The Russians had apparently seeded stories to British and U.S. Intelligence, suggesting that in the 1950s and 1960s a number of atomic bombs were smuggled into the United States and were to be detonated in major cities.
Area 51 The Revealing Truth of Ufos, Secret Aircraft, Cover-Ups & Conspiracies
The Russians had apparently seeded stories to British and U.S. intelligence, suggesting that in the 1950s and 1960s a number of atomic bombs were smuggled into the United States and were to be detonated in major cities. It was, fortunately for the Western world, a case of the Soviets and their allies trying to instill fear and confusion via the creation of a totally bogus claim. No bombs were smuggled—at all—and as a result, Chapman maintained, Serpo was the CIA’s way of trying to hit back at the Soviets and have them running around like headless chickens and rendered into states of paranoia and anxiety.
True or not, the insertion into the Serpo story of Alice Bradley Sheldon is notable, specifically for who she was and what she did. She was born Alice Hastings Bradley in 1915 and had an interesting career. When the terrible December 1941 events at Pearl Harbor occurred, Bradley was keen to do what she could to help defeat crazy Hitler and his goose-stepping cronies. She took a position with military intelligence and ultimately reached the rank of major.
In 1945, Alice Hastings Bradley became Alice Bradley Sheldon when she married Huntington D. Sheldon. The pair moved to Washington, D.C., in the early 1950s after being “invited” to join none other than the CIA. While many aspects of her work with the agency remain hidden to this very day, it is known that until she resigned in 1955, Alice was involved in espionage missions in the Near East and worked on photo-analysis-themed cases. As for Huntington, he was the director of the Office of Current Intelligence of the CIA from 1951 to 1961.
In 1967, Alice Bradley Sheldon’s life took a radical, new direction. She decided to turn her hand to a favorite topic of hers: science fiction. In 1973, a collection of her short stories was published. Its title: Ten Thousand Light Years from Home. Two years later, Warm Worlds and Otherwise hit the bookstores.
Very few people knew that Sheldon was the author, however, as her sci-fi output was published under the male alias of James Tiptree Jr.
Two more titles surfaced: 1981’s Out of the Everywhere and Other Extraordinary Visions and 1985’s Brightness Falls from the Air. Tragedy was looming on the horizon, however: on May 19, 1987, Alice killed her eighty-four- year-old, blind, bedridden, and ailing husband, then took her own life with a bullet to the head. It just so happens that May 1987 was the very month that one of the most notorious of all the many and questionable UFO documents surfaced: the MJ-12 papers, which told of a secret group—the MJ-12 or the Majestic 12—that oversaw the secrets of the Roswell Crash of July 1947.
Did Alice Bradley Sheldon write the Serpo documents—or, perhaps, some of them? Maybe. Maybe not. What we can say for sure, however, is that as a highly regarded writer of science fiction and someone who worked for both the U.S. Air Force Intelligence and the CIA, she would have been the absolute ideal candidate to conjure up a wild sci-fi story (in the form of bogus-but-genuine- looking documents) and to try to terrify the Russians into thinking that the West was making top-secret deals with extraterrestrials.
Does the Serpo affair involve far more than many suspect? Was Alice Bradley Sheldon the original brains behind Serpo or was “Chapman” simply some Walter Mitty type stirring up the already churning waters even more? They are questions that, right now, we can only wonder about. The game was still being played in 2017, as we shall now see.
Following the publication of his coauthored 1980 book The Roswell Incident, William Moore was contacted by a number of military and intelligence insiders who claimed that they wished to reveal to Moore—and ultimately to the public, the media, and the world—classified data and documents on UFOs that would otherwise never see the light of day. It was as a result of this “Deep Throat”-style contact that Moore and his research partner Jaime Shandera obtained, in December 1984, a series of controversial and official-looking documents that detailed the existence and work of the allegedly top-secret group known as Majestic 12.
Supposedly established in 1947 by then-President Harry Truman, Majestic 12 was tasked with keeping the lid on the extraterrestrial secret while striving to understand and exploit the science and technology that had literally fallen into the hands of the U.S. government in the desert of New Mexico. At the heart of these documents was a several-page, top-secret memorandum titled “BRIEFING DOCUMENT: OPERATION MAJESTIC 12/PREPARED FOR PRESIDENT- ELECT DWIGHT D. EISENHOWER: (EYES ONLY)/18 November, 1952.” The documents, first published in 1987 by the British author Timothy Good in his book Above Top Secret, revealed that the membership of Majestic 12 included high-ranking military personnel and senior sources within the intelligence community as well as key scientific personnel in post-Second World War America.