02 July 2011

HOW MANY PEOPLE DOES IT TAKE TO KEEP A SECRET?


A quick note to my readers. I am spending a lot of time travelling this summer so, at least through September, I will be posting only once a month.
      Also, I have received several emails regarding some recent conspiracies; most notably on some current court cases regarding the 2nd amendment. I am looking into these and will probably be writing about them in late October or early November. Stay tuned.

HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO MY GRANDSON, LOGAN!
 HE TURNS 2 TODAY 

      As I said in my very first posting back in 2007, I don't wear a tinfoil hat, I don't believe that aliens had a damn thing to do with JFK's assassination and I don't think the CIA is causing hurricanes to weaken foreign countries.
      I won't get into any argument (right now) for or against the belief that aliens have ever visited earth. I do, however, want to debunk one often used argument meant to supposedly “disprove” the alleged Roswell spaceship crash.
      I have often heard it said that, if the Roswell incident did happen, there is no way that the 75 to 100 people that were actually involved; about a third of which were civilians (and therefore supposedly less able to keep their mouths shut) could ever keep it a secret.
      HuffPost Social News had a comment from Dave24 that said “The government couldn't keep Watergate a secret, yet they've kept alien spacecraft a secret for decades, and have done so across many administra­tions. Nonsense.1
      Of course, the fact is that if a flying saucer DID crash in New Mexico, it's definitely NOT a secret2, but that's beside the point. The question is: could a lot of people conspire to keep a really big secret for years? And succeed? How about 12,000 people?

     To get an answer, lets look at a really big secret. How about Ultra: the allied breaking of the Nazi and Japanese codes during WWII. How many people worked on it, how many were civilians and how long was the secret kept?

Anyone that has studied WWII knows now that Ultra was probably the most closely guarded secret in military history. According to Roswell logic though, that would have been impossible.
      First; the people. According to Wikipedia over 12,000 worked at the intelligence center at England's Bletchly Park throughout the war. A large portion were civilians, including chess champions, crossword experts, and mathematicians3.” But there's more.
      The ultimate refinement of Nazi code making was the Enigma; a typewriter-like machine that produced one of the most secure encryptions available. For a while. Polish cryptanalysts had been working on German codes since 1930 and succeeded in breaking the Enigma code in 19344. When WWII broke out in 1939 and Poland was overrun by the Nazis, work was transferred to the French and British. After America got into the war at the end of 1941, we got our hands into Enigma cracking. That's a lot of people in a lot of countries working on a big job for a long time.
 
     So how well was the secret kept?
      In 1974, a British gentleman by the name of FW Winterbottom5 went to the government and asked permission to finally reveal all that had been done by Allied cryptanalysts. Winterbottom had worked in Bletchley Park and knew a lot about it; a good source for a defining literary work. It was decided by the powers that were that no further value could be gained by keeping Bletchly a secret any more and permission was granted. “The Ultra Secret” was published6 and the secret was out.

      From 1930 to 1974, a period of 44 years, over 12,000 military and civilian personnel from no less than 5 countries kept their work hidden from not only the press and general public, but even from their wives and husbands. I don't know how many American and British administrations that period covered, but it was quite a few. Lots of people over lots of years. And yet the secret remained intact and was only revealed after careful consideration by the leaders; not by some nosy reporter.

      Could a hand full of people, both military and civilians from a single country and under threat of prosecution keep a secret for 50 years? If history is any yard stick, you damn rights they could.
      But did the US Army spirit off any deceased aliens with big black eyes? That's for another time.
 
At least that's my opinion. What's yours?
Citations

2 Just type “roswell ufo crash” into a search bar. You'll get over ½ million hits.


To learn more about the history of WWII cryptography and the breaking of the Enigma, see my April 15th posting: “A Crypto Reading List” for some good reading. Most books mentioned are available at your local public library.


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