Delbert Newhouse and the Utah Movie

There are two things that have happened recently that impact this blog. First is a statement, again, by someone who should actually know better, that there is no evidence that UFOs are alien craft. He asks, demands really, just one example of a solid case for the UFO. Ignoring the fact that the debunkers have worked wonders in marginalizing UFO reports by throwing all sorts of ridiculous explanations for the sightings out there, some of which are contradictory, there are some very good cases that have multiple chains of evidence and some very good research attached to them. Any explanation, even if it doesn’t fit the facts will do, just so long as they can claim the sighting is explained in the mundane.

The second point is that, for some reason, there has been an on-going dialogue into the July 1952 UFO sighing near Tremonton, Utah. This is the tale of a Navy warrant officer who filmed a formation of bright objects over the tiny Utah town. The film was studied for months by a number of different organizations but in January 1953, the objects were identified as birds by the CIA sponsored Robertson Panel. (For a lengthy analysis of the motivations of the Robertson Panel see Alien Mysteries, Conspiracies and Cover-Ups, 155 - 174)

Here’s the thing about this movie. Almost everyone talks about what is shown on the film but few mention what the witnesses observed. In 1976, when I interviewed Delbert Newhouse, the Navy photographer, he told me that he and his wife, Norma, saw the objects at close range. He said they were large, disc-shaped things that were brightly lighted. By the time he got the car stopped, dug his camera out of the trunk and put film into it, the objects had moved off so that they looked like bright blobs of white on a bright blue background. It was then that he began filming the formation or cluster or mass, which was now much farther away.

Sure, you could say that in 1976 he had heard more than twenty years of comments about the film, had been interviewed repeatedly and his story certainly could have changed. Ed Ruppelt, the chief of Project Blue Book when the film was shot in his Report on Unidentified Flying Objects wrote:

After I got out of the Air Force I met Newhouse and talked to him for two hours [in 1954, I believe]. I’ve talked to many people who have reported UFOs, but few impressed me as much as Newhouse. I learned that when he and his family first saw the UFOs they were close to the car, much closer than when he took the movie. To use Newhouse’s own words, “If they had been the size of a B-29 they would have been at 10,000 feet altitude.” And the Navy man and his family had taken a good look at the objects – they looked like “two pie pans, one inverted on the top of the other!” He didn’t just think the UFO’s were disk-shaped; he knew that they were; he had plainly seen them. I asked him why he hadn’t told this to the intelligence officer who interrogated him. He said that he had. Then I remember that I’d sent the intelligence officer a list of questions I wanted Newhouse to answer. The question “What did the UFO’s look like?” wasn’t one of them because when you have a picture of something you don’t normally ask what it looks like. Why the intelligence officer didn’t pass this information along to us I’ll never know.

So, it’s clear from the beginning that Newhouse was telling those interested that he had seen the objects up close. He said, from the beginning, that the objects were disc shaped. I don’t think anyone, in those early days, thought to get statements from the wife and the kids. They had the “important” information from a naval officer and were satisfied with that. And even with that, the Air Force didn’t bother to complete the investigation, failing to ask basic questions or seemingly failed to ask them, and according to Ruppelt, didn’t bother to pass along some of the answers.

In the months that followed, the Air Force analyzed the film and when they finished, they had no solution. Ruppelt wrote about that, saying, “All they had to say was ‘We don’t know what they are but they aren’t airplanes or balloons, and we don’t think they are birds.’”

When the Air Force finished, the Navy took over, and they weren’t as restricted in their praise as the Air Force. The Navy experts made a frame by frame examination that took over a thousand man hours. The Navy concluded that the objects were internally lights spheres that were not reflecting sunlight. They also estimated the speed of the objects at 3,780 miles an hour which ruled out aircraft of the time and birds of any time. They had no explanation for what was seen on the film.

But, as I say, never let an independent analysis stand when you can throw cold water on it. Donald Menzel, the Harvard astronomer who never met a UFO sighting he liked and who wasn’t above providing explanations as quickly as he could regardless of the facts, claimed that it had been proven the film showed birds. Such was not the case, except to those with closed minds but Menzel made the claim anyway.

Dr. R. M. L. Baker made an independent study of the film in 1955. He agreed with the Air Force that the film didn’t show aircraft or balloons, and he didn’t think it was some sort of airborne debris or radar chaff either. In disagreement with Menzel, he found the bird explanation “unsatisfactory.”

Given what we know about the University of Colorado UFO study led by Edward U. Condon we could guess what they would conclude about this film. I won’t mention what we now know about the reasons for the study or the directions Condon and his team had been given by the Air Force (see the Hippler Letter March 21, 2007; June 5, 2013) but that certainly influenced their conclusions.

William Hartmann conducted the analysis for the Condon committee. He provided a quick history of the investigations and did mention that during Baker’s investigation Newhouse provided “…substantially the same account, with the additional information: ‘When he got out [of the car], he observed the objects (twelve to fourteen of them) to be directly overhead and milling about. He described them as ‘gun metal colored objects, shaped like two saucers, one inverted of top of the other.’…” (Which sort of reinforces the idea that Newhouse had not radically altered his tale over time.)

Hartmann then made his own analysis, finally concluding, “These observations give strong evidence that the Tremonton films do show birds… and I now regard the objects as so identified.”

But this comes only after Hartmann rejected the statements by Newhouse seeing the objects at close range. He wrote, “The strongest negative argument was stated later by the witness that the objects were seen to subtend an angle of about 0.5 degrees and were then seen as gun metal colored and shaped like two saucers held together rim to rim, but the photographs and circumstances indicate that this observation could not have been meaningful.”

Or, in other words, the statements of Newhouse were unimportant and I suspect the reason being that if they were accepted, then the bird explanation was eliminated. Birds are not shaped like two saucers held together rim to rim.

To add to all this, Baker, in 1969, at a symposium sponsored by the American Association for the Advancement of Science said that while Hartmann’s analysis might be appealing “[The] motion [of the objects] is not what one would expect from a flock of soaring birds; there are erratic brightness fluctuations, but there is no indication of periodic decreases in brightness due to turning with the wind or flapping. No cumulus clouds are shown on the film that might betray the presence of thermal updraft… The motion pictures I have taken of birds at various distances have no similarity to the Utah film.”

Here’s where we are. This is a case of multiple chains of evidence. First is the eyewitness testimony that has been virtually ignored. It is clear from what Ruppelt and others say that some parts of the Project Blue Book file on the case have disappeared. But that doesn’t change the fact that Newhouse and his wife saw the UFOs and what they had to say about it is an important part of the report. Hartmann rejected it almost out of hand.

The second chain of evidence, which is independent of the first, is the film. It provides something that can be taken into the lab and analyzed in various ways. It seems to me that those without a bias (or in the case of the Air Force who leaned toward finding any explanation which now suggests they were arguing against their own interest) couldn’t positively identify the objects. Those who know that there is no alien visitation however, found what they believed to be the solution. The film showed birds.

Here’s the point, finally. Those who know that there is no alien visitation claim that there is no evidence to the contrary. I say the Tremonton, Utah film is evidence of something unusual flying through the atmosphere and if evaluated from a neutral position is not explained by birds. I will freely concede that eliminating the accepted explanation does not lead directly to the extraterrestrial; I will also note that we do have some evidence of an unusual event. I will further note that if Newhouse’s description is accurate then there is no terrestrial explanation for the sighting. Give it an unbiased reading, look at everything through a neutral prism, and you have something that suggests there could be alien visitation. It is, therefore, some of the evidence that many claim does not exist

The USS New York - Update

Back on July 30, I posted a column dealing with an alleged radar sighting aboard the USS New York. The claim was that the ship had fired on a UFO. The story appeared in a magazine back in 1945, and it was suggested that the solution was Venus. Someone had seen Venus in the daytime, thought it was some sort of a Japanese attack and they opened fire. The ship’s navigator rushed up on deck and made the identification. To me, that ended the story. At best it was an IFO.

But as happens in the world of the UFO someone just didn’t like that solution and without much in the way of information started an argument. I said at the time I would look into it and have attempted to find out more. The National Archives responded with a request for money and suggested it would take three months to get what I needed. I hadn’t counted on the government shut down (what a boondoggle that was, but I digress), but I now have the information based on the deck logs of the ship.

These logs were reviewed from January 1, 1945 through April 30, 1945 and there was nothing to suggest any sort of UFO related event in that time frame. (And so that I don’t have to explain this further, I used the generic UFO as opposed to the more specific Foo Fighter which would be period appropriate.)

Here’s what I know. The USS New York was in dry dock from March 1 to March 19 and left Seeadler Harbor, Manus Island and arrived at Ulithi Harbor on March 22. During the remainder of the month, the ship was moved to Okinawa. The only entries that relate to firing the guns was target practice which happened sometime each month, meaning there was no regular schedule for it. There were notations for warfare engagements at Okinawa in March.

There were no entries referencing any unknown objects or Venus or anything that could have been taken as such. In other words, there is no corroboration for this tale from the official documentation available and even a loose interpretation of what has been written does not allow for this.

This, I believe, should resolve this. We have tales told by sailors which were reported in magazines, but there is nothing from the ship to support this. I suppose someone will say that the captain, embarrassed by his attack on Venus, left it out of the deck logs. But we were searching for anything that would match the facts and could find nothing. The logs should have provided a hint, had there been one. There was nothing.

The ball now resides with those who believe this to be a Foo Fighter or some sort of anomaly. They need to provide some new and better documentation. Unless that happens, I believe the case to be resolved.

Project Moon Dust Revisited

As I worked on a new book about the UFO secrets found in various government files, I was scanning one of the Project Blue Book microfilms, searching for a specific case. As the files slipped by I thought I saw the words “Moon Dust.” I stopped and reversed course much more slowly. On one of what they called the “project card” which was a short summary of the case, I did see the term Moon Dust.

I located several different project cards that contained “Moon Dust” references. In those few files, I found indications that there was coordination between Blue Book and Moon Dust, at least briefly. Several of the cases do reference Moon Dust though they seem to have conventional explanations, at least according to the information in the file.

The first of these cases came from Ramey Air Force Base (which was not named for Roger Ramey of Roswell fame), Puerto Rico on September 15, 1960. This file, which noted one of the addressees on the message as Moon Dust, said:

Round object with a tail, size reports vary from the size of a pea to half dollar, color reports vary from bluish-white to dusky red. Tail aprox [sic] 3-5 times the size of the object. No sound. Object reported to have broken up into several fireballs. One report stated that object finally fell into ocean.

It is possible that this object was a very slow meteor. However it is more probably a reentry of the 1960 Epsilon vehicle, parts of which reentered during Sep and Oct 1960. Epsilon had an inclination of 64 [degrees], therefore the heading would be about 26 degrees.

A series of sightings on September 21, 22, and 23, 1960, from Bermuda, were listed as “ATIC possible Mon [sic] Dust. The witnesses are identified only as civilians. The case said, “Reported sightings by local people of dull orange object on 21, 22, 23 Sep [sic] accompanied by weird [sic] whirring sound, in evening.”

The original message said that further investigation was being conducted but no follow up information had been received. There was insufficient data for any sort of scientific analysis and I suspect that if anything interesting was found, it would not have become part of Blue Book. I also suspect that if nothing more was found, no one bothered with a follow up report.

Another of these Moon Dust cases took place on September 23, 1960, at Bitburg AB, Germany. The source of the sighting was listed as “Moon Dust.” It said:

Luminous streak, like shooting star, colors red and yellow. Object left a trail. Object appeared very suddenly and was red in color, gradually changing to bright yellow. Appeared much larger than meteor… Path momentarily broken and when reappeared was red in color, no smoke but numerous sparks.

Description conforms to satellite reentry. As to direction, color and breaking up. 1960 Lambda II (rocket body) reentered this date. Case evaluated as satellite reentry based upon general description, although duration of sighting was omitted.

This seems to be a reasonable explanation, especially since there was documentation to back up the solution. A few days later, on September 26, 1960, northeast of Bermuda, an object that was yellowish-green and described as a “falling star or object” was seen.

A teletype in the Project Blue Book files, received on 26 Sep 60, said, “PD Moon Dust falling star or object sighted by GULL special at 0527Z 26 Sep.” There was no explanation or definition of Gull. It might have been the name of the mission or the name of the witness. It was in sight for one second.

A Moon Dust case, like these others, meaning with little information, came from Thule, Greenland. A teletype message said, “Bright comet like object presumably MOONDUST sighted at Thule AB Greenland… on 24 Sep 60. Estimated elevation less than ten degrees. Direction: Appeared from south east and disappeared into the west… Observed time 5 seconds.” It was written off as a possible meteor.

Finally in September, a sighting was made in Wethersfield, England. The teletype message said, “Flare-like appearance, light green to white in color. Travelling northwest to southeast.” It was noted that the “Information too limited for valid conclusion.”

These cases are of importance because of the connection to Moon Dust. It proves that Moon Dust had a UFO component but more interesting is the fact that after this point, that is late 1960, I have found no other references to Moon Dust in the Project Blue Book files. This doesn’t mean that someone else might not find such a connection, just that I didn’t find one. My mission, at the time of the discoveries was research on a book about the secrets in the government files, so my research took in a wide range of government organizations. Just think how vast that target is.

These were cases that I stumbled across as I worked on one chapter of the book, but of course, will be found in the chapter in which I deal with Moon Dust. I believe that research will add to our knowledge of that project, taking us beyond what has been reported in the past.

The Coyame UFO Crash

Noe Torres and Ruben Uriarte have become two of the most prolific writers of UFO lore and they had produced a new book, The Coyame Incident. This tells the tale of a UFO crash in northern Mexico in 1974, at first recovered by the Mexican Army

but later captured by American military forces. The crash was the result of a collision between a small, general aviation airplane that had taken off from El Paso, Texas, enroute to Mexico City, and a UFO that was tracked by radar into American airspace and then into Mexico.

The story was first reported by Len Stringfield in his UFO Crash/Retrievals: Search for Proof in a Hall of Mirrors, Status Report VII published in February 1994. His source was Elaine Douglass, a UFO researcher active with Operation Right to Know, who received her copy of the report from JS, who is never identified, and who was apparently a member of something called the “Deneb Team.” This document was entitled, Research Findings on the Chihuahua Disk Crash and was dated March 23, 1992.

Stringfield wasn’t too happy with the data and wrote, “Despite the risk of publishing a bunch of baloney, the full text of the report is reproduced herewith, hoping the incident can be verified or exposed as mis-or-disinformation.” The whole of that report as published by Stringfield follows:

 

 

 

 

 

 

Torres and Uriarte took up the challenge and began an investigation into this tale with the hope of adding to the information available. The result of that investigation is their book.

It is an interesting book that is a fast read. It is loaded with names and dates, but most of it is a description of their travels into Mexico and their attempts to find verification of the crash. From the photographs it is clear that both of them were in Mexico and on the field where a small aircraft did crash in 1974. They found bits of wreckage and evidence of a hot fire. That debris, along with soil samples, was analyzed by an independent laboratory and while not all elements could be identified, that does not lead to the conclusion that there was something alien in it.

They interviewed a man who was retired California police officer who told of seeing a small, strange creature when he visited his grandmother in the Coyame area in 1974 when he was 13. The creature he described was similar to that seen much later in Varginha, Brazil.

But the creature can’t be tied to the UFO crash simply because the officer said that when he told his grandmother about it, she said she had seen the same thing. Her sightings preceded the UFO crash and she had said nothing to the family about it earlier because she didn’t think they would believe her.

Ruben Uriarte and Noe Torres

And here is the problem with the book. It contains other, similar tales that might or might not be related to the UFO crash, if one did take place. The witnesses, interviewed so long after the event remember seeing something that might have fallen in 1974. They might have seen the plane crash. There might have been soldiers in the area.

The major problem is told in an email sent to me. Noe said, “The evidence is definitely thin, as we always say in our presentations. It's an amazing story but one that cries out for more data. We're approaching this continuing research effort with the assistance of our fellow investigators in Mexico.”

And that sums up everything about the book. The evidence is thin but it demands more data. This is the same thing that Stringfield said in 1994 when he first reported the case to a wider audience.

What we have here is an interesting account of an investigation into a reported UFO crash that has little in the way of evidence. That fact is underscored by the lack of information about the small plane crash. That one did crash in the area is not in dispute, but other than that, almost nothing is known about it including the name of the pilot.

Torres and Uriarte are to be commended for their attempt to learn more about this incident. They have added a little data to the report but the real importance of their book is the descriptions of their research. Here we see how they have approached the case, how they investigated it, and what they have found. If for no other reason, this is why the book should be in every UFO researcher’s library. There is something to be learned about research methods here.

Detroit Airport Clears Venus to Land

(Blogger’s Note: Brad Sparks recently published the following on a closed discussion list so I asked permission to make it available to a wider audience. Brad kindly gave his permission, but he asked that I publish a slightly updated version. The following was written and updated by Brad.)

 

Recently, my attention was called to a story in Allan Hendry's UFO Handbook of 1979, by a Euroskeptic who was properly cautious in bringing it up, saying "If cited correctly" by Hendry, then it might be instructive.  Purportedly, the Detroit, Mich., airport controllers had many times "cleared" the planet Venus to land at the airport

 

In the first of two statements by Hendry, the context is one nestled among numbered CUFOS UFO / IFO cases (details omitted as not relevant to the point, which is that they were numbered).  Yet the Venus story itself has no case number.  In fact, it doesn't even rise to the level of an actual story but is more of an aphorism or a quip.  

 

Hendry, p. 27:

 

Venus continued to attract attention as

a "UFO" throughout the period of my

study. The witness in case 519 [sighted etc.] .... 

In cases 890 and 896, the witnesses [sighted etc.]....  

My favorite comment, however, was provided

by the FAA at Detroit Metropolitan

Airport: "Do you know how

many times we've cleared Venus to land?"  [No case number]

 

Hendry p. 102:

 

I was once told by a

member of the FAA control at the Detroit

Metropolitan Airport, "Do you

know how many times we have cleared

Venus to land?"  [No case number]

 

I can answer the alleged anonymous airport official's misleading question:  ZERO.  Yes, that's right, the story is a complete and total fiction.  The planet Venus cannot radio for clearance to land -- I mean to even have to explain this is ridiculous, Venus is an inanimate object incapable of intelligent thought and communication, radio or otherwise.  

 

An aircraft that tries to land at a busy airport in a restricted airway without obtaining radio clearance first is either an emergency due to radio failure or disability of the pilot, or it is a potential hijacking or terrorist aircraft or some hostile attack activity.  It is an extremely serious matter, not to be laughed off as just "lights in the sky playing tricks."  The airport radar will have been checked by controllers to verify that an aircraft is coming in on a standard approach path and/or is a hazard to other flights.  Repeated efforts will have been made to establish radio contact.  When there is no response, swift emergency action will be taken.  

 

It would be in all the newspapers and the subject of official FAA or NTSB investigation and by similar agencies in other countries if it ever occurred there.  The AF would be alerted to scramble fighters to intercept unless it was clearly just a pilot in trouble and not suspicious or hostile action.  Having something like this happen at night is an especially dangerous situation.  We would know all about it.  Hendry would have been able to provide names, dates, places, the whole works -- if anything like it had actually ever happened.  

 

And why only Detroit airport anyway?  Doesn't Venus radio other airports for clearance to land??? What about Jupiter and Sirius, don't they radio too???

The more I thought about it the more I was struck by the absurdity of the story insinuating that Detroit Airport controllers had many times "cleared" the planet Venus to "land" at the airport.  This seems to be something of a debunker article of faith, a prooftext for the stupidity of even trained air traffic controllers.  Yet it is not even claimed to be a UFO sighting. 

 

We are supposed to believe that Venus just shines brightly in the sky one evening and that busy air traffic controllers then become mesmerized by the sight and actually go through their procedures to "clear" the planet for landing -- the specifics of those "clearance procedures" being conveniently hazy in this debunker thought-balloon.  It is a grossly embarrassing act of folly -- if it ever happened.  Therefore, this cautionary tale supposedly tells us that UFO cases at airports can just be similar stupidity and it instructs us on how stupid people can be if even air traffic controllers can make such mammoth mistakes of "misperception" (whatever that loaded term really means, which I contend is a nonsense term anyway, but that's another story for another day).  

 

But in reality it is an example of a debunker hoax.  Yes, debunkers, can and do perpetrate hoaxes, just like the Adamskis of the world.  But it is a category of event or fabricated non-event that is not recognized or studied or debated.  There seems to be the attitude that debunkers are just skeptics trying to defend "truth," so by very definition they don't engage in untruthful or fraudulent hoaxes, right?

 

When I read what Hendry wrote, though, I was bothered by a number of things besides the patent absurdity of the story, such as the fact it is not even an assertion of fact but a question, an unanswered question at that.  Was Hendry's source simply playing a rhetorical game?  Was it a joke inspired by the similarity of the words "plane" and "planet"?  No UFO report is attached to the story, as I said, nor any IFO report.  No date, no names of alleged witnesses, whether FAA controllers or not.  No "sighting details."  

 

It is clear to me that the story was calculated to produce shame, and the shame was intended to shut down all thought and critical faculties.  The shame has the effect of allowing misconceptions, stereotypes and prejudices to fill in the vacuum left by shutting down thought -- in this case to forget everything we ought to know about airport procedures, even from watching the movies or television.  Debunkers apparently expect that it will be too embarrassing for critics to ask questions because it only draws more attention to the uncomfortable (alleged) "fact" that air controllers cleared a planet, Venus, for landing many times.  Embarrassment and shame obviate the need to supply any documentation -- no one dares bring up the subject to ask.  We are supposed to accept the story without question and let it have its intended effect, in this case a very deceitful one. 

 

The Venus-cleared-to-land story is patently so false, so fraudulent, so outrageous, that it is amazing to me that it hasn't been exposed sooner.  The shaming effect evidently shuts down all thinking, stops all questioning.  

 

This raises many disturbing questions:  Who in the FAA at Detroit made up this obviously false story?  Why did Hendry not question the story or attempt to get documentation for at least one purported instance?  Why hasn't anyone questioned this fraudulent and outrageous debunker hoax before?  Here we are 34 years after Hendry's book was published so why hasn't anyone blown the whistle?  Hendry's book has been the darling of skeptics and debunkers, who supposedly epitomize "critical thinking" yet seem to have trouble critically thinking about their own "side" (a point that Jerry Clark has been making for years).  Maybe there is some obscure review somewhere that has called attention to this bogus story and maybe the many other huge errors of astronomy, statistics, math, logic, etc., in the same book. 

 

And by the way, the falsity of this story does not mean the opposite is true, that controllers never make mistakes, never mistake IFO's for UFO's, just that they never foolishly radio clearances to land to unidentified aircraft or objects in the sky.  And my position on ETH needs to be reiterated here lest I be misunderstood:  The falsity of this story does not prove that UFO's are alien spacecraft.  I do not accept or "believe in" ET or alien visitation, never have, but others are welcome to draw their own conclusions as to what the unexplained UFO phenomenon may represent.  I agree with most of Jacques Vallée’s 5 numbered arguments in his “Five Arguments Against the Extraterrestrial Origin of Unidentified Flying Objects,” JSE, 1990, vol. 4, no. 1, pp. 105-117, with corrections and modifications, and additional reasons of my own, again a discussion for another time. 

Alien Invasion?

I saw a “news” story asking the question, “Could Earth defend itself from an ET invasion?”

Overlooking the fact that there would be no realistic reason for the aliens to invade because everything they would want could be found elsewhere in the Solar System, except, of course for our “Earth-like” environment and the life found here, the answer to the question is, “NO!”

I remember one of the science fiction writers, I think Jerry Pournelle or Larry Niven, but it might have been Harlan Ellison, say, “All they would have to do is stand back and throw rocks at us.”

What that meant, simply, was that an alien race that wanted to invade could soften us up by dropping asteroids on us. Think of all the documentaries that have aired in the last ten years that tell us about “asteroid apocalypse.” An asteroid some 300 feet in diameter (or something about (100 meters) would do incredible damage. Move to something about a half mile, and continents disappear, the global climate would be shot for centuries, and billions would perish.

Go much larger than that and you have an extinction level event. Pushing asteroids around wouldn’t be all that difficult for a spacefaring race. And rather than pushing a dinosaur killer (yes, I know that the dinosaurs probably weren’t extinguished by an asteroid, but the term is great) into an orbit that would collide with Earth, they could push hundreds of smaller ones into that orbit. It could turn out to be carpet bombing the world with no danger to themselves.

The point is that given our current technology, we simply couldn’t reach out to touch them. If they are inside of the orbit of the moon, then we could shoot at them, but our chemical rockets would be moving slowly enough that they could intercept and destroy them regardless of how many we launched and right now there aren’t all that many when talking interstellar war.

Or, they could just move out of the way.

Or, throw rocks at the missiles.

So, if the aliens wished to invade, given our current technology, they would win. If they decided they needed to occupy Earth, they certainly could do that as well, but why expose themselves to our retaliation. Why not just sit there in orbit and dictate their terms to us? If we chose to fight back, throw another rock.

Strategically speaking, they have no motivation to engage in a fight especially one on the planet’s surface. Independence Day never dealt with that question. “V” in its various incarnations did, to a degree… the “visitors” wanted to engage in some sort of trade or communication with a hidden agenda. Damon Knight’s story, “To Serve Man,” (which also a Twilight Zone episode) dealt with the reason for a landing rather than an invasion. But, at least there was a reason for the contact.

But without any additional reason, they have no motivation to land or to invade. If we launched something into orbit to attack them, they could withdraw to the orbit of, say, Saturn, and it would take us years to get there. They could evade us simply. And then attack at their leisure.

In the end, the answer to the question is that he who controls the high ground wins the battle.  We can’t actually fight a battle in space, which means the aliens have the high ground. Or… as was learned in the Iraq war, Iraqi tanks could engage at one mile. The problem? The Abrams tanks could engage at two miles. In other words, they could stand out of range of the Iraqis and destroy their armor. Such is the situation we would face with the aliens in orbit. We couldn’t successfully engage and we would lose.

Death of a Dream

(Blogger’s Note: I published this with trepidation, simply because I have been warned that if I persist in the claim that I was not a participant in the slide investigation other confidential emails will be published to prove the point. I freely admit that it appears from those emails that I was involved but the reality is that I wasn’t even completely in the loop. But I will not be intimidated. I told the truth when I said that I had not seen the slides and that I did not participate in the investigation of them. So, even with this threat handing over my head, I post the following.)

 

Well, looks like this time it was I who screwed the pooch. I trusted a friend with information, which he is now outraged that I dumped on him, but that wasn’t his original reaction. The big regret here is that it is Tom Carey who gets caught in the crossfire which is not of his making.

Some two years ago, Tom approached me to do the “ultimate” Roswell book. I had already approached a publisher with a similar idea, but that publisher wasn’t interested in it, thinking that the market was saturated and besides, they liked their books to be about several cases rather than concentrating on one. That solved a dilemma for me.

We discussed the direction that we wanted to go and I think our opinions were a little different. I wanted to be sure the book was properly and completely resourced and Tom agreed, but he didn’t want the book to be written for skeptics. I thought we should follow the “what do we think, what do we know and what can we prove” adage.

Tom, gentleman that he is, didn’t want to leave Don out of it and although we hadn’t discussed it, told Don of the project. We all met sometime later and talked about what the project would need. I said that for it to work well, we would need to find something more than additional testimony. We would need some documentation, some kind of confirmation that went beyond additional testimony, but I had no idea what that would be.

As a side note, I did learn of a woman who claimed to have a diary written in 1947 that mentioned some of this. That was what we needed and I pursued that only to learn, in a conversation with Tom, that he’d actually been to the woman’s home in New Mexico and the diary, if it existed, was buried in an out building that was filled with snakes and scorpions, two of my favorite things.

Finding myself having completed my contractually obligated book, I thought that I would begin to put together the information for part of the investigation, which was an analysis of MJ-12. I don’t know how we could do anything unless we looked deeply into this controversy. It ran more than fifty pages and had 175 footnotes.

I also completed a long piece on Project Mogul in which I actually found a few things that had not been discussed before, most of them coming from the Air Force report on Roswell. I think the Air Force just threw in all this material without looking at it. Some good stuff is hidden in there. Like the MJ-12 report about Mogul was long and heavily footnoted.

Several of us were continuing to interview witnesses, or to be technically correct so that I’m not accused of lying again, men who were stationed in Roswell in July 1947. These were men who had not been located before and who had not come forward. The results were mixed with some not knowing anything and others adding to the body of testimony. At this point, as can be imagined, all were in their eighties.

We were chugging along, finding some new witnesses, developing some new information and I thought, looking for that sizzle that would bring this all home. One thing that must be said is that we were scattered all over the United States and into Canada. We communicated through email and telephone and just a few times in person. That made coordination a little difficult, but not impossible.

Then, earlier this year, Rich Reynolds published his piece about slides that had been found showing alien bodies, or I suppose, more accurately, a strange creature that might be a deformed human. Nick Redfern was the source of the information, which I had never heard until I read it on Rich’s blog. I sent Nick an email and he said I should call, which I did.

On February 10, 2013, I sent an email to the team, which must have struck most of them as odd, because it demonstrated my total lack of knowledge on the subject. I said:

I have no idea if any of you have been watching the nonsense over at Rich Reynolds’ UFO Iconoclasts blog. He is suggesting that he now has inside information of the Roswell events, which he will release in the near future… However, I noted today that he is suggesting that we all have entered into some sort of legal entanglement to cement our legacy and that we are prevented from disclosing what we know. I have entered no such agreement with anyone and have no inside knowledge that I have hidden from the group. If any one of you have done so (and no I don't think you have) it would not be legally binding on the rest of us. …. I don't know the purpose… Therefore, my advice is to ignore him completely (Ahh, had I just taken my own advise).

 

In response I learned some of the details of the slides and given the situation, pursued it no further. It was under control by members of the team and by inserting myself into the investigation, I could screw it up. The owner of the slides seemed to be a little “gun shy.”

And that is the extent of my investigation. I talked to Nick, learned a little more about what had been written, and then received an email advising me that the situation was being handled. There was nothing more for me to do about it.

Periodically, Rich would publish a little more, but he didn’t add details and seemed to be averse to saying anything that might screw up the investigation. It was just a periodic mention of this, most of which were observed.

In August I agreed to do the podcast with Paul Kimball. By then I had heard little more about this. It was not my investigation and there simply was nothing that I could do to further it. My intervention might have screwed things up, and while I thought of this as a rather unsophisticated “alien autopsy” I also thought the investigation should continue. I did mention to one of the team members that I believed the slides to be a hoax.

After that podcast, I noticed that Kimball was being criticized for not asking me about the slides. As I have said, I would not have answered the questions because I didn’t believe the information belonged to me. It belonged to those who had conducted the investigation and who were working with the witnesses. In fact, I didn’t know that the nether regions of the creature or body had been covered until Nick Redfern mentioned in it his latest posting about this a couple of days ago.

I thought the criticism was unfair, so I sent Paul an email explaining the situation to him. I thought he could be trusted to keep the information private. In fact, on August 29, he wrote, “Thanks for sharing it with me, and of course I will keep it in confidence.” I will note here that his assurance lasted nearly a month.

In what I should have paid attention to, he also wrote, “Personally, I would reveal the whole story publicly and force a clearing out of the stables…”

And although I had learned about the slides from Nick and Rich, I felt that the information belonged to others who had originated the investigation. I was not comfortable in publishing anything for two reasons. One, it was proprietary and second, I was not confident that it was a real event, meaning that the slides had not been authenticated.

It was about the time of the podcast that I said that I didn’t think the slides were authentic, meaning that there were slides, but that the image was not of anything real. At that time I received, unsolicited, an email about an analysis of the slides, suggesting that some analysis had been accomplish back in March. It added something of a note of authenticity, so I mentioned all this to Paul. But then I realized that this was not an analysis of the slides, but a proposal of what sort of information was necessary to build a case for authenticity. I sent a second email reporting this, but note, I’m not participating in the investigation, I’m merely a recipient of the data. I hadn’t asked for it, I hadn’t interviewed anyone to get it and I hadn’t even been given access to the documents about it. I had not seen the slides in any form.

Then came Rich’s latest update on the slides. I received quite a number of emails about them, and replied to some of them. In a response that so outraged Paul, I said that I hadn’t seen the slides nor had I participated in the investigation. I knew about it but I hadn’t participated.

So, in what I guess is the classical definition of situational ethics, Paul decided that if I lied about this, he was under no obligation to hold my communications with him in confidence. I don’t understand how this would nullify that agreement. Even if I had lied, he had agreed to hold the information in confidence.

Then, to prove his point, he threatened to publish more of our confidential communications. Now, I could prove that I had not participated in the investigation, but to do so would require me to violate a confidence or two in a way similar to that of Paul, but I won’t do it.

In fact, he also said that I would have to talk about the nun’s diary, but I thought that had all been covered earlier. The tale was told by Bill English to Don and then to me in Alamogordo. English was reported to be a former Special Forces officer and a Vietnam veteran. We, meaning Don and I, also talked to a woman in Roswell who was supposed to be a nun, or former nun, who had seen the diaries and remembered the entry. But it turns out that English wasn’t in the Special Forces, wasn’t an officer, and apparently wasn’t a Vietnam veteran. We’ve chased the diaries for two decades, and if they existed, I now believe them to be irretrievable lost. Since I had reported all this earlier, I’m not sure why it is an issue.

I did suggest to Paul that I had come to the conclusion that this re-investigation simply wasn’t working and that I was going to alert the team about this. I wanted to email Tom first because I thought he deserved a personal note from me. I probably wrote a half dozen versions and finally sent one. After more than ten days, I received an email from Tom in which I noted he was a little annoyed with me… but what the hell, I expected that. I just hoped that we could remain friends. Apparently all this was not fast enough for Paul and ironically, I received the reply from Tom only a couple of hours before anonymous posted his article that lead to all this unnecessary turmoil.

And the question that pops to mind is, “Just who in the hell is Paul Kimball to make these decisions?” He might not approve of some of the team members, but that isn’t really any of his business. I knew of the problems with some of them as this began. I overlooked them, but this too has outraged Paul and gets us back to the question of “Just who in the hell is Paul Kimball?”

To pile on, now he publishes an old letter of mine, written, what, nearly twenty years ago. This doesn’t need to be rehashed. What is the point, other than to attack someone he might not like? Apparently, he believes he needs to select my friends for me.

Here’s the point that some don’t seem to understand and is the real issue. I confided in Paul and he agreed to that. He kept the confidence for nearly a month. It takes no courage to violate an agreement and what I seem to be getting hammered for is not revealing all I knew immediately because some of it came in confidential agreements. I will again note that I know of no instances in which Tom or Don violated any agreements they had made.

I will note here that I was not allowed to withdraw gracefully from the project and I believe this has irreparably damaged my friendship with Tom Carey. This I deeply regret. And, that it has brought up an issue about Don Schmitt again, I regret. Say what you will, he is a charismatic man who has a deep knowledge of the field. We had worked around our differences, but Paul Kimball is outraged that he wasn’t chased away twenty years ago.

The real point here is that after two years, we have identified more men who remember endless drumbeat of Roswell information. I know from my own military experience that I will watch almost anything that has to do with the units I served with in Vietnam or Iraq… though I haven’t seen any of the Vietnam movies other than the laughable The Green Beret (which is not to say the Green Berets are laughable, just that silly John Wayne movie is.)

To my team members, I apologize for screwing this up. I tried to do what I thought of as right, but, of course, that didn’t work out. I tried to avoid this controversy but just underscored it. To Tom, I apologize for outing this whole thing by trusting someone I thought of as a friend and to Don I apologize for unnecessarily opening an old wound.

This is much longer than I planned, but it should be clear that all this came about because a confidence was violated. Regardless of the reason, that is the bottom line here.