Not surprisingly, many of NICAP’s early reports came from the navy, some directly through Fahrney. One example (of which an identical report was given independently in 1958 to NICAP advisor Lou Corbin), concerns an incident that took place in 1953. According to the report, a squadron of carrier-based Navy AD-3s had been practicing offshore combat maneuvers. As Keyhoe described it, when the planes reformed:
an enormous rocket-shaped machine swooped down over them. Swiftly decelerating to their speed, it leveled off a thousand feet above the squadron ... the pilots spread out ... and climbed at full throttle toward the giant spaceship. The huge craft turned sharply ... and with a tremedous burst of power it shot into the sky, vanishing in seconds.
Three air force intelligence officers were flown to the carrier, and an air force colonel grilled the navy men. Without consulting the carrier captain, he warned them “to forget what you saw today! You’re not to discuss it with anyone—not even among yourselves!” However, since no navy order backed up the air force colonel, the report leaked to Fahrney.6
In May, NICAP nearly printed a phony UFO crash story that was said to take place in the Everglades, based on an account it received by AP wire. The crash story struck Keyhoe as too sensational to be credible, and he checked directly with AP, which acknowledged that, while the wires looked genuine, the story was “definitely fake.” The company traced the story to an AP employee who had been “a former Signal Corps engineer” familiar with teletype systems. The employee admitted to faking the stories, refused to give any motive, and stubbornly denied involvement of anyone else. This was pretty strong stuff when Keyhoe published the account in 1960. But neither Keyhoe nor anyone else knew at that time that Shamrock—an operation run by the NSA, formerly by the Signal Corps—was intercepting electronic transmissions on a daily basis throughout the U.S. and abroad. Evidently, Shamrock was also spreading disinformation relating to UFOs.7
The preceding incident becomes more interesting when we note that in November 1956, Air Force Director of Intelligence John Samford succeeded Julian Canine as DIRNSA. Like Cabell, Samford was a general who assumed an even more prominent role in the world of intelligence after spending time on the UFO problem. While Cabell was the number two man at the CIA, Samford now became the number one man at the NSA, America’s most secretive intelligence agency. Samford was only one of three people who knew all the details of Shamrock. Is it simply a coincidence that NICAP was nearly discredited by a phony AP story, planted by a “former” Signal Corps member, just months after Samford took charge of the NSA? Hard proof of the NSA’s involvement will surely never surface, but considering NSA activities and capabilities from 1957, a little AP disinformation would have been child’s play.8
CREATING ZOMBIE ROOMS
UFOs, of course, were by no means the only secret of the U.S. government. By 1957, the CIA’s MK-Ultra program had moved six drugs into active use. In February, Sid Gottlieb organized field trials of psilocybin (the active ingredient of hallucinogenic—“magic”—mushrooms) for injection into nine black inmates at the Addiction Center in Lexington, Kentucky. At the end of February, Dulles approved Ewen Cameron’s application for mind-control experiments to be administered at McGill University in Montreal, funded through the Society for the Investigation of Human Ecology, a CIA cutout organization. Cameron, the most prestigious psychiatrist in North America at the time, coined the terms “depatterning” and “psychic driving” to describe what he did to people. He was also a leading proponent of “psychic surgery,” that is, lobotomies. Cameron immediately began serious work on sensory deprivation and created a “sleep room.” This was a dimly lit dormitory of about twenty beds where patients were drugged, given electroshock, and lobotomized. The nurses aptly called it “The Zombie Room.” The importance of keeping this grisly work off American soil was self-evident, hence its location in Canada. The Canadian government, as far as anyone can determine, was unaware of these activities. At the same time, U.S. Army Intelligence, in conjunction with the Army Chemical Corps and the CIA, began using drugs such as LSD and PCP on
