The Unmentionable UFO Hypothesis
Why do we only go so far in connecting UFOs, etc. to the parapolitical?
Generally, we are drawn towards unified, or singular, hypotheses and theories. This is one of the larger problem with various tentative explanations regarding the matter of UFOs, close encounters, and abductions. Despite his own decades-long involvement with these phenomenal varieties, Whitley Strieber still makes it a point to stress that the moment we believe we have once and for all contained the issue, a new wrinkle emerges, spreading out and ruining the neat hypothetical surface. This has certainly been my experience, too, as a lay researcher over the past several years.
As with any other domain couched in uncertainties, some UFO/ET hypotheses have more or less popularity than others. By far, apparently, the least popular hypothesis is that many of the phenomena are attributable to some ongoing, highly advanced form of human-directed psychological experimentation and warfare. It is odd that the idea of an even more deeply occulted, and more technically sophisticated, MKUltra-/Project Artichoke-/Project RHIC-EDOM-like program tends to be regarded within these communities with a higher level of suspicion than, say, the idea that “ET”s are inter-dimensional beings responsible for the creation and evolution of humanity. Perhaps part of this has to do with it being a less interesting narrative.
Despite the intellectual reservations and conventionalities of the academic world, most recent papers of which I am aware regarding UFOs and ETs are much more willing to dive into speculations about consciousness than anything involving PsyOps. As one example, consider Hussein Ali Agrama’s 2020 paper, “Secularity, Synchronicity, and Uncanny Science: Considerations and Challenges”, shared with me by Jeffrey Kripal in an exchange over email. The total exclusion of this possibility is especially perplexing here, considering the attention Agrama gives to demonstrable governmental gaslighting about the UFO issue.
Perhaps this is partially attributable to the strange state we live in: citizens have less trust than ever in their governing bodies, yet are, usually, willing to only go so far in conjecturing about the extent of governmental and extra-constitutional corruption, manipulation, and trans-national, orthogonal technological developments for fear of being identified as “conspiratorially minded.” After all, it is obvious that, today, the label of “conspiracy theorist” is about as damning of a term as “racist.” Note that, on this triangular chart someone made in order to categorically dismiss all conspiracy theories, the horrific endpoint of everything is — “antisemitism.”
As an acquaintance recently remarked, on this matter:
. . . the reptilian framework is actually incredibly good for examining our society through the lens of class, even though it is very probably not literally true.
The anti-semitism argument against it is mostly guilt by association, due to the people who have associated with it. It’s another great example of muddying the pool in service of capitalism.
Is there a shadowy cabal of bankers and elites that basically rule the world with impunity? Yeah. Are they all Jewish, or does Judaism have any part in this? Absolutely not. But consider how powerful it is to then associate the two! You’ve now created a situation where anyone who even says the words “bankers” in a negative way sounds antisemitic. The ostracization of being considered antisemitic then effectively controls this formerly class-based critique.
Don’t forget that “conspiracy theory” and the field of parapolitics originated with the Left. The effort to effectively neuter and poison it was a huge project in the late 20th century; thus, COINTELPRO, etc.
Further frustrating considerations here is what I will term the impossibility of the present: no matter how many plots, and executions of these plots, by the FBI, CIA, and NSA are unveiled, it would seem that we tend to regard these matters as not only deviations — that is, as aberrations, rather than as practices fundamental to the functions and operations of these agencies — but as matters only conceivable in terms of the Past. Arrogantly, we render the present as immune to the most pernicious and strange of geopolitical machinations, simply because we are living through it now. It is the Past, you see, where and when the truly nefarious and occulted things occur!
Given the apparent insensibility of UFOs and ETs as topics, I think it is then more than sensible to consider all possible explanations, even if they touch elbows with the paranoiac. And so here I would like to briefly explore the PsyOp angle.
Two of the better explorations of this hypothesis that I'm aware of are Martin Cannon's paper, "The Controllers: A New Hypothesis of Alien Abductions"1, and the paper, by a person going by the alias of Dream's End, "Whitley Strieber and the Paradigm of Doom."2 The former is a broad overview of various psychologically manipulative technologies and their programmatic applications, with connections drawn to certain close encounter and abduction aspects. The latter examines Strieber’s experiences as a child at Lackland Air Force Base, among others, and how those appear to tie into PSI research involving children and trauma response.
I came across Cannon's paper by way of a post on the blog The UFO Trail, and it interested me to learn of these details regarding its original publication:
[Colonel John] Alexander's wife, Victoria, reportedly telephoned Cannon in 1993. She allegedly informed Cannon that Alexander and Hal Puthoff were very angry at Cannon, for whatever reasons, and that Gordon Novel had been called on to handle the situation, whatever the situation and details of its handling specifically may have been considered to be.
Writer/researcher George P. Hansen explained he personally heard the recording left by Alexander's wife on Cannon's answering machine. Hansen wrote: "Alexander has spent some time with Novel and has flaunted the affiliation, perhaps in an attempt to intimidate others. Martin Cannon, an investigator who has written on government mind-control projects, received a call from Alexander’s wife on May 30, 1993. She left a message on his answering machine saying: 'Martin, as an ex-friend I have to warn you. John and Hal [Puthoff] are really pissed off at you. And they’ve given the matter over to Gordon [Novel] to handle. Watch out.' ...Cannon [...] was quite alarmed, and the day he received the message, he called and played me the tape. I suggested that he alert a number of people in the media, and he also notified the FBI."
Of course, the evidence here relies upon pure testimony; but then much of our evidence for UFOs is also testimonial-dependent. It is just as reasonable to not take this testimony as the unquestionable truth as it is to ask: if this account is true, why would Cannon’s paper have prompted such a hostile response? Could it be that Cannon was perhaps getting too close to the mark, or one of the marks?
For a piece of indirect yet relevant commentary, let us refer here to a partially available document, “An Encyclopedia of Flying Saucers”, by author Vernon Bowen:
Perhaps Henry J. Taylor, Billy Ross, and some other commentators were right when they said, quite early in the game, that flying saucers are secret weapons. The only trouble was, they said they were U.S. weapons. Such may not have been the case at all. But certainly, the Taylor “expose” was the only thing that drew instant, emphatic and universal denial by every branch of the armed services, with even a spokesperson for the President considering it important enough to issue a White House denial. There has been no such overwhelming denial of the extraterrestrial theory — there has even been semi-encouragement of this theory all along by the Air Force — although on one occasion a press conference was held following Major Keyhoe’s article in TRUE that claimed saucers were from outer space, and there was another denial when President Eisenhower said, in late 1954, that he had been told that saucers were not from outer space.
But, when it was said that saucers were U.S. secret warcraft, there was instant, overwhelming denial.
Martin Cannon’s paper — importantly, exhaustively researched and cross-referenced with other material, rather than dependent upon its own fantastic speculations — is valuable both for its indexing of a variety of programmatic and technological precedents relating to cognitive control and its recognition of the all-too-human presence within “close encounter” accounts, which tends to be marginalized. For an example of the former, consider this passage:
Perhaps the most interesting pieces of evidence surrounding the abduction phenomenon are the intracerebral implants allegedly visible in the X-rays and MRI scans of many abductees. Indeed, abductees often describe operations in which needles are inserted into the brain; more frequently still, they report implantation of foreign objects through the sinus cavities. Many abduction specialists assume that these intracranial incursions must be the handiwork of scientists from the stars. Unfortunately, these researchers have failed to familiarize themselves with certain little-heralded advances in terrestrial technology.
The abductees’ implants strongly suggest a technological lineage which can be traced to a device known as a “stimoceiver,” invented in the late ’50s-early ’60s by a neuroscientist named Jose Delgado. The stimoceiver is a miniature depth electrode which can receive and transmit electronic signals over FM radio waves. By stimulating a correctly-positioned stimoceiver, an outside operator can wield a surprising degree of control over the subject’s responses.
The most famous example of the stimoceiver in action occurred in a Madrid bull ring. Delgado “wired” the bull before stepping into the ring, entirely unprotected. Furious for gore, the bull charged toward the doctor — then stopped, just before reaching him. The technician-turned-toreador had halted the animal by simply pushing a button on a black box, held in the hand.
Or:
In his autobiography The Scientist, John C. Lilly (who would later achieve a cultish renown for his work with dolphins, drugs and sensory deprivation) records a conversation he had with the director of the National Institute of Mental Health — in 1953. The director asked Lilly to brief the CIA, FBI, NSA and the various military intelligence services on his work using electrodes to stimulate directly the pleasure and pain centers of the brain. Lilly refused, noting, in his reply:
Dr. Antoine Remond, using our techniques in Paris, has demonstrated that this method of stimulation of the brain can be applied to the human without the help of the neurosurgeon; he is doing it in his office in Paris without neurosurgical supervision. This means that anybody with the proper apparatus can carry this out on a person covertly, with no external signs that electrodes have been used on that person. I feel that if this technique got into the hands of a secret agency, they would have total control over a human being and be able to change his beliefs extremely quickly, leaving little evidence of what they had done.
Or:
Unfortunately, even the Freedom of Information Act couldn’t pry loose much information on electronic mind control techniques, though we know a great deal of study was done in these areas. We have, for example, only four pages on subproject 94 — by comparison, a veritable flood of documents were released on the use of drugs in mind control. (Whenever an author tells us that MKULTRA met with little success, the reference is to drug testing.) On this point, I must criticize John Marks: His book never mentions that roughly 20-25 percent of the MKULTRA subprojects are “dark” — i.e., little or no information was ever made available, despite lawyers and FOIA requests. Marks seems to feel that the only information worth having is the information he received. We know, however, that research into psychoelectronics was extensive; indeed, statements of project goals dating from ARTICHOKE and BLUEBIRD days clearly identify this area as a high priority. Marks’ anonymous informant, jocularly named “Deep Trance,” even told a previous interviewer that, beginning in 1963, the CIA and military’s mind control efforts strongly emphasized electronics. I therefore assume — not rashly, I hope — that the “dark” MKULTRA subprojects concerned matters such as brain implants, microwaves, ESB, and related technologies.
I make an issue of the timing and secrecy involved in this research to underscore three points: 1. We can never know with certainty the true origin dates of the various brainwashing methods — often, we discover that techniques which seem impossibly futuristic actually originated in the 19th century. (Pioneering ESB research was conducted in 1898, by J.R. Ewald, professor of physiology at Straussbourg.) 2. The open literature almost certainly gives a bowdlerized view of the actual research. 3. Lavishly-funded clandestine researchers — unrestrained by peer review or the need for strict controls — can achieve far more rapid progress than scientists on “the outside.”
For the latter dimension, that of “the all-too-human presence within ‘close encounter’ accounts”, now consider:
The bizarre story of Rex Niles and his sister (not named in news accounts) may shed interesting light on a variety of abductee cases, particularly that of Betty and Barney Hill. Niles, the high-rolling owner of a Woodland Hills defense subcontracting firm (Rex Rep) was fingered by authorities investigating defense industry kickbacks. He became an extraordinarily cooperative witness in the investigation — until he was targeted by his enemies, who allegedly used psychoelectronics as harassment.
The following excerpt from the Los Angeles Times article on Niles is particularly compelling:
He [Niles] has produced testimony from his sister, a Simi Valley woman who swears that helicopters have repeatedly circled her home. An engineer measured 250 watts of microwaves in the atmosphere outside Niles’ house and found a radioactive disc underneath the dash of his car [my italics].
A former high school friend, Lyn Silverman, claimed that her home computer went haywire when Niles stepped close to it.
No aliens in this story — yet how similar it is to tales of alien abduction! The low-flying helicopters, of course, are frequently reported by abduction victims — the Betty Andreasson Luca case provides the best-known example. The haywire electronics equipment is also frequently encountered in putative abduction cases; I have spoken (independently) to three women who claimed to have been able to disturb or shut off televisions and stereos simply by walking past the devices; one woman even claimed she had switched off her TV simply by pointing at it!
But the radioactive disc is especially intriguing. As former FBI agent Ted Gunderson recently explained to my associate Alexander Constantine, magnetic radioactive discs have long been used by the clandestine services as cancer-inducing “silent killers” — i.e., as tools of assassination.3 Not only that. The disk calls to mind one little-remembered detail of the Hill case — the dozen-or-so circular “shiny spots,” each the size of a silver dollar, found on the trunk of her car directly after the abduction. A compass needle reacted wildly when placed near these spots. Could they have marked the location where an electromagnetic or radioactive device, similar to that found by Niles, was placed on the car? (Such a device might have been held to the spot magnetically, hence the circular impressions.) If so, then the disorienting EMR could have helped induce the Hills’ “UFO sighting.”
Or:
In an interview with me, a northern-California abductee — call him “Peter” — reported an experience which was conducted not by a small grey alien, but by a human being. The percipient called this man a “doctor.” He gave a description of this individual, and even provided a drawing.
Some time after I gathered this information, a southern-California abductee told me her story — which included a description of this very same “doctor.” The physical details were so strikingly similar as to erase coincidence. This woman is a leading member of a Los Angeles-based UFO group; three other women in this group report abduction encounters with the same individual.
Perhaps those three women were fantasists, attaching themselves to another’s narrative. But my northern informant never met these people. Why did he describe the same “doctor”?
One of the abductees I have dealt with insisted, under hypnosis, that her abduction experience brought her to a certain house in the Los Angeles area. She was able to provide directions to the house, even though she had no conscious memory of ever being there. I later learned that this house is indeed occupied by a scientist who formerly (and perhaps currently) conducted clandestine research on mind control technology.
This same abductee described a clandestine brain operation of some sort she underwent in childhood. The neurosurgeon was a human being, not an alien. She even recalled the name. (Note: This is not the same individual referred to above.) When I heard the name, it meant nothing to me — but later I learned that there really was a scientist of that name who specialized in electrode implant research.
Licia Davidson is a thoughtful and articulate abductee, whose fascinating story closely parallels many found in the abductee literature — except for one unusual detail. In an interview with me, she described an unsettling recollection of a human being, dressed normally, holding a black box with a protruding antenna. This odd snippet of memory did not coincide with the general thrust of her abduction narrative. Could this remembrance represent an all-too-brief segment of accurately-perceived reality interrupting her hypnotically-induced “screen memory”? Peter clearly recalls seeing a similar box during his abduction.
Interestingly, Licia resides in the Los Angeles suburb of Tujunga Canyon, a prominent spot on the abduction map: Many of the abductees I have spoken to first had unusual experiences while living in this area. Near Tujunga Canyon, in Mt. Pacifico, is a hidden former Nike missile base; more than one abductee has described odd, seemingly inexplicable military activity around this location. The reader will recall the connection of Nike missile bases to the disturbing story of Dr. L. Jolyon West, a veteran of MKULTRA.
Recently, I finished reading Budd Hopkins' and Carol Rainey's Sight Unseen (2003). The book is organized according to chapters written by Hopkins, who details abduction accounts, and chapters written by Rainey, who attempts to provide scientific explanations according to available data. What is most remarkable about Sight Unseen is perhaps not the data it offers but the speculative framework it advances. Rainey is keen to outline decades-old precedents for technologies and applications, and yet, every time, passes by the question of potential contemporary applications of these technologies — likely unrecognizable to a sort of “public consumption science” — in favor of musing, “Now, just imagine how advanced these technologies might be in the hands of beings millennia older than us!”4
Take this part, for instance:
There is documentation that throughout the Cold War, our own government has more than dipped a toe into the dark waters of “mind control".” Type acoustic psycho-correction or “psychotronics” into your search engine and see what turns up:
1. At Walter Reed Hospital in 1973, Dr. Joseph Sharp participated in an experiment with pulsed microwave audiogram. Sharp sat in a soundproof room, while electronic signals were broadcast toward him in the frequency range of the electro-magnetic spectrum (EM) that carries microwaves — ordinarily inaudible to humans. There was no receiver, no electronic translation device. Yet, in a direct transmission to his brain, Dr. Sharp clearly made our specific words. How was that possible? The microwaves, causing microscopic thermal expansion of the brain tissue, had apparently directly stimulated the area of the brain that processes language. The human ear’s need for an audible pulse with a lower frequency and longer wavelength was entirely bypassed.
2. A 1993 article in American Defense News discusses a Russian mind-control technology, called “acoustic psycho-correction.” Apparently demonstrated in laboratory experiments since the mid-seventies, the technology, say the magazine’s sources, “could be used to suppress riots, control dissidents, demoralize or disable opposing forces and enhances the performance of friendly special operations teams.”
In 1991, after the fall of the Soviet Union, Janet Morris, defense consultant to the U.S. Marine Corps and U.S. Army, was invited to Russia to assess possible commercial applications for the technologies. She and her team witnessed a demonstration of acoustic psycho-correction, (mind control technology) that Morris, an expert in the field of nonlethal weaponry, found quite intriguing. She described it as “infrasound, very low frequency-type transmission” in which the message “is transmitted via bone conduction. […] An entire body protection system would be required to stop reception.” The Russians stated that the message bypasses the person’s conscious mind but is acted upon in less than a minute.
(A frightening thought, but you do have to wonder about the validity of this report. With the godlike powers of mind control at their disposal, how is it that Russia is in its present state of dishevelment? Was it the fledgling capitalism or was it the technology that didn’t pan out?)
3. The U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) also appears to have been interested in the direct broadcasting of audible sound and voice to the human brain. In 1961, Allen Frey, a biophysicist working for the DIA, reportedly experimented with the concept that human beings are capable of hearing microwave broadcasts. He advocated the idea of learning to “stimulate the nervous system without the damage caused by electrodes.” But, for UFO researchers, the most startling part of the report came next. It was almost a throwaway line. In his experiments, Frey said, subjects experienced the intercranial microwave transmissions as humming, buzzing or knocking sounds. As we will see in cases to follow, especially in the case of Anne-Marie, abductees often hear a humming or buzzing sound in their heads just prior to an abduction. We can speculate that they are either hearing the UFO’s power plant as the craft approaches, or the craft’s occupants are transmitting messages of some kind directly into the abductees’ brains.5
As to abductee paralysis, it could be caused by muscular contractions from electric shock — possibly a general byproduct of the UFO power plants’ electromagnetic effect that stalls vehicles and stops watches or by a more deliberately targeted and aimed form of shock to the human electrical impulses. We simply don’t know. What we do know is that abductees regularly report paralysis before and during the abduction. In many reports, the person is temporarily paralyzed by a light beam or object held in the alien’s hand. Richard M. Neal, Jr., M.D., hypothesizes that this effect is caused by “a selective type of microwave radiation [unknown to us] . . . [the sets up] a chain reaction in the Central Nervous System to affect only certain areas and spare those that are essential to vital biological functions.”
Rainey, as noted, moves right past all of the parapolitical implications of such studies and reports in favor of, in the next section, talking about “our alien visitors.”
It is worth remarking upon Rainey’s reservations regarding Janet Morris’ report on Russian technology, because it potentially makes the same kind of error as the one when persons ask: “If there are aliens, and if they do not have our best interests in mind, and if they have had decades, if not a full century, or even millennia, to invade, then — where is the invasion?” A proper response to this sort of question, I believe, is that, if there is any factuality regarding the E.T. hypothesis (ETH), then, by all appearances, the invasion has already begun. In other words, this question rests upon a presumption that “invasion” will look just as we imagine it would. But there are a number of ways it might occur, some of them not obvious at all. At the same time, if we are to put any stock in the ETH, I am not sure how decades of ostensible abductions constitute anything other than a kind of invasion, “alien” or not.
To bring this back to Rainey’s reservation, with associations to another frequent question — “If the technology exists, then why isn’t it being used to demonstrate military superiority?” —, the tacit presumption here often seems to be that the possession of certain sorts of technologies would, as a matter of course, mean the visible application of those technologies and, as a consequence, an utterly impenetrable militaristic hegemony. Indeed, the same question could be asked of the U.S. right now, which is engaged in a hopeless war against Russia with no coherent vision for the conflict’s end, and yet which also by all accounts appears to be one of the primary possessors and appliers of “exotic” technologies.
Either we have to give up the idea altogether that such technologies may exist, or allow the possibilities that 1) such technologies’ applications have surfaced, and continue to surface, in a variety of strange and/or unrecognizable ways6, and 2) that application and dissemination of them is being handled by an extremely small group whose interests are, or have become, more privatized than strictly nationalistic. There is an aspect of irritating, inward-folding humor to this supposed conundrum: we are asking where this or that technology is manifesting, while the conditions for why we are asking in the first place — the decades-old presence of UFO sightings and close encounter reports — are maybe the best evidence for such technology.
Before I move on, I will say that I have given thought to the idea that the source of idiopathic transmissions, or directed frequencies, may be a kind of algorithmic system. Many of these transmissions appear to have common but contradicting information, pseudo-apocalyptic scripts, and/or the inclusion of made-up words with a slight resonance to others.7 Perhaps just enough information and resonances are embedded in these transmissions to make people's pattern-compelled and meaning-making brains — all the more pining for meaning, given the baffling nature of these intrusions — concoct a mythic-spiritual/E.T. basis for what is, really, nonsense.
Given the ways in which these transmissions might newly interfere with age-old mystical interfacings, confusing both individuals and communities, the hypothesis here becomes distinctly depressing. Consider a description of one such transmission or “demonstration” by Karla Turner from her book, Into the Fringe (1992):
After going to bed as usual on the sixth of April, I awoke sometime later in the night, and I soon began to hear music in my head.
I wondered momentarily if I were generating the music myself, but it was so unfamiliar and such a surprise that I didn’t think so. Besides, the music had a very concrete quality about it, as clearly heard music coming through perfectly balanced headphones would be. It was possible, then, that something might be sending the sounds into my thoughts, either by accident or design. I do know that I was not asleep, as I tested my reality several times, opening my eyes, sitting up and moving around.
I heard the music very clearly, for a sustained period of time. It was like synthesized music, light and airy and beautiful, with a strange rhythm and quick succession of notes. As I listened in amazement to this music, I began to “see” a rectangular shape, like a piece of paper, on which the notes traced out ephemeral designs in various colors. The rectangular image and the note designs, like the music itself, I experienced internally rather than through sensory input, yet I saw them clearly.
Then I began to hear other things. As if a radio dial were being moved up and down frequency bands, I picked up bits and pieces of various voices, none of which I recognized. The words made no real sense, just snippets like, “Hey, brother!” in one instance, and another voice that sounded like someone trying to talk in a computerized voice. That was followed by more music, and then the voices started up again, and finally the music returned for a little while longer. It stopped quite suddenly, and before long I fell asleep again.
Is this an example of ephemeral contact with the Other? or of a person, both experiment subject and victim, being targeted by occulted technologies capable of stimulating audiovisual hallucinations?8
For a leap more fundamental to the popular interpretation (or, potentially, gross misinterpretation) of an event, let us turn to lieutenant colonel Philip J. Corso’s book, The Day After Rosewell (1997), which advances the thesis that not only did a craft of exceptional type crash in Corono, New Mexico in June of 1947, and not only did it contain humanoid bodies, but that aspects of this craft relating to its make, as well as the humanoids’ articles, were studied, replicated, and disseminated first to specialized spheres and then to a public unaware of its true origins. As Corso writes,
My boss, General Trudeau, asked me to use the army’s ongoing weapons development and research program as a way to filter the Roswell technology into the mainstream of industrial development through the military defense contracting program. Today, items such as lasers, integrated circuitry, fiber-optics networks, accelerated particle-beam devices, and even the Kevlar material in bulletproof vests are all commonplace. Yet the seeds for all of them were found in the crash of the alien craft at Roswell and turned up in my files fourteen years later.
Corso’s citation of the humanoid bodies and their characteristics, as relayed by army photographs and sketches, and a medical examiner’s report from the Walter Reed Army Medical Center, is an important detail within his book — perhaps all the more because the particularities of these entities suggest an artificial origin — yet, again, of equal or greater import here is the deduction Corso makes of extraterrestrial origins for everything, despite conflicting information he himself delivers. Alternative historian Joseph P. Farrell is keen to point out the unnecessary stretch of such a leap in his book, The SS Brotherhood of the Bell (2006), when he writes:
Corso himself, while wishing to maintain that the technology pointed conclusively to something extra-terrestrial in origin, also paradoxically and repeatedly indicates that something about this exotic extra-terrestrial technology looked peculiarly familiar, and he does so often in the very next breath, as in the following example:
“In those confusing hours after the discovery of the crashed Roswell alien craft, the army determined that in the absence of any other information it had to be extraterrestrial. Worse, the fact that this craft and other flying saucers had been surveilling our defensive installations and even seemed to evidence a technology we’d seen evidenced by the Nazis [Farrell’s emphasis] caused the military to assume these flying saucers had hostile intentions and might have even interfered in human events during the war.”
On the previous page Corso indicates the technology he has in mind, because the military feared that at first “the craft might have been an experimental Soviet weapon because it bore a resemblance to some of the German-designed aircraft that had made their appearances near the end of the war, especially the crescent-shaped Horton (sic) flying wing [Farrel’s emphasis].”
A brief aside: Kenneth Arnold stands as an odd centerpiece in the early days of UFOs’ twentieth-century history, for the details of his report, deriving from a sighting he made near Mount Rainier (also in June of 1947), are not very difficult to find, and yet are also not well-known by many enthusiasts of the subject. Arnold’s report is indeed where the term “flying saucers” derives; but Arnold’s description related to the craft’s characteristics of flight, and not to appearance (so it is noteworthy that one of the main types of UFOs seen since is formally described as a “flying saucer”). Most crucially, the depiction of a craft Arnold is seen posing with in one photograph is not unprecedented; rather, it bears a remarkable resemblance to the piece of radical, and real, German hardware cited above: the Horten Ho 229.
To continue with Farrell’s analysis:
On the face of it this is an odd statement to make, since Corso, who was himself involved in Operation Paperclip, most likely knew that the Horten Flying Wings were brought to this country, not the Soviet Union. But there is more.
“As early as 1947, scientists who had done to the Air Material Command at Wright Field to see the debris were speculating that the electronic potential of the Roswell craft reminded them of the German and British antigravity experiments of the 1920s and 1930s [Farrell’s emphasis]. General Twining was reported to have said more than once that the name of the Serbian electrical engineer and inventor of alternating current, Nikola Tesla, kept bubbling up in the conversation because the scientists examining the damaged craft described the way it must have converted an electromagnetic field into an antigravity field [Farrell’s emphasis]. And, of course, the craft itself reminded them of the German experimental fighter aircraft that made their appearance near the end of the war but that had been in development ever since the 1930s.”
Because Corso’s thesis of extraterrestrial origin most substantially depends upon the nature of the replicated technology, as the “alien” bodies are not a part of Corso’s firsthand experiences, it would stand to reason that such technology must be historically inexplicable. However, Farrell again notes, with reference to Igor Witkowski’s research, that this is not strictly true: proto-transistors and semi-conductor wafers both find their precedents in German-made technology of the 1930s and 1940s9; and there is even, at the very least, conceptual activity concerning spatial coherence and light telephony — the work of August Karolus is cited here — which, in the case of the latter, could very possibly relate to modern fiber optics technology.
Corso further undermines his E.T. interpretation with another set of admissions:
The entire development arc of the radio tube, from Edison’s first experiments with filament for his incandescent lightbulb to the vacuum tubes that formed the switching mechanisms of ENIAC, lasted about fifty years. The development of the silicon transistor seemed to come upon us in a matter of months. And, had I not seen the silicon wafers from the Roswell crash with my own eyes, held them in my own hands and talked about them with Hermann Oberth, Wernher von Braun, or Hans Kohler, and heard the reports from these now dead scientists of the meetings between Nathan Twining, Vannevar Bush, and researchers at Bell Labs, I would have thought the invention of the transistor was a miracle. I now know how it came about.
Two key details should stick out to us here in the context of a terrestrial hypothesis of interpretation regarding the craft’s technology: first, that Corso’s alleged interactions were with exactly the sort of people who would be most equipped to comprehend the technology, given their own conceptual and technical specialties and political/national allegiances; and, second, that it is — not impossible, but — highly unlikely that the technology of a category of beings unimaginably more developed than Earth’s humans could be unraveled in, as Corso states, a matter of months, in the mid-1900s, no less. For sure — in Corso’s own interpretation of origin, this would indeed be a miracle.
An aside: it is interesting to consider Bob Lazar’s testimony alongside this speculative framework. Could it be that Lazar, to this day, has unwittingly acted as an obfuscating whistleblower — one who, in promoting the idea that the United States has long been in possession of E.T. technology and, in the late 1980s, was still ignorant of its operations and capabilities, has disseminated half-truths which simultaneously sound too incredible to be true to the disinclined and, to the inclined, are evidence of a singular, and extraterrestrial, interpretation? Would this tactic not create a highly effective binary, canceling out a “secret third thing” — the truth in between?
To return to the point, then, I find Farrell’s conclusions here more than reasonable:
…more documentary substantiation exists for a terrestrial and German origin for some of the technology [Corso] cites in support of his thesis, than there exists evidence for its extra-terrestrial origin, for which Corso adduces not a shred of evidence other than his stories [Farrell’s emphasis]. Indeed, in these anecdotal stories Corso every now and then includes statements to the effect that our military saw the “German resemblance” in the “ET” technology recovered at Roswell! Unless one is to believe the Nazis’ own Thule Society-inspired belief that the White Aryan race is ultimately of extra-terrestrial origin, the indicators seem preponderantly to point to terrestrial, and most probably German origins for the technology.
Before I finish, I wish to be clear that this miniature evaluation of some evidence for a terrestrial interpretation of UFOs and associated phenomena has never been in the name of exclusivity. I consider the larger parapolitical hypothesis here conceptually porous, and continue to admit the simultaneous possibility of an extraterrestrial dimension, among others, such as a super-phenomenal dimension which Jason Reza Jorjani explores, I believe better than anyone else yet, in Closer Encounters (2021).
In a certain sense, the presence of comparable phenomena might very well represent an advantage for the terrestrial command of such technology. By mimicking it in certain ways, a human agency could hide within similitude, and thus mislead us into the false and inflexible domain of the singular hypothesis — provided that such a hypothesis never exerts scrutiny upon said agency or becomes a major interpretation. Bizarrely, it would seem that, as long as the categorizing of certain ideas as “conspiracy theories” is an effective tool to hyper-politicize critical thought and deflect curiosity, the general public might sooner put stock into the totalizing idea of an E.T. presence over a coexisting potential: a very human — and maybe, by now, very similar — form of technology, manipulation, and propaganda.
I will conclude by sharing a fragment an acquaintance wrote during a recent conversation we had, since it I think it’s a provocative and relevant line of speculation:
So, full on high octane speculation territory here, but this is my working theory: So, before WW2, tying all the back to the Völkisch movement and the Thule-Gesellschaft, there was significant interest in elite Nazi circles in "magic", or, more rightly put, PSI phenomena. As a corollary to that, an interest in contact with non-human intelligences (aliens, spirits, gods, extradimensional non-euclidean horrors, machine elves, whatever). So, I think there was probably a lot of experimentation in that direction in pre- and post-war Germany to that degree.
Post-Paperclip, a lot of those same Nazis were sent over here, and given positions doing the same research they were doing back home. So we get MKULTRA out of that, but also the various PSI programs like the one at SRI later on. I think Strieber and probably a host of other high IQ children were experimented upon as a way to either A) turn them into psychic weapons, B) establish communications with non-human intelligences, or C) explore methods of disassociation and mind control (but probably a mix of all three of those).
There were also parallel, non-PSI based communications experiments going on at the same time, à la the information Ray Boeche got from the Collins Elite, which was that certain elements were doing experiments with EVP type stuff in the vein of Konstantin Raudive as a way to communicate with non-human entities. So, I think Strieber was experimented on and this had the effect of not only mind-controlling him, but also legitimately opening him up to contact with numinous beings.
There appears to be a somewhat persistent belief that Cannon’s paper was published as a book. Cannon himself has clarified, via a comment on a YouTube video concerning the paper, that it was only ever released in the form of a monograph.
Although I have yet to read them, a few books which may be relevant to the research of this topic are Jim Keith’s Mind Control, World Control: The Encyclopedia of Mind Control, Mind Control and UFOs: Casebook on Alternative 3, and Saucers of the Illuminati.
It is perhaps worth citing here the death of, for example, researcher Karla Turner (who, as a “contactee” herself, increasingly found evidential validity in the PsyOp, or MILABS, hypothesis), which a number of persons regard as suspicious, or the assertion in an anonymous letter, sent in July of 1999, to Californian researcher Timothy J. Cooper that Oppenheimer was eventually offed by a form of induced cancer. Naturally, such suspicions and assertions remain unsubstantiated and are likely impossible to prove.
Rainey later became highly critical not only of her former husband Hopkins’ work but of a general credulity and interpretative rigidity pervading the communities dedicated to the research of UFOs. For one example of this criticism, see Rainey’s 2011 article, “The Priests of High Strangeness: Co-creation of the ‘Alien Abduction Phenomenon.’”
Igor Witkowski, in his book The Truth About the Wunderwaffe, notes that a distinct buzzing sound, as well as certain paresthesic sensations, was reportedly one of the short-term characteristics of the Bell. Such short-term effects “…became immediately perceptible after the power had been switched on. These were: a characteristic sound, which could be described as something extremely similar to the humming of bees sealed in a bottle (hence the unofficial name ‘The Hive’ — ‘Bienenstock’ was also used in relation to ‘the Bell’) as well as a series of electromagnetic effects. […] In addition, participants of the experiments felt disturbances of the nervous system’s operations, such as formication (‘pins and needles’), headaches and a metallic taste in the mouths.”
Little attention has been given to the possibility that the ongoing and fairly recent epidemic of mass shootings in the United States may, partially, have something to do with technologies of remote induction. If an extra-constitutional group wanted to lessen faith in governing bodies, promote discord among the populace according to the identities of instigators and victims, and stimulate the foregone conclusion that only the nuttiest people — White Supremacist Right-wingers — will fight for the right to arm themselves, the propagation of shootings has certainly been a viable tactic. Let us also, for example, consider the strange idiopathic phenomenon of so-called Havana Syndrome.
See my two essays on abductions for a slight explication of this aspect: here and here. As I write, “a decades-old demographic of people […] seem to have been infected by a contagious, overlaying transmission of an ostensibly utopic orientation, the core elements of which are relatively stable but the arrangement of which keeps shifting, as if the myth reconstitutes itself with each new host — and, again, a story the host or their therapist barely, or never, interrogates or cross-references with other transmitted stories.”
Author Philip K. Dick is an interesting example of a high-profile figure who experienced a kind of mental invasion possessing some apparent similarities to Turner’s invasion. As Dick’s page on Wikipedia details, “Throughout February and March 1974, Dick experienced a series of hallucinations which he referred to as ‘2-3-74’, shorthand for February–March 1974. Aside from the ‘pink beam’, he described the initial hallucinations as geometric patterns, and, occasionally, brief pictures of Jesus and ancient Rome.”
For the sake of having some restraint with quoting others in this essay, I have omitted these sections from Farrell’s book. For those who are interested and inclined to do their own reading, see pages 311-384 from The SS Brotherhood of the Bell.