In September 1980, while promoting The Roswell Incident, Moore took part in a number of radio-based interviews around the United States. At the end of one such interview, a secretary told Moore that there was someone on the line who wanted to speak privately with Moore. The voice at the other end belonged to a colonel who was stationed at Offutt Air Force Base, which is located in Sarpy County, Nebraska. The man said to Moore, as Greg Bishop tells it in his 2005 book, Project Beta: “We think you’re the only one we’ve heard that seems to know what he’s talking about.” The colonel desired a meeting. And soon, too. Moore scribbled down the colonel’s number, promising to get back in touch as soon as possible. The proactive colonel didn’t wait for Moore to reach him, however. Instead, he contacted Moore – for a second time. Once again, the man trotted out those same sixteen words: “We think you’re the only one we’ve heard that seems to know what he’s talking about.” By now, Moore was more than intrigued. A meeting was quickly arranged. The pair was to rendezvous in an Albuquerque restaurant, one which was on Moore’s journey home, for good food and – hopefully - enlightening conversation. The mysterious informant was described by Moore as being elderly and gaunt. Greg Bishop said that the man had a “hint of an Eastern European accent.” From that day on, the wizened old man would become known to Moore as “The Falcon.”

Greg Bishop says that, “…[Moore’s] new acquaintance told [him] that he represented a group of intelligence agents in the U.S. Government who were tired of the secrecy surrounding the UFO subject and were eager to release more accurate information to the public. They wanted to do this through a reputable researcher. He would be given small bites of the story over time, and could do with it as he wished. Would Moore be interested in participating in such a program?” Yes, Moore was interested. Very much so. But, there was the matter of that aforementioned unholy alliance, which Moore knew he would have to enter into; like it or not. He knew that if he didn’t play the game, then his chance of getting to the heart of what Uncle Sam knew of UFOs and aliens – dead, alive or even both - would irreversibly slip out of his grip. So, Moore agreed to do whatever had to be done. And forget the cost. Maybe, even the consequences, too. Everything soon took off: in the early 1980s, Moore found himself periodically on the receiving end of instructions to travel to certain locations around the United States, where he would meet with anonymous, insider-type characters, including, yet again, the Falcon.

On each occasion seemingly highly-classified material on UFOs was handed over to Moore – always in manila envelopes and in various, widespread places. Those locations included a motel-room in upstate New York, and a certain building in the heart of Los Angeles, California. On one occasion, in April 1983, a friend of Moore, Nic Magnuson, picked up a collection of documents for Moore at Seattle, Washington’s Sea-Tac International Airport. The handover was made by “a short, elderly, balding man” who gave to Magnuson a newspaper that contained hidden within its pages one of those priceless manila envelopes. The collective documentation referred to such enigmas as “Project Aquarius,” “MJ12 [an alternative term for Majestic 12],” “communications with aliens,” even to decisions taken by elite figures in the domain of intelligence-gathering to keep the White House firmly out of the ufological loop. A secret that was so astounding that not even the president of the United States could be told the truth? Possibly, yes.

For Moore there was very little doubt the papers amounted to absolute dynamite. If they were true, that is. That was the biggest issue of all: were they genuine? Or, was Moore being used by people in the intelligence community; manipulative characters who were trying to push Moore away from his genuinely significant Roswell research and further down a pathway filled with questionable document upon questionable document? And, still hanging over Moore’s head like the sword of Damocles, there was that part of the deal which Moore had to fulfil if he was to continue to receive regular supplies of those seemingly priceless papers. Moore’s part in all of this revolved around a man named Paul Bennewitz.

An Albuquerque, New Mexico physicist who died in 2003, Paul Bennewitz spent a significant amount of time digging into U.S. Air Force- and National Security Agency-based top secret projects which, from the late-seventies to the early-eighties, were housed at Kirtland Air Force Base, New Mexico. Bennewitz believed those projects were connected to the activities of sinister extraterrestrials. They soared across the skies above Kirtland AFB by star-filled, moonlit nights, demonstrating their extraterrestrial invulnerability and power. It’s hardly surprising that, for years, Bennewitz was put under deep surveillance by the U.S. military and a numbers of intelligence services. He was, as a consequence of his digging, bombarded by the murky world of officialdom with a mass of disinformation, faked stories, and outright lies in order to divert him from his research. It worked. In fact, and to Bennewitz’s eternal cost, it worked just too damned well. By the mid-eighties, he was heading for complete mental disintegration.

The intelligence community cared not a bit that Bennewitz thought their secret operations were UFO-related – precisely because the UFO connection was one of Bennewitz’s very own making. There was, however, deep concern on the part of the world of officialdom that by digging into classified activities at Kirtland in search of UFOs, Bennewitz just might inadvertently reveal – to the spies of the Soviet Union, in a worst-case scenario – information and technology that had to be kept secret at all costs, even if those costs included Bennewitz’s own sanity and health. Which, ultimately, they did. And, so, a grim plan was initiated.

U.S. agents learned the essential parts of Bennewitz’s theories from the man himself, by actually breaking into his home while he was out and checking his files and research notes. Bennewitz’s beliefs were astounding and controversial: aliens were mutilating cattle as part of some weird genetic experiment. The E.T.s were abducting American citizens and implanting them with small devices for purposes disturbingly unknown. Those same aliens were living deep underground in a secure fortress below the Archuleta Mesa at Dulce, New Mexico. And everyone was soon going to be in deep and dire trouble as a direct result of the presence of this brewing, intergalactic threat. So, the Air Force gave Bennewitz precisely what he was looking for: confirmation that his theories were all true, and more. This was, however, all just a carefully-planned ruse to bombard Bennewitz with so much faked UFO data in the hope that it would steer him away from the classified military projects of a non-UFO nature that he had uncovered. And, sure enough, it all worked very well. For the government. Far less so for Bennewitz.

When Bennewitz received conformation (albeit carefully controlled and utterly fabricated confirmation) that, yes, he had stumbled upon the horrible truth and that, yes, there really was an alien base deep below Dulce, the actions of the Intelligence community had the desired effect: Bennewitz became increasingly paranoid and unstable, and he began looking away from Kirtland (the hub of the down-to-earth secrets of the NSA and the Air Force that had to be kept) and harmlessly towards the vicinity of Dulce, where his actions, research, and theories could be carefully controlled and manipulated by the government. At this time American Intelligence brought Bill Moore into the secret scheme and asked him to keep them informed of how well – from their perspective - the disinformation operations against Bennewitz were working. In return, Moore was promised – and provided with – data and documents on super-secret, official UFO projects, crashed saucers, dead aliens, and more. That, then, was the nature of the bleak agreement between Moore and the man with the European accent, the Falcon.

All of which brings us to what happened after December 11, 1984, the date on which Jaime Shandera received the ever-controversial Majestic 12 documents. It’s a story as mind-blowing as that of Paul Bennewitz – partly because it was interconnected, as we shall further see. It caused the FBI’s counterintelligence staff to suspect that those same documents were the creations of no less than disinformation agents of the Russian government. In the summer of 1987, Sidgwick & Jackson published Timothy Good’s book, Above Top Secret: The Worldwide UFO Cover-Up. It contained copies of the same controversial Majestic 12 documents which had been dropped through Jaime Shandera’s mailbox some three years earlier. According to Good, he got his copies of the pages in March 1987 from “a CIA source.” Good has been consistently cagey when it comes to the matter of how, precisely, he obtained his copies of the files. And from whom, too. Two months after Good’s CIA insider provided him with the documents, the London Observer newspaper mentioned the Majestic 12 documents. The date of the article was May 31, 1987. Written by Martin Bailey it had the lengthy title of “Close encounters of an alien kind – and now if you’ve read enough about the election, here’s news from another world.”

In no time, Moore, Shandera and Friedman chose to release their copies into the public domain, which is hardly surprising, given the fact that word of the Majestic 12 papers was now starting to trickle and circulate outside of the confines of the trio. This was completely understandable: after all, the three had done all of the groundwork, and the very last thing they wanted was to be written out of the story – or, at the absolute least, left marginalized and sitting frustratingly on the sidelines. As an aside, Alice Bradley Sheldon, who very likely wrote the “Serpo” papers back in the late 1960s, killed herself and her husband less than two weeks before the Majestic 12 documents mailed to Jaime Shandera were first publicly referenced – namely, in the pages of the London Observer newspaper. Also, James Jesus Angleton, who was the Chief of CIA Counterintelligence operations from 1954 to 1975, and who was rumored to have been “in the know” when it came to Majestic 12, died in that very same month. Lung-cancer took him on May 11 at the age of sixty-nine.

If the FBI learned anything further about Majestic 12 in the post-1989 period, then that information has not surfaced under the terms of the Freedom of Information Act. We do know something of deep interest though, thanks to a man named Richard L. Huff. He served as Bureau Co-Director within the Office of Information and Privacy. In correspondence (specifically on July 22, 1993), Huff informed me of the existence of an FBI “Main File” on Majestic 12, which is now in what is termed “closed status.” The title of the file is not something along the lines of “Potentially leaked document” or “Questionable document,” as one might imagine, given the strange story that is detailed in this chapter. Rather, the file title is nothing less than – wait for it – “Espionage.” While we’re admittedly forced to speculate, that one, eye-opening word alone strongly suggests that the Majestic 12 saga really did revolve around those very same components that surface in the pages of this chapter: spies, counterintelligence operations, the Moore-Bennewitz situation, the words of Gerald K. Haines, and the interference of the Russians. And espionage.

One Falcon? Two Falcons? Bogus documents about dead aliens? Russian spies? People dying around the days when the Majestic 12 documents surfaced? What does all of this mean? Well, it means that the world of the whistleblower is a very strange one; a world in which truth, disinformation, counter-intelligence and fabricated material and more all come to the table. So, be careful about what you see and hear.

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“Though your career is over and you are sitting in a jail cell, you are still, ethically, at least, on solid footing,” Brown offers. “Strictly from a utilitarian perspective, your act did the maximum amount of good for the maximum amount of people. As a matter of deontology, you had a duty to do something so intrinsically good and right. And ultimately, good government should be as transparent as possible and accountable to its citizens. And you can reflect on all this as you decay in a federal penitentiary. Don’t worry, though. You’ve got a heck of a book deal waiting for you on the other side.”

You can read the original letter on Clearance Jobs here.

How to Blow the Whistle if You Work With Flying Saucers and Their Alien Pilots

David Brown

Last month, David Grusch, who studied “unexplained anomalous phenomena” for the DoD, blew the whistle on the U.S. government for hiding partially intact flying saucers and dead alien pilots. He didn’t see the spacecraft. He didn’t see the aliens. But people assure him that they are there, and that there’s been a conspiracy afoot since at least 1933, when one crashed in Italy. The Mussolini government kept it covered up, and somehow the Pope and Allied Forces managed to get it to the United States.

The U.S. government has recovered more such alien hardware. Top men tell Grusch this. Indeed, some have seen “very large, very large, like a football field kind of size” spacecraft. Why would the government hide the existence of alien life? “Feudalistic dominance,” said Grusch.

What more convincing do you need?

WHISTLEBLOWING SOMETHING GOOD

Congress, as you might expect, is on it. Meanwhile, NASA and the Defense Department have denied everything (of course they would). But let’s assume for a moment that Grusch is telling the truth about the people who allegedly told him the truth and that what they saw were indeed space aliens. If it were all true, it would be the most extraordinary event in millennia, with seismic implications for science, philosophy, religion, sociology, psychology, technology—everything! Nothing would ever be the same again. It would be a unifying force unlike anything since Constantine legalized Christianity in the Roman Empire.

Try as I might, I cannot think of a single drawback to the U.S. government revealing the existence of space aliens (feudalistic dominance notwithstanding). Which means if Grusch is sane, he has blown the whistle on an objectively positive thing in all respects. Hiding flying saucers isn’t government wrongdoing, exactly, or fraud, waste, or abuse. At most, it’s just a little weird. Blowing the whistle on aliens, in other words, is a complete and total positive for all involved, except potentially for the whistleblower.

WHAT THE LAW HAS TO SAY

“The statutes that pertain to whistleblowing all speak to things like violation of the law, gross mismanagement, gross waste of public funds, threats to life or public health—those types of things,” said Sean Bigley, an attorney and ClearanceJobs legal correspondent. He told me that for a whistleblower to be protected, he or she has to reasonably believe that whatever he or she is disclosing falls in one of those protected categories. Moreover, he said, a would-be whistleblower must follow the established mechanisms for how and what they report, which generally involves documenting the issue, following internal procedures, and going unsuccessfully to proper authorities.

Grusch claims he did all those things. The catch is that reporting the existence of aliens doesn’t arguably itself fall under the protected categories, which means whistleblowing statutes might not protect him, if he experienced any internal government or security clearance repercussions. However, any other claims that fall under the protected categories are a different story.

“This would fall under what I would call a ‘public good category.’ But under current law, there isn’t one,” said Bigley. Keep in mind that whistleblower protection laws only cover those who follow the established legal process; it’s not for those who go public.

IF LIZARD PEOPLE ARE NOT INVOLVED

Let’s leave the aliens out of it for a moment. Suppose you are a scientist for the Department of Energy helping to develop some revolutionary carbon capture technology. It uses minimal energy, works in seconds, and turns carbon dioxide captured from the atmosphere into a stable, harmless solid.

But the government classified it for some reason (as it does for too many things). Maybe there’s a proprietary process involved, or a fear that terrorists might reverse-engineer the tech for malevolent purposes. But you are convinced that the benefits of revealing the technology greatly outweigh the risks. The planet is getting hotter, and you could save the world.

You document your concerns and go through the chain trying desperately to get someone to listen, but no one does. The classification remains. So you leak it to the journal Nature (though are careful to protect the parts that can be reverse-engineered by bad guys). The revelation causes an uproar for obvious reasons.

Legally, you are on the hook for this, even if you just saved the planet Earth. Among the consequences you might face include being charged for violating the Espionage Act for leaking classified information that could benefit a foreign nation. You could be sued by the government. You could lose your security clearance, obviously. You could also lose your job and be barred from other government or contractor jobs.

WHAT DEFENSE DO YOU HAVE?

Bigley says that such a “positive” hypothetical whistleblower would have a hard time in a court of law.

“It is all subjective,” he explained. “Who is to say what is and isn’t for the public good? The government might have a compelling reason to keep such a secret, so the ‘public good’ defense wouldn’t really fly from a legal standpoint—at least not under existing law.”

Whether it moves the needle in the court of public opinion is another matter entirely, however. If the public response to such a revelation were strong enough, from a pragmatic or political standpoint, the government might shy away from prosecution. “But I would not advise anyone to be the test case for that.”

Another possible outcome is something called jury nullification. “The government might prosecute the whistleblower, and the 12 people on a jury might agree that it met the legal requirements for a conviction, but still refused to convict the person.” Again, he emphasized, he would not advise anyone to roll the dice on such an outcome.

NO GOOD DEED GOES UNPUNISHED

And so it goes. Whether you work in the UFO warehouse at Area 52, are the surgeon who handles the alien autopsies, or are the designer of the amazing climate cleaning machine, if your work is classified, you can’t blow the whistle on it for the public good and expect the law to work in your favor. “It’s just not a category of protection,” said Bigley, “but it’s one of those things that, arguably, a case could be made that there should be. There just isn’t right now, and I’m not sure how you could create a standard that somebody could even follow.”

Though your career is over and you are sitting in a jail cell, you are still, ethically, at least, on solid footing. Strictly from a utilitarian perspective, your act did the maximum amount of good for the maximum amount of people. As a matter of deontology, you had a duty to do something so intrinsically good and right. And ultimately, good government should be as transparent as possible and accountable to its citizens. And you can reflect on all this as you decay in a federal penitentiary. Don’t worry, though. You’ve got a heck of a book deal waiting for you on the other side.

Christopher Plain is a Science Fiction and Fantasy novelist and Head Science Writer at The Debrief. Follow and connect with him on Twitter, learn about his books at plainfiction.com, or email him directly at christopher@thedebrief.org.

Vivian Lammerse

Perseverance is in de Jezero-krater op veelbelovende organische moleculen gestuit, die ook wel worden gezien als ‘de bouwstenen voor leven’. Maar of ze ook echt door Martiaanse microben zijn achtergelaten, blijft twijfelachtig.

Het is alweer zo’n twee jaar geleden dat Marsrover Perseverance in de Jezero-krater op Mars landde. Sindsdien speurt het Marswagentje zorgvuldig de krater af, op zoek naar tekenen van (voormalig) leven. En dat kan de rover nu zomaar eens gevonden hebben. Zo blijkt Perseverance bewijs te hebben ontdekt van verschillende soorten organische moleculen, zo laten onderzoekers weten.

Organische moleculen
De aangetroffen organische moleculen zijn een klasse van op koolstof gebaseerde moleculen. “Ze komen overeen met moleculen die koolstof bevatten en de bouwstenen zijn van het leven zoals wij dat kennen,” zegt teamlid Ashley Murphy. “Dit is één van de eerste keren dat we potentiële organische stoffen in de Jezero-krater vinden.” De ontdekking is dan ook best spannend. Want mogelijk zijn de ontdekte organische moleculen wel achtergelaten door oud microbieel leven! Al hoeft dat overigens niet per se het geval te zijn.

Bouwstenen voor leven
Organische moleculen bestaan voornamelijk uit koolstof en bevatten gewoonlijk waterstof- en zuurstofatomen. Ze kunnen ook andere elementen bevatten, zoals stikstof, fosfor en zwavel. De vondst van dergelijke organische moleculen zijn van belang, omdat sommige van deze verbindingen de bouwstenen van leven zijn. De aanwezigheid van deze specifieke moleculen wordt beschouwd als een potentiële biosignatuur – een stof of structuur die een bewijs zou kunnen zijn van voormalig leven. Toch houden wetenschappers een slag om de arm. Sommige organische moleculen kunnen namelijk ook door middel van chemische processen, zonder de aanwezigheid van leven, ontstaan.

Geen biologische oorsprong
“Niet alle organische moleculen hebben een biologische oorsprong,” legt Murphy uit. “Daarom is het belangrijk om de relatie tussen mineralen en organische stoffen te bestuderen. Alles wat we weten over het leven op aarde is beperkt tot wat bewaard is gebleven in het gesteente en mineralen. Op aarde worden biosignaturen gevonden in bepaalde mineralen en sommige mineralen zijn beter in het bewaren van organische stoffen dan andere.”

Mars en de aarde
Het betekent dat onderzoekers de aarde vaak als voorbeeld gebruiken om te achterhalen wat er op Mars kan hebben plaatsgevonden. “Mars kan een vergelijkbare vroege geologische geschiedenis hebben gehad als de aarde, dus we gebruiken onze kennis van het leven zoals we dat op aarde kennen om te zoeken naar mogelijk bewijs van voormalig leven op Mars,” aldus Murphy. “Het in kaart brengen van organische stoffen zorgt voor een beter begrip van de koolstofcyclus van Mars. We kunnen dan bepalen of deze vergelijkbaar is met of juist verschilt van die van de aarde. Ook zal het ons meer kunnen vertellen over hoe waarschijnlijk het is dat Mars leven herbergde.”

Close-up of NASA's Mars 2020 Rover's SHERLOC Instrument – NASA Mars ...

Close-up of NASA's Mars 2020 Rover's SHERLOC Instrument

SHERLOC
De organische moleculen werden aan het licht gebracht met behulp van Perseverance’ SHERLOC-instrument. SHERLOC – een afkorting voor Scanning Habitable Environments with Raman & Luminescence for Organics & Chemicals – gebruikt een ultraviolette laser om mineralen in gesteente te identificeren. Daarnaast is het instrument uitgerust met camera’s en spectrometers om te zoeken naar organische stoffen en mineralen die mogelijk tekenen zijn van microbieel leven uit het verleden. “Met het SHERLOC-instrument, gemonteerd op de robotarm van Perseverance, kunnen we potentiële biosignaturen evalueren,” licht Murphy toe.

Máaz en Séítah
De onderzoekers gebruikten het SHERLOC-instrument om twee Martiaanse rotsformaties, Máaz en Séítah, nader te bestuderen. Perseverance boorde daarvoor kleine gaatjes in het gesteente. En op alle tien de plekken trof het team sporen van organische moleculen aan. “De potentiële organische stoffen zijn te vinden in meerdere lagen,” vertelt Murphy. “Dit kan erop wijzen dat Mars ooit verschillende oppervlakteprocessen en een relatief complexe organische geochemie had. Op aarde wordt dit geassocieerd met bepaalde bewoonbare omgevingen waar tekenen van oud leven bewaard kunnen blijven.”

Andere vondsten
Overigens is het niet de eerste keer dat er op Mars organisch materiaal wordt gevonden. Zowel Perseverance als de Curiosity-rover hebben dit al eerder aangetroffen. “De nieuw ontdekte moleculen lijken op de exemplaren die al eerder in de Gale-krater en in verschillende meteorieten zijn gevonden,” vertelt Murphy. “De detectie van diverse organische stoffen in twee oude meren (de Gale- en Jezero-krater) is belangrijk voor ons begrip van de omvang en diversiteit van oppervlakteprocessen en hoe dit verband houdt met de leefbaarheid van de planeet.”

Oorsprong
Maar nogmaals, de ontdekking is geenszins een bevestiging dat er ooit leven op Mars bestond. Organische moleculen kunnen op verschillende manieren worden gevormd, waaronder door niet-biologische processen zoals interacties tussen water en gesteente, afzettingen door interplanetair stof of meteoren of door synthese met vulkanisch materiaal. Op dit moment is het nog niet duidelijk wat precies de oorsprong van de opgeduikelde organische moleculen is.

Ondanks dat de organische stoffen dus geen bewijs zijn van voormalig leven, is de vondst alsnog opwindend, omdat het wel laat zien dat Mars over de bouwstenen van leven beschikt. De monsters zullen nu eerst terug naar de aarde moeten worden gebracht en hier nader moeten worden onderzocht, voordat er definitieve conclusies kunnen worden getrokken. We zullen dus nog even geduld moeten hebben voordat er voor eens en voor altijd kan worden bepaald of er leven is (geweest) op Mars.

Meer weten…
…over de toekomstige Mars Sample Return-missie, waarin de door Perseverance verzamelde Marsmonsters op aarde zullen worden afgeleverd?

Lees dan ook dit eerder verschenen artikel op Scientias.nl!