Alien Intrusion Page 18

  When we consider that today most children would describe UFOs as “visitors from other planets” as Ronald Story’s son believed, then to some extent, the UFOnauts have already succeeded in substantially shaping our ideas. It is disturbing that so many people are willing to jump on board the “benevolent” UFO bandwagon, despite the seeming evidence that the space brothers — whatever they are — have some sort of secret agenda, and have not been entirely honest with us. Yet many are willing to believe their messages, without even stopping to consider that they might be being deceived.

  The IDH has given rise to the new “religious” brand of UFOlogist. We include the UFO cults in this category. Some feel that the UFOs are from parallel universes and/or that genuine ETs have evolved to a new level of consciousness or spirituality and are able to communicate with us from distant galaxies. In the following chapters, we will see evidence that the space brothers are contacting a selected few modern prophets who are being encouraged to rise up and show others how to reach their next stage of evolution.

  Ankerberg and Weldon have commented on the disparity between the ETH and what is really occurring:

  … how credible is it to think that literally thousands of extraterrestrials would fly millions or billions of light-years simply to teach New Age philosophy, deny Christianity, and support the occult… . Why would they consistently lie about things which we know are true, and why would they purposefully deceive their contacts?[21]

  For example, a common claim revealed as deception was that ETs were visiting us from Venus. Chapter 3 described Frank Strange’s 1959 meeting with a Venusian by the name of Val Thor. Nowadays, most visitors seem to come from farther away, elsewhere in the galaxy where we cannot test their claims.

  As Weldon and Ankerberg noted, the denial of the Christ of the Bible and a reshaping of our traditional religious views is a very common thread that runs through UFOlogy. It seems incredible that seeming alien space travelers are so interested in Christian ideas. As the founder of the faith, Jesus Christ had some interesting things to say about the future. His words of warning in Matthew 24:24–25 seem surprisingly relevant to today’s UFO phenomenon:

  For false Christs and false prophets will appear and perform great signs and miracles to deceive even the elect — if that were possible. See, I have told you ahead of time.

  J. Allen Hynek’s book The Hynek Report of UFOs argues that, during his years as a researcher on Project Blue Book, the U.S. government intentionally deceived and lied to the American public about the nature of UFOs.[22] Hynek and other cogent UFOlogists such as John Keel and Vallée have shifted from the ETH view and noticed the paranormal link to UFOs. So why does the government have nothing to say in this matter? This remains a mystery, and perhaps it is the religious connotations that prohibit it from “official” classification. Because the occultic and spiritual nature of such claims is not scientifically verifiable, perhaps governments do not want to admit that they cannot explain what is really happening. One could imagine the public disquiet if its leaders actually admitted that “something is happening, we don’t know what, and we are powerless to do anything about it.” It would be open season for every bizarre claim of the “UFOnuts” and hoaxers professing to have the answer, and could lead to a serious, although unwitting, endorsement of those self-professed UFO messiahs who claim to be in contact with the ETs. It would be even more difficult to weed out the apparently genuine and serious claims from those of the frauds and fame-seekers. Hence, it seems, the blanket statement, “UFOs pose no threat to national security.”

  Cooper, the high-flyer — what did he see?

  Sometimes, even otherwise cautious UFO researchers cite cases as “fact” which are anything but. In chapter 1, we mentioned the UFO sightings of high-profile NASA astronaut Gordon Cooper. A search of the Internet will reveal a myriad of articles reproducing the famous claim of his seeing a greenish-glowing object ahead of his Mercury capsule in 1963. It has almost become UFO “fact.” As the story has grown and spread over the years, it has been recorded that Cooper saw the object, which was apparently seen by a tracking station at Muchea, just north of Perth, Western Australia. In addition to this, it is claimed that over two hundred people at the tracking station also witnessed this event. It appears that even Hynek and Vallée were swayed by these reports. This point must be stressed because many other high-profile and seemingly credible UFO agencies believed the report to be true. By 1977, yet another story surfaced that Australian scientists also visually sighted the low-level, football-shaped object, and also that cameramen took 16,000 feet of film.[23] However, a closer look will reveal that Cooper never actually claimed to have seen a UFO at all while on that mission.

  James Oberg is a computer scientist and a former flight controller at NASA’s Johnson Space Center. He is also a UFO skeptic and is a member of the UFO committee for the skeptics’ organization Committee on the Scientific Investigation of Claims of the Paranormal (CSICOP). He has researched the Cooper UFOs and claims to have exchanged communications with Cooper himself on the subject. He says:

  What was actually happening was that on his third orbit, five hours into the flight, Cooper was describing auroral activity (“Northern Lights”). He reported, “Right now I can make out a lot of luminous activity in an easterly direction. I wouldn’t say it was much like a layer. It wasn’t distinct and it didn’t last long, but it was higher than I was. It wasn’t even in the vicinity of the horizon and was not well defined. A good size — it was a good-sized area. It was very indistinct in shape. It was a faint glow with a reddish-brown cast.”[24]

  Many times since, Cooper has flatly denied seeing a UFO. On a radio show he was quoted as saying:

  No, somebody made a lot of money selling … lies on that one… . It was totally untrue, sorry to say.[25]

  Oberg reports that in an OMNI interview published in 1980, Cooper was also asked about his UFO reports, and said:

  It got so bad that there were deliberately falsified tapes of communications with the astronauts, where UFO material was simply edited in.[26]

  Furthermore, Oberg claims that:

  Cooper explicitly denied that there had been UFO sightings on his two flights. In a 1978 letter to me, Cooper stressed the non-occurrence of a sighting on Mercury 9. I have the original on-board tapes in my possession which also refute this.[27]

  Although Cooper was an avid proponent of the ETH, he stated that the Mercury legend was incorrect. This is a strong rebuttal by any standard. Without going into the details of how this urban myth became reality, it should suffice to say that this example aptly demonstrates that there are too many willing parties eager to perpetrate a story for notoriety, material gain, or just to promote their pet UFO theory. However, Cooper still held to his claim that he saw a UFO land at Edwards Air Force base in 1957. He says:

  … the case of one that landed out on the dry lake bed right out from a number of camera crews we had who filmed it. And the film was there and was sent forward to the safekeeping [sic] somewhere in Washington, never to be seen again.[28]

  Cooper claimed that the object was:

  … hovering above the ground — and then it slowly came down and sat on the lake bed for a few minutes.[29]

  Sounds compelling, doesn’t it? Once again, the prebelief appeared to be at work in Cooper’s thought processes, as he already believed that he had seen UFOs early in the 1950s while stationed at an airbase in Munich, Germany. Oberg set about investigating the “Edwards base” claim. In talking firsthand with one of the witnesses, he was sent a file of material on the sighting, which revealed that the claim had already been thoroughly investigated by a leading UFOlogist (and ETH proponent) of the day, James McDonald. Oberg discovered that the “dome-shaped” object was nothing more than a distant weather balloon, the appearance of which was distorted by the desert’s atmospheric effects. The film footage was simply exposures made by a tracking camera. And far from disappearing (or being suppressed, as Cooper actually claimed), t
he film was sent to Project Blue Book at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base.

  Brad Steiger is one of the most prolific writers on the paranormal. He has authored and co-authored 148 books on the subject, including 22 on UFOs.[30] He believes in a multidimensional origin for UFOs. Some years after the Edwards AFB incident, Oberg says Steiger revisited the photos in his paperback Project Blue Book and wrote the following caption for the photographs:

  UFOs on target! Photos taken by United States military personnel for case #4715, Edwards AFB, May 2, 1957.[31]

  Oberg claimed that the case number did not appear on another list in Steiger’s book, which included all unsolved cases, suggesting that it did not remain a mystery — it must have been solved. But surely the reader would want to know what it was, particularly after the declaration, “UFOs on target!”

  This is either a genuine error or a case of “never let the facts get in the way of a good story.” In relating the difficulty of getting to the bottom of any UFO report, Vallée noted this about proponents of the ETH:

  I also discovered that I could expect no cooperation from most of the UFO believers, who were willing to help me only to the extent that my conclusions would support their preconceived idea that UFOs are extraterrestrial visitors to the earth.[32]

  An avid New Ager, Steiger himself has abandoned the ETH, stating that:

  … we are dealing with a multidimensional paraphysical phenomenon which is largely indigenous to planet earth.[33]

  There are many who, like Cooper, still advocate the ETH. For such “nuts and bolts kinda guys” the interdimensional hypothesis has too many spiritual connotations. After all, based on the belief that cosmic evolution accounts for the origin of the universe, some galaxies may be millions of years older than ours, and therefore more advanced, so, “Who knows what technologies they may possess?”

  The origin of the extraterrestrial hypothesis

  Coming hot on the heels of a wave of postwar sightings, the theory that the U.S. government knew more than it was letting on about UFOs became the “only game in town.” In 1947, pilot Kenneth Arnold saw nine saucer-shaped objects from his airplane. His report seemed to spark a subsequent wave of UFO sightings. Among other ideas, he thought that the saucers could have been a secret U.S. weapon. Earlier we mentioned that a Gallup poll of the same year highlighted that the public thought much the same thing. It revealed that 29 percent of those surveyed thought that saucers were an optical illusion, 10 percent thought they were hoaxes, 15 percent agreed with Arnold, and 1 percent thought it was Russian technology.[34] People were fascinated, but there was nothing to suggest anything more than the public had already concluded. But in 1948, the mood was about to change. This was due to the involvement of former Marine Corps Major Donald Keyhoe into an event, which became known as the Mantell incident. There is no doubt that Keyhoe’s subsequent writings were a prime catalyst for today’s widespread acceptance of the ETH.

  On January 7, 1948, the first officially recorded UFO-related fatality occurred. A UFO shaped like an “ice-cream cone topped with red” was sighted over a military base near Fort Knox, Kentucky. Four National Guard F-51 Mustangs were dispatched to investigate. When three of the planes closed in on the object, it was described as metallic and of “tremendous size” and “round like a tear drop, and at times almost fluid.”

  Flight leader Thomas F. Mantell radioed in to say that he was closing in to take a good look:

  It’s going up now and forward as fast as I am … that’s 360 mph, … I’m going up to 20,000 feet, and if I’m no closer, I’ll abandon chase.[35]

  Mantell was never heard from again. His decapitated body was later found in the wreckage of his aircraft near Fort Knox. It was revealed that Mantell blacked out at 20,000 feet from a lack of oxygen, and it was officially reported that he was merely chasing the planet Venus.[36]

  Captain Thomas F. Mantell

  UFO incidents had now taken a serious turn. A death had occurred, and with a wave of recent sightings, the government’s not-so-convincing answer and its less-than-prompt response on the matter created rampant speculation. It was discovered that the elevation of Venus in relation to the pilots’ position did not correlate. The authorities could not have made such a basic mistake.

  Keyhoe and cover-ups

  Upon taking a closer look, the editor of True magazine thought the official position was “damned queer,” so he called in Donald Keyhoe to investigate. Keyhoe believed the Mantell incident had all the hallmarks of a cover-up. Also unimpressed with the handling of a couple of other cases, Keyhoe thought he was on to something big, and he said so in his 1950 magazine article titled “The Flying Saucers are Real.” In it he drew the following conclusions that later became part of the reconnaissance theory, i.e., the ETs are watching us:

  1. For the past 175 years, the planet Earth has been under systematic close-range observation by living, intelligent observers from another planet.

  2. The intensity of this observation and the frequency of the visits to the earth’s atmosphere increased markedly during the past two years.

  3. The vehicles used for this observation and for interplanetary transport have been identified and categorized as follows: Type I, a small, non–pilot-carrying, disk-shaped aircraft equipped with some form of television or impulse transmitter; Type II, a very large (up to 250 feet in diameter), metallic, disk-shaped aircraft operating on the helicopter principle; Type III, a dirigible-shaped, wingless aircraft which, in the earth’s atmosphere, operates in conformity with the Prandtl theory [aerodynamics] of lift.

  4. The discernible pattern of observation and exploration shown by the so-called “flying disks” varies in no important particular way from well-developed American plans for the exploration of space expected to come to fruition within the next 50 years. There is reason to believe, however, that some other race of thinking beings is a matter of two-and-one-quarter centuries ahead of us.[37]

  Although such ETH theories had abounded before, Keyhoe had hit the big time — he had details! This was the start of an enormous controversy. In the same year, he published a book of the same name as his article. The world and its UFO beliefs would never be the same again. By 1950, Gallup polls added another category as an explanation for UFOs, namely: “comets, shooting stars, something from other planets” (emphasis added). Keyhoe subsequently published four more books: Flying Saucers From Outer Space (1953), The Flying Saucer Conspiracy (1955), Flying Saucers — Top Secret (1960), and Aliens from Space (1973). The titles leave no doubt as to his particular viewpoint, and the public eagerly consumed all of it.

  Keyhoe smelled a conspiracy — a theme he played to the fullest extent, and he was partly correct. However, the government wasn’t covering up evidence of alien visitations. It was covering up top-secret technology that even its own Air Force wasn’t aware of at the time, and it wasn’t even advanced technology. Unfortunately, the truth would not be revealed openly until 1985.

  A secret project known as Skyhook was being conducted. These were massive weather balloons 450 feet (135 m) tall and 100 feet (30 m) across that were used to carry equipment to listen to radio transmissions around the world. They could ascend to altitudes of 70,000 feet, where the high-altitude, fast jet-stream currents could carry them. Such currents could also cause the balloons to move quite erratically and even stop on occasions. The balloons could also reflect an assortment of colors as the light would be refracted off, and through, their plastic envelope covering.

  More conclusively, subsequent investigations by the Blue Book team, years later, confirmed that two other ground-based observers who thought they had also seen a UFO had agreed that it was a balloon when taking a closer look through their telescopes.[38]

  But it was all too late. The “gate was open and the horse had bolted.” By the time of, and as a result of, Keyhoe’s books, the myth of the Mantell incident was growing. It became an urban legend similar to Cooper’s Mercury sightings. Despite the fact that medical examinations s
howed that Mantell had died from the impact of his plane crashing to Earth, stories circulated that a UFO “death ray” had shot him down.

  This demonstrates how little Keyhoe actually had to go on, as is often the case with sensational reports. His provocative conclusions demonstrate that he was already a UFO believer (the prebelief again), and that he did not discern the evidence with any impartiality (another common problem). It should also be remembered that the government of the day contributed to the perceptions of its alleged lack of integrity. Government officials were non-cooperative and became more so after Keyhoe’s allegations. In turn, their over-defensive attitude gave the impression that Keyhoe was right, and this gave the government continuing credibility problems. Keyhoe wrote in 1953:

  Three years ago this proposal would have amazed me. In 1949, after months of investigation, I wrote an article for True magazine, stating that the saucers were probably interplanetary machines. Within 24 hours the Air Force was swamped with demands for the truth. To end the uproar, the Pentagon announced that the saucer project was closed. The saucers, the Air Force insisted, were hoaxes, hallucinations, or mistakes. Later, in a book called The Flying Saucers are Real, I repeated my belief that the Air Force was keeping the answer secret until the country could be prepared. Several times officers at the Pentagon tried to convince me I’d made a bad mistake. But when I asked them to prove it by showing me the secret sighting reports, I ran into a stone wall… .[39]