John B. Alexander

Lieutenant Colonel John B. Alexander is a former Green Beret and Special Forces commander in Vietnam and Thailand, earning the moniker Assassin Six. He holds a PhD in thanatology, the study of death. Alexander became a prominent figure in the U.S. Army's exploration of anomalous mental phenomena and human potential¹.

In December 1980, Alexander authored an article titled "The New Mental Battlefield: Beam Me Up, Spock," published in Military Review, an official U.S. Army publication. This article was the first time ESP and PK were discussed in an official Army publication, asserting that "there are weapons systems that operate on the power of the mind whose lethal capacity has already been demonstrated"¹. The article, based on personal experience and open-source information, gained national attention after Washington Post columnist Jack Anderson wrote about it under the heading "Voodoo Warriors of the Pentagon"¹.

Alexander's esoteric interests caught the attention of Task Force Delta, a high-level Army organization. In 1981, Richard G. Stilwell, the deputy undersecretary of defense, arranged for Alexander's transfer to INSCOM under Major General Albert Stubblebine. Here, Alexander was put in charge of the Advanced Human Technology Office, interacting with Stubblebine's High Performance Task Force¹.

Alexander's work at INSCOM focused on developing human technologies to enhance soldier performance and narrow the "human technology gap." He explored various new age and self-help programs, including sleep discipline, neurolinguistic programming, and Silva Mind Control¹.

He also played a role in the Grill Flame program, particularly after the James Randi hoax. Alexander suggested using magicians as consultants, and worked with Doug Henning and Jack Houck on psychokinesis research, observing spoon-bending parties to understand the phenomena¹.

After retiring from the military, Alexander joined Psi's corporate board in 1990, though he later stated it was a mistake¹.

Publications

• "The New Mental Battlefield: Beam Me Up, Spock" (Military Review, 1980)

The Documents

John B. Alexander, a lieutenant colonel of the Army who had served with the Special Forces in Thailand and Vietnam, published "The New Mental Battlefield: 'Beam Me Up, Spock'" in Military Review in December 1980. Its author note placed him on the staff of the Army's inspector general in Washington after heading the human resources division of the organizational effectiveness office at Fort McPherson.²

The New Mental Battlefield

The article's note gave him as "with the Inspector General Agency, Department of the Army, Washington, DC," with a B.A. from the University of Nebraska, an M.A. from Pepperdine University, a Ph.D. from Walden University, and a 1980 diploma from the Command and General Staff College. It opened: "Psychotronics may be described as the interaction of mind and matter. While the concepts may stretch the imagination of many readers, research in this area has been underway for years, and the possibility for employment as weaponry has been explored. To be more specific, there are weapons systems that operate on the power of the mind and whose lethal capacity has already been demonstrated." Citing the DIA reports of 1972 and 1975 by John LaMothe and Louis Maire, Thomas Bearden's "Soviet Psychotronic Weapons" in Specula (1976), Henry Gris and William Dick's The New Soviet Psychic Discoveries, and Ostrander and Schroeder, it stated that "it is generally believed that the Soviets and their allies are well in the lead"; that "the ability to heal or cause disease can be transmitted over distance, thus inducing illness or death for no apparent cause. While this has been demonstrated on lower organisms, flies and frogs, the present capacity for human death is still debated"; that "telepathic behavior modification, which includes the ability to induce hypnotic states up to distances in excess of 1,000 kilometers, has been reported"; that the SRI work of Targ and Puthoff "tends to support claims that relatively accurate information can be obtained"; that "the intelligence-gathering capability available through remote viewing or OOBE travel is obvious"; that the Soviets "have applied those techniques against the US Embassy in Moscow" with "extremely-low-frequency (ELF) emissions" of "psychoactive characteristics"; and that "the use of telepathic hypnosis also holds great potential. This capability could allow agents to be deeply planted with no conscious knowledge of their programming. In movie terms, the Manchurian candidate lives and does not even require a phone call." It concluded: "It has been suggested that whoever makes the first major breakthrough in this field will have a quantum lead over his opponent, an advantage similar to sole possession of nuclear weapons." "Clearly, psychotronic weapons already exist; only their capabilities are in doubt."³

INSCOM

He served under Major General Albert Stubblebine at INSCOM during the Center Lane years. The project manager's record of a meeting with Stubblebine on November 30, 1983, notes "an update on the RAPT training" and that the general "confirmed his decision to hold a 'bonding' ceremony and that it would be lead by LTC Alexander." At a meeting on January 6, 1984, the "recent LTC Alexander problem concerning the debriefing of Russell Targ" was raised: "The CG stated that he was unaware that there was a problem as he had not instructed LTC Alexander to debrief Targ because Alexander was not a trained intelligence officer. The CG stated that he would get with Alexander and resolve the issue."⁴

Advanced Theoretical Physics Group, 1985

After INSCOM, Alexander wrote in 2011, he was assigned to the Army Materiel Command, as "the only military officer working in an office comprised of senior civilians that managed the Army's technology base," where in 1984 he was "abruptly given an assignment to take over a huge, but failing project called New Thrust" and met Ron Blackburn, a retired Air Force lieutenant colonel then at the Lockheed Aircraft Company Skunk Works in Burbank. With Blackburn he drew up an invitation list for a group that he named the Advanced Theoretical Physics project, meeting in the secure facility of the contractor BDM, where his former commander Stubblebine was a vice president. He wrote that he used the name "advanced theoretical physics" to "legally avoid answering any UFO FOIA requests," and that "as the person responsible for conducting the sessions, I never wrote any reports before or after meetings."⁵ A Department of Energy visit request of May 8, 1985 names the BDM McLean facility and the purpose, as typed, "Advance Theoretical Physics Conference (20-25 May 1985)," and a page of notes by Houck of May 21, 1985 states the group's objective as "Does the evidence support an R+D project?" Oke Shannon of Los Alamos listed Alexander as "AMC/USA" among the attendees of a later meeting.⁶ The attendee list appears on the page for the group.

Jacques Vallee recorded in 1989 that Hal Puthoff "confirmed John Alexander had gone very high to get [ATP] funded"; Puthoff said that Alexander "briefed the head of Norad, the head of the Space Command, the top guy at SDI," and that Alexander "was in charge of Directed Energy Weapon work for the Army, over a billion-dollar budget" when he was reassigned to Los Alamos and "lost his power base." Vallee wrote that he was "unconvinced." Vallee's journal for May 11, 1986 records his refusal "to become part of the outer skin of some shadowy organization whose chief's I don't trust."⁷

A press release and survey packet forwarded to the White House science adviser John H. Gibbons by C. B. Scott Jones of the Human Potential Foundation on June 13, 1994 reports "The Alexander UFO Religious Crisis Survey," conducted by Victoria Alexander of Santa Fe, New Mexico, and funded by the Bigelow Foundation of Las Vegas (see Robert Bigelow); a mailing to 1,000 clergy drew a response above 23 percent, with 77 percent disagreeing that proof of extraterrestrial life would cause a religious crisis. It includes a two-page "Commentary by John B. Alexander, Ph.D." that begins "The results of this survey are very important" and says the data are "counter to the widely held belief frequently posited by many in the UFO community predicting doom and destruction in the wake of verifiable contact," while listing caveats (the respondents were clergy, "approximately 77% did not" return the survey, n=230). Its acknowledgments thank "my fabulous husband, John B. Alexander."⁸

Afterward

He retired as a colonel in 1988, his last post the advanced systems concepts office of the Army Laboratory Command, and went to Los Alamos National Laboratory, where he worked on non-lethal weapons with Janet Morris of the U.S. Global Strategy Council, the body chaired by Ray Cline. His books include The Warrior's Edge (1990, with Richard Groller and Janet Morris), Future War (1999), and UFOs: Myths, Conspiracies, and Realities (2011).⁹

Richard J. Boylan listed Alexander as Penguin in a roster of the Aviary, describing him as an Army Intelligence and Security Command lieutenant colonel and director of the non-lethal weapons department at Los Alamos.¹⁰ Melinda Leslie told the authors of the Loose Threads Report that Colonel Charles Halt said in 2009 that Alexander "aggressively called" him soon after the December 1980 events near RAF Woodbridge and seemed to know "every detail," which made Halt "very concerned about John Alexander's role in ufology"; the Loose Threads authors write that Alexander has called Howard Blum's account of a Pentagon UFO working group "pure poppycock."¹¹ In the 2011 book, as quoted there, Alexander wrote of the premise of the group: "While many researchers, and even the general public, indicate they believe the U.S. Government is withholding critical information about UFOs; that is not a position in which I concur."⁵

In the Press, 1993 and 1997

The Santa Fe New Mexican of March 1, 1993 printed a story identifying Alexander as a Los Alamos National Laboratory researcher and describing non-lethal weapons as he presented them: infrasound generators that "could be tuned to incapacitate humans," anti-traction lubricants delivered by aircraft, a computer virus to disrupt enemy computers, and weapons to destroy the optical systems of tanks. The story quoted him that such weapons go after command, control and logistics ("If you can take that away, they can't fight"), that he considers them "humane" because they are designed to damage hardware rather than people, and, answering critics who said they could be lethal, that "nothing is 100 percent safe."¹²

The Deseret News reporter Zack Van Eyck, in a story reprinted in The Uintah Basin Standard of April 29, 1997, identified Alexander as the director for scientific liaison of the Las Vegas-based National Institute for Discovery Science and as a former director of nonlethal weapons testing at Los Alamos. Alexander was quoted on the institute's observation post on the ranch of Terry and Gwen Sherman near Randlett, Utah, which Robert Bigelow had bought in September 1996: "There have been some minor observations, but nothing you would stand behind," and "It's like a watched pot." He said any findings would be posted on the institute's web page.¹³