An Innocent in Exile...

John Ford, a retired police officer, holds a Master's degree, 
and was a community pillar of the Doric variety!
A good man and true!

 

An Innocent in Exile

by Alfred Lehmberg

Our John Ford was not the famed filmmaker (with a UFO in his own right), though his name echoed one. Our John Ford was a busy archivist of the revealed anomalous and a Long Island investigator who had the audacity and the temerity to ask questions that our more “uptight” institutions refused to even entertain! See, in the early 1990s, Ford uncovered what he believed to be compelling evidence of extraterrestrial visitation in Suffolk County—radiation traces, eyewitness accounts, and the obligatory official silence. UFOs are beside the point.

Ford, a retired officer of the court, documented, cataloged, and broadcast his findings through his Long Island UFO Network, a modest but defiant node in the larger web of human interest and legitimate UFO disclosure, at the time. His investigations were... uncomfortable some... for the criminal political machine then alive and well in his home, Suffolk County.

Then came the implosion. John Ford was dropped into a virtual black hole from which there is no seeming escape and very little communication with the outside world. What happened?!

Recall that Ford was arrested in 1996 on charges so bizarre they read like a bad paranormal pulp novel: consider... a conspiracy to poison local officials with "radioactive toothpaste" because they were concealing UFOs. The evidence? A recorded phone call of dubious provenance and content, a small cache of uranium (legally purchased to test his Geiger counters used in investigation!), and a narrative stitched together by authorities who seemed a lot more interested in silencing Ford than prosecuting him. 

Declared mentally unfit to stand trial, conveniently, Ford was committed to the Mid-Hudson Psychiatric Center—where he remains to this day (if not there, in some other minimum security facility!), nearly three decades later.

No trial. No conviction. Just indefinite detention when guys like him, more guilty by orders of magnitude, but of real crimes, walk every day! Due process was indulged to the full extent of the law... but not in a good way. Ford was accused, tried in the press, and quickly gulaged... The black hole loomed...

The Kafkaesque machinery of Ford’s fate grinds on and on. Periodically, he is evaluated. Periodically, he is deemed “not ready.” The institutions locking him away offer no roadmap to release, no reckoning with the possibility that Ford’s real "crime"… was epistemic courage. 

He challenged the orthodoxy. He refused to play the skeptic’s game. He documented what others dismissed. ...And for that, he was disappeared—not by shadowy men in black, but by the banality of bureaucratic political evil! 

Recall that this was an evil threatened with dire exposure in the lurid existential if Ford’s investigations were continued! All of this was proven out when that “evil” was later incarcerated for HIS crimes… if not consigned to Ford’s black hole!

Ford’s story is not just tragic—it’s emblematic. It reveals the soft tyranny of our growing institutional denial, the unethical way systems protect their own narratives by pathologizing dissent against them. His continued lockup is not about justice. It’s about containment. See, "They" owe him a LOT of money for the obvious injuries he has suffered... which are monstrous. Officialdom would be running out Ford's clock just to preclude that pecuniary juncture.

It remains, Ford is a living reminder, friends! He reminds that the uncomfortable truth, once glimpsed, cannot be unglimpsed. …And so he is kept out of sight, out of mind, and in a facility cruelly designed not for healing... but for forgetting. A black hole by any other name…

But we remember... we recall stuff...

We remember the year—1947—when Ford's truth might first have been revealed. We’d have that at our backs for four or five generations if we’d been braver! Where would we be?! 

We remember the Brookings Report, warning that UFO disclosure could unravel our whole civilization. We remember the War of the Worlds broadcast, weaponized as a cautionary tale, facilitating that ignorance. We remember an undeclared air war with ET in 1952 and "lurid duels of death"… ...And now we remember John Ford, the innocent archivist rotting in exile, whose only crime in 1996 was refusing to kneel before the altar of sanctioned ignorance.

Restore John Ford. Not just the man, but the myth. Let his story be told—not as a footnote, but as a fulcrum. ...Because if our culture cannot withstand the truth he tried to share, then perhaps it deserves to implode into its own black hole. …And from that rubble? We might build something better.

Something worthy.