In current day ufology, Roswell still reigns supreme as the saucer crash above all others. However,  a new challenger to the crash-retrieval throne entered the conversation a couple years back by way of Trinity: The Best Kept Secret, in which Dr. Jacques Vallee and Paola Harris contend that the first flying saucer crash (in the modern era of UFOs) wasn’t actually the iconic Roswell crack-up, but “Oh, contraire”—as Doc Vallee in his native tongue might say—an entirely different saucer that spun out of control and plummeted to Earth a full two years before Roswell was even a glint in Major Jesse Marcel’s eye. Vallee and Harris identify this new competitor to the crash-retrieval throne as “Trinity.”

In the history of the so-called UFO “crash-retrievals,” Trinity is yet another to add to the flying saucer hit parade along with King Roswell and a smattering of other supposed crashes that presumably had the technological know-how to travel several gazillion light years to Earth but somehow never learned to successfully steer their craft, let alone land them in one piece. As these saucer stories often go, the military would then swoop in, cordon off the area, scoop up the saucer debris and alien remains (that’s where the whole “crash-retrieval” bit comes from), then load the goods on transports and haul them off to Wright Patterson or some other military base in an effort to conceal the startling truth of…you guessed it…flying saucers from another planet in Hangar 18!

 Ever-present in the lore is the discovery of “exotic materials,” such as the “memory metal” retrieved from the Roswell crash, which you could pick up and crumple in your hand and when released it would spring back into its original shape just like that time Gumby got flattened by a steamroller. More recently, the term “meta-materials” has become a sort of a catch-all that the cool kids in ufology (or uapology) use to refer to this wondrous stuff of which UFO Disclosure wet dreams are made. As recounted in Trinity, just one month after the July 16, 1945 experimental bomb blast, the young heroes of our story—a couple rancher kids named Jose Padilla and Reme Baca—were out looking for a missing cow, and it was at that time that the youths witnessed, on August 16, the crash of an avocado shaped something that occurred in the “mesquite-infested hills only some 10 miles North of Trinity,” near San Antonio, New Mexico. Vallee and Harris bombastically refer to this purported saucer smash-up as “…the first UFO crash in modern history.” It was from the wreckage of this flying avocado that some praying mantis type looking entities hopped out and started bopping about in an otherworldly fashion as praying mantis looking entities from other planets are often wont to do. When promoting Trinity in October of 2021 on the Jimmy Church UFO radio show, Vallee stated that he didn’t know for sure if the creatures the kids had witnessed were actually extraterrestrials. To that end, Doc Jacques prefers to refer to these entities as “unknown intelligences— in other words, they could be some sort of  phantasmagoric phantoms that reside here on earth although most of the time we don’t even see them—or just as easily they could be some type of life forms from another dimension running parallel to our planet, though not actually on our planet, yet somehow able to access our space time continuum through a stargate or interdimensional portal, for those who entertain such notions. Furthermore, the implication set forth in Trinity suggests that the Trinity bomb blast might have quite possibly attracted these extraterrestrial or ethereal entities; or perhaps the blast in some way created the phenomenon, or…you can fill in the blanks however your imagination sees fit.

A couple days after the flying avocado smackdown, Jose and Reme returned to the area of the crash site and from a distance witnessed some military troops clearing the wreckage. After the troops had left with the remains of the avocado in tow, the boys approached closer and came across some debris that had the characteristics of the so-called Roswell memory metal; i.e. some foil looking stuff that was half covered by a rock and when they lifted the rock off of the crumpled foil looking stuff,  it unfolded back into its original shape, or what was presumed to be its original shape. The boys kept this mystery metal a secret for many years, one of them hiding it under a floorboard in their house, but occasionally would bust it out to repair things on the ranch, and in particular of section of a windmill. Apparently Vallee or somebody in his Invisible College circle have analyzed or in the process of analyzing this latest rendition of memory metal, although it still isn’t clear what exactly the result of those test were, or if they even happened at all, though honestly it’s hard to keep up with all of this because most of the parties involved haven’t really been all that transparent about what they’ve been up to in regards to these so-called “exotic materials.” But I digress.

For those who’ve been around the ufological block a time or two, these stories of crashed saucers and “exotic materials” have long littered UFO lore, and so none of this really got me all that worked up until  I came across another  little nugget while flipping through my digital copy of Trinity, which was a reference that made me spit out my coffee on my iPad and do a double take, namely the recitation of the words “Jornado del Muerto,” which is Spanish for “The Journey of Death.” The reason I found this choice of words by Vallee more than a bit curious was because it is the precise language that was set forth in the works of James Shelby Downard more than 50 years ago: “The Journey of Death – Jornado del Muerto” was jargon Downard used to describe an alchemical ritual landscape related to the Trinity bomb tests, which in turn presumably set in motion a chain reaction that created an anomalous event that, according to Downard’s theory, *may* have given birth to a homunculus-hermaphroditic entity.

Downard, for the uninitiated, is most well-known for his freewheeling essay “King Kill 33°: Masonic Symbolism in the Assassination of John F. Kennedy” which theorized that JFK’s assassination was part of a masonic ritual conducted on the 33° latitude. 33—for those not in the know—is the highest Freemasonic degree, hence this theorized topographical arrangement used in the killing of the divine King, John F. Kennedy. According to Downard, Kennedy’s death ritual was likewise associated with the number 3, another popular number on the Freemasonic hit parade. Dealey Plaza, the site of JFK’s ritual sacrifice, is located near the Trinity River, which was the site for the first Masonic temple in Dallas. Kennedy’s ill-fated motorcade was just about to reach the “Triple Underpass” when “three shoots” rang out, wounding JFK twice and Texas Governor John Connally once. Even the date, 11/22/63, contains symbolistic numerology (11 + 22 = 33). In the aftermath of the assassination, three tramps (alleged by some to be an assassination hit team) were picked up by the Dallas cops, which according to Downard correlated to the masonic legend of Hiram Abiff, who was murdered by three “unworthy craftsman.”

Moving westward on Downard’s 33° black magic carpet ride, we make our way to El Paso and hang a hard right at a place called Kern Gate that was purportedly constructed by a Masonic sorcerer named (you guessed it) Kern, and this is where you jump aboard the ol’ Jornado del Muerto highway that enters into New Mexico (The Land of Enchantment) to eventually wind your way to ground zero at the White Sands/Trinity site where this grand alchemical experiment purportedly played out, all of which is described in another Downard essay entitled “The Call to Chaos: From Adam to Atom by Way of the Jornada del Muerto” that appeared in the revised and expanded edition of Apocalypse Culture (Feral House, 1990).  As Downard notes in said essay: “The Jornada del Muerto (Journey of the Dead Man)…runs north to south, and El Camino del Diablo (Devil’s Highway) running east to west. They meet just north of the site of the first atomic bomb blast.” So make no mistake about it, folks, this connection between and the Trinity bomb blast and Jornada del Muerto is straight from the Downard canon, and I’d be quite surprised if Vallee was not aware of these connections with the use of the “Jornada del Muerto.”

Many of us saucer-heads first became aware of the name James Shelby Downard via Robert Anton Wilson’s classic Cosmic Trigger Volume 1: The Final Secret of the Illuminati wherein Wilson referred to an audio cassette series entitled Sirius Rising which“…set forth the most absurd, the most incredible, the most ridiculous Illuminati theory of them all…[that] the Illuminati were preparing Earth, in an occult manner, for extraterrestrial contact…. The only trouble is that, after the weird data we have already surveyed, [Downard’s] theory may not sound totally unbelievable to us….”

In Cosmic Trigger , Wilson recounts a Crowleymass party he threw at his pad in Berkeley in 1974, and among those invited to this freak fest of local wizards and witches and new agers was none other than Jacques Vallee, who to one degree or another was part of the Bay Area occult scene that Wilson was so thoroughly steeped in, and in fact Wilson spends several pages in Cosmic Trigger examining Vallee’s theories in regards to UFOs and their  link to  psychic phenomenon. Due to these interactions, it’s entirely possible that Wilson, during this period,  turned Vallee on to the strange world of James Shelby Downard, and in particular this concept concerning the Trinity bomb blast and how it was part and parcel of a magical freemasonic conspiracy.

In the aforementioned essay “Adam to Atom,” Downard refers to the story of Adam Kadman found in The Kabbalah, the first human who possessed both male and female attributes, and then later was split in two to became the first man and woman.  The Trinity bomb blast was designed to fuse the two back together—chaos and synergy, the male and female principles—using the power of the atom to achieve this hermaphroditic fusion. Accompanying this experimental atomic blast was a half million pound steel bottle code-named Jumbo, which Downard theorized contained a “Mannikin.”

Curiously enough, as both Downard and Vallee explain in their respective writings,  Jumbo was never used for the Trinity bomb blasts, thereby lending this immense vessel an air of great mystery. In “Adam to Atom,”  Downard conjectured that the nearest man-made vessel ( i.e. Jumbo) exposed to the light of the Sefiroth (Trinity bomb blast) would serve as a death chamber to the primordial kings and give birth to a magical manikin or homunculus, possessed with superhuman powers, which in myth usually describes a preternatural creature that forms inside a bottle or vessel. Jewish mysticism refers to these beasties as Golems. Or in Arabic traditions, the Jinn. In Downard’s freemasonic 33° conspiracy, he drew a through line to one of the founding fathers of Cal Tech (later to become of Jet Propulsion Laboratories, which just so happens to be on the 33°) none other than Jack Parsons, who played a key role in the development of the solid fueled rocket technology that eventually propelled NASA astronuats to the moon.  Parsons’ role was so significant that NASA later named a crater on the moon after him (on the dark side, no less!) According to Downard, the moon landing was but a further unraveling of this Masonic conspiracy caper, as the firing of the moon rockets occurred on 33rd latitude at Cape Kennedy. To this end, Downard contended that the Illuminati arranged it so that the first man on the moon, Neil Armstrong, was a 33rd degree Mason. This theory is further fleshed out in the writings of Downard’s colleague Jim Brandon aka William Grimstad, which you can read about it here.

Running parallel with Parsons’ rocket research was his involvement in the occult. Parsons—in collaboration with L. Ron Hubbard—conducted a series of rituals in the late 1940s known as the Babalon Working, the intent of which was to create a “child” in the spiritual realms who would be “called down” and directed into the womb of a female volunteer. When born, this child would incarnate the forces of Babalon, and become the Scarlet Woman of Revelations. At one point during these ceremonies, as the legend goes, Parsons and his Hubbard reportedly conjured some sort of otherworldly entity during a ritual conducted in Mojave Desert in 1946. The Babalon Working ended just before the “Great Flying Saucer Flap” of 1947 when the modern era of UFO’s purportedly began with Kenneth Arnold’s sighting on June 24th of that year. In this regard, some have suggested that Parsons and Hubbard “opened a door and something flew in.”

Parsons’ life ended with a monumental bang—on June 17, 1952—when he blew himself to smithereens while working with powerful explosives. A theory proffered by Downard and his colleague Michal Hoffman contends that Parsons was attempting to conjure an elemental being by way of a homunculus experiment that apparently backfired, leading to his fiery death.

As all of these disparate Downardian threads were bouncing around in my brain, I flashed back on a #ufotwitter kerfuffle that commenced on January 9, 2019 concerning Dr. Diane Pasulka, author of  American Cosmic, which started with the following curious tweet:

The following evening, on January 10, when one of Pasulka’s Twitter followers asked what this ritual was she was referring, Dr. Pasulka replied: “Which ritual? The one done during classified launches? I received this info from sources who have been in the space shuttle program and the new space force program for over 40 years. Hit has a history. Jack parsons. Russion cosmics. Read about it.” Pasulka added some curious comments to the effect that To The Stars Academy (TTSA) was a Psy Op, and that Tom DeLonge had been corrupted by Freemasonic forces, or something along those lines. At the time I was online witnessing this back and forth happen in real time, which, to my memory, is accurately portrayed in this reddit thread.

You can see more screen shots of went down in this post at The UFO Trail. Shortly afterwards, Pasulka deleted her Twitter account and the following day put out a notice stating that her email and Twitter accounts had been hacked the previous evening ( January 10) and that it had been a Pasulka imposter prattling on about Jack Parsons and Freemasons, which still leaves us in a bit of a quandary concerning Pasulka’s January 9 tweet (which occurred before she was purportedly hacked) having to do with Presidential moon rituals. Whatever the case, the comments of Pasulka (or her alleged hacker) were indeed eye-opening and evoked, once again, the utterances of James Shelby Downard regarding moon landings, Freemasons, Jack Parsons and other assorted homunculi that go bump in the night.

Around the time of her twitter freak-out (or hack, or whatever occurred), Pasulka had been dropping hints about a new book in-the-works that would tell a more robust version of her experiences—suggesting she’d been stymied from telling the full tale in American Cosmic—essentially that The Man (i.e., The Deep State-Establishment-Silence Control Group) had been keeping the good doctor down.

At the time, Pasulka had apparently been collaborating (or at least comparing notes) with Jacques Vallee on some secret project that appeared to be related to “meta-materials.”  In American Cosmic, Pasulka presented her thesis that the UFO phenomena was a modern religious movement where “technology informs a widespread and growing religiosity focused on UFOs.” Elsewhere in American Cosmic, Pasulka referred to the so-called meta-materials as key to “the modern UFO narrative” that includes stories about “a location where one could find artifacts of an extraterrestrial aerial craft that had crashed in 1947” and that a secret society of scientists, scholars and assorted spooks were exploring the phenomenon behind the scenes, known in some corners as the “Invisible College.” This group of scientists, who have been meta-material-curious for several decades now, includes Dr. Vallee, as well as Dr. Hal Puthoff.

In the 1980s, Puthoff was associated with a similar Invisible College of known as The Aviary, and—a decade later—many of the Aviary’s former members crossed over to a somewhat more overt group of scientists/spooks known as the National Institute of Discovery Science (NIDS) funded by billionaire entrepreneur and perennial UFO enthusiast, Robert Bigelow. More recently Puthoff served as a member of  TTSA, who were involved in their own purported meta-material “investigation” dubbed the ADAM Research Project. In light of my observation of a potential Downard-Jumbo-Atom-to-Adam connection to Vallee’s Trinity book, ADAM seemed like a curious name choice for TTSA’s “research project.” https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vP1v44NM9ls

As you may recall, a mighty buzz was made back in December 16, 2017 when the New York Times ran an article titled “Glowing Auras and ‘Black Money’: The Pentagon’s Mysterious U.F.O. Program,”  which revealed the supposed role of the TTSA’s  Lue Elizondo as former director of a purported top secret ufo project at the Pentagon known as Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Programme (AATIP.) One intriguing meta-material nugget that was dropped into the article alleged that BAASS (Bigelow Aerospace Advanced Space Studies) had been contracted by the government (a la AATIP) to collect and analyze UFO files, and as part of this project Bigelow and his boys had “modified” a facility in Las Vegas to store some meta-material sounding stuff.

Bigelow later disavowed this claim about any modifications made to his Las Vegas facility, and so this simply appeared as another questionable claim that Lue Elizondo stirred into the pot to promote future TTSA projects and promotions, which all eventually fizzled and flopped.

Stay tuned for Part 2 of this series, Doc Pasulka vs. the Deep State UFO Gatekeepers, which might take a while to write, so in the meantime you really need to cruise over  to Amazon and pick up a copy of Stalking the Great Whore: The Lost Writings of James Shelby Downard that includes further revelations about Jack Parsons and assorted homunculi that go bump and grind in the night, all part of a secret space program coming soon to a UFO Disclosure conference near you!

A couple years back when I was conducting background research for Stalking the Great Whore: The Lost Writings of James Shelby Downard, my pal Jack Brewer (of the UFO Trail and Expanding Frontiers Research) was gracious enough to file a FOIA request for me with the FBI (otherwise known to Downard as the Federal Bureaucratic Inverts), and the result of said request netted the following  document, which in essence was a rambling 9 page diatribe Downard sent to then FBI Director Clarence Kelley (who was probably wondering “wtf is this shit?”) concerning a manuscript Downard had just completed writing called Sorcery, Sex, Assassination and the Science of Symbolism.

Anyway, I had originally intended to include this magnificent missive as an appendix to Stalking the Great Whore, but it didn’t quite work out that way due to interference by Agents of the Illuminati. Nonetheless, here it is now, in its entirety, for your possible reading pleasure!

Well, not actually letters (because people don’t really do those that much anymore), but I received an email just the other day concerning a post from a few years back entitled Phil Schneider and the Dulce Base Mythos. In said post, I shared a Phil Schneider FOIA that demonstrated how ol’ Phil did some truly nutty stuff concerning some radioactive material he got his hands on back in the day and how he was known to self-mutilate and…well, you can read all about it at the link above, which included excerpts from the Phil Schneider FOIA in question. Here is a link to the entire document.

Anyway, one of our beloved readers here at Chasing UFOs wanted to know if the Phil Schneider FOIA in question was actually the real deal…which of course it is, silly!

As for how we here at Chasing UFO hindquarters got our hands on this beauty, we were first alerted to its existence via that Joe from the Carolinas guy who had posted a video about the Schneider FOIA docs, and in fact it was Carolina Joe who originally obtained these files and was showing off excerpts of them in a video he produced in 2018 that once upon a time could be found at the following youtube link below that, alas, no longer seems to work. (Do better, Carolina Joe!)

Anyway, at the time this Carolina Joe video was up and running, our crack staff here at Chasing UFOs contacted him about getting our hands on these files and as I recall Carolina J. pretty much gave us the run around, said he would be releasing them in due time yada yada yada, and so we said fuck that noise and put our staff FOIA expert on the case, none other than Jack Brewer of the UFO Trail and Expanding Frontiers Research.

To this end, Jack was able to snap some screen shots of the Schneider docs that had been teased out on the Carolina Joe youtube vid, which Jack then forwarded to his FOIA dude at the FBI, and this was enough info to allow them to identify the document in question as “case file 117-HQ-2708, which was reviewed and released under FOIA case number 58396 on September 18, 2018.”

And that, my friends, is how FOIA magic is done!

Below are some of the startling screen shots from the Carolina Joe UFO show that we sent to the Feds!

I recently came across this post, Incredible 1957–58 Poster by Fred Keziah about the Phenomenon by Richard Geldreich, Jr., who has a Medium blog dedicated to UAP research.  (Apparently UAPs are what the cool kids are calling UFOs these days, but I prefer to refer to them as flying saucers as Professor George Adamski intended!) 

 

Shortly after coming across Richard’s blog, I contacted him and mentioned that I, as well, possessed an original copy of the fabled Keziah poster that at this very moment is hanging on the wall of my reclusive hipster writing room.

Richard had become aware of the Keziah poster from a fellow on Twitter named Logan, and in short order Richard and another fellow #ufotwitter traveler named Johnathan Milgie set about to digitally recreate this magnificent relic of yore from UFO lore.  

As it turned out, my copy of the Keziah poster, which is still in pretty good condition, is just what the (mad) doctor ordered, allowing Johnathan and Richard to complete the project after I sent them some additional photos.

I originally acquired my very own Fred Keziah poster from my good friend Greg Bishop, who (as I recall) gifted myself and some other friends copies of the poster at one of our fabled Kookout’s back in the 1990s. According to Greg, he had purchased a half dozen of so of these gems from Keziah himself during that period in the mid ‘90s.

As for Fred Keziah (who’s last name sounds like an old school flying saucer pilot), I found the following link at Kook Science, which gives us a glimpse of this magical man who was “an American cartoonist and animator who was featured in several magazines, including the Sunday Evening Post. He served in the U.S. Navy beginning in the 1940s, working for the Naval Photographic Center as a graphics producer on training materials.”

The Keziah Kook Science entry notes that he actually created 2 posters, or what is referred to as “Information Sheets, ” which included:

Visual Metaphysics No. 1: Flying Saucers (A242635, 2 July 1956) — “A graphic colored chart 22″ X 34″ picturing 228 drawings of saucer shapes, formations, maneuvers and spacepeople. Numerous listings of colors, sounds, speeds, sizes, etc.” Keziah acknowledged the Little Listening Post for “library research”.

Visual Metaphysics No. 2: Reincarnation (A286122, 28 May 1957) — “A chart depicting all aspects of Reincarnation, showing karmic relationships between lifetimes”

As noted in the Kook Science entry, our man Keziah gave up the ghost at the beginning of the New Year in 2010, and hopefully was reincarnated as a space captain from the planet Keziah who will return to visit us very  soon.

You can find the final digitized pdf version of Keziah’s  Visual Metaphysics No. 1: Flying Saucers at this link.

And if that wasn’t enough, you can find some AI generated art based on the Keziah poster here.

Here’s an audio file if you don’t want to look at my mug:

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1bXlGVQy4oGXLt0NQYdi14sUIywS8Tsiu/view?usp=sharing

My Tasmanian colleague, xAberration, has created some wonderful videos and playlist for an album I compiled of my spaciest songs called, fittingly enough, “Space Songs”, recorded over the last decade or so.

Since it’s a virtual album, here are some of the virtual liner notes:

All songs written, composed and performed by Adam Gorightly except for:

Lost in Time – co-written by Joe Hook, with Joe on 12-strng guitar.

Mind Traps – Chris Wilhoite: Synthesizer, 5 String Bass Guitar, Electric Guitar, 12 String Tanglewood Guitar, Mellotron and Digital Drum Pads – Adam Gorightly: Vocals and Synthesizer

UFO Lane – Composed and performed by Joe Hook with Gorightly on theremin and synthesizer.

UFO Lane Refrain – Joe Hook, vocals and guitar

The following is an excerpt from Saucers, Spooks and Kooks: UFO Disinformation in the Age of Aquarius

On one occasion, Bill Moore and Paul Bennewitz were on the deck of Bennewitz’s condo when he instructed Moore to set the shutter speed of his camera to 1000 and snap some random photos of the general landscape which encompassed Kirtland AFB and Manzano Mountain. When Moore later developed these photos, several shots revealed a curious tube of light that was only visible at this 1000^th of a second setting. By using this shutter setting, Bennewitz had presumably employed a method of photographing images otherwise unseen by the naked eye.

Another oddity Bennewitz observed were orange orbs that frequently materialized in his home. Bill Moore later confirmed seeing one of these softball-sized orbs, which he described as three dimensional and self-illuminating, hovering near the ceiling. According to film maker Mark Pilkington:

“Others had noticed the orbs too. On one of his many trips out to the Bennewitz home to check up on things when the family was out (i.e., break-ins) Doty and two NSA operatives had disconnected the alarm system and were just about to start snooping around when they noticed one of the balls floating underneath a central stairway in the large entry room. “It was orange and had sparkles in it,” said Doty. “I asked the other guys: ‘Is it one of yours?’” But the NSA men were mystified as well, and the trio tried to see if the phenomenon was projected from outside of the house somewhere. No dice. ‘We never did figure out what that was,’ said Doty. Perhaps the NSA was in fact responsible, but if so, they never admitted this to anyone outside their circle.” 1

Orbs weren’t the only weird things buzzing about Bennewitz. National Security Agency (NSA) operatives had moved into a vacant building across the street from Bennewitz’s home in an attempt to monitor his activities. Although Bennewitz didn’t know if the strangers across the street were actually government agents, or aliens in disguise, he somehow determined that they were scanning him with high tech equipment. Bennewitz said he could “sense their sweep” and that it caused a stinging sensation on his body. Over time, Bennewitz grew to suspect that this “sweep” had been performed by an ET beam. On one occasion, Bill Moore was visiting Bennewitz and also experienced this sensation, describing it as a beam that scanned his body.

To combat this perceived ET beam, Bennewitz constructed his very own spacegun. “The speed of my weapon exceeds that of their weapons and in its most sophisticated form can be readily computer controlled to allow extremely rapid tracking and lock-on regardless of speed along with electronic wobbulation of the beam.” 2 Bennewitz further claimed that: “Two small prototypes have been funded and constructed by my Company. Tests conducted to date indicate they do work and work rather well considering their small size…” 3

The beam or “scan” that Bennewitz and Moore experienced could have conceivably been a form of directed-energy weapon that was first reported in development during the late 1990s by the Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL) at Kirtland Air Force Base. According to researcher Christian Lambright:

“In 2001, the AFRL publicly revealed the existence of Active Denial Technology (ADT), which was referred to, behind closed doors, as the ‘pain beam,’ a science fiction sounding “microwave beam that heats the water in the surface layer of the skin where the pain-sensing nerves are, and can do so from a considerable distance…By all accounts, the sudden and intense pain is enough to cause virtual panic as people desperately try to get away from the beam. Research into such ‘non-lethal’ weapons has reportedly been going on since the mid-1980s, though it is an outgrowth of research into radar and electromagnetic pulse technology.” 4

During the ADT’s 2001 public roll-out, a contraption called the Active Denial System (ADS) was demonstrated, which consisted of a large antenna mounted atop a military transport. In 2003, Eric Adams—an associate editor with Popular Science Magazine—volunteered himself, guinea pig style, to test the effects of this technology. According to Lambright:

“[Adams] had the system fired at him from a half mile away with the directed-energy beam controlled to hit him only in the middle of his back. In less than two seconds, he experienced a warm sensation that quickly grew to feel like an ‘electric burner.’ Though in this demonstration the purpose was to show that the ADS could generate only enough pain to motivate someone to leave the area, in a 2007 accident at Moody AFB, Georgia, an exposure of four seconds at 100% power injured one person seriously enough to require being flown to a local burn center. However, at lower power levels the beam can produce only a mild feeling of warmth and, as the above demonstration showed, it can be focused on a relatively small area even over a substantial distance…” 5

Lambright notes the existence of “man-portable” ADS-like systems in development as far back as the early 1970s. A 1972 Time Magazine article entitled “The Death Ray” described “a portable chemically-powered laser” that could “silently burn a fatal, quarter-inch-wide hole in the body of an enemy soldier up to five miles away…Much of the Pentagon’s laser weaponry research is being conducted in great secrecy at Kirtland Air Force Base, outside Albuquerque.” Lambright goes on to say:

“The above Time Magazine article was written forty years ago, and we are left to wonder how the research may have developed since then. Perhaps it melded into the Air Force Research Laboratory’s Directed Energy Directorate and a little-known research group located at Kirtland Air Force Base…Even more interesting, is word of the Portable Efficient Laser Testbed (PELT), which was described in the above New Scientist article…as the ‘first man-portable heat compliance weapon of its kind.’ Cursory information on this weapon appeared in a Department of Defense (DoD) document titled Joint Non-Lethal Weapons Exercise Reference Book published in 2003, which listed the PELT laser rifle as a classified program. Included in the document is an illustration of this decidedly futuristic looking weapon and, if you look closely, it sports the unique logo of the ScorpWorks…

“What about the choice of the unusual name ‘ScorpWorks’? It was one of the questions I addressed to the AFRL Public Relations Office and, as expected, they acknowledged that the name is a play on the infamous Skunkworks, the secretive advanced aircraft division of Lockheed. The reference to a scorpion is supposed to reflect the Southwest flavor of their New Mexico location. But a scorpion being selected to symbolize the types of weapons the ScorpWorks develops, directed energy beam weapons with painful effects, also brought to mind what Paul Bennewitz complained about. It is what scorpions do. When a scorpion strikes… it stings… “ 6

ADS was subsequently deployed to Afghanistan during the 2010 Iraq War, but never used due to “ethical and safety concerns” and was “deemed too unpredictable to use in war zones.” 7 However, as recently as the Summer of 2020, the Trump administration was toying with the idea of using ADS on its own citizenry. According to a National Public Radio (NPR) article dated September 16, 2020:

“… Joint Forces Headquarters Command in Washington, D.C., confirmed to NPR that hours before federal police officers cleared a crowded park near the White House with smoke and tear gas on June 1, a military police staff officer asked if the D.C. National Guard had a kind of ‘heat ray’ weapon that might be deployed against demonstrators in the nation’s capital.” The command “inquired informally about capabilities across the full-spectrum of non-lethal systems, to include the Long Range Acoustic Device (LRAD) and Active Denial System (ADS)…” 8

Soon after, The Washington Post matched NPR’s reporting citing the congressional testimony of Major Adam D. DeMarco, the senior-most D.C. National Guard officer on the ground when the hammer went down in Lafayette Square. Not only did DeMarco contradict White House denials that they hadn’t used tear gas on protestors, but DeMarco also provided an email from June 1, 2020 that stated:

“…the Defense Department’s top military police officer in the Washington region… asked whether the unit had a Long Range Acoustic Device, also known as an LRAD, or a microwave-like weapon called the Active Denial System, which was designed by the military to make people feel as if their skin is burning when in range of its invisible rays…”

The email went on to describe ADS in glowing terms:

“ …the ability to reach out and engage potential adversaries at distances well beyond small arms range, and in a safe, effective, and nonlethal manner…The ADS can immediately compel an individual to cease threatening behavior or depart through application of a directed energy beam that provides a sensation of intense heat on the surface of the skin. The effect is overwhelming, causing an immediate repel response by the targeted individual.”

Ultimately, federal officials were unable to get their hands on an ADS device and instead opted for tear gas and rubber bullets to disperse the crowd from Lafayette Square so that President Trump could stage a photo op of himself holding a bible in front of St. John’s Episcopal Church.

Apparently, this wasn’t the first such instance in which the Trump admin contemplated using ADS on civilians. According to reporter Michael D. Shear in the August 26, 2020 edition of The New York Times:

“Fifteen days before the 2018 midterm elections, as President Trump sought to motivate Republicans with dark warnings about caravans heading to the U.S. border, he gathered his homeland security secretary and White House staff to deliver a message: “extreme action” was needed to stop the migrants….That afternoon, at a separate meeting with top leaders of the Department of Homeland Security, Customs and Border Protection officials suggested deploying a microwave weapon — a “heat ray” designed by the military to make people’s skin feel as if it is burning when they get within range of its invisible beams… Two former officials who attended the afternoon meeting at the Department of Homeland Security on Oct. 22, 2018, said the suggestion that the device be installed at the border shocked attendees, even if it would have satisfied the president…”

1 Pilkington, Mark. 2010. Mirage Men: An Adventure into Paranoia, Espionage, Psychological Warfare, and UFOs. Skyhorse Publishing. (p. 126)

2  Bishop, Greg. 2005. Project Beta: The Story of Paul Bennewitz, and the Creation of a Modern UFO Myth. Paraview Pocket Books. (p. 164)

3 Summary & Report Status (With Suggested Guidelines) “Project Beta Report”– Paul F. Bennewitz.

4  Lambright, Christian. 2012. X Descending. X Desk Publishing. (Kindle Locations 4345-4348)

5 Lambright, Christian. X Descending. 2012. X Desk Publishing. Kindle Edition. (Kindle Locations 4355-4356)

6 Lambright, Christian. 2012. X Descending. X Desk Publishing. (Kindle Locations 4407-4409)

7 https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/dc-protest-lafayette-square/2020/09/16/ca0174e4-f788-11ea-89e3-4b9efa36dc64_story.html

8 https://www.npr.org/2020/09/16/913748800/military-police-leaders-weighed-deploying-heat-ray-against-d-c-protesters