27 September 2003

I am up, it is just after six. Someone has fired three rockets at the al Rashid Hotel in Baghdad, no reported casualties, and the crazy Burmese have returned Nobel laureate Aun San Suu Chi to her home from the hospital where she had been confined for three months following a gynecologic procedure.

I have CDs and diskettes piled up from an archiving project that didn't get done last week and an apartment that is dusty and a little forlorn. I have a major set of errands to do, some new bills that will have to wait until payday next week, and those idiot Wolverines have their first conference game this afternoon. It's Iowa, at home, thank goodness, and starts at 3:30 pm. I'll watch it at home, assuming they have it on the local stations here. Always problematic, these Virginia stations, and I am not sure I will go downtown to the Poli-Tiki to watch with the other crazed fans. It would be interesting to see if the hysteria that accompanied attendance there continues after Big Blue threw away their chance for the National Championship at Oregon.

The leaves have not yet begun to turn, but it is cool out there. It is football weather and the most magical part of the weekend when everything is still possible. The day stretches before me and all the chores are capable of being accomplished. But there is so much I would like to do. I don't know what will come up to preclude me from accomplishing it. Perhaps I will read a book, though the act makes me feel guilty with so much to be done. I doubt if I will get far down onto the list.

There is important stuff to be done. I have to complete some paperwork for Veteran's Administration, or rather, the Department of Veteran's Affairs. I need to make the case that something that happened years ago with no detectable consequences may have had such a profound affect on me that I am entitled to a hefty disability. In this matter I have carefully researched the unit histories of the two aircraft carriers I was assigned to years ago. I have identified two major fires that occurred on them when I was assigned to them. Of course, in those days, we had at least one major fire a day, the result of kids smoking cigarettes on watch all day, filling up ashtrays and then dumping them into trash cans that immediately burst into flames. The number of fires has declined since they banned smoking inside the ships.

But there were also big structural fires on both ships, really scary ones. They both happened in-port, thank goodness, but he ship is where we lived and there was no getting away from the consequences. Fire-fighting resulted in the wholesale disruption of the lagging, the insulation that protects us from the cold steel. In the days these two ships were made, that lagging was composed of asbestos.

I know that the VA recognizes these things happen. A pilot I know from the Vietnam War got classified as 100% disabled because he was exposed to Agent Orange. He is fine, but the possibility exists that he might get sick. One of the new hires to the company was an Air Force captain with seven years service. He said, as I clutched my briefcase and headed for the door, that he had a back injury while he was on active duty. On his physical the VA assigned him a twenty percent disability because these things always get worse later. It is very queer. Hell, I know a gal who had a hysterectomy while on active duty and the VA considers her 50% disabled!

It is a day of queer things, and I am not talking about make-overs for heterosexuals. President Bush granted another year to the Air Force to protect Area 51 with patrols of deadly force. The New York Times implies that it is not because the Nevada desert base has alien corpses but because the Service burns some stage and exotic materials there in violation of the Environmental Protection Act. This is the anniversary of the issuance of the Warren Commission Report, which concluded that Lee Harvey Oswald was the lone gunman and that he acted alone. Forget about Oficer J.D. Tippett and the GRassy Knoll. Don't worry about it. So Lewis Carol would be pleased. I found my two impossible things to believe before breakfast.

In checking on the Area 51 story- and I do check some things- I ran into some websites populated by the UFO crowd. I scrolled through several of them dealing with Cattle Abduction, Alien Impregnation, Crop Circles and Cattle Mutilation before I got to one that had some pretty impressive stuff. It was the site with the agenda for the . One of them, one Peter Robbins- is supposed to give a lecture at an upcoming UFO symposium which will feature several presentations by learned researchers on the strange phenomena which seem to be clustered around the years that immediately follow World War Two. Peter is going to talk about what he terms The Strange Death of James Vincent Forrestal.

Here is the root of the conspiracy: early on the morning of May 22, 1949, the former Secretary of the Navy, chief architect of our modern Department of Defense and recently-retired first Secretary of Defense, threw himself to his death from the 16th floor of the Bethesda Naval Hospital. He was being held there under Marine guard while being treated for depression. The Navy to five-months to investigate something that look less than twenty seconds to happen. The Board concluded that the Secretary had taken his own life by means of defenestration. The report was then classified and remains so to this day. According to the teaser for the lecture, Robbins will take us through a diverse body of evidence countering the Navy's contention and makes the then present the case for officially sanctioned murder. The motive is the shadowy existence of Majestic 12, the senior panel entrusted with preserving the UFO secrets of Roswell, New Mexico.

You remember the Majestic 12 memo, a purported briefing paper for incoming President Eisenhower. It laid out the whole Roswell conspiracy by the Government. I found a copy in the files at my office, and it scared me because it was with some other very highly classified stuff. I found a copy in the files at my office, and it scared me because it was with some other very highly classified stuff. If I was real, it was a challenge to everything I knew.

In the end, I was told it was all a hoax, to get rid of it and not worry. I had to think hard. I concluded that everything in my files was a hoax, whether it was about Majestic 12 or not. Work got a lot easier.

Another panel at the UFO convention will be conducted by the father and son team of Robert Wood and Ryan Wood. They will present compelling evidence for the authenticity of the Special Operations Manual from the Majestic operation for recovering alien bodies. There will discussions of interviews with retired government printing experts, style manual comparisons and witness interviews. Ryan will have a PowerPoint pitch on the suspicious and related deaths of Forrestal, President Kennedy and others in the name of UFO secrecy. He has powerful and convincing evidence that scores of murders from the period may be linked, and has researched some of them and is willing to speculate without evidence on the others.

We need to remember how crazy things seemed back then. There was the real expectation that Uncle Joe Stalin was going to develop a bomb to threaten us, since he failed to see the clear peaceful nature of the ones we were building. Accordingly we had to build surveillance systems to check up on him, floating sensors over his country to guarantee we wouldn't have to use our deterrence capabilities. The project was called "Mogul" and it was highly compartmentalized. At the unclassified level, it was a program to develop constant-altitude weather balloons. It's actual mission was to deliver low-frequency acoustic microphones to high over Soviet test ranges. Mogul was so highly classified that the Air Force didn't remember it until the mid-1990s.

The whole problem really stems from a day in early July 1947. There were strange things being reported in the air that summer all over the country. Roswell rancher Mac Brazel brought some strange metallic debris into the Chaves County Sheriff's Office. The military was called in to provide technical support. The most important military unit at Roswell Army Air Field was the 509th Bomb Group, the very special squadron that dropped the atomic bombs on Japan. Maj Walter Haut served as the Group Public Relations officer at the time. On July 8, Col. William Blanchard told Haut to write a press release stating that the unit had gained possession of a crashed flying saucer. He then hand-delivered the press release to Roswell 's two newspapers and two radio stations. When he returned to the office, phones were ringing with calls from every corner of the globe. Reporters asked Haut to describe the disk, but he only knew what his Colonel had told him to write. The press release was rescinded, and almost everyone got on with life, building the modern economic Colossus of America. But not everyone. Some of them had to reorganize the War Department, and create a brand new service that was less expensive than the Army and the Navy. One that could deliver atomic weapons anywhere are relatively low cost.

There was a lot of stuff going on in those days. Some very important people were doing some very important thinking. It is not surprising that little mistakes like lost highly classified reconnaissance projects could get forgotten about and that some secrets were considered more important than flying saucers. After all, as far as we knew, the aliens didn't have The Bomb. Unless we already knew that. You see?

The whole thing makes my head hurt.

But I have done my homework. I am absolutely convinced that Oswald was no where near the Bethesda Naval Hospital on May 22nd. I have the documents to prove it. I believe that Secretary Forrestal acted alone. But I am not sure about Jack Ruby. I am conducting a detailed investigation on my own, and thinking deep thoughts. I may conduct an interview with somebody, maybe the grandson of one of the Marine Guards at the hospital to get to the bottom of this. At a minimum I will post a wild assertion on one of the bulletin boards.

I have already started a PowerPoint Presentation on the matter which I can post to the web. When I have it all worked out, I will get down to work on my VA claim. Oh, the fire on my second ship?

Yeah. It was the USS Forrestal.

Copyright 2003 Vic Socotra