Ben Mezrich wrote book which The Social Network film was based on and now he has turned his attentions to UFOs and what the military have been covering up
A couple of months ago, US presidential hopeful Hillary Clinton made what was perhaps the most peculiar campaign promise in a presidential race defined by its peculiarities.
Speaking on Jimmy Kimmel’s popular late night program, Clinton promised that if elected, she would do everything in her power to open up the military’s UFO files.
Although one might argue that Hillary was pandering to the UFO vote, a previous interview summed up the leading candidate for our Presidency’s views on whether or not we’ve been visited, in her own words: “I think we may have been. We don’t know for sure.”
At least in this, I’m with Hillary. Up until a year ago, I didn’t believe in UFOs. I consider myself a pretty rational person, and I come from a family of scientists.
Although I think the math pretty much guarantees that life exists on other planets- a nearly infinite number of stars, new earth-like objects being found every other day, the prolific amount of potential chemical building blocks throughout the universe- the idea of flying saucers being real just seemed too silly to contemplate seriously.
Writer Ben Mezrich and Chuck Zukowski
But my beliefs began to change when I met the protagonist of my latest book, The 37 Parallel , Chuck Zukowski.
Up until the summer of 2010, Chuck was a microchip engineer and part-time reserve Sheriff’s deputy- until he was fired from the Colorado Springs Sheriff’s department while investigating a cattle mutilation on a ranch in the tiny, brush-filled town of Rush, Colorado.
The phenomenon of cattle mutilations is one of the most bizarre, far reaching mysteries of the modern era.
Over the past seventy years, more than ten thousand cows and horses have been found killed and mutilated, in frighteningly similar fashion: usually left lying on their sides, with multiple organs removed through precise, circular wounds.
The animals are found missing hearts, eyes, tongues, lungs- and that isn’t even the worst part. Almost all of these carcasses have been found completely drained of blood.
In the Midwestern United States in the 1970s, the situation had gotten so bad that three state governors petitioned the Attorney General, demanding that the FBI get involved.
The feds conducted a ten-year investigation, involving over a hundred agents, and found…nothing. To this day, nobody has ever been arrested, and no real conclusions have been drawn.
Chuck might have been forgiven for beginning to wonder if the mutilation he was investigating in 2010 – involving two horses, chopped up and exsanguinated – had something to do with UFOs; after all, strange sightings of lights in the sky are common across Colorado, and there seems to be well-documented correlations between aerial phenomenon and mutilations.
Ben Mezrich has been investigating UFOs
From that moment on, Chuck went from being an amateur UFO enthusiast to a self-described “ufo-nut.” He bought an RV, packed his family on board, and started criss-crossing the country, searching for answers.
To tell his story, I followed Chuck down that rabbit hole.
I was immediately surprised by the vast amount of evidence that existed: from first person accounts, to military radar data, to photographs and video of unexplained lights in the sky.
But what interested me the most was the lack of any mainstream efforts to really dig into the topic.
An example of the cattle mutilation which UFO hunters find suspicious
The harder I looked at the data, the more convinced I became that something real was going on here- that even if 99.9 percent of sightings could be explained away by secret military test projects, mistaken drones and airplanes, natural cosmic phenomenon- that left more than a handful of events that needed to be studied more seriously.
Of the thousands of incidents I looked at with Chuck’s help, two especially stood out.
The first – arguably the most famous UFO sighting in history – occurred in Roswell, New Mexico, back in 1947.
On July 3 of that year, radar operators at Walker Air Base – the US’s first nuclear base, where the planes that dropped the atomic bombs on Japan had been stationed – began tracking a pair of strange objects flying in formation at impossibly high speeds.
Walker Air Force Base front gate pictured in 1960
A massive, electrical storm moved in, and a few hours later, something crashed into a ranch owned by a rancher named Mac Brazel, scattering debris over three hundred yards.
The debris was strange- metallic, and covered in odd hieroglyphics.
Brazel called the local sheriff, who in turn called the authorities at Walker.
The Air Force sent over a few men, who carted some of the debris back to the base – and then put out a press release: “RAAF Captures Flying Saucer on Ranch in Roswell Region”.
The press release was carried by the local newspaper, and then newspapers across the country- until a few hours later, when suddenly, the press release was rescinded.
The Air Force gathered up the rest of the debris, scouring the ranch inch by inch, then packed the metallic wreckage onto a cargo plane and flew it all to Area 51.
Along the journey, the officers in charge set up a photo shoot with one of the Air Force’s first responders, a radar operator named Jesse Marcel, with the remains of an experimental weather balloon.
Major Jesse Marcel from the Roswell Army Air Field with debris allegedly found 75 miles north west of Roswell, NM, in June 1947
But years later, Marcel admitted that the official photo was staged, that the debris in the photo wasn’t the debris that had been taken off that ranch.
Whatever the Air Force had really found at Roswell was sealed away in the most secretive military base in the country, where it sits to this day.
The second UFO sighting that remains an unexplained mystery to me occurred in the UK, and is generally known as the Rendlesham Forest Incident.
Britain’s own version of Roswell took place near RAF Woodbridge, a British Air Force Base being leased by the US Military for joint operations.
In the middle of the night of December 26, 1980, a group of officers out on patrol saw lights descending into the forest.
As the men approached the lights, one of the officers came upon something huge, glowing and metallic, hovering over the trees.
As he approached, the object sped off- leaving behind indentations in the ground, as well as triangular scorch marks.
Two nights later, other officers investigating the site documented another object covered in flashing lights, moving past at incredible speeds.
The gate to the legendary Area 51
Though sightings like the ones that occurred at Rendlesham are common, the UK incident is especially intriguing because it involved multiple witnesses with military backgrounds, an initial veil of secrecy that eventually gave way to public affidavits about what had been experienced that night- and no official explanations that hold up to even the smallest amount of scrutiny.
In both these cases, Roswell and Rendlesham, the efforts to cover up the incidents seems almost as damning as the events themselves.
Since the forties, there appears to have been a well coordinated effort at a very high level to obscure the facts of many UFO sightings.
Dating back to multiple intelligence agencies have been sealing files on the Foo Fighter phenomenon of World War II, in which strange fireballs were seen by British and American fighting pilots flying alongside their craft during night missions over France and Germany.
All the way to today, with files on Area 51 and UFO sightings locked down to the point that Presidential candidates have to wonder about the information contained inside.
UFO trail sign at Rendlesham Forest, Suffolk, England
Why is such a cover up necessary? What, exactly, could be hidden in files about crash sites from seventy years ago?
The very fact that mainstream scientists, legitimate historians, and respected journalists can’t look into the UFO phenomenon without facing ridicule- heck, every interview I’ll do for my new book will be introduced with X-Files music and pictures of little green men- maintains the cover-up better than any military veil.
At this point, no amount of data, eyewitness accounts, or photos, will convince the average skeptic. Hillary Clinton’s efforts aside, it would take a UFO landing on the White House lawn to really change the conversation about UFOs- and even then a large portion of the population would assume it was a hoax.
One high level aerospace executive I spoke with – and there is a compelling number of respected scientists in the aeronautic industry, at NASA, and among astronauts themselves, who are now believers – summed it up in simple terms:
“A generation from now, people will look back at us the same way we look back at those who believed the Earth was flat; the evidence that we’ve been visited by extraterrestrials is so overwhelming, it’s actually a leap of faith to believe anything else.”
Roswell UFO Museum sign – the sighting has attracted renewed interest recently (
Image:
Getty)
In other words, maybe we don’t need to keep building giant telescopes, listening for radio waves from other star systems, or sending probes into deep space – because the evidence of alien intelligence we are looking for is already here.