By KEN KORCZAK
Here is what I suggest you do first:
Zoom in on the book cover pictured at right until it fills your entire screen.
Next, put your nose up to your screen so that your whole vision is filled with the roiling nuclear blast that is engulfing that poor city in the near distance.
Now scream at the top of your lungs.
There.
That should give you the visceral feeling and urgency that Dr. Richard O’Connor seeks to impart in this book —
— and he doesn’t let up across 400 pages.
And why should he?
Indeed, one might well ask:
“Why aren’t more people running around with their hair on fire as is Dr. O’Connor?”
We’re a planet awash in thousands of gigantic thermonuclear bombs. About 3,750 of those planet-killing warheads are currently active. An additional 13,890 are on standby. Sure, that’s progress from the height of the Cold War. In 1986, there were an incredible 70,300 active nuclear weapons all primed to unleash Armageddon on our beautiful green little Planet Earth.
It hardly matters, though. The 3,750 ready to go right now is way more than enough to incinerate this globe, our only home, leaving behind perhaps only microbial life deep beneath the soil or on the bottom of the oceans. In writing UFOs, Nuclear Weapons and a New Age of Reason, Richard O’Connor endeavors to drive home three major themes:
1: Our world RIGHT NOW remains on the brink of an all-out nuclear war which, at any moment, is a lot closer than most people care to believe. The end of the Cold War did little to change anything.
2: The issue of nuclear weapons is inextricably and indelibly linked to the UFO phenomenon, and it is critically important for us to understand this connection.
3: The time to wake up and face both Issue 1 and Issue 2 is RIGHT NOW or they may not be a RIGHT NOW anymore sometime very soon.
Even though I have written more than 1,000 book reviews, this is one of those volumes I approached with trepidation. That’s because there is so much to unpack across these hundreds of pages. It’s a considerable challenge to do the work justice. Dr. O’Connor goes after his subject from myriad angles, including:
–> Revisiting classic UFO cases, including old film footage, photos, government reports/documents and famous cases in the media that have defied the skeptic and their so-called “rational” explanations for decades.
–> An extensive review of crop circles and what studies and interpretations of their patterns might be able to inform us about UFOs and nukes.
–> Accounts of his personal investigative efforts and his own intriguing attempts to make contact with “The Others.”
–> Wide-ranging discussion of government policy and how the U.S. military and the federal government has handled the issue since the 1940s. (Hint: They lie a lot).
–> The animal mutilation connection and potential meaning.
–> Alien abductions
–>The implications of the 911 terrorist attacks on the NYC World Trade Center.
–> Efforts at reverse engineering materials obtained from military UFO crash retrievals.
–> The connection of the UFO phenomenon to world religions down through millennia of history.
… and that’s not a complete list!
But aside from the UFO-related material, I emphasize Dr. O’Connor sense of urgency. He pleads for humanity to “wake up” and come to grips with the fact that our planet is bristling with deadly nuclear weapons and that this is not a problem that will simply go away on its own.
Above: Screenshot of Richard O’Connor M.D. in a recent conversation with Winnipeg’s Grant Cameron. SOURCE LINK
Dr. O’Connor makes frequent use of the phrase, “nuclear weapons strapped to our backs” or “I have a nuclear weapon strapped to my back.” It’s a powerful rhetorical tactic because it transfers to the reader a vivid sense of the frightening closeness of the problem. Think about it: There’s nowhere to run and nowhere to hide from nuclear weapons. Whether you are a nomad in the Gobi Desert, live in downtown Manhattan, the deepest village of the Amazon rainforest or a small town in the Midwest — it’s all the same.
If the nukes fly, all will die!
So, yes, as Dr. O’Connor warns, we all might as well have a clutch of TNT sticks strapped to our backs accompanied by a loudly ticking clock. In a genuine sense, we all carry it with us 24 hours a day. It’s a constant reminder that our deaths could easily happen at any moment.
FROM MEDICAL DOCTOR TO NUCLEAR ACTIVITY AND UFOLOGIST
So, what launched an anesthesiologist working in the fresh and lovely Rocky Mountain city of Helena into becoming a fiercely driven anti-nuclear weapons campaigner and an ardent student of the UFO phenomenon?
Young Richard O’Connor had little interest in UFOs as he grew up with a hard-scrabble family in the Oklahoma Panhandle — and then precious little time to sit around and read UFO books as he diligently worked his way up through the rigorous pursuit of earning an M.D. in the demanding field of anesthesiology.
But it just so happens that after he and his wife (also a doctor) accepted positions at St. Peter’s Hospital in Helena, fate would come calling in the form of a friend and colleague. One of the surgeons O’Connor worked alongside most frequently was none other than Jesse Marcel Jr.
Those of you who know your UFO history need no further explanation.
For the rest of you, the future doctor Jesse Marcel Jr. was 11 years old and living in Roswell, New Mexico, where his father, Lt. Colonel Jesse Marcel Sr., was stationed at Walker Air Force Base as an intelligence officer. Col. Marcel was among the first military personnel on the scene after a local rancher reported that some manner of unidentified crashed-landed debris was freshly strewn across the desert landscape.
This would turn out to be the famous case of the Roswell UFO crash.
Marcel Sr. collected samples of the debris but made the extraordinary decision to first take a detour to his home before returning to base. He wanted to show his young son the remnants of what Marcel Sr. believed to be a “genuine craft from another planet.” The memory of pouring over and handling the exotic material was seared into the mind of Jesse Jr. It proved to be a defining moment in his life.
At the same time, Marcel Jr. didn’t let his certain knowledge of the reality of UFOs deter him from pursuing a mainstream life that involved becoming an ENT surgeon and then a flight surgeon in the U.S National Guard. He served 13 months in the combat zones of the U.S.-Iraqi war. Anyway, Dr. O’Connor found out — perhaps via natural social osmosis — that his friend and medical colleague was thee Jesse Marcel–the one famous within ufology circles for having handled the scraps of a crashed UFO.
O’Connor delicately broached the subject to his friend Dr. Marcel one day. He was impressed by the matter-of-fact way that Dr. Marcel related the story of his Roswell experience.
It was told without sensationalism or obvious embellishment. His story was neither stridently expiated nor dismissive and qualifying of the facts as they were.
That conversation occurred in 1988. It became a seminal doorway for O’Connor to step through — an entryway leading to the fantastically weird psycho-social milieu of ufology.
To make a long story short, subsequent voluminous reading and research led Dr. O’Connor to become convinced, beyond a reasonable doubt, that the UFO phenomenon was real. Among the many facets of ufology that electrified him the most was the UFO-nukes connection.
Reading the works of folks like Robert Hastings and former nuclear missile site commander Robert Salas (and others) makes for an almost undeniable case that UFOs are not only highly interested in our nuclear weapons, but they also have the ability to switch them on and off at will.
Of course, one of the leading threads of thought today among the UFO research community is that the modern UFO era was triggered by the detonation of the first atomic bombs in the 1940s — and our subsequent use of them to kill hundreds of thousands of people in Japan on August 6 and 9, 1945.
Dr. O’Connor fleshes out the UFO-nuke connection and implications at great length — I’ll say no more and invite you to read the book so that you can discover his in-depth view on the subject for yourself.
ADDITIONAL NOTES:
–-> O’Connor takes us on a detour now and then to relate personal events of his life, one of which includes heartbreaking tragedy that remains unimaginably painful for him (and wrenching for us to read about) — but it contributes to our overall understanding of this author’s thesis and his motivation for writing this book.
–> The book is jammed-packed with suggestions for further reading, resources, links to videos and a wealth of other information that offers readers of all levels of UFO knowledge to bolster their understanding of the issue.
–> O’Connor established the Jesse A. Marcel Library (JAML) in Montana City. It’s a collection of UFO literature and documents but also serves as a meeting place for people who want to discuss the UFO issue and/or find a safe and non-judgmental place to talk about their personal encounters with UFOs or The Others. JAML is free and open to the public. Find its Facebook site here: JAML
–> O’Connor makes an impassioned call to action, especially his urging for all to look into an organization called ICAN — the International Campaign to Abolish Nuclear Weapons. ICAN was awarded the Nobel Prize in 2017.
The ICAN website is: icanw.org
NOTE: For more UFO book reviews, please see: KEN-ON-MEDIUM