Ancillary Mercy полностью

The most interesting UFO incident of 1963 occurred in Britain, where throughout the mid-1960s landings and crop circles were increasingly common. In many of these cases, reeds and grass were found in a clockwise swirl. On July 15, in the English town of Charlton, Wiltshire, a farmer named Roy Blanchard discovered a strange crater in his potato field, about eight feet wide and four inches deep. A hole at the center was three feet deep and less than a foot in diameter. All vegetation inside the circle was burned, leaving only the bare earth, and there were four “slots” in the ground around it, each about four feet long and a foot wide. A small piece of metal was recovered from the hole. British astronomer Patrick Moore stated that a “shrimp-sized meteorite” caused the crater. A military investigation, however, showed no burn or scratch marks, nor any trace of an explosion. Just prior to the appearance of this crater, several UFO reports had come from the neighborhood. Moreover, a number of “craters” also appeared in other areas in England and Scotland, some quite large. The series of events gained much coverage in Flying Saucer Review, and the journal of the British UFO Association (BUFOA). Soon after, on August 1, a former RAF pilot and current flying instructor in Garston, Hertfordshire, England, saw a triangular UFO which hovered for a long period of time, then climbed out of sight. An air traffic controller four miles away also saw it.²²

But Britain was over there. Across the Atlantic, congressional interest in UFOs was extremely low. On July 18, 1963, Georgia Congressman Carl Vinson made the last congressional inquiry into UFOs for the next three years.²³

ASSASSINATION AND SECRET DOINGS: 1963 AND 1964

In Dallas, on November 22, 1963, John F. Kennedy was assassinated. Working from the premise that one contentious conspiracy theory is quite sufficient for one book, we will restrict ourselves to a few remarks regarding the official investigation.

FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover had a hatred of all things Kennedy. He had known about, and used, JFK’s womanizing to his advantage. He detested his direct superior, Attorney General Robert Kennedy. In August 1962, when Marilyn Monroe died, Hoover had information connecting RFK to Monroe’s residence that day; he used this information to his advantage, too. In June 1963, when JFK met with Martin Luther King, Jr., at the White House, Kennedy actually took King outside, where there were no FBI bugs, to warn him about Hoover’s surveillance.

After the assassination, Hoover’s office filtered nearly all information going to the Warren Commission. Caught in the net, among much else, were connections to the world of organized crime, which the assassination suggested at myriad points. Hoover may have had connections to that world and may even have been blackmailed by it.²⁴ He also filtered out ties to the FBI itself. Within mere hours of the assassination, Hoover stated definitively that Lee Harvey Oswald had acted alone. He denied that either Oswald or Oswald’s own assassin, Jack Ruby, had ever been FBI informants. Yet, it later surfaced that Ruby had, in addition to his links to the Mafia, no fewer than nine contacts with the FBI and was listed in FBI files as potential criminal informant. If Hoover misled the Warren Commission about Ruby, what about Oswald? Oswald was well-known to the CIA long before the assassination, a fact unknown to the Warren Commission.

By this time, the U.S. intelligence community was spending an estimated $4 billion annually via federal channels; this was distinct from money generated through private ventures, of which there are no financial records, but which was probably considerable. Even Truman commented on the growing secret state. On December 22, 1963, the Washington Post quoted him as “disturbed by the way in which the CIA has been diverted from its original assignment.” It had “become a government all of its own and all secret. They don’t have to account to anybody.”²⁵

These were true words. Year after year, the CIA seemed to outdo itself. Its activities in Southeast Asia have already been discussed. During 1964, the CIA also fixed the Chilean elections to defeat Marxist candidate Salvador Allende. Richard Helms, chief of clandestine operations, coordinated the action. Incredibly, more than half of all money spent on this election came from the CIA. In addition, CIA was flying Cuban exile pilots—Bay of Pigs veterans—in B-26 bombers over the Congo, under the cover of a dummy company. Their mission was now to suppress a revolt against the Central Congolese government of Joseph Mobutu, who had wasted no time in his quest for personal enrichment at the expense of his people.²⁶