GOAT'S NOTES: MORE SECRETS OF THE MEN WHO STARE AT GOATS

WHO IS THE MYSTERIOUS "RON" FROM JON RONSON'S THE MEN WHO STARE AT GOATS?

In the first "Goat's Notes," we reveal the mysterious Ron from Chapter Two: Goat Lab.

 
(STARpod.org) -- The man who reactivated me is ..." Uri paused, then he said, "called Ron."

I was reading Jon Ronson's book The Men Who Stare at Goats.

Ronson wrote, "Was Ron FBI? CIA? Military intelligence? Homeland Security? Could Ron be MI5? MI6?"

"Ah ha!" I thought. "Now it makes sense."

I knew that Ron worked for CIA. And why psychic mentalist Uri Geller would claim to have been 'reactivated' for the war on terror.

It was December 6th, 2005, and I had just received another intriguing email from Dan Smith.

Dan Smith's claim to fame includes his father, Dan Throop Smith, "a renowned Harvard economist who had served as the Treasury Department's top tax adviser during the Eisenhower administration" according to the Washington Post, and his older sister, Deborah, a friend of President G.H.W. Bush according to the White House, as reported in another Washington Post story about Presidential cuff links used to impress Toyota.

Smith had forwarded the latest rumor concerning his friend Ron, the former CIA analyst made famous by a Pulitzer prize winning story from the New York Times.

"What do you think about Ron encouraging Gordon to go to Iraq, support RC [Ramsey Clark]  'because people in D.C. would appreciate it' (my paraphrasing) and help Saddam?  Risky for a senior officer? Obviously not in Ron's mind. But his note 'from a Senior Negroponte Deputy' encouraging defense of SH is making quite a stir on the internet."

Dan Smith would soon tell me of meetings with the FBI over concerns of Ron's involvement in his personal affairs.

According to Mr. Smith, his friend, Ron Pandolfi, then with the CIA, appeared to have prior knowledge the terror attacks of September 11th, 2001.

When I pressed Smith for more information, he told me that Pandolfi had been "harassed by FBI and DIA" over Smith's posting "Ron's prior knowledge" on the Internet.

Intrigued, I wanted to know what had happened to give Smith this impression. So I asked him.

On or about Sunday, September 9, 2001, Smith claims Pandolfi called him on the phone to come over to his house for "an urgent meeting."

Upon arriving, Smith was told that Pandolfi was going to "reactivate" the "Aquarium," Smith's code-name for disclosure of paranormal involvement in the government.

Among those in attendance: a shaman from South America, and several persons "into psychic stuff."

According to Smith, this "Aquarium" group had more or less been defunct for a while, prior to these events.

As I spoke with Smith, he told me, to the best of his recollection, what had happened a few days later, on September 11, 2001.

On the morning of 9/11, Smith was listening to music on the radio, when it was announced something was taking place in New York City. He turned on the TV just in time to witness the second plane strike the South Tower.

Smith's sister in Montana had called, looking for his other sister, Deborah, who had boarded a plane at Logan International Airport, about the same time as the hijackers. Phone lines were jammed, leaving Smith unable to reach his sister, or his friend Ron from the CIA.

Eventually all commercial traffic was grounded, including his sister's plane that had already flown out of Logan. Later Smith learned that Deborah had spoken to her friend, former President George H.W. Bush, who was also in the air when the planes hit the towers.

All of this climaxed for Smith when Ron Pandolfi called him from a secure location, shortly after a third plane had struck the Pentagon, to, in Smith's words, let him know that "everything was OK, all was going according to plan."

Smith told me Pandolfi called for another urgent meeting of the Aquarium, which was held in front of the tiger cage at the National Zoo. Topics discussed at these meetings, which included a new presence -- a "special forces" bodyguard -- were not disclosed.

A few days later, Smith claims to have discussed all the above with a female Special Agent in front of the FBI offices in Baltimore.

Revelations similar to the above, concerning Pandolfi's tasking of the JASON scientific expert committee at MITRE Corporation, have later been proven accurate, based upon government documents.

As with most things played out in the world of spies and lies, all is not as it seems.

Smith's revelations do, however, play a significant role in filling in some of the holes left by British author Jon Ronson in his book, The Men Who Stare at Goats.

A few weeks after the "reactivation" of the Aquarium group, Jon Ronson sat down with psychic-superstar Uri Geller, in a London restaurant.

Geller, who had been the subject of CIA's original psychic spy operations in the 1970s (a fact now confirmed by genuine US government documents from the CIA STAR GATE collection, which are available to view at STARpod.org) was reluctant to discuss his CIA work with Ronson.

According to Ronson's book, Geller then admitted, "I have been reactivated" by someone named "Ron."

Ronson cites the meeting with Geller as the beginning of the search that led him to Special Forces and psychic goat killers.

Ron Pandolfi denies that he ever reactivated Uri Geller, or anyone else, for that matter. I imagine it's a matter of perspective. Is the Aquarium anything more than an imaginary group of men involved in the applied use of the human imagination?

It does appear that Dan Smith occupies the center of a 'virtual' conspiracy, notable for the involvement of his friends who are real very high ranking U.S. government intelligence persons.

Intrigued by the above, I decided to look into the email archive to see what, if any, corroborating evidence I could find.

Dismayed to learn that the time frame of interest was missing from my old Dell computer, I discovered the earliest mention of Ron Pandolfi appeared in 1999, during the height of former US Web CEO Joe Firmage's quest to reverse engineer extraterrestrial technology, even as he promoted the Majestic MJ-12 TOP SECRET / MAJIC UFO documents.

In September of 2000, Dan Smith made several statements to an alternative science email discussion group, implying his friend Ron from the CIA had an active interest.

Smith, who is convinced of the eschatological dimensions of paranormal phenomena -- an implied end-of-the -world scenario -- wrote to a long list of email recipients:

"... it appears that Ron wants me to be a bus driver. He wants me to obtain a bus and paint it to look like an 'official' MTA bus, and go around the city picking up passengers at the bus stops, but instead of delivering them to their usual destinations, I will take them on an eschatological tour. When I told Ron that this might be construed as being illegal, he did not seem perturbed."

And then, for those not paying close attention, Dan added:

"Would I lie to you? Do you think for a minute that these were not my 'official' instructions from a person who seems no longer inclined to deny membership in 'MTA-12'?"

Dan Smith's "tour bus" of the "world wide web," the same sticky net that had brought riches to Joe Firmage, was about to become a spidery snare for intelligence persons and paranormalists everywhere.

In the intelligence world it is known as "flypaper theory."

My first direct contact from Pandolfi arrived shortly after Smith announced his "tour bus" of the Aquarium.

Smith apparently struck a nerve, somewhere, as the elusive and mysterious "Ron" was inspired to respond to the above email "passengers," tongue firmly in cheek:

"Is it a ferret or a weasel that Dan will be adopting for the avian birthday? [An allusion to the Dan Smith identification of the UFO Aviary of former intelligence persons involved with UFOs and the paranormal.]  I am ready to purchase a bus ticket for Dan's eschatological tour, as long as I get to select at least one of the stops. Who else will join the adventure? Where will it end?"

As you might imagine, more than a few skeptics were on the receiving end of the above, leaving Smith with no other option than to provide more information about his relationship with Pandolfi, and his claim that "Ron" was in fact the government's chief weird phenomena point man.

After several days and numerous emails, Smith revealed something Jon Ronson would only learn several years later:

"I spent last Saturday being confronted with the fact that the point person for phenomenology is also a point person with respect to our Special Forces. It is very difficult for me to imagine that this is just a coincidence. And it came as no great surprise to me in the light of my lengthy assimilation into these 'nether' regions ... If the Aquarium plan does move forward, there will be a continuing need for Special Forces."

Near the end of The Men Who Stare at Goats, Jon Ronson tells the story of a mysterious caller, who alerted him to a new kind of soldier.

"Psychic assassins," the unnamed caller announced, "Cool, eh? They're teaching the Special Ops assassins, the Fort Bragg guys who go out in the field to track down and assassinate terrorists, how to be psychic."

According to Dan Smith, his interaction with Ron some eight years prior to the planned 'eschatological MJ-12 tour' had landed Ron in hot water and cost the taxpayers a considerable sum of money.

Eventually Smith went to the FBI for guidance.

The first time around it was concerning Ron's interest in Dan and his "joint mission" with paranormalist Rosemary Ellen Guiley.

Smith wrote to me, "The first time was to get some feedback on CF [Smith's code for Ron Pandolfi.]. I was unable to get any until I had three meetings with Chris Straub, c.'95. He was then the ranking staff member for the Senate Intel. Comm. CF joined us for the final meeting that was in the cafeteria. Bottom line: Chris was knowledgeable concerning eschatology, and he told me, 'to rest assured that I was dealing with some very competent people' ... Recall that I was indirectly responsible for the Inspector General's investigation of CF in '92-93, ... CF reported that it was a six month, $100K investigation in which he was cleared of any wrong doing."

And according to CRS Reports for Congress, and several articles in the New York Times, Ron would soon be mired in another CIA controversy involving the Senate Intelligence Committee.

Ken Timmerman in American Spectator wrote that "Ronald Pandolfi was the CIA's highest ranking scientist when he visited the headquarters of Hughes Space and Communications in El Segundo, California in 1996."

In April 1996, CRS Reports state that "A CIA analyst, Ronald Pandolfi, briefed the Senate Intelligence Committee on what he had found in 1995 about Hughes' review of the explosion of a Long March rocket in January 1995. The CIA then allegedly alerted Hughes about Pandolfi's briefing, reportedly according to an internal CIA cable dated September 23, 1998. The committee then asked Attorney General Janet Reno for a criminal investigation into whether the CIA improperly obstructed a Senate investigation."

Jeff Gerth, in the New York Times wrote, "The concern of Congress involves broad issues of national security. It was the Senate panel on proliferation that asked the Pentagon to assess the national security implications of the 1995 accident review. And the Senate Intelligence Committee, officials said, is looking at whether what happened to Pandolfi is part of a larger question: Has the Clinton administration's strategic partnership with Beijing affected the way the intelligence community sees China?"

Strangely, the weirdness surrounding Pandolfi and his associates, appears to have a teflon coating. In spite of Jon Ronson's now rather loud expose' of The Men Who Stare at Goats, the mainstream media remains numb to the odd goings on which continue to this day.

Copyright (c) 2009 by Gary S Bekkum / STARstream Research and STARpod.org -- All rights reserved.