Levelland and Electro-magnetic Effects

Here’s something I noticed as I was reviewing the sightings near Levelland, Texas on November 2, 1957. There were many reports that vehicle engines stalled, lights dimmed and radios filled with static at the close approach of the UFO. I’m not going to argue numbers here, or point fingers at the lack of substantive investigation, but comment only on one aspect of the case.

I will note first that the Condon Committee investigation at the University of Colorado, funded by the Air Force, attempted to learn something about these sightings. In an experiment, they could find no way to suppress the electrical energy of an engine that would allow it to restart when the suppression field, whatever it might have been, was removed. Dimmed lights might brighten and static filled radios might clear, but the engines would not restart automatically.

While I’m not sure that their experiments or conclusions were based on good science, I have noticed something in the reports. Here’s what one of the witnesses, Newell Wright, a 19-year-old college student, reported about his encounter with the UFO:

I was driving home from Lubbock on state highway 116 [the same highway that Saucedo was on] at approximately 12:00 p.m. when the ammeter on my car jumped to complete discharge, then it returned to normal and my motor started cutting out like it was out of gas. After it had quit running, my lights went out. I got out of my car and tried in vain to find the trouble…. It was at this time that I saw this object, I got back into my car and tried to start it, but to no avail. After that I did nothing but stare at this object until it disappeared about 5 minutes later. I then resumed trying to start my car and succeeded with no more trouble than under normal circumstances.

And just so I’m not accused of taking but a single example from these sightings and applying it to all of them, let me say that Jim Wheeler said that when the UFO took off, his lights came back on and he was able to start his car.

Ronald Martin, who also reported his car engine stalled and his lights dimmed, suggested that when the UFO left, the lights came on and his car engine started. But I’m not sure if that was something spontaneous or if he meant that he could now start it himself.

In other reports it does seem as if the cars started without any action by the witness once the UFO was gone. We have a discrepancy here. In some reports, the witness said that the engine would not start while the UFO was near but they were able to start it once the UFO was gone. That was what I found intriguing about Wright’s and Wheeler’s accounts. They reported they had to start their cars.

I wondered if the other witnesses, in the course of talking about it, might have been misunderstood, meaning they too started their cars… or if they had started them they hadn’t realized that they had.

I don’t know if this is a big deal or not. It was just something that I noticed that I hadn’t seen pointed out by anyone else. The electrical systems were suppressed, the lights and the radios worked fine when the UFO took off but the car needed to be started again, at least according to some. Different electrical systems and different ways of working. Maybe most of those who reported that the lights came on and the engine started meant that they were able to start it. Maybe some of them didn’t remember having to start it, only that it worked once the UFO was gone.

The solution here is simple. In future cases like this, the investigators should make sure that the engine started again without any action by the witness. Just a simple question to clarify the situation. That might give us an insight into this.

Eisenhower Briefing Document, MJ-12, and the Washington Alert

I am often stunned by the mental gymnastics of some to keep a cherished belief alive in the face of documented facts and reliable testimony. I am often surprised when something that I believe to be obvious from the evidence available is rejected for speculation that has no supporting proof. When the facts line up, when there is good evidence for a conclusion, when it all seems to be so obvious to me, I simply fail to understand how it is that others can’t see with the same clarity. And yes, I know there are those who believe Roswell to be a Mogul balloon will point at me and say the same things but this isn’t about Roswell or Mogul balloons (and besides, I can point at the Mogul explanation and say the same thing about that conclusion).

This is about the Eisenhower Briefing Document (EBD) and the fatal flaw that is contained in it. I am going to lay all the facts out at length because those other postings which contain the information are spread throughout this blog. I haven’t put it all together into a single document until now. There is a caveat, however. I am not going to review all the other problems with the EBD including a lack of provenance, the other factual errors, or the misspellings and incorrect security classifications. I am going to deal with the one paragraph that relates to another UFO crash that is a hoax and as such shouldn’t have been included in a briefing written for the incoming president. That entry said:

On 06 December, 1950, a second object, probably of similar origin, impacted the earth at high speed in the El Indio – Guerrero area of the Texas – Mexican boder [sic] after following a long trajectory through the atmosphere. By the time a search team arrived, what remained of the object had been almost totally incinerated. Such material as could be recovered was transported to the A.E.C. facility at Sandia, New Mexico, for study.

The first mention of this report of a crash in any sort of a public arena came from Robert Willingham, a pilot in the Civil Air Patrol (CAP), which is identified as an official auxiliary of the United States Air Force. To be clear, it is not a part of the Air Force, members of the CAP are not paid for their service, they do not earn retirement points, and they are not considered to be part of the Reserve Component of the United States military. They are civilians who wear modified uniforms and provide a valuable service in search and rescue operations. But understand, they are not part of the military.

Willingham, and several other CAP pilots, were interviewed in the late 1960s about their experiences with UFOs. This was done for a small “shopper” type of newspaper, and while I have been unable to find that specific article, I did find a summary of Willingham’s statements in MUFON’s Skylook, which was their newsletter/magazine in the 1960s. According to the March, 1968 issue:

Col. R. B. Willingham, CAP squadron commander, has had an avid interest in UFO’s for years, dating back to 1948 when he was leading a squadron of F-94 jets near the Mexican border in Texas and was advised by radio that three UFO’s “flying formation” were near. He picked them up on his plane radar and was informed one of the UFO’s had crashed a few miles away from him in Mexico. He went to the scene of the crash but was prevented by the Mexican authorities from making an investigation or coming any closer than 60 feet. From that vantage point the wreckage seemed to consist of “numerous pieces of metal polished on the outside, very rough on the inner sides.”

For those keeping score at home, please note that it clearly states that Willingham is in the CAP, that the date of the sighting is 1948, that he was flying an F-94, there were three UFOs instead of just one, that he saw them on his plane’s radar and was told that one had crashed in Mexico. I mention these things because this is the first time that Willingham told the story in public and it was written down in an article for those who wish to verify the accuracy of the statements… which is not to say that what he was saying was true, only that I have reported here exactly what was reported in 1968.

I did find another 1968 article about Willingham that is important to this discussion because it proves Willingham had a long interest in UFOs. I found, in the NICAP UFO Investigator for March 1968 on page one:

During the early morning hours of January 12, Colonel Robert Willingham, of the Civil Air Patrol, a member of the Subcommittee, was alerted by Chairman George Cook to a UFO seen by a police dispatcher near Camp Hill.

Col. Willingham sighted the orange-and-white glowing object at an altitude of not more than 150 feet, as it traveled toward North Mountain. The UFO appeared to be between 30 and 40 feet in diameter. The former jet pilot followed the object by car until it disappeared behind trees in the Mountain section.

In other words, NICAP was so unimpressed with the crash story, they didn’t even mention it. Instead, they published a Willingham UFO sighting that was rather mundane.  It was just an object in the sky, noting that Willingham was a colonel in the CAP but said nothing about any association with the Air Force Reserve. It also said that Willingham belonged to NICAP underscoring his interest in UFOs.

We all know that W. Todd Zechel tracked down Willingham and got a statement from him. Zechel made that point repeatedly, and there is no dispute that it is accurate. Zechel found Willingham and talked to him. In fact, Zechel was able to get Willingham to sign an affidavit about his experiences in 1977. That date does not seem to be in dispute.

That affidavit does little to enhance the credibility of the tale. It does allow us to make some comparisons, however. It said:

Down in Dyess Air Force Base in Texas, we were testing what turned out to be the F-94. They reported on the [radar] scope that they had an unidentified flying object at a high speed to intercept our course. It came visible to us and we wanted to take off after it. Headquarters wouldn’t let us go after it and it played around a little bit. We got to watching how it made 90 degree turns at this high speed and everything. We knew it wasn’t a missile of any type. So then we confirmed it with the radar control station on the DEW Line (NORAD) and they kept following it and they claimed that it crashed somewhere off between Texas and the Mexican border. We got a light aircraft, me and my co-pilot, and we went down to the site. We landed out in the pasture right across from the where it hit. We got over there. They told us to leave and everything else and then the armed guards came out and they started to form a line around the area. So, on the way back, I saw a little piece of metal so I picked it up and brought it back with me. There were two sand mounds that came down and it looked to me like this thing crashed right in between them. But it went into the ground, according to the way people were acting around it. But you could see for, oh I’d say, three to five hundred yards where it had went across the sand. It looked to me, I guess from the metal that we found, chunks of metal, that it either had a little explosion or it began to disintegrate. Something caused this metal to come apart.

It looked like it was something that was made because it was honeycombed. You know how you would make a metal that would cool faster. In a way it looked like magnesium steel but it had a lot of carbon in it. I tried to heat it with a cutting torch. It just wouldn’t melt. A cutting torch burns anywhere from 3200 to 3800 degrees Fahrenheit and it would make the metal hot but it wouldn’t even start to melt.

Please notice here that he is in his F-94 and that DEW line radar picked up the object but it says nothing about where the object was first sighted nor does it mention where Willingham was flying at the time. Most importantly, this affidavit gives no date for the sighting which is a major oversight. That becomes important later.

Len Stringfield, a well-respected UFO researcher who took an interest in UFO crashes when the rest of us were ignoring them, collected many stories of crashes. In 1978 he wrote a paper for the MUFON Symposium, which allows us to date this next chapter in this case. He wrote, “...Months later in 1977, I was to learn more about a crashed disc occurring in 1948. This came from researcher Todd Zeckel [sic], whom I had known since 1975 when he became Research Director of Ground Saucer Watch... The crash occurred about 30 miles inside the Mexican border across from Laredo, Texas, and was recovered by U.S. troops after it was tracked on radar screens... Zeckel pieced together other eyewitnesses to the 1948 crash event.”

According to Stringfield, Zechel reported:

I traced another Air Force colonel, now retired in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. He had seen the UFO in flight. He was flying an F-94 fighter out of Dias [sic] Air Force base in Texas and was over Albuquerque, New Mexico, when reports came of a UFO on the West Coast, flying over Washington State. Radars clocked its speed at 2,000 miles per hours.

It made a 90 – degree turn and flew east, over Texas. The colonel, then a captain pilot, actually saw it as it passed. Then suddenly it disappeared from radar screens. At Dias [sic] base, the radar operators plotted its course, and decided it had crashed some 30 miles across the Mexican border from Laredo. When the captain got back to base, he and a fellow pilot got into a small plane and took off over the border after the UFO. When they landed in the desert at the crash site, U.S. troops were there before them.

The craft was covered with a canopy [tarpaulin?], and the two pilots were not allowed to see it. They were then called to Washington, D.C. for debriefing and sworn to secrecy about the whole event.

It’s clear from the above information that Zechel was reporting on the story told by Willingham. We know, based on documentation available, that Willingham was living in Pennsylvania at the time and the other details of the story are close to what Willingham had originally reported. Please note here that Willingham is still flying his F-94, that the crash site is near Laredo, Texas, that it happened in 1948, and that it was tracked on radar. Also note that the radars put the UFO over Washington state which will become important later.

What we have here is a single witness tale that is believed because the man telling it is a retired Air Force colonel and a veteran fighter pilot. These two facts lend to his credibility and I know that when I first heard this story and was told it came from a high-ranking Air Force officer, I was inclined to believe it, especially since we had Jesse Marcel and so many others around Roswell talking of the crash there. This simply means that I was a little less suspicious of tales of crashes, given what I knew about Roswell. Please remember here, that I learned of Willingham’s crashed saucer tale after several trips to Roswell, rather than coming upon it cold.

There was another fact that came out later. According to Zechel, the crash didn’t take place in 1948 but in December 1950. Bruce Maccabee, another respected UFO researcher had been sending Freedom of Information (FOIA) requests to the FBI, among other places. His persistence paid off and he received a huge stack of documents that included some that related to some sort of alert in December 1950.

The question becomes did the alert have anything to do with UFOs. According to the documents found by Maccabee and others, on December 6, 1950, unidentified objects were spotted by radar heading toward the eastern seaboard. This triggered an alert and was discussed at the highest levels of the government. The consensus, from various memoirs and other documents, suggests that at about 10:30 a.m. Deputy Secretary of Defense Lovett called Dean Acheson, then secretary of State to tell him that the Pentagon’s phone system was about to shut down because the early warning system in Canada had picked up formations of unidentified objects, presumably aircraft heading to the southeast on a course that would put them over Washington, D.C. in two or three hours. Given the state of the world at the time, that is a major war in Korea that involved Chinese and UN forces (the majority of which were American and South Korean); it was thought that the Soviets might have been sending bombers toward the United States, probably armed with atomic weapons.

Truman, in his memoirs, suggested that the objects had been detected by radar stations and fighters had been launched to reconnoiter, though I personally would have wanted every fighter launched to intercept if I had thought the Soviets were sending bombers, which probably explains why I won’t be president.

There is another version of these events that suggest that the formations were over Alaska, which makes you wonder how they could have reached Washington, D.C. in just two or three hours unless their speed was considerably higher, that is, something on the order of 2000 miles an hour. This doesn’t have the same kind of documentation that the other version has and might be where Zechel got the idea that the UFOs were near Washington state and traveling at 2000 mph.

Within an hour, that is, by 11:30 a.m., the alert was cancelled, and once again there are multiple answers. Acheson reported that he was called back by Lovett who told him that the objects had disappeared. Lovett apparently thought the objects were geese but that seems a little strange to me… but I do remember reading about a strange event during WW II in which London radar operators reported that each morning an object appeared, rose into the sky and then seemed to fade away. It was found that it was caused by birds awaking and taking flight about the same time every day from the same London park.

Truman said that some sort of Atlantic weather disturbance had thrown off the radars. I suppose you could say that the disturbance could have caused the geese to be misidentified. The point is that the alert lasted about an hour.

These descriptions are based on the memories of the men (or the ghostwriters) who were there at the time. But as there is in many UFO–linked stories, there are some documents from the time. One of the major news services, INS reported:

A warning of an impending air attack resulted in a false alarm in this capitol [sic] city today. No air raid alarms were sounded, but functionaries charged with Civil Air Defense of Washington [D.C.] were alerted that an unidentified aircraft had been detected off the coast of the State of Maine at mid-day. Later, a spokesman for the Air Force stated that interceptor aircraft had been dispatched, and that the object in question had been identified shortly thereafter as a North American C-47 aircraft which was approaching the continent from Goose Bay, Labrador. The warning was said to have been useful in verifying the efficient of the Washington Civil Defense System. Civil Defense officials declined to comment on the incident.

Yes, there is a letter written by Colonel Charles Winkle, Assistant Executive in the Directorate of Plans that said that 40 aircraft were spotted at 32,000 feet. He noted that at 1104 hours the original track had faded out and it appeared that the flight was friendly.

While all this is interesting, it is irrelevant. This has nothing to do with the Willingham and his alleged sighting, which, until Zechel got involved was set in 1948. Then, seeing an opportunity to add some credibility to the Willingham crash report, he changed the date of the sighting to December 1950. Now Willingham’s sighting was not stand alone. There was a historical perspective to it.

There is one other aspect to this, again which is probably not related at all, other than it happened on December 8, 1950. Maccabee found, in the FBI files, an “Urgent” message that was labeled, “Flying Saucers.”

This office very confidentially advised by Army Intelligence, Richmond, that they have been put on immediate high alert for any data whatsoever concerning flying saucers. CIC here states background of instructions not available from Air Force Intelligence, who are not aware of the reason for alert locally, but any information whatsoever must be telephoned by them immediately to Air Force Intelligence. CIC advises data strictly confidential and should not be disseminated (sic).

And this would suggest some credibility to the Willingham tale. Here, just two days after the crash, the Air Force was requiring all intelligence information to be relayed to them. But, again, it is clear from Willingham’s original story, the crash took place in 1948, and not 1950. In fact, Willingham told me that in December 1950, he was serving in Korea (no evidence to support this claim), and the real date of the crash was in 1954 or 1955.

What that tells me is that no matter what Air Force Intelligence wanted in December 1950, this incident is irrelevant because there was no crash in December 1950. Remember, Willingham first claimed it was in 1948 and said that Zechel had changed the date to December 6, 1950. Willingham later said that it couldn’t have happened in December 1950 because he was in Korea at the time.

The question then becomes, how did this sighting get into the Eisenhower Briefing Document if it is a hoax? According to Zechel, he shared the information with Bill Moore and Moore, believing that Willingham was a retired colonel and that his story was credible, accepted it. We know that Moore was aware of this because he wrote about it, briefly, in The Roswell Incident. Moore wrote:

Then a second group, Citizens Against UFO Secrecy (CAUS), was formed in 1978 under the directorship of W. T. Zechel, former research director of GSW [Ground Saucer Watch] and a one-time radio-telegraph operator for the Army Security Agency. CAUS’s announced aim was nothing less than an “attempt to establish that the USAF (or elements thereof) recovered a crashed extraterrestrial spacecraft” in the Texas – New Mexico – Mexico border area sometime in the late 1940s.

This establishes that Zechel, as he claimed, had been talking to Moore about this crash. Since the book was published in 1980, and because the lead time between manuscript submission and actual publication is a year to eighteen months, it means that Zechel was talking to Moore in the late 1970s. In other words, it verifies part of what Zechel claimed when he said that Moore knew about this crash, and because Moore accepted the information from CAUS as authentic, it provides another reason that the Willingham crash had to be included in the EBD.  

They all thought it real, and if it was real, it had to be mentioned in the document.

It is clear from the details, that the Del Rio crash is the El Indio - Guerrero crash. The location selected is between the original site of Laredo and Del Rio. Zechel changed the date to correspond to the December 6, 1950 alert, though he suggested the event as December 5. The accepted date in the EBD is a compromise between that date and the December 8, 1950, request by the Air Force to the Army’s CIC. There were no documents to contradict this and Willingham said that he knew the December 6 date was wrong, but said nothing about that until years later.

Everything points to the December 6 crash as being the Willingham crash, and if that is true, then there was no such crash. And without a December 6, 1950 crash, anywhere in the Texas – Mexico border area, then the EBD must be a hoax.

You can reject everything that Zechel said, but the facts here are verified through other sources. Willingham confirms that he gave all this information to Zechel, he confirms that it was Zechel who came up with the December 1950 date, and Bill Moore, in his book, confirms that Zechel and CAUS were pursuing this crash case. 

All the dots line up and the facts now argue against the authenticity of the EBD because there is nothing true about the case except that Zechel investigated and the original source was Willingham.

Here is the real point. The December 6, 1950, alert has no relevance here. The information for the crash has come from a small circle of people and it all goes back to Willingham. He has changed the story to cover the facts that were in error and Zechel changed it to make use of the 1950 alert. There are no documents about it, nothing printed in any newspaper such as there was for Roswell, Kecksburg, or Shag Harbour to name just three, and there is a single witness, which again is unlike those other cases.

Unless someone can come up with some evidence that hasn’t passed through the hands of Willingham, Zechel or Moore, there is nothing left for this case. It is a hoax and if that is true, then the Eisenhower Briefing Document is a hoax. That is the only rational conclusion to be drawn.

Roswell, Bill Clinton and Jimmy Kimmel

Jimmy Kimmel had Bill Clinton on his show, and said that had he, Kimmel, been elected as president, almost before he had finished the oath of office, he would have run to the White House to look at all the classified files on UFOs.

Clinton said that he had “sort of” done that, though it came out it took him about four years to make the run. Then he talked about Area 51 and said that he had someone look at all the records for Area 51 to find out if there was an “alien hidden down there.” He acknowledged that a lot of our stealth technology was developed there and though he didn’t say it that would make it a place that should be shrouded in mystery. He did say that there were no aliens there.

And I have to agree with this. I have said for a long time that I believed the next generation of military aircraft would be developed there, but other than a few very weak claims that lack real evidence, there is probably nothing alien there. This, of course, puts me at odds with many of my colleagues in the UFO field, but I just don’t think the evidence supports the idea of aliens at Area 51. The development of military aircraft makes the high-level secrecy plausible.

Then Clinton said, “When the Roswell thing came up, I knew we’d get zillions of letters, so I had all the papers reviewed. Everything.”

Kimmel asked: If you saw there were aliens there would you tell us?

Clinton answered: Yeah.

Kimmel: You would?

Clinton: I think, look. What do we know? We know now we live in an ever-expanding universe. We know there are billions of stars and planets literally out there. And the universe is getting bigger. We know from our fancy telescopes that just in the last two years more than twenty planets have been identified outside our solar system that seem to be far enough away from the sun and dense enough that they might be able to support some form of life so it makes it increasingly less likely we are alone.

Kimmel: Oh, you’re trying to give me a hint there are aliens.

Clinton: No, I’m trying to tell you I don’t know but if we were visited someday, I wouldn’t be surprised. I just hope it’s not like Independence Day.

The conversation then degenerates into some jokes about Independence Day and Clinton’s thought that such an invasion would create a new spirit of cooperation around the world to repel the invaders… probably like shown in Independence Day.

But what I noticed is that Clinton didn’t really answer the question about Roswell. He moved onto other things and had Kimmel been hosting a more news oriented program, the lack of follow up would be inexcusable. But Kimmel’s show is entertainment and he seemed to run where the laughs were… not that I blame him.

So Clinton didn’t really talk about Roswell and what might have been found there. Yes, I know that he answered a similar question when he was president, saying that that he hadn’t been told if there were aliens at Roswell… and I also know that had he said anything other than the jokes he made or the rather mundane, trite, and useless speculation about other planets in other solar systems, he probably would never had heard the end of it.

And while he didn’t really answer the question about Roswell, he did say, when Kimmel asked, that he wasn’t hinting there were aliens. He was just suggesting he wouldn’t be surprised if we were visited someday… which is, of course, the general feeling by millions if not billions of people.

What did we pull from this interview? Not much. If you believe in the alien crash at Roswell, you can look at how he really said nothing about it. If you believe there has been no alien visitation, you can look at his response to Kimmel’s question about the hint of alien visitation.

Or, in other worlds, a little something for everyone… just a politician keeping everyone happy with these statements.

The Eisenhower Briefing Document, MJ-12, and the Del Rio UFO Crash

I have argued for years that the Eisenhower Briefing Document (EBD) is not authentic. I have argued that it was created in the early to mid-1980s because the information contained in it reflected the UFOlogical thought of that time. The one paragraph that seemed to prove that more than any other was the one referring to the December 6, 1950 crash near El Indio – Guerrero area of northern Mexico. I had suggested that this is the sighting made by Robert Willingham and that we know that he has changed so much of the information about it that it is clear that it never happened.

“Why bring this up now?” you may ask.

Because I have additional information thanks to Isaac Koi, Greg Long, and James Carrion. Let’s take this all one step at a time.

Apparently on October 19, 1994, Greg Long received a telephone from W. Todd Zechel, who then launched into what was pretty much a monologue according to a document created by Long (which makes sense since I too received one of these Zechel telephone calls in which he talked and talked and talked until his father yelled for him to get off the telephone). Long made notes, and the important part of that document, at least to us here, said:

Zechel talked about his research into the Del Rio case. He described how John Acuff [one time director of NICAP] had put NICAP’s cases in storage. Maccabee stole documents from the NICAP files. There was a particular file that Zechel read regarding a crashed object in Del Rio. Zechel tracked down a name, Colonel Willingham, in Mechanicsburg, Pennsylvania, flew to Pennsylvania, and interviewed him. Willingham admitted that he saw the crashed object. To assess Willingham, Zechel got the colonel’s military records and proved he was authentic.

Later in this same document, in a section labeled “Hoax,” Zechel again alludes to the Del Rio case. He wrote, “[Brad] Sparks responded that he felt only two of the cases showed some promise: the Roswell incident of 1947, which Moore had written about, and one that reportedly occurred in Dec. 1950 near the Texas/Mexico border.

And later still, Del Rio is connected to the El Indio – Guerrero case, when talking about the EBD received by Shandera, Zechel wrote:

Billed as a briefing paper prepared for ‘President-elect Eisenhower,’ the document ‘ contains a rather lengthy description of the Roswell incident – which just happens to verify Moore’s contentions and misrepresentations of the facts – but only a spare paragraph describing a second incident in December 1950. According to the new, improved model:

On 06 December 1950, a second object, probably of similar origin, impacted the earth at high speed in the El Indio – Guerrero area of the Texas – Mexico boder (sic) after following a long trajectory through the atmosphere. By the time a search team arrived, what remained of the object had been almost totally incinerated. Such material as could be recovered was transported to the A.E.C. facility at Sandia, New Mexico for study.

Zechel then explains how this information about the crash had come into the hands of Moore and one of his cohorts, Richard Doty. He suggested that a manuscript that he had written was “either given or sold… to Bill Moore…”

To follow through on this linkage, and to prove that the information about the El Indio – Guerrero crash is that from Del Rio and Robert Willingham, Zechel wrote:

The point is that Moore… obtained two separate manuscripts I had written about the crashed saucer case which reportedly occurred in Dec. 1950, near the Texas – Mexico border. The first manuscript… gave the location of the incident as near Laredo, Texas. The second manuscript… gave the date of the incident as happening between Dec. 5 and Dec. 8, 1950, and the location as near Del Rio, Texas… No witnesses that I know of support the El Indio location given in the ‘briefing paper,’ but, on the contrary several eye-witness accounts have verified the Del Rio site. Moore, however, would not have known that, since I myself did not know these facts until a couple of years after I left Hollywood.

More telling than this is what Zechel believed about how this particular case came to be part of the EBD. Zechel wrote:

What I’m saying is that he [Moore] clearly knew, based on my manuscripts and Brad Sparks’ input, that he had to acknowledge the 1950 case in the ‘briefing paper,’ but with all the bitterness, acrimony, jealousy and hate he feels toward me … he just had to burn that sucker up!

And, in case that hasn’t made the connection between the Willingham tale and that from the EBD, in a letter to Walt Andrus at MUFON, dated December 8, 1978, Zechel wrote:

What I did say is that I had an affidavit from the retired Lt. Colonel (emphasis in the original) – the former pilot who flew down to the crash site – about his knowledge of the incident, which is limited to seeing the object in the air and covered by a canopy on the ground.

This retired Lt. Colonel is Robert Willingham who did sign an affidavit about the crash. So, we know that Willingham is the source of the Del Rio case, who also suggested that the crash was near Laredo. We know that Zechel was sharing information with Bill Moore, though it isn’t clear that the sharing was voluntary or if Moore acquired the information through some devious means. We know that in the late 1970s and the early 1980s, many in the UFO field believed the Willingham story because he was a retired military officer who signed an affidavit and Zechel claimed that he had verified his records (which by the way is untrue because it is clear that Willingham’s records reveal he was a low-ranking enlisted man with 13 months of active duty). We also know that Zechel was claiming other witnesses, but none have surfaced to this point.

But now the Willlingham story is in tatters. As mentioned here before, he was neither a retired Air Force officer nor a fighter pilot and if that is true, then he was not in a position to see any crash of anything. We know, based on the available documentation that Willingham originally claimed that the crash had taken place in 1948, and while Zechel attempted to vilify Len Stringfield for saying this in his 1978 presentation about crashed UFOs, we know, from the available documentation that Willingham himself is responsible for this “error.” Zechel moved the date to conform to information about a security alert in December 1950, but there is nothing to suggest the alert had anything to do with a flying saucer crash.

What all this does is prove that one segment of the EBD is based on a hoax and that does not bode well for the remainder of the document. If this paragraph is faked, then what else in it is faked and isn’t a reasonable conclusion that it is all faked? I think that we now have all the information we need to connect all the dots and with that, we can draw the conclusion that the EBD is a fake based on faulty information and complete invention. We can now move onto other, more important things.

MJ-12 and Major Contradictions

 Here’s something that I have never understood. How can you hold two beliefs that are contradictory? If one is true, then the other cannot be true. They cancel out one another.

Here’s what I mean. For the sake of argument, let’s say that the Eisenhower Briefing Document (EBD) received by Jaime Shandera is authentic (which means only for this point). It tells of two crashes, one on the Brazel ranch and the other in December 1950 in the El Indio – Guerrero area near the Texas – Mexico border. It tells us that four “human-like beings” had been found some two miles from the main debris field and all four had been killed in the crash. Other details, such as the name of the base at Roswell, the creation of the Air Force Project Sign, and Arnold sighting of June 24, 1947, suggest that the creator of the document had knowledge of the history of the UFO phenomenon.

There are those who believe this document but who also believe there was a crash on the Plains of San Agustin which might have been part of the Roswell crash, and another event near Aztec, New Mexico in March 1948. The question that arises from this is if the EBD was created for President-elect Eisenhower, why are these other two crashes left out? There is no reason to hide that information from Eisenhower, unless those creating the EBD knew that those events hadn’t happened? In other words, they didn’t include them because they knew they were faked.

Taking this a step further, and because we’ve just discussed the Interplanetary Phenomenon Unit, we see in those two documents the information about a UFO crash near the Trinity site on the White Sands Missile Ranch. While it could be said that this is part of the events on the Brazel ranch, it was not mentioned in the EDB. The documents talk of five creatures rather than four and, importantly, mention that Eisenhower, then the top officer in the Army, would be briefed in August 1947, eliminating the need for a briefing in November 1952.

If we look at the First Annual Report, it mentions three sites. Two are on the Brazel ranch and one at the Trinity site. Again, this is in conflict not only with the EBD but also the IPU summary. So which of these documents is accurate and which are fakes? And isn’t it possible that all three are fake?

As mentioned in the past, the El Indio – Guerrero crash of December 6, 1950, has but a single witness and the credibility of the crash rests on his shoulders. In the mid-1980s when the EDB was released, nearly everyone in the UFO field accepted this case because the witness was a retired Air Force colonel who had been fighter pilot. The trouble is that he is neither and he changed the date of the crash three or more times. Given those facts, it seems logical to reject his claims of a UFO crash, and if that is true, what does that mean for both the EBD and the First Annual Report, which contain that information?

I had planned to talk of other MJ-12 documents that seem to contradict one another, but this all makes the point. There are fatal flaws in each of the documents. Any document created at the supposed level at which these were created would be accurate. There wouldn’t be the sort of elemental errors seen here. If there were three crashes, then three crashes would have been mentioned.

I will point out one other obvious thing because there are some who don’t seem to get it. In various MJ-12 documents there are anachronisms… that is, there are things mentioned that did not exist when the documents were allegedly created. I’ve pointed out that the First Annual Report written in 1952 mentions Project Moon Dust which wasn’t created until late 1957 as an example. The MJ-12 manual SOM1-01 sent to Don Berliner some time ago, suggested as one of the cover stories to suggest to the press that the debris was from a “downed satellite.” The manual was allegedly created in 1954 when there were no satellites to crash and scatter debris. Such a suggestion prior to October 1957 would raise more questions than it answered.

What all that means is that the documents have some real problems that are not easily explained. They contain information that just wasn’t available when they were allegedly created and they seem to be predictive of the future. Or, more precisely, this seems to suggest the documents are forged.

However, the real question that I have is how one person can hold two sets of beliefs that are mutually exclusive. If the EBD is authentic, then the tales of other crashes, on the Plains of San Agustin and at Aztec must be false… and if those are real events, then why are they not mentioned in the EBD? One set of facts or documents must be wrong and given everything else we know, it seems obvious that all of the documents are fraudulent… but as they say, “That’s just my opinion

Interplanetary Phenomenon Unit - Part Two

There is another alleged MJ-12 document that suffers from many of the same problems as the Interplanetary Phenomenon Unit Summary and this is the Majestic Twelve Project, Annual Report which is believed to have been created during the summer of 1952. This is another of the documents provided by Timothy Cooper through his source of Thomas Cantwheel, that unidentified man who claimed to have been on the inside of UFO crashes investigations and with the Majestic Twelve or some such.

These are the conclusions from a larger document which rehashes some of the information from other documents and adds to the knowledge that we have been told is highly classified. It is clear from the document that, “…no country on this earth has the means and the security of its resources to produce such [meaning an interplanetary craft].”

It is noted that “The occupants of these planform vehicles are, in most respects, human or human-like. Autopsies, so far indicate, that these beings share the same biological needs as humans.”

One of the things that would become important in understanding the veracity of the document said, “The ATIC Interrogation Reports, numbered 1 to 93 (the last dated December, 1950), present significant information on a broad variety of subjects and areas where witnesses were obtained subsequent to the post-1947 incident. The un-published documents consolidate records of interrogation derived from the accumulated reports of interviews of selected witnesses from New Mexico and military personnel involved in removal of evidence.”

It is after Section P labeled as “Government Policy of Control and Denial,” a list of statements about all these events is found. For example, it said, “The Panel’s review of the AEC and AFSWP investigation of Site L-1 and the Air Force Site L-2, has led the Panel to conclude that the objects under study, are the result of a high altitude ejection of a [sic] escape cylinder from a fatal mid-air collision of two unidentified circular planform aircraft of interplanetary nature.”

As had been seen in the Interplanetary Phenomenon Unit Summary, there are the coordinates for L-2 [which is why the two documents can be tied together] and they are written in the same weird format, meaning “Lat. 33-40-31, Long. 106-28-29.… this site yielded the most material for analysis.”

We learn that Site L-2 is associated with Site L-1, again for which no coordinates are provided, which also seems strange. The descriptions of both sites seem to match to some degree and that “impact and the debris pattern… and debris pattern suggests that the craft hit the ground at a sharp angle and continued to remain airborne until coming to rest at Site L-2.”

Then comes a statement that turns part of this upside down. According to the document “The second craft that impacted at Site L-3, provided very little evidence that it too was similar in design, so the impact was vertical in nature and at very high speed. It is believed that the debris discovered on 2 July 1947, by a local rancher was the result of a mid-air collision with an X-plane from HAFB [Holloman Air Force Base]; another unidentified object; or possibly collided with both…”

According to the document, “There were five recovered bodies, two of which were found in a severely damaged escape cylinder, and the remaining three were found some distance away from the cylinder. All five appeared to have suffered from sudden decompression and heat suffication [sic] (recovery and autopsies of the occupants are covered in detail in a separate study GRAY SUIT within Projects 612 and 621…”

Later, it is noted that tissue samples from the contamination of four technicians involved in the recovery were being held at Fort Detrick, MD.

And to make matters worse, there is the note, “Detection of a high altitude explosion was recorded by a Project MOGUL constant level balloon on 4 July 1947.”

At another point it said, “On 6 December 1950, MAJCOM-4 alerts MAJCOM-1 of a breach in DEW Greenland of a UFO on a south-westerly course. HQ IPU alerted and dispatched a scientific team to El Indio-Guerrero on the Texas-Mexico border. MAJCOM-4 orders a recovery team from Project Stork and MOON DUST to crash site…”

But here’s the problem with those things mentioned above. They are out of place. They shouldn’t be in this document because they didn’t exist at the time it was supposedly written. Or other, better information has superseded it. Newer information has shown where the older data are wrong. For example, the document states that “…ATIC Interrogation Reports, numbered 1 to 93 (the last dated December, 1950), present significant information on a broad variety of subjects…” But, according to Brad Sparks, ATIC wasn’t formed until May 1951 and therefore could not issue a series of reports before its existence.

Although there is the discussion about some sort of mid-air collision, the best evidence today is that there was a single craft that scattered its debris over three sites, all of them between Corona, New Mexico and Roswell. There is no evidence of a crash near the Trinity Site, other than in the MJ-12 documents. While an argument can be made that the information we have today does not completely eliminate the collision scenario, it can also be argued that it is out of date information that was the current thinking by some in the mid-1990s. That dates the creation of the document to that time.

Then, unlike the Interplanetary Phenomenon Unit Summary, this document adds a third site. This might be an attempt to account for the later information coming from UFO researchers in the 1990s. Realizing that something else had come down between the Brazel ranch debris field and Roswell, the forger added this new detail to conform to the new and better information. As an aside, this information should have appeared in the Interplanetary Phenomenon Unit Summary, since it would have been available in July 1947. This all, of course, is indicative of a hoax rather than the truth.

Worse still, is the suggestion that Mack Brazel had found the debris field on July 2. It has been claimed by some that the crash took place either late on July 2 or early on July 3. Brazel found the debris on July 3 or 4, according to some of the scenarios, but none of them include finding debris as early as July 2.

The idea of a collision between an experimental aircraft out of Holloman is not borne out by research. Air Force investigation showed that no military aircraft, either in the regular inventory or in the experimental stages disappeared in early July 1947. Those on the inside of these organizations, with the clearances necessary, would know this. They might speculate about a collision with an unknown object but they would know that it was not an aircraft of any type.

We move into trivia again. Holloman Air Force Base was, in fact, the Alamogordo Army Air Field in 1947, but I suppose you could argue that someone writing about this in 1952 would use the current name of the air field rather than the older name.

Almost the same could be said about the tissue samples were sent to Fort Detrick. The problem here is that Fort Detrick was Camp Detrick in 1952. The new designation would not be made until some four years after the document was allegedly written. Yes, you could say that it is a minor mistake that might have been made by someone who was not fully aware of how the Army designated their installations. Even someone inside the Army might not understand this. The question to be asked is how many of these sorts of errors are allowed before it becomes clear that the document was not written by an insider?

Part of that answer is found in the next statement about a MOGUL balloon detecting the collision or explosion on a July 4. First, there was no July 4 MOGUL flight and there is no indication that any sort of explosion detected by MOGUL. This is not to mention that it contradicts the other information suggesting that Brazel found the debris on July 2. If the alleged detonation was detected by the July 4 flight, then how is it linked to an event that happened two days before it was launched?

But it is the next paragraph that proves the document a hoax. It begins with a date of December 6, 1950, and claims that the UFO breeched the DEW in Greenland. The problem is that the DEW line didn’t exist in 1950 and according to Brad Sparks the name wasn’t even “coined until the MIT Project Lincoln Summer Study Group report of September 1952. The DEW line was not started until 1954.”

Even worse, according to the document, “HQ IPU alerted and dispatched a scientific team to El Indio-Guerrero on the Texas-Mexico border.” This is based on the testimony of Robert Willingham, who claimed that as a high-ranking Air Force officer and fighter pilot, he had seen the crash. The trouble is that Willingham was neither an officer nor a fighter pilot and his story has been discredited. It would seem that a tale, invented in the 1960s by Willingham and that has undergone several revisions since then, would not appear in an authentic document created more than a decade before Willingham made his first claim.

Finally, we know that Project Stork was the analysis done by Battelle and had nothing to do with crash retrievals. Although it began early enough to be mentioned in this document, it is clear that the author didn’t know what Project Stork was.

Attached to this is the mention of the MOON DUST team but this is a real problem. According to documents that I located in the Project Blue Book files and a letter dated December 12, 1957, MOON DUST began in the fall of 1957. In other words, it would not exist for five years and there is no way for it to deploy a team in 1950.

To summarize (which is to say, let’s beat this dead horse), this document is filled with internal contradictions, it is filled with inaccurate information, and it contains information that would be correct if the programs, units and projects actually existed in 1952. While it might be argued that this is a draft (which would have been destroyed when the final draft was completed) so that you might expect the typos, misnamed military organizations, and some inaccurate information, all of which would be corrected in the final draft, there is no way to explain the predictions for the future.  There is no way for the author to know the DEW line would be created two years in the future, would know that it would be called the DEW line before the name was coined, and no way to know that MOON DUST would be created some five years later. These, to me, are the fatal flaws.

For those interested, there are more examples of this in the document. I just didn’t bother to enumerate all of them. And yes, I know that the comment will be made that the way to discredit a leak of classified information is to pump false information into it so no one knows what is accurate, what is false, and the whole thing is rejected. But that isn’t the point here. These documents just appeared in Timothy Cooper’s mail box and the trail basically ends there.

Without a provenance, without an eyewitness, without anything to allow us to validate the documents, there is but one sane course. Ignore them. Reject them. Move our research efforts into another arena. Unfortunately, the facts about this document are not enough to remove it from the case. Instead it is considered highly reliable by some in the UFO community.

There is one other thing to be said. During all my investigations into the MJ-12 documents, regardless of source, Stan Friedman, Dr. Robert Wood and Ryan Wood, have answered most of my email questions. All are aware of my personal belief in MJ-12 but they do respond and I appreciate that. It would be simple for them to ignore my questions but they don’t. I thank them for putting up with my questions.

Interplanetary Phenomenon Unit Summary - July 22, 1947

The other night as I was cursing the cable I blundered into another of those UFO programs filled with hysterical narration and a belief that nearly every outrageous claim is based in reality. In this case they were talking about the Interplanetary Phenomenon Unit as if the documentation existed to prove that the Army had, at one time, investigated UFOs under that unit title. They flashed some documentation but in today’s world with nearly everyone and her brother creating UFO documents for fun and profit you would think that a little caution would be called for. But there was really nothing in the documentary to suggest that this wasn’t true other than a mention of the “controversial MJ-12” documents.

I had thought that it had been fairly well established that this IPU information had been discredited and was a little surprised to see it being used as evidence that MJ-12 was real, as was the Roswell UFO crash along with a similar event over on the Plains of San Agustin (or more accurately, a point to the southeast of Socorro, but more on that later). So I wondered just what do we know about the IPU and where did that information originate.

It seems that in 1977 Larry Bryant had filed a somewhat generic FOIA request with the Army asking about their gathering of UFO reports. Eventually, in response, the Army said that their records had been sent to the Air Force in 1962 so they no longer had anything related to UFOs. If you look at the timing here, you’d see that the Air Force was also attempting to get rid of the UFO investigation or relegate it to the Secretary of the Air Force Office of Information (SAFOI), so the Army, having the perfect place to dump their UFO material, did so. All this means that at the time no one wanted to get stuck with the UFO problem.

Bryant filed another request and in 1978 the Army came back with what they termed an “institutional memory,” which was their way of saying they’d asked an older member of the team what he could remember. He said that in 1958 the UFO reports were processed by the Interplanetary Phenomenon Unit. This was set up in 1958 after the launch of the Soviet satellites in late 1957. According to the institutional memory, all the material gathered was sent to the Air Force in 1962. The IPU was abolished at that point.

Brad Sparks believed that the actual name was probably something like the Intelligence Processing Unit and the function was that of gathering all sorts of intelligence reports about all sorts of things to be distributed to the various commands and activities where that information could be exploited. According to Sparks, based on his review of various organizational charts and other documentation, he found the name of the IPU was actually Input Processing Unit, and if Sparks was right about its function, then this name makes more sense than the more exciting Interplanetary Phenomenon Unit.

And while you could argue that Sparks has gotten this wrong, though the evidence supports him, there seems to be one fact that is not in dispute. The IPU did not begin to function until 1958. There is no evidence that it existed prior to that.

But then documents from the IPU began to surface. They seemed to come from a man named Timothy Cooper who received them from a fellow named Thomas “Cy” Cantwheel which is a pseudonym so that he can’t be traced and his claims about his background can’t be independently verified. One of the documents that relates to the IPU is labeled Top Secret and it mentions only those with “Majic access may have access.” This strikes me as a rather wishy-washy way to say that “Access to the document is restricted to those with Majic clearance,” but then, that’s just my personal opinion.

The document is the “Interplanetary Phenomenon Unit Summary,” and it is classified as “Top Secret – Ultra.” There is a problem with this as well. A classified project known as “Ultra” existed during World War II. Ultra was an attempt to gather and decrypt Nazi communications at the highest level. By the end of the war this was an Allied effort that was of significant importance and certainly contributed to the defeat of the Nazis. But the point is, the classification for the project was Top Secret Ultra and that was for that specific project which has nothing to do with UFOs.

Overlooking this, the document lays out the “facts” about the Roswell UFO crash. The problem here is that investigations as outlined in these documents have been superseded by new and better information. It places a part of the crash at Site LZ - 2 (which I suppose is Landing Zone 2) some twenty miles southeast (that’s right, southeast) of Socorro, which moves it from the Plains of San Agustin to “Lat. 33 – 40 – 31, Long. 106 – 28 – 29, with Oscura Peak being the geographic reference point.” Overlooking the fact that the coordinates would have been listed as 33.40.31N and 106.28.29W (33° 40' 31" N, 106° 28' 29" W), those coordinates are not on the Plains of San Agustin, but southeast of Socorro. While the Barnett story is questioned and certainly does not relate to the Roswell crash, it was clear that he was talking about the high country meaning the Plains and not someplace to the southeast.

For those keeping score at home and who don’t have Google Earth on their computers, those coordinates, along with Oscura Peak, are on the White Sands Missile Range near the Trinity site. It’s difficult enough to get onto the debris field found by Mack Brazel since it is private property surrounded by BLM land. No one is going to drive out onto the missile range to dig on that site, let alone get near the Trinity site without permission. As far as I know, no one has been there to see what might have been left behind.

In fact, that leads to another question. Why is it that they have the coordinates for LZ – 2, but not for the Brazel ranch site? I suspect the reason is that when this document was created, the coordinates of the Brazel site were known to very few people and if the document had the wrong coordinates, that would call its legitimacy into question. The hoaxer just didn’t know those coordinates.

These few things should be enough for those paying attention to reject this document as fraudulent. It should be enough to prove that this document is a forgery and a not very clever one at that. It does nothing to support the idea of the Interplanetary Phenomenon Unit because the document is an invention created in the 1990s, after the publication of the various books about the Roswell crash, but the forger didn’t seem to have looked at a map, which proves the forgery. (Or maybe I should say he did look at a map and picked the location because of its highly restricted access. He didn’t have to worry about someone going there to see what they might find.)

In fact, I can date it even better than that because it does mention Mogul and no one was talking about Mogul until the early 1990s. It is unlikely that a report created in 1947 would refer to the balloon project by that name. It probably would have referred to it as the New York University balloon project or the constant level balloons rather than Mogul, if mentioned it at all. More likely it would have just mentioned weather balloons if it was felt necessary to make that connection. All that does is allow us to date the time of creation for the document and point to another flaw in it.

But, remember, the IPU, by whatever name, didn’t exist in 1947 and wouldn’t exist for another decade according to the best information available. This document does nothing to prove that the name of the organization was the Interplanetary Phenomenon Unit because the document is a fake.

In fact there is no real documentation confirming the existence of such an organization at all. It was the “institutional memory” who created the name based on what he remembered. That “institutional memory” was Craig Hunter who, some two decades after the fact, mentioned all that he remembered about the IPU. There is no official document with the Interplanetary Phenomenon Unit name on it…

Oh, I know what you’ll say. There are letters to researchers that prove the Interplanetary Phenomenon Unit existed, or exists, because it is referred to as the Interplanetary Phenomenon Unit in these official communications. In one of those, written by Lieutenant Colonel Lance R. Corine, it says, “As you note in your letter, the so-called Interplanetary Phenomenon Unit (IPU) was disestablished…”

In other words, Corine is not actually confirming the existence of the IPU as the Interplanetary Phenomenon Unit because that is the name of the unit used by William Steinman in his letter to the Army. Steinman gave them the name. Yes, the IPU existed but it was not the Interplanetary Phenomenon Unit. It was the Input Processing Unit, which certainly isn’t the same thing.

And, yes, this is splitting a fine hair, but the point is, other than the “institutional memory” of the name, the letters cited as proof seem to be responding to information included in the FOIA requests. I’d like to see a document from a government source (other than MJ-12, of course) that uses the name Interplanetary Phenomenon Unit on it. Brad Sparks said that he’s seen organizational charts with IPU on them, but not that particular name.

The evidence for the Interplanetary Phenomenon Unit is one man’s memory that seems to be contradicted by the documentation from official sources, which you all are now free to reject because it is from official sources and is all part of the bigger conspiracy. Everything, including to those letters to researchers, points to the creation of the IPU in 1958 which means that a document that was allegedly created in 1947 using the name Interplanetary Phenomenon Unit is a fake. And if it is a fake then those using it in a documentary to support another aspect of the UFO phenomenon have failed to prove their point. A fake document proves absolutely nothing and shouldn’t be used as evidence for the existence of something else.

Oh, I do get it. Those producing documentaries don’t have the comprehensive knowledge needed to understand what is going on. They must rely on the “experts” to understand what they are being told… and too often there are competing points of view. Sometimes the information is easily available and the evidence of fraud is almost overwhelming but they still use it to bolster their case. They want to believe just as badly as some of those in the field want to believe so the negative evidence is reduced to a single sentence or phrase that is almost mumbled. The “controversial” comment is misunderstood by many, suggesting that there is still an open question. In this case, with this organization, the IPU, and this particular document, there is no real controversy. The results are in and the document is a fake.