An Interview with Ed Komarek, Jr..: A personal glimpse into Exopolitics, Operation Right To Know, and Russian Ufology

by Brent Raynes

Ed Komarek lives in Cairo, Georgia. Mr. Komarek believes that the solution to the UFO enigma is in a political approach to it, and that the intelligence community has side-tracked us with the scientific focus. In this interview you’ll find out why Mr. Komarek says this, and learn much, much more. Komarek maintains a blog at: http://exopolitics.blogspot.com/

He can also be reached by email at: edkomarek@yahoo.com

Ed Komarek: In my early twenties I went through a kind of existential crisis. I just realized that I didn’t know anything about the world and the world around me, and that everything that everybody had told me just didn’t sound right. I wanted to know what was really going on and what reality really was.

I started asking the basic questions. Where did I come from? Did I exist before birth? Do I exist after death? It was a very troubling and difficult period of transition.

Editor: Was there anything in particular that brought this out that was unusual, or was this just a normal point that a lot of us reach?

Ed Komarek: Well, I was a kind of argumentative, know-it-all youngster. I grew up in the scientific community amongst scientists who like to argue different sides of an argument, so I’d hear one side of an argument and like a Devil’s Advocate I’d argue the other side of the argument. I thought I had things pretty well figured out as a young man, and then all of a sudden, over a period of two or three years, I realized that I didn’t know anything.

I went up to Fairbanks, Alaska, when I was 17 years old. I settled in at the University of Alaska, and about the middle of winter, when it was like 60 below zero, some young friends and I used to go down to the bars down on main street and we’d drink and play pool, and I remember that somewhere about that time that while walking through side streets that I came upon this little store. This must have been in the winter of 1967, the first year that I was up there, and this was a New Age bookstore, up in the middle of nowhere. I remember opening up the door and smelling all of these perfumes and incenses, and stepping inside and seeing all of these books on metaphysics, UFOs, out-of-body travel, and I just felt very much at home. And I think that was where I had encountered the first UFO books that I had started reading, as well as other books on the paranormal and all of this sort of thing, and I think that that probably was the beginning of this existential crisis and realizing that there was something much more to the universe than I had been led to believe. So it really started shaking me up psychologically.

Editor: Okay, so up to that point you had this scientific mindset. What were you majoring in college?

Ed Komarek: I was just following in my parent’s footsteps. My parents were ecologists. There weren’t ecological courses then, so I was majoring in wildlife management, but then after two years I really wasn’t learning that much about wildlife management. The University was a small college so they had really generalized courses, so I ended up taking anatomy, statistics, and I had two years of French, and this existential crisis came up after three years of college (one year down here and two years up there). One summer I just decided that I couldn’t go any farther with it. I did some real soul searching and was trying to figure out who I was and what life was about.

I worked for fish and game in the summer time, but during the winters (I spent two winters up there) and then after that I started coming back down here for the winter time while I worked up there for the summers, and my friend up in Alaska had a little small cabin back in the woods, and this really starting impressing upon me the importance of living simply to be able to have the time to pursue other interests. So we had an old camper that we used to travel with all over the country back when I was a boy, the family did, and it wasn’t being used anymore so I moved it down by one of our farms. So I put this camper down there, and then a year or two later I built a small cabin, using lumber from an old pump house I tore down, so I ended up spending only about $500. cash. The cabin still stands, and in this cabin I had a fireplace that I had built myself too, and I’d sit in front of that fireplace, all winter long, and just read. Sometimes one book a day.

I had learned that from my father. Whenever he got into something he would always say that the first thing you need to do is read the literature. He said that there is no use in re-inventing the wheel. Just familiarize yourself with the literature. So that’s why I familiarized myself with the literature on UFOs, reincarnation, psychic phenomena—the whole broad range of things.

This was in the 1970s. It started in the early ‘70s and went through the seventies. I worked for the fish and game in Alaska for three summers and then I moved furniture for the teamsters union for two summers and then for most of the summers I worked on the Alaska pipeline. I learned in Alaska how to live very simply so that even now my overhead is only about $500. a month. I don’t live in the same place now, but on a piece of land not far from where I was born and raised. This cabin is a little more sophisticated, it has a loft, it has running water, a bath and everything else, but still I live very frugally so that my time is my own and I can live my own life. Whereas if my expenses were higher then I’d have to be basically a wage slave for some corporation or business and my time would be devoted to gathering those resources.

So I realized that the secret to figuring out what was going on and owning my own life was to live as frugally as possible and not use that many resources and that way I wouldn’t have to work that much.

Editor: Okay, so then you read all of this literature and then you decided obviously that you needed to get involved?

Ed Komarek: The next step then was that once I got an overall idea, and then I was starting to communicate (another thing I learned from my father) and the similarity of the early forming of the field of ecology, which is something that my parents were involved in and their friends, is very similar to some of the aspects of what we now think of as exopolitics. Ecology sort of derived from the natural sciences and the old collectors and taxonomists. Before you can study relationships about things you’ve got to identify everything and categorize it all. So you had the old collectors and the taxonomists. The taxonomists worked down in the basement and were not that in touch with nature, but the collectors were out in the field all of the time collecting and stuff, and so they started realizing not only who these creatures were but that they had relationships with each other and they affected each other, and the taxonomists couldn’t understand that. But the collectors could, so the ecologists evolved from a few collectors who started realizing that there were a lot of dynamics going on between all of these different creatures.

So you had this early development with this field of ecology out of these earlier fields, but most of the old taxonomists and even a lot of the collectors, couldn’t make the jump to ecology from the natural sciences. It’s the same problem, I think, that we’ve got in the UFO field that a lot of the old established ufologists have trouble making that jump into exopolitics, and exopolitics is evolving in a very similar way out of the old field of ufology. So I’ve learned a lot and gained a lot from my father because my father had a lot to do with the evolution of ecology. In particular, fire ecology. He was a well-known fire ecologist. Probably, the first real fire ecologist, which is one who studies fire and its relationship to the environment, because fire has a big impact on almost all ecological environments all over the world. Even in the Arctic you have burns. Unfortunately, back in the turn of the century, a lot of cities burned from wild fires and people in the cities got a real bad and emotional attitude about fire and thought that it was very destructive of everything. Not only in the city but destructive of nature, and government came down really hard on fire suppression and even tried to stop my dad from burning. My dad was being threatened with a jail term one time for burning the woods. My dad felt that the way to deal with all of this propaganda that came out on fire suppression was education. He felt that if he built up enough of a scientific base then the politics would dissolve from the truth. So they set up fire experiments, fire plots and all of this sort of thing, and that is eventually what happened. The truth eventually undermined the emotional political suppression that a lot of people had. My dad said that the reason that he succeeded was that a lot of his old foes died off. He lived longer. (laughs)

So again it’s the same way. We’ve got this transition going on in the UFO field into exopolitics and we’re dealing with something like fire. We’re dealing with the suppression of the truth. What happened with Smoky the Bear was that if you suppress fire then you build up an accumulation of fuel in the woods. Light fires that burn through the woods just cleanse the woods, especially where you’ve got pine forests. The pine needles are flammable. So light fires in the forest don’t even hurt the trees. They just clear out the underbrush and rejuvenate the forest. But once you start to suppress fire, you build up more and more debris, and then when an igniter, either a match or lightning or something sets that forest on fire, and the whole fire blows up into a catastrophic fire and your worst fears are realized.

And the same thing is happening in the UFO field with the suppression of the truth about extraterrestrial life. Eventually this accumulation of suppressed information is going to ignite and the whole thing is going to blow up and it’s going to blow up out of control and it’s going to be catastrophic, and then nature will eventually get back to its old rhythms again. Just like you have in nature the same thing will happen in human society. There could be severe disruptions that shouldn’t have happened but came from the suppression of the truth, like the suppression of fire. I’m seeing more and more parallels with growing up in the field of ecology and what’s going on in our field.

Editor: Could you define exopolitics?

Ed Komarek: Okay. Exopolitics, as far as I know, was first coined by Alfred Webre, who lives up in Canada. You can google him on the Internet. He has a webpage. He worked in the Carter Administration on an investigation into UFOs, back in the 1970s. So he coined the word and Dr. Michael Salla picked up on that and developed it even further. I think this was going on about a couple of years and I got out of the UFO scene after we finally dissolved Right To Know, and for several years I felt like I had gotten ahead of the crowd in my understanding and I had gotten about as far as I could in understanding what was going on in our field, and I had already pretty much come to the conclusion that we were dealing with a lot of different races of beings from who knows where, from all different kinds of places, and that they had different motivations and agendas. So it was a complex ecology out there in the universe that was much more complex than what we have on this planet, and we’re a part of that great complexity.

Editor: Right. Could you describe a little bit about when you were involved with Right To Know and how you went to Washington, and how you even went to Russia later on?

Ed Komarek: Okay, but let me just finish this a little bit. I had dropped out for several years and all of a sudden I started running into UFO cases that I wasn’t even looking for here in my local area. I thought well maybe I had better get on the Internet and see what is going on. Within a day or so I came across the term exopolitics and I realized that the thinking in the UFO community had started to get back to where I was when I left it. You know, we were dealing with a complex set of interrelationships between a lot of different races and so that got me back involved and you can kind of follow where I’ve been involved with my blog. I put a blog up and started writing, and for the last year and half or two years I’ve been pretty proficient and helped Dr. Salla build the Exopolitics Institute up.

Going back to the 1970s, I was following in my father’s footsteps. Once he read the literature and he was up on the literature and he had his own personal experiences, he reached out and contacted people all over the world and had a fire conference, and that eventually became an institute, that was called Timbers Research Inc., that carried on his work. So I saw the Exopolitics Institute sort of developing in a similar manner and I was the first person to actually publicize the idea of a exopolitics institute. Dr. Salla had already thought about it but he hadn’t brought it into the public domain. So it’s like my father started communicating early on and I started communicating to people I had read about. I remember I talked with Len Stringfield a number of times on crash retrievals. I had read his books and talked with him over the telephone quite a bit. He had told me some interesting things about personal experiences and stuff that maybe never got out in the public domain. I started going to UFO conferences and meeting people, and in my local area I realized that this UFO stuff was going on everywhere and underneath everybody’s noses.

So first I started looking at this scientifically and then I realized that politics was corrupting the scientific investigation because you’re dealing with a cover-up and then I realized that it was not only a scientific problem and a political problem, but it was an intelligence problem too. So I started studying up on intelligence techniques and reading books on the CIA, NSA, and intelligence gathering techniques, and I developed my own little intelligence gathering network in my local area by first writing a letter to the editor, getting in touch with local newspapers, and as I picked up some local sightings I would give that information to the local newspapers and then they would do a story and that would get me even more people. So at one time, when I was at the peak of my interest in what was going on locally, I was picking up one or two sightings a week, in a 50 mile area of where I lived. There was that much stuff going on.

So I started digging down in my own local area and not only did I get witnesses, but I started picking up retired military people who had had experiences in the military. Also I realized that these sightings would clump in certain areas and what it would be is that often times there might be a person having direct contact with the occupants, and then there would be kind of like auxiliary sightings by people in the surrounding area that would see the craft coming and going, from a distance or whatever, but sometimes at the heart of all of these sightings would be somebody having contact, and usually it was someone low on the socio-economic level so that even if he did talk about what was going on nobody would take him seriously. So I ran into several of those cases.

One in particular that I got to know over the years was a person who was dealing with the small human type. You can read about it on my blog. They were short humans, kind of barrel chested, and they were a small contingent and they had been investigating in this area since the 1800s, and they were allied with other groups that were operating here in more depth. This guy ran into them when they were taking water samples down at a creek, which I assume probably had something to do with environmental pollution and stuff in my local area. They were probably monitoring changes in the environment from man’s effects.

This guy had been fishing in the creek and apparently when their ship came in (this was in the middle of the night—it was midnight when he met them) and he was down along this creek with steep sides and this ship came in and apparently he didn’t show up on their scanners and he saw the lights so he got up and walked over, but kind of hid behind a tree and they had gotten out and they got water samples and they had started to go back to their ship and they made a mistake and apparently all of them were down there and nobody was in the ship monitoring what was going on and when they saw him come out from behind the tree wanting to meet them, and he wasn’t afraid of them. They got scared and started to run for the ramp, but he started to say “Don’t run. I just want to meet you.” They stopped, and it kind of caught them dumbfounded because they expected him to be scared to death of them, like most people were, and he had a conversation with them, and that’s how he met them and he got to know them, and he got to travel with them and whatever.

How I got into that situation was that a friend of mine who lives close by where this contact person was and she had been seeing the craft and I had come over with my camera to try and take a picture of something, and I had never had any sightings before this. This bright red light, with like a little purple in the center, started coming down from the northeast, descending, and as it slowed down, this bright red light with kind of purple (the red was so dark in the center it was almost like purple) as the craft slowed down this light got smaller and smaller and when it actually stopped hovering over the trees it was like one small light among other lights, like an airliner just sitting out there, like you’re looking at an airliner on edge with maybe portholes and navigational lights on it. Then it accelerated a little bit and stopped again, and as it accelerated the bright red light got a little bit brighter, and as it slowed down the red light got a little smaller, so I assume that had something to do with the propulsion or power system of the craft. The first time it hovered it kind of hovered over his trailer and then it moved further back over the creek and he took off across the field, and I didn’t know anything about his involvement with this, and this lady friend and I took off after him and we got down there and there were some weird sounds and really strange things going on. My lady friend who really wanted to meet them freaked and so I had to deal with her and then the guy came out laughing at us at the way she was reacting to the situation and he said they didn’t stay very long, that they took off because this whole situation kind of surprised them. It kind of caught them by surprise with me being there and us following him down to the creek. Then what happened was that night as I was coming home, late at night, from where I had that sighting, I had pulled in and was starting down my driveway and I saw two of these red lights cross over the corner of my property and I realized that they had followed me home to see where I lived and who I was.

That developed into a very significant case and interactions, with a lot of evidence. He took some pictures of me out in a field, where they were scanning me, and asked me if I was feeling anything, and I said “Not really. Maybe a little fuzzy feeling or whatever.” And then he showed me pictures that he had just taken with a cheap little camera of this light, of orange and red lights where they were kind of like circulating around me. Then another time he and this lady friend I was telling you about they shot a video of a craft sitting off in a field, had a little antenna on it and everything, and the beings said that I could see the video, but that after I saw it it had to be erased. So we erased it after I saw it. So there was a considerable amount of evidence to take this guy seriously, and apparently what had happened at that time was that the ET’s were preoccupied (the reason I was able to see all of this) and he said that one of the associate groups, that was like their friends, who were more of like a humanoid type, a little taller, about four feet with big eyes, had been captured and was being held underground and being interrogated and tortured in a cell that was protected from them being able to beam him in or out. And they were real upset about this and they were trying to figure out where he was and how to get to him and get him out and break him loose from the military. Eventually they did, but he said not after they had tortured him and gotten information out of him that could be dangerous to the ET’s, as to how their craft operated and that sort of thing.

That went on for years, and then also this friend had a father that was in the military and I was told about it and I went to interview him and first he said that he had to ask the Pentagon whether he could talk about any of this, which was a big mistake on his part because he contacted the Pentagon by computer and he didn’t hear anything for a couple of days and so I went on up there and interviewed him, and when the Pentagon found out that he had talked to me they came down on him real hard. Not only came down on him hard and took all of his papers and replaced them with other papers. Also a friend of his didn’t have anything to do with it and they burglarized his house and everything, and he said that he saw pictures of that Jimmy Doolittle had taken of different types of alien beings, some human and some more humanoid, some alive and some dead. And that was the first that I had heard of Jimmy Doolittle’s name of being involved in the UFO field, and then later I talked to John Lear and John Lear said that when he first got involved in the field that his mother, who was friends with the Doolittle’s, got concerned and called up Jimmy Doolittle and asked him about UFOs and asked if they were real, and Jimmy Doolittle said, “Yes, but I can’t talk about it.”

So this was new information that had never been available in the public domain and that I had never run across, so I had to take this guy pretty seriously. He claimed that he was part of a secret group of Air Force pilots that flew up to take camera photos in the 1950s, and I think that he was kind of like the Sergeant Secretary that handled the files and all of that kind of stuff. I’m not sure if he was a pilot or not. He said that by the end of the 1950s they had nine craft. This was very similar to what Olavo Fontes from Brazil, who was interrogated by two intelligence guys down in Brazil in the early to mid-1950s, who said the military at that time had approximately three or four. So you can see if this continued then the military probably has a lot of craft now.

I met other retired people. One of them was stationed near Roswell, up in a tower, on the night of that big thunderstorm in July 1947, and he saw the craft coming down from about 20 miles away.

I really began to feel about this time that the UFO community was being diverted by high level people in the UFO field to think of this as only a scientific problem and you couldn’t solve a political problem scientifically if your data was being manipulated and so I thought that somebody ought to make a statement and hold a demonstration. Mike Jamieson had written a little article about political activity in Bill Moore’s Focus magazine and I got a hold of Mike Jamieson and I told him, “I’m going to hold a demonstration, even if it’s just me, in Washington,” and Mike said, “Count me in,” and so that’s how we had the first demonstration. I think it was in 1991, in Washington, in front of the White House. The first demonstration brought in a lot of other interested people and so we had a really major demonstration that had massive media attention on CNN, CBS, FOX, and other networks, the following year. We were contacted first by AP about two weeks in advance by Harry Rosenbaum, but he twisted the information around to really distort our message. Like I told him that there were 20,000 pages of the government’s own documents that proved a UFO cover-up, and he turned it around to say that we were looking for 20,000 pages of the government’s own documents, and then we called him on that and I talked to his secretary, and then he went and used that same information in an article on the demonstration at which he was in a real huff running around. Later, I found out, that he was finally able to find one fruitcake lady and tried to discredit us, and I think it went out in the Washington Post and the New York Times, and all over the country, but a lot of newspapers all over the country dropped the last part. He went way out of his way to discredit us. Then later some of the Operation Right To Know people actually went up to the AP and talked to these folks and they didn’t think there was a problem, and so it shows that somebody, that we made so much noise, plus in 1993 I think it was, that at 3 o’clock in the morning Frank Drake with SETI had to come out and start trying to debunk us at 3 o’clock in the morning.

So the whole idea was to make a statement and also to try and get the media involved, even if we were going to be debunked. The thing was if we made enough smoke the people might begin to think that there was fire. And I really think that it worked because several years after that all of these shows started coming out like Sightings, so I really do think that we had an effect.

At first MUFON and some of the mainstream ufologists were interested in what we were doing and then we started running into resistance and into debunking efforts, both by Kal Korff and Dennis Stacy. Larry Bryant wrote a rebuttal but MUFON wouldn’t publish it, so we were running into resistance even within our own UFO organizations. It really started getting me suspicious about who was really running these organizations and why a lot of this information went into MUFON and CUFOS and went in at bottom and went up to the top but never seemed to get back down again, especially with more interesting and significant cases. Then I found out that Tom Deuley, who had worked with the NSA, was MUFON’s Corporate Secretary, so there were high level intelligence connections right at the top of MUFON and when you go back to CUFOS you had Dr. Hynek who was the Air Force’s big debunker. When the swamp gas thing came out he was made to look kind of stupid, so all of a sudden he switched and he became like a believer and created CUFOS for the scientific investigation of UFOs. Not the political investigation. You know, Keyhoe, when he got involved in politics with NICAP even earlier he got knocked out of the organization when he tried to get hearings in Congress. So I felt that Dr. Hynek very deliberately maneuvered the UFO community away from politics and into scientific investigations and then could use the UFO community as a civilian observation corp.

When I was like 5 years old I could go up to a tower with my mother who had volunteered to look for enemy airplanes after World War II. I began to feel that these major UFO organizations were kind of like a civilian observation corp, that we were gathering information at the grass roots, but that it was being passed up the chain of command into the intelligence community, so I started really realizing that we were part of an intelligence gathering operation for the intelligence community. I wasn’t very happy about it and I raised a lot of hell about it, upset people, and now I’ve kind of come around and I’ve been trying to work with high level people in the intelligence community on all of this, and I’m beginning to realize, and I’ve kind of gotten ahead of the pack again and gotten a lot of people upset at me in exopolitcs because some of my high level intelligence contacts that I have that I am interacting with and I really believe that even though there has been a cover up in the intelligence community and it has been a part of this, and it has been partly involved in attacks upon the public, it’s time to work together with the intelligence community to bring all of this out into the open and into the public domain. There’s a lot of people who are still resistant to that who want to see the intelligence community as an enemy, and I feel that we’ve got to get beyond that.

Editor: And the people who you’re in touch with in the intelligence community they want to cooperate?

Ed Komarek: What I’m beginning to realize the more I communicate with them is that all of this information is compartmentalized and so that even people who are high up in the intelligence community don’t have all of the information. They’ve got just bits and pieces of it.

Are you familiar with Masint?

Editor: No, I don’t think so.

Ed Komarek: Okay. The intelligence community was re-organized under the new director of intelligence into four departments. One department is signals intelligence, which is Signa, the other one is human intelligence, which would be the CIA, the other one would be image intelligence, that’s the NRO, and the fourth one is Measurement and Signatures Intelligence, which means that you detect something and you measure it’s signature, and everything has a signature, like a fox walks through the woods it’s footprints are a signature. Then you try to identify what it is. With this organization there’s an area of unconventional intelligence that involves a category of unconventional collection and this all goes back to a guy named Ron, and it’s believed that he was involved with the shutting down of a project that was involved with remote viewing, and I believe at the time he worked as a scientist with the CIA, but he got in trouble in the Clinton Administration apparently because he went before Congress and blew the whistle on technology transfers from China and these companies. So he kind of got in trouble in some of that with the Clinton Administration I think but his fortunes really got raised apparently in the Bush Administration. A friend of his named Dan Smith, who I got to know way back in the early 1990s when I was on the Internet a lot dealing with Jack Sarfatti and kind of working to bring Jack Sarfatti up to speed on UFOs, so I was kind of like pitch and carry man for him on the Internet for quite awhile, and I started putting a lot of people together and Dan thinks that I probably got him in touch with Jack. So I’ve known Jack over the Internet from years ago, and when I got back into exopolitics I got back in touch with Dan.

Editor: Right, Jack Sarfatti is like a physicist, right?

Ed Komarek: Yeah. He’s a physicist involved in the internet science projects and trying to develop how the propulsion systems of UFOs operate, making Star Trek real. You can go to his website. Just type in Sarfatti, and you should get his website, called the Star Drive website, and he’s got a lot of people in the physics community interested in all of this and he’s connected with a lot of people like Hal Puthoff of SRI.

My connections go all the way back to Bill Moore. In his Focus magazine was how Right To Know came to be from Mike Jamieson writing an article there.

Editor: I’ve got to find out about your trip to Russia. How that evolved and what that was like, because how many of us get there?

Ed Komarek: Okay. I believe that was around 1991 too, (1) and what was interesting is that I had that sighting, the only real sighting I had had, and after that sighting I think it was about like three weeks that we had the first demonstration. I thought that was kind of an interesting connection there.

I had developed these Russian contacts probably in the 1980s when I contacted you, because you had seen that picture from Hungary that I had sent one to MUFON and never heard anything about it either. But not only Hungary, I had developed some contacts in Russia. I started contacting this guy in Krasnodar and then I contact Yuri Stroganov in Yeisk, and I got to know Yuri quite a bit better than the guy in Krasnodar. I sent Uri books and materials and stuff, and they would send me back stuff like from Hungary, and it was like months to get stuff back, because this was before the internet.

So we set it up where I decided to do a lecture on UFOs, on the literature available in the United States and the rest of the world, because I knew by that time that the Russian people didn’t know about what was going on in the rest of the world, at that time, as far as UFOs were concerned, as well as a lot of other different things because the Berlin Wall hadn’t fallen yet. It was just before that happened.

Yuri met me in Moscow and we got on a train and we went to Yeisk, and I gave at least one lecture there, and he had translated the lecture into Russian, so as I was giving it in English it was being given in Russian. And I brought $500. worth of books, which was a small fortune in Russia because like my friend was only making like ten or twenty dollars a month, so I brought these books and had them all put out on tables so that they could see how much literature there was involved. There was a lot of military people and civilians. There were hundreds of people, and so I had a pretty good impact with that and I left all of that material with Yuri, which was just a goldmine to them because there was no way they could have access to this kind of material. I said, I’m going to give it to you and you can translate it and get it out to the Russian people, and that’s what Yuri started doing. Then I went to Krasnodar and I met my other contact there, and then Boris Shurinov, and he was closely connected with the KGB. Also when I was in Krasnodar I was staying with a communist party official and he got in trouble because he hadn’t notified the KGB that he had me there, and he had to pull a lot of favors to get himself out of trouble. So apparently Boris Shurinov got onto me and when I went back to Moscow Boris Shurinov picked me up and I stayed with him a night and he had, inside of his little apartment, just bookshelf after bookshelf with literature on UFOs from all over the world. He had just a really fine library, but it wasn’t accessible to the public, and he was closely connected with the KGB. He had had kind of a falling out with some folks and I think that he was kind of retired at that time.

Apparently I had really set some alarm bells going off with KGB and everybody over there, but I had already gotten back to the states. Yuri’s stuff was able to reach me, he could send me letters, but nothing I sent could get back to him. So I lost contact with him. I should be able to reach him on the internet. I did some internet searches, and I found a Yuri Stroganov who was a journalist over there, but I still haven’t been able to get in contact by the internet. So eventually Uri just quit writing because he couldn’t get anything back from me. So I lost contact with him, and I really would kind of like to reestablish and maybe go back over there again. Because Yuri was very involved and he had all kinds of crop circles in his area there. I stopped in a place in the Ukraine and I couldn’t get off because my visa wouldn’t let me get off, but I talked to this man who was the one who gave me the ice circle pictures that I sent on to MUFON and they put one on their front cover. So I was responsible I think for two front covers on MUFON Journal. One was the UFO demonstration and the other was the ice circle.

Editor: What was the ice circle?

Ed: It was a circle on the ice that was on a lake. I think that was the first time I had ever heard about an ice circle. I’ve seen other stuff since then, and you probably have too. I’ve sent quite a bit of stuff onto MUFON over the years, and some of it got out, but a lot of it just disappeared. Like those pictures of that alien that I think that boy had taken at the end of his bed, or something. I sent some pretty good stuff onto MUFON, and it just disappeared, and no telling where it went. (2)

Editor: I guess it’s in a folder in a file somewhere.

Ed Komarek: Yup. I believe in MUFON and these other organizations, and I think they’re good for people who are just coming into the field, but after you’ve been in there for awhile I really have problems with them, and it goes I think all the way back to Don Keyhoe, who I have a lot of respect for. Keyhoe was onto a lot of this and back in the ‘50s knew this was an intelligence problem. He knew it was more than a scientific problem. He knew that it was a political problem. He tried to get hearings in Congress or whatever, and he got kicked out because of it, and I think that basically the UFO community became infiltrated and manipulated early on.

Editor: Of course, that was what the Robertson Panel back in 1953 had suggested that they might try to control the groups. I think that there was mention of trying to use the information that they generated to help them to know what was going on.

Ed Komarek: Basically you’ve got a civilian observation corp in the 1940s, people with field glasses watching for incoming airplanes.

Editor: You mentioned Len Stringfield. Something he wrote in a book back in 1957 I think it was, he mentioned how back in the early 1950s that he was a part of a group of civilian observers who worked with the Air Force. If the Air Force had a report too these people would go out with binoculars and take a look.

Ed Komarek: Yeah, I think they figured it would be the thing, and I think that’s why Hynek built a civilian observation corp with CUFOS and instead of debunking UFOs, which he was starting to sound pretty silly, especially with the swamp gas thing, and then all of a sudden he had a complete change of heart and created CUFOS.

Editor: Of course, he did explain how the press had kind of misquoted him on the swamp gas thing, that he had said that some of it might have been swamp gas.

Ed Komarek: But he was obviously debunking for the Air Force.

Editor: But Coral Lorenzen did mention how she did meet with him a long time ago in the early days of her APRO organization and he was always kind of interested in what was going on and such, and I think it was the 1964 Socorro incident in New Mexico that got his attention.

Ed Komarek: I was reading this latest book by Richard Dolan, he said that Stringfield in the military, that he went way back, that he had a sighting in the 1940s.

Editor: Yeah. In 1945.

Ed Komarek: Over the Pacific Ocean.

Editor: Yes, I read that. It was in his 1957 book.

Ed Komarek: So I discussed this about Hynek with Stringfield, and Stringfield said that was interesting. Basically, I was coming down pretty hard on these guys, at that time, and I had kind of considered Hynek as being a mole who was passing information along from the UFO community to the intelligence community, and I brought this up with Stringfield, on the telephone, and he said that was interesting because he said that at one time Hynek, he was at a conference or something, and Hynek thought that he had some material from a crashed saucer, and apparently Stringfield didn’t, or it wasn’t what he thought it was, and Hynek told him later that he had a number of Air Force people there in the audience that were going to confiscate that material from him, if Stringfield brought up that piece of material, or whatever Hynek thought that he had. So that didn’t help my suspicions at all about Hynek.

What I saw him doing was cleverly diverting the UFO community away from political action, that Keyhoe had done, into scientific explanations, which would never achieve it’s end because the scientific data was being manipulated for political reasons because you’re dealing with a cover-up.

Editor: What I understand about Keyhoe is that he got kicked out of his own organization in the end.

Ed Komarek: Yeah, by the CIA folks there. I think after they got Keyhoe out the intelligence community very cleverly manipulated the UFO community to become an asset for them and not a liability. And the way to do that was to get the people to see this as a scientific problem when in fact it’s more than a scientific problem. It’s a political problem because you can’t solve a political problem scientifically, in my mind, except my father kind of did it with fire, in the long run, because the evidence mounted up that fire was an important part of the environment and that the political people were wrong.

References:

1. A brief report by Ed Komarek, Jr., then Georgia State Section Director for MUFON, entitled “Grass Roots UFOlogy in the U.S.S.R.,” appeared in the MUFON UFO Journal of August 1991 (#280). It stated that Mr. Romarek’s trip to Russia occurred from May 15th through June 13, 1991.

2. I did find a two page report entitled “Crop Circles Appear in the U.S.S.R.,” by Walt Andrus, showing a photograph of an alleged crop circle from Yeisk, Russia, provided by Ed Komarek, with credit given to Yuri Stroganov for pictures and details. MUFON UFO Journal, No. 270, October 1990.