But the phenomenon has exploited the Air Force, just as it has exploited the culpable flying saucer enthusiasts. While it manipulated belief and spread propaganda for the outer-space hypothesis, it also generated anti-Air Force feeling, greatly reducing public cooperation with Air Force investigations, until finally the paranoia was so widespread that, in a very real sense, the public was not telling the Air Force the truth about UFOs. Witnesses kept silent or singled out amateur UFO enthusiasts to tell their stories to.
Working alone, I managed to personally investigate several hundred UFO incidents in the 1960s. In about fifty cases I learned that someone representing—or claiming to represent—the Air Force had also been in touch with the witnesses—usually by telephone. In some of these instances, several different alleged Air Force officers had interviewed the witnesses for as long as three hours on long-distance phone. But when I later tried to get the Pentagon to verify the investigations in some manner, I was told there was no record of these particular cases.
One witness of the Wanaque Reservoir (New Jersey) sightings in 1966, a policeman, received a call from a “Mr. Johnson in Washington” who questioned him at length. The mystery is: The policeman had an unlisted phone number and doesn’t know how Mr. Johnson located him. Other witnesses in the Wanaque area received phone calls immediately after their sightings and before they had reported to anyone, warning them to keep quiet about what they had seen!
In a series of investigations on Long Island in 1967, I was repeatedly told of visits from an Air Force colonel with a pointed face and dark complexion who demanded that witnesses remain silent. Even witnesses to relatively uninteresting lights in the sky. The man was using the name of a sergeant who was actually stationed at the local Air Force base.
The law of synchronicity has been apparent in many MIB incidents. Author Brad Steiger has also been concerned with the Men in Black and has investigated several cases in the Midwest that matched my own Northeast file. For example, one of Brad’s friends received a visit from “the cadaver,” an extraordinarily emaciated man who looks like “those World War II photographs of someone in a concentration camp.” This pale, scrawny animated bone heap first appeared in New Jersey, and I have since received descriptions of him, or someone like him, from Wisconsin, Georgia, and California.
We are also troubled by doppelgängers—living duplicates of known persons, a classic form of psychic phenomenon. A duplicate John Keel has appeared on several occasions. James Moseley, publisher of the now-defunct Saucer News, has also had a phantom twin. But the strangest doppelganger experience happened to a British filmmaker who spent several years traveling the world to film UFO witnesses for a movie documentary, which as far as I know was never completed or released. In Brazil he and his camera team tracked down a backwoods farmer who had allegedly seen a UFO land and claimed to have talked with the pilot. The farmer welcomed them nervously and agreed to show them the site where the saucer had set down. Before leading them to the nearby field, he said goodbye to each member of his family in an elaborate and moving manner. When they finally reached the field, he looked enormously relieved to see there was no spaceship waiting there. Then he explained that the filmmaker’s appearance had really shaken him up, because the captain of the flying saucer had looked exactly like the Britisher right down to his neatly trimmed goatee. The farmer thought they had come to take him away in a saucer!
Our Men in Black seem mainly interested in retrieving evidence that points to terrestrial origin of the UFOs! Their secondary interests are to enhance the extraterrestrial belief and to create suspicion—even acute paranoia—among the UFO believers.
One of the first UFO investigators to be harassed by the MIB, Albert Bender of Connecticut, abandoned the extraterrestrial hypothesis when he calculated that the UFOs seemed to be originating from some point near the North and South poles. Other investigators who have discarded the extraterrestrial hypothesis and studied the apparent earthly links with the phenomenon have experienced more harassment, mail and phone problems, etc., than their colleagues who believe in outer-space vehicles. If you collect a piece of unidentifiable metal from a UFO witness, you will have no problems. But if a witness hands you a piece of aluminum, magnesium, or silicon—all common earthly substances—you are very apt to receive an unwelcome visit from the mysterious “enforcers” in black suits.
By mid-1967 I began to freely discuss and write about energy fields and terrestrial origin. During a trip to Washington, D.C., I was invited to record an hour-long tape for “Voice of America.” At that time the late Al Johnson was doing a series of UFO programs, which were broadcast throughout the world over VOA. Johnson interviewed me on mike for an hour, and I discussed the whole problem of terrestrial origin. A few days later he phoned me full of apologies. Our tape had inadvertently been placed in “the wrong pile” and had been erased completely before it could be aired. It was just one of those things.
Or was it?
That same year a team from a German television station was touring America interviewing UFO witnesses and investigators. They were seasoned professional technicians. They came to my New York apartment, set up all their expensive equipment, and filmed me for half an hour. A few days later I received a call from their Washington office. Their film of me was unusable. Parts were overexposed, and the magnetic sound track was spoiled by inexplicable static. It was just another one of those things.
Variations of these “coincidences” happened to me continually. Radio and TV transmitters would suddenly go dead during UFO discussions. Vital tapes were mysteriously erased. Precious photographs were lost in the mails. Somebody physically cut my telephone line with wire cutters twice. A duplicate John Keel popped up in areas where I had conducted investigations and was seen by reliable witnesses who knew me. Meanwhile, a woman claiming to be my secretary systematically visited other witnesses in West Virginia and Ohio, displaying a very sophisticated knowledge of UFOs. No wonder so many UFO investigators develop a nervous twitch and look over their shoulder constantly!
These games are by no means restricted to the U.S. In 1974 France Inter, the Paris radio station, aired a series of 39 programs about UFOs, beginning with a pro-UFO talk by M. Robert Galley, France’s minister of defense. French broadcasters had spent much of 1973 locating and recording statements by leading authorities in France, England, and the United States. The list was an impressive one and included such luminaries as Dr. David Saunders, the psychologist at Colorado University who has been programming thousands of UFO sightings for computerization; Dr. Jacques Vallee, author of three UFO books; Pierre Kohler, a famous astronomer; and even Cardinal Danielou, a prominent churchman.
The broadcasts were divided into two parts. The first part consisted of statements by UFO witnesses and local French enthusiasts and officials. The more advanced students of the phenomenon were scheduled for the second part. This second section was never aired because someone broke into the radio station and stole the tapes.
M. Jean-Claude Bourret sent the following explanation to Gordon Creighton, the distinguished British linguist and UFO authority: “Unfortunately, on Monday, March 18, 1974, a mysterious burglar carried off all the tapes which were still waiting to be broadcast. That this was an act of deliberate malevolence is beyond question. In the metal press where these taped recordings had been stacked, there were two piles side by side! Those interviews that had already gone out, and those that were still to be broadcast. Only this second pile was taken.”
What was the gist of the missing tapes? Like most of the professional scientists and journalists who have undertaken a serious study of UFOs, Dr. Vallee and his colleagues have found the popular extraterrestrial hypothesis untenable. For some time now they have been weighing the awesome alternative—that UFOs are similar to psychic manifestations and are produced by complex distortions of space, time, and even of reality itself.
Both the U.S. Air Force and the FBI have made efforts to track down these Men in Black without success
. It should be an easy task for experienced lawmen. Many witnesses have managed to get the license numbers of the phantom vehicles, but when a check is run, the numbers are always found to be unissued. Likewise, efforts to trace the epidemic of mysterious phone calls have failed: Those gentlemen in the wraparound sunglasses are just as elusive as the tall, hairy bipeds with red eyes. And they are probably just as unreal.
18
Any force that can scar your eyeballs, paralyze your limbs, erase your memory, burn your skin, and turn you into a coughing, blubbering wreck can also maim and kill you. And an unknown number of persons have died after their encounters with monsters, spacemen, and UFOs—unknown because there is no way to collect and document all such reports. Too few UFO investigators remain in touch with witnesses over a long period of time. The death rate of contactees and UFO hobbyists also seems unduly high and filled with spectacular coincidences. Several of the biggest names in the field have died on the twenty-fourth of the month, and the twenty-fourth happens to he the busiest day for UFOs. (For example, Puerto Rico had a UFO wave in the fall of 1973 with the greatest number of sightings occurring on November 24.)
In psychic phenomena, many investigators as well as students of black magic and witchcraft have met sudden, untimely ends, often in horrible ways. The machinations of the Men in Black also occur in these other fields of interest.
Both the reflective factor and synchronicity are at work, too, because the human mind when properly oriented—or disoriented—attracts the static from the superspectrum. When the famous radio writer Arch Obler (remember “Lights Out”?) was working on a novel about witchcraft a few years ago, he was plagued for the first time in his life by poltergeists and a variety of frightening coincidences. Locked doors in his home opened by themselves, the knobs turned by invisible hands. A deadly rattlesnake suddenly appeared in his path one day as he got out of his car. He lived through it all, but it gave him many second thoughts about the world of the supernatural, which so many people regard as purely mythical.
Another writer, named Gustv Davidson, produced a massive Dictionary of Angels in the 1960s. While he was compiling this seemingly harmless encyclopedia of angelology, he was “literally bedeviled by angels.”
“I moved, indeed, in a twilight zone of tall presences,” he wrote. “I remember one occasion—it was winter and getting dark—returning home from a neighboring farm. I had cut across an unfamiliar field. Suddenly a nightmarish shape loomed up in front of me, barring my progress. After a paralyzing moment I managed to fight my way past the phantom. The next morning I could not be sure whether I had encountered a ghost, an angel, a demon, or God. There were other such moments and other such encounters…”
While writers and investigators are often given a bad time, witnesses of the paranormal frequently suffer unspeakable horrors after their initial experience. Apparently once these forces zero in on a hapless innocent, they hang on tenaciously. For years the UFO enthusiasts, most of whom were totally unfamiliar with the correlative psychic and occult lore, actively suppressed the more bizarre reports or reduced them to paranoid rumors.
Only rarely have reports of UFO injuries and deaths received any notice. Back in April 1950, a twelve-year-old boy named David Lightfoot was playing outside Amarillo, Texas, when he and a friend saw a flying object about the size of an automobile tire. It dropped out of the sky and hovered a few feet above the ground. David walked over to it and boldly touched it.
“It was slick like a snake and hot,” he reported.
The bluish-gray thing responded by releasing some kind of gas or spray, which turned his arms and face bright red, even raising welts. Then it zipped off into the sky. Doctors and other adults took the boy’s story seriously and it was reported by United Press on April 9, 1950.
Charles Cozzens, 13, of Hamilton, Ontario, received a curved burn on his hand when he touched an “antenna” on an eight-foot-long object hovering behind a police station in March 1966. And nineteen-year-old Tiago Machado of Brazil made headlines when he was badly burned by a UFO in front of scores of witnesses in 1969.
Hundreds of people in the Pirassununga, Brazil, area saw a strange circular machine swoop low over the town and settle on tripod legs in a nearby valley on February 7, 1969. Young Machado was closest to it, and he headed for it cautiously.
“It seemed made of a material similar to aluminum, but it was luminous,” he explained to doctors afterwards. “The saucer’s rim was spinning around the center. It never stopped whirling. The center section was stationary and appeared to be made of a transparent substance. I could see what seemed to be shadowy figures in the cabin, gathered around what looked like an instrument panel.”
He crept to within 30 feet of the object while scores of people gathered on the more distant hills to watch. Suddenly a bright beam of light shot from the disk, striking him in the legs. He fell over, partially stunned and paralyzed. The object leaped into the air and disappeared into the sky with amazing speed.
Machado was rushed to the hospital where Dr. Henrique Reis noted, “There were no visible wounds or marks. At first I thought it could be snakebites, but it was not.”
The youth’s legs turned bright red and became painfully swollen.
Machado got off lightly. Beams of light from these objects have killed others.
At 4 p.m. on August 13, 1967, Inacio de Souza, 41, and his wife, Luiza de Souza, watched a “strange aircraft resembling an inverted wash basin” hovering above their farm at Pilar de Goias, Brazil. Three entities were standing near the object. At first, Inacio thought they were stark naked, but as the trio moved towards him, it appeared they were wearing skin-tight yellow coveralls. Sr. Souza was carrying a .44-caliber rifle at the time, and the appearance of these individuals was so alarming that he raised the weapon, took aim, and fired at one of them. That was a big mistake.
A “beam of green light” instantly shot out of the hovering object, striking him about the head and shoulders and knocking him unconscious. As his wife ran to his aid, she saw the three entities enter the object and it took off vertically at high speed, making a noise like the “humming of bees.”
“On the first and second days, Inacio complained of numbness and tingling of the body, and of headaches,” investigator Nigel Rimes, one of Brazil’s most respected ufologists, wrote in Flying Saucer Review.
On the third day the same symptoms were present, plus continuous tremors of the hands and head... His doctor discovered burns on the trunk and head, such as might have been caused by some poisonous plant, and indeed tried to establish whether or nor the patient had eaten any poisonous plants.
The burn marks were in the form of a perfect circle 15 centimeters in diameter… The doctor thought Inacio had suffered an hallucination, and was suffering from some disease, for he had no time for flying saucer stories, did not believe Inacio’s story, and advised all concerned to “keep silent on the matter.”
After four days treatment, Sr. Souza was released from the hospital. The diagnosis was leukemia (cancer of the blood). He quickly wasted away to skin and bone and was covered with yellowish-white blotches. He died on October 11, 1967, after undergoing considerable pain.
In reviewing this incredible sequence of events, FSR’s editor, Charles Bowen, remarked:
We do know that excessive exposure to radiation can cause leukemia. And if the beam of green light focused on lnacio de Souza was the cause of the onset of the killer disease, then it must have been very intense radiation, for I have never heard of a victim being carried away so quickly after exhibiting the first symptoms of the disease.
Finally, if this account is to be believed—and I do not think it should be dismissed our of hand—then the warning inherent in the story is that if anyone is unfortunate enough to come within striking range of one of these objects and its attendant entities, then they should not take any offensive action.
There are various clues in the UFO lore suggesting that the objects and the entities are surrounded by po
werful gamma rays. These same rays could account for the so-called electromagnetic effect, for they dissipate electrical energy. If one hovered over a power line, the gamma rays would drain off the current, just as a bit of radium drains the charge from the gold leaves in an electroscope. A power failure would naturally result.
Gamma rays also do the terrible damage in atomic blasts. And the most horrifying case of them all, also from Brazil, was probably caused by a concentrated blast of gamma rays. The victim disintegrated!
It happened in 1946 but the case was recently reinvestigated by Professor Felipe Machado Carrion of the Colegio Julio de Castilhos in the Brazilian State of Rio Grande do Sul, and by a dental surgeon, Dr. Irineu Jose da Silveira. Their full report appeared in Flying Saucer Review, March-April 1973.
On Tuesday, March 5, 1946, flying saucers were not yet a subject of notice, although unusual aerial lights were being observed in the skies over the little village of Aracariguama, Brazil, a place so poor it had no electricity or telephones at the time. Joäo Prestes Filho, 40, had spent the day fishing with a friend. He returned home about 7 p.m., and, since it was a warm, clear night, he went to open a window. As he raised the window, a beam of light flashed outside the house and struck him. He threw up his hands to protect his eyes from the sudden glare and fell stunned to the floor but didn’t lose consciousness. As soon as he could pull himself together, he fled the house and ran through the town seeking help, finally running into the home of his sister, Maria. She called her neighbors, and they gathered while Prestes repeated his story over and over. He did not display any burns, but his eyes were filled with terror, neighbor Aracy Gomide recalled 25 years later.
THE EIGHTH TOWER: On Ultraterrestrials and the Superspectrum Page 16
