History Decoded: The 10 Greatest Conspiracies of All Time

by Meltzer, Brad

  Fort Knox is famous for its gold vault, but throughout history, at different times, it’s also held our nation’s most vital items. Among the items the government has stored there:

  In the 1940s, it held the Magna Carta, which we held for the British to keep it out of the hands of the Nazis.

  The vault also held the Declaration of Independ-ence, the Constitution, the Gettysburg Address, and three copies of the Guten-berg Bible.

  In the 1950s, the vault became part of the Cold War era and held drugs, vaccines, and morphine in case of mass casualties.

  What Else Is In There?

  The Magna Carta, the Gettysburg Address, and the Declaration of Independence have all been stored in Fort Knox at one time or another.

  Some Final Thoughts

  People read The Wizard of Oz—written in 1900—as a children’s fantasy. But to others, it’s actually a story about gold:

  A country kid from the Midwest loses her house—teams up with a farmer and an industrial worker—and battles wicked forces from the West to the East.

  The only way to save herself is to follow the Yellow Brick Road, which sure looks like gold to me.

  And by the way, what is gold measured in? Ounces, or O-Z. Get it?

  When she gets to Oz, what does Dorothy find behind it all? A corrupt politician behind the curtains, pulling strings and controlling the little people.

  Today, our entire monetary system is based on trust. But for the last 40 years, it’s had to be blind trust. The gold belongs to Americans . . . and Americans pay to protect it. However, we’ll never truly know what we have until Fort Knox finally opens its doors once more.

  That’s the reason this chapter made the book. There’s nothing I believe in more than the power of an ordinary person. If you want to see Fort Knox opened, ask for it.

  And watch what happens.

  UFOs: Inside Roswell and Area 51

  What if I told you that our government is hiding definitive proof of the existence of alien life?

  Would you even be surprised? According to a recent poll, more than 40 million Americans claim to have seen, or know someone who claims to have seen, an Unidentified Flying Object, or UFO. Among those people: U.S. Presidents Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan, and countless civilian and military pilots.

  Yet the government, including both political and military leaders, continues to maintain that it has no official knowledge or evidence of extraterrestrial life.

  Is the government lying—and if so, why?

  Of all the things you’ve emailed me about, here’s one of the most requested: It’s time to decode what the government knows about alien life.

  UFOs. Flying saucers.

  Everybody’s heard of them—and everybody has an opinion about whether or not they provide evidence of extraterrestrial life.

  But nobody, at least according to the most official sources, has any hard evidence that aliens have visited our skies or landed on the earth, despite more than 60 years of stories, reports, photographs, testimonies, and wide-ranging government investigations.

  With that long a time line, and that many different threads to pull together, you might think it’s hard to know where to begin. It’s not. Because we all know there’s really only one place to start: the site of the most famous alleged UFO incident of all time. Roswell, New Mexico.

  Mysterious Skies

  Despite more than 60 years of stories, reports, photographs, testimonies, and wide-ranging government investigations, no one has ever definitively proven that a UFO was evidence of alien life.

  Roswell

  Here’s what most people know about Roswell, New Mexico. In July 1947, a public information officer issued a press release saying they recovered a flying disc. This has come to be known as the “Roswell Incident,” or the “Roswell Crash.”

  But the first real sighting of a UFO—and the incident that gave “flying saucers” their name—had occurred a month earlier, half a continent away.

  On June 24, 1947, a businessman and private pilot named Kenneth Arnold was piloting his airplane near Mount Rainier, Washington, when he saw . . . something.

  Actually, he claimed to have seen several somethings. According to Arnold’s report (see Exhibit 2A), he spotted a group of nine glowing objects flying in a V-formation, traveling at speeds he estimated to be 1,700 mph. At the time, we had not yet broken the sound barrier, a feat that required achieving a speed of at least 768 mph, so what Arnold saw was moving nearly 1,000 mph faster than we’d ever moved.

  In addition, these weren’t typical aircraft with a wings-fuselage-tail structure. Arnold described the flying objects as “disc-shaped,” comparing their movements to the skipping of a saucer across water. The press seized on that last image, and the label “flying saucers” was born.

  It’s hard to think of a more famous label—or a more controversial one. Initial reaction from the few officials who looked into the sighting dismissed Arnold’s report as a publicity stunt. But that accusation wouldn’t stick. Kenneth Arnold was an experienced pilot with more than 9,000 total flying hours—and not the sort of man who made up a wild tale just to garner attention. If he saw something, there was something to see.

  Within a matter of weeks, though, the Arnold sighting was eclipsed by the most famous of all. You know the one: Roswell.

  Ranch Wreckage

  Brig. General Roger M. Ramey and Col. Thomas J. Dubose, 8th Air Force Chief of Staff, identify metallic fragments found by a farmer near Roswell. Those pieces were later claimed to be a weather balloon.

  Unlike the Arnold sighting—where the UFOs were observed, then flew away—the Roswell incident involved a UFO that was actually on the ground. Some say it crashed on the nearby Foster Ranch, others that the craft had landed. Either way, there was finally some hard evidence, gathered at the site, rather than just some vague description of what someone saw in the air from a distance.

  Right there, a U.S. Army public information officer issued a press release saying they recovered a flying disc. The very next day, the military retracted that statement and said it was a radar-tracking balloon, not a flying saucer.

  So what happened?

  Let’s start with the incident itself.

  First of all, it didn’t start at the Roswell Army Air Field. It began just north when, at some point in late June or early July 1947, something crashed on the nearby Foster ranch. The ranch foreman said that he found unusual materials on the Foster land and reported those findings to the Chaves County sheriff. The sheriff, in turn, passed the word to officials at the Roswell Army Air Field, which on July 7, 1947, dispatched a team to investigate and bring back evidence.

  So again . . . what happened?

  For answers, we started by talking to Julie Shuster, the director of the International UFO Museum and Research Center. But what makes Shuster even more interesting is that her father was Lieutenant Walter Haut, the Roswell public information officer who issued the original press release. (Exhibit 2B is part of the original press release that was actually issued at Roswell.)

  According to Shuster, “On July 8, 1947, Colonel Blanchard called him in that morning and said you need to issue a press release, we found a flying saucer. So he issued a press release. Basically: We have in our possession a flying saucer. It’s being flown to higher headquarters.”

  But according to Shuster, “There was a contradictory story the next day . . . from General Ramey, saying basically, It’s a weather balloon. People here didn’t know what they were talking about. And once they said it’s a weather balloon, it’s classified. Done.”

  Indeed, within a single day,Lieutenant Haut’s press release was being denied by the head of the Air Force himself, General Roger M. Ramey. Instead of a flying disc of unknown origin, the debris collected from the New Mexico ranch was the remains of a standard weather
balloon that military bases launched frequently to measure atmospheric conditions.

  “The many rumors regarding the flying disc became a reality yesterday when the intelligence office of the 509th Bomb Group of the Eighth Air Force, Roswell Army Air Field, was fortunate enough to gain possession of a disc through the cooperation of one of the local ranchers and the sheriff’s office. . . . Action was immediately taken and the disc was picked up at the rancher’s home. It was inspected at the Roswell Army Air Field and subsequently loaned by Major Marcel to higher headquarters.”

  —Original Roswell Press Release

  And there’s the key question, right? Maybe it was just a weather balloon. But before you decide, here’s one fact that you need to know: At the time of the Roswell sighting, weather balloons were made from a flexible, lightweight neoprene rubber, weighing in at less than a single pound. Tethered to the train of the balloon would be a short nylon kite-tail featuring a data transmitter. But that’s about as complicated as these devices got. Lieutenant Haut described something otherworldly and indestructible. So ask yourself this: Could an accomplished military man and aviator really confuse an extraterrestrial spacecraft . . . with a one-pound weather balloon?

  A NATIONAL OBSESSION

  Reports of mysterious sightings increased rapidly after the Roswell incident. Was there an actual increase in UFOs—or only an increase in public fascination with them?

  The answer didn’t really matter, because once the general said it was a weather balloon . . . that became the official story of Roswell. And to make sure that the official version wasn’t questioned, the pieces of the weather balloon were classified.

  Why’s a weather balloon suddenly classified? Apparently, this wasn’t a run-of-the-mill weather balloon, but an advanced balloon used for surveillance. Walter Haut’s daughter, Julie Shuster, is one of the doubters, and she’s made her skepticism very clear.

  According to Shuster, her father actually handled the debris that was recovered from the ranch. And he not only handled it, but he reported that it couldn’t be cut, torn, or burned. It was unlike any material Haut—or anyone else on Earth—had ever seen.

  Years after the incident, Haut revealed something else to his daughter: The disc that was recovered from the Foster ranch was approximately 22 feet in diameter, far larger than a weather balloon. Large enough to carry passengers.

  “My father saw something under a tarp at the hangar,” she says. And did he describe it? “Large black eyes. Slits for nose. Little slit for mouth. Slits for ears,” Shuster added. “Long extended four fingers, longer arms, which to me is pretty detailed for somebody that didn’t see something.”

  Pretty detailed for sure. But you want to know the most vital part of the story? Roswell Army Air Field was the home base for the 509th Bombardment Wing. Know what they were responsible for? Dropping the atomic bombs on Japan two years earlier.

  “These were not typical GIs,” said engineer Dennis Balthaser, a Roswell resident and longtime investigator of UFOs. “These were the best we had. The best pilots, the best navigators—and to say that they could handle and deliver the atomic bomb, but were too dumb to know the difference between a weather balloon and a flying saucer is not something I can buy into.”

  Moreover, Balthaser knew and respected Walter Haut, adding that Haut told him as well of the body he saw in the famous Hangar 84. According to Balthaser, the body was humanoid. “About the size of a twelve-year-old child. They have the features of a human body except they have the larger eyes, bigger head. There’s been descriptions of four fingers instead of five. Very thin. Not anything that anybody has ever seen.”

  Mysterious Forms

  The Air Force insisted that sightings of body bags used to recover alien crash victims were in fact test dummies placed inside insulation bags to protect sensitive equipment.

  E.T. Phone Home

  Big eyes? Oval heads? Gray skin? That sounds like every alien we’ve ever seen in any bad science fiction movie. So did they pull their descriptions from the movies?

  Not at all. This was 1947. The vast majority of movies about aliens visiting Earth hadn’t even been conceived yet, much less produced and distributed.

  The most famous of these movies, the original version of The Day the Earth Stood Still, didn’t come out until 1951. For that matter, the 1940 science fiction story that that movie was based upon, “Farewell to the Master” by Harry Bates, didn’t have a saucer, either. The craft in that story was described as ovoid, and hadn’t flown to Earth, but just appeared here.

  Take a look at the covers of the pulp science fiction magazines of the 1930s and 1940s . . . or lose yourself in some of Alex Raymond’s truly great Flash Gordon comic strips. You’ll be hard-pressed to find any saucers.

  Sure, there are plenty of pointed rocket ships with fins and stubby wings—and more than a few giant spheres capable of traveling from world to world—but not many saucers.

  So.

  Which came first: the chicken, or the little green egg?

  Beyond the questions about aliens, whatever happened to the debris that was recovered from the Foster Ranch? According to Dennis Balthaser, that debris was originally relocated to Wright-Patterson Air Force Base near Dayton, Ohio. But it didn’t linger there long. “For reasons of better security,” he explained, “the debris is probably at Area 51.”

  THE ROSWELL LOOK

  Think about this: The standard image of the large-eyed, oval-headed, small-bodied alien only became popular after the Roswell incident.

  Pre-Saucer Crafts

  The “flying saucer” image didn’t appear in popular culture until after the stories leaked out of Roswell. Before then, alien spacecraft were rocket-shaped or spherical.

  Area 51

  The other place most closely associated with UFOs and extraterrestrials.

  But where Roswell boasts an International UFO Museum and Research Center and attracts a constant stream of visitors and investigators, Area 51 is off-limits to . . . well, just about everyone.

  Although it was first used as a military airfield in the 1940s—and it’s been home to CIA spycraft as well as nuclear testing in the 1950s, Area 51 is so secret, the government denied that it even existed until July 14, 2003.

  There’s only one road leading in to it—a 13-mile-long dirt road that runs through some of the most desolate land you’ll ever see. There’s no cover, no place to hide, no way to approach quietly or secretly. There is no fence marking the boundaries of the base, only a gate with signs that promise you: use of deadly force authorized.

  Dennis Balthaser believes that those signs are telling the absolute, deadly truth. In fact, he told us that we have no chance of getting into Area 51. At all.

  So we did the next best thing: We found some people who had worked there. And we got them to speak to us.

  Richard Mingus was a security guard at Area 51 in the late 1950s, and he remains both proud and reticent about his experience. To this day, he takes his security clearance quite seriously, and there’s only so much that he’ll say about his experiences at the top-secret base.

  “I was told that what I was going to be guarding was more classified than the atomic bomb,” he explained.

  Did he have any idea exactly what was under his protection?

  “We were told that it was a weather reconnaissance plane,” he said, knowing that the government was probably lying to him. But Mingus wasn’t upset. “That’s the way it had to be.”

  So as much as I want him to tell us absolutely everything that he saw, Mingus is still honoring his orders. You have to respect him for that.

  We asked him if he had access to the entire building. And Mingus admitted to us that he had peeked into one of the most restricted sites at Area 51, a hangar that was off-limits to all but half a dozen people.

  “It was on a week
end,” Mingus explained. “And I was walking, checking all the doors, making sure everything was secure. And I come up to this hangar that I’m not supposed to go in—and I crack the door. It’s open.”

  So what did he see inside?

  Mingus’s response was immediate: “I’ve never told anybody.”

  So how else could Mingus help us?

  “I don’t like to get into an area that is very, very sensitive when you’re talking about national security,” he explained. “It’s possible after I had gone that the program that Bob Lazar was assigned to would have been better off had they kept it as secret as possible, and a lot less people would know about it today.”

  There it was. Our next stop. Bob Lazar.

  Flying UFO Airlines?

  There’s only one road that leads to Area 51. So how does the government move its top-secret employees to and from the base?

  You guessed it. Fly them.

  The airline fleet includes six 737s that can carry up to 190 passengers each. Combined with five smaller jets, they can move up to 1,200 employees a day to a place that supposedly didn’t exist.

  Some say it even has a name: Janet Airlines.

  Why Janet? Rumors say that the airline’s name is actually an acronym standing for: Joint Air Network for Employee Transportation.

  Now put yourself in the position of a conspiracy theorist and ask yourself this: What sort of facility would require an entire covert airline, with all that such an airline would need—pilots, maintenance crews, fuel, and everything else?

  One that operates as far off the radar as possible—just the way a UFO research facility would be expected to.

  Bob Lazar

  BOB LAZAR

  One of the most fascinating—and probably the most controversial—characters associated with Area 51 and the UFO phenomenon.