Elk River UFO Crash

Although I had a hand in starting the tradition of listing UFO crashes, I have always been bothered by the sheer numbers of them. True, I believe there to be some very valid cases and Roswell leaps immediately to mind, as does Las Vegas in 1962, Kecksburg in 1965 and Shag Harbour in 1967. But the numbers are appallingly high when considering the engineering difficulties of creating an interstellar craft. If they can conquer that problem, I wouldn’t expect them to rain from the sky.

Given all this, James Clarkson (seen here), who appeared at the 6th Annual UFO Crash Retrieval Conference in Las Vegas, hosted by Ryan Wood, made a good case for adding another to the list.

According to Clarkson, on November 25, 1979, a number of people saw something fiery in the night sky and more than one of them thought of it as a craft without power. I use the term craft, though some of them described an airplane-like configuration with lighted windows and fire on one side.

Mrs. Ralph Case was riding in a car driven by her husband along State Route 12 and about four miles east of Aberdeen when she saw what she said was a plane with one side on fire. She reported this to the air traffic control tower at Bowerman Airfield, also near Aberdeen, Washington at about ten minutes to eleven.

Ernest Hayes, driving along the same highway as Case said that he had seen a very bright green flash overhead. He called the county sheriff at about eleven that same night or some ten minutes after Case had reported her sighting.

Estella Krussel, who Clarkson interviewed about eight years after the event, said that she’d seen an "unknown aircraft" fly over and thought of a passenger jet because of the illuminated windows. She thought it had a cigar shape, was narrower in front than the rear and had an intense blue-white light shining from each of the windows. She was one of those who had the impression that it was out of power.

Things got stranger, according to Clarkson. He interviewed a number of witnesses who had driven out into the rough country, a crazy pattern of logging roads and paved highways. Some of them in search of the object that others had seen.

Eight years after the crash, Clarkson interviewed Gordon Graham. Graham had heard about the crash from Donald Betts, and tried to drive out to find it. He was turned away by a military checkpoint.

Clarkson quoted Graham as saying, "I saw four military weapons carriers. There were at least ten soldiers there. They have the road blocked. They told us to get out of there. They didn’t say it very politely either."

Here we run into a problem and one that I should have mentioned to Clarkson. Posse Comitatus is a federal law that does not allow the use of active duty soldiers in a law enforcement function except in a very narrow range of situations. These soldiers, if active duty, had no authority to block the roads. If they were members of the National Guard on "maneuvers" in the area, they would probably have been in what is known as Title 10 or Title 32 status and would have been in violation of the law when manning these roadblocks. This means that had Graham driven on, the soldiers had no authority to stop or arrest him.

I know that National Guard soldiers, except in very limited cases, such as when called to State Active Duty can then be used for law enforcement. If these soldiers were from Georgia, as Clarkson suggests, based on his investigation and the interviews he conducted, then they couldn’t be in State Active Duty and they had no authority to enforce the road block. Of course, if they are standing there with loaded weapons, you might not want to challenge that authority.

I point this out only because it suggests something about the legality of the roadblocks and it might be something to investigate. Under normal circumstances, soldiers in this sort of duty would be paired with a sworn law enforcement officer who would have the authority to arrest those who refused to obey the instructions.

Maybe this point is a little esoteric, but it seems to me that we all need to know about the limits of authority. Challenging them might not be the smartest thing to do, but then, they have no real authority to order civilians away from an area and they have no arrest powers except in limited cases such as drug enforcement and by presidential direction.

This is not to say that those reporting this are inventing their tales, only that the soldiers, whoever they were probably had no authority to stop civilians from using the public roads. If this had been an aircraft accident, then the checkpoints and access control would have belonged to law enforcement and not the military.

But I digress...

Clarkson reported that Henry Harnden was another of the local residents who said he was threatened and chased from the area by troops. Harnden was the one who suggested they were from a "special division from Georgia."

An Elma, Washington police officer, Fred Bradshaw, said that two or three days after the crash, he saw an Army "low-boy truck with a boom... [and two] deuce and half [trucks]" and a couple of jeeps. The Army certainly has the authority to use the public roads to move stuff, whatever that stuff might be, so there is no problem here.

Clarkson (at the lecture at the conference) tells us that there were a number of witnesses to the "arrival of a fiery object" on November 25, 1979. He tells us that it hit the ground and might have exploded in the Elk River Drainage Area in a fairly inaccessible location that contains mud flats, marshes or a nearby thick forest.

The official explanation of "helicopter exhaust glow," offered later, is ridiculous. Even a quick look at the descriptions by the witnesses shows this to be untrue. I’ve flown in a lot of helicopter formations at night and the glow from the turbine just isn’t all that bright.

Clarkson never really says that the craft was extraterrestrial, though I take that as his meaning. He suggests the possibility that what fell might have been something lost by the military, specifically some sort of missile test that failed. He does note that no one lost an aircraft on that night. No reports of either a military or civilian crash and no reports of a missile gone astray.

As I say, there seem to be too many failures of alien craft. Some lists now top two hundred and a couple are closing in on 300. But still, there are some very intriguing UFO crash cases, many of which have no solid explanation... yet. This is another to add to the file. Until someone tells us what crashed, with the appropriate documentation, this is another well documented UFO crash.