The Ivy League, IC and UFOs

The Ivy League has a long and well-documented history with the intelligence community, or IC. This goes back to the mid-20th century and includes connections to the UFO subculture.

DCI Allen Dulles was a Princeton man, as were many of those who worked with Princeton alum Col. Joseph Bryan III on his CIA psychological warfare team. The colonel went on to be a staple of the Board of Governors of the National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomena (NICAP).

A talent of NICAP front man Maj. Donald Keyhoe was public relations. His background included managing the tour of famous aviator and politically controversial Charles Lindbergh, and Keyhoe's experience served him well while at the helm of NICAP. He effectively collected pro-UFO statements from influential community leaders and distributed them widely. This included a statement attributed to Dr. Harlow Shapley, director of the Harvard Observatory, as disseminated in NICAP literature published approximately 1958 (see p35):

Hundreds of pages of FBI records were obtained on Dr. Shapley. They indicate internal security investigations conducted during the 1940s identified concerns about his political interests.

Follow-up FOIA work undertaken by EFR resulted in more responsive records located at the National Archives. EFR is in the process of obtaining this material, which includes numerous internal security investigations launched by the FBI during the mid-20th century.

A high-profile colleague of Dr. Shapley was fellow Harvard astronomer Dr. Donald Menzel. FBI records on Menzel similarly show repeated investigations and interviews. Menzel was issued a clearance for national security work he did with the Navy, among other projects. As indicated in the FBI memo below, Menzel worked on communications, consulting about the significance of atmospheric conditions:

Menzel was frequently the subject of security investigations to either clear him for participation in a project or ensure he remained a low security risk. Among the biggest FBI concerns was consistently his association with Shapley. Menzel disagreed with Shapley's positions on both politics and UFOs, but he publicly defended Shapley's right to hold and express his opinions.

Menzel was adamantly skeptical about the UFO topic. He authored books and articles on the subject, and intellectually sparred with NICAP Chairman of the Board and former DCI Roscoe Hillenkoetter. This included going as far as diplomatically calling out Hillenkoetter for questionably supporting Keyhoe in public while denouncing the major's assertions and the UFO topic in general in private. 

Incidentally, Menzel and Hillenkoetter were each listed as members of the infamous MJ-12, a fictional group of leading intelligence officials tasked with managing the retrieval of crashed alien spaceships. Given Menzel's status as a skeptic, some researchers suspected his inclusion on the contrived list may have been considered a joke by the architects of the hoax.

All of this raises a number of legitimate questions, and they're not going to become any less complicated by a memo found in the Menzel FBI files. In 1974, after a lifetime as the subject of surveillance, FBI considered recruiting Dr. Menzel as a potential security informant or double agent (see p12): 

This might lead the discerning reader to formulate salient questions surrounding more recent events linking the Ivy League, the IC and the UFO meme, as raised by FBI records obtained on Avi Loeb's Galileo Project. The records released by the FBI observe the Harvard astronomer's endeavor raised $1.7 million from private investors to look for possible evidence of artifacts or equipment made by extraterrestrial technological civilizations, as shown in the 2021 communication below. If history is any indication, which it often is, the convergence of Harvard, the Bureau, and talk of alien spacecraft may have much more to do with topics such as telescopes, satellites, and the security thereof than it has to do with UFOs.