Robert Willingham and the Lie about the Del Rio UFO Crash

 

A couple of years ago, I heard Dr. Eric Davis mention, briefly, that the UFO crash near Del Rio, Texas, was real. It was something of a “throw away” line on Coast-to-Coast AM, and there was no follow up. Having investigated the Del Rio crash for more than two decades, I was surprised by such a bold statement and attempted to reach out to Dr. Davis to learn why he thought the case was solid.

I never received a reply… until now.

Apparently, André Skondras reached out to Dr. Davis to ask him about my assessment of the Del Rio case. According to Andre the response was, “Davis maintains that Randle’s conclusions about crash-retrieval history are incorrect and based on flawed research. He stresses that he, David Grusch, and other cleared personnel were briefed on classified evidence firsthand—information that remains inaccessible to the public due to long-standing national-security restrictions. According to Davis, critics often misunderstand how these secrecy protocols work, and the absence of public proof does not invalidate what is known inside classified programs.”

Yes, we have the old dodge that he is privy to information from classified sources and that he, among others, were briefed on classified evidence and that we, on the outside, misunderstand secrecy protocols. Except, of course, I served as an intelligence officer in both the Air Force and later the Army. I get all that, but the problem is his belief that the Del Rio crash is real.

As I have noted in the past, when the story first popped up, in 1968, the architect of the tale was Robert Willingham, identified as a lieutenant colonel in the Civil Air Patrol. You can read the entry from Skylook, the original publication of MUFON here:

The Willingham story is the 3rd paragraph down. 

This provides not only the article but identifies the 

source.

I will point out that the original source on this, the self-proclaimed Air Force colonel, Robert Willingham lied about his Air Force experiences, lied about being a fighter pilot and lied about serving in Korea. I’ll note that he eventually claimed to have been present at six other crashes. I was the first to actually vet his military record and found it wanting. I learned he had been a Civil Air Patrol lieutenant colonel, which is nowhere the same as being an Air Force officer. For those who missed it, a good recap of all this information can be found here:

https://kevinrandle.blogspot.com/2018/09/dr-davis-confirms-del-rio-ufo-crash.html

The point is that in over two decades of research into the Del Rio crash, I have not found another witness to the Del Rio retrieval. The date has changed three times and Willingham told me that he wasn’t sure if it was 1954 or 1955. Please note here that I did interview the prime source and so far, as I know, the only witness to the crash.

While Dr. Davis may well have been exposed to first-hand witnesses to other crash/retrievals, he heard nothing first-hand about Del Rio. That crash was invented by Robert Willingham. Other than him, there is no evidence that the crash took place.

I’ll close this by saying that unless there is something about Del Rio that I haven’t discovered, and I freely admit that possibility, my conclusion, based on my research to date is that it is a hoax.

Roswell and the World in 1947

In the course of reading the newspaper clippings from July 1947, I have made a couple of interesting discoveries. None of them really affect the Roswell research as we’re carrying it out.

From the Roswell Daily Record of July 8, 1947, “Lt. Col. Harry W. Schaefer of the Wisconsin civil air patrol announced in Milwaukee his group planned to conduct a series of mass flights in hopes of learning something about the flying objects.”

This was in addition to the patrol mounted by the Army National Guard in Oregon with five P-51's over the Cascade Mountains, which is the area where Arnold made his sighting, but they found nothing. According to the AP story, a sixth fighter circled over Portland in contact with the others and all carried photographic equipment.

At Manhattan Beach, California, another fighter searched for two hours but found nothing. It’s not clear if this was a military aircraft, or one of the many surplus planes that had been sold to the public. The pilot, A. W. McKelvey said that he had cruised at 35,000 feet without results. He told reporters that he hadn’t seen a thing.

At Muroc Army Air Field (now Edwards Air Force Base), a P-80 jet fighter was on stand-by in case any of the flying disks appeared. Apparently it never left the ground.

It was also on that weekend that Captain E. J. Smith of United Airlines said that he spotted one of the saucers coming straight at him. The co-pilot, Ralph Stevens, reached down to blink the landing lights. Smith asked what he was doing and Stevens said that another aircraft was coming at them.

The craft, which looked to be flat on the bottom and irregularly shaped on the top, followed them for ten or fifteen minutes. When it disappeared, four more objects approached them on the left side of the aircraft, and they seemed to be larger than a DC-4.

I mention this only because, in the Roswell Daily Record of July 30, 1947, I saw that Captain Charles F. Gibian, of United Airlines, reported that he had seen a flying saucer that he said was “going like hell.”

This wouldn’t be much different than a hundred other UFO reports made during that July, except that Gibian had taken over flying the route that Smith had been flying some weeks earlier... and you thought there was no connection.

Gibian said that he believed the object to be a military experiment and that they should keep them away from the commercial airways. He said that his co-pilot had seen the disk, or whatever it was, too.

He said that it was round and that they thought it might be another airplane until they saw how fast it disappeared. It might have been 40 miles away when they saw it which would suggest that it was huge but there seemed to be no other reports, and it doesn’t seem that Gibian told the military about his sighting.

As I say, as looking for something else, as I was researching a specific aspect of the Roswell case, I came across these two items which were interesting only in the way they related to other UFO sightings. The CAP out in an aerial search for the flying saucers, and the pilot who took over the route once flown by Smith seeing something in the sky.

I will note here, so that no one needs to get all bent out of shape about it, that neither of these stories suggest that UFOs are extraterrestrial in nature, they add nothing, really, to our knowledge of the subject, but they are interesting because they relate to other cases that were more widely reported.

Willingham - A 1978 Interview

It seems that when you begin to spin lies, and when you provide interviews about those lies, you have an obligation to keep the information straight. If you say the event took place in 1948, then you can’t move it to 1950 or to 1955 without someone noticing. And you should know what type of military aircraft were available in the inventory in 1948 so that you don’t claim to have been flying something that wouldn’t appear for years. (I might point out that you should also remember the type of aircraft you were flying and I base this on my own experiences as a military pilot.) If you’re going to tell a good story, you should make sure that you have enough facts straight so that it can’t be broken apart quickly and easily, when people begin to investigate.

What brought this on?

Well, I just was given a transcript of an interview with Robert Willingham and his claim to have seen a crashed flying saucer. It is dated May 1978 and provides us with still another version of his story, or rather a modified version of that story.

According to it, in May 1978, he was a lieutenant colonel (an O5 in the military vernacular) in the Air Force, or so he said. Actually, as I have pointed out time and again, he was in the Civil Air Patrol, an auxiliary of the Air Force. It is made up of civilians who receive no real compensation for their service and are a vital part of the country’s search and rescue component, but who are not part of the Air Force or the Air Force Reserve.

The important point is that he was claiming to be a lieutenant colonel in 1978, because in a later interview given to the American Legion, he said that he was promoted to full colonel (O6) when he retired. That article, entitled, “Robert B. Willingham marks 60th year in American Legion,” said, “He did return to Archer City in 1980, on disability leave, when his mother became ill. He was a Lt. Colonel at the time, but President Johnson made him a full colonel after retirement.”

Lyndon Johnson wasn’t president after 1978 (or 1969 for that matter if you count the days prior to Nixon’s inauguration) and in fact had died in 1973. There is no way that Willingham could have been promoted to colonel by Johnson. The idea of President Johnson promoting someone appeared in one of the novels by W.E.B. Griffin. I don’t know if that is where Willingham got the idea, but it just doesn’t work the way Willingham said... or Griffin for that matter.

That 1978 interview provides another clue. They are talking about the analysis to the piece of metal that Willingham said that he had recovered at the crash site. He said that he had taken it to a lab in Hagerstown, Maryland for analysis. He claimed that he had given it to a Marine major who worked there. When he tried to learn what the major had found, he was told the man did work there but he couldn’t follow up on it. According to Willingham, that was because “we were getting ready to go to Korea...”

While nowhere in the interview do they discuss an actual date for the crash, this puts it before Willingham claimed he went to Korea, and in other interviews, he suggested he served there at the beginning of the war, or in 1950. So, while Willingham claims that Todd Zechel came up with the December 6, 1950 date, the fact is that Willingham himself came up with both the 1948 date and the later 1954 date.

I could go on because in this interview Willingham claims he was flying a F-94, but these weren’t in the inventory in 1948 or 1950... He talks about the UFO being confirmed by radar on the DEW Line, but it didn’t exist in 1948 or 1950.

But this is becoming overkill. Clearly the story has evolved, contains elements that are impossible given the timing, and is littered with contradictions. This 1978 interview, which was clearly coached given the questions and wording of the answers, proves that there is little truth in the December 6, 1950 crash or any other that Willingham claims to have seen. I hope this will end it, but given the nature of UFOlogy, I know that it won’t. Nothing ever dies in UFOlogy, it’s just repeated endlessly.

UFOs and Stolen Valor

I was searching the web the other night and came across an interview with a man I had written about in the past. He was not pleased with my assessment of his tale and wondered why I had not contacted him before I posted it. I was a little disturbed by his comments and then realized that I was suggesting he had been less than candid about his UFO involvement and he certainly had the right to feel annoyed. Of course, I believed then what I written and I have seen nothing in the last several years to change that opinion.

The point is that I find myself in a similar position today. I have been researching, for the last year, a story told by a man who claimed to be a retired Air Force colonel. Based on his supposed high rank, I accepted the story he told as authentic. I believed that a man who had obtained high military rank wouldn’t be lying about something like this... but that was before Philip Corso entered the picture and proved me wrong.

In this case, however, the man had not been a high-ranking Air Force officer as claimed and the only record of military service I could find was a short period starting in December 1945 and ending in January 1947. This would technically make him a veteran of World War II, though he entered the service after the surrenders of Germany and Japan. The war wasn’t declared officially over until some time in 1946.

He claimed that he had been an Air Force fighter pilot, but I could find no record to substantiate this, and if he wasn’t a fighter pilot, then his tale of a UFO crash was no longer credible. He had been, according to him, flying a chase plane during some kind of a bomber mission when he saw the UFO. But if he wasn’t a fighter pilot, then the reason for him being where he claimed to be was eliminated and his tale collapsed.

I did learn that he had a long association with the Civil Air Patrol, the official auxiliary of the Air Force, but that is a civilian, volunteer organization. I don’t know if Air Force personnel, who can also serve in the CAP, receive retirement points for that service. If so, I suppose he could claim some kind of lengthy Air Force service, but the truth is, he wasn’t in the Air Force as claimed, nor in the Air Force Reserve, so the point is moot.

According to documentation, he rose to lieutenant colonel in the CAP, but again, that is not the same as being a lieutenant colonel in the Air Force. When questioned about his service, he provided several photographs and documents, but all of them related to the Civil Air Patrol. I have never seen a picture of him in an Air Force uniform, though it is clear from the photographs supplied that he was attempting to mask his CAP service by making alterations to the uniform.

I have since been given some documents that suggest service in the Air Force, but these came from the man, and I have been unable to verify their authenticity. I believe one of them to be a forgery and not a very clever one at that.

So, who is this guy you ask? This is where the trouble arises. In 2005 the US Congress passed the Stolen Valor Act which makes it a crime to wear ribbons or medals not earned. I have two pictures of him and in each he is wearing medals for which I can find no documentation. He is wearing an officer’s uniform and he is claiming to have served in the Air Force, either on active duty or the reserve long enough to have earned a pension. He claims it was denied because he talked to civilians about UFOs.

To identify this man now, who is 84 and whose health isn’t all that great, would be to bring addition attention and pressure to him. This is something that I’m not sure I want to do...

On the other hand, I understand the anger of veterans toward those who didn’t serve, or served in a limited way but who claim great things. One estimate, published in Military History magazine this month suggests there are 26 million people claiming to be veterans who are not. Thousands have received veteran benefits to which they were not entitled, taking money from the veterans who had earned it. I have seen men, and a few women, interviewed about their service, making claims that then tarnish the reputations of all of us who did serve.

But this guy is old, sick, and his family is not nearby. At the moment, nothing is gained by identifying him, at least in my mind. His story, however, does have a great impact on some avenues of UFO research, and that will be explored a little later.