UFO Religions

Archive for the ‘Man-Made UFOs’ Category

Readers of The Facade know that one of the important sub-plotlines in the story concerns Nazi occult mythology and the idea that UFOs extend from human technology traceable to research done by German scientists during World War II. Part of the lore associated with these trajectories is that, during the war the Nazis successfully constructed a base in the Antarctic, to which they were able to clandestinely transport UFO technology. The Allies, we are told, uncovered the truth of this escape and transport, and sent a mission (“Operation Highjump“) the location under the leadership of Rear Admiral Richard E. Byrd. That mission allegedly encountered UFOs manned by Nazi pilots, whom they fought to a draw. This engagement is supposedly part of the historical record in Byrd’s own words.

You can read all about this “event” on the internet (here and here, for example).

So did it happen?

Well, Operation Highjump was for real, but there’s no credible evidence that Byrd said anything about flying saucers in the Antarctic or saw any. The links above make much of “a Soviet intelligence report” (complete with a YouTube video translated from Russian) and “never before known testimony by two US Navy servicemen.”

Can anyone corroborate the testimony of these “never before known” servicemen? Are the Soviets trustworthy? The same people who talked out of both sides of their mouths when it came to Hitler’s remains at the end of the war? The same people that engaged the US in an unprecedented propaganda war for fifty years? And a YouTube video? The source for one of the links above is largely Frank Joseph, a former neo-Nazi turned wacky ancient America theorist. Now there’s objectivity (for anyone who reads occult literature, you know that those two facets of Mr. Joseph’s intellectual journey are closely related). Well, that’s what passes for evidence these days.  Innuendo, blind trust, and YouTube.

As an alternative, I’d like to direct your attention to what real researchers do. They return to primary sources and then submit their work to peer review, not YouTube or the exopolitics website. The article below is an excellent piece of work from a scholarly journal on the Nazi Antarctic base myth:

Colin Summerhayes and Peter Beeching, “Hitler’s Antarctic Base: The Myth and the Reality,” Polar Record 43 (224): 1-21 (2007).

Here’s the article’s abstract:

“In January-February 1939, a secret German expedition visited Dronning (or Queen) Maud Land, Antarctica, apparently with the intention inter alia of establishing a base there. Between 1943 and 1945 the British launched a secret wartime Antarctic operation, code-named Tabarin. Men from the Special Air Services Regiment (SAS), Britain’s covert forces for operating behind the lines, appeared to be involved. In July and August 1945, after the German surrender, two U-boats arrived in Argentina. Had they been to Antarctica to land Nazi treasure or officials? In the southern summer of 1946–1947, the US Navy appeared to ‘invade’ Antarctica using a large force. The operation, code-named Highjump, was classified confidential. In 1958, three nuclear weapons were exploded in the region, as part of another classified US operation, code-named Argus. Given the initial lack of information about these various activities, it is not, perhaps, surprising that some people would connect them to produce a pattern in which governments would be accused of suppressing information about ‘what really happened’, and would use these pieces of information to construct a myth of a large German base existing in Antarctica and of allied efforts to destroy it. Using background knowledge of Antarctica and information concerning these activities that has been published since the early 1940s, it is demonstrated: that the two U-Boats could not have reached Antarctica; that there was no secret wartime German base in Dronning Maud Land; that SAS troops did not attack the alleged German base; that the SAS men in the region at the time had civilian jobs; that Operation Highjump was designed to train the US Navy for a possible war with the Soviet Union in the Arctic, and not to attack an alleged German base in Antarctica; and that Operation Argus took place over the ocean more than 2000 km north of Dronning Maud Land. Activities that were classified have subsequently been declassified and it is no longer difficult to separate fact from fancy, despite the fact that many find it attractive not to do so.”

I bring all this up for a couple reasons. The mythology that has accrued to Operation Highjump does not actually undermine either the man-made UFO hypothesis or a link to Nazi technology. That link may be direct or indirect. The former is, in my view, possible, but the latter is much more so. I won’t define “indirect:” here, as the subject matter relates to The Portent, the sequel to The Facade. Despite the Nazis never being able to build an Antarctic base, there is evidence (see the above journal article) that they were actively seeking alternative locations for strategic military purposes. As such, these sorts of items are good for showing intent. The real question becomes, what would be the most sensible way to continue the research and the goals of the Third Reich after the war? I think there’s a coherent answer to that question hidden in plain sight. Lastly, Nazi occult mythology is important not because of the Nazis, but because its intellectual trajectories are old. There are reasons other than geographical remoteness that the Nazis were interested in Antarctica. They borrowed certain thinking on that point (and many others). Nazi occultism is just one iteration of a worldview and set of ideas that have been around for a very long time. And they’re still around. Sets of ideas are important. They’re often the impetus for massive shifts in thinking through human populations. That’s especially workable these days in the Information Age. We’re often told to “follow the money” to ferret out some truth. That’s very useful. I’d also suggest we “follow the ideas” — and it’s really interesting when both paths converge.

Technorati Tags: antarctic, base, byrd, flying, highjump, Nazis, saucers, UFOs

The National Archives recently de-classified records concerning a USAF project from the 1950s that aimed to build flying saucers. The schematic below is one of the pictures found at the above link.

The project was known as “Project 1794.” I’ve seen several posts on this today. One of the better ones is that found on the Daily Grail. The Grail post notes that this project was related to the development of the failed Avrocar, but it also includes a healthy dose of skepticism in regard to the project allegedly shutting down in 1960. Count me among the skeptics.

Readers know that I’ve favorably mentioned (and reviewed) Nick Redfern’s Roswell book, Body Snatchers in the Desert: The Horrible Truth at the Heart of the Roswell Story. I mention it here because part of Nick’s thesis is that the craft that crashed at Roswell was an experimental saucer attached to a high altitude balloon — that the Roswell incident represented a marriage between PAPERCLIP wingless aircraft technology begun by Nazi aerospace scientists and Japan’s Project FUGO, whose goal was transportation of lethal bio-agents to the west coast of the US via high altitude balloons. The marriage involved using these balloons to carry saucer-shaped prototypes with human unfortunates as guinea pigs to learn about the effects of high altitude (Nick discusses “Project Sunshine” in that regard). With this in mind, I have used the photograph below on my Roswell Mythos web page for illustrative purposes. The PAPERCLIP connection was part of the plotline of my novel, The Facade, which appeared prior to Nick’s non-fiction work. Note the date at the bottom of the picture: 1967.

It strikes me as odd that this technological marriage continued well after 1960 if the USAF was no longer interested in the wingless craft design. Why not use some other object or craft?  It suggests to me that research into the wingless craft design continued. Nick theorizes (with some intriguing circumstantial evidence brought forth) that the program also included applying nuclear technology to the wingless craft. As such, it wouldn’t have involved anything like the “gravity modification” technology talked about with respect to UFO propulsion — this was the late 40s – 1960s after all . . . unless Joe Farrell’s work on the Nazi “Bell” is at least in part on target (see Reich Of The Black Sun: Nazi Secret Weapons & The Cold War Allied Legend and Roswell and the Reich: The Nazi Connection).

In short, I’m not buying the USAF disinterest, or “death by Avrocar” storyline.

Technorati Tags: balloon, Fugo, Paperclip, project 1794, Project Sunshine, Roswell, UFOs

I’ve lost track of how many times the USAF has explained what happened at Roswell. First there was the 1994-1995 War-and-Peace-like, 1000-page tome, “The Roswell Report: Fact versus Fiction in the New Mexico Desert.”  This was the report connecting the Roswell crash with Project MOGUL. That was dutifully followed in 1997 by the overbearingly-titled, “The Roswell Report: Case Closed.” This report was released in conjunction with the 50th anniversary of the Roswell event. The CNN press conference from Roswell was what turned my interest in UFOs from that of casual enthusiast to something more academically serious. I can well remember how the USAF spokesman (Colonel Haynes), when confronted by a reporter who knew that the USAF test dummies could not explain the reports of bodies in a 1947 event because the dummies only came into use in the 1950s, stated with a straight face that the USAF believed the witnesses had undergone “time compression.” Here’s a transcript of a Larry King show that utilized video clips from the press conference where Haynes uttered this infamous piece of gobbledy-gook.

These more “official” explanations were in turn followed by Lt. Col. Philip Corso’s controversial book, The Day After Roswell. Corso’s credentials and identity are genuine. He claimed to have been in charge of the seeding of alien technology discovered at Roswell into the private sector for development (most notably Bell Labs). Corso’s book has been criticized, even by some UFO researchers otherwise committed to the ET view of Roswell (most notably Stanton Friedman). The fact that Corso’s son is a professing Christian who believes his father didn’t lie in this matter is an interesting footnote to the saga (but then again he claims the Roswell craft was a time machine).

So now we get another explanation from yet another USAF insider. I’m sure this one will put it all to rest. Personally, I still think the books by Nick Redfern and Joseph Farrell on the Paperclip connections make much better sense.¹

Technorati Tags: air force, crash, explanation, Roswell, UFO

I just finished Thomas Bullard’s book, The Myth and Mystery of UFOs, by scholar-folklorist Thomas Bullard (University of Kansas Press, 2010). Rather than write my own review, I found the work summarized nicely in this review over at Magonia review of books blog. I’ll just add a few thoughts below on this important work.

Bullard’s book is not light reading. It is an academic work. In my view, as an academic, it’s a wonderful volume. Bullard has detailed chapters, with the expected documentation in mainly academic sources, on all the major motifs of UFO studies: descriptions of alien craft, the aliens themselves, abduction narratives, and alien mission and homeworlds. In each case, Bullard painstakingly details how virtually all the UFO anecdotal evidence can be found in ancient, medieval, and early modern tales across the globe. Importantly, the vast majority of these correlations have nothing to do with other planets, inter-planetary travel, or extraterrestrials. That is, though the correlations are overwhelmingly present, it is only in the contemporary era that narratives about abduction and “otherworldly visitation” conforms to anything we would recognize as high technology. His point in this effort is to raise question of how any of the UFO phenomena could in reality be about visitors from space given the vast arrays of correlations. Good question.

Bullard’s (for the most part) explanation is the psycho-social approach. This is not a view that says a culture produces these episodes or encounters and their descriptions. Rather, it is the encounter with the anomalous that produces the descriptions — and the descriptions are far more likely to not be about genuine aliens from space than other deep-seated thoughts, fear, beliefs, yearnings, etc. The reason the overlaps are so high, reasons Bullard, is that experiences are parsed in such a way that new mythologies are constructed that serve the same fucntion or outlet as older ones.  The garb changes because we are living in a different era, our lives defined by technology and the “final frontier” of space.

Bullard doesn’t take a dogmatic stance on this, though. He simply feels it has high explanatory value, but not complete explanatory power. He leaves room for truly anomalous events that might include genuine extraterrestrial contact, and outlines in some details how such experiences might be winnowed from the those experiences for which the psycho-social explanation can best account.

I would encourage anyone interested in UFOs to read this book, and to keep it as a handy reference for its coverage and source material. In particular, those for whom the UFO subject goes beyond the nuts and bolts (questions of physics and reverse engineering which a priori assume that most UFOs are physical craft of non-human origin) will be well served by Bullard’s focus on how the UFO subject molds and produces religious experience and worldview.

Technorati Tags: abduction, aliens, Bullard, fairies, folklore, magonia, mystery, myth, review, UFOs

This is my third and final response to the UFO Iconoclast post opposed to the idea of man-made UFOs. (See Part 1 and Part 2). I just finished the new book by Vallee and Aubeck and will be writing a lengthy review of it.

My responses are at “MSH” and blocked off. I think you will see that these arguments lack persuasive power and can be turned back to anyone who makes them in such as a way as to demonstrate their un-compelling nature.

On the very face of it there are very fundamental reasons why such fantastic craft cannot be our own. If we have had such aerial abilities for so many decades:

1) Why do they fly in full view of civilian populations or within commercial air routes?

With all of the hundreds of thousands of square miles of Area 51′s and other such places, why fly publicly? It may test the “reaction” of the populace, but it would at the same time unnecessarily expose the technology and performance capabilities to enemy powers. In reality, security would never be compromised in that way.

MSH: I don’t find this at all persuasive. It compels us to believe that a sighting ranging from a few seconds to a couple of minutes will yield technological information. Unless observers have X-Ray vision, I don’t see how that is the case. Most of the best sightings are at high altitude, and so chances of detection are themselves minimal, and all the observer really knows is that “I’ve never seen one of those before,” or “we aint’ got one like that as far as I know.” Big deal. Now, the argument would be much better if there were USA-AF decals on the craft. THEN it would make sense to not fly these things anywhere they could be seen, because then you actually ARE risking sensitive information (like, “hey, this UFO is ours”). But without that, all a sighting does is perpetuate a mystery (or a convenient mythology; see below).

MSH: This argument can be reversed as follows: “Since civilians and other people, including commerical pilots, see UFOs, that means they cannot be man-made. Does that *really* make sense?

2) Why don’t we use this technology to transport our astronauts into space?

It makes no sense that if such UFO-like capabilities are man-made that they would not be applied in the exploration of the cosmos. Why continue to use “outdated” technology that relies on conventional combustion and thrust technologies, with extremely limited range and with significant safety issues?

MSH: This presumes speed is all one would need for space flight. There may very well be other technologically-related safety issues. It’s easy to presume there aren’t if one a priori assumes such craft are ET and are used to travel in deep space, but we don’t actually know that. At any rate, let’s assume they can do that. Then we are asked to believe that ineptitude on the part of the military is a reason to consider the craft extraterrestrial. Last time I checked, things like government waste, bureaucratic rivalry, and plain short-sighted stupidity are alive and well in the military and most other corporate entities. A bad decision does not an ET vehicle make. We also have to consider that, if these are man-made and there is some internal reason (comprehensible or sensible or not) for maintaining secrecy, that alone would be enough reason for whoever is in charge to remain using the old technology when it can get the job done.

MSH: Reversal: Since *we* are NOT using UFO technology to send people to space, that must mean *we* aren’t behind UFO technology. Say what?

3) Why is the technology not used in warfare?

If such things have been developed by our government, why have they not been applied in national defense? It would have instantly ended conflicts in past decades in Korea, Vietnam and Iraq. If another country has been the developer of UFO-like technology, why have they not exercised such amazing aerial superiority during conflict?

MSH: See my response above; it applies here as well. One could add that the reasoning might be the same as why we don’t just whip out an atomic bomb to end conflicts quickly and decisively. It may be too destructive. But my bet is on the fact that wars are inescapably political. Take the war on terror. We could end it in a day if we just nuked everybody, or if we took the handcuffs off our forces and allowed them to actually use the other weapons we have. But we don’t do that, and haven’t, since WWII.

Reversal: Since *we* are NOT using UFO technology for military purposes, that must mean *we* aren’t behind UFO technology. Ditto on “say what?”

4) Why don’t we use this technology in commercial air flight?

Such navigation and propulsion breakthroughs would revolutionize the flight of people and parcel. Billions would stand to be made- and everyone would appreciate shortened flights!

MSH: This is a better question, but still not very persuasive for simple reasons. So, we give our UFO technology to Boeing or Delta and then the technology is as close to falling into the hands of our enemies as a hijacking. Right. Good idea. Did Dilbert’s boss think of that plan?  I don’t think it is at all unreasonable to suggest that, if the military industrial complex is behind UFO technology we ought to expect it a reasonable thing to do would be share it with commerical entities. If the military industrial complex thought such technology gave us a military edge, they would withhold it from such public use, since that would invariably mean more porous security.

MSH: Reversal: Since *we* are NOT using UFO technology for commercial flight, that must mean *we* aren’t behind UFO technology. Really?  Is it that simple?

5) Why hasn’t the aerial technology been used to take over the world?

If the “controllers” of such technology are of nefarious intent (i.e. former Nazis, the Illuminati or even an enemy country) why have they not openly displayed their terror technology and by now have commanded the world’s allegiance?

MSH: This is also a better question, but one that presumes certain things in relation to the man-made argument it is targeting. For instance, one could take the targeted view and say something like, “since this technology derives from Nazi science, and since members of the teams who worked on projects that are related to exotic flight (see Farrell’s books here, e.g.), then it is possible that this technology may be in mutliple hands (U.S. included) or at least suspected of being in multiple hands.” In other words, one could apply the MAD logic to this question (Mutually Assured Destruction — anyone remember the Cold War?). But that’s guesswork. It also presupposes that anyone holding this technology is interested in world domination. Maybe they aren’t. Maybe they are content with their own little invisible empire that’s puttering along just fine while the rest of the known geo-political entities implode just fine on their own. But maybe they are interested in world domination and don’t think they can pull it off. Would 100 UFOs do that?  Last time I checked, all a UFO was really good for was SPEED. I don’t recall much in the way of any reports that UFOs were weaponized (they “are for peace, always,” right?). Let’s say some entity has 100 or 1000 of these craft. Now what? All one would need to do is find out where they are an nuke them. They aren’t indestructible (can we say “UFO crash”?). My point is that, since we are using our imaginations, if I had a UFO squadron I’d be pretty scared about anyone knowing about them, because they are quite destructible, and the facilities I have to make them and house them are also quite destructible. Hey, one piece of imagination is as good as another.

MSH: This one has another problem. It can be reversed very easily on the ET view: “If UFOs are ET vehicles, why isn’t ET using them to take over the world?” Hmmm.  Maybe they don’t want to.  And maybe the humans who might have them don’t want to, either. Oh, I forgot, ET is far more enlightened than we are. He told us so. If he exists. Or there’s this reversal: Since no single human group has taken over the world yet, none such group can be behind UFO technology. That one has some serious gaps of thought.

6) Why haven’t other scientists anywhere in the world “stumbled upon” such aerial breakthroughs in intervening decades?

It is inconceivable that only a very few working within deep black programs (or who were WWII Germans scientists, secret Tesla disciples or the like) could alone have discovered the secret to such propulsion without any other scientists or physicists in private or university employ ever having envisioned these same technologies after all of these years.

MSH: No, it isn’t inconceivable at all. My guess is that a reasonable number of people (working within the controlled sphere where it’s happening) would know about the technology. If it was at the highest level of security, the burden of proof is on the other side to tell us WHY it would become known to others — or that it has not become known. So let’s play with this one. Let’s say the US developed UFOs after WWII and no one else did. They were able to protect this knowledge for a couple of decades but, as espionage would have it, the secret leaked out to the Russians. What would the Russians do?  Tell the world? Aside from the fact that they’d expose their access to us by doing so, what good would it do? How would they prove themselves trustworthy without compromising the intelligence apparatus that allowed them to gain such closely-guarded secrets? They’d probably want MORE information, like how to take that piece of knowledge and make it their own reality. They’d already be decades behind, and losing their intelligence conduit would mean getting no further. And if they developed one, by the time they did, we’d be a few models ahead. And if they did tell tje world at any point, it would just be denied.

Frankly, this isn’t a coherent objection because the ETH defenders would want to build part of their case on secret information about aliens escaping the screcy placed upon it.  But then that undermines this very argument — about others stumbling upon the technology.  It’s further shown to be weak by the simple counter-assertion that man-made UFO technology *has* broken out, but there is still uncertainty about whether it is man-made. This is actually where find ourselves. We have had a number of insiders come forward and say “I saw this and that technology and I think it might be alien, but I’m not sure.” Great. So the fact that the technology has become known or exposed can’t tell us the point of origin in any regard. Let me illustrate:

Statements:
* Credible people have witnessed UFO technology up close (or “stumbled upon it”) but it can’t tell us if it’s alien.
* Credible people have witnessed UFO technology up close (or “stumbled upon it”) and believe that it’s alien.
* Credible people have witnessed UFO technology up close (or “stumbled upon it”) and believe that it is man-made.

Question: HOW do any of these statements actually solve the riddle?  They don’t. Piont: allowing for such disclosures don’t compel any position; you need an actual alien to make that case. Otherwise, you are assuming what you are trying to prove. The UFOI argument is that it is unreasonable to think that such knowledge could be maintained with complete security forever. I agree — but how does that help or compel a conclusion? It doesn’t.

The rest of the UFOI post aims to convince us that it is a lie that the U.S. Government wants us to believe in ETs for some internal purpose. On what basis is the claim made? Well, the post pokes fun at some attempts to articulate that conspiracy, and that’s pretty much it. I’d poke fun at some of what I saw there, too. But that isn’t a compelling answer or rebuttal. What I want to see is the UFOI group systematically show, by virtue of a systematic critique of Joe Farrell’s work and W. A. Harbinson’s non-fiction work, that a group of scientists, mostly attached to Nazi scientific teams, lacked the knowledge, funding, and wherewithal to keep working on these ideas. I would suggest that they had all three, but that of course doesn’t prove the man-made view.  As I said at the end of my second post on all this:

Instead of taking the human answer off the table, given what we know human scientists were working on since the 1940s (questions, goals, and strategies for overcoming gravity or its effects), we ought to be seriously asking if they found solutions. The kinds of technologies that would produce these effects are *not* beyond the human MIND. That much is quite verifiable. The only question is whether they are still beyond human ACHIEVEMENT. Maybe they are. Maybe they aren’t. But there is no reason at all to take the man-made view off the table. Since we know humans exist, and are not at all sure aliens actually exist, as things stand right now, I know which way Occam’s razor is cutting.

Technorati Tags: alien, extraterrestrial, government, Man-Made UFOs, military, Nazis, secrecy