Richard Thieme (Founder, Thieme Works)

CLOSING KEYNOTE TITLE: UFOs and Government: A Case Study in Disinformation, Deception, and Perception Management

CLOSING KEYNOTE ABSTRACT:

There is no one “government.” There are many components of government that interact and respond to challenging and anomalous events, often contending with one another – and leaving their disputes on record.

UFOs were challenging and anomalous since the 1940s, when “foo fighters” trailed planes on bombing runs over Germany and Japan. But strange flying vehicles did not go away when the war ended. In the 1950s, the CIA advocated training observers “inside” to learn what they could while dismissing reports from “outside.”

To understand why and how a government responds that way is analogous to hacking a complex system. One has to do appropriate reconnaissance, then execute effective counter-measures, then engage in offensive operations.

The proliferation of reliable reports of unidentified flying objects elicited a response that feels familiar in the days of Assange, Snowden, and the NSA. UFOs were anomalous, well-documented, and challenging because, as Major General John Samford said, “credible people have seen incredible things.” Snowden, too, thought he had seen incredible things that needed to be brought into the light.

But this talk isn’t about Snowden, it’s about how governments manage these challenges. An NSA veteran thinks that Thieme’s talk is “perfect timing – it’s about how the government deals with serious yet largely unknown or not understood potential threats, while trying desperately to keep the public from knowing what they are doing. What better way to discuss the current situation at a meta level, without ever getting into the knee-jerk muddle of response to current events? You can’t ask for a better context for this talk.”

Richard Thieme was privileged to be invited to join the UFO History Group which includes the best researchers in the field. After 5 years of work, they produced “UFOs and Government: A Historical Inquiry,” an outstanding work of historical scholarship that reads like a fascinating detective story. In almost 600 pages and with nearly 1000 citations, the work illuminates the response of the government since the early 1940s. how and why policies were set, and how they were executed. Reviewers say, “this is the best book about the UFO phenomena that was ever written” and “UFOs and Government is a triumph of sober, conscientious scholarship unlikely to be equaled for years to come.”

Don Quixote said, “Insanity is seeing things as they really are.” This speech uses UFO phenomena as dye in the arteries of “how things really are.” And how governments carry out cover and deception with all of the best intentions in the world.

ABOUT RICHARD THIEME

Richard Thieme has published hundreds of articles, dozens of short stories, two books with more coming, and given several thousand speeches. He speaks professionally about the challenges posed by new technologies and the future, how to redesign ourselves to meet these challenges, and creativity in response to radical change. Many recent speeches have addressed security and intelligence issues for professionals around the world. He has keynoted conferences in Sydney and Brisbane, Wellington and Auckland, Dublin and Berlin, Amsterdam and Eilat Israel. Clients range from GE and Microsoft to the FBI, US Dept of the Treasury. and the US Secret Service.

His pre-blog column, “Islands in the Clickstream,” was distributed to thousands of subscribers in sixty countries before collection as a book by Syngress, a division of Elsevier. His most recent work, “Mind Games,” is a collection of nineteen short stories about anomalies and edgy realities. He returned to writing fiction when a friend at the NSA told him, “The only way you can tell the truth [about what we discuss] is through fiction.” His work has been taught at universities in Europe, Australia, Canada, and the United States.

At DefCon VIII, he moderated a panel that included the Assistant Secretary of Defense, who came to “dialogue” with 5000 computer hackers. He was invited to moderate because, according to a National Security Agency veteran, “You’re the only one in the room with the acceptance and respect of both the hacking community and the Feds.”