Brigadier General Arthur Exon and J. Bond Johnson

The other day I was interviewed by Whitley Strieber for his radio show/podcast about my book, Encounter in the Desert. I mentioned the book just because I could and hope that some of you will be inspired to buy it.

Anyway…

During the course of the interview, we touched on the Roswell UFO crash case, and he mentioned Brigadier General Arthur Exon who had become one of the important witnesses in the case. He said that Exon was a witness that Stan Friedman had found but I said, “No,” I had discovered Exon (this is

BG Arthur Exon

something that has happened before… Friedman getting credit for something he hadn’t done, and yes, I can provide other examples).

Naturally, he asked how I had learned of Exon, and I explained that J. Bond Johnson had mentioned the name to me and I had tracked him down, calling him in 1990. But, that got me to thinking about all this and I went back to my notes and files about the interviews with Exon.

For those who don’t know, I had called him, but rather than mention Roswell, I said that I was interested in tracking some of the information about ATIC and Project Blue Book, retrieval operations or four separate incidents, figuring that once we got into the topic of UFOs, we could expand from that.

After we had discussed those incidents, which had nothing to do with Roswell and the name of the town hadn’t even been mentioned, we did finally get to the meat of the interview. Most of that isn’t all that important here. I did ask him if he had heard about the rumors of little bodies and he said, “Well, yes, I have. In fact, I know people that were involved in photographing some of the residue from the New Mexico affair near Roswell.”

And that was the first mention of Roswell in the conversation.

I asked if this was from 1947 and he said, “Yeah. It was in the late 40s.”

He then said, “What they had done… this fellow was in [the] PR business apparently in command there at Roswell at the time of the sighting was found when the rancher reported it and some of the people as you obviously know collected a good bit of the information and took it into the commander’s office and took photographs. This fellow took the photographs of the residue. I’m talking about metal and stuff.”

I suppose you all can figure out the next question I asked. “Do we know his name?”

Exon said, “His name is Johnson. He lives here in Long Beach…”

Naturally, I said, “I know him. James Bond Johnson.”

Exon said that he didn’t know him all that well but did say that he had his telephone number. I already had that as well.

Yes, I know what you all are thinking but that interview took place on May 19, 1990, before we all learned the truth about Johnson and his ever-shifting story. At the time I knew that Johnson held a commission and was a colonel in the Reserve. I hadn’t really thought about this in a long time, and in 1990, I didn’t realize the importance of the statement.

And, to be fair, I did provide copies of the transcript to several people including Philip Klass, Karl Pflock, Don Schmitt and Tom Carey. One page was missing from that I had sent Klass, and I replaced it. The point is that these people, and probably a couple more have had this information almost from the time that I collected it. Had the Air Force, during their investigation contacted me about Roswell, I would have sent them copies of the tape. In fact, I offered copies of a number of the taped interviews to them, but they seem uninterested in them. I always thought it was because they didn’t want to have to attack the reputation of a general officer.  Had they taken the tapes, they would have had all this information as well.

The other thing here is that Exon was right about knowing one of the photographers who took pictures of the residue. Johnson did take them and it was from Johnson that I got Exon’s name. I shared that information with Stan Friedman when were both in Roswell to film the segment of Unsolved Mysteries that dealt with Roswell.

What is the take away here?

Exon’s information about the photographer isn’t startling, and in fact, is somewhat depressing. Johnson took pictures of the weather balloon debris in General Ramey’s office. He didn’t photograph anything of overwhelming importance. Exon provided some additional details, but the fact of the matter is, that Johnson didn’t photograph an alien spacecraft and Exon’s statements didn’t do anything to provide additional information on this aspect of the case…

But I’ll bet my skeptical pals will suggest this is another reason that we should not place any emphasis on Exon’s statements. This is another example of how jumbled his memories were nearly a half century after the fact.

(For those who would like to but the book, Encounter in the Desert, you can find it here:

https://www.amazon.com/Encounter-Desert-Alien-Contact-Socorro/dp/1632651130/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1513042152&sr=8-1&keywords=encounter+in+the+desert

Thanks.)

General Exon and Disappearing Airplanes

Since I’m off on this General Exon rant, I thought I’d add another level to it. As I went back over the material that I had gathered in all forms which are the telephone interviews, emails and letters, and a personal meeting at Wright-

Arthur Exon

Patterson Air Force Base, I came across some information that hadn’t really registered at the time (though I did provide Philip Klass with a complete transcript of the interview, so he missed it too). It does, however, affect the overall importance of the information that he provided about the Roswell UFO crash.

First, a bit of a back story here. In my conversations with him, he mentioned that he was going to be at Wright-Pat for a golf tournament. Since Ohio is a lot closer to my home than California, I arranged to meet him there. He had suggested a time and I was at the front gate early enough that I wouldn’t miss him. The security police were checking IDs and asking for those of us who wished to enter the base to have some sort of a sponsor. I called Exon (in these pre-cell phone days), but there was no answer in the VOQ (Visiting Officer’s Quarters). Though I hadn’t wanted to do it I finally flashed my military ID, which, of course, negated the problem. Since I had an Air Force ID card (at the time I was still serving with the Air Force), they had no problem with me entering the base unescorted, and issued the temporary pass for me and my vehicle.

I drove to the VOQ, knocked on the door, but there was no answer. We’d had an appointment, but it seemed he was not interested in keeping it. As I turned to leave, he stepped into the hall, returning to his quarters. Trapped, so to speak, he had no choice but to go to lunch as we had planned. I always wondered why, after agreeing to meet me, he worked so hard to dodge me. He hadn’t counted on me having a military ID so that I could enter the base unescorted.

I’m not sure of the relevance of this little anecdote, but relate it anyway. I wondered if he had been “talked” to by some of his pals at a higher level, or if there had been an official visit of some sort that cautioned him about talking with us about UFOs and Roswell. That doesn’t prove that what he said was the whole truth, only that someone might not have appreciated his candor in talking with me and some of those others.

Now, on to the real point here. In my first conversation with him, back on May 19, 1990, he told me about four aircraft that had disappeared as they attempted to intercept a UFO. Given that, I had asked, “All four of airplanes disappeared?”

He said, “Yeah. And they don’t know what happened. If they went out oversees or out over the water which was not likely.”

“They were scrambled out of Kentucky?”

“Kentucky or Tennessee,” he said. “There were four of them that were scrambled. They were all lost.”

I asked, “Nobody ever found any wreckage or have any clues as to what happened to them?”

“That’s right. Not that I know of. That’s all been investigated before and it’s a matter of record and it’s kind of a mysterious thing.”

Well, it’s not a matter of any record that I can find. In all my searching, I never came across a story of four aircraft, scrambled to identify an intruder, that disappeared in the way he described. Exon said that it had happened in the mid-1950s, when he was assigned to the Pentagon, so he thought that was where the story originated.

My theory on this is that Exon was talking about Mantell. I say this because four aircraft were involved in the intercept and that it took place in Kentucky. Other than that, there isn’t much of a match. None of the planes disappeared and only Mantell was lost. Although we don’t know exactly what happened, there is a good theory about that.

I suppose an alternative theory is that this had something to do with the Flatwoods UFO case from September 1952, but there is no good documentation about aircraft disappearing in the big fur ball (fighter pilot talk for the aerial dogfight) that allegedly took place).

At any rate, I have found nothing that truly fits in with what Exon said. I think these were fragmented memories put together as people asked him questions about UFOs and what he knew about them. Bits of things that he overheard and put together but were unrelated. Aircraft scrambled to intercept UFOs, aircraft in Kentucky crashing while chasing UFOs, and aircraft disappearing over water (think Flight 19 and the Bermuda Triangle).

While this doesn’t overly affect what he said about other aspects of the UFO phenomena, we do have the notes that suggest his discussion of the UFO investigative teams which was technically true is not completely accurate. This is the problem when we begin to access memories that are decades old. Sometimes they are accurate, sometimes they are partially true, and sometimes they are cobbled together from fragments that might not be connected. It’s why documentation from the era is so important. Without that, we end up with some truly interesting tales that might not be completely grounded in reality.

X-Zone Broadcast Network - Don Schmitt

Don Schmitt. Photo copyright by
Kevin Randle

This week I noted that the show has been on the air for a year.  I spoke with Don Schmitt. We covered the Roswell festival and how it had evolved into more of a circus than a symposium on what had happened in Roswell so long ago. The city sees it as a way of attracting tourists and the International UFO Museum and Research Center thinks of it as more of an opportunity to contribute something to UFO research. You can listen to the show here:

https://youtu.be/t1GAupYNIIw

We did touch on the article that I had just published about Brigadier General Arthur Exon and his discussion of special teams deployed to investigate UFOs. It suggests the Air Force was taking the problem a little more seriously than they would have us all believe. For those of you too lazy to scroll down through one article, you can read the post here:

http://kevinrandle.blogspot.com/2017/08/arthur-exon-and-investigative-teams.html

We also talked, briefly about the beginnings of MUFON and how Walt Andrus had started the organization in the late 1960s. We did lament the slow evolution from a UFO research group into a platform for too many New Age messages, but then, that was just us.

Next week’s show: “A Look Back at the Last Year.” 

Arthur Exon and the Investigative Teams

As happens all too often, as I’m searching for something else, I stumble onto a document that helps explain information I had found in the past. Brigadier General Arthur Exon, who was the Wright-Patterson Air Force Base commander, a position similar to that of a mayor, told me during an interview on May 19, 1990, that he was responsible for dispatching aircraft to carry investigators to important

Brigadier General Arthur Exon.

UFO sightings. He said:

Well, the way this happened to me is that I would get a call and say that the crew or the team was leaving and they knew… there was such and such a time they wanted an airplane and pilots to take “X” number of people to wherever, you know. They might be gone two or three days or might be gone a week. The would come back and that would be the end of it. So, there would be certain people in FTD [ATIC evolved into FTD in 1961] that would lay the missions on… I know they went out to Montana and Wyoming and the northwest states a number of times in a year and a half… They went to Arizona once or twice.

These special teams, or these people, would apparently come from around the United States and their assignment was to investigate a UFO sighting according to Exon. He didn’t have much in the way of details about these special flights, but the implication I took away from this was that the teams, or the team members, were a specially trained group who were investigating UFOs at a higher level than Project Blue Book. It was clear that they weren’t part of the Blue Book operation.

We (Don Schmitt and I, who first interviewed Exon) asked if the men were assigned to Wright-Patterson. Exon said, “No. They would come from Washington, D.C.” He also said that the team would be made up of eight, maybe fifteen people, the number probably dictated by the sighting they were investigating. The idea was that if anyone checked, they would learn that the team had been dispatched from Wright-Patterson as a way of disguising the nature of this somewhat secret activity.

During my interview with Exon, I wanted to know if he knew who the controlling agency or agencies were. I thought FTD was one of those agencies, but Exon said, “I don’t know they were controlling but I know where the assignments came from.”

I asked, “That was basically your control? FTD?”

He said, simply, “Yeah.”

The conclusions that I drew, and the conclusions that Don drew, were that teams, controlled at a different level, but that were not assigned to Blue Book were called in for special investigations. This, according to Exon, was in 1960 and 1961.

But it turns out, according to the documentation that I have just found, this assumption is not true. Oh, the documents were there in the Project Blue Book files for anyone to find who scanned through the boxes and boxes of data as it is contained on microfilm. As, I say, I was looking for something else when I found this.

According to the documents, in a draft of a staff study that was declassified in 1969 but suggested in a document dated December 17, 1958, that:

To provide a flexible investigative force which will not cause a particular drain on any one office within ATIC [think FTD at this point] the Commander has approved the establishment of a volunteer force which will work under the direction of the Aerial Phenomena Group of the Air Science Division when actually engaged in field investigation of UFO sightings. The general ground rules for their employment are as follows:

A total group of from 18 to 20 volunteers will be selected from company grade officers [lieutenants and captains] and NCO’s presently assigned within ATIC. This group will for the most part be people who do not have much opportunity to travel during the normal course of their duties. Once selected they will be given a 20 hour course of instruction in interrogative and investigative procedures and will be checked out on equipment pertinent thereto [the class syllabus was included in the documentation]. Once trained two of these individuals will be placed on alert each week to undertake such investigations as may arise during the week. Orders required for TDY [temporary duty] travel will be processed by the Aerial Phenomena Group citing funds programmed by that Group for such travel. A separate project nick-named “Horse Fly” [which is the first time that I have heard of this project] will be established to provide military airlift for investigators to and from the nearest Air Force installation to point of UFO sighting. Flyaway kits of equipment will be issued by and specific flight arrangements will be made by the Aerial Phenomena Group.

It is estimated that each investigator can plan on about 5 TDY trips of 3 days duration per year.

FTD Building at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base.
Photo courtesy of USAF.

The officer who signed the document was William E. Boyd, who was a colonel at the time and listed as the Chief of Staff at ATIC. Although what I found was a draft, there was additional discussion about this later but it apparently was implemented. While the suggestion is that the alert teams would be made up of two individuals, there was nothing in the original document to suggest that the deployment teams were restricted to the two people on alert. This sounds suspiciously like the teams that Exon spoke about when he talked to me, though he seemed to have overestimated the size. They didn’t come from Washington, D.C as he suggested, but they were not all consolidated in a single office within ATIC. They would come from a number of locations within ATIC to deploy into the field.

Given that the documents were originally classified (confidential, I believe), and given the nature of the assignment, I don’t believe that there was any reason for Exon to have denied the request for the assets needed. It would have come from inside ATIC [or later FTD], or possibly from the Pentagon, authorizing the use of military equipment to move the personnel into the field. Since it involved specific intelligence, which in this case would be a UFO sighting or landing, there would be no reason to brief Exon on the specific mission. The request would have the proper authorization, and in fact, given the nature of it, and the various authorizations approved, there would be no reason for Exon to handle this personally. Someone on his staff could certainly have made the arrangements and if there were questions about the authorizations, those might have been bumped up to Exon for resolution, but I doubt that would be necessary. This suggests the reason that Exon was rather vague on the nature of the assignments. He wouldn’t be doing the work himself, one of his staff did, and Exon was probably briefed on this, as he would be on other aspects of the operations at Wright-Patterson that fell under his area of authority. At the time, this would not have been a big deal, but the routine movement of assets to a location where their expertise would be of value.

This means, I suppose, that we shouldn’t draw any specific conclusions about the nature of these teams, simply because we now know about their formation, their purpose, and their deployments. They were sent to investigate UFO sightings that would require the expertise that these officers and NCOs brought to the table based on their 20 hours of classroom work so that they knew, at least in a rudimentary sense, what they were doing.

What I don’t know at this point is where their reports would have been sent. Probably to the Aerial Phenomena Group, which would have been housed at ATIC and then FTD when the name change came about. All I really know is that the teams were formed and were apparently deployed on a number of investigations. While all this is interesting, it seems to lessen the importance of the information supplied by Exon, but it does give another avenue of investigation. It will be interesting to see if I can find the results of those investigations that Exon mentioned.