From Russia to Roswell (Part 2)

Area 51 The Revealing Truth of Ufos, Secret Aircraft, Cover-Ups & Conspiracies

Kenneth Goff was born in Wisconsin in 1914 and described in now declassified FBI files of May 6, 1955, as “a self-styled freelance Evangelist who for the past number of years has been speaking around the U.S. regarding the threat of communism to the U.S.” Lectures that Goff routinely delivered to interested parties included “Treason in Our State Department”; “Should We Use the Atom Bomb?”; “Red Secret Plot for Seizure of Denver”; and “Do the Reds Plan to Come by Alaska?”

The FBI additionally notes: “Also, some of the titles of Goff’s books, which he publishes voluminously are: Will Russia Invade America?, One World, a Red World, and Confessions of Stalin’s Agent.” They had other concerns about Goff, though. He had once been a rabid commie himself, and certain figures in the bureau believed that Goff was not quite the now anticommunist that he professed to be. Rather, some suspected that Goff had gone deep cover, and his red-hating ravings were merely a collective, ingenious ruse to camouflage his real intent: establishing networks of communist sympathizers across the United States.

The FBI certainly had a fine stash of material on Goff, who, it was recorded, “is a self-admitted former member of the Communist Party” and who “was found guilty by jury trial on February 25, 1948, in United States District Court, District of Columbia, and was fined $100 as a result of the subject’s placing anticommunist signs before the Soviet Embassy in Washington, D.C.” FBI files on Goff also noted: “The Rocky Mountain News on October 25, 1951, contained an article stating that three Englewood persons were ordered to appear in Denver Municipal Court as an aftermath of the ripping of the Soviet flag yesterday at Civic Center. Mr. and Mrs. Kenneth Goff were two of these three individuals.”

Patriotic Americans might say that protesting outside the Soviet embassy and tearing up the Soviet flag were very laudable actions for a U.S. citizen to undertake on home turf at the height of the fraught and dicey Cold War. The FBI wasn’t quite so sure, however: “It has been our concern that Goff always ensures he is seen while displaying anti-Soviet tendencies. [Deleted] has remarked that if Goff is still privately ‘of a party mind’ this might explain his public displays.” Goff was certainly an interesting character and had made comments in the 1950s about communist-based plans to covertly introduce fluoride into the U.S. water supply to create a “spirit of lethargy” in the nation, and guess what? Goff had a deep interest in flying saucers. Indeed, one of Goff’s regular lectures was titled “Traitors in the Pulpit, or What’s behind the Flying Saucers—Are They from Russia, Another Planet, or God?” It was not so much from the perspective of UFOs being alien or even Russian that interested Goff, though. His concern was the very subject matter of the book you are now reading: how the UFO subject could be utilized as a tool of manipulation and control by the government.

In his 1959 publication, Red Shadows, Goff offered the following to his readers—which, of course, secretly included the FBI: “During the past few years, the flying saucer scare has rapidly become one of the main issues, used by organizations working for a one-world government, to frighten people into the belief that we will need a super world government to cope with an invasion from another planet. Many means are being used to create a vast amount of imagination in the minds of the general public, concerning the possibilities of an invasion by strange creatures from Mars or Venus.”

He continued: “This drive began early in the 40’s, with a radio drama, put on by Orson Welles, which caused panic in many of the larger cities of the East, and resulted in the death of several people. The Orson Welles program of invasion from Mars was used by the Communist Party as a test to find out how the people would react on instructions given out over the radio. It was an important part of the Communist rehearsal for the Revolution.” The now infamous Welles broadcast was, of course, based upon H. G. Wells’s acclaimed novel War of the Worlds. While today, it is fashionable and almost de rigueur within ufological circles to suggest that the Welles broadcast and deep conspiracy go together hand-in-glove, it was far less so in the 1950s.

Goff, then, was quite the prophet—particularly so when one takes into consideration the fact that he had been mouthing off about War of the Worlds, a “one-world government,” and a secret program to manipulate the public with staged UFO encounters as far back as 1951.

According to what Alfred O’Donnell told Annie Jacobsen, in 1947, the Soviet Union—then under the ruthless control of Joseph Stalin—came up with a similar scenario to the Welles saga, namely, to try to make the U.S. government and its people believe that an alien invasion was underway, which, it was hoped, would plunge the United States into states of hysteria and fear. But how could such a thing be successfully achieved? O’Donnell had an answer to that question. It was an answer saturated in controversy and dark conspiracy.

Supposedly, Stalin and his cronies did a secret deal with one of the most crazed, evil figures ever to have lived, Dr. Josef Mengele. Much of his time was spent at Auschwitz, where he undertook terrible experiments on people, even children. Dwarfs, for some reason, attracted his attention in a very sinister fashion. He operated on them, disfigured them, and, in essence, changed them.

As Jacobsen notes correctly, Mengele “removed parts of children’s craniums and replaced them with bones from larger, adult skulls.” Eyes were removed. Certain tests caused the children to lose their hair. You may already have some inkling as to where this weird tale is heading.

Stalin and his staff, said O’Donnell, decided to come up with the ultimate deception to try to destabilize the United States of America. Mengele would take a number of young children and radically and horrifically alter their appearances to the point where they would no longer look human. They would actually look decidedly alien: non-human. Then was the matter of the “alien spacecraft,” which the “aliens” would fly in to the United States. In the story, said O’Donnell, the Russians had the perfect answer: they used the brainpower of two brilliant aircraft engineers, Reimar and Walter Horten. During the Second World War, the pair had designed some very strange-looking aircraft—futuristic, even. It is even rumored that the Horten brothers created—or, at the very least, designed—circular-shaped aircraft that could perform incredible aerial feats.

Whether Walter and Reimar worked on creating what the Russians hoped would be perceived by the U.S. military and government as an alien spaceship or if Stalin’s team had acquired Nazi blueprints for saucerlike craft and then built their own craft is an issue that remains hazy and lost to the fog of time.