The newspaper continued: “Contrary to information from American and other sources, Second Lieutenants Brobs and Tyllenson … report the flying discs have landed in the polar regions several times.”
Area 51 The Revealing Truth of Ufos, Secret Aircraft, Cover-Ups & Conspiracies
These are certainly fantastic revelations, but how much can be authenticated? The British researcher Philip Mantle looked into the case in 1985 and had received an outright denial that anything remotely resembling the Spitsbergen crash had ever occurred on Norwegian soil. “The whole story seems utterly unfounded,” Mantle was told by Arild Isegg, the head of the Information Division, Norwegian Royal Ministry of Defense. Moreover, despite its 1952 interest in the matter, the CIA later came to accept the whole thing as a complete fabrication that the media ran with, which spiraled wildly out of control.
However, Spitsbergen refused to roll over and die. UFO investigator Bill Moore spoke with the French investigator Jean Sider, who had uncovered a clipping from a Nancy-based newspaper that referred to a Nazi-developed craft built in the closing stages of the Second World War, the description of which sounded remarkably like the craft recovered at Spitsbergen.
By far, the most intriguing aspect of this saga, however, came from none other than the National Security Agency. From the NSA, I obtained a translation of a 1960s Russian media article on the UFO subject. Contained within the article was a passing reference to the Spitsbergen incident, which stated: “An abandoned silvery disc was found in the deep rock-coal seams in Norwegian coalmines on Spitsbergen. It was pierced and marked by micro-meteor impacts and bore all traces of having performed a long space voyage. It was sent for analysis to the Pentagon and disappeared there.”
This was certainly a new slant on the case, but what really caught my eye was the National Security Agency’s reaction to the mention of Spitsbergen. Instead of dismissing the matter as a hoax, a still unidentified NSA agent circled the paragraph of the article referencing Spitsbergen and wrote in the margin the intriguing word “PLANT” in bold capitals. Had the NSA been exposed to data that could conclusively lay the legend of Spitsbergen to rest once and for all? If that was the case, the NSA wasn’t saying, and no further evidence pertaining to National Security Agency involvement in the Spitsbergen incident came to light.
Yet, that curious, one-word note, scrawled many years previous by an anonymous NSA employee, continues to puzzle me. Rather than indicating an outright hoax, the “PLANT” reference suggested that the Spitsbergen story (even if bogus) had been disseminated officially, possibly to cloud and confuse the rumors surrounding crashed-UFO incidents in the late 1940s and early 1950s. This begs the questions: (a) How many more “UFO crash” stories may have had their origins in the world of government/intelligence-orchestrated programs of disinformation and psychological warfare and (b) why the need for such actions?
Perhaps certain governments really do have crashed UFOs in their possession and wish to swamp the real data with so much faked material that the former will get buried, hidden, and confused by the latter, or maybe, a real, crashed UFO event never happened—ever—but certain governments, at the height of the Cold War, dearly wished to promote such scenarios as a means to frighten and intimidate the enemy.
After all, effectively telling your potential foe that “we have alien technology in our hands and you don’t” may have worried more than a few generals—whether in the Kremlin, the Pentagon, or both—when the flying saucer mystery kicked off all those years ago. The fact that the stories of crashed UFOs may not even have been true demonstrates how a well-placed lie can have a profound effect.
One of the most significant is a 1963 episode of the cult classic sci-fi show The Outer Limits—which, along with The Twilight Zone, defined 1960sera, on- screen science fiction. The episode in question is titled “The Architects of Fear,” and it was broadcast on the night of September 30, 1963. It starred Robert Culp, Leonard Stone, and Geraldine Brooks.
In the story, the world is a very dangerous place. That much is obvious from the opening words of the show: “Is this the day? Is this the beginning of the end? There is no time to wonder.
No time to ask why is it happening, why is it finally happening? There is time only for fear, for the piercing pain of panic. Do we pray? Or do we merely run now and pray later? Will there be a later? Or is this the day?” Not only is the world a dangerous place, but it appears that an all-out nuclear Armageddon is right on the horizon with no return from the brink of destruction. On the other hand, maybe not. Cue the plans of a group that undertakes classified work for a variety of government agencies. Its name: United Labs.
The highest echelons of the company plan to save the people of the world—and the world itself—by creating a faked alien invasion. In other words, if the human race can be deceived into thinking that an alien attack is looming large on the horizon, it will provoke the United States, Europe, China, and the then-Soviet Union to combine their efforts to defeat the alien foe. The result: a world as one, rather than as a planet filled with nations that seem almost desperate to destroy each other.