Tonight we watched a TV Movie called "The Disappearance of Flight 412"(1974), about a UFO incident involving an Air Force flight crew. I'd read about it while perusing my lists. It was supposed to be uncompromising, to "go behind the scenes" as it were, to show how these situations. are covered up.
I mentioned the other day that I might start to include some Weird Stuff in the blog from time to time. Well, here ya go. The opportunity was provided by this movie. It's the real deal and reminded me of What Happened In Northridge.
"Captain Roy Bishop" (David Soul) and his crew are ready to take off from Edwards Air Force Base on a routine test flight, to check out some brand new radar gear in a specially equipped Gulfstream jet. When they reach altitude, the control tower at Edwards notices three anomalous blips on their screen. They alert Bishop, instructing him to avoid the "unknowns", then contact a nearby Marine base, which sends up two F-4s to intercept them if possible. Bishop and his crew monitor the jets as they climb, but when they pass through the cloud cover, they never come out. They're gone, never to be seen again. Mysteriously, the blips disappear as well.
Bishop is then contacted by his superior, "Col. Pete Moore" (Glenn Ford), who tells him to return to base. The test is now cancelled. But on his way back, he receives a contradictory order from someone affiliated with NORAD. The person offers no identification, just coordinates for Bishop to follow that direct him to an old, decommissioned airbase in the middle of nowhere. The place looks like a ghost town. It's been used as a gunnery range so the buildings are a shambles, with broken glass everywhere.
"Why are they having us land here"?, Bishop wonders. We in the audience see a ground crew scrambling, activating cameras and alarms. But they're dressed in civilian clothes. They all have blow dried haircuts and look like William Devane in aviator sunglasses. Could they by any chance be CIA? Well, you're close, but that's just hair splitting for the moment. In this case they're AFOSI, but Spooks are Spooks, the kind of people who keep secrets under the guise of National Security. Whoever wrote this movie knew all about them, and boy, he did an accurate job.
Bishop taxis his jet to a stop, then disembarks with his men. "Where are we"?, he asks the strangers surrounding the Gulfstream.
"That's classified", replies the man in charge, a burly gent with a big moustache. Like his cohorts, he's wearing jeans and a short sleeved shirt.
"At least let me see some I.D.", Bishop insists.
"You let me see yours first", says the man, which causes Bishop to explode. "Listen mister, I'm a captain in the United States Air Force, as you can see by my uniform. But I have no idea who the hell you are, so you'd better tell me or we're gonna fly right out of here". You don't mess with David Soul.
But the thing is, Spooks don't give a hoot who you are because they think they run America, and can do whatever they want without oversight. So if you get pissed at them and ask for I.D. for instance, they'll just stand there and let you blow off steam, then they'll get right back to their agenda with smirks on their faces.
By now, the plainclothes team has locked down Bishop's jet, using a device that resembles one of those "boots" the police put on your car, so Bishop and his men aren't going anywhere, no matter how much they protest. The Spooks never pull any guns, never threaten violence (though they do have a black clad security guard with an M-16), but what they do is simply go about their well-rehearsed routine, and they mess with you. They have the advantage of knowing what is going on, while you, or in this case Captain Bishop and his crew, do not. Bishop is in unfamiliar surroundings (a decrepit base), his plane is locked up, and he's being ordered around by a guy in street clothes with an expressionless face.
"This'll go a lot easier for you guys if you just do what we tell you, so follow me". He nods at his cronies, who lead Bishop and the crew into an old barracks. The big man separates them into two groups of two and places them in adjoining rooms. Then he retreats to an office down the hall, which is equipped with audiovisual equipment to monitor the holding cells.
"Let 'em sweat for fifteen minutes, then go in", he instructs his underlings.
What follows is a "debriefing" (what you and I would call a cover-up), in which the Spooks "ask" the airmen to describe what they saw. When they finish, they're told, "oh.....but you didn't actually see it. Is that what you're saying"?
Bishop quickly gets frustrated with this dishonest line of questioning. "No, what I'm saying is the opposite. I did see three blips on my radar, and I did see the F-4s enter the cloud cover. At over 700mph, they should've come out no more than twenty seconds later, but they never did. Then the blips disappeared and I saw that, too. So did my men".
"But you never actually saw the jets disappear, so you don't know that's what happened".
This ridiculous logic causes Bishop to lose his temper once again. "Look, I have over 4000 hours of flight time! I flew almost a hundred missions in Vietnam! I know how F-4s navigate! Even if they both suffered engine failure, the inertia would've carried them above the clouds, which I did see them enter. There's no place else they could've gone"!
But the Spook is well trained to maintain his poker face, and to keep the argument weighing in his favor, no matter how he has to twist the evidence. It's as if someone locked you in a room and wouldn't let you out until you agreed that two and two make five. Hours go by, but Captain Bishop will not concede to the cover story, which is "you didn't see what you thought you saw".
The Spooks try a different tactic, sending in a "good cop" with some sandwiches and soft drinks. "Hey guys", he says cheerily. "How's it going? I bet you'd like to go home. We all would, and we could get out of here a lot faster if you'd just sign the lousy papers. I know it looks ridiculous, but it's policy".
"Whose policy"?, Bishop demands. He finally gets the big man to show him an I.D. card, which lists him as being with "S.I.D", the Special Investigations Division of the Air Force, meaning AFOSI, and like the CIA, they operate with little to no oversight. The men holding Bishop and his crew are not going to allow them to leave until they sign documents saying they were mistaken about the F-4 jets. Bishop is a proud, loyal officer and isn't going to do this. "I won't sign my name to a lie". This leads to a stand-off that will eventually cause one of the crew members to acquiesce. "I can't take this anymore, sir", he says to Bishop after 18 hours.
Now, all of this time, Colonel Moore (Glenn Ford) has been waiting back at Edwards for word on what happened to Flight 412. He calls NORAD for an explanation. "Yes, I've looking for my Gulfstream, call sign Delta Four-One-Two. Your people diverted it mid-flight while it was returning to Whitney". The desk at NORAD assures Moore that it was not they who ordered the diversion. By now, he's pissed off too. "Then who the hell was it"?!
"A group called 'Digger Control' ".
"Who the hell is Digger Control"?!
"I'm sorry, Colonel; that's classified".
So, not even the C.O. of an Air Force Base is allowed to know who these guys are. This is why Spooks get away with anything. They think they're untouchable. Glenn Ford, however, ain't going for it. For one thing, he's a Full Bird Colonel. For another thing, he's Glenn Freakin' Ford, star of a thousand movies. Nobody tells Glenn Ford what is or isn't "classified"!
He asks around and finds one officer, Lieutenant Bradford Dillman, who's heard of "Digger Control".
"They're a UFO group", he tells Ford. "In charge of mitigating these kinds of situations. I actually have experience with them, and it's no fun, believe me. Whatever your men are involved with, they'd do better to cooperate".
"Listen", says Ford. "They more or less kidnapped my officers. No one is gonna do that and get away with it, I don't care who they are".
He persuades Dillman to accompany him to the desert and direct him to the secret base. When they get there, a showdown ensues, not an armed confrontation but a battle of wills. Finally, Ford is allowed to leave with his men. Only one has signed the false papers.
When they get back to Whitney AFB, Ford is determined to get to the bottom of the affair. He calls the Regional Commander with all of his evidence, including the original radar tapes of the blips and the scramble orders for the F-4s. But he's in for a surprise, because the General - a friend of his - is behind the entire cover-up. Wow.
This movie has the most realistic depiction of such an event you are likely to see, and I say this because as you know, I have my own experience with men like this, which is why I get so worked up writing about it, lol. In my case, I was not taken to a faraway airbase and held against my will......except, wait a second......yes I was! But that's another part of the story, and it was for "medical reasons" that were partially legit. But now I'm getting off on a tangent. The part that corresponds to the movie is that I too was interviewed by two men who never identified themselves.
On the night of September 1st, 1989, after the events at the Concord Square apartment complex and the subsequent altercation at Northridge Hospital involving the late Howard Schaller, I was taken back to Concord Square by Lillian's sister. There, she spoke to a man in a suit who suggested it would be best for me to spend the night at the complex for safety reasons. "There are still a lot of bad guys out there tonight", he told Ann. So, I was placed inside an empty apartment, where I woke up the next morning, exhausted and recovering from shock.
The apartment manager came in around 11am. I told her I wanted to go home, but she said, "You can't leave yet. You've gotta stay until they talk to you", indicating two men who were waiting outside. When I went out there, we sat by the pool at a table with a metal umbrella. One of the first things they asked me was "do you remember what you saw last night"? Well, I saw a bunch of things, one of them being the actress Sean Young, but you can read the book if you want the full story. Or maybe we'll re-tell it one day. I don't remember if I answered "yes" or "no" to their question. Probably something in between, like "what are you referring to"? What I remember mostly from the meeting is that I just wanted to go home. I was scared and tired. The two guys never identified themselves. They were dressed in street clothes just like the guys in the movie, jeans and button-up shirts. And, most of all, they were determined to get me to sign a paper. In this case it wasn't a statement, like the phony story the men were being forced to sign in the movie. For me, the men had a security oath, what would now be casually referred to in civilian situations as a non-disclosure agreement.
I asked them what it was, and I remember the guy telling me to "read it very carefully".
"Go over it line by line, and make sure you agree with every statement", he told me.
I remember very distinctly telling him that I was not comfortable signing such a paper.
And just like in the movie, he made it clear, in so many words (without actually threatening me), that I wasn't gonna be allowed to leave until I signed. He tried playing the Good Cop : "It's the only way we can protect you", he told me. Those were his exact words. Like the men in the movie, I was worn to a frazzle and just wanted to go home. I had no idea who the men were. Basically what I was signing was an agreement not to talk about the previous night, with penalties of fines and possible prison time for violating the agreement. You can look online for copies of such an oath. The thing is, in my case the security agreement became a moot point because until October 1993 I had no memory of anything that happened to me during the nearly two week period between August 31 and September 12, 1989. As you may know, a ton of other stuff happened during that time that was so bizarre that I guess they didn't trust me with just a security oath, so they erased my memory.
By 1998, I had recalled enough of the details to begin piecing the events together, but it wasn't until about 2010 or so that I remembered the men at the table on that morning at Concord Square. I've written to the CIA about them, and received what is known as a "Glomar" response, which is where they neither "confirm nor deny". You can Google that, too, if you wish.
Anyhow, I give "The Disappearance of Flight 412" Two Gigantic Thumbs Up, my highest rating. It tells the truth about how these people operate.
See you tonight at the Usual Time.
Tons of love. xoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxoxo :):)
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