(3) These superimposed views are not just proposed to make us believe that these mysteries will prove that the history books are wrong, but to impress upon us the idea that they will have a direct impact on us today, pointing to some earth-shattering (perhaps literally) change in the near future. Examples include the belief that the Great Pyramid will somehow trigger the dawn of the new Age of Aquarius in the year 2000 and the imminent return of the builders of Cydonia.
(4) There is a degree of ‘official’ involvement behind the scenes. We have seen that, for whatever reasons, it appears that a search for something at Giza is under way. It is also clear that Hoagland’s research projects have received encouragement and assistance from individuals and organisations closely connected with the intelligence community, from the original help of Paul Shay in setting up the initial Mars Mission, to the support of Congressman Roe. (Obviously, the involvement of some of the individuals with intelligence agents may well have a ‘non-conspiratorial’ explanation. For example, Mark Carlotto’s expertise in analysing satellite data for military and intelligence purposes is something that could naturally lead to his participation in the Cydonia investigation, but the sheer number of the people who are connected with intelligence personnel and organisations and also support and encourage Hoagland’s work is, in our view, somewhat suspicious.)
We have noted that Hoagland’s work appears to fall into two distinct phases: the first, backed by SRI in 1983 — 4, was concerned with promoting the idea of the existence of a very ancient civilisation on Mars. But, since 1989, the second phase has been about the ‘Message’, the connection with humanity’s own ancient history and our present and future.
Was Phase One, as social scientist Tom Rautenberg thought at first, in fact a sociological experiment to determine public reaction to the concept of life on Mars? And then did someone realise that the Mars material could be used more effectively to put across another message, part of a separate but interlinking agenda?
Another motive may have lain behind the 1983 — 4 SRI-backed project. The Iron Curtain was still in place and the attendant suspicions of Soviet plotting was very strong: the Eastern Bloc countries were perceived to be keeping many secrets very close to their chests. Perhaps Hoagland/SRI’s Phase One was an attempt to draw out of the Soviets their knowledge or suspicions about Mars. It is certainly a curious coincidence that, within a month of the Boulder conference at which Hoagland announced his initial findings, the Russian English-language propaganda newspaper, Soviet Weekly, carried an article by Vladimir Avinsky on his research into what he termed ‘the Martian Sphinx’ and ‘pyramids’.65
Hoagland and his team then tried to establish a line of communication with the Soviet Academy of Sciences to exchange data on the subject. Significantly, their intermediary in this was Jim Hickman of the Soviet Exchange Program of the Esalen Institute in California (of which more later).66
Not only do marked parallels lie between the way that the stories of Egypt and of Mars are being presented, but the stories themselves are also being deliberately fused to make one big, dramatic picture. These days there are few non-academic interested parties who fail to associate the features of Cydonia with Egypt. Those with their own agendas have been very successful: we have seen the attempts by Cydonia researchers such as Hoagland to link the Message with ancient Egypt (and other cultures, such as megalithic Britain). On the other hand, Hancock and Bauval have made the journey the other way round, beginning with the mysteries of Egypt, and then linking them back to Mars. This is one story, not two, as is demonstrated by the overlap of people and groups involved.
For example, it is reported that, in 1996, on their return to the United States from the Giza project, members of the Joseph Schor Foundation consulted both Richard Hoagland and James Hurtak, the two main proponents of the pyramids of Mars and of a Mars — Giza connection.67 And Boris Said, the film-maker who has been chronicling events at Giza since 1990, recently enrolled James Hurtak as part of his team. Hurtak had talked about the Mars — Egypt connection as being part of a ‘great cosmic blueprint’ as far back as 1975.
There are other curious crossovers of personnel between the pyramids of Mars and the Mars-Giza camps. Dr Farouk El Baz was appointed head of the team that continued Rudolf Gantenbrink’s work to explore the ‘Sirius shaft’ in the Great Pyramid. El Baz’s past association with NASA may be coincidental, but SRI — as we have seen — certainly does not lack contacts within defence and intelligence agencies. (Since leaving NASA, El Baz founded and is now director of the Center for Remote Sensing at Boston University. One of the Starship Enterprise’s shuttle craft in Star Trek: The Next Generation is named after him - true fame.)
By far the most prominent of all crossover individuals is Lambert Dolphin Jr, the SRI teamleader at Giza between 1973 and 1982, who was also the co-founder with Hoagland of the Independent Mars Mission in 1983, a project funded and resourced by SRI.
This is a strangely thought-provoking scenario, but it becomes even stranger, particularly when considered in the context of the knowledge we have gathered so far and the conclusions we can extrapolate from it.
(1) Intelligence agencies in both the United States and Britain have shown interest in the idea of extraterrestrial contact at the dawn of civilisation; for example, in their reaction to Robert Temple’s research.
(2) Clandestine explorations, backed by the US government, are being carried out in Egypt. Clearly, they believe there is something worth looking for, which will presumably be of some practical use to them, either by their ownership of it or by preventing anyone else from having it.
(3) Certain writers and researchers are promoting ‘messianic’ messages based very much on their own interpretation of legitimate questions about the origins of Egyptian civilisation and the anomalous features on Mars. These two strands have been gradually, but conceitedly, drawn together. The ‘consensus’ story emerging from these influential authors — whose readership worldwide totals many millions — is that of extraterrestrial influence on the evolving human civilisation. (Interestingly, in the 1998 edition of The Sirius Mystery, Robert Temple discusses the Face on Mars in positive terms, writing: ‘I would not be surprised at a Martian connection with the Sirius Mystery.’68)
(4) There appears to be a great deal of behind-the-scenes encouragement of the work of Hoagland’s research team, which makes the most extreme claims. Examples include the involvement of intelligence-connected individuals and groups, including SRI, right from the beginning, and NASA’s ‘courting’ of Hoagland and his team in the late 1980s and early 1990s.
A glaring paradox is found in the above points. On the one hand, the involvement of official bodies may simply mean that they have come to the same conclusions as Hancock, Bauval, Hoagland and Temple - and are, like them, excited by the idea of imminent revelations about Egypt and Mars. Perhaps they even have prior knowledge... Do the ‘powers that be’ already know about the influence on humanity of an extraterrestrial race — either from Mars or elsewhere? Are they secretly trying to recover some knowledge of that race?
Superficially, this may seem likely. On the other hand, as we have seen, the ‘messianic’ messages claimed for both the Egyptian and Martian scenarios do not bear scrutiny. They use faulty reasoning, misread source material or are manifestly massaged to accord with some personal — or group - hidden agenda. So why should official bodies such as SRI and NASA, who have reputations - and funding — to lose, take this all so seriously?
We can suggest two main hypotheses that may account for the mounting official interest in such apparently off-the-wall scenarios: one is a conspiracy about something real, and the other is a conspiracy to make us believe something that is unreal.
Hypothesis One: The messages for mankind extrapolated from both terrestrial and Martian mysteries are basically false. At the very least they are wishful thinking or delusions or, more disturbingly, the data have been forced to fit into a preconceived set of beliefs. The proponents of these
ideas want to use the mysteries to further their own agendas, perhaps in order to promote their religious, quasi-religious - or Masonic - ideologies. They could even form an exercise in the manipulation of mass psychology - as suspected by Tom Rautenberg when he first heard of SRI’s involvement with the Cydonia enigma - but on a much grander and more worrying scale.
This hypothesis would account for much of the data, though not some of the official activities. We are convinced, for example, of clandestine activity at Giza, which is obviously expected to produce some kind of tangible results. Another example involves the curious circumstances surrounding NASA’s photographing of the Crater Pyramid. In our opinion, this 600-foot spire perched on the edge of a crater is the most compelling of the anomalous Martian features, and very difficult to explain in terms of natural processes. What is curious is that, back in 1976, Viking took four pictures of that area in rapid succession, the only time during the entire mission that this happened.69 As Mark Carlotto has pointed out, this must have been preprogrammed into the orbiter, as the time delay on radio instructions would not permit mission control to react so quickly. It seems too much of a coincidence that the only instance of such rapid-fire photography should occur at that one particular spot - but how did NASA know in advance that there was something interesting to photograph in that area?
Hypothesis Two: Those promoting the message for mankind - both publicly and behind the scenes — somehow know it to be true, yet realise it is important to proceed with caution where the public is concerned. Information is gradually being fed to the masses to ‘acclimatise’ us all to such ideas. Perhaps the idea behind the ‘mass psychology’ experiment is to gauge public reactions to some forthcoming genuine announcement(s) about extraterrestrial influences on our past — and even on our present and future.
In this scenario, false evidence is being proposed to support a genuine phenomenon. This is a bold and apparently bizarre proposition, but the whole history of intelligence operations is one of absurdity and contradiction, albeit with a steely underpinning of single-minded agendas. This hypothesis deserves to be taken seriously, if only to see where it leads. Its advantage is that it explains why, on the one hand, official bodies appear to be searching seriously for something, while on the other the reasons for doing so simply do not sustain closer examination.
Our two hypotheses will be tested as this investigation continues: as we have seen, in the first, the so-called messages for mankind are simply fabricated or delusory. But is there any other information that might support the second hypothesis?
Could the ‘powers that be’ know that extraterrestrial influence on human civilisation and the connection with Mars are genuine, even if they have to create false evidence to persuade the public that this is so? If they really have such inside information, how did they acquire it? Evidence that convinced hard-headed industrialists, scientists and intelligence operatives about the reality of alien intervention in human affairs must have been so persuasive as to be virtually incontestable, but at the same time impossible to entrust to the public domain. But what kind of evidence could possibly be so watertight?
A clue may lie in the fact that a favoured target of the Pentagon’s remote-viewing experiments was Mars. The original SRI experiments, between 1973 and 1976, included sessions by Ingo Swann and physical researcher Harold Sherman in which they remote viewed the surface of Mars (and indeed, other planets). 70 The results of these experiments have never been made public,71 although it is known that the Face on Mars was detected by RVers some years before the Viking mission.
In a conversation with Uri Geller in January 1998 about his time at SRI, he told us that the Face on Mars had, in fact, been discovered by remote viewing in the early 1970s, long before the Viking mission. For various reasons he could not reveal the identity of the remote viewer in question, but in October 1998 we asked James Hurtak’s Academy For Future Sciences about his supposed ‘prediction’ about a facelike feature on Mars that - according to Hancock and Bauval — he had made in 1975. The reply was: ‘Dr Hurtak shared his insights of “remote viewing” with Mr Harold Sherman’.72 This was rather puzzling, as we had not actually mentioned remote viewing; in our view, this was tantamount to an admission that the Face had been discovered by remote viewing. The AFFS’s reply went on: ‘However, the principle [sic] artifact that Dr Hurtak saw was the pyramidal formations [sic] which has always been his uniqueness and not the Face itself.’ So although Hurtak himself may not have remote viewed the Face, the implication is that Harold Sherman did. This is interesting, because we do know that Sherman remote viewed Mars for SRI.
Sherman began as a sports writer before becoming interested in the paranormal and UFOs in the 1940s. He coined the phrase ‘Little Green Men’ to describe aliens. Sherman was by 1975 a veteran psychical researcher, in his seventies, who had been brought in by SRI specifically to help set up the first remote-viewing project.73
The issue of remote viewing may seem like something from The X-Files, a ripping yarn about invisible spies and mind control, not based on hard fact. No matter how it may challenge our mundane certainties about the ways things are, though, remote viewing works, which is why so much time and taxpayers’ money was invested in it by several governments, and particularly the US government. When the cream of the crop of US RVers repeatedly - and consistently - described the surface of Mars, individuals within the government and associated agencies took note.
The US Army’s highly talented remote viewer Joe McMoneagle ‘visited’ Mars several times, always sketching the scenes that met his disembodied gaze. There, unmistakably, were pyramids and, he claimed, tunnels under the Cydonia complex in which the remnants of an ancient civilisation continued to exist.
In his 1996 book Psychic Warrior, David Morehouse tells of his own remote-viewing missions to Mars eight years before. He had been given Mars as a blind target, without knowing that this location had been set for him. He saw nothing significant, just a barren reddish landscape that had been deserted for thousands of years. After this ‘mission’, Morehouse was shown a folder enclosing details of the target location: pictures of Mars, taken from orbit and the ground. He writes of the other material in the folder:
There was a chemical analysis of the atmosphere, and some high-altitude photographs of the surface with captions indicating which spots had led several scientists to believe Mars was once inhabited.74
Morehouse, who also sketched a dream in which ‘the sky tears and another dimension is revealed’, had a tendency to remote view particularly significant scenes, even if he only realised it in retrospect. In Psychic Warrior he describes being set a blind target and homing in on a boxlike object hidden in a cavern that appeared to be protected by an aura of extreme danger. He told his ‘monitor’ that it was ‘something very powerful and sacred’ and said it would ‘vaporise’ anyone who got too close, adding: ’I felt very uncomfortable and vulnerable in that cavern’.75 An hour or so after this ‘mission’, Morehouse was shown an artist’s impression of the target — the fabled Old Testament Ark of the Covenant, whose mysterious power could fell whole armies. It seems that he had successfully used one paranormal ability to get the target right — perhaps a form of telepathic contact with the mind of the experimenter - but had he really tuned in to the Ark itself?
No one knows for certain how remote viewing works, only what it can produce. Seated in a mundane office with a monitor asking questions, the RVer’s invisible consciousness takes flight and visits elsewhere, sometimes even elsewhen, for time is no barrier to the remote viewer who can ‘scroll’ up or down through past, present and future by the force of will alone. Sometimes, of course, they fail to describe the targets, and come up with either a ‘displacement’ description, an accurate description of a place that was not the target, or something that might just be fantasy. Sometimes the remote viewers can describe frankly outlandish scenarios.
Despite the many successes of remote viewing, the problem has always been the accurate
interpretation of what is seen. Even everyday perception involves the brain making decisions about the meaning of the shapes of objects and people seen. In this process, context is everything, and the more obvious and detailed the context, the more accurate the brain’s interpretation of the shapes seen. The same applies to remote viewing, particularly when the target was Mars prior to 1976 - before the first good photographs of its surface reached us on Earth. The mind of the remote viewer would automatically try to make sense of unfamiliar landmarks, perhaps reacting as if to an inkblot test and turning a rocky outcrop into a recognisable Face.
We ourselves know that remote viewing can, and often does, work, but it is by no means 100 per cent accurate. One cautionary tale involves Courtney Brown, professor of political science at Emory University in Atlanta. Trained in remote viewing in 1992 by a former member of the Pentagon RV unit (he refuses to name him, but it was, in fact, Pentagon remote-viewing star, Major Ed Dames), he hit upon the idea of using remote viewing as a scientific research tool, specifically to investigate the question of extraterrestrial visitors on Earth.
Brown made several ‘research trips’, via remote viewing, to Mars in 1993 and 1994. The first was part of his training, when it was a blind target (clearly a favourite destination for RV trainers). He described a pyramid, and nearby a volcano erupting, devastating the area and causing the inhabitants to flee for their lives. Afterwards, his trainer showed him the target picture: it was Cydonia.76
Brown maintains, thanks to the evidence of his remote-viewing ‘eyes’, that there are not only survivors of the Martian race living underground on Cydonia, but also on Earth - beneath the mountains of New Mexico and in villages in Latin America. According to Brown, Martian civilisation at the time of its great catastrophe had achieved approximately the level of development of ancient Egypt, although we do not know whether that is the level understood by mainstream academics or that of the technologically advanced Egyptians of the New Orthodoxy. All but wiped out, the Martians were rescued by the arrival of the — by now familiar — Grey aliens, who took the survivors forward in time to our present and altered them genetically so they can live on Earth.
The Stargate Conspiracy Page 17
