Moon Dust and the 4602nd AISS

For years, decades really, there has been this idea that Project Moon Dust began with the creation of the 4602^nd Air Intelligence Squadron (AISS) in early 1953. Ed Ruppelt, one time chief of Project Blue Book, had complained to his superiors after the massive UFO sighting wave of the summer 1952, that he needed help in the investigations. He was surprised when it was suggested, and later put into an Air Force regulation, that the investigation of UFO sightings would be accomplished by the 4602^nd.

If you go back and read what Ruppelt wrote, and if you look at the unit history of the 4602^nd along with an examination of the Project Blue Book administrative files, you’ll see what was going on. The 4602^nd was created at the time of the Korean War and during the Cold War in which military, governmental and strategic planners were worried about an aerial assault on the continental United States. This means, naturally, they worried about a Soviet bombing campaign which would see bombers shot out of the sky and Soviet airmen trying to escape and evade inside the US borders.

The thought was they needed trained teams who could search for these downed crewmen, who had lots of skills that normal service members didn’t need such as riding horses, Russian language skills, the ability to question civilians who might have seen something in the

Wright-Patterson AFB, home of Project Blue Book. Photo courtesy USAF.

sky, and other similar skills. The 4602^nd was designed with this in mind and to gain experience in interrogating civilian witnesses, they would be investigating UFO sightings. This put them in contact with untrained, sometimes uneducated, and often nervous civilians who had seen something strange. They would become experienced investigators.

Regulations written dictated this and it was, in fact, implemented. Going through the Blue Book files, there are sighting reports that were written by members of the 4602^nd about their investigations of UFO sightings. There is correspondence from the commanders of the 4602^nd to ATIC and other offices about UFOs. There is no dispute that this happened, and it interesting if only because it wasn’t until much later that this connection was made.

But, that does not give us the date of the beginning of Moon Dust. Others, and me among them, have suggested it and run with that idea that the 4602^nd was the beginning of Moon Dust. It seemed to be a logical conclusion, but it wasn’t actually supported by the documentation.

This idea was reinforced when New Mexico Senator Jeff Bingaman, working with Cliff Stone of Roswell, requested information about Project Moon Dust from the Air Force. Lieutenant Colonel John E. Madison, of the Congressional Inquiry Division, Office of Legislative Liaison wrote, “There is no agency, nor has there ever been, at Fort Belvoir, Virginia, which would deal with UFOs or have any information about the incident in Roswell. In addition, there is no Project Moon Dust or Operation Blue Fly.”

Documentation obtained through the Freedom of Information Act, first by Robert Todd, later by Stone, and also by me, proved the statement to be untrue. I found, in the Project Blue Book files four cases that had been marked as “Moon Dust.” Clearly, the project existed.

When that documentation was presented to the Air Force, they changed their response. Colonel George M. Mattingley, Jr., wrote that they wanted to amend their response, suggesting that Moon Dust did exist. Mattingley wrote:

In 1953, during the Korean War, the Air Defense Command organized intelligence teams to deploy, recover, or exploit at the scene of downed enemy personnel, equipment, and aircraft. The unit with responsibility for maintaining these teams was located at Fort Belvoir, Virginia. As the occasion never arose to use these air defense teams, the mission was assigned to Headquarters, United States Air Force in 1957 and expanded to include the following peace-time functions: a) Unidentified Flying Objects (UFOs); b) Project MOON DUST; to recover objects and debris from space vehicles that had survived re-entry from space to earth; c) Operation BLUE FLY, to expeditiously retrieve downed Soviet Bloc equipment.

This seems to suggest that the beginning of Moon Dust was in 1953, but what it actually tells us, which we already knew, was that it was the beginning of the 4602^nd, which is not the same as Moon Dust. I have been unable to find a single reference to Moon Dust in the 4602^nd unit history which was classified as secret when it was written. That means there would be no prohibition to mentioning Moon Dust in the context of the unit history because it was classified.

Mattingley, in fact, gives us the information about the creation of the 4602^nd and what its mission was in 1953. It wasn’t created in response to the UFO sightings of 1952, but as an outgrowth of the conflict in Korea and the escalating cold war. The UFO mission was secondary, thought of as a way to train their personnel.

But there is additional information. As I was researching another aspect of the UFO field, I found another document that provides a clue about the beginning of Moon Dust. A document from Headquarters, US Air Force, Message #54322 and dated December 23, 1957, discussed a new project, obviously developed after the launch of the Soviet satellite in October, 1957, that had a mission “to collect and analyze raw intelligence reports from the field on fallen space debris and objects of unknown origin.”

This is the earliest reference that I have found to Moon Dust. We also know that it had a UFO component based on other documents that define several terms including UFO and that there are reports in the Blue Book file that refer to Moon Dust.

Note also that Mattingley mentions that the mission was given to Headquarters, USAF in 1957, which corresponds with the launch of Sputnik, and the message issued by that Headquarters in 1957. The creation of the 4602^nd, then, was not the beginning of Moon Dust.

The upshot of all this is that Moon Dust did not begin in 1953, but late in 1957. It was in operation until 1985, and contrary to Mattingley’s claim, it was deployed and was not shut down. When the name was compromised in 1985, the code name was changed. In a letter to Robert Todd, dated July 1, 1987, he was told the “nickname Project Moon Dust no longer exists.” The new name was not releasable because even the code name was classified.

In the years that followed, we have not been able to learn the new name, and we don’t know if it is still in operation today. All I can say for certain is that we know, based on other information, that the Pentagon did engage in UFO research not all that long ago and though they say that project ended, we don’t know if that is true. After all, they told us that Project Sign, the first official UFO project had ended, but the name was merely changed to Grudge. We were told that Grudge had ended, but the name was changed to Blue Book. We were told that Blue Book had ended, but we know that Project Moon Dust survived the end of Blue Book and was still in operation in 1987 when the name was changed.

What we really see here, and what we can document, is a long history of Air Force investigation of UFOs, Air Force saying one thing and doing another, and that UFO investigation continued beyond the end of Blue Book, and that other studies of UFOs have been conducted into the 21^st century. What this tells us that there are many aspects of the UFO problem that have not been revealed to us and that there are still secrets being kept.

Chasing Notes... Sort Of...

Although this isn’t actually about chasing footnotes, it sort of began that way. I was trying to follow up on a comment about the Mantell crash and why it had happened. Nearly twenty years ago or so, I had a thought of creating a sort of peer review of UFO information using the Internet as the publishing vehicle as well as a way of getting that peer review. To that end, I selected the Mantell case because there was so much bad information about it out there, from the idea that he was an experienced fighter pilot and ace to the claim that he had seen some creatures inside the craft or that they had shot him down because he approached too close.

The idea failed because no one wanted to invest the time and effort in creating documents of length about a case, some of the needed information was still classified at various levels, or maybe they all just thought it was not worth the effort. Why work so hard on a sighting because no matter the conclusion and how honest you believed the results might be there would be others who would reject the word because it didn’t fit their personal belief structure? I suppose I should have known that it was doomed to failure, but sometimes we all get overly optimistic.

Anyway, I was pulling up information from a variety of sources just to see how it was treated in them. Skeptic Curtis Peeples in Watch the Skies didn’t actually explain the sighting but noted the Air Force had claimed Venus and others thought it might have been a weather balloon but investigation apparently couldn’t prove that. The one real contribution to the discussion was Peeples’ report that Mantell

Thomas Mantell.

had a mere 67 hours of flight time in the F-51D type aircraft he was flying and 2867 hours in transports. Peeples doesn’t mention it, but Mantell had been awarded a Distinguished Flying Cross for his actions during the Normandy invasion (D-Day for those of you who aren’t history buffs) in 1944. The point is that he was an experienced pilot but that his flight time in fighters was relatively low which might explain part of this.

I checked Richard Dolan’s UFO’s and the National Security State. Dolan suggested that Mantell was flying a P-51, which is the same aircraft as the F-51. The designation had been changed from “P” for pursuit to “F” for fighter, but many people make the mistake and it isn’t of much importance. He said that two of the other aircraft accompanied Mantell to 15,000 (while regulations required oxygen above 14,000) feet, but other documents suggested they climbed to 22,000 feet with Mantell.

Dolan quotes from Mantell’s last transmissions suggesting the object is above him and that is metallic and of tremendous size. He finally reports that the object is moving about his speed of maybe a little faster. According to Dolan, Mantell said that he was going to climb 20,000 feet and if he was no closer he would abandon the chase. The records seem to suggest that Mantell was already at 20,000 feet, and he was going to climb to 25,000 and circle for ten minutes before giving up. It is now clear to all of us, that if Mantell climbed to 25,000 feet he wouldn’t have had ten minutes of useful consciousness. He would have passed out in three to four minutes because of hypoxia.

The Air Force first claimed that Mantell had chased Venus, then a weather balloon and finally two weather balloons and Venus. Ed Ruppelt, when he took over as the chief of Project Blue Book concluded that Mantell might have been chasing a Skyhook balloon which could reach altitudes of nearly 100,000 feet, and given they were made of polyethylene, would have a metallic sheen in the bright sunlight. Ruppelt was unable to find a launch of one of those balloons on the proper date but there did seem to be one or two that might have been launched in the days preceding Mantell’s doomed flight.

Where Dolan goes astray, in the footnote sort of way is when he wrote, “Clifford Stone, a twenty-year U.S. Army veteran, has informed me that a navy colleague of his checked with the Office of Naval Research for Skyhook balloon plots. The man said that ONR records indicated there was definitely no launch of a Skyhook balloon from at least January 6 to January 8, 1948, but also that probably none had been launched since late December 1947.”

Here’s the problem, he mentions Cliff Stone, who is unreliable as a source on this, given the many unconfirmed tales he has told over the years. More importantly, Stone does not supply the name of his source, so not only is the information provided by Stone unverified, we aren’t provided with the name of this man with ONR. There is no way to check this out if Stone won’t supply the name.

Or, in other words, we can trace it from Dolan to Stone to a “navy colleague. That tells us nothing about where the information originated, about the accuracy of the information or what documentation exists to confirm it. The trail ends at that point. We need to ask Stone about it.

But here’s the point and it is one that we all too often ignore. We need to be able to trace the evidence to the original source so that we might be able to assess the credibility of that source. When I say, for example, that Edwin Easley suggested to me the path to the extraterrestrial was not the wrong path to follow in my investigation, we all could look at who he was. Easley, according to the documentation, was the provost marshal at Roswell in 1947 and was in a position to know. We can’t get beyond him, but we don’t need to. He was an eyewitness source who was clearly there in 1947. Unfortunately, in today’s world that information can’t be corroborated because he said it to me in an unrecorded conversation. He fell ill shortly after that and the opportunity was lost. You can accept it or reject based on your personal bias, but the point is, Easley was a named source who was in the right place at the right time. With Stone’s source we cannot verify his credentials, we don’t know if he was in the right place to gather the data claimed and that is the difference.

Those of us engaged in UFO research, regardless of the side of the fence we inhabit, must be willing to provide proper sourcing for what we say. We must name the names and the documents. Once that is done, we can all argue about the interpretation, but we must be willing to share all relevant data so that everyone can see where it originated. Otherwise we are just spinning our wheels.

Richard French, UFOs and Roswell

(Blogger’s Note: This was a particularly difficult post to write. I have great respect for Lieutenant Colonel Richard E. French’s nearly three decades of military service including fighting in two wars. The problems arise, however, when we look into his claims of participation in UFO investigations and his claims of educational background. I have emailed him three times, including a draft of this article, asking for comment. He has failed to respond. It is with great reluctance that I post the following.)

Since the Citizen Hearing in Washington, D.C., I have looking into the background of retired Lieutenant Colonel Richard E. French. Here was a guy who was saying some amazing things about the Air Force investigation into UFOs and his

Richard French at the Citizen Hearing

participation in it. He was talking about how he had faked UFO sighting solutions, his personal knowledge of the Roswell UFO crash and how he had a hand in writing the “Blue Book.” He seemed to think that it was a document with a blue cover, and while the various incarnations of the official UFO investigation did produce reports, there was never anything that was actually the Blue Book.

His comments about there being two alien craft that crashed in Roswell, including one that was shot down by an experimental fighter, were quickly published all over the Internet pushing his name in front of many others. Additional comments about his involvement in UFO research, or rather debunking of UFO sightings, on orders by the Air Force, were accepted as authentic by many without bothering to check his credentials or if his story was consistent. It added a new level of conspiracy to the already cluttered landscape of the conspiracy minded.

While in Washington, D.C. for the Citizen Hearing, he was interviewed by Kerry Cassidy and that interview has been posted to the Internet. By watching it, we can

French swearing to tell the truth

see where all the problems lie with this tale. According to what he has said to her, he had spent 27½ years in the Air Force and that he spent most of his time as an Operations Officer. His records do not confirm he spent so much time in operations and that is really a trivial point. He also said that he was the youngest officer in the Air Force to hold the position as operations officer. This makes no sense because he doesn’t specify at what level he held the job though he does say that it was with the 8^th Tactical Fighter Squadron in Germany. That isn’t exactly a high level position and I would be surprised that he was the youngest ever to hold it. This seems like so much hyperbole to me.

In response to a question at 7:06 during the Cassidy interview, French said, “I have several tours. Three flying tours in Korea and about six or seven in Vietnam. Therefore I have a lot of stories. I have over 680 combat missions. I think that is more than twice as many as anyone else.”

This is not hyperbole and is not accurate. It is just wrong. According to his records, he entered active duty in the middle of 1952, and in August 1952 was assigned as an administration officer in FEAF (Far East Air Force… meaning Korea… or Japan supporting operations in Korea). He did receive, according to the records, the awards that suggest service on the ground in Korea. There is no evidence that he was a pilot in Korea.

In fact, according to the available records, he didn’t enter flight school until 1954, and since that school lasted about a year, there is no way he could have deployed to Korea as a pilot. The war ended in July 1953. He also attended advanced training at Nellis Air Force Base for eight additional months, meaning that it was mid-1955, at the earliest he could have been assigned as a fighter pilot.

The records I have stop in 1968 but they do indicate a short tour in Vietnam in 1965, where he was awarded an Air Medal. The citation said, in part, “Captain Richard E. French distinguished himself by meritorious achievement while participating in sustained aerial flight as a combat crew member in Southeast Asia from 18 July 1965 to 14 August 1965…”

It is unclear from the record if he was only in Southeast Asia for that nearly month long period, or if it was part of another, longer assignment. It is not clear that he was in even Vietnam at the time which means the flights could have originated from an Air Force base outside Vietnam with flights over it. His records do indicate, however, that he was an assistant operations officer with the 478^th Tactical Fighter Squadron at Cannon Air Force Base, New Mexico during this time. So, it seems, based on the records, that it was not a full tour in Vietnam but a temporary duty assignment.

There is a citation in the record which places him in Vietnam in 1968, but I have nothing else about this. This could easily be and probably is a full tour in Vietnam. I have no records for anything beyond that, though it was in 1969 that Richard Nixon began to wind down American participation in the war. Given all this, it would seem that French can claim two “flying” tours in Vietnam. There might be another, but I have seen no record of it and as I say.

At 7:38 in the Cassidy interview, French said, “I have 121 American and foreign decorations. I look like MacArthur if I put everything on.”

That seems excessive and by my count, he is entitled to a minimum of 50 American and foreign decorations. This count is based on the records and the

Official USAF photo

official photograph of French taken in 1972. I am sure that this count is incomplete but it is far short of the claim. Unless there is additional information about it, including a complete list of all awards and decorations, then I would view this as hyperbole… as “resume inflation.”

The real trouble begins when we move away from his documented military career and into the claims he makes about UFOs, his part in the investigation of them, and his orders to debunk UFO sightings. At the Washington Citizen Hearing, French said that he was one of the few to see the Majestic Report referring of course to the Majestic-Twelve documents and what many of us believe to be a hoax. French talked about a meeting Truman held with a bunch of high level people including all the Chiefs of Staff about the Roswell case. They wrote a short report, which he claims to be the only living person to have seen (which of course makes it impossible to verify). He didn’t attend the meeting, and given his military career, I don’t know when he would have had the opportunity to see it, if you believe such a document ever existed.

About 18:50 into this Cassidy interview, he explains why they wanted to keep the Roswell UFO crash secret. Here is where another problem develops. According to what he said to others in other interviews, one of the alien spacecraft that crashed near Roswell in July 1947 had been shot down by a new weapon that worked along the lines of an electromagnetic pulse (EMP). But when asked why the government kept the crash a secret, he said it was because we had no defense against the aliens and their craft. First he was telling us we could shoot them down and later saying that we had no defense against them.

Demonstrating that he had very little knowledge of Project Blue Book, at 20:07 in the interview he said, “At that time the Blue Book… had a blue cover but it contained all these different stories…” Here he seems to be suggesting a real blue book rather than an investigation of UFOs. He doesn’t get that Blue Book was a code name and not an actual book. He said, “Official Air Force Blue Book. It’s the Air Force official report on UFOs.” He even claimed authorship of part of it.

It would seem that an officer who had worked on the project would have known exactly what it was. True, there were a number of final reports, one for Project Sign and one for Project Grudge, not to mention a number of status reports issued in the early days, but there never was a “blue book.”

During that interview he said that he had just graduated from college when he went into the Air Force. He said in another interview that he attended Oregon State University. According to the university, he attended from 1947 to the winter of 1952 but didn’t receive a degree. Now, I know that sometimes the universities make mistakes, but the evidence from the official documentation doesn’t suggest a degree. While it is always possible that he finished his degree work after his military service, there is currently nothing in the record to indicate he earned his bachelor’s degree from Oregon State University.

He also mentioned that he had two Ph.Ds, one in philosophy and another in astrophysics, “from Kings College online education system.” I searched the Internet for any reference remotely like Kings College and found one in Great Britain that offered a degree in astrophysics, but in an email response to me, they wrote that they do not offer an online doctorate in astrophysics.

At about 36:00 in the interview he said did research at MIT and Stanford… this work was research on cancer and that he and another fellow invented a device that would get 50 miles to a gallon of gas in an old eight-cylinder Buick. He said that he couldn’t sell it because they invented when gas was thirty cents a gallon, but today, with the pressure to increase gas mileage, it would seem that they could. He said that is was some kind of light ring that went into the carburetor that created oxygen so that the fuel mixture burned more efficiently. There is currently no evidence to back up these claims.

As I listened to his interview with Cassidy, I was impressed by the robust tale that he told. It just didn’t seem to be the sort of thing that would be invented by the average guy. But then he mentioned his book, Macedonian Gray. Here’s the description from Amazon.com:

This book is far more than a simple battle scene narration. It's a story embracing courage, love, and a penetrating view of the human mind under extremes of stress. The central figure, a jet fighter pilot, spends years in spine chilling Korean and Vietnam combat plus cold war actions around the world. A naturally endowed psychic, he sees flashes of incidents past and future that he doesn't understand and fears to share. Among these are fortelling President Kennedy's death and predicting his own violent combat death that is vividly related in the opening chapter. The story flashes back to narrative form and follows the hero's life through a series of aerial actions, a failed marriage, romantic episodes and incidents, and a friendship of warriors that lasts through thick and thin. It reaches a startling conclusion when, after death, the man's immortal spirit endures afterlife pain and eventual reincarnation.

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In creating the “hero” of his book, he used autobiographical information to add a note of authenticity to the story. Many authors incorporate bits of their lives into the books they write. Here I think that French then turned the tables believing that some of the embellishments added for characterization were now traits he held as well. He invented a character and then became that character.

What disturbs me about all this is that it is clear that French served in the Air Force and did so honorably, but once that service ended he began to invent additional accomplishments. For some reason, he decided that he had been a member of Project Blue Book, though there is no evidence to support this. He decided that he had seen some Majestic-12 documents, ones that no one else has seen, but has offered no proof this was true. He decided that he talked to the late Philip Corso about UFOs and that he, French, somehow knew that Corso was telling the truth, though he gets much of the Corso story wrong.

He gave us a version of what happened at Roswell, but clearly he couldn’t have been involved in 1947 simply because he was not in the military at the time, wasn’t in the area, and had no reason to know about it. His tales, now repeated throughout the world, are second hand at best and pure fiction at worst. I am baffled why a man with the military record he has would embellish it to the point where it is almost unbelievable and insert himself into projects and incidents that he clearly could not have been involved in. We see some of the fiction in his claims of flying tours in Korea, and see those fictions grow as he moves through his career.

But I want to be fair here. Let me point out that the man had a distinguished career and was an Air Force officer. He began serving in 1951, as a second lieutenant commissioned after taking ROTC in college (though I should note that he entered the Army Reserve as a PVT in June 1948). That lead to an active duty assignment in the middle of 1952 and lasted until he retired, as a lieutenant colonel in August 1974. He served first with the AFOSI and later as a fighter pilot. He served in Korea, was awarded the decorations that would go with such an assignment and served in the FEAF (Far East Air Force). There is no question that he served in Asia during that war but he held a ground assignment.

In 1954, or about six to eight months after the shooting war ended, he was sent to flight school. Total training time, including his advance transition into the F-86 was about eighteen months.

From there he had a number of military assignments, including those you’d expect from an Air Force officer. He was a flight commander, a squadron commander and an operations officer at various bases and in various foreign countries

The records I have only cover his career until late 1968. I will note that according to the records, he was awarded a Silver Star, two Distinguished Flying Crosses, 24 Air Medals and a Purple Heart. Unlike so many others, he had a fine and distinguished career that required no hyperbole. He was an Air Force officer, he served in two wars, and was decorated for that service. There would be no reason for him to complicate his life by inventing tales about his service, what he did, and what he saw.

What this demonstrates is that even a man with a fine military career will invent tales to bring the spotlight on himself. Money doesn’t seem to be the motivation. It is the power of the spotlight and those who will believe practically anything as long as the message is one they wish to hear. Unfortunately, he now joins the ranks of Robert Willingham, Mel Noel, Gerald Anderson, Cliff Stone and Frank Kaufmann. The evidence is not there to support French’s tale of UFO involvement and inside knowledge. All he has done is muddy the waters even more for those of us trying to get a clear picture.