James Schlesinger, a CIA outsider, replaced Helms, then named William Colby as head of clandestine services. At Colby’s urging, Schlesinger soon ordered CIA employees to report all suspected violations of the law, or of the CIA’s charter, to the CIA’s Inspector General. The result was a 693-page report called “Potential Flap Activities,” known more commonly as The Family Jewels. It discussed Operation Chaos, bits of MK-Ultra (although nothing significant), illegal domestic wiretaps and bugging, and so on. As amazing as these revelations were, there is little doubt that much, much more never surfaced. Schlesinger fired about one thousand CIA officers, then left the agency in July 1973 to take over at the Pentagon. Colby succeeded him as DCI, regarded as a traitor, possibly even a Soviet mole, by much of the old guard. Certainly James Angleton thought so, and Colby wasted no time in firing the CIA’s longtime counterintelligence expert.13
Classified information spilled out throughout 1973. People learned that the FBI actually wiretapped reporters and White House officials. Former White House staffer John Dean squawked first about the burglary of Ellsberg’s psychiatrist’s office, then about Nixon’s Enemies List. Nixon henchmen began to resign. The national security apparatus suddenly looked vulnerable, and the president most of all.14
UFOs IN THE EARLY 1970s
UFOs may have been old news in the early 1970s, but they had not gone away altogether. While there were few reports of strange craft, there were interesting reports of crop circles, as well as unexplained animal mutilations. Several cases described large, circular impressions within a grassy area, often after a witness claimed to see a large craft descend in the field the night before.15
Some landing reports were fairly well documented, such as the Delphos case of November 2, 1971. At a farm near Delphos, in northern Kansas, a sixteen-year-old boy, out with his dog in the evening, saw a mushroom-shaped object with multicolored lights, hovering low over the ground about seventy-five feet away. It was about nine feet in diameter and sounded like “an old washing machine.” The young man became temporarily blind but regained his sight and called his parents. All three saw the object high in the sky, about half the apparent size of the full moon. It then vanished. On the ground was a glowing ring, about a foot wide, and several trees glowed. A month later, UFO researcher Ted Phillips investigated the site. He found the ring and noticed that the soil felt strange, “like a slick crust, as if the soil was crystalized.” UFO researcher Michael Swords wrote that the soil was “hydrophobic [resistant to wetting], luminescent, and anaesthetic,” and could not attribute this to anything known. In the late 1980s, Erol Faruk, a British chemist, wrote a series of articles about Delphos, concluding that the evidence pointed to an unconventional aerial object as “the most tenable explanation—despite its implications.”16
In 1972, a man from Eganville, Ontario, took aerial photographs of perfect circles burned into the grass at the time of UFO reports in the area, then showed his slides at an Experimental Aircraft Association meeting. Ten years later, the effects of the circles remained visible.
Many crop circles were reported in South Australia, including the following three cases. In December 1971 at Tooligie Hill, a crop circle about ten feet in diameter was discovered in a wheat field. During the previous night, a local farmer had seen a large ball of red light descending on the field where the rings were found. In Bordertown in 1973, seven crop circles were discovered in an oat field, ranging in size from about eight feet to fifteen feet in diameter, all swirling counterclockwise. In December 1973, in Wokurna, South Australia, another crop circle was found in a wheat field, with counterclockwise swirls and bare soil patches.17
