Modern UFO Era as Cold War Con

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Modern UFO Era as Cold War Con

Postby elfismiles » Fri Jul 30, 2010 3:36 pm

I felt CERTAIN that this first article was posted somewhere around here but I just spent minutes looking and couldn't find it...

As I've often said (often in reply to HMW) ... YES, there are PsyOps at the heart of the Modern UFO Phenomenon ... but there is also a "true UFO phenomenon" that has been with humanity as long as we've been on this planet.


ARE UFOs JUST A CIA CON-TRICK? MIRAGE MEN BY MARK PILKINGTON
By Harry Ritchie

Last updated at 4:39 PM on 29th July 2010

The way of things to come?: Or are UFOs just a CIA conspiracy?

Ufology is a faith that includes many beliefs, from the oddly popular one about Nazi aliens who live under the ground to David Icke's contention that the Duke of Edinburgh is in fact a shape-changing, blood-sucking alien lizard.
But here's the core of the faith - that some UFO sightings and encounters are real, the U.S. government knows all about these extraterrestrial visitations, and they've mounted a huge conspiracy to keep the aliens secret and us in the dark.
This book threatens to demolish that faith. Because here Mark Pilkington sets out to prove that the U.S. government really has been conducting a top-secret UFO conspiracy - only one designed not to hide UFOs but publicise them, fuelling and even creating the major UFO myths. Flying saucers, alien abductions, crash-landed spacecraft, secret underground bases in New Mexico - they were all created by the U.S. government.
As Mark Pilkington immediately acknowledges, that might sound only marginally less ridiculous and emptily melodramatic than claiming that the Royal Family are actually alien reptiles. But he begins to build a pretty convincing case that U.S. agencies really have been conducting just such a long-running disinformation campaign to promote UFOs. And it does make sense.
UFOs make the perfect cover story to hide experimental aircraft from prying Russian eyes as well as those of their own citizens. Ufologists are a particular pest to U.S. Air Force security, for ever trying to root around their secret projects and hack into their systems - they need to be led up various extraterrestrial garden paths and far away from finding out about actual highly-classified experiments in weaponry or aircraft.
The Roswell Incident: were alien bodies really found?
Pilkington's theory would certainly explain why so many of the key UFO sightings and events happen near U.S. Air Force bases - such as Roswell, home of the famous 'incident' when an alien craft was supposed to have crash-landed, with a couple of aliens aboard.
And why so many extraterrestrial spaceships seem to behave like the pilotless drones and stealth aircraft developed by the U.S. Air Force. And why flying saucers should first turn up at the start of the Cold War, just when the U.S. Air Force was beginning to experiment with exotic new types of flight.
According to Pilkington, the campaign to promote the idea of UFOs was masterminded in the Fifties by the head of the CIA, Allen Welsh Dulles. More recently, many of the leaked fake documents and bogus stories seem to have come from the U.S. Air Force's Office of Special Investigations (AFOSI).
One victim of fake UFO documents evidently supplied by the American government was Timothy Good, whose international bestseller about supposed contact with aliens, Above Top Secret, included completely bogus papers planted in the American National Archives.
Another is George Adamski, an early fan of flying saucers whose bestselling books in the Fifties described his meetings with a chap called Orthon from Venus and his own trips in flying saucers.
I came across one of Adamski's mad books in my local public library when I was a boy, and I remember being disturbed and perplexed - this was a book, a proper printed book, so all this stuff about going to Venus and meeting Venusians ... it had to be real, didn't it? Now, it seems Adamski was an innocent, eager dupe and that Orthon and the spaceships weren't figments of his silly or venal imagination but real people and vehicles supplied by the CIA.
Fake spaceships, fake aliens, fake documents and even a fake underground alien base - it might all seem unduly elaborate and indeed expensive.
But the Americans certainly had the money for it, budgeting billions of dollars for the CIA's black arts.
The Pentagon already had a good bash at that themselves, sponsoring a recruitment film of the Seventies, which claimed that UFOs were real and which included footage of a flying saucer landing at a U.S. Air Force base and a couple of aliens disembarking.
And that, you might think, is the Pentagon bang to rights. But at this point in the book, things begin to get even more complicated.
An AFOSI agent takes Pilkington aside and confides the real 'truth' - yes, there is a huge government conspiracy to produce a smokescreen of nonsense about UFOS, of course; however, it's designed to hide not supersonic test-flights but ... real UFOs.
Because, you see, by offering up a series of scary stories about UFO invasions and alien abductions, this will gradually desensitise the public to the eventual truth that the U.S. government really has been in contact with aliens.
Argh! Clearly, obviously, surely, this is more hokum, an attempt to exploit Pilkington with a slightly refined version of the same old stories - but he has previous as a Ufology believer and he can't quite shake off the thrill of thinking that maybe, just maybe, an alien spaceship did crash-land at Roswell. That's typical of a book that isn't quite the rigorous hard-hitting investigation it could and should have been. Pilkington just about manages to hold on to his scepticism but ends with a spiel about nobody knowing for sure what the truth can be and Ufology being a murky, grey area.
No, no, no. There's nothing grey about it. Either we have been visited by aliens and the American government is covering this up or we haven't and it isn't.
Either that debris at Roswell was part of a crashed flying saucer or it came from a test-flight that went wrong or a knackered high-altitude weather balloon. Either the Duke of Edinburgh is a blood-sucking alien reptile seeded from a distant star system or he is a human from Greece. So. What do you reckon? Great credit to Pilkington, though, for revealing who Orthon really was/ those aliens really are.


http://www.dailymail.co.uk/home/books/a ... NGTON.html




Weapons of Mass Deception
Washington, 1952: How the CIA created the flying saucer craze
By Mark Pilkington


FT266


On 19 July 1952 – and again on the 26th – an event took place that must have seemed as unthinkable then as it would be considered impossible now: Washington DC was buzzed by several unidentified aircraft. These fast-moving phantoms hopped like fleas across radar screens and evaded all attempts to intercept them with jets; they made fools of jumpy Air Force personnel and generated front-page news all around the world.

The incident illustrated perfectly the threat that UFOs posed to America’s defence establishment, which carried painful memories of the attack on Pearl Harbor and now lived in the shadow of the burgeoning Soviet atomic programme, and would shape the UFO phenomenon – and the attitude of America’s custodians to it – for the next 60 years.

Although the case has been dismissed as a dramatic example of a temperature invers­ion – whereby objects on the ground are picked up on radar and appear as aircraft – the facts are complex enough to deserve more than a simple brush-off, and may point to a deliberate attempt to exploit the phenomenon.

But who by? And for what purpose?


UFORIA
America’s relationship to the flying saucer changed dramatically between 1949 and 1953. After two years of intermittent “UFOria” sparked by Kenneth Arnold’s original 1947 sighting, by late 1949 it looked as if the public might finally be losing interest in the elusive intruders. This was largely thanks to the Air Force’s Project Grudge, which had spent the year doing its best to play down public enthusiasm for the phenomenon – largely by ridiculing it – and, most importantly, inocul­ating its own pilots against the UFO bug.

In late December 1949, however, all Grudge’s hard work came undone thanks to an article in the hugely popular men’s magazine True. “Flying Saucers are Real” by pulp author Donald Keyhoe, a retired Major from the US Marine Corps naval aviation division, was a shocking exposé of the Air Force cover-up of the awful truth – that flying saucers were real, and they were from Outer Space.

Although the Extraterrestrial Hypo­thesis (ETH) had always been a contender for the discs’ origin, until then most people, civilian and military, thought the saucers were American or possibly Soviet in origin. Even Kenneth Arnold had spoken publicly of his belief that what he saw were experimental US craft, perhaps powered by atomic energy. It was these comments that caused him to be drawn into the Maury Island UFO affair in July 1947, a bizarre honey-trap involving Air Force Intelli­gence, the FBI and, possibly, the powerful Atomic Energy Commission. Arnold was lured to Tacoma, Washington, by the promise of UFO debris, but his investigat­ion inadvertently led to the deaths of two Air Force intelligence agents (the newly-formed USAF’s first ever casualties) in a plane crash and a lucky escape for Arnold in his own aircraft.

Although Arnold wouldn’t have known it, the Air Force did have a nascent atomic aircraft project at the time – Nuclear Energy for the Propulsion of Aircraft – so it’s not surprising that he became the subject of an intense investigation, especially given how seriously the US authorities took the threat of Soviet infiltration. It was only eight months since the Venona intelligence decryption project – so secret that not even Presidents Roosevelt and Truman knew of its existence – had made its first breakthrough, and the situation it unravelled was nothing short of devastating. Venona identified Soviet moles inside the Man­hattan Project and in government bodies including the Office of Strategic Services (which became the CIA in 1947), the Army Air Force, the War Production Board (chief spymaster Victor Perlo headed the Aviation Section) the Treasury, the State Department, and even amongst President Roose­velt’s trusted White House administrators. The United States was paranoid, and with good reason: there really were Reds under the bed, including the four-posters at the White House.

The strange brew of technology and paranoia that led to the first outbreak of the UFO bug was fomented by the breakdown of relations between the US Air Force and the Navy. As they fought over post-war funding, each side accused the other of corruption in pursuing government contracts and leaked one another’s internal documents in what was described by some as a civil war. Things deteriorated so badly that a chronically depressed Secretary of Defense, James Forrestal, who had previously headed the Navy, leapt to his death from the 16th floor of the Bethesda Naval Hospital, an incident that has launched a thousand conspiracy theories.

The feud also meant that neither side was showing the other its new toys, which in the Navy’s case meant the brand spanking new XF-5U flying flapjack, a saucer-like, propeller-driven Vertical Take Off and Landing aircraft, of which at least two fully functional models were built. The flapjack neatly fits the silhouette of the whooshing, heel-shaped aircraft photographed by William Rhoads over Phoenix, Arizona, on 7 July 1947 (the first photograph of the UFO era) and also the aircraft described in the USAF’s first internal saucer report as a “thin metallic object” seen flying over Muroc Army Air Field (later Edwards AFB) in California the following day.

Was the Navy taunting its rivals with its superior technology? Were Keyhoe’s True article, and a pro-ET follow-up by Robert Mclaughlin, head of the Navy’s miss­ile programme at White Sands, all part of the game? Certainly the timing of the art­icles was infuriating to the Air Force, coming just as Grudge seemed to have put a lid on the simmering saucer mania.

Whatever intentions lay behind them, the True articles helped to transform flying saucers from something of a joke into a respectable topic for research and discuss­ion amongst American men of all ages: the era of scientific ufology was born.


VISITORS FROM SPACE
The DC overflights were the culmination of a series of events that cast the mould for the UFO myth as we know it. The first was the release of Robert Wise’s The Day The Earth Stood Still in September 1951, a film that perfectly crystallised America’s flying saucer moment. With its message of peace brought by the Christ-like extra­terrestrial Klaatu and enforced by Gort, the robot policeman with the power to destroy the Earth, it reflected the hopes and fears of what an encounter with beings from Outer Space might bring, while cannily echoing the role that America felt it could, and should, play on the world stage.

The film coincided with, or, some might say, sparked, a sudden surge of UFO witness reports, many from within the armed forces. In response the Air Force issued JANAP 146(B), which instructed members of all the armed forces to report sightings of unknown aircraft and made the unauthorised release of information about a UFO incident a crime, punishable by up to 10 years in prison and a 10,000 dollar fine. With the Soviets watching America’s every move, UFOs – and that included clandestine balloons, missile launches and test flights of new aircraft – were a growing intelligence and security problem that needed to be contained.

Another key moment came in April 1952, when LIFE, America’s most popular magazine, ran an article entitled “Have We Visitors From Space?” As if UFOs weren’t enough of a draw, the issue featured a pouting Marilyn Monroe on the cover, making it irresistible to any red-blooded American male.

“The Air Force,” the article began, “is now ready to concede that many saucer and fireball sightings still defy explanation; here LIFE offers some scientific evidence that there is a real case for interplanetary saucers.” Its authors, HB Darrach Jr. and Robert Ginna, had spent a year in consult­ation with the Air Force, so the pro-ET tone was a surprise to many, who expected them to play down the hype. Instead, the article gave flying saucer studies, and the ETH, another boost of respectability and added to the deluge of press reports that the phenomenon was now generating, with US newspapers carrying over 16,000 UFO items in the first six months of 1952 alone.

All of this made America’s policy-makers nervous. In early 1952, CIA director Walter B Smith wrote to Raymond Allen, director of the secretive Psychological Strategy Board: “I am today transmitting… a proposal in which it is concluded that the problems associated with unidentified flying objects appear to have implications for psycho­logical warfare as well as for intelligence and operations.” Smith’s concerns would prove to be uncannily prescient.

On two nights in July 1952, a number of unidentified objects blipped onto radar screens at Washington DC National Airport. At close to midnight on the first night, 19–20 July, seven objects were tracked 24km from the capital city, gradually homing in on the White House at about 160km/h. A bright, orange ball of light was seen from nearby Andrews Air Force Base, making “a kind of circular movement” according to an airman on the scene, before taking off at “an incredible speed” and disappearing.[1] Six bright white, fast-moving lights were also spotted by the pilot of a passenger jet flying in the area.

Sightings and radar tracking of “unident­ifieds” continued until 3am, when two interceptors flew in to try to get a closer look, at which point the remaining UFOs vanished from the skies and from radar. They reapp­eared as soon as the jets had returned to base, leading Harry Barnes, a senior Air Traffic Controller, to suspect that the UFOs were listening in on radio communications and planning their actions accordingly. Adding to his frustration, Barnes’s attempts to interest senior Air Force officials in the incident seemed to fall on deaf ears. Creating further grounds for suspicion that someone knew what was going on, Edward Ruppelt, head of the Air Force’s recently created Project Bluebook, heard nothing about the incident until he read about it in a Washington newspaper two days later.

On 26 July, the UFOs returned. This time, 12 were spotted on radar, again flying at a not particularly impressive 160km/h. As before, there were sightings of lights from the air and from the ground and, once more, two jets were scrambled. One of the pilots chased four white “glows” that suddenly “shot toward him and clustered around his plane”,[2] but the UFOs remained as elusive as ever.

Another media flurry followed, leading to an Air Force press conference at the Pentagon, its largest since World War II. In his 1956 memoir The Report on Unidentified Flying Objects, Ruppelt describes the scene as chaotic, with General John Samford of Air Force Intelligence doing his best to be noncommittal about the sightings and focusing on calming fears that they were stray guided missiles or new American aircraft. When asked directly whether the objects had been US secret weapons, Samford gave the oblique and enigmatic response: “We have nothing that has no mass and unlimited power.” Then came Captain Roy James, a radar specialist from the Air Technical Intelligence Center at Wright Patterson AFB, who pointed out that at least some of the radar returns were the result of a temperature inversion, a layer of warm, moist air on top of cool air on the ground, which had caused radar systems to detect a steamboat and other large objects at ground level. Rupp­elt himself was unconvinced by the explan­ation – in fact he’d hastily cooked it up without having time to study the incident properly – but the press lapped it up and that, for now at least, was the end of that.

The following month, technical specialists from both the CIA and the Air Force met to discuss the UFO problem and, having rejected both the secret weapon and ET hypothesis, agreed that the sightings were down to a combination of misperceptions and ‘mental conditioning’ by the media. H Marshall Chadwell, the CIA’s Assistant Director for Scientific Intelligence, wrote to Director Walter B Smith to suggest that they investigate the extent to which the phenomenon could be “controlled… predicted” and “used from a psychological warfare point of view”. Noting that “a fair proportion of our population is mentally conditioned to the acceptance of the incredible”, he worried about the potential for mass hysteria and that in the event of a Soviet attack, neither civilian nor military observers would be able to “distinguish hardware from phantom”.

To address the UFO question, in January 1953 the CIA convened a secret panel under Dr Howard Percy Robertson, dir­ector of the Pentagon’s Weapons Systems Evaluations Group. Over four days with long lunch breaks, they watched UFO films, read reports and listened to testimony from experts in various fields, before reaching a conclusion similar to Chadwell’s. While the UFOs themselves seemed to present no “direct physical threat to national security”, the reporting of them did, “clogging… channels of communication by irrelevant reports” and creating a ‘cry wolf’ situation that could lead to so many false alarms that genuine hostile actions might be ignored. What’s more, the general interest in the subject threatened to inculcate “a morbid national psychology in which skilful hostile propaganda could induce hysterical behaviour and harmful distrust of duly constituted authority”.

Flying saucers could make a rebel out of you – or worse, a Communist. The national security agencies were, therefore, to “take immediate steps to strip the Unidentified Flying Objects of the special status they have been given and the aura of mystery they have unfortunately acquired”. The authorities were now at war with ufology.


ECM + CIA = UFO
Born in New York in 1922, Leon Davidson had always been something of a scientific prodigy. By the age of 13, he had declared himself a chemical engineer, and a few years later he would be plucked from his PhD course at the engineering school of Columbia University to work on the Manhattan Project. He eventually became a supervising engineer at the Los Alamos laboratories, working for many years in the nuclear industry.

Like many scientists working in the late 1940s and early 1950s within what President Eisenhower would later term the “military-industrial complex”, Davidson became fascinated with the UFO problem. Soon after starting work at Los Alamos in 1949, he joined the lab’s Astrophysical Association, an in-house flying saucer group interested in, amongst other things, the strange green fireballs seen around New Mexico. While no official explanation for the fireballs was forthcoming, Davidson gradually came to believe that secret military tests lay behind these and most other UFO incidents, including the Washington overflights. In the splendidly titled essay “ECM+CIA=UFO”,[3] Davidson described the basic Electronic Counter Measures (ECM) technology available to the Air Force by 1950:

“A ‘black box’ in our bombers would pick up the enemy’s radar impulses; amplify and modify them; and send them back, drowning out the normal radar return from the bomber. The modification could be a change in timing or phase and could cause the ‘blip’ on the radar screen to have an incorrect range, speed, or heading.”[4]

The origins of this new technology lay in a wartime incident, when Navy scientists noted that the proximity of several powerful ships’ radars during the South Pacific campaign produced phantom returns known as the “galloping ghosts”. These, the scient­ists realised, could be put to good use in deceiving the enemy. A March 1957 article from Aviation Research and Development magazine discussed how this ghosting technology had improved and was now entering the civilian domain:

“A new radar moving target simulator system which generates a display of up to 6 individual targets on any standard radar indicator has been developed… to train radar operators… and for in-flight testing of airborne early-warning personnel… Target positions, paths, and velocities can… simulate… realistic flight paths… Speeds up to 10,000 knots are easily generated… The target can be made to turn left or right… For each target there is… adjustment to provide a realistic scope presentation.”[5]

Davidson recognised this description as being close to what was seen on radar over Washington in July 1952 – and he thought he knew just who had been behind it: “Since 1951, the CIA has caused or sponsored saucer sightings for its own purposes. By shrewd psychological manipulation, a series of ‘normal’ events has been served up so as to appear as quite convincing evidence of extra­terrestrial UFOs… [including] military use of ECM on a classified basis unknown to the radar observers who were involved.”[6]

A 1957 incident that took place over the UK appears to be a classic case of radar spoofing at the expense of a terrified American pilot (see FT242:34–35). 25-year-old Lieut­enant Milton Torres was based at RAF Manston in East Kent, then an outpost for America’s Strategic Air Command. On 20 May, Torres received the order to scramble his F86D Sabre in pursuit of a large aircraft the size of a B52 bomber, picked up on radar about 24km away. He was given the order to arm his weapons and fire on sight, something that no airman would expect to have to do over the Kent countryside, except in time of war. As he feared, he was informed that the aircraft was hostile and probably Russian.

Torres and a wingman in another Sabre hurtled towards the object at Mach 0.92. It now registered as the size of an aircraft carrier, but zipped about on his radar screen like an insect. He was ready to fire a full salvo of 24 rockets at the intruder, yet neither he nor his wingman could see a visual target. Was the aircraft invisible? Suddenly the radar signature disappeared and the Sabres were called back to base. The next day, a shaken Torres was visited by a trench-coated American who claimed to be from the National Security Agency. The mystery man warned Torres that if he ever wanted to fly again he would keep his mouth shut. And for 30 years, he did.[7]

By the early 1960s, the CIA and NSA were collaborating on a project known as Pallad­ium, designed to provide the Americans with electrical (ELINT), communications (COMINT) and signals (SIGINT) intelli­gence from Soviet aircraft, ships, submarines, ground radars and missile batteries. The technology allowed the CIA to create ghost aircraft that would be detected on Soviet radar, while the NSA monitored the way in which the phantoms were received, tracked and transmitted. These ghost aircraft could be ‘built’ to order in any shape and size, and could fly at any speed or altitude.

Former CIA signals specialist Eugene Poteat describes a complex operation during the Cuban Missile Crisis that used both the Palladium system and submarine-launched metallic spheres on parachutes to confuse Cuban radar. Poteat’s CIA team flew a radar ghost into Cuban airspace, prompting fighter planes to be scrambled to intercept. Using the Palladium system’s controls, the CIA kept their phantom aircraft just ahead of the Cuban fighters, waiting for the right moment. Then, when the NSA team heard that the Cuban pilot was about to shoot their ghost plane down, “We all had the same idea at the same instant. The engineer moved his finger to the switch, I nodded yes and he switched off the Palladium system.”[8] Another UFO, another pilot’s unbelievable tale.


TRACKS AND TRACES
So were the Washington UFOs an early attempt to put the galloping ghosts under human control? It had been seven years since the phenomenon was first observed on radar screens, plenty of time to tame and contain the phantoms, and a number of clues would seem to suggest that Davidson’s suspicions were not unreasonable, even if he was perhaps accusing the wrong agency of conducting the tests.

Davidson notes that during the month that the overflights took place, due to alleged runway repairs, the Air Force interceptors tasked with protecting the capital were moved from their usual home at Andrews AFB, 6.4km from DC, to New Castle, Delaware, 145km away. This considerably delayed the jets’ arrival on the scene and would have prevented them from identifying the source of the radar returns, which were only flying at 160km/h. He also wondered whether the bright lights seen on the nights in question were created by the ‘Hell Roarer’, a missile-bay-mounted magnesium lighting device that burned at 10 million candlepower and had caused a flood of saucer reports when tested by the Air Force over Connecticut in October 1951.

Adding to the intrigue, days after the incident General Samford told the New York Times: “We are learning more and more about radar… [which is] capable of playing tricks for which it was not designed.”[9] Was this a tacit admission that someone, perhaps the Air Force, had pulled a fast one over the Capital? Is it a coincidence that four years later Samford became the second director of the National Security Agency, which rout­inely used the Palladium system alongside the CIA?

The clearest hint that the Washington sightings were no accident was given to Bluebook’s Edward Ruppelt a few days before events kicked off. Ruppelt wrote that he and a scientist “from an agency I can’t name” had a two-hour discussion about UFOs, at the end of which the scientist made a ‘prediction’: “Within the next few days… they’re going to blow up and you’re going to have the granddaddy of all UFO sightings… in Washington or New York… probably Washington.”[10] A few days later it happ­ened, just as the scientist had said it would. As Ruppelt complains in his book, Air Force Intelligence were the last to know about the Washington event and when Ruppelt then tried to get from Wright Patterson (near Dayton, Ohio) to DC to investigate, he found that he couldn’t get a staff car to take him there: “Every time we would start to leave,” he wrote, “something more pressing would come up.”[11]

A final tantalising piece of the puzzle comes in a memo sent from Dr Howard Clinton Cross to Edward Ruppelt on 9 January 1953.[12] Cross was a metallurgist working at the Battelle Memorial Institute, a private research body that was processing all the Air Force’s UFO data under the codename Project Stork. The memo, classified Secret, points out that the CIA’s Robertson Panel was due to meet in less than a week’s time and that Project Stork and the Air Force’s Air Technological Intelligence Center should work out beforehand “what can and what cannot be discussed at the meeting”.

Why would the Air Force consider restricting the information that they shared with the CIA, and what might that information have been? Given the Agency’s concern that the Soviets might use the UFO hysteria to launch a phantom attack over the US, it also seems odd that no one on the Robertson panel mentioned that the technology to do so was already available – and that it might have been responsible for the Washington flap. Was this one of the things that Cross wanted to keep back from the CIA? In the same memo, Cross recommends that “a controlled experiment be set up” to launch “many different types of aerial activity” over a target area and then assess civilian and military responses to these false UFOs. Was it the Air Force – and not the CIA as Davidson believed – who were behind the incident? Had Stork already made a special delivery over Washington DC?


THE SHAPE OF THINGS TO COME
Whether the Washington “invasion” of July 1952 was the result of accident or intrigue, and whichever department, if any, was behind it, the event focused the attentions of the US establishment on the UFO’s potential as both a weapon and a threat. From now on, the CIA, the FBI, the Air Force and the NSA would keep a close eye on what civilian UFO groups were doing and saying; the Air Force and the CIA would collaborate to use Project Bluebook to mask spyplane flights over the USA and USSR, while the CIA and NSA’s ghost planes flew rings around disorientated pilots.

Over the next six decades, the UFO mythology, and those who engaged with it, would continue to be exploited, steered and shaped by America’s armed forces and intelli­gence agencies. Who knows how differ­ently things would have evolved if the UFO community had paid more attention to Leon Davidson, ufology’s lost prophet.


Notes
1 Jerome Clark: The UFO Book, Visible Ink, 1998.
2 Ibid.
3 Leon Davidson: “ECM+CIA=UFO”, Saucer News, Feb/Mar 1959.
4 Ibid.
5 Ibid.
6 Ibid.
7 “US airman Milton Torres told to shoot down UFO when based at RAF Manston”; Times, 20 Oct 2008.
8 Eugune Poteat: “Some Beginnings of Information Warfare, Stealth, Countermeasures, and ELINT, 1960–1975”, Studies in Intelligence, vol. 42, No.1, 1998.
9 New York Times, 30 July 1952.
10 Edward J Ruppelt: The Report on Unidentified Flying Objects, Doubleday, 1956.
11 Ibid.
12 The document was discovered by astronomer and UFO researcher Jacques Vallée in 1967, though it wasn’t made public until the publication of Vallée’s diaries in 1992.


Mark's new book, Mirage Men (Constable and Robinson), reveals the long history of UFOria and its origins in espionage, psychological warfare and advanced military technology. For your chance to win a copy, click here.
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Re: Modern UFO Era as Cold War Con

Postby barracuda » Fri Jul 30, 2010 3:57 pm

elfismiles wrote:...there are PsyOps at the heart of the Modern UFO Phenomenon ...


I don't think there is any way around that idea. The question remains, how much of the psyop is an attempt to hide their black projects from the public and each other, and how much is a attempt to simply throw research off track and sideline and discredit real areas of inquiry? I think it's important that Richard Dolan, who has written the two most comprehensive studies of this subject, has come to conclusion that there is something beyond mere psyops going on. He seems adamant that at least some of the UFOs are nuts and bolts crafts piloted by non-humans, and that the governments of the world have interests in these crafts for reasons beyond the psyop factor.
The most dangerous traps are the ones you set for yourself. - Phillip Marlowe
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Re: Modern UFO Era as Cold War Con

Postby elfismiles » Fri Jul 30, 2010 4:43 pm

barracuda wrote:
elfismiles wrote:...there are PsyOps at the heart of the Modern UFO Phenomenon ...


I don't think there is any way around that idea. The question remains, how much of the psyop is an attempt to hide their black projects from the public and each other, and how much is a attempt to simply throw research off track and sideline and discredit real areas of inquiry? I think it's important that Richard Dolan, who has written the two most comprehensive studies of this subject, has come to conclusion that there is something beyond mere psyops going on. He seems adamant that at least some of the UFOs are nuts and bolts crafts piloted by non-humans, and that the governments of the world have interests in these crafts for reasons beyond the psyop factor.


I think the nature of the psyops and coverup has always been about hiding the fact that they don't know as much as people think they do about the "trUFOs" while using the phenomenon's chain of info dissemination for their own multivarious purposes that have much more to do with the many uses of plain old psyops and infowar, like following the flow of reports to route moles, leaks and whistleblowers - as a counter-intelligence tool.

At the same time I think the "trUFOs" are part of a long-term mass-human-consciousness control system as Vallee has posited but that those same mechanisms of mass-control have been coopted by the PTB towards very specific psychological warfare goals, some of which may be as grandiose as fomenting Global Governance in the ultimate Counterfeit Foe type scenario - which Vallee has also suggested.

And I think some variation of the UltraTerrestrial / CryptoTerrestrial hypotheses could be what is being hidden by the PsyOps that subtly and not so subtly suggest the ETH.
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Re: Modern UFO Era as Cold War Con

Postby elfismiles » Fri Jul 30, 2010 4:49 pm

I'm very delinquint in reading Dolan's books. I got a copy of volume one some time in the last 12 months but haven't read it yet. Need to get Volume 2 and do an interview with him soon.

I'd also add that its my understanding that James Carrion left the directorship of MUFON largely over his frustration with the fields NOT acknowledging how manipulated and infiltrated it has been by the Mil-Spook complex.

He launched his own non-org recently but the site appears to be down and only accessible via the google cache:

The Center for UFO Truth
http://www.centerforufotruth.org
Google Cache


Friday, June 25, 2010
Announcing the Center for UFO Truth

I am proud to announce the formation of The Center for UFO Truth (CUT) http://www.centerforufotruth.org.

CUT is not a UFO organization nor is it affiliated in any way with Ufology. Instead CUT is a historical research organization focused on examining the question long ignored by historians - was the UFO subject purposely created by the United States and its allies as part of a cold war operation and perpetuated to this day for national security reasons?

CUT will focus its efforts on research in official government archives, not only in the United States but all over the world, searching for authenticated official documents that can prove or disprove this theory. CUT will work closely with Cold War and Intelligence Historians and collaborate with foreign governments willing to contribute to CUT's efforts.

CUT will work outside of the three ring circus that is Ufology and will not accept the contributions of anonymous individuals or alleged whistleblowers nor will it examine alleged leaked documents.

Unfortunately,the field of Ufology has nothing to show for more than 60 years of investigation and research. By not adhering to professional evidentiary standards, Ufology will neither join the halls of academia nor will it discover what truly lies behind the subject of UFOs.

Believers will continue to believe, debunkers will continue to summarily dismiss, but the true skeptics who are willing to dig deep will be rewarded with the truth.

Posted by James Carrion at 8:06 AM

http://followthemagicthread.blogspot.co ... truth.html

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Re: Modern UFO Era as Cold War Con

Postby elfismiles » Fri Jul 30, 2010 4:56 pm

More from James Carrion...

Presentation at the 2009 Crash Retrieval conference on “Russian Espionage and UFOs”
http://www.mntview.com/CenterforUFOTruth.htm
[Video does not appear to work]


MUFON Symposium Proceedings
New Avenues for UFO Research
By James Carrion, MUFON International Director


http://scilib.ucsd.edu/sio/hist/Carrion ... venues.pdf




Monday, April 5, 2010
Goodbye Ufology, Hello Truth


There comes a defining moment in everyone’s life when you must choose to lead or be led, to accept life for what it is or strive for change, however small, in favor of the common good. As I write this on Easter weekend, I contemplate the man whose life we celebrate and his impact on the world. He lead by example, was not afraid to challenge the status quo and his message was pure. What he had to offer was simple, words based on the truth, and as a person that I admire and respect, if I can be one millionth of what he was; I feel that I am on the right path.

There was a time many years ago when I was considering leaving Ufology because I couldn’t make sense of it all. Here was a subject that was still being pursued passionately by intelligent and sober folks many with advanced academic degrees, yet the solution was always out of reach. Surely there must be something to the subject with so many people working on it, I thought. The problem gnawed at me and I decided that I must discover the truth for myself even if it meant sacrificing other things in my life. In a field where wild claims are rampant, I latched on to the only organization that I felt had some reservoir of common sense and reason in its modus operandi – MUFON.

Fortunately, MUFON moved its headquarters to Denver in the year 2000 and I contacted John Schuessler, International Director at the time and offered to volunteer my services. I remember sitting in a café across from the MUFON storefront and pointedly asking John “What do you think is really going on?” His answer surprised me. “I don’t know.” Surely, after all of these years of searching and digging, there must be some answers, I thought to myself, and so I became even more intrigued.

As I stared at the rows and rows of file cabinets at MUFON headquarters, I began to wonder if the answers I sought lay inside. I proposed to the MUFON Board to digitize the paper files under what I called the “Pandora Project” and they gave me their blessing and financial backing. I spent hundreds of hours tediously cataloging the files and getting them in order for scanning and the project was completed within the span of a couple of years. I also joined the MUFON Board and helped define MUFON’s new mission statement of the scientific investigation of UFOs for the benefit of humanity.

When John was searching for a successor, I was reluctant to apply, but then I thought about the unique position this would put me in to dedicate my time to the pursuit of the truth. I took on the challenge and the next three years became a roller coaster of insight and discoveries that would change my view forever on why the truth behind UFOs is so elusive.

I also decided to take a unique approach. Poke at the phenomenon and see what pokes back. Not only look for a signal but the absence of one as well because it just as telling. In addition I made the conscious decision to forsake the “inside source”. Coupling all of this with an investigative ethic that was thorough and unrelenting, a clear picture began to emerge.

What I discovered was that the phenomenon is based in deception – of the human kind –and that there is no way ANYONE will understand the real truth unless they are willing to first accept that. No, I am not talking about some grandiose cover-up of alien visitation, but instead the documented manipulation of people and information for purposes that I can only speculate on. How do I unequivocally know this to be true? Well let me lay it out for you in laymen’s terms.

People are easily manipulated because we are all subject to the psychological pressures of ego, biased beliefs and tunnel vision. For example, those that KNOW that earth is being visited by aliens have blinders on and no amount of alternative explanation will convince them otherwise. They are the die hard in the wool believers for whom Ufology serves as a religion to confirm their beliefs that they take on faith. On the other end of the spectrum are the debunkers who must counter every claim with a reason why it can’t be so, without bothering to examine the data or lift a finger in conducting original research of their own.

Whoa! Wait a minute, what about those who don’t take things on faith and actually collect data and conduct investigation? Good question. I decided to examine the data collection and investigative practices in Ufology, and after poring over thousands of historical case files from MUFON, NICAP and APRO investigators in the MUFON archives, what I found, was inconsistent investigation with a total lack of evidentiary standards. I also found a paper trail of disinformation and misinformation that has kept Ufology in check through infighting and red herrings, rabbit holes and elaborate deception operations.

The other thing I found documented in the MUFON archives was the sad history of those UFO investigators who thought they could successfully play the “cover up game” by cultivating their inside sources only to be discredited, manipulated or ego driven to delusion. But it was after conducting six personal investigations that I began to question whether or not ANY of the data sitting in any UFO archive can be relied on.

2006 – The report by a bogus Dive Company of finding the 1953 Kinross UFO – perpetrators unknown and still at large.

2007 – Michael Nelson’s bogus claims of recovering physical evidence related to the 1966 Portage County UFO Chase. Read Nelson’s paper in the 2007 MUFON Symposium Proceedings, then tear it out as none of it is based in fact.

2007 – The California Drones story for which not a single, verifiable beyond reproach, real witness can be found.

2008 – The Stan Romanek claims which are not only unverified by science (despite what he says) but involves the shameful practice of investigators ignoring professional standards by fraternizing and becoming emotionally involved with the subject of their investigation.

2009 – Unsettling information I discovered with Dr. Frank Salisbury about the Skinwalker Ranch that calls into question the validity of experiences described in the book “Hunt for the Skinwalker”.

All of these cases have a common thread: they are based on half-truths, and outright manipulation that predictably draw in the believer but have also drawn in a number of Ufologists into their web of deception. And they all would have gotten away with it too had it not been for those meddling kids, but more about the Scooby Doo analogy later.

As I the picture became clearer, I began to be more vocal about what I had uncovered, much to the displeasure of those perpetrating the deception. At first, I limited myself to publishing my investigations in the MUFON Journal but eventually carried it over to my blog because of the increased reluctance of the MUFON Board to expose some of these perpetrators over concerns of legal liability or funding. But I could not stay silent and let yet more UFO myth be created in an already endless sea of nebulous data.

I decided to dig deeper and rather than focus on the sideshows that would pop up and distract Ufologists by leading us down yet another rabbit hole, I did original research into the early days of the phenomenon. What I found was amazing and is documented in my paper at http://scilib.ucsd.edu/sio/hist/Carrion ... venues.pdf. Realizing that to uncover more information and to prove my theory would require laser like focus and time that I did not have to spare, I made the decision to leave the MUFON International Director position and informed the MUFON Board.

Interestingly I also observed how my original research fell on deaf ears in the UFO community. When I suggested that the holy grail of Ufology, Roswell, could be part of an elaborate intelligence deception operation, not only did I encounter a wave of hostility from the “believers” but a backlash of silence, debunking and dismissal by even those “unbiased” researchers who claim to not stoop to such tactics. Rather than inspire an army of fellow investigators to dig deeper in this unexplored area I felt like Copernicus telling a room full of colleagues how the earth revolved around the sun despite everyone else believing the earth the center of the Universe. Blasphemy! Heresy!

All of this has led me to where I am at today – squarely outside of Ufology – away from the polarized beliefs, the three ring circus of sideshows and illusion acts that has created nothing but a hall of mirrors and dead ends and which has produced no definite answers despite 60 years of accumulated investigation. I feel free and alive with possibilities; being able to pursue the truth through original research and verifiable original documentation, without the constant distractions and noise.

In 1969, Project Blue Book was history and MUFON was founded. The same year, a soon to be popular TV show was started – Scooby Doo, that featured a gang of amateur sleuths solving mysteries and exposing con artists and charlatans who were then apprehended by the authorities. As the perpetrator was being led away in handcuffs, they predictably stated – “and I would have gotten away with it too if it hadn’t been for those meddling kids.” I began to wonder if the gang would have solved any mysteries if the perpetrator and authorities were one and the same. The perpetrator may get caught and exposed but once free to go, could practice their con somewhere else. That in a nutshell is the sad state of Ufology today, humans deceiving humans. If there is a real phenomenon, I have yet to see any evidence of it that would stand under scientific scrutiny. Outside of Ufology, I will pursue peeling away these layers of human deception and exposing them for what they are. If a real phenomenon lies at its core remains to be seen.


Posted by James Carrion at 7:02 AM

http://followthemagicthread.blogspot.co ... truth.html

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Re: Modern UFO Era as Cold War Con

Postby barracuda » Fri Jul 30, 2010 5:23 pm





The most dangerous traps are the ones you set for yourself. - Phillip Marlowe
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Re: Modern UFO Era as Cold War Con

Postby elfismiles » Fri Jul 30, 2010 5:40 pm

Yes, Ronny Raygun made variations of that speech 2 or more times (twice at the UN and once at a highschool I think) - I have multiple audio files of the different speeches.

Try this other one from Clinton ...


President Clinton on Roswell?

Image
"The Belfast Perspective?" - November 30th, 1995

November 30, 1995, while visiting Belfast, Northern Ireland, Clinton made a comment in a humorous tone, about the controversial Roswell UFO crash: "I got a letter from 13-year-old Ryan from Belfast. Now, Ryan, if you're out in the crowd tonight, here's the answer to your question. No, as far as I know, an alien spacecraft did not crash in Roswell, New Mexico, in 1947. And, Ryan, if the United States Air Force did recover alien bodies, they didn't tell me about it, either, and I want to know". - Listen Here

<en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Executive_Order_12958>

...

Image

One Man's Search for President Clinton's 1995 Roswell Comment by Giuliano Marinkovic
President Bill Clinton - Belfast, Ireland 30th November 1995:

"I got a letter from 13-year-old Ryan from Belfast. Now, Ryan, if you're out in the crowd tonight, here's the answer to your question. No, as far as I know, an alien spacecraft did not crash in Roswell, New Mexico, in 1947. (Laughter.)

And, Ryan, if the United States Air Force did recover alien bodies, they didn't tell me about it, either, and I want to know. (Applause.)"

30th of November 1995., US president Bill Clinton was on a official visit to Belfast. In his many public relations he has constantly addressed the message of peace to confronted sides. During the switching of the Christmas tree in the Belfast City hall, Clinton has suddenly made interesting comment that in later years will be obssesion for the UFO community.

I can remember that I have made first comment about this Clinton's speech with Damir Popovic, editor of the radio show 'UFOport' during 1996. After the following years, the UFO community wanted to find the sense in Clinton's reference. The question was asked; 'Was the Clinton reference prepared in advance to make the additional pressure towards the US Airforce to release all available documents about the Roswell incident so the case could be finaly concluded?'


Read the entire article here ... <www.VirtuallyStrange.net/ufo/updates/2005/sep/m24-019.shtml> and listen to the audio clip here ... <http://tinyurl.com/9z6e7> and here ... <www.AnomalyArchives.org/media/>


http://www.anomalyarchives.org/oldenews ... ws0511.htm

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Re: Modern UFO Era as Cold War Con

Postby undead » Fri Jul 30, 2010 10:51 pm

The Intuition Network, A Thinking Allowed Television Underwriter, presents the following transcript from the series Thinking Allowed, Conversations On the Leading Edge of Knowledge and Discovery, with Dr. Jeffrey Mishlove.

ALIENS AND ARCHETYPES with TERENCE McKENNA

JEFFREY MISHLOVE, Ph.D.: Hello and welcome. I'm Jeffrey Mishlove. Throughout recorded history, human society has been haunted by reports of unidentified flying objects in our skies, many of which have defied all attempts at scientific explanation or understanding. What are these phenomena, and how can they be explained? With me today is Terence McKenna, a philosopher and thinker of note in the area of altered states of consciousness and alternative realities. Terence is the coauthor with his brother Dennis of The Invisible Landscape, and also Psilocybin: The Magic Mushroom Grower's Guide. He is a founding member of Botanical Dimensions, a nonprofit organization devoted to preserving and studying psychoactive plants used by native cultures throughout the world, and he is also the developer of a computer software package called Timewave Zero, designed to augment interpretation of the ancient Chinese book of prophecy, the I Ching. Welcome, Terence.

TERENCE McKENNA: It's a pleasure to be here with you.

MISHLOVE: It's a pleasure to have you here with me also. You know, the UFO phenomenon is striking because it's so bizarre. It seems as if the reports that come in about UFOs defy any attempt whatsoever to categorize them. I guess from my point of view, I can only assume that there are probably many different interpretations of this event. I think, given your background as a student of shamanism and altered states of consciousness and alternative realities, you have some unique perspectives on the UFO phenomenon. I wonder if we could get into that material.

McKENNA: Yes. Well, the ordinary approach to the UFOs has been to view them as visitors or intruders from a nearby star system that have come in metal ships for reasons of trade or scientific investigation or military conquest --

MISHLOVE: Or missionary activity.

McKENNA: -- or missionary activity, to the vicinity of our planet. This was a myth that sprang up concomitant with the modern wave of sightings that began shortly after World War II. As time has passed and the number of sightings has gone from hundreds to thousands to hundreds of thousands of instances, as the myth has fleshed itself out with subthemes -- the theme of abduction, the theme of telepathic contact

-- it's become much more difficult to fit all the known facts into the simple model of spacefaring visitors from another world. So what we are left with, then, are a number of more exotic competing theories in the so-called postmodern phase of thinking about the UFO. Probably the best known of these alternative explanations was the one pioneered by the Swiss psychologist Carl Jung, who in 1953 wrote a book called Flying Saucers: A Modern Myth of Things Seen in the Skies. Jung was at great pains, without passing judgment on the reality of the saucers, of the things seen, to interpret them psychologically, to interpret them as one would interpret a dream. He saw in their circular form, in their scintillating, shining, alchemical brilliance, a symbol of human wholeness, and felt that they were a symbol of our collective yearning for a kind of totality and individuation. Now, in a way this kind of explanation is very satisfying; however, it is not satisfying to the person who has immediately undergone a very strange and a very real seeming experience.

MISHLOVE: Unless such a person were told great messages of hope for the planet.

McKENNA: Well, and this is a persistent part of the flying saucer phenomenon -- that people who have close contact with the saucers return with messages of universal brotherhood and benevolence, with stories of a beneficent hegemony of organized intelligence, where wiser, older worlds and civilizations help younger and less mature worlds toward a kind of galactic citizenship. However --

MISHLOVE: That's just one thread of the evidence.

McKENNA: It's one thread of the evidence, and it isn't really well supported by the evidence. Jacques Vallee, who is one of the foremost commentators on the phenomenon, has been at great pains to point out that with the flying saucer phenomenon we're dealing with thousands and thousands of incidents per year, throughout the world. Even at our own primitive level of scientific sophistication we can learn a great deal about a planet by sending a single probe to that planet. What kind of scientific program of investigation requires thousands and thousands of appearances? And if we make the assumption that not all appearances are observed, but that in fact only a small number are observed, then the number of appearances that must actually be going on soars toward an astronomical number. It suggests we're dealing with an interpenetration by an alien dimension on an almost industrial scale.

MISHLOVE: Of course a single probe could cause thousands of appearances.

McKENNA: If it were of a sophisticated enough nature, that's right. The approach that I have taken, that has characterized my work with this phenomenon, was first of all to say we have not carried out a sufficiently in-depth survey of the life already on this planet to be able to say that at some time in the past life did not arrive here and thrive here that is not part of the general heritage of life on this planet, but that has somehow come in from the outside. My candidate for that kind of an intrusive extraterrestrial would probably be a mushroom of some sort, or a spore-bearing life form, because spores are very impervious to low temperatures and high radiation -- the kind of environment met with in outer space.

MISHLOVE: In other words, a mushroom spore could conceivably even waft itself up through the atmosphere of our planet and enter into empty space.

McKENNA: Oh, there's no question but what this is happening -- that through what's called Brownian motion, which is sort of random percolation, spores do reach the outer edge of our atmosphere, and there, in the presence of cosmic rays and meteors and rare, highly energetic events, occasionally a very small percentage of these biological objects are wafted into space. We even possess meteorites that are believed to be pieces of the Martian surface, thrown out by impacts on the Martian surface of asteroidal material. In fact I think part of the grappling with the UFO mystery is going to lead to the conclusion that space is not an impermeable and insurmountable barrier to biology -- that in fact planets are islands, and life does occasionally wash in from distant places, and if conditions are correct, can take hold. However, let me say in the UFO phenomenon we are dealing, or we presuppose that we are dealing, not simply with the phenomenon of extraterrestrial biology, but with the phenomenon of extraterrestrial intelligence, and this is a hackle-raising notion.

MISHLOVE: We're dealing with more than mushroom spores.

McKENNA: We're dealing with more than mushroom spores, at least as ordinarily conceived. I think the thing that has been overlooked in almost all discussions of extraterrestrial contact is how strange the extraterrestrial is likely to be. It isn't going to be a friendly, elfin little feller with a beating heart of gold. It isn't even going to be some of the more extravagantly grotesque creations out of Hollywood. Conditions and time spans in the universe are long enough and varied enough that I would bet that the real task with extraterrestrial intelligence will be to recognize it, you see. We have no conception of how species-bound our images of life and biology are. This is a place where we have never been asked to confront to what degree the monkey within us has channeled our expectations and perceptions.

MISHLOVE: Well, it is the case that on this planet virtually all known life forms are based on the same DNA molecule.

McKENNA: Well, except that have all life forms been examined, to see to what degree they deviate, percentage-wise, from, let's say, a standard DNA molecule? The answer is no. The sequencing of DNA is a very expensive process, and is only carried out on laboratory organisms with an extensive history of involvement in medical research, like E. coli or the ordinary laboratory rat. No, there's a great deal we don't know about life on earth. We don't know when the fungi entered into the evolutionary chain. We don't know what kind of intelligence is really possessed by the cephalopods, the shell-less molluscs that include the octopi. The intelligence of dolphins has been studied by Lilly and others; the intelligence of the large primates other than man. One way of looking at nature is that it is entirely linguistic intent -- that DNA is in fact a way of uttering protein syntactical structures into matter.

MISHLOVE: In other words, that all of nature is like a poem.

McKENNA: Yes, nature is a communicating system of some sort, and the problem that we have is to transcend cultural languages, historically created languages with very limited applications, and instead fall into phase with the communication systems that nature has placed all around us. One possible view of the flying saucer is that it is a kind of projection from the consciousness of the planet -- that it is Gaia, that it is in fact a kind of alchemical object, haunting human historical time with a symbol of totality, the kind of totality that our religions and our mystical yearnings are so at pains to concretize for us. But unless we as egocentric beings clarify our relationship to the unconscious, then I think the flying saucer is going to remain quintessentially mysterious. This was Jung's view.

MISHLOVE: One of the things that Jung pointed out in his book is that we must pay attention to the research that Dr. J.B. Rhine was doing at that time at Duke University in ESP and psychokinesis, and that even if UFOs had a physical reality, could be photographed or could be weighed and measured, that they still might in some manner be projections of the human mind.

McKENNA: Oh yes, this is an important point to make, which the flying saucer people are forever misunderstanding, and that is that saying the flying saucer is a psychic object does not mean it is not a physical object. Jung in Mysterium Coniunctionis is at great pains to say that the realm of the psychic and the realm of the physical meet in a strange kind of never-never land that we have yet to create the intellectual tools to explore. This is where the mystery of synchronicity is going to come to rest, the mystery of all kinds of paranormal activity on the part of human beings, and the mystery of the flying saucer. It's interesting, you see, that if you take the broad world of the so-called mysteries -- parapsychological, shamanic, extraterrestrial, and so forth -- and hypothesize another spatial dimension, one more spatial dimension, then suddenly all these mysteries become trivial. They are easily done. Locked boxes are opened; future events are discerned; lost objects are found. This sort of thing becomes quite the ordinary run of things if we hypothesize dimensions hidden from ordinary experience.

MISHLOVE: And of course there's serious work at this point in the field of unified field theory in physics, to postulate other dimensions of space than we normally think of.

McKENNA: That's right. The current physical models of the universe require eleven dimensions, eleven integrated variables to describe. And that's physical models of the universe. If we then turn our attention to mind and realize that we have no definition of what mind is, why then is there any mystery in the fact that we have no definition of what the UFO is? The mind is present at hand in every conscious moment. It has been our constant companion for fifty thousand years, and we haven't a clue as to what it is. So therefore, a manifestation of the other -- the superego, or the extraterrestrial other like the UFO -- it is not surprising that it is a mystery. I always hark back to the words of J.B.S. Haldane, the great British enzymologist, who said reality is not only stranger than we suppose, it may be stranger than we can suppose.

MISHLOVE: Well, that suggests to me that if we look at some of the most bizarre, most anomalous cases that we have, such as UFOs, we begin to ask ourselves not so much what are they, because that's a mystery, but what is their function? How are they affecting us? That's like holding up a mirror to ourselves, and it tells us a great deal about the basic mystery of our mind and our reality.

McKENNA: Yes, this is the so-called postmodern approach -- to ask the question, not what is the UFO, but what is it doing to us? Jacques Vallee pioneered this approach. And the answer is fascinating. What the UFOs are doing to us, to global society, is they are eroding faith in science by casting directly in the path of science a kind of gauntlet, a challenge: "Crack this" -- almost as if the cosmic giggle had shown up at the bachelor party of science to spoil the bash, in the same way that the resurrection of Christ posed a tremendous problem for the intellectuals of late Roman antiquity, because they had no place in their world view for someone rising from the dead. They were Greek materialists, atomists essentially. In that same way, the UFO challenges the assumptions of science, and I think in that sense Jung was really onto something when he saw it as coming from the unconscious. It is like an object coming from the unconscious with a compensatory function -- to turn us away from the rational and toward the intuitive; to turn us away from the paternalistic, Apollonian, solar, masculine view of things, and toward a kind of watery, lunar, mysterious, intuitively felt feminine force -- almost as though the UFO is a manifestation of Gaia as mother goddess. Science, as the proudest -- pardon the word -- erection of the rational mind, then is challenged by something from an entirely other dimension, an entirely other realm, that concretizes for us the culture crisis. And that's why I've gotten into UFOs; I think they are important for a resolution of the culture crisis. They concretize the struggle between the paternalistic-masculine and the lunar-feminine, between a dominator society and the kind of partnership society that we require to survive.

MISHLOVE: And yet it seems as if that challenge is not a direct confrontation. As Vallee points out, the UFOs are operating almost at the mythological level of our culture. They're not landing in the White House; they're not really challenging the military or NASA.

McKENNA: No, they're very mercurial, very watery. When you reach out toward them, there is nothing there. What they chiefly have become is an intellectual force in human thinking about the future, but when you reach out to grasp the hardware, to read the message, to meet the alien, there is nothing there. I've come to the conclusion, both from talking to contactees and having had a contactee experience, that whatever lies behind the UFO mystery, it is a force which can literally do anything. So it is fruitless to talk about the size of the objects or their composition or color, or the size of the entities, their dress and weapons and accoutrements, because it can appear literally any way it wants to. It can appear as the Virgin Mary; it can appear as galactarian overlords; it can appear as gnomes, elves, sprites, this sort of thing. It is not to be caught in the rational net.

MISHLOVE: Your description is strikingly actually parallel, with one exception, to the view of many Fundamentalist Christians, who say this UFO stuff is all the work of the devil.

McKENNA: Well, I don't know about the work of the devil. Jung's criticism of Christianity was that it had not made a place for what he called the shadow, and he said the productions of Christian culture will always be neurotic because the shadow has not been included, so there's a lack of psychic balance. Perhaps the UFO carries compensatory psychic energy from the realm of the shadow. Some people are very frightened of it. Some people see it as an almost millenarian salvational hope, the savior of mankind. I think that it's very powerful, that it haunts time like a ghost, that the messianic anticipations of Fundamentalist Christianity and Islam are in fact a picking up on the shock wave that the image of the flying saucer casts backward through time -- that this image of the New Jerusalem, the four-gated city descending from the sky to whisk the elect away to a better place, is a kind of prophecy yearning toward a fact in the act of becoming. You know, Christianity and Islam are the most history-obsessed of all the world's major religions.

MISHLOVE: Along with Judaism.

McKENNA: Along with Judaism. And all three of them have this notion of the transcendental object at the end of time. And alchemy in the sixteenth century was an outbreak of an expectation of a transcendental object in the nearby here and now, that would cure --

MISHLOVE: The omega point of history, so to speak.

McKENNA: Yes, it would cure all ills, confer longevity, fertility, virility, immortality. And I think that the flying saucer is an airborne philosopher's stone -- the sophic hydrolith of Paracelsus haunting the skies of modern America, with a promise of mandalic cohesion for the future, that science has not given us. Science has been a very sadly disappointing religion in the realm of the heart. The flying saucer comes from the heart, but it bears the very strange energy of the other in its manifestation as planetary goddess.

MISHLOVE: I'm often struck by the psychic powers that seem to be associated with people who've had intensive encounters with UFOs. I've researched many of these cases myself.

McKENNA: That's right. The thing is both material and psychological. It anticipates the future. It seems that the memories of the contactees are transparent to this force. It can reach deep into their lives and confront them with information taken from forgotten incidents in their lives. It is an awesome kind of force that transcends space and time for the individual. Now, it may be that we will never have a general theory of flying saucers. It may be that this is something that addresses the individual, in the same way that I don't think we will ever have a general theory of falling in love. That too is something which addresses the individual. We have been mistaken to expect Time magazine or the New York Times to explain the flying saucers to us. They will not explain the flying saucers to us, any more than they will explain ourselves to us. This is something that haunts the membrane of experience very close in to the experiencing ego, and therefore it is threatening. This is one of the reasons that I think it relates to the psychedelic experience, because the psychedelic experience is like a UFO encounter on demand. It's where the will of the person having the experience enters in. They decide to have this curious symmetry-breaking kind of experience. What I have tried to say to the UFO community is that we will not really have a deep understanding of what the contact experience is until we include data from the psychedelic experience as legitimate data to be included when looking at the problem.

MISHLOVE: You have talked earlier about our need to make an extensive survey of all of the biological manifestations on our planet. It almost seems that in order to really get a handle on the UFO phenomenon we'd need to make a comparable survey of all of the psychological manifestations of which we are aware, and it seems to me that at some level you would agree with me that the UFO phenomenon is one of our psychological manifestations.

McKENNA: Yes, I agree.

MISHLOVE: We've got about two minutes left, so I wonder if we can sort of summarize your view in that regard.

McKENNA: Yes, I think that the UFO phenomenon is a modern manifestation of a phemonenon which has been with us for thousands of years -- that is, the partial penetration of our own cultural space by others -- pixies, elves, fairies, sprites, demons, whatever you wish to call them.

MISHLOVE: Angels.

McKENNA: Angels. In the past we had a professional class for dealing with these go-betweens. We called the professional class shamans, and they mitigated these comings and goings and had a lore and a mythology about them. As we have lost contact with our shamanic roots, the things which go on at a low frequency, out in the wilderness and deserts of this planet, have come to seem to us either like invasions from another world, or virtual impossibilities. I think that the flying saucer is knocking on our door to remind us of the depth and strangeness and animate intelligence that is resident with us in nature on this planet.

MISHLOVE: Terence McKenna, it's been a very eloquent presentation, extremely thought provoking. Thank you very much for being with me.

McKENNA: It's always a pleasure to talk with you.

END
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Re: Modern UFO Era as Cold War Con

Postby undead » Sat Jul 31, 2010 12:17 am

Terence McKenna wrote:There is another metaphor. One must balance these explanations. Now I shall sound as if I didn't think the mushroom is an extraterrestrial. It may instead be what I've recently come to suspect - that the human soul is so alienated from us in our present culture that we treat it as an extraterrestrial. To us the most alien thing in the cosmos is the human soul. Aliens Hollywood-style could arrive on earth tomorrow and the DMT trance would remain more weird and continue to hold more promise for useful information for the human future. It is that intense.

Terence McKenna wrote:And after many encounters of this sort...I mean, when I first did DMT, I couldn't bring anything out of it. I mean, I just said, you know, 'It's the damndest thing I've ever encountered and I can't say anything about it and I don't think I ever will be able to say anything about it.' But by going back repeatedly and working at it, I think I've gotten a pretty coherent -- well, let's not go that far. (laughter) I think I've got a pretty clear metaphor anyway for what's happening in there, and I think a lot of people have this experience. When you talk to shamans, they say, 'Oh, well, yes, the helping spirits. Those are the helping spirits. They can help you cure, find lost objects, you didn't know about the helping spirits?' And you say, 'Well, I knew, but I, I had no idea that it was so literal.' And they say, 'Oh, no, that's the helping spirits.'

But then, the other thing they say, if you press a shaman, if you say, 'Well, what exactly is a helping spirit?' They say, 'Well, a helping spirit is an ancestor.' You say, 'You mean to tell me that those are dead people in there?' They say, 'Well, yes, ancestor, dead person. You didn't know about ancestors apparently. This is what happens to people who die.' And you say, 'My God, is it possible that what we're breaking into here is an ecology of souls?' That these are not extraterrestrials from Zenebelganooby or Zeta Reticula Beta. These are the dear departed. And they exist in a realm which, for want of a better word, let's call eternity. And somehow this drug, or whatever it is, is allowing me to see across the veil. This is the lifting -- you want to talk about boundary dissolution. It's one thing to get tight to your partner, it's quite another to get tight to the dear departed of centuries past. That's a serious boundary dissolution when that happens.


I have encountered many different kinds of spirits and entities under the influence of psychedelics, so many that it no longer fazes me. It's just something I expect to see when I do that and go there. I have had one encounter that would qualify as a classic UFO contact experience. I had not taken any psychedelic, only a joint to my head right before I walked through the woods to go feed the chickens on this farm I had been working at. Granted, I have taken enough LSD in my life that it starts to come back when I smoke a lot of cannabis. Still, objective verification suggests that I was not hallucinating. This is the only time in my life that I said to my self, "Damn, maybe I shouldn't have taken all that acid."

The chicken coop had a portable electric fence to keep away our dogs and wild animals like coyotes. It was a clear night with a full moon. I fed the chickens and started to walk back to the wooded path that led to my back yard. Before I could step out of the electric fence and turn it back on, I noticed a star that was drifting. As I stared at it it continued to drift and I noticed that there were 5 or 6 of them. At this point I started to feel like I was tripping on LSD for a brief moment. One of them stopped and I realized that they were attracted by the rectangle of electricity in the middle of the field, where I was standing. I was afraid, and I didn't want to walk back through the woods because they were above the path. As I was hesitating, the neighbors' dogs started barking, coyotes in the woods started howling, and the rooster in the coop started crowing over and over, creating a cacophony of animal noises. Eventually I got up the nerve to walk back to my house. The lights had separated but they were still there when I left.

Personally, I believe that all the visions I see when I take the so-called hallucinogenic drugs are real, and that these substances are a tool for perceiving things that remain invisible to most people. The neurological changes caused by LSD and Psilocybin can be made permanent by using meditation, breathing exercises, fasting, and other practices in combination with the drug. It is my current understanding that these beings exist independently of humans, following and observing humans who exhibit psychic potential. Whether or not they follow in physical form is debatable. I tend to think that they are ethereal beings of pure energy. Perhaps they are souls that have attained moksha and escaped the cycle of birth and death.

I also think that there are certain people in the elite powers that be who are at least aware of this phenomenon. Elites have always sought to withhold information from the masses of humanity in order to control and subjugate them, from the first Christian clergy hiding apocryphal texts in the Vatican archives to George Washington and his revolutionary posse of masonic cannabis farmers. Now, the elite so-called Illuminati promote the idea that they are the Nephilim, descended from these higher intelligences and thus worthy of their privileged position. The literalist UFO craze would fit in nicely with this delusion of grandeur.
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Re: Modern UFO Era as Cold War Con

Postby Joe Hillshoist » Sat Jul 31, 2010 8:49 am

There's definitely a side to shrooms that entails meeting your ancestors.

And honestly, it sure feels like your ancestors, cos if any of them were alive during your life but aren't now ... its hard to mistake the feeling of reunion. I mean it could be a powerful form of projection, but its hard to believe it is, cos if it is its incredibly real and its like where did I ever experience that before?

That sense of actually meeting again, some summer day.

All the aliens and pan dimensional tentacled monsters and shit don't really count on the wash up. Even the spirits ... actual ghosts tho, they are probably someone elses ancestors so the same rule applies. I've met the same interactive real ghosts tripping, dreaming and neither - late at night round a fire in the paddock. Weird meeting them straight, tho they kind of kept their distance. I was going to bed and heard someone out at the fire, which was just embers in a pit, when I got out to see who it was it was the same bunch of old blackfellas, warming themselves round the fire. It was trippy as.

They just waved and I left em to it.
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Re: Modern UFO Era as Cold War Con

Postby Wombaticus Rex » Sat Jul 31, 2010 12:24 pm

MILAB information is important -- especially since it offers an entire "matrix of causation" for north american abduction experiences: perpetrators, intellectual justification, scientific research history, likely high-level culprits, technological and institutional means of execution.

I have always wondered if the imaginal content of these experiences was mostly self-generated...I'm reminded of a Vallee case where a family had an entire extended "craft" experience outside of their car on a grassy hill, but witnesses about a half mile away simply watched a short, weird flash of light. The implication of the case appeared to be that some very weird relativistic effects were going -- the family who had the "encounter" remembered three or four terrifying minutes, but to people watching from the outside, they never moved.

Considering the strong (or at least persistent) correlation between UFO experiences and strange EM levels and phenomena, it's possible that an invisible energy field is stimulating the human brain in such a way that creates these experiences wholesale. (Which is neurologically not a stretch at all.)

Which would also mean that MILAB PsyOps being triggered with EM technology and drug-hypnosis combinations would often have the same effect.

...are humans wired for visionary and transcendent experiences?
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Re: Modern UFO Era as Cold War Con

Postby operator kos » Sat Jul 31, 2010 2:10 pm

Wombaticus Rex wrote:...are humans wired for visionary and transcendent experiences?


yes.
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Re: Modern UFO Era as Cold War Con

Postby operator kos » Sat Jul 31, 2010 2:16 pm

Cool stories, undead and Joe.

Re: mushrooms, a lot of people report a sense of familiarity, or "coming home" with psilocybin. It's a very comforting sensation. Or so I hear. Suggests to me that this restricted, localized sense of self we normally experience is the byproduct of the vehicle we are using for a journey away from home and back.
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Re: Modern UFO Era as Cold War Con

Postby undead » Mon Aug 02, 2010 3:01 pm

operator kos wrote:Re: mushrooms, a lot of people report a sense of familiarity, or "coming home" with psilocybin. It's a very comforting sensation. Or so I hear. Suggests to me that this restricted, localized sense of self we normally experience is the byproduct of the vehicle we are using for a journey away from home and back.


http://welcomehome.org is a good place to read about friendly UFO sightings.
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Re: Modern UFO Era as Cold War Con

Postby Wombaticus Rex » Mon Aug 02, 2010 3:14 pm

^^Interesting stuff, thanks.

As a counter-point, I think this is equally compelling reading:
http://raven1.net/perpsurv.htm
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