Page Content (OCR)
hoax. know." REVELATIONS that have been carefully engineered for our benefit. The witnesses are merely the victims and the instruments rather than the authors of the Who is perpetrating such deliberate fabrications and what is their goal? There is no single answer to this question because there is no single source to human fantasy, no single reason for the deviousness of those military or civilian agencies that are spending our money to conduct secret psychological experiments—as the mind control projects of the Sixties and Seventies have abundantly demonstrated. So, as I kept digging into a mass of information that had been generally avoided, it is not surprising that my research should have taken me toward some unexpected quarters. Some cases, it turns out, involved private groups with fantastic delusions and an insane compulsion to spread them to a larger segment of the public. Others were found to have been engineered by government agencies engaged in psychological warfare exercises on which they declined comment, conveniently bury- ing them behind the curtain of classified intelligence. This bears em- phasizing: some UFO sightings are covert experiments in the manipulation of the belief systems of the public. And some cases simply did not happen. The stories about them, numerous rumors of crashed saucers and burned aliens, were not so much the result of delusions as the product of deception: rumors deliberately planted in the eager minds of gullible believers to hide more real facts about which it was felt that the public and the scientific community had no "need to In previous works I have argued that ufology was, among other things, "folklore in the making," and that it ought to be studied as such. I was referring to the accumulation of stories about contact with aliens, a new form of mythology that formed a striking parallel to the inter- course with angels, demons, and elves in earlier ages. But the stories that are spreading now go way beyond anything in ordinary folklore. We are told that aliens have crashed on earth in their flying machines, that bodies have been recovered and autopsies performed. The first part of this book, entitled "Alien Retrievals," describes the array of such stories that have proliferated in the last ten years. Ac-