From November 2005
LM: Linda Moulton Howe : LMH Productions
SM: Stuart Miller : UFO Interviewer
A lot of men don’t like strong-minded women : they’re just too intimidating and they can’t mentally handle them. Linda Moulton Howe is one such woman, but then again, she’s had to be. You rarely get anywhere in life pussyfooting around and as it’s still, predominantly, a man’s world, you have to play hard to achieve anything. And Linda has certainly achieved. Twenty six years in journalism and TV reporting and producing that has resulted in a list of awards for her work that won’t fit on just one mantelpiece, she has forged a path in a wide diversity of subjects from science through to animal mutilations. And on more than one occasion she has so overwhelmed America with what she’s produced that if you had touched her, you would have burnt your fingers.
It is reasonable to describe her as a very successful journalist. Success naturally attracts criticism and sniping and there’s certainly been a bit of that. Occasionally, Linda has made genuine errors of judgement but she wouldn’t be alone by a very long way. But, hypocrisy is a much-valued human trait and we wouldn’t want to detract from her critics. I found this interview interesting. I did want to make the point in our discussion that she wasn’t just known for one topic and that she had successfully covered a number of different topics. That point is indeed made during the interview, more than once by Linda herself and yet I was very surprised, once we started talking, just how quickly we came round to animal mutilations. This subject is still very, very close to Linda’s heart and one on which she speaks with great passion.
SM: You went to Stanford and got a Masters degree in communication. I presume from that that you had it in your mind, when you went to college in the first place to eventually go into journalism?
LMH: Yes, I wanted to do what I did, which was to work in television, non-fiction, in documentaries and public affairs.
SM: You’ve specialised in a number of different areas, in science, in the environment, and obviously in Ufology, etc. Is there…
LMH: No, I didn’t specialise ever in my life in the word “Ufology”. It’s really irritating to me. I have always been a television producer, a documentary filmmaker, and an investigative reporter. That’s my work. And one of the subjects that I investigated and produced a television show about was the animal mutilation phenomena affecting the United States, Canada, Australia and other parts of the world, in the summer and into the fall of 1979. That’s the film A Strange Harvest. Prior to that for eleven years, I had received a National Emmy nomination, and other Emmies and a Peabody and a lot of awards for the work that I was doing in science and environmental reporting, which is what I had done before A Strange Harvest. The film is about a phenomenon that law enforcement and military and intelligence people, only off the record and not going before cameras, told me without any question and uncertain terms that the animal mutilation phenomenon of the world was linked to. This is their term, extraterrestrial biological entities. As a TV producer, documentary film maker and investigative reporter, the film that I produced that was first broadcast as a two hour special on the CBS station in Colorado was the exploration of what I learned trying to understand why these animals were being found, not only in Colorado but all over the world, with the same bloodless incisions. That was one of the hallmarks; no blood, no puncture marks from teeth or claws, no evidence of what is called natural predator attacks, and no tracks around the body of the animal, even those that were found on snow, wet sand, and powdery dust. We’re talking about animals looking the same as if they had been laid down.
SM: Would I be right in thinking though Linda that that was not the first documentary that you had produced.
LMH: Oh no. I had been doing documentaries since I graduated from Stanford in 1968. I went to work in news in Los Angeles, I was married and my husband went to Harvard and I was doing science and medical programming at WCVB-TV, the ABC station in Boston where I was a producer. Then we went to Denver where my husband was working for Time Inc. in their video division and I was hired to be director of Special Projects at the CBS station. By that time when I started the investigation into the animal mutilations in September 1979, I had been working as a TV producer and documentary filmmaker for eleven years.
SM: Indeed, yes, that was really the point I wanted to make. Do you find that a lot of people make the assumption that you thought I’d made that you’re only associated with cattle mutilations?
LMH: Yes, it’s frustrating that out of the large number of news stories I have covered that the animal mutilation investigation became the benchmark of my investigative reporting career. But I guess it’s because governments and law enforcement had pretty much convinced the public and media that the answers were predator or Satanic cults. When I concentrated on the actual physical evidence and eyewitness testimonies and reported straightforwardly at least one law enforcement official saying on the record he thought the perpetrators were “creatures not from this planet,” I guess that was groundbreaking. But what I’ve learned over the past 26 years since beginning my animal mutilation investigation and the TV broadcast, A Strange Harvest, is that the word “Ufology” carries so much negative baggage. There have been in the last three years in Argentina and Chile alone at least 3,200 cases of animal mutilations reported to veterinarians and law enforcement in those countries. Veterinarians have gone on the record with the media and reports filed with SENASA, Argentina’s version of our Dept. of Agriculture, that the excisions of many examined animals were subjected to high heat. But the instrument is not identified. That is exactly what I first reported with the help of pathologist and haematologist, Dr. John Altshuler. Dr. Altshuler had a respected career at the University of Colorado in Denver and then ran his own pathology and haematology lab for years until his untimely death in 2004 from a bicycle accident. Dr. Altshuler was brave enough, beginning in 1988, to help me research tissues from mutilated animals I collected in the field and returned to his lab. His findings and photomicrographs I reported for the first time in my book, An Alien Harvest © 1989. They were all saying that these incisions were being cut by something that was causing heat and it was Doctor John Altshuler who, looking under microscopes and taking photo micrographs, could show me that the collagen, the haemoglobin were being cooked at the very site of these incisions on the bodies of the animals that we were investigating. I think personally I have gone out into the field to more than a dozen of these animals to collect tissue and in some cases, grass and soil samples for biophysical examination. And once you have done that much field research and once you keep getting back from people who are outstanding in their field that you are dealing with something that is not easily explained, then you know that the original reports a decade earlier with law enforcement and others who are saying that we are dealing with creatures not from this planet, keeps being held up by the physical evidence we were investigating. That is the parallel track that I kept; how would anybody with a reasonable mind leave a subject in which the bottom line is that animals are being killed bloodlessly, without leaving tracks, around the world and that law enforcement and military and Intel working for the United States government link the bodies of animals around the world directly to some kind of non human presence. How do you ever leave that subject alone until the government admits it publicly?
SM: So you feel you can’t walk away until you’ve reached some sort of conclusion with it?
LMH: Well, it’s a story that keeps going is, my point. There’s not a single year since 1979 when I first started investigating the story, that there have not been so many unusual reports of animal deaths in this category around the world, including right now. There are new cases right now and when we’re talking about animal mutilations, why are they so unusual? Why do they stick out from anything that satanic cults do, what predators do, and disease? It’s because all of these animals, whether it’s in England where I’ve investigated cases there as well, it is the same thing. It is usually one ear, on the same side of the face that an eye is taken, on the same side of the face that half of the jaw flesh is taken, and often, it is a perfect half of the face, making it quite bizarre. The hide in the flesh is removed cleanly to the bone leaving nothing. Do this yourself; go and ask any veterinarian or a pathologist. If an animal is still warm to touch, which usually indicates it has been dead only zero to 12 hours, and you are looking at bone in that head, but there’s not any flesh whatsoever on the bone, in the jaw and in that area, then you will hear the same thing I have heard, over and over and over again. It’s not possible. The only way to get tissue off of bone is to boil it off. Okay, that didn’t happen, so whatever it is that took that jaw flesh was doing so with some kind of instrument that can remove everything down to the bone. Another thing, which law enforcement asked me not to report back in the 70’s and 80’s as they wanted it to be one of those secret pieces of evidence that they had because they worry about copycats, whether its in humans, animals or whatever, was the fact that in case after case after case, one or two molars in the cow’s jaw, were removed and always on the same side that the tissue of the eye and the ear were removed. And this was done cleanly, again without blood. The tongue in probably 95% of the cases was removed in a vertical cut deep within the throat, often upon necropsy showing that the trachea was removed along with the tongue. You would not know that if you did not have a necropsy done. In a few cases, in addition to the trachea being removed with the tongue, have also been necropsy reports of the oesophagus also being removed. And then as you move into the body of the animal, male or female, penis and scrotum on males, the udder and teats on the female in, I would say, at least the majority of cases have been excised. In the classic mysterious cases I’m talking about, the removal of the belly is either squarish, scalloped or circular. It’s a very odd cut. Around any portion of the genitals and in the females, the vaginal tract is almost always taken with rectal tissue and in the male, also rectal tissue, and that gives you the classic repeated removal of tissue. There are sidebars to this in which in many cases, the tail of the animal is removed right up to the base of the tailbone. I have seen photographs of this very glassy appearance, cutting right through the tailbone. It’s very odd and the tail is removed for whatever reason. And in some cases, there are what are called quarter inch wide by one inch to one and a half inch deep : many sheriffs that I talked to about this refer to them as being like biopsy punches : often from the briscuit, the neck, or even under the front legs of the animals. And it’s very interesting that even right now as we speak, one of the mysteries of animal deaths in Calhan, Colorado in the United States this week has been the report of more than 16 horses found in an area that had repeated animal mutilations over and over, decade after decade.
SM: Yes, I’ve seen that report.
LMH: And what is the big mysterious characteristic that they have found on all these horses? Like I was amazed to be reading that it is a quarter inch by one to two inches of what looks like a single hole and on X ray, they cannot find any bullets. Well that is consistent with the animal mutilations without the other tissue being taken on all these horses in Colorado. Why these variations in any given year and time, I have no idea. If we are dealing with a non human intelligence that is harvesting genetic material and fluids and whatever it is they are doing with earth life, it is beyond my comprehension and it has certainly been beyond the comprehension of the military and Intel people that I have talked to about what exactly is the agenda. But the bottom line is, everyone I have had off the record conversations with, including a Lieutenant Colonel in the army, admits that they know its extraterrestrial. The government does not want to admit it. They can’t stop it, obviously, it’s been going on for decades, maybe it’s been going on for centuries under some other name, and the one thing that they don’t want to open up to the public and the world is that a subject as repulsive as animal mutilations in every country and every hemisphere, over time there’s been reports everywhere, that they don’t want that to be the opening headline, “Sorry ladies and gentlemen, we’ve been hiding information from you about extraterrestrial biological entities interaction with our planet because we can’t control animal mutilations. We can’t stop this, we can’t do that, we don’t know exactly why they are here or where they are from.” Which President, which Prime Minister wants to stand up in front of a thousand microphones and admit that?
SM: Linda, you said very emphatically that you’ve been told repeatedly that it’s an extraterrestrial source that is responsible for this. Have these people that have told you this ever told you how they come to know this?
LMH: Get a copy, a JPEG of the book cover of The Day After Roswell © 1997 by Lt. Col. Philip J. Corso, now deceased. In that book, he lays out very clearly the details he was privy to from his work in the Eisenhower administration about the fact, and these are his terms as well, that the animal mutilations were being conducted around the world by extraterrestrial biological entities. And I met him for the first time on July 4th 1997 at the 50th anniversary of the alleged Roswell crash at Roswell. Later on, after that event, he and I were able to talk privately in another location and also by phone. And he told me face to face that he had seen with his own eyes, highly classified documents with a date as early as 1951, during his work for the Eisenhower administration that were describing the unusual bloodless deaths of animals around the world, with the same signature of incisions, without blood, no tracks around the bodies of the animals and that was 1951, and these highly classified documents stated that the perpetrators were, quote, Extraterrestrial Biological Entities, unquote. That’s what he told me before he died in 1998.
SM: So in your mind, there is absolutely no chance that this is somehow connected with the American government, for one reason or another.
LMH: We’re talking about worldwide, we’re talking about cases documented even in Australia, going back to the earliest newspaper accounts in 1961 in Huntsville, Alabama. That’s only ten years after Lieutenant Philip J. Corso said that he saw with his own eyes, documents dated 1951. The government of the United States would have what resources in 1951 to go around the world in both hemispheres, lifting animals from the ground, excising tissue and fluid and returning them without tracks and blood? You find the technology.
SM: That’s a fair point. With all the people you have talked to, has any motive ever been suggested?
LMH: Yes. Always the same. Genetic harvesting.
SM: Why do they need so much?
LMH: I don’t know. It falls into the category more of a food supply from the amount and the quantity.
SM: Right. A few moments ago you were talking about newspaper reports of animal mutilations and cases which were not covered by the newspapers. Were you implying that there is at times an element of censorship going on here to minimize the number of accounts of this nature that appear in the media or am I drawing an inference that wasn’t there?
LMH: What I have seen over the 26 years since I first started investigating this, as I said, I was a producer and documentary film maker and by the time I started investigating animal mutilations I had received numerous awards for my work and I’m saying, not as a pat on the back, that I had been producing and being honoured with journalistic awards for 11 years. I’m going to make a point out of this. There would be these spikes. There would be a whole flood of animal mutilations and then these stories would go away and then there would be another flood. There was such another flood in 1979 while I was working on a completely different documentary. Being my charge, my responsibility, my assignment was to always be staying up with what was happening in environmental issues, medical and scientific issues and this was happening all over the state of Colorado for which I was director of Special Projects at the CBS station. When I first learned about this story, and I know this is a circuitous answer but it’s coming up to underscore what’s happened in the media today and what I have seen evolve over the last 26 years, sometimes I have been stunned by the lack of courage of the media and editors to go against political restraints, that which is not politically acceptable. And that’s even when they know that the explanations provided by the authorities and the government are completely bogus. And that the fact the media will buy into politically illogical explanations for phenomenon that are happening around them and will not spend money to investigate further has always astonished me, and that’s where I’m headed, and I will try to make this brief. The first person who told me about the fact that there were all these mutilations was an audio man working for me on another documentary in that summer of 79. His name was Mark O’Kane. He had been working on a 20/20 ABC television network special. 20/20 had just come into existence and he told me they had shot over 100,000 feet of double system film and this was not a time of video tape. This was when you had a Nagra with a crystal sync that was umbilical to cameras and the audio man and camera man always had to be a team dancing around a story because you had to have the crystal sync keeping the audio running with the speed being synced up later on a machine and that’s how we worked, that was how you got picture and sound. So to devote more than a 100, 000 feet to any story, it was an horrendous amount of money, time and effort. So that astonished me and the subject was Unusual Animal Deaths in the United States so as a television producer hearing that I said, “When is this going to air?” And he said, “Well I heard that it was dropped.” And I replied, “You’re saying that a network shot over 100,000 feet of double system and they dropped the story. Why?” And he said he didn’t know. But he went on, “But the strange thing is Linda, we couldn’t keep any batteries functioning on that entire shoot.” That was a common problem I had. That was a common problem so many people covering animal mutilations have had for 30 years. Why I cannot tell you but batteries that should last for 4 or 6 hours can be put on a camera fresh and bang, in 20 minutes they’re gone. And you can have 12 battery packs ready and every single one of them will experience the same thing. I do not know why but we had a constant problem which is exactly what he said 20/20 also had. That got my attention so I called up the executive producer in New York and I said that my name was Linda Moulton Howe and that I was director of Special Projects at the CBS station in Denver. My audio man on a documentary has said that he just worked with you on a shoot having to do with unusual animal deaths in the United States and that you shot over 100,000 feet of film and I wanted to find out what the status was. And to my surprise he said, “We dropped the story”. I asked why and this was exactly his answer; “We’re in the business of news and we could never get a hard answer.” Now, if you’re in my shoes, in a State in which these animals are dropping all over the place and you’re hearing this from an executive in New York, wouldn’t you want to find out what was behind all this?
SM: Yes.
LMH: That’s why, as director of Special Projects, I began what became the documentary A Strange Harvest which is definitely a strange harvest, and ten years later, I used the same title, changing the word Strange to Alien on the book, specifically and purposely, because in those ten years I had become absolutely convinced we were dealing with non humans, they were being seeing seen in broad daylight by ranchers, I talked to so many…
SM: Can I stop you there. I’ve never heard that before. Are you saying…
LMH: It’s in my books!
SM: I’m sorry; I’ve never caught that before.
LMH: My gosh, yes. Newspaper reports in Colorado, I still have them and they’re in my book, An Alien Harvest, and if you’re hearing frustration, it’s because I’ve tried to follow every journalistic tenet. I have tried to always have three or more eye witnesses for everything I have reported. Where I have been able to get photographs, where I’ve been able to get drawings, multiple eye witness accounts, I have reported them. There were newspaper accounts, one in Colorado in which a rancher is describing seeing a small being, I think it was more than one, float, that was the word in the newspaper article, float over his coral fence.
SM: Good grief.
LMH: Oh, there’s so many. I’m just astonished. If you go back, you really, really should get (laughing) An Alien Harvest And Glimpses of Other Realities Volume 1 for your own context of being able to do anything legitimate in this story, you really, really should see what’s there in the facts. “When I think of the hundreds of people I have interviewed since 1979 about the global animal mutilation mystery, at least a dozen people have described seeing beams of light come out of something in the sky into pastures where animals are later found dead and mutilated. Some have even seen animals rise up in whatever the beam technology is, or being returned in the beam, or even dropped heavily to the ground from whatever the round, glowing aerial objects are that emit the beams. I’ve talked with law enforcement, this is an absolutely chilling case, he’s now also deceased, a wonderful Sheriff called George Yarnell from Elizabeth Colorado which is very near Calhan, an area that has had animal mutilations in an intense way in cycles now for at least forty years. Sheriff Yarnell, who is in my film A Strange Harvest told me privately, he would not tell me on camera because so many sheriffs have had so many weird and strange encounters and they were afraid if they were ever on television or on radio or in the newspapers talking about what they had really seen and really experienced that they would be ridiculed, which also comes back to your original question; Why has the media totally avoided this subject? It is politically unacceptable and when people reported animal mutilations they were ridiculed, including law enforcement. So they always came up with other explanations. Satanic cults, predators, or disease, none of which has ever explained any of this. OK, so Sheriff Yarnell hired a pilot, the Sheriff of Albert County where Elizabeth is. He gets the OK with the aviation people, on a formal law enforcement investigation, to fly at night in pure darkness without any lights on the plane. And what are they looking for? They’re trying to hide themselves, to camouflage themselves in the dark, to look for lights on the ground, because the one thing that every sheriff and every deputy that I’ve interviewed, and I interviewed them all over the place, they talked about the orange glowing lights or the white glowing lights that were always, always linked to animal mutilations, and that’s what they were looking for. It’s dark and all of a sudden the Sheriff said that the pilot almost screamed. It was a very loud yell and he sounded afraid. The Sheriff said he had been looking out of a window, looking for lights and the pilot yelled and screamed, “Look down”. And when he looked down, in the darkness, somehow dark against dark, they were in a Cessna and he could see underneath them there was the circumference of a darker circle right below the plane, blotting out the ground. The pilot said, “There is something tracking, right below us.” It scared Sheriff George Yarnell.
SM: Is there any connection in your mind between cattle mutilations and human mutilations?
LMH: In the 26 years I have tried to understand the story, I have heard rumours, I’ve heard circumstantial descriptions, I have yet to see a single piece of forensic evidence, coroners report, medical report of any kind concerning human mutilations.
SM: Right, so you don’t think there’s any connection there at all.
LMH: How could I report such a connection if there is no proof?
SM: Just one other factor in this. A lot of people, when talking about cattle mutilations, will mention black helicopters. Is there anything in that as far as you’re concerned or is it something that somebody’s made up?
LMH: Oh no, they were an intimate part of animal mutilations. I’ll give you two examples. Lou Sherodo, Chief Investigator in the District Attorney’s office in Trinidad, Colorado; the crew and I were sitting across from him at 10:00 pm late one night. It was the only time we could get with him because his life was so overwhelmed with animal mutilation reports that he was going to. I was asking him the same question that I ask every single person that I talk with; who or what do you think is killing and mutilating these animals? And he was the first person in law enforcement to say on the record in front of a TV camera what everybody else had been telling me off the record. He said, “Other investigators and I have come to the conclusion that we are dealing with creatures not of this planet.” All of that is in the documentary. Then he volunteered and went on to relate another strange part of this story. All of the black helicopters that are always reported being in the pastures, we had already talked about the orange lights and the white lights, and he said, “You tell me Linda, what black helicopter dissolves into a cloud?” Well, I heard from so many people in Montana and Wyoming and Colorado and Utah and all over the place in Canada, of people who had been watching what they thought was a silent, black helicopter, in a blue sky, that would just dissolve into white mist. You tell me what that is. Law enforcement didn’t know what it was. But, I was pausing there for you to think about it but here is the conclusion that surfaced from so many in law enforcement; “We came to the conclusion that we were dealing with an intelligence than can camouflage itself as anything that it wants to that is here on earth, including black helicopters.” That’s in the film. That’s been on the record since it was first broadcast in May of 1980 and we’re talking in October of 2005, so for 25 years his words have been on the record.
SM: I’m very interested in what happened a short time after A Strange Harvest was broadcast. Am I right in thinking that you drew some flack from some elements of the Intelligence services who were not happy with the exposure that you gave this subject?
LH: That didn’t surface until the HBO special that I left channel 7 to do for Home Box Office in 1983. And from 1983 to 1986, I got a real dose of how governments can make your life miserable when you are pushing against things they don’t want out.
Between the broadcast in 1980 and the signing of the contract with Home Box Office on March 21st. 1983, in those three years I was doing astronaut training in Colorado, I was doing radioactive water looking at uranium contamination of a water supply of a suburb of Denver, I was doing news, I was doing a whole lot of other things but, there was this parallel track that never stopped. After the broadcast, the mail was bringing brought in, in huge mailbags. The switchboard couldn’t keep up with all of the phone calls. It was as if I had touched the hottest spot on the planet in terms of reaction coming not just from the United States but from literally around the world. Everybody saying, “I’ve never told anybody this before…” And it was a black helicopter that dissolved, a black helicopter that changed shape, a beam of light that came down over cows in a pasture, the red pulsing light a rancher who was out in his trailer watching animals saw that scared the living daylights out of him, and the next day they had a mutilated animal.
All of these stories started coming in. The jump cut, if you want to say, from that explosion that didn’t stop, put me into this parallel track. I’m doing all of this other work and then I’m doing the animal mutilation work to the best of my ability because the general manager said, “Linda, I know it’s an important story and I know you’re getting so much information and I end up getting an Emmy and other awards for that show as well, but you can’t keep doing animal mutilations.” That’s when you work for somebody, then management has the right to say that.
So I’m doing all this other work but I’m also trying to keep up privately, in my own time and with my own money with what is happening in the animal mutilation story. And eventually HBO came to me at the station and said to me, “We’d like to discuss contracting with you to do an hour beyond A Strange Harvest”. They proposed the title; UFOs – The ET Factor and the rest is history as I have documented it in the book An Alien Harvest about exactly what happened.
It’s my understanding now, looking back, that it was a convergence. The government was keeping track of what I was doing but, remember, I kept on doing all these other stories and I was doing the animal mutilation research privately. I did a few news stories and I was allowed to do an update a year later, I think, or something like that, but I couldn’t just keep doing animal mutilation reports. The station just didn’t want it.
So when HBO came to me, I already had such an enormous amount of private information that it made sense to me to do it and that’s why I left the station and signed their contract.
Well apparently, I was being watched and monitored in those three years between (19)80 and (19)83 and when whoever the spies were learned that I had signed the contract with HBO in New York and I was setting off now to do a national hour for Home Box Office, alarm bells went off and the fix was in; She’s got to be stopped. And that was the whole Richard Doty/AFOSI story that I tell in great detail in Alien Harvest.
SM: That Doty episode you regard as an attempt to stop you.
LH: Oh yeah, to me, there’s no question about it. Did I know that when I met there at the AFOSI office in Albuquerque on April 9, 1983? No. It was a meeting that was very important. People for some reason constantly ignore and eliminate the context and the time line of events and if you take away context and time line, then you are not anywhere near the truth.
The context of the meeting at Kirtland Air Force base, Air Force Office Of Special Investigations was a meeting set up by Peter Gersten, New York attorney, the same attorney who had filed the very first Freedom of Information act law suit against the Central Intelligence Agency, the National Security Agency, the Defence Intelligence Agency, the National Reconnaissance Organisation and other alphabet soup intelligence agencies in the United States.
He was also the first attorney to use the very first FOIA that emerged in the second half of the 70s to try to extract UFO information from their files on behalf an organisation called Citizens Against UFO Secrecy. Barry Greenwood and Larry Fawcett ran that organisation. Larry Fawcett was a police officer in Connecticut. They had their own experiences, they knew that they were dealing with phenomena. They worked with Peter Gersten and this was a case that went all of the way to the Supreme Court of the United States and in camera, which was a private conversation between the judge and the lawyers, pieces of paper were released, and this is actually funny in retrospect. The lawyer had pushed so hard because, why? He would file to the NSA for all information concerning UFOs, unidentified flying objects, any acronym, any word, any phrase that would include the category of these flying discs. And he would get back a letter response from the NSA saying “We have no files but our records show that the CIA has 163”.
He’d go to the CIA and the CIA would send back a letter saying, “We have no files but our records show that the NSA has 21”. And he got all of these letters, each one pointing a finger at another agency. This was how Gersten took this case to the Supreme Court, using the replies of the agencies fingering other agencies and it was on the strength of all of that that they had this in camera session because it came down to all of these agencies, fingered in all of this correspondence saying that it was in the interests of national security of the United States of America that these documents could not be released that were referenced by each other. And that was where, out of that FOIA suit, that it was forced out from all of those agencies all of those pages that were blacked out. These are pages that Stanton Freidman originally used in his presentation showing all of these solid black pages of a subject that is not supposed to exist.
SM: I’m curious about one thing; why is Peter Gersten, who, to put it into simple, childish language, appears to be a good guy because he’s pressing the government to release information that they don’t want to release, involved in setting up a meeting with you and Rick Doty in Albuquerque?
LH: How did it come about? I think, remembering back to that period, I think it was Larry Fawcett. Larry and I knew each other and also Budd Hopkins. Budd’s book Missing Time had come out almost identically to mine. It was as if we were on parallel tracks. He was doing human abductions and I was doing animal mutilations. Harvest was broadcast for the first time on, I think, May 28th 1980 and Budd’s book came out I believe at approximately the same. Budd Hopkins lived in Manhattan, Larry Fawcett lived in Connecticut, I’m out in Denver, Colorado. My film is broadcast, and it was like a bomb went off. So all of us became aware of each other at the same time in 1980. I was asked to present A Strange Harvest at the MUFON meeting in Houston I think June or July, 1980. And that’s where I met for the first time a lot of these people who had been doing their own investigations.
So between 1980 and March 21st 1983, in those three years I was in conversation with an awful lot of people about animal mutilations, human abductions, government knowledge cover up. So by that time it was no secret to those guys on the East Coast that I was at HBO doing this contract and I think it was very logical at the time, with people that I knew that Peter Gersten had contacted me and suggested getting together for dinner, which is what he proposed, with Patrick Huyghe, a writer, and the three of us had dinner in New York the night of the day I signed the contract with HBO. It was the most logical thing in the world. They were doing most of the hard investigation and I now have the challenge of doing an hour for HBO that can be based on the hardest evidence possible.
From his brief case Gersten pulled out correspondence from an air force officer, special investigations special agent named Richard C. Doty. And he shows me this correspondence and says, “This guy in Kirtland says that he has eye witnesses to a landing and an encounter between military security and beings coming out of a disc at Ellsworth air force base. We want to investigate it. Would you be interested in covering it?” Of course!
He went on, “I will set up the meeting with Richard Doty who’s been corresponding with us about this incident and you go and get the names of the eye witnesses and we will follow up, I as an attorney for Citizens Against UFO Secrecy. We will set up an itinerary of meetings in the area of Ellsworth and you can come with your crew and follow our investigation.” That was what I wanted to do, follow a real investigation. It made perfect sense. The date and the time was set up with Richard Doty and I flew to Albuquerque as part of my development of the project and on April 9th 1983, I just thought I would be there for 15 minutes, get names and phone numbers and addresses and then go on my way to many other things that I had scheduled.
Instead there was this astonishing presentation to me, taken from the draw of the table that Doty was sitting at, saying his superiors had asked him to show this to me, that I could not take notes but could ask him questions, and he redirected me to move from the chair I was sitting in while he handed me pages that he had been taking out of a manila envelope, of the Presidential briefing on UFOs. That was a turning point. Up until that moment of handing me an alleged briefing paper for the President of the United States of unidentified aerial craft, with all of the stuff that was in those pages, I was just doing what I’d always been doing.
SM: What was going through your mind as you sat there reading it?
LH: I was astonished, I was absolutely astonished and I said that to Doty and I wrote about this in the book. “Why are you showing this to me? Why aren’t you showing this to 60 Minutes and the New York Times?” You know what his answer was? “They’re enemies. They are considered enemies of the government.”
The bottom line was, I wasn’t a complete innocent standing there. What came across my mind then was, “Oh, it’s much easier to take an independent producer and manipulate them then it is to the deep pocketed legal fees of the New York Times and 60 Minutes”.
Later on though, this is very important, this is another very important bead on the time line, I am astonished by what I read. I asked questions. When I left Albuquerque, I don’t have any physical paper with me, I’m not given anything. I have what is in my mind and I wrote down copious notes that night in a notebook that I still have about what I had read. If their intention, and I believe it was their intention, looking back, that I would immediately run out to somebody, a TV station, a radio station or a newspaper and say, “Oh my god, this is what I’ve been shown at Kirtland”, well, that’s not my style. It may be others but that’s not what I did. And I was totally silent. I even met with other researchers a few days later on another issue and I never said anything even to them.
I had a responsibility, as a contracted producer, to communicate with HBO, and I did. I’m talking with Jean Abanater who was director of documentaries for HBO and I tell her about the meeting on the phone. Remember that the phone was one of the major ways that the government learned information and always has. I have to talk with HBO. I do not have endless resources to get on an airplane for private meetings. I talk with her on the phone with what I’ve been shown and I’ve been told that the government of the United States understands that I am working on this documentary for HBO and that they want me, to screen, at a private location on the East Coast, 600 feet, I think that’s what they said, of film that had been taken at Holloman air force base when three craft not from Earth landed in a pre- arranged meeting for an exchange with our government, and the date I was given was April 25th 1964, and that it tied in to the Lonnie Zamora case and a whole bunch of things. And I’m telling her this and I said, “If I’m going to be given this kind of film for this HBO project, then this is becoming a much bigger deal then when I was in your office three weeks ago”, and she agreed. She said, “Linda, if any of this is going to happen, we have to sit down with Michael Fukes and Bridget Potter (senior execs at HBO). We are going to have to have a meeting with them.” And I understood because if we’re moving into that kind of territory, well up to then the government had insisted that there were no UFOs and that we were alone in the Universe and they are sitting on film that they now want to drop into my lap that would be saying, “Yes, extraterrestrials have been here, they’ve gone” it was a whole other order. She wanted executives to understand where this was headed.
I went back to New York in May but between the meeting in Kirtland and the meeting in New York which I think was May 18th, I have correspondence and copies to Richard Doty at AFOSI saying “I must have a letter of some sort, on a letterhead, confirming your intention of sharing film with me for this HBO project so I can present it at HBO.” This was the only professional tack anybody could take. And the upshot of it was, I went to the meeting, I had left phone messages at the only phone number I had for Doty saying I would be in New York for this meeting, if this project is to go forward, I must have some letter of commitment, and of course, nothing. And Bridget Potter said, “I would never authorise funds for the project that you have now described to me unless you could bring to me the President of the United States, the Vice President, the Secretary of Defence and the Joint Chiefs of Staff to back you up.” The government of the United States must have anticipated that that would be the response of executives at Home Box Office and that comes back to your other question. Why is it that all of these events that are taking place on this planet on a regular basis that fall into the category, sometimes dangerous, sometimes mysterious phenomenon that include global animal mutilations, and they are never covered because no one wants to be politically incorrect. No one wants to suffer being cut off from whatever they consider to be their “inside political sources”. No one wants to have a black hole of research open up in front of them which may cost them millions of dollars.
To finalise this piece on the last 26 years that has really astonished me, I had a close and good friend in an executive position at the ABC network in New York. This was after all of the disintegration at HBO with Bridget Potter saying that I had to bring to her essentially the administration of the United States. I felt that I wanted to try to keep going to tell the story through whoever and however I could. And I met with this executive and I showed him what I had and some of it was quite strong. This was a really good friend, not somebody who was going to yank a chain. I laid out the story and I was saying, “Would you hire me to produce this?” And he sat back in his chair and he said, “Linda. The entire ABC network does not have the money to take on the story that you’re outlining because you’re talking about going up against the United States government.”
SM: Do you think that the Holloman air force base film actually exists?
LH: Absolutely. I’ve talked to many more than one person who have seen it.
SM: Because it’s been dangled before other people before and since, and yet at the last moment, it’s always just pulled back.
LH: Yes, because the government has now learned, by person by person by person, including Robert Emmenager and Jacques Vallee and others and Linda Howe. The government has to deal with professionals. A professional has a certain work ethic and you always report to your superiors who are funding you, what you are about to do. That stops projects. In the Emmenager case, he was working with a guy who worked for the CIA. They really thought they were getting the film. I know both and have talked to them. And it gets jerked at the last minute and what happens? The credibility of the project that you were working on with whatever the company, the network, the production company, it doesn’t matter what it is, the credibility of the producer and the project goes down if you can’t produce what has been promised. And they know it.
SM: So they’re in a win/win situation. You keep it internal but you work to professional standards and eventually you’re going to be asked, “If we’re going ahead with this project we need something a lot harder.” You’re unable to produce it because you get no response to phone calls etc. Or alternatively, if you’d rushed out of Albuquerque and started shouting about and writing about everything you’d just read and what had happened, you’d be made to look foolish then as well.
LH: Absolutely. They have it down to a science from everything they did in World War 1 and World War 2. We’re not dealing with foolish people. We’re dealing with intelligence operations that came through the OSS. You’re government, MI5 and MI6.
SM: I know, we taught you how to do it.
LH: Exactly. And so any reporter and any producer worth their salt who tries to take on a really, really difficult complex subject that is outside the balance of what your government or my government or any government has said that it doesn’t exist, you’re going to be hurt some way or another.
SM: The pattern seems to be, and it’s fairly obvious now, somebody writes a book or produces a documentary, you’ve mentioned yourself, Emmanager, Whitley Schrieber and others.
LH: Don’t forget Jacques Vallee.
SM: Yes, he was approached too. Your head rises above the parapet, you start attracting a great deal of national or even international publicity and it almost seems to be a case of “We’re going to swot you back down.”
LH: Well in my case, my answer was my silence and the fact that the subject that started me off on this investigation in the first place was animal mutilations. And so, my answer to everything that happened after the HBO meeting was to continue to do what I can, independently because I had left the station, and I took on work to do a whole bunch of different projects.
So now I’m living as an independent producer and I have this huge, huge other story that I know is real and that the world in general is either scared of or doesn’t have the guts to take it on. So how do I keep it going? Well, my answer to myself was, just keep going out into the field and keep doing investigations, forensic investigations on the animals with whoever will help. That is the strength. There was nothing about Richard Doty or anybody in the government that I as an independent producer needed in order to keep on investigating animal mutilations. They were happening and all you had to do was find somebody with medical expertise who would work and help in trying to look at the issue and report about it. So that’s what I did.
To me, the important contribution of my work, after doing A Strange Harvest was all the field work that got reported in the book and documentaries and TV segments and radio work I’ve done since, as well as my web site, Earthfiles. There is a gigantic amount of research and information dealing with hard evidence. It exists, it has never been challenged and I don’t think there is any real resistance any more to the fact that animal mutilations continue and are highly strange, even if there is still not a government on the planet that will stand up at a microphone and say, “We are dealing with extraterrestrial biological entities” You instead get the words, “Unusual phenomena” or “Peculiar Phenomena” or “Peculiar” or “unusual animal deaths” and that is an enormous story that links to the lie that we’re alone in the Universe. We’re not.
SM: Do you think, do you believe, that we will ever be told?
LH: The question before that question is; when is it in the interests of governments to acknowledge that they have lied?
SM: Very, very rarely, if ever.
LH: And therefore the question as to when will this will be laid out in all of its gory detail to the world, well I don’t know of any current administration where that would serve a purpose and that means that it may go on perhaps for another generation.
But always waiting in the wings is the question, why is it, that whatever this is, what our own military people who served in World War 2 refer to as Extraterrestrial Biological Entities, why does it seem to be in the interests of that to remain silent?
Anything that has the ability to pluck animals out of pastures around the world and return them bloodless and baffle veterinarians and pathologists has the ability to literally do the old cliche and set down on the White House Lawn, in your country, anywhere. It has the ability to appear around the world and say, “Here we are” and it never does it. Why? That makes me nervous, frankly. Why is it that silence and obscurity seems to be serving two sides, the government side and the non-human intelligence side?
SM: That’s interesting because you open up a lot of doors with that. The implication, the conclusion from that statement is that there is an agreement.
LH: Or an agenda on which both sides have decided that silence and obscurity serves both of them. As a human on this planet, for my entire life I have only had one goal and that it to try and understand facts and report them honestly and when you realise that your own government has come to the conclusion that it is not in the interests of national security to report anything about any of it truthfully makes me nervous. What are the agendas? What are the real agendas?
SM: And presumably the conclusion is, it cannot be positive.
LH: I just don’t know. But I would say that the deeper you get into this, if you would read An Alien Harvest Glimpses Volume 1 and Volume 2 and call me back, I can pretty much say to that you will have encountered real, documented facts that will leave you wondering, “What in the world is the big picture here?”
SM: What do you think of Ufologists? The reason I ask that question is that I am very aware that you do speak at a large number of Ufological conferences.
LH: As an investigative reporter, I’ve investigated subjects for radio, television, books and now my web site. I’m not a Ufologist and I don’t even know what that word means.
SM: Sorry Linda, I wasn’t saying that you were one.
LH: But I don’t know that anybody could even say there was a definition because when you come to this strange, squirly phrase, Unidentified Flying Objects, it has been, without question, one of the tacks on the part of the mis-informers to make the acronym and the words be loaded down with so much ridicule baggage that anybody who associates themselves with those words is loading themselves down with ridicule baggage. That’s why it’s self defeating to keep trying to put these gigantic subjects inside of those little words that have been dismissed and that is why I won’t do it and I think it is a disservice to anybody who is trying seriously to look at the facts of what’s happening on the planet. That’s an acronym that goes back 60 years.
SM: OK, I take your point and I’ll rephrase the question. Would it be right to say that you attract more criticism from people interested in the subject of Ufology than in any other subject that you’re interested in?
LH: Am I criticised? Yes, although I don’t know exactly why because I think my work speaks for itself.
SM: That’s really what I was getting at when I asked what you think of Ufologists. I accept you don’t care for that term, and so on but it does seem to me that people are always sniping.
LH: Well where would you say in your summary, what is the nature of the strongest sniping against me that you have heard?
SM: It’s basically professional in the sense that you’ve carried on with somebody, investigating them when to the people criticising you, it’s been obvious that the game is up. I’m thinking of Burisch for example.
LH: Oh that’s a very, very complex subject and there are lots and lots of noise and attacks and there is still tremendous confusion about the Dan Crane/Dan Burisch story and it’s going to be very interesting to see what George Knapp does.
Are they Grifters? Maybe but Linda Howe recorded what was available from a man who just started speaking about his experience in Area 51 that people that I knew, off the record, said he was describing something that is real. And the first reports that I did, which were long before the bankruptcy, and I was the first one to report on that, when you go back again, time line and context, why is it that people will not look at things as they were evolving and emerging?
The Dan Burisch story never has been and never will be simple. The guy is very, very odd. There are many odd things. And what is the reason that this Dan Burisch began speaking the way he did in 2003. What is the real reason? Is it part of another OSS/CIA/MI5/MI6 misinformation campaign? Is it wrong for you, for me, for anybody who is in the media to report and interview a man who is making these claims? Sure I did a lot of research about his background and found many things that gelled. Some things that didn’t. Alright, why should I be lambasted for doing interviews with somebody that everybody was interested in?
I do sometimes feel that if people were to put themselves in my shoes and the path that I have walked the last 26 years and what I have seen, and the foulness of how humans conduct themselves and the bashing of real stories that get close to the truth, I ask, who is doing this bashing? The bottom line is, Linda Moulton Howe can only do one thing; I put one foot in front of the other as I have for my entire life. I don’t work for somebody, I’m not paid by some government. I’m actually trying to report facts. That’s all I have ever done. I get bashed for that because there are a hell of lot of ulterior motives out there? Well, that’s the world we’re living in but it’s not going to change me. It’s not going to change what my perspective is in trying to report the facts. The facts may change and I will report changes in facts but no reporter existing can do other than that. You cannot anticipate the depths of deception of government. You just simply have to do the best you can to find facts and report them.
SM: If you don’t stick your neck out, you never get anywhere.
LH: Yeah. You know, what can I tell you? If you were here for a week, I think that you would realise, that this is a really straight forward human being who works really damned hard, I love reporting, I love exploring the world and that’s what makes me tick. I try to do as honest a job as I can and there are so many, many people now who want to destroy other people for reasons that are not clear and their numbers seem to increase.
SM: I agree with you. Can I turn to what I hope is a happier subject. In 2003 you came to the UK. Am I right in thinking you spoke at the Glastonbury Symposium?
LH: Yeah, I’m pretty sure it was two years ago and I think it was the second or third time I’ve spoken there.
SM: Am I right in thinking you took the opportunity to get round to some of the ancient sites? I’ve seen a picture of you standing in front of some stones somewhere.
LH: I started going to England doing crop circle investigations in ’92 and I was in England in ’92, ’93, ’95, ’97, ’99, 2000. I think I was there in the summer of 2001 then 2003.
SM: I hadn’t realised you’d been here so often.
LH: If you read my books (laughing again), my crop circle book is a series of stories from Linda Howe’s journalistic point of view starting back in 1992 and the evolution of formations and a lot of the underlying themes that are there in the crop circles, and it’s a book I think you’d find valuable.
SM: Do you think the there is a connection between crop circles and animal mutilations?
LH: In October 2005 I would find it hard to imagine that the same intelligence is responsible for both. I guess that’s as honest a way as I can say. I don’t know. I just know that there seems to be a profound intelligence working in mathematical ways that has astonished some mathematicians I’ve talked to, in the crop formations. The animals seem to be repulsive while the crop circles are beautiful.
SM: Yes, one does have that contrast. Linda, I am going to read your books!! Thank you.
Linda’s web site is at http://www.earthfiles.com. Her books can be purchased from Linda’s site at the Shop.