IN 1975, nine-year-old Clifford Sullivan saw a UFO while hunting in Montana with his dad. His father, conspiring to disprove the child's account, insisted his son was "telling stories."

Coincidentally, starting with the year of Sullivan's birth in 1966, and throughout the next 10 years, Montana residents reported more UFO sightings than at any time in the state's history. This includes several Defense Department reports of sightings at extremely sensitive nuclear missile silos and atomic bomb storage units near the Malmstrom air force base.

One quarter of a century later, Clifford "Spooky Mulder" Sullivan still hasn't shaken the conspiracy bug. Sullivan jokes, "I guess I was born with it. My folks tried to have it amputated, but it didn't work. It just grew. They think I'm a nutbar." Sullivan makes good use of this talent, still telling stories each Wednesday evening at his Conspiracy Night, at Billy Ray's Dive on MLK, where he bartends.

To date, there hasn't been an "average" Conspiracy Night, and the attendance is oft times hit or miss. Some nights have been populated only by a few accidental souls, while other times the place is butt to butt, tit to tit. As the ringleader of this cosmic circus, Sullivan shows videos, rants, lectures, and entertains, but he also encourages candor and questions from Conspiracy Night's enthusiasts.

While Sullivan's topics tend to orbit a handful of subjects--UFOs, invisibility, government conspiracies, mind control, time travel, and the strange disappearance of Connie Chung (more on that later)-- he is more than willing to take on new themes. Should a cryptozoologist show up wanting to discuss Bigfoot, the Loch Ness monster, or chupacabras, they'll find a home here as well.

"Knowledge is power, baby," he decrees to his audience, "arm yourself."

Coming from a pencil-necked geek, the phrase would be laughable, but Sullivan's got a boxer's build, chiseled features, and he stands well over six feet tall. It's obvious he's spent hundreds of hours researching his subject matter. He's confident, sure of his facts, and that alone puts doubters on edge, and lends credence to believers.

While Sullivan's delivery may be blunt and commanding, he remains a charming host, giving equal time to those who want to listen, and those who want to snicker. He'll often pause a video to elaborate upon certain subjects, pass around informational handouts, and sometimes he brings in guest lecturers.

Taking a proactive role in the weekly events, coming on like a prize fighter, Sullivan often circles through the attendees, providing insight and answering questions with a passion rivaling that of a Southern evangelist.

INVISIBILITY AND THE "POWERS THAT BE"

It is a bright fall day. I sit outside with Sullivan at one of Billy Ray's "beer-garden" picnic tables, and we talk over two grain-silo sized (22-ounce) brewskies. He'd just spent a full shift in the darkness, and like a newly released convict, Sullivan squints his eyes before beginning his disclosure.

"They [the extra-terrestrials] have given us everything from computer chips to Kevlar bullet-proof vests," Sullivan insists. "Night vision, lasers, all of it. It's all E.T., and it's all stuff recovered from the Roswell crash in 1947. President Truman signed a treaty with the Gray aliens...."

Suddenly, Sullivan stops in mid-sentence. "See, this is where people are going to think I'm a fucking nutbar. I don't want this to go off like I'm just a crackpot. Yeah, I mean, I have reason to believe that Truman signed a treaty with the Grays... the Saurians."

Of all his subjects, Sullivan's darlings are the infamous Philadelphia Experiment, and the Montauk Project, which, purportedly, were time travel/invisibility experiments that began in August of 1943.

The goals of the experiments were to make U.S. Naval ships invisible in order to defeat Hitler's navy. Instead, so the story goes, the test ship, USS Eldridge, did become invisible but when it re-materialized hours later, the crew members' bodies had become intermixed with the physical composition of the ship, killing some, and leaving others with their parts sticking out of bulkheads. Limbs were amputated, and most of the sailors were later found to be insane. Many believe alien technology was used to help the U.S. government conduct the experiments.

"When I first read about it, I was blown away," he says. "Invisibility! That struck me as amazing. These people were claiming that our government made a ship disappear! So, for the next four months, I did nothing but research the Philadelphia Experiment: books, newsletters, videos, on the internet. There's really an endless supply of information, depending on how hard you want to look. It's a huge, huge story.

"Quote me on this," Sullivan repeats. "Knowledge is power. Arm yourself."

"Against whom?" I ask.

"Against the powers that be. It's private industry. It's corporate America. It's people with a lot of money and a lot of power. It's not necessarily our 'government' per se, our elected government. Everyone's under the misunderstanding that our president and our congress run this country. That's horseshit. That hasn't been true since, probably, the 1930s.

"It's the powers that be," he stresses. "They influence our media--any form, whatever form they're using--they influence radio, television, they control what's on our airwaves. I'll bring up what happened to Connie Chung."

WHAT HAPPENED TO CONNIE CHUNG?

"We all know who Connie Chung is," Sullivan says, leaning in toward me. "Maury Povich's wife. One night on a call-in talk show, she made a comment. One of the callers asked, 'Who dictates what makes it onto the news?' and she... I think she meant to be facetious about the whole thing... she said, 'You've got to call Washington, and ask them what's okay to put on the air,' and they all laughed. The reports say, within two hours she lost her job. Her contract was torn up and she was blacklisted from Hollywood. Blacklisted from anyone. That's why, for some time, you didn't see her. She's only now reappearing.

"This is public information," Sullivan says emphatically. "No one saw Connie Chung for five fucking years. You can say she went on hiatus... bullshit. She made that comment, and the next day she was fired. Anytime a big name star goes on hiatus, or goes anywhere, there's an Entertainment Tonight four miles long.

"It wasn't precluded by anything, because what she said was the truth. Our government controls everything. To me, the biggest fallacy is that this is a free country. Yeah, this may be the most comfortable country to live in, I'll give you that, but it's hardly free. It hasn't been since the 1930s."

"I've got information," he says in hushed tones, "pages of mandates that our government can impose on anyone in this country in a matter of hours. They can shut down all transportation.... See I'm scared about this... I've been warned. I don't want to name names, but by people that have been in the military, people that have worked with very classified information.

"They tell me the way they were threatened when they left the military--and I can't repeat that. I have talked to people that have actually worked on aspects of the Montauk Project."

According to Sullivan, and other believers, the Montauk Project used specialized Cray computers to develop time travel and mind control technologies.

Sullivan continues, "All they did was validate everything I'm saying. My suspicions were confirmed in an instant when I heard from one individual that their father worked in the military in the 1970s on the Cray Computers. The Cray I and the Cray II. The Cray III was used in the Montauk Project."

ALIENS AMONG US

The New England Skeptical Society says of conspiracy theories: "Humans have an innate paranoia, this is the part of our brain which is on the lookout for potential threats. In proper amounts, this is a protective mechanism and it is easy to see how evolution selected for it."

According to Sullivan, the obfuscation of the existence of extra-terrestrial life is the biggest lie of the century. "There are, and there have been, aliens on this planet, living here, visiting here, for decades. It is ignorance and arrogance, to think that these frickin' [military] Jar-heads have any more capacity to absorb this phenomena than any average person does. It's arrogance. It pisses me off. I mean, how far would we be medically? How far would we be technologically, had this information been brought to light back in the day?

"But," he adds, "it's not just humans lying to us. This is where I lose a lot of people. The Illuminati, a good part of them, from my research, are aliens. There are so many different aliens. Everyone thinks of aliens, as being like the little Gray. When they hear the word alien, they think of the Gray they've seen on the X-Files. Millions, millions of different races. The majority of these aliens are thousands of years ahead of us technologically."

One of Sullivan's recent videos, shown during Conspiracy Night, described the Draconian alien that is said to be a foul-smelling lizard creature that dwells underground, takes in food through its skin (through osmosis), excretes via the same organ, and likes getting drunk on Drano. The Grays are said to enjoy a shot or two of aerosol deodorant.

"There are thousands of levels underground, military installations. There's an entire city under the Denver airport in Colorado! From what I've been able to ascertain, most of them [aliens] live underground. They don't interact with humans directly.

"There is so much information being kept from us, by the government," says Sullivan. "My greatest fear would come from the research of the Montauk Project, where they did extensive time travel."

THE PHILADELPHIA STORY

Among the suspected bizarre side-effects of Philadelphia/Montauk, Sullivan's research has led him to believe that a time warp field was responsible for the crash of TWA Flight 800 off the coast of New York.

"Flight 800, in 1996, July 17th. 230 passengers killed, and that was what happened from the Philadelphia Experiment. It's a hole that will always be in the space time continuum. There's no way to close it. It's impossible. It's huge. The reason that hole was torn so big and so wide, was for an alien invasion."

It's a difficult path to follow, but the Philadelphia Experiment eventually led to the Montauk Project. According to "experts," using what they learned from the Philadelphia Experiment, the National Security Agency developed technology that, basically, allowed them to shoot commands into the brains of its recruits, enabling them to manifest physical apparitions with their minds, such as a cold beer, or an evil monster. (More than once, a snide customer listening to Sullivan speak about this aspect, has remarked, "Hey Cliff! Manifest me another beer over here!")

This is where the Cray computer comes in. These were supposedly designed to help transmit the mind commands.

Sullivan explains that "The Montauk Project came to an end in 1983, thanks to Duncan Cameron [a recruit who has since written extensively about the Montauk Project]. He was esoterically trained by the NSA and released a beast--a monster, if you will--from his subconscious. It was meant to destroy the project, to close it down, because the scientists that were working on the project thought that the research had gone way too far. These guys were meddling in time; they could have gone back and altered the life of Christ. They were frightened, they were scared of the technology."

Cameron says his monster opened up a can of whoop-ass on the Montauk Project machinery and completely destroyed any hope of salvage. The monster's current whereabouts are unknown.

TIME AFTER TIME

"Time travel, if you want to get down to the nuts and bolts, was proven by Albert Einstein," says Sullivan. "Von Neuman, one of the greatest mathematicians, proved mathematically that yes, you can travel in time. There's a private company, ex-military guys, called the Time Travel Research Center, and it's incredible!"

I ask Sullivan about one report, of time traveler Mike Arklinski, who claimed to have gone back in time in a so-called Chronocraft, so he could hang out in a honky-tonk saloon.

Sullivan responds by saying, "I've read that. The gentleman you're talking about was not a scientist. He was a researcher, like myself, I guess. He was interested in the subject, and purchased a time travel machine, which you can still do to this day. He went to the past--1896, or something like that--to a saloon for a couple hours, and came back, and said that nothing Hollywood has ever put in a saloon scene is anything close to what it was really like."

Unlike Connie Chung, Arklinski is said to have disappeared in the late '80s, and hasn't been seen since. Anyone interested in looking for Arklinski can purchase a Chronocraft online. As far as what saloon he'll be in... who knows. Maybe he's quaffing stubbies with Cameron's monster somewhere in the Old West.

"I would feel compelled to bring back something," Sullivan admits. "Something to prove I was there. An artifact... anything! But, the thing is, time travel is not science fiction, it is science fact. It's been proven by some of the greatest minds in the history of this planet."

"The people from the Montauk Project who are coming forward with information, are the ones involved with time travel and mind control, but there were literally dozens of other projects directly related to the Philadelphia Project."

THE MAN WHO KNEW TOO MUCH

Sullivan looks like he could go on for hours. Even as my engorged bladder screams for mercy (after 44 ounces of beer), it is apparent that he's barely skimmed the surface of his conspiracy pool. Another interesting element, is the feeling that he doesn't seem to care whether I believe him or not. He doesn't even ask. I point to a list of questions I brought along--to the one that asks, "Are you a crackpot?"

He shrugs. "Anyone who thinks I'm a nut case, because I think too much, is not making the bar to begin with. Anybody that doesn't think enough, to me, is full of shit. There are a few people who are not afraid to get up and say what they think."

"I'm not really a threat to anyone. I think my ideals may be considered a threat to the powers that be. There are reports of one guy, who was taken back a million years, dropped off and left there. Who's going to give a frog's fat ass about what he has to say when he's a million years behind?"

For conspiracy buffs, it might be a good time to catch Spooky Mulder before he's sent into prehistoric exile.

"Come on down to Conspiracy Night, and see what it's all about," Sullivan says, pushing the glasses back up on his nose. "Everything I've said might just be a bunch of bullshit. But, if it isn't, it's worth at least listening to."

Not only that, after a few beers, it all seems to make sense.

Clifford "Spooky Mulder" Sullivan holds court every Wednesday at Billy Ray's Neighborhood Dive, 2216 NE MLK Jr. Blvd at 8 pm. Those looking to purchase, learn more, or build their own time machines, should travel to the following websites:

TIME TRAVEL RESEARCH CENTER: http://www.time-travel.com/

STEVEN L. GIBBS: http://home.inreach.com/dov/tt.htm