Disinformation: From Euros to UFOs

A secret service?

In the Guardian of 12 June 2000 David Leigh had an important piece on the relationship between our secret servants and the media. At the core of this was his account of the revelation, via a libel suit in London, of an MI6 operation to plant disinformation in the Sunday Telegraph about the son of Colonel Gaddafi. (1)
The story was written by Con Coughlin and attributed to a ‘British banking official’. As the trial revealed, said official came from MI6, who had been supplying Coughlin with material for years. Leigh describes how, when Coughlin asked his source for evidence, he was shown but not allowed to copy documents. This is the classic IRD disinformation technique, described in use in Cyprus in the 1960s by Charles Foley in his book Legacy of Strife (2) and, more recently, by Colin Wallace working in Information Policy in Northern Ireland in the 1970s: show the dummies forgeries but don’t let them take them out of the room

Finding MI6 disinformation in the Sunday Telegraph will hardly come as a surprise to anyone who reads it, for it has been a leading purveyor of MI6 disinformation for many years. I began at one stage collecting it but gave up: there was just too much cutting and filing to be done. But I have a story in my files from the same Con Coughlin, headlined ‘Gaddafi “was praised for jet bombing”‘, about a letter, purporting to have been written, two days after the Lockerbie bombing, by the former head of Libya’s diplomatic mission in London, praising Gaddafi for the bombing. (3) Somebody with a lot of patience could sit in the Collindale newspaper Library, comb through the Sunday Telegraph for the past 20 years and reconstruct, through the stories filed by Coughlin and his colleagues and predecessors, many of MI6’s disinformation projects.

Two days before I began writing this piece in September, the Sunday Telegraph of 24 September carried three pieces about or sourced by MI6. On the back of the attack on the MI6 building, the BBC’s John Simpson published a puff piece about being wined and dined by MI6 in their new building; another puff piece was by former MI6 officer Alan Petty, using his nom de plume Alan Judd, again on the building; and, apparently unabashed by the libel case described by Hollingsworth and Leigh, there was another anti-Gaddafi piece by Con Coughlin, claiming that Libya now has some North Korean ballistic missiles. The only stated source for the allegations contained therein was a
‘Western intelligence official’. On 28 May 2000 the Sunday Times article ‘IRA investors make 300% profit out of Gaddafi cash donations’, sourced back to ‘MI5 documents seen by The Sunday Times‘, concluded by telling us that Swiss police were ‘investigating the supply to Libya from Taiwan of plans and parts for Scud missiles.’ Well, is it Taiwanese Scuds (MI5, Sunday Times) or North Korean missiles (MI6, Sunday Telegraph)?

Sometimes these MI6 plants are really laughable. The Sunday Telegraph of 30 July carried a story on its front page and on page 23 by Christina Lamb, ‘Diplomatic Correspondent’ – a title once held by Coughlin – which claimed that Saddam Hussein had sent belly dancing assassins to London to murder his opponents there. Lamb sourced this to ‘a Foreign Office official’.(4)

Where are they now?

Skimming through the e-newsletter NewsmakingNews of 18 September I had an attack of deja vu. Was that really Robert Moss’s name? And John Rees? Yes, indeed it was. And what do you suppose erstwhile professional anti-communists and disinformationists Moss and Rees are doing these days, more than a decade after the fall of the Wall? You’re right: the same thing they were doing before the Wall fell; they’re still commie-spotting.

These days they are running something called the Maldon Institute, funded by, among others, Richard Scaife, who funded – or fronted for the funding of – much of the American right in the 1970s and 80s, as well as old Uncle Brian Crozier and his many projects. As Maldon they feed the traditional brand of baloney into the politically naive ears of American police forces warning them of ‘the red menace’ locally. Rees has been doing this since the 1960s.

For an example, a piece in the Philadelphia Inquirer of 20 September (5) included this:

‘In state police affidavits justifying a raid on a West Philadelphia warehouse used by convention protesters, troopers alleged that communists were behind the demonstrations.

“Funds allegedly originate with Communist and leftist parties and from sympathetic trade unions”, the state police declared in the affidavits. Other funds reportedly come from the former Soviet-allied World Federation of Trade Unions.'(6)

The dear old WFTU!

The disinformation hall of fame

1: The European project

There have been a number of major disinformation projects in my lifetime. The selling of the EEC/EU as an economic not a political project is probably the most important and certainly the longest-running. This operation is described in some detail in Hugo Young’s book, This Blessed Plot (reviewed in Lobster 37), though that was not his intention. At the heart of Young’s account was his access to a secret Foreign and Commonwealth Office (FCO) history of the negotiations. That ‘secret’ account was published in September 2000.(7) The Guardian gloss of the FCO press release marking publication of the history was by Ian Black, headlined ‘”Secret” history of EC talks to be published to counter Eurosceptics’ (6 September). This was a beautiful example of the Big Lie. For far from ‘countering’ the Eurosceptics, this internal history, to judge from the sections quoted in Young, shows that everything the Euro-sceptics suspected about the FCO’s motives and actions in the European issue are true.(8) The anti-EU Telegraph version of the story on 9 September concluded that it was ‘the most shameful episode in post-war British history’ – a preposterous exaggeration. What about 2? 3? million dead in Biafra, the ‘African holocaust’ to use Harold Smith’s term? On a smaller scale, what about 15? 20? thousand Kenyans killed during the Mau Mau insurgency?

Both newspapers’ accounts of the document’s release refer to its publication, 2 years ahead of the 30 year deadline for its apparent scheduled release under the Official Secrets Act, as evidence of concerns by the FCO about open government. This is difficult to take seriously. Given the delicate nature of the debate in the UK about membership of the EU – the second major FCO objective for about 30 years; the first has been cosying up to America – how likely is it that the FCO would release, and release now, its in-house history of the negotiations with the EEC?

Another explanation of why it has been published is this. In my review of Young’s book I pointed out that in giving Young access to the hitherto secret report, the Official Secrets Act had been breached in a major way. My review was sent to the Eurosceptic Lord Stoddard who put down a question in the House of Lords about Young’s breach of the OSA. It was only then, in the FCO reply to Stoddard, that it was announced that the report was going to be released (and thus, implicitly, while Young may have breached the OSA, it didn’t matter because the secret wouldn’t be secret much longer).

EuroFAQ distributed the text of a letter dated 7 August from the chair of the UK Independence Party, Jeremy Titford MEP, to the governors of the BBC. The letter included this:

‘…the news revealed by Andrew Neil, one of the BBC’s presenters, on a recent Radio 5 Live breakfast show, when he said that the BBC’s “Europarty” – a group of senior staff at the BBC – had conspired to keep out of the news, all day, a new MORI Poll showing that 72% of British people wanted to keep the Pound. Andrew Neil alleged that the BBC’s “Europarty” had also manipulated the news to the extent that the news of the MORI Poll had even been kept from its roundup of the daily newspapers …………….The Minotaur Media Tracking Report _ an independent report commissioned last year by Global Britain _ demonstrated, conclusively, BBC bias on the European Union and on the Euro in the lead-up to the European elections. Crucially, senior staff at the BBC managed the news to such an extent that the Pro-Euro Conservative Party, which received just 1% of the popular vote, received infinitely more coverage than did my Party, which achieved 8% of the vote. Yet, when we met with Mr Mitchell and his colleagues on 31 July, Mr Mitchell could refer us to no action whatsoever that had been taken by the BBC to ensure that its news and political programming on the European Union and the Euro became impartial. In essence, senior staff at the BBC appear to be in complete ‘denial’ that there is a problem – and a serious problem – of bias on the E.U. and the Euro. That is what one would expect, frankly, in a situation where there is deliberate news manipulation.’

Titford detects bias – of course he’s right; but it’s more than bias, really. Being in favour of British membership of the EEC/EU is written through the rock of the BBC’s higher management, one of the never challenged core assumptions of its world view. This BBC collective line, never articulated, is that we should do what the Foreign Office tell us: they are sensible, clever chaps (and they pay for the BBC World Service….) This has been the BBC line since the late sixties; since, oddly enough, the Foreign Office decided it had to embrace the then EEC.

The core reason for that embrace, to quote Sir Con O’Neil, author of the in-house history of negotiations with the EEC/EU, was that:

‘What mattered was to get into the Community and thereby restore our position at the centre of European affairs which, since 1958, we had lost. None of [the Community’s] policies was essential to us; many of them were objectionable. But in order to get in we either had to accept them or to secure agreed adaptations.’

‘Restoring Britain’s place….’ – the authentic voice of the Foreign Office. As to what happened in 1958, I had to look that up. I think it is a reference to the arrival of General De Gaulle as head of state in France. In short: we had to join the EEC to carry on the competition with France. If you employ diplomats they play the diplomatic game.

Euro-wise

We know something of the previous covert campaigns to persuade the UK voters to support entry into the EU/EEC. On the campaign in the 1960s the only source I have come across is chapter 12 of Richard Kisch, The Private Life of Public Relations. (9) (See review in Lobster 30) On the 1970s there are two sources worth a look. The major one is Paul Lashmar and James Oliver’s Britain’s Secret Propaganda War 1948-1977 (10) (See review in Lobster 37) chapter 16. The other is a section of chapter 10 of Alistair McAlpine’s memoir Once a Jolly Bagman.(11)

2: the KGB shot the Pope

One of the most successful major scale disinformation projects since Lobster was begun has been the KGB-shot-the-Pope story created by Brian Crozier’s chums in the CIA. Hardly anyone still believes this nonsense but this didn’t stop the Sunday Times running a very strange, thin version of the ‘KGB story’ on 9 January 2000, ‘Gunman links KGB to shooting of Pope’, in which Agca was described as still saying he was run by the KGB. (Agca was released from prison in June – an event which I confess I didn’t notice at the time.) In ‘The real Ali Agca connection’ in Extra! September/October 2000, Martin Lee described some recent developments in the public knowledge of the Grey Wolves-drugs-Turkish state-terrorism relationships, the milieu in which Agca was run. He tells us there, citing Le Monde Diplomatique, that the Grey Wolves were armed and run by the Conter-Guerilla (sic) Organisation of the Turkish Army’s Special Warfare Department. This Department, in turn, had been set up by the US military to act as a ‘stay behind’ group in the event of a Soviet invasion; but actually set about fighting the Turkish left. Is the story sounding familiar yet? It should: this is the Gladio network – or its off-spring – its Turkish branch doing the same thing as its Italian counterpart.(12)

In retaliation for the KGB-shot-the Pope story, the Soviets manufactured the story that AIDS had been developed by the US military, a story which trundled round the world in the late 1980s and 1990s but never broke through into the European or American major media.(13)

Bennewitz reported his findings to the US Air Force and had a series of meetings with USAF personnel in October and November 1980, including Richard Doty of the Air Force Office of Special Investigations (AFOSI), about whom we will hear a lot more.

A ‘Multipurpose Internal OSI Form’, signed by Maj. Thomas A. Cseh (Commander of the Base Investigative Detachment), dated October 28, 1980, and subsequently released under the Freedom of Information Act, states:

‘On 26 Oct 80, SA [Special Agent] Doty, with the assistance of Jerry Miller, GS-15, Chief Scientific Advisor for Air Force Test and Evaluation Center, KAFB interviewed Dr. Bennewitz at his home in the Four Hills section of Albuquerque, which is adjacent to to the northern boundary of Manzano Base, Dr. Bennewitz has been conducting independent research into Aerial Phenomena for the last 15 months. Dr. Bennewitz also produced several electronic recording tapes, allegedly showing high periods of electrical magnetism being emitted from Manzano/Coyote Canyon area. Dr. Bennewitz also produced several photographs of flying objects taken over the general Albuquerque area. He has several pieces of electronic surveillance equipment pointed at Manzano and is attempting to record high frequency electrical beam pulses. Dr. Bennewitz claims these Aerial Objects produce these pulses…….. After analyzing the data collected by Dr. Bennewitz, Mr Miller related the evidence clearly shows that some type of unidentified aerial objects were caught on film; however, no conclusions could be made whether these objects pose a threat to Manzano/Coyote Canyon areas. Mr Miller felt the electronical [sic] recording tapes were inconclusive and could have been gathered from several conventional sources. No sightings, other than these, have been reported in the area.’

On November 10 Bennewitz was invited to the base to present his findings to a small group of officers and scientists. Exactly one week later Sgt. Doty informed Bennewitz that AFOSI had decided against further consideration of the matter. [Clark]

This last statement was a lie: For reasons I discuss below, Bennewitz’s bizarre stories had set the alarm bells sounding within the US military and he became the first victim of an operation to disinform the US UFO researchers. When this operation began, and at what level it was initiated, is not known. However it appears to have begun before the October AFOSI meetings with Bennewitz.(15) For in September the operation, in the person of a man later given the code-name ‘Falcon’, contacted William Moore, co-author of the 1980 book about the alleged UFO crash at Roswell, which began the whole Roswell saga, and offered him a role in official US government research into UFOs. Moore’s role was that of recipient and disseminator of information and disinformation and – perhaps – a source for ‘Falcon’ on the civilian UFO groups.(16)

‘Falcon’ was the AFOSI Special Agent [Sgt.] Doty who had interviewed Bennewitz; and Doty, an Air Force investigator, a figure – albeit not a very significant one – from the Federal government, proceeded to feed a lot of ridiculous nonsense to Bennewitz (17) and Moore; and thus into the wider UFO buff world. For example:

‘…… that the U.S. government and malevolent aliens are in an uneasy alliance to control the planet, that the aliens are killing and mutilating not only cattle but human beings, whose organs they need to lengthen their lives, and that they are even eating human flesh. In underground bases at government installations in Nevada and New Mexico human and alien scientists work together on ghastly experiments, including the creation of soulless androids out of human and animal body parts. Aliens are abducting as many as one American in 40 and implanting devices which control human behaviour. CIA brainwashing and other control techniques are doing the same, turning life on earth into a nightmare of violence and irrationality. It was, as Moore remarks, ‘the wildest science fiction scenario anyone could possibly imagine’. [Clark] (18)

Doty also began producing and/or distributing forged documents – a paper trail of apparently official US government/military documents. Such paper, evidence of government involvement, rather than video footage of disks in the sky, is the Holy Grail for many of the more serious UFO researchers. Some of them, for example the group Citizens Against UFO Secrecy (CAUS), were trying at the time to use the Freedom of Information Act to winkle out official paper on UFOs.

The first identified forgery, in 1980, was a relatively simple document, an official report of a UFO sighting.(19) The next, released under the FOIA in 1982, was another such report but tacked on at the end were the words ‘MJ twelve’ – the first reference to the secret group alleged to be running US contacts with aliens. [Clark]

Moore describes this as an ‘example of some of the disinformation produced in connection with the Bennewitz case. The document is a retyped version of a real AFOSI message with a few spurious additions.’ [Clark](20)
The following year Doty met attorney Peter Gersten, director of Citizens Against UFO Secrecy (CAUS). There were two meetings, at the second of which Doty ran bits and pieces of the agenda he had earlier run at Bennewitz and Moore, talking of extraterrestrials, UFO crashes, recovered bodies, and even

‘…..a spectacular incident, much like the one depicted in the ending of the film Close Encounters of the Third Kind, [which] took place in 1966……. agreements between the U.S. government and extraterrestrials under which the latter are free to conduct animal mutilations (especially of cattle) and to land at a certain base, in exchange for information about advanced UFO technology. Doty also claimed that via popular entertainment the American people are being prepared to accept the reality of visitation by benevolent beings from other worlds.’ [Clark]

And so on to MJ-12

The following year the disinformation operation took a big step forward, releasing the fake MJ-12 documents.

‘In December 1984, in the midst of continuing contact with their own sources (Doty and a number of others) who claimed to be leaking the secret of the cover-up, Moore’s associate Jaime Shandera received a roll of 35mm film containing, it turned out, what purported to be a briefing paper dated November 18, 1952, and intended for president-elect Eisenhower. The purported author, Adm. Roscoe H. Hillenkoetter, reported that an ‘Operation Majestic-12’, consisting of a dozen top scientists, military officers and intelligence specialists, had been set up by presidential order on September 24 1947, to study the Roswell remains and the four humanoid bodies that had been recovered nearby. The document reports that the team directed by MJ12 member and physiologist Detlev Bronk ‘has suggested the term “Extra-terrestrial Biological Entities”, or “EBEs”, be adopted as the standard term of reference for these creatures until such time as a more definitive designation can be agreed upon.’ Brief mention is also made of a December 6, 1950, crash along the Texas-Mexico border. Nothing is said, however, about live aliens or communications with them.’

This phase of the operation then added the nice wrinkle in 1985 of planting a document in the archives and giving Moore and Shandera a tip that it was there. It was duly found – ‘confirmation’ of the authenticity of the MJ-12 documents. [Clark]

The MJ-12 documents themselves were sent to the British UFO researcher Timothy Good and the first mention of them in the major media appeared in the Observer in London in 1987. This is the psy-ops technique of ‘surfacing’ an item abroad to be imported with the added authenticity of it having already been published by a reputable source. (22)

In 1987 another USAF officer, Robert Collins, showed some MJ-12 documents to Linda Howe primarily relating to a live alien allegedly held captive by the U.S. Government. According to Howe, Collins stated that he had worked ‘behind the scenes’ with Bill Moore for years. [Hastings]

Having created the bubble, the operation – recognisably the psy-ops operation known as double bubble which leads the inquirer down a false trail before popping the bubble, revealing the trail to be false – then proceeded to detonation, done in two steps. In the first, two of the government sources, Doty and Robert Collins, appeared, their faces hidden, their voices altered, on a networked TV show in October 1988 about UFOs and made the whole thing look ridiculous by telling the audience that the aliens liked Tibetan music and strawberry ice cream. [Clark] (23)

The final major act?
The final major act in the operation came in July 1989 at the annual conference of the big American UFO organisation MUFON, at which Bill Moore blew the gaff on the whole thing, revealing his role in disinforming the UFO community.

It is not clear what the purpose of these operations was beyond causing chaos among the UFO researchers (and messing with Bennewitz’s head).(24) But chaos it certainly caused. Some years after he blew the gaffe, Moore said in an interview with Greg Bishop:

‘The whole story of Government/alien involvement, treaties with aliens, underground bases, a plot to take over the planet, implants, two different races of aliens, one hostile and one friendly, etc. was all cooked up by the counter-intelligence people for the purpose of discrediting Bennewitz. He bought it, and a lot of other people in the UFO community bought it, and they continue to buy it today….. Bennewitz was meeting with everybody who was anybody and telling that story to anyone who would listen. John Lear, and ultimately through him to Bill Cooper, Bill English, Wendell Stevens… they all revolved around that information. It was the kind of paranoia that they wanted to hear. And so here’s John Lear, organizer and host of the conference in Vegas, one of the chief proponents of that kind of information, staking his so-called reputation on the fact that it was all true. Linda Howe has gotten in over her head over it, all those people prepared to tell their stories, and become important forces for good in the UFO research community.

Then I get up and tell them, ‘Folks, you’ve been had. And here’s how I know. It isn’t that I’ve heard it, I was part of it. I was there. I watched it happen. I knew who was doing it, and I was privy to it.’ [Moore interview]

Dan T. Smith is a kind of public spokesperson for the group of scientists and intelligence officers, collectively dubbed ‘the birds’ or ‘the aviary’, who were involved in the operation. Of Doty he said in a recent interview:

‘Rick Doty has probably contributed more to the UFO-government conspiracy rumours than everyone else combined. He has done so while in the government employ, and maintaining high level contacts in the intelligence community.’ [Paranoia magazine]

Why Bennewitz in the first place?

The question that to my knowledge has not been answered is this: what did Bennewitz have which justified this? Why bother with a mentally ill UFO nut with a few fuzzy pictures? Most of those inside the UFO community seem to have assumed it was because of his evidence of UFOs. I don’t think this is the answer. Moore said in his 1989 revelation to the MUFON conference:

‘…..certain elements within the intelligence community were concerned that the story of his having intercepted low frequency electromagnetic emissions from the Coyote Canyon area of the Kirtland/ Sandia complex would end up as part of a feature film. Since this in turn might influence others (possibly even the Russians) to attempt similar experiments, someone in a control position apparently felt it had to be stopped before it got out of hand (emphasis added).’ [Clark]

Does this reference to Bennewitz’s evidence of extremely low frequency (elf) electromagnetic emissions explain why Bennewitz was targeted? It was in the mid-1970s that the US military began taking a serious interest in elf – and microwaves generally. (The Soviets were already doing it.) I have no idea on which ‘experiments’ was Bennewitz was electronically eavesdropping, but by 1980 a small group of American scientists and scientifically-literate journalists were already discussing the implications of this research in fairly apocalyptic terms. In the US academic papers in this field began vanishing off the library shelves: at UCLA a student was sent to check some 180 references in the open literature and found many of them cut from the academic journals. (25) Is it possible that the entire ‘X Files agenda’ of the last decade began as the by-product of the desire to conceal US military electromagnetic research?

Sources

Clark — http://www.anomalies.net/archive/ufo/mulder. rutgers.edu/ebe.txt
Doty letter — http://akita.textfiles.com/ufo/doty.ufo
Robert J. Durant, ‘Will the real Scott Jones Please stand up?’ http://netropic.speakeasy.org/strand/4/scottjones.html
Robert Hastings, ‘The MJ-12 affair: Facts, Questions, Comments’, March 1, 1980 — http://www.mj12.org/mj12/ hastings.txt
Moore interview — http://www.excludedmiddle.com/Moore%20interview.html
Paranoia magazine: interview with Dan. T. Smith — http://www.paranoiamagazine.com/DanSmith.htm
psimind — http://members.nbci.com/psimind/ufo6.htm

Notes

1. This was first discussed in ‘The hidden hand’, Mark Hollingsworth, the Guardian 30 March 2000. A similar story was run through the Sunday Times. See ‘View from the bridge’ in Lobster 36.
2. Penguin, 1964 p. 104
3. Sunday Telegraph 29 September 1989
4. It was Lamb who put her name to a load of FCO nonsense about the Sudan on 27 August 2000, headlined ‘China puts “700,000 troops” on Sudan alert’. The flood of stories on the Net around this time about the Sudan seems to be linked to the presence of oil in the Sudan.For a detailed account of recent events in the Sudan see The European-Sudanese Public Affairs council pamphlet, Farce Majeure: the Clinton Administration’s Sudan Policy by David Hoile (ISBN 1-903545-00-5). Readers with long memories will recognise Hoile as former young activist on the radical right of the early 1980s.
5. Available at http://web.philly.com/content/inquirer/2000/09/10/city/PPROTEST10.htm
6. For details on Rees, Moss and Maldon see the piece by Chip Berlet http://www.publiceye.org/liberty/Rees/Rees.htm
7. But it has been edited by Sir David Hannay and without comparing the two texts we will ever know what has been removed.
8. Black, presumably, didn’t read it before writing his piece.
9. London: Macgibbon and Kee, 1964. This was a book about twenty years ahead of its time.
10. Stroud, Glos: Sutton Publishing, 1998.
11. London: Orion and BCA, 1996 and 7. McAlpine was Mrs Thatcher’s fund-raiser in chief and evidently dictated the text of this memoir into a tape-recorder and didn’t bother proof-reading the transcript (or doing an index). Thus in McAlpine’s memory IRD is ‘a branch of the security services, called, I believe, something like IDA….’ and Ernest Wistrich of the European Movement is ‘Ernest Wisterage’.
12. Extra! the magazine of FAIR http://www.fair.org Also worth checking out is Lee on Gehlen and ‘blowback’ in ‘The CIA’s Neo-Nazis’ at http://www.intellectualcapital.com/issues/issue377/item9461.asp
13. Most Soviet misinformation aimed at the NATO countries seems to have been a failure, much of it incompetent. For examples see the piffle Gordievsky offered up in his book with Christopher Andrew, KGB, pp. 527-9.
14. The sources cited here in brackets at the end of some indented sections are all listed at the end of this piece. For this basic chronology I have relied almost entirely on Jerome Clark’s account; I am, in fact, merely annotating it.
15. The simpest explanation for this appears to be that the US Air Force had contacts with APRO and had been informed of the Bennewitz allegations before Bennewitz made contact.
16. On Roswell the most interesting recent analysis is by Martin Cannon at http://www.redshift.com/~damason/lhreport/articles/roswell.html
17. I have not seen an account by Bennewitz of his dealings with Doty and what he told him.
18. It is also the plot of the X Files, more of less.
19. See http://netropic.speakeasy.org/strand/4/scottjones.html for a 1980 example.
20. It is interesting to note that the US military can manipulate the FOIA system.
21. It was reading the account of this meeting in C. D. B. Bryan’s book , Close Encounters of the Fourth Kind (Penguin, 1995) and the psy-ops use of the material – read but no note-taking – which got me interested in this.
22. The term ‘surfacing’ is used in the CIA documents recently released about the coup in Chile. See Scott Newton’s ‘Historical Notes’ in this issue. Good initially thought the documents were real, eventually changed his mind and is quoted in Jim Marrs’ Alien Agenda (p. 117) as believing they are a fake but contain some genuine information!
23. At this stage in the chronology William Cooper appeared with his version of the whole alien fantasy. I don’t know whether he was freelancing or a part of the operation. I favour the former but have no evidence either way.
24. It is possible, even probable, that the famous Santilli film of the alien autopsy was another part in the same operation but I have seen no evidence to support this.