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WHILE MJ12 - THE SEMI-SECRET BODY ALLEGEDLY OVERSEEING THE
ALIEN 'PROBLEM' - AND AREA 51- THE SUPPOSED ALIEN HQ ON
EARTH - ARE NOW WELL KNOWN, FEW PEOPLE ARE AWARE OF
THEIR ORIGINS IN THE LATE 1980'S. VETERAN UFOLOGIST DON
ECKER, CONCLUDES HIS ACCOUNT.
While MJ-12 - the semi-secret body allegedly overseeing the alien
‘problem’ -
and Area 51 - the supposed alien HQ on Earth - are now well known, few
people are aware of their origins in the late 1980s. veteran Ufologist Don
Ecker, who had a ringside seat at the birth of this murky mythology, concludes
his account.
The close of 1988 saw American ufology in chaos over the claims and
counter-claims about MJ-12. The airing, in October 1988, of the two-hour TV
special UFO Coverup - Live only fanned the flames higher. In it, William Moore
and Jaime Shandera - who had both gained fame for their investigations of
the MJ-12 affair - introduced two men as American intelligence agents.
Disguised electronically and given the codenames of ‘Falcon’ and
‘Condor’,
the men stated as fact that the American Government was playing host to
alien visitors. Memorably, ‘Falcon’ claimed the "grey
aliens" liked strawberry
ice cream.
Within days of this broadcast William Cooper sent me his critique of it for
publication on the ParaNet bulletin board system (BBS)2. He claimed that
UFO Coverup - Live, in tandem with the MJ-12 documents, was part of an
elaborate disinformation scheme designed to lead UFO researchers away
from the ‘real’ situation.
WILLIAM COOPER
William Cooper declared that he could confirm
"150 per cent" of the ‘Lear Hypothesis’;
a paper by John Lear containing allegations of
the US Government’s alliance with ETs who, in
exchange for advanced alien technology, were
‘allowed’ to abduct unwilling human subjects for
experimentation and the harvesting of biological
material.
The confusing war of fantastic, paranoid and
often contradictory claims between Lear and
Cooper proved too much for ParaNet’s founder
Jim Speiser. He ejected them from the ParaNet
membership on 26 October 1988, explaining
his reasons in a four-page document.
Speiser also mentioned he had been contacted by a 24-year-old ParaNet
user named Jeff Felix whom he agreed to meet in a restaurant in Tempe,
Arizona. Felix claimed to work as a cryptology technician for the National
Security Agency (NSA) who, while "fooling around" on the NSA computer,
had
stumbled across files on secret projects called ‘Majestic’ and
‘Aquarius’. After
consulting contacts who had a genuine intelligence background, Speiser put
some testing questions to Felix at a second meeting several days later. Felix
failed this simple test but referred to something he called "Project
X-calibur".
When Speiser mentioned this to Cooper, he claimed to have heard of it but
knew nothing more. Later that day, Cooper called Speiser back and, to
Speiser’s surprise, proceeded to tell him that ‘Project
Excalibur’ was real and
concerned an MJ-12 project to obtain technology from the aliens. Speiser
later said he began to think that Cooper and Felix "were scamming me behind
my back". ParaNet, he said, was becoming "a home for unwed
paranoids."
That same month (October 1988) Lear sent Cooper copies of all his research
into UFOs, including communications from ‘Val Valerian’ (aka John
Grace, an
airforce NCO on active duty who had a keen interest in UFOs) and the Dallas
Revisited videotape made by Lars Hansson exploring the theory that John F
Kennedy had been fatally shot by his driver. Hansson had sent it to Lear in the
hope that Lear might help finance his JFK research, asking Lear not to pass it
on to anyone. The fact that Lear passed it on to Cooper had catastrophic
consequences.
In April 1989, KLAS TV journalist George Knapp presented a highly
successful multi-part series on UFOs. In one segment, Knapp interviewed a
man (electronically disguised) identified as ‘Dennis’ who claimed to
have
worked at a super-secret site in Nevada known as ‘Area 51’ and at an
even
more secret site called ‘S-4’. His fantastic claim was he had worked
on "real
flying saucers". At this time, no-one except Knapp and Area 51 security
knew
who ‘Dennis’ was.
BILLY GOODMAN
Lear and Cooper also appeared on a radio
programme broadcast from Las Vegas and
heard all over the western United States,
hosted by Billy Goodman on KVEG radio. In
May of 1989, Lear and Cooper were asked to
appear on a tabloid television programme, PM
Magazine. Later Lear heard Cooper telling the
interviewer that while he was on the Naval
briefing team in Hawaii, he saw secret files
containing documents designated ‘O H Krill’.
I knew these documents; John Lear sent me
copies of the ‘Krill papers’ in early 1988. I
knew that they were written by the USAF NCO
John Grace using the pseudonym ‘Val
Valarian’.
The name ‘Krill’ was an inside joke, referring to a case in the late
1950s in
which Navy investigators interviewed a woman who claimed to channel an
alien named ‘Cyrll’. Lear and Grace made up the initials ‘O
H’ out of thin air.
Grace did not want his actual name on these papers because he was still in
the Air Force. So the ‘O H Krill papers’ were just over a year old
at the time of
this television programme, yet here was Cooper claiming to have seen them
in 1972 or 1973.
Lear said: "When I heard Bill tell the interviewer he saw the Krill papers
while
he was in the Navy, I motioned him over and asked him, ‘What in the hell
are
you doing?’ He said, ‘What do you mean?’ I said ‘Bill,
John Grace and I did
the Krill papers. We named them after a 1950s case’ [..] Well, Cooper
insisted he saw them in the Navy. That is when I really began to wonder about
Cooper."
By June of 1989 Lear’s paper on the "evil grey aliens," Bill
Moore’s MJ-12
research and Cooper’s twist and spin on both subjects, were causing
shockwaves throughout American ufology, as exemplified by the controversial
1989 symposium in Las Vegas organised by MUFON (Mutual
UFO Network).
During that year, John Lear became MUFON’s director for Nevada and had
invited Bill Cooper, Bill English and me to speak about our own research. At
the very last moment (Saturday, 1 July), Walt Andrus - the International
Director of MUFON - objected to the content of the papers by Lear, Cooper
and English and cancelled their presentation, scheduled for Sunday.
The MUFON membership reacted with open revolt. Lear threatened to take
his speakers down the street to another location and most of the conference
would have followed him had it not been for an even more outrageous event.
William Moore’s talk ran for over two hours in length and had the audience
calling for his blood. He admitted that he had worked hand-in-fist with military
intelligence during the 1980s in an attempt to "get on the inside" of
the
military’s knowledge on UFOs. During his speech, he admitted participating
in
the ‘disinforming’ of Paul Bennewitz, a civilian UFO investigator
who had to be
hospitalised for severe mental problems. When Moore’s talk was complete,
he refused questions and rushed from the room leaving the proceedings in
turmoil. Lear seemed severely stressed and uncommunicative. Later he said:
"Bill Cooper came to my house on Friday before the talk and was drinking
heavily. He demanded to know who I was working for.
He said he was afraid that either I or someone else was setting him up. The
more he drank the louder he became and started slamming his hand down on
my desk. His girlfriend was there and I thought she might try to temper him but
did nothing. He then told me that anyone who tried to cross him would regret it.
I moved to the other side of my desk, not sure what he might do. Finally his
girlfriend led him out. "That Sunday (2 July 1989) the
‘alternative’ MUFON
event began. Lear spoke first and then Cooper. By this time, Cooper had
refined his material and for the most part stunned his audience by claiming the
US government had recovered dozens of UFO crashes and alien pilots. The
aliens were abducting people and killing them, he said, and the US had a
‘secret’ space programme jointly with the Russians and the aliens
with bases
on Mars and the Moon. Cooper even claimed there were areas on the Moon
where there was free-standing water and vegetation. "Man can walk on the
Moon with just an airpack," Cooper confidently told the audience. Finally,
he
blurted out that President Kennedy was murdered by his secret service driver
as part of a huge conspiracy plot and that he read about it in secret Navy
documents.
Serious researchers - and some media channels - were now suspicious about
Cooper’s claims, especially concerning the Kennedy assassination tape.
Even Lear talked openly about how Cooper claimed to have ‘read’ the
‘Krill
paper’ years before Lear and Grace invented them.
A rival TV station hired private investigators to follow Knapp and Lazar
around. When news leaked out that Lazar was followed to an illegal brothel,
Knapp convinced Lazar to go public first. Lazar admitted that he knew the
madam, saying she had hired him to set up a computer and software for her.
Facing increasing criticism of his material as unreliable at best or
deliberately
twisted at worst, Cooper distanced himself from the UFO field. Lars Hansson
had spent a great deal of time explaining why the ‘driver’ theory
was invalid.
Significantly, Cooper had been calling for the driver, William Greer, to be
brought before a court of law and charged with murder, seemingly oblivious to
the fact that Greer died in the 1970s. Cooper slandered many prominent JFK
assassination researchers while pushing this theory and it was obvious he
had very little investigative experience with the case. In a typically sudden
and
arbitrary switch of loyalties, he began to ally himself with the ultra
right-wing
militia movement, a position he maintains to this day. Now he claims that all
UFO cases are actually part of a vast one-world conspiracy by a secret
government that aims to enslave everyone through its tyranny.
Ufology was nearly destroyed by the disinformation games I’ve detailed
here.
Great harm was done; the real problems are still with us and there is no end in
sight.
The full version of
this article can be found in FORTEAN TIMES 122
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