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The Utah Office of the Governor provided records Thursday of a January email chain started by former Entrata CEO David Bateman. The initial email authored by Bateman contained a link to the website of conspiracy monger David Icke, as well as a plea to embrace an anti-Semitic vaccine conspiracy theory. Recipients of the email were some fifty-plus of Utah's leading tech CEOs, investors and other public figures, including the sitting governor, Spencer Cox, as reported by Forbes earlier this year. The records may be downloaded below. Bateman co-founded the Utah-based startup Entrata, a property management software company, valued in 2021 at over a billion dollars. By late afternoon Jan. 4, the day of the email, Entrata announced Bateman had been removed from the board, effective immediately. The email chain was obtained through the Government Records Access and Management Act (GRAMA), the Utah equivalent of the Freedom of Information Act. The request was submitted to the Office of the Governor in the course of a research collaboration undertaken between this writer and Expanding Frontiers Research Director Erica Lukes. The email obtained from Gov. Cox's office shows how Bateman began the message by stating his belief a sadistic effort to euthanize the American people was underway. He then provided a link to a video posted on the website of David Icke which asserted genocide is being conducted through vaccines. “I believe the Jews are behind this,” Bateman stated in the email, adding that systematic extermination of billions of people would lead to totalitarian rule. “Utah has got to stop the vaccination drive,” he added in closing. In addition to the governor, others in the email group included Matt Waldrip, a well-connected associate of Sen. Mitt Romney. While some requested in response to the message to be taken off the list, Waldrip quipped, “Please DO NOT remove me from future emails,” adding, “It's always informative to understand what the bowels of the human mind can create and helpful to know of the conspiratorial drivel being [propagated] around the state.” Ken Davis was similarly among email recipients who pushed back. Believed to be the former Vice President of Technology at Raytheon and a celebrated Utah entrepreneur, Davis replied he had seen no solid research on “the vaccine CAUSING deleterious effects.” “If you'd like to engage in a scientific conversation about what is going on, I'm happy to be a sounding board,” Davis continued. “But I will NOT participate in the wholesale slander of any group of people...” “I don't want any part of this,” Brock J. Blake, CEO of Lendio concisely replied. “Anti-Semitic, divisive, conspiratorial.” Lendio specializes in facilitating business loans. Other recipients included billionaire Utah Jazz owner and businessman Ryan Smith. Todd Pederson was also on the list, founder of Vivint, a smart home company that sold for more than $2 billion in 2012. Damien Patton was among the more than fifty email recipients. This is presumably the former CEO of Banjo, a Utah-based social media mining company that raised at least $121 million in funding. The corporation made headlines for its artificial intelligence social media alert system that provided real-time updates to law enforcement agencies, but Patton also made news in 2020 when his history was discovered of ties to the Ku Klux Klan, Nazi sympathizers and hate crimes. A contract valued at more than $20 million between Banjo and Utah was subsequently canceled and Patton resigned immediately from his position as CEO.

Official personnel records of Leo H. McCormick compiled during his civil service career were recently obtained from the National Archives and Records Administration. The material was provided in response to a 2021 FOIA request prompted by a 1949 FBI report obtained through the FOIA which referenced McCormick's records maintained at the National Archives (see p15). The records revealed further verification of McCormick's employment and affiliations with Counsel Services, a Baltimore-based public relations firm he co-founded, and the Economic Cooperation Administration, a government agency which acted as a CIA asset. During the mid-20th century, Counsel Services represented career intelligence officers and coordinated the incorporation of the National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomena, as documented in Wayward Sons: NICAP and the IC. Leo McCormick was born in Baltimore in 1908. Previously obtained FBI files indicate he submitted an application for employment to the Bureau in 1935 (see p30). FBI files also reflect extensive background checks conducted for McCormick's work with the U.S. government. McCormick's recently obtained personnel records establish he was employed in the Office of Emergency Management in the early 1940s. He was assigned to its Office of Price Administration in 1941, where he became the Director for the State of Maryland and would remain until 1946. His office employed Mary Vaughan King, who became a key figure with Counsel Services in 1947 and would prove instrumental in the early operation of NICAP in 1956. McCormick, Vaughan King, and L.G. Shreve co-founded Counsel Services in 1947. According to statements Vaughan King gave the FBI in 1949 (see pp23-24), McCormick sold his interest in Counsel Services to his fellow founders in 1948 to pursue what turned out to be an unsuccessful candidacy for a Democratic seat in Congress. McCormick was well-connected in the community, listing such figures as a Maryland governor and sitting judges as personal references. Page 180 of the above linked McCormick personnel file confirms that in October 1949 he was appointed as an Administrative Officer and a Project Manager at the Economic Cooperation Administration, or ECA. Page 178 indicates he remained employed with the ECA with no break in service until assigned to the Economic Stabilization Agency in late 1950. A May 1949 letter declassified in 2003 and obtained from the CIA establishes an ongoing relationship between the CIA and Economic Cooperation Administration in which the latter provided “current economic intelligence information” to the Agency. The letter sought to increase the security classification from SECRET to TOP SECRET of the information supplied to the CIA and was authored from then-DCI and future NICAP Chairman of the Board Roscoe Hillenkoetter to an ECA administrator. Archived newspaper clippings indicate Mary Vaughan King took leadership of Counsel Services, which was contracted by the Economic Cooperation Administration in 1949 and 1950 to undertake work in Europe and China. The firm's L.G. Shreve traveled to China with what were reportedly described by Vaughan King as men on special temporary assignment. The reader will note this took place, coincidentally or otherwise, during McCormick's service as an Administrative Officer and a Project Manager with the Economic Cooperation Administration. Mary Vaughan King and Counsel Services worked with a colorful cast of characters. They included, among others, career CIA officer Col. Ulius Amoss and his wife Mary Veronica "Ron" Grogan, who was also employed in the intelligence community; the enigmatic Nicholas de Rochefort, who went on to be the subject of a 1970s lawsuit, Stanley D. Bachrack v. CIA, William Colby, in which investigative journalist Bachrack tried unsuccessfully to obtain potentially responsive records on de Rochefort from the Agency; and Thomas D. O'Keefe, a State Department man who cited serving on the Selection Board for Foreign Service Officers among his previous employment assignments. Vaughan King and Counsel Services apparently also had a working relationship with initial NICAP frontman T. Townsend Brown prior to what would prove to be their collaboration on the UFO organization. The relationship was reportedly due to Brown's dabbling in anti-gravity technology and his 1950s efforts to secure Department of Defense funding for his pursuits (see Brown's 1971 letter to Stuart Nixon, pp22-24). In a contract undertaken with NICAP and Brown in 1956, Mary Vaughan King acted as Counsel Services president and described former State Department employee Thomas O'Keefe as a senior officer of the firm, designating him to retain NICAP consultants and regional directors (see p7). Vaughan King, O'Keefe, and Brown incorporated the UFO investigation organization in October 1956 (see p3). By January 1957, the group was on its third treasurer and Maj. Donald Keyhoe, who attended initial planning sessions with a small group including Brown, was appointed director. He would remain in the position for some 13 years and was credited with persuading former DCI Hillenkoetter to take the position as board chairman. Leo McCormick's 204-page personnel file comes to a close with his September 1952 resignation, for "personal reasons," from the Economic Stabilization Agency. He was reprimanded earlier that year for what his employer described in a May 1952 letter, shown in part below, as going to the office of a Mr. Vance during business hours and committing assault and battery on him. The details of the circumstances are not clear. The Economic Stabilization Agency was authorized through the actions of President Harry S. Truman in 1950. It was responsible for price ceilings and wage controls in response to the Korean War. Truman subsequently abolished the office in April 1953, a few months after McCormick resigned. The Economic Cooperation Administration, which employed McCormick and DCI Hillenkoetter tapped for intelligence, was established in 1948. It was succeeded in 1951 by the Mutual Security Agency, a predecessor to the United States Agency for International Development, or USAID.

The FBI provided a 1983 letter attributed to then-Director William H. Webster in a Sep. 29 response to a FOIA request for records pertaining to Samisdat, an entity identified by the Bureau as a source of Nazi propaganda. Samisdat was a publishing house in Canada which distributed “Nazi propaganda material, stickers, and emblems,” according to Webster's letter addressed to Senator Jeremiah Denton. The publishing house was owned by Ernst Zundel, an anti-Semite who the National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomena President Jack Acuff infamously sold access to the UFO org's mailing list in 1978. In July 2022 this writer obtained some 181 pages of previously declassified FBI records responsive to Ernst Zundel during a research and FOIA collaboration with Erica Lukes. The records, posted for download and viewing, describe a German artist residing in Montreal who “refers to negroes, Jews, and Communists, in one breath as the enemy of the White Race,” according to a 1965 letter quoted in a Justice Department memo. The letter further suggested Zundel “advocates concentration camps for these enemies.” The author of the letter is redacted. “He appears to be highly intellectual,” the document continued, “he speaks easily and well, and he is persuasive. For these reasons he is extremely dangerous. He has some sort of political movement underway in Montreal. If this man should contact gullible people who's values are completely twisted, he could become a real threat...” Nazi propaganda began arriving in the mailboxes of NICAP members in 1978 and it was surmised the president of the UFO org, Jack Acuff, sold mailing lists to Zundel. NICAP members were reportedly “barraged by Nazi propaganda, always bearing computer labels saying NICAP and bearing NICAP membership codes,” according to a UFO-themed publication. The trail led to “Christoff Freidrich,” a now-known alias of Ernst Zundel, who acknowledged ownership of Samisdat. Some defended Acuff's actions, or at least argued he did not know how the mailing list would be used by the purchaser, but others were less convinced, apparently including “Freidrich” himself. “Freidrich told [NICAP representative] Dr. McIntyre that he had bought the NICAP mailing lists from Acuff two times with Acuff's knowledge where they were going,” the publication reported (see pp1-2). Sen. Denton, the recipient of FBI Dir. Webster's 1983 letter, was a conservative Alabama Republican who formed the Senate Judiciary Subcommittee on Security and Terrorism. The Subcommittee sought to identify and uncover circumstances of what it alleged were Soviet and KGB infiltration of left-wing activist groups. The circumstances might offer further clues about a passage contained in a 1982 letter written from Jack Acuff to Arizona Republican Sen. Barry Goldwater, who joined the NICAP Board of Governors in 1978. This writer consulted Erica Lukes during research conducted to write the 2021 nonfiction book Wayward Sons: NICAP and the IC. Lukes facilitated interactions with various sources which led to exchanges with archivist Barry Greenwood. This resulted in Greenwood helpfully providing a digital archive of NICAP material. Among the material was the 1982 letter written from Acuff to Goldwater. Acuff explained in the letter, pictured below, he was leaving NICAP, widely considered nothing more than a shell of its former self by that point in time. A “P.S.” across the bottom of the letter asked Goldwater to have a staff member route an enclosed copy of what Acuff described as “my letter to the post office” to the proper Senate Committee. Acuff added he did not know the name of the chairman, thus the request for Goldwater to see the letter was delivered (see p21). Given the date and reference to a Senate Committee, it might be a reasonable suspicion Sen. Denton's Subcommittee inquired about Acuff's knowledge of Samisdat and related issues in a similar manner as Denton requested information from FBI Dir. Webster. We might further speculate how familiar Acuff and some of his NICAP colleagues may have become with various political and intelligence agency figures populating the Beltway. In the FBI Sep. 29 response for records on Samisdat, the Bureau advised additional potentially responsive records were transferred to the National Archives and Records Administration. Expanding Frontiers Research is in the process of obtaining the additional material.

Opinions come in a wide variety of flavors. Experience tells us this is the case, as well as a quick glance around social media and the podcast circuit. How does one even begin to sort out all the conflicting proclamations and identify reasonably accurate information? For starters, some of us feel it's important to recognize whether we're observing, by definition, a stated opinion or an assertion of fact. The former may be allowed much tolerance, up to a point of irresponsibly promoting what might be considered harmful beliefs which are easily proven false. Otherwise, someone is pretty much entitled to whatever opinions they choose. It might be questioned if an individual seems disproportionately concerned about leading others to agree with their chosen opinion, but they are nonetheless entitled to believe as they wish. An assertion of fact, however, is another matter. Suggestions of the reality of certain phenomena, occurrence of supposed events, accusations leveled against people, and similar circumstances carry burdens of proof. Many people and even organizations show no interest in meeting such burdens. They are often content to do no more than post on social media and casually chat about their unverified assertions. In contrast, some others are much more rigorous in their research activities. Standards of evidence are essential to the rigorous researcher and those who wish to separate the proverbial signal from noise. Science journalist and author Sarah Scoles aptly addressed the topic when asked to provide content for a 2021 blogpost at The UFO Trail, Discerning Truth. Scoles pointed out how sources and attribution are key parts of a functional reporting process. “[L]ook at how much the piece relies on the word of its sources (turns out, people can say pretty much anything they want!), versus harder, more verifiable evidence,” Scoles wrote. “For example, 'Aliens landed on the White House roof, according to a guy who says he saw it happen' versus 'four people who described the same thing independently' versus 'security footage and genetic analysis' versus 'a declassified document.'” A challenge when failing to remain actively aware of the standards as described by Scoles often arises due to the utter volume of subpar articles, misleading statements, and outright incorrect assertions. We are regularly (and effectively, it might be added) bombarded from a host of platforms with simply wrong information. Compounding the problem is the likelihood we tend to start believing that which we hear most often. It, therefore, takes ongoing conscious decisions to remain vigilant in separating fact from fiction through embracing quality standards of evidence. Otherwise, we are at high risk of succumbing to confirmation bias and unwittingly spreading false or, at best, yet to be verified notions and concepts. When it comes to making assertions as compared to casually stating opinions, “Show, don't tell” is a good rule to both adopt and note in the work of others. Or, as recently suggested to me, the phrase is known in Latin, Ostende, non dice. Jack Brewer

It's been an exciting few weeks since our plans for launching the organization began to come to fruition. After months of detailed discussion and years of informal collaborations, co-founders Erica Lukes and Jack Brewer, along with the support of Barry Greenwood, filed EFR as a nonprofit corporation with the State of Utah. Shortly thereafter, we sought and received nonprofit status under section 501(c)(3) of the Internal Revenue Code, effective August 17, 2022. So why did we do it? The short answer is to provide a platform for presenting original research; facilitating a supportive group for those who respect standards of evidence recognized by the professional research community; and maintaining and growing an archive of historic records. A bit more detailed answer follows. There is an abundantly clear need to provide the public with both reliable research as well as resources with which to conduct such research. This is evident in virtually every aspect of Western culture, including fringe topics such as UFOs and conspiracies that overlap with politics and extremist ideologies. The harm has been apparent in aspects of life ranging from public health safety to election integrity. EFR is confident it will make significant and positive contributions. Original research will be posted using sources that include documents obtained via the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) and records obtained through requests submitted to regional law enforcement and government agencies. Universally recognized standards of evidence will be respected in the pursuit of providing reliable reports on a wide range of subject matter, but EFR is much more than just a publicly supported news or research site. Our organization aims to additionally facilitate the sharing of research techniques, ideas, mentoring, and moral support. This will be accomplished through activities including conducting virtual events and organizing committees with a variety of goals and objectives. A network of competent and supportive research associates will be achieved and maintained. The research process will be as emphasized as the subject of inquiry. Another tier of our organization is archiving. EFR is currently storing special collections generously contributed by UFO investigators and their families, as well as a variety of materials of interest to researchers and the public at large. These collections will be preserved and maintained for public benefit. We are pleased to report we have already been contacted by individuals and journalists, asking about our intentions and funding sources. We find these to be more than reasonable lines of inquiry and we welcome more of same. Perhaps it will be helpful to explain we are currently operating out of pocket; we do not have a specific financial sponsor. The purpose of incorporating a nonprofit was multi-fold: seek crowdsource funding for research projects which require expenses such as FOIA fees, various types of equipment, occasional travel, and miscellaneous costs while offering tax deductible donations; qualify ourselves as a media organization per the FOIA as it relates to requests, resulting appeals, and potential lawsuits; seek grant funding exclusively offered to 501(c)(3) corporations; create a platform for our research, and other benefits we envision. Thank you again for your interest in Expanding Frontiers Research. We sincerely hope you find our work meaningful and worthy of your interest. We hope to impress you soon.