-cont'd-
One theory had it that Casolaro's death had less to do with the Octopus than it did
with manufacturing fraud at Hughes Aircraft. Hughes Aircraft has a long history of exclusive
and secret deals with the US government for aerospace technologies, many almost certainly
involving Area 51. Casolaro had brushed up against this corruption in his pursuit of his
Octopus spook group. A contact he made the day before he died, Bill Turner, gave him
documentation of the fraud at Hughes. Turner noted that Casolaro added these papers to the
ever-present accordion file of current research. After they found Casolaro's body, Turner got
himself arrested on a bank robbery charge in order to remove himself from any further
involvement.
The joint venture between the Cabazon Indian tribe and Area 51's Wackenhut did
exist, at least between 1981 and 1983, and Michael Riconosciuto certainly was involved with
it at least in some capacity. A report from a task force of the sheriff's office of Riverside
County, California placed Riconosciuto at a weapons demonstration with Earl Brian ("of the
CIA") put on by the Cabazons and Wackenhut.
Riconosciuto also claimed that he had a tape documenting threats made against him by
another Justice Department official, but he had thrown it in a marsh near Puget Sound the
night he was arrested on trumped up methamphetamine charges. Casolaro spent many days
searching the Puget Sound bog to no avail, looking for the tape that ostensibly could verify
the claims of "Danger Man," Casolaro's nickname for Riconosciuto. The Puget Sound location
was significant because of its proximity to a famous early UFO event, the 1947 Maury Island
incident. That event--six flying saucers seen by harbor seamen that left behind slag debris--had
been witnessed, or hoaxed, by the business partner of Riconosciuto's father, a man named Fred
Lee Crisman. In the 1960s, Crisman was subpoenaed by New Orleans district attorney Jim
Garrison as part of his investigation of the Kennedy assassination. Some researchers claimed
that Crisman was one of the "railyard tramps" arrested near Dealy Plaza on November 22,
1963; others note that he possibly gave refuge on his Oregon ranch to a member of the
Minutemen, an early militia group investigated by the Warren Commission.
AUSSIE LINK
Little suggests that Casolaro knew of the Crisman connection, or of the significance
it might hold for what he already knew about Area 51 and the other secret airbase that held
his attention, Australia's Pine Gap. Pine Gap is the top secret American underground base
located near Alice Springs in the Northern Territory of the land down under, officially known
as the Joint Defense Space Research Facility. It was built in 1968 officially to share program
data with the Australians.
Renown intelligence defector Victor Marchetti, who served in the CIA director's office
from 1966 to 1969, now acknowledges that he co-authored the secret agreement between the
agency and the Australian Department of Defence on the establishment of the Pine Gap
station. Officially, it monitors spy satellites and intercepts and decodes broadcast
communications between foreign powers unfriendly to the US. One of Pine Gap's important
functions is to monitor geostationary satellites for wide ranging information on enemy
telemetry, radar emissions and telecommunications.
Opposition from the Australians to the base grew as its nature as an espionage facility
outside of Australian control became clear. In his 1987 book Crimes of Patriots, author
Jonathan Kwitny demonstrates that covert manipulation led to the early end in Australia of
the administration of Labor Party prime minister Gough Whitlam because of his opposition
to Pine Gap. Casolaro noted with aggravation Kwitny's inability to see the tentacles of the
Octopus in the affair. "It didn't take many people to design the apparatus that would insure
the renewal of the lease for the Pine Gap installation near Alice Springs, Australia," Casolaro
wrote. "After all, how could a democracy spit up a Prime Minister that could sack the security
of the Western Alliance?"
Indeed, Whitlam was rousted after his public complaints about intelligence agency
deceptions over the tragic US policy in East Timor, and the CIA's funding of Australia's right-
wing Country Party, as well as his opposition to Pine Gap. Whitlam was not driven from
office by an election, but was removed on a technicality by a governor-general he had
appointed, one who had strong ties to the CIA. No doubt the paranoia about this
destabilization of the Australian government by the US fueled rumors about the underground
Pine Gap base involving alien/government collaborations, rumors that Danny Casolaro knew
about that were very similar to what he was hearing about Area 51. Certainly the base's
potential for surveillance also triggered his interest as well. PROMIS had been used in tracking
Soviet submarines; might it also be used to track Soviet satellites? One report told of a
Moscow summit conference in 1972 during which an early Pine Gap satellite picked up
limousine radio-telephone conversations between Soviet missile designers, Andrei Gromyko
and Leonid Brezhnev that revealed a missile secretly being kept from SALT negotiations.
UFO DISINFO?
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 both Bill Lear, creator of
the Lear jet, and 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. 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 1991 classic, Behold
A Pale Horse, shared the title of the first draft proposal of Casolaro's manuscript that
eventually became titled The Octopus.
After Casolaro's death, Michael Riconosciuto made claims that Casolaro had learned
nothing more than what one of two intelligence factions wanted him to know in order to
embarrass the other faction. One faction was called Aquarius and had a leadership sub-group
called MJ-12, the name, of course, of the supposed secret group founded by Harry Truman in
the wake of the Roswell flying saucer crash. Riconosciuto even told one writer that he had
witnessed the autopsy of an alien body--this long before the famous alien autopsy film began
to circulate. Some have suggested that the tales of extraterrestrials that surround areas like Area
51 and Pine Gap serve as disinformation to deflect attention away from serious issues such as
gun-running and black project weapons development. Casolaro's own view, and the extent of
his knowledge and interest in this tributary from the Octopus research, and whatever he
learned that might have brought the truth closer to the surface of the murky waters in which
he swam, may have died with him.