by Nick Redfern
“Founded as Edgerton, Germeshausen and Grier (EG&G) the company was acquired by URS Corporation some years ago. URS employs over 50,000 and is the leading designer and builder of federal classified facilities in the United States. They work with military as well as with the Intelligence Community (particularly the NSA) in constructing and operating some of our nation’s most sensitive and secret facilities.”
Now, let’s take a look at what O’Donnell claimed was the dark truth behind the Roswell legend.
According to data that Alfred O’Donnell claimed he was exposed to during his time working for EG&G, what came down outside of Roswell, New Mexico in July 1947 was not a UFO. Nor was it a weather-balloon or a Mogul balloon. And there was, apparently, not even a single crash-test dummy anywhere in sight. O’Donnell made the controversial and sensational claim that the craft and its crew originated in the Soviet Union. But, we’re not talking about your average aircraft. The same goes for those aboard it, too. O’Donnell said that Joseph Stalin – the General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union from 1922 to 1952 and Premier from 1941 to 1953 – was the driving force behind what was, allegedly, a diabolical, manipulative plot designed to make the U.S. Government and the people of the United States think that an alien invasion was underway. The purpose: to plunge America into a state of overwhelming terror.
It’s worth my time mentioning that in early 2006 I was given an almost identical story from a former employee of Area 51 (where Alfred O’Donnell spent some time). The scenario was practically the same: physically altered people were flown – from Russia to the United States - aboard a strange-looking aircraft, as a means to try and convince the United States government that the nation was about to be invaded by extraterrestrials. The story, as it was told to me, was first published in my 2010 book, The NASA Conspiracies, one year before Jacobsen’s book appeared. This suggests that O’Donnell was not the only one with Area 51 connections who had been exposed to this strange believe-it-or-not type tale.
O’Donnell said that Stalin had secretly enlisted into the plot Dr. Josef Mengele, one of the vilest and most deranged and dangerous figures of the 20th century. Mengele spent a great deal of his time at Auschwitz, a complex comprised of more than forty camps in then-occupied Poland, at which where more than one million people died in horrible fashions at the hands of Nazi scum. Mengele had a very disturbing fascination with dwarfs, to the extent that he undertook awful experiments on them. As Annie Jacobsen states, Mengele “removed parts of children’s craniums and replaced them with bones from larger, adult skulls.” He also removed the eyes from children who exhibited various forms of dwarfism. Some of the experiments led the children to lose all of their hair. By this point, you might have deduced where things are leading. Stalin had a warped plan to have a number of child-dwarfs physically altered by Mengele and his team of doctors (although, calling them “doctors” is a disservice to doctors all around the world). They would go from looking like children to resembling something unearthly. Then, there was the matter of the “alien spaceship” that Stalin needed to complete the ruse.
So O’Donnell’s tale goes, Stalin brought in a team of experts in the field of aviation and had them create two strange-looking aircraft based upon the near-unique designs of a pair of aircraft engineers. They were Walter and Reimar Horten, both born in Germany; Walter in 1913 and Reimar in 1915. There is no doubt that during the Second World War the pair constructed some very strange aerial vehicles. According to what Annie Jacobsen was told, by 1947 Stalin’s infernal plan was just about ready to go. An obvious question needs answering: how on Earth could a number of poor, surgically-altered children fly a highly advanced aircraft from Russia to the United States? Well, according to Alfred O’Donnell, they didn’t. He claimed that the vehicle in which the children were strapped in was remotely-controlled by the crew of the second Horten-type craft.
The plot was for the aircraft containing the children to land in a visible location in the United States and then have the children exit the strange-looking craft and present themselves to the highest echelons of the U.S. Government. The outcome: a unanimous belief that an alien invasion was about to begin, and widespread chaos and fear across the land would inevitably follow. It didn’t quite work out like that, though. As history has shown, the craft crashed rather than landed, and all of the action went down on the Foster Ranch, New Mexico; not on the lawns of the White House, as, perhaps, may have been the plan. So, with just (a) a few locals in Lincoln County, (b) various personnel from the Roswell Army Air Field, and (c) a group of senior military personnel in the Pentagon, in the know, the Army Air Force quickly shut everything down and put a plan into process that revolved around nothing more threatening than a weather-balloon. The same team then put the fear of God into the likes of Mack Brazel – ensuring that he would never talk; which, history has shown, after 1947 he did not. And they retrieved the smashed craft and the badly damaged bodies of the children, along with two survivors of the flight. Everything was then swiftly flown to what is now Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, Dayton, Ohio; the home of the Foreign Technology Division. In 1951, all of the recovered evidence was secretly transported to Area 51, Nevada, where they are still said to be held to this day. That, basically, is the claim of Alfred O’Donnell. It’s well-thought out, but it most definitely has its flaws.
It is a fact that the Horten brothers did work on aircraft that were radical in design and appearance. There’s a December 1947 document that focuses on what the U.S. military knew, at that time, on matters relative to the Horten brother and flying saucers. It’s a document that was written by a Lieutenant Colonel Harry H. Pretty for the H.Q. Berlin Command, Office of Military Government for Germany (U.S.). Titled Horten Brothers (Flying Saucers), it was sent to the Deputy Director of Intelligence, European Command, Frankfurt, Germany, U.S. Army for study. Lieutenant Colonel Pretty’s report shows that although the Horten brothers had certainly worked on some revolutionary designs, none could be said to be definitive flying saucers.
A U.S. Air Force document of January 3, 1952 (on the subject of UFO sightings investigated by the Air Force in the late 1940s and early 1950s) from Brigadier General W.M. Garland to General John A. Samford, Air Force Director of Intelligence is highly intriguing, as it touches upon the work of the Horten brothers, Walter and Reimar. It starts: “It is logical to relate the reported sightings to the known development of aircraft, jet propulsion, rockets and range extension capabilities in Germany and the USSR. In this connection, it is to be noted that certain developments by the Germans, particularly the Horten wing, jet propulsion, and refueling, combined with their extensive employment of V-l and V-2 weapons during World War II, lend credence to the possibility that the flying objects may be of German and Russian origin.”
The document continues: “The developments mentioned above were completed and operational between 1941 and 1944 and subsequently fell into the hands of the Soviets at the end of the war [italics mine]. There is evidence that the Germans were working on these projects as far back as 1931 to 1938. Therefore it may be assumed that the Germans had at least a 7 to 10 year lead over the United States.”
Some might say that this bizarre tale has a degree of plausibility attached to it. For example, it should be noted that both Reimar Horten and Josef Mengele moved to Argentina. Mengele did so in July 1949, later fleeing to Paraguay and then Brazil, while trying to avoid extradition on war-crimes. He died in 1979. Reimar Horten left for Argentina in the post-Second World War era and died there in 1994.
There are, however, significant red-flags that need to be addressed. Alfred O’Donnell told Annie Jacobsen that the interior of the craft that came down on the Foster Ranch in 1947 contained “Russian writing” and “letters from the Cyrillic alphabet.” If the Russians wanted the craft to be perceived by the U.S. Government as being extraterrestrial in origin, what would prompt the Russians to adorn it with examples of their very own writing? Such a
n action would be ridiculous and would quickly reveal to the United States government the Russian craft for what it really was; surely causing the entire “alien invasion” plan to collapse in rapid-time. We should also note that the Roswell affair occurred in early July 1947. The Kenneth Arnold incident occurred only two weeks before. How could the Russians have constructed the two aircraft, surgically altered the “crew,” and remotely flown the vehicles to the United States in such a short time-frame after Arnold spoke out? Unless, of course, the Russians were behind Arnold’s sighting, too, and the plan to fly the craft which crashed on the ranch was already in place and planned months earlier. There’s also the issue of that huge debris field, which was said to have covered an area of roughly six hundred feet. With such a huge amount of damage done to the vehicle, one has to wonder how anyone could have survived the crash; never mind two children. It’s an unfortunate and grisly fact that in many high-speed, high-altitude air accidents, the bodies of those on-board are pulverized beyond recognition. But, two somehow managed to survive the Roswell crash?
When it comes to the matter of trying to resolve all of this, there are several theories we might want to ponder on: (a) that Alfred O’Donnell was directed by Area 51-based colleagues to feed such a sensational story to Annie Jacobsen, as a means to try and discredit and “contaminate” the legitimate top secret material she had uncovered and published in her 2011 Area 51 book; (b) that the story was the creation of right-wing extremists who had an agenda designed to instill the very disturbing image of superior, advanced, Nazi technology in our midst; or, (c) that the events broadly occurred as O’Donnell described them: a truly horrific effort by the Soviets to use the UFO phenomenon as a means to try and psychologically destabilize the United States by faking the first wave of an alien invasion.
Now, we’ll see an example of how the United States government hit back against the early saucer-based operations of the Soviets.
4. “Some sort of psychological warfare operation”
The strange story of the alleged UFO crash at Aztec, New Mexico in March 1948 – and the recovery of a number of dead “little men” at the site - is a real hotbed of lies, disinformation, and shady characters. Most of those same characters were best avoided by those with dollars to spare. The tale was made infamous in the pages of Frank Scully’s 1950 blockbuster, Behind the Flying Saucers; it was a book that turned out to be a huge seller. Today, the Aztec affair is seen by some ufologists as Roswell’s “little brother;” “skeleton in the cupboard” might be a far more apt description, however. Many researchers of the UFO phenomenon dismiss the Aztec incident as nothing but a hoax; one which was perpetrated by a shady businessman/conman named Silas Newton. His less-than-shining FBI file can be accessed at the FBI’s website, The Vault. When it came to stories of aliens from faraway worlds, making money was always the goal for Newton. And the only goal. Along for the ride with Newton was Leo Gebauer. He was a quasi-scientist and the Igor to Newton’s ego-driven Dr. Frankenstein. There is, though, a very interesting and extremely odd aspect to the Newton/Aztec story. It serves to demonstrate how the UFO phenomenon was becoming the tool of manipulative disinformation specialists in the intelligence community. And not just of the Soviet Union. The United States was getting into the strange game, too.
Back in 1998, the late Karl Pflock, ufologist and CIA employee (sometimes at the same time…), was approached by a still-anonymous source who had something very interesting to say about the Aztec caper, and about Newton too. It was a decidedly weird series of revelations that Pflock surely never anticipated receiving. To his dying day, Pflock refused to reveal the name of his informant in the shadows – rumors, however, were that the person may have been a nephew of Silas Newton – but, Pflock did say that all of the lunchtime meetings with his source occurred between July 11 and September 24, 1998 and took place in a restaurant in Bernalillo, New Mexico. As the story goes, Pflock’s informant had in their hands twenty-seven pages taken, or rather torn, from an old and faded, lined journal. No prizes for guessing who that journal had belonged to. That’s right, sly, old Silas Newton. Pflock was told that Newton had kept journals and diaries not just for years, but for decades. They were jammed with entertaining tales of sexual conquests, of Hollywood starlets, of the fleecing of the rich and the gullible, and of wild adventures across the United States. The outcome of all this? Newton decided, around the turn of the 1970s, that it was right about time for him to write-up his version of the Aztec controversy. It would surely have been a definitive page-turner. Death, however, inconveniently intervened in 1972, when Newton passed away in his mid-eighties. What happened to all of those journals is anyone’s guess.
As for those few pages that Pflock was allowed to see – and to transcribe word for word – they tell a tale of undeniable weirdness. By his own admittance, and a couple of years after the Aztec story surfaced in Frank Scully’s book, Newton was clandestinely visited by two representatives of “a highly secret U.S. Government entity,” as Pflock carefully and tactfully described it. Those same representatives of the government told Newton, in no uncertain terms, that they knew his Aztec story was a complete and bald-faced lie. Utter bullshit, in fact. Incredibly, though, they wanted Newton to keep telling the tale to just about anyone and everyone who would listen. This caused Pflock to ponder on an amazing possibility: “Did the U.S. Government or someone associated with it use Newton to discredit the idea of crashed flying saucers so a real captured saucer or saucers could be more easily kept under wraps?”
Far more intriguing, though, and highly relevant to the theme of this book, is the next question that Pflock posed: “Was this actually nothing to do with real saucers but instead some sort of psychological warfare operation [italics mine]?” With the Newton revelations in hand, Pflock, no later than 1999, came to believe that back in the early fifties someone in the government, the intelligence community, or the military of the United States – and maybe even a swirling combination of all three – wanted the Aztec story further circulated. The purpose: as a means to try and convince the Russians that the U.S. military had acquired, or captured, alien technology. When, in reality, it had no such thing in its possession at all.
For the record, in 2002, when Pflock and I were corresponding regularly on the matter of these particularly curious revelations, he told me that he had been able to confirm who the two men that approached Newton worked for and specifically when their meeting with Newton occurred.
The timeframe was late March 1950 and the pair of spooks came from a small group within the CIA. Slightly more than a year later, Pflock learned, that very same group was absorbed into the Psychological Strategy Board. Files on the PSB are held at the President Harry S. Truman Library & Museum. Its staff have prepared the following summary on the history and work of the PSB. It was established by Presidential Directive on April 4, 1951 “to authorize and provide for the more effective planning, coordination, and conduct within the framework of approved national policies, of psychological operations.” An abbreviated version of the Presidential Directive was released to the public on June 20, 1951.
The PSB was composed of the Undersecretary of State, the Deputy Secretary of Defense and the Director of Central Intelligence, or their designated representatives. The founding Presidential Directive instructed the PSB to report to the National Security Council “on the Board’s activities on the evaluation of the national psychological operations, including implementation of approved objectives, policies, and programs by the departments and agencies concerned.”
The Psychological Strategy Board succeeded the State-War-Navy Coordinating Committee, which had been established during World War II to coordinate the Government’s psychological warfare efforts. During the Truman Presidency, the PSB, in addition to its inherited coordination role, conducted planning for psychological operations undertaken by its constituent agencies. It did not conduct operations of its own. According to Edward P. Lilly, the PSB’s histo
rian, the Board’s basic function was to prevent interagency rivalries from developing among the agencies involved in psychological operations. Seventeen meetings of the PSB’s constituent agency representatives were held during the last year and a half of Truman’s administration.
During the Eisenhower presidency, the PSB became purely a coordinating body; all planning was discontinued. The Board was terminated by Executive Order 10483 of September 3, 1953, and its functions were transferred to the Operations Coordinating Board.
Having digested the words above, it can be said with a high degree of certainty that those predecessors to the PSB, which Newton was confronted by, would have been the perfect people to have enlisted Newton into their operation mind-fuck. Not only that, in November 1998 Pflock secured from Bill Moore – co-author with Charles Berlitz of the 1980 book, The Roswell Incident – a copy of Newton’s will. Having earlier seen Newton’s “scrawling, sprawling” writing up close at that Bernalillo restaurant, Pflock said: “The will unquestionably is in Newton’s hand, and while I’m certainly not a handwriting expert, the comparison left no doubt in my mind that he wrote the journal, too.”
I know just how fascinated Pflock was when it came to the Aztec crash and the claims of Newton and that “highly secret U.S. Government entity.” Pflock and I had been corresponding as far back as the late 1990s, but, I didn’t meet him in person until 2003 – at a UFO gig in the city of Aztec itself. For a number of years, the conference was an annual event. But no more. Eclipsed by Roswell? Probably. When Pflock and I finally met, he near-immediately suggested that we should write an Aztec-themed book. Pflock’s reasoning was that he knew the story very well, and, via the provisions of the Freedom of Information Act, I had uncovered hundreds upon hundreds of pages of material – chiefly from the FBI – on the Aztec controversy and the players within it. He thought that we would make a good team. Particularly so now that I lived in the U.S. – and specifically in Dallas, Texas, which (in terms of the road-trips that I regularly undertake) is not at all far from New Mexico, where Pflock resided and where the 1948 crash supposedly happened.