Spies, Lies, and Polygraph Tape: The UFO Spy Games Blog

Burnt Eyeballs: Critics Stare "Goats" to Death

2009-11-06T10:37:00.002-06:00

Although I haven't had a chance to see The Men Who Stare at Goats movie, the reviews are pouring in and it doesn't look good for Clooney and Company.

Ouch! I'm still looking forward to seeing the fictionalized version of Jon Ronson's darkly humorous introduction to the world of black ops psychic ESPionage. Based upon the reviews, it might be out on video before I make to the theater.

Here are a few examples:

MTV: What went wrong with this movie?

Boston Herald: Goats cheesy

Washington Post:: An amusing but finally trivial picaresque, part Hunter S. Thompson, part Stanley Kubrick, with none of their ferocious genius.

WIRED: Maybe the greatest conspiracy of all was turning The Men Who Stare at Goats into another middlebrow Hollywood action flick – complete with a saccharine ending.

CNN: 'Men Who Stare at Goats' is baaaaaad

TORONTO STAR: The Men Who Stare at Goats: Uncontrollable bleating

SNAFU Updates: Coast to Coast AM with George Noory 5 Nov. 2009

2009-11-05T09:18:00.004-06:00

Coast to Coast AM

Tonight's Show, Thursday, November 5th:

Rogue journalist Gary S. Bekkum will discuss his research on secret government documents including the Stargate Files from the 1980s which reveal predictions of events similar to 9-11, and evidence for psychic spying.

SNAFU REPORT

In spite of advanced notice to my web host provider, they have managed to temporarily shut down my main web site at www.starpod.org ... if the site is down please try my mirror site at www.starstreamresearch.com ... or here, at the Spies, Lies, and Polygraph Tape blog site.

Thank you to everyone for their support!

Chris Robinson reports that his Caller ID display shows a call yesterday, November 4, 2009, at 3:30 PM. The last time Chris had a call from this number was the morning of 9/11, which came from a US Colonel in the air shortly after planes hit the Twin Towers in NYC.

Sources: CIA Knew Passenger Planes Were About to be Used As Missiles

2009-10-23T19:48:00.005-05:00

Two independent sources, one here in the United States, another in the United Kingdom, have provided new information that converges days before 9/11.

A third possible connection, previously revealed by Jon Ronson, further adds to the latest revelations: Special Forces appear to have been actively involved in the use of paranormal phenomena, as portrayed in The Men Who Stare At Goats.

Keeping in mind the two-source rule of journalism, I need to point out that what follows are from two independent unconfirmed accounts provided to me.

It is also important to report that my email archive from 2001 is inexplicably missing the months of September and October of 2001.

The first source, a psychic with a history of providing warnings of terrorist events before they take place, confirmed to me he provided the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency Special Operations Intelligence Officer at the U.S. Embassy a warning that terrorists were about to use passenger planes as "cruise missiles" -- something his previous handlers at MI5 (the British Security Service) could not accept.

According to my source, visions of the use of passenger planes as weapons of mass destruction began in 1999.

According to a CBS News story that investigated what was known about the use of airplanes as missiles:

Two years before the Sept. 11 attacks, an analysis prepared for U.S. intelligence warned that Osama bin Laden's terrorists could hijack an airliner and fly it into government buildings like the Pentagon.

"Suicide bomber(s) belonging to al Qaeda's Martyrdom Battalion could crash-land an aircraft packed with high explosives (C-4 and semtex) into the Pentagon, the headquarters of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA), or the White House," the September 1999 report said.

The report was written under the watch of John Gannon, an associate of Dr. Kit Green, one of the original CIA handlers for the intelligence agency's psychic spy research program in the 1970s.

Former CIA Deputy Director John Gannon, who was chairman of the National Intelligence Council when the report was written, said officials long have known a suicide hijacking was a threat.

"If you ask anybody could terrorists convert a plane into a missile, nobody would have ruled that out," he said.

This latest revelation adds further weight to the argument that CIA was aware of the threat.

By early 2001, my source had become disillusioned at home; then, setting eyes on the United States, decided to offer precognitive services to U.S. officials.

The visions of the attacks became more detailed as the actual event neared. By May it was apparent that the planes would crash into a major city. During a trip to the United States, which included a series of experiments at an American University, my source "witnessed" the planes hitting the Twin Towers.

An American Intelligence person and police were alerted to the dream events by a Professor involved in the experiment.

My source returned to England and, as the dreams continued, decided to mail a prepared document to the U.S Embassy, only days before 9/11.

We now turn our attention back to the United States, where source # 2, Dan T. Smith, who was unaware of the above, provided his own account of the last few days leading up to the events of 9/11.

According to Mr. Smith, his friend Ron Pandolfi, then with the CIA, appeared to have prior knowledge of what was about to happen on September 11th.

When I pressed Smith for more information, he said that Pandolfi had been "harassed by FBI and DIA" over Smith's posting this on the Internet.

Intrigued, I wanted to know what had happened to give Smith this impression.

On or about Sunday, September 9, 2001, Smith claims Pandolfi called him on the phone to come over to his house for an urgent meeting. Upon arriving, Smith was told that Pandolfi was going to "reactivate" the "Aquarium."

Among those in attendance: a shaman from South America, and several persons "into psychic stuff."

According to Smith, this "Aquarium" group had more or less been defunct for a while, prior to these events. I'll return to the topic and function of the Aquarium group later.

Continuing with his best recollection of the events, Smith attaches special significance to the 9/11 attacks because of a series of curious coincidences.

On the morning of 9/11, Smith was listening to music on the radio, when it was announced something had happened in New York City. He turned on the TV just in time to witness the second plane strike the South Tower.

Dan's sister in Montana had called, looking for his other sister, who had boarded a plane at Logan International Airport, about the same time as the hijackers. Phone lines were jammed, leaving Smith unable to reach his sister, or his friend Ron from the CIA.

All commercial traffic was grounded, including his sister's flight out of Logan. Later Smith learned that his sister had spoken to her friend, former President George H.W. Bush, who was also in the air when the planes hit the towers.

All of this climaxed when Ron Pandolfi called from a secure location, shortly after a third plane had struck the Pentagon.

Smith says Pandolfi called for another urgent meeting of the Aquarium, which was held in front of the tiger cage at the National Zoo. Topics discussed at these meetings, which included a new presence -- a "special forces" bodyguard -- were not disclosed.

A few days later, Smith discussed all the above with a female Special Agent in front of the FBI offices in Baltimore.

A few weeks after the "reactivation" of the Aquarium group, British author Jon Ronson sat down with psychic-superstar Uri Geller in London.

Geller, who had been the subject of CIA's original psychic spy operations in the 1970s, was reluctant to discuss his CIA work with Ronson.

According to Ronson's book, The Men Who Stare at Goats, Geller then admitted, "I have been reactivated" by someone named "Ron."

Ronson cites the meeting with Geller as the beginning of the search that led him to Special Forces and psychic goat killers.

Intrigued by the above, I decided to look into the email archive to see what, if any, corroborating evidence I could find.

Dismayed to learn that the time frame of interest was missing, I discovered the earliest mention of Ron Pandolfi appeared in 1999, during the height of former US Web CEO Joe Firmage's quest to reverse engineer extraterrestrial technology even as he promoted the Majestic MJ-12 TOP SECRET / MAJIC UFO documents.

In September of 2000, Dan Smith made several statements to an alternative science email discussion group, implying his friend Ron from the CIA had an active interest.

Smith, who is convinced of the eschatological dimensions of paranormal phenomena -- an implied end-of-the -world scenario -- wrote to a long list of email recipients, including Firmage, the above mentioned American Professor, and Uri Geller:

... it appears that Ron wants me to be a bus driver. He wants me to obtain a bus and paint it to look like an 'official' MTA bus, and go around the city picking up passengers at the bus stops, but instead of delivering them to their usual destinations, I will take them on an eschatological tour.

When I told Ron that this might be construed as being illegal, he did not seem perturbed.

Would I lie to you? Do you think for a minute that these were not my 'official' instructions from a person who seems no longer inclined to deny membership in 'MTA-12'?

Smith apparently struck a nerve, somewhere, as the elusive and mysterious "Ron" was inspired to respond to the above email "passengers," tongue firmly in cheek:

Is it a ferret or a weasel that Dan will be adopting for the avian birthday?

(An allusion to the UFO Aviary of former intelligence persons involved with UFOs and the paranormal.)

I am ready to purchase a bus ticket for Dan's eschatological tour, as long as I get to select at least one of the stops. Who else will join the adventure? Where will it end?

As you might imagine, more than a few skeptics were on the receiving end of the above, leaving Smith with no other option than to provide more information about his relationship with Pandolfi, and his claim that "Ron" was the government's chief weird phenomena point man.

In September of 2000, Smith revealed something Jon Ronson would only learn several years later:

I spent last Saturday being confronted with the fact that the point person for phenomenology is also a point person with respect to our special forces.

It is very difficult for me to imagine that this is just a coincidence. And it came as no great surprise to me in the light of my lengthy assimilation into these 'nether' regions ... If the Aquarium plan does move forward, there will be a continuing need for Special Forces.

Jon Ronson tells the story of a mysterious caller, who alerted him to a new kind of soldier.

"Psychic assassins," he announced. "Cool, eh? They're teaching the Special Ops assassins, the Fort Bragg guys who go out in the field to track down and assassinate terrorists, how to be psychic."

Spy Agency Operation Looking at Blogs, Tweets

2009-10-20T09:50:00.010-05:00

SLP (Spies, Lies, Polygraph Tape) refers to spy games played on the Internet by persons known to have close ties to "The Agency" or actually work for CIA and the ODNI.

These folks play their spy games near the top of the Intelligence Community food chain.

I've told the story of the mysterious spy games played on the Internet by CIA's Ron Pandolfi: the email leaks, including the appearance of compromise of messages from Dr. Kit Green concerning an alleged national security issue.

Now, according to this exclusive story by Noah Shachtman for WIRED's Danger Room blog, CIA's technology investment operation IN-Q-TEL is funding software designed to spy on Internet posts:

Noah, who blogs about the latest defense industry chatter, writes:

America’s spy agencies want to read your blog posts, keep track of your Twitter updates — even check out your book reviews on Amazon ... In-Q-Tel, the investment arm of the CIA and the wider intelligence community, is putting cash into Visible Technologies, a software firm that specializes in monitoring social media ... In-Q-Tel says it wants Visible to keep track of foreign social media, and give spooks “early-warning detection on how issues are playing internationally,” spokesperson Donald Tighe tells Danger Room ... Visible chief executive officer Dan Vetras says the CIA is now an “end customer,” thanks to the In-Q-Tel investment. And more government clients are now on the horizon. “We just got awarded another one in the last few days,” Vetras adds.

Of course, it's a small networked world, even more so when one considers the Intelligence Community: IN-Q-TEL is widely considered to be the brainchild of Dr. Ruth David, former CIA Director of Science and Technology.

The idea for In-Q-Tel was hatched during the same period DIA's STAR GATE psychic spy operation was hijacked by CIA and clubbed, beaten to a pulp, and left for dead by the agency (although the rotting corpse of the psychic operations that were conducted for more than twenty-five years may have been intended to distract attention away from another program or two, notably one we keep hearing of at the National Security Agency).

As it turns out, more than ten years on, David's brain-child is alive and well and funding private ideas of interest to the CIA. Meanwhile David sits on a DIA standing committee with Dr. John Gannon, another formerly high-ranking CIA official, who was implicated in the spies, lies, and polygraph tape affair in the email messages passed by Ron Pandolfi. Sitting shoulder to shoulder with Dr.'s David and Gannon is non other than our friendly Dr. Kit Green, who recently authored an important study for the group.

Here's the scoop, and a few new developing tidbits of information recently brought to my attention:

In 2006, when the SLP scandal hit the Internet (thanks to Dr. Pandolfi's intentional sharing of private emails concerning the odd affair, which involved the discussion of UFO-related topics, most notably the viral SERPO tales) Dr. Green's personal email messages had been compromised by an individual identified as Stephen Broadbent of the United Kingdom.

Broadbent managed to obtain copies of emails Green had sent to another party by gaining access to the recipient's email account.

In fact, Broadbent was only one of numerous individuals said to be based from the United Kingdom, who were displaying an "unhealthy interest" in persons connected to high levels of the Untied States Intelligence Community.

One of the reasons given at that time for all the commotion over the bloody hemorrhage of private messages involved the use of software to track all of the Internet traffic about the alleged UFO disclosure. Apparently someone high up in the I.C. saw this as an opportunity to perfect their electronic open-source intelligence collection methods.

In fact, it was intelligence methods, not sources, that were of most concern, according to a message I received from Pandolfi when I inquired about the leaked messages.

Recently another odd item has added new fuel to the funeral pyre for the rotting corpse previously mentioned.

According to another source from the United Kingdom, independent from the SLP affair discussed above, the CIA's London office at the US Embassy was notified days prior to the September 11th attacks that passenger planes were about to be used as missiles against tall buildings in New York City.

When the planes hit the twin towers on 9/11, and prior to their collapse, this source was contacted by US authorities and shortly after arrived in the United States to work with American intelligence. About this same time, according to Jon Ronson, in his book, The Men Who Stare at Goats, psychic Uri Geller had been "reactivated" in response to the terror attacks.

The UK source who had warned CIA pre-9/11 then met with numerous persons from the FBI, the Defense Intelligence Agency, the National Security Agency, and other private operations with known connections to the Intelligence Community.

Now here's where the connections come together: My source had been working with British intelligence, the MI5, prior to his "defection" to the United States. Apparently this did not go over well with the British, who consider the "psychic-spy" paranormal operations politically sensitive.

(Recall that Uri Geller is based in London as well.)

Assuming that "Ron" who activated Uri Geller is the same Ron Pandolfi known for his oversight of US persons involved in paranormal and exotic physics activities, it would not be too surprising to learn, as we had in 2006, of suspicions of UK persons involved in espionage collection activity.

My primary source in this affair, Caryn Anscomb, was from London, acting as an independent investigator of the American program. Shortly after her arrival in the United States, she was accused by "a government person" of acting as an agent of MI6, the British Secret Intelligence Service (SIS). Ms. Anscomb had developed a close working relationship to Dan T. Smith, a private citizen who often acts on behalf of Dr. Pandolfi by distributing the odd bit of "insider" information which often sticks to "persons of interest."

Ms. Anscomb, who then acted in the capacity of "citizen journalist" by covertly forwarding a great deal of information to me at STARstream Research, proceeded to meet with several persons, including some associated with the original STAR GATE psychic spy effort.

Shortly after all of this, the British Ministry of Defence responded to a Freedom of Information Request which confirmed their interest in psychic remote viewing post 9/11 and, at the same time, denied the utility of the effort. Perhaps this was also intended to distract attention away from other on-going programs, like the American NSA project, which has been said to exist by multiple sources in both nations.

I've written a brief overview of some of the odd spy games surrounding the alternative physics and psychic spy community in my series Knowing the Future.

As for the Internet open-source collection effort, I have to wonder about Pandolfi's associate Mr. Smith, who often muses about crashing the White House gate to effect disclosure of the secrets.

As Pandolfi has full knowledge of these veiled "threats" against national security, I have to wonder if this is just another method used to effect collection against persons of interest on the world wide web of spies, lies, and trickster tales.

Scientist Arrested By FBI Sting Operation

2009-10-20T08:49:00.007-05:00

A scientist has been arrested as the result of an FBI sting operation in Maryland. Why not arrest persons who have allegedly provided information about "deep black" UFO-related secrets?

According to the press release issued by The Justice Department, FBI arrested "Stewart David Nozette, 52, of Chevy Chase, Maryland, with attempted espionage for knowingly and willfully attempting to communicate, deliver, and transmit classified information relating to the national defense of the United States to an individual that Nozette believed to be an Israeli intelligence officer."

The operation to nab Nozette began when an FBI undercover operative posing as an Israeli intelligence officer called Nozette to arrange a meeting to discuss an arrangement to exchange classified information for money.

Nozette provided information about a SECRET classified project and allegedly offered "to reveal additional classified information that directly concerned nuclear weaponry, military spacecraft or satellites, and other major weapons systems."

During his career, Nozette had access to TOP SECRET and Special Access information.

Based upon information provided by the DoJ, it would appear this case is a classic example of a set-up and take-down operation against an individual suspected of being a risk to national security.

One question remains in my mind:

What happens when FBI goes after individuals involved in the deepest black projects; those programs considered so sensitive that the authorities play the Glomar response card:

"We can neither confirm nor deny that any information exists or does not exist."

If an individual was to reveal the existence or even sensitive information concerning such a program, how would officials assess the risk of exposure of an official acknowledgement of the existence of the program, which is itself a closely guarded secret, against the damage from any individual leak of information?

Would the program officials inform the FBI, as was apparently the case for the original MJ-12/MAJIC Majestic briefing document, allegedly prepared for President-Elect Eisenhower, declare the leaked information to be "BOGUS" and proceed to employ counter-intelligence operations against the information that had been leaked?

On the other hand, there is no statute of limitations for crimes of espionage. This means that someone today who is leaking deep black secrets deemed too sensitive to bust today might find themselves behind bars twenty-five years from now, after the existence of the project has been declassified.

CIA's Glomar Explorer and "USO" Alien Recovery Mystery Part Three

2009-10-07T09:13:00.009-05:00

In 1972, the US NAVY recovered a secret from the ocean floor. Today, it is possible to confirm from the record that the dives took place -- at the correct depth, and in the approximate location of the sunken Russian submarine K-129.

According to the best information available, the K-129 was at least partially raised from the bottom in July 1974 by the CIA Glomar Explorer.

Whatever had been recovered by the US NAVY during the 1972 Trieste II dive had been locked into a commandeered cold food storage locker and placed under armed guard for the long journey home.

The Glomar recovery and the Trieste II recovery operations remain closely guarded secrets, in spite of evidence that the Russians had accessed a fair amount of information about the operation.

Consider this: a search for "Glomar" at navy.mil produces zero results.

However, in 1992, TIME magazine reported:

"Speaking to an American delegation in Moscow recently, a Russian intelligence officer revealed intimate knowledge of a 1974 mission in which the U.S. salvage ship Glomar Explorer raised a sunken Soviet nuclear submarine in the central Pacific."

Apparently it is better for the enemy to know the secrets than to provide them to the taxpayers who paid the bill for the recovery operation.

A Congressional review of America's paranormal programs produced little information about the NAVY psychic research:

"The US NAVY program was to evaluate an individual's ability to perceive remote visual stimuli. This effort was to answer the question whether the phenomena exist. No additional information is on file regarding the NAVY program."

Dan T. Smith, son of Dan Throop Smith, the late former tax adviser to the Eisenhower administration, tells the story of his friend Ron Pandolfi, from CIA.

As TIME explained in a 1995 article about deep sea mining:

"Oceanographers have long known that parts of the Pacific sea floor at depths between 14,000 ft. and 17,000 ft. are carpeted with so-called manganese nodules, potato-size chunks of manganese mixed with iron, nickel, cobalt and other useful metals. In the 1970s, Howard Hughes used the search for nodules as a cover for building the ship Glomar Explorer, which was used to salvage a sunken Soviet sub."

According to Dan Smith, his friend Pandolfi, as a college student, was given samples of the nodules by his uncle, who was involved with the CIA cover story for the Glomar operation.

Pandolfi had the samples analyzed and concluded they could not have come from the location claimed by Hughes and, suspecting this was a cover story for something bigger, soon drew the attention of a couple of "men in black" who advised he keep his suspicions to himself.

Pandolfi appears again in Smith's musing about a bizarre encounter with a couple of bodies in a hospital.

Smith tells the story of his 1992 disturbing encounter:

"I went back to work as a free-lance, mostly volunteer computer programmer in ‘85. I worked for ... Daniel S Ruchkin, who was studying brain-waves at the University of Maryland Medical School in Baltimore.

A former student of Ruchkin’s was Dr. Richard L. Horst, Man-made Systems/UserWorks, Inc. I worked for Dick as a part-time subcontractor, being paid on a, more or less, hourly basis.

This was my status when Dick obtained a Navy contract to study the behavioral implications of psychological stress. The test subjects were to be the Anesthesiologists working at the UM Hospital’s shock-trauma unit. We were going to be electrically recording their manipulations of various instruments during the procedures. As I try to recall the details and rationale of this supposed experiment, it is still not making much sense to me.

Dave Mahaffey and I spent several days in the S/T building, back and forth between the upstairs surgical floor, and someone’s lab facility downstairs. Dave and I were setting up our equipment in one of the recovery cubicles outside of the operating area. While I was there, I only recall seeing one patient in one of the cubicles. There were always several nurses over at their station. More than once I heard them discussing the unusual lack of patients, in the facility.

One lunch hour, in the downstairs lab, the doctor in charge, told Dave and me that he wanted to show us a video to prepare us for having to work inside the surgical area. It was a 30 min color video of someone who had tried to commit suicide by shooting themselves in the face with a shotgun. Only the mouth was visible in what had once been his face. The surgeons were heard discussing the fellow’s plight, off-screen. I was grossed-out, but not sufficiently so, that I could not finish my sandwich. I got the impression that guy remained more or less conscious.

Now we come to the day in question…….

I had been told that I would be introduced to the surgical area, the day before. I showed up a few minutes late, and Dave was not there. Instead was an asian fellow, heavily accented, whom I had not seen before. He instructed me to strip-down, before putting on the surgical gown. I balked at removing my shorts, and he became agitated. Since there was no scrubbing involved, I could not imagine the point of removing my shorts. Reluctantly he acquiesced, and we proceeded into the 'surgical' area.

It was not like any surgical area that had seen or imagined. There were some glass-walled cubicles. Hanging from the ceiling, by their four appendages, in two of the cubicles were two ‘bodies’. Neither head was visible. I stood there staring at this scene for two or three minutes. I got the distinct impression that the four ‘surgeons’ in the nearest cubicle were quite bored. They appeared to be chatting to one another. There was no one in the second cubicle. There did not appear to be any skin, just brown [sic] exposed flesh, no blood. Like the face in video, but the wrong color.

I found the whole scene, and the context of its lengthy prelude, to be most unsettling. I went back out to where I found Dave. He was fiddling with the instruments. I just stood watching, feeling dumbfounded, and saying nothing. He suggested that I leave, and I readily complied.

The next morning I called the doctor who had shown us the video. I was already suspecting that this was one of those trick psychology experiments where the tester turns out to be the testee. I demanded an explanation for what I had witnessed. He said he would check and call me back. He soon called me back……

There had been a motorcycle accident with two victims. They were undergoing an emergency ‘filleting’ [sic!] procedure, in order to relieve excess blood pressure. This ‘explanation’ just made me angry. Only now have I had the gumption to look up that word, and find it only being applied to fish. If someone would care to investigate further, be my guest.

I told him that I was involved in some very sensitive business with someone at the CIA, and that if I ever found out that this experiment had any connection with that other business, I would become extremely angry. I was pretty much screaming over the phone, at that point.

And a few minutes later, the phone rang again. Guess who….?

Our buddy, Ron [Pandolfi], was on the other end. He seemed to be chuckling, while commenting on how I had really reamed-out the 'poor' doctor."

Smith readily admits that he has no idea who, or what, was in the two body bags. He does, however, point out from that day forward he has been acting as a civilian proxy for his friend Ron, who had once suffered the ire of the agency he now works for, so many years ago.

These days Smith continues to engage his friend Ron on the topic of government disclosure of an unworldly presence that Smith believes heralds the end of the world order as we know it.

Pandolfi, who had moved from CIA to the Office of the Director of National Intelligence MASINT committee, is said to have landed back at CIA HQ.

Kit Green, a retired CIA officer who had worked on the Glomar project, remains a government consultant on issues related to national security. Dr. Green, who witnessed first hand the psychic weirdness that inspired the government programs in "remote viewing," remains convinced there is a "core story" behind all of the strange tales.

In Dr. Green's version of the core, the otherworldly presence must be biological in nature. Visitors to our world, at least the kind of visitors that would be of interest to Green and his colleagues, must be extraterrestrial biological entities.

Stranger still:

In July 1974, as Dr. Green and his associates from CIA moved to take psychic remote viewing operational against the Soviets and, in the Pacific Ocean, recover a submarine that one of the CIA psychics would later describe as the target of interest to a "flying saucer" -- disembodied EVP (electronic voice phenomena) voices thousands of miles away were telling the story of the CIA physicists and their quest for paranormal powers, predicting a long-range plan that would be revealed some twenty years into the future.

Given the vast scale of the universe, and the likelihood there is far more "out there," Green's position should be of no surprise. Tantalizing tales of the EBEs from "high ranking authorities" in the U.S. government offer few clues to the underlying truth of what, if anything, a small group of "need to know" officials may actually know.

As for the rest of us, we are left to speculate from an ever-growing mountain of rumors.

As for myself, I continue to wonder what aspect of the "core story" is grounded in fact: the now infamous STAR GATE psychic spy program was once a fable.

CIA's Glomar Explorer and "USO" Alien Recovery Mystery Part Two

2009-10-06T09:29:00.010-05:00

In 1972, the US NAVY submersible Trieste II recovered a valuable object from the depths of the Pacific Ocean. Based upon his research into the Glomar Explorer recovery operation and the mystery of the sinking of Soviet submarine K-129, author Ken Sewell concluded that the Trieste II had recovered an object, perhaps even a Russian nuclear weapon, two years before the CIA arrived on the scene with their massive ocean-going platform.

The heart of the mystery is what actually caused the sinking of the Soviet Golf-class K-129 submarine in March of 1968.

Here we will connect one mystery with another, and then another: we begin with Ingo Swann, the psychic spy with a US government security clearance.

Swann had been recruited -- initially without his knowledge -- into a CIA ESP research operation at the Stanford Research Institute. About the same time Swann was an unwitting CIA lab rat, the US NAVY was meeting with Director of Central Intelligence Richard Helms about another crazy scheme: how to raise an entire Soviet submarine from the depths more than 16,000 feet below.

Adding another twist to the tale, one CIA-man assigned to the Stanford Research Institute project (which later would be associated with the Defense Intelligence Agency effort nick-named STAR GATE) was Dr. Christopher "Kit" Green, then with CIA's LSD division.

Although it is true that a certain Dr. Sidney Gottlieb of the CIA's Technical Services Division had been behind the testing of the hallucinogenic drug LSD on unwitting victims as part of the notorious MKULTRA project -- and it was also true in fact that Gottlieb had personally been involved in the initial funding of the Stanford Research Institute psychic effort in 1972 -- the LSD associated with Dr. Green is the Life Sciences Division.

As I have Dr. Green's CV in hand, a quick check reveals the following:

"Dr. Green was an analyst with the Life Sciences Division, Chief of the Biomedical Sciences Branch / LSD, and Deputy Division Chief."

Green's interests were not confined to the lab:

"He served as Chairman of the Ad Hoc Interagency Working Group on Soviet Submarine Drag Reduction Research and Development. Other interests in naval subjects have included his work on the Glomar Explorer project, diving physiology and submarine life support system. He also served as the Senior Medical Intelligence Officer on collection programs involving naval and undersea platforms."

Green's CV also notes that he directed "the medical collection portion of a large national undersea research program" from 1974 to 1977 and that he had served as "Life Science space reconnaissance officer to the national space tasking effort" from 1969 to 1979. Green was involved in the "design and promotion of inter-agency marine biological R&D effort including extensive coordination with the Under-Secretary of the Navy for Research and ultimate direction of a joint extramural research effort" during 1974 to 1976.

This places Dr. Green at the center of the junction of two mysteries: the naval recovery of a Soviet wreck from the bottom of the Pacific Ocean, and the weirdness of psychic research focused on Ingo Swann.

Oh, and I almost forgot to mention: Kit Green is the man behind the original tale of the "core story" of an extraterrestrial visitation.

For the third clue we need to go OUT THERE, thanks to former New York Times' journalist Howard Blum and his attempt to crack the secrecy twenty years ago.

During the peak years of STAR GATE -- the mid-1980s, a time when some elements within the American intelligence community took the prospect of psychic warfare quite seriously -- Ingo Swann had been training military "remote viewers," to prepare them for ethereal encounters against the enemy.

One of the 'problems of interest' to the psychic spy operations was the use of psychic remote viewing to track Soviet submarines.

Blum writes about a test demonstration conducted at the Old Executive Office Building directly across from the White House:

"At the start, the photograph of this Soviet Delta-class submarine seemed to present little challenge to the viewer. He went into his head-bobbing routine and, as usual, started to call out a set of coordinates. Then he stumbled; his face suddenly became twisted with the surprised look of someone who had just encountered a small, but unexpected trouble in his path ... The viewer, now a little embarrassed, explained that he had seen something else while he was searching for the last boat. The coordinates were the same, only it was ... hovering above the submarine ... So the scientist, willing to let the experiment follow its own momentum, asked the viewer to draw ... what he had seen ... The scientist returned to study the drawing ... 'you're not going to tell me it's a flying saucer?' 'Yes,' said the viewer, 'That's it exactly.'"

According to the account of the US NAVY covert 1972 Trieste II dive ( presumably to the site of the Russian submarine wreckage): something was recovered, concealed from the crew, and quickly placed in a cold food storage locker under armed guard.

One might reasonably speculate whether or not the item of interest actually required cold storage to preserve it from decay -- as would a biological organism -- or whether the storage locker was merely a convenient location for the long trip home.

All of this fodder for the conspiratorial mind comes together in an odd experience told by Dan T. Smith, a friend of CIA's Ron Pandolfi, who has been rumored to be the custodian of CIA's weird desk files, following Dr. Green's departure from the agency in the mid-1980s.

(It is also worth noting this same "team of three" consisting of Green, Pandolfi, and Smith, were discussing a strategy to move forward with government disclosure of the alleged extraterrestrial problem.)

Smith has confirmed that his friend Pandolfi has failed to penetrate "real-life X-files" held by the US NAVY, presumably under the watch of the Office of Naval Intelligence (ONI).

Smith has gone public concerning a personal encounter of the odd kind: he was exposed to a creature, dangling from the ceiling in a body bag, during a brief stint at a hospital.

Was this the smoking gun: an alien cadaver recovered from the depths of the ocean, the result of an unfortunate incident between an extraterrestrial probe and a Soviet submarine in the 1960s?

In part three we will consider the crazy spin zone where all of the above come together and ask why the NAVY strange phenomena unit and psychic spy program remains inaccessible.

CIA's Glomar Explorer and "USO" Alien Recovery Mystery Part One

2009-10-05T14:49:00.015-05:00

The mission and the recovery remain a closely guarded secret: what exactly was the purpose behind the CIA's Project Jennifer, conducted on behalf of the US NAVY, and what exactly was recovered?

In a SECRET/SENSITIVE Memorandum for the Record, dated 2 December 1976, then Director of Central Intelligence George H.W. Bush states:

"Glomar Explorer: I stated to the President that we had leveled, and that the TIME magazine story which was out yesterday was totally false."

According to the December 6, 1976, issue:

"TIME has learned that Project Jennifer did in fact succeed: the entire wreck, a 320-ft.-long Golf-class II diesel-powered submarine built in 1961, was recovered virtually intact. Confirms a senior U.S. Navy officer: 'It was all one hell of a success.' Why the partial-recovery story? The CIA remains mum about its motives but the agency evidently had a dual aim. For one thing, it wanted to defend the high cost of Jennifer—about $550 million, all billed to the Navy. At the same time, the agency wanted to avoid unnecessarily embarrassing the Russians, who, U.S. intelligence officials knew, would not fall for the CIA's story anyway."

The meeting between DCI Bush and the President is one of only a handful of documents CIA has released concerning the TOP SECRET PROJECT JENNIFER Glomar Explorer recovery operation, which took place in July 1974.

The alleged target for the recovery was the Soviet nuclear submarine K-129, which had mysteriously sunk to a depth of more that 16,000 feet below the surface of the Pacific Ocean, in March of 1968.

CIA had cleverly created a plausible back story for the operation.

Over a period of many months, TIME magazine slowly shifted from presenting the original back story to releasing bits and pieces of information the CIA Director had asked be withheld for national security reasons.

In the July 29, 1974 issue, which was published as the operation was underway, TIME reported:

"About 100 companies and half a dozen governments are now actively working on nodule-mining technology. Billionaire Howard Hughes seems to be ahead of the pack. With characteristic Hughes secrecy, his Summa Corp. is testing a specially built, 36,000-ton, $100 million deep-ocean mining ship, Glomar Explorer, off Hawaii. The ship stations itself over a potential site, then lowers its TV-equipped mining apparatus, along with connecting pipe, through a large well in the hull. Once the mining gear hits bottom some two or three miles down, it slurps up nodules from the ocean floor like a huge vacuum cleaner."

Having identified the wreckage on the ocean floor and, according to numerous accounts, having explored the site in detail, the NAVY approached the CIA for assistance in mounting the greatest (and most expensive!) recovery operation in history.

Curiously, the historical record and witness accounts provided to author Kenneth Sewell suggest that the NAVY had already recovered something mysterious from the site in 1972.

Sewell, in a postscript for the paperback version of his book RED STAR ROGUE, writes:

"One of the early dives [of the NAVY's submersible Trieste II] in 1972, an important piece of ... hardware was recovered [Sewell assumes this was from the Soviet submarine, and concludes it was probably a nuclear warhead]. "

Sewell goes on to describe " the strange account of how the recovered item was handled."

He writes:

"One of the large food freezers had been emptied to serve as a special storage receptacle on the aft deck of the White Sands [the mother ship involved in the Trieste operation] ... The item, which was concealed from the crew members' view by a tarpaulin, was hoisted into the commandeered cooler and sealed inside ... the chest and its contents remained under armed guard for the duration of the mission."

Eventually, once the story had been revealed to the public by another media source, TIME decided to come clean and tell their readers what they really knew.

In the March 31, 1975 issue, TIME reported:

"For months, right up to last week, William E. Colby, director of the Central Intelligence Agency, spent a good deal of his time on an unusual undercover task. By phone calls, visits and through his emissaries, Colby made contact with a number of news organizations. His purpose: to persuade them, on national security grounds, not to print a story that they all knew about -- the attempt by the CIA to raise a sunken Soviet submarine from the ocean bottom."

Leaks about the secret mission had begun long before the Glomar Explorer had been launched on a mission to recovery something from the depths of the Pacific:

"Seymour Hersh of the New York Times first heard of the salvage operation's code name, 'Project Jennifer,' but without details, in 1973."

Curiously, having recovered an important artifact from the site, and presumably already equipped with a means of recovering additional materials from the bottom, the NAVY approached then CIA Director Richard Helms to launch a mission to recover the entire Soviet submarine.

"Soon his other top aides, who knew nothing about the proposal, became curious about the brisk parade of Pentagon officials and high-ranking Navy officers that passed through Helms' office."

Once the White House gave the OK, PROJECT JENNIFER approached Howard Hughes to contract the construction of the recovery vessel and provide the cover story.

"Everyone, including TIME (July 29), accepted Hughes' account, and the press ran glowing stories about the ship's capabilities ... the Glomar Explorer headed for the open sea on June 20, 1974, ready at last to attempt the culmination of Project Jennifer. By about mid-July the odd convoy reached the site of the sunken Soviet sub. The delicate salvage operation got under way."

Adding to the mystery, documents about PROJECT JENNIFER on file at one of Hughes' offices were stolen in June, just prior to the recovery operation, by a sophisticated operation, including overcoming an electronic alarm system and burning into the document safe using acetylene torches. Some speculated that Hughes or CIA had been behind the break in, "to get rid of incriminating documents."

In 2006, STARstream Research was approached with an offer of "deep background" information which we would find interesting, but would not be allowed to publish. It soon was apparent that the worm on the hook was intended to divert our attention, and then the offer was rescinded.

TIME reported a similar situation concerning the leaks about the Glomar recovery:

"What Colby [who had replaced Helms as CIA Director] offered was unusual: briefings on Jennifer in exchange for silence. He seemed to feel that only by being briefed on the stakes involved could the press be expected to join the conspiracy of silence.

A curious turnabout took place once the story did become public: the CIA had nothing more to say about Jennifer. The formula seemed simple if slightly surreal: 'We'll tell you something if you won't tell anybody; now that you've told everybody, we won't tell you anything.'"

Today the CIA remains mum about the operation, in spite of Russian confirmation that nuclear warheads had been recovered by the US NAVY during the operation. It seems likely that there is much more to the story behind PROJECT JENNIFER and the Glomar Explorer recovery operation.

Even as early as March of 1975, just months after the recovery operation and only a week following the public expose' of the covert attempt to raise a sunken Soviet nuclear submarine, TIME speculated about the possible true nature and requirements of the mission:

"... there is the puzzle of why so many reporters for major newspapers, magazines and TV networks simultaneously stumbled upon the Jennifer trail. On the morning after, some journalists got the feeling that the CIA had actually been helpful all along in getting the story out, while at the same time it apparently tried to suppress the story."

Indeed, given the above, and the recent revelation of the Trieste II deep sea dive and recovery of something important off the ocean floor 16,000 feet down, TIME magazine's March 1975 conspiracy speculation opens the door to another possible explanation, drenched in conspiracy and cosmic strangeness:

"The last theory goes off into the wild blue yonder, suggesting that raising a Soviet submarine was not Jennifer's mission at all, but the supreme cover for a secret mission as yet safely secure."

In part two I'll explore the connection between the CIA's extraterrestrially-inspired remote viewing program at SRI, the "core story" of contact with an otherworldly intelligence, and a tale of an alien cadaver in a body bag.

FBI Counterintelligence Operations

2009-09-25T12:57:00.002-05:00

Are there active counterintelligence operations infiltrating the UFO community?

Yesterday's complaint against Hosam Maher Husein Smadi presents a case study of counterintelligence operations conducted by American intelligence operatives on the Internet.

According to the indictment:

"SMADI was discovered by the FBI within an online group of extremists; an FBI undercover employee (hereafter 'FBI UCE1") was a part of that group."

The FBI investigation focused on SMADI because "SMADI stood out based on his vehement intention to actually conduct terror attacks in the United States."

Having attracted FBI attention, the FBI operative UCE1 made contact with Smadi to ascertain his intentions and eventually determined Smadi was a real threat to national security.

The FBI operative then introduced Smadi to another FBI operative who presented himself as part of an al-Qaeda sleeper cell.

The entire indictment is a fascinating example of how counterintelligence operations target persons on the Internet who are viewed as threats to national security. Since 2006 other elements of the Intelligence Community have been authorized to interact with US persons and their foreign national contacts in order to obtain intelligence on possible threats to US secrecy.

The UFO community remains a highly visible and worthwhile target of these kinds of operations because of the give and take roles played out between US and foreign nationals on topics tangential to real technology (for example, in the 1980s the USAF stealth program was compromised by UFO researchers).

9/11 and The Men Who Stare at Goats Part Two

2009-09-11T20:33:00.006-05:00

(STARpod.org) -- "Remember that the crazy people are not always to be found on the outside. Sometimes the crazy people are deeply embedded on the inside. Not even the most imaginative conspiracy theorist has ever thought to invent a scenario in which a crack team of Special Forces soldiers and major generals secretly try to walk through their walls and stare goats to death." -- Jon Ronson, from The Men Who Stare at Goats.

Buried inside the craziness of the hidden psychic government uncovered by Jon Ronson are the "eight martini" reports. For those in the know, "eight martini" results from psychic dabbling are so mind blowing that the rational brain requires at least eight martinis worth of alcohol to recover.

It was Norm, not the affable character from TV's "Cheers" bar, but a CIA operations person who went on national television, alongside current Secretary of Defense Robert Gates, to express his own opinion of the "eight martini results."

Black magic at CIA?

As ABC News icon Ted Koppel revealed to America, our intelligence services had been experimenting with psychic warfare for decades. Why?

Robert Gates and Norm both expressed the opinion that the phenomena, which apparently had exhibited some level of reality (at least to the satisfaction of the researchers and intelligence persons who had been involved) would be best developed outside of the Intelligence Community.

This seemed to leave open the possibility of "contracted research" or even private intelligence operations.

Is there a "Black Water" ESPionage Service?

By the end of his book, Jon Ronson was wondering if the CIA revelation had been intended to distract attention away from on-going psychic wars, buried in the deepest black-budget operations of the Bush War on Terror.

Ronson wondered "whether Tom Ridge's Department of Homeland Security" had "ever issued a non-specific warning of a future terrorist attack based on intelligence provided by a psychic."

He wrote:

"I know that almost every former psychic spy from the old Fort Meade unit received a telephone call from the intelligence services in the weeks that followed 9/11. They were told that if they had any psychic visions of future terrorist attacks they shouldn't hesitate to inform the authorities."

Following 9/11, psychics who had worked with the government, or had been privately trained by the former psychic spies, began to have visions of nuclear terrorism.

Mushroom clouds kept appearing over American cities -- and London too -- and the reports were well known among members of the government's psychic community.

Shortly after, we learned that Ron, the man who allegedly reactivated Uri Geller for the War on Terror, had moved to MASINT, an intelligence specialty uniquely qualified to hunt down the signatures of nuclear weapons.

At least that was what we were being led to believe.

Ron's friend Dan Smith was more forthcoming.

Ron, he assured me, was actually involved in operations, not the scientific research arm of CIA, and even the outing of Ron in the New York Times had been used as a cover for this role.

Operations suggested counterintelligence was, at the very least, a possible motive.

I had learned how the paranormal operations were closely related to alternative physics and the never-ending search for new weapons by military contractors. It seemed reasonable to assume, post 9/11, that the need for an expanded effort might include taking advantage of all the Internet chat between former government researchers, CIA officers, USAF intelligence types, foreign nationals, and the odd psychic or two.

Like Uri Geller.

Ronson wrote that he had been directed to the one man who admitted he could stare a goat to death, by Colonel John B. Alexander, the leading advocate of non-lethal weapons.

This lead took Ronson to a civilian martial arts instructor named Guy Savelli, and revealed another counterintelligence scheme to infiltrate al Qaeda operatives who had been contacting Savelli about his alleged abilities.

Ronson called it an "al Qaeda paranormal sting operation" in his book. Ronson told Savelli, the man who stared at goats, "You're bait."

Savelli kept Ronson in the loop as the plot developed.

On July 15, 2004, Ronson received a phone call from Savelli, who revealed that he had been contacted by Fort Bragg. They wanted Savelli to show them how to stare an animal to death.

Savelli told Ronson, "I am taking a hamster out there and I'm going to blow their minds with it."

Days later Savelli called again, "They're trying to get what I'm doing classified."

Savelli goes on to explain this will involve more than staring a hamster to death.

"Think of what you can do just by staring. You can confuse people to the point where they'll give you all sorts of information."

On July 23rd, 2004, Ronson received one last call from Savelli.

He told Ronson, "If the enemy knows we have this power, it'll scare the shit out of them."

He then added, "I'm going to tell them all about you tomorrow."

That was the last time Ronson heard from Savelli.

On Friday, August 7th, 2009, I received the following from Ron, in response to my email "Dan Smith intends to drop by the White House to visit with you":

"Dan is welcome any time. We need to catch up on what he learned about hamsters ... Dan knows that I am the White House hamster guy. He may have added things up and concluded that hamsters are aliens."

For more information please visit STARpod.org

Copyright (c) 2009 Gary S Bekkum. All rights reserved.

9/11 and The Men Who Stare at Goats

2009-09-11T12:55:00.004-05:00

(STARpod.org) -- Although the horrific images of 9/11 are burned into the minds of most Americans, few are aware of the strangeness linking those fateful events to Jon Ronson's book, and the new film starring George Clooney, Ewan McGregor, Jeff Bridges, and Kevin Spacey.

What, you may ask, is the connection between the events of 9/11, and "The Men Who Stare at Goats?"

Or, for that matter, what exactly is a man who stares at goats?

Knowing that many would question the reality of government agents tasked to stop the heart of a goat -- a bizarre demonstration of psychic assassination -- Ronson explains to the incredulous reader:

"This is a true story."

(The fictional film version is an adventure comedy, based upon the real story told in Ronson's book.)

One man, who has been known to stare at cutlery, not goats, is the famous psychic paranormalist Uri Geller.

It was (according to Ronson) Uri Geller, who set Ronson "on the trail that led to the goats."

And, I should add, it was Ronson's expose' of Geller's revelation that finally tied together, at least in my own mind, several threads connecting Geller to the CIA.

(For more information please see my series "Knowing the Future" and CIA's STAR GATE documents at the STARpod.org website.)

Geller allegedly told Ronson, "If you repeat what I am about to tell you, I will deny it."

According to Ronson, it was Geller who let the "catfish" out of the bag, when he told Ronson that he had been reactivated as a psychic spy in the war on terror, by a man named Ron.

Plausible and deniable. Of course.

"Ah, Ron," I thought out loud, "Yes, of course. I know who Ron is. That enigmatic guy from CIA that his buddy Dan Smith always writes about.

Physicist Jack Sarfatti claimed Ron had dropped by to visit him in San Francisco, accompanied by an armed military escort.

Sarfatti also claimed Ron had been asking questions about physicist Hal Puthoff, the government's former number one psychic researcher, and Bob Bigelow, the billionaire who had funded paranormal research.

But why would Ron want anyone to stare at a goat?

True, Ron did on a rare occasion send a brief and typically witty email to a rather extensive list of persons known to have interest in the esoteric realms. Little was known of Ron's true purpose, or, for that matter, if he worked at CIA's Directorate of Science and Technology as an analyst, the back story that had been conveniently provided by The New York Times; or was he "operational" as Smith would later claim.

One person who had played a key role in guiding Jon Ronson to the poor goats, animals awaiting various misfortunes courtesy of Special Forces at "goat lab," was non-lethal weapons advocate Colonel John B. Alexander, who advises the government on various defense related issues.

Colonel Alexander is also well known for his interest in psychic phenomena.

When Ronson asked Alexander about Ron, he stared into space waiting for another question.

The other psychic spies interviewed also acknowledged knowing Ron, but would say little else.

It did seem that every stone Ronson uncovered would lead to another associate of Sarfatti's email list.

Indeed, as I had learned over several years time, that kind of "meaningful coincidence" is woven by numerous threads penetrating the government and military scientific establishment.

And, as it turned out, so was the 9/11 connection.

Ronson quickly suspected that the psychic spies and the men who stared at goats were "back, and fighting the War on Terror."

The history of US government involvement in the paranormal spans decades and spy agencies, military services, and secret research programs.

All along, one objective had been clear: they wanted to establish "operational" programs to "read the enemy's mind," "remote view enemy targets," "see into the future," and, perhaps, "stare the occasional unlucky goat to death."

For years, government psychics had warned of airplanes under the control of terrorists being used as weapons of mass destruction, by crashing into buildings.

One vision of the future, a suicide attack using a Learjet packed with explosives against the U.S. Capitol Building, had been predicted by a group of military psychics in 1983.

This warning was played out fifteen years later as an exercise involving "a scenario in which a group of terrorists commandeered a Learjet on the ground in Atlanta, loaded it with explosives, and flew it toward a target in Washington, D.C.," according to the 9/11 Commission Report.

Unfortunately, although the Intelligence Community was largely aware of the dangers, as John Gannon, another former CIA man would admit to CBS News, the threat was largely ignored.

In August of 2001, Professor Gary E.R. Schwartz, who had also appeared from time to time on Jack Sarfatti's email discussions of the mind, psyche, and consciousness -- as had Uri Geller, Dan Smith, myself, and the elusive Ron -- was testing Chris Robinson at the University of Arizona.

For many years, Robinson had claimed that images from his dreams, when properly interpreted, were able to predict events in the future.

Shortly after arriving in Arizona, Robinson, a citizen of the United Kingdom, reported to Schwartz that his dreams were filled with terrible visions of airplanes crashing into tall buildings.

Neither Schwartz nor Robinson were aware that similar visions had haunted one of the Defense Intelligence Agency's psychic spies in the mid-1980s.

The DIA wanted to know if terrorists were a near-future threat, and tasked their mental spies accordingly (although the psychics were "blind" to their targets and would usually only be provided sealed envelopes directing them to the items of concern).

One of the psychics lapsed into a panic attack: she had a relative at the Pentagon, another in New York City, and visions of an air attack taking place in both locations.

One of her visions concerned a building full of people collapsing after being struck from the air by "a large object."

She added, "something to do with an airplane."

Details concerning a ceremony to honor those who had lost their lives protecting the White House added additional emotional impact to the vision.

But this was 1986: Ronald Reagan was the President and the perceived threat was interpreted as coming from Libya in response to U.S. actions (which had been partially guided by input from America's psychic spies).

In 1995, CIA, empowered by congressional mandate, pulled the power cord out from under the DIA program, nicknamed STAR GATE. The warnings were forgotten until after 9/11, when CIA released roughly two-thirds of the psychic spy files under the Freedom of Information Act.

On September 11, 2001, three hijacked airplanes were turned into missiles and destroyed the twin towers of the World Trade Center in New York City and severely damaged the Pentagon in Washington D.C.

A fourth plane, piloted by a terrorist with a name that military psychics had predicted would sound like "Jerry, Gerard, or Geraldo," crashed into a field, thanks to the efforts of passengers who attempted to retake the cockpit. The fallen heroes were later honored at the White House in a ceremony that reflected the 1986 vision of the DIA's psychic spy.

It was this man, Ziad Jarrah, who had set out that fateful morning believing he would crash into the U.S. Capitol Building.

"Ziad was like Luke Skywalker," Bert Rodriguez told Jon Ronson, when Ronson visited US 1 Fitness Center in Dania Beach, Florida, where Jarrah had trained in martial arts.

In the paranormal war on terror, it was Jarrah who was most closely identified "by the force."

In part two, Jon Ronson explores post 9/11 psychic warnings, including new visions of mushroom clouds over America, and I examine the psychic war as a counterintelligence operation.

For additional information including government documents please visit STARpod.org.

Jon Ronson and The Men Who Stare at Goats

2009-09-01T19:25:00.004-05:00

MINNEAPOLIS (STARpod.org) -- "The man who reactivated me is... " Uri paused, then he said, "called Ron."

I was reading Jon Ronson's book, THE MEN WHO STARE AT GOATS.

Ronson wrote, "Was Ron FBI? CIA? Military intelligence? Homeland security? Could Ron be MI5? MI6?"

"Ah ha!" I thought. "Now it makes sense!"

I knew that Ron worked for CIA.

And why Uri Geller may have found himself "reactivated" for the war on terror.

"This is about what happened when a small group of men -- highly placed within the United States military, the government, and the intelligence services -- began believing in very strange things."

Thus begins Jon's Ronson's disturbing and entertaining exploration of high strangeness infecting the US government in his follow-up to his first book THEM: Adventures with Extremists.

THEM clearly set the tone for Ronson's unique approach to the sources and methods found in THE MEN WHO STARE AT GOATS -- understated shock and awe tempered by a dry sense of humor in all the right places.

When faced with video evidence of alleged mind-control over a small animal, Ronson notes:

"It does seem odd ... although I have to say that emotions such as circumspection and wariness are not that easy to discern in hamsters."

Ronson (who followed in the footsteps of another UK citizen and journalist, Nick Cook of Janes Defence Weekly) was astonished by the fascination high-ranking persons in the United States exhibited over the paranormal. And like Cook and Ronson, who had observed the inexplicable weirdness (which had largely emerged for all to see on the Internet in the 1990s) -- I was also curious about what had inspired strange beliefs in the unreal.

Since the mid-1990s I had been exploring far-out science with an eye on future developments.

It did appear that an entire industry had developed around improbable imaginary weapons, but what of the impossible?

Ronson began by looking into Uri Geller's claims of involvement with American intelligence services.

Ronson writes, "The way I saw it, the truth lay in one of four possible scenarios:

(1) It just never happened

(2) A couple of crazy renegades in the higher levels of the U.S. Intelligence Community had brought in Uri Geller.

(3) U.S. intelligence is the repository of incredible secrets, which are kept from us for our own good; one of those is that Uri Geller has psychic powers, which were harnessed during the Cold War. They just hoped he wouldn't go around telling everybody.

(4) The U.S. Intelligence Community was, back then, essentially nuts through and through."

Ronson landed in the midst of the controversy beginning with an interview with former head of military intelligence (INSCOM) Bert Stubblebine and the above mentioned lunch meeting with Uri Geller.

In his book Ronson claims "It was Uri Geller who set me on the trail that led to the goats" as he searched for the mysterious "Ron."

Ronson never did find "Ron," or at least never admitted as much.

I was aware of the connection between Uri and "Ron" ever since "Ron" had responded to an email we had both received less than a year prior to 9/11. That particular email implied a recruitment drive allegedly sanctioned by "Ron."

As it turns out, it was not Uri Geller but another associate of "Ron" who sent Ronson on quest to track down "the men who stare at goats."

Ronson's big break in the story came from Colonel John B. Alexander, a non-lethal weapons consultant to the government and former associate of Stubblebine at INSCOM.

According to Ronson, it was Alexander who named the man that redirected his attention away from current Intelligence Community involvement ("Ron") towards Special Forces, and the allegations of psychic goat-killers.

Hold onto the thought that Ronson may have been deliberately sent off on a new vector when he kept asking about "Ron."

What fascinated me from the beginning of Ronson's book was his ability to personalize his story and uncover new details.

It was also clear that Ronson was not always in-the-know concerning the import of his discoveries.

Of Ronson's four possibilities, we can easily rule out number one, as recently declassified files (available to review at STARpod.org) evidence CIA's attempt to recruit Uri Geller for his psychic powers in the early 1970s. Number two can also be ruled out, since the same set of documents, known as the STAR GATE collection, prove that the highest levels of military and intelligence right up to the Vice President's office were well aware of the situation. Number four may also be discarded: evidence exists that interest in the paranormal continues today.

Ronson soon learned that not only had the government tasked psychic spies to obtain enemy secrets during the cold war, and even into the Gulf War in the 1990's, but they had pursued the dark side of the force: the willful killing of goats and hamsters with a thought.

And, more chillingly, they were interested in "reactivating" the research for the war on terror -- and so, apparently, was al Qaeda.

With the stage set under the light of high strangeness and clandestine evil, Ronson goes off the track to explore other equally confusing and disturbing aspects of government involvement with the paranormal and their errant children in the private sector.

Throughout the book Ronson invokes the new-age warrior philosophy of the 1st Earth Battalion for guidance, but it is soon apparent that a disturbing darkness lurks beneath the surface.

Psychic remote viewers for hire, weird predictions that never come true, and strange UFO death cults are explored as Ronson desperately seeks the unifying narrative to his book. This is new and uncharted territory for Ronson (and for most of his readers) -- thus Ronson weaves back and forth across space, time, and subject matter -- turning over stones big and small to uncover the meaning behind the madness.

Psychological operations in Iraq, crazy non-lethal weapons, abusive torture, mind-control projects from the 1950s, subversive subliminal messages, and psychic delusions grow from every crack in the pavement of reason.

By the end of THE MEN WHO STARE AT GOATS Ronson begins to see the extent of landscape ahead as if for the first time.

Ronson writes:

"It seemed remarkable to me that the organizational gap in the intelligence world between the light side (psychic supermen) and the dark side (covert assassination) has been so narrow."

Meanwhile, as Ronson was busy tracking down the goats, "Ron" went on his merry way investigating weird science on behalf of the newly formed Office of the Director of National Intelligence, as told in my series KNOWING THE FUTURE: CIA, 9/11, UFOs, and the Extraterrestrial Presence (available at STARpod.org).

Was Ronson sent on a wild goat chase?

Was he set up by cleverly planted intelligence operatives?

In the end, does it really matter?

It's not a question of whether or not the government has a team of psychic assassins staged to take down any adversary deemed a threat.

In the end it comes down to tales of spies and lies, manipulation of the truth, and public oversight.

The recent CIA torture scandal is only one small tip of an iceberg of private contractor black-operations protected from the heat of disclosure by national security laws.

Is it really worth putting the public mental health at risk by promoting insanity in the interest of national security? How much collateral damage from counterintelligence operations is deemed acceptable?

Jon Ronson (and the writer of the fictionalized film version of Ronson's book) wisely understood that humor is the best vaccination to protect one's sanity against the strange and unnatural.

By not taking himself too seriously, Ronson has been able to get closer to the strangeness than almost anyone else in recent memory, without being caught up in the paranoia and delusion.

(For those who doubt the truth behind Ronson's book, I am assembling an archive of government documents at the STARpod.org website. Additional background is available in my series KNOWING THE FUTURE about spy games used to collect intelligence on the Internet.)

UFO SPY GAMES: THE FACE OF THE CORE STORY PART 3

2009-07-27T16:10:00.008-05:00

UFO SPY GAMES ...

My source had alerted me. By August of 2006, the Internet spy games were heating up fast, and no one seemed to know who to trust.

SERPO, the alien-human exchange tale which had been around since the 1980s and reborn anew in late 2005, was looking more like Internet flypaper.

"Their tactics are quite despicable and they are most certainly baiting ... they were clever enough to hack ... into his original SERPO source's account ... this is something you need to keep in mind too ... these folks aren't playing."

Weeks earlier I had received information on "deep background" that had raised the possibility of uncovering more about the "core story" of government contact with an extraterrestrial presence.

Then, as the first pieces of core information were about to be revealed, other actors had taken front stage.

I was already wary of taking STARstream Research, which was intended to process open-source information, into the an area fraught with disinformation and questionable activities.

I wrote to my source that "reciprocity demands a carefully measured response."

Ron Pandolfi, working out of the DIA for the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, had been quietly pursuing his own interests in the UFO spy games, mostly by proxy through his friend Dan Smith. Little was known about Pandolfi's motives over the years, with the exception of a covertly recorded phone conversation from the early 1990s where Pandolfi admitted to having been a member of the legendary government "UFO working group."

Controversy surrounded Pandolfi, but history supported his methods.

Pandolfi's previous concerns about Hughes providing the Chinese assistance to improve their missile technology, "were not warmly received back at CIA headquarters," according to New York Times journalist Jeff Gerth, who added "the agency killed his study, called a National Intelligence Estimate [NIE]."

Eventually enough questions were raised about why CIA killed the NIE that Pandolfi was called to testify before closed sessions of the Senate Intelligence Committee. That information remains classified.

By the end of 2006, no one seemed to really know the status of Pandolfi's UFO-related espionage investigation, either.

Pandolfi told one interested party, "Keep in mind that the SERPO storytellers left many false links back to DIA and other intelligence organizations while protecting their own trail with false e-mail addresses."

Strangely enough, the most flammable information had been poured upon the SERPO tale by Pandolfi himself, a few months earlier.

Pandolfi released a series of email exchanges between Pandolfi and his associate Dr. Green, concerning UFO source Rick Doty, phony DIA persons, SERPO, and a 1980s meeting with USAF Colonels Hennessey and Weaver at Pandolfi's CIA office.

When he learned of the release, Dr. Green was alarmed.

Green immediately raised concerns that the information he had provided was "requested in an official capacity."

I mused about the implications of the use of Internet forum hounds and citizen journalists to conduct intelligence operations.

I wrote, "With spies like us, the smoke and mirrors world of espionage remains comfortably concealed in the guise of journalists investigating government officials."

One government document advised, "Information about yourself and in particular your employment with the Federal Government should not be provided to Internet user groups, e-mail services, or other web sites. Adversaries through a variety of methods can easily exploit such information ..."

Reciprocity -- our reporting of the situation -- had drawn unwanted attention.

Pandolfi approved "damage control" and requested specific information be removed from an article I had in preparation.

Later, perhaps out of frustration, he would write to me:

"Maybe you can save the Little Chicken with one of your "news" articles. He gets so excited when you are working on one [of] those articles that he stops thinking about crashing into the White House."

Pandolfi was referring to his friend Dan Smith, who had been dubbed "Chicken Little" of the infamous AVIARY UFO group.

The idea of a metaphorical crashing was an apt image for those seeking government disclosure from the Executive Office. Dan had taken that metaphor closer to home than anyone in UFOlogy.

At the end of the day, government secrets are exactly what they are: protected information.

Dan Smith is as aware of this fact as anyone in UFOlogy.

In spite of Smith's outreach through his friends in the intelligence world, and a family member who was friendly with President G.H.W. Bush's only sister, he knows there is little chance of moving the powers-that-be towards full government disclosure.

Smith's goal is to raise public awareness and draw the attention of the mainstream media.

Smith envisions a day when the President of the United States will be asked by the mainstream media why some of his highest ranking intelligence officials are pursuing the UFO topic.

The President would smile, wave his hand at the eager and bewildered reporters, add "sorry folks, no comment," and walk out the door.

Meanwhile, the mainstream media is oblivious to the fact that alleged communications between very senior persons in the intelligence community were simply handed off to an Internet forum -- some who are foreign nationals.

It was Ron Pandolfi, the highly placed intelligence official and friend of Dan Smith, who released a series of email messages to and from Dr. Christopher Kit Green of the DIA TIGER Committee -- messages which include discussion of FBI involvement and the Justice Department.

The questionable use or misuse of references to FBI by both Green and Pandolfi had been particularly troubling, given my generic inquiry to the FBI about Internet contact with CIA and DIA officials returned a response from the local Joint Terrorism Task Force.

Months later Pandolfi responded to my request for an explanation of his unusual methods.

"None of the e-mails I provided to Dan involved government activities," Pandolfi explained, somewhat elusively, "They involved personal communications between me, Dan, Kit, and Rick, concerning fabricated e-mail accounts used to disseminate false documents about UFOs, SERPO, etc. for which government (intelligence) officials such as John Gannon were falsely implicated."

Pandolfi then noted the issue of "sources and methods" and later requested numerous redactions.

Either members of the intelligence community had contracted Internet madness, or something else was at play.

I questioned why highly placed and respected individuals would risk so much by exposing themselves to ridicule, not to mention the attention of the world intelligence community, some who are not as friendly as their American counterparts.

It is a matter of public record that Pandolfi and his associates had operated from the DIA, and Green consulted to TIGER, a DIA National Academies of Science committee.

Following the SERPO email affair, AFP and other mainstream news sources reported that the DIA "can operate in cyberspace" and can "conduct the operations inside the United States as well as overseas."

The DIA cyberspace initiative had begun in 2006 "on a trial basis," around the same time Green engaged Pandolfi over the SERPO affair.

The AFP report, which quoted Toby Sullivan, a senior Pentagon CI (counter-intelligence) official, noted that the on-line operations were "not intended to catch spies but to turn their operations to US ends."

The operational use of the Internet by the DIA, inside of the United States, suggests the concept of "virtual flypaper" and "flypaper theory."

It is not entirely impossible for official US Intelligence or their proxies in the private sector to establish enticing "sticky" topics to attract spy-flies.

The big question is how much collateral damage spills over onto US citizens.

The give and take of reciprocity comes to mind.

I recalled the previous initiation into deep black world of protected sources.

"I think you handled this just fine ... I was talking about the future ... something more interesting that the TIGER Committee ..."

THE FACE OF THE CORE STORY ...

Technology Insight-Gauge, Evaluate, and Review. That, my friend, is real world stuff.

Nothing of interest to us belongs in the real world.

Past this point, beyond the TIGER, the "real" world will no longer exist.

By the way, I must mention that shaking a TIGER by a UFO tale may not lead you to answers, but it will likely introduce you to Dr. Christopher Kit Green, a man, who, like the rest of us, has plenty of questions.

Dr. Green's latest contribution to the DIA TIGER is a study done for the NAS National Research Council titled EMERGING COGNITIVE NEUROSCIENCE AND RELATED TECHNOLOGIES.

What, you may ask, does that have to do with UFOs and the core story of alien contact?

Perhaps nothing.

Or, perhaps, our core story is the one we are collectively creating, in a 21st Century where information acts as a catalyst to unleash the human extraterrestrial.

Pay attention now.

From this moment forward, all is not what it appears to be.

(We enter an allegorical world of phantasms in motion.)

As you dangle the TIGER by a UFO tale, you may notice the eyes have slits. Strangely beautiful, don't you think?

Almost -- alien?

Look carefully into those eyes.

Are they watching? Always, yes, it is what they were intended to do.

Notice how your reality has shifted, ever so slightly, as you look deeply into the eyes of the TIGER.

Watch now, closely. Something is happening inside of those eyes.

Something MAJIC?

You must have realized by now, this is no ordinary beast.

Feel the power, the strength, which grasps you. The electricity. Like a wave passing through you.

You no longer have hold of a TIGER by a tale.

From here you will be carried to the entrance of the dark secret.

The TIGER reappears.

A meeting is called, and Dr. Green has been tasked to identify and explore "several specific research areas that have implications for U.S. national security, and should therefore be monitored consistently by the intelligence community."

The TIGER listens.

We call our first Witness, the soulless mind, stripped bare before you.

To understand and detect the thoughts and intentions of men, you build eyes for the beast.

To understand the drugs and technologies that alter the physical and cognitive abilities of men, you build hands for the beast.

To watch the thoughts of men, you create an image for the beast.

To imitate the functions of the brain of men, you create a mind for the beast.

"As these fields continue to grow, it will be imperative that the intelligence community be able to identify scientific advances relevant to national security when they occur. To do so will require adequate funding, intelligence analysts with advanced training in science and technology, and increased collaboration with the scientific community, particularly academia."

To touch the alien within, you invoke the soul of the beast.

Somewhere, lost amongst the extraterrestrial images, are the hearts of men.

Your tour will pause, momentarily, to catch a quick breath of fresh air, perhaps with a new appreciation of what it means to "know the future."

The core story? Yes, it's true. It is far, far more disturbing.

Up ahead:

At the heart of knowing the future, something far more interesting than the TIGER Committee, is the "Core Story" of alien contact with an extraterrestrial intelligence.

To be continued in future releases of UFO SPY GAMES and THE FACE OF THE CORE STORY, from STARpod.org.

The Crystal Knight: UFO counterintelligence or confusion?

2009-07-17T09:46:00.004-05:00

As I anticipated, yesterday's SLP posts about Richard Helms and a space crystal elicited confusion and consternation on both sides of the UFO reality debate.

My favorite response came from Ryan Dube who is an administrator for Reality Uncovered, a forum driven to debunk UFO documents sometimes using false statements about the kind of markings used by the government:

Gary - your articles encourage loose thinking and idiotic theories based on whatever little tidbits you can gather from formerly classified documents. You're a moron. After reading this latest, I can honestly say that I despise everything you do. The effects of your writing are harmful, dangerous, and counter-productive to encouraging critical thinking, true open-mindedness based on the highest probable answers, and following the most clear path to the truth. Your articles, your writing, and your thought processes fly in the face of all of that.

As expected, Ryan simply "doesn't get it."

Apparently Ryan needs to pay closer attention to my biography tag line:

"I am a researcher of material that blurs the distinction between fiction and reality."

My point was simple: to the best of my knowledge (as of today) the only intersection in the public record which brings together Richard Helms, his alias "Knight," and a crystal from space is found in three documents at the CIA's electronic reading room.

Together these documents form an "ink blot test" you can use to gauge your personal reaction.

The heart of myth making is in the eye of the beholder. Counterintelligence takes that art to a higher level by confusing sources, motives, and methods. Ryan is clearly confused!

In simplest terms, you should see the documents for what they are: requests concerning recovery of a NASA space crystal formed in zero gravity. For those more conspiratorially minded, they will represent something else.

And as I demonstrated, a myth-maker can easily take a real document and spin the story by removing a few words.

Here's the raw deal: when one is used to working in the clear fresh clarity of the open-source waters, stepping into the murky, dark, putrid black waters of the UFO spy game is not an easy transition.

Why would anyone in their right mind even wish to attempt to sort through all of the lies, rumors, reports, mis and disinformation?

It's even worse trying to track down real, verifiable government information. After all, this is the same government that erased the moon landing tapes!

The truth of the matter -- and this does come from real government-issued documents -- there is an acknowledged "phenomenology problem."

We also know (again from government records beginning in the early 1950s onward) the CIA intended to use the "phenomenology problem" for clandestine purposes, including counterintelligence.

In my previous two posts here at SLP, I reproduced a small sampling of the rumors, partly from inside sources, partly from Robert Collins' book EXEMPT FROM DISCLOSURE, which point to Richard Helms involvement in the alleged MAJESTIC MJ-12 MAJIC UFO extraterrestrial business.

So what do we really know?

As the saying goes, "Just the facts..."

We know that CIA acknowledged a "phenomenology problem" with the UFO topic, and intended to explore the use of this problem for counterintelligence activities.

We know with certainty that Richard Helms was involved in some very spooky business at CIA. This includes Helms' role in MKULTRA and other related mind-control and paranormal investigations, his interest in developing telepathy and hypnosis for operational Clandestine Services, and the fact that Helms gave the order to have the files destroyed.

We know that Sidney Gottlieb, running CIA's Technical Services Division (TSD) under Helms, was funding some of the research into psychic paranormal perception at Stanford Research Institute (SRI).

One of the principles of that project was Dr. Hal Puthoff, who is currently researching UFO-related technologies. Dr. Kit Green was a senior CIA analyst from Life Sciences attached to the SRI work.

We also have off-the-record sources on deep background who have attempted to direct our interests, evidenced by numerous messages and sources which remain confidential until further notice.

We know now for a fact that Helms is referenced in the government record about the recovery of a "space crystal."

Note: The picture which accompanies this post shows President Gerald Ford holding a space crystal manufactured during the Skylab 4 mission. To his left is Dr. James C. Fletcher of NASA, who was referenced in the messages to Helms. The other gentleman is Dr. Harold Johnson of M.I.T. The indium-antimonide crystal was formed in Earth orbit on January 6, 1974, by the Skylab 4 astronauts.

CRYSTAL KNIGHT: How to create a myth

2009-07-16T15:31:00.005-05:00

May I present the CIA's "CRYSTAL KNIGHT" memos ...

http://www.foia.cia.gov/helms/pdf/74_1503800.pdf

http://www.foia.cia.gov/helms/pdf/74_1503801.pdf

http://www.foia.cia.gov/helms/pdf/74_1503802.pdf

(I hearby declare that these three genuine CIA memos from the Helms' Collection shall be so known from this day forward, as they reference a NASA "space crystal" and the late DCI / Ambassador to Iran known as "KNIGHT")

For an example of how a simple modification (nothing has been added here; just a small bit taken away under the black ) allows the imagination to grow from the seeds of reality, click on the above image. Fill in the blank with your favorite conspiracy, like "a gift from the aliens."

Imagine being presented the above document -- everything is real -- and verifiable with the right access (in the 1970s) -- and being told that a planned presentation of the alien's gift to the United States -- a special space crystal with MAJIC properties -- had been canceled by order of the White House.

CRYSTAL KNIGHT: Is this Richard Helms' real "alien crystal?"

2009-07-16T08:46:00.009-05:00

" ... the core story he claimed was true is the same we have heard ..."

The human mind, powered by imagination, can do amazing things. Many minds, working together, can amplify that effect to where it becomes a real, if viral, contagion.

Sometimes a very clever human mind can take advantage of the power of human imagination to design a message, seed the human network, and infect the system.

Richard Helms, the late former Director of Central Intelligence, was well aware of this capability.

Helms observed it was his duty to know, and acting from a position of official authority, he gave the orders to investigate the depths of scientific and paranormal aspects of the human mind.

Later, again acting from a position of authority, he ordered many of the resulting efforts destroyed, to protect the American people.

It is not too surprising that Helms' legacy has become the cornerstone of many conspiracy theories. Some of the conspiracy theories live on and become legends. Eventually some of the legends get published.

A critical component in the published account by Robert Collins, EXEMPT FROM DISCLOSURE, are types of "crystal device" -- sometimes described as an extraterrestrial holographic television, other times as an energy device.

Rick Doty, the former USAF intelligence officer who remains at the source of many of the rumors which have grown up into legends, describes one of the crystals in Collins' book:

"The most intriguing in my experience with the aliens is a crystal -- an octagon shaped crystal -- which when held in the aliens' hands, and viewed by a second person, displayed pictures. These pictures could be of the alien's home planet or of the Earth thousands of years ago. The crystal always intrigued me, but I don't understand how it operates, nor do I think the government understands how it operates. I have seen the crystal, but I have not seen the pictures."

As with many legends, it turns out that there is a kernel of truth that may have inspired the tale.

The clues to the legend involve the claims of Doty, and others involved presently working with the Intelligence Community (based upon several sources who have shared numerous communications) that Helms personally verified the alleged "core story" of extraterrestrial contact with the government.

According to messages provided in 2005:

"As far as Helms ... there is that squib in Collin's book ... and I have said it is true ... I fully agree with Ron's mystification about Helms. Why he contacted me, wanted to meet with me privately at the National Research Council, and was so unambiguous confuses me. I did not get the impression he did so because he was using me, indeed, he was insistent on privacy. Shortly before he died, he wrote me and one other person, saying he had learned that despite his counsel to us, he had "heard" (incorrectly, it turned out) that we had agreed Rick Doty had been a "bad person" and he said he would never talk to us again, and he did not. A letter, then another, and another from me to him saying he had heard a distorted and wrong story went unanswered. I am not prepared to repeat what he said to me before that, because I am uncertain as to his mental state (he seemed intact, but the subject was, after all quite crazy) , he required secrecy, and he never said I would be released from it, the core story he claimed was true is the same we have heard ..."

Among the rumors we received about Helms' ET activities, the UFO AVIARY (bird names) and other tales of government involvement with extraterrestrials ...

1. "Raven" IDed as " Dick Helms by Doty, who also called him Mr R.
Collins indicated that only Jaime Shandera knows who he is. Jaimie
meet with Raven in DC. Raven was showing him secret apartment the
EBE3 was being kept in DC. Walter Ferguson, CIA, also possible
"Raven".

2. Bird Code was instructions that if followed correctly would led to
that same apartment in DC. (This location is associated with KING'S CHESS)

9. 1988-1989-Dick Helms joins to group. Called Mr R by Doty, also
called "Raven"' Jamie had a "Raven" Source also. He meet in DC Mall
area in l995.

MJ-12 / Special Advisory Group / Richard Helms

15. "Raven" came into picture in 1991.Worked with "MJ12" group for
over 30 years and based in LANL. Raven revealed OROCA panel which is
above MJ12 group. It meets at CIA in Langley. Raven worked out of
"Dulce Complex or TA 49 at LANL. We communicate with alien used
"scattered binary hyper-burst. Jerry Miller is "Heron" revealed.

According to Gus Russo, Helms used the alias KNIGHT, which can be confirmed in many of his communciations from the new CIA Helms collection.

This curious fact leads us to the legend of the CRYSTAL and KNIGHT, the alleged ET SERPO tale of a project called CRYSTAL KNIGHT, and the true and verified (by CIA FOIA files) story of a botched attempt to offer a gift to the Shah of Iran. This special gift -- an exotic crystal apparently held in very high regard by NASA -- was a concern directed to the former Director of Central Intelligence, Richard Helms.

One SECRET/SENSITIVE/EYES ONLY memo sent to Helms in June of 1974 from Brent Scowcroft at the White House, reads:

"NASA BELIEVES THAT DR. WEISSNER'S IDEA TO PRESENT THE GIFT (A CRYSTAL GROWN UNDER ZERO GRAVITY) TO THE SHAH IS EXTREMELY UNWISE, MAY BE ILLEGAL, AND IN ANY CASE MUST NOT -- REPEAT MUST NOT -- BE DONE. NASA FURTHER REQUESTS THAT THE ITEM BE RETURNED TO THEM AT THE EARLIEST OPPORTUNITY." -- http://www.foia.cia.gov/helms/pdf/74_1503801.pdf

It is interesting to consider this message from two points of view.

The first, reasonable and logical explanation, involves one of the crystals grown in space by the US SKYLAB space station.

The second, the conspiratorial viewpoint, is the odd inclusion of a description of the item in a trasnmitted message. Typically this would be handled differently, unless it was intended to send disinformation to another party.

What do you think?

I'll be exploring the "HELMS CODE" in UFO SPY GAMES and FACE OF THE CORE STORY at the STARpod.org website.

UFO SPY GAMES: THE FACE OF THE CORE STORY PART 2

2009-07-14T15:49:00.002-05:00

A review and a preview, part two.

Like the fictional TV series TWIN PEAKS, which mixed the supernatural with UFO topics like project BLUE BOOK, the real core story seemed to have its roots in the paranormal.

According to an undated CIA memorandum, Walter B. Smith, Director of Central Intelligence in the early 1950s, sent a proposal to the National Security Council which concluded that "the problems with unidentified flying objects appear to have implications for psychological warfare, as well as for intelligence and operations."

This theme, which forever links the "nuts and bolts" of UFO mythology as an extension of human technological evolution, to the paranormal weirdness of the unexplainable, is at the heart of the "core story" of government extraterrestrial contact.

It is no longer a matter of uninformed speculation: the United States, Great Britain, China, Russia, and the Former Soviet Union, to name a few, are concerned about strange phenomena.

As the Freedom of Information Act pushed tightly held secrets into the harsh light of public opinion, bits and pieces of a dark -- some might say disturbing -- secret world have been revealed.

In 1963, future CIA Director of Intelligence Richard Helms was thinking about the phenomenology problem, too

On the day after Christmas Day, while the national was still in shock over the loss of their President, Richard Helms wrote to the CIA Deputy Director for Science and Technology:

"Recently, reports from various sources on life science research in the Soviet Union have been called to my attention. These reports indicate a current preoccupation by an important sector of Soviet biological science with cybernetics, telepathy, hypnosis, and related subjects. Stimulated by these reports, I would like to pass on to you some thoughts on the possible significance of these activities to the Clandestine Services."

Nearly forty-four years after Helms penned his memo, Gus Russo, an investigative author best known for his investigative work on the Kennedy assassination plot, would be asked by Dan Smith to write an article about how the I.C.'s "phenomenology problem" had lead to counterintelligence operations involving U.S. citizens.

Russo examined material from numerous sources.

I discussed some of my own observations with Russo. Together we laughed about why some of our mutual sources in the I.C. would request absolute anonymity when their names were already plastered atop the UFO "core story" on the Internet.

In his article "The Real X-files: Is Uncle Sam a Closet UFOlogist," available at the starpod.org website, Russo expressed his opinion of the high-strangeness of intelligence operations involving psychic spies and UFOs:

"Summing it all up, there is certainly a very small percentage of government officials with intelligence clearance -- some active, some retired -- who are interested in the UFO research community, if not UFOs themselves. Some of these men are of the impression, rightly or wrongly, that a very few individuals in government and the private sector are keeping the big secret even from them. This is small consolation to earnest UFO researchers, but at least they should no longer feel alone and marginalized as kooks completely at odds with officialdom."

Is there an extraterrestrial presence representing a "phenomenology problem" for the U.S. government? Or is the "phenomenology problem" a useful cover for sweeping deep black budget programs under the "nut-case" carpet?

The US government has no intention of providing an answer to these questions.

Inquiries made using the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) are typically met with this kind of response:

"... the Air Force can neither confirm nor deny the existence of the information you have requested."

This "can neither confirm nor deny" escape clause is known as the "Glomar Response," named after the once super-secret CIA vessel used to recover a sunken Soviet nuclear submarine.

According to a review of a previous and related FOIA filing found at a Department of Energy website, the "Glomar Response" is required "where the existence or non-existence of requested documents is itself a classified fact exempt from disclosure ... or where admission that documents exist would indicate that the agency was involved in a certain issue ... or that an individual is the target of investigation or surveillance ... [or where] the existence or non-existence of requested documents is classified."

It is clear: the existence or non existence of materials demonstrating government interest in a "phenomenology problem" is a matter of critical US national security.

It isn't hard to find persons of intelligence -- or persons from an intelligence agency of the U.S. government -- who are involved at some level of interest with the UFO issue. UFO interests come from top level CIA technology analysts, like Ron Pandolfi, who admitted in a covertly tape recorded phone conversation with a foreign national to having been a member of the once secret "UFO Working Group." They come from former astronauts, like Dr. Edgar Mitchell, one of twelve human beings to have walked on the moon. And they are discussed by numerous lesser known experts who have heard the rumors or seen the classified documents first hand.

Over the past ten years the evidence has continued to mount in favor of the involvement of the government of the United States with the alleged "extraterrestrial presence."

To understand the UFO tales of spies, lies, and polygraph tape, one must first become familiar with the key players sitting at the spy game table, and learn why they are important to U.S. National Security.

For some, like Dr. Christopher "Kit" Green, even the existence or nonexistence of the mystery remains concealed and may be "legally protected."

Green's career at CIA included work on the Glomar recovery project and his involvement in the early days of psychic warfare research at the Stanford Research Institute (SRI International), a matter of the record where he is named by Ken Kress in a declassified edition of the CIA's STUDIES IN INTELLIGENCE.

A key researcher at SRI was Dr. Hal Puthoff, whose private institute focuses on UFO-related exotic energy production.

Green has since left CIA but continues as a consultant to the government. He is also a member of the National Academies of Science / Defense Intelligence Agency TIGER Committee, where he provides expert analysis on emerging defense applications in the field of neuroscience.

The TIGER Committee is notable for membership which includes Ruth David, the former head of CIA Science and Technology, and John Gannon, former CIA Deputy Director for Intelligence.

In January of 2006, in a privately distributed email list, Green referenced a discussion of Dr. Hal Puthoff's exotic propulsion and energy topics at one of the TIGER meetings. Exotic energy concepts include so-called zero point energy or vacuum energy, which many physicists consider the 21st century equivalent of the perpetual motion machine. Zero point energy is also closely associated with the "reverse engineering" of UFO propulsion systems.

One man, and one man alone appeared to occupy the best possible position to probe into the facts, fantasies, and fallacies behind the real-life "X-files" of UFOs, alien visitors, spies, lies, and polygraph tape.

Dr. Ron Pandolfi, the former CIA analyst recently with the ODNI, has a reputation for using "unconventional methods."

The ODNI (Office of the Director of National Intelligence) is the highest publicly acknowledged intelligence authority in the United States government. The President of the United States is briefed by the Director of National Intelligence, a job formerly handled by the Director of Central Intelligence.

Pandolfi's position at ODNI involved the kind of technical intelligence that would be used to detect and track UFO activity. Pandolfi's association with UFOs is well known, and has been heavily promoted by his friend Dan Smith, who often blogs about Pandolfi's activities. Even Smith questions why his blogging, which would seem to be put Pandolfi's career in jeopardy, has failed to prevent Pandolfi was rising to a very senior position in the Intelligence Community.

It was Ron Pandolfi, who in the latter half of 2006, provided a glimpse into the spy games, when he forwarded a series of emails discussing a possible violation of national security.

The messages in question appear to have been exchanged by Pandolfi with Rick Doty, a former USAF AFOSI agent working for New Mexico law enforcement, who has often discussed UFOs, and Dr. Green.

I obtained copies of the Pandolfi distributed email messages from our acting source based in London, who in 2006 was a contributing journalist to STARstream Research.

Several months after meeting with Pandolfi in 2006, our source was instructed to pass the email messages to the managers of another Internet forum, Reality Uncovered, as requested by Dr. Pandolfi.

It is generally assumed this tale began in late 2005 when an anonymous source began providing details about "SERPO," an alleged human-extraterrestrial biological entity exchange program.

The real story, as best as can be discerned from additional information provided in early to mid 2005, may have been initiated by an earlier effort by Dan Smith to reach then President George W. Bush concerning the alleged "extraterrestrial presence."

In the 2005 series of leaked messages, the originating source wrote, "For the time being, I do not need any additional named sources. I just need reasonable confidence that I have a reliable independent source for the core story. Despite Ron's occasional protestations, you remain my first preference."

This series of messages, which I refer to as "the team of three," involved discussion of how to best promote government disclosure of the alleged extraterrestrial core story, confirmation of some related details from the late DCI Richard Helms, and one team member offering that "I will think about this seriously, as long as our three-person team (you, me, and Ron) remains protected."

By early 2006, the SERPO tale had infected various UFO groups and their related Internet discussions, and was continuing to spread.

Many, including Ron Pandolfi himself, would point to Rick Doty as the most likely source of the SERPO material -- "SERPO-A" -- and by June of 2006, our sources informed us of Pandolfi's intention to use an "unconventional method" to remove Doty from the picture.

In their search to know the future, CIA and other elements in the U.S. Intelligence Community have been shadowed by a growing number of private "intelligence" operations.

I wondered about their Internet presence as new clues to the UFO spy game came into focus.

Ron Pandolfi, operating from the DIA for ODNI MASINT, wrote to a colleague and associate:

"You and I both have interests and reasons for having interests in getting at the truth regarding activities that potentially threaten national security. Let me be clear ... I am not implying any potential truth in the SERPO story. But behind any story there are motivations, players, and possibly facts that are rather disturbing. As such some of us are forced to ask some questions and try to get some answers."

Within a few days Pandolfi had gone from paying his teenagers to delete SERPO-related emails to actively engaging the issue over "national security concerns" with allegations of questionable persons and access to government facilities.

Pandolfi wrote to his colleague:

"Your expansion of the story of the two DIA employees visiting LANL [Los Alamos National Laboratory] and being known to others has me concerned. The names you provided do not correspond to any DIA employees. There are no people with these names that have TS//SCI clearances. If the story of the sources/visitors is true, they are falsely representing themselves as DIA employees, possibly to access sensitive facilities and acquire classified information for a foreign service."

Anytime the issue of falsification of government documents was raised, Pandolfi was ready to place the blame on Rick Doty.

In July of 2006, Pandolfi wrote to me requesting certain information be withheld from an impending article about allegations that a USAF UFO source known as FALCON had been traced back to Col. Hennessey, who had appeared at a meeting at CIA arranged by Pandolfi following a 1988 national TV broadcast called UFO COVER-UP LIVE.

Mr. Smith tells the story of the events that immediately followed the 1988 AVIARY disclosure:

"Colonels Hennessey and Weaver [from the USAF] were called over to the CIA after the 1988 TV show [UFO COVER-UP LIVE] to discuss Rick Doty's situation. They denied any continuing connection with Doty, claiming he was nothing more than a petty criminal. The alleged proof of that was that Rick Doty had failed a polygraph test relative to his case. Kit Green [who was a former senior CIA analyst and division head] had [seen] the polygraph charts ... the conclusion was that Doty had not lied."

Pandolfi clarified his position on the Hennessey affair:

"It was Doty who claimed Col. Hennessey was the Falcon, and it was Doty who claimed Col. Hennessey had provided him (Doty) with UFO documents for release to the public. My opinion is that Doty personally forged these documents, that he used the FALCON name to cover his tracks, and that he had absolutely no professional or personal relationship with Col. Hennessey."

It didn't take long to discover a long trail of inconsistent statements made by Pandolfi. Various versions of the CIA meeting were put forth by Pandolfi, and Green's version was different as well.

Regardless of any involvement by Hennessey in the FALCON matter, other documents evidence his involvement in dealing with persons snooping for information on the UFO issue, including a 1986 letter from the Defense Investigative Service that identifies Hennessey with the UFO topic.

One of the messages released by Pandolfi appeared to be deliberately intended to deliver a bombshell concerning an alleged source for the SERPO tale:

"I need you to know that Col. Weaver has contacted me and said he is Gene Loscowski. Her [sic] referred in detail to the meeting you and I had with Barry Hennessey about Rick's polygraph records ... He quoted what I said, what you did, and the circumstances of the meeting to convince me of who he was. He also told me the essence of the SERPO story was true."

Two items connected the threads of the story: the alleged polygraph interview of Rick Doty, and the "core story."

I knew from experience that nothing in the UFO Spy Games was as it appeared.

This review, and preview of things to come, will continue in part three.

The series KNOWING THE FUTURE: CIA, 9/11, UFOs, and the Extraterrestrial Presence, is available at STARpod.org.

UFO SPY GAMES: THE FACE OF THE CORE STORY

2009-07-10T12:00:00.002-05:00

A review of KNOWING THE FUTURE: CIA, 9/11, UFOs, and the Extraterrestrial Presence, and a preview of two new series: UFO SPY GAMES and THE FACE OF THE CORE STORY.

A strange symbiosis exists between the worlds of UFOs and the paranormal, and the international intelligence community. CIA, DIA, and other government agencies are revealed as alternative scientists and wealthy eccentrics seek to discover the Holy Grail of alleged extraterrestrial technologies. At the dark heart of this true and disturbing tale, is the "Core Story" of government contact with an unearthly presence.

In the KNOWING THE FUTURE series, I have explored "behind the scenes" activities of persons closely associated with the CIA and other intelligence organizations, and their involvement in the world of UFOs.

My explorations to date have been focused on two interweaving agendas.

The first emerges from a technological push to know the future for advanced propulsion, communications, and weapons-related technologies.

The second involves accessing and manipulating the first agenda, by members of the Intelligence Community.

Future articles of the KNOWING THE FUTURE series will be divided into two different but related channels.

KNOWING THE FUTURE: UFO SPY GAMES will focus on intelligence collection and counterintelligence spy games played on the Internet, obfuscating the quest for advanced human and alleged alien technologies.

KNOWING THE FUTURE: THE FACE OF THE CORE STORY will attempt to penetrate deeper into the mysterious, strange, and frightening aspects of human evolution and the alleged extraterrestrial alien agenda.

The journey towards these two roads began with a question: is it possible to see into the future?

The truth is, as always, stranger than simple explanations of time machines portrayed in popular films and television.

Tales and rumors of the future are the stuff of dreams from which Internet myths become viral memes, ideas spread like a disease over the world wide web of deceit and confusion.

Hidden within the flood of insanity and paranoia are little truths: predictions come true, warnings unheeded, and coincidences of misfortune.

And perhaps, a genuine knowing of the future.

One very successful young man was certain he knew the future.

A front page feature story in the SF Chronicle reported:

"Joe Firmage -- the Fox Mulder of Silicon Valley -- resigned ... from the firm he founded so he could promote his belief that many of today's high-tech advancements, including semiconductors, fiber optics and lasers, came from aliens."

"A remarkable being, clothed in brilliant white light, appeared hovering over my bed in my room," according to Firmage.

After a brief discussion about space travel, the "visitor" emitted a ball of light, "about the size of a basketball," which then entered Firmage, leaving him with a sensation almost beyond words.

Later Firmage would promote his belief in the existence of an "alien technology."

"Now that the new MAJESTIC 12 documents are in broad circulation, it is appropriate for me to make a few comments regarding their authenticity ..."

MAJESTIC 12 was a collection of ever growing and highly controversial UFO documents. The FBI had declared the so-called MJ-12 documents to be "BOGUS" based upon a source from the Air Force Office of Special Investigations.

In his on-line book "The Word Is Truth," Firmage argued for a revised view of human history in the context of a cosmos teaming with alien intelligence.

The media responded with a hail storm of written bullets. Weeks after issuing a press release about "The Truth," Firmage left US WEB, the multi-billion dollar company he had founded.

In a press release issued just prior to leaving USWeb, Firmage wrote:

"If the [MAJESTIC] documents are partial or complete forgeries, then they were written by an intelligence agency of the government of either the United States or the Soviet Union."

Although Firmage had pointed to questionable documents to support his quest, real government documents, released by the CIA under the Freedom of Information Act, were about to see the light of day.

One long-suspected secret confirmed by the United States Government was the existence of a formerly operational psychic spy program run by the Defense Intelligence Agency.

The psychic spies used a form of clairvoyance called "remote viewing" to collect intelligence against various foreign and enemy targets, including Soviet facilities.

DIA nicknamed the program STAR GATE. According to a government memo, STAR GATE was intended to collect intelligence on foreign paranormal developments.

One of the principle US military psychics, Ingo Swann, eventually went public with a tale of aliens on the moon and a personal UFO encounter mediated by a super-secret organization.

A reality check reveals it is not MAJESTIC, but HER MAJESTY's Secret Files that provide a slim entry into the international intrigue hidden under the rubric of exotic technology.

"X-files" provided by the MoD revealed Her Majesty's official interest in fringe subjects like gravitation, zero point energy extracted from empty space, and other novel energy technologies which had been the focus of Joe Firmage's UFO venture.

The MoD files also make note of "novel phenomena" like psychic "remote viewing," "bio-effects psychotronics," requests for copies of US psychic research by the Stanford Research Institute, and exotic morphogenetic fields thought to control DNA in living organisms.

According to documents produced for Firmage's International Space Sciences Organization from 1999 to 2000, torsion fields had been a core topic of study in collaborative efforts with the Russians.

In an interview with ZDTV's "Big Thinkers," Firmage explained his view of the secrecy behind the alleged cover-up of extraterrestrial technology:

"I'll tell you the best information I have. The best information I have is that the organization that does have, shall we say, better knowledge than the public is much smaller than you might guess. It is very small. It is also quasi-private, established over a half a century ago and essentially custodians for one of the greatest secrets of all time."

In little over a year, and in spite of Firmage promoting his ideas in the press, over the Internet, and on national radio in interviews with paranormal talk show host Art Bell, Firmage's "reverse extraterrestrial engineering project" had faded quietly from public view.

The mystery surrounding so many persons involved in both intelligence work and alternative physics attracted the attention of journalists investigating the secret world of black budget government research.

Nick Cook, author and aerospace journalist for Janes Information Group in the UK wrote to me, "What intrigues me in this whole business are the connections ... I wonder why so many of these names keep recurring in these peripherally related -- but deeply weird --- orbits."

The connections go even deeper, and twist and wrap around seemingly disconnected threads.

In 1983, few Americans knew, or would have believed that the US government was training psychics to spy on the enemy.

By December of 1983 some of America's psychic spies were receiving special mental training at the Monroe Institute of Applied Sciences. For his part of the training program, Mr. Robert Monroe was granted SECRET security clearance and $24,400.

In return for the $24,400, the government may have received the first known warning of the terrorist attack of September 11th, 2001.

A few years later another U.S. government psychic, DIA SOURCE 21 warned of simultaneous attacks in New York City and Washington, D.C.

A 1986 SECRET Defense Intelligence Agency document quotes SOURCE 21's raw and un-interpreted vision of terror:

"Newspaper headlines have something to do with the collapse of a building -- a lot of people hurt or injured. I also sense a feeling of panic, people scrambling and perhaps something to do with an aircraft. In summary, standing on top of a building, which is crowded inside with people, tourists, there is a perception of a large object falling -- heading -- toward the building ... I sense the object may cause structural damage as it crashes through the building. All of this takes place sometime in the future."

In August of 2001, psychic dream detective Chris Robinson was visiting with Professor Gary E. R. Schwartz at the University of Arizona.

Schwartz had arranged a series of tests to see if Chris Robinson was able to describe locations where he would be taken at a future date.

Robinson's dreams were interrupted by disturbing images: airplanes crashing into buildings.
According to Robinson, who had previously worked with law enforcement in the UK, the authorities were notified when the dreams kept recurring.

A month later Robinson's nightmares were no longer confined to his dreams.

Jon Ronson, in his darkly humorous book The Men Who Stare at Goats, soon to be a fictionalized feature film starring George Clooney, claims that Israeli psychic-mentalist Uri Geller identified "Ron" as the man behind his reinstatement as a government "psychic spook."

Ronson wrote, "Was Ron FBI? CIA? Military intelligence? Homeland Security? Could Ron be MI5? MI6?"

I knew that Ron worked for CIA, and why psychic mentalist Uri Geller would claim to have been 'reactivated' for the war on terror.

It seemed wherever the strange, the unusual, the rich and alien came together, "Ron" was nearby, waiting in the shadows. And not far behind, his friend Dan Smith.

Dan Smith sees himself at the center of a 'virtual' conspiracy covered with 'extraterrestrial' contact, most notable for the involvement of his friends who are real U.S. government intelligence persons.

I later learned that uncovering the real secrets of Dan Smith's friends from the intelligence world involved the Holy Grail of UFO enthusiasts: antigravity and time machines, sprinkled with heavy does of neurology and human psychology.

Smith's September 30th, 2000 contribution to conspiracy paranoia was summed up in a not-too-well-disguised reference to the alleged MAJESTIC MJ-12 government UFO cabal:

"Also it appears that Ron wants me to be a bus driver. He wants me to obtain a bus and paint it to look like an 'official' MTA bus, and go around the city picking up passengers at the bus stops, but instead of delivering them to their usual destinations, I will take them on an eschatological tour. When I told Ron that might be construed as being illegal, he did not seem perturbed."

And then, for those not paying close attention, Dan added:

"Would I lie to you? Do you think for a minute that these were not my 'official' instructions from a person who seems no longer inclined to deny membership in 'MTA-12'?"

Controversy had followed his friend "Ron" throughout his CIA career.

Ken Timmerman in American Spectator wrote that "Ronald Pandolfi was the CIA's highest ranking scientist when he visited the headquarters of Hughes Space and Communications in El Segundo, California in 1996."

"A CIA analyst, Ronald Pandolfi, briefed the Senate Intelligence Committee on what he had found in 1995 about Hughes' review of the explosion of a Long March rocket in January 1995. The CIA then allegedly alerted Hughes about Pandolfi's briefing, reportedly according to an internal CIA cable dated September 23, 1998. The committee then asked Attorney General Janet Reno for a criminal investigation into whether the CIA improperly obstructed a Senate investigation."

On January 18, 2006, Dr. Jack Sarfatti forwarded an email to my attention asking if I had sent an email listing the National Academy of Sciences "UFO" TIGER team.

"Jack, Ron P. told me today that you very likely know the names of all the members of the National Academy of Sciences "UFO" tiger team. If this is true, could you please tell me who they are. I have come up with something he wants briefed to them."

The TIGER Committee was sponsored by the Defense Intelligence Agency, and included several of Ron Pandolfi's former associates from the CIA.

My own efforts lead me to believe there was something more: a presence, an agenda, lurking in the darkness before me.

Soon I found myself working the darkness with "deep throat" contacts unwilling to go on the record, and open source contacts chosen as "useful idiots" protected by "plausible deniability."

Similar situations had driven many investigative journalists near the border of madness. Most days it came down to juggling a handful of spies, lies, and an occasional tale of polygraph tape.

Entering the unknown chamber of covert intentions had been occasionally rewarding.

I had uncovered sources willing to speak, in private, and strictly off the record. They pointed to the darkness ahead.

I knew that the more I penetrated the blackness, the more I was at risk of falling over the edge -- pushed by a runaway imagination and deliberate misdirection.

It was all part and parcel of the spy games being played in the UFO community.

This review, and preview of things to come, will continue in part two.

The series KNOWING THE FUTURE: CIA, 9/11, UFOs, and the Extraterrestrial Presence, is available at STARpod.org.

Richard Helms on SERPO and Counterintelligence

2009-07-06T23:19:00.004-05:00

Disclaimer: Although it's true that Richard Helms is no longer with us, his words, presented gently out-of-context, are his own.

SLP: Thank you Mr. Helms for being with us today to discuss the SERPO UFO Spy Games and the reason behind the apparent counterintelligence activities surrounding the tale.

Why do you think we may be seeing counterintelligence operations on the Internet?

Helms: Counterintelligence in any intelligence organization is obviously a key element for the simple reason that any [intelligence manager] is bound to be deeply concerned ahout the day that he may walk into the office and have someone tell him that a [foreign] penetration has been found in the organization.

SLP: It is my understanding that the so-called "Team of Five" who were looking into the SERPO affair -- the team consisted of persons with close ties to the world of intelligence, including your former associate from the Agency, Dr. Kit Green -- had been compromised through Internet trickery.

Helms: This is obviously a ... nightmare because in the tradition of intelligence, being penetrated by a hostile service is one of the real disasters. In other words, a man who is in a position to turn over your real intelligence secrets, your sources particularly, to a hostile service. This possibility that the service is penetrated ... is something that obviously should concern ... very deeply.

SLP: What would be the role for counterintelligence in the case of SERPO, which involved alleged releases of government information on the Internet, by dubious sources?

Helms: The Counterintelligence Staff in my view had two principal roles.

One: to identify wherever possible what hostile services are doling, what agents they were using, and in turn attempting to protect the [Intelligence Community] from penetration by these hostile forces.

The second big job was to ride, in a sense, sidecar with the positive intelligence operators who were recruiting agents and getting information through this device [The Internet], to see to it that those agents were clean.

SLP: It would seem that you are implying the possibility of intelligence collection on the Internet, and vetting of new sources by counterintelligence operatives?

Helms: In other words, that they were individuals that were really telling the truth (as they saw it) to their handlers ... and were not double agents penetrating [members of the intelligence community] on behalf of some hostile service.

SLP: If I understand what you are saying correctly, intelligence on the Internet may consist of two different operations ... intelligence collection, and counterintelligence elements which provide both protection and vetting?

Helms: ... the more controversial part of the CI Staff is the second element, where there is a normal and natural tension between the positive intelligence collector ...

SLP: The intelligence persons interacting with the Internet community ...

Helms: ... and the counterintelligence expert, who is wont to tell the positive intelligence collector that the agent he has just recruited is likely to be working for some foreign intelligence organization and therefore, either he should be treated as a double agent or should be dropped.

Now this tension sometimes creates, and has in the past created, real animosities.

SLP: It sounds as if the CI elements shadow the Internet collection efforts?

Helms: I don't know any way to run an intelligence organization properly without this kind of tension. The positive intelligence collector will say, "Look, we know whether the agent

is on the level or not. We don't need these fellows in the Counterintelligence constantly worrying us and harassing us ..."

SLP: Assuming they even know the identities of the CI operatives. It's possible to conceal your identity, cover your tracks on line ... even covertly remote control the collectors' computers ...

Helms: The counterintelligence fellows, on the other side, say the positive intelligence fellows fall in love with their agents, that they aren't careful enough in analysing the potential that that agent has for penetration or for being a double agent.

SLP: It almost sounds as if there is a potential for intentional covert interference with the collection operation?

Helms: ... on the one hand the positive intelligence collector is told to go out and recruit agents. And here on the other hand the person in his own organization is telling him his recruitments are no good. I don't know any way to eliminate that tension. I think it's built into the process.

SLP: And it would certainly seem to be an effective "spy game" to play on the Internet.

Helms: I realize that when I was Director some of the most difficult, in effect painful decisions I had to make were to resolve differences between the positive intelligence collector and the Counterintelligence Staff.

SLP: Mr. Helms, the SERPO affair has resulted in numerous and often baseless accusations. I understand that presents a problem of trust, and potentially might even damage a few careers without just cause. How did you deal with these kind of situations as the Director?

Helms: I had a policy with respect to, a personal policy with respect to people, staff members who were accused or where it was alleged that they might be in touch with a hostile service or

be a double agent or something of this kind.

And that was that I felt that we owed any staff man against whom allegations of this kind were made not only the fullest kind of examination but the fullest opportunity to clear himself if he could ... it's just honest-to-God fairness with respect to people with whom you'd worked, whom you had assumed were as dedicated as you were to the work of the Agency and that to have them smeared when sometimes there was no real basis for this was unfair, and I wanted to see justice done.

At least as imperfect as human justice can be.

SLP: Unfortunately, these kind of smear tactics become a permanent part of the Internet and the on-line culture ...

Helms: I wanted to at least satisfy myself that I wasn't simply being swept along by somebody who didn't like the man, or who had an odd beat in his head or felt that the chain of circumstantial evidence was so persuasive that it had to be proved.

SLP: There's been plenty of that in this entire sordid SERPO UFO Spy Game.

Helms: I just didn't like those things.

SLP: Thank you, sir, for preserving your thoughts, which are even more relevant today.

[Helms comments are sourced from the CIA released interview of March 2008, conducted by Dr. Robert M. Hathaway.]

Note added 7/7/2009:

http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/wireStory?id=5522102

The Defense Intelligence Agency, long a home for intelligence analysis, is joining the spy vs. spy game.

DIA joins just three other military organizations authorized to carry out offensive counterintelligence operations— the Army Counterintelligence office, the Navy Criminal Investigative Serve and the Air Force office of Special Investigations.

Crash and Burn: Is this the Beginning and the End of Disclosure?

2009-06-30T10:22:00.015-05:00

"Warning! Take cover! Fantastic imagination? Or terrifying truth of the future?"

"We are the survivors of a disintegrated solar system. At this moment, the remainder of our fleet is circling your globe."

"What do you want with me?"

"Arrange for your leaders to confer with us in the city of Washington."

Thus begins the trailer for the classic 1950s film EARTH VS THE FLYING SAUCERS ...

And if it all sounds too familiar, it should: it's the same basic message being promoted today by the "exopolitical movement," the "disclosure movement," and anyone else willing to throw their political weight against an alledged White House gateway to "UFO truth."

Some folks take this subject way too seriously -- Ryan Dube at Reality Uncovered was all over me yesterday for revealing a snippet of email from the messages leaked in 2006 by Ron Pandolfi at DNI DIA/MASINT.

This is strange because the same snippet was already posted at Reality Uncovered in 2007.

Ryan continues to pursue an agenda against the UFO believers with a fervency that often surprises me.

In a somewhat threatening tone, Ryan wrote to me:

"Whether or not you're a collaborator, knowingly or not - everything you're doing is assisting the Scammers, making you enemy #1."

Good to know I'm Number One, Ryan, but who is Number Six?

It's become true: the Internet has created "the whole world as The Village."

Back to the "saucer problem" ...

Fortunately modern technology (The Internet) allows for less destructive ways of getting attention to an issue than crashing a flying saucer into the Capitol or disintegrating the White House.

The problem with forcing government disclosure (on any subject) is the resulting mess tends to crash and burn.

Secrets are, after all, intended to remain hidden from the public at large. It's the law, and saying otherwise doesn't make it so. If they wanted you to know, they'd tell you.

No one should be surprised to learn they are the target of counterintelligence if they oppose government policy.

Of course the whole idea behind an "exopolitical movement" is to gently nudge the government in the executive and congressional ribs by pointing out that they appear to be excluded from "the big secret" too.

And some enthusiasts claim that is exactly what is happening right now as witnessed by the SERPO Affair. (Which is apparently evil and not entertainment, in the world of Ryan Dube.)

As for the state of exopolitics ...

Larry Lowe has published an interesting overview of the major players in the exopolitics game.

I recommend reading the full article, but here is the short list:

Dr. Steven M. Greer www.disclosureproject.org
Steven Bassett www.paradigmresearchgroup.org
National Exopolitics Exopolitics Institute
The Obama Administration www.whitehouse.gov
Jeff Peckman Extraterrestrial Affairs Commission Ballot Initiative
Mainstream Media

(Huh? OK, Larry King, and a handful of not particularly informative UFO specials on CNN and some of the other networks.)

International Exopolitics European Exopolitics Summit in Barcelona, Spain

Disclosure 2.0

ET

And that, my friends, leads us back to the beginning, waiting for the proverbial flying saucer to drop onto the White House lawn.