Flying Saucers from the Kremlin Read online

  A final aspect on this particular part of the story: Maybe Moore was used, but not by U.S. intelligence. Let’s not forget that, as Greg Bishop noted, the Falcon had what was described as an eastern European accent. He may well not have been an American, which suggests the incredible theory that the Russians may have been running the program to learn all they could from Bennewitz. Or, maybe, there was more than one Falcon, which really serves to complicate matters.

  Based on private data provided to him by sources in the know, Greg Bishop has concluded that the Falcon was probably a man named Harry Rositzke; he ran covert programs for the CIA, after cutting his teeth in the heart of the Second World War-era Office of Strategic Services. Rositzke, a Brooklyn native, was an expert on the matter of Soviet intelligence, the KGB, and Russia’s programs designed to destabilize the West with carefully crafted propaganda. Rositzke, who died in 2002 at the age of ninety-one, wrote a number of non-fiction books on the world of espionage, including The KGB: The Eyes of Russia and The CIA’s Secret Operations. Rositzke, it’s important to note, did not have a European accent. That revelation adds further weight to the possibility that there may have been competing Falcons; one, Rositzke, an American trying to protect U.S. government secrets. The other? An unknown European character posing as an American official, and using the same alias of the Falcon, and trying to further disrupt U.S. intelligence.

  When the story of Majestic 12 got more and more complicated and multi-layered, Bill Moore quite reasonably tried to get his hands on his FBI file – if such a thing existed. It turns out that such a thing did exist. It has to be said that it would have been a huge surprise if there wasn’t such a file on Moore, given all that had gone down with regard to crashed UFOs, bodies of aliens on ice, the FBI connection, and allegedly leaked top secret papers on extraterrestrial life. On November 16, 1988 – when the FBI’s investigation of the Majestic 12 papers was at its height – UFO investigator Larry Bryant sent a letter to one Hope Nakamura; she worked for the Center for National Security Studies. Bryant explained to Nakamura that Moore was looking to try and obtain his FBI file and determine what it contained. There was a good reason for this: Moore had already been able to determine that a file existed on him, which ran close to sixty pages; but he was having trouble getting the papers declassified. Moore’s file got lengthier when the FBI’s Majestic 12 probe got ever more complicated, which is hardly a surprise. Notably, some of the documents on Moore, the man himself learned, fell under the “B1” category of the Freedom of Information Act. Rather notably, B1 covers U.S. national security issues. This was quite a revelation. For Moore, though, not necessarily a good one.

  In a proactive fashion, and with regard to Moore’s file, Bryant put together an ad for publication in various military-themed publications. The ad was titled “UFO Secrecy/Congress-Watch.” Among its highlights, it revealed that Moore’s FBI was officially classed at a “Secret” level, and it demonstrated that another agency, beyond the FBI, was also watching Moore. The ad was published on November 23, 1988, in The Pentagram, an official U.S. Army publication. Bryant, in the ad, suggested that those reading it should demand a congressional hearing in relation to the UFO phenomenon. Despite Bryan’s gung-ho approach, and help and advice from the Center for National Security Studies, Moore only managed to secure a small portion of his file.

  One year later, 1989, Bryant tried to get a hold of any and all files that the FBI might have had on yet another figure in the Majestic 12 story: Stanton Friedman. The FBI got back to Bryant on August 2: “Mr. Friedman is the subject of one Headquarters main file. This file is classified in its entirety and I am affirming the denial of access to it.” Attempts to determine the length and the scope of the file fell flat. So, on August 28, Bryant filed a suit in the District Court for the Eastern District of Columbia. He said: “My complaint seeks full disclosure of the UFO-related content of the FBI dossier on Stan Friedman. Neither Stan nor I have been able to convince the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation to loosen its grasp on that dossier, which Bureau officials assert, bears a security classification.”

  A few, scant pages were all that the FBI was willing to give up. Not much has changed since.

  If the FBI learned anything further about Majestic 12 in the post-1989 period, then that information has not surfaced under the terms of the Freedom of Information Act. We do know something of deep interest though, thanks to a man named Richard L. Huff. He served as Bureau Co-Director within the Office of Information and Privacy. In correspondence (specifically on July 22, 1993), Huff informed me of the existence of an FBI “Main File” on Majestic 12, which is now in what is termed “closed status.” The title of the file is not something along the lines of “Potentially leaked document” or “Questionable document,” as one might imagine, given the strange story detailed in this chapter. Rather, the file title is nothing less than – wait for it – “Espionage.” While we’re admittedly forced to speculate, that one, eye-opening word alone strongly suggests that the Majestic 12 saga really did revolve around those very same components that surface in the pages of this chapter: spies, counterintelligence operations, the Moore-Bennewitz situation, the words of Gerald K. Haines, and the interference of the Russians. And espionage. There is another thing that adds further weight to this argument.

  You’ll recall that the Fund for UFO Research funded Stanton Friedman to the tune of a hefty sixteen grand to investigate the controversial Majestic 12 papers. Keep that in mind when you read the following words of Maccabee himself, which might suggest an ongoing monitoring by the Russians – and by U.S. intelligence, too - of the key figures in the Majestic 12 caper: “After I spoke at a UFO conference near Washington, D.C. in February 1993, I was contacted by an assistant military attaché who was stationed at the Russian Embassy [italics mine]. He wanted to know how to obtain U.S. government files on UFOs. You can imagine my surprise and amusement when, about six months later, while I was at work I got a call from the ‘dreaded’ FBI. It became obvious to me that the agent didn’t know much about the UFO phenomenon and was amused to learn about the FBI files on the subject. But he was especially interested in my interactions with the military attaché [italics mine].”

  In 2014, there was yet another development in the controversy surrounding Majestic 12: the Department of Defense declassified a previously top secret file on what was known during the Cold War as Project Pandora. To a significant degree, the program was focused on Cold War secrets of the Russians, and how microwaves can affect the mind and body to dangerous, harmful degrees. It’s a fascinating dossier that dates back decades. It’s a lengthy file, too, running to nearly 500 pages, and is comprised of a number of notable documents. But, here’s the weird thing, the document contains a copy of the controversial Majestic 12 /Eisenhower Briefing Document on the Roswell UFO affair of 1947. Of interest, the copy of the EBD document in the Pandora file has a hand-written note on it stating that: “This cannot be authenticated as an official DoD document.”

  Logic suggests that the message was probably written around the end of 1988, which is when both the Air Force and the FBI were busily adding near-identical messages to their copies of the Majestic 12 documents. Exopaedia notes of the Pandora program that, in the early 1960s, “…the CIA discovered that the U.S. embassy in Moscow was ‘bombarded’ with EMR (electromagnetic radiation). The signal was composed of several frequencies. The Pandora Project was intended to investigate and gather data on this Russian experiment. The embassy personnel were not informed of the existence of the beam, nor of the Pandora project.”

  Exopaedia continues that, “the signal was intended to produce blurred vision and loss of mental concentration. Investigation on the effects on the embassy personnel, however, showed that they developed blood composition anomalies and unusual chromosome counts. Some people even developed a leukemia-like blood disease.”

  So, what we have here is a file on a program that dates back to the early 1960s and which
was focused on major U.S. government concerns that the Soviets were up to no good – as was clearly the case. But, even so, that still does not provide the answer to an important question. Why is a very controversial and questionable document on dead aliens and crashed UFOs contained in a Department of Defense file on an old, Cold War-era operation instigated by the Russians? Attempts on my part – between 2014 and 2018 - to use the Freedom of Information Act to get the answers have failed to reveal anything of note. In fact, of anything in the slightest.

  Game over? Not a chance. The shenanigans – and the issues concerning Russia and the Majestic 12 documents - continue. As you will now see.

  15. “Some form of toxin or a highly contagious disease”

  As we saw in the previous chapter, there is strong available evidence that suggests the Russians were behind the notorious Majestic 12 documents, which publicly surfaced in 1987; even though Bill Moore and Jaime Shandera had copies in their hands since Christmas 1984. At the same time ufologists were salivating over the Majestic 12 papers in the eighties, the Russians were working to convince Americans that the U.S. government had secretly created AIDS, the Human Immunodeficiency Virus, or HIV. The purpose? To use the virus as the definitive doomsday weapon. It was nothing but tacky Russian propaganda. It’s a strange and controversy-filled story that, in a very odd way, has a link to a second set of Majestic 12 documents; the new ones surfaced in the 1990s. This second set would provoke even more controversy than the original ones ever could. Before we get back to Majestic 12, though, let’s take a look at the claims and rumors that the U.S. Government created HIV and how the whole situation played out. We have to turn our attentions to a U.S. Department of State document titled AIDS as a Biological Weapon, which I obtained thanks to the Freedom of Information Act. I’ll present it to you without interruption:

  When the AIDS disease was first recognized in the early 1980s, its origins were a mystery. A deadly new disease had suddenly appeared, with no obvious explanation of what had caused it. In such a situation, false rumors and misinformation naturally arose, and Soviet disinformation specialists exploited this situation as well as the musings of conspiracy theorists to help shape their brief but highly effective disinformation campaign on this issue. In March 1992, then-Russian intelligence chief and later Russian Prime Minister Yevgeny Primakov admitted that the disinformation service of the Soviet KGB had concocted the false story that the AIDS virus had been created in a U.S. military laboratory as a biological weapon. The Russian newspaper Izvestiya reported on March 19, 1992: “[Primakov] mentioned the well-known articles printed a few years ago in our central newspapers about AIDS supposedly originating from secret Pentagon laboratories.” According to Yevgeny Primakov, the articles exposing U.S. scientists’ “crafty” plots were fabricated in KGB offices. The Soviets eventually abandoned the AIDS disinformation campaign in their media under pressure from the U.S. government in August 1987.

  In addition to the Soviet disinformation specialists, a tiny handful of fringe-group conspiracy theorists also espoused the false charge that the AIDS virus had been created as a biological weapon. One of them was Mr. Theodore Strecker, an attorney in the United States, who had a brother, Robert, who was a physician in Los Angeles. Theodore wrote a manifesto, “This is a Bio-Attack Alert” on March 28, 1986. He imagined that traitorous American doctors, United Nations bureaucrats, and Soviet officials were involved in a gigantic conspiracy to destroy the United States with biological warfare. He wrote, “We have allowed the United Nations World Health Organization to combine with traitors in the United States National Institute of Health to start a Soviet Union attack.” Mr. Strecker claimed that the “War on Cancer” led by the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH) was a cover for developing AIDS. He wrote, “the virologists of WHO [the World Health Organization], NCI [the U.S. National Institute of Cancer], and the NIH, have written in plain English their plan for conquest of America and are presently executing it disguised as cancer research. Mr. Strecker saw the Soviet Union at the heart of this alleged conspiracy: “This is an attempt to exhaust America with hatred, struggle, want, confusion, and inoculation of disease. The enemy intends to control our population with disease, make us dependent upon their remedies, engineer each birth, and reduce America to a servant of the Supreme Soviet.”

  Mr. Strecker sent his manifesto to the president and vice president of the United States, governors of several states, and various U.S. government departments, urging them to ‘retake the virus labs using force if necessary’ and other dramatic emergency measures. It did not have the galvanizing effect he had hoped. In the mid-1980s, there was still considerable confusion about how AIDS developed, although scientists universally agreed that it was a naturally occurring disease, not one that was man-made. In the intervening years, science has done much to solve this mystery. There is now strong scientific evidence that the AIDS virus originated as a subspecies of a virus that commonly infects the western equatorial African chimpanzee.

  Today, among some of the most extreme conspiracy-theorists, the idea/rumor that AIDS was deliberately created as a biological weapon – possibly to lower population levels and to allow a global elite to take control of a smaller, decimated human race - still pervades. All of which brings us to the matter of a controversial batch of Majestic 12 papers that surfaced in the 1990s from a man named Timothy Cooper. Although no longer active in the UFO research community, Cooper, of Big Bear Lake, California, provoked a wealth of controversy for saucer-seekers when it was announced what he had in his possession. It was all “thanks” to an enormous body of allegedly leaked and highly secret documentation that had been given to Cooper under circumstances worthy of All the President’s Men. Cooper was certainly no Woodward or Bernstein, but you get the point I’m making: Cooper had insider sources who were willing to significantly assist his UFO research by feeding him controversial papers on aliens and extraterrestrial spacecraft. Clandestine mail drops in the dead of night were very much the order of the day. The primary informants were an elderly man named “Thomas Cantwheel” and a woman named “Salina.” The latter was said to have been Cantwheel’s daughter. Both of them, Cooper was told, had worked in the field of U.S. counterintelligence for decades. They were the careful keepers of untold numbers of sinister secrets, some supposedly connected to the 1962 death of uber-babe, Marilyn Monroe, and to the November 22, 1963 assassination of President John F. Kennedy, in Dealey Plaza, Dallas, Texas. If you believe their words, that is.

  It’s important to note that if you do a Google search on “Cantwheel” you will find only links that deal with UFOs, Tim Cooper, and Majestic 12. The reason for this is very simple: “Cantwheel” is not a real name. Yet, that’s the name Cooper’s source consistently signed off on his communications to Cooper. The closest real name is “Cantwell.” There’s a reason for – and significance to – the oddness in relation to the names, as will become obvious when this chapter reaches its end.

  Over a period of time that ran close to a decade, Cooper’s informants provided him with what ultimately amounted to thousands of pages of saucer-themed material and additional data. They were focused on everything from the Majestic 12 committee and alien autopsies to accounts of crashed UFOs and attempts by the U.S. military to replicate extraterrestrial technology. One document even alluded to the possibility that the May 22, 1949, death of James Forrestal – the first U.S. Secretary of Defense – was not the suicide many assumed it was. Rather, the Cooper papers suggest, Forrestal had to be taken out of circulation to ensure that he didn’t go public on what he knew about flying saucers. What really set the Cooper-era Majestic 12 documentation apart from that which caught the attention of the Moore-Shandera-Friedman team in the 1980s? It was references of deadly viruses; something that is the most significant part of the overall story, as you will now see.

  In my 2017 book, The Roswell UFO Conspiracy, I wrote the following, which will demonstrate how I personally became so embroile
d in the matter of the Cooper-era papers: “It’s a little known fact that in late 2001, Tim Cooper sold all of his voluminous UFO files to Dr. Robert M. Wood. Bob is the author of Alien Viruses and the father of Ryan Wood, who has spent years researching alleged crashed UFO incidents – all detailed in his book, Majic Eyes Only. It is even less well-known that in the early days of 2002, Bob hired me to spend a week in an Orange County, California-based motel-room, surrounded by all of the thousands upon thousands of pages of Cooper’s voluminous collection of the cosmic sort. The plan was for me to catalog all of the material, to compile each and every piece of it into chronological order, and to summarize the content of each document, every letter, and every Freedom of Information request that Cooper had submitted to government agencies – which is precisely what I did. It was a week in which I most definitely earned my loot. It was also a week that paralleled the infamous story told by Hunter S. Thompson in his classic gonzo saga, Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. Whereas Thompson was hunkered down with his whisky, margaritas and shrimp cocktails, for me it was cases of cold beer and club sandwiches.”

  I could not fail to note just how much of the material that existed in Cooper’s files was relative to stories of manufactured viruses, biological weaponry, and bizarre, medical conspiracies. Contained in Cooper’s vast collection was a 1999 edition of Edward T. Haslam’s book, Mary, Ferrie & the Monkey Virus (“Mary” being Mary Sherman, a cancer researcher who died under very strange, fiery circumstances in New Orleans in 1964, and “Ferrie” being David Ferrie, a man that New Orleans District Attorney Jim Garrison concluded was a conspirator in the death of JFK). Haslam’s story is a controversial one. It mixes biological warfare and deadly viruses with a ruthless murder – and much more, too. And, as the back-cover of the book reveals, the story addresses “questions concerning the origins of the AIDS epidemic.” In 2007, Haslam wrote Dr. Mary’s Monkey, a lengthy book that added a wealth of new material to the Ferrie-Sherman-AIDS controversy.