Tom DeLonge and UFOs

I must be doing something wrong.

For months I have been hearing about Tom DeLonge, he formerly of Blink-182, who has entered the UFO arena with, allegedly, some highly-place contacts who will assist him in bringing the truth about alien visitation to the public. This began around 2015.

According to Rolling Stone:

DeLonge contacted [John] Podesta [Hillary Clinton’s campaign manager] again this January [2016], sending an email with the subject, "General McCasland," apparently a reference to a former Air Force official with (according to DeLonge) information relating to the infamous Roswell crash. In the email, DeLonge insisted that McCasland was not a skeptic — despite the General's own previous insistence — and added, "When Roswell crashed, they shipped it to the laboratory at Wright Patterson Air Force Base. General McCasland was in charge of that exact laboratory up to a couple years ago. He not only knows what I'm trying to achieve, he helped assemble my advisory team. He's a very important man."

Of course, I suppose, we could look at this as so much hyperbole. It does sound impressive to say that he was in communication with an Air Force general who was

Tom DeLonge

in charge of the exact laboratory where the Roswell material was sent. The problem is that William McCasland didn’t take over the post until 2011, according to his official Air Force biography and the laboratory was created in October 1997. It was, however, a combination of four other labs, but there is no way of knowing if any of them were the ones to which Roswell material would have been sent in 1947 or if material had been sent there it would have remained until 2011.

Anyway, that just sort of shows that DeLonge had been talking about UFOs and mentioning Roswell for a number of years. He did have, and does have, the ear of some people with impressive sounding credentials, which, of course, doesn’t mean they have anything of interest to say about UFOs or Roswell, only that they have been around the government for a very long time and moved in some of the rarified atmosphere in Washington, D.C.

However, it does seem that DeLonge’s messages have been heard by the UFO community. In February, 2017, at the International UFO Congress, he was named UFO Researcher of the Year. This seemed a tad bit odd since he hadn’t done much in the way of original research or published much in the way of what he had learned that hadn’t been said before. He did say that in a couple of months that he would make an announcement about some “serious sh*t” he was into and that he was making some serious progress.

During the next several months, there had been hints about this announcement, some of them centering around Disclosure and some of them hinting about new information or new evidence concerning the Roswell crash. The speculation was that he had some incredible inside information that came about through his association with his former band. Somehow that had resulted in the contacts that provided the information.

After months of waiting, the announcement came on October 11. No, there wasn’t anything about new UFO evidence, it had nothing to do with Disclosure or government secrecy but everything to do with making money. Let’s look at that.

According to a story in the Huffington Post, by Leslie Kean, there had been “something extraordinary revealed today [October 11].” It told of high-level officials and scientists who had not been seen by many but who, apparently “have long-standing connections to government agencies which may have programs investigating unidentified aerial phenomena (UAP/UFOs). You can read the whole article here:

https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/fmr-manager-of-dod-aerospace-threat-program-ufos_us_59de2f4be4b0b992a8214874.

What strikes me in that very first paragraph is that we have been provided with a number of conditions. They have connections to agencies that may have been investigating UFOs… but then, may not. We eventually find out who these people are, but they are those in middle management or maybe in second tier bureaucrats but not the top people.

Then we learn that this is not about Disclosure, or about providing some stunning evidence of alien visitation, but about the “official launch of To The Stars Academy of Arts and Science,” or as they abbreviate it, TTS/AAS which they describe as a public benefit corporation. This organization will have three components, which are science, aerospace and entertainment. That last concerns me. Entertainment is not necessarily restricted to fact and we learn in other places that DeLonge has been planning the entertainment aspect since he left Blink-182. According to Rolling Stone:

But since DeLonge parted ways with Blink-182 in 2015, his interest in extraterrestrials has become more than a hobby. "The more I got into it, the more I realized it was all real," he tells Rolling Stone. "Then I was like, 'OK, what am I going to do about it?'" So he started spreading the word. He began creating a multi-part, multi-platform rollout of an entirely new philosophy, one based on the theory that aliens have been visiting Earth for most of our species' existence – and the only way for us to have a prosperous future on the planet is if we take that into account, and soon.

The newest addition to this project is the book Sekret Machines: Gods, the first in a non-fiction trilogy he's co-writing with occult historian Peter Levanda.

Already we see some promotion for the books that DeLonge is writing which would be incorporated under the umbrella of TTS/AAS and get a hint about the financial aspects of all of this. In fact, Jason Colavito, on his website, looked deeper into the financial arrangements of the organization. You can read his entire analysis here:

http://www.jasoncolavito.com/blog/not-quite-a-ufo-ipo-tom-delonge-is-seeking-your-investment-in-to-the-stars-to-give-himself-a-700000-or-more-payday

Colavito lays out, in detail, how money will be raised by selling stock in the company and how much DeLonge is guaranteed for his part in all this. Colavito wrote:

DeLonge is soliciting investment by registering TTS AAS as a public benefit corporation—notably not a nonprofit—and he is framing his sale of $5 per share stock in the company as a chance to democratize investment. Under the 2012 JOBS Act, companies may sell stock directly to the public through a crowd funding website without needing to file an IPO with the SEC. DeLonge is taking advantage of this to sell $200 stock packages. The 2015 Title IV Regulation A+ allows companies to raise up to $50 million without a formal IPO…

It's interesting to see the difference between TTS AAS’s public face and what they confess in their financial filings. Publicly, TTS AAS is an educational enterprise divided into a number of units focused on cutting-edge fringe research. The science division is pursuing consciousness research and psychic phenomena. The aerospace division is looking for exotic propulsion technologies. The entertainment division is producing the Sekret Machines books, and a dystopian young adult franchise. Note carefully that space aliens and “disclosure” don’t occur as a research subject or a purpose for the company. And yet, the public protestations about using the company to promote human knowledge are belied by what we see in the financial documents. That’s not to say that there won’t be “educational” material, only that the company’s primary purpose isn’t science and education, as it pretends…

DeLonge, though, is certainly a beneficiary. Documents laying out what he gets paid make pretty clear that this is intended to be a very lucrative investment for him. DeLonge has a constellation of corporate entities that control the intellectual property he creates as a musician and now filmmaker. TSA, which the company abbreviates as TTS AAS, is legally obligated to pay all of DeLonge’s expenses in using his existing intellectual property to develop new TTS AAS multimedia products.

But, those of us interested in all aspects of UFOs and not the inner workings of a corporation created to make some money and produce multi-media products wanted to hear something about UFO sightings. Eventually we treated to one UFO report provided by “TTS Academy member Chris Mellon” who was, at one time, Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Intelligence for two administrations. “He gave a synopsis of an event from 2004 that involved the battleship [sic] USS Nimitz.” I’ll give Mellon the benefit of the doubt here by saying that in his position he should have known that the Nimitz was an aircraft carrier and not a battleship. I suspect the reporter got it wrong. According to the story:

“Two F-18s approach, the four aviators see that the object has no wings or exhaust — it is white, oblong, some 40 ft long and perhaps 12 ft thick”, he [Mellon] said. “One pilot pursues the craft while his wingman stays high. The pilots are astonished to see the object suddenly reorient itself toward the approaching F-18. In a series of discrete tumbling maneuvers that seem to defy the laws of physics, the object takes a position directly behind the approaching F-18.”

The lengthy event occurred in broad daylight off the California coast, and gun camera footage was taken. At one point the object went from hovering at 80,000 feet to dropping at supersonic speeds, and came to a complete stop at 50 feet above the ocean. “More F-18’s are dispatched but with similar results,” Mellon stated. “The secret machine easily evades the F-18s. Dozens of military personnel aboard the various planes and ships involved are privy to these interactions.”

Okay. Not an overly spectacular sighting but it does suggest some evidence in the form of gun camera footage. It mirrors other sightings that have been reported over

USS Nimitz complete with aircraft.

the years that include radar images, photographs of the radarscopes and many witnesses on the ships involved. Investigation into them have yet to provide the evidence to prove that there is alien visitation.

There was one other aspect of all this that bothered me as well. One of those now part of this was identified as Luis Elizondo. The Huffington Post reported:

Lue had resigned his position at the DOD literally the day before we met. I was able to verify who he was and what his tasks were at the Pentagon. He received the highest commendatons [sic] from his superiors. I was told that important unclassified [emphasis added] data and documentation are expected to be released through the Academy’s on-line Community of Interest (COI) in collaboration with the US government, which will be set up soon.

Unclassified data? The Internet is awash in unclassified data. The vast majority of the Project Blue Book files can be found at Fold3. John Greenewald’s Black Vault is loaded with all sorts of unclassified documents relating to UFOs. Even the FBI’s website provides information about UFOs. And now we are to be treated to another source that will provide us with unclassified documents. Wow.

In fact, this was underscored when Rolling Stone reported, “Subsequent books in the Sekret Machines trilogy will move away from ancient texts to focus on claims of interactions with aliens documented by government agencies since the 1940s, many of which are available by Freedom of Information Act requests and a recently digitized cache of CIA documents.” More unclassified documents that can be obtained by anyone who cares to do so.

Which, of course, moves us away from any meaningful research and puts us back in the entertainment camp. There are too many shows today that rely not on solid research but on the entertainment value of the show. Tell us a story, no matter how ridiculous and we’ll climb onboard even if it is so incredible that it can’t be true. Entertain us first and worry about the reality later. Ironically DeLonge and his co-author had something to say about that. According to Rolling Stone, “…they’re not claiming that everything you've seen on shows like Ancient Aliens is real. ‘Humans are responsible for building the pyramids, for instance,’ says [Peter] Levanda. ‘I think we can agree on that. But what was the impetus behind it? What we're saying is the initial contact is what prompted all this. Not that there were aliens out there telling us how to build pyramids. I think that just devalues the entire conversation, and we're trying to get beyond that.’"

That, of course, is something that many of us have said for years. I didn’t single out Ancient Aliens in the past but have pointed a finger at Hangar 1 and Unsealed: Alien Files which seemed to be based more on speculation and wild stories than on cases that added some real value to UFO research.

There is one other point that has been mentioned in the past that should be bothersome to all those interested in UFO research. According to Rolling Stone, “DeLonge's plan is bigger than just a few books. In addition to the nonfiction series, he is writing a historical-fiction trilogy with novelist A.J. Hartley, the first book of which was released last spring, as well as a documentary and a scripted film, all of which discuss the theory that we're not alone.”

And the additional irony here is that I point this out. Almost since I published my first book on UFOs, one of the criticisms is that I also write science fiction as well. I have kept the science fiction away from my UFO writings and I’m not the only one who has investigated UFOs and who has written science fiction. Bruce Maccabee, Whitley Strieber, Don Ecker and Nick Pope have all written fiction. The difference here, subtle though it might be, is that we have not put the science fiction under the same umbrella as our UFO research. And, of course, DeLong’s plan might not affect the rest of the organization’s goals, but it is just one more worrisome aspect of all this.

We learn, at the end of the news conference, that TTS/AAS “… intends to release game-changing information of the type interested people have been seeking for a long time.”

But the problem here is that this is the same claim that has been made for months about DeLonge’s research and activities and no matter who he has pulled in, he has yet to make any stunning revelations, other than he is forming a corporation to exploit the UFO field. This announcement ended, not so much with a bang, but with a whimper. We have learned nothing that we didn’t already know and it seems that we were promised much the same thing that has been promised by so many others over the last half century. The real point doesn’t seem to be research but entertainment, which, of course, is not always a bad thing… it’s just there has been too much entertainment in the UFO field and not enough research.

X-Zone Broadcast Network - Rob Swiatek

Rob Swiatek, formerly of the Fund for UFO Research and lately as member of the board at MUFON joined me for this week’s show. We discussed the state of UFO research including how many reports have been made to MUFON in the last year (something like 3500) and why there don’t seem to be the same sort of robust reports that were made in the past. He suggested that sightings in which the occupants were seen were a mere handful of the reports made. And we discussed some of the better sightings from the last couple of years, including some interesting photographs. You can listen to the show here:

https://youtu.be/l8W0PV1QVE8

For those of you who were interested in the Kauai, Hawaii UFO photograph we discussed, Rob supplied additional information after the show. Following is the report and a black and white copy of the photograph.

For an in depth analysis of the photograph see Bruce Maccabee, “A Rare Photo Coincidence,” in International UFO Reporter for May/June 1990, pages 4-9, 22.

Next week’s guest: Robert Sheaffer

Topic: Bad UFOs (The name of his book).

More Thoughts on McMinnville

I find that sometimes, if I pose a question here, someone out there has an answer. I have said for a very long time that there are only two conclusions to be drawn about the pictures taken in McMinnville, Oregon. They either show a craft from another world, or they are a hoax. I do not see a third possibility given the clarity of the photographs, the features of the object, and the state of our research and development of aircraft in 1950.

Philip Klass believed the photographs to be a hoax and research and analysis on the photographs suggested to Robert Sheaffer that the pictures were taken in the morning rather than the evening as claimed and they were taken in a different order than claimed. They believe that if the Trents lied about the time of day when the pictures were taken, then they probably lied about other aspects of the case, and that suggests hoax. If they are correct in their analysis, I would have to agree with them… if they are correct.

In today’s world, is there a way to resolve this?

Yes, but it depends on a couple of things. First, we have to locate the original negatives which I understand are now in the possession of MUFON. If true, all we need is for someone to look at them, which I hope this will inspire them to do.

Second, we have to hope that the negatives were numbered at the time they were developed. As we all know, 35 mm film, for example, is numbered, which would allow us to establish the sequence in which the pictures were taken. This was not a 35 mm camera but one that took a roll of film that was loaded into the camera by hand in a dark room. But if that film had numbers on it, or if the negatives are numbered, then we can determine the sequence in which the pictures were taken.

If we can do that, if there are numbers on the film, we can answer the question but I find nothing on the Internet to suggest that this has been done. I believe it is because most of those who studied the photographs were working from prints or copy negatives and the numbering sequence wasn’t important information during those earlier investigations… or it might just mean they weren’t numbered in which case we’re back to square one.

If they are numbered, however, that will either confirm or refute part of Sheaffer’s analysis by telling us in what order the pictures were taken. If they were taken in the sequence given by the Trents, then it is one more bit of evidence of authenticity. If they were taken in the order that Sheaffer suggested, then it is evidence that the Trents faked the whole thing. Either way, we learn something new about the photographs and that advances our understanding of the situation. I just can’t believe that someone has yet to do this.

(Update: Robert Sheaffer tells me that his original calculations came from prints that Philip Klass had supplied but in 1976 he, and Bruce Maccabee, made a study from the original negatives that Maccabee had retrieved. Sheaffer wrote that he didn’t remember seeing numbers on the negatives and that scans of those prints were available at http://debunker.com/trent.html. This doesn’t completely resolve the issue but suggests that there may be no numbers on the negatives. I have yet to hear from Bruce Maccabee.)

(Update No. 2: I have received information that the film manufactured in the 1960s did not have numbers on it. I will assume from this, that this type of film from 1950 would not have numbers either. It was suggested that if the negatives are matched, meaning that they were usually hand trimmed so that the cuts wouldn't be perfect, it might be possible to deduce the order in which the photographs were taken.)

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.

UFOs and the Old Geezers

Many times when someone posts something somewhere that is ridiculous or meanspirited, I just ignore it. Ignorance is in great supply in the world of the Internet and all you need to do to see that is take a look at the comments appended to news articles. Ignorance of the UFO world is overwhelming.

Just recently the RRR Group posted a picture that my wife took at the MUFON Symposium in Denver and claimed that those of us on the Speakers panel were a bunch of geezers who had failed to solve the UFO question. It was time for us to get out of the way and let those younger, brighter and more enlightened take over. We had our chance and we failed.

Except we haven’t failed. We solved the problem. We have the proof that some UFOs are alien spacecraft and we can make that point over and over. The evidence for that is overwhelming, but not unlike Galileo, who failed to convince the church that there were moons orbiting Jupiter, we get a bunch of people who "refuse to look through the telescope."

Old geezer Ted Philips, being interviewed during th MUFON Press Conference made an important point. Talking about the four thousand or so landing trace cases that he had investigated, he mentioned that once he had a description of the craft, he could predict what the landing traces would be. In other, more scientific words, we had reproducibility, meaning the same things observed under similar circumstances and the predictability that comes from repeated observation. This was science at its best and it’s something that the debunkers, the skeptics, and apparently those in the RRR Group ignore.

Old geezer Chris Rutkowski (seen here) reviewed, at length, a longitudinal study of twenty years of UFO reports in Canada, looking for trends. Here again was a statistical study that provided information about what people saw and how it was identified, if it was identified and what it meant when the mundane, or what some would call the rational, did not explain the events. These were unidentified sightings that suggested alien visitation.

Old geezer Stan Friedman (seen here) diverted from his normal "Flying Saucers Are Real" talk and spoke about the possibilities of interstellar travel, something the youngsters, the debunkers, and the skeptics will always reject out of hand. The distances are too vast and we just can’t travel that far with our chemical rockets.

Well, of course, a chemical rocket would quickly run out of fuel, but other methods of propulsion have been discussed everywhere from science fiction to science conventions... and ways to generate the necessary energy have been discussed. Methods that aren’t beyond our current technology so that when the opposition says the Voyager spacecraft will take 70,000 years to get to the nearest star, they don’t mention that it is not accelerating. Any trip to another star will require constant acceleration until a point is reached that the craft will have to begin to slow down, but the round trip time drops considerably.

Old geezer Bruce Maccabee (seen here) examined the pictorial evidence for UFOs and there are some cases in which there are but two possible solutions. The object is either alien or the case is a hoax. Maccabee mentions the McMinnville, Oregon case which he had investigated for decades and he finds no evidence of hoax... which, coincidentally, is the solution offered by the Condon Committee, the University of Colorado scientific study of UFOs. The object in the photographs matches no known earthly-built craft and was, or is, therefore good evidence of alien visitation.

I, myself an old geezer, would point to the Lubbock Lights photographs taken by Carl Hart, Jr. in 1951. The four known pictures show the objects in V-shaped formations over the town and are either of some unknown craft (which could be of earthly manufacture though no one can point to it) or they are faked. Donald Menzel, that paragon of scientific thought and rationality, for no reason what-so-ever, declared the pictures to be fakes. Carl Hart, Jr., told me in an interview a number of years ago that they weren’t faked and he doesn’t know what they were.

I could point here that the Air Force has been less than candid in its investigation of UFOs, slapping on ridiculous solutions just to be able to label the case. For the 1957 sightings in Levelland, Texas, which involved multiple witnesses, the UFO interacting with the environment, sightings by law enforcement officers and even the suggestion of a landing trace, the Air Force decided the sightings were weather related and the culprit was ball lightning... at the time, even science denied the existence of ball lightning. No one then seemed to catch the irony of using something that didn’t exist to explain the sightings of something else that didn’t exist, at least according to those in the Air Force.

If you are interested in the duplicity of the Air Force, let me point out that according to their nearly day long investigation, their representative spoke to only three witnesses. Later, when Major Don Keyhoe suggested that there were nine witnesses, the Air Force all but called him a liar.

But the truth is that both Keyhoe and the Air Force were wrong. There were many witnesses in thirteen separate locations. Many of their stories, gathered before the publicity and within minutes of their sightings were strikingly similar, including the electromagnetic effects on their vehicles engines, radios and lights.

What all this means is that we geezers have solved the UFO question. We know what is going on and we use our experience to provide answers for those cases that we can and we suggest that some of these UFO sightings are the result of alien visitation. I believe that we know what is going on with the cattle mutilations, a subset of UFOs, I’m fairly certain we know what is happening with crop circles, another subset, and the jury seems to be out on alien abduction, though we have some very interesting terrestrial solutions.

And now we have people... scientists saying the evidence is anecdotal but, of course, that is a way to reject it without having to examine it. We have people claiming that after 60 or 70 years of investigation we have no answers, though we have many solid answers, and we have one group waiting impatiently for those they consider geezers to die off and get out of the way of the new breed who can bring a fresh approach to the problem.

I ask, just what will this new breed do differently? Use the Internet for their research? Rehash the cases that have been solved and involve us again in messes like the Allende Letters, which was explained thirty years ago? Or maybe the RRR Group will support more experiments like those two clowns in New Jersey who proved that witnesses report accurately what they see and that UFO investigators provide answers quickly...

Old geezer Marc D’Antonio told me that he knew the objects in the New Jersey case were either Chinese Lanterns or flares after examining the tape of the lights. The only people fooled were the news media who haven’t conducted much in the way of investigations in thirty years and the employees of a Ford dealership. The two "twenty-somethings" who conducted the "experiment" lied to the media, lied to the researchers, interjected themselves when the publicity began to slip, and then drew conclusions that were not based on the research but on their own personal bias. So much for the new life interjected into UFO investigations and research by the young, hip, enlightened youth.

Here’s the bottom line in this. We know the answers but we can’t get the scientists, the Air Force, the media and the debunkers to look through the damned telescope. They know there are no such things as alien visitors and any evidence that shows otherwise must be manufactured.

And now we have to put up with those enlightened individuals who believe that we have failed in our mission the last several decades. But no, that’s not where we failed. It was in the public relations war. The bad guys had access to the media who are too sophisticated to believe that creatures from another world were smart enough to get here from there. They’re too sophisticated to believe that an average person is smart enough to distinguish between the mundane and something extraordinary. They’re simply too sophisticated to look through the telescope.

So what is the answer here? Simply do a better job communicating the results of investigations to the press. Make sure that everyone knows when an explanation is the result of a desire for a specific truth rather than the culmination of an investigation. And to get those who refuse to finally look through the telescope.