Paranormal Nation

by Marc E. Fitch

  Today, the Native Americans occupy territory outside the federal government’s jurisdiction but within the boundaries of the United States. They are truly a liminal people that exist at the boundaries of society and are, at once, part of that society and also separated from it. Their reservations are largely poverty-stricken and rife with alcoholism, and many of the ancient beliefs are feared to be fading from cultural memory. But it’s this existence at the periphery of the United States that makes the Native American such a powerful and enduring specter in the paranormal history of the United States and may help explain why, to this day, people still claim to see the ghosts of Native Americans. While the Native Americans have been pushed to the outskirts of our society, they still exist and still serve as reminders to the very atrocities that created this nation.

  To be haunted, by its very definition, is to be possessed of the past, and while this nation’s face may be to the future, our troubled and contradictory past remains with us. The incorporation of Native American ghosts into the haunted American landscape is a way of addressing the past without facing it. Foster writes,

  When the Irish arrived in Ireland, they defeated and dispossessed the preceding peoples of those lands, the Tuatha de Danaan. After the Tuatha were defeated, through guilt and admiration, they were romanticized as a race of spiritual beings who live in the lands beneath the hills … the Good People, the Faerie. This also happened in other lands, an older people giving way before a migration of people from another land. And it happened in America as well. We see the same romanticization of Native Americans as the original, spiritual people of a place.21

  Hence, the Native Americans merged with their sacred lands and became the ghosts that now haunt the American landscape. These ghosts can be seen as symbolic representations of national guilt for the displacement and genocide of the indigenous people. Their ghosts are a way of trying to reconcile the past with the present. While the dispossession of the native peoples was necessary to create the United States as we know it today, it does not relieve the guilt for moral wrongdoing. The United States defined itself through its rejection of colonialism but formed itself through the very same kind of colonialism, thereby leaving a contradiction in the heart of the nation that remains unresolved to this day. Indeed, it is probably not able to be resolved. Thus, the ghosts of the displaced people have returned to remind us of this wrong, similar to the works of Shakespeare, when the ghosts of the murdered return to right the wrongs that were done to them on earth.

  The Native Americans exist at the peripheries of our society. Their ancient beliefs were incorporated by the European Americans who became subject to their ghosts, and these were thus passed down through the generations to haunt today’s society. Our very own totemic culture absorbed the beliefs of the indigenous people, and their ghosts became a part of our cultural legacy. The pervading national guilt, recognized or not, has left an indelible mark on the national subconscious. The contradictions that formed our society remain in limbo—unable to be laid to rest in our past and thereby haunting our present.

  The American landscape has a time dimension. Drive off the hardtop road in Tennessee, Kentucky, or in the Ozark Hills, and in a matter of minutes you enter another world of closely knit communities that retain many of the superstitions and customs of Old Europe. In the isolated hollows, ghosts and witches are as much a part of living tradition as dying in one’s own home and maintaining the family graveyard. A country lane or covered bridge, so picturesque to the passing tourist on a sunny day, can seem ominous to the old-timer trudging home before the shadow deepens.22

  CHAPTER 5

  The JFK Assassination and the Paranormal

  The assassination of John F. Kennedy as he rode through Dealey Plaza in Dallas, Texas, on November 6, 1963, is often referred to as the moment when the United States’ innocence was totally lost. A young, handsome, charismatic president was shot and killed in front of thousands of people at a time in U.S. history when nuclear Cold War tensions were beginning to boil. Nearly everyone alive at that time remembers where they were and what they were doing when they heard the news; likewise, nearly everyone living today remembers where they were and what they were doing when news of the jetliner crashing into the World Trade Center first reached them on September 11, 2001. These were days in U.S. history that marked dramatic turning points. But the assassination of JFK marked a more ominous and paranoid moment in U.S. culture, one that would transcend the decades and haunt the aftermath of 9/11. It would also breed an entirely new wave of paranoia and distrust of the U.S. government; a distrust which formed massive conspiracy theories and quickly found its way into paranormal belief systems, where it has thrived ever since.

  At the time of Kennedy’s assassination, conspiracy theories were nothing new, though very few remembered the “Ring of Gold” conspiracy of WWI or the Pearl Harbor Conspiracy trumpeted at the outset of U.S. involvement in WWII, which posited that Roosevelt had prior knowledge of the coming Japanese attack but allowed it to occur in order to justify entry into war with Germany. These were times of extreme duress and political outrage that would make today’s partisan bickering seem tame. Both the politicians and the public actively feared that the U.S. government was being subverted by outside influences such as Communists, Jews, and bankers. However, that day in Dealey Plaza marked a fundamental change in the U.S. psyche and in the way the government is perceived. Kathryn S. Olmsted, in her work Real Enemies: Conspiracy Theories and American Democracy, World War I to 9/11, writes, “No longer were conspiracy theorists chiefly concerned that alien forces were plotting to capture the federal government; instead, they proposed that the federal government itself was the conspirator.”1 The federal government had grown and expanded into something that was big and anonymous, and to many, it had become secretive, threatening, and violent.

  In many ways, the idea of conspiracy had been a long-held belief and rallying cry in the past as a means of persecution. During the European witch craze, public officials and clergy preached of a conspiracy of witches that consorted with the devil by moonlight. “Witches were to be found in Europe, in every neighborhood, all linked together in one great conspiracy under generalship of Satan against the Christian Community.”2 The conspiracy of witchcraft is something that would continually reinvent itself in the American consciousness through the McCarthyism of the 1950s, during which Senator Joseph McCarthy questioned whether this time was a “show-down between the democratic Christian world and the Communist atheistic world,”3 and into the 1980s and ’90s with the satanic panic, which will be covered in a later chapter. The witch-hunt and the conspiracy theory have become endemic to U.S. culture.

  However, the European witch-hunt and conspiracy was alleged by the elite and powerful government figures, as was nearly every conspiracy theory up until the JFK assassination. But November 6 essentially turned the tables on the elite and powerful; suddenly they were the “witches” being hunted by the townspeople. “The researchers set out to prove that ordinary American citizens had as much authority to investigate the killing of the president as the government did—indeed, that their status as amateurs gave them more claim to authenticity and truth.”4 Furthermore, in an ironic twist on the witch-hunts, for the first time in history the primary investigators and conspiracy hunters were women, something that would continue throughout the rest of the century.

  Olmsted notes that, while conspiracy theories tend to eventually spin out of control, they usually begin from a point of truth. In the case of JFK, Lyndon Johnson and the Kennedy family purposefully concealed aspects of the assassination and aspects of Kennedy’s life in order to preserve peace and the image of John F. Kennedy. JFK, it turns out, had several skeletons in his closet, both in regards to his Cuban policy and in his personal life, which both the government and his family wanted to keep secret. However, this secrecy concerning the possible causes of the assassination and other aspects involving JFK’s anti-communism policies created more distrust in the gove
rnment and spurred further investigation and accusations of conspiracy by the public. When the Warren Commission was created to investigate the assassination, it was given a script by Johnson as to what the “official story” would be; it was the commission’s job to reinforce the official story. “The commission’s reconstruction of the assassination, in short, was shaped from the beginning by the members’ determination to reach a predetermined conclusion. It was unpersuasive even to the men who came up with it. This does not mean that it was wrong. It does mean, however, that the commission was primarily a public relations exercise, as Robert Kennedy later told an aide, meant to placate the American public. It was not meant to discover the truth.”5 This public relations commission—designed not to find the truth but rather to placate the public—is something that would haunt the American psyche from that point on and would essentially poison the well of public and government relations. The public could not trust the government to investigate itself, and therefore, everything and everyone in the commission was suspect, including the scientists and experts that the panel used as sources. They all became part of the conspiracy. “Besides their obvious distrust of government, the assassination conspiracy theories also reflect a loss of faith in all experts—in government and science—and the whole idea of ‘expertise.’”6

  Following a yearlong rash of UFO sightings in 1947 (including the supposed crash in Roswell, New Mexico), the air force began to investigate UFO sightings. First dubbed Project Sign, then Project Grudge, the compilation and investigation finally settled on Project Blue Book as a name and it lasted through the completion of the investigation in 1969. In 1969 the air force contracted with the University of Colorado to form a panel, headed by Dr. Edward Condon, to review the cases and conduct a study to determine if there was any need for further investigation. Known as “The Condon Report,” the panel determined that there was no cause for further investigation and that UFOs were not worthy of further study. While the report included many UFO incidents that the panel could not explain, the official word was that UFOs were weather anomalies, stars, figments of imagination, and so on.

  However, this investigation and panel, much like the Warren Commission, left more questions than answers for believers, and suddenly the amateurs took the reigns of the investigation and castigated the “experts.” But the believers did have a few experts on their side, one of whom was Dr. J. Allen Hynek, who had been a consultant on Project Blue Book. Dr. Hynek criticized the Condon Report and went on to write his own book, which detailed a number of cases that were deemed unexplainable. More vocal and persistent, however, was a young physicist and rocket-propulsion engineer named Stanton Friedman. Friedman was the kind of person who exhibited a drive and tenacity that bordered on religious fanaticism; but unlike the religious zealot, he had the credentials and arguments to back up his assertions. He was also a skilled researcher. He and several other organizations and believers went through Condon’s report piecemeal. “It comes as a great surprise to many that, according to a UFO subcommittee of the world’s largest group of space scientists—the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics—one could come to the opposite conclusions as Dr. Condon based on the data in the report. Any phenomena with 30 percent unidentified classifications is certainly worth further investigation, as the AIAA noted.”7 Friedman also pointed to a 1966 memo from the assistant dean at the University of Colorado, which states,

  The trick would be, I think, to describe the project so that to the public, it would appear a totally objective study, but to the scientific community would present the image of a group of nonbelievers trying their best to be objective, but having an almost zero expectation of finding a saucer. One way to do this would be to stress investigation, not of the physical phenomena, but rather of the people who do the observing—the psychology and sociology of persons and groups who report seeing UFOs. If the emphasis were put here, rather than on examination of the old question of the physical reality of the saucer, I think the scientific community would quickly get the message … I’m inclined to feel at this early stage that, if we set up the thing right and take pains to get the proper people involved and have success in presenting the image we want to present to the scientific community, we could carry the job off to our benefit…8

  Once again, it would appear to the believers that the commission had been rigged from the beginning, and that furthermore, its goal was to paint believers as kooks and as people who were experiencing some form of psychosis or sociological phenomenon.

  This, of course, was not the first or the last time that critics and conspiracy theorists would be labeled as lunatics. Even during the 9/11 Commission the New Jersey widows were labeled as “harpies” by one political commentator (note the element of witchcraft). And during the JFK investigations, the media and politicians also labeled the women who began their independent study. “The Warren Commission’s defenders quickly mobilized to attack these amateurs. With few exceptions, most mainstream media outlets rushed to defend the Warren Report and to blast critics as cranks and obsessives.”9 However, the critics were merely responding to what they knew were glaring omissions of fact and logic from both commissions’ reports. The people had begun to recognize the more sinister side of the government and were no longer willing to be spoon-fed the public mandate from on high. The JFK assassination sparked a democratization of investigatory journalism and “expertise.” Suddenly, regular citizens were becoming some of the most educated and informed people on the planet about the assassination, and they had some theories that differed from the government’s narrative. Obviously, they did not have all the facts because the government was withholding evidence that it deemed necessary for national security. However, the public quickly recognized this and pounced on it as evidence of a greater, more evil conspiracy. The people felt the government was deceiving them, and, for the most part, they were right.

  This democratization of expertise and investigatory journalism extended quite naturally into the realm of the paranormal, particularly surrounding the UFO phenomenon, which had experienced the height of public fascination in the late forties and the fifties. People were seeing something in the skies and reporting it to the media and the government. The U.S. cultural landscape was inundated with flying saucer films and books, most of which reflected Cold War fears of nuclear annihilation. The public was responding, and the government launched its investigations with Project Blue Book and eventually the Condon Report. It could be speculated that had the Condon Report come before the Warren Commission debacle and subsequent public rejection, it may have been well received. As it was, the Condon Report was viewed as another government attempt to placate the public with spoon-fed government script.

  It was shortly after the Condon Report that Stanton Friedman began investigating what was at that time a little known story out of Roswell, New Mexico. In July of 1947 the local newspaper reported that the air force had recovered a crashed flying saucer in the New Mexican desert. However, the very next day, the air force retracted its statement and said that it was merely a weather balloon. Friedman, doubting the government’s honesty and good intentions, sought out the people involved in the Roswell incident, including the air force personnel who inspected the crash. Friedman teamed with some other investigators and authored the first book on the subject, entitled The Roswell Incident, which was published in 1980. He then went on to coauthor Crash at Corona: A Definitive Study of the Roswell Incident in 1992. These books detail the alleged truth of the Roswell incident in which the air force discovered an actual flying saucer and alien bodies in the New Mexican desert. The bodies and debris were then moved to Area 51, a top-secret government facility in the Nevadan desert, where they were held and used to create new technologies.

  This may sound like fantasy, but in 1997 retired Colonel Philip J. Corso authored a book, entitled The Day After Roswell, which detailed a similar scenario, and Col. Corso was in a perfect position to know the facts of the case. He had worked in military
intelligence during WWII and quickly rose among the ranks, working directly under President Truman and President Eisenhower where he served on the National Security Council and was head of the Foreign Technology Desk for the army’s research and development department. Corso claims that this position enabled him to covertly funnel new technology that had been reverse engineered from the downed saucer to companies around the United States, thereby concealing the source of the scientific breakthroughs.