Jon Lewis - The Mammoth Book of Cover-Ups

After the release of The Interrupted Journey in 1966, a parade of alien abductions followed, including:

In November 1975 six woodcutters claimed that their colleague, Travis Walton, had vanished after encountering a UFO. When Walton reappeared he claimed that he, like the Hills, had been abducted by the aliens known throughout the UFO fraternity as “Greys”.

In 1987 the horror novelist Whitley Strieber claimed in his book Communion (later filmed starring Christopher Walken) to have been abducted and anally probed by aliens.

In 1991 Linda Cortile alleged that she was beamed out of her New York apartment into a UFO; the “case of the century” was researched by UFOlogist Budd Hopkins, who maintains he found two secret servicemen attached to the United Nations who witnessed Cortile’s aerial passage into the UFO.

In the same year as Cortile’s alleged abduction, the Roper polling organization found that 2 per cent of the US’s 300 million population had been abducted by aliens. Most abductees reported multiple abductions over their lifetimes. On an average, humdrum day in the US, it follows, some 2,740 Americans are being taken aboard spaceships and examined, probed and raped.

Why is abduction on this scale not a major news event? There are claims that the media systematically covers up the abduction phenomenon because the media’s masters in the New World Ordergain from collusion with the aliens: the New World Order trades the citizens of America for futuristic technology. Anyone who dares to whistle-blow on this cosy arrangement is threatened with permanent silence by the Men in Black.

Another scenario suggests itself: alien abduction is hooey. In almost all cases of alien abduction the only evidence is the abductee’s story, and 87 per cent of abductees are, according to one survey, fantasists. That is to say, most abductees make up, either consciously or unconsciously, their abduction experience. A telling point against alien abduction is that the abductees tend to repeat the Hill experience; yet, if aliens have the ability to travel a trillion miles, might they not have the ability to vary their experiments on humans a little? The church-going Hills themselves were likely victims of the psychological condition known as folie à deux, where two (or more) people subconsciously influence each other into sincerely believing a lie or delusion. Some would-be abductees have been found to be suffering from sleep terrors or temporal lobe epilepsy, both of which can cause vivid hallucinations.

Then there is the primary tool for obtaining evidence of abduction experiences: hypnosis. While abduction supporters such as John E. Mack, sometime professor of psychiatry at Harvard, argue that hypnosis is necessary to circumvent the mental blocks put on the abduction experience by the aliens, the reliability of memories recovered under hypnosis is extremely poor. There is growing evidence that recovered memories either play to what the patient believes the therapist wants or are “confabulations”, amalgams of fact and fantasy.

No physical evidence of alien interference with a human, be it an operation or the placing of an implant, has ever stood up to investigation. One “alien implant” was found to be a mercury dental filling!

Eric Elfman., Almanac of Alien Encounters, 2001

John Fuller, The Interrupted Journey, 1966

Budd Hopkins., Intruders, 1987

John E. Mack, Abduction: Human Encounters with Aliens, 1994

In Rambo: First Blood Part II, Sylvester Stallone’s gun-toting hero lands in Vietnam to rescue American POWs left behind after the conclusion of the war in 1973.

But were there any such POWs in real life? No, said successive US governments, starting with Richard Nixon’s Republicans in 1973. Sociology professors agreed, labelling the “MIA myth” as mass conservative hysteria, a psychological unwillingness to let go of Vietnam as a hopeless cause.

Yes, said an awful lot of US soldiers and intelligence agents, starting with US Marine Bobby Garfield. Garfield was captured by the Viet Cong in 1965 and released in 1979—that is, five years after the US government had assured the nation that all MIAs and POWs had been accounted for. Families of MIAs/POWs then asked the Pentagon for declassified documents about their loved ones—only for the Pentagon to reclassify these documents. When the wife of one MIA wrote to President Reagan, he replied that his administration had planned a rescue raid for the MIA by Green Berets under the command of Colonel Bo Gritz in 1981.

Eh? The official line was that no US MIA remained alive in Indochina.

Some sense of the contradictions and denials of the White House was made by the authors Monika Jensen-Stevenson and William Stevenson in their 1990 book Kiss the Boys Goodbye. The Stevensons reported that Dr Henry Kissinger negotiated a secret clause in the Paris Peace Accord (which ended the war in Nam) whereby the US would pay North Vietnam $4 billion in reparations in return for POWs held by Hanoi. The US then reneged on the reparations—and the POWs stayed in Vietnam. “We had thousands of Americans after the release of 1973,” a Vietnamese secret police chief informed the Stevensons.

Confirmation of the Stevensons’ case came in 1992 with the testimony of Richard Allen before Senator John Kerry’s Senate Select Committee on the fate of the American MIA. Allen informed the Committee that in 1981 Vietnam had offered to free the POWs it still held—some dozens—if the US handed over the $4 billion it had originally promised. The offer was rebuffed by the Reagan government because it was not willing to pay ransom money for hostages (a piece of high-mindedness that apparently ended at the border of Iran; in 1987 Reagan confessed on TV that he had traded arms for American hostages and funnelled the funds to the Contras in Nicaragua—see Iran-Contra Scandal).Some observers, however, considered that the Reagan rebuff was simply because his administration wanted to close down the MIA/POW issue for fear of exposing the US’s illegal operations in Laos, bordering Vietnam, where many POWs were believed held. According to whistle-blowing CIA agents, there were any number of embarrassing schemes operated by the agency in Laos, from drug-running to arms sales, waiting to be turned into headline news by the media. Better, then, to sacrifice the POWs and keep newshound noses out of Laos.

So John Rambo had it right: there were MIAs/POWs left behind in Vietnam.

Sadly, the chances of any POWs being left alive today, after 30 years of privation and imprisonment, are remote.

Monika Jensen-Stevenson and William Stevenson, Kiss the Boys Goodbye, 1990

Also known as the Groom Lake Facility, Area 51 is a high-security military base in the Nevada desert, 90 miles (145 km) north of Las Vegas. The facility, which comprises thousands of acres, is surrounded by security fencing and intruder-detection systems, and is regularly patrolled. A no-fly zone operates above it.

So far, so military-base humdrum. Where Area 51 differs from other military installations is in the longstanding belief by conspiracists that it houses the UFO disc found at Roswell,as well as other crashed alien spaceships. At Area 51, the theory goes, the recovered UFOs are back-engineered so that their technology can be utilized by the US military. The latter are helped—either willingly or unwillingly—by captured alien pilots.