This week I’ve done 7 or 8 radio shows and podcasts on my new book, The Rendlesham Forest UFO Conspiracy. More than a few people in Ufology have said that no-one in Ufology (apart from me LOL) believes in the “secret experiment angle.” Really? I could reel off a whole bunch of people who suspect the experiment angle is the genuine one. But, for today I’ll go with a perfect, right-on-target statement on this issue of a non-alien theory. It comes from long-time UFO researcher/writer Jacques Vallee. He said on Rendlesham/Bentwaters: “The Bentwaters case is a classic. At the landing site, they had a mix of ordinary guards, officers, sentries and so on – they all had orders to go to the site under a scenario. And that’s not what would have happened if the encounter were real – if a strange object landed on the base you wouldn’t be sending out a hundred people without weapons. The thing has all the earmarks of being staged for the benefit of the witnesses, so that they could be studied and the reactions of the different psychological types and of different ranks could be studied. And when you think about it, it’s not that weird [italics mine].”

Vallee concluded: ” If you were in charge of a project like that, you’d have to test it in conditions where nobody is danger and you can get the data you need. In cases like this one – not many but a few of them – that I investigated, I had to conclude that these were tests of virtual reality projectors.” There’s another angle too: the matter of holograms. In my book I suggest the events in Rendlesham Forest in December 1980 did not involve aliens. Rather, it was all a ruse in which sophisticated  holograms were used – for reasons along the lines Jacques Vallee suggested above. This week, I’ve been asked time and again something like this: “Why are you the only one talking about this hologram scenario?” This is particularly crazy, because that theory first surfaced way back in 1991! And is know by just about every Rendlesham researcher.

It’s certainly not every day that you get to meet with a pair of Edward Snowden-style whistle-blowers from the U.S. Department of Defense. But, incredibly, that’s exactly what happened to UFO researcher/writer Ray Boeche on November 25, 1991. The location, however, was not a dark and shadowy parking garage – as per the story of “Deep Throat” in Bob Woodward’s and Carl Bernstein’s hit book of 1974, All the President’s Men. Rather, it was a pleasant restaurant in the Lincoln Marriott Cornhusker Hotel in Lincoln, Nebraska. I guess you’ve already got a good idea of what the two guys wanted to talk about. Along with various and sundry theories concerning the UFO phenomenon, it was those mysterious woods on the other side of the world and what went down deep within them in December 1980. Ray said: “I found it interesting that they would mention Rendlesham at the meeting. They said there was a sense that this was maybe, in some sense, staged. Or, that some of the senior people there were more concerned with the reaction of the men, how they responded to the situation, rather than what was actually going on. That this was some sort of psychotronic device – a hologram – to see what sort of havoc they can wreak with people. But, even if it was a type of hologram, they said it could interact with the environment. The tree marks and the pod marks at the landing site were indications of that.”

UFO investigator/author Jenny Randles had a good, solid, working relationship with Ray Boeche. She, too, addressed the matter of what Ray’s secret informants told him back in 1991. On the matter of those claims pertaining to highly sophisticated holograms, Jenny stated, in her 1998 book, UFO Crash Landing?: “This is a device which manipulates the subatomic basis of matter at a quantum level and builds a bridge between mind and physical substance. If I understood it correctly, this supposedly stimulated the mind into having vivid hallucinations but, at the same time, created physical effects in the real world which could take on a semblance of the appearance of the hallucinated images. What was seen was mostly in the mind – but it was not entirely without physical form and partially substantial in the same way that a hologram is real, but has no weight or solidity. The result is a terrifying apparition.”

In 2000, Georgina Bruni’s book on the Rendlesham controversy surfaced. It was titled You Can’t Tell the People. Georgina was certainly not a full-on believer in the theory that the incidents in the woods were nothing but the results of top secret human experimentation. She stressed to me that she viewed the hologram angle as a theory to be studied. Georgina was, though, incredibly generous with her information on this angle – and quite open to sharing with me what she found concerning a secret, domestic explanation for Rendlesham. Even if she didn’t fully buy into it, Georgina was happy to help when and where she could. Georgina also said to me that Ray Boeche’s informants “explained that holography and Fourier transforms are a way of separating an image from its object, the viewing of the image at a distance. In essence, they claim the world is a hologram composed of interference patterns which can be altered by disruptive static frequencies. They believe the human brain is part of this hologram and as such it is capable of performing its own Fourier transforms. However, they concluded that the human brain is unreliable, whereas a psychotronic device, much like a computer, would be able to exert an exact effect on animate and inanimate objects.”

Finally, there’s Encounter in Rendlesham Forest, a book published in 2014 and written by Nick Pope, John Burroughs and Jim Penniston. On the angle of a secret experiment for Rendlesham, they said in their book: “Suggestions as to how such an exotic test could have been accomplished include hallucinogenic drugs, mind control, and holographic technology.” What all of this tells us is that (A) the hologram controversy has circulated for almost thirty years and (B) it has appeared in almost all of the Rendlesham-themed books that have been published since the 1990s; albeit to small degrees. And, if people tell you that no reputable ufologist buys into the “secret experiment” angle,  refer them to Jacques Vallee’s words at the top of this article.

For those who saw those Tic-Tac UFO videos from what is now called the USS Nimitz UFO incident and said, “That’s just the tip of the iceberg,” your Titanic moment may have arrived. Those intrepid military investigators at The Drive have been submitting Freedom of Information Act requests to the Navy religiously and their fervor and perseverance has finally paid off … big time. They recently obtained eight additional never-before-see-by-the-public “hazard reports” from pilot encounters with UAPs off the Atlantic coast. Is this the smoking tailpipe?

“The FOIA officer handling our request said that these were the only eight reports in the Web-Enabled Safety System (WESS) Aviation Mishap and Hazard Reporting System (WAMHRS) to deal with naval aviation encounters with unidentified objects, balloons, and any other similar objects anywhere. WAMHRS is a centralized computer database that is supposed to contain all such hazard and flight incident reports that Navy aviation units file with the Naval Safety Center.”

Let’s ignore the believability of “the only eight reports” and look at the hazard reports, which are filed when a pilot has a potentially dangerous encounter with an unknown aircraft. All eight took place off the Atlantic coast between 2013 and 2014, except for one in 2019. Seven of the pilots were in F/A-18F Super Hornets and one was in an EA-18G Growler. While a number of the UFOs sounded a lot like UASs (unmanned aerial systems) – aka ‘drones’ — The Drive reports that a few were unusual.

An F/A 18F Super Hornet

(US Navy Photo)

On June 27, 2013, an F/A-18F Super Hornet had an encounter with an “aircraft [that] was white in color and approximately the size and shape of a drone or missile” which passed “down the right side of their aircraft with approximately 200 feet of lateral separation” and had a visible exhaust trail.

Another F/A-18F Super Hornet had an encounter with multiple “unidentified aerial devices” (UAD) on Apr. 23, 2014. While investigating the first pair of UADs, another two appeared to pass through the ATFLIR field of vision at high-speed, but did not appear on the aircraft’s radar. The next day, two more F/A-18Fs made radar contact with another UAD. Three days later, the crew of an F/A-18F had a “near mid-air collision with balloon like object.”

The other reports, although not clearly identified, were most likely a red weather balloon and a quad copter drone. Unfortunately, there were no videos of any of the encounters.

The Drive’s extensive investigative experience showed in its comparison to the Tic-Tic UFOs. Like those, these reports were not sent further up the chain of command. It also found unusual anomalies – there were no reports from late2014 to mid 2015 when other crew reported encounters, including from the USS Theodore Roosevelt. One of those incidents was allegedly made public by a pilot who said an official warning was issued, but no proof was available. Finally, almost half of the incidents were from one squadron. Were the rest warned against them … or suppressed?

Quadcopter

While the pilots didn’t speculate what they encountered, it’s easy to see that most of them could be drones or balloons. That’s the obvious difference from the Tic-Tacs, which appeared to have performance capabilities beyond conventional aircraft. Is the Pentagon letting these reports out to calm the public into thinking that most UFO encounters are explainable? Or to distract them from the unexplainable?

Kudos and thanks to the fine folks at The Drive for digging hard, digging deep and never giving up the quest to find out more about military encounters with UFOs. The iceberg keeps getting bigger.

There are numerous cases of strangeness throughout history that have just sort of fallen through the cracks to be mostly forgotten. These are the accounts that have somehow managed to just sort of fade into the mists of time, and are not something you are likely to read about in the history books. Many of these even concern very famous and notable historic figures, yet these odd experiences are relegated to the shadows of history. One such case must certainly be the time the famous explorer Christopher Columbus supposedly saw UFOs and experienced weirdness as he made his way through the Bermuda Triangle.

The year was 1492, and Christopher Columbus and his crew were in uncharted waters, reaching out over unexplored horizons to penetrate into a new era, on their way to the eventual discovery of the new world. There were many strange and exciting discoveries to come, but before that a bizarre series of events would supposedly play out, beginning with a strange sighting made on the evening of September 15, 1492. The Diario of Christopher Columbus’s First Voyage to America, written by the Spanish historian Bartolomé de las Casas describes how the crew witnessed a strange phenomenon in the sky, which is described as follows:

They sailed that day and night 27 leagues and a few more on their route west. And on this night, at the beginning of it, they saw a marvelous branch of fire fall from the sky into the sea, distant from them four or five leagues.

Christopher Columbus

While this very well could have been a meteor, it seems curious that it was spectacular enough for them to make mention of it and emphasize it as a “branch of fire,” especially when they were likely to have witnessed many meteors in the sky during the voyage. Oddly, many interpretations of this sighting claim it as having been the opposite, and that the light was actually coming out of the ocean to shoot up into the sky. It is intriguing at the very least, but this was only one of several weird incidents they witnessed, according to Casas’ account. The following month, on October 11, 1492, the expedition was only hours away from their historic discovery of the Americas, and on this evening the Admiral spotted something very unusual on the horizon. It seemed to be a light bobbing up and down in the air, and it was odd enough that the Admiral called others to look upon it. Cases writes:

After sunset he [Columbus] steered on his former course to the west. They made about 12 miles each hour and, until two hours after midnight, made about 90 miles, which is twenty-two leagues and a half. And because the caravel Pinta was a better sailor and went ahead of the Admiral [Columbus] it found land and made the signals that the Admiral had ordered. A sailor named Rodrigo de Triana saw this land first, although the Admiral, at the tenth hour of the night, while he was on the sterncastle, saw a light, although it was something so faint that he did not wish to affirm that it was land. But he called Pero Gutierrez, the steward of the king’s dais, and told him that there seemed to be a light, and for him to look: and thus he did and saw it. He also told Rodrigo Sanchez de Segovia, whom the king and queen were sending as veedor [inspector] of the fleet, who saw nothing because he was not in a place where he could see it. After the Admiral said it, it was seen once or twice; and it was like a small wax candle that rose and lifted up, which to few seemed to be an indication of land. But the Admiral was certain that they were near land, because of which when they recited the Salve, which sailors in their own way are accustomed to recite and sing, all being present, the Admiral entreated and admonished them to keep a good lookout on the forecastle and to watch carefully for land; and that to the man who first told him that he saw land he would later give a silk jacket in addition to the other rewards that the sovereigns had promised, which were ten thousand maravedis [silver coins] as an annuity to whoever should see it first.

It was apparently seen by many witnesses on several of the ships, leaving us to ask what was this light? This was all surrounded by various compass oddities they had experienced during the voyage. In short, the compass reportedly was constantly going haywire without any discernible reason, to the point that it had become quite unsettling for the crew. In a 1792 manuscript called The American Geography, by Jedidiah Morse, it is written of this anomaly:

On the 14th of September he [Columbus] was astonished to find that the magnetic needle in their compass, did not point exactly to the polar star, but varied toward the west; and as they proceeded, this variation increased. This new phenomenon filled the companions of Columbus with terror. Nature itself seemed to have sustained a change; and the only guide they had left, to point them to a safe retreat from an unbounded and trackless ocean, was about to fail them. Columbus, with no less quickness than ingenuity, assigned a reason for this appearance, which, though it did not satisfy himself, seemed so plausible to them, that it dispelled their fears, or silenced their murmurs.

All of this has been taken in modern times as a sign that Columbus and his men saw UFOs, and that either these or their proximity to the Bermuda Triangle at the time caused the compasses to malfunction. The case was famously shown on The History Channel, and has generated quite a bit of discussion, but what are we really looking at here? One of the main problems with the reports is that, although they are often claimed as being from Christopher Columbus’ own diary, the fact is that there is no known actual copy of that diary remaining. It all comes from the work of Bartolomé de las Casas, which was a supposed copy of the original log and diary, and it is important to note that Casas never was actually on the voyage and wrote this 50 years after the fact. Since it is not the actual original, there is no way to know how much of it was really from Columbus’ own pen and how much was perhaps extrapolated or even exaggerated by Casas.

However, Casas was a well-respected historian not given to changing things around, and for the most part it seems that Columbus and his men saw something, but what? There have been many interpretations and ideas thrown around, including that he saw bioluminescent sea life, a meteor, some sort of atmospheric phenomenon, or even Natives with torches on a canoe, but the most popular theory is that they simply saw lights from land. The October sighting was made just hours before land was sighted, so it seems reasonable to suggest that it might have been lights from the Natives on shore. Even Casas thought this, writing:

I feel about this is that the Indians at night throughout these islands, as they are temperate without any cold, go out or used to go out from their straw houses that they call bohíos at night to comply with their natural necessities and take in hand a firebrand, or small torch, or a chink of pine or of another very dry and resinous wood which burns like a torch, when it is dark night, and with which they guide themselves back again, and in the manner could be seen the light which Christopher Columbus and the others saw the light three or four times.

In the end there is no way to really know for sure what happened here. We are left with a second hand copy of the original journal and no way of really verifying any of it. Was this UFOs, Natives with torches, or what? It is all a curious little footnote in the history of Christopher Columbus, and likely will remain a mostly forgotten curiosity and historical oddity that will never be fully solved.

With the Tic-Tac UFOs seen by Navy pilots from the USS Nimitz (with the Pentagon finally admitting they’re real but still ‘unidentified’) getting all of the media publicity, most other UFO sightings are getting the Rodney Dangerfield “I get no respect” treatment – if it wasn’t recorded by Navy pilots, it didn’t happen. A good example occurred last week in Brazil when multiple reports of UFOs seen and possibly crashing in Magé, a suburb of Rio de Janeiro, and recorded on non-military cellphones, seemed to be quickly discounted, prompting other reports of videos allegedly disappearing and strange Google Earth images. Was all of this a cover-up, a mix-up or just something made up?

@andredimauro
Hey @elonmusk another image supposedly taken in the same region in Magé (Rio de Janeiro) and there are reports that something fell over there in a lake … But it doesn’t seem to be a satellite… #Ovnis #ovnis2020 #ovni #Mage #ufo2020 #UFO #ufosighting #RiodeJaneiro

@bomdialeo
Hey @tomdelonge yesterday in Magé – Brazil many people saw OVNI’s in the sky. Enjoy 👊👊👊 there is more vídeos like these and sorry for my bad english #aliensexist

I hope someone caught that on video

RT.com picked up the earliest Twitter reports of two UFO incidents occurring in Magé on May 13. The first reports say the local government, local police and Brazilian Air Force all said they received no calls on UFOs and told residents to stay home in coronavirus shutdown. Those are conspiracy theory words these days and that’s pretty much what happened next. More videos of blue, red and yellow orbs were posted, with some in a flying wedge formation. A new one appeared with a single red orb, there was a report of gunshots near where the UFO allegedly came down and someone found a Google Earth image of the site (see it here) with something seemingly blocked. That’s when posts like this started popping up.

@KenLayne
The UFO-crash story out of Magé, Brazil, is getting good. Hashtag #MageUFO vanishes, Reddit posts disappear, and something weird is going on with the satellite view of the “crash site.”

While many followed that lead and posted about the alleged disappearances, others noticed that the videos and the Google Earth image were still up in multiple locations (here’s an example). Fortunately, people like Reddit user u/Falkenny posted more accurate info on the r/ufo page. Turns out the crash site was near the location of a fireworks factory that may have been either testing or celebrating. The blocked-out Google Earth image was caused by the roof of a building. Many videos of helicopters and planes in the area were coincidentally linked to the sightings.

Meanwhile, those looking for plausible explanations suggested an exploding transformer (for the noise and flash), rocket debris (the Chinese rocket part had just crashed in the Atlantic and a Russian rocket exploded in space and crashed in the Indian Ocean), SpaceX satellites (they’re everywhere these days) or skydivers (often the cause of formations of bright lights). Without any official explanation and with everyone tired of coronavirus news, social media, mainstream media and conspiracy media all picked their own version and ran with it.

What were they?

Which brings us back to the obvious question … what were they? Unfortunately, even with the benefit of mainstream media exposure, the Tic-Tac UFOs are still unidentified. What makes you think these Brazilian UFOs will get any respect or detailed investigation?

Brazilians — take matters into your own hands … after you first wash them. Put on your masks, grab your charged cellphones, go outside and watch the skies. The best remedy for a conspiracy theory is facts and real data.

Perhaps the most well known supposed UFO crash in history is the one that allegedly happened in Roswell, New Mexico back in 1947. It really set off the boom of interest in flying saucers, and many people mark it as one of the heralds of the modern UFO craze. Yet the UFO phenomenon has been observed since far before this, all the way back to ancient times, and it also seems that aliens have been crashing their spaceships here for just about as long.

Possibly one of the earliest reports of an actual UFO crash comes from all the way back in the 9th century, and is held within the pages of an obscure Latin manuscript called Liber contra insulam vulgi opinionem. In the very brief report, the Archbishop of Lyons is talking about the French peasants when suddenly he sort of makes an offhand mention of what seems to be UFOs and aliens. He says that these French peasants often a speak of a region they called Magonia, “from whence come ships in the clouds.” According to the odd account, the people in this region often traded with these “storm wizards,” and that sometimes these ships would fall from the sky. In one case, he mentions that he had personally seen these ships, and that he had been present when four of these “wizards” fell from their ship to the earth, after which they had been stoned to death. The whole thing is written of matter-of-factly as if it is just a little everyday anecdote, before the manuscript moves on to leave us wondering just what these ships and their “storm wizards” could have been.

In 1211 AD we have another very early report that seems to be of a UFO crash. It supposedly happened in the remote town of Cloera, where a very bizarre series of events seems to have taken place above a church dedicated to St. Kinarus as the people were holding mass there. An English historical chronicler called Gervase of Tilbury would write of what happened thusly:

It befell that an anchor was dropped from the sky, with a rope attached to it, and one of the flukes caught in the arch above the church door. The people rushed out of the church and saw in the sky a ship with men on board, floating before the anchor cable, and they saw a man leap overboard and jump down to the anchor, as if to release it. He looked as if he were swimming in water. The folk rushed up and tried to seize him; but the Bishop forbade the people to hold the man, for it might kill him, he said. The man was freed, and hurried up to the ship, where the crew cut the rope and the ship sailed out of sight. But the anchor is in the church, and has been there ever since, as a testimony.

What was going on here? It sounds very much like this could have been an early UFO account, but it is hard to say for sure. Moving along in years we come to a report that has made the rounds a bit and which allegedly occurred in 1790, in the French town of Alencon, just west of Paris. The report was quoted by the famed UFO researcher Dr Jacques Vallee in 1975, when he claimed that he had heard this from a man named Antonio Fenoglio, who had allegedly uncovered it while perusing the Archives of the French Academy of Sciences, in Paris in 1967. According to this alleged report, in June of 1790 a Paris police inspector by the name of Liabeuf was sent to the rural village to investigate a strange incident that had happened there. Fenoglio claimed that the police inspector’s report read:

At 5 A.M., on June 12th, several farmers caught sight of an enormous globe which seemed surrounded with flames. First they thought it was perhaps a balloon that had caught fire, but the great velocity and the whistling sound which came from that body intrigued them. The globe slowed down, made some oscillations and precipitated itself towards the top of a hill, unearthing plants along the slope. The heat which emanated from it was so intense that soon the grass and the small tree started burning. The peasants succeeded in controlling the fire which threatened to spread to the whole area. In the evening this sphere was still warm and an extraordinary happened, not to say an incredible thing.

The witnesses were; two mayors, a doctor and three other authorities who confirm my report, in addition to the dozens of peasants who were present. This sphere, which would have been large enough to contain a carriage, had not suffered from all that flight. It excited so much curiosity that people came from all parts to see it. Then all of a sudden a kind of door opened and, there is the interesting thing, a person like us came out of it, but this person was dressed in a strange way, wearing a tight-fitting suit and, seeing all that crowd, said some words which were not understood and fled into the woods. Instinctively, the peasants stepped back, in fear, and this saved them because soon after that the sphere exploded in silence, throwing pieces everywhere, and these pieces burned until they were reduced to powder. Researches were initiated to find the mysterious man, but he seemed to have dissolved.

It is a pretty intriguing and spectacular report, and Vallee is a respected researcher, but in the end it doesn’t seem he that he ever saw the supposed original document for himself, and it all comes exclusively from a 1967 claim by Fenoglio. Furthermore, the report seems to be very modern in its depiction and wording, and there is also the fact that the Academy of Sciences has apparently denied that any such document exists, leading one to believe that this may have been a hoax. Still, if it is real, then it is a truly perplexing case of what seems to be an early UFO crash.

Finally, we come to the most recent of these cases, with a more well-known account from 1897, in the small town of Aurora, Texas. At 6 AM on April 17 of that year, it was reported that a great, mechanical airship of some sort had suddenly descended from the sky, sailed over the town square, and smashed into a windmill on the property of a Judge Proctor. This was far from the end of the incident, as it would soon become apparent that this was no normal airship, and its pilot was no normal man. A report by a S.E Haydon in the Dallas Evening News said of the event:

Evidently some of the machinery was out of order, for it was making a speed of only ten or twelve miles an hour and gradually settling toward the Earth. It sailed directly over the public square, and when it reached the north part of town collided with the tower of Judge Proctor’s windmill and went to pieces with a terrific explosion, scattering debris over several acres of ground, wrecking the windmill and water tank and destroying the judge’s flower garden.

The pilot of the ship is supposed to have been the only one on board, and while his remains are badly disfigured, enough of the original has been picked up to show that he was not an inhabitant of this world. Mr. T.J Weems, the United States signal service office at this place and an authority on astronomy, gives it as his opinion that he was a native of the planet Mars. Papers found on his person – evidently the record of his travels – are written in some unknown hieroglyphics, and can not be deciphered.

The ship was too badly wrecked to form any conclusion as to its construction or motive power. It was built of an unknown metal, resembling somewhat a mixture of aluminum and silver, and it must have weighed several tons. The town is full today of people who are viewing the wreck and gathering specimens of the strange metal from the debris. The pilot’s funeral will take place at noon tomorrow.

The wreckage was supposedly disposed of in a well and the alien body buried in a grave at the town cemetery, and from here the story picks up all kinds of strange elements. Some versions say that the military swooped in to whisk away the ship and its pilot. Others say the wreckage contaminated the water supply and led to inexplicable illnesses. The burial plot is said to still be in the town cemetery, which has an official plaque from the Texas Historical Commission that mentions the strange incident. There have been plenty of people who have asked permission to dig the alien’s grave up, but the city has always denied these requests. Considering that at the time Aurora was falling on hard times and this supposed incident drew in huge crowds of people, it has been suggested that this was all a hoax and a publicity stunt, but in the end, who knows what is going on here. Whatever really did happen on that day in 1897, whether it was a hoax or there is any truth to it, the tale of the airship and the alien grave have become a popular local legend.

These reports mostly have an air of myth and mystique about them, partly because they are so lost to the mists of time and shrouded in the shadows of history. There is very little we can do to really know for sure what was seen back in these early times, or how to unwind the truth from possible fabrication. However, if there is any truth to it all, then it appears that UFOs crashing to earth are not a purely modern phenomenon, and such cases serve to really fire up the imagination.

A few days ago I wrote an article here at Mysterious Universe on the possibility that the acclaimed movie director Billy Wilder may have known something about the Roswell affair of July 1947 – and turned that knowledge into a movie: 1970’s The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes. On a similar angle, today I’m going to share with you certain other data that suggests the world of entertainment and UFO conspiracies is nothing new. In 1948, Bernard Newman wrote a book called The Flying Saucer. It told a story of a faked UFO invasion, designed to create a one world government. Newman was an expert in the field and history of espionage and performed a number of secret operations for U.K. Intelligence during the Second World War. Dennis Wheatley was a renowned writer of horror novels. He was also a member of the U.K. government’s Joint Planning Staff, which was a part of the War Cabinet. Such was the level of respect the government had for Wheatley, he received the rank of Wing Commander – something that made him then the first civilian to have been given such a level. Wheatley’s 1952 novel, Star of Ill-Omen, is a story of hostile Martians who are determined to take over our world. Imagine something along the lines of an earlier version of the 1996 blockbuster movie, Independence Day, and you won’t be far off.

Nineteen-Ninety-Nine was the year in which Nick Pope’s Operation Thunder Child novel was published. The basic theme is that of a hostile assault on the U.K. By whom? By dangerous extraterrestrials, that’s who. When the news surfaced on the Ufological grapevine, it was all but guaranteed that some UFO researchers would suggest that Pope had written a story that was based on top secrets he had learned of while working in the MoD. There’s no evidence that there was any truth to those suggestions. Although, it must be said that Pope was not beyond cultivating an air of intrigue and mystery about himself. He did it very well – and I’m sure that Nick, and his publicists at Simon & Schuster’s publishing house, would agree with me. Nevertheless, Pope did make a few comments that are worth noting.

When the news of Operation Thunder Child’s then-looming book surfaced, I asked Nick Pope about his novel. I wanted to know what his response was to the fact-vs.-fiction scenario of his then-soon-to-be-published book that had the UFO field, of that time, buzzing. Pope replied: “Even to you, Nick, I can’t comment on that. But, let’s put it this way: Operation Thunder Child is going to be more controversial than Open Skies, Closed Minds or The Uninvited. And, indeed, the Ministry of Defense may have more of a problem with it. Mainly because it’s going to feature real locations, real weapon systems, real tactics, real doctrine and real crisis management techniques. It’s going to blend my knowledge and experience of UFOs with my knowledge of crisis management – such as my involvement in the Gulf War, where I worked in the Joint Operations Center.” Moving on…

The publishers of Ralph Noyes’ 1985  novel, A Secret Property (Quartet Books, Ltd.) provided their readers with the following background on their author: “Ralph Noyes was born in the tropics and spent most of his childhood in the West Indies. He served in the RAF from 1940 to 1946 and was commissioned as aircrew, engaging in active service in North Africa and the Far East. He entered the civil service in 1949 and served in the Air Ministry and subsequently the unified Ministry of Defense. In 1977 he retired early from the civil service to take up a writing career, leaving in the grade of under Secretary of State. He has since published several pieces of shorter fiction, most of them on speculative themes.”

The publishers added: “For nearly four years, until late 1972, Ralph Noyes headed a division in the central staffs of the Ministry of Defense which brought him in touch with the UFO problem. Since his retirement he has become increasingly interested in this subject, among others which lie on the fringes of present understanding. He sees speculative fiction as the ideal mode for grappling with these unusual areas of experience. But A Secret Property is not only fiction but also ‘faction’–at least to the extent of drawing on Ralph Noyes’s lengthy background in the Royal Air Force and the Ministry of Defense.”

A Secret Property is a thinly-veiled, fictional version of what happened at Rendlesham Forest, Suffolk, U.K. in December 1980. Most important of all, it is not the matter of how much data and material Noyes chose to fictionalize in A Secret Property. Rather, it’s the theme of Noyes’ story that is so important and relevant to us – more than thirty-five years after his book was published. In her 1991 book From Out of the Blue, Jenny Randles said of Noyes’ book that it involved a technology that “produces etheric visions of aliens and spaceships” and that can “effect the real world in various hazardous ways.” This issue of “visions,” in relation to a fictionalized tale of what happened at Rendlesham Forest, eerily mirrors the data provided in my new book, The Rendlesham Forest UFO Conspiracy. Do I think Noyes knew of this “vision”-based top secret experiment? Yes. And did he choose to fictionalize his secret knowledge and insert it into the pages of A Secret Property? Yes. You may be surprised how, sometimes, secret facts surface in the guise of fiction.

Videos, selected by peter2011