Jesse Marcel's Journal - Update 2

The other day I was discussing the latest update on the Jesse Marcel, Sr. journal (or journals) and had a thought or two about it. I had mentioned that nothing being found in the journals for 1947 wouldn’t be all that surprising because it was, well, 1947, and Marcel was still in the military. Had there been a crash, and from what others had said, they were all cautioned about sharing of classified material with those who weren’t cleared to receive it.

It was pointed out that he had been talking about it in 1978. I thought that point irrelevant because so much time had passed. No mention in a 1947 journal wasn’t that important (unless, of course there was one) but no mention in journals written

Major Jesse Marcel

later, especially prior to 1978, could be very important.

But that wasn’t the important revelation. It was the sudden thought that when Marcel told Friedman about picking up the pieces of a flying saucer, he, Marcel, couldn’t remember what year it was. It wasn’t until Bill Moore, looking for information about the beginning of the modern UFO era in 1947 found pictures of Marcel kneeling near the remains of a weather balloon in General Ramey’s office, that the information fell into place.

I wondered, if Marcel had journals, then why had he been unable to give Friedman the date of the sighting? True, he might not have had the journal at his fingertips when Friedman called, but surely, he would have been able to look that up… if he had a journal.

That raises a second question. If he was keeping journals, then why didn’t he have copies of some of the newspaper articles in which he was quoted? If nothing else, maybe a notation that his name had appeared in the newspapers. It isn’t every day that ordinary people find themselves mentioned in the newspaper.  Or, at the very least, a mention that he had his name in the newspaper on July 8, 1947. True, that tells us nothing about the validity of alien aspect of the crash, but it would be something… Even a mention of the balloon explanation would be something, such as found in the 509^th Unit History.

Sure, I get that Marcel might have been embarrassed by the outcome, but there was really nothing in those articles that suggested he had made a horrible mistake. Just that he had recovered debris, taken it into Roswell and then onto Fort Worth, on the orders of his superiors, who, by the way, failed to identify the balloon in Roswell if we accept that whole story.

Anyway, all this speculation is based on a simple request for someone who might be good at cryptic analysis. I might be way off base here. It’s just that this seems to answer the question about the value of the journals to all of us. To the family, they would be invaluable but to us, looking for anything about the Roswell case, they might just be another dead end.

X-Zone Broadcast Network - Special Edition, Steve Bassett

In what I think of as a “Special Edition” of the radio version of “A Different Perspective,” I spoke with Steven Bassett, he of the Paradigm Research Group, and a driving force behind Disclosure. That means, simply, that he believes the government is wrong to withhold the information they have about alien visitation, and they should disclose it immediately.

The show was two hours long, but was broken into two one-hour segments. You can listen to both of them here:

https://www.spreaker.com/user/xzoneradiotv/adp20181121ep66aemstephenbassett

and here

https://www.spreaker.com/user/xzoneradiotv/adp20181121ep66bemstephenbassett

I did begin the show with a bit of a tribute to my old friend, Brad Steiger. He had

Brad Steiger

died recently, and I wanted to say a few words about him.

And, I sort of went off-script (though there really isn’t a script) by asking Steven what he thought about the original MJ-12 documents. He was unaware of the book that Bill Moore, Richard Doty and Bob Pratt had written a couple of years prior to the MJ-12 documents surfacing. I did explain all that in Roswell in the 21^st Century.

We then moved onto the USS Nimitz “tic tac” video of something near the carrier group. Two fighters, already airborne, intercepted the object, recorded it using their onboard equipment, and returned to the carrier. I asked Steve (eventually, it comes in the last segment) if the Pentagon had offered an identification of the object.

This led to a discussion of Disclosure, the idea that the government would eventually tell what it knows about UFOs, or as Steve and many others prefer, UAPs (Unidentified Aerial Phenomenon). While that it probably a more apt description of what is going on, it just doesn’t have the zip of UFO (and yes, I said

Steve Bassett

zip on purpose).

We do talk about the history of UFO investigation, showing that it has been ongoing since, at the very least, 1947, though there is evidence that it began, unofficially, in the United States in late 1946. We do get into some of the history that is hidden behind a thick veil of secrecy. Although we didn’t have the time to get into it in depth, there were hints of where to search for more information. This is a topic that demands more information but too much of it is guesswork, speculation, or a reliance on uncorroborated insider information.

For more information on Steven Bassett and the Paradigm Research Group see:

www.paradigmresearchgroup.org 

MJ-12 - New Documents, Old Story

(Blogger's Note: Normally I would take more time to edit this, but there is pressure to get something posted. This is my opinion based on what I have seen, read, and researched since I was alerted to the documents at 4:18 p.m. CDT on June 14. Excuse the typos...)

The field where Mack Brazel is alleged to have found the
metallic debris. Photo copyright by Kevin
Randle.

Okay, I’ve had time to review the document carefully, or rather given it a solid first reading and I have some points to make. I will note here that in my talks with Stephen Bassett, he suggested that all of us, meaning Stan Friedman, Richard Dolan, him and me, create a list of what our first impressions are, and the things that we spotted right off the top. I thought that idea had some merit. We’re not looking to authenticate or debunk, only at the things that disturbed us in some fashion.

I did ask Heather Wade about the source, or sources, and she didn’t give me names, only that they were ex-military and had possessed the documents for a very long time. She didn’t know which government agency had originated them,

Richard Dolan. Copyright by
Kevin Randle

and there seemed no way to verify them through government sources. We also seem to suffer from the same problems that we’ve always had and that is that we’re working from copies and not originals. This makes the whole process problematic… and I think we can point to many cases in which copies of documents have turned out to be forgeries (think CBS and George W. Bush’s military records and any number of MJ-12 documents).

The classification markings on the documents do not seem to be consistent with authenticity, that is, the classification is not marked at both the top and the bottom of the document.

The dating format, 07 July, 1947, is not one that was in use in 1947, but I suppose you could argue that this format is consistent with the other MJ-12 documents even if it is more consistent with a dating format used by Bill Moore.

The use of “Ultra Top Secret” also raises questions. Ultra was the British code name for their operation to intercept and read high-level, highly-classified Nazi message traffic. This code name seems inappropriate for use by the US government or military. In keeping with that, there are several mentions that these documents are classified “Above Top Secret,” but that is really a misnomer… Top Secret is the highest classification, but the number of people allowed to review certain documents can be further restricted by adding a code word. Only those who are code word cleared would have access to the document and by adding a second code word you restrict the numbers even further. So, if there are two code words, you have a document that can be said to be two points above top secret, though that is not actually a fact. While we can argue the semantics of this, I don’t believe someone on the inside would talk of a document being classified two points above top secret, but rather suggesting it was double code word protected.

Jesse Marcel, Sr.

The description of the Roswell case, and the chronology is not accurate based on all the documented evidence available. As but a single example, the document tells us that Mack Brazel alerted the authorities at Roswell Army Air Forces base (which is not the correct name of the facility) at “05:18” (which should have been written as 0518 hrs) though it is clear that it was the sheriff who alerted the Army and Major Marcel himself said that he learned about it as he was eating lunch.

One of the major red flags is, “At his arrival in Roswell, General Twining relieved Colonel Blanchard of command…” There is no evidence of any such order. The relief of a commanding officer is a major event. Had Twining arrived in Roswell and assumed command by virtue of being the senior officer present, that is not the same thing.

I’m going to leave the Roswell segment here, though I see many other problems, and move onto the “Aztec UFO Crash,” which is featured more prominently (which means I’m not even going to discuss the fraudulent IPU). As I was reading this, I thought the same thing that one of the commenters made on the previous post, that is, I was reminded of William Steinman’s nonsensical book, UFO Crash at Aztec. If we compare this to Scott Ramey’s book, The Aztec Incident, the chronology here is all wrong. If we accept Ramey’s book as accurate, then the document fails (which is sort of a point in another arena).

In this document, they have changed the times which had been Mountain Standard Time, to what they call Local Time or LT. If this was strictly a military document, I would have expected the times to be converted to Greenwich Mean Time or Zulu Time. Not really a fatal flaw but one that seems to be out of place.

I’m now going to skip all the trouble with the Aztec aspect of this simply because there is so much that is simply wrong. And if this is a real briefing, where is the mention of Del Rio, Plains of San Agustin and Kingman? They mention other crashes but provide no detail, probably because these details would be difficult to find and easy to refute.

Anyway, we are now treated to the transcript between an EBE and an assortment of interviewers who are never named for a reason that I can’t fathom (unless, of course, they don’t exist). At first glance, I was drawn to the comment about why the aliens had coming to Earth for centuries and learned, “And we like trees?” I wondered if this was the same group of aliens that liked strawberry ice cream and Tibetan music.

I did mention this to Stephen Bassett who wondered if someone had gone to all the trouble to fake the documents, all the study that it had taken and the time to create it, if he or she would then sabotage the effort with some ridiculous, off the wall comment about liking trees.

My first reaction was to think that was an interesting point, but I had yet to carefully read the document. Having now done so, I see that there really is nothing new here. The information about Roswell is wrong, the name of the base is wrong, the chain of command is wrong, and even the higher headquarters at Fort Worth is wrong (it wasn’t the 5^th Air Force, but the 8^th).

Stan Friedman. Copyright by
Kevin Randle

The Aztec material is derivative of Steinman’s book, the MJ-12 information is taken from there (or maybe from any of Stan Friedman’s many writings on it), and there is nothing that is suggestive of advanced scholarship. The writing does not sound as if it came from a government source, and without names, without government agencies, without any way to check things out, this just doesn’t seem to be authentic. I withheld my opinion on this, just announcing that the documents have been released so others would have a chance to review them, but it is now clear that this does nothing to further our knowledge and just confuses an already confused issue.

The Great Roswell Hoaxes

The Roswell UFO crash case seems to be a lightning rod for all sorts of hoaxes, many of which have gained international attention. They began almost from the moment that we all learned that something had fallen near Roswell that certainly wasn’t a standard weather balloon. After the publication of The Roswell Incident Bill Moore complained that he had taken the investigation as far as he could and told several people that he was thinking of creating a “Roswell” type document in an attempt to convince the reluctant witnesses to talk. The blueprint for this document and the story of it was laid out in a novel Moore wrote with Bob Pratt that was called Majik. Later the first of the MJ-12 papers ended up in the hands of Moore’s pal Jaime Shandera. When the MJ-12 documents were announced, Pratt thought it was time to “dust off” the novel in an attempt to find a publisher. Apparently Moore wasn’t interested in that idea and that never happened.

We’ve gone over the problems with these mysterious documents time and again, from the lack of provenance to the false information included in them. Except for a few hardcore believers, they are all generally considered to be bogus, from the Eisenhower Briefing Document to the Cutler/Twining memo. Rather than deal with the problems they prefer to debate the issue which is not the best investigative tactic. Nearly everyone believes that the thousands of the pages that have appeared in the last couple of decades are faked by those taking real historic documents and retyping them to insert a clue or two about MJ-12. To this day no one has ever found through FOIA or extensive searches through archival material a single reference to MJ-12 that is not tainted by controversy.

The lone exception seems to be the Cutler/Twining memo, but even the MJ-12 advocates admit that the document was planted in the National Archives. Although we have heard for years that they are very strict at the National Archives checking briefcases and note pads to prevent theft. It is far easier to sneak a single sheet in than it is to take anything out. They also believe the Cutler/Twining is disinformation while I think it is just an extension of the original hoax.

About a decade after this all broke, there was the Alien Autopsy. Here was a case with film of the Roswell events, at least according to the original statements. More than two hours of film was available, according to the first “rumors” and that included footage of President Truman walking the crash site. It was said that the photographer had been left holding all this footage because of some sort of an error in 1947. No one ever asked him for the film so he eventually sold it to a record promoter in England. Those of us with military experience dealing with classified material found the story somewhat implausible. We were told that the cameraman’s name was being withheld because he feared retribution by the government. Of course, had his story been true, those with the proper clearances would have found it simple to learn who he was… and charge him with income tax evasion for failing to disclose the alleged $100,000 he was paid for it.

Of course, it is never a good idea to promote the reality of one controversial claim with another. At one point they were using the MJ-12 documents to underscore the reality of the film. They also showed photographs of the film canisters with the classified markings visible. When it was pointed out that these markings resembled nothing that has ever been used by the US military, those photographs disappeared.

Over time, the claims changed. There weren’t two hours of film; there were some twenty minutes of it. Some of the footage, taken in a tent supposedly erected on the scene for preliminary autopsy was so dark that little could be seen and so bad it couldn’t be used. We were told that they had attempted to reproduce that footage but it was still too dark to use (and here I think of all the documents that Bill Moore retyped because the originals were too blurry to be easily read). Those owning the film were admitting to faking some of it but the other footage, the actual autopsy, filmed in black and white in a room that was brightly lit, was the real thing.

There were problems with this since military autopsies, even in 1947, were filmed in color. There was no one recognizable in the film. There was nothing to suggest where it was taken and more importantly, it seemed that those conducting the autopsy seemed to be a little too cavalier in it. They were not making the sort of record you would expect, especially when you consider this would be a unique biological sample. They were sort of hacking away at the body without the still photographs that you would expect.

All this speculation and wasted time ended when those who had created the alien autopsy came forward and admitted the hoax. Interestingly, this is not good enough for some. They continue to believe that the autopsy is real. I do not understand this reasoning given those who originated it said it was a hoax and provided pictures to prove it. I believe that the discussion should have ended at that point rather than a useless debate on why they were lying about faking the film.

During the 1997 Roswell anniversary, we heard about a piece of debris that had a proper chain of custody, had a provenance, and that the name of the man who had picked it up on the field would be revealed at a special presentation. Because this would be physical evidence that could be taken into a lab and tested, and because it had been taken into a lab for analysis by a scientist who would present his findings, the presentation was well attended. This was the smoking gun that proved the Roswell crash was of an alien craft. 

The scientist, Dr. Russell VernonClark who had conducted the analysis, was slipped into Roswell for the presentation and nothing else. If this was an artifact from another planet, as VernonClark claimed, then this was certainly big news. Certainly the biggest at that festival.

VernonClark, during his presentation said, “The atomic mass so differs from that found in known earthly elements, that it is impossible for it to be from Earth.”

That would mean, of course, that it was of extraterrestrial manufacture. It would mean that an alien race had visited Earth and the evidence they left behind was now in the hands of investigators and scientists. VernonClark did not equivocate. He was definite about the meaning of his findings. There is nowhere on Earth that this piece of metal could have been found. It had to come from another world.

Finished with the presentation, he sneaked out the back door and then fled from Roswell in the way that he had arrived. Some say he ran out the back door to a waiting car to get him out of town before anyone could be ask any pointed questions such as who had found the metal and how had it made it into his hands.

There was no back up for the testing presented, although it was alleged that such additional and independent testing had taken place. There was no corroboration for the analysis or the conclusions that had been drawn. It was claimed it had been done but no one involved would say by whom or where or even present the independent lab work.

Other scientists, when contacted by reporters, said that the isotopic ratios described by VernonClark, while not natural, could be produced in any university laboratory. In other words, the artifact didn’t necessarily have to be alien. It could have been manufactured on Earth and in fact that wasn’t all that difficult given the proper lab facilities.

In an article published by the Albuquerque Journal, reporter John Fleck quoted a number of scientists including University of Kentucky chemist Rob Toreki who said, “You can do it here.”

He meant that you could manipulate the isotopic ratios. And VernonClark eventually said the same thing when asked about that. In a telephone conversation with me, he said it could be done so that the isotopic ratios, while not naturally occurring, could be produced in a lab. He added that it was an expensive proposition which is hardly the point. But he also suggested he had been bullied into the presentation. The whole thing was turning into a big mess.

Most importantly, there is no follow up on this. I was in the auditorium when VernonClark made his announcement and I saw the reporters’ reactions. They were very interested in what he had to say, especially when they were promised the information to confirm the chain of custody and the results of additional, independent testing. But none of that ever happened and I saw the reporters’ reaction to that as well. If you are going to make an extraordinary claim, then you had better be prepared to provide the confirming evidence. And when you withhold that and other scientists do not agree with the conclusions you put forward, then you have lost your audience. Yes, the reporters were very interested until they could not corroborate anything about the artifact.

All of this seems to suggest why the news media ignores the newest of the UFO reports out of New Mexico. In the 1980s they were told that there were documents that proved the case and reported this only to learn that the documents were a hoax. In the mid-1990s they were told there was film footage of an autopsy of alien creatures only to have it admitted to be a hoax. The late 1990s they were told that there was metal that couldn’t have been made on Earth picked up on the fields near Roswell only to discover that the metal could have been manufactured on Earth and that none of the supporting evidence was available.

We could always add the alleged witnesses to all these events who were not candid in their tales. Frank Kaufmann sounded good and spun an interesting tale but in the end, he had seen nothing and knew nothing. Gerald Anderson seemed to corroborate the Barney Barnett story but Anderson forged documents and lied about aspects of his tale. Glenn Dennis’ tale of the missing nurse collapsed when no nurse by the name he provided could be found. He then blamed others for that failed corroboration. In other words, there have been many failed claims about the Roswell case which would cause anyone to wonder about all the other information reported. Only those with all the time necessary to unravel all the various threads could be expected to understand the nuances of the case and no reporter (and very few of the rest of the population) could be expected to invest the necessary time to learn the truth. And even if they did, there are various “truths” to be learned out there.

I mention this only to suggest that the less than enthusiastic response by the media and many others is caused by this long and tainted history. I could suggest that it was all part of the strategy to kept the Roswell case hidden, but the truth seems to be that all the competing voices, all the opportunists, all those with their own agendas have complicated the case to the point where it might never be unraveled.

As I look over this, I wonder if anyone else has seen the relation to some of the things going on in the world today. Promises are being made but if the information circulating now is accurate, then the same problems are going to pop up again. But given the history of the Roswell case it is going to be a tough sell for the newest of the revelations especially in light of this history.

MJ-12: The Beginning

My friend, Alejandro Rojas, has posted to the Open Minds YouTube channel an analysis of the beginnings of MJ-12. It is based on some original research he conducted through interviews with some of those involved and on FOIA requests that he has made recently to the U.S. Air Force. The thirty minute program can be found here:

http://www.openminds.tv/majestic-12-ufo-disinformation-scandal-video/28049

There are two additional points that I think should be made that add some context to this story. First, Stan Friedman told me about twenty years ago when we were in California on a research trip that Bill Moore had said he had run into a wall on his Roswell research. Moore said that he was thinking of creating a “Roswell-type” document to shake things loose. Moore apparently thought that if he had an official looking document it might induce some of the reluctant witnesses to tell all that they knew.

Friedman has since denied that the conversation ever took place. Fortunately this isn’t one of those “he said, he said” situations. There are others who heard a similar tale. Brad Sparks said that Moore had told him much the same thing and he, Sparks, called Friedman, saying that it was a really bad idea. The information about Sparks and his memory of this can be found on the Internet. For more information see:

http://www.roswellfiles.com/FOIA/majestic12.htm

While I hesitate to mention this, simply because it comes from Philip Klass and will be rejected out of hand by many here is another source:

http://www.csicop.org/specialarticles/show/klass_files_volume_44/

Those who wish for more information or other corroboration can conduct their own searches. Just remember, that I’m reporting what Friedman said to me and I’m noting that he now denies he said it.

The second point is how the documents were released. Alejandro reported that Timothy Good received the Eisenhower Briefing Document [EBD]before it entered the public arena. But that copy came from Bill Moore and that can be proved as Barry Greenwood demonstrated. The copy of the EBD has a chevron-like artifact on several of the pages. Since it does not appear in the same place on other pages, it means that it is an artifact produced by a specific copier. It floats from page to page.

Okay, you say, but so what?

That chevron-like artifact also appears on the EBD released by Moore, but it is not in the same place as it is on the pages released by Good. In other words, the EBD copies were produced on the same copier and that means there was a single source for them. One person made several Xerox copies and sent one of them to Good.

Since it was Moore who had the original film negatives, it would seem that Moore made copies of them and sent them off. Moore, then, was the source of the copies that Good had. Good simply jumped the gun, revealing the existence of the EBD to the press before Moore had a chance to do so.

It is clear that Moore’s copies were made from the pictures printed from the 35 mm film on which the EBD fell into his hands. If he wanted copies of it, he could run all that he needed… but there is that chevron artifact that appears on his copies as well as those given to Good. Or, in other words, it was Moore (or one of his buddies) who made the Xerox copies from the originals, and that links Moore to the copier and to Good.

So, while it might be said that Good’s copy came from another source, it is clear that his copies came from the same copier that Moore used. There is a single source for all the copies and that is the film sent to Jaime Shandera, Moore’s pal in California.

I thought these two points should be made. But there is the new information revealed by Alejandro that should convince even more people that MJ-12 is a hoax and that not a single document linking the U.S. government to something called MJ-12 has ever been independently found. I can’t FOIA a government agency and receive a series of documents as we can in so many other UFO related matters.

I have said for years that MJ-12 should be relegated to a footnote in the history of UFO studies, but it keeps appearing. I know that Alejandro’s piece will not end the debate, but, at least, it comes from a different perspective.

Eisenhower Briefing Document, MJ-12, and the Washington Alert

I am often stunned by the mental gymnastics of some to keep a cherished belief alive in the face of documented facts and reliable testimony. I am often surprised when something that I believe to be obvious from the evidence available is rejected for speculation that has no supporting proof. When the facts line up, when there is good evidence for a conclusion, when it all seems to be so obvious to me, I simply fail to understand how it is that others can’t see with the same clarity. And yes, I know there are those who believe Roswell to be a Mogul balloon will point at me and say the same things but this isn’t about Roswell or Mogul balloons (and besides, I can point at the Mogul explanation and say the same thing about that conclusion).

This is about the Eisenhower Briefing Document (EBD) and the fatal flaw that is contained in it. I am going to lay all the facts out at length because those other postings which contain the information are spread throughout this blog. I haven’t put it all together into a single document until now. There is a caveat, however. I am not going to review all the other problems with the EBD including a lack of provenance, the other factual errors, or the misspellings and incorrect security classifications. I am going to deal with the one paragraph that relates to another UFO crash that is a hoax and as such shouldn’t have been included in a briefing written for the incoming president. That entry said:

On 06 December, 1950, a second object, probably of similar origin, impacted the earth at high speed in the El Indio – Guerrero area of the Texas – Mexican boder [sic] after following a long trajectory through the atmosphere. By the time a search team arrived, what remained of the object had been almost totally incinerated. Such material as could be recovered was transported to the A.E.C. facility at Sandia, New Mexico, for study.

The first mention of this report of a crash in any sort of a public arena came from Robert Willingham, a pilot in the Civil Air Patrol (CAP), which is identified as an official auxiliary of the United States Air Force. To be clear, it is not a part of the Air Force, members of the CAP are not paid for their service, they do not earn retirement points, and they are not considered to be part of the Reserve Component of the United States military. They are civilians who wear modified uniforms and provide a valuable service in search and rescue operations. But understand, they are not part of the military.

Willingham, and several other CAP pilots, were interviewed in the late 1960s about their experiences with UFOs. This was done for a small “shopper” type of newspaper, and while I have been unable to find that specific article, I did find a summary of Willingham’s statements in MUFON’s Skylook, which was their newsletter/magazine in the 1960s. According to the March, 1968 issue:

Col. R. B. Willingham, CAP squadron commander, has had an avid interest in UFO’s for years, dating back to 1948 when he was leading a squadron of F-94 jets near the Mexican border in Texas and was advised by radio that three UFO’s “flying formation” were near. He picked them up on his plane radar and was informed one of the UFO’s had crashed a few miles away from him in Mexico. He went to the scene of the crash but was prevented by the Mexican authorities from making an investigation or coming any closer than 60 feet. From that vantage point the wreckage seemed to consist of “numerous pieces of metal polished on the outside, very rough on the inner sides.”

For those keeping score at home, please note that it clearly states that Willingham is in the CAP, that the date of the sighting is 1948, that he was flying an F-94, there were three UFOs instead of just one, that he saw them on his plane’s radar and was told that one had crashed in Mexico. I mention these things because this is the first time that Willingham told the story in public and it was written down in an article for those who wish to verify the accuracy of the statements… which is not to say that what he was saying was true, only that I have reported here exactly what was reported in 1968.

I did find another 1968 article about Willingham that is important to this discussion because it proves Willingham had a long interest in UFOs. I found, in the NICAP UFO Investigator for March 1968 on page one:

During the early morning hours of January 12, Colonel Robert Willingham, of the Civil Air Patrol, a member of the Subcommittee, was alerted by Chairman George Cook to a UFO seen by a police dispatcher near Camp Hill.

Col. Willingham sighted the orange-and-white glowing object at an altitude of not more than 150 feet, as it traveled toward North Mountain. The UFO appeared to be between 30 and 40 feet in diameter. The former jet pilot followed the object by car until it disappeared behind trees in the Mountain section.

In other words, NICAP was so unimpressed with the crash story, they didn’t even mention it. Instead, they published a Willingham UFO sighting that was rather mundane.  It was just an object in the sky, noting that Willingham was a colonel in the CAP but said nothing about any association with the Air Force Reserve. It also said that Willingham belonged to NICAP underscoring his interest in UFOs.

We all know that W. Todd Zechel tracked down Willingham and got a statement from him. Zechel made that point repeatedly, and there is no dispute that it is accurate. Zechel found Willingham and talked to him. In fact, Zechel was able to get Willingham to sign an affidavit about his experiences in 1977. That date does not seem to be in dispute.

That affidavit does little to enhance the credibility of the tale. It does allow us to make some comparisons, however. It said:

Down in Dyess Air Force Base in Texas, we were testing what turned out to be the F-94. They reported on the [radar] scope that they had an unidentified flying object at a high speed to intercept our course. It came visible to us and we wanted to take off after it. Headquarters wouldn’t let us go after it and it played around a little bit. We got to watching how it made 90 degree turns at this high speed and everything. We knew it wasn’t a missile of any type. So then we confirmed it with the radar control station on the DEW Line (NORAD) and they kept following it and they claimed that it crashed somewhere off between Texas and the Mexican border. We got a light aircraft, me and my co-pilot, and we went down to the site. We landed out in the pasture right across from the where it hit. We got over there. They told us to leave and everything else and then the armed guards came out and they started to form a line around the area. So, on the way back, I saw a little piece of metal so I picked it up and brought it back with me. There were two sand mounds that came down and it looked to me like this thing crashed right in between them. But it went into the ground, according to the way people were acting around it. But you could see for, oh I’d say, three to five hundred yards where it had went across the sand. It looked to me, I guess from the metal that we found, chunks of metal, that it either had a little explosion or it began to disintegrate. Something caused this metal to come apart.

It looked like it was something that was made because it was honeycombed. You know how you would make a metal that would cool faster. In a way it looked like magnesium steel but it had a lot of carbon in it. I tried to heat it with a cutting torch. It just wouldn’t melt. A cutting torch burns anywhere from 3200 to 3800 degrees Fahrenheit and it would make the metal hot but it wouldn’t even start to melt.

Please notice here that he is in his F-94 and that DEW line radar picked up the object but it says nothing about where the object was first sighted nor does it mention where Willingham was flying at the time. Most importantly, this affidavit gives no date for the sighting which is a major oversight. That becomes important later.

Len Stringfield, a well-respected UFO researcher who took an interest in UFO crashes when the rest of us were ignoring them, collected many stories of crashes. In 1978 he wrote a paper for the MUFON Symposium, which allows us to date this next chapter in this case. He wrote, “...Months later in 1977, I was to learn more about a crashed disc occurring in 1948. This came from researcher Todd Zeckel [sic], whom I had known since 1975 when he became Research Director of Ground Saucer Watch... The crash occurred about 30 miles inside the Mexican border across from Laredo, Texas, and was recovered by U.S. troops after it was tracked on radar screens... Zeckel pieced together other eyewitnesses to the 1948 crash event.”

According to Stringfield, Zechel reported:

I traced another Air Force colonel, now retired in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. He had seen the UFO in flight. He was flying an F-94 fighter out of Dias [sic] Air Force base in Texas and was over Albuquerque, New Mexico, when reports came of a UFO on the West Coast, flying over Washington State. Radars clocked its speed at 2,000 miles per hours.

It made a 90 – degree turn and flew east, over Texas. The colonel, then a captain pilot, actually saw it as it passed. Then suddenly it disappeared from radar screens. At Dias [sic] base, the radar operators plotted its course, and decided it had crashed some 30 miles across the Mexican border from Laredo. When the captain got back to base, he and a fellow pilot got into a small plane and took off over the border after the UFO. When they landed in the desert at the crash site, U.S. troops were there before them.

The craft was covered with a canopy [tarpaulin?], and the two pilots were not allowed to see it. They were then called to Washington, D.C. for debriefing and sworn to secrecy about the whole event.

It’s clear from the above information that Zechel was reporting on the story told by Willingham. We know, based on documentation available, that Willingham was living in Pennsylvania at the time and the other details of the story are close to what Willingham had originally reported. Please note here that Willingham is still flying his F-94, that the crash site is near Laredo, Texas, that it happened in 1948, and that it was tracked on radar. Also note that the radars put the UFO over Washington state which will become important later.

What we have here is a single witness tale that is believed because the man telling it is a retired Air Force colonel and a veteran fighter pilot. These two facts lend to his credibility and I know that when I first heard this story and was told it came from a high-ranking Air Force officer, I was inclined to believe it, especially since we had Jesse Marcel and so many others around Roswell talking of the crash there. This simply means that I was a little less suspicious of tales of crashes, given what I knew about Roswell. Please remember here, that I learned of Willingham’s crashed saucer tale after several trips to Roswell, rather than coming upon it cold.

There was another fact that came out later. According to Zechel, the crash didn’t take place in 1948 but in December 1950. Bruce Maccabee, another respected UFO researcher had been sending Freedom of Information (FOIA) requests to the FBI, among other places. His persistence paid off and he received a huge stack of documents that included some that related to some sort of alert in December 1950.

The question becomes did the alert have anything to do with UFOs. According to the documents found by Maccabee and others, on December 6, 1950, unidentified objects were spotted by radar heading toward the eastern seaboard. This triggered an alert and was discussed at the highest levels of the government. The consensus, from various memoirs and other documents, suggests that at about 10:30 a.m. Deputy Secretary of Defense Lovett called Dean Acheson, then secretary of State to tell him that the Pentagon’s phone system was about to shut down because the early warning system in Canada had picked up formations of unidentified objects, presumably aircraft heading to the southeast on a course that would put them over Washington, D.C. in two or three hours. Given the state of the world at the time, that is a major war in Korea that involved Chinese and UN forces (the majority of which were American and South Korean); it was thought that the Soviets might have been sending bombers toward the United States, probably armed with atomic weapons.

Truman, in his memoirs, suggested that the objects had been detected by radar stations and fighters had been launched to reconnoiter, though I personally would have wanted every fighter launched to intercept if I had thought the Soviets were sending bombers, which probably explains why I won’t be president.

There is another version of these events that suggest that the formations were over Alaska, which makes you wonder how they could have reached Washington, D.C. in just two or three hours unless their speed was considerably higher, that is, something on the order of 2000 miles an hour. This doesn’t have the same kind of documentation that the other version has and might be where Zechel got the idea that the UFOs were near Washington state and traveling at 2000 mph.

Within an hour, that is, by 11:30 a.m., the alert was cancelled, and once again there are multiple answers. Acheson reported that he was called back by Lovett who told him that the objects had disappeared. Lovett apparently thought the objects were geese but that seems a little strange to me… but I do remember reading about a strange event during WW II in which London radar operators reported that each morning an object appeared, rose into the sky and then seemed to fade away. It was found that it was caused by birds awaking and taking flight about the same time every day from the same London park.

Truman said that some sort of Atlantic weather disturbance had thrown off the radars. I suppose you could say that the disturbance could have caused the geese to be misidentified. The point is that the alert lasted about an hour.

These descriptions are based on the memories of the men (or the ghostwriters) who were there at the time. But as there is in many UFO–linked stories, there are some documents from the time. One of the major news services, INS reported:

A warning of an impending air attack resulted in a false alarm in this capitol [sic] city today. No air raid alarms were sounded, but functionaries charged with Civil Air Defense of Washington [D.C.] were alerted that an unidentified aircraft had been detected off the coast of the State of Maine at mid-day. Later, a spokesman for the Air Force stated that interceptor aircraft had been dispatched, and that the object in question had been identified shortly thereafter as a North American C-47 aircraft which was approaching the continent from Goose Bay, Labrador. The warning was said to have been useful in verifying the efficient of the Washington Civil Defense System. Civil Defense officials declined to comment on the incident.

Yes, there is a letter written by Colonel Charles Winkle, Assistant Executive in the Directorate of Plans that said that 40 aircraft were spotted at 32,000 feet. He noted that at 1104 hours the original track had faded out and it appeared that the flight was friendly.

While all this is interesting, it is irrelevant. This has nothing to do with the Willingham and his alleged sighting, which, until Zechel got involved was set in 1948. Then, seeing an opportunity to add some credibility to the Willingham crash report, he changed the date of the sighting to December 1950. Now Willingham’s sighting was not stand alone. There was a historical perspective to it.

There is one other aspect to this, again which is probably not related at all, other than it happened on December 8, 1950. Maccabee found, in the FBI files, an “Urgent” message that was labeled, “Flying Saucers.”

This office very confidentially advised by Army Intelligence, Richmond, that they have been put on immediate high alert for any data whatsoever concerning flying saucers. CIC here states background of instructions not available from Air Force Intelligence, who are not aware of the reason for alert locally, but any information whatsoever must be telephoned by them immediately to Air Force Intelligence. CIC advises data strictly confidential and should not be disseminated (sic).

And this would suggest some credibility to the Willingham tale. Here, just two days after the crash, the Air Force was requiring all intelligence information to be relayed to them. But, again, it is clear from Willingham’s original story, the crash took place in 1948, and not 1950. In fact, Willingham told me that in December 1950, he was serving in Korea (no evidence to support this claim), and the real date of the crash was in 1954 or 1955.

What that tells me is that no matter what Air Force Intelligence wanted in December 1950, this incident is irrelevant because there was no crash in December 1950. Remember, Willingham first claimed it was in 1948 and said that Zechel had changed the date to December 6, 1950. Willingham later said that it couldn’t have happened in December 1950 because he was in Korea at the time.

The question then becomes, how did this sighting get into the Eisenhower Briefing Document if it is a hoax? According to Zechel, he shared the information with Bill Moore and Moore, believing that Willingham was a retired colonel and that his story was credible, accepted it. We know that Moore was aware of this because he wrote about it, briefly, in The Roswell Incident. Moore wrote:

Then a second group, Citizens Against UFO Secrecy (CAUS), was formed in 1978 under the directorship of W. T. Zechel, former research director of GSW [Ground Saucer Watch] and a one-time radio-telegraph operator for the Army Security Agency. CAUS’s announced aim was nothing less than an “attempt to establish that the USAF (or elements thereof) recovered a crashed extraterrestrial spacecraft” in the Texas – New Mexico – Mexico border area sometime in the late 1940s.

This establishes that Zechel, as he claimed, had been talking to Moore about this crash. Since the book was published in 1980, and because the lead time between manuscript submission and actual publication is a year to eighteen months, it means that Zechel was talking to Moore in the late 1970s. In other words, it verifies part of what Zechel claimed when he said that Moore knew about this crash, and because Moore accepted the information from CAUS as authentic, it provides another reason that the Willingham crash had to be included in the EBD.  

They all thought it real, and if it was real, it had to be mentioned in the document.

It is clear from the details, that the Del Rio crash is the El Indio - Guerrero crash. The location selected is between the original site of Laredo and Del Rio. Zechel changed the date to correspond to the December 6, 1950 alert, though he suggested the event as December 5. The accepted date in the EBD is a compromise between that date and the December 8, 1950, request by the Air Force to the Army’s CIC. There were no documents to contradict this and Willingham said that he knew the December 6 date was wrong, but said nothing about that until years later.

Everything points to the December 6 crash as being the Willingham crash, and if that is true, then there was no such crash. And without a December 6, 1950 crash, anywhere in the Texas – Mexico border area, then the EBD must be a hoax.

You can reject everything that Zechel said, but the facts here are verified through other sources. Willingham confirms that he gave all this information to Zechel, he confirms that it was Zechel who came up with the December 1950 date, and Bill Moore, in his book, confirms that Zechel and CAUS were pursuing this crash case. 

All the dots line up and the facts now argue against the authenticity of the EBD because there is nothing true about the case except that Zechel investigated and the original source was Willingham.

Here is the real point. The December 6, 1950, alert has no relevance here. The information for the crash has come from a small circle of people and it all goes back to Willingham. He has changed the story to cover the facts that were in error and Zechel changed it to make use of the 1950 alert. There are no documents about it, nothing printed in any newspaper such as there was for Roswell, Kecksburg, or Shag Harbour to name just three, and there is a single witness, which again is unlike those other cases.

Unless someone can come up with some evidence that hasn’t passed through the hands of Willingham, Zechel or Moore, there is nothing left for this case. It is a hoax and if that is true, then the Eisenhower Briefing Document is a hoax. That is the only rational conclusion to be drawn.

The Eisenhower Briefing Document, MJ-12, and the Del Rio UFO Crash

I have argued for years that the Eisenhower Briefing Document (EBD) is not authentic. I have argued that it was created in the early to mid-1980s because the information contained in it reflected the UFOlogical thought of that time. The one paragraph that seemed to prove that more than any other was the one referring to the December 6, 1950 crash near El Indio – Guerrero area of northern Mexico. I had suggested that this is the sighting made by Robert Willingham and that we know that he has changed so much of the information about it that it is clear that it never happened.

“Why bring this up now?” you may ask.

Because I have additional information thanks to Isaac Koi, Greg Long, and James Carrion. Let’s take this all one step at a time.

Apparently on October 19, 1994, Greg Long received a telephone from W. Todd Zechel, who then launched into what was pretty much a monologue according to a document created by Long (which makes sense since I too received one of these Zechel telephone calls in which he talked and talked and talked until his father yelled for him to get off the telephone). Long made notes, and the important part of that document, at least to us here, said:

Zechel talked about his research into the Del Rio case. He described how John Acuff [one time director of NICAP] had put NICAP’s cases in storage. Maccabee stole documents from the NICAP files. There was a particular file that Zechel read regarding a crashed object in Del Rio. Zechel tracked down a name, Colonel Willingham, in Mechanicsburg, Pennsylvania, flew to Pennsylvania, and interviewed him. Willingham admitted that he saw the crashed object. To assess Willingham, Zechel got the colonel’s military records and proved he was authentic.

Later in this same document, in a section labeled “Hoax,” Zechel again alludes to the Del Rio case. He wrote, “[Brad] Sparks responded that he felt only two of the cases showed some promise: the Roswell incident of 1947, which Moore had written about, and one that reportedly occurred in Dec. 1950 near the Texas/Mexico border.

And later still, Del Rio is connected to the El Indio – Guerrero case, when talking about the EBD received by Shandera, Zechel wrote:

Billed as a briefing paper prepared for ‘President-elect Eisenhower,’ the document ‘ contains a rather lengthy description of the Roswell incident – which just happens to verify Moore’s contentions and misrepresentations of the facts – but only a spare paragraph describing a second incident in December 1950. According to the new, improved model:

On 06 December 1950, a second object, probably of similar origin, impacted the earth at high speed in the El Indio – Guerrero area of the Texas – Mexico boder (sic) after following a long trajectory through the atmosphere. By the time a search team arrived, what remained of the object had been almost totally incinerated. Such material as could be recovered was transported to the A.E.C. facility at Sandia, New Mexico for study.

Zechel then explains how this information about the crash had come into the hands of Moore and one of his cohorts, Richard Doty. He suggested that a manuscript that he had written was “either given or sold… to Bill Moore…”

To follow through on this linkage, and to prove that the information about the El Indio – Guerrero crash is that from Del Rio and Robert Willingham, Zechel wrote:

The point is that Moore… obtained two separate manuscripts I had written about the crashed saucer case which reportedly occurred in Dec. 1950, near the Texas – Mexico border. The first manuscript… gave the location of the incident as near Laredo, Texas. The second manuscript… gave the date of the incident as happening between Dec. 5 and Dec. 8, 1950, and the location as near Del Rio, Texas… No witnesses that I know of support the El Indio location given in the ‘briefing paper,’ but, on the contrary several eye-witness accounts have verified the Del Rio site. Moore, however, would not have known that, since I myself did not know these facts until a couple of years after I left Hollywood.

More telling than this is what Zechel believed about how this particular case came to be part of the EBD. Zechel wrote:

What I’m saying is that he [Moore] clearly knew, based on my manuscripts and Brad Sparks’ input, that he had to acknowledge the 1950 case in the ‘briefing paper,’ but with all the bitterness, acrimony, jealousy and hate he feels toward me … he just had to burn that sucker up!

And, in case that hasn’t made the connection between the Willingham tale and that from the EBD, in a letter to Walt Andrus at MUFON, dated December 8, 1978, Zechel wrote:

What I did say is that I had an affidavit from the retired Lt. Colonel (emphasis in the original) – the former pilot who flew down to the crash site – about his knowledge of the incident, which is limited to seeing the object in the air and covered by a canopy on the ground.

This retired Lt. Colonel is Robert Willingham who did sign an affidavit about the crash. So, we know that Willingham is the source of the Del Rio case, who also suggested that the crash was near Laredo. We know that Zechel was sharing information with Bill Moore, though it isn’t clear that the sharing was voluntary or if Moore acquired the information through some devious means. We know that in the late 1970s and the early 1980s, many in the UFO field believed the Willingham story because he was a retired military officer who signed an affidavit and Zechel claimed that he had verified his records (which by the way is untrue because it is clear that Willingham’s records reveal he was a low-ranking enlisted man with 13 months of active duty). We also know that Zechel was claiming other witnesses, but none have surfaced to this point.

But now the Willlingham story is in tatters. As mentioned here before, he was neither a retired Air Force officer nor a fighter pilot and if that is true, then he was not in a position to see any crash of anything. We know, based on the available documentation that Willingham originally claimed that the crash had taken place in 1948, and while Zechel attempted to vilify Len Stringfield for saying this in his 1978 presentation about crashed UFOs, we know, from the available documentation that Willingham himself is responsible for this “error.” Zechel moved the date to conform to information about a security alert in December 1950, but there is nothing to suggest the alert had anything to do with a flying saucer crash.

What all this does is prove that one segment of the EBD is based on a hoax and that does not bode well for the remainder of the document. If this paragraph is faked, then what else in it is faked and isn’t a reasonable conclusion that it is all faked? I think that we now have all the information we need to connect all the dots and with that, we can draw the conclusion that the EBD is a fake based on faulty information and complete invention. We can now move onto other, more important things.