Police Strike Back Part II

While this is not the type of topic VISUP normally addresses, police brutality is of great interest to me and I believe the following article does a fine job of raising awareness concerning yet another draconian piece of legislation that is slowly making its way through the states concerning the citizen's ability to videotape on duty police. The article notes:

"Police brutality takes many forms around the country on a regular basis, particularly in poor and minority neighborhoods. Sometimes, the only method of accountability is a victim’s word (if they are still alive) against that of an officer. Unsurprisingly, the police officer’s version of the story is often adequate for a judge to dismiss allegations of wrongdoing, unless there is hard evidence of misconduct, such as a video or audio recording, which can be useful to unravel conflicting versions of police-citizen encounters.

"Due to advancements in technology, the average citizen carries a digital camera in his or her pocket or purse, creating a potential army of amateur videographers on every street corner. A quick YouTube search of "police brutality" lists endless videos, often cell phone footage, of what appear to be police acting with unnecessary and violent force. Some of those videos have served a crucial role in bringing charges against brutality that may have gone unaddressed had it not been for bystanders recording."

Naturally an effective, widespread tool curving police brutality is unacceptable to TPTB:

"One would think the fear of videographers on every block would be a powerful deterrent to police misconduct. However, legislatures are not taking this newfound power against police abuse lightly. In at least three states, it is illegal to record any on-duty police officer, even if the encounter involves you and may be necessary to your defense, and even if the recording is on a public street where no expectation of privacy exists. The legal justification is usually based on the warped interpretation of existing wiretapping or eavesdropping laws with statutes against obstructing law enforcement sometimes cited.

"Illinois, Massachusetts and Maryland are among the 12 states where all parties must consent for a recording to be legal. Since the police do not consent, the camera-wielder can be arrested and charged with a felony. Most all-party consent states (except Illinois and Massachusetts) include a "privacy provision" that says a violation occurs only when the offended party has a reasonable expectation that the conversation is private. This is meant to protect TV news crews and people who record public meetings — where it is obvious to all that recording is underway — from accidentally committing a felony."

Naturally the police themselves are quite opposed to such acts on the part of the citizenry:

"In the most comprehensive article to date about recording the police —' The War on Cameras' — Radley Balko interviewed James Pasco, executive director of the national Fraternal Order of Police (FOP), which describes itself as 'the world's largest organization of sworn law enforcement officers.' Pasco argues that videotaping police officers in public should be illegal because it can intimidate officers from doing their jobs. Mark Donahue, president of FOP, concurs, telling the New York Times that his organization 'absolutely supports' the eavesdropping act and was relieved that the ACLU's challenge filed last year failed, adding that allowing the audio recording of police officers while performing their duty 'can affect how an officer does his job on the street.' ”


James Pasco (far right) in photo op with one of the great champions of civil liberties in the modern era...

And we wouldn't want the police effected from doing their jobs, now would we? The hypocrisy of this stance is of course staggering, as the Double Mind is want to be:

"However, when considering recent developments in police surveillance, Pasco's argument is rather baffling. In stark contrast to the laws banning citizens from monitoring police misconduct with recording devices, police officers are equipped with top-of-line surveillance cameras in their cars and on their uniforms. According to a recent AP report, hundreds of police departments across the country are equipping officers with tiny body cameras to record anything from a traffic stop to a hot vehicle pursuit to an unfolding violent crime. The mini cameras have even spawned a new cable reality TV series, Police POV, which uses police video from Cincinnati, Chattanooga and Fort Smith, Ark.

"The cameras are intended to provide more transparency and security to officers on the street and to reduce the number of misconduct complaints and potential lawsuits. Which begs the question: what is the difference between these cameras and the footage captured by citizens in public? Why is it acceptable for police officers to record, but not citizens? Aren't the uniform and dashboard cameras, which unlike citizen recordings document police actions all through the day, intimidating police from doing their jobs, just as Pasco suggested?"

The absurdity goes far beyond the cameras police officers themselves are equipped with. We the American public are progressively moving down a path in which virtually every aspects of our lives in public places will be videotaped. Popular Mechanics hails the new era as 'the Surveillance Society,' noting:

"In the late 18th century, English philosopher Jeremy Bentham dreamed up a new type of prison: the panopticon. It would be built so that guards could see all of the prisoners at all times without their knowing they were being watched, creating  'the sentiment of an invisible omniscience,' Bentham wrote. America is starting to resemble a giant panopticon, according to surveillance critics like Bob Barr, a former Republican congressman from Georgia. 'Were Bentham alive today, he probably would be the most sought-after consultant on the planet,' he recently wrote in a Washington Times op-ed...

"The debate over surveillance pits the tangible benefits of saving lives and dollars against the abstract ones of preserving privacy and freedom. To many people, the promise of increased security is worth the exchange. History shows that new technologies, once developed, are seldom abandoned, and the computer vision systems being adopted today are transforming America from a society that spies upon a small number of suspicious individuals to one that moni­tors everybody. The question arises: Do people exercise their perfectly legal freedoms as freely when they know they're being watched? As the ACLU's Stanley argues, 'You need space in your life to live beyond the gaze of society.'

"Surveillance has become pervasive. It is also more enduring. As companies develop powerful archiving and search tools, your life will be accessible for years to come in rich multimedia records. The information about you may be collected for reasonable purposes--but as its life span increases, so too does the chance that it may fall into unscrupulous hands."

Bentham's panopticon

Of course, powerful multinational corporations and imperialistic Western governments wouldn't qualify as 'unscrupulous hands.' And very soon dear reader, not only will your public life be brought to the light of the surveillance camera, but so to will your private. Our friends across the pound in Britain have already begun a pilot program aimed at installing cameras in the homes of 'troubled' parents:

"The Children’s Secretary set out £400million plans to put 20,000 problem families under 24-hour CCTV super-vision in their own homes. 

"They will be monitored to ensure that children attend school, go to bed on time and eat proper meals. 

"Private security guards will also be sent round to carry out home checks, while parents will be given help to combat drug and alcohol addiction. 

"Around 2,000 families have gone through these Family Intervention Projects so far.

"But ministers want to target 20,000 more in the next two years, with each costing between £5,000 and £20,000 – a potential total bill of £400million."

In the name of a brighter future, all must submit to Bentham's 'sentiment of an invisible omniscience,' except the police forces and all of those other good shepards, naturally.

The Double Mind

The tragic killings in Norway are such a blatant instance of occult-sponsored terrorism that its almost comical. We the public are presented with yet another three named lone nut in Anders Behring Breivik with an obsession with the occult and mystical orders, despite the media's portrayal of this killer as as a white, nationalistic Christian crusader with a good heaping of Nazism for good measure. The Calgary Herald presents a different picture, noting:

"Aside from his interest in Christianity, Breivik appears to have studied aspects of esotericism and neopaganism, and may have been involved with such circles at one time. In regards to followers of the neopagan religion of Odinism, he says, 'Even Odinists can fight with us or by our side as brothers' in the Knights Templar organization that Breivik claims to be a founding member of... 

"The modern Knights Templar will, according to the manifesto, fight 'against the “cultural Marxist/multiculturalist regimes of Western Europe before . . . we are completely demographically overwhelmed by Muslims.' In its romantic view of indiscriminate violence and adoption of militant religious imagery, the organization — whether real or imagined — is in many respects a mirror image of al-Qaeda. The manifesto says that the founders of the organization decided on carrying out a 'large successful attack every five to 12 years . . . depending on available forces.'

"In the manifesto and video are three photographs. In the first, Breivik is shown wearing Masonic regalia. This seems a peculiar decision, but it is extremely significant. Popular legend suggests that the Masonic fraternity was created by the medieval order of the Knights Templar, but Breivik was probably also aware that Islamist extremists have viewed Freemasonry as an enemy for several decades. It was made illegal in Iran after the Islamic Revolution of 1978-79, and the Hamas Charter of 1988 claims that Freemasons 'work in the interest of Zionism...'

"Breivik would almost certainly have known that a Masonic building in Oslo was attacked in January 2009. The assault took place during an anti-Israel demonstration by pro-Palestinian Muslims and left-wing activists, at which anti-Semitic chants and threats against Jewish people were reportedly made. At one point, several Arab-looking youths broke away from the demonstration and led a reporter and cameraman to the Masonic building. They then smashed a window and took turns throwing high-power firecrackers inside. 

"It is possible that this assault was a factor in Breivik’s decision to target youth members of the Labour Party, since a children’s party was being held inside the Masonic building at the time of the attack, and children could be heard screaming in terror after each firework exploded...

"In the manifesto, Breivik acknowledges being a member of the Masonic fraternity, and of taking the first three degrees, but he also criticizes Freemasonry because it is 'not in any way political.' Freemasons, says Breivik, 'claim to be Knights of Christ, yet they are not willing to sacrifice their life for the preservation of European Christendom. They do not even acknowledge that European Christendom is in the process of being deconstructed.' 

"Breivik does commend Freemasonry as 'keepers of cultural heritage.' This appears to be emotionally important for Breivik, who insists that those joining his Knights Templar organization must perform an initiation ceremony that is 'somewhat similar to the ancient and original ritual of the Knights Templar...'

"The manifesto states that he was present at the founding of the revived Knights Templar in London in April 2009. This, he says, is a 'revolutionary conservative movement because we had lost hope that the democratic framework can solve Europe’s current problems.' 

"It may be a coincidence, but 'revolutionary conservative' was a term used by the anti-Masonic occultist and fascist Julius Evola. Notably, Breivik criticizes the extreme right for being inspired by Rene Guenon, a convert to Islam and the founder of the pro-Islamic esoteric school of traditionalism that Evola knew and imitated. Breivik seems to place himself broadly within the school, while rejecting its favourable view of Islam. 

"Breivik says, 'In the U.S., Christian fundamentalists and Islamic organizations are increasingly creating common platforms to speak out against trends of moral decay (abortion, pornography, etc.). Some of these phenomena of traditionalist alliance-building are quite respectable, but they are nevertheless conducive to Islam negationism.'

An image from a video posted by Anders Behring Breivik on the Internet

To call Mr. Breivik's belief system confused and riddled with contradictions would be quite the understatement. The one positive I see from this whole bloody affair is the fine example Breivik gives of the double mind in action, and just how far these contradictions can be ignored.

"The double-mind -the profoundly disturbed mind at war with itself and ignorant even of that fact -is a characteristic of the scapegoat-patsy 'lone nut' cult-killers -and of the American people in general. For, in the this time-frame of ours, we are initiated into their cult by means of exposure to the electronic videodrome. And thus, our prospects become the same as those of David Berkowitz, Mark David Chapman, Arthur Bremer or James Earl Ray. In the 19th century the phenomenon was termed 'masonic apoplexy.' Today it is called zombieism."
(Secret Societies and Psychological Warfare, Michael A. Hoffman II, pg. 35)

We shall now examine various aspects of the double-mind behind the psychosis of Anders Behring Breivik.

For starters, you have Mr. Breivik's anti-Marxist stance combined with his reverence of the Knights Templar. This is highly amusing, considering the Templars were one of the first proto-communist organizations around. Wikipedia notes:

"Though initially an Order of poor monks, the official papal sanction made the Knights Templar a charity across Europe. Further resources came in when members joined the Order, as they had to take oaths of poverty, and therefore often donated large amounts of their original cash or property to the Order."

I shall let historian Thomas Keightley elaborate on this practice:

"This ambitious and covetous order required that he who sought this honour of affiliation with them should, besides taking three vows, pledge himself to lead a reputable life, to further the interests of the order to the best of his power, and leave it the entire of his property at his death. If he was married, and died before his wife, he might leave her a competent provision for life; but from the day of his admission into the order he was to abstain from her bed, though he might continue to reside in the same house with her; for were he to have children, he might provide for them to the disadvantage of the order, or on his death they might give trouble to it by claiming his property. For a similar reason the affiliated were forbidden to be sponsors, lest they might covertly or openly give some of their property to their god-children. They were not even permitted to give offerings to the clergy. If hey dared to violate these injunctions, a severe punishment -in general, confinement for life -awaited them."
(Secret Societies of the Middle Ages, pgs. 202-203)

Now, consider that Keightley is not even referring to the actual members of the Order, but simply to those affiliated with the Order, in the above paragraph. Actual members, such as the knights who came from noble families, were required to turn over all their property upon joining the Order.

"In keeping with his vow of poverty, Hugh de Payens [the first Grand Master of the Knights Templar] gave all of his property to the order, and the other founding Templars soon followed suit. If a new Templar recruit did not have property to contribute, he was expected to come with a money 'dowry.' Once a Templar, he was permitted to keep no money or other valuables, not even books, in his personal possession. If loot was taken, it went to the order. This Rule was so important that if, upon his death, it was learned that a Templar had money or property of his own, he was declared outside the order, which precluded Christian burial."
(Born in Blood, John J Robinson, pg. 71)

This was a major factor in the rapid growth of the wealth of the Knights Templar which eventually enabled them to become the first international banking organization. Here we also find one of the first early overlaps between 'communism' and 'capitalism' that plays into the collective double mind of the masses.

The seal of the Knights Templars, depicting two members sharing a horse

Still, it is Breivik's obsession with Islam, and his total ignorance of the Templars curious relationship with it, that is best representative of the double mind. In Anders Behring Breivik's YouTube video he notes that their are 45 Christian 'democracies' in Europe and 50 Islamic 'dictatiorships' in the world. Yet the Knights Templar, Breivik's champions of the West, were a thoroughly totalitarian organization. Continuing with Robinson:

"Instant obedience to his superiors was required of every Templar, and since the order was responsible to no one but the pope, it essentially created its own system of punishments, up to the death penalty, for disobedience. For example, a penitential cell only four and a half feet long was built into the Templar church in London, and in that cell the brother marshal (military commander) for Ireland was confined for disobedience to the orders of the master. Unable to stand up, unable to stretch out, he was kept in the cramped stone cell until he starved to death. In no other way were the Templars to be bound by the laws of the countries in which they might reside from time to time. Only their own Rule governed their conduct, and only their own superiors could discipline them."
(ibid, pg. 71)

That Breivik would turn his modern Templar order into a glorified terror cell similar to al-Qaeda, and other 'Islamic extremist', is not an accident. In fact, it's likely that that is what the original Knights Templar themselves did after years of close relations with the Assassins, possibly the first 'Islamic' terrorist organization.

The Assassins, or more aptly the Nizaris, are a complex topic, as is their relationship with the Knights Templars. Thus, I will mainly with generals in this piece until a later date when I can give this fascinating topic the depth it deserves. But for now, a brief description of the Assassins/Nizaris:

"Nearly a thousand years ago, the Western world was enthralled by tales of Islamic terrorism, espionage, sabotage and assassination. It was believed that religious fanatics, devotees of a mysterious Islamic leader who lived in an impregnable mountain fortress, had ordered his men to infiltrate enemy cities and assinate their leaders, Christian and Muslim alike. There was no defense against this secret network of killers. They could show up at any time, anywhere, to carry out their murderous agenda. Even worse, they were not afraid to die, and would gladly undertake suicide missions where their chance of survival was nil. This organization came to be known as the hashishiyya, an Arabic word that means 'hashish eaters.' It was from this word that the European language derived their word asssassin, demonstrating a conscious equivalence between this obscure (to the West) religious sect, drugs, and the practice of political murder."
(Sinister Forces Book II, Peter Levenda, pg. 133)

Alamut, the legenday stronghold of the Assassins

Both organizations are generally characterized as fanatics of their respective religions, yet both groups maintained esoteric teachings within their ranks derived from Gnosticism, neo-Platonism, the Qabal, Zoroastrianism, the Mandaeans, and countless other fringe religious teachings preserved in the Middle East at that time. Both groups maintained strict hierarchies in which their most precious secrets were only revealed to the highest ranking members. Both sects were a combination of religious and military orders. And both groups had dealings, and likely influence, upon one and other. Continuing with Levenda:

"There is ample documentation to show that the Assassins and the Templars had financial and other relationships... While somewhat more is known about he Hospitallers and the Assassins... the relationship with the Templars is not so well understood or explicated. The Hospitallers, of course, were not suppressed and information about their operations is considerably better known. Both military orders were warned by the Church on several occasions about their unhealthy relationship with the Assassins, and with Muslims in general. The Church did not condone the tidy little arrangement in which the Nizaris paid a tribute to the Hospitallers for protection against Saladin, and in which the Nizaris agreed to assist the Hospitallers for protection against Saladin, and in which the Nizaris agreed to assist the Hospitallers against their common enemy as well.

"...the close working relationship between the Crusaders and the Assassins is a matter of record in both European and Islamic sources. Only the details are secret, and especially so in the case of the Templars. The Templars and Hospitallers were held in captivity by the Muslims for more than a year at one period, and it is said that they learned Arabic at that time... Templar Grand masters are known to have had Arabic-speaking secretaries and to employ Muslim informers in the courts of the caliphs."
(ibid, pg. 145)

The founder of the Assassins, Hasan-i Sabbah, was also the pioneer of terrorism as a political tool.

"Hasan-i Sabbah knew that his preaching could not prevail against the entrenched orthodoxy of Sunni Islam -that his followers could not meet and defeat the armed might of the Seljuq state. Others before him had vented their frustration in unplanned violence, in hopeless insurrections, or in sullen passivity. Hasan found a new way, by which a small force, disiplined and devoted, could strike against an overwhelmingly superior enemy. 'Terrorism,' says a modern authority, 'is carried on by a narrowly limited organization and is inspired by a sustained program of large-scale objectives in the name of which terror is practiced.' This was the method that Hasan chose -the method, it may well be, that he invented."
(The Assassins, Bernard Lewis, pg. 130)

Hassan-i Sabbah

The major difference between the terrorism of the Nizaris and their modern predecessors is that the former struck with surgical precision, targeting the heads of various Islamic states. They did not attack civilian populations as the later are want to do. For the most part, this method was relatively effective until the Nizaris came into contact with the West, and specifically the Templars and Hospitallers.

"'The Old Man of the Mountain,' says Joinville, speaking of a later Ismaili chief in Syria, 'paid tribute to the Templars and the Hospitallers, because they feared nothing if he caused the Master of the Temple or the Hospital to be killed; for he knew very well that if he had one killed, another just as good would replace him, and for this reason he did not wish to lose Assassins where he could gain nothing.' The two orders of knighthood were integrated institutions, with an institutional structure, hierarchy, and loyalty, which made them immune to attack by assassination; it was the absence of the qualities that made the atomized Islamic state, with centralized, autocratic power based on personal and transient loyalties, peculiarly vulnerable to it."
(ibid, pgs. 130--131)

To this day many Islamic countries feature the same kinds of structural problems. Thus, the scope of targets for terrorist acts was broadened largely as necessity in combating the West. At least, this is what conventional historians will have you believe. But what if another organization, based in the West, but influenced by the techniques of the Nizaris, came to this realization long before the modern suicide bombers?

"Obviously, the Templars and the Assassins shared much of the same mindset. The passion for secrecy, and the willingness to die if ordered to do so, were two very important things the two groups had in common. In addition, they were both religious orders, devoted to God, and they were both military organizations devoted to conquest. The main difference between them -aside from religion -was the fact that the Assassins operated in secret, in disguise, with lethal precision, whereas the Knights Templar were everywhere obvious by their mode of dress, and they struck as soldiers, in the open field, en masse. While the Assassins would take a castle by murdering its ruler, the Templars took a castle by overwhelming its forces in the heat of bloody conflict. But that would all change on October 13, 1307, when the Templars were arrested throughout France and the order went out to crush them in every part of the Catholic empire. At that point, the Templars went underground like their Nizari counterparts, and they suddenly had much more in common than ever before, for they suddenly had a common enemy in the Catholic Church and the Catholic kings of Europe."
(Sinister Forces Book II, Peter Levenda, pg. 158)

Templars burned at the stake

It is quite possible that the Knights Templars embraced terrorism as a political tool as the Nizaris had, with slight adjustments in targets to account for the cultural differences of Europe.

Of course the prior statement is highly speculative -most mainstream historians would not even dare assert that the Templars survived in organizations such as Freemasonry, and certainly would not consider terrorism as a new political tool that these 'brotherhoods' employed. An in depth discussion of these possibilities is well beyond the scope of this blog, though hopefully one day I will address this topic in depth.

For now, I can only point out the obvious, that a member of a modern Knights Templar organization has embraced terrorism as a political tool. And I can point out the blatant instances of the double mind in action, as I have throughout this piece, in the mind of both Anders Behring Breivik as well as the masses, who are literally being mentally torn apart by the contradictions of this tragedy.

Such is the nature double mind, both individually and collectively.

Close Encounters of the PSYOPs Kind Part IV

Much of the new UFO mythology that emerged in the 1980s can seemingly be traced back to a series of documents known as the Aquarius documents. Like many things in the Bennewitz Affair, it began small, like a butterfly flapping its wings on the other side of the world:

"On 17 November, AFOSI's new recruit, Bill Moore, was summoned to their offices for the first time and asked to tell the team what he knew about the state of UFO research. Following the meeting, Richard Doty showed Moore a teletype display for classified internal AFOSI communications on which a new document had appeared. Labelled 'Secret', it contained an analysis of three photographs and two strips of 8mm film shot by Bennewitz. At the bottom of the document was a reference to Project Aquarius.

"In February 1981 Falcon and Doty asked Moore to hand a document to Bennewitz. At first glance it appeared to be the same one that he had seen on the teletype in November, but on closer inspection he noticed that it had been subtly altered. The document read:

"(S/WINTEL) USAF no longer publicly active in UFO research, however USAF still has interest in all UFO sightings over USAF installation/test ranges. Several other government agencies, led by NASA, actively investigates [sic] legitimate sightings through covert cover. S/WINTEL/FSA)

"One such cover is UFO Reporting Center, US Coast and Geodetic Survey, Rockville, MD 20852. NASA filters results of sightings to appropriate military departments with interest in that particular sighting. The official US Government Policy and results of Project Aquarius is still classified top secret with no dissemination outside official intelligence channels and with restricted access to 'MJ Twelve'. Case of Bennewitz is being monitored by NASA, INS, who request all future evidence be forwarded to them thru AFOSI, IVOE...'

"Falcon and Doty were insistent that Moore pass the Project Aquarius document to Bennewitz. This was the first time they had asked him actively to deceive somebody else and initially Moore refused to cross the line: he and Bennewitz were now in regular contact and were becoming friends. But his handlers made it clear that if he wouldn't play the game, then their relationship would end then and there."
(ibid, pgs. 121-123)

Doty

William Moore

Bennewitz

It is generally believed that this faked document represented the first ever reference to 'MJ 12' or 'Majestic 12', which would go on to become one of the cornerstones of UFO mythology in the 80s and 90s.

"Here, near the bottom of this wordy message in late 1980, was the very first time anyone had seen a reference to the idea of a suspected government group called 'MJ Twelve' that controlled UFO information. Of course, no one suspected at the time the colossal role that this idea would play in 1980s and 90s UFOlogy, and it eventually spread beyond its confines to become a cultural mainstay.

"According to the 'mythos' that now surrounds this subject, there is a high-level group, close and answerable only to the president, which since 1947 has fielded reports on all important and hard-to-explain UFO incidents. The group is (or was) known as MJ-12, and was called into existence in 1947 by President Truman -at the time, the only man in the world who had his finger on the nuclear button, and the only one who has ever pushed it. One of MJ-12's first members was supposedly Adm. Roscoe Hillenkoeter, who Truman also tapped to run the National Intelligence Agency, which soon changed the 'National' to 'Central' and eventually used an obscure loophole in their charter to justify all sorts of meddling in foreign and domestic affairs. Allegedly, MJ-12 was formed to deal with the possible threat from flying saucers and their pilots. MJ-12's assignment was to create an official policy on how to spin the saucer stories to the public -foreign and domestic.

"Although it has been almost conclusively proven beyond a reasonable doubt that a group by that name did exist in the time frame of the late 1940s and 50s, no one has yet completely shown that MJ-12 had anything to do with UFOs, though the debate rages to this day. The counterintelligence string-pullers had done their homework, and had used the name of an obscure but significant group as the grain of sand that started a landslide."
(Project Beta, Greg Bishop, pgs. 127-128)

The Aquarius documents went into overdrive in 1984.

"On 11 December 1984, a manila envelope with an Albuquerque postmark dropped through the door of Jamie Shandera, a TV producer working with Bill Moore on his UFO investigations.

"Inside was a roll of 35mm film containing photographs of a paper, dated 18 November 1952, prepared by the first CIA director Rear Admiral Roscoe Hillenkoeter, briefing incumbent President Dwight Eisenhower on the existence of Operation Majestic 12. The Majestic 12 or MJ-12 group consisted of twelve specially selected scientists, military and intelligence specialists brought together following the 1947 Roswell UFO crash to study the wreckage and its occupants. Projects Sign and Grudge, the document stated, had been set up to collect data to aid the group's work. The document referred to the upsurge in UFO sightings that took place in 1952 and concluded that the MJ-12 project should continue into the new president's administration with the 'imposition of the strictest security precautions'. A list of attachments was included with the briefing document, along with a note signed by Harry Truman, dated 24 September 1947, instigating the project...

"Moore decided that the best thing to do with the documents was to sit on them, though he did give copies to a select few fellow ufologists, including fellow Roswell researcher Stanton Friedman and Lee Graham, an aerospace defence contractor. Perhaps this delay frustrated the source of the original package because, over the following months, Moore and Shandera received a series of postcards, this time postmarked New Zealand, with a return address of Box 189, Addis Ababa, Ethiopia. The cards bore short phrases like 'Reeses Pieces' and 'Suitland' that meant nothing to either of the recipients. Then, in what seems like a remarkable moment of serendipity, Friedman, a Canadian resident, asked Moore and Shandera to visit a collection of recently declassified US Air Force documents at the National Archives. The archives were based at Suitland, Maryland. The head archivist there was called Ed Reese.

"Sure enough, in Box 189 of the new document collection, Shandera and Moore found what appeared to be confirmatory supporting evidence for the MJ-12 papers. The smoking gun was a memo, dated 14 July 1954, in which Robert Cutler, Executive Secretary of the National Security Council, advised Nathan Twining, the Air Force Chief of Staff and alleged MJ-12 member, of a rescheduled MJ-12 meeting...

"Moore, Shandera and Friedman kept MJ-12 close to their chests, though word of its existence began leaking out to the inner circles of the UFO community. And somebody wanted it to go further. In 1986, Britain's best-known UFO researcher, Jenny Randles, was approached by an anonymous source offering her evidence of an American government conspiracy to cover up evidence of UFOs. Wary of being taken for a ride, she declined the material.

"In early summer 1987, another up-and-coming British UFO researcher, Timothy Good, was less picky and took the bait, presenting the MJ-12 papers as an appendix to his book Above Top Secret, due to be published that July. Word filtered back to Bill Moore, who decided that it was time to go public, which he did at the National UFO Conference on 13 June. The mainstream press immediately picked up the story, which within days had featured on ABC TV's high-profile Nightline news programme, and in the New York Times.

"Like the KGB's AIDS hoax, MJ-12 had taken three years to travel from remote obscurity to the national news. Timothy Good's Above Top Secret, meanwhile, became an international bestseller and put UFOs once more on to the public agenda. This was disinformation as it is supposed to happen. The MJ-12 papers caused huge fractures across the entire UFO community, pitching those who believed the documents to be the evidence they had all been waiting for against those who felt that they were just another hoax. Twenty-five years later the battle lines are still intact, while reams of further alleged MJ-12 documents continue to surface, creating new dissensus and confusion."
(Mirage Men, Mark Pilkington, pgs. 213-215)

It is quite possible that the leaking of the Aquarius documents took longer than three years to develop. It seems that many of the most noted UFO researchers since the late 1970s were approached with some version of the MJ-12 jive at some point or another. Further, the mid-1980s saw the rise of several UFO researchers with intelligence backgrounds such as John Lear (a pilot for a CIA controlled airline), Bill English (who served as an information analyst at a listening post north of London) and the legendary (or infamous, depending on your point of view) Bill Cooper (formerly of Naval Intelligence) who all made claims similar to those surrounding the Bennewitz-Moore-Doty circle. In the case of Cooper and English, both men claimed to have seen documents while working in intelligence capacities. In the case of Cooper, he claimed to have seen these documents in the early 1970s.

"Someone who worked for the public relations branch of the Air Force dangled the carrot of extraterrestrial proof before Emenegger in 1974. The same carrot was dangled before reporter Linda Howe. Curiously, the man who offered this opportunity to her worked for the same branch of the Air Force and was closely associated with Bill Moore, a UFO researcher who has stated that he had been recruited by Air Force Intelligence as an informer. The same game was played for Hynek and for me in 1985.

"The result of Linda Howe's acceptance of the bait was the sinking of her UFO documentary. Her serious work on such topics as cattle mutilations was also partially and unjustly discredited. And Doty's so-called proof -the Majestic 12 revelation -spliced into the credulous channel of UFO believers by Bill Moore who had previously established his credentials by publishing (under Charles Berlitz's auspices as co-author) a book about the Roswell mystery that claimed it proved extraterrestrial intervention.

"It is very curious to find that a similar scenario unfolded in England at the same time. Researcher Jenny Randles told me that she was discreetly approached to leak out certain revelations about the alleged alien presence on earth. Like Allen Hynek and me, she refused to do it unless she could check the facts and identify the source. As a result she was dropped and another channel was found -the much less demanding Timothy Good, who rushed into print with the information in a book entitled Beyond Top Secret, which supported the Majestic 12 deception without any critical analysis, claiming the governments of several nations were now cooperating with the aliens.

"Another step in the effort to confuse and to destabilize serious research into UFOs was taken when John Lear came into contact with the claims of Paul Bennewitz
(Revelations, Jacques Vallee, pgs. 178-179)

William Cooper

John Lear

Whether Cooper and company were actively working as disinformation agents or simply unwitting dupes in spreading the Majestic-12 mythos will probably never be known. But it does illustrate in fine fashion how an effective disinformation campaign works. Now, we shall consider some of the extreme measures the disinformation campaign took in regards to Bennewitz. One such incident involves yet another highly reputed UFO researcher.

"In mid-1981 Bennewitz received a distinguished visitor, Professor J. Allen Hynek, the famed astronomer and UFO researcher, who had brought a new computer with him. This was a visit from UFO royalty and, once again, would only have confirmed to Bennewitz that he was on to something important. Hynek had been closely involved with UFOs since he was hired to assist the US Air Force's Project Sign in 1948. Initially dubious of the subject, Hynek became convinced that the phenomenon represented something real and unknown, and in the late 1960s he turned against the Air Force. In his 1972 book The UFO Experience Hynek denounced Project Blue Book as a sham and introduced his own system for categorizing UFO encounters, which included 'Close Encounters of the Third Kind' to describe encounters with beings on board a UFO...

"At the time of his visit to Bennewitz, Hynek was running the Center for UFO Studies while holding a professorship at Evanston University and, allegedly, receiving a $5,000-a-year honorarium from the Air Force campaign against Paul Bennewitz? It would certainly shoot holes in his image as the Colonel Sanders-lie kindly 'godfather' of scientific ufology. But Bill Moore claims that Hynek himself told him that the Air Force instructed him to deliver the computer, which contained their own special software, to Bennewitz, and not to tell him where it came from.

"Bennewitz set up the new computer and began feasting on the vastly 'improved' decoded messages that it delivered to him. A sample of these new texts reveals how consumed Bennewitz was by his alien fantasy: 'VICTORY OUR BASES OBTAIN SUPPLIES FROM THE STARSHIP METAL TIME IS YANKED TIME IS YANKED MESSAGE HIT STAR USING REJUVINATION [sic] METHODS GOT US IN TROUBLE SIX SKY WE REALIZE TELLING YOU ALL MIGHT HELP YOU.' There are pages and pages of this material. Moore thought that the new computer assigned 'entire words, sentence fragments, or sometimes even entire sentences themselves to the various individual pulses of energy' being transmitted into Bennewitz's home..."
(Mirage Men, Mark Pilkington, pgs. 124-125)

J. Allen Hynek

By now I'm hoping that those of you reading this will be grasping the true futility of taking anything anyone involved in the UFO field says at face value. Hynek has about as clean an image within the UFO field as you can find -he was in the vanguard of 'scientific UFO research' for decades. Undoubtedly many of his colleagues will deny his ties to the Bennewitz affair, and not without good reason: The only source for this allegation is Bill Moore himself, an admitted disinformation agent. On the other hand, Hynek has long been associated with Dr. Jacques Vallee, who has been cited extensively in this piece.

Jacques Vallee

Regular readers will know that I'm quite a big fan of Vallee's theories surrounding UFOs. On the other hand, Vallee also became closely associated with the whole Nine circle centered around Puharich and Geller and others in the mid-1970s, as noted in part III of this series. While I tend to believe that Hynek and Vallee were too sharp to allow themselves to be manipulated to the extent as individuals like Moore or William Cooper, both rubbed shoulders with more than their fair share of spooks and military men over the course of their legendary careers. Despite Vallee's denials above, its quite possible either or both had to deal with the devil from time to time in exchange for the access they sought.

Anyway, back to the campaign against Bennewitz. One of the most truly striking features was that of a fake alien underground base, built around Dulce, NM, for the sole purpose of drawing Bennewitz's attention away from the base at Kirkland.

"...AFOSI began 'set-dressing' the Archuleta Mesa to look more like the underground base that the physicist believed it to be. At night, old military equipment was hauled up the long winding tracks to the top of the Mesa. Shacks, broken-down vehicles and air vents were tactically arranged to give the impression of an active location, while patches of scrub were cleared to look like landing pads for helicopters and, perhaps, UFOs. Doty claims that his team also set up a system for projecting lights on to the clouds above, generating new UFO reports to keep Bennewitz, Valdez and others coming back for more.

"An underground base also needs staff, so Kirkland's Special Forces unit was sent out to the area to look busy. AFOSI also contacted Fort Carson Army Base on the Colorado side of the Mesa and suggested that they use it for training exercises. According to Doty, AFOSI even subsidized these Army exercises, explaining that their manoeuvres would be part of an anti-Soviet counter-intelligence operation; which in a strange way, they were. On one occasion Gabe Valdez and a TV crew were shooting a news segment about local UFO sightings with Bennewitz when a Blackhawk helicopter buzzed their own chopper. Panicked, the news crew landed, followed by the Blackhawk. Valdez angrily confronted the blackclad Army men on board, pointing out that they were within his jurisdiction as Highway Patrolman. Before being warned off, Valdez got a close look at one of the soldier's patches and noted that they were from Fort Carson's elite Delta Force unit.

"Bennewitz, himself a skilled pilot, would regularly fly over the Mesa looking for entrances to the alien base, and on at least three occasions was given guided tours by Rick Doty and Colonel Edwards, Kirkland's security chief, who showed him the vents and other paraphernalia that had been placed there by AFOSI. Encouraged by AFOSI, Bennewitz distributed regular reports about the base to the UFO community, incorporating his own photographs of blurry 'UFOs' and indistinct surface features on the Mesa. These gave rise to an elaborate mythology about Dulce's alien base that would incorporate detailed drawings of its interior and dramatic accounts of showdowns between the US military and the base's ET inhabitants."
(ibid, pgs. 159-160)

Those of you familiar with the various players in the UFO field will recognize the name Gabe Valdez. For those of you who haven't kept track, Valdez was a New Mexico Highway Patrolman based out of the Dulce area who began investigating a rash of cattle mutilations in the area in the mid-1970s. He would eventually come into contact with Bennewitz, bringing the cattle mutilation mythos into the affair. It went something like this:

"The New Mexico State Police office in Cimarron received a strange telephone call on May 6, 1980. The desk sergeant heard a frightened and confused voice on the receiver describing a weird experience the night before. All he could understand was something about incredibly bright lights and herds of cattle and the female caller's fear that she might have seen some strange 'people.' The officer asked her name for the report. 'I'm Myrna Hansen,' she replied. 'Can you help me?' The woman had no idea at the time that her story would help Paul Bennewitz usher in a new and frightening age of alien interventions.

"The cattle mutilations by aliens that Hansen would end up describing is a story that actually began years earlier with not a cow but a horse. In 1967, rancher Harry King of Amalosa, Colorado, found his prized horse 'Lady' missing. Saddling up another horse, he soon found Lady's carcass on a nearby mesa. The animal looked like it had been deliberately killed. The throat was cut and some of the hide on the head and neck was removed. The brain and stomach were missing as well. Circular 'exhaust marks' around the body, as well as a substance that burned the skin when touched, only added to the mystery. In an effort to make sense of the senseless act, King connected Lady's disappearance and death with mysterious floating lights that were seen in the area. It was to be the beginning of an uneasy era.

"As the phenomenon spread throughout the West in the early 1970s, the FBI became involved, even though the killing and mutilation of livestock was not specifically a federal crime. In Minnesota, Agent Don Flickinger of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacoo, and Firearms investigated the possibility that satanic cults were involved. Even though he received anonymous threats and once found his front door daubed with blood, his agency never found the culprits. Hundreds and then thousands of reports continued to flood in from Colorado, Minnesota, Nebraska, Kansas, Oklahoma, Wyoming, South Dakota, Montana, Texas, and New Mexico. Some were misidentifactions of natural deaths, but a core of cases convinced law enforcement that an organized and well-financed group was responsible. The mutilations were simply too difficult to perform in secret without access to surgical instruments and heavy equipment that could lift the carcasses and drop them in remote areas, leaving no footprints or other evidence on the ground.

"Many had heard of the cattle mutilation phenomenon, and most UFOlogists had assumed for years that something from Out There was responsible. Bennewitz was keenly interested in the problem, and developed his own theories as to their origins. He was utterly convinced that the extraterrestrials were responsible, but he needed incontrovertible evidence. In May of 1980, Myrna Hansen's encounter delivered it literally to his doorstep, and the UFO link to animal mutilations would be forged."
(Project Beta, Greg Bishop, pgs. 9-11)

Incidentally, the cattle mutilation/UFO connection was initially by a peculiar source.

"Soon afterwords it looks as if an attempt was made, via the faked Ellsworth documents sent to the Enquirer in 1978, to identify the events with ETs and UFOs, perhaps a ploy to keep the nationals from investigating further. For reporters on the major papers, taking an interest in the ICBM incidents would have allied them with the kooks, the UFO conspiracists and, worse, the National Enquirer."
(Mirage Men, Mark Pilkington, pg. 156)

Anyway, back to Valdez, Bennewitz, and Myrna Hansen:

"The Cimarron officer who had taken the call from Hansen knew Valdez as the 'cattle mutilation guy,' and called the Dulce office to ask hm what to do. When Valdez heard Myrna Hansen's story, he immediately got his new friend, Paul Bennewitz, on the line. Yes, Bennewitz could get a sympathetic party who knew about UFO entity encounters, and was a professional psychologist to boot, but the witness had to come to Albuquerque for the procedure. With a few phone calls, Valdez arranged for one of the Cimarron officers to drive Hansen and her son 200 miles to the Bennewitz home."
(Project Beta, Greg Bishop, pg. 15)

Gabe Valdez

The 'smoking gun' Bennewitz extracted from Hansen was a hypnotic session under the direction of University of Colorado psychologist Leo Sprinkle, whose intelligence ties I've discussed before here. Under the direction of Bennewitz and Sprinkle Hansen recounted mutilations of both people and animals as well as being abducted on May 6th and taken off to an underground base where she witnessed the mutilations. And thus, several of the most enduring features of modern UFOlogy were born.

Before leaving the cattle mutilations, I would like to briefly mention the first meeting between Bennewitz and Valdez.

"On 20 April 1979... Senator and former moonwalking astronaut Harrison Schmitt convened a very unusual conference in Albuquerque. Present at the all-day meeting were ranchers and law enforcement officials from New Mexico, Colorado, Montana, Arkansas, Nebraska, all seeking answers to one question: who, or what, was killing and mutilating their cattle? Also in the audience were Paul Bennewitz..."
(Mirage Men, Mark Pilkington, pg. 149)

Gabe Valdez was also in the audience and it was here that he and Bennewitz would first meet. I find the dating of this event most curious. Regular readers know that the date of 4/20 is of keen interest on this blog. It is notorious as both an unofficial cannabis holiday, as well as the birthday of Adolf Hitler. More information can be found on it here. As mentioned in part two of this series, it was also the date, in 1950, when the CIA began its first psychological warfare operations under the auspices of notorious former CIA director and UFO buff Rear Admiral Roscoe Hillenkoeter.

Roscoe Hillenkoeter

I find it most interesting that cattle mutilations were also initially linked to satanic cults. I covered this topic a bit in my series on Satanic Ritual Abuse, which can be viewed here, here, and here. I concluded that while cult-like organizations such as the Finders have been involved in child sex trafficking, there did not appear to be a vast network of 'satanic cults' at play across the country. What there does appear to be is a vast underground network dedicated to the trafficking of children for the the sexual needs of the wealthy and influential. This network largely functions under the auspices of various military and intelligence groups that use it as a means of fundraising, blackmail, and even terrorism (do not forget the scale of the Satanic Ritual Abuse Panic of the 1980s and early 90s). At times various cult-like organizations have been used as part of this network, adding to the mythos. This is of course strikingly similar to what we have encountered during this investigation into the modern UFO phenomenon. More on that in a little bit.

One final thing I would like to address before leaving the Bennewitz affair is its truly bizarre reaches into pop culture via The X-Files and series creator Chris Carter. Once again, we find Richard Doty working tirelessly behind the scenes.

"Years after his AFOSI involvement with saucer researchers, Doty's career reached an apotheosis of sorts when he was actually invited to become a consultant for The X-Files, a position he says he held from 1994 to 1996. In time, he also wrote the screenplay for an episode, 'The Blessing Way,' which aired on September 22, 1995, although producer Chris Carter received writing credit. Doty also appeared as an extra in two episodes: 'Anasazi,' which aired on May 19, 1995, and 'Paper Clip,' shown on September 29 of the same year. He tried to write another, but says that it was 'killed' by a government agency that he was required to run everything past before turning any of it in for production. After the final season of the show, X-File producer Chris Carter was reportedly spotted at the Los Angeles FBI shooting range, which makes one wonder who was courting whom."
(Project Beta, Greg Bishop, pgs. 82-83)

Carter

Doty is of course far from the most reliable source on the face of the Earth. But consider one of his prior projects, a novel inspired by Doty that was supposed to have been written by Bob Moore and National Enquirer scribe Bob Pratt:

"The book, as plotted by Pratt and Moore, would tell the story of D, a patriotic American soldier who returns from a devastating tour of duty in Vietnam feeling betrayed by his country. D is recruited into the intelligence field, where he is tasked with feeding false UFO information to one Dr Berkowitz (a thinly disguised Paul Bennewitz), before being called in to investigate a case of an unknown object tampering with a nuclear missile in a South Dakota silo (a play on the Ellsworth hoax). D gradually discovers that there is a high-level, super-secret UFO programme buried deep within the US government. This is Project Aquarius and the organization that acts as its custodian is Majestic, or MJ-12

"As D is drawn deeper into the UFO conspiracy he learns that historical figures including Jesus Christ, Muhammad and Adolf Hitler were all in the control of extraterrestrials. Reflecting information supplied to Moore by Doty, D learns that there are three alien species interacting with the Earth: the beatific Nordic-looking humanoids (like George Adamski's Orthon) had originally seeded human life here and were discreetly guiding our development; the malevolent Greys were abducting humans and mutilating cattle as part of a genetic harvesting programme, while a third species wanted to plunder Earth's natural resources. The US government knew all about these aliens, and through MJ-12, kept tabs on them, occasionally negotiating with them in exchange for advanced technologies. But MJ-12 was ultimately powerless to stop the aliens, hence the need for a cover-up. How does a government tell its citizens that their genes and the planet's resources are in alien hands without inducing a state of total chaos? After getting too close to the truth, our hero D decides that the people deserve to know what's really going on. He starts leaking genuine UFO material to researchers -like Bill Moore and Bob Pratt -but is assassinated by MJ-12. His body is handed over to one of the alien races and flown back to their planet in a downbeat twist on Close Encounters of the Third Kind's grand finale."
(Mirage Men, Mark Pilkington, pgs. 141-142)

Obviously several of these plot threads are quite similar to story lines that later appeared in The X-Files. Doty apparently joined the show as a consultant at some point during the tale end of season one or early in season two, when the show's mythology begins to take shape. The episode that Doty claims to have written, "The Blessing Way," was extremely important in the show's mythology. It was the season three premier and featured the introduction of the native American shaman Albert Hosteen, a reoccurring character that would play a small but significant role in the series. It was also the first time the show overtly addressed the religious overtones of the UFO experience. The Hosteen character would later appear in the season six finale "Biogenesis" and the second part of the season seven premier, "The Sixth Extinction II: Amor Fati" in which extraterrestrials are revealed to be behind all the world's religions. Doty had left the show by then, but one can't help but wonder to what extent he influenced this particular storyline.

Albert Hosteen in "The Blessing Way"

Well dear reader, we have come a long way. I will wrap things up with a few closing thoughts: As noted in part three of this series while discussing the Nine, I do believe that there is something else at play in the UFO phenomenon other than the military and intelligence communities. On the other hand, I seriously doubt that this something is extraterrestrial. For more on my thinking on this topic, check here, here, and here, for starters. Further, I find it most perplexing that there is such an obsession with convincing the public at large that this something must be extraterrestrial. That such a colossal effort has been put forth to this end is highly suspicious in and of itself.

Finally, I will point out again the specter PSYOPs has played in various fringe groups and cultures across American society since the post-WWII era. In this piece I examined the role the intelligence community played in creating the drug culture. Here and here I covered the deep background behind the Manson Family cult and the broader serial killer phenomenon that went into overdrive in modern America. As previously noted, Satanic Ritual Abuse and child sex trafficking, and there links to the military and intelligence community, were addressed here, here, and here.

In all three cases, and now in the UFO phenomenon, we can see the specter of PSYOPs in full bloom. These various threads have enabled the powers behind the throne to track and even use various fringe movements and individuals to their own ends while spreading a general wave of terrorism across America that is only now beginning to come into full view. Extraterrestrials have become the new creators, Manson is a kind of messiah, pedophilia is a ritual now thinly endorsed in popular culture while conventional dope was attempted as a new sacrament before painkillers and anti-depressants provided a more potent means of control. And behind all of these threads we find a similar source.

Close Encounters of the PSYOPS Kind Part III

This is part three of my UFO series. Parts one and two can be viewed here and here.

And now onto the intelligence links behind the Nine. While Andrija Puharich is generally portrayed as an accomplished scientist and inventor with heavy New Age leanings, he also has a very deep background, in the Peter Dale Scott sense.

"According to Jack Sarfatti, a physicist on the fringes of the Puharich-Geller-Whitmore events of the min-1970s, Puharich 'worked for Army Intelligence in the early fifties -which perhaps implies that his 'discharge' was a cover for continuing to operate in an apparently civilian capacity. It also appears that some of Puharich's medical inventions were originally developed as part of classified Army projects.

"In 1987, Puharich himself claimed that he had been part of a US Navy investigation called Project Penguin that researched psychic abilities back in 1948. He named the head of this project as Rexford Daniels, who lived close to his home in Glen Cove in the 1950s. According to writers Peter Tompkins and Christopher Bird, Daniels -who studied the effects of electromagnetic waves on human beings -became convinced, in the 1970s of the existence of some kind of intelligent force in the universe operating through electromagnetic frequencies and that 'human beings can mentally interact with it.'

"Ira Einhorn, Puharich's close associate in the 1970s, told us recently that, although Puharich had worked for the CIA during the 1950s, he was no longer doing so twenty years later. However, evidence points very much in the other direction. Puharich's relationship with intelligence agencies almost certainly did not end in the 1950s. Uri Geller told us at a meeting in his home near Reading in England in 1998 that: 'The CIA brought Puharich in to come and get me out of Israel.' Jack Sarfatti goes further, claiming: 'Puharich was Geller's case officer in America with money provided by Sir John Whitmore.' And according to James Hurtak, via his Academy For Future Sciences, Puharich 'worked with the US intelligence community.' By implication this was during the early 1970s when he, Hurtak, was also working with him.

"We know Puharich was working with the CIA on experiments with various techniques for inducing altered states of consciousness, which is another way of saying he worked on the potential of mind control. We also know, at least up to a point, that Geller worked for them -they wanted to know how he could use his mind to influence inanimate objects and see distant locations -in other words, to test his remote-viewing abilities. Were the Nine somehow part of a CIA mind-control experiment?"
(The Stargate Conspiracy, Picknett and Prince, pgs. 206-207)

Further, Puharich was deeply involved in hypnosis.

"...his [Puharich] personal training in hypnosis to the level of master hypnotist, at which stage are revealed such mysteries as the 'instant command technique' so often used, and arguably abused, by stage hypnotists...

"Writer Stuart Holroyd later (rather worryingly) described hypnosis as 'a routine procedure in Puharich's investigation of pyschics', which raises some ethical questions about his methods. The altered state of consciousness known as hypnosis is by no means fully understood, but it is well known that entranced subjects are notoriously eager to please their hypnotists by creating fantasies that comply with his or her own predilections or agendas. Hypnotist and subject can soon become partners in a strange and wild dance in which sometimes one person leads and sometimes the other, although it is usually the hypnotist who calls the tune."
(ibid, pgs. 169-170)

Hypnosis can have far more sinister implications than Picknett and Prince address. Two prior blogs I wrote on hypnosis address some of these implications here and here. In the case of the Nine, many of Puharich's 'findings' occurred while the subject was under hypnosis. Continuing with Picknett and Prince:

"From the accounts of contact with the Nine, it is obvious that Puharich steered his 'contactees' very much in the direction that he wanted them to go. When he first hypnotized Uri Geller, who then began to speak of extraterrestrials, it was Puharich who asked whether or not they were the 'Nine Principles' spoken of by Dr Vinod twenty years before. Perhaps not surprisingly, the answer was yes...

"...Similarly, when Puharich put Bobby Horne into a hypnotic trance and he began to speak the words of an extraterrestrial intelligence called Corean, Puharich suggested to him that it was really the Nine, and the 'entity' immediately agreed. In fact, one of Puharich's close colleagues during this time, Ira Einhorn... confirmed Puharich's determination to turn all psychic communication into contact with the Nine, and that he was 'humanly directing' the pattern of the channelling."
(ibid, pg. 216)

Puharich even went so far as to experiment on children in a hypnotic state in an attempt to induce extraterrestrial contact.

"Consider, for example, Puharich's Geller Kids or Space Kids, whom he tested and trained during the 1970s. There were twenty of them, the youngest nine and the oldest in their late teens, culled from seven different countries and taken to what became jokingly known as Puharich's 'Turkey Farm' at Ossining in order to develop their psychic potential. As we have seen, Puharich trained them in remote viewing, but target locations he set them were significant: they were military or intelligence interest and included the Pentagon, the Kremlin and even the White House. It seems clear that there was an official element to these experiments, as they were being carried out at exactly the same time (1975-8) that defense and intelligence agencies were studying remote viewing in adults. We can speculate that the Ossining establishment was chosen for the children's project because it was a conveniently 'civilian' location: questions would certainly have been asked if youngsters had been experimented on inside military facilities.

"The Ossining programme had even more disturbing elements: Puharich experimented on the children in order to contact extraterrestrial intelligences. As with Geller and Bobby Horne, he regularly hypnotized his young subjects, apparently in the belief that their powers did indeed come from 'aliens'. As Steven Levy wrote: 'The Kids describe strange cities with science-fiction trappings and claim to be messengers from these distant civilisations.'

"Given Puharich's obsession with extraterrestrial influence, not to mention his indiscriminate use of the most powerful sort of hypnosis, it would be strange if the Space Kids had not come up with such descriptions. But was Puharich simply releasing memories of real events, or was he in fact implanting them? In either case, his use of hypnosis, in what were clearly uncontrolled conditions, on children as young as nine, is extremely disquieting."
(ibid, pg. 226)

Puharich's 'Space Kids' make for some interesting implications. One of the main arguments for the existence of the Nine is that to many individuals have encountered them without direct contact from Puharich. On the other hand, what if other groups of children were 'programmed' earlier in much the same fashion Puharich is described as doing above, with the good doctor then using certain 'triggers' to bring back these memories? Consider, for instance, a strange experience Dr. Jack Sarfatti had as a child.

"Jack Sarfatti, on the other hand, had been a gifted child who won a scholarship to Cornell to study physics in 1956, when he was only seventeen years old. In 1953, however, and during the same year as Puharich and the Round Table were in contact with The Nine, Sarfatti had been getting strange phone calls at home. Much later, Puharich's book, URI, brought it all back. Sarfatti's mother began reading the book -which contains a description of the Round Table seances with the Dr. Vinod who channled The Nine -and suddenly recognized the symptoms. She brought the circumstances to her son's attention and the memory of the strange phone calls came back in full force. 

"Sarfatti had been getting calls from someone speaking in a strange, metallic voice stating that it was the voice of a computer aboard a spacecraft hovering over the earth. These calls went on for a while, and would cause the young Sarfatti to wander around dazed. Evidently, the memory of the calls receded into his unconscious as he pursued his career in nuclear physics, and only the book by Puharich about Uri Geller brought it all back. The Nine claimed to be aboard a spacecraft, hovering over the earth, called Spectra. Sarfatti himself seemed selected at a very early age for something of importance. He was being tutored in a separate program for gifted children by a founder of American MENSA, Walter Breen, in a program that was funded (at least in part) by the Sandia Corporation. Some of this extracurricular training included lectures on patriotism and anti-Communism: heady stuff for a bunch of thirteen-year-olds. It would be Breen who would recommend Sarfatti for the Cornell scholarship."
(Sinister Forces Book Two, Peter Levenda, pg. 244)

Essentially Sarfatti began receiving these phone calls at the same time as he was being groomed for his future career in nuclear physics. The possibility that the phone calls could have been related to his time in the MENSA program was not lost on Sarfatti.

"Given this background, it is tempting to speculate that Sarfatti was part of a sinister, X-Files-type experiment in 'programming' children as part of some long-term government project. Sarfatti himself acknowledges the possibility, but thinks too much remains unexplained by this scenario. Tellingly, in a question-and-answer session on the Internet in March 1998 with one Mark Thornally, when asked whether Walter Breen could have stage-managed the phone calls and computer voice, Sarfatti admitted that he could, then volunteered: 'Andrija Puharich, who was in the Army at that time I think, would have been able to do it."
(The Stargate Conspiracy, Picknett and Prince, pg. 244)

Is it possible that individuals like Sarfatti and Geller were experimented on as children by Puharich, or someone in the same line, in a fashion similar to the Space Kids? Was it mere chance that Sarfatti, Geller, Robert Anton Wilson, Jacques Vallee, Saul Paul Sirag, and many more were brought together in a loose collective that Ira Einhorn dubbed the 'psychic mafia' around Puharich in the 1970s or was it some how arranged through years of subtle conditioning? And was this simply the work of human agencies, or was there something else at play?

Vallee

Robert Anton Wilson

Puharich and Pope

Sarfatti takes a wise stance. I have read a lot of material on the Nine and am relatively convinced that some kind of nonhuman intelligence is at play in this whole affair. On the other hand, the obsession Puharich and others have had with making this intelligence into some kind of extraterrestrial being is most curious. As previously stated, the entity or entities calling themselves the Nine did not claim to be extraterrestrial until several years after initial contact. Is it possible that the expectations of Puharich and others heavily involved in the early stages, such as Arthur Young, for the intelligence to be extraterrestrial factor in to this direction? Or did human agencies opt to portray this intelligence as extraterrestrial for their own purposes?

One final point I would like to consider in the strange saga of the Nine is the role various 'human potential centers' have played in spreading their mystic amongst the academics, and the patrons behind these centers.

"A further integral part of this movement was the Institute of Neotic Science at Palo Alto, which was founded by Apollo 14 astronaut Edgar Mitchell in March 1973, and is 'dedicated to research and education in the processes of human consciousness to help achieve a new understanding and expanded awareness among all people... They were heavily involved in the psi testing of the 1970s, partly funding the Geller experiments at SRI and, until the CIA came clean about their involvement in the remote-viewing experiments in the mid-1990s, it was the Institute of Noetic Science that claimed to have funded the initial programme. At the very least, this shows that the Institute allowed itself to be used as a cover for the CIA, and perhaps even as a conduit for the funding of the agency's more controversial experiments.

"Arthur Young's highly influential Institute for the Study of Consciousness at Berkeley, founded in 1972, also provided a forum for some of the most daring thinkers of the day. It was here that Richard Hoagland had his meeting with Paul Shay of SRI, and also where he gave his first lecture about Cydonia in 1984. Later he was to acknowledge Arthur Young's personnel influence...

"Institutions and foundations only succeed because of the individuals who breathe life into them. One of the key figures on this scene was avant-garde physicist Jack Sarfatti, the first director of the Physics/Consciousness Research Group at the Esalen Institute, which was funded by Werner Erhard and money covertly channelled through from the Pentagon. His seminars were attended by Stanislas Grof, Russell Targ, Timothy Leary, physicist Saul Paul Sirag (who became director after Sarfatti), Robert Anton Wilson, Fritjof Capra, and Ira Einhorn, who was Sarfatti's literary agent.

"The work carried out by this interlinked network of organizations was imaginative and innovative, presenting a serious challenge to the previous arrogant certainties of the scientific world. It was undertaken in a genuine pioneering spirit, largely born of the idealism of the youth culture of the 1960s and a desire to change the world for the better. However, a dark shadow was cast over this early idyllic promise by the involvement of the Pentagon, CIA and other security and intelligence agencies, who soon realised that the breakthroughs of these idealists had great potential in their own spheres, such as remote viewing. And they did not fail to note that research into altered states of consciousness, including the use of LSD and other drugs, also had darker applications in the various techniques of mind control. So often this research was encouraged and funded -although often covertly, through other channels -by organizations such as the CIA and the Pentagon. One of the pioneers of LSD and consciousness research, John C. Lilly, worked at the Esalen Institute for several years, as well as for the CIA, but only on the condition that his research remained unclassified. This made things difficult for him professionally, because nearly all other researchers in the field were also working on classified projects, so he was unable to share data with them or vice versa.

"Another case of behind-the-scenes agendas in this milieu involved Dr Brendan O'Regan, research director of Edgar Mitchell's Institute of Noetic Sciences and a consultant for SRI, as well as research director for the scientist-philosopher R. Buckminster Fuller. O'Regan arranged the experiments into the strange talents of Uri Geller at Birkbeck College, London in 1975 and was also closely involved with the Puharich-Whitmore circle surrounding the Nine. And, since O'Regan's death in 1992, Jack Sarfatti has claimed that he was also working with the CIA at this time, writing:

"I was then [1973] simply a young inexperienced 'naive idiot' in a very very sophisticated and successful covert psychological warfare operation run by the late Brendan O'Regan of the Institute of Noetic Sciences and the late Harold Chipman who was the CIA station chief responsible for all mind-control research in the Bay Area in the 70s."
(ibid, pgs. 235-237)

It goes without saying that all of these human potential centers are big on the extraterrestrial theory. I personally have attended meetings of a local branch of the Institute of Noetic Sciences which typically ended with a 45 minute mediation session in which the 'Space Brothers' were invoked to help us through the transition to the Age of Aquarius, or something along those lines anyway. While undeniably the vast majority of people involved with these organizations are genuine and well meaning truth-seekers, the specter of PSYOPs looms large.

Finally, we come to Paul Bennewitz, who represents one of the truly barbaric and blatant instances of PSYOPs in the past 30 years. The principal figures involved in what became known as the 'Bennewitz Affair' are naturally Bennewitz himself; author, UFO researcher, and sometime disinformation agent William Moore, who we encountered in part one of this series for his role in writing The Roswell Incident; and US Air Force Office of Special Investigations (AFOSI) agent Richard C Doty. However, many of the most notables in the UFO field in addition to high ranking intelligence agents, including the infamous 'Falcon', would become involved in this massive disinformation campaign before all was said and done. The end results would have enormous influence on how the public perceived extraterrestrials for the next three decades. The Bennewitz Affair goes something like this:

"The story begins in 1979 with Paul Bennewitz, a brilliant engineer and physicist in his early fifties. His company, Thunder Scientific, developed temperature gauges, compasses and other equipment for the Air Force and NASA from workshops on the border of Kirkland. Bennewitz himself lived with his wife and kids in the swanky Four Hills estate on the north side of Kirkland, from where he had a good view of the base and the Monzano mountains in particular, hollowed-out twin peaks that at the time held one of the largest stockpiles of nuclear weapons in the USA.

"In July of that year, from his roof deck, Bennewitz began filming strange lights flitting and bouncing around the Manzano area, and recorded radio transmissions that he left were associated with them. Being a responsible citizen, not to mention an Air Force contractor, in 1980 he decided to tell Kirkland Security what was going on. While an undoubtedly brilliant scientist, Bennewitz was also, like many brilliant people, a little on the eccentric side, and had reached the conclusion that the lights could only be highly advanced aircraft piloted by extraterrestrials. He also surmised that their intentions were anything but friendly, and that's what he told the Air Force.

"So far, so peculiar, but here's where it gets odder and very sinister. Bennewitz, who died in 2003, aged seventy-five, was a good man and a true patriot. The Air Force could easily have brushed him off with a 'thanks for looking out for us, these are our own classified aircraft, so we'd rather you just ignore them and didn't tell anyone about what you've seen.' Instead, they, or rather AFOSI, decided not just to encourage Bennewitz in his harmless delusions but to amplify them to a volume that would eventually push him over the brink and into madness. For the next few years AFOSI passed him fake government UFO documents, gave him a computer that appeared to be receiving transmissions from the malevolent ETs and created a fake UFO base in remotest New Mexico. All this for one eccentric scientist.

"Richard Doty's role was to befriend Paul Bennewitz and steer him deeper into his War of the Worlds fantasy. At the same time, Doty was secretly liaising with at least one respected UFO researcher, William Moore, who provided AFOSI with the latest details of ongoing investigations and research in the UFO field. Moore's information was then used to generate bogus government documents that corroborated the UFO community's suspicions of a top-level UFO cover-up and drew his fellow researchers into a rich pseudo-history of human-alien interaction that stretched back at least two thousand years. Moore, for his part, claimed to have been co-opted with the promise of genuine government UFO documents that would prove, once and for all, that extraterrestrials really were visiting planet Earth, and that the US government was sitting on the biggest story in human history.

"The twisted pretzel of a campaign lasted until the late 1980s, culminating with the fracturing of both the American UFO community and Paul Bennewitz's mind. Doty's actions were eventually exposed and, after some time working with AFOSI in West Germany, he retired from the Air Force to become a New Mexico state trooper...

"For me the really interesting part was that Doty and Bennewitz were the conduits, if not the source, for much of the UFO mythology that had emerged since the early 1980s. Stories about crashed UFOs, US government pacts with nasty ETs, alien harvesting of cattle and manipulation of human DNA, which had gained in potency and authenticity as they were retold through countless books, articles, films, and TV documentaries..."
(Mirage Men, Mark Pilkington, pgs. 11-13)

The Bennewitz/ Doty/Moore era also represents an interesting transformation in the public perception of aliens. After the whole 'Space Brothers' jive that dominated in the 1950s-1970s, when the ETs were generally perceived in human (often in the mold of an Aryan god) form, the 80s saw them taking on a distinctly nonhuman, emotionless guise of the 'grey.' Close encounters become more horrific in pop culture, losing much of the feel-good, Spielberg vibes. The ETs became obsessed with strange medical experiments which at times closely resembled rape, cattle mutilations, implants, and other cringe inducing processes. Some commentators, such as Whitley Strieber, maintained the utopian aspirations of the extraterrestrials. Others, such as Bennewitz, saw far more sinister implications. Unfortunately, few of them picked up on the role the US intelligence community has always played in the extraterrestrial belief system.

We shall finish examining that role in part IV.