FT248

The subject of this column dropped through the letterbox. I was going to return to the American right’s conspiracy theories about President Obama – the most amusing of which is the claim that he’s a stooge of the Soviet Communists, trained by them and planted on America [1] – until the postman brought the March/February issue of Nexus. It contains an interview by Linda Moulton Howe with someone purporting to be a former CIA and military officer who worked with UFOs. It’s obviously disinform­ation – and not even very good disinformation, at that. Howe’s interviewee, whom she calls “Stein”, runs some of ufology’s greatest hits past her: Nazi UFOs hidden in the Antarctic (FT175:42–47), aliens, Roswell, and so on and so forth. He claims to have seen the Santilli ‘alien autopsy’ film in the 1950s – seemingly unaware that Santilli has admitted it was a fake – and tells Howe that the Germans had the flying discs we think of as UFOs in 1917(!), built from plans received (sort of downloaded) by mediums from the Vril Society.

The really startling thing to me that is that Howe doesn’t appear to have thought, “UFOS in 1917? That seems unlikely”, or asked herself, “Oh, the Vril Society: what’s that?” Had she Googled “Vril society” she would found that the concept of Vril first appeared in a novel by Edward Bulwer-Lytton published in 1871 (FT241:32–33) and evidence for the existence of a real Vril Society is non-existent. For a journalist and filmmaker, Howe is stunningly uncurious.

And we have been here before. It was Howe who was taken into an office of the US Air Force by Sgt Richard Doty in 1983 and shown ‘secret documents’ about UFOs, aliens and crash sites which she could read but not copy. [2] Doty was part of a disinformation operation by the US Air Force aimed at American ufology. This operation gave similar inform­ation to Paul Bennewitz and then, a year later, offered some of it in documentary form as the MJ12 papers (FT121:40–43; 122:28–31). We know this was a disinformation operation because one of its main perpetrators, the writer William Moore, told American ufologists at a conference in 1989 that they’d been had – and by him. [3]

Having been conned in 1983, here is Howe putting her name to the same information: MJ12 – with Nazi knobs on this time – and trusting an “informant” she has never met. The interview with “Stein” was done over the phone. I swear, if I could do a decent American accent I could have pulled off a more convincing job than Howe’s informant, “Stein”. He claimed to have been in the CIA, informing Howe that his boss in the CIA was “in charge of the south-eastern United States… they had the country divided up four ways. We also had an administrative person as a well as a European head. And, of course, we had spies in Russia and so on.”

Uh-huh. As a description of the CIA, that doesn’t even approach inadequate.

Sgt Doty, who had showed Howe the documents in his office, was the subject of quite a bit of discussion in the years following the debunking of the MJ12 papers by Bill Moore, but he’s still at it. In the same issue of Nexus as the Howe farrago, there is a review of a new edition of a book by Doty, Timothy Cooper and Robert Collins called Exempt from Disclosure. Doty and Collins were both – and possibly are still both – members of the network of US intelligence and military pers­onnel who went by bird code names and which became known collectively as ‘the Aviary’. Timothy Cooper received/distributed another batch of MJ12 papers in 1992. It’s as if Bill Moore’s statement to a MUFON conference in 1989 had never happened!

A widely published recent study of the brains of political activists, using MRI scann­ing, showed that when confronted by evid­ence which threatened to undermine their beliefs, it was emotional rather than reasoning circuits which were activated by the material. [4]

Confronted by the evidence that the MJ12 documents were a fake, Timothy Cooper came up with this response which enabled him not to acknowledge that he’d been conned: “In summary, the Majestic documents are, in all probability, an attempt by an informed person(s) to reconstruct for researchers a historical narrative based on non-existent and authentic documents supported by published facts with classic disinformation techniques in what is termed in counterintelligence parlance as ‘gray’ intelligence. The question of whether they are genuine, authentic or real is not the issue here. The important point to keep in mind, as I believe, is the information contained in the documents themselves. For in these documents and the FOIA material already released, and the published facts contain the answers we all seek. The truth may be found in our individual perceptions.” [5]

So, the truth isn’t out there after all – it’s in here!

Notes
1  See http://tinyurl.com/aabmxv (worldnetdaily.com).
2  See Greg Bishop: Project Beta (New York, 2005) pp202–7. The ‘read but don’t copy’ line was stand­ard psy-ops technique with journalists.
3  This was a psy-ops disinformation technique, known in the British Army as the double bubble. You lead a target down a false trail and then, when the target accepts your version of reality as true, you tell them they’ve been conned, leaving them confused.
4  See for example: http://tinyurl.com/dc7p27 (catallaxis.com).
5  http://tinyurl.com/auz89n (geocities.com).