Phase Space (57 page)

1) Grainy photographs of what could be structures on the surface taken by the space probe Mariner 4 in 1964.

2) Mysterious surface glimpses through the global dust storm encountered on the planet by Mariner 9 in 1971.

3) The strange readings from the Viking landers of 1976, which found a supposedly sterile Martian surface.

And of course the Mars Observer of 1992 was deliberately destroyed. (The jury is out on the Russian Mars
96.
Maybe that really was a screw-up. The later NASA probes definitely were.)

Only a handful of people know that the US General Accounting Office – that’s Congress’s investigative arm – recently published this, the results of a search for records concerning the Cross Fork, Nevada incident, generally thought to be at the centre of the Mars cover-up. Search meaning forced through by white-hat Congressman Bill Lambie, who’s as sick of cover-ups as anyone. Published meaning hurried out and buried. I owe my copy to [illegible].

Here’s how I started this.

I got an e-mail from a Janet [illegible] of Albuquerque. She said she had met a hooker from Reno in the 1970s. This lady had worked at a cathouse close to Cross Fork, Nevada. And she told Janet there had been an awful lot of ex-NASA engineers in town at that time.

And one night two NASA guys talked too much.

NATIONAL SECURITY COUNCIL, WASHINGTON DC 20506.

APRIL 18, 1997.

MEMORANDUM FOR MR JOHN E PROCTOR, DIRECTOR-IN-CHARGE,

NATIONAL SECURITY ISSUES, GENERAL ACCOUNTING OFFICE.

SUBJECT
: Request for Records.

I am responding to your April 2, 1997 request for information or NSC records related to the supposed explosion near Cross Fork, Nevada in October 1983.

The NSC has no records or information related to the incident.

For information about any government records that may document the explosion in Nevada, we suggest you contact the National Archives, Textual Reference Division, 8601 Adelphi Rd, College Park, Maryland 20740.

– Albert D. Steele, Executive Secretary

There were four categories of key staff involved in the Mars cover-up:

1) top-level management, including CIA, FBI and DIA operatives

2) interface personnel

3) technical personnel

4) the astronauts.

Only recruiting the astronauts would have posed any challenge. These were, after all, brave and dedicated men.

Secrecy would not have been a major problem, even for such a gigantic enterprise. There were precedents. More than three hundred thousand people were directly involved in the building of an atomic bomb in 1942–5, and no significant information reached the public.

And besides America had been sliding towards a police state for years (wire-taps, surveillance of civilians) and it was a simple matter to apply these cloak-and-dagger methods and precedents to the Mars program.

(I was e-mailed with the news that someone had called into a talk show in Phoenix, Arizona, and claimed to be the man who had run the security operation for NASA during that period. He claimed that four astronauts died in missions that were squelched by NASA. And he said he had the truth about Apollo 13. Never heard from again. Probably a flake.)

The entire Mars program was run out of Southern Nevada, at a (so-called) atomic test station called the Nevada Test Site: a thousand square miles of Nevada desert.

Why there?

It is an area of hills, mountain peaks, desert valleys draining into dry lake beds. The lunar-like terrain is a warren of dark tunnels and secret facilities. You’d spot a car miles away from its dust cloud; anybody walking would be the only moving object in the landscape. And who would go there? Even by 1970 it had a reputation as a forbidden region, soaked in radioactivity.

The most likely sites of the USAF Mars facility are those least used by the AEC, notably Yucca Flat and Camp Desert Rock, aka Area 22.

Here’s another good reason: Vegas – just sixty miles to the southeast.

Those astronauts weren’t children, and they weren’t shrinking violets. The clerks and secretaries for the Mars control centre were babes recruited from Las Vegas casinos, which added to the general appeal of the place.

Executive Office of the President, Office of Science and Technology

Policy,

Washington DC 20500. April 20, 1997.

Mr John E Proctor, Director-in-Charge, National Security Issues, General Accounting Office.

Dear Mr Proctor:

In response to your recent query of April 2, 1997.

The Office of Science and Technology Policy reviewed its records concerning the ‘Nevada Incident’. OSTP has no direct knowledge of what occurred at Nevada and no records, except for the information I received from the Air Force. I look forward to receiving the GAO report.

Sincerely, Joseph V. Ververk, Director

At Cross Fork, Nevada, I found that hooker.

And through her I found a guy called Tad Jones.

Tad Jones claimed to have been a minor worker, in the early 1970s, on a covert government nuclear-rocket program. This program continued after the shut-down of the public-domain NERVA program, following Nixon’s (supposed) decision not to go to Mars.

Jones, and other workers, were bribed and threatened to keep them quiet about their work on the program. Jones lost his job in 1972, I gather for personal reasons. Now, more than two decades later, radiation injuries were killing him.

The thing of it is, Tad Jones told me he once met a man who told
him
he had been to Mars.

He was called Elliott Becker, and at the time he was an Air Force colonel, and he made the mistake of getting too drunk one night.

Under false pretences, which I won’t go into here, I got to meet Elliott Becker himself. He is now a senior Air Force officer. He is aged around 60, and he suffers from premature-ageing symptoms: atrophied muscles, osteoporosis.

He threw me out fast. But not so fast I didn’t manage to notice some oddities. For instance at one point Becker let go of a glass in mid-air and looked startled when it fell.

This sort of thing happened to the Skylab astronauts and Mir cosmonauts, conditioned to long periods in zero G. Furthermore his illnesses are consistent with the proposal that Becker endured a long-duration spaceflight in the early 1980s.

But he was not on any spaceflight made public.

So where the hell did he go?

I only met Tad Jones the once.

I wasn’t so surprised. Ageing, poor, stricken by pain, Jones was becoming less discreet. I don’t know how he died. His old radiation injuries must have baffled the coroners.

Of course he could have been lying through his teeth about the whole thing. But if so, where did he get his injuries?

US Department of Justice, Federal Bureau of Investigation,

Washington DC 20535

April 22, 1997.

Mr John E Proctor, Director-in-Charge, National Security Issues, General Accounting Office.

Dear Mr Proctor:

This is in response to a letter dated April 2, 1997, from Simon J Holusha, Director, Administration of Justice Issues, General Accounting Office, to Kathryn G Keyworth, Inspector in Charge, Office of Public and Congressional Affairs, FBI, regarding government records concerning the large-scale explosion near Cross Fork, Nevada in October 1983 (Code 91183).

A search of FBI indices has determined that all FBI data concerning the incident has been processed under the provisions of the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) and is available for review in our FOIA Reading Room. If your staff wishes to review the material, please call Margaret Feeley, a member of my staff, at least 48 hours in advance of the desired appointment.

Sincerely yours,

Eric G. Dower, Supervisory Special Agent, Office of Public and Congressional affairs

The truth about Mars, at least, is now obvious.

The space probes did not observe any evidence of an inhabited Mars because it was deliberately concealed. The Mariner 9 dust storm was no coincidence! – it was thrown up to conceal hasty efforts
by the planet’s inhabitants
to fake a Moonlike landscape. And the surface was sterilized by neutron bombs before the Vikings could land, and the Mars Observer was shot out of the sky.

We didn’t go back to Mars for twenty years. And by the time we got there, with Pathfinder and the rest, there was nothing to see. Of course not. The Martians had completed their mock-up.

And nobody told us about all this.

We worship secrecy in this country.

Get this: last year the US government produced 6,300,000 ‘classified’ documents. The least restricted bear the stamp FOUO, ‘For Official Use Only’. The next category – the first technically classified – are ‘Confidential’. After that comes ‘Secret’, and some of them are ‘NATO Secret’, meaning they can be shared with NATO nations. Then comes ‘Top Secret’ and ‘NATO Top Secret’.

Above ‘Top Secret’ there is ‘SCI’ – ‘Sensitive Compartmented Information’, open to still fewer individuals. And there is some information that you can only see if you are on a BIGOT list – if you have your own specific code word.

And then there are qualifies like ‘NOFORN’ – no foreigners to see – and ‘NOCONTRACT’ – no contractors, ‘WNINTEL’ – ‘Warning Notice – Intelligence Sources or Methods Involved’, ‘ORCON’ – ‘Originator Controls Further Dissemination’.

What’s the cost of all this secrecy? When does secrecy increase military strength, and when does it weaken security?

We should be told.

… Or is that classified too?

The space-probe evidence, naturally, was covered up. I should be used by now to our natural disposition for secrecy. But over an issue as immense as this, it utterly dismays me.

That’s why I fight on.

(Teletype uncovered during review of FOIA material:)

FBI DALLAS
10–20–1983 4–28
PM

DIRECTOR AND SAC, CINCINNATI URGENT

NEVADA EXPLOSION, INFORMATION CONCERNING
(blanked)
TELEPHONICALLY ADVISED THIS OFFICE THAT
(blanked)
SATELLITE OBSERVED DEBRIS AND DESTRUCTION AT
(blanked)
TELEPHONIC CONVERSATION BETWEEN THIS OFFICE AND
(blanked)
FAILED TO BEAR OUT BELIEF PHOTOGRAPHS AND NEGATIVES BEING TRANSPORTED TO THIS OFFICE BY SPECIAL PLANE FOR EXAMINATION PROVIDED BY THIS OFFICE BECAUSE OF NATIONAL INTEREST IN THE CASE AND FACT THAT NATIONAL BROADCASTING COMPANY ASSOCIATED PRESS AND OTHERS ATTEMPTING TO BREAK STORY OF EXPLOSION AND/OR AIRCRAFT CRASH TODAY NO FURTHER INVESTIGATION BEING CONDUCTED

END.

Here’s the story, as best I can reconstruct it.

In 1971 – armed with space-probe information about a secretive, advanced and possibly hostile civilization on Mars – President Nixon ordered preparations to begin for covert missions to Mars, manned and otherwise. These were to include the possibility of launching a pre-emptive nuclear attack against the planet. The project was under the command of the USAF, and would use Apollo moon-rocket technology with nuclear-rocket stages.

(And
that,
sir author, is the truth about Nixon’s decision on going to Mars after Apollo. He didn’t decide we wouldn’t go. He decided we
would
– but the program would be run by the USAF, not NASA, and it would be run in secret. Even the publicly declared Apollo follow-on program, the Space Shuttle, had a military flavour and had a role in the defense of Earth against the Martians, which I’ve yet to determine.)

Elliott Becker trained as an astronaut in the 1960s. In 1971 his death was faked in a T-38 airplane accident, and he was assigned to the secret man-to-Mars program.

But Nixon fell, and the project was abandoned, the Nevada launch complex and the space hardware mothballed. Elliott was moved into senior Air Force positions, with a central responsibility for maintaining the integrity of a Mars program cover-up.