a reply to:
Mogget
I cannot legally discuss what I said about MJ 12, sorry.
But please do not assume from that remark that it involves something sinister or government pressure or any link with the MJ 12 documents from me. It
is none of those things. I simply cannot discuss it.
But I can tell you more about the events that got me involved in what seems in retrospect to be a UK version of the MJ 12 scenario just before that
story surfaced.
As noted I was contacted out of the blue by a man who knew that I was a writer and had just read my then new book with Peter Warrington - Science and
the UFOs - which we had been asked to write by Oxford science publisher Basil Blackwell after we had an article called 'The Neglected Science of UFOs'
published by New Scientist.
This is coincidentally the same book that has a bit part in the Whitley Strieber 'Communion' story - as in him tossing it across the room as if it
were a coiled snake, for anyone familiar with that abduction case.
Anyhow, this man got my home number (he did not say how) and told me that he had been handed by his commanding officer in the British Army six ultra
top secret reports totalling 600 pages. He gave me some information - enough to be tantalising - and the gist of their content. But asked to meet
somewhere covertly to take this further as he was very worried about possessing these things.
As I mentioned above I asked my colleague Peter Hough to come with me for some back up if this went gaga and this guy did show up - sheepishly -
apparently recognising me (which was not too surprising as I had been on TV quite a bit so did not find that odd).
Peter and I grilled him for quite some time and we spent an hour or two with him. He looked worried and kept glancing around.
He told us he was in the Army up to early 1985 and his commanding officer had been on attachment in the States and befriended a USAF officer from
Wright Patterson. This guy was a computer tech who one night confided that by accident he had accessed some locked UFO files. Intrigued he copied them
to read later but was arrested as he had somehow alerted higher ups. With this man's help his British friend took them from their hiding spot and
carried them to the UK.
So far, so much nonsense we both thought. Especially when this Army man (who called himself John) said both his boss and the Wright Patterson man
wanted the files made public but soon after they were brought to the UK the USAF computer tech died in a car crash. Which, surprise, surprise, neither
of the Brits now believed was an accident.
Allegedly the British CO tested some of his men one after the other by raising the general issue of UFOs with them to see how they responded. And if
they kept his chat with them about the subject (but not these files as he did not tell them about these) to themselves.
Only later - after John had left the Army but was still a reservist - did his ex CO tell him all the above when he returned for a training weekend. He
told John that after his test he was the only one he could trust with the files and that he should try to get them into the open and that he should do
so via myself.
Aside from my books around then I was being rather ludicrously portrayed on TV in a TV advert because a new women's magazine was out around then and
there was an interview with me inside issue 1. That ad went a bit (well actually a lot!) over the top and spouted about me also having had a close
encounter on a 'deserted Wiltshire road'. In real life (and the interview) this was just a sighting of three lights in a triangle (nothing else) -
which my fiancé and I had whilst on his motorbike heading back to Cheshire from the Farnborough Air Show. And the 'deserted' road was far from that
and actually was the M4 motorway! So for a brief while I was 'famous'.
John had not got the documents with him when we met. Not one page. Despite him telling us there were many documents with illustrations and photos. He
had agreed with his CO to check me out and see if I would help get the world to see this news. But his own fears after reading them (one was a file
dated October 1977 titled 'Elimination of non-military sources') made him split them up into individual unsorted piles in different locations so that
nobody accidentally finding them would get the proper picture.
He saw we were pretty sceptical by this point - as we both were. And did start offering up codes and names and described in more detail the content of
the files. One was a biological analysis by a scientist of an alien body retrieved from a crash. This file dated from 1948.
It was all interesting, of course, but nothing at all that could not have been made up with a rudimentary background reading into USAF files on UFOs
and a few books by Tim Good and others.
We told him that before even considering helping him we needed to see some evidence for his story as right then it was just that - a story. He said he
understood and asked to meet us in a covert spot - a country park - where he would bring 'samples'. We were not sure what to do but we did turn up for
the meeting and waited quite a while but he never showed up.
In the meantime we had done some digging as discretely as we could to try to check out his story. What we could check of his claims worked out but we
could not really dig deep as if he was telling the truth we would have alerted someone.
We had just written it all off as a probable hoax when 11 days after the no show I got a letter from him in which he apologised for not turning up,
said he had been 'invited' in to an internal investigation. Two days after he met Peter and I he was taken to his base and made to hand over the
documents which he was assured were 'sensitive' but the creation of an educated prankster' and 'no credence could be attributed' to them.
Not long after Tim Good apparently got leaked documents and published the news and we wondered if we had been a dry run and been opted against because
we were not jumping eagerly into accepting this story.
Or it was all a joke and nothing to do with MJ 12 at all.