Sunday, June 14, 2020

Levelland and the Four Witnesses, Part Two


For those of you who have been keeping score at home (which I probably say more often than I should), you know that I looked into the idea that four of the witnesses quoted in the Levelland UFO vehicle interference cases had been discredited. Robert Sheaffer mentioned it on my radio show and did send a link to the site run by the Iron Skeptic. After the show I asked for the contact information for the site host, Aaron Sakulich. When I posted the article about Levelland, I had not heard back from him. In case you missed all this, you can read that article here:


and listen to the show here:


The point is that I received a very cordial response from Aaron. I was looking for the source of his information because I had never heard anything like that, and I have been studying the case for, shall we say, decades. I had looked at both skeptical and believer sites, have the complete Project Blue Book file on the case (with a copy with all the names in it), have been to Levelland, twice, and talked with a few of those who have done some original research on the case. In other, more precise words, I had done my due diligence in the research of the case so that
Levelland, Texas, Obviously.
I could say that I hadn’t seen this particular issue raised…

And yes, I know what you’re thinking. If that information was out there on a website and I didn’t find it, then how can I say I had performed my due diligence? Because there becomes a point where you have all the information necessary to properly analyze the case and what you might have missed probably isn’t all that relevant. Or, I suppose, that when the issue was raised, I was able to refute it without having to make any further study. To properly refute it, I did additional research, which, BTW, was out there for others to find. Again, if you look at my original post about this, you’ll understand what I mean. The question shouldn’t have been raised…

The real point, however, is that the information wasn’t published on the website until after I had completed my research. When I looked, on the web, for new information, this particular site did not appear in my search engine.

But I digress…

As I say, I received a very nice response from Aaron that should put this aspect of the case to rest. He wrote, “At any rate, I had to go back and re-read my article about Levelland to remember which case it was about. I must admit that even it was not my finest work. I am sure that at the time I only had access to whatever came up on google or whatever books I may have had around the house. So, I am afraid that I cannot provide a great deal of new information - and since I didn't cite my sources at the time, I don't even know what books those might have been.”

And that’s where this ends. We don’t know the sources so we can’t see what those sources might have said. We don’t know how the information was developed. We can say that it might have been someone who was writing about the case in the pre-Internet days so that he or she extrapolated from the lack of additional information about those four witnesses. Without access to the body of data I have, the writer might have thought that those witnesses had not been interviewed, or that those witnesses might have only called in reports. It might just boil down to a guess based on the lack of information and nothing particularly nefarious.

What we can do is eliminate this criticism of the case because we don’t have good information on the way it was gathered. And since I was able to find evidence that two of the witnesses had, in fact, been questioned by the police, if not by the Air Force, then we know that the criticism is inaccurate. We can leave it there. 

2 comments:

Louis Nicholson said...

Have you received a response from Robert Sheaffer to this information and what you said in Part I? I would love to see how he attempts to refute all this.

Marcos said...

Thanks Kevin for chasing this down. This makes plain my disappointment with sheaffer and his SI bunch. He could have done his homework as well, instead he takes as gospel unsubstantiated claims from another so-called skeptic, because it suits his point of view. So much for the scientific process. His dismissal of the recent Naval videos of uaps is similarly based on accepting without critical assessment, the analyses of another skeptic page. But that page has also been challenged.