(Continued from Part 2/3)
Krshanna Duran has just republished an interview between crop circle researcher Colin Andrews and Jon King, former senior editor of UFO Reality Magazine and author of Cosmic Top Secret: The Unseen Agenda.
The interview describes the career of one of the most influential figures in UFOlogy and so I publish it in whole, in three parts.
Apparently, the interview was originally done in 1995 but gives significant background on the manner in which the intelligence community tried to defeat crop-circle research.
INTERVIEW WITH COLIN ANDREWS (continued)
JK: So what happened next?
CA: Well, some weeks later there was a rap on my door, and when I answered it I immediately recognized the man standing there. It was the `fox-study’ man. He said that he’d come to tell me something… he wanted me to get Pat Delgado over to my place because he wanted to talk to both of us.
Pat lived about seventeen miles away. It was late at night but I phoned him and he agreed to come over. When he arrived the man spent all evening into the early hours with both of us, asking question after question. He appeared to be comparing the answers I gave against those that Pat gave. Well, perhaps not surprisingly, Pat eventually grew more and more frustrated, and said to the man: `Look, exactly what have you come to tell us?’ But the man just shook his head, as if to say: `I’m not ready to tell you yet.’ So Pat just stood up and said something like: `Well, I’ve got better things to do with my time,’ and headed out the door and went home. He was very angry.
The guy accompanied me to the door to see Pat out (I didn’t know whether he was going to leave as well – I was rather hoping he would, because I was pretty bloody angry about it, too) but as Pat left and I closed the door the man just spun round on me and said: `Get your jacket on. I want to tell you something.’
So against my better judgment I went through into the front room and told my wife I was popping out for a few minutes (I wanted to tell her so she didn’t become worried). We then went out.
JK: Where did you go at that time of night?
CA: We wandered down towards Andover town centre, then back up Salisbury Road, back and forth, back and forth, questions and more questions, most of a fairly general nature, but none of the questions were about me. Rather they were to do with things like, you know: Where were the circles? Who were we in touch with? What did we know, particularly about the Russians? That kind of thing. He was asking every question you could possibly think of that an intelligence agent would probably ask. But the conversation wasn’t going anywhere at all. As for myself I was furious, but I didn’t quite have the courage to walk away.
JK: But presumably at some point he told you what it was he’d come to tell you?
CA: Yes. When we eventually started to walk back towards my home he stopped on the pavement and said: `You are now one of us.’
So I said: `What do you mean by that?’
He said, simply: `CIA.’
When I asked him for ID he just laughed and said: `You really think a CIA agent would carry identification?’ And then he laughed again.
He told me I would never see his boss, and that he never saw his boss’s boss. He said that was the way it worked. He said that from here on in I was ‘one of them’. He gave me no say in the matter whatever. He never asked me if I wanted to be associated with the CIA – he just told me that from then on I was to consider myself one of them.
Following this he named a lot of people – most of whom were my colleagues in crop circle research – who were to be eliminated from the research program (he did not mean that they were to be killed or anything quite like that, but they were nevertheless to be taken off the stage, so to speak). And they have been. I have watched the process in operation for some years now – a process he openly told me about on that night. And every name he named that night has since been `got at’, and everything that he said would happen has happened.
JK: Could you give us an example?
CA: Well, for instance, the following year Terence Meaden was never out of the newspapers. Nobody else could get a look in. This is exactly what he told me would happen. But where is Terence Meaden now? Who knows what Terence Meaden’s latest ideas are? Answer: no one. Because, presumably, his stage has been taken from him – he’s been `taken out’. Pat Delgado was next, and we all know what happened to him. [Author’s note: sadly, Pat Delgado was so taken in by the`Doug And Dave’ episode, and so distraught because of it, that he retired from crop circle research soon thereafter.]
JK: Do you think there was a reason why you weren’t `taken out’, too? Did this man indicate why you should be singled out from the rest?
CA: He did, yes. The CIA guy told me that, so far as they were concerned, I seemed to have a particular affinity and contact with the public. ‘You have a way,’ is what he said. `The public identify with you.’
JK: And at the time, of course, you were getting a lot of media coverage.
CA: Yes, I was. There were really only two people in those days, Pat and myself. We’d written a book and it had sold a lot of copies. We were getting a lot of TV and radio coverage. But a decision seemed to be made that night that I was the one. I mean, if you look at it logically, it could have been either one of us. So this man must have been in a position to make a decision. He must have carried some authority within his agency.
JK: Right.
CA: So he chose me to go with this`role’…
JK: And what was this ‘role’?
CA: Once they had taken these other researchers out of the frame, so to speak, they wanted me to do something for them. He said I was to carry on being Colin Andrews, researching the phenomenon, just doing my thing, and at some point in the near future I would be asked to do one interview which would enjoy maximum, saturated media coverage. During the course of this interview I was to make one statement, and one statement only.
They wanted me to state publicly that the crop circle phenomenon was a hoax. When we got back to my home he said that he would show me how to say it and what to say. In return for this I was offered a bank account in Switzerland, in which would be enough money that I would never need to even think about money ever again.
On top of this he said that they were in possession of some kind of “instrument” which they would send to me within two weeks. He said that this instrument would allow me to identify immediately a real crop circle from a hoax – something that, presumably, could measure some or other microwave residue, or some other residual effect. He told me: `You will then be in a privileged position, and we will put you right out there as the number one crop circle expert.’ He then said that they would send me to a certain college… (which I know to be a government establishment, so my ears pricked up at this point)… where you will be familiarized with coding structures.
I mean, this is an absolute bloody horror story I’m hearing… I mean, I was… God, no one will ever know how I felt that night. I was terrified. I even cried. I was completely and utterly bloody freaked. I even saw my daughter the next day and I broke down while I was talking to her, too.
I said to her: ‘Darling, I want you to forget everything I’ve ever told you about crop circles. I think I’m in terrible trouble. You know, I’m in bloody trouble.’ Of course, she didn’t know what I was talking about but I just wanted my family out of it. It took everything I knew to get over that ordeal and carry on a relatively normal life…
(At this point Colin took a few moments to himself. It was obvious that the ordeal had affected him very deeply- indeed, that the memory was as painful as the ordeal itself. A short while later we resumed.)
CA:… So anyway… I was told that there would be another couple of contacts made and that these would be ‘voice-only’ contacts via the telephone. And sure enough they phoned me, but by this time I’d had time to think about the situation and I’d decided I was going to take his head off, you know. There was no way I was going to give them what they wanted.
JK: So what did you do?
CA: I was given a contact number at the Ministry of Defence and I rang that number and told them that I’d had this approach, but I was told they had no jurisdiction. Can you believe that? A British subject was being harassed by a member of US Intelligence and the MoD had no jurisdiction to protect me! My God! I mean, it really made me ashamed to be British.
Anyway, they also told me that I was not to be concerned, that I should simply refuse to cooperate with them. They said that if I refused to go along with it there should not be any danger to me. Hah! I thought: `Thanks for the invaluable assistance!’
JK: And is that what you did?
CA: In the event, yes. That’s precisely what I did. I literally ignored the phone calls. And I guess, in retrospect, it might just have saved my life, the fact that I’d contacted the MoD. Perhaps they have a little more jurisdiction than they admitted to. Perhaps the fact that I contacted the MoD meant that the CIA dared not harm me in any way.
JK: So how did you know which calls to ignore? How did you know it was them?
CA: Oh, it was them, all right. The guy was on the answer machine saying: `Pick up the phone. Pick up the phone.’ But I didn’t. I just let it go. Then the voice said: `Ring me back at this number.’ And then they gave a number, but I didn’t ring back. A few days later they phoned again, and this time what they said was vile, and frightening. But my answer was: `Sorry, I’m not playing.’ And that was that so far as I was concerned. Like I said, perhaps they knew I’d contacted the MoD. Maybe, just maybe, this was enough for them to leave me alone.
JK: Have you had similar approaches since you moved to America?
CA: Well, nothing quite like that. But I have certainly been approached, yes. A computer analyst at the Pentagon, for example, approached me with a person called [name deleted] Pretty soon this woman, [name deleted], sought [name deleted] out and asked to see her in her office. Now this meant that my new office – which I used to share with [name deleted] – had already been infiltrated by people who we now know for sure were CIA. I have since had several approaches by both of these people.
JK: Sounds like someone was pretty desperate to gain access to your database.
CA: Absolutely. This is the only possible answer. Well, I know that’s what it was all about. They told me so. For instance, [name deleted], who is an author in the US, offered that I should co-author a book with her and she went to every extreme in order to get me to agree. She wanted to work with me on the project in my office here in Connecticut, which of course would have allowed her unlimited access to my database. But again, I turned the offer down.
JK: Well, thank you for being so frank, Colin. I’m sure you’ve opened a lot of people’s minds about the ways in which the world’s intelligence agencies work and about just how seriously they view the UFO and crop circle phenomena.
Thanks once again.
CA: My pleasure.