BY GARY S BEKKUM

(STARpod.org) -- "Maybe you can save the Little Chicken with one of your "news" articles. He gets so excited when you are working on one [of] those articles that he stops thinking about crashing into the White House."

Ron Pandolfi, who had a day job working out of an office at the Defense Intelligence Agency for the Director of National Intelligence, was referring to his friend and associate, Dan Smith, who had been dubbed "Chicken Little" of the infamous AVIARY UFO group. The idea of a metaphorical crashing was an apt image for those seeking government disclosure from the Executive Office.

Smith, the son of a former Eisenhower Administration tax adviser, had worked hard to earn his role as the AVIARY resident eschatologist: he pondered the uncharted religious territory implied by the government's UFO "phenomenology problem," where the end of science smashes head first into the end of the world.

One of the truly unforgettable scenes inspired by real UFO sightings is a flying disc crashing into the US Capitol Building from the 1950s sci-fi cult classic EARTH VS. THE FLYING SAUCERS.

The UFO invasion of Washington would eventually be re-imagined on a grander scale in a spectacular scene visualizing the total destruction of the White House, from the 1996 alien invasion flick INDEPENDENCE DAY.

"BREAKING NEWS: WHITE HOUSE LEVELED BY EXTRATERRESTRIALS" would qualify as the kind of UFO "phenomenology problem" guaranteed to elicit an executive statement.

Unfortunately, according to Smith, his friend Pandolfi, who specializes in "measurement and signature" intelligence, told him the real "phenomenology problem" is elusive and can't be traced.

Instead of tracking UFOs, the intelligence community has focused on tracking the "persons involved with the phenomena."

Notice he left out whether the "phenomena" was real, or an imagined but effective means of altering human behavior.

I'll return to the question of intelligence officials and social control later in this series.

Smith had long pondered how to draw media attention and the President to the UFO "phenomenology problem" -- a flying saucer or two landing on the White House lawn on prime time TV would probably do the trick -- although crashing the White House gate has become more than a metaphor in the post 9/11 world.

All joking aside, Smith had been so concerned that his friend Pandolfi may have known something about 9/11 in advance that he made a statement to a female Special Agent at the Baltimore Office of the FBI days later.

Perhaps he should have sought out the Secret Service instead.

Smith envisions a day when the President of the United States will be asked by the mainstream media why some of his highest ranking intelligence officials are pursuing the UFO topic.

The President would smile, wave his hand at the eager and bewildered reporters, add "sorry folks, no comment," and walk out the door.

The events of 9/11 may have closed the Presidential disclosure door permanently.

Meanwhile, a slow trickle of real evidence of official government interest in the strange and unnatural has been largely ignored by the mainstream media.

Unlike the bogus and questionable documents held in high regard by UFO believers, the new evidence comes from unlikely sources, including the CIA.

There is a clear pattern of interest in a "phenomenology problem" and even greater interest in "how can we use this" with an emphasis on "clandestine services."

Stranger than the historical record is the verified present day involvement of key intelligence officials in UFO-related matters.

Over the past several years a new "phenomenology problem" has appeared, this time on the Internet.

One of the best known, and most controversial, is the strange tale of SERPO, an on-line "disclosure" of the US government and extraterrestrial aliens.

The knotty twists and turns of the SERPO "SoaP OpERa" wind around various players, with email messages shared among a "Team of Three" and later another "Team of Five," unknown sources claiming to work for the DIA, citizen snoops faking Internet identities and hacking into private email accounts to gain access to personal communications, all followed by intelligence officials and contractors scrambling to provide "damage control" and redirect the course of the various agendas at play.

Perhaps more was at stake than a few bruised reputations.

It was Ron Pandolfi, the highly placed intelligence official and friend of Dan Smith, who released a series of email messages to and from Dr. Christopher Kit Green of the DIA TIGER Committee -- messages which include discussion of FBI involvement and the Justice Department.

The questionable use or misuse of references to FBI by both Green and Pandolfi are particularly troubling, given a generic inquiry to the FBI about Internet contact with CIA and DIA officials returned a response from the local Joint Terrorism Task Force.

It is a matter of public record that Pandolfi and his associates operated from the DIA, and Green consulted to TIGER, a DIA National Academies of Science committee.

Following the SERPO email affair, AFP and other mainstream news sources reported that the DIA "can operate in cyberspace" and can "conduct the operations inside the United States as well as overseas."

The DIA cyberspace initiative had begun in 2006 "on a trial basis," around the same time Green engaged Pandolfi over the SERPO affair.

The AFP report, which quoted Toby Sullivan, a senior Pentagon CI (counter-intelligence) official, noted that the on-line operations were "not intended to catch spies but to turn their operations to US ends."

The operational use of the Internet by the DIA, inside of the United States, suggests the concept of "virtual flypaper" and "flypaper theory."

It is not entirely impossible for official US Intelligence or their proxies in the private sector to establish enticing "sticky" topics to attract spy-flies. The big question is how much collateral damage spills over onto US citizens.

Pandolfi seemed determined to identify former USAF operative Rick Doty as the source of the SERPO madness, at least as far as the public was concerned.

In September of 2006, he wrote to Doty:

"What concerns me is whether you are working for a foreign intelligence service. That has been my sole interest in you from when I first heard your name and it has been the sole focus of my interactions with OSI and FBI concerning your behaviors and whereabouts. Recently Dr. Green relayed to me a claim attributed to you that two DIA employees had identified John Gannon as the source of the SERPO story and Mr. Anonymous. As I anticipated the two names you provided to Dr. Green are not those of DIA employees. The most likely case is that you invented these sources to cover your unauthorized access to sensitive facilities including Los Alamos and SANDIA where you may have attempted to access classified information."

From the beginning the Internet spies had been aware of allegations claiming that John Gannon, the former Deputy Director for Intelligence at CIA, was the original SERPO Anonymous source.

In 2006 the Intelligence Community was being widely outsourced, and Gannon's new role at BAE Systems put him in charge of hundreds of qualified analysts in the private sector.

Was a private intelligence operation involved in the machinations of the SERPO Affair?

One source seemed to think so.

Pandolfi would later explain to a colleague, "You were correct that my interest is not specifically in Doty. My interest in temporarily removing Doty from the plot is to test whether another actor will fill the role."

Months later Pandolfi responded to my request for an explanation of his unusual methods.

"None of the e-mails I provided to Dan involved government activities," Pandolfi explained, somewhat elusively, "They involved personal communications between me, Dan, Kit, and Rick, concerning fabricated e-mail accounts used to disseminate false documents about UFOs, SERPO, etc. for which government (intelligence) officials such as John Gannon were falsely implicated."

Pandolfi then noted the issue of "sources and methods" and later requested numerous redactions.

Either members of the intelligence community had contracted Internet madness, or something else was at play.

I questioned why highly placed and respected individuals would risk so much by exposing themselves to ridicule, not to mention the attention of the world intelligence community, some who are no as friendly as their American counterparts.

A small coincidence soon provided another ephemeral piece to the mystery.

To be continued in part fifteen: MIND WARS

For more information and the rest of this series, please visit STARpod.org.

Copyright (c) 2009 Gary S. Bekkum, STARstream Research, and STARpod.org.

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