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

When it comes to weird cults, you could do a lot worse than the Stella Maris Gnostic Church. Based in South America, specifically Cartagena, Colombia, it was founded in 1989 by a man named Rodolfo Perez, who brought over several members of the Universal Christian Gnostic Movement to help him kickstart his project. Shortly after its formation, the cult began to make a name for itself as being rather odd, to say the least. It quickly gained a reputation as doomsday cult, pronouncing that there was a great cataclysm awaiting mankind, and they made it all even weirder by proclaiming that the only way to escape this fate was to be whisked away by aliens from outer space. This would lead to a strange mass vanishing surrounded by talk of odd beliefs, brainwashing, and aliens.

Over the years there would be many reports to the police from concerned family members who worried that their loved ones had been completely brainwashed by the enigmatic and charismatic cult leader Rogelio Perea, who went through great lengths to make sure his members severed all ties with the outside world, and viewing material existence as flawed or evil. At the time, there was a lot in the news about this mysterious group, and through it all they became ever more obsessed with the idea that the cataclysm was upon us, and that they had to make preparations to leave aboard a spaceship, with the similarities with the infamous Heaven’s Gate Cult not lost on anyone at all. Specifically, the Stella Maris Gnostic Church believed that exactly 140,000 of the faithful from the world’s population would be saved by aliens during the doomsday, and the rest would perish.

The Stella Maris Gnostic Church

In June of 1999 there was reported a good amount of activity from the cult’s compound in Cartegena, as if they were getting ready for something big. There was much speculation on what this could be, but it was hard to ascertain anything, as the members had mostly cut all ties with their families and the outside world in general. However, some rumors began to creep out when some of the family members reported sporadic contact with their brainwashed loved ones, which hinted that the cult was preparing to head out into the wilderness to await their promised salvation from the stars. One woman with a daughter in the cult would say:

The two leaders told my daughter Liliana that she was God’s chosen one and made her change her name to Stella Maris to brainwash her. She was convinced she was going to make contact with flying saucers. My daughter told me she had to leave because a cataclysm was going to occur and that she had to go to a high place to meet extraterrestrials who would save them from the end of the world. The leader of the group told them the world was going to end in August and that they had to go to meet some aliens. She was convinced that cosmic beings were coming to save a chosen few from some big catastrophe. I couldn’t stop her.

The group made preparations and their official statement was that they were going on an annual retreat near San Pedro, Colombia, in the Sierra Nevada mountains, yet the leaked accounts pointed to them on a mission to actually go meet aliens in the wilderness, in an area well-known for its intense UFO activity. One day in July of 1999, a group of around 60 cult members, in some reports up to 100, many of them comprising whole families, reportedly headed off into the dim wilderness, abandoning their facility in the process. After that it seems like the entire group then just vanished off the face of the earth. A search of the entire region turned op no sign of them, and a sweep of their facility showed it to be eerily devoid of any answers, sitting there untouched as if someone would come home at any moment. There would be no further contact to their families and friends they had left behind.

Theories as to what happened to them would fly. Many thought they had gone off to commit a mass suicide much like the Heaven’s Gate cult, but there were found no bodies. Another was that they had simply gotten lost in the wilderness, but again no sign of them was found. They may also have been kidnapped in a region where kidnappings for ransoms are common, but no one ever came forward with a ransom demand. Even more sinister is the far-out idea that they actually managed to succeed in being whisked away by the aliens they so fervently believed in. As all of this speculation went on, some members of the cult did emerge to claim that they were not involved with UFOs, yet the 60 to 100 people remained missing. It is hard to know what happened after this, as the news on the matter has dried up and there are some who even claim it might have been a hoax and that it never happened at all. We do know it made the news at the time, but then it curiously sort of went away, the vanishing of 60 men, women, and children sort of quietly brushed under the carpet. What happened to these people? No one seems to really know, and it is a tragic and obscure oddity.

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My new book, Diary of Secrets, is a look at the life and mysterious death of Marilyn Monroe. Was she really murdered for what she knew about UFOs and aliens? That’s the primary question I ask in the book. It should be noted, though, that there have been a number of suspicious deaths in the UFO field. Of course, we have to be very careful how we address such matters. Just because someone in the domain of Ufology dies, doesn’t mean there has to be a mystery behind it. In fact, my view is that while there have been some strange deaths tied to the UFO subject, they are in the minority. For example, there’s the matter of the death of the late Dr. John E. Mack, who died after being hit by a car in a busy London street in 2004. I’ve seen people in Ufology claim that Mack was murdered on that London road. Total bullshit. It was the night of September 27, 2004 that Mack was killed. It’s important to note that Mack was in England, at the time. Mack was walking along London’s Totteridge Lane when tragedy struck.

He stepped out onto a crosswalk and was hit and killed by a drunk driver. His name was Raymond Czechowski, at the time 52 years of age. The emergency services were quickly on the seen. But it was too late. In an article at UFO Updates, we have the following: “Mr. Czechowski was sentenced to 15 months imprisonment and was disqualified from driving for 3 years. The Judge also ordered that before Mr. Czechowski was allowed to return to driving he must take an extended driving test. Because of time already spent in custody, Mr Czechowski will serve 6 months of the 15 month sentence.” There is another issue that may have relevance, one which I can relate to. It was September. It was night-time. It was London. It was busy. And John Mack was an American in England. I’m an Englishman who lives in America. When I moved to the United States, fifteen years ago, two of the very first things I had to do were (a) learn to drive on the opposite side of the road; and (b) take a US driving test.

Dr John E. Mack

For those who may not know, whereas in the States we drive on the right, in the UK, it’s on the left. So, what we have with the death of John E. Mack is a series of things that culminated in disaster: there was the darkness, a busy London road, traffic traveling in a direction that was not typical for the victim, and – the main thing – a drunk driver. Put all of those issues together and we have a terrible tragedy. What we don’t have is a conspiracy to have Mack killed. Moving on: when Mac Tonnies – the author of several books, including After the Martian Apocalypse and The Cyptoterrestrials – died in 2009 at the young age of just thirty-four, I heard stupid statements that Mac had been murdered. He had a heart condition. Period. With that all said, let’s look at a couple of fatal cases that I do think are worthy of investigation – and that just might have had links to the UFO topic.

May 22, 1949 was the date on which the first U.S. Secretary of Defense, James Forrestal, died. Specifically at 1:50 a.m. As will quickly become apparent, the circumstances surrounding Forrestal’s final hours are swamped in controversy. All that we know with absolute certainty is that in the early hours of the 22^nd, Forrestal’s body was found on a third-floor canopy of the Bethesda Naval Hospital, Maryland. Did he take a fatal leap out of the window of the 13^th floor of the hospital, his mind in turmoil and suicide on his mind? Was it an accident? Or, was Forrestal assassinated? Let’s have a look at this undeniably strange and disturbing affair. We’ll begin with a bit of important background on the man himself. For years there have been rumors that Forrestal was taken out of circulation as a result of what he knew about UFOs. Certainly, the circumstances surrounding Forrestal’s death are suspicious – at the least.

James V. Forrestal

Now, there’s Dorothy Kilgallen – a well-known journalist who had an interest in UFOs and who wrote about them on several occasions – who died under controversial circumstances in 1965 and while she was investigating the JFK assassination of November 22, 1963. Born in Chicago in July 1913, Kilgallen was someone who, without the benefit of a college degree, soared up the ranks in the field of journalism. She became one of the most popular – and, at times, hated and even feared – figures in the media. Kilgallen was also someone who moved effortlessly in the worlds of high-society, Hollywood, politics, government secrecy, and deep and dark conspiracies. She was buddies with Marilyn Monroe, and she hung out with Ernest Hemingway. Kilgallen was also someone who was the subject of extensive surveillance – by several agencies of the U.S. intelligence community. Indeed, the FBI surveillance file on Kilgallen runs to hundreds of pages. As Kilgallen’s research into the intricacies of the whole JFK affair increased, she became somewhat worried, then frightened; she was concerned that her life was in danger. All of which leads up to the matter of her puzzling, controversy-filled death and the discovery of her dead in bed on November 8, 1965. Now, onto another case:

In the late 1970s, UFO researcher Rich Reynolds was contacted by a man named Bosco Nedelcovic. The latter suggested that the “Space Brother”-type encounter of one Arthur Bryant in the wilds of Devon, England in April 1965, had very little to do with aliens, and much more to do with secret experimentation of a very down to earth nature. Nedelcovic (who worked for the U.S. Department of State’s Agency for International Development, and who also had ties to the CIA) claimed that Bryant was the victim of a form of sophisticated mind-control, somewhat akin to the kind of work undertaken by the CIA’s MKUltra program. Nedelcovic told Reynolds of a number of bogus “UFO episodes” in both the U.S. and the U.K., in which individuals were led to believe they had UFO encounters when, in fact, they experienced something very different. Nedelcovic alluded to how these events involved “visual displays, radar displacement, and artifact droppings.” One of those events, said Nedelcovic, was the Bryant case. Nedelcovic also revealed how the operation proceeded, and which involved “experimental drugs used to induce specific hallucinatory material” as well as “microwave transmissions.” On this latter point, Reynolds was told by Nedelcovic that “the injudicious use of microwave technology” led to a disastrous outcome for Bryant. As history has shown, Bryant died from the effects of a fast-developing brain tumor. In this case, we’re not talking about murder. We are, however, taking about accidental death of just about the worst type possible.

So, yes, I do believe that there have been fatal events in relation to UFOs. But, we need to be very careful not to go over the top. Just because someone in Ufology dies, we shouldn’t automatically think “murder.” We should use our common sense and address everything very carefully.