Read The Black World of UFOs: Exempt from Disclosure Online
Authors: Robert M. Collins,Timothy Cooper,Rick Doty
In 1985, Ernie was working for Systems Research Labs located on Indian Ripple Road in Dayton, OH.
For someone who was just passing on “stories,” he was a treasure trove of information on virtually every aspect of the UFO subject. Ernie mentioned people like Dr. Anthony Joseph Cacioppo (Chief FTD Scientist at the time) (2a), Dale Graff (reassigned from FTD to the Defense Intelligence Agency [DIA] now retired) and others as having great in-depth knowledge of the UFO/alien subject (2b). The prime reason according to Ernie was that both Cacioppo and Graff used to tag along with MJ-12 Team Members to various meetings. One famous meeting was reportedly held at a ski lodge just north of Albuquerque, NM, in 1968 where the topic of concern was a new wave of UFO sightings that made the U.S. government extremely nervous.
Ernie also talked at length about the underground facilities at Wright-Patterson that were reportedly used to house recovered alien artifacts and other facilities nationwide that included the Los Alamos National Labs (LANL) and the National Security Agency or NSA. A good portion of the information that Ernie provided became part of this book.
Go west as they say
In the spring of 1986, I flew out to Los Angeles, California on a TDY (Temporary Duty Assignment for the Air Force) to consult with the technical staff of TRW. While there, I met Bill Moore, who with Charles Berlitz, wrote the first book on Roswell mentioned before (3). Bill came to my motel room where we sat and talked for about an hour. Bill mentioned being contacted in 1980 by a “Mr. X” (see Section 2, Chapter 4, last paragraph in Addendum and reference 4) who told him at the time that Bill was the only one on the right track among UFO researchers, so he wanted to work with Bill in a government disclosure process (4). We then both agreed to stay in touch and I returned to Dayton and Wright-Patterson AFB.
So, between what I learned at FTD, and elsewhere, this is how it all began for us as a group. From 1986 onward, Bill Moore, Jaime Shandera (TV producer in North Hollywood, CA), Ernie Kellerstrass (working at, General Dynamics, Wyle Corp and Wright-Patterson AFB permanently retiring in April 2007), Rick Doty (NM State Trooper), Hal Puthoff (joined the group in1987, Institute of Advanced Studies in Austin Texas) (5), (6), Dr. Christopher “Kit” Green (joined in 1989 and now at Wayne State Medical Center, Michigan), myself and many others had a succession of meetings dealing with UFOs and the alien subject matter. MJ-12 was often referred to as just the ‘Committee’ in many of our conversations.
Summits without the Cocktails, the fall of 1987
Ernie Kellerstrass had Bill Moore, Jaime Shandera, Hal Puthoff, Col. John Alexander (author of the book, Future War), Scott Jones (assistant for Senator Pell), and me over to his house in Beavercreek, OH (suburb of Dayton, OH) for dinner. All of our meetings were very somber with most of us looking like stiffs right out of an “X-Files” show. During the dinner and afterwards many of the conversations went non-stop involving such topics as Area 51 in Nevada where purportedly there was an ET base according to Ernie. He also mentioned that on government maps there was an area located northwest of Groom Lake marked “radiation” in which a low yield nuclear device had accidentally detonated many years ago (early to mid ‘50s). “It’s still radioactive, and people were warned to keep out of this specific area. There is supposed to be an ET base in there,” Ernie said. It is also an area that the U.S. Government did not want anybody wandering into because anyone who did never returned; they even found security vehicles parked just outside of the area with nobody in them. Kellerstrass said that ostensibly our government never went in there. The idea of an ET base makes you want to stay away, and, of course, you don’t know what to make of the stories. So went the conversations in the ensuing months and years until July 1988 when we met again.
And We Became Birds: “The Aviary”
During the interlude, all the players received bird names. Rick Doty was already the surrogate “Falcon” when the real Falcon (DIA’s, Dale Graff?) couldn’t be found; Ernie became “Hawk,” Hal Puthoff became “Partridge,” Scott Jones was “Hummingbird,” Kit Green became “Blue Jay,” John Alexander was “Chickadee” and I, Robert Collins, became “Condor.”
August 1988: Cloak & Dagger
Another meeting was to take place in Dayton, OH again, and we all had an elaborate map drawn up by Ernie Kellerstrass showing us how to get to the contact point. Each participant had a different contact point except for the Executive Producer Seligman. Bill Moore, Jaime Shandera and I, were all to meet together. Since we didn’t want to cross our signals, and it was important to the executive producer (we felt this was vital to the success of the forthcoming show), Bill and Jaime flew into Dayton OH the night before. I was already in Richmond, IN (40 miles away from Dayton) visiting a friend. The next day we all were able to get local maps and determine how long it would take us to get to the state park. We all traveled separately except for Bill, Jaime and Seligman.
On the way to the contact location, an incredible thunderstorm broke out. It was just pounding. Luckily for us it subsided somewhat so we all made our way down the many roads finally discovering the huge state park. The area had a large lake broken up into a lot of smaller sections with a hilly, wooded area and a large recreation center with a man-made beach.
A couple minutes before 4:00 p.m., the skies began to clear. Bill, Jaime and Seligman (the “UFO Cover-Up Live” producer) got out of the car and began walking toward the beach when all of a sudden, out from a peninsula down to the left came a speedboat. It just came barreling across the lake with a big rooster tail spray behind it. The boat pulled up to the shore and beached then one man jumped off pulling the boat up and called out, “You guys with Bill Moore? We are here for you.”
They all walked down toward the boat. Ernie Kellerstrass later said the objective was that we would all be taken in the boat to an island, where there was no communications in or out. No phone lines, no nothing. But, because of the storm, that got a little “iffy” and it was decided that they should take a different tack.
Ernie and his companion turned the boat around and pulled away. Jaime, Bill and Seligman turned around and headed for the car. At that point, I finally pulled up next to their car having traveled separately from Richmond, IN. I followed them and we all headed over to the new location. We assumed that Rick Doty had waited at his assigned location and then left. By the time we got to the other location, everyone had showed up except for Rick Doty. Jaime went to the location where Rick was supposed to be and finding him led him back to where we were.
It turned out that Ernie had somebody with him and, we determined eventually, he was an individual from Air Force’s “DET 22.” DET 22 is Detachment 22 which is essentially a bodyguard service for anybody in a technical intelligence capacity. Anytime a technician or scientist goes into a foreign country or puts themselves in any other risky travel, they always take a DET 22 person with them (I had a DET 22 person with me when I was on a mission in Germany and France).
They are usually fairly knowledgeable about the subject at hand, but their principal function is escort. The very strange thing about Ernie having a DET 22 person with him was that he had been retired from the Air Force since 1979 and was working for Systems Research Labs (SRL), so why the DET 22 person? To this day we have no answer for that question.
All our discussions were very frank and straightforward. Credentials were shown, the executive producer wanted to look at our picture ID CARDS so that he could be 100 percent certain of the sources and their specific functions and agencies they belonged to. He also elicited their cooperation by allowing him to run a background check. He eventually hired a Congressional Investigator to determine if these men were indeed bona fide agents within the agencies they had claimed affiliations with. They all checked out. The discussions were informative. There was some new information, and some old information that all of us were familiar with; no tape recorders or cameras were allowed.
Even amongst fellow spooks there was a cat and mouse game going during the meeting. Rick and Ernie ostensibly had not met before, and they were doing a little challenging back and forth as to who knew what. One would start to describe a certain classified room in the Pentagon or something, and then say, “Oh yeah, and then when you go through this door...um what was it again on the other side of that wall?” If the other spook could pick up the conversation from there and describe it, and everybody was in sync, then everything continued along. At the same time, they began talking about the ET who was an “ambassador” or liaison to the U.S. Among the things discussed was that the extraterrestrial ambassador was a female, Extraterrestrial Biological Entity (EBE-3?) or some other female EBE? We really didn’t know the answer to that. See Section 2, Chapter 4.
The extraterrestrials supposedly had a book known as the “Yellow Book.” The Yellow Book was a history of the extraterrestrials written by them. There was talk about a crystal that when an ET held it and turned it in certain ways, it showed pictures of their home planet, and what life was like on that planet. Agent Rick Doty indicated that he had seen that crystal, and in fact had handled it, but couldn’t make it work. It seemed to work only when an ET handled it. We all had a fascinating discussion; quite an earful was learned by Seligman and some of the others. Further arrangements for additional contacts were set up and at the end of the meeting we parted company with all the participants heading in separate directions. Once Bill and Jaime got back to Los Angeles, they started putting together all of the material that had been gathered during all the meetings including the most recent one. The biggest obstacle was how to make use of the information and dig out further information for use in the upcoming October 1988 show. Seligman, Rick and I all headed back to California and New Mexico respectively. I was stationed at Kirtland AFB, Air Force Weapons Lab at the time.
September 1988
Interviews were needed for the upcoming October 1988 UFO show. We all met in Albuquerque, NM where Bill and Jaime shot
an interview
with the surrogate Falcon (Rick Doty), and they also shot an interview with me (Condor). They also shot an interview with Richard Doty as just ‘Special OSI Agent’ Rick Doty who was just leaving the Air Force. Ultimately, Rick’s unmasked interview did not make it to the “UFO Cover-Up Live” show since all of the interviews were running over their time limit. The show finally aired on October 14, 1988 and, as we found out later, the phones were burning off the hook in Washington D.C. Almost immediately, Bill and Jaime had two new high-level contacts that had approached them. They were aware of these individuals before and introductions were immediately arranged. There were now two new birds in the Aviary.
April 1989
Time for another mini-summit and this time around there was absolutely no reason to involve the executive producer Seligman. The meeting was held in Albuquerque, NM, at a motel. We had Partridge (Hal Puthoff), Blue Jay (Kit Green), Rick Doty, Bill and Jaime and me at this mini-summit. This meeting dealt with the aftershocks from the “UFO Cover-Up Live” show and how to proceed with the new sources. Kit Green took center stage by proposing several lines of attack involving disclosure strategies.
In the next few years after 1988 and ‘89, relationships with several new contacts developed. An old contact friend, Richard Helms (ex-CIA Director) was renamed Mr. R. (in 1991) by Rick Doty and sometimes called “Raven,” but not to be confused with Jaime Shandera’s “Raven,” with more on that later. Then in 1995, Jaime had a fateful meeting with our “Mr. X” near the mall in Washington D.C. see Section 2 Chapter 4, pg 104. All of these meetings and contacts of course were handled in the utmost covert manner. To this day many of us still stay in contact (except for Bill & Jaime) coordinating information while talking with our sources. All of the sources were used in one way or another as a basis for this book. So, what is MJ-12 and how does it relate to everything else and the cover-up? Chapter 2 and later in Section 2, we will attempt to address those important questions.
References/Footnotes
(1) Lieutenant Colonel E. J. Kellerstrass,
(2a) Anthony Joseph Cacioppo (1923-1996):
http://www.ufoconspiracy.com/reports/Cacioppo.html
(b) Dale E. Graff:
http://www.dalegraff.com/
(3) The Roswell Incident, Charles Berlitz & William L. Moore, 1980 G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1988 Berkley Publishing Group.