Earth (32 page)

On November 13, 1989, Bob reported to the Pentagon for a meeting with Thomas P. Stafford, Lieutenant General, USAF (Ret.). A former fighter pilot (who flew F-86D Sabre jets among others), he later became an astronaut, piloting Gemini VI for the first rendezvous in space and commanding Gemini IX. He was also the commander of Apollo 10 in May 1969, the first flight of the lunar module, performing the first rendezvous around the Moon and the entire lunar landing mission, apart from the actual landing itself. He logged his fourth space flight as Apollo commander of the Apollo-Soyuz Test Project mission, July 15–24, 1975, a joint space flight culminating in the historic first meeting in space between American astronauts and Soviet cosmonauts.
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Stafford turned out to be the intelligence community contact for Cosmic
Journey. Following some bizarre sensations generated by an unusual type of detector at the security check, Bob proceeded to the general's office, accompanied by a guard. Stafford discussed exhibits for the project, asking Bob where he planned to obtain material for the kiosks to show UFO case histories and photographs. Stafford indicated that NASA and the CIA's National Photographic Interpretation Center (NPIC) would be good places to start.

“One of the more intriguing elements of the discussion,” Bob told me, “involved an exhibit showing an alien/ET corpse.

“As a reference, the general showed me an eight-by-ten-inch color photo of what appeared to be an alien in a cryogenic tank; a space-age-looking coffin with blue tube lighting inside the clear lexan cover…. It was difficult to see too much in the way of detail, so it's virtually impossible to know if this was real, and the general didn't enlighten me…. It looked like one of the so-called ‘gray' types, but the chin was much more sharply pointed than is usually described. I could see evidence of the ‘bug' eyes, but there was a sort of covering over them….”

The general seemed to be concerned about using the real thing versus a mock-up, querying Bob about his thoughts on public perception. Bob suggested that displaying a companion autopsy report with color photographs might lend credibility. The possible exhibition of an actual alien corpse was proposed quite seriously. “As a matter of fact,” Bob added, “I got the impression they had a lot of bodies to choose from! The general also had the same concerns about showing a real, versus a mock-up, craft, [and] I suggested that the real thing would be preferable if on-board access for the public could be achieved.

“The other primary areas of discussion involved my robotics experience and the minor role that I had played in the development of the space shuttle arm, which was initially designed to provide life support to astronauts and a diagnostic instrument for repairing satellites in orbit.”
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Bob had expected further contact with General Stafford, but none was forthcoming, probably related to the fact that funds for the project apparently stalled. In late 1996, I invited Stafford and his wife Linda to drinks and dinner at his hotel in London. It was a great privilege listening to this modest pioneer as he answered my questions about the flight to the Moon
in Apollo 10 in May 1969. Naturally, at one point during the meal, I asked about Bob Oechsler's claim to have met him in the Pentagon back in 1991. “Bob
who
?” he expostulated. He denied having met him or even having had an office in the Pentagon at that time.
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For a while, I believed Stafford. However, a combination of several circumstances, including Bob's unwavering insistence that he had indeed been invited for a meeting with Stafford in the Pentagon, caused me to change my mind.

During the second week of January 1990, Bob was billeted at NASA Ellington Field (also known as Ellington Air Force Base), near the Johnson Space Center in Houston, where he was asked to assist in reconfiguring the movements of the shuttle arm from a zero-gravity environment to that of ordinary gravity, according to the project's requirements. But first, he told me, he was required to become accustomed to how it worked in “microgravity.” Together with some astronauts and engineers, he was flown by helicopter to a NASA facility about twenty miles southwest of Ellington, where he changed into special clothing in preparation for entry into another room. He stepped through a hatch into this other room—and became airborne!

“It was weird, because it's like the loss of equilibrium and everything,” he explained. “Obviously the astronauts had done a lot of training; they were so accustomed to it, and they were laughing at me…. You learn to skip around [and] it takes about fifteen minutes to become accustomed to the biomechanics [and] feels almost similar to getting into a pool of water—the arms tend to swing out.”

No more than about eight astronauts or engineers worked on a variety of projects in the chamber at any one time, Bob told me. The chamber measured about thirty feet long, twenty feet wide, and nine feet high. Recessed in the ceiling was a strange, plasma-like light, which Bob felt was responsible for generating microgravity. Everyone was wearing the same clothing. “Several of the others I knew, but they really wouldn't let us talk among ourselves. It was pretty much forbidden to talk about anything that had to do with what we were doing.”

In January 1990, Bob was invited to visit a North American Aerospace Defense Command (NORAD) installation in the Gulf of Mexico. He traveled in one of three sleek, black NORAD helicopters. “You couldn't
see where the door was until it popped open,” he said. The helicopter was relatively quiet, sounding “more like a humming noise.” Bob believes that a highly advanced type of propulsion was being utilized, possibly deriving from alien technology. In any event, the over-500-mile flight lasted amazingly no more than forty-five minutes, a speed well in excess of that of the world's officially fastest helicopter, the Sikorsky X2, which in 2010 reached the unofficial speed record of 288 miles per hour in level flight. The X2 is known as a “compound” helicopter: in addition to two four-blade main rotors set one above the other, it also features a “propulsor”—a six-blade propeller that produces forward thrust.
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Of related interest, in a 2002/2003 Discovery Wings Channel program on the future development of the U.S. Army's Boeing/Sikorsky RAH-66 Comanche helicopter, former Director of Army Acquisition Bud Foster revealed: “I think Comanche will be flying in 2050. In my opinion it is the last pure helicopter the Army will ever develop. We may be into antigravity machines after Comanche.”

The black helicopter landed on what looked like an oil-rig platform, possibly twenty miles south of Pensacola, Florida. It turned out to be a NORAD facility. Bob was taken to a control room with consoles and a huge screen, the latter seemingly with a three-dimensional quality and displaying about a third or fourth of the southeast quadrant of the United States. “It had altitude to it as well, and the entire area was covered with a grid that was moving,” added Bob. At one point, a series of “blips” moved across the top part of the screen:

“There were five, as I recall [and] they were labeled, like a typical radar screen where blips usually designate aircraft … these particular ones that were up top were all labeled
ASC
.
They didn't have any specific numbers—just
ASC
.
I overheard someone say, ‘Alternative Space Craft.' And they came down and spread out—all five of them. Two immediately went off the screen to the northwest and one came around the Gulf ‘horn' … almost as if they were following the shoreline. There was one—possibly two, I forget—that stopped what looked like just across the border of Florida into Georgia [and] as soon as it stopped, it glowed; there was like a red glow that came off of it. I don't know what that meant….”

After about 45 minutes at the NORAD facility, Bob and the others
were flown back to Ellington.
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Plans for the Cosmic Journey exhibition were temporarily shelved in early 1990, ostensibly for budgetary reasons. And the project directors denied that they ever had any plans to exhibit anything other than mock-ups of aliens or flying saucers. They also denied that Bob Oechsler was ever employed as a consultant. NASA, too, denied that Bob had visited the places he said he went to.

On June 5, 1991, I had a brief meeting with astrophysicist Colonel (later Brigadier General) Simon “Pete” Worden, at that time Director, Advanced Concepts, Science and Technology, National Space Council (NSC), Executive Office of the President. The meeting took place in the NSC offices at the Old Executive Office Building (now the Eisenhower Executive Office Building) adjoining the White House. I asked Worden if he knew anything about the fate of the Cosmic Journey project, and if he was aware of any plans to include “extraterrestrial hardware” in the exhibition. He replied that he knew of no such plans, and that the exhibition had been canceled owing to the Spanish government's withdrawal of its financial support. He promised to keep me informed if he learned anything more. I did not hear from him again.

In February 1992, I wrote to Vice President Dan Quayle (Chairman of the NSC), seeking information on the status of the project, alluding to the alleged plans to feature an extraterrestrial body and/or craft. I received a reply from Jack Schmidt, NASA Exhibits Coordinator. “There were plans to have the exhibition at Expo '92,” he wrote, “but negotiations between Feld Productions, Inc. and a group of Spanish investors were not successful. At that point further development of the exhibition was terminated….”
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A Clandestine Space Program

In October 2010, Simon Worden—as Director, NASA Ames—revealed a joint project with DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency) called the Hundred Year Starship. “The human space program is now really aimed at settling other worlds,” he explained. “Twenty years ago you had to whisper that in dark bars and get fired.” He went on to mention some nearer-term projects that NASA is exploring, not necessarily related to the
Starship program, one of which was “electric propulsion.”

“Anybody that watches the Star Trek Enterprise, you know you don't see huge plumes of fire,” Worden added. “Within a few years we will see the first true prototype of a spaceship that will take us between worlds….”
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But as Lockheed Skunk Works genius Ben Rich had declared, during a lecture at the UCLA School of Engineering as far back as 1993: “We already have the means to travel among the stars.”
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In the late 1980s, the Electric Propulsion Study was conducted by Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC), a leading U.S. civil and military R&D company, for the Astronautics Laboratory (later part of the Phillips Laboratory, currently merged into the Air Force Research Laboratory's Space Vehicles Directorate). The study's primary objective was to “outline physical methods to test theories of inductive coupling between electromagnetic and gravitational forces to determine the feasibility of such methods as they apply to space propulsion.” In simplified terms—an antigravity propulsion system.
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In his ground-breaking book
Secrets of Antigravity Propulsion
, physicist Paul LaViolette recounts much information acquired from sources knowledgeable about Project Skyvault, a highly classified program set up in the early 1950s to develop exotic propulsion technology. One of these sources—“Tom”—stated that NASA is “essentially a public relations organization or a front that obscures Air Force space research.” Tom had served with the Civil Air Patrol (CAP) and had been the recipient of the prestigious Michelson Award, as a result of which he was selected in 1963 to represent Idaho, together with CAP representatives from all the other states, to visit Chanute Air Force Base, Rantoul, Illinois. One day, about eight generals appeared onstage in an auditorium for a “no holds barred” question-and-answer session. A representative asked about Air Force Major Donald E. Keyhoe, who had been censored for his pioneering books on UFOs and outspoken comments in the media.

“One of the generals responded that they had a way of taking care of people who gave out a little too much information,” LaViolette relates. “He said they would use physical injury or whatever was necessary to make them shut up, indicating they would kill a person (‘extreme prejudice,' if you will). Someone else started to ask more about UFOs….

“One of the generals said the United States had a defense system in place
at the time that consisted of a number of satellites, in orbit not only around Earth, but also around Mercury, Venus, Mars, and a few other, more distant planets they couldn't talk about. He said the satellites together functioned as an early warning system, that they were afraid of the ‘people out there' because they didn't know very much about them. This satellite system was built to observe three possible sources: missiles that might come from the Soviet Union, missiles that might come from China, and intrusions of aliens coming in toward Earth.

“Someone asked why the generals were being so candid. According to Tom, one responded by saying, ‘If you want, you can go ahead and tell people what we've told you, but they're not going to believe you. Besides, if you did get anyone to believe you and they came back to ask us, we would just deny it. So we have nothing to lose by telling you this.'
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“In the late 1950s NASA was formed to compartmentalize, containerize, and sanitize information from all space platforms and vehicles,” claimed John Lear to Art Bell in 2003. “We sold NASA to the public, claiming that all information would belong to them, but they got very little, and even that was highly sanitized.” He added:

“We set up operations in Pine Gap, Australia, to preclude any prying eyes figuring out what we were up to. We regularly ‘eliminated with extreme prejudice' anybody who was part of the operation and made the least little tiny threat about disclosure or dissatisfaction with the operation. Any space mission that included Mercury, Gemini, Apollo, Mariner, Voyager, Clementine, and all the rest, all the data initially came transmitted to Pine Gap, then it was relayed to JPL or wherever, after sanitizing. We had a little trouble with amateur radio operators, but we figured out how they [were able] to intercept these signals [and] managed to deal with that.”
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