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Physicist Bruce Maccabee Provides Clarity And Important Perspective On How Government/Military Policy Evolved On UFO Issue

Physicist BRUCE MACCABEE has been a significant figure in ufology for some 50 years. He holds a Ph.D. earned from American University, Washington D.C. He is often referred to as an “optics physicist” because of his work with optical data processing for the Naval Ordnance Laboratory, later known as the Naval Surface Warfare Center.

He also worked on underwater lasers to generate subsurface sound and made significant contributions on aspects of SDI, Ronald Reagan’s “Star Wars” space-based defense platform.

For those of us who have been addicted to UFO stuff for decades, Dr. Maccabee is an instantly recognizable face. Starting in the 1970s he began popping up in UFO documentaries on TV and film, usually as an analyst of anomalous photographs and video.

If Bruce Maccabee pronounced an image or video footage “authentic” or “unexplainable by natural means” – well, that really meant something. With his serious scientific credentials, he could not be written off as just another flake.

Dr. Maccabee is also a dogged researcher who has made enormous efforts to obtain all manner of military and government documents relating to UFOs. A major milestone was getting his hands on the secret “flying disc files” of the FBI – yes, there really was an actual FBI “X-Files.”

Dr. Bruce Maccabee

So, in this short book, THE LEGACY OF 1952: YEAR OF THE UFO, Maccabee offers an important perspective on where things stand in UFO research today, and “how we got here,” for better or worse.

He argues that early on, but especially in the year 1952, certain protocols became set in stone in terms of how our military and government would treat the UFO issue and how they would relate what they knew (or did not know) to the taxpaying public they serve.

Those protocols hardened into “tradition,” Maccabee writes, in 1952 and have remained largely unchanged since. The result is wide ranging and enormous. An entire American generation grew up with a government that either denied the “reality” of the UFO phenomenon … or for any case it could not explain, no matter how sensational, the policy was to suggest it could be explained in common terms if more facts were obtained.

What was so special about 1952? Well, that year witnessed a remarkable explosion of UFO sightings. Thousands of reports poured into media outlets, local police and various government agencies. It seems no location in America was spared.

The most significant is known as the “WASHINGTON FLAP” occurring from July 12 through July 29 in the summer of 1952. It was an amazing time! Suddenly, “swarms of UFOs” began appearing over the American capital city. And it wasn’t just sightings. The objects were routinely captured on radar. Jets were scrambled to pursue the objects. Our best-trained fighter pilots observed UFOs with their own eyes. The “saucers” routinely outdistanced the F-94s and other assets that chased them – and when the jets ran low on fuel forcing them to cut off chase and return – the UFOs would sometimes turn around and come right back!

It was impossible for anyone to be in denial of what was happening!

The sightings were making headlines in major papers across the nation. Also unable to ignore the events was President Harry Truman himself. Truman was alarmed enough to call top people in the Air Force to get some answers.

Stop for a minute and think about that. The President of the United States picks up the phone, calls his Top Brass, and orders them to get some answers about UFOs.

President Harry Truman

What would it take today for the President of the United States to pick up the phone and call his top military commanders to focus urgent attention on getting answers about the UFO issue?

And … and … well, I guess that leads me to my take away from this book. It informs me or, I guess, clarifies for me how we came to be in the place we are today in ufology. Ii helps explain the sort of “crazy labyrinth” that is the “UFO question” in which we find ourselves endlessly lost here in 2019.

Reading Maccabee’s book gave me the notion that a certain normalcy or rationality held sway for a few short years after that June day in 1947 when the Kenneth Arnold sighted nine shiny objects flitting over Mount Rainier, kicking off the modern UFO era.

For example, the press was reporting the UFO story largely in a straightforward way. It was “just that facts, ma’me.” If entire fleets of UFOs were observed over Washington D.C., ordinary, mainstream newspapers, such as the Cedar Rapids Gazette in Iowa, would sport the headline:

“SAUCERS SWARM OVER CAPITAL”

Sure, that’s a sensational headline, but it also happened to be simply factual and true. There was no need to hide it, censor it, spin it, mock it or sugar coat it for the reading public – the media just reported to the people what happened – so that citizens could have this information.

The same goes for the military and government. Early on, a fantastic UFO sighting was not immediately inserted into a meat grinder of denial, disinformation, propaganda or captured into a classified super-double-top-cosmic-secret-for-your-eyes-only-report. Rather, it was confronted directly as a problem for government experts to look at directly as they strove to come up with straightforward answers.

But after 1952 – and because of critical policy decisions made by top government officials in that amazing time – we were all kicked down the proverbial rabbit hole we remain lost in today. That’s mostly what Dr. Maccabee is suggesting in this book.

On the other hand, this is all a much more complex issue. There’s a lot more at play here. For example, the UFO phenomenon has evolved in texture and scope to an astonishing degree since 1952.

Just nine years after 1952, guess what happened? In 1961 a certain couple from Vermont reported they were abducted aboard a UFO by alien beings. They were subjected to medical tests – Barney Hill reported what is arguably the first ever report of an anal probe. His wife, Betty, had a long needled pushed into her belly. Barney was also forced to give a sperm sample.

And then things really got weird.

I have three words for you: “Praying Mantis Alien.” Or how about three more: “20 And Back.” See where I’m going here?

Oh for the days when swarms of flying saucers were blackening the skies over Washington! What simple times!

So, on the one hand, Dr. Maccabee’s book provided for me an excellent sense of sociological clarity and perspective on how the UFO issue developed from the 1950s to present time in terms of government, military, media and public dynamics.

On the other hand, this perspective “stays in its lane,” so to speak, as it represents a narrow slice of the overall phenomenon as it roils and boils today. That’s by no means a knock on Dr. Maccabee’s well-presented book. It provides a compelling narrative which adds to the realization that the UFO phenomenon is not only real, but that the conventional explanations supplied by the skeptics are demonstrably flawed.

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PLEASE CHECK OUT MY REVIEWS OF OTHER UFO BOOKS, LINKED BELOW:

BLACK SWAN GHOSTS by Simeon Hein PhD

SYMBIOSIS by Nancy Tremaine

PASCAGOULA: THE CLOSEST ENCOUNTER by Calvin Parker

INCIDENT AT DEVIL’S DEN by Terry Lovelace

MANAGING MAGIC by Grant Cameron

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Ken Korczak is a former newspaper reporter, government information officer, served as an advocate for homeless people as a VISTA Volunteer, and taught journalism at the University of North Dakota for five years. He is the author of: BIRD BRAIN GENIUS

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Veteran UFO Investigator Grant Cameron Makes His Case: U.S. Government Has Been Managing A Subtle, Controlled Disclosure Strategy For 70 Years

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Review by: KEN KORCZAK

Who is the most important person in ufology today?

Forget Steven Greer or Tom Delong or Stanton Friedman or Linda Moulton Howe or Richard Dolan or Leslie Kean or Steve Basset or Timothy Good or Luis Elizondo or Robert and Ryan Wood or Michael Salla — or even the now mostly silent Jacques Vallee.

The most significant figure in the study of UFO phenomenon today is this guy: GRANT CAMERON.

Cameron, a well-mannered Canadian from the Great Plains city of Winnipeg, has been doggedly seeking the truth about UFOs for 42 years. He was unwittingly thrust into this role after a personal encounter with the famous Charlie Red Star in 1975.

That was the name given to a blood-red, pulsating ball of light that amazed people dwelling in a series of small towns in southern Manitoba near the North Dakota border.

The Charlie Red Star UFO was captured in many photos as it cruised the countryside of southern Manitoba from 1975 to 1976.

For an incredible two years, Charlie Red Star haunted the skies of this sparsely-populated, wide-open prairie landscape dotted by small farming communities. The conservative, no-nonsense folks of the region could only gape in wonder at the bold aerial antics of the unfathomable object gamboling across their heavens.

Grant Cameron – who previously had zero interest in UFOs – suddenly knew that he would spend the rest of his life trying to find an answer: “What was that thing?”

Now, more than four decades later, he feels he has an answer. He sums up his conclusion with a single word: “Consciousness.”

Grant Cameron

More than anything else, the central most important aspect of the UFO phenomenon is the idea that Consciousness is primary and material reality is secondary. If you want to understand UFOs, you must start there, Cameron says.

Furthermore, if you stay mired in materialism – specifically, the paradigm of material, nuts-n-bolts science – your fate in the UFO field will be an agonizing entanglement in one bizarre rabbit hole after another – it might even drive you insane.

Cameron has avoided insanity, however, or even evolving into an eccentric UFO weirdo. He’s maintained a kind of grounded dignity. He has diligently sought answers while living gracefully with uncertainty and staying close to facts.

But that doesn’t mean he has rejected high strangeness out of hand. Cameron has since embraced a lot of way-out-there stuff, from the accepting the reality of ETs interacting with us daily to the existence of trans-dimensional portals that can punch us through to parallel worlds. (NOTE: See Cameron’s video documentation of Xendra Portals HERE

This book, MANAGING MAGIC, sticks to slightly more practical matters, however. A few years ago, Cameron said he was done with investigating UFOs. He concluded that chasing lights in the sky and sifting through endless classified government reports obtained through FOIA requests was fruitless.

Recent release of a U.S. Air Force F/A-18 fighter jet footage of a UFO exploded speculation that the government was about to reveal more of what it knows about UFOs

But just like Michael Corleone’s famous lament from Godfather III – “Just when I thought I was out, they pull me back in” – Cameron felt compelled to write another UFO book. That’s because of what he believes he now knows about the issue of Disclosure – official government disclosure to the public about the reality of UFOs.

A huge portion of the UFO community has been foaming at the mouth for decades, excoriating the government for withholding information from tax-paying citizens who have a right to know . In fact, ranting and raving about oppressive and corrupt government secrecy is an almost inseparable issue from the central premise of UFOs itself within ufology circles.

Government secrecy fosters delicious conspiracy theories and a self-righteous “feel-good” outlet for venting and blaming the powerful elite for the condescending way they treat the masses. The evil cabals at the highest levels of society have earned our virtuous rage of the sainted public.

Let’s face it – playing the victim is a guilty pleasure for many people — perhaps even when justified.

Cameron now believes, however, that our government has likely adopted the correct course all along – that course is an extremely gradual disclosure designed to drip-drip-drip out UFO information over a period of decades.

Doing it that way is for our own good, Cameron says. That’s because the actual truth behind the phenomenon is so bizarre, so enormous, so weird and so epistemologically shattering – a long, drawn-out disclosure is the only responsible thing to do. In the conclusion of Managing Magic he writes:

“After decades of work on the disclosure problem I have become much more sympathetic to the position the government has taken, and how they have handled the situation they were handed in the 1940s.

“Many in the UFO community will say that full disclosure should be a simple thing and done ASAP. The more I view the evidence, the less I agree with that position and the more I see a potential for disaster were that approach to be taken.”

He also states near the beginning of the book:

“The American government is taking the lead on this measured disclosure. When the facts get reviewed, this becomes very evident.”

This view is anathema to so many in ufology. Again, the endorphin rush they get from the righteous indignation they feel at the hands of a deceitful government is a fundamental aspect – in an ironic sort of way – of why people get enthralled by the UFO issue in the first place.

Rock star turned UFO investigator Tom DeLong.

Dr. Steven Greer.

Cameron offers a blunt assessment on some of the biggest names in ufology today – especially rock-star-turned-ufology-star TOM DELONG, former front man for the band Blink 182. Another is DR. STEVEN GREER the emergency-room-doctor-turned-self-proclaimed-greatest-ufologist-of-all-time.

Cameron points out what these two men have in common: They are both supreme ego maniacs. As such, they have been easily manipulated by government disinformation agents who are only happy to use them to leak both factual UFO information to the public – and disinformation when it suits the government strategy of a nuanced, subtle and gradual disclosure process.

That’s the crux of what Cameron is trying to tell us here. Our government, in fact, IS disclosing UFO information to us – but it is also misleading us with smoke screens when it wants to. The government is threading a delicate middle path between disclosure and disinformation – this middle way is designed to gradually acclimate the public over a period of many years – a necessary strategy to avoid catastrophic consequences.

But be warned: This is complicated.

Cameron’s thesis toils under the burden of that complication. I advise the reader to consider the information in this book with great care. The potential to misunderstand what Cameron is telling us is considerable. There are occasions in which the author would appear to contradict his own theories – but I believe that’s an artifact of the tangled labyrinth we necessarily must stumble through. The truth about UFOs is the the proverbial, “riddle, wrapped in a mystery, hidden inside an enigma.”

With Managing Magic, Grant Cameron makes a heroic effort to light a pathway through the most vexing labyrinth ever to confront mankind.
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NOTE: SEE SOME OF THE OTHER UFO BOOKS KEN HAS REVIEWED ON THIS SITE:

EXTRATERRESTRIAL ODYSSEY By Roger Kvande

SELECTED BY EXTRATERRESTRIALS By Bill Tompkin

PASSPORT TO THE COSMOS By John Mack M.D.

LIGHT QUEST By Andrew Collins

SEARCHERS By Ron Felber

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Paul H. Smith’s Epic Saga of Remote Viewing Is The Most Complete Book On History and Other Aspects of Psychic Spying

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Review by: KEN KORCZAK

I’ve read a lot of books about Remote Viewing, but I’m willing to bet that this one, READING THE ENEMY’S MIND by Paul H. Smith, is THEE definitive book on the topic.

Clocking in at more than 600 pages, Smith slogs through just about every aspect of remote viewing — from the mind boggling to the mundane — from the first days of its development through its eventual demise as a sanctioned government project.

Smith was a U.S. Army Intelligence Officer and among the original remote viewers. Here he doggedly documents the endless and banal bureaucratic twists and turns of managing a super secretive, highly classified intelligence operation — but, wow! — it was a spy game unlike any other in the already dark and spooky underworld of international espionage.

Most readers eager for sensational stories of extraordinary paranormal happenings will find themselves enduring some eye-glazing moments as Smith plods through all the crushingly boring — the red tape, the funding methods, the inter-governmental squabbling. However, those who wade through it will be rewarded with a greater perspective about what really happened inside our government’s unlikely foray into “psychic spying.”

Paul Smith

But there is much to amaze as well. There’s lots of juicy paranormal stuff — psychic powers, UFO tangents, channeling strange entities, spoon bending — that will satisfy the inquiring mind.

It would take pages to provide a truly comprehensive review of everything Smith covers in this book, so let me focus on one area where I think the author provides invaluable insight into a deeply controversial topic.

The insight I am talking about is the window inside Smith gives us on certain people who emerged as high profile public remote viewers after the official program ended — especially Ed Dames and David Morehouse.

Smith tells that Dames and Morehouse are two guys who more or less went off the deep end and were ensnared by the most unscientific and fringy possibilities associated with remote viewing.

Smith levels his biggest criticism at David Morehouse, whom he describes as a barely involved, minimally trained slacker who was, if not actually AWOL, absent for much of the time when he was supposed to be on duty working RV sessions. Morehouse also had periods of mental instability, a disastrous illicit affair, was once suicidal — none of which was precipitated by the strangeness of remote viewing — although Morehouse sought to use RV as an excuse for his behavior when he was facing court martial.

Yet Morehouse is active today as a “celebrity” remote viewer, promoting himself as one of the original “Psychic Warriors” (That’s the title of his book). He also peddles a RV study course, he leads remote viewing seminars and is popular on the lecture tour. But Smith paints Morehouse as little more than a failure at remote viewing, a fraud and a blatant, self-serving opportunist.

But the guy who really sucks up all the oxygen in the world of remote viewing today is former U.S. Army Major Ed Dames.

Smith is somewhat kinder to Dames in terms of his work ethic and commitment to military intelligence. Smith even gives him high marks for his professionalism as a soldier. However, when it came to performing the actual remote viewing sessions, Dames was rarely the one sitting in the psychic spying seat. Rather, Dames served more often as a monitor and facilitator for other remote viewers. His own ability to remote view were unremarkable, and he barely worked more than a half dozen official RV sessions himself.

Smith writes that Dames also frequently thwarted protocol by improperly “front loading” remote viewing sessions — that is, Dames frequently attempted to “lead” or bias remote viewers with his own unstoppable obsession with UFOs and his own pet theories about extraterrestrials.

When Dames could not goad disciplined remote viewers into coughing up questionable information about ETs, he would go ahead and conduct his own sessions with sloppy protocols, which would, not surprisingly, confirm his own belief system about aliens from other worlds.

Paul Smith’s organization, RVIS, or Remote Viewing Instructional Services

Even worse, Dames displayed an extreme proclivity for apocalyptic scenarios. Again and again, Dames came up with end-of-the-world predictions both during his time with military intelligence, and for years after as a public figure — and he continues to do today. Dames has appeared dozens of times on the hugely popular Coast to Coast radio program hosted by Art Bell, and over the years had made one disaster-scenario prediction after another, none of which have ever come true.

Smith also sharply criticizes Ed Dames for the claims he has made about his involvement with the development of the remote viewing program — in short, Smith says that many of Dames’ claims about what he did and to help develop the military remote viewer program are flat out false. Dames was a far more marginal player than he has long advertised himself to be, according to Smith.

So this is an outstanding book which is an invaluable historical document that both dispels the many myths that still linger about remote viewing, and which provides incredible insight — a clarifying window into one of the strangest times in the history of U.S. espionage and intelligence operations.

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Please see also my reviews of these books on astral travel and remote viewing:

EXPLORATIONS IN CONSCIOUSNESS BY FREDERICK AARDEMA

LIMITLESS MIND BY RUSSELL TARG

MASTER OF MY SHIP, CAPTAIN OF MY SOUL BY SKIP ATWATER

THE TRANSCENDENT INGO SWANN BY RAUL DASILVA

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