Beyond Area 51

by Mack Maloney

  History shows the U.S. Navy has simply managed to keep a low profile when it comes to unexplained aerial phenomena. Somehow, whatever America’s oldest and largest military branch knows about UFOs it has been able to keep under tighter wraps than its cousin service, the U.S. Air Force.

  What the Russians Say

  The U.S. Navy’s official position on the Bermuda Triangle, and by extension all the strange things that have happened in and around the Bahamas, will probably surprise no one.

  This is from the Navy’s own website (www.history.navy.mil): “The ‘Bermuda Triangle’ or ‘Devil’s Triangle’ is an imaginary area located off the southeastern Atlantic coast of the United States, which is noted for a supposedly high incidence of unexplained disappearances of ships and aircraft. The U.S. Board of Geographic Names does not recognize the Bermuda Triangle as an official name. The U.S. Navy does not believe the Bermuda Triangle exists.”

  But the Russian Navy disagrees. According to the Russian-based English-language news service www.rt.com, mysterious events happen in the Bermuda Triangle all the time. Rear Admiral Yury Beketov, a retired Russian Navy commander, tells of instruments showing unexplainable readings while his submarine was passing though the Bermuda Triangle and in waters near the Bahamas, disruptions he believed were caused by UFOs or USOs, or both.

  “On several occasions the instruments gave readings of material objects moving at incredible speed below the water,” Beketov said in an interview with rt.com. “Our calculations showed speeds of four hundred kilometers per hour [about 250 miles per hour]. Speeding so fast is a challenge even on the surface. But water resistance is much higher. There’s only one explanation: The creatures who built these objects far surpass us in development.”

  Another Russian Navy veteran agreed. Naval intelligence officer Captain Igor Barklay said on rt.com, “Ocean UFOs often showed up wherever our or NATO fleets were concentrated. Near the Bahamas and Bermuda and Puerto Rico. They are most often seen in the deepest part of the Atlantic Ocean, in the southern part of the Bermuda Triangle and also in the Caribbean Sea.”

  Inside the Fence

  One day, a handful of hunters on Andros Island mistakenly wandered into AUTEC’s prohibited area. This was a big mistake. One moment they were alone, the next they were pounced on by armed men and their faces pushed into the ground. The armed men were Navy guards who had been under camouflage until the hunters practically walked on top of them. The hunters were handcuffed and brought to a nearby Navy facility where they were interrogated for hours by Navy officers. During this hair-raising time, the hunters were certain they were heading for jail.

  The hunters insisted they had innocently walked into the prohibited zone, though, and eventually the Navy believed them.

  But just change a few of the facts around and this could read like an encounter inside the perimeter of Area 51.

  * * *

  We spoke with an employee of a firm that works closely with U.S. intelligence agencies as well as the Department of Defense. He’d spent time at the AUTEC facility on Andros Island and painted a somewhat unexpected description of the place and its surroundings. The area around the base is actually a very run-down, poor region—more of a Third World situation and not at all the kind of tourist destination one associates with the Bahamas. He also spoke of many mangrove swamps and a little town close to the base that featured a few crumbling concrete houses with tin roofs and little else.

  The AUTEC facility itself is huge, though—two square miles by one estimate—and obviously very well guarded. Inside is a different world. About a thousand people work there and the place features an officers’ club, a snorkeling shop, sailboat rentals and a bowling alley. There’s also a pub-type bar.

  The only other distinguishing features he could discuss were a large radar set located on a beach nearby and a huge tree-trunk-sized cable that runs from the AUTEC facility across another beach and down into the Toto trench. And about a half mile from the base one of the Bahamas’ mysterious blue holes can be found.

  Noted UFO researcher and TV personality Bill Birnes has also been to AUTEC. He told us in an interview for this book, “The big thing isn’t the base itself. It looks like any other base. The whole point of the base is the deep trench nearby. The base is a submarine base, and the trench is so deep, subs can get in and out without being detected. In other words they can submerge as deep as a sub can submerge, then get into the base without being tracked by satellites or anything else.”

  As for the many UFO and USO sightings that occur in the area, Birnes has an interesting hypothesis.

  “Lots of people see lots of objects come out of the water and fly,” he said. “My theory is that many of these are our own inventions. Because when you think about it, masking something to look like a UFO is the best way to mask a top-secret weapon.”

  In the End…

  Where does all this leave us?

  Put aside the deepwater naval training, the weapons testing, even the deep trench called Toto. The Navy has billions of dollars of sophisticated equipment at AUTEC, equipment that by their own admission can track multiple targets under the water and very high in the sky.

  At the same time, people see lots of UFOs and USOs in the vicinity of AUTEC and have been seeing them there for quite some time. So, could the Navy really be unaware of all this strange activity going on right in its own watery backyard? With so many ways to find things underwater or flying in the sky, many UFO researchers think that would be impossible.

  This leads to theories, then, maybe not so crazy, that the Navy is very much aware of what’s happening in these mysterious waters, and that just like their brethren at Area 51, they might even be the cause of all the strangeness.

  Maybe Bill Birnes’s theory is right. Maybe the Navy has secret weapons at AUTEC that are disguised to look like UFOs and USOs. That would answer the question of why so many unusual things are seen around Andros Island and Toto. It would also provide a perfect cover story—because after all the fringe press the Bermuda Triangle gets, who is going to be surprised when someone sees yet another UFO or USO inside it?

  But this also begs another question: What kind of secret weapons could these things be if the Navy has the ability to disguise them to look like UFOs and USOs, objects that are seen doing some pretty fantastic things?

  Until we find out for sure, the biggest mystery of the Bermuda Triangle might still be why the Navy chose to build their secret base there in the first place.

  9

  The Mystery of Ong’s Hat

  Haunted Woods

  The Pine Barrens is a peculiar place in a peculiar location.

  A large forest that takes up a significant portion of New Jersey’s southern coast, the Pine Barrens stretches from Lakehurst in the north to Cape May in the south. The Garden State Parkway and Atlantic City Expressway run right through it and it’s close to both New York City and Philadelphia. Yet many people are unaware the Pine Barrens exists. Fifteen hundred square miles of woods that are undeveloped, rural and almost devoid of people, in the midst of one of the most heavily traveled, densely populated parts of the United States.

  The chief reason no one lives there is the soil. The locals call it “sugar sand.” Highly acidic, it holds almost none of the essential nutrients needed for growing agricultural products. When European settlers first arrived in the area in the seventeenth century, they found their crops would not grow in the Barrens’ soil, so the vast majority of them went elsewhere.

  That doesn’t mean nothing grows there, though. Just the opposite. The Pine Barrens boasts some very strange flora: four-foot-tall “pygmy” pines, rare orchids, ultra-rare curly grass ferns… and carnivorous plants. Lots of them.

  There are also rattlesnakes here.

  And ghosts.

  And at least one monster.

  The New Jersey Devil (Among Others)

  It all started with a woman named Mrs. Leeds. She lived deep inside the Pine Barrens and around 1735 gave birth
to an infant who was right out of a horror movie.

  The baby boy was her thirteenth child, and cursed from the beginning. One account has the infant attacking its mother and the attending nurses at the moment of birth, before escaping up a chimney. Variously described as having the body of a serpent, the head of a horse, the wings of a bat and a devil’s forked tail, that monstrous toddler became the New Jersey Devil and has been haunting the Pine Barrens ever since.

  But when it comes to the paranormal, the Barrens can be a pretty crowded place.

  According to legend, close-by Barnegat Bay is one of the resting places of the notorious pirate Captain Kidd. Locals tell tales of Kidd’s ghost endlessly walking the beach, looking for his buried treasure, often minus his head.

  There is the Barrens’ Black Dog, the ethereal canine that roams the forests from Absecon Island to Barnegat Bay. The story goes that pirates hiding on Absecon Island murdered the crew of a merchant ship, including the ship’s cabin boy and his dog. The dog now walks the Barrens searching for his long-lost owner.

  Another Pine Barrens ghost eternally pining for a loved one is the Golden Haired Girl. She is frequently seen dressed all in white and looking forlornly out to sea for a drowned lover who will never return.

  Then there is the White Stag. This ghostly deer is a helpful spirit known to lead travelers lost in the Pine Barrens to safety. The stag also has the reputation for preventing mishaps, on one occasion stopping a stagecoach from falling into a raging river by blocking its path to a bridge that had been washed away.

  According to legend, if you see the White Stag, it’s supposed to be good luck, not a bad thing with Atlantic City just a few miles down the road.

  * * *

  No surprise that the Pine Barrens also has an authentic ghost town.

  It’s called Ong’s Hat. It began as a small village sometime in the nineteenth century and was never more than a handful of buildings at the intersection of two roads. Its odd name came from an incident in which a local man named Jacob Ong threw his hat up in the air, for reasons unknown, only to get it stuck in a tree. The hat remained entangled in the branches for so long, whenever anyone passed through the tiny village and saw Ong’s Hat, they knew where they were.

  By the 1920s, just about all traces of Ong’s Hat village had disappeared. The tiny community continued to appear on maps though little more than just a name in the middle of this odd, out-of-place wilderness.

  Yet, it was here, in Ong’s Hat, that a small group of scientists did nothing less than open a door to another dimension.

  But it was also here, soon after these scientists made this startling breakthrough, that the U.S. military raided Ong’s Hat, burned down the group’s laboratory, and by most accounts killed all of its members.

  The Universe Next Door…

  The Pine Barrens has been described as a perfect place for a UFO landing.

  Perhaps that’s what first attracted twin brother and sister Frank and Althea Dobbs to it. The Dobbs twins spent their early childhood on a UFO cult commune in rural Texas, a collective founded by their father.

  It’s said that, as undergraduates at the University of Texas, the twins came up with a series of equations they were certain contained the seeds of a new science, which they called Cognitive Chaos. In this, they theorized that people could not only heal themselves of any affliction and put an end to aging, but they could also travel to other dimensions with very little physical effort.

  Though later enrolling in Princeton University, the twins soon became disenchanted with that institution’s strict academic policies. Nevertheless, they worked diligently to prove interdimensional travel was attainable through the science of Cognitive Chaos. But after submitting a thesis on the subject sometime in the mid-1980s, the twins were immediately expelled from the famous Ivy League school.

  Determined to pursue their studies, the twins bought a rundown Airstream trailer and drove it to Ong’s Hat. Hidden away in the Barrens, they constructed a crude laboratory inside the trailer and went back to work on their theory. Sources of income presented themselves via the sale of certain illegal agricultural items (translation: pot), and soon a commune of sorts rose up around the tiny settlement. Many members of this collective were local runaways.

  Time passed. The twins did their science and the commune grew. The tiny community eventually became known as the Institute of Chaos Studies, or ICS. Two more scientists joined the twins in their studies. Contact with other underground experts in various related fields was made as well.

  As it turned out, even the twins were shocked with the advances they were making. Within a year just about everything their equations had predicted had come true.

  A little more than three years later, now in the late 1980s, they made their breakthrough: They created a device they called the “Gate.”

  On one side was the old trailer. On the other side, another dimension.

  * * *

  The group built a capsule, a vehicle to travel through the Gate. One of their commune members, a person described as a juvenile delinquent, volunteered to be the first one to go through the portal.

  On the big day, and apparently at the right moment, this capsule vanished from the laboratory, with the young volunteer strapped inside.

  The group began to panic, not quite sure what they had done. But seven minutes after it disappeared, the capsule reappeared. Its passenger was still inside, alive, unscathed and beside himself with delight.

  The passenger reported that he had indeed passed through to another dimension. In fact, on the other side of the Gate he found… the Pine Barrens. It was not the one he’d traveled from, but a place very much the same, except for one thing: In this dimension, there were no humans anywhere. Same place, just no people.

  This was just the beginning for the visionaries at Ong’s Hat. As time went on, the group perfected ways of visiting more dimensions and they journeyed to these places en masse. But they always kept a soft spot for the first place their volunteer had traveled to.

  They set up a sort of alternate colony in this different Pine Barrens and began spending most of their time there. During this period, they would often come back to our present dimension to get necessities like computer parts and books, coffee and beer. There was never any intention to “escape” to the other dimension and totally leave this one behind. They were travelers; they liked going back and forth.

  Then something went wrong.

  Details are sketchy, but either word got out to the powers that be of what the group was doing or the government suspected the group had something to do with a dangerous chemical leak at nearby Fort Dix. In any case, the commune at Ong’s Hat was stormed by members of a Delta Force team operating out of Fort Dix, with the New Jersey State Police SWAT team backing them up.

  The Delta Force troops arrived over Ong’s Hat in helicopters and rappelled down long ropes, carrying automatic weapons. In an action eerily similar to the Waco Branch Davidian massacre, the Ong’s Hat commune was set ablaze and burned to the ground. As many as seven residents were either killed or disappeared in the raid and all evidence of the settlement was bulldozed over, finally eliminating Ong’s Hat for good.

  Yet none of this was ever reported in the media.

  Because maybe none of it ever happened.

  The Legend of a Legend

  Is the story of Ong’s Hat real?

  That depends on how you define real.

  But ruse or not, the genesis of how the tale came about is almost as strange as the tale itself.

  It’s widely believed that the story of the ICS commune at Ong’s Hat was created in the early 1990s by author Joseph Matheny in an attempt to insert it into the collective consciousness of a then budding World Wide Web. To this end, Matheny and others planted different pieces of the saga disguised as true items on bulletin boards and in early Internet zines.

  It took a while, but eventually others began responding to these postings, adding their own artifacts, from pe
rsonal anecdotes to audio and even video recordings. As more people added pieces, Matheny’s original narrative began to build like an incredibly involved kids’ game of telephone.

  In other words, Ong’s Hat was a legend that grew not by numerous retellings around a campfire but by numerous retellings on the Internet. In fact, it was probably the Net’s first real myth.

  But… because the story of Ong’s Hat induced such extraordinary responses from so many participants, many of them believed the story was real. This phenomenon is based on the theory that the reason strange things “exist” in this world—ghosts, monsters, aliens—is because so many people think about them, and with so many people thinking about them then they must be real.

  Michael Kinsella, author of the book Legend-Tripping Online: Supernatural Folklore and the Search for Ong’s Hat (University Press of Mississippi, 2011), told this writer, “Modern supernatural legends thrive because they not only describe tantalizing other worlds and possibilities, but they also serve as templates for all kinds of ostensive acts that may lead to all kinds of ostensibly supernatural experiences.”

  In fact, even though some reports say Matheny called the story to a halt in 2001, at one time, hard-core participants actually embarked on pilgrimages to the Pine Barrens, hoping to find (and maybe finding) the interdimensional portal at Ong’s Hat.

  But was it really “real”? The twins, the trailer, the capsule, the “other Pine Barrens”? Did they really “exist”?

  We’ll leave that answer to the man who created the greatest detective of all time.

  There is a story about a question once asked of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, author of the Sherlock Holmes mystery novels.

  The question was, “Is Sherlock Holmes a real person—or is he fiction?”