The Mammoth Book of Cover-Ups

by Jon E. Lewis

  An alien space craft landed at Rendlesham Forest in 1980: ALERT LEVEL 2

  Further Reading

  Peter Brookesmith, UFO: The Complete Sightings Catalogue, 1995

  www.ufoworld.co.uk/rendlshm.htm

  ROSICRUCIANS

  As for Rosy cross Philosophers

  Whom you will have to be but sorcerers,

  What they pretend to is no more

  Than Trismegistus did before

  Pythagoras old Zoroastra,

  And Apollonius their master

  Butler: Hudibras, Pt II, iii

  The mysterious sect known as the Rosicrucians may be a 3,000-year-old organization which holds the philosophical secrets of the Ancient Egyptian pharaohs, which begat the Freemasons, which was the humanistic force behind the Renaissance, which sponsored Sirhan Sirhan to assassinate Robert F. Kennedy, and which currently runs the New World Order.

  Of course, the Rosicrucians might also be a gigantic con trick.

  The Rosicrucians first announced their presence in 1614 with the publication of a tract entitled Fama Fraternitatis Rosae Crucis, which claimed that their fraternity was established in 1407 by Christian Rosencreutz (translated as “Rosy Cross”), a German nobleman-cum-monk who had travelled to the Holy Land, Egypt and Spain gathering esoteric knowledge, and who had erected a House of the Holy Spirit on his return. Two other tracts quickly followed, the Confessio Fraternitatis Rosae Crucis Addressed to the Learned of Europe (1615) and The Chymical Marriage of Christian Rosencreutz (1616). The tracts showed the Rosicrucians as consummately skilled in the Hermetic arts – able to transmute metals and to render people invisible. The name “Rosicrucian”, it is sometimes suggested, derives not from “Rosy Cross” or “Rosencreutz” but from “ros crux”, meaning “dew cross”. In alchemy the cross is the symbol of light or knowledge, while the “dew” is the medium for turning base metal to gold. Some Freemasons have also claimed that “ros crux” refers to the bloodstained cross of Christ, and that the Rosicrucians were actually the banned Knights Templar under a new label. The Catholic Church concurred, finding the symbolic references to the Knights Templar in The Chymical Marriage so frequent and objectionable that they condemned it.

  The Catholic Church might have seen the Rosicrucians as heretics and Satanists, but the intelligentsia of Europe were madly attracted to the promise in the tracts of a “universal reformation of mankind”. Strangely, though, the tracts gave no indication as to how “students of nature” might contact the Rosicrucians. This led some critics to dismiss the Rosicrucian tracts as a “ludibrium” or hoax. Here the plot congeals: among those who characterized the tracts thus was Johann Valentin Andreae, a German Lutheran cleric known to have authored The Chymical Marriage and suspected of having penned the other early papers. It can be guessed that Andreae intended the tracts to catalyse opposition to the Catholic Church, and, in order to make them more substantial, pretended they were the work of a fraternity, the “Rosicrucians”.

  Andreae caught the Zeitgeist like few before or after him. Such was the phenomenal impact of the tracts that the historian Frances Yates was minded to label the early 17th century “the Rosicrucian enlightenment”. Groups of liberal-minded scholars began setting up Rosicrucian societies. Life imitated art. The first real Rosicrucian order appeared in Holland in the 1620s and was followed by the establishment of an order in London, which managed to recruit Elias Ashmole (founder of the Ashmolean Museum in Oxford) and the architect Christopher Wren. The first American group, the Chapter of Perfection, was set up in Pennsylvania in the 1690s. Needless to say a secret society required arcane rules and rituals; these were codified in the Perfect and True Preparation of the Philosophical Stone, According to the Secret of the Brotherhoods of the Golden and Rosy Cross (1710) and Secret Symbols of the Rosicrucians of the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries (1785–88). In an admirable piece of recycling, the Freemasons of the 18th century borrowed terminology and practices from the Rosicrucians, including, it is alleged, the Rectified Scottish Rite and the Ancient and Accepted Scottish Rite (in which the 18th degree is called the Knight of the Rose Croix). According to the Masonic author J. M. Ragon, so interconnected did the Rosicrucians and Freemasons become in the 18th century that they eventually merged.

  Today at least 20 Rosicrucian societies exist, most claiming a direct line back to Christian Rosencreutz, even to Pharaoh Thutmose III. Broadly, the contemporary Rosicrucians are either esoteric–Christian or para-Masonic, and never the twain shall meet. The Ancient Mystical Order Rosae Cruces (AMORC), the largest of the extant groups, offers open days which are “gentle and informal occasions where people can drop in and meet members of the local Affiliated Bodies. There will usually be a short presentation, called ‘A Gentle Flame’, followed by refreshments.”

  A cheese and wine party including mystical mumbo-jumbo from a guy with a beard and sandals. Is that any way to recruit for a secret society to implement the New World Order?

  The Rosicrucians are an ancient esoteric order intent on global take-over: ALERT LEVEL 1

  Further Reading

  Frances Yates, Rosicrucian Enlightenment, 1971

  ROSWELL

  What did happen at Roswell, New Mexico, 60 years ago?

  The world’s most enduring UFO mystery began on 3 July 1947 when sheep farmer Mac Brazel was riding out over the isolated Foster ranch near Corona, New Mexico, and found some strange “metallic, foil-like debris” scattered around. A week later Brazel ventured into Corona, where he heard for the first time about the spate of “flying saucer” sightings in the US. Thinking the wreckage on his ranch might be associated, he informed Sheriff Wilcox, who in turn informed the Army Air Force base at Roswell, 75 miles (120km) to the south. Major Jesse Marcel, the base intelligence officer, duly travelled to Brazel’s ranch to inspect the wreckage, and took much of it away. On the same day a civil engineer called Grady L. “Barney” Barnett found a “disc-shaped object” in the Socorro region some 150 miles (240km) west of the Foster spread, inside which were a number of small hairless humanoids. Before Barnett could investigate further, an army jeep rushed up and the occupants ordered him away.

  Meanwhile, the base commander at Roswell authorized a press statement announcing the discovery of a flying disc in the locality. The headline in the Roswell Daily Record of 8 July blared: “RAAF [Roswell Army Air Field] Captures Flying Saucer on Ranch in Roswell Region.” In the afternoon of 8 July, the army suddenly changed its story: the wreckage discovered in the Roswell region was from a high-altitude weather balloon, not an alien craft. The Army’s steady insistence on its new line quenched public interest in the Roswell incident for 30 years.

  In 1980 that interest was reignited by the publication of The Roswell Incident by Charles Berlitz and William Moore, with additional unaccredited material by Stanton Friedman. The Roswell Incident maintained categorically that an alien craft had crashed west of Roswell in July 1947, and that alien bodies had been recovered from the wreckage; the debris (like “nothing made on this earth”, Marcel recalled) at Brazel’s farm was break-up from this craft and that the Army’s weather-balloon story was a cover-up to prevent hysteria over an alien invasion. Since The Roswell Incident, other UFO researchers have suggested that the US has back-engineered alien technology from the Roswell craft at Area 51, and many think – à la Nick Redfern in Body Snatchers in the Desert (2005) – that the Roswell craft was on a mission to experiment on human beings.

  The Roswell Incident garnered an impressive array of new evidence. Among those interviewed by Friedman and Moore was a teletype operator called Lydia Sleppy, who in 1947 was typing out the story of the Roswell crash when she was interrupted by an incoming message: “Attention Albuquerque. Do not transmit. Repeat do not transmit this message. Stop communication immediately.” Meanwhile, Roswell researchers Kevin Randle and Donald Schmitt found in the woodwork one Arthur Exon, a retired Air Force brigadier, who told of unusual debris brought into Wright Field in 1947 which was indestructible despi
te its extraordinarily light weight. Yet another retired USAF officer, Brigadier-General Thomas Dubose, stated in interviews that the White House had been involved in the cover-up and that the weather balloon story was a fabrication. Soon there was a positive rush of people and sources to back up the Roswell alien-crash story. New Mexico mortician Glenn Dennis recalled being asked to provide child-sized coffins for the Roswell base, documents from secret government committee Majestic–12 confirmed the recovery of alien bodies at Roswell . . . and then in 1995 a film surfaced showing an autopsy on the recovered aliens.

  Under scrutiny, however, most of the new information appeared riddled with holes. Sceptics proved conclusively that the Roswell autopsy film was a hoax, as were most if not all the Majestic–12 documents, while Lydia Sleppy’s story became ever more fanciful. Declassified documents from 1948 included a secret memorandum by an Air Force intelligence officer reporting no “physical evidence of the existence [of extraterrestrial craft] has been obtained”. Marcel contradicted himself on whether the debris he posed with in a 1947 photograph was the recovered debris or switched material.

  In an attempt to pour oil on troubled waters, the US Air Force finally published two official reports on the Roswell incident, in 1994 and 1997. The second of these concluded: “But . . . witnesses are mistaken about when events they saw occurred, and they are also seriously mistaken about details of the events.” This second report was entitled The Roswell Report: Case Closed.

  Hardly. Counter-reports, books, films . . . all fly steadily into magazines, bookstores, websites, TV schedules . . . Such promiscuity is not aided by the fact that the UFO community itself is split on whether there was an alien crash at Roswell in 1947.

  So, as we said at the beginning, what did happen at Roswell? According to the Roswell Daily Record of 8 July 1947, the debris Brazel found included “a paper fin . . . Scotch tape”. Not exactly the kind of high tech you’d expect from interstellar-travelling Little Green Men, is it? In the absence of hard or convincing alien evidence, the high likelihood is that the debris found at Roswell was from a terrestrial craft. This craft could have been

  a prototype jetfighter which crashed (some researchers suggest the whole aliens-crash-at-Roswell story was actually concocted by an intelligence unit in the US military to cover up the embarrassing failure);

  a crashed missile from RAAF itself, which was home to the 509th Bomb Group, the world’s only nuclear bomb squadron in 1947 (this would explain the armed guard used to move materials from Roswell);

  a fu-go incendiary balloon launched by Japan in 1945 but coming to earth two years later;

  or, as the Air Force contends in its 1990s reports, a high-altitude US balloon from the spying operation known as Operation Mogul against Russian nuclear facilities.

  All these scenarios would require some minor (in Cold War terms) deceit, but the Air Force’s explanation (see below) best fits the facts.

  So overwhelming is the quality of the mundane cause for the Roswell incident that William Moore, co-author of the book which started the hullabaloo, has stated: “I am no longer of the opinion that the extraterrestrial explanation is the best explanation for the [Roswell] event.”

  The US military/government covered up evidence of a UFO crash at Roswell: ALERT LEVEL 4

  Further Reading

  Charles Berlitz and William Moore, The Roswell Incident, 1980

  Kevin D. Randle and Donald R. Schmitt, UFO Crash at Roswell, 1991

  DOCUMENT: EXTRACTS FROM THE ROSWELL REPORT

  FACT VS. FICTION IN THE NEW MEXICO DESERT PUBLISHED BY HEADQUARTERS, UNITED STATES AIR FORCE, 1995

  EXECUTIVE SUMMARY

  WHAT THE ROSWELL INCIDENT WAS NOT

  Before discussing specific positive results that these efforts revealed, it is first appropriate to discuss those things, as indicated by information available to the Air Force, that the “Roswell Incident” was not:

  An Airplane Crash

  [. . .]

  A Missile Crash

  [. . .]

  A Nuclear Accident

  [. . .]

  An Extraterrestrial Craft

  The Air Force research found absolutely no indication that what happened near Roswell in 1947 involved any type of extraterrestrial spacecraft. This, of course, is the crux of this entire matter. “Pro-UFO” persons who obtain a copy of this report, at this point, most probably begin the “cover-up is still on” claims. Nevertheless, the research indicated absolutely no evidence of any kind that a spaceship crashed near Roswell or that any alien occupants were recovered therefrom, in some secret military operation or otherwise. This does not mean, however, that the early Air Force was not concerned about UFOs. However, in the early days, “UFO” meant Unidentified Flying Object, which literally translated as some object in the air that was not readily identifiable. It did not mean, as the term has evolved in today’s language, to equate to alien spaceships. Records from the period reviewed by Air Force researchers as well as those cited by the authors mentioned before, do indicate that the USAF was seriously concerned about the inability to adequately identify unknown flying objects reported in American airspace. All the records, however, indicated that the focus of concern was not on aliens, hostile or otherwise, but on the Soviet Union. Many documents from that period speak to the possibility of developmental secret Soviet aircraft overflying US airspace. This, of course, was of major concern to the fledgling USAF, whose job it was to protect these same skies.

  The research revealed only one official AAF document that indicated that there was any activity of any type that pertained to UFOs and Roswell in July 1947. This was a small section of the July Historical Report for the 509th Bomb Group and Roswell AAF that stated: “The Office of Public Information was quite busy during the month answering inquiries on the ‘flying disk’, which was reported to be in possession of the 509th Bomb Group. The object turned out to be a radar tracking balloon” [. . .] Additionally, this history showed that the 509th Commander, Colonel Blanchard, went on leave on 8 July 1947, which would be a somewhat unusual maneuver for a person involved in the supposed first ever recovery of extraterrestrial materials. (Detractors claim Blanchard did this as a ploy to elude the press and go to the scene to direct the recovery operations.) The history and the morning reports also showed that the subsequent activities at Roswell during the month were mostly mundane and not indicative of any unusual high-level activity, expenditure of manpower, resources or security.

  Likewise, the researchers found no indication of heightened activity anywhere else in the military hierarchy in the July 1947 message traffic or orders (to include classified traffic). There were no indications and warnings, notice of alerts, or a higher tempo of operational activity reported that would be logically generated if an alien craft, whose intentions were unknown, entered US territory. To believe that such operational and high-level security activity could be conducted solely by relying on unsecured telecommunications or personal contact without creating any records of such activity certainly stretches the imagination of those who have served in the military who know that paperwork of some kind is necessary to accomplish even emergency, highly classified, or sensitive tasks.

  An example of activity sometimes cited by pro-UFO writers to illustrate the point that something unusual was going on was the travel of Lt.-General Nathan Twining, Commander of the Air Materiel Command, to New Mexico in July 1947. Actually, records were located indicating that Twining went to the Bomb Commanders’ Course on 8 July, along with a number of other general officers, and requested orders to do so a month before, on 5 June 1947 [. . .]

  Similarly, it has also been alleged that General Hoyt Vandenberg, Deputy Chief of Staff at the time, had been involved in directing activity regarding events at Roswell. Activity reports [. . .] located in General Vandenberg’s personal papers stored in the Library of Congress did indicate that on July 7 he was busy with a “flying disk” incident; however, this particular incident involved Ellington Field, Texas,
and the Spokane (Washington) Depot. After much discussion and information-gathering on this incident, it was learned to be a hoax. There is no similar mention of his personal interest or involvement in Roswell events except in the newspapers.

  The above are but two small examples that indicate that, if some event happened that was one of the “watershed happenings” in human history, the US military certainly reacted in an unconcerned and cavalier manner. In an actual case, the military would have had to order thousands of soldiers and airmen, not only at Roswell but throughout the US, to act nonchalantly, pretend to conduct and report business as usual, and generate absolutely no paperwork of a suspicious nature, while simultaneously anticipating that 20 years or more into the future people would have available a comprehensive Freedom of Information Act that would give them great leeway to review and explore government documents. The records indicate that none of this happened (or if it did, it was controlled by a security system so efficient and tight that no one, US or otherwise, has been able to duplicate it since. If such a system had been in effect at the time, it would have also been used to protect our atomic secrets from the Soviets, which history has showed obviously was not the case). The records reviewed confirmed that no such sophisticated and efficient security system existed.