Aberration in the Heartland of the Real: The Secret Lives of Timothy McVeigh

by Wendy S. Painting

The continued belief in conspiracy theories of this type is founded upon actual experiments on humans involving radioactive isotopes, viruses, psychoactive drugs, cancer cells, mustard gas, fluoride, various vaccines, as well as chemical and biological weapons that continued well into the 1990s. The unwitting test subjects included, among others: soldiers, prisoners, veterans, cancer patients, and children. Cook, for one, did not discount out of hand such seemingly paranoid scenarios as ridiculous or implausible and, like Dean, opined that suspicions and conspiracy theories about government science experiments were not as outlandish or unfounded as they may first appear when the practices of the U.S. after Nuremburg are considered. Cook warned that, even if the government did not create AIDS, its previous abusive research practices posed a danger nonetheless, as victimized individuals and populations may be suspicious of and reject (for good reason) harmless protective measures such as vaccines, when offered.

Further, throughout the 1990s, the government made a number of admissions about just such experiments that had occurred decades previous. A presidential advisory panel established in 1994 resulted in the declassification of documents pertaining to the use of civilians and soldier guinea pigs. The panel found that while “the great majority” of these had been “conducted to advance biomedical science,” the intent of many was to advance national defense interests.

circumstances that have led many in the African-American community to believe that the government not only created AIDS but also administered it to the citizenry. After all, many realized only later that the entire Gulf War itself had been a massive theatrical experiment in technology and genocidal greed.

associated with Morgellons disease,

psychic disturbances coinciding with political and economic upheavals as theorized by Carl Jung in 1958.

“the father of space medicine” and former Luftwaffe colonel, Hubertus Strughold, whose love of science led him to place prisoners at Dachau and Auschwitz in low-pressure chambers to determine human resiliency to high-altitude and high-speed flight, resulting in many gruesome deaths.

Although the staff of the Nuremburg Trials and U.S. Army Intelligence documents listed him as a war criminal, Strughold apparently redeemed himself when he designed NASA’s on-board life support systems and for the remainder of his life, continued to hold a number of esteemed positions in the U.S. defense establishment, where he went about developing methods to allow humans to travel safely into outer space.

“the CIA had smuggled Nazi scientists into the States to work with the American military at Calspan” where they developed tracking devices – brain implants.

Paperclip, however, is one of the subjects where the boundary separating the conspiracy genre and “credible” mainstream journalism becomes porous.

According to the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics, “Nearly every military aircraft and space vehicle developed in the United States from the end of World War II until the present day has been tested at the facility, now known as Calspan.”

Among the technological loot seized from the Nazis after WWII was the drone. While other countries including the U.S. had tinkered with the idea of unmanned aircraft previously, they hadn’t gotten as far as the Nazi’s. Air Force Intelligence documents related to Paperclip operations describe, in Cook’s words, Nazi development and late-stage testing of “Vesco’s Fireball drone: a pilotless, remote controlled aircraft that disrupted the energies and electronic systems of Allied bombers”

dollar contracts from the DOD and all branches of the military made significant contributions to the further development and testing of remotely controlled aircraft capable of unusual and risky maneuvers human pilots could not perform, and the training and interface systems necessary for those who would “pilot” them. Perhaps coincidently, an unrelated article in the Buffalo News written by a Calspan engineer noted that most UFO sightings involved “lights and apparently solid objects that execute incredible maneuvers such as high-speed, right-angle turns; sudden starts and stops; ‘falling leaf’ descent, and silent hovering followed by rapid acceleration capabilities far beyond any known aircraft on Earth.”

And then 9/11 happened. After that, drones such as the Global Hawk and Predator carrying Hellfire missiles swarmed the skies of Afghanistan and then Iraq, theatres of war that Peter Pace, vice chairman of the Joint Chiefs said “provides a tremendous laboratory” to test the Pentagon’s new toys. Someday, there could even be “whole squadrons of pilotless attack planes,” and would make up 90% of all combat aircraft by 2025, media outlets gleefully announced in November 2001. The CIA (at the time the main overseers and users of drones) pressed for increased use of attack drones, implying that if they’d had them sooner they could have killed Osama Bin Laden, thereby preventing 9/11. As the months went on, drones were increasingly credited with victories in the Global War on Terror. Admittedly, drones crashed more often than war wagers would have liked … but this was a work in progress.

The real winners in all of this though, were not the American people per se, but the entire aerospace industry. After 9/11, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, long criticized for his efforts to “transform” the military by endowing it with the ability to project American power anywhere at any time at a moment’s notice (or pre-emptively sooner), was now heralded as a prophet.

Pakistan submitted a resolution to the National Assembly denouncing “the never-ending US drone attacks” and demanded the U.S. government stop the slaughter, which, they pointed out, violates the country’s sovereignty as well as a number of UN Human Rights resolutions and charters as well as international treaties and Geneva Convention provisions.

the ACLU announced that while it is known that U.S. drones have killed thousands, “no one outside the government has a clear idea of who’s being killed, or why”

Even the laws governing the use of drone strikes remain hidden from the public and, until recently, the CIA, citing National Security, refused to acknowledge that a drone program even existed.

Since 2011, the United States Air Force, using exciting massive multi-player video game-like simulators, has trained more drone pilots than fighter and bomber pilots combined.

Today, law enforcement agencies, including local and state police, the FBI, Homeland Security, Border Patrol and the Department of Defense, increasingly use drones for domestic reconnaissance and surveillance. While these Brave New Drones openly spy on and police Americans, thus far U.S. citizens have not been subjected to the types of aerial attacks suffered by those in Afghanistan, Pakistan, Syria, Somalia and elsewhere. But, as they say, what’s good for the goose.… When the FAA authorized the commercial use of drones in domestic airspace in 2012, it estimated that nearly 30,000 drones would populate U.S. skies by 2020, conjuring thoughts of all-seeing private security firms and unmanned mercenary drone armies.

McVeigh too heeded this call and set off on his own pilgrimage to Area 51.

sometimes called “Dreamland” and was operted by the Departement of Defense and the Wackenhut Security company.

In 2007, Calspan, now with facilities around the country, established its newest prestigious research facility located at, of all places, Roswell, New Mexico. Popular Science dubbed the Roswell “Calspan Bicycle Works” site, “the New Area 51.” Before continuing with the history of Calspan, I will briefly outline McVeigh’s trip to the actual Area 51 after he left Buffalo, the possible relationship this trip might have to the bombing plot, and explore the intersection of fact, folklore, rumor and disinformation in this and related stories.

In some of the more entertaining Experimental Wolf legends, McVeigh, or one of his doubles, appeared in Area 51 prior to the bombing where he underwent various procedures including the injection of bio-tracking chips and brainwashing.

Michael Fortier claimed that McVeigh made more than one trip to Area 51. Fortier told the FBI that in February 1995, while on their way back to Kingman from gun shows in Nevada and Utah, he and McVeigh made two trips to Area 51, one in the middle of the night and the second trip in the day.

“Tim T.” The intended recipient of the letter, the man McVeigh said he was supposed to meet near Area 51, turned out to be a highly skilled chemist and federal fugitive named Stephen Garrett Colbern.

Colbern, the son of a U.S. Army Reserve Colonel and Department of Corrections dentist, was remembered by his former classmates and high school physics teacher in Oxnard, California as a highly intelligent, nerdy loner who, even as a teenager, was obsessed with guns, snakes, chemistry and bomb making. One high school friend recounted how Colbern, whom he said had a hard time controlling his temper during their Dungeons and Dragons games, would often practice building and detonating ammonium nitrate bombs in the desert. After graduating high school in 1978, Colbern attended UCLA where he studied chemistry. Dan Mauck (name changed) told the FBI that he met Colbern in 1984, when they were both graduate students at UCLA. Although they became friends, Mauck began to suspect Colbern was stealing chemicals from the lab, including ammonium nitrate and told his supervisor and other professors about it. They did nothing and even warned him to “leave it alone.” Mauck said Colbern was “very anti-Semitic” and believed Jews ran the world as part of a U.N. conspiracy. A man he worked with later said, “He was a Nazi.” Colbern’s uncle told the FBI that his nephew was a paranoid schizophrenic who was capable of participating in a bombing and, in fact, he had always worried that someday his nephew would end up being a “mad bomber.”

Throughout 1993 and 1994, Colbern divided his time by working at Cedars-Sinai hospital in Beverly Hills where he conducted DNA research and holing himself up in a trailer in Bullhead City,

McVeigh and Colbern had a few other things in common. On April 14, 1995, four days before the Oklahoma City bombing, a US Marshall arrived in Kingman looking for the fugitive Colbern and questioned the manager of the post office where Colbern (as well as McVeigh and a couple other notables) rented boxes. In this and subsequent interviews, she described Colbern as someone who came in occasionally during March and April 1995, to pick up mail for a man who turned out to be Timothy McVeigh. In fact, it turned out that the only two people authorized to pick up McVeigh’s mail were Michael Fortier and Steven Colbern. After the bombing on April 19, the manhunt for Colbern, which had been ongoing at the time of the bombing, intensified.

First, he said, he contacted the Militia of Montana, whose organizer John Trochman later turned out to be an FBI informant.

Through them, he learned of Arkansas gun dealer Roger Moore and his girlfriend Karen Anderson, who ran a mail-order gun and ammunition business and had many associates in the movement. Unknown to his customers and friends, Moore, who himself used a number of aliases, was a highly protected federal asset/informant whose connections with shadowy covert government operators, mercenaries and international arms dealers, could be traced at least as far back as the Iran-Contra era. When Colbern contacted Moore

the Wild West, McVeigh formed relationships with a number of high profile Neo-Nazis, other white supremacists and former or aspiring terrorists. When questioned by the FBI, a number of people said they recognized McVeigh and had seen him before, but that they knew him by other names including Tim Tuttle and Sergeant Mac. McVeigh admitted to his attorneys that he had used these and other aliases as well as disguises during his travels and interactions with his many “underground right wing connections” who, unlike movement spokespeople, avoided the limelight so they could engage in their activities unimpeded. Among the organized groups he associated himself with were the Aryan Nations and National Alliance, whose founder wrote The Turner Diaries. McVeigh attended at least one Bullhead City National Alliance chapter meeting and in the days before the bombing, placed at least ten calls to their regional headquarters (located near Kingman, Arizona in Bullhead City). McVeigh explained that he was looking for an “Army” to disseminate literature and progress his rebellion further and although he never found it, he came close with the Bullhead National Alliance. His occasional allusions to a much larger group of conspirators consistently wavered.

Colbern had both the “qualifications” and “ideological inclinations” to fill the position and observed that the FBI “appeared indifferent” to the mountain of incriminating evidence against Colbern and was “oddly quick in dismissing [him] as a suspect.” In fact, the FBI never questioned Colbern about his shared mailbox with McVeigh and, in a logic that defies logic, determined he was too weird to have been involved in the bombing plot. Terry Nichols’ attorneys complained that the FBI “even knew what Colbern smelled like,” yet failed to turn over any of the evidence they gathered about him to either defense team.

By now, the subjects of UFOs, aliens, and the growing phenomenon of alien abductions were a “catalyst for splintered fragments of belief”; a topical hub that posed a great threat, ideas that acted as magnets for “militia types” who warned of space invasions staged by the Illuminati to usher in the long-planned-for world government. In fact, according to the Guardian, all of this “gobbledygook” was “the launch pad for the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing.”

transform society and humanity itself. Christopher Roth, in his 2005 essay “Ufology as Anthropology: Race, Extraterrestrials and the Occult” adeptly demonstrates the shared intellectual roots, belief structures and discursive practices between Ufology and

science, anthropology, religion, and mysticism generally. For him, the crossovers are most salient in relation to the issue of race. “Put simply,” wrote Roth, “ufology is in one sense all about race, and it has more to do with terrestrial racial schemes as social and cultural constructs than most UFO believers are aware.” Ross argues that UFO discourse is nearly inseparable from existing but “older anthropological discourses that had legitimized a hierarchical racial and class order.”

The attempts of the “alien” invaders (as imagined by mostly white people) to manipulate and sway human genetics thereby creating new races, their meddling attempts to fix bad DNA and their obsessive efforts to preserve the human race, but especially their own “race” sound eerily similar to projects advanced by eugenicists and advocated by historical as well as modern Nazi’s and white racialists. Certainly, such conceptions appealed to Hitler and the mystically-minded SS, who themselves, through their Vril and Thule Societies, sought contact with extraterrestrial beings and called forth and even built (or attempted to build) their own spaceships. Several influential 1950s-era Ufologists were either the direct disciples of Blavatsky or had been greatly influenced by her doctrines. Included were prominent faces of the U.S.’s pro-Hitler/Nazi party such as William Dudley Pelley, founder of the Silver Shirt organization.

While the links between Nazi beliefs and those about aliens and UFO’s are important to understand, what the majority of mainstream commentary and theorizing surrounding the UFO and contactee movements fail to take into account (including those commentators not focused on racial ideologies) is that the world of UFO mania is, and has always been, highly infiltrated. A sizable amount of information propagated by the UFO movement was intentionally planted there by the U.S. intelligence community.

A handful of writers however, most notably Jodi Dean and investigative journalist Mark Pilkington, have presented credible and well-documented histories of the U.S. government’s attempts to contain, exert control over and shape the public’s never-ending fascination, inquiries and speculations about UFOs.

In an attempt to mitigate the rumors, Project Sign became Project Grudge in late 1948 but, unlike its predecessor, Grudge began with the official position that UFOs did not exist and attributed the sightings to mass hallucinations. Grudge recognized that, even if UFOs were not real, the Soviets could exploit the American public’s increasing preoccupation with them and weaken citizens’ faith in their government as, for citizens, government denials coupled with continuing sightings a dishonest government makes.

To decrease the likelihood of mass manipulation, Project Grudge waged a propaganda campaign to alleviate public fears of UFOs while downplaying sighting reports in general. A primary element of this campaign involved stripping away the credibility of those who thought they saw something strange in the sky. Properly trained observers (scientists and military experts) would then provide “true” explanations […] Witnesses were dismissed as drunk, hysterical, crazy, or deeply twisted and dishonest. [Yet] the official ridicule had a reverse effect: suspicions that there was really something to hide [which managed to] shift the problem of credibility from UFO witnesses to the U.S. government and military.

Pilkington noted that the decision to intervene in the UFO debate and discredit (sometimes maliciously) those who claimed to see strange, unexplainable aircraft in the sky, stands as an example of one of many early acts of Cold War “ontological aggression” leveled by the U.S. government against its own citizens and foreign populations alike. These perception management efforts became aggressive and began in earnest in 1951 when President Harry S. Truman created the Psychological Strategy Board (PSB), whose purpose was to intervene in American popular culture and religious and intellectual domains in order to promote “the American way of life” and neutralize “doctrines hostile to foreign objectives.”

Thus, in early 1952, CIA Director Walter B. Smith wrote to PSB Director Raymond Allen that he was “transmitting to the National Security Council a proposal in which it is concluded that the problems associated with unidentified flying objects appear to have implications for psychological warfare as well as for intelligence operations. I suggest that we discuss [at a] board meeting the possible offensive of and defense of utilization of these phenomena for psychological warfare purposes.”

Project Blue Book and the military made unauthorized release of information about UFO sightings a criminal act.

The panel’s findings, outlined in the Report of Meetings of the Office of Scientific Intelligence Scientific Advisory Panel on Unidentified Flying Objects, 1953, explained that the “‘debunking’ aim would result in reduction of public interest in ‘flying saucers’ which today evoke a strong psychological reaction … this education could be accomplished by mass media, television, motion pictures and popular articles.” (Even Walt Disney would end up getting in on the perception management act.) They further recommended

and close monitoring of citizen UFO research organizations “because of their potentially great influence on mass thinking if widespread sightings should occur.

As passive intelligence gathering and perception management efforts had failed to demystify UFO’s, the CIA and military intelligence agencies adopted a more aggressive approach; one that not only made UFO believers seem crazy but actually, at times, drove them insane. These operations were intended, not to squelch the

propagation of UFO/ alien legends (this had proved impossible) but to make those who claimed to have seen or experienced related phenomenon, or even those who earnestly sought to understand why these stories existed in the first place, appear as outlandish as possible.

This took place concurrently and in association with the CIA’s MKUltra project, which explored the possibilities of brainwashing, often by using unsuspecting civilians (foreign and domestic) as unwitting experimental test subjects. Their hearts, minds and bodies became the testing grounds for various hallucinogens...

To begin with, UFO sightings (and on occasion alien encounters) were staged in the U.S. and elsewhere, after which witness’ reports about what they saw and their subsequent activities could be studied, both psychologically (how did they react at the time of the sighting and afterwards) and sociologically (whom did they tell and how did the information travel).

Secondly, the Air Force, CIA, NSA and other agencies continued to spy on the UFO community by embedding operatives within citizen UFO research groups but rather than simply gathering information, the operatives acted as disinformation specialists, real life Men In Black, or “Mirage Men” targeted select individuals, often those who had already gained some clout and respect among their