…in addition to being disturbed by the realization that Janus was reading his mind, he was even more disturbed by the fact that this extraordinary man ‘knew all Britain’s top-secret nuclear secrets’…. [Horsley was convinced that] they come from another planet somewhere in the universe but not in our galaxy. They are benign, not aggressive and, like us, are explorers.

Nick Redfern on the strange case of RAF Air Marshal Sir Peter Horsley and his visitor from Outer Space, Mr Janus. Was it a high-concept prank, a test of Horsley’s sanity, or of his loyalty to Crown and Country? Or was Mr Janus really who he claimed to be?

Read all about it here

In a topical variant of the super-weapon myth discussed in Mirage Men,  an Iranian scientist with a background in nuclear reactor technology claims that the US RQ-170 drone, allegedly brought down over Iran on 4 December 2011, was captured using his own ‘advanced space technology’.

It’s unclear whether Mehran Tavakoli Kashe’s technology also informed the Iranian flying saucer programme, but the engineer is adamant that there is no space technology in the world to compete with his own.

On his web site, Keshe reports (via the  Pure Energy Systems News site, dedicated to exotic technologies):

By allegedly harnessing a fusion reaction that manipulates dark matter, regular matter, and antimatter, [Keshe] claims to have developed technologies that rival those in science fiction. As we reported last April, Keshe claims that years ago he gave the Iranian military his technology in order for them to produce flying saucers; and the alleged Iranian flying saucer that had popped up in the news last March was a result of that. He had offered it to NASA, but they poopooed it. 

In a recent lecture in Belgium, Keshe stated that his technology was capable of producing:

• Extremely fast speeds that would allow for rapid travel through the solar system and beyond. A round trip to Mars, with a stop at the moon, would take a few days.
• Deflector fields that can destroy tiny particles that could impact and destroy a vehicle traveling at high speed.
• Friction removal, so there is no effect from environmental friction as the vehicle travels through the atmosphere.
• Inertial damping so that the occupants of a craft would not feel accelerations.
• Force fields that can block space radiation.
• Artificial gravity so that the occupants would be able to live and work just like they do on Earth, without having to worry about the effect of weightlessness on their body.
• Invisibility or cloaking technology.
• Replicators or the ability to turn energy into food and water. 
• Healing technology to address injuries or sickness that might arise.

Keshe states:

I have explained again and again that the Keshe Foundation and Iranian spaceship program has the capability of radar blockage and capture of material in airborne condition.. The Islamic republic of Iran has the capability of capture and landing of any flying object irrespective of their size and speed as seen with capture of one of the most advanced flying crafts in these above videos and the request of so called the most advanced nation on earth for its toy back

Like many outsider scientists working on controversial free energy programmes, Keshe claims to suffer regular harassment from ‘various governments and organisations’.

Keshe explains some of his ideas on his web site, including this cola bottle plasma reactor – a universe in a bottle.

One for the very interesting if true dept, from Inexplicata:

Mexico’s NOTIMEX news agency published an interesting news item yesterday: a statement by Spanish UFO researcher / novelist J.J. Benítez suggesting that former Chilean strongman Augusto Pinochet’s estancia was visited by a UFO on September 6, 1986. 

The object hovered over the property and was seen by “the General and all of the Police forces,” said Benitez…“A day before the coup attempt against General Pinochet, a UFO hovered over his estate and was seen by all the Police forces, his entire escort, the Carabineros – everyone, both inside and out. Weapons were drawn and bedlam ensued.”

The next day

…a commando raid by elements of the FPMR group (Frente Patriótico Manuel Rodríguez) ambushed the dictator’s motorcade as it traveled through the Cajón del Maipo region outside the capital city of Santiago. Five escorts were killed during the attack, and Pinochet himself sustained injuries.

What did the UFO look like?
Was it a portent of the changes to come?
A warning from the Mirage Men?
A Soviet drone sent to sow fear and confusion before the FPMR strike?
Or is it a plotline for a new novel from Benítez?

With material costs of about £1000 per unit, this incredibly maneuvrable UAV could make for a great surveillance tool or perhaps an upmarket big boys’ toy.

I wonder if it might be related to the spherical flying somethings that I saw in Yosemite in 1995 and describe in the opening chapter of Mirage Men.

Gabriel ‘Gabe’ Valdez  passed away in his sleep at home in Albuquerque, New Mexico aged 67, on 7 August. Here he is on the right, alongside our mutual friend Project Beta author Greg Bishop.

Retired for some years, Gabe was a much-respected and honoured New Mexico State Police Officer and Gaming Control Board Investigator, based for many years around Dulce, New Mexico. It was here, during the mid-1970s, that Gabe took a lead in investigating a rash of bizarre cattle ‘mutilations’, conducted by persons unknown, and a wave of seemingly-connected UFO sightings. As a result, he was drawn into the sad and strange story of physicist and UFO enthusiast Paul Bennewitz, as told at length in Mirage Men.

John Lundberg and I met and interviewed Gabe twice at his home, where he was unfailingly friendly and generous with his time. Gabe had clearly been a fearless lawman, but he was still uncomfortable talking about the complex story that he’d uncovered around Dulce and the looming Archuleta Mesa, making at times for an awkward interview. Gabe believed that he had discovered a clandestine military operation and felt sure that his research back in the 1970s and ’80s had drawn the attention of some unpleasant characters, leading to his phone being tapped, amongst other things.

While no doubt some natural animal deaths were mistakenly attributed to the unseen mutilators, there’s a great deal of evidence, much of it pieced together by Gabe and his fellow investigators, pointing towards an organised programme of some kind. Although its true purpose remains unclear, over the years writers and researchers have connected the cattle deaths to the monitoring of radiation leaks or viral contagion and secret biological weapon tests, as well as to the inevitable extraterrestrials, Satanic / Masonic / Illuminati / NWO activity and, more mundanely, human poachers.

I’d like to think that one day we’ll learn what was really going on around Dulce, New Mexico, no matter how sinister, or prosaic, it really was. In the mean time, hats off to Gabe Valdez, a man who put himself on the line and made the concerns of his community his own.

Here are the Wikipedia and FBI pages on the mutilation wave, the now defunct National Institute for Discovery Science’s cattle mutilations archive – Gabe did research for the group – and an interesting NIDS paper connecting the deaths to an American BSE epidemic. Be prepared to open a steaming can of worms. 

For those seeking a more digestible summary of the mutilation phenomenon, after the break I’ve posted some video featuring Gabe, and extracted material from Mirage Men about his research.

Here’s Gabe talking about his cattle mutilation research in the 1976 film UFOs It Has Begun (no that’s not him in the dress, press play to start the sequence):

And here he is quite recently, discussing the mutilations with Norio Hayakawa, containing more detail about suspected military involvement:

And by way of tribute, an extract from Mirage Men about Gabe and his Dulce investigation:

‘Back in the 1970s, Valdez’s investigation had focused on the ranch of Manuel Gomez, whose cattle had suffered particularly badly; alongside dead and mutilated animals he’d found caterpillar tracks, bits of paper, measuring tools, syringes, needles and a gas mask. One site was covered with radar-reflecting chaff, some of it stuffed into the dead cow’s mouth. Some of the animals had broken bones and what appeared to be rope marks on their limbs, suggesting that they had been hoisted up then dropped back on to the ground. Whoever was doing this to the cattle, they were organized, and human.

As in Montana, the mutilations coincided with a rash of UFO sightings, and Valdez and his fellow officers had several close shaves with strange flying machines. On one occasion Valdez’s team cornered an orange light in a field; as they approached, the light went out. Then, although they could see nothing, they heard a muffled sound like a lawnmower engine pass over their heads. Another time Valdez and two colleagues ducked beneath an object that he described as disc-shaped, rotor-less, and dazzlingly bright. Valdez described the noise it made as it flew over them as ‘put-put- putting’ or ‘ticking’ – hardly the sound of advanced alien technology.

The intensity of the mutilations around Dulce had also drawn the interest of Howard Burgess, a retired Sandia Labs scientist, and one night in July 1975 he, Valdez and Gomez, the ranch-owner, followed a hunch to see whether or not humans really were behind the attacks. By shining an ultraviolet lamp on to the backs of a sample of a hundred cattle, the trio found that some of them had been marked with a substance that showed up only under ultraviolet light. The marked cattle were all between one and three years old and came from a particular breed: the same one as the dead animals found on Gomez’s land. Gomez quickly sold off all the animals that fitted the mutilation profile.

Based on their discovery, the three men pieced together a modus operandi. The selected cattle were being marked with water-soluble UV paint containing potassium and magnesium; this suggested that the marking was done quite soon before the operation was to take place. Under cover of darkness, whatever aircraft that the team employed would fly over the region and identify the marked animals using a blacklight beam that was invisible to any observers. The selected animal was tranquillized, probably from the air with a rifle, and then the mutilation operation was performed, either on the ground or, as Valdez believed, after the victim had been hauled to another location – hence the rope marks on some of them. Valdez told us that the mutilators had their surgery-cum-laboratory in one of many disused mine shafts on top of the Archuleta Mesa. Their grisly work over, they then returned the animal to the pastures, mutilated and drained of blood, to be found by an unlucky rancher.

Although Valdez’s enthusiasm for the subject was clear, so was his anxiety; at one point he hinted to us that he had found the entrance to a military facility on top of the Mesa, but he quickly backed away from the subject when asked for more information. Valdez clammed up like this a few times, as if he felt he’d said something he shouldn’t. We later learned that there was good reason for his hesitance: while conducting his investigations back in the 1970s he’d become convinced that he was under surveillance, a suspicion borne out by the discovery of a microphone ‘bug’ in his telephone handset.

What Valdez did tell us was startling enough: he thought that the military had been flying helicopters into the Dulce area from Fort Carson, an army installation about 300 miles to the north, near Colorado Springs, and using the Archuleta Mesa as a staging post for their mutilation missions. He also suggested that ‘real’ UFOs  – flying saucers – were being flown alongside the mutilators’ own aircraft, perhaps by another government agency, in order to obfuscate matters further, or at least to confuse the locals. That one confused us, too.’

Read more in Mirage Men

dorkbotlondon #75

When:

19:00-22:00, 15 July 2011
Where:

Victoria & Albert Museum, Cromwell Road, London, SW7 2RL (directions below)

Featuring the scientific and slightly irrational…

• Automatically generating dubstep - Dan Stowell
• e-Material Girl - Rain Ashford
  some examples of my adventures exploring wearable technology & electronic art using microcontrollers, sensors & e-textiles
• Persuading global brands to Open Source - Joel Gethin Lewis
  Joel is going to talk about his experiences with Coca Cola, and persuading them to embrace Open Source in their recent 24 hour music project
• Flying Saucers are (almost) Real! – Dreaming the Future from 1716 to the Present - Mark Pilkington
  Mark Pilkington, author of ‘Mirage Men: A Journey in Disinformation, Paranoia and UFOs’, presents a true history of human attempts to build flying saucers.
• Chrominoes - Mike Harrison

  By the way, Mike Harrison was behind this awesome UFO installation:

More at dorkbot

March 1950: was the USAF testing the limits of belief with a far-out flying saucer lecture at a Colorado University?

Earlier this year there was an unwarranted kerfuffle surrounding a report by FBI agent Guy Hottel, filed on 29 March 1950, that begins:

An investigator for the Air Force stated that three so-called flying saucers had been recovered in New Mexico…

As newspapers all over the world disingenuously ran the story as evidence of the US government’s ET coverup  – all very healthy for click-through rates, of course – those in the know pointed out that the memo was rather old news (61 years young in fact!) and the end product of an intricate game of Chinese Whispers.

At the root of the memo’s claims were a shady businessman looking to make a fast buck and, perhaps, the grander agenda of a rather more respectable organisation.

8 March 1950. The Korean war was three months away and American interest in flying saucers was reaching one of its early peaks thanks to sensational articles by Navy men Major Donald Keyhoe and Commander Robert McLaughlin, published earlier that year in the hugely popular True magazine.

In a crammed lecture hall at the University of Denver, Colorado, Silas Newton (left), proprietor of the Newton Oil Company, gave an anonymous presentation in which he described several crashed flying saucers in the possession of the Air Force, and their diminutive humanoid occupants, in some detail.

How Newton (whose identity was later revealed in the Denver Post) ended up getting a speaking slot at the university remains unclear, but what is known is that he was in cahoots with – or was perhaps himself being conned by – one Leo Gebauer, who had already drawn the FBI’s attention during the war for calling on President Roosevelt to be assassinated and replaced with that ‘swell guy’ Adolf Hitler.

Gebauer was now selling ‘doodlebugs’ – black boxes for prospecting gold, minerals, gas and other precious metals. These, he claimed, were based on technology from the USAF’s crashed ET craft, and Newton was acting as his front man (read a contemporary account of the hoax from True magazine here).

Later that year, Newton and Gebauer’s tale would become the basis for one of the first best-selling UFO books, Behind The Flying Saucers (pictured top, read it here) by Variety magazine gossip columnist Frank Scully, seeding belief in crashed saucer tales in thousands of minds, a good thirty years before anyone took interest in the Roswell account, which had crashed and burned overnight in July 1947.

What’s interesting is that after Newton’s presentation, the audience, composed largely of science and engineering students, were quizzed as to how convincing they felt his lecture had been – apparently 60 percent believed him to be telling the truth – and some of them were then interviewed by Air Force Intelligence officers.

So what was going on in Denver? With the benefit of hindsight it all sounds rather like a textbook market research exercise – if that was the case, what were the Air Force men doing there, and who might they have been conducting the research for?

I’ve written elsewhere about the US Air Force’s RAND (Research and Development) Corporation paper The Exploitation of Superstition for the purposes of  Psychological Warfare [an intriguing piece of the Mirage Men puzzle I only learned about after the book was published!].

The paper, by Jean Hungerford, was officially published by RAND on 14 June 1950 and contains many useful suggestions for making mileage of regional superstitions and folklore, including gods and devils, phantoms, astrologers, magic, good luck charms, chain letters and more. What it neglects to mention, however, is the one subject that everyone was talking about at the time – especially the US Air Force (though in hushed tones) – and that, of course, was flying saucers.

It seems unlikely that this was an simply oversight on the part of the author. Maybe the subject was outside her remit, as the paper mostly deals with cases from the two World Wars. Then again, perhaps the saucers – reports of which were actually being clandestinely examined for the Air Force by RAND at the same time that Hungerford was preparing her own paper, were still too much of a political hot potato for Hungerford to tuck into. Either way, the omission is intriguing.

‘What types of superstitious appeals will be best adapted to the various audiences to be propagandised?’ the paper asks. ‘A study of local supserstitions as reflected in popular folk lore might be profitable in providing answers to these questions.’

Given that Silas Newton’s University of Denver talk, and the ensuing questioning of attendees, took place just six weeks before the RAND paper was published, and that Air Force Intelligence men were amongst those asking the questions, one does have to wonder the if Denver affair wasn’t an attempt to gauge how successful Newton was at spinning his crashed saucer yarn, and whether it might gain wings. It did, of course, via Frank Scully’s book and the story of the UFO crash at Aztec is still being retold over and over again, six decades later.

It would be nearly three years before the CIA’s Robertson Panel formally recognised the great psychological warfare potential of the flying saucer lore, but the events of March/April 1950 suggest that RAND and the USAF were already fully aware of this – and perhaps in Denver these Mirage Men were already exploring how they could make use of it.

              A drawing by Newton of one of the crashed saucers.

As an interesting coda, in his diaries Newton wrote that after his presentation made the Denver Post he was approached by two members of a ‘highly secret US Government entity’ who told him that they knew his UFO crash story was a hoax, but that he should continue to tell it. If he did then ‘they and the people they worked for would look out for me [Newton] and for Leo [Gebauer]’.

Two years later Newton and Gebauer were convicted of fraud for trying to sell advanced mining equipment based on back-engineered alien technology; both received only suspended sentences – perhaps those mysterious men from the government put in a good word for the two crooks…

The conference runs from 10.30am until 7.30pm and my presentation is at 6pm.

Also on the bill are Nick Pope, Andy Roberts, Tony Eccles and John Hanson.

More info here

On Tuesday 28 June I’ll be on a panel as part of the British Library’s excellent ‘Out of This World‘ science fiction exhibition alongside film director Gareth Edwards (Monsters, above), author Gwyneth Jones, scientists and writers Jack Cohen and Ian Stewart, (What Does a Martian Look Like?: The Science of Extraterrestrial Life) and David Clarke, consultant to the National Archives UFO project.

It should be a wide-ranging and enlightening discussion, do join us if you can.

Tue 28 Jun 2011, 18.30 – 20.00

The militarisation of space, or at least near-Earth space, has long been a matter of serious concern for warhawks and peaceniks, and has given rise to a number of conspiracy theories of the sort that got Gary McKinnon into so much trouble.

The extent to which the world’s militaries have taken the fight out of the atmosphere remains something of an unknown to those of us not privy to their secrets. Sure, we know that there are dozens, if not hundreds of military satellites whirling around the planet, some of which may now be capable of destroying other satellites. We also know that just over the horizon (or at least the visible horizon) wait the next generation of manned and unmanned spaceplanes, like the Boeing X-37B and DARPA’s Falcon (pictured above). Some of these may soon emerge as real nuts and bolts vehicles, others will forever be gleaming pies in the sky.

But what are we to make of this titbit, revealed in the 18 March 2011 issue of Private Eye? A short article on the editorial page details some of the recent arms sales to Libya approved by the UK’s Foreign Office. Alongside the usual roster of military transport aircraft, APCs, tear gas, smoke grenades, water cannons, machine guns, tanks, night vision equipment and the like is a listing, from July and September of 2010, for ‘spacecraft’.

Unfortunately the article doesn’t mention the spacecrafts’ country, or planet, of origin, but I’m certainly curious to know what they were. Sensible suggestions in the comments box please!