Conspiracy Music (Part 8)

In 1984 Laurie Anderson released her four-part magnum opus entitled United States that included a song/poem/performance piece, “Dance of Electricity,” all about the suppressed science of Nikola Tesla and his fierce battle with Thomas Edison that raged throughout the final decade of the nineteenth century.  

Since “Dance of Electricity” was performed in 1983, it’s possible that Anderson’s piece was inspired by Margaret Chaney’s comprehensive and highly readable biography TESLA:  MAN OUT OF TIME, the first edition of which was published in 1981.   

 

 

However, it should be noted that Anderson’s interest in Tesla can be traced even earlier to her 1978 performance piece entitled “Like a Stream,” which was inspired by a photograph of Tesla operating one of his infamous giant coils.  

 Laurie Anderson's "Dance of Electricity" can be heard HERE.

Conspiracy Music (Part 7)

Three years after the Beatles broke up in 1970, a new psychedelic rock band called Klaatu emerged from obscurity.  The musical style of the group was—according to some influential music critics—so similar to the Beatles that many thought the Fab 4 had secretly reformed under a new name.  Klaatu’s record company, Capitol, did little to dissuade potential customers from believing this rumor (it seems, in fact, they did everything they could to encourage it), as the feverish speculation could only increase sales on the band’s debut album, 3:47 EST, which was rechristened simply Klaatu for its United States release in August of 1976.  

It turns out that the band, which was named after the extraterrestrial emissary portrayed by Michael Rennie in Robert Wise’s 1951 film The Day the Earth Stood Still (Klaatu’s identification with Wise’s film must have been substantial, as the title 3:47 EST is the exact time mentioned in the movie at which the alien’s spacecraft arrives on Earth), actually consisted of three Canadians:  John Woloschuk, Dee Long and Terry Draper.  Their first album, interwoven with several metaphysical and science fictional elements, includes a song entitled “Calling Occupants of Interplanetary Craft (The Recognized Anthem of World Contact Day),” which is clearly based on Albert K. Bender’s 1962 nonfiction book, Flying Saucers and the Three Men, an essential entry in the flood of UFO “contactee” books that surged from the cultural zeitgeist of 1950s/60s America.  On p. 82 of his book, Bender writes:  

…early in March, 1953 [the  International Flying Saucer Bureau] voted to hold what we would term a “World Contact Day,” on which we would urge all IFSB members to attempt to send out a telepathic message to visitors from space.  If there was anything to the claims of people expounding telepathic methods, and if we did have visitors from space, perhaps such a message might get across, particularly with so many minds concentrating on the same message. 

On pp. 83-84 Bender reproduces the message that was transmitted, telepathically, on what Bender calls “C-Day” (Contact Day), March 15, 1953:  

“Calling occupants of interplanetary craft!  Calling occupants of interplanetary craft that have been observing our planet EARTH.  We of IFSB wish to make contact with you.  We are your friends, and would like you to make an appearance here on EARTH.  Your presence before us will be welcomed with the utmost friendship.  We will do all in our power to promote mutual understanding between your people and the people of EARTH.  Please come in peace and help us in our EARTHLY problems.  Give us some sign that you have received our message.  Be responsible for creating a miracle here on our planet to wake up the ignorant ones to reality.  Let us hear from you.  We are your friends.”  

 

In 1962 even the most credulous UFO buffs scoffed in disgust at Bender’s mysticism-laden narrative.  From a 21^st century perspective, however, the book can be seen as an illuminating exploration of formerly obscure occult phenomena that have since become far more widely known thanks to the New Age movement that burgeoned several years after the book’s publication.  In retrospect, Bender comes across as a reluctant shaman rather than a neurotic clown.  

In Chapter 10 of his excellent 1970 book, UFOs:  Operation Trojan Horse, John A. Keel offers up his own thoughts on Flying Saucers and the Three Men:

From what we know about the Pleiades, the stars there seem to be swirling among great clouds of radiant gases.  If they harbor any planetary systems, we wonder what effect those gases might have.  An early contactee, Albert K. Bender, wrote a book containing so many far-out details that few ufologists took it seriously.  He claimed that UFO entities told him that they lived underground on their home planet because periodically they passed through masses of deadly clouds which destroyed life and created a great blackness.  When Bender’s account, Flying Saucers and the Three Men, was first published in 1962, it read like the fantasies of a madman.  But now many of the things he described have repeatedly occurred all over the world, and the book deserves a careful rereading.

I couldn’t agree more.  Used copies of Bender’s long-out-of-print book can still be found HERE.  

The entirety of Klaatu’s song “Calling Occupants of Interplanetary Craft (The Recognized Anthem of World Contact Day)” can be heard HERE.

“Calling Occupants of Interplanetary Craft” by Klaatu:

In your mind you have abilities you know
to telepath messages through the vast unknown.
Please close your eyes and concentrate
with every thought you think
upon the recitation we're about to sing:

Calling occupants of interplanetary craft.
Calling occupants of interplanetary, most extraordinary craft.

Calling occupants of interplanetary craft;
Calling occupants of interplanetary craft;
Calling occupants of interplanetary, most extraordinary craft.

You've been observing our earth
and we'd like to make a contact with you.

We are your friends!

Calling occupants of interplanetary craft.
Calling occupants and interplanetary ultra-emissaries.

We've been observing your earth
and one night we'll make a contact with you

We are your friends!

Calling occupants of interplanetary craft.
Calling occupants of interplanetary, quite extraordinary craft.

Please come in peace we beseech you.
--Only a landing will teach them!--
Our earth may never survive,
so do come we beg you.
Please interstellar policemen.
Won't you give us a sign (give us a sign)
that we've reached you?

With your mind you have ability to form.
And transmit thought energy far beyond the norm.
You close your eyes,
you concentrate
together—that's the way
to send the message
We declare World Contact Day

Calling occupants of interplanetary craft;
Calling occupants of interplanetary craft;
Calling occupants of interplanetary, most extraordinary craft.

Calling occupants;
Calling occupants;
Calling occupants;
Calling occupants;
Calling occupants of interplanetary, most extraordinary craft

Conspiracy Music (Part 6)

In June of 2005 Ry Cooder released a concept album entitled CHAVEZ RAVINE which chronicles the conspiracies and cover-ups surrounding the destruction of a Mexican-American community called Chavez Ravine in 1950s Los Angeles to make way for Dodger Stadium.  The album has an impressive novelistic scope that vividly captures the tone and tenor, the excitement and tragedy, of living in Los Angeles at that time.  Cooder manages to weave an impressive array of disparate elements into this musical web, many of them of intense interest to cryptoscatologists and integral to understanding the unique culture of 1950s Los Angeles:  UFO flaps, Red Scare paranoia, rampant corruption at City Hall, J. Edgar Hoover’s iron-tight grip on the U.S. justice system, assassination attempts galore, and potentially fatal political conspiracies. 

 

This album ended up exerting quite an influence on my forthcoming book Spies & Saucers (due to be published in August of this year) which shares with Chavez Ravine several different eccentric obsessions such as 1950s Los Angeles, UFOs and political conspiracies of all sorts. 

 

Here’s one track from the album, “DON’T CALL ME RED,” about the successful campaign to paint Frank Wilkinson (who, in the early ‘50s, was the assistant director of the Housing Authority of the City of Los Angeles) as a Communist saboteur in order to derail his plans to, in Ry Cooder’s words:  “…build utopian, low-rent housing in Chavez Ravine.  Today, you can drive to the result.  Strike one.”

And as an added bonus, a second song:  “EL U.F.O. CAYO,” about a close encounter of the third kind amidst the soon-to-be-bulldozed Chavez Ravine.... 

 

Conspiracy Music (Part 5)

Let’s jump backwards once again, this time to 1985 and the release of Kate Bush’s song “Cloudbusting” from her album The Hounds of Love.  Bush has written several songs with cryptoscatological overtones:  “Strange Phenomena” (an ode to Forteana) from The Kick Inside, “Hammer Horror” (British cult horror films) from Lionheart, “The Dreaming” (the Aboriginal Dreamtime) and “Houdini” (life after death) from The Dreaming, “Experiment IV” (covert sonic weapons) from The Whole Story, and “Lily” (ceremonial magic and the Order of the Golden Dawn) from The Red Shoes.  “Cloudbusting” was inspired by the work of Dr. Wilhelm Reich who, late in his life, claimed he’d invented a “cloudbusting” machine that not only had the ability to control the weather, but to destroy UFOs as well.  Reich documented this research in CONTACT WITH SPACE, the last book he wrote before his premature death in Federal prison in 1957.  According to some conspiracy theorists, Dr. Reich was incarcerated because of the breakthroughs he had been making in cancer research (i.e., his invention of the “Orgone Box” which he claimed was capable of curing various terminal illnesses) as well as his weather control/UFO research.  “Cloudbusting” was inspired by this conspiracy theory as well as A Book of Dreams, a memoir written by Peter Reich, Dr. Reich’s son.   

In collaboration with film directors Terry Gilliam and Julian Doyle, Bush produced a music video to showcase the song.  Not only does this video include a Cloudbusting machine designed by the Swiss surrealist painter H.R. Giger, but also features the actor David Sutherland as Wilhelm Reich.  (This role prefigures similar conspiracy-themed parts that Sutherland would later play such as “Mr. X” in Oliver Stone’s JFK and “Andrew Nivens” in Stuart Orme’s The Puppet Masters based on Robert Heinlein’s UFO-themed 1951 novel.  Of course, Sutherland’s presence also echoes the UFO content of Philip Kaufman’s 1978 film adaptation of Jack Finney’s 1955 novel Invasion of the Body Snatchers.) 

You can see Kate Bush’s “Cloudbusting” video by clicking HERE.

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.