COVER-UPS AND UFO ENCOUNTERS THAT INSPIRE THE SHOW
By John L. Flynn
A twenty-two year-old man is supposedly abducted from a forest in east central Arizona, and his six friends are arrested and charged with his murder. The United States Air Force retrieves alien technology from a downed UFO, and installs it in experimental aircraft. Several men and women, suffering from severe exhaustion and disorientation, report the loss of significant amounts of time from their daily routine that cannot be otherwise explained. The remains for four alien bodies are recovered from the wreckage of a flying saucer, and then hidden at a nearby Air Force Base. And a middle class family is terrorized by alien abductors in their upstate New York cabin. Excerpts from The X-Files episode guide? Not exactly. Even though the Federal Bureau of Investigation does not routinely assign agents to probe unsolved cases dealing with UFOs and alien abduction, the stories which form the basis of the hit television series are taken from actual accounts and documentation of unexplained phenomenon. In fact, the thousands of documents on UFOs and alien abduction, compiled by agencies like the FBI and released under provisions of the Freedom of Information Act, provide accounts that are far more bizarre and intriguing than those investigated by Mulder and Scully. The truth is not only out there, but much more interesting than the weekly excursions into fantasy. The pilot episode of The X-Files establishes several important details about the background of the two lead characters, and their assignment with the Federal Bureau of Investigation. Agent Fox Mulder is an Oxford-trained psychologist with a photographic memory who earned the nickname "Spooky" from his fellow classmates at the FBI Academy because of his uncanny ability to process information and leap ahead to logical conclusions. During his first three years with the Bureau, while working as a crack analyst in the behavorial sciences department, he stumbled upon a collection of unsolved cases dealing with unexplained phenomena. Agent Dana Scully, a medical doctor with an undergraduate degree in physics from the University of Maryland, is skeptical of anything paranormal, choosing to believe that everything has a logical and scientific explanation. While their characters are clearly fictional, they do epitomize the finer qualities of a Bureau operativ. Most agents are highly educated, possess multiple degrees, demonstrate superior problem-solving skills and exhibit keen resourcefulness.
GOVERNMENT COVERUPS
Agents Fox Mulder and Dana Scully routinely probe cases involving UFOs and alien abduction as part of their duties with the Violent Crimes Division. Their assignments often put them at odds with other intelligence agencies, notably the National Security Agency (NSA) and the yet-as-unnamed organization to which the Smoking Man belongs. Over the years, the Federal Bureau of Investigation has cooperated with local jurisdictions and other federal agencies in the study of unexplained phenomenon, but it does not maintain a special section or taskforce for that study. In fact, the FBI has been routinely left out of the intelligence loop, and often discouraged from taking on such assignments. In April 1973, for instance, the Bureau was asked to launch an intensive investigation, following a series of cattle mutilations in Iowa, but the FBI was actually reluctant to get involved. Director Clarence M. Kelley stated that "the investigation of Unidentified Flying Objects is not and never has been a matter that is within the investigative jurisdiction of the FBI." While the Federal Bureau of Investigation was involved in several earlier studies, most notably Kenneth Arnold's famous sighting of nine disk-shaped objects over the Cascade Mountains in 1947, its authority has repeatedly been superseded by the venue of other intelligence organizations.
One of the earliest government agencies to examine the sightings of UFOs was the United States Air Force, under the code name Project Sign. Project Sign (later renamed Project Saucer) investigated hundreds of reports and gathered tons of physical evidence before giving way to another, far more important project. Project Grudge, also attached to the Air Technical Intelligence Center at Wright Field, took a much more negative approach to the issue of flying saucers. During the same period, President Truman formed a special intelligence group, code-named "Majestic-12," to investigate Unidentified Flying Objects, and report its findings to the President. The group was comprised of a dozen top scientists, researchers and military leaders, and had an intelligence rating higher than those making the hydrogen bomb. Under government auspices, a number of other projects were established to study the question of extraterrestrials. Project Garnet studied the evolution of man on earth, and how that evolution was affected or related to aliens. Project Sigma, a forerunner of SETI, dealt with alien communication, while Project Snowbird researched the development and use of alien technology. The most secretive of studies, Project Gleem (later renamed Project Aquarius), was devoted to the accumulation of data about alien life forms.
When President-elect Dwight D. Eisenhower was first briefed by Majestic-12 about the remains of four alien bodies and the wreckage of a flying saucer, the issue of&127 disinformation was raised. The crash at Roswell, New Mexico, had been bungled, and far too many civilians were asking questions. As a result, a new, low-level effort by the Air Force replaced Project Grudge. Project Blue Book was formed to gather and control information, and at times mislead the public by explaining away as many reports as possible. MJ-12 and Project Aquarius continued to provide government leaders with the true findings. In subsequent years, the National Security Agency, the Central Intelligence Agency and the Defense Intelligence Agency have assumed control of most investigations under the mantle of national security. Even the Joint Chiefs of Staff, through the Pentagon's National Military Command Center, has its own secret command structure to deal with UFO issues. Chris Carter's "Smoking Man," undoubtably a founding member of MJ-12 or one of these other arcane organizations, represents a synthesis of all of the government power-brokers who are determined to keep UFOs a secret.
The "back story," which sustains much of the tension and paranoia in the television series, suggests that these top secret organizations have been deliberately concealing information about UFOs and alien abduction from the public. This contention is not a new one, and has been raised repeatedly since "flying saucers" first made headlines throughout the world in 1947. But far too many people have actually witnessed or experienced some type of unexplained phenomenon, or know someone who has, to perpetuate this charade. The official denials by the Government of the United States have given rise to the suspicion that not only is the public being told less than the truth but also a massive cover-up has suppressed the overwhelming evidence that UFOs are real. Agent Fox Mulder's paranoia is merely a reflection of the mistrust that most people feel towards the government.
Daniel E. Keyhoe's The Flying Saucer Conspiracy (Henry Holt & Company, 1955) first exposed key information about the Air Force Project Sign and the Majestic-12 group forty years ago to an innocent America. Larry Fawcett and Barry Greenwood's Clear Intent: The Government Coverup of the UFO Experience (Prentice-Hall, 1984) and Timothy Good's Above Top Secret: The Worldwide UFO Cover-up (Morrow, 1988) both reveal a massive conspiracy on the part of the United States government and other governments to coverup information about alien landings and abductions. In fact, their use of the more than 10,000 pages of Freedom of Information Act documents about UFOs that are now in the hands of the public detail exactly how the various agencies have conspired to obscure the facts. Some of those controversial reports have been reworked by the writers of The X-Files into some of the show's finest hours.
In the episode Deep Throat (9/17/93), Fox Mulder and Dana Scully's investigation into the disappearance of a test pilot at Ellens Air Force Base, Idaho, leads to the inescapable conclusion that the military is experimenting with alien technology. Not far from Nellis Air Force Base, Nevada, about eighty miles north-northwest of Las Vegas, extremely advanced and unconventional aircraft have been seen traversing the skies over a top secret site known as "Area 51" (or "Dreamland"). According to a mysterious Colonel "L," who was stationed there in 1970, and Robert Lazar, a former employee, the facility has at least three captured UFOs, two nearly complete and one dismantled. Designated Project Red Light (or simply "Red Light") the military has been supposedly researching the development and implementation of gravity-drive systems, flying saucer designs, advanced stealth technology and alien weaponry. In fact, one of the operational UFOs was said to have exploded in flight with two American test pilots aboard. Whether the facility really studies UFOs or not, two undeniable facts are true. Workers are flown to and from the site aboard a chartered Boeing 737 originating at McCarron Airport every day. And curiosity seekers in the Groom Dry Lake area are routinely searched and turned away by armed security teams.
According to another classified report, the military has recovered three alien spacecraft from the Southwestern United States. In 1947, near Roswell, New Mexico, officials from the 509th Bomb Group Intelligence Office (including Major Jess Marcel) retrieved wreckage, which was scattered over a three-quarter mile area, of a flying saucer. While the cover story of a weather balloon was used to obscure an earlier press leak, the actual debris was loaded on a B-29 and flown to Wright Field (now Wright-Patterson AFB) in Dayton, Ohio, for study. Two years later, not far from the Roswell site, the wreckage of another alien craft was discovered, and immediately hidden from the public. In 1958, the United States recovered a third alien spacecraft from the Utah desert. The craft was in excellant flying condition, and had been mysteriously abandoned by its occupants. When examined by a group of scientists, the instrumentation was so complex that none of them could fully comprehend its operation. Shortly thereafter, funds were not only appropriated by Project Snowbird to begin a more intensive study but also to contact the aliens who had abandoned their craft. In Fallen Angel (11/19/93), Mulder investigates the government cover-up of a UFO crash site, and discovers that the military is trying to bring in a UFO enthusiast who might have vital information about a recovered spacecraft. Fact or fiction? When a downed UFO crashes near Iraqi airspace, in the episode E.B.E. (2/18/94), Agents Mulder and Scully track an unmarked truck, carrying an extraterrestrial occupant, to its destination at an airbase. According to reports, the United States Government has not only recovered bodies but also captured a real-life ET. In 1977, a top secret document from ORCON (Dissemination and Extraction of Information Controlled by Originator) was made public during the Carter Administration. The document revealed that one alien (called an E.B.E., or Extraterrestrial Biological Entity) survived the second crash in New Mexico (in 1949), and was thoroughly interrogated by military personnel at a secret airbase. The E.B.E. disclosed, before its death of an unexplained illness in 1952, that it came from a planet in the Zeta Reticula star system, and that its social structure was thousands of years ahead of our own. The alien's body was frozen, like those earlier ones from Roswell, and transported to another facility for study. Project Bando, established in 1949 by the military to collect and evaluate medical information about E.B.E.s, allowed scientists and medical researchers to dissect the alien bodies. Soon after the experiments, contact was established with two other E.B.E.s, and both were invited as guests to live in secret at the base.
Project Sign's Report #13 also disclosed that as many as sixteen bodies were found at a separate site in Aztec, New Mexico, in 1948. Dr. Detlev Bronk, a physiologist and biophysicist, was brought in to conduct an autopsy on one of the aliens. The gray figure, which was about four feet in height with large slanted eyes and long pointy ears, confirmed many suspicions scientists had about the origins and evolution of life on earth. Bronk and his colleagues also removed extraterrestrial DNA to see if there was any evidence to confirm genetic manipulation. (Several researchers suspect that aliens may been manipulating our own gene pool to create the best human.) All of the bodies were then frozen by Dr. Paul Scherer, a cryogenics specialist, and transported aboard three trucks covered with tarpulins marked "explosives." In The Erlenmeyer Flask (5/13/94), Fox Mulder stumbles upon a plot in which the government is experimenting on human subjects with extraterrestrial DNA. Incredible as that story may seem, the government has been conducting its own genetic tests for nearly fifty years.
ALIEN ABDUCTIONS
Tales of alien abduction and missing time--often the most shocking and frightening encounters with the unknown--have formed the basis of five out of the forty-plus episodes of The X-Files. In the Pilot episode, for example, viewers are told that Fox Mulder's fascination with the paranormal dates back to a childhood incident when he was twelve. Apparently, through hypnosis and deep regressive therapy, he has learned that he witnessed the alien abduction of his eight year-old sister Samantha from their home in Chilmark, Mass. His drive to solve these unusual cases of alien abduction is related to a desire to mentally put to rest his sister's cries for help for which he was too paralyzed as a child with fear to respond. This fictional account of Samantha Mulder's disappearance seems to have been inspired by the night siege experienced by author Whitley Strieber. Strieber writes in Communion (William Morrow, 1987) and Transformation (William Morrow, 1988) that he and his family were terrorized by an extraterrestrial force at their cabin in the woods of upstate New York.
Of course, close encounters of the third kind, the term originated by Dr. J. Allen Hynek to which they are more commonly referred, are not that unusual. They have been documented, discussed, analyzed, seemingly debunked and re-examined for overly thirty-five years. The most famous case of alien abduction and missing time centers around Betty and Barney Hill, an interracial couple from Portsmouth, New Hamshire. On the night of September 19-20, 1961, the Hills were returning to their home from a vacation in Niagara Falls when they experienced a bright light above U.S. Route 3. They pulled off the road, and Barney went out onto a field near Indian Head to observe a UFO at close range. Two hours and thirty-five miles later, the Hills were again traveling on the highway with no conscious recollection of what had happened. The couple soon realized that they were missing time from their trip, but it would be over two years later, under intensive hypno-therapy, that Betty and Barney Hill would discover they had been abducted and studied by aliens. Their story has been retold a number of times, most notably in John Fuller's book The Interrupted Journey (Dial Press, 1966) and a popular tele-film.
The dramatic situation in the Pilot episode, dealing with the abduction of several high school classmates in Oregon, seems influenced by the real-life drama of Betty and Barney Hill and other, more recent accounts of alien abduction. Budd Hopkins, probably the foremost investigator of abductions, wrote the highly-regarded study Missing Time: A Documented Study of UFO Abductions (New York: Richard Marek, 1981), in which he interviewed hundreds of people who had experienced the unusual phenomenon of lost time. Chris Carter must have been familiar enough with each of these cases to provide the basis for not only his Bellefleur abductions but also for Mulder and Scully's missing nine minutes. Since then, Mulder has lost additional time in Deep Throat, E.B.E. and Little Green Men, while Scully has lost an indeterminate amount of time in E.B.E. and approximately three months in Ascension/One Breath. Similarly, the well-documented abduction of Travis Walton, the basis of several books (one written by Walton himself in 1978) and the motion picture Fire In the Sky (1993), drives the fictional nightmares of the tormented protagonist in Duane Barry (10/14/94). Walton, a twenty- two year-old woodcutter with the U.S. Forest Service, was abducted on November 5, 1975, in plain view of his six co-workers (who were subsequently charged with his muder). Five days later, Travis awoke a quarter mile west of Heber, Arizona, and began experiencing nightmares of such unspeakable horror that he sought out a therapist. After months of regressive hypnosis, he remembered being strapped to a table aboard the spacecraft and being tortured by the inhabitants with strange medical instruments. Polygraph and Psychological Stress Evaluator tests have established that he told the truth. Coincidentally, Travis' brother was named Duane. In Conduit (10/1/93), a divorcee who claims to have seen a flying saucer as a child tells Mulder and Scully that her teenage daughter was abducted while on a recent camping trip. This episode clearly smacks of two other, well-documented abduction cases. In 1973, Pat Roach, a divorced woman living alone with her two daughters, was taken aboard a craft standing in the empty field next to her house. Once inside the craft, she was separated from her children, taken to a small medical room and given a gynecological examination by one of the alien creatures. Her daughters, Bonnie and Debbie, were also placed on a machine, and given a full exam. All three were then returned to their home. Another account, taken from 1967, tells of a woman's abduction from her home in South Ashburnham, Massachusetts. Betty Andreasson was abducted from her kitchen, while her seven children, mother and father were placed into suspended animation. During Betty's abduction, her eleven-year-old daughter Becky was revived momentarily as part of the study. Betty was then examined and returned, unharmed, to her home. Both accounts were thoroughly investigated by UFO experts, and deemed credible. Volumes and volumes of voice transcripts, documents, and supplementary materials further substantiate the claims by these and dozens of other individuals that alien abductions are real.
OTHER UFO ENCOUNTERS
In addition to the various sightings the United States Government has tried to suppress, or simply explain away, and the eye-witness accounts of alien abductions, many others have had encounters with UFOs. A recent survey, in fact, finds that more Americans believe in the existence of flying saucers and extraterrestrials than do not. That popular belief in UFOs has fueled a number of other episodes of The X-Files.
In Little Green Men (9/16/94), Mulder travels to an abandoned SETI program site in Puerto Rico with the hopes of contacting aliens. For years, the giant radio telescope at the Observatory of Arecibo has been transmitting coded messages to the stars. Not surprisingly, Puerto Rico has been the main focal point of dozens of UFO sightings dating back to the Fifties. In 1956, local residents reported seeing several disc-shaped craft in the airspace above Laguna Cartagena. In 1964, Quintin Ramirez had a close encounter with a flying saucer outside his home, not far from the location of the other sightings. The wave of sightings in 1980 culminated in a powerful aerial collision between unidentified craft near Cabo Rojo in 1981 that was witnessed by hundreds of spectators. Most recently, ten carloads of witnesses reported seeing five alien beings walking along the road. When one of the cars stopped, the aliens scrambled into the dense tropical rain forest nearby a military complex, long rumored to have played host to visiting E.B.E.s.
A former astronaut in Space (11/12/93) claims to be haunted by something he encountered during an earlier spacewalk in a truly chilling episode. Over the years, astronauts and test pilots have logged some of the most convincing reports of UFO sightings. Back in 1962, there were no less than four different accounts. John Glenn, while piloting his Mercury capsule, told Cape Cannaveral officials that he saw three objects follow and then overtake him at varying speeds. Similarly, Scott Carpenter reported seeing firefly-like objects, and even managed to photograph one. Test pilots Joe Walton and Robert White detected UFOs during several flights in the X-15, and shot several rolls of film. In 1964, James McDivitt claimed he saw a cylindrical object in the same object as his Gemini IV spacecraft. Both Frank Borman and Jim Lovell reported a bogie on their flight, and photographed twin oval-shaped UFOs with glowing undersides. Even Neil Armstrong and Edwin "Buzz" Aldrin said they saw a UFO chase their craft shortly before their historic moon landing. Recent reports by Shuttle astronauts have added to the sightings, but none of the photographs, possessed by NASA, have ever been released for publication.
Fact may well be stranger than fiction, if not always as easily accessible. Chris Carter, the creator of The X-Files, reminds us all that the truth is out there, buried in the tens of thousands of reports, voice transcripts, photographs, maps, drawings and other documentation that the United States Government has under lock and key. May be one day, if our bureaucracy ever deems us mature enough, we will all know the truth. Until then, Agents Fox Mulder and Dana Scully will have to stand as our fictional champions of the truth about alien abductions, government conspiracies and UFO encounters.
