Our esteemed magazine has been getting a lot of hatred hurled at it lately, and I have to tell you that it really hurts to read it. It’s daunting, sickening, and upsetting. For me, the more horrible part is when the ones hurling the insults are out-and-out lying or just too stupid to pick up an issue and check what we’re doing here.

Therefore, I think it’s time to defend the turf and do what we do best: present the facts. The facts -- in any topic -- have to rule the day, or we are all doomed. People who lie almost always do it in a very loud voice and repeat the lies over and over. Loud stupid bullies. Mostly fat, lazy white men with too much time on their hands, a radio microphone as a phallic enhancement near their lips, and hate hate hate dribbling out in sad, impotent spurts.

Turn on your TV, and you will see what I mean.

Here on the internets, folks are hating on the magazine, the TV show I created, and especially my husband. I believe it is time to counter these attacks with some facts, and so I have invented the FAQ ATTAQ!! Read it and save it and refer to it and link to it. It is the whole truth, the kind of truth I can prove in a court of law if I have to, and it’s the truth as I have lived it.

I am not going to name a few of the people in the FAQ for one really great reason: the folks spewing the hatred are doing it so that you will give them your attention, and by not typing in their names, I will deny them their search-engine recognition. At least for a little while.

They are publicity hounds of the very first order, demanding to be the center of attention in any conversation. It becomes harder and harder to stay in the spotlight if you can’t invent anything except insults, and I would feel sorry for them if I weren’t the one getting insulted. It’s got to be awful to be so angry so much of the time. The world has displeased them!

This FAQ ATTAQ!! is a work in progress, constantly changing and growing, and it has been shaken into existence because the subject at hand is the UFO. We know so little about this topic, and it is so important. Is there such a thing, at all? Is our beloved government lying to us? Can you trust what we’re trying to uncover and report?

I work for you, the reader and the viewer, and you need the truth so that you can figure out what’s going on. Let’s get started! Here is the FAQ ATTAQ!!

The snow is probably over two feet deep, and they don't plow out here. It's a penetrating cold, even in the few moments of sunlight. Above us is this huge support structure called the Henge, a ring like the one at Stonehenge, only over a hundred feet high an built by construction workers during World War II. Around us are the bombed out structures of buildings. We don't know who bombed them, almost on the Czech border, the Germans, the Russians, or the Americans. 

We're here to meet a Polish UFO expert on Nazi secret weapons to talk about the Die Glocke, the legendary Nazi Bell. Did it exist? Was it a time-traveling machine? Was it all a myth? Can we find the residue of Red Mercury? Are we at the very site of the  Wonder Weapon?

It's  been a long journey from Berlin to Peenemunde to a desolate German underground facility in Poland. And every stop along the way is burdened by the history of what happened at these places and how America's military rocket program was begun by the work of Nazi scientists, who were, in truth, war criminals. Our German hosts, historians mostly, except for a 90-year old self-declared SS officer and member of the mysterious Vril Society, are uncomfortably conscious of the past crimes in these places and the names of the concentration camps that supplied the slave labor to keep these facilities functioning. They, too, lament the past and the victims.

I'm trying to keep a reporter's mindset: watch, listen, ask questions, let your respondents speak their truths, document, and interpret later. But it's hard. The photos on the wall of the concentration camp victims in their striped pajamas working in sub-freezing cold and ill-heated factories are frightening. The special Anne Frank exhibit advertised on a bulletin board wall at Peenemunde is grimly ironic. Our guests, academically cordial in a way that I remember only too well from my years teaching college, are encyclopedic in their recitation of the facts: X number of laborers, these types of weapons, those types of propulsion systems, the names of scientists, and the day they closed down Peenemunde to take the work underground to places like Mittelbau-Dora and Nordhausen to escape the allied bombing. 

We stop at a bombed out field that housed the barracks of some of the slave laborers at Peenemunde. Our host tells us that it was ironic that the first news of the existence of Peenemunde reached the British from an escaped concentration camp victim. The RAF then bombed Peenemunde in 1943, only they bombed the barracks housing the slave laborers, almost all of whom died in the raid.

Our trip continues to the underground facilities in Poland that, legend has it, housed the project that developed the Bell. The cave walls reek of death. The cold is the cold of death, not of winter. The sound of water dripping and running along the ditches inside, echoing within the massive structure carved inside a mountain, makes the place seem alive with the spirits of the dead. This is reality, not legend. 

There is still one remaining worker alive somewhere in Poland or Germany who attests to something so critical taking place at these sites that the SS went to incredible lengths to keep the project functioning even though they knew, by 1943, that the war had been lost at the failed siege at Stalingrad. 

And now we're trudging through the snow around a structure allegedly used to hold down a device so powerful that it could have been a delivery system for a weapon of mass destruction aimed at New York, where, in 1945,  I  was living in the Manhattan neighborhood of Morningside Heights. So now it's even more personal. You can look at the stories of the Holocaust and the War in a textbook or learn about them first hand from your aunts and uncles in Brooklyn, but only feel the impact decades later when you stare at the proof and realize that whatever this thing was it might have been aimed at your city and launched, but for the Battle of the Bulge.

Downtown Berlin, today, looks more like Fifth Avenue and 57th Street than it does anything else. But the looming Brandenburg Gate, Checkpoint Charlie, and some relics of the old Berlin Wall are reminders of the past and the Cold War. You can have your picture taken with a man in a Soviet Army uniform or a British Tommy. You can stand, smiling, under the Hammer and Sickle or even flash a V sign at the camera before you grab a quick Starbucks on the corner. But the past weighs heavy and you're all too happy to get away. 

Far away.

Our 767 has just taken off from Newark into the coming darkness and is now out over the ocean. Been up since before 5 this morning, doing final chores, preparing for this long European trip to the source of the mystery of Nazi flying saucers and the infamous Glocke, the Nazi Bell. And now the lack of sleep is catching up to me and I begin to doze.

Drifting off, I hear the voices of the flight attendants, all speaking German. German, my first language spoken to me by my grandmother, but forgotten over sixty years. German, although one of my languages in graduate school, it was only the language of scholarly journals and not spoken German. Yet here it is, playing back a tape recorder deep in a memory stored as a bunch of cells buried in a convolutional swirl somewhere. The words resonate, the announcements sound like orders. They are orders, orders to do things right. "Alles is im ordnung." 

UFO Hunters is smack in the middle of its long march across Eastern Europe for our middle episodes. Winter gear all packed, waterproof trekking boots all packed, World War II B-17 bomber jacket all wrapped around me in the ice-cold cabin. This isn't just another location shoot. It's a trip back to the beginnings of my own family. 

My cousin, Norman Davis, then a young B-17 bombardier over Schweinfort, crouched in the tiny cabin under the  navigator and pilot cockpit. A burst of flak from an AAA shell blows up he cabin above him and pieces of the pilot and co-pilot rain down upon him. His own cabin is wet with blood, but he is flying the plane now, staying in rigid formation as Luftwaffe fighters knife through the squadron. But the B-17s are rigid as they head over the target with rounds tearing into the planes' midsections, shredding the waist gunners like so much meat. 

Over the target, my cousin calls "bombs away," retribution for the war and the terrible camps, and he and the rest of the squadron wing their way back to England and the protection of the Mustangs that will escort them home. With the pilot and co-pilot bleeding out their last, my cousin Norman manages to bring the crippled plane in for a landing, He will get a hero's welcome and a medal from General Eisenhower. And he will go down in family history. But he is dead now, just like so many of the very young men who faced almost certain death in the skies over Germany more than 65 years ago. 

Memories well up inside of me as the announcements in German continue. Now just sinking into sleep, I can hear the voices of great uncles and great aunts, those who made it out just in time, and remember the faces of those who didn't. And I am going there now to the very spot where concentration camp inmates were forced into stacking the ceramic bricks to protect the Nazi scientists from Red Mercury contamination. And then those very same Nazi scientists came here with full immunity from war crimes because we needed their technology and their brain power. 

But we are flying back there now, German announcements  ringing in my ears, memories flooding into dreams, and the sound of a German lullaby from long ago and far away soothing it all. My first language is coming back to me, absent all these years, alive in the darkness of dreams, and taking me back to where I was. 

Over the sea into the endless night,

Bitte, kinde, langsam schlaff, schoenheit.

Our flight from Albuquerque to Alabama circles over Dallas Love Field. It will be a long layover between flights, but through the clouds I can almost travel back in time to 1963 and the scenes of JFK's body being loaded onto Air Force One as Walter Cronkite narrates the devastating events in solemn tones dripping with the gravitas of history. Our generation had lost. The bad guys had won. But that was a thousand conspiracies ago, and now we know -- after a multitude of books and histories and Oval Office tapes -- that there were no good guys, only different degrees of bad.

It's the conspiracies, not the economy, that drives us. Roswell, JFK's assassination, LBJ's Gulf of Tonkin, Bush's October Surprise, 9/11, and now the all-too-convenient economic collapse. Conspiracies, each of them.

Follow the money, or in the present case, the lack thereof, and you will find the culprit. It was 9/11 that triggered one of the largest cuts in history for the tiniest segment of taxpayers while the rest of the world went to war against the hapless Saddam Hussein, W's Noriega. And it's the economic collapse, which triggers the government's takeover of businesses in the private sector, all standing in line with their corporate hands out waiting for he billions of our money that the Treasury will hand over to them. Sound overly simplistic? Sure it does. Bu the truth usually comes out in the wash just that way.

The nice part of this economic collapse and the New New Deal is that it was all laid out for us very neatly in Joseph's prophecies and his advice to Pharaoh in the Old Testament. You see, Pharaoh had a dream while Joseph was in prison interpreting the dreams of the royal butler, that there would be seven fat cows and seven starved ones coming out of the Nile.

Joseph, probably the first Director of Homeland Security or head of FEMA in history, was called into the Pharaoh's Oval Office to interpret. Joseph foretold the years of plenty and the years of famine, the national depression, and the cries of the masses for help from the central government. And Pharaoh followed Joseph's sage advice: Sell the people grain for bread, but take their land so as to expand the central government, and then relocate the population to interment camps -- concentration camps -- for population control until the famine passed. In the end, Pharaoh, because he stored the extra grain in the times of plenty, had enough grain to feed the population in exchange for taking ownership positions in the land. Sound familiar?

You can get a lot out of the Bible. Abraham invented the first modern contract and established black-letter contract law; Jethro invented the first modern judicial system; Moses invented a top-down bureaucracy, and Ezekiel saw the first flying saucer, grokking his wheel, "turning like a fire in the sky." And then he became a contactee. Take that, David Icke.

Love Field is in sight as we make our descent. Time to pack our gear and move out to our next conspiracy: Nazi Flying Saucers and the menacing story of the Bell and the crashes at Kecksburg -- in the presence of a former SS officer who became NASA's launch director -- and Needles.

There are conspiracies afoot, indeed.

See you on Wednesday nights when our new season starts on March 26.

Here is my editorial for the new issue, and my basic explanation and apology for taking so long with it. Life ... it is amazing!

Please forgive the totally unforgivable absence of this fine magazine from your mailboxes and store shelves all these many, many months. I have missed you!

The reasons for my lacuna are many and complex, but they all boil down to one thing: I just plain ran out of steam. I got tired, and I wondered what in the heck I was doing. Did I really want to throw my life away in the service of the illusive UFO?

I’m sure some of you know what I mean. This is madness, chasing a troubling dream down the stairs and into the morning kitchen. It’s gone before you put the kettle on.

Is this any way for a grown-up to live? Well, OK. That was how I was feeling at the end of October so I stepped away for a while and indulged in a little bit of living. I cooked and I cleaned up afterwards; I shopped and wrapped presents and I hugged every family member I could get my hands on.

And now, I’m back. Ready for more UFO. Here we go, again. This time, with even more conviction.

Perhaps one of the most troubling aspects of the UFO gig is represented by David Icke. Yes, you will find a long, detailed interview with him in these pages this month. My indecision over whether or not to run the piece is one of the reasons I would put the word month in sneer quotes if I liked to use sneer quotes, but I don’t, and I won’t.

Yes, we are still a monthly magazine, and yes, here is a piece on Icke. Pros and cons: First, the piece is by Bret Lueder, one of our favorite people. He’s a hard worker, and I respect his hard work. When he told me he had the Icke interview, I warned him that we wouldn’t run it unless he addressed that nasty and persistent anti-Semitism rumor.

Why do people call Icke an anti-Semite? Is it because he says that some of the Jewish folk are Reptilian aliens? How could anyone believe that? Or, is it more subtle?

Does he say that it’s all a metaphor for rapacious greed and a cold-blooded nature? No, he does not. He means it, literally. Does he include lots of other folk in the Reptilian tribe? Certainly. Do I personally believe any of this? Do you?

In the end, belief is not the issue. Rather, what’s at stake here is the rousing of the rabble. The burning at that stake. The mob fomenting at your garden gate, torches at the ready. The cleansing of the race, the purging of the blood, the fire-bombing of this house of cards. Or, as the cops at the Paracast will say: the taking out of the trash.

But wait. Here in the fabulous UFO field, things can’t be so cut and dried or black and white, right? If you’re reading these pages, you already know about nuance and those gray areas where the truth often lurks. You are fundamentally tolerant if you’ve gotten here, as far as page 6 in a truly alternative publication.

So, before I throw out the baby with the bong water, I always like to pause and really think first. Is Icke really trash? He fills entire stadiums, but then again, Limbaugh is popular, too. Should either man be silenced?

If they spew hate, I say yes. Hate literally makes me—and you—sick. You can feel it as a knot in the pit of your stomach. It makes your skin crawl.

Hate speech basically always says the same thing: Kill the infidel! Kill him! Burn that bitch! Burn her! Silence!
Silence.

As readers, you have to trust this publication. As editor, I have to trust my instinct. I’ve taken four full months to think about Icke, and he speaks on page 50. If he turns your stomach, let me know. If not, then I did the right thing.

Meanwhile, I will hop the fence and rejoice in the true beauty of this field: the Hieronimus cover, showing you a mural full of love and joy and hope. The Marley quote that would be a fine tattoo. The fabulous columnists who each say something memorable each and every issue. And now Skylaire is writing for us!

Even though I moan and complain, I have many people who make this magazine the wonderful place it is: Sean Casteel, who never drops a stitch and always checks in on me; Lesley Gunter, who runs our website and is a dream to work with; Al Lehmberg, our poet and the most loyal man on the planet; Jeremy, my alien son; sweet Farah, brilliant Regan, the manly Mr. Earley, the sexy Nick the Brit.

This field is full of sharp intellects, and they fill our pages with the kind of erudition that still goes unnoticed by the mainstream: Friedman, Andrews, Tonnies, Hanks, Good. Some of our writers—Sri Ram Kaa, Kira Raa, Kate, Noory, and Steve—strike a more spiritual chord than many would like to hear, and some of our writers—Bryant, Balthaser, and Troopman—do the heavy lifting.

While I was pondering my future these last few months, I did hear from you, our reader. Yes, I did. You were displeased with the silence and you let me know. Yes, you did. In fact, there are a lot more of you now that our magazine is featured on the TV each week. UFO Hunters! My favorite show, with Adventure Pat and Science Ted. Plus, there’s this really cute guy who wears our cap …

So, it’s back to basics and back to work. There is still so much still to do here at UFO Magazine. Only a coward would quit. And yes, I’ll plug the phone back in as soon as I send this issue off to the printer.