Article 2: UFO Magazine (Feb 2006)

There are two issues I'll address here. First, I've been asked to comment on whether I believe the postings from a high-ranking U.S. government source from the Defense Intelligence Agency who has taken the name Anonymous are authentic or are part of some incredibly complex hoax; and second, what is the best method for releasing this information? Should it be through a small but highly specialized email group's moderator or through a more credible, traditional source like CNN or Fox News?
With respect to the authenticity of the emailed postings to me from Anonymous, I believe they are true and correct in terms of the basic or core story: In 1965 twelve very carefully screened and selected individuals were sent to an alien home world called Serpo approximately 38.42 light years away in the Zeta Reticuli binary star system. They resided there until 1978, when eight of them returned. Two died on the foreign planet, and two decided to remain there.
Their story, their journal entries, their photographs, and the samples they brought back were all memorialized in a final 3,000-plus page report entitled Project Serpo, which was finalized in 1980 with two supplementary reports to which the late Dr. Carl Sagan contributed and grudgingly but finally signed off on regarding the astronomical and math anomalies that did not add up.
Many have found themselves bogged down in the minutiae of whether it was ten men and two women or twelve men, or how could Anonymous make a mistake over the amount of equipment taken? Was it 9,100 pounds or 91,000 pounds? So what! Let's concentrate on the core story-the overall big picture-that twelve of our citizens from the United States of America embarked on a 13-year mission to live on another world. That's where the focus should be-not on all of these petty, nit-picky details! That's what everyone should be in awe of.
What BS! Little wonder ufology finds itself progressing ever so slowly over the years. It constantly shoots itself with all its inhouse pettiness and fighting; it finds itself hardly any further along after a major disclosure is made in the UFO field.
The evidence we have that such a human-alien exchange program did take place is backed up by several high-ranking former government officials: retired USAF colonel Ed Doty, ex-AFOSI special agent Richard Doty, Paul McGovern, Gene Loscowski, and USAF Colonel Jack Casey. In addition, author Whitley Strieber claims to have met a surviving team member of Project Serpo in Florida. Anonymous later confirmed Whitley's story to me-that, in fact, Whitley ran into this team member on three separate occasions.
A retired USAF colonel actually oversaw the project and commented privately to an acquaintance of Bill Ryan, amazed that details were now being released; this incident is recounted in the comments section of the website www.serpo.org/comments.html#1 . I know his name from Anonymous, as confirmed by Bill, but I will withhold it since he has chosen not to go public at this time.
Next, there is the former high-ranking government official who is actually coordinating this programmed release between the former DIA officials who worked on and oversaw the project and the three DIA officials who allow them access to the secure reading room where they can transcribe this material to be released to the general public through me. His name would be known to 99.99 percent of the readers of this magazine and my UFO email list because the readers and subscribers to these two forums follow such intelligence and black-world matters more closely than the general public.
For obvious reasons I'm not going to disclose his name because many UFO investigators, kooks, and freaks would soon be beating down his door asking him if it were true, and he would say, "No, it isn't true!" and then make it so. He'd order it stopped. And last but not least, former high-ranking government official Paul McGovern had lunch at an Arlington, Virginia restaurant on December 8, 2005 with another former high-ranking intelligence official now retired and working as a consultant. Paul gave me a brief summation of his conversation with this official under several administrations and the official said he was never briefed on the specific details but was aware of the project's existence and its overall big picture. I was going to provide his name for this article, but after careful reflective thought, I've decided not to for the same reasons I cited above: I don't want him harassed by anyone reading this article and the zillions of self-styled investigators in this field called ufology.
This former official believes in disclosure, but he feels that some of the information should be kept from public view, and I totally agree now that I've been made privy to much of it via the postings from Anonymous. Much of it which will never see the light of day. Besides, for the UFO field enough never seems to be enough. I could have provided twelve names who have gone on record that such a program did in fact take place while stating that I had another twelve names that I was keeping to myself, and people would still want those other twelve names; the twelve they got just wouldn't be good enough. It never is with the kooky, mental whack-job ufologists.
And now on to the second issue-the method of disclosure-which I'll briefly address to my highly regarded and respected colleague in all of this, Richard C. Doty. In Sergeant Doty's piece, he suggests that while there was really nothing wrong with Anonymous making his stunning revelations through me, it would have carried more credibility had it been done through a more open source like CNN or Fox News.
Again: BS! More credible than li'l ol' me? Absolutely! I agree with Rick, but the real question is: Would those more credible, mainstream open sources have ever run with it and published the material from Anonymous? Absolutely not.
CNN, CBS, NBC, ABC, 60 Minutes, Dateline, 20/20, and others would have demanded that the story be verified by the White House itself, meaning either Bush, Cheney, or one of their subordinates, with their implicit knowledge and permission, would have signed off on such a disclosure before being made public. Now does Doty or anyone reading this article really believe that the single most secretive presidential administration of the past 50 years or so would sign off on verifying such a highly classified project? Does anyone in their right mind imagine the White House spokeshole as saying to one of these major news media outlets: "Oh, yeah, wow, so you found out; someone leaked it to you guys. OK, the cat's out of the bag, so yes, it's all true. Go ahead and run with it; President Bush is fine with it!"
Yeah, right. And my mother's the Queen of England! In fact, look at what's happened in fewer than 60 days with postings 1-11, November 2-December 21, 2005 coming through me: It's sparked a worldwide phenomenon and has caused people to really, seriously consider that a mind-boggling human-ET exchange program actually occurred during that time period.
At this point, I won't elaborate on how postings to my small but highly influential UFO email list, ironically loaded with former and current government insiders, really got the word out much more effectively than a mainstream news media outlet would ever have, except to refer the readers of this article and magazine to the absolutely brilliant summation written by my learned, scholarly, and erudite colleague Bill Ryan. He wrote an executive summary of sorts specifically for Anonymous on the tremendous reach, impact, scope, breadth, and sociological inroads Project Serpo has had thus far. Amazing! People are actually beginning to think outside of the box. Bottom line: Could approaching CNN or Fox have resulted in greater publicity for Project Serpo than the method chosen by Anonymous and his small group at the DIA? That's right: We're not alone in the universe and our government, for its own paranoid, sick reasons has been keeping this-what ufology's cop-on-the-beat Stan Friedman calls the Cosmic Watergate-from us for umpteen years! And mind you, your tax dollars pay these government clowns to keep us in the dark. Does any of this really make sense?
Think about it: We pay these government kooks, spooks, and ne'er-do-wells high GS-grade salaries to keep us from learning what they've discovered over the years. That's the real outrage that the UFO community should be up in arms over, not about the gender makeup of our team members on Project Serpo nor the weight of the equipment taken on their 13-year journey. Gimme a break, mental patients! I respectfully disagree with Sergeant Doty, whose wise counsel and sage advice I have often sought with respect to intelligence matters, but I totally disagree with his assessment here. In all fairness to him, he is really out of his league.
Why the secrecy? And when will it end with at least some major announcement regarding the UFO subject being made public? The most troubling aspect of all this is that most people need an authority figure to come out and say this-and-that is so for reasons of credibility because most people can't think for themselves. In other words, they can't weigh and evaluate the evidence on its own merits and come to a definitive conclusion on their own; they need someone to do it for them.
Short of that, people are never going to buy this story-nor any other UFO-related story-short of a former director of Central Intelligence, secretary of Defense, or chairman of the Joint Chiefs coming out and saying: "Yes, Project Serpo occurred and I was apprised of its overall program, structure, makeup, and mission when I was the DCI during the XX administration." Keep dreamin'.
In closing, I'd like to cite a few choice passages from well-respected UFO author Timothy Good's 1996 ground-breaking book, Beyond Top Secret: The Worldwide UFO Cover-Up (William Morrow, 1988). Much has been made of the widely published comments that President Reagan made after a private White House screening of Close Encounters of the Third Kind, but what has been nearly forgotten were the following comments which appear in Good's book and which deserve equal consideration:

CLOSE ENCOUNTERS OF THE THIRD KIND-A REALITY
During a talk given to the Tulsa, Oklahoma Astronomy Club in 1982, former Air Force intelligence officer Steve Lewis revealed that the 12 years he spent investigating UFOs for the military both in the U.S. and abroad convinced him that intelligent extraterrestrial beings are visiting Earth. Apologizing for being unable to be more specific owing to strict orders from the Air Force not to divulge specific details about his UFO research from 1965-1977, Lewis stated that only a fraction of information accumulated by the military has been released.
"That movie Close Encounters of the Third Kind is more realistic than you'd believe," he told the audience. "You can believe that or not." Pressed to reveal what had convinced him that UFOs are extraterrestrial spacecraft rather than top-secret military devices, Lewis commented: "The records, the information I saw while in my job. I no longer rule out what the possibilities might be."
Next, we have this information, which includes a cryptic comment by former DCI and President George Bush:
Nobody likes to look silly. Fear of ridicule is a very compelling reason for politicians to debunk the subject. British Air Minister George Ward explained [1954] that, if he admitted the existence of UFOs without evidence that the general public could actually touch, the public would consider that the Government had gone barmy. Few politicians-in Britain, the United States and worldwide- have any inside knowledge of the subject of UFOs, which is why their repeated pronouncements debunking all the reports are so convincing. And those few who have troubled to study the matter, or who have been privy to top-secret information, may be so bewildered and even alarmed by the awesome complexity of the phenomenon that they would rather say nothing at all.
"You don't know the half of it," was all former CIA Director George Bush could say when asked by a campaign committee member about UFO secrecy during his first presidential election campaign.
Politicians, furthermore, are unlikely to speak out on such a controversial topic without a mandate from the electorate. Relatively few people write to their elected representatives about UFOs, although I am pleased to report than an increasing number are doing so."
And continuing with these choice comments:
In these respects, I am fully in sympathy with the current official policy. "From an intelligence point of view," remarks Dr James Harder, "the UFO phenomenon must be truly awesome - the worst of science fiction come to life. However, over the years, the intelligence agencies must have come to the realization that the strangers from space are nothing exactly new - that evidence indicates that we are experiencing only an intensification of what may have been going on centuries. And continuing with this same line of thought, we have:
It has been suggested that those in the know are concerned about the reaction of the public and religious authorities to revelations regarding the link between the UFO phenomenon and religion (one hypothesis being that homo sapiens is genetically linked with extraterrestrials). And with one final notation on this same train of thought from Good's other book, Alien Base: The Evidence for Extraterrestrial Colonization of Earth (Harper Perennial, 1999):
In addition to the visitors being responsible for genetically upgrading the human race on two occasions in our distant past, it was alleged that a few of our great spiritual leaders-including Jesus-were genetically "engineered" by a type of artificial insemination, in an attempt to instill Earth people with spiritual concepts. The reluctance of this particular group of extraterrestrials to communicate with humanity at large was due mainly to the fact that we simply are not psychologically nor spiritually ready for contact with a higher civilization, and it is necessary for us to evolve independently. Essentially, we are spiritual beings surviving beyond death. And finally, these are author Timothy Good's personal, closing observations:
It is my conviction that we are being visited by several groups of extraterrestrials, and that, while some may not be well-disposed towards us, others are benevolent. From my own investigations throughout the world, however, I am convinced that selective contacts have been made with possibly thousands of individuals. The visitors have no need to establish open contact, nor do they want the majority of us to know what they are doing here. It is probably, in my view, that the cover-up is sustained to a certain extent by the aliens themselves.
And in closing, we have this choice snippet from former DCI Roscoe Hillenkoetter:
One authority in a position to know facts-as known at the time-was former CIA Director Admiral Roscoe Hillenkoetter, who was unequivocal in his condemnation of official policy.
"The public has a right to know," he declared in 1960. "It is time for the truth to be brought out in open Congressional hearings . through official secrecy and ridicule, many citizens are led to believe the unknown flying objects are nonsense."
Forty-six years later, we're still those mushrooms living under a canopy of darkness and ignorance somewhat like the infamous, ignorant inhabitants of Plato's Allegory of the Cave in Book VII of The Republic. So, while the UFO community continues to wallow like swine in their petty jealousies and bicker, argue, and fight amongst themselves, this rather profound and awe-inspiring information will continue to be withheld from us. We berate the government insiders who withhold this information which rightfully belongs to us as losers. Believe me, they're not the only losers. Go look in the mirror and see who's staring back at you.