Decoding UFO / Alien Phenomena
 Part 2 of an article in which John Lister looks at the politics and possible motivations of the 'leading lights' in today's burgeoning UFO movement.
In her 1989 book Encounters, Dr. Edith Fiore attempted to define a thematic unity from 13 largely disparate abduction reports that she had obtained using hypnotic regression, including that of one man who recalled a former existence as an intergalactic mercenary marine before retirement to the "backwater" of Earth, where he "incorporated" the body of a young boy. He became a "walk-in" in channelling parlance and possessed the donor’s body without consent, contradicting a tenet of this particular mythology.
Fiore helpfully provided the reader with 50 questions to determine the likelihood of personal abduction. These were to be answered by the subconscious in the yes/no swings of a pendulum (which could simply be a button) suspended from a string held between thumb and forefinger.
She recommended that the exercise be repeated at different intervals over a number of months and that the answers, including discrepancies, be recorded to arrive at the mean average truth. Apart from the dubious validity of the exercise itself, one must ponder the influence of subjective desire and physical exhaustion on the outcomes. Fiore’s summation was resoundingly positive:
One of the most interesting findings that emerged from this work was the many healings and attempts to heal on the part of the visitors. Even when lasers were not yet being used by Earth people, the extraterrestrials were using them on humans in their spacecraft. I wonder if some of the modern developments in medicine, technology and space exploration can be credited directly or indirectly to the intervention of our space friends. Remember telepathy! Wouldn’t it be interesting if our top scientists were being helped with their research and development?17
Following their appearance at the 1996 UFO Symposium in Brisbane, Dr. Stanton Friedman and Dr. John Mack gave joint lecture evenings in Sydney and Melbourne. The Sydney lecture was held at Scots Church, Wynyard, on October 16th, where Dr. Mack ironically spoke about the need to do away with "the dross of religion". "Religion is a hoax," he stated flatly, while preaching his own eco-religion which replaces sin with a new guilt complex: environmental vandalism. "I’ve been called the first green ufologist and I’m proud of that!" He compared humanity to a parasitic infestation on the skin of the Earth, which is now exacting its revenge. Not for Mack the finer point that most of us are subject to a powerful elite who rape the environment as they please; this is our collective guilt.
At the same time he encouraged us to think of the extraterrestrials as gods and to treat them accordingly during any prospective encounter, because through them lies our only chance to escape ecological doom, an archetypal New Age belief. The aliens are offering us speedy transformation because time is running short. By Dr. Mack’s own standards, such intervention would constitute a subversion of natural justice (viz. human extinction).The stooped Harvard psychiatrist spoke in assured, dulcet tones about higher spirituality and the godliness of the aliens (psychiatric terms?) to an audience of the faithful.
He went on to talk about gratifying sexual encounters that many abductees had allegedly experienced — carnal adventures that we could all look forward to. (Nervous, excited laughter from the audience.) During abductions, he maintained, the aliens often like to pair off men and women and force them to copulate because, for some reason, the aliens are very curious about why we do it. (This elicited a roar of laughter from the audience, who ignored the element of coercion involved.) The aliens sometimes engage in sex with humans, we were told, because they’re interested in the experience and want to create hybrid children. Mack made no mention of rape or technical procedures to remove ova and semen. It seems that his "gods" are beyond human trivialities like morality and ethics.
Stanton’s universe
Nuclear physicist Dr. Stanton T. Friedman appeared to support his colleague’s contentions, describing abduction as "the fast food route to interplanetary travel". (It seems that all we’ve ever needed was a Big Mack!) If he were to see an alien vessel land and its occupants emerge, Friedman claims that he would approach them with the demand "Lead me to your taker!" It gets a laugh but we should consider what an appropriate motto this is for quislings.Another of Friedman’s stock phrases concerns the need for an "Earthling orientation" to unite humanity. He believes that exposure of the UFO cover-up would lead "the younger generation" to exert pressure for such a new world order — the dream of Ronald Reagan and the dread of ufologist-prophets like Stan Deyo and Norio Hayakawa.
I think the only hope for a decent future for this planet is an Earthling orientation. The easiest way to get it is to recognise that somebody’s coming here and that, to them, we are all Earthlings, like it or not. 18
Friedman’s formula lecture grinds through well-worn territory — the Roswell crash (his specialty), MJ-12, the Avro disc, Betty and Barney Hill, the Condon Report, trace samples and famous UFO photographs (the same conspicuous selection adopted by Bill Cooper for his own lectures). One slide showed a disc partly obscured by white vapour, which Friedman identified as an "electromagnetic plasma gas emission". He said that recent developments in nuclear fusion and nuclear fission offered exciting possibilities for the future of space travel, but one would expect a nuclear physicist to promote his livelihood. Of course this form of propulsion is nothing like that used by the aliens, whose technology is "thousands, perhaps hundreds of thousands of years in advance of our own".
Friedman won’t countenance the "cult" of Nikola Tesla and stories about Nazi flying saucers or the possible development of anti-gravity technology in this or any previous age.Friedman is convinced that Robert Lazar has no scientific credentials and has never held a scientific post, based on what little he could determine in the course of investigation. He maintains that Lazar failed to gain a high school diploma, although he did pass a course in chemistry. This conflicts with a statement in Alien Encounters magazine: "Bob Lazar was born in 1959 and grew up in Long Island, New York, graduating from Westbury High School in 1976."19 Lazar has stuck to his oft-repeated testimony since 1989 and has received the belated support of Dr. Michael Wolf. British researcher Timothy Good was more circumspect in his assessment of Lazar:
Bob Lazar’s story is fascinating and I feel it’s essentially true. I think he’s lied about his credentials — there’s absolutely no evidence that he has any qualifications as a nuclear physicist, but he’s a very talented engineer, that’s for sure... I think he needed to bolster his image to make the story more credible, but of course, once people realise that he’s exaggerated about something, they tend to throw the baby out with the bathwater, which, in his case, I don’t think we should.20
Lazar’s credibility is further strained by one of his less publicised claims — that when he worked at Los Alamos in the early ’80s he wrote a paper on "Project Excalibur", the construction of an "earth-penetrating, nuclear-tipped missile to destroy underground facilities". At Area S4 he allegedly read a document which referred to "Project Looking Glass, which dealt with the physics of seeing back in time".21
Such a project would seem redundant in the wake of full-fledged time travel asserted in the Montauk mythology.Bill Cooper said that the MJ-12 documents were posted to several UFO researchers in the form of undeveloped rolls of 35mm film in December, 1984. One of the recipients, Californian researcher Jamie Shandera, didn’t go public with the information until 1987, when he was supported by associate Bill Moore. Moore is a colleague of the owlish Dr. Stanton Friedman, who has defended the authenticity of the documents ever since and boasts about a $1000 bet he won from Philip Klass regarding the type-face employed in them.
Bill Cooper believes the documents were a clever hoax and offered pertinent criticism of their Presidential Executive Order serial numbers. He maintained that the other recipients kept their silence because they realised that the documents were a forgery. Cooper said that MJ-12 really referred to "Majority", not Majestic, a point that a researcher on the Australian panel at the Sydney lecture tried to correct Friedman on.The Canadian scientist was plainly irritated to find that Cooper’s proverbial ghost had dogged his steps to the shores of the Antipodes.
A question from the audience asked him to comment on assertions that he was an employee of the CIA, at which he launched into a tirade against "a certain Mr. Milton William Cooper" who had made the accusation. "Anybody who has the audacity to reprint the entire Protocols of the Elders of Zion in one of his books, that anti-Semitic forgery which has been proven to be (so) for the last ninety to a hundred years, has got no credibility at all!" Friedman added that the only time he had ever worked for the government was a fortnight’s duty as a postal delivery officer at a university when he was a student there.
Spooky connections
The CIA’s infamous Robertson Panel of 1953 recommended that UFO organisations be infiltrated and their activities monitored. Timothy Good’s Above Top Secret (1987) recounted the success of this initiative and its duplication in Britain and Australia. Many of the early groups collapsed from within but is there any reason for the complacent belief that governmental subversion is an historical footnote? Not so, according to researchers who claim to be subjects of ongoing surveillance. This claim has assumed the status of a rite of passage or, in the case of those named as intelligence agents themselves, a badge of verisimilitude.
I have been saying, since the first time I came out and started talking, that the whole UFO movement is controlled by the CIA, and most of the people that you’ve ever seen on stages at UFO events are working for the secret government.22
Bill Cooper nominated various individuals in this capacity, thus ensuring his marginalisation and a ufological backlash that has sought to depict him as a paranoid liar, an alcoholic and a political extremist. Cooper has deserved much of the opprobrium meted out to him by his adoption and misrepresentation of other people’s research, making him a soft target for critics like Donna Kossy [see New Dawn No. 31, pp.39-43]. "But focussing on any one aspect of Cooper’s junk heap of claims is impossible," she alleges in typically restrained style. This blanket statement drags into perfidy the likes of Stan Deyo, John Lear, Bob Oechsler, Bill Hamilton, Linda Moulton Howe and Fred Steckling. Kossy and her sources (the now-married couple who edit America’s UFO Magazine and who were conspicuously slandered by Cooper in Behold a Pale Horse) are not beyond a little ‘creative’ journalism.
Neither Cooper nor anyone else has ever asserted that George Bush was a member of MJ-12. Kossy and company seem to have attempted some clumsy obfuscation of Dr. Vannevar Bush with the Presidential namesake. She proceeded to put an entirely spurious statement into Cooper’s mouth: ‘Since George Bush was on MJ-12, he obviously knew the secret while President.’There’s no doubt that the field of ufology would be immensely poorer without the involvement of ufologist-whistleblowers who admit to prior involvement in the military and intelligence communities. Veteran conspiracy writer Jim Keith cautioned us to temper our cupidity for knowledge with a wider perspective: "People connected with the CIA tend to stay connected with the CIA."23
Thus we should note John Lear’s inordinate pride over his involvement in William Casey’s ‘October Surprise’ operation of 1980.During one of his 1992 Nexus lectures, Stan Deyo recalled a meeting with Stanton Friedman and William Moore that took place in an all-night diner in a small Arizona town during 1983. The pair offered to share secret information with Deyo if he could say the correct code (which was apparently "Gold Eagle"):
What bothered me was that I thought that these guys were just as straight as an arrow and there was no cover-up, and here they are telling me a few hours before, ‘Aliens are here!’ They showed me pictures and stuff like this in my hotel room back in ’83 and they were coming on from the position ‘They are here’. That certainly may be but it worried me that it was under a code sign and these guys are out here telling the UFO crowd various things, and saying we’ve got to do something about this cover-up, blah-blah-blah, and they’re part of the cover-up! I don’t understand. Maybe I misunderstood, and if you’re listening, guys, if you see this tape, I’d appreciate a letter... and not from your solicitors either.24
Bill Moore’s involvement with Air Force Intelligence in a scheme to discredit another UFO researcher, a man who subsequently suffered a nervous breakdown, came to the attention of the press in the 1980s. KLAS TV reporter George Knapp pressed Moore for an explanation, who offered this pathetic defence:
My involvement was only with the motive of learning how the process worked, who was involved with it, and ultimately, if I could, what was behind it. Why is the government doing these kinds of things? I never did quite learn why but I did learn who and I learned a great deal about how.25
FEMA (the U.S. Federal Emergency Management Agency) is allegedly under the control of Zbigniew Brzezinski and Henry Kissinger. Anyone who is concerned about its activities might wonder about Bob Dean’s loyalties. Before his lecture at Leeds University on March 2nd, 1996, Dean was introduced by Graham W. Birdsall (the editor of Britain’s UFO Magazine, which organised the event), who made the following, puzzling statements:
...Retiring from the Army in 1976, he spent the next fourteen years working for FEMA, the Federal Emergency Management Administration [sic]. He retired as an Emergency Service Manager from the FEMA County Sheriff’s Department. Robert is the former Arizona State Assistant Director and the former FEMA County Section Director for Mutual UFO Network, MUFON...26
Ufologists are reputedly known as ‘useful idiots’ in CIA circles and their behaviour sometimes confirms this impression. The recent Australian documentary Conspiracy featured the leaders of Sydney’s ASTRO group as ‘Dennis, Independant Researcher’ (Bob Lazar’s first nom de plume) and ‘James T. Ellis, Former Intelligence Analyst’. This name was apparently based on a U.S. Air Force radar operator named James Ellis, who stated that UFO radar blips were routinely detected during his 26 years of service.
Contemporary fascination with the subject has seen the launch of four commercial magazines in Britain within the last two years all of which are striving to carve a separate identity in the core market, Generation X (Files). Two are in the anti-conspiracy camp and two are in the opposition but they generally mull over the same material that tired American publications have been repackaging since the heady days of the late ’80s, when Lear, Lazar, Cooper and Bielek revolutionised the field. There have been more recent novelties like flying triangles, the Santilli film, the Brazilian crash and stories of violence meted out to alien survivors but there is a perceptible disappointment that greater revelations have not followed.
In the face of sustained government intransigence, there is a growing consensus that such revelations depend on the caprice of the aliens.Linda Moulton Howe said that we live in a "schizophrenic society". The description aptly suits the microcosm of ufology, where a supermarket of belief systems has obscured the relevance of the subject and reinforced its fringe status. The general public have been acclimatised to the existence of extraterrestrials through what Bob Oechsler believes to be a deliberate campaign of "selective fictions". The reliable strategy of divide and conquer is applied with the modern propaganda of ‘friendly fascism’. Whether or not aliens exist, they offer a convenient scapegoat and distraction to the very real machinations of terrestrial invaders.
REFERENCES
1. Stanton Friedman, public lecture in Sydney, October 16th, 1996.
2. The New Inquisition, Robert Anton Wilson, 1991, U.S., p.47.
3. Disneyland of the Gods, John A. Keel, 1995, Illuminet Press, U.S.
4. ibid.
5. Video: UFOs - The Best Evidence, George Knapp and Lucinda Owens, 1994, 180 minutes - 3 parts, KLAS TV Inc./AltaMira Productions, L.A. (a revised and expanded edition of a 1989 documentary, 96 minutes - 2 parts).
6. Video: UFOs - What’s Going On?, Robert Guenette, 1985, 56 minutes, HBO Cable TV/Robert Guenette Production.
7. Broca’s Brain, Carl Sagan, 1979, excerpt published in OMNI, Vol.1, No.11, August 1979, Omni Publications, N.Y.
8. Video: UFOs - The Best Evidence, op. cit.
9. The X Files Book of the Unexplained - Volume One, Jane Goldman, 1995, Simon and Schuster, U.K., p.297.
10. Fortean Times, No.92, November 1996, U.K., p.59.
11. ‘How to Build a UFO... Story’, Richard Thieme, Internet Underground, Vol.1, No.12, November 1996, Ziff-Davis Publishing, Illinois p.39.
12. Disneyland of the Gods, op. cit, pp.10-11.13. ibid, p.17.
14. Alien Encounters, No. 2, Paragon Publishing, Dorset, U.K.
15. Cecilia Dean, Video: Cosmic Top Secret - A Lecture by Robert Dean, March 2nd 1996, 109 minutes, Quest International/UFO Magazine, U.K.
16. Transformation: The Breakthrough, Whitley Strieber, 1988, Beech Tree Books/William Morrow, N.Y., p.254.
17. Encounters, Edith Piore, Ph.d., 1989, Doubleday, U.S., p.334.
18. Video: UFOs - The Best Evidence, op. cit.
19. ‘Profile: Bob Lazar’, Stuart Taylor, Alien Encounters, No.6, December 1996, op. cit., pp.47.
20. The X Files Book of the Unexplained - Volume One, op. cit., p.267.
21. Video: The Lazar Tape... And Excerpts From the Government Bible, Bob Lazar and Gene Huff, 1991, 40 minutes, UFO Central Video/Tri-Dot Productions, U.S.
22. Video: Extraterrestrial Biological Entities (EBE’s), a.k.a. William Cooper: Alien Agenda Conference, September 1990, Part 2, a lecture by Milton William Cooper, 1990, 135 minutes, Shining Star Productions, California.
23. TV documentary: Conspiracy, Victor Gentile and Brendan Young, 1996, 44 minutes, Mystery Clock Cinema Ltd., Australia.
24. Video: Stan Deyo in Conference - Tape A, a lecture by Stan Deyo, 1992, 142 minutes, Nexus Video Publishing/Instant Replay Productions, Australia.
25. Video: UFOs - The Best Evidence, op. cit.
26. Video: Cosmic Top Secret - A Lecture by Robert Dean, op. cit.
This article originally appeared in New Dawn Magazine No. 43 (July-August 1997).
© Copyright New Dawn Magazine, http://www.newdawnmagazine.com. Permission to re-send, post and place on web sites for non-commercial purposes, and if shown only in its entirety with no changes or additions. This notice must accompany all re-posting.
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