The Stargate Conspiracy (46 page)

Hancock and Strieber may simply admire each other’s books, and the matter may end there. But other, thought-provoking connections lie just under the surface, allowing many of the pieces of the jigsaw to fall finally into place. For example, Strieber had worked with Richard Hoagland, and funded Mark Carlotto’s image enhancement work at Hoagland’s request as early as 1985, two years before his first ‘abduction’ book,
Communion,
was published.
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Strieber was introduced to Richard Hoagland by a mutual friend in the summer of 1984, but he makes some puzzling comments about the Mars research in his account in
Breakthrough
(1997). In discussing Mark Carlotto’s enhancement of the Viking images, which used the advanced equipment made available to him through the intelligence division of The Analytical Science Corporation, he writes: ‘The fact that the Mars face was reimaged on the best equipment known to man in 1985 and came out looking even more like a sculpture had been efficiently suppressed.’
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It is difficult to begin to understand how the subject could be described as having been ‘efficiently suppressed’ given that Hoagland has been telling anyone who would listen about the Face — including the United Nations — besides lecturing and selling books and videos on the subject ever since.

The Secret School,
however, reveals the subtext of Strieber’s writings, and adds another piece to our complex jigsaw. This 1997 book describes the recovery, beginning in 1995, of further memories of his lifelong alien abduction experiences, specifically those long suppressed from his Texan childhood in the mid- to late 1950s. He recalls being part of the ‘Secret School’, a group of child abductees who were given lessons by their Grey captors. Although Strieber believes that he ‘attended’ this school for a number of years during his childhood, the memories recovered and lessons presented in the book were those given to him at the age of nine.

He recalls that, when first shown the image of the Face on Mars by John Gliedman, a scientist friend, he remembered seeing the image before, and later realised that the aliens had shown him that same image during his schooling.
⁶
(This may be nothing but the honest truth, but it is hard to see how the new images of the Face that reveal it to be nothing more than a large rocky outcrop fit into this scenario. Were the aliens playing a cruel joke on him? If so, it would not be the first nor the last time that apparent discarnate entities amused themselves by toying with human gullibility. Remember that Colin Wilson called such beings ‘the crooks and conmen of the spirit world’, while Uri Geller called the Nine ‘a civilization of clowns’.)

Most significant is Strieber’s attribution of the onset of his recall of the abduction experiences - which led directly to
Communion —
to being shown the picture of the Face by Gliedman. He writes:

The mortar that binds Strieber’s agenda together lies in his emphasis on the importance of the number nine. As he writes:

(This parallels the nine knocks that woke Jack Parsons during a lengthy magickal working on 10 January 1946.
⁹
)

Surely Strieber is virtually inviting us to make connections with the Council of Nine?

The Secret School
described the nine lessons he was given from childhood in three triads, but he adds a tenth, a new lesson given to him by the ‘visitors’ on 12 November 1995: a vision of the future in 2036 (in which the United States has become a military dictatorship after terrorists have destroyed Washington with an atomic bomb). It is, by now, a familiar pattern: there are ten significant numbers, but the tenth is only there to complete and make sense of the other nine, and also to provide continuity to the next sequence.

The first lesson began with a dream in which he flew above the surface of Mars, looking down on a gigantic, sculpted face and pyramids. (He also records that, at the same age, suddenly, for no reason he can remember, he became intensely interested in ancient Egypt.
¹⁰
)

The eighth lesson of
The Secret School
relates the great monuments of Egypt and other early civilisations to forthcoming changes in the world. As in Hancock, Bauval and Grigsby’s
The Mars Mystery,
they were built to encode the memory of global catastrophes and to serve as a warning to future generations that such cataclysms might well come again. Strieber writes:

Clues suggest who really runs the Secret School. Tellingly, Strieber also introduces the work of Robert Bauval and the erosion of the Sphinx, fully accepting the argument that the geological evidence and the astronomical correlations of the Sphinx and the pyramids pinpoint the date of ... that familiar year 10,500 BCE. Not surprisingly, he also dates the beginning of the Age of Aquarius as shortly after the year 2000. Perhaps that is why
The Secret School
is endorsed by Graham Hancock.

The point of Strieber’s lessons is that they show a way out of the nightmare scenarios of the future, through the shift in consciousness that comes with being a Chosen One, this time as a repeated abductee who accepts the alleged meaning of the Martian monuments, the Sphinx and the pyramids as well as the reality of the ‘visitors’. He writes, with real endtimes fervour:

So what is Whitley Strieber’s part, consciously or unwittingly, in the conspiracy to insidiously create a new religion and prepare us for some imminent takeover by its adherents? An integral part of the new belief system is the blending and exploitation of all the most potent modem myths, and surely there are few more powerful than the alien abduction scenario. Here we see one of the most successful icons of our times — the Grey alien - brought together with the Face on Mars and the ubiquitous emphasis on the 10,500 BCE dating of the Giza monuments. This is all linked to the imminent Age of Aquarius and, one way or another, to the return of the space gods, or of a quasi-Christian god who will save us from all evil - especially from ourselves — if we believe in him.

The reality or otherwise of the abduction experience has been much debated, and goes beyond the scope of this book. One other little known connection should give us pause for thought. When American veteran journalist Ed Conroy set out to investigate objectively the story behind Whitley Strieber’s
Communion
in the late 1980s, he explored all the possible connections, including parallels with such matters as folklore and the occult. He writes in
Report on Communion
(1989) that according to Kenneth Grant, Aleister Crowley claimed, in 1919, to have contacted an extraterrestrial being named Lam connected with the Sirius and Andromeda star systems. Conroy continues:

In the previous paragraph before this extract, Conroy had been drawing parallels between Crowley’s magickal invocation of angelic beings and the cosmic scheme outlined in Hurtak’s
The Keys of Enoch.

We believe that genuine mysteries, real unanswered questions are, ironically, being obscured by the half-truths and inventions of this new ‘religion’. The Giza monuments present huge problems for orthodox Egyptology. Even the case for the Martian monuments - especially the pyramids — retains some merit. We have no argument with real intellectual curiosity challenging these subjects. What concerns us is the presence of a campaign to impose a meaning on all these disparate subjects, to create synthetic answers that build all too easily into a new belief system that also appears to offer glib solutions to mankind’s present problems, pointing the way to the future. Yet the message is always the same, and the inherent dangers are incalculable.

Whitley Strieber and Richard Hoagland played a considerable part in spreading the belief that there was something anomalous trailing the Hale-Bopp comet.
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One result of this belief was the suicides of the members of the Heaven’s Gate cult, who were convinced that a spaceship had come to collect their souls and take them to a better life. This was an extreme scenario, and their deaths cannot be blamed on the likes of Hoagland, Strieber or Courtney Brown, but surely the cult’s madness is even more tragic because they died for nothing - to go to a nonexistent spaceship.

Let us identify the groups involved in this extraordinarily complex scenario:

And Robert Temple claimed that the CIA had tried to interfere with his work on the Dogon by stealing essential research material, and that then, after his book was published, it continued to harass him over a fifteen-year period. But why should it do this? It makes little sense. If it intended to obstruct his research, it was singularly unsuccessful. And why, after failing to stop the publication of his book, did it continue its campaign of harassment? The book was already in the public domain, so nothing could be done to prevent people from reading it. Neither did the CIA stop the new 1998 edition, which also describes the story of its previous interest in the book.

What did the CIA achieve by all this? If it had really wanted to stop
The Sirius Mystery,
not only did it fail miserably, but it also managed to achieve the opposite. It appears that its real intention, from the very first, was not to prevent publication, but to promote it. Its actions convinced Temple himself of the importance of his research, and the 1998 edition has now convinced his readers too. Introducing this air of intrigue, by implication the significance of the ‘message’ today is reinforced. It must be remembered that intelligence agencies are the masters of such psychological games.