Too Young to Be Believed: The White Sands Sightings

Here’s something else that really annoys me. I’ve been doing some research into the Levelland case after Robert Sheaffer mentioned that four of the witnesses had been discredited. I’m not sure discredited is the correct word, but I have discovered some problems with three of these testimonies, but that’s a discussion for another time.

This led me to the sightings at White Sands Missile Range that took place some two or three hours after the sightings in Levelland. The witnesses were military police on routine patrol and reported an object that descended onto the range and according to the testimony, including what one of them told me, the object was seen below the horizon and not all that far away. That rules out the “official” explanation, which, of course, doesn’t mean it was an alien spacecraft.

What annoyed me was the statements made by the investigating officer after the interviews. He basically rejected the testimony of the men because of their youth. Glenn Toy was 21 and James Wilbanks was only 19. The impression that because of their youth, they were naïve and impressionable. I mean, one was still a teenager and you would expect them to be overly excited by the attention being paid to them.

187th AHC on the ground. 

The problem is that the military often places great responsibility on the shoulders of the young, including teenagers. As a single example of this, I was appointed an aircraft commander at 19. I had, by that time, flown nearly 300 hours in that combat arena and had an additional 200 hours of flight time. I lead the flight more than once, and was responsible for my aircraft and the lives of the crew, not to mention the passengers.

I might mention here one other aspect of it. In our unit we called one of the helicopter pilots and aircraft commanders “Papa.” He was the oldest of the men who were assigned to the flight and was not one of the platoon leaders or the company commander. I mention this because, at that  time, Papa was… TWENTY-THREE.

The point is that you simply can’t look at the age of the person and decide that he or she is somehow less than competent. The Army looked at the skills of the soldier to decide what his or her responsibilities might be. All we have to do is look through history to see that soldiers have often reacted with intelligence, skill and courage in some nearly unimaginable situations.

You can reject the White Sands sightings of November 3, 1957, because you don’t believe in alien visitation or because you believe there is another solution that doesn’t require the invention of interstellar travel, but you can’t reject it because the witnesses were so young. In the military that is just a non-starter.