UFO'S of UAP'S, ASTRONOMIE, RUIMTEVAART, ARCHEOLOGIE, OUDHEIDKUNDE, SF-SNUFJES EN ANDERE ESOTERISCHE WETENSCHAPPEN

In 1957, something strange and highly alternative occurred in the U.K. That was the year in which George King and his Aetherius Society attracted the secret attention of the world of officialdom, specifically in May of that year. It was on the 26^th of the month that an eye-catching article appeared in the pages of a weekly U.K.-based publication called The Empire News. In an article titled “Flying Saucer Clubs Probe: Peace Messages ‘from outer space,'” the following was revealed: “‘Warnings’ from outer space against Britain’s H-Bomb tests published in a flying saucer magazine take a similar line to Moscow-inspired propaganda. The ‘warning’ – in a special issue of the magazine – is being scrutinized by Scotland Yard’s Special Branch [the origins of which date back to 1883 and which, in 2006, was absorbed into the Metropolitan Police Service’s Counter Terrorism Command]. It is suspected that a number of flying saucer clubs – and some spiritualists as well – are unwittingly being used by the communists. The warning appears in the magazine of the Aetherius Society, which circulates widely among flying saucer enthusiasts.”

Not only that, The Empire News revealed that George King had, as he put it, received a channeled message from advanced entities from the planet Mars. The decidedly anti-nuke message of the Martians went as follows: “Have not the latest peace moves come from Russia? You in the West blame Russia and say it is necessary to make these weapons to protect yourselves from them. You in Britain are in a favorable position to show the larger countries the way.” It’s hardly surprising that a body like Special Branch would sit up and take notice of (a) this development in the world of the Aetherius Society and (b) the pro-Russian words of the alleged Martians. King wasted no time in contacting Scotland Yard, demanding to know why, exactly, he and his group were now under surveillance by government authorities.

Well, given both the time-frame and the climate, it should have been glaringly obvious: the authorities saw King’s words (and those of his claimed Martian friends) as nothing less than outright propaganda designed to make the U.K. government look bad and the Russians look good. In a letter of May 26, King scolded Scotland Yard and did his utmost to try and put things straight. He wrote in his letter that the Aetherius Society was actually “a religious and occult society, which has contact with Intelligences on certain other planets. We are non-political and non-sectarian.” That’s certainly not how the authorities saw things, though.

As to how Special Branch became involved in all of this weirdness, and learned of the activities and statements of King, well, that’s all very simple. The Empire News was very much a right-wing newspaper. King’s political views were anything but right-wing. It transpires that one of the staff of The Empire News, concerned and pissed that King was using his Cosmic Voice publication to promote communism, contacted Scotland Yard just a couple of days before their planned article on King appeared. According to Special Branch, their source at the publication “wished to bring it to the notice of this department in view of the, in his opinion, Communist bias of part of the contents which refer to the atom bomb.” The result was that Scotland Yard opened a file on King and his colleagues. They did much more than that, though. After receiving King’s letter of disgust as to how his organization was being portrayed and presented, on May 31 an officer headed out to King’s home. The matter of King, his motivations, the goals of the Aetherius Society, the comments concerning Russia and nuclear weapons, and alien life were discussed frankly – and in a surreal situation, too.

The Special Branch officer who had the task of speaking with King wrote the following summarized report: “I disclosed my identity and told King that I had come to see him in connection with his letter to the Commissioner. I pointed out to him that in this letter he stated ‘The article purports to give a report of some recent work of this Society and states that the Society is being scrutinized by the Special Branch of Scotland Yard,’ whereas the article states, ‘The ‘warning’ – in a special issue of the magazine – is being scrutinized by Scotland Yard’s Special Branch.” Many might say – justifiably – there is very little difference between scrutinizing the words of the “warning” and scrutinizing the work of the Aetherius Society. The head-to-head at King’s home was not cordial. From then on, however, and for a couple of years, King and his followers were watched intensely. Interestingly, Special Branch officers took careful studies of King’s written output, too. Take note of the following, prepared by a Special Branch officer in May 1957:

“COSMIC VOICE (Special Emergency May 1957) consists of a cover page and three pages of cyclostyle printed matter stapled together and is printed and published by THE AETHERIUS SOCIETY, 88, The Drive Mansions, Fulham Road, S.W.6. In page 1 of the printed matter one George KING is referred to as the Chairman of the society. On page 1, which is headed ‘Introduction. You are responsible’ it is stated that KING is able to tune in telepathically to mental radiations from a Space Station in the orbit of the Earth, 1550 miles above its surface, which is controlled by an entity from the Planet Mars, referred to as Mars Sector 6. It also states that an appeal for the cessation of nuclear experimentation was transmitted on the 7^th May, 1957 from the Space Station. Pages 2 and 3 give the text of this message in full. In brief, it is an appeal to the ordinary man to protest through spiritual progress against nuclear bombs. Reference is made on page 1 to the placing of blame by the West on Russia because it is said that it is necessary to make weapons for protection against this country, and the question is asked, ‘Yet, Western Civilizations, have not the latest Peace moves come from this country you condemn.’ The trend of the text is more religious than political in general. KING is obviously a crank. King claimed that some 600 copies of the Special Emergency Supplement of “COSMIC VOICE” dated 7^th May, 1957 has been printed, and that copies had been sent to Buckingham Palace, No. 10, Downing Street, President Eisenhower at Washington, to 125 Members of Parliament, Prime Ministers of the Dominions, etc., as well as to Religious and Social Reform authorities and to many newspapers.”

Special Branch certainly viewed King as, in their words, a “crank.” As the extract from the previously-classified document above shows, however, Special Branch also came to quickly realize that King was highly motivated when it came to getting the word out regarding his views on nuclear weapons and the Russians. That alone was certainly a matter of deep concern to the authorities. The surveillance, hardly surprisingly, continued at a steady and secret pace. Another Special Branch document, from 1959, provides the following on the Aetherius Society: “It crusades for the suspension of the H-bomb tests and supports the Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament. It took part in the 1958 Aldermaston March and holds public meetings from time to time. One was held on 23^rd August 1959 when 200 persons formed a ‘quiet, amused’ audience. It was covered by Special Branch.”

Special Branch eventually discontinued its surveillance of the Aetherius Society. The strange affair – that involved the U.K. government, nuclear weapons, aliens, the planet Mars, and channeling – was finally over.

In May of this year Lisa Hagan Books published my book, The Rendlesham Forest UFO Conspiracy. It’s a book that totally discards a UFO angle for the famous December 1980 case. Instead, it looks at matters from the angle of what I call, in concise terms, a “secret experiment.” Part of the story revolves around a classified program designed to utilize and control ball-lightning in the sky – as a means to make the witnesses to the aerial activity believe they were seeing UFOs. They were actually seeing nothing of the sort. There were no UFOs: the whole thing was a test to see how the human mind could be deceived and manipulated. There’s another part of the story, however – one that I will share with you today. Months before the book was published, there was an incredible development in the overall story. It was a very welcome, but also mysterious, development that suggested not only was I on the right track; but, that I had sympathetic insiders who wanted the full, unexpurgated story out for everyone to see – finally. Before we get to that development, however, we need to see how the high-strangeness began and where things are at now.

There is a distinct probability that none other than the late Brad Steiger knew something of this secret project concerning ball-lightning. Steiger, who passed away in 2018 at the age of eighty-two, wrote more than 160 books. It is, however, just one of those many books that we need to focus our attention on. It is World of the Weird. It was published by Belmont Books. The book – an old paperback that I had never heard of before this 2020 development occurred – contains a chapter titled “The Mystery of Lightning Balls.” As can be deduced from the title of that chapter, it’s a study of ball-lightning. Before we get to my role in this latest development, I’ll give you some background material on Steiger’s book.

In World of the Weird, Steiger cited the words of Professor Harold W. Lewis, a professor of physics at the University of Wisconsin, who said: “Any normal, cynical scientist, on hearing of ball-lightning for the first time, almost instinctively places it in the category of folklore, along with flying saucers and ectoplasm. A brief survey of reported events, however, quickly convinces the skeptic that enough reputable observers have seen and possibly even photographed ball-lightning to leave no doubt that the phenomenon is real, although it is rare and as yet unexplained.” It wasn’t so much the mystery surrounding ball-lightning that intrigued Steiger. Rather, it was the potential military application of ball-lightning as a weapon. This gets to the very heart of the operation described in my book. Steiger’s book was published in 1966, having been written one year earlier, 1965. That was the very same time – we now know, thanks to the Freedom of Information Act – in which the ball-lightning program quietly began in earnest.

Steiger wrote: “Recent reports of lightning balls have spurred scientists, who before simply had no use for such rare phenomena, to become very curious as to how they can reproduce such a bundle of electricity in their laboratories. The new investigations have probably not taken place only in this country. Certain information indicates that the Soviet Union is just as curious about the production and control of this phenomenon as the U.S. is.” Steiger got to the heart of the situation: “Such a concentrated ball of energy, if harnessed, could be put to hundreds of military as well as civilian uses. As a weapon, it would be awesome. It could not be shot down by a presently available firepower, and its concentrated heat could penetrate any normal armor.” It scarcely needs stating that Steiger’s words practically mirror the words contained in the secret 1965 report. Did Steiger somehow have access to the report? Did he have an insider source who helped him to expose the story? While the chances of answering those questions are slim, there is another – equally intriguing – development in all of this. It ties in with my very own research into this field. And, it brings a degree of conspiracy and inside-information into the mysterious story.

It wasn’t until September 2019 that I finally decided – with the 40^th anniversary of the Rendlesham events coming at the end of 2020 – to go ahead and write my book on Rendlesham. At the time, the only people who knew of the project were me and my literary agent, Lisa Hagan – who has been my agent for more than fifteen years. That’s it: no-one else at all. When I told Lisa of the idea for the book, she was highly enthused. A deal was made, a contract was drawn up, and the wheels began to turn, which included interviewing Ray Boeche. He is a UFO researcher who, in the early 1980s, did a lot of probing into the Rendlesham Forest case. Boeche became the third person to know about the planned book. My editor, Beth Wareham, was next to learn of the project. And, that was it. No-one else knew about the book until the day it was published and placed on Amazon, etc. We were, then, just a “Gang of four,” to shamelessly hijack the name of a post-punk band of the late 1970s.

Eleven days into the writing, something very weird happened: a package was dropped off on my doorstep. I say “dropped off” because it clearly didn’t come through the usual sources, such as FedEx, UPS or the Post Office. It was a manila envelope that was covered in scotch-tape – in fact, there was way more tape than was needed. My name was written on the front of the envelope with a black-marker. As for my name, it didn’t just say “Nick Redfern.”” Rather, it said: “Nick D. Redfern.” Not many know that I have a middle name. It’s David. But, whoever sent the package to me evidently did know. Maybe, it was done to let me know that someone knew more about me than most did. Who knows? The weirdness – and what I deduced to be strange mind-games – didn’t end there, however. I opened the envelope to find inside a first edition copy of Brad Steiger’s World of the Weird. It was when I read the Steiger book then in my hands, I realized that someone wanted me to know more of the military-based ball-lightning issue of my research – and that I was working on at that very same time.

I realized that the book had been sent to me with a specific purpose. But, who was the sender? I had zero chance of figuring out the answer to that question. In fact, there was no sender’s address on the envelope at all. There were no stamps on it, either. I could only conclude that someone, at an undetermined time between around midnight and 1:00 a.m. the night before – which is usually around the time I go to bed – and approximately 8:00 a.m. the next morning, when I got up, had deliberately dropped the envelope outside the door of my second-floor apartment. Did I have my very own “Deep Throat?”” One who, in a very odd way, tried his or her best to tell me exactly what I needed to know? Was someone trying to help me make a solid case for what happened in Rendlesham Forest? I think that’s precisely what happened. Someone had been keeping an eye on me. And they still want the complete story of what happened in Rendesham Forest in December 1980 to be blown wide open.

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