June Crain - Witness?

 

Over the last few years, June Crain has appeared as one of those who handled the metallic debris that has been dubbed memory metal, and she claimed inside knowledge of the events surrounding the Roswell crash. She also claimed to have information about the alien bodies that had been recovered and their transport to Wright Field. Unfortunately, much of this information about her is inaccurate.

On April 18, 1990, June Crain, or as she signed her name then, June Kaba, wrote to me after I appeared on Unsolved Mysteries. The call center there provided her with my address and she wrote, “I will send you info on the flying saucer men at WPAFB [Wright-Patterson AFB] referred to in ‘Unsolved Mysteries’ on TV.”

She added, “I first want you to send me a letter assuring me you will keep my identity a secret. When I tell you the reason for the secrecy, I think you will understand why no one will tell you about the ‘little green men’ at WPAFB.”

I wrote back to her that I would not reveal any information about her. While I didn’t reveal her name, she did, eventually contact other UFO researchers without invoking the caveat that she remain anonymous. One of them did release her name but I suspect it was because she allowed it. No matter now, she passed away in 1997.

She wrote back and told me the story of hearing about the alien creatures that were taken to Wright-Pat. She wrote:

We at WPAFB-WADC [Wright Air Development Center] at Dayton, Ohio, Wright Field would meet for coffee in one of the lab offices before we went to work and chat. We were all people cleared for Top Secret plus and we would feel free and at ease talking among ourselves. I worked in Parachute lab (later Rocketry).

This particular morning things were really on a buzz. When I got there at 7:45 AM. the scoop was that two little greenish men from a wrecked flying saucer had been flown into the base during the night and were in a freezer locker in one of the hangers (sic) and that Aero Med lab had charge of them for examination. The person who was doing the talking seemed to know what he was talking about.

Time to go to work and everyone still excited over the happening.

Approximately at 9:30 a memo was hand carried and each of us had to read it and sign it. This was the jist (sic) of the memo:

Some irresponsible person has started a false rumor about 2 green men from Flying Saucer. This is nothing but a rumor and has no truth. Anyone repeating this rumor will be liable for dismissal and will be liable for $20,000 fine or 20 years in jail.

This memo was over the signature of Laboratory chief.

Needless to say all talk stopped and I never heard anything about it again.

I have kept this to myself for nearly 40 years but I have always wondered what the real story was.

She said nothing else about this, or the flying saucer crash, but did provide some information about others who have seen UFOs. She mentioned that she had seen them on two occasions. She supplied the basics of those sightings, but frankly, I wasn’t interested in more saucers in the sky. I was interested in the little green men being housed at Wright-Pat.

There were some problems with her story. First was the lack of a date for the “little green men” tale. She seemed to have assumed it was Roswell. Or maybe that was my assumption in the beginning because I knew of no other crash stories that resulted in the recovery of bodies that were reliable.

One of the red flags was her claim that she had a top-secret clearance and that before beginning work, others with such high clearances sat around chatting. The implication was that the shared some of those secrets because they all had the clearances. But it just doesn’t work that way and those of us who have held top secret clearances know it. Along with having the proper clearance, you also need to have a need to know. If something classified as top secret is shared with someone without their need to know, then this is a violation of the regulations.

Later, in an interview conducted by Jim Clarkson, she would tell him more about her high-level clearances. She said, “And I had top secret clearance and later then finally gave me ‘Q’ clearance which is what at that time was the highest clearance that you could have, because I was in very sensitive, doing very sensitive work.”

Clearly, she didn’t know what a “Q” clearance was then, or what it is now. It is not a higher level of a top-secret clearance but what is known as DOE security clearance that is equivalent to a DoD top secret clearance. The “Q” relates to atomic or nuclear related materials. Many of those at the Roswell Army Air Field had “Q” clearances because they worked, or had the potential to work, with atomic weapons. But a low-level secretary who worked at Wright-Patterson in an office that had nothing to do with atomic energy wouldn’t be granted a “Q” clearance. It sounds impressive, but in this case it is untrue.

Clarkson, in his research, could only verify that Crain held a secret clearance. Every officer, with very few exceptions, has a secret clearance. Nearly every top-level NCO will have, at least a secret clearance, and depending on the job, many lower ranking soldiers have secret clearances as well. On the other hand, top secret clearances are a different matter, and there is no evidence that June Crain had such a clearance.

We run into another problem here and that is attempting to learn exactly when that soldier, who she later said was a master sergeant, had appeared in her office. Or rather the problem is what UFO crash she was talking about. Remember she said, “…that two little greenish men from a wrecked flying saucer had been flown into the base during the night…” That statement eliminates Roswell.

How do I know? Because the documentation available shows that she was first employed at Wright-Patterson on July 3, 1942, and according to the reporting of others she had stayed on the job until May 2, 1952. However, she didn’t work there continually for those ten years. After just under a year on the job, on June 30, 1943, she quit to have a baby. This is the first major gap in her employment.

On May 13, 1948, she was again hired at Wright Field, but left on July 21, 1948, after about eight weeks, because of ill-health. And her final employment there was from March 8, 1951 until May 2, 1952, or just a little over a year.

Her total employment at Wright-Patterson AFB was just under three years, spread out over that ten-year period. And, since she wasn’t employed there in July 1947, when, if we have the information right, the alien bodies were brought in, the master sergeant couldn’t have told her that they had just flown them in because she didn’t work there at the time. This is one of the reasons that Don Schmitt and I dropped her as a witness.

There is not a reported UFO crash at the times that she worked at Wright Field or Wright-Patterson AFB. The closest is the alleged Aztec crash in March 1948, but even that is six or eight weeks too early for her.

In discussing the bodies arriving at Wright-Pat, Crain displays a total lack of understanding about the military protocols on aircraft. In an effort to make the master sergeant sound more important, she said, “… but the person that brought them in, he was a master sergeant, and you understand that when a military airplane takes off, there’s always an enlisted man in charge. You know that, don’t you?”

She compounds the error, saying, “So, when an airplane takes off, until the moment that the plane takes off the ground the military personnel, the officer, is in charge of the airplane. But the moment it is off the ground, the enlisted man has charge of the airplane until she lands.”

This is, of course, complete nonsense. In Army aviation, as in other military branches, the officer in charge is the aircraft commander. He or she might not be the senior officer on board, but in all things aboard the aircraft during its operation, the aircraft commander is in charge, not some enlisted soldier. As but a single example of this, I was a warrant officer in Vietnam. I was appointed an aircraft commander and often times, the co-pilot was a higher-ranking officer, probably a first lieutenant or a captain. The aircraft commander was appointed based on his experience in Vietnam and number of hours of flight time and not based on his rank.

Crain’s comments about who was in charge of the aircraft are inaccurate, which is not to say that the load master or the flight engineer, depending on the specific task, might be in charge of getting certain tasks completed while on the ground. However, at no time were either of them in charge. That is the role of the aircraft commander who is always an officer.

In my communications with her, there is nothing to suggest that she had seen any bits of memory metal. She stuck with the tale of hearing about the two little bodies brought into Wright-Patterson. According to her, another soldier showed up sometime later and told her that he had a piece of the spaceship. She said that he told her, “I just came back from New Mexico and I brought it back with me.”

She provided a description of the metal, saying that it was super strong. It was some of the memory metal that others had talked about. The problem here, is the same with the bodies and that’s the timing. There is no way that he could have gotten his hands on any of the metal when she said he had just come back from New Mexico. She simply didn’t work at Wright-Pat at anytime to make this tale plausible.

Finally, she said that she had been a high-level secretary at Wright-Pat and that was why she allegedly had a top-secret security clearance. Documents she supplied to me simply do not bear this out. In a document dated March 16, 1951, during her last employment at the air base, she is rated as a GS-3, which is among the lowest. These were considered entry level positions then and now the GS-3 rating is assigned to an intern or student. While she might have held the secret clearance that Clarkson verified for her, she would not have had the top-secret clearance she claimed.

June Crain (Cubbage) pay sheet showing her employment grade.

There is enough wrong with what she said, what the documentation proved, and the timing of the various events, that she is eliminated as a witness. She had an interest in UFOs, and contrary to what Clarkson said, she did have books about UFOs. I know because I sent her some in the early 1990s.

This is a chapter in our search for information and evidence that we can now ignore. I would suggest that her tales be relegated to a footnote, but we now have so many of those such as Gerald Anderson, Glenn Dennis and Frank Kaufmann, that we don’t need another one cluttering up the landscape.