By Mark Pilkington
When the first mention of UFOs in the tranche of diplomatic papers unveiled by Wikileaks proved to be less than explosive, the ufological rumour machine went into interstellar overdrive with a wackyleak of its own, released on 17 January via ‘Allnewsweb’:
New secret UFO Wikileaks cable revealed
A source from within the inner circle of the Wikileaks team has confidentially leaked to All News Web the content of a State Dept cable, concerning UFO affairs, that Wikileaks has declined to upload onto their website.
“It is critical all embassy staff understand that they are not to discuss under any circumstance concerns DOD has with UFOs entering orbit, once again the seriousness of this matter cannot be overstated”
The cable was sent on 9 November, 2005 by the State Dept to a diplomat connected to the US embassy in Kiev, Ukraine.
Unlike Wikileaks’ own releases this one contained no actual documents (couldn’t they at least have made one up?), just a sensational message that was sure to get Exopolitical juices flowing and make Wikileaks look a bit hokey if the story ever escaped into the mainstream media – which, by the way, it didn’t. It even copied the Russian origin for this alleged cable from the earlier Wikileaks release, which emerged from the US embassy in Minsk.
The author of this message, and others like it (‘Barack Obama to make UFO Announcment’ etc), was one Michael Cohen, while the site carrying the story, Allnewsweb is part of the All News Network, which describes itself as ‘The Official News for the Tea Party’ and appears to allow anyone to post stories as long as they don’t obviously conflict with the Tea Party message. (Update: There seems to be some question as to the extent that the site is actually connected to the movement – see comments below).
So where’s all this leading? I’m not exactly sure, but this story in the Independent newspaper might provide some pointers:
The computer hackers’ collective Anonymous has uncovered a proposal by a consortium of private contractors to attack and discredit WikiLeaks…
The PowerPoint presentation claims that a trio of internet security companies – HB Gary Federal, Palantir Technologies and Berico Technologies – are already prepared to attack WikiLeaks which is rumoured to be getting ready to release a cache of potentially embarrassing information on the Bank of America.
The presentation, which has been seen by The Independent, recommends a multi-pronged assault on WikiLeaks including deliberately submitting false documents to the website to undermine its credibility, pioneering cyber attacks to expose who the leakers to WikiLeaks are and going after sympathetic journalists.
Now I don’t want to make any grand leaps of conspiratorial connectivity, but I will propose the following:
if someone was trying to discredit Wikileaks – and there are many people and organisations who might wish to do so – then one way to do it might be to stir up nonsense UFO stories (the ‘Allnews’ posting was just a few days after the first bona fide, if unsensational, UFO-related diplomatic paper had gone public) and disseminate them via a grass roots, broadly right-leaning political movement. This would certainly add an extra dimension to the idea of astro-turfing!
Whether Michael Cohen is an apolitical hoaxer, perhaps one hoping to turn a fast web-buck (see Kandinsky’s comment below), an overzealous believer in ET visitation, a ‘private security’ specialist working on behalf of someone else, or a mixture of all of the above, remains to be seen. In the mean time it’ll be interesting to look into the amount of cross over between the Tea Party movement, which is a very broad church, and the UFO/Exopolicial movement.
As for feelings about Wikileaks itself within the Tea Party, they are quite clearly divided, with libertarian Tea Party affiliate Ron Paul supporting it and the move towards greater transparency in government, while others, like Tea Party Nation founder Judson Phillips, are calling for Julian Assange to be executed as a traitor.
Article source: miragemen.wordpress.com.