Suppressed Inventions and Other Discoveries (53 page)

The format in which UFO COVER-UP? ... LIVE! was presented tranquilized the general public, as did the movies E.T. and Close Encounters of the Third Kind, in the comfortable belief that there is absolutely nothing to worry about, as far as any reports of alleged "aliens" are concerned.

As Dr. Mundy has pointed out, this comfortable belief system—so assiduously maintained by the authorities through their constant insistence on relegating the subject of alien intervention in human affairs to the realm of media trivia—relies for its support on some very thin ice indeed.

This ice is so thin that it can be shattered by featherweight random events, such as the arrival in my mailbox of a letter from Rev. John E. Schroeder of the UFO Study Group of Greater St. Louis, saying:

You mentioned William Moore's TV program hosted by Mike Farrell. Is it any surprise that the November 1989 issue of prestigious Millimeter magazine for film and TV producers listed the CIA as paying producer for that show? I wonder what happened to the response requests? Who effectively collected whose paying phone numbers? Why? How are they to be used? Was any data ever given congressional members? The plot thickens!

The plot does indeed thicken. A search of the November 1989 issue of Millimeter magazine did not locate the item which Rev. Schroeder is nevertheless sure that he and his wife saw in Millimeter, though he may have been mistaken as to the issue. This does not necessarily mean that the item does not exist, but as we go to press the question remains unresolved. In spite of this uncertainty, the item seems worth retaining, because both the possibility and the questions raised by Rev. Schroeder remain relevant, even if neither confirmed nor invalidated.

The abi lit y to face phenomena of high strangeness with an open mind is a rare trait, not shared by the vast majority of contemporary humanity. The average person feels threatened or terrified by any unprecedented divergence from conventionally accepted norms of reality, and may react with dangerous violence.

Let us consider the case of Herbert Schirmer, who in 1967 held the distinction of being the youngest Chief of Police in Nebraska, and who was one of the most prominent citizens in his home town of Ashland, Nebraska. One night while on duty in his patrol car, he encountered a large disc-shaped UFO, which had landed not far from the highway. When a glowing humanoid figure appeared in his headlights, he tried to draw his gun, but found himself inexplicably paralyzed. When the humanoid opened the door of his car, Schirmer felt a cold hard instrument being applied to the back of his neck, and he blacked out. Upon regaining consciousness, he drove straight back to the police station and reported the incident to his fellow officers, who noticed that he was unable to account for about half an hour, There was an unusual welt on the back of his neck, which later left a permanent scar. A qualified hypnotist, Dr. Leo Sprinkle, was brought in to regress him back to the period of missing time. Under hypnosis, the regression indicated that he had been taken aboard the UFO and had communicated with a group of alien humanoids during the period of missing time. A search of the location where the incident occurred revealed physical landing traces.

How did Chief of Police Schirmer's old friends react to his adventure? By firing him from his job, dynamiting his car, and hanging and burning him in effigy in the town square. His wife divorced him, and he was driven out of town. He has since moved frequently, contacting various UFO investigators, trying to make sense of his dilemma.

There is a remarkable resemblance between Herbert Schirmer's ordeal and the Jeff Greenhaw case. In 1973, Jeff Greenhaw was the youngest Chief of Police in Alabama, and was one of the most prominent citizens in his home town of Falkville, Alabama. One night he received an anonymous phone call from a woman who said that a UFO had just landed in a field not far from town. Greenhaw got into his patrol car and drove toward that area. As he approached the field, he encountered a humanoid about six feet tall, covered from head to foot in metallic clothing, standing in the middle of the road. Greenhaw pulled up near him and said: "Howdy, stranger." There was no response. Greenhaw reached for a Polaroid camera he happened to have with him and took four pictures. Then he turned on the flashing blue light on the top of his patrol car. The humanoid began to run, but not in normal fashion, moving sideways instead of forward, taking large leaps of about ten feet at a time very quickly, traveling at extraordinary speed. Greenhaw began to pursue him, but his patrol car suddenly went out of control and into a spin as he reached 45 miles per hour, obliging him to give up the chase. He returned to town and reported the incident.

How did Chief of Police Greenhaw's old friends react to his adventure? By firing him from his job, dynamiting his car, and burning down the trailer in which he lived. His wife divorced him, and he was driven out of town. He has since disappeared.

These two cases are not isolated. One could easily fill a book with the many cases of UFO contactees who have been obliged to leave their homes and change their names because of hostile social pressures. As our history clearly indicates, such witch hunts are nothing new. The average citizen's tolerance of diversity has increased only minimally since medieval times. What sets the Schirmer and Greenhaw cases apart from the hundreds, if not thousands, of other cases of contactee harassment is the secure social position they both enjoyed, until they reported their UFO encounters.

Being the Chief of Police in a small town one has grown up in implies widespread respect and trust from a closely knit group of people who have known you since childhood, and is about as secure a social position in the hierachy of the American system as it is possible to attain. The fact that one encounter with the unknown could in one day transform the role model for an entire community into a despised outcast demonstrates the extreme extent to which the average citizen feels insecure, and therefore fears the unknown.

This is true on the national level as well as on the individual level. The thousands of documents that the government has been obliged to release under the Freedom of Information Act demonstrate that its internal policy concerning UFOs and extra-terrestrials is extremely different from its publicly stated policy. To put it bluntly, our government has been lying to its citizens about UFOs and extra-terrestrials for over 40 years.

To point out merely one example of this duplicity: Air Force Regulation 200-2, JANAP-146* provides a penalty often years in prison plus a $10,000 fine and a forefeiture of pay and pension for any member of the Armed Forces who makes an unauthorized statement about UFOs. If you write to the Library of Congress and ask for a copy of this regulation, you will get an answer stating that no such regulation exists. Air Force spokesmen blandly deny that any such regulation exists. However, if you write to the Library of Congress and ask for a copy of The UFO Enigma by Marcia Smith and David Havas, which was published by none other than the Library of Congress itself in 1983, you will find in it a statement that Major Donald Keyhoe was the first to make public reference to the previously secret JANAP-146.

Further details are to be found in a book by a well-known French

* Joint-Army-Navy-Air Forve Publication

researcher, Aime Michel, published in 1969. The preface to a previous book by Michel was written by General L. M. Chassin, General Air Defense Coordinator, Allied Air Forces, Central Europe, NATO. General Chassin commends Michel's ability and integrity in strong terms. The statement Michael made in 1969 translates as follows: "However, if it is so certain that for the American authorities this subject is no more than crazy stories that are completely without interest, how does one explain the extraordinary precautions in Air Force Regulation 200-2, and the ten years in prison plus $10,000 fine of JANAP-146, all of which are still being enforced fifteen years later, and more vigorously than ever?"

Since Michel stated in 1969 that the regulation had been enforced for fifteen years, it must have originated in 1954, which just happens to have been a year during which an exceptional amount of UFO activity took place.

According to Ralph and Judy Blum, who received assistance from government sources while compiling their excellent book Beyond Earth (Bantam, 1974), the text of JANAP-146 is contained in an official publication of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, entitled Canadian-United States Communications Instructions for Reporting Vital Intelligence Sightings (CIR-VIS/MERINT, JANAP 146).

As the vast majority of UFO incidents get coverage only in local newspapers, if they even get that, there is no general awareness of the persistent UFO activity occurring in other parts of the country and other parts of the world. Some stories in the media even state that UFO activity is now almost non-existent and was just a passing fad of the 50s and 60s, when the truth is that there are just as many incidents as there ever were, but that the covert censorship is being enforced more effectively.

Major wire services operate in collusion with governmental intelligence agencies in perpetrating this devious form of camouflaged censorship for one basic reason, as clearly expressed by nuclear physicist Stanton Friedman: "No government of Earth would want its citizens to pledge allegiance to the planet rather than to itself, and to think of themselves first as Earthlings, rather than as Americans, Canadians, Russians, etc."

On pages 188-191 of Extra-Terrestrials Among Us, I described the adventures of an officer using the pseudonym of "Toulinet,"who had been assigned to write an analysis of the top secret "Grudge 13" report, after which he has been summarily discharged from military service. During the summer of 1989, this man took the courageous step of publicly indentifying himself as former Captain William English of the Green Berets, who had been working at the RAF Security Services Command, RAF Chicksands, England, at the time that he was assigned to write the analysis of "Grudge 13." I have been unable to either confirm or invalidate the rumor that no sooner had he publicly identified himself than his residence was firebombed, as had been the residences of police chiefs Schirmer and Greenhaw in 1967 and 1973.

Attempts have been made to destroy English's credibility, such as the U.S. Army stating that it has no military records concerning him. However, it is standard operating procedure for military commanders to delete, either partially or in totality, the service records of subordinate personnel who have become security risks, as is examplifed in "The Cutolo Affidavit," published in Erase and Forget by Paragon Research, P.O. Box 981, Orlando FL 32802, in 1991.

Records are also systematically destroyed by the highly paid defense contractors engaged by the Pentagon for secret projects. In November 1989, physicist Robert Lazar went public with disclosures concerning alien discs and related activities at Area 51 of the Nevada Test Site. From one day to the next, all records of his previous employment, his education, and even of his birth, vanished as if by magic. This would have effectively destroyed his credibility, if there had not been certain items that survived the onslaught of the modern Inquisitors. For example, Lazar stated that he had worked as a physicist for Los Alamos National Laboratories, whose representatives denied that he had ever been employed by them. However, independent investigators found a copy of the telephone directory issued by the Los Alamos Lab in 1982, which listed Robert Lazar among the scientists employed by them. An article in the Los Alamos paper during that same year, 1982, described Lazar's interest in jet cars, mentioning his employment at the Los Alamos Lab as a physicist. Finding themselves unable to destroy Lazar's credibility in any other way, the authorities resorted to a crude but time-tested technique and tarnished his reputation with a sex scandal, which Lazar's lifestyle unfortunately made possible.

Some people have taken issue with my statement that we are about to experience direct confrontation with non-human intelligent beings from elsewhere in the cosmos in the near future, pointing out that UFO intervention in human affairs has been minimal during the last forty years, so why shouldn't that pattern continue indefinitely? I have answered that question at length in my previous book, but would like to extend my response by describing some major incidents that occurred since its publication, which clearly indicate that we have entered a new phase of UFO activity, a phase characterized by deliberate and ostentatious UFO displays over heavily populated areas on an unprecedented scale.

There was a flurry of significant UFO activity both before and after August 12, 1986, but it was on the night of August 12-13 that the climax of the first incident occurred. During that night, reports came flooding in from Lake Huron to Nova Scotia in Canada, and in the United States from Maine, New York, Michigan, Indiana, Illinois, Arkansas, Louisiana, Kentucky, Pennsylvania, South Carolina, and Florida, as well as from the town of Leongatha in the province of Victoria in Australia. There had also been multi-witness sightings of a large UFO in Pennsylvania. Both of the Pennsylvania sightings appeared to involve the same object, described as bright silver and elliptical, the size of three buses in length. On the night of August 12-13, the reports from Arkansas, Louisiana, and Kentucky described a large cloud-like ball of fire. In Clark County, Kentucky, the appearance of an enormous ball of fire that lit up the whole sky was accompanied by a sonic boom that made houses shake, along with an odor described as similar to gunpowder. From Illinois, Indiana, Michigan, and Ontario came a flood of reports about "a spiral cloud with a star-like object beside it." An air traffic controller, Tim Jones, saw it both visually and on his radar screen, and stated that the way it was behaving was unlike any aircraft he had ever seen. On the same night in Leongatha, Victoria Province, Australia, an English teacher and a science teacher at the local high school reported that a UFO with flashing lights had hovered and maneuvered above them for about forty minutes.

On the following day, the scramble for explanations began. Both NASA and NORAD* denied any involvement in the phenomena, and further specified that it did not correspond with any known Soviet space activity. Speculation that a new Japanese satellite might have exploded was squelched by a statement from Japan's Tanageshima Space Center that their satellite was functioning normally.