-Caveat Lector-
Subj: [CTRL] Philip Corso & the Kennedy Assassination
Date: 97-07-14 03:33:37 EDT
From: [EMAIL PROTECTED] (Alex Constantine)
To: [EMAIL PROTECTED]
Philip Corso & the Kennedy Assassination
From The Man Who Knew Too Much, by Dick Russell,
p. 529, concerning Colonel Philip Corso, a recent honored
guest on Art Bell's syndicated program, a clearinghouse
for intelligence agents promoting the "alien" cover story.
[Note: General Willoughby, prominent in the text, was
General MacArthur's intelligence chief in Korea, a Nazi
agent and a ramrod in the Shickshinny Knights of Malta
of New York, a fascist enclave.]
"Willoughby was in auspicious company, for the
Shickshinny Kinghts had an "Armed Services Committee"
that inj 1963 read like a Who's Who of retired military
men at the extremist fringe. All of these "Knights" had
been 'singled out for their brilliant and outstanding careers
as Soldiers of Christ nd Advoates of a Free World.' Besides
Willoughby [ie., Adolph Weidenback], they included a number
of other members of MacArthur's old team - Brigadier
General Bonner Fellers, Lieutenant General Pedro del Valle
[an IT&T Vice president, led CIA operations in the Chil� coup]
Marine General Lemmel Shepherd, British admiral Sir Barry
Domville, jailed in England during World War II as a Nazi
agent, was also on the list.
"So was Colonel Philip J. Corso, a twenty-year Army
Intelligence career man until his retirement in August 1963.
He had been the military Operations Coordinating Board's
delegate to the CIA group planning the 1954 Guatemalan coup.
In 1956 Corso had sought to reactivate fifty surviving garrisons
of East European paramilitary units still haning on in West
Germany and tied to the Gehlen spy network. When his Volunteer
Freedom Corps, dedicated to rolling back communism, was
scuttled as too radical by the Eisenhower administration, Corso
attributed the defeat to 'lies by our liberal darlings.' A
staunch foe of what he considered a laissez-faire CIA, Corso
testified before congress on "military muzzling" after General
Walker was kicked out of West Germany in 1961. Upon leaving Army
intelligence, Corso went to work in 1963 as a 'research
assistant' for segregationist senator Strom Thurmond in South
Carolina. And, after the Kennedy assassination, Corso was among
the first to spread rumors that Oswald was tied to a Communist
ring inside the CIA - and doubling as an informant for the FBI."
- Alex Constantine
_______________________________________________________________
http://www.ufomind.com/ufo/people/c/corso/>Philip Corso
From: Greg Sandow <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
To: "UFO Updates (E-mail)" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>
Subject: Corso's book
Date: Tue, 17 Jun 1997 17:34:25 -0400
Damn. I never meant to buy it. I just thought I'd sit and read it
in the bookstore, to see what it was like. But it turned out to
be more substantial, more dubious, and more just plain quirky
than I expected, so I had to have a copy.
Here's what's in it. The central UFO theme is a lot more detailed
and newer than anyone has yet suggested here. But there's a
smorgasbord of UFO references -- Roswell, abductions, the autopsy
film, cattle mutilations, MJ-12 -- so random and incoherent you
can easily suspect they were tossed in by someone who didn't
really know the UFO literature, to give a manufactured story
credibility.
And that's not all. Corso makes claims about non-UFO history --
the U-2 incident and the Cuban Missile Crisis -- that are, shall
we say, at variance with the usuaul accounts. It turns out, in
fact, that even in non-UFO terms Corso is a key figure in postwar
events, and, if we factor in his alleged UFO role, he becomes one
of the most important people in the 20th century. Though to give
him credit, he's modest about his stature and in fact says that
the importance of his work hadn't even occured to him until he
sat down to write what apparently (he's not entirely clear about
this) was originally going to be quite a different memoir.
If I've read him correctly on this last point, of course, then
Thurmond's staff might be right when they say they originally had
an outline with nothing in it about UFOs. However, Corso says in
the book that Thurmond knew the UFO secret, so Thurmond was going
to be involved with the book whether he wrote the foreword or
not.
To discuss some of these points in greater detail:
The key to Corso's UFO information is the title of the book --
"The Day After Roswell." This refers to something initially quite
limited, and fascinating -- what happened to the crash debris.
Corso says that it initially got scattered scientific study, some
of which led to the development of the transitor. But then it
languished, until the early '60s when Corso went to work for a
foreign technology unit of the army. His superior asked him to
look at the stuff, and suggest what might be done with it.
Corso's report (I'm leaving out all the "supposedly"s here, to
save wear and tear on my typing fingers) led to an ingenious
project, in which suggestive bits of alien stuff were funneled
into private-industry research projects that were already
used to getting terrestrial foreign technology, and not asking
questions about it. That is, one week they'd get parts from a
crashed Soviet jet. The next week they'd get something alien.
They wouldn't be told what either thing was. The point here was
to keep the work secret by NOT starting a massive new project --
and, by the way, to cover the tracks of any alien-based
technological developments.
This sounds plausible to me, though I'd be quick to stress I
don't have the military or intellgence background for my
assesssment to mean much. One key to the plan was that security
was just as important as information. That's why a full-bore
study wasn't unleashed from the start. Corso's full story of the
aliens includes more than this -- they're hostile, for instance,
and they're genetically-engineered creatures, optimized for space
travel. And it has a grand and glorious conclusion. After alien
technology helped create night vision equipment and lasers, among
much else, it finally helped us build particle-beam weaponry that
-- when deployed as part of Reagan's Star Wars program -- not
only brought the cold war to an end, but brought about a
stalemate with the aliens, whose UFOs could now be shot down!
Corso somewhat fudges the extent of his involvement with this,
since he left the army shortly after setting the initial project
in motion (though his fudging may just be a reflection of a
general carelessness that afflicts much of the narrative). Still,
if this is where his work led, he's a hero -- clearly, as the man
who set us on the path of miltiary equality with an alien
invading force, one of the great heroes of our time.
One passing thought: We've read here that somebody traced the
development of the transistor through patents and articles in
scientific journals, and found every step accounted for, thus
proving, supposedly, that alien technology wasn't involved. Corso
suggests that the project was set up to create precisely this
impression. Besides -- and here I'm speaking for myself --
patents and journal articles don't record where engineers and
scientists get their ideas. If somebody's thinking is stimulated
by a fragment of an alien TV set, they still have to theorize and
experiment to imitate the thing -- and it's those theories and
experiments that show up in published data, not the inspiration
for them.
So what about Corso's non-UFO heroism? This, friends and fellow
ufologists, is a doozy. Corso takes personal credit for U.S.
resistance to Soviet missiles in Cuba. I'm not exaggerating.
Corso says he had photographs clearly showing the missles, and
says that he knew President Kennedy wasn't going to do anything
about it. So he leaked the information to Senator Kenneth Keating
of New York, and, most crucially, to a reporter -- and says that
it was the reporter's articles that forced Kennedy to act!
Needless to say, you can't find this in standard histories.
Keating, it's true, sounded an early alarm; that I could
document. But -- while Corso is in synch with standard histories
when he says the CIA didn't believe that Soviet ICBMs were in
Cuba -- the usual story depicts a steady buildup of data within
the Kennedy administration that quickly persuaded Kennedy to act.
Corso also appears out to lunch when he reproduces quotes from
phone conversations between Eisenhower and Soviet premier
Khrushchev about the U-2 flights that eventually would wreck a
US-Soviet summit meeting. Corso seems to say (again, the sloppy
tracking of details throughout the book makes this hard to be
sure about) that his source is a buddy in the KGB, and he's
correct, according to standard histories, to say that Eisenhower
was dubious about the flights, and that the USSR knew all about
them, even before they shot one down. But that Khruschchev and
Eisenhower ever talked about it before the shooting, and even
that they ever talked on the phone, is, um, new. You won't find
any reference to it in the standard Stephen Ambrose biography of
Eisenhower, or in Khrushchev's memoirs. For what it's worth, the
hot line between the White House and the Kremlin wasn't even
installed till the '60s.
There's also a hint somewhere about the CIA plotting Kennedy's
assassination. Nothing more on the subject. And everything in the
book is buried in a subtext right out of a spy novel. The CIA
(which follows Corso around Washington to see what he's up to) is
shipping secrets to the Russians. Nevertheless, an unstated bond
between the CIA and the KGB adds a touch of stability to
US-Soviet relations, and Corso quite happily makes deals with the
Soviet military, which hates the KGB. On one memorable page he
even gets photocopies smuggled out of the Soviet embasssy -- the
point being to find out exactly what secrets the CIA has
revealed!
Thurmond? The reference to his secret knowledge is brief, and
just a bit coy. I can't find it, for the moment, and the book has
no index. But in essence it's this. Corso finds his superior,
General Arthur Trudeau, talking to Thurmond. Thurmond says
something about "them," and Corso understands that "they" are the
aliens. If that's all he has to go on, you might wonder why he's
so sure. but he does state outright that Thurmond knew.
UFO data? What a mishmash. The book begins, in fact, with an
account of the Roswell crash, complete with reconstructed
dialogue. It reads like fiction -- or, to give a proper UFO
antecedent, like one of Keyhoe's books, though the facts Keyhoe
alleged always checked out. Maybe to give himself an out, Corso
says he's heard many versions of the crash story, and that this
is just one of them. As we've read here, Major Jesse Marcel is on
hand at the crash site, overseeing the recovery of the body of
the craft, and the aliens. That's at variance with standard
Roswell accounts, which, as Dennis Stacy has pointed out, leave
us wondering why Marcel wasn't there, or, if he was, why he never
talked about it afterwards.
But there's more. A sentry shoots an alien that starts to move,
and there are named witnesses heretofore unknown (or at least not
listed in the indexes of the standard Roswell books). Who's Steve
Arnold? Corso says he rode shotgun on one of the staff cars
heading for the recovery site, and was the first to disembark.
Who's Roy Danzer, a plumbing subcontractor who was fitting pipe
at the base, and saw the recovery convoy arriving with the alien
bodies, one of which Danzer saw?
Corso mentions the members of MJ-12, without naming the
organization. He says the aliens have six fingers; that's from
the autopsy film. He's confusing on abductions. I've said that
much in this book isn't clear, and the abduction references go to
the front (or rear) of the pack. It's hard to tell, but Corso
does seem to state that abductions were known in the '50s and
known to be widespread in the '60s, something the UFO literature
won't support. (But then Corso might have been referring to
secret military data. Who knows?)
These UFO references are a mess, basically. Corso at least should
have noted where they fit. As in: "Yes, UFO researchers have
found these names, and say they were part of a group called
MJ-12. I never heard that name, but the group did exist, and
these were the guys who ran it." As things stand, every one of
these references seems phony, as if Corso (or his ghostwriter)
had plucked factoids from various UFO sources, to make the story
seem credible.
What WOULD make the tale believable? More facts. Backup.
Corroboration. The book, taken as a whole, is simply weird.
Suppose it's fake. Why on earth would Corso, after what appears
to have been a distinguished career, smash his reputation
for....what, money? Fame? Attention? Why would he say Thurmond
knew the secret, when that means Thurmond would certainly be
asked, and presumably would deny the whole thing?
But then suppose the story is real. Is this how a distinguished
military man spills the greatest secret in human history? By
hiring a ghostwriter to write an incoherent popular potboiler?
Wouldn't a better plan be, first, to make sure the book makes
sense, and addresses obvious problems right where they occur, and
second to call a press conference, in which supporting evidence
and maybe even a supporting witness or two would see the light of
day?
There's precious little in the book for anyone to work with. Here
and there you find a name -- "Dr. Mark Johnson," for instance,
identified as an "aeronautical reserach scientst" from Hughes
Aircraft, whom Corso says he met at Fort Belvoir, and who knew
the alien secret. Does this man exist? And how did Corso emerge
from this long history without a single document? All he seems to
have are some shadowy photos of UFOs, and even these he says he
can't vouch for as genuine.
But wait -- there ARE documents! He mentions them in the text,
and even quotes from them. For instance, he has a private copy of
General Trudeau's apparently unpublished memoirs. He even quotes
a paragraph, in which UFOs aren't mentioned. Is that the best he
could do? What do the rest of the memoirs say? Would I be right
to suspect that UFOs aren't mentioned anywhere in them?
And then there are Corso's sharply written reports to Trudeau,
which he quotes from liberally. Could we, perhaps, see a page or
two? Can we verify that they really were written in the '60s, or
that at least they could have been? What security markings do
they bear, if any? The book doesn't tell us.
Corso also mentions his journals. Can we see them? Can we verify
their age? This is getting frustrating -- unless, of course, we
simply conclude that the whole thing is bogus, and that we're not
seeing these documents because they don't exist.
Finally, there's something else. Apparently this secret wasn't
very tightly kept. The Soviets knew all about it. Even the Nazis
did -- Corso thinks they'd recovered their own alien UFO, and
were on the way to learning the aliens' secrets. The ET threat
was discussed at National Security Council meetings, he also
says, was known about at high levels in all the armed services,
and was widely known (or at least rumored) in science and private
industry.
So where's the evidence for that? Stalin, Corso says, pitched a
fit when he heard about Roswell. Are there Kremlin files that say
so? And what about the hundreds or thousands of politicians,
generals, admirals, Washington insiders, scientists and
industrial magnates who knew about the aliens? Surely -- if
Corso's book is true, and he's still alive after writing it --
somebody, somewhere, is going to step forward to say that they
were there, too.
(Delightful fact! Corso's view of the aliens does not support
other alleged insiders' reports -- not Bob Lazar's, with its
spacecraft fueled by element 115, or William Uhouse's (he being
Glenn Campbell's "Jarod II"), with its deal between the ETs and
our government: their technology in exchange for a steady supply
of boron. Who should we believe?)
Greg Sandow
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