UFOs- Reframing the Debate

by Robbie Graham

  However, nothing ignited the mind control conspiracy sub-genre within the ufological scene as much as Martin Cannon’s important paper, “The Controllers: A new hypothesis of Alien Abduction,” first published in the pages of the MUFON UFO Journal in 1989.33 Jim Keith’s Mind Control, World Control: The Encyclopedia of Mind Control (1997) and Mass Control: Engineering Human Consciousness (1999), Helmut and Marion Lammer’s MILABS: Military Mind Control and Alien Abduction (2000) and others signalled that the mind control interpretation of Close Encounters had successfully carved out its own niche within the UFO scene.

  The level of paranoia within the UFO community has only grown since then. These days, just about everyone eventually gets labeled as an agent provocateur—even ol’ Carl Jung, whose ideas on the collective unconscious and the archetypes I incorporate so deeply into my ideas about UFOs. It is, apparently, not widely known but is well established that Jung worked with the founder of the CIA (when it was the OSS) Allen Dulles, in his psychological profiling of Hitler and the German people during the war.

  It’s been suggested by others that this may be where Dulles got the idea to use people’s belief in the paranormal and specifically UFOs for psychological warfare purposes. In fact, a former chemist and researcher on the Manhattan Project, Leon Davidson, as far back as the 1950s and into the 1970s, was talking about this idea that the UFO phenomenon was being manipulated by the CIA specifically as part of a Cold War tool to disinform the Soviets and for various other purposes:

  Dulles also adopted a concept from his old friend Carl Jung and coopted the myth that benign aliens have visited Earth for millennia. He used magicians’ illusions, tricks, and showmanship to blend in sightings, landings, and contacts with the legitimate military test sightings… Later, Dulles found the saucer believers and their clubs an ideal propaganda vehicle.34

  MKUltra has had a lasting legacy. There are a lot of different cases during the 1970s of these apparent mind control assassins. H.P. Albarelli and others before him have found dramatic connections between the people surrounding Oswald, the MKUltra mind control research community, and individuals at the birth of the modern UFO era.35 Both Kenn Thomas36 and Peter Levenda37 have written books and/or lectured on these very bizarre links between the formation of the Flying Saucer Era, Post-WWII American Nazism, and MKUltra activities.

  Did you know that Ted Kaczynski participated in one of the CIA’s MKUltra programs? He wasn’t dosed with LSD, and he volunteered willingly. He was not, like so many others, one of the unwitting experimentees in the MKUltra programs.38

  What about Whitey Bulger, the Mafioso? Like the alleged killers of Frank Olson—the subject of that book I cited earlier, A Terrible Mistake—Olson’s assassins and Whitey Bulger were active in organized crime and willingly participated in MKUltra prison experiments.39 Afterwards they were used by the CIA and FBI for their own nefarious purposes.

  There has been a number of different attempts over the years to get the truth out about these experiments. The first were the Church Committee hearings in the 1970s, the US House of Representatives Select Committee on Assassinations (HSCA) in 1978, and the Advisory Committee on Human Radiation Experiments in the 1990s. The Canadian government had to create “The Allan Memorial Institute Depatterned Persons Assistance Plan,” and provided $100,000 to each former patient of Dr. Ewen Cameron’s MKUltra experiments.40 Cameron served as President of the American Psychiatric Association, Canadian Psychiatric Association, American Psychopathological Association, Society of Biological Psychiatry, and World Psychiatric Association.

  I’ve described the many different classic cases that I grew up loving as a kid. Let’s briefly look at them again “through a glass, darkly,” through the lens of covert-ops and deception.

  The Flatwoods Monster in 1952 was one of those classic flying saucer monster cases I grew up on. I’m not saying this is an explanation for it, but Nick Redfern has reported41 on a RAND document called “The Exploitation of Superstitions for Purposes of Psychological Warfare” that was written for the Air Force back in 1950.42 In it there is a description of a particular psychological operation that was done in Italy to spook the locals, and it involves the creation of a simple robotic scarecrow that they would wheel into town and scare the natives, supposedly. He noticed the similarity in the description to this 12-foot being that was described in the Flatwoods case and wonders if the two may be related.

  One of the first abduction cases before the Betty Hill abduction case has also come under scrutiny. Antonio Vilas Boas was out tilling his field. The tractor began to stall. He saw a UFO. It landed. Occupants came out. They gassed him, dragged him onboard, and forced him to have sex with a very peculiar naked humanoid that barked like a dog and then, after they’d had sex, she pointed at her belly and then to the sky as if to imply, “Your children are coming with us up there.”

  One has to wonder if maybe this was the test-bedding of new human technology. In 1978, an individual by the name of Bosco Nedelcovic, who was an interpreter and translator at the Inter-American Defense College, started talking to UFO researchers in the states about his participation in various projects that, he says, were the ones perpetrating at least some UFO incidents, specifically the Vilas Boas abduction. According to researcher Philip Coppens, Nedelcovic claimed that he was, “part of a nine-man helicopter team that abducted civilians and conducted both psychological warfare experiments and hallucinogenic drug tests, specifically in the Minas Gerais region of Brazil. The team included a doctor, CIA and Navy personnel, while the helicopter was equipped with a metal cubicle, about five feet long and three feet wide, used—somehow—in the psychological warfare operations.”43

  I’ll tell you what that 5 × 3 box reminds me of—it’s the isolation coffins that were used by the psychiatrist Ewen Cameron in Canada, as part of his MKUltra sensory deprivation and psychic driving experiments where they abused hapless Canadians who were just looking for a little psychological relief.44

  Let’s move on to the first publicized “alien” abduction in North America. Again, I’m not suggesting that this is the definitive explanation, but it’s always struck me as significant that the description Barney Hill gave of the lead alien (besides his other description of a “red-headed Irishman” that doesn’t quite fit with the rest of it). He said, “He looks like a German Nazi. He’s a Nazi. He had a black scarf around his neck that was dangling over his shoulder.” The drawing Barney sketched under hypnosis, with the little cap on its head, and the scarf on the shoulder,45 always reminded me more of French fashion than German. Over time, his description became more in line with that of his wife and more in line with the standard grey alien with big eyes. There are other aspects of this case, like the strange beeping noise that they heard right before the experience, and descriptions of strange marks on the hood of the car that always struck me as where somebody could’ve placed one of these psychotronic mind control devices.

  Nick Redfern has also reported on the famous army reserve helicopter encounter that brings us again to the connection between UFOs and Out-of-Body-Experiences. He writes:

  Captain Coyne [the pilot and witness] received telephone calls from people identifying themselves as representatives of the Department of the Army, Surgeon General’s Office, asking if he, Coyne, had experienced any ‘unusual dreams’ subsequent to the UFO incident. As it happened, not long before the Army’s call, Coyne had undergone a very vivid out-of-body experience.

  Sgt. John Healey also reported … ‘the Pentagon would call us up and ask … have I ever dreamed of body separation? And I have. I dreamed that I was dead in bed and that my spirit or whatever was floating, looking down at me lying dead in bed.46

  Another famous case is the Pascagoula, Mississippi Clawmen from 1973. I always found this case fascinating—probably because it involved alien entities who were radically different from the classic short, big-headed, black-eyed aliens. This case involves tall clawmen with elephant-like skin and pinchers for hands that floated ove
r the pier where the two witnesses were fishing and is very different from other types of close encounters.

  According to Hank Albarelli and Zoe Martell, they’ve talked to researchers who were chemists at Fort Detrick, which was the testing ground of so much of the chemical warfare research that was part of MKUltra, and they make the claim that this was somehow part of that experimentation. They say that “former Fort Detrick researchers… revealed an odd experiment that took place in Pascagoula, Mississippi, and produced one of the most puzzling UFO and strange entity cases on record in America.” They go on to state, “that the pier was not far away from a former Fort Detrick research site, Horn Island.” They continue:

  Detrick microbiologists conducted intensive experiments on the islands “involving human research subjects” and a number “of natural hallucinogens as well as advanced neuroscience techniques” aimed at the objection of producing “previously unexplored and unique psychological warfare methods.47

  There are many more threads we could tug on to discuss this weaponization of folklore and governmental, military, and intelligence communities misuse of the UFO community’s belief systems as weapons of mass enchantment for psychological warfare. Quickly, here are just a few.

  In his 1991 book, Revelations: Alien Contact and Human Deception, Vallée pondered the possibility that the reason for the numerous sightings of UFOs over sensitive military installations may be due to hoaxes performed to test the security of these bases and the reaction of the personnel when confronted by a UFO. In that book he writes, “antiterrorist exercises in which the attackers disguised their craft as a flying saucer have actually been run more than once.”48 He was discussing this in the context of the Bentwaters/Rendlesham base encounters. Jacques seems to have been convinced of this in the 1980s by former CIA analyst Dr. Christopher “Kit” Green.49 Both men are alleged members of the infamous ufological “Aviary” of intelligence community spooks.50 More recently, researcher Sacha Christie has continued this line of inquiry.51

  Jacques Vallée, Gerald K. Haines and others have stressed the idea that UFOs have been used as cover for exotic military R&D tech, helping protect projects like the U2 spy planes and stealth aircraft before they are made public. Haines asserts that the Air Force’s Project Blue Book knowingly misattributed sightings of the CIA’s U-2 and OXCART planes as UFOs.52 Other UFO researchers, such as Bruce Maccabee, vehemently disagree that this could be true except in a few rare cases.53

  There is also the classic Paul Bennewitz case where AFOSI agent Richard Doty used a variety of unethical tactics in the name of protecting National Security—there are rumors that J. Allen Hynek delivered one of the computers to poor ol’ Paul that was loaded with software installed on the part of the Air Force or NSA to convince Bennewitz that he was intercepting communications from aliens. Of course, that claim comes via disgraced but intriguing UFO researcher Bill Moore, who, admittedly, was also doing AFOSI agent Dick Doty’s bidding in driving his friend Paul further into madness.54

  Former head of MUFON, James Carrion, before stepping down from the job, moved in the direction of interpreting UFOs as a psychological warfare technique. He went so far as to suggest that the Roswell incident was a disinfo ploy to cover up research about the United States’ efforts at creating a tsunami bomb,55 and continues researching his claim that the Ghost Rockets were one of the earliest examples of UFOs being used for strategic deception operations.56

  What’s the purpose? Is there an attempt to manipulate human consciousness? Does this go beyond the simple use of UFO stories as laughter-curtain-cover for exotic aircraft and technology testing? A recurring theme is the idea of uniting humanity through a common enemy by manufacturing a counterfeit foe.

  There are many important historical figures suggesting this unification in the face of an extraterrestrial threat, like John Dewey in 1917:

  Someone remarked that the best way to unite all the nations on this globe would be an attack from some other planet. In the face of such an alien enemy, people would respond with a sense of their unity of interest and purpose.57

  I know this sounds familiar to you because you’ve probably heard it from various other people. It was said by Sir Anthony Eden in 1947:

  It seems to be an unfortunate fact that the nations of the world were only really united when they were facing a common menace. What we really needed was an attack from Mars.58

  Sir Anthony’s quote inspired the 1947 book, Flying Saucer, by Bernard Newman, which proposed the idea that is mirrored in the 1963 Outer Limits episode, “Architects of Fear,” the idea of scientists creating a Chimera, a fake alien threat and staging events to unite humanity against a common but counterfeit foe: Uniting us against the UFaux, the false, counterfeit UFOs.

  This is one you’ve got to remember, old “Ronnie RayGun” [President Reagan] saying, no less than three times that:

  Perhaps we need some outside, universal threat to make us realize this common bond. I occasionally think how quickly our differences would vanish if we were facing an alien threat from outside this world.59

  He made nearly identical statements to this, first in 1985 in front of a high school student body and faculty,60 then at the general assembly of the U.N. in 1987, and again at the Grand Ballroom for the National Strategy Forum in 1988.61

  In Vallée’s seminal 1979 book, Messengers of Deception, he talked about what had just become declassified in 1978 (as reported in the book Bodyguard of Lies by Anthony Cave Brown) and that was the LCS (London Controlling Section), and what he called the “Martian Conspiracy.” The Brits called their psychological warfare experts the “Martians.” Vallée suggests that at the end of World War II there was, within this joint deception campaign between the Americans and the British, a sense of, “well, we’ve managed to unite our intelligence agencies and use these engines of deception. Could these same techniques be used to prevent another world war?”

  More recently, economist and Nobel Prize laureate Paul Krugman went so far as to say that we need a fake alien invasion to stimulate the economy. He said this on CNN,62 and then went on Real Time with Bill Maher, echoing the theme of the infamous, allegedly satirical, Report from Iron Mountain (1967) with “a serious proposal” suggesting we need a fake alien threat to boost the economy.63

  There is this history of notable people warning about this possibility. I mentioned previously Manhattan Project scientist Leon Davidson who wrote about the CIA using ECM, electronic countermeasures, to fake UFO sightings. One such technology platform was called Palladium. Apparently, we’ve had this technology to spoof objects on radar for quite some time. The Holy Grail, for most UFO researchers, is when we have witnesses and radar. But now we find that these radar blips can be faked. Apparently this was used widely in harassing the Cubans and the Soviets to try to ascertain the abilities of their electronic countermeasures and radar stations. Gene Poteat talks about Project Palladium in his 1998 essay, “Stealth, Countermeasures, and ELINT, 1960-1975” and elsewhere.64

  The idea of spooking the natives, so to speak, has been around for quite a long time. Peter Watson talks in his 1978 book War on the Mind about projecting images on clouds and using loud speakers as psychological warfare to convince people of various things. Then there are the infamous plans of Major General Edward Geary Lansdale to stage a Second-Coming-Coup against Castro using a submarine projecting images of Jesus Christ off the Cuban coast.65

  On September 11, 2001, there were a lot of UFOs in the form of unidentified blips on radars along the Eastern Seaboard of North America. This reminds us of Palladium and technology for spoofing aircraft. There are reports, both military and mainstream, about their ability to inject into the radar screens these false radar returns. This may have confused the air traffic controllers and aided the perpetrators of that day’s events.66

  In May of 2001, alien disclosure zealot Steven Greer held a well-attended event at the Press Club in Washington D.C. At that press conference, Dr. Carol Rosin told of her mentor Dr.
Wernher von Braun warning her that the powers-that-be were going to stage an escalation of threats from terrorism to asteroids to extraterrestrial invasion, and that this was going to be used to justify space weapons.67 Remember, von Braun was one of those more than 1,500 German researchers embedded in America after World War II.

  Over the last several years, UFOs have seemed to become a little more mainstream—from childhood educational systems to adult global economic policy discussion. I’ve said for some time that UFOs are a great way of educating people to think critically and rationally to investigate the world around them. Well, between 2008 and 2013, UFO crashes and alien abductions have repeatedly been staged for little kids at primary and middle schools in the UK. It’s all part of a creative writing program. There is a non-governmental organization called the National Literacy Trust which is funded by the Department for Children, Schools, and Families. The program is called “Everybody Writes.”68

  There was the Davos World Economic Forum in 2004. They had a panel titled, “The Conspiracy Behind Conspiracy Theories: Have Extraterrestrials Made Contact With Government Leaders?” Dick Cheney was one of the people on the panel for that discussion, and the moderator was Chief Executive Ian Much from the international corporation that “prints the money,” De La Rue.69

  At the 2011 Global Competitiveness Forum on “Global Challenges and Solutions 2020” Conference in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, there were several UFO researchers speaking, including Nick Pope, Jacques Vallée, and Stanton Friedman. Bill Clinton gave the keynote address and said “I don’t have to tell you what the implications of that would be, if it turned out to be true,” alluding to the potential discovery of earth-like planets.70

  Whether the UFO phenomenon is considered simply as the result of human misperception of mundane stimulus or something more exotic such as a transpersonal virtual reality communications mechanism, or planetary poltergeist (with or without its own consciousness or self-directing autonomy), human belief in alien Others creates cults, religions, and social movements of significance. Even in the absence of specific documentation declaring and funding UFO deception programs, it is clear that a wide variety of human agencies have manipulated the superstitions and myths surrounding stories of contact with non-human entities—folklore has been weaponized as a means to various ends.