Ronald Pandolfi

Ronald Pandolfi is described in the files of the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy on Laurance Rockefeller's UFO initiative, in a Congressional Research Service chronology and in The New York Times as a scientist or analyst of the Central Intelligence Agency, and he figures in the 1998 congressional inquiry into Hughes Electronics and China. The sources opened do not state his CIA office or title; an office-level description (including the Office of Scientific and Weapons Research) was not found in any opened source and is not asserted here.

The Science Adviser's Briefing, 1993

A transcript headed "Telecon: Ron Pandolphy and Scott Jones," dated April 15, 1993, purports to record a call between Pandolfi and C. B. Scott Jones of the Human Potential Foundation. In it Pandolfi says "we had been tasked a couple of days before the proposed visit of Laurance Rockefeller with the White House Science Advisor, to provide a briefing update to him, and we didn't do that, instead we tasked out friend Dr. Maccabee to do it." Jones asks "why didn't you guys do it yourselves?" Pandolfi answers "We didn't have the material here to do it on that short of notice, didn't have any reference material in the file records, and Bruce had already taken a shot on something fairly similar." He describes a briefing book of "one and a half pages of bulletized notes, and then tabs going back to paragraphs on each of the main points, and then further tabs going back to the original source material," which is "unclassified." He says the science adviser, John H. Gibbons, "got it the night before," that "Kit was supposed to meet with Jack yesterday and supposed to give us some guidance today," and "My guess is that he is not going to do anything. He seemed to be fairly adverse to this whole subject." (The typed line in the reproduction is partly garbled; "he" is not identified in that sentence, and the preceding exchange concerns Gibbons.) Asked whether the timing was a coincidence, he says "No, Gibbons tasked us to do this," and that Gibbons, who "didn't have any background" and "never heard of the MJ-12," "contacted our representative over there and asked whether we could provide some support." Jones says in the transcript that Gibbons "was not read into it" and "declared to us that he was an agnostic." The transcript does not name the agency Pandolfi speaks for.¹

The transcript reached the files through C. Richard Farley Jr., who wrote that he had been associated with the Human Potential Foundation from August 1991 through April 30, 1994 and had been its Director of Project Development. He sent it to Gibbons on April 29, 1995 as an "enclosed purported transcript of a telephone conversation Jones had with Dr. Pandolfi, allegedly discussing his (and CIA's) role in supporting your response to the Rockefeller 'UFO' initiative." Farley wrote that Jones "routinely 'bugged' Pandolfi's calls, according to Jones' former executive assistant," that Jones himself gave him the transcript "for purposes which were not clear to me then, nor presently," and that he had sent it to the FBI and CIA "months ago." In the same letter Farley wrote that he had learned of Gibbons's release of Rockefeller correspondence from "Mr. Dan T. Smith, of Baltimore, a self-proclaimed confidant and asset of Dr. Ronald Pandolfi, described to me (by Jones, Smith and others) as a CIA scientist," and that he knew of Pandolfi's role "from my discussions with Dr. Bruce Maccabee and from Pandolfi himself at an August, 1993 meeting (Ron, two of his associates, Dr. Jones and myself)."²

Bruce Maccabee wrote to Gibbons on January 2, 1997 that "in April 1993, at the request of Dr. Ronald Pandolfi of the CIA, I sent (faxed) to you an information paper regarding UFOs entitled 'Briefing on the U.S. Government Approach to the UFO Problem as Determined by Civilian Researchers During the Last Twenty Years,'" and enclosed a copy. In it, he wrote, he had presented evidence that the government held a "rather large number of documents on UFO sightings."³

In a letter of March 29, 1997 Farley told Gibbons that Kit Green used the term "myth-making" for efforts by "cultists and culture-change agents employed in ongoing efforts by Laurance Rockefeller, with his attorney Henry Diamond and former Pell aide (and intelligence 'rogue') C.R. 'Scott' Jones, to involve President Clinton in their 'UFO disclosures' initiatives."²

Hughes and China, 1995 to 1998

The Congressional Research Service recorded that in April 1996 "a CIA analyst, Ronald Pandolfi, had reportedly prepared a National Intelligence Estimate (NIE) on how Hughes may have helped to improve China's missile capabilities," which the CIA "did not approve." In September 1998 he briefed the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence on what he had found at Hughes in 1995 after the January 1995 explosion of a Long March rocket; according to a reported internal CIA cable of September 23, 1998, the CIA then told Hughes of the briefing, and the committee asked Attorney General Janet Reno for a criminal investigation of whether the CIA obstructed its inquiry.⁴ The House Select Committee on U.S. National Security and Military/Commercial Concerns with the People's Republic of China (the Cox Committee) wrote, without naming him, that "a CIA analyst" had alleged that while visiting Hughes in 1995 he found information that technical data had been passed to China, "and that the CIA had ignored his request for a formal report to CIA Headquarters." The committee wrote that the CIA advised Hughes of the lines of questioning the committee would probably pursue, which the committee considered "ill-advised and an impediment."⁵ The committee wrote that the CIA's official explanation was that it notified Hughes "as a courtesy" and that the CIA denied any intent to interfere with the Justice Department or congressional investigations.⁵ The New York Times of December 7, 1998 began its report, "When a Central Intelligence Agency scientist visited the Hughes Electronics Corporation in Los Angeles in 1995 to learn more about China's missile capabilities, he became concerned that the satellite manufacturer might have helped improve Chinese military capabilities," named him as Ronald Pandolfi, and wrote that the agency "killed his study, called a National Intelligence Estimate." It reported that agency officials denied intending to hinder the Senate inquiry and said they helped facilitate his questioning, that an agency spokesman, Bill Harlow, said the agency "would not talk about Mr. Pandolfi's experiences or the 1996 National Intelligence Estimate he wrote, because of the investigations," and that one official said CIA officials "disagreed with some of Mr. Pandolfi's conclusions" and judged the estimate not "rigorous" enough.⁶ In September 2000 Senator Richard Shelby said the Justice Department had decided not to charge an unnamed CIA official with obstructing a Senate investigation.⁴ The Washington Post, in a story printed in The Kansas City Star of December 5, 1998, reported that officials said on Friday, December 4, the Justice Department had begun a criminal obstruction-of-justice investigation of the CIA after the Senate committee learned that the agency had told Hughes the names of company officials it had supplied to the committee. The story described Pandolfi as a CIA analyst specializing in technology who told committee staff that in 1995 he had concluded Hughes had been too aggressive in marketing high-technology equipment in China; according to unnamed sources, he had interviewed Hughes executives about their work there, Hughes complained angrily to the CIA that he was operating outside customary channels, and the CIA office that regularly deals with Hughes reprimanded him before the committee summoned him in September. The story said the CIA, aware of his views, gave Hughes advance word of his discussion with the committee and offered names of Hughes executives who might explain the disagreement. A Hughes spokesman, Richard Dore, was quoted as saying Hughes "has not been provided information by the CIA regarding the details of federal criminal investigations involving Hughes."⁷

Reported Role on UFO Matters

Richard J. Boylan listed "Ron Pandolfi" as Pelican in a roster of the Aviary published in Perceptions, describing him as "CIA Deputy Director for the Division of Science and Technology and current custodian of UFO files at the 'Weird Desk'" who "may be involved in the White House initiative to promptly release UFO information to the public." Boylan gave no source for the roster; in a separate passage he attributed other Aviary claims to an informant he called "Beltway Throat," whom the host site's editor calls Dan Smith, the same Dan T. Smith of Baltimore whom Farley described in 1995 as a "self-proclaimed confidant and asset of Dr. Ronald Pandolfi" (the identification of the two rests on the name alone).⁸ The Aviary of William L. Moore and Jaime Shandera, as described in a UFO BBS text file and in Mark Pilkington's Mirage Men, consisted of bird-named contacts of Moore at AFOSI and elsewhere; neither source names Pandolfi, and Boylan's list attaches the same term to a different and larger roster.⁹ The authors of the Loose Threads Report wrote that Kit Green left the "weird desk" "before hiring Ron Pandolfi to take over," without a stated source.¹⁰ A note in Jacques Vallee's Forbidden Science: Volume Three, as quoted by Keith Basterfield, ends a list of reported participants in the 1985 Advanced Theoretical Physics Working Group with "Ron Pandolfi of CIA also claims to have been involved." Pandolfi does not appear on James Oke Shannon's handwritten attendee list.¹¹

Bob Oechsler wrote in Alien Update that, "After validating my meeting with Everett Hineman, the CIA Deputy Director for Science & Technology, Pandolfi asked Admiral Inman if he had in fact talked to me about UFOs," and that Inman "did not deny that such a conversation took place, but was unwilling to discuss any details."¹²

The blogger Robert Schaeffer, quoted by Jason Colavito in 2019, reported that the television producer Robert Kiviat was engaged by Joe Firmage to develop a series on Firmage's anti-gravity claims "and also the story of the Aviary UFO history as seen through the eyes of Pandolfi," and quoted Kiviat as saying that "Pandolfi was not willing to state his claims publicly." Colavito wrote that Kiviat sued Firmage, Pandolfi and Daniel Marriott for $300,000. The complaint was not read, and the defendants' answers were not found.¹³