Ray Boeche's meeting with two DoD scientists

Ray Boeche's meeting with two DoD scientists

Date	25 November 1991
Topics	Beings & bodies (topic), Secrecy & cover-up (topic), Government programs (topic)
People	Ray Boeche
Testimony	Shellenberger testimony, p. 112
Year	1991 in UFO history
Timeline	1991 on the UAP Timeline
Sources	6

Ray Boeche, an Anglican priest and ufologist, says that on 25 November 1991 he met face to face with two Department of Defense scientists. They told him they were part of a classified program trying to contact and harness what they called "non-human entities" (NHEs), and that they had become convinced the entities were evil.^[6][2] Michael Shellenberger's 2024 UAP timeline describes the two as scientists "connected with the DIA and NSA". It lists a series of claims they made, from psychotronic weapons to the true, spiritual nature of the entities.^[6] The story reached a wide audience through Nick Redfern's 2010 book Final Events. That book also introduced the "Collins Elite", an alleged group of officials who believe UFOs are demonic.^[2]

The meeting

• Who they were. In Final Events' framing story, Boeche is contacted in 1991 by "two Christians physicists from the Department of Defense". They reveal a government program to contact "nonhuman entities" and say they have become convinced the entities are demonic and should not be communicated with.^[2]
• The program. According to the timeline's summary of Boeche's record of the meeting:^[6]
  • Government agencies and contractors were running programs that tried to control non-human intelligences and harness them for military and intelligence purposes.
  • The work had involved "satanic ritual and human sacrifices".
  • Although some efforts to use the entities were for "good", the scientists were convinced that what was being tapped was "evil".
• Physics and weapons. The scientists said that the work of the physicist David Bohm had been extended: "everything exists everywhere at once", enfolded in an invisible, timeless medium.^[6]
  • They showed Boeche photographs of people said to have been killed in psychotronic-weapons experiments.^[6]
  • They said some UAP sightings are projections of physical three-dimensional objects by undisclosed projects.^[6]
• The entities. According to the timeline, the scientists said the entities could:^[6]
  • Work unseen.
  • Make incisions and perform medical procedures without being detected.
  • Create the illusion of extraterrestrials or phantom helicopters.

  They said "the ET scenario is disinformation" to protect the entity projects, and that contact had been established through psi and mind-control weapons programs. They described the entities as spiritual beings able to control, monitor and possess human minds, which sought to deceive humanity to prevent belief in "Jesus Christ".^[6]

• Boeche's record. The timeline's source is a "Complete Record of DOD contacts" posted by Boeche on Academia.edu, revised on 10 September 2020.^[6][1][5] That page returned an access error when checked for this article.^[1]

A letter about the NHEs

• The quotation. In a 2019 post, the sceptical writer Jason Colavito quoted a letter written in the voice of one of these insiders.^[4]
  • It said: "Our misguided program directors cling to the false belief that we can control or manipulate the NHEs, when in actuality, the reverse is occurring – we are the ones being manipulated and deceived."^[4]
  • It called the extraterrestrial explanation of UFO abductions "a masterful piece of disinformation to divert attention away from the real source of the NHEs".^[4]
• The recipient. The letter refers to the recipient's book Glimpses of Other Realities. A commenter on the post describes it as "the letter to LMH", meaning Linda Moulton Howe, and notes its praise for Boeche's "obvious abilities as an astute researcher".^[4] See Linda Moulton Howe.

Final Events and the "Collins Elite"

• The book. Final Events: Demonic UFOs, Alien Abductions, the Government, and the Afterlife (2010) has been described as a pseudohistory book. In it, Redfern states explicitly that its contents are not demonstrably factual.^[2]
  • After learning of Boeche's meeting, Redfern was contacted by a man in his 80s calling himself "Richard Duke". Duke claimed to be a former CIA man and "the last surviving member of the original Collins Elite".^[2]
  • Redfern conveys Duke's story without vouching for it, quoting Walter Scott: "I cannot tell how the truth may be; I say the tale as 'twas said to me".^[2]
• Duke's narrative. In Duke's account, the group grew out of officials who investigated the rocket engineer and occultist Jack Parsons after he removed classified documents from Hughes Aircraft.^[2]
  • After Parsons died in a 1952 explosion and the Washington UFO wave followed, about 15 of them were invited to the Pentagon to study whether flying discs "had devil beginnings". The name "Collins" came from a member from Collins, New York.^[2]
• Redfern on Boeche. In comments on Colavito's site, Redfern said he interviewed Boeche in 2007. He said Boeche "did not give me any of the additional sources at all".^[4]
  • He argued Boeche was unlikely to be a hoaxer, because he had barely promoted the story: a couple of lectures, a 1990s paper, and a brief mention in Jenny Randles's 1998 book UFO Crash Landing? Friend or Foe?. Randles had met Boeche in Lincoln, Nebraska, in May 1992.^[4]
• The size of the group. Redfern described the Collins Elite as small: fewer than 10 people at one point, perhaps a couple of dozen at others. He said it had no permanent building and a very small budget.^[4]
• Correction notes:
  • The earlier version of this article said Redfern stated that the name "came from his own research, not from Boeche". Redfern's recorded statement is that Boeche did not give him "any of the additional sources".^[4]
  • The earlier version also called Boeche a "former Nebraska state director" of MUFON. It said he kept the scientists' names confidential, and that he concluded "some sort of spiritual deception" was going on. These points are not covered in the sources read here, and a Redfern blog post cited for them returned no text.^[3]

Reception

• Heiser. The Christian scholar Michael S. Heiser criticised Final Events for its lack of credibility and "Cartoonish Demonology". He wrote that the Collins Elite, "if it is real and if it is made up of Christians, could simply be a bunch of witless dupes".^[2]
• Gulyas. In 2014 Aaron John Gulyas devoted a chapter titled "Space Demons" to the book. He likened it to the evangelical pastor Bob Larson's ideas of spiritual warfare.^[2]
• Colavito. Colavito's 2019 post noted claims that the U.S. government had investigated "bizarre creatures, poltergeist activity, invisible entities, orbs of light" under cover of UFO studies.^[4]
  • Commenters on it argued that Boeche had presented a talk titled "UFOs Caught in a Web of Deception" at a Gulf Breeze UFO conference on 12 February 1994.^[4]
• Later revival. By 2021, some in ufology believed an organised Pentagon cabal had suppressed UFO work because it feared UFOs were demons.^[2]
  • Luis Elizondo has claimed that a faction called the "Collins Elite" opposed UFO research on those grounds, a claim that first appeared in Final Events.^[2]
  • Colavito wrote that Elizondo "depicts the Pentagon as a department riven top to bottom with unstable people who believe they are spiritual warriors holding back the tide of a literal demon invasion".^[2]
• No confirmation. No documents have confirmed the program Boeche described or the existence of the Collins Elite.^[2]

People and topics

• Defense Intelligence Agency — The Pentagon's military intelligence agency, which ran AAWSAP.
• National Security Agency — The U.S. signals intelligence agency, which holds UFO-related intercepts.
• Non-human intelligence — A term for intelligent beings of non-human origin, used in UAP legislation.
• Ray Boeche — Pastor and former MUFON director who met two Defense Department scientists in 1991.
• MUFON — The largest civilian UFO organization in the United States.
• Unidentified anomalous phenomena — The U.S. government's current term for unidentified objects in the air, in space and underwater.
• AAWSAP — The Defense Intelligence Agency's UAP research program of 2008–2010, carried out by Bigelow Aerospace Advanced Space Studies.

On the Timeline

• DuBose affidavit (1991) (16 September 1991) — Gen. Thomas DuBose says the Roswell balloon story was a cover and the event was above Top Secret.
• Jud Roberts and the Mac Brazel interview (30 December 1991) — A Roswell radio manager says he interviewed rancher Mac Brazel and was warned off broadcasting it.

See every 1991 event on the UAP Timeline →

Further reading

References

Facts in this article are drawn in part from the Wikipedia article “Final Events”, available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.