The Mammoth Book of Conspiracies
Page 35
Those of us in the Tower lost sight of the flight, but could still see this object. Shortly after the last transmission, the Flight Leader said he was at 15,000 ft, and still climbing after “it”, but that he judged its speed to be the same as his. At that time a member of the Flight called to the leader and requested that he “level off ”, but we heard no reply from the leader. That was the last message received from any member of the flight by Godman.
/a/James F. Duesler, Jr
JAMES F. DUESLER, JR
Captain, USAF
MAXW-PBB3–720
5. Col Guy F. Hix statement
HEADQUARTERS
315TH AF BASE UNIT (RES TNG) A/hmg
GODMAN FIELD, FORT KNOX, KENTUCKY
9 January 1948
At approximately 1300 hours a call came to this Headquarters from State Police, reporting a flying object near Elizabethtown. Another report came in from Madisonville about ten minutes later. A third call came in from Lexington, Kentucky. (All towns are south of Godman Field.)
We alerted the Tower to be on the lookout for flying objects. At 1445 hrs the Tower notified me that an object had been sighted at about 215°. I went to the Tower and observed the object until 1550 hrs., when it disappeared behind the clouds.
The object observed could be plainly seen with the naked eye, and appeared to be about one-quarter the size of a full moon, white in color. Through eight-power binoculars, the object seemed to have a red border at the bottom, at times, and a red border at the top at times. It remained stationary for 1½ hours.
When I arrived at the Tower, Tech. Sgt Quinton Blackwell had contacted the P-51 airplanes over the field and suggested that they have a look if they had sufficient fuel. When I arrived they were within sight of the Tower, heading on a course of 215°.
I heard one of the pilots report that he saw the object straight ahead and estimated the speed of 180 M.P.H. The pilot stated that the object was very large and very bright.
/a/Guy F. Hix
GUY F. HIX
Colonel, USAF Commanding
NARA-PBB2–865
6. Lt Paul Orner statement
UNITED STATES AIR FORCE
AIRWAYS AND AIR COMMUNICATIONS SERVICE, ATC
DETACHMENT 733–5 AF BASE UNIT (103D AACS SQ)
Godman Field, Fort Knox, Ky
9 January 1948
STATEMENT OF LT PAUL I. ORNER
Following is an account of the sighting of unknown objects from the Control Tower on 7 January 48 at Godman Field.
On the above date at approximately 1400 CST a report came in to the Control Tower through M Sgt. Cook of a report of an unidentified object flying at terrific speed in the vicinity of Maysville. This call was cancelled minutes later by the Military Police at Fort Knox who had instructions from the Kentucky State Police.
Very soon thereafter several reports of the same nature came from Flight Service saying this object was over Irvington and Owensboro, Kentucky. At the same time an object was reported by T. Sgt Blackwell, Chief Control Tower operator on duty. I was in the office of the Commanding Officer checking the call from the Fort Knox Military Police at this time. When the call was cancelled I was returning to the Control Tower to see the object sighted by them. I immediately went to the Control Tower and saw a small white object in the southwest sky. This object appeared stationary. I was unable to tell if it was an object radiating its own light or giving off reflected light. Through binoculars it partially appeared as a parachute does with bright sun shining on the top of the silk but there also seemed to be some red light around the lower of it.
The Commanding Officer, Operations Officer, S-2 and Executive Officer were called immediately. Several minutes after the object was sighted a flight of four (4) P-51’s came over the field from the south. I instructed T. Sgt Blackwell to call the flight leader and ask if they had seen any evidence of this object. The flight leader answered negative and I suggested to the Operations Officer that we ask them if they had enough gas to go look for this object. The Tower operator was instructed to call the flight leader and he answered “yes” to this question. One (1) P-51 had permission from the flight leader to break formation and continue where he landed several minutes later on their original flight plan. The flight leader and two (2) other planes flew a course of 210° and in about five (5) minutes sighted the object. At first the flight leader reported it high and about one-half his speed at “12 o’clock”. Shortly thereafter the flight leader reported it at about his speed and later said he was closing in to take a good look. This was the last message from NG869, the flight leader. NG800 shortly thereafter reported NG869 disappeared. From pilots reports in the formation NG869 was high and ahead of the wing man at about 1515 CST to 1530 CST when he disappeared. NG800 said he was breaking off with other wingman to return to Standiford Field due to lack of gas. This was about 1523 CST to 1530 CST. From messages transmitted by the formation it is estimated the flight leader was at 18 to 20 thousand feet and the wingman at approximately 15 thousand feet wide formation when the flight leader NG869 disappeared. NG800 and other wing man returned to Standiford Field.
NG800 gassed up and got more oxygen and flew a second mission on the same heading of 210° to a position of about 100 miles south of Godman Field to an altitude of 33 thousand feet and did not sight the object. At about 1645 CST when NG800 reported not seeing the object I left the Control Tower.
At about 1735 CST I returned to the Control Tower and a bright light different than a star at a position of about 240° azimuth and 8° elevation from the Control Tower. This was a round object. It seemed to have a dark spot in the center and the object moved north and disappeared from the horizon at a point 250° from the Tower. The unusual fact about this object was the fact that it remained visible and glowed through the haze near the Earth when no other stars were visible and did not disappear until it went below the level of the earth in a manner similar to the sun or moon setting. This object was viewed and tracked with the Weather Station theodolite from the hangar roof.
MAYAN CALENDAR
If you are reading this in 2013 or beyond, then the Mayan Calendar was wrong and the world has not disappeared in a catastrophe.
The medieval Central American civilization of the Maya used three intersecting calendar cycles, the haab (civil year, 365 days), the tzolkin (religious year, 260 days) and the Long Count. The Long Count gives the total number of days which have passed since a fixed point in the past which, for we users of the Gregorian calendar, is 11 August 3114 BC. Since the Long Count or “Great Cycle” lasts for 5,125.36 years, this means that time runs out on 21 December 2012 .
Did the Maya know something we didn’t? Forgotten after the invasion of Yucatan by the Spanish, the Mayan Calendar was revived in the late twentieth century from information preserved in the study Relación de las cosas de Yucatán by Fray Diego de Landa, a Franciscan monk, accompanying the conquistadors. Soberingly for the apocalyptically minded, numerous other native myths based on the sun cycle also end with the end of days.
How the catastrophe will arrive is open to conjecture. Some claim that 2012 is the year the Earth will experience a polar shift, others moot the final triumph of the New World Order. The End Game scenario with the most scientific substance is that 2012 will see massive solar activity on the scale of the 1859 supercharged sun strike known as the Carrington Event. Most worrying of all, the Earth’s magnetic shield ain’t what it used to be in 1859, meaning that solar activity has a large hole through which to enter and zap the globe’s electrical and electronic systems. Human cost, with no communications, refrigerated medicines, heat, financial services could be extreme. Some scientists postulate that full recovery could take a decade.
Further Reading
John Jenkins, Tzolkin: Visionary Perspectives and Calendar Studies, 1994
NAZCA LINES
Ever since the first explorers stumbled on the Nazca Lines, high in the Peruvian Andes, they have exercised the Western imagination. The artificial
lines, cut into the red desert floor rock, range from animal shapes to complex geometric patterns. By carbon-dating the hundreds of giant geoglyphs, as the shapes are properly known, archaeologists have determined that the Nazca Lines are at least 1,500 years old. After that, it is open season on who made the lines and why.
Noting that some of the lines are only intelligible from the air, many theorists have reached for the stars for the answers. Frenchmen Louis Pauwels and Jacques Bergier proposed in The Morning of the Magicians that the lines had an alien origin, and that said ETs helped hairy lumbering proto-humans to stand up, count and take over the planet from other earthly life forms. The doyen of alternative history, Erich Von Daniken, climbed on the alien-wagon and mooted in his 1969 classic Chariots of the Gods?: Unsolved Mysteries of the Past that the Nazca Plateau was an airfield for ET-craft. The lines were markers for the runway, and the figures enticers by humans for the aliens to drop in (a sort of ancient take on the cargo cult). Going one better, a current troop of UFO-centric conspiracists maintain that the Nazca Lines are still a landing ground for alien astronauts, with members of the New World Order making up the reception committee. Quite how the ETs and the NWO manage to avoid the gaze of the hundreds of tourists to the Nazca Desert, an UNESCO World Heritage site, is left deafeningly silent. Neither do the “runway” theories explain how a spacecraft can land on the soft desert without getting stuck in the mud.
Closer to planet Earth, but still edging towards the wacky, is the notion of Jim Woodman of the International Explorers Society that the ancient Nazca Indians who inhabited the region fabricated hot-air balloons for “ceremonial flights” during which they could “appreciate the great ground drawings on the pampas”. Full marks to Mr Woodman for effort: using cloth, reeds and rope, Woodman and his colleagues made a balloon and basket, in which he and British balloonist Julian Nott made a shaky 300 feet high flight over the Nazca plain. When the balloon took a dive downwards, Woodman and Nott were lucky to escape with their lives, jumping clear of the craft ten feet off the desert floor. Woodman’s thesis flies about as well as his balloon: there is no evidence whatsoever that balloons existed 1,500 years back.
With her feet planted firmly on the Earth, Dr Maria Reiche spent nearly fifty years mapping and studying the Nazca geoglyphs, starting as the assistant to American archaeologist Paul Kosok. Like Kosok, who called the Nazca Lines, “the largest astronomy book in the world”, Reiche maintained that the geoglyphs comprised a sun calendar for the ancient Nazca peoples. Her magnum opus The Mystery on the Desert, however, attracted as many brickbats as bouquets, because numerous of the geoglyphs have no astronomical significance. The likelihood is that lines that do not align with the stars have a religious purpose, these drawings being a form of worship to their sky gods. Who, after all, would be in a position to see them.
Any Von Danikenesque belief that only alien astronauts could have ordered up the Nazca Lines was convincingly ended in a muddy field in Kentucky by researcher Joe Nickell in 1982. Using simple tools and technology available to Nazca Indians – such as wooden stakes, numbers of which archaeologists have found next to the Nazca designs – Nickell and a small team was able to recreate the geoglyphs within a week without any aerial assistance at all.
Further Reading
Erich von Daniken, Chariots of the Gods?, 1960
Louis Pauwels and Jacques Bergier, Le Matin des magiciens, 1960
Maria Reiche, The Mystery on the Desert, 1949
NAZI GOLD
Treasure hunters have flocked to Lake Toplitz in the picturesque Austrian Alps ever since a group of diehard Nazis retreated to the area in the final days of the Second World War. With US troops closing in, the Nazis transported metal boxes to the edge of the lake, by lorry and by horse-drawn wagon, then chucked them into the icy depths.
What was in the boxes? A rumour soon swept around that the said crates contained gold looted by German troops throughout Europe and carried back to Germany. Or gold stolen from the Nazis’ German victims.
In searching for the fabled lost gold of the Nazis many have died, causing the Austrian authorities to ban diving without express approval.
The tragedy is that the Nazis’ stolen gold was not dumped in Lake Toplitz – from which it would have been all but impossible to recover it, short of hauling a U-boat there – but in the altogether drier environment of the Merkers mine, 200 miles southwest of Berlin, and in the mountains above Oberbayern. And in the cool vaults of Swiss banks.
Following a B-17 raid on 3 February 1945 which hit the Berlin Reichsbank, $238 millions’ worth of the Third Reich’s gold reserves was taken by German Alpine troops under the command of Colonel Franz Pfeiffer and hidden in the Merker mine. Three months later the mine and mountain hoards were captured by Patton’s US Third Army and placed under safe military control.
Well, not quite. Even by the estimates of the US Army, 2 per cent of the closing balance of the Reichsbank went missing, amounting to several million dollars (at 1945 values). The Guinness Book of Records called the disappearance of the Merkers and Oberbayern gold “the largest robbery on record”. Some conspiracy researchers suggest that the missing gold was appropriated by SS clandestine escape network ODESSA, then shipped to Spain to fund various ex-Nazi organizations such as Paladin.
Ian Sayer and Douglas Botting, authors of Nazi Gold, have a less convoluted explanation for the gold missing from Merkers and Oberbayern; it was heisted in bits by just about every GI and soldat who could get their mitts on it.
The story of the rest of the Third Reich’s missing gold is more sordid still.
In 1997, the World Jewish Congress and the US Senate Banking Committee uncovered a tainted tale of Swiss-based financial institutions accepting gold from Nazi Germany without any proper scrutiny. The deposits included gold stolen from Jewish bank deposits, jewellery and even dental work from the millions of Jews exterminated in the death camps, all of which was smelted down into bullion bars, and stamped with pre-war dates to make it appear genuine. The sums involved were vast – more than $400 million went into Basel’s Bank for International Settlements alone – and the “laundered” bullion was afterwards diverted into the central banks of Sweden, Argentina, Turkey, Portugal and Spain as payments for trade. The Swiss, despite their avowed neutrality, were aiding the Nazi war effort. Post-1945 the Swiss banks vigorously denied accepting looted gold – until the 1997 report from the WJC and US Senate obliged them to admit that the nation’s banks had made no discernible effort to check the provenance of gold deposited by the Third Reich until late in the war. And that the said banks still held as much as $20 billion in “Nazi gold”. Swiss banks also denied, then admitted, keeping for themselves the contents of “heirless accounts” – the accounts of Holocaust victims. With the threat of class actions by US beneficiaries, the Swiss Government set up a $5 billion annual compensation fund for the victims of the Holocaust and other human catastrophes – a weasel formulation that allowed the Swiss to pretend to be beneficent humanitarians.
Alas, it was not only the Swiss that had bloodstained Nazi gold in their coffers. The governments of the US, Britain and France set up the Tripartite Gold Commission after the war to return seized gold. Only about 70 per cent of the gold, however, was reimbursed, and two tons remains in the Federal Reserve in the US and three and half tons in the Bank of England. A document discovered in the US Embassy in Paris asserted that one shipment of 8,307 gold bars taken by the Allies from a German salt mine might “represent melted down gold teeth fillings”. Quite possibly some of this remodelled gold is held in the Fed or the Bank of England.
Then there is the Vatican. In 1997 a declassified US intelligence report from 1946 indicated that the Vatican was holding $170 million Nazi gold “for safe keeping”. The gold, mainly in coins, was stolen from gypsies, Serbs and Jews exterminated by the Nazis’ puppet Ustasha Government in Yugoslavia. Holocaust research groups, notably the Simon Wiesenthal Centre, accused the Vatican of using the gold in the years after t
he war to smuggle Nazi war criminals out of Europe down the “ratlines” run by ODESSA.
The accusations were rejected by the Vatican, which opened its World War II archives in 2003 to researchers in an attempt to prove its innocence. Such “transparency” did little to mollify Holocaust groups and conspiracy theorists, because it seemed entirely plausible that any damning documents had already been destroyed.
The Vatican was far from being a monolith during World War II. Certainly, some factions were pro-Nazi and provided material aid to SS on the run in the conflict’s aftermath; on the other hand, there were Vatican factions that were resolutely anti-Nazi. Lest it be forgotten, agencies in the Vatican helped thousands of Jews flee persecution.
What then, you might wonder, did the Nazis dump in Lake Toplitz? In 1959, a team financed by the German magazine Stern retrieved £72 million in forged sterling currency hidden in boxes, and a printing press.
The currency was part of a secret counterfeiting operation, Operation Bernhard, personally authorized by Adolf Hitler to weaken the British economy.
Further Reading
Ian Sayer and Douglas Botting, Nazi Gold: The Story of the World’s Greatest Robbery – and Its Aftermath, 1984
NEW COKE
Meet the new Coke. Same as the old Coke?
Back in the rock ’n’ roll fifties, Coca-Cola (popularly called “Coke”) had the American soft drinks market sewn up, with a 60 per cent share. Thirty years later, Coke’s share of the beverage business was down to 24 per cent due to competition from arch-rival Pepsi.