Tag: CONSPIRACY

  • JFK and the Majestic Papers: The History of a Hoax, Part 3



    Part 3: When Linda met Bob and Timmy

    Crop Circle Queen Takes on Kennedy Case

    “I would just like to point out that we would have no major frauds if this subject wasn’t filled with ignorant, gullible people. Don’t take that as an insult, because it’s not. It’s reality.”

    So said ‘Ignorethefacts’ on the forum of the extremely kook ridden tabloid conspiracy site ‘Above Top Secret’ on the 14th of March 2010. In a discussion which listed the heroes in the UFO community.

    And while it is not directed at the Woods, if anybody reads the full post I took this off of, they’ll note it very easily could have been. As seen, the Woods’ defense of Timothy Cooper is largely based on their unwillingness to accept the reality that he stiffed them. Big time! Much of what follows was picked up from Linda Moulton Howe’s website in which she utilised an old interview concerning the ‘Scorched/Lancer document’ and intersected it with the more up to date AOL piece linked in Part I. While this was a clever idea, the general execution was not. The repetition of the documents was unnecessary and interrupted the flow of banal questions by Moulton Howe, whose background investigating cattle mutilation and crop circles left her ill prepared for anything to do with the JFK assassination.

    Moulton Howe was part of the rather weird Laurence Rockefeller Alien study group of the mid 90’s, along with known CIA stooges like Bruce Maccabee (). This Rockefeller led group tried to convince world leaders of a so-called Contact Scenario, and further, to persudae them to make an annoucnemnt to the world about it. Howe was part of the pitch to Bill Clinton. Moulton Howe, like her buddy Lee Speigel, not only backed this Laurence Rockefeller War of the Worlds move, she demurred on the Burnt Documents as akin to being a ‘mystery’. It’s a mystery how anybody could take her seriously after being part of this group and reading her travesty of an interview with Robert Wood, the pater familas of ‘Majestic Documents’


    Bob Wood ‘King of the Impossible’

    Though not initially connected to the Howe interview, a quote from a piece claiming that Cooper’s character toward the Majestic Documents was beyond reproach (one of the many) struck me as particularly odd:

    In general, our opinion is that Tim is basically honest, hardworking and has very low motivation to forge anything. We have hired Tim as a consultant to research and write about the new Majestic documents. We can assure the sums involved are negligible motivation to fake these documents, given the massive multi-year effort that would have been required.

    Now, Cooper is the man who first surfaced the Angleton-MM-JFK document, which is almost certainly a forgery. Cooper first was in receipt of this red herring in 1992, just when the controversy about Oliver Stone’s film JFK reached it pinnacle. Further, he says he got it from a former CIA employee. Now, if this is not enough to raise any eyebrows, how about this: just a few months after receiving the above ersatz document, Cooper is the guy who began to also get the first Majestic Documents. Again, this was from a mysterious source thorugh his post office box. Stanton Friedman, a colleague and friend of Maccabee told Cooper to take the documents to the Woods, for verification! Yet somehow, Moulton Howe did not smell anything fishy about this.

    For in Part one of Howe’s interview, Bob Woods Sr. relates that for a fee they bought all of Cooper’s MJ-12 documents:

    But I got possession of the documents in 2001, when Timothy Cooper became disenchanted with the UFO subject, wanted to become a TV script writer, and was really short of cash. I asked him, ‘How much would it take to buy from you everything you’ve got?’ He agreed on a price and he shipped me the documents.

    This is informative as to how the Woods got started with their website. What struck me was that Cooper seems to have been paid to research his own documents and then decided too sell these documents to the Woods.

    Wood believes that Cooper’s long time contact was a fellow by the name of Thomas Cantwell. Cantwell is a man who also shared the same handwriting as William Colby, and claimed he was a member of James Angleton’s Counter Intelligence unit. Prior to this, his daughter, the mysterious ‘Salina,’ sent some documents and a forwarding letter to Cooper in 1996 with evidence of ‘Project Jehovah’, an initiative led by none other than Albert Einstein with his pal Robert Oppenheimer, exploring the physics behind Alien vehicles. This one has been shot to more pieces than a John Hankey documentary on a good day by Barry Greenwood.

    As discussed earlier, Salina, like her Dad also worked for Angleton. Thus for Moulton Howe the question of ‘Who was closest to Jesus James Angleton in his counter intelligence realm’ is a timely one, because Wood’s reply below gives us an indication of how far out of his league he really is.

    I don’t know. That’s research that needs to be done.

    This comment exemplifies the benign and misguided arrogance/ignorance many in the nexus like the Woods have. Unless ‘they’ have discovered it (usually meaning they forged it or made it up), it quite simply hasn’t happened. Thus I have to break it to Mr. Woods that ‘yes’ the research has already been done, right back in the days of the HSCA, later touched on by John Newman and expanded upon by Lisa Pease:

    Angleton’s complete counter-intelligence empire employed over 200 people. Inside this large group was a small handful of Angleton’s most trusted and closed-mouthed associates, called the Special Investigations Group (SIG). According to Ann Egerter, in 1959, when Oswald defected to the Soviet Union, only “about four or five” people were part of SIG, which was headed by Birch D. O’Neal. SIG members included Ann Egerter, Newton “Scotty” Miler, and very few others, Miler was, as of 1955, “either the Deputy or one of the principle officers with O’Neal.

    Pease also mentions another highly important figure, Ray Rocca, a person anybody interested in Angleton should study. This article and small contributions from John Newman could be found in CTKA’s Probe Magazine and the excellent Pease and DiEugenio edited volume The Assassinations. The people in Angleton’s group were hand picked by him. Any sign of weakness, like simple human morality and concern for others was literally career ending, and any thought he had at all that you had crossed him, then look out. Thus it’s exceptionally hard to believe anybody would have picked one of Angleton’s documents out of a fire on a pang of conscience. For those of you interested in Angleton, we will later discuss the lengths Cooper has gone through to implicate Angleton in numerous areas of the US power apparatus.


    And we Thought Colby was a Cheese?

    Robert Woods’ comments concerning the nearest competitor to the ‘Scorched/Lancer’ memo for the title of ‘most stupid and fraudulent document Cooper has ever produced’ is of course the ‘Colby’ one dated the 12th of November 1963. This was also touched on briefly in the previous segment.

    In it we can clearly see that the name of the addressee is redacted. That’s okay; it’s likely John McCone anyhow. But the Woods, nor fellows like Michael E Salla, who gave a lot of attention to this practically worthless piece of paper never stopped to think about the problems (rather than supposed mysteries solved) that the comment below presents.

    “Response from Colby: Angleton has MJ directive”.

    Because, as I discussed with the ‘Scorched/Lancer’ memo, the idea that an intelligence professional like William Colby, future director of the Central Intelligence Agency, would ever write something like this and give Angleton’s position away as the head honcho is beyond mockery. What idiot would redact vast tracts of an internal document to the original addressee yet keep Colby’s scrawl intact? But that’s only the entrée. That a man like Colby, deeply involved in South East Asia, would concern himself with MJ-12, the man who would later end Angleton’s career upon his appointment as DCI in 1973, that this man would act as some kind of secretary for McCone and Angleton is pure fantasy.

    Luckily for Cooper, the Woods and Salla, there was an anonymous saviour at hand – it’s our old Biblical rant friend S-1 (Source 1). He wrote on page one of his paranoid diatribe that Colby’s death was because of his involvement with the aforementioned memo Cooper was sent some years back. The source supposedly another mysterious ‘agent’. The agent acatually wrote that somehow the UFO phenomenon was behind the Soviet gamble to place missiles inside Cuba therefore causing the Missiel Crisis. And Kennedy was briefed on this during that crisis.

    Uh huh. (I recommend everyone read this doucmnet. It’s a real doozy even for Cooper and the Woods.) 


    Operation Artichoke the Alien Andromeda Virus

    To further elucidate the acumenof Mr. Wood, when asked by Howe about numerous operations mentioned in the ‘Lancer memo’, Wood could only describe the notorious MK Ultra in the following terms:

    I think the part they have admitted to was the use of psychedelic drugs without permission of the subjects. If you look up MK-ULTRA in the public record, I think you’ll find a lot of bad stuff that has been released.

    Bob then shows his in-depth (or is it inept) knowledge of the CIA by not being able to discern between the validity and function of well-known operations like ‘Artichoke’, a torturous sub stream of MK Ultra which according to some researchers outlasted its more famous predecessor, and fantasies like ‘Spike’, ‘House Cleaning’ and ‘Domestic’. Operations which no one in the Kennedy world (generally more well read on average than those in ufology circles concerning authentic CIA projects) has heard of anywhere. Indeed Wood Sr. believes the document’s claims that those involved in Artichoke and MK Ultra were overseeing a biological weapons campaign ultimately containing Alien contaminants:

    My guess is that these projects, SPIKE, HOUSE CLEANING, ARTICHOKE and DOMESTIC might be responses to an ‘Andromeda strain.

    I suggest then that the Woods and Miss Moulton Howe tell the long suffering family of Frank Olson about this ‘strain’ sometime and why he died. I would be interested to see what would happen. I think we can all predict the reaction.

  • JFK and the Majestic Papers: The History of a Hoax, Part 2



    Part 2: JFK Killed over UFOs (and other crocks)

    ‘It had one eye, and it was purple. It had one horn. It flew. I’m sure it ate people too’

    ~ Sheb Wooley, 1958; ‘Purple People Eater’

     

    The Monroe-JFK-Aliens guff in 1992 set something of a precedent for what was to come. For seven years later, in 1999, Tim Cooper had a burnt nine page document ‘sent to him’, the infamous ‘Burned Memo’, seen hereand here. These memos posited that Kennedy’s dabbling in and around the UFO field was likely what got him killed. Let’s cut the bull and show you why not…..


    The JFK ‘Burned Memo’ is a Crock

    A complete dissection of the ‘Burned memoranda’ really isn’t in order as Cooper has disowned every MJ-12 document he was ever sent or was privy to. Yet from here till Part V, we return to this juicy morsel of disinformation for some rather large nibbles, in particular when we examine Moulton Howes travesty of an interview with Bob Wood, which has been splashed around the world. But I guess while we are here we can touch on some aspects of the Burnt Memo hoax. The cover letter for starters from Source-1 or S-1 is a good place to start.

    S-1 was supposedly an insider in Jim Angleton’s camp who apparently rescued the documents from incineration after Angleton’s death (we’ll get to that aspect a bit later). S-1 thought that Cooper’s decision to work with Dr. Woods ‘a good one as he has credibility’ (not any more), and that he and ‘Dr. Wood’ had started a ‘shit storm’ in Washington.

    Thanks to S-1 the Woods proudly brandish a document called the Counter IntelligenceCorps/Interplanetary Phenomenon Unit Report’ which states on the 22nd of July 1947, Congressman John Fitzgerald Kennedy was privy to information about aliens crashing at Roswell. The document never explains why he was privy to this information, bar his brief stint with naval intelligence and being Joe’s son. Joe was apparently sitting on a 12 member board called the ‘Commission on Organisation of the Executive Branch of theGovernment, geez, sounds scary doesn’t it? Well the reality of the board is that its true function was frighteningly banal. And why Herbert Hoover and Dr. James Kerr Pollock would be privy to anything bar the paper clip expense is beyond me.

    Enough of that silliness, let’s take a look at the actual ‘Burned Memo’ and the incendiary quote which appears on its very first page.

    “As you must know LANCER [JFK] has made some inquiries regarding our activities which we cannot allow.” 
    – Director of Central Intelligence (MJ-1)

    For starters, through the work of people like Lisa Pease, we know the CIA cryptonym for Kennedy was GPIDEAL. ‘Lancer’ was Kennedy’s Secret Service code name. At the time the document was surfaced it was well known that JFK’s Secret Service codename was ‘Lancer’. But Lisa’s work in the CIA files did not surface until about three years later. Thus the manufacturer of the document was hardly in command of a secret. In fact this makes the author of the undated and unsigned memo (supposedly John McCone or Allen Dulles according to ‘expert’ Robert Wood) look kind of stupid.

    If someone as well-known as JFK was a threat to those in power, in particularly skilled covert operators like, say Dulles, then they wouldn’t use him by a name he was well known in the system by. They probably would have called him something like ‘Homer’. But taken one step further, Dulles would have to be as brainless as Austin Powers to even commit this sort of thing to paper. And Angleton or anybody else who received it would have been exceptionally stupid to have even kept a copy. It would have been destroyed immediately. Yet in Linda Howe’s interview with Bob Wood in 2008, he champions an utterly ludicrous premise:

    “I would presume that the scenario involved is that MJ-1 is dictating this burned memo to a secretary. He, MJ-1, does not want the secretary to know that he is saying, ‘We ought to kill JFK.’”

    The above ridiculous statement leads one to ask the inevitable: “Dictated to a secretary”? How many people actually knew of MJ-12, that is the allegedly secret group meant to seek out the truth about interplanetary travel by space creatures? For a top secret operation it seems as if every ‘Tom, Dick and Secretary’ was in the loop. Including Kennedy’s own secretarial and clerical staff, as this memo seems to indicate.

    What’s inherently bogus about this document is that it’s trying to make out as if Kennedy was aware of, or involved in, some ‘psy-op’ element behind MJ-12. Now as we have seen previously, the CIA had been running their non MJ-12 counter intelligence as an in-house operation. To try and tie Kennedy to it is reminiscent of Lamar Waldron’s attempts to tie Kennedy into the bogus invasion of Cuba, or E. Howard Hunt falsifying documents manufacturing Kennedy’s role in the murder of Ngo Dinh Diem.

    These points aside, the Majestic Documents webpage it is located on states the following:

    The Kennedy signature looks genuine, but he often used an autopen so that is not an important authentication point. There seems to be no reason to doubt that this is a valid memo.

    Ignoring the last sentence, let’s think about the first for a second. Autopens were used primarily on mass mailed letters, and for general orders/directives/edicts/checks etc. to go around government departments. However, for top secret information, especially for something as delicate as MJ-12 is made out to be, we are asked to believe that Kennedy couldn’t be bothered to take the time to sign his name? Let’s have a look at what Kennedy’s lethargy would entail in two colorful scenarios:

    (1) Not wanting to sign the document, he casually walked over to the autopen machine and spent anywhere up to ten minutes setting the thing up and then turning it over to his secretary Evelyn Lincoln. Possibly with his suit jacket off or a dry cleaning note attached for ink spillages. (2) He gave this sensitive letter to Mrs. Lincoln, who handed it onto to the ancillary staff who likely went on to use the autopen to sign this sole top secret document, posting it, and then sending it off.

    Were Allen Dulles, John McCone and JFK truly that inept?

    Returning to the first page of the ‘Burned Memo’ we can see that this ‘moronic incontendo’ affliction had become contagious throughout US intelligence. The document has been sent to a number of individuals, ‘MJ’s’ ‘2-7’ to be precise. That’s a fair chop of people to have a top secret document routed through the cabals. Indeed, I encourage anyone to take a peek at the Woods’ master tabulation of operators involved with MJ-12 operations – it’s quite a guest list.

    One will notice the number of names mentioned in the documents as being part of, or knowledgeable of the operation. In reading the documents and then this list, individuals like Bill Colby (who apparently knew of Angleton’s supposed directive level), Dulles (whom had received memos on the issue and whom Wood suspected in the Howe interview as being a hidden MJ-12 Kingpin, John McCone (the individual apparently concerned about his poking his nose around MJ-12 business) knew. Yet Truman (who started it all) did not. Yet Bruce Pitzer and Lee Harvey Oswald did know?

    How many more people ‘not’ mentioned in this list knew what was going on? Indeed is this the correct question to ask? Shouldn’t the questions be how could anybody be so conceited enough as to fall for such a sham? Not to mention, could this sort of thing get any worse? Well it does and we haven’t even touched on the ludicrous John F. Kennedy to CIA, November 1963and what I now term the ‘Bogus Colby Memo’ which will be discussed later. I


    Did the Pres really give a fig about UFO’s?

    I have no recollection of precisely when I first encountered the disinformation pertaining to Kennedy’s assassination enacted because of his crossing MJ-12. But it was in the period between 1997-1998 in my chrysalis phase of research when I stumbled upon the often ‘silly’ but surprisingly entertaining graphic novel The Big Book of Conspiracies from the local library. Kennedy and Monroe, to my puzzlement, were depicted at the tail end of the book, on page 212, in bed discussing the UFO topic. From there on I noted that it was discussed on some UFO forums a long time before its current popularity. But I also noted it was a dead topic on the Kennedy ones. Thus I smelled a rat with this MJ-12 thing fairly early.

    The big problem with all of this is that outside of these utterly hilarious MJ-12 documents (and the reasoning of the Woods), Kennedy really wasn’t all that interested in flying saucers; he was busy fighting the ‘Martians’ in his own administration. As Larry Hancock explains:

    UFO’s were not a major media story during JFK’s term, there were no massive “waves” of sightings or headline stories such as had occurred in 1957 and 1958. In 1957 a radar sighting had produced a national alert extending to the White House. After JFK’s death, there would be major national media coverage of UFO’s in 1964 (the Socorro landing incident) and the huge wave of sightings in 1965. Irrespective of any personal interest JFK might have had, there is no evidence it was a subject that he was actively involved with, other Presidents displayed far more interest.”(Larry Hancock; email, 2011)

    In addition to Hancock’s comments, there is a letter from the National Aeronautics and Space Council’s, Maxwell W. Hunter to Robert Packard in July of 1963.

    If one has read the first Preamble, one can see it’s possible that Kennedy may well have uncovered Dulles’ dabblings in and around the UFO counter intelligence area, in particularly from Bob Lovett. But I may be a little melodramatic here, as there’s also the chance that Dulles, in a cooler period between the men, may well have told Kennedy of a few counter intelligence tricks that had been played in the interests of National Security.

     


    Possible Conversations about UFO’s

    Conversations with the likes of Lovett or Dulles aside, UFO’s are such a broad topic Kennedy could have chatted to anybody about them at any time. But it’s safe to say he never had any discussions with the likes of George Adamski. Nor did he discuss anything on the matter with the likes of Bill Holden aboard Air Force One, nor did he make any comments that his ‘hands were tied’ on the matter.

    Thus it was good to encounter true believers in UFO’s like Robert Barrow, whom showed all due respect for the subject by digging up information on some of Kennedy’s closest advisors (it’s a shame some of his links like Grant Cameron show very little of his common sense). As we can clearly see, Bob McNamara, the Secretary of Defense, was not a fan of them. Nor was Robert Kennedy, himself a victim of ‘UFO infatuation’ hoaxes. This is why the list of people in official capacity that JFK had been associated with in the area and could have shot the breeze about the topic is short. 

     


    James Webb

    Kennedy without a doubt had contact with Webb about matters of the Cosmos, like this important one here to NASA chief exec James Webb (). Yet it seems this document was the basis for the utterly silly ‘Bogus Colby Memo’. It was after having a look around for information on this subject that I came across some good research which may indirectly hint at some possible discussions Kennedy may have had about them. First up, Bernice Moore found an interesting article which indicates that the ‘Pres’ was extremely concerned about the potential for a major PR failure with his space initiatives. Note that in this article both Kennedy and Webb were deeply concerned about gaining support for increased NASA funding for the project. Which makes the idea of Webb somehow being the man who ‘bit the hand that fed him’ over the issue of UFO disclosure somewhat hard to swallow. Kookery aside, Kennedy may well have discussed the issue of Alien existence with the likes of Webb. But there is no real evidence of this occurring, at least in an official capacity.

    Another figure Kennedy could have discussed the topic with was an individual called Captain Arthur C. Lundahl whom CIA Historian Gerald K Haines mentions Kennedy was rather taken by.


    Captain Arthur C. Lundahl

    In Gerald K. Haines rather lukewarm and misleading CIA public relations ploy, CIA’s Role in the Study of UFO’s 1947-1990’, one of the few things I did not disagree with him on was what he writes about Lundahl. Lunhdahl was the head of the CIA’s National Photographic Interpretation Centre (NPIC), a leading light in aircraft and satellite based reconnaissance. He was also a skilled de-briefer on these activities and briefed President Kennedy on the presence of Soviet Missiles in Cuba which sparked the missile crisis. Though evidence suggests he only became involved in the UFO related field in the late sixties in any official capacity, he was hired by the CIA after their investigations into UFO’s in the wake of their Robertson Panel hearings in 1953 for his skills in the area of photo recon. Indeed, Luhndahl apparently had a personal interest in the field of UFO’s and he may well have shot the breeze with JFK on the subject. But, as said, his interest in the subject appears to have started after Kennedy’s murder. However, if Luhndahl has piqued the reader’s interest there’s some good non Cameron articles on Lundahl at JFK researcher Bill Kelly’s Blog.

    Captain Bob Collins (an individual you will get to know very well later) made a bold statement that all Presidents are briefed about the UFO ‘situation’ upon assuming office. Kennedy was thus one of them. Well that’s if you believe dubious researchers like Grant Cameron who in turn believes dubious frauds like Collins, Timothy Cooper and Adamskyite Lou Zinsstag. Richard Dolan has long been pumping an angle that journalist Todd W. Zechel, was close with Luhndahl and was told that Kennedy had a great interest in the study. Yet after much looking around, I have found that Zechel himself never seems to have said anything about it, and the fact it comes from a huckster like Dolan doesn’t fill with me confidence.

    Thus if anyone could find the briefing in question Id like to have a peek. But, let’s put this aside judging by the rather lo-fi comments about Aliens abounding during Kennedy’s tenure. If true, Kennedy may have just shot the breeze (Presidents are allowed to speculate about UFO’s you know, Bill Clinton was a big fan after all and so was Carter).


    John McCone

    As we have seen John McCone, Dulles’ replacement, is also another overlooked avenue. Haines reported that the first internal government investigations in the sixties were more or less sparked in 1964 by CIA director John McCone whom Kennedy had appointed in 1961. Of course this was a convenient cover yet again for the CIA’s own in-house investigations following the assassination but I’ll leave that up for the reader to mull over. Could McCone have discussed the UFO issue with Kennedy at some stage prior to his assassination? Once again there’s no credible evidence to suggest so (remembering that the documents that purported these happenings have been disowned by the original recipient). But considering the generally good relations between the two it’s another remote possibility. Regardless of this, McCone’s concerns about UFO’s, and his internal investigations compiling the best evidence and analysis of the situation at the time, flies in the face of him being an insider and shadowy player in the big bad world of MJ-12, which Cooper attempted to paint him as.

     

    Prouty Redherrings

    Major General Charles P. Cabell

    Major General Charles P. Cabell was a well-known figure in the Kennedy saga, being fired as the Deputy Director of the CIA alongside Richard Bissell and Allen Dulles as a result of the Bay of Pigs debacle. Cabell appears to be a key player in the promotion of UFO’s within government circles, and if anyone was the prime candidate to have talked with Kennedy about UFO’s, Allen Dulles or Cabell were prime candidates. But if they did, well McNamara and RFK, as we have seen, didn’t buy it.


    Colonel L Fletcher Prouty

    Like Mae Brussell, Colonel L Fletcher Prouty has long been used and abused by lone nut and Nexus Magazine folk alike. Prouty, a decorated pilot, was a high level liaison between the CIA and the USAF. He has become precious to many individuals in the para-political field. Thanks in part to appearing in numerous documentaries and being the inspiration behind Donald Sutherland’s ‘Mr. X’ in JFK. Prouty, by his own admission, was not a ‘researcher’ of the assassination but an observer and commentator on it, as his books the Secret Team and JFK: The CIA, Vietnam, and the Plot to Assassinate John F. Kennedy provide testament to. Prouty himself was also a believer in UFO’s, as he wrote in 1983 (http://www.prouty.org/coment16.html):

    These nine or ten experienced air crew men were convinced, beyond any doubt, that what they were watching was a UFO. They made an initial report to their commanding officer; and later, after a night’s rest, they returned to make out individual formal statements. Their formal reports were then forwarded to Air Force Headquarters in Washington. The reason I’ve chosen to cite this factual UFO case from 1954 is because I was that commanding officer. I have heard nothing more about that incident since that day. However, I have heard about UFO’s flying along beside the world’s fastest aircraft, the Spyplane (SR-71), and I have heard that the Air Force has two “bodies” or extraterrestrial objects in storage on one of its bases. Most UFO stories contain elements I cannot believe; this case has been my only direct contact with an actual responsible sighting.

    Note that Prouty says ‘I have heard’ about this and immediately after he discusses the USAF’s storage of “bodies” he makes this important statement “Most UFO stories contain elements I cannot believe”. Prouty never stumped for the MJ-12 documents, nor did he ever write about UFO’s nor discuss them in any manner other than this.However, this has not stopped him from being targeted, like Sylvia Meagher before him, as a UFO ‘nut’ on John McAdams’ website (http://mcadams.posc.mu.edu/prouty.htm). As usual, McAdams grievously misquotes and distorts his comments in a number of, what can at best be described, as slanderous diatribes. While Dave Perry’s piece on Prouty and the Christchurch Star is doubly so (please check out ‘Dancing With Dave P’ in this article on Alex Jones.) Bear this in mind when Perry and McAdams make an appearance later.

    Nothing to see here Folks…..Well on Second Thoughts

    There are some crossovers in the Kennedy/Space field out there. But most of these were discussed in Preamble I. We all knew JFK wanted to send a man to the moon, while everyone is familiar with the nefarious activities of Fred L Crisman and that hoax on Maury Island. (If not I refer the reader to Part I of the Preamble). Not to mention how Crisman popped up in Garrison’s investigation. Had Garrison been capable of convicting Shaw and tying him effectively to Crisman in any capacity, perhaps he may have brought into question some of the Dulles created camouflage surrounding UFO’s.

    But the point I am making here is this: someone is creating specioius documents trying to connect the UFO world with JFK and his assassination. We have now seen it twice: with the JFK-MM-Angleton con job (which was also exposed by John Newman), and the so called Angleton “Burned Memorandum”. And clearly, whoever is faking this stuff understands the suspicions about Angleton that have surfaced in the last genration about his involvement in the JFK murder. They then seem to have tried to transfer his importance in the JFK research field and transpose it to the UFO field. Therefore trying to gain traction in both areas. Now, whoever is doing this, they are clearly up to mischief. Much valuable work on Angleton, by people like John Newman and Lisa Pease, is now being hijacked for the purposes of diversion and distraction.

  • JFK and the Majestic Papers: The History of a Hoax, Part 1

    JFK and the Majestic Papers: The History of a Hoax, Part 1



    Part 1: Majestic Documents & Marilyn

    “And pray that there’s intelligent life somewhere up in space
    ’Cause there’s bugger all down here on Earth.”

    -Eric Idle, Monty Python’s The Meaning of Life, 1983

    Before we embark upon discussing Marilyn Monroe and the Majestic document fallacies surrounding her, let us take a look at how the new wave of MJ-12 related stories re-emerged this year thanks to a fellow by the name of William Lester and some extremely bad journalism.


    AOL, The Daily Mail, & The 2011 MJ-12 Tale

    When the FBI recently published details of a purported UFO crash in New Mexico in 1947, word abounded that it was the infamous Roswell crash. It garnered a good deal of attention, in particular from David Wilcock and other extremely dubious people who believe it is part of a new form of government disclosure preparing us for Alien co-existence. In reality, the document has been around since 1977 and the incident that occurred in Aztec, New Mexico is believed by those who seriously study flying saucers to be a hoax (as noted here).

    This story was promptly backed up in the press that ‘JFK’ was killed because of his belief in Aliens’ headlines in the AOL News (April 18, 2011) and Daily Mail (April 19, 2011). What amazed me was the exceptionally poor journalism in both articles. While the AOL piece was somewhat more critical of the documents, it still used the ever gullible Linda Moulton Howe (examined in Part IV) for a critique, and it never once questioned the absurd claim of author William Lester in the Daily Mail which said “The CIA released the documents to him under the Freedom of Information Act after he made a request while researching his new book ‘A Celebration of Freedom: JFK and the New Frontier.’”

    William calls himself a ‘Doctor’, yet he earned this after apparently doing only three years of an undergraduate degree. Using his questionable Ph.D. status, Lester charges people to do a correspondence course via his website The American Institute of Metaphysics. In fact he runs a bunch of them. Unfortunately for Willie, I caught up with him on his aptly titled Game ‘Con’ Radio site which is dedicated to a niche of gamers and the paranormal community (and likely what ever game he’s running at any particular time). In fact I suggest anyone go have a chat with him about his dubious documents. You can see what happened when I did.

    Slick Willie Table!


    The Lester-Waring Con Game

    No one, and I repeat no one, has ever heard of William Lester in JFK circles till these two articles. These tried to insinuate that people like John Newman and Fletcher Prouty and Jim Douglass were wrong. Kennedy was not killed over his foreign policy. He was killed because of his outer space policy. It is doubtful Lester will ever front on any forum again. For a giggle I suggest you check out his pipe smoking musings on his At my Desk YouTube commentaries on ‘Bigfoot’.

    With logic like this it shouldn’t surprise anyone that Lester never, ever, received the documents from the CIA via the FOIA. They had in fact been peddled around since the nineties and deemed a hoax by all bar the worst cranks in all manner of conspiracy circles. Indeed another equally formless and empty boaster named Scott Waring (who never got the joke) claims he was the first to publish it. Lester’s proclamations, led one over-exuberant fellow by the name of Mark Bermann, to exclaim “It’s taken nearly fifty years, but someone has finally tied the JFK assassination to UFOs”. Oh really? If that wasn’t funny enough, Bermann’s next line will have you cringing: “While the separate UFO and assassination conspiracy theorists will likely join forces to say that Kennedy was knocked off to prevent him from learning the truth about aliens and UFOs, Lester said there is a more rational explanation for JFK’s requests for information.” As we can see from Bermann’s wild musings, with the upcoming 50th anniversary of the assassination looming there seems to be very real attempts by cheap hucksters like Lester and unnamed sinister government forces to once again try and link JFK researchers with the UFO field, thereby reducing Kennedy’s murder to absurd mush.


    The Majestic Documents Website

    If any one group are responsible for continually encouraging the likes of Lester and Waring, it is this group of MJ-12 devotes and their so-called ‘Majestic Documents’. headed up by the father and son team of Bob and Ryan Wood. The initial impression one gets from their website is that it is well organised, and I have to give top marks to the Woods in this regard. Thanks to the smooth feel to the site one gets the sense that the Woods and their team, which includes Stanton Friedman, Jim Marrs, Nick Redfern, Jim Clarkson and Timothy S Cooper (the father of the ‘new MJ-12’ documentation himself and no relation to Bill), have rigorously checked and authenticated the documents and other articles that they have come across from a diverse array of opinions. They even rate the documents there on an “authenticity meter”.


    A Dickensian Twist

    But it is not all happy families. This fine website is in reality something akin to Miss Havisham’s Mansion from Dickens and feels as if it too is overgrown with weeds, moss and ivy. This is because, like Havisham’s, the clocks have been well and truly stopped, as the site hasn’t been updated since 2009. I then got my first queasy ‘Pip’ like feelings when I noticed that all of the MJ-12 articles on the website pertaining to the Kennedys had a suspiciously high authenticity rating. Indeed, I noted that very few of the documents the Woods’ have ranked dip below halfway and on the rare occasions they do, the glowing comments about their ‘potential’ use as anecdotal evidence essentially invalidated their entire ratings system.

    But things get even stranger for the Woods in their house of Havisham. While Jim Clarkson believes the MJ-12 documents on the page endorse his research into the June Crain abduction, and the Woods and Jim Marrs have actively supported a document unearthed by Cooper linking Marilyn Monroe to Kennedy and UFOs, one would think that the rest of their ‘Investigative Team’ would hold similar views. But this is not a true investigative team. In reality, it’s more or less a collection of contacts. Because were these individual members truly consulted as to the validity of the documents in question, the ratings for many (if not all of them) would be extremely poor.

    While Marrs appeared to indulge in much of the MJ-12 mystique, he never believed that Kennedy for instance was killed by MJ-12 over UFOs. Nick Redfern believes MJ-12 to be a hoax, and Friedman emailed me stating that he believes the ‘new MJ-12’ documents to also be fake. But the real reason for the sombreness is that in 2009 the person who brought forth the 1992 batch of documents, Timothy S. Cooper, denounced Friedman and the Woods. Claiming that the papers he peddled were likely frauds. This came amidst mounting suspicion by Bob Hastings that Cooper and others wittingly forged them. Thus, much like Miss Havisham, it appears the groomsman stood them up, and they’re still getting over it (http://www.rense.com/general85/m12.htm).


    Marrs & Monroe

    On that note any aspiring ‘Pip’ would thus do well enough to stay away. In particularly if ‘Estella’ in the form of a UFO and JFK obsessed Marilyn Monroe is part of the mix. One of the many things that caught my eye on the ‘Majestic Documents’ website was an article by the rather rabid anti-Kennedy MUFON high-up Donald Burleson. In one of them, the concerns are the fraudulent Monroe tryst with JFK and some pillow talk they purportedly indulged in about Cuba and UFOs — supposedly this juicy gossip had come via James Angleton, the notorious CIA head its counter intelligence operations. Burleson had ignored the critiques of the document’s authenticity at the time he wrote his article, and his claim to fame in this sad tale is that the routing sheet for the document, upon closer examination, contained the signature of a one General Schulgen. Schulgen is important to Burleson because he was supposedly involved in the Roswell crash, and he tried to enlist FBI support in covering up the story and blaming the communists. Sadly for Burleson, the much more studious ufologist Barry Greenwood has effectively proven those Schulgen memos were fakes, seemingly cooked up by one Bill Moore, a notorious figure within the halls of UFOdom and a central figure in the original MJ-12 tomfoolery. Greenwood and Brad Sparks presented this paper at MUFOn Symposium 7 which effectively expsoed these documents as suspect.

    Another interesting aspect of Burleson’s article, published two years before he worte a book, is that he championed Monroe biographer Donald Wolfe’s hatchet piece which claimed – incredibly – that RFK was present when Monroe was ‘murdered’. Well, one would expect that of an individual with an antipathy to the Kennedys and little understanding of the case. In other words, where the whole ‘MM was murdered’ stuff ties into what Jim DiEugenio has called “The Posthumous Assassination of John F. Kennedy”.

    Jim Marrs’s endorsement of the JFK-MM-UFO evidence, which can be seen in his book Alien Agenda, entertained this redundant angle. He later cemented his stance by giving something of a favourable review to the document, which brought the issue to light in his 2000 article “JFK, Marilyn and UFOs: An astounding but likely combination”.

    What made this report credible for Marrs is that, as seen on the document, in Dorothy Kilgallen’s conversation with Howard Rothburg, she mentions that she’d had discussions with English authorities about UFOs. According to Marrs this is vindicated by Air Marshall Dowding’s comments about them. I’d like to point out that she never spoke to Dowding, for what good it would have done her anyway, and the fact she had a piece published in the Los Angeles Examiner newspaper on the 23rd of May 1955 concerning UFO sightings in Britain. Marrs never once stopped to think that maybe, just maybe, someone clever could have gone back and found that very article and used it? Well maybe he did. When interviewed by Robert Wilonsky in a notorious hit piece instigated by Dave Perry Marrs said he “didn’t buy into it”. Yet in 2002 Marrs was again discussing many of the dodgey MJ-12 documents we shall cover in this study, and endorsing Richard Dolan’s utterly banal After Disclosure. Dolan, like Joseph Farrell, Kenn Thomas, David Icke and others is yet another tragic example of ufologists deciding ‘they know it all’ and drilling the unwitting out there with utterly worthless and banal work.


    Milo & Moon Unit

    In the Preambles I-II, one can see that well before the current dirge of tabloid Monroe-UFO madness. Miss Monroe had been tied to UFOs via Life Magazine. On the 7th of April 1952 the pouting starlet appeared on the cover in a stylish black and white spread. Near the top of the page was the small but stark headline “THERE IS A CASE FOR INTERPLANETARY SAUCERS”.

    Just as Life sought to cash in on the UFO craze (that hit its peak shortly after in July of the same year with the mass sightings in and around Washington), the timing of the Monroe MJ-12 document couldn’t have been better. If 1991 and Bill Cooper’s rants were the beginnings of a new age in Kennedy disinformation, 1992, the year after Stone’s JFK, heralded a golden age for any charlatan trying to cash in on renewed interest in the Kennedy murder. And this was when the MJ-12 documents linking Kennedy and Monroe appeared. The plethora of conspiracy fantasies was matched all the way by the anti-Kennedy gutter penmanship of the era, culminating in the most famous piece of anti-Kennedy trash of the era- Seymour Hersh’s 1997 The Dark Side of Camelot, for which the author attempted to hock bogus documents pertaining to Kennedy and Monroe prior to the publication of his book, before the fake documents were exposed as crude forgeries.

    No doubt adding to Hersh’s sleaze fest was Milo Speriglio’s Crypt 33: The Saga of Marylin Monroe (co-authored with Adela Gregory). This came out in 1993. Cooper, an ‘unwitting recipient’ of the MM documentation (or one of his associates), knew precisely whom to turn this supposedly ‘sensitive’ information over to. Not well established figures in JFK research at the time, not on your life. But none other than well-known tabloid celebrity sleuth Speriglio who had been writing turgid Monroe biographies since 1982. Speriglo, for all the hoopla he’d garnered, was considered (away from his decidedly studied and softly spoken demeanour) something of a tall story teller and a ‘gloryhound’ (bare this in mind in regards to Cooper later on).

    Much has been made by defenders of the document, including Marrs, that Speriglio was an avid document authenticist and not easily fooled. Yet judging by the tall tales he was willing to make on on behalf of notorious Monroe leach and con man Robert Slatzer (besides Speriglio, one of the single most loathed individuals in all of ‘Marilyndom’ ). Speriglo’s endorsement of the document obviously means very little. So little, Monroe researcher Marijane Gray (one of the more sober and responsble writers in that field) responded to my questions about the document in an extremely direct fashion:

    The basis of all science is evidence. UFO aficionados are already viewed with incredulity, but when they attempt to tie themselves in with the death of Marilyn Monroe they remove any credibility they may have had. Claiming that Miss Monroe was killed by a chupacabra has about the same amount of merit.

    Gray’s full work on the myths surrounding Monroe’s murder can be seen here. Indeed, we’ll see her work again very shortly.


    Another Stucco Veneer

    Tim Cooper, as we have seen (despite his disassociation with the Woods), is still the centrepiece of the ‘Majestic Documents’ group and looking at his resume one is initially impressed (or suspicious) of the variety of military positions and experiences he claims he has had. His treatise on the documents at his MJ-12 peak in 1999 which speculated that it had less to do with aliens than nuclear powered weapons systems and transport was intriguing, as was his claim that some of the documents now available may well have been written by some disgruntled ‘ufologists’ seemed vaguely sensible.

    His article “Paradox: Contradictions in Reality — Questions Regarding UFOs, Extraterrestrial Intelligence, and the Future of Ufology” which I tried to track down, seemed to also follow the same vein. Sadly, because none of the links to it seem to go any where, it received a rather nice write up: “It is the hope and desire of the author that the reader considers the topics mentioned as part of the paradox in which human society exists and what serious UFO research must address if the phenomena is to be taken seriously by science and religion”.

    Continuing on with his mild guise, and quite interestingly, our friend Mr. Cooper later signed two affidavits in an attempt to state in the case of any forgeries being discovered that he was uninvolved with the production and distribution of the articles sent to him in any way.


    Her Again

    But just as Speriglo’s quiet demeanour masked a pernicious and irresponsible agenda, the rational MJ-12 skeptic Cooper seen in the above articles (and the one championed by the Woods) melts under the microscope. In the link below we can clearly see him endorse the hoax documents he was actively advocating for at the time in the June-July 2000 edition of Nexus Magazine. And we also see him take a very careful and rerespectful attitude towrards and approach to the CIA’s counter intelligence guru James Angleton. The person (if you recall) to whom the Monroe-JFK-UFO memo is credited. And clearly, Cooper is trying to make some kind of connection between these documents, Angleton, and Kennedy’s death.

    Moving on from Angleton, we can clearly see that ‘Timmy’ enjoyed the notoriety. Just look at this link below supplied to me by Richard J Smith on the JFK Lancer Forum. One of his many email addresses around 2000 was majestictim@earthlink.net. And at that time Cooper was indeed given to wild theories about all manner of UFOs and conspiracies concerning Monroe and Kennedy. He was more than pleased to publicize the fact it was he himself who discovered the Monroe memo and that he was saddling her death on the Kennedy brothers:

    I am convinced that Marilyn Monroe was silenced and RFK was seen in a car with Peter Lawford by L.A.P.D. speeding to LAX on the day she was killed. And I bet he wanted to make sure she didn’t talk to the press regarding what she wrote in her little red diary, which disappeared from the L.A. Coroner’s office the day after her body was brought in for autopsy.

    Mr. Cooper really let himself and the credibility of his documents down here. There’s no evidence according to the most well known and respected Monroe biographer, Donald Spoto, that RFK was anywhere near Brentwood at the time. Furthermore the ‘little red diary story’ is a complete and utter myth as the aforementioned Marijane Gray writes:

    Myth Number Six: The Red Diary and The Press Conference- One of the most repeated rumours regarding Marilyn’s death was that she kept a ‘red diary’ where she jotted down the things she spoke about with John and Robert Kennedy, and that she was murdered either because of the contents of it or because she was threatening to hold a press conference to divulge everything about the ‘affairs’ after being rejected by both brothers. Both of these stories originate from Robert Slatzer, who met Marilyn once for about ten minutes but stretched that into a decades long career about lying about a relationship with Marilyn, going so far as to claim he secretly married her despite documents proving otherwise. He has been thoroughly and soundly discredited as a conman by every reputable Monroe scholar, yet the lies that took root in his 1974 book continue to grow. He claims that Marilyn kept a red diary where she would jot down national secrets supposedly told to her by the Kennedys. Although Marilyn was not a diary keeper, she did frequently jot down questions that came to her, lists for herself, and other random thoughts. However, as the recent book Fragments shows us in Marilyn’s own hand, she was not organized in her writings, nor was there any discipline or consistency to them. Her thoughts were written on hotel stationary, scraps of paper, and receipts. Even the closest thing to a diary that she had- a spiral notebook- is filled with thoughts with no cohesion or time consistency.

    The claims about a press conference ‘to reveal everything’ is even more outlandish. Marilyn was not a vengeful or spiteful woman; she was discreet and tactful to a fault. She never spoke ill of anyone publicly, no matter how they had wronged her. She never said a cross word about any of her ex-husbands, about co-stars who had vilified her, she was always proper and discreet. Her character simply does not coincide with a vengeful woman who would spill secrets to the press, but moreover, this rumour was started by the insufferable Robert Slatzer in his nearly completely fictionalized account in his book.

    Now if that wasn’t enough of a slap for Cooper’s logic at the time I don’t know what is. But the man was clearly on a roll! The next statement he made was a nothing short of a Hankeyian misrepresentation of Britain’s ‘Mr X-Files’ Nick Pope’s work. Read this mouthful:

    On that same note, Nick Pope has CIA files on Dorothy Kilgallen which relate how she was asked to find out what she could on the UFO scene and probably talked to Monroe about what JFK knew. She was found dead in her NY apartment shortly after she interviewed Jack Ruby in prison. Is it coincidence? I think not.

    What article of Pope’s did Cooper read? I could find nothing from Pope saying anything of the sort. In fact, Pope’s a pretty conservative kind of guy and is a bit of a let down for the ‘believers’ out there and shows a great deal of interest and cynicism with regard to conspiracies of all shades. Thus Pope saying this sort of thing is completely out of character. In his article discussing Kilgallen, all Pope does is confirm that she had likely heard the UFO story (which we have already discussed) from Lord Mountbatten. But note what Tim has done: Kilgallen’s mysterious death now is solved. It was all about UFOs and it jibes with the Angleton memo. But Cooper trips the light fantastic with the next sip of the conspirahypocritic Kool-Aid:

    The August 3, 1962 CIA/Monroe wire tap document given to me in 1992 draws some powerful connections to JFK, RFK, the Roswell 1947 incident, and NASA (which Kilgallen is mentioned talking about Monroe and the Kennedy brothers). There’s a connection somewhere in all of this and I am working on it right now. I do know this, the FBI and the CIA kept records on Monroe, the Kennedys, and Kilgallen (Monroe had a DOD ID card).

    That anyone took Cooper seriously then is bad enough. That people still take Cooper seriously today is terminal. There’s no denying at all that the FBI kept records on these individuals. But as for Marilyn’s DOD card, it’s no big secret every entertainer who performed for the USO had to have one as can be seen with this example from one of the Bell Sisters DOD ID card.

    If you have come to this article from a UFO background and know little of the assassinations of the Sixties, in particular President Kennedy’s, be warned the internet is awash with numerous myths about Monroe, JFK and RFK. Of which the UFO angle is the most recent arrival in this morass. Monroe may well have been intimate at some point with JFK as Spoto notes, but the clincher is that it was not ongoing, nor did Robert have anything much to do with her or her death. Let’s also be mindful that practically all serious Monroe researchers (not all of them Kennedy fans by a long shot), note there is no evidence that she was obsessed with either Kennedy brother to the point of suicide, or that she kept a tell all diary of their liaisons.

    I hasten to add that The Posthumous Assassination of JFK, Parts I and II by Jim DiEugenio in regards to the Kennedy-Monroe subject comes highly recommended. Also, if you have come from my review of Joseph Farrell’s sorry book you may want to consider combining the Monroe-JFK rumours in DiEugenio’s article with the James Angleton sponsored Farewell America and the likely Angleton product, the Torbitt Document. Angleton died in 1987, but his legacy lives on. To the point his story is now entwined in the very sort of disinformation campaigns he later helped Allen Dulles perform. By mixing up the Kennedys, Marilyn Monroe and UFOs, he was constructing a design that was bound to be pounced on by the likes of Cooper and Speriglio. Thereby creating a phony sideshow, distracting many people from the real point.

  • JFK and the Majestic Papers: The History of a Hoax, Preamble II



    George Adamski

    George ‘A Scam I See’ Adamski

    Being a keen amateur astronomer as a kid, I read up all I could about the planets. One in particular was Venus because of its proximity to Earth and its comparable size. Thus when I was about 10 I found a glossy covered book from the late 70’s or early 80’s and read about someone whom had flown to Venus in the company of a tall blonde haired creature. Now while I was deflated because it wasn’t some scary bug eyed green thing, I also knew the landscape of Venus at the time. Because I was confused, how on earth could adults have ever bought that one about flying to Venus? My thinking at the time was that its in a book and somehow it must be ‘official’.

    It wasn’t until much later that I learned the story I had encountered was a glowing tale by the infamous UFO fraudster George Adamski. My awakening to George, and by forfeit my suspicions about human like aliens begun as a teen in New Zealand. I saw a UFO documentary on television entitled UFOs Miracle of the Unknown with my cousin Jason (part of which can be viewed here). Never being a fan of the X-Files, I knew relatively little about UFOs bar the stuff I had read in the odd book or Unexplained Magazine lying around my friend’s Dad’s place or at primary school. Later on, I began to be more circumspect. I didn’t buy into John Lear’s bogus ‘Aliens and Eisenhower’ meeting then and I sure as hell don’t now. One of the highlights of this cheap and tacky production was the director’s decision to intercut it with an inaccurately painted picture of a youthful looking George Adamski being hailed to a space ship by an Aryan Alien. The real clincher however was the nauseating pseudo hippie sleaze bag ‘astral’ voice-over which sounds like the love child of Hal 9000 discussing the importance of George Adamski and his important message for humanity from his alien visitors. My cousin and I were so inspired by the unintentional humour of it all we started a punk band.

    Since then George has never been far from my mind, nor indeed from New Zealand as it turned out. He visited here in 1959 and met with the ‘George Adamski Saucer Society’ set up in Timaru and his visit piqued the interest of the NZ Ministry of Defense. George’s impact on New Zealand ufology has been rather startling. One of the many well written biographies of Adamski’s life was authored in 2010 by my fellow Kiwi Tony Brunt, who though critical of Adamski’s character and general showmanship believed in his contact stories. New Zealand seems to have embraced the greatest conman in ufo history with open arms (we obviously like a rogue). Across the ditch, Australians (always a little more streetwise), appeared to have a large series of falling-outs over his appearance there. Indeed many Aussies were greatly worried about the hit their organizations would take in the credibility stakes by his being seen in association with them.

    As fate would have it George and I have crossed paths yet again. Because as CTKA followers know, a subject very close to my heart has been the Kennedy assassination which started in those tender teenage years I described earlier. Thus I had to chuckle when I came across a piece in Brunt’s book in which he claimed George met secretly with President Kennedy. Now alarmed as I was that NZ ufologists had greatly admired Adamski, the fact a fellow countryman could embarrass us so badly, left me deeply devastated. Thankfully I found that Brunt wasn’t alone in this crazy idea. People all over the globe (even some from Oz) had bought into this one. And luckily for my national pride, Brunt was positively mild when compared to some in this lot. As expected there are utterly no White House records, witnesses, nor even a mention from Kennedy’s posthumous ‘hack’ biographers like Richard Reeves and Sy Hersh about this. They would have if there had even been the merest sniff to associate JFK with the guy. To this end, an anonymous English critic of Adamski cuttingly noted “Adamski supporters also boast of a supposed secret meeting with JFK in Washington D.C. in which the former burger vendor briefed the President on the aliens’ concerns.”


    Space Brother Dulles: Did He Run Adamski?

    In his 1962 “Open Letter to Saucer Researchers” in Saucer News Davidson noted that Leon Stringwell had written in his ‘book’, the rather intriguing 1957 Inside Saucer Post…3-0 Blue: CRIFO Views the Status Quo: A Summary Report (pgs. 40-42), that Dulles himself would put an injunction against anyone appearing in court concerning Adamski’s book Inside The Space Ships. The injunction from Dulles apparently concerned author Thomas Eickhoff’s wanting the two unknown scientists Adamski had brought up in his publication to testify in a case charging Adamski with mail fraud for selling products which contained false claims.

    However, Timothy Good received a freedom of information Act request with some of Dulles’ actual comments concerning Eickhoff’s case. At first appearance it appears that Stringwell’s claims as used by Davidson may well be something of an exaggeration on behalf of Mr Eickhoff:

    Allen Welsh Dulles was Director of the CIA (DCI) from 1953 to 1961, and following a FOIA request to the Agency in 1984 I was sent a copy of a letter from Dulles to the Honourable Gordon H. Scherer, House of Representatives, Washington DC, dated 4 October 1955:

    The questions which Mr. Eickhoff has raised in his letter to you are largely outside of the jurisdiction of this Agency. Section 102(d) of the National Security Act of 1947 provides that the CIA shall have no police, subpoena, law-enforcement powers, or internal security. Insofar as Mr. Eickhoff appears interested in pursuing the problem of mail fraud in connection with George Adamski’s book entitled “Inside The Space Ships” it would appear to be a problem of law-enforcement, from which we are specifically barred by statute. CIA, as a matter of policy, does not comment on the truth or falsity of material contained in books or other published statements, and therefore it is not in a position to comment on Mr. Adamski’s book or the authenticity of the pictures which it contains. The subject matter of Mr Adamski’s book would appear to be more in the jurisdiction of the Department of Defense and the National Science Foundation.

    However, Good, who for a spell fell for the MJ-12 documents, is a well-known devotee of Adamski who even believes the tripe about his meeting Kennedy. He grossly misrepresented the context of Dulles’ statement. While it’s pretty obvious that this ‘fob off’ letter from Dulles to Congressman Scherer makes no mention of his threatening any blockage or legal proceedings, Eickhoff, is probably referring to the above message when he stated: “The answer that was forthcoming was so evasive that it even angered my very conservative lawyer friend.”

    As one will see in Stringwell’s work, the ‘injunction’ conversation appeared to have happened after this letter not before. Good states that there appears to be no more communication concerning this in the CIA’s files, and then being ever so helpful, gives a bunch of seemingly dead ends to pursue in the CIA’s Office of Scientific Intelligence. As we’ve seen, the problem here is that Good hadn’t figured out (or being a staunch ‘Adamskiite’ chose to ignore the fact) that Davidson had already written his suspicions on whom the two scientists in the saucer were. Because the names of Bloom and Maxwell were both given a big write up in Adamski’s book prior to Inside the Space Ships namely the equally infamous The Flying Saucers Have Landed. He should also have read the preface to his mentor’s book Inside the Space Ships, brought to my notice by Davidson. Here he would have seen that Adamski wrote to a correspondent Charlotte Blodgett:

    As I have told you I do have witnesses to one of my journeys in a Space craft. Both are scientists who hold high positions… When they believe that they can release the substantial information they have, without jeopardising either the national defence or themselves, they have said that they will do so through the press… they were with me at the request of the Brothers.

    Good doesn’t seem to grasp that not everything goes through bureaucratic channels. On one hand, there need not be anything sinister here. Either Dulles may well have had a phone conversation or sent a letter to either Eickhoff’s lawyer himself or via some intermediary like Scherer. But without an affidavit, from the attorney concerned, let alone an ID for him (not to mention the fact that he like Eickhoff have likely passed away by now) without direct physical evidence from their remaining relatives there’s no actual evidence that Dulles threatened any injunction concerning the scientists. As much much as a gullible and deceitful merchant of disinformation as Good appears to be, he may have gotten something right (quite by accident). Nevertheless, before spoiling that particular surprise, let’s take a little detour.


    The CI-Age of Innocence

    Until more information concerning Eickhoff becomes known I am content to wait. I take this stance ecause it appears that Adamski had no problems discussing his ties to the government in his work anyhow. The people he named in the Flying Saucers Have Landed were genuine government employers as confirmed in Davidson’s article “I Agree With Adamski”.

    Adamski also openly commented in lectures that he was cleared by the FBI and the USAF to say such things, and numerous accounts speak of his having some kind of diplomatic passport. While one could say this was conjecture cooked up by Adamski, who likely revelled in the attention that led Hoover and the FBI to admonish and threaten legal action against him. This is where American laws once again seem different from the rest of the world. Adamski, in a very Crisman and Palmer like way, would go on maintaining the same old connections without ever being prosecuted. Thus, of course the question comes down to whom was protecting Adamski or what be revealed about their monitoring of him. Martin Jeffrey’s comments in his article “The Mystery of George Adamski’’seem to be a little wayward at times concerning the man possibly being an FBI stooge, but his citing the following was very well done:

    In a later memorandum dated 12/10/53, Hoover is told by SAC, Los Angeles that Adamski produced a document having a blue seal in the lower left corner, at the top of which three names of Government agents appeared. The names were erased in the de-classified document.

    As Coppens said in his discussion of NICAP and its many ties to the agency, back then times were more innocent. Having the FBI or the CIA show interest in your work in the UFO or any other field, let alone to be seen as working with their associates in a public capacity, actually enhanced one’s credibility, not detracted from it. People had little idea about the potential for life anywhere in the solar system, we would not land on the moon till 1968, and it was not till the mid seventies that photos of Venus revealed it as a barren wasteland. Thus the chances of benevolent ‘honkies’ on another planet must have been deeply reassuring to white middle America (Just imagine the panic if Orthon, Adamski’s Venusian pal, had been Black?)

    Thus in the aforementioned NICAP’s halcyon days in the fifties and early sixties, the vast majority of its membership had little idea the agency wasn’t watching the stars, but watching for them. Now this is a major difference to the Kennedy arena. To say you are CIA in this neighbourhood and to say you believe in a conspiracy is the kiss of death for all but the most gullible JFK researchers. No one nowadays admits they’re agency anywhere, even when people like John McAdams advertises them on his website. In UFO circles, many ufologists still try to make contact with known CIA or intelligence staffers for all manner of little crumbs and titbits. There seems to be a massive disconnect between what the reality of intelligence agencies are and how much any given person within an organisation who can be accessed easily would ever know anyhow.

    Now returning to Adamski, these groups were likely not working with Adamski (nor did they like being bandied with him), but the plus side to making someone as clearly deluded as Adamski think he was on the ‘inside’ so to speak (like the far less fortunate Paul Benewitz whom we shall come across in later episodes) was that it drew attention to the likes of Adamski from foreign operatives and the aforementioned malcontents, who would waste their time by following him around and/or out themselves in approaching him. It also attracted public attention as the Australian ufologists of the fifties complained, and Jeffrey of the 21st century writes, it wasn’t a good thing:

    The well-publicized books immediately turned the very people who should be investigating the UFO phenomenon away: The scientists. George Adamski had single-handedly (with a little help from Howard Menger) succeeded in making the subject of UFOs so utterly ridiculous, no serious scientist would want to have anything to do with it.

    This is why even some cynics of Adamski admit some form of government interest. The links between Adamski and the CIA (utterly off putting by today’s standards) hardly deters people like the abysmal Michael Salla from promoting his friend and Adamski fanatic Neil Gould, who gives an interesting analogy of duel usage and mutual benefit between the two. I understand there will be people stating that Adamski simply made these connections up to increase his standing, and he may well have on occasion. But what I will say here is that his flamboyance was always going to get him noticed and approached in some way. I mean saying that Aliens preferred Communism and that Russia could decimate the US in a nuclear strike probably weren’t the smartest things to do.

    So, however anyone ‘cuts it’, the notion of Adamski becoming ensnared in something far bigger than himself is something worthy of serious consideration. Yet Davidson also goes one step further and suggests that Adamski was coerced into a drug induced faux contact/abduction. The problem here is that Davidson’s accusations occurred over twenty years before the revelations about MK-ULTRA ever came out.


    Aryans, Adamski, Abductions & Acid

    Before we begin this passage, I provide a word of caution. Adamski may well have been flat out lying about his experiences with his alien pals; or he was telling the truth. Davidson believed that this visitation actually happened. Of course Davidson’s ‘stick in the mud’ was he didn’t believe Adamski’s corny tale as having anything to do with extra terrestrials, but with an experiment conducted by the CIA.

    Thus, let us return yet again to Space Brother ‘Al’ Dulles and his violations of CIA protocol. While Dulles was writing his sanctimonious reply to Eickhoff in 1955, one of his most infamous ‘pet-projects’ MK-ULTRA had ‘officially’ been running since April of 1953. Its horrific rampage while supposedly stopping in the late sixties would not be discovered till the mid Seventies. The equally insidious (but infinitely more subtle) Operation Mockingbird we have touched on a number of times in this work, like MK Ultra, debuted in the late 1940’s. Adamski, by all accounts, appears to have been the perfect guinea pig for both, and its an equally good reason why there is no trace of Eickhoff’s or Dulles’s communication (nor why the CIA has so little information on Adamski). Because there is every chance that when Dulles’ loyal lieutenant Richard Helms burned thousands of incriminating documents related to MK-ULTRA in the seventies, that information also related to UFO contact/abductions.

    As early as July 1953, just three months after MK-ULTRA had gotten the ‘official’ go-ahead, Davidson started a series of communications with Adamski whose book The Flying Saucers Have Landed had also come out that year. Davidson’s article “Why I Believe Adamski” provides some of the first insights into all manner of silliness which could well have shaped the United States in the decades that followed:

    1. The contact/abductees wave of the mid fifties and sixties.
    1. Adamski’s use of cinematic images in his book.
    1. The Venusians Newsreel Adamski witnessed was, according to Davidson “a collection of film clips which someone from the film industry of California could have prepared” (pg. 6). Later, Davidson notes that Bloom and Maxwell (whose identities he confirmed and whose credentials he’d exposed) had the requisite skills to create such an illusion (pg. 8). In addition, looking at it Davidson is bang on the money. Maxwell in particular had been involved in all manner of photoreconnaissance, film analysis and technology, and unsurprisingly had worked in Hollywood himself.
    1. Potential use of hallucinogen’s on Adamski’s person (despite Davidson saying Adamski’s tale does not appear hallucinatory), he does mention Adamski’s curious taste sensations and his drinking of liquids upon arrival in the ‘craft’ and how they were given again on the hour. Davidson questions whether or not these are “medicinal” and containing a “stimulant or other drug” (pg. 6).
    1. Adamski was certain that with the “ Brothers’ help his message, via his book Inside the Space Ships would become ‘accepted’ and spread his message. Davidson cynically states it had received a ton of publicity and had gone through “three reprintings in three months” (pg. 8).
    1. Throughout Davidson’s allegations, a key question is one of targeting. Why was a harmless crank like Adamski targeted in the first place? It appears that through flattery and the promise of inside information the imaginative, overly confident cult leader was perfect fodder.

    Is it a coincidence as numerous Michael Shermer/Randi types like Peter Rogerson think that the first large spates of UFO contacts began at around the same time in the mid-fifties? Is it also a coincidence to Rogerson that Davidson asked Adamski in a letter if he had any idea that when his ‘Space Brothers’ left him that there was a spate of similar incidence in the US and Europe. Is it also a coincidence that the Adamski inspired ‘contactee’ Howard Menger, blatantly came out at one time and said the Pentagon was using him to test the reactions of people he bought to his house?


    Flight of the Nordics

    As mentioned in Preamble I, Dulles’s good old PSYOP pal C.D. Jackson became an integral part of the ufology scene, involving himself with the bizarre tale of Betty and Barney Hill’s abduction in late September 1961. Jackson and his pal Robert Hohmann came up with the idea that the Hills experienced ‘missing time’ (John Fuller, Interrupted Journey, 1966, pgs. 42-58). How about Jackson and Hohmann (who also met the Hills) then discussing An Historic Report from Life in Space?

    Arthur Young, for his part, turned up in Berkley California circa 1972 with his Institute For Public Consciousness Organization. Young, also endorsed the ludicrous Adamski ‘Plaedian-Nordic’ hypothesis. He soon had company. A year later the Industrial Church of the New World Comforter was formed by a commune leader called Allen Noonan (who changed it to the infinitely cooler Allen Michael). His first epiphany happened in 1947, (funnily enough, it was the year the CIA formed and Young left Bell Helicopters; not to mention that Kenneth Arnold’s sighting also occurred). Amidst the alien abduct/contactee madness in 1954, Adamski encountered ‘Nordic’ aliens in the desert.

    Steve Snider runs a well-written ‘Fortean’ style blog which touches on a number of issues surrounding UFO related PSYOPs. I asked him kindly if he could comment on the human appearance of the Aliens in both the Adamski and Hill scenarios.:

    It seems like dwarves were more popular in South America… Maybe Nordics were all we Yanks could handle. In general, I tend to agree that much of the UFO stuff is PSYOPs; many alien abductions certainly seem to serve no other purpose than inducing trauma… I mean, surely an advanced alien species capable of travelling across the galaxy would certainly have developed more effective medical procedures than the anal probe, or draining an entire cow of blood. It’s just too illogical to be extra-terrestrials. (Steve Snider email; 29/07/11)

    Now here’s the grand finale in all of this pertaining to Adamski and Dulles. One of Adamski’s closest adherents, Ms. Lou Zinsstag, claims to be the second cousin of Jung himself. Indeed, in her book co-authored with the extremely bad Tim Good, George Adamski the untold Story, a discussion with the famed psychologist about Adamski is a key feature. Nevertheless, Zinsstag went one-step further, she herself is the originator of ‘Adamski met Kennedy’ line… It’s a small world after all.


    A Repose

    Davidson’s investigations and his allegations of Agency involvement in elaborate hoaxes like the one he felt Adamski had been part of, was, for the time, even more outrageous than anything Adamski had claimed. And there are still a few people out there whom may well take offence to this piece. Alternatively, maybe not. I am encouraged by the growing wave of rationalist ufologists, open to meeting in the middle, and respecting other people’s areas of research. Yet, there has been elaborate plots and hoodwinks in all areas for eons. I advise anybody to check out the nefarious ‘False Flag’ activities of Ed Lansdale another student of Paul Linebarger.

    Lansdale’s plans in Indoneisa and North Vietnam for example, were on a scale far more elaborate than Adamski’s little drug induced voyages. I mean just check out Lansdale’s ideas for Jesus liberating Cuba.


    Onwards to a new Dawn: A final Note

    This list of kooks and cranks with ties to US intelligence I have mentioned throughout this article — Crisman, Oswald and Novel to Adamski and Zinstagg — are just the beginning of a dark slope that many like Mark Pilkington, Robin Ramsay, Jim Hougan, George Michael Evica, Charles Drago, Steve Snider and Greg Bishop, Bill Kelly and Bob Hastings, Larry Hancock and others have explored in more depth before myself. Whether or not you or I agree with everything said by these sorts of people is irrelevant. They all contain one simple common thread. That being, the vast majority of the people attaching themselves to contactee or UFO groups have never ever been experimented on and have no ties to the agency. These people may simply be traumatised, over imaginative, or trying to cash in on a craze, or make a quick buck or two. Perhaps there is a very small chance there may have been a genuine abduction somewhere at sometime not to mention an alien sighting. Nevertheless, I am going to state that from 1947 onwards the waters have been so badly muddied and outright contaminated by the Agency you can’t blame anyone for being cautious, and more than a little suspect.

    It is also important to mention that those in or near the Dulles circle need not be as evil as he was, nor in on the game. They may just as likely have been the victims. For example, I briefly mentioned Admiral Roscoe Hillenkotter’s becoming a board member of NICAP, in Part A. However, it seems that Hillenkotter genuinely believed in UFOs as a board member of NICAP. As Jon Ronson and Adam Curtis have explained in their works, numerous high-ranking people in military and intelligence circles have benevolent hearts, but brains of fruit. Take good-natured ‘pacifists’ like Artie Young, for instance. Unlike utterly cynical figures like Dulles, Jackson or Angleton he genuinely thought he was doing the ‘Lords work’ for the Agency. At one stage, he asked Bill Kelly to his face if he really was a Plaedian ‘Nordic’ alien coming to visit him. Now if this is where Young’s head was at, one has to wonder how easily he could have been manipulated or have had his organization infiltrated. Scarily there is a hell of lot of wealthy Art Young types out there waiting to be tapped. Just look at Laurance Rockefeller, whom while the Rockefeller foundation provided cover and apparently funds for MK-ULTRA related activities, became a big campaigner for UFO disclosure in the 1990’s.

    The debates about the CIA’s double dipping in the field now and the growing movement of individuals’ writing or commenting about is in direct contrast to the outrage Jacque Vale’s 1977 book Messengers of Deception caused when he criticised UFO believers for accepting any old dross thrown at them about abductions and criticised the sceptics for ignoring what the real implications are if the aliens are less than benevolent and all too human. Martin Cannon’s essay “The Controllers” about contact/abductees being MK-ULTRA victims created another hoopla, the intense criticism that he was subjected to promptly led him to disavow his own work and leave the UFO field. Cannon’s treatment, however you look at it and the often-misguided passions it creates, is an alarming testament to how powerful an influence Dulles and US intelligence had been in destroying any form of critical analysis in both devotee and sceptic camps. When Cannon was writing, Davidson’s observations of the CIA’s antics were not well known (indeed Cannon’s use of sources like Whitley Strieber beg some questions). Thus his work seemed to lack some direction. Yet the good work done by the likes of Pilkington, Bishop, Coppens, and Steve Snider have helped shed much light on this ludicrously taboo area.


    Overall Conclusion; What of Davidson

    Davidson seems to have understood from a very early stage that the CIA aided and abetted shaping realities like no other agency on earth. Other valid question have to be asked. Was Davidson some anti CIA conduit for information? Did he have some kind of protection? In the world of feuding intelligence agencies, it is difficult to tell what real information is and what is not; or more precisely, why is that information not coming out? On the other hand, was Davidson simply smart enough and ‘in the know’ so to speak? What is important is that Dulles did have enemies and critics within the circles of power he himself owned. Though as we have seen in Preamble I, Dulles quite clearly had the means to obfuscate and destroy individuals (if necessary) on any number of levels. Davidson’s accumulated works I believe would be a treasure trove of commentary like Colonel Fletcher Prouty, and Bob Lovett (a scion of the Eastern Establishment). How much Davidson wrote about the Kennedy assassination is another question in point and it would be fascinating to see his evolution within that field. These two essays in no way cover the gamut of all UFO experiences nor as I said do I have all the answers to UFOs abductions and sightings, however I am stunned Davidson is not more well known, and why it has taken so long for genuine abductions and contacts to not be seen as some type of human experimentation. Knowing the CIA’s predilections for the big scam, I’d go for that well before I ever contemplated anything extra terrestrial. It is testament of the power of the covert operatives that so many do not.

  • JFK and the Majestic Papers: The History of a Hoax, Preamble I



    Doctor Feel Good & Alien Dulles

    Introduction

    To start I shall focus on Allen Dulles’ role in the creation of the modern day UFO phenomenon. This was born out of the Cold War, which have had far reaching and, dare I say, negative consequences on society and on research into the Kennedy assassination and other such areas. One person who consistently wrote about the problems of the CIA playing ‘God’ at the time was an important lower rung establishment figure by the name of Dr. Leon Davidson, who implicated Dulles all the way through his research career. Both parts of this essay are based largely on his commentaries. This focus on Dulles, flies in the face of the accusations that Jim Angleton was involved in running the asinine MJ-12 program to cover up UFOs; in this regard there’s little evidence that Angleton himself was part of a ‘disinformation campaign’. Individuals like Angleton may have pulled a shift or two in the alien palaver promoting bogus UFO stories, but not in the crucial period between the end of WWII and Dulles becoming DCI in 1953. It seems the core people behind Dulles pushing the original UFO agenda were Charles Cabell and CD Jackson, with important if indirect roles coming from Frank Wisner and Dulles’s brother John Foster upon Eisenhower’s election in 1952.


    Dr. ‘Feel Good’ Notes a Diversion

    “It should not come as a surprise that Davidson suffered persecution by the CIA. This is extremely telling when compared to the lack of action taken against other researchers who claim that the CIA and other agencies are engaged in a massive cover-up concerning alien contact. So it’s okay to say that the CIA is hiding little green men, but when you say the CIA has concocted the story of little green men, the CIA hunts you down…”

    -Phil Coppens, A Lone Chemist’s Quest to Expose the UFO Cover-Up

    “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.”

    -Mark Pilkington, Weapons of Mass Deception

    The fine work of Mark Pilkington and Phil Coppens concerning the studies of Los Alamos scientist and Manhattan Project participant Dr Leon Davidson have bought much needed clarity and scope to the UFO equation. Davidson, whom enjoyed some small fame as a commentator on the subject, had begun investigating and tabulating all manner of UFO interactions in 1949 (and researching those prior). He had grave suspicions about the CIA’s involvement with disinformation concerning UFOs and all manner of PSYOPs (Psychological Operations) well ahead of his time.

    Indeed, Davidson, often without knowing it, seems to have passed comment on both Operation Mockingbird and a certain infamous CIA drug induced program, years before they ever came to light. Davidson appears to have been open to the possibility of alien UFOs, but seems to have always believed in their being man made. He campaigned to have the government release unpublished documents pertaining to projects in the fifties namely Project Blue Book Special Report No. 14. But what’s odd is that he soon felt that he had been a conduit for US intelligence passing off false data about the US military’s use of captured alien technology. When we consider that most ufologists of the time (represented by Davidson’s friend Col Don Keyhoe), would have considered this a major triumph (as many still do), we can see the difference in thinking that separated Davidson from his peers, then and now.

    Phil Coppens has done a great job of straightening out Davidson’s seemingly hasty writing style which, though insightful, could sometimes come across as unintentionally kooky or specious due to his prose style. A case in point is a piece by Davidson from 1977 which can be seen in the article The CIA and the Saucer. Davidson’s interest in Dulles and the CIA’s involvement in a number of UFO related areas led him to make some seemingly odd calls concerning the Lonnie Zamora, Socorro, UFO incident years before in 1964. Namely that the ensign seen on the vessel spelled out ‘CIA’ and was also an anagram for Allen Dulles. Davidson notes that it was either the CIA having a joke, or another agency (like the DIA or the FBI) pulling a prank to try and draw attention to the CIA’s nefarious dealings in the area. Now, while the famed Dr. J. Allen Hynek seems to be in agreement with Davidson concerning the logo, I personally agree with Phil Klass that anything could be made out of the name (no, I am not an advocate of Klass).

    The FBI (whom he opined could have been in on the prank) as we know were busy elsewhere. Davidson fails to note that the famed Socorro sighting occurred at the same time as the Warren Commission was moving into high gear. Nor did he mention that his Public Enemy Number One, Allen Dulles, was in on that one as well. This omission aside, Davidson hits on a very real and important observation (even if he missed the point himself in this case). That being that the CIA seemed to be wheeling out and utilizing UFO stories as if on cue to divert the public’s gaze at certain opportune moments.

    Thanks to this sort of sighting John McCone, whom had been head of the CIA since 1961, embarked upon an investigation of UFOs using the CIA’s, OSI (Office of Scientific Investigation) that year. The spate of UFO sightings in and around 1965-1967, caused a brand new UFO flap which resulted in the USAF commissioning the Condon Report (supposedly the final word on the issue). One year after Davidson wrote his article a well known civil case taken by a group led by journalist Ted Zechel released a number of documents from a number of agencies. Indeed Roswell resurfaced that year, 1978, thanks to the efforts of government disinformation agent Bill Moore whom was encouraged by Stanton Friedman to explore the long forgotten crash. Moore published his book The Roswell Incident in 1980. This renewed interest in the paranormal occurred in and around when the HSCA stated that there had been probable conspiracies in the JFK and MLK case. The following year, 1979, a Cuban exile in Miami, Filberto Cardenas, had a hilariously lame abduction tale which got big news.

    Davidson was deeply affected by and interested in the Kennedy assassination. He was a passionate supporter of Richard E. Sprague’s People and the Pursuit of Truth publication. He also appears to be one of the first people to raise mention of the Chicago plot and a possible French connection to one of the assassins (Davidson, People and the Pursuit of Truth Vol. 2, No. 5 September, 1976, pg. 7.)


    Alien Dulles, the original Martian

    Coppens and an increasing chorus of others have pointed out that, in the early years of UFOs, most researchers believed them to be man-made objects. Those whom believed in their being of ‘alien’ origin were part of a ‘kooky’ minority. Yet, Davidson and those like him, who were open to yet sceptical of the ET answer to the equation, found themselves effectively swallowed up by the complex machinations of Allen Dulles. As we shall see, Dulles played all sides of the UFO angle. When he, without doubt the single most influential individual in the history of US intelligence, truly became involved in the espionage field is a veritable black hole and worthy of another study altogether. He worked for the fledgling US intelligence operation prior to and during WWI and again for the US under the banner of the more organised OSS (Office of Strategic Services) in WWII. In both conflicts, his base was Switzerland, an extremely important location in both conflicts. Dulles was therefore an integral part of both the OSS and the CIA from their inceptions and would go on to become the CIA’s longest serving DCI.

    Prior to its establishment, the CIA had been the aforementioned OSS and briefly, the CIG (Central Intelligence Group). Little is actually known of the OSS and CIG’s interest in the examination of UFOs. However, it’s utterly inconceivable the OSS didn’t take notice of the now famed ‘foo fighter’ sightings by Axis and Allied pilots from the early forties onwards. Neal H. Petersen who studied and compiled highlights from Dulles’ wartime correspondence with various OSS officials, wrote on page 37 of From Hitlers Doorstep: The Wartime Intelligence Reports of Allen Dulles that “OSS Bern reported frequently on the development of Secret Weapons by the Nazis.” Dulles wrote that the Germans were working on a “flying contraption perhaps in the form of an aerial torpedoin February of 1943, a year before the V1 and V2 rockets hit London. These intelligence reports came by way of a fellow called Fritz Kolbe codenamed ‘George Wood’. Kolbe, would also go on to furnish Dulles with plans for the Nazi ME 262 jet fighter. What is curious is that while Agency friendly writers have been quite prepared to discuss the V1 and 2 rockets, they barely raise an eyebrow about Dulles’ involvement in procuring this information. We all know of Dulles’ acquisition of the German military intelligence officer, General Reinhardt Gehlen. Not to mention those very rocket scientists Dulles had begun hearing about in early 1943, whisked away in Operation Paperclip. Let’s not forget the fact that there are documents detailing Nazi drug experimentation in places like the Dachau ‘Hilton’. Experiments which documentation of became available almost immediately after the war, and which and play an interesting role in Part II of this essay.

    But for all Dulles learned during the war, it likely pales in comparison to when he took control of intelligence in post war West Germany. The many Nazi secrets he then discovered, and precisely what he learned, we may never really know. What is apparent is that by the time the United States Army Air Force Intelligence started to hunt down all manner of abandoned top-secret German aircraft at the war’s end in 1945, Dulles and the OSS seem to have been one-step ahead.


    Ken Arnold and How to Stiff the USAF

    I just mentioned Project Paper Clip, and I really don’t want to. Why? Well I cannot overstate the amount of crazed disinformation there is in regards to a whole matter of uber-conspiracy authors on that subject. It is true the Nazis likely experimented with anti-gravity, but after over seventy years, we only have an inkling of what the US had and when they actually began test flights (Igor Wikowski & Nick Cook: UFOs The Secret Evidence, 2005). Also the Nazis have been given far too much credit by fantasist elements for the invention of what we would call UFO craft, as a number of individuals and companies had also begun making designs and prototypes of unconventional aircraft in the US prior to WWII.

    Northrop’s own Flying Wing Bombers (whose ‘flying wing’ design would eventually evolve into the B-2 Stealth Fighter) had been in development since the 1930’s; around the same time as the German equivalent the Horten IX, which apparently became the first flying wing jet flight in late 1944 or early 1945. Therefore, there is an extensive history of unconventional aircraft and mankind’s experimentation with them, interest in them dating back years before the Kenneth Arnold incident. I am in agreement with Coppens, Pilkington, Davidson and an increasing amount of others, that what Arnold saw that fateful June day in 1947 was more than likely entirely man made (I feel much the same way about Roswell). Indeed, in 1947, the year the CIA came into being, there were numerous UFO sightings.

    UFOs possess speed and agility that apparently outmatch anything we have. While speed can often only be estimated, its the uncanny agility of these aircraft operating at high speeds which have long been considered the ‘ET’ component of their flight. However, as we can see here, machines don’t bother about G-Forces like humans do. Of course the discussion in the previous link is based on 21st Century understandings and technology, yet Greg Bishop discusses that Nikolai Tesla himself operated a radio control boat in 1895. While Mark Pilkington notes that UAVs (Unmanned Aerial Vehicles) had been in mainstream use since the 1930’s, and had started out being used as far back as WWI. It’s also interesting to note that Lt. Joe Kennedy Jr, President Kennedy’s older brother, was a WWII pilot who was tragically killed in a classified experiment with radio controlled craft in 1944.

    Thus it wasn’t just many designs that had been tested, but technologies like radio control that were still relatively unknown to the post war public that had been explored for decades before the Arnold sightings on June the 24th, 1947. This started the modern day UFO phenomena. Whether the objects he saw that day were an alien entity, an infamous Vought ‘flying flap jack’ XF5U or a VI73, as Pilkington and Davidson say Arnold saw, some variation of the Northrop or a captured German Horten HO IX model, a prototype glider, or a UAV. All this is open to debate.

    But there’s also a question that hasn’t been properly asked. Thus we return to Kenneth Arnold. Arnold himself was reluctant to go down the Extra Terrestrial avenue (except when dollar signs were shown it seems). He also has an interesting story to tell. When Arnold saw the UFOs he also saw a DC-4 in the same vicinity as the objects. Yet, no effort I know of has ever been made to track this plane down or interview it’s occupants. Arnold was a well respected businessman, search and rescue pilot, and was a Deputy Sheriff whom worked closely with his local police department, aided in prison transfers, was a part time Federal Marshall, by all accounts had a number of contacts in the US military, and was close friends with Colonel Paul Wieland with whom he investigated pollution of the Salmon fisheries.

    Now no conversation about Kennedy and UFOs would be complete without mentioning this incident. After Kenneth Arnold’s sighting, he went on to investigate the Maury Island hoax which had occurred some three days before Arnold’s own encounter. Arnold was paid two hundred dollars to come and investigate the claims of Harold Dahl and Fred Crisman, by one Ray Palmer, editor of Amazing Stories and the man who invented the term ‘flying saucers’. I ask the reader to forget all the dross pitched over the Maury Island topic by the likes of Joseph Farrell, Kenn Thomas and Peter Levenda. I also advise the reader to tread carefully around references to the contentious ‘easy papers’. Just read Coppens’ breakdown of the topic, entitled “The Strangest UFO encounter,,,or a hoax?”. It’s far superior to anything pitched by this sad bunch concerning Maury Island.

    According to Coppens, Davidson himself contacted Jim Garrison concerning the nefarious activities of Fred Lee Crisman and Ray Palmer. In the mid 40’s Crisman had written a letter to Palmer and got it published in his magazine concerning all manner of bizarre encounters concerning one Richard Sharpe Shavers’s Lemuria and other fantastic stories. Palmer caught Davidson’s eye no less than five years before Garrison began digging around the case. In his ‘Open Letter to Saucer Researchers’ article on page 4 Davidson writes:

    The June 1947 Maury Island (Tacoma, Washington) sighting did not become widely known until after the secret Grudge Report was released in 1949. (Released only to the Military and the AEC. It was not — and is not yet — available to the public.) The Maury Island incident was referred to by the Rand Corporation in its chapter of the Grudge Report. The Maury Island affair is fully described in the book by Kenneth Arnold and Ray Palmer. (And thus Palmer is associated with the earliest stages of the flying saucer story.)

    One question the majority of people never ask in this case about Crisman and his companion Dahl is why they would both admit that the Maury Island incident was a hoax to an Air force investigation team. Now I do not know how things work in the United States, but were someone from say Canada to pull a prank on the local Air Force, let alone one which resulted in the deaths of two brave airmen in the area of Kelso nearby the sighting as a grown adult, they would likely be prosecuted, fined, and imprisoned. Furthermore, there is a high likelihood he would be publicly shamed in the press nationwide for doing so. Screwing with one’s military outside of the US is that big of a deal for the rest of us. In particular when this is on record as being the reconstituted USAF’s first ever fatal plane crash.

    That Crisman, Dahl, and in particular Palmer (whom knew of Crisman’s predilection for tall stories yet still promoted the incident) all got off ‘Scot free’ for pulling this stunt, and then went on to cash in on this purportedly ‘childish’ prank, is shocking, but this seems to be how things are done in America. There is a curious cultural precedent for this type of weirdness. You may recall the US Marines once let an avowed Communist monitor their top-secret U-2 spy flights over Russia and let him return home after promising to divulge state secrets, and that a fellow by the name of Gordon Novel never faced prosecution for his running interference in Jim Garrison’s trial. In the modern era, we have individuals falsifying government documents like MJ-12 then profiteering from them, yet not a finger has been raised against these people either. Don Ecker, one of the few UFO people to have written cautiously on the topic of Fred Crisman made this statement which I believe is very pertinent: “Had these men been exposed, Garrison would have unsealed the Pandora’s Box on flying saucers, which, if it had occurred, would have forever ripped away the then nearly 20-year-old mythic fabric wrapping the UFO mystery — a veil since used to great benefit by the military to conceal the testing of classified aircraft.”

    And what of Kenneth Arnold? If the UFO Hunters did anything well with their abjectly awful show it was getting hold of Barry Fisher the great nephew of one of the victim’s Lieutenant Frank Brown. Fisher explained his uncle was not just an investigator but was involved in ‘counter espionage’, and further, that they gave his uncle’s personal belongings and military ID to Mr. Arnold. A fact which no one has explained to my satisfaction


    The Sound of PSYOPs

    Let’s return now to our Dear Mr. Dulles. While Dulles was interested in the analysis and development of weapons like the ME 262 and the V1 and 2 rockets, it didn’t really float his boat. It was in the dark arts of covert and psychological operations that Allen’s heart really was. In Davidson’s March 1962 address “An Open Letter to Saucer Researchers” he quotes Captain Edward Ruppelt of Project Bluebook (and author of the 1956 “Report On Unidentified Flying Objects”) as having wrote that Allen Dulles had become interested in the use of flying saucers as ‘psychological weapons’ as early as 1950. While I could not find this mention of Dulles in Ruppelt’s book anywhere, Davidson was likely referring to comments made by Ruppelt in his personal correspondance with him. Either way, Ruppelt and Davidson were correct about Dulles growing interest, but as we have seen they were likely off by some 6 or 7 years.

    No one should be surprised about Dulles’ proclivities. He’d had a well known lifelong fascination with mass psychology and was by all accounts an admirer and associate of the insidious Edward Bernays, and the man he inspired, Josef Goebbels. Dulles was also close friends with one of psychology’s most famous pioneers: Carl Jung, who became fascinated with the subject of UFOs and wrote the much vaunted Flying Saucers: A Modern Myth of Things Seen in the Skies in 1959. However, in terms of the biggest influence on Dulles’ use of them, or more precisely how to use them one cannot overlook the highly influential writings of PSYOP specialist Paul Linebarger whose 1948 book Psychological Warfare is a classic in the intelligence field. It should be mentioned that Linebarger’s hobby was writing science fiction. Linebarger wrote under the pen name ‘Cordwainer Smith’ and his writings, which predate Jung’s, show a very real connection between UFOs and religious expression. Dulles was also fascinated by religion, and throughout his time in intelligence he infiltrated all manner of religious institutions and organisations (as noted here). We can see the potential for Dulles’ abuse of the idea and the creation of a cultural phenomena. Quite simply the CIA’s use of advanced studies into psychology and a vast black budget helped the CIA become the most successful and lethal advertising agency in the world.

    Now, Walter Bedell-Smith is viewed as being the first person to envisage the CIA using UFOs as potential PSYOPs via this message he sent to Raymond Allen, head of the PSB (Psychological Strategy Board) in 1952:

    I am today transmitting to the national security council a proposal in which it is concluded that the problems connected with the UFOs appear to have implications for psychological warfare as well as for intelligence and operations… I suggest that we discuss at an early board meeting the possible offensive and defensive utilization of these phenomena for psychological warfare purposes.

    The reality is that the decision to utilize UFOs for psychological purposes likely happened sometime earlier than even Davidson suggested, and well before Bedell Smith ever cottoned on to the idea. It likely started in the bowels of the OSS immediately during the war with an increase in sightings of unidentifiable aircraft. C.D. Jackson of Time-Life was a man with an extensive PSYOPs background and had a major role in the formation of that organisation, not to mention that of it’s follow up group, the Operations Coordinating Board (OSB), in 1953. He was also involved with the dubious NICAP organisation that interviewed Betty and Barney Hill about their alien abduction story in 1961. (See the book The Interrupted Journey, which was adapted into the 1975 TV film The UFO Incident.)


    Mockingbirds from Mars

    In Davidson’s examination he clearly implies that a Life magazine issue that Marilyn Monroe appeared on the cover of and which contained numerous articles discussing bogus sightings from 1947 onwards (a reproduction of one of those articles can be found here) was part of what seemed to be a disinformation campaign. As we have discussed in the case of Ray Palmer, Davidson was clearly suspicious of a collusion between the media and the CIA, well before the revelations of Operation Mockingbird in the seventies and revelations of the intensely cosy relationship Dulles had with both C.D. Jackson editor/publisher of Time-Life, and and it’s owner Henry Luce. A formidable figure in Mockingbird was Dulles’ earliest right hand man, Frank Wisner. It was Wisner, who formed the CIA satellite OPC (Office of Policy Coordination) in 1948. This became the CIA’s covert operations branch, and it was in and around the same time that Operation Mockingbird became a formalized series of media relationships.

    The links between the Time-Life, publishing empire of Henry Luce, his closeness to the OPC, Dulles and the Kennedy assassination are well known. But there is more. For starters one of Dulles’ most loyal assets was Clare Booth Luce (Henry’s wife). While ambassador to Italy she saw a UFO but had no idea what it could be. (Ruppelt, The Report on Unidentified Flying Objects, pg 238). Ruth Paine, the woman at the centre of Oswald’s rise to infamy in Dallas, had ties to the CIA and Dulles through a series of family friendships. Allen was close friends with family friend Mary Bancroft whilst she was his employee in Switzerland during the war years. Michael Paine’s mother re-married ‘ace’ Bell Helicopter designer Arthur Young, who became Michael’s stepfather at 18. Young himself would become noted for embracing and promoting all manner of George Adamski type ‘touchy feely’ alien-astrology ideas.


    Airforce + UFO + Investigations = CIA

    With heavy PSYOP backing and loyal media assets in tow, not to mention key insiders placed within the Truman and Eisenhower administrations, it appears that Dulles and his cabal pulled of one of the greatest ongoing cons in the bureaucratic history of the time, and its cultural ramifications have been massive. The United States Airforce studies on the UFO phenomena officially began in 1948 with Project SIGN. However, it seems that SIGN really began in 1946 under its original name ‘Saucer’. SIGN was replaced by Project Grudge in 1948. What was significant about it was it showed a division between those in the Air Force who believed UFOs had to be of Russian manufacture or extra-terrestrial. Grudge changed under the encouragement of Lieutenant General Charles Cabell, the then head of the AFOSI (Air Force Office of Special Investigations), which was the Air Force’s in house intelligence arm. Cabell apparently wanted the extra-terrestrial aspect of the case to be taken more seriously. This happened and Project Bluebook enjoyed a successful transition under what ufologists describe as its most successful era under Captain Edward Ruppelt. He is the individual credited as coining the term ‘UFO’. Project Bluebook with Ruppelt at its helm ran from 1951-1953. Though Bluebook, would continue long after Ruppelt left, it became an ongoing joke as a debunking apparatus of the USAF until its dissolution in 1969.

    Many ufologists put the death of Ruppelt’s Bluebook down to the CIA led Robertson Panel in January of 1952. The Panel essentially set out to discredit incidents on the periphery of Bluebook and Ruppelt’s investigations. But it is also true that since Kenneth Arnold’s sighting near Mount Rainier in Washington State, the public had gone saucer-crazy, not to mention that the CIA were indeed concerned about the use of saucers being used to create confusion in the face of a Soviet attack (pg. 25) “We cite as examples the clogging of channels of communication by irrelevant reports, the danger of being led by continued false alarms to ignore real indications of hostile action, and the cultivation of a morbid national psychology in which skilful hostile propaganda could induce hysterical behaviour and harmful distrust of duty constituted authority.”

    It’s not a lie either that just a page earlier the CIA recommended civilian UFO groups be monitored for potentially subversive activities (ibid, 24):

    The Panel took cognizance of the existence of such groups as the “Civilian Flying Saucer Investigators” (Los Angeles) and the “Aerial Phenomena Research Organization” (Wisconsin).  It was believed that such organizations should be watched because of their potentially great influence on mass thinking if widespread sightings should occur. The apparent irresponsibility and the possible use of such groups for subversive purposes should be kept in mind. 

    Pre 9/11 this sort of thing sounds extremely odious. However, it gets better before it gets worse. For the sake of effect, I omitted until now the Robertson Panel’s discussions on how to educate the public that UFOs were an explainable phenomena, i.e. utilizing Hollywood studios like the Jam Handy Co. (who made propaganda films for the military during WWII) and Disney, not to mention making broad comments like “This education could be accomplished by mass media such as television, motion pictures, and popular articles.” (ibid, 20-21).

    While Ruppelt’s era is seen by many in the UFO field as some last gasp against secrecy, the reality is — and its one that many ufologists’ simply don’t want to entertain for the life of them — that Ruppelt himself later wrote in his book, and to Davidson, that he felt he had merely been the figurehead for an investigation and was being used as little more than a PR man. Davidson’s observations on the relocation of Washington’s jet air cover and Ruppelt’s humiliating story of trying to investigate the famous 1952 Washington UFO sightings are hilarious, as Coppens observes:

    Davidson was working in Washington that year and saw classified photographs of a certain Navy guided missile which in itself disproved the Air Force denials that the US had no devices that looked like UFO sightings reported by the public. He also questioned several “incidents” that occurred during the “invasion”: jet interceptors were removed from Andrews Air Force (4 miles from Washington) to New Castle Delaware (90 miles) in the time framework of the sightings, so that no visual confirmation was possible. Did someone make use of this window to stage a UFO wave?

    In his 1959 expose in a Saucer Scoop article ‘ECM+UFO=CIA’ Davidson explained that UFO identification with radars was fraught with all manner of problems (least of all the USAF had long been utilising Electromagnetic Counter Measures to train their own and swindle enemy radar operators). He quotes from an article in Aviation Research and Development circa 1957:

    …paths, and velocities can … simulate … realistic flight paths… Speeds up to 10,000 knots (about 11,500 mph) 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.

    Davidson also surmised that the “skilful hostile propaganda” which “could induce hysterical behaviour” and the irresponsibility of UFO organisations was due in large part to the very intensive disinformation, nay ‘education’ the CIA themselves had helped spread about UFOs existing, right throughout the media in a classic case of subterfuge or ‘paradox’, as Mark Pilkington explains here. By 1954 James Angleton had risen to become the head of counter intelligence and within two years some large civilian organisations emerged, the biggest of which was NICAP (National Investigation Committee on Aerial Phenomena). Formed by supposedly reputable and balanced science types. But with Dulles, it should come as no surprise that the board was riddled with numerous individuals involved in CIA counter intelligence theatres. As all of whom seemed to have either pushed for ET answers to the UFO question or utterly ridiculed the notion. Laying the foundations for the modern day extremist debates between the two sides. Eventually voices excluded or marginalised from this sort of debate were people like our very own Dr. Leon Davidson.

    Lamentations aside, the first head of the CIA, Admiral Roscoe Hillenkotter (1947-1950) himself joined NICAP in 1957. This is where it gets interesting, and I’ll reiterate this point later. What I feel Davidson and Coppens didn’t explain is that intelligence work is extremely compartmentalised. Only the very senior figures know what the overall plan of any operation actually is. It is precisely this lack of knowledge pertaining to this most basic of intelligence credos that have led many people, in particularly ufologists, to concoct grand conspiratorial narratives within which JFK-MJ-12 type fantasies abound, or are encouraged. Davidson and Coppens undoubtedly knew this, but their writing on this issue leads to the type of bogus conspiracy evangelist generalisations, namely the idea that practically ‘everyone’ is in on any given plot.

    While Hillenkoetter’s tenure as DCI, is noted for his astute navigation of the bureaucratic minefields in Washington, and it was Hillenkotter who was also behind the CIA’s unmandated covert operations at the behest of then Secretary of Defense James Forrestal. Yet, Hillenkotter (whom had been deeply reluctant to take the position as DCI of the CIA), was ill at ease about the agency operating outside of it’s original mandate. Forrestal, who had worked with both the Dulles brothers in the formation of the aforementioned CIA satellite OPC, shared no such concern.

    That annoying little detour aside, Hillenkoetter, much like John McCone some eleven years later, really had no idea of the rather lethal capabilities of the persons underneath him. But he got the picture pretty sharply. Major D.H. Berger’s study The Use of Covert Paramilitary Activity as a Policy Tool is a useful insight into the politics of covert operations of this era. As are Col Fletcher Prouty’s commentaries. Hillenkotter appears to have wanted the CIA to have more oversight and coordinate its activities with other agencies; he also struggled with the idea of the CIA operating outside it’s mandate.


    Comrade Cabell, in the Cabal

    Let us return to a key figure in the early days of UFO investigations, the aforementioned General Charles Cabell who had been the inspiration behind the creation of Grudge in 1949 and Bluebook in 1951. The signing of the 1947 National Security Act by Harry Truman made the United States Air Force independent from the army. However, the longhorns in the OSS and the CIA, knew how to take advantage of the situation when the AFOSI (Air Force Office of Special Investigations) was formed in 1948. Thereupon, one Charles Cabell stepped up to bat. In addition, he did not just bat, he hit it out into, well, space. Cabell, you can recall, had caused a great stir about the existence of UFOs, according to Ruppelt, by calling a high-level meeting with all his top staff about the issue (Ruppelt, The Report on Unidentified Flying Objects, pgs. 92-94). However, in 1951 he had moved on to the position of director of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. By 1953 at Dulles’ ascension to the top job in the agency seemingly out of the blue, Cabell became Allen Dulles’ DDCI, going on to become the longest serving deputy in the CIA’s history. Cabell, whom had become an associate of Dulles since WWII, and was intensely loyal to him, had absolutely no problem whatsoever with the CIA’s sticking the knife into the USAF over the very time wasting UFO investigations that he himself had called for. Cabell played Judas to perfection. and while most biographical sketches tout Cabell’s organizational ability, this seems to be only one aspect of the man. He was part of a complex disinformation campaign designed to spread confusion about UFOs throughout the US power structure itself, and if we recall Davidson’s comment about being shown the 1952 Tremonton, Utah film, well that was hardly an exclusive, it was actually hocked around the Pentagon and other places by the CIA.


    Keeping the Brakes On the Imagination

    While one could wax lyrical about the sinister brilliance of the Dulles gang’s machinations in befuddling the state with UFOs, one has to really put the brakes on here. There are a myriad number of legitimate security reasons for the rather elaborate deceptions they pulled in governmental and citizen circles. Furthermore, all intelligence agencies were doing something dirty in and around the area. The CIA quite simply was well organised, had the media onside, and had lots more cash. Pilkington explains much of this in his excellent, “Weapons of Mass Deception” article.

    For instance, here was much discussion of the US’s inability to see behind the Iron Curtain and from at least 1952 onwards the USAF had planned for a series of competing tenders to create a high tech super sonic surveillance aircraft. Cabell would have been well aware of these endeavours and aspirations at this time. He also would have been aware of Curtis LeMay, and of the SAC’s reluctance to cut the CIA in on any counter surveillance action. This would lessen in later years as Colonel Fletcher Prouty explains that a number of CIA men were able to infiltrate the higher ranks of military circles via Air Force General LeMay, with PSYOP king Ed Lansdale being the most prominent. Eventually, by 1955, the CIA, the USAF, and Lockheed Martin had agreed on a course of action from which one time Atomic Energy Commission land near Groom Lake, Nevada would be used and the infamous Area 51, not to mention the U2 spy plane, would emerge in 1955-1956. However much credit Richard Bissell takes for managing the U2 spy flights, the forgotten heroes of the interdepartmental dirty war from the late forties till the U2 flights began really seem to be General Charles Cabell’s quite brilliant ducking and diving in Pentagon circles. Allen Dulles, whom though initially reluctant about the flights, with help from his brother appears to have gotten Eisenhower onside and kept the U2 a civilian CIA operation.

    The Dulles cabal played the Wurlitzer and created false stories for their own benefit. This eventually blew back to influence official policy or inflame civic concern, or manipulate either side of a debate (often over nothing at all). This was the epitome of what a PSYOP was like, and what Mockingbird was all about. With Dulles’s allies, whom had been well entrenched in the media and military circles for decades, combined with the influence of his brother John Foster Dulles and their other Eastern Establishment buddies, he simply took advantage of the disorganization and the governments fixation on the ‘red menace’ to create an additional often benevolent Alien one. It’s ramifications have been felt ever since as explained in the important “Alien Overlords” article by Coppens which provides a vitally important back drop for everything I am going to cover in the essay, and from which I quote the following statement.

    UFO incidents, did not evolve around whether or not UFOs were alien spacecraft, or, whether or not, ET crashed in Roswell and the Air Force put his tiny, grey body on ice. The UFO psychological warfare was a display by a small group of people, who pretended to have a big secret; a big secret they pretended to have the power to shield from the public as a whole, and the President and his entourage in specific. It was a mechanism whereby even the President was led to believe there were men somewhere in his government whom he had to fear tremendously. The latter was true – but not because they were in possession of alien beings. In truth, it was — and is — nothing more than an exercise in power, in which a myth was created, then promoted, then apparently covered-up, even though each cover-up was a confirmation of the existence of the myth, so that we would believe. In truth, it was an empty secret.
  • JFK and the Majestic Papers: The History of a Hoax, Introduction



    First a Warning

    If someone would like to take a good no nonsense look at the history of the MJ-12 documents I advise reading this overview from Phil Coppens. Bar his comments concerning the ‘real MJ-12’ being behind the false documents, it provides another important backdrop for what you shall read herein.

    I’d like to point out before we go on that: no, CTKA is not turning into some Fortean organisation. I’m just going to speak a few home truths to some of the more imaginative types out there concerning something very sacred to ufologists. How, since 1947 the CIA rather than starving you from accessing them, have actually force fed you with it.

    Like the vast majority of JFK researchers, I am not an ufologist. I don’t pretend to speak for anyone in this area either. Nevertheless, I don’t believe a fake UFO invasion will be used to unite the world under a one-world government. That fake invasion (that the likes of Alex Jones and other conspiracy magnets bleat on about) and that one world corporation have already happened. Because if the mainstream media is prepared to present balanced discussions about UFOs and whether God exists, then surely a balanced discussion covering cosmically irrelevant issues like the potential for a planned murder of a head of state, and a few others aspiring to benefit all humanity, wouldn’t even be a trifle, or even an afterthought at that.

    I believe we went to the moon and I’m a believer in the Drake equation, not to mention an admirer of the likes of Greg Bishop, Mark Pilkington, Larry Hancock, Bill Kelly, Robert Hastings (despite his disagreements with Bishop) and (with particular regards to this essay) Phil Coppens. His work, though poorly referenced, does bear up to scrutiny and has been an excellent resource. This is why I’m puzzled that the terminally appalling Nexus Magazine never picked up on him, nor seemed to have learned anything from him, instead being mates with David Hatcher Childress. Thanks to the efforts of those above, I find myself in a comfortable place of 90 percent sceptic and 10 percent ‘open to anything’ as far as UFOs go… okay, maybe 12. I blame this on my discovery of Bob Hastings. Without Hastings’ work in outing the liars involved with the MJ-12 hoax some years ago this field would be all the poorer.

    I also admire the above individuals for not falling for the perpetrators of the JFK-MJ-12 documents and their work in outing them. It appears that the Dulles cabal in the CIA created a powerful myth with UFOs that they have since used as a diversion both internally and externally for myriad purposes, not just the obfuscation of secret weapons and aircraft, but have nurtured a powerful social phenomenon. Both the Kennedy assassination and UFOs are massive cultural happenings that pervade practically everything in Western Civilisation. However, for all of this, the Kennedy assassination and UFOs are and will always be two different areas of study, bar sharing some of the same progenitors of UFO disinformation. Sadly, many people have made the mistake of conjoining the two in some mega plot utilising the MJ-12/Torbitt Document/Gemstone Files inspired nonsense.

    The Layout of the Essay

    Students of the JFK case, like my self have largely ignored the comings and goings on of those inhabiting Zeta Reticuli, and dare I say most of the time, with very good reason. But with regards to this ongoing JFK-MJ-12 mess we really shouldn’t have. This foreword serves to provide something of a backdrop to the madness herein. It’ll give a series of brief and not so brief looks into the current explosion of JFK-MJ-12 hype, the leeches that have fed off it, the origins of said documents, and a clarification of where I stand on the issue of UFOs. More specifically, I shall adress this topic in the following sections:

    Preamble I and II seek to provide a backdrop to Scientist Leon Davidson, who made a number of alarming accusations against the CIA’s whipping up UFO mania. In turn, he created a powerful cultural phenomena–picked up by other agencies who know a good thing when they see it–that is to hide, subvert and confuse all manner of issues within and outside of the government. I would like to point out that I am well aware that there is much conjecture on the topics I bring up. I have tried as best I could to provide some antecedent or give a relevant example to any points made. I hope that the reader will appreciate my honesty in this regard as far too many individuals covering this ground mistake their own fantasies and musings for reality (I hope Richard Dolan and Joseph Farrell read this). All I aspire to is that in putting this out there to provide a template to work from or to debate.

    Part I – Majestic Documents & Marilyn deals with how the current craze has started and who has cashed in on it. But primarily it deals with the Wood’s family’s Majestic Documents group, their use of the bogus documentation surrounding Marilyn Monroe, and their attempts to link her death to Kennedy and UFOs and vice versa.

    Part II – Kennedy Killed Over UFOs (and Other Lies) deals with the recent assault on the senses concerning dubious evidence concerning Kennedy’s murder being enacted for sticking his nose in and around the UFO issue. In so doing, I rationally (a key word here) discuss what Kennedy’s interests in the phenomena likely was.

    Part III – Lunacy, Loyalty and Failed Lie Detectors returns to the Woods, focussing on denials of Tim Cooper’s wrongdoing in the face of strong evidence to the contrary.

    Part IV – Tweedle Dee Rob Meets Tweedle Dee Linda discusses Wood Sr. and his lack of knowledge concerning the basics of Cold War intelligence initiatives, with resident UFO/JFK ‘expert’ Linda Moulton Howe. What’s important about this section is that aside from giving the abdominal muscles a good work out from reading this clueless duo is that (depending on one’s prerogative) it also expands upon some issues pertaining to the MJ-12 stuff mentioned in parts II & III.

    (Parts V and VI of this essay embark from a more solid and factual basis established in Parts I to IV, becoming more speculative due to the dodgy nature of the subject and the people involved.)

    Part V – A Very Sad Attempt At Making a Rabbit Hole in effect discusses how people unprepared to confront the fact that just because someone is a ‘con’ and has a history of being one, doesn’t mean they aren’t intelligence agency material. In fact it often makes them prime candidates for being so and they are thus particularly effective in disinformation campaigns. There seems to be a total and utter failure in UFO circles to acknowledge that counter intelligence is in itself designed to mislead and misrepresent. Once one realizes that intelligence agencies like to ‘cut it both ways’ then looking over scraps from them loses its lustre. It’s not a rabbit hole after all, the hole doesn’t even exist, but well you fell into it anyhow. Nevertheless, it discusses the extremely dubious company the originator of the documents has kept. Not too, mention how one well-known figure in the MJ-12 drama has absurdly escaped a great deal of scrutiny.

    Part VI – Gus Russo, Phone Home! is effectively a continuation of Part V and discusses how outcasts from the JFK scene like Gus Russo have made homes for themselves in a field all to willing to be taken in by the ‘next bright thing’. In many ways it’s also the most important chapter of this study as it examines why the JFK community ignored the MJ-12 palaver, but more importantly it explores why ‘truth seekers’ and ‘crank busters’ like Russo and others avoided the JFK-MJ-12 issue altogether and gives an outline of one of the potential targets of this disinformation.

    Part VII – The Conclusion is a summary of all that has been covered, in the essay and essentially the bookend to this foreword.

  • The Necessary Embrace of Conspiracy


    First published on Friday, August 31, 2007 by CommonDreams.org


    Several years ago I gave a talk on Martha’s Vineyard about many of the people whose portraits I’ve painted in the Americans Who Tell the Truth series. I spent some time talking about the legacy of Martin Luther King, Jr. When I talk about King, I like to focus on his last year — the period when, defying the advice of many of his advisors in the civil rights movement, he spoke against the Vietnam War, equating racism with imperialism. King felt bound to make the point that the forces of capitalism, materialism, and militarism that were driving segregation were also driving the war, and until we confronted the source of the problem, the abuses would continue. It was April 4, 1967, in Riverside Church in New York, that he made that declaration. A year to the day before his assassination.

    It has always confounded me every year when we celebrate Dr. King’s life that no mention is made of that Riverside Church speech in the major media. We are always treated to sound bites of the 1963 I Have a Dream speech. That speech’s oratory is as powerful as it is non-confrontational. Which is why it is re-played for modern audiences. Dr. King was about confrontation. Non-violence and confrontation, each ennobling and making the other effective. In 1967 he said, “… my country is the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today.” And he explained how our economic system thrived on exploitation and violence, or, as Emma Goldman put it, “The greatest bulwark of capitalism is militarism.” This was probably the most important speech King ever gave and not playing it when we ostensibly honor him, is tantamount to castrating him morally and intellectually. Just as there is a long history of White America castrating black men, there is an equal legacy of Elite America cutting the most important truths of our social prophets out of the history books. We pay homage to King’s icon, the cardboard cutout, but not to his strongest beliefs and his most cogent analysis of our problems — to what vision called forth his courage. And, if we think that he spoke the truth, to censor that truth is to promote a curious kind of segregation. He is segregated, not for the color of his skin, but for the accuracy of his perception, how close to the bone his words cut. We can’t bear to hear the sound of truth’s knife scraping on hypocrisy’s bone. Only people who actually want to change the system dance to that music or want it to be heard.

    Equally important, and part of the same neglect, is the intentional ignoring of the facts of his death. In my talk on Martha’s Vineyard I spoke about William Pepper’s book, An Act of State: The Execution of Martin Luther King, Jr. Pepper had been James Earl Ray’s lawyer. Ray was the man convicted of killing King. But both Pepper and the King family were convinced that Ray was innocent. The King family hired Pepper to represent them in a suit; they asked only $100.00 in damages to clear Ray’s name. Before the trial came to court in 1999, Ray had died in prison. The jury determined that King had been assassinated by a conspiracy involving the Memphis police, the Mafia, the FBI, and the Special Forces of the U.S. Army. Ray, the patsy, had left town before the shot was fired. The verdict was barely mentioned in the U.S. media then and is not mentioned every year on the anniversary of his death. Why?

    After my talk on Martha’s Vineyard a man came up to me and said, “I enjoyed your speech and was with you until you started that conspiracy stuff about MLK, Jr.” I said, “That’s not conspiracy. What I told you are facts.” End of conversation.

    I think we’re confronted with two conspiracies here: one to commit the crime, the other to ignore it even when the facts are known. ( Two sides of the same coin.) The man who accused me of slipping into the neurotic, aliens-are-among-us land of conspiracy nuts was unable to hear the evidence, perhaps because he was so utterly convinced by our government and media that conspiracies don’t exist, people who espouse them are dangerous fruitcakes, and if you begin to think like that, your whole house of cards wobbles then topples. Who wants that? Better a standing tower of marked cards, than having to admit the game is rigged and the ground is shaking.

    America is steeped in conspiracy, and even more steeped in propaganda that discredits those who try to expose the conspiracies. Whether we’re talking about MLK, Jr., JFK, RFK, Iran-Contra, 9/11, or, most importantly, the status quo, anyone who works to uncover the truth is branded a “conspiracy nut” and discredited before any evidence has a fair hearing. The government/corporate/media version is THE VERSION. Anything else is illusory.

    In fact, the cultural success of labeling investigative reporters and forensic historians, and, simply, anyone who tries to name reality, “conspiracy nuts” is perhaps the most successful conspiracy of our time. Well, not the most successful. That prize goes to the conspiracy to give corporations all the rights of individual persons under our Constitution. That conspiracy has codified and consolidated corporate power so that it controls our lives in almost every meaningful way. It controls the election funds of our candidates, and them once they are in office. It controls our major media including public broadcasting. It controls the content of our television programming. It controls how are tax dollars are spent making sure that the richest get the most welfare. It controls the laws, the courts, the prison system and the mind numbing propaganda that we are the greatest democracy on earth. It controls the values with which we raise our children. It controls our ability to dispense justice. It controls how we treat nature, how we deface our land with strip malls, and blow the tops off our mountains — a form of corporate free speech. It dictates our modes of transportation. It controls our inability to respond to true crises like climate change. It attempts to create a spiritual deficiency in every person that can be filled and healed only with stuff — and no stuff is ever enough.

    As Richard Grossman puts it, “Isn’t it an old story? People create what looks to be a nifty machine, a robot, called the corporation. Over time, the robots get together and overpower the people. … For a century, the robots propagandize and indoctrinate each generation of people so they grow up believing that robots are people too, gifts from God and Mother Nature; that they are inevitable and the source of all that is good. How odd that we have been so gullible, so docile, obedient.”

    It is obvious to say that we have been engineered into a culture that values competitive consumption and consumers instead of community cooperation and citizenship. Capitalism with its obsessive and necessary appetite for consumption, expanding markets, resource depletion, and increasing profits has consumed democracy. Have you ever watched a small snake swallow a large frog? The snake’s hinged jaw stretches wider and wider, squeezing the frog millimeter by millimeter into its gullet until finally the snake looks like the Holland Tunnel might if it had devoured the Titanic. Then the acids and enzymes do their corrosive work. The frog becomes the snake. And the snake claims it is the frog. Capitalism has gulped down democracy and claimed it is democracy. When, immediately after 9/11, President Bush advised Americans to demonstrate their love of freedom and their resistance to terrorism by courageously, selflessly, hurrying to the mall to buy something, he was speaking as the snake that identifies itself as a frog. He was asking us to play a little game with our brains’ synapses, replace the snake icon with the frog’s. Sadly, he may also have been speaking about democracy in the only way that he can understand or recognize it. And, for him, Christianity has been another tidy meal for the snake.

    Perhaps this switcheroo is nowhere more obvious than in the military /industrial complex. We are told that the vulnerable frog needs protecting. The threats are grave. So we fork over our money and children’s lives for war and weapons. We are told that we are building security and peace. More lives. More weapons. What we aren’t told is that the largest US export to the world is weapons. What we aren’t told is that enormous fortunes are being made from the arms trade. What we aren’t told is that the more precarious and unstable the world is, the better the business for the arms dealers — that the real promotion is not for security and peace but insecurity and war, that the lives of our children are the necessary collateral damage for this monster. What we aren’t told is that the only real security is in cooperation, conservation, and fairness, not imperialism. The frog, who is a snake, wrapped in a flag, pleads for patriotism and counts the cash. The snake’s forked tongue is a barbeque fork on which we’ve all been roasted.

    I’d call that conspiracy.

    The neocons have claimed, with some accuracy, that they can create reality faster than we can react: the deed is done, now deal with it. The troops have invaded, Halliburton, Blackwater, and Lockheed signed their contracts, the prisoners are tortured, your email is bugged, the resources for social programs are gone, the laws are changed, the Wal-Mart is built, the sludge dump has already polluted the aquifer, truth is hollowed out —- catch me if you can!

    How is that not conspiracy?

    The cooks & the crooks create a new status quo, legalize it, propagandize it, mythologize it, fundamentalize it, slather it with fear and patriotism, and force feed it to the complacent, sedated cow we call America.

    How is that not conspiracy?

    Of course, ever since the Constitution was signed and didn’t free the slaves or give the vote to women, poor folks, Native Americans and freed blacks so that people with power and money could continue to profit, America has been a conspiracy against itself. It’s been cowboy grilling his own heart over a smoke & mirrors campfire, a CEO with inherited wealth and three hundred years of patrician, affirmative action crooning “Only in America.”

    The reason we can’t talk about conspiracy is because it is the modus operandi. It isn’t the elephant in the room, it is the room itself. We all live there. We can impeach a few elephants, and we should, but the architecture is in place. And they control it.

    When I was in school, I was reminded – repeatedly — to avoid using an indefinite pronoun without identifying whom it refers to, as in, “They are coming to get us,” … or, “They control everything.” Who are They? It’s bad practice to think and write like that. Without reference it just sounds like paranoia. But the hell of it is that it’s damned hard to say who the They are that are in conspiracy to destroy democracy and, by exploitation, nature. Did They do it on purpose or merely discover by serendipity, like cavemen seeing copper ooze out of a rock by a fire, the wondrous possibility and power of what they had found. For instance, the invention of the TV was not a conspiracy. But once the realization of how TV could be used to submerge the public in a lobotomizing swamp of advertising, sound bites, inactivity, community destruction, titillation, false history, empty myth, consumption, and complicity in making fortunes for the sponsors, the program was clear. Conspiracy was the silent partner in the euphemism good business practice. And, once they saw the implications of giving corporations First Amendment rights, they were home free.

    Time to re-think conspiracy.

    We need to embrace conspiracy in two ways. One, admit that it’s real, its quotidian, it’s the fabric of our lives, the mercury in the air, the dioxin in the water, it’s filling the airwaves and the marketplace and the courts and the halls of Congress before we even get out of bed every morning. Two, counter it with a conspiracy of our own. On our side we have the fundamental fact that although the corporate They can alter many of our realities, they can’t alter Reality. They can’t change the behavior of Nature. They can sell off the rain forest, but they can’t leverage the effect of cutting it. They can keep the mileage of cars poor so we’ll buy more gas, but they can’t alter the amount of oil in the ground or the damage to the atmosphere. They can privatize every human interaction and every natural resource, but they can’t privatize the laws of nature. They have conspired to change reality. We must conspire to live in harmony with Reality.

    In the same way, they can conspire to kill Martin Luther King, Jr., but they can’t totally eradicate the truth of who did it and why.

    Con + spirare, from the Latin. To breathe together. Those are the roots of conspiracy. Breathing together doesn’t sound like an activity of the ideologically deracinated whispering seditiously in a dank cellar or a board room, foul breaths denting a weak flame flickering over a candle nub, gunpowder or greed blackened fingers setting a timer, the whites of creased eyes glinting like knives with treason, murder, power, and deceit.

    Con + spirare sounds like healthy men and women standing in the sun figuring out how in the hell they are going to take care of each other and their aging mother Earth and love life while doing it. Breathing together, sharing the same air, plotting to make sure that what’s mine is yours, conspiring to save their self-respect, their ideals, the future for their children.

    I want to be part of a conspiracy. Pervasive, populist, revolutionary, and totally transparent. Grassroots. Idealistic. Simplistic. Life-affirming. Community building

    A conspiracy to make the common good and the love of nature the common denominator of every economic transaction.

    And the simple truth is either we start breathing together, conspiring big time, right out in the open, nakedly, unashamedly, or we will have conspired in secret, by default, in our own demise.

    We have let them breathe for us, and they have stolen our breath, our air, our spirit.

    Secret con + spirare is death. Open con + spirare is life.

    Conspiracy is dead. Long live conspiracy!


    Robert Shetterly lives in Brooksville, Maine
    www.americanswhotellthetruth.org

  • Update: Shermer Takes the Message Wide


    I hope you didn’t blink … or you would have missed it.

    On December 14, 2010, an article appeared in the Huffington Post, titled “My Day in Dealey Plaza: Why JFK Was Killed by a Lone Assassin.” It was supplied by Michael Shermer. I say “supplied” because I hesitate to use the word “written.” “Written” would imply that it was a creative and original endeavor.

    But there is nothing about this article by Shermer that is different from anything you ever saw Max Holland provide for the New York Times, and other publications, pertaining to the violent death of John Fitzgerald Kennedy on November 22, 1963, in Dallas.

    It pretty much begins and ends with “Lee Harvey Oswald was the lone assassin of President Kennedy.” (There, I just saved you some time. You don’t need to read the article anymore.) Shermer does do Holland one take better in that he doesn’t even make it out of the first paragraph before he’s already smeared those who give tours down in Dealey Plaza as being interested only in procuring your money. (As if the people who give tours at the Sixth Floor Museum are not? You can be sure that any information you get from the people in Dealey Plaza is bound to be infinitely closer to reality than anything you could ever receive on the Sixth Floor.)

    And make no mistake, Shermer wants no alternative thinking about anything. In this same article, he uses the date he was in Dealey Plaza–December 7th–to take a swipe at anyone who thinks the USA deliberately let its guard down to allow the Japanese attack at Pearl Harbor. He then extends that into this: “There is no more to the Pearl Harbor conspiracy theory than there is that President Bush helped orchestrate 9/11 or knew about the pending attack and allowed it to happen in order to unite the American public into supporting his wars of aggression in the Middle East.”

    But it is paragraph four that is my overall favorite. Second sentence in particular:

    This was certainly the case for me when I interviewed several conspiracy theorists hanging around Dealey Plaza that day. Their eye light up and they grow ever more animated (and even agitated) as their story grows in complexity about all the different people, elements, and events that almost miraculously (it would be a miracle in most re-tellings) came together to assassinate JFK. One fellow had so many people involved in the assassination that they would have needed a small sports arena to meet to plan out the day. This improbability seems to bother conspiracy theorists not one tiny bit, as they spin out their narratives, drawing you down their causal pathway that resulted in the end of Camelot.

    “Their eye light up…”?

    Was Mr. Shermer speaking with a Cyclops that day in Dealey Plaza?

    I’m surprised Shermer didn’t seize the opportunity to build up that angle. It would have added immensely to the ridiculous picture he always strives to paint about the JFK assassination, Dealey Plaza, and conspiracy theorists. (Plus, a Cyclops roaming around Dealey Plaza would have fit perfectly into Shermer’s cute little puppet show/slide presentations.)

    But of course, this is another canard. Shermer never delineates between what the actual conspiracy consisted of and what the cover up consisted of. Since the cover up was ratified by J. Edgar Hoover of the FBI, President Johnson, and Supreme Court Chief Justice Earl Warren, then yes, many people were involved with it. Since it was clear there was no downside or consequences to cooperating with a lie.

    Shermer then follows with another hackneyed canard: that Dealey Plaza is much smaller than he thought therefore, it would have been easy for Oswald to pull off his “three shots, with two direct hits in six seconds.” Shermer fails to bring up the fact the Warren Commission could not duplicate this feat using marksmen who were worlds above Oswald in shooting skill.

    I’d say that the most interesting part of the article was not Shermer’s parroting of the Warren Commission hocus-pocus–that’s par for the course in everything Shermer does. Rather, it was the posts which were included in the “comments” section underneath the story.

    The posts demonstrate beyond any doubt that there are enough people present out there who remain skeptical about the “official story.” So much so that “they” would need to go out and hire another 20 Michael Shermers if they hoped to ever change that. True, plenty are still woefully misinformed … but the vast majority can see past all the blatant bull crap, voodoo, snake oil, and smoke.

    One last word on the sorcery of Shermer. Prior to his cover up of the JFK case for Huffington Post, he did a review for them of the excellent film Inside Job. This is clearly the finest documentary on the Wall Street crash of 2007. In the entire review, Shermer could not bring himself to type the word “derivative.” Which, of course, was the main cause of the crash.

    That fact tells you all you need to know about who Shermer is and what he is about.

  • The Illusion of Michael Shermer


    See also: Update: Shermer Takes the Message Wide


    Before you read this article, I would ask that you first watch this short video. In it, magicians Penn and Teller demonstrate their “7 Principles of Sleight of Hand.” These techniques will help you better understand how disinformation campaigns work.

      1. Palm (To conceal an object in an apparently otherwise empty hand)
      2. Ditch (To discard an object)
      3. Steal (To secretly acquire a needed item)
      4. Load (To move an object into place)
      5. Simulation (To give the impress that something has happened when nothing has)
      6. Misdirection (To lead attention away from a secret move)
      7. Switch (To secretly exchange one object for another)

     

    I: Avuncular Affection

    A couple of years ago I came across a YouTube video whose mandate was ostensibly to demonstrate why people believe the things they do—particularly when the things they believe in may sound a bit wacky to the majority of us. Aptly enough, it was titled, “Why People Believe Strange Things”.

    Actually, there was more than just one of these video presentations to choose from. Some are longer, some are shorter, and there are minor differences throughout. But the message contained therein remains essentially the same. They are all done in slide-presentation format and usually conducted in college auditoriums, up on the stage, with the lights down.

    And they were hosted by one Michael Shermer.

    By all appearances, Shermer is a skilled and gifted spokesperson. He’s intelligent, charming, appears friendly enough, and almost always has a smile on his face—the kind that says “you can trust me.” His speeches are interspersed with cute little jokes—many about politicians (those inept bumblers!)—which succeed in showing us what an “everyman” he is. Surely, the only reason he’s gone to all the trouble of hosting these presentations is to tell us something that’s designed to help us … by showing us the error of our ways. We’re all indebted to you for that, Michael. We’re lost without you. Thanks for looking out for us.

    In an alternate universe, Shermer could easily have functioned as the ideal pitchman for any company with a product to sell. It is not a stretch to say that he appears to be the personification of everybody’s favorite uncle. And, sure enough, by the time I finished watching his presentation … he sure had me crying “Uncle!!!” alright.

    Shermer usually starts off his presentations right at the bottom of the barrel—with a supermarket tabloid newspaper (complete with wacky headline about aliens and space invasions). He then proceeds to guide the audience—most of whom appear sincerely suspicious of various “official stories” they’ve been fed by governments (and the media) over the years—through a demonstration which is designed to show how easy it is for the brain to pick up the wrong signals when processing information. (You thought you were looking at a picture of someone’s butt crack? Wrong! It’s actually a picture of female breasts! Fooled ya! See how easily we can be tricked? See how unreliable our perceptions are? Oh, and don’t eat that potato chip … it has Jesus Christ’s face on it!)

    Those were my own examples … but you get the picture.

    Shermer goes on to mention the Beatles’ famous “Paul Is Dead” rumors and how the phrase, “turn me on dead man” can seemingly be heard if you play the song “Revolution #9” backwards. He then plays the Led Zeppelin song, “Stairway To Heaven,” backwards, which seemingly reveals a long satanic message. (It’s really getting hilarious now, eh, Michael? ) Well, this is getting so incredibly ridiculous and over the top that anybody with a half a brain and an ounce of common sense would be reduced to derisive laughter. And that’s exactly what unfolds—almost as if on cue. Audience members have been practically peeing on themselves ever since Shermer brought up those silly alien stories earlier on. But that Led Zeppelin example really takes that cake! To think that some people actually believe that stuff? Sheesh…are people ever gullible, or what!

    And then somewhere along the way—between stories about aliens, UFO abductions, brain functions, satanic message in songs, and the like (and interspersed between all the derisive laughter)—Shermer quietly, without fanfare, slips in the JFK assassination and 9/11. (See Rule #6 in the Principles of Sleight of Hand: Misdirection. Followed by Rule #7: Switch.) He even tells the audience of the time when somebody in Dealey Plaza told him how President Kennedy was likely shot from a manhole cover. Can you believe these kooks—I mean, how ridiculous is that? (More laughter.) But Shermer, the pitchman, is not selling a product. He is selling a message. (Not exactly “ShamWow!” … well, maybe just the “Sham” part.)

    It was just recently reported on an internet site that Shermer will be producing a documentary about conspiracy theories for the CBC (Canadian Broadcasting Corporation). So, this is a good time to ask: Who is Michael Shermer?

    II: A Skeptic Skeptic

    Shermer publishes Skeptic magazine. He is frequently called upon by major television networks and shows (such as Larry King Live) whenever they are in need of someone to “debunk” a popular “myth” or “conspiracy”—much the same way that Gary Mack is called upon by the cable networks whenever they are in need of an “expert” opinion about the JFK case.

    There is yet another video which Shermer appears in where he admits during the Q&A session that he has done work with the History Channel. And can you guess which other noteworthy person also happens to share an intimate, working connection with Skeptic magazine?

    James “The Amazing” Randi.

    Throughout the 50s, 60s, and 70s, Randi was a magician/illusionist of some fame. He could be seen escaping from a straightjacket while being dangled upside down over Niagara Falls. He even oversaw the special effects wizardry for one of Alice Cooper’s early tours. Most notably, he went on to found the James Randi Educational Foundation. This foundation has been active in debunking various claims of mind power, or ESP—even going so far as to offer a prize of $1,000,000 to anyone who can prove that they have psychic powers.

    Even though many have tried, that million dollar prize has yet to be claimed. Randi’s most famous exposé was unquestionably Uri Geller—the man who claimed to be able to bend spoons using the power of his mind. (As it turns out, the spoons bend because they have been manipulated and softened to the consistency of near-putty well before the illusion is to be performed. At that point, all the “conjurer” needs to do is touch the spoon ever so slightly … and it will eventually appear to bend.)

    Randi should be applauded for his efforts and achievements at exposing such fakery and fraudulence in the paranormal world. But unfortunately for Randi, the JFK assassination case is not about spoon-bending, or ESP, or clairvoyance. Here, the prestidigitation is being perpetrated not by some charlatan wearing a swami hat, or some fortune teller rubbing her crystal ball while reciting mysterious incantations in an indiscernible tongue. Far from it. The flim-flammery emanates from those who destroy or subvert the evidence, those who alter or conceal the facts, those who intimidate witnesses into either changing their testimony or keeping their mouth shut altogether, and those who would prefer that the rest of us stopped asking so many pesky questions just because a sitting President of the United States happened to get his head blown off in 1963.

    Randi was a talented escape artist and entertainer. He conquered handcuffs and straightjackets. It was often done with mirrors. Abraham Bolden was not so lucky. Bolden, the first African-American Secret Service Agent, exposed what became known as “The Chicago Plot” out of a sense of duty to his country. It was often done with mirrors. The Chicago Plot mirrored almost precisely what was to unfold in Dallas only a short time later. But Bolden would not be hailed or applauded for his astounding feats. Instead, Bolden was framed. He was jailed. He was confined to a mental institution.

    Why—because he was some deranged serial killer? Or a spy who sold sensitive information to the Soviet Union? Or a child molestor? Or a tax cheat? Worse. Bolden apparently did something so heinous, low-down, underhanded, and disgusting that the powers-that-be deemed it unforgivable: he came forward to volunteer information about a plot to kill the President of the United States. Handcuffs and straightjackets indeed. Only for Bolden, this was no illusion. It was all too real.

    I Googled “James ‘The Amazing’ Randi CIA” to see if he ever shared any connection with the dubious agency. There are indications that he has acted as a CIA consultant in the areas of mind control, magic, debunking, and disinformation. You decide.

    I once emailed him my profound disappointment that he would ever stoop to aligning himself alongside any organization that promoted the Warren Commission fairy tale. I provided several examples which indicated how the official story is bogus, and how Oswald was framed. His response? He replied, simply: “Enjoy your convictions.”

    What fueled that profound disappointment? Well, because I, too, am a skeptic, that’s why … and I expected much better from Randi. I don’t believe in UFOs. I don’t believe in alien abductions. I don’t believe in ESP or clairvoyance. I don’t believe in the Moon Landing Hoax. I don’t believe that the Bermuda Triangle is supernatural or evil. I don’t believe in the power of prayer. I don’t believe that the world was created in seven days by an omniscient being.

    I don’t believe in the 9/11 Commission.

    I don’t believe in the Warren Commission.

    For Shermer and Randi to mention the John F. Kennedy assassination in the same breath as aliens and UFOs is a massive insult to the memory of the man—and the office. It is an insult, as well, to those of us who have smelled a rat for 47 years now and would like to see the true culprits brought to justice and an open and equitable democratic system of government restored to the people.

    Perhaps they should change the title of the magazine from Skeptic to Denier? One thing is for sure … I’ve become a skeptic about Skeptic.

    Because for these men—who like to preach how “science” and “reason” are everything— to not show skepticism towards what happened in Dallas, reveals in brutal starkness just what we’re up against here. Are we supposed to believe that a magazine devoted to analyzing factual data and separating it from “make believe” could not find a single shred of evidence pointing to a conspiracy? Not one shred? And that not only is there no such evidence reflective of a conspiracy … but that the case belongs in the realm of alien abductions and UFOs, no less?

    III: Into the Pig Pen

    One of the most glaring outlets of disinformation in the JFK case has been the International Movie Data Base (IMDb) website. If you check out the listing of any movie ever made about the Kennedy case, you’ll run smack dab into a hovering horde of disinfo agents with colorful user names. But these wasps don’t just sting … they also deceive. They are fully armed with a copy-and-paste campaign of deception, disinformation, and personal attacks—all designed to throw off any well-intentioned person who is simply looking to find out accurate, honest, and truthful information about the assassination of John F. Kennedy, and other principle players involved in the case.

    I’ve visited the site many times. And I must say that it’s akin to standing waist-deep in a rank, overflowing sewer in the searing heat of a hot summer’s day. It is never long before I inevitably get the irresistible urge to take a long, hot shower. None other than Dave Reitzes and David Von Pein can be found posting freely on the messageboards. But there is yet another poster who can be found haunting the site virtually 24/7. If you dare post anything that implies that JFK was killed as the direct result of a conspiracy, she will attack you—facts be damned.

    Her username? … “randimazing”

    Hmm… that name sure sounds familiar, doesn’t it? What are the odds, you ask?

    Let’s take a look at the score so far:

    • Shermer publishes Skeptic magazine.
    • Skeptic magazine is a very active participant in attempting to discredit JFK research.
    • James “The Amazing Randi” is also closely associated with Skeptic magazine.
    • One of the posters of out-and-out disinformation at the IMDb website possesses the username, “randimazing”.
    • Randi is a regular contributor to the Penn and Teller TV show, Bullshit. Both are shamelessly pro-WC.
    • Shermer has admitted to having had a working relationship with the History Channel.
    • Dave Reitzes emails articles by Shermer to people who believe in a JFK conspiracy.

    In the following YouTube video, Shermer is shown being challenged and confronted by two different audience members during one of his slanted, biased, and agenda-laden presentations at the University of Lethbridge, Alberta. Shermer was in the process of denying the possibility that 9/11 was an orchestrated, inside job. However, when challenged by several people in the audience … well, see for yourself how Shermer reacted.

     

    A few days later, Shermer attempted to defend himself in the Scientific American magazine. But instead of showing us how his “attackers” were wrong, by laying out the reasons why their arguments were faulty, or in any way inaccurate, Shermer simply goes on to re-hash the same old schmaltz he feeds us in his cute little old slide presentations—about how the human mind has the inherent need to “connect the dots” in order to make sense of something that probably otherwise wouldn’t make sense.

    It wasn’t a defense at all. He didn’t address a single point which Hall (the professor who challenges Shermer) brought up about 9/11. Maybe … it’s because Shermer doesn’t know enough about the facts surrounding 9/11 to be able to provide a defense in the first place?

    Ditto with the JFK assassination.

    Ask yourself a few simple questions: Why was Shermer’s slide presentation originally produced? Why did it seem necessary? Who paid for it? Why did someone go to all of that expense, time, and effort? Are there really so many poor, misguided people out there who believe in alien abductions that it’s developed into that big of a problem in our society where it needs to be specifically addressed by a man who travels around the world equipped with an all-purpose slide presentation under his arm? I would hardly think so. Well, then, what is it?

    Remember rules #6 and #7 in the 7 Principles of Sleight of Hand. Misdirection: To lead attention away from a secret move…and Switch: To secretly exchange one object for another.

    (As discussed earlier, the irony here is that James “The Amazing” Randi is a well known contributor to Penn and Teller’s TV show called Bullshit. Both Randi, as well as Penn and Teller, reflect a decidedly pro-WC position. If you’ve never seen the P & T segment on the JFK assassination, you’d be stunned at what a shallow, dismissive, and predictable mishmash it is. The fact that P & T and Randi share a close association should no longer come as any surprise now that this article has proved how so many of those who live in the disinfo camp are clearly connected, tied, or whose efforts overlap in one way or another. But, hey, it’s not like P & T invented these deceptive magicians’ techniques— the techniques have been used for hundreds of years. They merely present them here in an entertaining— but, more importantly, short—fashion.)

    IV: Conclusion

    So why, Messers Shermer and Randi?

    These little puppet shows you conduct are out there for one reason and one reason only. OK, two reasons.

    1. To discredit any and all research done in the JFK and 9/11 cases.
    2. And, further, to discredit the very notion that all may not be what it seems when it comes to “official government stories,” and that we should sheepishly and obediently accept everything we’re told.

    Is that about right, Mr. Shermer?

    Michael Shermer and his group are currently involved in producing a documentary about conspiracy theories. For Canadian television. But here’s the point I despair about: Who will make the documentary about the documentary makers? That’s the one I’d pay big money to see.

    For whether it’s Shermer, or Randi, or Penn and Teller, or Dale Myers, or Vincent Bugliosi, or Gary Mack (and the list goes on …), they seem to do a pretty good disappearing act whenever cornered on the subject. Heck, Dave von Pein and Dave Reitzes have made it abundantly clear that they remain unwilling (or unable) to ever show their faces in public to defend their positions. And John McAdams is perfectly content to fabricate facts during debates.

    Yes, my friends … it appears, that among the LN camp, that there is no “I” in “Team”.

    (The hand is quicker than the “I”?)

  • Alex Jones on the Kennedy Murder, Addendum: Who is James Bamford? And what was he doing with the ARRB?


    Operation Northwoods and Logic Gone Southwards


    This is an addendum to my two-part critique of Alex Jones. (Please see: Part One & Part Two.) What follows isn’t so much an examination of Operation Northwoods, but how it came to be so entwined with the Kennedy assassination, very often incorrectly. The reader has a series of old notes made over the best part of some 9-10 years on the subject and a reading of  Jones’ chief researcher Paul Joseph Watson’s awful book, Order Out of Chaos, to thank for what follows.

    In his work, Watson more than makes mention of Operation Northwoods and its origins. So when Watson grabs hold of something and clings to it, by now the reader should automatically sense trouble. As you will find in the following sections, Watson, as usual, is wrong on practically every detail about Northwoods:

    Long hidden documents, uncovered in 2001 by former ABC News investigative reporter James Bamford, code-named Operation Northwoods, put a haunting perspective behind the events of September 11.

    I can recall skimming through extracts of the Northwoods proposal in either 1999 or 2000. I didn’t give it too much thought. Except, that it was important because it was a clear indication from the Assassination Records Review Board (ARRB) of Kennedy rejecting another hare-brained proposal from the military. (This reaction, I later found, was fairly common throughout the research community.) I gave it such a flickering glimpse that, when I saw 9/11 unfold, I did not register any parallel. Nor did the name of the man who most heavily associated himself with it, James Bamford, (whom I shall discuss shortly) come to the fore.

    To give credit where credit is due, I was reawakened to Northwoods (rather ironically) when watching the first version of Bermas’ Loose Change and remembering that no credit was given to the ARRB for unearthing the documents. But from what we know of Jason Bermas, it’s a stretch to think he would have known where it came from. After 9/11, in particular when Loose Change came out, researchers had slowly become aware of a new movement arising out of the carnage and rubble in New York. While on one hand, it was nice to see so many people – young and old alike – galvanized by what had occurred, on the other, I didn’t like what I was seeing from the various 9/11 groups and blogs. And one of the biggest frights I received was finding out that the Bushes had gone from being fringe dwellers (if even that) in pretty much all of the established JFK circles, to being full-fledged orchestrators of both the JFK hit and the 9-11 attacks in many unlearned parts of the new 9/11 milieu.

    Kennedy’s refusal to engage in Operation Northwoods had become one of the main causes, if not the main cause, of his death. People like Jim Fetzer – who also believes that the idea of no planes flying into the World Trade Center should be considered – seemed in support of this double view (a viewpoint even Prison Planet hasn’t swallowed, and which caused a major falling out between Fetzer and Steven Jones) and one time Fetzer supporter, Alex (no relation to the former) Jones himself.

    As Jim DiEugenio and I have tried to explain in our works on John Hankey and Russ Baker, the notion of the Bush family orchestrating the Kennedy assassination is seriously flawed disinformation foisted upon an unwitting public by these two pals.  As is the idea that Kennedy was killed as a result of his refusal to follow through on Northwoods. There are three major problems with this mode of thought:

    1. Kennedy lived for another year or so after the proposal.
    2. There were myriad other causes for his horrific death before, during, and after Northwoods. These issues have been well covered in Donald Gibson’s Battling Wall Street, John Newman’s JFK and Vietnam, and in Jim Douglass’ JFK and the Unspeakable, to name but a few “big-picture” books.
    3. Many people involved in the 9/11 field (and rather alarmingly within the Kennedy assassination fold) forget that Northwoods itself was just one of many contingency plans dreamed up by the Pentagon. It’s a little known fact that the US army has created contingency plans to invade Canada. (Please see this Washington Post article: Raiding the Icebox.) And much has been made from some quarters by the likes of Fetzer about McNamara supposedly lying about its importance. But someone as long in the game as Fetzer should know that McNamara, who liaised with the Pentagon daily and who saw contingency plans big and small on a weekly basis as part of his job description, can be forgiven for being blasé about it. (Larry Hancock: email; 29 April. Greg Parker: Email; 30 April 2010)

    And further, as David Talbot in his 2007 book, Brothers, so authoritatively informs us:

    There is no record of how McNamara responded to this cynical proposal by his top military officers when Lemnitzer met with him that Tuesday afternoon. But the sinister plan, which was codenamed Operation Northwoods, did not receive higher approval. When I asked him about Northwoods, McNamara said, “I have absolutely zero recollection of it. But I sure as hell would have rejected it…. I really can’t believe that anyone was proposing such provocative acts in Miami. How stupid! (David Talbot, Brothers, p. 107).

    What makes the document important, as I have said, is that it was more hard evidence of Kennedy’s negative attitude towards an invasion of Cuba, which ran counter to disinformation that he was bent on Castro’s destruction. What makes it unique is that it is the only government document released that called for US casualties to be incurred on US soil to whip up popular support for an invasion of a foreign land. Note that I have said “released”, and as Larry Hancock states, there are likely others lurking around, and these could make Northwoods pale in comparison to other such initiatives. (Larry Hancock: email; 29 April, 2010)

    One such initiative, which makes Northwoods look more than a little humble, was the top secret NATO/CIA/MI6 Operation Gladio “false flag” initiative that went from 1948-1990 right across Western Europe and was focused largely in Italy. Gladio itself had consisted of numerous fascist groups murdering and bombing innocent civilians to stir up ill feeling against the very leftist organizations they had infiltrated.

    The Blind Eye of Activism

    What follows may come as something of a shock for the many peace activists, as well as critics of the official word on 9/11, who have devoured James Bamford’s literature over the last twenty-eight years. Bamford became a hero with his 1982 work, The Puzzle Palace, which detailed the National Security Agency (NSA). This was followed by his 2001 book, Body of Secrets, which contained the details of Northwoods. As has been discussed, the ARRB, was a body set up to declassify a massive amount of government documents pertaining to the Kennedy assassination from 1994-1998. In his brief and begrudging acknowledgement to the press about where the documents had come from – i.e., the ARRB – Bamford seemed more concerned about bragging as to how he’d got wind of them – i.e., via a tip from a friend in the ARRB.

    Now before we delve into that little quagmire, perhaps one question is in order: If Northwoods was just one of many gruesome plans cooked up by the Pentagon, surely intelligence/military advisors like Bamford, who litter the major networks and are familiar with contingency planning, would have been immune to such initiatives? Because by 1997, Northwoods should have come as little surprise to anyone within Bamford’s line of work. Thus, it was interesting that during an ABC interview Bamford got extremely expressive about what he had found:

    The Joint Chiefs of Staff drew up and approved plans for what may be the most corrupt plan ever created by the US government.

    Thus Bamford, who was born in 1946, is either a master of hyperbole or, like a latter-day Rip Van Winkle, had been asleep for a long, long time. Perhaps we should refresh Mr. Bamford’s memory. George W. Bush, (perhaps the worst President in US history) had just stolen the 2000 election by alienating thousands of black voters in Miami and key states across America. There had been over 50-odd US interventions in foreign countries since World War II, the majority of them in support of right-wing or fascist initiatives which have resulted in the murder, rape and torture of millions. If Bamford doesn’t think MK/Ultra was an initiative that has ruined hundreds if not thousands of peoples lives, or that, say, Operation Phoenix is not one of the most “corrupt” plans created under the banner of the United States government – amongst numerous other atrocities – then what credibility can the man have? In 1990, Bamford, the whistleblower, was working for ABC in Washington when the aforementioned news of Operation Gladio broke. Why no noise from him then? And where was he during the CIA drugs smuggling scandals that first came out in the mid-1980’s and then erupted in 1996 – thanks to Gary Webb. Yet Bamford, for all the hype, made a big song and dance about something that never actually was even put in place or seriously contemplated. So what is Bamford playing at?

    Joe Backes, writing for JFK Lancer in 2001, was one of the first JFK researchers to rally against the Northwoods document being misappropriated in the controversy surrounding 9/11. But he was also one of the first JFK researchers to go public with his suspicions about Bamford’s posturing and clearly had problems with Bamford’s “tip off”. He noted that the full body of the document was available from January 29th, 1998. Bamford’s book came out in 2001. This was far too long a lapse for Bamford to claim any scoop. (Assassination Chronicles, Vol 7, 4, pg 2, 2001)

    Thus Bamford stood out not only for his being highly selective in his examples of corrupt government practice, he was clearly exaggerating – if not lying – about inside access in trying to hype his book. Bamford is a smart guy, he isn’t that brazen, and his work, while imperfect, certainly doesn’t indicate that he is a liar. Can it be that Bamford is simply not as good as he thinks?

    In 2006, Bamford and the ACLU harangued the NSA for their illegal gathering of information on US citizens. Now this may sound big of him, but in this very article Bamford mentions Arlen Specter’s criticism of the Bush administration’s illegal wire tapping of US citizens, in rather glowing terms. Bamford never mentioned that government “toady” Arlen Specter (who saw the writing on the wall for the GOP in 2008 and was likely making calculated criticisms so as he could become a Democratic candidate at the time) was a highly ironic person for him to make mention of. (For those of you new to this, Specter is regarded as the father of the magic bullet theory, and one of the most unscrupulous politicians of recent times.) Now many people will say that Bamford doesn’t have to be interested in the Kennedy assassination at all. As far as Specter is concerned, Bamford’s just calling the shots as he sees them. Right?

    OK. But when I came across an article in which Bamford (as per his schtick) gloated about spending time on his very own “60-foot motor yacht,” cruising the Potomac with a soon-to-be-deceased CIA operative friend, and in the company of another soon-to-be-spook-friend, the infamous double-agent Bob Hanssen, well, Bamford’s background starts becoming the story itself. Because it also appears that Bamford is not just friends with US intelligence officers, he is one himself. In another interesting article by Justin Raimondo, a rather prominent peace activist, Raimondo actually names Bamford – in a rather positive light – as a member of the “intelligence community.” An allegation that Bamford has apparently never denied.

    And so it was about this time that I checked out Bamford’s profile on the Random House website – which makes for quite an interesting read.

    The Charmed Life of James Bamford

    Bamford is an ex-Navy man who upon the end of his three-year service eventually gained a degree in law. However, he became fascinated with the goings-on around Watergate and became a journalist. But, as the blurb says, he didn’t work for any paper. He worked freelance to become an author. And what an author. His first ever book was his 1982 hit, The Puzzle Palace. (First published by Hougton Mifflin and then Penguin in paperback.) Herein he had used the FOIA (Freedom of Information Act) to write the first profile of the NSA. What happened next is a classic case of Jimmy Stewart-like rash judgement, atonement, and forgiveness. Believing that Bamford had obtained the information illegally, the NSA (National Security Agency) first prosecuted Bamford, but then realized “no,” it was they who were wrong: Bamford had gained the information through legal means. Apparently, they then felt so bad, they dropped the case and eventually decided to use The Puzzle Palace as a core textbook in its Defense Intelligence College.  (George Bailey, in It’s A Wonderful Life, never had it so good.)

    FOIA requests take a lot of time and a lot of money. One could argue that Bamford was a trained lawyer and probably “knew the ropes” to speed up the process. The question is: How could the NSA, which monitors vast tracts of the planet, have missed the fact that Bamford (or a representative of his) was soliciting information from them via the FOIA? Could Bamford be a first? After all, since when does a book once prosecuted become a training manual? And since when does the author of said book eventually gain employment lecturing the NSA staff?

    But it’s Bamford’s time spent with Peter Jennings from 1987 till 1998 that should raise eyebrows. (In an interview with Timothy W. Maier, Bamford says 1998 which differs from the Random House date of 1997.) His role as Investigative Producer for ABC’s World News Tonight with Peter Jennings meant the two were close. Now, let us turn back to the long-suffering Paul Joseph Watson. While I could find little concerning Jennings within the Alex Jones matrix, what I did find was fairly alarming. Because Jennings, like Dan Rather, had earned folk hero status for mentioning that the collapse of one of the WTC towers seemed like a controlled demolition.

    Now anybody truly familiar with the Kennedy case knows that in 2003 Jennings would go on to besmirch his reputation with an appallingly bad show on the assassination of John Kennedy: Peter Jennings Reporting – The Kennedy Assassination: Beyond Conspiracy. Gus Russo was his chief consultant. What is funny here is that Prison Planet had once endorsed conspiravangelist John Hankey’s 2003/2004 released JFK II in which Hankey launched a laughable attack on 9/11 hero Jennings and ABC. Yet, bizarrely, Watson’s detailing of Rather’s and Jennings’ demolition comments were being made as late as September 11, 2006 – with absolutely no mention of their previous obfuscations in the Kennedy arena.

    Returning to Bamford, what’s most significant is the year he left Jennings. As stated previously, this was either 1997 or 1998. Most interestingly, regardless on whose year you go by (as of this date, Bamford hasn’t bothered to correct Random House), it was in and around the time that Operation Northwoods first appeared publicly, i.e., on the 17th November, 1997.

    Random who?

    The above may seem just a bunch of coincidences to the reader. But it’s clearly no coincidence to Random House that Bamford left ABC to join them. And in so doing he became something of a “Mr. Fix it” for US intelligence (if he was not before). Though one wouldn’t anticipate someone of Paul Watson’s skill level conceiving of the issues surrounding Random House, how anybody versed in the Kennedy case could miss Bamford’s ongoing association with the company that employed James Angleton’s wife and cuddled up to Gerald Posner, amongst numerous other sins, is quite incredible. Especially in light of the numerous critiques of this most dubious of publishing companies.

    Should it come as any surprise, then, that Bamford’s coziness with the NSA and Random House turns out to be anything but random? :

    Unlike before with The Puzzle Palace, this time the NSA cooperated with Bamford. Alarmed by Hollywood films like Enemy of the State that portrayed his agency as a ruthless cadre of assassins, the director of the NSA, Lt. Gen Michael V. Hayden, wanted the American public to have a more accurate picture of how the NSA functioned. In order to encourage better communication between the NSA and the press, Hayden granted Bamford unprecedented access to Crypto City (the NSA campus in Ft. Meade, MD), senior NSA officials, and thousands of NSA documents while he researched Body of Secrets. The NSA even hosted a book signing for Bamford on the grounds of Crypto City. It lasted more than four hours as hundreds of NSA employees lined up to have their copies of Body of Secrets autographed. (Ibid., Bamford’s profile from Random House)

    It is with great shame that no one – bar a certain Carol A. Valentine (a crank similar to Jones and Watson) – has commented on Bamford’s Random House rÈsumÈ. Valentine is typically “off the planet” with regards to Northwoods being a fake document. But she was certainly the first to note that Bamford’s spiel about Northwoods was published in a book wholly designed not so much to inform but as to protect the reputation of a vital component of the U.S intelligence establishment, the NSA.

    Finding the Real Parallel

    Many people try and make parallels between Northwoods, the Kennedy assassination, and 9/11, quite often forgetting that when an event of international significance occurs, like an untimely death, or a group of them, that there are often similarities. Kennedy’s death and 9/11 were never the first purported pretexts for expansion into foreign territories. There are numerous parallels right throughout U.S history: The 1898 sinking of the USS Maine in Havana Harbor, and the 1964 Gulf of Tonkin incident are classic examples. Sometimes no act of aggression is needed on behalf the intended victims. The U.S government just doesn’t have to like a government and that’s that. It need not be bloody or dramatic. Just look at the CIA’s ousting of Australia’s Whitlam government. (William Blum, Killing Hope, pgs 244-249)

    But the biggest parallel one can see between Operation Northwoods (after one dispels the utter crock that the Bush family organized both 9/11 and the Kennedy assassination) is not the crimes themselves, nor the use of airplanes, but that the book Northwoods first appeared in (i.e., Body of Secrets) was created for the exact same purpose and by the exact same company as Gerald Posner’s 1993 joke, Case Closed, which was clearly a response from the CIA to counter public reaction after the 1991 film JFK. What’s funny here is that while JFK was a political drama based around actual events and thus infinitely more serious in tone than the Will Smith Enemy of the State vehicle, we can see that Random House has clearly stated the NSA’s justification for publishing a counterpoint, and seem rather proud of themselves for doing so. Now I ask the reader to contrast Bamford’s profile with that of his fellow playmate at Random House, Gerald Posner. In Posner’s bio they say nothing about the CIA (or their intermediary Bob Loomis of Random House) approaching him to create a reply to Stone’s film, as this link here shows. And in their blurb about Case Closed, Random House clearly wants you to believe the lie that Posner – of his own accord – jumped up and defended the Warren Commission.

    Backes to the Egg

    Let’s us go back to the egg, or Joe Backes to be precise. Where once it looked as if Bamford was exaggerating how he came across Northwoods, it’s highly likely he was actually telling the truth when he says he got a “tip off” from someone in the ARRB. Bill Kelly, like Backes, was one of the few people to comment about this situation anywhere (albeit six years later). Initially, he believed that the NSA itself was behind the leak. (4/29/2007 Post at Spartacus Kennedy Education Forum). However, it is more than likely that it came from the ARRB itself because Doug Horne has since spoken and written that the ARRB was stacked with Warren Commission defenders and hints at intelligence plants (Horn: BOR, #459 1/28/2010). Debra Conway, in fact, confirmed that a number of leaks or more precisely “tip offs” did come from the ARRB, particularly concerning issues such as Cuba and Vietnam, not to mention information on Military Intelligence agent James Powell, which was leaked to Max Holland. However, Conway had no knowledge of who leaked the Northwoods documents. (Debra Conway: email; 6 May 2010) Returning to Bill Kelly. Though incorrect about the NSA leak, he asked questions about Bamford and Northwoods few people have ever voiced:

    The NSA doesn’t just give journalists tours of their operations, and retired CIA officers don’t just send documents to writers from the grave. There is a reason behind all this that isn’t what it appears to be.

    Kelly’s right. It’s hard to take seriously a man who was given access to practically all areas within the NSA apparatus who then says the “NSA never handed me any documents, it was a question of digging.” For 9/11 Truthers raised on a diet of Northwoods and James Bamford, what follows might be depressing: Though Bamford lamented the NSA’s not releasing the cockpit tapes, he openly praised the work of the 9/11 Commission. Did Fletcher Prouty, Victor Marchetti, Bill Turner, or John Newman ever praise the Warren Commission or the HSCA?

    Speaking of those two bodies, Bamford seemed to have little or no interest in Arlen Specter’s checkered history. Thus, one assumes he had no real interest in the Kennedy assassination. Yet one would be wrong in that assumption. Because Bamford addressed the JFK Accountability Conference on the 18th– 20th of November, 2005. I have little or no idea what Bamford discussed at this conference. According to the blurb, he discussed the 1962 book by Fletcher Knebel and Charles W. Bailey II, Seven Days in May, a fictional account of a military coup in America, and a book that Kennedy admired. One brief account by attendee and Probe co-editor Lisa Pease is also available. She wrote:

    Bamford discussed documents from Operation Northwoods, a plan that called for a wave of terrorism inside the United States that falsely would be blamed on Fidel Castro and become the justification for invading Cuba.

    Like much of Bamford’s work, this sounds good on the surface. But things take an interesting turn when Pease says one of the only people prepared to engage in a fully conspiratorial conversation at the conference was Bamford’s contemporary John Newman. This left me thinking. If anybody is familiar with Newman and Bamford they would understand that Newman’s quest for accuracy and detail in his works far surpasses anything Bamford has ever written. Because, Newman is a bonified and genuine intelligence expert. Bamford for all his bluster isn’t. But this should be no surprise. Bamford just happens to be an associate of a well-known lone gunman figure in the JFK research community, Gus Russo. Russo, you may recall, was the adviser for the awful Peter Jennings’ special, and a man long considered by many in the Kennedy assassination research community to be a CIA plant.

    The Return of Bamford’s Blindness

    At the above conference, Bamford was likely reading from the fourth chapter of his book Body of Secrets The question never asked by anyone in attendance (quite mercifully for Bamford) was: Why would anyone want to pay money to hear him talk about the assassination or Northwoods anywhere at any time? Judging by his chapter on Northwoods, Bamford quite clearly has no knowledge whatsoever of Kennedy-era covert operations, nor Operation Mongoose.

    Operation Mongoose was run in conjunction with the newly formed SG(A) or Special Group Augmented and was not really led by General Lemnitzer but by General Maxwell Taylor who was appointed by the President. Furthermore, civilians such as Robert Kennedy and Robert McNamara often turned up to the meetings. The Central Intelligence Agency was represented by their Director John McCone and by his deputy Richard Helms. Helms was working closely with General Edward Lansdale, the coordinator of the project. Lansdale was purely a creature of the CIA, not the U.S military. Thus, the CIA retained a large amount of control over the operation, in particular with the rabid William Harvey leading Task Force W which was based in Miami at the JM Wave Station. This is all explained in the Church Committee Report. (pgs 139-145)

    So why did Bamford turn a blind eye to Lansdale’s real employers and the agency behind Mongoose? It may be his relationship with a one Richard Helms, a person heavily involved in Mongoose. I first became suspicious of this when I came across a glowing Helms review of Bamford’s work on the USS Liberty. This was followed up by a very odd call by Bamford regarding Helms’ non-assistance to John Roselli. This information recently surfaced through the CIA’s 2007 release of its so-called “family jewels,” a post-Watergate “limited hangout” which had been overseen by the then Director of Central Intelligence (DCI), James R. Schlesinger, and which detailed numerous illegal actions the CIA had partaken in from its inception in 1947 through to 1973.

    Bamford’s take on a piece of “the jewels” is a real gem:

    In the early 1960s the C.I.A. hired members of the Mafia, including mobster Johnny Roselli, to help in the assassination of Fidel Castro in Cuba. The operation never panned out. I found the section interesting in that it shows the crazy extent of the C.I.A.’s thinking in those days. I also found it somewhat uplifting that Richard Helms did not lift a finger to help Roselli after he was arrested and threatened to go public with the details of the plot.

    I have to ask what’s so uplifting about this? Was Bamford “hoping” Helms would be found doing no wrong? The man who Richard Case Nagell nicknamed Dirty Dick? Or is he trying to say that Helms had nothing to fear because he was not involved in the plots against Castro enough to be threatened by any revelations? If so, this is patently false as one can clearly see on the documents that Bob Maheu and Bill Harvey were more than prepared to become the Deep Throat and Oliver North of the scenario.

    Helms was no stranger to the covert shenanigans of countless CIA operations around the world and a man who was involved in more than a few incidents. Bamford’s selective eye for atrocities by the United States government never picked up on some of them. I say this because Bamford, in his usual name-dropping style, can’t help but tell the reader of sharing lunch with Helms on a number of occasions. Yes, they were lunch partners. If you want see how much Jim enjoys Dick, then read this rather delusional eulogy of Helms’ lousy 2003 biography, which was also released by (you guessed it) Random House.

    You may also want to check out how he gently lets Dick off of the murder of President Kennedy and ponder why on earth Bamford felt the need to even bring it up? Bamford kind of gives the game away here. Quoting Helms, he actually says that Operation Chaos was started at the instigation of LBJ to locate Russian funding for the anti-war movement. In fact, in Angus McKenzie’s splendid little book, Secrets, it was revealed that the CIA started it as a reaction to the numerous exposures by Ramparts magazine of its domestic operations. So when Bamford writes of Helms’ rueful, teary-eyed comment that Chaos had violated the CIA’s domestic operations charter, one does not know whether to laugh or cry.

    Similarly, Bamford praises Helms for keeping the CIA out of the Watergate scandal. When, in fact, one can argue that Helms created a cover story to disguise the Agency’s prime role in originating that scandal that brought down Richard Nixon. The icing on the cake is how Bamford deals with the Thomas Powers’ cover-up biography of Helms, The Man Who Kept the Secrets. He first says that Helms was actually disdainful of reading the book since he thought it would be unfair to him. In fact, the Powers book was a set up all the way. Helms sat for four long interviews with Powers. And this book was one of the first to shift the blame for the Castro assassination plots from the CIA onto the Kennedys. The book was published before the CIA Inspector General report on the subject was declassified by the ARRB. If Bamford had read that report he would have realized that Helms and the CIA were lying to Powers and Powers went along with the lie. The IG report was written for Helms. It clearly states that the CIA concealed the Castro plots from the Kennedys. In fact, the CIA had actually lied to Bobby when they said the plots had been halted in 1962. They were not. They continued through 1963 and beyond. Powers later became a favorite of the intelligence community and the New York Times. This seems to be the kind of career advancement ladder that Bamford is seeking.

    A Final Consensus

    So what of Northwoods? Well, consensus abounds from many experienced Kennedy researchers that Northwoods was, at the time, a false flag contingency plan of some (but not massive) significance. It is agreed by many – Bob Groden, Greg Parker, Larry Hancock, Bill Davy, Pat Speer – that its coverage clouded many more important issues concerning the ARRB. Bill Davy went a little further saying that it could have been used as a ploy or limited hangout (William Davy: email 06/17/2010). If so, what more important revelations was Northwoods obscuring from the world? Well it’s quite a list:

    This accusation has sometimes been bandied at researchers with backgrounds in military and intelligence circles like Col. Fletcher Prouty or John Newman. Despite his earlier apparently staged troubles with the NSA, however, Bamford has never ever had his books pulled from the shelves as has Prouty, who wrote the following:

    After excellent sales of The Secret Team, during which Prentice Hall printed three editions of the book, and it had received more than 100 favorable reviews, I was invited to meet Ian Ballantine, the founder of Ballantine books. He told me he liked the book and would like to publish 100,000 copies in paperback as soon as he could complete the deal with Prentice Hall. Soon there were 100,000 paperbacks in bookstores through out the country.

    Then one day a business associate in Seattle called to tell me that the bookstore next to his office building had had a window full of books the day before and none the day of his call. They claimed they never had the book. I called other associates from across the country, I got the same story. The paperback had vanished. At the same time I learned that Mr. Ballantine had sold the company. I travelled to New York to visit the new “Ballantines Books” president. He professed to know nothing about me, and my book. That was the end of that surge of publication. For some unknown reason Prentice Hall was out of my book also. It had become an extinct species. (The Secret Team, Author’s Note, pgs.xi, xii)

    And neither has Bamford ever encountered the kind of hassles that JFK and Vietnam brought upon its author:

    John Newman’s book went much further than any of the above. So much further, that the publisher ditched the book. As Galbraith writes in his fine 2003 essay in Boston Review, 32,000 copies of JFK and Vietnam were initially printed in 1992. After 10,000 were sold, Warner Books ceased selling the hardcover. Even though the book had high visibility because of Oliver Stone’s film JFK, the company never spent anything on promoting the book. Incredibly, it was never reprinted in trade paperback. When Newman complained about this in 1993, the company quietly returned his rights. (Virtual JFK: Vietnam if Kennedy Had Lived; Part Two of a review by James DiEugenio)

    In defending the integrity of both Newman and Prouty, we can see that Bamford is hardly frightening to the power structure at large. The “Northwoods guru” seems to be an incredibly poorly disguised (or overt to the point you can’t believe it the first time you look) intelligence asset. While this may be big news for those in the more wild-eyed 9/11 crowd, for those seasoned in the Kennedy case, Bamford’s posturing is nothing new – as Pat Speer explains:

    Bamford is not surprising to me. I realized some years ago that it’s all about access. Journalists get scoops based on who they know. Authors get published based on who they know. And who they know is related to the favors they’ve performed, and are willing to perform. As a result, some of the biggest stories in recent times have been broken by writers with contacts within the FBI or CIA, who have quite possibly repaid this access by burying important information related to other stories. These writers include well-known personalities such as Jack Anderson, Bob Woodward, and Seymour Hersh… it also includes lesser figures such as Max Holland and Joe Trento IMO. (Pat Spear: email; 16 June,2010)

    Greg Parker, Larry Hancock, William Davy all gave very similar statements (emails; June 2010). One prominent researcher (who refused to be named and who was strongly against this piece) commented along the lines: “Some people out there just aren’t very smart with their associations. He still has some good intel work.” The last part of this sentiment – i.e., that Bamford has inadvertently revealed something of the intelligence state – is not an opinion without some appeal to a few researchers of note. (Pat Speer, Deb Conway, emails June 2010)  Famed activists Nicky Hagar and Mike Frost have also utilized his work to great effect. Hence the warning here is clearly: “Don’t throw the baby out with the bath water.”

    In the complex inter-departmental turf war struggles between agencies, enlightening information often comes out. Bamford may well be one of those conduits. But this is hardly “free” information, and no matter how “useful” Bamford may be in some areas, he certainly demands to be thought of in a wholly new light. As does the myth that Operation Northwoods is of huge significance to the assassination of President Kennedy. Or of it being the most significant document unearthed by the ARRB. Indeed, Northwoods may be important for a wholly different reason. When Bill Kelly stated all was not what it seemed with Northwoods he was not wrong and Bill Davy’s comment about it being a limited hangout exercise rings ominously true. Thus, it’s time to cast the myths about Northwoods aside along with the myth that Bamford is some fearless truth seeker. This much should by now be clear: No matter what waters the ex-Navy man, James Bamford, may be navigating, the NSA’s “limited-hangout baby” certainly has his limits.