Saturday, March 09, 2024

The Latest From ARRO: More of the Same

 

There are many of us old-timers in the UFO field who have been around for more decades that we care to admit and who can see the many flaws in the latest, and probably last ARRO report, given there is a new office and new investigation into UAP. We know the flaws in that assessment and the repeated lies that lace it. We have the documentation, the interviews, and the evidence to support that claim.

Before I get into the many flaws, let me point out one area that is positive. As I was working on The Government UFO Files, I mentioned an unofficial investigation that began in December 1946. This was based on the work of Keith Chester, Wendy Connors, Michael Hall, and Michael Swords. I had noticed that each time the US government was involved in investigations of mysterious objects beginning with the World War II Foo Fighters, then the Scandinavian Ghost Rockets and finally with some strange sightings by American service members, one name came up. Colonel Howard McCoy.

According to Connors and Hall, McCoy had been given an order by General Nathan Twining to set up an unofficial project to study these reports of strange objects. Most of the information they had, and that I had, was not completely documented. Connors and Hall believed that most of the files of this early project were buried under one of the golf courses at Wright-Patterson AFB. General Arthur Exon, who had been the base commander there in the 1960s, almost confirmed this to me when I met with him at Wright-Patterson.

Brigadier General Arthur Exon


I provided more information on this in The Government UFO Files, though I had wished there were some sort of official statement confirming that early, pre-Kenneth Arnold sighting of June 1947, project. With the release of the “AARO Historical Report, Volume 1,” we learn of Project SAUCER (1946/1947 - January 1948). (No one seemed to wonder how it could have been called Project SAUCER before Arnold’s sighting, but I digress).

In the background, we learn:

AARO reviewed official USG efforts involving UFOs/UAP since 1945… The exact date of the founding of this first effort as well as its official and unofficial name are unclear. According to one source, General Nathan Twining, Commander of the Air Technical Services Command, established Project SAUCER on December 30, 1947 [I believe this should be early December (maybe the sixth 1946) to collect and evaluate all information relating to UFO sightings which could be construed as of concern to national security. Captain Edward Ruppelt claimed that Project SAUCER was the informal name of Project SIGN, and it was designated a high priority. However, in an interview with an employee of Project SIGN, the employee claimed the project started a year earlier, in 1946 and that Project SAUCER was its original informal name.

The results, according to the report, were that Project SAUCER did not find evidence of extraterrestrial technology. But that really isn’t the point here. The AARO report confirmed the information about the early beginnings of research into these strange phenomena, pushing back the beginnings of the investigation by six or seven months. Makes you wonder what had happened to cause Twining to issue the order to McCoy and why none of those files were transferred to the first of the official projects.

I’m going to skip some of the other, earlier reports on various government run UFO studies because this would become much too long. I will point out that they lumped the Green Fireballs in with the UFO reports. This was Project Twinkle, which this new report does suggest that “That the literature is not clear if Project TWINKLE was officially supported by the original Project GRUDGE, but it was managed by the USAF’s Cambridge Research Laboratory.”

The report said in the “Results” section that “This project was only able to secure one camera, which was frequently moved between locations following fireball reports, and no photographs of the fireballs were ever taken.”

The problem is that there is documentation that there was one photograph taken of a fireball. A single picture, taken from a single location wouldn’t do much to provide data about the fireballs, other than showing there were fireballs. The ultimate plan, to use multiple cameras to take pictures from multiple angles, was never implemented.

I’m going to jump over several other reports, committee recommendations and conclusions to reach what might be the most egregious example of collusion between the Air Force and an American university.

When the Project Blue Book files were released into the public arena in 1976, Bob Cornett and I were able to review them while the files were still at the Air Force Archives at Maxwell Air Force Base. We found document after document explaining how various members of the government and the Air Force were attempting to end Project Blue Book for years. This was from the top of the civilian aspects of the government, various scientific boards and committees and the highest-ranking members of the Air Force. They wanted an excuse to close Blue Book.

To that end, the Air Force, following a plan to end Blue Book, searched for a university to take on a “scientific” study UFOs. The Air Force finally found the University of Colorado to accept their half-million-dollar grant (which, according to this new report, was only $325,000) and that Dr. Edward U. Condon would lead the effort. This would be an “objective effort” to find a solution to the mystery of UFOs.

To spell this out, Lieutenant Colonel Robert Hippler sent a letter to what would be called the Condon Committee. Hippler wrote that the Air Force wanted to end Blue Book because of the cost to taxpayers. He pointed out that it was difficult to prove a negative and speculated on what an alien species would do if it was visiting Earth, though, according to him, there was no evidence of such. The point of the letter was to get the Air Force out of the hole that it found itself in. I printed the text of the Hippler letter in The UFO Dossier. And you can read more about the letter, as well some commentary about those efforts to end the Air Force investigation here:

http://kevinrandle.blogspot.com/2007/03/hippler-letter.html

Dr. Robert Low, the number two man on the Condon Committee acknowledged the letter and in the text of his response wrote, “On the second page, you indicate what you believe the Air Force wants of us, and I am very glad to have your opinion.”

The text of that response was also published in The UFO Dossier. The Air Force wanted an investigation that would show there is nothing to UFO sightings, there is nothing to be learned of scientific value and there is no threat to national security.

While it might seem that the discussion is vague, just three days after that letter was received, Condon delivered a lecture to scientists in Corning, New York, telling them, “It is my inclination right now to recommend that the government get out of this business. My attitude right now is that there is nothing in it. But I’m not supposed to reach that conclusion for another year.”

While the Condon Committee found that the Air Force had done a good job of investigating UFOs, despite the ridiculous solutions appended to some sightings (the Lubbock Lights were birds despite the photograph that wasn’t birds; Levelland was ball lightning despite all the evidence that proved it was not), that there was no threat to national security (despite the sightings around Malmstrom Air Force Base proving otherwise) and that there was nothing of scientific value to be learned by continued investigation (despite the fact one of the sightings was explained as a natural phenomenon so rare it had never been seen before or since), they recommended that the investigation be ended. In 1969, the Air Force closed Project Blue Book. Of course, they did continue to investigate some UFO sightings and there was Project Moon Dust which had a UFO component to it that persisted until 1985 when the name was compromised. At that point, there was a new name, which was, according to the Air Force, properly classified. This means that the investigations continued, but it was all classified.

Of course, the real problem with the AARO report is the take on the Roswell UFO crash. I am not sure how someone who is supposed to be investigating the topic of UFOs with a dispassionate attitude can subscribe to the Project Mogul explanation. I am going to spend a little more time on picking apart the conclusions offered for the debris recovered at Roswell.

This segment begins saying, “According to press reports, President Clinton tasked former National Security Advisor Sandy Berger to determine if the USG held aliens or alien technology. President Clinton said, ‘As far as I know, an alien spacecraft did not crash in Roswell, New Mexico in 1947… [ellipses in original] if the USAF did recover alien bodies, they didn’t tell me about it… and I want to know.’”

This would not be the first time or the only time that a president, or presidents, were not told about ongoing intelligence operations. I point to Operation Solo, in which the FBI office in New York City did not tell several presidents that there was a spy with access to the highest levels of the Soviet government. The operation was run out of New York City to protect its integrity of the operation and to keep leak happy Washington out of the loop. This was exposed after the collapse of the Soviet Union and the death of the spy, Morris Childs. The book, by John Barron, was called Operation Solo.

This doesn’t prove anything other that there have been times when information was withheld from presidents in the interest of national security. It is relevant only in proving that such things do happen, especially at the highest levels. In UFOs and the Deep State, I do mention the way that bureaucrats are able to dodge presidential inquiries.

The report then moves on to Congressman Steven Schiff, who initiated a GAO search for information from several government and military organizations about the Roswell case. This, of course, spawned an Air Force investigation into the Roswell case as well. The results were:

The [GAO] report stated that the USAF’s research did not locate or develop any information that indicated the “Roswell Incident” was a UFO event, nor was there any “cover up” by the USG. Rather, the materials recovered near Roswell were consistent with a balloon of the type used in the then-classified Project Mogul. No records showed any evidence that the USG recovered aliens or extraterrestrial material.

So, let’s break this down. First, there were several witnesses, high-ranking officers stationed at Roswell, who were not interviewed. Many of us, Bill Moore, Stan Friedman, Don Schmitt, Tom Carey, and me, to name a few, interviewed these men and had both audio and video tape of those interviews so that the validity of the quotes could be established.

Although I told Lieutenant McAndrew, who worked with Colonel Weaver that I could make all the information available, they seemed less than interested. This included a statement from Colonel Edwin Easley, the base Provost Marshal in 1947, to me about the extraterrestrial nature of the event. Specifically, I asked if we were following the right path.

Easley asked me, “What do you mean?”

“We think it was extraterrestrial.”

“Let me put it this way. It’s not the wrong path.”

Major Edwin Easley, Roswell Provost Marshal.


In fact, every member of Colonel Blanchard’s staff (Blanchard was the commanding office at Roswell in 1947) that we interviewed took us in the same direction with a single exception. I, among others, have laid this out in several books and articles, including Roswell in the 21st Century and Understanding Roswell. Yes, all this is not the sort of thing that the GAO would have uncovered, but it is evidence of something strange.

The Air Force investigation did interview some former and retired officers, but ignored those who would have provided a different perspective. I think of General Arthur Exon who provided Don Schmitt and me with some very interesting information about what had been recovered in Roswell, including descriptions of the strange metallic debris that did not match the balloon material that is supposed to be what was recovered. To be fair, Exon didn’t see the metal himself but was reporting what he had been told by those who did.

I could mention here Master Sergeant Bill Rickett who was assigned to the counterintelligence office at Roswell in 1947. He not only handled the metal and provided descriptions to several UFO researchers including Don Schmitt and Mark Rodeghier. Rickett’s testimony is in direct conflict with that of Captain Sheridan Cavitt who was the officer in charge of the counterintelligence office in 1947.

This, I suppose, boils down to a case of who do you want to believe. I’ll note here that in the interviews that Don and I conducted with Cavitt, he lied to us repeatedly, telling us that he wasn't in Roswell in July 1947. Yes, I have that quote on tape.

Which leads to the “then-classified Project Mogul.” There are many problems with this. I laid it out at length in Roswell in the 21st Century. While Mogul was classified, the experiments being conducted in New Mexico were not. The equipment was off-the-shelf neoprene weather balloons and rawin radar targets. That material would have been easily recognized by the officers at Roswell and that would have been the end of the story.

Charles Moore reviewing the winds aloft data I had
supplied. Photo by Kevin Randle


Photographs of one of the balloon arrays were published in the newspapers on July 10, 1947, which would have compromised the purpose of Mogul if anyone was paying attention. But the experiments in New Mexico were not classified and were run by a team from New York University. Although Charles Moore, one of the men working on the project in New Mexico, told me that he had never heard the name “Mogul” it was used in the field notes of Dr. Albert Crary, the man in charge of the research. Again, it was the purpose that was classified and not the experiments being conducted in New Mexico.

But here’s the real problem. It was alleged that Flight No. 4 was the culprit in this. It was to be launched on June 4, 1947, but according to the field notes, and the later analysis of the results of the flights, Flight No. 4 was cancelled. It did not fly. Later in the afternoon, those in New Mexico launched a small cluster of balloons that did not leave the confines of the ranges around Alamogordo Army Air Field or the White Sands Proving Grounds. It did not approach the Brazel (Foster) ranch where it was alleged the balloons were recovered.

What I fail to understand is how the skeptics and the scientific community can continue to demand documentation but ignore the written record that removes Flight No. 4 from the list of culprits. In other words, if the flight was cancelled, then it couldn’t have been responsible for the strange metallic debris found by Mack Brazel and some of which was recovered by Major Jesse Marcel.

I was going to end this long analysis here and provide a list of alternative sources of information, but just have to mention the last bullet point in the AARO. It said:

Reports of military units that allegedly recovered a flying saucer and its “crew” were descriptions of Air Force personnel engaged in dummy recovery operations. Claims of “alien bodies” at the Roswell Army Air Field (RAAF) hospital were most likely the result of the conflation of two incidents” a 1956 KC-97 aircraft accident in which 11 Air Force members lost their lives: and a 1959 manned balloon mishap in which two Air Force pilots were injured.

The problem here is that some of the witnesses that Don Schmitt, Tom Carey, and I interviewed over the years, weren’t stationed in Roswell at the time of these later events. They wouldn’t have been “fooled” by the tragedy of the aircraft accident or the injury of others in the years after the reported UFO crash. There is not logical way that many of them could have conflated these two incidents into their memories of what they witnessed in July 1947.

There are other aspects of the overall report that can be refuted by evidence, which I have jumped over. The Robertson Panel of 1953, sponsored by the CIA, apparently had the final report written before the first day of testimony. Michael Swords provided an in-depth analysis of this, which would render the findings of the panel as irrelevant to anyone who understood the circumstances around its creation.

I have limited this analysis to the historical aspects of the report. Others, I’m sure, will attack the later material, including the UAP research of the last few years. For those interested in following up on some of this, or looking for more detail, you can read it on this blog by typing in a keyword sure as “Mogul.” Other sources, including special articles on this blog can be found here:

http://kevinrandle.blogspot.com/2013/07/mogul-and-roswell.html

And here is a reference that not only provides additional information but also links to a series of blog posts about Mogul:

http://kevinrandle.blogspot.com/search?q=Mogul

For those interested in the Lubbock Lights that the Air Force decided was birds, here is a long article that talks about much of that:

http://kevinrandle.blogspot.com/2023/02/coast-to-coast-am-lubbock-lights.html

http://kevinrandle.blogspot.com/2019/01/historys-project-blue-book-lubbock.html

For those interested in the Levelland sightings of November 1957, might I suggest finding a copy of the book cleverly entitled Levelland. It is my analysis for that sighting as well as a look at the history about those sightings.

Condon and his committee never did much with the Levelland sightings. They are barely mentioned. Here is a new perspective on that aspect (and yes, I know it is supposed to be just UAP without the “S,” but I find that proofreading is not my strongest skill:

http://kevinrandle.blogspot.com/2022/08/nasa-and-uaps-ufos.html

And for a general overview of much of this, you can find information at this link. Yes, some of it will be redundant:

http://kevinrandle.blogspot.com/2022/11/the-latest-on-government-uap-report.html

I have published several books relevant to this conversation for those who wish to really to learn as much as possible. I would suggest, in no particular order, Understanding Roswell, Roswell in the 21st Century (which contains a long analysis of the whole Mogul history,  Levelland, UFOs and the Deep State, and The Government UFO Files. You might also wish to look at the Carey and Schmitt books beginning with Witness to Roswell, and you might be interested in the book written by Colonel Weaver, the man who conducted the Air Force investigation called Backstory: Roswell. You might also wish to find a copy of the Air Force Report, The Roswell Report that contains much information about Project Mogul and the field notes and diaries kept by Dr. Albert Crary, that proved there was no Flight No. 4.

There are many other sources of information, but I’ll sure this is much more than most people wish to read. I mention all this to provide a sample of the work that I, among others, have done on this. If there are other questions, use the search engine on my blog, kevinrandle.blogspot.com.

6 comments:

  1. Kevin: Thank you very much for this posting. I was hoping the AARO release would spur you to post again, and myself along with many, many others I feel certain, are pleased as peach that you have taken up the gauntlet once more.

    Thank you and welcome back!

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  2. Good Afternoon, Dr. Randle.

    I hope you are feeling better and are recovering well from your treatment.
    I appreciate your writing this article. The "new" information in the recent Defense Department's UAP report is depressingly obvious and contains too much of the same old party line. Much of it seems word-for-word the same as instructions issued to AF personnel back in 1949-1950.

    We have access to documents that show clearly the manner in which the AF officials were to discuss, and not discuss the UFO issue. We learned that in January of 1949, Colonel Watson was told not to give out the real information when asked. The top brass offered up exacting statements to be followed, with blanks in the parts where actual sighting data was to be inputted. And actually, the interest in the psyops part of it was called for, by the Air Technical Intelligence Center, long before the CIA got more involved (Robertson Panel, etc.). ATIC always seemed more interested in how the Flying Disc information could be utilized for psychological warfare, rather than what the information actually implied for us regular humans.

    In the mean time, the Army was conducting a secret investigation into the Flying Discs, but you hardly ever hear about it from writers on the subject.

    On a better, more positive note, I just finished my first read-through of Linda C. Powell's recent offering about Donald Keyhoe: "Against the Odds; Major Donald E. Keyhoe and His Battle to end UFO Secrecy". I very much recommend this book! Linda Powell did an excellent job at researching the topic. We need more books like this...now more than ever.

    Thanks again for the article, and as always, wishing you wellness.

    -Robert Koford

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  3. (1 of 2)

    First of all, welcome back Kevin!

    The AARO report got my blood boiling again too. Hence the following screed from a quick read.

    Sean Kirkpatrick last January foreshadowed what AARO was going to say about Roswell, namely instead of doing a real independent investigation, simply adopting what AF counterintelligence said happened back in the 1990s in order to derail Congressman Schiff's inquiry for his NM constituents. So Roswell was again a nonexistent Mogul balloon flight that they invented out of thin air, along with time traveling wooden crash dummies from the 1950s and an aircraft accident from 1956.

    I noticed a number of obvious omissions from this cursory history and often disingenuous distortions of studies. E.g., the 1947 Twining memo after Roswell was never mentioned but was highly important, since Twining declared the flying discs real, not imaginary, described their anomalous shape and flight characteristics, and urged an obvious back-engineering effort involving multiple government R&D groups, which were included in the distribution list. The memo was based primarily on the conclusions of the various engineering departments at Wright Field and was a key step in getting Project Sign initiated.

    Or AF Reg 200-2 by Twining in 1953 when he was now AF C/S, defining UFOs (anomalous shapes and/or flight characteristics, not identifiable even after investigation by their experts) and stating they were to be studied for national security reasons and their "technical aspects." The “technical aspects” again suggests interest in back-engineering. Also how the press was only to be informed of solutions for cases, but not to be informed of more puzzling cases, only that they were under investigation. There was also a directive to reduce the unknowns to a minimum. (After which the “unknowns”, plummeted from over 20% of cases down to 1 or 2% a year.)

    AARO did mention Project Blue Book Special Report #14 by the Battelle Memorial Institute, but disingenuously badly misrepresented the substance of the report, claiming: "It concluded that all cases that had enough data were resolved and readily explainable. The report assessed that if more data were available on cases marked unknown, most of those cases could be explained as well." This was simply a flagrant lie.

    Instead it was a team of 4 Battelle scientists going through all of PBB's 3200 cases to date. All four had to agree that there was no plausible solution in order for the case to be labeled "Unknown", but only two had to agree on a solution for it to be labeled "Known". Still after this stringent criterion, 22% remained "Unknown". And this number went up to 35% for those cases labeled as "Excellent", i.e., having ample data to determine what they were and the best witnesses, vs. only 18% for the "Poor" cases. This is the exact opposite from AARO's claim that all cases with good data could be "readily explained", and nearly all cases could be explained if only they had more data. In fact, BBSR#14 had a separate category for cases with "insufficient information" to make a determination, numbering 9%. These were neither "Known" nor "Unknown" cases. Even among the 69% deemed "Known", 31% were still considered "doubtfully" explained.

    AARO did mention that Battelle analyzed six characteristics. But then they curiously omitted the fact that they found a highly statistically significant difference between the "Knowns" and "Unknowns". In 5 of the 6 characteristics, the odds that they were the same were less than 1%. Across all six, the odds were less than 1 in a billion. The late Stan Friedman touted BBSR#14 for good reason. At the very least, it demonstrated a high probability that UFOs (the "Unknowns") overall did not have a conventional explanation, and it wasn't because the data was inadequate.

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  4. (2 of 2)
    They also did an extremely cursory examination of other country UFO investigations. They mentioned, e.g., the decades-long French investigation, but failed to mention it was done within the French space agency (CNES). Their summary is also highly misleading: "When it dissolved, SERPA [sic] concluded that the vast majority of cases possess ordinary explanations, while 28 percent of its caseload remained unresolved. None of these organizations have found evidence of extraterrestrial visitations to Earth."

    In reality, of 1600 cases examined, only 42% were actually labeled identified (only 9% as definite, 33% as probable), thus NOT "the vast majority". 30% were labeled unidentified due to lack of sufficient information (junk cases), thus neither explained or unexplained, while the 28%, which they say "remained unresolved", were the unidentifieds that DID have sufficient information, and still did not have “ordinary explanations”. While the parent organization did not give an opinion as to the nature of the true UFOs, three of the directors publicly stated these were hard core cases which they believed couldn’t be explained (or ultimately “resolved”) and were most likely ET in origin.

    There is no mention of the 1999 French COMETA Report, although not an official French government investigation, was nonetheless done primarily by high-level military intelligence analysts and then submitted to the French government. They concluded about 5% of the cases they examined were unexplained and most likely extraterrestrial in origin. (This included Roswell.) They also accused the US government of a massive coverup.

    No mention of the 1946 "ghost rocket" wave in Europe, the first major post-war UFO wave. If they had discussed this, they could have mentioned the USAF Europe was briefed by Swedish intelligence in 1948 that many of their analysts also believed the ghost rockets and later flying saucers were extraterrestrial in origin. (In a Top Secret document that was classified for nearly 50 years.) Or they could have mentioned that Greek physicist Paul Santorini, who led the Greek military investigation, would later publicly state they were forced to stop their inquiry because U.S. officials told them they already knew the objects were extraterrestrial and were too advanced to have any defense against.

    No mention of the totally unexplained Belgium UFO wave of 1989-1990 of large triangles (maybe several thousand witnesses, including many police), Rendlesham 1980, Tehran 1976, Colares Brazil 1977-1978, thoroughly documented by Brazilian military intelligence, and many, many other inexplicable cases.

    Most mysterious of all, why are there all these government UFO studies all over the world if there is absolutely nothing to it? It sounds like many governments and militaries, including the U.S., were treating UFOs as something very important, worthy of repeated, serious and often secret study. Why no fairy or leprechaun studies? Maybe because they don't show up on radar, cameras, infrared and microwave sensors, cause EM interference including the jamming of radios and weapons systems, stall internal combustion engines, leave landing traces, cause spiked radiation readings and radiation poisoning, cause other physiological effects, intrude in sensitive military areas, especially those having to do with nukes, etc., etc.

    That’s why the USAF used to have “UFO officers” at bases to order jet intercepts and write up reports, and not leprechaun officers. There is no equivalent Twining memo or AFR 200-2 saying leprechauns are real and are to be investigated for national security reasons and their technical aspects. Presidents dating back to at least Truman have been briefed on UFOs but not leprechauns.

    And they left out Project Moon Dust, a very real, very secret space object crash retrieval program. They weren’t just going after Russian satellites. But Kevin is the expert on that. A whole book could be written on what AARO omitted from or badly distorted in UFO history.

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  5. Great post. You say that you have tapes of interviews from people. Would you be willing to publish the contents of those tapes? That would be a real disclosure for sure.

    Take care.

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  6. Example: [Similar to Condon Report, in that it was decided ahead of time]

    From Project GRUDGE files
    12 October 1950
    Memorandum For The record
    "...1. To advise Col Watson, AMC, concerning proper proceedure for handling unidentified aerial object rerports...On 9 Oct 50, Gen Moore instructed Col Harris, AFOIV-TC, to telephone Col Watson...the following may be released:

    "We have investigated and evaluated _____________________ incident and have found nothing of value and nothing which would change our previous estimates on this subject".

    Cont:

    "5. Intelligence Dept, AMC was further advised that, should results of such incidents contain information of any technical intelligence value, they should not be released but should be sent to D/I, Hq, USAF.

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