Larry King needs a new format

By BILLY COX

Friday night, for the third time in six months, Larry King went to the formula again on CNN: nutty graphics, a panel of nongovernment experts, eyewitnesses being dismissed by a designated skeptic, and a silly logo that asks something like, “Do You Believe in UFOs?” As if belief were a prerequisite to legitimacy.

This is fun entertainment, maybe, but it’s not news. News is stuff like this: Last summer, Jimmy Carter told a podcast called The Skeptics Guide to the Universe that he had never heard stories about his efforts to gain access to classified UFO data being blocked by former CIA director George H.W. Bush. But California attorney Danny Sheehan has gone around the country arguing that this is exactly what he was told by Marcia Smith of the Congressional Research Service.

Somebody’s lying. Get Carter, Sheehan and Smith to figure it out on the show. That’s news.

Get a real live Air Force spokesman to explain what Brig. Gen. C.H. Bolender, USAF deputy director of development, meant in 1969 when he wrote: “Reports of unidentified flying objects which could affect national security are made in accordance with JANAP 146 or Air Force Manual 55-11, and are not part of the Blue Book system.”

Get that person to explain why, if the USAF isn’t investigating UFOs anymore, they’re itemized as potential national security threats under Communication Instructions for Reporting Vital Intelligence Sightings. In the 1995 edition of Manual 10-206, for instance, you can find references in Chapter 5.7.3 of the Air Force Operational Reporting System.

That’d be news.

Get CIA historian Gerald Haines to explain his 1997 analysis — “A Die-Hard Issue: CIA’s Role in the Study of UFOs, 1947-90” — which ascribed more than half of all UFO reports in the late 1950s and early 1960s to U.S. spy planes. Ask him why his conclusions don’t mesh with Air Force data to the contrary. Haines doesn’t return phone calls.

Veteran UFO researcher/author Stan Friedman, who was featured on King’s Friday night panel, has a few suggestions for CNN, too. Invite a representative of the National Security Agency to the show. Ask him or her why 156 of its UFO documents generated between 1958 and 1979 remain largely redacted after years of legal wrangling.

“They say it protects sources and methods, and that may be true,” Friedman says from his home in New Brunswick, Canada. “But it always amazes me when I run into people who still can’t conceive of the idea that government secrets can’t be kept.”

If his mental and physical abilities are still intact, why not invite former Secretary of Defense and USAF Secretary Harold Brown on the show? “Here’s somebody,” says Friedman, “with an extraordinary career, who got a Ph.D. in physics, became director of Livermore Lab, and as a scientist became secretary of defense. He’s a policy guy, and I’d love to hear what he has to say.”

The list goes on and on. On the other hand, it’s a lot easier and safer for CNN to stick with the format. Even though it doesn’t make much sense.

“I don’t know why they have to keep wasting airtime with a skeptic who knows nothing about the event in question,” Friedman says. “If you have a show about a new treatment for heart disease, why would you put somebody on who says, ‘I don’t believe in it’?”