The Mammoth Book of Cover-Ups
Page 40
USAF/CIA Project Blue Book covered up UFO sightings: ALERT LEVEL 10
Further Reading
Peter Brookesmith, UFO: The Complete Sightings Catalogue, 1995
J. Allen Hynek, The UFO Experience: A Scientific Inquiry, 1972
Jenny Randles and Peter Hough, The Complete Book of UFOs, 1994
DOCUMENT: EXTRACTS FROM THE US AIR FORCE’S “PROJECT BLUE BOOK” FACTSHEET
On 17 December 1969 the Secretary of the Air Force announced the termination of Project Blue Book, the Air Force program for the investigation of UFOs.
The decision to discontinue the UFO investigation was based on an evaluation of a report prepared by the University of Colorado entitled “Scientific Study of Unidentified Flying Objects”; a review of the University of Colorado’s report by the National Academy of Sciences; and Air Force experience investigating UFO reports during the past two decades.
As a result of theses investigations and studies, and experience gained from investigating UFO reports since 1948, the conclusions of Project Blue Book are:
(1) no UFO reported, investigated, and evaluated by the Air Force has ever given any indication of threat to our national security;
(2) there has been no evidence submitted to or discovered by the Air Force that sightings categorized as “unidentified” represent technological developments or principles beyond the range of present day scientific knowledge; and
(3) there has been no evidence indicating that sightings categorized as “unidentified” are extraterrestrial vehicles.
With the termination of Project Blue Book, the Air Force regulation establishing and controlling the program for investigating and analysing UFOs was rescinded. All documentation regarding the former Blue Book investigation has been permanently transferred to the Modern Military Branch, National Archives and Records service, 8th and Pennsylvania Avenue, Washington, DC 20408, and is available for public review and analysis.
Attached for your information is the Project Blue Book sighting summary for the period 1947–69. Also included is a listing of UFO-related materials currently available.
Since the termination of the Project, no evidence has been presented to indicate that further investigation of UFOs by the Air Force is warranted. In view of the considerable Air Force commitment of resources in the past, and the extreme pressure on Air Force funds at this time, there is no likelihood of renewed Air Force involvement in this area.
TOTAL UFO SIGHTINGS, 1947–69
Year
Total Sightings
Unidentified
1947
122
12
1948
156
7
1949
186
22
1950
210
27
1951
169
22
1952
1,501
303
1953
509
42
1954
487
46
1955
545
24
1956
670
14
1957
1,006
14
1958
627
10
1959
390
12
1960
557
14
1961
591
13
1962
474
15
1963
399
14
1964
562
19
1965
887
16
1966
1,112
32
1967
937
19
1968
375
3
1969
146
1
PROMIS
In 1982 a Washington DC software firm, Inslaw, developed a programme called PROMIS (Prosecutors’ Management Information System) for the US Justice Department. The unique feature of PROMIS was that it could collate information from different criminal databases without the information being reentered. An unseemly dispute between Inslaw and the Justice Department soon occurred as to who controlled the rights to PROMIS. The Justice Department halted all payments and Inslaw went bankrupt.
After a tenacious campaign by Bill Hamilton, Inslaw’s boss, a bankruptcy court concluded in 1987 that the Justice Department “took, converted and stole PROMIS software through trickery, fraud and deceit”.
Why, people wondered, had the Justice Department been so desperate for the PROMIS software that it was prepared to steal it? According to some American conspiracy researchers, the men behind the theft of PROMIS software were the same Reagan stooges behind the alleged 1980 “October Surprise”, whereby the Republicans did a deal with the Iranians not to release the 52 American Embassy hostages from Tehran until Reagan was ensconced in the White House. Afterwards, the software was touted to foreign intelligence agencies across the globe; not only did the exported PROMIS software garner revenue for secret CIA operations unauthorized by Congress, the software had been re-engineered to contain a “back door” that allowed the CIA to spy on its foreign users. Naturally, the Justice Department was keen to keep the lid on its creative improvement of PROMIS, and that was why it could not allow Inslaw to claim the rights.
Among the researchers on the PROMIS trail was Danny Casolaro, who believed the PROMIS theft was connected to the activities of a transnational cabal he called the Octopus. On 10 August 1990 Casolaro was found dead in room 517 of the Sheraton Hotel in Martinsburg, West Virginia. The official verdict was suicide, but former Attorney General Elliot Richardson, hired by Inslaw to investigate the case, said: “It’s hard to come up with any reason for Casolaro’s death other than he was deliberately murdered because he was so close to uncovering sinister elements in . . . the Octopus.” However, Casalaro’s notes on the Octopus, discovered after his death, turned out to be a far-fetched, fact-free, alternative history of post-war America à la the Gemstone File, in which the tentacles of the Octopus included the Mafia, Colonel Oliver D. North and the CIA.
It became tempting to dismiss Casolaro’s allegations as more Walter Mitty imaginings – except that he was more likely “suicided” than a suicide. He had slashed both wrists 12 times (once so deeply that he cut a tendon, making it virtually impossible to continue holding the razorblade), his suicide note was implausible, his briefcase was missing, and he had warned his brother the previous week: “If anything happens to me, don’t believe it was accidental.” Casolaro’s housekeeper confirmed the journalist had been receiving threatening phone calls.
During his investigation into PROMIS/the Octopus, he had been meeting with a gallery of unsavoury people. The character who provided most of Casolaro’s leads was Michael Riconoscuito, a self-professed intelligence operative who doubled as a self-professed science genius (indeed, Riconoscuito claimed to be the inventor of the “back door” on the PROMIS software). Casolaro’s other “Deep Throat” was Robert Booth Nichols. According to various sources, both Riconoscuito and Nichols worked for, or on behalf of, a private security firm called the Wackenhut Corporation, which used the semi-autonomous status of the Cabazon Indian Reservation in California to obviate laws on the manufacturing and selling of guns. The Wackenhut Corporation sometimes did “off-the-books” sales jobs for the CIA.
In his notebooks Casolaro christened Nichols “Extreme Danger Man”. Accurately enough. In addition to whatever it was he was doing down in Cabazon, Nichols was a drug trafficker with ties to the Mafia and its Japanese counterpart, the Yakuza. And Casolaro, according to Spy journalist John Connolly, had coincidentally discovered that Nichols had once offered to be an informer for the FBI. In Connolly’s words, “If John Gotti, for example, had ever found out what Danny Casolaro had fo
und out, Nichols would be a dead man.”
To paraphrase Elliot Richardson, it is hard to come up with any reason for Casolaro’s death other than that he was deliberately murdered because he was so close to uncovering sinister elements in the PROMIS deception.
Or rogue arms sales.
Or he needed to be silenced by Nichols.
Casolaro, clearly, was on to something down in the badlands.
Conspiracy researcher Danny Casolaro was silenced to stop his investigation into the theft of PROMIS software: ALERT LEVEL 6
Further Reading
Jonathan Vankin and John Whalen, The Giant Book of Conspiracies, 1998
PROTOCOLS OF THE LEARNED ELDERS OF ZION
The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion, first published in its complete form as an appendix to The Anti-Christ is Near at Hand by Russian writer Sergei Nilus in 1897, is an instruction manual by which a cabal of anonymous but powerful Jews set out the secret means to rule the Christian world.
Among the chief points of the Protocols are:
The Protocol mission “will remain invisible until the moment when it has gained such strength that no cunning can any longer undermine it”. (Protocol I)
“We shall create an intensified centralization of government.” (Protocol V)
“We shall saddle and bridle it [the press] with a tight curb.” (Protocol XII)
“In order that the goyim themselves may not guess what they are about, we further distract them with amusements, games, pastimes, passions . . .” (Protocol XIII)
“It will be undesirable for us that there should exist any other religion than ours . . . We must therefore sweep away all other form of belief.” (Protocol XIV)
The impact of the Protocols was immediate. They became a sensation in Russia, and after that the world. So taken was industrialist Henry Ford by the book that he printed sections in his Dearborn Independent, stating that the Protocols “have fitted the world situation up to this time”. He also used them to influence the US Senate against joining the League of Nations. He might have done well to ponder his own maxim: History is Bunk. The Protocols were a massive hoax and forgery.
The first to debunk the Protocols was Lucien Wolf, whose The Jewish Bogey and the Forged Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion (1920) proved that sections of the document had been lifted, with only cosmetic changes, from the 1855 satire Dialogue aux Enfers entre Montesquieu et Machiavelli (“Dialogue in Hell between Montesquieu and Machiavelli”) by the French lawyer Maurice Joly, who in turn was heavily influenced by Eugene Sue’s popular conspiracy novel The Mysteries of Paris (1843). Another important source for the Protocols was the 1868 novel Biarritz by Sir John Retcliffe (aka the German spy Hermann Goedsche), which included a chapter describing how a fictitious rabbinical cadre met in a cemetery at midnight every century to further the work of Jewish domination . . . oh, my.
So who was the forger who stitched the various sources together to make up the Protocols? Probably one Matvei Golovinski, an agent for the Russian Tsarist secret police, the Okhrana. By whipping up a scare about revolutionaries in the pay of Jews seeking to bring down the Tsar, the Okhrana intended to justify the regime’s reactionary measures. The Protocols worked just fine: the 1905–06 pogroms against the Jews ensued. Just over a decade later, the “truth” of the Jewish plan outlined in the Protocols seemed confirmed by the 1917 Russian Revolution, some of whose leaders happened to be Jews.
In the febrile minds of far-right Europe, the Protocols now became indisputably real and revealing. When the Nazis seized power in Germany, Adolf Hitler made the Protocols mandatory reading in schools. He had written in his autobiography, Mein Kampf, “For once this book [i.e., the Protocols] has become the common property of a people, the Jewish danger is bound to be considered as broken.”
Despite – or indeed, because of – the role of the Protocols in fanning the anti-Semitism that caused the Holocaust, they live on as “fact”. In 2000 Egyptian TV made a series of programmes tracing the connection between the Protocols’ message and the creation of Israel. In the US, Louis Farrakhan’s Nation of Islam distributes the Protocols. They are popular, too, in al-Qaeda training camps. Hamas refers positively to them. In fact, wherever anti-Semites gather you’ll find well-thumbed copies of the Protocols. That any of these organizations or their adherents could not discover within at most thirty seconds’ worth of research that the Protocols are, as a Swiss court described them as long ago as 1935, “ridiculous nonsense”, forgeries and plagiarisms, beggars belief.
The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion is the road-map for Jewish take-over of the world: ALERT LEVEL 0
Further Reading
Norman Cohn, Warrant for Genocide: The Myth of the Jewish World Conspiracy and the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, 1996
Daniel Pipes, The Hidden Hand: Middle East Fears of Conspiracy, 1998
Lucien Wolf, The Jewish Bogey and the Forged Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion, 1920
http: //www.radioislam.org
DOCUMENT: EXTRACTS FROM THE PROTOCOLS OF THE LEARNED ELDERS OF ZION
PROTOCOL No. 1
1. [. . .] Putting aside fine phrases we shall speak of the significance of each thought: by comparisons and deductions we shall throw light upon surrounding facts.
2. What I am about to set forth, then, is our system from the two points of view, that of ourselves and that of the goyim [i.e., non-Jews].
3. It must be noted that men with bad instincts are more in number than the good, and therefore the best results in governing them are attained by violence and terrorization, and not by academic discussions. Every man aims at power, everyone would like to become a dictator if only he could, and rare indeed are the men who would not be willing to sacrifice the welfare of all for the sake of securing their own welfare.
4. What has restrained the beasts of prey who are called men? What has served for their guidance hitherto?
5. In the beginnings of the structure of society, they were subjected to brutal and blind force; afterwards to Law, which is the same force, only disguised. I draw the conclusion that by the law of nature right lies in force.
6. Political freedom is an idea but not a fact. This idea one must know how to apply whenever it appears necessary with this bait of an idea to attract the masses of the people to one’s party for the purpose of crushing another who is in authority. This task is rendered easier if the opponent has himself been infected with the idea of freedom, so-called liberalism, and, for the sake of an idea, is willing to yield some of his power. It is precisely here that the triumph of our theory appears; the slackened reins of government are immediately, by the law of life, caught up and gathered together by a new hand, because the blind might of the nation cannot for one single day exist without guidance, and the new authority merely fits into the place of the old, already weakened by liberalism.
7. In our day the power which has replaced that of the rulers who were liberal is the power of Gold. Time was when Faith ruled. The idea of freedom is impossible of realization because no one knows how to use it with moderation. It is enough to hand over a people to self-government for a certain length of time for that people to be turned into a disorganized mob. From that moment on we get internecine strife which soon develops into battles between classes, in the midst of which States burn down and their importance is reduced to that of a heap of ashes.
8. Whether a State exhausts itself in its own convulsions, whether its internal discord brings it under the power of external foes – in any case it can be accounted irretrievably lost: it is in our power. The despotism of Capital, which is entirely in our hands, reaches out to it a straw that the State, willy-nilly, must take hold of: if not – it goes to the bottom.
9. Should anyone of a liberal mind say that such reflections as the above are immoral, I would put the following questions: – If every State has two foes and if in regard to the external foe it is allowed and not considered immoral to use every manner and art of conflict, as
for example to keep the enemy in ignorance of plans of attack and defence, to attack him by night or in superior numbers, then in what way can the same means in regard to a worse foe, the destroyer of the structure of society and the commonweal, be called immoral and not permissible?
10. Is it possible for any sound logical mind to hope with any success to guide crowds by the aid of reasonable counsels and arguments, when any objection or contradiction, senseless though it may be, can be made and when such objection may find more favour with the people, whose powers of reasoning are superficial? Men in masses and the men of the masses, being guided solely by petty passions, paltry beliefs, traditions and sentimental theorems, fall a prey to party dissension, which hinders any kind of agreement even on the basis of a perfectly reasonable argument. Every resolution of a crowd depends upon a chance or packed majority, which, in its ignorance of political secrets, puts forth some ridiculous resolution that lays in the administration a seed of anarchy.