Taking on the Octopus … and Losing

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

On August 1, 1991, the body of a middle-aged man was discovered in a hotel room in the Martinsburg, West Virginia, Sheraton Inn. His body was lying in the shower. It was a grim sight for the maid who made the discovery. The man, it seemed, had committed suicide: his wrists were cut deep, which effectively meant that without anyone to help him, the man was doomed—and he was. It didn’t take more than a few moments for hotel staff to figure out who, exactly, the man was. He was identified by the person at the front desk as Danny Casolaro. He was an investigative journalist of the Woodward and Bernstein variety.

Casolaro’s death was a big tragedy for his family and friends. Suicide is always a terrible tragedy not just for the victim but also for those left behind who have to pick up the pieces. Was Casolaro’s death really just the suicide that it appeared to be, though? The investigation continued to grow, to the point where it wasn’t just the local police looking into the death but also conspiracy theorists.

The latter group had a very good reason for looking into Casolaro’s out-of-the- blue death. For around a year and a half leading up to the point of his reported suicide, Casolaro had been looking into a powerful group of people who sound very much like candidates for a New World Order. Casolaro termed this group “the Octopus.” Appropriately, but unfortunately and tragically, the Octopus soon got its tentacles into Casolaro and dragged him down to an untimely death.

Casolaro’s investigations started as a result of his interactions with a man named William Hamilton, who just happened to be a retired employee of the National Security Agency—the former employer of Edward Snowden. Hamilton was an expert in the then-growing field of computer software. As part of his work, Hamilton came up with a highly sophisticated program (sophisticated for 1991, at least) designed to help the U.S. Department of Justice chase down criminals.

For a while, at least, all went well. The time came, though, when the Department of Justice, quite out of the blue, stunned Hamilton by informing him that he had been overcharging them for his technology, which went by the title of PROMIS. A huge legal feud followed; Hamilton did not come out as the victor as was almost certainly guaranteed. Just because Hamilton was on the losing end, though, it didn’t mean that his program was also going belly-up. In fact, it was the exact opposite: the Department of Justice had no intention of letting go of this program that, in terms of its widespread surveillance and tracking ability, promised a great deal.