Abby Martin interviews retired U.S.
Army Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, former national security advisor to the
Reagan administration, who spent years as an assistant to Secretary of
State Colin Powell during both Bush administrations. Today, he is honest
about the unfixable corruption inside the establishment and the
corporate interests driving foreign policy.
Hear a rare insider’s view of what interests are behind U.S. wars,
the manipulation of intelligence, the intertwining of the military and
corporate world, and why the U.S. Empire is doomed.
I want to get right to the meat of the matter without a big preamble.
I do not 'believe' in UFOs. I don't much believe anything.
I am convinced, though, that an intelligent person who sits down and takes a hard look at the available information will, if he or she overcomes cognitive dissonance, come away convinced that there is something going on.
I want to use this article to link to various resources that a putative explorer of this topic can use to arrive at his or her own conclusions about the matter.
1.> Let's talk about Ben Rich. Rich was the second director of Lockheed Skunkworks from 1975-1991.
He oversaw the development
of the stealth fighter, the F-117A nighthawk. Before his death, Rich made several statements which might be called eyebrow-raising.
Aerospace journalist James Goodall, who wrote for publications such as Jane’s Defense Weekly, Aviation Week and Space Technology, and Interavia, specializes in the history, development,
and operations of the world’s only Mach 3 capable, manned air breathing
aircraft, the SR-71 family of aircraft. He is also an author, as well as the Associate Curator at the Pacific
Aviation Meseum, HI. He was also the restoration manager at the Museum
of Flight in Paine Field, Everett, WA.
He alleges that he spoke to Ben Rich shortly before Rich's death: “About ten days before he died, I was speaking to Ben on the telephone at the USC Medical Center in LA. And he said, ‘Jim, we have things out in the desert that are fifty years beyond what you can comprehend. They have about forty five hundred people at the Lockheed Skunk works. What have they been doing for the last eighteen or twenty years? They’re building something.'”
Jan Harzan, a senior executive with IBM, along with Tom Keller, an aerospace engineer who has worked as a computer systems analyst for NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, discusses a talk Ben gave some time ago. On March 23rd, 1993 at a UCLA School of Engineering talk where he was presenting a general history of Skunk Works, he said this:
“We now know how to travel to the stars. There is an error in the equations, and we have figured it out, and now know how to travel to the stars and it won’t take a lifetime to do it. It is time to end all the secrecy on this, as it no longer poses a national security threat, and make the technology available for use in the private sector. There are many in the intelligence community who would like to see this stay in the black and not see the light of day. We now have the technology to take ET home.”
Here is video of Jan telling his story:
2.> Paul Hellyer. Hellyer was Canada's Minister of Defence under Lester B. Pearson from 1963 to 1968. As Minister of Defence, he oversaw the drastic and controversial integration and unification of the Royal Canadian Navy, Canadian Army, and the Royal Canadian Air Force into a single organization, the Canadian Forces. Under Pierre Trudeau, he served as Transport Minister, and was Senior Minister in the Cabinet, a position similar to the current position of Deputy Prime Minister.
Here's what he has to say: “Decades ago, visitors from other planets warned us about the direction we were heading and offered to help. Instead, some of us interpreted their visits as a threat, and decided to shoot first and ask questions after."
"Trillions of dollars have been spent on black projects which both congress and the commander in chief have deliberately been kept in the dark.”
”In one of the cases during the cold war, 1961, there were about 50 UFOs in formation flying South from Russia across Europe. The supreme allied commander was very concerned and was about ready to press the panic button when they turned around and went back over the North Pole. They decided to do an investigation and they investigated for three years and they decided that with absolute certainty that four different species, at least, have been visiting this planet for thousands of years. There’s been a lot more activity in the past two decades, especially since we invented the atomic bomb.”
Whaaaaaat?
No, don't worry, Hellyer isn't "disclosing" anything. He became a UFO enthusiast much later in life. This is a hobby for him.
Here's a video of him speaking:
3.> Various NASA astronauts.
What does Brian O'Leary former Astronaut and Princeton Physics professor have to say?
“There is abundant evidence that we are being contacted, that civilizations have been monitoring us for a very long time. That their appearance is bizarre from any type of traditional materialistic western point of view. That these visitors use the technologies of consciousness, they use toroids, they use co-rotating magnetic disks for their propulsion systems, that seems to be a common denominator of the UFO phenomenon”
“In my opinion I think they were worried that it would panic the public so they started telling lies about it. And then I think they had to tell another lie to cover their first lie, now they don’t know how to get out of it. Now it’s going to be so embarrassing to admit that all these administrations have told so many untruths, it would be embarrassing getting out of it. There are a number of extraterrestrial vehicles out there cruising around.”
4.> Lord Admiral Hill-Norton, Former Chief of Defence Staff, 5 Star Admiral of the Royal Navy, Chairman of the NATO Military Committee:
“There is a serious possibility that we are being visited and have been visited for many years by people from outer space, by other civilizations. Who they are, where they are from, and what they want should be the subject of rigorous scientific investigation and not be the subject of ‘rubishing’ by tabloid newspapers.”
“This thing has gotten so highly-classified…it is just impossible to get anything on it. I have no idea who controls the flow of need-to-know because, frankly, I was told in such an emphatic way that it was none of my business that I’ve never tried to make it to be my business since. I have been interested in this subject for a long time and I do know that whatever the Air Force has on the subject is going to remain highly classified”
6.> Various military personnel with verified backgrounds: UFOs near nuclear missile silos?
"Behind the scenes, high-ranking Air Force officers are soberly concerned about UFOs. But through official secrecy and ridicule, many citizens are led to believe the unknown flying objects are nonsense." (source)
"It is time for the government to declassify records that are more than 25 years old and to provide scientists with data that will assist in determining the real nature of this phenomenon"
The UFO phenomenon interests me, not because I believe or want to believe that aliens are real and involved in human affairs, but because there is clearly something happening to make all these people report abductions, all these ex-military staffers report sightings, investigative journalists write books, and so forth.
From a psychological standpoint, the existence of the UFO phenomenon, and people's varied reactions to it, is interesting. As Carl Jung noted:
The
problem of the Ufos is, as you rightly say, a very fascinating one, but
it is as puzzling as it is fascinating; since, in spite of all
observations I know of, there is no certainty about their very nature.
On the other side, there is an overwhelming material pointing to their
legendary or mythological aspect. As a matter of fact the psychological
aspect is so impressive, that one almost must regret that the Ufos seem
to be real after all. I have followed up the literature as much as
possible and it looks to me as if something were seen and even confirmed
by radar, but nobody knows exactly what is seen.
I'm not about to deluge you with links to UFO resources. Good information on the topic is readily available online to anyone with the curiosity, discernment, and ability to push a "search" button who is willing to go fishing for it amongst the deluge of crap that is even more readily available.
Yes, if there is "truth" to these UFO stories it turns everything our tv sets, educators, and governments are telling us about the world on its head.
Yes, there are a lot of loons out there who are UFO truthers.
Still, one can't look at the data and readily dismiss the reams of credible incident reports without lying to oneself or engaging in gross intellectual dishonesty.
This is why many self-professed "skeptics", it would seem, never bother to look at the data at all.
The mainstream massmind's infantilizing obsession with science fiction and fantasy on the one hand while maintaining rigid, rabid ignorance of this phenomenon strikes me as somewhat dissociative.
I think the implications of there being any substance to this stuff scares the bejesus out of most people, frankly. Especially "religious" people (or more correctly, dogmatic people). Or perhaps the average person is uncomfortable living with uncertainties.
There's also a really weird social stigma attached to being interested in this stuff, a taint by association that affects one's credibility and perceived intellectual merit.
For this reason I suspect there are many more people who are interested in this than would be apparent from the amount of conversation that takes place on the matter.
Strange that a society so taken with "science" should also be happy to ignore what's right in front of its face. But this goes back to cognitive dissonance, again... people are strongly psychologically motivated to ignore, forget, or hallucinate away data that interferes with their operating belief systems.
