Ancillary Mercy полностью

The failure of Congress to do anything productive about ending UFO secrecy did not reflect the wishes of citizens who were directly affected by it. On December 22, 1958, came the report that 450 airline pilots had signed a petition—alas, futile—protesting the official policy of debunking UFO sightings. This was an extraordinary and unheard-of development. One pilot described the policy as “a lesson in lying, intrigue, and the ‘Big Brother’ attitude carried to the ultimate extreme.” Of the signatories, over fifty had personally reported UFO sightings (!) but had been told by the air force they were mistaken. Even so, the air force still warned them that they faced up to ten years in prison under JANAP 146 if they revealed details of their sightings to the media.⁸⁰

The ability of the air force and its allies to disable the movement against UFO secrecy was most impressive. It was certainly not above playing dirty pool: back in 1957 someone—most probably the NSA—was behind the attempt to feed NICAP false information in order to discredit it. During 1958, the air force exerted heavy-handed, but effective, control over television to censor Keyhoe, was deft and deceptive in managing the press and Congress, and—in the case of Ruppelt—seems to have disabled a key individual who threatened its position on UFOs. Not a bad year.

The trend continued in 1959. In retrospect, it is astonishing that Keyhoe entertained the idea of besting his nemesis, “The Silence Group.” He was going up against an organization that was into much more than he could dream of. The horrific experiments conducted by the army and CIA at Edgewood Arsenal and McGill University, unchecked by any responsible authority, only got worse. By 1959, LSD was a sideshow compared with another chemical: quinunclidinyl benzilate, or BZ. Incredibly, this drug possessed effects far more profound than LSD and which lasted for three days, although effects lasting as long as six days occurred at times. Between 1959 and 1975, an estimated 2,800 U.S. soldiers were given BZ at Edgewood Arsenal. About this time, Jose Delgado invented a device he called the stimoceiver. This was a miniature depth electrode able to receive and transmit electronic signals over FM radio waves. By stimulating a correctly positioned stimoceiver, an outside operator could wield a surprising degree of control over the subject responses.⁸¹

Writing of such developments in a book about UFOs is no mere exercise in paranoia. Such tools of mind control, developed and used by the American national security state, show what these official branches of the American government were capable of. We must assume that inventions such as Delgado’s were not merely drawing room experiments done for reasons of pure science. Inventions such as these had to be field tested. Against whom? Probably, as we have seen elsewhere, against hapless prisoners, minorities, and unsuspecting patriotic soldiers. It is maddening but true that the full dimension of this history will never be revealed. We shall never know whether an important or prominent person really died from an ordinary heart attack at just the wrong time. We can never know if someone lost their mind because of the inscrutable workings of their brain chemistry, or because the CIA made them lose it. Because America’s official culture pretends that such realities do not exist, even stating these as possibilities places one into the crackpot paranoia category of public discourse. But the fact is that from the 1950s onward, and with increasing effectiveness with each passing year, America’s national security groups developed effective, and wholly secret, means of disabling individuals as well as large groups.

All this is a separate issue from whether or not such techniques were ever used against people in the UFO field. Surely, however, if the government deemed it fit to experiment upon patriotic and trusting soldiers, may one at least assume they would have had fewer qualms about using such means against irritating pests within the UFO arena? We must realize, of course, that in matters such as this, “proof” will never, ever arise. One is left only with suspicion.