Space Cadet

I had seen this interview over at 9-11 Blogger, and thought the morons over at the Pilots group had actually gotten themselves a real "name" with the son of the founder of the Learjet empire. Of course, I should have known better and done a little digging. Fortunately our longtime reader Sword of Truth either had the information at hand or did the necessary Googling.

Turns out John Lear might be one of the Brazil nuts in the conspiracy theory can. You can get a feel for this when he starts into his nonsense, starting about seven minutes in, when he claims that it would be very hard to hit the twin towers. Let's remember, those towers were 208 feet wide. I don't know how wide the average runway is, but it's for darn sure not that distance.

Lear also repeats the supposed October Surprise story, where the 1980 Reagan/Bush campaign supposedly negotiated with the Iranians to ensure that the embassy hostages were not released before the election. This story has been out there for years; Clock Lady Barbara "Voices in my head told me to work for Reagan" Honegger even wrote a book about it.

But let's get back to Lear. He's quite a character, with some rather fanciful notions. From the UFO Conspiracy page on Wikipedia:

In the late 1980s, John Lear became prominent in UFO circles. Citing "unnamed but well-connected sources" (Clark 1998, 157), Lear asserted that the U.S. government had in fact recovered dozens of UFOs over the decades. In exchange for advanced technology, the government allowed for a limited number of alien abductions.

This proceeded for some years, until in 1972 the government discovered that the aliens were kidnapping far more persons than their agreement had stipulated. This dispute culminated in a conflict between aliens and humans at a secret military base near Dulce, New Mexico. The aliens supposedly killed about 40 high-ranking military officials or scientists, and many more military personnel who tried to invade the base.

Following this conflict, Lear reports, the aliens have essentially gone about their schemes with no interference. Up to 10% of the U.S. population has been abducted, and the Strategic Defense Initiative was actually proposed to protect from alien invaders, not Soviet missiles.

You know, I had wondered where 10% of my neighborhood went to! Sounds like a sci-fi story reject.

Notice as well, that Lear fits a certain pattern that almost guarantees that half of the 9-11 Denial movement will turn against him. Let's see if you can pick it out of this paragraph:

Back on the Area 51 front, Casolaro was hearing rumors that Michael Riconosciuto had worked for Lear Aircraft in Reno, Nevada. This connected him to Bill Lear, creator of the Lear jet, who is often claimed by UFO buffs as having done research on anti-gravity for the government as well as John Lear, a former CIA pilot who also hit the UFO circuit with tales of saucers and aliens in cahoots with the US government. It is now becoming distant history, but back in 1989, a man named Bob Lazar went public with his claims that he had back-engineered alien spacecraft at Area 51. Lear and Lazar lectured widely on the UFO circuit in the late 1980s and early 1990s, along with other UFO lecture celebrities like Bill English and William Cooper. Cooper's classic, Behold A Pale Horse (Flagstaff AZ: Light Technology Publications, 1991), shared the title of the first draft proposal of Casolaro's manuscript that eventually became The Octopus.

Obviously, it's that he's "a former CIA pilot." This kind of "insider" status immediately grants him credibility, but solely because he supports the CT viewpoint. If he said that the 9-11 Deniers are fruitcakes, he'd immediately be dismissed much like JamesB is, as an obvious CIA tool. ;) And inevitably, he will run afoul of the No-Planers, or the No-Planers at the Pentagon, or the No-Planers in Shanksville or the people who believe the opposite of those folks but have some other element of the conspiracy theory.

Interestingly, although Lear claims to be new to 9-11 Denial, he skirted close to the edge back in a 2003 interview with Art Bell.

John called 9/11 a tremendous feat of airmanship. "This had to be accomplished by pilots with training in 757 simulator." Whoever concocted this did some switches of airplanes, but everything was still covered.

"It took about 200 or 300 hours of simulator practice time for each pilot." John Lear.

"They were doing 600 miles and hour at 700 feet! That is amazing, in air races we only do 400 miles per hour. That took skill and a long time, probably a year."

Hitting the Pentagon was a tremendous feat. The process of going down increases the airflow and the lift, and makes it even harder to continue going down and "avoid being pushed up and over."

"We don't want to get Osama... Other than that video tape, we don't have a shred of evidence" John claims.

That's it for the 9-11 stuff, but John did have some more important information to offer:

John claims we have not been going back to the moon because we were told to stay away. That's why Nasa abruptly canceled the program.

Later in the program, John Lear gave Art Bell a sample briefing that Art might receive if the Government chose him to decide to release all the information about UFO's, aliens, and related things, to the public. This briefing included talk of buildings on the moon, Venus not really having the sulfuric atmosphere we say it has (otherwise how did the space craft parachutes survive it), human mutilations, financial corrupt, etc.