The Mammoth Book of Conspiracies (77 page)

Very helpfully, the Vatican issued an image of the four pages of Lucia’s handwritten account of the Third Secret. This was petrol to the flames of controversy: Lucia herself, along with a bevy of Vatican prelates who had sighted the text, all commented that it was written down as a one-page letter. These witnesses included Father Joaquin Alonso, the official Fátima archivist for sixteen years.

Many “Fátamists”, as those in the Catholic Church who are cynical of the Vatican’s line on the Third Secret are dubbed, believe that there are two Third Secret texts, with the first a single page containing the words of the Blessed Virgin and the other a description of the vision. All this, of course, begs the question – what is in the suppressed portion? According to arch-Fátamist Father Nicholas Gruener, the secret portion is a prophecy that the Vatican itself will be taken over by Satan and the Roman Catholic Church will suffer a crisis of faith.

Little wonder, then, that the top men of the Vatican City have kept the important bit of the third prophecy locked tightly away in the archives.

Further Reading

Christopher Ferrara,
The Secret Still Hidden
, 2008

Antonio Socci,
Il Quatrro Segretto di Fátima
, 2006

DOCUMENT: SISTER LUCIA, THE THIRD PART OF THE SECRET REVEALED AT THE COVA DA IRIA-FÁTIMA ON 13 JULY 1917

I write in obedience to you, my God, who command me to do so through his Excellency the Bishop of Leiria and through your Most Holy Mother and mine.

After the two parts which I have already explained, at the left of Our Lady and a little above, we saw an Angel with a flaming sword in his left hand; flashing, it gave out flames that looked as though they would set the world on fire; but they died out in contact with the splendour that Our Lady radiated towards him from her right hand: pointing to the earth with his right hand, the Angel cried out in a loud voice: “Penance, Penance, Penance!” And we saw in an immense light that is God: “something similar to how people appear in a mirror when they pass in front of it” a Bishop dressed in White “we had the impression that it was the Holy Father”.

Other Bishops, Priests, men and women Religious going up a steep mountain, at the top of which there was a big Cross of rough-hewn trunks as of a cork-tree with the bark; before reaching there the Holy Father passed through a big city half in ruins and half trembling with halting step, afflicted with pain and sorrow, he prayed for the souls of the corpses he met on his way; having reached the top of the mountain, on his knees at the foot of the big Cross he was killed by a group of soldiers who fired bullets and arrows at him, and in the same way there died one after another the other Bishops, Priests, men and women Religious, and various lay people of different ranks and positions. Beneath the two arms of the Cross there were two Angels each with a crystal aspersorium in his hand, in which they gathered up the blood of the Martyrs and with it sprinkled the souls that were making their way to God.

THE THULE SOCIETY

Occult-loving Nazis piloting flying saucers? You couldn’t make it up.

Could you?

In 1912 veteran German occultist Rudolf von Sebottendorf set up the Thule Society, the name taken from the legendary continent in the Far North where, by repute, had lived the original Aryan civilization – who had divined the secrets of the Universe. By means of mystical rituals, Sebottendorf sought to imbibe said ancient wisdoms of Thule, which would accordingly endow Sebottendorf and his fellow initiates with superior powers.

Sebottendorf was also a virulent anti-Semite, so rather more of the Thule Society’s energy went into denouncing Jews than communing with the spirits of the original master race. Despite damning Freemasonry as a Jewish plot, the Thule Society ironically modelled its structures and symbolisms on Freemasonry. It also adopted the swastika as its emblem.

The connection between the Thule Society and the Nazi Party extended to rather more than a liking for the swastika. Two Thule Society members, Anton Drexler and Karl Harrer, set up the fledgling German Workers Party, soon to become the National Socialist German Workers Party – the Nazi Party. Ernst Rohm and Rudolf Hess, both key players in the early Nazi Party, were also Thule Society members.

Under the tutelage of the Nazis, Germany made significant advances in military and aviation technology – far more so than the Allied powers who fought her between 1939 and 1945. By the end of the Second World War, the Germans had fielded the first jet fighter, the “cruise missile” V-1, the ballistic V-2, not to mention the Me163 rocket plane.

Advancing into the ruins of Nazi Germany, the Americans were quick to notice the superiority of Nazi avionics, and promptly recruited hundreds of scientists and technicians in
Project Paperclip
.

But was German military technology so far advanced because Nazi mystics were in contact with the inhabitants of the Isle of Thule? And did the Nazis even get as far as building flying saucers? Someone who believes all the above is UFO researcher Vladimir Terziski, President of the American Academy of Dissident Sciences. According to Terziski, the occult Thule Society (and the
Vril Society
, too) established clear lines of communication with the “Thulians” in the inter-war period, who then generously passed on their superior technical knowledge to SS Military Technical Branch E-IV. In turn SS Military Branch E-IV was not only able to build jets and rockets, but flying saucers which reached the Moon in 1942. And Mars a little later.

A more mundane use for the saucers came in 1945, when they whisked Adolf Hitler from his Berlin bunker to a secret underground base in Antarctica. Terziski has the film footage of the base, known as “New Schwabia”.

If all this was not extraordinary enough, it turns out that the beings from Thule were not actually humans – but aliens.

What proto-Nazis like Rudolf von Sebottendorf would have made of the knowledge that they were descended from little green men and not white supermen can only be guessed at. What can be said with certainty is that the Luftwaffe did not need alien technology for its futuristic designs. The Treaty of Versailles at the end of World War I forbade Germany to build military aircraft. So, frustrated aircraft designers turned their attention to designing extreme shapes for the new sport of gliding. The case in point were the Horten brothers, who were building delta-winged gliders in the 1930s. When Germany under Hitler re-armed, the Horton boys built “flying wing” jet planes for the Luftwaffe. Then there was Professor Heinrich Focke who patented a flying-disc design in 1939, Alexander Lippisch who helped build the delta-winged Me163 rocket plane, Arthur Sack who constructed an aircraft with a circular wing … The Germans did not need alien technology. They could do it all by themselves. Vorsprung durch Technik, as they say.

THE TONKIN GULF INCIDENT

By early 1964 South Vietnam seemed to be losing the war against its Communist insurgency, sponsored by Ho Chi Minh’s regime in North Vietnam. This was a major concern to the US, which feared a “domino effect” should the South fall, in which country after country in Asia would turn Red. To aid the South Vietnamese effort, President Lyndon B. Johnson provided a number of fast patrol boats; ostensibly these were for defensive purposes, but secret OPLAN-34A sanctioned them for covert attacks on North Vietnamese military targets. US warships, operating in international waters just off the North’s coast, were to direct the operations.

On the night of 4 August, two US Navy destroyers, the
C. Turner Joy
and the
Maddox
, were patrolling the Gulf of Tonkin off the North Vietnamese coast when they came under apparent torpedo-attack from North Vietnamese PT boats. President Johnson, after assessing North Vietnamese radio intercepts and on the advice of Admiral Ulysses S. Grant Sharp, went on national TV to denounce North Vietnam’s “open aggression on the open seas”. Within three days Congress had passed the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution (there were just two dissensions in the Senate, see Document, p.550), which authorized the president “To take all necessary measures to repel any armed attack against the forces of the United States and to prevent further aggression … [and] to take all necessary steps, including the use of armed force, to assist any member or protocol state of the Southeast Asia Collective Defense Treaty requesting assistance in defense of its freedom.”

Up to 7 August 1964, the US had only been “advising” in the Vietnam War. From that day forth, it was fighting it. A campaign of heavy bombing was ordered immediately, and by early 1965 thousands of US troops were arriving in theatre almost daily.

According to the
Los Angeles Times
, “the Communists, by their attack on American vessels in international waters, have themselves escalated hostilities”. The North Vietnamese started it!

Or, perhaps, not. Even on 4 August there were doubts that the
Maddox
and
C. Turner Joy
had actually come under attack. The
Maddox
’s captain blamed “freak weather conditions” for affecting the radio, while Admiral Grant Sharp of the Pacific Fleet cited edgy personnel, adding in a communiqué to the White House, “A lot of these torpedo attacks were from the sonar operators!”

The personnel on the US ships were definitely hyped up, because the
Maddox
had come under attack two days previously. Why did the US Government not denounce North Vietnamese aggression on that occasion? Because the
Maddox
had been operating illegally and provocatively
inside
North Vietnamese waters. The radio decrypts used to justify the official account of the Gulf of Tonkin almost definitely relate to 2 August, not 4 August.

Nearly fifty years later, the weight of evidence is that the “incident” in the Gulf of Tonkin was a fabricated pretext for the US to step up its involvement in Vietnam. In the words of the US Navy Historical Center, “North Vietnamese naval forces did not attack
Maddox
and
Turner Joy
that night.’ The defense secretary at the time, Robert McNamara, admitted in a 2001 TV documentary
The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara
, that the US “initiated the action”. The same documentary revealed that five weeks before Tonkin, Johnson had told McNamara over the phone, “I want to be able to trap these people [the North Vietnamese].”

Lyndon B. Johnson was gunning for war. By the tramlines of his morality, Johnson acted justifiably in escalating the conflict with a “white lie” because he hoped to keep the people of South Vietnam free of Communist totalitarianism. Less generously, Professor Peter Dale Scott has suggested that Johnson was encouraged by the oil corporations to intervene, since they wanted control of the “considerable offshore oil deposits in the South China Sea”. In this oily scenario President
John F. Kennedy
had been assassinated for his peacenik signing of National Security Action Memorandum 263, which reduced the number of military advisors in South Vietnam. The oil boys wanted more army boots on the ground, not less.

Why exactly the Tonkin Gulf incident was faked up may never be known, but faked it was.