JFK, WikiLeaks & UFO Disclosure

In the strange, parallel world of ufology, mention JFK and UFOs in the same sentence, and one immediately thinks of the alleged plan by JFK to publicly reveal U.S. Government knowledge about UFOs shortly before his death. In one Majestic 12 document, JFK asks the CIA director to turn over all “unknowns” to NASA, presumably in preparation for a wider disclosure. For some of you, Marilyn Monroe may spring to mind — the notion put forward by Donald Burleson and others that the movie star may have been murdered over her threat to reveal pillow talk that included, among other secrets, stories about recovered alien bodies and technology.


Granted, these are not allegations for the faint of heart — nor for those of limited imagination. What I have in mind, however, is a different sort of connection. Think of the following as a thought experiment.


A recent historical epoch offers a possible template for UFO disclosure. During the glasnost period in the late 1980’s, UFO censorship in the former Soviet Union began to ease. The Berlin Wall came down, and a treasure trove of closely held secrets flowed into the West. Former Soviet officers came forward with sober-eyed stories of UFOs hovering over ICBM silos and fighter jets scrambled. Scholars tell us that the old power structures of the Soviet Union collapsed because the country was broke. Following this line of logic, might it take an event that shakes the U.S. power structure to the core to bring about UFO disclosure?

Wait a minute? Isn’t the U.S. slouching toward bankruptcy?  The Fed printing greenbacks like a manic suburbanite on a shopping spree?  Indeed, the parallels with the last days of the USSR are striking — including a protracted war in that destroyer of armies, Afghanistan. (Remember, this is a thought experiment.)


You might be wondering how JFK ties in. In a second disclosure scenario, the government doesn’t collapse — only the relevant intelligence agencies. For instance, a whistleblower comes forward and reveals the full and nasty tale of how the cold warriors of the CIA masterminded the slaying of a president in order to save the world from Communism. This is not such a radical idea. The essence of this narrative has been well documented in several excellent books and films, a recent example of which is the magisterial work by James Douglas, JFK and the Unspeakable: Why He Died and Why It Matters. The point here is that a crisis that shatters the credibility and moral standing of the CIA could also shake loose UFO secrets.


One problem, however, is that the above crisis has already occurred, and ET skeletons did not spill out of the proverbial closet. I am referring to the Church Committee’s investigation of the illegal activities of the CIA and other intelligence agencies in the mid 1970’s. During that epoch we learned all about assassination plots, illegal spying on American citizens, and MKULTRA mind control experiments. Yet, even these shocking revelations did not precipitate UFO disclosure.


Is this because UFO secrecy has been privatized, as argued persuasively by Richard Dolan? Or could it be that in the wake of the Condon Committee’s report, the government did in fact get out of the UFO business — in which case, the black vault whose lost treasures are being sought by the disclosure movement is filled with cobwebs and rat droppings but, alas, no alien technology.


In sum, if the U.S. economy does not collapse, the U.S. government does not undergo perestroika, and a UFO glasnost does not break out in the so called ‘land of freedom,’ then who will provide the key to the black vault?


In the face of the failed attempts to breach the government’s wall of secrecy, I turn to WikiLeaks as a possible model. Might there be a Private Manning sitting at a terminal somewhere in the black project world of alien bodies, infinite energy and reverse technology?


If so, Private X, your country needs you.*


(*Two figures who took a crack at filling the role of Private X were UK Hacker Gary McKinnon and Area 51 scientist Bob Lazar. Yet, the conspiracy of UFO silence seems to remain intact.)

There Be Time Travelers

Professor Ronald Mallett, an African-American theoretical physicist, has been working hard on developing a time machine.  When he was ten years old, his 33-year-old father and center of his universe died from a heart attack.  After reading a comic book version of H.G. Wells, The Time Traveler, Mallett began a lifelong quest to turn back the clock in order to save his father.  His ingenious device, based on ideas that flow from Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity, would employ a circulating laser beam to create a closed time-like curve, hence time travel.  While other physicists have criticized his ideas, Mallett nonetheless believes that time travel will be possible during this century.

Guided by early UFO research and the memes of Hollywood movies, most people tend to think of UFO occupants as hailing from other worlds.  Whether they be city destroying cage fighters or intergalactic Mother Theresas, we have come to see the others as truly alien.  Nonetheless, a compelling argument can be made that their origin lies closer to home.

            In Visitors from Time, Marc Davenport presents abundant evidence that UFO occupants are, in fact, time travelers.  Consider that a time machine in many respects is indistinguishable from a spaceship.  Since the Earth orbits the Sun at 67,000 miles/hour, if a time traveler jumps forward or back  a day within her self-contained space-time field, the time machine will be observed to jump 1.6 million miles as seen from a vantage point on Earth — or over six times the distance from the Earth to the moon.  In his book, Davenport correlates several aspects of the UFO phenomena to time-bending, Doppler effects, including: 

• Color spectrum shifts commonly seen in nighttime sightings
• Car engines dying and lights going out — then automatically restarting or turning on when the UFO passes, which Davenport says could be attributed to a dramatic slowing of the electrical energy
• The absence of sound in proximity to a UFO, as sound waves are stretched or compressed beyond the range of human audition

I cannot do justice to the wealth of Davenport’s evidence and reasoning here, and I refer you to his seminal work.  But what excites me about the notion of time travelers is how the physical evidence lines up with what UFO witnesses and abductees actually say.

Budd Hopkins’ concept of ‘missing time’ has entered the cultural vernacular.  This idea arose from Hopkins’ observation that witnesses who had experienced close encounters with UFOs often reported gaps in their memory.  In one well-known case, Travis Walton disappeared from the White Mountains of Northern Arizona after being knocked unconscious by a beam of blue-green light from a hovering disk.  When he showed up five days later, Walton thought that only hours had passed.

In another case which I helped investigate, a woman saw a brilliant white light while driving in a snowstorm on a lonely Wisconsin highway.  When she woke up in her car a day and half later, she was hundreds of miles away from the place where she passed out.  Moreover, her gas tank was still full, but there were no gas receipts — a relevant detail since she was a stickler for saving gas receipts.  She had no recollection of the previous day and a half.

Marc Davenport points out that those in close proximity to a time traveling UFO will participate in the temporal field of the craft.  Within the UFO’s altered time frame, minutes may pass, while outside hours — or even days — may elapse.  This altered time sense seems to find an echo in the oft reported comment by close encounter witnesses that time seems to stand still.  While this may be attributed to an altered mental state, it could also approximate literal truth. 

(Photo by Bradford Evans, "Light Tunnel")

UFO occupants may be no more trustworthy then your average politician, but it is interesting to note that time travel often comes up in what they say and do.  Abductee Betty Andreasson told author Raymond Fowler, “Time to them is not like our time . . . they can reverse time.”  In the famous Rendlesham Forest case — the so called, British Roswell — Staff Sergeant Jim Penniston recalled receiving a message from a landed UFO outside RAF Woodbridge, indicating that the occupants were time travelers from the future who had come for our DNA.  According to John Keel, one fairly credible witness in the Point Pleasant Mothman case was approached by some rather strange looking men who asked her repeatedly, “What is your time?” 

Elsewhere I have noted the apparent preoccupation with our DNA and the future of the planet — which makes perfect sense if you are human descendants and your DNA needs to be restored.  While this body of evidence does not prove that UFO occupants are time travelers from the future, I believe that it makes a good case. 

Of course, there are objections to the very notion of time travel — especially into the past.  One objection has to do with the massive amounts of energy required.  Physicist Michio Kaku has pointed out that while Einstein’s equations allow for a time machine, to drive it would require harvesting the energy of a planet or a star.  The energy to power a single time machine would be vast, let alone to power the sheer number of UFOs observed. 

Then there are the paradoxes generated by travel into the past.  You may have heard of the conundrum created by going back and preventing your own parents from meeting — a metaphysically awkward situation that can be remedied by suggesting that altering the past creates a parallel universe in which your parents did not meet and you were not born. 

I don’t know whether the UFOs denizens are future human time travelers, interdimensional bar hoppers or cosmic joyriders hitching a ride from the Pleiades.  Recently, I was thinking about these matters while strolling along Halifax’s picturesque waterfront.  A young man, a perfect stranger approached me, and, since I was taking pictures of the boats, this became our point of departure. 

“Photography conveys a sense of peace and calm,” he says.

“Yes,” I say.  “It’s like stopping time.”

His eyes seem to fill with a strange light as he says, “Time does not exist. Time is an illusion.”

A Journey to the Dark Side

The closing event at the recent MUFON conference in Denver was a speakers’ panel.  I was standing in line when the young man ahead of me stepped up to the microphone.  After expressing appreciation for the speakers’ contributions, he proceeded to ask a most provocative question.  “I take issue with the term visitors”, he said.  “Visitors knock on the front door and you let them in.”  The so-called visitors and humankind, he went on to say, are in direct competition.  The implication was clear — when two species compete for the same resources, only one wins. 

           

A silence fell over the meeting hall.  It was as if the ghost of J. Allen Hynek had walked across the stage.

The young man’s question slithered through a dark recess of my mind as I flew back across the Rockies and the vast emptiness of the Great Basin.  Why are the visitors here?  What do they want?  Does their presence offer us an opportunity?   Or do we stand in their way?   

The narratives of alien abduction paint a discomforting picture.  Unwilling ‘victims’ taken from misty fields, stalled cars or dark bedrooms in the dead of night . . . awakening on surgical tables surrounded by gray, unfeeling doctors.  This is not the behavior of enlightened, benevolent space brothers.  And there are darker intimations too.  Stories of cows or horses being drawn up in beams of light then dropped in secluded areas with their eyes, udders and reproductive organs surgically removed.  Their bodies drained of blood.  Scavenging animals, it is said, won’t go near the carcasses, as if they are contaminated or cursed.   

(Photo by Mugley, Alien Inferno)

 

Fortunately, serious human injuries and deaths in relation to contact with UFOs are rare.  Two well-known exceptions are the Cash-Landrum incident and the chupas of Parnarama, Brazil.  Betty Cash and Vickie and Colby Landrum were driving through the wooded Texas countryside at night when they came upon a diamond-shaped UFO hovering at treetop level.  The object was expelling flame below it like rocket exhaust.  Later, all three experienced nausea, diarrhea and vomiting.  Betty Cash, who had spent the most time outside the car, was hospitalized with burns and other symptoms of what appeared to be ionizing radiation.  She never fully recovered her health.  

 

Jacques Vallee recounts the story of Parnarama, in his book, Confrontations. In this remote region of Brazil, flying boxlike UFOs shot local hunters with painful beams of light.  Reportedly, at least five people died from their injuries.  A similar case on Colares Island near Belem in 1977 was extensively documented by the Brazilian Air Force.  

 

The Cash-Landrum incident may well have been due to experimental military aircraft, since the UFO was later seen in the company of Chinook helicopters.  However, in the Parnarama and Colares Island cases there are no similar indications.  Close contact with UFOs in other cases have led to radiation burns.  Therefore, if a UFO lands in your backyard, I suggest that you grab your camera — but use the telephoto setting.  Close interaction with alien craft can be hazardous to your health.

 

When asked about the prospect of an interplanetary war, some ufologists offer the staid reassurance that after at least sixty plus years of contact Independence Day has not come to pass.  Ufonauts haven’t turned off the planet’s electrical grid or blasted the White House into confetti.  If the visitors intend to do us harm, their methods and aims are more subtle than a full frontal attack.  

 

Unlike the Texas case, in which Betty Cash and her friends found themselves in the wrong place at the wrong time, the chupas of Parnarama and the island of Colares stand out in the UFO literature as rare examples of unprovoked, intentional harm to humans.  In abduction accounts, the visitors conduct their business with clinical detachment.  Indeed, they seem puzzled by if not a bit envious of human emotion.  If we can find the semblance of morality in their wan reassurances spoken telepathically, we must also note that calming their terrified subjects is certainly self-serving.  Yet, such palliatives suggest an at least rudimentary grasp of human psychology, which is not surprising given that fear is the most universal of emotions, wired to the instinct of self-preservation.

 

The young man is right — the visitors do not knock on the front door.  They magically appear at the foot of the bed.  They approach as we are walking or driving down a lonely road.  Or even in a well-populated suburb.   Close encounters of the Budd Hopkins and David Jacobs kind tell us that the visitors want something, and they are willing to take it without asking.  If we are to find a ray of hope in this parasitic gloom, it is that visitors need us.  They need our sperm and our ova.  They need our DNA, presumably because theirs is defective.  Perhaps they even need our souls. 

 

The lingering question then becomes — what happens when they don't need us anymore?

An Intriguing Case . . .

The most common UFO report I receive is about strange lights in the sky. The lights are often of multiple and/or shifting colors. Sometimes the lights will move in patterns that defy the behavior of conventional aircraft or satellites, such as making right angle turns or ‘crazy’ loops. Sometimes they will blink out and then reappear in another part of the sky. While these cases are interesting, they are so frequent that it may be difficult to derive new information from them about the nature of UFOs.

The more interesting cases involve what J. Allen Hynek, former chairman of astronomy at Northwestern University and father of scientific ufology, called close encounters of the first, second or third kind. Consider the case of Stephanie (witness names in this blog will be changed to protect their privacy) who related the following set of experiences.

Stephanie was tending to her horses one morning when she noticed a thin, rectangular, metallic object across the fenced-in pasture. The object puzzled her, since she was the only one who used the pasture. Even more perplexing — the object had no apparent means of support. In fact, it seemed to be floating in the air. When relating the story to me, Stephanie couldn’t comprehend why she didn’t go over to take a closer look at the hovering object, which would have been her natural impulse.

Later that afternoon, Stephanie returned to the property where she ran into Miguel, the ranch hand who had worked there for many years. Miguel pointed out that her horses were acting strangely, as if they were scared of something. He went on to say that he had seen a metal object in the pasture that looked like a feeder except it was moving up and down and side-to-side. A grounded and dependable man, Miguel was clearly upset by what he had seen. He told Stephanie, “I don’t think it’s from here” — meaning, not from Earth.

 (Photo by Carl Jones, Black & White Horses)

Stephanie reported several other anomalous encounters too. Among these was a sighting in the late 1980’s of two barbell shaped craft larger than 747’s, floating above the trees outside her house. The flying barbells seemed familiar to her and made her feel happy. On another occasion, a strange beam of light danced along the dashboard of her car, making her dog “go crazy.” The way she described these events indicated that Stephanie had a personal, even spiritual, relationship with the source of these events. She confided to me that she wasn’t sure if they were aliens or spiritual beings.

Her curiosity inflamed, one night before retiring to bed Stephanie asked these beings to show themselves so that she could know who they were. Later that night she awoke to see her tabby cat sitting just outside the window across the room. Above the cat was an egg-shaped, golden orb. Stephanie’s thought was, “It’s heard me and it’s telling me that everything is okay.” Upon hearing this story, I wondered if it was a moving dream incubated by her attempt to summon the source of the UFOs. However, Stephanie insisted that she was fully awake.

This complex case presents several conundrums for the investigator. One immediate question was – what did the feeder shaped UFO want with Stephanie’s horses? And why was she so nonchalant when she saw the object hovering in the pasture with no visible means of support? The impression I had when hearing her story was that the UFO in the pasture was affecting her mind, blocking her natural interest and curiosity.

The fact that Stephanie reported so many strange encounters makes one wonder if the intelligence behind the UFOs and orbs had an ongoing interest in her. For instance, it’s not unusual for someone who has been abducted to report multiple experiences. While Stephanie did not claim to be an abductee, she did report several close encounters of the first kind. Another possibility is that Stephanie is an intuitive, and her mind is porous to other dimensions. Yet, didn’t Miguel see the UFO too?

Another puzzle is this. Assuming that the orb that appeared above her cat was not a dream, then what can we make of the fact that Stephanie seemed to summon its presence? If UFOs represent an alien intelligence, then how likely is it that they would show up upon request? It strikes me that true extraterrestrials from other worlds would be here for their own purposes, not to satisfy our curiosity. Or maybe her orb experiences have nothing to do with the UFOs she described. In this case, the orbs might represent a spiritual experience, and the UFOs, a nuts and bolts visitation. However, during my conversation with her that Stephanie clearly viewed these experiences as pieces of a single tapestry.

The skeptic in me might be tempted to dismiss her account as the product of an overactive imagination. But that would be an easy out, a psychological defense against a discomforting metaphysical ambiguity. Most of us like to divide the world into two categories: real or unreal, material or spiritual, fact or fantasy. When confronted by events that seem to have aspects of both, our minds seek to resolve the paradox by leaning right or left, making half of the phenomenon disappear. While I believed Stephanie’s story, in the end this case left me left with more questions than answers. I call to mind writer and publisher Ray Palmer's startling proposition:

Flying saucers are here to make us think.