A.D. After Disclosure

THE JFK-UFO CONNECTION: From Extreme Fiction to Legitimate Question

Was President Kennedy's interest in the facts about UFOs a major or even a contributing factor in his own murder?

There are actual documents coming to light in the past week that say it's a possibility. Watching this happen is almost an out-of-body experience for me.

Relating Kennedy's assassination to his desire to tell the world the truth about extraterrestrial visitation was, in fact, the central organizing premise of my UFO-themed TV series Dark Skies (co-created with Brent Friedman) that ran on NBC from 1996-1997. On one level, it's true that Brent and I conceived the idea of JFK's death being connected to UFO disclosure as a way of putting the two most compelling modern conspiracies -- the JFK public execution and the UFO cover-up -- into an atom collider, thus creating the Ultimate Conspiracy. But it was more than that. We both accepted the validity of the Roswell event as the crash of a piece of technology that came from some place that wasn't here on Earth. And, if you accept that premise, then the world as we knew it in the 1950s and 1960s (through today, of course) is simply not the same as it appears. For us, that included the Kennedy assassination. As the series log-line stated: "History is a lie."

Now, almost a decade and a half later, the breaking news seems to be that maybe we were a lot closer to the truth than we thought. The best summary of it to date comes from Lee Spiegel of AOL News in a new column. I'd urge you to read Lee's thoughtful examination over some of the other versions getting traction on the Internet, specifically the coverage from the Daily News.

I remember vividly thinking in 1995 that it was possibly one of the most subversive acts ever propagated on an American television network -- devoting 20 hours of programming, produced at a cost of over $40-million, to the theory that President Kennedy died over UFO disclosure. Even as the executives who sponsored us at Columbia TV then at NBC gave us the greenlight to series, none of them really believed the concept. For them, it was just "pushing the envelope" to get an audience.

Now, some researchers are taking this premise seriously. Certainly no one is embracing the every detail of what we did in Dark Skies. It was obviously fiction, designed to attract an audience. But people are talking about the Big Picture idea and saying that it might just have some merit to it.

Carl Sagan: They’re Everywhere But Here

Like a lot of ufologists, I have a problem with S.E.T.I., or the Search for Extra-Terrestrial Intelligence. It's always seemed to me that if UFOs are real, then you don't need to listen for alien signals from space, you should start looking here on Earth. So the news that the Allen Telescope Array near Mount Shasta is being shut down over the budget crisis leaves me with mixed feelings. I'm in favor of science, but I'm not in favor of sham.

But it has me thinking about one of America's earliest and strongest advocates of S.E.T.I., Carl Sagan.

Sagan took America by storm during the 1970s and 1980s and became, practically speaking, America’s public Scientist-in-Chief. He first entered millions of living rooms as the affable scientist who appeared regularly on The Tonight Show with Johnny Carson. The Cornell University professor had a passion for astronomy and a gift of making complex ideas easy to understand.

Sagan’s celebrity increased with the release of the PBS Cosmos series in 1980, when he became famous for his phrase “billions and billions” (which he denied ever saying exactlly in those words) to describe galaxies, stars, and planets. He pioneered the science of exobiology and promoted SETI through the use of radio telescopes to listen for signals from space.

As an investigative reporter for PBS, specializing in space science, I met Carl Sagan several times in 1981. Cosmos was still airing on the network, and the unmanned Voyager spacecraft was approaching the planet Saturn.

Sagan gave a live, on-air interview as the pictures came in and were assembled by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena. He was effusive about what a great moment it was for humanity. He talked passionately about how this first step beyond Earth would someday lead to manned adventures further and further into space. He was positive that the universe, because of the sheer numbers of habitable planets and what he saw as the “bias” toward life, would be teeming with intelligent beings.

50 Years Since the Betty & Barney Hill Abduction

The 1961 Betty & Barney Hill UFO abduction is being developed as a feature film by Stellar Productions.

The feature film, Shades of Gray, will tell their story based on new information from the book Captured! The Betty and Barney Hill UFO Experience by Stanton T. Friedman and Kathleen Marden.

All ufologists know, of course, that Betty and Barney are not just the Flintstones' next door neighbors, but the names that belong to the Hills, the married couple who became the ignition point of the modern alien abduction era.

50 years ago, on September 19, 1961, Betty and Barney Hill were driving home from Canada and about 100 miles northwest of Portsmouth, New Hampshire, when they saw a UFO at close range and then suffered one of the first recorded "missing time" episodes. Later, under hypnosis, they gave strikingly similar and detailed accounts of their kidnapping.

It is a compelling and seminal narrative of the UFO abduction phenomenon. Over the years, it has spawned books, articles, a film and even, in my own instance, an appearance in the Dark Skies series.

I'm pleased to announce, in time for the 50th anniversary, that my production company, Stellar Productions, has optioned the film rights to Captured! The Betty and Barney Hill UFO Experience (New Page Books) by Stanton T. Friedman, MSc. and Kathleen Marden. Friedman, of course, is the leading scientific ufologist of our time and a former nuclear physicist, the man who broke the Roswell case. Marden is Betty Hill's niece and the trustee of her estate. I'm thrilled to be in business with them in bringing this profound and unsettling case to what we all hope will be its largest audience yet.

Their book, published in 2007, reveals a wealth of new information about the Hills’ lives, the UFO encounter and abduction, and the scientific evaluation of the evidence. It has given new life to the Hills’ extraordinary story, and has caused me to get involved.

I will be working on this with friend and producer Don Most, my collaborator on Majic Men, the film script that was just completed about the competition between Stan Friedman and Don Schmitt to prove the Roswell story beyond reasonable doubt during the late 80s and early-to-mid 90s. We'll have an update on that project soon.

This won't be the first time that Betty and Barney's story has been filmed or a book written about them, but it will be the most definitive book/film combo that has come to the screen. A 1966 book, The Interrupted Journey, written by John Fuller, topped the New York Times best-seller list and went on to be the basis of a primetime NBC movie of the week, The UFO Incident, in October 1975.

Read The Huffington Post Coverage >>>

Captured! -- the book I have under option that will form the basis of the film Shades of Gray -- includes previously unpublished information about the lives of the Hills before and after Barney's death in 1969, their status as celebrities, Betty's experiences as a UFO investigator, and other activities before her death in 2004. Kathleen Marden writes in depth about new details from her discussions with her aunt Betty about the event and her riveting hypnosis sessions about their time onboard the spacecraft. Stanton Friedman, the original investigator of the Roswell incident, reviews and refutes the arguments of those who have attacked the Hill case, as well as the star map that Betty Hill saw inside the craft and later recreated. 

That map, by the way, provides a whole new window on where humanity fits in the larger scheme of things by showing two sun-like stars that are 30 times closer to each other than our sun is to the next star over and a cool billion years older than our own sun and less than 40 light years away from us.

Breaking News From Roswell? Or Journalistic Malpractice?

The long rumored crash of a craft of unknown origin outside of Roswell, New Mexico in July of 1947 has just been solved. The US government was wrong. The US Army Air Corps was wrong. The US Air Force was wrong. And more amazing, over 500 witnesses directly or indirectly involved were wrong! The latest "theory of the month" has been proposed by author, Annie Jacobsen in her just released book about Area 51 and a single addendum about Roswell which for some reason is getting all forms of media attention. I will limit my response to address strictly the Roswell Incident of 1947.

Simply put, this represents another classic example of lazy journalism at its worst and investigative malpractice at its finest. I recall when the Air Force was planning on the Pentagon release of their "fifth" official explanation for the Roswell case. It was reported to us that the new "theory" was what actually crashed was a Russian flying wing with a... get this... crew of monkeys in silver jump suits. The story would continue that the fiery crash would burn off all their hair and leave all the witnesses bewildered as to what they truly were. We immediately sent off a FAX to Washington just asking one question: "Which monkey was flying?" End of story. And the same applies here.

The mere suggestion that the Soviets captured a Horton Brothers "flying wing" at the fall of Berlin in 1945 (mind you, none were operational at that time and they were mainly constructed of wood), manned it with 13 year-old mutants created by German scientist Joseph Mengele as to appear "alien", flew all the way from Russia, intended to crash in New Mexico, the heart of the most militarily sensitive territory in the world, to "scare us." To say totally absurd would be an under statement.

Donald Schmitt is the co-author of the best-selling book,Witness to Roswell, and is the leading specialist who continues to investigate the Roswell Incident. He is the former co-director of the J. Allen Hynek Center for UFO Studies, where he served as Director of Special Investigations for ten years. Prior to that, he was a special investigator for the late Dr. J. Allen Hynek. The Showtime movie Roswell was based on first book, UFO Crash at Roswell. His latest book and life rights have been optioned, along with those of Stanton Friedman, as the basis for the feature film project, Majic Men.

The German brothers, Walter and Reimar Horton experimented with flying wings in much the same way that Jack Northrop did in California during the 1930s. Historically, all of the NAZI prototypes were destroyed by American forces at the fall of Berlin - so they would not fall into the hands of the Soviets. The only Horton H.IX to survive is now kept at the Smithsonian in Washington.

Writer Jacobsen claims that the Soviets created mutants to resemble the Martians described by H.G. Welles in War of the Worlds. Jacobsen should know that Welles modeled them from earthly octopus. That, and the fact that the Russians never did capture Mengele paints an illustration of pure fiction.

It never seems to matter what the new alternative explanation is. These theorists never address the unusual, exotic characteristics of the wreckage. The weightless, nearly indestructible material. The material that possessed perfect memory. The fiber optics. Except for the later, no one on earth has such material even today. And there must have been divine intervention to save us if either the Germans or Russians had it back in the forties.

The author states that Area 51 was named due to her one lone anonymous source's claim that the crashed craft and children were moved there from Wright Patterson in 1951. In reality, Nevada is divided into sections and the facility just happens to be in Section 51.

We have presented and named in our bestselling book Witness to Roswell, and previous books since 1991, hundreds of eyewitnesses who were actually there. Witnesses who right up to their deathbeds swore that what had crashed, what they held in their hands, and the bodies they loaded into ambulance trucks, were not from this world. These are all ignored by the US national media because it can't be therefore it isn't. Anything but UFOs is alright with these so-called guardians and keepers of the truth. Except, when it applies to Roswell -- the truth be damned no matter how ridiculous the alternative "theory." We chose to present the facts as presented to us by the truth bearers - the participants.

In recent weeks, we have all heard dozens of versions of what took place during the raid which killed Osama bin Laden. Have any of us noticed that none of these accounts come from the actual participants? For the same reason over the past twenty years, we have focused on the people who were there... not the so-called "truth" that some journalist or government official wants us to believe. Eyewitnesses send people to prison and serve as the staple for our judicial system for a reason. I can solve every crime ever committed by just siting at my computer and throwing out "theories." It's up to us as objective, free thinking, rational individuals to examine the evidence and decide which carries the greatest weight. Over 500 witnesses can't all be wrong and would certainly win hands-down in any courtroom throughout America.

And so I have just one question for Ms. Jacobsen regarding her new "magic bullet" solution to Roswell. After we obviously have wasted all of our time and effort all these years:  Which of the 13 year-olds was flying?

I just thought I would ask.

Hollywood and the Discourse on Disclosure

Many a UFO skeptic will tell you that UFOlogy (and, nowadays, exopolitics) feeds on and thrives largely as a result of images projected by the American entertainment industry: it is Hollywood, they’ll insist, that fuels the UFO mythos.

The art historian, John Moffitt, for example, views UFOs and extraterrestrials purely as “hyperreal” constructs – which is to say that they are “real” in a cultural sense, but have no grounding in our lived historical reality. Moffitt suggests that, as far as UFOs are concerned, there never was a “real” to begin with – the UFO phenomenon is entirely psychosocial, a complex simulacrum sustained in large part by mass-media images and audience culture. Moffitt notes that “American films and television have now become the major vehicles for propagating in a postmodernist, transglobal “visual culture” the popular imagery of lurking ETs and their high-tech UFO vehicles.”[i] In Moffitt’s view, “the extraterrestrials only persist as recognisable visual phenomena due to zealous attention paid to them by their audience culture. No audience culture: no attention.”[ii]

The suggestion inherent in this “audience culture” theory is that Hollywood “creatives” simply bring forth from their fertile imaginations entirely original UFOlogical ideas and design concepts which are then projected to and absorbed by an (assumed) passive audience, provoking continual reports of UFOs and aliens, certain details from which, in turn, feed back into the entertainment industry to fuel the endless hyperreal cycle that is the modern UFO phenomenon. The psychologist Susan Blackmore, propounding this same idea within the framework of memetics, suggests that UFOs and aliens are “a memeplex consisting of the idea of four-foot high, skinny, large-headed creatures with big black eyes, an image of the ships they come in... and all the other details we are fed through the media.”[iii] 

Let's Go "Live" to the White House...

First off, welcome and hello to all our readers who are checking us out due to Richard Dolan's appearance tonight on Coast-to-Coast with George Noory. We're glad to have you, and hope you'll bookmark us and come back again and again and join the discussion here about UFO/ET Disclosure.

We all know that big "D" Disclosure -- when it finally comes -- may or may not originate from the Oval Office of the U.S. president. It may come from China, Russia, Brazil, France or it may not even come from an official source at all. Still, it can be fun to imagine it...

In the A.D. After Disclosure book, there is a "vignette" between each chapter, and between chapters 1 and 2, there is a transcript of a possible presidential news conference. This YouTube is a dramatic reading of that document. It's just for fun, but it does make you think.

Special thanks to George Knapp, whose introduction to Rich and Bryce on the October 24, 2010 appearance is used as the lead-in to our "what if" news conference.

And, by the way, in the sidebar to the right of this post, you'll seen a vertical bar of our YouTube videos, all of them themed around the discussion of UFO Disclosure. We hope you'll check them out, too.

Right now, of course, Rich Dolan is appearing on Coast-to-Coast, so please listen to Rich and come back and play this later.

We also have a Facebook page for those of you who want to join the discussion.

John Alexander: Realities and Myths

I first met John Alexander in 2003. Of all the people associated with the topic of UFOs, he is undoubtedly among the most interesting. Indeed, he has become something of the official ufological boogyman. Go to any UFO conference, and if John Alexander is there, he will inevitably be the subject of much private conversation and speculation.

The reasons are self-evident, once you learn a little bit about the man. Alexander spent a long and distinctive career within the U.S. Army. While rising to the rank of colonel, he distinguished himself as a maverick. Consider that in an organization as rigid and bureaucratic as the U.S. Army, he championed such areas of research as psi phenomena, remote viewing, and non-lethal weapons technology. None of this was easy, and yet Alexander was quite successful in the course of his career. He is clearly a formidable individual. 

Then there is the UFO connection. During the 1980s, Alexander initiated and led an extended inquiry throughout many avenues of the Pentagon at high levels to find a UFO related program. As he put it many times, he was convinced such a program had to exist. After all, he himself has long been a believer in the reality of UFOs as something that is not from our ordinary reality, and which could well be extraterrestrial.

Toward that end, he created something he innocuously titled the Advanced Theoretical Physics Group. Later, this was erroneously called the UFO Working Group by the journalist Howard Blum in his 1990 book Out There. Alexander intended this group to be something of a crowbar that would pry open the doors of secrecy. The idea was that by creating a group of top notch specialists culled from throughout the U.S. defense establishment, who would conduct sophisticated analyses of UFO reports, that such a group might gain the attention of the “real” UFO program that had to exist within the Pentagon – so Alexander reasoned.

But they never got the call. After years of door-knocking and briefings with generals and other senior officials, John Alexander never saw evidence that any group or any department was mandated to study UFOs in any capacity. There was much private interest, yes, but no official investigation going on anywhere that he could see. 

Dr. J. Allen Hynek Remembered at 100 101!

Legendary folklorist Mark Twain wasn't the only famous American to be born in the year of Halley's Comet and to die in the year of its next return. So was my friend and mentor, Dr. J. Allen Hynek. The year Twain died, 1910, was the year Hynek was born. This May 1 would have been Dr. Hynek's 101st birthday.

Many have searched for the truth about the UFO mystery, hoping it will lead to some form of Disclosure. Like Halley's Comet, Dr. Hynek traveled an astronomical path and his story remains a very important one in ufology -- from a skepticism to an acknowledgement that something outside the ordinary was actually happening in the skies above us.

Ironically, his work as the scientific adviser to the study of UFOs undertaken by the U.S. Air Force known as Project Blue Book (1952 to 1969) may have been an accident of geography. At the time of his selection, he was a professor of astronomy and physics at Ohio State in Columbus, Ohio. And Ohio State is really just down the road from Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton, Ohio where Blue Book was based. That geography changed his life, and meeting him changed mine.

In 1973, after Blue Book had been mothballed and he'd moved out of the Air Force's influence, Hynek became the founder of CUFOS, the Center for UFO Studies where he continued his own independent UFO research until the day he died on April 27, 1986. Hynek also served as chairman of the Astronomy Department at Northwestern University where his specialty was the chemical composition of space.  

He always promoted the idea of scientific analysis of UFO reports, and I followed his lead in my work for him as the CUFOS Director of Special Investigations. His belief in evidence first still informs all my current research into the Roswell case. 

Life After Blue Book

The first actual attempt at some form of public disclosure took place during the Gerald Ford administration following the resignation of Richard Nixon. Ford had previously taken a very active position while serving as a congressman for the state of Michigan as a result of the famous Dexter/Ann Arbor sightings in 1966. At that time, while serving as the scientific consultant to Project Blue Book, Hynek suggested that only one of the numerous reports could be attributed to “swamp gas,” although that phrase stuck with him all his life and colored perceptions of him both within and without the UFO community. Ford, in particular, was not amused with the Air Force’s nonchalant attitude and treatment of his own constituents, as he perceived them through Hynek's filtered observations. And so, the future president, never forgot the very scientist, who made, in his eyes, such an outlandish suggestion -- Dr. J. Allen Hynek.

Lessons From Egypt: The Inevitability of Sudden Change

The world has turned upside down. What seemed unthinkable a mere month ago has now become a major political force throughout the world. 

Hosni Mubarak, the autocratic head of Egypt, a man who had ruled his country for thirty years under a “State of Emergency,” who had suspended the Egyptian constitution, who had suspended the most basic human rights, who ran an irredeemably corrupt regime, who enriched himself and his family to the tune of more than $70 billion from the backs of the Egyptian people, has fled the country. 

It took just two weeks of massive public demonstrations to get rid of him. 

The events in Egypt – and before them, Tunisia – are electrifying for many reasons. In the first place, there hasn’t been a real popular uprising in the Arab world against their perennially autocratic rulers in most people’s living memory. There have been Islamicist movements, yes, and there have been many government-sponsored public demonstrations regarding the plight of the Palestinian people. Yet, for year after year, generation upon generation, Arab people continued to suffer at the hands of their own governments. 

A populist venting of the people hasn’t occurred since Gamal Abdel Nasser’s pan-Arabism of the 1950s and 1960s. And even those protests pale in force and depth of feeling to those of today. 

For what we are seeing now is something Nasser never encouraged: a true democratic spirit, a true voice of the people. Not an anti-foreign, anti-imperialist populism, but a genuine populism that has identified the corruption and evil of one’s own government, and which seeks to remove the tumor. 

Across the Arab world, people are euphoric. Everything is up for grabs. Right now, demonstrations are occurring in Algeria, Yemen, and Jordan. Look for them to expand in Palestine and Syria. 

Video Debut: The UFO Cover-Up in 10 Minutes

Everybody's busy these days, right? Getting through an entire book, even that can be a challenge. Enter "The UFO Cover-Up in 10 Minutes."

It's Rich Dolan's latest innovative way to bring the message of Disclosure to new audiences, especially the crowd that is just now getting turned on to ET/UFO reality. The video classroom format is expressionistic, unafraid and even has a sense of humor... at least that was the idea!

If you like this video, we thank you for passing it on to friends, as you have our other videos. Below, you'll find the one that Rich and Bryce completed in support of A.D. After Disclosure.

And finally, here is the trailer for the book project, set to the music, Need-to-Know: The UFO Disclosure Song.

Thanks for watching, and for spreading the word!