The Humanist, November-December 1992 (slightly altered from published version)
Hath not an alien eyes? Much in the likenesses of children found on black velvet? Hath not an alien hands, vestigal organs, multiple dimensions, senses, and passions? Do we not look like praying mantises? If you prick us, do we not bleed purple dripping ichor? If you wrong us, shall we not abduct you?. . . I demand my pound of flesh, a few unfertilized eggs and semen samples, and maybe a couple of heifers from Colorado to pass the time.
Ignatz Shakespeare, "The Merchant of Venus"
Aliens have to put up with a lot of prejudice. Even UFOlogists call them "the Greys" because of their skin color-- they don't even try to use the more politically correct "Ashen-Americans." I'm sure you've heard the stereotypes before; All aliens abduct people for medical experiments. All cattle mutilations are done by aliens. Those Greys are taking over our country with their superior technology. Their spacecraft are smaller, faster, and more fuel-efficient than ours. The Greys are crafty, sinister, telepathic, inscrutable, and they all look alike. The Greys want our women. The Greys use the blood of Christian babies to make matzoh bread, hide subliminal messgaes on Metallica albums, eat dogs and cats, and secretly run the world through the Rothschild banks.
But the situation has gotten so bad that UFOlogist Wendelle C. Stevens (USAF ret.) recently felt the need to write an article for International UFO Library Magazine titled, "All 'Greys' Are Not Reticulans." It seems that ". . . most of the 'greys' are actually coming from someplace else and are not Reticulans at all. The true Reticulans are being erroneously blamed for the misdeeds of all those others, some of whom seem to be involved in the ET genetic experiments now being reported more and more."
Stevens complains that when Budd Hopkins was assembling his book Intruders, he was "pre-selecting" cases where Grey-like aliens were involved. Turns out that all of the visiting types of aliens were performing these experiments, but the Greys from Zeta 1 and Zeta 2 Reticuli‑‑ the ones contacting Bill Herrmann of Charleston, South Carolina, at least‑‑ were NOT.
Now, if this strikes you as splitting hairs (although it could be important to the apparently-snobbish Zeta Reticulans), you can imagine just how many UFO-contact theories are zooming around out there. So let's take a look in the UFO Coverup Conspiracy and Wish-Fulfillment Paranoia pool. I stuck a toe in that pool, and walked away feeling like I'd been dunked into a vat of sewage effluents. This metaphorical pool is stagnant, fetid, murky, and chock full of grotty bottom-feeders scrounging amongst themselves for a tasty bit of phlegm. So we'll have to be content with culturing a sample or two of the most outré growths-- but let's make sure we keep the things in the glove box, and store them at Absolute Zero.
"Well it had been 987 years in outer space time when I got back,
Couldn't seem to find any of my friends to tell my interesting stories to"
-- The B-52's, "Is That You, Mo-Dean?"
Twenty-five years ago, UFOlogists speculated as to whether the government really did take UFOs seriously, and might be concealing its real and substantial interest. These days, most UFO coverup theories begin with the crashed-saucer-recovery story in William Moore and Charles Berlitz's 1980 book The Roswell Incident. According to the authors, the government recovered saucer wreckage and four bodies from a crash at Roswell, New Mexico, and they've been keeping it a secret since 1947. The authors' previous books do not inspire confidence. Berlitz wrote a discredited study on the Bermuda Triangle, and Moore was previously known for his book The Philadelphia Experiment.
And between three books on the subject, there's not a lot of agreement. There was either one crash with four bodies (Moore), one crash with three bodies and one survivor (Kevin Randle and Don Schmitt, UFO Crash at Roswell), or two crashes, 150 miles apart, one with four bodies and the other with three bodies and one survivor (Stanton Friedman and Don Berliner, Crash at Corona, to be published). Given the above confusion, it's not surprising that photos of the collected debris are claimed to be the 'actual' debris in Moore's book, and faked wreckage in Randle's. Problem is, the debris pictured looks like a kite made of tinfoil.
Now, let's add the further confusion of the MJ-12 papers. (This is pretty condensed, so follow this carefully.) In 1987, William Moore received what appeared to be Top Secret papers that outlined the formation of a high-level commission called Majestic-12, to study the recovered wreckage from one crash in 1947. The papers, if authentic, would have been the 'smoking gun' supporting accounts of a crashed-saucer cover-up. UFO debunker Philip Klass turned up a lot of anomalies in the documents-- for example, a signature of Harry Truman was exactly like another, authentic Truman signature, and showed signs of apparent Xerox-doctoring. Friedman has endorsed their authenticity, even though they mention only one crash-- conflicting with his compromise two-crash scenario. Moore, on the other hand, threw the whole fire-and-boat drill into a tizzy when he announced at the 1989 Mutual UFO Network (MUFON) conference that he'd served as a government misinformation agent, feeding false data to other UFOlogists. Currently, the various crashed-saucer camps are calling each other names in a three-way standoff. And they don't like Phil Klass a whole lot, either.
Remember, this is the less extravagant end of UFO coverup theories. These are the serious researchers whose books are published by major companies, who get substantial grants from UFO research organizations, and who are featured speakers at UFO conferences. These are the respectable UFO coverup researchers. Just keep telling yourself that.
"While cruising through the ionosphere, I saw these alien beings.
Everywhere I went up there, they were shakin' their alien things."
- - The B-52's, "Cosmic Thing"
Moving on to the slightly more. . . baroque factions, we come across Bob Lazar, who turned up late last year on KLAS-TV in Nevada. Lazar claims to have worked for the U.S. Navy at a lab in Los Alamos, and was regularly shuttled to an area designated S-4. At S-4, Lazar was permitted to check out the latest in alien-derived technology-- at least nine flying saucers using 'gravity-wave drives' powered by antimatter reactors which use a theoretical Element 115. Lazar has a fertile imagination for such things as candles that don't burn or melt under distorted gravity, and playfully bouncing golfballs from a repulsion field.
Researchers for the ParaNet computer network, however, were unable to confirm many of Lazar's claims. Beyond a phone book listing, a newspaper article about jet cars, and a W-2 form that anyone could've filled out at the public library, Bob Lazar the Government Physicist seems never to have existed. George Knapp of KLAS-TV says that "We did a lot of checking on him and found interestingly enough that his life was disappearing around him. . . We called Los Alamos Labs and they said they never heard of him. We called MIT where he says he went to school and they had never heard of him. We called for his birth records and they had disappeared. . . as if someone was trying to make him a non‑person." Most journalists, faced with this lack of substantiation, would figure Lazar was yanking someone's chain. Knapp put him on the news.
Other problems in Lazar's story turn up. In a KLAS interview, describing the dissection of an alien body-- yep, those pesky Greys from Zeta Reticuli again-- Lazar says that the insides seemed to be "one large organ, as opposed to identifiable heart and lungs," and follows this by saying how the pathologist catalogued and weighed the individual organs. Paranet has also circulated criticisms of the wonky gee-whiz gravity-bends-space-and-time physics Lazar describes. It sounds quasi-Einsteinian to the layman, but Lazar trips up on details-- for example, antimatter is not made by bombarding matter with protons, let alone a theoretical Element 115, which can only form within stars.
Lazar wishes to keep his distance from the debates of the UFO community. This is understandable, considering who brought him into the circus.
The man who brought Lazar to KLAS was John Lear, son of the Learjet's developer. He maintains that not only does the government have forty saucers stashed away, but they've got anywhere from 25 to 100 alien bodies in cryogenic storage, three living aliens in custody, and a long-standing "business deal" with the Space Brothers, "having been duped into thinking they were making some kind of agreement in which we traded permission to abduct humans in return for super‑advanced technology."
Lear's Laundry List of established 'facts' includes: secret U.S. military bases on the Moon and Mars; there are Martians, but they look just like us; there are at least 70 different species of aliens visiting Earth, engaging in abductions and cattle mutilations; there are secret alien bases underground in Nevada; AIDS was developed by an "R.M. Donner" for the Navy between 1969 and 1972; John Lennon, Charlie Chaplin, and Pee-Wee Herman, among others, were 'killed or destroyed' by the CIA; and man was developed by aliens to be a 'container' for "physical matter, blood, enzymes, hormones, souls, thoughts, emotions. . . all of it engineered, multiplied, grown, harvested, and processed by a higher entity, and their licensees. . . At the end of the corporeal life of the container, the soul is extracted and either stored for future use or reintroduced into a fetal container. To what purpose? It's probably none of our business anymore that it's a cow's business what they are here for.If you have wondered why the government has never come clean on the subject of flying saucers, maybe you should consider why we never take the trouble to brief cows on the reason for their existence."
I'd love to hear the bedtime stories he tells his kids. But perhaps the real core of Lear's hypothesis rests on one big assumption; all of the rest of us are ignorant, ill-educated sheep. Doubt his tale of the development of AIDS? You're likely to be told that "If this sounds unbelievable, this is because there are a number of things you don't understand about world population growth versus food consumption. The reason you don't understand these things is you have not been fed this type of information because it's none of your business. And if you still think you have a government by the people and for the people, you are as ignorant as you are misinformed." Wonder how the government could keep such a thing a secret all these years? "Well, if you truly believe that the government can't keep a secret when it wants to, then you are worse than terminally ignorant. You are willfully ignorant."
Then Lear plays his trump card. "Find a friend in an aerospace related government project. Ask him this question that will not in any way compromise his oath of security. Ask him, 'Would you bet your life that John Lear is wrong?'" I think most people can find more important things to bet their lives on.
I can guess at least one question you might have at this point; "How extreme can this stuff get before someone decides enough's enough?" When UFOlogists claim not only to have determined different species of aliens, which star systems they've come from, and what their technology is like, and where their underground bases are, one can't help but wonder if maybe there's a limit. Imagine a story so outrageous even the Weekly World News wouldn't print it. Imagine, perhaps, a UFOlogist who's managed to throw nearly every shred of credibility he has to the four winds.
"They're good fine people, Stuart, But they don't know what the queers are doing to the soil. . . The government says it's bad farming, but I know it's the queers. They're in it with the aliens. They're building landing strips for GAY MARTIANS! I SWEAR TO GOD! You know what, Stuart? I like you."
-- The Dead Milkmen, "Stuart"
Which brings us to William Cooper.
Even other UFOlogists say "Enough!" at this point. Cooper made his first appearance on Paranet, and administrator Jim Speiser has since barred Cooper from posting material onto the system. Budd Hopkins wrote "The Paranoid Temptation" for the MUFON Journal, specifically denouncing Cooper. James Moseley's Saucer Smear calls Cooper's and Lear's claims "wild ravings," and Jerome Clark of International UFO Reporter uses the phrase "lurid pulp fantasies." UFO magazine attacked Cooper in its "Whistleblowers" column; editor Vicki Cooper (no relation) recently wrote an article about fascist trends in UFO imagery and claims, citing Cooper's use of the anti-Semitic Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion in his recent book Behold a Pale Horse.
According to a lecture delivered at the 1989 Whole Earth Expo, Cooper's yet another former military man who's been seeing UFOs and UFO-related stuff throughout his career; aircraft carrier-sized spaceships emerging from the ocean depths, for example, or 'enemy helicopters' abducting whole villages in Vietnam. You know, the usual. Lesser men would have shrugged such things off as being merely "spooky," or "a coincidence," but Cooper immediately realized that Something Was Going On. Eventually, Cooper claims, he was given "Top Secret Magic" clearance, where he dealt with "answers to questions which you didn't know what the questions were so you really didn't know what the message was all about." Uh-huh.
Suddenly Cooper was dealing with all sorts of UFO coverup stuff-- crashed saucers recovered by the Nazis in 1936, "Operation Majority," Project GRUDGE, MAJI, SIGMA, PLATO, AQUARIUS, GARNET, POUNCE, SNOWBIRD and REDLIGHT, the test flights of captured UFOs in Nevada, the real moon landing in 1962, the alien creation of Jesus and four major religions, and lots, lots more. Cooper out-Majestics the other conspiratologists by presenting the Jason Society, top secret people from the Manhattan Project, Nobel prizewinners, and people from the Council on Foreign Relations, who were appointed to figure out the alien technology. He also maintains that Whitley Streiber's book Majestic was based on authentic government documents-- and that Streiber, along with William Moore, is a government agent. (Streiber, by the way, was so angered by obnoxious UFO proponents that he turned away from the whole movement.)
It's part of the effort to weaken our moral fiber and get us used to the existence of aliens, Cooper sez. At a 1989 conference in Modesto, Cooper maintained that the actors on the TV series Alien Nation were real aliens, whom he designated "Orange." This cultural saturation effort is funded in large part through drug money; Cooper says that the "Project Grudge" documents from the early 1960's specify that George Bush would use Zapata Oil's drilling platforms as smuggling centers. And when President Kennedy ordered MJ-12 to stop their drug running, the Bilderbergers ordered him killed. Or, in Cooper's words at the Whole Earth Expo talk;
"President Kennedy was killed by the driver of his car, his name was William Greer, he used a recoilless, electrically operated, gas‑powered assassination pistol that was specially built by the CIA to assassinate people at close range. It fired an explosive pellet which injected a large amount of shellfish poison into the brain, and that is why, in the documents, it stated that President Kennedy's brain was removed. If you've studied the case, you will find that indeed his brain disappeared. The reason for that is so that they would not find the particles of the exploding pellet or the shellfish poison in his brain which would have proved conclusively that Lee Harvey Oswald was NOT the assassin. In fact, Lee Harvey Oswald never fired a shot, he was the patsy."
And a year later, at the 1990 Expo: "[MAJESTY TWELVE] is the secret government, which controls the alien technology and the Defense Industrial Complex. Who report to the Royal Institute of International Affairs in London. Who reports to the Rothschild family, who owns the Bank of England and who owns, ladies and gentlemen, the FEDERAL RESERVE OF THE UNITED STATES OF AMERICA." UFOlogists who disagree with Cooper are part of the disinformation campaign, and L. Ron Hubbard's in on it as well, since Scientology teaches about extraterrestrials. Cooper claims Hubbard worked for the Office of Naval Intelligence, and that a former associate of his had founded the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, pretty damn strange, huh? And as the Council on Foreign Relations is planning to 'depopulate' two billion people by the year 2000, and the dark night falls upon the globe, the smiler with the knife roams the alleyways of our souls and we await with shuddering dread the whisper of the truncheon above our heads--
AAAAAGGGGHHHHH!! ENOUGH! STOP! Jesus, do you people know what it's like to slog through this shit? Forty-five-page rants about how a rival UFOlogist is a mother-grabbing, father-raping whoremonger? The whoremonger's reply that the first guy is a coke-snuffling Communist degenerate? Their followers apologetically claiming that the more embarrassing screeds are CIA disinformation?
I'm only exaggerating slightly; I assembled a lot of Cooper and Lear material for this article, but it's mostly umpty-ump-page rants about how other UFOlogists-- usually the ones who dare criticize Cooper-- are government disinformation agents. His lectures have included rococo accounts of analyzing videotapes of John Lear for careful 'body analysis' and 'voice descrambling.' At one point, according to UFO magazine, Cooper accused Bob Lazar of dealing in drugs and prostitution; Lazar has admitted on a TV show that he'd written software to manage a bordello (which is no big deal), but the 'drug dealing' part seems to be based on a reference to Lazar's jet-car hobbies and a 'speed lab' where he makes the fuel. There must be a market for this stuff; UFO conspiratologist Lars Hansson is selling a 300+ page compendium of documents detailing his wars with Lear and Cooper-- whom he initially believed. You people don't know how ugly this stuff can get; it's like watching wasps crawl on an infant's cheek.
Maybe you can't blame the UFO-conspiracy theorists for such extremes. After all, they claim they're onto the Most Important News Story of All Time, and they face the obstacles of government surveillance, harassment, and misinformation. But I have a hard time believing that even the respectable UFO coverup researchers could track down their own shoelaces, especially when we put these 'investigative' efforts into their proper context.
William Greider's Secrets of the Temple detailed the operations of the Federal Reserve, and his Who Will Tell the People? managed to explicate a maddeningly complex story of nationwide financial mismanagement and ruin. Robert Caro's The Power Broker described how Robert Moses' Triborough Authority ran the complex politics of New York City for more than forty years. Even events which could be considered government 'cover-ups' can be examined substantially and in detail; its complicity in the drug trade was examined in Alfred McCoy's The Politics of Heroin, and Tim Weiner was able to outline the Pentagon's "black budget" in Blank Check. And as far as government malice towards whistleblowers goes, John Stockwell (In Search of Enemies) and Philip Agee (CIA Diary) got published in spite of lengthy government harassment efforts. Solzhenitsyn even managed to get The Gulag Archipelago published.
If the government really was keeping the aliens in storage, there's no legitimate excuse for not having uncovered the story in complete and convincing detail by now-- unless, maybe, there's no story to be uncovered. Compared to the above examples of substantial journalism, even the more respected UFO-Coverup investigators sound like children playing Junior G-Man, with secret decoder rings, hidden military bases and 'misinformation agents.'
Afterword (not published, written about a year after the original column)
William Cooper is still pretty busy; even though the UFO community holds him in deep contempt, he's managed to turn up at the Whole Life expos on a regular basis. He's since turned more towards nutty conspiracy theories that the above article hints at, pulling in elements of UFO coverup fantasies to anti-Semitic claims of a Bank of England-Rothschild conspiracy and the fear that George Bush's "New World Order" would constitute the feared One World Government of the Saucer People. He's managed to find audiences among New Agers, Fundamentalist Christians, and the ultra-right wing. They're welcome to him.
During the course of researching this article, I spent some time looking through the material posted on Paranet, a computer net devoted to discussions of paranormal topics, specifically UFOs. Although I'm not a believer in UFOs-- couldn't ya tell?--, I couldn't help but sympathize with the more respected UFO researchers. They were trying, with various levels of success and ability, to treat their field as a serious matter of scientific investigation. However, the discussions and data libraries were frequently invaded with lengthy posts detailing any amount of paranoia or wishful thinking. It must be tough to try to talk sanely about alien intelligence when the audience is clamoring to hear who shot JFK. Many of them were dismayed at how quickly Cooper and Lear had acquired some 'respectability' within the field.
The only time I ever encountered Cooper semi-directly was in an exchanges on an email list in the late 1990s. The list was devoted to such decent issues as women's rights, gay and lesbian rights, and fighting the right-wing. But one of Cooper's listeners turned up and began posting materials from Cooper's website. I, in turn, posted the text of the article above. Apparently my note was forwarded to Cooper himself, who sent a reply accusing me of being either insane, a drunkard, or a government agent.
It was obvious that the UFO field couldn't contain Cooper; he quickly found a small but appreciative audience audience among the wackier militia-heads, survivalists, and white supremacists, developing a small cottage industry around his books, documentaries, and lectures. Not surprisingly, Timothy McVeigh was an avid Cooper fan.
And also, perhaps not surprisingly, William Cooper was killed in a shootout with Arizona sheriff's deputies in early November of 2001. He'd been wanted on charges of aggravated assault, and after some careful attempts by sheriff's deputies to lure him off his his property, Cooper finally snapped. One deputy got two bullets in his head; happily, he's expected to survive. Cooper, however, is dead.
For more on Cooper, here's an expose by one Don Ecker; a eulogy from some survivalist fan can be found on Deja here,
Personally, I'm happy I went on the record about this worthless bag of garbage years before he did some serious harm.
Copyright 2000-6 Brian Siano
(unless otherwise noted)