Contactees and intelligence agencies

Hi

Issue 259 of the "Fortean Times" magazine also carried a book review by Andy Roberts. The book is Nick Redfern's "Contactees:A History of Alien-Human Interaction" published by New Page Books. ISBN 978 160 1630 964. (Click here to go to Amazon.)

The book is an examination of the accounts of "contactees." However, the following section of the review caught my eye. Those readers of my blog who know of my fascination with the role intelligence agencies have played in the UFO phenomenon, will understand why.

"And, of course, despite the unproven claims of the contactees and their proponents, the intelligence agencies were interested in the contactees. Not because they had a hotline to the stars, but because the 'messages' given to them by space folk were essentially antithetical to the consumer boom of the '50s and '60s.

"Messages of equality, love and peace , early ecological concerns and speculations about new ways of living were emphatically not what the military-industrial governments of the US and UK wanted spread around. There was real belief that communists and their organisations could harness the contactees and their organisations for their own subversive ends. Redfern cites UK police files, obtained under the Freedom of Information Act, which indicate that the AEtherius Society was watched for that very reason. But within UFOlogy, there are always at least two sides to every story, and Redfern suggests it could have been possible that the FBI were using the contactees to spread disinformation about UFOs and aliens in order to bury genuine UFO cases."

Comment:

We know from the work of the Disclosure Australia Project, that the Australian Security Intelligence Organisation (ASIO) kept files on at least the Queensland Flying Saucer Research Society and the Australian Flying Saucer Society. (Click here and here.)

Redfern's latest book looks like it will be a great read.