Conspiracy Music (Part 4)

We now move forward to 1991 and the release of The Pixies’ “Motorway to Roswell,” the penultimate song on their fourth and final album, Trompe le Monde.  The conspiratorial subject matter of this song should be self-explanatory.  Some UFO buffs think the legend of an extraterrestrial spacecraft and its occupants crashing into a desert near Roswell, New Mexico to be traceable only as far back as Charles Berlitz and William Moore’s 1980 book The Roswell Incident.  Not so.  The roots of the legend—in print, at least—can be traced back to the very first UFO book ever published:  BEHIND THE FLYING SAUCERS (1950) by Variety newspaper reporter Frank Scully, whose last name was later used by Chris Carter for FBI agent “Dana Scully,” one of the main characters of Carter’s long-running television series The X-Files. 

 

It’s worthwhile to note that Dana Scully is not the only fictional character based on Frank Scully.  The September 1954 issue of EC Comics’ Weird Science-Fantasy (#25) featured an eight-page story by Al Feldstein and Wally Wood entitled “Flying Saucer Report” in which journalist “Frank E. Keely,” author of a book called The Truth About the Flying Saucers, tells the reader in earnest, “I wrote an article for a show business weekly, claiming that two flying saucers had crashed in the southwest.  I told how, in the wreckage, investigators found the bodies of several little men dressed in strange costumes.  I claimed that the Air Force had spirited away the bodies and the discs for secret analysis.”  This is a fairly accurate summation of Chapter 12 (”Inside Flying Saucers”) of Scully’s book. 

A few months later, in December of 1954, the EC editors devoted an entire issue of Weird Science-Fantasy (#26) to a documentary-style reportage of all the most significant UFO sightings up to that point illustrated by the likes of Al Feldstein, Wally Wood and Joe Orlando.   

The inside front cover eschewed the advertisements one would ordinarily see in that space and featured instead a strident message to the reader headlined in bold:  “THIS IS A CHALLENGE TO THE UNITED STATES AIR FORCE!”  The effect of this single issue on a generation of future UFOlogists and UFO enthusiasts can’t be overestimated.  In fact, it could be legitimately claimed that this issue of Weird Science-Fantasy is the first “documentary” comic book, which is now a burgeoning sub-genre within the field of sequential art (see, for example, Will Eisner’s 2005 conspiracy-themed graphic novel The Plot:  The Secret Story of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion).  Scully’s book created an enduring substrate of American—indeed, global—mythology that has only grown stronger over the decades.

Though Scully was attacked vehemently upon the publication of Behind the Flying Saucers and his career nearly ruined as a result, thirty-six years later William Steinman’s UFO CRASH AT AZTEC (1986) verified many of the allegations Scully published way back in 1950.  The two books form a four-decade-long hendiadys, and are best consumed back-to-back.  

 

Now let's flash forward to the early 1990s when Scully and Steinman's complex web of legends, rumors, half-truths and bald facts eventually emerge as The Pixies’ penultimate song, “Motorway to Roswell,” the entirety of which can be heard HERE. 

“Motorway to Roswell” by Black Francis

Last night he could not make it
He tried hard but he could not make it
Last night he could not make it
On a holiday
So many miles
Looking for a place to stay
Near some friendly star
He found this mote
And now we wonder where we are
How could this so great
Turn so shitty
He ended up in army crates
And photographs in files
His tiny boat
Sparked as he turned and grazed our city
I started driving on the motorway
I was feelin’ down
Last night he could not make it
Last night he could not make it
He tried hard but he could not make it
Last night he could not make it
On a holiday
So many miles
Lookin’ for a place to stay
Near some friendly star
He found this mote
And now we wonder
How could this so great
Turn so shit
He ended up in army crates
And photographs in files
His tiny boat
Sparked as he grazed it
He started heading for the motorway
And he came right down.

Significantly, only a year before Trompe le Monde was released in the United States, “Motorway to Roswell” was preceded by an even more overt culmination of the allegations in Scully’s books in the form of  Megadeath’s song “Hangar 18” from their 1990 album Rust in Peace.  When the songs are listened to one after another, “Hangar 18” can be interpreted as a direct sequel to “Motorway to Roswell,” picking up the alien’s unfortunate tale after the crash described by The Pixies:

“Hangar 18” by Nick Menza

Welcome to our fortress tall
Take some time to show you around
Impossible to break these walls
For you see the steel is much too strong
Computer banks to rule the world
Instruments to sight the stars

Possibly I've seen too much
Hangar 18 I know too much

Foreign life forms inventory
Suspended state of cryogenics
Selective amnesia's the story
Believed foretold but who'd suspect
The Military Intelligence
Two words combined that can't make sense

Possibly I've seen too much
Hangar 18 I know too much

The entire music video for “Hangar 18” can be seen HERE.

Medal of Honor Awarded to Drones

From a 2-13-13 Reuters news article entitled "As War Changes, New Medal Honors Drone Pilots, Cyber Warriors":

(Reuters) - In a nod to the changing nature of warfare, the Pentagon on Wednesday created a new medal recognizing combat contributions of people like drone pilots and cyber warriors who are reshaping the battlefield, even from thousands of miles away.

Outgoing Defense Secretary and former CIA Director Leon Panetta - who spent much of the past four years bolstering those new capabilities - announced the decision to create the "Distinguished Warfare Medal" at a Pentagon news conference […].

"This award recognizes the reality of the kind of technological warfare that we are engaged in, in the 21st century," [Panetta said].

It is the ninth-highest warfare medal the Pentagon can bestow on troops - even higher than the Bronze Star. Importantly, it is the only combat medal that a military service member can receive without actually physically being in the same geographic area where combat took place.

From a 2-14-13 Foxnews.com article entitled “VFW Slams Pentagon’s Drone Medal, Complains It Would Outrank Purple Heart”:  

WASHINGTON –  America’s largest combat veterans group is worried the creation of a new medal for drone strikes and cyber-warfare could bestow higher honor on those using a joystick to kill terrorists than soldiers wounded on the battlefield.

The Distinguished Warfare Medal, announced Wednesday, would rank higher than the Bronze Star and Purple Heart, which is given to servicemembers killed or wounded in battle. The new medal would rank immediately below the Distinguished Flying Cross.

But to some, like the Veterans of Foreign Wars, creating a non-combat medal is turning into a major Pentagon misfire.

“It’s a boneheaded decision,” VFW spokesman Joe Davis told FoxNews.com. “This is going to affect morale and it’s sending troops in the field a horrible message.”

By Thursday afternoon, more than 800 responses had been posted on the VFW’s Facebook page. Many said the medal’s high ranking on the military medal hierarchy would hurt an already-bruised U.S. military morale.

One dubbed the medal the “Geek Cross” and suggested that the country was close to handing video-gamers Purple Hearts for animated wounds […].

On Wednesday, outgoing Defense Secretary Leon Panetta announced the creation of the medal to recognize “extraordinary achievements that directly impact on combat operations, but do not involve acts of valor or physical risks that combat entails.”

Panetta said the medal recognizes the reality that drones and cyber warfare “have changed the way wars are fought.” Under the Obama administration, drone strikes have become an integral part of America's counterterrorism strategy. 

UFO Fears Spark Panic in the Urals

While the “Russian Meteorite” news began to spread throughout the world at around 10:00 P.M. (PST) on 2-14-13--a story I was monitoring as it broke--rt.com (the Russian Times) was reporting that the Russian military had shot down a mysterious object from the sky, and that this object had crashed into a zinc factory in Chelyabinsk.  On that evening the banner headline for the Russian Times read as follows:

Meteorite crash in Russia: UFO fears spark panic in the Urals (VIDEO, PHOTOS)

Only days later, however, this same link takes one to a similar article bearing an altered headline: 

Meteorite hits Russian Urals: Fireball explosion wreaks havoc, up to 1,200 injured (PHOTOS, VIDEO)

Almost all references to UFOs have been expunged, as if they had never been there at all, and the initial military shoot-down story is now refuted:

“The regional Emergency Ministry denied previous unconfirmed reports by local media that the meteorite was shot by the military air defenses.

“The local newspaper Znak reported the meteorite was intercepted by an air defense unit at the Urzhumka settlement near Chelyabinsk. Quoting a source in the military, it wrote a missile salvo blew the meteorite to pieces at an altitude of 20 kilometers.

“Regnum news agency quoted a military source who claimed that the vapor condensation trail of the meteorite speaks to the fact that the meteorite was intercepted by air defenses.

“Witnesses said the explosion was so loud that it seemed like an earthquake and thunder had struck at the same time, and that there were huge trails of smoke across the sky. Others reported seeing burning objects fall to earth.”

Comparisons between this most recent “Russian Meteorite” disaster and the infamous Tunguska Event that occurred in Siberia on June 30, 1908 are inevitable.  The May 2001 issue of Fate Magazine covered the more anomalous aspects of the Tunguksa Event in Dr. Vladimir Rubtsov's article entitled "The Unknown Tunguska:  What We Know and What We Do Not Know About the Great Explosion of 1908."  To read Dr. Rubtsov's entire article, click HERE.

Conspiracy Music (Part 3)

Now let’s move back to 1984 and the release of Frank Zappa’s three-album experimental rock opera Thing-Fish, a truly bizarre send-up of Broadway musicals based on the conspiracy theory that the U.S. government manufactured AIDS as a biowarfare weapon to eradicate homosexuals and African-Americans.  In a parasatirical world, it shouldn’t be a surprise that at least four well-researched books subsequently (or concurrently, in the case of the first book mentioned below) verified Zappa’s satirical notion: 

1)      AIDS AND THE DOCTORS OF DEATH:  AN INQUIRY INTO THE ORIGIN OF THE AIDS EPIDEMIC by Dr. Alan Cantwell (Aries Rising Press, 1984). 

2)      AIDS INC.:  SCANDAL OF THE CENTURY by investigative journalist Jon Rappoport (Human Energy Press, 1988). 

3)      QUEER BLOOD:  THE SECRET AIDS GENOCIDE PLOT by Dr. Alan Cantwell (Aries Rising Press, 1993). 

4)      EMERGING VIRUSES:  AIDS & EBOLA—NATURE, ACCIDENT OR INTENTIONAL? by Dr. Leonard G. Horowitz (Tetrahedron Publishing, 1996).

Related sources about the overall subject of germ warfare include the book CLOUDS OF SECRECY:  THE ARMY’S GERM WARFARE TESTS OVER POPULATED AREAS by bioterrorism expert Leonard A. Cole (Rowman & Littlefield, 1989) and a little-known scientific paper entitled “Ethnic Weapons” by Carl A. Larson that was originally published in the Nov. 1970 issue of Military Review (Vol. L, No. 11), a revelatory article worth tracking down in a well-stocked library near you. 

To groove to Thing-Fish, click HERE.

Conspiracy Music (Part 2)

Our roundup of the obscure musical genre I’ve chosen to christen “Conspiracy Music” now moves forward to the epic “Full Metal Jackoff” by Jello Biafra and DOA from their 1989 album Last Scream of the Missing Neighbors.  This fourteen-minute song references various conspiracy theories, particularly the one that contends that the Central Intelligence Agency has purposely been dumping drugs into African-American neighborhoods—e.g., South-Central Los Angeles—for several decades.  In 1996 this theory was researched and verified by a Pulitzer-Prize-winning journalist named Gary Webb of the San Jose Mercury News.  Webb’s thorough investigation led to the publication of his 1999 book DARK ALLIANCE: THE CIA, THE CONTRAS, AND THE CRACK COCAINE EXPLOSION (Seven Stories Press).  As a reward for his diligence and ingenuity, Webb was driven out of the San Jose Mercury News by the executive editor of the newspaper.  Five years after the publication of DARK ALLIANCE, Webb ostensibly committed suicide by shooting himself in the head… twice.

Conspiracy theory, indeed.

A subsequent internal investigation headed by Frederick Porter Hitz, Inspector General of the CIA, eventually verified all of Webb’s findings and more, but very few mainstream media outlets even bothered to take note of this.  Needless to say, this validation came far too late for Webb. 

The entirety of “Full Metal Jackoff” can be heard HERE.

What follows are choice excerpts from Jello Biafra’s lyrics:

On the Washington D.C. Beltway
Around and around I go
In the black van with no windows
And a chimney puffing smoke
Bloody headlines in the news each day
Drug "crisis" everywhere
So much comes in so easy
It's as though someone wants it there

It would be a little obvious
To fence off all the slums
Hand out machine guns
To the poor in the projects
And watch 'em kill each other off
A more subtle genocide is when
The only hope for the young
Is to join the Army and slowly die
Wall Street or Crack Dealer Avenue
The last roads left to the American Dream

Wall Street or Crack Dealer Avenue
Wall Street or Crack Dealer Avenue
Only one road leads to this neighborhood
Little kids wanna sell drugs when they grow up

The folks might get just a little upset
If they knew where that dope comes from
From Columbia to the Contras
To our Air Force bases, where we trade it for guns
The moral equivalent of a serial killer
And his CIA friends
Call the shots from the White House
But now that we own the media too
Those stories just aren't run

On the Washington D.C. Beltway, 'round and 'round I go
In a black van with no windows, and a chimney puffing smoke
Some gang that ran smack in Viet Nam
Ain't got no reason to fear
Just get a Vice President so dumb
The crook at the top never gets impeached

That sure was easy wasn't it?
That sure was easy wasn't it?
More crack-more panic-more cops-more jails

You see emergency-total war
You see emergency-total war
You see a black face-you see a crackhead
You see a black face-you see a crackhead
You see a black face-you see Willie Horton with a knife
You see Willie Horton with a knife

You see one Willie Horton you've seen them all
They're everywhere, I know
You asked for it, you've got it
Drug suspects have no rights at all
Property seized and sold before trial
Labor camps on American soil!
Neo-Nazi bootboys
That the cops never seem to arrest
Prowl neighborhoods with baseball bats
Why now? Why do they get so much press...?

Mein Kampf-the mini series
Ollie North-"patriotic" hero
The leader for tomorrow is yours today
Finally gotcha psyched for a police state

On the Washington D.C. Beltway
Around and around I go
In a black van with no windows
And a chimney puffing smoke
My van's a mobile oven now
That burns the bodies you never see
Just like in Chile or Guatemala
People just seem to disappear

Just like Rome
We fell asleep when we got spoiled
Ignore human rights in the rest of the world
Ya might just lose your own

As the noose of narco-militarism
Tightens 'round your necks

We worry about burning flags
And pee in jars at work
To keep our jobs

But if someone came for you one night
And dragged you away
Do you really think your neighbors
Would even care...

L.A. SECRET POLICE

To check out Loren Coleman’s ongoing analysis of the multiple “synchromystic” levels of significance embedded in the current Christopher Dorner manhunt, simply click HERE.  By now many of you will have read the infamous manifesto that is being attributed to Dorner (reproduced in full on Coleman’s Twilight Language blog).  If you’re wondering whether or not Dorner’s allegations against the Los Angeles Police Department have any basis in reality, you might want to read an illuminating book entitled L.A. SECRET POLICE:  INSIDE THE LAPD ELITE SPY NETWORK by former LAPD officer Mike Rothmiller and journalist Ivan G. Goldman (Pocket Books, 1992). 

The description on the back cover of L.A. SECRET POLICE reads as follows:

"One night in Orange County, a helmeted figure on a motorcycle pulled alongside an unmarked LAPD car and emptied a machine pistol at the cop inside.  Elite OCID [Organized Crime Intelligence Division] Detective Mike Rothmiller lived to tell the story.  Now, with veteran journalist Ivan Goldman, he rips the lid off Chief of Police Daryl Gates' LAPD - and reveals, for the first time, the dirty secrets of the elite unit whose crushing power and vast influence kept many of America's most citizens in its iron grip."

Upon reading the Dorner manifesto, my mind immediately turned back to Rothmiller and his book.  Only yesterday (2-11-13) Rothmiller spoke to ABC News about Dorner’s less-than-laudatory descriptions of the LAPD:  “I was a detective and I was a sergeant and the issues that he describes regarding racism, brutality, corruption, internal affairs malfeasance, so forth.... That is absolutely true,” says Rothmiller. “I saw it firsthand.”  Rothmiller served with the LAPD for ten years.  ABC’s entire report on Rothmiller can be read HERE.  

To place Dorner’s allegations within a broader historical perspective, I also encourage you to read the book THE POLICE ESTABLISHMENT by former FBI agent William W. Turner (Putnam, 1968), which will definitely establish that these allegations are by no means new and certainly not the figment of a mad man’s brain. 

"Perhaps the Most Important Book You Will Ever Read"

Here are further excerpts from Tessa Dick's book review of Cryptoscatology (entitled "Cryptoscatology: Perhaps the Most Important Book You Will Ever Read"):

"Cryptoscataology confirms my suspicion that schools are designed to teach us not to think.  They teach us to be good soldiers or factory workers, to line up and march, to do what we are told without asking any questions and without thinking.

"There is so much more to this volume, that I can’t cover even a tenth of it here.  Robert Guffey has packed decades of information into 350 pages of highly readable text.  The extensive index is useful, but I prefer to read the entire book in order, then to reread it and read it again.  It takes persistence to allow the implications of mind control to sink in, but it is well worth it.

"Highly recommended."

You can read the full review HERE.