The Kingman Crash and the Mystery Letter

 

Kingman, Arizona in the late 1990s.

As those who visit here regularly know, I sometimes chase footnotes to the original source and sometime I chase other information to a primary source. In the last several weeks, as I worked on a new UFO book, I was engaged in communications with others about the Kingman crash. This was not about Arthur Stansel, the man who started the story after his interview with two teenagers, Jeff Young and Paul Chetham, and then with Ray Fowler, but follow on information and alleged additional witnesses.

This has to do with the tales told by Judie Woolcott who claimed that her late husband, an Army officer killed in Vietnam in 1965, had written to her and told her about his involvement in the crash. She said that he had been in a control tower in northwestern Arizona when the object hit the ground. He, along with several others, drove out, in the direction of a bright flash that interested them, finally finding it. They were chased from the site by military police after being warned not to talk about what they had seen.

I received a telephone call and later an email from Kathryn Baez, who was Woolcott’s daughter. She wrote, “My Step Father, William Woolcott, served in the Navy off the coast of Vietnam, however, they were never considered Vietnam Veterans.”

I’m not sure why they weren’t considered Vietnam Veterans if they served off the coast of Vietnam, but that’s another problem. According to the email, dated June 1, 2010, she wrote, “He is very much alive and living in Wausau.”

She added that her mother didn’t know Woolcott until 1980. Both those facts seemed to rule him out as the source of the extraordinary information provided by Judie about the Kingman crash.

As I have mentioned in older posts, David Rudiak and I, had been chasing down some of this information over the summer. David came up with another name and an explanation why Judie Woolcott might have lied about who sent the letter to her from Vietnam.

David found a website hosted by someone who called himself, “The Wanderling,” who might have identified the real source of that mythical letter. According The Wanderling, he said the man who sent the letters wasn’t married to Woolcott, but was a soldier and close friend who was killed in Vietnam in 1965.

David thought the man, an Army captain whose name might have been Charles Alan Roberts, and who was killed in Vietnam in 1965, might have been the author the letter. David’s research did put the man in Vietnam in the mid-1960s and confirmed that he had been killed in action.

But there was a complication to this speculation. According to his military record, which I discovered online a couple of weeks ago, he had been in the Army but was discharged in December 1952. From 1953 to 1955, he was attending New Mexico A&M which became New Mexico State University in Las Cruces. The record puts him nowhere near an air control tower in Kingman in 1953 and rules him out as the writer of the letter that Woolcott never produced.

Woolcott supposedly lied about him being her husband because they had a thing going on and she didn’t want the family to learn about it. The alleged letter was not released by Woolcott because of that personal information. She was hiding it from her then current husband or her family or maybe the government because of those personal comments. It is just one more claim of corroboration that seems to have vanished into the mists of time.

Oh, there is one other thing that Baez mentioned in an email dated June 7, 2010. Her mother, Judie, was a teenager in 1953 and in school. It seems unlikely that she would have developed a relationship with a man who had been in the Army in 1952 and later college.

I’ll mention again, that there is now a single first-hand witness to the Kingman crash, the wholly (I nearly wrote holy) unreliable Arthur Stansel.

The Mellon email that started this hunt.

Yes, I realize that this will not drive the stake through the heart of the Kingman case, but the recent support provided by Christopher Mellon, makes you wonder about his insider status. There simply are no reliable witnesses to any Kingman crash… which, I suppose I should note means that I haven’t found any but they might be out there, lurking somewhere. Unless or until they surface, the only logical conclusion is the case is a hoax originally created by Arthur Stansel as he chatted with the boys back in 1973 and drank a bunch of martinis.