UFO'S of UAP'S, ASTRONOMIE, RUIMTEVAART, ARCHEOLOGIE, OUDHEIDKUNDE, SF-SNUFJES EN ANDERE ESOTERISCHE WETENSCHAPPEN

Over the years and decades, a large number of UFO-themed government documents have been declassified into the public domain thanks to the Freedom of Information Acts of various nations. There is, however, another aspect to this: namely, the files that should have been released but that can’t be found. Anywhere. We’ll begin with the Roswell affair of July 1947. When, in the 1990s, the U.S. Government Accountability Office (previously the General Accounting Office) dug deep to try and find any documentation on Roswell, many researchers of the still-mysterious case thought that at least some degree of answers would be found. Not so. There’s no doubt that the GAO did a very good job when it came to the search for the Roswell files, but even they couldn’t find what turned out to be a significant body of files. As the GAO said: “In our search for records concerning the Roswell crash, we learned that some government records covering RAAF activities had been destroyed and others had not. For example, RAAF administrative records (from Mar. 1945 through Dec. 1949) and RAAF outgoing messages (from Oct. 1946 through Dec. 1949) were destroyed. The document disposition form does not indicate what organization or person destroyed the records and when or under what authority the records were destroyed [italics mine].” The mystery is still not clear. Now, onto another famous (or infamous) case.

(Nick Redfern)

Roswell: Files that can’t be found

In 2011, the BBC ran an online article titled “UFO files reveal ‘Rendlesham incident’ papers missing.” The BBC’s Neil Henderson wrote: “Intelligence papers on a reported UFO sighting known as the ‘Rendlesham incident’ have gone missing, files from the National Archives reveal. The missing files relate to a report of mysterious lights from US servicemen at RAF Woodbridge in Suffolk in 1980. The disappearance came to light with the release of 8,000 previously classified documents on UFOs. Officials found a ‘huge’ gap where defense intelligence files relating to the case should be, the papers show.” The files also referred to a “deliberate attempt” to “eradicate the records covering this incident.” Hmm.

(Nick Redfern)

When documents vanish…

Now, onto the matter of the Contactees of the 1950s. Or, rather, one particular Contactee: Orfeo Angelucci, who came on the UFO scene in the early 1950s.. It’s a fact that nearly all of the UFO Contactees had files opened on them by J. Edgar Hoover’s FBI. The list included George Adamski, George Van Tassel, Wayne Aho, and George Hunt Williamson. Some of those FBI surveillance files ran to more than 300 pages. By the mid-1950s, Angelucci had moved on from his job at Lockheed and he and his family were now based out of Twentynine Palms, San Bernadino County, California. And, with his book The Secret of the Saucers on the bookshelves, he was becoming a familiar face at UFO lectures and conferences. It was in this period that Angelucci caught the attention of the FBI – and for a very curious reason. As he became more adept at public speaking, and more comfortable about discussing his claimed encounters with aliens, Angelucci revealed something disturbingly eye-opening. It was something which soon had the Feds on his tail. According to Angelucci, as his profile as one of the Contactees grew and grew, he found himself approached on several occasions by what he described as a “subversive element.”On occasion, those approaches were made at Giant Rock, California, near to George Van Tassel’s Integratron.

(Nick Redfern)

George Van Tassel’s Integratron

This small group – “foreigners,” as he worded it – first approached Angelucci while he was engaged in a series of lectures along the east coast in the 1950s. Regular UFO enthusiasts, they were certainly not. They did their very best to try and encourage Angelucci to suggest to his listeners and readers that his alien comrades were communists. In correspondence with Jim Moseley, who, as we have seen, spent time addressing the matter of a communist plot to manipulate the U.S. UFO scene, Angelucci claimed that this “gang of four,” as we might describe them, bought him dinner on three occasions and plied him with plentiful amounts of booze, in plush, New York hotels and bars. Angelucci admitted to Moseley that he was “flattered” by the attention, but remained very uneasy about the agenda. Angelucci would later say of this curious affair: “Failing in their desperate attempts to convert me to communism and slant my talks along the Party Line, they invariably defiantly demanded: ‘Well, then, just what do you think is wrong with Communism?'” Angelucci was a scared man.

(Nick Redfern)

Shortly before Angelucci publicly revealed that a certain “subversive element” was mixing and stirring left-wing, extremist politics with extraterrestrials, the FBI came knocking on the front-door of the Angelucci home. While we don’t know the full story, we do at least have the bones of it, thanks to Jim Moseley. According to what Angelucci told Moseley, a pair of FBI agents visited Angelucci at his Twentynine Palms home, telling him that they had heard of the actions of this east coast group – from who, though, was something that the FBI was not prepared to reveal. The questions posed to Angelucci were many: How did he first meet the group? Did they give their names? Were they Americans? Did they offer him money to slant his tales down a politically-driven path? The list of questions went on and on. Angelucci – admittedly scared out of his wits by the fact that the FBI was onto him, even though he hadn’t really done anything wrong – blurted out just about all that he could. The group had first approached him, in an overly friendly fashion, at a lecture in New York, he told the special-agents. No names were ever given to him, but all four were well-dressed, all seemed to be around the forty-mark, and all had overseas accents. No money ever crossed hands. They invited Angelucci to dinner, which he accepted, admittedly intrigued by the prospect of developing new contacts. It was over dinner that the matter of communism surfaced its head. This mysterious group wanted Angelucci to present his lectures in a fashion that suggested the aliens were communists – and that communism was a good thing. No wonder the FBI opened a file on the man. There’s something else, though: on October 24, 2017, the FBI informed UFO researcher John Greenewald that Angelucci had indeed been the subject of a Bureau file, but that it was destroyed on October 30, 2009.

It’s a fact that the origins of Area 51 date back to the early years of the Second World War. The Nevada Test and Training Range soon came to fruition and planted the seeds for what would come in the mid-1950s: Area 51. Highly advanced aircraft, such as the U-2, the SR-71 Blackbird, the Stealth Fighter and the Stealth Bomber were all secretly test-flown from Area 51. Probably the almost legendary Aurora, too. In that sense, many might say, there is no doubt that Area 51 has a valid reason for keeping just about everything under wraps. Indeed, considering the fact that those aforementioned aircraft were being built, tested, and flown when the Cold War was still in place and the Soviet Union had still yet to fall, one can easily see why measures would be taken to ensure that the U.S. Government’s most advanced aircraft would be subject to incredible secrecy. But, is there just too much secrecy for a squadron or several of radical, futuristic aircraft? Maybe. Perhaps not. As we have seen over the years and decades, there is one thing – more than any other – that sets Area 51 apart from just about every other military or government facility in the United States: it’s the sheer extent of the government’s determination to make sure that absolutely nothing gets out of Area 51 and no-one gets in. Of course, and particularly so in today’s climate of uncertainty and threats of nuclear attacks, everyone needs to be vigilant. And that includes everyone who works out at Area 51, too. They are, when all is said and done, just like us, regular people with lives and families. The big difference, though, is that they know the reasons for so much secrecy and we don’t.

Area 51 site map, as depicted in declassified CIA documents released via its CREST program

(Credit: CIA.gov/Wikimedia Commons).

It would be hard – in fact, impossible – to find a military installation in the United States that protects its secrets to a greater degree than Area 51. People have been forced to leave their homes and their land – solely due to U.S. Government concerns and worries that those same people just might see something they shouldn’t see. Those who stray too close to portions of the Nevada desert that the staff of Area 51 would prefer to keep under wraps risk large fines, imprisonment and even death, and all in the name of national security. Aircraft are banned from flying close to or over Area 51. They can even be shot down out of the sky, if circumstances dictate and warrant such drastic action. When, in 1974, NASA’s astronauts on-board Skylab took an aerial photo of the base, all hell broke loose in the defense- and intelligence-based communities of the United States. The CIA and the Department of Defense quickly got involved. Major concerns were expressed about how on Earth (or, in this case, off it) such a thing could have happened. Secret files were created, most of which have never publicly surfaced. Motion-detector equipment peppers the landscape. Cameras are everywhere. Guards patrol the local roads for any perceived suspicious characters. Night-vision technology ensures that no-one can penetrate the base in the early hours of the morning.

The government practically refuses to acknowledge not just the existence of Area 51, but even its name. That same government refused to offer help on the 1996 movie Independence Day, and all because a substantial portion of the movie revolved around Area 51 and the 1947 incident at Roswell, New Mexico. All of the above is astonishing. No facility in the United States comes even close to the level of secrecy and paranoia that surrounds Area 51. That brings up an important question: is all of this overwhelming secrecy just in place to protect next-generation after next-generation of aircraft? Or, are the rumors and the whispers true? You know the ones, of course: the claims that deeply hidden at Area 51 are the remains of the Roswell wreckage, recovered flying saucers, and alien corpses. Maybe, even living aliens are at the base, too. Regardless of where you, me and everyone else stands on the matter of what goes on at Area 51, there can be no doubt that it is the UFO-driven rumors and revelations which attract so much attention. Certainly, there’s no doubt that it was Bob Lazar who, in the late 1980s, set the wheels in motion for the controversy to begin and for the media and the public to sit up and take notice. And, as we have seen, accounts relative to aliens and UFOs – all in relation to area 51 – abound, and have done so for decades.

Consider the following: Annie Jacobsen’s source, Alfred O’Donnell, told her that the Roswell wreckage and the grossly mutated human crew were secretly transferred to the Nevada Test and Training Range in 1951, after previously being secretly stored at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, Dayton, Ohio. The story suggest the bodies may well still be stored there. Perhaps in a museum-like state. The alleged May 1953 crash of a UFO in Kingman, Arizona also had a connection to the Nevada Test and Training Range. The so-called “alien interview” footage led many to believe that living aliens are housed somewhere at Area 51. Boyd Bushman told incredible stories of alien life and Area 51 connections. But, it was Bob Lazar – more than anyone else – who defined the beliefs and suspicions, and who still defines those beliefs and suspicions about Area 51. Another thing: we should note there are certain threads running through the tales of UFOs at Area 51 that should make us cautious of what we are told. Let’s not forget that Lazar, himself, told of how his mind may have been messed with – possibly using updated MK-Ultra-type technologies. Certain portions of his memories were wiped clean. He felt that his very brief glimpse of a small creature at S-4 may have been a staged event; an event designed to make him think that live extraterrestrials were hidden at the base, when they may not have been.

Note: The CIA document above was created by the U.S. Government. It is in the public domain, having been released by the terms of the U.S. Freedom of Information Act.

There can be no doubt that the alien angle of the history of Area 51 excites many. Maybe that’s what the U.S. Government is counting on. After all, not even the power of all the military-, defense-, and intelligence-based agencies in the United States can prevent a few leaks of classified information. So, perhaps to keep eager Ufologists away from stumbling on covert programs concerned with new aircraft designs, next-generation weapons-systems, mind-control techniques and more of a down to earth nature, they swamp those same Ufologists with enticing tales of extraterrestrial conspiracies, the Roswell affair, and interviews with a sickly creature from another world. For the people at Area 51, it may be a case of this: if you can’t plug the genuine leaks, then swamp them with far more tantalizing and enticing tales of E.T. A good argument could be made that this is exactly what has happened. At times, the targeted people might have been patriotic American citizens who overstepped the mark in their quests to find out if alien life really does hang out at Area 51. On other occasions, and particularly during the Cold War, the targets may have been Soviet spies, seeking the very same answers. Dangling an alien carrot – so to speak – would be the perfect way to reel in and arrest eager Russian agents. And if that carrot never really existed – except in the minds of those running the disinformation programs – then all the better.

Something that dates back decades has prompted the U.S. Government to turn Area 51 into a veritable impenetrable fortress, to steal peoples’ land and kick them to the curb, to threaten inquisitive souls at gunpoint, to chastise NASA for daring to take an overhead photo of the base, and to try and bully Hollywood movie-makers from making references to the installation. Is this all about secret aircraft? Aliens? Both? Even after the wild ride that this article details, we still don’t know. It is, perhaps, highly appropriate to end this article with the words of David Duchovny’s character of FBI Special-Agent Fox Mulder in The X-Files. Episode seventeen of the first season is titled “E.B.E.,” (which is said to be an abbreviated term used by staff at Area 51 to describe aliens: “Extraterrestrial Biological Entities”). As the episode comes to an end, Mulder says to one of his well-informed sources on the inside, dubbed Deep Throat, “I’m wondering which lie to believe.” We can all surely relate to that. Unfortunately, though, it doesn’t make things any easier for us. But, for “THEM?” Hell, yes!