Page Content (OCR)
regime. In his well-documented book War on the Mind, clinical psychologist Peter Watson, who was a member of the Sunday Times "Insight" team which investigated (among other things) the use of psychological warfare by the British, reveals that "equipment has been developed to use low-lying clouds as a screen off which to bounce huge propaganda shows. Tape recordings of primitive gods have been prepared, to be played from helicopters, thus frightening tribes." During the Vietnam war a U.S. military unit called the 4" Psyop Group invented an image projector called the Mitralux. It used eighty-five-millimeter slides and a 1,000-watt bulb to project pictures on buildings, mountains, and cloud banks. I believe that it is imperative for scientists to study UFOs. But we should not do it naively. With the progress of human technology, it has become impossible to study any UFO report without considering the possibility of a deliberate deception along with all the other classical hypotheses. Many UFO groups are gullible to any rumor that seems to support the extraterrestrial credo, without seriously investigating where the rumor comes from and who may have an interest in spreading it. The skeptical zeal of some of the more vocal debunkers is also inspired by the need to maintain political control. To prevent genuine scientific study from being organized, all that is needed is to maintain a certain threshold of ridicule around the phenomenon. This can be done easily enough by a few influential science writers, under the guise of humanism or rationalism. UFO research is equated by them with "false science," thus creating an atmosphere of guilt by association, which is deadly to any independent scientist. Efforts are made to systematically discredit professional researchers who investigate the phenomenon. This history of the interaction between flying-saucer contact and politics goes back to the early California contactees. In those days, many occult groups linked to power-hungry organizations were extremely active. Right after World War II, when a branch of Aleister Crowley's neo-Templar cult flourished in Los Angeles, two of the most ardent members were Jack W. Parsons, a propulsion engineer, and L. Ron Hubbard, a science-fiction buff. Jack Parsons claimed to have met a Venusian in the desert in 1946 and went on to be one of the founders of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory and of the Aerojet Corporation, although JPL may deny the connection. L. Ron Hubbard went on to found Dianetics and Scientology. According to my information, contactee George Adamski had prewar connections with American fascist leader William Dudley Pelley, who was interned during the war. Another seminal contactee, George Hunt Williamson (whose real name was Michel d'Obrenovic), was associated with Pelley's organization in the early fifties. In fact, Pelley may have put Williamson in touch with Adamski. Other associates of Williamson during the great era of the flying saucers were such contactees as John McCoy and the two Stanford brothers, Ray and Rex. The connections among all these men, who have been very influential in shaping the UFO myth in the United States, are quite intricate. William Dudley Pelley, who died in 1965, was the leader of the Silver Shirts, an American Nazi group that began its activities about 1932. Its membership overlapped strongly with Guy Ballard's J Am movement. Pelley declined to join the other fascist groups in their support for Congressman Lemke in 1936, standing on his own in Indiana as a Christian Party candidate. His opposition to Roosevelt increased until his eight-year internment for sedition in 1942. After the war, he started an occult group, Soulcraft, and published a racist magazine called Valor. He also wrote the book Star Guests in 1950, a compilation of automatic writing reminiscent of the Seth Material. It was about 1950 that Williamson is said to have begun working for Pelley at the offices of Soulcraft Publications in Noblesville, Indiana, before moving to California, where he witnessed Adamski's desert contact on November 20, 1952, with a Venusian that had long blond hair. Williamson, however, has assured me that he never embraced any of the racist theories that the pro- Nazi movements promoted. Perhaps Adamski and Pelley knew one another as a result of their common interest in the J Am cult? Dr. Laughead, who inspired the contacts of Mrs. Keech in the Midwest and later launched Dr. Andrija Pucharich on the tracks of the mythic "Spectra," is also said 1 rs re) to have associated with this group.