiding the hashtags #ufo , #ufos, #uap or any other hashtags. I don’t denigrate those hashtags by any means, but the signal-to-noise ratio for my topic of interest is somewhat better found on the hashtags I’ve circled down on.