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The Psychopathology of Shrinks
une 16 / 17, 2007
By ALEXANDER COCKBURN

Summer’s hot breath draws closer and the psychoanalysts of New York and Boston prepare their patients for the difficult two or three weeks of holiday separation. Traditionally, many Boston shrinks take their seaside weeks on Cape Cod, around Truro, sunning and gossiping while their patients muster on their beach towels a few hundred yards away. The touching scene is duplicated further south around the Hamptons on Long Island.

Undoubtedly beach chat among both analysts and analysands will ripple over the June excitements of the psychoanalytic trade, starting with the gallant efforts of Paris Hilton’s psychiatrist, Dr Charles Sophy, to engineer what her costly but incompetent lawyers failed to do, namely spring her from L.A. County Jail where – given the triviality of her offenses - she is grotesquely pent. But of course the prime topic will surely be the end of the Soprano series which, across the past eight years, courtesy of Lorraine Bracco's Jennifer Melfi – Tony Soprano’s analyst -- has been the biggest boost to the shrink business since Lee J. Cobb starred in The Three Faces of Eve.

Truly comical has been the solemnity with which psychoanalysts across the United States have been deploring the “breach of professional ethics” at a shrinks’ dinner party in one of the concluding Soprano episodes in which the identity of Dr Melfi’s patient as Mobster Tony was disclosed. The rare moments when shrinks aren’t seducing their female patients (70 per cent, in an informal New York survey some years ago) are usually consumed by such indiscretions, a tradition stretching all the way back to the notoriety of the patients trotting up the stairs of Bergasse 19, Freud’s chambers in Vienna.

It’s true that some psychoanalysts were indignant at the way Melfi, chided by her colleagues for enabling a sociopath, promptly dumped the Mafia boss as a patient, the climax of a process identified back in 1999 in the British Medical Journal by Dr Tony David as the collision of “the superego of Melfi’s civilised values and the intellect… with the murky id that is Soprano’s stock in trade.” “The strict ethical principles established by the American Psychological Association”, wrote one APA member furiously, “do not allow for the arbitrary dismissal of a client even if they are sociopathic in nature (unless there is danger to the therapist).”

It so happens that these same “strict ethical principles” of the APA have been the topic of unsparing rebuke which probably won’t be cited much on those holiday beaches. A recent report by the Pentagon’s Inspector General confirms what has been detailed in a number of news stories since 2005 concerning the starring role played by American psychologists and psychoanalysts in devising and supervising torture techniques as administered by the U.S. military in Guantanamo, Iraq and Afghanistan, as well as other secret interrogation centers run by the CIA.

These techniques -- as has been recently described here by Stephen Soldz have been “reverse-engineered” from the Pentagon’s SERE (“Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape”) program in which US military and intelligence personnel are taught how to withstand harsh interrogation. Psychologists have always been central to this enterprise and are now similarly central to the use of sleep deprivation, sexual and cultural humiliation and waterboarding in grilling America’s enemies. “Reverse-engineered” simply means the Pentagon is using the techniques to torture suspected terrorists.

In 2002 the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff concluded that “interrogation methods used were no longer effective in obtaining useful information from some detainees” and, as the Inspector General’s report details, “recommended that the Federal Bureau of Investigation Behavioral Science Unit, the Army's Behavioral Science Consultation Team, the Southern Command Psychological Operations Support Element, and the JTF-170 clinical psychologist develop a plan to exploit detainee vulnerabilities.” The use of dogs, sexual humiliation, and kindred tortures were only a couple of months away.

Amid furious protests from such APA members as Soldz and others the APA leadership has piously maintained that "psychologists have a critical role in keeping interrogations safe, legal, ethical and effective." The Pentagon Inspector General’s Report make clear this claim is ludicrous. So here we have shrinks refining Tony Soprano’s brutish violence, draping his id with the national flag. The August meeting of the APA’s “Council of Representatives” will be stormy as the members vote on a motion introduced by Neil Altman urging "A moratorium on psychologist involvement in interrogations at US detention centers for foreign detainees.”

“Peer Review” and Global Warming

There were yelps of alarm and the rustle of skirts being hoist knee-high after I published a note on sources in my column last week, Dissidents against Dogma. The panic was caused by one of the references to the work of Professor Zbigniew Jaworowski who, as I wrote, has written devastating onslaughts on the IPCC rallying cry that CO2 is higher now than it has ever been over the past 650,000 years. Jaworowski has pointed out the enormous inaccuracies in the ice-core data and the ease with which a CO2 reading from any given year is contaminated by the CO2 from entirely different eras. He also points out that from 1985 on there’s been some highly suspect editing of the CO2 data, presumably to reinforce the case for the “unprecedented levels” of modern CO2. I offered a couple of references to Jaworowski, one of them to an essay, "Ice Core Data Show No Carbon Dioxide Increase", published in 21st Century Science & Technology, Spring 1997.

It turns out that this is a publication put out by the LaRouche crowd. Next thing you know, poor Jaworowski was being accused oif being a neo-Nazi cultist, with kindred vitriol hurled at CounterPunch co-editor Cockburn.

George Monbiot used to it as the excuse to add Jaworowski to the enormously long list of books and articles he refuses to read because they have not been “peer-reviewed”, thus leaving the honorary chairman of the King Canute Action Committee safely sequestered from any information that might discomfit his prejudices.

I strongly doubt that Jaworowski knows much or indeed anything about the more sinister and odious aspects of the LaRouch enterprise, and sent along his paper because they asked him to. The article in the Larouche magazine merely repeats the claims and supporting arguments that Jaworowski has published in other journals. I cited one of these, "Do Glaciers Tell a True CO2 Story", The Science of the Total Environment, 144, 1992) pp 227-284.

Another example would be Environmental Science and Pollution Research ("Ancient atmosphere: Validity of ice records," Vol. 1, No. 3, pp. 161 - 171, 1994). These are peer-reviewed journals, so the papers must count as
"science" according to Monbiot's labor-saving epistemology. Since the whole mechanism of “peer review” is less than a century old I wonder Monbiot deals with science before the mid-twentieth century. He probably disdains it on principle.

As a reader noted to me, “How, I wonder, would Monbiot handle the idea of science that thus contradicts itself? Like many another climate-crisis alarmist (most notably the chief of them, Al Gore), he combines a humble layman's deference to "what the scientists tell us" with an oddly childlike and deeply obscurantist impression of the way scientists actually work. If everybody in a field of research started talking as if the supreme court had now ruled on a question, or some authoritative magisterium spoken--leaving nothing more to be asked there--you
could tell something had gone radically awry. But the mirage of just such an untroubled consensus is where Monbiot appears to have placed his ardent faith, in the teeth of facts to the contrary. It's the rhetoric of science that convinces him, more than the reality.”

I also suspect Monbiot was being disingenuous in dismissing Jaworowski as a crank, since a glance at Google would have disclosed to him a cartload of obviously “peer-reviewed” papers by Jaworowski, many of them published by the distinguished Dutch publishing house of Elsevier, which publishes scientific books and journals and is not, I can assert with perfect confidence, not part of the LaRouche operation.

There were also claims that Jaworowski had somehow discounted the effects of nuclear radiation, particularly at Chernobyl. Actually, Jaworowski’s article "The Real Chernobyl Folly" was quite reasonable. He clearly acknowledges the acute radiation deaths of the 'first responders'. His points about some of the uninformed and wasteful countermeasures, the real psychological damage caused by panic, and the exaggerated claims of victimhood, etc., etc., were all quite sensible. Jaworowski does seem to favor the use nuclear power, as do many advocates of the anthropogenic origins of global warming.

Apropos “peer review” Martin Hertzberg, sent me an amusing note last week:

“When people ask me how can I possibly disagree with all the Nobel Prize winners who have signed on to the theory of the human causation of global warming, I tell them the Einstein story of the ‘Anti-Relativity Society’.

“After Einstein left Berlin and after Hitler took over, the Nazis were not happy with Relativity Theory, which of course they didn't understand, and which they considered a ‘Jewish science’. There were many distinguished German scientists who were eager to please their new masters, some of them even Nobel Prize winners, so they formed an ‘Anti-Relativity Society’ that published papers trying to show that Einstein's theory of Special Relativity, was wrong.

“When Einstein was asked about it later, he smiled and responded to the effect that if his Special Theory of Relativity was really wrong, it didn't take an army of physicists or Nobel Laureates to prove him wrong: just one physics student with a single experiment or observation that contradicted his theory, would suffice!

“One can be sure that all the publications in the Anti-Relativity Journal were peer reviewed. My experience in reviewing papers and in having my papers reviewed, has caused me to reject the whole idea of "anonymous" peer review. The potential for abuse is too great. When I reviewed papers, I always insisted that the Journal Editor inform the author that I was the reviewer and was prepared to support my review openly. Planck himself was the only one who reviewed Einstein's seminal 1905 papers. Zeitschrift fur Physik was his Journal and everyone knew who the reviewer was.”

Martin Hertzberg’s papers, incidentally, are being scanned by CounterPunch business manager Becky Grant, a task postponed last week because Becky was in Utah with her family attending the wedding of her sister Tiffany, who is the designer of our CounterPunch Books. Best wishes to Tiffany Wardle de Sosa and her husband Miguel Sosa as they settle in San Jose.

I strongly encourage readers to go to David Noble’s essay “Regression on the Left” which has very useful material on the origins of peer review. It can be found here
http://climateguy.blogspot.com/ peer review on the website of Denis Rancourt, the Ottawa-based physicist and radical whose excellent essay Global Warming: Truth or Dare,also featured in my list of references and which was presumably also skirted by the testy Monbiot because of its peerless status. Noble describes how the postwar National Research Foundation (later, also called the National Science Foundation “adopted a new mechanism of exclusion: ‘peer review.’ Only peers - fellow privileged professionals, whatever their unacknowledged ties to commercial enterprise - could be involved in deciding upon the merits and agenda of science. Peer review was a relatively novel concept. Editors of journals had in the past, at their own discretion on an ad hoc basis, referred manuscripts to anonymous reviewers before publication to aid them in their decisions, but this would now become required and routinized into standard practice. Peer review certainly had its benefits, such as credibility (peer review as PR), convenient credentialling (no need to read it if it has been peer reviewed), and consensus-building (through mutual back-scratching).

“But it also had its costs, such as prior censorship (by interested parties), and, especially, the coercive encouragement of conformity. If peer review served to immunize science from democratic scrutiny and intervention, it also imposed a measure of like-mindedness upon the scientific community itself, mistakenly celebrated as consensus. Invariably, this tended to narrow the scope of respectable discourse and, hence, of the scientific imagination, inbreeding often entailing a degree of enfeeblement. A safeguard against error, it might also eliminate eccentric approaches and illuminating mistakes, often the key to significant discovery. And if intended to insure that only correct papers were permitted to be published, why then the need for the community of science at all? Peer review before publication would suffice to guarantee that only the truth prevailed.

“Such perils of peer review were early detected and condemned by the physicist Albert Einstein, after his arrival in America. Having submitted a co-authored paper to the journal Physical Review, he was dismayed to learn that it had bean sent by the editor to an anonymous reviewer. ‘We had sent our manuscript for publication and had not authorized you to show it to specialists before it is printed,’ an irate Einstein wrote the editor. ‘On the basis of this incident I prefer to publish the paper elsewhere.’ Einstein never again contributed to that journal. In Germany he had published in a journal edited by Max Planck, whose editorial philosophy was ‘to shun much more the reproach of having suppressed strange opinions than of having been too gentle in evaluating them.’

Despite its defects, peer review became the hallmark of the exclusive scientific establishment (and, eventually - and disastrously - of all of academia), and for a short while the hegemony of the elite remained relatively secure.”

Then came the challenges, few more influential than the work of Rachel Carson, whose work I assume Monbiot disdains because she was never peer-reviewed and didn’t even have a PhD. So much for you, Rachel! Monbiot now states grandly that he has concluded his attacks on the views advanced here. I must congratulate him at least for a perfect record in not addressing a single issue of substantive science, preferring to scurry about in the underbrush, ranting about peer review and LaRouchies. It beats thinking.
http://tinyurl.com/yvytxc

The Younger Dryas Impact Event and the Cycles of Cosmic Catastrophes - Climate Scientists Awakening
Signs of the Times
Fri, 15 Jun 2007 08:58 EDT



NASA seems to spend a lot of time looking for and thinking of ways to divert errant asteroids that might possibly hit earth. However, they keep reassuring the public that the probability of actually being hit by an asteroid is extremely small. So why all the attention?

To David Morrison, a senior scientist at NASA, the Earth orbits the sun in a sort of cosmic shooting gallery. More than 1 million asteroids spin around the sun, and it is Morrison's job to figure out which of these bodies of rock, dust and metal could come crashing down on Earth.

Right now, NASA is tracking 127 asteroids that have a very small chance of striking the planet. That number is about to get a lot higher. Stronger telescopes, and a new mandate from Congress, will allow scientists to detect thousands of smaller asteroids more likely to hit Earth. And scientists are plotting ways to stop them, from "gravity tractors" to solar ray guns. "There is no question that these will hit the Earth," says Russell Schweickart, a former Apollo astronaut who is involved in a group studying asteroids. "The question is how often we will have to do something about it." In fact, Schweickart thinks world leaders might have to do something about it very soon, within the next 15 years.

In early March, Russian, European, Japanese and American scientists held a Planetary Defense Conference in Washington to discuss the threats and plot a strategy for dealing with them. Identifying asteroids close to the Earth is the priority right now, says Dave Jonta, a conference spokesman. A large asteroid could cause what scientists call an "impact winter": a huge volume of dust gets thrown into the atmosphere, completely or partially blocking the sun's light, causing crop loss, disease and possible global starvation. And smaller asteroids could kill hundred of thousands, if not millions of people, Schweickart says.

A group of experts, scientists, diplomats and international lawyers will meet in May to confront issues such as what country will finance asteroid-destruction missions. One problem: Because of the difficulty in projecting an asteroid's orbit, scientists often can only predict the probability that a specific asteroid will hit the Earth. So international leaders might have to take action before knowing for certain what path an asteroid might take. "We may have to spend $300 million to fly a mission that, in the end, wasn't needed," Schweickart says, "but that's a lot better than living with a 10 percent chance that New York City will be hit."

Well it seems either their asteroid program is just another boondoggle meant to enrich contractors in the Military Industrial Complex or they're lying. Possibly a combination of both. If we can't stop an asteroid or comet from hitting us, do you think they'll panic the public by announcing an impending collision beforehand? Do you have a personal bunker?

I'm climate model analyst working at a major research institute. On March 1st of this year I received a curious email from a climate scientist, Prof. James P Kennett, of the University of California Santa Barbara addressed to a paleoclimate email list to which I subscribe. It was an invitation to submit abstracts for the American Geophysical Union meeting in Acapulco, Mexico in May of this year, 2007. It read:

"The Younger Dryas Impact Event": The deglaciation that followed the last ice age was abruptly and dramatically interrupted ~12,900 years ago by widespread cooling that marks the onset of the Younger Dryas. Much evidence shows that the Younger Dryas was marked by abrupt changes in ice sheet configuration, the sudden emptying of proglacial lakes, diversion of North American flood-waters to the northern Atlantic, and the reorganization of thermohaline circulation. Nevertheless, significant questions have recently emerged about timing and direction of major freshwater flows to the oceans, in turn raising questions about the triggering mechanism for the Younger Dryas.

The onset of the Younger Dryas also appears to have coincided with massive, widespread, and punctuated changes in animal biota and Paleolithic cultural development centered in North and South America. This is represented by the most recent of all mass extinctions, the disappearance of the megafauna of the Americas, including mammoths, horses, and ground sloths and the termination of Clovis and other contemporaneous Paleolithic human cultures.

The cause of these changes is highly controversial and much debated, but is likely tied to the severe environmental changes that occurred at the beginning of the Younger Dryas. Another hypothesis attributes the extinctions to overhunting by Clovis people and other Paleolithic hunters or to pandemics associated with human migrations. However, all these hypotheses appear to fall short in satisfactorily explaining much available evidence. A new hypothesis posits that Younger Dryas cooling was instead triggered by extraterrestrial impacts that caused ice sheet destabilization, flood-water rediversion, and changes in ocean circulation.

This work offers newly uncovered evidence for an ET impact or airbursts at 12.9 ka including end-Clovis-age sediments throughout North America with high levels of iridium, magnetic and carbon spherules, glass-like carbon, fullerenes, and ET noble gas ratios often in association with carbonaceous layers ("black mats") with unusual biota.

In this session, we invite abstracts that will explore the strengths and weaknesses of existing and new hypotheses that attempt to explain the cause of the Younger Dryas, changes in global climate, the extinctions, and human cultural changes.

We are interested in exploring new perspectives on the chronology, stratigraphic succession, and potential interconnections between a wide-range of processes that appear to have been associated with the Younger Dryas. These include abrupt climatic change, ice-sheet deglaciation, flood-water rerouting, surficial geology, iceberg discharge, ocean reorganization, including thermohaline circulation, and sea-level change.

Though I wasn't able to attend, the reports of the event made the news. Ice Age Ends Smashingly: Did a comet blow up over eastern Canada?

Evidence unearthed at more than two dozen sites across North America suggests that an extraterrestrial object exploded in Earth's atmosphere above Canada about 12,900 years ago, just as the climate was warming at the end of the last ice age. The explosion sparked immense wildfires, devastated North America's ecosystems and prehistoric cultures, and triggered a millennium-long cold spell, scientists say.

Well, the first thing you notice is that it wasn't an asteroid, but a comet. Likewise the Tunguska event in 1908 was a comet, not an asteroid. Norse mythologies talk about "Fenris-wolf" who "advances with wide-open mouth," the "upper jaw" reaching to heaven and the "lower jaw" to earth.

"The stars shall be hurled from heaven"...

"Then it shall come to pass that the earth will shake so violently that trees will be torn up by the roots, the mountains will topple down, and all bonds and fetters will be broken and snapped."

So why is NASA looking for asteroids?

Maybe because they're the only thing that they can observe in the inner solar system with trajectories intersecting earth. And at the same time they are the only thing they can make plans to divert years in advance. They can't bother with comets, because they come from the outer solar system without warning. In fact, there is no NASA program, publicly at least, that tries to detect comets. Almost all comets discovered in recent history were found by amateurs with backyard telescopes. One exception is comet Shoemaker-Levy, formally designated D/1993 F2, discovered by three professional astronomers, Eugene and Carolyn Shoemaker and David Levy, the ninth short-periodic comet they had spotted. It was first detected on a photograph taken on the night of March 24, 1993 with the 0.4-meter Schmidt telescope on Palomar Mountain in California. The comet collided with Jupiter in July 1994.

This was the wakeup call for NASA.

But is there something more?

In Laura Knight-Jadczyk's article "Has Nibiru/Planet X Been Sighted?" (Don't worry. It hasn't.) she writes:

Immanuel Velikovsky demonstrated rather convincingly that there was massive evidence of both a literary and scientific nature that great catastrophic earth changes had occurred during the second millennium BC due to cometary showers and the close passage of Venus. He settled on a date of 1450 BC, but more recent scientific evidence points to the date actually being 1628 BC. There is also evidence for a disruption circa 5200 BC, 8,800 BC, 12,400 BC, 16,000 BC, 19,600 BC, and by logical extension every 3,600 years previously for an indefinite and unknown period of time. What is more, if the last "return" was in 1628 BC, we are not just due, we are overdue for the next one.

The theories about Nibiru do not take into account many of the literary reports from the ancients regarding these great bombardments of comets. Velikovsky tried to account for this by suggesting that a cometary Venus was hauling around a tail of rocks. It seems that Velikovsky and his supporters, and Sitchin and his supporters, although recognizing serious worldwide catastrophes, have failed to recognize the true nature of such events. Velikovsky proposed that Venus out of orbit was a more or less one-time event rather than a symptom of a long term cycle. Sitchin came closer with his understanding of the cycle, but he failed to consider all the variables in his solution. What is more, once he settled on his idea as the one and only solution, his efforts to make the mythical elements fit the hypothesis became almost as absurd as the efforts of mainstream science to avoid them!

The confirmed linchpin for the fall of the late Bronze Age cultures, the Middle Eastern Civilizations, and other recorded disasters that are found to be "around that time," seems to be the period from 1644 BC to 1628 BC. The ice cores show the disturbances starting in 1644 (registering in 1645) and the tree rings show a big spike in 1628, though the entire period was disturbed. Yoshiyuki Fujii and Okitsugu Watanabe's "Microparticle Concentration And Electrical Conductivity of A 700 m Ice Core from Mizuho Station Antarctic" published in Annals of Glaciology (1-, 1988) pp. 38-42, demonstrate that "large scale environmental changed possibly occurred in the Southern Hemisphere in the middle of the Holocene. (Within the last 10,000 years). Their depth profiles of micro particle concentration, electrical conductivity and Oxygen 18 at circa 1600 BC indicates a spike in readings for all of these elements.

The evidence shows that this disturbance covered this designated period, but with a "huge spike" at c. 1600 BC. Similar evidence from the same source article exists at 5200 BC. This period shows a less severe but similar period. The oxygen 18 profile is close to normal, but there is a visible volcanic dirt band. The dating of this segment is less close because it is clear that nobody is really looking for this cycle, but it appears to correspond to the ash band from the Byrd station core.

I'll get back to these dates, but what I'd like to wrestle with is the allegation that there was a cometary impact or climate changing event in the 1628 BC. What is known to have happened in that year was the eruption of Thera (or Santorini) in the southern Aegean Sea. The ashes and dust loading could then be detected as micro particles in the Antarctic Dome C ice cores. The presence of micro particles, as Ms. Knight-Jadczyk points out, "the tree rings shows almost no registration in the Antarctic cores in terms of volcanic activity. But the northern cores show the activity beginning 1644 BC." In fact, it's hard to believe the eruption of Thera had any great impact on global climate:

The Minoan eruption of Santorini was a large-magnitude natural event. However, in terms of scale it ranks smaller in erupted volume and eruptive intensity than the historical eruption of Tambora in 1815 AD, and smaller in sulphur emission and, by inference, climatic effects than both the Tambora and Mt. Pinatubo, 1991, eruptions. Eruption statistics for the past 2000 years indicate that Minoan-size eruptions typically occur at a rate of several per thousand years. Eruptions resulting in a Minoan-scale injection of sulphur to the stratosphere occur far more frequently - at a rate of one or two per century. Inferences of massive sociological, religious and political impacts from such eruptions owe more to mythology than reality. [ The global impact of the Minoan eruption of Santorini, Greece, D. M. Pyle, Environmental Geology, Volume 30, Numbers 1-2 / March, 1997]

If one looks at the first time series EOF (Empirical Orthogonal Function) of the GISP2 (Greenland) ice core which is a marker of the circulation strength, one clearly sees other events which have triggered the reduction of circulation, but not the Thera eruption (see fig. 22 from Weiss et al. reproduced below with yellow box marking the time period.).



It's not to say that the eruption that killed thousands wasn't an awe-inspiring event, but it looks more and more like it had simply a regional impact, mostly on the political systems, but hardly any major impact on the global climate, perhaps reducing the global temperature a degree over the next year as happened with the Mt. Pinatubo eruption, before the dust settled - some of it in Antarctica.

Now, getting back to those other dates. Further on in her article, Ms. Knight-Jadczyk refers to another paper on the Antarctic ice cores.

Looking further: Michel R. Legrand and Robert J. Delmas of Laboratoire de Glaciologie et Geophysique de l'Environment published an article "Soluble Impurities in Four Antarctic Ice Cores Over the Last 30,000 Years" in Annals of Glaciology (10, 1988, pp 116-120). They graphed the Oxygen 18 variations and the ionic components Na = NH (sub4) and Ca (sup 2) and H and Cl and NO (sub 3) and SO (sub 4). The time scale for each ionic component level as well as the O (sup 18) levels stretches back 30,000 years. The graph shows correlations to spikes at 5,200 BC, 8,800 BC, 12,400 BC, c. 16,000 BC, c. 19,600 BC. All of these were times of great geologic stress.

However, if you look at the figure (see fig. 1 from the paper below) that was used in determining the dates of this recurring event it isn't very clear at all that these things happened at the times quoted. The time scale (Years Before Present) are given at the top of the figure. One can see a ~12,400 - 13,000 BP event in the d180 plot, but not in any of the microparticles. There is no 5,200 BP event in the d18O plot, but what looks like a 6,000 BP event in two of the microparticle plots. It's hard to narrow down precisely the 19,600 BP event though there is something going on around the 20,000 BP event. Anyway, the point is that the authors do not mention specific events in the paper and it's hard for the reader to interpret the timing of the events from the figure.



This is not to say there isn't cyclic phenomenon, but the best way to figure this out isn't to subjectively look at a curve dating back 30,000 years and pick and choose dates. No, there's a better way. And there have been many papers and much data gathering since the Legrand paper came out. We now have data going back hundreds of thousands of years in both the Antarctic and Greenland ice cores. In fact, if you're trying to understand cycles and their impacts on Northern Hemisphere cultures it's best to stick with the Greenland ice cores.

Harvey Weiss, an archaeologist at Yale U. wrote an article in 2002 called Environmental Disaster and the Archaeology of Human Response.


The earliest Holocene abrupt climate changes occurred at 12,800, 8200, 5200, and 4200 B.P. The 4200 B.P. abrupt climate change is especially well documented across West Asia, Central Asia, Africa, and parts of the New World. Limnological and speleothem radiometric dates situate the beginning of this event at ca. 3,800 radiocarbon years before 1950 (3.8 ka bp) or ca. 2200 B.C.

High resolution paleoclimate records, including the Greenland Ice Shee Project 2 (GISP2) ice core, Lake Van varve sediments, and U.S. Southwest dendrochronology, now also provide absolute calendar dating for this event in addition to quantification of its amplitude relative to prior and succeeding climate states. Social adaptations to this event are recorded in the contemporary archaeological records of southeastern Europe, North Africa, and West Asia: habitat-tracking, regional population abandonments, migrations, and sociopolitical collapse.

The first thing to notice is that he does not even mention the 1628 BC Thera eruption event. In other words, it's impact was regional, mostly in the Mediterranean area. Another thing to notice is that precise dating pins down the timing of the events. The only date that matches the above dates is the 5200 BP event, otherwise, we have adjustments to the other events.

And as you can see, the 3600 year cycle is harder to discern. But has it disappeared? What seems to appear in its place, excluding the 5200 BP event, is a ~4200 year cycle. But, as I mentioned, we have data now going back hundreds of thousands of years so if there is a 3600 year or 4200 year cycle and it's been going on for a long time they should appear in this record.

There's a data analysis technique known as the Fast Fourier Transform (FFT) which basically extracts the spectral coefficients and returns the power of any cyclicity in the data passed through this mathematical filter.

Fig 2 shows the results of using FFT on the GRIP and NGRIP oxygen-18 isotope data. Before passing the data through FFT it was interpolated to yearly values. The NGRIP (left) data goes back 112,900 years, the GRIP data (right) 41760 years. And as can be seen in the GRIP FFT there's a rather strong signal at 4600 years, a broader, but slightly stronger signal centered around ~8200 years and a pronounced signal at 20,900 years.

For this type of data the errors on these signals increase as the period increases because the error is proportional to the number of cycles contained in the time period of the data. So for example the error for the 4600 years is 1/sqrt(N) where N=41760/4600 or 33% which is about 1500 years. For the largest period the error is quite high, but this signal is well known. It is one of the Milankovitch cycles, specifically the precessional periods of 19000, 22000, and 24000 years. There is 3500 year cycle, but this isn't as strong a signal, being less than half the strength of the 4600 year signal and is thus not as important to the cyclic nature of the data, however it does exist, though its significance is questionable. The error on this is smaller still at 29% or +/- 1000 years.


Fig. 2a) Left side shows Periodicity of longer NGRIP data. Right side shows periodicity of shorter GRIP data.


Fig. 2b) Left side shows Periodicity of longer NGRIP data. Right side shows periodicity of shorter GRIP data. Same as fig. 2a, but zoomed into higher periodicities.

Looking at the longer time series from the NGRIP data we again see the precessional cycle more resolved at 25000 years and 20500 years. The larger signal at 41000 years is another Milankovitch cycle, the obliquity or axial tilt of the earth. The 61500 year signal is most likely picking up the 100,000 year eccentricity cycle given that the data set is only 112,900 years long and the error so large.

But what we're concerned with here are the shorter cycles. Because of the longer time series of the data (roughly a factor of three), the errors are reduced by roughly 1.7 (sqrt(3)).

As can be seen in the plot, there is a ~6000 year cycle which has been recognized in the Greenland ice core data ("A 6-ka climatic cycle during at least the last 50,000 years" [pdf]).

"[S]ignificant ice growth did, in fact, occur at around 6000 years BP. Studies of some of the largest of the 3000 small glaciers that occur in Fennoscandia today indicate that the majority of these started to grow shortly after 6000 years ago." The biblical flood of Noah is believed to date back to this time period.

According to recent archaeological research the flooding of the Black Sea dates to this period:

In 1998, William Ryan and Walter Pitman, geologists from Columbia University, published evidence that a massive flood through the Bosporus occurred about 5600 BC. Glacial meltwater had turned the Black and Caspian Seas into vast freshwater lakes, while sea levels remained lower worldwide. The fresh water lakes were emptying their waters into the Aegean Sea. As the glaciers retreated, rivers emptying into the Black Sea reduced their volume and found new outlets in the North Sea, and the water levels lowered through evaporation. Then, about 5600 BC, as sea levels rose, Ryan and Pitman suggest, the rising Mediterranean finally spilled over a rocky sill at the Bosporus. The event flooded 60,000 mile² (155,000 km²) of land and significantly expanded the Black Sea shoreline to the north and west. Ryan and Pitman wrote:

"Ten cubic miles [42 km³] of water poured through each day, two hundred times what flows over Niagara Falls. ...The Bosporus flume roared and surged at full spate for at least three hundred days."

The next largest signal below 6000 is ~4300 years, and then, below that, a 3600 year cycle. A similar spectral analysis using the Lomb-Scargle periodogram (not shown) shows that the 4300 and 6000 periodicity are significant, but not the 3600 year cycle.

So from the longer time series data we see a stronger, 4300 year cycle and an even stronger 6000 year cycle. These two (possibly three) cycles are unexplained. We do not know what causes them.

Or do we?

The answer is important for not only was there an global event 4200 years ago (and again at 8200 BP), there was one 6000 years ago (and again at ~12000 BP). On top of that, there was the rapid rise in sea level 19000 years ago and the associated warming of the North Atlantic region that began 21000 to 22000 years BP coinciding with the precessional cycle (see Rapid Rise of Sea Level 19,000 Years Ago and Its Global Implications[pdf]). Then there was an event 41000 years ago, possibly a supernova (Firestone, et al.), aligning with the obliquity cycle.

So we have four cycles, possibly five if you include the eruption of Thera as part of the 3600 year cycle, that are converging at the present moment. I believe my correction that it's a 4300 year cycle that we need to be most concerned about is the correct one, not a 3600 year cycle. Arguably, the 4300 year cycle could fit into the 41000 year cycle, but that wouldn't fit with the known solar forcing due to the obliquity cycle.

Just a quick look at the bottom plot from the wiki site (reproduced below) shows that if recent warm periods (or interglacials) are a guide, then we may soon slip into another glacial period and that whatever brings it about is due right about now as at least four cycles coincide to bring down global temperatures a few notches. The hype about global warming, (which preceded every glacial cycle for the past million years), is just mere distraction by comparison, because the bigger surprise is yet to come.



Now, getting back to the email, The Younger Dryas Impact Event. What's interesting about this story is that climate scientists, not being historians, archaeologists, astronomers or nuclear physicists (they're mostly geologists), tend to think that only the Sun influences the climate and that the Earth is pretty much a closed system that has periodic climate changes, probably due to the chaotic nature of the system. A comment by Dr. Peter de Menocal of Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory pretty much sums up the views of paleoclimate scientists about the Holocene era:

The archeological community - and actually segments of the paleoclimate community - have viewed the Holocene as being climatically stable... And so they imagine that the whole drama of civilization's emergence took place on a level playing field in terms of the environment.

But a broader base of knowledge brought in by archaeologists, astronomers and nuclear physicists has rocked the boat and it has been going on for over a decade. A look at some of the abstracts presented at the meeting will give some flavor on how far things have come in the past few years:

Scientific Drilling, Impact Craters, Paleoclimate, and Mass Extinctions ; I D A Kring, Lunar and Planetary Institute; J Urrutia-Fucugauchi, Universidad Nacional Autonoma de Mexico

Did a Bolide Impact Trigger the Younger Dryas and Wipe Out American Megafauna? A Skeptic's Reaction to an Intriguing Hypothesis.; Fiedel, S J

Geophysical evidence of an impact crater in northwestern South America; Hernandez, O

Exploring the Human Ecology of the Younger Dryas Extraterrestrial Impact Event; Kennett, D J, Erlandson, J M, Braje, T J , Culleton, B J

The Younger Dryas ET Impact Theory and Terminal Pleistocene Mammalian Extinctions in North America; Erlandson, J M ,Kennett, D J, Braje, T, Culleton, B

Triggering of the Younger Dryas Cooling by Extraterrestrial Impact; Kennett, J P, Becker, L, West, A

Evidence for an Extraterrestrial Impact Origin of the Carolina Bays on the Atlantic Coast of North America; Howard, G A, West, A, Firestone, R B,Kennett, J P, Kimbel, D, Kobres, R

Evidence for a Massive Extraterrestrial Airburst over North America 12.9 ka Ago; Firestone, R B, West, A,Revay, Z, Belgya, T,Smith, A, Que Hee, S S

Extraterrestrial Markers Found at Clovis Sites Across North America; West, A, Firestone, R B, Kennett, J P,Becker, L

Kennett's abstract, Triggering of the Younger Dryas Cooling by Extraterrestrial Impact, reads:

The enigmatic Younger Dryas (YD) cooling episode (12.9-11.5 ka) is unique to late Quaternary deglacials; its timing is unexplainable by orbital forcing because Northern Hemisphere insolation was increasing at that time. The abrupt onset of YD cooling coincided with, and was likely partially in consequence of reduction in north Atlantic thermohaline circulation (THC).

Triggering of YD cooling has often been attributed to major diversion of freshwater outflow from the continental interior via newly opened outlets resulting from ice sheet melt-back. However, an alternative primary trigger for YD cooling is actively being sought because of problems related to the timing of outlet openings and the relative importance of the magnitude and timing of freshwater input into the ocean.

We present evidence in support of the hypothesis that the primary trigger for YD cooling may have instead been an extraterrestrial impact (the YD impact event) over northern North America at 12.9 ka.

This impact event is recorded in a diverse range of impact-related proxies within the widely distributed YDB layer that indicates continent-wide impact effects.

YD cooling likely resulted both from a combination of short-term atmospheric processes due to the impact itself that reduced solar radiation and from reorganization of ocean circulation. The hypothesis also posits that the impact caused partial destabilization of northern ice sheets and the opening of freshwater conduits; ice sheet melting due in part to the deposition of impact related dust (i.e. albedo) on the ice sheets; freshening of Arctic and northern Atlantic surface waters, and resulting strong reduction in north Atlantic THC. The impact hypothesis for YD triggering explains the timing enigma of the YD episode and is consistent with much existing data:

1) Abrupt and dramatic switch in Lake Agassiz outflow at 12.9 ka away from the Mississippi River's southern outlet to newly-opened outlets to the east and/or north;

2) A major and abrupt drop in ice-margin lake levels at precisely the time of the impact, based on the chronostratigraphy at Lake Hind and supported by Lake Agassiz sediment records;

3) Evidence at the onset of YD cooling in northern Atlantic and Arctic sediment cores of widespread IRD (during Heinrich event H0) reflecting ice-rafting armadas, freshwater discharges and reduced sea-surface salinity that resulted from the partial destabilization and melting of the ice sheet;

4) Evidence for an anomalous peak in Greenland ice sheet margin melting at the onset of the YD during a time of abrupt ocean and atmosphere cooling.

The YD impact event supports the concept that extraterrestrial impacts, even of such limited geographic extent, can significantly and abruptly affect global climate change.

Comparison of the YD event with other even larger meltwater outflow events of the last deglacial that had limited affects on the THC, suggests that the YD cooling was not triggered solely by salinity-driven ocean circulation changes. Instead, short-term climate pertubations due to the impact likely played a key role in triggering initial cooling that was reinforced or enhanced by the ocean circulation changes. Thus, the YD climate episode would not have occurred in the absence of the YD extraterrestrial impact event.

Fiedel's skeptical abstract reads:

Perhaps there is credible physical evidence of a bolide impact in North America at 12,900 cal BP. However, several incongruous aspects of the paleoclimatic, archaeological, and faunal records of the Terminal Pleistocene must be addressed to allay skepticism about the hypothesis of dramatic effects upon humans or megafauna:

1) Paleoindian populations (e.g., Folsom, Dalton) thrived after the Younger Dryas (YD) onset;

2) megafauna, including giant sloths were wiped out in Florida, but medium-sized sloths in the Caribbean islands (including Cuba) survived into the mid-Holocene;

3) South American megafauna survived until at least 12,500 cal BP, probably longer; why was there not a synchronous extinction?

4) Late Pleistocene cold reversals in Antarctica and southern South America are not synchronous with the YD;

5) Bison and grizzly survived, and elk and moose expanded into North America in the Terminal Pleistocene-Early Holocene; why did they survive and thrive?

6) Mammoths survived on Wrangel Island and probably in pockets in Siberia well into the Holocene; why did the supposed impact in the Arctic not wipe them out?

7) Finally, the YD ended at 11,590 cal BP even more abruptly than it began (over less than a decade); does this require another impact? If not, why does the YD onset call for an extraterrestrial trigger?

While Fiedel's skeptical questions need to be answered, the appearance of a "black mat" and carbon spherules in the sediments scattered throughout North America , along with the Carolina Bays radiating from possible impact craters in Lake Michigan dating from this period is pretty convincing evidence that a comet or other bolide impacted over the Laurentide ice sheet approximately 12,900 years ago. And just recently this appeared in the news:

Two geologists from Washington traveled to north-central Montana last week after an accidental discovery of what they believe is a "new" meteorite impact crater, located just southeast of Thornhill Butte. The Havre Daily caught up with the two St. Martin University students at Havre's Fifth Street Grind and Short Stop Thursday. The discoverers were on their way to a local laundry to dry their clothes, drenched in the previous day's rain, before heading back out in their home-built buggy, "the Mule" designed for rugged terrain.

Joe D'Alelio and Gabriel Mainwaring of Shelton, Wash. Said they had been using Google Earth to locate fossil hunting grounds when "dumb luck" led the satellite view to scan over a formation familiar, yet very exciting. "We zoomed in and saw it had the form of a meteorite impact crater," D'Alelio said. "We checked with the USGS (United States Geological Survey) and there was no record of it. The only one they have is south of the Missouri River about 200 miles. This one is located north of the DY Junction (Highways 66 and 191). You can see it from Highway 66.

We loaded up the Mule and headed out Monday and camped when we got to the crater. We studied the rim, the bowl and surrounding area and took samples." Much like Daniel Moreau Barringer, who proved the famous Meteor Crater in Arizona in 1902, D'Alelio and Mainwaring said they had not spent a full day before they knew the crater had been caused by meteorite impact.

"It's about a mile wide, rim to rim and the sandstone layers are upside down," D'Alelio said. "The white is on top from the impact. You can measure the red sandstone to see how thick it is and it tells you the age. We are guessing it hit between 10,000 to 50,000 years ago, which is relatively new."

How about 12,900 years ago?

You can see the crater here. Notice off to the right (Northeast). There appears to be another, larger, crater, but there's no way to know for sure from the satellite image. How many more, "relatively new" craters are left to be discovered?

Firestone has written a book about this subject so I won't go into it here. New evidence of catastrophic changes appear in the science publications on a regular basis. The latest, A catastrophic meltwater flood event and the formation of the Hudson Shelf Valley. What is more, not only is it likely that Earth has been impacted by periodic comet swarms, these comet swarms are relatively new on the scene, geologically speaking. In a paper published in Science in March, 2000, titled "Lunar impact history from (40)Ar/(39)Ar dating of glass spherules",

Lunar spherules are small glass beads that are formed mainly as a result of small impacts on the lunar surface; the ages of these impacts can be determined by the (40)Ar/(39)Ar isochron technique. Here, 155 spherules separated from 1 gram of Apollo 14 soi l were analyzed using this technique. The data show that over the last approximately 3.5 billion years, the cratering rate decreased by a factor of 2 to 3 to a low about 500 to 600 million years ago, then increased by a factor of 3.7 +/- 1.2 in the last 400 million years. This latter period coincided with rapid biotic evolutionary radiation on Earth.

And the same swarm that hit the moon surely struck the Earth which has a much larger area.

As Firestone has speculated, the sun is now moving through the outer arm of the Milky Way galaxy which is cluttered with debris, remnants of supernovas and this probably means much more frequent gravitational encounters with errant stars able to perturb the Oort cloud or even be captured by our own sun.

The most dramatic increase corresponds to the time of the dinosaur extinction 65 million years ago, and it continues to this day at a higher level than for most of the last 3 billion years. Clearly, the moon has been under a major meteor and comet assault in recent times, and this means that Earth has suffered from the same fate. According to Muller's research, we are still at one of the highest levels of bombardment that the Earth has seen in the last 3 billion years. There is absolutely no evidence that it is over; instead all the evidence suggests that it is continuing. [Richard Firestone, The Cycle of Cosmic Catastrophes p. 248]



There's an oft cited excerpt from "Critias" by Plato (c.428 - c.347 BCE) in which he describes an encounter by Solon, his ancestor, with an Egyptian priest. It's worth repeating here:

Critias: Then listen, Socrates, to a strange tale, which is, however, certainly true, as Solon, who was the wisest of the seven sages, declared. He was a relative and great friend of my great-grandfather, Dropidas, as he himself says in several of his poems; and Dropidas told Critias, my grandfather, who remembered, and told us, that there were of old great and marvelous actions of the Athenians, which have passed into oblivion through time and the destruction of the human race and one in particular, which was the greatest of them all, the recital of which will be a suitable testimony of our gratitude to you....

[...]

Now, the citizens of this city are great lovers of the Athenians, and say that they are in some way related to them. Thither came Solon, who was received by them with great honor; and he asked the priests, who were most skilful in such matters, about antiquity, and made the discovery that neither he nor any other Hellene knew anything worth mentioning about the times of old.

On one occasion, when he was drawing them on to speak of antiquity, he began to tell about the most ancient things in our part of the world--about Phoroneus, who is called 'the first,' and about Niobe; and, after the Deluge, to tell of the lives of Deucalion and Pyrrha; and he traced the genealogy of their descendants, and attempted to reckon how many years old were the events of which he was speaking, and to give the dates.

Thereupon, one of the priests, who was of very great age; said,

'O Solon, Solon, you Hellenes are but children, and there is never an old man who is an Hellene.'

Solon, hearing this, said, 'What do you mean?'

'I mean to say,' he replied, 'that in mind you are all young; there is no old opinion handed down among you by ancient tradition, nor any science which is hoary with age. And I will tell you the reason of this: there have been, and there will be again, many destructions of mankind arising out of many causes.

There is a story which even you have preserved, that once upon a time Phaethon, the son of Helios, having yoked the steeds in his father's chariot, because he was not able to drive them in the path of his father, burnt up all that was upon the earth, and was himself destroyed by a thunderbolt.

Now, this has the form of a myth, but really signifies a declination of the bodies moving around the earth and in the heavens, and a great conflagration of things upon the earth recurring at long intervals of time: when this happens, those who live upon the mountains and in dry and lofty places are more liable to destruction than those who dwell by rivers or on the sea-shore; and from this calamity the Nile, who is our never-failing savior, saves and delivers us.

Plato goes on to write about Atlantis. But that is another tale... What's important here is that the Egyptian priest tells Solon that the myth reflects actual astronomical cycles of destruction and that they did not believe the myth as literal fact, but what it in fact represents.

Getting back to the present; Laura Knight-Jadczyk writes concerning the sudden appearance of new moons orbiting Neptune, Saturn and Jupiter:

[T]o get back to our conversation about humanity being past its "extinct by" date, I mused that anybody with eyes and ears and a bit of scientific knowledge can look around and see that something is going on "out there".

The problem is, of course, that the masses of humanity are so distracted by all the concerns of everyday life - many of which are quite serious nowadays, especially the threat of nuclear war brought to us by George W. Bush and the Ziocons - that most of them haven't got a clue that they probably don't have to worry about Global Warming. (And just because I say that people don't have to worry about Global Warming doesn't mean they don't have to worry!)

The evidence that is all around us nowadays even helps us to realize that there was nothing really magical or mysterious about the story of Noah. The Bible tells us that God told Noah that something was up, something was coming, and that he should build an ark and that would enable him and his family and a few critters to survive.

But obviously, in this day and time, we really don't need God to tell us that Something Wicked This Way Comes..

In any event, what is perfectly clear is that the story of Noah and the story of Atlantis are apocryphal: many groups of people survived the event of 12,000 years ago here and there, and very likely many of them survived because they realized what was coming. Afterward, in their stories and legends they ascribed their survival to the intervention of their particular deity to give that deity more authority.

There was another article recently by Alexander Cockburn, perhaps the only liberal writer out there speaking against "global warming" or the idea that man is the cause of it. He writes:

We should never be more vigilant than at the moment a new dogma is being installed. The claque endorsing what is now dignified as "the mainstream theory" of global warming stretches all the way from radical greens through Al Gore to George W. Bush, who signed on at the end of May. The left has been swept along, entranced by the allure of weather as revolutionary agent, naïvely conceiving of global warming as a crisis that will force radical social changes on capitalism by the weight of the global emergency.

Amid the collapse of genuinely radical politics, they have seen it as the alarm clock prompting a new Great New Spiritual Awakening.

Alas for their illusions.

Capitalism is ingesting global warming as happily as a python swallowing a piglet. The press, which thrives on fearmongering, promotes the nonexistent threat as vigorously as it did the imminence of Soviet attack during the cold war, in concert with the arms industry. There's money to be made, and so, as Talleyrand said, "Enrich yourselves!"

Now, some of the facts Mr. Cockburn confuses, but the gist of his article is correct (see comments in above link). What is happening is that the controllers are using Global Warming as a distraction to consolidate their hold on the public, the economy and now even the military:

A secret report, suppressed by US defence chiefs and obtained by The Observer, warns that major European cities will be sunk beneath rising seas as Britain is plunged into a 'Siberian' climate by 2020. Nuclear conflict, mega-droughts, famine and widespread rioting will erupt across the world.

The document predicts that abrupt climate change could bring the planet to the edge of anarchy as countries develop a nuclear threat to defend and secure dwindling food, water and energy supplies. The threat to global stability vastly eclipses that of terrorism, say the few experts privy to its contents.

'Disruption and conflict will be endemic features of life,' concludes the Pentagon analysis. 'Once again, warfare would define human life. The findings will prove humiliating to the Bush administration, which has repeatedly denied that climate change even exists. Experts said that they will also make unsettling reading for a President who has insisted national defence is a priority.

The report was commissioned by influential Pentagon defence adviser Andrew Marshall, who has held considerable sway on US military thinking over the past three decades. He was the man behind a sweeping recent review aimed at transforming the American military under Defence Secretary Donald Rumsfeld.

Climate change 'should be elevated beyond a scientific debate to a US national security concern', say the authors, Peter Schwartz, CIA consultant and former head of planning at Royal Dutch/Shell Group, and Doug Randall of the California-based Global Business Network.

An imminent scenario of catastrophic climate change is 'plausible and would challenge United States national security in ways that should be considered immediately', they conclude. As early as next year widespread flooding by a rise in sea levels will create major upheaval for millions.

Of course, it didn't prove humiliating at all to Bush. In fact, it played right into his hands as he has subsumed even more power like the python swallowing the piglet.

As I wrote at the beginning of this article, "If we can't stop an asteroid or comet from hitting us, do you think they'll panic the public by announcing an impending collision beforehand?" Nevertheless, panicking the public is de rigeuer for the Powers That Be, but only for those things they can manage. Global warming that would slowly play out over decades is the ideal problem for those seeking power: the ever more dire warnings feed into the controllers' hands as they use it to justify ever higher military spending, dismantling of civil liberties, more control for corporations, and "pre-emptive" invasions in the quest for dwindling resources. What the public doesn't realize is that this may very well be all in preparation for when that first comet swarm panics us little earthlings who have no underground bases, no stockpiles of supplies, no protocol for surviving such an event, to emerge on the other side still in control.

Whether it's a 3600, 4200, 6000, 20,000, 41,000 year cycle and that it was 3600 or is 4200, 6000, 12,000, 20,000, or 41,000 years ago doesn't make any difference to our "extinct by" date. As I noted above, the cycles are converging and the time is now. Indeed, Something Wicked This Way Comes.

If humanity could wake up to what is really in store for us, they might be able to throw off the ideological and cultural baggage strapped to us from our first breath and stop feeding a system run by psychopaths all too happy to enslave us with the yoke of fear and perpetual war and DO something.
And that's what They fear.
http://tinyurl.com/3533df

Uncle Sam and UFOs
Jun 14 2007

A new article by Gus Russo provides a good overview of and introduction to the current state of saucers and spies. Russo chronicles the history of failed UFO disclosure, beginning with Disney animator Ward Kimball in 1956, and continuing through the Robert Emenegger and Linda Howe stories of promised UFO footage which never materialized.

He conducted an email interview with me, and stated that he was hired to write the article by one Dan Smith, who enjoys no small amount of notoriety in the UFO research community for his strange stories passed along by “UFO insiders.” Russo readily admits this in the article, which vouches somewhat for his impartiality.

One fact he brings to light particularly interested me: A conference from May 20-25 of 1985 in McClean VA, which was called “The Advanced Theoretical Physics Conference,” a title which concealed the actual agenda, which appears to have been a meeting of current and former government intelligence personnel to find out what the government knew about UFOs–in other words, a high-level UFO conference. Apparently nothing was concluded, but lowly citizens like us might never know if anything positive transpired in any case.

In 1999, I published an article in my old magazine (The Excluded Middle) entitled “PSI + mc (squared), + R&D = MJ12: UFOs, Physics, Parapsychology Mix In Secret Group,” describing something that was known at the time as “The Advanced Theoretical Physics Working Group.” The article examined evidence (from the research of Melinda Leslie and Randy Koppang) that the group had continued on to look for answers to the UFO question in the minds and files of the U.S. government, and was composed of people who supposedly had high-level access to the information.

At the time, the only names on record were people like John Alexander, Ed Dames, Hal Puthoff, Bob Wood, and Jack Houck–all former employees of the government (or government contractors) and all certainly interested in the UFO question. Russo brings up more names (although disguised in aliases but which students of the subject can readily guess at.)

Russo concludes and generally agrees with my own opinion:

…there is certainly a very small percentage government officials with intelligence clearance — some active, some retired — who are interested in the UFO research community, if not UFOs themselves. Some of these men are of the impression, rightly or wrongly, that a very few individuals in government and the private sector are keeping the big secret even from them. This is small consolation to earnest UFO researchers, but at least they should no longer feel alone and marginalized as kooks completely at odds with officialdom

Definitely worth checking out, even if there are a couple of minor factual errors that I spied in the text - which is a hazard I have found when writing and reading about this subject.
http://tinyurl.com/yqgje6



The Real ‘X-Files’ : Is Uncle Sam a Closet UFOlogist?
Gus Russo
June 12, 2007

[Note: In late May 2007, I was asked by Dan Smith, who is discussed in this article, to attempt to write an overview of the apparent interest of the intelligence community in UFOs. Although Dan paid me a modest retainer for my time, he agreed to have absolutely no editorial control over my work or its conclusions. He was fully prepared to be, possibly, unhappy with whatever I delivered.]

With terrorism, drug trafficking, climate change, and ever-present pork projects on its plate, the US government, one would think, would have zero free time – not to mention resources -- to devote the supremely elusive topic of flying saucers. But, for some observers, there is compelling evidence that it does -- and in direct contradiction of its own official statements.

These federal forays into the fanciful seem inspired by the relatively new buzzwords added to the UFO lexicon, not the iconic “Roswell,” “Alien Autopsies,” or even “MJ-12 documents” of old. Those passé riddles are no longer considered “coins of the realm.” Now the most intense debates involve subjects with names like Project Beta, SERPO, Project Camelot, Operation Snow White, and Star Gate. And weaving in and out of all these alleged controversies, especially in the UFO internet chat rooms, are at least three senior intelligence analysts and one retired Air Force Special Investigator: “Tom” (pseudo.), a MASINT specialist (Measures and Signals Intelligence) with a PhD in chemistry and Paul, an aeronautics scholar interested in “breakthrough propulsion and gravity-modification technologies,” work down the hall from each at the Directorate of National Intelligence (DNI) headquarters in Washington. “Jim” (pseudo.), a physician and former CIA officer in the Directorate of Science and Technology, maintains his security clearance, and travels back to Washington often to work on classified psychological studies. Richard “Rick” Doty, a longtime friend and colleague of Jim, was an investigator assigned the Air Force Office of Special Investigations (AFOSI).

What has been confounding UFO buffs for years is the regular presence of these well-informed “spooks” (and others less active) in both the physical UFO world and the world of cyberspace saucers. The mystery seems to have its origins in 1956, pre Tom- Paul-Jim-Rick, and pre internet, and in the most unlikely of settings: the office of Ward Kimball, one of Walt Disney’s key animators. At a 1979 UFO symposium in San Francisco, Kimball told how the US Air Force had approached Disney to make a UFO documentary, the ostensible purpose being to help prepare the collective American psyche for planned revelations concerning the reality of extraterrestrials. If that wasn’t enough, the senior flyboys offered to supply actual UFO footage, which Disney would be allowed to use in his film. It must have seemed to Kimball that his character Jiminy Cricket’s “wish upon a star” had actually been answered. However, a few weeks later, the offer was withdrawn just as quickly as it had been made. Kimball said that an Air Force Colonel said brusquely, “There indeed was plenty of UFO footage, but that neither Ward, nor anyone else, was going to get access to it.”

The Air Force revisited the gambit in the early seventies, when Air Force Colonels Robert Coleman and George Weinbrenner approached documentary filmmaker Robert Emenegger with a very similar astounding offer. The two colonels, who were possibly attached to AFOSI, took Emenegger to Norton AFB near San Bernardino and awed him with footage of what appeared to be three flying saucers landing at Holloman AFB in New Mexico in 1971. Incredibly, the Air Force was again, according to the colonels, going to give the footage to Emenegger as a climax to his forthcoming film, UFOs, Past, Present and Future. But once again, at the eleventh hour the Air Force changed its mind, they said, because of the Watergate scandal. Perhaps the country couldn’t handle more bad news.

In the eighties, AFOSI agent Rick Doty, a longtime colleague and friend of analyst Jim, appeared in New Mexico in order to tease scientist Paul Bennewitz with promises to divulge the government’s UFO secrets. And in this case, the Air Force actually delivered the goods, in a sense. Bennewitz, an entrepreneur who specialized in selling high altitude testing equipment to the Air Force, had contacted AFOSI after filming bizarre flying craft near Kirtland AFB, outside Albuquerque. As a result, Doty was tasked not only with determining if Bennewitz had stumbled onto classified aircraft tests (and also scientific research such as Project Starfire), but also with feeding the physicist mountains of disinformation about UFOs, the furtive purpose being to divert his attention from classified goings-on, and later, to monitor the flow of information through the UFOlogy network. A still-unidentified Air Force intelligence officer also seduced best-selling UFO writer Bill Moore (The Philadelphia Experiment and The Roswell Incident) into assisting Doty in his spycraft; in exchange, Moore was offered real UFO information, including meeting a live extraterrestrial – promises that, like Emenegger’s UFO footage, never materialized. The charade played out for most of the eighties, driving poor Bennewitz, who coined the disclosures Project Beta, to a mental meltdown. Moore actually admitted his double agent role to an astonished UFO community at a Las Vegas convention in July 1989, however the bizarre alien tales he fed Bennewitz poisoned the UFO database, perhaps permanently. Infinite mutations of the Doty fictions continue to spread like an internet virus. Just google “SERPO” for a taste.

In 1983, the government next approached Emmy Award winning documentarian Linda Howe, then at work on a UFO film for HBO. After meeting with Howe in Albuquerque, Rick Doty took her to the AFOSI offices at Kirtland, and not only promised her the same footage that was dangled in front of Emenegger, but he went one step further.

“My superiors asked me to show this to you,” Doty said as he handed Howe a file entitled “Briefing Paper for the President of the United States.” Allowed only to scan the explosive cache, Howe saw tales of crashed extraterrestrial craft, alien bodies, and even more astounding, UFO crash survivors. Although Howe was not allowed to take the papers away, Doty promised her the same “landing footage” promised to Emenegger a decade earlier for his film. But, just as they had with Emenegger, months of negotiating went absolutely nowhere. Doty later admitted to author Greg Bishop that the ploy was but another government counterintelligence probe into the UFO community.

The Kimball, Emenegger, Bennewitz, and Howe affairs were just the beginning of excursions into the world of UFO ephemera by federal employees. In the 1990’s the feds seemed determined to insert their agenda into the nascent internet, where UFOlogists were now trading “evidence” around the world at lightening speed. Their newest civilian contact became a soft-spoken computer analyst who was determined to use the new technology to get to “the truth.”

Dan Smith of Maryland, the son of a former economic advisor to the White House, has spent two decades, largely via internet blogging, pursuing his interest in future apocalyptic scenarios. Invariably, his quest led him into the miasma of rumored UFO disclosure scenarios. In 1991, Smith learned of the possibility of a real-life X-Files when UK crop circle researchers made him aware of analyst Tom, and his forays into their provenance. Before calling Tom, Smith vetted him with NASA, which readily agreed that Tom was the government’s man on “phenomenology.” Thus, in September 1991, Smith started calling Tom, and in only their second conversation, Tom floored Dan by announcing, “I’m going to Los Alamos next week to talk to aliens.” The trip to the famed nuclear lab never happened, as best Dan can ascertain.

Dan and Tom’s relationship has progressed from phone calls and email exchanges to attending family outings and ball games together, and even to meeting at his agency’s headquarters. Throughout the course of the relationship, Tom made it abundantly clear that he is officially following the UFO topic as part of his intelligence portfolio, admitting that he had participated, as did Jim, in an inter-agency “Phenomenology Working Group.” When pressed for details, however, Tom only gives obtuse, often cryptic answers as to why the monitoring of the UFO crowd consumes what one insider estimates as 20% of his publicly funded workday. Unbeknownst to Smith, in 1992 Tom allegedly admitted to another internet contact, Habib “Henry” Azadehdel, that he had indeed been part of a working group. In a phone conversation recorded by Azadehdel, Tom, or someone impersonating Tom, confided that he had been the first member of an inter-agency “working group.” “You know,” Tom offered, “I was a member of that Working Group, ah, when it started…I was a member of it, but I, I resigned I guess after the first meeting,” claimed Tom. The meeting, he explained was organized by Jim, and there were “about a dozen people there.”

In his 1990 book Out There, New York Times reporter Howard Blum described a top secret inter-agency Working Group, which he contended met in the Pentagon in 1987, the purpose being to investigate UFOs. The participants Blum named overlapped too nicely with those known to be in Tom and Jim’s gathering: in the minds of many UFOlogists, Tom and Jim were members of Blum’s UFO Working Group. Thus the current controversy often postulates that their interest relates to an ongoing UFO Working Group mandate.

Although Smith seemed only bemused by the attention, one of his friends, an engineer who frequently holds classified government contracts, became so concerned that he reported Tom to his agency’s Inspector General. “I later found out that it became a six-month internal investigation,” says the friend, “but, in the end, Tom was able to convince them that his communication with Smith fell within his official purview.” Still, Smith’s friends worry that Smith’s health is suffering from all the gamesmanship, worried that he might become the next Paul Bennewitz. Since 1994, Tom continues to communicate with Dan on a regular basis.

Next up on the US intel radar was one Bob Bigelow, the billionaire heir to the Bigelow Tea fortune and owner of the Budget Suites of America hotel chain and Bigelow Aerospace. In 1996, Bigelow created the National Institute of Discovery Science (NIDS) to explore paranormal activity, especially cattle mutilations in the Utah badlands and UFO reports. Enter officers Tom and Jim, now nick-named collectively “The Aviary” by their contactees. Jim confirmed to a popular website administrator that Bigelow’s think tank was the subject of informal discussion at DIA sponsored meetings he attended on the threats of emerging technologies. More importantly, analyst Tom has openly admitted to Dan Smith that he was so interested in NIDS that he attended its inaugural meeting, and kept tabs on its research until its dissolution on 2004.

The dawning of the twenty-first century saw a marked escalation in the activities of Tom, Jim, and Rick, especially in cyberspace. Chris Iverson, administrator with the internet’s “Open Minds Forum,” says, “ I have spoken directly with Tom, Jim, and Rick. The highlight so far is the conversation I had with Tom several weeks ago. He went quite far in describing not just his relationship with Dan Smith but also covered several other topics as well.” Iverson says that Tom corroborated what he told Smith years ago about the mysterious trips to Los Alamos. “The story is that these people made several monthly trips out from Washington DC to Los Alamos several years ago to either meet directly with "The Visitors" or to meet with the people who were responsible for holding or communicating with them,” explains Iverson. “Tom stated that yes, these trips did take place, but they occurred over 15 years ago and are not happening today.”

The list of contacts goes on. Gary Bekkum, of Starstream Research, says, “I have had increasing contact, by email, and phone, with some of the Aviary members, concerning stories I have written about their activities, including requests not to expose ‘sources and methods.’ I have also had increasing contact from others, including a DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Project) subcontractor.” Ryan Dube, of Reality Uncovered notes that his first contact with the trio came when Doty began harassing one of his moderators. “Tom contacted us in 2006, via email, with a request to assist him in his investigation of Richard Doty,” remembers Dube. “He wanted to know the details of the harassment and Rick's supervisor contact information. I was suspicious of Tom from the start, and didn't believe him. However we verified that his emails were coming from DIA military servers and the contact phone number he initial gave me was in fact located in the DC area. That's when I realized that I was actually talking to the real Tom - the intelligence analyst. I've been in contact (phone and email) with Tom up until about three months ago, as well as Jim.”

The Tom, Jim, and Rick Show even enjoys syndication across the pond. Brendan Burton, the British administrator for the “Open Minds” forum, vividly recalls when Jim emailed him in early 2006. The missive is again a bit of a tease, wherein the agent makes “hypothetical” statements about the size of the UFO cover-up. But, Burton adds, “He seemed to confirm that the US government was indeed in this thing, right up to their necks!” The UK’s Caryn Anscomb, who frequently contributes to the “Reality Uncovered” and “Starstream” sites, first heard from analyst Jim in 2004, and has had regular communications from him ever since. Ditto Steve Broadbent, another Reality Uncovered administrator from England.

Both Tom and Jim have made only half-hearted attempts to hide their identities (this is especially peculiar regarding Tom, who still works full-time at the highest echelons of US intelligence.) Their impressive CV’s, contact information, and emails are regularly exchanged by the bloggers as the amateurs try to brainstorm an answer to the ultimate question: what is their agenda? Also asking the question is UK filmmaker John Lundberg, who has been traipsing across the US recently, filming anyone who will agree to speak on the subject for his forthcoming film Miragemen. Lundberg has, like this writer, also had communications with both Tom and Jim.

Dan Smith and the rest of his web colleagues, who are still in regular contact with Tom, Jim, and Rick, are confused for another reason: the feds have officially stated ad nauseum that they maintain no interest in the subject of little green men. The proclamations began in 1953 with the publication of the CIA’s “Robertson Panel Report.” Chaired by CIA physicist Howard Percy Robertson, the panel concluded that 90 percent of UFO sightings could be readily identified with meteorological, astronomical, or natural phenomena, and that the remaining 10 percent could be similarly explained with more study. It further suggested that the Air Force should begin to reduce "public gullibility" and utilize the mass media, including influential media giants like the Walt Disney Corporation, to demystify UFO reports.

In 1968, Rick Doty’s Air Force weighed in with the 1,438-page Condon Committee Report, a two-year study chaired by physicist Edward Condon. The investigation, undertaken by eight faculty members from the University of Colorado, concluded (albeit with some dissention amongst the faculty ranks) that all UFO reports had conventional explanations, and further study of the subject would not be worthwhile. The Air Force put the issue aside for almost three decades, then in 1995 released a UFO “Fact Sheet” that noted: “From 1947 to 1969, the Air Force investigated Unidentified Flying Objects under Project Blue Book. The project, headquartered at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, Ohio, was terminated Dec. 17, 1969. Of a total of 12,618 sightings reported to Project Blue Book, 701 remained ‘unidentified.’”

Two years later, a Pentagon spokesman told the press that the military had “long ago” stopped tracking UFOs. That same year, Gerald K. Haines, the official historian of the CIA, joined the chorus of denials when he authored the Agency’s position in its official publication, Studies in Intelligence. Although the CIA was concerned about UFOs until the early 1950s, Haines wrote, it has since “paid only limited and peripheral attention to the phenomena.” Haines added that the actual explanation to the UFO mystery was much more mundane than the fantasy of alien visitation: UFOs were nothing more than classified, experimental US aircraft.

How then to explain the ongoing presence of Tom, Jim, and Rick?

UFOlogists are quick to point out one other study that might explain their true goal. In 1960, the Brookings Institution drafted a 100-page report for NASA, advising the newborn US space agency of societal chaos if it discovered alien life and did not release the story in a very controlled way. (NASA ultimately ignored the Brookings warning when, in 1972 it launched the Pioneer 10 spacecraft to the farthest reaches of space; affixed to the craft was a gold-anodized aluminum plaque engraved with a map showing the location of Earth.) Thus, it is postulated, the intelligence community might be preparing the world for “Disclosure.”

Some Answers
Greg Bishop, who chronicled the Bennewitz-Doty saga in his 2005 book Project Beta, and has himself been contacted separately by four intelligence professionals, sums up the feelings of many, saying “There is no denying a concern with the UFO subject in the corridors of the Pentagon and the halls of our government. How much these people actually know is the subject of hot debate.” Recently, however, in private statements to bloggers and to this writer, some clarity is coming to the issues of “who knows what” and “what is their agenda?” Research for this article points to these answers: they know little or nothing about UFOs, and their agendas differ.

Ryan Dube recalled what Tom once revealed about his interest. “Once,” Dube said, “when I pushed Tom over the phone on why he remains so involved with in ufology “his statement - paraphrased, was essentially: ‘No one needs to know why I'm interested...and if I have any hint that anyone is at all on to why I am interested, I'll certainly do everything within my power to distract them - but I can tell you one thing - my interest certainly has nothing at all to do with aliens or UFOs.’” This is consistent with Tom’s statement to another site administrator: “There are no classified files on UFOs because UFOs don’t exist.” Ryan points out the obvious paradox: “The active involvement of current and former government officials certainly suggests that our government sees value in the field of UFOlogy for some reason.”

Tom’s motivation, it now appears certain, can be summed up in two words: national security. In a recent interview, a senior intelligence official who is familiar with spooks in cyberspace explained, “Tom is interested in the subject because, one, he is concerned that DIA officers parading as CIA officers -- a felony -- are leaking classified material to the UFO groups. He also knows that in years past the KGB used parapsychology and paranormal groups to get to military people with classified information. He is concerned that any enemy group could easily use these forums to search out national security secrets.” Joel Brenner, the United States national counterintelligence chief recently said that the number of Russian agents operating in the country had reached “Cold War levels,” according to the Russian News & Information Agency.

“They are sending over an increasing and troubling number of intelligence officers into the United States,” Brener reported. Former head of FBI counterintelligence David Szady echoed Brenner's, adding that Russian agents often arrived in the U.S. under the cover of students or businessmen. The Times UK recently noted the Russians’ escalation in spy wars against the US: “White House intelligence advisers believe no other country is as aggressive as Russia in trying to obtain US secrets, with the possible exception of China. In particular the SVR, as the former KGB’s foreign intelligence arm is now known, is using a network of undercover agents in America to gather classified information about sensitive technologies, including military projects under development and high-tech research.” The article adds that Putin’s intelligence apparatus views cyberspace as a powerful new weapon. Among the evidence cited is Moscow’s recent cyber attack against the Baltic state Estonia over its decision to relocate a Soviet-era military monument.

Some see corroboration for the government’s interest in internet UFO writers in the so-called “Stargate Archive” files. Stargate was the name of a remote viewing project founded by the DIA in 1972, then later transferred to CIA. In 2004 the CIA released under a FOIA request the Stargate Archive files, which reveal that the CIA was indeed concerned about monitoring UFO authors who might be privy to classified material.

Then there were the security breaches that occurred during Operation Stargate itself, which Tom was instrumental in bringing to an end in 1996. By the mid-seventies it was learned that Stargate, which had Aviary members on its board, and other CIA projects, had been massively infiltrated, the target of Scientology’s infamous “Operation Snow White.” In 1979, eleven highly placed Church executives, including Mary Sue Hubbard (wife of founder L. Ron Hubbard and second in command of the organization), pleaded guilty or were convicted in federal court of obstructing justice, burglary of government offices, and theft of documents and government property.

Tom admits that there is one other minor reason for him to be surfing the UFO web. In a recent email, he let his guard down a tad, explaining how UFO bloggers can serve a patriotic purpose, if inadvertently. “Under normal times this tendency towards mass delusional states and radical heresies is perhaps a weakness,” Tom wrote. “However in stressful times it promotes radical out-of-the-box thinking…[it] plays an increasingly important role as we approach cataclysmic species survival stress points. The end of accessible oil could be such a point. Most people will continue to believe new oil discoveries are just around the corner…[bloggers] search for solutions in the strangest places. Perhaps they will find one in time.”

Working down the DNI hall from Tom, cyberspace regular Paul, the aeronautics and advanced propulsion researcher, explains that, much like fictional X-Files agent Fox Mulder, he believes because he wants to believe. Further, he hopes to end his science colleagues’ discrimination against UFO believers.

Then there is Jim, whose professional history in the subject goes back to his personal involvement in the Stargate project in the 1970’s and as a participant in the legendary “Working Group” meetings in the eighties. As one of the intel community’s most senior medical analysts, Jim frequently communicates with UFOlogists. Chris Iverson believes that Tom and Jim clearly have differing agendas, noting, “Jim is the person I have had the most contact with over the last several months and he seems to be interested in the spreading of viral memes over the internet, particularly in relation to this subject.” Iverson is not far off the mark. However, in a recent meeting with this writer, Jim explained that his internet presence emanates from a number of overlapping pursuits.

“The whole subject,” Jim says in wonderfully measured speech, “is composed of three components: delusion, sociological groupthink, and a kernel of truth.” Jim then reminds that he is first and foremost a medical scientist. “My interest in this subject is much, much more professional than it is personal. That is, 90 to 95% of all persons who are engaged fully with this [UFO] subject are psychiatrically ill, and by that I mean that they are on medication or should be.” Jim elaborates that “viral memes,”[see below] in which disturbed people seek validation in numbers on the web, is, or should be, a growing public health concern. That said, Jim nonetheless has a real interest in UFO’s, and seemingly with good reason.

“I believe there’s a ‘core story’,” Jim explained, “but I don’t know what it is. I have been told by people more senior than me that there is some truth to it, but they told me time and time again to stop pursuing it with CIA people and other intel types. Two very senior officials told me they saw briefing books, [however] the only ones who would be cleared to know the story are the most senior Pentagon career officers.” Jim refuses to divulge his sources, but when pressed, he reiterates what they told him: look to the Pentagon and the private sector’s aerospace and weapons labs, etc. US intelligence “doesn’t have labs capable of dealing with something this profound.” He also notes that over the years he has received thousands of UFO-related government documents in unmarked envelopes. Although some are obvious fakes, others, according to Jim, contain information that correlates with known, but still classified, scientific studies. In an intriguing footnote, Jim adds, “I have spoken to three former Presidents and the subject always comes up, not as a briefing, but they also want to know the truth. But apparently they aren’t cleared for it.”

Both Tom and Jim seem to share at least one rationale for their internet excursions: studying the frightening potential of “viral internet memes.” Coined by evolutionary theorist Richard Dawkins in 1976 (The Selfish Gene), a meme is a unit of cultural information that evolves the way a gene propagates from one organism to another, and subject to all the analogous unintended mutations. In the view of many, computers and blogs could function as powerful meme “replicators.” Richard Brodie, the creator of Microsoft Word, notes, “Most of these viruses of the mind are spread because they are intriguing or frightening or inspiring, and not necessarily because they're true. That's the problem.” It doesn’t take much intuition to envision an enemy creating memes that can be used to destabilize a society, or a freelance predator utilizing them to cozy up to potential victims. Caryn Anscomb writes online, “The UFO community has been deeply penetrated by the manipulators of information, who couldn’t really give a fig whether there might be any valuable data pertaining to Aliens and contact hidden behind the deafening noise. That’s not their business; their business is information warfare.”

Rick Doty’s intent seems by far the most mysterious. He has been vouched for by two former Directors of Central Intelligence (DCI) – as well as Jim – but has been excoriated by his former superior at AFOSI, Col. Richard L. Weaver, who recently noted that Doty had been “cashiered out of OSI” and that he has a well-known “lack of veracity.” It should also be noted that the two DCIs only knew Doty before they ran the Agency, when they all were deployed in Europe together. The DCIs are only vouching for his previous work, not his UFO allegations.

Doty has promulgated some of the most outlandish “alien contact” stories extant. He not only fed them to Paul Bennewitz in the 1980’s, but to the public at large in his 2005 book with Robert Collins, Exempt From Disclosure. But amidst the book’s sci-fi-like claims of extraterrestrials in US custody and “reverse engineered” saucers -- currently being exploited by one Gordon Novel with his Project Camelot -- Doty also admits the following: “There are times when you deceive the public you are doing the public a great service and I certainly protect the public with deception operations if it were for their own good.” Nonetheless, much the same way that reporters speculated about the fraudulent New Orleans DA Jim Garrison forty years ago, there remains a group of UFO bloggers who continue to opine about Doty: “He must have something.”

Greg Bishop, among the most sober of the UFO authors, sums up the continued presence of federally employed UFO believers like Jim, Paul and Rick thus: “Their agenda is to do their jobs first, and find out what is going on behind the scenes with the UFO enigma… They get hints, but never the whole picture, and that becomes the quest after they leave active service.”

What then of the so-called “Top Secret UFO Working Group” in which Tom, Jim and others participated in the 1980s? Fortunately, four participants in those gatherings have communicated with this writer, and one in particular shared original paperwork from the meetings with Caryn, who graciously shared them with me. Consequently, the following can be said of the Working Group story:

• The key meetings were held from May 20-25, 1985 in the secure facility of the BDM Corporation (a high clearance military contractor) in MacLean, VA.

• There were twenty known attendees (we have the names) representing Los Alamos Nuclear Labs, Army Intelligence, CIA, Lockheed, McDonnell Douglas, and various scientists with security clearances. Other unnamed guests such as Jim attended.

• The meeting was titled “Advanced Theoretical Physics Conference” and its main objective was to study odd radar tracings to determine their origins (“friendly” “enemy” or “unknown”). They turned out to be totally anomalous.

Jim notes that quite a few of the attendees turned out to be closet UFO buffs who only showed up to see who knew the truth about ETs (no one did). He called it a waste of time, leaving after just the first day. Tom recalls attending a follow-up meeting at the Pentagon that was so silly that he made a derisive remark before walking out in the middle of it.

Summing it all up, there is certainly a very small percentage government officials with intelligence clearance -- some active, some retired -- who are interested in the UFO research community, if not UFOs themselves. Some of these men are of the impression, rightly or wrongly, that a very few individuals in government and the private sector are keeping the big secret even from them. This is small consolation to earnest UFO researchers, but at least they should no longer feel alone and marginalized as kooks completely at odds with officialdom.

All this does not mean that evidence for alien visits is non-existent, it’s just that Tom, Jim, Paul, and Rick don’t appear to be the keepers of it. The opinion of Ryan Dube appears inarguable. “If the field of UFOlogy could be cleaned of the rubbish,” Dube wrote me, “we may find that there remains very valid and important evidence and stories that demand our attention - and might actually finally reveal the truth about the alien and UFO question.” And if Jim ever decides to reveal his sources, things could get very interesting.
http://tinyurl.com/372ueq

The alien overlords
posted 18 June 2007
Philip Coppens

The drive to uncover “the truth” about the UFO phenomenon is often believed to be an “us versus them” situation: the people versus the evil government. But in the 1990s, it became clear that this was not the case. Instead, it became apparent that it were “CIA assets” that were briefing that the CIA had secrets. A rather incestuous relationship…



One leading and influential advocate of the Extraterrestrial Hypothesis and the Contact Scenario was Dr. Bruce Maccabee, a former US Navy physicist. Maccabee became prominent in the UFO field in the mid 1970s, and was a founding member of the Fund for UFO Research (FUFOR), whose primary purpose was to give grants to UFO researchers to further “the cause”: the study and disclosure of “the truth” about UFOs – and their “obvious” alien, extra-terrestrial nature.
FUFOR has since played a major role in the dissemination of key aspects of the Contact Scenario. For example, it gave Stanton Friedman a grant of $16,000 to authenticate the MJ-12 documents. When these false documents were released in 1987, Maccabee was their greatest supporter.

Both by his position and his reputation, Maccabee was an influential figure in UFO research, and his support for several sensational - but controversial - cases has led to their general acceptance by other researchers who, in turn, have promoted them to the public. As such, the UFO myth became firmly embedded within society.
Furthermore, his rise to prominence was due to his claim that he had evidence that the CIA were withholding thousands of files relating to UFOs – a claim that has greatly encouraged the belief in a cover-up and, by extension, that there is something to be covered up.
But while supporting many of the more sensational UFO cases, Maccabee has also used his influence to down-play evidence that supports a more conventional explanation of the UFO phenomenon. For example, when the declassified CIA documents relating to the use of UFOs as a cover for spy plane sightings were released in 1997, he argued vociferously – and successfully – that these were of no significance.
Most importantly, Maccabee worked closely with William Moore, for example on investigating an alleged UFO landing near Kirtland AFB in 1980 – using information supplied by Sergeant Richard Doty – the government’s UFO disinformation agent par excellence. Moore later admitted he had spread disinformation on behalf of the government, promoting the UFO myth.

Maccabee might just be gullible – not uncommon amongst UFO researchers – but in 1993, fellow UFO researchers discovered that Maccabee maintained close links with the CIA. When challenged, he admitted that, since 1979 (i.e. for 14 years), he had indeed regularly briefed the CIA at their Langley, Virginia headquarters on developments in the UFO field, but denied that his involvement went any deeper than that. Many in the UFO community once again accepted his word for it – the alternative was probably too hard to ponder. But if it was all innocent, why had Maccabee failed to explain why he kept these briefings secret for 14 years?

It is ironic that a leading member of an organisation that is pledged to challenge official secrecy about UFOs – and one of the main proponents of the idea that the CIA are withholding thousands of documents on the subject – should have such a long-standing, secret relationship with that very agency. In the end, Maccabee’s reassurances failed to convince some, including his close friend and fellow FUFOR board member, Richard Hall.

The drive that the government – and specifically the CIA – is involved in an “alien cover-up” was paramount throughout the 1990s, popularised by the existence of “The X Files”, which in the eyes of the UFO community seemed to “validate” them. John Podesta, working in Clinton’s government, was apparently such a fan of the series that after an episode of the series, he came to work wondering what aspects of the show were based on fact and which government agent that reported into the White House was lying to the President.



The role of the CIA within the UFO enigma is bizarre at best. It has often dangled carrots in front of people, and the agency is not alone. In 1989, former NASA scientist Robert Oeschler claimed that he had been invited by top USAF officials to participate in an exercise to finally reveal the existence of extraterrestrials to the public. He was shown photographs, including one of a “typical grey alien”, and was taken to a “top-secret tracking station” off the Florida Coast where he was allowed to see what was described as UFOs being monitored during their flights over US and surrounding airspace. Oeschler publicised this information, although the promised official revelations did not materialise.
Raising hopes of imminent revelations, yet nothing materialising is probably the best gimmick in these exercises, whereby each non-revelation is seen as further proof that there is a cover-up in place and that the forces of evil have once again stopped full disclosure.
And what to make of Oeschler’s taped conversations with Admiral Robert Inman, former head of the NSA and deputy director of the CIA, in which Inman admitted that the US government had recovered crashed UFOs? Inman warned Oeschler that the conversations were secret because of national security considerations, and that the tapes could not be used without official approval. Yet Oeschler was allowed to broadcast them – supposedly revealing the greatest military secret in existence – on television with complete impunity.
It seems that Oeschler was honestly reporting what he had seen and been told – yet all his information came from military and intelligence sources. Is it likely that the likes of Inman would have been truthful in such allegations? And if so, why were they allowed to get away with it? It may also be significant that Oeschler’s greatest supporter and advocate was Bruce Maccabee.

Dr Maccabee’s most controversial endorsement was of the Gulf Breeze sightings and their primary witness, Ed Walters. In the late 1980s, Walters claimed to have taken photographs of UFOs over the Florida coast. Maccabee proclaimed the photographs genuine, an opinion that was hotly disputed by professional photo analysts. Even when an accomplice of Walters confessed to having faked them, Maccabee refused to admit that the photographs were fabricated.
Maccabee and the supporters of the Gulf Breeze sightings argued that shortly after Walter’s initial claims, other people began to report seeing anomalous lights in the sky over the Gulf Breeze area – suggesting the Gulf Breeze sightings were genuine, irrelevant of faked photographs. But curiously, the phenomena only manifested at certain, regular times, specifically when civilians had gathered to see them. Significantly, Gulf Breeze is surrounded by military installations, one of which is specifically charged with psychological warfare experiments.

In 1994, a group of very senior power brokers in the USA tried to promote the Contact Scenario to leading politicians – including the President Clinton himself. Though some presidents before him, like Jimmy Carter, had been interested in UFOs after apparently seeing one from an airplane, Clinton was apparently a fan of science-fiction and genuinely interested in UFOs.



The group of influential and rich people that tried to put UFOs on the political agenda was presided over by their most senior figure: Laurence Rockefeller, whose wealth and influence gave him access to the top level of American – and international – society. As the grandson of John D. Rockefeller, the founder of the dynasty, and brother of John D. III, Nelson, Winthrop, and David Rockefeller, he was at the centre of American politics. It was therefore no problem for Rockefeller to brief President Clinton on UFOs while the president was staying at Rockefeller’s Wyoming Ranch in August 1995.
The Rockefeller group’s aim was to convince world leaders of the reality of the Contact Scenario, and to persuade them to make a public announcement to this effect. As the evidence suggests, it came very close to such an announcement.

As part of the UFO temptation of the President, an informal discussion was held in September 1993 at Rockefeller’s ranch in Wyoming. Those attending included: Richard Farley, Bob Teets, Henry Diamond, Dr. Scott Jones, Dr. John Mack, Dr. Bruce Maccabee, Dr. Leo Sprinkle, Linda Moulton Howe, Dr. Steven Greer, Marie Galbraith, and Keith Thompson. Each of these participants were leading UFO researchers or promising new lights.
Dr. Jill Tartar, then director of SETI, was also invited to the meeting, but declined, stating some of the attendees were “not scientific”. A similar response was received from Carl Sagan, citing a scheduling conflict. He later argued that anything he had to say on the subject had been said in his recent book, “The Demon-Haunted World”.

A key though relatively unknown attendant was Scott Jones, then President of an organisation called the “Human Potential Foundation”, to which Rockefeller donated no less than $700,000 for research into the social effects of the public revelation of alien contact, and into the most effective methods for lobbying Congress. The Foundation was established by Jones’s employer, veteran Senator Claiborne Pell, one-time head of Congress’s Foreign Relations Committee, and a great influence on Vice President Al Gore, who was equally said to be interested in UFOs and “strange phenomena”.

In 1993, Rockefeller and Jones met with Jack Gibbons, Clinton’s chief science advisor, using a briefing paper “Matrix of UFO Beliefs” as the backbone of their presentation.
That document had been written by investigative journalist Richard Farley. When asked about its general line of reasoning, Farley stated that “the paper reflects my assumption that, for at least some publicly perceived ‘UFOs’, various of our government’s branches would be expected to know very well what may have been witnessed.” In short, Farley suggested that UFOs were often a label stuck by government branches on top secret flights, experiments, etc. Farley did not seem to argue for the extra-terrestrial nature of the phenomenon.
This, of course, was not conform to Contact Scenario that most of the Rockefeller group subscribed to, so it was no surprise to see that in 1994, Farley resigned, stating “I ultimately disagreed on the timing and dynamics of ‘what to push and when.’” Farley underlined that he had a serious concern that UFOs were being used as “camouflage for exotic aerospace and directed energy technologies.” Though Farley had left, Jones too warned about UFOs being used to cloak other highly classified projects. And though he left, it seems that Farley then tried to brief the Clinton administration of his individual beliefs too.
The same happened to Jacques Vallee, considered to be a leading and most esteemed UFO researcher. Vallee had been offered a position helping with the Disclosure Initiative, but he declined, only to write directly to Gibbons to present his own UFO views, which differed from those ideas Rockefeller was presenting. Vallee offered to meet with Gibbons either in San Francisco or Washington or at Gibbons convenience. Despite Vallee’s high profile in the UFO community, Gibbons turned Vallee down cold. It is remarkable that Gibbons was interested in talking to Rockefeller about the Contact Scenario but not with Vallee, who is not a proponent of “crashed saucers” stories – and it seems Gibbons was not interested in hearing such “other possibilities”.

After an initial meeting, a second briefing paper, aimed towards the Central Intelligence Agency, was prepared by none other than Bruce Maccabee. And with the CIA, we come to the crux of Rockefeller’s – and the Clinton’s – interest: Roswell. The first and most important test case where declassification had to apply, according to Rockefeller, was the Roswell UFO incident. By 1994, a whole series of books had been written on the infamous story, starting in the late 1970s, when the story had been resurrected from oblivion by William Moore, apparently at a time when he was not yet a willing disinformation agent.
Rockefeller repeatedly argued along the lines that “There is a belief in many quarters that the government has long held classified information regarding UFOs which has not been released and that the failure to do so has brought about unnecessary suspicion and distrust. Many believe that the release of such information, if it exists, on a basis consistent with national security considerations, would be a significant gesture which would increase confidence in government.” That was indeed a noble sentiment and throughout the entire initiative, there is no evidence to suggest that Rockefeller was insincere; he seems to have been convinced the government was covering up ET and he tried to uncover the truth.

Rockefeller and Greer’s pressure was able to convince Director of Central Intelligence Woolsey to request full disclosure on the Roswell crash. The outcome was a review of the UFO material, in which the emphasis shifted from the CIA to the Air Force. The conclusion of the report was that the Air Force had lied about more than half of its public statements regarding UFOs from the 1950s onwards. Why? To cover for covert CIA operations.
The report argued that more than half of the UFO sightings during the 1950s and 1960s were actually not UFOs, but misidentified secret spy planes such as the U-2 and SR-71. The damaging part to the Air Force was the report’s author, Richard Haines’ allegation that the Air Force Project Blue Book, set up to investigate UFO reports, actually consulted with the CIA U-2 staff personnel in Washington, and helped to co-ordinate dismissive explanations for the public to cover for the CIA aerial spy operations. In short, the report concluded that the public had been lied to, for decades, by both the Air Force and the CIA, and that UFOs were nothing but a smokescreen. The Contact Scenario had been a public illusion, painted on top of the official lies that masked something else – something more mundane.

Rockefeller largely felt – and so did most of the UFO community with him – that despite claims that this was the truth, these series of reports were more disinformation. The reports were seen as evidence of how powerful the true powerbrokers of the alien cover-up really were.
Rockefeller continued and prepared a special briefing paper for select politicians, heads of state, and CEOs. In this, he engaged the help of Marie “Bootsie” Galbraith, wife of investment banker Evan Galbraith and one-time US ambassador to France. Galbraith wanted to compile a report containing the most reliable evidence for the paranormal nature of UFOs. Though the final 169-page document was less than impressive in scope and was largely a survey of a “best of the year 19XX UFO sightings and incidents”, the effort was remarkable as she managed to unite under the temporary banner of the UFO Research Coalition: CUFOS (Center for UFO Studies), FUFOR (Fund for UFO Research) and MUFON (Mutual UFO Network), the three leading UFO organisations which were seldom willing to co-operate.
Among the cases selected for inclusion in this report were the Belgian wave and the Rendlesham Forest Incident – two cases in which there is a suspicious degree of military and intelligence involvement – and two cases which could have been part of a psychological warfare exercise.

When the Report was finished, Rockefeller did not request many copies for himself. The copies he did request went to General Colin Powell, then former Chairman of the Joint Chiefs and later Secretary of State, former Secretary of State for President Nixon Henry Kissinger, evangelist Billy Graham, and founder of the Earth Council and Secretary General of the landmark 1992 Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro Maurice F. Strong. It reveals the political clout Rockefeller’s initiative had and the extent of his desire to convince the world of the Contact Scenario.



As mentioned, Rockefeller was not the only person trying to interest president Clinton. On December 13, 1993, Steven Greer met with the “principal advisor to the President for Intelligence matters related to national security,” DCI James Woolsey. It was the first of many UFO briefings that Greer would do for members of the Clinton administration. Though Greer later claimed this was a three hour briefing which was well received by Woolsey, the director of Central Intelligence later stated that the “briefing” was actually a conversation over dinner, in which Greer was one of the guests. Another target of Greer was Bruce Lindsay, one of Clinton’s senior councillors in the White House and one of his closest friends and Al Gore and his staff.
Though at first firmly in Rockefeller’s camp, it seems that soon, Greer decided not play in the team, but make the briefings a personal ambition. An exact reason for the split has never been communicated, but it is believed that the disagreement between Greer and the Rockefeller group was about Greer’s contention that most if not all abductions were the result of US covert black operation paramilitary units simulating “alien abductions” through “reverse-engineered ET technologies.” This was a spin-off of the Contact Scenario, but perhaps one step the Rockefeller group did not want to reach out for.
Greer has since become known as one of the key collectors of “UFO whistleblowers” and since 1993, he hoped to gain amnesty for witnesses involved in classified UFO activities, so they could tell their stories without fear of reprisal. Why such amnesty was specifically required is a good question, for none of these alleged whistleblowers have never been prosecuted, let alone arrested. After Rockefeller’s attempts to achieve full disclosure ceased (and the Clinton administration became embroiled in the Monica Lewinsky scandal), Greer became the only person collating stories of often anonymous “whistleblowers” claiming the Contact Scenario was true.

Greer’s exposure to “whistleblowers” has led him to one conclusion: that the President and his advisors had not been honestly briefed on the UFO subject. According to Greer, any briefing that might have occurred, would have been an exercise in disinformation. His “deep throat” informants had all stated that neither the DCI nor the President were aware of what was truly going on. And hence, Greer saw Clinton as a fellow victim.
It seems Rockefeller and Co. were able to convince the president of their conclusion. For example, the President was convinced of Rockefeller’s claim that the 1994 official Roswell report was a smokescreen and that he was being kept out of the loop on matters related to UFOs. His lack of faith was most evident during a November 1995 speech in Belfast, Northern Ireland, when he read a letter from a thirteen-year-old Belfast boy named Ryan dealing with Roswell. “I got a letter from 13-year-old Ryan from Belfast. Now, Ryan, if you’re out in the crowd tonight, here’s the answer to your question. No, as far as I know, an alien spacecraft did not crash in Roswell, New Mexico, in 1947. (Laughter.) And, Ryan, if the United States Air Force did recover alien bodies, they didn’t tell me about it, either, and I want to know.” (Applause.) Though this response may seem ad hoc and personal, we should note that all speeches by the president are carefully prepared – however much they may appear to be unrehearsed.

Rockefeller clearly had the White House talking about UFOs. The biggest players, Clinton, Gore and Woolsey, were convinced that sections of the government were withholding key information from them. Roswell seems to have acted as a catalyst throughout most of these discussions and beliefs.
As mentioned, Rockefeller’s role was of a genuinely interested party. But evidence suggests he too was being played, and that the trail led – via Maccabee and others – back to the CIA. In short, the puppet masters were unknown operatives within the Intelligence Community, trying to convince the president they had items in their possession that the president did not know about. The obvious question would be: why play such games? Even if such information was in their possession, why not simply reveal this material – if that is truly what they wanted to do?

The veil of confusion is slightly lifted with the help of Richard Farley. After a face-to-face meeting between Scott Jones and presidential science advisor Gibbons, Farley discovered a transcript of a phone interview between Scott Jones and Dr. Ronald Pandolfi at the CIA, “discussing Pandolfi’s (and the CIA’s) role in supporting Gibbons’ response to the Rockefeller ‘UFO’ Initiative". Farley wrote in his April 28, 1995 letter to Gibbons that Scott Jones’ former executive assistant told him “Jones routinely ‘bugged’ Pandolfi’s calls.” Farley further stated that the attached transcript was given to him by Jones “for purposes which were not clear to me then, nor presently; I sent it to the FBI and CIA months ago.”

According to the transcript of the April 15 telephone call, Pandolfi confirmed he had been contacted by the White House. He told Jones: “We [the CIA] had been tasked a couple of days before the proposed visit of Laurance Rockefeller with the White House Science Advisor, to provide a briefing update to him – and we didn’t do that. Instead we tasked our friend Dr. Maccabee to do it. He did an excellent job… Gibbons said that he had gotten a one page input from Rockefeller indicating what the subject was going to be, and he didn’t have any background on it, claimed that he had never heard of MJ-12, or things like that, and so he contacted our representative over there and asked whether we could provide some support.”
“Instead we tasked our friend Dr. Maccabee to do it.”

Maccabee had been hanging around the CIA for a very long time. In fact, Ron Pandolfi’s predecessor at the CIA, Christopher C. “Kit” Green, had spoken to Bruce Maccabee in 1979. Kit had apparently stated that the CIA files might contain as many as 15,000 UFO-related files, of which two or three thousand were really interesting. Back in the 1980s, UFO researcher Bill Moore had also described Kit Green as “a person close to the President of the United States, capable of checking on information to determine its reliability.” It is remarkable that of all UFO researchers, Maccabee and Moore seemed to be prominent visitors of the CIA “Weird Desk”, as the likes of Green and Pandolfi were known.
In this scenario, few possible explanations make sense. Either the Weird Desk has such documents in their possession, but then the question is why full disclosure did not come about – noting that various channels and opportunities existed in the past decades to get the “truth” about the Contact Scenario out. The other scenario is that someone has been playing games – psychological warfare.

This, and other "UFO incidents", did not evolve around whether or not UFOs were alien spacecraft, or, whether or not, ET crashed in Roswell and the Air Force put his tiny, grey body on ice. The UFO psychological warfare was a display by a small group of people, who pretended to have a big secret; a big secret they prenteded to have the power to shield from the public as a whole, and the President and his entourage in specific. It was a mechanism whereby even the President was led to believe there were men somewhere in his government whom he had to fear tremendously. The latter was true - but not because they were in possession of alien beings. In truth, it was - and is - nothing more than an exercise in power, in which a myth was created, then promoted, then apparently covered-up, even though each cover-up was a confirmation of the existence of the myth, so that we would believe. In truth, it was an empty secret...
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SPIEGEL INTERVIEW WITH TURKISH PRIME MINISTER TAYYIP RECEP ERDOGAN
April 16, 2007
'If the EU Doesn't Want Us, They Should Say it Now'
By DER SPIEGEL

In an interview with DER SPIEGEL, Turkish Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan discusses Iran's nuclear program, Turkey's geopolitical role, its ties with the European Union and his difficult relationship with German Chancellor Angela Merkel.

SPIEGEL: Mr. Prime Minister, the world is alarmed by Iran's nuclear ambitions, especially after the announcement that it is now capable of enriching uranium on an industrial level. Do you share Western fears about the possibility of Tehran developing a nuclear bomb?

Erdogan: We are against nuclear weapons, regardless of whether they are in the hands of Iran or Israel or any Western country. But obviously some states are allowed to have weapons of mass destruction while others are not. If nuclear energy is used for the sake of humanity, then we say yes. But if it is used destructively, then no. The knife in the hand of a murderer kills, but if you give it to a doctor he will heal with it.

SPIEGEL: Do you believe that Iran is exclusively pursuing civilian use of nuclear energy?

Erdogan: Right now I can only take the answers that I am given. I personally spoke several times with Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad about this -- also at the request of France, the United Kingdom and German Chancellor Angela Merkel. And he is always saying: We will use it only for the benefit of our people. For now I have to accept it like this, without implying something else.

SPIEGEL: As the international community pushes to increase pressure on Iran, Turkey is developing closer and more amicable ties to Tehran. Do you support sanctions against Iran?

Erdogan: If the nuclear program is indeed meant only for civil purposes, then it is wrong to impose sanctions. I said from the beginning that we think a diplomatic way would be better.

SPIEGEL: Three weeks ago the United Nations Security Council decided to sharpen punitive measures against Iran. Was this a mistake in your opinion?

Erdogan: The Security Council made this decision on the basis of its own conclusion and evidence. First we would like to see exactly what the embargo means in practice and which countries follow it.

SPIEGEL: As Iraq's neighbor, you share the international community's concern about the possible disintegration of the multi-ethnic state. But you are also complaining about a special problem: PKK (Kurdistan Workers Party) fighters who are hiding in the northern part of the country.

Erdogan: Yes, unfortunately these terrorists have found safe haven there. They are attacking us from northern Iraq, they are smuggling weapons and terrorists into our country. We already sent a diplomatic note to the government in Baghdad. We expect decisive action to be taken against those terrorists. Otherwise we have the right to defend ourselves.

SPIEGEL: Your chief of staff, Yasar Büyükanit, just pleaded publicly for a miltary intervention. Do you really want to send your army into northern Iraq?

Erdogan: For years we have been patiently waiting. According to international law we have the right to guarantee our national security. When the Iraqi Kurds fled from Saddam Hussein, we hosted them in our country. That's another reason why it is inconceivable to us that they are now providing hiding places for the terrorists.

SPIEGEL: Under your leadership Turkey is re-emerging more strongly as a regional power -- you are intensifying your relations with Arab and Islamic states and you are taking part on a regular basis in summits of the Arab League. Meanwhile, a crisis seems to be looming in your relationships with the United States and Europe. Is Turkey in the process of realigning itself geopolitically from west to east?

Erdogan: I don't understand that. When we strengthen our relations with the Gulf states, when we cooperate with the Arabs, everybody asks if we are looking for a new geopolitical place. But in the Middle East and the Gulf, you can find German, French and British goods everywhere. German relations to these states are very good, as are English and French relations. Does this make them Arab-oriented? The whole world is an open, free market. No state can exist without the others.

SPIEGEL: But the language you use to describe your relationship with, for example, Saudi Arabia is striking: "We are not only bound by friendship, but by ties of brotherhood, as people of the same civilization."

Erdogan: What is wrong with it? We all want an alliance of civilizations, don't we? Turkey and Spain are co-chairs of the United Nations initiative with this name. Turkey is the gateway to the east for Europe, and the gateway to Europe for the east. We have a bridging function that Europe shouldn't underestimate.

SPIEGEL: Would there be an alternative to Europe at all for Turkey?

Erdogan: Look, about 60 percent of our trade is done with the EU and not with the Gulf states, up to 10 percent with US, around 6 percent with China and the rest is done with other countries. Don't forget, Turkey's path toward Europe started back in 1959, almost 50 years ago. But we have been pushed to the side ever since. Despite all the hurdles we will not deviate from our course towards Europe -- even by one step.

SPIEGEL: Out of frustration, the Turkish population is increasingly turning away from Europe.

Erdogan: Unfortunately, our European friends are instigating this negative view with their discouraging statements. When the opening round of negotiations began in 2005, 70 percent of Turkey's citizens favored the EU; today it is only 50 percent. If you ask if they want Turkey to become an EU member, 60 to 65 percent still say yes. But if you ask: Do you believe Europe will accept Turkey, 60 percent say no.

SPIEGEL: What are you saying?

Erdogan: We want to be treated by the same standards as other countries. If you compare us to some other newly accepted EU members our performance, especially in terms of the economy, is much better.

SPIEGEL: Turkey wants confirmation now that it will finally become a member of the EU?

Erdogan: We would like a clear target date, a road map, a timetable for negotiations. With that Europe could prove to our people that they are sincere.

SPIEGEL: Which date do you have in mind?

Erdogan: One could set 2014 or 2015 as a date for our accession to the EU. But above all I am calling on the EU to be honest: If the EU doesn't want us, they should say it now and clearly. If we are not wanted, then both sides don't need to waste their time with negotiations. Is Europe a home for an alliance of civilizations or is it a Christian club? If the former is true, then Turkey should be part of it.

SPIEGEL: Brussels complains that the pace of reforms in Turkey has slowed. For example, you still have the infamous Article 301, which makes the denigration of Turkishness prosecutable and limits freedom of opinion. The EU is also demanding complete freedom of religion.

Erdogan: In Turkey the religious minorities have more rights than they do in Europe. What aspect of their faith are they not allowed to live out here? Do we tear down their churches?

SPIEGEL: Churches are not allowed to own property, they are not a legal entity. Churches have been expropriated from many Christian communities.

Erdogan: We changed the construction law. Before, there were only "mosques," but now we have "places of worship." New churches are opening. We wanted to change the law on religious institutions, but the president didn't sign it. Now we're sending it through parliament again. The courts have also started to return property of minority institutions that has been seized.

SPIEGEL: Why are churches still prohibited from training their own priests? The EU has been calling for the famous Greek-Orthodox seminary on the island of Halki near Istanbul to be reopened.

Erdogan: If they don't accept us into the EU because of Halki, so be it! This is a different situation. We have problems with Turkish law in this case. It used to be a high school, but now they want to transform it into a kind of university, but the high council for universities doesn't permit this.

SPIEGEL: Why are authors still tried in Turkey under Article 301?

Erdogan: I see that you are influenced by the Turkish press! Please check how many have been sentenced under this law or are in jail.

SPIEGEL: But people have been convicted. For example, murdered journalist Hrant Dink, who had Armenian roots, was sentenced to probation.

Erdogan: I met the writers who say that Article 301 must be completely eliminated. I asked them: Do you want to make it easier to decry the state, the parliament or the prime minister? I am saying yes to criticism, but no to insults. There are similar laws in Europe -- but for us it is about Turkishness, and for you it is about the German nation.

SPIEGEL: But we are protecting the state, there is no protection for "Germanness." So you don't want to change 301?

Erdogan: I don't think it should fall completely. The article also protects the right to criticize.

SPIEGEL: After former Chancellor Gerhard Schröder, who was a passionate supporter of Turkey's EU accession, you now have to get along with Chancellor Angela Merkel who is currently president of the EU and has in the past said that she only supports a "privileged partnership" with Turkey. Are you satisfied with the German EU leadership under Merkel?

Erdogan: We have now passed the half-way mark. Honestly, I expected more from Germany. We have special relations that cannot be compared to any other country in Europe. There are kinships. At least 50,000 Germans live along the Turkish Riviera, and when the German national team plays, we root for Germany.

SPIEGEL: What more could you have expected? At least under the German presidency, an additional chapter has been opened in the EU accession negotiations.

Erdogan: And there was the prospect of three more chapters. But altogether there are 35! We think the pace could be much faster. Back in December ...

SPIEGEL: ... when negotiations were partially suspended because of the row with Cyprus ...

Erdogan: ... Germany could have given us greater support. The decision was very disappointing for us.

SPIEGEL: Did the fact that Turkey was not invited to attend the EU's 50th anniversary celebrations in Berlin also upset you?

Erdogan: To tell you the truth, I felt hurt about that. It wasn't really necessary. I personally do believe that it was a big mistake. It overshadows the German EU presidency. What did she get from not inviting Turkey? She could have gained a lot by inviting us. We are two countries that need each other. As political leaders we will leave our offices one day, but our people will remain and have to get along with each other. So we shouldn't give them negative messages.

SPIEGEL: The race for the influential office of the Turkish presidency begins starts this week. Will you run?

Erdogan: I haven't decided yet. I am still consulting with my party, with members of parliament and also non-government organizations. When I come back from Hanover on April 18, the AKP board will meet again. After that I will make my decision public.

SPIEGEL: The headscarf worn by your wife is said to be the biggest hurdle.

Erdogan: No, I don't think this will be an obstacle. Our constitution tells us who is eligible to be president, but there is no mention of the headscarf. That should also be an expression of religious freedom.

SPIEGEL: You make it all sound so free of conflict. But as a matter of fact, in Turkey you do have a strict headscarf ban in schools, universities and public offices. And your wife Emine doesn't get invited to receptions held by current President Ahmet Necdet Sezer.

Erdogan: In that respect injustice has been done to a lot of women, including my wife. Until we came into power, women with headscarves were invited to visit the presidents, including Sezer. But then we won the elections and he didn't invite us. There is no legal basis for this discrimination.

SPIEGEL: But didn't you promise your religious voters that you would ease the headscarf ban?

Erdogan: No. To me, that isn't a question of getting votes -- it's a question of freedom. I said we need a consensus between people in society and among the public institutions, only then can we overcome this problem. My own daughters weren't able to study in Turkey because of their headscarves, so they went to the United States.

SPIEGEL: If you don't run for president, will Sezer's successor still come from your party?

Erdogan: I am sure about that. We currently have 354 seats in parliament -- this is the majority that is enough to elect the president in the third round. Why would we give that up?

SPIEGEL: Mr. Prime Minister, we thank you for this interview.

Interview conducted by Annette Grossbongardt and Joachim Preuss in Ankara.
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