Beginning as early as 1950, there were important leaks in this curtain of secrecy. Individuals who claimed direct encounters with the UFO occupants reported that shortly after their experiences became known, they were visited and examined by doctors professing to work for the government. Some were flown to government hospitals at taxpayers’ expense. A few were even railroaded into mental institutions, where they could be examined extensively.
At the same time, civilian UFO organizations were maneuvered into adopting a firm anti-contactee stance. Maj. Donald Keyhoe, an influential figure in ufology in the 1950s, led the anti-contactee movement. His Washington-based National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomena (NICAP)) campaigned vigorously against all the contactees who surfaced at that time. Other organizations followed suit, believing the contactees were all hoaxers and were exposing the ufological movement to ridicule. Had these groups applied some fundamental logic to the situation, they might have realized their approach was wrong. If UFOs are intangible, paraphysical objects, then the most sensible avenue of investigation is a careful study of the contactees. By publicly disassociating themselves from the contactees, the early ufologists left this fruitful aspect entirely in the hands of the government. The federal agencies were able to study these people freely, with little or no conflict with civilian groups.
NICAP always proudly listed Adm. R.H. Hillenkoetter as one of its key board members and advisors. Adm. Hillenkoetter had also served as head of the CIA in the early 1950s.
A few cases of medical investigation became celebrated in UFO literature. In 1957, both Reinhold Schmidt and Olden Moore experienced strange after-effects with their contacts. Schmidt, of Nebraska, was placed briefly in a mental hospital, while Moore (who came from Ohio) was flown to Washington by unidentified agents. Both men underwent extensive mental and psychological testing. These tests were sophisticated and far beyond anything even present-day ufologists employ. These tests were not designed to confirm the reliability of the witnesses. Rather they were geared to find out how much the contactee actually knew or suspected.
By the 1950s, the art of psychological warfare and brainwashing was quite advanced. The use of drugs, hypnosis, and techniques for altering brain patterns were already a part of our psychological warfare arsenal.
Government specialists could induce amnesia, introduce imaginary experiences into the subject’s brain, and even alter his entire identity and personality. An eyewitness who “knew too much” (because he or she accidentally had seen something they shouldn’t have) could be made to forget the experience totally, or could be manipulated into erratic behavior that would forever discredit their UFO story.
At least one contactee, Howard Menger of New Jersey, finally confessed publicly that his experiences with the UFO entities had somehow been engineered by the CIA. Others recalled being hauled aboard unmarked vehicles (not flying saucers but ordinary cars, trucks, and vans) where they were hypnotized by flashing lights and injected with hypodermic needles.
These strange episodes have not been limited to the United States. Contactees in England, Italy, and throughout South America have reported enjoying free trips to the U.S. Recently, a Venezuelan contactee told me how, in 1974, he had been approached by two men claiming to represent the U.S. Embassy. They flew him to Washington, D.C., where he submitted to a variety of tests for several days. Obviously such investigations cost a great deal of money. Some branch of government must have an overwhelming interest in UFO contactees – and has had this interest since the early 1950s.
The official investigators assume many guises. Woodrow Derenberger of West Virginia was flown to the NASA installation at Cape Kennedy, FL, where he was studied for five days in a basement somewhere on the rocket installation. Others have supposedly been examined by officials from the Smithsonian Institution, the U.S. Navy, and even the U.S. Marines.
In 1966, Mort Young, a reporter for the New York Journal-American, investigated a case in which two young seamen reported seeing a UFO while on duty. They were immediately hustled into a mental hospital. Young found, somewhat to his own astonishment, that this was standard naval procedure at that time. In fact, numerous Air Force personnel, including high-ranking officers, had received the same kind of treatment after reporting a UFO. That is, they were subjected to thorough medical and psychological testing, not to find out if they were nuts, but to find out every detail of their experience – to find out how much they really knew.
My own field investigations began in earnest in 1966. Because of my varied background as an investigative reporter, I quickly discovered the hidden complexities of the UFO situation. I found “silent” contactees in every state of the country and uncovered many unpublicized “abduction” cases. I admit I had been influenced by the early UFO literature and was prejudiced against all contactees at first. But my personal investigations and experiences quickly changed my attitude – so much that I willingly faced the wrath of the ufological establishment by writing my first two articles in 1966 about these seemingly unsavory aspects. My first article in SAGA (Feb. 1967) dealt exclusively with UFO abductions. Paradoxically, the ufological establishment tried to ignore abduction cases until the UFO outbreak of 1973 – six years later.
As I explored these cases, I was disturbed to find many Men in Black incidents, another aspect long held in disrepute by ET believers. While some of these MIB appeared to be apparitions or entities directly related to the UFO phenomenon itself, others seemed to be real government agents. The latter were concerned solely with the UFO “contact” cases. I naturally reasoned that the contact episodes must be of particular importance, since the government was so interested in them.
Originally I assumed that if there was anything to the UFO mystery – if the objects were real and interplanetary – systematic field research should quickly prove this fact. To my chagrin, I found that psychic manifestations overlapped into the UFO cases. I made myself quite unpopular by questioning the reality of the objects. It occurred to me that the real answers, if there were any, could only be found in a careful study of the contactee cases. Obviously, someone within the government had arrived at the same conclusion as far back as 1950. If the contactees were all hoaxers and lunatics, I doubt if the government would have continued their expensive contactee studies for such a long period.
As a newsman, I had many excellent sources within the federal government. One old friend held an important position in the office of the Secretary of the Air Force in the 1960s, and he did his best to penetrate the alleged Air Force secrecy surrounding the subject. Although he came up with small bits of interesting gossip and information, he drew a blank with the more important questions.
Having worked for the government in the past, I knew how the bureaucracy operated and thought. A secret UFO project would be carefully concealed, probably in a seemingly unrelated department like the Dept. of Transportation, or some sub-agency not connected with the Air Force or CIA. The standard journalistic method for ferreting out such projects is to study the budgets of the agencies and search for large, unspecified expenditures. I wasted a lot of time on this. In any case, duplication of effort is common in government, and it is quite possible that several different UFO projects are being conducted by different agencies without any coordination or cooperation.
While I was living in Washington in 1971-72, the newspapers were filled with stories about a mysterious windowless building that had been constructed on government property there. Curious reporters tried vainly to find out which agency had built the structure, even though such basic information is supposed to be freely available (since tax dollars were spent on the project).
If a government group can construct an expensive (and illegal) building in the heart of Washington and keep it a secret, then other groups could possibly set up sub-rosa UFO study projects. If such projects are largely “medical” and run by doctors, our chances of learning anything about them are, alas, slight.
When I realized the contactees might hol
d the key, I enlisted the aid of a number of doctors and psychologists in the New York area to help me. Some of them later threw their hands up in despair, partly because what they were learning could never be made public without jeopardizing their careers. Another medical man, well-known in UFO research, recently told me the same thing. “The best cases involved such ethical considerations and uncertainties,” he said, “that one is pledged to secrecy.”
There’s the rub. The very nature of our investigations makes in necessary to keep the identities of the witnesses secret. The deeply personal aspects of UFO experiences have an automatic silencing factor. In essence, when a responsible investigator does stumble onto important information, he finds he cannot reveal it publicly without seriously affecting the lives of the witnesses. This is undoubtedly why some government investigators have advised certain witnesses to keep quiet.
Only a few of the many hundreds of MIB cases have been made public for the reasons stated above. It is apparent, though, that the MIB often employ the same techniques as the elusive government agents. In many cases, it appears that two different groups are involved, and that these groups are actually working against each other. A kind of underground war of nerves is taking place around the world.
A large part of the UFO mystery is nothing more than myths based upon the speculations of bewildered outsiders. The government successfully diverted civilian research for two decades. If Menger and others like him are correct, official brainwashers may have actually worked to create the extraterrestrial theory. The idea was to misdirect the civilian ufological establishment while, in the shadows, some covert government agency quietly tried to get at the real truth.
CHAPTER 13
BEHIND THE FBI’S UNDERCOVER FLYING SAUCER INVESTIGATION – MEN MAGAZINE, 1968
It crossed the dawn-lit French countryside in eerie silence, and the early-rising farmers stood in their fields and stared at it with wonder. At first they thought it was a giant hot-air balloon on fire and about to crash. As it swooped low over the skies near the village of Alençon, it began to whistle. It slowed, rocked up and down as if it were out of control, and then plummeted down onto the top of a high hill. The grass and shrubbery burst into flames from the heat of the object. Crowds of farmers and villagers rushed up the hill to fight the fire.
When they reached the summit, they stopped. The fiery sphere appeared to be some kind of mechanical contrivance. A door on its side suddenly flew open. A man stepped out and looked around uneasily at the gathering crowd. Later, the witnesses described him as looking “just like us, except that he was dressed in strange clothes – very tight-fitting garments.” The man mumbled something no one could understand, and then he ran into some nearby woods and disappeared. He was never seen again. A few minutes later, his odd vehicle exploded in complete silence. Nothing was left except granules of metallic powder.
A few days later, Paris sent a police inspector named Liabeuf to the site to investigate. He found that the eyewitnesses included two mayors, a physician, and three other local authorities, in addition to dozens of peasants and farmers. All of their stories matched, detail for detail. Something very unusual had apparently happened at Alençon, but it was never reported to the French Air Force. And for very good reason...
The incident occurred 178 years ago, at 5 a.m. on the morning of June 12, 1790. There were only three or four hot air balloons in the entire world at that time. (The first balloon had been sent up by Montgolfier brothers only eight years earlier.) What and who did these Frenchmen view on that distant date? Many of the details in Inspector Liabeuf ’s report are uncomfortably similar to modern “flying saucer” accounts. If this same distinguished group of witnesses were around in 1968 and reported something like this, they would have been branded “contactees,” subjected to ridicule, and the French Air force would probably have explained the UFO away as a “weather balloon.”
Unidentified flying objects have been turning up throughout history. Many thousands of people claim to have actually seen and even spoken with the “ufonauts” (pilots).
Not all of these people can be lumped into the category of “kooks, cultists, and crackpots.” Their constantly growing ranks include judges, senators, doctors, lawyers, engineers, and hard-boiled newspapermen. A good many of these witnesses understandably choose to remain silent about their experiences, because so much controversy and ridicule has been heaped upon “contactees” who dared to publicly reveal their encounters with the “flying saucer people.”
“People” may be the right term, too. In many reports, the ufonauts are described as looking just like us, with human features and an apparent ability to breathe our atmosphere without difficulty. But there have also been a spate of stories involving “little men” in “diving suits,” and “giants” in “space suits” complete with transparent helmets. “Contacts” with the flying saucer pilots have now been reported from every country on Earth, including the Soviet Union. Since very few of these stories are widely publicized or circulated, it is remarkable that so many witnesses, so separated by distance, could come up with the same correlative details. It is easy for us to dismiss the single reports as being the work of liars and cranks but, in the past 20 years, over 2,500 such stories have been carefully investigated by trained scientists and reporters on every continent. And historians have unearthed hundreds more going all the way back to ancient Roman times. The sightings of the flying saucers themselves (there are now over 100,000 fully documented sightings from all over the world) pall into insignificance beside this mass of data about the UFO occupants.
Deep in East Africa, the residents of the tiny village of Baira, Mozambique reported an incident in April 1960 that is almost identical to that 1790 “touchdown” (landing) in France. According to the story filed by the Portuguese news service Lusitania, hundreds of villagers saw a whistling orange object land in a field outside Baira, and a group of “tiny little men” leaped out of it. They ran into the forest just as the thing exploded. Searchers could find no trace of the “little men,” either. The objects and their pilots have an uncanny way of disappearing without leaving any evidence behind, and it is this absence of hard physical evidence that keeps anti-UFO skepticism alive.
Since the flying saucers and their peculiar occupants have apparently been busy in our skies since the beginning of history (there are extensive UFO descriptions in Hindu scriptures dating back 5000 years and, of course, there are several UFO-like accounts in the Holy Bible), it seems unlikely that “they” will ever provide us with concrete evidence or enter into formal and open contact with our governments. The UFO buffs have been waiting patiently for twenty years now, hoping that one day soon, a flying saucer will land on the White House lawn or settle in front of the United Nations. This will probably never happen. Indeed, if some of the UFO pilots look just like us, there is no need for this to happen. They could easily walk our streets and even move into our apartment buildings without ever being noticed. And it does seem as if they want it that way.
Sure, this sounds like a bad plot from the TV series, The Invaders. But, to coin a cliché, fiction is always struggling to keep up with fact.
In 1866, a man in Massachusetts named William Denton announced that he was in contact with beings from other planets. He said they looked just like us, could speak our languages, and flew through the skies in saucer-shaped machines made from aluminum. (The commercial process for manufacturing aluminum was not developed until 1886.) Mr. Denton also explained that they could communicate silently via mental telepathy. Needless to say, not very many people took these startling revelations seriously. There had been other “contacts” in 1823 and 1846 but, of course, nobody paid much attention.
In March and April of 1897, thousands of people all over the U.S. reported seeing gigantic cigar-shaped machines in the sky (this was long before any kind of dirigible had been successfully flown in the U.S.), and many told of landings and casual chats with the pilots. What did these pilots look like? Fortunately, t
here were hundreds of extensive newspaper stories on these incidents throughout the period. UFO researchers have burrowed into the old files and come up with hundreds of interesting items. The pilots of the 1897 “airships” were slight in stature, had dark olive skin, deep black eyes, and long fingers. They spoke perfect English, according to the witnesses.
Not all of the UFO occupants are male, either. There are many stories of “beautiful ladies” alighting from the objects.
An ex-Senator named Harris, from Harrisburg, Arkansas, testified that a strange flying machine landed on his farm early on the morning of April 21, 1897, and that two men and a woman stepped out to draw water from his well. A week earlier, a similar object allegedly landed on a farm near Springfield, IL. Two men and a woman disembarked from it briefly to chat with Adolph Winkle and John Hulle. Both farmers later signed notarized affidavits swearing to the truth of their story.
A pair of Arkansas lawmen, Constable John J. Sumpter and Deputy Sheriff John McLemore, also signed sworn affidavits claiming that they saw a luminous object land on the night of May 6, 1897, in Garland County. They said that two men and a woman appeared, and filled a sack with water from a well while they watched. In all three of these cases, one of the men was said to have sported a waist-length beard of “silken” whiskers and acted as the spokesman. Bearded ufonauts were also reported by a large group of witnesses at Bell Plains, Iowa, on April 15th of that year.
There were scores of other “contacts” in 1897, and hundreds of detailed aerial sightings. The objects themselves flew low over Chicago, Omaha, San Francisco, and even Washington, D.C. They were viewed by thousands of people. When all of these reports were sifted and organized by dates, it was obvious that many “airships” were involved, for they appeared simultaneously over dozens of localities on a single date.
Flying Saucer to the Center of Your Mind: Selected Writings of John A. Keel Page 19
