The Mammoth Book of Cover-Ups

by Jon E. Lewis

  The interview with Colonel Trakowski [. . .] also provided valuable information. Trakowski provided specific details on Project Mogul and described how the security for the program was set up, as he was formerly the TOP SECRET Control Officer for the program. He further related that many of the original radar targets that were produced around the end of World War II were fabricated by toy or novelty companies using a purplish-pink tape with flower and heart symbols on it. Trakowski also recounted a conversation that he had with his friend, and superior military officer in his chain of command, Colonel Marcellus Duffy, in July 1947. Duffy formerly had Trakowski’s position on Mogul but had subsequently been transferred to Wright Field. He stated: “. . . Colonel Duffy called me on the telephone from Wright Field and gave me a story about a fellow that had come in from New Mexico, woke him up in the middle of the night or some such thing with a handful of debris, and wanted him, Colonel Duffy, to identify it. . . . He just said, ‘It sure looks like some of the stuff you’ve been launching at Alamogordo,’ and he described it, and I said, ‘Yes, I think it is.’ Certainly Colonel Duffy knew enough about radar targets, radiosondes, balloon-borne weather devices. He was intimately familiar with all that apparatus.”

  Attempts were made to locate Colonel Duffy but it was ascertained that he had died. His widow explained that, although he had amassed a large amount of personal papers relating to his Air Force activities, she had recently disposed of these items. Likewise, it was learned that A.P. Crary was also deceased; however his surviving spouse had a number of his papers from his balloon-testing days, including his professional journal from the period in question. She provided the Air Force researchers with this material. [. . .] Overall, it helps fill in gaps of the Mogul story.

  During the period the Air Force conducted this research, it was discovered that several others had also discovered the possibility that the “Roswell Incident” may have been generated by the recovery of a Project Mogul balloon device. These persons included Professor Charles B. Moore, Robert Todd, and coincidentally Karl Pflock, a researcher who is married to a staffer who works for Congressman Schiff. Some of these persons provided suggestions as to where documentation might be located in various archives, histories and libraries. A review of the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests revealed that Robert Todd, particularly, had become aware of Project Mogul several years ago and had doggedly obtained from the Air Force, through the FOIA, a large amount of material pertaining to it; long before the AAZD researchers independently seized on the same possibility.

  Most interestingly, as this report was being written, Pflock published his own report of this matter under the auspices of FUFOR, entitled “Roswell in Perspective” (1994). Pflock concluded from his research that the Brazel Ranch debris originally reported as a “flying disc” was probably debris from a Mogul balloon; however, there was a simultaneous incident that occurred not far away that caused an alien craft to crash and that the AAF subsequently recovered three alien bodies therefrom. Air Force research did not locate any information to corroborate that this incredible coincidence occurred, however.

  In order to provide a more detailed discussion of the specifics of Project Mogul and how it appeared to be directly responsible for the “Roswell Incident,” a SAF/AAZD researcher prepared a more detailed discussion on the balloon project which is appended to this report [. . .]

  [. . .]

  Conclusion

  The Air Force research did not locate or develop any information that the “Roswell Incident” was a UFO event. All available official materials, although they do not directly address Roswell per se, indicate that the most likely source of the wreckage recovered from the Brazel Ranch was from one of the Project Mogul balloon trains. Although that project was TOP SECRET at the time, there was also no specific indication found to indicate an official pre-planned cover story was in place to explain an event such as that which ultimately happened. It appears that the identification of the wreckage as being part of a weather-balloon device, as reported in the newspapers at the time, was based on the fact that there was no physical difference in the radar targets and the neoprene balloons (other than the numbers and configuration) and between Mogul balloons and normal weather balloons. Additionally, it seems that there was over-reaction by Colonel Blanchard and Major Marcel, in originally reporting that a “flying disk” had been recovered when, at that time, nobody for sure knew what that term even meant since it had only been in use for a couple of weeks.

  Likewise, there was no indication in official records from the period that there was heightened military operational or security activity which should have been generated if this was, in fact, the first recovery of materials and/or persons from another world. The post-War US Military (or today’s for that matter) did not have the capability to rapidly identify, recover, coordinate, cover-up, and quickly minimize public scrutiny of such an event. The claim that they did so without leaving even a little bit of a suspicious paper trail for 47 years is incredible.

  It should also be noted here that there was little mentioned in this report about the recovery of the so-called “alien bodies.” This is for several reasons: First, the recovered wreckage was from a Project Mogul balloon. There were no “alien” passengers therein. Secondly, the pro-UFO groups who espouse the alien-bodies theories cannot even agree among themselves as to what, how many, and where, such bodies were supposedly recovered. Additionally, some of these claims have been shown to be hoaxes, even by other UFO researchers. Thirdly, when such claims are made, they are often attributed to people using pseudonyms or who otherwise do not want to be publicly identified, presumably so that some sort of retribution cannot be taken against them (notwithstanding that nobody has been shown to have died, disappeared or otherwise suffered at the hands of the government during the last 47 years). Fourth, many of the persons making the biggest claims of “alien bodies” make their living from the “Roswell Incident.” While having a commercial interest in something does not automatically make it suspect, it does raise interesting questions related to authenticity. Such persons should be encouraged to present their evidence (not speculation) directly to the government and provide all pertinent details and evidence to support their claims if honest fact-finding is what is wanted. Lastly, persons who have come forward and provided their names and made claims, may have, in good faith but in the “fog of time,” misinterpreted past events. The review of Air Force records did not locate even one piece of evidence to indicate that the Air Force has had any part in an “alien” body recovery operation or continuing cover-up.

  During the course of this effort, the Air Force has kept in close touch with the GAO and responded to their various queries and requests for assistance. This report was generated as an official response to the GAO, and to document the considerable effort expended by the Air Force on their behalf. It is anticipated that that they will request a copy of this report to help formulate the formal report of their efforts. It is recommended that this document serve as the final Air Force report related to the Roswell matter, for the GAO, or any other inquiries.

  [. . .]

  ROYAL INSTITUTE OF INTERNATIONAL AFFAIRS

  The Royal Institute of International Affairs is the legal name for the British think-tank more popularly known as Chatham House. At first viewing everything about the RIIA seems open and above-board; it is a membership-based organization that hosts discussions any member can attend (providing he or she pays up an annual membership fee in excess of £300). Staff are listed on the RIIA website, and posts are advertised publicly.

  Critics claim, however, that behind the elegant 18th-century facade of Chatham House there machinates a cabal of politicians which seeks to undemocratically influence world opinion. More darkly still, some internet websites argue that the RIIA and its sister US organization, the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), are home to a secret society which actually runs the earth’s affairs.

  Few would disagree that Chatham House lies both lite
rally and metaphorically in the heart of the British Establishment; founded in 1920, it provides a regular sounding board for senior statesmen, especially the incumbent of the head job at the Foreign Office. A Guardian report in December 2006 traced the ways in which the RIIA cosily spreads British government propaganda as news. What always sets conspiracy alarm bells ringing, however, is the famous Chatham House Rule, which, when invoked, ensures the confidentiality of all meeting participants. The rule currently reads as follows:

  When a meeting, or part thereof, is held under the Chatham House Rule, participants are free to use the information received, but neither the identity nor the affiliation of the speaker(s), nor that of any other participant, may be revealed.

  Inevitably, Chatham House maintains that the secrecy rule is necessary for free speech to occur at meetings; if there were no such rule, participants would not genuinely engage for fear of their comments being reported in the press.

  As with the CFR, the origins of the RIIA lie in a dream of the British adventurer and diamond magnate Cecil Rhodes. In the late Victorian era, few men on Earth matched Rhodes’s wealth and power; the country Rhodesia (now Zimbabwe) was named for him. In 1877, Rhodes wrote in Confession of Faith: “Why should we not form a secret society with but one object: the furtherance of the British Empire and the bringing of the whole civilized world under British rule, for the recovery of the United States, for making the Anglo-Saxon race but one Empire.” Rhodes put his money where his mouth was and set up the Round Table organization, to be funded in perpetuity by a bequest in his will. (Rhodes also founded the Rhodes Scholarships at Oxford, of which Bill Clinton was a recipient . . . but that’s another story.) Nearly 20 years later, at the Versailles Conference which ended the First World War, some men who shared Rhodes’s Round Table ideals met with diplomats and statesmen from both Britain and the US. Out of their discussions both the RIIA and CFR were conceived. It follows, therefore, according to conspiracists, that both the CFR and RIIA are the present embodiments of Rhodes’s secret society ideal.

  RIIA undemocratically influences world agendas: ALERT LEVEL 8

  RIIA is the cover for Round Table society of one-worlders: ALERT LEVEL 3

  Further Reading

  Robert Gaylon Ross, Who’s Who of the Elite, 2002

  http://www.riia.org/

  SATANIC RITUAL ABUSE

  In 1980 Canadian Michelle Smith and her psychiatrist Lawrence Pazder published Michelle Remembers, in which she told of the physical and sexual abuse she had suffered as a child in the hands of a Satanic cult. She had even witnessed human sacrifice. By 1983 the neighbouring US was in a state of near hysteria over “Satanic Ritual Abuse” (SRA) after a mother at the McMartin Pre-School in Manhattan, California, accused a social worker there of abusing her child; hundreds of children were interviewed by psychotherapists, and it was discovered that 360 children had been abused by McMartin teachers who belonged to a “Satanic Church” whose practices involved drinking the blood of ritually murdered babies.

  In 1987 US talk-show host Geraldo Rivera presented a series of TV shows on the phenomenon, claiming: “There are over one million Satanists in this country . . . From small towns to large cities, they have attracted police and FBI attention to their ritual child abuse, child pornography and grisly Satanic murders. The odds are that this is happening in your town.” It was estimated by Rivera and others in the media that thousands of children were disappearing every year into the hands of the cults.

  Why was no one doing anything to stop it? Because in every city, every town, every settlement, the Satanists had co-opted local police officers and politicians into their conspiracy. Apocalyptic Christians proposed that the conspiracy ran to the top of the social pyramid, even unto the White House itself. Since in the end of times the Devil must establish himself everywhere, the SRA phenomenon spread abroad, notably to the UK; in 1993 children in the Orkney Islands were forcibly removed in dawn raids from their Satanic, abusive parents.

  Sceptics claim that the only evidence for SRA comes from the victims themselves, usually through the technique of “recovered memory”, in which psychotherapists aid the subject to “recall” the abuse suffered. The technique has been demonstrated since to be badly flawed, and many of the subjects (including Michelle Smith herself) were mentally ill. Her book has been proven a hoax by several independent investigators. A four-year study of SRA headed by University of California at Davis psychology professors Gail S. Goodman and Phillip R. Shaver assessed more than 12,000 accusations; the researchers could find no unequivocal evidence for SRA in the US.

  Believers in SRA point to the testimony of ritually abused children, suggesting they are unlikely to have invented stories of macabre sexual practices. This is correct: research has demonstrated over and over that investigating social workers, police officers and adult authorities suggestively encourage or badger children to tell stories of abusive behaviour. John Stoll of Bakersfield, California, served a 20-year prison sentence for child abuse until a judge released him in 2004; it transpired that, in assembling the original “evidence” against Stoll, the county’s Child Protective Services had informed child interviewees they could not go home until they admitted Stoll had abused them.

  Typically of SRA cases, the evidence against John Stoll rested on testimony alone. The same was true of the McMartin trial, where the jury failed to make one conviction. Where medical evidence has been given in SRA cases of sodomy in Britain it has proven to be suspect.

  The SRA panic has uncomfortable undertones of the medieval witch hunts.

  Satanists ritually abuse and kill children: ALERT LEVEL 2

  Further Reading

  Elizabeth Loftus, The Myth of Repressed Memory, 1994

  Debbie Nathan and Michael Snedeker, Satan’s Silence: Ritual Abuse and the Making of a Modern American Witch Hunt, 2001

  7/7

  At the height of London’s morning rush hour on 7 July 2005, a series of four coordinated bomb blasts hit the city’s public transport system. Three of the bombs exploded within 50 seconds of each other on Underground trains (at King’s Cross, Edgware Road and Liverpool Street/Aldgate); the fourth exploded nearly an hour later, at 9.47 a.m., on a Number 30 double-decker bus as it entered Tavistock Square. Altogether the explosions took 56 lives and injured 700 in what was the deadliest terror attack in Britain since the Lockerbie Bombing of 1988.

  While ambulances were still rushing casualties to hospital, a flurry of conspiracy theories started on the internet concerning the attacks, but they boiled down to two main ideas:

  the British security services had advance warning of the terrorist attacks, yet failed to take action, either because of incompetence or because they wished the attacks to occur to justify the introduction of draconian laws

  the bombings were carried out by MI5 themselves as a false-flag operation to facilitate the implementation of those draconian laws

  The evidence for the false-flag op centres on where the bombs were placed. According to the Metropolitan Police, which led the state’s investigation, the bombs were carried into London in back-packs by four British-born supporters of al-Qaeda: Mohammad Sidique Khan, Shehzad Tanweer, Germain Lindsay and Hasib Hussain. Conspiracy blogger socialdemocracynow, however, asserts:

  The most damning piece of evidence against the government is the testimony of one of the victims, dancer Bruce Lait, who, along with his dance partner Crystal Main, was nearest to the bomb when it exploded. When he was being assisted out of the carriage, Lait recalls, “The policeman said, ‘Mind that hole, that’s where the bomb was.’ The metal was pushed upwards as if the bomb was underneath the train.”

  MI5, in other words, laid explosive devices on the tracks. If the bombs were on the tracks it accounts for one of the peculiarities of the morning of 7 July: the shut-down of the electrically powered Underground system, since bombs placed in carriages could not have wrecked lines to the requisite extent. Some conspiracists favour a tweak to the MI5-bomb-plot scenario, alleg
ing that the security service subcontracted the attacks to an outside agency. This is generally identified as London-based Visor Consultants, a security risk and assessment company. According to the company’s website:

  Visor Consultants have been able to support many domestic and global organizations to prevent chaos in a crisis and increase their overall resilience. Our clients include one of the top seven companies in the US and key Departments of the UK Government. Making any crisis an “brupt audit” rather than a presumed catastrophe has helped many organizations grow as a result.

  Visor Consultants, by their own admission, were engaged in a city-wide operation on the morning of 7 July. The company’s managing director, Peter Power, told a BBC Radio 5 interviewer that evening: “At half past nine this morning we were actually running an exercise for a company of over a thousand people in London based on simultaneous bombs going off precisely at the railway stations where it happened this morning, so I still have the hairs on the back of my neck standing up right now.” He dismissed the similarity between the Visor Consultants’ exercise and the actual bombings as coincidence.

  Some conspiracists speculate that Visor Consultants were not MI5 proxy bombers but genuine casualty/crisis experts put on alert by “key Departments of the UK Government” to assist in the aftermath of the attacks, of which the government had prior knowledge. In this version, Visor were responsible for the medical supplies said by several witnesses to be on site at Edgware Road before the bombs detonated. The Israeli intelligence agency Mossad is frequently reported as having tipped off the British government about a planned al-Qaeda attack on London; as early as December 2004 FBI operatives in London, Newsweek reported, were avoiding the underground because of the impending al-Qaeda attack upon it. The British government has consistently maintained that it had no advance warning of the 7/7 bombs.