Beyond Area 51

by Mack Maloney

  For the next half hour, the witness watched as a series of blue and gold beams bounced back and forth between the gigantic saucer and the base. Then the object suddenly began oscillating, lighting up like a neon sign.

  An instant later, it shot straight up and was lost among the stars.

  The UFOs Next Door

  UFOs have also been frequently reported around Alice Springs, the small town about a dozen miles away from Pine Gap.

  In 1998, people there watched a weird silver glow hover over their town for nearly a half hour before it roared off to the south. Also spotted over the town on several occasions have been triangular-shaped clusters containing five lights that flicker brightly before eventually fading away.

  In 1996, up to forty orange lights comprising two distinct formations flew over the town. Half the lights formed a circle that was visible for about fifteen minutes. Then the remaining lights moved in from east to west, forming an evenly spaced straight line. Both formations then traveled west and soon went out of sight.

  That same year, in an incident similar to that endured by the Knowles family, a UFO touched down about five miles west of Alice Springs. Witnesses driving nearby said the UFO was about seventy-five feet in diameter and colored blue with a flat base.

  As the witnesses watched, a halo formed around the blue object. This was followed by a whirling noise. Suddenly the UFO took off, and an instant later it was hovering above the witnesses’ car.

  It stayed there for a few terrifying moments before finally flying off toward Pine Gap.

  Read All About It

  One particular UFO story from the Pine Gap area actually made front-page headlines Down Under.

  It happened in 1976 when a number of media sources reported that a UFO had crashed near the Pine Gap base, killing all on board. The occupants’ bodies were recovered, but as the story goes, they were not human. Witnesses claim the remains were immediately transported to Pine Gap.

  As strange as this story sounds, it was widely reported by the Australian national media. Even the government’s own TV channel promised further details on the incident.

  But in reality, the government never mentioned the crash again, at least not officially.

  The “Lost” Files

  Exactly what Pine Gap’s strange connection is to UFOs remains a mystery. Perhaps with the exception of Groom Lake itself, no other secret military base has been so directly linked with the operation of UFOs as this highly unusual place in the middle of the desolate Outback.

  But making the whole UFOs Down Under story even more puzzling, in 2010, Australia’s Department of Defence announced it had lost many of its records on UFO sightings, not just over Pine Gap but over the entire continent, files it had collected over several decades.

  This episode began when a Sydney newspaper asked the Australian military to turn over the UFO files via a freedom of information request.

  But after two months of searching, the Australian DOD admitted the documents could not be found and that some of the files had likely been destroyed—which according to the Australian military was part of normal administrative procedure.

  Blame It on the Brits?

  Australia seems to attract a different breed of UFOs than the rest of the world.

  Positively demonic when it comes to incidents on the Nullarbor Plain, aggressive and proactive when shutting down the Woomera weapons tests and yet oddly cooperative and even collaborative over Pine Gap—at least according to witnesses who say they’ve seen strange things happening there.

  For want of a better description, UFOs over Oz seem a bit schizo. Friendly one moment, scaring the bejesus out of citizens the next.

  Was it the British atomic tests of the fifties that opened this can of worms for the Aussies?

  “There were certainly a number of civilian encounters with UFOs in Australia in the early 1950s and even before,” author Nick Redfern told us in an interview. “But it’s correct to say that with the beginning of the British nuclear tests at Woomera, UFOs began showing up with great frequency over secret military sites all over the continent, and that never really stopped. They’re still doing so today.”

  18

  Last Stop: Playing the HAARP

  Fooling with Mother Nature

  A phrase Mark Twain was fond of repeating went as follows: “Everyone talks about the weather, but nobody does anything about it.”

  If you believe what some people are saying about a little-known U.S. government research project, though, Twain might finally get his wish—but not in any way he could have imagined.

  The project is the High Frequency Active Auroral Research Program, or HAARP. It’s located in an isolated corner of Alaska called Gakona, about two hundred miles northeast of Anchorage. Built on a tract of land once occupied by a massive U.S. Air Force radar installation, HAARP combines 360 radio transmitters with 180 antennas (each one sixty-eight feet tall), for what looks like a bizarre metal forest covering more than forty acres of remote bush country.

  What does HAARP do? It depends on whom you ask.

  The project’s official website states, “HAARP is a scientific endeavor aimed at studying the properties and behavior of the ionosphere, with particular emphasis on… enhancing communications and surveillance systems for both civilian and defense purposes.”

  In effect, HAARP directs huge amounts of energy at the ionosphere—the electrically charged sphere surrounding our planet, about fifty miles high—and then bounces that energy back to earth.

  However, critics of the project claim that when that energy comes back down, it can penetrate the Earth’s surface for many miles, revealing things like underground munitions, hidden tunnels and possibly untapped mineral caches—very little to do with enhancing communications.

  Critics also cite that the radio frequency needed for this earth-penetrating magic is close to the same frequency that disrupts human mental functions. This frequency might also affect the migration patterns of certain fish and animals.

  But most disturbing of all is the charge that what HAARP really does is heat up the ionosphere with tremendous amounts of energy in an attempt to control the weather and use this unnatural power as a bizarre and dangerous weapon.

  “Owning the Weather”

  Though the idea of using the weather as a weapon might sound like science fiction, it’s not. The U.S. military has been studying the concept since at least the mid-1990s, as was made clear by Nick Redfern in his book Keep Out.

  Redfern quoted from a paper called the “USAF 2025 Report.” It was prepared in 1996 by the College of Aerospace Doctrine, Research, and Education Center at Maxwell Air Force Base in Alabama.

  Said Redfern: “One particularly intriguing subsection of the report had the notable title of ‘Weather as a Force Multiplier, Owning the Weather in 2025.’ It states that the U.S. military has been hard at work trying to determine if the manipulation and even the creation of harsh weather conditions such as hurricanes or earthquakes, volcanoes and other forms of devastation might be considered as a viable tool of warfare in the very near future.”

  The History Channel was also on the story. A 2006 TV special titled The Invisible Machine detailed how heating up the ionosphere could indeed turn weather into a weapon of war.

  “Imagine using a flood to destroy a city or tornadoes to decimate an approaching army in the desert,” the documentary asked. “The U.S. military has spent a huge amount of time on weather modification as a concept for battle environments.”

  * * *

  So the weather could be used as a weapon. But can HAARP really control the weather?

  Critics say the facility has the capability to heat up an enormous part of the atmosphere—maybe four hundred square miles or more—to a staggering temperature of fifty thousand degrees Fahrenheit. Moreover, the way that HAARP is set up (basically as a grid of 180 transmission towers in what is called a phased array), this heat and energy can be directed at many points of the sky. In other words, if the
critics can be believed, HAARP’s atmospheric baking process can be targeted. And that process could involve, for instance, rerouting high-pressure systems or even adjusting the flow of jet streams, with catastrophic weather being the result.

  So, if some unfriendly country is doing something the U.S. government disapproves of, is a massive hurricane heading its way? Or a devastating flood? Or even an earthquake?

  Even E.T. Might Be Scared

  What does this have to do with UFOs?

  Maybe not much.

  Like Tonopah, Nevada (that similarly mysterious place approximately 2,500 miles to the southeast), HAARP is not a common locale for UFO sightings—which is intriguing in itself.

  True, some conspiracy enthusiasts claim that HAARP’s real purpose is to create a ginormous electromagnetic shield around Earth to prevent an attack from outer space. And others swear that HAARP has already induced earthquakes around the world and that UFOs spotted over the targeted areas before they were struck hint at some kind of collaboration. But if anything close to what some people claim HAARP can do is true, then frankly, an attack from outer space might be preferable.

  What is particularly frightening about all this is another fact that Nick Redfern dug up and wrote in his book, Keep Out: “On April 28, 1997, then U.S. Secretary of Defense William S. Cohen gave the keynote speech at a conference on ‘Terrorism, Weapons of Mass Destruction and U.S. Strategy’ held at the University of Georgia. Cohen must have shocked his audience by telling them, ‘Powerful shadowy forces [are] out there engaging in an eco-type of terrorism whereby they can alter the climate and set off earthquakes and volcanoes remotely, through the use of electromagnetic waves.’”

  Cohen added, “There are plenty of ingenious minds out there that are at work finding ways in which they can wreak terror upon other nations. It’s real.”

  Wow…

  That the United States is not the only entity working on this technology changes the dynamic dramatically. The European Incoherent Scatter Scientific Association operates an ionospheric heating facility near Tromso, Norway. And Russia runs the Sura Ionospheric Heating Facility in Vasilsursk, near Nizhniy Novgorod.

  Norway is considered a country friendly to the West, and since the early 1990s Russia is no longer the boogeyman it once was.

  So who was Secretary Cohen talking about when he said: “Powerful shadowy forces out there… can alter the climate”?

  Open or Closed?

  According to HAARP’s management, the project strives for transparency. All of its activities are logged and publicly available. Scientists without security clearances, even foreign nationals, are routinely allowed on the HAARP site.

  In addition, the HAARP facility regularly hosts open houses during which any civilian may tour the entire facility. Furthermore, scientific results obtained by HAARP are routinely published in major research and defense journals.

  However… when former governor of Minnesota and present-day conspiracy theorist/TV star Jesse Ventura (who has openly questioned whether the government is using the Gakona site to manipulate the weather) made an official request to visit the research station, he was denied.

  And when Ventura and his film crew showed up at HAARP anyway, they were turned away.

  So much for transparency.

  Too Dumb to Understand?

  Various mainstream scientists have commented that HAARP makes an attractive target for conspiracy theorists because, in the words of one skeptic, “Its purpose seems deeply mysterious to the scientifically uninformed.”

  But maybe that’s the whole idea. Maybe instead of miles of desert as a buffer, or rings of barbed wire, or a small army of private security guards, maybe this unsecret place in Alaska is the most dangerous place of all, and for cover it uses that elitist, look-down-one’s-nose comment perfectly delivered in a Harvard accent: “Sorry, this is deeply mysterious to the… uninformed.”

  The Future and Weather Wars

  But uninformed or not, a dangerous clock might be ticking. Take the example of the United States and the A-bomb. Once the first nuclear device, developed via the legendary Manhattan Project, was exploded in 1945, America instantly and indisputably became the most powerful nation on Earth—and automatically held an atomic monopoly over the rest of the world. Happy days indeed.

  But then Russia exploded its own A-bomb in August 1949, and that monopoly came to an end after just four years. Other countries have since joined the nuclear club (China, Pakistan and North Korea among them), making America’s claim of pure world dominance through nuclear weapons a thing of the distant past.

  So what happens when China or North Korea or even Iran acquires the capability to use and control the weather?

  Then what will we have? A war of competing HAARPs? Hostile countries hurling massive floods or hurricanes at each other? Or creating über-destructive droughts or earthquakes to soften up an opponent before an attack?

  The weather is an extremely powerful thing. It can likely do as much damage, take more lives and affect the long-term environment and the Earth itself as can today’s arsenal of nuclear weapons.

  Is this really how we want to fight the wars of the future? By changing the weather?

  That’s probably not what Mark Twain had in mind.

  19

  The Second Meeting

  Another Beer with the Spook

  As agreed, my Spook friend and I set up a time and place to meet again.

  He’d read a draft of this book as promised and forwarded some positive if general comments. He’d been especially interested in the sections on Russia and also provided new information pertaining to UFOs over Scotland.

  I was glad to get his feedback even though it was broad in nature. I really didn’t expect anything else. I knew he would not floor me with some incredible revelation like he and his colleagues knew what UFOs were, or where they came from, or why they seem to be attracted to secret bases around the world.

  Still, in the time leading up to this second meeting, I couldn’t stop thinking about all the bits of information, the stories, the interviews, the anecdotes and the plain old reading I’d done while putting this book together and concluding that many of the events I wrote about just seemed too bizarre. Too far-fetched to be real.

  More than once, I fretted that the whole UFO mystery might be nothing more than a grand expansion of the legend of Ong’s Hat. Maybe that is what’s really happening. For whatever reason a person makes up a UFO story from whole cloth and tells it to another person, and then they add something and it goes on to another, who adds their own embellishments, and on and on, and pretty soon we have an elaborate tale about a UFO doing this fantastic thing, or that fantastic thing, and the whole story is so detailed that some people can’t help but take it all as fact.

  As Michael Kinsella reminded me about Ong’s Hat, “Legends force audiences to choose how to interpret them… and therein the ‘truth’ or ‘reality’ of the story comes to life.”

  So, I found myself asking the same question over and over. Is that all the UFO puzzle is? Just one huge, elaborate game of telephone?

  But then I thought, No. Not all these stories are made up. Not all can be cases of misidentification of aerial phenomenon, or delusions, or hoaxes, or people just trying to cash in because no one is looking over their shoulder to verify what they claim has been already verified.

  I know from my first UFO book, UFOs in Wartime, that pilots see these strange flying things all the time. That sometimes military pilots see UFOs in the midst of combat. And airline pilots see them just as often while shepherding hundreds of people across the sky. These pilots are expertly trained professionals, trusted with the controls of multimillion-dollar aircraft. They know the difference between a strange-looking cloud, the planet Venus at sunset, the reflection of another aircraft twenty miles away and something they’ve never seen before.

  When you read accounts like the famous 1956 “Gander Sighting” off Newfoundland, when a hundred Navy personnel, m
any of them pilots themselves, saw a huge saucer flying alongside their plane, you know they couldn’t possibly have been imagining it. When hundreds of people living in the San Luis Valley routinely see UFOs (and a whole lot more), they all can’t be making it up. Not everyone in Bonnybridge or Gorebridge, Scotland, is a kook or a little too much into the grain spirits. And what Russian soldier would lie to the KGB about seeing a UFO over a nuclear storage facility? Why would Marina Popovich put her estimable reputation on the line by speaking out about things that weren’t true? Why would the kids in Aksai Chin draw pictures of strange things flying in the sky if they didn’t see them so often?

  No, for every story about Dulce Base, there’s a story about hundreds of people seeing an unexplainable parade of UFOs stream across the Bahamian skies. For every guy like “O’Hennessy” and stories of J-Rod 52 there’s a serious investigator like Christopher O’Brien, Nick Redfern, Jerome Clark or Bill Birnes and the dozens of UFO radio commentators, film producers and authors. People who have devoted their lives to trying to solve this mystery. They all can’t be wrong. They all can’t be just tilting at windmills. It’s in the numbers. All it takes is for one UFO sighting to be true; then in effect, they’re all true.

  So yes, Mulder, something is out there. Something is happening. UFOs do exist; we just don’t know what they are yet.

  * * *

  In anticipation of my follow-up meeting, I thought about the specifics of some of the places visited in this book. Secret places around the world that for the most part seem to have that one thing in common: an unexplainable connection to UFOs. If the most important question is “What are UFOs?” then maybe the second most important question in the big scheme of things is “Why are they attracted to these secret places?”