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by Martin Davis |
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This is a story about Men in Black, only not the kind you
see at the movies. These men in black don't cover up UFO incidents; they
promote them.
Consider Philip J. Corso. This retired U.S. Army colonel is the co-author
(with Bill Birne) of The Day After Roswell, a recent release from Pocket
Books whose publication was timed to coincide with last summer's much hyped
anniversary of the alleged UFO crash at Roswell, New Mexico in 1947. In the
book, Corso presents himself as a national security insider who is coming
clean about the UFO phenomenon and the U.S. government's involvement with
it. The book--which contains no index, no footnotes, and virtually no named
sources--reads like a bad episode of NBC's dimwitted Dark Skies, outdoing
much science fiction in the fantastic quality of its claims about UFOs, EBEs,
and the like.
Among other things, Corso claims that in the early sixties he headed the
Army's Foreign Technology Division, in which capacity he oversaw the handling
of alien material recovered from a saucer crash in New Mexico. Moreover,
Corso says his office supplied portions of the saucer debris to various defense
contractors and high-tech labs (who were led to think that it was stolen
Soviet technology) who developed out of the bestowal such modern marvels
as the computer chip, fiber optics, and kevlar. (Of course, Tommy Lee Jones
says something similar in the movie Men In Black, adding velcro, microwave
ovens, and, as I recall, karaoke machines to the mix; but Corso purports
to be serious about this.)
And that's just for starters. He goes on to regale us with tales of dead
alien bodies on display at army bases and secret installations on the moon.
Oh yes, and then there's the truth ("now it can be told!", as they used to
say in the old Captain America comics) about Reagan's Strategic Defense
initiative. Turns out they didn't call it "Star Wars" for nothing, as its
real purpose, according to Corso, was not to deflect a missile attack by
the Russkies, but to counter the threat posed by the inscrutable saucer men.
This, of course, led to the end of the Cold War, when Reagan agreed to let
the Soviets use Star Wars technology to defend the USSR against the same
galactic menace.
It gets curiouser still. Corso was formerly a "research assistant" to right-wing
segregationist Senator Strom Thurmond (R-South Carolina), the oldest,
longest-serving, and (for many) most annoying presence in the U.S. Congress.
As Corso's old boss, Thurmond was persuaded to write the forward to The Day
After Roswell, a coup the publishers emphasize with a big blurb on the cover.
However, Thurmond apparently neglected to read or even inquire about the
book he was plugging; when someone woke him up (he's well into his nineties)
and explained that he was in effect endorsing the existence of UFOs, Thurmond
reacted with an announcement disavowing any knowledge of Corso's kooky-sounding
subject matter.
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Given such bizarre turns, as well as the complete lack of support for Corso's
claims, a reasonable person might surmise that Corso is either a) a shameless
hustler trying to milk a popular myth, b) a mental case, or c) a provocateur
whose "work" is meant to disrupt serious inquiry into UFOs and discredit
the tiny group of writers and researchers who try to engage the phenomenon
with some semblance of intellectual integrity. Option c, in other words,
would cast Corso as a debunker of UFOs, since the most likely impact of his
outrageous claims will be reinforcement of the notion that ufology is strictly
the province of lunatics and fools.
National Security
About ufology, one thing is now certain: it's been the province, for decades,
of intelligence agents. Confirming what many have long suspected, the CIA
recently admitted that, during the 1950s, it recommended that the National
Security Council adopt a policy of debunking UFO reports. The Spring issue
of the CIA journal Studies of Intelligence contains an article by historian
Gerald K. Haines entitled "CIA's Role in the Study of UFOs,
1947-1990."1 The article asserts that concerns over UFO "hysteria"
prompted the CIA in 1953 "to create a special outside scientific panel to
look into the security implications" of the phenomenon. According to Haines,
the panel concluded that there was nothing scientifically unusual going on,
i.e., that UFOs were not alien spacecraft. However, the panel was concerned
about the impact that a nationwide wave of UFO hysteria might have on Cold
War security. If the Soviets were to devise some sneaky means of inducing
such a panic, then we might have a real problem. According to the panel,
the resultant furor could distract the populace and clog vital lines of
communication, making us sitting ducks for a nuclear sneak
attack.2 (It all sounds a bit like something from Dr. Strangelove:
"Mr. President, I regret to inform you that we've discovered a UFO Hysteria
Gap!") Therefore the panel recommended that the NSC "debunk UFO reports and
institute a policy of public education to reassure the public of the lack
of evidence behind UFOs."3 (Can you say, "swamp gas"?) The report
further recommended that the project enlist the aid of mass media outlets,
ad agencies, business organizations, and "even the Disney Corporation to
get the message across."4
Yes, that's right, boys and girls, according to a CIA journal, the Disney
Corporation played a secret role in Cold War ufology, though that's a topic
for another occasion (or perhaps an animated musical). Still, what seems
clear is that the spooks saw the realms of mass media and pop culture as
areas of real concern about the UFO phenomenon. According to Haines' article,
they set out years ago to manipulate popular beliefs.
One suspects that certain government agencies have persisted in working to
manipulate popular belief in UFOs. Moreover, one suspects that at some point
such agencies decided to widen the net and approach UFOs from the other direction
as well. Currently, the ranks of ufologists are full of ex-military and national
security types. Moreover, many of these individuals affirm the existence
of UFOs, giving voice to some of the strangest extant scenarios regarding
the topic.5 Like Corso, many of them offer wild tales and little
or no supporting evidence. Consider Bob Lazar, a source for much of the lore
surrounding "Area 51" in Nevada. Lazar claims to have worked on top secret
government projects, some of which involved the "back-engineering" of recovered
alien saucer technology. He claims to have observed aliens, or alien-like
entities, at underground bases. Unfortunately, he can produce no real evidence
to support his claims.6 (It is perhaps interesting to note that
the man who "discovered" Lazar, Las Vegas reporter George Knapp, also strongly
promotes the reliability of Corso.)7
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From the Pentagon perspective, "witnesses" and "testimony" of this type might
prove useful in a couple of ways. Given their dubiousness, such reports can
obviously be used to debunk UFOs, as per the recommendations of the 1953
CIA panel. However, among those inclined to believe such claims, outrageous
stories of the Lazar type can provide a convenient smokescreen. Smokescreen
for what, you ask? Well, for what everyone--both UFO believers and
skeptics--seems to agree is going on at Area 51, namely the development and
testing of super-high tech weaponry. The "debate" is over whether or not
the technology in question is derived from "alien" sources. But for those
charged with running such a super-weapons lab, a prime interest is secrecy.
To such cloak-and-dagger types, wild stories about UFO bases and alien bodies
may be just what the spin doctor ordered. They could be very effective at
distracting the public from, and confusing the enemy about, what's really
going on. ("The Pentagon bookstore," Corso co-author Birne enthuses, "stocks
The Day After Roswell..")8
In other words, I'm suggesting that the national security establishment decided,
at some point, to go beyond the recommendations of the 1953 CIA panel regarding
UFOs. Moreover, they in effect decided to do to the American public what
they feared the Soviets would do; they decided to contribute to--to foment--UFO
hysteria or, at least, confusion. Of course, their motivation for doing so
would have been different from that of the purported Soviet enemy. The rationale
would be classically Cold War: we have to develop new weaponry and we have
to conceal that development; moreover, we have to know what might happen
if an enemy power were to induce UFO hysteria nationwide.
The same kind of twisted logic drove other secret U.S. projects during the
Cold War. Korean War reports about Red Chinese "brainwashing" of American
prisoners provided the rationale for decades of CIA research into mind control
techniques. When atomic war loomed as a real possibility in the fifties,
the need to understand its effects was used to justify experiments which
exposed unwitting Americans to nuclear radiation. Compared to those interventions
in the name of national security, the creation of some UFO hysteria seems
a modest imposition.
So, to return to Corso and the question of his purpose: he may be hoping
to cash in on a popular topic; he may be some sort of kook; or he may be
carrying water for the Pentagon (or all of the above). We can't say for sure,
but a couple of things are clear: he has a background with the Pentagon,
with, more specifically, military intelligence; and there is evidence to
suggest that he's had a career as a disinformation specialist.
Secret Societies
For details on this point we must turn to the literature on the Kennedy
assassination. That, you may object, is like jumping from the frying pan
into the fire, for if there is another topic of popular interest that's as
whacked-out as UFOs, it's the Kennedy assassination. But bear with me, and
keep in mind that the authors I am about to cite approach their research
in the most scrupulous fashion. Unlike Corso, they footnote their work with
scholarly precision and distinguish clearly between facts and inferences,
theories and speculations. The books detailing Corso's background include
Deep Politics and the Death of JFK by UC/Berkeley professor Peter Dale Scott;
The Man Who Knew Too Much by journalist Dick Russell; and a tome about American
intelligence (which does not emphasize the JFK case) called The Old Boys
by Burton Hersh. They concur on the following history:
In the early sixties Corso was a member of a secret society called The Sovereign
Order of Saint John of Jerusalem, also known as the Shickshinny Knights of
Malta, after the Pennsylvania town where the order was based. (This group
is not to be confused with the other--and better known--Knights of Malta,
the Rome-based Sovereign Military Order of Malta.)9 The order's
"Armed Services Committee" was full of retired military types with ultra-rightist
sympathies and included generals from the MacArthur circle like Bonner Fellers
and Pedro del Valle. The Committee also included British Admiral Sir Barry
Domville, who was fingered by the English as a Nazi agent and jailed during
World War II, and General Charles Willoughby, former chief of intelligence
for General Douglas MacArthur, whom MacArthur referred to as "my little
fascist."10
The Shickshinny Knights were fanatical anticommunists. Some of them, like
Willoughby, were affiliated with international ultra-rightist organizations
like the World Anticommunist League and the International Committee for the
Defense of Christian Culture. Shickshinny, PA was itself the home of many
White Russians who had fled Russia when the Bolsheviks came to power. In
1963, the Grand Chancellor of the Order was Col. Charles Thourot Pichel;
during the thirties, Pichel had lobbied the German government to appoint
him the official American liaison to Hitler.11
The Shickshinny Knights Armed Services Committee membership list also included
Philip J. Corso, who, according to Russell, "had been a twenty-year Army
Intelligence career man until his retirement in August 1963".12
Russell notes that in 1954 Corso had been the Army Operations Coordinating
Board's delegate to the CIA team planning the overthrow of Guatemalan President
Jacobo Arbenz Guzman. (This coup, in which the democratically elected leftist
Arbenz was successfully removed from office, was primarily a U.S. intelligence
operation. It was celebrated by the CIA as a "bloodless coup" because nary
a shot was fired; rather, Arbenz was driven to flee the country by a barrage
of U.S.-backed disinformation and propaganda. In other words, it was for
the most part what spy folk call a "psy op," or psychological operation.)
In 1956, Corso worked with West German paramilitary units connected to the
spy network of former Nazi masterspy Reinhard Gehlen.13 (Corso
himself claims that he participated in Operation Paperclip, the American
intelligence operation that repatriated Nazi rocket scientists like Werner
von Braun and Walter Dornberger to the U.S., so that they could run the U.S.
space program.)
According to Peter Dale Scott, after the Kennedy assassination, both Corso
and Frank Capell (another Shickshinny Knight, also an editor for the John
Birch Society) were instrumental in spreading "stories linking Oswald to
Russia and Ruby to Castro's Cuba."14 In Deep Politics, Scott argues
that such stories were systematically disseminated after the assassination
as part of a coverup, i.e., a disinformation scheme whose purpose was to
deflect attention away from the real forces behind the Kennedy murder.
Russell concurs, saying that Corso was "among the first to spread rumors
hinting that Oswald was tied to a Communist ring inside the
CIA".15 Apparently the colonel is still on the case: according
to Corso co-author Birne, an upcoming volume from the duo, tentatively titled
The Day After Dallas, will give the real insider's lowdown on the JFK
assassination, emphasizing alleged penetration of the CIA and "the entire
U.S. secret government," by the KGB.16 (Interestingly, Russell
explores indications--admittedly circumstantial--suggesting that the real
group behind the assassination was connected to Willoughby and a "right-wing
clique inside the Pentagon."17
Both Russell and Scott link Willoughby, Corso, and company to a power struggle
within the national security establishment between ultra-right military
intelligence types and more "liberal," civilian CIA men.
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Willoughby's "old boys" were a vastly different breed from the old-school
tie, Ivy League crowd who ran the CIA. Their enmity went back to a battle
for hegemony between Military Intelligence and the OSS [the CIA] during World
War II. While the CIA's power base expanded, the MacArthur-Willoughby's team's
very existence was threatened. One Democratic president, Harry Truman, pushed
them out of the far east. But Willoughby and his ilk did not fade away. They
melded into global alliances, extending from quasi-religious orders such
as the Shickshinny Knights of Malta to the [ex-Nazi] Reinhard Gehlen-Otto
Skorzeny spy team in Europe.18
Such details may have no bearing on Corso's bizarre UFO memoir. But they
make clear that Corso has had a lifelong association with military intelligence
and the ultra-right. They also suggest that he's no slouch at disinformation
schemes and no stranger to hidden agendas. Furthermore, it's clear from such
history that Corso is a veteran of CIA-style espionage. Interestingly, in
The Day After Roswell, he paints CIA types as the bad guys in the story.
It's this branch of the government that is bent on keeping the truth from
the American people, Corso implies. Salt of the earth military patriots like
himself just want the truth to come out, dadgummit.
Populist Generals
The image of populist generals fighting faceless bureaucrats on behalf of
you and me has great appeal to Americans raised on John Wayne and Jimmy Stewart
movies. Author Jim Marrs concludes his recent book on UFOs, Alien Agenda,
on just such a note, ascribing the alleged government coverup of alleged
alien presence to the exploitative "money power" that was the target of the
old populist political movement.19 Marrs even brings up the story
of the populist General Smedley Butler, who, after a career as one of the
Marine Corps' most celebrated leaders, repudiated imperialism and the globalist
agenda of corporate America back in the 1930s. Butler is a fascinating figure
(he began as the most gungho of Marines and ended as a spokesman for the
League Against War and Fascism) but he has zero to do with UFOs.20
But for Marrs the UFO issue is basically populist politics; as with the Kennedy
assassination (the subject of Marrs' bestselling Crossfire, it's a case of
the people being lied to and manipulated by the elites of business and
government.
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Corso strikes a similar pose: he's a populist general--or colonel, anyway--who's
here to blow the whistle on what those creeps in the ivory towers are doing
to us. But Corso is no Smedley Butler, nor is he a populist in the old sense
of the term, where the slogan "Share the Wealth" implied a concern for the
underclass. The Shickshinny Knights who made up the Armed Services Committee
of the society were described in the group's literature as "Soldiers of Christ
and Advocates of a Free World"--as the shock troops of global
anticommunism.21 Sharing the wealth, it seems safe to say, was
not part of their agenda.
But even Corso's pseudo-populist position has a Shickshinny feel to it. As
both Scott and Russell demonstrate, the Shickshinny milieu represents a faction
of the intelligence community that is to the right of the CIA and which views
the whole civilian intelligence apparatus as a hotbed of dangerous liberalism.
J. Edgar Hoover's own turf war with the CIA during the 1950s factors into
this. As Scott writes:
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The intra-bureaucratic feud of the 1950s between the CIA and Hoover was much
more than a matter of personalities: it was a conflict between alternate
visions (globalist/internationalist versus nationalist/expansionist) of how
the United States should expand into the rest of the world. Where the major
oil companies and their allies in the CIA thought of creating and dominating
a global economy, their nationalist opposition in the United States preferred
unilateralist expansion into specific areas, above all Latin America and
the far east. The latter group allied dissident generals, resentful of civilian
control, with exploiters of minerals and independent oilmen opposed to the
oil majors, like William Pawley and H. L. Hunt.22
These days, many would argue that the people would be well served by more
opposition to the global economy and its elite promoters. But the "nationalist"
opposition to globalization described above might as well be called the "fascist"
opposition. Hunt, Hoover, and the Shickshinny types may not be fans of
globalization, but they sure aren't the champions of ordinary folk. For
"unilateralist expansion into. . . Latin America and the far east," read
"Guatemala," "Chile," "Korea," "Vietnam."
Propaganda for the Ultra-Right
Coming back then to the question of what Corso is up to, I want to propose
another possibility. While Corso is no doubt enriching himself at least a
bit, and while his claims may indeed help the Pentagon disguise projects
like Area 51, he may have still another purpose in mind, the same one he
had in mind back in 1963: namely, stirring up popular sentiment against
internationalism and the dangerous liberals in the CIA. (Imagine, for a moment,
the mindset that views the CIA as "liberal.") He may be performing his
Shickshinny specialty, spreading propaganda on behalf of the reactionary
right. It's just that today he's using popular belief in UFO coverups to
do so.
Think about it: conspiracy theories have of late become the national pastime.
Of course, this is understandable, given that actual conspiracies--like
Watergate, Iran-Contra, and the Kennedy coverup--have inundated the American
people in recent decades. The current popular obsession with conspiracies
is also fueled by the decline of the old myth, dominant in the fifties and
so flattering to America's self image, which assured Americans that conspiracies
can't happen here. In recent years the old myth has collapsed under the weight
of reality. But now, in place of the discredited old certainty, the popular
imagination has embraced a new myth, one that is just as sweeping and irrational
as the old one, but which says the opposite: i.e., everything's a conspiracy.
And in this, activists of the ultra-right see an organizing tool.
The ultra-right has a long historical association with conspiracy theories;
claims that the Jews were plotting to take over the world served Hitler and
the Nazis quite well in their rise to power. Today, in the wake of the Cold
War, it's quite clear that the ultra-right is on the rise again, as are
grandiose, demonizing conspiracy theories. In some corners, a program appears
to be underway whose purpose is to exploit popular interest in conspiracies
for rightist purposes. Consider the militia subculture: while this milieu
no doubt includes some people who are sincere in their distrust of big
government, it's also full of neo-Nazi organizers looking to draw such innocents
into the fascist orbit. Conspiracy theories about government plots, many
of them as kooky sounding and ill-supported as those spouted by Corso, abound
in this same milieu. These help drive a wedge between the people and "the
government," reinforcing a popular alienation which the ultra-rightists can
exploit.
Lore about UFOs and government coverups can be made to fit this same
pattern.23 It's a popular mythology that can be used to convince
people--through drama, not data--that yes, something terribly wrong, something
virtually demonic, is going on "in Washington." Of course, not everyone will
be convinced by such propaganda; indeed, many won't even listen; but some
will, and they will tend to encounter the stories in media contexts where
standards of proof are, at best, loose. On talk radio, on the Internet, in
subcultures like those surrounding the militias or ufology, assertion often
passes for proof and rumor for fact.
Propagandists for the ultra-right have, one suspects, figured this out. They've
targeted these marginal, unregulated areas of the media and are using them
to spread myths, rumors and lies, the gist of which is always the same: that
"the Guvmint" is your worst enemy. Never mind that the people spreading such
tales often emerge from the national security milieu themselves, as was the
case with the Shickshinny rumormongers in 1963. Never mind that their quibble
seems to be not with exploitation per se but with who gets to reap the benefits
of it. Never mind that such "Soldiers of Christ" seem mostly to worship military
might.
Is Corso still a propagandist of this type, or is he today just a buffoon?
The colonel ends his book congratulating himself on having saved his country,
his planet, and his species It's so ridiculous, you have to chuckle. Old
Soldiers of Christ never die; they just protect the earth from the scum of
the universe. And hey, you can't argue with that. But let us give the last
word here to a different kind of soldier:
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We must give up the Prussian ideal--carrying on offensive warfare and imposing
our wills upon other people in distant places. Such doctrine is un-American
and vicious. . .
There must be no more reactionary and destructive intelligence work. The
true domestic enemies of our nation--hunger, injustice, and exploitation--should
concern the military intelligence; not the subversive shadows of their own
creation.24
So wrote Smedley Butler, ex-Marine general and authentic populist, in 1935.
Now: who you gonna call?
Notes and References
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