The Intel Op Hypothesis
A friendly reminder that CIA vampires are not out of the question ...
At some point, you might have come across the classic 1996 movie, Mission Impossible. The movie opens in a Ukrainian hotel room where a desperate Russian appears to have just murdered a hooker. He talks briefly with another man who’s arrived to clean up the mess. But there’s a catch. This other man needs at least some information before he can offer his services. The murderer gives up a name and moments later it becomes clear that they’re not in Ukraine, the hotel room isn’t real, and the hooker isn’t dead. The man who came to help? That’s Tom Cruise wearing a mask, and this whole scenario is revealed to be an elaborate set up on a carefully managed sound stage.
Of course, this is a fictional spy story. I’m not here to suggest there’s a lot we can learn from the tradecraft that shows up in Hollywood blockbusters. But that doesn’t mean you should discount it entirely. One possible explanation for the UFO stories you hear involves a scenario just like the opening to Mission Impossible. One where other human beings use modern technology to “fake” profound encounters with the hope of extracting actionable intelligence. Could it be done? And would there be any reason to believe it already has? Maybe at least some of the government secrecy around this topic has to do with …
Sources and Methods
In 1950, a U.S. Air Force Officer named Edward G. Lansdale arrived in the Philippines. The country was in the middle of a low-grade civil war between the American-backed government and a group of communist insurgents called the Huks. For five years, the Filipinos had trouble making any progress against these insurgents and Landsdale was brought in to stabilize the situation as the Cold War raged on.1
But Landsdale wasn’t quite what he appeared. Even thought he seemed like just another military advisor, he was actually a CIA Officer brought in to lead clandestine military operations in the country. Landsdale’s diagnosis was simple. He felt that “a popular guerilla army cannot be defeated by force alone.”2 And since one of the chief problems in fighting the Huks was your ability to find them, he felt you would have to get creative in flushing them out of the jungle.
One way he chose to do this involved working with local superstitions. When he interviewed peasants in the region, they consistently mentioned widespread fear of a mythical vampire-like creature called the “asuang.” What did he do with that knowledge? As historian William Blum described his approach:
A psywar squad [would] enter a town and plant rumors that an asuang lived in the neighboring hill where the Huks were based, a location from which government forces were anxious to have them out. Two nights later, after giving the rumors time to circulate among Huk sympathizers in the town and make their way up the hill, the psywar squad laid an ambush for the rebels along a trail used by them. When a Huk patrol passed, the ambushers silently snatched the last man, punctured his neck vampire-fashion with two holes, held his body by the heels until the blood drained out, and put the corpse back on the trail. When the Huks, as superstitious as any other Filipinos, discovered the bloodless comrade, they fled from the region.3
By 1953 the Huk insurgency was dead. It wasn’t bullets that killed them; it was a series of psychological blows that led to their utter dissolution. Landsdale was recognized and promoted by the head of the CIA (Allen Dulles) who then instructed him to “do what you did in the Philippines in Vietnam.”4
Why am I telling you this? Because this is one of the CIA’s greatest ever success stories. The ability to work with local superstition was recognized at the highest levels of the intel community. And the only reason you know about this particular piece of tradecraft was because Landsdale wrote his own book about it. The CIA never mentioned anything about this campaign, nor did they release any documentation. You know about this event because of a disgruntled memoir released long before the CIA clamped down on books that gave away sources and methods.
Back to the Future
One reason for the perceived secrecy on the UFO Phenomenon is that the United States government is convinced that you would freak out if you knew the full extent of the problem. Assuming that the phenomenon is a real thing, you might be inclined to believe that the work of former CIA Officers like Hadley Cantril got the ball rolling on a cover up. That’s a theory that’s covered extensively by a lot of UFO pundits and I don’t think you need me to add anything here.
But in this newsletter, I feel obligated to open you up to some other possibilities which could also include a very uncomfortable extension of the psychological warfare I highlighted above. Substitute vampires for aliens and I think you could perhaps imagine an intelligence agency that takes advantage of local superstitions in the same way. Perhaps a large one might be inclined to mimic the experience of a UFO abduction and ask people questions it would like answered.
Could that be done? Mask technology is now much better than the fictional scenario in the Mission Impossible movies.5 Every intelligence agency on Earth has a history of using mind altering drugs on witting and unwitting subjects. Sound stages are increasingly good and portable.
But why would you want to? Because, as I highlighted in my recent coverage of former CIA Officer John Ramirez, high ranking government and intelligence officials are vulnerable to this deception. In addition to Ramirez’s own description of being abducted, he notes (1) that he encountered about a dozen other “experiencers” across his intelligence career, and (2) that they were unwilling to report it because of the stigma.6
What did Ramirez claim to experience? He indicates that he interacted with beings that were “more like humanoid with a mixture of Sarian. Bipedal, two arms, a head, two eyes, mouth and so forth. They’re flesh and blood and, as far as I can tell.”7 And what did they want? They wanted to relay a somewhat apocalyptic message that suggested:
… it’s humanities responsibility to take care of this planet because [they] live on it to and [they] don’t like what we’ve been doing. You have free will so exercise your free will to take care of your planet because if you don’t, your species may suffer dire consequences if the planet turns against you.8
With that message in mind, is it a stretch that one of these “beings” might ask John for the nuclear codes? You know, to prevent a disaster of our own making? And, if so, what if those beings are actually human beings, in a very achievable disguise, asking on behalf of the Chinese Ministry of State Security?
This opens a conversation and brings us back to an article I published two weeks ago on the need to consider updated polygraph testing for members of the U.S. Intelligence Community. It was my view then that inserting questions about perceived interactions with UFOs could be illuminating and help us understand the extent of the problem being reported by people like John. With the possibility of a foreign intelligence explanation, I think there’s all the more reason to do that.
Ultimately, at least some of the UFO secrecy exerted by the government may be about protecting sources and methods – either for an intel op we’re using or for an op that’s being used on us. And if we’re going to consider possible UFO explanations like extra-terrestrials, ultra-terrestrials, or time travelling versions of us, I think we might as well check in on China and Russia while we’re at it.
P.S. Do you think perspectives like this are important? Help prompt better coverage of UFO Policy and:
Bloom, William. Killing Hope U.S. Military and CIA Interventions Since World War II – Part I. Central Intelligence Agency. London, U.K.: Zed Books, 2003. https://www.cia.gov/library/abbottabad-compound/13/130AEF1531746AAD6AC03EF59F91E1A1_Killing_Hope_Blum_William.pdf. Pg 40.
Bloom, Killing Hope. Pg 41.
Bloom, Killing Hope. Pg 41.
Logevall, Frederick. Embers of War: The Fall of an Empire and the Making of America’s Vietnam. New York, NY: Random House, 2012. Pg 635.
Kring-Schreifels, Jake. “The Mission: Impossible Masks Are Almost a Reality.” Polygon, April 24, 2023. https://www.polygon.com/23688879/mission-impossible-masks-real-life.
Raasch, Sean. “The Return of John Ramirez.” Witness Citizen, January 11, 2022. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TjeWwoyzb5E. At 16min 23s.
The current "disclosure" process might be recycling Cold War era inter-military PsyOp materials into a new PsyOp aimed at the public.