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The P/\NTHER -UMF & TRSi- __________________________________________________________________________ THE OMNI SIX PART SERIES ENTITLED: COSMIC CONSPIRACY: SIX DECADES OF GOVERNMENT UFO COVER-UPS Compiled by: The P/\NTHER TRSI/UMF Edited by: INDESTROY/UMF INDEX: Part I - Cosmic Consipiracy April '94 I.a - The Freedom Fighter's Handbook I.b - Inside the Military: I.c - The Great High Rise Abduction I.d - Soviet Saucers Part II - Cosmic Conspiracy May '94 Part III - Cosmic Conspiracy June '94 Part IV - Cosmic Conspiracy July '94 Part V - Cosmic Conspiracy August '94 Part VI - Cosmic Conspiracy September '94 [ Editor's Note - From the Desk of UMF: Although the information here is fairly reliable, it is by no means a SOUCE of information. This is a reprint of OMNI articles, and should be treated as a REFERENCE, to be used with other Publications and articles.] ____________________________________________________________________________ COSMIC CONSPIRACY: SIX DECADES OF GOVERNMENT UFO COVER-UPS PART I Article By Dennis Stacy Lightning flashed over Corona, New Mexico, and thunder rattled the thin windowpanes of the small shack where ranch foreman Mac Brazel slept. Brazel was used to summer thunderstorms, but he was suddenly brought wide awake by a loud explosion that set the dishes in the kitchen sink dancing. Sonofabitch, he thought to himself before sinking back to sleep, the sheep will be scattered halfway between hell and high water come dawn. In the morning, Brazel rode out on horseback, accompanied by seven-year-old Timothy Proctor, to survey the damage. According to published accounts, Brazel and young Proctor stumbled across something unearthly-a field of tattered debris two to three hundred yards wide stretching some three-quarters of a mile in length. No rocket scientist, Brazel still realized he had something strange on his hands-so strange that he decided to haul several pieces of it into Roswell, some 75 miles distant, a day or two later. For all its lightness, the debris in Brazel's pickup bed seemed remarkably durable. Sheriff George Wilcox reportedly took one look at it and called the military at Roswell Army Air Field, then home to the world's only atomic-bomb wing. Two officers from the base eventually arrived and agreed to accompany Brazel back to the debris field. As a consequence of their investigation, a press release unique in the history of the American military appeared on the front page of Roswell DAily Record for July 8, 1947. Authored by public information officer Lt. Walter Haut and approved by base commander Col. William Blanchard, it admitted that the many rumors regarding UFOs "became a reality yesterday when the intelligence office of the 509th Bomb Group of the Eighth Air Force, Roswell Army Air Field, was fortunate enough to gain possession of a disc through the cooperation of one of the local ranchers and the sheriff's office of Chaves County." Haut's noon press release circled the planet, reprinted in papers as far abroad as Germany and England, where it was picked up by the prestigious London Times. UFOs were real! Media calls poured in to the Roswell Daily Record and the local radio station, which had first broken the news, demanding additional details. Four hours later and some 600 miles to the east in Fort Worth, Texas, Brig. Gen. Roger Ramey, commander of the Eighth Air Force, held a press conference to answer reporters' questions. Spread on the general's office floor were lumps of a blackened, rubberlike material and crumpled pieces of what looked like a flimsy tinfoil kite. Ramey posed for pictures, kneeling on his carpet with the material, as did Maj. Jesse Marcel, flown in from Roswell for the occasion. Alas, allowed the general, the Roswell incident was simple case of mistaken identity; in reality, the so-called recovered flying disc was nothing more than a weather balloon with an attached radar reflector. "Unfortunately, the media bought the Air Force cover-up hook, line, and sinker," asserts Stanton Friedman, a nuclear physicist and coauthor with aviation writer Don Berliner of Crash at Corona, one of three books written about Roswell. "The weather balloon story went in the next morning's papers, the phone calls dropped off dramatically, and any chance of an immediate follow-up was effectively squelched." Ramey's impromptu press conference marks the beginning of what Friedman refers to as a "'Cosmic Watergate,' the ongoing cover-up of the government's knowledge about extraterrestrial UFOs and their terrestrial activities." By contrast, says Friedman, the original Watergate snafu and cover-up pales in significance. In fact, if Friedman and his cohorts within the UFO community are correct, military involvement in the recovery of a crashed flying saucer would rank as the most well-kept and explosive secret in world history. Of course, not all students of the subject see it that way. "You have to put Roswell in a certain context," cautions Curtis Peebles, an aerospace historian whose treatment of UFOs as an evolving belief system in Watch the Skies! was just published by the Smithsonian Institute. "And the relevant context is the role of government and its relationship to the governed. Americans have always been suspicious, if not actively contemptuous, of their government. On the other hand, forget what the government says and look at what it does. Is there any evidence in the historical record that the Air Force or government behaved as if it actually owned a flying saucer presumably thousands of years in advance of anything on either the Soviet or U.S. side? If there, I didn't find it." Regardless of its ultimate reality, however, Roswell symbolizes the difficulties and frustrations Friedman and fellow UFOlogists have encountered in prying loose what the government does or does not know about UFOs. Memories fade, documents get lost or misplaced, witnesses die, and others refuse to speak up, either out of fear of ridicule, or according to Friedman, because of secrecy oaths. Despite a trail that lay cold for more than 30 years, UFOlogists still consider Roswell one of the most convincing UFO cases on record. In 1978, for example, Friedman personally interviewed Maj. Jesse Marcel shortly before his death. "He still didn't know what the material was," says Friedman, "except that it was like nothing he had ever seen before and certainly wasn't from any weather balloon." According to what Marcel reportedly told Friedman, in Fact, the featherlight material couldn't be dented by a sledgehammer or burned by a blowtorch. Yet getting the Air Force itself to say anything about Roswell in particular of UFOs in general can be an exercise in futility. Officials are either bureaucratically vague or maddeningly abrupt. Maj. David Thurston, a Pentagon spokesperson for the Air Force Office of Public Affairs, could only refer inquires to the Air Force Historical Research Center in Montgomery, Alabama, where unit histories are kept on microfilm for public review. But a spokesperson there said they had no "investigative material" and suggested checking the National Archives for files from Project Blue Book, the Air Force's public UFO investigative agency from the late 1940s until its closure in December of 1969. Indeed, the dismissive nature with which U.S. officials treated Blue Book research seemed to indicate they were unimpressed; on that point, believers and skeptics alike agree. But according to Friedman and colleagues, that demeanor, and Blue Book itself, was a ruse. Instead far from the eyes of Blue Book patsies, in top-secret meetings of upper-echelon intelligence officers from military and civilian agencies alike, UFOs-including real crashed saucers and the mangled bodies of aliens-were the subject of endless study and debate. What's more, claims Friedman, proof of this UFO reality can be found in the classified files of government vaults. With all this documentation, Friedman might have had a field day. Unfortunately, researchers had no mechanism for forcing classified documents to the surface until 1966, when Congress passed the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). The FOIA was later amended in the last year of the Nixon administration (1974) to include the Privacy Act. Now individuals could view their own files, and some UFOlogists-Friedman included-were surprised to find that their personal UFO activities had resulted in government dossiers. Be that as it may, UFOlogists saw the FOIA as a means to an end, and beginning in the 1970s, their requests and lawsuits started pouring in. Attorneys for the Connecticut based Citizens Against UFO Secrecy (CAUS) and other UFO activists eventually unleashed a flood tide of previously classified UFO documents. In many cases, notes Barry Greenwood, director of research for CAUS and coauthor with Lawrence Fawcett of The Government UFO Cover-up, most agencies at first denied they had any such documents in their files. "A case in point is the CIA," says Greenwood, "which assured us that its interest and involvement in UFOs ended in 1953. After a lengthy lawsuit, the CIA ultimately released more than ten thousand pages of documents pertaining to UFOs, the overwhelming majority of which were from the CIA, FBI, Air Force, and various other military agencies. It's safe to say there are probably that many more we haven't seen." As might be expected, the UFO paper trail is a mixed bag. Many of the documents released are simply sighting reports logged well after the demise of Blue Book. Others are more tantalizing. A document released by the North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) revealed that several sensitive military bases scattered from Maine to Montana were temporarily put on alert status following a series of sightings in October and November of 1975. An Air Force Office of Special Intelligence document reported a landed light seen near Kirtland Air Force Base, Albuquerque, New Mexico, on the night of August 8, 1980. Another warm and still-smoking gun, according to Greenwood, is the so called Bolender memo, named after its author, Brig. Gen. C. H. Bolender, then Air Force deputy director of development. Dated October 20, 1969, it expressly states that "reports of unidentified flying objects which could affect national security. . .are not part of the Blue Book system." Says Greenwood, "I take that to mean that Blue Book was little more than an exercise in public relations. The really significant reports went somewhere else. Where did they go? That's what we would like to know." Of course there are objections to such a literal interpretation. "As I understand the context in which it was written," says Phillip Klass, a former senior editor with Aviation Week and Space Technology and author of UFOs: The Public Deceived, "the Bolender memo tried to address the problem of what would happen with UFO reports of any sort following the closure of Project Blue Book. Bolender was simply saying that other channels for such reports, be they incoming Soviet missiles or whatever, already existed." Greenwood counters that the original memo speaks for itself, adding that "the interesting thing is that sixteen referenced attachments are presently reported as missing from Air Force files." Missing files are one problem. Files known to exists but kept under wraps, notes Greenwood, are another. To make his point, he cites a case involving the ultrasecret National Security Agency, or NSA, an acronym often assumed by insiders to mean "Never Say Anything." Using cross references found in CIA and other intelligence-agency papers, CAUS attorneys filed for the release of all NSA documents pertaining to the UFO phenomenon. After initial denials, the NSA admitted to the existence of some 160 such documents but resisted their release on the grounds of national security. Federal District Judge Gerhard Gessell upheld the NSA's request for suppression following a review (judge's chambers only) of the agency's classified 21-page In Camera petition. "Two years later," Greenwood says, "we finally got a copy of the NSA In Camera affidavit. Of 582 lines, 412, or approximately 75 percent, were completely blacked out. The government can't have it both ways. Either UFOs affect national security or they don't." The NSA's blockage of the CAUS suit only highlights the shortcomings of the Freedom of Information Act, according to Friedman. "The American public operates under the illusion that the FOIA is some sort of magical key that will unlock all the the government's secret vaults," he says, "that all you have to do is ask. They also seem to think everything is in one big computer file somewhere deep in the bowels of the Pentagon, when nothing could be farther from the truth. Secrecy thrives on compartmentalization." In recent years, UFOlogists have found an unusual ally in the person of Steven Aftergood, an electrical engineer who directs the Project on Government and Secrecy for the Washington, DC-based Federation of American Scientists, where most members wouldn't ordinarily give UFOs the time of day. "Our problem," says Aftergood, "is with government secrecy on principle, because it widens the gap between citizens and government, making it that much more difficult to participate in the democratic process. It's also antithetical to peer review and cross-fertilization, two natural processes conducive to the growth of both science and technology. Bureaucratic secrecy is also prohibitively expensive." Aftergood cites some daunting statistics in his favor. Despite campaign promises by a succession of Democratic and Republican presidential administrations to make government files more publicly accessible, more than 300 million documents compiled prior to 1960 in the National Archives alone still await declassification. Aftergood also points to a 1990 Department of Defense study, which estimated the cost of protecting industrial-not military-secrets at almost $14 billion a year. "That's a budget about the size of NASA's," he says, adding that "the numbers were ludicrous enough during the Cold War, but now that the Cold War is supposedly over, they're even more ludicrous." Could the Air Force and other government agencies have their own hidden agenda for maintaining the reputed Cosmic Watergate? Yes, according to some pundits who say UFOs may be our own advanced super-top-secret aerial platforms, not extraterrestrial vehicles from on high. Something of the sort could be occurring at the supersecret Groom Lake test facility in Nevada, part of the immense Nellis Air Force Base gunnery range north of Las Vegas. Aviation buffs believe the Groom Lake runway, one of the world's longest, could be home to the much-rumored Aurora, reputed to be a hypersonic Mach-8 spy plane and a replacement for the recently retired SR-71 Blackbird. In fact, the Air Force routinely denies the existence of Aurora. And with Blue Book a closed chapter, it no longer has to hold press conferences to answer reporters' questions about UFOs. From the government's perspective, the current confusion between terrestrial technology and extraterrestrial UFOs could be a marriage of both coincidence and convenience. The Air Force doesn't seem to be taking chances. On September 30 of last year, it initiated procedures to seize another 3,900 acres adjoining Groom Lake, effectively sealing off two public viewing sites of a base it refuses to admit exists. By perpetuating such disinformation, if that is, in fact, what's happening, the Air Force might be using a page torn from the Soviet Union's Cold War playbook. James Oberg, a senior space engineer and author of Red Star in Orbit, a critical analysis of the Soviet space program, has long argued that Soviet officials remained publicly mum about the widely reported Russian UFOs in the 1970s and 1980s because such reports masked military operations conducted at the supersecret Plesetsk Cosmodrome. "Could a similar scenario occur in this country? It's conceivable," concedes oberg. "On the other hand, should our own government take an interest in UFO reports, especially those that may reflect missile or space technology from around the world? Sure. I'd be dismayed if we didn't. But does it follow that alien-acquired technology recovered as Roswell is driving our own space technology program? I don't see any outstanding evidence for it." Friedman's counterargument is not so much a technological as a political one. "Governments and nations demand allegiance in order to survive," he says. "They don't want us thinking in global terms, as a citizen of a planet as opposed to a particular political entity, because that would threaten their very existence. The impact on our collective social, economic, and religious structures of admitting that we have been contacted by another intelligent life form would be enormous if not literally catastrophic to the political powers that be." Whatever its reason for holding large numbers of documents and an array of information close to the vest, there's no doubt that the U.S. government has been less than forthcoming on the topic of UFOs. Historically, the government's public attitude toward UFOs has run the gamut of human emotions, at times confused and dismissive, at others deliberately covert and coy. On one hand, it claims to have recovered a flying disc; on the other, a weather balloon. One night UFOs constitute a threat to the national security; the next they are merely part of a public hysteria based on religious feelings, fear of technology, mass hypnosis, or whatever the prevailing psychology of the era will bear. To sort through the layers of confusion spawned by the governments stance and to reveal informational chasms, whatever the cause, Omni is launching a series of six continuing articles. In the following months, we will take the long view, scanning through the history to examine UFOs under wraps in the decades following Roswell. In the next installment, look for our report on official efforts to squelch UFO mania and keep tabs on UFO researchers in the McCarthy-era landscape of the Fifties. *END* **************************************************************************** PART I.a FREEDOM FIGHTERS HANDBOOK: THE OFFICIAL FREEDOM OF INFORMATION ACT HOW-TO FOR INVESTIGATING UFOs By Paul McCarthy Many people think the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), passed by Congress in 1966, gives an American citizen automatic access to any government document. Not so. UFO researchers have found that it gives them the right to request, but government agencies retain the right to deny-as they often do. In fact, applicants find, FOIA requests may be stymied by any number of exemptions. When information if related to criminal investigations, pending policy deliberations, national security considerations, or when it violates an individual's privacy, the FOIA application is denied. The applicant can appeal, of course, and if he or she loses, may take the case to federal court-but who has the money? On top of that, FOIA requests are not a priority with the government, so some agencies have backlogs that won't be acted upon for years. On other occasions, UFO investigators suspect their petitions are acted upon too quickly and end up in the circular file. Yet thousands of pages of UFO documents have been pried loose over the past 20 years. None clinch the case for a government cover-up of UFO activity, but they, along with the cross-referencing of other documents and insider tips, hold out the intriguing possibility that the government is clinging to hundreds of thousands of pages of files for the diligent or luck to unearth. Hoping to satisfy our readers' fascination for government secrets new and old, the following handbook details some of the most tantalizing FOIA requests and provides tips on tapping the government for more. YOUR EYES ONLY: OMNI'S TOP TIPS FOR ACCESSING CLASSIFIED MATERIAL ON UFOs ON THE DOCKET UFOlogists list the most dramatic attempts to pry loose documents still marked classified. The Big Fish. The most important FOIA UFO case ever, according to UFO researcher Stanton Friedman, was filed in 1979 against the CIA. Citizens Against UFO Secrecy (CAUS), an Alexandria, Virginia, organization headed by Larry Byrant, joined with others, including Friedman, to go after all UFO documents in the possession of the CIA. The CIA responded that it could do nothing because the documents it had were issued by other agencies and could only be released by them. Of those, CAUS went after 18 National Security Agency (NSA) documents, but the NSA would not release them, claiming they would reveal "sources and methods." CAUS filed an admini-strative appeal with the NSA and lost. It then went to federal court, and the judge ordered NSA to search its files for UFO documents. Surprise: 239 documents showed up-79 from other unnamed agencies, 23 from the CIA, and 137 unexpected NSA bonus documents. Still, the NSA refused to release them, and the judge, after reading the NSA's justification, agreed. Under a later FOIA actions, the CIA released 9 of its 23 documents, mostly unimportant abstracts of Eastern European press stories on UFOs. Adding the original 18 NSA documents that CAUS sought to the newly uncovered batch of 137 shows that the NSA held on to 155 while the CIA retained 11. In addition, 79 documents from other agencies never saw the light of day-proof, according to Friedman, that the government can keep a secret. Project Moon Dust. Projects Moon Dust and Blue Fly are purportedly efforts aimed at retrieving manmade space objects that reenter the atmosphere and crash. Clifford Stone, a retired U.S. Army sergeant with an interest in UFOs, has been trying to get the military to admit that it runs these projects and that it also recovers downed UFOs. Stone claims that the 696th Intelligence Group at Andrews Air Force Base, Maryland, makes these retrievals, and he has even submitted an FOIA request for the group's UFO files. Records from Roswell. The Roswell case, in which a UFO is said to have crashed near Roswell, New Mexico, in July 1947, continues to haunt researchers and to draw numerous FOIA requests. In one of these, Don Schmitt, a researcher from the Center for UFO Studies in Illinois and coauthor with Kevin Randle of the 1991 book UFO Crash at Roswell, has filed an FOIA request on behalf of the family of Mac Brazel, the rancher who found the purported UFO wreckage. "Specifically, we wanted to see the results of a medical examination allegedly given to Brazel by the United STates Army after he made his discovery," Schmitt explains. "The Army denied that it had records on Brazel of any soft, even though Brazel served in the Army during WWII." Secret Sins. Is there a secrecy oath signed by military personnel involved with UFOs? Many UFO investigators, including Don Schmitt, claim to have active-duty and retired military witnesses who will talk privately but not openly about UFOs and the government for fear of losing pensions. Schmitt awaits the results of an FOIA request submitted to the Army, Navy, and Air Force on whether or not an oath of secrecy actually exists. X Marks the Spot. Another facet of the Roswell case concerns a United Press International (UPI) reporter who supposedly told Schmitt that in the early 1960s, a public-information officer (PIO) at Holloman Air Force Base showed him a map of the Roswell crash site and even drove him out to look at it. Schmitt's FOIA asks for the name of the PIO and seeks to learn whether he ever worked with a UPI reporter in the early Sixties. Name, Rank, and Serial Number. Schmitt would also like to obtain the records of an ultimately locate 30 military personnel who allegedly worked at Roswell Air Force Base in 1947. He submitted an FOIA with their names and serial numbers, asking for access to their complete records. The Air Force responded that it had no records on those individuals. Operation Majestic. The MJ-12 documents-short for Operation Majestic-turned up in microfilm form in the mailbox of Jaime Shadera, a UFO investigator, back in 1984. Although most UFO researchers now believe the documents are phony, some say they may be evidence of a top-secret briefing given to president-elect Dwight Eisenhower in November 1952 by Admiral Roscoe Hillenkoetter, then-director of the CIA. After spending considerable time and money trying to verify these documents, Stanton Friedman put in an FOIA request in 1989. He thought he could study the authenticity of the controversial MJ-12 documents by comparing them to other CIA briefings of like. Friedman learned the times and dates of these additional briefings in archival research and using that specific information requested the documents from the CIA. Two years later, the CIA responded that it could not find any such briefing documents. Friedman appealed but was told he was number 390 on the list. He is still waiting for a response. FOIA Wannabes. Fred Olsen III would like to submit an FOIA request to the Air Force that asks for the guncamera photos of UFOs that former military pilots claim were taken during the 1940s and 1950s. Don Schmitt would like to submit an FOIA request to the Air Force on the contents and purpose of a mysterious military transport plan said to have departed from Roswell Air Force Base under tight security on July 9, 1947. FOIA TIPS For those sturdy souls who wish to buck the tide, it is sometimes possible to successfully wield the Freedom of Information Act to dredge up information buried deep. To help the uninitiated work the system and uncover as much as possible, FOIA pro Don Schmitt of the Center for UFO Studies provides three useful tips: * UFOlogists believe petitions may be screened for buzzwords like UFO, which tip officials off to give the request prejudicial treatment, so researchers try to be creative. "We never refer to Roswell by name," says Schmitt, "and in the last five years, I have not made an FOIA request in which I specifically referred to UFOs." * Schmitt and other FOIA experts often request paragraphs, even sentences, not in classified documents just to see whether the agency has any information on the topic at all. The technique also confuses officials, preventing them from pigeonholing the request as UFO related, thus encouraging them to give it a higher priority and push it through. * Hoping to stop the government in efforts to pull the wool over their eyes, UFO researchers often request documents they know for a fact exist. "We often try to trip them up," Schmitt explains. "We sent in our request; they deny it. Then we send copies of specific documents that refer to the documents they claim they don't have." SIDE-STEPPING THE FOIA The frustrations of filing an FOIA being what they are, a number of UFO researchers have now evolved alternative strategies for prying documents from government vaults. A couple of the most prominent efforts are detailed below. MOON DUST II. Cliff Stone's requests to the Air Force and Defense Intelligence Agency for projects Moon Dust and Blue Fly information were unsuccessful, so he's making similar requests through the office of Senator Jeff Bingaman of New Mexico who is working with the Pentagon's Congressional Liaison Office on this issue. Remember, you are part of a constituency; your representative can help. Operation Right to Know. In 1992, Operation Right to Know was formed by three Mutual UFO Network members who felt political action was the only way to wrest secrets from the government. They passed out UFO literature on the ellipse behind the White House in 1992, picketed in front of the White House in 1993, and demonstrated outside the United Nations building in New York in November 1993. Operation Right to Know now has more than 200 members, is growing wit European chapters, and will probably picket for access to government UFO information in a city near you. *END* **************************************************************************** PART I.b INSIDE THE MILITARY: UFO UNDERGROUND Article by A.J.S. Rayl In 1969, Project Blue Book-the 16-year U.S. Air Force investigation of UFOs-came to an end, and so did the government's interest in extraterrestrial flying discs. Of so the American public has been told. In recent years, numerous individuals and documents from various agencies have emerged from behind the veil of government secrecy to tell a different story. Their spin: that while the government officially abandoned all interest in UFOs, a secret military underground was hot on the trail of suspicious radar blips, saucers, and even the aliens themselves. What follows are the stories of three individuals-two of whom come with impressive military credentials; they say they have glimpsed what seems like evidence of a decades-old cover-up cloaked in the guise of national security. The third interviewee, a propulsion-system engineer, claims he was hired by an independent military contractor to study the innards of an extraterrestrial spacecraft being researched and tested on the Nellis Air Range in central Nevada. Omni cannot endorse the veracity of the stories told below. In fact, we must emphasize that extraordinary tales like these require extraordinary levels of proof certainly not furnished in our pages, nor, we feel, anywhere else. That said, we'll get to the fun part. In the pages that follow, you'll find strange tales of alien intrigue and UFO woe. Decide for yourself: Are these the ravings of demented hoaxers and madmen or revelations of truth? Their stories, delivered in dossier format, have been edited from interviews conducted by author A.J.S. Rayl during the past year. NATO Meets E.T. Name: Robert O. Dean, retired Army command sergeant major Claim: Back in the Sixties, NATO issued a classified report stating that UFOs were real, of extraterrestrial origin, and had visited the earth. This extraordinary report was said to come our of NATO's command center, the Supreme Headquarters Allied Powers, Europe (SHAPE), located then just outside of Paris, France. Background: Dean, a highly decorated veteran, served on the front lines in both Korea and Vietnam. In 1963, while assigned to the Supreme Headquarters Operations Center (SHOC), SHAPE's war room, headed up by then-supreme allied commander of Europe, Gen. Lyman Lemnitzer, Dean claims he was able to read the detailed 12-inch-thick NATO report on UFOs. The Story: "SHAPE was one of those choice assignments. You had to have a spotless record and pass security background checks. I applied on a whim and got it. I was very proud and pleased. At SHAPE, I was put through more security checks, given a Cosmic Top Secret (yes, this is a real term) clearance, the highest NATO has, and assigned to the Supreme Headquarters Operations Center, known as SHOC, the NATO war room. In those days, the activity would run hot and cold and much of it would depend on how the Soviets wanted to play it. The most intriguing thing to me was that we were continually having a problem with large, metallic, circular objects that would appear over central Europe; these were reported as visual phenomena by our pilots and appeared on radar as well. Some flew in formation, and most of the time we spotted them coming out of the Soviet Union, over East Germany, West Germany, France, and then they would often circle somewhere over the English Channel and head north, disappearing from NATO radar over the Norwegian Sea. These objects were very large, moving very fast, at very high altitudes-higher than we could reach at the time-and they seemed obviously under intelligent control. "I was told this had been going on for some time and that in February 1961 there had been quite a scare. Fifty of these objects were spotted on radar and headed in formation from the Soviet Union toward Europe, flying at about 100,000 feet. The Soviets had closed all borders. Everybody went to red alert. All hell broke loose. We really thought 'The War' had started. We scrambled. We knew the Russians were scrambling. It was the largest number of these objects that had been seen. Fortunately -and only by the grace of God-we didn't start bombing and neither did the Russians. In nine minutes, they were gone. "I was told that then-Deputy Supreme Allied Commander of Europe, Sir Thomas Pike, had been repeatedly requesting information from London and Washington about these objects, but nothing would ever come. We found out later that the Columbine-Topaz spy ring in Paris was intercepting everything and forwarding it to the KGB, which often got intelligence information even before we did. So Pike decided, I was told, to develop an in-house study to determine whether these objects were a military threat. "In the meantime, the UFO matter literally brought about the establishment of direct communication between the East and West in 1962, which I have always found interesting and ironic. We had pretty well determined by that time that these were not Russian craft, and the Russians had determined they were not ours. So, we came to an understanding, and a direct telephone line was opened between SHOC and the Warsaw Pact Headquarters Command. Of course, a setup was always a possibility, so we had backup ways of checking out whether the Russians were being truthful. But since we were both armed to the teeth and World War III was just ticking away, it was a logical step in the right direction. That idea developed into the hotline between the president of the United States and the soviet premier, following the Cuban Missile Crisis. "Well, by the time I arrived in 1963, everybody had been talking about the study, and I had heard the rumors, seen the blips on radar, witnesses the commotions, and some of us occasionally even talked about the possibilities. But nothing really prepared me for what I started to read in the early morning hours one night in January 1964. "It was about 2:00 a.m. and a relatively quiet night when the SHOC controller on duty went into the vault and came out with this huge document. 'Take a look at this,' he said. The title was simply Assessment: An Evaluation of a Possible Military Threat to Allied Forces in Europe. It was numbered, #3, stamped Cosmic Top Secret, had eight inches worth of appendices, dozens of photographs, and had been signed into the vault by German colonel Heinz Berger, SHOC's head of security: I quickly learned that it was based on two and a half years of research, was funded by NATO money, and that only 15 copies were published-in English, German, and French. Each one was numbered. All were classified and ordered to be kept under lock and key. "Every time I got the chance, from then until I left, I would read a section or two in it. It was the most intriguing document I'd ever read. It was put together by military representatives of every NATO nation and also included contributions from some of the greatest scientific minds. These objects were violating all of our known laws of physics, and the study team had gone to Cambridge, Oxford, the Sorbonne, MIT, and other major universities for input on chemistry, physics, atmospheric physics, biology, history, psychology, and even theology, all of which were separate appendices. "I read about theories on Einstein's sought-after unified-field theory, the high radiation at various landing sites, and UFO reports that dated back to the Roman era and up to our own F105 pilots' sightings and encounters, and on and on. I had always been a skeptic, but this report, well . . . it concluded that this stuff was not science fiction. "I read about contact encounters. One incident that had just happened in 1963 involved a landing on a Danish farm. According to the report, the farmer went aboard with the two little beings and two more human-looking men who spoke to him in Danish. The report included parts of his interrogation by government authorities and their conclusions that he was telling the truth. In another incident, according to the reports, a craft landed on an Italian airfield and offered to take an Italian sergeant for a ride. He wet his pants-that's what it said-and was so scared, he didn't go. "The appendix that really got to me was titled 'Autopsies.' I saw pictures of a 30-meter disc that had crashed in Timmensdorfer, Germany, near the Baltic Sea in 1961. The British Army, according to the report, got there first and put up a perimeter. The craft had landed in very soft, loamy soil near the Russian border and so hadn't destructed, but one-third of it was buried in. We and the Russians, who also quickly showed up, had both tracked it. "inside, there were 12 small bodies, all dead. There were pictures of the bodies, which looked like the beings known as the 'grays,' being laid out and then put on stretchers and loaded into jeeps, and autopsy photos, too. Some of the little grays appeared to not be a reproductive-capable species. The autopsy guys concluded, according to the report, that it looked as if they had any system for elimination. "The craft itself was cut up like a pie into six pieces, put on lowboys and hauled off. Scuttlebutt was that it was given to the Americans and flown to Wright-Patterson Air Force base in Ohio. I looked at all these pictures and couldn't believe it. My skin got cold and I thought, My God. I had never really believed we were all alone in the universe, but this was hard to swallow. "The major conclusions in the NATO report blew me away. There were five: 1) The planet and human race had been the subject of a detailed survey of some kind by several different extraterrestrial civilizations, four of which they had identified visually. One race looked almost indistinguishable from us. Another resembled humans in height, stature, and structure, but with a very gray, pasty skin tone. The third race is now popularly known as the grays, and the fourth was described as reptilian, with vertical pupils and lizardlike skin. 2) These alien visitations had been going on for a very long time, at least 200 years-perhaps longer. 3) The extraterestrials did not appear hostile since if that were their intent they would have already demonstrated their malevolence. 4) UFO appearances and quick disappearances as well as the flybys were demonstrations conducted on purpose to show us some of their capabilities. 5) A process or program of some soft seemed to be underway since flybys progressed to landings and eventually contact. "I wanted so badly to copy this thing. I did take a photograph of the cover sheet, which wasn't in and of itself classified. But I didn't want to wind up in Fort Leavenworth. So instead I would go to the bathroom and take notes-surreptitiously, very carefully. "I have been through an awful lot in my life, but I've never been able to just walk away from that report. I know that I'm taking a chance by violating my oaths. But this is the most important issue of our times-so dammed important that I can't think of anything more important, and the public has been deceived and completely kept in the dark about all of this for all these years. It's the biggest scientific, political scandal ever. Besides, what have I got to lose? I'm 64 years old now. Are they going to bump me off? I have told the truth. My integrity and credibility stand. When is our government going to tell the truth?" Update: After 27 years of military service, Dean retired and began another 14-year career with the Pima County Sheriff's Department Emergency Services in Tuscon, Arizona. In 1990, he gave a lecture at the University of Arizona in which he talked about UFOs. The talk garnered local media coverage. Afterward, he was denied a promotion at the Sheriff's Department, because, he alleged, be believed in UFOs. Dean filed suit and won an out-of-court settlement in March 1992. Now retired, Dean has become a member of several UFO organizations and has begun giving occasional lectures. He is working through "any and all legitimate channels" to uncover a copy of the NATO document and to gather witnesses for an open Congressional hearing on the subject of UFOs. Official Response: "Our list of classified documents generated by SHAPE at that time does not include any with titles similar to that cited by Mr. Dean," says Lt. Col. Rainer Otte, German Force, deputy chief, media section of the public-information office at SHAPE. "Files on military personnel are in all circumstances kept under national control. Information on the security clearance that Mr. Dean held may-if ever-only be released by U.S. authorities." The Critics' Corner: "This is a fascinating story, but fantastic claims like these need more than one man's testimony to be credible," says Jerome Clark of the Center for UFO Studies. "Unless independent verification comes forth, this remains only an intriguing anecdote, not unlike many others that have circulated since the early UFO era." Project Galileo Name: Bob Lazar, independent contract scientist and businessman Claim: To have worked as a propulsion-system engineer in late 1988 and early 1989 on one of nine extraterrestrial spacecraft being researched and tested on the Nellis Air Range in central Nevada. Background: From 1982 to 1984, Lazar claims he worked at Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico in the Meson Physics lab with a Q-level security clearance. In 1985, while on vacation in Nevada, he wound up buying into a legal Reno brothel; the investment proved so profitable that he didn't have to return to full-time employment for a while. He moved to Nevada in 1986. In 1988, he wanted to get back into scientific work and was hired, he says, to work on the top-secret Project Galileo. Lazar passed a lie-detector test in 1989, arranged by George Knapp, then an anchorman for KLAS-TV, the CBS affiliate in Las Vegas, Nevada, for a special locally aired series, UFOs: The Best Evidence. The Story: "In 1988, I decided to reenter the scientific community and sent resumes to various people. Finally, I interviewed with a placement firm to work for the Department of Naval Intelligence in a civilian capacity, and in the fall of 1988, I was hired on an on-call basis to work on a project involving advanced propulsion systems. At that point, that's all I knew. "Not long after, I was flown along with several others out to area 51 on the Nellis Air Range. There, we were put on a bus with blacked-out windows and driven about 15 miles south to the Papoose dry lake bed, bordered by the Papoose Mountains, where there was an installation they called 'S4.' "I was introduced to my supervisor and a co-worker and then given a stack of briefings on various projects, including Project Galileo, which was devoted to the study of nine disc-shaped extraterrestrial craft that were somehow acquired by the U.S. government. "I was assigned back engineering tasks on the reactor and gravity-propulsion system of one of the discs-essentially to help figure out what made it work. I don't know whether it was a crash retrieval, although I doubt it, because the disc didn't appear damaged in any way. In the briefing reports, there were pictures of several discs along with some of the information they had already obtained from back engineering research. "I was stunned and exhilarated at the same time. But there were well-armed guards everywhere, and this place wasn't exactly the kind of environment where you could just start asking any and every question you had. Security, in fact, was oppressive. You were escorted everywhere, even the bathroom. And if your I.D. badge was just the slightest bit out of place, you would be tackled by a guard and held with a gun to your head until your supervisor arrived. And the guards lived for that. "At times, the whole thing seemed just surreal. There was a poster of the disc I was working on, which I dubbed the Sport Model, on several walls. It read, They're here. "I dealt with only the power sources and propulsion systems on one of the discs, and I did enter that one disc on several occasions. The disc was approximately 15 feet tall and about 52 feet in diameter. It had the appearance of brushed stainless steel or brushed aluminum. I didn't run a test on it, so I don't know if it was metal, but I did run my hands down the side of it getting in, and it felt cold, like metal, and it looked like metal. It had no physical seams, no welds or bolts or rivets, and it looked as if it were injection molded. "Inside, there were tiny little seats, much too small to comfortably handle an average-sized human. I bumped my head on the ends of the craft, so I concluded that the ceiling curved down to below five feet, 11 inches inside. There was not a right angle cut anywhere in the craft. Everything had a smooth curve to it. "The reactor, which produced anti-matter and then reacted it with matter in an annihilation reaction, was only about 18 inches in-diameter and 12 inches tall and was located in the center of the disc. It operated like a tiny ballet, where everything that happened relied on the effect before it. The way it accelerated protons inside of it, the was the heat was converted to electricity, was totally smooth without any wasted heat or latent energy. It was phenomenal, approaching a 100-percent dynamic efficiency. Now that seems impossible when you consider the laws of thermodynamics. All I can say is that this technology is well beyond anything that we now know with our twentieth century knowledge. "The reactor is fueled with an element that is not found here on Earth. Part of my contribution to the program was to find out where this element plugged into the periodic chart. Well, it didn't plug in anywhere, so we placed it at an atomic number of 115. It has been theorized for some time that elements around 113, 114, and 115 may become stable and nonradioactive, and this is apparently what we were seeing. Element 115 is a stable element, but one with some interesting properties. It can be used inside the reactor as a fuel, but also as the source of an energy field accessed and amplified by the craft's gravity amplifiers. In other words, the craft was both fueled and propelled by virtue of element 115. "There was a storage of silver-dollar-sized discs of element 115 from which triangular wedges were cut and put into the reactor. It was a copper-orange color and extremely heavy. While it was not radioactive, we assumed it was a toxic material and consequently handled it as such. "In all the discs at S4, there were three gravity amplifiers positioned in a triad at the base of the craft. These were the propulsion devices. Essentially, what they did was amplify gravity waves out of phase with those of the earth. The craft operated in two modes-omicron and delta, which indicated how many gravity amplifiers were in use. In the omnicron configuration, only one amplifier was used; the other two were swung out of the way and tucked inside the disc. In omnicron mode, the crafts can essentially rise and hover but do little else. To leave the atmosphere, however, all three gravity amplifiers have to be powered up and focused on the desired location. Finally, the crafts do not travel in a linear mode. Rather, we determined that the discs produced their own gravitational fields in order to distort time and space and essentially pull their destinations to them. "One afternoon, my colleagues and I walked out onto the dry lake bed. The disc on which we had been working, the Sport Model, had already been moved out of the hangar and was beginning to lift off. Except for a slight hissing, it made no noise. It lifted to about 30 feet off the ground. The hissing stopped, and it just hung silently in the air, moving to the left, then right. It was absolutely amazing. "The was information is compartmentalized, that's all the hands-on information and experience I was allowed to have access to, though we were given the chance on occasion and only for short periods of time to read briefing reports that detailed other aspects of this project. The reports I read that dealt with power and propulsion systems were accurate, and I proved that to myself by working on the system. Still, I draw a hard line between what I know to be true and what I read in the other briefing reports. "With that understanding, I did read reports about the origin of this disc. According to one of the briefings, it came from the Zeta Reticuli star system. Now obviously I didn't fly in a craft or go to that star system, so I don't really know if it came from there. I didn't speak to any aliens or see any, so I don't know if they exist or not. That report also said that contact was made at a certain date; however, all the dates were in code. Also, according to the report, these beings told our officials that they had been coming here for 10,000 years, that humans are the product of externally corrected evolution, and that they were integral to the accelerated evolution of man. "My tolerance for the intensive security rapidly diminished. Because of the 24-hour telephone surveillance, they found out I was having marital problems and told me the situation had made me a candidate for 'emotional instability.' They then took my security clearance and told me I could reapply in six months. "Well, I knew the test schedule, and I couldn't resist, so one night I decided to show some friends from a distance what I had been working on. We all caravaned out into the desert where we watched a test flight. We got away with it that time, so we started coming back again and again. "Anyway, the third time we got caught by the Wackenhut Security guards out on the Bureau of Land Management land that surrounds the range. They turned me in. Needless to say, officials at Nellis weren't happy. I went through a debriefing and was threatened at that time. I was scared and felt that I needed to break away from this before I couldn't. "Not only did I believe this technology should be given to the greater scientific community, but I also believed my only protection was to get the story out. A friend convinced me to talk to George Knapp at KLAS-TV. I figured if they killed me, then it would simply prove that what I was saying was true. "There are many scientists who theorize that there simply cannot be extraterrestrial discs here, that aliens could not possibly have come here specifically, because the distance traveled is too great and the energy required is too awesome, and that there's no relatively quick way to go that distance even at the speed of light. What I reported is what I experienced, though in some respects I regret going public. If I had it to do over again, I might be more inclined to stay on as one of the boys." Update: In 1990, after Lazar says he was released from Project Galileo, he accepted a freelance job setting up a database and surveillance system for an illegal Las Vegas brothel. That gig eventually garnered him six felony counts, including aiding and abetting a prostitute, running a house of prostitution, and living off the earnings of a prostitute. The charges were quickly dropped to a single felony count of pandering. The one good thing that came out of the resulting trial, Lazar says, is that he's not being followed anymore-at least not to his knowledge. "I guess they figured the pandering conviction discredited me," he comments. Lazar currently earns a living from his two small companies, an independent contracting firm that repairs nuclear devices, and a photo lab. He also builds and races jetcars. And, every year since 1984, on the weekend before July 4, he has staged Desert Blast, which he says is the "largest illegal fireworks show in the West." This annual pyrotechnic extravaganza features huge fireworks and assorted gas bombs made by Lazar and friends as well as jetcar demonstrations and a little semiautomatic weapons venting. Lazar recently sold his movie rights and is working on a new home video. Official Response: "The Air Force comment is that there is no comment on anything that goes on at the Nellis Range," says Air Force Master Sgt. J. C. Marcom of Public Affairs. Meanwhile, according to Technical Sergeant Henderson of Public Affairs, "The Air Force has no record that Lazar ever worked at Nellis Air Force Base, though we have compiled an extensive list of inquiries as to his status." The Critics Corner: "We've pretty well determined that Lazar did work at Los Alamos, but it's been impossible to verify exactly what he did," says Mark Rodeghier, scientific director of the Center for UFO Studies. "As for element 115, physicists admit that such an element is theoretically possible, but we don't know how to manufacture it or where to get it. So, Lazar's claim to have worked with this element is not necessarily insane, but it's completely unverifiable. Finally, he seems to know enough to have really worked at Area 51 or Dreamland where secret aircraft are tested, but his story remains a murky mystery. The bottom line: It's impossible to verify. So far, we have not found anyone to corroborate the essentials of what Lazar says." Baffled at Bentwaters Name: Col. Charles I. Halt, U.S. Air Force, retired Claim: In late December 1980, while serving as deputy base commander at Brentwaters Air Base in southern Englant, Halt witnessed and investigated several anomalous objects in the skies over the Rendelsham Forest, which separates the American installation from its twin Royal Air Force base, Woodbridge. The sightings occurred on two separate nights during the week after Christmas. Two, weeks later, Halt sent a report about the strange encounters to the British Ministry of Defense. Background: A career Air Force officer, Halt served in Vietnam and on various bases before arriving at Bentwaters in 1980. He was promoted to base commander in 1984. Halt later served as base commander at Kunsan Air Base, Korea, and as director of the inspections directorate for the Department of Defense inspector general. He retired in 1991. Halt is the first USAF officer since Project Blue Book ended to have filed a memo on unidentified flying objects and gone public with the details. The Story: "Just after Christmas, about 5:30 a.m., December 26, 1980, I walked into police headquarters and the desk sergeant started to laugh. He said a couple of the guys had been out chasing UFOs. Nothing, however, was in the blotter. I told him to put it in. "When our base commander came in, we both chuckled. Neither of us believed in UFOs, be we did decide to look into it. Before we had the chance, two nights later, the duty flight commander for the security police unit rushed in to a belated Christmas party white as a sheet. 'The UFO is back,' he said. "I was asked to investigate. I changed into a utility uniform, then headed out in a jeep to the edge of the forest. About a dozen of our men were already there. Out light-alls (large gas-powered lights) wouldn't work, and there was so much static and constant interference on our radios that we had to set up a relay. There was increasing commotion. I was determined to show them this was nonsense. "I took half a dozen of the men and headed into the woods on foot to a clearing where the initial incident had supposedly taken place. We found three distinct indentations in the ground equidistant apart and pressed well into the sandy soil. They were supposedly cause by the object seen two nights before, but I didn't see anything sitting there that night. Neither did anybody else there. "Inside the triangular area formed by the indentations, one of the men got slightly higher readings on the Geiger counter than he did outside. He photographed the area, and I took a soil sample. Meanwhile, I recorded this activity on my microcassette recorder. "We knew the Orford Ness lighthouse beacon beamed from the southeast. All of a sudden, directly to the east, we saw an unusual red, sunlike light oval shaped, glowing, with a black center-10 to 15 feet off the ground, moving through the trees. Beyond the clearing was a barbed-wire fence, farmer's field, house, and barn. The animals were making a lot of noise. "We ran toward the light up to the fense. It shot over the field and then moved in a 20-to 30-degree horizontal arc. Strangely, it appeared to be dripping what looked like molten steel out of a crucible, as if gravity were somehow pulling it down. Suddenly, it exploded-not a loud bang, just boomph-and broke into five white objects that scattered in the sky. Everything except our radios seemed to return to normal. "We went to the end of the farmer's property to get a different perspective. In the north, maybe 20 degrees off the horizon, we saw three white objects-elliptical, like a quarter moon but a little larger-with blue, greed, and red lights on them, making sharp, angular movements. The objects eventually turned from elliptical to round. "I called the command post, asked them to call Easter Radar, responsible for air defense of that sector. Twice they reported that they did'nt see anything. "Suddenly, from the south, a different glowing object moved towards us at a high rate of speed, came withing several hundred feet, and then stopped. A pencillike beam, six to eight inches in diameter, shot from this thing right down by our feet. Seconds later, the object rose and disappeared. "The objects in the north were still dancing in the sky. After an hour or so, I finally made the call to go in. We left those things out there. "The film turned out to be fogged; nothing came out. But a staff sergeant later made plaster castings of the indentations, and I had the soil sample. "Around New Year's Eve, I took statements and interviewed the men who had taken part in the initial incident. The reports were nearly identical. "Basically, they reported this: In the early morning hours of December 26, one of the airmen drove to the back gate at Woodbridge on a routine security check. He saw lights in the forest, specifically a red light, and thought maybe an airplane had crashed. He radioed a report, which was called into the tower, but the tower reported nobody was flying. "Eventually, a group headed out to the forest. They reported strange noises-animals, movement, like we heard two nights later. "As they approached the clearing, they reported seeing a large yellowish white light with a blinking red light on the upper center portion and a steady blue light emanating from underneath. The tower again reported nothing on radar. "A few of the men moved to within 20 or 30 feet. Each said the same thing independently-a triangular shaped metallic object, about nine feet across the base, six feet high, appeared to be sitting on a tripod. They split up, walked around the craft. One of the men apparently tried to get on the craft, but, they said, it levitated up. "All three of the guys hit the ground as the craft moved quickly in a zigzagging manner through the woods towared the field, hitting some trees on the way. They got up and approached again, but the object rose up, and then it disappeared at gerat speed. "Finally, on January 13, 1981, I wrote a memo to the British Ministry of Defense. Despite my efforts, to my knowledge, no one from any intelligence or government agency ever came on base to investigate. "I have never sought the limelight, nor have I hidden. I stand to receive no financial benifit from this interview but consented becase it's time the truth came out. I don't know what those objects were. I don't know anybody who does. But something as yet unexplained happened out there." Update: In 1983, a copy of Halt's memo to the British MOD was released through the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), Shortly thereafter, a copy of the 18-minute audiotape of the investigation Halt conducted was given to a British UFOlogists by, Halt says, another Air Force Officer. Both have made the rounds within the UFO community. As a result, Halt says he has been "harassed" by UFOlogists and fanatics. While half a dozen men assisted Halt's investigation and dozens of others were near the scene, only a handful of witnesses have come forward. At leat one of them, Halt says, is spreading disinformation; consquently, media coverage has been inaccurate at best. For instance, he says, "The stories about holographiclike aliens emerging from their craft are pure fiction." Official Response: "The Air Force stopped investigating UFOs in 1969 when Project Blue Book was completed," says Air Force spokesman Maj. Dave Thurston, based in Washintgon, D.C. The Critics' Corner: "The UFO you hear described on the audiotape was almost certainly the lighthouse beacon in my opinion, becase the peak interval between their descriptions of it getting brighter, then dimmer, is the time of rotation of the beacon, which was about ten miles away," says UFO skeptic Philip Klass. "Even though they said they saw numerous lights in the night sky, one of ever three UFOs reported turns out to be a bright celestial body." "Bentwaters is a case of magical thinking-a situation where a bunch of people got excited about different things they correlated in their mind," says UFO investigator James McGaha, technical consultant to the Committee for the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal and a retired Air Force Pilot, who traveled to England, surveyed the area, and interviewed various people. "Consider these facts: On the night of December 25 to 26, at 9:10 p.m., Russian satellite Cosmos 746 reentered the atmosphere over England and appeared as a bright object. At 2:50 a.m., a fireball entered the atmosphere over Woodbridge. At 4:11 a.m., a British police car with a blue strobe light on top and other lights attached to the undercarriage responded to a telephone report and was driving on the dirt roads through the forest. "Halt's memo reports that on the second night, they saw two objects in the north, one in the south. On that night, three of the brightest stars were visible-vega and Deneb in the north, Sirius in the south. And clearly, the strange red light mentioned on the audio tape is the Orford Ness Lighthouse beacon. Beyond that, the morning after the first night, British officers identified the indentations as rabbit diggings. The Geiger counter readings were of background radiation. Nothing appeared on radar that night, either, and no one in either base tower reported anything unusual. Furthermore, no civilians reported seeing or hearing anything." *END* **************************************************************************** PART I.c The Great High-Rise Abduction Whatever spin you put on it, it's definitely the case of the century It was cold and clear, about 3:00 a.m., when the car stalled near the South Street seaport in Manhattan. Glimpsing up, the passengers-a major political figure, who will remain unnamed, and two government agents-spied a glowing oval object hovering over a building a couple of blocks away. As lights on the heavenly vision changed from red-orange to a bright bluish-white, a woman in a nightgown floated off a twelfth story window and hovered midair. The awe-struck witnesses watched as the woman, surrounded by several small creatures, ascended effortlessly into the bottom of the craft. The object zipped over the Brooklyn Bridge and finally plunged into the East River. Or so the story goes. "It's an extraordinary case," says Budd Hopkins, a world-class modern artist who has recently become known for his books, Missing Time and Intruders, detailing his 18 years of investigation into claims that thousands of people have been abducted by UFOs. A trip to Hopkins' studio on Manhattan's West Side reveals the profound influence these so-called abductions have had on his art. Scattered around the room are colorful, profile-shaped paintings he calls "guardians" that evoke nothing if not the aliens in question. Indeed, as Hopkins describes his work, his dark, thick eyebrows dance with enthusiasm; these days, it is the bizarre tales of UFOs and the nasty creatures who inhabit them, plucking innocents from their homes in the middle of the night, that consume most of his time. If Hopkins seems excited, he explains, it's because he has found a case that might convince the army of skeptics who have hounded him for years. Unlike the thousands of other abduction cases on record, he explains, this is the first time independent witnesses have come forward claiming to have seen the event take place. Even more significant, one of these witnesses is said, in the vernacular, to be a Very Import Person. "The implication," Hopkins speculates, "is that this was deliberate, a demonstration of alien power and intent." Hopkins has never had trouble drawing dramatic conclusions about UFO abductions, a phenomenon that emerged, it should be noted, without him. The first bizarre story came to public attention in 1966 and involved the now-notorious New England couple, Betty and Barney Hill. Under hypnosis, the Hills recalled being snatched from their car and examined by small creatures aboard a flying saucer. But it would take another decade, a few more headline-grabbing abduction tales, and, finally, the television broadcast of the Hills' own story before tales of alien encounters became embedded in the popular consciousness at large. The stage was now set for Hopkins to emerge as the leading authority on abductions. It happened in 1981 with the publication of his book, Missing Time, in which he suggested that the abduction experience was much more widespread than anyone had imagined. For Hopkins, the plight of the abductee became a personal crusade, and before long, he would be lecturing on the subject across the country, appearing on one talk show after another, and finally writing Intruders, a 1987 best seller that was turned into a television mini series in 1992. Clearly, no one has done more than Hopkins to bring this strange phenomenon to public awareness. Even more to the point, no one has had greater success in getting scientists and mental-health professionals to take a serious look at abductions. So it's no surprise that when Hopkins began touting his latest case as the strongest evidence yet for UFOs, their alien occupants, and their systematic abduction of human beings, people listened. But as the pieces of the puzzle were revealed, critics began charging that rather than prove his point, Hopkins had fallen victim to the elaborate fantasy of a bored housewife or a complex hoax. Indeed, said his detractors, so outrageous was the tale and so fragile the evidence for it, it had backfired, destroying his credibility and bringing down his body of work like a house of cards. The story certainly is a humdinger, with more twists and turns than California's Highway 1 and more mystery characters than a Le Carre spy thriller. "It's a crazy, endless saga," says Hopkins, including such elements as secret agents, attempted murder, and two high-level political figures, Mikhail Gorbachev one of them. The central character in the case is Linda. She does not want her last name revealed. She lives in Lower Manhattan, and on the very hot spring day I went to meet her, I came to appreciate why the aliens had decided to grab her through the windows. It certainly beats penetrating a locked gate and the scrutiny of a guard, then taking an elevator up 12 stories and winding your way through a corridor to her place. When I knocked on the door, I was greeted by an attractive, fortyish woman with brown, almond-shaped eyes and long, flowing brown hair. We sat down on her couch, and as her air conditioner blasted arctic air and she smoked a dozen cigarettes, I was treated to one mind-boggling tale. It started early in 1988. Linda had just bought Kitty Kelly's biography of Frank Sinatra and another book, which she took to be a mystery. The other book was Intruders by Budd Hopkins. By the end of the first chapter, she was stumped: Aliens had left mysterious implants in people's brains and noses, and that last little bit bothered her. Thirteen years before, she had found a lump on the side of her nose and had gone to a specialist who said it was built up cartilage left over from a surgical scar. But she had never had any such surgery, even as a child, she said. Linda then took my finger and put it on her nose: Yes, I could feel a very slight bump on her upper right nostril. But there had to be more than this, I thought. There was. A year later, Linda finally contacted Hopkins, who decided to explore Linda's past with his favorite tool-hypnosis. "It felt kind of strange," Linda says. "I'm just a wife and mother. I'm just Linda. UFOs? Naw." Hopkins says he learned otherwise. He regressed Linda to age 8, enabling her to recall an episode in which she thought she glimpsed the cartoon character Casper, of Casper the Friendly Ghost fame. But under hypnosis, her memory of Casper turned out to be a large, top shaped object that she'd seen flying above the apartment building across the street from her childhood home in Manhattan. Hopkins came to suspect that she had been abducted by aliens and by June of 1989 had invited her to join his support group for abductees. "I remember sitting there bug-eyed listening to these people," says Linda. "I felt strange the first time, but after that I felt better." "Finally, on November 30, 1989, a very agitated Linda called Hopkins to report she had been abducted again. She had gone to bed quite late, at about ten minuets before 3:00 a.m., because she'd been up doing the laundry. Towels and blue jeans for four take eons to dry in her small dryer, she explained. Her husband, who normally worked nights, was on jury duty that week and so was home and asleep in the bedroom. She showered, got into bed, and lying on her back, clasped her hands and began reciting "Our Father" to herself, a habit she carried over into adulthood from her Roman Catholic upbringing. Then she felt a presence in the room. "I was awake but had my eyes closed," she recalls. "I was afraid. I knew it wasn't my husband; he was snoring away. Then I lay there wondering Did I lock the door? Is it one of the kids?" She called out the names of her two boys and finally reached out for her husband. "Wake up," she said, "there's somebody in the room." He didn't answer, and she began to feel a numbness crawl up from her toes. After months in the support group exploring her past abductions, she recognized what that meant. It's now or never, she thought and opened her eyes. At the foot of the bed, says Linda, stood a small creature with a large head and huge black eyes. "I screamed and yelled," she says, "and then threw my pillow. The creature fell back." After that, she has only fragments of conscious memory-a white fabric going over her eyes; little alien hands pounding up and down her back; suddenly falling back into bed. It was a quarter to 5:00 in the morning when Linda jumped out of bed, ran into the kids' room, and discovered, she says, that "they weren't breathing." Hysterical, she retrieved a small mirror from the bathroom and placed it under their noses. Suddenly, a mist formed on the mirror, she says, and she heard her husband snoring in the other room. They were all alive. Linda, in shock, sat on the floor in the hallway between the two bedrooms until dawn. Later she called Hopkins. Under hypnosis, Linda revealed that there had actually been five creatures in the apartment. They had led her form the bedroom through the living room and out a closed window, she declared, where, floating in midair, she saw a bright bluish-white light. She was afraid of falling and embarrassed, thinking her nightgown had gone over her head. She moved up into the craft and then found herself sitting on a table. The creatures around her, she says, were scraping her arms-"like taking skin samples," she speculates, and pounding with an instrument up and down her spine-all typical abduction fare, to say the least. Quite atypical is what allegedly happened 15 months later. In February 1991, Hopkins received a typewritten letter from two people claiming to be police officers. Late in 1989, the letter said, the two had witnessed a "little girl or woman wearing a full white nightgown" floating out of a twelfth-floor apartment window, escorted by three "ugly but small humanlike creatures" into a very large hovering oval that eventually turned reddish orange. The object, the letter added, flew over their heads, over the Brooklyn Bridge, and plunged into the East River. They wondered if the woman was alive, though they wished to remain anonymous to protect their careers. They signed the letter with first names only-Richard and Dan. Hopkins was astonished. "I realized immediately that the woman they had seen was Linda," he said. "The account seemed to corroborate the time, date, and details of her abduction. Here, finally, were independent, seemingly reputable witnesses to an abduction.: When Hopkins first called Linda to tell her, she replied, "That can't be possible." Then she wondered if she and Budd were the victims of a cruel joke. But all suspicions vanished one evening a few weeks later, she says, when Richard and Dan showed up at her door. "Police," they announced. Linda looked through the peephole and saw two men in plain clothes flashing a gold badge. "So I let them in," said Linda, "and they looked at me kind of funny. When they introduced themselves as Dan and Richard, my stomach dropped to the floor." Both were tall, well-built, attractive men in their forties, she says. Dan sat on the couch, put his head in his hand, and said, "My God, it's really her." Richard had tears in his eyes and hugged her, expressing relief that she was alive." "Budd had warned me not to discuss the incident with anyone," Linda says now, "so all I could do was tell them to talk to Budd." In the year that followed, Linda claims, she had numerous encounters with the mystery due-at the bus stops, outside her dentist's office, even at church. Hopkins himself never had the pleasure of meeting the pair, though, he says, he did eventually receive three more letters from Dan and four letters and an audiocassette from Richard. In one letter, says Hopkins, Dan explained his need to remain anonymous: He and Richard were not New York City cops, he said, nor on that fateful November night had they been alone. They were, in fact, government security agents and had been escorting an important political figure, who they would not name, to a downtown heliport; suddenly their car's engine died and the headlights went out. They had seen Linda's abduction unfold after they pushed the car to safety under the elevated FDR Drive. Dan and Richard just couldn't stay away. One morning, after Linda had walked her youngest son to the school bus at 7:15, she claims she was approached by Richard, who asked her to take a ride in his car. She refused, but Richard's grip firmed on her shoulder. "You can go quietly or you can go kicking and screaming," Linda claims Richard told her. As he dragged her to the open rear door of his black Mercedes, he tickled her, Linda states. "That's how he got me in the car." "They drove me around for about three hours," says Linda, "asking me all sorts of questions." Did she work for the government? Was she herself an alien? They even demanded she prove herself human by taking off her shoes. Aliens, they would claim in a letter to Hopkins, lacked toes. She called Hopkins as soon as they dropped her off at home. "Hopkins told me to call the police," Linda now explains, "but I refused. Who would have believed me?" The notion of surveillance by Richard and Dan eventually spooked her so much that she quit her secretarial job and simply stayed home. To ease Linda's isolation, Hopkins found a benefactor who paid for Linda's limited use of a bodyguard so she could go out. Unfortunately, the bodyguard was not around for what Linda says was her second major encounter with Richard and Dan. On October 15, 1991, Linda reports, Dan accosted her on the street and pulled her into a red Jaguar. As they drove along, he sometimes put his hand on her knee-"to distract me," Linda suggests, "from following the rout to a three-story beach house which I assume was on Long Island." Inside, Dan started a pot of coffee and gave Linda a present: a nightgown, she says, "the kind a woman might wear if she didn't have any children, especially sons." Dan asked her to put it on so he could photograph her in it as she appeared mid-abduction, floating over New York. She refused but finally agreed to put it on over her clothes. As Dan's behavior became increasingly strange, she decided to flee, running out the door and onto the beach. "Dan caught me and picked me up, shaking me like a toy," she says. There was mud on my face, so he dunked me in the water once, twice, three times. I don't think he was trying to drown me, but he kept me under too long." This behavior, which critics of this strange tale have termed "attempted murder," finally ceased. Instead, Dan pulled off Linda's wet jeans and she says, pulled her down on his lap in the water, rocking her like a baby. Shortly after, Linda reports, "Richard showed up, apologized for Dan, and drove me home." Linda went straight to Hopkins. "She left sand all over my house," Hopkins says. "A few weeks later, I received a half dozen photographs of Linda, in the nightgown, running along the beach." That November, the saga became stranger still. While lunching with Linda, a relative who was also a doctor insisted she go to the hospital to x-ray the lump in her nose. The x-ray Linda now presents shows a profile of her head; clearly visible is a quarter-inch-long cylinder apparently embedded in her nose. "It was weird," says Hopkins' friend Paul Cooper, professor of neurosurgery at New York University, who has examined the x-ray. "I've never seen anything like it." But even Cooper admits the x-ray could have been faked by taping a little something to the outside of Linda's nose. Moreover, as usually happens in UFO stories, this tantalizing bit of evidence vanished as quickly as it had appeared. Soon after getting the x-ray, Linda told Hopkins she'd awakened with a bloody nose. Under hypnosis, Hopkins says, Linda revealed that the aliens had again whisked her away. Later, with Cooper's help, Hopkins had further x-rays taken, but the implant was nowhere to be seen. Meanwhile, another alleged witness to Linda's spectacular abduction came forward. That same month, Hopkins received a large manila envelope from a woman living in upstate New York. On the outside, in large letters, appeared the words, Confidential, Re: Brooklyn Bridge. On the evening of November 29, 1989, the woman-Hopkins calls her "Janet Kimble"-Had been in Brooklyn at a retirement party for her boss. When she headed home via the Brooklyn Bridge around 3:00 a.m., she told Hopkins, her car came to a dead stop in the middle of the bridge and her headlights blinked out. The same thing, she states, happened to the cars coming up behind her. Suddenly, she saw what she thought was "a building on fire" about a quarter of a mile away. The light was so bright that she had to shield her eyes, she said. Then she realized what she was seeing: Four "balls" had floated out of an apartment window and, midair, unfolded into three "rickets-stricken" children and a fourth, taller, "normal girl-child" wearing a white gown. "While I watched," she wrote, "I could hear the screams of people parked in their cars behind me." The "children" were then whisked up into the object, whereupon it flew over the Brooklyn Bridge and disappeared when her view was obscured by a walkway. Hopkins says he telephoned "Janet Kimble" immediately and later had lunch with her. The tale told by this "widow of about sixty who once worked as a telephone operator" corroborates stories told by Richard and Linda, he says, ruling out the possibility of a hoax. In fact, if Hopkins is to be believed, another witness to the Linda abduction was actually the first. That person, he states, is a UFO abductee as well, a woman in her early thirties who claims to have been abducted from her Manhattan bedroom in the middle of the night. She consciously remembers being outside at some point, moving along the streets involuntarily, and seeing 15 to 20 other women all moving zombielike toward a UFO on the banks of the East River. When Hopkins tells me this, I can't help but guffaw. He finds my reaction perfectly understandable. "What can I say?" he says. For Hopkins, who is in the midst of investigating another mass abduction in New York City involving a hundred humans, this woman's story is only "a little more bizarre than most." In any event, says Hopkins, this woman at one point looks down the East River and sees two other UFOs in the sky, one a bright orange object at the southern end of Manhattan, ostensibly the one that abducted Linda. The two cases, if believed and taken in concert, shed an ominous light on the humorous name that some critics have bestowed on the Linda case: "Manhattan Transfer." Were the aliens out that night abducting Manhattanites like Linda in droves? By December of 1991, the end of Linda's saga was nowhere in sight. She was now struggling with an obviously disturbed an persistent human named Dan, who, according to Richard had been admitted to a "rest home." At Christmas, she received a card and note from Dan. It was a love letter actually. He told her he planned to leave the "rest home" soon and asked her to pack her toothbrush-he was coming for her. He wanted to learn her alien ways and her special language. "You'll make a beautiful bride," he teased. Linda, however was not amused. Dan apparently tried to get Linda in February of 1992, but she was rescued from this dragon by Richard, who Linda now regards as a knight in shining armor. Linda says that Richard, up on returning from a "mission" abroad, had gone to visit Dan at the rest home, found him missing, and had come looking for him in New York. When he learned that Dan had prepared a passport for Linda and booked two tickets to England, he immediately sought out Linda and managed to sweep her away just in time. Linda's last contact with the aliens occurred a few months afterward. On Memorial Day 1992, she, her husband, two sons, and one of their guests all awakened at about 4:30 in the morning with nosebleeds. Hopkins says he has subsequently confirmed, through hypnosis, that the incident was UFO related. "I really don't try to convince anybody," says Linda, having come to the end of her story. "I don't expect anyone to believe this because, to tell you the truth, if the shoe were on the other foot, I wouldn't believe it either. But it happened. It happened." If it really did, I thought, the independent witnesses would confirm it. The prize witness obviously was the VIP, and the word in the UFO community is that Hopkins thinks it was Javier Perez de Cuellar, secretary-general of the United Nations from 1982 to 1991. "I will not deny or confirm that," says Hopkins. "I won't say who he is, but I can say this: All the letters from Richard and Dan refer to the fact that there was a third man in the car. And he's written one letter to me, which was signed, The Third Man. I can't make the things he said public, though clearly he's letting me know between the lines who he is." Actually, rumor has it that this third party may be central to the Linda case. According to anonymous sources close to Hopkins, Richard, Dan, and their passenger were all abducted on that fateful day of November 30, 1989, right along with Linda. Their delayed recall of this event supposedly would explain why it took them 15 months for them to write to Hopkins, why they were so interested in Linda, and why they are so reluctant to come forward now. But all that is certain about Perez de Cullar is that he was in New York City on the days in question. Did he really witness the Linda abduction? Joe Sills, spokesman for the secretary-general at the United Nations, was nice enough to check with the security people but came up empty handed. "No one that I spoke to," he says, "was aware of him ever being in that part of town at that hour of the morning. It's just not in the kind of schedule he kept." What's more, he added, Perez de Cuellar could not have been heading for the heliport since he always went to the airport via limousine. U.N. spokesperson Juan Carlos Brandt checked with Perez de Cuellar directly. "He says he never witnessed any incident," says Brandt. And adding insult to injury, Hopkins can't even prove that the two government security agents, Richard and Dan, are real. He has never met or spoken to them, and all efforts to identify them have proven fruitless. In March of 1991, for instance, Linda looked through six hours of clips of news programs showing security agents at events in New York City. The clips belong to one of Hopkins' contacts in the government law enforcement. Near the end of the six hours Linda spotted a man whom she identified as 'Dan.' Despite the fact that the images were taken from a distance, involved crowds and the bustling chaos that accompanies visiting dignitaries, she apparently had no trouble making her identification. Those who have viewed the tapes have seen a man who appears to be taking part in official business, and who is in no way out of place or unusual. In the months that followed, Hopkins and Linda made the rounds with their pictures of "Dan" in hand. They went to United Nations security and the State Department, Secret Service, and Russian delegation offices in New York. At times, Hopkins and Linda would use a cover story so as not to arouse suspicion: "Sometimes we said we were husband and wife and that this was a friend we had met a couple of years ago in Cape Cod and he had said to look him up here when we came to New York," Hopkins explains. But the ploy didn't work. "I've been all over with these pictures," says Hopkins, "and nobody recognizes him." Then there is the woman on the bridge, "Janet Kimble." She is a real person but apparently, after being ridiculed by her own family, wants no part of Hopkins' story. When Hopkins tried to arrange an interview for me, she told him, "I can't help you anymore with this." The final independent witness is the woman up the East River who claims to have participated in the mass abduction of women that very night. But she's another abductee and not truly impartial in the matter. With no independent witnesses willing to come forward, the case, not surprisingly, has come under intense criticism. Curiously, two of those most critical of the case initially became involved at Linda's request. By early 1992, Linda was feeling so helpless at the hands of her human kidnappers that she decided to seek additional expert help. At the suggestion of New York journalist and UFO researcher Antonio Huneeus, she contacted Richard Butler, a former law-enforcement and security specialist for the Air Force and a fellow abductee, whom Linda had met at Hopkins' support group. Butler met with Linda on February 1, 1992, and brought with him Joe Stefula, a former special agent for the U.S. Army's Criminal Investigations Command and current head of security for a drug company in New Jersey. During the meeting, Linda asked for safety tips on how to protect herself from the dangerous duo, and Butler and Stefula, in order to give useful advice, asked Linda a few questions of their own. Several months later, after Hopkins made the case public at the 1992 Mutual UFO Network annual meeting in Albuquerque, Stefula, Butler, and a friend of theirs, parapsychologist George Hansen, decided the case needed a thorough investigation and began poking around Linda's neighborhood. They spoke to the security guard and supervisor at Linda's building, went to the offices of the New York Post nearby, and simply interviewed residents to see if they remembered anything amiss. No one did. Afterward, Hansen, already the author of a number of stinging critiques of both psi research and its critics, wrote a lengthy skeptical report. The central issue, say the skeptics, is the lack of large numbers of witnesses to this spectacular event. After all, New York never sleeps; there are people out and about even in the middle of the night. Why did none of the truck drivers at the loading dock of the New York Post just a short distance from Linda's apartment see this blindingly bright object? Why haven't all those other people whose cars were supposedly stalled on the Brooklyn Bridge come forward? To such questions, Hopkins has a two-fold reply: "The unwillingness of people to report such fantastic experiences is not new. People do not like to be ridiculed," he says. Then there's the invisibility issue, "which just seems to be part of the phenomenon. Many people who you think should have seen these things just don't," Hopkins explains. But Hopkins can't explain everything. For instance, how could "Janet Kimble" know that the words Brooklyn Bridge written on the outside of her envelope would attract Hopkins' attention unless she knew or was related to one of the the people in the Hopkins support group, all of whom had heard about the case? The answer, replies Hopkins, is ridiculously simple: "She saw the abduction from the Brooklyn Bridge and thought that the others who had been stalled on the bridge that night might have contacted me about it." But Butler says the likelier explanation is that Linda fabricated the whole story after reading Nighteyes, a science-fiction novel by Garfield Reeves-Stevens published in April of 1989, just months before her alleged abduction. The novel charts the abductions of an FBI team staking out a beach house in California while a mother and daughter undergo a series of abductions in and around New York City. It concludes with an apocalyptic finale. Butler claims that Linda was very intrigued when the book was brought up at the Hopkins support-group meetings. "I guarantee you that's where she got the basis for her story," he says. Butler admits the book's storyline is different from Linda's but says there are too many parallels to be coincidence. Both Linda and the novel's Sarah were abducted into a UFO hovering over a high-rise apartment building in New York City. Linda was kidnapped and thrown into a car by Richard and Dan; one of the novel's central characters, Wendy, was kidnapped and thrown into a van by two mystery men. Dan is supposed to be a security and intelligence agent, while one of the book's central characters is an FBI agent. Both Dan and an agent in the novel were hospitalized for emotional trauma. Both Linda and the novel's Wendy were taken to a "safe house" on the beach. The list of such parallels goes on and on. "But similarity does not prove relationship," replies Hopkins. Without an important political figure witnessing the abduction-the very essence of the Linda case, he notes-the comparison with the book is meaningless. Hopkins is not alone. Walt Andrus, international director of the Mutual UFO Network (MUFON, is "absolutely convinced the case is authentic." And David Jacobs, a history professor at Temple University and another researcher on the abduction scene, says the critics debunking the case have twisted the facts. "Over the past several years, I have been a confidant of Hopkins' and, at times, of Linda's. I can tell you that when Hopkins' report comes out, the inaccuracy of the critics will be apparent and the case will stand or fall on its own merits." For Hansen, of course, those merits are slim. And, he says, the hoaxing he believes occurred is the least of it. "For me," he says, "the worst infraction is the reaction of the leadership of UFOlogy. I think this has given us great insight into the mentality-and the gullibility-of Budd Hopkins, Walt Andrus, and David Jacobs, the people who really control much of what people actually read about UFOs." Hansen is particularly upset that, given charges of kidnapping and attempted murder, the leadership did not go to the police. "I recognize there is government cover-up on UFOs," he says, "but covering up a so-called attempted murder and kidnapping, as these guys apparently say they've done-that's quite something else." Hoping to right the wrong, Hansen has, in fact, sent a letter to the inspector general's office, Department of the Treasury, requesting that Linda's claims of kidnapping and attempted murder by federal agents be investigated. In February of 1992, the SEcret Service contacted Linda and she and Hopkins went down to their World Trade Center offices to speak to Special Agent Peggy Fleming and her supervisor. Hopkins and Linda told Fleming the story and explained that they didn't know who Hanson was or why he was involved. Linda also objected to what she perceived as Hansen's insinuation that she was against the government. She was not, she said: "I'm a Bush Republican." When I called the Secret Service about their investigation, I was referred to Special Agent James Kaiser, media representative in the New York field office. After reviewing the file on the case, titled "Special Agent Alleged Misconduct, February 10, 1993," Kaiser told me that Linda "was, in fact, interviewed at our office, and it was determined that her allegations regarding U.S. Secret Service agents having any contact with her whatsoever prior to that day were unfounded and baseless. It never happened. She may have been mistaking us for some other agency or organization. Case closed." The case is also closed as far as Hansen, Stefula, and Butler are concerned. They truly believe that Linda is involved in a hoax. "I think she started out with a small lie," speculates Hansen, "a tall tale that grew in the three years that followed. She's been a typist and temporary secretary, so she has had access to a lot of different typewriters undoubtedly. It would not surprise me if there were someone else hoaxing Hopkins as well." Hopkins flatly rejects the hoax scenario. "An efficient hoax has a minimum of moving parts," he says. "You don't want to go into too many details. This has more moving parts that one could possibly imagine." As for Linda, when asked if she had made up this whole scenario, she replied simply, "No. How could this be a hoax? There are too many people involved. In fact," she added, "I take the suggestion as a compliment. They must think I'm pretty intelligent to pull off such a thing." Some details of the case frankly do make me suspicious. For one, the drawings of the abduction that Hopkins received from Richard and the woman on the bridge not only look like they might have been prepared by the same person, despite the stylistic and perspective differences, which Hopkins has duly noted, but more importantly, both were done in crayons and used the same colors. What's more, to actually meet Linda and hear her talk is to be transported to a world where reality is inverted, where all we have ever known is flipped on its head. Strain your ears, and you can almost hear the chords from Twilight Zone kick in as the underlying chaos of the universe takes control. Fact is, outrageous as I find Linda's story, Linda herself seems sincere. Her emotions-fright, anxiety, and anger-appear genuine. I'm not alone in these impressions. John Mack, a professor of psychiatry at Harvard University MEdical School, whom Hopkins confided in as the story unfolded and who know knows Linda well, insists that "there is nothing unauthentic or devious" about her. Gibbs Williams, a New York psychoanalytic psychotherapist with a quarter century of experience, has tested Linda and also dismisses any notion that Linda might be hoaxing the whole affair. "You would have to have the kind of conspiratorial mentality of Richard Nixon and be able to think sixty-two moves ahead," Williams says. "Quite frankly, Linda doesn't appear to have that kind of mind; she does not have that kind of abstracting capacity." He notes further that her emotive capacity-her anger, crying, and tendency to get carried away-is not consistent with the psychopathic cool mentality of the hoaxer and liar. "My conclusion," he says, "is that from her perspective, she is telling her truth." Perhaps Jerome Clark, vice president for the Center for UFO Studies (CUFOS) and editor of the International UFO Reporter, sums up the controversy best: "This is an absolutely extraordinary claim, and the evidence that you need to marshal to support such a claim simply is not there." Hopkins promises it will be when his book appears. Until then, Linda stands alone, ambivalent about her fame. On the one hand, she seems to revel in the notoriety. She attends national UFO meetings obviously dressed to impress. "To tell you the truth, it wouldn't be that bad if I didn't have a family," she admits to me. Yet she also feels victimized. "There are a lot of Italian Americans and Chinese in my neighborhood, and many of them even laugh at joggers," she says. "Imagine if anyone in the area herd that I was abducted by aliens." "Worst of all," she continues, "those critics took away the safety of my family by taking my real name and publishing it. We are sitting ducks for any crackpot int he UFO community. They know where I live. They know what I look like." She has already taken her name off her intercom system, and she fully expects to move when Hopkins' book on the case comes out. "I don't know what's worse," she says finally, "what Richard and Dan did, what these three stooges from New Jersey did, or what the aliens did." Or what Hopkins has done, I might add. After all, he promised so much and has delivered so little. Poor Linda. *END* **************************************************************************** PART I.d SOVIET SAUCERS by James Oberg [ The P/\NTHER - This guy is a suspected CIA disinformant and I have seen him appear in numerous UFO specials/documentaries with different credentials each time...This is the guy who said the 1991 Space Shuttle UFO footage was 'SPACE ICE'... Beware!] Day after day, the waves of UFOs returned to southern Russia. Cossacks on horseback saw them high in the evening sky. Pilots aboard commercial airliners and military interceptors chased and dodged them. Astronomers at observatories in the Caucasus Mountains noted their crescent shape and their fiery companions. It was the fall of 1967, and the Soviet Union was in the grip of its first major UFO flap. The extraordinary tales, described on Soviet television, reported in Soviet newspaper, and analyzed in a private nationwide UFO study group soon took on a life of their own. In one detailed account, an airliner crew from Voroshilovgrad to Volgograd, flight 104, insisted that a UFO had hovered and then maneuvered around their plane. According to Soviet UFO enthusiast Felix Zigel, who compiled such accounts, the plane's engines died and did not start up again until after the UFO had disappeared, when the aircraft was only a half mile high in the air. These tales and others were repeated in Western UFO books and presented as important evidence at UFO hearings in the United States Congress and in Britain's House of Lords. Then, as suddenly as it had started, the wave of Russian UFO sightings ceased. Private UFO groups were banned by the Soviet government, and the subject was dropped from the controlled media even as it spread wildly in the samizdat, the underground Russian press. But the phenomenon was not forgotten. Years later, astronomer Lev Gindilis and a team of investigators from the Academy of Sciences in Moscow assessed Zigel's UFO files, analyzing statistics from what they said was "the repetitive motion" of the objects Ziegel described. In 1979, the "Gindilis Report" was released and distributed around the world. It concluded that no known natural or manmade stimulus could account for these "anomalous atmospheric phenomena." Something truly extraordinary and truly alien must have occurred. But it was too good to be true. Like many other official Soviet government reports, the Gindilis Report turned out to be counterfeit science. In effect, and probably in intent, it served to cover up one of Moscow's greatest military secrets, an illegal space-to-earth nuclear weapon. What the witnesses really saw back in those exciting days in 1967 were space vehicles all right, but not from some distant, alien world. They were Russian missile warheads, placed in low orbit under false registration names and then diverted back toward the planet's surface after one circuit of the globe. As they fireballed down toward a target zone near the lower Volga River, they seared their way into the imaginations of startled witnesses for hundreds of miles in all directions. Of course, U.S. intelligence agencies had also been watching the tests, and they weren't fooled by the UFO smokescreen. Pentagon experts soon dubbed this fearsome new weapon a "fractional orbit bombardment system," or FOBS. Government spokespeople in Washington denounced it as a first strike weapon designed to evade defensive radars. Since Moscow had recently signed a solemn international treaty forbidding the orbiting of nuclear weapons, the existence of this weapon (whose tests alone did not violate the treaty) was a glaring advertisement of contempt. So when Russian UFO witnesses concluded that they had been seeing alien spaceships instead of treaty-busting weapons tests, Soviet military officials were all too willing to permit this illusion to prosper. Twenty-five years later, with the FOBS rockets long since scrapped and the Soviet regime itself on the scrap heap of history, the now-purposeless deception has maintained a zombielike life of its own. Russian UFO literature continues to issue ever more glorious accounts of the 1967 "crescent spaceships." Mainstream Russian magazines, newspapers, and even museum exhibits contain fanciful drawings of such shapes. Zigel himself is revered as "the father of Soviet UFOlogy," an icon of reliability and authenticity. But Zigel's and Gindilis's crescent craft are just one example of the ridiculous notions and outrageous fictions Russian UFOlogy has spawned. In 1977, for instance, Tass, the official Russian new agency, carried a dispatch from the northwest Russian port city of Petrozavodsk titled "Strange Natural Phenomenon over Kerelia." Wrote local correspondent Nikolay Milov, "On September 20 at about 0400 a huge star suddenly flared up in the dark sky, impulsively sending shafts of light to the earth. This star moved slowly toward Petrozavodsk and, spreading out over it in the form of a jellyfish, hung there, showering the city with a multitude of very fine rays which created an image of pouring rain." The "visitation" unleashed a torrent of rumors. People later reported being awakened from deep sleep by telepathic messages. Tiny holes were reportedly seen in windows and paving stones. Cars were said to have stalled and computers to have crashed, and witnesses smelled ozone. Soviet UFO enthusiasts rushed to embrace the case. "As far as I am concerned," claimed science-fiction author Aleksandr Kazantsev, "it was a spaceship from outer space, carrying out reconnaissance." According to Dr. Vladimir Azhazha, "In my opinion, what was seen over Petrozavodsk was either a UFO, a carrier of high intelligence with crew and passengers, or it was a field of energy created by such a UFO." Zigel, the dean of Soviet UFOlogists, agreed it was a true UFO: "Without a doubt-it had all the features." Sadly, the cause of all this mindless panic was a routine rocket launching from the supersecret military space center at Plesetsk in northwest Russia. The multiengined booster's contrails, backlit by the dawn sun, seemed to split into multiple glowing tentacles. In 1981, a midnight rocket launch from Plesetsk lit up the skies of Moscow itself and sent the capital city's residents into a blitz of unconstrained creativity. UFO expert Sergey Bozhich's notebooks contain reports of numerous "independent" UFO encounters during this ordinary launching. "Pilots of six civil aircraft reported either a UFO in flight or a UFO [attacking] their aircraft," he wrote. "At 1:30 a UFO attacked a truck along the Ryazan Avenue in Moscow." One witness even reported walking from a deep sleep to see a "scout ship" with a glass cupola and small alien pilot cruising down his street. The pattern is clear. Time and again, secret launchings or Russian rockets have unleashed avalanches of classic UFO perceptions from the imaginative, excitable witnesses and their careless interviewers. And consistent with its origins, Russian UFO literature is still characterized by fantastic tales and an utter lack of research into possible explanations. "I have no doubts" is the most common figure of speech in the lexicon of Russian UFOlogists, and they are doubtlessly sincere, if arguably deluded. "Are UFOs real?" one was asked not long ago by American documentary filmmaker Bryan Gresh. "My colleagues and I don't even think that's a question," he responded. "Of course they are real!" This sort of quasi-religious fervor just helps to fuel the skepticism of the cautious observer. After all, if Russian UFOlogists cannot or will not recognize the prosaic stimulus behind these phony crescent UFOs of 1967 and the UFO "jellyfish" of 1977, they may be incapable of solving any of the other hundreds of ordinary (if rare) causes that account for at least 90 percent (if not 100 percent) of all UFO perceptions. Dozens of major stimuli, and hundreds of minor ones, are constantly giving rise to counterfeit UFO perceptions around the world. Filtering out the residue of true UFOs from the pseudo UFOs poses enormous challenges for investigators. Most Russian UFOlogists appear unwilling to face this challenge. And the writings of prominent Russian UFO experts give ample ground for more anxiety. Vladimir Azhazha, probably the leading Russian UFO expert of the 1990s, is an undeniable enthusiast of UFO miracle stories. Some years ago, his favorite Western UFO story involved a UFO attack on the Apollo 13 space capsule, which he "disclosed" was carrying a secret atomic bomb to create seismic waves on the moon. But it was carrying no such thing. The April 1970 explosion, which disabled the craft and threatened the lives of the three astronauts, was caused by a hardware malfunction. When challenged recently by UFOlogists Antonio Huneeus, Azhazha made a candid admission: "When I gave the lecture, I was a teenager in UFOlogy and was intoxicated by the E.T. hypothesis and did not recognize anything else. I would retell with pleasure everything I read." Supposedly reformed, Azhazha then published a new book with a glorious new Apollo astronaut UFO story based this time on forged photographs published in American tabloid newspapers. The pictures show contrast-enhanced fuzzballs, photographic images that had been sharpened in the photo lab. A fabricated "radio conversation" in which the astronauts exclaim surprise at seeing alien spaceships in a crater near their landing site later appeared in another tabloid; it was patently bogus, too, based on grossly misused space jargon. The story was long ago abandoned by reputable Western UFOlogists, but Azhazha still loves it and presents it as true. At a UFO conference in Albuquerque in 1992, Azhazha told astonished Western colleagues that he had proof that 5,000 Russians had been abducted by UFOs and never returned to Earth. When asked to defend this number, he disclosed that he took the reported number of ordinary "missing persons" in the entire Soviet Union, plotted the regions over which major UFO activity had been reported, and then allocated those population proportions of "missing" to the UFOs. It was simple, sincere, and senseless, but the embarrassed American hosts (who had paid his travel expenses) couldn't disagree too publicly lest their waste of money be obvious. Russian UFOlogists claim to be careful. Azhazha himself has written: "NOthing on faith! One must check, check, and eleven times check in order to find an error!" But he doesn't seem to know how, and neither do any of his colleagues. While their sincerity and enthusiasm are not in doubt, their judgement, balance, and accuracy should be. Why are people like Azhazha the best that Russia can offer? Russians are heirs to a great, creative civilization, but they are also emerging from a social era that has had profound effects on their habits of thought. Today's Russians have lived in a reality-deprived and judgement-atrophied culture for generations. Once they were sufficiently brain be numbed by a repressive communist regime to accept any and all propagandistic idiocies fed to them, they were intellectually defenseless against infections of other brain bunk as well. UFO enthusiasm prospers in this nurturing environment. And it's not just UFO sightings that get conjured up by this fuzzy thinking. Historical figures, preferably dead ones who cannot disagree, are now constantly being portrayed as "secret UFO believers." For example, in 1993, a slick new UFO magazine called AURA-Z appeared in Moscow. Continuing the trend of tying now-dead space heroes to UFO studies, the magazine featured two separate interviews with contemporary experts concerning the role played by Sergey Korolev, the founder of the Soviet missile and space programs. It didn't bother the magazine at all that the two stories were utterly inconsistent. In one article, rocket expert Valery Burdakov presented a detailed account of how back in 1947 Stalin had ordered Korolev to assess Soviet intelligence reports on the Roswell, New Mexico, UFO crash. Korolev had reported back that the UFOs were real but not dangerous, the article "revealed." Yet just seven pages earlier, another expert named Lev Chulkov had written: "As early as the beginning of the 1950s, Stalin ordered Korolev to study the phenomenon of UFOs, but Korolev managed to avoid fulfilling this task." Of course, both claims can't be true. Besides, Burdakov was a recently rehabilitated political prisoner in 1947 and was thus hardly the type of trusted expert that Stalin would have consulted. Behind all such distracting noise, the UFO problem remains a fascinating and elusive puzzle, worthy of serious research. But weeding out true UFOs from the overwhelming mass of "IFOs," or identified flying objects, is a difficult, time-consuming task, as Western UFOlogists have learned in the past half century. Their new Russian colleagues so far show no indication that they have even begun. "I haven't seen too much effort at that job," admits Antonio Huneeus, one of the West's most perceptive pro-UFO observers of Russian UFOlogy. "The Russians themselves keep knocking on my door," Huneeus states. "They want to sell their stuff here." In fact, given today's economic crisis in Russia, thousands of people of all classes, but particularly from the military services, are desperately seeking-or deliberately creating-anything they can sell to Western buyers with bucks. UFO files are one of the few exportable raw materials with a market in the West, so there should be no surprise that there are suddenly so many bizarre items now available and so few Russians willing to be cautious or critical about them. If these Russian UFO delusions only affected their own research, the silliness would do no worldwide harm. But the intellectual infection has spread far beyond borders and polluted UFO studies in other countries as well. These new commercial conspiracies between Russian tall-tale sellers and Western tall-tale tellers in the entertainment and pseudodocumentary industry will make it much worse. The more serious Western UFOlogists, for instance, are particularly embarrassed by their colleagues' naive, unbounded enthusiasm for the 1967 "crescents" and the subsequent so-called Gindilis Report, with Soviet thermonuclear weapons tests masquerading as true UFOs. Dr. James McDonald, probably America's top UFO expert of the 1960s, testified that the crescents "can not be readily explained in any conventional terms." Dr. J. Allen Hynek, dean of American UFOlogy in the 1970s, reviewed the sightings and crowed, "It becomes very much harder-in fact, from my personal viewpoint, impossible-to find a trivial solution for all the UFO reports if one weights and considers the caliber of some of the witnesses." They were scientists, pilots, engineers, and fellow astronomers, and Hynek as absolutely certain they couldn't have been mistaken. Today's successor to McDonald and Hynek is retired space scientist Richard Haines, American director of the joint United States-Commonwealth of independent States working group on UFOs, the Aerial Anomaly Federation. Concerning the 1967 sightings, he confidently wrote that "the reports represent currently unknown phenomena, being completely different in nature from known atmospheric optics effects or technical experiments in the atmosphere." Another famous Russian pseudo UFO case, called the "Cape Kamenny UFO," has long been foolishly championed by Western UFO experts. Top American UFOlogist Jacques Valle cited this encounter in a 1992 book as one of the best in the world. His casebook coding scheme gave it the highest marks: "Firsthand personal interview with the witness by a source of proven reliability; site visited by a skilled analyst; and no explanation possible, given the evidence." A graphic account of this UFO was given by American UFOlogist William L. Moore based on casebooks compiled by Zigel. "On December 3, 1967 at 3:04p.m.," wrote Moore, several crewmen and passengers of an IL-18 aircraft on a test flight for the State Scientific Institute of Civil Aviation sited an intensely bright object approaching them in the night sky." Moore reported that the object "followed" the evasive turns of the aircraft. But years later I discovered that the aircraft, passing near Vorkuta in the northern Urals, had by chance been crossing the flight path of the Kosmos-194 spy satellite during its ascent from Plesetsk. The crew had unwittingly observed the rocket's plumes and the separation of its strap-on boosters. All other details of maneuvers were added in by their imaginations. Yet this bogus UFO story is highlighted as authentic by nearly every Western account of Russian UFOs in the last 20 years. Of course, not all Russian UFO reports spring from missile and space events. Far from it! But those specific kinds of stimuli are extremely well documented, unlike other traditional pseudo UFO stimuli such as balloons, experimental aircraft, military and police helicopters, bodice fireballs, and so forth. Thus, they can provide an unmatchable calibration test for the ability of Russian UFOlogists to find solutions for these pseudo UFOs. The Russian UFOlogists have failed. The ultimate test of the Russians' ability to perform mature, reliable UFO research is how they treat "the smoking gun" of Russian UFOlogy, the Petrozavodsk "jellyfish" UFO of 1977. The "jellyfish" was a brief wonder in the West before being quickly solved (by me) as the launch of a rocket from Plesetsk. Western UFOlogists readily accepted the explanation, but now it turns out that Russian UFO experts never did. They have assembled a vast array of miracle stories associated with the event, including reports of telepathic messages and physical damage to the earth. But all this proves is that ordinary Russians love to embellish stories and that Russian UFO researchers haven't a clue on how to filter out such exaggerations from original perceptions. If they cannot do it for such obviously bogus UFOs as Petrozavodsk, how can they be expected to do it for less clearcut ones? If the UFO mystery is to be solved, there is adequate data from the rest of the world outside of Russia. Serious UFOlogists will have to quarantine the obviously hopelessly infected UFO lore from Russia and disregard it all. Some valuable data might be lost, but the crippling effect of unconstrained crackpottery would be avoided. Every decade or two, the question can be reconsidered with a simple test: Do leading Russian UFOlogists still insist on the alien nature of the 1967 crescent UFOs and the 1977 "jellyfish" UFO? If so, slam the door on them again. Yet the temptation may be too great, especially for those who are into what I call the "fairy tale mode" of modern UFO study-those who believe the best cases are ones that happened long ago and far away, and thus are forever immune from prosaic solution. Russian UFO stories have turned out to be exactly those kinds of fairy tales. And if the purpose of modern UFOlogy is only mystery worship and obfuscation, only mind-boggling tall tales and mind-stretching theorizing, then it will continue to feed on the baseless bilge coming out of Russia while being insidiously and unavoidable poisoned by it. The reality test, then, is not of Russian UFOlogy, which has already failed, but of non-Russian UFOlogy, where the issue remains in doubt. *END* **************************************************************************** COSMIC CONSPIRACY: SIX DECADES OF GOVERNMENT UFO COVER-UPS PART II Article by Dennis Stacy Editor's note (OMNI Mag.): This is the second of a six-part series ivestigating UFOs and government secrecy through the years. The decade under scrutiny here is the 1950s. Shortly before midnight of July 19, 1952, air-traffic controllers at Washington National Airport picked up a group of unidentified flying objects on their radar screens. Over the next three and a half hours, the targets would disappear and reappear on their scopes. They were visually corroborated by incoming flight crews. At 3:00 in the morning, the Air Defense Command dispatched two F-94 jet interceptors, which failed to make contact with the targets. The following weekend, the same scenario virtually repeated itself. Unknown targets were picked up on radar and verified both by incoming pilots and ground observers. This time, the hurriedly scrambled jets did manage to make visual contact and establish a brief radar lock-on, and the general public joined in the hoopla as well. According to The UFO Controversy in America, by Temple University historian David Jacobs, "So many calls came into the Pentagon alone that its telephone circuits were completely tied up with UFO inquiries for the next few days." In several major newspapers, the 1952 UFO flap even bumped the Democratic National Convention off the front-page-headlines. The so-called "Washington Wave" also resulted in at least two events that have been debated ever since. On July 29, in an attempt to quell public concern, the military held its largest press conference since the end of WWII. Press conference heads Maj. Gen. John Samford, director of Air Force Intelligence, adn Maj. Gen. Roger Ramey, chief of the Air Defense Command, denied that any interceptors had been scrambled and attributed the radar returns to temperature inversions. In addition, the Washington sightings led directly to the CIA-sponsored Robertson Panel, so named after its chairman Dr. Harold P. Robertson, director of the Weapons Systems Evaluation Group for the secretary of defense. The Panel's basic mandate was outlined in a document later retrieved under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA). In that crucial document, a 1952 memorandum to the National Security Council (NSC), CIA director Walter Bedell Smith wrote that "a broader, coordinated effort should be initiated to develop a firm scientific understanding of the several phenomena which are apparently involved in these reports, and to assure outselves that [they] will not hamber our present efforts in the Cold War or confuse our early warning system in case of an attack." In line with this mandate, the panel that finally convened in Washington, DC, in mid January of 1953 consisted of some of the best scientific minds of the day. Members included a future Nobel Prize laureate in physics, Luis Alvarez, formerly of Berkeley; physicist Samuel Goudsmit of the Brookhaven National Laboratories; and astronomer Thornton Page of Johns Hopkins University, later with NASA> Yet for all of its scientific expertise, the Panel's major recommendations fell mainly in the domain of public policy. After a review of the evidence, the Panel concluded that while UFOs themselves did not necessarily "constitute a direct threat to the national security. . . the continued emphasis on the reporting of these phenomena does [threaten] the orderly functioning of the protective organs of the body politic." Panel members recommended that "national-security agencies take steps immediately to strip the UFO phenomenon of its special status and eliminate the aura of mystery it has acquired." Perhaps a public-education program with the dual goals of "training and debunking" could be implemented? In this context, the Panel suggested that the mass media might be brought to bear on the problem, up to and including Walt Disney Productions! More interestingly, the Panel also recommended that pro-UFO grassroots organizations be actively monitored "because of thei r potentially great influence on mass thinking if widespread sightings should occur." Mentioned by name were two organizations that had arisen in the wake of the Washington Wave: Civilian Saucer Intelligence of Los Angeles and the Aerial Phenomena Research Organization of Sturgeon Bay, Wisconsin, both now defunct. Is there evidence that such surveillance was conducted or that the Robertson Panel recommendations influenced government policies? "The paper trail is sketchy at best," says Dale Goudie, a Seattle advertising agent and information director for the Computerized UFO Network, or CUFON, an electronic bulletin board specializing in UFO documents retrieved under the FOIA. "What we know is that some agencies tend to keep some old UFO files while throwing out or mysteriously losing others. For example, we know the FBI kept a file on George Adamski, a famous UFO 'contactee' of the Fifties, perhaps because they thought he was a communist, and that the CIA had communicated with Maj. Donald Keyhoe, later one of the directors of the National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomena. "When it comes to their own programs, however, the agencies are a bit more absent-minded." An example, says Goudie, Project Aquarius. "The National Security Agency [NSA] admitted in a letter to Senator John Glenn that apparently there is or was an Air Force Project Aquarius that dealt with UFOs," Goudie states. "Their own Project Aquarius, they said, did not, but they refused to say what it did deal with. They did admit it was classified top secret and that the release of any documents would damage the national security. The Air Force denies the existence of their own Project Aquarius, and the NSA now says it was mistaken. They ought to get their stories straight." "It's almost impossible to confirm that any individual action was directly dictated by the Robertson Panel," agrees physicist and UFOlogist Stanton Friedman, co-author of Crash at Corona, "but was the subject defused at every available opportunity per its recommendations? You bet!" Friedman points specifically to a press release issued on October 25, 1955, by the Department of Defense, chaired by secretary of the Air Force Donald Quarles. The occasion was the release of Special Report 14, issued by Project Blue Book, the Air Force agency publicly charged with investigating UFOs. Quarles said there was no reason to believe that any UFO had ever overflown the United States and that the 3 percent of unknowns reported the previous year could probably be identified with more information. As Friedman sees it, however, Special Report 14 was the best UFO study ever conducted. Interpreting the report for Omni, Friedman says it showed that "over 20 percent of all UFO sightings investigated between 1947 and 1952 were unknowns, and the better the quality of the sighting, the more likely it was to be an unknown. The press release failed to mention any of the 240 charts and tables in the original study," adds Friedman, "nor did it point out that the work had been done by the highly respected Battelle Memorial Institute under contract to the Department of Air Force. It's a classic case," Friedman says, "of the government having two hands and the left one not knowning what the right one is up to." Whatever the truth about UFOs, however, the government tried mightily to conceal information suggesting mysterious origins afoot. For a population already shaky over nuclear arsenals, cold war, and communists under ever bush, officials may have reckoned that the notion of visitors from beyond, even imaginary ones, might just have been too much to bear. ************************************************************************* COSMIC CONSPIRACY: SIX DECADES OF GOVERNMENT UFO COVER-UPS PART III Article by DENNIS STACY The third in a six-part series on government suppression of UFO-related material, this article examines the 1960s. The Sixties were marked by upheaval: street riots outside the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, demonstrations against the war in Vietnam, "free love," and psychedelic drugs. And according to pundits, a "Big Brother" government intent on suppressing the winds of change had extended its reach beyond the merely social or political to the realm of UFOs. The result of this saucer suppression? Angry congressional hearings and the closure of Project Blue Book, the Air Force agency responsible for investigating UFOs. The Sixties' "Saucergate" was triggered on March 20, 1966, when a glowing, football-shaped UFO was reported hovering above a swampy area near the women's dormitory of a small college in Hillsdale, Michigan. Witnesses included 87 female students and the local civil-defense director. The following night in Dexter, 63 miles away, another UFO was spotted by five people, including two police officers. The Michigan sightings provoked a national outcry; in short, the public wanted an explanation. Addressing the largest media gathering in the history of the Detroit Free Press Club, Project Blue Book spokesman J. Allen Hynek, an astronomer with Ohio State University, finally ventured an opinion. He said the sightings might be due to "swamp gas"-methane gas from rotting vegetation that had somehow spontaneously ignited. The explanation didn't wash, and both Hynek and the Air Force found themselves the brunt of immediate and almost universal ridicule. Newspapers had a field day as cartoonists, columnists, and editorial writers nationwide lampooned the Air Force suggestion. In a letter to the House Armed Services Committee, then-Michagan congressman and House Republican minority leader (and later president) Gerald R. Ford called for congressional hearings on the subject, arguing that "the American Public deserves a better explanation than that thus far given by the Air Force." The subcommittee subsequently held its hearing on April 5, 1966, but only three individuals, all with Air Force connections, were invited to testify: Hynek, then-Blue Book chief; Hector Quintanilla; and Harold D. Brown, secretary of the Air Force. Brown told the committee, chaired by L. Mendel Rivers, that they had no evidence of an extraterrestrial origin of UFOs, nor was there any indication that UFOs constituted a threat to national security. Under scrutiny, however, the Air Force eventually agreed to an outside review of Blue Book's files. Toward that end, the Air Force awarded $500,000 to the University of Colorado at Boulder. The major-domo of this extensive review was physicist Edward U. Condon, former director of the National Bureau of STandards. His second in command was the assistant dean of the graduate school, Robert Low. Initially, critics of the government's UFO policy were happy to see the matter out of Air Force hands. But it didn't take long for their faith in the Condon effort to fade. If the Air Force had tried to gloss over the UFO issue, said retired Marine major Donald E. Keyhoe, director of the civilian National Investigation Committee on Aerial Phenomena (NICAP), the Condon Commission was even worse. The day after his appointment, for instance, Condon was quoted in the Denver Rocky Mountain News. He was "no evidence," he said, for "advanced life on other planets." Moreover, he explained, the study would give the public a "better understanding of ordinary phenomena, which, if recognized at once, would reduce the number of UFO reports." Low, Condon's chief administrator, seems to have prejudged the reality of UFOs, too. In a telling memo written to University administrators, Low noted that "the trick would be, I think, to describe the project so that to the public it would appear a totally objective study but to the scientific community would present the image of a group of non believers trying their best to be objective but having an almost zero expectation of finding a saucer." Condon soon fired the two senior staffers he blamed for leaking the memo to the press. Two weeks later, Mary Lou Armstrong, his own administrative assistant resigned, citing low morale within the project as a whole. "Low's attitude from the beginning," she wrote, "has been one of negativism. [He] showed little interest in keeping current on sightings, either by reading or talking with those who did." At one point, Low left for a month, ostensibly to represent the Condon Committee at the International AStronomical Union in Prague. Staff members suggested he use the opportunity to meet with veteran UFO researchers in England and France. Instead, Low went to Loch Ness, claiming that sea monsters and UFOs might share some similarities since neither existed. Even so, there is no record that he filed any written notes on his investigations. The Condon Report was published in August of 1968 as the Scientific Study of Unidentified Flying Objects. In all, 30 of the 91 cases analyzed remained unidentified. Examining the famous McMinnville, Oregon, UFO photos, for example, project investigators opined that this was "one of the few UFO reports in which all factors investigated, geometric, psychological, and physical, appear to be consistent with the assertion that an extraordinary flying object, silvery, metallic, disc shaped, flew within sight of two witnesses." Of a radar/visual UFO sighting that occurred over Lakenheath, England, in August of 1965, the study concluded that "the probability that at least one genuine UFO was involved appeared to be fairly high." Yet these suggestions that an unidentified phenomenon might indeed be afoot were buried in a bulky 1,500-page report. More readily accessible to the media was Condon's conclusion, published at the beginning of the study rather than at the end, as was standard scientific procedure. Essentially, Condon concluded, "further extensive study of UFOs probably cannot be justified in the expectation that science will be advanced thereby." The Air Force seized the opportunity to withdraw from the minefield of UFOs, and on December 17, 1969, called a press conference to announce the closing of Project Blue Book. Citing the Condon report, acting secretary of the Air Force, Robert C. Seamans, Jr., told reporters that Blue Book's continuation could no longer "be justified on grounds of national security or in the interest of science." Critics contend that Blue Book never mounted a thorough scientific investigation of the UFO phenomenon to begin with, and that during its 22-year involvement with the issue, it had functioned as little more than a public-relations program. The charge, it turns out, was made by Hynek himself. In his last interview, granted this reporter shortly before his death from a brain tumor, Hynek avowed that while th Air Force always said it was interested in the study of UFOs, officials regularly "turned handsprings to keep a good case from getting to the attention of the media. Any case they solved," Hynek added, "they had no trouble talking about. It was really sad." As the Sixties came to a close, the Air Force finally got what it wanted: It officially washed its hands of UFOs. Condon continued to deny the subject was "shrouded in secrecy." Overall, he said, the Air Force had done a commendable job. Hynek agreed, though for reasons of his own. "The Air Force regarded UFOs as an intelligence matter, and it became increasingly more and more embarrassing to them," he said. "After all, we paid good tax dollars to have the Air Force guard our skies, and it would have been bad public relations for them to say, 'Yes there's something up there, but we're helpless.' They just couldn't do that, so they took the very human action of protecting their own interests." *END* *************************************************************************** COSMIC CONSPIRACY: SEX DECADES OF GOVERNMENT UFO COVER-UPS PART FOUR Article by Dennis Stacy This is the fourth in a six-part series on alleged UFO-related government cover-ups. This segment covers the 1970s. Todd Zechel knows how David felt the day he marched out to take on Goliath. Early in 1978, in otherwise out-of-the-way Prairie due Sac, Wisconsin, Zechel helped found Citizens Against UFO Secrecy, or CAUS. The group's mandate: to take on the behemoth of the U.S. government, which had kept thousands of documents relevant to UFO researchers under lock and key for years. In the past, getting to those documents had been virtually impossible. For the most part, they were buried within a paper labyrinth of agencies within agencies, each employing its own unique form of "bureauspeak" and filing. What was an "unidentified flying object" in one agency might be an "incident report" or "air space violation" in another. The reports might be in the form of a carbon copy, micro film, or rapidly degrading thermal fax paper, barely legible in the original. Other files were lost or routinely destroyed on a regular basis. Still, one had to start somewhere, and CAUS was determined to track down and make public as many of the existing documents as it could. In its quest for truth, the new group would put out a newsletter called Just Cause, and, with the help of UFO researcher Brad Sparks and attorney Peter Gersten, tread legal waters no UFO group had entered before. "We were full of fire," Zechel now recalls. "We had served the government notice; we weren't going to take their stonewalling anymore, and if necessary, we would haul them into court." The euphoria was not misplaced. As the Seventies unfurled, most UFOlogists felt that all they needed in the battle against the governmental Goliath was one good slingshot. Any now that slingshot, in the form of the newly enacted Freedom of Information Act, FOIA, was here. Signed into law in 1966 by a Democratic Congress under President Lyndon Johnson, FOIA (affectionately called "foya") was created so the public could access all but the most highly classified government records. Nine categories of information were originally exempted from scrutiny, beginning with those affecting national security and foreign policy and then trickling down into fairly mundane materials like maps. UFOs, of course, weren't mentioned at all. Then, in the mid Seventies, the Nixon administration gave FOIA more muscle still. Time limits were imposed on agencies receiving FOIA requests. Affordable fees for the search and reproduction of requested documents were established, and courts were empowered to decide whether or not specific documents fell within the act's guidelines. In the real world outside the halls of Congress, however, the soldiers for CAUS found land mines strewn across the battlefield. The first CAUS celebre, Zechel states, occurred before the Wisconsin group was officially formed. It was 1977, and Zechel, Sparks, and Gersten made their stab at wielding the FOIA through the auspices of the now defunct Ground Saucer Watch, a UFO group based in Phoenix. In 1975, it turns out, the Phoenix group's director Bill Spaulding, had written the CIA complaining it had withheld a vast quantity of information on UFOs. "It wasn't an official FOIA request as such," Zechel says, "but more like an accusatory letter. Surprisingly, the CIA responded." Specifically, Spaulding had referenced the case of one Ralph Mayher, a marine photographer who claimed to have filmed a UFO over Miami Bay in July of 1952. Mayher went on to become a celebrated news cameraman with ABC news in Los Angeles. Not surprisingly, under the circumstances, he also signed on as a consultant to one of the more prominent UFO organizations of the day-the National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomena, or NICAP. Only years later did Mayher learn that, unbeknownst to him, his original film had been turned over to the CIA for analysis. Looking into the matter, the CIA's response to Spaulding was expected: Its interest in UFOs was virtually nonexistent, the Agency declared, and had been ever since 1952, when a panel of scientists met in Washington to declare the phenomenon a public-relations problem, nothing more. But much to Spaulding's surprise, the spy agency also released two documents relating to the Mayher case. "The Agency had blacked our about 70 percent of the documents," Zechel states, "and also referred to three other related documents still in their possession." Zechel retained Gersten, who in 1977 filed a suit seeking full release of all five documents. The case wound up in federal district court as GSW vs. the CIA under the jurisdiction of Judge John Pratt. After protracted legal maneuverings, lawyers for both sides finally met with representatives of the attorney general's office in Washington in July of 1978. "At that meeting," according to Zechel, "I had threatened to have the CIA prosecuted for making false replies under the FOIA. Ultimately, the Agency agreed to search all of its files for UFO records and to stipulate which ones it would release and which it wouldn't. As the FOIA was structured at the time, the CIA was also obligated to account for any deletions on an item-by-item basis." As Zechel recalls, the CIA missed its original 90-day deadline by 88 days. "Then they dumped a stack of documents on our desk about two to three feet thick, heavily blacked out, and with none of the deletions accounted for," Zechel states. "We now had 30 days to try to identify and contest the deletions, which was humanly impossible." Instead, Gersten filed a motion claiming the CIA stood in contempt of court and clearly had not acted in good faith. The motion was filed after GSW's own 30-day response deadline had expired, however, and Judge Pratt summarily dismissed the suit. "We were one day late," Zechel recalls, "and that effectively ended the suit." But when all was said and done, the CIA decided to release some 900 pages of UFO-related documents. Indeed, like the CIA, many agencies decided to release documents even when courts did not force their hands. A request for UFO files from the FBI, for instance, netted almost 2,000 pages. By scrutinizing documents obtained from the FBI and CIA, moreover, CAUS researchers were able to identify witnesses. They could also pinpoint relevant incidents likely to be described in documents on file with a host of other government agencies. Ultimately, CAUS would be responsible for the release of between 7,000 and 8,000 UFO-related documents from a who's who of official entities, including the Air Force, Coast Guard, Navy, Defense Intelligence Agency, North American Aerospace Defense Command, Federal Aviation Administration, and others. Among the major tidbits revealed were a series of sightings reported from October through November 1975 by the northern tier of Air Force bases from Montana to Maine; several of these sightings involved personnel stationed at Minuteman silos. CAUS also uncovered a September 1976 file on an Imperial Iranian Air Force jet that reportedly locked its radar onto a bright UFO only to have its electronic weapons system fail. CAUS's most celebrated suit, however, was the one it launched against the supersecret National Security Agency (NSA) in December 1979. The case was not fully resolved until March 1982 when the Supreme Court refused to hear Gersten's appeal. Although the agency admitted to having approximately 57 documents pertaining to UFOs in its files, it successfully refused to release them, citing national-security concerns. Despite the progress, Zechel can't help wishing that CAUS had been able to do more. "I felt we could inflame the public and marshal tremendous popular support," Zechel says, "but we never got beyond four or five hundred members. We were constantly hampered by a serious lack of funds and the usual personality conflicts." As for Gersten, he expresses disappointment that not every known document was turned over to SAUS, especially those from the CIA and NSA, but concedes that "they were probably witheld for legitimate reasons. I suspect they were protecting their own intelligence sources and technology." Gersten performed all of his work for CAUS pro bono, but estimates that his fees would have come to nearly $70,000. "And that's in 1970 dollars," he says. As the decade of the 1970s came to a close, Zechel left CAUS and has since founded the Associated Investigators Group. CAUS, meanwhile, continues under different officers and still puts out its publication, Just CAUSE on a regular basis. "What's changed most is the FOIA itself," says Barry Greenwood, the newsletter's editor and current CAUS director of research. "The act was essentially gutted by Executive Order number 12356, signed by President Ronald Reagan. Among other changes wrought by Reagan's general secrecy order," according to Greenwood, "is the fact that agencies are no longer required to respond within a reasonable period of time. Searches, when they do them at all now, routinely take between six months and two years. The fees have gone up, too," Greenwood complains. "One agency cited us the enormous search fee of $250,000. It's very discouraging." Pennsylvania researcher Robert Todd was also involved with CAUS early on, but his experiences have left him disillusioned with both David and Goliath. "The UFO community won't be satisfied until the government admits it's behind a vast cover-up," says Todd. "Is there a lot of material still being withheld? Without a doubt. But does that prove the government is engaged in a massive conspiracy, or that it's merely a massive bureaucracy? I can't state this strongly enough: I don't believe there's a cover-up at all." A spokesperson with the CIA's Freedom of Information office in Washington, DC, refused a telephone request to talk to someone regarding the agency's Freedom of Information Act policy, explaining that all such inquiries would first have to be submitted in writing to John H. Wright, information and privacy coordinator. Following agency guidelines, Omni has submitted a written request for explanation of CIA policy as well as UFO documents, past and present. The request is still pending but remained unanswered at press time. Results of our inquiry will have to wait for a future edition of the magazine. As far as the UFO community is concerned, the work of CAUS, Zechel-style, remains undone. These days, says Todd, "getting any kind of document out of the government is a lengthy, time consuming process. First, they consider the FOIA an annoyance; after all, they're understaffed and saddled with budget constraints. Second, the nature of any government is to control the flow of information." *END* ***************************************************************************** COSMIC CONSPIRACY: SIX DECADES OF GOVERNMENT UFO COVER-UPS PART V Article by Dennis Stacy and Patrick Huyghe This is the fifth piece in a six-part series on government secrecy and UFOs through the decades. Here we look at the 1980s. From their vantage point 22,300 miles above the earth's surface, a fleet of supersecret military satellites monitors our planet for missile launches and nuclear detonations. On a clear day, these satellites can see forever, so it's no surprise when they also pick up erupting volcanos, oil-well fires, incoming meteors, sunlight reflections off the ocean, and a host of other head sources, including those that still remain unexplained. Since 1985, all this data has been beamed down in near real-time to the U.S. Space Command's Missile Warning Center, operating from within Cheyenne Mountain, near Colorado Springs. The purpose: coordinating satellite-based early warning systems for the army, navy, air force, and marines. Whether harmless or threatening, the information has always been a guarded national secret. But suddenly, in 1993, with the Cold War over, the Defense Department agreed to declassify some satellite information not related to intercontinental ballistic missile (ICBM) launches and nuclear events. Since then, scientists ranging from astronomers to geophysicists have rushed to get their hands on this motherload of data. Among researchers hoping to glean some truth from the declassified data are UFOlogists, long frustrated by the critic's classic retort: "If UFOs are real, why haven't they been detected by our satellites?" Well, some UFO researchers are now saying, they have been. With access to the most sophisticated space data ever generated, say some UFO researchers, they may finally find the Holy Grail of their profession: bona fide, irrefutable, nuts-and-bolts proof of UFOs. As this series of articles explains, UFO researchers have been searching for such evidence in government vaults for years. In the Fifties and Sixties, some UFOlogists claimed, the military kept alien corpses and a ship under wraps. The search for proof was fueled throughout the Seventies by the Freedom of Information Act, which yielded thousands of pages of government documents, but no hard, technical, incontrovertible evidence of UFOs. Finally, in the 1980s, a supposedly explosive memo revealed the existence of a top-secret group, dubbed MJ12, made up of high-level government officials devoted to the secret reality of UFOs. Only problem is, according to most UFO experts, the memo was a hoax. Of course, data from crude detection systems like gun cameras and radar were available. But they merely confirmed the obvious: that military and goverment personnel, like many other sectors of the population, saw and reported mysterious lights in the sky. If they could ever prove their theories, UFOlogists knew, they would have to tap the most sophisticated information-gathering technology available: Department of Defense spy satellites, like the Defense Support Program (DSP) satellites, in geosynchronous orbit above the earth. In face, rumor had it, heat, light, and infrared sensors at the heart of the satellites were routinely picking up moving targets clearly not missiles and tagged "Valid IR Source." Some of these targets were given the mysterious code name of "Fast Walker." Unfortunately for UFOlogists, few secrets in this country's vast military arsenal have been so closely guarded as the operational parameters of DSP satellites. Even their exact number is classified. "That shouldn't surprise anyone," explains Captain John Kennedy, public affairs officer with the USAF Space Command Center at Peterson Air Force Base. "It's an early ICBM launch detection system, and we have to protect our own technology for obvious reasons. If everyone knew what the system's capabilities were, they would try to take steps to get around it." But in recent years, thanks to a loosening of the reigns, a few tantalizing tidbits of information have managed to seep under the satellite secrecy dam, allowing UFOlogists a small glimpse of some surprising nearspace events. The first issue for UFOlogists to examine, explains Ron Regehr of Aerojet General in California, the company that builds the DSP sensor systems, is whether the satellites could detect UFOs even if we wanted them to. According to Regehr, who has worked on the satellite sensors for the last 25 years and even wrote its operational software specifications, the answer to that question was revealed in 1990, during Operation Desert Storm. "As we know," says Regehr, "the satellites picked up every one of the 80 Iraqi Scud launches, and the Scud is a very low-intensity infrared source compared to the average ICBM." Pursuing the matter further, Regehr turned to an article published in MIJI Quarterly, "Now You See It, Now You Don't," which detailed a September, 1976 UFO encounter near Teheran. The incident nivolved two brilliantly glowing UFOs first seem by ground observers. One object, or light source, an estimated 30 feet in diameter, reportedly went from ground level to an altitude of 40,000 feet, and was visible at a distance of 70 miles. An Imperial Iranian Air Force F-4 jet fighter was sent aloft and managed to aim a Sidewinder AIM-19 air-to-air missile at the target before its electronic systems failed. "Apart from the visible light factor, there's the indication that the UFO gave off enough infrared energy for the Sidewinder's IR sensor to lock on to it," says Regehr. "You can do a few simple calculations," he adds, "and conclude that teh DSP satellites of the day should easily have been able to see the same thing. Of course, I can't say they did, or if they did, whether or not it was recorded in the database." Part of the problem, according to Regehr, is the sheer mountain of data that the DSP satellites generate. On average, an infrared portrait of the earth's surface and surrounding space is downloaded every ten seconds. All of the data is then stored on larget 14-inch reels of magnetic tape, "the kind," says Regehr, "that you always see spinning around in science fiction movies, and which fill up in about 15 minutes." The tapes are eventually erased and reused. Technicians visually monitor the datastream on a near real-time basis, but only follow up a narrow range of events-those that match up with what the air force calls "tamplates." Based on known rocket fuel burn times and color spectra, the templates are used to identify ballistic missile launches and nuclear explosions. But the system also picks up other infrared events ranging from mid-air collisions of planes to oil-well fires and volcanoes. "I would say that rarely a week goes by that we don't get some kind of infrared source that is avalid, or real, but physicist and consultant to the Aerospace Corporation in El Segundo, California, a nonprofit air force satellite engineering contractor. "But once we determine it isn't a threat, that's basically the end of our job. We aren't paid to look at each and every one." Tagliaferri and a handful of colleagues are among the few civilian space scientists who have thus far been allowed access to the Department of Defense database. Their research, based on spy satellite data declassified in the fall of 1993, is part of a chapter in Hazards Due to Comets and Asteroids, from the University of Arizona Press. "I think the air force finally agreed that the data had scientific, as well as political and global security value," says Tagliaferri. What Tagliaferri and his collaborators were able to confirm was that between 1975 and 1992, DOD satellites detected 136 upper-atmosphere explosions, a few equivalent in energy to the atomic bombs that destroyed Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Unlike the three-to ten-minute burn periods of an ICBM, these previously unacknowledged "flash events" typically take place in a matter of seconds. They are attributable to meteorites and small asteroids. "Most of what we see are objects that are probably 10 to 50 meters in diameter, about the size of a house, and packing 300 times the kinetic energy of dynamite," Tagliaferri says. The ramification, however, is that nervous governments might mistake these flash events for nuclear bombsaimed in their direction and trigger a like response. One of the brightest unknown flash events occurred over indonesia on April 15, 1988, shortly before noon, exploding with the approximate firepower of 5.000 tons of high explosives. A slightly less powerful detonation shook an uninhabited expance of the Pacific Ocean on October 1, 1990, in the midst of Operation Deser Shield. "But what if the latter event had exploded a little lower in the atmosphere, and over, say Baghdad?" Tagliaferri warns. "The consequences could well have been disastrous. Ground observers would have seen a fireball the brightness of the sun and heard a shock wave rattle windows. Given the mindset of the Iraqis, Israelis, and the other combatants in the area at that time, any of them might have concluded that they were under nuclear attack and responded accordingly." The argument that some UFOs might be capable of triggering a similar false alarm ahs been made many times in the past by, among others, the Soviets. An article titled "UFOs and Security," which appeared in the June, 1989 issue of Soviet Military Review, states: "We believe that lack of information on the characteristics an dinfluence of UFOs increases the threat of incorrect identification. Then, mass transit of UFOs along trajectories close to those of combast missiles could be regarded by computers as an attack." But when asked if some unknowns detected by satellite sensors might represent real UFOs rather than incoming meteorites, Tagliaferri chuckles. "Personally, I don't think so," he says. "But who knows? How can you tell? I'm a scientist, a physicist, and to my mind the evidence of UFOs is just not convicing. On the other hand, I've been wrong before." UFOlogists, meanwhile, think that proof might be lurking in the stacks of printouts from the DSP system computers. But the only material of this sort likely to see the light of day will probably have to come from inside leaks. And that may have already happened. One UFO researcher, using sources he won't reveal, has turned up evidence of what he believes mihgt be a UFO tracked by satellite. Last year, aJoe Stefula, formerly a special agent with the army's Criminal Investigation Command, made public on several electronic bulletin boards what purports to be a diagram of an infrared even detected by a DSP satellite on May 5, 1984. "I haven't been able to determine that the document's absolutely authentic," says Stefula, "but I have been able to confirm that the DSP printout for that date shows an event at the same time with the same characteristics." According to Stefula's alleged source, now said to be retired from the military, the offical code name for unidentified objects exhibiting ballistic missile characteristics is Fast Walker. "But what makes this particular Fast Walker so peculiar," says Stefula, "is that it comes in from outer space on a curved trajectory, passes within three kilometers of the satellite platform, and then disappears back into space. Whatever it is, it was tracked for nine minutes. That doesn't sound like a meteorite to me." Regehr agrees: "It was there too long. It was going too slow. It didn't have enough speed for escape velocity." But escape it did. The May, 1984 event allegedly generated a 300-page internal report, only portions of which are classified, though non of it has yet been released. "I don't think they would do a 300-page report on everything they detect," says Stefula, whose efforts to obtain the report have so far been unsuccessful, "so there must have been something significant about this that led them to look into it. My source told me that they basically looked at every possibility and couldn't explain it by natural or man-made means." Nor was this apparently an isolated event. According to the unnamed source, such Fast Walkers are detected, on the average, "two to three times a month." Even longtime arch-UFO skeptic Philip J. Klass, contributing avionics editor to Aviaton Week and Space Technology, admits that the military's DSP satellites could detect physical flying saucers from outer space-but with one very large proviso: "If you assume," says Klass, "that a UFO traveling at, say 80,000 feet leaves a long strong plume liek a space shuttle launch. But we know that isn't the way UFOs are usually reported." Part of the problem, according to Klass, who has written a book on military spy satellites titled Secret Sentries in Space, is that the DSP system has performed better than spec. "It's too good, or too sensitive, if you prefer," he says. "In fact, it was so good that it was sent back to research and development for fine tuning, in order to eliminate as many false alarms as possible. Obviously, we didn't want a fuel storage tank fire next to a Soviet missile silo to set off a launch alarm," he explains. "Nor did we want the system to track the dozens or hundreds of Russian jet fighters in the air every day." Klass's best guess is that the mysterious May, 1984 Fast Walker even uncovered by Stefula probably represents nothing more than a classified mission flown by our own SR-71 high-altitude Blackbird spyplane. "it's admittedly too long a duration to be a meteor fireball," he concedes, "but the Blackbird typically flies at an altitude of 80,000 to 100,000 feet, which makes its afterburner trail easily visible to the DSP system." In the same context, says Klass, Fast Walker might be a code name for the recently retired SR-71 itself, or, conceivably, its Soviet counterpart, assuming the Soviets had one at the time. Either way, Klass concludes, "It's no surprise that the air force would want to keep much of this information secret." Apparently, keep most of it secret they will. Despite the success Tagliaferri and a few others had in getting past the military censors, don't anticipate a flood of similar studies, especially one in search of UFO reports. "I don't see the air force declassifying a whole lot more of the DSP data to other scientists, not without an incredible amount of cleanup," says Captain Kennedy. "And it's certainly not accessible to requests through the Freedom of Information Act." Even if some unknowns turn out to be UFOs, the Air Force Space Command isn't going to hand UFOlogists-or anyone else-that information on a silver platter. Meanwhile, the dividing line between what might constitute extraterrestrial technology and our own twentieth century equivalent grows increasingly narrow and blurred with every new device sent into space. Somewhere out there, no doubt, is a sensor system that already knows whether we are being visited by UFOs or not, but the owners of those systems aren't talking. *END* ************************************************************************* COSMIC CONSPIRACY: SIX DECADES OF GOVERNMENT UFO COVER-UPS PART VI Editor's note (Omni Mag): In the final installment of our six-part series on alleged government cover-ups and UFOs, we look at the most controversial case of the 1990s. The sun sinks beyond the jagged Groom Mountains like a bloated red basketball. As temperatures plummet in the thin desert air, we make our way up a narrow arroyo to the base of White Sides, a towering jumble of limestone ledges overlooking the super-secret air base below, our hiking boots making crunching sounds in the growing darkness. We've been whispering and walking side-by-side. Now our guide, a young mountain goat by the name of Glenn Campbell, takes the lead. "Damn!" he suddenly hisses, "They've erased them again," referring to the orange arrows spray-painted on the rocks a few days earlier. "They" are the anonymous individuals Campbell refers to as the "cammo dudes." Thought to be civilian employees of the Air Force, they patrol the perimeter of the unacknowledged base in white all-terrain vehicles, monitoring electronic detectors and, by the way, erasing signposts like those on the rocks. When interlopers cross the military boundaries or haul out their cameras, it's the cammo dudes who call in the local constabulary, the Lincoln County Sheriff's Department, to confiscate the film. Campbell assures us that we don't have to worry, though. For one thing, we all agreed to leave our cameras locked in our cars at the bottom of White Sides. For another, we're still on public property, well outside the restricted zone which comprises part of the vast Nellis Air Force Range complex and stretches more than halfway from here to Las Vegas, 100 miles away. "Besides," he says cheerfully, "it'll take the sheriff 40 minutes to get here. By that time we'll already be on top, and he'll have to wait for us to get down." Still, White Sides is no cake walk. Beginning at about 5,000 feet, it rises in altitude for another 1,000 feet. From here, however, you can peer down on one of the world's longest runways and one of the Cold War's most isolated inner sanctums. It was here, variously known as Groom Lake, Area 51, Dreamland, or simply the Ranch, that sophisticated black-budget (that is, off-the-record) projects like the U-2, SR-71 Blackbird, and F-117A Stealth fighter first earned their wings in secrecy. And it was 15 miles south of here, at an even more clandestine (and controversial) base of operations known as Area S4 at Papoose Lake, that shadowy physicist Robert Lazar claimed to have helped study captured flying-saucer technology. Because of its remoteness, spying on alleged Area S4 is out of the question, which leaves Groom Lake as the next best UFO mecca, assuming the many rumors surrounding these remote outposts are rooted even in half-truths. We break out our binoculars and sweep the runway, clearly outlined by a string of small red lights. At one end, backed up against the base of the Groom Mountains, squats a collection of radar arrays and giant hangars, feebly illuminated on this Saturday night by fan-shaped rays of yellow light. "Looks like they're shut down for the weekend," Campbell whispers. Still, the thrill of visually eavesdropping on this country's most secret air base sends a certain chill up the spine, where it mingles with the growing desert chill and the memory of the signs at the bottom of White Sides authorizing the use of deadly force. All remains eerily silent, however; not so much as a cricket, cammo dude, sheriff, or UFO disturbs the night. After a few hours of fruitless surveillance, fingers and toes numbed by the cold, we start back down. Campbell, a retired computer programmer, explains why he left the comfy confines on his native Boston and moved lock, stock, and Mac Powerbook to Rachel, a hardscrabble community of 100 smack in the middle of the Nevada desert. "You go where the UFO stories are," he says, "and in the fall of 1992, when I first came here Dreamland was where they were." Campbell had read an article published the year before in the monthly journal of the Mutual UFO Network (MUFON) detailing some of the exploits of Lazar, who claimed to have actually been aboard one of nine recovered flying saucers sequestered at Area S4 while helping reverse-engineer their apparent antigravity propulsion system. In a series of November 1989 interviews with then anchorman George Knapp of KLAS-TV, the Las Vegas CBS affiliate, Lazar went public with his claims. Dreamland, at least, was now in the public domain. Though Lazar's credibility has recently taken a nosedive, even with UFO insiders, Knapp, now senior vice president with the Altamira Communications Group, an independent video production company, notes that "stories of captured or acquired alien technology have circulated in the area since the mid 1950s and the very beginning of the base." His best source, among the 14 he has interviewed to date, is a member of a prominent Nevada family who will not allow his name to be used, although he has supposedly videotaped a deposition to be given to Knapp upon his death. According to Knapp, his source occupied a position of senior management at Groom Lake during the late Fifties and early Sixties, and admitted that at least one extraordinary craft was being test flown and taken apart. "It's the totality of the accounts, not any specific one, that I find convincing," says Knapp. Spurred by the local lore following his first visit, Campbell returned to Boston, packed his belongings in a rickety Toyota camper, and in January of 1993 moved to Rachel, setting up shop in the dusty parking lot of the Little A-Le-Inn, a combination bar and restaurant turned UFO museum, joint jumping-off point, watering-hole headquarters, and sometime conference center for UFOlogists hoping to repeat the earlier Lazar sightings. Campbell began his own investigation and was soon desktop publishing the Area 51 Viewer's Guide, of which he estimates he has now sold more than 2,000 copies. As reports of UFOs in the area soared, so did Campbell's reputation as de facto onsite guide. In the last year alone, virtually every major media outlet in the country, from CNN, NBC, and ABC News to the New York Times, Despite the temptation to turn tabloid, Campbell seems to have kept his head on straight. "I am still interested in the UFO phenomenon," he says, "but the evidence has to speak for itself. I've been living here night and day for over a year now and still haven't seen anything that couldn't be explained." He's also seen satisfied believers come and go. "But most of what they report," Campbell warns, "is ordinary military activity, from Russian MiGs to parachute flares. You pretty much see what you want to see, depending on what kind of expectations you bring to the table." A case in point is so-called Old Faithful. In the wake of Lazar's allegations, observers were soon reporting a brilliant UFO adhering to a rigid schedule at 4:50 every weekday morning. Campbell, a UFOlogists who readily admits he likes his sleep, nonetheless routinely roused himself-until he became convinced that what he was seeing was nothing more than the landing lights of a approaching 737. Methodical by nature, Campbell purchased a radio scanner and began monitoring flights outside McCarran Airport in Las Vegas. It turned out that Janet, a private charter airline, routinely flies into Groom Lake from Las Vegas, transporting workers as Lazar had previously alleged. Old Faithful was their early morning flight, and in the next release of his Viewer's Guide, Campbell published the airline's complete schedule. But stories of alleged alien involvement at or near Area 51 continue. On the evening of March 16, 1993 William Hamilton, director of investigations for MUFON Los Angeles, and a companion were parked alongside Highway 375 near the popular Black Mailbox viewing area when a bright light winked into view to their right. "I looked at it through binoculars," Hamilton remembers, "and it seemed to be on or near the Groom Road and casting a beam [of light] on the ground." As it drew nearer, according to Hamilton, "the light appeared to be an object the size of a bus with square light panels lifting off from the ground. The panels appeared to glow amber and blue-white." A bus does travel the dirt road leading into Groom Lake, transporting civilian workers who gather every morning at nearby Alamo for the 30- to 40-mile ride, returning in the afternoon. But this bus was clearly out of the ordinary, says Hamilton. As he watched, "the lights rapidly resolved into two glowing orbs or discs of brilliant blue-white light, so bright they hurt my eyes." The two baby suns rapidly approached the parked car and confusion reigned. When Hamilton looked at his watch, approximately 30 minutes of time were missing. Hypnotically regressed later, both Hamilton and his companion had memories of being abducted aboard a UFO by now-traditional little gray beings with large dark eyes, the leader of whom in this case referred to himself as Quaylar. Campbell was at the Little A-Le-Inn when the couple returned. "I can attest they were both visibly shaken," he says, "but neither had any memory of an abduction at that time. I don't know what to think. I've spent many a night in Tikaboo Valley, where the sighting occurred, and as far as I know nothing like that has ever happened to me. I've never seen or experienced anything that I couldn't explain." It may be that the remote desert interface between alleged extraterrestrial technology and known or suspected terrestrial technology predisposes or inflames the human imagination to see flying buses where only earthly ones exist. Light can play tricks in the thin air, making determination of distance and brilliance doubly difficult at best. Or it could be that the latest generation of Stealth and other secret platforms being test flown out of Groom Lake demonstrate such odd performance characteristics that they are easily misidentified at night as one of Lazar's reputed H=PACs-Human-Piloted Alien Craft. Rumors have long circulated of a hypersonic high-altitude spyplane, code named Aurora, designed to replace the recently retired SR-71 Blackbird. Both the Air Force and Aurora's alleged manufacturer, Northrop's secret Skunk Works facility at Palmdale, California, deny any knowledge of such a platform. Another potential candidate is the TR-33A Black Mantra, an electronic warfare platform widely rumored to have flown support for the F-117 Stealth fighter during Operation Desert Storm. Other advanced airforms could be in research and development, too, their operating expenditures buried in the Pentagon's estimated $14.3 billion per year black-budget programs. Even with the Cold War apparently successfully concluded-and the strategic necessity of much of our black budget presumably obviated-the Air Force can't be happy campers at Groom Lake. They certainly don't relish the prospect of a growing number of UFOlogists and media types, increasingly armed with sophisticated video cameras and night-vision equipment, all on the prowl for H-PACs or UFOs, stumbling across a plane which they've gone to a great deal of trouble to keep secret from both Russian and American citizens, presumably in our own best interests. But previous attempts to seal off Groom Lake from public scrutiny have met with just partial success. In 1984, the Air Force seized (or withdrew, in their vernacular) some 89,000 acres on the northeast quadrant of the Nellis Test Range in order to provide a better buffer zone for the base. Due to a surveying error, White Sides and a few other vantage points were overlooked. But then, in the wake of the Lazar story, Campbell and other UFOlogists began making the trek up White Sides, triggering security perimeter alarms and forcing the cammo dudes out of their white vehicles. Subsequently, on October 18, 1993, the Air Force filed a request for Federal Register seeking the withdrawal of an additional 3,7982 acres, presently public property under the control of the Bureau of Land Management. Not surprisingly, White Sides is contained within the new acreage, as is another lookout point discovered by Campbell and dubbed Freedom Ridge. The additional land was needed, the Air Force claimed, "to ensure the public safety and the safe and secure operation of activities in the Nellis Air Force Range complex." No mention by name was made of Groom Lake, the air base that doesn't officially exist. By now, Campbell had become a professional prickly=pear int he Air Force's exposed side. He formed the White Sides Defense Committee and publicized the public hearing the Bureau of Land Management was required by law to hold. The Air Force request is currently on hold, awaiting an environmental assessment and final approval. In the meantime, Campbell formed Secrecy OVersight Council to market his Viewers Guide and an assortment of Area 51 souvenirs, including topographical maps, bumper stickers, and a colorful, self-designed Groom Lake sew-on patch. More recently, he took out an address on the electronic highway and began publishing a series of regular digital updates, "The Desert Rat," including a map detailing the location of known magnetic sensors. And he tweaked a few local noses with a defiant fashion statement, updating his own apparel to match the desert camouflage suite of the cammo dudes, shade for shade. Such pranks aside, Campbell insists he's a serious civilian spy. "The difference between me and the Air Force is that I don't have any secrets," he says, "and everything I do is legal." On at least two occasions Campbell and visiting journalists were buzzed by low-flying helicopters called in from Groom Lake, both times while clearly on public property outside the restricted zone. "The rotor wash throws up a tremendous amount of dust and debris," he notes, "endangering us and the helicopter crew, too." Indeed, the Secrecy Oversight Council tracked down the appropriate Air Force regulation and found that pilots are restricted to a minimum of 500 feet altitude except when taking off or landing. But if the Air Force is peeved or perplexed by Campbell's activities, they aren't saying so in public. "We know who Mr Campbell is," admits Major George Sillia, public affairs officer at Nellis AFB, Las Vegas. "He keeps us informed as to what he's up to. Beyond that, what can I say? He's an American citizen, and they have a right to certain activities on public property." The Air Force is more mum about the existence of Groom Lake itself. "We can neither confirm nor deny the existence of a facility at Groom Lake," Sillia adds, "and if we can't confirm its existence, we certainly can't say anything about it." A more vocal Campbell critic is Jim Bilbray, a Democratic congressman from Las Vegas who sits on both the House Armed Services Committee and the Select House Committee on Intelligence. Without mentioning Campbell by name, Bilbray says that "these people are persistent, and if they're taking pictures, they're breaking the law. But that really isn't the problem; there's even a Soviet satellite photo of Groom Lake in circulation. The problem comes when you have to shut down operations and secure the technology, which is time-consuming and costly, and which they have to do every time someone is up on the mountain. And believe me, they make sure they know when you're up there." Bilbray also doesn't subscribe to the argument that now that the Cold War is apparently over there is a concurrent corollary that reduces the need for secrecy in general and secret high-tech technology in particular. "The Nellis Range is one of the few secure areas in the country where you can test these new technologies," he says. "And most people in the intelligence community will tell you that the world is a more, not less, dangerous place, now that the old system of checks and balances between the two superpowers has seriously broken down." Still, Bilbray admits that he, the Air Force, and other government agencies are caught in a classic Catch-22 situation vis-a-vis UFOlogists. "I can't name them," he says, "but I can tell you that I've been on virtually every facility in the Nellis Range and that there are no captured flying saucers or extraterrestrial bodies out there. I've heard all the rumors. But the minute I say I've been to one valley, the UFOlogists are going to ask, what about the next valley over, or claim that everything has been moved. Well, what about the next valley over? We used to test atomic bombs above ground here and some of the valleys are still so hot that a Geiger counter will start spitting the moment you turn it on. Doesn't sound like a very good place to test flying saucers or hide alien bodies to me." But researchers like Campbell say they're in a Catch-22 as well, because they know the Air Force routinely denies things that do exist, beginning with the big secret base on the edge of Groom Lake. If it didn't exist, why would they need more space to keep you from seeing it? And if Groom Lake exists, then why not Aurora, the Black Mantra, and possibly even a UFO or two? Nature abhors a vacuum, and where a lack of openness and penchant for secrecy persists, rumor and rumors of rumors are sure to flourish, even in the middle of the desert. "You just keep shaking the secrecy tree," and unperturbed and determined Campbell advises, "and, hopefully, something drops out." That may prove increasingly difficult to do, at least from White Sides or Freedom Ridge. Bilbray, who supports the latest withdrawal of land around Groom Lake, advises that Congress, while it has the opportunity to object and call for a review, does not have to give approval, and the Bureau of Land Management will most assuredly approve the Air Force's request, "probably within this year." *END* ___________________________________________________________________________ Watch for future editions of the UMF MAG... We are still collection lots of new & interesting information that you might not hear about from your everyday news.. Issue # 6 is around the corner and we have most of the articles.. If you would like to become a contributor to this magazine then contact us on -SEPULTURA-UMF WHQ - And we'll be glad to check it out.. 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