FIRE FROM THE SKY:
Battle of Harvest Moon & True Story of Space Shuttles

by "One Who Knows"

Photo Courtesy of NASA

PART 1:
As I begin writing this report, the news is telling about a strange USAIR airplane crash in Pennsylvania. Next day a plane crashed in Moscow. CNN told about a fireball that was reported from Bakersfield, California, to Medford, Oregon. They said it occurred about 6 or 6:15 in the morning on Saturday, September 10 (1994) and was so bright that the light shining through windows woke up some people. They showed a house in San Rafael with a hole in the roof from a piece of something falling from the sky.
An Arian rocket was launched from French Guyana and was lost, a day before. Several earthquakes have occurred in California, including one that CNN showed on a map, southwest of Lake Tahoe. About 15 minutes later, CNN began telling about the Space Shuttle firing lasers at Earth and showed a view of Earth, with Lake Tahoe in the upper right corner of the screen. If you put the two together, then you see that the Columbia Space Shuttle is firing laser beams at Earth "for environmental purposes," precisely where the earthquakes are occurring. The President went to Camp David, then when the President returned (?), a plane crashed into the White House. Later he gave a speech in a room of the White House, then just after he left a fire broke out in the room. Rosh Hashanah is recently passed (September 6-7, 1994), and Yom Kippur is coming up (September 15, 1994). The President has ordered 8,300 Navy, 1,800 Marine and 4,000 Army personnel along with 15 or 20 warships to [prepare to] invade Haiti.
SECRET WARS BETWEEN POWERS THAT BE
If what you are about to read does not scare the pants off you, then you must not be wearing any. Pay attention and this information may save your life. The purpose of this article is to inform you briefly about some of the secret wars that are going on between the Powers-That-Be that are struggling for control of the world.
In 1978, I was head of a Mensa special interest group called the Doomsday Club News and Intelligence Report. I wrote a newsletter for the Club. In the May, 1978, issue I said:
"WAR is an ever-present danger, much closer than most people realize. Now Russia is testing 'killer satellites' and laser and particle beam weapons, while the U.S. is undertaking a major program to develop counterbeam weapons - a real Star Wars battle is taking shape. War in space is now possible and the likelihood of it grows. A program is now under way to determine the feasibility of using the Space Shuttle for defense purposes." What I did not know at that time, was the fact that the space war had already started. This manuscript will provide more details.
In the same newsletter, I mentioned that Richard Helms of the CIA had been fired by President Carter, and recommended that the reader contact the Security & Intelligence Fund (at address included) for more information. I listed the staff members a s James Angleton, Elbridge Durbrow, Brig Gen. Robert Richardson, Former Secy. of Navy and Treasury Robert Anderson, former Chief of Naval Operations Admiral G. W. Anderson, and other names that become important later in this story.
SHIFTING DEFENSE STRATEGIES
On page 10, I said: "The U.S. is shifting its defense to sub-launched ballistics missiles and air-launched cruise missiles, as silo-based ICBMs become vulnerable to a pre-emptive first strike by the Soviet Union." The B-52, F-14, F-15, and F-16 will be equipped with cruise missiles over the next five years, in the Pacific Region. This posture indicates admission that nothing standing still in the U.S. can be protected - only aircraft and submarines have a chance of surviving a first strike.
"Independent congressional studies already have been completed that show that by 1980 the Russians could conduct a first strike against the Minuteman force with a strong probability of being able to destroy the majority of U.S. ICBMs, and that by as early as 1981 the U.S. will no longer have a sufficient deterrent to preclude a Soviet first strike." I continued with a quote from Aviation Week & Space Technology, (p. 14, Apr. 3, 1978), about the numbers of missiles that we and Russia had. Later on the page I mentioned about Defense Secretary Harold Brown proposing a sharp increase in civil defense spending, including funding a study to plan faster evacuation of cities during threat of a nuclear attack. What was going on? Why was the U.S. shifting its defense strategy, and suddenly emphasizing the importance of civil defense?
In my July issue of the DCN&IR newsletter, I quoted General George S. Brown, Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, who said: "What the Soviets are doing is unsettling, principally because none of us know why." I said: "General Alexander Haig, Supreme Allied Commander in Europe, warned Washington in March of the fundamental change in the Warsaw Pact Air Arm to "an offensive character." I continued by saying that I felt that Russia was preparing to defend itself from the threat of a rearmed Germany. I mentioned that most of the U.S. nuclear force was on German soil. On page 7 I said that "Japan, for the first time since World War II, has ordered its armed forces to prepare defense plans to protect itself from foreign attack."
On page 10, I quoted Alexander Solzhenitsyn as saying, "No weapons, no matter how powerful, can help the West until it overcomes its loss of willpower. To defend oneself, one must be ready to die."
PARTICLE BEAM TECHNOLOGY RIDICULED
The cover headline article of my October 1978 issue was NUCLEAR WEAPONS - SOON OBSOLETE! The following is what that article said:
General George Keegan - grad of Harvard, flew 56 combat missions in WWII, earned Distinguished Service Cross in Vietnam, Executive VP of U.S. Strategic Institute, Chief of U.S. Air Force Intelligence. About two years ago he retired from the Air Force, because he saw some critical dangers to the U.S. that he was not allowed to reveal to the public. He tried to warn the Powers in the White House but they laughed at him. So about 19 months ago he made the first public references to secret Russian research on *charged-particle beam weapons.* Aviation Week & Space Technology magazine followed up on his information and determined that he was essentially correct. However, President Carter and Defense Secretary Harold Brown, both badly briefed by the CIA, ridiculed Keegan.
U.S. scientists at Lawrence Livermore Lab (bicycle riding distance from me) undertook Project See-Saw to determine if the U.S. could build particle beam weapons. The decision was that it was presently impossible to build such a weapon and since we are so far ahead of the Soviets technologically, it was ridiculous to think they were building one. Keegan revealed his findings on Soviet particle beam developments to CIA head William Colby in 1975. Colby convened the Nuclear Intelligence Panel which determined that, since the US could not build such a weapon, it was impossible that the Soviets were doing it. Colby never passed the information from the Air Force intelligence on to the President or Secretary of Defense.
Keegan retired and started making the information public, through the American Security Council (of which I am a member of the National Advisory Board) and other groups. His story was greeted with high-level official sneering, the most acrimonious sneers coming from the self-styled "nuclear engineer" President Jimmy Carter and Defense Secretary Harold Brown (formerly from Lawrence Livermore Lab). "But despite the official denials, the Soviets continued their work, carrying at least eight electron-beam experiments into space on board Cosmos, Soyuz and Salyut spacecraft..." (AW & ST) and conducting tests at Semipalatinsk and Sarova. "At the same time, younger U.S. physicists, uninhibited by the ego problems of their elders, also were making progress on the key techniques required for beam weapons development.  Now the tide has turned. A full-scale U.S. effort to tackle the technology required to determine the feasibility of beam weapons development is being organized at the highest level in the Pentagon. Even the most stubborn skeptics now acknowledge that leaving this field uncontested to the Soviets is a risk the U.S. cannot afford to take. Because of the extreme public embarrassment this series [of articles] will bring to... President Jimmy Carter, and Defense Secretary Harold Brown, who saw his contemporaries try and fail in Project See-Saw, there is still an attempt to shroud the program in official secrecy" (Aviation Week & Space Technology, Oct. 2, 1978).
The article states, "Experts on Capitol Hill, who have surveyed all the evidence including secret data not available to us, have concluded that Gen. Keegan's assessment was essentially correct..." Edward Teller has informed key senators that Gen. Keegan's analysis was right on the core of the matter."
The Soviets have already successfully tested particle beam weapons (as has France!). "U.S. particle beam weapons experts who have access to U.S. intelligence information and personal contacts with Russian physicists involved in magnetic and plasma physics programs believe the Soviets will field a ground-based proton beam weapon between 1980-1983."
SIPAPU PROJECT
The Pentagon has initiated a program called "Chair Heritage" to field our own system by about 1982. It formerly was mostly a Navy program at the Naval Post-graduate facility in Monterey, CA, but is now being combined with the Army SIPAPU project (space beams, as opposed to beams carried on Navy vessels) and others - it seems that now everybody who is anybody is getting involved (Lawrence Livermore Lab, Sandia Corp., Defense Nuclear Agency, CIA, Hughes Aircraft, Lockheed, University of Texas, Austin Research Associates, etc.).
If you remember, Russia beat us into space with Sputnik, then we went into a crash program to get ahead of them. Vannevar Bush once said that it was impossible to build a ballistics missile capable of going 3000 miles, but within 10 years Russia had them and we were just beginning a crash program to catch up.
Now we are once again in a race for strategic superiority, but this time Russia may field their system in 2 years while it appears that we require at least 5 years - but then things can change quickly.
A problem we now have is the top leadership - the President and Secretary of Defense - may hold back progress because they do not like to admit their mistake. In the past, there were several intelligence services, all in competition with each other trying to be the most accurate and when one service goofed, the other pointed it out. Now, Carter has unified the intelligence services under Stansfield Turner and all intelligence reports must be through Turner before they get to the Defense Secretary or President from men such as Gen. Keegan, Gen. Singlaub, etc. It also creates the chance that the President can be considerably misinformed or uninformed. This, in the long run, could be an even greater danger to the U.S. than the particle beam weapon!
PARTICLE BEAM CAPABILITIES
So what is a particle beam weapon? It is similar to a laser, but it is not a laser. Lasers shoot a beam of electromagnetic radiation (light), while particle beam weapons shoot a beam of sub-atomic particles (electrons, protons, ions, etc.). What this means is that NUCLEAR WEAPONS MAY SOON BECOME OBSOLETE.
Whoever puts satellites with particle beam weapons into orbit first (property controlled by complex sensors and computers) can control the world. ANY GUIDED MISSILE OR AIRCRAFT CAN THEN BE ZAPPED OUT OF EXISTENCE IN A FRACTION OF A SECOND AFTER LAUNCH.
Under those conditions, we will still have nuclear bombs, but it would be impossible to deliver them against an enemy who is protected by particle beams.
An editorial in AW & ST said, "For beam weapons offer the promise of reducing strategic nuclear weapons to a negligible factor in the future. If successfully deployed, beam weapons can end the long reign of nuclear terror introduced by the ballistic missile and its thermonuclear warhead. If the Soviets achieve this capability first, it will give them enormous crucial leverage in imposing their political will on the rest of the world. If the U.S. achieves it first, there will be no need for flimsy SALT agreements, and in a dead heat, the citizens of this planet can look forward to a shifting of international tensions from the strategic nuclear area to more conventional and less devastating weapons."
If you want to know what particle beam weapons are like, just watch "Star Wars" or Battlestar Galactica."
This is the end of the quote from my 1978 newsletter. And now, as Paul Harvey would say, for the rest of the story!
Russia launched the Intercosmos 17 octagon space vehicle on September 26, 1977. The *Encyclopedia Brittanica* says its purpose was for "international scientific research in charged particles and micrometeorites." What, a charged particle satellite? Already in space? What did we just read above? "If the Soviets achieve this capability FIRST, it will give them enormous crucial leverage in imposing their political will on the rest of the world."
WAR IN SPACE
The Battle of the Harvest Moon began on September 17, 1977. Russia began destroying our spy satellites using "killer satellites." On September 27, Russia destroyed our SECRET MOON BASE. On September 29, 1977, Russia launched the Salyut 6 manned space station into orbit.
First, let's explore a little background. The book *War In Space* by James Canan, 1982, Harper & Row, p. 153 says: "High-energy weapons, their perils and their promise, began penetrating the congressional consciousness in the late seventies, and it was Major General George J. Keegan USAF - 'crazy George' to his critic, 'brilliant George' to his admirers - who started it all. Keegan undoubtedly harbored one of the very highest IQs ever to grace the military establishment, which is, stereotypes to the contrary, saying quite a lot.
Keegan was in Air Force intelligence for many years, and in charge of it, starting in 1972, for five... By the mid-seventies, Keegan's Air Force intelligence empire, as his critics dubbed it, had a population of about 50,000 and was spending nearly $3 billion a year. Keegan had access to HUMINT sources inside Russia and elsewhere, to all the albums of the photorecce satellites and all the tapes of the ELINT satellites."
P. 155: "In 1972, a young civilian scientist in the employ of Air Force intelligence had come to Keegan with 'evidence of a Soviet effort to develop one of the greatest strategic weapons of all time - a beam weapon of great, high energy that would be used to destroy ballistic missiles in flight for the ultimate defense of the Soviet Union.'
Having spent three years studying nuclear physics at the graduate level, Keegan took it upon himself to team up with that young scientist in the examination of evidence gleaned from unclassified Soviet scientific papers. He concluded that the young man was onto something, and he put his troops to work. With Keegan in direct control, an Air Force intelligence team sifted and collated reports from inside Russia and from satellite photographs and communications intercepts concerning a sprawling complex of buildings, pipes, and what-not at Semipalatinsk in south-central Soviet Asia.
What the Soviets had built there - starting with their underground positioning of two huge spheres in the early 1970s - was a facility for the testing of charged-particle beams... a sizable segment of the U.S. scientific community jumped all over Keegan, accusing him of trafficking in paranoia."
P. 157: "In 1974, two years after General Keegan began sounding off in top-secret circles about the Russian work at Semipalatinsk, particle beams came back into vogue at the Pentagon. A Defense Department document described what happened: the Navy initiated its "Chair Heritage' program involving electron beam development [for] 'application to defense of ships against all forms of attack by aircraft and missiles... The Army also began a separate program to demonstrate the production of high-current ion beams.'
The first Army program, called 'SIPAPU' (an American Indian word for sacred fire) is controlled by the Ballistic Missile Defense Command at Redstone Arsenal, Alabama, and centered at the Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory. Chair Heritage, transferred to DARPA control in 1980, is being conducted by the Lawrence Radiation Laboratory at Livermore..." I trust that some of my readers will take note of that word "Sipapu."
SECRET PROJECTS
Until mid-1979, I worked for Control Data Corporation in Sunnyvale, California, in the "skunk works" division. One of the projects on which I worked was Chair Heritage.
For confirmation for researchers, I will provide the following information: My boss was Phil Myers. Program Managers were JM Moore (TIGS, IOS projects), Jack Crawford, JL Smith, CR Shuler, LH Woodward, WA Osborne, and others.
Some of the projects were code named STC, RFREDA, BRONCO, MARE ISLAND, A4, LATFAC, DALFAC, RKYDSO, etc. It would do you no good to know what these names stood for - TIGS stood for Terminal Integrated Graphics, IOS was Integrated Operating Systems, DALFAC was Dallas Facility, etc.
Just suffice to say that we had the world's most powerful computers (Star 100 which was a Cray computer, etc.) and we were involved in the U.S.'s most secret projects. Our customers included the weather facility at Monterey, CA, (weather satellites do more than observe the weather), Cheyenne Mountain in Colorado, DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency), NASA, and, oh yes, THE IRS. One of my friends spent all his free time away from the job studying anti-gravity, so it was not too hard to guess what his job concerned.
General Keegan and Carter's Secretary of Defense Harold Brown did not see eye to eye - could the fact that Brown's father was a Russian Jew (I forget his real name) have had anything to do with it? As a military officer, Keegan was forbidden to say anything to the public, so in January 1977 Keegan resigned and set up the civilian American Security Council and began traveling over the country giving speeches to try to awaken everybody. He failed.
Keegan died in March, 1993. His obituary in the *New York Times* said, "He asserted that the Soviet Union was building a civil-defense system that would ensure a reasonable rate of survival from nuclear exchange. He also believed that the Russians were close to deploying futuristic charged particle-beam weapons." The book *Deep Black: Space Espionage and National Security* by William E. Burrows, Random House, a history of spy satellites, has more information on Keegan.
SKYLAB MISSIONS
Have you ever REALLY wondered why the U.S. never went to the moon again? Do you remember *Skylab?* The official story is *Skylab* was launched May 14, 1973. It was to be America's manned space station. On 5/25/73 a Saturn rocket carried the first crew (Conrad, Kerwin & Weitz) to *Skylab,* a mission that lasted nearly a month.
The second crew (Alan Bean, Owen Garriott, and Jack Lousma) was launched 7/28/73, a mission that lasted nearly two months. Both missions were plagued by failures, leaks and other problems.
The third manned *Skylab* mission began November 14 with Gerald Carr, William Pogue and Edward Gibson. It was said that the mission was delayed six days because of cracks in the Saturn rocket's tail fins.
Russia had launched a space station on April 3, but on April 14 it blew up, what was described as a "catastrophic malfunction."
"BAD LUCK" AT NASA
After the amazing successes of the Apollo missions, for some reason NASA started having all kinds of bad luck. "In the U.S. the success of the first flight of the Space Shuttle orbiter was clouded by two catastrophic failures of previously reliable rocket launch vehicles.
After preliminary taxi test on the runway and flights mated to its Boeing 747 jet carrier plane, the Shuttle orbiter Enterprise was pronounced ready for release from its mother plane. On August 12, at Edwards Air Force Base in California, astronauts Fred W. Haise, Jr., and C. Gordon Fullerton guided the Enterprise to a 'superslick' landing on the floor of Rogers Dry Lake 5 minutes and 23 seconds after being released from the 747.
A second flight, with astronauts Joe H. Engle and Richard H. Truly, on September 13 was equally successful. Haise and Fullerton put the Enterprise through yet another landing ten days later. An ill omen appeared at the Kennedy Space Center in Florida in mid-May, when a small, strap-on solid-propellant booster rocket fell from its bracket on the first stage of a Delta vehicle and damaged it. The booster was being prepared to launch the Orbital Test Satellite for ESA.
The satellite was destroyed on September 13 when its Delta launch vehicle exploded one minute after lift-off, apparently because one of its solid-propellant strap-on rockets detonated. Only 16 days later, a Centaur booster with an Intellsat 4A communications satellite on board also went up in flames only one minute after launch" (*Encyclopedia Brittanica Book of the Year,* 1978, p. 638.
Friends, it's time you learned the real story. In October, 1977, a newly operational Russian Cosmos Interceptor shot down *Skylab. Skylab,* along with its crew of five American astronauts secretly aboard, died in a giant fireball over the United States. NASA immediately initiated a prolonged cover-up of what had happened. How do I know? Suffice it to say, I have a very high-up source of information.
Dale G. Stonehouse (stoney@cloudnet.com)
DISCLAIMER: "I know one thing for certain; that I know no thing (nothing) for certain." - Me.
"It's what you learn after you know it all that counts." - Earl Weaver.