It all got rolling in 1947 when an Army public information officer captured a “flying saucer” on a ranch near Roswell, New Mexico, a story covered prominently in the local newspaper. A few days later, however, the Air Force stepped in and changed the story to a downed weather balloon. Today, we’re told it was a Project Mogul balloon, a top-secret program that placed microphones at high altitudes to check for indications of Soviet nuclear tests. Free-floating spy balloons were being deployed covertly for intelligence gathering at the time, the predecessors of the U2 spy plane. There were many unexplained crashes in the Southwest over the next few decades.
Today we know Area 51 was the base where drones, spy planes and stealth bombers were initially developed. Obviously, whenever covert technology crashed, great secrecy was deployed to contain information from leaking to the Soviets. This may be why so many phony stories about UFOs began appearing in file cabinets of intelligence officers across the country and why some of those officers were instructed to intentionally misdirect the growing UFO community and monitor the success rate of the fake memes they were planting into it.
Unexplained globular lights in the sky are a longstanding phenomenon and their source remains unclear. WWII pilots referred to these lights as “foo fighters.” But it’s a long way from unexplained globes of light darting around the night sky, to little green men with bugged-out eyes jumping out of interstellar craft. If you look at the public record, you’ll find the stories of the little green men were initially planted and encouraged by intelligence officers.
The first big splash was created by Life magazine five years after Roswell when the following sentence appeared on the cover: There is a case for interplanetary saucers.
It’s important to realize both Life and Time were created by Henry Luce, a member of Yale’s powerful Order of Skull & Bones, which has deep connections to the CIA and military intelligence. These two magazines became a dominating force in the media almost overnight, and were frequently tools for counterintelligence propaganda operations. My guide for distinguishing real whistle-blowers from fakes is whether or not they appeared on the cover of Time magazine, because if they do, rest assured they’re an op and not some organic force for positive change. The initial Life magazine article quoted Air Force official Edward J. Ruppelt as the inside source on the UFO cover-up, although later in life, Ruppelt would repudiate these comments.
“British scientists are convinced these strange aerial objects are not optical illusions or Soviet inventions, but are flying saucers which originate on another planet,” wrote Dorothy Kilgallen, in a mind-blowing front-page story two years later, an article published in hundreds of newspapers. “The source of my information is a British official of Cabinet rank who prefers to remain unidentified. ‘We believe, on the basis of our inquiry thus far, that the saucers were staffed by small men—probably under four feet tall. It’s frightening, but there is no denying the flying saucers come from another planet.’”
While various insiders in the British and American military were planting these stories of contact with aliens, another wing of the military was studying the science of constructing Manchurian Candidates with drugs, hypnosis, psychic driving and complex play-acting. This was real voodoo possession at work and hundreds of people were dosed with LSD without their knowledge. Some were turned into hypnotic mind slaves, some were guided into field operations as sex toys, while others served as experiments to be monitored and worked on as the years went by. A decade after Life magazine broke the aliens-are-here story, the first alien abduction took place.
Barney and Betty Hill were one of the few interracial couples in the early sixties, and also members of the NAACP and the Unitarian Church, two organizations heavily penetrated by spooks. The civil rights movement was of great concern to intel, as was the student youth movement, and the Unitarian Church provided a base of operations for anti-war movements in college towns across America. I know because in my hometown of Champaign-Urbana, Illinois, the Red Herring coffeeshop, located in the basement of the Unitarian Church, became the local counterculture center of gravity, the site where most of our anti-war demonstrations were conceived and planned.
On September 19, 1961, the Hills were traveling home from a trip to Canada when they spotted a mysterious light in the sky. Soon, a strange craft landed in the road in front of them. Barney got out of his car to investigate, and saw a group of aliens observing him through the window in the craft. Barney became convinced they intended to capture him and his wife, so he quickly drove home in a panic. Two days later, Betty called Pease Air Force Base to report the encounter, and the following day Major Paul Henderson investigated. He wrote a brief report for Project Bluebook stating the Hills had seen the planet Jupiter, claiming it had been unusually bright that night.
Betty also wrote to retired Marine Corps Major Donald Keyhoe, head of NICAP, a civilian research group, and Keyhoe sent a parade of civilian investigators to collect more information. The NICAP came up with the hypothesis the Hills had been abducted and medically examined, as evidence by a three-hour time gap in their memory. On November 23, 1962, the Hills were introduced privately to Air Force Captain Ben Swett at their church, and Swett suggested they seek hypnosis therapy to recover the lost three hours.
In March 1963, the Hills made their first public admission to members of their own church, and in January 1964, they were hypnotized and tape recorded, while drawings were produced during the session to be presented as evidence.
The therapist concluded the couple shared a fantasy inspired by TV and films, one that had resonated in Betty’s dreams. He published an article in Psychiatric Opinion. Two weeks before the episode, the Outer Limits broadcast a show on aliens that resembled the story told by the Hills. The hypnosis session had a settling effect on the Hills, however, and they returned to their normal lives, although they never accepted the therapist’s opinion, and remained convinced the NICAP investigators were correct in assuming they’d been abducted. In October 1965, after being fed the story by the NICAP, a Boston newspaper put the Hills on their front page. This led to the publication of a book, The Interrupted Journey, which sold several editions, thus proving UFOs were highly marketable and worth big bucks.
An artist was brought in to sketch the aliens as described by Barney, although his image neglected the distinctive cap Barney had drawn previously on his own. Interestingly, Barney drew the alien hat brims turned to the side, ghetto-style.
A series of dots drawn by Betty was supposedly a star map used to guide the aliens, and very soon some highly inventive and creative theories emerged on what those dots might signify, each one more absurd than the next. Clearly, this story was getting embellished as time went on. I find it important to note the CIA’s MK/Ultra project also involved hypnosis (although often without people’s consent or knowledge), so I have to wonder if alien abductions weren’t deployed as a cover story for illegal mind control experiments in case the hypnosis wore off.
MK/Ultra was proposed by Richard Helms, then the CIA’s Assistant Deputy Director for Plans, to fund “highly sensitive” research using chemical/ biological substances to alter human behavior. It was approved by CIA Director Allen Dulles on April 13, 1953 and overseen by chemist Sidney Gottlieb, chief of the CIA’s Technical Services Division. Forty-four American colleges, 15 research foundations and pharmaceutical companies (including Sandoz and Eli Lilly), 12 hospitals, and three prisons are known to have participated. During Watergate, Helms attempted to destroy every document and file relating to the program, although he missed a few, which is why we have some inkling on the immense scope of the project.
Mark Pilkington is a remarkable dude with an impressive resume, a musician, curator and publisher-writer-editor specializing in the occult. He traveled to America to research UFOs. He also admits to being a crop circle hoaxer in his native England, creating vegetable sculptures to dupe people into believing in alien interventions. I’ve always wondered if the crop circle phenomenon was created by intel to feed the fires on UFO mania. Intel seems intent on embedding the most ridiculous conspiracy theories into the public consciousness as a way to deflect from the real conspiracies. The most interesting part of Pilkington’s trip, however, was he got an intelligence officer to admit to planting fake UFO documents and monitoring how those documents moved though the UFO community.
U.S. Air Force Special Agent Richard C. Doty, retired, confessed to being one of many leakers of UFO disinfo, and also admitted one of his primary targets, Paul Bennewiz, was driven insane by his faked UFO reports. Another primary target was William Moore, who wrote the first book on Roswell and was considered an influential voice in the community. Most of the documents you see circulating today on the web supporting the story aliens-are-here were fabricated by Doty and his crew of disinformationalists. It’s somewhat astounding this story leaked out through a book and film, and now the History Channel has an hour-long episode devoted to it, leading me to conclude this must be some sort of limited hang-out that skims the surface of what these disinformationalists are up to.
But I also believe these revelations might help lead a few others to reject the aliens-are-here meme and other rabbit holes promoted by intel agents, and understand these memes are created for a purpose. Perhaps there’s a long-term strategy involving a fake alien invasion, but most likely, these projects exist primarily to brand researchers of JFK and 9/11 as conspiracy kooks.
A few years ago, a FOIA request by Professor Lance deHaven-Smith of Florida State University turned up a document proving the term “conspiracy theory” was invented by the CIA immediately after Warren Commission Report was released as a tool for combating citizen researchers across the country who’d been investigating the crime and could see through the fraudulent report. The strategy of inventing phony conspiracy theories was part of a strategy for painting critics of the Commission as crackpots. It’s been two years since deHaven-Smith published his findings in Conspiracy Theory in America (Discovering America) and still most Americans have no clue that by spreading stories about aliens, crop circles, chemtrails, we never landed on the moon, they are dancing to a tune played by the CIA. As the 15th anniversary of 9/11 draws near, I only hope more people will wake up and demand a Congressional investigation. Because the people have the power to make this right and end the longstanding war-for-profit hoodwink.
The experiment continues……