The Stargate Conspiracy

by Lynn Picknett

  Things went badly wrong for Courtney Brown, though. He also claimed, based on the remote viewing evidence of his team, that a spaceship was following in the tail of the comet Hale-Bopp, a claim that he promoted widely, especially on the Art Bell show. Subsequently, the Heaven’s Gate cult committed mass suicide specifically so that their souls would be ‘beamed up’ to the Hale-Bopp spaceship. Someone else who believed that there was something suspicious about Hale-Bopp, to the point of accusing the US government of a cover-up, was none other than Richard Hoagland, who promoted the theory with his usual zeal.77

  However, all this may well assume quite another interpretation when the possibility of remote influencing is taken into account...

  ‘The day we opened the door’

  One may smile at the apparently fantastical beliefs of a remote-viewing professor of political science, and dismiss the wilder claims for a Mars — Egypt connection, but the fact remains that there are reasons to take seriously the idea of life on Mars, even if it died out millions of years ago. The breakthrough appeared to come when NASA announced, on 7 August 1996, that evidence of micro-organisms on Mars — life, if a very primitive sort — had been found in a meteorite in Antarctica that had originated on Mars. Designated as ALH84001 (ALH = Allen Hills, where it was found; 84 was the year; 001 means it was the first collected in that year), its age is estimated at 4.5 billion years, and the microfossils in it at 3.6 billion years. It is believed to have been blown into orbit by an impact on Mars about 15 million years ago, and to have drifted around in space until it landed on Earth 13,000 years ago. The microfossils are of minute bacterialike organisms, the largest being 200 nanometers (billionths of a metre) in length. The meteorite is just under 2 kg in weight, and ‘about the size of a small potato’.

  Although thousands of meteorites rain down on the Earth’s surface every day, clearly this one was perceived to be different — but why? And what was the reason for the veritable circus of hype that erupted so abruptly over it? The sheer scale of the publicity surrounding the announcement and the way in which the whole business was stage-managed seemed odd at the time, but in retrospect it seems even more unusual.

  A major press conference at NASA’s Johnson Space Center in Houston was attended by the international media, ensuring that the news made headlines all around the world. The conference was hosted by NASA administrator Daniel Goldin, who hailed the event as ‘a day that may well go down in history for American science, for the American people, and indeed humanity’ - obviously he is not one to think small. He also called it, somewhat portentously, ‘the day we opened the door’. Later that day, President Clinton made a public statement hailing the event as historic and pledging that NASA would ‘search for answers and for knowledge that is as old as humanity itself but essential to our people’s future’: strange words, which appear to convey a subtext to those with inside knowledge, but only succeeding in mystifying the rest of us. What could there possibly be about micro-organisms in a piece of rock from Mars that is ‘essential to our people’s future’?

  For a normally conservative organisation with a scientific reputation to maintain, NASA’s orchestrated media splash was unprecedented. This is particularly odd, because the evidence presented at that conference was by no means conclusive enough to justify such a major event. Many scientists, particularly in Europe, have since expressed reservations about NASA’s interpretation of the facts. The question of whether the ‘fossils’ really are biological in origin is still being hotly debated in the scientific community. They may well be, as claimed, evidence of primitive life on Mars, but it was NASA’s certainty about it, not to mention the almost evangelical fervour and the sheer hype with which they promoted it, that is so surprising as to suggest another agenda.

  Bewilderment only increases when it is realised that such claims had been made before, though never with as much publicity as ALH84001. It is intriguing that this evidence had been brought to the attention of NASA Administrator Daniel Goldin just weeks before the announcement — by two of the original ‘discoverers’ of the Face on Mars, John Brandenburg and Vincent DiPietro.78 Brandenburg had been researching the history of Mars in order to establish whether it had ever had conditions suitable for sustaining life, when he came across scientific papers written in 1989 by a British team reporting the discovery of organic carbon in a meteorite known to have originated on Mars.

  Even further back, Dr Bartholomew Nagy of the University of Arizona had reported the discovery of bacterial microfossils in meteorites in the mid-1960s, although he did not discuss their origins. Nagy’s findings — particularly the question of the biological nature of the material — were published in the 1960s and early 1970s and had been disputed by other scientists at the time. Nagy had found what he believed to be microfossils in a specific type of meteorite known as carbonaceous chrondites. Later, Brandenburg tried to establish where these meteorites came from. He could do this relatively easily, as individual ‘signatures’ are found in the composition of different types of rocks, based on the proportions of certain isotopes, that associate them with Earth, Mars or elsewhere. (This is how we know that ALH84001 is Martian, for example.) Brandenburg found that the carbonaceous chrondites studied by Nagy had the characteristic signature of Mars. (Since this technique is well established, it is a mystery why nobody had, apparently, used it before. Perhaps they had.) Nagy died in December 1995, just a few months before NASA’s announcement vindicated his earlier work, notching the subject up into that almost hysterical publicity circus. It may well have shocked and saddened him.

  Brandenburg published a paper on his research in May 1996, and lectured on his discoveries in Germany in July. A month before his paper was published he had personally approached Daniel Goldin with the results. Four months later came the big announcement.

  ALH84001 had been discovered in Antarctica in 1984, but was only recognised as Martian in 1993. It had been analysed in secret at the Johnson Space Center in Houston - specifically to look for indications of biological constituents, which begs a question or two about the protocol of the scientific method. Brandenburg (who was present at the Houston press conference) speculates that pressure had been put on the NASA team to release their announcement before his work stole their thunder, although there was an ethical problem in this rivalry because his May 1996 paper had been peer-reviewed for publication by the very scientists at the Johnson Space Center who were secretly studying ALH84001! Others have speculated that Brandenburg’s work may simply have inspired NASA, who needed a good excuse for their suddenly renewed interest in Mars.

  In a further twist to this story, shortly after the press conference a Washington call girl confessed to the press that a client, Dick Morris - one of President Clinton’s advisors - had told her some time before the announcement that evidence of life on Mars had been discovered but was classified as a ‘military secret’.79

  It has also been pointed out that Daniel Goldin, who hosted the press conference so exuberantly, is known to be a political appointee with a former career in top-secret defence-related industrial work. He had been appointed by President Bush - himself a former head of the CIA — and has overseen a marked increase in the amount of defence work conducted by NASA, as well as an influx of ex-Defense Department personnel into key posts within the space agency.80

  The whole subject of the Martian microfossils and the press conference that announced them has provoked a flurry of conspiracy theories, which divide into two camps: one centred on the suspicion that this is part of a ‘softening up’ process that will eventually lead to the revelation of intelligent life on Mars, while the other argues that the story was a stunt to create a new climate of excitement about Mars, leading to more government funds being allocated to NASA in order to explore the planet further. These theories are not mutually exclusive, although one school maintains darkly that NASA wants to explore Mars for other, clandestine reasons of its own. Such theories are stimulated by the obsessive secrecy that surrounded
the work of the NASA team at Houston, and the over-the-top manner in which the discovery was announced, sidestepping the usual stages of peer-reviewed scientific papers, going instead straight to a live worldwide press conference.

  There has certainly been a marked scramble to explore Mars recently: funding for Mars Global Surveyor — currently sending back images - was rushed through after the loss of Mars Observer in August 1993. It was launched in 1996. Since the August 1996 announcement, a series of new Mars probes are being planned to continue the search for life on the Red Planet, including the bringing back of samples from the surface, and plans for a manned mission are now being seriously considered for the first time in decades. Russia and Japan are also working on their own Mars missions.

  With or without persuasive evidence from those vexed microfossils, excitement about Mars is building, especially in US governmental circles. Officials within the Clinton administration and in NASA seem to have a strong belief in life on Mars, perhaps even in intelligent life, and we have seen the eagerness of certain influential individuals and organisations — such as the Pentagon’s remote viewers, SRI and the Hoagland camp - to promote a widespread sense of belief and expectancy about Mars. Are ‘they’ looking for a stargate, either a physical or hyperdimensional portal through which they could more easily reach Mars, and perhaps even make contact with Martians? More importantly, do ‘they’ really believe that such a thing exists?

  Or is this multi-pronged attack on public awareness simply an insidious exercise in mass manipulation, perhaps testing how we would react to the idea that there were, and possibly still are, Martians? This could be a dummy-run for a real announcement in the near future, likely to be timed to coincide with the Millennium and the first few years of the twenty-first century, when people in the West have come to expect momentous public revelations.

  The plot thickens considerably, however, with the discovery that some prime movers in the West are utterly convinced that the stargate has already been opened - and that contact with extraterrestrials is already well established.

  4

  Contact?

  Few of the enthusiastic followers of the Face on Mars story realise that the ideas of both Richard Hoagland and James Hurtak — the main advocates of the Mars/Giza connection - are largely shaped by a highly influential cultish group who claim direct, telepathic communication with extraterrestrial intelligences. These alleged non-human entities have, we were to discover, adopted many different aliases over the course of several decades, but today are most often known as the Council of Nine, or simply ‘the Nine’. This may seem odd, perhaps even bizarre, but — one might think - hardly relevant. Who cares what peculiar ideas these people may hold privately?

  As we progressed in our investigation, however, we were astonished, not to say disturbed, by the influence exerted by the people who believe in the Nine — and, ultimately, the Nine themselves. We gradually uncovered evidence of the extraordinary hold that these alleged non-human intelligences have over top industrialists, cutting-edge scientists, popular entertainers, radical parapsychologists and key figures in military and intelligence circles. We were to find that the Nine’s influence even extends to the threshold of the White House itself.

  Behind the scenes

  Richard Hoagland’s influential Enterprise Mission had two directors of operations, for the United States and Europe respectively, David P. Myers and David S. Percy. Both had significant roles in the promotion of the Message of Cydonia. American writer and former US Navy officer Myers joined the team in 1989, and London-based film producer Percy went on board shortly afterwards. Both left the Mission together in 1992.

  It was Myers who ‘discovered’ many of the key measurements and angular relationships of the Cydonia monuments on which Hoagland bases his decoding of the Message. And it was Percy who surveyed the stone circle of Avebury in order to establish its relationship with Cydonia, as well as with other English sites such as Stonehenge and Glastonbury Tor. However, the source of Myers’s ‘unique insights’ (as Hoagland calls them in his acknowledgement in The Monuments of Mars) is neither mathematical skill nor deductive reasoning: he and Percy are part of a network of people who believe they are in direct contact with a group of advanced godlike extraterrestrials.

  Myers and Percy are co-authors of a highly idiosyncratic, 600-page tome with the enigmatic title of Two-Thirds (1993). It relates, in novel form, the history of the galaxy according to these beings. It tells how colonists from a distant planet — Altea — arrived in our solar system some 1.6 million years ago. They first colonised Mars (which they made habitable with their advanced technology) and built the Cydonia complex. Many generations later they came to Earth, where they genetically modified the indigenous beings, eventually creating hybrids who became the human race. Acting under instructions from their own higher intelligences, the Alteans built Avebury as an analogue of the Cydonia complex, as well as the pyramids and the Sphinx of Giza. Although told in the form of fiction, Myers and Percy claim on the cover of their book: ‘Two-Thirds is the key to the understanding of our history and is, in fact, non-fiction.’

  The book includes an extensive section of photographs and graphics illustrating the Message of Cydonia and its ‘terrestrial connections’, as well as ‘transtime crop glyphs’. Other key elements in Myers and Percy’s philosophy is the concept of hyperdimensionality and the technology that could be inspired by the Message of Cydonia. It is no coincidence that these are precisely the main points of Hoagland’s crusade: he acquired them from Myers and Percy in the late 1980s.

  Although Hoagland is undoubtedly fully aware of the source of Myers and Percy’s ‘insights’, he is (perhaps understandably) reluctant to mention it in his books and lectures. David Percy, in his lectures on the same subject in Britain, never mentions the source of his wisdom, although he was once forced to do so in public. After his lecture to the British UFO Research Association (BUFORA) in 1995, at which we were present, he was challenged by UFO researcher John Rimmer to reveal the origins of his information, and admitted that it was, in fact, partly derived from telepathic contact with the Nine. Recently, Percy has admitted being a member of the main circle of ‘contactees’.1

  James Hurtak also claims to have been in touch with the same extraterrestrial source of wisdom since 1973, shortly before championing the connection between the Elysium pyramids and those of Egypt. He is less reticent about acknowledging the Nine, even writing a book called The Keys of Enoch (also known as The Book of Knowledge, first published in 1977) which embodies the spiritual teachings he claims he was chosen to receive. Hurtak has told two different versions of this: in The Keys of Enoch he tells how the Old Testament prophet Enoch appeared in his room on the night of 2 — 3 January 1973.2 But in 1977 he told one of the world’s most respected UFO researchers, Jacques Vallée, that, driving through the Californian desert on the same night, a bright light hovered over his car and a beam of light ‘programmed’ him with the ‘Keys’ that form the basis of his teaching.3

  Hurtak’s work, like that of Myers and Percy, describes a system based on a hierarchy of intelligences that rule the universe, and explains how they have intervened throughout the history of the Earth. Atlantis and the ‘message’ of ancient Egypt also play a major role in Hurtak’s philosophy. The Keys of Enoch is a much more self-consciously religious work than Two-Thirds. Subtitled A Teaching Given on Seven Levels To Be Read and Visualized In Preparation for the Brotherhood of Light To be Delivered for the Quickening of the “People of Light”, it even looks like a Bible, with the Hebrew for Yahweh — YHWH — embossed in gold on its white-and-gold cover, and its text displayed in two columns and divided into short numbered verses. This book evidently believes itself to be very holy, very sacred, taking itself extremely seriously indeed. The sixty-four ‘Keys’ of spiritual wisdom, covering all aspects of ethics and history, are presented in resounding quasi-Biblical language, although it is virtually impenetrable. For example:

  The key to the
end of our consciousness time zone is the violation of the spectra of color codes and in the geometry of radiations which will explode gel forming capacities. For this reason, the Host of the Living Light comes to deliver those who are living under and within the Light of Righteousness.4

  Despite the fact that Hurtak has been promoting these beliefs since 1973, becoming a New Age guru par excellence, he has managed with astounding success to keep this side of his life completely separate even from the promotion of his other unconventional ideas, such as his belief in the Face on Mars. For example, when Hancock, Bauval and Grigsby quote from his book The Face on Mars (co-written with Brian Crowley), they make no mention of his status as a New Age mystic and leader.5 In fact, elsewhere Hancock and Bauval describe him as a specialist in remote sensing.6 Boris Said, who is now making films about Egypt and other ancient civilisations based on Hurtak’s ideas, describes him as his film company’s ‘scientific consultant.’7

  What these admirers omit is the fact that Hurtak has been actively - and successfully — promoting what is effectively a new religion over the last quarter of a century. (This omission is odd, since we know that Bauval at least is familiar with The Keys of Enoch.8) Not only has Hurtak established a particularly firm grip on the New Age, but his revelatory teachings have attracted a highly influential body of followers that includes multimillionaires and senior politicians. One of his disciples described him to us as ‘almost the Messiah’.