A Tale of Two Sciences: Memoirs of a Dissident Scientist

by Peter A. Sturrock

(Exoscience: Palo Alto) 2009.

by Richard Thieme

“A Tale of Two Sciences:  Memoirs of a Dissident Scientist,” by Dr. Peter A. Sturrock, is a personal work by the well-known Stanford physicist and astrophysicist, reflecting on the sometimes complementary, sometimes discordant threads of his professional lives: one as a conventional scientist, with a long list of respected publications, and one as an unconventional scientist who explored anomalous phenomena, in particular UFO phenomena.

His conventional scientific career might be a surprise to those who know him only in relationship to UFO studies; it is recounted here in terms that any educated layman can understand – in fact, the simplicity and clarity of his explanations of, say, plasma physics or pulsars, are a testimony to his deep knowledge – one can’t explain complex phenomena so clearly otherwise. And for readers who want to go a little deeper, there is a small bit of helpful math in appendices.

His unconventional career, on the other hand, has resulted in the full spectrum of responses which unfortunately are familiar to all researchers in anomalies –embarrassed smiles, curt dismissals, ridicule, the bemused shaking of a lot of heads – all of which tell the researcher that he or she is at best tolerated as an eccentric and at worst dismissed as a nut case.

The two strands of his unconventional career consist of accumulated evidence, the content of his explorations, food for further thought and research, and his personal account of reactions to that work and in turn his reactions to those reactions over a lifetime.

This is a memoir, not a scientific treatise, so it must be evaluated for what it tells us about the man and his internal journey as well as the rewards of a long career in orthodox scientific research. It is well-written, careful in its pronouncements, understated, eminently sane, and occasionally mind-boggling, especially for the uninitiated who previously accepted the dismissal of anomalies like UFOs and ESP uncritically. The book is a significant contribution to the psychology of science and scientists as well and can serve as the wise words of a mentor for younger scientists tempted by the forbidden. Sturrock warns those who would follow in his footsteps to count the cost. Enduring decades of abrasive dismissals by scientists who at their personal worst are unscientific makes this path a long-distance run, not a sprint, that requires stamina, grit, and renewable commitment.

A lifetime of cognitive dissonance is one result of the subject matter Sturrock investigates and frequent rejection of the pursuit itself, much less the fruits of that pursuit. At the core his commitment is the essence of a properly scientific attitude, namely, curiosity, curiosity about the ineluctably real that imprints itself indelibly on one’s consciousness.  Reading this narrative, one thinks of Francis Bacon’s response when criticized by the Church for dissecting cadavers to learn about human anatomy because the Church was afraid that his discoveries might contradict its teachings: “Whatever deserves to exist deserves to be known.”

So ultimately there has been for Peter Sturrock not two careers but one and one mode of knowing and wanting to know, the scientific mode applied rigorously and without prejudice. Conventional and unconventional science alike are the front and back of a single discipline requiring that one attends to the data, formulate hypotheses, then test and revise them, leaving the next generation with a slightly better understanding of what seems to exists in a complex universe.

Sturrock is well known in UFO circles as the organizer of the Pocantico Conference in September 1997 which brought together an eclectic group of scientists at the Pocantico Conference Center near Tarrytown, New York to hear presentations on selected cases and some summaries of UFO effects by serious researchers. Financed by Laurence Rockefeller, the conference straddled the forbidden and the familiar and included researchers known to readers of this journal such as Jacques Vallee, Mark Rodigher, and Richard Haines. The medium, a respectable scientific conference, was intended to be the message as well, leading to greater credibility for research into UFO phenomena. The conference concluded with carefully phrased, conservative, thoughtful suggestions that challenged orthodox scientists by proposing additional topics and structures for research.

Sturrock wrote about the conference in detail in “The UFO Enigma: a New Review of the Physical Evidence,” published in 1999 by Warner Books.  Much of that material is reviewed in this memoir, but because this is a memoir, there is a critical difference: “It is not easy to have a split personality,” Sturrock writes in the first sentence of the preface; “this book is – in part – an attempt to remedy that situation.” That compelling drive to clarify the data, integrate it into a unified framework, and articulate tentative but provocative conclusions about what it tells us to explore next – this is a subtext of this work. That drive, Sturrock makes clear, is motivated in part by the desire to alleviate the cognitive dissonance of which I spoke; that internal conflict must be addressed by a mature healthy ego, one’s life work must be justified and justifiable, to others as well as oneself. That too is a subtext of this work. Sturrock the man as well as the wary scientist shows up and makes his case. By establishing basic criteria – does it exist? therefore is it deserving of being understood? – for work in all arenas, Sturrock challenges again and again the irrational or non-rational rejection of the subject matter in itself by those who claim the scientific method as their modus opperandi. He places the burden on scientists who refuse even to look much less pay attention. And that challenge, I am afraid, will be handled by most career scientists as they have handled both Sturrock and the subject matter in the past, by not acknowledging that it exists.

Because Sturrock is willing in this personal account to reveal more of the feeling behind his thinking, he is impelled to conclusions that have not been often articulated in the past. UFO researchers since Hynek have noted the “strangeness” of some reports, aspects of the experience that might sound like science fiction to those unfamiliar with the now-voluminous body of research. At the end of the work, he advances an alternative view of physics that might account for the “strangeness” of some UFO reports, that vehicles or entities seem to be here yet not here at the same time, that observers walk around a luminous object which disappears as if tucked into a nook of spacetime behind a hidden curtain, that experiences of telepathic communication or transfer of knowledge have taken place… and that the compelling testimony of people for sixty years (and likely more) from all over the world, their experiences in agreement in many small details … this mass of experience and data should not be ignored.

His conclusions suggest in essence that current models of reality derived from physics do not account for what has been observed; therefore oblique trajectories must be drawn and followed to explore possibilities to begin to account for them – and perhaps reap practical rewards for spacetime travel, energy consumption, and medicine.

And because the narrative is from one point of view an apologia, a justification of a lifetime of unorthodox pursuits, and because sanity, like wisdom, is contextual, the author marshals a sequence of historical antecedents of theories that were rejected out of hand when first proposed but that turned out to be of merit. Consensus realities in the past led to the same kind of ridicule and “debunking” that UFO researchers experience today; heterodox ideas gained a foothold among mainstream scientists “one funeral at a time,” as Max Planck described progress in science.  Sturrock refers to the famous instance of meteorites which could not possibly exist because “rocks do not fall from the sky,” and battered child syndrome, the details of which could not be heard when first presented to doctors, and the theory of plate tectonics, and in his primary domain of expertise, theories about neutrinos and pulsars.  One thinks too of Raymond Dart and his work on Australopithecus, widely rejected for many years.

Such stories are widely known, and some of the motive power for repeating them comes I suspect from the need to establish a “tradition” of advances in science that occurred after prophets who first articulated them had been scorned and dishonored.  So on one level, the text reminds both scientists and laity that good science ought to consider anomalies worthy of investigation, and on a personal or psychological level, the author must make the case that in all of the work he has done, he listens carefully, observes scrupulously, and rigorously investigates before formulating a hypothesis.

Part of making his case is the entire first part of the memoir which reviews Sturrock’s educational and vocational history, linked by memories of influential teachers, mentors, and colleagues. That organizing principle is an attribute of memoirs too, the narrative sequence determined by memories of people important to the author’s personal and professional life.  Those chapters establish that Sturrock was indeed mentored and respected by conventional scientists of some renown, that some of the best people in his field led him into research in Europe and the United States in astrophysics and physics that resulted in numerous papers and a long distinguished career at Stanford University, one of the most respected academic environments in the world.

Then, having hung that framework like a curtain, Sturrock discusses his “other” career as a dissident scientist. A man, in other words, who was curious and found the universe, as Alice said, even “curiouser and curiouser.”

It sounds simple, doesn’t it? That the scientific mind is curious?  Yet again and again, Sturrock was frustrated by the absence of this core attribute, arguably the cornerstone of intelligence, the willingness to poke one’s whiskers out beyond the door of one’s snug abode and sniff the air;  that frustration comes to the surface in anecdote after anecdote.  So many colleagues were tamed and constrained by a culture of caution and hesitancy, a fear of being branded a heretic, a terror, after all, of losing one’s benefits.

In addition to UFO phenomena, Sturrock discusses possible instances of the paranormal, spontaneous healing, and reincarnation.  But UFO phenomena is in the foreground of his research. In the past he has discussed case histories, summaries of physical and psychological effects, and phenomena which seems to violate known laws of physics. He has always been appropriately cautious in public pronouncements, mindful of mine fields, tiptoeing with care.  He has generally avoided mention of personal reactions to his work, such as the near-terror of SETI researchers, for example, who thought he was attending a conference on extraterrestrial life and might advance the UFO point of view to their embarrassment. (My experience interviewing Frank Drake and Jill Tarter echoed Sturrock’s. The economic and political requirements of SETI, fighting for several hundred million dollars in endowment funds against a strong political headwind, necessitated, Tarter told me, a strict divorce of their project from “bad science,” defined as anything that might taint their efforts. She used her own mistaken identification of the moon as a UFO during an airplane ride as an example of why all UFO reports must be something similar. When I observed that this was not scientific, she did not respond. I recall feeling – as Sturrock often did – taken aback by the lack of a scientific attitude on the part of a well-known scientist.)

In all of his multiple pursuits, it is possible – not certain – that Sturrock’s English upbringing influenced some of his attitudes and interests. Based on my experiences while living in England as a young man, I offer these speculations.

First, I learned in England that loud expressions of enthusiasm are often frowned on. I recall that when Sesame Street was introduced to English television audiences, for example, a friend said a much better program was the one in which children sat quietly on the floor while a teacher read a story. When an Englishman felt strongly about something, he was more inclined  to say “um” quietly instead of “oh boy gee whiz wow!”

This is relevant because this is a review of a memoir, not a scientific paper. It underscores the habitual understatement which for an Englishman born and bred reveals rather than contradicts intensity of feeling. If an exuberant American extrovert like myself were to write this account, it might say: Please, people! this is DATA! this is observable, frequently reported data! and it challenges the way we believe the universe works! Let’s THINK about it, shall we?

But Sturrock is English, and always, his conclusions and proposals are those of a careful scientist. He insists on using Bayes’ Theorem as a touchstone for a sane way to proceed in every investigation, he never goes beyond the data itself, and he restricts the presentation of data to documented events.

Here’s a second hunch about “things English:” in addition to advances that created modern scientific thinking beginning with the Royal Society, there has been regard in England for the eccentric, the anomalous, the struggle to reconcile the known and the unknown into one big picture. The work of the Society for Psychical Research at the turn of the twentieth century included psychologists like Frederick W. H. Myers, philosophers like William James, politicians like Lord Balfour, physicists like Oliver Lodge, and serious, thoughtful investigation of mediums, spirits, spontaneous manifestations of apparitions at a time of crisis, the survival of bodily death, and the like. My hunch is simply that Sturrock is part of that tradition too. He knew that wise distinguished men did not reject a subject a priori but peered into the shadows on the edges of experience. He knew that Conan Doyle and Williams Butler Yates evangelized for the existence of faeries. That framework is part of the heritage of a man who suggests that when we turn around and look at the world, we transit a full 360 degrees before coming home again, knowing that when we do, the self at which we arrive will not be the self which departed on that journey.

A few years ago, I reviewed Jonathan Moreno’s “Mind Wars,” an investigation by a neuroscientist and bioethicist with good credentials. Moreno investigated research based on biology and neuroscience for warfare and “perception management.” Like Sturrock, Moreno advanced conventional credentials again and again, recounting his work with intelligence agencies, for example, so he could insist to a skeptical audience that he was not “a conspiracy theorist” or a nut-case but a legitimate credentialed academic.

Moreno worked with intelligence professionals and wrote openly about national security and secrecy issues. He told me scientists often “clammed up” when he asked about their research, that they dared not say a word for the record. Sturrock does not dwell on that aspect of research into anomalous phenomena but it is there nevertheless. Not only do sociological and cultural molds for conformity mold the clay of scientific research, but precisely because the data is compelling, precisely because it would have attracted attention, and research, and dollars in the past, whatever might have been discussed behind closed doors is beyond our reach. Life in the national security state since World War 2 adds even greater cognitive dissonance to our quest for understanding. It is not only the universe that plays dice with us but, closer to home, it is likely that some in positions of authority do too. No wonder we feel so often we are looking into a fun-house mirror when we try to connect the dots. The elusiveness of anomalies is further distorted by the fact that we don’t and can’t know what we don’t know … about who does know more about them.

It is a characteristic of an anomaly that it does not connect with other known facts. It hangs in the air like the grin of a Cheshire cat, tantalizing but out of reach. That characteristic also afflicts the fruits of research into anomalies. The Pocantico Conference, for example, resulted in distinguished scientists contradicting the Condon Report, the last known “official” Government paper on UFOs,  and made recommendations, and then … nothing. The investigation of anomalies became, itself, anomalous. Sturrock also cites GEPAN/SEPRA as one model for investigation of UFO events, so one might expect the work done by the French to be on our radar, but … it remains anomalous, too. A society which Sturrock helped to found – The Society for Scientific Exploration –an attempt to bridge the two worlds – and its publication, The Journal of Scientific Exploration, have also resulted in important work but … the society, the journal, remain in limbo, a bit off the beaten path, interesting to some, but anomalous. For the moment, those efforts are here and not here at the same time, lacking integration into mainstream thought. They accumulate but remain liminal to the primary concerns of establishment scientists, mainstream media, and 21^st century consensus reality.

The promise of this thoughtful, so-interesting memoir is that one more drip in a sequence of drips on the rocks of reality will help to wear away the resistant rock. The fear is that this work too will be dismissed as a quirky look into weird, new-agey experiences, an off-road trip irrelevant to the highways of career science.

The counter-cultural view? If it exists, it is worthy of being understood.

And so is Peter Sturrock.

Originally published in IUR: The International UFO Reporter (Volume 33, Number 1) March 2010, the official publication of CUFOS

The Second Edition:  Remembering Who We Are

Most of us live a large part of our lives skating on the ice of trivial essentials, the necessary tasks that fill our waking days. We pause from time to time and look at the etched images in the ice and think, this is the pattern of our lives, these images reveal our character and choices.

But more, much more, is going on.

Occasionally, the ice thins, heeding a midwinter springtime we don’t know how to define, a season hidden inside us, a season determined by a different sun. That sun knows what we need and when we need it. Our readiness is all.

The ice cracks and we fall into darkness that explodes paradoxically with light, we are saturated, immersed in the root sources of meaning. We know in those moments what matters, what is real.

The contents of ordinary days quickly return and fill our waking state, the meaning of those moments almost but not quite forgotten. But we never really forget. And next time it happens, we recognize the experience for what it is. We link those moments into a different, more fundamental pattern, we say to ourselves, yes. I know this place. I have been here before.

We remember who we really are.

A few years ago, a long friendship with another couple kind of played itself out. It drifted for a year or two toward an end with a whimper, not a bang, as relationships often do. We had taken different paths, with divergent interests, values, and choices, and moved apart. After a while, there wasn’t much point in getting together anymore.

That was acceptable. We knew that people grow and change. It happens.

Our lives, filled with those trivial essentials, moved on.

Then, a few weeks ago, seemingly out of nowhere, I felt intense waves of energy that surged or swept up in me or into me – the metaphors don’t really enlighten, they merely point toward things we don’t know how to explain – strong palpable waves associated with the name of the woman. As they came, I knew it had something to do with her but not what or why. I would be working out at the gym or driving or watching snow fall onto the trees through my office window, doing something else as it were with the other parts of my mind, when from around back at the edges, it felt like, her name and those waves of energy seized my attention.

That used to happen with regularity when I was in the professional ministry because, I think, I was linked to so many people with an intention to be open.  Oh I know, I know, when we call someone and ask how they are and they say they were thinking of us too or something important is going on, it’s easy to say it’s nothing but coincidence.

But other times, calling it a coincidence is a bit of a stretch.

I think of the time I had been visiting the mother of a member of the parish who was in a nursing home, seriously ill. I would stop by in the morning and then go on with the rest of the day. One day, however, although I had been there for my morning visit, as I returned to the office from lunch, one of those waves came. I was in the left hand lane of a wide Salt Lake City street, ready to turn left onto Highland Drive and return to the church, when it flashed through me and I thought, no, I had better get back there now. I crossed several lanes – Brigham Young wanted Salt Lake City streets to be wide enough to u-turn a team of oxen, remember – and turned right instead and returned to the nursing home.

As I pulled up to the door, the parishioner was on the curb.

“How did they find you so fast?” she said.

I shook my head. “What do you mean?”

“Mother just died, I just ran to the office and told them to call you.”

Some said I had picked up subliminal clues that the mother was about to die and calibrated my anomalous return to what I knew unconsciously. That “rational” explanation begs more questions than the obvious one, that I got the call and responded.

Spirituality, I was discovering in those years, meant not that some had “special gifts” but that it was human to be this way, that spiritual discipline meant learning to listen and not shut it out because one might be embarrassed to act on an impulse without knowing why. The imperative was not knowing but knowing that you knew, then acting, even if you didn’t know what you knew or how.

I learned to honor the experience by at least making a telephone call and saying, hi, what’s going on? That’s what I might have done twenty years earlier as a matter of professional habit. But this time, I did not want to reestablish a connection or reawaken the relationship. It was better, I told myself, to let it go, despite successive waves of feeling that always came with the name of my long-ago friend.

So I didn’t respond. I rode them out, let them subside, and resisted the call.

Last week my wife said, “Look at this.” She handed me an obituary for the mother of my friend. She had been in the last stages of dying when the waves began. We went to the funeral, saw our friends again, and expressed condolences. That might have been the end of it, but the following Sunday, remembering that my friend and her husband had had dinner every Sunday night with her mother and that this was the first Sunday without her, I telephoned and suggested that we have dinner. As it happened, no one else had thought of that connection and they would have been alone. So the four of us went to a favorite restaurant and talked for hours.

We were friends again, we realized, or still. But that’s not the point. This is the point:

I told her what I had felt and when and how and she said it began when her mother sank toward certain death. The waves of deep feeling were indeed a distress call, non-localized, consciousness to consciousness, however that happens. It’s like entanglement, we say, spooky action at a distance, Einstein called it, but that doesn’t explain anything.

I said as we both shed a few tears of shared grief that I had betrayed my calling, not as a former clergyman but as a human being, a spiritual being, by resisting the call and refusing to honor the fact of our connection.

I have often said that professional ministry is a training program for those like myself who seem to need it to become more fully human. We enter the profession not because we need the training less but because we need it more. And it works, the ministry as a training program works, because you can’t do that work effectively without learning each time a person brings you the truth of their lives and teaches you how resilient, elastic, even heroic humans are, not as an add-on but intrinsically. It is axiomatic to our humanity to transcend whatever life brings.

Once you know that, not once you read about it, think it, or recite it in a ritual, but KNOW that we are all connected, not metaphorically but in fact, that we really are all part of one another and of something bigger than we are, call it the universe, call it a body, call it whatever you like, once we know that we are cells in a body that may well grow to fill the galaxies and all of spacetime with its expansive meta-self, then it is axiomatic to know too that we belong to one another, that the well being of the other is as critical to me as my own, and to care for the other as for myself is an imperative – not as a duty, but as a concomitant aspect of knowing that to do this is what it means to be human.

As notions go, this is not new. But it is makes a difference to “get” it and not just think it with the left-side part of the brain that thinks it knows everything and that what I am saying here is foolishness and rant.

Mechanical engineering is not the end of life, after all.

I realized that I had chosen, contrary to what I knew but forgot, to push away what I felt and not act, and that was a betrayal, a betrayal of the real, a betrayal of the non-trivial sources of meaning and love.

I told her at that dinner that I had failed to honor that ineluctable fact of correlated relationship. It is not what is related but relationship itself that structures the universe. The angle of inclination is an imperative I had disregarded.

She cried and we hugged and she said, in that moment, it was honored.

Our readiness is all.

We can not unlearn what we have learned but we can neglect to remember it. We are cells in a single body, a single trans-person as it were, human and non-human alike, knitted into a being that extends to the edges of spacetime, infolded into a single mysterious vital beating heart.

Our sins, then, are often sins of forgetting, omission or neglect. When we remember who we are, when the quotidian vanishes in a flash, we act in accordance with fact. And when we do, the stars and planets and galaxies, the pattern or the form of the universe that angles us into complementary beings of wonder, with countenance and form and purpose beyond our grasp … we sing in a single thousand-part harmony, a chorus of myriad voices sounding one might guess like a shout.

The Second Edition is a periodic reflection by author and speaker
Richard Thieme. Subscribe (or unsubscribe) by writing to
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Richard Thieme (www.thiemeworks.com) speaks and writes about the issues
of our times, with an emphasis on the impact of various technologies on the structures of our lives, creativity in work and life, and how to reinvent ourselves in response to challenges – all aspects of “enlightened practical spirituality.”  If interested in
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Steven Miles is a professor of medicine and bioethics at the University of Minnesota. His forthcoming book, which has the working title Oath Betrayed: Military Medicine and the War on Terror, stemmed from his attempt to learn why the U.S. medical staff in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantanamo Bay did not report or intervene to stop the abuse of prisoners for the two years preceding the public release of the Abu Ghraib photographs. For this, he reviewed about 25,000 pages of government documents and trial testimony obtained under the Freedom of Information Act. Miles has assisted victims of war and torture in 25 years of international work with the American Refugee Committee and the Center for Victims of Torture. He is a past president of the American Association of Bioethics and served on President Clintons Bioethics Working Group on Health Care Reform. Dr. Miles was interviewed for the National Catholic Reporter by Richard Thieme about the failure of physicians to reveal torture.

Thieme: What first attracted your attention to the issue of the medical community’s responsibility toward torture?

Miles: When the Abu Ghraib pictures were published, it was clear this had been going on for a while. Clearly doctors were present in the prisons because doctors are always present in prisons so they must have seen the abuse or signs of the abuse. Why was this surfacing as a leaked CD rather than a report by the medical profession? I found somewhat to my amazement that it was not just a matter of not reporting but it was actually a matter of being involved in setting the harshness of the interrogation plans and delaying reports of homicide, which would have been an important signal to the public of what was wrong inside the prison.

Thieme:Are you aware of formal or informal pressures or influence brought to bear on the medical profession to enlist doctors in the practices you decry?

Miles:At the present time, I do not see any research agenda or set of programs comparable to MKSEARCH or MKULTRA [mind-control research conducted by the CIA from the 1950s to the late 1960s, including covert drug tests on unwitting citizens]. On the other hand, it is very clear that if you go all the way back to the beginning of the war on terror, the United States decided that the Geneva Convention did not apply. The next thing that happened was Guantanamo asked for policies to guide interrogations in the absence of the Geneva Convention. The JAG [Judge Advocate General Corps] officer at Guantanamo proposed an outline of policy for monitoring interrogation. The antecedent memos by the Department of Justice had already written off prisoner standards as not being violations of the Geneva Convention. Then [Secretary of Defense Donald] Rumsfeld set up a board to develop interrogation policy that fleshed out the role for medical monitoring and has since sketched the policy that was elaborated on as it went down the chain of command. It was not a matter of an informal pickup at the prison of various practices in the prison system but rather a matter of recruiting professionals into a centrally directed policy with guidelines. Thats an important difference.

Thieme: One antecedent for this discussion is Operation Paperclip, the program that brought formerly Nazi scientists and engineers to the United States after the war. Some were rocket scientists, but some were doctors who carried out horrific experiments with freezing, for example. One of those concentration camp doctors continued his experiments on behalf of helping American flyers downed in cold waters and I believe theres a building at Brooks Air Force Base named after him.

Miles:Paperclip was not the only one. We tried some doctors at Nuremberg [in Germany where war crimes trials were conducted by the United States following World War II] but elected not to have doctors trials in Japan in order to secure their cooperation in getting their biological warfare data. We made a policy decision that it would endanger the appropriation of that material if we went ahead with a war crimes trial. Some experiments using vivisection were done on American POWs.

I think there is a difference, however. I am just not finding a research agenda in Iraq. I have been looking at different historical roots because there are different historical problems. For example, in terms of the neglect of prisoners, you can look back to Andersonville [in Georgia, a notorious Confederate prison in the Civil War] and Elmira [in New York, a Union prison in the Civil war]. Or alternatively go back to World War II and the Thai-Burmese railroad. [During the building of the Thai-Burmese railroad, 11,000 of 60,000 prisoners died of starvation.] The Japanese had not signed the Geneva Convention but signed the Hague Convention of 1927, which promised adequate treatment of prisoners. They waived that in World War II, but said they would treat prisoners well anyway. Their documents have astonishing parallels to United States documents in 2005. The president issued an ambiguous directive suspending the Geneva Convention directing the Armed Forces to treat detainees humanely to the extent appropriate and consistent with military necessity.The government traduced domestic and international laws to create special categories of people, illegal combatants,who had truncated rights and who were dispatched to secret prisons and subject to special Kafkaesque tribunals. Red Cross monitors were locked out of prisons, given false information and were especially kept from ghost detainees.Hundreds of people were secretly transported to nations who imprisoned, interrogated and tortured them on our behalf.

Thieme: The book Journey into Madness by Gordon Thomas discusses Dr. Aziz al-Abub, who assisted Hezbollah in the torture of William Buckley, CIA station chief in Beirut, who was tortured to death over a long period of time, with video tapes of his treatment provided to document the event. Thomas drew a parallel with what we did during MKULTRA, Bluebird, Artichoke and similar programs when we experimented on people without their consent in often-horrific ways. He suggested that perhaps the moral high ground so often claimed by Americans had been surrendered through those programs and practices.

Miles:There are a couple of ways to look at that which are of great interest to ethicists. One is to speak of creating a precedent. For example, there was the business of Spc. Keith Maupin, an American soldier in Iraq who was kidnapped and killed — but only after the Abu Ghraib photos were shown. Before the photos became public, every POW returned alive, but not afterward. [Television carried the Abu Ghraib photographs on April 29, 2004. The first of the 11 beheadings in Iraq occurred 12 days later.]

The other way to look at it is using the concept of legitimacy. A world power does not simply have power, it has legitimacy. By behaving in these ways, we undermine our legitimacy as a world leader. Thats a different problem than establishing precedents for others to follow.

The State Department issued a report, for example, that criticized China for violation of human rights, for detentions and torture, and China blew off the United States and so did Russia. How do we speak on behalf of these matters? What is the legitimacy of our protests in the present climate?

Thieme:There seem to be things Americans need to believe about themselves that require that we filter certain facts out of our awareness. In my work with the Hoover archives at Stanford, I came across documentation from an authoritative source who named 10 specific countries with which we partner in torture. We may not be the ones turning on the electricity, but our people are present when it happens. He claims this did not begin with 9/11.

Another source discussed the use of children in those experiments done decades ago.

Miles: Its interesting that there was a certain coyness about the data that came out of Iraq. The photographs that have been released so far are all photographs of men. Photographs of women have been retained and have not been released by the media sources that have them.

Thieme:[Investigative journalist] Sy Hersh said the other photos are much worse. He mentioned audio recordings of children screaming while being sodomized.

Miles:All of the prisoner deaths that have been included in official tabulations, which are admittedly incomplete — curiously, you find references to the death of children by the Department of Defense only in footnotes. There is no reporting of kids’ deaths in official lists or in death certificates or anything else. So there are sets of this data that remain hidden. The data has obviously been scrubbed.

Thieme: What have you seen?

Miles:I have seen the footnotes referring to the kidsdeaths and have seen credible evidence of sexual abuse described in Army investigations. I have not seen photos. I do not need to see them, but I have seen investigators’ reports.

Thieme:Steve, aren’t we describing war crimes?

Miles:Yes. We are describing war crimes and I think its important to name them for what they are for a couple of reasons. First, when you name it as a war crime, you hint at the reality of the things we have described, the gravity of the harms that have occurred. Second, in describing it as a war crime you also describe accurately the transgressions against a framework of justice and the damage to the civil order that would be avoided by pretending these are not war crimes. I think thats important to do.

Thieme:If there are war crimes, there are war criminals. Do you anticipate trials of named war criminals? They would probably include Rumsfeld, Cheney and Bush, wouldn’t they?

Miles:As you know, many war criminals have never been tried for a variety of political reasons. That does not mean it is not worth stating that they are war criminals, that indictable war crimes have been committed and that the people who created the policies that led to them are responsible. It is the nature of war crimes that they are patterns of offense, not isolated events. You cannot track an individual act — for example the arrest of Anne Frank — to Adolph Eichman. Instead you see broad policy implications and a pattern, a series of acts at many different sites over a long period of time. In this case, there were all those things and these are war crimes. Its worthwhile naming what they are because historical accountability is important. In the case of Pinochet, we see that the long-term tracing of the acts can result in increasing accountability.

Now, I think this is a very important point. The world is at a very interesting tipping point as to war crimes as we steadily ratchet up degrees of accountability. We see, for example, Slobodon Milosevich tried in almost real time. We have seen action around Nazi stolen art totally change in the last 15 years. Swiss bank accounts no longer lack transparency. So even if indictments and trials do not follow, it sets the stage for greater accountability and thats a good thing.

Thieme:Who are your allies in this work?

Miles:Dr. Robert J. Lifton is one. Looking at why people or how people can do these things, Lifton coined the term “atrocity-producing situations” in a study of veterans of the war in Vietnam. Some soldiers suffered severe psychic damage by participating in atrocities. Lifton, a psychiatrist, proposed that extreme stress, a dehumanized enemy, and encouragement to commit moral transgressions create atrocity-producing situations. He quotes a combat medic in Vietnam. “I delighted in the destruction and yet was a healer.” That medics words strikingly resemble a medic who described his feeling while beating prisoners during his service in Iraq: “You get a burning in your stomach, a rush, a feeling of hot lead running through your veins, and you get a sense of power. … Imagine wearing point-blank body armor, an M-16 and all the power in the world, and the authority of God. That power is very attractive.”

Its also important to look at groups like HRW [Human Rights Watch] and the ACLU [American Civil Liberties Union]. By pulling out the documents and working on their largely legal pieces, they make it possible for more specialized scholars like myself to do our work. If the ACLU had not put all those documents on their Web site, I’d be just another guy with opinions and a pen.

Thieme:Groups like HRW, because they scrutinize the practices of nations cooperating with us in counterterror, are designated terror support groups and the police in those countries are encouraged to treat them accordingly. This can be daunting.

Miles:Yes, but thats an epiphenomenon of being a torturing society. A torturing society is a society that is abraded by the process of dehumanization. In that process, we essentially create our own mirrored netherworlds. We posit a secret omnipresent anarchist non-Christian entity against which we put up the people of the true faith,and thats one reason torture is so dangerous to societies, because torturing societies do have these epiphenomenon that spill out into the broader society and result in less discriminating thinking and less understanding. People ask me all the time if I think I’ll be killed for doing this work, which to me is an astonishing statement. I dont see a risk in getting killed. What I do see in the question is a direct indication of the degree to which living in a torturing society has damaged our larger civil society.

One of our problems is the paradox that we are one of the most parochial and provincial empires ever to exist on earth. That creates real problems for us because many of our political debates wind up being hermetically sealed and that hurts our ability to engage constructively with the world. Our ability to contextualize our own internal discussions of what it means to be a global empire is impaired. We wind up misreading our incredible impact not only on the world but on our own desires to project a civil society around the world. We can’t contextualize our actions internationally if we don’t have an international vision within our own domestic conversation.

Thieme:That brings us full circle. We start with transparency and accountability and the need for third-party points of view and contributions. Why are so many Americans incapable of hearing how others perceive us?

Miles:Americans have kept the reality of torture far from consciousness. Although we are steeped in fictional torture, we are nearly insensate to the reality of torture. We are unfamiliar with its techniques, its effects on individuals and civil societies, and with how widely it is used. Fictional governmental torture is usually depicted as occurring in developing countries. We are only dimly aware of the United Statesdisastrous complicity with torturing regimes in El Salvador, [Fulgencio] Batistas Cuba, Cambodia, Chile, Iran, South Vietnam, Guatemala, Argentina, Israel or Egypt.

There are creative voices in the United States that can speak to the larger international issues, outside the provincial paradigm, groups like Human Rights Watch that are perceived as a threat within the provincial perspective because of their cosmopolitan view of society and thats why they are marginalized and precisely why they are necessary. They are necessary because of the torture issues but also because, if we want to globalize the economy, we have to transcend our limited point of view.

Thieme:Do you get much negative response, that is, hate mail?

Miles:Many people express a fear that writing a book on the subject endangers my life. That disturbs me, as I said, because of what it says about fear of our government, a fear that reveals the damage that a torturing society does to the sense of civil liberties. That fear fosters a silence in which torture thrives. The implication that I, a citizen of the United States, should acquiesce to that fear strikes me as deeply disrespectful to my colleagues in Turkey, Egypt, Chile, South Africa, Cuba, and the former Soviet Union who have assumed much greater risks to fight torture in their nations. Some have been jailed, tortured or had their children murdered. For most Americans, it takes little more than the courage to be inconvenienced to speak against torture in the United States. If we are truly at risk of greater danger, it is all the more necessary that we should speak out.

A brief review of CIA-funded research into mind control
By Richard Thieme

Projects MKULTRA, MKSEARCH, Bluebird and Artichoke were code names for a series of mind control research programs in the 1950s and 1960s. Details were revealed by hearings of the Church Committee, headed by Sen. Frank Church, and the Pike Committee, headed by Rep. Otis Pike, and the Rockefeller Commission investigations in the 1970s, despite efforts to destroy evidence of the program. Then- CIA director Richard Helms ordered the documents related to the programs shredded, but thousands of financial documents were overlooked that detailed links between covert medical research funded by the CIA using hypnosis, electromagnetic fields, drugs and other chemicals to alter brain functioning, memory and behavior.

The intelligence community at the time was searching for a solution to the problem of brainwashing,which was believed to be the result of sophisticated new methodologies discovered by the Chinese and Russians. In fact, nothing new was involved, but the United States pursued the research in a way consistent with its own cultural bias, that is, the use of technology to alter human behavior.

One of the most notorious accounts of experimentation details the work of Dr. Ewen Cameron, a psychiatrist who believed that he had the right to destroy the personalities of mental patients entrusted to his care and endow them with new personalities. The sleep roomof Montreals Allan Memorial Psychiatric Institute was the site of a series of barbaric experiments conducted on patients over a nine-year period beginning in 1955. Cameron invented a technique he called psychic drivingthat the CIA thought might have potential as a brainwashing technique. Cameron used electroshock in extreme doses, drugs and sensory deprivation to depatternbehavior, create amnesia, and attempt to restructure the personalities of patients. Cameron died with many honors and was at various times head of the Quebec, Canadian, and American Psychiatric Associations, and a cofounder and first president of the World Psychiatric Association.

By locating the experiments on foreign soil, the CIA intended to establish a basis for plausible deniability of its involvement.

The Church committee wrote: The deputy director of the CIA revealed that over 30 universities and institutions were involved in an extensive testing and experimentationprogram which included covert drug tests on unwitting citizens at all social levels, high and low, native Americans and foreign.Several tests involved administering LSD to unwitting subjects in social situations,resulting in at least one death.

Bluebird was approved by the CIA director on April 20, 1950. In August 1951, the Project was renamed Artichoke. Bluebird and Artichoke included work on the creation of amnesia, hypnotic couriers and what came to be called Manchurian Candidatesafter the novel and movie of the same name. Artichoke documents verify that hypnotic couriers functioned effectively in real-life simulations conducted by the CIA in the early 1950s. Artichoke and Bluebird were administratively rolled over into MKULTRA by the CIA on April 3, 1953. MKULTRA was in turn rolled over into MKSEARCH on June 7, 1964. MKSEARCH ran until June 1972, at which time Helms ordered the shredding of the files. Documents that survived are available through Freedom of Information Act requests and on the Internet.

Further information on these programs can be found in:

Undue Risk: Secret State Experiments on Humans by Jonathan D. Moreno (W.H. Freeman and Company, 2000)

The Mind Manipulators by Alan W. Scheflin and Edward M. Opton Jr. (Paddington Press Ltd., 1978)

The Search for the Manchurian Candidate: The CIA and Mind Control/The Secret History of the Behavioral Sciences by John Marks (W. W. Norton and Company, 1979)

Bluebird: Deliberate Creation of Multiple Personality by Psychiatrists by Colin A. Ross M.D. (Manitou Communications, 2000)

This interview with Dr. Steven Miles was published on January 13, 2006 by the National Catholic Reporter (http://www.natcath.com/). Copyright The National Catholic Reporter Publishing Comapny.

Related Web sites

American Civil Liberties Union
www.aclu.org

Center for Bioethics
www.bioethics.umn.edu

Human Rights Watch
www.hrw.org

Oath Betrayed: Torture, Medical Complicity, and the War on Terror

by Steven H. Miles, M. D. (Random House. New York. 2006)

Reviewed by Richard Thieme

ThiemeWorks

PO Box 170737

Milwaukee WI 53217-8061

414 351 2321

rthieme@thiemeworks.com

www.thiemeworks.com

We all come to big issues like torture and terror from our own biographies. We cannot be  dispassionate when compelled to reflect on horrific events that cause cognitive dissonance or worse. So let me begin this review with a conversation over a cup of coffee in Washington DC, earlier this year.

I met Steven Miles in a restaurant before this book was published. Miles is a soft-spoken physician from Minneapolis, MN, where he is a Professor of Medicine at the University of Minnesota Medical School and a faculty member of the Center for Bioethics. He looks and sounds quintessentially professorial, with a pleasant smile and an easy manner.

Yet our conversation was almost conspiratorial in tone, even though the 35,000 documents Miles consulted for this book were in the pubic domain, thanks to the ACLU and FOIA. Nothing we discussed was really a secret.  But Miles had had to discover the meaning of links between documents for himself, connecting the dots from document to document (the documents in were separate files, the connections between them not easily searchable by software.) He had to correlate the movements of military physicians with diverse places and events.

As he discussed his research, outrage and rage burned through Miles’ restrained demeanor.  He described how doctors had aided and abetted torture in Iraq, Guantanamo, and other places, some still hidden from view.

That our conversation about documents in the public domain in a public place should feel conspiratorial is a tip-off to what it does to us to enter the world of this book. We were not being paranoid—we were experiencing the impact of confronting what is being done in the name of the war on terror and in our name as Americans in a secret world.

Researchers like Miles often show the effects of “secondary trauma,” a therapist told me, alerting me to my own symptoms. Immersing oneself in this world results in predictable consequences. We become obsessed with the truth, an elusive quarry under any conditions, and our moral framework skews toward the binary. In the face of traumatic events, whether experienced first or second hand, evil seems easy to distinguish from good.

Whether it is a conversation in a restaurant or the experience of reading this book – that’s what can happen.

“I am often asked if my life is in danger, because of this research,” Miles told me. “That’s an epiphenomenon of being a torturing society. A torturing society is a society that is abraded by the process of dehumanization. In that process, we essentially create our own mirrored netherworlds.”

The distortion of our thinking, our behavior, our moral compass, as our society justifies, rationalizes, and  minimizes the impact of engaging in state torture is inevitable.

That is the deeper subtext of Miles’ book, which documents and illuminates how some doctors have kept prisoners alive as they are tortured and interrogated and have falsified death certificates to substitute natural causes for torture as the cause of death. Oath Betrayed shows how the oath sworn by doctors to do no harm is turned on its head in the name of fighting terror.

This book is a plea for justice, an attempt to reinforce the reasons why America rejected torture in the past as ineffective and inhumane for both practical and moral reasons. Miles believes that a society which allows discourse about such events will be affected for the better as consciences are quickened and resolve strengthened. The existence of this book is an act of hope and affirmation.

Miles also knows that discussing these issues does not expose him to the risks faced by colleagues in other countries, who have been tortured themselves or killed for speaking out. He knows that we still have relative freedom of speech. But for freedom of speech to be more than a bleeder valve, it must lead to action. In a society saturated with fictional and non-fictional accounts of violence and torture, we have been desensitized to the reality that Miles urges us to confront. It is not easy to read this book. Miles asks that we swim in the deeper waters of the moral, ethical and psychological consequences of our policies and practices, that we understand what it does to us to become a torturing society. Unlike screen violence, he does not do so to produce a vicarious shiver, but so that we will re-examine the thinking that led us to such practices in the first place.

#  #  #

Entrevista con David MacMichael, ex analista de la CIA, marine usamericano e historiador

La CIA: vaqueros, indios y denunciadores

Richard Thieme

CounterPunch

David MacMichael es un ex analista de la CIA, marine usamericano e historiador. Fue alto oficial de valoración con responsabilidad especial de Asuntos del Hemisferio Occidental de 1981 a 1988. Renunció a la CIA para no tener que falsificar informes por razones políticas y testimonió ante el Tribunal Mundial sobre la Ilegalidad de Irán-Contra.

MacMichael fundó The Association of National Security Alumni [la Asociación de Graduados de la Seguridad Nacional], una organización para denunciar y restringir las acciones clandestinas, y es miembro del comité director de Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS) [Profesionales Veteranos de la Inteligencia por la Cordura].

Nos encontramos en una Conferencia de Ética de la Inteligencia que reunió a casi doscientos profesionales de un amplio espectro de perspectivas para discutir el impacto de una carrera en la inteligencia sobre la vida moral y ética del profesional de la inteligencia.

MacMichael discute su carrera, temas éticas en la inteligencia, y la relevancia de Irán-Contra para los temas actuales de la seguridad nacional.

RT: David, discutamos de tecnología y de la comunidad de la inteligencia

DM: ¡Es una expresión que odio! Suena tan tibia y confusa.

RT: ¿Cuál prefiere?

DM: Sistema de inteligencia

RT: OK. Tecnología y el sistema de inteligencia.

DM: Durante años trabajé en SRI (Stanford Research Institute) y Uri Geller y gente como él flotaban todo el tiempo por ahí. Se suponía que yo fuera la voz de la cordura, pero me llevaron a pensar en ciertas cosas que aparecen en su ensayo sobre tecnología. (MacMichael hizo una reseña sobre mi ensayo “The Changing Context of Intelligence and Ethics: Enabling Technologies as Transformational Engines, and what is happening there in the intelligence community.) [El contexto cambiante de la Inteligencia y la Ética: Tecnologías Posibilitantes como Instrumentos Transformacionales y lo que sucede en la comunidad de la inteligencia]. Jacques Ellul escribió sobre cómo la tecnología define la forma como opera el mundo y que será utilizada incluso si tiene un propósito maléfico o que sea incorrecto según los estándares existentes.

Fui profesor de historia, y pienso en Diderot en la Francia del Siglo XVIII. La Enciclopedia fue realmente un manual técnico que sacó a la luz lo que anteriormente había sido calificado de “misterios” de las corporaciones artesanales. La transformación del misterio en conocimiento se convirtió en una base de la revolución industrial. Ese tipo de cambio es importante e impacta en los temas que se presentan respecto al lado ético del sistema de inteligencia.

Esto provoca una pregunta importante: ¿Qué tiene todo esto que ver con la “inteligencia”? Pienso en toda la ciencia demencial que hicieron en MKULTRA y en MKSEARCH y programas semejantes. ¿Cómo se relacionaban con la recolección de inteligencia para informar políticas?

Otro punto que se menciona es que la transformación impuesta por las corporaciones multinacionales globales que transcienden todas las fronteras nacionales hace que el concepto de estados-naciones en conflicto sea extremadamente cuestionable. En los siglos XIX y XX, los conflictos fueron entre estados-naciones. Pero incluso en ese caso, se puede estudiar cualquier atlas histórico y considerar el imperio post-romano y es como un calidoscopio a medida que se hojean los mapas, ya que cambian las fronteras y las formas de las estructuras geográficas.

RT: Los mapas en las mentes de la gente son más permanentes que los territorios representados por los mapas. Ahora la neurociencia traza mapas de las regiones del cerebro –

DM: Sí, y desde la perspectiva de Ellul, eso se convierte en control. Programas como

MKULTRA tenían que ver con control y eso provoca problemas éticos críticos.

Trabajé en Stanford con Harvey Weinstein, un psiquiatra que dirigía servicios psiquiátricos estudiantiles para la universidad. Harvey llegó a ser psiquiatra porque su padre fue víctima de la experimentación MKULTRA. Su padre se deterioró hasta llegar a la depresión y peor todavía como consecuencia de la ciencia demencial de Ewen Cameron pero a su familia le dijeron que su padre pasaba por todo eso porque no cooperó suficientemente con su tratamiento. Eso impulsó a Harvey hacia la psiquiatría. A fines de los años setenta, conoció las verdaderas causas después de las revelaciones de las audiencias del Comité Church y Pike.

¿Por qué asocian esas devastadoras técnicas con la inteligencia? Eso nos lleva a la pregunta más elemental de: ¿por qué asocian la inteligencia con las operaciones clandestinas? La inteligencia tiene que ver con información. La regla general para las operaciones clandestinas es que contienen un 75% de desinformación. Los problemas éticos son difíciles de reconciliar. Una se basa en la verdad, y la otra en lo contrario.

RT: Amigos míos en una de las agencias se quejan de la arrogancia que ciega a la gente en ellas ante su sentido de responsabilidad hacia el público, es decir hacia ciudadanos como nosotros, que pagan sus salarios. No se puede distinguir la desinformación que sale de las agencias dirigida hacia el enemigo, de la desinformación dirigida a la población. Además, es imposible impedir la propaganda vuelva como un bumerang hacia su origen debido a la red de sistemas de información en el que todos vivimos. ¿Cómo buscamos la verdad mayor y la articulamos a fin de informar discusiones políticas responsables? ¿Llega a ser posible?

DM: Quisiera volver a los neoconservadores con su base intelectual maquiavélica y citar a Walter Lippman que planteaba el mismo argumento. Los asuntos de política exterior e internacional se hallan demasiado lejos de la capacidad de comprensión de la masa, dijo, así que tienen que ser conducidos en secreto y no debe haber transparencia.

RT: Cuénteme más sobre sus antecedentes.

DM: Yo no fui un oficial profesional de la inteligencia. Pasé diez años en el Cuerpo de Marines de USA, renuncié en 1959, y volví a estudiar. Fui miembro de NDEA en la Universidad de Oregon y recibí grados A en historia. Enseñé durante varios años y por mis antecedentes militares y porque me especialicé en historia militar centrada en Latinoamérica me contactó el SRI que tenía numerosos contratos del departamento de defensa. La contrainsurgencia estaba de moda. En el Cuerpo de Marines, fui a la Escuela de las Fuerzas Especiales. Siempre nos preparamos para la última guerra y todo el enfoque era repetir la experiencia del OSS en caso de una guerra con la Unión Soviética. Las Fuerzas Especiales fueron creadas porque los militares no querían volver jamás a ver algo como el OSS. El plan era que equipos entrarían en Europa Oriental para crear insurgencias, pero dentro de unos pocos años se hizo evidente que las insurgencias en las colonias de los aliados de posguerra tenían que ser “contrarrestadas” – así que se desarrolló la contrainsurgencia. El departamento de defensa otorgaba contratos como si hubieran perdido la razón. SRI me contrató para que fuera a Centroamérica y realizara trabajo confidencial. Habían obtenido un gran contrato de ARPA (más tarde DARPA) para un centro de contrainsurgencia en Tailandia y trabajé en eso.

Existía una batalla en Tailandia entre el embajador Graham Martin y consejeros militares dirigidos por Richard Stillwell. Se batían por el control de nuestros principales programas de ayuda que tenían que ser justificados en términos de seguridad. Martin y Stillwell se odiaban así que, por cierto, la Casa Blanca escogió a alguien que odiara a ambos y fuera odiado por ellos, Peer De Silva, que escribió sus memorias (“Sub Rosa: The CIA and the Uses of Intelligence”. New York: New York Times Books, 1978). Fue oficial de seguridad en el Proyecto Manhattan y transferido a la nueva CIA.

La cantidad de personas que podía llevar a Tailandia había sido limitada, así que tuvo que usar lo que encontró allí. Mi colega, John Huxley, había sido jefe de estación en Pakistán, y le dijo que me consiguiera y trabajé para él durante cuatro años en la embajada de USA. Allí establecí mis contactos con la agencia y la oficina local de la estación y cuando volví a USA realicé trabajo contractual para ellos. Luego, como consultor, trabajé con John Nesbitt, el tecnólogo, durante los últimos años de control de la agencia por Stan Turner, cuando trataban de reconstruir el tipo de operación del antiguo Consejo de Valoraciones Nacionales.

Querían que gente externa con antecedentes y reputación dirigiera el Grupo Analítico en el Consejo Nacional de Inteligencia y tuviera la responsabilidad de redactar las valoraciones nacionales de inteligencia. Comencé a trabajar para Harold Ford. Fui responsable de las valoraciones junto con otras cosas y el trabajo llegó a concentrarse en la guerra de la Contra.

Yo era diligente. No importa con quién hablara, a quién sonsacaba información, no pude encontrar nada que apoyara la justificación principal para la operación Contra. Tuve serios problemas con la caracterización del gobierno sandinista.

Esto resume cómo funciona realmente el sistema. Es relevante a lo que ocurre en la actualidad. Me pidieron que hiciera una valoración del gobierno sandinista e hice una evaluación y una proyección que resultaron ser realistas, pero que no se ajustaban a los deseos de los que decidían la política. Por eso me recuerda la controversia sobre las ADM. Ford me respaldó pero William Casey (Director de la CIA) dijo que no, que algo semejante no puede aparecer como una valoración especial. Fue publicado como un memorando de investigación de inteligencia, fue archivado y se acabó.

Después de dos años con el grupo analítico, ya no pude continuar. No deseaba nada más en la agencia. En su lugar, viajé con dinero de mi propio bolsillo a Centroamérica y mientras más averiguaba, más claro veía que la operación era demencial. Si iba a pronunciarme, más valía que lo hiciera porque conocía planes usamericanos bien avanzados para una invasión de Nicaragua. Sabía lo que habían hecho en otros sitios y si iba a decir algo, tenía que ser antes de que ocurriera, no después.

Fui observador en la elección en Nicaragua de 1985; iba a ser verificada como una elección limpia y abierta pero justo antes de la elección se demostró cómo se suministra desinformación a la prensa: Difundieron noticias de que Nicaragua iba a recibir un gran embarque de aviones MIG.

RT: ¿La relación entre la CIA y los medios era tan sutil como en la actualidad?

DM: Fue muy sutil durante todo ese prolongado período. El papel operativo del control de la opinión se originó directamente en la Segunda Guerra Mundial. Se aplica a cualquier situación en tiempos de guerra: la guerra exige que alistes a los medios para lanzar en el mejor sentido de la palabra la propaganda de guerra. Es lo que quieres que publiquen, y formas parte del esfuerzo de guerra, estás apoyando a tu país, y en la Guerra Fría, se invocó la misma justificación. Hay que comprender que hubo muchas personas involucradas que fueron atraídas intelectualmente a una alternativa a lo que era considerado como el destructivo y fracasado capitalismo, que trabajaban con el Partido Comunista y que luego se desilusionaron por los eventos en Europa oriental. Se integraron y lo hicieron con el ímpetu de la Segunda Guerra Mundial. Creían que apoyaban a su país y que había que ocultar su actividad – ahora bien, es muy poderosa, esa idea de estar dentro de ese esfuerzo, es tan atractiva, tan poderosa. Una gran amenaza para cualquiera que quería decir lo que pensaba era que se podía perder acceso, y se deseaba tanto estar dentro. Algo semejante mantiene a mucha gente en el sistema de inteligencia, aparte de las razones usuales como el salario, la jubilación, etc. Temen que si dicen lo que piensan, perderán su acceso.

RT: El rechazo por los demás es un refuerzo primitivo y poderoso.

DM: Lo verás en las audiencias cuando se aplica a los denunciadores. Conozco a muchos de estos y lo que destroza a muchos de ellos y los altera tanto es que cuando expresan preocupaciones, no tanto sobre la política sino sobre la manera como es realizada, pierden su aprobación de seguridad. Hay que comprender lo crítico que es algo así. Es todo para una persona. Todo.

RT: Las consecuencias son tan serias.

DM: Así es, lo son. Conozco a denunciadores destacados que siguen sufriendo del efecto después de muchos años. “Eran mis colegas,” dicen. “Eran mis amigos. Pero repentinamente no soy ni colega ni amigo,” dicen. Es como el sentimiento de pertenecer al mismo club del Foreign Office, cuando ya no eres bienvenido en ciertas fiestas o en ciertas casas, es un golpe serio.

Ahora bien, había gozado de bastante buena aceptación por parte de la prensa, y contraté a un abogado, Melvin Wolfe, que era el principal asesor jurídico de la ACLU [Unión Usamericana de Libertades Cívicas] y había trabajado con Victor Marchetti en la publicación de sus memorias de la CIA. No quería ser procesado ni quería ir a la cárcel. Mel dijo que podría defenderme. Estudié el formulario que había firmado con la agencia. La historia iba a salir a la luz y di a Wolfe un artículo para una revista que estaba seguro que iban a bloquear. Le dije, Mel, lleva esto al consejo de revisión de publicaciones en la agencia – y resultó exactamente tal como lo había previsto. Dejaron pasar lo que yo creía que era necesario que dijera, quién era, la evidencia crítica, y bloquearon las otras cosas de las que esta seguro que no permitirían que aparecieran. Ahora tenía la orientación necesaria para el resto de los años ochenta, para hablar y ayudar a organizar la Asociación de Graduados de la Seguridad Nacional. Utilicé esa acción como orientación. Wolfe controlaba ocasionalmente – también me vigilaban mucho – y lo que le dijeron fue que ese hijo de puta llega todo tiempo hasta el límite, pero nunca va más allá.

No fui un héroe en busca del martirio y parecía dar resultado. Testimonié en el Tribunal Mundial, lo que me fue muy importante – fue un evento importante y tuvo un impacto en la política exterior. Desarrollamos incluso en aquel entonces una creciente comunidad de antiguos oficiales de la inteligencia, con John Stockwell y otros que organizaron la asociación, y yo me convertí en su representante en Washington. Publicamos bimensualmente nuestra revista “Unclassified” durante 5 o 6 años. Era una buena revista, atacó una serie de esos temas y tuvo una circulación razonable. Mucha gente en los medios la utilizó.

RT: ¿Puede valorar el impacto de lo que hizo?

DM: En términos de impacto, la oportunidad es importante. Ampliamos la conversación sobre el uso de la inteligencia. La consigna que concebí fue: no nos oponemos a la inteligencia, pero nos oponemos a operaciones paramilitares clandestinas, que constituyen por definición violaciones del derecho internacional. La oportunidad fue importante por las audiencias de Irán-Contra – pero en realidad, en términos de impacto, fue desalentador ver cómo el Congreso trataba el tema. Fue el escándalo constitucional más significativo que hayamos tenido y lo ocultaron bajo la alfombra. Los hechos exigían un juicio político. La cualidad emocional de las palabras es importante cuando se llega a ese nivel y el juicio político son algunas de esas palabras. El uso de esas palabras llegó a su clímax o debería decir a su anti-clímax con los perdones a la hora once de George Bush, el primero. Dejó un sentimiento negativo, para decir lo menos.

¿Para qué sirvió? ¿Qué importó, todo lo que hicimos?

RT: Provoca cinismo.

DM: Así es, por cierto.

Es una vieja historia. En el Libro de Samuel, el pueblo dijo que quería un Rey. Samuel dijo: Os diré lo que sucederá si tenéis un Rey: tomará a vuestros jóvenes y los enviará a la guerra; tomará vuestro dinero para construirse casas; tomará a vuestras mujeres para sus propios proyectos, y os impondrá increíbles impuestos.

Y el pueblo de Israel dijo: ¡Queremos un Rey! y eso fue todo.

¿Qué ha cambiado?

RT: La conferencia sobre Inteligencia y Ética es un intento de crear un contexto para el examen de estos temas y lo que causa a los profesionales de la inteligencia durante su vida hacer, saber, escuchar, lo que usted describe. ¿Cree que es un proyecto viable?

DM: En las organizaciones más brutales – en la Gestapo, por ejemplo – una proporción minúscula de las personas en la organización participa en las peores barbaridades. La mayoría vuelve a casa, juegan con sus chicos, son simpáticos hacia los vecinos, y pueden soportarlo. Mientras más se distancia uno de lo que hace en realidad, menos problemas tiene. El disparo de un misil Tomahawk no es lo mismo que un combate mano a mano.

Pero podemos hablar de esto en términos de crímenes de guerra. Los ataques contra centros de población civil están prohibidos, pero en la Primera Guerra Mundial estuvimos dispuestos a hacerlo y luego, en la Segunda Guerra Mundial, ninguno de los ataques aéreos en violación de esas normas, como ser los bombardeos incendiarios en Japón fue jamás mencionado. ¿Es la manera usamericana de librar una guerra, o simplemente el modo industrial de hacerlo? No lo sé.

Mis antecedentes me dieron cierta credibilidad cuando expresé mi opinión y espero que haya tenido algún impacto sobre miembros del Congreso. ¿Afectó en algo a la política? No lo sé. Mi mayor desilusión fue en 1988 cuando la campaña de Dukakis y la Convención Nacional Demócrata me pidieron que hiciera presentaciones sobre cómo utilizar este tema y me sentí tan defraudado por su reacción. Había estado hablando por todo el país y dije, si usted encara este tema en 1988 y dice, si me eligen, se acaba el programa Contra, existen grupos en todo el país que reaccionarán, pero ¡Dios mío, la palabrería! Oh, bueno, dijeron, bien, sí, pero ya sabe, y todo eso. La incapacidad de la gente de coger esos toros en particular por los cuernos es un motivo por el que se desinflan sus campañas. Hablando de impacto, se pueden generar diez mil cartas al editor, pero no tienen ningún impacto político. En esas horribles audiencias, la denuncia fue interminable, ¿y para qué?

RT: ¿Bueno? ¿Valió la pena?

DM: Uno se encuentra en una situación parecida tal vez una vez en toda una vida. Sólo se tiene una ocasión y más vale intentar dar en el blanco. Yo lo hice. Fue mi mejor acto ético en una vida de conducta poco ética.

RT: Usted distingue las operaciones encubiertas de la recolección de inteligencia. ¿No nos remonta eso a cómo fue interpretada la ley que creó la CIA?

DM: La ley específica que estableció la CIA, la Ley de Seguridad Nacional de 1947, prescribió que la CIA realizara otras actividades de naturaleza de inteligencia que podrían ser determinadas de tiempo en tiempo por el Consejo de Seguridad Nacional. ¿Qué demonios quería decir eso? El primer Asesor Jurídico General de la CIA, preguntó si se refería al tipo de operaciones tras las líneas que habían sido realizadas por la OSS. En ningún caso. Pero Frank Wisner y otros se agarraron del lenguaje. Wisner, con su poderoso Wurlitzer difundiendo propaganda, salió a buscar aventuras. Pero ya se sabe que la mayoría de esas tempranas aventuras fueron desastres totales.

RT: Una gran parte fue mal concebida.

DM: Sí, pero vaya, la fascinación de vivirlas…

RT: El síndrome de Oliver North.

DM: La atracción de jugar a vaqueros e indios es tan inmensa. Así que hay que preguntar si podemos llegar a discutir ética e inteligencia a renglón seguido. El New York Times escribió un artículo sobre nuestra conferencia y citó “Ethics” de Dewey Claridge. “Ethics? ¿Están locos? Si uno se mete en este negocio, se espera que lo haga.”

Recuerdo cuando la Asesora Jurídica de la CIA bajó la guardia en una entrevista con AP y dijo: “¡sí, mentimos, engañamos, robamos y ocasionalmente matamos, pero en general, la gente de la CIA son de lo mejorcito que se pueda encontrar en parte alguna!”

RT: Me dicen que EO 12333 (Orden Ejecutiva 1233 que prohíbe asesinatos y otras actividades específicas) está siendo re-escrita. “Esperen,” fueron las últimas palabras del general Hayden en cuanto a que las actuales actividades de la Agencia Nacional de Seguridad quedaban cubiertas. Pero mi sentido es que eso siempre ha sido re-escrita.

DM: Por cierto fue así. Creo que fue el profesor de derecho de la Universidad de Virginia que dirigió un panel de la asociación de derecho sobre ética e inteligencia a inicios de los años noventa quien dijo, hablando de asesinatos, bueno, ese término no es realmente utilizado correctamente, no debería incluir todo intento de matar a alguien.

RT: ¿Qué impulsó todo esto, David? ¿Qué llevó a gente inteligente a volverse tan salvaje?

DM: Como tantas cosas en el sistema de inteligencia, parecía sexy a algunos y sobre todo ESTABA EL DINERO. Eso lo impulsa todo. La gente hará lo que se pueda financiar. Las líneas entre organizaciones y especialistas y contratistas y agencias están muy desdibujadas y el dinero es más una correa de transmisión que una puerta giratoria.

Cuando hice trabajo contractual, realicé algunos proyectos de los que no me sentía orgulloso, parte del trabajo era cuestionable como ser varias tecnologías de interrogatorio que han sido utilizadas durante treinta años, midiendo cambios en el tamaño de la pupila del ojo para ver si alguien está mintiendo – tiendo a desdeñar esos esfuerzos, pero cuando buscas “capacidades e intenciones”, hay mucho trecho que considerar y poca goma. Las más débiles huellas de un patinazo supuestamente revelan cosas importantes, pero su interpretación no es fácil. La inteligencia se divide en dos partes: una es la Inteligencia Táctica y las Actividades Relacionadas (TIARA, por sus siglas en inglés). TIARA es usualmente bastante buena y tienes la capacidad de saber mediante la vigilancia o intercepciones dónde se hallan varias unidades enemigas, es lo que yo utilizaba y consideraba en el Cuerpo de Marines. Es bastante difícil en la conocida neblina de la guerra. Pero cuando lo llevas a este otro nivel en el que buscas a tientas y a ciegas intenciones, capacidades industriales, etc., es útil para la discusión pero ¿es realmente útil para la acción y la toma de decisiones inmediatas? Lo dudo. La inteligencia está a varios pasos de la realidad. ¿Hasta que punto sirve? Tienes que comprender que una vez que el lado analítico, no el lado operativo, está ligado al uso de estas técnicas, eres como un profesor titular que trabaja en su área de especialización: obtienes una enorme satisfacción al hacerlo, y te financian. ¿Pero hasta que punto es útil?

La única vez que oí hablar de temas éticos presentados en relación con nuestro trabajo fue cuando alguien se detuvo y consideró lo que estábamos haciendo y dijo: ¿Qué estoy haciendo? ¿Qué estoy haciendo realmente?

RT: ¿Existe realmente responsabilidad ante los ciudadanos del país y su Constitución? ¿Es posible una transparencia que tenga sentido?

DM: Conozco a alguien que demandó a la CIA porque dijo que no cumplían con los términos de su contrato. Operaba una organización especializada o de pantalla para ellos y transportaba diferentes cosas por todo el mundo. Cuando les dijo que quería dejar de hacerlo, dijeron que no podía. Demandó a la agencia bajo una ley que tenía que ver con el mantenimiento del orden y la agencia efectivamente informó al tribunal que el individuo al que nombró en su demanda era un oficial de la CIA y que por lo tanto había que desestimar el caso ya que no tenía que ver con el mantenimiento del orden.

Oirá decir que los profesionales de la inteligencia no pueden operar fuera de la ley. Pero Lawrence Welch dijo, que EXISTE una clase de gente que no puede ser responsable ante la ley.

El tema de la transparencia presenta otro aspecto: ¿cuándo es ético salir a hablar? Ahora usan la “seguridad nacional” para tapar cualquier cosa. El tema del secreto de Estado se ha ido por completo de las manos. Si se acepta que el ciudadano tiene derecho a conocer información que lo concierne directamente, ¿existe el requerimiento de que la persona que tiene ese conocimiento debe informarlo? Lo mismo se aplica a la confidencialidad y a la compartimentación.

Recuerde cómo operan todos los sistemas de inteligencia. El oficial de operaciones en la estación de la CIA tiene una responsabilidad primordial: reclutar agentes. Los agentes son, por definición, ciudadanos del gobierno del país en el que opera el jefe de estación. Un agente es alguien que suministra información o servicios POR UNA CONSIDERACIÓN – esto es importante, no dejamos que la gente se ofrezca a trabajar voluntariamente para nosotros – y por lo tanto traicione a su propio país. Nuestro negocio es solicitar a la gente que traicione sus lealtades. Es la naturaleza del negocio.

¿Así que cómo podemos discutir esos temas éticos críticos en ese contexto? Esos fiascos iniciales terminaron con el esfuerzo coreano. Teníamos una red intrincada desde Seúl que suministraba información exacta y precisa sobre Corea del Norte, pero al ser revisada, comprobamos que un 90% de los agentes que trabajaban para Seúl eran doblados por los norcoreanos. Un fiasco inmenso. Beetle Smith, director de la CIA en la época, dijo que no íbamos a escribir un informe al respecto porque si llega a salir a la luz, sería el fin de la CIA.

La pregunta es: ¿considerando que la misión de la estación de la CIA es reclutar agentes, qué país permitiría a sabiendas que se estableciera una estación de la CIA? Como dijimos, el historial de la agencia en los primeros años fue un fiasco – olviden la elección italiana, no fue más que una elección al estilo del Bronx, que compramos.

RT: Después de la elección italiana y el derrocamiento de Arbenz en Guatemala, dijeron, la cosa es fácil. Y se les subió a la cabeza.

DM: La penetración en objetivos duros, la Unión Soviética, Europa oriental, y después de 1949, China – no ocurrió. En los años cincuenta y sesenta, en el clímax del período poscolonial, la CIA volcó su atención a Latinoamérica y allí tuvo éxito porque esos objetivos son tan blandos, las sociedades tan corruptas, y los individuos en las agencias de seguridad hacían cola – créamelo – pidiendo que los contrataran. Es un buen día de pago. Así se hicieron tantas carreras. Vi muchas de esas operaciones en África, Latinoamérica, y en Bangkok, donde trabajé – esto en sí es un “tema ético”. Persuaden a la gente para que haga cosas semejantes.

RT: En sí y por sí, usted dice, que la naturaleza del trabajo quebranta normas éticas tal como las vemos en otros contextos. Se trata de control por casi cualquier medio.

DM: Sí. Mi difunta colega Diane Kuntz, sirvió en la estación en Lima, Perú. Un joven funcionario en la embajada china solicitó una prostituta en particular. Así que colocaron cámaras y filmaron. Eso era siempre divertido, pero lo que fastidió a Diane es que todos los demás agentes en la estación miraban semanalmente las películas, y no la dejaban verlas.

Una vez que tuvieron bastante sobre el individuo, organizaron que un oficial de la agencia irrumpiera y lo viera, gritando que esa mujer era su hija y que le pasarían cosas horrendas, que tenían esas cintas, y luego llegaron al punto. Hizo lo que haría toda persona sensata. Fue donde sus superiores y les dijo lo que había ocurrido, es lo que le pidieron, lo pusieron en el próximo avión a Beijing, y continuó su carrera.

El punto es que siempre buscan esas cosas para atrapar a las personas, y lo racionalizas, lo justificas, dices: es mi trabajo y estamos obteniendo información que necesitamos, y si no eres bastante insensible para hacerlo – búscate otro trabajo.

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Richard Thieme es autor y orador y se especializa en las implicaciones más profundas de la tecnología, la religión y la ciencia. También escribe ficción y su cuento “Gibby the Sit-down King”, fue recientemente nominada para un Premio Pushcart. Para contactos: rthieme@thiemeworks.com

http://www.counterpunch.org/thieme04032006.html

Interview with David MacMichael

by Richard Thieme

David MacMichael is a former CIA Analyst, US Marine and historian.  He was a senior estimates officer with special responsibility for Western Hemisphere Affairs at the CIA’s National Intelligence Council from 1981 to 1983. He resigned from the CIA rather than falsify reports for political reasons and testified at the World Court on the illegalities of Iran-Contra.

MacMichael started The Association of National Security Alumni, an organization to expose and curtail covert actions, and is a steering committee member of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS).

He and Richard Thieme, a frequent contributor to NCR, recently met at an Intelligence Ethics Conference that gathered nearly two hundred professionals from a broad spectrum of perspectives to discuss the impact of a career in intelligence on the moral and ethical life of the intelligence professional.

MacMichael discusses his background, ethical issues in intelligence, and the relevance of Iran-Contra to current national security issues.

RT: David, we discussed technology and the intelligence community—

DM: That’s a term I hate! It sounds so warm and fuzzy.

RT: What do you prefer?

DM: Intelligence system.

RT: OK. Technology and the intelligence system.

DM: For years I worked at SRI (Stanford Research Institute) and Uri Geller and people like that were always floating through. I was supposed to be a voice of sanity but they did get me thinking about certain things that show up in your piece on technology (MacMichael reviewed my essay, The Changing Context of Intelligence and Ethics:

Enabling Technologies as Transformational Engines) and what is happening there in the intelligence community. Jacques Ellul wrote of how technology defines the way the world operates and if it has an evil purpose or one that is wrong by previous standards, it will be used anyway.

I was a history professor, and I think of Diderot in the 18^th century France. The Encyclopedia was really a technical manual that exposed what had previously been referred to as “the mysteries” of the craft guilds. Transforming mystery into knowledge became a basis for the industrial revolution. That kind of change is significant and impacts the issues you raise on the ethical side about the intelligence system.

Which brings me to an important question: What has all of that got to do with “intelligence?” I think of all the crazy science they did in MKULTRA and MKSEARCH and programs like that.  How did that relate to gathering intelligence in order to inform policies?

Another point you make is that transformation imposed by global multi-national corporations that transcend all national boundaries make the concept of nation states in conflict highly questionable. In the 19^th and 20^th centuries, conflicts were between nation states. But even so, you can go back through any historical atlas and look at the post-Roman empire and it’s like a kaleidoscope as you turn through the maps as the borders and shapes of geographical structures change.

RT: The maps in people’s minds are more permanent than the territories represented by the maps. Now neuro-science is mapping regions of the brain-

DM: Yes, and from Ellul’s perspective, that translates into control. Control is what programs like MK Ultra were about and that raises critical ethical issues.

I worked at Stanford with Harvey Weinstein a psychiatrist who headed student psychiatric services for the university. Harvey became a psychiatrist because his father was a victim of MKULTRA experimentation. His father deteriorated into depression and worse as a consequence of Ewen Cameron’s crazy science, but the family was told his father was going through this because he was not sufficiently cooperative with his treatment. That pushed Harvey into psychiatry. In the late seventies, after the revelations of the Church and Pike Committee hearings, he became aware of the real causes.

Why are those devastating techniques lumped in with intelligence at all? That goes to the more basic question of why are intelligence and covert operations lumped together? Intelligence is about information. The rule of thumb for covert operations is that there is 75% disinformation. The ethical issues are difficult to reconcile. One is based on truth and other on its opposite.

RT: Friends in one of the agencies complain of the hubris that blinds people inside to a sense of accountability toward the people i.e. citizens like us, who pay their salaries. Disinformation coming out of the agencies directed toward enemies can not be distinguished from disinformation directed toward the population. In addition, propaganda is impossible to protect from blowback because of network of the information systems we all inhabit. How do we seek the larger truth and articulate it in order to inform responsible policy discussions. Is it even possible?

DM: I like to go back before the Neocons with their Machiavellian intellectual base and quote Walter Lippman who made the same point. Matters of foreign affairs and international policy are too far beyond the ability of the populace to understand, he said,  so they have to be conducted in secret and there must be no transparency.

RT: Tell me more about your background.

DM: I was not a professional intelligence officer. I had ten years in the US Marine Corps, resigned my commission in 1959, and went back to grad school. I was an NDEA fellow at the U of Oregon and received advanced degrees in history. I taught for a few years and because of my military background and because I specialized in military history with a focus on Latin America I was contacted by SRI which had a lot of DOD contracts. Counter insurgency was the new thing. In the Corps, I went to Special Forces School. We always prepare for the last war and the whole focus was to repeat the OSS experience in the event of war with the Soviet Union. Special Forces was created because the military never wanted to see anything like OSS again. The plan was, teams would go into eastern Europe to create insurgencies, but in a few years it became obvious that the insurgencies in the colonies of post-war allies had to be “countered” – so counter insurgency was developed. DOD was letting contracts like crazy. SRI hired me to go to Central America and do classified work. They had gotten a big contract from ARPA (later DARPA) for a counter insurgency center in Thailand and I worked on that.

There was a battle going on in Thailand between the Ambassador Graham Martin and military advisors headed by Richard Stillwell. They were battling for control of our major aid programs which had to be justified in terms of security. Martin and Stillwell hated each other so the White House of course chose someone who hated both of them and was hated by them, Peer De Silva, who wrote a memoir ( Sub Rosa: The CIA and the Uses of Intelligence. New York: New York Times Books, 1978). He was security officer on the Manhattan Project and transferred into the new CIA.

He was restricted in terms of how many people he could take to Thailand so he had to staff from what was there. My colleague. John Huxley, had been station chief in Pakistan, and told him to get me and I worked for him for four years in the US Embassy. That where I made my contacts with the agency and the branch office of the station and when I returned to the USA I did contract work for them. Then, as a consultant, I worked with John Nesbitt the technologist during the last years of Stan Turner’s control of the agency, when they were trying to reconstruct the old Board of National Estimates type of operation.

They wanted outside people with background and reputation to head the Analytic Group at the National Intelligence Council to be responsible for writing national intelligence estimates. I went to work for Harold Ford. I was responsible for western hemisphere estimates along with another and the focus came to be on the Contra war.

I was diligent. No matter who I talked to, who I pumped, I was unable to come up with anything in support of the main rationale for the Contra operation. I had serious problems with the characterization of the Sandinista government.

This tells you how the system actually works. This is relevant to what’s happening now. I was asked to do an estimate on the Sandinista government and I did an assessment and a projection which all came true but did not fit the policy makers’ desires. That’s why it resonates with the WMD controversy. Ford backed me up but William Casey (Director of the CIA) said no, this can not go out as a special estimate. It was published as an intelligence research memorandum and went into the file and that was that.

After two years with the analytic group, I could not continue. I did not want anything else in the agency. Instead I traveled at my own expense in Central America and the more I learned the more clear it became that the operation was whacko. If I was going to speak out I had better do it because I knew of well developed US plans for an invasion of Nicaragua. I was well aware of what we had done elsewhere and if I was going to speak out it should be before the fact instead of after.

At the 1985 elections in Nicaragua, I was an observer; it was going to be verified as a fair and open election but right before the election – this is how disinformation is fed to the press – news was broken that Nicaragua was going to receive a big shipment of MIG aircraft.

RT: Was the relationship between the CIA and the media as subtle then as it is now?

DM: It was very subtle over that entire long period. The operational role of opinion control came directly out of the Second World War. It applies to any war time situation; war requires you to enlist the media to push in the best sense of the word war propaganda. This is what you want out, and you’re part of the war effort, you’re supporting your country, and in the Cold War, the same rationale was invoked. You have to understand that many people were involved who had been intellectually attracted to an alternative of what was seen as destructive and failed capitalism and were working with the Communist Party and were then disillusioned by events in eastern Europe. They were brought in and did this in the momentum of World War 2. They believed they were supporting our country and you had to conceal their activity—now this is very powerful, this idea of being on the inside of that effort, it is so attractive, so powerful. A big threat to any who wanted to speak up was that you would lose access, and you want so much to be on the inside. This keeps many people in the intelligence system, besides the usual reasons like salary, pension, and the like. They’re afraid that if they speak up, they will lose their access.

RT: Shunning is a primitive and powerful reinforcement.

DM: You’ll see this in the hearings coming up on whistle blowers. I know many of these people and what fractures a lot of them and makes them so upset is that when they raise concerns, not so much about policy but about the way it is carried out, they lose their security clearance. You have to understand how critical this is. It means everything to a person. Everything.

RT: The consequences are so serious.

DM: Oh, they are. I know prominent whistle blowers who still deal with this after many years. “These were my colleagues,” they say. “These were my friends. But suddenly I am not a colleague or a friend.” It’s like the clubbiness of the Foreign Service; when you’re no longer welcome at certain parties or in certain houses, it’s a serious blow.

Now, I had gotten some good press and I hired a lawyer, Melvin Wolfe, who was chief counsel of the ACLU and had worked with Victor Marchetti on publishing his CIA memoirs. I did not want to be prosecuted and I did not wish to go to jail. Mel said he would be able to defend me. I reviewed the form I had signed with the agency. The story was going to go out and I gave Wolfe a magazine article I wanted to publish in which I said everything I felt I had to say as well as some things I was certain they would block. I said, Mel, take this to the publications review board at the agency –and it worked out exactly as I anticipated. They passed through what I believed was necessary for me to say, who I was, the critical evidence, and blocked out the other stuff which I was certain they would not let me say. Now I had a guideline for the rest of the eighties, for speaking and helping to organize the Association of National Security Alumni. I used that action as my guideline. Occasionally Wolfe would check – there was a lot of surveillance on me as well—and the word he got was, that son of a bitch keeps going right up to the line but he never goes over.

I was not heroic or seeking martyrdom and it seemed to work. I testified at the World Court which was very important to me – that was an important event and had an impact on foreign policy. We evolved a growing community even then of former intelligence officers, John Stockwell and others who put the association together, and I became the Washington representative. We published our magazine Unclassified bimonthly for 5-6 years. It was a good magazine and attacked a lot of these issues and had a reasonable circulation. Lots of media people used it.

RT: Can you evaluate the impact of what you did?

DM: In terms of impact, timing is important. We broadened the conversation on the use of intelligence. The slogan I devised was: we are not opposed to intelligence but we are opposed to covert paramilitary operations which by definition are violations of international law. The timing was important because of the Iran-Contra hearings—but in fact, in terms of impact, it was discouraging to see how Congress dealt with it. It was the most significant constitutional scandal we had had and they pushed it under the rug. The facts cried out for impeachment. The emotional quality of words is important when you get involved at this level and “impeachment” is one of those words. The use of those words climaxed or I should say anti-climaxed with eleventh hour pardons from George Bush the First. It left a bad feeling, to say the least.

What was the use? What did it matter, everything we did?

RT: It creates cynicism.

DM: Oh, did it ever.

It’s an old story. In the Book of Samuel, the people said they wanted a King. Samuel said, I’ll tell you what will happen if you have a King: he’ll take your young men and send them to war, take your money to build himself houses, take your women for his own projects, and he’ll put incredible taxes on you.

And the people of Israel said, We want a King! and that was that.

How much has changed?

RT: The conference on Intelligence and Ethics is an attempt to build a context for examining these issues and what it does to intelligence professionals over a lifetime to do, to know, to hear about what you describe. Do you think the project is viable?

DM: In the most brutal organizations – in the Gestapo, for example – a miniscule proportion of the people in the organization participate in the worst barbarities. Most go home, play with their kids, are nice to their neighbors, and can deal with it. The further you are away from actually “doing it,” the less problems you have. Firing a Tomahawk missile is not hand-to-hand combat.

But we can talk about this in terms of war crimes. Attacks on civilian population centers are prohibited but in WWI we were ready to do it and then, in WW2, none of the aerial attacks in violation of those norms like incendiary bombings in Japan were ever brought up. Is that the American way of war or simply the industrial way of war? I don’t know.

My background gave me some credibility when I spoke out and I hope it had some impact on members of Congress. Did that effect policy? I can’t say. My greatest disappointment was in 1988 when I was asked by the Dukakis campaign and the Democratic National Committee to make presentations on how to use this issue and I was so disappointed by their response. I had been speaking all around the country and said, if you take on this issue in 1988 and say, if I’m elected, the Contra program is over, there are groups all over the country that will respond, but my God, the waffling! Oh well, they said, well, yes, but you know, and all that. The inability of people to grasp these particular nettles is one reason their campaigns deflate. Talk about impact, you can generate ten thousand letters to the editor but it does not have political impact. In those dreadful hearings, the expose went on and on—but for what?

RT: Well? Was it worth it?

DM: You find yourself in this situation maybe once in a  lifetime. You only come to the plate once and had better take your swings. I took my swings. That was my one ethical plus in a lifetime of unethical behavior.

RT: You distinguish covert operations from gathering intelligence. Doesn’t that go back to how the law creating the CIA was interpreted?

DM: The specific law establishing the CIA, the National Security Act of 1947, directed the CIA to carry out “other activities of an intelligence nature as the National Security Council may from time to time direct.” What the hell did that mean? The first General Counsel of the CIA, asked if it meant the behind-the-lines kinds of operations the OSS had carried out, said, “Absolutely not.” But Frank Wisner and others grabbed onto the language;, Wisner with his “mighty Wurlitzer” cranking out propaganda, went adventuring. Yet you know – most of those early escapades were total disasters.

RT: So much was ill-conceived—

DM: Yes, but oh, the glamour of doing it—

RT: The Oliver North syndrome.

DM: The attraction of playing cowboys and Indians is so great. So you have to question whether we can even discuss ethics and intelligence in the same breath. The New York Times wrote an article about our conference and quoted Dewey Claridge. “Ethics? Are you crazy? You go into this line of business, you’re expected to do this.”

I recall when the General Counsel for the CIA let down her guard in an interview with AP and said, yes, we lie cheat steal and occasionally kill but overall, the people in the CIA are as fine a bunch as you’ll ever find anywhere!

RT: I am told that EO 12333 (Executive Order 12333 prohibits assassinations and other specific activities) is being rewritten. “Stand by,” were the final words of General Hayden as to whether current NSA activities were covered. But my sense is that it was always being rewritten.

DM: Of course it was. I think of  the law professor at the University of Virginia who was heading a panel of the law association on ethics and intelligence in the early nineties and said, on the matter of assassination, well, that term is not really correctly used, it should not be directed at every intent to kill someone.

RT: What drove all this, David? What compelled intelligent people to get so wild?

DM: Like so much in the intelligence system, it looked sexy to some people and above all, THE MONEY WAS THERE. That drives all of this. People will do what they can fund. The lines between organizations and proprietaries and contractors and agencies are very blurred and the money is more like a transmission belt than a revolving door. When I did contract work, I did some projects I was not all that proud of, some of the work was questionable—like various interrogation technologies that have been worked on for thirty years, measuring changes in the size of the pupil of the eye to see if someone’s lying —I tend to be dismissive of those efforts but when you’re looking for “capabilities and intentions,”  there is a whole lot of road to look at and not a lot of rubber. The faintest skid marks are supposed to tell you significant things but interpreting the marks is not easy. Intelligence is divided into two parts: one is Tactical Intelligence and Related Activity (TIARA). TIARA is usually pretty good and you have the ability to know through surveillance or interceptions where various enemy units are, that’s what I used and looked at in the Marine Corps. That’s hard enough in the well-known fog of war. But when you take it to this other level where you’re fumbling with intentions, industrial capabilities, etc. – it’s useful for discussion but is it really useful for immediate action and decision making? It’s questionable. The intelligence is several steps removed the real. So how useful is it? You have to understand that once the analytic side, not the operational side, is wedded to using these techniques, you’re like a tenured professor working in your area of specialty, you get enormous satisfaction from doing so, and you get funded. But how useful is it?

The only time I ever heard ethical issues raised in relationship to our work came when someone stood back and looked at what they were doing and said: what am I doing? what am I really doing?

RT: Is there realistic accountability to the citizens of the country and the Constitution? Is meaningful transparency possible?

DM: I know someone who sued the CIA because he said they did not meet the terms of their contract with him. He operated a proprietary or front organization for them and shipped various things around the world. When he told them he wanted to stop, they said he couldn’t. He sued the agency under a law that applied to law enforcement and the agency actually informed the court that the individual he named in his suit was a CIA officer and therefore the case should be dismissed since they were not law enforcement.

You’ll hear it said that intelligence professionals can not operate outside the law. But Lawrence Welch said, there IS a class of people who can not be held accountable under the law.

The issue of transparency raises another issue: when is it ethical to speak out? They use “national security” to cover everything now. The state secrecy issue is completely out of hand. If you accept that the citizen has a right to know information that directly impacts him, does the person who has that knowledge have the requirement to inform him?  The same applies to classification and compartmentalization.

Remember how all intelligence systems operate. The operations officer in the CIA station has one primary responsibility: to recruit agents. Agents, by definition, are citizens of the government of the country in which the station chief operates. An agent is someone who provides information or services FOR A CONSIDERATION – this is important, we don’t let people “volunteer” to work for us – and therefore is a traitor to his own country. We are in the business of soliciting people to betray their loyalties. That’s the nature of the business.

So how can we discuss these critical ethical issues in that context?. Those early fiascoes came to a head with the Korean effort. We had an elaborate network out of Seoul reporting exact and precise information about North Korea but when it was reviewed, we learned that 90% of the agents running out of Seoul were doubled by the North Koreans. An enormous fiasco. Beetle Smith, CIA director at the time, said, we’re not going to write a report on this because if it ever gets out, it would be the end of the CIA.

The question is: given that the mission of the CIA station is to recruit agents, why would a country knowingly allow a CIA station to be established? As we said, the record of the agency in the first years was a fiasco—forget about the Italian election, that was just a good Bronx-style election that we bought.

RT: After the Italian election and the demise of Arbenz in Guatemala, they said, this is easy. It went to their heads.

DM: The penetration in hard targets, the Soviet Union, eastern Europe, and after 1949, China – that did not happen. In the fifties and sixties, at the height of the post-colonial period, the CIA turned its attention to Latin America and that’s where they had success because those targets are so soft, the societies are so corrupt, and the guys in the security agencies lined up – believe me – and said, sign me up! It’s a good payday. That’s where so many careers were made. I saw many of these operations going on in Africa, Latin America, and in Bangkok where I worked – this in itself is an “ethical issue.” You are persuading people to do this.

RT: In and of itself, you are saying, the nature of the work breaks ethical norms as we understand them in other contexts. It’s about control by nearly any means.

DM: Yes. My late colleague, Diane Kuntz, served in the station in Lima Peru. A junior officer at the Chinese embassy requested a particular prostitute. So they got the cameras in there and filmed, that was always fun, but what ticked Diane off is that all the other officers at the station watched the films on a weekly basis but they wouldn‘t let her watch.

After they had enough stuff on the guy, they arranged for an agency officer to storm in and see this guy, shrieking that this woman is his daughter and bad things will happen and they have these films and then they make the pitch. This guy did what any sensible person would do. He went to his superiors and told them what happened, this is what they asked, and he was on the next plane back to Beijing and went on with his career.

The point is, they’re always looking for things like that to trap people, and you rationalize it, you justify it, you say, this is my job and we’re obtaining information that we need, and if your skin isn’t thick enough to do it—then get a different job.

Originally published in the National Catholic Reporter

Interview with Edgar Mitchell, ScD., Captain USN (Ret)

by

Richard Thieme

RT: You’ve been involved with consciousness studies, including the exploration of UFOs, for some time. What’s your primary focus?

EM: My focus has never been primarily on UFOs. My focus has been consciousness studies for thirty years. I kind of back doored into this because of my work in consciousness studies and talking to John Mack about abductees or experiencers as he prefers to call them.

I ran into a large number of what I call the “old timers,” people in government, in the military and intelligence work going back fifty years, who say, “Yes, it’s all true.”

RT: When I was a parish priest on the edge of an air force base, I was told by a member of the parish, an air force fighter pilot, that some basic reports were true – that pilots encountered vehicles which paced fighters and flew rings around them, doing things that even in black budget projects at the time to my knowledge were impossible. Because I know that black budget projects create technologies that seem fantastic to ordinary people, I like to focus on early reports, from 1947-1952, when the waters were not quite so muddy.

EM: That has been my focus too. I grew up in Roswell NM and remember when that story broke. I was just a kid in high school. When it was dismissed the next day as weather balloons I wrote it off and went about my business. My grandparents were in the cattle business and knew the Brazells. So we were there but it never really came back to me until ten-twelve years ago when I really became interested in the consciousness stuff and John Mack and I started getting literature and seeing names I recognized from Roswell. I was close personal friends with Werner von Braun. Although he never mentioned that event, he was very interested in my consciousness work. And then a few other people, military, retired generals and admirals, that years ago I happened to encounter, and they all said oh yes, it really was all real, we just couldn’t talk about it at the time. They’re still reluctant to talk about it.

RT: “It” means …?”

EM: Something like the Roswell incident was real. I’m not sure we have all the details correct right down to the nitty-gritty fundamentals but the fact of the incident itself and it being a non-earth craft, that seems to be without question according to the testimony of these people.

RT: What is your understanding of the phenomena at this point?

EM: We discovered 8-9 years ago a mechanism in physics called the quantum hologram. It was discovered trying to perfect MRI machines and build quantum computers. Trying to improve the resolution and imaging on a MRI resulted in the quantum hologram. It’s rooted in the fact that matter at its most basic level does not consist of ping-pong-ball atoms but flowing dynamic energy. Quanta of energy are emitted and reabsorbed by all matter down to the most basic level.

Those emissions from all physical objects are quanta but it has turned out that they are sufficiently coherent that they carry information about the object and we now have both theory and good experimental evidence on that fact. The interesting thing is that the information is non-local. The formalism of the quantum hologram is non-local.

To have nature having a non-local information structure that carries the event history of each physical object puts a whole different perspective on things. When these guys brought this to me I had given a lecture at Cambridge University, St John’s College, in England, on what I call a dyadic model, which says, if you start with energy and information and define information as patterns of energy, then the basis of our universe has two fundamental aspects. It exists because of its energetic structure and it’s knowing because of the information structure. If you start with that basic premise, that energy has two forms, a structural form and a patternal form which is the basis of knowing anything, so that information is the basis of knowing anything and patterns of energy are just information, if you start with that you can build a pretty decent cosmology for an evolving  knowing thinking universe. Because we evolved out of it and are part of the universe, therefore it must be a knowing thinking universe.

This also goes back to the very definition of non-locality coming out of quantum physics, that particles ever interacting maintain a spin correlation wherever they go until they interact with something else. The quantum hologram takes that idea from the particle level and expands it to all macro scale objects. It extends quantum mechanics from the particle level to virtually all matter. And it says that all matter not only has a local here-and-now structure but also a non-local everywhere informational structure. The history, the events in the life of that object, are carried non-locally throughout the universe. We know so little about the characteristics of non-locality. With the quantum hologram, it is mathematically defined that information is recovered through resonance. We have written the math on it and we have physically done it in the laboratory. But still, exactly how a non-local resonance takes place, we don’t know; we know it takes place in far distances compared with the size of a particle, but what that means in terms of the universe, I haven’t the faintest idea. And neither does anyone else. But still, the mathematics shows that the hologram is non-local and if you look carefully it starts to show why we have psychic experience and internal mystical experience, in fact, it seems to be why we have subjective experience at all.

RT: When I was a priest, I used to use exercises in psychometry, which is a kind of clairvoyance during which people attempt to receive impressions or information from objects, to illuminate the porosity of boundaries. Some results were striking.

EM: Richard, that is precisely what the quantum hologram as a structure explains. So I have written several papers on this, as are others. I started working on it in 1995 after these fellows came to me after my lecture and said we think we’ve found a structure that seems to validate what you’re saying about information, we’re using it for quantum computers and MRI machines. Those guys and I have been working on this for five years and the concepts are finding their way through the science and physics literature. Not in Nature yet but a few mentions, no major article yet – they’re too conservative – but papers have been written on how DNA learns, how cells learn. Our thesis is that consciousness is not a thing but a feedback loop in nature. How does an electron know what its spin is supposed to be if it’s across the universe from its partner? If you take that to the complex level of the organized brain, then the knowing is appropriate. But the very basis of this non-local resonance that occurs at the particle level, if you then say, it is a feedback loop, a resonance feedback loop which we observe here in macroscopic nature, it would appear that this is precisely what consciousness is, except that I prefer the words awareness or perception, because it appears that only animals with brains have self-awareness and only Homo sapiens have self-reflective awareness and can reflect upon our reflections. All animals with a brain can distinguish self from nature, but animals without brains have awareness and perception but not self-awareness, they’re part of the environment. If you trace that down to the inanimate world where the quantum correlation of particles prevails and the quantum hologram is still a property of inanimate matter, it’s saying that nature does not lose its experience, nature is informational and conscious at some level. That’s the work I have been pursuing. To say that consciousness is not amenable to scientific study is just plain wrong.

RT: The biggest barrier is scientific –

EM: Kuhn was right and so was Max Planck, who said that progress in science is not made by convincing skeptics but funeral by funeral. That’s what we’re dealing with.

RT: Whether it’s religion or science, the dynamics are the same.

EM: To jump to the bottom line, the quantum hologram is as close as we come in the moment to the theological concept of spirit of soul. What it doesn’t do in this model is have discarnate action, it’s an informational structure, and that fits into the great sea of consciousness concept which this model suggests is absolutely right.

RT: Are other astronauts involved in this search?

EM: Not many astronauts are philosophically deep. But many of the younger ones accept UFO phenomena and are open to meditation or the paranormal and other consciousness explorations. I have often been a lone wolf, a voice in the wilderness, but I have worked in this for thirty years and it’s finally paying off.

RT: What you’re saying makes sense from so many converging points of view that are helping us construct reality in new ways.

EM: The Cartesian division between materialism on one side and spirituality and mentality on the other in a different realm is wrong.

RT: Paranormal phenomena is difficult to discuss because, by the time you can say what “it” is, the names disappear. They names don’t distinguish real differences.

EM: They don’t mean anything. That’s exactly right. And that’s what the quantum hologram shows. People who purport to communicate with the dead or have psychic experiences are picking up information from the morphogenetic field or the holographic field and as far as they’re concerned, it’s real, and it is real, but their interpretation is not correct.

RT: Abduction “evidence” too comes from people in altered states either at the time or afterward at the hands of researchers. So how can we know the objectivity of what’s reported?

EM: That’s right,. People will interpret it through their own experience and biases. That’s how I got involved. John Mack was reading some of my material and asked me how to interpret some of his work. That’s what got me into the ET stuff. Also, given this type of model, and chaos theory, the bottom line is, we live in a self-organizing creative intelligent learning trial-and-error participatory interactive evolving universe. That’s quite a different story than we had twenty years ago. And it sets the stage to say that life has evolved everywhere the environmental conditions are correct.

RT: If life can happen, it will happen.

EM: Exactly. Much of 20^th century science, like special relativity, limits on the speed of light, dismissing non-locality as unimportant, all that is being challenged as just being wrong. I think over the next few decades, we will discover the physics that allowed ETs to get here.

RT: You wrote a very strong endorsement of Paul Hill’s “Unconventional Flying Objects: a scientific analysis” (Hampton Roads: 1995) which articulates a solid basis in contemporary physics for understanding the propulsion systems of UFOs as observed and reported. You wrote, “Paul Hill has done a masterful job ferreting out the basic science and technology behind the elusive UFO characteristics and demonstrating they are just advanced and exotic extensions of our own technologies.”

EM: Yes. He was right on. He did a good study of the data. The data says things on radiation, energy, he uses “force field,” we would call that zero-point energy field now, but by and large he approached it correctly. He had very good data, categorized it and evaluated it according to science as understood now. He said, we don’t have it yet but it’s not outside the realm of science that we understand.

RT: What’s your sense at the age of seventy of where this is all headed? How will you be thinking about this in five or ten years?

EM: In space I had an epiphany, an experience of the connectedness of everything. I later came to understand it. It’s where you experience, see the separateness of things with your physical eyes but experience the connectedness of all things in an altered state. From that point on, life was never the same for me. I had to come out and find what these deep issues are, recognizing that our scientific cosmology was incomplete and out religious cosmologies archaic. I was looking for a new myth about ourselves, but by myth I mean truth.

For thirty years, we have been looking at connecting these dots and finding new dots to connect to create the picture better. All of these changes in science, beginning with chaos structure and special relativity and its limitations. and discovering what the devil resonance means in terms of non locality, to me those are the key elements because they bring consciousness into it. They bring the fact that information in the universe is not limited by the speed of light and maybe nothing else is either. I think within the next decade or so and probably within the next few years the real truth of this visitation we have experienced will be uncovered. The momentum is building for that right now, very strongly. Now, I always have to qualify my remarks by saying, I have no firsthand experience with ET stuff or even UFO stuff so I have to preserve some wiggle room by saying I could be totally wrong –

RT: But that’s the way it looks.

EM: That’s the way it looks at the moment. Our science in the 21^st century will do very shortly to Einstein and Pauli and Schroedinger what they did to Newton a hundred years ago. Their science is great as far as it goes but it doesn’t go far enough.

RT: If it’s good science that has to happen.

EM: It has to happen. I think we’re ready for a major paradigm shift. We’re already seeing it on the frontiers of science. Mainstream academicians are still stuck but it doesn’t look like the Big Bang is the right answer. Hoyle’s most recent work, Halton Arp’s most recent work, is powerfully damning to the Big Bang, which is a knee-jerk reaction to the red shift. It’s just not right. So we have, it looks like, a whole new era of science about to open up, provided that humanity can survive.

RT: Let me take the ET hypothesis one step further. Most of the people I talk to – various individuals, never anyone on the record, but people who have had astonishing encounters, air force pilots, commercial pilots, even some in the intelligence community say that while what they are saying is not classified, they have talked to X off the record who talked to Y – these people seem to generally articulate the same point of view on the reality of UFO phenomena, the reality of visitation. But given what we know about psychological operations and counter-intelligence, cover and deception, simulated phenomena to cover technological advances, I can’t go any further that listening to what they report and remaining agnostic. I don’t know how much is bumbling, or organized forgetfulness, or confusion, or intentional disinformation.

EM: There is so much disinformation and misinformation that is deliberate. There is clearly a covert attempt to disguise and debunk this information.

RT: So how do we know? How do we know what we know? What methodology, what procedure would a reasonably intelligent guy follow to determine as clearly as he can what is likely to be likely?

EM: Richard, I can’t answer that question, only because I think in terms of chaotic systems, systems in disequilibrium. When systems are far from equilibrium they are not predictable and they can go any way, and this is a not-predictable system, it’s a pot boiling, and exactly where it will break out and bubble over, no one has the answer to that. It is going to be determined by the collective unconscious more than the plans of whoever is trying to keep the lid on this. There’s no doubt that someone is trying to keep the lid on it. Who that is, how it is, where it is, we only get glimmers.

I have personally been told by a senior officer on a joint intelligence committee a few years ago – all he would say, when asked the question, is there an organization still doing all this? all we could get out of him was, a couple of weeks later, after he did some checking, “Yes. You’re right.” That’s all he would say.

I don’t know what much more we could do. What some of us are trying to do is get congressional pressure put on it, but politicians are so politically sensitive about their careers that not one in ten thousand will touch it. We tried and tried and almost got there a few times and then they backed out.

RT: At that point, you have no idea what they’re encountering in terms of resistance.

EM: No we don’t. We don’t know if someone came in the office and closed the door and told them, shut your goddamn mouth or it’s peer pressure or election pressure or what.

RT: Without triangulating data, you can’t know.

EM: No. All we can do is go on the preponderance of data and the preponderance of data is so overwhelming that at least some portion of this activity is ET activity. A goodly portion of it, it would now appear, is not ET activity. There are black programs where they can emulate some of the so-called ET phenomenon. It appears they are doing it. But when we’ve said these things, we can’t say them with a hundred per cent certainty. We’re still guessing. It’s a terribly complex, difficult phenomena and there are a lot of people opposed. The fundamentalist religious community recognizes that it will destroy established religion as we have known it, if it comes out.

In my opinion, the theological structure that comes closest to what we’re seeing with quantum holographic work is Tibetan Buddhism. It comes right out of shamanism and Buddhism as it entered Tibet centuries ago. I consider the dispersed Tibetan scholars to be some of the greatest scholars on consciousness studies that we have. Their notion of spirit, reincarnation, etc., dovetails well with work in quantum holography. I lecture on reincarnation and say that you can’t tell the difference in principle between an old soul and a new soul with a long memory. You just tune into the collective unconsciousness, and claim the memories as your own. From a therapeutic point of view it does not matter what model or structure you use. If people trying to resolve early life trauma can pull out of the collective unconscious information about an event that can help them understand or heal their trauma, it doesn’t matter where it comes from. It’s irrelevant from the therapeutic point of view but for those of us trying to articulate the new mythology disguised as truth, it’s important.

RT: Explanations have to be congruent with the other pieces of our constructions of reality. We’re trying to build a multi-faceted construction of reality now within which we can have discourse like this. That’s challenging.

EM: Much of what happened to me that I would have liked to talk about, I have not talked about for thirty years, because the culture had not moved far enough forward for it even to compute. I would have sounded like a madman.

RT: Breakthrough ideas always sound crazy. You have to build bridges to others’ consensus reality so they can speak with you.

EM: Exactly right. Thirty years ago, working with mystics and shamans, seeing what was real … yes, it was real, but how do you fit it into a framework that matches the rest of reality that we know about?

If we could get the world’s leaders out there to look at the earth from deep space, we would have a very different political system than the one we have.

In 1971, Dr. Edgar Mitchell, then a U.S. Navy Captain, became the sixth man to walk on the moon.

He is a scientist, test pilot, navel officer, astronaut, entrepreneur, author and lecturer. In 1973, he founded the Institute of Noetic Sciences to sponsor research in the nature of consciousness. He is co-founder of the Association of Space Explorers, an international organization founded in 1984 for all who share the experience of space travel.

He is author of The Way of the Explorer (Putnam, 1996) and Psychic Exploration: A Challenge for Science (G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1974.

Are There UFOs on Mars?

by

Richard Thieme

It’s a matter of common sense, really, this UFO business, that and taking the time to understand all kinds of human activity from the psychology of perception to “black budget” and other clandestine operations to the uses of cults and religions for purposes of social control.

It’s also a matter of listening, of course, to credible people telling remarkably similar stories over a number of decades.

Imagine that you live on Mars. One afternoon an orange ball falls out of the sky and bounces across the landscape. You stare with disbelief as it unfolds and out rolls a little robot, sticking up what looks like an artificial wicket. The robot rolls about, bumps into rocks and displays what looks like intelligent behavior.

What is reasonable for your neighbors to conclude when you tell them what you saw? Are there really UFOs on Mars? Or were you delusional, confused, or just plain drunk? Would it matter if others on Mars told similar stories … for more than fifty years?

What if the robot stayed around for months, crossing craters, drilling into rocks, sometimes just spinning its wheels?  Would you suspect that the entity had an agenda? If you couldn’t detect the signals that made the robot move or do other interesting things, what would you conclude about the origin or purpose of the robot, especially when reports began circulating that a similar robot was doing similar things on the other side of the planet? Would Martian science account adequately for what you observed?

What if your neighbor, a veteran of the Martian army, suddenly declared that he couldn’t go to his grave without telling someone of a similar event involving a robot thirty years earlier?

That’s the story on Earth, too, although the robots (or other seemingly intelligent entities) are different, the details are voluminous instead of scanty, the back story is complex, and the UFO domain, thanks to both intentional blurring and years of stumbling about in the dark, is a hall of mirrors.

My interest in UFOs began when I was a child in the fifties. I have since discussed it with many others, some from the intelligence world, the military, or the space command.  I have also interviewed ordinary people who, for example, went for a walk in the woods one night and were startled when the forest was suddenly flooded with light and a self-luminous circular craft rose from the trees and vanished in a twinkling. Or the northern Wisconsin dairy farmer who described a luminous vehicle landing behind the barn one night, a state trooper who had raced after it down the highway stopping but afraid to go back there to investigate, and cattle so terrified they stampeded through barb wire and had to be destroyed—and who found, the next morning, a circular pattern of broken branches and charred leaves among the otherwise green leaves of healthy trees.

Or the police officer in a northwest Wisconsin town who went after a colleague who followed an unidentified flying vehicle until, as he said later, it “zapped” him, frying the electronics of his squad car and injuring him as well. The officer later died in the hospital.

All those people tell different stories but details are often congruent and patterns of narrative overlap. The cumulative weight of their reports when cross-referenced with reports from the past half-century suggests a phenomena that is global, persistent, uniform, and credible.

In any other domain, when thoughtful people reflect on this much data and arrive at different but equally compelling hypotheses, however tentative, we generally believe that the phenomena is—at the least—worthy of investigation if only as a psychological or sociological event.  We study seldom seen insects and birds, experiment with clairvoyance and psychokenesis, argue in scholarly journals about false memories, multiple personalities and dissociative identity disorder—so why not study UFOs?  If only a single account suggests, as Captain Edward J. Ruppelt, former head of US Air Force Project Blue Book said in the nineteen fifties, that the least unlikely hypothesis for some UFO reports is the extraterrestrial – then it is certainly worthy of scientific  investigation.

There is evidence that such an exploration has indeed taken place, but if it has, details would be obscured by compartmentalization and secrecy in numerous diverse areas of research, the big picture known only to the (also diverse) directors of the various projects. That’s one plausible explanation for why a phenomena with serious implications for military and civilian life is publicly ignored or dismissed. (In 1952 an official campaign of “debunking” UFO reports was initiated when a Washington DC flap clogged telephone lines and it was concluded that a UFO event, whether real or illusory, was itself a threat to national security). Once a project goes “black,” previously public papers in academic journals and popular literature alike suddenly stop (that’s what happened when the Manhattan Project, during World War 2, was given top priority—serious articles on the subject vanished from the public domain overnight).  Researchers in all walks of life are often invited to look at a particular research problem, sworn to secrecy, taken to places where the research is conducted, and delivered back to their university or corporation with thanks but with no additional explanation as to how their piece fits into other pieces of research. In the numerous thought-worlds that have evolved since World War 2, that scenario is common.

The UFO inquiry goes everywhere – psychology, sociology, meteorology,  chemistry, physics,  astronomy, military R&D, intelligence (management of perception, counter-intelligence, disinformation, psy ops and social control) – but the questions that grab the person-in-the-street are not about ball lightning, sprites or seismic activity. They’re about the possibility of intelligent life visiting the earth. We want to know if some UFO reports indicate technologies beyond our abilities and if the behavior of reported vehicles is at least as purposive and seemingly intelligent as the behavior of our own telerobotic extensions, Opportunity and Spirit, or our satellites orbiting Saturn or Mars. Eliminate that question and the air goes out of the UFO inquiry and the cottage industry based on it.

Until 1978, everything I knew about UFOs came from popular magazines, movies, and books.  I was raised to believe that earth was the only home of intelligent life with humans at the top of the food chain. But over time, one story or interview at a time, incident by incident, an alternative worldview emerged. I still try to remain agnostic in the face of partial, imperfect and contradictory data, but the progressive study of the phenomena gradually suggests some tentative conclusions. The number and quality of unexplained cases begs for hypotheses to test and for rigorous scientific exploration.             Many investigators, I think, find themselves flipping back and forth between not knowing and seeing patterns that suggest hypotheses and avenues of exploration. One of those is certainly the extraterrestrial explanation for some sightings.

If that process sounds like a “conversion,” a term usually applied to religious experience, it’s for good reason. Immersion in the study of the data over time often triggers a dynamic that results in a contextual shift as the data itself suggests previously unthinkable explanations. Thomas Kuhn in The Structure of Scientific Revolutions gave popular culture the term “paradigm change” to frame this process in terms of the history of science rather than religion. But the psychological—and spiritual—dynamics are the same. (Some, of course, suggest that this process has been carefully engineered over two generations to prepare humankind for the announcement that extraterrestrial life is not a fantasy. Contingency plans developed by NASA in the eventuality of encountering alien species as we explore the neighborhood provide for similar behavior on our part, revealing and then hiding our presence as we acclimate the alien species over time to our existence.)

Religious metaphors frequently show up in the UFO field because a religious experience too includes an encounter with data that contradicts our worldview and stimulates a restructuring of the contents of our psyches.  This leap is referred to in Christianity as being “born again,” in Buddhism as enlightenment, and in other religions by different names tagged to different stories. Traditional religious experience (an encounter with what one believes in the moment is a supernatural or other-worldly intelligence)  and an encounter with what one believes in the moment may be an other-worldly or other-dimensional craft piloted by another species do resemble one another. Both kinds of experience transform how we think about everything else, too.

After years of listening to people tell their stories, I realized that the frequent ridicule of people reporting UFOs, including experienced commercial and military pilots and astronauts, often makes those who dare talk about their experiences sound like victims of abuse.  The primary data of the encounter becomes in and of itself a source of shame, as if the experiencer is responsible for the embarrassing event. Then he or she self-censors, internalizing the goals of the ridiculer as their own.

After giving a talk on UFOs, for example, I noticed a man who hung back, waiting until everyone else had left before coming forward to tell me in a whisper that he had been a fighter pilot and was scrambled to pursue an unknown aerial vehicle above an air base, that he and several others made visual and radar contact with a self-luminous object that suddenly accelerated rapidly and left them far behind. His body language and emotional “feel” communicated sincerity, embarrassment, even shame. He wanted to tell someone what had happened but did not want to say it out loud.

Other investigators report similar behaviors.

When one has a traumatic experience that alters one’s fundamental beliefs, the story that makes sense of the experience must come later. An explanatory narrative does not piggyback on the experience itself. We have to rethink our assumptions and be taught the narrative that explains the event and links it to a bigger picture. That provides congruence and relief from cognitive dissonance, a bridge to a new way of thinking that alleviates anxiety and mediates fear, and often initiates us into a community of believers bound by a shared story.  The processes of assimilation are strikingly similar regardless of whether they relate to religions, cults (a pejorative name given to non-mainstream religions by mainstream religions which were often themselves once considered cults) and other communities, including those that form around UFOs.

For many in UFO subcultures,  the core group is a religious community, providing meaning and safety as well as social structure. The community designates saints and devils, determines orthodoxies and heresies, creates believers and followers. Because these subcultures and the force field of distortion they generate are the primary face of the UFO world, attracting much of the attention from authors and film makers, those who want to explore the phenomena scientifically go underground. Finding them and exploring their studies and stories in a systematic way is difficult. The “invisible college” generates its own secret handshakes and rituals, its own methodologies, its own saints and devils.

To make a muddy stream even muddier, beliefs and meanings in the UFO domain sometimes come to believers through paranormal channels. Teachings disclosed to initiates during abductions, for example, or through channeling, often have apocalyptic content, forecasting the end of the world. The cause has shifted over time from nuclear catastrophe to environmental disaster but the narrative structure is the same. Initiates are often encouraged to tell the Revealed Truth but to expect to be persecuted as prophets always are. For believers, the rejection that inevitably follows validates the subjective truth of their special revelation.

Debate among UFO subcultures often sounds like theological warfare. Battles over spurious documents, the details of the Roswell mythology, the reasons for abductions rather than evidence for abductions begin to sound like arguments about the details of the Rapture. To those inside, these distinctions mean life or death; to those outside, they mean nothing – unless they are symptoms of a pathology or simply an interesting psycho-social event.

Add money to that mix and the dervish really begins to whirl. Inevitably UFOs created a cottage industry that sells products and services, beliefs and meanings, constructions of reality, and community lifestyles, just like religions. There are no standards of accountability or accreditation and the major criteria for status seems to be the ability to draw a crowd. Groups validate one another through invitations to conferences and publication in magazines and on web sites where they argue with one another about crash sites, the metaphysics of abduction, and the validity of hypnotically recovered memories. Those arguments replace the rigorously scientific search for data. Anybody can say just about anything and someone will take it seriously and sign up. Then the media blurs journalism and entertainment further by its wink-wink reporting on UFOs, presenting nonsensical and credible accounts side by side. The newspaper UFO story that is not tongue-in-cheek is rare indeed.

To resolve some of the conundrums presented by UFO phenomena, we need good data—which is exactly what we don’t get from military sources or the intelligence world where numerous leaks suggest it ought to be found. Since World War 2, what Americans still call “history” has forked. Down one path is a relatively coherent narrative that excludes details of the many black budget or secret operations that have proliferated. Millions of classified documents never see the light of day. That means that a second fork with its many branches consists of histories constructed by those who know some secrets but not others. Compartmentalization based on clearance levels and “need to know” means that many such constructions exist, each based on partial access. Many clandestine operations are not documented at all and officially cease to exist once they are finished. As a result, only a few people may know what really happened in many important areas, not just the study of anomalous aerial phenomena. The rest of us rely on fragments assembled into meaningful but necessarily distorted patterns; we understand that our search for truth is fraught with error, misinformation and disinformation.  When a critical detail such as the immense amount of information gathered during World War 2 because the Allies cracked the Enigma code is finally revealed, entire histories must be revised. Everything that made sense according to prior points of references are recontextualized in a different narrative structure. The same would be true in the world of UFOs if the truth that is out there, whatever it is, suddenly came inside.

Knowing this creates cynicism. Knowing this also suggests that the UFO domain stands for something larger than itself, the fact of life in the 21^st century—we know we don’t know but don’t know what we don’t know.  When we suggest that some others might know what we don’t know, we are called “conspiracy theorists,” a term that characterizes an ad hominem attack,  a pejorative dismissal of a person rather than the person’s argument. The inability to correlate UFO reports with hidden research into materials science, propulsion and weapons systems, exotic vehicles, or the intentional use of UFO phenomena by intelligence agencies for cover and deception, means it is impossible to know that bigger picture: when witnesses report what they see or think they see, interpretation of the data requires points of reference that we simply don’t have. In addition, we are easily manipulated; it is easier to use the myths that people believe rather than create new ones, and UFO mythologies are now widely believed.

These factors transform an inquiry that would be difficult into a journey through a hall of mirrors. It takes a particular kind of person who likes a particular kind of fun to wander in that wilderness. This brief account can not do justice to all the ways light is bent, making distorted images, in that fun-house hall. So I will simply reflect on a few accounts in light of the insights of reasonable educated people who have explored this domain as I have for many years. I will not venture very far into the treacherous swamps of “alien abduction” and “the Roswell event,” which have become stand-alone communities with mythological and religious dimensions all their own. I will touch on the relationship of the intelligence community to the phenomena because many questions asked in the UFO domain could be answered if we had access to classified material. Unfortunately, I can not reveal some of the more interesting accounts I have heard, having promised confidentiality to sources. I will stick with the kind of mundane, now-familiar accounts that are analogous to that Martian scenario in which an orange ball bounces down and a ho-hum kind of routine robot scoots out.

Mark Rodigher, scientific director of The Center for UFO Studies (CUFOS), has a Ph.D. in sociology. Like all serious observers of the field, he is cautious and deliberate when he speaks. The study of UFOs, he observes, is a proto-science, not a science; its data is not cumulative. Every investigator starts over. Databases exist but are amassed indiscriminately. Few cases have been thoroughly investigated and much evidence is anecdotal. This is why rigorous discipline and accountability to standards of objectivity and the scientific method are essential, he insists.

Rodigher is right.

So I need to say that I have no more authority in this field than anyone else. There are no degrees in “UFOlogy.” I look back from the age of sixty and think that my education and life experience provided some good tools for doing research and understanding people. (I have a B.A. in English lit and composition from Northwestern University, with highest honors, Phi Beta Kappa, a M. A. in English lit from the University of Chicago where I was an NDEA Title IV Fellow, and a M. Div, a three-year master’s degree in theology from Seabury Western Theological Seminary, with honors. Sixteen years as an Episcopal priest in three cultures enhanced my understanding of people and deepened my natural empathy. Subsequent work in information security helped me understand some of the subtleties of intelligence and the “black” world.”)  I have been driven throughout my adult life by curiosity and a passion to learn … and so, after twenty-five years of looking at the UFO phenomena, I am writing this reflection.

#  #  #

In 1978 I was a parish priest at St. Peter’s Episcopal Church in Clearfield, Utah, near Hill Air Force Base. The senior administrative lay officer of the church was a major who later retired as a colonel.  A fighter pilot, he had all “the right stuff.” He was self-effacing, quiet about military matters, and later served on the senior staff of major Air Force Commands.

We were talking casually at the church one night when the subject of UFOs came up. I said that some stories in Allen Hynek’s book, The UFO Experience: A Scientific Inquiry,  implied that UFOs displayed aerodynamic capabilities beyond our abilities. They suggest, I said, that “you guys in your fastest fighters chase these things and can’t catch them.”

My friend’s expression indicated uncharacteristic concern.

“You’re right,” he said. “We chase the damned things and we can’t catch them.”

That’s so often how it happens – someone we know well, someone credible, a trusted friend or colleague, tells a story with appropriate congruence and affect that stops us in our skeptical tracks, making us rethink what we thought.

The vehicles, they say, that chased them, or that they chased, or that they observed, have aerodynamic capabilities exceeding anything known on earth.

Often they are trained observers, educated, intelligent, and with long experience.  A fighter pilot is likely to know the technical capabilities of our fighters, but of course, he may very well not have been cleared to know about compartmentalized R&D projects. That’s why the path of observation and reflection forks. If he and others were seeing something that we developed (although we are talking about the fifties, sixties, and seventies, and those remarkable technologies did not result in commercial jets flying much faster than the first ones), then the path leads into secrecy and darkness. We can only take the path into the relative light and pursue what can be known.

My friend spoke of a B47 pilot who in 1963 described a disc-shaped  object that approached his aircraft, flew in formation, then accelerated at a speed he could not match. The pilot did not make an official report because he did not want people to think he was crazy and lose security clearance and the ability to fly. The co-pilot independently verified the incident.

Simple reports like that can be multiplied by the thousands. They fill the literature and those who follow them up often verify that witnesses are credible and intelligent. The characteristics of the vehicles have been documented; they are described consistently from one experience to the next, and a brave soul like Paul R. Hill, who wrote Unconventional Flying Objects: A Scientific Analysis based on his years at NASA as an informal terminal for UFO reports, could use contemporary physics to analyze, however imperfectly, the science that might explain the observable data. (Hal Puthoff, a physicist with long experience in exotic research for the US government, wrote in a 1997 review: “To the degree that the engineering characteristics of UFOs can be estimated by empirical observation, in my opinion [this] … book by Paul Hill provides the most reliable, concise summary of engineering-type data available. The data were compiled over decades of research by a Chief Scientist-Manager at NASA’s Langley Research Center who acted as an informal clearinghouse for UFO-related data. The strength of the compilation lies in its thoughtful separation of wheat from chaff, and the analysis of the former into coherent patterns, including detailed calculations. Perhaps surprising to the casually interested, under careful examination the observations, rather than defying the laws of physics as naive interpretation might suggest, instead appear to be solidly commensurate with them.”)

Dr. Peter A. Sturrock, Professor Emeritus of Applied Physics and Emeritus Director of the Center for Space Science and Astrophysics at Stanford University, takes a conservative approach to the subject but differs from most of his academic colleagues in that he is willing to examine the evidence for UFOs at all. His book, The UFO Enigma: A New Review of the Physical Evidence, discusses a conference in Terrytown, New York, in 1997 at which a few selected cases were presented to a panel of scientists for evaluation. The panel concluded that further evaluation was warranted but it hasn’t happened.

Asked to define his relationship to the phenomena, Sturrock said, “I’m a student. That’s about it.”

But then, at his academic level, that’s a lot. His willingness to explore the subject is rare after ridicule has relegated the subject to “fringe science.” Sturrock expresses significant frustration at the near-unanimity of professional colleagues who refuse to examine the subject. “Their attitude,” he says, “is hardly scientific.”

Sturrock believes that physical evidence can be evaluated properly if we assess the chain of evidence that produced that evidence. That process requires taking the subject seriously and investing the resources to do it right.

The process also requires a big picture view.

“Something funny in America is not funny everywhere,” says an intelligence analyst, a veteran of the National Security Agency, who we’ll call “Albert” because he requested anonymity. “Something funny for one year is not funny for fifty. When, over fifty years, reports from all over the world agree in the small details … it suggests that it’s real.”

The analyst used his position inside the agency to have numerous private conversations with military and intelligence operatives who had been present at anomalous events. After my conversation in that church basement, I did the same as a priest when people volunteered stories they were otherwise embarrassed to tell. Over the years I listened to stories of close encounters, unconventional flying objects with unusual aerodynamics, and events that so frightened the teller they could barely bring themselves to discuss them. “Albert” and I listened closely to people we knew well, and we were both told of numerous events that were consistent and compelling.

#  #  #

It is often suggested that people who have UFO experiences want publicity or notoriety, but my experience is the opposite. As I have suggested, people who spoke of UFO experiences were often hesitant to disclose experiences which would lead to ridicule or jeopardize their careers. A commercial pilot with more than two decades of experience said, “That’s why we share stories with one another and not openly. No one is going to jeopardize a career by filing an official report or risk an accusation of being drunk.”

Here’s an example.

One morning the subject of UFOs came up during a staff meeting and a member of my staff waited until we were leaving the room to ask in a low voice if I might come to her office. She closed the door, turned and said: “I saw a UFO.”

She described driving on a country road in the mid 1970s when she passed a power station. A UFO, she said, was hovering above.

What do you mean, a UFO? What did it look like?

“Well,” she said, “it looked like … you know, like a flying saucer. Like if you were asked to describe a flying saucer, that’s what it looked like. It was a silvery disc hovering over the power station, tilted like it was feeding on the energy. It had lights around it going real real fast like lights on a movie marquee but a lot faster.

“I know I couldn’t have seen it – but I did. I couldn’t have but – I know what I saw. I saw – a flying saucer.”

Her account also illuminates how observers often negotiate with the reality of their own experience, bouncing back and forth between saying what they saw and saying why they could not have seen it.

Or this:

A local man recalled a time that he and his brother rose before dawn to fish on a nearby lake. As he rowed, he looked up at a sky full of stars, occasional meteorites, and one particular star that seemed to grow bigger and brighter. He watched it grow larger until it was clearly a disc-shaped luminous object descending toward the lake. It slowed as it approached the water, tilted up, and entered the water very slowly. Once submerged, it radiated a diffused glow in the water. He remembers rowing, the glow in the lake remaining in the otherwise dark water until the object emerged slowly, shedding water from its sides. Once it was clear of the surface, it accelerated rapidly and within seconds was gone, looking once more like a star.

What struck me, he said, now, listen, he added, I’m an engineer, and you might expect it to enter the water at a forty-five degree angle. But it was tilted up close to thirty degrees going in and coming out, nearly vertical. The water poured off the sides like it wasn’t touching the surface, like something prevented the water from touching.

I asked Jeffrey Sainio, an engineer with QuadTech in Milwaukee, about that report. Sainio has examined hundreds of photos and videos for MUFON (Mutual UFO Network). In every single report, he reflected, of a vehicle in water or on land, the vehicle does not accelerate rapidly until it’s no longer touching the ground or water. It moves slowly until it’s clear, then takes off at an incredible speed.

#  #  #

The visible, Wordsworth said, points to the world of the unseen. Sense data suddenly unfolds and reveals the infrastructure of consciousness or the universe in a flash of insight.

That was the experience of Captain Edward Mitchell, too.

Mitchell walked on the moon during the Apollo 14 mission. On the return to Earth, he had a mystical experience of the unity and interconnectedness of all things.  He has spent the subsequent years trying to communicate what he experienced, how a mystical view of the universe and modern physics are congruent.

I asked about the possibility of extraterrestrial visitation.

“I run into a large number of old timers in government, the military, and intelligence going back fifty years,” he said, “and privately they all say, yes, it’s true.”

Mitchell had heard stories of the recovery of crashed vehicles which led him to question sources as to the existence of a group inside the government with responsibility for oversight. He spoke to “a senior officer on a joint intelligence committee and asked if some core group is responsible for handling the phenomena. After some checking, a couple of weeks later, he said, ‘Yes. There is.’ But he wouldn’t say anything more.”

Later I spoke with a fellow Episcopal priest who was Mitchell’s pastor and good friend. He recalled sitting in a hotel room with Mitchell and astronomer Allen Hynek, consultant to the USAF on Project Blue Book. “They were talking about what these things [UFOs] might be,” the clergyman said. “Hynek said he was convinced that they are not from our planetary system at all. Mitchell said, based on his involvement with the space program, they were not from our planet or they would never have sent him to the moon in a tin lizzie. When you eliminate the cases that can not be explained or dismissed, they agreed that there’s something left. But where are they from? They thought they might be from a parallel universe which didn’t mean they weren’t real.

“I’ll never forget it,” said the priest. “I remember the conversation vividly.”

Mitchell’s observation about going to the moon in a primitive spacecraft raises another question: If black programs develop an advanced technology, will the technology be protected even if it means the loss of lives? Is it possible that hundreds of airmen were allowed to be shot down during the Viet Nam War while we had propulsion systems that would have prevented that?

“Albert,” the intelligence analyst, said, “Yes, we allow lives to be lost to protect technologies we don’t want to disclose. It doesn’t prove anything one way or the other.”

The extent of the deception, however, if that’s what it was, would boggle the mind. Would Americans have but not use such advanced technology back in the sixties and seventies? Would we continue to lose lives with more primitive space shuttle technology today?

Once again, the forking path. Except this time, we know that an astronaut and an astronomer working with the Air Force, in the privacy of a hotel room with a priest accepted some unexplained UFO events as evidence of extraterrestrial or interdimensional visitation.

Others hear that kind of assessment and laugh, shaking their heads. Conspiracy theory and cover-ups, ha! They scoff at the very notion. They don’t think that we stumble about in the darkness at all; they think there is plenty of light if we would only open our eyes.

“I hope you’re talking to skeptics like Phillip Klass,” said Dr. Jill Tarter, Director for the Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence at the SETI Institute. “He knows the foibles, lack of rigor and downright lies the majority of people in this field perpetrate.”

You can’t talk long with Tarter or Frank Drake, father of Project OZMA and author of the Drake Equation suggesting mathematical probabilities for finding intelligent life, without being impressed by their passion for doing the search the right way, i.e. the SETI way. Tarter, Drake and Klass attack charlatans in the UFO field who intentionally misrepresent data. They excoriate the muddled thinking of the cottage industry. Among other lapses, they say, “experts” are often ignorant of current technologies.

I nod, thinking of a colleague who lives near Edwards Air Force Base in California who has observed silent black triangular aircraft over the desert, aircraft that he believes are frequently reported as unearthly visitors.. I think of his observation of jets high overhead that slowed to stall speed, then took off rapidly in another direction, looking like vehicles “stopping on a dime, then accelerating rapidly” as UFOs are often said to do. I think of another colleague who waited in the desert near Area 51 and used night vision lenses to photograph exotic glowing plasmas on aircraft that look like luminous arrows

I also think of a veteran journalist who said, I know a guy who spent most of his career in the spook business and when I raised the question of UFO phenomena to cover stealthy airplane prototypes from Area 51 to Tonopah and everything else, he looked at me and said, “It’s worked for fifty years. Why stop using it now?”

I acknowledge that many, perhaps most, reports are not what observers believe them to be.

Nevertheless, the skeptical critics refuse to consider data that can’t be explained in addition to data that can.  They reject suggestions that any reports should be investigated in light of the extraterrestrial hypothesis because modern physics doesn’t support the possibility. It can’t be true; therefore, it isn’t true. You can’t get here from there, they say, dismissing as irrelevant the various DARPA contracts exploring exotic technologies such as anti-gravitational fields or those that investigate faster-than-light travel inside plasma bubbles. Their confidence in their position has hardened into certainty and they reject the possibility of an alternative hypothesis.

The intensity of the negativity of a committed skeptic like Klass, a contributing editor for Aviation Week and Space Technology, corroborated my observation when I was a priest that atheists are as committed to NO as believers are to YES. Their fervor equally undermines an objective appraisal of the data. Klass has sometimes invented alternative explanations for credible sightings that have the structure of a Rube Goldberg device because he simply can not entertain the possibility that someone is reporting accurately what they saw.

Jill Tarter dismissed all UFO reports as unworthy of scientific attention. She told me of a time she thought she saw a UFO while flying one night but discovered it was caused by the moon being intermittently eclipsed by clouds. I said this did not show that all accounts are wrong, only that some are mistaken. She responded with a disdainful laugh – for reasons, I think, as human as the motives of those she attacks.

Tarter and Drake fear that Project SETI, currently seeking to establish an endowment of two hundred million dollars, would be tarnished by association with a discredited field. SETI has captured the imagination of many, although it has also earned its share of criticism for being expensive, unwieldy, and unlikely to succeed. To sustain credibility, Drake and Tarter said, Project SETI must draw a rigid line between itself and less credible searches for extraterrestrial life, so when someone like Silicon Valley millionaire Joe Firmage funds “bad science” and issues rambling non-scientific tracts about extraterrestrial life, SETI refuses his money lest it be associated with his projects and perspectives. SETI wants to establish itself as the only scientific game in town, so SETI’s leaders do not distinguish between mediums who channel “space brothers” and serious scientists like Dr. James E. McDonald, Senior Physicist at the Institute of Atmospheric Physics, who appeared before the House Committee on Science and Astronautics in 1968 with a list of unexplained events and urged serious study of UFOs.

Russ Estes, a producer of television documentaries, shares Tarter’s skepticism of much of the information circulating in the cottage industry. Estes investigated UFOs for a documentary series. Time and again, he said, as he listened to “experts” in the cottage industry, red flags went up about the truth of their stories or their backgrounds. Every time he followed up, his doubts were confirmed. He titled his first documentary,” The Quality of the Messenger,” an indication of his unhappiness with their lack of credibility.

He agreed, however, that there are credible accounts. I asked Estes if the lack of honesty and integrity on the part of so many in the cottage industry also discredited those reports.

No, he said. It does not.

First of all, he believes that the skew is just as irrational, just as hard-headed, on the other side. Like Sturrock, Estes was astonished by the closed minds of scientists who refused to discuss the subject. Their narrowness confounded him. If science was done in another country, he said, they acted as if it didn’t exist. He asked engineers at JPL for comment on the phenomena, but as soon as he mentioned the subject, they slammed the door.

Who, then, I asked, can be taken seriously?

“People you don’t know. People you don’t hear about. People who are researching on their own as we are, not making themselves public and not speaking in the cottage industry.

“I’m cynical,” he said, “but I believe there’s something there. The congruence and consistency of the best stories suggest that credible witnesses are telling the truth as they saw it.”

#  #  #

In light of these divisions, it is no surprise that those who tend to “believe in UFOs” going in believe in them coming out and those who don’t, don’t. This is illustrated by the McMinnville photographs.

Two photographs of a UFO hovering over a farm building were taken in 1950 near McMinnville, Oregon,  by farmer Paul Trent. A few years ago I delivered a speech for an association of morticians. I saw “McMinnville OR” on a badge and, knowing that small-town morticians usually know their neighbors, asked about Paul Trent.

We knew him for years, said the mortician. We buried him.

And the photos?

Trent regretted making them public, the mortician said. It caused nothing but trouble. He didn’t think it was a UFO, he didn’t know what it was, he thought it was something from a nearby military base. He saw it, he took the pictures, that was that.

Could he have perpetrated a hoax?

The mortician laughed. “Paul Trent was a country boy who wouldn’t have had a clue how to fake a photo. Until his dying day he said those photos showed what he saw.”

Klass dismisses the photos as fakes, saying that shadows indicate the pictures were taken in the morning rather than afternoon as claimed. Others say that clouds easily account for the shadows and dismiss Klass as a knee-jerk “debunker.”

Sainio, the engineer who examines photos for MUFON, said that many photos are fakes. But in addition, despite the existence of fakes, some are real, as far as he and his colleagues can tell. There are people all over the world, he said, from Israel to Siberia to the USA, who are either all using expensive, sophisticated technology to create false images on video tape – or people are photographing the same anomalous objects.

When I spoke with Klass, I was struck by his zeal. Despite his vocal cords having been severely damaged by surgery, he spoke in a passionate whisper. I told him that his passion reminded me of Madelyn Murray O’Hair’s atheism. Why, if UFOs were bunk, did he keep going, even though seriously ill and more than eighty years old? Why keep writing books, making the same points again and again?

After a moment, he said, “That’s a good question.”

I listened to him breathe heavily, painfully, laboriously for a long time. But he never added to his answer.

#  #  #

Dr. Richard F. Haines was a NASA research scientist and Chief of the Space Human Factors Office at Ames Research Center. He was also Senior Research Scientist at the Research Institute for Advanced Computer Science. In his early days, he thought he could duplicate what UFO witnesses told him, but the cumulative effect of talking to pilots led him to conclude that some encounters could not be easily explained.

Haines has compiled several catalogs of UFO incidents. One includes only reports by pilots. Another focuses on characteristics of intelligent behavior as indicated by the ways vehicles interact with humans. Reading through a large volume of accounts from military and commercial pilots is certainly suggestive, as it is when we read numerous news accounts of UFOs in newspapers between 1947 and 1952. Before government policy shifted toward debunking UFO reports, hundreds of accounts appeared in mainstream newspapers across the country. They often name military officers reporting sightings near sensitive installations. Was every single one wrong or mistaken?

An “estimate of the situation” was drafted by Project Sign, the U. S. Air Force’s first known UFO project, in the autumn of 1948. The thick Top Secret document reviewed reports from scientists, pilots and other credible observers. It concluded that the best evidence indicated an extraterrestrial origin for UFOs. The report rose through channels to the desk of Chief of Staff Gen. Hoyt S. Vandenburgh who rejected the document and told his staff to come up with something else.

In another memo famous in UFO circles, Lieutenant General Nathan Twining wrote in 1947 that the rash of UFO sightings during that first major wave documented “something real and not visionary or fictitious.” Twining said, “It is possible, within the present U. S. knowledge – provided extensive detailed development is undertaken – to construct a piloted aircraft which has the general description of the object which would be capable of an approximate range of 7,000 miles at subsonic speeds.”

Nick Cook, in his book The Hunt for Zero Point, suggests that it is possible that captured Nazi scientific research at the end of World War 2 which included blueprints for “flying saucers” using technologies that mitigated gravitational fields was the basis for Twining’s belief. Cook’s long career writing for Jane’s Defence Weekly and his rigorous journalistic standards provide credibility for his well-documented journey into black programs and the appropriation of Nazi research and scientists after the war,

Cook believes some of that research might account for some UFO sightings but is equally clear that “the subject [UFOs] is too complex, too multifarious … to conform to a single explanation.”

Cook’s fascinating exploration of stealth technologies and other black projects shows why, again, one hallway leads into the darkness and the other into twilight if not the light. Cook documents the excitement in the American aerospace industry in the mid-fifties over “anti-gravity” technologies that seemed to be right around the corner. They were discussed in mainstream publications and by mainstream scientists and industrialists. Then, suddenly, all talk of such revolutionary propulsion systems stopped. Did the research go black or did efforts simply not bear fruit? Or was it killed by an industry that would disappear if it came to fruition?

Accounts like Cook’s remind us that the twentieth century saw the elevation of propaganda and disinformation to a fine art. Perfected in politics, advertising and public relations, founded on theories by Walter Lippman and the practice of pioneers like Edward Bernays, the management of perception by governments, corporations, the military, and the media has become ubiquitous. Some is collusive and intentional, some a result of unconscious but convergent self-interest. Creating belief systems for social, economic and political ends has become standard practice. We may know that but still can’t help projecting patterns onto blank screens, making even propaganda that we recognize as propaganda effective in building belief structures. When those projections are sustained and manipulated by sophisticated practitioners, its adds more dimensions to the puzzle. Three-dimensional tic-tac-toe turns into a Rubik’s cube.

The fact that governments can and do keep secrets, often for long periods of time, makes anyone who worked for an intelligence agency suspect in the UFO cottage industry. Ignoring the subtlety of real disinformation campaigns, UFO gurus often assume that anyone connected to the CIA or NSA is part of the campaign. People like Russ Estes, however, who worked for the National Security Agency, know that it doesn’t work like that. Compartmentalization and the segregation of information on a need-to-know basis means that intelligence personnel interested in UFOs are often in the dark too.

“Albert” was not informed officially about the subject but spoke privately with military and intelligence personnel from all over the world, listening to stories of aerial vehicles tracked through theodolites or witnessed over air bases. If he discovered someone coming to the agency from Pease Air Force Base, near Exeter N.H., for example, or White Sands N.M., he asked for details of recent events. After a period of many years he concluded that, “The evidence is overwhelming. A cultural penetration from somewhere else, some other civilization, is taking place.”

Human perception has limits, he said. Ants don’t get that dogs exist. We humans screen out facts that threaten our feelings of uniqueness or safety.

The inability to see beyond survival needs is ingrained in all bureaucracies, he said. Officially, the phenomena doesn’t exist, but individuals who have been deeply affected or traumatized by an unusual encounter have to talk about it with someone. That’s why they tell us these stories behind closed doors. Paul Hill listened to stories for years before writing about the technology after he retired. NASA does not acknowledge the phenomena, but people who work for NASA do. I have been listening for years, too, to top-flight people, not some idiot who doesn’t know a bird from a plane from superman.

“I’m talking about military officers,” he said, “ranking intelligence officers, people in positions of authority, who can’t report these events because of the consequences for their careers. But confidentially, they say, this is what I saw. This is real.”

Critics often ask why, if that’s so, there haven’t been leaks. The obvious answer is, there have been leaks, plenty of them, which is why we have these accounts. Once the reality is out in the open, it must be hidden in plain sight. The hallmarks of cover and deception are illusion, misdirection—and, above all, ridicule. Used effectively, ridicule lets us hide things in plain sight.

I think again of commercial pilots talking among themselves, knowing that colleagues are accused of flying drunk if they make reports. I think of fighter pilots who chased luminous disc-shaped vehicles but heard officers dismiss their stories as hallucinations. I think of a senior official at NASA who said – off the record, always off the record – yes, we know we have been visited, but if you say I said so, I’ll deny it.

When people are marginalized in this way, a “black market” in truth develops.  Lip service is given to “official” truth, but behind closed doors, people whisper. What results is more nefarious than any conspiracy. Complex systems such as governments are seldom directed by a single person or group. What looks like conspiracy is often bureaucratic muddle. But that muddle can also result in the truth being told by mistake.

The State Department, for example, may release a document about an event without understanding its significance because they do not know the data that makes it important. People in DOD may spot the leak and cringe, but if they say anything, it reveals the significance of the data. So the leak is ignored.

The report of a UFO encounter over Iran in 1976, for example, was released by the Department of Defense. The document describes the incident in detail. It states that the quality of information in the report is high, confirms the credibility of multiple sources, and names the Defense Intelligence Agency as the primary source.

In the hall of mirrors, it is easy to neutralize controversial statements. Edgar Mitchell asked someone “close to the center, close to the top” about that Group that Manages it All and was told yes, it’s real. But Colonel John B. Alexander, author of Future War: Non-lethal Weapons in Twenty-first-century Warfare and a staff member of the National Institute for Discovery Science (NIDS) tells me that he too attempted to locate such a group and, “I got to higher and higher levels and never found even an inference of such a program.”

Of course, some claim that NIDS is a cover operation with links to intelligence and that Alexander’s job is to spread disinformation. Others claim that Mitchell’s testimony is useless hearsay. That sort of point-counterpoint shows that all it takes to stall momentum in any direction is energy from the opposite direction.  That’s why this entire domain is so full of words, words, words.

Yet … words have meaning. Mark Rodigher suggests we stay with accounts which, if true, are more obviously evidential. Rodigher studies physical trace and vehicle interference cases, particularly those with multiple witnesses, because while people can be wrong about subjective interpretations of lights maneuvering in the sky, they are not likely to be wrong about vehicles hovering near their cars, killing their engines, and leaving marks or burns on their skin.

Dr. Robert Schuessler began with the human space flight program in 1962 at the end of the Mercury program and worked on the Gemini program, then SkyLab. Reports of unusual returns on radar during space flights and stories from astronauts like Jim McDivitt, Deke Slayton and Gordon Cooper kindled his interest in UFOs. Schuessler notes that surveillance from space is so comprehensive today that many answers to our questions must be known, changing the question from, is it real? to, what is it? and then, who knows and what do they know? People at the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO), he says, would know.

So when I found myself in Washington DC having lunch with the director of signals intelligence (SigInt) for the NRO, Brigadier General James B. Armor, Jr.,  I raised the subject. “You guys pretty much observe everything in near-earth or trans-lunar space, don’t you?”

“Pretty much,” Armor said.

“Ever see anything … unusual?”

“You mean like UFOs?” Armor smiled. “It’s an interesting subject, isn’t it? But we don’t know any more than you do.”

Which is either true, or false, or both.

#  #  #

So where does that leave us?  One tentative hypothesis based on the best reports agrees with the early writings of Edward Ruppelt, with Mark Rodigher, Allen Hynek, and Edgar Mitchell.

As Rodigher put it: “It’s difficult to avoid the conclusion that some UFOs are non-terrestrial intelligently piloted vehicles. Whether they are interdimensional, alien, or something more bizarre than that, we can’t tell.”

We can’t tell, because we don’t know what we don’t know.

I have listened with care to critics like Tarter and Klass for evidence that would expose UFOs as unworthy of scientific exploration. I never heard it. I heard and agreed with critiques of unethical investigators, mistaken or deluded “witnesses,” sloppy reporting, and bad science, but I never heard a single critique of credible witnesses who made the kinds of reports that account for the most compelling “unexplained” sightings. Nor did I hear skeptics critique their own motivations or methodologies. As Sturrock observed, their approach to a legitimate domain of human inquiry was not always scientific. They too have an agenda.

We can’t be seeing what we’re seeing – but we are. There is not likely to be a single explanation for the diverse phenomena reported on the ground, at sea, in the air, in space, but for some of it, the extraterrestrial hypothesis can not be ruled out.  UFO phenomena invites a serious multi-disciplinary scientific investigation. Either that investigation has taken place or is taking place, out of sight – or thousands of scientists and researchers who study arcane domains and should be interested in these accounts close their minds when the subject comes up.

We must gather data and collaborate in cross-disciplinary ways to do together what we can not do alone. Then we are likely to reach reasonable sane answers to the simple question: are there UFOs, not only on Mars, and the Moon, and Venus, and Jupiter, and Titan—but also on Earth?

#  #  #

Copyright 2000-2005 by Richard Thieme.  All Rights Reserved.

Persons of Conscience and the Laws of Robotics

by

Richard Thieme

The Three Laws of Robotics

I have been listening a lot lately to persons of conscience.

What do I mean by “persons of conscience?”

Let’s take a cue from Jeffrey Wigand. Wigand, made famous by the film The Insider, is the man who called the tobacco industry to account for its homicidal lies and deceits. In a recent interview in Time Magazine, he was asked why he objected to the term “whistle blower.”

What does it imply? he asked.  A rat or a snitch. It’s pejorative, isn’t it?

I prefer the term “person of conscience,” he said.

So let’s use “persons of conscience” to mean people in corporations, the military,

government agencies, religious organizations, whatever, who share this trait:

They find it impossible to keep quiet any longer about actions that torture their consciences.

They may have been silent until that moment, knowing that speaking up violates the first law of robotics, but then a variety of circumstances conspire to end their silence.

The First Law of Robotics? Yes. With a little revision, I think, Isaac Asimov’s Three Laws of Robotics from I, Robot can be adapted for this discussion.  For our purposes, the first law (revised) states that a robot may never injure the organization to which it belongs or, through inaction, allow it to come to harm.

In other words, to work successfully in an organization, everyone to some degree has to become robotic. The norms of the organization eclipse the promptings of one’s own conscience, slowly obscuring them until – the organizational ideal – the darkness is complete and the conscience is permanently eclipsed.

Every organization has written and unwritten rules. Written rules are given to new employees through briefings, manuals, handbooks. Unwritten rules are communicated in whispers and by example. Unwritten rules govern the real behaviors in the culture and embody its unspoken norms. Unwritten rules come first, written rules second. If one does not obey the unwritten rules, one is not promoted or retained or, if one is kept on, one’s life can be made miserable.

The second law of robotics states, a robot must obey orders given by the organization, except when such orders conflict with the first law. In other words, the written rules or orders of a superior can be ignored if the robot knows a higher superior wants them ignored.

The third law of robotics states, employees must protect their own existence so long as such protection does not conflict with the first or second law. In other words, be as ethical as you like in other areas of your life but don’t let it interfere with what you have to do in here.

“Robotic” is not too strong a term to characterize the behaviors I am discussing.

All organizations assimilate people into cultures. The anthropologist Margaret Meade said that it took another full year to learn as much as she learned in the first week when she entered a new culture. That’s a measure of how quickly we pick up cues. Corporate cultures communicate the rewards and consequences of doing the right and wrong things. Right and wrong are defined in relationship to the well-being and survival of the organization.

Institutional survival and individual conscience at some point come into conflict. The optimal behaviors of any institution are framed in reference to success, which usually means  profitability, and that means defeating others in a competitive marketplace. Those optimal behaviors can never be completely congruent with the integrity of an individual. The same applies to not-for-profits of all kinds where profit is measured in psychological gain or competitive advantage. “Not-for-profit” does not necessarily mean low salaries or an undersized cash flow.

So human beings who are assimilated into organizational cultures are inevitably turned into robots in varying degrees if we mean by “robot” a person who follows automatically the organizational program rather than his or her conscience. Following one’s conscience, after all, is what makes a human being human.

A CIA veteran described the agency as sixty per cent bureaucrats who sustain the structures, thirty percent imaginative people who dream up all sorts of creative projects, and ten per cent sociopaths who are willing to do anything to carry out those projects.

A sociopath does not have a conscience. Sociopaths don’t go to confession. They never feel sufficient distress to articulate a boundary between themselves and the organization. Their identities seamlessly fuse with corporate ideology, their will with its will, and behaviors become mechanical. They will, as my source said, do literally anything on behalf of their agency, their company, their government, their country.

Everyone who has worked in an organization knows what I’m talking about. The CIA may seem like an extreme example because the agency is chartered to break laws so long as its actions are sanctioned by a power elite.  But I think it’s a good benchmark of organizational behavior particularly in relationship to powerful trans-global supra-national companies because the power elite in any organization determines the behaviors that are sanctioned, they are always behaviors that serve the organization’s objectives, and they often break or skirt the law in letter or in spirit. (An exaggeration? I picked up the Wall Street Journal on March 2, 2005 and read: (1) Citigroup hopes to emphasize ethics as an antidote to recent major scandals; (2) former workers at Halliburton are being investigated for conspiring to rig bids, an offshoot of the larger bribery scandal in Nigeria; (3) Titan Corp., a defense contractor, agreed to pay $28.5 million to settle allegations that it covered up illegal payments in six countries including millions to influence a national election; (4) GE intends to exploit developing markets, nothing new there, just a statement of fact congruent with what I am describing; (5) more than 500 public companies reported deficiencies with internal accounting controls – all this in a single section of a newspaper dedicated to advancing corporate agendas.

That’s the water in which we all have to swim.

But such institutional behaviors are not restricted to trans-global corporations. The stated purpose of an organization is irrelevant to its behaviors; its “mission statement” is irrelevant. A church, for example, may not only talk about the importance of a conscience but also successfully inculcate and reinforce a conscience in members – but then insists that one’s conscience be exercised exclusively outside the closed world of the Church. The recent pedophile scandal in the Roman Catholic Church, much of which is still hidden and protected by systemic processes that created the scandal in the first place, is an example. Catholics I know who tried to alert authorities years ago were ignored or punished for their efforts. Except within narrow limits, they still are.

Religious and other hierarchical structures like the armed services always promote individuals to the degree that they support the institutional culture and its norms. Each promotion up the ladder is in direct proportion to the person’s commitment not to change or challenge anything in the system. By the time someone arrives at the top, they have proven themselves faithful custodians of institutional norms.

“What were you doing in Chinatown?” Evelyn Mulwray asks Jake Gittes in the classic film of the same name.

“As little as possible,” he replied.

“The District Attorney gives his men advice like that?”

“They do in Chinatown.”

Indeed they do. Except that Chinatown is the world.

And if they don’t do “as little as possible” …  there are consequences.

A “whistle blower” in the Department of Energy told me he had to go to court numerous times at a cost of hundreds of thousands of dollars each when he challenged the department about human safety issues. He won every time but knew he would always be sued so he could be used as an example. The communication to employees is: you may prevail but we’ll make your life a living hell even if you do.

People approach him quietly, he said, thanking him for what he did, often saying they would do the same if … they did not have a mortgage; or family; or were not afraid of what would be done in return.

An organization does not and can not have a conscience. Only an individual human being can have a conscience.

That’s why persons of conscience are always perceived as threats. To speak the truth of one’s conscience against the myths of a culture is subversive.

That does not mean that persons of conscience are innocent. Far from it. They have participated in whatever behaviors come to haunt them and know it. But a point comes when the balance tips and the aggrieved conscience can no longer remain silent. They speak up to relieve their own cognitive dissonance; they speak up to transcend in the moment of speaking their own past behaviors and the culture that fostered them; they speak up to affirm a standard of accountability that, if not articulated, can never be recognized. The power of nonviolent resistance to injustice resides in the quickening of the conscience of people watching. That strategy is predicated on the existence of universal moral truths. Those truths translate to the standard of accountability we are discussing.

Persons of conscience reclaim their humanity by speaking out even when they know the consequences will be ridicule, rejection, destruction of their livelihoods or careers, even death. When the stakes are sufficiently high or the culture is one that supports illegal actions including killing, assassination may well serve as an object lesson to those left standing. Assassination is the ultimate form of censorship.

Neutralization, however, does not always require that extreme measure. Forcing a person of conscience onto the margins where they can be ridiculed or dismissed is simple in a society where the media controls what people believe is real.

Inside the organization, persons of conscience will be called snitches, rats, traitors, or worse. It depends on the organization. If it’s a corporation or government agency, you’re a whistleblower, the opposite of a “team player,” and you’re shunned. If it’s news media and you’re a journalist, you’re a “muckraker” or “a conspiracy theorist” and you’re reassigned from the city desk to the strawberry festival. If it’s a country, you’re a traitor.

Everyone sooner or later is faced with the choice of whether or not to be a person of conscience – the moment when a robot can transform itself into a fully human being.

Or not.

The Righteous Need Not Apply

I said that persons of conscience are not innocent. Neither are they virtuous. They have simply reached a threshold at which the pain of violating their consciences is greater

than the pain of anticipated consequences. They have no moral high ground but they do speak the truth of a moral universe that convicts those who hear it. They may be narcissistic in their crusading, their motives may be mixed, but that’s not the primary question: the question is, Are they telling the truth?

Persons of conscience speak out not only to help others but to save themselves, to reclaim their integrity in the act of declaring the truth. They don’t say, this is what YOU are doing; they say, this is what WE have been doing and it can’t go on.

That’s why they’re dangerous. Persons of conscience threaten the status quo.

Gary Webb

Gary Webb, a journalist who had won a Pulitzer Prize, wrote hard-hitting investigative stories over seventeen years that never resulted in dismissal or serious threats. He wrote that he came to believe that the system worked, that “muckraking” was encouraged and rewarded.

Then he was made “radioactive” by the industry for disclosing connections between the CIA, drug cartels, and arms for the Contras. That’s when he realized, he said, that his earlier stories were tolerated only because they were not important enough to suppress.

When his work became threatening, he was taken down. He never recovered from the sentence decreed by a hidden court and never worked in journalism again, the only work he ever wanted to do. He became deeply depressed and killed himself.

The truths he disclosed about the CIA did not even touch the deeper levels of truth that were later revealed. The truth of his accusations were apparently unimportant because they were subsequently admitted. The most shocking revelations can be

neutralized by the passage of time. Project Northwoods, for example, a treasonous scheme involving attacks on our own troops and cities was devised by the Joint Chiefs of Staff; because it was disclosed decades later (by James Bamford in Body of Secrets) it was greeted with silence instead of outrage.

The important thing was for Gary Webb to serve as an example to other journalists thinking of challenging “the great Wurlitzer” as the CIA Public Affairs Office was called.

I know I am not describing conditions that will change. This is the human condition. So long as people need the rewards of corporate affiliation, they will be robotic to a degree. There will always be a cost to having a conscience. Persons of conscience who expect gratitude will be disappointed. To speak out is like putting real cash on the table instead of playing a game with Monopoly money. That can be dangerous and is likely to be played out not in a parlor but on a balcony, say, in Memphis, when genuine conspirators, tangled together in the many motivations of why people hate, focus their common interest through the crosshairs of a scope.

Or, as with Gary Webb, they so erode your reasons for living that you pull the trigger for them.

What We Have Inherited

Knowing what’s at stake, we can’t blame those who choose the expedient path.

An accountant for a trans-global corporation recently came to me in distress. He had objected to moving twenty million dollars from a legitimate account to one where it did not belong. His wife who also worked for the company was told by her boss, your husband doesn’t seem to understand how business works.  He’s not a team player, is he?

They knew what that meant. Because I knew his boss, I said I would raise the subject confidentially.

When we were alone, I said to his superior, “I want to bring something up–“

He smiled. “Don’t tell me you’re going to ask if we cook the books.”

“I am.”

“Richard,” he said, “Richard, of course we do. We all do. How do you think we hit our numbers quarter after quarter? Through planning and execution?

“You want to know what a company is worth? Forget stated earnings. The only way to gauge a company’s health is cash flow.

“The rest is a myth, written for the Street.”

My friend still works for the corporation but learned his lesson. Now, when asked to move money, he moves money.

The next example might sound silly—because it has been made to sound silly.

We have been conditioned to laugh when someone suggests that the food we eat has a connection to the obesity epidemic. Black has been turned into white. As an exercise in perception management, think about how you have been led to believe that it’s absurd to suggest a causal relationship between our health and what we eat.

A local chemist who worked for a food conglomerate asked, “Do you know why it’s so hard to eat just one Oreo cookie?”

“All that sugar and fat?”

“No,” he said. “Because [at the time he was speaking] we have isolated seventeen different appetite stimulants and we put them all in Oreos.”

Sounds like nicotine boosting to me. But suggest a share of responsibility for those who do it, who hope you’ll quickly consume any package you open, and people laugh.

Rather than fight a losing battle, he left the corporation to found his own healthy bread company.

The Big Picture

Technology is a force multiplier at the macro level for those who thrive on disguising the truth and punishing those who tell it.

I said in a recent interview with the Linux Journal, “The convergence of enabling technologies of intrusion, interception, and panoptic reach, combined with a sense of urgency about doing counter-terror and a clear mandate from the White House to do everything possible and seek forgiveness afterward rather than permission in advance has created a dire but often invisible set of threatening conditions.”

That’s an abstract way of saying how bad it has become. What does it imply? That the Bill of Rights no longer means what we once thought because the context of our lives has changed dramatically. That many men and women on the front lines in government and intelligence work often find their consciences aggrieved but their options limited. The lived implications of that contextual change go unexamined. We live as if the Bill of Rights in our heads is still viable despite a technology revolution that has made life transparent and magnified the power of those who control the technologies in a climate of fear that now justifies torture, assassination and unilateral military action.

Don’t take my word for it. Listen to an expert.

Retired U.S. Army Gen. Patrick M. Hughes, a former chief of the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), eight months before the White House appointed him the Homeland Security Department’s top intelligence official, told a public forum at Harvard last year that the government would have to “abridge individual rights” and take domestic security measures “not in accordance with our values and traditions” to prevent terrorist attacks in the United States.

“Set aside what the mass of people think,” he said. “Some things are so bad for them that you cannot allow them to have them. One is war in the context of terrorism in the United States. Therefore, we have to abridge individual rights, change societal conditions, and act in ways that heretofore were not in accordance with our values and, like giving a police officer or security official the right to search you without a judicial finding of probable cause.”

“Is that going to change your lives?” he asked. “ It already has.”

Or this: A Pentagon effort to persuade Congress to allow military intelligence agents to work undercover in the United States met resistance in the House of Representatives when the provision was left out of the highly secretive intelligence funding bill but the Senate’s version of the Intelligence Authorization Act of 2005 still includes the provision, which exempts Department of Defense intelligence agents from a portion of the Privacy Act, a 30-year-old law that outlaws secret databases on American citizens and green-card holders.  The bill would allow Pentagon intelligence agents to work undercover and question American citizens and legal residents without having to reveal that they are government agents.

Hundreds of stories like those stream across my desktop daily from global sources. Typical recent headlines are:

Bush Can Hold Citizens Without Charges

The Surveillance Industrial Complex

The secret history of secrecy: the closing of the American government.

Spy imagery agency takes new role inside United States after Sept. 11

No change in US torture policy

44 percent of Americans favor curtailing some Muslim rights

Many Americans think the Bill of Rights “goes too far,” say polls

I asked a veteran in the intelligence community, “Do you think we’ll ever get the Bill of Rights back?”

“Probably not,” he said. “Unless some Watergate-type scandal wakes people up.”

So I asked a veteran journalist if a story like Watergate would be covered the same way today.

“No,” he said. “People accept just about anything. Stories of torture, crimes, cover-ups, whatever. The media is owned by a very few people whose self-interest fuses with the power elite. Newspapers and networks distract us with scandals, sex stories, silly celebrity gossip, everything they can use to prevent people from thinking seriously about what’s going on.

“Even if the stories were written, they would be ignored.”

So I asked an official at DOD, “Is there any meaningful accountability in the intelligence community to an ethical standard? Or to an external reference?”

“No,” he said.

The bottom line: Individuals of conscience struggle anonymously inside agencies long steeped in secrecy to try to establish accountability so citizens can be safe from egregious abuses of power. Those abuses, they know, are happening and at the least, unintended consequences can blow back into our lives.

Max Weber, the father of modern sociology, defined the state as that entity which had a monopoly on the sanctioned use of violence within its borders. But borders are dissolving and the field of action today is a boundary-blurring amalgam of military, intelligence and corporate structures that transcend national interests or prior alliances. Violence is sanctioned in effect anywhere inside those indeterminate structures that a threat is said to exist.

When the victims of that violence are defined as enemies because they threaten a power elite, because they are persons of conscience who just won’t get with the program,

the lesson is clear: if you can, live with the pain of a violated conscience. Don’t speak out if you can avoid it. Play golf, go to movies, worry about the mortgage.

But if you reach that tipping point—if you can’t stand being silent for one more minute—then count the cost. Before you speak, count the cost.

And then as if your life, as if your humanity depends upon it, break those rules and set yourself free.

Identity/Destiny.

by Richard Thieme

“Identity/Destiny” was published in Prophecy Anthology, Volume 1“  a full-color book featuring sequential art by artists such as Shannon Wheeler, Scott McCloud, Sho Murase, Yuko Shimizu, Nathan Fox and Bernie Mireault by Sequent Media (2004). The text accompanied wonderful graphic narrative.

Identity is destiny.

Identity is designed.

Our destiny then is to design our identity and …

how we design our identity determines our destiny.

Existence precedes essence. Our existence as conscious beings enables us to create and recreate ourselves (within constraints, of course) in our image(s).

Constraints include how we are constructed as cognitive and sensory systems and the deep structure of our biological and cultural inheritance, the context of which we are the contents.

Translating that deep structure which is “unknown and unwritten” through symbols into “known and unwritten” or “known and written” is a primary task of human civilization.

Identity is also a function of boundaries.

How do we choose to think of ourselves? As colonies of organs or glandular systems? as individuals whose skins are a hard delimitation of where we begin and end? as nodes in a network or members of a tribe or nation?

Our identity is determined by the line around ourSelf, our Selves.

[see the short story, Species, Lost in Apple-eating Time, at www.thiemeworks.com for sequential images of this moving target]

“Individual” is a notion-come-lately. “Individual” is a renaissance invention like the modern “self.”

Now we are again thinking of ourselves as cells in bodies, nodes in networks. Selves are becoming ourSelf again.

Boundaries are determined by technologies of information and communication.

Boundaries draw themselves at the levels of complexity of our social, economic, and political lives appropriate to the speed of the flow of information and the size and shape of the structures needed to manage that flow.

The printing press came to England in the late fourteen hundreds and transformed regional peoples into one people-becoming-English. Nation states were not thinkable before the printing press turned languages into dialects and chose one dialect to be a language, creating a unified framework for a “people” who recontextualized their former identities, now included and transcended, in something larger, something unimaginable prior to transformation.

Today England is fighting not to become part of Europe but England is already over. Using euros or translating pounds into euros is the same transaction.  The boundary has shifted.

Privacy is the illusion of containment. We radiate information about ourselves everywhere and always. We are systems of energy and information. Or we are one system of energy and information.

Language made us human. Language is the glue of the human universe. To be human therefore is to be social.

Even the Unabomber wrote letters. A human alone is a brain in a bottle.

There are four eras of the Technology of the Word: speech, writing, printing, and electronic communication. Fractal-like, self-similar at all levels.

The last era began with the telegraph, the first of the network-generating electronic technologies.

McLuhan talked about television a lot because that was his Internet.

Human beings and all other organizations are systems of information and energy. How energy and information flow determines the structure(s) of the system.

The era of electronic communication creates communities of identity on the fly, undermining prior identities. Cognitive dissonance is the result.

We do not know at any given moment which identity is speaking through us (in the sense that we do not speak a language but language speaks us).

Am I writing this as an American or as a trans-national … non-American?

What am I becoming? What is its name? Not-being-something is not an identity.

Nietzsche said creative thinkers see what is emerging and give it a name just before the herd sees it. Naming is a primary act of creativity. Names set boundaries and boundaries determines identity.

New names have not yet been invented.

Today our identities are modular and fluid because the networks in which we are immersed are modular and fluid. We created them but then they created us in their images. Our relationship with our technologies is symbiotic.

There is more to it than that, of course.

We are already cyborgs, fused with numerous made-bones, manufactured skin and artificial joints and implants in heads and hearts. Artificial and natural are no longer useful distinctions. Chips will be embedded in muscles, organs, brains to monitor or correct health. Optimal health will be redefined in terms of the kinds of intelligence, talents and skills we want to have. Whether ingested in chemicals or designed by genetic engineers or nanotechnologists, our redesigned fields of subjectivity will determine how we experience our selves as possibilities for action in the world.

We are cyborg selves with enhanced cognitive and sensory functions. We are it, the objects of our own design.

How can it not know what it is? asked Deckert of the replicant Rachel in Bladerunner.  Deckert did not yet suspect that he was a replicant too.

Not only Rachel-as-Other but ourselves-as-Deckert use photographs to frame our identities. At the micro level, photos remember who we are. At the macro level, conceptual images from PR, propaganda and psyops inside and outside our societies (there is no inside or outside anymore – whoops! there go the boundaries!) determine our collective memories, not our history but our shared myths.

History is not bunk. History is a manufactured field of collective subjectivity useful for managing the herd.

There’s more to it than that, of course.

A trans-planetary culture is already emerging in our midst like a fifth column, Viet Cong emerging from hiding in Saigon after the fall of the city.

Here is a direct quote from an intelligence agency analyst:

“The evidence for a cultural intrusion over a long period of time from other planets or dimensions is overwhelming.”

It does not matter if “we” go there or “they” come here. “We” and “they” are transformed in the encounter. Whether socially through neighborhoods or economically through trade or politically through alliances or biologically through interbreeding, a trans-planetary culture is the lead-edge of a transformation of earth identity into a trans-galactic identity.

Where are the Picts or the Celts?

Our designer progeny will ask, where are the Americans? where are the earthlings?

Picts, Celts, Americans, earthlings, all live on in story and song, memories helpful for managing nostalgia.  Nostalgia is how we manage transitions. Some are nostalgic for the days of a single planet. Some are nostalgic for individual species before we realized we shared the life of all higher primates. Some are nostalgic for the days before we knew that all sentient life shares an awareness.

Identities – humans, nations, trans-planetary alliances – are momentary states designed on the fly in specific cultural contexts to manage transitions from one state to the next. We swim from island to island  but we know too that islands are also made of water.

Identity is destiny.

Identity is designed.

Our destiny is to design our identity and

how we design our identity will determine our destiny.