Who's the Hoaxer?

Gregory M Kanon. The Great UFO Hoax: The Final Solution to the UFO mystery. Galde Press, 1997.🔻
I have been intrigued by the possibility that there has been a conspiracy or conspiracies to promote the ETH. The curious statements by a number of public figures about how the world would unite against an ET threat; the presence of a number of fringe political figures around ufology; the curious way that the governing committee of the old NICAP resembled a who's who of the military industrial complex all add grist to the mill. The idea was the subject of the very first UFO book of all, Bernard Newman's 1949 novel, The Flying Saucer (the theme was used by by Martin Caiden in The Mendelav Conspiracy and in Hawkey and Bingham's Wild Card. It was also promoted by a number of ufologists including Leon Davidson, William Spaulding, and on and off by Jacques Vallee.

I was therefore eager to see if this book provided any good evidence or persuasive arguments for the existence of such a conspiracy. It does not; instead of an insightful discussion of possible media manipulations and playing on the politics of UFO groups we get a face value presentation of UFO reports, only arguing that their amazing technology is a product of the US government. So we have the usual nonsense about the US's secret anti-gravity devises, beam weapons, Nikola Tesla, mind control etc. This includes the claim that the Tunguska meteorite of 1908 was the result of one of Tesla death ray experiments going wrong. Apparently this amazing technology is not used for any purpose other than scaring the American public shitless so that come the day they will let the agents of the New World order in the Federal Emergency Agency take over I find that even harder to believe than dear old EBE Krill sucking strawberry ice cream.

There is one piece of blatant dishonesty in this book which tells us a lot about the author. The claim on p.85 that the Tehran UFO case occurred In the late 1970's, around the time of the attack on the American Embassy, with the clear implication that the events were connected, and the UFO was some sort of American secret device. The UFO case actually took place 3 years before the siege of the embassy, at a time when the Shah of Iran still seemed secure on his peacock throne. A footnote shows that Kannon knows this. By their lies and evasions ye shall know them.  
  • Peter Rogerson, from Magonia 64, August 1998.

1 comment:

Terry the Censor said...

> Bernard Newman's 1949 novel, The Flying Saucer

A very entertaining book.