On the final day of March information started to unfold round on-line UFO circles that John Lear, one of the controversial figures within the area within the final 35 years, handed away throughout his sleep on March 29th at his house. He was 79 years previous.
Even earlier than he made a splash within the UFO scene, Lear had already had a most sui-generis profession: The disowned son of plane designer Invoice Lear –founding father of the Learjet firm– as an aviator he broke quite a few information and even ran clandestine missions for the CIA throughout the Vietnam conflict (the film Air America is a fictionalized story of that period). By the Eighties Lear established himself in Nevada (the place he remained till his demise) and it was then when he turned very within the UFO phenomenon; notably, within the tales that started to proliferate amongst American researchers after the story of the (alleged) crash of a flying saucer in Roswell, New Mexico had resurfaced from public opinion due to the work of Stan Friedman, Invoice Moore and different investigators.
It was then that UFOlogy started what it might arguably be thought-about its most paranoid section, as a result of not like their predecessors from the Nineteen Fifties and 60s who additionally stored insisting the US authorities knew an entire lot extra about UFOs than they publicly admitted by their PR marketing campaign with the Air Drive’s Blue E book undertaking, UFOlogists within the 80’s have been not solely satisfied the federal government stored entire squadrons of crashed saucers and their pickled occupants hidden away in closely secured army bases like Space 51 –whose existence was nonetheless formally denied regardless of the actual fact the Air Drive was grabbing an increasing number of public lands to maintain it secure from curious eyes– and below the management of a secret cabal generally known as ‘Majestic 12’, however that the federal government was additionally conscious of the harrowing experiences narrated by ‘abductees’ who claimed to be submitted to painful medical and gynecological procedures by the hands of impassive beings with chilly, black eyes; and that both they have been powerless to cease the aliens from kidnapping harmless civilians from their very houses –therefore the explanation for the coverup and official denial– or, even worse, they have been in cahoots with the Martian Mengeles by a darkish pact that not solely threatened the freedoms of Americans, however your entire destiny of mankind itself.
It was into all this menagerie of disinformation that Lear dove in, and merrily helped to crank the lever of the rumor mill by ‘information dumps’ uploaded into the nascent world broad internet by way of bulletin board techniques (BBS) and Usenet teams, wherein he poured in his theories of how each unsubstantiated story he got here throughout match collectively into the ‘huge image’ of the alien presence in our planet. So even if you’re comparatively new in your curiosity in UFOs and have by no means even heard of the identify ‘John Lear’, his affect remains to be indelible within the area to this present day by the permanence of mythologies involving underground alien bases, nefarious genetic experimentation on abductees to create human-alien hybrids, and even the enduring public fascination with Bob Lazar and his claims of reverse-engineering applications of extraterrestrial expertise –the truth that Lazar was open about his friendship with Lear when he was interviewed for a place contained in the Groom Lake testing floor (one thing his would-be employers appeared to have already know) not solely not hindered his candidacy, however it appears to have been one of many explanation why he bought the job within the first place. Was somebody relying on Lear to ‘spill the beans’ as he was fond to do?
Final yr our good good friend and collaborator Adam Gorightly revealed the guide Saucers, Spooks & Kooks by Each day Grail Press, which delved deep into this wacky period of UFO historical past. In order a particular deal with to our readers, we’re together with a small excerpt from the guide which could assist you get a way of simply how influential John Lear was within the shaping of recent UFO narratives –for higher or for worse.
Grailers are welcomed to take a look at the numerous recordings of radio appearances Lear made through the years in exhibits like Coast to Coast AM with Artwork Bell or Darkish Issues Radio with Don Ecker –though listeners are suggested to take EVERYTHING coming from his mouth with an enormous bucket of salt. I might additionally strongly encourage you to offer a hearken to the episodes on Aaron Gulyas’s The Saucer Life wherein John Lear’s involvement with the OH-KRILL papers and his relationship with Invoice Cooper are mentioned.
Godspeed and farewell to you, o Baron Munchausen of Saucerdom. You weaved webs of lies and fantasy so sticky you ended up trapped by them your self, however with out you UFOlogy loses a lot of its chutzpah. Might you handle to evade the soul-catching machines on the Moon.
Chapter 21: The Crestone Manifesto (Excerpt)
Though Paul Bennewitz lit the preliminary Dulce Base fuse, it took the higher a part of a decade for the story to go viral when John Lear burst on to the scene together with his hair on fireplace. Lear—who seemingly added some measure of credibility as a Dulce Base promoter— was an airline captain and former CIA contract pilot, in addition to the son of William Lear, inventor of not solely the Learjet, but additionally the eight-track tape participant.
On the June 11, 1994 version of Don Ecker’s UFOs Tonight radio program, Invoice Moore said that the majority of John Lear’s Dulce Base data got here courtesy of Paul Bennewitz, together with the time period “Greys” that first appeared in Bennewitz’s “Venture Beta” report, describing the aliens who had entered right into a secret treaty with the U.S. authorities. In keeping with Moore:
Many individuals on the market have heard these little aliens known as ‘Greys’—that time period was invented within the Bennewitz counterintelligence affair. They made it up. They dumped that in Bennewitz’s lap and he proceeded to repeat it to all types of individuals within the UFO neighborhood and right this moment it’s commonplace phrase of mouth. And it’s crap!
In early November 1987, a mini-conference, comprised completely of UFO researchers, was organized by Tom Adams and held in Crestone, Colorado. Amongst these attending have been John Lear, Linda Howe, Christian Lambright, David Perkins, Gary Massey, Lockheed engineer John Andrews, and Jim Speiser, founding father of the ParaNet Bulletin Board System (BBS).
It was at this Crestone “assembly of the minds” —in line with Invoice Moore—that the Dulce Base story was fleshed-out utilizing Paul Bennewitz as the first supply of knowledge, or not less than that was the state of affairs that Moore specified by his interview with Don Ecker. What Moore was most definitely referring to because the “Dulce Base story” later advanced into “The UFO Cowl-Up”, a controversial seven-page doc that Lear posted to ParaNet in December 1987. Through the Crestone convention, Lear steered that the group put their heads collectively and provide you with a joint assertion addressing the present state of ufology. Initially everybody was receptive to this concept, and on the second day they gathered in a gathering room to return to a consensus as to what this group assertion would say. Because the dialogue progressed, everybody appeared in settlement that some type of unidentified aerial phenomenon was concerned with the cattle mutilations, however John Lear wished to take it a number of steps additional and definitively declare that Earth was below assault from an alien race. As David Perkins recalled:
I used to be horrified about the place Lear wished to take our assertion, however I used to be making an attempt to be well mannered, and I stated, ‘I can’t fairly get behind that one, John. I’m not signing my identify to that.’ And from there this entire concept of placing out a press release shortly fell aside. Lear bought miffed; he thought he might come away from our convention with this Crestone Manifesto, and it didn’t occur—so he was form of pouty the remainder of the day, as I recall—after which later that night he and Linda Howe out of the blue determined to take off and go on a street journey collectively, leaving the convention early. And I stated to her: ‘What? You may’t go away now, we nonetheless have one other day.’ And he or she stated, ‘Properly, now we have to go instantly to Roswell to see Clifford Stone. It’s crucial. He has some data for us.’ And that basically appeared out of character for Linda, and raised a number of eyebrows, as a result of she by no means left something early. She’d keep to the bitter finish if there was some kind of gathering taking place. And we thought it have to be actually damned vital no matter Clifford Stone needed to inform her.
On their approach to Roswell, Lear and Howe had a stop-over in Albuquerque the place they “had dinner with Col. (Ernie) Edwards who stored monitor of Dr. Paul Bennewitz for the Air Drive and met with Condor (Robert Collins)…who confirmed us some transcripts concerning EBE3, one of many residing aliens sequestered from the Roswell crash. One of many messages stated, ‘EBE3 desires to see the ocean. We had higher comply or he’ll disappear once more.’”
Howe and Lear’s subsequent cease was Roswell the place they met up with one other spooky ex-military sort, the aforementioned Sgt. Clifford Stone, who claimed that as a toddler rising up in Southern Ohio he had encountered extraterrestrials, and that these encounters had come to the eye of the U.S. authorities, who monitored Stone all through his youth and into maturity.
Through the Vietnam period, Stone enlisted within the Military and in brief order (or so Stone claimed) he was whisked away to a prime secret movie-screening room at Fort Belvoir and proven a movie of a UFO retrieval, then afterwards positioned on a particular army workforce assigned to crash-retrievals, throughout the course of which Stone recognized a minimum of fifty-seven completely different alien races.
In the summertime of 1986, Stone had been in correspondence with Paul Bennewitz, receiving what might greatest be described as two relatively prolonged and rambling letters wherein Bennewitz went into exhaustive element concerning the completely different alien races at Dulce, maybe evaluating notes concerning the completely different aliens that Stone himself had allegedly encountered throughout his crash-retrieval assignments. It was Stone’s involvement with Bennewitz that seems to have been not less than one of many elements that motivated Howe and Lear to skip out early from Crestone to rendezvous in Roswell with Stone. All of those peculiar peregrinations appeared have the singular focus in thoughts of discovering out extra of what Bennewitz knew concerning the ETs and the alleged Dulce underground base.
Not lengthy after his street journey with Howe, Lear returned to Albuquerque to fulfill with Bennewitz. In keeping with Christian Lambright:
Someday in 1987, or probably 1988, John Lear went to fulfill Paul [Bennewitz] at Paul’s house. I discovered later that John spent a number of days there, although to the perfect of my data it was the primary time they’d met in particular person. A number of days after John’s departure, I bought a name from Paul. He was extraordinarily offended about one thing involving John and, from the sturdy phrases he used, it was very clear that he didn’t care to see John once more.
Following his interactions with Lear, Bennewitz modified his cellphone quantity and withdrew from the entrance traces of ufology. Lambright suspects that the trigger behind Bennewitz’s self-imposed ufological exile had one thing to do together with his assembly with Lear, to not point out that by this time Bennewitz was teetering on the sting of a psychological meltdown.
