Uncle Fats at the UFO Museum

Uncle Fats, the man who inspired "Stoner Cooking", took these photos at the UFO Museum in Roswell, New Mexico.  If you pay attention, you'll spot him in one of the pictures...

A Return to Paranormalcy

True Confessions of a Paranormal Radio Addict
by Geoff Vasil
http://www.steamshovelpress.com/paranormalcy.html

Growing up in Seattle and then rural parts of Washington state—even Seattle was a backwater back then—I remember scouring the radio dial for something interesting from a very young age. I used to get CBS Radio Mystery Theater sometimes, or pull in KGO AM 810 San Francisco, the super-powered station, when the ionosphere was right. San Francisco was exotic, there was even a television series called The Streets of San Francisco which used to scare me when I was allowed to stay up late enough to watch it. Sometime after checking the radio dial had become habitual, I came across the strangest program I’d ever heard, on a sunny afternoon, on KRAB FM out of Seattle, a community radio station. It was a conversation with a man, an interview, who said the most wonderful and outlandish things I’d ever heard, as a young boy. He was talking about chakras, breathing out one nostril at a time, reciting AUM, Sanskrit, and a lot of other stuff you’d pigeon-hole as spiritual or New Age now, but his talk shifted back and forth between this and high technology. In fact, he said he’d invented a three-dimensional television, in his garage, except that the Office of Naval Intelligence had got wind of it, came in, slapped a CLASSIFIED on everything and stolen it. They always do this with the latest technology American entrepreneurs come up with, he explained, and went on to list other exotic things kept from the public in this way.

This was more or less my introduction to “paranormal” radio, if paranormal can be borrowed for the purpose from the stricter meaning of scientific investigation of spiritual phenomenon, studies of clairvoyance, ESP and ghosts which have been at the heart of modern Western scientific endeavor since almost the beginning, when Boyle, a founder of the Royal Society, was in touch with Kirk, the author of The Secret Commonwealth. And well should these things inspire wonder as well as the desire for an explanation, even if it has somehow become fashionable among the scientific set to scoff at the inexplicable.

Later, much later, I stumbled across Art Bell in the same manner, looking for something to aid in achieving sleep on the radio. Between KRAB and Bell there was the entire parapsychological milieu of 1970s America, from Uri Geller to Nimoy’s In Search Of (both the original specials and the series), and a whole slew of magazines with an alternative slant on history, reality and the future, including Omni, Future Life, Starlog and those random UFO magazines I used to shoplift at the local grocery store. The first Art Bell encounter I remember was drifting in and out of sleep as KVI faded in and out, with Al Bielik telling the story of the Philadelphia Project (I think for the first time). The fading in and out was fine, it didn’t affect the story much as I drifted in and out (They set up alternating magnetic fields ... vortex ... Caller on the Wild Card Line, Line Number One next), but ... reality intruded in the form of semi-distant blood-curdling screams, although they were not navy men embedded in the bulkheads of the USS Eldridge, because it was clearly a female voice. I ended up getting dressed and going out to investigate, because it sounded like someone was getting killed, and it turned out someone was. I was never successful in getting through to the Seattle detectives investigating the case, mainly because they never called me back, but I left all I knew on their answering machines, and I know they heard it, because the wikipedia article for the murdered Seattle singer Mia Zapata links to an Unsolved Mysteries webpage which says the detectives first got a break on the case from an “aural” witness who contacted them. I’m sure that was me, on their answering machines, as they were on vacation.

Whether that was the first Art Bell I heard, or whether it was the time he was complaining about rabbits around his transmitters in Pahrump and I actually called up to chew the fat, I don’t know for sure, but Al Bielik combined with the death-knell of the loud punk Mia Zapata have never disentwined in my subconscious, which I suppose goes with the territory if you decide to let late-night radio inform your subconscious.

Later I had some brushes with what might be called paranormal journalism. I volunteered for the local underground semi-college-affiliated newspaper, whose editor and prime mover was a little ga-ga over aliens, UFOs, Roswell. Sometime during that period I happened to attend a meeting at the college, took notes, and afterwards collected notes from friends who were there, compiled them into an article and got the prime mover to print it in the paper, although he was quite skeptical of my/our skepticism. See, the meeting was actually a Heaven’s Gate recruitment drive, although they had a different name that month. They hung up posters around town about aliens and UFOs and rented a lecture room. I’d seen very similar posters put out by a charismatic fundamentalist church in Eugene, Oregon, and had attended that, and the Heaven’s Gate people were not a whole lot different in their approach to what they called “Luciferian” aliens, and probably not too distant from some of the ideas John Keel and Nick Redfern float about the demonic nature of the visitors. The thing was, no one had heard about this particular group before. I called around, a friend asked a friend who knew something about them, and it turned out they had an earlier shtick where they’d arrive in a new town (always in the western USA), claim to be stranded time travellers, and ask for bus fare, coffee money, laundromat change, whatever. This brought it home, because some of those rural myths had shown up on Art Bell’s program already. I asked the “astronauts in training” at the meeting some pointed questions about sexuality, masturbation, after which they got quite embarrassed almost (to be expected) and Applewhite, who had been sitting in the first or second row of the audience, took some real offense, stood up and delivered a harangue, mainly to me. After they committed mass suicide, or whatever it was that happened outside San Diego, my article (I gave credit to two friends whose notes I used as co-authors) was one of maybe only a handful that contained any information at all about the cult, and was somehow found by the local mainstream paper in Olympia and passed around. I was halfway around the globe at that point, watching the eerie blue-green light of Hale-Bopp in the night sky, blissfully unaware of “the mothership” behind the comet mentioned on the Art Bell program, but I did hear about the mass suicide, and one of the co-authors sent me an email about what happened. A few years later I caught a BBC dramatization which included Bell, Strieber and other people involved, and it was fairly well done. A few years after that I learned the editor and prime mover of that local underground semi-college-affiliated paper, a labor of love by a man whose veins flowed with the ink of several generations of Jewish newspaper men, had been murdered in a most horrific way, beheaded, his body dismembered, body parts hidden in his garden. Word was, it was a drug deal gone bad, a real possibility with him, but for some petty amount of pot and some paltry sum, something like $20.

The paranormal, the weird, the latest fucked up conspiracy theory tying it all together, was never far away on the West Coast. From Seattle to Eugene to Berkeley to Isla Vista it only took a little coaxing to elicit the most fantastic notions from freaky strangers. I knew about the Roswell autopsy film by word of mouth. I heard about Dulce and Area 51 and Kirtwell and all the rest probably before anyone had published anything about them. It’s simply a part of the cultural ferment of the American West Coast, the general craziness and the ambient cutting-edge-ness of the coast that is either the cul-de-sac or culmination, depending upon how you look at it, of the entire trend of Western civ from Bablyon on. But as so often happens, you never miss a thing until it’s gone, and you sometimes fail even to notice it.

When I moved away—partly because the murder of Mia Zapata really disturbed me and I didn’t think having people strangled in my neighborhood could possibly be any way to live—I did miss all the paranormal gossip, no matter how outlandish. I turned to internet radio, eventually. Listening to Art Bell on-line over dialup wasn’t very satisfying, when it was possible, and there was a hiatus of several years before anything seemed to become available. Or maybe I just wasn’t sure where to look. Some C2C episodes started showing up on a music file-sharing network, so I grabbed those and heard George Noory for the first time. Bell retired several times while I was learning how to find the show on the internet. It was always hit-and-miss and many of the episodes I found were outdated, which was fine, because I’d missed a lot of what went on in America, including September 11th.

When Art Bell was leaving his own program and Noory seemed to be taking over, Art Bell seemed stuck in a very patriotic reality-tunnel regarding 9/11, and was also becoming stuck in some sort of immovable position on global warming, although his earlier “quickening” and “drastic climate change” allowed for global warming, manmade or not, followed by a new ice age. Or any permutation. Noory was interesting because he let the guests talk a lot while he listened, and even let them hang themselves at times, but the years that have passed since Art Bell left have seen Noory become a bit confused at times about what the guests are actually saying. While Noory is more flexible on whether 9/11 was self-inflicted and on the possible causes of climate change, his show is so much less interesting than Art Bell’s, simply because of Bell’s radio presence, his experience combined with his sense of immediacy, what constitutes entertainment for the listeners, his wit and his whole personality.

I never did learn what happened with someone blackmailing Art Bell about his son, nor how his wife died.

Knapp and Punnett brought different things to the C2C table: Knapp as a serious paranormal investigator, Punnett as a somewhat manic but very witty heir to Art Bell’s own mania and wit. The overall sense, though, has been that the people producing Coast to Coast AM are trying to put Humpty Dumpty back together again, and Humpty seems retired for good now. The “latest addition to the Coast Family,” as they say, John B. Wells, while he has his own strengths and weaknesses as a host and interviewer, almost seems like a political appointment: he in a sense tows the line of that other alternative radio talkshow host based in Austin, Alex Jones, or at least brings the same sensibility to Coast, although in a much more aesthetically palatable form. If it’s not a political appointment, it is one based on a marketing specialist’s sense of which way the wind is blowing (away from Bell’s 9/11-ism and manmade global warming, towards a set of beliefs I’ll touch on below regarding patriotic alternative radio).

I can’t say much about Jeff Rense because I missed that boat, I only started listening about a year ago. He has a great radio presence, although he interrupts guests at the wrong moments sometimes. He’s a smooth talker, an experienced interviewer and evidently he’s a real aficionado of radio, sometimes mentioning the Great Gildersleeve, or another old-time radio series, and modeling his own show on a sort of serial basis, where most of the guests are regulars, who come back, week after week or month after month, and discuss the latest. I think this is an extremely intriguing format: mixing old-style “the lost art of” conversation and fireside dialogue with the weird, the para- and hyper-normal and the alternative. The only problem is that most of the guests don’t seem to generate new material from week to week, so much is repeated, and Jeff Rense himself seems to have become set in his ways and even cynical concerning life, politics and the prospects for humanity. What should by all rights be an exhilarating and surreal—in the true sense of the word—format sometimes becomes tedious.

I started listening to Rense because Michael Rivero moved there for a time. Mike Rivero and his What Really Happened radio program and website is decidedly and intentionally NOT paranormal. For years he told callers: “We don’t do UFOs/chemtrails/HAARP etc., here, go to Rense.” The problem was Rivero shared a network with Alex Jones, the Genesis Communications Network of Ted ___, involved in peddling gold. Rivero and Jones disagree about Zionism, Israel and Jews, and Jones allegedly cancelled his weekly chat with Rivero on his Alex Jones Show program, or at least Rivero felt he had. Ted ___ probably took that opportunity to tighten the screws on Rivero a bit for his alleged anti-Semitism, although there were other shows he continued to host for years which were basically apologies for Nazi Germany and attacks on Jews and Israel as the alleged masters of global banking. First Rivero went to John Stadtmiller’s Republic network, which carries its own share of anti-Semitic programming, but for unknown reasons Rivero was forced to leave after about a year there. Rense had empty slots on his internet radio feed, Rivero asked him for one, and he agreed. Rense’s network hosts the David Duke Show. David Duke is the former politician from New Orleans who was exposed as a KKK leader or something, and repatriated to the Ukraine where he lives now (and where Ed Dames, Art Bell’s first remote viewing star to come out of the closet, also now lives). Rivero left the Rense network around the same time Rense was coming under attack by former associates for his finances and some sordid details regarding an ex-wife. Rivero immediately went back to Stadtmiller’s Republican, where he is now, in the slot following Springola Speaks, which seems to be devoted to debunking the myth of the Holocaust, to rehabilitating Nazi Germany, busting the global Jewish bankers, etc.

Rivero isn’t a dyed-in-the-wool anti-Semite by any means. In fact he has Sephardic ancestry, as he frequently says on air, although his ancestors went crypto to please the inquisitors at some point. His “anti-Semitism” consists of his personal negative experience with his first wife, who was Jewish, and his distaste for Zionism and Israeli injustice towards and atrocities against the Palestinians and other Arabs (although he occasionally refers to Jews as parasites in specific contexts). He has a brilliant on-air personality, a great sense of humor and seems to actually enjoy taking calls from listeners, so long as they don’t stray into paranormality. His whole slant is rationalist and he tends to shine when discussing science, tectonics, space exploration and technical subjects. His domestic politics are somewhat underdeveloped: he has a strong inclination towards constitutional government and “real money,” but supported Obama in 2008 and is now backing Ron Paul, saying he has traditionally voted Republican. He refutes all “birther” calls by saying Obama was so-and-so’s lovechild, end of story, natural born citizen (albeit bastard), and claims the whole birther issue was conceived in order to draw the opposition into an untenable position, whereupon Obama will milk sympathy from the American people by declaring his mother was a whore, not in so many words.

Rivero also exhibits one of the interesting features of the current crop of alternative, patriotic and paranormal radio: when the posited “false-flag” never comes off, he is wont to claim some credit for defeating it through public exposure. Even so, he is less bogged down by personal deceit and self-delusion than many hosts, and his program is an interesting mix of current events, science class and speculation on politics, banking and sociology. Some paranormal/alternative hosts could adopt the motto “Stopping US war on Iran weekly since 2003,” but Rivero has the grace to now describe himself as a peace activist.

Rivero’s polar opposite on alternative radio could be Webster Tarpley. Tarpley often uses history to argue for socialistic infrastructure projects, wiping off the books all trades in derivatives and debts accrued thereof, the introduction of real healthcare and welfare projects, etc. It’s interesting that Tarpley and Rivero agree on two important points: both are very much in favor of an active space program, and both tend towards sympathy towards Russia, both as a victim of NATO encirclement and as the possible savior of the world through the possible vetoing of the possible war against Syria and possibly Iran.

Sympathy for Russia is not lacking on other patriotic and alternative programs, including people who once considered themselves on the right side of the Cold War. It is not unusual to hear hosts saying Russia has a better and freer media than the corporately-controlled US media, that personal freedom in Russia is now greater than in the US, and that the US has embraced fascism (corporate control of politics) while Russia is still moving towards a free market system.

One of the main points of contention between Tarpley and the patriotic internet radio community seems to be his total rejection of von Mises-style Austrian School economics, a sort of theoretical model of free-market capitalism which some Ayn Rand-type libertarians embrace, including Ron Paul. Tarpley believes it is a tool of the ruling elite based in the City of London, the center of all evil in his assessment of vampire-capitalism (an assessment originally done for Lyndon LaRouche, incidentally, many years ago, although no less salient for that reason). Many on the right side of patriotic radio imbibe and repeat these sorts of assumptions and beliefs about economic reality unexamined, including Stadtmiller, Jones and Rense.

Alex Jones has been the giant of alternative radio for the last several years. There’s much to criticize, and much to applaud in his approach, but two points chosen more or less at random for now:

1) While espousing traditional right-wing values such as right-to-life and a monetary system backed by gold, Alex Jones also argues against what he calls “the false left-right paradigm” in American politics, in other words, the idea that either of the two parties are in any way different.

2) Alex Jones does not like the idea of transhumanism (of uploading human consciousness to machines to achieve virtual immortality, among other things), yet his insistence on “information warfare” in place of organized labor strikes and/or armed conflict/self-defense to bring about political change in the United States essentially directs or detours all dissent under his direction towards a sort of internet bitch-fight, in other words, into a virtual realm, a la transhumanism.

To be fair to Alex Jones, he does engage in real, on-the-ground bullhorning of the elite, something of his trademark, and while he himself seems devoted to traditional right-wing values, he doesn’t hold that up (usually) as a precondition for others to engage the powers that be in battle.

The problem with Alex Jones is none of the above, nor is it his yelling and screaming on air. It’s that so much information gets repeated, and so little new is introduced. It is not fair to call his website infowars.com merely an aggregator of mainstream news, because he and his staff do original work, it’s just that one is left with the feeling that very little real new information is being broached. Again, Alex Jones’s home network is Genesis, involved in selling gold, and he is a friend and supporter of senator Ron Paul, whose economic notions are definitely “Austrian” (aka City of London).

Jones’s detractors often attack him, ironically, for his lack of anti-Semitism. Jones refuses to attack the state of Israel as such and never claims “the Jews did 9/11” or anything of that nature. His anti-Semitic critics claim his wife is Jewish.

Another flange arrayed against Jones go back to William Cooper, who did his own patriotic-alternative-paranormal shortwave broadcasts for a number of years, and has been involved in exposing various elements of the UFO and JFK mysteries. Unfortunately, Bill Cooper was often wrong, including his categorical claim and his alleged cinematic proof that the driver shot JFK. He was probably put onto that tack by John Lear, son of the Lear Jet and Iran/Contra pilot. Cooper, an alcoholic, used to spew venom when he was drunk, and might have been drinking when he attacked Alex Jones several times on his shortwave radio broadcast, referring enigmatically to Jones’s “nipple piercings” at one point. Cooper was killed by the police outside his home, while Jones kept capturing new markets, leading some Cooper fans to the conclusion their man was the real deal, while Jones is a G-man at base. The thing about Cooper, though, was that when he sobered up, he wasn’t afraid to admit he was wrong about his wildest ideas. That’s not a comparison with Jones, who is also somewhat capable of the same thing, it’s simply an observation, Yeltin’s alleged launching of nukes on New Years’ Eve aside. Both men claimed to have predicted 9/11; Bill Cooper might have actually predicted it.

Another man who straddles the patriotic/alternative/paranormal radio spectrum is Dr. Bill Deagle. His Nutrimedical show is carried on Ted Andersen’s Genesis network. Deagle is the most interesting of this bunch on a regular basis: his predictions are always wrong, but always seem intended to inspire real fear, from the coming binary weapon trigger to turn avian flu into mass murder of humanity, to the Gulf Stream stopping because of the oil-and-methane blowout in the Gulf of Mexico. Nibiru is coming, just over the horizon. Scalar weapons, earthquakes, ice ages, HAARP, nuclear armageddon, it’s always happening, every day and every week, but usually only in the third hour, because the first two hours seem to be devoted to selling “nutriceutical” medications. Deagle describes himself as a Jewish Christian who received access to classified DoD mass murder plans when he was posted to Fort Falken (or is it Falken Base?) in Colorado. He also learned about the massive supercomputer there. Whenever he mentions the classified site, whatever it’s actually called, I always flash back to the film War Games and the Dr. Falken who created Joshua, the talking artificial intelligence computer the main character hacks into somewhat accidentally, which in turn brings to mind the prosecutor’s words at a certain Kevin Mitnick trial: “He can start World War III by whistling into a payphone.” Deagle presents a delicious level of intrigue, and, who knows, some of his predictions are probably bound to come true sooner or later. For much of the last year he managed to score Robert Felix, author and the force behind the iceagenow.info website, during the second half of the third hour on Fridays, adding considerably to the overall effect. To be fair, Deagle seems to know his medicine, which is mainly what the show is about, and which gave him his entree to the world of classified secrets.

Moving outside the alternative political realm to what could be called real paranormal radio, the pickings are rather slim, or at least, I don’t know or listen to a lot of them. The ones I do like include The Stench of Truth, now on Inception Radio Network, a network whose other shows seem mainly devoted to UFOs and ghosts, although I’m not well versed and haven’t heard much of them. Stench, formerly on blogspot radio, announces the guest for the upcoming show at thestenchoftruth.com website and the show can be caught live on Inception through their internet radio stream, or found in the archives there. Ted Torbich, the host, spends considerable time questioning interesting people every Sunday, and seems to have a fairly solid grasp of the subjects he tackles, and some occult perspective as well. Ted, who used to be called Tenebrous T on blogspot, lets his guests speak, and only interrupts with thoughtful questions here and there, basically moderating the monologue, and sometimes it is a bit slow, but informative if you have the patience for it.

Another host who employs even more of a hands-off approach is Henrik Palmgren of Red Ice Radio in Sweden. His guests run the gamut of parapolitical, economic, occult, ufological and similar informants, but, depending on the talent of the guest, it usually isn’t extremely interesting, unless it’s a topic that engages you completely. He posts the first hour free and asks you to subscribe for Hour Two, which is never any more exciting than the first hour, I’ve found. Lately some sort of arrogance, or perhaps it is simply lack of native facility in English, has crept into the endeavor: their new motto is “Red Ice Radio: A Voice of Reason in Northern Europe.” As if Northern Europe, or Southern Europe, were engulfed in insanity otherwise... Apparently Henrich DIDN’T name his Red Ice Radio and Red Ice Creations after the well-known phenomenon of red snow caused by the actions of extremophile bacteria in the Arctic. Nonetheless, it is a better name than Yellow Snow Radio. I think. Maybe not.

Mel Fabergas’s Veritas Radio has the same scheme: a paranormal guest for two hours, first hour free, second by subscription. I’ve never heard the second hour, although I’m not sure it’s because it’s difficult to pirate and pass around, and rather suspect no one bothers to share it due to lack of interest. Fabergas, like Henrik Palmgren, is not a native speaker of American English, or even English English, but whereas Palmgren doesn’t seem to care much, Fabergas emulates a deep baritone radio announcer voice, but doesn’t quite achieve the ideal. His questions are a hell of a lot more interesting, in general, than Red Ice’s, and his guests are generally more “on topic” in terms of paranormalcy, known names discussing known and novel cases and events.

Again, since I was late to the table, I can’t say a lot about Project Camelot, except that the lady now in charge tends to annoy me in the way she deals with guests, but her questions and objections and interruptions are generally good. She seems to rely heavily on “whistleblowers” and the information they have passed to her privately, hence the name for her show is Whistleblower Radio, as far as I can tell. The other half of Camelot was her husband or boyfriend, apparently, and when they broke up, they did parallel shows, although I haven’t heard on of his in several years now. The topics are generally UFOs with a heavy dose of madness thrown in, such as the Elenin Comet hysteria (correct me if I’m wrong, but should it have been transcribed from the Russian as Yelenin? So much for the “hidden message” of ELE, as Extinction Level Event... and what is NIN supposed to stand for? Nine Inch Nails?). The quality depends on the guest rather than the host.

A lone, somewhat newish, new to me at least, voice in the wilderness is Gary “Spaceman” Bell’s A View from Space, broadcast by 640 AM Toronto, but never ever even once appearing on their archives or podcast page. The Spaceman comes up with a heady mix weekly of numerology, current events, British royal-watching, occultism and Bible studies to precede Coast to Coast AM on Saturday nights. According to the host, the ruling elite believe in three things: numerology, sacred geometry and something else which slips my mind right now. No wonder I’m not a ruling elite. Anyway, he ties it all together, including the Stanley Cup, the latest Batman film, Kabbala, the times and dates and the demonic race. Queen Elizabeth will abdicate and/or die in the autumn of 2016, after which Prince Harry will wear the crown. He knows the date, even the time down to the minute, which is, invariably, both a hidden 13, and the royal 3, and a 9, a very rare number indeed. Now that demonoid has been shut down, there are only two places on the internet to get recordings of the webcast as far as I know. You can listen live on the 640 AM Toronto webpage (they seem to have done away with the traditional radio state call letters but you can find it by searching that), Saturday night going into Sunday before Coast. If it’s not preempted by hockey. Astrology. That’s the third thing the ruling elites believe. I win. All hail the Lord of the World.

An even loner voice in the wilderness really shouldn’t be so all alone, but apparently is. Clyde Lewis’s Ground Zero Live on Portland’s KXL has an opening that seems intended to promote Gary Bell’s A View from Space, for some reason, Clyde Lewis seems to know a little about a lot of parapolitical and paranormal topics, the show is usually good radio, in the sense that there is intrigue and interest and the audience is sucked up into it, and yet... Clyde Lewis seems to exist in some sort of vacuum. As an example, he spent much of the summer congratulating himself for breaking the “Baltic UFO/NSO” story just prior to that, i.e., this summer or spring, but Linda Moulton Howe, Bill Deagle and many many others spoke of it almost a year prior. And yet... Clyde Lewis was the first to get the Swedish captain of the salvage vessel on the air for a live interview. He even scooped the Palmgren of Red Ice, who had him on almost a month later. So his scoop is not a scoop, and yet it becomes a scoop. One senses Lewis has a subconscious mechanism isolating him from the larger world of paranormal radio, a psychological protective mechanism which serves him well. And yet... one of his latest shows (the podcast is SNAFU and can be posted after the actual broadcast by over a week) was advertised as being about Indred Cold, the alien fellow in Keel’s Mothman and Barker’s Silver Bridge, but Lewis kept trying to tie it in with his previous broadcast’s interview with Andy Colvin, and kept equating Cold with Charlie Manson, even calling him “a smiling man with a shiny bald head who will smile as he murders you.” This didn’t fit what I took away from Keel and Barker in any way, but then again, it doesn’t exactly bring to mind Charlie Manson either. I must’ve missed something. It is a very long show, but only really gripping in certain places.

More in league with Stench of Truth is a long-running program, also out of Austin, called Psiop Radio, with SMiles Lewis (no relation with Clyde, apparently) and Mack White. What they do is sort of a current events roundup featuring the stuff that interests them, and usually the news items have something to do with parapolitics, the paranormal or police state USA. Amid the news there is a lot of back and forth, friendly conversation but also real ideas about what it can possibly mean. The whole thing is conducted with understatement verging on the surreal, and SMiles and Mac both fit the image of people who know a lot more than they care to say just now. Unfortunately, the show, which used to be weekly, on Sundays, has all but disappeared with only two installments in the last 6 months or so. Both men are obviously involved in a lot of other projects, but my impression a few months ago was that this Octopi movement sweeping Amerika had them firmly held in its tentacles. (Does Alex Jones’s “false left/right paradigm” not apply all the more to the twin protest movements, the Tea Party coopted by right-wing republicans Sarah Palin and Dick Armee, and the Octopi Wallstreet thing, run and ruined by “consensus” lead by equaller-than-thou idiots, as well as intense involvement by Holeland Sick-you-re-a-T, DoD and N$A?)

SMiles Lewis has reportedly been doing alternative internet stuff for ages, and Radio Misterioso’s Greg Bishop recently got tired of killradio and moved to one of SMile’s servers for his live broadcast on Sundays. The live thing, which is usually a telephone conversation with several participants, with Greg Bishop putting microphones to cell-phones and adjusting volumes and asking “can you hear me now?” for the first ten minutes, can be downloaded in semi-edited form usually about a week later from the radiomisterioso.com website, which has links to numerous past shows extending back over the decades with some very notable and even important figures in ufology and the study of the paranormal. The semi-edited version (I’ve never heard the show live) has an extremely corny and funny intro from Forbidden Planet or Plan 9 or somesuch, which sets the general tone (carnival atmosphere) and the lack of belief inherent in what follows.

Bishop has (I understand) been involved in UFO research and thinking since the mid-1980s at least and long had a ‘zine called The Excluded Middle. He was also somehow involved with Gene Stein’s Paracast for some time. He knows a lot of people and you get the sense he remembers just about every UFO case there ever was when he’s engaged with guests, although he never seems to show off his knowledge. Instead, he brings the sort of “fireside chat” feeling to his conversations that Rense attempts but doesn’t quite achieve. But Misterioso is part of an inner clique, or inner sanctum, of internet radio ufology that is just as much about the people involved in ufology as it is about UFOs. In fact it’s more about the people: the good, the bad, the indifferent, the hucksters and showmen and the “serious investigators,” without a great deal of moral distinction drawn between the categories, although, as is universal in ufology, everyone on Misterioso seems to agree that ufology is fucked because the people are so fucked up. Perhaps that illustrates the power of negative thinking, but Bishop’s show is usually interesting, and he seems to know whereof he speaks. The only problem is it seems to look backwards, very little new is aired but lots of arcane information about past intrigues is passed along to listeners, although I’m not qualified to judge the value of that information and do not know most of the intrigues.

Another inner sanctum among sancta of ufology is Gene Steinberg’s The Paracast, oddly enough carried on Ted’s Genesis network. Steinberg seems to have been around BEFORE Long John Nebel got paranormal radio cooking. He seems to have been personal friends or enemies with everyone from the 1890s onward involved in tracking down those mystery zeppelins. Again, the focus is more on the people and places and milestones of ufology than UFOs or current events, although new books do come up for ridicule, especially a recent book trying to resurrect the suspension of disbelief in the Aztec, New Mexico crash. Jim Mosely of Saucer Smear, a friend of Gray Barker’s, seems to be a regular guest. Steinberg’s current co-host is a bright young man whose name escapes me, and is only guilty of complimenting certain guests a little too robustly. Perhaps as a concession to Ted’s gold business, one of the Paracast’s intercommercial soundbites goes: “You’re listening to the Paracast, the Gold Standard of Paranormal Radio!” They sell mugs and t-shirts, and sometimes Mac computers get a good word, but this is obviously an underfunded labor of love driven by the determination of Steinberg.

***

Most of the UFO-related shows have long ago passed the point where it was verbotten to question the ETH (Extra-Terrestrial Hypothesis), so much so that the semi-derogatory phrase “nuts-and-bolts” used to denigrate mechanical UFOs has itself gone out of fashion. There isn’t any consensus at all in the field, but there does seem to be a majority opinion, at least among the spokespeople, self-declared or otherwise, that the various fields of the paranormal impinge on one another. Ghosts appear with Grays, Whitley Strieber says. Strange pixie lights float around Bigfoot. UFOs and USOs hover near active anomaly areas in the Bermuda Triangle. The “psychic dimension,” or what Timothy Leary might more simply call setting and expectation, the individual perception filtered through cultural lenses of SOME objective phenomena, seems to be generally acknowledged now. Adam Gorightly freely admits he saw his first UFO on acid, and that he saw it when he thought, wow, wouldn’t it be neat to see one of those?, and one appeared.

There is no unified paranormal field theory, none that I know of, and none that I’ve heard mooted on paranormal radio, that ties it all together. There is no King Bigfoot in a mothership in geostationary over the Bermuda Triangle or Tesseract conducting craft via fifth-dimensional vortex/torsion physics. There is just a general acknowledgement that there are overlappings, things aren’t cut and dried, and musings and broodings over what it all means.

There are more shows, such as Strieber’s Dreamland, and semi-shows, such as Linda Moulton Howe’s Earthfiles reports and assorted interviews, and regular guests, such as Widener, the film director who deconstructs Kubrick’s films to alchemical treatises and finds in the Shining that mankind never stepped on the Moon, or at least, did not in the summer of 1969 when he was supposed to. There is Richard G. Hoaxland who can find an alien spaceport in a single pixel, and always does. There is “doctor of patristics” Joseph Farrell, an author who does a lot of paranormal radio interviews, and knows about the secret space program, and the Nazis in space. There is Dr. Sauder, the specialist and researcher on underground and undersea bases who fled to Ecuador long before J. P. Assange holed up in the Ecuadorian embassy in London (and what a stupid thing to do, when he could almost swim to Ireland, and why doesn’t Gary McKinnon get a clue and do it right?). There are too many shows to mention, but there is one more I ought to get around to: Strange Universe, on americanfreedomradio.com, hosted by Sean David Morton. It should be bad, just like Clyde Lewis’s Ground Zero should be, but it’s not. Morton makes all the wrong claims: that he is a bona fides investigative journalist, unlike most alt radio hosts, because he worked for Geraldo Rivera, or Maury Povich, or someone, for several years. There is too much ego, too much bravado, and still, it’s good. He’s on hiatus and in Europe where’s he’s travelling with that annoying lady from Camelot, Cassedy. His girlfriend Melissa is doing the show while he’s gone. Except the shows have become erratic. There must be great pressures at work, hopefully it will all work out for the couple and the man’s radio career. But there are too many shows, I certainly don’t know them all, and I don’t remember all the ones I do know. So that ends the list as such for now.

Now, one interesting thing I’ve noticed is how topics pass from the fringe of paranormal radio to the mainsteam thereof. Assuming Coast is the mainstream, in the month of August, 2012, Misterioso did a program which touched upon a project to conjure a hitherto non-existent spirit, provisionally called Philip. Within a week or two the same topic appeared on Coast. The same thing happened with a Paracast topic in the same period. I noticed it much earlier when Red Ice topics began appearing on Coast. Apparently the “Coast Family” (is it anything like the Love Israel Family, or the Manson Family?) has very big ears, and hears much of what goes on in the field, the rustling of the field mice as they live out their small lives gleaning leftover grains from the last harvest, locked out by self-imposed exile from the Bosom of Art Bell, and largely from the right-wing patriotic airwaves, because they’re just too damned weird.

I remember one theory about the Grays which held they are either our future selves, or an advanced alien race which has, a la Spock and the Vulcans, long extinguished the passions which writhe in our chests, and being so dispassionate, they really get a kick out of exposure to our strong emotions, so keep hanging around, like crack addicts. I guess it’s the same idea as the vampire sucking life essence, or the parasitical spirits in Scientology afflicting us, or demonic forces thriving off our negative emotions and especially fear, just dressed in a new costume. If you apply this to paranormal radio, then Coast is that distant alien relative returning from an orbit around an expiring sun, seeking under every speck of dust inspiration for next week’s list of topics. Or maybe the Phillip story, and the other ones I noticed they cribbed, were just too good to pass up. In fact there’s more than enough jade, as in jaded, to go around throughout paranormal radio large and small, and a fair amount of borrowing at all levels. In the wider sphere of alternative and patriotic radio, there is an almost unconscious transmission of right-wing political values, so at least the incestuous plagiarism inside paranormal radio proper seems conscious, one point in its favor.

Another thing about paranormal radio which almost doesn’t need saying is that there is an intellectual laziness at work, especially regarding conspiracy topics, according to which it somehow allowable to make sweeping generalizations and connections supposedly connecting one figure or group with another, usually to demonstrate some sort of evil or satanic affiliation. Thus you might occasionally still here sincere voices on paranormal/alternative radio repeating that the late Robert Anton Wilson was the Grand Master of the Illuminati, rather than what he really was (a sophisticated leptoufologist who could’ve helped Art Bell out with all the rabbits at his transmitter farm way back when).

A few years back, in a local paper, in a small Eastern European country, I read this article about a group of clairvoyants, bio-field workers, psychics and so on lobbying law makers for a body to regulate their trade. They said there were all too many charlatans in the field. There needed to be a body, made up of qualified judges, to protect the public and the reputation of their industry from false claims and the damage wrought by these interlopers, these poseurs with no real ability or talent making a living off the public’s gullibility.

At the time, I probably thought what a field day the Amazing Randi would have with such a news item. Now I’m no longer sure quite what to make of it, because, first off, I don’t really care whether that guy on KRAB radio in the 1970s really had built a three-dimensional television system with off-the-shelf components which the US Navy stole. What interested me was the idea. That it was possible. And I’m certain it was, it was at least that, possible, in the 1970s. There is 3-D television now, I hear, and some of it doesn’t involve wearing special glasses, neither polarized nor with green and red lenses.

Second, I don’t believe these psychics and tarot card readers were really any more talented or honest than the charlatans they were lobbying against. They just wanted to protect their incomes, to legitimize themselves, and perhaps land a job on the commission of judges paid for by the state to keep the bad psychics out.

Third, I don’t think the field of ufology is made up almost exclusively of cranks, nor that the so-called serious researchers really know anything more than the wishful thinkers. Neither do I think the psychos and fringe on the fringe of already fringe ufology are less likely to come up with hypotheses approximating the truth than those who appear more rational, more scientific in their method, more careful in their positions.

Fourth, I don’t think ufology or the paranormal needs an influx of capital S Science to shed light on whatever the heck’s going on. Because science from the beginning has been involved and studying the paranormal, from the museum in Alexandria to the early astronomers to Boyle in Scotland. They’ve all been a bunch of wild-eyed Forteans, even before Fort was born. Because formal Science funded by the gubmint and administered by commissions is not going to get any closer to anything than the wishful-thinking fringe in fringe ufology. Because there is no such thing as Science with a capital S: anything they can do, you can do. It’s a method of constructing testable hypotheses and testing them, then adopting them or rejecting them. You CAN do this, in your garage, or wherever. The lack of physical evidence in ufology is not a barrier to coming up with new theories and seeing how they fit the testimonies (which are evidence, incidentally). That Science with a capital S as a caste, a priesthood, has decided as a social class to ignore the paranormal and UFOs for the present time only means there is some intellectual cowardice at work, not that ufology and paranormal studies need to crash the party, which isn’t that fun anyway. Of course it would be HELPFUL if the US govt “disclosed” what they’re holding, but that’s not crucial to finding the answers, at least not as far as I know. Perhaps ET has spilled its guts to the Nixon administration, for example, and it’s all on file, and ET will never spill its guts again, because it’s been done and there is a paper trail. In that case, disclosure might disclose something we couldn’t learn otherwise. It is interesting that Carl Sagan started out talking as if UFOs were real, and then sort of crossed over to the Campe d’Bunq, and it’s interesting that Manley Hall thought the UFOs were US govt issued, and that Hawking recently got cold feet about contact, but these are peripheral issues, almost trivial, in the same league as Contact star Jodi Foster praising Leni Riefenstahl in the New York Times, saying she was going to Germany to meet her. Interesting, but not central.

Warren G. Harding  campaigned for president of the United States in 1920 by promising a “return to normalcy” for the American people, still reeling from the unprecedented horrors—machine guns, trench warfare, chemical warfare—of the Great War. What paranormal radio needs is a return to paranormalcy, a return to discussing the weird, to examining the fringe, to entertaining strange and perhaps new ideas, and the courage to state one’s political beliefs, if relevant, openly and without fearing the censure of right or left-wing nuts posing as broadcasting colleagues. The Mystic Barber, Otis T. Carr’s UFO company, the Shaver Mystery—these were probably perceived as hoaxers and hoaxes even by Nebel and Palmer, but that wasn’t the point. Keel embellished to prove a point or make a better story, Barker probably did the same, and that’s not the point either. The point was to entertain the idea, even for second, and to convey that suspension of disbelief to the audience so they could partake of same. Art Bell could do this as well. Wild Bill Cooper was capable of the sort of speculative algebra, but was all very serious about things, believing what he believed until... he no longer believed it. And the goal is not merely entertainment, although that suffices during dry periods, rather it is to open up to the listener new possibilities for further speculation and action. Of course if I knew how to do this, I’d be doing paranormal radio, but all I am is a listener out there in paranormal radioland, the silent majority, the audient void, the Listener orbiting geostationarily above the North Pole in a 20,000-year-old-or-greater black satellite, taking notes, comparing statistics, sending reports home. It’s entirely possible.

Personal disclosure: All of the statements above are purely my own impressions and opinions and many of them are based on very limited information. I probably got a lot of names wrong. I probably underestimated some good programs and praised some stinkers.

Further personal disclosure: I have never met Kenn Thomas but I bought the latest edition of his Maury Island book on amazon, twice. The footnotes aren’t as good as he claimed on some radio program, and there are many typos, but it’s worth getting, I say as someone born in Tacoma, where most of the “action” takes place. I have not read Greg Bishop’s book or Sean David Morton’s, or Art Bell’s for that matter.

Final disclosure: I have had three paranormal experiences in my life, including seeing a ghost (of a woman murdered at the place of the sighting, I learned later), seeing little people or grays alone at night who then disappeared, and seeing a UFO that vanished in a greenish haze as I watched it. At the time of each of these, all I did was shrug and go “huh? what was that, that was weird,” and only realized what happened years later when I thought back on them. Also, I might have had a small piece of pumice materialize and fall on the hearth in my living room once, but am not sure about that one, and it never repeated itself.

Earth Vs. Flying Saucers With Cloudbusters

Kenn Thomas
29 October 2011
http://silverscreensaucers.blogspot.com/2011/10/guest-blogger-kenn-thomas.html

Critics skeptical of the Roswell flying saucer crash story often claim that interest in the event dropped off immediately after its initial media flash in 1947, only to be revived in the 1980s by unreliable UFO researchers seeking to profiteer from a myth of their own making. I have often contradicted this assertion by pointing out that the scientist Wilhelm Reich paid a visit to Roswell in 1955 and made clear references to aliens in relation to the town in his final book, Contact With Space. It is an unusual book primarily documenting Reich and his assistants using beam cannons to clash with flying saucers--in real life, not on the silver screen.

Researchers have slowly been accumulating Roswell references in movies and other pop culture forms to support the idea that the incident had more of a cultural impact on pre-1980s pop culture than previously has been presupposed. The little Roswell grey aliens appear in a mid-1960s episode of the anime cartoon Prince Planet, for instance. Recently, a 1951 wristwatch ad from the Hamilton Corporation was discovered that referred to the weather balloon explanation for flying saucers, an explanation offered only for Roswell in 1947 until adopted by the Robertson UFO investigation panel of 1952. Another obvious example often escapes notice; however, that again ties the tale back to Wilhelm Reich. It involves the famous 1956 Ray Harryhausen movie Earth Vs. the Flying Saucers.

In that movie, aliens attack the earth in flying saucers and in a few instances the aliens hobble out onto the surface. The creatures look a bit like roll-on deodorant cans with stiff arms and legs. The costumes were used briefly in one other movie, 1961’s The Creation of Humanoids, most recently broadcast following an episode of cable TV’s The Walking Dead series. In Earth Vs. the Flying Saucers, the costumes’ rounded helmets with no features conceal the aliens’ real form until one is killed and his roll-cap removed. The alien looks like a Roswell grey.

Wilhelm Reich had Ruidoso, New Mexico as his destination in 1955 for an overnight stay on his way to Tuscon, Arizona. Passing through Roswell—and Stanton Friedman often makes the point at lectures that few just “pass through” Roswell’s out of the way location—Reich clearly was looking for signs of aliens. In Contact With Space, he writes: “Although it was very hot as we neared Roswell, New Mexico, no OR flow [OR was Reich’s abbreviation for orgone, or natural earth energy] was visible on the road, which should have been shimmering with ‘heatwaves’. Instead, DOR [Reich’s abbreviation for “deadly orgone radiation”, which he believed came from the exhaust of UFOs].”

Reich’s concern about the environmental impact of UFOs stemmed from experiences he had in his lab in Rangeley, Maine called Orgonon. In 1951 he first discovered the DOR business by putting a milligram of radium into one of his orgone boxes, an invention of his designed to harness the natural earth energy. It resulted in highly polluted air around the lab, causing fauna to wilt and animals to become ill. Strange red UFOs appeared in the sky over Rangeley. In response to all this, Reich came up with another invention, the “cloudbuster,” a cannon mounted on the back of a truck that concentrated and redirected orgone, which was aimed and fired at the UFOs, causing them to disappear. In the following years, he brought these devices with him to Tucson, Arizona, passing through Roswell, and did battle with UFOs there.

That happened in real life. It’s an obscure story to many now but apparently a paradigm for the major Hollywood science fiction of the time. Reich’s cloudbuster battles with UFOs are virtually reproduced in Earth Vs. the Flying Saucers. Instead of orgone, earth's scientists develop a sonar canon, but they are mounted onto trucks and directed at the space ships in the same way Reich did it. And the movie was released just shortly after the end of Reich’s desert UFO adventure, so it can’t be said that Reich took his ideas from a fanciful movie. In fact, it seems quite the reverse.

The controversies about Earth Vs. the Flying Saucers in the UFO community relate to Donald Keyhoe's request that his name be removed from the credits following his discovery that it would be a “fictional” movie (see here for details). But was it fictional? The movie may have had little relation to Keyhoe’s book at the time, but did it have another uncredited real life analog?

Kenn Thomas’ essay, “Wilhelm Reich, Eisenhower and the Aliens” appears in Secret and Suppressed II: Banned Ideas and Hidden History into the 21st Century, Edited by Adam Parfrey and Kenn Thomas, available at feralhouse.com. Mr. Thomas’ current book, JFK & UFO, is also available from Feral House. Thomas’ web site is steamshovelpress.com.

The Roswell UFO Museum

Konformist Korrespondent Scott Rose of ScottWorld.com visiting the UFO Museum in Roswell, New Mexico.

For more info:
http://www.roswellufomuseum.com/

The CIA's Real Life Fox Mulder

Is there a cooler nickname to have in the paranormal world? Ron Pandolfi is one of those dudes who has earned it. From Starpod.org:

Call it the "Weird Science of National Insecurity."

According to official records released by the CIA, it's been going on since 1953.

According to the legend, it all started in the summer of 1947, near Roswell, New Mexico.

Whispered alongside concerns about new Chinese offensive capabilities against the US Pacific Fleet -- missile "bomblets" for which the US Navy has no existing deterrent -- is the "phenomenology problem."

And if some of my sources, both inside and outside of government, are to be believed, it always comes back to the UFO issue.

The question remains: are the UFOs from "out there" or is there a more earthly explanation involving the intelligence community and deep black covert military cover stories?

One man, and one man alone appears to occupy the best possible position to probe into the facts, fantasies, and fallacies behind the real-life "X-files" of UFOs, alien visitors, spies, lies, and polygraph tape...

Pandolfi first hit mainstream news pages in the late 1990s, following an investigation of unauthorized technology transfers from American defense contractors to the People's Republic of China.

Ken Timmerman, writing for the American Spectator, claimed that "Ronald Pandolfi was the CIA's highest ranking scientist when he visited the headquarters of Hughes Space and Communications in El Segundo, California in 1996."

Congressional Research Service Reports state that:

"A CIA analyst, Ronald Pandolfi, briefed the Senate Intelligence Committee on what he had found in 1995 about Hughes' review of the explosion of a Long March rocket in January 1995. The CIA then allegedly alerted Hughes about Pandolfi's briefing, reportedly according to an internal CIA cable dated September 23, 1998. The committee then asked Attorney General Janet Reno for a criminal investigation into whether the CIA improperly obstructed a Senate investigation."

According to Timmerman, "After Pandolfi testified in closed session before Senate Intelligence Committee Chairman Richard Shelby (R-Ala.), he was removed from the China division and put to work on developing alternative energy sources."

Some believe the "alternative energy sources" include exotic spacecraft propulsion systems with capabilities associated with intelligently controlled extraterrestrial flying objects...

In Jon Ronson's book The Men Who Stare at Goats, Uri Geller, whose psychic powers had been officially investigated by the CIA in the 1970s, claimed he had been recruited into George Bush's War on Terror.

"The man who reactivated me is ..." Uri told Ronson, "called Ron."

Smith claimed his friend at CIA had prior knowledge of the events of September 11th, 2001...

PsycheLeaks: Is Ron Pandolfi the CIA's "Real-life X-files" Fox Mulder?
GARY S BEKKUM
09/28/2011
http://www.starpod.org/news/1001151.htm

Roswell Aliens Wore Hamilton Watches

From UFOMystic.com:

This 1951 wristwatch ad from the Hamilton Corporation mentions something about meteorological instruments and flying saucers...

The Robertson Panel certainly encouraged this explanation as one of their go-to excuses for UFO sightings, but that was not until 1952. Until then, the only official explanation of UFOs as weather balloons that I am currently aware of was during the Roswell incident itself, when General Roger Ramey said as much to the Roswell Record on July 9th, 1947. There are certainly others, but when and where, and how did this filter into the popular culture to the point where it would be used in a (presumably) national advertisement by 1951?

1951 Ad Mentions Roswell?
9-12-2011
http://www.ufomystic.com/2011/09/12/1951-ad-mentions-roswell

Roswell Turns 64

From HuffPo:
The Roswell UFO controversy may be 64 years old, but it shows no sign of heading into retirement.

One thing we know for sure: On July 8, 1947, the front page of the Roswell Daily Record proclaimed that a flying saucer had been captured by the Roswell Army Air Field.

The U.S. Air Force had issued a press release that day stating that a flying saucer had been "captured," and photos were released of soldiers examining metallic-looking objects, presumably pieces of a crashed balloon.

Then the controversy began. At a press conference later that day in Ft. Worth, Texas, Air Force Brig. Gen. Roger Ramey essentially recanted the entire story, announcing instead that the debris was simply pieces of a fallen weather balloon.

Speculation of what really happened has never truly ended. George Filer, a retired Air Force intelligence officer, told The Huffington Post that he believes Ramey was forced to lie about the Roswell incident.

And, in news that will come as a shock even to ardent UFO researches, he told The Huffington Post in an exclusive interview that Ramey's wife told him he was "embarrassed about having to lie about the weather balloon."

Over his 20-year career, Filer regularly briefed generals and congressmen about a wide range of security issues, including UFO sightings, up through the Vietnam War.

"It is my opinion that President Truman was there [at Fort Worth] and that he made the decision that it should be held at the highest levels," Filer said.

"The reason I believe that is that I had talked with Mrs. Ramey. She would never admit that she knew anything about aliens, but she did say that [her husband] was very embarrassed about having to lie about the weather balloon -- he was very upset about that."

"She also admitted that they became good friends with the Trumans," Filer added. "My point is: How does a one-star general become a good friend with the president of the United States?"

None of this comes as a surprise to former nuclear physicist Stanton T. Friedman. He's the original civilian investigator of the Roswell UFO incident and the most outspoken scientist who believes there is overwhelming evidence that alien spacecrafts are visiting Earth. He, too, has talked with Mrs. Ramey.

"From talking to her, I had no reason to believe A) that she knew intimate details about Roswell or any other such event; or B) that she made up this story because it is consistent with a man of reasonable character who followed orders as one would certainly have expected him to," Friedman said.

Both Filer and Friedman -- the military man and the scientist -- said they believe the Roswell UFO was an alien spacecraft, that Earth is currently visited by extraterrestrials and that only individuals with very specific "need to know" credentials have access to this information...

Roswell UFO Controversy: Former Air Force Officer Says Gen. Ramey Lied To Cover Up Space Ship Crash
Lee Speigel
7-22-11
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/07/22/roswell-ufo-cover-up_n_904039.html

Roswell 'was Soviet plot to create US panic'

UFOs: Devotees of science fiction have been convinced for decades that an alien spacecraft crashed in the desert of New Mexico – and that the American government covered up the recovery of extraterrestrial bodies.
Thomas Harding
13 May 2011
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/howaboutthat/ufo/8512408/Roswell-was-Soviet-plot-to-create-US-panic.html

The so-called Roswell Incident of 1947 spawned conspiracy theories by the score.

But now, sadly for UFO spotters, a new book offers an entirely man-made – and some would say even more bizarre – explanation, featuring two of the greatest villains of 20th century history: the Soviet dictator Josef Stalin and the infamous Nazi “Angel of Death” Dr Joseph Mengele.

During a powerful storm in July, 1947, an object crashed near a rancher’s home in Roswell, New Mexico.

Roswell army air base initially said that a “flying disc” had come down, but hours later, as government scientists arrived in the area, it was stated instead that a weather balloon had crashed.

The incident went largely unreported until books and documentaries in the 1970s made allegations of alien life forms.

Area 51, the new book by Annie Jacobsen, is based on interviews with scientists and engineers who worked in Area 51, the top secret test base in the Nevada desert.

It dismisses the alien story and puts forward the theory that Stalin was inspired by Orson Wells’s famous radio adaptation of the HG Wells novel War of the Worlds, which provoked hysteria across America when broadcast in 1938. According to the book, the plot started after the Soviet Union seized from Germany at the end of the war the jet-propelled, single wing Horton Ho 229 – a fighter said to be the forerunner of the modern B2 stealth bomber.

This is where Mengele enters the story. The Nazi doctor, who experimented on prisoners in Auschwitz and fled to South America after the war, was supposedly enlisted to create a crew of “grotesque, child-size aviators” in return for a eugenics laboratory.

The book says that the plane was filled with “alien-like” children, aged 12 or 13, who Stalin wanted to land in America and cause hysteria similar to the 1938 broadcast. But, the plane, remotely piloted by another aircraft, crashed and the Americans hushed up the incident.

Jacobsen’s source, a retired engineer from the former defence company EG&G, which handled the US government’s most sensitive projects, said he was put on to the Roswell project in Area 51 in 1978.

Miss Jacobsen writes: “They found bodies alongside the crashed craft. These were not aliens. Nor were they consenting airmen. They were human guinea pigs. Unusually petite for pilots, they appeared to be children. Each was under five feet tall.

“They were grotesquely deformed, but each in the same manner as the others. They had unusually large heads and abnormally shaped oversize eyes.”

Two were supposedly found “comatose but still alive”.

The EG&G engineers were told “that seeing the bodies would be a shocking and disturbing experience”.

Perhaps not surprisingly, a spokesman for the US Air Force said: “We have not yet read this book so we are not able to make a comment on it.”

KT on Roswell Document

PARAPOLITCIS OFFHAND
Feature at SteamshovelPress.com
Kenn Thomas

4/10/11: Researchers trying to Roswell-cubbyhole a well-known 7/15/47 note by J. Edgar Hoover now see its infamous "La." abbreviation as possibly being "Sw"--as in "Southwest", like around Roswell where the flying saucer crashed. Steamshovel agrees that the damned abbreviation could be anything, especially in a time before the standardization of such abbreviations.

The memo goes on that "the army grabbed it and would not let us have it for cursory examination." Well, J. Edgar, it's kinda diffcult to just pass over a big ol' space ship like that for cursory examination. Perhaps he refers to the 30 inch saucer handed over to Guy Banister three days prior to Hoover's note. Banister was the FBI special agent in charge of the Pacific northwest at the time-later famous for his association with Lee Harvey Oswald down in Louisiana ("La."!)--who reported that the army took the small saucer. This happened in Twin Falls, Idaho, was urned over in Butte, Montana, and got reported in the Tacoma and Seattle papers, and who knows how J. Edgar might have abbreviated any of those? Read all about it in JFK & UFO!

Flying Saucers in New Mexico

From IO9.com:

It's unclear whether this memo is a hoax, but it has just appeared on the FBI's "vault" website, devoted to once-classified documents that have become public. The brief memo contains information from an Air Force informant about "flying saucers."

In the memo, FBI agent Guy Hottel records what an "investigator for the Air Forces" (whose name is blacked out) told him about what is popularly called "the Roswell incident." Hottel writes:

Three so-called flying saucers had been recovered in New Mexico . . . they were described as being circular in shape with raised centers, approximately 50 feet in diameter . . . Each one was occupied by three bodies of human shape but only 3 feet tall, dressed in a metallic cloth of a very fine texture. Each body was bandaged in a manner similar to the blackout suits used by speed flyers and test pilots.

The informant speculates that the saucers were found in New Mexico because the US government had a "high powered radar set up" there, and "it is believed that the radar interferes with the controlling mechanism of the saucers."

This memo seems to confirm what many believed happened at Roswell, which includes flying saucers crashing and alien autopsies. But it's important to remember that even if the memo is authentic, it is simply the record of what one informant said to another. We don't know who this Air Force investigator is, nor do we know whether he's reporting what other people told him, or if he witnessed the saucers himself. He could be simply reporting a rumor...

Newly-released FBI memo from 1950 confirms "flying saucers" crashing in New Mexico
Annalee Newitz
Apr 12, 2011
http://io9.com/#!5791340/newly+released-fbi-memo-from-1950-confirms-flying-saucers-crashing-in-new-mexico

Armageddon in 2012? The truth behind the doomsday theories

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/newstopics/howaboutthat/ufo/8216394/Armageddon-in-2012-The-truth-behind-the-doomsday-theories.html

UFOs
Armageddon in 2012? The truth behind the doomsday theories
The picturesque French village of Bugarach, southwestern France braces for invasion of UFO campaigners who believe it will be only place to survive Armageddon in 2012. Here we examine the fact and the fiction behind the most popular doomsday scenarios.
21 Dec 2010

1. Alien invasion/government confirmation of extraterrestrial contact

Alien invasion has been the subject of great works of fiction since HG Wells published War of the Worlds in 1898. Fear of such an attack such as from Mars, a species from outside our galaxy or beings from other dimensions, ebbs and flows with the general state of anxiety on Earth.

Researchers have found that fear of attack by aliens tends to rise at times of heightened fear about more terrestrial threats.

Believers cite increasing numbers of UFO sightings, the alleged crash of a disc at Roswell, New Mexico, in 1947 and several seemingly credible photographs and videos of strange craft in our skies as evidence that such a threat is increasing.

Evidence: Photographs, videos, official releases that prove how governments around the world have monitored UFO activity for more than 50 years, stories by abductees and other claims by campaigners. But do any of these suggest that we're about to be taken over by a race of grey humanoids with large black eyes at any time in the future, let alone in 2012?

Likelihood: 0.1/10

2. Nibiru/Planet X/Wormwood

Thousands of web forums and sites propose the belief that sometime in the early years of the 21st century, a previously undiscovered planet will collide with or pass very close to the Earth destroying civilisation or causing a massive planetary cataclysm.

Nibiru was invented in the late 1960s by Zechariah Sitchin in a book. According to Sitchin, Nibiru is a planet in our solar system which follows an erratic orbit bringing it into the inner system every 3,700 years. But Sitchin never suggested that it would threaten the Earth.

Some even suggest that Nibiru is a brown dwarf sister to our own sun and will first be seen towards the end of this year.

Evidence: Very little. Some point to the 2005 announcement by Nasa that a 10th planet had been discovered on the outer fringes of our solar system and many think that it will pass close to the Earth in 2012. But this 10th planet is most certainly not moving into the inner solar system.

Likelihood: 0.2/10

3. Solar catastrophe

This is one of the few doomsday scenarios connected with the end of the Mayan calendar that may actually be based on science. In this scenario a vast solar flare or expulsion of gases from the sun in December 2012 will engulf the Earth wreaking havoc upon mankind and the planet's ecosystems. There is no evidence that such catastrophic events happened in the past.

Evidence: There may be some correlation between the observed 11-year solar cycle and the time cycles seen in the Mayan calendar although this evidence is rather weak. But whilst a solar flare from the sun could cause problems such as satellite damage and injury to unprotected astronauts and blackouts, the flare itself would not be powerful enough to destroy Earth, certainly not in 2012. In the far future, when the sun runs out of fuel, most scientists accept that it will swell into a red giant and engulf the Earth. But rather than happening in 2012, this event will happen no sooner than five billion years from now. Last year a Mayan elder dubunked the claims, insisting that time will not "run out" on December 21 of that year. Apolinario Chile Pixtun said he was tired of being bombarded with frantic questions about the end of the world. "I came back from England last year and, man, they had me fed up with this stuff," he said last year. Nasa has also said that the world was not coming to an end on December 21, 2012.

Likelihood: 0.3/10

4. Magnetic pole shift

A large section of doomsday believers believe a dramatic reversal of Earth's magnetic poles is imminent and that it will trigger a reversal of the planet's rotation and the subsequent catastrophic events.

They point to evidence of pole shifts in Earth's past and claim that these reversals can be calculated by studying sunspots or magnetic field theory. Many believe the Mayans and the ancient Egyptians discovered evidence of pole reversal events in the future and that the secrets have been covered up by today's governments.

Evidence: Work by scientists at Princeton University and Paul Sabatier University in Toulouse, France, indicates that Earth did rebalance itself 800 million years ago. They studied magnetic minerals in sedimentary rocks in Norway and found that the north pole shifted by more than 50 degrees (a quarter the distance from pole to pole, in effect) in under 20 million years.

Other scientists have also discovered that seasonal movements in both polar regions do effect the positioning of the poles. But where the scientists and the "doomers" differ greatly is over the timescale of any potential pole shift.

While the apocalyptic visionaries believe such a switch could happen in a very short time scale, geologists think that it would happen over a period of one million years.

Likelihood: 1/10

5. Supervolcano

A supervolcanic eruption would be larger than any volcanic eruption in modern history. Researchers believe this will happen when magma rose into the Earth's crust but would be unable to break through.

The resulting build in pressure would mean that at some point a huge area of land would be devastated as the magma blasted skyward. Such an event would, campaigners say, blast millions of tons of debris and poisonous gases into the atmosphere, and could either plunge the world into a so-called nuclear winter triggering an ice age or, at worst, wipe out life in parts or all of the planet.

Evidence: Most of the concern about 2012 and supervolanoes centres on the so-called super-caldera underneath Yellowstone Park in the United States.

Satellite images have over the past few years shown changes in the the movement of molten rock 10 miles under the surface.

Wayne Thatcher of the US Geological Survey recently told Nature magazine: "We know now how mobile and restless the Yellowstone caldera actually is."

Nobody actually knows whether the caldera will blow or, if it does, when such an event could take place.

Likelihood: 1/10

6. World War III

Almost as soon as the Second World War in 1945 ended and with a standoff between the Western Allies and the Eastern bloc in place through the middle of Europe, there was rising anxiety that the world would be consumed by another epic conflict.

When Russia exploded its first atomic bomb just two years later, a nuclear arms race between East and West began. The invention of hydrogen (thermonuclear) devices only accelerated the race which peaked in 1962 during the Cuban Missile Crisis when the world came closest to an all-out nuclear exchange between the United States and the Soviet Union.

The build-up of weapons continued throughout the 1970s and 1980s but a dedicated hotline between the Kremlin and the White House and some arms control treaties reduced the threat of an accidental nuclear war. The threat diminished in the 1990s with the collapse of the Soviet Union. Some believe the latest "war games" between North and South Korea

Evidence: Today, the fears of a nuclear exchange centre on the rising power of China and the American response and the possibility of wars between India and Pakistan or North and South Korea escalating into global conflicts.

Likelihood: 1.5/10

7. Mass casualty terrorism

Since September 11, 2001 and the deaths of nearly 3,000 people in New York and Washington DC there have been fears about al Qaeda or another terrorist network acquiring weapons of mass destruction and devastating a major western city or releasing a chemical or biological attack.

Statements by governments about the risk of such an attack have done little to lessen the anxiety with both the British and American administrations raising the spectre of a stray nuclear weapon being detonated in a major city.

Dick Cheney, the former US vice president, is reported to have stated that he is haunted by thoughts of a mushroom cloud rising over an American downtown skyline.

Many conspiracy theories, particularly those who believe that the 9/11 attacks were actually planned and executed by rogue elements in the US administration, believe that there will be a so-called "false flag" nuclear attack to divert attention from the west's woes and usher in an era of martial law and totalitarian government. The UK's terror level was raised to "severe" in January. After the arrest of 12 men around Britain on Monday, Metropolitan Police Assistant Commissioner John Yates, the country’s most senior counter-terrorism officer, said the raids had been “absolutely necessary” to keep the public safe.

Evidence: Osama bin Laden famously declared a few years ago that his organisation has several nuclear devices but they were only a "deterrent". There has been some concern about several "loose" nukes from the former Soviet Union, particularly six so-called "suitcase" nukes.

But there is no evidence that al-Qaeda or anybody else holds nuclear weapons and several attempts by terrorists in the UK to make nerve or biological agents have proved inept failures. Nevertheless, concern now centres upon the instability of the Pakistan regime - a nuclear-equipped country - and fears that al-Qaeda or a Taliban group could topple the government and get its hands on nuclear weapons.

Likelihood: 2/10

8. Peak oil

The reduction of global oil stocks is a reality with the world's economies consuming - financial collapses excepted - ever-increasing amounts of the black gold.

But peak oil theory centres around supply and demand and postulates that, at some point, demand will outstrip supply. When is this likely to happen? Some believe that it already has while others think that it is likely to happen some time between now and 2020.

A number of doomer sites link peak oil with the end of the Mayan calendar in 2012. Demand for oil outstripping supply would have huge consequences around the world given that most economies are powered by oil, agriculture is completely dependent upon it for fertilisers and pesticides and the plastics industry is based on oil extraction. A collapse in social order following a peak in oil production is, therefore, something to be taken seriously.

Evidence: Peak oil is a near certainty but two questions remain: when will it happen and will the world have developed alternative sources of fuel in time?

M. King Hubbert created the theory behind peak oil in 1956 to accurately predict that United States oil production would peak between 1965 and 1970. The theory has successfully predicted the decline from oil fields and regions subsequently.

Optimistic observers do not believe that peak oil will occur before 2020 but admissions by some oil companies that they have overstated the reserves held underground have raised fears that we are at or may already have passed the peak.

A decline in investment in new oil fields and plant during the global recession has only served to emphasise our total dependence upon a finite resource.

Likelihood: 4/10

9. Bee colony collapse

More than a third of the commercial beehives in the US were lost to colony colapse disorder [CCD] in the winter of 2008. The syndrome, in which all of the worker bees in a colony die off suddenly, leaving nothing but a solitary queen wandering alone on empty frames, has spread to several countries in Europe already including France, Belgium, Italy, Portugal and Spain.

Several causes of the disease have been suggested, including the almost universally present varroa mite, certain pesticides, Israeli acute paralysis virus, climate change and mobile phone broadcasts, but none have yet been proved to be the culprit.

No cure has been found either, and as cases are reported in new countries the likelihood of a global pandemic leading to the extinction of the honeybee becomes a real possibility.

Evidence: Apart from the loss of the honey crop, without the honeybee several crops key to human life would be wiped out, including the soya bean, cotton, brassicas, several kinds of nut including brazil nuts and almonds, grapes, apples and sunflowers, the source of a large proportion of the world's vegetable oil. Almost a third of the world's food is directly traceable to the action of bees. If they became extinct severe shortages, starvation, violence and riots would surely follow.

Likelihood: 7/10

10. Environmental collapse

Today's mantra is climate change or man-made global warming. In previous decades pollution, soil depletion, the destruction of the ozone layer and an imminent ice age were the ecological catastrophes that faced us.

There is, of course, no doubt that man's impact upon his environment is getting worse although a large body of opinion believes that global warming is a liberal conspiracy and that the world has actually been cooling over the last decade.

A total environmental collapse brought about by runaway warming, toxic poisoning of the seas of parts of the inhabited areas of the world or a tipping point with some of the most crucial species (see Bee colony collapse above) would have a huge impact upon civilisation and could render parts of the world near uninhabitable. The world is however, attempting to combat this with key summits in Copenhagen, Denmark last December, and Cancun, Mexico, this month seeking to reduce greenhouse gas emissions. After two weeks of tense negotiations, the United Nations finally agreed on a way forward to keep global temperature rise below 2C (3.6F). David Cameron expressed his satisfaction at the climate change package that will see the rich world committed to forking out billions of pounds every year to stop global warming, but delay plans to cut carbon emissions.

Evidence: Few scientists dispute that the global average temperature has been rising for at least a century. This is despite rows over an Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) report into rising temperatures and another controversy surrounding the science behind climate change, dubbed “Climategate”, when leaked e-mails appeared to suggest that scientists at the University of East Anglia had manipulated climate change data.

The Government's chief scientific adviser Prof John Beddington has insisted that uncertainty about some aspects of climate science should not be used as an excuse for inaction. Nasa scientists have reported that the past decade was the warmest on record, proving that global warming had continued “unabated”. Nasa's Goddard Institute for Space Studies (GISS) in New York, found average global temperatures have increased by about 1.5F (0.8C) since 1880, when records began.

Likelihood: 7/10

ROSWELL CRASH TALK

http://ufocon.blogspot.com/2010/02/roswell-crash-talk-before-all-hoopla-by.html

Tuesday, February 02, 2010
ROSWELL CRASH TALK, BEFORE ALL THE HOOPLA
Anthony Bragalia

Skeptics who say that the Roswell UFO crash was never discussed before 1980 with the publication of the seminal book "The Roswell Incident" are wrong. In fact, the 1947 UFO event in New Mexico was brought up in many ways -and at many times- throughout the 1950's, 1960's and 1970's.

These naysayers maintain that witnesses only came forward when the Roswell story became "popularized" by the numerous books, movies, TV shows, documentaries and articles done in the 1980s and 1990s- many years after the crash event itself. They would like us to believe that after the original press release and newspaper articles in July of 1947 on the crash had appeared that nothing more was ever said until much later. The implication made by these disbelievers and cynics is that Roswell was a virtual "non-event" until the release of the first book on Roswell in 1980 and the subsequent publicity in following decades. But an examination of the literature -and confirmation of stories told privately- reveal that the alien episode was known and discussed well before all of the "hoopla."

WILHELM REICH – 1955
DR. WILHELM REICH

Dr. Wilhelm Reich was a psychiatrist and psychoanalyst who worked closely with Sigmund Freud. Known for his development of radical theories that related to a "life energy" that he referred to as "orgone energy," Reich was also very interested in the subject of extraterrestrial life and UFOs. Reich died in 1957, but his last book, published in the last year of his life, refers to Roswell and UFOs.

In 1957's "Contact With Space" Reich recounts a 1955 trip to Tucson, AZ to conduct "weather and energy experimentation" using a device that he designed and called a "cloudbuster" along with other devices made to attract UFOs. On his way to Tucson, he relates that he "felt compelled" to stop at a small town called Roswell, NM. Reich decided to make "field observations" there at Roswell. In the 1957 book, Reich makes specific (albeit brief) mention of what he called the Roswell area's "strange imbalance" of what he believed were "UFO energies" related to forces he called "DOR/OR."

Reich was known to conduct such unusual experimentation in geographic areas that he felt held special meaning and that were relevant to his UFO study. Though Reich was controversial -and his mention of Roswell oblique, without speaking to the actual crash there- others were far more direct:

TWO AUTHORS AND A SERGEANT - 1976
DR. KEVIN RANDLE

Noted Ufologist and author Kevin Randle relates an intriguing story about a pre-1980 mention of Roswell. Randle explains that he did not understand the significance of the story until much later, as at that time, he never had even heard of the Roswell UFO crash.

In 1976 he and researcher Robert Cornett were researching trace landing cases in the Midwest. They both had an opportunity to interview a former Air Force sergeant who told them that he was tasked to "stage a solution" to a UFO sighting. The sergeant had explained to the investigators that he had trucked the debris of a weather balloon into a town, and, according to Randle, "told all who would listen that this is what they had seen, or what their neighbors had seen. The wreckage contained the silvery elements of the rawin radar reflectors, the neoprene balloon envelope, and the balsa sticks that had formed the frame of the reflector." Randle asked him "how often have you done this?" The sergeant replied, "Only once." When Randle asked him where this had taken place, the sergeant replied, "at Roswell, NM." This remarkable story was told in 1976, years before the publication of the first book on the Roswell crash.

LYDIA'S TELETYPE - 1973 and BEFORE

In 1973, author Peter Gutilla was a correspondent with the the now-defunct publication "Saga." Saga was a long-running mens adventure magazine which competed with magazine with titles such as "Argosy" and "True." Gutilla relates that he had a conversation with a Park Ranger that he identified as "G. Sleppy." The Park Ranger was giving Gutilla an account of a UFO sighting that he had experienced in the woods while on duty sometime prior. He then mentioned to Gutilla that his mother Lydia had a far more interesting and unusual UFO story that she had been telling for a very long time.

The now-famous Lydia Sleppy story (published only in part, and without using her name) appeared on page 60 of the Winter 1974 issue of Saga magazine in a special "UFO Report" edition. It read:

"In New Mexico a woman with a responsible position received a call from a station manager. He had been checking out reports of a UFO which had crashed in a field and was trying to track down the rumor that pieces of the object were supposedly stored in a local barn. In his excited call to the newsroom, the station manager verified the UFO crash report, and also claimed to have seen metallic pieces of the UFO being carried away to a waiting Air Force plane destined to Wright Patterson Air Force Base. As the woman was typing the fantastic news item over the teletype to their other two stations, a line appeared in the middle of her text, tapped in from somewhere, with the official order, 'Do not continue this transmission!' "

Today the story of Lydia Sleppy is well known to Roswell followers. She since expanded on this story in the book "The Roswell Incident" and to other researchers, and agreed to allow her name to be divulged. But with my re-discovery of this early "Saga" article we learn that she first told her Roswell story publicly in 1973 and -according to her son- for many years before to her close friends and family.

THE PROFESSOR AND THE RANCH WOMAN – 1960
RANCHER LORETTA PROCTOR

Richard Glaze was a Professor of Agriculture at New Mexico State University (NMSU) and honored by the Las Cruces-based University with a Distinguished Service Award in recognition for his long service over and above normal routine duties. He was also known for his contributions to the University in Experimental Statistics and Quantitative Anaysis. In addition to his scholarly achievements, Glaze was an avid amateur archaelogist and arrowhead hunter. He relates that in 1960 he took his family to the Proctor ranch near Roswell on the recommendation of one of his students. It was suggested that the ranch was a particular appropriate spot to find such Native American arrowheads.

He maintained that during the summer of 1960 he introduced himself to Loretta Proctor (still alive today at 96) and sought permission from her to search for arrowheads on her property. Loretta Proctor was a close friend of rancher Mac Brazel, who was custodian of the Foster Ranch and who had reported the crash to the Roswell Sheriff George Wilcox and to the RAAF base. Loretta's son Dee was with Mac when the discovery was made. Loretta was herself shown a piece of the strange debris by Brazel. Her story is well-known to those who follow the Roswell crash story.

Glaze stated that Loretta granted him permission to explore her property, but also told him what he thought to be a "wild story" at the time. Loretta told Glaze, "If you find anything unusual, let me know." Loretta then related to Professor Glaze that about a dozen years prior a "crashed UFO" from another world had fallen to Earth on a nearby ranch- the Foster Ranch. Glaze stated that Loretta "talked a lot" about this event but that he did not hold much credence to it until he was reminded of his encounter with her after he read the book "The Truth About the UFO Crash at Roswell" many years later. Glaze then remembered the long conversation that he had decades earlier with the ranch woman- and that what was told in the book was the precise story she had told him so many years prior.

So here we have an example of a Roswell witness, Loretta Proctor, telling her story privately as early as 1960- and well before her public confession on the subject over three decades later in an affidavit signed in 1991!

OTHER MENTIONS OF ROSWELL - 1950's and 1960's
Now deceased UFO author Frank Edwards may have been one of the very first researchers to relate details on the UFO crash at Roswell. Though incomplete on the details, he spoke of the crash at a New York City meeting of the early UFO research group Civilian Saucer Intelligence. On April 28, 1956, Edwards told the assembled group that "at Roswell a farmer reported that he saw something strike a mountainside and crash."

Though sparse on information in his 1956 lecture, Edwards later expanded on the story. In his 1966 "Flying Saucers: Serious Business" book on page 76 he writes: "There are such difficult cases as the rancher near Roswell, New Mexico, who phoned the Sheriff that a blazing disc-shaped object had passed over his house at low altititude and had crashed and burned on a hillside within view of his house. We were not told, however, why the military cordoned off the area while they inspected the wreckage."

A review of the literature reveals other (brief) mentions of the Roswell crash event:

1) "Flying Saucers on the Attack" (Harold Wilkins, 1954)
2) "Flying Saucer Review" (Volume 1, No. 1, Spring, 1955)
3) "The Flying Saucer Story" (Brinsley LePour Trench, 1966)

THE REASON WHY ROSWELL WAS EXPANDED ON IN LATER YEARS

Of course it is impossible for many of us today in 2010 to relate to or identify with just what it was like to live during the 1940s in impoverished rural New Mexico. Most did not have telephones, there was no TV and much of that part of the country did not have even have electrification. As rancher Loretta Proctor said to me, "In those days, travel was a 'big deal' and you watched the amount of gas you used and even how much wear you put on your tires." To say that those at Roswell at that time were in many ways isolated would be a very true statement.

The UFO crash at Roswell could not have happened at a better place or time to ensure secrecy - and little talk of the event by the involved to the outside world. But to be sure, there was talk amongst themselves about the incident. I have several other accounts of this in my research records.

Though many of the involved had left Roswell in the intervening years, over time the "secret of Roswell" was no longer secret. It must have been a relief when, beginning in the 1980s, researchers began re-examing the event and started to ask the involved what had happened. As more and more came forward, those people were likely more inclined to tell what they knew. You would tell what you knew when you realized that others were doing the same. Because others were now saying what you knew to be true, you would feel that people would not think of you as "crazy." A "strength in numbers" dynamic had come into play.

CAPTAIN OLIVER "PAPPY" HENDERSON

Captain Oliver "Pappy" Henderson makes this very point very well in a confession to his family. Henderson was stationed at RAAF in 1947. In 1981, he indicated to his wife Sappho and to his daughters -after reading a newspaper article on the crash event: "I want you to read this article because it is a true story. I am the pilot who flew the wreckage of the UFO to Dayton. I guess now that they're putting it in the papers I can tell you about this. I wanted to tell you for years." Publicity about the event -and the knowledge that others were talking- was Pappy's motivator to tell all.

Indeed, the "hoopla" about Roswell in later years had finally freed those who knew the truth to speak the truth: extraterrestrials had fallen to the desert floor, forever changing the lives of the involved. It was a memory never forgotten- and a memory now to be shared with the world.