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

In 1992, in a privately-published paper titled: Have You Checked Your File Lately? Robert Durant, a UFO researcher and pilot, discussed the theme of an all-encompassing, Government-sanctioned-and-controlled operation designed to covertly monitor the activities of the public UFO research community: “You, the reader, are among the approximately 4,000 Americans who subscribe to ufological journals or newsletters, buy UFO books through the mail, attend conferences, or spend time with others who engage in such activities. Not a large group. We are only 3% of the total number of citizens the government admits to watching with intense care. A very easy group to track. Building your file is so much easier than compiling one on a Russian spy or a Mafioso. There is a file on you at the Internal Revenue Service, the Social Security Administration, the driver’s license bureau of the state in which you are licensed, the commercial credit card companies that do business with your bank and your lenders, your doctor’s office, and so forth and so on. Is it really unreasonable to suspect that a UFO file would be created?” With that said, read on:

My previous article here at Mysterious Universe was titled “In the U.K. Government, it’s not just the Ministry of Defense that is tied to UFOs.” In part, I revealed how, in the mid-1990s, English ufologist Robin Cole was visited by government agents because he dug a bit too deep into the UFO connection to the Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ), the U.K.’s equivalent of the United States’ National Security Agency. With that in mind, I thought I would share with you other examples of UFO researchers getting knocks on the front-door from “the man.” Back in the early 1950s, the FBI opened a file on “Contactee” George Van Tassel, who created the Integratron and ran an outdoor UFO event for years – an event that attracted thousands of people. Van Tassel’s file runs to 319 pages and has now been declassified. But, what about Mrs. Van Tassel? It wasn’t just George who got a visit. His wife did, too. In a face-to-face meeting at the Van Tassel home, the FBI recorded the following:

“Relative to her husband and herself, Mrs. Van Tassel claims that she and her husband practice a metaphysical religion. She declared this religion is based on an occult principle in that she and her husband sit in a room in dead silence and receive thought transfers from one another and from other individuals who are not psychically present in the room. She declared that it was through this type of practice that her husband has learned or prophesied the coming of World War III and a gigantic explosion on the East Coast. She mentioned that at the present time she and her husband have undertaken a special project. This project is the founding and organizing of the College of Universal Wisdom. The purpose of the college is to promote and carry out interplanetary communication and the dissemination of Universal Wisdom gained through the median of space beings.” The two agents thanked Mrs. Van Tassel and left, satisfied with what they heard.

As the CIA note, in a very amusing fashion, in 1955, two elderly sisters in Chicago, Mildred and Marie Maier, reported in the Journal of Space Flight their experiences with UFOs, including the recording of a radio program in which an unidentified code was allegedly heard. The sisters taped the program; and other ham radio operators also claimed to have heard the “space message.” The CIA’s Office of Scientific Intelligence duly became interested and asked its Scientific Contact Branch to obtain a copy of the recording. Field officers from the Contact Division, one of who was a man named Dewelt Walker, made contact with the Maier sisters at their home, who were “thrilled that the government was interested,” and set up a time to meet with them. In trying to secure the tape recording, the Agency officers reported that they had stumbled upon a scene from Arsenic and Old Lace. “The only thing lacking was the elderberry wine,” Walker told Headquarters. After reviewing the sisters’ scrapbook of clippings from their days as entertainers on the stage, the bemused and amused officers secured a copy of the recording. OSI analyzed the tape and found it was nothing more than Morse code from a US radio station.

Moving on: In 1977, the late Graham Birdsall – editor of the now-defunct British-based UFO Magazine – and his brother, Mark, investigated a major UFO sighting near to Harrogate, North Yorkshire, England, that involved a number of witnesses who had viewed strange, aerial objects in the vicinity of Menwith Hill – a vast “listening-post” controlled by the American National Security Agency. The Birdsall brothers duly approached the staff at Menwith Hill for comment and, at one point, were actually allowed on base. This led to a curious series of events. Soon after visiting the base, Graham received a telephone call from a Mr. Mills, the senior NSA security officer at the base, who had just taken up his post at Menwith Hill and was keen to cement good, local relations. Graham engaged the NSA official in conversation for approximately one hour – something that few civilians can claim. Not only that, Graham was visited by an NSA employee who asked him more than a few questions about “motivations” when to came to UFOs – as well as Graham’s beliefs in the UFO phenomenon. The man soon left.

One of my own particularly memorable experiences occurred in 2001. After writing an article on MI5 whistleblower, David Shayler, for Mark Birdsall’s Eye-Spy magazine, I received a telephone call from a highly concerned and nervous Birdsall. He informed me that he had been visited – at his home – in North Yorkshire by “two lads from the Metropolitan Police.” Mark advised me that the two officers informed him that while publication of the article was not deemed to have harmed the national security of the country, there was a pressing need on their part to obtain the tape-recording of the interview I had conducted with Shayler. For a while I mused upon this and did nothing. Not long after, however, I was contacted by a representative of Special Branch, who advised me, in no uncertain term}s that I would hand over the tape, like it or not. Based upon what I was told, I was left with little choice, and I did indeed hand over the original recording. I should stress, though, MI5 were fine with the text of the interview being included in the pages of Eye-Spy. It was a surreal situation.

In light of all the above, the day may come when you, too, get that ominous, slow knock on the door.

The Vietnam War, also known as the Second Indochina War, was fought between the years of 1955 and 1975, officially between North Vietnam and South Vietnam, but as most know America was pulled into it starting from 1964. The catalyst for America’s entry into the war revolves around a mysterious and disputed incident that happened in early August 1964 in the Gulf of Tonkin, also known as the USS Maddox Incident, in which a U.S. destroyer was said to have been put under attack by with North Vietnamese fast attack craft. It would help serve to force the U.S. Congress to pass the Gulf of Tonkin Resolution and give President Lyndon B. Johnson great authority to increase American military presence in Vietnam. This would result in a horrific trial of attrition in the jungles of Vietnam that would see an estimated 58,220 U.S. service members killed in the conflict and a further 1,626 remain missing in action by the time they pulled out in 1973, but what really happened during this initial incident has long been wrapped in mystery and controversy, and one of the weirder ideas is that this might have been the doing of underwater UFOs, also called USO (Underwater Submersible Objects) or even mysterious sea beasts.

The official version of the Gulf of Tonkin incident is that on August 2, 1964, the American destroyer the USS Maddox had been out performing a signals intelligence patrol as part of DESOTO operations when they were aggressively approached by three North Vietnamese Navy torpedo boats. In the ensuing melee, the USS Maddox was assailed by machine gun fire and torpedoes, and when the smoke cleared one U.S. aircraft was damaged, three North Vietnamese torpedo boats were damaged, and four North Vietnamese sailors were killed. This first attack is not in dispute, but there would then be an alleged second incident on August 4, 1964 that would really rile the Americans up, this time involving the USS Maddox and another destroyer called the USS Turner Joy, which furthered the U.S. resolve to enter the conflict, but there has long been some amount of doubt that the US forces had ever been under fire at all, or whether this had just been an excuse to escalate the efforts to enter the war.

USS Maddox

The North Vietnamese immediately denied that a second attack had ever happened, and in later years former United States Secretary of Defense Robert S. McNamara also admitted that there was never any second attack. Indeed, it was found that there were not even any North Vietnamese vessels in the area during the August 4 incident, but personnel aboard both the USS Turner Joy and USS Maddox begged to differ, insisting that it had happened, so what was going on here? According to some testimony from aboard the vessels involved, some pretty weird stuff.

In 1966, a Navy sonar engineer assigned to the destroyer USS Turner Joy came forward with a rather odd version of the events of that day. He claimed that on the day of that supposed second Gulf of Tonkin attack, he had picked up signatures on his radar that appeared to be enemy torpedoes, but which behaved erratically and as if under intelligent control, approaching the ship, even going under it, only to dart off. Both vessels reported detecting small, fast-moving objects on radar, both above and below the surface, which they took to be torpedoes and torpedo boats, but visibility was low due to a storm that had brought heavy clouds and fog. There would apparently by over 20 signatures of torpedoes on sonar, but they did not behave like torpedoes, seeming to move about at will rather than a straight line, and none of them actually hit. Some frightened crew members reported that the torpedoes seemed to be illuminated, while others swore they had seen the cockpit lights of the enemy vessels out in the gloom. Others saw what they took to be the wakes of torpedoes and there were even strange sounds heard that sounded a lot like the propellers of torpedoes, yet no impacts ever occurred.

Taking no chances at all, the two American destroyers allegedly performed evasive maneuvers and unloaded almost 650 cannon shells and several depth charges, blowing the area to absolute hell, yet when the smoke cleared there were found to be no enemy vessels, no wreckage or debris, nothing. This was despite the accounts of crew aboard the destroyers who were adamant that there had definitely been something out there and that they had been under attack. At the time it was convincing enough to propel America full on into the war, only in later years being found to have been perhaps a phantom attack that had no evidence of ever having happened at all. In 2005, the National Security Agency would declassify a trove of documents that revealed there was no second Gulf of Tonkin attack, and the at the time U.S. Secretary of Defense, Robert McNamara himself would concede that there had been no enemy attack on that day. Even then president Johnson would say “For all I know, our navy was shooting at whales out there.”

Despite this, crew members aboard the two destroyers have continued to insist that there was something out there menacing them, leading to all sorts of theories. One of the main ideas is that a combination of weather, schools of fish near the surface, birds, or sensor problems had all conspired to make them misidentify phantom targets as actual ones. Another idea is that these ships were being circled by USOs, or underwater UFOs, and just as strange is the idea that the signatures and sightings were caused by underwater creatures. Todd Newberry, a professor emeritus of marine biology at the University of California, Santa Cruz, believes that this can be blamed on bioluminescent cousins of sea squirts called giant pyrosomes, which are basically massive colonies of filter-feeding organisms that form long blunt-ended tubes that can propel themselves along and reach up to 60 feet in length. They also tend to light up when disturbed, and the idea here is that the crews of these ships were freaked by these giant, decidedly torpedo shaped colonies of organisms shooting about. Newberry has said of this:

These things are the size of torpedoes, so they produce the same sonar image. It all fit together, as far as the character of the colony and its behavior. They could certainly have shown up on sonar. I can totally see that if you didn’t know that something like them exist and you were looking at them in the water, your imagination could go pretty crazy with what you were seeing. Imagine telling your commander who thinks you’re being attacked by torpedoes, ‘No sir, those are Pyrosoma!’ You’d be put in the brig immediately. Here’s an angle that was never picked up at the time. It could be a perfectly natural phenomenon. It was a misunderstanding by people who had never heard of pyrosomes. It’s an irresistible story to bring up.

Whatever the case may be, this alleged second Gulf of Tonkin attack is undeniably one of the reasons America entered the Vietnam conflict. Was this just propaganda spun by a government eager to staunch the spread of communism? Or was it something else? What happened to those men out there? What were they picking up and even seeing zipping around out there in those dark waters? Was this all just a misunderstanding, USOs, sea creatures, or something even more mysterious still? Whatever the answers to these questions, it all had heavy weight on the history of war, and remains a curious historical oddity that has never seen any real concrete answers, leaving it to the realm of speculation.