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AREA 51 75 angry calls from the audience. "What about the Constitution?" yelled one man sitting near me. "What gives you the right to drive someone crazy?" A woman simply got up and left in utter disgust. It is not for me to judge the actions of the people who claim to be genuine researchers of the paranormal and who willingly engage in such games, as Bill Moore did. If the Air Force, or any other government organization, has in fact encouraged its agents to act in such ways, then the result is a scandal on the scale of the disinformation and mind- control operations of the Sixties and the Seventies that culminated in the FBI's Cointelpro and the CIA's MK-Ultra, a very dark chapter in American history. With these programs, citizens of the U.S. and other countries, notably Canada, were systematically exposed to disinforma- tion, to anonymous letters that used every possible racist and sexual insinuation to discredit them, or to dangerous drugs that turned them into vegetables and sometimes led to their death. MK-Ultra has been documented in the courts and in several books. But the scandal of the manipulation of the belief in UFOs has not been documented at all. This is a very grave situation indeed, for Paul Bennewitz is not the only reputable scientist who is being affected by these rumors. Over the last few years, I have witnessed radical changes of attitude among those of my scientific colleagues who, at one time, had seriously devoted their energies to UFO research. Many of them, discouraged between the absurd practices of the Abductionists hypnotizing witnesses without any safeguard, and the fabricated claims of crashed aliens, have simply abandoned their investigations. I cannot say that I blame them. But before I retire from the field, I want to place a few more facts on record to help those who may follow, and I want to ask a few blunt questions. Something does not make sense here. Why would someone in Washington mount a disinformation effort if the only result is to confuse the members of the UFO research community, which is a very small group without much influence over the public at large? Is something more sinister involved? Are John Lear and Bill Cooper right when they claim the truth is more horrible than anything we can imagine, even if they are utterly, tragically wrong about the facts and the motives?