Forbidden Science Dispatches #9

The Early NIDS Days, Ron Pandolfi, Kit Green, Robert Frosch, General Motors and Hughes Connections, and How the UFO Topic Has Been a Fount for NatSec & Foreign Policy Psyops for Nearly a Century

You can find other dispatches in the Table of Discontents.

i.

It’s now the mid-90s in my read-through of Jacques Vallée’s Forbidden Science, and aligning with the zeitgeist of the time, paranoia was running rampant. After the shakeup caused by the Bennewitz affair and ufologist Bill Moore’s revelations of disinformation and infiltration within the subculture, Vallée seemed to grow more distant with his longtime colleague, CIA analyst Christopher “Kit” Green. Touched upon in dispatches #7 and #8, Vallée saw strange intelligence games being played by Green and those around him. They did not meet up in person for around a year in the early 1990s and also even had a lengthy hiatus from telephone conversations “following insinuations by a shadowy ‘Armen Victorian’ that Kit, Hal Puthoff, and (Ron) Pandolfi were keeping too many bizarre secrets.”¹

Indeed, Victorian was in the midst of attempting to verify so-called “Aviary” members—defense personnel working on a secret UFO project, either sanctioned or informal. It was an amorphous mixture of characters, many coming from the so-called UFO Working Group outlined in Howard Blum’s Out There: The Government’s Secret Quest for Extraterrestrials as well as the list of MJ-12 collaborators fingered by Bill Moore. Some of Victorian’s research rightfully questioned the motivations of various personalities in the UFO field, noting the connections to non-lethal weapons and other classified defense projects (not all that dissimilar to some of my lines of thinking). In his Lobster magazine article “Non-Lethality: John B. Alexander, the Pentagon’s Penguin”, Victorian notes how Alexander “utilizes the bank of information he has accumulated” in unconventional subjects and subcultures “to try to develop psychotronic, psychological and mind weaponry,” implicating many other alleged Aviary members in the endeavor.² Victorian was a contradictory, untrustworthy character in his own right—check out John Lundberg’s short documentary The Mythologist to learn more on that front—but in many respects, he was asking the right questions. Vallée, himself likely subjected to some of this defense tech mindwar, was not reassured when chatting with Green amidst Victorian’s revelations.

Alleging the continuation of a CIA UFO desk, now headed up by fellow purported Aviary member Ron Pandolfi, Vallée was put off by some of the explanations and contradictions offered by Green. Pandolfi, at this point somewhat of a recurring Getting Spooked character, apparently had access to a huge tranche of UFO data that Green was not privy to himself while at the CIA. Despite all this data and apparent interest in the subject, Pandolfi was said to see the phenomenon as ultimately “meaningless.”³ Like many other characters in ufology, however, Pandolfi’s portrayal was contadictory. Green reported that this new “weird desk” analyst visited Brazil regularly to get UFO data but then, a few sentences later, denies that Pandolfi even has a passport, making visits to Brazil an impossibility. Or rather, Green issued another correction: Pandolfi got a passport two weeks prior to investigate crop circles in the U.K. While one must consider Vallée’s imperfections as a narrator, he was still nonplused by Green’s statements. “There were so many contradictions (…) that I didn’t even try to sort them out,” Vallée writes. “It sounded like a recorded speech.”⁴

Regardless of the lack of clarity from Green, Ron Pandolfi is most certainly an odd duck (a Pelican, if you will) within the ufology sphere. At one time rumored to be the closest analogue to Fox Mulder within the U.S. defense establishment, he now works as the Chief Technology Officer for his wife’s Kashmir World Foundation—a data-driven conservation group.⁵ While the stated goal is anti-poaching technology, Pandolfi’s resumé boasts “over 40 years of experience in surveillance, communications, robotics, aircraft, and weapons systems” on the group’s about page.⁶ One wonders if the use of reconnaissance technology in sensitive conservation areas wouldn’t have some peripheral utility, but I digress. His wife, Aliyah Pandolfi, serves as the executive director of the same organization and claims to be a Princess in the Kashmiri royal family. This title is up for debate as the Kashmir monarchy was abolished in 1952. Her father, Bashir Ahmad Malik, was—as best as I can tell—an accountant at a Pakistani embassy in the United States with no clear linkage to a royal family.⁷ Echoes of Michal Goleniewski notwithstanding, the claims might have some merit if related to a disputed monarchic line I am unaware of.

Despite their shift to more corporate appearances with the technology-infused conservation efforts, Pandolfi and Princess Aliyah still have at least one foot in the woo. UFO researcher Grant Cameron has catalogued much of Pandolfi’s actions and claims throughout the succeeding decades, as well as those of his supposed mouthpiece Dan Smith. Amongst rehashed forum posts and email list messages, there are nearly endless tall tales planted within the UFO community by Pandolfi and Smith, seeming to be specifically geared for the seekers who are pretty deeply enmeshed in the lore. Cameron includes one supposed incident from 2016 where:

Smith reported about waiting to brief Mike Pillsbury about what he refers to as the Princess and the Pod. This Pandolfi story involved a discovered pod (Stargate) and stated Pandolfi’s wife Aliyah “has some control on access to the pod/portal, although the portal itself is government property.” According to Smith, Pandolfi had twice traveled through the pod.⁸

While Smith is, to say the least, not the most trustworthy source, there is some evidence that both Ron and Aliyah Pandolfi are perpetuating this rumor mill. Smith and “the Princess” appeared on a stream together in 2017 talking about portals, indicating some continuing association.⁹ I’m not even touching Pandolfi’s alleged claim that his Princess wife arrived to our planet via a portal connected to the “other side” and has a time machine, perhaps explaining her questionable royal status.¹⁰ It’s a different time, a different place, a different dimension, etc. Rest assured, the many “leaks” that Cameron documents from the Pandolfis and Smith are truly out there batshittery—contradictory and unverifiable. Just recently, within quantum physicist Jack Sarfatti’s storied UFO mailing list, Pandolfi claimed that the ubiquitous “tic-tac” video was fake, ripped from a German film by Lue Elizondo and repackaged to Chris Mellon as top-secret UFO footage.¹¹ I would genuinely love to see the film it supposedly comes from, but this is beside the point. Many claims that appear in this arena are potentially earth-shattering, but of course have very little evidence provided. Even when first making waves in the UFO scene, Vallée noted how much noise was caused by Pandolfi and Smith:

The reality of an undercurrent, actively driven from Washington, is becoming increasingly obvious. The enigmatic Dan T. Smith is setting up meetings all over the Bay Area, again claiming direction from Pandolfi. He dangles money and rumors, arranging luncheons with people, taking their photographs, taping conversations.¹²

With all the portals, princesses, and secret dealings, let’s pump the brake for a second. This is all, for lack of a better term, nonsense. But what purpose does the nonsense serve? I believe this is hinted at when Kit Green relays Pandolfi’s standard operating procedure at the “UFO desk,” though it is of course wise to take anything Green says with a grain of salt. He continued speaking about Pandolfi within his contradictory statements to Vallée in June 1993:

There's a whole culture building up around him. He's a very bright guy; he feels obligated to listen to the crazies, but he knows that what they say makes no sense. He's got a reputation as open-minded. He's got one assistant at CIA who does nothing but screen UFO data. (…)

Whenever ufologists come to him with data he triggers extensive background investigations, using the resources of his office; he gets their banking records, he sets up telephone taps, I've never seen so many background checks. He wants to know why they're coming. He doesn't think there's a mystery; he just finds recreation in oddities.¹³

Several items are of interest in this bizarre, rambling explanation of Pandolfi’s role at the CIA. Green’s descriptions make no sense unless Pandolfi was doing an intelligence gathering operation or surveying potential assets. As is usually the case—even in the wake of the Bill Moore revelations not even a decade earlier—no lessons were learned within the field of ufology. Without fail, many UFO enthusiasts offered themselves up to Pandolfi’s scrutiny. Lord knows what he was doing with those banking records and wiretaps, but I imagine both had little to do with the UFOs and the real focus was studying the human beings interested in the subject. The inclusion of thorough background checks as well as Dan Smith’s constant tape recording of proceedings illustrates that ufologists were likely being monitored or milked for intel. “Crazies” or not, I would not call any of this activity ethical if Green is telling the truth.

Speaking of assets, Dan Smith—the Chicken Little to Pandolfi’s Chicken Big in Aviary terms—has a strange past himself. He was the son of a “violently anti-New Deal” economist, Dan Throop Smith, who “held positions in both the Eisenhower and Nixon administrations.”¹⁴ Smith Jr., however, was zeroed in on by Pandolfi while doing paranormal research. Gary Bekkum, a UFO researcher who often focuses on intelligence connections, writes that “Pandolfi struck up a friendship with (…) Smith” while the latter “had been busy investigating crop circles with paranormal expert Rosemary-Ellen Guiley.”¹⁵

Vallée’s journal entries align with this timeline, noting curious conversations with Linda Moulton Howe in January 1993. He writes that “the CIA had descended on the English fields since my conversations with Kit on the subject and (Linda) hinted (that) Pandolfi may have sent” a cadre of investigators to the sites, Smith and Guiley among them.¹⁶ “(Pandolfi) runs a special project with an interest in crop circles, the paranormal,” Howe reports later in the year. “Rosemary keeps sending faxes to him. She and Dan Smith introduce themselves as ‘working for the CIA.’ They ask questions like: How can Christians help in the coming Apocalypse?”¹⁷

Also among this group of Pandolfi followers was allegedly Jim Schnabel, the author of Remote Viewers: The Secret History of America's Psychic Spies. With conspicuous access to many of the spies and military folks involved in the psi project, it is one of the first comprehensive overviews of the practice of remote viewing. The intrepid Armen Victorian also sought to get confirmation of Schnabel’s Agency ties: In a recorded chat, Schnabel apparently let slip his status “as a member of a secret organisation which had links with the CIA and the Vatican.”¹⁸ While “Schnabel later claimed he was winding Victorian up as a joke,” I don’t think his unfettered access to the CIA’s psychic spies is to be completely disregarded. Indeed, he was at least semi-familiar with Pandolfi, who was quoted in Schnabel’s Remote Viewers as a 90s CIA figure who was dismissive of remote viewing.¹⁹ “They come straight from Langley,” Howe remarks on Schnabel and Dan Smith’s crop circle investigations, though Vallée is quick to note that he “can’t verify any of it.”²⁰ Neither can I, as we’re entering the realm of turn of the century UFO gossip. Given Howe’s background, it’s possible that some confabulation is at play here.

Nevertheless, seemingly under some kind of charisma spell, Smith has been preaching and writing about his interactions with Pandolfi ever since, ensnared in a warped and ponderous philosophy inscrutable to most outsiders. Of note in Pandolfi’s earliest utilization of Smith is the fact that apparent CIA interest in crop circles directly followed Vallée speaking to Kit Green on the subject, and—if he is remembering correctly—this may be an indication that the Agency was conceivably siphoning information from fringe figures, Jacques Vallée included. In this scenario, much as assumed in prior dispatches, Green was an important node in this “weird” intelligence apparatus.

Strangely, Vallée notes, Dan Smith was spreading “rumors that Kit was involved in MKULTRA and ‘isn’t somebody on whom you should turn your back’”²¹—rumors that have since been partially substantiated though not in the neat, sensationalistic way Smith relays them. Indeed, while Vallée seemed to treat Green more suspiciously in this period, the former CIA analyst was making other friends, notably Louis Jolyon “Jolly” West, a notorious MKULTRA researcher. Dispatch #7A noted this friendship, but Vallée writes of Green hobnobbing with West around the same time that Pandolfi and Smith were making waves. “You and I are just beginning to recognize to what extent many people are delusional,” Green tells a mostly unreceptive Vallée. He continues:

Five percent of the population is nearly psychotic by the time they reach age 50; many maintain their delusions and live normally. Occasionally they even become psychiatrists—or CIA analysts. (…) Jolly West at UCLA thinks they're looking for a healthy outlet for their craziness!²²

Green’s own attitude towards the phenomena at this point in his life seems to have been directly influenced by West—hyper-suggestibility merged with the UFO question. He postulates that that while UFOs are real, the core story creates “spin-offs” that “spreads a mental virus to which people fall victim,” a ufological memetics of sorts.²³ Not to disparage the dead, but I imagine that in his conversations with Green, West began to see the potential madness induction capabilities of ufology. I am only half-joking, I hope.

As for Green’s relationship with Pandolfi, in addition to both being employed at one time by the CIA, they were at least once part of the same disinformation campaign. Through his friend Fred Beckman, Vallée was alerted to the fact that strange rumors were being spread about him, specifically that he was shown footage of alien autopsies in Brazil. When he asks where these falsehoods come from, Beckman goes through everyone taking part in the ludicrous game of telephone: Beckman heard it from Robert J. Durant and Dan Smith, who (of course) got it from Pandolfi. However, Pandolfi said he heard the story from Kit Green. Vallée writes in a footnote that “planting such rumors (…) is standard CIA practice.” Further: “It serves to draw people into narratives the government wants to spread, either to make the yarn look more interesting, or to question the credibility of researchers who may be too close to the truth about a particular situation.”²⁴ He is, of course, correct in this analysis. Bizarrely, while this strained their relationship with one another somewhat, Vallée still interacted with Green semi-regularly. All this gossip and ufological mudslinging from Smith and Pandolfi, it should be mentioned, was being relayed to Vallée while, simultaneously, Green was encouraging him to meet Pandolfi and Smith. “Those games are too subtle for me,” Vallée writes.²⁵

ii.

Another strange element regarding Pandolfi’s background arises in the journals when, on December 23^rd, 1995, Vallée is discussing progress of the National Institute for Discovery Science with Col. John B. Alexander. NIDS was in its earliest stirrings, funded by the now ubiquitous Robert Bigelow with Alexander heading the group’s UFO research at the time. Yet, already, leaks were sprouting from an unsurprising source: Ron Pandolfi. “Ron was at one meeting I set up,” Alexander tells Vallée. “He’s violated our confidentiality agreement. He knew all the names.”²⁶ Why Pandolfi was trusted with keeping the NIDS study under wraps is anyone’s guess, especially as his associate, Smith, was taking the Zuckerberg approach to ufology—moving fast and breaking things, that is. Whether Smith was acting on orders from Pandolfi is a matter of some debate, though their continued association after years of Smith claiming Pandolfi as a high-level source makes this collaboration/asset handling more probable than not.

But John Alexander lets slip another interesting claim about Pandolfi that I’ve seen written about sparingly: Like Kit Green, Pandolfi was apparently associated with General Motors at one point. When Vallée asks Alexander why Pandolfi would want to leak the information about NIDS, the colonel replies: “I don't understand it. Pandolfi is on sabbatical from the Agency, on a GM program.”²⁷ While this statement is vague and could possibly refer to some internal CIA program, other researchers have homed in on the possibility that it is referring to the automaker. “For some reason I highly doubt this is a mid-life crisis career change evaluation,” the author Undersc0red remarks.²⁸ Indeed, there are other, more understated connections to General Motors in Pandolfi’s resumé.

When first coming to the attention of the broader public in 1998, Pandolfi was not best known as the “CIA’s Fox Mulder” or the shadowy ufology ringmaster behind the scenes. Rather, it was in a series of exposés on potential technology secrets being transferred to China from Hughes Electronics Corporation at great risk to national security. From one of the articles on the subject:

A secret Pentagon report concludes that Hughes Space and Communications, without proper authorization, gave China technological insights that are crucial to the successful launchings of satellites and ballistic missiles. (…) In 1995, the Central Intelligence Agency ignored warnings raised that year by one of its scientists, Ronald Pandolfi, that Hughes may have provided crucial ballistic missile technology to China.²⁹

The NYT article indicates that, in addition to being an actual CIA scientist and not just a total huckster, Pandolfi was very concerned about national security. He is one of several subjects profiled in an article by author Kenneth R. Timmerman about the technology transfer, where it is alleged that Pandolfi was punished by CIA officials for drawing attention to the leak: “He was removed from the China division and put to work on developing alternative energy sources. ‘In other words, he was given an empty office, without a telephone or a computer,’ one source familiar with the case said.”³⁰

It should be noted that Timmerman isn’t just a run of the mill journalist, but a staunch Republican and warhawk. Even within the article about the Hughes Electronics leaks, he takes a moment to understate the horrors of the 1973 CIA-assisted coup in Chile, complaining that the Agency will release documents about their involvement in the coup d’état but not the transfer of tech to China. “The only difference is, that harm would be caused to the current occupant of the White House, not to our national security,” Timmerman writes.³¹ He cannot be too critical of the coup because he is constantly itching for foreign intervention, sounding the alarm on WMDs and the horrors of radical Islam to encourage it.³² Timmerman currently serves as a Senior Fellow at the Center for American Security—an offshoot of the America First Policy Institute, a Trump-aligned think tank that is seen as a rival to the (very similar) Heritage Foundation.³³

Nevertheless, given Timmerman’s foreign policy hawk nature, the attention given to Pandolfi clearly places him within the realm of high-level national security issues. Recall Grant Cameron’s claim of alleged contact between Pandolfi, Smith, and one Mike Pillsbury. Another rabid “Chinahawk,” Pillsbury was one of Donald Trump’s favorite foreign relations strategists during his first term.³⁴ He currently serves as a top China advisor to the Heritage Foundation, referring to China explicitly as the adversary in United States’ “New Cold War.”³⁵ While the claims of Pandolfi and Smith regarding Pillbsury warrant immediate suspicion—as in, they are the pinnacle of unreliability—it is notable that the foreign policy strategist has flirted with the UFO crowd. He appeared on Thiel Capital investor Jesse Michels’ American Alchemy in 2024 to fear monger about China and to discuss spy balloons and UFOs.³⁶ The Heritage Foundation similarly took umbrage with Hughes Electronics’ work with China—the same national security concerns as Pandolfi—writing a report entitled “Commercial Space Cooperation Should Not Harm National Security” in 1998.³⁷ While the title might sound fairly reasonable on first glance, remember that this is the Heritage Foundation, authors of Project 2025, whose only interest in China is market exploitation or domination. This is not reasonable discourse, it is hawkish and combative “diplomacy” that is best suited to turning the “New Cold War” very hot. I don’t know about you, but I’m getting the sinking feeling that UFOs are cloaking nationalist foreign policy once again.

This perpetual reappearance of military competition with China on the outskirts of the UFO crowd is disconcerting, emblematic of a plausible ulterior motive for the personalities pushing countless stories into the UFO zeitgeist. Kit Green, who shares both CIA and (apparently) GM employment with Pandolfi, was also involved with “Technology Intelligence” at GM’s Asia Pacific branch, where his “responsibility included the collection, analysis, and reporting of information from worldwide sources for the purpose of generating technology intelligence for GM’s global operations.”³⁸ Earlier in his GM tenure, Green “managed and coordinated GM and European technology deployment to GM China Operations.”³⁹ If one is to believe his CV, that is.

Much as UFOs and other speculative science topics were useful for both powers in the American/Soviet Cold War for the purposes of counterintelligence, I surmise that the field did not lose its utility once the Berlin Wall fell—only the participants changed. As China became the clear-cut foe to American hegemony, technology intelligence operations shifted to focusing on their defensive and offensive capabilities. One might recall the Chinese spy balloon scare, an incident which was quickly put up on a pedestal by UAP activists—a development that illustrates the usefulness of UFO mania to foreign policy wonks and Chinahawks.⁴⁰ UAP enthusiasts, often with a sole focus on the phenomena or feverish, utopian visions of disclosure, are especially vulnerable to supporting questionable diplomatic decisions or military interventions with grave consequences. Plus, a bit of information that I’ve been holding close to the chest: Hughes Aircraft was, at the time of Pandolfi’s critical report, owned by General Motors. Indeed, it was after their purchase by GM that the Hughes Electronics Corporation was formed in a merger with Delco Electronics. A GM link then goes beyond John Alexander’s throwaway mention, Pandolfi was responsible for a brief but important schism between the CIA and one of GM’s subsidiaries. If ETs and portals and time travel are taken out of the equation, a new likelihood appears: Technology intelligence operations, either testing for leaks or covering secret projects—and Hughes Aircraft and its sister companies were themselves involved in such secret projects in the past, some verifiably working under cover stories.

Through it all, the similarities between the backgrounds of Green and Pandolfi makes one wonder if “General Motors” is a euphemism for something else entirely while still technically being under the automaker’s employ. Many Howard Hughes-owned companies are known to have assisted the CIA or served as fronts for operations. Consider Hughes Aircraft’s production of “the silent one” helicopter for CIA usage in the Vietnam War—a special case where UFO disinformation could serve as perfect cover—or even the Glomar Explorer (covered in depth in dispatch #7B) which was overseen by Hughes’ Global Marine Development Inc. This latter instance was famously done under special concealment, with a scientific/manufacturing mining project serving as the front for the recovery of a Soviet submarine. Weirdly, another Dan Smith rumor put Pandolfi right in the middle of the Glomar operation, though the tale seems very dubious:

According to (…) Smith, as a young college student, Pandolfi was visited by “a couple of suits” when he questioned the true nature of the Glomar operation, based upon lab analysis of alleged Glomar samples provided by Pandolfi's uncle.

In June 2006, Mr. Smith described a conversation with Pandolfi involving the UFO core story and a previous revelation of government complicity of the extraterrestrial kind.⁴¹

The Glomar Explorer was already a closely guarded secret—one might recognize that the “Glomar response” term was coined after researchers were met with “neither confirmation nor denial” from the CIA on the matter. However, as the cover story started to fall to the backdrop, the public gradually came to recognize Project Azorian as the CIA scooping up the Soviet sub, not a typical mining vessel. Perhaps more UFO rumors were added to the mix to dilute the narrative, to move the casual observer away from the secret deep-sea operation. In addition to Pandolfi’s tall tale, we previously saw UFO researcher Leonard Stringfield—a personality constantly under the gaze of Kit Green within the journals—talk to a witness who claimed the Glomar Explorer was used in a UFO crash retrieval.⁴² A speculative possibility for why Pandolfi would make such claims about Glomar is that military factions benefit in general from UFO researchers being cognizant of Project Azorian at all: It is one of the premier examples of a cover story concealing a secret program. Ufologists and amateur researchers, always eager to get close to the UFO truth, are more liable to believe that other potential cover stories are hiding UFO programs as opposed to some earthly military project that is also worthy of scrutiny. It is a complex shell game, in other words, with twofold obfuscatory capabilities. Then again, he could also just be spinning yarns.

Dan Smith, ever the dutiful messenger, gave out even more odd information that is reported by Vallée. And, once again, General Motors was in the mix. Among the many rumors spread by Dan Smith that likely originated from Pandolfi, he alleged on one occasion that Kit Green was part of a highly secretive UFO investigation group. Vallée writes on January 7^th, 1994: “(Smith) claims that Robert Fros(c)h (former NASA boss, now at GM) ran a secret UFO study at the Johnson Spacecraft Center in the mid-1970s along with Kit, using microwaves to study their effect on human behavior.”⁴³ One might notice the glaring detail of Frosch being yet another General Motors employee, the Vice President of Research and Development in the 1980s. Additionally, his tenure covered the time in which Kit Green joined the organization, both falling into the general R&D category. While the claim of the two of them running a UFO study by microwaving humans does not seem to have much, if any, documentation elsewhere—Frosch seemed particularly averse to the study of UFOs while NASA head⁴⁴—I am not totally averse to microwave weapons theories. I would, however, need a bit more evidence on this one. Regardless, there were other projects that they could have conceivably worked on together prior to arrival at GM.

One such endeavor was the aforementioned Project Azorian: Frosch was the “founding staff director” for the National Underwater Reconnaissance Office, one of the earliest stepping stones to the CIA’s project to recover the sunken K-129 submarine with the Glomar Explorer.⁴⁵ This then puts Pandolfi, Green, and Frosch—all GM employees—in some way connected with the Glomar Explorer, some roles more fabricated than others I imagine. While many within the field may see this as hallmarks of a secret UFO program, I think the fact that this possibility is advertised in hushed, conspiratorial tones lessens that likelihood. It is more likely a sort of verbal sleight of hand, distractions that speak to science fictional desires while hiding the real, still highly impressive technology being developed by these companies. In turn, these happenings make one wonder what GM or its subsidiary Hughes Electronics were actually up to at the time. With a dossier including missiles, military satellites, and other aerospace tech, I think the UFO rumors would have been a helpful buffer against industrial espionage or an affirmation of trade secret security.

Speaking of satellites, Robert Frosch was also the onetime head of ARPA’s Project VELA, a massive surveillance apparatus created to monitor nuclear testing around the globe through satellite imaging and seismographic research. While initiated to make sure the conditions of the ban on nuclear testing were followed by signatory nations, it allowed for continued underground testing, some of which was done in the American Southwest. Frosch’s role in VELA is of interest because he was responsible primarily for the seismic portion of the monitoring, instigating the “LASA design concept” or “Large Aperture Seismic Array”—a vast network of seismographs that could detect a nuclear blast within its range.⁴⁶ His work also greatly improved underwater detection capabilities, a feat which likely made him an obvious asset to the later Glomar expedition. The technological boundaries pushed in VELA, as well as the large scale project planning required, no doubt came in handy once Frosch became the vice president of R&D at GM. Likewise, I cannot help but wonder if Frosch was drawn into this tangled web of Pandolfi and Smith’s creation simply because of the secret and technologically advanced projects he was involved with at any point in his career. More speculatively, if Green was associated with Frosch as early as the mid-1970s, why must it be a UFO research project? With Green hellbent on downplaying cattle mutilations in the same time frame, might Project VELA’s underground nuclear tests have anything to do with it? Were they simply working on Glomar together and Pandolfi was adding a layer of secrecy? Did Green and Frosch ever know each other well at all? Vallée noted rumors spread in 1977 by an unnamed SRI colleague—I am incredibly curious about who—that Frosch was said to be trying to start “a UFO office.”⁴⁷ In public, only a few months later, Frosch came out against the very notion of a UFO investigation project.⁴⁸ But, I suppose, in the land of doublespeak, the man with the Möbius strip mind is king.

iii.

Treading this downright bog of unsubstantiated and alarming claims within the UFO community, one throughline remains crystal clear: The flying saucers matter less than the widening gyre of spooks who obtain intelligence assets, obfuscate motives, and conceal technology, programs, and operations from the public. The eyes that would be drawn to what’s behind the curtain are instead given shiny key jingling—a tabloid story of exotic craft and tech from another world or another race of intelligent beings. Amidst the crowd spinning these ufological yarns, we see a simmering analogue to the CIA- and narcotics-funded China Lobby of the mid-1900s.⁴⁹ As Western anti-China sentiments have become more accepted in the rationalized lobbyist/foreign policy strategist discourse today—largely through the pretext of anti-terrorism activism and national security concerns—it would make sense that UAP issues do not fall far afield. When, in the current climate, UFO advocates give outsize attention to spy balloons and drones, the modern day China Lobby may smell blood in the water—an easy opportunity to prey on the fears and fascinations of a sizeable subset of the American population.

Closer to the present day, Pandolfi was named in a lawsuit brought forward by Robert Kiviat, a TV producer most famous for FOX’s airing of Alien Autopsy: Fact or Fiction. Pandolfi, the lawsuit alleged, wanted to use Kiviat to make a documentary supporting InterNASA, the brainchild of fringe scientist and UFO businessman Joe Firmage. At the time of writing, Firmage is in jail awaiting trial for elder abuse and further financial improprieties.⁵⁰ Pandolfi nevertheless wanted Kiviat to promote Firmage’s pseudoscientific antigravity inventions, as did a segment of the UFO spook regulars. Jack Brewer and Erica Lukes of Expanding Frontiers Research summarize Kiviat’s beef:

The suit alleged a variety of circumstances were misrepresented to Kiviat, ranging from the amount of funds secured to the purported interest of the intelligence community in developing an alleged anti-gravity device. Kiviat claimed he was promised compensation never received, among other grievances. The suit was ultimately dismissed.⁵¹

While Kiviat’s stated goal of the suit was to “depose former officials about the UFO phenomenon,” this presumptuous notion likely hindered more than helped his case.⁵² A secret UFO program does not have to exist (at least not in the way many assume) for the UFO story to work its manifold magic tricks on a hungry public. As such, the motives of the intelligence community, always murky to say the least, should be questioned in this instance, especially given Pandolfi’s longtime playbook of seeding bits of disinformation and exaggerations within the community. While there is a hoax at the heart of this InterNASA affair, the hoax may well not be the end of the story. It is true that financial gain is always a factor in cases like this, but I am always left thinking that many questions remain unanswered. The presence of an extensive DoD network within these narrative horribly complicates the motives rather than simplifying them. Foreign technology counterintelligence, the countless defense contractors, and the efficacy of the UFO meme for the purposes of narrative-shaping all come to the forefront when looking at Pandolfi, Green, and other individuals profiled in Forbidden Science. All along the way, there is no doubt that money does come into play. But where does it go? And are there deeper, more sinister machinations at the heart of the endless lore?

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Thanks to The Anomalist and The Daily Grail for linking to the most recent reading list and the podcast’s interview with Dr. Armin Krishnan. Email me at gettingspooked@protonmail.com with any questions, comments, recommendations, leads, or paranormal stories. You can find me on Twitter at @TannerFBoyle1, on Bluesky at @tannerfboyle.bsky.social, or on Instagram at @gettingspooked. Until next time, stay spooked.

1. Vallée, Jacques. Forbidden Science 4: The Spring Hill Chronicles – The Journals of Jacques Vallée, 1990-1999. San Antonio: Anomalist Books, 2019. Page 172.

2. Victorian, Armen. “Non-Lethality: John B. Alexander, the Pentagon’s Penguin.” Lobster, no. 25. June 1993. Reprinted here: http://gbppr.net/mindcontrolforums/hambone/nexusavi.html.

3. Vallée, Jacques. Forbidden Science 4: The Spring Hill Chronicles – The Journals of Jacques Vallée, 1990-1999. San Antonio: Anomalist Books, 2019. Page 174.

4. Ibid.

5. Huyghe, Patrick. Swamp Gas Times: My Two Decades on the UFO Beat. New York: Paraview Press, 2001. Page 185. Reprinted here: https://www.anomalist.com/features/president.html.

6. “Meet the Team.” Kashmir World Foundation. https://www.kashmirworldfoundation.org/team.

7. United States Department of State. Employees of Diplomatic Missions. Washington, D.C.: Department of State Publication, May 1988. Page 55. https://archive.org/details/employeesofdipl1988wash_0.

8. Cameron, Grant. Managing Magic: The Government’s UFO Disclosure Plan. Winnipeg: Itsallconnected Publishing, 2017. Ebook. Page 266.

9. “Aliyah Pandolfi and Dan Smith on Portals - Patience x Perfection = Portalific.” YouTube, uploaded by Grant Cameron Whitehouse UFO, 17 August 2017. Link. (The incredibly bad audio feedback throughout the stream makes it largely unintelligible, but one might note that Chris Bledsoe makes an early appearance as a speaker here, as does the artist Douglas Auld who painted the popular depiction of Bledsoe’s Hathor or “the Lady.” Bledsoe’s relationship with the informal Pandolfi collective would sour after Dan Smith allegedly made an unexpected and apparently threatening appearance at the Bledsoe household. Despite this, he still appears to be friendly with Grant Cameron.)

10. “UFOs, Non-Human Intelligence, Psionics, & Consciousness with Grant Cameron.” YouTube, uploaded by Engaging The Phenomenon, 28 January 2025. Link.

11. “TIC-TAC UFO VIDEO IS A FAKE says Former CIA Scientist Ron Pandolfi.” YouTube, uploaded by VETTED, 27 February 2025. Link.

12. Vallée, Jacques. Forbidden Science 4: The Spring Hill Chronicles – The Journals of Jacques Vallée, 1990-1999. San Antonio: Anomalist Books, 2019. Page 195.

13. Ibid., page 174-175.

14. Sullivan, Ronald. “Dan T. Smith Dies; Tax Policy Expert.” The New York Times. 2 June 1982. https://web.archive.org/web/20150524102710/https://www.nytimes.com/1982/06/02/obituaries/dan-t-smith-dies-tax-policy-expert.html.

15. Bekkum, Gary S. “Is Ron Pandolfi the CIA's "Real-life X-files" Fox Mulder?” STARpod. 18 January 2010. Reprinted here: https://www.colinandrews.net/CIA-Pandolfii-XFile.html.

16. Vallée, Jacques. Forbidden Science 4: The Spring Hill Chronicles – The Journals of Jacques Vallée, 1990-1999. San Antonio: Anomalist Books, 2019. Page 156.

17. Ibid., page 176.

18. Allen, Marcus. “Behind the Hoaxers: Physicists, Scientists, Stompers and the Secret History of Circle Faking.” Sussex Circular, no. 33. September 1994. Page 7. https://thecroppie.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/01/Sussex-Circular-1994-no-33.pdf.

19. Schnabel, Jim. Remote Viewers: The Secret History of America’s Psychic Spies. New York: Dell Publishing, 1997. Page 347-348.

20. Vallée, Jacques. Forbidden Science 4: The Spring Hill Chronicles – The Journals of Jacques Vallée, 1990-1999. San Antonio: Anomalist Books, 2019. Page 157.

21. Ibid., page 196.

22. Ibid., page 233.

23. Ibid.

24. Ibid., page 243.

25. Ibid., page 196.

26. Ibid., page 282.

27. Ibid.

28. Undersc0red. “General Motors, Glomar Explorer, Lockheed Martin & UAP Connections.” Medium. 29 May 2024. https://medium.com/@underscred/general-motors-glomar-explorer-lockheed-martin-uap-connections-d9c8b0efc5f5.

29. Gerth, Jeff. “Satellite Company Faulted Over Rocket Aid to China.” The New York Times. 9 December 1998. https://web.archive.org/web/20220624193849/https://www.nytimes.com/1998/12/09/world/satellite-company-faulted-over-rocket-aid-to-china.html.

30. Timmerman, Kenneth R. “Dumbing Down Missile Defense.” The American Spectator. January 1999. Reprinted here: https://kentimmerman.com/news/bmd.htm.

31. Ibid.

32. Timmerman, Kenneth R. “Empowering the Iranian People to Advance America’s Security.” Center for American Security, Research Report. America First Policy Institute. 8 August 2024. https://americafirstpolicy.com/issues/empowering-the-iranian-people-to-advance-americas-security.

33. Bensinger, Ken and David A. Fahrenthold. “The Group at the Center of Trump’s Planning for a Second Term Is One You Haven’t Heard of.” The New York Times. 24 October 2024. https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/24/us/politics/donald-trump-campaign-america-first-policy-institute.html.

34. Rappeport, Alan. “A China Hawk Gains Prominence as Trump Confronts Xi on Trade.” The New York Times. 30 November 2018. https://web.archive.org/web/20190327031939/https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/30/us/politics/trump-china-trade-xi-michael-pillsbury.html.

35. Carafano, James, Michael Pillsbury, Jeff Smith, and Andrew Harding. “Winning the New Cold War: A Plan for Countering China.” The Heritage Foundation. 28 March 2023. https://www.heritage.org/china/report/winning-the-new-cold-war-plan-countering-china.

36. “The Purchase Of America (ft. Michael Pillsbury & Josh Rogin).” YouTube, uploaded by Jesse Michels, 30 April 2024. Link.

37. Fisher, Richard. “Commercial Space Cooperation Should Not Harm National Security.” The Heritage Foundation. 26 June 1998. https://www.heritage.org/defense/report/commercial-space-cooperation-should-not-harm-national-security-0.

38. Green, Christopher Canfield. “Curriculum Vitae.” 20 November 2007. https://web.archive.org/web/20190303145615/https://www.johnclarkson.com.au/images/downloads/DrGreen_Article.pdf.

39. Ibid.

40. Graves, Ryan. “Spy balloons, drones and advanced UAP pose a clear and present danger.” The Hill. 5 March 2024. https://thehill.com/opinion/national-security/4500579-spy-balloons-drones-and-advanced-uap-pose-a-clear-and-present-danger/.

41. Bekkum, Gary S. “Is Ron Pandolfi the CIA's "Real-life X-files" Fox Mulder?” STARpod. 18 January 2010. Reprinted here: https://www.colinandrews.net/CIA-Pandolfii-XFile.html.

42. Stringfield, Leonard. Retrievals of the Third Kind: A Case Study of Alleged UFOs and Occupants in Military Custody. Self-published, 1978. eBook reprint. Page 128. https://archive.org/details/ufo-crash-retrievals-status-reports-1-vii.

43. Vallée, Jacques. Forbidden Science 4: The Spring Hill Chronicles – The Journals of Jacques Vallée, 1990-1999. San Antonio: Anomalist Books, 2019. Page 195.

44. “Around the Nation.” The New York Times. 28 December 1977. https://www.nytimes.com/1977/12/28/archives/around-the-nation-nasa-refuses-to-reopen-investigation-of-ufos-40.html. (Frosch is quoted as saying that a UFO study would be “wasteful and probably unproductive.”)

45. Dean, Josh. The Taking of K-129: How the CIA Used Howard Hughes to Steal a Russian Sub in the Most Daring Covert Operation in History. New York: Dutton, 2017. Ebook. Page 75.

46. The Advanced Research Projects Agency. “A Study Prepared by Richard J. Barber Associates, Inc.” December 1975. Page VII-17. https://apps.dtic.mil/sti/tr/pdf/ADA154363.pdf.

47. Vallée, Jacques. Forbidden Science 2: California Hermetica – The Journals of Jacques Vallée 1970-1979. San Antonio: Anomalist Books, 2008. Page 393.

48. “Around the Nation.” The New York Times. 28 December 1977. https://www.nytimes.com/1977/12/28/archives/around-the-nation-nasa-refuses-to-reopen-investigation-of-ufos-40.html.

49. See: Scott, Peter Dale. The War Conspiracy: JFK, 9/11, and the Deep Politics of War. New York: Skyhorse Publishing, 2008.

50. Crane, Brent. “Believing in Aliens Derailed This Internet Pioneer’s Career. Now He’s Facing Prison.” Bloomberg. 5 February 2025. https://www.bloomberg.com/news/features/2025-02-05/aliens-derailed-this-silicon-valley-exec-s-career-now-he-s-facing-prison.

51. Brewer, Jack and Erica Lukes. “SEC Interview Describes Firmage Ventures in Disarray.” Expanding Frontiers Research. 28 February 2023. https://www.expandingfrontiersresearch.org/post/manyone.

52. Colavito, Jason. “’Alien Autopsy’ Producer Sues UFO ‘Contactee,’ Former CIA Scientist, and Ex-Congressman Over Stalled UFO Documentary.” Jason Colavito. 23 March 2019. https://www.jasoncolavito.com/blog/alien-autopsy-producer-sues-ufo-contactee-former-cia-scientist-and-ex-congressman-over-stalled-ufo-documentary.