UFO, fairies, legends and generally fortean books author Nick Redfern comes with a new theory about what was really behind the 1947 Roswell incident, based on interviews of people he says are insiders. He says that rather than the crash of an ET craft and occupants, or the remnants of weather balloon from project Mogul, the US government was secretly conducting aerial tests with gliders and gondolas from WWII Japanese and German inspiration, attached under balloons. He says the US put Japanese prisoners of war who were dwarves victims of diabolical human experimentation not unlike what Mengele did in Germany, and also victims of Progeria and radiations, on board of these gondolas. He says that as they looked like aliens when they crashed, people reported to have seen crashed aliens.
Then, the government invented UFO crash stories to divert people away from the truth about these human experimentations, he says. All the stories about an alien spaceship recovery in Roswell, such as those by Col. Philip Corso, or the MJ12 papers, were created or propagated as diversion. Redfern says he is sure of that the people he interviewed tell the truth because they referred him to obscure declassified documents on radiation experiments which confirmed parts of their stories.
The book, called "Body Snatchers in the Desert: The Horrible Truth at the Heart of the Roswell Story," is just out, nobody has read it yet, and author Nick Redfern has granted an exclusive interview to Suart Miller for his web magazine UFOReview, #11 (www.uforeview.net/issue11.doc)
The interview is as often in "Roswell non-ET litterature" - as further reading shows it is a non-ET thesis - introduced by some rhetorics about "The Truth arriving at last. It's here in this issue" and "What you've not been waiting for" and "what you don't want to hear; Roswell case cracked at last." and "It may not be what you want to hear because I will tell you right now; it doesn't involve aliens," "Most of you though will be disappointed, but, we cannot hide from the truth", as interviewer Stuart Miller put it.
So, you are warned: either you believe the new non-alien theory, or if you don't believe it, that's obviously because you are under the spell of the will to believe in aliens. How boring.
That's all like when you do not want to give too much good money to the psychoanalyst because you're not too sure that the Freudian theory is so worthy after all. Isn't it proof that there is an unconscious resistance at work, like the theory says? And don't criticize Marxist theories; you would be the impersonated proof that the working class does have enemies.
Now, when it comes to some new type of truth about Roswell, I have been served already with so much crap of the most fantastic kind, with or without aliens involved, that I doubted much that I would be very surprised now.
Indeed, I heard that the "Alien Autopsy" figure was the unfortunate victim of a genetic disorder called Progeria, that Nazi saucers flew to America and one crashed there, that the remains were of a Japanese Fugo balloon and so many tall tales that the only really surprising thing to me would have been to hear of any explanation, really any, but with some evidence to support it!
Remember Philip Corso's book? Tall tales, no evidence. Who believed it? Not me, almost nobody actually!
The point in Roswell is not about loving aliens involvement theories and hating non-alien involvement theories; it is about accepting discriminating thesis on the base of the found evidence.
I did want to hear it anyway; so I read the interview. However, my alarm bell had already rung with the sensationalistic introduction: "scoop...", "Truth...", "certainly the definitive explanation..." I just don't fall for that kind of language; it has been used too often in the past along with some of the most inane Roswell explanations whatever they were.
Nick Redfern says he was contacted in 1996 by "a guy who said he had some inside information about the British government's involvement in the UFO subject" and the guy meets Redfern at Euston station, which Redfern finds "strange" while I find that it can mean that the "guy" is some nut from the street with some tall tale to share.
The guy tells Redfern "Oh, I've got something vaguely that I can tell you about" and claims to have worked at the Home Office in the UK, in the immigration office, and have information on crashed UFOs from the British Government.
Again rings the alarm bell. Yes, Redfern says that the guy showed him evidence that he worked in the immigration at the Home Office, but a) we do not get to see this evidence yet and b) any guy from the immigration at the Home Office in UK can produce some crashed UFO tale, but how on earth should the immigration at the Home Office be believed as a truthful "insider" source on some US incident?
How was the meeting? Well, Redfern tells later in he interview:
"I mention this in the book but his approach was like pure theatre, overly exaggerated looking around the station as if some Men In Black were going to come straight off the platform and arrest him or me or whoever. It came across like a pulp detective Sam Spade type scenario."
Redfern believing some cook... Could this too shockingly close to the truth?
Once I listen to some guy in my area, who said that he knew an old man who had worked in a known factory in Mulhouse during WWII and the factory was using kids for building Nazi antigravity flying saucers. It could have been that the first guy had papers showing that he worked in the immigration services in France. It could even had happened that the old factory worker had produced papers showing that he did work in the factory he indicated. Is this evidence that this factory built Nazi flying saucers? To some people it would be; not to me.
How knowledgeable is Nick Redfern's "guy"? Did he put his hand on some secret drawer of the government? Not at all. Says Redfern:
"How this guy learned about this information was that he and three or four colleagues at the Home Office, which was where he worked, had a personal interest in the UFO subject. They used to meet every so often at a particular pub in London, just off Northumberland avenue just to talk about UFOs, and they used to go to conferences."
Yes, that is the bottomline on these informers: guys interested in UFOs meeting in the pub...
Now, what does the "guy" tell Nick Redfern? He gives him more or less the Bennewitz story, mentions the first book on Roswell by Bill Moore and Charles Berlitz and says that the US military was concerned that the truth about Roswell could emerge, and that the US military was taping UFO researchers phone conversations and put out a disinformation campaign and fake documents to hide the real truth on Roswell.
Nothing new, and no evidence. It's been ages that the notion that the US would use fake documents to discredit ufologist research, or to lead researchers to an alien involvement thesis to cover up something else. Here, we merely have a one more guy who said so and an author telling us about it.
Redfern, who is an English citizen, says:
"I don't know who these researchers were but evidently there had been some liaison with British UFO researchers."
And the guy tells Redfern that the US told the UK that there was an ET crash at Roswell with alien bodies recovered.
What is this worth? It seems of course very illogic that Englishmen would be knowledgeable of such a Roswell incident secret, so it looks like a "link" must be created. This link is really nothing more than "I don't know who these researchers were but evidently there had been some liaison with British UFO researchers," because a guy told Redfern so, and again, my alarm bell rings.
The guys continues: although the US told the UK that there was a saucer crash and alien bodies recovery, the UK did not believe the US and thought that "the Americans had been buggering around with Japanese prisoners of war brought over at the end of the Second World War."
When interviewer Stuart Miller dares ask how the UK knew the US were lying about aliens to hide "buggering of Japanese POW", Redfern answers:
"No, I don't. The one thing I would stress is that certain people have told me one part of the story and certain people have told me another."
Yes, that's the start of it. A guy told this to Redfern, and other guys told a different story. You may think that when a story is contradicted by other stories, one needs not to accept any of these stories at face value, but Redfern goes along with the Japanese POW story.
Why? What logic is at work there?
Well, Redfern says, "If all these people were saying exactly the same things and knew exactly the same things, it would be kind of like talking parrot fashion and then I would be suspicious."
Yes, here is the shocking truth: Redfern flatly states that a corroborated story is suspicious in his mind and that an uncorroborated story has more therefore more credibility!
I will not comment any little phrase in the interview, I will rather go to the core of the claims, and you may simply read the entire interview with a critical mind; however, some points that raised my doubts on the whole new theory are:
"In one of Tim Good's books, I can't remember which, ... look up Home Office, he talks about somebody in the 50's who was visited by Home Office personnel. ... The idea that something would crash from outer space and the Home Office would have jurisdiction..."
This is to make a link between the Home Office and crashed saucers. The guy says he knows guys who work at the Home Office, they often talk UFOs in a pub, and because the Home Office recovers satellites - or alien spaceship should one fall down? - according to Tim Good and some paper we do not get to see, these guys must be knowledgeable on the Roswell story and have found the truth about Roswell: it was really buggering of Japanese POW... and they did not speak, because the Home Office had told them to shut up. Dubious plot, frail link, no evidence. No papers, no names, nothing. Are the names in the book? Some are, some are not, says Redfern. Bottomline: I need to buy the book.
In another paragraph, Redfern says he has found a barely readable government paper of the fourties, in which we learn that army scientists were studying "mutations at high altitude." We have to wait for the book to check what the paper really is about. Gullible readers may see in it that the US government sent people up in the air and there, they became genetic mutant freaks - real nonsense on the medical point of view - and maybe that's why they came down looking like aliens (?). But what if the paper is merely just telling of exposing bacteria to cosmic rays? This, can make sense, but certainly isn't Roswell / aliens / Japanese mutants POW related. This is exactly the type of glitches in interpretations on which tall tales can seem to gain support by some genuine papers. Bottomline: I need to buy the book.
Other historical errors abound, experts on Roswell matters will probably not fail to notice. For example, it is claimed that Dr. Lincoln La Paz (spelled Lepaz in the interview) was used as a Fugo balloon expert during the war. Possibly. But when he was in NM and the Roswell area, his interest, as everyone can check in papers released via FOIA, was dealing with meteors, the infamous green fireballs and flying discs, not with balloons at all, Fugo or not.
Redfern gave a lecture in the US, and a lady there told him that she saw, at Oak Ridge, in 1947 "three strange bodies" that "looked just like normal Japanese people" and "there were others that were obviously physically handicapped people with all sorts of syndromes like Progeria and Turners syndrome which do, no disrespect intended, make people look unusual. With Progeria you get an average height of 4 - 5 feet with a large, bald head. And sometimes, polydactylism, which is an extra finger which is a factor in a lot of these other syndromes."
And the story is that these Japanese were victims of atrocities in a special Japanese "Unit 731" during the war much like the Nazi performed horrendous atrocities, and were brought in the US in secret in 1945, with their torturers, where the horrible Japanese experiences continued under US military direction.
The lady tells Redfern that some of these victims were used by the US military in New Mexico in further terrible testing: some were sent up in the air in balloons to study the affects of lack of air on their bodies. Others were shot up to the sky in ejection capsules.
The truth about Roswell is thus, that some of these victims and remains of balloons and capsule devices were sometimes seen in the desert by ordinary people, and this created the numerous Roswell crash stories. And of course the US government had to hide the truth, this is why they created the rumours of ET crashes.
And Redfern says that he interviewed one guy from the Army Psychological Branch and one guy who worked, for at least a period, for the Defence Intelligence Agency (supposedly he means to say that they told the same story than the lady after his conference).
Redfern agrees that the incident reported by Jesse Marcel, which is the core of the Roswell case, is unrelated. This is convenient, since Major Jesse Marcel and RAAF did not report any Japanese Progeria victims but debris of apparently unearthly nature. (Although, later in the interview, he tells a story in which the original Roswell case is related anyway with all this, in which Marcel and Brazel are supposed to really have stumbled on remains of a "gondola" filled with Japanese diseased/irradiated/mutant deformed POW).
Redfern says the Japanese victims have more to do as explanation to stories like the Barney Barrett story, in which a craft and alien-looking small bodies were seen while the military was recovering it and trying to keep civilian out of the place. Now, how exactly you would send a glider and gondola p in the air and expect Japanese deformed dwarves-type prisoner of war to even want to try to detach the glider from the balloon ... and fly the glider ... This forces into thinking that the Japanese POW would be used exactly as if they were monkeys. But where is the sense of such a test? Why would you test a balloon suspended glider or gondola with monkeys in it? Of course, you may want to test the effects on the human body of a rocket flight into space, and this was done later, but a glider? Balloons? Everyone already knew that a man can stay very high in the air in a balloon or an airplane. Swiss scientist Auguste Piccard was the first to achieve a manned flight to the Stratosphere reaching an altitude of 52,498 feet, and this was in August of 1932!
The story of Japan's Fugo balloons is known, real, documented. It should be clear that these paper-made low cost balloons which the Japanese sent to drift in the high winds to bomb the US could offer no interested to the Army Air Force in 1947. The Air Force had much better, bigger, more resistant balloons, there is absolutely no sense in the notion that they would use balloons based on the Japanese Fugo balloon design, whatever purpose they may have in mind.
Redfern repeats it and mentions further projects by the Japanese, which actually were not started one bit, involving larger balloons from which flying wing aircraft would be launched over the US to bomb cities with germs. It is of course quite possible that the Japanese had this in mind. But why would the launched aircraft be flying wings is left to the imagination. Whether these flying wings would be inspired by German WWII Horten prototypes of flying wing type airplane is quite speculative to say the least (the German did not believe in the flying wing concept, the Hortens were regarded as eccentric almost until the last days of the war, and certainly it is not the flying wing concept that the Japanese bought). Why the US would have pursued such a project in the desert in 1947, using balloons to launch small flying wing kamikaze type aircraft seems entire "ballooney". The US had aircraft which did not require balloons for lift, they had their own flying wings, they were testing much more efficient advanced warfare such as German V2 rockets.
Japanese advanced concepts were not at all to drop "Horten flying wings" from balloons! They were developing piloted rockets and jet planes, Okha 11 "Baka" to Okha 22, much like the German thought to use by putting a cockpit on the V1; they attached these piloted rockets under the belly of Mitsubishi G4M2 "Betty" bombers. The Japanese had ideas that worked, and needed not any yet-to-test Horten flying wings attached to Fugo balloons unfeasible fantasies. Yet Redfern thinks the US later needed it!
Below: Okha 11 piloted rocket, captured by the US at the end of WW II.
|
Below: Okha 11 piloted rocket in US museum.
|
|
Below: Okha 22 piloted combined rocket and jet in US museum.
|
The Fugo balloons concept certainly made sense as last chance weapon in bombed Japan in WW II. When metal and propellant has become extremely sparse, why not have women build rice paper balloons requiring no propellant? But Fugo balloons weaponry made absolutely no sense for the US in 1947. Post war US balloons projects existed, but they has entirely different purposes and they was no notion of putting men on board: Mogul was to put mikes high in the air to check whether the USSR was testing atomic bombs, Skyhook was used for example to study cosmic rays etc. Bombing USSR by balloons was absolutely not the doctrine, this was to be done by long range fast bombers such as the B-29s, a proven concept, not by balloons which would have drifted the wrong direction anyway!
What Redfern did here is simply fall for nonsensical notions started when John Keel and then Jacques Vallée wondered if the debris found by Marcel and others near Corona in 1947 could have been of a Fugo balloon. But that was a useless speculation, if a balloon it was, then why not any normal US weather balloon? Why would the US launch such primitive balloons when they had neoprene balloons?
Redfern says of the alleged "Horten inspired flying wing under a balloon" project:
"The project was ultimately cancelled anyway in August 1947 because it was just seen as unwieldy to have this huge balloon thing with this aircraft below it and somehow hope to get it to operate successfully. It was just one of a number of weird projects the air force and the military were working on at that time."
There is an appeal in Japanese and German WWII "secret warfare", and many authors fell for it. "Fugo" sounds exotic, these must be magic balloons. Normal weather balloons or Skyhook balloons, much more advanced, have no appeal to these authors. In the same manner, they would not care for Northrop flying wings, much more advanced that the Hortens brother prototypes in Germany (the brothers tried to continue building flying wings in Spain and South America, but without success). The "Hortens" are fascinating, people say they were like the B-2 Stealth bomber decades in advance - they weren't really. People say the Horten "Parabola" was like the objects seen by Kenneth Arnold - it wasn't and the Parabola was a wooden glider which, incidentally, never flew, the brothers burnt it because its wood deformed in the previous winter). But, fascinated, Redfern has to bring the Horten mythology in this Roswell patchwork. With no reason and no evidence and to the contradiction of all that is known on the Horten brothers wanderings after WWII and all the aeronautical realities.
The nonsensical nature of the "flying wing under a balloon" should appear to any people with some critical sense, if no knowledge of the aeronautics and aviation history.
For example, Redfern tells that the project was cancelled because "this thing began spinning and as it began spinning, where the front part of the glider was attached to the balloon array, it came away and ended up pointing nose down to the ground, spinning, beneath this huge balloon array."
Absolutely ridiculous. Obviously in such a project, nobody would have overlooked a spin problem and they would just have attached the airplane with more than one attach so that it doesn't spin! This is how it was done even before WWII when small planes were attached to dirigibles! How could the utter idiocy of the "flying wing under balloon" story by "a DIA guy" not appear to Redfern just with this detail, that, is beyond me.
Below: German Zeppelin dirigibles were able of carrying a few fighter aircraft. The US Navy did this too (Right); but the idea was dropped in 1933 after the two giant blimps Akron and Macon were destroyed in crashes; which was the end of the great rigid American balloon era and the end of the dirigibles "aircraft carrier" experience.
How can anyone believe that the Army started this again in 1947 with the small Japanese Fugo paper balloons supposedly lifting gliders and gondola manned by dwarves deformed Japanese prisoner of war to check if they survive the experience or any other purpose whatsoever?
|
Below: US Navy's Akron, in 1931.
|
Again Nick Redfern's theory seems to confuse things. Project NEPA, which was presented in detail in several TV documentaries over the years, was basically an effort to check if it was possible to fly a nuclear reactor in an airplane. Difficulties ranged from the weight of the reactor to the radiations which were suspectedly dangerous for the pilots.
No nuclear propelled airplane ever flew. What NEPA did is to board the nuclear reactor in a conventional Convair airplane. The Convair was a huge bomber, it was the minimum it took to even take off with a nuclear reactor on board. The crew was quite simply protected from the radiation by a thick wall have lead behind their back in the isolated cockpit, the reactor being in the center of the plane. Thing was flown around at the end of the fifties, measurements were taken from inside the plane and also by a following plane. As a matter of coincidence, Roswell expert Stanton Friedman actually worked on this project.
The problems that stopped the project from any next step, that is, from really propelling a plane thanks to the energy from an on-board nuclear reactor, was not so much the radiations danger for the crew. It was much more the heavy and costly ground infrastructure needed to handle the highly radioactive reactor, to load and unload it, to clean up all the contaminated parts etc. It cost too much money and was much too complicated.
Another problem is that it just made no sense anymore. At the origin, the idea was that a nuclear propelled bomber did not have to refuel; it could fly a week or more around the enemy's borders, ready to drop atomic bombs. Not only was it not so practical to get crews accepting to spend weeks flying with a nuclear reactor on their back, yet another factor was that another solution was much more effective: the ICBMS. A nuclear propelled bomber can be shot down by air to air or ground to air missile too easily. The intercontinental missiles couldn't, it's still not really feasible nowadays. ICBMS are fast, no so costly, not so complicated to handle, and required no crew on board.
After NEPA's nuclear airplane tests were stopped, came the idea to create a nuclear powered missile. The idea was very simple, it was based on statoreactor propulsion: burn or heat something, and the exhaust of heated air makes your craft move. So, all that was needed was to put a nuclear reactor in a heat-resistant pipe, to put a rocket to start the whole thing. The air swallowed at the front would then overheat at the contact of the nuclear reactor and get out very fast at the back, providing reaction. The interest of the idea in comparison with standard rocket propelled missiles was that the virtually endless run of the reactor would allow supersonic flight of the missile at low altitude, under the radar range, and the enemy would be struck before even knowing something was fired. It failed, again, not because of an inapplicable principle but because it cost too much taxpayer money to continue the tests, which required a terrible infrastructure, for example supersonic wind tunnels requiring huge amounts of compressed air stored in miles of pipes, etc.
The bottomline is, I do not know what Redfern's book exactly claim about project NEPA, but it does not have any relation with any flying saucers matters, no relation with diminutive Japanese POW, no need for any alienish cover stories, no link with the Roswell incident.
Redfern says he heard of a theory that the alleged body in the alleged "alien Autopsy" film is a human person afflicted of Progeria. Stuart Miller carefully tells him that he thought that this theory has been dismissed. It has indeed, but Redfern probably did not want to go into this, he probably does not know much, so he suddenly diverts to another explanation of the strangeness of the alleged "alien autopsy" body: "a number of these people who were used in these Unit 731 experiments were actually taken from remote villages in China where inbreeding was rife and there were all sorts of really weird deformities and syndromes, and combinations of different syndromes, where people just looked very odd." Yet he comes back to Progeria, finding strange that "it was sort of in the wake of the film that people began this discussion about whether it showed someone with Progeria." And again he diverts to other causes of deformities: radiation experiments.
He ends up practically with suggesting the notion that ... well, the body is actually all that together, taken from remote villages in China where inbreeding was rife and there were all sorts of really weird deformities and syndromes, afflicted with Progeria, and used in radiation experiments!
I really cannot go along with such line of thinking. Talk about the so-called "will to believe" of the supported of an alien origin to the Roswell incident; here we are offered the "will to believe all that pops into the mind".
Of course, everyone will notice with a single glance that the alleged body in the "alien autopsy" film, whatever a deformed human it is supposed to be, does not look like a victim of Progeria (*). So, it needs to be more than Progeria, some radiation effects are now proposed to save the picture. Moreover, to save the picture from the criticism that the alleged being's eyes are not fit with Progeria, Redfern suggests that he had contact lenses against radiations. It looks sensible, but only if you believe that there were any contact lenses in 1947 looking even remotely like the soft dark membranes in the alien autopsy film.
(*) The being has a normal proportioned face surface / cranium ratio, i.e. normal face surface compared to the cranium, unlike Progeria victims who have a large head disproportioned to the face surface. Progeria victims look as having suddenly grown old (Progeria means faster ageing), it shows on their skin, their hair, their face; this is not the case with the being in the film. The being in the film has eyes twice as large as the mouth, which is not the case with Progeria victims. The being seemed to be possibly female but has no breasts, no navel; this would be the case with Progeria victims. The nose is different. The skin of the being seems firm, normal, Progeria victims have the wrinkled skin of very old people. The being is massive and muscular, Progeria victims look like frail ol people. If the being is a human being afflicted by a disorder, this disorder is not simply Progeria.
Now, of course, after proposing the "deformed by inbreeding Chinese from a remote village afflicted by Progeria and used in radiation tests" Redfern confesses: "I actually don't conclude anything beyond the fact that to me that if it's a hoax it is an orchestrated one."
By whom? Well, Redfern thinks that it's apparently hoaxed by the very people who he says are terrified that the public may found out that the US had no aliens but experimented on "deformed by inbreeding Chinese from a remote village afflicted by Progeria and used in radiation tests!"
Understand me; I do not deny that some terrible experimentation could have been taken place. But:
"... if those type of experiments were undertaken and somebody was fearful of it getting out, why not fake a story or fake a film that looks likes the bodies that were really used and then show it to be a fake and then if the real story gets out, which I think I've found, then people are going to cast doubt on that."
Doesn't this top by far the wildest Cosmic Watergate theories?
On my part, I would go no further as "there seems to be nothing serious at all in all that."
Redfern actually filters the facts. Much has to do with quite horrendous experiments on people. His idea is that such experiments had to be kept secret, otherwise the US would collapse in the scandal. But experiments made on mentally retarded and abandoned people have been revealed and confirmed officially by the US Department of Health long ago. The US did not collapse. Sad to say, but terrible things continue to occur, and even when it surfaces, even when some people are upset and protest, the larger number does not care at all and no government collapse. For example in the recent years it as appeared that some orphanage for kids with AIDS in New York really had another agenda than help these kids in their suffering. Their suffering was terribly increased, on the contrary: the poor kids were used to test new AIDS pharmaceuticals. Whatever the implications in the high sphere of the city, the health services and the personal and management of the orphanage was, despite the revealing of these terrible acts, strictly nothing happened.
Redfern tells of the likely hoaxed saucer crash story of the Spitzenberg, which is probably is nothing more than German newspaper and tabloid hoaxes as it was usual then. Redfern tells that the story is covered by a Russian magazine, and the NSA foreign information service gets a copy off that magazine in which the story is propagated. Redfern says it was the US who did the hoaxing. The evidence? On the copy of the magazine on the NSA website, someone had put the word "plant" in handwriting over the test. This is no evidence at all. Of course the story was "planted". Some guy at the NSA looked into the story, found out that it was "planted" and noted it on the paper. So what? Is this any proof that the story was planted by NSA? To cover-up a totally forgotten Roswell incident by creating another such alien incident, even more dramatic? To cover-up that in 1947 in the US, little Chinese POW of war thrown from a balloon in a gondola were recovered, when at the time no such story existed in New Mexico? It makes absolutely no sense at all.
All the documents and testimonies which have surfaced in the last decade point at a "soft" cover-up of UFOs by the military authorities, initially in the US and then mostly adopted or slightly adapted by the other countries military:
There are UFO reports, most have commonplace explanations, they are confusions, misinterpretations of airplanes, helicopters, astronomical phenomenon etc., and some are hoaxes and outright inventions. A small number have no commonplace explanation so far, it is not proven that they are not extraterrestrial spacecraft, but there is no hard evidence, i.e. piece of extraterrestrial spacecraft or captured extraterrestrial being to prove that these yet-to-explain reports are caused by extraterrestrial spacecraft.
The cover-up aspect is a "soft cover-up" in the sense that most policies applied by most authorities was to calm down the situation. For example, USAF policy was to talk to the press of UFO sightings only when they have found a commonplace explanation, and to shut up if they hadn't. In many occasions, official would "invent" any explanation to get rid of the UFO problem.
This soft cover-up is totally proven. Testimonies are numerous, and a huge paper trail supports these testimonies.
Of course, if, and only if, an ET spacecraft or occupant, had really be captured, it is totally logic to suspect that this information would not be told, and kept under high secret conditions, based on the need-to-know policy, kept within a small group to avoid leaks. In this case, logically, it is not required that all the government agencies in the entire world have to know "The Truth", leaks could happen, but one would not expect thousands of whistleblowers and a huge paper trail all over any archive.
There are testimonies, and a very small number of papers, which suggest that a "hard evidence" cover-up may have happened. The whole is not that convincing to most researchers, but the whole is a bit more than nothing, and many researchers feel, at the minimum, that there may be more to it, that a "hard evidence cover-up" could exist, specifically in the US.
Now, the situation presented by Nick Redfern is totally different.
Despite the evidence that the most intriguing UFO data were silenced and kept inside walls by the USAF, Redfern accepts on the words of one unnamed "DIA guy" that the opposite occurred: the claim is that UFO affairs were promoted by government agencies. They wanted people to believe in alien visits, says Redfern's guy, so that nobody discovers that small Progeria suffering Japanese people were thrown up to the ground from Horten flying wings suspended under Japanese Fugo-inspired balloons in the desert of New Mexico. An extraordinary claim, revisionist to all current theories on government UFO policies, with nothing more to support it than... hearsay.
|
Above: Horten Ho-229 captured by USAF, 1945 photograph.
"It's not like there's a prototype Horten Wing stored away with all this balloon debris" says Redfern. Of course there is! Although they were insignificant to the German war effort, the US did seize several of the Horten flying wings including one of the two Ho 229 jet prototype when they invaded Germany. Most of them can now be seen in various US museums. The real story of the Horten brothers has not prevented authors such as Nick Redfern to create a "flying saucers are NAZI secret planes" mythology around these planes.
First, such hearsay exist to support just about anything.
Second, why aliens must be involved as cause in a cover up of atrocities is quite unreasonable. Why would they involve aliens to cover up a Roswell incident which was, at the origin, explained as balloon? Why would they later, when the incident resurfaced, spread rumors of aliens, when they had another explanation at hand, which was really produced whatever its merits, the explanation that the "aliens" were parachute test anthropomorphic dummies?
Agreed, if the US performed atrocities on people, Russians would take advantage of it in terms of political propaganda. But at the time when this could have happened, in the cold war years, there was no Roswell issue. Roswell was a totally forgotten incident; it was a balloon, a very minor incident; which made headlines for a few hours but had died fast when the military show pieces of balloons. There was, then, absolutely no need for them to invent tales of crashed saucers and aliens recoveries, because tales of crashed saucers and aliens recoveries were totally rejected by all, including those UFO researchers holding the opinion that there are indeed alien spacecraft in our skies. The notion that the Soviet would, for example, read Scully's book, which had drowned in ridicule as a reporter found out that Scully had been served lies by conmen, and then think "maybe this book is true except that these were not aliens and saucers but Japanese victims killed in balloon testing" simply does not hold up. The notion that some US agency would think in terms of "there's this book by Scully about crashed aliens, people could find that these were truly Progeria-struck Japanese POW thrown to the ground in our balloon tests, so let's say that they were aliens" is absolutely rubbish. Moreover, just protecting non-alien incidents with invented alien involvement would probably be the best way to make sure that some researchers would go: "hold on, this Scully book nonsense about aliens is supported by the officials, so, let's start to look into it rather than just scoff."
To make things clearer, let me fictionize the Redfern revised UFO history.
1947: flying discs are reported all over the US skies after Kenneth Arnold saw some.
What are they? People hesitate: either hallucinations, or real; if they are real, maybe ours, maybe Russians.
July 1947: a farmer finds debris on his ranch, the Army first says it is a flying disc, but a few hours later the Army shows that these were remains of a weather balloon and its radar target. The case is closed and totally forgotten in the next decades.
But 30 years later, the case is reopened when a major says that the debris which he handed were not those of a balloon.
Luckily, in the 30 previous years, a disinformation campaign had been organized so that people believe in aliens, so that researchers of future decades do not find out that they were mistreated Japanese used in balloon tests, but aliens.
And the established history runs:
1947: flying discs are reported all over the US skies after Kenneth Arnold saw some.
What are they? People hesitate: either hallucinations, or real; if they are real, maybe ours, maybe Russians.
July 1947: a farmer finds debris on his ranch, the Army first says it is a flying disc, but a few hours later the Army shows that these were remains of a weather balloon and its radar target. The case is closed and totally forgotten in the next decades.
But 30 years later, the case is reopened when a major says that the debris which he handed were not those of a balloon.
The US military say that his recollections do not count, and that the debris were of balloons. UFOs and aliens may exist, but the military has never found any hard evidence that they do.
Simply put, we are asked to believe the revised version, because a book will be published by a fortean researcher telling of "people in a pub" and "a lady" and "a DIA guy" giving bits of this revised version. "There's nothing to say that they won't speak out eventually", says Redfern.
This is totally insufficient to me. In my way of handling such things, first you check the claims, then you propagate them. Propagating claims and telling people that the claimants "will speak out eventually" makes no sense at all.
The lack of logic of the plot is advanced by interviewer Stuart Miller, who asks Redfern:
"Actually Nick, I've got to say that's fairly subjective. My opinion, and its only an opinion, is there can be nothing bigger, in terms of impact, than a story about a UFO, not of this Earth, containing bodies not from this earth. I would think that the fact that the American government may well have been dabbling in human experimentation, while dreadful and shocking, still doesn't rank higher than the reality of a real crashed UFO and real aliens."
Redfern's answer is:
"That's an argument and it's a good argument. My only argument against it really is in the fact that by revealing it, I know for a fact that whether or not people accept what I've been told is genuine or not, because it's so controversial, it's going to cause numerous people to look into it. I can't go into details right now, unfortunately, for reasons I can't go into either but already there's official interest into delving further into this ..."
I do not want to sound to cruel, but this is nothing else than: "Yes, what I tell may not make sense, but let me try to say it's true, because then people will check it out."
It does sound as "Buy my book, it tells true things, it's controversial, people who buy it I want you to buy it to check if these are true things."
Redfern adds: "It's not like there's a need for damage control because nothing else has come out on Roswell."
In short, the idea is that since there wasn't anything new on Roswell, he just tries something new in case it would work. A sensational thesis is good for release, regardless of investigation, just because it's "new".
In general, all questions demanding a precise answer are skipped by Redfern with formulas such as "That's a good question", or "It's a complicated story and there are so many different aspects to it and facets to it that trying to get it all across in one phone call is difficult" or "what I've tried to do is not to speculate" "somebody" "the story I got" "a former British army source" "there could be a connection there" etc.
Now to be fair, two names are given: Bill Salter and Al Barker. Redfern says that it is heir real names and that they are from the Psychological Strategy Board and the Army Psychological War Fare branch. And that's it. Redfern says he knows that the people who came to hum are genuine, because they showed him papers and family pictures. But there seems to be no real investigation. Remember Frank Kaufmann: he also looked "genuine"; as a matter of fact, he lied very little on his career. But investigation by Stan Friedman allowed to find out that he did lie.
In the rest of the interview, Redfern explains that he shares Vallée / Keel perspective on UFOs: they are real, there's some intelligence at work in this like with fairies stories of the old days. A mix of Buddhist considerations, Tulpas, mysteries of the folkloric kind, eerie energies and Bigfoot in Rendlesham, and ... a governmental cover-up of the paranormal truth of UFOs, which are "thought forms" etc. It seems anything is good enough to explain UFOs as non-alien, even the unfathomable... But that is another topic.
Interviewer Stuart Miller writes:
"This interview that you are about to read is the only one he gave before publication. In return, I had to give my word that I would say nothing. His publishers had placed a very strict embargo on any pre publication publicity and the breaking of that promise of silence to Nick could well have resulted in financial penalties for him."
Now it seems that "Truth" or not, "Finance" come first. "Promote the book, make some noise about it," the Finance men say, the main point to them is of course not to answer too many questions but to tease potential readers into buying it.
Don't believe the book is not advertised; it is. You can order it from Amazon.com at http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0743497538/ctoc/103-7333954-0623009
Nick Redfern was expectedly pressed with questions by UFO researchers, via the UFOupdates discussion group. Redfern says, "since the book was published I've had a wealth of new leads come through that I am actively following up, right now."
I don't doubt that the whole crowd of Nazi saucers fans and others will provide him all the tales we were already served in the past years.
I will buy the book [I did since and all I wrote here is still vaild]. I do not accept for now that anything in the interview points at any "final truth" on the Roswell case; it seems much more than another piece of "UFO entertainment" of the speculative kind is to be sold. I have heard similar stories too often, either directly from gullible people sitting in a pub, or in books. It is not the first, it will probably won't be the last such book.
