“Andy”

Is This The Real Thing?
The Most Authentic Alien Image Ever
© 1996 Whitley Strieber
Photograph © 1996 Communion Foundation

     In propaganda, stimulating a particular set of questions is often more effective than giving people answers. The “Project Enable” image plants tantalizing questions designed to make people talk amongst themselves and thereby create a legend.
     That the questions are planted with apparent care reveals to wiser readers that this image (I hesitate to call it a sheet of paper, since it arrived as an image) is a work of fiction. For example, the title of the operation, “Enable,” is far too suggestive. “It must be an effort to enable something,” is an idea planted firmly by the suggestive title, and one is led by this title and by the author list (again, all too evidently) to conclude it was an operation to enable the cultural acceptance of the idea that aliens exist.
     I like the phrasing, which leaves as an open question whether the “candidates” were “enrolled” with or without their knowledge or consent. Were this a real document, the question would have been a valid one. Here, the lack of precision is just another attempt to encourage people to create their own opinions; in propaganda, when people are given an opportunity to create their own opinions, they are likely to believe in them.
     The creator of this document, allegedly William Milton Cooper (a conspiracy theorist who died in late 2001), did not need to do much research, such as learning details of people's lives to make sure the timing of any events matched up to their biographies. In 1981 Whitley Strieber was still a writer of horror fiction and would be for several more years. Had they provided any more info, contradictions could have arisen.
     More remarkably, we are asked to believe that only this single page could be copied; a page that only raises questions without providing any actual information. We are to believe that the secret agent ran out of dimes for the photocopier? If one must be suspicious, speculate about that oddity.

     Addendum: On the occasion of William Morton Cooper's demise, Whitley Strieber noted that "In defense of his claim that Strieber was a CIA operative, he produced a document that was allegedly written in 1981 that 'activated' Strieber and a number of other individuals, including Richard Hoagland in a program called 'Project Enable'. Among other inaccuracies, the document identifies Dr. John Alexander as a major when he was, at the time of its writing, a Lieutenant Colonel. It makes reference to Project Stargate, but is dated in 1981, when the military remote viewing program was still called Project Grill Flame."