Three Classic UFO Conspiracy Theories

As a skeptical blogger, I've often found topics that are interesting enough to research, but don't really have a lot of "there there," so to speak. Most just kind of appeared on the internet in the early days of conspiracy mongering (the early 90's) and don't have much of an origin story. But they have a number of devotees, and have had books, articles and even television episodes devoted to them.

Here are three, concerning UFO's and aliens - all with fairly significant internet presence, but with little in the way of evidence to support their existence:

Project Blue Beam

NUMBER OF GOOGLE HITS: 235,000

WHAT BELIEVERS THINK IT IS: An incredibly deep, complicated conspiracy involving NASA leading the New World Order with its own technology-based religion, headed by the Antichrist himself. Project Blue Beam, the NASA name for this heinous plot, will fake an alien invasion and the Rapture through holograms and mind control, while simultaneously destroying all knowledge on earth, capturing children to use as sex slaves and culling the population through execution and medical experimentation.

WHAT IT ACTUALLY IS: A hoax created by a French-Canadian conspiracy theorist �" and most likely based on unused concepts from the first Star Trek movie.

Serge Monast had already written a number of essays, poems and French-language books when he appeared to stumble on his greatest discovery yet: the secretive plot by NASA to take over the world. He began writing about the New World Order in the early 90’s, then codified his beliefs in the plan in his 1994 book, Project Blue Beam (NASA). The book laid out, in the typical flood of gibberish that comes with conspiracy theories, NASA’s four part plan to take over the world.

The steps were, according to Monast:

1. Engineered Earthquakes & Hoaxed 'Discoveries' �" designed to turn people away from Christianity
2. The Big Space Show in the Sky �" the unveiling of lifelike hologram “new gods” designed for each region of the globe
3. Artificial Thought & Communication �" the takeover of each individual mind through VLF waves
4. Universal Supernatural Manifestations via Electronics �" mind control and the stripping of freedom

While Monast’s book and subsequent lectures laid the groundwork for the Project Blue Beam conspiracy, much of the following work has been done by others, as Monast died of a heart attack in 1996. Of course, Blue Beam believers allege he was taken out by the Project, as he was getting too close to the truth. Numerous websites cropped up to evangelize Monast’s theories, and some are still active today. Presumably none of those people have been “taken out.”

Project Blue Beam has become a sort of Conspiracy Theory of Everything, drawing in everything from 9/11 and FEMA camps to the death of Tupac Shakur and old Star Trek: The Next Generation episodes in an effort to explain how exactly NASA is going to take over our minds. After all, when you’re dealing with new gods, massive exterminations, mind control and 3D holograms, everything and everything can be part of your plan.

It’s likely that Monast took part of the Blue Beam concept from a recently published book about Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry, who had worked for years to get a film project off the ground with a similar plot to what Monast was writing about. Roddenberry’s concept for what eventually became Star Trek: the Motion Picture was called “The God Thing” and involved an alien ship, hovering above Earth, that was programmed to send down people who looked like prophets, including Jesus Christ. Paramount rejected the idea, and Roddenberry had to go back to the drawing board, though he continued to tinker with it for years, eventually publishing it as a novel.

So there you go, a conspiracy theory so silly it couldn’t even be made into a Star Trek movie.

The Blue Planet Project

NUMBER OF GOOGLE HITS: 58,000

WHAT BELIEVERS THINK IT IS: An organized research project to catalog our knowledge of alien life and extraterrestrial civilization. The Blue Planet Project (not to be confused with Project Blue Beam, or the very real Project Blue Book) is nothing less than a public domain Alien Technical Manual that serves as an encyclopedia of what we know about alien races, weapons, technology and plans.

WHAT IT ACTUALLY IS: Supposedly written by UFO expert and scientist Jefferson Souza, the Blue Planet Project made waves among the UFO community for its level of detail and commitment to disseminating forbidden knowledge. Of course, any Skeptoid reader knows that the more detail a conspiracy theory has, the more likely it is to be false, as most alien invasion plots and government conspiracies come filled to the brim with green ink nonsense.

Whether or not “Jefferson Souza” is a real person (there are multiple people on various message boards and Twitter claiming to be him) or not is unknown, and not really important. Because what’s contained in the “Blue Planet Project” is a gigantic amount of alien nonsense, conspiracy theories and gibberish. None of it really has any meaning, except for a few things like crop circles, which already have a perfectly terrestrial origin.

Even a read through the “table of contents” of the Blue Planet Project should set off all kinds of red flags:

1. The Invisible Government
2. Facts About Aliens On Earth - Code: Omnidata
3. Cattle Mutilations
4. The Antarian Connection - Code: Omnicord
5. Crop Circles Phenomena - Code: Sec
6. The Dulce Base - Code: J.B. Ill
7. Some Kinds Of Alien Life Forms We Know About (An Anthropological Analysis)
8. Alien Technology
9. U.S. Government Secret Technology
10. Alien Abductions
11. Inculcation Devices And The Practice Of Manipulation Of The Mind - Code: Nar
• Appendix A

Each chapter is full of thousands of words on topics that have been debunked years or decades ago �" or that are just made up. Just the first chapter, about the “invisible government,” alleges a conspiracy to assassinate JFK due to his knowledge of alien life, a massive cover-up by high-ranking admirals and generals, high-frequency pulse weapons capable of destroying underground bases, a variety of alien logos and an organizational chart for the “U.S. Space Counter Intelligence HQ.” They each go on like this, with so much gibberish that it’s impossible and pointless for anyone to actually debunk them.

One aspect of the Blue Planet Project that you’ll find online often is that reading the document can cause headaches and psychic attacks to occur to those who have been abducted by extraterrestrials in the past. Reading the whole thing certainly can cause headaches, that’s for sure.

Project Sigma

GOOGLE HITS: 146,000

WHAT BELIEVERS THINK IT IS: An NSA initiative started in the early 50’s to send communications to the alien species whose craft crashed at Roswell in 1947. Project Sigma actually gave birth to the NSA, then facilitated contacted, an exchange of hostages (kidnapped humans for the aliens found at Roswell), and eventually a treaty between the Gray aliens and the Eisenhower administration.

WHAT IT ACTUALLY IS: Another overly detailed conspiracy theory that alleges a bunch of totally unprovable events and couches them in real life. The Project Sigma theory seems to originate with Valdemar Valerian, a UFO writer and prolific self-publisher. “Valdemar Valerian” himself appears to be a pseudonym for someone named John Grace, who, according to the tiny amount of biographical information I found, was a combat photographer in Vietnam. I couldn’t find a picture of either one, and John Grace’s website is long defunct. Whether either exist is anyone’s guess.

Regardless, the person writing under that name cranked out a bunch of stuff about aliens, secret governments and UFO’s in the 80’s and 90’s. And it’s all the usual long-winded, massively detailed gibberish we see in books like this. Among “Valerian’s” books are a large number of 8.5 by 11 bound pamphlets published under the title of “The Matrix.” Their titles (and all of these are long out of print) include:

The Matrix - Understanding Aspects of Covert Interaction with Alien Culture, Technology and Planetary Power Structures...
Matrix II - The Abduction and Manipulation of Humans Using Advanced Technology
Matrix III - The Psycho-Social, Chemical, Biological, and Electronic Manipulation of Human Conciousness (sic)
Matrix III, Volume Two - The Psycho-Social, Chemical, Biological and Electromagnetic Manipulation of Human Consciousness
Matrix IV - The Equivideum (IV) Paradigms and Dimensions of Human Evolution and Conscoiusness (sic)
Matrix V - The Graduation Key
Matrix V, Volume Two - Quest of the Spirit
Defending Sacred Ground, The Andromedan Compendium

Project Sigma is a chapter in Matrix II and is probably the best known of the limitless theories and plots put forward by these books.

It’s up to the reader whether they think any of these theories contain startling, life-changing information about humanity's future or whether they’re simply the ramblings of people with too much time on their hands, a scam they think will make them some cash, or unchecked mental illness.