Feb 02 2007
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UFO Whistleblowers
Greg’s post on the strange tale of Jaime Shandera’s involvement in the UFO subject should be considered a cautionary and essential lesson for anyone who has tried (or is contemplating trying) to determine precisely what is known about the UFO subject at an official level.
Indeed, as I know well, any attempt to pull back the veil of secrecy that certainly exists when it comes to UFOs often results in conveniently-placed insider sources coming forward with ufological tales of both wonder and awe. Or are they just tales full of lies and half-truths, designed to push persistent ufologists as far away from the real picture as possible? As Greg noted in his post, with respect to the odd tale of the so-called Yellow Book: “[It] may be one more piece of disinformation in a litany of junk that was released…to ensnare unsuspecting ufologists and the foreign intelligence agents who preyed on them.”
And that is the central problem. Sorting the good data from the bad data; the wheat from the chaff. And there is another problem too; and it’s one that is slightly more subtle in nature. I know from speaking with certain colleagues who have cultivated their own Deep Throat-style sources, that there is often an intense desire to believe what they are told - usually because it offers the researcher a unique insight into a secret world full of intrigue, excitement, and high-strangeness. In other words, it makes the researcher feel important that someone “in the Government” wants to spill the secrets of the Universe to them - and possibly to them alone.
Make no mistake: psychological warfare planners and disinformation specialists within the official world fully understand the very ridiculous ego-driven attitudes that certain players in the UFO field have, and they exploit this to the absolute hilt. They make the researcher feel important; they stress that it is the researcher, and the researcher alone, who can help in “getting the truth out.”Â
And what happens? The same researcher is plunged into a strange environment full of clandestine meetings, shadowy informants, questionable documents, and where nothing is quite as it appears to be. And the outcome is very often the same: the relationship between researcher and “government agent” eventually comes to an end with nothing definitive having been supplied by the official world; yet for his or her part, the researcher has often been manipulated and milked for data to an extreme level.
Who wins in this scenario? Certainly not the UFO research community, which can do little more than endlessly debate whether or not the data provided by “Informant A,” or “Source B,” is genuine or not. And perhaps that is the whole point. Perhaps all of the whistleblower data provided by insider sources can be considered bogus. Perhaps we have all been duped into arguing about this case or that case, while the real story remains buried. Perhaps none of those off-the-record insiders who have related fantastic tales about galaxy-hopping aliens have a real interest in spilling the beans. Perhaps, instead, their goal is to get us to spill the beans about what we know; and then, if anything of a truly sensitive nature surfaces, the official world stands a decent chance of uncovering the source of that same data and quickly and effectively crushing it.
Having interviewed - extensively at times - a number of elderly whistleblowers (for, primarily, my books Body Snatchers in the Desert and On the Trail of the Saucer Spies), I speak from experience. At times, some might say, I have fallen into precisely those traps that I highlight above. And, like many people within the UFO community who have cultivated such sources, I tend to believe certain things (but not all, by any means) I’ve been told. Mostly, as my two aforementioned books reveal, the data I was supplied with suggested that the “alien” angle of the UFO puzzle is a smokescreen, behind which sensitive military projects (sometimes of a distinctly dark and dubious nature) can be effectively hidden.
People often ask me about Body Snatchers in particular: “How do you know you weren’t lied to?” “How do you know that you weren’t fed a specific story to steer you away from the fact that aliens really did crash at Roswell?” Well, the answer of course is that I don’t know. It could be; and I have never denied that scenario either when asked. I don’t think I was lied to. Or let me put it another way: I don’t believe that the people I interviewed were consciously lying to me. Had they been provided with disinformation and, not realizing that fact, passed it on to me believing it to be the genuine article? That’s certainly a possibility. But, again, I don’t think that’s the case.
But, to reiterate: the reader might consider that I have fallen into precisely the same trap that I warn about above. The fact is that when it comes to whistleblowers, there is very little that can be said with one-hundred-per-cent certainty. They surface, they tell their tales, and they vanish back into the shadows - and the UFO research community spends decades arguing and debating the relevant insider stories, with little progress achieved beyond yet more endless shouting and arguing about the merits of this or that.
So, if one day you receive a call from an elderly man or woman who claims too have worked in the Pentagon decades ago; and additionally claims that you, the researcher, have been identified as someone who can “help get the truth out to the public,” certainly listen to what they have to say, research it, and when you’re confident that you have gone about as far as you can, put the story out there for the community to evaluate.
But don’t expect that it will change anything. It won’t. It will just confuse things further. I found that out with Body Snatchers: a good many people, as Paul Kimball once noted, dismissed the data that my sources provided before they had even read the book! Why? Because it wasn’t what they wanted to hear. Others read the book, then rationally disagreed because they felt that the evidence pointed in other directions; or agreed because they felt it answered the questions to a satisfactory degree. But still, we the community, are left debating controversial data provided by whistlebowers that is likely to remain unresolved to any meaningful, definitive degree. Again, perhaps that is the intended goal all along: keep us busy, and keep us guessing.
So, the UFO research field endlessly debates while, no doubt, disinformation planners in the Pentagon congratulate themselves on their latest ploy that keeps us within the confines of this particular avenue or that particular avenue, and away from the real story.
For many people it comes down to one thing: which whistleblower-originated story or theme you care to believe. And, to our cost, those psychological geniuses in the official world know this, they exploit it, and they always will. Always keep that in mind when dealing with such people.
Â
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February 2nd, 2007 at 3:28 pm
There is a related problem in that some UFO witnesses appear to be hawking both real experiences as well as flights of their own fancy, and in some cases it isn’t always easy to know which parts are which.
I’m thinking in particular of everyone’s favorite, Billy Meier. Some of his photographs seem very convincing, and would be difficult to fake with that degree of quality to them. Others are clearly fakery, particularly some of his video pieces which are nothing more than models being swung around in circles on strings.
It’s tempting to pass Meier off as nothing but a revealed fraud, and many do just that. He makes claimd about his Pleiadian babe, Semjase, and the wisdom she imparts to him. Then you do a quick Google on the name Semjase and you find numerous sites that say the photo of her that Meier provided was confirmed to be that of a model from an old Sears catalog. And you think, “Well, that nails the coffin shut on Billy and his babe.”
But try to locate that picture alleged Sears picture. I haven’t been able to and I’ve searched quite a bit for it. So then trace the claim that Semjase is a model for Sears and you find that all the sites making that claim refer back to a site called Underground Video. Go to their site and indeed you find that they allege they researched the matter and discovered the photo in a Sears catalog. But they give no references to the catalog date; no photos of the catalog. All they give is an allegation, and all the other sites that parrot what Underground Video says are just regurgitating unsupported hearsay.
That just adds more confustion to the whole subject of the credibility of Billy Meier. It appears we have serious trust issues, not just with “official insider sources,” but with witnesses as well.
February 2nd, 2007 at 7:37 pm
Excellent posting and a sober warning.
There are so many rabbit trails you can go down in this field that I don’t think anyone will ever get “to the bottom of it” You might get a pretty good idea, but you won’t “figure it out”
Again I think the government really doesn’t have a clue as to what is going on because if they did they wouldn’t be using UFOlogists or even bothering to talk to them, because to the intel types a UFOlogist is beneath contempt. Just like some scientists treat paranormal investigators as beneath contempt.
Jess
February 3rd, 2007 at 8:49 am
I couldn’t agree any more with your points without becoming strident. The researchers and the audience (the overall UFO community) are being played. It’s the elephant in the room no one is willing to talk about, because to call it what it is would be to make us all look like fools.
Well, we are fools to buy anything from a source that can’t be verified.
Remember whet Scotty said in the original Star Trek … “Fool me once, shame on you, fool me twice, shame on me.”
Shame on all of us.
February 3rd, 2007 at 1:27 pm
Nick
I don’t think governments can afford to have its private citizens (ufologist) find the answer to what is probably the greatest mystery mankind has faced, before they have. Confusing researchers as to the true nature of u.f.o.s keeps them one step ahead in the quest for answers. With that in mind, I give no more importance to an informants story than to the story told by a witness of a bigfoot exiting a saucer while wearing a blue belt. This doesn’t mean that the information shouldn’t be analyzed and that other evidence or witnesses to support the claims not be looked for, just that no matter how good it looks there is still a 99% chance of it being lies. It’s that 1% chance of it being the truth that prevents me from discarding these tales out of hand.
February 3rd, 2007 at 4:10 pm
Excellent points Nick. I agree with Daniel; that “Well, we are fools to buy anything from a source that can’t be verified.” except that I’d go further; even then, with so-called “verification” how are we ever to know it’s authentic? We don’t.
If the White House came out on the world wide news and announced that we did, indeed, have UFOs and aliens, and the camera panned on the ship and the little buggers, I wouldn’t believe it. I’d like to, I would almost, (maybe) but I’d have a nagging feeling that it was staged, a fake.
Lots of disinfo out there, no one can pick out the true bits. Except the people that were there, or experienced such. And then, since the rest of us are suspicious of everything to some degree, no one believes them anyway.
(jesus, what a dismissal view, lol.)
March 24th, 2008 at 6:09 am
Raven - Right, can you at least learn to google properly? I’m calling BS on your supposed search for the Sears catalogue model. I searched and found her in about 10-15 mins. Her name is Michelle DellaFave and she also appears on the Dean Martin Show as one of the ‘Golddiggers’ and a ‘Dingaling Sister’. We’ll never get to the bottom of anything if you can’t even be bothered to put a little effort in and do a proper search. Here’s a link:
http://images.google.co.uk/imgres?imgurl=http://thegolddiggers.files.wordpress.com/2007/07/golddiggers-railroadcolorad.jpg&imgrefurl=http://thegolddiggers.wordpress.com/striking-gold/&h=1466&w=1120&sz=415&hl=en&start=1&um=1&tbnid=5D0t6sA39Vf9tM:&tbnh=150&tbnw=115&prev=/images%3Fq%3DGolddiggers%26um%3D1%26hl%3Den%26safe%3Doff