Laurance, vetted by the U.S. Naval Reserve, rose to the rank of
lieutenant commander during the war, assigned to the Bureau of
Aeronautics as liaison between the Navy and aircraft production plants -
despite huge financial investments in Hitler's Holocaust machine by
family-owned businesses, as documented by George Seldes and
Charles Higham - who dreamed of transforming the postwar world with
advancements in communications, nuclear power, aviation and computers.
The
defense industry fostered experimentation with new technologies and they
intrigued Laurance Rockefeller, especially those with the
potential to significantly transform everyday life.
When Hitler's Germany rolled out the armaments to flatten Europe, young
Rockefeller launched into an intense study of military aviation. He
joined the Institute of Aeronautical Sciences, was a director of Eastern
Airlines and a trustee of Air Affairs, a quarterly international
journal. Laurance and his brother Winthrop mustered the
Air Youth of America, an aviation training program.
Laurance may have been less visible than his brothers, but he was
equally steeped in the sordid world of covert intelligence and
disinformation. In the 1950s, he served on a panel that released a
report penned by Henry Kissinger, International Security - The
Military Aspect, calling for successive escalations in defense
spending of $3 billion per year to 1965. In 1973 he was named a director
of Reader's Digest, a fount of CIA cold war black propaganda. (To
indulge in a bit of necessary guilt by association, Melvin Laird,
a Digest officer, is also a director of SAIC, the "remote viewing"
sponsor.) Rockefeller is a trustee of M.I.T., a director of the Alfred
P. Sloan Foundation, Olin Mathieson, etc., etc.
Renato Vesco traced immediate
postwar development of the Nazi saucers to the UK. Vesco,
the Italian Werner von Braun, plodded through a detailed
investigation of the technology transfer in Intercept, but Don't
Shoot, published in 1967. British defense officials, he discovered,
hoped to barter advancements in saucer propulsion and design to the
United States in exchange for classified nuclear research data. A
priority was placed on making the saucers faster, leading to
experimentation with a number of rocket propulsion systems. Wind tunnel
tests demonstrated the disks could easily slip through the sound barrier
when the friction layer was drawn through a multitude of pinholes
punched in the hull. Normally, the layer of air that builds along an
aircraft's surface slows it down. The air pulling on the craft,
otherwise known as the buoyant layer, was eliminated in the saucer
design with suction along the entire surface of the vehicle, in place of
the conventional jet design. The pinholes sucked away the buoyant layer
and pumped the air through a thruster, like an ordinary jet.
When the war ended Laurance was off to Europe, according to Alvin
Moscow's sanitized Rockefeller biography, "to examine the latest British
experiments with jet propulsion for military aircraft. He looked into
the technology of the German Rockets used in the blitz of London." The
author doesn't mention a visit to the British Air Force saucer section,
but if developments were shared with anyone, it was Laurance
Rockefeller, the most influential military aerospace scion in the
country.
Laurance and his namesake progeny have been lavish godfathers to
UFOlogy organizations that attribute saucer overflights and abductions
to the "alien" invasion. A panoply of aircraft defense firms swelled
with an infusion of funds from Laurance Rockefeller. The most imposing
is McDonnell-Douglas, founded in 1930 by a prodigy of aircraft design,
James S. McDonnell of St. Louis. McDonnell shares with
Laurance Rockefeller the taint of war profiteering. Periodic postwar
investigations of his aircraft company by the General Accounting Office
have exposed a deep, chronically overfunded well of fraud. In 1967 the
company merged with Douglas Aircraft, the primary subcontractor of
Western Electric, a subsidiary of AT&T.
However cerebral, James McDonnell had one foot firmly planted in
the occult. He was a principal donor to the famed J.B. Rhine
psychic research center at Duke University, a forerunner of Psi-Tech,
and supported psychic experimentation at Washington University in St.
Louis. Professor Rhine and his wife Louisa joined the faculty of
Duke University in 1927 to explore the paranormal with Dr. William
McDougall, chairman of the psychology department. In a few years,
according to Parapsychological Institute literature,
"Dr. Rhine was
conducting the groundbreaking research that demonstrated under
rigorous, scientific conditions that certain persons could acquire
information without the use of the known senses. He introduced the
term extrasensory perception (ESP) to describe this ability and
adopted the word parapsychology to distinguish his experimental
approach from other methods of psychical research."
Among the key early
supporters of the Rhine ESP center was Medtronics, a medical technology
firm in Minneapolis. The connection is chilling in the context of
forced human experimentation. Bear in mind the horrors of the
surgical table described by abductees, circled by "alien" doctors, when
paging through the Medtronics catalog:
"The company's
neurological business produces implantable systems for spinal cord
stimulation and drug delivery.... The Itrel II spinal cord
stimulation system is the most advanced and flexible implantable
neurostimulation device on the market today."
Another financial supporter
of the Rhine center was insurance magnate W. Clement Stone, whose
name was the very first on Richard Nixon's list of presidential
campaign contributors.
The
defense industry fostered experimentation with new technologies and they
intrigued Laurance Rockefeller, especially those with the
potential to significantly transform everyday life.