I’m fascinated by how aviation and missing planes are so often linked, in one way or another, to ESP phenomena. The ongoing, frustrating search for Malaysian Flight 370 seems like the perfect opportunity to write down some thoughts about this strange nexus.

There’s a long history of psychics being enlisted (or volunteering) to search for lost planes, for one thing. One of the best-known successes of the early operational remote viewing work at Stanford Research Institute (SRI) was the successful location of a lost Soviet spy plane in the African jungle using the talents of viewers Gary Langford and Rosemary Smith. The annals of remote viewing (as described in Jim Schnabel’s excellent history of the subject) include other successful searches for missing aircraft. At Fort Meade for example, Ken Bell accurately pinpointed the site of a military crash in Virginia (even getting the name of the mountain, “Bald Knob”). On another occasion, he successfully remote-viewed the burned wreckage of an American helicopter that had crashed high in the Andes in Peru, killing the crew.

So it is to be expected that today’s most accomplished remote viewers and other psychics are being recruited to search for the missing Malaysian jet. Uri Geller, quite naturally, says he has been asked by a “substantial figure” for help in the search. Geller is more famous for telekinetic and telepathic feats than for clairvoyance, but he made his fortune map-dowsing for mineral and oil deposits—a skill one would think is not too different from viewing lost objects at a distance. He has not pointed to an actual location for the presumably downed plane, that we know of. But according to The Anomalist, remote viewer extraordinaire Joe McMoneagle, one of the original Fort Meade team, has also been tasked in the search; he says he has “duly reported” his findings.

When scientific or military professionalism and rigor are not involved, psychic attempts to locate missing aircraft are, as one can imagine, often not only unsuccessful but even tragically misleading. In his thorough and riveting account of the Uruguayan rugby team lost in the Andes in 1972, Piers Paul Read documents the desperate families’ use of psychics to help in the search. A Belgian clairvoyant, Gerard Croiset Jr., was recruited, and although he described several specific details that ultimately proved accurate (such as a nearby sign reading “Danger” and the physical appearance of wreckage itself), he insisted the plane went down near a lake over 80 miles south of the crash site—resulting in much money, time, and effort being wasted searching in the wrong place.

The sad irony is that the first psychic consulted by parents of two of the lost boys, a dowser in a poor Montevideo neighborhood, turned out to have precisely pinpointed the location of the downed plane. Unfortunately the area he picked had already been overflown on early search flights and was, in any event, deemed too dangerous and remote for further searching. (Read’s book Alive contains more tantalizing ESP-related tidbits, including accurate premonitions of imminent rescue by some of the survivors; the more recent documentary Stranded includes survivors’ fascinating accounts of their near-death experiences during an avalanche that struck 16 days into their ordeal and killed 8 of their companions.)

Then of course there’s Amelia Earhart.

When Earhart went missing in her Lockheed Electra in 1937, her husband George Palmer Putnam was inundated with mail from psychics and others who insisted they knew where Earhart’s plane had gone down, had had dreams of her, or had actually communicated with her psychically in the days and weeks following the disappearance. A 1940 article in Popular Aviation, which has been made available as a pdf on the Earhart Project website, is a great read and another fascinating account of the paranormal giving hope to those desperate to find their loved ones but also hopelessly muddying the waters of an investigation of a lost flight.

The Popular Aviation article only details a few of the examples of the messages Putnam received, unfortunately, but the ones described are particularly interesting in light of the unfolding (but lately stalled due to legal problems) efforts of the The International Group for Historic Aircraft Recovery (TIGHAR) to piece together Earhart’s last days and recover remains of the Electra. From what one can glean from the 1940 article, psychic consensus seemed to be that she and her navigator Fred Noonan went down somewhere north of Howland Island—not south, in the direction of Nikumaroro atoll, where TIGHAR has found tantalizing evidence that the flyers actually ended up. However, people who corresponded with Putnam said that they knew she had survived the crash and was on an island or atoll, and provided scenes that correspond to the picture being assembled by TIGHAR—that the famed aviatrix and her companion survived, possibly for a few weeks, before perishing (probably from dehydration).

An interesting angle in this case is that Earhart herself was an accomplished psychic—although she publicly downplayed her talents in an era that was just as rationalistic and skeptical as ours. She had a particular knack for finding missing aircraft. As described by two newspaper columnists quoted by David K Bowman:

    “Officials at first were inclined to laugh at Miss Earhart’s psychic messages. But her accuracy now has them mystified. When a United Airlines plane was lost just outside of Burbank, Calif. Dec. 27, Miss Earhart called the United Airlines office and told them to look on a hill near Saugus, a little town north of Burbank.

    “There the wreckage was found.

    “Again when the Western Air Express plane carrying Mr. and Mrs. Martin Johnson crashed Jan. 12, Miss Earhart reported the plane to be near Newhall, 15 miles north of Burbank, where it was found.

    “In the earlier crash of the Western Air Express in Utah, Miss Earhart had a vision to the effect that the bodies of the dead had been robbed by a trapper. Two days later, a trapper near Salt Lake City reported finding the wreckage, but then suddenly disappeared without giving the location of the plane.”

There seems to be a link between a penchant for real-world flying and psychic aviation. For example, decades after his historic trans-Atlantic solo flight, Charles Lindbergh admitted in a memoir that during the 33-hour journey, during which he did not dare actually fall asleep, he experienced a hypnagogic, dissociative state in which he felt his body, soul, and spirit separate—what we might now call an out-of-body experience. During this experience, the flyer perceived and communicated with angelic beings accompanying him in his plane. The encounter left him with a lasting interest in the afterlife and immortality.

A more recent example is the popular author and aviator Richard Bach. After the CIA withdrew funding from the SRI project in the late 1970s (wanting to distance itself from questionable research in the aftermath of revelations about MK-ULTRA and other projects), Hal Puthoff and Russell Targ became increasingly creative in seeking support for their research at SRI. One person they sought out for possible help was Bach, whose bestseller Jonathan Livingston Seagull seemed (to Targ at least) like an account of an out-of-body experience—a phenomenon with strong continuity with remote viewing. On the hunch that Bach might be interested to participate in some psychic research himself and perhaps give some money to SRI, Targ and Puthoff invited Bach to California to take part in some experiments.

The writer proved quite talented. For example, in one out-bounder experiment described in Targ and Puthoff’s book Mind-Reach, he gave a very accurate physical description of the interior of a modern A-frame Methodist church and its altar—although in a case of “analytical overlay” biasing his interpretation, Bach thought the altar with the cross behind it looked like (appropriately enough) an airport ticket counter with a fleur-de-lis airline logo. Jacques Vallee, SRI Arpanet pioneer and friend to the remote viewing program, describes in his journals that he arranged to have a computer terminal installed in Bach’s Florida home, where Bach participated in a networked, cross-country remote viewing experiment in which he was remarkably accurate in describing an assortment of minerals chosen by a geologist.

The longest-distance psychic experiment ever conducted by an aviator, or anybody, is no-doubt that conducted by astronaut Dr. Edgar Mitchell aboard Apollo 14 in 1971. Like previous aviation pioneers, Mitchell had a profound mystical experience during his journey; but quite apart from this, he had a longstanding interest in ESP and, at four predetermined times during the mission, telepathically transmitted randomly selected Zener symbols (the type used in the classic Rhine experiments) to a small group of psychics back on Earth. He reported that there were 51 correct responses out of 200 total—slightly better than chance (there are 5 symbols in a Zener deck, so 40 correct responses would be predicted by chance). It is typical of the interesting but rather uninspiring positive results produced by classical psi research before the SRI era.

The great precedent for Mitchell’s long-distance telepathy experiment, however, is far more inspiring. In 1938, a dashing, larger-than-life aviator and all-around hero explorer, Sir George Hubert Wilkins (left), volunteered on a dangerous mission to the arctic to search for a lost Russian plane and hopefully rescue the crew. Before he departed, he arranged to mentally send updates of his adventure at regular times each week to a New York writer with an interest in ESP named Harold M. Sherman. Sherman, for his part, recorded his impressions and had them notarized to prove that no cheating had transpired. Wilkins and Sherman documented the results in their classic book Thoughts Through Space.

The records of Sherman’s and Wilkin’s experiment are remarkable, and resemble the sometimes astonishing accuracy of later CIA and military clairvoyants when real-world events and locales, rather than boring randomly generated cards, are involved. Reading the book through the lens of hindsight, it becomes clear—as it even became clear to the participants themselves when Sherman’s impressions were checked against Wilkins’ periodic bulletins—that “thoughts through space” did not accurately characterize the signal line through which Sherman received his information. Wilkins admitted he was often too busy, or simply forgot, to send his mental messages at the appointed times, but this did not prevent Sherman from obtaining detailed, usually accurate impressions of Wilkins’ activities and whereabouts.

In other words, Sherman was engaged precisely in remote viewing, not telepathy or (to use Upton Sinclair’s term) “mental radio.” Had it occurred to either of the experimenters to have Sherman psychically search for the missing Russian plane himself and thus serve as Wilkins’ guide rather than just his remote “receiver,” Wilkins’ mission may have been more successful than it was—but that would have required a paradigm shift in parapsychological thinking that was still over three decades off.

The experiment with Sherman is, to my knowledge, the first and last time Wilkins participated in an ESP experiment. Sherman, however, went on to write several interesting popular guides to developing ESP powers, not to mention numerous pulp sci-fi novels. In fact, he is a strangely absent figure in the nexus of psychic abilities, human potential, and sci-fi so densely chronicled by Jeffrey Kripal in his great book Mutants and Mystics.

In any case, there seems to be something fascinatingly archetypal about this nexus of aviation and ESP. Flying through air and space—and the extreme lengths to which one can get lost doing so—seem almost like a hieroglyph, in mundane 4-D reality, of how far one can travel and also get lost in the dimensionless space of consciousness and psychic abilities (or dis-abilities). Time will tell if and how this archetype plays out in the story of Flight 370. As The Anomalist notes, there may be little hope of anyone’s (even Geller’s or McMoneagle’s) ESP-derived insights having an impact on that search, given that there are bound to be hundreds or more intuitives, psychics, remote viewers, etc. giving their own conflicting reports. If I were one of the “authorities” involved, this is one reason I would be cautious following leads obtained from the paranormal information superhighway, however tantalizing they may be.

Oddly enough, it is through an interesting mix of coincidence and distorted memory that Wilkins’ and Sherman’s Thoughts Through Space experiment may have had a decisive influence on the later research at SRI and the whole history of remote viewing.

According to Jim Schnabel, a 1960 report in the French magazine Science et Vie claimed that the nuclear submarine USS Nautilus had conducted a telepathy experiment on its historic voyage under the North Pole in 1958. Upon closer scrutiny, the claim proved to have been either fraudulent or based on fabricated information, but nevertheless it spurred anxiety on the part of the Soviets that the United States was developing psychic abilities for military application, and they began pouring money into paranormal research. It was this development, reported in Psychic Discoveries Behind the Iron Curtain in 1970, that in turn triggered anxiety in US intelligence and military circles that we may lose the psychic arms race if we didn’t fund such research ourselves. Hence SRI, and the subsequent developments at Ft Meade and elsewhere.

According to Schnabel, the source of the Science et Vie story that started the false rumor of US psychic research in the 1950s is unknown—it was either a hoax or may have been a deliberate disinformation ploy to get the Soviets to waste their money on paranormal woo. But I suspect the story could actually have arisen from a more innocent case of distorted recollection by someone involved in the magazine article or their sources, because it involves a fascinating, tangled knot of coincidences.

Several years before his 1938 arctic aviation expedition with its telepathy component, Wilkins had himself attempted to reach the North Pole underwater, in a decommissioned American submarine O-12 that he had leased from the Navy and rechristened, wait for it, The Nautilus. I think it would have been all too easy for someone to later conflate the various adventures of this dashing polar explorer (who sometimes engaged in telepathy experiments) with the news of the first actual polar crossing by a (this time nuclear) submarine, also named Nautilus, in 1958.

To make things more confusing, the nuclear Nautilus‘s first commander was named … Wilkinson.

Source: The Night Shift
http://thenightshirt.com/?p=1686

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[Excerpted from their book Real Aliens, Space Beings, and Creatures from Other Worlds.  Visible Ink Press, 2011]

The annals of UFOlogy have always been frighteningly filled with the deaths of UFOlogists from unusual cancers, heart attacks, questionable suicides and all manner of strange happenings.  Professor G. Cope Schellhorn has observed that mysterious and suspicious deaths among UFO investigators are almost as old as the phenomenon itself.

In 1971, the well-known author and researcher Otto Binder wrote an article for Saga magazine's Special UFO Report titled "Liquidation of the UFO Investigators.” Binder had researched the deaths of "no less than 137 flying saucer researchers, writers, scientists, and witnesses” who had died in the previous 10 years, "many under the most mysterious circumstances. " The cases Binder offered were loaded with a plethora of alleged heart attacks, suspicious cancers and what appears to be outright examples of murder.

Phil Schneider

Phil Schneider was a self-taught geologist and explosive expert. Of the 129 deep underground facilities Schneider believed that the U.S. government had constructed since World War II, he claimed to have worked in thirteen of them. Schneider maintained that Gray humanoid extraterrestrials worked side by side with American technicians at the bioengineering facility at Dulce, New Mexico.  In 1979, a misunderstanding arose between the aliens and the earthlings. In the ensuing shootout, 66 Secret Service, FBI and Black Berets were killed, along with an unspecified number of Grays. It was during the violent encounter that Schneider received a beam-weapon blast to the chest, which later caused his cancer.

Schneider died Januarv 17, 1996, reportedly strangled by a catheter found wrapped around his neck. If the circumstances of his death seem highly controversial, they are matched by the controversy over his public statements uttered recently before his death.

If Schneider was telling the truth, he obviously broke the code of imposed silence to which all major black-budget personnel are subjected. The penalty for that misstep is presumably termination. Schneider maintained that numerous previous attempts had been made on his life, including the removal of lug nuts from one of the front wheels of his automobile to encourage a fatal automobile accident. He had stated publicly that he was a marked man and did not expect to live long.

Some of Schneider's major accusations are worthy of attention:

(1) The American government concluded a treaty with Gray aliens in 1954. This mutual cooperation pack is called the Grenada Treaty.

(2) The space shuttle has been functioning with special metals provided by the aliens. A vacuum atmosphere is needed for the rending of these special alloys, thus the push for a large space station.

(3) Much of our stealth aircraft technology was developed by back-engineering crashed alien craft.

(4) AIDS was a population control virus invented by the National Ordinance Laboratory, Chicago, Illinois.

(5) Unbeknownst to just about everyone, our government has an earthquake device: The Kobe quake had no pulse wave; the 1989 San Francisco quake had no pulse wave.

(6) The World Trade Center bomb blast and the Oklahoma City blast were achieved using small nuclear devices. The melting and pitting of the concrete and the extrusion of metal supporting rods indicated this. (Remember, Schneider's forte, he claimed, was explosives. )

Finally, Phil Schneider lamented that the democracy he loved no longer existed. We had become instead a technocracy ruled by a shadow government intent on imposing their own view of things on all of us, whether we like it or not. He believed many of his best friends had been murdered in the last 22 years, eight of whom had been officially disposed of as suicides.

Whatever we think of Phil Schneider's claims, there is no denying that he was of peculiar interest to the FBI and CIA. According to his widow, intelligence agents thoroughly searched the premises shortly after his death and made off with at least a third of the family photographs.

Ron Rummel

Another disturbing case is the death of Ron Rummel, ex-Air Force intelligence agent and publisher of the Alien Digest, on August 6, 1993. Rummel allegedly shot himself in the mouth with a pistol. Friends say, however, that no blood was found on the pistol barrel and the handle of the weapon was free of fingerprints. Also, according to information now circulating, the suicide note left by the deceased was written by a left-handed person. Rummel was right-handed. Perspiration on the body smelled like sodium pentothal--or so it is alleged.

If you would like more information or to order this book through AMAZON.COM simply click on its title: Real Aliens, Space Beings, and Creatures from Other Worlds

The Alien Digest ran to seven limited issues, all now almost impossible to acquire. Ron Rummel's magazine was touching on sensitive issues such as the predator/prey aspect of the alien-human relationship and the use of humans as food and recyclable body parts. Did Rummel cross a forbidden line? It would seem so. But which line, and where? Interestingly enough, one of Rummel's friends was Phil Schneider, and the two had been collaborating.

Ron Johnson

An equally disturbing death is that of Ron (Jerrold) Johnson, at the time MUFON's Deputy Director of Investigations. Johnson was 43 years old and, it would seem, in excellent health. He had just passed a recent physical examination with the proverbial flying colors.

However, on June 9, 1994, while attending a Society of Scientific Exploration meeting in Austin, Texas, Johnson died quickly and amid very strange circumstances. During a slide show, several people sitting close to him heard a gasp. When the lights were turned back on, Johnson was slumped over in his chair, his face purple, blood oozing from his nose. A soda can, from which he had been sipping, was sitting on the chair next to him.

Did Ron Johnson die of a stroke? Possibly. An allergic reaction? Another possibility.

Some of the more outstanding facts of Ron Johnson's life might easily lead a more skeptical-minded person to a tentative conclusion that his death was probably neither accidental nor natural. For instance, his most recent job was with the Institute of Advanced Studies, purportedly working on UFO propulsion systems. He had been formerly employed by Earth Tech, Inc., a private Austin, Texas, think tank headed by Harold Puthoff. It would appear that he held high security clearances, traveled frequently between San Antonio and White Sands, and had attended two secret NATO meetings in the last year or so. One of those meetings, it is rumored dealt with ET communications. Although advanced in years, there are some who believe that Dr. J. Allen Hynek's death was because of "strange circumstances," due to the high number of researchers who have died of brain tumors or cancer. If all or most of the facts offered above are accurate, one thing seems obvious: Johnson was walking both sides of the street. This in itself was highly dangerous, and he may have paid the ultimate price in an attempt to serve more than one master.

As for exactly what killed Ron Johnson, a number of possibilities beyond natural ones present themselves. It is quite easy in this day and age to induce strokes through chemicals or pulsed radiation. It is just as easy, and has been for some time, to induce heart attacks and other physical debilitations, such as fast-acting cancers. The best bet is that Ron Johnson was eliminated by a quick-acting toxin, perhaps a nerve agent. As for exactly why he was killed, we will probably never know. The autopsy has been officially classified as inconclusive.

Ann Livingston

Another death involving elements of high strangeness is that of Ann Livingston, who died in early 1994 of a fast form of ovarian cancer. Livingston made her living as an accountant, but she was also a MUFON investigator and had in fact published an article entitled "Electronic Harassment and Alien Abductions" in the November 1993 MUFON Journal.

Some facts which seem relevant to the case stand out. At 7:15  A.M., December 29, 1992, Livingston's apartment, which was close to O'Hare airport in Chicago, was lit up brightly by a silver-white flash. She was accosted later in the day while in her apartment parking lot by five MIBs (Men in Black) ,which she described as being almost faceless and carrying long, flashlight-like black objects. She was rendered unconscious.

What, we must ask, assuming her story is true, was done to her at this time, and why? And did it have anything to do with her later rapidly-advancing ovarian cancer?

It is not a well-known fact that Ann Livingston had been previously abducted. Could genital intrusions from past UFO abductions have poisoned in some way Ann Livingston's system? That is exactly the suspicion that  Karla Turner (author of Masquerade of Angels, Taken, and Into the Fringe) had about the breast cancer that preceded her own death during the summer of 1996. Both publicly and privately, Karla Turner held up the specter of alien retaliation for statements that she had made in print, especially in Masquerade of Angels. How much her suspicions were founded in reality we will probably never know.

Danny Casolaro

Danny Casolaro, an investigative reporter looking into the theft of Project Promise software, a program capable of tracking down anyone anywhere in the world, died in 1991, a reported suicide.

Casolaro was also investigating several UFO cases: Pine Gap, Area 51, and governmental bioengineering.

Brian Lynch

Brian Lynch, young psychic and contactee, died in 1985, purportedly of a drug overdose. According to Lynch's sister, Geraldine, Brian was approached approximately a year before his death by an intelligence operative working for an Austin, Texas, PSI-tech company. Geraldine said they told Brian they were experimenting on psychic warfare techniques. After his death, a note in his personal effects was found with the words "Five million from Pentagon for Project Scanate."

Capt. Don Elkin

In the 1980s Eastern Airlines pilot Capt. Don Elkin committed suicide. He had been investigating the UFO cover-up for over 10 years and, at the time, was deep into the study of the Ra Material wit Carla Rucker. There are reports of negative psychological interferences having developed during this latter investigation.

Dean Stonier

Dean was the organizer and promoter of the Global Sciences Congress that over the years hosted many top researchers including Phil Schneider and Al Bielek, who claims to be the sole survivor of the Philadelphia Experiment. Dean died of a heart attack in August 2001, just a few months after a Denver Global Sciences Congress.

Jim Keith

Jim Keith died in 1999. The author of many books including Mind Control, World Control, Jim died in hospital during surgery to repair a broken leg he received while attending the infamous Burning Man Festival in Nevada. It seemed a blood clot was released during the surgery and traveled to the heart causing a pulmonary edema.

Ron Bonds

Ron Bonds published books on unsolved mysteries, unexplained phenomena, and conspiracies--from the Kennedy assassination to the ominous black helicopters of the New World Order. In the subculture of the paranormal, his reputation was such that writers for "The X-Files" used to call him for ideas.

In April 2001, fifteen hours after eating a meal in a Mexican restaurant in Atlanta, Bonds suffered an agonizing evening of vomiting and diarrhea.  He was taken by ambulance from their home to Grady Memorial Hospital where he died.

During an autopsy, the medical examiner found copious amounts of blood in the bowels, so he sent a stool sample to the Georgia Public Health Laboratory in Decatur. The lab discovered high levels of Clostridium perfringens Type A, a bacterium often seen in small quantities in beef and poultry. When it occurs in larger quantities -- anything above 100,000 organisms per gram is considered unsafe -- it can release toxins that cause diarrhea, vomiting and, rarely, hemorrhaging. The bacterium figures in 250,000 cases of food poisoning a year, the CDC estimates, only seven of which result in death.

Four days after Bonds ate there, epidemiologists visited El Azteca to collect samples of ground beef from the steam table. When C. perfringens becomes dangerous, it usually has to do with cooked meat being held at too low a temperature. The lab found 6 million organisms per gram -- 60 times the safety threshold.

One obvious question is: Why didn't other people get sick too?

Astronomer M.K Jessup

When astronomer and archaeologist M. K. Jessup allegedly committed suicide in Dade County Park, Florida., in 1959 certain alarm bells should have gone off. There is no doubt the well-known author of such influential works as The Case for the UFO and The Expanding Case for the UFO had been depressed. Things had not been going well for him, and he had, it must be admitted, indicated his gloom to close friends, Ivan Sanderson, the biologist, and Long John Nebel, the well-known New York City radio host. Sanderson reported him disturbed by "a series of strange events" which put him "into a completely insane world of unreality."

Was the reality Jessup was faced with at the time "completely insane" or were there, perhaps, forces driving Jessup to the edge, forces with a plan?

Researcher Anna Genzlinger thoroughly investigated Jessups’s death. Her conclusion: "He was under some sort of control."

If you would like more information or to order this book through AMAZON.COM simply click on its title: Real Aliens, Space Beings, and Creatures from Other Worlds

These were the days of secret government mind-control experiments which have only recently been uncovered.

Certain facts about the Jessup case raise redflags. For example, no autopsy was performed, contrary to the state law. Sergeant Obenclain, who was on the scene shortly after Jessup's body was discovered, has said for the record, "Everything seemed too professional." The hose from the car exhaust was wired on; and it was, strangely, washing machine hose.

Jessup died at rush hour, with more than the usual amount of traffic passing by. Some say that Jessup had been visited by Carlos Allende (of Philadelphia Experiment fame) three days before his death and, according to his wife, Jessup had been receiving strange phone calls. We know the Navy was very much interested in what he was doing; and we all know it is the ONI (Office of Naval Investigations) that has been in the forefront, from the very beginning, of the UFO cover-up.

And what of particular interest was Jessup investigating at the time? Something that was top secret and would remain so for some time: the Philadelphia Experiment.

Dr. James McDonald

Dr. James McDonald, senior physicist, Institute of Atmospheric Physics, and also professor in the Department of Meteorology at the University of Arizona, died in 1971 purportedly of a gunshot wound to the head. There was no one who had worked harder in the 1960s than McDonald to convince Congress to hold serious, substantial subcommittee meetings to explore the UFO reality of which he was thoroughly convinced. He was definitely a thorn in the side of those who maintained the official cover-up.

McDonald, allegedly depressed, shot himself in the head. He didn't die, but he was confined to a wheelchair.  Several months after his attempted suicide, he allegedly got in an automobile, drove to a pawnshop, purchased another pistol from his wheelchair, drove to the desert, and killed himself.

Frank Edwards

Frank Edwards, the noted news commentator, author of Flying Saucers: Serious Business, died of an alleged heart attack on June 24, 1967, on the 20th anniversary of the Kenneth Arnold sighting. Was that coincidence?

It so happened that a "World UFO Conference" was being held in New York City at the Commodore Hotel on that very day in June, chaired by UFO publisher and author Gray Barker. Barker stated publicly that he had received two letters and a telephone call threatening that Frank Edwards would not be alive by the conference's end. It definitely looks like someone was sending a message.

The list of mysterious deaths of individuals involved in UFO research and even among those who displayed an interest has grown frighteningly long over the years. Their numbers even include high-ranking government officials and celebrities.

Did former Secretary of Defense James Forrestal really commit suicide as purported by jumping out a hotel window at about the time saucers may have been crashing down in the southwestern desert?

Was UFO writer Damon Runyon, Jr.'s suicidal plunge off a Washington D.C. bridge in 1988 really an act of will?

What really happened to Dr. B. Noel Opan who, in 1959, after an alleged visit by MIBs, disappeared, as did Edgar Jarrold, the Australian UFOlogist, in 1960?

 And what of Dorothy Kilgallen, the most famous syndicated female journalist of her day. People who didn’t read her column and articles were familiar with her appearance as a regular on the popular television program What’s My Line? Stationed in England in 1954 - 55, and privy to the highest levels of English society and its secrets, she wired two unusual dispatches which may have contributed to her death.

The first, sent in February 1954, mentioned a "special hush-hush meeting of the world's military heads" scheduled to take place the following summer.

The 1955 dispatch, which barely preceded her death from an alleged overdose of sleeping pills and alcohol, quoted an unnamed British official of cabinet rank who stated: “We believe, on the basis of our inquiry thus far, that flying saucers are staffed by small men--probably under four feet tall. It's frightening, but there is no denying the flying saucers come from another planet.”

Whatever the source (rumored to be the Earl of Mountbatten), this kind of leak in the Cold War atmosphere of the mid- 1950s was an unacceptable leak.  The secret CIA-orchestrated Robertson Panel on UFOs had met in 1953 and issued the Robertson Report that represented a new hard-line military attitude toward covering up all significant UFO phenomena. The year 1953 and the meeting of the Robertson Panel truly initiated the UFO cover-up as we know it today.

Did Dorothy Kilgallen actually commit accidental suicide? There appears to be an excellent probability that she had help.

Bizarre Death of Scientists

Certainly nothing is stranger and breeds speculation more quickly, than the 30-some-odd deaths associated with SDI (Star Wars) research at Marconi Ltd. in England between approximately 1985-1988. Here in capsulated form is a list of a few of the more bizarre deaths:

Roger Hill, a designer at Marconi Defense Systems, allegedly committed suicide with a shotgun, March 1985.

Jonathan Walsh, a digital communications expert employed by GE, Marconi's parent firm, falls from his hotel room, November 1985, after expressing fear for his life.

Ashad Sharif, another Marconi scientist, reportedly tied a rope around his neck, and then to a tree, in October 1986, got behind the wheel of his car and stepped on the gas with predictable results.

In March of 1988, Trevor Knight, also associated with Marconi, died of carbon monoxide poisoning in his car.

Peter Ferry, marketing director of the firm, was found shocked to death with electrical leads in his mouth (August 1988).

Also during the same month of the same year, Alistair Beckham was found shocked to death with electric leads attached to his body and his mouth stuffed with a handkerchief. He was an engineer with the allied firm of Plessey Defense Systems.

Andrew Hall was found dead in September of 1988 of carbon monoxide poisoning.

What, you may be asking, does SDI research have to do with the deaths of UFO investigators?

Theoretically, quite a lot. If, as many investigators have hypothesized, Star Wars research was initiated with the dual purpose of protecting "us" against Soviet aggression and/or the presence of UFO craft in our atmosphere, then several possibilities arise. Most compelling is the idea that the soviet KGB, realizing that the Western powers were on the verge of perfecting a high-powered beam-weapon that could be used from outer space or atmospheric space against them, marshaled an all-out espionage offensive to slow or destroy the project. If this scenario is true, and the weapon was indeed successfully developed, we have an explanation for the collapse of the Soviet Union ("Surrender or you might be incinerated").

Other explanations have been offered. For example, scientists working on the project discovered the true nature of the research they were involved with and the overwhelming stress led them to suicide. Or they discovered that their real collaborators were aliens or Western politicians working with/for Gray aliens. One thing seems obvious. Something went terribly wrong at Marconi. Scientists usually don't commit the kinds of bizarre, "unscientific" suicides we find here.

One other possibility is that a contingent of unfriendly aliens got wind of what GEC and Marconi and its affiliates were up to and, to protect themselves, created enough psychic trauma within the minds of many of the scientists to drive them to suicide.

But if this is so, why have the deaths stopped? Has the project been shelved?

Highly unlikely. The best bet is that the project was completed, roughly about 1988, and whatever it is, beam-weapon or otherwise, it is now operational.

UFOlogy is apparently not a particularly safe area to research or even to enjoy as a hobby.

Source: UFO Digest
http://ufodigest.com/article/strange-deaths-0319

My recent article on how the UFO subject (and specifically the issue of “alien bodies on ice“) has been used as a tool of disinformation has provoked a lot of people to email, Twitter and Facebook me on this thorny, controversial issue. And many of those same people seem to be missing the point. Hardly surprising, since disinformation is a murky mixture of fact and fiction. It’s chiefly designed to confuse the targeted individual or group – whether the Nazis during the Second World War, the Soviets at the height of the Cold War, or, in today’s world, maniacs who want to provoke terror.

But, to what extent has the UFO phenomenon been used and manipulated to confuse both enemy targets and the UFO research community? The answer is: to a huge extent! If you read my latest article on this very subject (as linked to above), you’ll know it focused on claims that, in the mid-1950s, the U.S. Air Force secretly commissioned the creation/manufacture of a number of very lifelike “dead alien bodies.”

Supposedly, they were used in a strange operation to (A) try and smoke-out Soviet agents/sympathizers in the United States; and (B) confuse the Russians regarding the true extent of U.S. knowledge of the UFO phenomenon. Indeed, convincing the highest echelons of the Kremlin that the U.S. had acquired alien bodies and extraterrestrial technology might very well have been perceived as a great way to frighten and unsettle the Reds.

But, when it comes to UFOs, things didn’t start in 1955.

According to a Technical Report prepared by the Air Force’s UFO study-program, Project Grudge, way back in August of 1949: “Upon eliminating several additional incidents due to vagueness and duplication, there remain 228 incidents, which are considered in this report. Thirty of these could not be explained, because there was found to be insufficient evidence on which to base a conclusion.”

Certainly the most notable entry in the document appears in the Recommendations section. It states, and I quote: “…that Psychological Warfare Division and other governmental agencies interested in psychological warfare be informed of the results of this study.”

It’s important to note that psychological warfare is an integral part of disinformation. Thus, we see a connection between disinformation, UFOs and psychological warfare as far back as the 1940s.

Moving on, a 1952 document from CIA director Walter B. Smith to the Director of the Psychological Strategy Board, titled Flying Saucers, reveals: “I am today transmitting to the National Security Council a proposal in which it is concluded that the problems connected with unidentified flying objects appear to have implications for psychological warfare as well as for intelligence and operations. I suggest that we discuss at an early board meeting the possible offensive or defensive utilization of these phenomena for psychological warfare purposes.”

Then there is the matter of the infamous, alleged UFO crash at Aztec, New Mexico in March 1948. It’s a story made famous in Frank Scully’s 1950 book, Behind the Flying Saucers. Many researchers of the UFO phenomenon (although certainly not all, such as Scott and Suzanne Ramsey) dismiss Aztec as nothing but a hoax, one perpetrated by a shady businessman named Silas Newton.

There is an interesting aspect to the Newton/Aztec story worth noting: by his own admittance, and after the Aztec story surfaced, Newton was visited by two representatives of “a highly secret U.S. Government entity” (as the late Karl Pflock worded it). Those same representatives told Newton, in no uncertain terms, that they knew his Aztec story was a complete lie, but, incredibly, they wanted him to keep telling the tale to just about anyone and everyone that would listen.

This led Pflock to wonder: “Did the U.S. Government or someone associated with it use Newton to discredit the idea of crashed flying saucers so a real captured saucer or saucers could be more easily kept under wraps?”

And this is where disinformation becomes a tricky area to fathom: just because officialdom may spread a spurious story about crashed UFOs and dead aliens, doesn’t mean there aren’t real crashed UFOs and dead aliens hidden somewhere! In that sense, it’s not necessarily an “either/or” situation.

For many years, rumors have circulated to the effect that in the early 1950’s a UFO crashed on the island of Spitzbergen, Norway. And that under circumstances similar to those that allegedly occurred at Aztec, New Mexico, the unearthly craft was recovered along with its deceased alien crew. It transpires that a reference to this case can be found in a UFO-themed document that surfaced under the terms of the U.S. Freedom of Information Act from the National Security Agency.

The NSA’s copy is slightly different to copies of the same document that have been declassified by the Air Force, the Department of State, and the Army. Someone in the NSA – unfortunately, we don’t know who – identified the Spitzbergen story in the document as a “plant.” As to who seeded the story and why, that’s another matter entirely, one that is probably now lost to the fog of time.

And if you think such things were merely the work of spy-masters in the early years of the Cold War, you’re dead wrong.

In June 2001, Britain’s Independent newspaper noted that Richard Tomlinson, formerly of Britain’s MI6, had revealed that: ”…during the run-up to the 1992 [United Nations] Secretary General elections, [MI6] mounted a smear operation against the Egyptian candidate, Boutros Boutros-Ghali…” Although the operation failed, reported the newspaper, one of the ways that MI6 tried to make Boutros-Ghali look “unbalanced” was by planting stories “claiming that he was a believer in the existence of UFOs and extra-terrestrial life.”

So, where does all of this leave us? I’ll tell you where: massively confused! And that’s the point: ensure that whoever is the target of the disinformation operation in question is used and manipulated according to the rules of those running the show.

Now, a lot of people in Ufology get all hot and bothered and defensive when a discussion of UFO disinformation surfaces. They assume, quite wrongly, that if someone says there is massive UFO disinformation afoot, it somehow implies the person is saying the phenomenon has zero merit outside of the world of psychological warfare – which is nonsense! Clearly, there is a real UFO phenomenon. There are way too many reports – and highly credible reports, I should stress – for the entire mystery to be born out of the minds of disinformation strategists.

The problem, however, is that where the disinformation has succeeded is in sowing the seeds of doubt over this case, or over that case. And, sometimes, that leads people to then wonder about the merits (or the lack of merits) of other cases. So, what we end up with is (A) the UFO research community confused and unsure about what’s real and what isn’t, and (B) those manipulators behind the scenes eagerly rubbing their hands together and congratulating each other on a job well done.

So, yes, there is UFO disinformation – and a hell of a lot if it. But, here’s the important thing: there are real UFOs, too…

Source: Mysterious Universe
http://mysteriousuniverse.org/2014/03/real-ufos-and-real-disinformation/