In the early 1950s, numerous people throughout the world claimed contact with a breed of extraterrestrial that purportedly bore an eerie resemblance to the human race. In many cases, those who maintained that they had met such beings asserted that the aliens were highly concerned about our warlike ways and our ever-increasing nuclear arsenals. Thus was created the cult of the contactee.

	Berney claimed to have made at least two trips to Venus

Some of the better known contactees, such as George Adamski (co-author with Desmond Leslie of Flying Saucers Have Landed, describing Adamski’s supposed meetings with aliens; see FT160:49) claimed that their alleged extraterrestrial friends had Communist-style governments, which led them to be closely monitored by the FBI for decades (see my book, On the Trail of the Saucer Spies). That Adamski and his fellow writers were making such claims at the height of the Cold War, when McCarthyism and ‘Reds-under-the-beds’ scares were at their height, perhaps makes the choice of such strange surveillance targets understandable. But while Adamski himself maintained that his stories were very real (even though, in 1949, he had written a science fiction novel entitled Pioneers of Space: A Trip to the Moon, Mars and Venus), there were those who unscrupulously, and very successfully, exploited the contactee movement for financial gain.

On 10 June 1959, special agents at FBI Headquarters in Washington DC recorded, in a four-page document, a weird story that was simultaneously farcical and tragic. Entitled Interstate Transportation of Stolen Property, the document focused upon the nefarious exploits of one Harold Jesse Berney, whose only motivation for immersing himself in the world of the contactees was the lure of the almighty dollar.

FBI documentation on Berney’s exploits begins thus:

Perhaps one of the most fantastic fraudulent schemes ever to be conceived is the one in which a woman was duped into turning over between ,000 and ,000 of her considerable assets to an elderly man with an extraordinarily vivid imagination.

Current publications contain many articles concerning travel into space and landings on the Moon or one of the planets. Newspapers carry daily stories of new accomplishments in the field of astronautics and space travel forecasts. Confidence man Harold Jesse Berney, however, as early as 1952 set in motion a scheme involving alleged interplanetary travel which, by October 1956, had defrauded his victims out of a total of ,000.

Berney, a sign painter by trade, had a criminal record which dated back some forty years. He was last released from prison by court order in 1949 after serving less than a year of a five-year sentence for embezzlement.

It was upon his release, the FBI related, that Berney began working on his next scam:

In 1952, Berney became active in forming the Aberney Corporation, which was intended to produce television antennae. This company was dissolved in 1953, and a year later Berney incorporated the Telewand Corporation. This company also was allegedly for the purpose of producing television antennae, but it actually served as a front for a more ambitious program its promoter had in mind.

Miss Pauline Eva Bock, a legal secretary, met Berney in the Fall of 1952 and by the Spring of 1953 had advanced several hundred dollars to Berney and had been made the secretary-treasurer of the Aberney Corporation, even though she was not present when elected to this position. After the Aberney Corporation went out of existence, she became secretary-treasurer of the Telewand Corporation, which was controlled entirely by Berney. Pauline Bock had no actual duties and no authority over the activities of the company or its funds.

Then, the FBI noted, Berney revealed to Miss Bock his utterly spurious story – one that would ultimately prove tragically costly to his victim:

In the Fall of 1954, Berney first began to tell Miss Bock of his trip to the planet Venus. He told her he had made a trip to Venus and had gained the confidence of certain leading men on the planet. He narrated how he had travelled to the planet on a spaceship two miles [3.2km] long, stopping on the Moon en route, and told of his travels on the planet, his tour of the major cities, some explanation of the governmental system on Venus, and about his return to Earth after two weeks on the planet.

In his fantastic narrations of life and culture on the planet, Berney stated that apartments and office buildings on Venus dwarfed the Washington Monument. He said that little crime or dishonesty was evident because when anyone was found guilty of committing a serious crime he was just picked up and dropped off on another planet. He also stated that gold was so plentiful that it was used in the manufacture of plumbing fixtures. He went on to say that he had gone to and returned from Venus on a flying saucer and in the time it took to get there from the Earth the Sun had come up twice [while travelling in interplanetary space!]. He said that the Moon was a stopping place on the way to Venus to pick up articles of trade.

Returning to his original theme, Berney related the confidence the planet prince “Uccelles” had in him, saying that he had been selected to supervise the manufacture on Earth of certain highly secret items which had been invented on Venus. The most important of these, Berney referred to as a “modulator,” a device which was designed to operate on energy obtained from the atmosphere and which would create greater energy potential than any atomic device.

In a book Berney wrote, entitled “Two Weeks on Venus,” he gave the following description of the “modulator”: “It not only generates power for light and manufacturing, but manufactures of itself the product known as magnetic flux, that being a source of unlimited power to operate any type of machinery.”

Allegedly, the modulator could softly lift and lower millions of tons in a fraction of a second and could propel planes and spaceships at about the speed of light or hold them motionless in the sky. A modulator-equipped plane, by means of the pull of its magnetic field, could, if desired, blow every fuse in a city, stop all motors and completely block communications.

It was then that Berney played his ace:

Berney told Miss Bock that he was working in conjunction with a large corporation in the East to develop the “modulator” for use by this country. The project was so secret, he said, that the details were known only to the White House and certain top officials of the Government. For this reason, he swore her to secrecy but assured her that when the device was completed any money she had invested in it would be multiplied at least seven times.

Berney gave Pauline Bock certificates which he had signed and told her each certificate represented one share in the Telewand Corporation at 0 a share. He told her she was to take one certificate for each 0 she invested in the firm. He assured her that in order to make the stock certificates valid, it was necessary only for her to add her signature as secretary-treasurer of the firm. This she was careful to do, and she believed in the project so completely that by September 1956 she had entrusted to Berney between ,000 and ,000.

One transaction between the two involved a check for the sum of ,000, which he claimed was necessary “to pay technicians for completing the modulator device ahead of schedule”.

In addition, Berney had interested a man and his wife in his scheme to the extent that they had invested ,000. During the period from 1954 to 1956, Berney was alleged to have made at least two trips to Venus aboard a spaceship as large as the Pentagon Building.

But it was not just Miss Bock that Berney was deceiving, as the FBI noted:

In the meantime, in November 1956, it was reported that his wife and children had received word that Berney had been killed in an explosion and that there would be no burial service. His personal effects had been sent to his wife. The package also contained a camera, billfold and contents including two or three hundred dollars and all Berney’s credentials.

A letter which Mrs Berney received, supposedly from Mr “Uccelles” and written with a pen brush on parchment, advised her that her husband had died and that his body was lying in state on Venus. Mrs Berney, who had not believed his tales of Venus, concluded that he had deserted her.

It would not be long, however, before the authorities were in hot pursuit of this cosmic conman:

In February 1957, the information regarding Berney’s defrauding operations came to the attention of the FBI and investigation was started under the Fraud by Wire Section of the Interstate Transportation of Stolen Property Statute. In the furtherance of his scheme, Berney had frequently contacted Miss Bock by telephone or letter to have her send more money to him. The check for ,000 had been sent to him through the mails and this he had converted to his own use.

When contacted by FBI agents, Miss Bock instantly identified a photograph of Harold J Berney as the individual who had defrauded her of her money. She said that the only things she had to show, in a material way, from Berney’s schemes were a chair and a couch she got when the Telewand office was closed in 1955. She also had 0 from the sale of Telewand machinery.

On March 8 1957, authorized complaints were filed charging Berney with fraud by wire and interstate transportation of stolen property. The following day, bond was recommended for Berney at ,000.

Learning through investigation that Berney intensely disliked cold weather and usually tried to winter in warmer climates, FBI agents intensified their investigation in the southern states.

On March 25 1957, Berney was apprehended by an alert FBI agent at Prichard, Alabama. This agent had learned that a new sign-painting firm had recently opened in Prichard, and the agent, knowing Berney’s background, had investigated and determined Berney’s identity.

In December, 1957, Berney was sentenced to imprisonment for a term of from twenty months to five years.

It will be recalled that, according to Berney, he was in possession of a device that he called the “modulator”, which, he claimed, “manufactures of itself the product known as magnetic flux” and had the ability to “blow every fuse in a city, stop all motors and completely block communications”. It so transpires that an FBI document of January 1953 contained within George Adamski’s FBI file refers to Adamski’s knowledge of a “machine” that operated on the principle of “cutting magnetic lines of force”, and that could “draw airplanes down from the sky”. The machine, Adamski told the FBI, was in the possession of a man whose name is excised from Adamski’s file.

We may never know who this person was, but the description of the device given to FBI agents by Adamski sounds suspiciously like the one Berney claimed to have. If it was indeed the same device, and Adamski and Berney were acquainted, then perhaps this is an indication that we should firmly relegate Adamski’s out-of-this-world tales to the realm of science fiction, too.

And there is one, final, strange point: Pauline Eva Bock – Harold Berney’s unfortunate victim – never existed, at least, not under that name. Her real name was Pauline Goebel. To protect the identity of the undoubtedly mortified and embarrassed woman, the FBI created an alias for her. Why the FBI resorted to such actions, when it could have simply blacked out Goebel’s name on the declassified versions of the original files, is puzzling – even Time magazine printed her real name – but arguably more than appropriate for such a strange tale.