Read The Secret History of Extraterrestrials: Advanced Technology and the Coming New Race Online
Authors: Len Kasten
Tags: #UFOs/Paranormal
The Secret History of Extraterrestrials: Advanced Technology and the Coming New Race (8 page)
6
Through the Looking Glass
For, you see, so many out-of-the-way things had happened lately that Alice had begun to think that very few things indeed were really impossible.
L
EWIS
C
ARROLL
,
A
LICE IN
W
ONDERLAND
“Colonel Corso said to me, ‘Linda, how did you get all of that classified material in your book? How did you do it? At least I had a gun.’” This remark by Linda Moulton Howe was made at the conclusion of an extraordinary three-hour telephone interview with Colonel Philip J. Corso and William J. Birnes on July 7, 1997, the fiftieth anniversary of the Roswell crash, with Howe coordinating the four-way conversation and radio host Art Bell asking the questions. Howe was the science reporter for the
Coast-to-Coast
radio program, which Bell hosted at the time. The interview covered many of the startling revelations made by Corso and Birnes in their groundbreaking book,
The Day After Roswell,
but it was one thing to read it in print and quite another to hear about these events directly from Corso, the only living person to have personal knowledge about them. Because his work had been top-secret and compartmentalized, only Corso and General Arthur Trudeau, his boss, knew about the events recounted in the book. Since General Trudeau had died in 1991, that left only Corso with knowledge of what had been done.
This interview, certainly a “scoop” in every sense of the term, is just one of the examples of how Howe has managed to stay in the middle of the labyrinthine morass that is the UFO controversy and how she is able to get interviews and obtain classified information from otherwise forbidding sources. She is precisely in the eye of the storm and has been there ever since her bold, Emmy-winning documentary about the cattle mutilations in the western United States,
Strange Harvest,
was first aired on Colorado television in 1980.
The world of UFO investigation and reporting is a strange, shifting, surrealistic mix of delusion, belief, and fact, where the hard evidence at one moment becomes the disinformation of the next, and vice versa. Some journalists are believed to be purveyors of disinformation, either as government accomplices or as unwitting dupes. Since very little is provable, it then becomes a game of reputation, but even the UFO investigators and journalists with the most experience and highest reputations can suddenly fall into distrust. In this milieu, for Howe to have remained above reproach for twenty ears and to be trusted by both sides is rather remarkable.
Atlantis Rising
magazine had taken note of Howe’s activities for some time, but it was the 1998 publication of her book
High Strangeness
(volume 2 of
Glimpses of Other Realities
) that precipitated my request for an interview.
*14
She agreed, and I met with her at a UFO conference hosted by new age writer John White over the weekend of October 10 and 11, 1998, in North Haven, Connecticut.
Howe has traveled a highly improbable path from beauty queen to UFO investigator and journalist. A former Miss Boise and Miss Idaho, she parlayed her pageant scholarship winnings into a first-class education, obtaining a BA degree from the University of Colorado in English literature and a master’s degree in communications from the prestigious Stanford University on a Stanley Beaubaire Fellowship. She was hired by MGM’s documentary division right out of Stanford and went on to a series of TV producing jobs. In 1976, she joined KMGH-TV in Denver as a director of special projects. In that capacity, she produced, wrote, directed, and edited TV documentaries and also did on-air TV reporting. Initially she focused on projects about the environment, medicine, and science and had no interest in UFO phenomena. But in 1979, when her audio man told her about his work with a crew for ABC-TV’s show
20/20
that was doing an investigation of cattle mutilations, she became intrigued and decided to investigate. This ultimately resulted in
Strange Harvest
and a strange new twist in her career path. The rest, as they say, is history.
Linda Moulton Howe, Emmy-award-winning TV producer
Howe is now the reporter and editor of Earthfiles.com news website and an investigative reporter for Premiere Radio Networks.
A QUICKSAND FLOOR
As we talked over lunch about various UFO and extraterrestrial topics, the impression that I had already gathered from Howe’s books became confirmed. While several other prominent investigators and writers in the field have staked out compartmentalized territories, Howe is trying to solve the entire mystery. What started out as a determined effort to simply understand cattle mutilations has now broadened to encompass comprehension of the totality of reported encounters, what the government knows, crop circles, ancient astronauts, paranormal phenomena, and the scientific breakthroughs that are promised by alien technology. Like Alice in Wonderland, she has, in her search for the truth, been led down a path that gets “curiouser and curiouser,” to a place of “high strangeness” (the “strangeness scale” was invented by the astronomer Dr. J. Allen Hynek). She refers to it as “a hall of mirrors with a quicksand floor.”
Never daunted by the fantastic information she has uncovered, Howe has the mental scope to entertain even the most bizarre possibilities and to report them without fear of ridicule and with incisive and informed commentary. It is probably for this reason that so many military operatives have confided in her. Perhaps the most noteworthy example of this is the now well-known incident in April 1983 when Air Force intelligence officer Master Sergeant Richard Doty invited her to Kirtland Air Force Base in Albuquerque to sit down in a secured room and read, under observation, a classified government document titled “Briefing Paper for the President of the United States of America.” Howe later reported that the paper revealed that the government had reliable information that extraterrestrials had been visiting Earth for tens of thousand of years and had helped create the human race, as we now know it, by genetic manipulation of the DNA of the native primate population. It was this incident that helped propel her further into UFO investigation.
Howe’s book is a chronicle of her trip through Wonderland. It covers a bewildering diversity of reports of phenomena that stretch conventional reality to the breaking point and threaten to push us “through the looking glass” into another paradigm—a completely different view of what life is all about. Perhaps the largest section of the book is titled “Military Voices,” wherein Howe reports on “confessions,” anonymous and otherwise, from prior and active military personnel about previously secret UFO and extraterrestrial activity. Much of this material is about Roswell. Howe devotes considerable space to new reports about the incident, based on information given directly to her, but she acknowledges the conflicting narratives about the crash and concludes that disinformation is probably the culprit. She says in her book, “Government insiders, under ordered policy, have inspired and fueled ridicule of witnesses with weather balloon, Venus, flares and swamp gas explanations to make sure that the public and media stayed away from the bodies, craft and technologies.”
TWO SPACESHIPS IN THE NIGHT
Included in this section of Howe’s book is a report about Roswell that has the ring of authenticity and sheds new light on the incident. One of her contacts, a man named Peter A. Bostrom, reported to her about an interview he had conducted with a former soldier who claimed to have viewed all the top-secret 16mm films taken at the Roswell crash site (or sites). The canisters of film were stored with other classified films in a vault within a vault in a basement with bricked-over windows at Fort Richardson in Anchorage, Alaska. In the inner vault was a box marked “Roswell” that contained several canisters of film taken by the Signal Corps. The soldier viewed all of them while doing an inventory in 1960, and he reported seeing two different crashed craft in two different films, one with aliens with six-fingered hands being put in body bags and loaded onto military trucks. He told Bostrom that he was positive that the films showed two different sites, although the terrain was similar in both.
Howe points out that this was the first intimation that what we loosely refer to now as “Roswell” may have been two distinct crashes, and this may be the reason that two different sites, scenarios, and types of aliens were reported by various witnesses.
*15
This conclusion has been supported by the release of Roswell/MJ-12 documents on the Internet that make reference to two different UFO crashes on the night of July 4, 1947, during an intense electrical storm. Howe speculates that the two crashes were probably the result of a midair collision!
To confuse the matter even more, the book supplies evidence of a third crash that even predates Roswell. This one evidently occurred on May 31, 1947, somewhere southwest of Socorro in the Plains of San Augustin, possibly as far west as Elk Mountain. This crash, according to information in the book, was probably the one that caused the death of the alien depicted in the now-famous Ray Santilli alien autopsy film. In July 1995, Santilli released the transcript of his video interview in 1994 with the military cameraman who had filmed both the crash site and three subsequent autopsies. The entire transcript is included in the book. Referred to only as “JB,” the photographer says that the crash occurred on May 31, “just southwest of Socorro.”
Anyone who has seen the autopsy film (and who hasn’t at this point?) will recall that this type of alien appears to be a miniature human but has large, round eyes and six fingers and toes. JB was literally “freaked out” by what he saw. He refers to the aliens as “circus freaks” and claims that three were alive and one was dead. They were crying and holding some sort of a box clasped tightly to their chests. The boxes, shown in one of the films, were evidently the metal control panels, with indentations for six-fingered hands. Howe tells us that Bob Shell, editor of
Shutterbug
magazine, analyzed the Santilli film and found that it had been manufactured in the early 1940s and had probably been used within two years of manufacture. In 1997, Kodak verified this information.
JB claimed that he filmed two dissections in July 1947. One of the dissected aliens was probably one of the three from Socorro that survived but later died of his wounds, which are quite apparent in the autopsy film, where we see a very large gash in the right leg. Did the second one come from the El Capitan crash, where four six-fingered aliens were filmed being put into body bags? Of the two Socorro aliens left alive, one apparently died in 1949, when JB filmed a third dissection. That left one alien still alive. His fate may have been revealed by a mysterious message that Howe found on her answering machine one night. A slow, deliberate voice with a Texas drawl said, “The government made contact in 1949 when they returned the alien that survived.” Apparently, the amount of secret information yet to be revealed is truly staggering!
DEAD ALIEN SHOULD BE PACKED IN ICE
In August 1995, Howe received in the mail a plain manila envelope containing what was apparently a copy of a government document with the formidable title “SOM1-01 Majestic-12 Group Special Operations Manual—Extraterrestrial Entities and Technology, Recovery and Disposal, TOP SECRET/MAJIC EYES ONLY.” It was dated April 7, 1954. It is essentially a handbook for “Majestic-12 units” dispatched to crash sites, giving them background information about the extraterrestrial craft (referred to as UFOBs) and the alien entities (EBEs), and complete instructions for technology retrieval and transport, security, handling of aliens (“Dead EBE’s should be packed in ice . . .”), and dealing with the press. Howe includes the entire document, exactly as received, in an appendix. The section titled “Press Blackout” is especially revealing. There we officially learn what every UFO investigator has already concluded: the three techniques to be used with the press are (a) official denial, (b) discrediting witnesses, and (c) deceptive statements.
It is in this document that we discover what the government knew about extraterrestrials to that point in time. Two types of EBEs are described. The Type I EBE description closely matches the six-fingered aliens from the San Augustin and El Capitan crashes, also shown in the autopsy film, with one exception. They are said to have “four long digits but no opposable thumb.” No matter what else can be said about the authenticity of the rest of this manual, this statement is definitely disinformation since, as we have already seen, by 1954 the military had already dissected three six-fingered aliens and had held two of them as guests of the government for two years. The Type II EBEs are our old friends of abduction fame, the little grey guys with the big black eyes that the military/industrial people refer to as “the kids,” with seeming affection. What is most interesting about this document is what it doesn’t say. For example, it does cover rudimentary procedures for avoiding biological contact, but the instructions are rather sloppy considering the risk of contacting a foreign virus. MJ-12 documents that have more recently been available on the Internet claim that four retrieval personnel had already died from an alien virus by 1954.
There is much more fascinating material in the “Military Voices” section of Howe’s book—too much to cover here. Howe’s informants and interviewees discuss such subjects as the UFO disabling of nuclear missiles at Malmstrom Air Force Base in Great Falls, Montana, in March 1967; a close encounter in Cambodia in 1971 by a Special Forces operative named “Joe,” which includes a detailed account of how the MJ-12 agents erased his memory of the event and replaced it with another version; some new information about the RAF Bentwaters case at Rendlesham Forest, England, in 1980, where a crippled UFO was observed landing by a large group of U.S. Air Force personnel; an explanation of how the aliens accomplish time travel into the past; and a surrealistic account of the abduction of a navy flier while in flight, who was taken back in time to his previous incarnations. In this last case, the navy man refers to the grey aliens as “glorified bellhops” who just take you where you’re supposed to go.