Conspiracies Declassified

by Brian Dunning

  That first dot to connect came from Tesla, who in 1899 did indeed pick up mysterious radio signals from space. They were regular, repetitive, and gave every indication of being artificially produced. Today, we know what he discovered: pulsars, which are stars that emit a beam of electromagnetic radiation. (These signals are so regularly timed that when they were rediscovered in 1967, researchers playfully named them LGMs, for Little Green Men.) So, as it turns out, Tesla’s discovery had nothing to do with any alien satellite.

  Nor, it transpired, did the Norwegian discovery of LDEs. As scientists have since learned, shortwave radio signals echo back about eight seconds after they’re sent, and although the reasons are not fully understood, they have to do with effects from the Earth’s ionosphere. LDE signals are not dependent upon, or correlated with, the existence or positions of any artificial satellites.

  The object reported in 1960 to be circling the Earth on a semi-polar orbit was soon identified by the Air Force as the second of two casings from the Discoverer VIII launch. (Today, we know the Discoverer program was a cover for the Corona program, which launched spy satellites into polar orbits.)

  And as much as Black Knight satellite proponents like to claim Duncan Lunan’s LDE analysis as evidence for their apocryphal alien craft, he himself never expressed any such thing. He thought the LDE reflections came from the Earth’s L5 Lagrangian point, a location 60° behind the Earth on its orbit around the sun. This clearly has no relation to an object in an eccentric semi-polar orbit around the Earth. Lunan himself later retracted his work, in fact, after finding errors in it. With that retraction went the support for the 12,600-year age of Black Knight and its connection with any specific star of origin.

  Gordon Cooper’s testimony is a bit different. He did report various UFOs during his long career, but he was always adamant that his Mercury-Atlas 9 sighting of a greenish object in 1963 was a total fabrication by UFOlogists. He claims he saw nothing at all, and indeed no official records confirm a radar sighting by 100 people at the Australian tracking station (we do know, however, that nowhere near 100 people could have physically fit in front of the tiny radar screen, so that part of the story is certainly false).

  And all of this brings us to the final piece of evidence, those photographs of Black Knight taken by the crew of the Endeavour. These photos were indeed taken by the shuttle crew, but there is nothing mysterious about them. During the space walk, a piece of thermal blanket came detached from the inside of the cargo bay and floated out of reach. The astronauts documented it with their cameras. We can also say with certainty that the photos are not of anything on a semi-polar orbit. The shuttle orbited on a semi-equatorial orbit, so the shuttle and the debris would have passed each other at about 36,000 kmh if the debris had been on a semi-polar orbit—far too fast to be seen, and much too fast for anyone (let alone a spacesuit-clad astronaut) to take a picture. The fact that multiple pictures were taken is incontrovertible proof that the object was nearby and following the shuttle on its exact same orbit.

  All in all, it’s an intriguing story, but unfortunately, no useful evidence can be found to support the existence of any Black Knight satellite, nor of a conspiracy by NASA to cover it up.

  Roswell

  * * *

  Date: 1947

  Location: Roswell, New Mexico

  The Conspirators: US Army Air Forces, other military branches

  The Victims: Unclear

  * * *

  The Theory

  The story of Roswell is the most famous cover-up conspiracy in all of UFOlogy, and it’s based on actual events that UFO authors have strung together into a cohesive narrative of aliens and deception. Strange debris found in 1947 near Roswell Army Air Field was initially described as a “flying disc” in the Roswell Daily Record. Even though the story was corrected the next day to identify it as material from a weather balloon, conspiracy theorists thought there might be more to the story. Imaginative authors in the 1970s claimed that the debris was actually a crashed flying saucer containing alien bodies, and that story has become the stuff of conspiracy legend. Today, conspiracy theorists feel that no intelligent person would believe the ludicrous explanation of “weather balloon” to explain a crashed flying saucer with alien bodies, and so their general belief is that the Air Force’s explanation was a cover-up.

  The Truth

  No flying saucer has ever been found crashed at Roswell. What was found in 1947 was debris from a weather balloon, and was well known to the New York University researchers who launched it, and to the Roswell Army Air Field officers who retrieved it.

  The Backstory

  The Roswell story began when rancher Mac Brazel found some strange debris on the Foster Ranch property 75 miles northwest of Roswell, New Mexico, in 1947. He reported it to the sheriff, who passed the report along to Major Jesse Marcel at nearby Roswell Army Air Field (RAAF). Marcel released a statement to the Roswell Daily Record newspaper, which ran the headline “RAAF Captures Flying Saucer on Ranch in Roswell Region.”

  However, the next day, the Roswell Daily Record printed a correction, stating that it was merely debris from a weather balloon, and this has been the official position of the Air Force ever since (in September of 1947, the US Army Air Forces became the US Air Force).

  Skeptoid ® Says . . .

  Some believe that the mysterious debris was taken to government-owned facilities for examination—part to the highly classified Area 51 in Nevada for testing, and part to Hangar 18 at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio.

  Although later accounts have varied considerably, the debris that was initially found consisted of some 5 pounds of aluminum and foil. Army Air Force officials immediately identified it as part of a long, low-frequency antenna train suspended from a weather balloon as part of Project Mogul, intended to detect Soviet nuclear tests by their low-frequency radio burst. The photographs of the debris being examined by Marcel and other officers show material consistent with the Mogul balloon trains. Some have accepted this explanation, and others have not.

  Skeptoid ® Says . . .

  Talk about the power of suggestion: Mac Brazel had just been reading about UFOs, so he reported the debris he found to the sheriff as such. The sheriff didn’t know any better, so he reported it to the Army as such. And, apparently, the reporter from the Roswell Daily Record didn’t know any better either, and so printed the headline.

  Regardless, the story was essentially dormant and largely unknown until 1978, thirty-one years later. The National Enquirer tabloid decided to reprint the original uncorrected article from the Roswell Daily Record, which identified the debris as a flying saucer. UFOlogist Stanton Friedman, assuming the first story to be the true account, interviewed everyone he could find who was still alive to try and piece together the story, but there wasn’t much new information. Two other UFOlogists published the book The Roswell Incident, which also didn’t add very much.

  It wasn’t for another eleven years that the story finally took on a life of its own. The TV show Unsolved Mysteries devoted a 1989 episode mainly to Friedman and his work. One viewer was a retired mortician, Glenn Dennis, who had worked in Roswell in 1947. Dennis contacted Friedman to share his recollections. Together, the two reconstructed what they believed was an accurate time line of extraordinary events, based entirely upon Dennis’s forty-two-year-old memories. This reconstruction forms the entire basis of the modern Roswell mythology, including alien bodies, multiple crash sites, and an aggressive military cover-up. The 1991 book UFO Crash at Roswell details the complete reconstructed tale, based on Friedman’s interviews with Dennis. This book captures all the out-of-this-world theories you’ve ever heard about the Roswell incident.

  The Explanation

  It turns out that Glenn Dennis’s memory wasn’t very good, and Friedman was perhaps a little too eager and imaginative.

  Under tremendous pressure from UFOlogists and the general public to reveal these alien discoveries, New Mexico Congressman Steven Schi
ff made an official request through the General Accounting Office, and the Air Force detailed Col. Richard L. Weaver and 1st Lt. James McAndrew to dig up everything they could to explain the extraordinary claims in the book. Their findings were compiled into the book The Roswell Report: Fact versus Fiction in the New Mexico Desert, which was made freely available to the general public. It is highly entertaining—you should definitely check it out.

  Weaver and McAndrew were indeed able to concretely identify all of Dennis’s memories—but it turns out they did not occur in one single event in 1947, but were many unrelated events over a twelve-year period. Most of them happened in the 1950s.

  For example, Dennis recalled going to the base one day on business and finding everyone very upset for some reason unknown to him. He remembered a tall, red-haired colonel, accompanied by a black sergeant, who angrily threw Dennis off the base and threatened him. This incident is usually pointed to as part of the cover-up effort. Whatever this incident was, however, could not have happened in 1947, because the Air Force did not begin racial integration until 1949—and the only red-haired colonel ever stationed there, Lee Ferrell, didn’t start until 1956.

  Dennis also recalled an Air Force nurse friend being very upset over the autopsy of three small bodies that were mangled, burned black, and emitted fumes so noxious they had to be moved. The nurse soon disappeared and Dennis was not able to learn what happened to her. In fact, these bodies came from a 1956 crash of a KC-97G aircraft, which killed all eleven crew in an intense cabin fire. Little remained of the bodies. Three of the charred corpses were soaked in fuel and had to be moved from the military base because of the strong fumes, and they were autopsied instead at Dennis’s mortuary. The nurse friend who disappeared was Lt. Eileen Mae Fanton, who was taken to a hospital in Texas in 1955 and medically retired—but the dates prove that these incidents were unrelated. (Dennis had been unable to learn her fate simply because of privacy regulations.)

  The most amusing of Dennis’s recollections concerned a humanoid creature with a huge head walking under its own power into the base hospital. Even this story was tracked down. Captain Dan Fulgham was struck on the head by a balloon gondola in 1959 and developed a magnificent hematoma, which made his forehead and face swell up. But he said he felt all right, and smoked a cigarette and hung around like that for a while before heading into the hospital for treatment.

  Weaver and McAndrew’s report also contains extensive documentation of the debris that was collected. Army Air Forces officers recognized it immediately as a rawin target (short for radio-wind and pronounced RAY-win), a battery-powered telemetry instrument that is lifted by a weather balloon. Although the purpose of Project Mogul was classified, the actual materials its rawin was made of were commonplace, so they were not difficult for the officers to identify.

  In short, ample evidence exists that the full scope of the Roswell incident was the recovery of some boring weather balloon equipment that was quickly identified and then forgotten. Zero evidence supports the modern reinterpretations of this event, such as multiple crash sites, alien spacecraft, alien bodies, and death threats and cover-ups by a military conspiracy. After more than seventy years, it’s unlikely that anything new will emerge.

  Area 51

  * * *

  Date: 1955–Present

  Location: Nellis Air Force Base, Nevada

  The Conspirators: US Air Force and other unspecified US government divisions

  The Victims: Not specified

  * * *

  The Theory

  Way off in a remote corner of nowhere in the Nevada desert is a great, flat, dry lake bed with an Air Force base sprawling at its edge. As it’s inside the vast boundaries of Nellis AFB, it is off limits to civilians, and fenced off with signs warning against trespassers. No small wonder that such a facility draws the curious into suspecting a conspiracy.

  The conspiracy theorists call it Area 51, and they claim that the government denies that it (most famous military facility in the world) exists. They believe that an alien spacecraft crashed at Roswell in 1947, and the wreckage was brought here and has been developed by the US government for use as a weapon. They also believe that secret Nazi weapons, including a vehicle very much like a flying saucer, were brought here and their development has continued as well. Even darker, they believe that trespassers who only want to know the truth are often seized and never heard from again. What could the government actually be doing inside this most inner sanctum, the very heart of black ops?

  The Truth

  Area 51 is actually the National Classified Test Facility, and is used for test flying both new designs for the Air Force, and captured foreign aircraft. There are no alien flying saucers in its hangars.

  The Backstory

  Area 51 is an actual place. Formally, it is called the National Classified Test Facility inside Nellis Air Force Base in Nevada, and its existence has always been public. The large, flat surface of dry Groom Lake makes it an ideal place for long runways. The test facility was founded in 1955 by Lockheed design chief Kelly Johnson, who needed a place for the Air Force to develop and test his new U-2 spy plane. He gave the remote location a nice name to attract civilian workers: Paradise Ranch. At the time it was public knowledge.

  Skeptoid ® Says . . .

  Informally, Area 51 has been called The Ranch, Groom Lake, Dreamland, or simply The Site. Radio traffic inside Nellis has referred to it as The Box, Red Square, Homey Airport, and Home Plate. Regardless, Area 51 has emerged as the public’s favorite name. (The name comes from its parcel number from when the US Atomic Energy Commission subdivided land to create the National Proving Grounds in 1950, for the testing of nuclear weapons.)

  Once the highly classified, top-secret “black programs” began operating there, the veil of secrecy was pulled over Area 51, its employees, and its activities. It’s a large facility, easily visible, and yet the Air Force would say nothing about it officially. Conspiracy theorists therefore jumped on it—after all, whenever the government is up to something secret, it’s got to be something nefarious.

  Much of the modern pop-culture hype about Area 51 is the result of one man who came forward, claiming to have been an employee working on captured alien technology. In 1989, a guy named Bob Lazar told a Las Vegas TV reporter that he had been a civilian engineer at Area 51 assigned to study alien field propulsion systems. He quickly became the darling of TV documentaries looking to sensationalize Area 51, and spoke very openly of his work and his background.

  The Explanation

  The problem with supporting the conspiratorial claims about Area 51 is that its actual history is pretty well documented, while its conspiratorial history is without any evidence at all, and certainly without scientific plausibility. The types of propulsion technologies described by Lazar aren’t simply nonexistent, they’re based on purely fictional misrepresentations of physics.

  To start, one glaring red flag characterized Lazar’s commentary about his secret work, and it’s a common one that we see with many such people who claim some insider position. In Lazar’s version of Area 51, everything was top secret, and employees were told never to reveal their work. Yet Lazar actually spoke quite freely and openly about his alien propulsion systems. It seems unlikely for both to be true: that Lazar had actually worked there under a threat not to reveal the fact, and that he now traveled around telling his stories openly to anyone who would listen.

  However, it seems only the TV producers took Lazar seriously. Amateur investigators immediately discovered that he lied about his educational credentials (he said he graduated from Cal Tech and MIT, yet he never attended either school, much less earned a degree). Actual physicists who listened to Lazar’s descriptions of some basic physics revealed that he had no idea what he was talking about, and probably had no physics education whatsoever. For example, he did not appear to understand the difference between gravity and particles; he said that gravity and the strong nuclear force were one and the same, which they
’re not; and he claimed that an equivalent mass of antimatter could be created by bombarding conventional matter with protons, a flagrant violation of basic arithmetic, as well as a fundamental violation of conservation of energy. Basically, Lazar tossed together a “word salad”—language that sounds sciencey because the words are impressive to a layperson, but that mean nothing to anyone who understands them.

  Skeptoid ® Says . . .

  Despite declassified files, conspiracy theorists continue publishing strange beliefs about what happens at Area 51, even making claims now proven to be false. In 2011, author Annie Jacobsen published Area 51: An Uncensored History of America’s Top Secret Military Base, which repeated the claim that the nonexistent “flying saucer” recovered at Roswell in 1947 had been studied at Area 51.

  As far as secret projects go, in 1991, the Air Force declassified Project OXCART, and the complete development history of the A-12 and SR-71 spy planes became a matter of public record. We now know that after these programs, Area 51 was mainly the development base for the F-117A stealth fighter (project names HAVE BLUE and SENIOR TREND), as well as a test site for various new technologies. This shows us that Area 51 was quite busy on actual, earthly projects throughout the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s, and had scant time or resources for anything else.