Christopher Bledsoe and the UFO Cult of Intelligence, Pt. 4
The Transmigration of Timothy Taylor / The Divine Invasion of Chris Bledsoe
In Timothy Taylor’s 2003 self-published biography, Launch Fever, he recalls a particular period of his life when he was attending flight school to earn his pilot’s license. “I did not know it, but I was about to start flying cocaine from the Bahamas to the United States right in the middle of the largest drug corridor in the nation,” he writes.1 A NASA contractor at the time, Taylor was flying to the Bahamas on the weekends to get more recorded flight hours. His instructor, named Jeff Waterford in the book, was an investment analyst who did flying lessons in the evenings. Although Taylor describes Waterford as “the type of guy you would normally run into at church,” it turned out that he was doing drug smuggling every weekend, taking advantage of Taylor’s naivete.2 Taylor writes: “These were the golden days of drug transportation into the United States before the American government had yet to build (sic) a strong defense system.”3 Taylor, supposedly a highly-regarded and knowledgeable individual in the intelligence community, does not note that a substantial portion of this drug smuggling was done by the same agencies he would later claim affiliation with.4 Perhaps that occupation came after he published Launch Fever or his naivete is coming into play again.
Regardless, it is interesting that Taylor would claim to have taken part in operations such as this, as the CIA would often develop assets out of people involved in similar situations.5 As Taylor writes, he “was (…) a pretty good navigator and radio control operator” which allowed Waterford “to contemplate evasive maneuvers.”6 He would also be approached to do further flights after he had earned his license: “Once a month I would receive a very late call from a person who wanted to know if I would be willing to fly gifts and clothes from South America,” he writes. “They offered to pay me what amounted to a full months’ salary for a weekend trip. Something felt wrong, but I couldn’t put my finger on it.”7 With the credentials claimed to Bledsoe and his reputation in the broader UFO field as a shadowy intelligence figure, a history of drug smuggling (even accidental) is a red flag—if he is telling the truth.
This is a recurring issue among figures in the UFO field: Key elements of their background are murky or illusory. Although Taylor mentions that he saw Waterford’s picture on the front page of The Orlando Sentinel “with the caption, ‘Orlando Man Convicted of Smuggling Drugs,’” wherein he saw Waterford sentenced to “five years in a Miami prison,” I cannot find the article through keyword searches.8 This is despite The Orlando Sentinel having a more or less complete and searchable archive. I can find no reference to a Jeff Waterford of Orlando, Florida involved in drug-smuggling via other methods. This leads to the possibility that Taylor is either using a pseudonym for Waterford, is obscuring some other details, is misremembering how the article appeared or what paper the article appeared in, or he is fabricating much of the story. Whatever the case, something is awry.
Many people mention Taylor’s book in passing, using it as an example of how his credentials check out, how he was a public figure before any of interactions with the UFO community. Yet I have not seen many places really unpack the details of Launch Fever or give a general summary of its contents. A mixture of memoir and biography, the book is a short, self-published recollection of his trajectory from a humble childhood in Mississippi to the heights of working at Cape Canaveral and various biomedical companies. Taylor also wrote with the aspiring entrepreneur in mind, lending advice that tends toward the commonsensical. There is no mention of the “protocols” used to interact with non-human intelligences and receive ideas for revolutionary medical technology, protocols that are consistently talked about in the works of D.W. Pasulka. Rather, ideas come the very human way, sometimes even through a business partner. In fact, there are no marked paranormal experiences or even a stated interest in the paranormal within Launch Fever, just the recollections of a very business-minded entrepreneur with an intense passion for NASA and the space program. Bizarrely, his first documented engagement with anything in the paranormal/ufological arena, as far as I am aware, was in his interactions with Chris Bledsoe.
And his interactions with Bledsoe were alarming from the start. Taylor visited Bledsoe’s home on September 7th, 2008, hoping to “talk with Junior about the legitimacy of his experiences.”9 An hour into this visit, Taylor seemed caught off guard by the arrival of MUFON investigator Chase Kloetzke and her husband. Bledsoe writes:
Tim was taken aback by the two strangers walking in, but he was more than friendly to all of us. Naturally, he was inclined to keep his activities and whereabouts on a strictly need-to-know basis. It created a fairly awkward situation at first. (Kloetzke’s husband) was wearing a U.S. Navy Seal T-shirt, and it was impossible to discern from Tim’s stoic face whether that comforted or concerned him. Tim had been planning on briefing us, though none of us knew at the time what his intentions were with his visit. (…) Out of the corner of my eye I saw Tim give a bit of a wink and a nod to Ryan, who got up and went to the kitchen. Tim then got up with his backpack and followed him in.10
In a rather bizarre scene, Taylor leads Ryan to his bedroom followed by each successive Bledsoe sibling leaving the living room to join them. Taylor places a laptop on Ryan’s dresser to initiate a “briefing” of sorts. “He explained to Ryan that he wanted to explain a few things to us one-on-one and give us a little test,” Bledsoe recalls.11 With the living room now emptying out while Kloetzke and her husband were still present, the couple “sensed that maybe it wasn’t the best time for a visit” and decided to come back at another time.12 Apart from being incredibly rude, one gets the sense that Taylor was trying to separate the family from other investigators. Heightening this demand for attention was the scene that met Chris Bledsoe once he seated himself with everyone else in Ryan’s bedroom:
All six of us, plus Ryan’s girlfriend Jennifer, sat down looking up at Tim and his laptop. The first slide read FOR THE BLEDSOE FAMILY ONLY, and the next was a warning declaring various penalties for sharing this information. Of course, I am not at liberty to share the information in the presentation, but suffice it to say that it most likely contained U.S. Government related information dealing with UFOs, unexplained phenomena, and related subjects. It was extensive and detailed, leaving very little lingering uncertainty.13
Within UFO of God, this moment serves as one of the most important points of validation throughout Bledsoe’s journey. Through bouts of high strangeness, trauma, and self-described humiliation and ostracization, his life was suddenly given a clear sense of purpose. In addition to a slideshow presentation of the utmost secrecy, Taylor showed Bledsoe metallic samples—one that appeared to be some kind of memory metal, like those constantly rehashed metal pieces alleged at the scene of the Roswell incident. When the second piece was handed to Bledsoe, he felt a jolt of “energy” that made heart race and “eyes darken(…) with tunnel vision.”14 This reaction incited Taylor to repeatedly question Bledsoe in exasperation: “Why you? Why you?”15 Taylor then informed him that this piece of metal “had isotopes that came from fifty million light years away,” and was not human made nor fully understood.16 He assured Bledsoe that this not only meant that his experience was genuine, but also that he had a remarkably unique connection with the phenomenon.
Maybe Taylor is for real—or, at the very least, a true believer. However, the pageantry and performance inherent in his interactions with Bledsoe and his family recall some rather infamous moments in ufological history. Namely, the seeding of disinformation to journalist Linda Moulton Howe by AFOSI and Richard Doty in 1983. Doty had informed Howe that “her film A Strange Harvest (…) had upset people in the government” and that “she was on to something important.”17 Particularly, “he and others at AFOSI wanted to help her to get the truth out through her documentary” that was supposed to be released by HBO.18 What followed was a very impressive debriefing—akin to Taylor’s with Bledsoe—that included remarkably realistic fake documents alleging a vast UFO and ET conspiracy that the government was aware of and concealing from the American public. Howe bought the story hook, line, and sinker, the HBO documentary folded after further promised information never materialized, and her career/belief system has never been the same in the decades following. Given the theatrical nature of Taylor’s interactions with Bledsoe, complete with a stated resume stacked with secretive governmental organizations and a powerpoint full of allegedly highly classified intel, the question of whether a potential disinformation campaign was being perpetrated is one that looms large. Scenarios such as the one laid out by Bledsoe occur repeatedly in ufology, often resulting in fervent belief but little in the way of material evidence. Much as in the case of Linda Moulton Howe, who has perpetuated far out tales from anonymous intelligence sources in the years after her meeting with Doty, Bledsoe too has proven an excellent conduit for affirming UFO belief (and misbeliefs) amongst a broader populace. He has been outright eager to spread what Taylor has told him, likely because it serves as a form of confirmation that his anomalous experience was real and because it establishes him as a special, important person.
Bledsoe and Taylor’s tight-knit relationship only strengthened after this debriefing and the experiment with the strange metal piece. Somewhat disconcertingly, Taylor continued to insinuate himself into the lives of Bledsoe and his family, being trusted enough to attend Bledsoe’s daughter Emily being crowned homecoming queen. A picture of Tim Taylor and Emily Bledsoe is included in current copies of UFO of God where it has seemingly replaced a picture of Taylor, D.W. Pasulka, and the director of the Vatican Observatory that was in earlier editions. While Bledsoe reports that he and his “family’s saving grace all these years has been our ability to make friends out of strangers,” his willingness to allow these people—often with some connection to military intelligence—to get close to his family is a dangerous quality.19 I recall Jacques Vallee’s hesitancy to meet an intelligence-connected individual in D.W. Pasulka’s Encounters: “People in intelligence communities are generally very charming. They meet you. Then they meet your friends. Then they meet your family and they become friendly with your children.”20 This is a scenario that is generally good to avoid. Taylor comes across as an individual who enthusiastically tries to impress and gain one’s trust and, as such, his motivations in the Chris Bledsoe case warrant further scrutiny.
Through it all, I am reminded of another Jacques Vallee passage, this time originating from his Forbidden Science journals. In a throwaway line from a moment in 1973 where SRI scientists Hal Puthoff and Russell Targ were speaking of funding for their unconventional projects, often involving remote viewing or psychics. They informed Vallee that they were “currently financed in part by ‘NASA’ (wink, wink).”21 Within other parts of this volume of Forbidden Science, winks tend to indicate some connection to the CIA.22 Now, whether or not Taylor was or is part of the “wink, wink” side of NASA is up for debate, but his clear role in cultivating the developing beliefs of Bledsoe and his family may be indicative of allegiance to an uncertain faction of UFO/NHI promoters. As Bledsoe’s encounters only amplify as time passes, there are inherent concerns that the officials, contractors, and spooks—Taylor included—are molding him into the perfect cosmic spokesperson.
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Taylor, Timothy E. Launch Fever: An Entrepreneur’s Journey. Bloomington: iUniverse, 2003. Page 72. Available here.
Ibid., page 73.
Ibid.
See:
Hopsicker, Daniel. “Barry Seal, the CIA camp in Lacombe, & the JFK Assassination.” Daniel Hopsicker: Investigating State-Sponsored Crime. 20 November 2013. https://www.madcowprod.com/2013/11/20/barry-seal-the-cias-secret-camp-in-lacombe-the-jfk-assassination/.
Bullmore, Joseph. “The incredible story of Barry Seal – the man who worked for both the CIA and Pablo Escobar.” Gentlemen’s Journal. Accessed 22 March 2023. https://www.thegentlemansjournal.com/article/incredible-story-barry-seal-man-worked-cia-pablo-escobar/.
Webb, Gary. Dark Alliance: The CIA, the Contras, and the Crack Cocaine Explosion. New York: Seven Stories Press, 1998.
Mitchell, Alex. “The farmer who faked his own death to work for Pablo Escobar — and the CIA.” The New York Post. 31 March 2022. https://nypost.com/2022/03/31/the-invisible-pilot-life-of-a-drug-smuggler-turned-cia-op/.
Taylor, Timothy E. Launch Fever: An Entrepreneur’s Journey. Bloomington: iUniverse, 2003. Page 80.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Bledsoe, Chris. UFO of God: The Extraordinary True Story of Chris Bledsoe. Self-published, 2023. Page 213.
Ibid., page 214.
Ibid., page 215.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Ibid., page 216.
Ibid.
Ibid., page 217.
Pilkington, Mark. Mirage Men: A Journey in Disinformation, Paranoia and UFOs. London: Constable, 2010. Page 205-206.
Ibid., page 206.
Bledsoe, Chris. UFO of God: The Extraordinary True Story of Chris Bledsoe. Self-published, 2023. Page 209.
Pasulka, D.W. Encounters: Experiences with Nonhuman Intelligences. New York: St. Martin’s Essentials, 2023. Page 176.
Vallee, Jacques. Forbidden Science 2: California Hermetica – The Journals of Jacques Vallee, 1970-1979. San Antonio: Anomalist Books, 2008. Page 186. (For those curious: Vallee says that the other portion of their funding came from Judy Skutch, a philanthropic promoter of the new age/spiritual psychology text, A Course in Miracles. Somewhat of a channeled work, one of the “editors” of the book was William Thetford, a former MKULTRA psychologist who worked on Subproject 130 investigating potential uses of personality classifications.)
Ibid., page 237.