Strange Secrets: Real Government Files on the Unknown - Softcover

Redfern, Nick

 
9780743469760: Strange Secrets: Real Government Files on the Unknown
Softcover
ISBN 10: 0743469763 ISBN 13: 9780743469760
Verlag: Gallery Books, 2003

Inhaltsangabe

IF YOU THOUGHT THAT THE X-FILES WAS ONLY FICTION, THINK AGAIN!
For as long as extraterrestrial and paranormal phenomena have been investigated, the official government response to any events deemed "otherworldly" or unexplainable has been well documented: DENIAL. Not because they aren't interested in UFOs, monsters, and psychic abilities -- but because they have their own secret agendas for using this knowledge.
In this thoroughly researched compendium of conspiracies and cover-ups, the remarkable findings that have been documented (and supposedly debunked) by the governments of the United States, Great Britain, and the former Soviet Union are finally revealed, including

  • Attempts by the U.S. Air Force to build a fleet of nuclear-powered flying saucers...
  • The British military's files on the Loch Ness monster and other mysterious beasts...
  • The Cold War race between the CIA and the KGB to create the perfect psychic spy/assassin...
  • The real story behind the enigmatic "Men in Black," who terrify UFO witnesses into silence...

For anyone who wants to know the truth -- or the truth behind the truth -- Strange Secrets is the ultimate resource to understanding exactly what the government doesn't want us to know -- and why they want to keep us in the dark.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Nick Redfern began his writing career in the 1980s on Zero—a British-based magazine devoted to music, fashion, and the world of entertainment. He has written numerous books, including Body Snatchers in the Desert: The Horrible Truth at the Heart of the Roswell Story, and has contributed articles to numerous publications, including the London Daily Express, Eye Spy magazine, and Military Illustrated. He lives in Dallas, Texas.

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Part One

High Strangeness

One

Around in Circles

Exactly who, or what, is responsible for peppering Britain's landscape with the now familiar crop circles and the fantastically elaborate "pictogram" designs has been hotly debated for years. Indeed, worldwide interest in the subject is so intense that it even became a key aspect of the summer 2002 blockbuster movie starring Mel Gibson, Signs.

Official interest in these mysterious "circles" began early on. According to the Wall Street Journal of August 28, 1989, "British agriculture and defense officials want to know more about the mysterious crop circles which have appeared across the countryside...so does Queen Elizabeth, who is said to have sharply questioned Prime Minister Margaret Thatcher about the circles recently. While those talks are kept secret, a Buckingham Palace spokesman says the Queen took a hurriedly published book about the circles to her summer palace in Scotland this month."

Numerous theories have been advanced to try to explain the phenomenal number of designs that have appeared throughout the country (and now, the world) since the 1980s, but opinions remain sharply divided. For the "believers," crop circles are the work of UFOs, some form of vaguely defined "earth energy," or some other inexplicable phenomenon. For many, however, the human factor is overriding. Indeed, good evidence shows that many of the pictograms are the work of human beings.

In the latter part of 2000, for instance, a Welshman named Matthew Williams hit the headlines when he was arrested for causing criminal damage in a field in Wiltshire, England. Williams had created under cover of darkness a highly elaborate pictogram of the type that many crop-circle researchers believed -- and continue to believe -- could only be made by a currently unexplained medium. Little wonder, then, that the matter remains unresolved to everyone's satisfaction.

But what of the possibility that the circles -- whatever their origin -- have attracted the attention of officialdom, as the Wall Street Journal suggested was the case in 1989? One man who claims to have such knowledge is crop-circle researcher George Wingfield. Eton-educated and previously employed at the Royal Greenwich Observatory, Wingfield claims that in September 1990 the British government called a secret ministerial briefing to debate the circles. According to Wingfield's sources, the meeting was supposedly convened to try to determine the nature of the circles, lest the British government be placed in the potentially embarrassing position of having to admit its ignorance of the phenomenon.

A similar but more personal experience comes from a Royal Air Force medic, Jonathan Turner, who was stationed at RAF Lyneham, Wiltshire, in 1991. He recalls that on July 15 of that year, a crop circle was discovered on nearby Hackpen Hill. Shortly afterward, examples of the more elaborate pictograms began appearing too. His interest piqued, Turner visited the area on an off-duty day and took some photographs of the various patterns and formations that had appeared. As he soon learned, however, Turner was not alone.

Parked near a run-down farm building was a car: a Royal Air Force Police car. Turner subsequently had a brief conversation with the police officer and questioned him about his presence. This provoked a cryptic response from the RAF policeman, who admitted that he was "monitoring the activity on the downs regarding the crop circles."

And the stories continue of official interest, in one form or another. The film director John McNeish claims that he received an order from Buckingham Palace for a copy of his book Crop Circle Apocalypse.

But to what extent can such tales of official interest in crop circles be validated? Do governmental, military, and intelligence files exist on this topic? The answer is yes -- at least, to an extent.

The earliest documented example of official interest in unusual crop formations dates not, as might be expected, from the 1980s or 1990s, but from the 1940s and the battle-scarred landscape of wartime Britain. This example implicates one of Britain's most secretive intelligence agencies, MI5, in the mystery.

In March 1909, the British government instructed its Committee of Imperial Defense to consider the dangers posed to British naval ports by German espionage agents. On October 1 of that year, Captain Vernon Kell of the South Staffordshire Regiment and Captain Mansfield Cumming of the Royal Navy jointly established the Secret Service Bureau. To fulfill the Admiralty's requirement for information about Germany's new navy, Kell and Cumming divided their work; Kell became responsible for counterespionage within the British Isles, while Cumming coordinated the collection and analysis of overseas intelligence data.

Between March 1909 and the outbreak of the First World War, more than thirty spies were identified and arrested by the Secret Service Bureau. At the time the bureau had a staff of only ten, but it was rapidly mobilized as a branch of the War Office and in January 1916 became part of the new Directorate of Military Intelligence and was known thereafter as MI5.

In early 1941, Sir David Petrie was appointed the first director general of the Security Service and was given substantial resources to rebuild the organization. As a result MI5 became one of the most efficient agencies of the war. After the defeat of the Nazis in 1945, it was learned that all of the Nazi agents targeted against Britain had been identified, and in some cases recruited as double agents, by MI5 -- something that contributed to the success of the Allied landing in Normandy on D day on June 6, 1944. But what, you may ask, does this have to do with the crop-circle mystery?

In 2001 a number of files pertaining to the wartime activities of MI5 were declassified and made available for inspection at the Public Record Office, Kew. One dealt with MI5 investigations of "markings on the ground," "suspicious pieces of paper and messages," "marked maps," and "markings on telegraph poles." According to the report:

The early days of 1940 and 1941 produced an avalanche of reports about the spys [sic] and fifth columnists who many people thought were roaming the land unhindered. Each village boasted of "enemy agents" in their midst, and it is only by recapturing the atmosphere of those days that one can see the matter in its proper perspective. Everyone had heard of the activities of fifth columnists on the continent and of the alarmingly successful part they had played in the overthrow of France and Belgium. It was therefore natural with everyone tense for the threatened invasion that so many reports came in. Each had to be investigated, even if only to put the minds of the public and the services at rest.

The report outlines the nature of its content:

This account is not concerned with the activities of fifth columnists such as sabotage, capturing airfields and key points, and harassing the defending army, but in the methods used in communicating to each other and to the enemy. Reports from Poland, Holland, France and Belgium showed that they used ground markings for the guidance of bombers and paratroops (and of lights by night). Such ground markings might be the cutting of cornfields into guiding marks for aircraft, painting of roofs and the inside of chimneys white, setting haystacks on fire, and laying out strips of white linen in pre-arranged patterns. For guiding and giving information to advancing troops they would conceal messages behind advertisement hoardings and leave markings on walls and telegraph poles.

For the most part, the unusual markings on telegraph poles, roofs, and chimneys were dismissed as having perfectly innocent explanations and indicates how rumor...

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Verlag
Gallery Books
Erscheinungsdatum
2003
Sprache
Englisch
ISBN 10 
0743469763
ISBN 13 
9780743469760
Einband
Taschenbuch
Anzahl der Seiten
336
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Verantwortliche Person
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