Richard Dolan’s
UFOs and the National Security State is the first comprehensive study of the past 50 years of the U.S. Government’s response to the intrusion of UFO phenomena in America. The compiled evidence - which includes government documents - suggests that
a group of specialists working in the shadows, set up and executed the most massive cover-up in the history of government; and that the Human Potential movement and the subsequent New Age movements, were key elements of this cover-up. In other words, they not only have used the “colorful community” of alternative ideas as an unwitting tool of disinformation, it is highly probable that
most of it was literally created by them as COINTELPRO. According to analysts, COINTELPRO was the FBI’s secret program to undermine the popular upsurge, which swept the country during the 1960s. Though the name stands for “Counterintelligence Program”, the targets were not enemy spies. The FBI set out to eliminate “radical” political opposition inside the US. What a lot of people do not realize is that this was a high level psychological operation specifically set up to vector “ideological” trends - beliefs, etc. To get a complete picture of the problem, Dolan writes:
Dolan said:
The UFO problem has involved military personnel around the world for more than fifty years, and is wrapped in secrecy. […] Because this subject is so widely ridiculed, it is important to stress why it is worthy of serious attention.[…] Stories of strange objects in the sky go far back into time, but the problem received little attention until the Second World War. […] During the UFO wave of 1947, American military and intelligence organizations conducted multiple, simultaneous investigations of these sightings. […] By the end of 1947, a contingent of analysts at the Air Technical Intelligence Center at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base believed that UFOs were extraterrestrial. By the summer of 1948, this team prepared an “Estimate of the Situation.” […] As the story goes, Air Force Commander Hoyt Vandenberg rejected [this conclusion.] […]
In the summer of 1952… UFO sightings were so frequent and often of such high quality that some in the air force actually wondered whether an invasion was under way. With some help from the secret CIA sponsored Robertson Panel of January 1953, the air force improved censorship over the problem. Still, it never quite went away. Civilian organizations began to collect and analyze interesting UFO reports. […] Then came the great UFO wave of 1965 and 1966, when the air force could no longer hide behind weather balloons and swamp gas, nor withstand public scrutiny. […]
Let us pause to assess the situation. By the mid-1940s, America’s intelligence apparatus had reason to believe that there were artifacts in the skies that did not originate from America, Russia, Germany, or any other country. These objects violated some highly sensitive military airspace, and did not appear to be natural phenomena. One may presume that the affected national security authorities made it an immediate obsession to determine the nature and purpose of these objects, and we may infer that the issue probably became a deep secret by 1946, or 1947 at the latest.
It was at this precise moment in time that the Human Potential movement was “born”. Do we think that this was a coincidence? By the mid-50s, it was becoming obvious that things were getting out of control and in August of 1956, the FBI began its COINTELPRO operation. When traditional modes of repression (exposure, blatant harassment, and prosecution for political crimes) failed to counter the growing insurgency, and even helped to fuel it, the Bureau took the law into its own hands. Its methods ranged far beyond surveillance, and amounted to a domestic version of the covert action for which the CIA has become infamous throughout the world.
Usually, when we think of COINTELPRO, we think of the most well known and typical activities which include sending anonymous or fictitious letters designed to start rumors, among other things, publishing false defamatory or threatening information, forging signatures on fake documents, introducing disruptive and subversive members into organizations to destroy them from within, and so on. Blackmailing insiders in any group to force them to spread false rumors, or to foment factionalism was also common.
What a lot of people don’t keep in mind is the fact that COINTELPRO also concentrated on creating bogus organizations. These bogus groups could serve many functions which might include attacking and/or disrupting bona fide groups, or even just simply
creating a diversion with clever propaganda in order to attract members away so as to involve them with time-wasting activity designed to prevent them from doing anything useful. COINTELPRO was also famous for instigation of hostile actions through third parties. According to investigators, these FBI programs were noteworthy because all documents relating to them were stamped “do not file”. This meant that they were never filed in the system, and for all intents and purposes, did not exist. This cover was blown after activists broke into an FBI office in Media, Pennsylvania in 1971. The possibility of finding evidence for any of it, after that event, is about zero. To spell it out in Dolan’s words:
Dolan said:
Regarding matters connected with “national security”, there appears to be a wealth of information that does not exist officially. Thus, a request to find such documents through a Freedom of Information Act request would be in vain. Add to this the likelihood that perhaps the most sensitive information regarding UFOs may not even exist in document form (“the first rule in keeping secrets is nothing on paper”, Richard Helms), and one can appreciate the difficulty that an honest UFO researcher has in ferreting out the truth.
Now, let us take a few logical steps. The UFO problem emerged into the national consciousness in 1947, or thereabouts. Not long afterward, a lot of people began asking a lot of questions. The government wasn’t answering, and so the people began to band together to find out the answers for themselves. They started forming groups. And this is where things get just a bit curious.
The thing that was most threatened by the UFO/alien issue seems to have been the Standard Monotheistic Religions. Religion seems to be a necessary component of political control. Social control - that is the mainstay of religion - was most definitely under threat. In fact, what seems to be true is that it is not even clear that religions - as we know them - would have survived a full disclosure. So the logical conclusion is that part of the main reason for the cover-up was to “protect the religious
status quo”.
As things stood at the time, protecting the religious
status quo - mainly the social controls that stem from religion - was iffy at best. After a century of scholarly investigation into many religious texts, and the raising of many questions about the “old time religion”, there were a lot of people in society who were most definitely turning away from religious dogma. It’s fairly simple to take the next logical step and see that a combining of the questions of those who were disenchanted with religion, with the questions of those who wanted to know just what the heck was going on in terms of possible “extraterrestrials”, was seen as a dangerous and explosive mixture. Something had to be done.
The activities of COINTELPRO in attempting to neutralize political opposition have been pretty well exposed. But we are now considering the fact that, in addition to political activists, it seems that COINTELPRO has particularly targeted groups that are seeking the truth about the interactions between the US government and Ultra Terrestrials, or so-called “aliens”. That a long-time cover-up of these matters has been in effect is certainly evident to any careful researcher.
The COINTELPRO files show the U.S. Government targeted a very broad range of religious, labor and community groups opposed to any of its agendas, and it is only logical to assume that the same type of operation would be created to cover up the “alien agenda”. Such a theoretical COINTELPRO operation also goes far in explaining why, when the sincere researcher of UFO phenomena enters this field, he or she discovers only lies, lies, and more lies; confusion and disinformation. That is most definitely the signature of COINTELPRO.
Considering all of this, would anybody care to suggest that it did not also occur to the Powers that Be that the chief means of diverting attention and covering up the truth would be to literally fund and create the “New Age” and “Human Potential movement”, so that it would follow their agenda of keeping secrets?
In other words, it is extremely likely that the most successful and popular of Metaphysical Mavens and New Age Impresarios are COINTELPRO agents - either consciously or as dupes of those who are. The objective seems to be to attack and “neutralize” those who are seeking the answers. Those who are sincere, who do bona fide research and seek to explicate the truth, are infiltrated, attacked, and marginalized according to standard COINTELPRO procedures.
What all of this seems to suggest is that the Powers That Be (PTB) have developed COINTELPRO to an all new level of Social Shaping, Cultural Brainwashing, and the main targets of this activity would include virtually anyone who is seeking the truth about the shifting realities of our world. The cases of COINTELPRO activities against political groups must be no more than the tip of the iceberg, given that the great bulk of COINTELPRO-type operations remain secret until long after their damage has been done. By all indications, domestic covert operations have become a permanent feature of U.S. politics and Social Programming, and it is hardly likely, considering the evidence, that the New Age and Human Potential fields are exempt.
The implications of this are truly alarming. Those who manage to get close to the truth of these matters, despite the many obstacles in their path, face National covert campaigns to discredit and disrupt their research and reputations. Clearly, COINTELPRO and similar operations under other names also work to distort academic and popular perceptions of the problems facing our world. They have done enormous damage to the search for the Truth.
