Conspiracies: The Facts * the Theories * the Evidence (34 page)

The most famous alleged occurrence in the decade which appeared

to see such a major rise in UFO reports was the now-fabled

Roswell incident. On 7 July 1947 the New Mexico newspaper the

Roswell Daily Record
reported, incredibly, that the Roswell Army Air Field base had successful y retrieved a crashed flying saucer.

The immediate fuss was swept under the carpet, however, by the

presentation of weather balloon debris to journalists the next

day, who were told that this was all that came down in the nearby desert.

But decades later, information from ex-military personnel

and other whistleblowers began to make clear that
something

strange must have occurred at Roswel , especial y when Major

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Jesse Marcel (who had fronted the weather balloon story) came

forward to deny the official version. Marcel stated that what he

and other personnel had witnessed could only, in their view,

have come from an extra-terrestrial craft. More elaborate claims

from other Roswell locals told of alien bodies (the ‘grey’ variety reported by many claimed contactees) having been brought into

the local hospital, adding spice to the story and spiralling it into UFO legend – some would say, myth. Shifting cover stories (the

balloon became a device for detecting Soviet atomic tests, and the bodies were explained away as crash-test dummies) only added to

the intrigue.

Getting to the truth of what real y occurred at Roswel , given the many claims and counter-claims, is now difficult at this distance, with even some ufologists doubting the extra-terrestrial elements of the story. However, a large number of conspiracy theorists

do believe that an important encounter did take place and that

the craft was retrieved and taken to a hangar at the now in itself legendary Area 51 (or ‘Dreamland’), a Nevada desert testing site

for confidential US military projects. It has been suggested that the reverse-engineering of captured UFOs has secretly been the

source for several of civilization’s recent technological advances, while mysterious ‘men in black’ are said to turn up at the scenes of alleged encounters to gather further data and contain public

knowledge.

There have been many other stories of military units

encountering extra-terrestrials, but getting to the bottom of

any of them becomes harder as the years go by, with layers of

concealment and debunking clouding any chance of reaching an

irrefutable conclusion. The Rendlesham Forest incident of 1980,

for instance, in which US soldiers guarding a UK military base in Suffolk claim to have witnessed a conical UFO at close quarters

in nearby woodlands, has been assailed by varied and sometimes

weak means (disregarded as being a lighthouse seen through fog,

covert hal ucinogenic experiments, etc.), yet the actual accounts 211

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seem too particular for some of the more mundane explanations

to ring true.

Meanwhile, civilians have reported many variations on lights,

saucers, discs, triangular craft and cylinders over the years, with thousands claiming personal encounters with the occupants.

Although the greys are the most commonly reported variety,

other beings have been described, including tall ‘Nordic’-looking humanoids and insectoid or reptilian creatures (
see
below
). In view of the treatment that professional witnesses have received, it is perhaps unsurprising that the public’s stories have been handled even more shoddily for the most part. Yet recurring themes of

bizarre operations, alien ‘implants’ and remarkably accurate

visions of the future having been conveyed by the apparent ETs

are so dominant that, if nothing else, the abduction phenomenon

surely demands attention as a major psychological crisis of our

times. But even Carl Jung met ridicule when he tried to tackle the subject with this sensible approach in his perceptive 1959 book

Flying Saucers: A Modern Myth of Things Seen in the Sky
.

Official Responses

When authorities do appear to investigate UFOs, impressive data

is often sidelined or simply ignored, as was demonstrated by the

USAF’s Project Blue Book, which gathered information on over

12,000 sightings between 1952 and 1969. It wrote most of them

off – probably correctly – as having mundane causes, but admitted that a not-insubstantial 22 per cent of cases ‘remained unsolved’.

Yet no more was said about this surely significant number of

apparently non-mundane encounters. Most official inquiries

have followed much the same pattern, for all the impressive roll

cal s of ex-military personnel, astronauts (including Apollo 14’s Ed Mitchell) and commercial airline pilots who have come

forward with their own testimony, either personal y or through

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conduits such as Steven Greer’s ambitious Disclosure Project,

which has gathered considerable positive evidence for the UFO

phenomenon.7

The US government came down heavily on British computer

expert Gary McKinnon when he hacked into American military

and NASA files between 2001 and 2002, seeking proof of UFO

cover-ups. This sparked more than a decade of attempted

extradition procedures unlike any before them, suggesting a

particular touchiness in this area. Controversial figures such

as Nick Pope, who claims to have worked for a UK Ministry of

Defence department which investigated UFOs, have stated that the

authorities have far more interest in such phenomena than is ever declared. Pope himself has been accused of being a government

‘plant’, but his contention would make sense of some of the alleged cover-ups surrounding elements of ufological folklore such as

‘Majestic 12’ (a secret investigation project said to have been set up in the wake of Roswell) or the ‘NSC 5412/2 Special Group’. It

may be that all these rumoured organizations are confusion tactics in themselves, introduced into the conspiracy world to mask the

real operations, while the media’s debunking and regular claims

that ‘ufology is dead’ – in the face of actual y increased sightings

– could be viewed as the workings of a complex double-bluff,

sowing interest and uncertainty all at the same time.

Whichever way it is looked at, the presence of some kind of

unknown force operating in our airspace, while not entirely

denied, is barely discussed by authorities and quickly brushed

aside. Yet sometimes there may be glimpses of more honest

opinions. According to Steven Spielberg, following a special

screening of his 1982 movie
ET
, an unsmiling President Ronald Reagan is reputed to have said: ‘There are a number of people in

this room who know that everything on that screen is absolutely

true.’ Spielberg has written this off as a joke, but others believe Reagan, a firm believer in mysticism and astrology, was making a

rare declaration of the truth in this area.8

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John F Kennedy clearly took UFOs seriously (as did presidents

Gerald Ford and Jimmy Carter). On 12 November 1963, Kennedy

ordered a full declassification of relevant CIA documents to

NASA with a view to sharing UFO information with the Soviets.

Two weeks later, he was dead; this might be a coincidence,

of course, although in the conspiracy world little is seen as

coincidence.9

Origins and Purpose?

As for precisely why extra-terrestrials might be here, opinions

vary enormously. If real, are they, as numerous sci-fi movies

would have it, scouting us out for a planned invasion, or are

they here simply to gather knowledge and genetic material for

some kind of galactic archive? Claims of UFOs leaving behind

mutilated cattle with specific organs cleanly removed are rife and may indicate some kind of organic extraction programme, but

people also claim to have had physical material taken from them

during encounters. Are the visitors benevolent forces, wanting

to save humankind from its own excesses, or are they using us

to take DNA and maybe save themselves from some kind of

evolutionary crisis? (Some say they could, in fact, be humans from the future.) Are they here instead to inspire us subtly to a new

stage of enlightenment, creating the more advanced crop circles

(aerial phenomena are often witnessed over the host fields) and

transmitting psychic messages? Or are they advance parties from

Nibiru, assessing the situation for the return of their masters?

Could all of these possibilities be occurring? In essence, are they here to police us or to fleece us?

Where extra-terrestrials might come from is another unresolved

issue. If they have developed some kind of instantaneous method

of interstel ar propulsion, they might be from anywhere (some

abductees say greys come from the star system Zeta Reticuli).

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Those unable to accept ‘warp drive’ theories have suggested that

the visitors may have long ago colonized the interior of our own

Moon (or the interior of a hollow Earth) and have been essential y native for centuries, manipulating the human race from behind

the scenes. UFOs have also been seen coming up from the sea.

The mainstream implication of all the persistent debunking and

academic sneering, on the other hand, is that the belief in visiting aliens is all a kind of collective madness – a huge psychological projection from the inner recesses of mass consciousness, creating fictions that eventual y take on a kind of hal ucinogenic reality for the impressionable. That attitude is perhaps not quite fair,

especial y when it comes from a media that has played a major part in having introduced them into the global psyche in the first place.

Fake Aliens?

The idea of ETs as a collective psychogenic thought-form has

helped grow yet another branch of conspiracy thinking. It has

been suggested that the New World Order might try to use the

concept
of an alien threat as a huge psy-ops experiment, designed to encourage further the creation of a one world government

(
see
chapter 8). In this view, some, if not al , of the ufological evidence (including the debunking, as part of the psychological

conditioning) may have been deliberately introduced into our

culture to build us up slowly for the day when ‘aliens’ – but in

reality fake ones – are final y seen to arrive.

If a mass visitation of ET vessels were to materialize in plain

sight, this could indeed present a dilemma in a world prone to

complex deceptions. Could we trust our usual senses in that

situation? Concerns over the potential capabilities of holographic projection technology (often described as ‘Project Blue Beam’)

have led to the development of the ‘fake alien invasion’ theory, in which fears have been expressed that the ruling elite might beam

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images into the sky to falsify an extra-terrestrial presence. Why might this be necessary, though? The answer may once again lie

in the words of President Reagan, who, in a 1987 address to the

United Nations General Assembly, stated:

In our obsession with antagonisms of the moment, we often

forget how much unites all the members of humanity. Perhaps

we need some outside, universal threat to make us recognize

this common bond. I occasional y think how quickly our

differences worldwide would vanish if we were facing an

alien threat from outside this world.10

Some believe this idea might have been taken literal y by the

NWO and that plans to implement such a ‘common bond’ by

false means could be well advanced. All of which means that

if ET craft are ever seen coming through the clouds
en masse
, transmitting either threats or welcomes, there is going to be a

stratum of humanity which will eye them with deep suspicion.

The future might well bring other similar dilemmas, with talk of

faked second comings of Christ also occurring in an attempt to

‘fulfil’ biblical prophecies (
see
p. 228).

Real Powers

For those who believe that extra-terrestrials are very real,

perhaps worse than a falsified presence is the notion that several governments might actual y be working in cahoots with different

alien factions, some good, some bad, manipulating us into

situations for uncertain purposes of their own. UFOs would

certainly appear to have some genuinely impressive powers, as the several accounts of unexplained craft neutralizing nuclear missile silos would attest. One prominent case was brought forward

by USAF Colonel Robert Salas, who claims he was present

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at the Malmstrom base in Montana when a hovering saucer-

shaped object appeared to cause a mass shutdown in 1967.11 The