INSIDE THE BIG TENT

Timothy Green Beckley and Sean Casteel. Alien Strongholds On Earth; Secret UFO Bases Exist All Around Us. Inner Light/Global Communications, 2019.

Alien strongholds, or what John Keel would have called window areas, are believed to exist throughout the world. These areas are where aliens have their secret underground bases that maintain their fleets of flying saucer and where they can conduct their nefarious activities, often in league with mysterious human military units.

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The book starts with UFO hot spots ‘In Your Own Backyard!’- that’s if your backyard happens to be the Tujunga Canyon or the Tehachapi Mountains, California. In the latter we are told about ‘Alex R.’ and a friend who got lost in the Lancaster/Palmdale area when looking for a parcel of undeveloped property. Going down a dirt road they were confronted by three young men in a late model sedan car who politely told them to go back to the main road. This understandably scared them and they felt even more intimidated by seeing another late model car following them on the Freeway. 

Like the previous encounter the men in the vehicle wore wraparound sunglasses. That evening they speculated these men were aliens who were protecting the rumoured underground bases in that region and they had agitated them because they had got too close to one of them. Reinforcing this idea, that evening they were leaving their local restaurant when they saw a triangular UFO and ‘lost’ two hours and five minutes of time. Had they encountered the notorious MIB and been abducted during the missing time?

That case just about sums up this book as it is full of anonymous reports and ‘friend of a friend’ stories that in chapter two even includes the UMMO hoax that featured letters and phone calls to Spanish ufologists in the 1960s, detailing how they established underground bases in the south of France and Australia.

Of equal merit are the claims that 15-feet-tall human-like aliens nicknamed the ‘W-56s’ set up a base in Pascara, Italy in the 1950s. The beings communicated either through radio or by telepathy and took delivery of truckloads of vegetables. The mission for this confederation of space people was to generate and collect love energy, but it was a failure.

The following chapters recount stories of alien strongholds in the deserts of the world, inside remote mountain retreats, Mexico, under the sea and of course at Dulce, New Mexico.

I particularly like chapter fifteen by Timothy Green Beckley, ‘Mind Control, reptilians and the Superstition Mountains.’ The appropriately named Superstition Mountains in Arizona are claimed to be the home for alien reptilian creatures. Unlike the love-energy seeking W-56s, these entities abduct and rape unwitting hikers, and blot out such memories until hypnotic regression releases it to full consciousness. Into the mix is that the mountains are said to hide vast quantities of gold which have caused people to kill or go mad in its pursuit.

Others have seen young ‘children’ playing in the area who appear more like men when seen close-up. On one occasion a teenage boy who was lost for several days was in a semi-conscious state when a group of these little men guided him home to safety. He was never sure if they were ghosts or real entities, or perhaps just a figment of his imagination. People who have actually visited the UFO base inside Superstition Mountains have had nervous breakdowns, completely lost their sanity or gone into voluntary solitude.

Only one person, Brian Scott, seems to have avoided such traumas after being beamed inside a craft parked inside the base. Bulky, 7-feet-tall, tough skinned beings with big ears who smelt of dirty socks undressed and examined him. After his first encounter in 1971 he experienced four more similar episodes that included meeting a human-like being who called himself ‘the host.’

The chapters by various authors go from being outright potty to the mind boggling. It is certainly not a detailed guide or listing of supposed alien bases, rather it is a buffet of wild stories and speculation. Timothy and Sean are the ringmasters of yet another ufological circus of weird delights that underpin the growing UFO mythology. 

• Nigel Watson.