FEATURE: Believe!

Attending a UFO conference tempts you into a seductive world of secrets, lies and huge, scary truths. Because, you know, what if it’s real? Then again, what if it’s not?

Joe Schoenmann

There's an underground network in this country, and a good handful of its members are aboveground on this day, walking around Sunset Station clutching a 58-page pamphlet with "TOP SECRET/MAJIC EYES ONLY" stamped on the cover.


Now, these people aren't in uniform and, judging by their friendliness to strangers or the guy picking at the zit on his neck during one hour-long presentation, they aren't exactly the type of people with whom the government would entrust state secrets. And yet, there's no denying that within their clammy grasp are copies of what appears to be a government-issued Strategic Operations Manual 1-01, or SOM1-01. Take a peek into that little booklet and see just what it is that the government doesn't want them, you, us, to know about.


"Extraterrestrial Entities and Technology, Recovery and Disposal," reads the heading in the table of contents. The chapters include "Recovery Operations"; "Extraterrestrial Biological Entities: I. Living organisms. II. Non-living organisms"; "Guide to UFO Identification." The date is "7 April 1954," and, just in case you're thinking about letting the world in on the secret, one more warning printed on every other page: "EYES ONLY ACCESS to the material herein is strictly limited to personnel possessing MAJIC-12 CLEARANCE LEVEL. Examination or use by unauthorized personnel is strictly forbidden and is punishable by federal law."


MAJIC-12 is a reference to the 12 members of something called the Military Assessment Joint Intelligence Committee that President Truman established in 1947. Don't be upset if you've never heard of it. Most of the people here—scientists, housewives, corporate headhunters and others—hadn't, either, until they started looking into the piles of extraterrestrial information floating on the Internet, in books, films and television specials.


There is a network of people in this country struggling to deal with their everyday lives when they know that there is so much more to it than, say, dotting Ts and adding figures in their workaday cubicles. It's not religion that holds promise for them—though some might say those in search of UFO proof work with the zeal of a fundamentalist. It's this belief—augmented by photos and official-looking documents, mind you—that something more tangible exists that's greater than they. And the critical mass of information about these beings and their crafts has grown such that UFO conferences are starting to specialize.


That's why Ryan Wood set up this UFO Crash Retrieval Conference, held two weekends ago. It's why 200 people showed up to the inaugural event, and why more than a dozen of them are holding that "Top Secret" manual. It's also why, the night before the presentations, a couple of presenters seem a little irked that there aren't more media there to cover the event.


"Fox is going to have it on national television," Wood told presenters at a meet-and-greet Friday night. (A local Fox News cameraman came alone and took footage of Wood.) "Then, they'll all come next time."


Then, most of the 17 presenters—all men but one—summarized what they'd talk about in the coming two days: Chupacabra and a downed UFO in Puerto Rico; why World War II Secretary of the Navy James Forrestal didn't commit suicide but was murdered in 1949; Britain's Area 51; what U.S. presidents know of UFOs; and crashes beyond Roswell that you've never heard of.


"I came away from Puerto Rico convinced that (the chupacabra) was real," said Brit researcher Jonathan Downes, whose nasal English accent dripped with foreboding. The chupacabra is believed to be a human infected with alien DNA that villagers believe lives off the blood of their livestock. Downes mentioned other abnormalites, such as birds with teeth, that he believes resulted from a crashed UFO in the tiny U.S. territory. "This has frightening implications for Puerto Rico."


Heads nodded. Notes were jotted. No one giggled.


I went home and slept, with scarcely a dream about little green men.



•••


You don't want to get mad at the thought of government coverups, because that means it's gotten to you, that you somehow think it's real. And if it's real, there's really no recourse other than to get mad.


And who wants to be mad all the time?


Still, it's hard to listen to some of these presentations without inwardly wincing, without feeling the red blush of indignation at what comes off as the Big Brothering paternalism of a government that knows what's best for me, that thinks it has a right to lie and hide information from the people who are paying its bills.


Roswell, New Mexico, is the one to first get under your skin. Most Americans have heard of the "weather balloon" story concocted by the Air Force one day after it told newspapermen that a "flying saucer" had crashed in the New Mexican desert in 1947. But who knew there might be other downed UFOs? In Kecksburg, Pennsylvania, 40 miles outside Pittsburgh, in 1965. One in Puerto Rico. Two more in New Mexico—those pesky aliens seem to have a keen interest in the country's 14th least-populous state, which also happens to be home of the first A-bomb detonation, has three Air Force bases and hosts the Air Force's only Space Vehicle Research Lab.


But if you only know about Roswell, you can pretty much forget about it and go about your life. And if that's how you like it, don't attend one of these conferences. You really don't need to know that, according to the Top Secret manual, most of these flying-saucer parts get shipped out to Area 51, about 100 miles northwest of Las Vegas.


Art Campbell got the pot stirring first. Early Saturday morning, he recounted his adventures scouring a site 100 miles south of Albuquerque on the Plains of St. Augustin—current home to the Very Large Array, a battery of 27 radio telescopes, each 80 feet in diameter—where a UFO crash supposedly happened in 1947. Walking between two classroom-sized screens, struggling with the PowerPoint control while 200 people drink free Pepsi and coffee, some obviously rousing themselves from a sleepless Vegas night, Campbell very quickly gets to the point: a hunk of space plastic and the soles of space shoes. Decades after the military had scoured the alleged crash site, Campbell did his own search, coming up with what appeared to be human trash. An electron-scanning microscope told him different, he says.


Embedded in the plastic was found a thread of gold. And the shoe soles were so small and so out of proportion to human feet—to say nothing of the fact that they were layered with titanium, cotton and other natural materials—that he couldn't find a podiatrist or shoe expert who could tell him who or what would wear them.


"If it doesn't fit, you must acquit," someone in the back of the smallish Sunset Station auditorium whispered as Campbell showed his slides.


"Yeah, that's a big stretch for me," said the man's pal.


Later, someone asked Campbell: "Why would an alien shoe have all Earthly components?" Campbell didn't have an answer.


"But the back-to-nature folks would sure love this one," he chuckles. "'All natural.'"



•••


I bought the SOM1-01 booklet and read it over a Fatburger. The 50's-style font, the government-drone verbiage, the simple, unmistakable directions—these bodies go here, spaceship parts go there—everything about it feels real. A tangible connection to little green men. A raised middle finger to the military-secrecy guys. A sense that you're "in."


It's not just the look of the thing. In his seminar on the booklet's validity, Robert Wood, a retired aerospace engineer who now spends all of his time trying to authenticate documents that the government won't acknowledge, hit a little close to home. He said it was mailed in 1994 to science writer Don Berliner from a Quillin's pharmacy in La Crosse, Wisconsin. I grew up 80 miles from La Crosse. That is, I grew up in a wooded, mosquitoes-big-as-birds part of the country more prone to white-tail deer hunting, catfish trawling and Old Style beer-drinking than to caring about the authenticity of a manual purporting to instruct government flunkies on the capture, preservation and storage of crashed aliens and their flying machines.


Almost that alone would have been enough to convince me.


But Wood had more. Like the way certain letters, like "z", would be raised above a sentence, the perfect adherence to 1954 federal government printing standards, the lack of commas in dates, and comparisons to other documents of that era.


And the one thing Wood didn't mention; the ability of the unknown booklet writers to take a topic as interesting and potentially Earth-shaking as aliens and UFOs and turn it into something jargony, acronym-laden and dry as, well, a government document. Boring.


It has to be real.



•••


If it's dry, it's real. That might have been the conference's theme.


Which isn't to bad-mouth it. It's just that, as a veteran of two International UFO Congresses, held annually in Laughlin, I can tell you that there are some really weird, completely unbelievable but incredibly fun and interesting alien, out-of-body, mind-reading, time-traveling storytellers out there. Two years ago, I drank water supposedly so packed with oxygen it was going to boost my energy level (it didn't). I listened raptly as someone told of a possible alien base on the dark side of the moon. And the stories of Stephen Greer and his Project Disclosure, with the promise of "back-engineered" alien technologies—like a suitcase-sized free-energy machine—practically had me quitting my job and taking off, Deadhead-style, to traipse around the country so I'd be on the cusp of this millennium-shaking story. But my favorite was the two guys with slides of their alien bracelet (kept under lock and key somewhere by a super-secret group of alien artifact custodians!) that allowed the wearer to step through dimensional portals, rendering them invisible to the human eye. I told Stanton Friedman I bought their book, and Stanton Friedman rolled his eyes at me.


See, Friedman is one of those UFO "buffs" who won't believe it unless he can prove it. And his proof comes by scouring documents in the National Archives, in presidential libraries and by making Freedom of Information Act requests for some plain, numbered, lettered box hidden deep within the warehouses of the federal government. His presentation—defending the Roswell crash against the new military spinmeister attacks—was one of the conference highlights. With his chin-hugging beard, his almost folksy Einsteinian quickness and a worn Stanton Brands Paint Co. pocket protector on his shirt, Friedman makes the layman comfortable enough to actually say words like "fusion" and "anti-gravitational" and "plasma beams" like they know what they're talking about. Having been on television numerous times, it also helps that he's recognizable enough to look like someone you know.


On his website, Friedman challenges those Air Force writers who keep trying to debunk the Roswell UFO-crash story to a debate. And he mercilessly rips their latest story, which says that what farmers and others saw as "bodies" back in 1947 were actually crash-test dummies dropped with, alongside or near the "weather balloon" that everyone mistakes for a flying saucer. The problem is, Friedman fumes, the government didn't start using dummies until the 1950s.


After his address, a group huddles around his table of books as I ask him the kind of questions that make it so hard for people to believe any of this is real.


Why—if UFOs are so prevalent and the government system to deal with them so huge—haven't more people come forward with information to blow it open? Friedman points to the volumes of documents that have been released, like the SOM1-01 pamphlet, to suggest that it is getting out. He also refers to the Manhattan Project, the supersecret lab that developed the atomic bomb. An estimated 12,000 people worked on that project. "And there was not one word to the public in 25 years," Friedman says. "And back then, we didn't even have the Patriot Act."


Further, he says, the people at the top of these kind of projects "don't get to that level not learning to shut their mouths."


OK. Then if we've had alien technology from some of these craft for some 40 years, how come we haven't torn them apart, learned how to make them, and built anti-gravitational cars?


Friedman holds up a Timex LCD wristwatch. "Give this to scientists 60 years ago, and I guarantee you there's no way they'd be able to create another one," he says. "It's the same thing today. We don't know how [alien craft] works. We can't figure it out."


With all of his media connections, and all the information he's mined from national archives, why can't he get anyone from the national media interested in doing a serious story about what he calls the "cosmic Watergate"?


Friedman calls the media mentality toward UFOs "the David Susskind Syndrome." "If it's real, it must be important; if it's important, [the media] must know about it—if [the media doesn't] know about it, it's not important; if it's not important, it's not real.


"The major media has an arrogance that transcends everything."



•••


In the lecture hall, two middle-aged women are talking between presentations. I can't help overhearing something that sounds akin to stories about being abducted. And, indeed, the Henderson woman says she has been abducted. In fact, one time she was so incensed that they came and did their thing with her in her home that she shouted at them from her bed. "And you could see them, sort of, startle from that," she says, smiling.


Before her next abduction, she says, her mother told her to "look at the walls." Cryptic advice, but Mom knew what she was talking about. The next time she was abducted, the woman noticed that instead of the wallpapered sides of her bedroom, the walls were blank, sterile. She was actually inside the ship.


"They got the message, I guess," she says, giggling.


What about her mom? I asked. What did she think?


She smiled to her friend, then said her mom had passed away.


"Before that abduction?"


"Mm-hmm."


"Then how did you talk to her?"


"I talk to dead people," she says, then laughs.


"I do too," says the other woman. "But I hung it up a long time ago."


"My mother always knew when someone had died," says the first woman, trying to explain how it is that she has this ability. "I remember once, I saw the score of the 49ers game and I knew they were going to win. And my son was so mad that I hadn't told him ahead of time."



•••


It's galling that Jackie Gleason could be trusted to take a peek at the bottled-up, formaldehyde-preserved bodies of extra-terrestrials, but I can't. Then again, to get Gleason's level of access, I would have had to befriend Richard Nixon—a pretty steep price to pay to see jarred aliens.


One of the most interesting parts of the weekend seminar was Grant Cameron's rushed presentation about what the various presidents have said or known about ETs. From Truman to George W. Bush, every president—but one—has been "briefed" about what the government knows about aliens, Cameron attests. Some have tried to shed light on the information—Jimmy Carter and Bill Clinton were the two most inquisitive—while others, like Nixon, used them as his own personal show-and-tell.


The Gleason episode was recounted in the National Enquirer, then reportedly confirmed by a former airman first class named Larry Warren. It boils down to this: Nixon and Gleason were golfing buddies, both with a keen interest in UFOs. In Florida one year, Nixon shows up at Gleason's place, drives him to Homestead Air Force Base in Dade County. After going through several checkpoints, they arrive at an area where crash wreckage and alien bodies are stored. Warren said Gleason told him of the encounter after Warren had made public a military encounter with UFO's in 1980.


"Gleason was shaken up about it," Cameron said. "To the moon," indeed.


When Carter took office, he "did what he could to release the information," says Cameron, who is working on a book. He even fired George H.W. Bush, who was director of the Central Intelligence Agency, when Bush refused to give him "the briefing." Carter later got the information he wanted, then was left in a predicament.


"He wanted to expose it, but he didn't and couldn't," is how Cameron summarized Carter's predicament.


Ronald Reagan, on the other hand, was given "the briefing," and at least four times made references to otherworldly beings and forces in public speeches. Cameron said that when Steven Spielberg screened E.T. for Reagan in 1982, Reagan leaned forward and whispered to Spielberg: "I bet there aren't six people in this room who know how real this thing is." Colin Powell was Reagan's National Security Adviser who, Cameron said, "worked hard to keep UFOs out of the speeches." The editor, however, couldn't stop Reagan's mouth. This is what he said in 1988, standing alongside Russian President Mikhail Gorbachev: "I occasionally think how quickly our differences, worldwide, would vanish if we were facing an alien threat from outside this world."


Because Clinton was such an outsider, and because of the knife he took with the country's enormous military budget, Cameron believes he was never briefed. "He tried to get Roswell disclosed and couldn't."


Vice President Dick Cheney slipped up a few years ago, Cameron says, when he told a national radio audience that if he had been briefed about UFOs, "it's classified and I can't talk about it."


"Needless to say, they haven't let him on too many more radio shows," Cameron said to the knowing snickers of his Sunset Station audience.



•••


Going to a UFO conference is a bit like taking the Red Pill in The Matrix, stepping out of the collective illusion and seeing reality for the first time. Not with the first presentation. Or even the second. But by the end of a conference, after falling in lockstep with so many believers and hearing people speak so plainly about alien visitations and encounters on Earth, it's hard not to feel different. Exposed.


Because what if it's real?


And what if I'm the only one—outside of this handful of people who are rarely given a smidgeon of credibility beyond their own circles—who now believes it? How can I look at my kid the same way? What do I say to my friends? And work: How do I care about local politics when this immeasurably vast story is out there?


At least, that's how I always feel the moment the conference is over. Jazzed on the sheer possibility. (It's why my wife doesn't like me to cover these things.) Then a few days pass. I'm not hearing anything about UFOs or back-engineering anymore. My muscles ache from planting trees in the yard. I'm foggy from waking in the wee hours to the cries of a hungry, soiled baby. Some asshole cuts me off on the way to work. I forget to pay the mortgage.


And suddenly, I don't need the Blue Pill to be reinserted into consensual reality. I'm back in my own little matrix. And this time, it only took a week. Just like my wife said it would.

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