David Grusch, UFO Crashes and Analysis (Updated June 12, 2023) (Updated June 13, 2023)

While Canada burns down and it seems that the leaders and former leaders of this country are accused, and in some cases indited, for breaking various federal laws, there are those more interested in crashed UFOs, or as is becoming the more correct term, UAPs. David Charles Grusch, whose credentials have been cited by many as impressive, claimed that the US Government has, in its possession, recovered alien spacecraft and the bodies of the alien crew. Overlooked here is the fact that he also said that he could produce no documents or pictures because of national security. I’ll concede that if he had pictures of aliens or alien spacecraft, that would be a national security issue.

Even without naming names and without the documentation, Grusch had been greeted with enthusiasm rather than skepticism by most of the mainstream media. Few worried about the lack of verifiable sources and fewer still mentioned it. Now, Michael Shellenberger issued his own statement saying that he knew of, at least, a dozen downed alien craft and that every five years we get one or two recovered for one reason and another. An unnamed source supposedly shared this information with AARO but AARO’s response suggests they don’t have access to that information.

Sean Kirpatrick at the Senate Hearing. He would say that he has seen no evidence
of alien material .

Of course, the Pentagon released a statement. Susan Gough told Fox News, “To date, AARO has not discovered any verifiable information to substantiate claims that any programs regarding the possession or reverse-engineering of extraterrestrial materials have existed in the past or exist currently.”

That is similar to the statements made after the NASA meeting held on June 7. Several of the participants, when addressing this particular claim, said that they had no knowledge or had seen nothing to suggest that the government or the military had any sort of alien material or recovered craft.

After the meeting, Scott Kelly said, "I want to emphasize this loud and proud.
There is absolutely no convincing evidence for extraterrestrial life
associated with unidentified objects."

And, of course, comes the part that I love. More than one reporter trotted out the stale line about the Roswell UFO crash, claiming it was a “test balloon from Project Mogul.” It doesn’t seem to have occurred to those reporters that the Mogul explanation is just another in a long line of lies about the Roswell UFO case. According to the documentation, published by the Air Force, but overlooked by the media, is that the culprit in this, Mogul Flight No. 4, was cancelled. It did not fly and neither does this explanation.

But that does take us to Roswell, where a great deal of this all started. Don Schmitt and I have interviewed many high-ranking individuals about crashed UFOs and some of them have gone on the record. One of the first was Brigadier General Thomas DuBose, who, in 1947, was the Chief of Staff of the Eighth Air Force with headquarters at Fort Worth Army Air Field, later Carswell Air Force Base.

Interviewed in 1991, on tape, DuBose mentioned that the debris displayed in General Ramey’s office was not the material recovered outside of Roswell. Skeptics have pointed at the pictures of that debris as evidence for the Mogul explanation. In one of the pictures, we see Thomas DuBose proving that he was there, in the office, when the debris was displayed and identified as the material found outside of Roswell. He explained that there had been a switch, and that this was not the material that had been brought from Roswell. He said, “…actually it was a cover story, the balloon part of it for the remnants were taken from this location and Al Clark took it to Washington… That part of it was a cover story that we were to give to the public and the news and that was it.”

Since the material displayed in Ramey’s office is clearly the remains of a weather balloon and a rawin radar reflector, and since General DuBose said, on video tape, that it was not the debris brought from Roswell, it seems that Mogul is removed as an answer.

General Roger Ramey (left) and Colonel Thomas
DuBose (right) with the alleged Roswell debris.
DuBose would say that this is not the material
brought from Roswell.

Also, in the Army Air Forces in July 1947, was Lieutenant Colonel Arthur Exon, later a brigadier general. He was stationed at Wright Field which would eventually evolve into the Wright-Patterson Air Force Base where he would later serve as the base commander. Exon acknowledged, more than once, that unusual material had arrived at Wright-Patterson. He told Don and me, on audio tape, “We heard the material was coming to Wright Field… It was brought into our material evaluation labs. I don’t know how it arrived but the boys who tested it said it was very unusual… [Some of it] could be easily ripped or changed… there were parts of it that were very thin and awfully strong and couldn’t be dented with very heavy hammers… It was flexible to a degree and some of it was flimsy and was tougher than hell and almost like foil but strong. It had them pretty puzzled.”

Exon also said, on tape, “The metal and material was unknown to anyone I talked to. Whatever they found, I never heard what the results were. A couple of guys thought it might be Russian, but the overall consensus was that the pieces were from space.”

And to quote just one more officer who was stationed at Roswell in 1947, Major (later colonel) Edwin Easley told me that it was something from space. Oh, not in so many words. During one of the interviews, I had asked him if we were following the right path.

He asked, “What do you mean?”

I said, “We think it was extraterrestrial.”

He said, “Let me put it this way, it’s not the wrong path.”

So, the officer in charge of the base security and who served as the Provost Marshal, and later retired as a colonel, said, basically, what was found was from outer space. He was in charge of security at the crash site and for the material, and the bodies, when they were brought to the base.

Here are three officers, two generals and one colonel who were suggesting that Roswell was a cover up and that we had something from space. Project Mogul doesn’t figure into it and offers no real counter to the statements of these men, or a few dozen others who were involved. And even though we used their names and provided copies of the tapes to other interested parties, the story didn’t get all that much traction at the time. Instead, we were attacked as charlatans who believed everything we were told and who cherry-picked the data to make our case.

As an interesting aside, Don and I met with a reporter at the Chicago Tribune in the early 1990s. We met her in a hallway for the interview. She was an intern who told us that her editors didn’t believe in UFOs and therefore weren’t overly interested in the testimony that we had recovered, even though we could name names, provide contact information, and even had limited documentation. The sophisticated reporters and editors were uninterested unless it was to prove they were all too sophisticated to believe in UFOs.

Here today, we are bombarded with stories about crashed UFOs and alien pilots, and the mainstream media seems to be bending over backwards to tell these tales without critical comment. What’s the difference? We could name names and they do not.

David Charles Grusch has said that he talked to several people, respectable people, highly placed people who would be in the jobs to know, that there had been several UFO crashes and that dead alien pilots had been found. He provided no names and said that he wasn’t allowed to provide any documentation. He just could tell us what he had heard.

We are told about his credentials which are impressive, but that doesn’t translate into evidence. It is second-hand testimony without any specifics. Did anyone notice that. He said there were multiple UFO crashes but didn’t tell us anything about them. Isn’t that interesting. The mainstream media has provided Grusch with a platform but hasn’t managed to get any of those specifics.

However, there is another player. Michael Shellenberger is on stage now. He claims that he knew there were twelve alien craft in the possession of the US government. He dodged the questions about the recovery of an alien flight crew. He mentioned that he had talked to multiple sources. He said they were high-ranking military officials, intelligence officers and civilian contractors who verified what Grusch had said. But here, again, he provided no names, no documents but only said that these unidentified people were reliable.

One of the reporters actually said that it was intriguing that there were things that he had left out of the story. I suppose that this means that Don and I should have left things out of the information that we published three decades ago. Maybe they would have listened to us then and followed up on the Roswell case while the witnesses, the dozens of witnesses, were still alive to tell their stories.

Shellenberger did mention a crash around the testing site for the atomic weapons. This might be a reference to Roswell, though it is more likely a reference to the 1945 San Antonio, New Mexico, crash referred to by Jacques Vallee. If it is the Trinity tale, that undercuts the reliability of what Shellenberger has to say because the Trinity story is a hoax.

That we have no information about any specific crashes and given that we have no idea who all these reliable sources are, I worry about the validity of the information. There is another point to be made here.

Several years ago, I communicated with a former Air Force Officer who said that in the early 1950s, he had been assigned to an Air Force communications center. He told me that he had seen classified documents pass through the center that mentioned a UFO crash in Scandinavia. He told me he had seen the documents personally and knew that it was true. He didn’t have copies of the messages because they were, at the time, classified, so he wasn’t allowed to keep them.

The Spitzbergen message sent through the Air Force communications
channels. It shows the officer was accurate in claiming he had
seen a classified message, but it was not the whole story.

I believe him, and if the documents referred to a real incident, that would be even more impressive. However, I do have copies of those documents, and they were released at the same time the Project Blue Book files were declassified. The document outlined the information about the Spitzbergen UFO crash in 1952. The best information currently available is that the story is a hoax, and the original newspaper cited as the source does not exist. It is just another of those stories that dot the UFO landscape.

What this demonstrates is that there are sources out there who can say, without lying, that they had seen official documents about crashed UFOs. The problem is those documents are often among the first to cite the information and it is in later documents that the truth is learned. That officer I communicated with told the truth. He just didn’t know the outcome. I’m not sure that once the hoax was uncovered, that another message, or group of messages would have passed through that communications center. If they did, the officer hadn’t seen them.

There is one other fact that I have just learned about. On Monday, June 12, at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C., Grusch is going to give the last presentation. This is something that is hosted by Dr. Steven Greer, whose CSETI organization once had a list of over 300 UFO crashes. I have been unable to find that list today, though it was once easily available on the Internet.

UPDATE (June 12, 2023) : Here is something that I just learned that has some relevance to the story: STATEMENT FROM DAVID GRUSCH - “I took my job very seriously, and early on, I allowed various individuals that alleged they had information to speak their truth as part of my evaluation process. I have not been mentored by anyone, and my public disclosure has been done independently under my own free will. I emphatically request that Steven Greer cease using my name to promote his personal agenda”

Update 2: (June 13, 2023): David Charles Grusch did not make a presentation at the Greer Press Conference on June 12. Douglas Dean Johnson tells me that he, Johnson, spoke with Grusch colleagues who confirmed that Grusch will not have an association with Greer. This should end the speculation that Grusch will appear on any venue that is associated with Greer. I will note, however, that the information published here about Greer is relevant to the discussion because of the talk of alien spacecraft crashes. And yes, I liked that last little bit of alliteration.)

Back on May 9, 2001, Greer held another event at the National Press Club. Interestingly, he excluded members of the Fund for UFO Research, though I don’t know what the rational for that might have been. However, Greer had made many startling claims then such as, “We have learned from three separate, corroborating sources that since the early 1990s, at least two extraterrestrial spacecraft have been targeted and destroyed by experimental space-based weapon systems.”

Dr. Steven Greer at the National Press
Club in 2013.

One of the claims that caught my attention was, “Multiple new independently corroborating witnesses told us of the crash and retrieval of ET spacecraft in 1947 in New Mexico and in 1948 in Kingman, Arizona.”

Clearly, the first reference is to Roswell but I’m unsure about the second. There has been a report, circulated for years, of a crash near Kingman, but that was in 1953, not 1948, and it is a hoax.

Here’s the point of this brief interlude. Greer is holding another such press conference, and as I say, it will feature Grusch, telling his stories. I had wondered about Grusch’s sudden appearance on the UFO scene with tales of UFO crashes and hidden information. This is, of course, the same drumbeat that Greer has been making for decades. Any association with Greer would raise red flags but in this case it seems to be a false flag. As noted, Grusch will have no association with Greer. (Added June 13, 2023)

Don’t get me wrong, I believe Grusch is telling the truth as he knows it, but without additional information, which we never seem to get, you have to wonder about the validity of it. Without sources, or with others who have been running in these same Ufological circles for years providing some sort of validation for Grusch, you must be skeptical. Had Grusch added just a bit more information, such as location of the crash sites, or the names of some of the witnesses, his revelations would, at least to my way of thinking, have been more plausible. But without that information we are at the same place we were thirty years ago.

Here’s where we are on this. We have no new information, just new faces. We have no documentation, photographs or names of the sources. We are just supposed to believe these anonymous sources but if the last few years have taught us anything, anonymous sources are nearly useless. There is no way to vet them or their information, and often times they are speaking of rumor rather than fact.

The few names we do have are those who have worked with and have known Grusch for years. They validate his character but not necessarily his information, which is a subtle but important point. And one of the names offered, Jonathan Grey, we are told is a pseudonym, which, again, allows for no vetting and does nothing to validate the information.

To my way of thinking, if just one of these new claims could be validated, it would be a great boost to my reporting, and the reporting of Don Schmitt and Tom Carey, and so many others. But while we named names and sources for those who wished to check our work, that hasn’t happened here. So, until we get some better information, I’ll be without a final opinion. I fear this will end up just like so many other attempts to bring this all to a conclusion. We’ll be left with questions but with no one to supply the proper and verifiable answers. 

Lue Elizondo and Two Crashes on the Same Day

 

While I was reading the material posted to the Anomalist website (www.anomalist.com), I followed a couple of links and came to a story headlined, “’Roswell Was Real, Claimed Apollo 14 Astronaut, Elizondo Suggests 2 UFOs Crashed That Day.” (No, the headline is not suggesting that Elizondo was an astronaut… I think they needed a semi-colon rather than a comma to make it clear.)

That headline intrigued me because of the suggestion that two UFOs had crashed on the same day. This was the theory spun by Stan Friedman in an attempt to validate the Plains of San Agustin crash site identified by Barney Barnett. Friedman’s theory was that the UFOs had collided with one falling to the Brazel (Foster) ranch near Corona, New Mexico, and the other coming down farther to the west, on the Plains.

I do not believe there was a crash on the Plains in July 1947, and the reason that theory was ever considered was that the original information, provided by Jesse Marcel, Sr., had no mention of alien bodies. Barney Barnett, however, who lived in Socorro, New Mexico, did tell of something falling on the Plains and that he had seen the bodies of an alien flight crew. Ruth Barnett kept a diary for all of 1947, and there is no mention of anything like that in her written record. I have explored this in the past, at length, and you can read more about it here:

http://kevinrandle.blogspot.com/2018/07/finding-ruth-barnett-diary.html

http://kevinrandle.blogspot.com/2015/02/the-plains-of-san-agustin-crash.html

The point is, given the information I have uncovered and the investigation that I conducted, there was no evidence substantiate the dual crash aspect of the Roswell case. In one of the more notorious tales told, Gerald Anderson, said that he was on the Plains that day and saw the crashed craft and the alien creatures. Friedman continued to support Anderson long after it was clear that Anderson lied about his involvement. You can read more about that here, but you need to scroll down to find the relevant information about Anderson:

http://kevinrandle.blogspot.com/2020/08/stan-friedman-vs-philip-klass-whats.html

Don Schmitt at the Anderson crash site with the Plains behind him. In the far distance is
the location of the bat cave where scientists were working beginning on July 1. They would have 
seen the crash had there been one, but none of them did.

To me, if Elizondo was, in fact, saying that two UFOs crashed that day, it suggested he was not on the inside because two UFOs had not crashed that day. The Barnett tale had been single witness with no corroboration, and in fact, scientists who were in the area at the time and who had a perfect view of the entire Plains, did not corroborate the story. Given all that, it seemed that Elizondo might not have been the insider that he claimed.

However…

And you knew there would be a “however”…

I wanted to know exactly what he had said, and I wanted to know where he had said it. According to the story in the Roswell Daily Record, Elizondo said, “Before I was part of AATIP, I had no idea about Roswell, other than that there was sort of some alleged crash at some point and some farmer found debris – but during my time with AATIP, there was some very interesting anecdotal information that suggests there wasn’t just one crash, there may have been two crashes, and that somehow it may have been related to some sort of testing that was being done at the time at White Sands, and that the material was recovered.”

He didn’t add much in that article about what he knew, only that these were things that he had heard from those who had been around since the days of Project Blue Book. This is exactly the same sort of thing that Don Schmitt, Tom Carey, and I have heard for many years from people who were actually in Roswell at the time or who were in the Army Air Forces when the object crashed. Brigadier General Arthur

Arthur Exon

Exon, for example, provided us with these same stories about what he had heard when he was assigned to Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in 1947. Exon even talked about the recovery of alien creatures and what happened to the bodies once they had been moved out of Roswell.

My original purpose here was to suggest that if Elizondo was talking about two crashes on the same day, that would tend to undercut his importance to the UFO investigation given that there was only the single event. But the newspaper story doesn’t say anything about two crashes on the same day, only that there were two crashes. And, he says that these were anecdotal tales he had been told, not that he had seen documents or classified studies which changes the importance of what he said. Only that he had heard these things from others who he suggested would have known the truth.

This turned out not to be much of a chase for accurate information. I guess you could say that it was a “nothing burger.” I was intrigued by the headline that was inaccurate and reading the whole story gave the correct information. It does, however, show that Roswell is still alive in the UFO world.

The General Exon Quotes... Again

I had some fun the other day that had nothing to do with the Fourth of July holiday. I received an email from a woman who had stumbled across an article about Brigadier General Arthur Exon. She wanted to know the source of the quotes I had published. Her tone was nearly accusatory. She wrote, “… I'm wondering if you have any corroborating source material for what you are attributing to General Exon?”

Arthur Exon. Photo by Tom Carey

She went on to explain that her father had been a close friend of Exon and that her father said that reports he had ever discussed Roswell were “completely false.” She added that her father had once asked Exon about Roswell and that he, Exon, refused to talk about it. She said that it was hard to believe that “during those later years he would not have told my dad that he went public with military secrets.”

She then wrote, “I would so appreciate a response. I’d like sources that I can trace.”

I emailed her almost immediately, which is something I rarely do. But I thought of this inquiry as a treat. I told her that I could provide the source of the quotes in two words. “Arthur Exon.”

I went on to explain that I had interviewed Exon in May 1990. Don Schmitt interviewed him a few weeks later. Both interviews were recorded, though Don’s was intermittent, given his recorder and the lawn mowing going out just outside the window. A few months later I met Exon at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base but it wasn’t recorded, given the circumstances.

To make this even better, I mentioned that I had a letter from Exon attesting to the accuracy of the quotes. Stan Friedman, in one of his many attacks on my integrity, said that I had misquoted Exon. I told Friedman that I had the quotes on tape, but he said he didn’t care. Exon had told him I had misquoted him and Friedman was going to continue to push that point.

I sent a copy of the book, UFO Crash at Roswell, to Exon where the “offending” quotes were published and copies of the taped interviews, as well as the transcripts. Exon responded with a handwritten letter saying, “Although I believe you did quote me accurately, I do believe that in your writings you gave more credence and impression of personal direct knowledge than my recordings would indicate on their own.”

I also sent her a link to an article that Greg Sandow had written about the Exon episode. Kal Korff, that perigone of journalistic integrity, had made several allegations about Exon’s testimony. Sandow, a disinterested third party, responded to those allegations at length. For those interested in that, you can read it here (reprinted in the post with his permission):

http://kevinrandle.blogspot.com/search?q=Greg+Sandow

With that, I believe that the questions about the source of the information was established. We had the tapes, I had the letter from Exon, and later Tom Carey became involved so that he heard many of the same things and took a picture of Exon as well.

There is one other thing that came from all this. Friedman never again raised the issue of misquoting Exon. I believe that was because he’d look a little bit vindictive by continuing the allegation when Exon himself had called the quotes accurate.

In the end, I gave her the information about the sources she could trace, provided documentation that the quotes were accurate, and told her I would be interested in her response to all this. She sent a longer email, giving some additional information about her research. The important line in all this was, “E[xon] intimated, though he could not claim first-hand experience, that it was all true.”

I will note that is not exactly true since Exon did talk about having flown over the crash sites, sometime later and could describe that he had seen burned areas and tire marks. Not exactly reporting on the downed craft, or the soldiers cleaning the area, but of some interest to us all.

But I think the questions about what Exon said have been laid to rest once again. I am certainly glad that I recorded the conversations and Friedman’s allegation inspired a handwritten response from Exon. It put all this to bed… again.

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.