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Before learning about this Air Force connection, I had had no reason to imagine Myrabo’s work would connect to the Air Force Research Lab. Through his work on laser propulsion, both before and after meeting Ray Stanford, it was obvious that he had connections far beyond what I had originally known. I called Ray and passed on what I had learned about Myrabo’s Air Force sponsorship. At that point it seemed like a good idea to look more closely at Myrabo’s previous work to see what other connections he might have.
Before coming to RPI in 1983, Myrabo had worked for several companies that provided research and development services in technologies from lasers to aerospace.
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Many of their clients were in government and military sectors, and some of Myrabo’s work was involved with the Strategic Defense Initiative, more popularly known as “Star Wars”. One of these companies in particular caught my attention because I had seen its name before…BDM Corporation.
BDM was deeply involved in work for the military and considered to be one of the most successful defense consultants in history.
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Headquartered in McLean, Virginia, by the end of the 1990’s it had become a multinational corporation and major military contractor. Evidence of BDM’s strong position was demonstrated in the 1990’s when it was acquired by the Carlyle Group, an investment group well known for its connection to former high-ranking government officials. At the time of the acquisition, the head of the Carlyle Group was none other than Frank Carlucci, former Assistant Director of the CIA. Carlucci was also Ronald Reagan’s Defense Secretary and a long time friend of former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld.
In 1997 BDM was acquired by TRW, another giant in space and defense contracting, in a deal valued at almost one billion dollars. At the time, the CEO of BDM was Philip Odeen, a former Assistant Secretary of Defense working directly under Henry Kissinger
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. In 1997, when BDM was acquired by TRW, Odeen became executive VP and General Manager of Information Technology at TRW, and that same year, was selected to chair the National Defense Counsel by William Cohen, then the U.S. Secretary of Defense. Odeen retired in 2002 when Northrop-Grumman acquired TRW, and along with it, the former BDM holdings. In February of 2003 however, Odeen joined the Northrop-Grumman Board of Directors, a 12 member board that currently includes a retired Air Force General who was once Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
Especially interesting, from my perspective, is that during BDM Corporation’s long and successful history, its largest operating site—second only to its headquarters in Virginia—was in Albuquerque, New Mexico.
The former CEO of BDM International, Earle Williams, first came to New Mexico in the early 1950’s. He was assigned to Sandia Base as an Army Special Weapons Electronics Officer. Under his leadership BDM moved its headquarters to Virginia, ostensibly to be better able to serve its clients, though it certainly also gave Williams closer access to power players in Washington. Throughout this time however, BDM continued to expand its Albuquerque operations until, by 1988, it accounted for nearly 40% of the company’s overall business activities.
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An Air Force budget estimate in 1994 named BDM as one of the top five contractors on a program to study the feasibility of moderate to high power lasers, with growing emphasis on long-range optical imaging.
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It was a program managed by Phillips Laboratory’s Lasers and Imaging Directorate at Kirtland AFB. Soon, the BDM name would turn up in relation to something very different.
In 1990, author and award-winning journalist, Howard Blum, published a book titled
Out There: The Government’s Secret Quest for Extraterrestrials
. Blum had pursued the subject after learning from a senior official at the National Security Agency that a select group of individuals was secretly studying the UFO phenomenon. The story began in 1985 with a series of unusual reports that came out of another classified project, a project studying an uncanny mental ability to perceive people and places, now called “Remote Viewing”. According to the information Blum was told, the remote viewers had detected saucer shaped objects in close proximity to other targets on which they were focusing. Not long afterward, following a particularly strange case of NORAD tracking an anomalous object, a request had come from the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) to have the remote viewers try to target the object NORAD had tracked. The results were significant enough to motivate more open-minded thinkers in the DIA to bring together a well-connected group of scientists, military, and intelligence personnel to look into the whole question of unidentified flying objects. This group came to be called—quite literally—the UFO Working Group.
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In Blum’s story, the man in charge of this “working group” was an Army officer assigned to the DIA, a Colonel Harold E. Phillips. Suspicions soon began to grow that the name was a pseudonym. In 1993, an enigmatic writer using the name Armen Victorian, after talking with Blum, exposed the real head of the Working Group as a Colonel by the name of John B. Alexander.
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Though Alexander at first denied it, some years later he finally admited to it in front of a number of researchers.
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With the 2011 release of his own book, UFO’s, his involvement with this group became public knowledge.
In the early 1980’s, prior to his position with DIA, John B. Alexander had served in the Army Intelligence and Security Command (INSCOM), an organization with close ties to the National Security Agency. At INSCOM he worked with programs exploring human potential and was well known for having interests in a variety of esoteric subjects. Perhaps it was no coincidence then that his position with INSCOM put him directly under Major General Albert N. Stubblebine
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, another free-thinker open to new ideas. After spending thirty-two years in the U.S. Army, Stubblebine retired in 1984 as Commanding General of the Army INSCOM.
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But it was during his term in charge of INSCOM that the Army had funded—and Stubblebine supervised—the first operational remote viewing unit.
Working with Stubblebine at INSCOM prior to being assigned to the DIA (which had taken charge of the remote viewing unit in 1985) would explain how Alexander knew of the existence of the remote viewing unit at the time they were asked to look into the NORAD incident. Ultimately, with approval to form the UFO Working Group (Advanced Theoretical Physics Group according to Alexander) invitations were sent out to the prospective members. With such a controversial group and a secretive membership, their meetings would, of necessity, be held at secure sites. Surprisingly however, it appears that few if any of the meetings were held at government or military locations. The vast majority were reportedly held somewhere else entirely, a secure facility belonging to—BDM Corporation.
According to information obtained by researcher Grant Cameron, some ninety percent of the meetings of this “UFO Working Group” were held in the BDM secure vault in McLean, Virginia. Though Alexander acknowledges in his book that the BDM site was used, he says little else about it. Very few of the groups meetings, perhaps only one, took place at a Defense Intelligence Agency location. Along with material revealing the BDM meeting site, Cameron also uncovered a list of names of the group members, some of whom Alexander has now identified. On the list was Major General Stubblebine who, no doubt, was a factor in the meetings being held at BDM. After retiring from the Army, he was hired by BDM to be Vice-President for Intelligence Systems. With the majority of these meetings being held at BDM, including a five day conference in May 1985 designated “Advanced Theoretical Physics Conference”, it seems reasonable to conclude that the defense contractor held an especially close knit relationship with the Defense Intelligence Agency and, by inference, the defense establishment at large.
Stubblebine accepting a position at BDM after retiring from military service was not unique. It often happens that on retirement influential government and military figures end up working for defense contractors they worked with not long before. Odeen, the former CEO of BDM, had come from being Assistant Secretary of Defense and later went on to work for TRW. Frank Carlucci had gone from the CIA to head the well-connected Carlyle Group. As if in a game of musical chairs, insiders seem to rotate into seats at companies connected to the defense industry. Titles and locations change, but often the same players remain in influential positions and with the same network of connections. BDM, like other companies, was well connected, but with some rather unique connections to people and places with curious ties to the UFO phenomenon.
Whatever these connections suggest, there is no doubt that in the case of BDM Corporation, Leik Myrabo had worked for a company and with people very well-connected in government and military circles. Though he had gone on to work at RPI, it would be safe to presume he still had friends and connections in any number of places.
According to an AFRL Propulsion Directorate press release dated October 29, 1997
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, Myrabo first proposed his Lightcraft concept under the Strategic Defense Initiative Organization (SDIO) Laser Launch Program in the late 1980's. The "Transatmospheric Laser Propulsion" final technical report was published on June 30, 1989 under a contract for Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) and the SDIO Laser Propulsion Program. Sometime between then and 1996 Myrabo drew the interest of the Air Force (exactly how is a bit unclear) and was subsequently offered the chance for an extended leave from RPI to experiment with his Lightcraft designs.
The above 1997 AFRL press release stated simply that Dr. Franklin Mead Jr. of the “advanced propulsion group” studied the original SDIO proposal and then offered Myrabo the opportunity. But according to the White Sands Missile Range web site
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, Myrabo came to the attention of Stephen Squires of the White Sands Directorate of Applied Technology. Squires then called and suggested Myrabo could do his testing at White Sands. However it actually came about, in 1996 Myrabo did receive funding from Phillips Labs and in July of that year the first Lightcraft experiments were under way.
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Franklin Mead is interesting in his own right. Prior to 1997, Phillips Laboratory was still one of four separate Air Force laboratories. The WSMR announcement about the Lightcraft project referred to Mead as a senior scientist at Phillips Labs “Advanced Concepts and Enigmatic Sciences Branch” (an enigmatic title in itself). The Propulsion Sciences & Advanced Concepts division eventually became part of the AFRL Propulsion Directorate, headquartered at Wright-Patterson AFB, Ohio, with an operating location at Edwards AFB, California. In an August 2001 AFRL Propulsion Directorate accomplishment report
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Mead was described simply as being with the Propellants Branch. Whatever Mead’s current position and title may be, during Myrabo’s sabbatical at White Sands, he and Franklin Mead worked together as co-directors of the Lightcraft project.
Franklin Mead’s work with the AFRL seems to keep him involved in a number of advanced research areas, notably a recent AFRL study on “Teleportation Physics”. The author of the report on the Teleportation Physics Study was Eric W. Davis who had met Mead in 1997 through NASA’s Breakthrough Propulsion Physics (BPP) Workshop
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. Eric Davis had been brought into the BPP project through his association with Dr. Hal Puthoff, the same brilliant and intriguing scientist who was instrumental in remote viewing research and who has interests in areas as diverse as lasers and zero-point energy effects.
In 1997, after a stint working for the Air Force in Asia, Eric Davis worked as a research physicist for the National Institute for Discovery Science (NIDS) in Las Vegas, Nevada. NIDS was founded by wealthy Las Vegas businessman Robert Bigelow, with one of its primary aims to be the study and investigation of unidentified flying objects. As part of its operation, NIDS had also maintained a Science Advisory Board composed of a number of well-known scientists and researchers, including Hal Puthoff. Puthoff and Davis, having met through their work with NIDS, went on to work together on topics of interest to NASA’s Breakthrough Propulsion Physics workshop. Their involvement with this workshop also resulted in collaboration with Franklin Mead. Though the NASA BPP program eventually lost funding, in 2001 Davis began doing contract work on advanced concepts for Franklin Mead, and a year later, when NIDS ceased operations, Davis set up his own company, Warp Drive Metrics. He became a consultant and contractor to the Air Force Research Lab’s Advanced Concepts Office, again working directly with Franklin Mead. In 2004, after funding reductions at the AFRL Advanced Concepts office, Davis accepted a position at the Institute for Advanced Studies at Austin, working once again with Hal Puthoff.