Tuesday, December 08, 2020

Fake aliens

There are many important things to talk about right now, so why should I focus on an elderly former Israeli general who claims that the governments of the world are hiding the existence of aliens? I am addressing this topic because 2020 sucks, and we all need a break from the suckiness. Sometimes bloggers just wanna have fun.
 
The whistleblower's name is Haim Eshed. 
Speaking in an interview to Yediot Aharonot, Eshed – who served as the head of Israel's space security program for nearly 30 years and is a three-time recipient of the Israel Security Award – explained that Israel and the US have both been dealing with aliens for years.
He calls them the Galactic Federation. That preposterous name is just one reason why don't I believe this guy's claims.

His story sounds like a precis of every flying saucer contactee/conspiracy story we've heard since the 1950s. Cliches galore; no new material. This is the kind of unimaginative space opera I might have expected from L. Ron Hubbard.
The 87-year-old former space security chief gave further descriptions about exactly what sort of agreements have been made between the aliens and the US, which ostensibly have been made because they wish to research and understand "the fabric of the universe." This cooperation includes a secret underground base on Mars, where there are American and alien representatives.
The base-on-Mars riff was stolen from a well-known British hoax called Alternative 3, which originated as a TV broadcast slated for April 1. Obviously, any space endeavor capable of colonizing Mars would be known to this country's enemies and competitors. We can keep big secrets, but not that big.

Eshed never clarifies where his information comes from. Is he presenting material he learned during his government service? Or are these private findings -- conclusions he hopped to after reading books and magazine articles about UFOs? 

Let us posit that we're dealing with the first situation. Let us posit that Eshed is summarizing secret information he learned while working for the Israeli government. Should we presume that Eshed was given accurate information? 

If you know how counterintelligence works, you'll understand why a government employee -- even one of high rank -- may have been deliberately exposed to false documents. 
 
Counterintelligence officers operate separately from other spies. The foremost job of a counterintelligence officer is mole-hunting. These professional paranoids must continuously ask themselves one question: Have we been penetrated? Is one of our people secretly working for their people? 

One classic way of making this determination is the "marked card" technique. Here's how it works:
 
You are working in American counterintelligence during the Cold War. You have reason to believe that someone in a certain government office has been passing data to the Soviets. You've narrowed your suspects down to three people. To narrow the list down to one, you must make sure all three suspects get access to a document containing information which the Russians covet. 
 
But it's not quite the same document: In each of the three versions, one small detail -- maybe a date, maybe a description -- is wrong. Each version contains a unique error. If document B ends up in Soviet hands, then you know that suspect B is your mole. 
 
I can hear you asking: How can one know which version of the document was passed to the Russians? Well...there are ways. Our side may have discovered their "dead drops." We were always quite good at eavesdropping on foreign communications. And we had moles of our own.
 
I don't believe in visitors from space, yet I've long suspected that the United States government has made use of the myth of alien contact. Counterintelligence officers may even have invented huge chunks of that myth. 
 
In my opinion, American molehunters have concocted various documents about UFO crashes and alien contacts, and may even have created elaborate "in the field" ruses intended to heighten foreign interest in such documents. Adversarial governments would be curious to learn if we really do possess so spectacular a secret. 

I could point to a number of incidents which tend to buttress this theory. The most obvious example that comes to mind is this book by a former American Army officer named Philip Corso, who might be considered a direct precursor to Haim Eshed. Although the book is generally derided as a literary hoax, I suspect that Corso was not a deceiver. He was deceived.

Most people don't know that Corso had inadvertently crossed the most powerful -- and paranoid -- counterintelligence professional in the history of espionage: James J. Angleton of the CIA. I've mentioned him in many previous posts. 
 
I cannot here offer a full explanation as to why Angleton mistrusted Corso. The main bone of contention had to do with a Polish defector named Michael Goleniewski (code-named SNIPER) who switched his allegiance to the West in 1961. Corso, working for Army intelligence, was Goleniewski's handler and champion. 
 
Angleton did not trust Goleniewski. Thus, Angleton did not trust Philip Corso.
 
Angleton was besotted with the spectacular claims made his own defector, a Russian named Anatoliy Golitsyn. (Alfred Hitchcock's worst movie, Topaz, offers a misleading version of the Golitsyn/Angleton affair.) This alcoholic, arrogant Russian fed Angleton some absurd fabrications -- for example, Golitsyn said that the Sino-Soviet split was a massive ruse. Since other defectors were hardly going to back up that nonsensical claim, Golitsyn had no choice but to denounce all other defectors -- including Goleniewski -- as Soviet deception agents. 
 
Michael Goleniewski's information turned out to be quite good, and Corso made sure that "his" defector was taken very seriously. Golitsyn? Screw Golitsyn. 
 
Since Angleton's paranoia matched that of any modern-day QAnon cultist, he naturally decided that Corso must himself be a Soviet agent.  
 
Soon after Corso got on Angleton's bad side, he (Corso) was assigned to the Pentagon's foreign technology division. There, he was informed that the United States was back-engineering recovered alien devices. I suspect that Corso was fed false information because Angleton presumed that Corso would be caught passing this data on to the Russians. 
 
But Corso was no traitor, and he eventually retired with honor.
 
Please understand: Mine is hardly the only "Theory of Corso." This is a complex tale with many moving parts, and I've had to leave much out. I could well be wrong. Perhaps the book Corso wrote in the 1990s -- published shortly before his 1998 death -- was nothing more than a simple hoax, an end-of-life money-grab. 
 
But even if you don't buy my particular "Theory of Corso," you should still consider the possibility that American counterintelligence officers have used bogus flying saucer documentation as a kind of loyalty test. A number of odd episodes fit this scenario. (Maybe even this strange affair. Did you know that "MAJESTIC" was actually the Truman-era code-name for our military's attack plan against the USSR?)
 
There's another reason why our spooks may have wanted to convince their spooks that aliens are zipping through the skies: Infiltration and exfiltration
 
During the Cold War, getting American agents into and out of adversarial nations was no easy task. If you misdirect the enemy (especially their air forces) with a science-fictiony light show in one area, the enemy is more likely to ignore a chopper crossing into their airspace somewhere else. Fake aliens can be a marvelous distraction.

Bottom line: Haim Eshed may be recounting "facts" which he truly believes to be factual. But who were his sources of information? Were they truthful?

14 comments:

Anonymous said...

he maybe just senile. Simple.

Joseph Cannon said...

Yeah, that’s possible. But if I had gone with that scenario I would not have had a chance to write about Angleton. And I always seek an excuse to write about him.

joseph said...

Eshed is trying to sell a book, The Universe Beyond the Horizon. He may be senile, but he may also be trying to make a buck. Not quite as ambitious as Hubbard perhaps, but maybe he is just trying to make a buck and thinks he's too old to start a religion.

Anonymous said...

@Joseph

As an example of a supposedly successful counterintelligence operation, don’t I remember reading somewhere above Reagan’s Star-wars in this connection?

Besides being nuclear saber rattling on steroids, the Strategic Defense Initiative was also meant to get the Soviet spy handlers to jolt their agents into action. How could the agents have not picked up on what must have been many research projects? Get Them Going!
(The agents had been silent because the projects, e.g. nuclear-driven x-ray lasers on satellites were little more than newly created science fiction.)

And so when the Russian agents, who had been quietly gathering material for years suddenly jumped into action trying to find the SDI info, they walked into the waiting arms of the counterintelligence agents.

Anonymous said...

The scene you sketch, of alien encounters being used in CI investigations makes sense. Shows how bad information takes on a life of its own.

Anonymous said...

In the last few years before he died, and therefore long after you had rightly pegged him as a dangerous crank and were ignoring him, William Cooper disavowed his whole space-alien schtick, claiming he had been grossly misled by insidiously clever mil-intel propaganda. Instead, he was warning his followers that someday a fake "alien contact" event would be staged for purposes of widespread, high-tech social control and massive new federal spending for STAR WARS against an imaginary enemy.

Remember the old saying that even a defective clock can sometimes tell the correct time.

Joseph Cannon said...

Cooper did more than that. He put out a screed -- I used to have a print-out -- in which he re-remembered everything he supposedly learned from the supposed intel briefing paper he read during the Vietnam war. According to these new and improved memories, the aliens were fake.

As always with Cooper, he was dealing in stolen riffs. The fake alien invasion idea had been around for a long time, and was often toyed with on the left-wing conspiracy buffs, back in the days when such beasts still existed. For example, Paul Krassner joked about this scenario during the Watergate crisis. A similar idea drives the plot of the 1952 film "Red Planet Mars." I seem to recall that there was an even earlier novel based on this scenario.

Of course, Cooper revised his memories years after Alan Moore used this idea as the whammo twist ending for "Watchmen."

My basic point is that NOTHING Cooper said was ever original. He stole everything he "revealed," sometimes word for word, even when his pilferings made no sense. And no matter how many times his burglaries were exposed, his asshole followers refused to admit that Cooper was lying.

Actually, there's a book to be written here. Cooper was hardly the only right-wing conspiracy theorist to heist ideas formulated by other people. Followers of Q have little idea that most of the things they believe are actually revised versions of theories first mooted decades ago, sometimes generations ago.

Casbott said...

I wonder if marked cards have been given to Trump.
He may even have been fed a whole bogus narrative, to mess with anyone he tries and sell secrets to.
Imagine the poor Russian debriefers who want to slap him so hard…
"Once again Donald, there is no such thing as The Stargate Program".

Anonymous said...

I know you won't credit Cooper for anything other than being a malevolent huckster (which he was, and wow was he super-envious of rival Alex Jones!) but Coop DID point the way for us "chronic skeptics" to discover and study the research of such authors as:

https://www.abebooks.com/servlet/BookDetailsPL?bi=30723179050&searchurl=sortby%3D17%26tn%3Dthe%2Bgreat%2Bufo%2Bhoax&cm_sp=snippet-_-srp1-_-title1

https://www.abebooks.com/servlet/BookDetailsPL?bi=30352528559&cm_sp=SEARCHREC-_-WIDGET-L-_-BDP-R&searchurl=kn%3Dspace%2Baliens%2Bfrom%2Bthe%2Bpentagon%26sortby%3D17

https://www.abebooks.com/servlet/BookDetailsPL?bi=30685186791&searchurl=kn%3DMILABS%26sortby%3D17&cm_sp=snippet-_-srp1-_-title6

Joseph Cannon said...

Pure junk, anon. Cooper was an absolute evil. The fact that my readers immediately started to talk about him -- that HE was the knee-jerk reference point -- indicates the insidious appeal of fascist demagoguery.

Joseph Cannon said...

Added note: When I look back on this thread, I realize that I must never address this topic again. I wrote this post mainly because I wanted to say a few words about Angleton, who has always been one of my pet topics. And people IMMEDIATELY insisted on inserting fucking COOPER into the dialogue. I try to talk about something that matters, about something real, and people insist on switching over to nonsense. I serve you healthy chicken soup, and you say: "Nah. I'd rather eat dogshit."

Lesson learned. Gotta stick purely to politics. Bloggers CAN'T have fun.

Anonymous said...

Don’t stop being you.

Anonymous said...

agree with anon 8:29. please never stop being you, Joseph.

Anonymous said...

Agree with the last two comments. Cooper could be on one’s mind for obvious reasons just now, but omit him, if you want. He’s the sick uncle that keeps drawing an audience, for no good reason as demonstrated.

Do write about Angelton. He’s always interesting, disgusting and instructive. I can’t forget that he and Kim Philby were great “friends” and drinking buddies, no doubt.