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Part 6: The California Years

(3:14:26)

When Operation Paperclip had been completed and all of the German scientists came into the U.S., they went to work at Brookhaven National Laboratories to continue projects they had been working on in Germany—namely time-travel, and also mind-control.

The mind-control becomes a very interesting and very strong issue today, but I will go into it because it wasn’t the strong issue at that time, but was one of the research programs. They were kicked out of Brookhaven in 1969 because somebody started reading their monthly reports, which are required for a tax-supported scientific institution. They looked for a new home. They found it at Montauk, Montauk Point, and the military people, they moved in, and the military people shortly after that moved out for the most part. And they continued their operations, funded privately, without any government money. Therefore there was no need for an oversight on the place. But, of course, you had your intelligence people—CIA and NSA, ONI, Office of Naval Intelligence, DIA, all of them—knew everything that was going on. And, of course, they were working with the people who were there because there was another aspect to this, which the public has never learned except in a few cases and instances, and very few people know about the Montauk research program out there at Montauk Point unless they reported it. And there are quite a few people around today who were part of it.

Working in league with The Majestic Twelve, greys land at Edwards in order to manipulate Eisenhower

That program went into high gear after 1968. It’s a very long and drawn-out story, but basically the continuation of German research took place there, and because of certain UFO activities, and what happened in 1954— This is part of the public record, which is still sealed, but it is public because I have read records—not the records but private letters communication from somebody was witness to this at Edwards Air Force Base. Believe it or not, a UFO landed in the middle of the base, the aliens got out, said to the scientists who were there, including the CIA, who had some very good scientists, and they do have some excellent technical people—there’s no question about it.

They said, “Okay, you guys think you’re so smart and know what it’s all about: see if you can get into our ships. We’ll just stand by and watch you and see what you can do. In two weeks time they found out they couldn’t get into the ships: they didn’t know how to enter them. They tried cutting torches, diamond cutters, everything else on the hull; they couldn’t cut it, they couldn’t scratch it, couldn’t do anything. Now, this became exceedingly frustrating to the scientists there, and, of course, the word went back through the community of intelligence groups, and the miltary, and to the president of the United States, Dwight Eisenhower. “Get out here and take a look at what’s going on.”

Eisenhower agrees to the Grenada Accords (1954)

So, he took a vacation trip to go to one of the golf courses which were nearby. Eisenhower was known as the golfing president: he spent a lot of time on the golf course. So, he took a little trip to California, and he disappeared one night or one weekend to Edwards. And he witnessed the ship, and they wouldn’t let him get up right next to it, they wouldn’t let him talk to the aliens, but the record is that the military told him, “This is technology we have no idea what it is, and we’ve got to buy time. Make a treaty. We don’t care what kind of treaty you make. Make one—we’ve got to buy time.” So, one was hammered out, which in essence, the name of the treaty for the record was the Grenada Treaty; I’m not going to say how I found that out. And it said in essence that neither us nor the aliens will interfere with either’s civilization—we will sort of keep our hands off of each other; we’ll each go our own way—but there will be cooperation. There will be technical information and expertise given to us that we don’t have. They wanted us to provide underground bases and medical expertise to help them with a problem they had, which, they said, was that “We have serious problems; our race is degenerating, and we need to create a new line of bodies. That was the story. Many people have reported this since and have discussed it.

And many underground bases were built over a period of time, starting in 1959. Because of this treaty, and this is the aspect that’s important, when the Montauk operation took place, that is, the secret part of it after the military was removed, and the German scientists and others that were not German moved in, there was government oversight in the sense of the direction of the projects and the cooperation that was ongoing and was to continue. And this was what they told these technical directors; he says, “You have to learn to work with aliens. They will be part of this project, and they will be cooperating with you to help develop certain technical aspects.” And that, of course, is what did happen.

And this was what they told these technical directors. He says, “You have to learn to work with aliens. They will be part of this project, and they will be cooperating with you to help develop certain technical aspects.” And that, of course, is what did happen.

I worked at Montauk as Al Bielek, but before I get into that, I want to go into the rest of the story as to what happened to me as I grew up.

In the life of Al Bielek, in the process of growing up, many things that I’ve not covered perhaps would be of interest, more in the sense of my personal life. I lived with my— what were truly my foster parents, but did not know at that time. We moved around to various locations and my father was seeking work. And quite aside from the fact that I started my life in Brooklyn, New York, and then went to New Jersey via Long Island, via Patterson, and then eventually settled in New Jersey, first Tennent, New Jersey and then Nutley, New Jersey, before I left and went to California.

I went through the usual schools and schooling, and had some strange interests. Perhaps not so strange, but for what was considered the norm at that time, for a kid in junior high to be avidly interested in science fiction was not considered that normal. I was not athletically inclined; I didn’t engage in any of the sports, and didn’t really have much in the way of girlfriends. I was academic; I even earned the dubious title of being a walking dictionary when I was in junior high, which, perhaps, proved to be true later. And I had the usual amount of scuffs and scrapes from people who wanted to beat on me and this sort of thing, all the process of growing up.

After I went to California, and that was in 1954. I left my job with Curtis Wright Corporation in New Jersey because I wanted to go to California. And, of course, one can always look back in retrospect and say, “Gee, maybe I should have done that.” But I didn’t. I didn’t go to Germany; I went to California.

I was first there, I loved the beaches, and I found work. I worked as a technician, and then I continued my schooling, and eventually became a consulting electronic engineer. The first company I worked for as an engineer was, one was later called Aerospace, but at that time it was called Space Technology Laboratories. I met a lot of interesting people there and throughout my history in California, which was 1954 to 1960, minus a year out in Hawaii for Hoffman Corporation. I met many interesting people, pursued a lot of interests, and I really liked very much the Southern California climate, the whole attitude of people who were living there—a rather loose-knit— not nearly as rigid as the East Coast. Because of that I largely stayed in the West ever since.

Many strange things happened during that period. I’m going to cover them very lightly. In 1954, in my driving all over Southern California, up in the desert everyplace, out of Los Angeles, San Diego, trips to San Francisco, I used to drive up in the area around Malibu Beach. And on one of the canyon trips, up Topanga Canyon, coming back down I happened to notice a group of buildings with a name on the side behind a chain-link fence, a heavy metal steel fence. And I always got a peculiar feeling about that place, something which I could never explain at that time. I even got to the point where I would park and look at the buildings. Why I wanted to park and look at the buildings I could not explain then—the answer has long since come back to me. I would sometimes pass out in the middle of the afternoon, or late afternoon, and awaken later and then go driving on to my determined [destination]—where I was going at that time. And it left me in a state of, not of anxiety, but a feeling of, What was it about this place that intrigued me? I did not find out about that until last year.

From California I went on to Hawaii. I worked for a company called Hoffman Electronics, Hoffman Laboratories, as a field engineer for the Navy. A field engineer, actually, for Hoffman, assigned to the Navy at Pearl Harbor. When I arrived there in July of 1955, I eventually found a place to live, but I was assigned to the Pearl Harbor Naval Office, a particular section. And my job as a field engineer for Hoffman Labs was, of course, to inspect their equipment that they had built and supplied to the Navy as it came in to Pearl Harbor—the ships came in for, not necessarily overhaul, but general reconditioning—check out all equipments and so forth. And they need field engineers from different companies to go aboard ship and check out the various pieces of equipment they were connected to through their corporate affiliations.

All of the time that I spent in Pearl Harbor, it had a strange effect on me. It felt like I was back home. I couldn’t understand what that was all about, because as Al Bielek, all of my memories as El Cameron had been erased. In a sense I was back home, because I had been there in 1941. Perhaps some of the leakage from ’41 and my life as Ed Cameron came through to me in 1955, 1956, because I felt quite at home. And I liked walking down the piers and all of this whole area devoted to the ships during my assignments, which were to inspect Hoffman’s equipment aboard ship, make reports and all of that.

I remained there a little over a year, and in that time, one other strange incident occurred which perplexed me for quite awhile, then eventually was resolved when, at a later time, my memories of who I really was came back. Through the office connections, I was invited to a party one weekend involving some Naval officers, some of the civilian people from that office. It was out in a more remote area of Honolulu, out in the boonies more or less. And it was on a Saturday afternoon. This party was run by two naval officers who had a connection with the yard. And everybody was having a great time, but as I imbibed more drinks— I did drink a little in those days. I was not an alcoholic, but it was customary, shall we say, in a few of the company I get, and particularly in these Navy parties, that we had a few drinks. Nothing unusual about that. What was unusual, and I thought about it many times after that until the meaning of it finally erupted and fell in on me consciously, was that the two guys who threw the party, both lieutenants in the Navy, in the tan fatigue uniform, to me had a funny feeling, like these two guys sort of belonged together, and I couldn’t quite understand what it meant. And then as they became more inebriated, if you will, I got the feeling in a certain sense I identified with one of them. And it didn’t mean I had any connection with this person—I didn’t know him from Adam other than from the Navy yard. I had a feeing in some way that I fit into this picture. And then I was looking mentally at this other officer: he fit into the picture. Now, who fit in there? And I could never answer that question at that time as to what the other person portrayed, what the other person meant to me.

It wasn’t for many years, decades afterwards, literally, that I finally figured it out that to me, on a conscious level connecting with the subconscious, the two officers represented Duncan and myself from our time in Pearl Harbor, when we were much younger. It was a type of thing where the subconscious was starting to break through, at least a little bit, and starting to identify on a conscious level the certain events then taking place—namely, that party with the two officers. It was a case, looking at it later, where I realized I almost broke through as to identifying a missing part of my past, but I never quite made it.

Well, that operation ended in 1956. I returned to the mainland, went through a series of jobs—I’ll not go into it. I wound up in Los Angeles working for Space Technology Laboratories off and on from 1957 to 1960. And then I moved to Houston, Texas, and then I remained out of the California area until 1984—’83 and ’84. At that time, having traveled around the U.S., I met many engineers in many walks of life. And the interesting part of it was, as a consultant, I’d talk with many of these people in strange projects who had strange histories to relate, and quite a few of them had quite a bit of knowledge about things like UFOs. I might add, of course, during this period of time, I had a great interest in the whole subject of UFOs—was it real or was it not; was there suppression of information and reports. I was sort of neutral, except I had an avid interest at that time, perhaps just as much as I had in the Philadelphia Experiment.

Friendship with author Ivan T. Sanderson

In 1951, before I left for the West Coast, through connections of a society I then belonged to, which was the NSS—National Spelunking Society—I met Ivan T. Sanderson. He was in the New York Grotto and I was in the Jersey Grotto. And I got an invite to come over and visit with him. So I did, and I met him one day and one night; he had an apartment in New York City at that time on 45th Street off of Broadway. And I visited him, and we went out for dinner and we talked about many things. And, a very interesting man. I didn’t know his whole history then; I learned more later. He was ex-British intelligence, who stayed in the United States at the tail end of the war because they were going to ship him back to England on one of the B-26 bombers, and he said the survivability of people on those bombers going across the Atlantic was not very good. So he jumped ship, so to speak, and stayed in New York; went undercover and then when the war was over, he surfaced.

He was well known for many years on the Gary Moore Show on TV in New York, which I did see a few. When in 1953 I went traveling, and then wound up in Los Angeles, I lost connection with him from 1953 until 1963. In 1963 I was in Pennsylvania on assignment, re-connected with him, and, of course, we discussed many other things at that time. Some years later, of course, he was trying to determine the history of the Philadelphia Experiment, because he kept hearing rumors of it himself. He became very interested, as I did, but this was in the late 1960s, early 1970s, before he died in 1973. He could never, including with his connections with British intelligence and with the Pentagon, could never get any straight information out of anyone about the Philadelphia Experiment. It was totally denied to him, other than the fact, yes, there was a USS Eldridge, it was a real ship by that name, and that was all the Navy would tell him.

That is about all I would learn in that time, and, of course, the series of books were written later—Thin Air in 1978, and then The Philadelphia Experiment: Project Invisibility in 1979—Berlitz and Moore. And all it did, with those reports, is stir the pot, and quite literally brought the subject alive again in the popular press, and it never died from that point on. And I still, at that point, did not know that I had a connection with the project. This did not come for quite awhile later. Ivan tried to get to the bottom of it and he never could. I was on a staff at that time working in a group on a subject-matter called mind-control, which was very interesting because there wasn’t much information available at that time, but I had a great deal of interest. And, of course, this expanded much later into a full-blown interest, but that came in the 1980s and the 1990s.

Not to get ahead of my story here. Ivan died. I continued what little research I was then doing myself, and I continued to work at various locations around the country. In retrospect, dealing with Ivan Sanderson, I did make it into one of his books. It was a reference to myself in one of his books. He wrote many, both on natural phenomena and natural life, and The Abominable Snowman was, I think, the first one he ever did and there was worldwide acclaim for it. He did a series on the various things and there was one about underseas civilizations. He did one on UFOs that caught the attention of the CIA, the NSA, and other intelligence agencies. They didn’t want him to write it, so he wrote it anyway. He took a number of literary risks but he always came out on top. It was unfortunate that he and his abilities were lost, but that’s the way it goes. His wife had died thirteen months to the day prior.
The group was broken up, the files remained, and the organization he founded, which I also was a part of, finally went into limbo, and his magazine which had been published for many years, entitled Pursuit, was no longer published and hasn’t been now for almost ten years.

In 1983 I was back to Los Angeles, working for a company known as Advanced Semiconductor Products, president Ray Nguyen. I mention his name for a very good reason. He in his own way was highly frustrated. He was a genius in many respects and he developed a thin-film technology, which is today used in the entire semiconductor industry. At that time there were others making similar films, but he finally mastered the process, took out patents, and eventually collected royalties from everybody. And his product demand was enormous: the entire industry in the U.S. came to him because what he did in the processing of major larger-sized semiconductor chips. The yield was quite low. You had to go in ultra-clean rooms to produce these things. Layer after layer was put on these things to make a very complex chip, but if you do not protect it properly from dust, one little mote of dust can ruin a chip, or can actually ruin an entire bowl—or bool, as it was called—in which there were many chips to be manufactured on this wafer. When they were finished, they were very good; they were cut off, and, of course, went through further processing. But he found a way to develop a thin film which was totally transparent to light of whatever range they were using, which in some cases included UV light, and the yield jumped remarkably. In some cases it was as low as 20 percent—he was able to get yields up to 80 percent and better. Of course they sought after him. He got patents; he was making all kinds of money, and that was the principal thing he had worked on, and then started the company Advanced Semiconductor Products related to his chemical thin-film technology, in which I designed some electronic equipment for him.

Ray was well known in the industry. He eventually wound up being a multimillionaire, and retired from Santa Barbara to Santa Fe, New Mexico. And as far as I know he disappeared several years ago. He did have some problems with his heart and he may have passed on—I have never yet heard fully.

Working in Los Angeles and Long Island at the same time

But what is important is that in that period of time, 1983-1984, the Montauk Project ended. I was still not aware of my involvement in it, and the thing becomes rather difficult to portray, and even more difficult to understand how I could be working two jobs in two locations at the same time. I was working as an engineer in Los Angeles, 1983-1984, and prior to that, from 1976 on, the whole period during which I was involved with the Montauk Project.

The beginning phases of the Montauk Project I want to get into, but I want to state that on a Sunday afternoon in August of 1983, when I was sunning myself on a beach on one of the lakes north of Los Angeles up in the hills one afternoon, I suddenly had the feeling I was free of something. I just felt a relief and a freedom. That was probably the day the project went down, but I have yet to correlate and find old calendars to see if that was the exact day.

Now, how did I get involved with the Montauk Project? And the second question, which I will answer later, is: how could I possibly be working in Los Angeles and on Long Island at the same time, or what appeared to be the same time?

(3:37:13)