The Groom Lake Desert Rat: Issue 29

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The Groom Lake Desert Rat

 · 10 months ago

Issue #29. August 18, 1995

In this issue...

• Fun With Folklore
• Campbell Confesses to Government Involvement
• Executive Correspondence?
• Pursuing the Hologram
• Our Readers Respond
• Intel Bitties

Fun With Folklore

Exploring The Hungarian Connection

In DR#28, we reported the matter-of-fact claim of our ex-government source "Jarod 2" that the aliens he knows speak a "higher form of Hungarian." J-2 has no explanation for why extraterrestrials would speak such an obscure earth tongue; he can only report that this is what his supervisor told him when he asked about some foreign-looking text on a technical specification. This may seem a ridiculous claim from a dubious source, but Hungarian turns out to be more interesting than it seems. Aside from being the language of Zsa Zsa--the Gabor on Hollywood Squares known for collecting husbands--and her recently deceased and oft-confused sister Eva--the one who played opposite the pig in Green Acres--Hungarian happens to be the native tongue of Dr. Edward Teller, the "father of the hydrogen bomb" and chief architect of Reagan's Star Wars program.The origins of the Hungarian language remain mysterious. It is one of only two significant languages in Europe that are unrelated to any of their neighbors. Hungarian and Finnish appear to be related to each other but neither are derived from the ancient Proto-Indo-European (PIE) tongue that is assumed to be the source of all other modern European languages. "Where did Hungarian come from?" is a question long asked by linguistic scholars, and now that Hungary is free of Soviet rule nationalistic citizens are also asking, "Where did we come from?" As reported in a Washington Post article on Feb. 6, Hungarians are looking not to the stars but to the Xinjiang Province of China thousands of miles to the east [thanks to RP for the lead]. In graves there dating from the 9th and 10th centuries, enquiring Hungarians have found archeological objects similar to those unearthed back home. One theory says that the Hungarian ancestors left China no later than the 5th century A.D. and migrated gradually westward across the Asian steppes until arriving in Europe around the year 896. Magyars, as they knew themselves, were the scourge of Europe for a time, raping and pillaging wherever they went in a role later played by the British Empire.

The linguistic and archeological record is ambiguous enough to allow other theories of Hungarian origins. One is recorded in The Curve of Binding Energy, a profile of a dissident atomic physicist by John McPhee...

Not all Los Alamos theories could be tested. Long popular within the Theoretical Division was, for example, a theory that the people of Hungary are Martians. The reasoning went like this: The Martians left their own planet several aeons ago and came to Earth; they landed in what is now Hungary; the tribes of Europe were so primitive and barbarian that it was necessary for the Martians to conceal their evolutionary difference or be hacked to pieces. Through the years, the concealment had on the whole been successful, but the Martians had three characteristics too strong to hide: their wanderlust, which found its outlet in the Hungarian gypsy; their language (Hungarian is not related to any of the languages spoken in surrounding countries); and their unearthly intelligence. One had only to look around to see the evidence: Teller, Wigner, Szilard, von Neumann-- Hungarians all. Szilard had been among the first to suggest that fission could be used to make a bomb. Von Neumann had developed the digital computer. Teller--moody, tireless, and given to fits of laughter, bursts of anger--worked long hours and was impatient with what he felt to be the excessively slow advancement of Project Panda, as the hydrogen-bomb development was known. Kindly to juniors, he had done much to encourage Ted Taylor in his work. His impatience with his peers, however, eventually caused him to leave Los Alamos and establish a rival laboratory at Livermore in California. Teller had a thick Martian accent. He also had a sense of humor that could penetrate bone. Dark-haired, heavy-browed, he limped pronouncedly. In Europe, one of his feet had been mangled by a streetcar.

McPhee is apparently using the Martian claim only as a transition, but it is clear there is some kind of folklore behind it. It seems to bear some relation to the anecdote told in Teller's War [quoted in DR#28] that Hungarians are aliens. SteeDee@aol.com, who was the first to refer us to the McPhee quote, comments:

The reason that 'aliens' speak Hungarian is that Hungarians arealiens. It is that simple. It appears that good-natured office ribbing among some of the brightest theoreticians working at Los Alamos has been twisted into fabricated 'evidence' supporting groundless claims of alien interaction with humans.

This is not necessarily true. The Martian story is certainly folklore, but folklore is neither true nor false in itself; it is simply the way people tell oral stories to each other. To call a story "folklore" does not mean it is a fabrication: In most cases people are telling the story honestly as they have interpreted it, but their perception, memory and sense of humor inevitably idealizes and simplifies the facts. Any time a remembered narrative is re-told by a human, it becomes distorted, but this does not mean the story is worthless. There is data in folklore, maybe not the data the speaker had intended, but usually some ancient basis in a worldly event.If you believe in Jesus--at least that the man existed on earth--you are believing in folklore, because the story of his (or His) life was passed down as an oral tradition for many years before being written down. If you believe the oft-told tale of how your mother first met your father, you are also believing in folklore: You can be darn sure they have distorted a thing or two--depending perhaps on whether they are still married--but that does not mean the described events never took place. Every oral story, in the absence of a reliable physical record, is subject to all the pressures that turn reality into myth, but there is usually some "proto-story" behind it that derived from a direct observation in the past.

Until unambiguous physical evidence presents itself, understanding the processes of folklore may be the key to finding the truth about UFOs. Confirmed skeptics say UFOs are solely the product of accumulated folklore, but if some UFOs were real and no reliable physical record was available, human reports of them would probably become distorted to the point where they would soon seem as implausible as any created fiction. Folklore takes a story and "humanizes" it--to bring it closer to the simplified concepts the speaker is most comfortable with. Folklore follows Darwinian rules of mutation, and immaculate conceptions are rare. Each story evolves over time in a recognizable series of steps, and by understanding these changes and the pressures that create them, we can understand what about the final story might reflect on an objective truth.

Folklore Examples

Campbell Confesses to Government Involvement

To illustrate folklore in its primal form, we recount the latest news from the Little A'Le'Inn in Lower Rachel. Two disturbing reports have recently been circulated by the Inn's denizens concerning our Regional Director, Glenn Campbell. The first says that Campbell has been seen driving a government vehicle--belonging to a sinister and little-known agency--suggesting that he must be a covert government operative sent to Rachel to "muddy the waters." The second report says that Campbell has been arrested for espionage. What happened was this: The government went to the management of the apartment complex and told them Campbell was engaged in espionage and if they didn't kick him out, they would be accessories. Of course, the management immediately kicked Campbell out, and sure enough, three days later, he was arrested for espionage. A member of the L.A. media who had phoned the Inn was so disturbed by this second story that he called around to jails in Las Vegas to try to locate Campbell. When finally contacted, Campbell was still in his old apartment and denied all knowledge. "Why am I always the last to know?" he complained about his arrest.Are these stories baseless fiction, lies produced by the Little A'Le'Inn to try to discredit their Number One enemy? No, these reports are rooted in fact, and no deliberate deception is implied. Campbell, in fact, has acknowledged that the first rumor is true. The Inn's supporter Al Cutillo confronted Campbell on the alt.conspiracy.area51 newsgroup:

I am and have been for almost 23 years an investigator. And, it was really strange when I was approached in your home town and was told by a citizen of your community, not Chuck, Joe or Pat, but another person, who is willing to sign a sworn statement, that they saw you, Mr. Campbell, the man who is "against" the government cover-ups, in a U.S. Government vehicle. (A USGS Vehicle to be exact.)As the friend that I promised to be, I am only relating the info I have heard. Believe me, I would not accuse you of anything. And it was strange, but, I also heard from a radio astronomer who had happened by the place you hate, the Little A'Le' Inn, that there are a number of people that are kinda getting the impression that someone up in that quiet little town is offering "misinformation" on a number of issues regarding Area 51....

By the way, that statement about you and the USGS truck is being faxed to me tomorrow. And I will be posting it the moment it comes in, but, not on the news group, but in an FTP site where people can see the ACTUAL fax, not just words that ANYONE can type.... Remember, NONE of these things are MY comments, but, the comments of the people that live around you.

usgs

This was too much truth for Campbell, who then broke down and confessed to the world: "I am an agent of the U.S. Geological Survey.... I know everyone is disappointed in me, but believe me there is an explanation. I did what I did for National Security. Someday, you'll thank me." His flimsy excuse is this:

My cousin used to work for the USGS. His job was to travel around the Colorado River Basin recording water levels at dams and streams. When engaged in this duty, he was supposed to attach to the sides of his vehicle two magnetic signs with the agency's logo. With some cynicism, he refused and gave one of the signs to me, which I proudly displayed on the door of my 4Runner. Soon after returning to Rachel, the stories from the Inn began to surface about my driving a government vehicle, but it was only when Al confronted me that I realized the depth of the conspiracy. I am an agent of the USGS, and not just through my cousin. It is by this special arrangement that I obtain maps at a discounted price for sale at the Research Center. I am an Authorized USGS Map Dealer!

Campbell's Arrest

The origin of the second report, that Campbell has been arrested for espionage, is more complicated but appears to derive from a letter sent to the manager of Campbell's apartment complex by an anonymous resident there. The letter was signed by "A Concerned Citizen," obviously a patriot. It sought to inform the management of Campbell's sinister aims. It compared Campbell to those who perpetrated Oklahoma City bombing, and it also suggested that he was running a business out of his apartment. (Indeed, Campbell admits that he visited Oklahoma City only one year before the bombing and that he still has contacts there, but he denies that he runs a business from his apartment. He says his small mail order company is operated solely in Rachel.) The letter concluded...

The bottom line here is that this individual falls into one of three categories,

1. An over zealous UFO watcher.
2. A terrorist that is unpredictable.
3. A Soviet spy using the UFO story as a cover.

I know that your hands are legally tied, but I felt that the management should be aware of this individual before it's to [sic] late. I know this is a shocking letter but I thought you should know!

This letter will NOT be circulated to other residents, as it would only create terror. That is something Campbell would do, not me.

Accusation #1 is clearly untrue, as Campbell shows little interest in staying up late or braving the elements to watch for UFOs. ("Let 'em come to me!" he says.) He collects mostly human data and pursues vague rumors of Hungarian. As for the other accusations, they could be true. Certainly a terrorist that is predictable wouldn't be worth his salt, while the Soviets might be stooping pretty low these days given their funding cuts. (Weren't they run out of business, you ask? Not true. The bear is only sleeping and is sure to reemerge to conquer the world as soon as vigilant Americans let down their guard.)The apartment manager was not too alarmed by the accusations but was disturbed that the letter was anonymous. "If I am going to write a complaint about somebody, I am going to sign it," she said as she made a copy for us. Although there are about 150 apartments in the complex, the list of suspects is short, thanks to the science of psycholinguistics. This is the study of the psychological implications of language; and it tackles such tasks as trying to profile serial killers from the unsigned letters they write. A reference in this letter to the thin ceilings in the complex suggests that this is a real resident who knows the buildings and probably lives on the first floor under a noisy neighbor. The quaint cold war point of view and reference to Soviet spies suggests a time warp, as though the author had been trapped in a cocoon for a decade and wasn't aware of recent changes in the world. Any competent psycholinguist knows not to speak in certainties, but an obvious scenario cannot be ignored: Concerned Citizen works at the Groom Lake base!

This theory is supported by the exhibits which Mr. (or Ms.) Citizen enclosed with his letter to the manager. It was an edited copy of DR#26 in which selected portions were expanded on a copy machine to support the author's claims that (1) Campbell was in trouble with the law (his obstruction appeal) and (2) that spying on McCarran Airport was just like spying on the NSA headquarters in Maryland from the motel next door. These were copies of copies of our printed version of the Rat, not the email or WWW versions. While thousands of electronic copies surf the net, the printed version has only a very limited distribution, about 300 copies. We know most of these recipients fairly well, and the only wild cards are the courtesy copies we send to BLM, DOE and the Air Force. Our BLM and DOE readers seem merely amused. We have never run into of any hard-core pro-military patriots in either organization. The fact that Mr. Citizen had a non-electronic form of the Rat suggests that he got it through a rigid, archaic, pre-technological chain of communication, which of course implies that the military was involved.

Indeed, we now observe that at least one resident, possibly more, walks every day from his apartment not far from Campbell's to the Janet terminal across the street. If he is not Concerned Citizen, perhaps he knows who is. We have no desire to violate the privacy of individual workers at Groom or Tonopah, but it is all we can do to restrain Campbell from taking revenge for the hate mail against him. A terrorist that is unpredictable should be treated with caution because you never know when he'll go over the edge. If incensed, he could engage in all sorts of terrifying anarchist actions, like directing reporters to this worker's apartment to obtain his view on current issues. We think we can restrain Campbell for now, but let this be a warning: This is his home, you Feds, and he will defend it with all guns at his disposal.

Anyway, as soon as we obtained a copy of the letter, we took the inevitable action which is the essence of Psychospy's nature: We posted it to the net. From the newsgroup, we assume it was picked up by Al Cutillo or Chuck Clark's son or some other ally of the Inn (since Chuckie and the Inn are still off-line) and the information was passed to Lower Rachel. We suspect, however, that the information was conveyed primarily in oral form, because it began to mutate immediately.

The "arrest" was easily deduced. Beer drinker "A", behind the bar, says, "You mark my words, they'll arrest that motherfucker," which drinker "B" interprets as, "They did arrest that motherfucker." "B" tells the story to "C" who, three days later, tells it back to "A" again. "I told you it would happen," says "A" with satisfaction. Indeed, there is no question that Campbell was arrested. He was convicted, in fact, for misdemeanor obstruction and condemned to paint the Rachel Senior Center (pending appeal). The fine distinctions of when he was arrested and on what charge are probably lost on "A," "B" and "C," who fade in and out of a permanent fog sponsored by the Anheuser-Busch and Phillip-Morris Corporations.

The fact that Campbell has been seen again in Rachel after his supposed arrest has not halted the narrative flow, merely caused some turbulence. The story has now split into two separate streams, both told with absolute certainty. One now says that Campbell is going to be arrested for espionage; it will happen any day now without question because the Inn has inside information. The other report says that the Evil One is seen in Rachel only on weekends because he on a special work-release program that allows him to serve his prison time only Monday through Friday (no doubt fueling "A's" rage at the laxity of our penal system).

Hearing the stories from the Inn, one is tempted to dismiss them as nonsense, but it is not as simple as that. There is real data in every rumor, but to deduce it you have to understand the emotional pressures distorting the story. These tendencies usually involve the speaker protecting his ego and defending the particular emotional trap he has already invested in. The obvious pressures at the Little A'Le'Inn are to interpret any data about Campbell as reflecting poorly on his integrity; thus, the owners can feel comfortable about their prior mistreatment of him. A "good" Campbell would create self-doubt, but an evil one is good, because then the actions of the past seem justified. If you understand the residents and allies of the Inn and their relationship to Campbell, then you can correct for this emotional bias and subtract it from the final story. The data you might then receive is that something happened concerning Campbell, the management of his apartment complex and someone connected with the government--which is true. Of course, you would then have to conduct your own research to discover what the source event was. In cases like this, folklore might at least provide an alert mechanism, focusing your attention on something of interest.

Characteristics of Folklore

Folklore, like electromagnetic radiation, may seem intangible at times, but it propagates according to recognizable rules. Most of these rules are self-evident. They apply to any oral story when there is no fixed record to compare it to.

1. The more people a story passes through, the more distorted it becomes. The least distortion is likely when only a single person has told the tale.
2. Most speakers convey the "truth" as they understand it. Distortion comes about when a speaker adds details which he feels are implied, removes details which he feels are irrelevant or corrects uncomfortable details which he feels must be wrong. This editing process is not necessarily conscious.
3. Some speakers are more reliable than others. The level and kind of distortion one person generates depends upon that individual's personality, which is stable across a wide variety of circumstances. Although one specific story, like a UFO claim, may be beyond confirmation, you can determine a person's general reliability by seeing how disciplined they are in other fields and with other stories.
4. A person tends to distort a story to support his existing world view and emotional needs. A person tends to recall and recount only what he wants to believe. By understanding this bias, which exhibits itself in everything the person does, the listener can subtract it out of the received story. The bias may render some of the story unreliable, but not necessarily all of it.
5. Each telling of the tale tends to turn a complex and confusing reality into a simplified and stereotyped shorthand that is easier for the speaker to understand and remember and that makes him feel more comfortable about himself.
6. A story passing through many people tends to evolve over time into an idealized form which most people in this social group feel comfortable with and can easily remember. Once the story reaches this stage, it stabilizes and does not change significantly until the society changes. Examples are the stable mythologies passed down from generation to generation in aboriginal cultures: These stories explain why the sun rises and storms come and help teach young people the ways of the tribe.
7. When the same story is told to two or more people each of whom convey it to others, it may split into separate streams that begin to evolve independently. Although each fork of the story may turn into something quite different depending on the needs of the people who passed it on, there will be certain common features in both streams which reflect the state of the story before the split.
8. Folklore often allows feelings to be expressed which could not otherwise be spoken. This is one reason rumors are spread and stories are told at all.

These rules apply almost as well to deliberate lies as they do to unintentional distortion. A lie is merely "extreme folklore" which is distorted more than usual when it passes through a particular person. In general, lying is difficult, risky and emotionally costly, so most people tend to avoid it, at least where there is not a strong incentive. Those who do lie tend to lie often (Rule #3), a style which is usually easy to detect if you spend enough time with the person. Liars also work with the material at their disposal; every lie has a source, usually lifted from another story the liar has heard elsewhere. The rest of the population tells what they believe is the truth; they merely "simplify" the story to make it more comfortable to tell.

Jokes, too, obey the rules of folklore. Although contrived on the surface, they serve an emotional need which is related to current social and personal environment. Oral jokes tend to be "topical," that is, related to subjects which are on people's minds. To be seen as funny and be retold repeatedly, a joke must relieve some kind of emotional tension. No matter how apparently ridiculous the tale may be, it tells you something about the person who recounts it. Why, among all the jokes he has heard, is the speaker choosing to tell this one? It must bear some relevance to the interests and conflicts in his own life and in the social environment in which he is engaged.

The rules of folklore can apply to almost any information exchanged verbally, including the evolution of languages themselves. Over generations, languages change to serve emotional and social needs and evolve over time to a stable state where they are easiest to process and remember. When a language has split into two, as with Hungarian and Finnish perhaps, the common features between them can reveal the ancestral state of the language before the split. We know, for example, that the other languages of Europe evolved from a common PIE ancestor because of the similarities in these languages: For example, a similar word for "snow"--schnee, snø, snieg, sníh, snyék, snijeg in various languages--is common throughout Europe but not in Asian languages, and the existence of such a word in the original PIE language suggests that the people who spoke it did not reside in a tropical climate. From this kind of reconstructed evidence, we can deduce something about where a language came from and how it evolved.

An important point about folklore or historical linguistics is that the current oral record can lead us to fairly reliable conclusions about events in the past that we have never seen. The fact that no one has spoken PIE in several millennia and that it has been distorted over time by countless human exchanges does not mean that the language never existed. As with many other sciences in which we are observing a phenomena only indirectly, we can still make logical conclusions about this invisible "ghost" that are almost are reliable as our own direct experience. For example, the atomic bomb was invented based solely on such indirect evidence--since no one has seen an atom--but it worked nonetheless.

Even from sources as unreliable as the Little A'Le'Inn or as unconfirmable as Lazar or Jarod 2, there is data in the story, and it can be filtered out by logical deduction. If Jarod made up his simulator story then it still had to come from somewhere. It may be his own stew, but the ingredients had to be drawn from the existing folklore to make the story agree with Lazar's and the longstanding tales of saucer crashes and government cover-ups in the UFO literature. Telling the truth is easy--you just do it--but creating a lie and making it consistent with the stories already told is a daunting task. If the story is false, sooner or later all the complex and interacting threads will be too great for any liar to reconcile, and obvious flaws will begin to show that no amount of creative theorizing can erase. The Little A'Le'Inn is no challenge to researchers because stories there are one dimensional and are easily traced. Jarod and Lazar are more of a problem; the richness of their stories is impressive, and calling the claims "true" or "false" does not solve the mystery of where they came from.

Back To The Hungarians

In addition to Jarod's claims that the aliens speak "a higher form of Hungarian," we have three sources that suggest, however facetiously, that the Hungarians themselves are aliens. One is The Curve of Binding Energy quote above. Another is the quote from Teller's War in DR#28...

Fermi, the Italian physicist, once mused over the number of stars in the universe and its age, saying that if aliens existed they should already have visited earth. Indeed, Szilard joked, "They call themselves Hungarians." Teller also delighted in this notion, applying it to himself with relish.

A third source for this story is a Hungary information page at the Technical University of Budapest, which credits Fermi alone for the claim.

Do extra-terrestrial beings exist? - the Nobel Prize winning Italian physicist, Enrico Fermi, was once asked by his disciples in California. Of course, Fermi answered - they are already here among us, they are called Hungarians...You are welcome here, in the homeland of the extra-terrestrial beings. Why did Fermi think this about us? Because Hollywood's dream factories were partly built by Hungarian producers, directors, writers and cameramen? Or because - as the saying goes - Hungarians were created by God to sit on horseback? Perhaps because Bela Bartok's music in his own time was considered extra-terrestrial by many? Or because of the Hungarian language, which does not resemble any world language and sounds so strange?

So, who are these Hungarians? It is not (yet) known quite precisely. It seems certain they arrived somewhere from Asia. Their nearest kinship is with distant "small" peoples. With regard to Hungary's location, world languages generally define it as Eastern Europe. In fact, our country is situated in the centre of the continent, in Central Europe. In its eastern part, this is the Carpathian Basin, where one thousand years ago visitors already found a Hungarian state.

Although these Hungarians-are-aliens stories do not match exactly, it is reasonable to assume that they derived from the same source--a single proto-story at Los Alamos which we have never heard directly but that must have existed for these three stories to be so similar. It seems probable that Jarod's Hungarian claim is also related in some way, perhaps branching off of the same proto-story. What was this original proto-story and why was it told? Who first equated Hungarians with aliens? Was it Fermi, Szilard or someone before them? What was the date of first telling? Was it before or after the Second World War? Was it after 1953?Without knowing the personalities of the people circulating the story, including the authors who reported it, it is hard for us to subtract out their emotional biases. All we know is that somebody first told this story for some reason, and for some reason it was remembered by physicists at Los Alamos and retold enough times that it became part of the stable folklore, to be repeated to the authors many years later. Was it, as SteeDee suggests, just good-natured ribbing around the water cooler? If so, why was this particular story told repeatedly and not others? What emotional need did it serve in the speakers?

If we understand SteeDee's theory correctly, the first Hungarians-are-aliens story arose from some minor human incident. The Hungarians may have stood out from the rest of the staff at Los Alamos, perhaps by maintaining their own cliques and speaking their own indecipherable tongue, and this made the English speakers uncomfortable. The Hungarians were like aliens to the rest, and since there were many reports of "flying saucers" in the popular press in the 50s and late 40s, the "Martian" label was a convenient way to sublimate the social tensions. To be called extraterrestrials, in a jocular, rib-poking way, might have helped reduce this social friction both inside and outside the Hungarian group. If there was a problem with communication, the recurring alien joke would provide a means to make light of it, thereby expressing frustrations that could not otherwise be spoken.

This is a respectable theory, and it could be true, but it is not the only one possible.

Suppose that things happened as Jarod said in DR#24. Sometime in the late 40s or early 50s, one of the most important contacts in history was made--between real extraterrestrials and a small segment the US government. Los Alamos, as our nation's premier think tank, would have been at the center of it. A decision was made, for whatever social or national security reasons, that the facts must be kept from the public, and a lid of absolute secrecy was imposed on the project. The participants knew their duty and obeyed the rules--perhaps with some firm enforcement--but keeping completely quiet about such incredible knowledge must have taken an emotional toll. The participants were forbidden to speak in public about the truth of the project, but that did not mean they could not tell jokes. A patently ridiculous folklore about Martians, inspired by the truth but far enough from it to not violate security oaths, might have been a way for participants to express themselves and reinforce camaraderie in public without getting in trouble. Emotional tensions could be released without jeopardizing any secrets.

We see the same sort of sublimation in Jarod 2, who often exchanges inside jokes regarding aliens with his former co-workers. (Or at least he seems to, since we have never met the co-workers.) Some of his jokes, which he has shown to us in writing, we find nearly indecipherable because they contain many long acronyms that apparently have meaning only to those on the inside. Jarod 2 is also an accomplished illustrator who produces pictures of imaginary aliens for certain products he quietly sells at UFO gatherings. These are basically standard Grays, but shown in situations where real Grays would never be found, like piloting a human airplane or dressed in the regal costume of a lord or lady. We know his pricing structure and see that he isn't making any significant money on these projects, yet he devotes a lot of time to them. He is capable of drawing real aliens that he has seen himself, because he has shown us an elegant sketch of Jarod 1, sitting at a conference table as J-2 says he personally saw him. Why, then, does he waste his time drawing imaginary aliens, too?

These drawings are different from his simulator accounts. There is no rich history behind these aliens, and Jarod readily admits they are imaginary. What is most interesting to us is that his former co-workers seem to love these fake aliens and according to J-2 are among his best customers for these products. The way we account for such odd tastes is this: Even if these workers cannot possess real photos of real aliens, no security regulation can prevent them from displaying a ridiculous photo of an alien that could not possibly be real but that has a personal connection for them. Thus their feelings can be expresses in the open, perhaps of fondness or nostalgia, without violating any of the oppressive rules they must observe.

Bob Lazar recounts a similar curiosity: He says that on the wall of the "S-4" laboratory where he worked was a commercial-type poster with a photo of a saucer in flight and the inscription, "THEY'RE HERE!" This is the kind of odd human detail that makes the Lazar story strike us as more real, precisely because it seems out of place. Such a poster could serve no government need, and including it in the story does not advance the needs of a liar either. No such detail would appear in a secret base created by Hollywood or in the fevered imaginations of a conspiracy buff; those sources would give us only stainless steel walls and workers marching like automatons. We could imagine that the poster was created not by the government, but by a worker like J-2 in his spare time. Think of what it would be like to work for 30 years in the firmly controlled environment that Jarod describes, barred from talking in public about a highly emotional situation. Although he says he was comfortable with his work, Jarod sometimes refers to it as his "prison," as though he had only recently been released. People need outlets, ways to say what they are forbidden to say, and these inside jokes might provide some emotional release.

[Readers reports "They're Here" posters on TV]

Avenues Of Investigation

As we have tried to say before (and been cruelly flamed every time), Psychospy's immediate aim is not to prove the Jarod story true or false. We seek first to understand the story, and building up a database of connections and origins should eventually make the truth obvious. Why should this approach be so offensive? Some Star Trek, Star Wars and X-Files fans pursue similar obsessions in their own virtual worlds, striving to understand warp drives and the intricacies of spoken Klingon without making demands that the story be real. We play a similar game, but the possibility, however remote, that the result might not be virtual gives it an extra edge. Movies and TV shows are always limited by the imagination and intellect of their creators. They may entertain for a while, but sooner or later the inconsistencies and repeated plot become so obvious that it isn't much fun anymore. UFOs, in our experience, are much more profound. Like the Energizer bunny, they keep going and going, banging their stupid little drum through almost every meaningful landscape of human philosophy.While we have no means at present to interrogate aliens or read their minds, we can explore any connections that fall on earth. Hungarian, Teller and the U.S. Government are human manifestations that are within our means to explore. Given enough time and effort, we can probably narrow down the origins of the Hungarians-are-aliens stories at Los Alamos and determine the general timeframe and social environment in which they started. If we believe Jarod, then the proto-story behind all these tales was the discovery by a Los Alamos team that the aliens spoke "a higher form of Hungarian"--whatever that means. The jokes, then, would have to emerge after this date. If it could be shown that they came before, then the cause-effect connection becomes much more awkward: It would suggest the unlikely scenario that there was not one Hungarian proto-story but two, like two nearly identical languages appearing in different places on earth without a common ancestor.

Jarod indicates in his statement in DR#24 that significant government contact with live aliens began with a suspiciously gentle saucer "crash" in Arizona. Although we cannot be certain it is the same, Raymond Fowler's Nevada Test Site witness "Fritz Warner" [book excerpt] claims he took part in a crash recovery, possibly near Kingman, on May 21, 1953. By then, the saucer hysteria in the public press had already been going strong for over five years, since the Kenneth Arnold sighting on June 24, 1947. Under the skeptical scenario, the Hungarians-are-Martians joke would have had plenty of time to establish itself before 1953. Establishing, by radio-carbon dating or whatever, that the proto-story emerged earlier, would give satisfaction to Phil Klass and his evil skeptic minions, while a later date would prove nothing but still keep the door open for those who want to believe.

That said, we have no inclination at present to personally pound the pavement to dig up this information. Life is short and we have easier avenues to pursue. Nonetheless, we ask any readers who are closer to this kind of information to please pass it on to us.

Executive Correspondence?

Whilst cruising the conspiracy ghetto on the World Wide Web, we stumbled upon this interesting bittie in a pile of Illuminati/New World Order rubbish. [Source document | Parent page] The X's apparently represent parts blacked out on the original paper document.

EXECUTIVE CORRESPONDENCE - EXECUTIVE BRIEFING
SUBJECT: PROJECT AQUARIUS (TS) - ATTENTION
THIS DOCUMENT WAS PREPARED BY MJ-12. MJ-12 IS
SOLELY RESPONSIBLE FOR ITS SUBJECT MATTER.
DOCUMENT CONTROL: ECN 0001
CLASSIFIED BY: MJ12 XXXXXX
DECLASSIFY ON: EXEMPT
TOP SECRET
PROJECT AQUARIUS(TS/ORCON) (PROWORD): XXXXXX Contains 16 volumes of documented information collected from the beginning of the United States' Investigation of Unidentified Flying Objects (UFOs) and Identified Alien Crafts (IAC). The Project was originally established in 1953, by order of President Eisenhower, under control of XXXXXX and MJ12. In 1960, the Project's name was changed from Project XXXXXX to Project Aquarius. The Project was funded by XXXXXX confidential funds (non-appropriated). The Project XXX<for 1 full line>XXX Dec 1969 after Project Blue Book was closed. The purpose of Project Aquarius was to collect all scientific, technological, medical and intelligence information from UFO/IAC sightings and contacts with alien life forms. This orderly file of collected information has been used to advance the United States' Space Program.

(TS/ORCON) The preceding briefing is an historical account of the United States Government's investigation of Aerial Phenomena, Recovered Alien Aircraft, and contacts with extraterrestrial Life Forms.

2. (TS/ORCON) PROJECT SIGMA: (PROWORD): AQUARIUS. Originally established as part of Project XXXXXX in 1954. Became a separate project in 1976. It's mission was to establish communication with Aliens. This Project met with positive success (sic) when in 1959, the United States established primitive communications with the Aliens. On April 25, 1964, a USAF intelligence officer met two aliens at a pre-arranged location in the desert in New Mexico. The contact lasted for approximately three hours. XXX<for over half a line>XXX the Air Force officer managed to exchange basic information with the two Aliens (Atch 7). This project is continuing at an Air Force base in New Mexico. (OPR): XXXXXX

3. (TS/ORCON) PROJECT SNOWBIRD: (PROWORD): XXXXXX Originally established in 1972. Its mission was to test fly a recovered Alien aircraft. This project is continuing in Nevada. XXXXXX

4. (TS/ORCON) PROJECT XXXXXX XXXXXX Originally established in 1968. Its mission was to evaluate all UFOXXXXXX information pertaining to space technology. PROJECT POUNCE continues XXXXXX XXXXXX

Can anyone tell us more about this document, like when it first emerged and whether its format is consistent with real government documents? We cannot vouch for anything about this document, but if we are looking for connections to the Jarod story, it certainly has them. Our attention was drawn to it because it was far more restrained than the Bill Cooper conspiracy material it was packaged with. Cooper alleges every conceivable kind of conspiracy--JFK, AIDS, New World Order and virtually anything else he can sell--but this document seems to stick to the facts of only a single alleged conspiracy. At least it was not created by your average dim-wit conspiracy buff but someone with slightly more sophistication.

The dates seem fairly consistent: At least 1953 is directly cited by Jarod for the founding of his program. The date of first contact, 1959, seems rather late, however. Did it take six years to communicate with The Boys in quarantine, or did the crash in which they were found take place later that 1953? Project Snowbird is also confusing. A project to test fly alien craft seems consistent with Lazar's tale but not Jarod's: By 1972, Jarod was already working on a flight simulator for the human-built version of the craft. Wouldn't the flight testing of the alien craft already have taken place?

We sent this document to Jarod 2. He seems to think it is a fake. Without prompting, he says, "The dates are all wrong." He also says there was no "MJ-12" after 1953; the new system put in place by Nixon changed all that. He also says that the method of classifying documents was changed. In other words, the form of the document might have been valid before 1953, but not after, as the dates in the document imply. Nonetheless, he says he did not have a lot of experience with these kinds of documents so he cannot say for sure. The technical documents he worked with did not contain classification markings, except for strange filing codes that may have been in Hungarian.

Enough with the Hungarian!

We contacted Paranet archivist Micheal Corbin to see if he knew this document. He seems to recall that it came directly from Bill Cooper--perhaps the world's least reliable source. Someone else tells us the document is printed in full in Linda Moulton Howe's cattle mutilation book, An Alien Harvest. Howe said it was part of Bill Cooper's "statement" released on Paranet and Compuserve on December 18, 1988. All debate aside, this document, real or fake, still fits the stream we are pursuing. It is something that must be added to our heap of folklore for categorization and filing.

And What of MJ-12?

The document above reminds us of another obvious connection: The MJ-12 document. This is supposedly a briefing paper created for President-Elect Eisenhower in Nov. 1952. "MJ-12" refers to the committee allegedly appointed by President Truman to study the UFO information. The authenticity of the document has been widely analyzed and debated in the UFO press, with good arguments on both sides. We have no desire now to jump into the fray. Instead, we fall back on our old "folklore" excuse and note only that MJ-12 is consistent with the stories of Lazar and Jarod as well as the "executive" document above. In the briefing papers, circa 1952, there is talk only of crash debris and bodies, no live aliens or communication. It is plausible that the new administration would want to study the situation for a few months before implementing a replacement program in the summer of 1953. Vice President Nixon was the logical choice to review the problem and make recommendations; that is the sort of thing vice presidents do since they are not under the gun every day like the President is.So what is the proto-story behind this stream of folklore? Is it merely lies built upon lies? If so, what was the original lie? The MJ-12 document surfaced in 1984, conveniently delivered on 35mm film to a UFO researcher. Whether real or fake, it must have been derived from something previous--either the real document from 1952 or the public UFO folklore up to 1984. In other words, even fake documents follow rules of evolution. They build upon the public information available at the time and cannot reflect other people's claims that have not yet been made. Dubious claims are still legitimate subjects for research, and the conclusion that they are fabrications does not render them devoid of interest.

For all four of these items--the MJ-12 document, the "executive" document above, Lazar's story and Jarod's story--there is no room for "benign misinterpretation" by the speaker as might apply to other folklore. Each of these documents or claims is either true or a deliberate fabrication. Maybe some are real and some fabrications, or maybe all are fabrications. In the total fabrication scenario, one liar alone could not do the job; there must be multiple liars, each building upon what the previous ones have said, yet doing it free of the expansive ego and grandiose inclinations common to the liars we have known. Bill Cooper and Sean Morton are certainly capable of lying and plagiarizing the ideas of others, as they frequently do, but they could never agree with each other for very long or to such an extent as this. It is their nature to expand every story theatrically to hog the spotlight. In our experience, we have never met a restrained liar. They lie to seek attention for themselves and are rarely burdened in this pursuit by the need for intellectual consistency.

These four stories, if all false, would at least provide us with a new human animal: liars with restraint and principal, who hold the integrity of a story higher than their own self-aggrandizement. We ask ourselves, from a psychological standpoint, How could this be so? What would motivate a liar if not ego? Is it money? If so, who is paying and why? The government certainly has the funds, but it would be engaged in a most peculiar propaganda program: a coordinated effort since at least 1984 specifically creating public distrust of the government itself and drawing attention to secret defense facilities. This is inconsistent with our knowledge of government agencies, who tend to pursue single-minded agendas defined by established rules with little room for much subterfuge.

No matter how you slice it, there is something here to learn.

Pursuing The Hologram

Reasonable skeptics ask, How could the government keep something as big as UFOs secret for nearly 50 years? Regardless of the efficiency of security, wouldn't the story have to leak out? The answer may be that it already has. The truth could have been in front of us all along, surrounded by the drivel of a dozen con-men. Whenever a reasonable and compelling UFO story emerges, the circus of wackos and charlatans arrives a few days later. They are the human parasites who have come to suck the energy from the story to turn it toward their own personal agenda. The attraction does not end for them until they have thoroughly discredited and fragmented the story and no one cares about it anymore.Maybe everything we want to know is already available to us in the vast UFO slag heap, which is rapidly making its way onto the internet as we speak. The challenge is how to separate the ore from the dross, and one technique is our folklore method. We look at the entire body of fantastic UFO stories, take it all at face value and try to find parts of it which are related to each other and fit together into a consistent whole. We are not going to spend a lot of time on any one story, because life is short and history has shown that specific UFO investigations lead only to the conclusion that (A) the story is false or (B) that it remains a mystery--neither of which significantly advances our knowledge. Instead, we look at the entire body of folklore and try to distinguish the various streams within it. Then, we concentrate on what seems the most coherent and accessible stream and apply to it the techniques of historical linguistics to reconstruct the original proto-story which gave rise to this folklore.

If the number of stories in the folklore stream is large enough, they form a hologram. A hologram, in the physical sense, is a piece of photographic film that you shine a laser into to retrieve an image. As it happens, holograms were first conceived in 1948 by a Hungarian-born engineer, Dennis Gabor, who may or may not be related to the Hollywood sisters. Although the film is flat, the image you see is in 3-D, and the entire scene is represented in every part of the film. If you cut the film in half, you still see the same picture, albeit in a fuzzier, more degraded form. There can be defects in some parts of the film without affecting the overall picture. The defects, in fact, are easy to spot, because they clash with the image produced by the rest of the film.

What this means to our folklore method is that as long as we collect a lot of stories, we do not have to expend undue effort worrying about the quality of each one. The defective stories will automatically call attention to themselves as a common image begins to emerge from the rest. Most of the theoretical concepts that apply to physical holograms also apply here. To get a three dimensional image from the two dimensional reports being collected, the stories must contain, on the whole, sufficient information about the source object to reconstruct the third dimension. You don't get this information simply by replicating the same 2-D picture.

For example: Let's say the folklore stream was started by a liar, who simply made something up out of the blue. He tells his story to two people, each of whom tell it to two more people, and on, until we have a body of 1000 separate stories, each distorted in its own way by the people it has passed through. If you now collect all these stories and compare them, then subtract out the irreconcilable inconsistencies between them, what you have left is a story that is no deeper than the original lie. The two dimensional story remains two dimensional even though replicated.

It is different if the source object is something real and three dimensional that a number of different witnesses had directly experienced from different angles. This would be true if the government UFO cover-up were real. Each of those witnesses tells others, who tell others, and in the end you may have 1000 distorted stories just like before. If you analyze the folklore now, you will find that on the whole the image has far greater richness than any single story conveys. There will still be inconsistencies, resulting from the noise picked up enroute, but many unexpected but consistent details will also emerge. Encoded in this body of distorted reports are the observations of the original separate witnesses, each seeing the source object from a different angle and conveying together a more complete picture than any one of these witnesses actually experienced.

Perhaps our readers can see Psychospy's plan. We have focused on a certain stream of folklore. This stream purports that a limited section of the U.S. government has engaged in a sophisticated UFO research program since the 40s and 50s; in the course of this program, contact has been made with aliens and a transfer of technology has taken place. There are many other streams of the UFO folklore that we have chosen to ignore for now. We haven't talked about abductions (AB), cattle mutilations (CM), crop circles (CC), lights in the sky (LS), ancient astronauts (AA), monuments on Mars (MM), underground bases (UB) or Men in Black (MB). It is not that we regard these fields as invalid; we simply haven't yet come across a substantial link to connect them to the historical theme we have chosen to pursue, which is government cover-up (GC). We think this makes our pursuit more credible: We do not try to describe everything, only a single government program.

Now that you can see where we are going, we need your help. We want to collect more stories connected to our chosen stream, and we know there are a lot of them out there. Anecdotes anyone? What was the story someone once told a friend of your friend about the tiny furniture he installed in a government laboratory? Have you picked up anything relevant on the net that you do not see referenced in our web pages? As long as some specific government involvement is implicated, apart from conspiracy speculation, we want to hear about it. No Illuminati/New World Order theories, please! We want specific experiences, not grand enlightenment. We also do not need to know about underground bases or tunnels unless there is a tangible link to government activity on the surface. We prefer to receive these reports in electronic form, suitable for posting to the Web. Anonymous reports are okay, but it would be nice if we could publish at least your email address along with them to allow further queries. We will accept and respect confidential reports (TS/ORCON), but not with enthusiasm. If it doesn't get on the Web, the story is as good as forgotten.

Volunteers are also needed to set up Web pages for the new material. You need to speak Html, have more than half a brain (90% preferred) and be willing to obey some standard rules of style consistent with the existing pages. It is best if you can provide your own web space, but we may be able to arrange space if necessary. People with scanners and OCR software are also needed to help turn printed reports from the pre-net era into electronic ones, accessible by everyone.

Enroll now! Get in on the ground floor! This could be your rocket ship to the Moon! (Or Hell.)

Our Readers Respond

UFOjockey@aol.com writes:

I am fascinated by Jarod, but extremely bugged by the idea the he is speaking with permission of his superiors. Uh, oh... I think I'm beginning to smell a rodent. Permission of his superiors??? Well, if it isn't just a load of disinfo, then "The Boys" have made the decision to let their presence become known. (Now we're in REAL trouble!)

Lazar associate Gene Huff writes:

I've got two things to say [in response to DR#24]... The first is, if people feel Bob Lazar fabricated his story to fool Lear, they must at least give him credit for doing a fantastic job. It is intertwined with all of the necessary components, all the way down to frequencies of the gravity "A" wave. Second, he has to be the most fantastic gambler ever. In 1988, he decided to fabricate a story, betting that in subsequent years he could make money on a movie deal. Now that's successful gambling!

A technician at a Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory relays this anecdote:

Our lab has physicists and their support staff that come over from all government agencies and laboratories. Around 1991, I asked an engineer about Area 51 because he had mentioned he worked at the Nevada Test Site a number of years ago. He said yes... there is indeed an Area 51 but mostly it involves Black aircraft such as SR-71s, etc. I asked him about Bob Lazar and S-4. Immediately his eyes became wide and he made fanning gestures with his hands and said, "Don't talk about that here." After that he got up and left and avoided all discussion about that subject. He comes irregularly to our lab and he won't discuss the subject anymore.

Reader RM writes...

I am very interested in your work at Area 51... Has anyone seriously discussed whether or not the creatures may be from the far future? They may be afraid of paradoxes, which could explain their bizarre activities trying to confuse the issue with us looking only for aliens.

Never mind paradoxes; what about sarcasm? Are they afraid of that? Could this be the anti-alien weapon to finally put an end to those nasty abductions? Irony, too, could have deadly effect, but can we trust the military with it? Could the same lethal capability, intended to vanquish a foreign foe, be turned against the domestic population? Fortunately, the U.S. defense establishment still lags far behind the rest of the world in these critical technologies. Although often a victim, the military has failed to grasp paradoxes, sarcasm, irony, black comedy or indeed any form of humor whatsoever. If anyone is to save the planet by application of the comic arts, it must be us.

Intel Bitties

ALIEN HIGHWAY BILL DEFEATED. Much to our surprise, in spite of unanimous approval in the state Assembly [DR#25], the bill to designate State Route 375 the "Extraterrestrial Alien Highway" has died in the Nevada Senate. As the legislative session approached its close in June, the Senate Transportation Chairman felt that the bill was frivolous compared to the other unfinished business at hand and refused to consider it. Personally, we blame Ambassador Merlin. His impure thoughts and spilling of seminal liquor [DR#27] could only have angered his alien overlords and disrupted the harmony of the cosmos. Merlin, however, has acknowledged no defeat. The Las Vegas Review-Journalreported:

Ambassador Merlin II, a man who spends his days in the Legislative Building and claims to be an alien, was not disturbed by O'Donnell's reluctance to hear the bill. "There's a government secret right now that will take care of the situation," said Merlin, whose given name was David Solomon. "It will be revealed shortly."

LEVIATHAN HIKE AUG. 26. The public hike for August will take us to Leviathan cave, a quarter-mile cavern system on a mountaintop north of Rachel. It will take place Saturday, Aug. 26, beginning in the early AM from Rachel. Although everyone is invited, this is a "specialty" hike that only a handful are expected to attend. You need to be in top shape to brave the strenuous 4+ hour hike up. (Of course, you can try it if you want and turn back if it is too much.) Entering the cave involves climbing down a 15 foot rope. You need to be in Rachel by Friday night for the early start, but free on-the-floor lodging will be provided by the Research Center. If you plan to join, you must email our fearless leader at AkaZero@aol.com or call the Research Center at 702-729-2648.AL CUTILLO WEB SITE. Little A'Le'Inn supporter Al Cutillo [DR#27], has unveiled his new Area 51 web site. "I will be handling it with as much professionalism as possible," Al announced. The page is supposed to be at http://www.indirect.com/www/abcassoc/area51/a51.html, but it often displays server errors. Fortunately, we copied the page when we first read it and have preserved it without alteration on own web server. Al's web structure, which exhibits high hopes but only two pages at present, seems primarily intent on counteracting the evil effects of a certain unnamed agent....

In one particular "researcher", which I will not name names, who seems to have a two fold goal, one being that they want to be looked at as the "expert", and the second being that they want to make as much money as they can in exploiting the whole area, to the point of having complete catalogs of "related materials", a WEB address to place the orders, another address to check order status, and still another to "order" a purported "news publication" about Area 51... Well, you will NOT find garbage like that here !!!

Imagine such a beast! He must be exposed!

For those who are interested, Al's advertised Area 51 tours and his internet connection for the Inn [DR#27] still have not materialized, but perhaps he is taking more time for the cautious research he is known for. The Rat will report any unveilings as soon as they take place because the public has a need to know.

Rubik cube

NEW PRODUCT. The Curve of Binding Energy (quoted above) will be available from us shortly. The price for this 232-page softbound book is $10.00 plus the usual $4 postage. [Description.]

ASSISTANCE FROM OUR READERS IS REQUESTED for these Hungarian leads:

1. We recall that the inventor of the Rubik's Cube was Hungarian. Any confirmation? [A reader confirms and supplies references.]
2. A reader says the computer language PROLOG--often used in linguistic analysis--was invented in Hungary. Anyone have info on its history and a sample of code? [No, France; more info]
3. A reader reports that a former president of the Mormon church, Spencer Kimball, once gave a talk in Finland saying that the Finnish language, a cousin of Hungarian, is the closest living language to the original "Adamic" spoken by one of the lost tribes of Israel. (According to Mormon doctrine, two of these tribes migrated to America where one of them left behind golden tablets containing the original Book of Mormon written in "reformed Egyptian." These were buried on a hill in what is now upstate New York to be rediscovered and translated in the late 1820s by Mormon founder Joseph Smith before God took the tablets back. Clearly, we could devote an entire issue of the Desert Rat to this fascinating anthropological history.) Can anyone tell us exactly what Kimball said?
4. Is Bob Lazar Hungarian? [He replies: "hardly."]

PSYCHOSPY HUNGARIAN EXPEDITION. Like Richard Dreyfus building Devil's Tower out of mashed potatoes in Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Psychospy feels irresistibly drawn to Hungary. We have made our reservations and bought our tickets and will be visiting Budapest sometime between Nov. 2 and 8. Munich, Austria and maybe Prague are also on the intinerary. Can anyone tell us about the local UFO lore in these areas--especially Hungary? Where is Hungary's "Area 51," and more importantly, where is Hungary's Vegas? Will we find buffets there, and if not, how will we eat? How do you say "Big Mac" in Hungarian?

Supplements and Reader Responses

1. Parable about the spread of news in the henhouse.
2. Al Cutillo provides his investigative credentials in a note to Agent X.
3. Mormon Research Page by a fallen member
4. Campbell's Personality Classification System
5. Popular conspiracy focus Nikola Tesla was not Hungarian. He was an ethnic Serb who grew up in Croatia. (Given current "ethnic cleansing" there, this may never happen again.)
6. Psychospy report on Tyson-McNeeley boxing match in Las Vegas, 8/19/95. (Observed many Famous People arriving in limousines)
7. Sean Morton To Join Big Kahuna in Egypt | Main Page on Sean
8. "Martians Replace Marx As Hungary Seeks New Beliefs." Article from London Times, 12/28/94.
9. A reader shares a Hungarian Recipe, 8/24/95.
10. Reader comments that quirky "human details" are found in all good fiction. (9/5/95)
11. Reader Recommmends book: Foucalt's Pendulum