Conspiracy: History’s Greatest Plots, Collusions and Cover-Ups (10 page)

According to the Gemstone Files, Onassis was a drug dealer who made his fortune selling opium to Turkey before going into partnership with Joe Kennedy (JFK's father) to smuggle booze into the USA during prohibition. By the 1950s, Onassis was running the Mafia. Meanwhile, the Texan millionaire Howard Hughes was buying up politicians with a view to controlling the Presidency. Onassis saw Hughes as a rival, kidnapped him and replaced him with a double (which explains why Hughes became a recluse in his later years). Now Onassis controlled both the Mafia and a number of key politicians. In the 1960 election both candidates, Kennedy and Nixon, were beholden to him – so either way, he won.

However, when Kennedy pulled back from invading Cuba, the Mafia decided to have him killed. And so on, and so on. Every assassination during the sixties could be laid at the feet of this sinister conspiracy. Particularly bizarre are the allegations that Onassis kept the real Howard Hughes prisoner on his private Greek island and only married Jackie Kennedy as part of his revenge on the treacherous JFK.

F
ROM
G
EMSTONES TO
X-F
ILES
All in all, Onassis emerges more as a Bond super-villain than a real person. And that may be the key to the Gemstone Files' enduring popularity. This is the Bond movie version of modern history – more colourful and exciting than real life could ever be. And, in turn, the kind of conspiracy theories propounded in the Gemstone Files have definitely influenced many movies: they notions inform Oliver Stone's films like
JFK
and
Nixon
, and have also influenced TV shows like the
X-Files
.

So do the Gemstone Files have any serious credibility at all? Well, some of the many theories that are bandied about in their pages do bear consideration. That there was some kind of connection between JFK and the Mafia, for instance, seems certain. Overall though, the Files are clearly written by someone who had a few nuggets of inside knowledge, but proceeded to put two and two together and make a million. As for whether the real author was the mysterious Roberts, or whether Brussell or Caruana was actually the author of the Files, remains open to speculation. Whoever the author was, though, the Gemstone Files are ultimately an entertaining and remarkably influential work of fiction.

The Roswell Incident of June 1947 remains one of the most intriguing episodes in the history of UFO research. For many, it is the most persuasive evidence we have that alien beings exist, that they travel about the cosmos in spacecraft and that they once landed here on Earth.

The story began in 1947 when a pilot named Kenneth Arnold claimed that he had seen several objects flying "like geese" through the sky near Mount Rainier, Washington. He described them "moving like a saucer would if it skimmed across the water". The journalist reporting the story coined the term "flying saucer" to describe the craft and this has been used informally ever since to denote UFOs – unidentified flying objects.

Whether such objects exist, and whether Arnold was telling the truth when he made the claim that day, has been the subject of much speculation over the years. For what happened a few weeks afterwards confirmed, in many people's minds, that aliens had indeed visited our planet and that the American government, for reasons of its own, tried to hush up the story.

E
XTRA-TERRESTRIAL CRASH LANDING?
In early July 1947, a rancher named William "Mack" Brazel was riding out over land near Corona, New Mexico when he noticed a large amount of strange-looking debris scattered about. He informed Sheriff Wilcox of Chaves County who, thinking this must be to do with military exercises, passed the information on to the Army Air Force base at Roswell. Major Jesse Marcel, the base intelligence officer, was instructed to examine the debris. Meanwhile, a local newspaper published the story, reporting that a "flying saucer" had landed on the ranch (they also claimed that it had "been captured", which was a complete fabrication). The matter was then referred to the United States Army Air Force research laboratories, who issued a statement to the effect that the debris was not a flying saucer but the remains of a high altitude weather balloon with a radar attachment made of aluminium and balsa wood, that was being used for State purposes.

After the sighting in New Mexico, the press picked up the story and many newspapers across the United States published more or less lurid accounts of it. Public interest ran high and various other sightings were reported during the summer of 1947. However, the Army's insistence that the wreckage was not a crashed or captured flying saucer but simply the remains of a weather balloon eventually began to quell press and public interest in the subject.

T
HE EVIDENCE
The Roswell Incident, as it came to be called, looked destined to slip into obscurity for many years, but in 1978 a UFO researcher named Stanton Friedman began to delve into it once again. While on a lecture tour, he received a call from Jesse Marcel, who had handled the affair back in 1947. However, Marcel could not remember the date on which the incident took place. With the help of co-researcher William Moore, Friedman began to find out more and eventually unearthed newspaper clippings reporting the story. Then the pair began to ask questions. What kind of weather balloon could yield such strange debris? Brazel and others had said that the material they had found was extremely light and could not be burned or otherwise destroyed. Why would they lie about such a thing? And why was the whole affair cloaked in such secrecy? The Army seemed to have something to hide – what was it?

L
ITTLE GREEN MEN
Friedman and Moore interviewed a teletype operator named Lydia Sleppy. She had worked at a New Mexico radio station in 1947 and had claimed that the FBI had interrupted the transmission of the "flying saucer" story. This seemed to tally with Marcel's account, in which he had stated that the army had suppressed information about the strange debris that he had seen with his own eyes and that the "weather balloon" story had been a cover up. A retired Air Force brigadier general called Arthur Exon then came out of the woodwork. He told UFO researchers Kevin Randle and Donald Schmitt that some strange debris had been brought in while he had been working at the Wright Patterson Air Force Base in 1947. It was lightweight and apparently indestructible. There were also rumours circulating around the base, he said, that bodies had been recovered out of a "craft from space".

Another retired Air Force officer, Brigadier General Thomas Dubose, alleged in interviews that the Roswell incident had been treated with the greatest secrecy and that the White House had been involved. He also confirmed that the "weather balloon" story had been fabricated. Other senior ex-officers then emerged with similar tales to tell: they had either seen the bodies of alien creatures who had died when the craft crashed or they had heard of their existence.

Much of this evidence was dismissed by sceptics as second hand. Yet there remained disturbing anomalies in the government's weather balloon story, so – not surprisingly – questions continued to be asked.

S
ECRET SURVEILLANCE
?
Several theories were advanced. The first, and in the opinion of many people, the most persuasive, was that the debris was surveillance equipment that was being used in a top secret government project designed to spy on Russian nuclear activity, called Mogul. The incident needed to be hushed up because of the clandestine nature of the operation, which is why the army came up with the story about the weather balloon. However, this theory does not explain why the material found on the ranch was so unusual, or why the army would be using such material. It was also pointed out that the army had previously been unconcerned about people stumbling across the evidence of balloons and other army equipment found scattered in the desert: but this time they rushed to hide it.

Next came the idea that the incident could be attributed to a nuclear accident on the part of the army but, once again, there were problems with this explanation. For a start, the army had no assembled nuclear weapons in its arsenal at the time and there were no other nuclear accidents during the period in question, as public records now attest. Critics also argued that if the army had lost a nuclear weapon in the desert they would surely not have waited for a passing rancher to let them know where it was!