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Australian researcher John Lister looks at the politics and possible motivations of the 'leading lights' in today's burgeoning UFO movement.
In these times of globe-trotting UFO gurus, whose message may be far from spiritual, and manipulative mass entertainments which distort the original source material, it is becoming an increasing challenge to maintain an ‘open mind’ when pressured to accept the belief system of a particular faction which is promoted to the exclusion of others. In this article we’ll look at some of ufology’s leading lights and their internecine warfare, using pertinent quotations which reveal their mindsets. The subject covers the contradictions, permutations and limits of belief, as opposed to open findings, and this will partly be a cautionary exercise.
Decoding UFO / Alien Phenomena
Moderators: eye_of_tiger, shalimar123
Pyrrho’s successors
At one extreme of the ufology spectrum are the skeptics — people who express disbelief in all things unscientific. To the casual observer, their obsession with debunking UFOs, paranormal phenomena and fringe science must make them seem as fanatical as any UFO enthusiast. Dr. Stanton T. Friedman said that arch-skeptic Philip Klass followed the cardinal rule of all skeptics: "Make proclamations; don’t do any research."1
To be fair to the movement in general, this really can’t be said to be the norm. An examination of the Australian journal, The Skeptic, will reveal articles with arguments supported by numerous orthodox reference sources. It’s well done — even if you fail to be convinced, for instance, that monosodium glutamate is a harmless food additive. With the amount of consensus information in existence, there should be no difficulty in finding sources nor excuse for unsupported material.Skeptics equate objectivity with their own belief system — scientific materialism — and pretend that this is an apolitical stance. A courageous and truly sceptical individual would be equally suspicious of every pronouncement made by establishment scientists and politicians. Robert Anton Wilson commented on a renegade from CSICOP (the Committee for Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal):
Professor Marcello Truzzi, sociologist from Eastern Michigan University, was editor of the CSICOP journal when it was called The Zetetic. He had a difference of opinion with the Executive Council about whether dissenting views should be published. He says CSICOP isn’t sceptical at all in the true meaning of the word but is "an advocacy group upholding orthodox establishment views". Their alleged scepticism has become just another dogmatic blind faith.2
Veteran ufologist John A. Keel also cast a critical eye on CSICOP in his recent book Disneyland of the Gods:
Corliss is an elderly New Yorker who is rather proud of his title, "the millionaire communist". One of his pet enterprises is the American Humanist Association (AHA) which he rules with benign despotism. For years the AHA was reportedly on the FBI’s notorious list of "communist fronts". The organisation has about 2000 members. One of its spin-off groups was CSICOP. They declared themselves to be sceptics of almost everything and they staged frequent press conferences designed to get their names into the newspapers by denouncing social evils like dice-throwing, sea serpents and (gasp) UFOs.
...As you might surmise, outstanding members of the sceptics’ sewing circle include Mr. (Philip) Klass and Mr. (James) Randi. At their 1987 convention, Dr. Carl Sagan and Dr. Isaac Asimov were among the featured speakers.3
In UFOs: Operation Trojan Horse (1970) Keel expressed his belief that the UFO phenomenon was being manipulated for some subversive purpose, though by whom and for what end he wasn’t prepared to speculate. 25 years later, he had embraced Forteana and arrived at the conclusion that, because of such illogical phenomena, we inhabit a parallel reality distinct from the hypothetically rational original. This makes our Earth something of an intergalactic tourist attraction (the Disneyland of the Gods of the book’s title) where no rules apply — a thesis that is fanciful if not exactly helpful. Abandoning the conservative style of his earlier work, Keel wrote a cranky appraisal of Dr. J. Allen Hynek, a sceptic whom he was appalled to see elevated to the title of ‘Father of Ufology’:
The most hated man in the history of ufology was Mr. J. Allen Hynek, minion of the Air Force... He was teaching at a small college near the Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, home of Project Blue Book; what’s more, he could be had for a small amount of money. The Air Force needed all the help it could get to keep an irate UFO-watching public off its back. They were looking for someone with academic credentials who would lend authority to their wild anti-UFO statements — somebody who would just take the money and run.For eighteen years, the US Air Force paid Dr. Hynek an average of $5000 per year as a "consultant" but, by his own admission, he was never consulted about anything. When official committees were formed to review the UFO "problem", the Air Force called in Dr. (Donald) Menzel (ufology’s earliest critic and proponent of air inversions of refracted light) and a young upstart named Carl Sagan. Hynek’s role... was simple. Twice a year Project Blue Book sent him a manila envelope filled with sighting reports. His job was to check through the star charts and astronomical catalogs and come up with celestial explanations.
...Dr. Hynek did have an unfortunate habit of making undocumented claims or getting all his facts scrambled. He seemed to be ignorant of a wide range of subjects, particularly astronomy (!) and psychic phenomena.
After Hynek’s cautious conversion to the ‘cause’ in the early ‘70s, he was opposed by Philip Klaass "the leather-lunged heckler of an aerospace journal (Aviation Week and Space Technology) who first surfaced in March. 1966, to heckle Donald Keyhoe at a UFO press conference. His favourite explanation is the ‘corona effect’, a rare phenomenon that occurs around power lines." 4
In 1968 Dr. Hynek testified before Congress that the legitimate study of UFOs is a scientific taboo. In his estimation there had never been a fair and objective study of the phenomenon, at least none that had been released to the public. When Project Blue Book folded the following year, he stated, "None of the evidence that I have examined would indicate any proof at all that we are being visited by extraterrestrials." By 1973 he was saying that Blue Book "had a job to do, whether rightfully or wrongfully, to keep the public from getting excited." 5
In the mid-’80s, Philip Klass was describing the object that crashed near Roswell in 1947 as a "radar corner reflector" suspended from a weather balloon, and he probably feels vindicated by the Air Force’s recent revelations about Project Mogul. Not so easily dismissed are fatuous remarks like, "Today, 99% of all UFO government documents are available in the national archive."
The famous Cash-Landrum case of 1980 is one of the most meticulously investigated in UFO history. Two women and a young boy suffered radiation burns after being exposed to a diamond-shaped UFO near Houston, Texas. The UFO was escorted towards a nearby Army base by 23 twin-bladed helicopters after leaving scorch marks on the highway and nearby trees. Betty Cash was repeatedly hospitalised in the years that followed and developed cancer. The women mounted an unsuccessful lawsuit against the federal government, alleging that a military test vehicle had caused their injuries. Considering the medical evidence alone, Philip Klass’s summation of the case was both misrepresentative and offensive: "I believe the story is a hoax. There is absolutely no evidence. The women’s story is supported only by the claim of Betty Cash that she had serious health problems after the alleged incident." 6
James Oberg is a NASA engineer on the space shuttle program, an associate editor of Space World magazine and the author of several books on the Russian space program, on which he is considered an expert. In the late ’70s and early ’80s he wrote a column for OMNI magazine, ‘UFO Update’, in which he regularly debunked all sighting reports. He invited readers to send in their own reports, which he promised to pass on to his associate Philip Klass for ‘expert’ analysis. After CIA documents surfaced in 1978 regarding a confrontation between two F-4 Phantom fighter jets and a UFO over southern Iran on September 19th, 1976, Oberg slovenly reported Klass’s opinion as the last word on the subject. This was to the effect that there was no reliable information about the incident because it had occurred in a foreign country which, by 1979, had become a new enemy, thus preventing American researchers’ access to the original witnesses.
In 1994 the NBC television program Sightings managed to trace the original witnesses, high-ranking officers in what had been Iran’s Imperial Air Force, who provided detailed testimony. This appeared in published form in the Sightings book (1996) by Susan Michaels.Oberg was first invited to speak on the Sightings program about the controversial footage of anomalous objects from Discovery mission STS-48 in 1991, which he maintained were ice crystals from a water dump. It was pointed out that some ufologists see Oberg as a paid government UFO debunker and not the "independent analyst" that he claims to be, yet Oberg was subsequently invited back to the program to prognosticate on the UFO crash at Kecksburg, Pennsylvania, in 1965 (which he believed was a failed Russian probe to Venus) and the abduction of Betty and Barney Hill in 1961, whose later memories of the incident, obtained under hypnotic regression, Oberg traced to the film Invaders from Mars (1953) and an episode of The Outer Limits (1964). "Can’t prove it but the sequence is highly suggestive," he asserted in 1994.
The late Dr. Carl Sagan based his scepticism on the shaky certainty that faster-than-light travel is impossible, so there would be a passage of five millennia between any two visits from the same extraterrestrial civilisation. He identified five stars which may possibly support solar systems in which ET civilisations have developed, including Alpha Centauri (4 1/2 light years away) and Tau Ceti (15 light years away). Sagan evidently believed that anything approaching travel at the speed of light was also an impossibility. While prepared to concede the possibility of a singular alien visit which kick-started the Sumerian civilisation, he dismissed the astronomical knowledge of the Dogon tribe of Mali, west Africa, with the supposition that they had obtained it from "an explorer, an adventurer or an early anthropologist" of the 19th century, who happened to be well-versed in then-current astronomical debate about Sirius A and the existence of its white dwarf companion.
In the long litany of ‘ancient astronaut’ pop archaeology, the cases of apparent interest have perfectly reasonable alternative explanations, or have been misreported, or are simple prevarications, hoaxes or distortions. This description applies to arguments about the Piris Reis map, the Easter Island monoliths, the heroic drawings on the plains of Nazca, and various artefacts from Mexico, Uzbekistan and China.
...There are too many loopholes, too many alternative explanations, for such a myth (as the Dogon’s) to provide reliable evidence of past extraterrestrial contact. If there are extraterrestrials, I think it much more likely that unmanned planetary spacecraft and large radiotelescopes will prove to be the means of their detection.7
After studying only a handful of cases, Sagan wrote an article for Parade magazine in 1993 in which he flatly refuted all abduction reports as the result of hallucinations or other mental disturbances. Abduction researcher Dr. David Jacobs, author of Secret Life, was not impressed. "Carl Sagan has what I call the arrogance of ignorance. He is a person who has enough arrogance to believe that he can answer the UFO and abduction mystery through lack of knowledge
To be fair to the movement in general, this really can’t be said to be the norm. An examination of the Australian journal, The Skeptic, will reveal articles with arguments supported by numerous orthodox reference sources. It’s well done — even if you fail to be convinced, for instance, that monosodium glutamate is a harmless food additive. With the amount of consensus information in existence, there should be no difficulty in finding sources nor excuse for unsupported material.Skeptics equate objectivity with their own belief system — scientific materialism — and pretend that this is an apolitical stance. A courageous and truly sceptical individual would be equally suspicious of every pronouncement made by establishment scientists and politicians. Robert Anton Wilson commented on a renegade from CSICOP (the Committee for Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal):
Professor Marcello Truzzi, sociologist from Eastern Michigan University, was editor of the CSICOP journal when it was called The Zetetic. He had a difference of opinion with the Executive Council about whether dissenting views should be published. He says CSICOP isn’t sceptical at all in the true meaning of the word but is "an advocacy group upholding orthodox establishment views". Their alleged scepticism has become just another dogmatic blind faith.2
Veteran ufologist John A. Keel also cast a critical eye on CSICOP in his recent book Disneyland of the Gods:
Corliss is an elderly New Yorker who is rather proud of his title, "the millionaire communist". One of his pet enterprises is the American Humanist Association (AHA) which he rules with benign despotism. For years the AHA was reportedly on the FBI’s notorious list of "communist fronts". The organisation has about 2000 members. One of its spin-off groups was CSICOP. They declared themselves to be sceptics of almost everything and they staged frequent press conferences designed to get their names into the newspapers by denouncing social evils like dice-throwing, sea serpents and (gasp) UFOs.
...As you might surmise, outstanding members of the sceptics’ sewing circle include Mr. (Philip) Klass and Mr. (James) Randi. At their 1987 convention, Dr. Carl Sagan and Dr. Isaac Asimov were among the featured speakers.3
In UFOs: Operation Trojan Horse (1970) Keel expressed his belief that the UFO phenomenon was being manipulated for some subversive purpose, though by whom and for what end he wasn’t prepared to speculate. 25 years later, he had embraced Forteana and arrived at the conclusion that, because of such illogical phenomena, we inhabit a parallel reality distinct from the hypothetically rational original. This makes our Earth something of an intergalactic tourist attraction (the Disneyland of the Gods of the book’s title) where no rules apply — a thesis that is fanciful if not exactly helpful. Abandoning the conservative style of his earlier work, Keel wrote a cranky appraisal of Dr. J. Allen Hynek, a sceptic whom he was appalled to see elevated to the title of ‘Father of Ufology’:
The most hated man in the history of ufology was Mr. J. Allen Hynek, minion of the Air Force... He was teaching at a small college near the Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, home of Project Blue Book; what’s more, he could be had for a small amount of money. The Air Force needed all the help it could get to keep an irate UFO-watching public off its back. They were looking for someone with academic credentials who would lend authority to their wild anti-UFO statements — somebody who would just take the money and run.For eighteen years, the US Air Force paid Dr. Hynek an average of $5000 per year as a "consultant" but, by his own admission, he was never consulted about anything. When official committees were formed to review the UFO "problem", the Air Force called in Dr. (Donald) Menzel (ufology’s earliest critic and proponent of air inversions of refracted light) and a young upstart named Carl Sagan. Hynek’s role... was simple. Twice a year Project Blue Book sent him a manila envelope filled with sighting reports. His job was to check through the star charts and astronomical catalogs and come up with celestial explanations.
...Dr. Hynek did have an unfortunate habit of making undocumented claims or getting all his facts scrambled. He seemed to be ignorant of a wide range of subjects, particularly astronomy (!) and psychic phenomena.
After Hynek’s cautious conversion to the ‘cause’ in the early ‘70s, he was opposed by Philip Klaass "the leather-lunged heckler of an aerospace journal (Aviation Week and Space Technology) who first surfaced in March. 1966, to heckle Donald Keyhoe at a UFO press conference. His favourite explanation is the ‘corona effect’, a rare phenomenon that occurs around power lines." 4
In 1968 Dr. Hynek testified before Congress that the legitimate study of UFOs is a scientific taboo. In his estimation there had never been a fair and objective study of the phenomenon, at least none that had been released to the public. When Project Blue Book folded the following year, he stated, "None of the evidence that I have examined would indicate any proof at all that we are being visited by extraterrestrials." By 1973 he was saying that Blue Book "had a job to do, whether rightfully or wrongfully, to keep the public from getting excited." 5
In the mid-’80s, Philip Klass was describing the object that crashed near Roswell in 1947 as a "radar corner reflector" suspended from a weather balloon, and he probably feels vindicated by the Air Force’s recent revelations about Project Mogul. Not so easily dismissed are fatuous remarks like, "Today, 99% of all UFO government documents are available in the national archive."
The famous Cash-Landrum case of 1980 is one of the most meticulously investigated in UFO history. Two women and a young boy suffered radiation burns after being exposed to a diamond-shaped UFO near Houston, Texas. The UFO was escorted towards a nearby Army base by 23 twin-bladed helicopters after leaving scorch marks on the highway and nearby trees. Betty Cash was repeatedly hospitalised in the years that followed and developed cancer. The women mounted an unsuccessful lawsuit against the federal government, alleging that a military test vehicle had caused their injuries. Considering the medical evidence alone, Philip Klass’s summation of the case was both misrepresentative and offensive: "I believe the story is a hoax. There is absolutely no evidence. The women’s story is supported only by the claim of Betty Cash that she had serious health problems after the alleged incident." 6
James Oberg is a NASA engineer on the space shuttle program, an associate editor of Space World magazine and the author of several books on the Russian space program, on which he is considered an expert. In the late ’70s and early ’80s he wrote a column for OMNI magazine, ‘UFO Update’, in which he regularly debunked all sighting reports. He invited readers to send in their own reports, which he promised to pass on to his associate Philip Klass for ‘expert’ analysis. After CIA documents surfaced in 1978 regarding a confrontation between two F-4 Phantom fighter jets and a UFO over southern Iran on September 19th, 1976, Oberg slovenly reported Klass’s opinion as the last word on the subject. This was to the effect that there was no reliable information about the incident because it had occurred in a foreign country which, by 1979, had become a new enemy, thus preventing American researchers’ access to the original witnesses.
In 1994 the NBC television program Sightings managed to trace the original witnesses, high-ranking officers in what had been Iran’s Imperial Air Force, who provided detailed testimony. This appeared in published form in the Sightings book (1996) by Susan Michaels.Oberg was first invited to speak on the Sightings program about the controversial footage of anomalous objects from Discovery mission STS-48 in 1991, which he maintained were ice crystals from a water dump. It was pointed out that some ufologists see Oberg as a paid government UFO debunker and not the "independent analyst" that he claims to be, yet Oberg was subsequently invited back to the program to prognosticate on the UFO crash at Kecksburg, Pennsylvania, in 1965 (which he believed was a failed Russian probe to Venus) and the abduction of Betty and Barney Hill in 1961, whose later memories of the incident, obtained under hypnotic regression, Oberg traced to the film Invaders from Mars (1953) and an episode of The Outer Limits (1964). "Can’t prove it but the sequence is highly suggestive," he asserted in 1994.
The late Dr. Carl Sagan based his scepticism on the shaky certainty that faster-than-light travel is impossible, so there would be a passage of five millennia between any two visits from the same extraterrestrial civilisation. He identified five stars which may possibly support solar systems in which ET civilisations have developed, including Alpha Centauri (4 1/2 light years away) and Tau Ceti (15 light years away). Sagan evidently believed that anything approaching travel at the speed of light was also an impossibility. While prepared to concede the possibility of a singular alien visit which kick-started the Sumerian civilisation, he dismissed the astronomical knowledge of the Dogon tribe of Mali, west Africa, with the supposition that they had obtained it from "an explorer, an adventurer or an early anthropologist" of the 19th century, who happened to be well-versed in then-current astronomical debate about Sirius A and the existence of its white dwarf companion.
In the long litany of ‘ancient astronaut’ pop archaeology, the cases of apparent interest have perfectly reasonable alternative explanations, or have been misreported, or are simple prevarications, hoaxes or distortions. This description applies to arguments about the Piris Reis map, the Easter Island monoliths, the heroic drawings on the plains of Nazca, and various artefacts from Mexico, Uzbekistan and China.
...There are too many loopholes, too many alternative explanations, for such a myth (as the Dogon’s) to provide reliable evidence of past extraterrestrial contact. If there are extraterrestrials, I think it much more likely that unmanned planetary spacecraft and large radiotelescopes will prove to be the means of their detection.7
After studying only a handful of cases, Sagan wrote an article for Parade magazine in 1993 in which he flatly refuted all abduction reports as the result of hallucinations or other mental disturbances. Abduction researcher Dr. David Jacobs, author of Secret Life, was not impressed. "Carl Sagan has what I call the arrogance of ignorance. He is a person who has enough arrogance to believe that he can answer the UFO and abduction mystery through lack of knowledge
Holding the fort
Self-described Forteans occupy a nebulous zone of disunity between skeptics and believers, although their intellectual sympathies clearly reside with the former. Bob Rickard, co-editor of the Fortean Times (UK), described the Fortean outlook in these words:
I like to think we are true sceptics in the Greek sense, not in the modern American sense. If you mention the word sceptic in America — with a ‘k’ that is — it automatically means an attitude that you are dismissing anything non-scientific. The original sceptics questioned things in order to discover things about them, which is similar to the attitude that Buddha asked his disciples to follow. He said if you want to know, you must question your teachers, your parents, your rulers and everybody — otherwise you won’t know. Sure it’s uncomfortable, but as (Charles) Fort said, "I don’t know how to find out anything new without upsetting people". ...We tell our readers: don’t believe it, even if you read it in the Fortean Times. But you have to trust people sometimes. ...There’s a quote I like: "For every expert there is an equal and opposite expert".9
The suspension of belief tends to reduce the magazine to the level of entertainment for skeptics, a modern-day freak show of weird stories whose very absurdity mitigates the need for deeper thought. Feature-length articles on particular subjects often reveal the magazine’s bias towards the psychological reductionism of Carl Gustav Jung, who believed that UFOs are mandalas — archetypal images of our deep selves which invite external projections. He warned us to separate what we think we see from what we actually see.
Fortean Times writers have extended the projection theory to all manner of phenomena, including, of all things, cattle mutilations (or ‘mootilations’, as the pun-happy publication refers to them). Peter Brookesmith is a regular contributor to the Fortean Times and the author of a recent debunking book, UFO: The Government Files. During the course of a critique on Nick Pope’s Open Skies, Closed Minds, Brookesmith noted: "His skimpy, sceptic-free bibliography includes one of ufology’s most unhinged books, Linda Moulton Howe’s An Alien Harvest."10 Skeptics publish books for every prejudice. If you doubt Howe’s journalistic integrity you might appreciate a title warmly recommended by Richard Thieme:
Dan Kagan and Ian Summers have written a masterful investigation of "cattle mutilation" (Mute Evidence, Bantam Books, NY, 1984). It details how predator damage becomes "cattle mutilation" conducted with "surgical precision" as a result of media distortion, "professional experts" who kept everyone one step away from the evidence (common in UFO research) and true believers who suspended their capacity for critical judgement.11
John Keel expressed vitriolic disdain for Forteans, whose efforts, he believes, have abandoned the standards set by Charles Hoy Fort.
They hate each other with a fierce passion and are completely suspicious of everyone else. When the first Fortean Society was founded in 1932, the man after whom it was named, Charles Fort, flatly refused to join, grumbling that he would sooner join the Elks. The Society’s journal, Doubt, was published at random intervals, usually one issue every two or three years, and its editorial position was that it was against everything and everybody. ...Since each Fortean has a theory to explain the bizarre things he is investigating, and since each theory contradicts all other theories, the world of Forteana is a bedlam of battered egos and misplaced sentiments. The Forteans not only expect to be ignored, they demand it.12
Keel defended Fort’s own reputation, pointing out that his sources were mostly scientific journals, not newspapers, as often claimed by ill-informed critics.
Intellectual cowardice is only one of the problems of the scientific community. Fort rubbed their noses in the swill generated by their gibberish and illiteracy. It was no secret then and now that academic publications are designed to protect the inept and to conceal ignorance. People with nothing to say, who even lack the ability to say nothing, can hide behind the academic method for a lifetime.13
I like to think we are true sceptics in the Greek sense, not in the modern American sense. If you mention the word sceptic in America — with a ‘k’ that is — it automatically means an attitude that you are dismissing anything non-scientific. The original sceptics questioned things in order to discover things about them, which is similar to the attitude that Buddha asked his disciples to follow. He said if you want to know, you must question your teachers, your parents, your rulers and everybody — otherwise you won’t know. Sure it’s uncomfortable, but as (Charles) Fort said, "I don’t know how to find out anything new without upsetting people". ...We tell our readers: don’t believe it, even if you read it in the Fortean Times. But you have to trust people sometimes. ...There’s a quote I like: "For every expert there is an equal and opposite expert".9
The suspension of belief tends to reduce the magazine to the level of entertainment for skeptics, a modern-day freak show of weird stories whose very absurdity mitigates the need for deeper thought. Feature-length articles on particular subjects often reveal the magazine’s bias towards the psychological reductionism of Carl Gustav Jung, who believed that UFOs are mandalas — archetypal images of our deep selves which invite external projections. He warned us to separate what we think we see from what we actually see.
Fortean Times writers have extended the projection theory to all manner of phenomena, including, of all things, cattle mutilations (or ‘mootilations’, as the pun-happy publication refers to them). Peter Brookesmith is a regular contributor to the Fortean Times and the author of a recent debunking book, UFO: The Government Files. During the course of a critique on Nick Pope’s Open Skies, Closed Minds, Brookesmith noted: "His skimpy, sceptic-free bibliography includes one of ufology’s most unhinged books, Linda Moulton Howe’s An Alien Harvest."10 Skeptics publish books for every prejudice. If you doubt Howe’s journalistic integrity you might appreciate a title warmly recommended by Richard Thieme:
Dan Kagan and Ian Summers have written a masterful investigation of "cattle mutilation" (Mute Evidence, Bantam Books, NY, 1984). It details how predator damage becomes "cattle mutilation" conducted with "surgical precision" as a result of media distortion, "professional experts" who kept everyone one step away from the evidence (common in UFO research) and true believers who suspended their capacity for critical judgement.11
John Keel expressed vitriolic disdain for Forteans, whose efforts, he believes, have abandoned the standards set by Charles Hoy Fort.
They hate each other with a fierce passion and are completely suspicious of everyone else. When the first Fortean Society was founded in 1932, the man after whom it was named, Charles Fort, flatly refused to join, grumbling that he would sooner join the Elks. The Society’s journal, Doubt, was published at random intervals, usually one issue every two or three years, and its editorial position was that it was against everything and everybody. ...Since each Fortean has a theory to explain the bizarre things he is investigating, and since each theory contradicts all other theories, the world of Forteana is a bedlam of battered egos and misplaced sentiments. The Forteans not only expect to be ignored, they demand it.12
Keel defended Fort’s own reputation, pointing out that his sources were mostly scientific journals, not newspapers, as often claimed by ill-informed critics.
Intellectual cowardice is only one of the problems of the scientific community. Fort rubbed their noses in the swill generated by their gibberish and illiteracy. It was no secret then and now that academic publications are designed to protect the inept and to conceal ignorance. People with nothing to say, who even lack the ability to say nothing, can hide behind the academic method for a lifetime.13
The respectables
The field of ufology is roughly divided between its orthodox and apocryphal enthusiasts. The dividing line has been blurred by the general acceptance of a modern mythology that embraces UFO crash retrievals, Grey aliens, abductions, underground bases, Majestic 12, crop circles and cattle mutilations. ‘Respected’ ufologists are concerned with demarcating the boundaries of the subject in the name of conventional science, and it is their overview, promulgated in the mass media, which has shaped public perception of the phenomenon. They espouse a governmental ‘cover-up’ but eschew any whiff of a ‘conspiracy theory’, as though the terms are mutually exclusive. The ‘extraterrestrial hypothesis’ is the given framework for their theories, in which case it ceases to be one hypothesis among many and becomes an article of faith.
Jerome Clark is a UFO historian, deputy president of the J. Allen Hynek Centre for UFO Studies and editor of the CUFOS journal, International UFO Reporter. He is highly critical of such luminaries as John Lear, Bob Lazar, Bill Cooper and Dr. Leo Sprinkle, while proffering his own select cases (Lonnie Zamora, Robert Emenegger-Alan Sandier, Robert Suffern) as the most significant in the history of the subject. In two of these cases, it could be countered, the ‘evidence’ involves as much hearsay as any story told by Clark’s foes. He is prepared to accept that something probably did crash near Roswell in 1947 and that this may have been an alien vehicle, which possibly yielded technological secrets that have since been utilised in the development of secret military aircraft.
Clark and fellow researcher Curtis Peebles are satisfied that the alleged crash of a UFO at Aztec, New Mexico, in 1948 was a hoax, based on an investigation by J.P. Cohn which exposed the story as a fraud scheme devised by Silas Newton, an oil magnate. Stanton Friedman is not so sure, while Wendelle Stevens, Bill Hamilton and Virgil Armstrong are convinced that the incident did occur. Armstrong served as an Army captain in the DIA, worked for the CIA and was a major in the elite Green Beret unit during the Vietnam War. He said that a relatively intact disc landed in an area of the White Sands Proving Grounds on March 25th, 1948 and that he was part of the recovery operation which found five diminutive male corpses aboard the craft.
Addressing a UFO conference in Sydney in 1990, Jerome Clark dismissed America’s Borderland Sciences Research Foundation as "an occult group", a breathtaking phrase which, by association, relegates to superstition and pseudo-science the work of centuries of alternate researchers in a multitude of disciplines. Ex-BSRF director Tom Brown believed in putting the "poetry" back into science, a poetry that included esoteric considerations derided by the materialists. In their 1975 book The Unidentified, Lauren Coleman and Jerome Clark suggested that the UFO phenomenon was a human enigma — a combination of cultural belief and visionary experience.
Jerome Clark is a UFO historian, deputy president of the J. Allen Hynek Centre for UFO Studies and editor of the CUFOS journal, International UFO Reporter. He is highly critical of such luminaries as John Lear, Bob Lazar, Bill Cooper and Dr. Leo Sprinkle, while proffering his own select cases (Lonnie Zamora, Robert Emenegger-Alan Sandier, Robert Suffern) as the most significant in the history of the subject. In two of these cases, it could be countered, the ‘evidence’ involves as much hearsay as any story told by Clark’s foes. He is prepared to accept that something probably did crash near Roswell in 1947 and that this may have been an alien vehicle, which possibly yielded technological secrets that have since been utilised in the development of secret military aircraft.
Clark and fellow researcher Curtis Peebles are satisfied that the alleged crash of a UFO at Aztec, New Mexico, in 1948 was a hoax, based on an investigation by J.P. Cohn which exposed the story as a fraud scheme devised by Silas Newton, an oil magnate. Stanton Friedman is not so sure, while Wendelle Stevens, Bill Hamilton and Virgil Armstrong are convinced that the incident did occur. Armstrong served as an Army captain in the DIA, worked for the CIA and was a major in the elite Green Beret unit during the Vietnam War. He said that a relatively intact disc landed in an area of the White Sands Proving Grounds on March 25th, 1948 and that he was part of the recovery operation which found five diminutive male corpses aboard the craft.
Addressing a UFO conference in Sydney in 1990, Jerome Clark dismissed America’s Borderland Sciences Research Foundation as "an occult group", a breathtaking phrase which, by association, relegates to superstition and pseudo-science the work of centuries of alternate researchers in a multitude of disciplines. Ex-BSRF director Tom Brown believed in putting the "poetry" back into science, a poetry that included esoteric considerations derided by the materialists. In their 1975 book The Unidentified, Lauren Coleman and Jerome Clark suggested that the UFO phenomenon was a human enigma — a combination of cultural belief and visionary experience.
Abduction blues and greys
Bill Cooper, the ‘bete noir’ of American ufology, published Dr. Stephen J. Kerswel’s affidavit against Bud Hopkins, which included Hopkins’ volunteered disclosure of his CIA employment, in Behold a Pale Horse (1991). Appalled by Hopkins’ treatment of abductees, Kerswel mounted an unsuccessful lawsuit against the artist for practising psychiatry without any professional qualifications. This test case gave a green light to anyone wishing to offer their services as an abduction ‘counsellor’.
Ex-CIA agent Derrel Sims runs a support group attached to the Houston UFO Network (HUFON), where the self-described "Master Practitioner in Neuro-Linguistic Programming, Master Hypnotherapist and Master Hypno-Anaesthesiologist"14 hypnotises abductees to wage a bizarre counter-intelligence operation against the evil aliens. Robert Dean and his wife, Cecilia, launched their Crisis Intervention Training Program in Tucson, Arizona, in January, 1996. The 60-hour course trains students to "debrief" abductees. Successful candidates receive a certificate which purportedly authorises them to counsel people who have "some UFO-related trauma".15
The abduction mythology, with its requisite Greys, hybrids and implants, has been formalised by a faction of psychiatrists, psychologists and researchers who discount alternate theories (metaphysical contact, hypnogogic imagery, false memory syndrome, mind control, etc.) Half of all abduction reports emanate from the USA, where individuals like Dr. John Mack, Bud Hopkins, Dr. David Jacobs, Dr. Edith Fiore and Dr. John Carpenter have cultivated a lucrative business in the belief market. Whitley Strieber, responsible for popularising the phenomenon, preaches the need to overcome fear and suspend judgement of the "visitors".
I feel that the present fad of hypnotizing "abductees", which is being engaged in by untrained investigators, will inevitably lead to suffering, breakdown, and possibly even suicide. These investigators usually make the devastating error of assuming that they understand this immense mystery.
They apply nineteenth-century scientific materialism and mechanistic thinking to a problem that actually stretches the limits of the most sophisticated modern thought. These untrained, often poorly educated and unskilled people are spreading a plague of confusion and fear.16
Dr. John Mack plays a 15-minute videocassette at his lectures of an interview he conducted with a bewildered looking Whitley Strieber, whose rambling testimony included an anecdote about looking into the eyes of a "visitor" and gaining instant enlightenment, after which the novelist was able to read people’s minds for a week. Mack compared some of his own experiences on LSD to Strieber’s visitations, after which he faced the camera and said, "Cut that bit out."
Ex-CIA agent Derrel Sims runs a support group attached to the Houston UFO Network (HUFON), where the self-described "Master Practitioner in Neuro-Linguistic Programming, Master Hypnotherapist and Master Hypno-Anaesthesiologist"14 hypnotises abductees to wage a bizarre counter-intelligence operation against the evil aliens. Robert Dean and his wife, Cecilia, launched their Crisis Intervention Training Program in Tucson, Arizona, in January, 1996. The 60-hour course trains students to "debrief" abductees. Successful candidates receive a certificate which purportedly authorises them to counsel people who have "some UFO-related trauma".15
The abduction mythology, with its requisite Greys, hybrids and implants, has been formalised by a faction of psychiatrists, psychologists and researchers who discount alternate theories (metaphysical contact, hypnogogic imagery, false memory syndrome, mind control, etc.) Half of all abduction reports emanate from the USA, where individuals like Dr. John Mack, Bud Hopkins, Dr. David Jacobs, Dr. Edith Fiore and Dr. John Carpenter have cultivated a lucrative business in the belief market. Whitley Strieber, responsible for popularising the phenomenon, preaches the need to overcome fear and suspend judgement of the "visitors".
I feel that the present fad of hypnotizing "abductees", which is being engaged in by untrained investigators, will inevitably lead to suffering, breakdown, and possibly even suicide. These investigators usually make the devastating error of assuming that they understand this immense mystery.
They apply nineteenth-century scientific materialism and mechanistic thinking to a problem that actually stretches the limits of the most sophisticated modern thought. These untrained, often poorly educated and unskilled people are spreading a plague of confusion and fear.16
Dr. John Mack plays a 15-minute videocassette at his lectures of an interview he conducted with a bewildered looking Whitley Strieber, whose rambling testimony included an anecdote about looking into the eyes of a "visitor" and gaining instant enlightenment, after which the novelist was able to read people’s minds for a week. Mack compared some of his own experiences on LSD to Strieber’s visitations, after which he faced the camera and said, "Cut that bit out."
Part 2
Part 2 of an article in which John Lister looks at the politics and possible motivations of the 'leading lights' in today's burgeoning UFO movement.
In her 1989 book Encounters, Dr. Edith Fiore attempted to define a thematic unity from 13 largely disparate abduction reports that she had obtained using hypnotic regression, including that of one man who recalled a former existence as an intergalactic mercenary marine before retirement to the "backwater" of Earth, where he "incorporated" the body of a young boy. He became a "walk-in" in channelling parlance and possessed the donor’s body without consent, contradicting a tenet of this particular mythology.
Fiore helpfully provided the reader with 50 questions to determine the likelihood of personal abduction. These were to be answered by the subconscious in the yes/no swings of a pendulum (which could simply be a button) suspended from a string held between thumb and forefinger. She recommended that the exercise be repeated at different intervals over a number of months and that the answers, including discrepancies, be recorded to arrive at the mean average truth. Apart from the dubious validity of the exercise itself, one must ponder the influence of subjective desire and physical exhaustion on the outcomes. Fiore’s summation was resoundingly positive:
One of the most interesting findings that emerged from this work was the many healings and attempts to heal on the part of the visitors. Even when lasers were not yet being used by Earth people, the extraterrestrials were using them on humans in their spacecraft. I wonder if some of the modern developments in medicine, technology and space exploration can be credited directly or indirectly to the intervention of our space friends. Remember telepathy! Wouldn’t it be interesting if our top scientists were being helped with their research and development?17
Following their appearance at the 1996 UFO Symposium in Brisbane, Dr. Stanton Friedman and Dr. John Mack gave joint lecture evenings in Sydney and Melbourne. The Sydney lecture was held at Scots Church, Wynyard, on October 16th, where Dr. Mack ironically spoke about the need to do away with "the dross of religion". "Religion is a hoax," he stated flatly, while preaching his own eco-religion which replaces sin with a new guilt complex: environmental vandalism. "I’ve been called the first green ufologist and I’m proud of that!" He compared humanity to a parasitic infestation on the skin of the Earth, which is now exacting its revenge. Not for Mack the finer point that most of us are subject to a powerful elite who rape the environment as they please; this is our collective guilt.
At the same time he encouraged us to think of the extraterrestrials as gods and to treat them accordingly during any prospective encounter, because through them lies our only chance to escape ecological doom, an archetypal New Age belief. The aliens are offering us speedy transformation because time is running short. By Dr. Mack’s own standards, such intervention would constitute a subversion of natural justice (viz. human extinction).The stooped Harvard psychiatrist spoke in assured, dulcet tones about higher spirituality and the godliness of the aliens (psychiatric terms?) to an audience of the faithful.
He went on to talk about gratifying sexual encounters that many abductees had allegedly experienced — carnal adventures that we could all look forward to. (Nervous, excited laughter from the audience.) During abductions, he maintained, the aliens often like to pair off men and women and force them to copulate because, for some reason, the aliens are very curious about why we do it. (This elicited a roar of laughter from the audience, who ignored the element of coercion involved.) The aliens sometimes engage in sex with humans, we were told, because they’re interested in the experience and want to create hybrid children. Mack made no mention of rape or technical procedures to remove ova and semen. It seems that his "gods" are beyond human trivialities like morality and ethics.
In her 1989 book Encounters, Dr. Edith Fiore attempted to define a thematic unity from 13 largely disparate abduction reports that she had obtained using hypnotic regression, including that of one man who recalled a former existence as an intergalactic mercenary marine before retirement to the "backwater" of Earth, where he "incorporated" the body of a young boy. He became a "walk-in" in channelling parlance and possessed the donor’s body without consent, contradicting a tenet of this particular mythology.
Fiore helpfully provided the reader with 50 questions to determine the likelihood of personal abduction. These were to be answered by the subconscious in the yes/no swings of a pendulum (which could simply be a button) suspended from a string held between thumb and forefinger. She recommended that the exercise be repeated at different intervals over a number of months and that the answers, including discrepancies, be recorded to arrive at the mean average truth. Apart from the dubious validity of the exercise itself, one must ponder the influence of subjective desire and physical exhaustion on the outcomes. Fiore’s summation was resoundingly positive:
One of the most interesting findings that emerged from this work was the many healings and attempts to heal on the part of the visitors. Even when lasers were not yet being used by Earth people, the extraterrestrials were using them on humans in their spacecraft. I wonder if some of the modern developments in medicine, technology and space exploration can be credited directly or indirectly to the intervention of our space friends. Remember telepathy! Wouldn’t it be interesting if our top scientists were being helped with their research and development?17
Following their appearance at the 1996 UFO Symposium in Brisbane, Dr. Stanton Friedman and Dr. John Mack gave joint lecture evenings in Sydney and Melbourne. The Sydney lecture was held at Scots Church, Wynyard, on October 16th, where Dr. Mack ironically spoke about the need to do away with "the dross of religion". "Religion is a hoax," he stated flatly, while preaching his own eco-religion which replaces sin with a new guilt complex: environmental vandalism. "I’ve been called the first green ufologist and I’m proud of that!" He compared humanity to a parasitic infestation on the skin of the Earth, which is now exacting its revenge. Not for Mack the finer point that most of us are subject to a powerful elite who rape the environment as they please; this is our collective guilt.
At the same time he encouraged us to think of the extraterrestrials as gods and to treat them accordingly during any prospective encounter, because through them lies our only chance to escape ecological doom, an archetypal New Age belief. The aliens are offering us speedy transformation because time is running short. By Dr. Mack’s own standards, such intervention would constitute a subversion of natural justice (viz. human extinction).The stooped Harvard psychiatrist spoke in assured, dulcet tones about higher spirituality and the godliness of the aliens (psychiatric terms?) to an audience of the faithful.
He went on to talk about gratifying sexual encounters that many abductees had allegedly experienced — carnal adventures that we could all look forward to. (Nervous, excited laughter from the audience.) During abductions, he maintained, the aliens often like to pair off men and women and force them to copulate because, for some reason, the aliens are very curious about why we do it. (This elicited a roar of laughter from the audience, who ignored the element of coercion involved.) The aliens sometimes engage in sex with humans, we were told, because they’re interested in the experience and want to create hybrid children. Mack made no mention of rape or technical procedures to remove ova and semen. It seems that his "gods" are beyond human trivialities like morality and ethics.
Stanton’s universe
Nuclear physicist Dr. Stanton T. Friedman appeared to support his colleague’s contentions, describing abduction as "the fast food route to interplanetary travel". (It seems that all we’ve ever needed was a Big Mack!) If he were to see an alien vessel land and its occupants emerge, Friedman claims that he would approach them with the demand "Lead me to your taker!" It gets a laugh but we should consider what an appropriate motto this is for quislings.Another of Friedman’s stock phrases concerns the need for an "Earthling orientation" to unite humanity. He believes that exposure of the UFO cover-up would lead "the younger generation" to exert pressure for such a new world order — the dream of Ronald Reagan and the dread of ufologist-prophets like Stan Deyo and Norio Hayakawa.
I think the only hope for a decent future for this planet is an Earthling orientation. The easiest way to get it is to recognise that somebody’s coming here and that, to them, we are all Earthlings, like it or not. 18
Friedman’s formula lecture grinds through well-worn territory — the Roswell crash (his specialty), MJ-12, the Avro disc, Betty and Barney Hill, the Condon Report, trace samples and famous UFO photographs (the same conspicuous selection adopted by Bill Cooper for his own lectures). One slide showed a disc partly obscured by white vapour, which Friedman identified as an "electromagnetic plasma gas emission". He said that recent developments in nuclear fusion and nuclear fission offered exciting possibilities for the future of space travel, but one would expect a nuclear physicist to promote his livelihood. Of course this form of propulsion is nothing like that used by the aliens, whose technology is "thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands of years in advance of our own".
Friedman won’t countenance the "cult" of Nikola Tesla and stories about Nazi flying saucers or the possible development of anti-gravity technology in this or any previous age.Friedman is convinced that Robert Lazar has no scientific credentials and has never held a scientific post, based on what little he could determine in the course of investigation. He maintains that Lazar failed to gain a high school diploma, although he did pass a course in chemistry. This conflicts with a statement in Alien Encounters magazine: "Bob Lazar was born in 1959 and grew up in Long Island, New York, graduating from Westbury High School in 1976."19 Lazar has stuck to his oft-repeated testimony since 1989 and has received the belated support of Dr. Michael Wolf. British researcher Timothy Good was more circumspect in his assessment of Lazar:
Bob Lazar’s story is fascinating and I feel it’s essentially true. I think he’s lied about his credentials — there’s absolutely no evidence that he has any qualifications as a nuclear physicist, but he’s a very talented engineer, that’s for sure... I think he needed to bolster his image to make the story more credible, but of course, once people realise that he’s exaggerated about something, they tend to throw the baby out with the bathwater, which, in his case, I don’t think we should.20
Lazar’s credibility is further strained by one of his less publicised claims — that when he worked at Los Alamos in the early ’80s he wrote a paper on "Project Excalibur", the construction of an "earth-penetrating, nuclear-tipped missile to destroy underground facilities". At Area S4 he allegedly read a document which referred to "Project Looking Glass, which dealt with the physics of seeing back in time".21
Such a project would seem redundant in the wake of full-fledged time travel asserted in the Montauk mythology.Bill Cooper said that the MJ-12 documents were posted to several UFO researchers in the form of undeveloped rolls of 35mm film in December, 1984. One of the recipients, Californian researcher Jamie Shandera, didn’t go public with the information until 1987, when he was supported by associate Bill Moore. Moore is a colleague of the owlish Dr. Stanton Friedman, who has defended the authenticity of the documents ever since and boasts about a $1000 bet he won from Philip Klass regarding the type-face employed in them.
Bill Cooper believes the documents were a clever hoax and offered pertinent criticism of their Presidential Executive Order serial numbers. He maintained that the other recipients kept their silence because they realised that the documents were a forgery. Cooper said that MJ-12 really referred to "Majority", not Majestic, a point that a researcher on the Australian panel at the Sydney lecture tried to correct Friedman on.The Canadian scientist was plainly irritated to find that Cooper’s proverbial ghost had dogged his steps to the shores of the Antipodes.
A question from the audience asked him to comment on assertions that he was an employee of the CIA, at which he launched into a tirade against "a certain Mr. Milton William Cooper" who had made the accusation. "Anybody who has the audacity to reprint the entire Protocols of the Elders of Zion in one of his books, that anti-Semitic forgery which has been proven to be (so) for the last ninety to a hundred years, has got no credibility at all!" Friedman added that the only time he had ever worked for the government was a fortnight’s duty as a postal delivery officer at a university when he was a student there.
I think the only hope for a decent future for this planet is an Earthling orientation. The easiest way to get it is to recognise that somebody’s coming here and that, to them, we are all Earthlings, like it or not. 18
Friedman’s formula lecture grinds through well-worn territory — the Roswell crash (his specialty), MJ-12, the Avro disc, Betty and Barney Hill, the Condon Report, trace samples and famous UFO photographs (the same conspicuous selection adopted by Bill Cooper for his own lectures). One slide showed a disc partly obscured by white vapour, which Friedman identified as an "electromagnetic plasma gas emission". He said that recent developments in nuclear fusion and nuclear fission offered exciting possibilities for the future of space travel, but one would expect a nuclear physicist to promote his livelihood. Of course this form of propulsion is nothing like that used by the aliens, whose technology is "thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands of years in advance of our own".
Friedman won’t countenance the "cult" of Nikola Tesla and stories about Nazi flying saucers or the possible development of anti-gravity technology in this or any previous age.Friedman is convinced that Robert Lazar has no scientific credentials and has never held a scientific post, based on what little he could determine in the course of investigation. He maintains that Lazar failed to gain a high school diploma, although he did pass a course in chemistry. This conflicts with a statement in Alien Encounters magazine: "Bob Lazar was born in 1959 and grew up in Long Island, New York, graduating from Westbury High School in 1976."19 Lazar has stuck to his oft-repeated testimony since 1989 and has received the belated support of Dr. Michael Wolf. British researcher Timothy Good was more circumspect in his assessment of Lazar:
Bob Lazar’s story is fascinating and I feel it’s essentially true. I think he’s lied about his credentials — there’s absolutely no evidence that he has any qualifications as a nuclear physicist, but he’s a very talented engineer, that’s for sure... I think he needed to bolster his image to make the story more credible, but of course, once people realise that he’s exaggerated about something, they tend to throw the baby out with the bathwater, which, in his case, I don’t think we should.20
Lazar’s credibility is further strained by one of his less publicised claims — that when he worked at Los Alamos in the early ’80s he wrote a paper on "Project Excalibur", the construction of an "earth-penetrating, nuclear-tipped missile to destroy underground facilities". At Area S4 he allegedly read a document which referred to "Project Looking Glass, which dealt with the physics of seeing back in time".21
Such a project would seem redundant in the wake of full-fledged time travel asserted in the Montauk mythology.Bill Cooper said that the MJ-12 documents were posted to several UFO researchers in the form of undeveloped rolls of 35mm film in December, 1984. One of the recipients, Californian researcher Jamie Shandera, didn’t go public with the information until 1987, when he was supported by associate Bill Moore. Moore is a colleague of the owlish Dr. Stanton Friedman, who has defended the authenticity of the documents ever since and boasts about a $1000 bet he won from Philip Klass regarding the type-face employed in them.
Bill Cooper believes the documents were a clever hoax and offered pertinent criticism of their Presidential Executive Order serial numbers. He maintained that the other recipients kept their silence because they realised that the documents were a forgery. Cooper said that MJ-12 really referred to "Majority", not Majestic, a point that a researcher on the Australian panel at the Sydney lecture tried to correct Friedman on.The Canadian scientist was plainly irritated to find that Cooper’s proverbial ghost had dogged his steps to the shores of the Antipodes.
A question from the audience asked him to comment on assertions that he was an employee of the CIA, at which he launched into a tirade against "a certain Mr. Milton William Cooper" who had made the accusation. "Anybody who has the audacity to reprint the entire Protocols of the Elders of Zion in one of his books, that anti-Semitic forgery which has been proven to be (so) for the last ninety to a hundred years, has got no credibility at all!" Friedman added that the only time he had ever worked for the government was a fortnight’s duty as a postal delivery officer at a university when he was a student there.
Spooky connections
The CIA’s infamous Robertson Panel of 1953 recommended that UFO organisations be infiltrated and their activities monitored. Timothy Good’s Above Top Secret (1987) recounted the success of this initiative and its duplication in Britain and Australia. Many of the early groups collapsed from within but is there any reason for the complacent belief that governmental subversion is an historical footnote? Not so, according to researchers who claim to be subjects of ongoing surveillance. This claim has assumed the status of a rite of passage or, in the case of those named as intelligence agents themselves, a badge of verisimilitude.
I have been saying, since the first time I came out and started talking, that the whole UFO movement is controlled by the CIA, and most of the people that you’ve ever seen on stages at UFO events are working for the secret government.22
Bill Cooper nominated various individuals in this capacity, thus ensuring his marginalisation and a ufological backlash that has sought to depict him as a paranoid liar, an alcoholic and a political extremist. Cooper has deserved much of the opprobrium meted out to him by his adoption and misrepresentation of other people’s research, making him a soft target for critics like Donna Kossy [see New Dawn No. 31, pp.39-43]. "But focussing on any one aspect of Cooper’s junk heap of claims is impossible," she alleges in typically restrained style. This blanket statement drags into perfidy the likes of Stan Deyo, John Lear, Bob Oechsler, Bill Hamilton, Linda Moulton Howe and Fred Steckling. Kossy and her sources (the now-married couple who edit America’s UFO Magazine and who were conspicuously slandered by Cooper in Behold a Pale Horse) are not beyond a little ‘creative’ journalism.
Neither Cooper nor anyone else has ever asserted that George Bush was a member of MJ-12. Kossy and company seem to have attempted some clumsy obfuscation of Dr. Vannevar Bush with the Presidential namesake. She proceeded to put an entirely spurious statement into Cooper’s mouth: ‘Since George Bush was on MJ-12, he obviously knew the secret while President.’There’s no doubt that the field of ufology would be immensely poorer without the involvement of ufologist-whistleblowers who admit to prior involvement in the military and intelligence communities. Veteran conspiracy writer Jim Keith cautioned us to temper our cupidity for knowledge with a wider perspective: "People connected with the CIA tend to stay connected with the CIA."23
Thus we should note John Lear’s inordinate pride over his involvement in William Casey’s ‘October Surprise’ operation of 1980.During one of his 1992 Nexus lectures, Stan Deyo recalled a meeting with Stanton Friedman and William Moore that took place in an all-night diner in a small Arizona town during 1983. The pair offered to share secret information with Deyo if he could say the correct code (which was apparently "Gold Eagle"):
What bothered me was that I thought that these guys were just as straight as an arrow and there was no cover-up, and here they are telling me a few hours before, ‘Aliens are here!’ They showed me pictures and stuff like this in my hotel room back in ’83 and they were coming on from the position ‘They are here’. That certainly may be but it worried me that it was under a code sign and these guys are out here telling the UFO crowd various things, and saying we’ve got to do something about this cover-up, blah-blah-blah, and they’re part of the cover-up! I don’t understand. Maybe I misunderstood, and if you’re listening, guys, if you see this tape, I’d appreciate a letter... and not from your solicitors either.24
Bill Moore’s involvement with Air Force Intelligence in a scheme to discredit another UFO researcher, a man who subsequently suffered a nervous breakdown, came to the attention of the press in the 1980s. KLAS TV reporter George Knapp pressed Moore for an explanation, who offered this pathetic defence:
My involvement was only with the motive of learning how the process worked, who was involved with it, and ultimately, if I could, what was behind it. Why is the government doing these kinds of things? I never did quite learn why but I did learn who and I learned a great deal about how.25
FEMA (the U.S. Federal Emergency Management Agency) is allegedly under the control of Zbigniew Brzezinski and Henry Kissinger. Anyone who is concerned about its activities might wonder about Bob Dean’s loyalties. Before his lecture at Leeds University on March 2nd, 1996, Dean was introduced by Graham W. Birdsall (the editor of Britain’s UFO Magazine, which organised the event), who made the following, puzzling statements:
...Retiring from the Army in 1976, he spent the next fourteen years working for FEMA, the Federal Emergency Management Administration [sic]. He retired as an Emergency Service Manager from the FEMA County Sheriff’s Department. Robert is the former Arizona State Assistant Director and the former FEMA County Section Director for Mutual UFO Network, MUFON...26
Ufologists are reputedly known as ‘useful idiots’ in CIA circles and their behaviour sometimes confirms this impression. The recent Australian documentary Conspiracy featured the leaders of Sydney’s ASTRO group as ‘Dennis, Independant Researcher’ (Bob Lazar’s first nom de plume) and ‘James T. Ellis, Former Intelligence Analyst’. This name was apparently based on a U.S. Air Force radar operator named James Ellis, who stated that UFO radar blips were routinely detected during his 26 years of service.
Contemporary fascination with the subject has seen the launch of four commercial magazines in Britain within the last two years all of which are striving to carve a separate identity in the core market, Generation X (Files). Two are in the anti-conspiracy camp and two are in the opposition but they generally mull over the same material that tired American publications have been repackaging since the heady days of the late ’80s, when Lear, Lazar, Cooper and Bielek revolutionised the field. There have been more recent novelties like flying triangles, the Santilli film, the Brazilian crash and stories of violence meted out to alien survivors but there is a perceptible disappointment that greater revelations have not followed.
In the face of sustained government intransigence, there is a growing consensus that such revelations depend on the caprice of the aliens.Linda Moulton Howe said that we live in a "schizophrenic society". The description aptly suits the microcosm of ufology, where a supermarket of belief systems has obscured the relevance of the subject and reinforced its fringe status. The general public have been acclimatised to the existence of extraterrestrials through what Bob Oechsler believes to be a deliberate campaign of "selective fictions". The reliable strategy of divide and conquer is applied with the modern propaganda of ‘friendly fascism’. Whether or not aliens exist, they offer a convenient scapegoat and distraction to the very real machinations of terrestrial invaders
I have been saying, since the first time I came out and started talking, that the whole UFO movement is controlled by the CIA, and most of the people that you’ve ever seen on stages at UFO events are working for the secret government.22
Bill Cooper nominated various individuals in this capacity, thus ensuring his marginalisation and a ufological backlash that has sought to depict him as a paranoid liar, an alcoholic and a political extremist. Cooper has deserved much of the opprobrium meted out to him by his adoption and misrepresentation of other people’s research, making him a soft target for critics like Donna Kossy [see New Dawn No. 31, pp.39-43]. "But focussing on any one aspect of Cooper’s junk heap of claims is impossible," she alleges in typically restrained style. This blanket statement drags into perfidy the likes of Stan Deyo, John Lear, Bob Oechsler, Bill Hamilton, Linda Moulton Howe and Fred Steckling. Kossy and her sources (the now-married couple who edit America’s UFO Magazine and who were conspicuously slandered by Cooper in Behold a Pale Horse) are not beyond a little ‘creative’ journalism.
Neither Cooper nor anyone else has ever asserted that George Bush was a member of MJ-12. Kossy and company seem to have attempted some clumsy obfuscation of Dr. Vannevar Bush with the Presidential namesake. She proceeded to put an entirely spurious statement into Cooper’s mouth: ‘Since George Bush was on MJ-12, he obviously knew the secret while President.’There’s no doubt that the field of ufology would be immensely poorer without the involvement of ufologist-whistleblowers who admit to prior involvement in the military and intelligence communities. Veteran conspiracy writer Jim Keith cautioned us to temper our cupidity for knowledge with a wider perspective: "People connected with the CIA tend to stay connected with the CIA."23
Thus we should note John Lear’s inordinate pride over his involvement in William Casey’s ‘October Surprise’ operation of 1980.During one of his 1992 Nexus lectures, Stan Deyo recalled a meeting with Stanton Friedman and William Moore that took place in an all-night diner in a small Arizona town during 1983. The pair offered to share secret information with Deyo if he could say the correct code (which was apparently "Gold Eagle"):
What bothered me was that I thought that these guys were just as straight as an arrow and there was no cover-up, and here they are telling me a few hours before, ‘Aliens are here!’ They showed me pictures and stuff like this in my hotel room back in ’83 and they were coming on from the position ‘They are here’. That certainly may be but it worried me that it was under a code sign and these guys are out here telling the UFO crowd various things, and saying we’ve got to do something about this cover-up, blah-blah-blah, and they’re part of the cover-up! I don’t understand. Maybe I misunderstood, and if you’re listening, guys, if you see this tape, I’d appreciate a letter... and not from your solicitors either.24
Bill Moore’s involvement with Air Force Intelligence in a scheme to discredit another UFO researcher, a man who subsequently suffered a nervous breakdown, came to the attention of the press in the 1980s. KLAS TV reporter George Knapp pressed Moore for an explanation, who offered this pathetic defence:
My involvement was only with the motive of learning how the process worked, who was involved with it, and ultimately, if I could, what was behind it. Why is the government doing these kinds of things? I never did quite learn why but I did learn who and I learned a great deal about how.25
FEMA (the U.S. Federal Emergency Management Agency) is allegedly under the control of Zbigniew Brzezinski and Henry Kissinger. Anyone who is concerned about its activities might wonder about Bob Dean’s loyalties. Before his lecture at Leeds University on March 2nd, 1996, Dean was introduced by Graham W. Birdsall (the editor of Britain’s UFO Magazine, which organised the event), who made the following, puzzling statements:
...Retiring from the Army in 1976, he spent the next fourteen years working for FEMA, the Federal Emergency Management Administration [sic]. He retired as an Emergency Service Manager from the FEMA County Sheriff’s Department. Robert is the former Arizona State Assistant Director and the former FEMA County Section Director for Mutual UFO Network, MUFON...26
Ufologists are reputedly known as ‘useful idiots’ in CIA circles and their behaviour sometimes confirms this impression. The recent Australian documentary Conspiracy featured the leaders of Sydney’s ASTRO group as ‘Dennis, Independant Researcher’ (Bob Lazar’s first nom de plume) and ‘James T. Ellis, Former Intelligence Analyst’. This name was apparently based on a U.S. Air Force radar operator named James Ellis, who stated that UFO radar blips were routinely detected during his 26 years of service.
Contemporary fascination with the subject has seen the launch of four commercial magazines in Britain within the last two years all of which are striving to carve a separate identity in the core market, Generation X (Files). Two are in the anti-conspiracy camp and two are in the opposition but they generally mull over the same material that tired American publications have been repackaging since the heady days of the late ’80s, when Lear, Lazar, Cooper and Bielek revolutionised the field. There have been more recent novelties like flying triangles, the Santilli film, the Brazilian crash and stories of violence meted out to alien survivors but there is a perceptible disappointment that greater revelations have not followed.
In the face of sustained government intransigence, there is a growing consensus that such revelations depend on the caprice of the aliens.Linda Moulton Howe said that we live in a "schizophrenic society". The description aptly suits the microcosm of ufology, where a supermarket of belief systems has obscured the relevance of the subject and reinforced its fringe status. The general public have been acclimatised to the existence of extraterrestrials through what Bob Oechsler believes to be a deliberate campaign of "selective fictions". The reliable strategy of divide and conquer is applied with the modern propaganda of ‘friendly fascism’. Whether or not aliens exist, they offer a convenient scapegoat and distraction to the very real machinations of terrestrial invaders
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