The Welsh Roswell: Did A UFO Crash In North Wales In 1974? - Richard's Room 101

What has become known in UFO circles as the “Welsh Roswell” or Berwyn Mountain incident splits the UFO research community into two distinct camps, those who believe that an alien spacecraft crashed on the Mountain range and those who believe the seemingly out-of-this-world events can be explained by a combination of natural phenomena and the popularity of shows such as the X-Files which feed the public’s need to believe in the unexplained. What is not in any doubt is that something happened on the Berwyn Mountain, North Wales on the night of January 20, 1974. The events on the mountain range were witnessed by the whole community. Police Constable Gwilym Owen stated, “there was a great roar and a bang. The Sky lit up over the mountains. The colour was yellowish but other people in the valley described seeing blue light.” 

   

Annie Williams who lives in the nearby town of Llandrillo told investigators about what she witnessed that January night. “I saw this bright light hanging in the sky,” she said. 

   

“It had a long fiery tale which seemed to be motionless for several minuets, going dim and then very brilliant, like a dormant fire which keeps coming to life. It would have been like an electric light bulb in shape, except that it seemed to have rough edges. Then fell somewhere behind my bungalow, and the earth shook.”

 

   

Other witnesses also reported the ground shaking as if something had crashed into the side of the mountain. David Hughes of the local village post office at Ysbyty Ifan reported that “The whole house shook violently and suddenly. It began quite suddenly, lasted for a few seconds, then stopped just as suddenly.” 

    

Hundreds of locals fearing a plane had crashed on the mountain phoned the emergency services, and within an hour police were searching the mountain. Five days after these mysterious events, on January 25, 1974, it was reported in the British press that an RAF mountain rescue team had also been dispatched to the area, but allegedly found nothing. One member of the public who heard an explosion and was convinced something had crashed into the mountain was district nurse Pat Evans. Thinking that a plane had crashed after contacting Colwyn Bay police she made her way up the mountain to offer assistance to the survivors while they waited for the emergency services to arrive. Instead of finding a crashed plane, however, she saw a bright ball of red light on the mountainside.

   

“There were no flames shooting or anything like that. It was very uniform; round in shape … it was a flat round”. As she watched, she observed the light change in colour from red to yellow and then white. Smaller “fairy lights” could be seen nearby. Too far away to reach on foot, the nurse turned back to head home, puzzled by what she had seen. 

    

 After the initial frenzy of media interest, the story gradually died down and was almost forgotten about, until the mid-Nineties when the Roswell UFO crash was approaching its 50th anniversary and the alien autopsy hoax was generating new interest in an old topic.

     

Alien bodies and Wreckage 

In 1996 retired police sergeant Tony Dodd published in UFO Magazine an account of a man who claimed he was in the British Army at the time of the Berwyn Mountain crash. According to this anonymous whistleblower in January 1974 his unit “received orders to proceed with speed towards North Wales.” After arriving at Llangollen, North Wales on the evening of January 20, Dodd’s source noticed a great deal of “ground and air” activity in the area. “We, that is myself and four others, were ordered to go to Llandderfel and were under strict orders not to stop for any civilians.” 

    

Upon arriving in the small Welsh village his team was then ordered to load two large oblong boxes into their vehicles and to take them to the Chemical and Biological Defence Establishment at Porton Down in Wiltshire, England. Warned not to look inside, some hours later they arrived at Porton Down and delivered the mysterious cargo. 

      

It is then alleged that the staff at Porton Down opened the boxes still within sight of Dodd’s informant and others. Inside we are told were the remains of two alien beings “five to six feet tall” which had been put inside “decontamination suits.” The Porton Down staff removed the suits, revealing creatures to be “so thin they looked almost skeletal with a covering skin.”

     

The Army source also told Dodd, “Although I did not see a craft at the scene of the recovery, I was informed that a large craft had crashed and was recovered by other military units.” Even more bizarre was this former Army man’s claims that he was told by others in his unit that they had also delivered extraterrestrial beings to Porton Down, but that these creatures were “still alive.” 

    

While the claims of Dodd’s British Army source have never been proven to have really occurred, it is interesting at least that someone that nobody disputes investigated the UFO phenomenon for the British Government, Nick Pope, wrote a science fiction novel, Operation Thunder Child, in which alien creatures are taken for study at Porton Down. “In any contact with an extraterrestrial civilisation the key strategic objective would be to open lines of communication and facilitate peaceful contact. Secondary objectives would include information exchange, with a particular emphasis on science and technology,” Nick Pope told me in an interview for my Sci-Fi Worlds column in 2009.

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Could There Be An Alien Base Inside The Bermuda Triangle? - Richard's Room 101

The Bermuda Triangle, sometimes known as the “Devil’s Triangle”, is a triangular area of the north-western Atlantic Ocean bounded by Bermuda, Puerto Rico, and a point near Melbourne, Florida, where famously numerous ships and aircraft have mysteriously disappeared throughout the ages. Since records began in 1851, it is estimated that an amazing 8,127 people have been lost in the Bermuda Triangle. However, perhaps the most intriguing and famous disappearance of all, occurred just after WWII on December 5, 1945, when an entire squadron of aircraft vanished without a trace and no clue as to what happened to them. Of course, this was the infamous Flight 19, which, more than any other case, brought the triangle into popular consciousness, sparking all kinds of explanations. The strangest and most interesting is the theory that they were abducted by aliens who have a base somewhere in the triangle, interesting because the alien/UFO theory was popularised by Stephen Spielberg in his 1977 film Close Encounters of the Third Kind.

    

While there could be a rational explanation for the disappearance of Flight 19, it is worth remembering that Lt. Charles Taylor was exonerated in 1947 by the Board for Correction of Naval Records, at the request of his mother, in regard to “responsibility for loss of lives and naval aircraft” and that the conclusion of the US Navy’s report was changed to “cause unknown”. 

  

The earliest suggestion that Flight 19 was anything other than just an accident, that this author has seen, came in the form of a “Letter to the editor” from one “Edward R. Walker of Colorado” in the August 1946 issue of Amazing Stories magazine. The letter shows that almost immediately after the disappearance of Flight 19, people were already beginning to speculate that the incident was more than just the result of pilot error due to poor weather. In his letter Walker writes:

   

“A couple months ago I read another AP dispatch about SIX NAVY PLANES disappearing ALL AT ONE TIME off the coast of Florida. Hundreds of hours were spent searching for a trace of them but none was found. Wish I had cut this out for you also, but you can verify that yourself. This is one of the strangest happenings that I have ever heard of in my lifetime. Even if they had flown over a carpet on anti-aircraft fire one or two would have gotten through. As I remember the article it wasn’t even storming.”

   

In his response to Walker’s letter the editor, Ray Palmer, who went on to become the editor of Fate magazine, not only agreed that something unexplained had happened to Flight 19 but also all but accused the US Navy of a cover-up:

   

 “About those Navy planes, now you’ve got something! As we remember it, search planes also failed to come back. Not a sign, not a message, just instant disappearance. And no fuss about it since, just official forgetfulness. Your EDITOR would like to KNOW what happened, because it wasn’t anything ordinary.”

   

In his book Berlitz also considered more esoteric and paranormal possibilities to explain the disappearances inside the triangle, including chapters on space and time warps, energy devices left behind from an advanced lost civilization, as well as extraterrestrials and even cryptoterrestrials: 

   

“Lacking a logical and readily acceptable explanation, independent researchers concerned with the disappearances in the Bermuda Triangle have gone even further afield — some to explanations based on exceptions to natural law, others to suggestions of interdimensional changeover through a passageway equivalent to a “hole in the sky” (which aircraft can enter but not leave), others believe the disappearances are engineered by entities from inner or outer space, while still others offer theories offer a theory or combinations of theories that the phenomenon may be essentially caused by still functioning man-made power complexes belonging to a science considerably older than and very different to ours.” 

   

 According to most triangle researchers, Christopher Columbus was probably the first person to document allegedly strange phenomena in the area. On October 11, 1492, the eve of discovering the New World, Columbus reports that he and his crew observed a mysterious light moving strangely up and down in the evening sky, appearing and quickly disappearing several times that night. Columbus wrote in his log:

   

“The land was first seen by a sailor called Rodrigo de Triana, although the Admiral at ten o’clock that evening standing on the quarter-deck saw a light, but so small a body that he could not affirm it to be land; calling to Pero Gutierrez, groom of the King’s wardrobe, he told him he saw a light, and bid him look that way, which he did and saw it; he did the same to Rodrigo Sanchez of Segovia, whom the King and Queen had sent with the squadron as comptroller, but he was unable to see it from his situation. The Admiral again perceived it once or twice, appearing like the light of a wax candle moving up and down, which some thought an indication of land. But the Admiral held it for certain that land was near…”

 

   

Whatever Columbus and his crew saw that historic night is probably impossible to know for sure now. In that limited sense, at least, the odd light is a true UFO in that it will probably always be unidentified. Perhaps more interesting, though, are the bizarre compass readings Columbus also recorded in the triangle.

   

Today, the triangle is supposedly one of only two places in the world, the other being the Dragon’s Sea in the Pacific, in which there is an unusual level of magnetic interference that can adversely affect compass readings. Whether paranormal or not, this magnetic interference is definitely interesting. Many have speculated that UFOs may be using some form of electromagnetic propulsion. Perhaps there could be a link of some kind between the magnetic interference, UFO sightings, and the mysterious disappearances in the triangle? 

   

Doctor Who fans will remember “The Sea Devils” a classic 1972 Jon Pertwee story written by Malcolm Hulke, the plot of which is very reminiscent of the triangle mystery. The story involves the Third Doctor and his companion Joe Grant investigating the mysterious disappearance of ships off the English South Coast and the discovery that an ancient race of amphibious reptiles, operating from a deep underwater base is responsible. 

   

Science fiction is filled with interesting storylines that parallel mysteries like the Bermuda Triangle, but is it possible that there really could be another civilization, of any kind, sharing the planet with us, living beneath the waves in seclusion? 

  

Amazingly, it is true that we actually know more about the surface of the Moon than we do about the bottom of our own oceans. In theory, at least, it is possible that anything could be down there hidden beneath the depths. What's more, making things more interesting, about half of all UFO sightings are said to take place near large bodies of water. 

   

In Invisible Residents: The Reality of Underwater UFOs (1970), renowned zoologist, Ivan T. Sanderson hypothesized that an advanced aquatic non-human civilization may have evolved right here on the Earth. This parallel, aquatic civilization could be twice as old as mankind, Sanderson proposes, and may well have developed space flight long before us. Sanderson even goes as far as suggesting that such a civilization could be behind many of the mysterious disappearances in the triangle as well as UFO sightings. Interestingly, more recently Sanderson’s ideas have been echoed somewhat in Mac Tonnies’ last book before his untimely passing in 2009 The Cryptoterrestrials. The year before his death, I had the privilege of interviewing Tonnies about his cryptoterrestrial hypothesis that we are sharing this world with another indigenous intelligent species: 

   

“I’m fascinated by accounts of apparent UFO occupants and have been rethinking who or what we might be dealing with. I’m of the opinion that the extraterrestrial interpretation is incomplete. Could we be interacting with indigenous humanoids? That’s the question I’m posing in the book I’m writing. Time will tell if it.” 

  

While the ETH or extraterrestrial hypothesis has become synonymous with the UFO phenomenon in popular culture, many serious UFO researchers give the cryptoterrestrial hypothesis equal kudos. In 2009 in an interview for my Sci-Fi Worlds blog, I asked former MoD UFO investigator Nick Pope about Doctor Who’s Sea Devils and what he thought about the possibility that we humans are sharing the planet with another intelligent Earth species: “Well, I hope these monsters are brought back at some stage! I reference the cryptoterrestrial hypothesis a fair bit in my first sci-fi novel, Operation Thunder Child. There are plenty of USO (Unidentified Submerged Object) reports and many UFO sightings where an object is seen over water, so who knows? I’m not hugely attracted to the cryptoterrestrial hypothesis, but I certainly can’t rule it out. And as the saying goes, we arguably know less about the deep ocean than we do about the Moon or Mars.” 

   

Richard Freeman, who is a researcher for the Centre for Fortean Zoology (CFZ), the only full-time scientific organisation dedicated to the study of unknown species of animals, went also agreed that extraterrestrial hypothesis needed to be considered when I interviewed him in 2009: “I have never bought the extraterrestrial hypothesis. The so-called ‘aliens’ are generally too humanoid looking to have evolved on another biosphere. If ‘alien’ encounters are objective events, and that’s a big if, I think the creatures are coming through time or dimensions rather than from outer space. There seems to be a strange analogue with fairy lore as well.” 

   

Another possibility, of course, could be that the planet has somehow been covertly colonised by an extraterrestrial civilization from another solar system. In Unearthly Disclosure (2000), best-selling author Timothy Good disclosed information given to him by “a senior reporter in Washington, DC,” who, in turn, received it from “a senior US Air Force officer”, about the existence of extraterrestrial bases on the Earth. Good writes: “According to the officer, aliens have been coming to Earth for a very long time. Following the Second World War, they began to establish permanent bases here, in Australia, the Caribbean, the Pacific Ocean, the Soviet Union and in the United States.” 

   

If extraterrestrials are really coming to Earth from another solar system, it would probably make sense that they would establish such bases to save them continue making the long voyage back and forth home. Also, the reference to the Caribbean is intriguing because that is where part of the Bermuda Triangle is located. 

   

However, whether from this world or another, where better to build an impenetrable, covert base than beneath the oceans of the world. The Bermuda Triangle, in particular, might also make a good location for such a base because of the volcanic activity there, which could be used to generate geothermal electricity as a power source.

  

The biggest problem with the alien base theory, of course, is like the wreckage of the missing planes and ships, why hasn’t it been found by the many detailed searches inside the triangle? Perhaps instead of a base, the Bermuda Triangle is the location of a “wormhole” to another world. 

   

In his book, another possibility Berlitz considered was that there could be a “vortex” or “portal” somewhere in the triangle which aliens from another planet or dimension are using as a bridge or gateway to Earth. An outrageous theory back in 1974 when The Bermuda Triangle was first published. 

   

Today, however, serious scientists regularly discuss the possibility of other dimensions and “wormholes” in books and on scientific documentaries for TV. In the bestselling book Hyperspace Michio Kaku refers to Flight 19 and the Bermuda Triangle: 

   

“Ever since Flight 19, a group of U.S. military torpedo bombers, vanished in the Caribbean 30 years ago, mystery writers too have used higher dimensions as a convenient solution to the puzzle of the Bermuda Triangle, or Devil’s Triangle. Some have conjectured that airplanes and ships disappearing in the Bermuda Triangle actually entered some sort of passageway to another world.” 

  

The internationally acclaimed physicist also explains in his book how such a “passageway” could work. Comparing space travellers to flatworms living on an apple, Kaku writes: 

   

“It’s obvious to these worms that their world, which they call Appleworld, is flat and two dimensional, like themselves. One worm, however, named Columbus, is obsessed by the notion that Appleworld is somehow finite and curved in something he calls the third demission. He even invents two new words, up and down, to describe motion in this invisible third dimension … By burrowing into the apple, he can carve a tunnel, creating a convenient shortcut to distant lands. These tunnels, which considerably reduce the time and discomfort of a long journey, he calls wormholes. They demonstrate that the shortest path between two points is not necessary a straight line, as he’s been taught, but a wormhole.” 

   

Perhaps the disappearance of Flight 19 and other planes and ships inside the Bermuda Triangle can be explained away by more mundane explanations, such as intense weather conditions and human error, but until we more fully explore the bottom of the world’s oceans we have no way of knowing for sure what could be down there.

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The Betty Hill Star Map - Richard's Room 101

On the night of 19/20 September 1961, on their way home to Portsmouth, New Hampshire from a short break in Canada, something happened to Betty and Barney Hill that began a new controversy in UFO research that continues even today. While modern polls show that as many as four million Americans could believe they might have been abducted by aliens, back in 1966 when the first book detailing the Hill case The Interrupted Journey was first published, the New England couple’s claims of alien contact were almost unheard of. There had been the famous Contactees of the 1950s, men and women who claimed they had been visited by the human-looking occupants of flying saucers with warnings about nuclear war and environmental concerns. But the experiences of the Hills were completely different, reporting beings that were obviously not human, and had no such messages.

   

Instead under hypothesis, the Hills told of how they were kidnapped and experimented on by short humanoid beings aboard a “cigar-shaped” craft that had pursued the couple that September night as they traveled home on Route 3 between Lancaster and Concord. The alien abduction phenomenon was born. 

    

There are two major explanations often given to explain the Hills’ recollections under hypnosis. The first offered by some psychiatrists is that the Hills’ abduction experience was a hallucination brought on by the stress of being an interracial couple during the end of the segregation era in the United States. But this explanation was discounted by Betty Hill, who said the couple’s interracial marriage caused no significant problems with their friends or family. This was echoed by Dr. Simon, who also thought that the Hills’ interracial marriage didn’t influence the couple’s abduction account in any way. 

    

In 1990 Martin Kottmeyer suggested in his article “Entirely Unpredisposed: The Cultural Background of UFO Abduction Reports “ that Barney’s account of his abduction experience under hypnosis might have been influenced by an episode of the popular science fiction anthology series The Outer Limits, entitled “The Bellero Shield”, which was broadcast twelve days before Barney’s first hypnotic session. This episode featured an alien being with large wraparound eyes reminiscent of the eyes of the alien beings described by Barney under hypnosis. In his article, Kottmeyer wrote: 

   

 “Wraparound eyes are an extreme rarity in science fiction films. I know of only one instance. They appeared on the alien of an episode of an old TV series The Outer Limits entitled “The Bellero Shield”. A person familiar with Barney’s sketch in “The Interrupted Journey” and the sketch done in collaboration with the artist David Baker will find a “frisson” of “déjà vu” creeping up his spine when seeing this episode. The resemblance is much abetted by an absence of ears, hair, and nose on both aliens. Could it be by chance? Consider this: Barney first described and drew the wraparound eyes during the hypnosis session dated 22 February 1964. “The Bellero Shield” was first broadcast on 10 February 1964. Only twelve days separate the two instances. If the identification is admitted, the commonness of wraparound eyes in the abduction literature falls to cultural forces.” (Entirely Unpredisposed: The Cultural Background of UFO Abduction Reports, Martin S. Kottmeyer)

     

When asked about The Outer Limits TV series Betty claimed to have “never heard of it”. Kottmeyer also pointed out that the medical tests the Hills described were reminiscent of scenes in the 1953 science fiction film, Invaders from Mars. 

   

Clearly, there are superficial similarities between the ‘Bellero alien’ from The Outer Limits episode and the oval-headed beings described by Barney and Betty, but there are significant differences between the two also. The Hill aliens were dressed in black, shiny uniforms and were “somehow not human”. The ‘Bellero alien’ in contrast was dressed in all white, and while humanoid, was very clearly non-human. 

   

While it is possible that some of what the Hills ‘remembered’ under hypnosis could have been influenced by the science fiction films and TV shows of the 1950s and 60s, the best evidence that Betty and Barney Hill didn’t make up or imagine everything they said under hypnosis, is the star map drawn by Betty Hill. 

    

In 1968, Marjorie Fish of Oak Harbor, Ohio read The Interrupted Journey. Fish was an elementary school teacher and amateur astronomer. Intrigued by the “star map”, Fish wondered if it might be “possible to determine which star system the space travelers came from. Assuming that one of the fifteen stars on the map must represent the Earth’s Sun; Fish constructed a three-dimensional model of nearby Sun-like stars using thread and beads, basing stellar distances on those published in the 1969 Gliese Star Catalogue. Studying thousands of vantage points the only one that seemed to match the Hill map was from the viewpoint of the double star system of Zeta Reticuli. 

      

This was significant because the distance information needed to match three stars, forming the distinctive triangle Hill said she remembered, was not generally available until the 1969 Gliese Catalogue came out. Five years after Betty Hill drew the star map. 

     

Fish sent her analysis to Webb and agreeing with her conclusions, Webb sent the map to Terence Dickinson, editor of the popular magazine Astronomy. Dickinson did not endorse Fish and Webb’s conclusions, but for the first time in the journal’s history, Astronomy invited comments and debate on a UFO report, starting with an opening article in the December 1974 issue. For about a year afterward, the opinions page of Astronomy carried arguments for and against Fish’s star map. Notable was an argument made by Carl Sagan and Steven Soter, arguing that the seeming “star map” was little more than a random alignment of chance points. In contrast, those more favorable to the map, such as Dr. David Saunders, a statistician who had been on the Condon UFO study, argued that the unusual alignment of key Sun-like stars in a plane centered around Zeta Reticuli (first described by Fish) was statistically improbable to have happened by chance from a random group of stars in our immediate neighborhood. 

   

Skeptic Robert Sheaffer, in an accompanying article, said that a map devised by Charles W. Atterberg, about the same time as Fish, was an even better match to Hill’s map and made more sense. The base stars, Epsilon Indi and Epsilon Eridani, plus the others were also closer to the sun than the Hill map. Fish counter-argued that the base stars in the Atterberg map were considered much less likely to harbor life than Zeta Reticuli and the map lacked a consistent grouping of sun-like stars along the lined routes. 

    

Another interpretation of the star map was offered in 1993 by two German crop circle enthusiasts, Joachim Koch and Hans-Jürgen Kyborg, who suggested that the map depicted planets in the solar system, not nearby stars. The objects in the map, they said, closely match the positions of the sun, the six inner planets, and several asteroids around 1960. This would parallel other abduction accounts where witnesses claim to be shown such depictions, though admittedly often elaborate and unmistakably our own solar system.

   

Barney Hill died in 1969 and Betty in 2004 and both stuck to their abduction account until the time of their deaths. While it is possible elements of their story were influenced by the Cold War science fiction films of the 1950s and 60s; the star map, if Fish’s interpretation is correct, couldn’t have been based on prior knowledge.

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Another Crashed UFO in New Mexico? - Richard's Room 101

So entrenched has the 1947 Roswell crash become in the minds of many UFO researchers, that it is often overlooked that the Roswell incident was not actually the first crashed saucer story to enter the public consciousness. That distinction belongs to another alleged UFO incident in the New Mexico desert. This time near Aztec, a small town in the upper western portion of the state, hundreds of miles away from the Roswell crash debris field found by Mac Brazel’s on the Foster Ranch in the summer of 1947. 

  

In his 1950 best-selling book Behind The Flying Saucers gossip columnist Frank Scully alleged that a flying disk had been found on a ranch 12 miles from Aztec, New Mexico, in 1948, the year after the alleged Roswell crash. In Paul Kimball’s 2003 documentary Aztec 1948 UFO Crash UFO researcher Nick Redfern summed up the alleged events at Aztec: “The jest of the Aztec tale is that in 1948 a flying saucer complete with anywhere between 14 to 18 bodies crashed in Aztec, New Mexico and was recovered in high secrecy by the US government.”

   

According to Scully, he was told about the Aztec crash by a man he called “Dr. Gee”, who was supposedly a specialist in magnetic anomalies working for the US government at Los Alamos National Laboratory, where famously the Manhattan Project to develop the Atomic bomb had been centred. Dr. Glee explained to Scully that the alien vehicle used some kind of magnetic propulsion system to levitate and that this was the reason he was brought in by the US government.

  

In his book and talks, Scully claimed that Dr. Gee had been flown out by helicopter to the New Mexico desert in April 1948 to look at the wreckage of a flying saucer that had crashed there. The Doctor also allegedly told Scully that the deceased bodies of the spaceship’s alien crew, who were described as small humanoid beings just over three feet tall, were also found at the crash site. The bodies of these creatures were said to be hairless, with soft downy skin, and two of the crew may have still been alive for a short time after the impact of the crash. Later accounts of the Roswell incident would also involve the recovery of similarly described deceased alien beings. In their 1994 book The Truth about the UFO Crash at Roswell authors, Kevin D. Randle and Donald Schmitt wrote: “Stringfield, from his sources, said that he was able to draw a number of conclusions. According to Stringfield, the beings are humanoid, three and a half to four and a half feet tall … There was no hair on the head … In fact, there isn’t much hair on the bodies.” 

  

As well as the biology of the aliens found at the two crash sites, there are also similarities between the Roswell debris found by Mac Brazel a year earlier and the lightweight but durable metal the Aztec saucer was said to be constructed from. In Behind the Flying Saucers Scully wrote: “It looked like aluminium, but wasn’t of a metal known to this earth.” 

  

Another similarity to Roswell are the pictorial symbols similar to Egyptian hieroglyphics alleged to be on the inside of the Aztec craft. The son of Major Jessie Marcel, who was one of the men sent by Colonel Blanchard to investigate the debris found by Brazel on the Foster Ranch, also reported seeing strange purple writing that resembled hieroglyphics on pieces of the Roswell debris. In his book The Roswell Legacy published in 2007 for the 60th anniversary of the Roswell crash, Jesse Marcel Jr. described what he remembered being shown by his father back in July 1947. 

  

“As I looked at the piece, with the light reflecting on the inner surface, I could see what looked like writing. At first I thought of Egyptian hieroglyphics, but there were no animal outlines or figures. They weren’t mathematical figures either; they were more like geometric symbols-squares, circles, triangles, pyramids, and the like. Approximately one-fourth of an inch tall, they were imprinted on the inner surface of the beam, and only on one side. They were not embossed into the I-beam but seemed more like part of its surface.” 

  

The parallels between the alleged alien creatures and materials described by Aztec and Roswell witnesses are intriguing. In The Roswell Incident, published in 1980, the authors Charles Berlitz and William Moore even speculated that the Aztec crash story was a garbled version of the Roswell crash. 

  

There are some big problems with the credibility of the Aztec crash story, however. Scully’s book was debunked in two articles in True magazine published in 1952 and 1956. Written by San Francisco Chronicle reporter J. P. Cahn, the two articles revealed that Dr. Gee, who he named as Leo GeBauer, and Scully’s other main source Silas Newton, were in fact two slick oil conmen who had hoaxed Scully. 

  

The Aztec incident has been revived somewhat in recent years by a book by Scott Ramsey, a UFO researcher and successful businessman from North Carolina. One anomaly highlighted by Ramsey that should give sceptics pause for thought is a mystery road off of Hart Canyon which leads to what he believes was the crash site, a deforested area surrounded by trees with broken branches as if something had flattened the area. The mysterious dirt road doesn’t appear on any road maps of the area until around 2003, and it is unknown where the road came from or who made it. Ramsey suggests that the road was made by military personnel attempting to extricate the Aztec saucer after it was forced to make an emergency landing at Hart Canyon. This might seem like wild speculation, however, there is some physical proof at the alleged crash site that something happened there in 1948. 

  

Adding to the mystery is a concrete slab sticking up out of the ground at the alleged crash site. Like the road, there are no records or reasons why it should be there in the middle of nowhere. Ramsey believes the slab was made by the military to support one of the legs of a crane used to carry out the crashed saucer. Laboratory tests have also shown that the concrete slab dates to around 1948, the year of the alleged saucer crash.

  

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The Mummy Returns: Illuminati Cloning? - Richard's Room 101

Do the global elite, sometimes called the Illuminati, plan on using cloning and other emerging technologies to give themselves immortality?

   

It is commonly believed inside conspiracy circles that the Illuminati secret society network that is allegedly working towards establishing a world government (New World Order) is thousands of years old, with its origins in Ancient Egypt and Babylon. The big problem with this belief often pointed out by sceptics is that it doesn’t make much sense that anyone would spend their entire life working towards something they would never see completed to benefit from.

   

But what if they knew that they could be brought back to life someday?

 

In the second Star Trek spin-off series Deep Space Nine, a species called the Vorta are given eternal life, of a sort, by their masters the Changelings in return for administrating a vast interspecies galactic empire called The Dominion. Whenever a Vorta dies, he or she is instantly resurrected via cloning. In the dark sci-fi series, we watch one Vorta called Weyoun die several times, only to be brought back, sometimes in the same episode.

  

Paralleling Gene Roddenberry’s Star Trek universe, since 1997, when a team of British scientists announced that they had successfully cloned Dolly the sheep, there have been many rumours that humans have also been cloned. Perhaps the most bizarre of these claims is that President Obama could be a clone and not just any clone, but the resurrected ancient Egyptian Pharaoh Akhenaten, who the President does bear a striking resemblance to.

   

The father of the Egyptian Pharaoh Tutankhamun, Akhenaten had a far greater impact on world history than his more famous son. The “Heretic Pharaoh” abandoned the traditional Egyptian gods in favour of worshipping a single deity, Aten, who was associated with the sun. Because of this, some historians credit Akhenaten as being the creator of the world’s first monotheistic religion. This might explain why the Illuminati would choose Akhenaten above other more famous Egyptian royalty to be brought back to life. It has even been speculated that the sun god religion started by the Pharaoh could be the secret religion of the Illuminati practiced today. For more information about this read Freeman Fly’s “Obama clone of an Egyptian Pharaoh” page on Freemantv.com. 

  

Whether or not “Atenism” was really the first religion to worship one god, there is something we can be sure of. Like all Ancient Egyptians, Akhenaten would have had no doubt about living again after his death: something which is made theoretically possible by the mummification process which preserved this ancient Egyptian Pharaoh’s DNA for cloning. 

  

While there is a resemblance between Obama and the Ancient Egyptian King, Obama does not have the elongated features that Akhenaten is depicted as having. This could be because these features are environmental rather than genetic in nature, but there is no consensus on why the Pharaoh is shown with such unusual-looking features. 

  

With controversy still surrounding the US President’s birth certificate, perhaps it isn’t surprising that conspiracy theories about Obama’s ‘real’ origins should pop up, but this isn’t the only clone conspiracy theory linked to the 44th occupant of the White House. 

  

In 2009 Fox News reported that an Indonesian magazine photographer, Ilham Anas, was collecting pay cheques appearing in advertising because of his strong resemblance to the President. 

   

The idea of a world leader being cloned strongly echoes the 1978 film The Boys from Brazil, in which Adolf Hitler is brought back to life as a teenager living in the 1970s. In this story, it is Joseph Mengele, the infamous Nazi Doctor notorious for his experiments on twins during WWII, who clones the Nazi Fuhrer in the sick hope of reviving the Third Reich.

  

The obvious problem with using cloning as a means of bringing the dead back to life is also explored in the film. A copy no matter how perfect is still just a copy. The boys Mengele creates may have the same DNA as Hitler, but without the life experiences of the Nazi Fuhrer, they are still completely different individuals. 

   

One answer to this problem would be to download a person’s consciousness into a computer until a new body is ready. This concept is used in the science fiction series Lexx, where one of the chief antagonists is a mad scientist called Mantrid who has transferred his “life essence” into a computer in order to survive the death of his body. 

  

Other science fiction series have also used this idea as a plot device. In the reimagined series of Battlestar Galactica, a race of biological robots identical to humans called Cylons use “resurrection ships” to download into a new body aboard one of these space vessels upon death.

   

Like human cloning “consciousness downloading” is another concept that began in science fiction, but could soon be a reality. In July 2012 the mainstream media reported that a Russian entrepreneur had contacted a list of billionaires offering them eternal life in return for funding a hi-tech research project called “Avatar”. The goal of which was “transferring one’s individual consciousness to an artificial carrier and achieving cybernetic immortality” by the year 2045.

  

With the announcement on 9 March (2013) that the first genetically engineered humans have already been born, it is clear science fact is rapidly catching up to science fiction. The idea that an American President could be a clone of an Ancient Egyptian Pharaoh may sound like a clever spin on The Mummy films, with technology replacing black magic. But it would appear that the Ancient Egyptians may have been right about mummification guaranteeing them eternal life after all.

READ RICHARD'S ROOM 101 COLUMN FOR BINNALL OF AMERICA

Doctor Who and Transhumanism - Richard's Room 101

Transhumanism is a movement that advocates advancing human evolution via artificial means, such as genetic engineering, cloning, and other emerging technologies. Proponents see certain aspects of the human condition such as old age and sickness as unnecessary and therefore undesirable. By merging with technology Transhumanists believe humans will be able to evolve into a new race of Transhumans free from these weaknesses. 

 

  

While it might sound like pure fantasy, since 1997 when a team of British scientists announced the cloning of Dolly the sheep, science fact has quickly been catching up to science fiction. On 9 March (2013), it was reported that the first genetically engineered humans have been born, sparking debate about the morality of science being used to guide human evolution: a subject first explored in Doctor Who in 1966 with the creation of the Cybermen. 

  

After Terry Nation withdrew his Daleks from Doctor Who, it was decided to introduce new star monsters to the series. But who or what could come close to replacing the Daleks? That was the difficult conundrum then script editor Gerry Davis posed to the unofficial scientific advisor to the series Kit Pedler as Doctor Who approached its fourth season. 

  

Reflecting on his own fears as a Medical Doctor of “dehumanising medicine” Pedler delivered in spades. Pedler imagined a race of human beings who had been forced by circumstances beyond their control to slowly replace most – if not all – of their vital organs and limbs with steel and plastic replacements. Ultimately even replacing large parts of their brains with computers and neurochemically programming out their emotions altogether. In effect, surgically erasing all traces of their humanity and transplanting it with cold technology and uncompromising logic. Pedler and Davis called these new nightmarish life forms Cybermen. 

 

In the 1974 Target Book adaptation of the first Cyber-story, The Tenth Planet, Gerry Davis described the fictional origins of the Cybermen: 

 

“Centuries ago by our Earth time, a race of men on the far distant planet Telos sought immortality. They perfected the art of cybernetics, the reproduction of machine functions in human beings. As bodies became old and diseased, they were replaced limb by limb, with plastic and steel. Finally, even the human circulation and nervous system were recreated, and brains replaced by computers. The first Cybermen were born.” 

 

Somewhat ironically, though, despite this apparent evolutionary leap forward Pedler reasoned that such beings would be driven solely by the most primitive of biological instincts … the will to survive whatever the cost. A frightening contradiction that made itself felt much more prevalently later on when Pedler and Davis decided to revisit the initial concept behind the Cybermen for the BBC series Doomwatch in the Seventies, oddly enough in an episode starring second Doctor, Patrick Troughton. Far from battling the Cybermen, though, on this occasion, Troughton does everything he can to become one of them! In the words of Troughton’s character: “I keep trying to tell them machines can’t catch diseases!” 

  

In the season two episode In The Dark a terminally ill man Alan McArthur (Patrick Troughton) desperately tries to prolong his life artificially by replacing his dying body piece by piece with experimental life support systems. Although the experiment is successful it has a terrible price. McArthur begins to think of himself as well as other human beings as nothing more than biological machines. Ultimately McArthur plans on cheating death forever by becoming a living brain attached to a dead machine. 

  

It is difficult to appreciate today but the spare-part surgery envisioned by Pedler was a rapidly emerging technology at the time. In 1960, Belding Scribner invented the Scribner shunt, a breakthrough kidney dialysis machine, and in December 1967 the first successful human heart transplant took place at Groote Schuur Hospital in Cape Town, South Africa. While, in hindsight, Pedler’s concerns about these developments might seem premature back in the Sixties and Seventies, are they still so in 2013? 

  

In July last year (2012), the mainstream media reported that a Russian entrepreneur had contacted a list of billionaires offering them eternal life in return for funding a hi-tech research project called “Avatar”. The goal of which was “transferring one’s individual consciousness to an artificial carrier and achieving cybernetic immortality” by the year 2045. 

  

Perhaps it is more likely, however, that instead of reinventing ourselves limb by limb as Pedler envisioned, the real danger is doing it gene by gene. Like heart transplants and dialysis machines such technology will no doubt save the lives of countless people but we must be cautious that in saving lives we do not begin to think of humans as mere biological machines. As Professor Quist points out in In The Dark human beings are separated from animals by two factors: knowledge of our own mortality and human emotion.

READ RICHARD'S ROOM 101 COLUMN FOR BINNALL OF AMERICA

Talk Radio Europe - Richard Thomas Para-News Book Interview

Is the Bermuda Triangle a good place for an alien base? 

  

Kenny Jones interviews me about my new book Para-News: UFOs, Ghosts, Conspiracy, Cryptids - and More.