Jonathan Wojcik: "AAAHH!! REAL ALIENS!"

Below you'll find a brief excerpt from a blog post by Jonathan Wojcik. The post (entitled "AAAHH!! REAL ALIENS!") is thematically similar to a pair of excellent articles by Jerome Clark that appeared in Mark Chorvinsky's STRANGE MAGAZINE #10. From 1987 to 1998, STRANGE MAGAZINE was consistently the most imaginative and informative of all Fortean print magazines. In Clark's two articles (entitled "Close Encounters of the Third Kind, 1901-1959" and "Where Were the 'Grays'?"), he points out that in in pre-1960 close encounters there's a near-total absence of "little gray men of the sort that would figure prominently in reports of UFO abductions" during the 1960s and afterwards. Instead, the 1901-1959 reports are festooned with a variety of different lifeforms that range from the ridiculous to the sublime. Wojcik explores this idea further on his BOGLEECH blog. The incidents cited by Wojcik range from 1952 to 1989:

When most people think of allegedly "true" alien encounters, they think of little grey men with big black eyeballs, beaming people out of their beds for strange medical experiments. In reality, before the popularity of the "greys," people around the world reported a fantastic variety of otherworldly visitors exhibiting inexplicable and often disturbing behavior. It's likely that many of these incidents are either powerful delusions or flagrant lies, but we're not here to pass judgment or debate the paranormal; no matter the truth, accounts like these form a fascinating modern mythology all their own, and even the most jaded skeptic should appreciate the rich imagination it would take to cook up eerie manifestations like these...

To read Wojcik's entire post, click HERE.

Tim Weisberg's MIDNIGHT SOCIETY

Last night I appeared on Tim Weisberg's MIDNIGHT SOCIETY podcast for two hours to discuss CHAMELEO, WIDOW OF THE AMPUTATION & OTHER WEIRD CRIMES, BELA LUGOSI AND THE MONOGRAM NINE, and BELA LUGOSI'S DEAD. Subscribers to MIDNIGHT.FM can listen to the archived show right HERE.

MIDNIGHT SOCIETY

WITH TIM WEISBERG

LIVE WEEKNIGHTS,
9PM-MIDNIGHT CENTRAL

Havana Syndrome Update

From the BBC's 7-17-21 report entitled "'Havana Syndrome'-like Mystery Illness Affects Vienna US Diplomats":

The US government is investigating a series of health incidents in the Austrian capital Vienna involving its diplomats and other administration staff.

More than 20 officials have reported symptoms similar to Havana Syndrome - a mystery brain illness - since President Joe Biden took office in January.

The syndrome is unexplained, but US scientists say it is most probably caused by directed microwave radiation.

It was first found in Cuba in 2016-17. 

To read the entire article, click HERE.

From NPR's 7-22-21 report entitled "CIA Director Says He Is Escalating Efforts To Solve 'Havana Syndrome' Mystery":

CIA Director William Burns says he has redoubled the agency's efforts to uncover the cause of Havana syndrome — the mysterious set of ailments that has afflicted more than 200 U.S. officials and family members around the world.

That includes the assignment of a senior officer who once led the hunt for Osama bin Laden to lead the investigation and tripling the size of a medical team involved in the probe, Burns told NPR on Thursday in his first sit-down interview since being confirmed as the agency's chief in March.

"I am absolutely determined — and I've spent a great deal of time and energy on this in the four months that I've been CIA director — to get to the bottom of the question of what and who caused this," Burns said.

In a wide-ranging, exclusive interview with NPR's Mary Louise Kelly, Burns also discussed the CIA's future in Afghanistan and the theory that the coronavirus outbreak was caused by a leak from a Chinese state-run laboratory in Wuhan.

He called the present moment "a really important moment of transition in the world."

To read the entire article, click HERE.

Edward Snowden: "The Truest Conspiracies Meet With the Least Opposition"

From Edward Snowden's 7-1-21 GUARDIAN article entitled "Why Do Conspiracy Theories Flourish? Because the Truth Is Too Hard to Handle":

The greatest conspiracies are open and notorious — not theories, but practices expressed through law and policy, technology, and finance. Counterintuitively, these conspiracies are more often than not announced in public and with a modicum of pride. They’re dutifully reported in our newspapers; they’re bannered onto the covers of our magazines; updates on their progress are scrolled across our screens —  all with such regularity as to render us unable to relate the banality of their methods to the rapacity of their ambitions.

The party in power wants to redraw district lines. The prime interest rate has changed. A free service has been created to host our personal files. These conspiracies order, and disorder, our lives; and yet they can’t compete for attention with digital graffiti about pedophile Satanists in the basement of a DC pizzeria.

This, in sum, is our problem: the truest conspiracies meet with the least opposition.

Or to put it another way, conspiracy practices — the methods by which true conspiracies such as gerrymandering, or the debt industry, or mass surveillance are realized — are almost always overshadowed by conspiracy theories: those malevolent falsehoods that in aggregate can erode civic confidence in the existence of anything certain or verifiable.

In my life, I’ve had enough of both the practice and the theory. In my work for the United States National Security Agency, I was involved with establishing a Top-Secret system intended to access and track the communications of every human being on the planet. And yet after I grew aware of the damage this system was causing — and after I helped to expose that true conspiracy to the press — I couldn’t help but notice that the conspiracies that garnered almost as much attention were those that were demonstrably false.

To read the entire article, click HERE.

PERVERSION OF JUSTICE: Julie K. Brown on FRESH AIR

On July 20, 2021, investigative journalist Julie K. Brown appeared on NPR's FRESH AIR to discuss her new book, PERVERSION OF JUSTICE: THE JEFFREY EPSTEIN STORY. If you want to listen to the entire interview, click HERE.

What follows is a brief excerpt from Dave Davies' 7-20-21 NPR report entitled "Everyone Heard About Jeffrey Epstein's Enablers. Few Listened To His Victims":

When wealthy financier Jeffrey Epstein was arrested in 2006 following an investigation into his sexual activities with teenage girls, the case ended in a lenient plea bargain in which Epstein served 13 months in a county jail.

Eleven years later, Miami Herald reporter Julie K. Brown decided to revisit the case, which she calls "a horrendous miscarriage of justice."

"I wanted to do an investigative story on sex trafficking in general. And every time I Googled 'sex trafficking in Florida,' quite frankly, another Jeffrey Epstein story came up," Brown says. "But none of the stories that I read seemed to answer exactly how he got away with what he got away with."

Brown pored over records of the original police investigation and talked to detectives who had developed evidence against Epstein. She also identified 80 survivors, many of whom allege repeated abuse as adolescents in Epstein's Palm Beach, Fla., mansion.

"That's the one thing that I found that was missing in the [original] story, that none of the women's voices were in any of the stories that I read," Brown says. "There is nothing that was more powerful than the words of the women talking about this themselves. And I still kind of get choked up when I think about how brave they were to [speak out]."

Brown's 2018 series for the Herald generated national attention and led to the resignation of Labor Secretary Alexander Acosta, who had approved the earlier plea bargain as a U.S. attorney. It also spurred an investigation that put Epstein behind bars on new federal charges. A month after that arrest, Epstein died by asphyxiation in his cell. Though New York City's chief medical examiner declared it a suicide, Epstein's death continues to inspire conspiracy theories.

Brown revisits the case and her two-year investigation into Epstein in the new book Perversion of Justice.

"In this book, I lay out more about the scope and the breadth of the story so that readers can see the patterns in the whole picture of how Epstein's web of enablers helped him," she says. "He didn't do this alone. He had a whole ecosystem that he created that allowed this to happen."

CRYPTOSCATOLOGY INVADES THE EVERGREEN REVIEW PODCAST!

Miracle Jones of THE EVERGREEN REVIEW PODCAST recently interviewed me about my four-part EVERGREEN REVIEW series entitled "If You’re Into Eating Children’s Brains, You’ve Got a Four-Year Free Ride: A QAnon Bedtime Story."

You can listen to the entire conversation right HERE.

In this episode:

Miracle Jones talks with novelist and conspiracy expert/enthusiast Robert Guffey (author of Chameleo and Bela Lugosi's Dead) about the true origin of QAnon and its goals after the 2020 election. They also discuss taboos in movies and conspiracy theory as both an existential challenge and an art form.

 

ROLLING STONE: "Was Jeffrey Epstein a Spy?"

From Vicky Ward's 7-15-21 ROLLING STONE article entitled "Was Jeffrey Epstein a Spy?":

[Steven] Hoffenberg also knew something else Epstein wanted hidden, according to Hoffenberg: He claimed that Epstein moved in intelligence circles [...].

Epstein had also told Hoffenberg that via [Robert] Maxwell and [Douglas] Leese he was involved in something that Hoffenberg described as “national security issues,” which he says involved “blackmail, influence trading, trading information at a level that is very serious and dangerous.”

So here’s where it gets tricky.

Four separate sources told me — on the record — that Epstein’s dealings in the arms world in the 1980s had led him to work for multiple governments, including the Israelis.

Some of these sources are more reliable than others. But the gist of the claims that you will be able to hear, and ultimately watch in a three-hour documentary series, is that Maxwell, who was himself a conduit between the Israelis and other governments during his life time, introduced Epstein to Israeli leaders, who then allegedly used Epstein as the equivalent of an old-fashioned Russian “sleeper,” someone who could be useful in an “influence campaign.”

The sources, who range from former arms dealers to former spies — and also Hoffenberg — suggest that Epstein, who lacked any sort of moral compass, decided to go one step further and compromise influential people by recording them doing things they wouldn’t want made public.

To read the entire article, click HERE.

WASHINGTON SPECTATOR: "Military Veterans, the Republican Party, and January 6--a New Chapter in the Story"

From George Black's 6-21-21 WASHINGTON SPECTATOR article entitled "Military Veterans, the Republican Party, and January 6—a New Chapter in the Story":

But if the commission had been limited to the events of January 6, it would have missed much of the point. The biggest risk here is not that we fail to understand what happened in the past and breathe a sigh of relief that American democracy dodged a bullet. It’s that we don’t recognize what some have called a process of “ongoing incitement.” The main significance of January 6 is that it failed. But failure is a learning experience, and those who propelled the insurrection are determined not to fail again. In that sense, the storming of the Capitol was not a culmination: it was one event in a sequence, even a dress rehearsal, just as the invasion of the Michigan State Capitol by armed militants last April can be seen as a dry run for January 6.

To read the entire article, click HERE.

Cat-faced & Dwarf Aliens

From Jak Connor's 7-6-21 TWEAKTOWN article entitled "Declassified Australian UFO Report Involves 'Cat-faced' & Dwarf Aliens":

A declassified report on UFO's encounters between 1957 and 1971 mentions recorded encounters with cat-faced and dwarf aliens.

The 58-page document outlines several interesting pieces of information surroundings Unidentified Flying Objects (UFOs), such as old reports that are relevant today and the United States' involvement with conducting research [...].

Under the "Stalled Engines," it reads on page 27 that a vehicle stalled within the vicinity of a transparent mushroom-shaped object that had occupants inside with "cat-like" faces. Page 32 features Case 144, France, which states that two individuals came into contact with two "dwarfs" who used an object to paralyze one of the individuals. The paralyzed individual was unable to move or talk until the light was shut off.

To view the original documents, click HERE.

OREO UFOs

From David Griner's 6-25-21 ADWEEK article entitled "The Government's UFO Report Led Oreo to Create a Fan-Curated Offering to Aliens":

Oreo is increasingly prepared for existential threats from space.

In 2020, the brand—with agencies The Community and 360i—created an underground Arctic vault to protect a cache of Oreos from an apocalyptic meteor strike. Luckily, asteroid 2018 VP1 soared harmlessly past Earth, and Oreo’s doomsday vault was named by Adweek readers as their favorite marketing stunt of the year.

Today, Oreo posted the next line of defense in its space-centric strategy for survival: an offering to our future alien overlords.

Timed to correspond with the release of long-classified documents about federal investigations into UFO reports, Oreo’s responsive marketing campaign asked fans to vote on what exactly should go into the offering. It was then placed, obviously, in an Oreo-branded crop circle.

To read the entire article, click HERE.

THE OREO OFFERING

NEW YORKER: "How the Pentagon Started Taking U.F.O.s Seriously"

Some relevant excerpts from Gideon Lewis-Kraus' 4-30-21 NEW YORKER article entitled "How the Pentagon Started Taking U.F.O.s Seriously":

In 2007, [Robert] Bigelow received a letter from a senior official at the Defense Intelligence Agency who was curious about Skinwalker. Bigelow connected him to an old friend from the Nevada desert, Senator Harry Reid, who was then the Senate Majority Leader, and the two men met to discuss their common interest in U.F.O.s. The D.I.A. official later visited Skinwalker, where, from a double-wide observation trailer on site, he is said to have had a spectral encounter; as one Bigelow affiliate described it, he saw a “topological figure” that “appeared in mid-air” and “went from pretzel-shaped to Möbius-strip-shaped.”

Reid reached out to Senator Ted Stevens, of Alaska, who believed he’d seen a U.F.O. as a pilot in the Second World War, and Senator Daniel Inouye, of Hawaii. In the 2008 Supplemental Appropriations Bill, twenty-two million dollars of so-called black money was set aside for a new program. The Pentagon was not enthusiastic. As one former intelligence official put it, “There were some government officials who said, ‘We shouldn’t be doing this, this is really ridiculous, this is a waste of money.’ ” He went on, “And then Reid would call them out of a meeting and say, ‘I want you to be doing this. This was appropriated.’ It was sort of like a joke that bordered on an annoyance and people worried that if this all came out, that the government was spending money on this, this will be a bad story.” The Advanced Aerospace Weapon System Applications Program was announced in a public solicitation for bids to examine the future of warfare. U.F.O.s were not mentioned, but according to Reid the subtext was clear. Bigelow Aerospace Advanced Space Studies, or baass, a Bigelow Aerospace subsidiary, was the only bidder. When Bigelow won the government contract, he contacted the same cohort of paranormal investigators he’d worked with at his institute. Other participants were recruited from within the Pentagon’s ranks. In 2008, Luis Elizondo, a longtime counterintelligence officer working in the Office of the Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence and Security, was visited by two people who asked him what he thought about U.F.O.s. He replied that he didn’t think about them, which was apparently the correct answer, and he was asked to join [...].

On October 4, 2017, at the behest of Christopher K. Mellon, a former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Intelligence, Leslie Kean was called to a confidential meeting in the bar of an upscale hotel near the Pentagon. She was greeted by Hal Puthoff, the longtime paranormal investigator, and Jim Semivan, a retired C.I.A. officer, who introduced her to a sturdy, thick-necked, tattooed man with a clipped goatee named Luis Elizondo. The previous day had been his last day of work at the Pentagon. Over the next three hours, Kean was taken through documents that proved the existence of what was, as far as anyone knew, the first government inquiry into U.F.O.s since the close of Project Blue Book, in 1970. The program that Kean had spent years lobbying for had existed the whole time.

After Elizondo resigned, he and other key aatip participants—including Mellon, Puthoff, and Semivan—almost immediately joined To the Stars Academy of Arts & Science, an operation dedicated to U.F.O.-related education, entertainment, and research, and organized by Tom DeLonge, a former front man of the pop-punk outfit Blink-182. Later that month, DeLonge invited Elizondo onstage at a launch event. Elizondo announced that they were “planning to provide never-before-released footage from real U.S. government systems—not blurry amateur photos but real data and real videos.”

Kean was told that she could have the videos, along with chain-of-custody documentation, if she could place a story in the Times. Kean soon developed doubts about DeLonge, after he appeared on Joe Rogan’s podcast to discuss his belief that what crashed at Roswell was a reverse-engineered U.F.O. built in Argentina by fugitive Nazi scientists, but she had full confidence in Elizondo. “He had incredible gravitas,” Kean told me. She called Ralph Blumenthal, an old friend and a former Times staffer at work on a biography of the Harvard psychiatrist and alien-abduction researcher John Mack; Blumenthal e-mailed Dean Baquet, the paper’s executive editor, to say that they wanted to pitch “a sensational and highly confidential time-sensitive story” in which a “senior U.S. intelligence official who abruptly quit last month” had decided to expose “a deeply secret program, long mythologized but now confirmed.” After a meeting with representatives from the Washington, D.C., bureau, the Times agreed. The paper assigned a veteran Pentagon correspondent, Helene Cooper, to work with Kean and Blumenthal.

On Saturday, December 16, 2017, their story—“glowing auras and ‘black money’: the pentagon’s mysterious u.f.o. program”—appeared online; it was printed on the front page the next day. Accompanying the piece were two videos, including “flir1.” Senator Reid was quoted as saying, “I’m not embarrassed or ashamed or sorry I got this going.” The Pentagon confirmed that the program had existed, but said that it had been closed down in 2012, in favor of other funding priorities. Elizondo claimed that the program had continued in the absence of dedicated funding. The article dwelled not on the reality of the U.F.O. phenomenon—the only actual case discussed at any length was the Nimitz encounter—but on the existence of the covert initiative. The Times article drew millions of readers. Kean noticed a change almost immediately. When people asked her at dinner parties what she did for a living, they no longer giggled at her response but fell rapt. Kean gave all the credit to Elizondo and Mellon for coming forward, but she told me, “I never would have ever imagined I could have ended up writing for the Times. It’s the pinnacle of everything I’ve ever wanted to do—just this miracle that it happened on this great road, great journey.”

It was hard to tell, however, what exactly aatip had accomplished. Elizondo went on to host the History Channel docuseries “Unidentified,” in which he solemnly invokes his security oath like a catchphrase. He insisted to me that aatip had made important strides in understanding the “five observables” of U.A.P. behavior—including “gravity-defying capabilities,” “low observability,” and “transmedium travel.” When I pressed for details, he reminded me of his security oath.

Perhaps unsurprisingly for a Pentagon project that had begun as a contractor’s investigation into goblins and werewolves, and had been reincarnated under the aegis of a musician best known for an album called “Enema of the State,” aatip was subject to intense scrutiny. Kean is unwavering in her belief that she and an insider exposed something formidable, but a former Pentagon official recently suggested that the story was more complicated: the program she disclosed was of little consequence compared with the one she set in motion. Widespread fascination with the idea that the government cared about U.F.O.s had inspired the government at last to care about U.F.O.s.

To read the entire article, click HERE.