This is an automated archive made by the Lemmit Bot.
The original was posted on /r/highstrangeness by /u/my_jefycu on 2023-11-03 21:16:35.
Political Overtones (by Jacques Vallee, from the book DIMENSIONS: A Casebook of Alien Contact, published 1988)
I have alluded to the fact that the major groups of UFO believers have been closely monitored by government agents. There is a good reason for this attention: their influence can be manipulated for political goals or simply as a test of various forms of deception. One of the recommendations of a recently declassified CIA/U.S. Air Force panel on UFOs, which met in Washington in 1953, was precisely to monitor the activities of civilian groups:
The Panel took cognizance of the existence of such groups as the “Civilian Flying Saucer Investigators” or Los Angeles and the “Aerial Phenomena Research Organization” (Wisconsin). It was believed that such organizations should be watched because of their great influence on mass thinking if widespread sightings should occur. The apparent irresponsibility and the possible use of such groups for subversive purposes should be kept in mind.
It is difficult to be more explicit. This political control factor does explain certain bizarre aspects of the UFO problem, including the behavior of some celebrated contactees, who could have been set up in their roles in order to propagate alleged extraterrestrial messages in this and other countries.
For example, George Adamski has confessed that four U.S. government scientists were responsible for launching his career as an ambassador for the Space Brothers. These scientists were from the Point Loma Naval Electronics Laboratory near San Diego and from a “similar setup” in Pasadena. They asked him if he would “cooperate in the collective attempt to get photographs of the strange craft moving through space.” Adamski’s major supporter abroad was a former intelligence officer with the British Army, with whom I have personally met, and a Cambridge engineering graduate who now lives in Mexico. A man who hosted Adamski during his tour of Australia has told me that “Good old George” was traveling with a passport bearing special privileges.
The political factor also explains the deliberate infiltration of civilian UFO groups by persons linked to the intelligence world. In terms of social behavior control, civilian UFO groups would be as necessary to an effective mechanism as Project Blue Book or the Condon committee, because they would provide an escape valve for the steam of the enthusiasts and a useful channel for planted stories. Admiral Roscoe H. Hillenkoetter, the former CIA chief who stated, “It is imperative that we learn what UFOs are and where they come from,” and later joined the board of directors of the National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomena (NICAP), could have lent credibility to the stratagem by deliberately promoting the extraterrestrial theory. Also among the leaders of NICAP, one of the most influential UFO groups in the fifties and sixties, were at least three well-known intelligence operatives: Bernard Corvalho, Nicholas de Rochefort, and Colonel Joseph Ryan, men who were trained practitioners of the modern techniques of psychological warfare.
It may seem preposterous for government to spend time and money testing the public’s reaction to the idea of contact with extraterrestrials. Yet I strongly suspect at least two major UFO cases were covert experiments in rumor generation and in the deliberate creation of contactee cults (one of these cases took place in Spain, one in France). To the skeptical reader I can only point out that there are people on the government payroll whose job it is to devise contingency plans for all sorts of extreme situations. Under the Nixon administration, a White House task force had even proposed a scheme for the invasion of Cuba that involved a submarine equipped with lasers. It would “paint” an image of Christ over the island to simulate the Second Coming. This “miracle,” it was thought, would disturb the Catholic population in Havana, paralyze communications, and disorganize the Cuban armed forces long enough for commandos to seize strategic points and overthrow the Castro regime.
In his well-documented book War on the Mind, clinical psychologist Peter Watson, who was a member of the Sunday Times “Insight” team which investigated (among other things) the use of psychological warfare by the British, reveals that “equipment has been developed to use lowlying clouds as a screen off which to bounce huge propaganda shows. Tape recordings of primitive gods have been prepared, to be played from helicopters, thus frightening tribes.”
During the Vietnam war a U.S. military unit called the 4th Psyop Group invented an image projector called the Mitralux. It used eighty-five-millimeter slides and a 1,000-watt bulb to project pictures on buildings, mountains, and cloud banks.
I believe that it is imperative for scientists to study UFOs. But we should not do it naively. With the progress of human technology, it has become impossible to study any UFO report without considering the possibility of a deliberate deception along with all the other classical hypotheses.
Many UFO groups are gullible to any rumor that seems to support the extraterrestrial credo, without seriously investigating where the rumor comes from and who may have an interest in spreading it. The skeptical zeal of some of the more vocal debunkers is also inspired by the need to maintain political control. To prevent genuine scientific study from being organized, all that is needed is to maintain a certain threshold of ridicule around the phenomenon. This can be done easily enough by a few influential science writers, under the guise of humanism or rationalism. UFO research is equated by them with “false science,” thus creating an atmosphere of guilt by association, which is deadly to any independent scientist. Efforts are made to systematically discredit professional researchers who investigate the phenomenon.
This history of the interaction between flying-saucer contact and politics goes back to the early California contactees. In those days, many occult groups linked to power-hungry organizations were extremely active. Right after World War II, when a branch of Aleister Crowley’s neo-Templar cult flourished in Los Angeles, two of the most ardent members were Jack W. Parsons, a propulsion engineer, and L. Ron Hubbard, a science-fiction buff. Jack Parsons claimed to have met a Venusian in the desert in 1946 and went on to be one of the founders of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and of the Aerojet Corporation, although JPL may deny the connection. L. Ron Hubbard went on to found Dianetics and Scientology.
According to my information, contactee George Adamski had prewar connections with American fascist leader William Dudley Pelley, who was interned during the war. Another seminal contactee, George Hunt Williamson (whose real name was Michel d’Obrenovic), was associated with Pelley’s organization in the early fifties. In fact, Pelley may have put Williamson in touch with Adamski.
Other associates of Williamson during the great era of the flying saucers were such contactees as John McCoy and the two Stanford brothers, Ray and Rex.
The connections among all these men, who have been very influential in shaping the UFO myth in the United States, are quite intricate. William Dudley Pelley, who died in 1965, was the leader of the Silver Shirts, an American Nazi group that began its activities about 1932. Its membership overlapped strongly with Guy Ballard’s I Am movement. Pelley declined to join the other fascist groups in their support for Congressman Lemke in 1936, standing on his own in Indiana as a Christian Party candidate. His opposition to Roosevelt increased until his eight-year internment for sedition in 1942. After the war, he started an occult group, Soulcraft, and published a racist magazine called Valor. He also wrote the book Star Guests in 1950, a compilation of automatic writing reminiscent of the Seth Material.
It was about 1950 that Williamson is said to have begun working for Pelley at the offices of Soulcraft Publications in Noblesville, Indiana, before moving to California, where he witnessed Adamski’s desert contact on November 20, 1952, with a Venusian that had long blond hair. Williamson, however, has assured me that he never embraced any of the racist theories that the pro-Nazi movements promoted. Perhaps Adamski and Pelley knew one another as a result of their common interest in the I Amcult? Dr. Laughead, who inspired the contacts of Mrs. Keech in the Midwest and later launched Dr. Andrija Pucharich on the tracks of the mythic “Spectra,” is also said to have associated with this group.
John McCoy, who coauthored with Williamson the book UFOs Confidential, operated the Essene Press. He introduced the idea that the Jewish banker conspiracy was involved in the UFO problem.
The Stanford brothers were living in the same Texas town (Corpus Christi) as McCoy was, and in the mid-1950s they produced a series of contact books, one of which listed McCoy as coauthor. The Stanford’s book, Look Up! , acknowledges “all those who helped in preparation of this book and the people of other planets who made the contacts described.” Ray Stanford states that in December 1954 he recieved “a very distinct telepathic message from the space people,” and he adds,
During 1955 I also had a person…
Content cut off. Read original on https://old.reddit.com/r/HighStrangeness/comments/17n3z4i/political_overtones_by_jacques_vallee_from_book/