by Kenneth Hite
Victory had not come without cost. An extraordinarily high percentage of the men who had served in either polar theater began displaying symptoms of psychiatric disorders even before the mission ended. In On the Ice, a 1995 study focused on personnel stationed in the Antarctic over the previous 50 years, Dr Lawrence Palinkas determined that more than 5 percent of those who had spent time on the continent were experiencing symptoms “severe enough to warrant clinical intervention” after only a few months in theater. Even in those not struggling with the sudden and inexplicable onset of mental illness, Palinkas observed a drastic increase in antisocial behaviors, as time on the site magnified “seemingly trivial events and symptoms, transforming what would be viewed as mundane or unimportant in any other environment into something that is problematic and significant under conditions of isolation and confinement” – to say nothing of exposure to the frankly alien.
The destroyer USS Jenkins (DD-447) off California in January 1944. Prior to its role in Operation Starfish Prime (p. 57), Jenkins provided shore support and operational facilities for the Unit 10 detachments in the Philippines from February to April 1945. The Iranun people, traditional sailors and pirates, formed part of the "Moro" resistance to US occupation (1899-1913); certain Iranun villages rebelled again in February 1925 during the R'lyeh aftershock. Unit 10 raided and cleared those villages, killing a breeding population of Deep Ones and hybrids but never finding the cult center of Aira, the so-called Bandar Marmar Zamrud ('city of marble and beryl'). On Walpurgisnacht 1945, an unknown sub-oceanic force attacked Jenkins near Tarakan Island; the destroyer survived, and official Navy records blamed the damage on a mine. (LOC)
On December 30, 1946, the Balao-class submarine USS Sennet rendezvoused with the Central Group of TF 68 off Scott Island, about 300 miles from the Antarctic coast. Its hydrophones had detected unusual activity beneath the Ross Sea ice. Rear Admiral Cruzen, on board the amphibious command ship USS Mount Olympus, ordered a reconnaissance in force by the Sennet as the icebreaker USCGC Northwind escorted the remainder of Central Group through the ice. Dr Waldo Lyon, an expert in acoustic physics and ice formation, boarded the Sennet along with Commander James Starkweather, a veteran of the 1933–34 Second Miskatonic Antarctic Expedition and ONI B-8 operative.
The Sennet encountered telepathic Megarkaruan opposition almost at once, but quick and humane disciplinary measures by Captain Joseph B. Icenhower contained the problem. (Dr Lyon also obtained valuable hydrophone readings that enabled later CIA work on human telepathy and mind-control in projects Bluebird, Artichoke, and MK Ultra.) On January 2, 1947, the Sennet positioned itself directly over the Megarkaruan city, pinpointing the few sound-emitting locations in the undersea near-necropolis. The city apparently hosted a shoggoth breeding pit, and launched at least three of the ancient bioweapons to destroy or drive off the Sennet. Shown here, the Sennet launches the third and fatal M28 HBX torpedo at nearly point-blank range, which disintegrated the attacker. With two more beasts incoming and the hydrophone showing no diminution in the supposedly destroyed shoggoth’s signaling activity, and only seven torpedoes remaining in its arsenal, the Sennet retreated with severe bow damage. The Northwind towed the Sennet back to Scott Island the next day. Direct or indirect shoggoth attack (the logs refer to unusual, even impossible, movement of icebergs into the ships’ path) also damaged the Mount Olympus and Northwind, and the cargo ships USS Merrick and USS Yancey. Reinforcement from the aircraft carrier Philippine Sea, which dropped salvoes of depth charges from its R4D Skytrain transports, suppressed Megarkarua activity against Central Group.
MAJIC and the Atomic Age
Success against the stiff resistance from NRE-associated forces in both polar regions had not only demonstrated that the United States could credibly combat Mythos entities in their own domains, but also proved the absolute necessity of a more permanent and comprehensive management of the Cthulhu Wars. Secretary of the Navy James Forrestal made unified operations against the Mythos threat a condition of his becoming the United States’ first Secretary of Defense.
In response to Forrestal’s concerns, President Harry S. Truman signed Executive Order 9887 on August 22, 1947, “Designating Public Organizations Entitled to Enjoy Certain Privileges, Exemptions, and Immunities.” This apparently innocuous document formally established a secret joint military/civilian Multi-Agency Joint Intelligence Command (MAJIC) in a classified annex. The new agency was authorized to use any and all means necessary to combat the NRE threat both at home and abroad.
As MAJIC’s first director, Dr Curtis V. Ropes reunited the scattered former elements of the old Unit 10. At the prompting of a formal advisory committee of 12 prominent figures drawn from the military, intelligence, and academic communities, MAJIC moved quickly to establish global intelligence and communication networks to monitor known hotbeds of Mythos activities, with manned short-wave radio stations transmitting signals encoded in series of apparently random numbers. With the launch of the Russian Sputnik satellite in 1957 after several Mi-Gö encounters in the Soviet Union, it became clear to MAJIC that terrestrial surveillance would not be enough. By March 1958, the United States had placed two of its own artificial satellites in orbit, confirming the presence of a belt of protective radiation surrounding the planet, and coincidentally discovering an elder race of half-polypous, semi-material, and utterly alien entities that seemed to live within it, flitting between the upper atmosphere and outer space.
The MAJIC after-action assessment of Starfish Prime holds that the creature destroyed by the nuclear explosion at 11.00pm Honolulu time, July 8, 1962, was likely not the actual entity known as Cthulhu, but one of his spawn or kindred. (A recent reassessment posits that it was indeed Cthulhu, but as with the 1925 Alert encounter, he recovered.) Similar controversies extend to almost every aspect of the operation: eyewitness testimony frequently contradicts not only that of sailors or observers on the same deck, but even itself. Almost two-thirds of listed observers report a “second missile” and a second detonation seconds after the first, despite the impossibility of a second launch from Johnston Atoll. The USS Halibut was on Pacific patrol at the time, and may have launched a Regulus nuclear cruise missile on Commander W. R. Cobean’s own recognizance upon encountering the Cthulhu-spawn. If so, MAJIC and the Pentagon understandably suppressed the evidence of a freelance nuclear release and redacted it even from internal reports. The official version puts “second missile” reports down to NRE time dilation or post-traumatic hysteria.
This view correlates reports from the deck of the helicopter carrier USS Iwo Jima, including the “second missile.” A Bell UH-1 deploys a sensor array, repurposed from Dominic to MAJIC requirements. A destroyer screen (from left to right, USS Newell, USS John S. McCain, USS O’Bannon) lays down a torpedo and artillery barrage that slows, but does not halt, the Thing’s advance.
THE VELA INCIDENT
On September 22, 1979, an American Vela Hotel satellite monitoring nuclear treaty compliance detected two rapid flashes of light – typically characteristic of a nuclear detonation – between the Prince Edward and Crozet islands in the South Indian Ocean. Although no nation has ever claimed responsibility for the detonation, the prevailing view of the US intelligence community identified it as a joint South African-Israeli nuclear weapons test. MAJIC files support this attribution, but notes that the blast occurred near the assessed location of a large Megarkarua colony believed to contain the largest shoggoth breeding pits outside Lake Vostok in Antarctica.
Operation Argus
Upon receiving a detailed brief from MAJIC indicating that these were the flying polyps described in the Pnakotika and the recovered Megarkaruan art and records and that they could represent a grave threat to American national security to which the United States could not credibly respond, President Dwight D. Eisenhower authorized a nuclear first strike against them. From August 27 to September 6, 1958, the USS Norton Sound, once more called into anti-Mythos duty, launched three modified X-171A missiles topp
ed with 1.7-kiloton nuclear warheads into the upper atmosphere with assistance from nine other vessels outfitted with special radars and targeting suites. The detonations – at 100, 310, and 490 miles above sea level – each targeted dense pockets of flying polyp activity, destroying many of the alien creatures and creating rings of ionized energy meant to prevent them from counter-attacking the Earth’s surface. The attack, dubbed Operation Argus, was publicly billed as a scientific exercise, a cover that had served MAJIC’s predecessor agencies well ten years before.
Hartwell and Starfish
The sudden and unexpected discovery of NREs in the upper atmosphere also raised MAJIC’s level of concern regarding activity in the inaccessible depths of the world’s oceans. In 1949, the Department of Defense began development of a permanent sound surveillance system (SOSUS): effectively a net of hydrographic sensors designed to detect Soviet submarine activity transiting the corridor between the United Kingdom, Iceland, and Greenland. As early as 1955, MAJIC had indoctrinated several key staff members, and the program, codenamed Project Hartwell, was first tested near a Deep One settlement southwest of Bermuda in 1960. When tuned properly, SOSUS could warn of significant shoggoth activity as well as Soviet submarines, and if necessary detect the movements of other undersea entities. Fully operational in 1961, MAJIC’s investment in Hartwell paid off almost immediately.
Hartwell detected significant sub-oceanic activity in the R’lyeh region on June 19, 1962, prompting an immediate response from MAJIC. By 10.00pm that day, MAJIC agents had landed on the amphibious assault ship USS Iwo Jima and commandeered Joint Task Force 8 (JTF 8), a US Navy flotilla conducting the ongoing (since April) Operation Dominic high-altitude nuclear tests. The agents carried presidential authorization to use any and all means to respond – including, if necessary, the use of two Thor intermediate-range ballistic missiles, based on Johnston Atoll and carrying 1.4-megaton yield W49 nuclear warheads. A destroyer assigned to JTF 8, the USS Jenkins, made first contact with the enemy, firing a volley of torpedoes at one of Cthulhu’s enormous spawn on June 20.
The USS New Jersey, shown here conducting shore bombardment during the Korean War, served in at least three (and possibly many more) anti-Mythos operations during its 22 years in service. On April 30, 1944, she (along with the USS Iowa and USS Massachusetts) composed Bombardment Unit Zero, targeting known NRE-active sites near Nan Madol on Ponape before the main shelling began the next day. While decommissioned at the Atlantic Reserve Fleet yard in Bayonne, New Jersey, she served as the impromptu headquarters and prison facility for a 1949 MAJIC investigation (Operation Festival) of a subterranean worm-cult, conventional land structures being deemed too vulnerable to literal subversion. On October 31, 1968, New Jersey’s 16in guns obliterated a Cham fishing village on the island of Hòn Mò that MAJIC suspected of being a Deep One outpost, an “Indochina Innsmouth” as Special Forces Colonel Kenton Stanfield put it. (PD)
The first Thor nuclear strike failed: whether the rocket or the warhead malfunctioned or missed, or was somehow neutralized, remains highly classified, along with everything else about the test later codenamed Starfish Prime. Several other vessels became engaged in a running battle over the next two weeks, firing on the creature and then pulling back to slowly draw it into almost point-blank range for the single Thor nuclear missile that remained between the titanic demigod and the Hawaiian islands. On July 8, the Iwo Jima sighted the enemy less than 200 miles from the Johnston Atoll and ordered a second missile launch. This time, the warhead detonated successfully, disintegrating the nameless sky-spawn. The United States had once more exercised its nuclear first-strike policy against the Mythos.
The Mi-Gö Offensive
While the United States mounted an active nuclear offensive against Mythos entities, the more conventional battles in the conflict were almost categorically defensive. As MAJIC executed strikes against Megarkarua, Deep Ones, and flying polyps, Mi-Gö activity increased in multiple theaters, but did not take on a belligerent character immediately.
Mi-Gö had shadowed Allied and Axis aircraft throughout World War II without taking action against either side, suggesting that they intended to remain neutral, both in purely human conflicts and perhaps also in humanity’s conflicts with its ancient predecessors. However, the Mi-Gö did upgrade their presence from the small glowing “foo fighters” (possibly the Mi-Gö themselves) to biometallic craft built on quasi-Euclidean discoid and conic lines. First sighted by civilian pilot Kenneth Arnold over Mt. Rainier, Washington on June 24, 1947, and then recovered by the US Army Air Force after a serendipitous lightning strike over Roswell, New Mexico the following month, these “flying saucers” characterized Mi-Gö activity for the rest of the century.
Korea, 1951
On April 10, 1951, a Mi-Gö flying disc launched from a mining base hidden in Korea’s Masikyrong Mountains attacked a US Army infantry company in the so-called “Iron Triangle” near Chorwan after hovering over the battlefield and weathering artillery and small-arms fire for the better part of an hour. The craft swept the US position with an energy ray that incapacitated the entire company without killing any of the American troops. The targeted men displayed striated patterns of second- and third-degree burns accompanied by drastically elevated white blood cell counts, and experienced episodes of disorientation and memory loss for the rest of their lives.
Alaska, 1951
Three-and-a-half weeks later, a Canadian Pacific Airlines DC-4, on a scheduled flight for the United Nations from Vancouver to Tokyo via Anchorage, went off-course after reporting contact with a disc-shaped craft. The plane, registered as CF-CPC, made a final radio transmission near Mt. McKinley (known today as Denali), and then disappeared without a trace, taking 31 passengers with it. In 1993, MAJIC discovered a subterranean Mi-Gö base codenamed “Black Pyramid” only 8 miles from the point where contact with the aircraft had been lost.
Washington, 1952
Perhaps as an additional show of force, seven large Mi-Gö saucers hovered over Washington, DC, intermittently for almost two weeks in July 1952. On the night of July 19, the craft took up a low observational position over both the White House and the US Capitol. By July 29, President Truman ordered the Air Force to prepare sorties to shoot down the saucers if and when they reappeared, despite MAJIC’s caution that the Mi-Gö response to such provocation could not be anticipated because of their seemingly incomprehensible strategic doctrine. Those consequences ultimately went unexplored: by the time the Air Force was ready to deploy fighters in defense of the capital, the Mi-Gö had simply left the area.
Soldiers of the US 2nd Infantry Division hunker down during an artillery barrage near Hwasun, South Korea, in October 1950. Their unit assisted the ROK 20th Regiment, 11th Division in counter-guerrilla operations in the hills, where remnants of the North Korean Army radicalized the so-called Olaegodae (“very old”) mountain folk. The guerrillas and Olaegodae surprised the 5th Battalion of the 20th Regiment in an ambush near Hwasun in late October and wiped it out nearly to the last man. One surviving US soldier, L. C. Rufus, described “an ice-cold wind that seemed to be alive” choosing victims and dragging them off: unknown Mythos magic, Wendigo attack, or action by Itlaqqa or Hastur perhaps. The South Korean government exterminated the Olaegodae in the pacification campaign of 1951–52. (LOC)
Mythos Proxies
“Should the central government successfully use occult methods to defeat a movement based upon such methods, the very concepts of sorcery and magic which lend impetus to the insurgencies of the moment may gain strength and acquire even greater trouble-making potential for the future. In other words, the more successful the counterinsurgency campaign, if that campaign is based upon a counter-magic approach, the more ominous the outlook for the future.”
–James R. Price & Paul Jureidini, Report to the Special Operations Research Office
While MAJIC focused on eliminating or at least mitigating the NRE threat, other agencies within the American security establishment sough
t to turn the powerful alien beings of the Alhazredic Mythos into instruments of statecraft. The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), born like MAJIC from the remnants of the wartime OSS in 1947, resented MAJIC’s primacy in occult war planning. On the thin grounds that MAJIC’s remit only covered counter-Mythos work, the CIA rapidly established its own occult operations shop, run out of the Technical Services Section under Dr Sidney Gottlieb. An expert in poisons and hypnosis known to his colleagues as “the black sorcerer,” Gottlieb had obtained a cache of 1st-century Aramaic scrolls delivered to the CIA’s Damascus Station by an Egyptian merchant in 1947. This Damascus Codex became the CIA’s operational bible: their tame Whittemore Group analysts concluded that these scrolls provided NRE control mechanisms.
Reconstructed skulls of Java Man (Homo erectus) based on fossils (1.6 MYA) discovered at Sangiran, Java by G. H. R. von Koenigswald in 1936–41. Note the large, prominent incisors. (The Naturl History Museum / Alamy)
Tibet
Between 1951 and 1965, CIA’s Special Activities Division trained and supplied several Tibetan volunteer paramilitary forces to resist occupation from Communist China. When a briefly successful uprising in Lhasa provoked an overwhelming Chinese military response in 1959, the CIA initiated an indirect counterattack.