The Stargate Conspiracy (23 page)

Not only do marked parallels lie between the way that the stories of Egypt and of Mars are being presented, but the stories themselves are also being deliberately fused to make one big, dramatic picture. These days there are few non-academic interested parties who fail to associate the features of Cydonia with Egypt. Those with their own agendas have been very successful: we have seen the attempts by Cydonia researchers such as Hoagland to link the Message with ancient Egypt (and other cultures, such as megalithic Britain). On the other hand, Hancock and Bauval have made the journey the other way round, beginning with the mysteries of Egypt, and then linking them back to Mars. This is one story, not two, as is demonstrated by the overlap of people and groups involved.

For example, it is reported that, in 1996, on their return to the United States from the Giza project, members of the Joseph Schor Foundation consulted both Richard Hoagland and James Hurtak, the two main proponents of the pyramids of Mars and of a Mars — Giza connection.
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And Boris Said, the film-maker who has been chronicling events at Giza since 1990, recently enrolled James Hurtak as part of his team. Hurtak had talked about the Mars — Egypt connection as being part of a ‘great cosmic blueprint’ as far back as 1975.

There are other curious crossovers of personnel between the pyramids of Mars and the Mars-Giza camps. Dr Farouk El Baz was appointed head of the team that continued Rudolf Gantenbrink’s work to explore the ‘Sirius shaft’ in the Great Pyramid. El Baz’s past association with NASA may be coincidental, but SRI — as we have seen — certainly does not lack contacts within defence and intelligence agencies. (Since leaving NASA, El Baz founded and is now director of the Center for Remote Sensing at Boston University. One of the Starship
Enterprise’s
shuttle craft in
Star Trek: The Next Generation
is named after him - true fame.)

By far the most prominent of all crossover individuals is Lambert Dolphin Jr, the SRI teamleader at Giza between 1973 and 1982, who was also the co-founder with Hoagland of the Independent Mars Mission in 1983, a project funded and resourced by SRI.

This is a strangely thought-provoking scenario, but it becomes even stranger, particularly when considered in the context of the knowledge we have gathered so far and the conclusions we can extrapolate from it.

A glaring paradox is found in the above points. On the one hand, the involvement of official bodies may simply mean that they have come to the same conclusions as Hancock, Bauval, Hoagland and Temple - and are, like them, excited by the idea of imminent revelations about Egypt and Mars. Perhaps they even have prior knowledge... Do the ‘powers that be’ already know about the influence on humanity of an extraterrestrial race — either from Mars or elsewhere? Are they secretly trying to recover some knowledge of that race?

Superficially, this may seem likely. On the other hand, as we have seen, the ‘messianic’ messages claimed for both the Egyptian and Martian scenarios do not bear scrutiny. They use faulty reasoning, misread source material or are manifestly massaged to accord with some personal — or group - hidden agenda. So why should official bodies such as SRI and NASA, who have reputations - and funding — to lose, take this all so seriously?

We can suggest two main hypotheses that may account for the mounting official interest in such apparently off-the-wall scenarios: one is a conspiracy about something real, and the other is a conspiracy to make us believe something that is unreal.

 

Hypothesis One:
The messages for mankind extrapolated from both terrestrial and Martian mysteries are basically false. At the very least they are wishful thinking or delusions or, more disturbingly, the data have been forced to fit into a preconceived set of beliefs. The proponents of these ideas want to use the mysteries to further their own agendas, perhaps in order to promote their religious, quasi-religious - or Masonic - ideologies. They could even form an exercise in the manipulation of mass psychology - as suspected by Tom Rautenberg when he first heard of SRI’s involvement with the Cydonia enigma - but on a much grander and more worrying scale.

This hypothesis would account for much of the data, though not some of the official activities. We are convinced, for example, of clandestine activity at Giza, which is obviously expected to produce some kind of tangible results. Another example involves the curious circumstances surrounding NASA’s photographing of the Crater Pyramid. In our opinion, this 600-foot spire perched on the edge of a crater is the most compelling of the anomalous Martian features, and very difficult to explain in terms of natural processes. What is curious is that, back in 1976, Viking took four pictures of that area in rapid succession, the only time during the entire mission that this happened.
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As Mark Carlotto has pointed out, this must have been preprogrammed into the orbiter, as the time delay on radio instructions would not permit mission control to react so quickly. It seems too much of a coincidence that the only instance of such rapid-fire photography should occur at that one particular spot - but how did NASA know in advance that there was something interesting to photograph in that area?

Hypothesis Two:
Those promoting the message for mankind - both publicly and behind the scenes — somehow know it to be true, yet realise it is important to proceed with caution where the public is concerned. Information is gradually being fed to the masses to ‘acclimatise’ us all to such ideas. Perhaps the idea behind the ‘mass psychology’ experiment is to gauge public reactions to some forthcoming genuine announcement(s) about extraterrestrial influences on our past — and even on our present and future.

In this scenario, false evidence is being proposed to support a genuine phenomenon. This is a bold and apparently bizarre proposition, but the whole history of intelligence operations is one of absurdity and contradiction, albeit with a steely underpinning of single-minded agendas. This hypothesis deserves to be taken seriously, if only to see where it leads. Its advantage is that it explains why, on the one hand, official bodies appear to be searching seriously for something, while on the other the reasons for doing so simply do not sustain closer examination.

 

Our two hypotheses will be tested as this investigation continues: as we have seen, in the first, the so-called messages for mankind are simply fabricated or delusory. But is there any other information that might support the second hypothesis?

Could the ‘powers that be’ know that extraterrestrial influence on human civilisation and the connection with Mars are genuine, even if they have to create false evidence to persuade the public that this is so? If they really have such inside information, how did they acquire it? Evidence that convinced hard-headed industrialists, scientists and intelligence operatives about the reality of alien intervention in human affairs must have been so persuasive as to be virtually incontestable, but at the same time impossible to entrust to the public domain. But what kind of evidence could possibly be so watertight?

A clue may lie in the fact that a favoured target of the Pentagon’s remote-viewing experiments was Mars. The original SRI experiments, between 1973 and 1976, included sessions by Ingo Swann and physical researcher Harold Sherman in which they remote viewed the surface of Mars (and indeed, other planets).
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The results of these experiments have never been made public,
⁷¹
although it is known that the Face on Mars was detected by RVers some years before the Viking mission.

In a conversation with Uri Geller in January 1998 about his time at SRI, he told us that the Face on Mars had, in fact, been discovered by remote viewing in the early 1970s, long before the Viking mission. For various reasons he could not reveal the identity of the remote viewer in question, but in October 1998 we asked James Hurtak’s Academy For Future Sciences about his supposed ‘prediction’ about a facelike feature on Mars that - according to Hancock and Bauval — he had made in 1975. The reply was: ‘Dr Hurtak shared his insights of “remote viewing” with Mr Harold Sherman’.
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This was rather puzzling, as we had not actually mentioned remote viewing; in our view, this was tantamount to an admission that the Face had been discovered by remote viewing. The AFFS’s reply went on: ‘However, the principle [sic] artifact that Dr Hurtak saw was the pyramidal formations [sic] which has always been his uniqueness and not the Face itself.’ So although Hurtak himself may not have remote viewed the Face, the implication is that Harold Sherman did. This is interesting, because we do know that Sherman remote viewed Mars for SRI.

Sherman began as a sports writer before becoming interested in the paranormal and UFOs in the 1940s. He coined the phrase ‘Little Green Men’ to describe aliens. Sherman was by 1975 a veteran psychical researcher, in his seventies, who had been brought in by SRI specifically to help set up the first remote-viewing project.
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The issue of remote viewing may seem like something from
The X-Files,
a ripping yarn about invisible spies and mind control, not based on hard fact. No matter how it may challenge our mundane certainties about the ways things are, though, remote viewing works, which is why so much time and taxpayers’ money was invested in it by several governments, and particularly the US government. When the cream of the crop of US RVers repeatedly - and consistently - described the surface of Mars, individuals within the government and associated agencies took note.

The US Army’s highly talented remote viewer Joe McMoneagle ‘visited’ Mars several times, always sketching the scenes that met his disembodied gaze. There, unmistakably, were pyramids and, he claimed, tunnels under the Cydonia complex in which the remnants of an ancient civilisation continued to exist.

In his 1996 book
Psychic Warrior,
David Morehouse tells of his own remote-viewing missions to Mars eight years before. He had been given Mars as a blind target, without knowing that this location had been set for him. He saw nothing significant, just a barren reddish landscape that had been deserted for thousands of years. After this ‘mission’, Morehouse was shown a folder enclosing details of the target location: pictures of Mars, taken from orbit and the ground. He writes of the other material in the folder:

Morehouse, who also sketched a dream in which ‘the sky tears and another dimension is revealed’, had a tendency to remote view particularly significant scenes, even if he only realised it in retrospect. In
Psychic Warrior
he describes being set a blind target and homing in on a boxlike object hidden in a cavern that appeared to be protected by an aura of extreme danger. He told his ‘monitor’ that it was ‘something very powerful and sacred’ and said it would ‘vaporise’ anyone who got too close, adding: ’I felt very uncomfortable and vulnerable in that cavern’.
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An hour or so after this ‘mission’, Morehouse was shown an artist’s impression of the target — the fabled Old Testament Ark of the Covenant, whose mysterious power could fell whole armies. It seems that he had successfully used one paranormal ability to get the target right — perhaps a form of telepathic contact with the mind of the experimenter - but had he really tuned in to the Ark itself?

No one knows for certain how remote viewing works, only what it can produce. Seated in a mundane office with a monitor asking questions, the RVer’s invisible consciousness takes flight and visits elsewhere, sometimes even else
when,
for time is no barrier to the remote viewer who can ‘scroll’ up or down through past, present and future by the force of will alone. Sometimes, of course, they fail to describe the targets, and come up with either a ‘displacement’ description, an accurate description of a place that was not the target, or something that might just be fantasy. Sometimes the remote viewers can describe frankly outlandish scenarios.

Despite the many successes of remote viewing, the problem has always been the accurate interpretation of what is seen. Even everyday perception involves the brain making decisions about the meaning of the shapes of objects and people seen. In this process, context is everything, and the more obvious and detailed the context, the more accurate the brain’s interpretation of the shapes seen. The same applies to remote viewing, particularly when the target was Mars prior to 1976 - before the first good photographs of its surface reached us on Earth. The mind of the remote viewer would automatically try to make sense of unfamiliar landmarks, perhaps reacting as if to an inkblot test and turning a rocky outcrop into a recognisable Face.