"A.D. - After Disclosure: The People's Guide to Life After Contact" by Richard Dolan and Bryce Zabel. What happens after they finally tell us the truth about UFOs?
A Special Analysis By Richard M. Dolan, April 2011
Our Classified World
Since the time of Pericles, defenders of human freedom have promoted the virtues of open debate within society, and for the full freedom of citizens to investigate their government and world. Whether in a household, a classroom, or a nation, a free flow of critically examined and openly discussed ideas gives us our best chance for intellectual growth and personal achievement.
The legendary physicist, Robert J. Oppenheimer, put the matter succinctly. “There must be no barriers for freedom of inquiry,” wrote the man who led the Manhattan Project. “There is no place for dogma in science. The scientist is free, and must be free to ask any question, to doubt any assertion, to seek for any evidence, to correct any errors.”
Oppenheimer, a man of conscience and intellect who straddled the worlds of free inquiry and national security, was in a good position to understand the deep meaning of his words.
And yet, despite the wonders of the Web, our world is not one in which free inquiry is the rule. It is a world in which our reality is polished and tinted on a daily basis by global power interests, and in which much of what really goes on is classified.
Consider. The Library of Congress adds roughly 60 million pages to its holdings each year, a huge cache of information for the public. However, also each year, the U.S. Government classifies nearly ten times that amount – an estimated 560 million pages of documents. For scholars engaged in political, historical, scientific, or any other archival work, the grim reality is that most of their government’s activities are secret.
What’s especially galling is that the nature of modern scientific and academic work enable such secrecy to thrive. This belies what they are supposed to do, at least according to the proponents of an open society.
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.
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.
It was fifty years ago on January 20 that John F. Kennedy was sworn in as the 35th President of the United States. While historians debate over the nature of his legacy -- whether as just another proponent for the military-industrial complex who actually got the U.S. further embroiled in Vietnam, or as a possible renegade with a vision of a different future, who was eliminated before matters got out of hand -- there is no question that there was something about the man that brings the world back to him, again and again.
Yes, it was youth, that sense of style, that energy -- above all the sense of possibility that pervaded the man himself. His assassination, essentially a public execution, finalized the image and gave the entire world a sense of loss from which it has never fully recovered.
I am convinced that the day will come when we as a society will agree that JFK was killed in a conspiracy, something involving elements from within the U.S. national security establishment. The truth on that matter will not remain buried forever. So many people already know that the official statements of the U.S. government -- that it was all the work of one single unstable individual -- are false.
Even President Bill Clinton didn’t believe that. Shortly after he became President, he asked his Assistant Attorney General, Webster Hubbell, to investigate two things. “One, who killed JFK? And two, are there UFOs?”
Clinton may not have realized how closely the two questions may have been connected. Consider the likelihood that there is indeed a UFO reality and -- of necessity -- a UFO cover-up. Could Kennedy’s assassination have been related to the latter? The world of conventional wisdom would never pause to consider this, but -- really -- why is this so difficult to imagine?
The Kennedy assassination is something like Agatha Christie’s Murder on the Orient Express. Everyone had a motive: the Mafia, the CIA, the Cubans, the Pentagon, the Soviets, and the Federal Reserve, for starters. Could that list also include Majestic Twelve, the name often ascribed to the powerful insiders who control the UFO secret?
My answer to that question is, why not?
Dark Skies, now n DVD as of 2011, is an entire 20-hour (fictional) NBC-TV series that relates the JFK assassination to the UFO cover-up. The pilot episode deals with the events leading up to Dallas, and Robert Kennedy is a continuing character in the series. Episode #17 deals with Dorothy Kilgallen's death and her investigations into JFK's death and UFOs. Dark Skies is created by Bryce Zabel & Brent V. Friedman.
By buying through this link, you receive the DVD at 50% of list price and receive a free collectible lithograph.
We must recall that the UFO topic remains the great hole in our modern history. The great unspoken reality around which so much has happened within classified circles, and about which so little has leaked to the outside world. There is an enormous history there, waiting for future researchers to describe, once the repository of data becomes available. And it will. Make no mistake, it will.
Something as important as UFOs would not have escaped the attention of JFK. Throughout the 1950s, American newspapers reported sightings of the “flying saucers” much more seriously than they do today. The topic was major news several times during the decade. We know, furthermore, that at classified levels, the topic was taken very seriously. Why then, would Kennedy not have been interested? More to the point, how would it be possible for him not to have known something about it?
Kennedy was close to a legendary figure in the CIA named Art Lundahl, who had provided briefings to four U.S. presidents, as well as to Congress and the Senate, Lundahl was renowned for his outstanding ability to explain technical concepts clearly to laymen. Interestingly, Lundahl’s main interest appears to have been UFOs, a topic which dominated his personal library. In addition, according to an interview with Lundahl by W. Todd Zechel, a UFO researcher and former employee of the Army Security Agency, Lundhahl briefed Kennedy not only on Soviet missiles in Cuba, but on UFOs. Interesting, for sure.
Then there is the controversial Marilyn Monroe UFO document, which came to light in 1992. This is a single page memo from the CIA dated August 3, 1962, one day before she died, almost certainly because she was murdered. The information on the document came from two monitored telephone conversations: one between the journalist Dorothy Killgallen and her friend Howard Rothberg, and another between Marilyn Monroe and JFK’s brother, the Attorney General Robert F. Kennedy.
The Killgallen-Rothberg conversation revolved around the fact that Monroe was telling secrets to select Hollywood insiders regarding her liaisons with the President, one of which was “a visit by the President at a secret air base for the purpose of inspecting things from outer space.” The conversation between Monroe and RFK focused on her anger at the Kennedys, the sensitive information she had in her journals, and her willingness to give a “tell all” press conference. The document bears the signature of James Jesus Angleton, head of Counterintelligence at the CIA.
Although the document lacks the kind of provenance that would make it of undisputed authenticity, I am one of the researchers who believes it is genuine. You can see the document and read more about it here.
So it looks like JFK was not only very interested in UFOs, but had connection to the topic in his capacity as President. Whether or not he was killed for reasons having to do with UFOs is not something on which I would care to pronounce a judgment. But I would say that, given the circumstances of his Presidency, it cannot be ruled out.
Like many people who have reviewed the life and Presidency of JFK, it’s my feeling that we lost something very important on that dark day of his assassination. What we lost was the implicit bond of trust that existed between the American people and their government.
The system that had been evolved for a century and a half, which despite all imperfections had moved in fits and starts toward greater power to the people, had made a great transformation during the Second World War. That was when the American republican system government became increasingly swallowed up by a “national security state.” It did not take new boss very long before it decided to remove the President in what became for all intents and purposes a silent coup d’etat.
Thus for good reason are we unable to look back at JFK, at the era of Camelot, and avoid that feeling in the pit of our stomachs. That feeling of loss, and the conviction that his assassination was a criminal action yet to be punished, or even acknowledged.
Yet, I prefer to remember something else about JFK. He was, without question, one of the greatest orators in American history. Much of that was thanks to Ted Sorenson, one of the greatest speechwriters any President was fortunate enough to have. But surely JFK had something to do with it, too.
So I would like to take a moment to re-read a classic statement made by the man. It was from a speech made at the Waldorf Astoria Hotel in New York on April 27, 1961. He gave it to the National News Publishers Association. His subject: the dangers of secrecy.
“The very word "secrecy" is repugnant in a free and open society; and we are as a people inherently and historically opposed to secret societies, to secret oaths and to secret proceedings. We decided long ago that the dangers of excessive and unwarranted concealment of pertinent facts far outweighed the dangers which are cited to justify it. Even today, there is little value in opposing the threat of a closed society by imitating its arbitrary restrictions. Even today, there is little value in insuring the survival of our nation if our traditions do not survive with it. And there is very grave danger that an announced need for increased security will be seized upon by those anxious to expand its meaning to the very limits of official censorship and concealment. That I do not intend to permit to the extent that it’s in my control. And no official of my Administration, whether his rank is high or low, civilian or military, should interpret my words here tonight as an excuse to censor the news, to stifle dissent, to cover up our mistakes or to withhold from the press and the public the facts they deserve to know.”
If we want to honor the memory of JFK, we can do no better than to live by these words, and to fight what is most assuredly the best fight of our lives. It is the fight to bring truth to this world, to shine light into the darkness, to scatter the forces of evil.
If you want to know a bit more about the book itself, here is the link to read the Introduction to A.D. After Disclosure. It is easily available through Amazon.com. Or you can order it through your local bookstore.
As always, we thank you for considering a purchase of the book through the button below at Keyhole Publishing. It will be shipped directly from the publisher signed by co-author Richard Dolan, and you will receive a free MP3 of "Need-to-Know: The UFO Disclosure Song," currently available on iTunes.
For some time now, a war has been intensifying. Not in Iraq, nor Afghanistan, nor the many other fields of death that darken our world, although all of them are affected by this particular war.
I am talking about an epic struggle -- a war fully and truly -- between the two fundamental forces of our modern age.
For we live in a world of extremes. As amazing as it seems to some, it has been only about twenty years in which the Internet has transformed our world and brought us to a level of interconnectivity that was once undreamed of. Twenty years, one human generation.
Only in the last ten years has the Web become what it is today. Only in the last decade have software and websites risen to the challenge of the possibilities offered by the Web, altering the way we obtain information, and even the way that we interact with each other. For starters, just think of the changes wrought by Youtube and Facebook, each of which is only about five years old.
For a little while, in the early days of the Internet, we used to talk of the "Information Highway." Then that became the "Information Superhighway." But even that phrase is so old, so outdated, because we are now in an era of such instant interconnectedness that our language has yet to catch up. Today, anything in the world can be right there in front of us, instantly and completely.
Or so it might seem. For at the same time, government secrets have multiplied. It may well be that more than half of all U.S. government records are classified. This is the estimate put forth in the fine book by Trevor Paglen, Blank Spots on the Map, and which finds support in many other independent studies on government secrecy worldwide.
If more than half of U.S. government documents are classified, you might say that more than half of U.S. political history is classified. And clearly, this is also true for many other nations in the world. Government secrecy has become deeply entrenched, despite all protestations to the contrary by the world’s political leaders.
It isn’t that some things shouldn't be kept secret. Few people would deny that there are legitimate reasons for military and government groups to keep some secrets. The question is, where to draw the line? In the U.S., the secrecy apparatus has been growing steadily since the 1940s. Nearly seventy years of deep secrecy, enormous black budgets, and near-total immunity from the law has only encouraged the classified world to grow. And grow. And grow.
So what happens when the powerful global trend of openness, as expressed via the Internet, collides with an equally powerful secrecy apparatus?
This is the war I am speaking of. It is the one between Freedom of Information versus Secrecy. We are seeing it now. Whether we know it or not, we are also participants. And this war includes the saga of WikiLeaks.
There is something even more interesting about this great clash, the Battle Royale of the 21st Century. It is beginning to involve the most verboten topic of all:
UFOs.
My personal feeling is that the end of UFO secrecy will unleash the greatest changes in human history. This, too, it turns out, may be part of the WikiLeaks story. Indeed, it is one that Bryce Zabel and I predicted might happen in our new book, A.D. After Disclosure: The People's Guide to Life After Contact. But more on that in a moment.
(or How I Stopped Worrying About the Past and Learned to Love the Future)
For the sake of exactitude, the title of this article ought to be why I co-wrote A.D., as I had the pleasure and superb fortune to write this book with Bryce Zabel. But what I mean to discuss is why I wrote A.D., and not Volume Three of UFOs and the National Security State.
Anyone who has followed my career in ufology understands this question. My first book, Volume One of UFOs and the National Security State, was published a full decade ago, in mid-2000, although it really wasn’t until toward the end of that year that people began to take notice.
That book wasn’t the first serious history of the modern UFO phenomenon (that would be David Jacobs’ The UFO Controversy in America), and it wasn’t the first attempt to describe the UFO cover-up (that had been done countless times by many authors). It was, however, the first attempt to provide a fairly comprehensive historical underpinning to both the phenomenon and the cover-up. That is, it attempted to make a strong case for the historical reality of some sort of UFO government conspiracy between the years 1941 and 1973.
I felt while I was preparing that book that it had the potential to be special. Even so, I was not prepared for the strong response I received from so many readers. Today, a full decade later, when I can see a number of shortcomings of that first book, I am still sometimes taken aback by the praise people offer to me about it.
Immediately after I published it, people began asking the inevitable question: when was Volume Two going to come out? I had originally thought that I would not need more than three or four years to research and write that follow-up volume, which was to cover the UFO reality and cover-up from 1973 to the present day.
That volume ended up being much more work than I ever imagined. Had I tried to complete it as planned, it would easily have exceeded 1,000 pages. Once I realized this fact, I decided to split it into two books and end up with a trilogy. A much neater solution for sure, but even so it was not until mid-2009 that the second volume was able, finally, to see the light of day. The level of relief expressed by many of my readers was easily exceeded by my own. A 600-page albatross was taken off of my neck. Now, I had taken the ufological football, so to speak, to the year 1991: past the 50th yard line and well into enemy territory.
I knew that the long delay between Volumes 1 and 2 would not be repeated for Volume 3. By the end of 2009, the research for that was nearly all collected and organized. It was mainly a matter of simply writing the book.
That was when I began talking to Bryce, a former CNN journalist and the producer of the television series, Dark Skies, which aired on NBC. He initially contacted me because he felt that my books would make a strong foundation for a television or cinema treatment, and he wanted to option them. Through the winter of 2009 and 2010, we had quite a few conversations about how such a thing might be done. Then, by degrees, our discussion evolved into something else, a project that we realized was close to both of our hearts.
That project was to envision something that many people involved in UFO studies think about, but seldom make concrete: a world in which the reality of UFOs were openly acknowledged.
March 16, 2011 is the 44th anniversary of the unsettling events that took place at Malmstrom Air Force Base back in 1967. We also mark the date now because Robert Salas -- who was in the center of that event -- will be speaking (along with Rich Dolan and Bryce Zabel) at the OZUFO Summit in Lawrence, Kansas, March 18-20.
Salas was an essential part of the news conference at the National Press Club on September 27 that here at the A.D. After Disclosure site generated three comprehensive posts that each had huge interest from our readers.
If you'd like to see how it all went down and then participate in this on-going discussion and debate, here's how they lay out:
If This Isn't a National Security Issue, Then What Is? This is Richard Dolan's original post on the subject of UFOs and nuclear weapons (which he has written about extensively in UFOs and the National Security State), timed to coincide with the news conference at the National Press Club on Monday, September 27. Although it devotes some analysis to the Malmstrom AFB case, it is a general survey of all the cases of alleged interference, and is a great place to start any study. It also dovetails nicely with any coverage you may have seen in the media about the news conference.
It's the Media That Can't Handle the Truth. Bryce Zabel weighs in with an analysis of the media coverage that accompanied the news conference, and finds that it was a very mixed bag, particularly when it comes to the establishment media. You'll find one horrendous example from CNN here, and another from the Washington Post. Our conclusion: it's good that it was done at all, but the reaction continues to show the difficulties faced along the road to Disclosure.
Maelstrom @ Malmstrom: What Really Happened in 1967? This comprehensive post by Richard Dolan is as long as a few chapters in the forthcoming A.D. book itself. In it, we address a debate that has been raging in some corners of ufology about whether the UFO explanation for the Malmstrom missile failures ever happened at all, and whether or not one of the key witnesses, Robert Salas, has been truthful in his testimony. It's long, but Richard weighs all the facts and, at the end, comes to a conclusion.
Feel free to join the debate yourself by leaving comments to any of these posts. They are moderated only for abusive behavior, and will be posted soon after you leave them. Also, our Facebook page is always available for a healthy thriving debate.
HEADLINES FROM A.D. -- UFOs and nukes have history together... the established media still doesn't get it when it comes to UFO reporting... and, even in the UFO community, debates continue to rage, often with a lack of civility that is counter-productive to the larger goals of Disclosure.
Robert Salas -- the primary witness -- is telling the truth.
Here's the case.
The Malmstrom UFO Event: Did It Really Happen? by Richard M. Dolan
After publishing this piece on afterdisclosure.com last week, I received a great deal of feedback, both positive and negative, from people of all opinions about what did or did not happen at Malmstrom AFB in March 1967. Of course, with a case this volatile, for which opinions are as strong as they are, this is inevitable. As some readers commented, I tried very hard to be even-handed in my treatment of the facts. Therefore, I was initially strongly disinclined to make any changes.
Still, I have decided that my initial defense of the reality of the case itself was in fact too tepid. The case, in my own opinion, is a very strong one. That is not to say that critics have nothing to point out; they do. But in my own assessment of the Malmstrom UFO event, I conclude that it was indeed “a UFO event.”
Finally, it has come to my attention that someone apparently accused me of “pulling” my article from this or that blog site. Apparently this was because I was afraid of the criticisms or some such thing. I placed my article on only one site: this one, afterdisclosure.com. If it has appeared anywhere else, it is because someone copied and pasted it there. If it was pulled from any site, it is because someone pulled it, presumably the moderators. Whatever the situation, I had nothing to do with any of that. It is beyond my physical ability, and well beyond my desire, to monitor the life of this article through the various blog sites that house it.
Over the last two years, a quiet controversy has been building in the field of UFO research. This concerns an attack on the truthfulness of what is one of the most discussed and important cases in current ufology: the 1967 Malmstrom Air Force Base UFO incident.
The case itself has been discussed countless times, including at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C. on September 27, 2010, and quite recently by myself. As it is always told, it involves the shut-down of (generally speaking) twenty ICBM missiles at two launch facilities while a UFO hovered above the area. It’s never a good idea to jump into a controversy that has been brewing for so long. I truly question the wisdom of inserting myself into it. It is a debate filled by both sides with a great deal of information put forth, as well as much invective and posturing. There is tremendous emotional meaning to all parties involved. But there is also no shortage a facts and claims – a mass of data that requires care and patience and cannot be undertaken lightly. Controversies in ufology happen all the time. Nearly every hallowed case I can think of has come under attack at one point or another. In my own view, some have turned out to be totally justified, others not so much. Amid the blizzard of the UFOWars, as we might call them, a great deal can slip under one’s personal radar.
But the implications in this instance are particularly important. This is because one person has put together a case claiming the Malmstrom event was in fact a non-event. He argues that there was no UFO over Malmstrom, and that the shut-down of the missiles (which has been documented to have occurred at one of the launch facilities) was caused by relatively mundane electrical problems.
UFOs and Nuclear Technology: A Serious Issue Written by Richard M. Dolan
2010 is turning out to be a very good year for the cause of UFO research and awareness. Despite the traditional blinders exhibited by ossified mainstream media sources such as the New York Times, there have been some encouraging developments.
Certainly, the publication of Leslie Kean’s very fine work has been a key breakthrough. Carefully written and solid as stone, UFOs: Generals, Pilots, and Government Officials Go On the Record, is a new tool with which to broach the topic one must never discuss in polite society. Leslie Kean found a way.
Now comes another important ufological event: the press conference at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C. Organized by UFO researcher and author (UFOs and Nukes) Robert Hastings and UFO witness USAF Captain Robert Salas, it takes place on Monday, September 27, 2010. As Hastings put it on his website, the conference’s purpose was “to address the vital issue of UFO incursions at U.S. nuclear weapons sites over the past six decades.” (My co-author Bryce Zabel analyzes the media coverage of the event elsewhere on this site.)
If you think this is hyperbole, think again. One of the most noteworthy aspects of the UFO phenomenon is its relationship to nuclear weapons and technology. From the beginning of the modern phenomenon, unknown and unusual aerial objects have been seen in the vicinity of the nuclear weapons and storage sites around the world.
Even during the late 1940s, when “flying saucers” burst upon the public consciousness, people began to wonder if “they” appeared because mankind had just entered the Atomic Age.
Certainly, the crash of something near Roswell Army Air Field during the summer of 1947 is suggestive of a connection. People often forget that, in 1947, there was exactly one military base in the world with operational nuclear weapons.
That place was in Roswell, New Mexico.
What many also forget, or never even knew, is that immediately after the Roswell event, UFOs -- really strange and bizarre UFOs -- were invading sensitive airspace and generally making a nuisance of themselves throughout the U.S. Much of their activity was centered around the leading nuclear centers in the nation.
Today -- September 23 -- is a special day in UFOlogy. September 23, 1947 is the day a top U.S. General said, in writing, that UFOs were real.
Right at the beginning of the “modern” UFO era -- three months after Kenneth Arnold and two months after Roswell -- General Nathan Twining, Head of the U.S. Air Materiel Command (AMC), wrote a classified letter to Air Force General George Schulgen regarding the “flying discs.” He said the objects were “real and not visionary or fictitious.”
Twining conceded the possibility that they may possibly be natural phenomena such as meteors, he continued, but added "the reported operating characteristics such as extreme rates of climb, maneuverability (particularly in roll), and action which must be considered evasive when sighted ... lend belief to the possibility that some of the objects are controlled either manually, automatically, or remotely.”
Twining listed several common descriptions of UFOs. They generally were silent, had a metallic or light reflecting surface, no trail, were circular or elliptical in shape, and often flat on the bottom. Many descriptions indicated a dome on top. Several reports indicated they flew in formation. Quite specific information, indeed.
UFO skeptics have pointed to Twining’s statement that no wreckage of a flying disc had been recovered. It’s true that he was probably in a good position to know. But what we don’t know is whether Twining would have been able to tell Schulgen about a UFO crash, if indeed such a thing happened. Simply put, if Schulgen lacked a “need to know,” Twining could not have told him.
On the other hand, Twining did state that UFOs were not secret American craft. This came as a surprise to Schulgen, who expected to learn that there was nothing to the affair, that everything was under control. Was Twining was hiding the fact that UFO’s were classified technology? It’s a fair question.
