X Descending (37 page)

Though Paul and I only spoke about these balls of light in a few of our telephone conversations, he did say that if one of them touched exposed skin it could produce a stinging sensation. It may not have happened every time, but I presumed it had happened at least once. What made this interesting was that he also claimed he had occasionally been hit by some type of beam that caused the same painful sting. I do not know if this beam was visible or detectable with his equipment, but it was apparently very narrow and focused, and there were times that I think Paul felt its sole purpose was to irritate him.

The idea of “aliens” going to the trouble of stinging people with invisible beams merely to irritate them, is so unbelievable that for most people it would be much easier to believe Paul was unstable. Belief, once again, becomes a real issue. Paul’s belief that all of this
was
happening—and the matter-of-fact way he could talk about it—would compel almost anyone to believe he was paranoid and delusional. What stable person would believe it? The possibility that such a thing may actually be true becomes blocked by the perceived improbability of it and, perhaps, by our own subconscious desire for it
not to be true
. With Paul claiming that “aliens” were behind these strange occurrences, and with few people aware of the extent of the counterintelligence operation to “defuse” him, would anyone have suspected that he may not be deluded, but merely mistaken?

In their 2003 article,
Beliefs About Delusions
, Bell, Halligan, and Ellis describe in clear terms the difficulty, even in clinical psychiatry, in establishing the two criteria generally considered significant in confirming delusion: falsifiability and bizarreness.
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Proving a claim is actually false may not only be beyond the scope of the clinicians’ job, it may be beyond his capability, even if he was motivated to try. Deciding whether a belief is bizarre may come down to a judgment call based on whether the belief is normally held by others. In Paul’s case, his belief that “aliens” were around and would sting him with invisible beams was certainly not a commonly held belief, and to most people would no doubt be considered very bizarre. But whether it was falsifiable would have required someone to try to document its veracity—and Paul was apparently the only one trying to do so!

The balls of light, scans, and stinging beams may not have been the catalyst for Paul’s belief in “aliens”, but they certainly reinforced it in some ongoing way. If his belief was a delusion, these odd manifestations and their physical effects appear to have been real enough considering the descriptions by others of what they saw and felt. With Doty and Moore having since admitted that an operation was underway for some time to “defuse” Paul, and the claims in
Project Beta
of photographs being taken of the inside of Paul’s home, perhaps it is prudent to ask whether the scans or beams he complained about might have been attributable to some other source in his vicinity. In fact, there is reason to believe that Paul himself may have begun to suspect a decidedly non-alien source for what he was being subjected to. The uncomfortable fact is that these accounts and the perceived effects, particularly the beams and heating, have all the hallmarks of research now known to have been going on virtually in Paul’s backyard. This research, beginning under the Air Force Weapons Laboratory, today falls under the auspices of the AFRL Directed Energy Directorate.

Details of classified research and development projects generally do not become publically known until years after the work began. In a television interview I saw years ago, an Air Force officer, referring to development of stealth aircraft technology, put it very succinctly when he smiled and said that by the time he could speak about a highly classified project, the work had probably been going on for twenty years. In this case, that time frame would be just about right.

The past few years have seen many news reports on the research and development that has gone into directed-energy weapons, conducted primarily by the Air Force Research Labs and Sandia National Laboratories. In September of 2001, Air Force Research Laboratory scientists announced the existence of what would be called Active Denial Technology (ADT). This technology, sometimes called a “pain beam” in the media, is a millimeter wavelength microwave beam that heats the water in the surface layer of the skin where the pain-sensing nerves are, and can do so from a considerable distance. By all accounts, the sudden and intense pain is enough to cause virtual panic as people desperately try to get away from the beam. Research into such “non-lethal” weapons has reportedly been going on since the mid-1980’s, though it is an outgrowth of research into radar and electromagnetic pulse technology stretching back to the late 1930s.
⁸⁶

The first public announcements that an Active Denial System (ADS) was ready for use were accompanied by pictures of a large octagonal antenna mounted atop a military transport vehicle. An interesting first-person account of what it felt like being on the receiving end of an ADS beam was given in 2003 by Eric Adams, Popular Science’s associate editor for aviation and military affairs. To accurately describe the effect of the Active Denial System created by the Air Force, he volunteered as a test subject. He had the system fired at him from a
half mile away
with the directed-energy beam controlled to hit him only in the middle of his back. In less that two seconds, he experienced a warm sensation that quickly grew to feel like an “electric burner”.
⁸⁷
Though in this demonstration the purpose was to show that the ADS could generate only enough pain to motivate someone to leave the area, in a 2007 accident at Moody AFB, Georgia, an exposure of four seconds at 100% power injured one person seriously enough to require being flown to a local burn center. However, at lower power levels the beam can produce only a mild feeling of warmth and, as the above demonstration showed, it can be focused on a relatively small area even over a substantial distance. Considering that this type of directed energy research was being conducted by the Air Force and others in the area around Kirtland AFB, it does not take a great stretch of the imagination to note the similarity to what Bill Moore reported experiencing at Paul’s home.

The above reports illustrate microwave energy in a beam large enough to effect one or more individuals and, hopefully, at power levels low enough not to cause permanent damage. What about Paul’s claim of beams that would sting when they hit him? Anyone who has ever been on the receiving end of a bee or wasp knows that the word “sting” implies a very localized effect—the quick onset of sharp pain at one specific point. Using this word to describe being hit by some type of beamed energy suggests that it was a very narrow diameter beam, with an effect at least as severe as the ADS system. Visible lasers, with their narrow colimated beams, are so widely used today that virtually everyone is familiar with them. Few people are probably aware however, that soon after the first ruby laser was created in 1960, the Air Force Special Weapons Center became the leading center for military research into the use of lasers for weapons—research that was soon transferred to the Air Force Weapons Lab.
⁸⁸
But microwaves can also be produced in a narrow “pencil beam”, as is sometimes the case in radar systems. Pencil-thin microwave beams have been produced as far back as 1940 when British researchers developed the legendary cavity magnetron.
⁸⁹
Presumably, a pencil-thin microwave beam could also create an instantaneous burning or “hot wire’ sensation, as has been said about recently revealed Active Denial Systems. The technology has the potential to do damage and burn, leaving visible marks, with some reports on the effects of ADS telling of incidents that caused severe blistering. But beyond Moore’s claim of sensing heat on the back of his neck when he was supposedly being scanned, I had never heard anyone claim to have seen any evidence of the“stinging” beams Paul claimed were hitting him...until the fall of 2006.

I had not spoken with writer/producer Linda Howe for a number of years prior to working on this book, though we had always been on good terms and I considered her a friend. In the fall of 2006 I telephoned her at her home in Albuquerque, New Mexico to refresh my memory on a few things and to get her recollection of events during the early and mid-1980’s. It also gave us a chance to catch up on old times and recent news. At one point in the conversation, I happened to mention Moore’s story of feeling hot and dizzy when Paul said they were being “scanned”, and how it had brought to mind Paul’s stories of invisible beams that would sting him. When I told her how coincidental I thought it was that similar-sounding energy beam weapons had been developed right in Albuquerque by the Air Force, she suddenly related a curious observation of her own. Years ago, on an occasion when she had met with Paul and his wife, she had noticed small marks, little lines that were visible on the exposed parts of their arms. When I asked if she had learned what caused them, she quickly replied that she had been told they were the result of being hit by the mysterious beams! Her remark that followed was uniquely telling, “And all that time I thought he had just lost his mind…”

Even presuming a device had existed that could generate a beam that would produce the reported effects, where would this device need to be placed? To be in line-of-sight of Paul’s home almost certainly would have required a location somewhere in the vicinity, if not his immediate neighborhood. Such a possibility is echoed in Project Beta, with Bishop writing that Paul had apparently seen suspicious vehicles and an unidentified woman coming and going from a vacant house across the street. Supposedly, the NSA was using this vacant house, and Paul had claimed to be able to see their cameras and “sense their sweep” of his equipment. Obviously he did not think “aliens” had taken up residence across the street. Bishop does not credit the information about the NSA using this house but, if correct, it suggests Paul may have begun to suspect his problems were much more down to earth than he had previously thought.

Most of the news released in the past decades relating to military research into Directed Energy has focused on major weapons systems such as the Airborne Laser. Since the days of “Star Wars” research and the Strategic Defense Initiative, news reports have typically described larger airborne, mobile, and space-based systems for defense on a large scale. Little to nothing has been said publicly about smaller individual weapons, what are called “man-portable” systems, though there are interesting references to such developments if you look hard enough for them.

Incredibly, a 1972 Time Magazine article,
Now, The Death Ray,
described work that was then being done by TRW Systems in Redondo Beach, California on a portable chemically-powered laser that could be carried into battle by three men. The frightening description given by TRW Systems in Redondo Beach, California on a portable chemically-powered laser that could be carried into battle by three men.The frightening description given by TRW engineer was that, aimed like a rifle, it would “silently burn a fatal, quarter-inch-wide hole in the body of an enemy soldier up to five miles away…there are no misses”. The overall focus of the article was on Air Force research, stating openly that “Much of the Pentagon’s laser weaponry research is being conducted in great secrecy at Kirtland Air Force Base, outside Albuquerque…”. With the aim of creating high-energy lasers with weapons potential, this early project, “Eighth Card”, was considered by some experts to be almost as important as the Manhattan Project of the 1940s.
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More recently, in 1999, Stavatti Corporation submitted a design for a gasdynamic laser weapon called the Tactical Infantry System-1 (TIS-1), a lethal weapon intended to be fielded by individual combatants.

The above Time Magazine article was written forty years ago, and we are left to wonder where the research may have gone since then. Perhaps it melded into the of the Air Force Research Laboratory’s Directed Energy Directorate and a little-known research group located at Kirtland Air Force Base. This group's job is to design and develop tactical directed-energy weapons, and they go by the very suggestive name of the “ScorpWorks”.

Very little is known about the ScorpWorks beyond what appeared in a December 2005 article in New Scientist magazine and a few scant references online. It has been referred to as an AFRL in-house development group, though “Boeing Scorpworks” has cropped up recently, suggesting Boeing is closely involved. However, a search of the Boeing web site finds no reference to it at all and a search of the AFRL Directed Energy Directorate web site yields only one article mentioning the "Scorpworks" name. This article is a fact sheet on the Personnel Halting and Stimulation Response (PHaSR) laser weapon, a non-lethal deterrent weapon used to distract and hinder an adversary with dazzling laser light (though rumors suggest it may also have a more painful mode.) More information on the ScorpWorks can be found in an article by David Hambling on the Defense Tech web site, DefenseTech.org.

Even more interesting, is word of the Portable Efficient Laser Testbed (PELT), which was described in the above New Scientist article, also by Hambling, as the “first man-portable heat compliance weapon of its kind”. Cursory information on this weapon appeared in a Department of Defense document titled
Joint Non-Lethal Weapons Exercise Reference Book
published in 2003, which listed the PELT laser rifle as a classified program (I was able to obtain a copy through Archive.org).
⁹¹
Included in the document is an illustration of this decidedly futuristic looking weapon and, if you look closely, it sports the unique logo of the ScorpWorks.