The Levelland Sightings and the Condon Committee

I had always wondered why the Condon Committee, that University of Colorado study of UFOs financed by the Air Force, which is to say us, never bothered looking into the Levelland UFO sightings of November 1957. In their final report there is a single mention of Levelland in which they report, “Magnetic mapping of automobiles involved in particularly puzzling UFO reports of past years, such as the November 1957 incidents in Levelland, Texas, would have been

The Levelland sign. Photo copyright by
Kevin Randle.

most desirable, but the cars were no longer available.”

An interesting idea and the scientists working with Condon had pointed out that the manufacture of the cars’ steel components such as hoods and doors would have created a magnetic signature. Even if the cars involved in the incidents had not been mapped prior to the sighting, those manufactured at the same time, at the same place, would have a magnetic signature that matched those from the UFO event. It meant that the magnetic signature of all the cars were similar and any major deviation would have been significant.

They did follow up on this, after a fashion. They reported that two of their investigators, Fred Hooven and David Moyer (actually part of the Ford Motor Company) investigated a case (Case No. 12 in the official report) from the winter of 1967, in which a woman said that a lighted UFO hovered over her car for several miles and that it interfered with the electrical functions of her car. Hooven and Moyer said that an examination of the car some two months later found all the electrical systems working as they should and that they discovered no magnetic anomalies when the magnetically mapped the automobile.

I will note here that it seemed a real effort was made to investigate the case including extensive examination of the car by Ford engineers. What they found was a car in poor repair with a radio antenna that was broken so that it only picked up the local stations, a fan belt that was loose so that it was not charging properly, that the speedometer had been broken, repaired and apparently broken again so that there were speed functions on the dashboard display and that oil gauge was malfunctioning because of leakage in the electrical system. In other words, it seemed that everything the witness had reported about car trouble was related to the car itself and not some sort of outside influence such as the hovering UFO.

They, that is Hooven and Moyer, reported that she seemed to be a nice woman who was not prone to hysteria and who was competent, meaning I suppose, that she was intelligent and wasn’t mentally ill in some way. However, they noted that her memories of the UFO incident were not without problems including that she remembered a bright, full moon when it was actually in its last quarter and that though she claimed to have seen the UFO in her rearview mirror, the configuration of the car and the placement of the mirror meant that the UFO couldn’t have been seen in the way she described.

There was a second case (No. 39) from the fall of 1967 and in a location noted as the South Pacific, that had somewhat similar results. Again, the Condon Committee doesn’t supply the name of the witness, only that he was a businessman who said that his car had been stopped by a UFO sometime between 3:30 and 4:00 a.m. The lights failed and the radio went dead. He also reported that he felt something pressing down on his head and shoulders. Through a break in the fog, he saw a UFO that passed over his car and stopped, hovering over the highway. He thought it was about thirty feet in diameter, red-orange, saucer shaped but with a fuzzy outline. It had rotating lights and wobbled as it moved and hovered about 160 feet above the ground. He watched it for about a minute and a half, before it took off into the fog. When it was gone the radio came back on, the lights brightened and he was able to start his car. (Note here that he had to take an action. The car did not spontaneously restart.)

Once he had started the car, he drove to the nearest town in search of someone to talk to. He didn’t find any additional witnesses. Eventually the case made its way to NICAP. That investigation showed that the car’s clock had stopped at 3:46 a.m. and, according to the unnamed witness, the clock had been working perfectly prior to the sighting. Interestingly, they found that stereo tapes that had been in the car at the time of the sighting had lost some of their fidelity, especially in the lower ranges and that the rear window had some sort of distortion in the glass.

The Condon Committee investigation was carried out by Roy Craig, who recorded the interviews with the witness and gathered additional details. In this case they found a car of similar manufacture and engaged in a magnetic mapping of the hoods of both. There were a couple of points where the magnetic signature differed significantly but for the most part, the magnetic signatures of the two cars were similar.

What I found interesting is that Craig reported that the radio’s FM band no longer worked, though, according to the witness, it had been fine until the sighting. Five days after the sighting all that could be heard was a loud hum across the whole FM spectrum.

And, now, according to the witness, he was no long certain that the clock had been working in the days prior to the sighting. The clock stoppage might not have been relevant.

Craig was bothered by the witness’ vague description of the object and with the inconsistencies in his estimates of the size and distance as they were determined later by measurement. He was also worried that no one else had seen the object and that the car didn’t seem to show an exposure to a strong magnetic field. Craig wrote, “…car body did not show evidence of exposure to strong magnetic fields, a more detailed investigation of this event as a source related to electro-magnetic effect on automobiles did not seem warranted.”

These were the only cases of reported electromagnetic effects stalling cars but they did look into other aspects such as power outages caused by UFOs. In their research of several of these blackouts, they could not establish a causal relationship. In other words, the evidence didn’t support the idea that a UFO had been

Location of the first Levelland sighting.
Photo copyright by Kevin Randle.

responsible for a blackout and I have to agree with that assessment.

The purpose here, however, was to try to understand why the Condon Committee seemed to ignore the Levelland case. It differed from those they did investigate because it had multiple, independent witnesses, and included law enforcement officers among those who had seen the object or the light.

The papers, documents, research, rough drafts and other material collected during the project were eventually sent to the American Philosophical Society Library. It turns out that they did make a study of the Levelland case though it seemed to have been based solely on the Project Blue Book files, what NICAP reported, and what was found in Dallas Times Herald newspaper.

Although there seemed to have been no original research, meaning they didn’t interview any of the witnesses and noted that the vehicles involved couldn’t be located (I have to wonder if this was just an excuse, though 10 years had passed and the effort to locate those vehicles would have been extremely difficult) they didn’t take their investigation any further. It amounted to a synopsis of the sources quoted, a short discussion on areas of further investigation that was only about related weather phenomena, especially ball lightning, which was the Air Force final conclusion, none of which made it into the final report.

At the end of the Condon Levelland report, there was a series of hypotheses suggesting solutions. This seems to have been taken almost directly from an Air Force document about the case. They simply did not bother to follow up on this case, though they noted its importance. There were multiple witnesses to the suppression of the electrical system made independently and there were multiple witnesses who reported an actual, physical object either close to the ground or sitting on the ground.

In the end, I’m unsure of the motives here. We know that Condon was instructed about the conclusions of his study prior the beginning of the work, and we know that he adhered to those instructions. We see evidence in other aspects of this research where solid leads were virtually ignored (Shag Harbour, though it could be argued that the Canadian case fell outside the scope of their project), and we see that sometimes they gave little more than lip service to the investigation. I had thought we’d find some more evidence of the committee ignored a solid case, but given the circumstances, it might just have been impossible for them to do more than they did with Levelland.

However, the Levelland case provided some interesting dynamics such as the craft interacting with the environment, multiple independent witnesses, and an opportunity for some scientific investigation. It suggested that they look a little deeper into this idea of electromagnetic interference, which they did, sort of. Instead, they found a way to ignore Levelland and move onto other aspects of their research. This was at best, a missed opportunity and at worst just another example of how not to actually conduct research.

Newhouse's Tremonton, Utah Movie Revisited

I hadn’t planned on doing this simply because it was more work at this point than I wanted to take on, but there seems to be a real interest in the film and there is a lot of misinformation floating around about it. These are distortions that I believe are lodged in the belief structures of the various commentators rather than in the facts of the case. I’m using as many of the original sources as possible, including the reports of others who interviewed the photographer after the event, sometimes years afterwards and will point out that when I interviewed him, I just wanted to confirm that he had told others what they had reported he told them.

The film was shot by Navy warrant officer Delbert C. Newhouse north of the small Utah town of Tremonton, Utah (though it has been spelled Trementon by many over the years). He provided a brief statement to the Air Force about the case that is woefully inadequate and I’m not sure why no one in the Air Force attempted to get something a little more comprehensive from him about the shape of the objects. According to the Project Blue Book files:

Driving from Washington, D.C. to Portland, Ore., on the morning of 2 July my wife noticed a group of objects in the sky that she could not identify. She asked me to stop the car and look. There was a group of about ten or twelve objects - that bore no relation to anything I had seen before - milling about in a rough formation and proceeding in a westerly direction. I opened the luggage compartment of the car and got my camera out of a suitcase. Loading it hurriedly, I exposed approximately thirty feet of film. There was no reference point in the sky and it was impossible for me to make any estimate of speed, size, altitude or distance. Toward the end one of the objects reversed course and proceeded away from the main group. I held the camera still and allowed this single one to cross the field of view, picking it up again and repeating for three or four such passes. By this time all of the objects had disappeared. I expended the balance of the film late that afternoon on a mountain somewhere in Idaho.

When he finished with the filming, he put the equipment away and they all got back in the car to continue the trip. Then, apparently after arriving at his new duty station, developed the film and sent the original off to Hill Air Force Base in Utah which eventually sent it on to Project Blue Book in Dayton, Ohio. According to the Condon Committee report (on page 420 of the Bantam paperback edition) William Hartmann, the investigator wrote, “The witness’s original letter of 11 August offers the film for whatever value it may have in connection with your investigation of the so-called flying saucers.”

And while all that is interesting, it turns out not to be the most important thing in that letter. Newhouse wrote, “(1) one (1) fifty-foot roll of processed 16mm color motion picture film.”

Ed Ruppelt, the chief of Project Blue Book at the time wrote, “When I received the Tremonton films I took them right over to the Wright Field photo lab, along with the Montana Movie [a short, color film shot over Great Falls in 1950 showing two bright lights], and the photo technicians and I ran them twenty or thirty times. The two movies were similar in that in both of them the objects appeared to be large, circular lights – in neither one could you see any detail. But, unlike the Montana Movie, the lights in the Tremonton Movie would fade out, then come back in again. This fading immediately suggested airplanes reflecting light, but the roar of a king-sized dogfight could have been heard for miles and the Newhouse family heard no sound.”

The inadequate statement provided in the letter with the film didn’t tell much and according to Ruppelt, they sent a list of questions to an intelligence officer. This interview was conducted on September 10, 1952, and included not only Newhouse, but his wife, Norma; son, Delbert Newhouse, Jr. then aged 14 and daughter Anne, then aged 12. This interview did nothing to clear up the questions that we would have so many years later and, according to Ruppelt, “The question ‘What did the UFO’s look like?’ wasn’t one of them because when you have a picture of something you don’t normally ask what it looks like.”

The answers to the questions were received by teletype on September 12 and do little to resolve the questions of today. I don’t know why certain things were not asked and why certain information is not found in the files. While Ruppelt explained why they hadn’t asked what the objects looked like, I also noted that there is no real description of the length of the film. Going through the Project Blue Book files, I found a few, vague references to the film being about thirty feet long, which, given the frames per second rate, works out to about 75 seconds. William Hartmann, who conducted the investigation for the Condon Committee in the late 1960s, wrote, “The film contains about 1200 frames… i.e. about 75 seconds…”

According to the teletype, all the Newhouses were interviewed at home and the answers to the questions were as follows:

1. No sound heard during the observation. 2. No exhaust trails or contrails observed. 3. No aircraft, birds, balloons, or other identifiable objects seen in the air immediately before, during, or immediately after observation. 4. Single object which detached itself from the group did head in direction opposite original course and disappeared from view while still traveling in this direction. 5. Camera pointed at estimated 70 degrees elevation and described and [sic] arc from approx. [sic] due east to due west then from due west to approx. 60 degrees from north in photographing detached obj [sic] heading in direction opposite original course. 6. Sun was approx overhead of observer. Objects were approx. 70 degrees above terrain on a course several miles from observer. 7. Weather conditions: Bright sunlight, clear, approx. 80 degrees temperature, slight breeze from east northeast approx. 3 to 5 mph. 8. No meteorological activity noted during that day. 9. Opinion regarding objects following CLN [sic] A. Light from objects caused by reflection: B. Objects appeared approx. as long as they were wide and thin, C. Appeared identical in shape, D. 12 to 14 objects, E. All appeared light color, F. No opinion, G. Appeared to have same type of motion except one object which reversed its course, H. Disappeared from view by moving out of range of eyesight. 10. No filters used. 11. One low hill 2 or 3 miles to right of US HWY 30 dash S with observer facing north. Located approx. 10 miles north of Tremonton, Utah. 12. Other persons sighting object [names of wife, children]. Whole Newhouse family included in interview. 13. CPO [sic s/b CWO] Newhouse and family have never sighted unidentified flying objects before. Newhouse stated that he never believed he would join the ranks of those reporting such objects prior to this observation… CPO [sic] Newhouse stated he has been in the Naval service for over 19 years with service as a commissioned officer during WW 2…

From this point, the Blue Book file is filled with questions about the technical aspects of the film and the camera. On one document, in which it was revealed that Newhouse had not used a tripod, someone underscored that and added an exclamation point.

The Air Force analysis, done in the months following the sighting, did not yield any positive results. According to Ruppelt, “All they had to say was, ‘We don’t know what they are but they aren’t aircraft or balloons, and we don’t think they are birds.”

It would seem that the next time that Newhouse was interviewed about the sighting in depth was when he met with Ruppelt as they were shooting the commercial film Unidentified Flying Objects, aka UFO. Ruppelt wrote about that meeting in his book The Report on Unidentified Flying Objects. Ruppelt said:

After I got out of the Air Force I met Newhouse and talked to him for two hours [in 1954, I believe]. I’ve talked to many people who have reported UFOs, but few impressed me as much as Newhouse. I learned that when he and his family first saw the UFOs they were close to the car, much closer than when he took the movie. To use Newhouse’s own words, “If they had been the size of a B-29 they would have been at 10,000 feet altitude.” And the Navy man and his family had taken a good look at the objects – they looked like “two pie pans, one inverted on the top of the other!” He didn’t just think the UFO’s were disk-shaped; he knew that they were; he had plainly seen them. I asked him why he hadn’t told this to the intelligence officer who interrogated him. He said that he had. Then I remember that I’d sent the intelligence officer a list of questions I wanted Newhouse to answer. The question “What did the UFO’s look like?” wasn’t one of them because when you have a picture of something you don’t normally ask what it looks like. Why the intelligence officer didn’t pass this information along to us I’ll never know.

The next mention of Newhouse’s experience came in January 1953, when the Robertson Panel, a CIA sponsored study of UFOs was made. Because there was physical evidence available, meaning the film, it was one of those reports they wanted to review. Luis Alvarez, one of the scientists involved, asked that the film be run several times and then suggested that the objects looked to him like sea gulls riding on thermals. The rest of the panel agreed with him and that was the answer they appended to the case.

Ruppelt, in his book wrote that they, meaning those at Blue Book and ATIC had thought of the birds explanation months earlier. He wrote, “…several months later I as in San Francisco… and I watched gulls soaring in a cloudless sky. They were ‘riding a thermal,’ and they were so high that you couldn’t see them until they banked just a certain way; then they appeared to be a bright white flash, much larger than one would expect from sea gulls. There was a strong resemblance to the UFO’s in the Tremonton Movie. But I’m not sure this is the answer.”

Also found in the Project Blue Book files, and dated 1955, is a report, “Analysis of Photographic Material Photogrammetric Analysis of the ‘Utah’ Film, Tracking UFO’s,” created for the Douglas Aircraft Company and written by Dr. R. M. L. Baker. He provides an overview of the sighting that is consistent with the earlier reports found in the Blue Book file, but then wrote, “He [Newhouse] described them as ‘gun metal colored objects shaped like two saucers, one inverted over the other.’”

Baker’s conclusion written on May 16, 1956, or nearly four years after the sighting, was, “The evidence remains rather contradictory and no single hypothesis of a natural phenomenon yet suggested seems to completely account for the UFO involved. The possibility of multiple hypotheses, i.e. that the Utah UFO’s are the result of two simultaneous natural phenomena might possibly yield the answer. However… no definite conclusion could be obtained.”

But even this isn’t without controversy. Tim Printy at his skeptics web site wrote:

In 1955, Dr. Robert Baker conducted an evaluation of the film and also interviewed Newhouse again. Newhouse now added more information that seemed to disagree with his earlier testimony.

When he got out, he observed the objects (twelve to fourteen of them) to be directly overhead and milling about. He described them as ‘gun metal colored objects shaped like two saucers, one inverted on top of the other.’ He estimated that they subtended ‘about the same angle as B29’s at 10,000 ft.’ (about half a degree i.e. about the angular diameter of the moon.”

In his earliest reports he stated that he could not estimate size or distance, now he was able to do this as well as describe the shape. Newhouse suggests before filming they appeared overhead and then went off in the distance when he finally got the camera going.

A close reading of the various sources including Ruppelt’s book and the Condon Committee report does not support the conclusion that Newhouse was giving any different answers. Baker’s source seemed not to be a new interview, but what Newhouse had told Ruppelt in 1954 and that Newhouse was not saying the objects were the size of B-29s at ten thousand feet, but looked to be the size of the bomber if it was at that altitude. It was the same as a witness describing a UFO as the size of a dime held at arm’s length.

At the same time, that is 1956, the Air Force, in response to the release of UFO, put together a press package to explain some of the cases mentioned in the film. At that point the Air Force endorsed the “birds” explanation, and that is the way it is carried in the Blue Book records. The documents suggest that the Air Force was more interested in lessening the impact of the movie than they were in supplying proper solutions to the cases. In other words, their acceptance of the birds explanation was a public relations ploy.

The next analysis came when the Condon Committee conducted its investigation in the late 1960s. William Hartmann added little of importance to the case. He noted the length of the film, which agreed with the claim that the sequence was about 30 feet long or about 75 seconds. Lance Moody had suggested that if the film could be recovered now, the length could be measured, which would answer some questions that have developed in the last few years. The problem is that Air Force file makes it clear the film had been cut. On September 15, 1952, Major Robert E. Kennedy sent Newhouse a letter saying, “The final footage of the mountain scenery will be detached and returned to you as soon as possible.” This point too, would become important later.

Hartmann reviewed all the information available, including, apparently, a complete copy of the Project Blue Book file. He provided a quick history of the investigations and did mention that during Baker’s earlier investigation Newhouse provided “…substantially the same account, with the additional information: ‘When he got out [of the car], he observed the objects (twelve to fourteen of them) to be directly overhead and milling about. He described them as ‘gun metal colored objects, shaped like two saucers, one inverted of top of the other.’…”

Hartmann then made his own analysis, finally concluding, “These observations give strong evidence that the Tremonton films do show birds… and I now regard the objects as so identified.”

But this comes only after Hartmann rejected the statements by Newhouse seeing the objects at close range. Hartmann wrote, “The strongest negative argument was stated later by the witness that the objects were seen to subtend an angle of about 0.5 degrees and were then seen as gun metal colored and shaped like two saucers held together rim to rim, but the photographs and circumstances indicate that this observation could not have been meaningful.”

Baker, in 1969 and in response to the negative findings of the Condon Committee, at a symposium sponsored by the American Association for the Advancement of Science said that while Hartmann’s analysis might be appealing “[The] motion [of the objects] is not what one would expect from a flock of soaring birds; there are erratic brightness fluctuations, but there is no indication of periodic decreases in brightness due to turning with the wind or flapping. No cumulus clouds are shown on the film that might betray the presence of thermal updraft… The motion pictures I have taken of birds at various distances have no similarity to the Utah film.”

Now the case becomes more complicated. In 1970, Dr. James E. McDonald interviewed Newhouse over the telephone, with his wife on the extension. In a letter to Arthur C. Lundahl and found on the NICAP web site, McDonald wrote:

It was particularly good to have Mrs. Newhouse on the phone, since she was the one who first spotted the objects and watched them for an estimated minute or so while she was trying to persuade Newhouse to stop the car for a better look…

Both of them emphasized that it must have taken two or three minutes for Newhouse to hunt through their luggage and locate the camera and film, which were in separate suitcases. In the initial period, the objects were considerably closer to them than at the time he finally began shooting, Newhouse stressed. It was his estimate that the objects lay only about 10 degrees east of their zenith when they first got out of the car. He reported his angular-size estimate that has been noted elsewhere, namely about the comparative size of a B-17 at 10,000ft…

… [O]ne of the key points that I wanted to check with Newhouse concerned the description given by Ruppelt… namely, that they appeared to be silvery-gray, “gunmetal”, and like two pie pans face-to-face. Both Newhouse and his wife fully confirmed that, Newhouse comparing the shape to a discus…

I asked Newhouse if it was correct that he had given that description to Ruppelt after the latter had left the Air Force. He confirmed that, saying that the only time he personally talked to Ruppelt was at a filming session for that movie entitles “UFO” produced in 1954 or 1955. He guessed that meeting must have been in 1954, and Al Chop was also present at that discussion. He brought out the important point that he had also stressed the visually observed shape in those early portions of the sighting, when he was interviewed at his duty station in Oakland by an Air Force officer. He further remarked that he saw a copy of the officer’s transcript of the interview, and that point appeared in the transcript…

…A rather interesting point, which I have never seen brought out before, was mentioned, almost by happenstance. It turned out that the footage which Newhouse submitted to the Air Force was spliced from about 20 feet that he shot at the end of one 50-foot magazine, plus about 40 feet that he shot on the first part of the next magazine. In other words, he had to change magazine in the middle of that shooting…

Newhouse said that the Air Force didn’t send the originals back to him at any time. He wrote ATIC when a long time had elapsed, and what they did finally send back to him was a color print which he stressed was distinctly inferior to the original. Not only that, but he was positive that they had cut out the first 10 or 20 feet, which were shot when the objects were very much closer and appeared much sharper on the film… The missing footage, which he seemed positive was from the earliest and best parts of his original…

I found it interesting to learn that no contacts of any sort have been made with Newhouse since that movie was made. This evidently included Baker, as well as Hartmann and the Condon Project team. I was particularly surprised that Bob Baker had not contacted him…

There are some things that we can deduce from all this. First, strangely, in the original interviews, there is no indication that anyone asked Newhouse or his family what the objects looked like. The statement he supplied as he submitted the film is devoid of any important information other than time and location. He does not describe the objects in any way other than to say, “…that bore no relation to anything I had seen before…”

The point to be made here is that Newhouse had more than 19 years of service in the Navy and it is reasonable to assume that he had seen sea gulls soaring in the past. It would seem that if five minutes or so passed during the sighting, which includes 75 seconds of the filming, sea gulls would have revealed themselves as such at some point. If he saw them at close range, as he claims, then the sea gull explanation fails.

Newhouse told McDonald that he had told the intelligence officer about the shape and that the description had been included in the transcript of the interview. There is nothing like that in the Project Blue Book file, which means one of two things: Either Newhouse is mistaken or the transcript was removed from the files.

Although some believe that Newhouse didn’t mention the shape until more than twenty years later when I interviewed him, it is clear that Newhouse was talking about the shape within two years. He told Ruppelt that he had told that to the intelligence officer, but there is nothing to back up the claim. The best we can say was that he mentioned it in 1954 and was consistent in those statements from that point. His original statement does not preclude the observation, only that it can’t be documented in the Project Blue Book file.

The criticism that Newhouse was unable to give size, distance and shape estimates at first but later came up with them is invalid. It is quite clear he was merely saying that the objects appeared to be the size of a bomber at 10,000 feet. The description he offered the September interview suggests a circular object (or one that is square or diamond shaped and very thin) isn’t very helpful. In fact, given that vague information, it would seem that someone, Newhouse, his wife or children, would have said something more definitive.

The real point where this falls apart, at least for me, is when Newhouse began talking to McDonald about his film. Here is the one thing that is well documented in the Project Blue Book files and for the believers we have the statements made by Newhouse himself about the film when he submitted it to the Air Force.

First, when he submitted the film, he made it clear there was a single enclosure and that was a fifty foot roll of film. The document was created by Newhouse so there is no reason to dispute it. It says nothing about there being more than fifty feet of film or that it was a spliced film. Just the whole roll that included some of his vacation pictures and that it had been processed.

Second, there is Major Kennedy’s letter of September 15, in which he mentioned the final footage of the mountain scenery would be “detached” and returned. In that same letter, Kennedy wrote, “If it is agreeable to you, a duplicate of the aerial phenomena will be made and forwarded to you in lieu of the original. It is desired to retain the original for analysis.”

Third, on February 17, 1953, Major Robert C. Brown wrote, “A copy of the original movie film taken by you near Tremonton, Utah, on 2 July 1952 is being returned.”

On November 17, 1953, Newhouse wrote to the Air Force, “About a year ago I mailed for evaluation a 16mm Kodachrome original film to the Commanding Officer, Hill Air Force Base in Utah. The film was of unidentified flying objects sighted by my wife, my children and myself… I gave the Air Force permission to retain the original for use in the investigation… My copy of the film has been damaged… If the Air Force has completed its evaluation and has no further use for it, I would appreciate the return of the original…”

On January 27, 1954, Lieutenant Barbara Conners wrote, “The Air Technical Intelligence Center is attempting to locate the original of a 35 mm [sic] film of unidentified flying objects taken by a Mr. D. C. Newhouse near Tremonton, Utah…” and then on February 23, 1954, CWO R. C. Schum wrote, “We are forwarding as Inclosure [sic] 1 one copy of you Tremonton, Utah film...”

This means the Air Force attempted to cooperate with Newhouse and that Newhouse had given them permission to keep the original. They supplied a copy which Newhouse ruined. He asked for the original, and the Air Force attempted to comply. We now know that Newhouse’s discussion of all this with McDonald is in error.

But more important than this trivia about originals and copies is the claim that Newhouse shot footage on two separate rolls and that there was more than sixty feet of film. The documentation, including that written by Newhouse himself does not bear this out. The best estimate is that there was thirty feet of film. There is a suggestion that the film lasted about 75 seconds, and with a 16 frame per second use that works out to about thirty feet of film.

In the end, there is no good evidence that Newhouse altered his story because the original investigation lacked competence. There are hints in the September 1952 interview but it is not very clear. It can be argued that the description is of the saucers but it could also be argued that the description is too vague to be of any real value to determine what he meant. It could be argued that his description was vague because he didn’t get a good, close up look at the objects.

It is clear that by 1954 Newhouse was providing a description that if accurate, eliminates the sea gulls as an explanation. It also seems that others such as Baker and Hartmann took the description from Ruppelt’s book but didn’t attempt to verify the accuracy of the information by contacting Newhouse. In 1976, when I talked to Newhouse, he verified that he had said that, which, of course, doesn’t mean that the description was accurate, only that he said it to Ruppelt.

The one point that seems to stand out here is that Newhouse made the comment in 1954 before the Air Force began pushing the sea gull explanation, but after the Robertson Panel had determined, to their satisfaction, that birds was the answer.

Here, I suppose, it boils down to the nonsense about the length of the film and if Newhouse switched magazines during the filming. Given the documentation available, it seems that these new details do not reflect the reality of the situation. Newhouse himself made it clear there was but a single roll of film, that it was only fifty feet long, and we know that part of it was detached and returned to him. If we wish to reject the case, this seems to be a good reason to do so. It suggests that his memory of the event has been clouded by outside influences.

I will note here that I have not engaged in a discussion of what the film showed or the various analyses of it. All of the investigators seem to find the conclusions that fit their own biases. The Air Force originally said it wasn’t balloons, airplanes and probably not birds. Robertson said it was birds and dismissed it. The Navy said they couldn’t identify them. The Air Force then said it was birds. Baker said he couldn’t identify the objects and Hartmann said he could

So, you look at the evidence, all the evidence, what the witnesses said and did and what the film shows and decide for yourself what to believe. I said in the beginning that this (the last post) was a case that provided some physical evidence. That evidence could lead to proof of something unusual in the air and that terrestrial explanations didn’t cover all the facts, if Newhouse saw the objects close by and that they were saucer shaped. If he didn’t, then the evidence is not as strong as it could be.

To my mind, the case is not resolved simply because there is not a consensus for the solution… but on the other hand, the evidence is not all that strong either, which, unfortunately seems to be the situation in a large number of UFO sightings.

Science and Charlatans

There has been a disturbing story circulating on UFO UpDates and told by Billy Cox on his blog and who is a real friend of the UFO community. According to these stories, Stan Friedman was to lecture at a science museum and that invitation was challenged by a "real" scientist, Paul Cottle, (see http://www.flascience.org/wp/?p=768)) who suggested that the study of UFOs is a "pseudoscience" and thought of Friedman, according to these reports, as a "charlatan."

Now, as many of you know, Stan and I have had our differences over the years. Simply look at the arguments about MJ-12 and you’ll understand some of it. But this really is too much, no matter what you think of Friedman, his theories, and his research.

These "scientists", and all too often the members of CSI (which used to be CSICOP before they changed their name) have long thought they needed to protect us unwashed heathens from those attempting to sell us snake oil. They have decided that we are incapable of discerning the truth for ourselves and always there to force the truth down our throats even if that truth smacks of their own dogma.

I won’t bother with a long list of things that scientists knew before the evidence finally overwhelmed them forcing them to reevaluate their positions. The history of science if loaded with things that we all just knew to be real until the radical new ideas were forced on us. I’m thinking here of germ theory, genetic mutation and the demise of the dinosaurs, just to name a few.

In this case the "scientists" who know relatively nothing about UFOs decided that they weren’t worthy of study. After all, didn’t Dr. Edward U. Condon study the flying saucers in the late 1960s and conclude that they weren’t anything to be taken seriously by science. Aren’t they "often-debunked pseudoscience?" No further study required.

Isn’t it true that there is no evidence of these alien visitations, so we can ignore the testimony of airline pilots entrusted with the lives of hundreds, of police officers who clearly don’t understand what is in the sky around them, and all sorts of professionals who have reported UFOs in the past including such scientists as Clyde Tombaugh?

Can’t we ignore the solid movies and photographs taken in the past? Haven’t reputable scientists found the pictures to be faked? Aren’t the reports corroborated by radar merely the mistakes of the air traffic controllers and others who are supposed to know the difference? Can’t we ignore the evidence collected at more than 4000 landings around the world?

Didn’t the Air Force prove that the 1947 Roswell UFO crash was nothing more than a Project Mogul balloon array... even though there were no unaccounted for launches, the balloon array would have been recognized for what it was, a balloon array, by those who found it and there is no record of a Flight No. 4 which was identified as the culprit by the skeptics. Can’t we just ignore the testimonies of those hundreds who were involved in the clean up because it doesn’t fit into our "accepted" reality?

I have nothing against any scientist who expresses an opinion, but I do have something against those who express uninformed opinions. Just because someone can append letters after his or her name, doesn’t mean that his or her opinion about everything is valid, especially when they have made no attempt to check the current literature. (For those interested, when I was working on my Ph. D., and when I became bored with psychology after long hours, I would look up UFOs in the scientific literature and found more than 100 articles in the psychology library, not all of them dismissing the topic as debunked.)

Years ago I had the opportunity to interview James A. van Allen, a scientist I believe everyone can respect. The topic was the idea that the Tunguska explosion of 1908 was the result of a failure in the power plant of an alien spacecraft. Van Allen knew the topic and granted me a couple of hours of his time.

Several things struck me at that interview. One, he was gracious enough to talk to me about a subject that might have been considered pseudoscience. Two, he had studied the Tunguska case because it interested him. And three, rather than rejecting what I said about it, he would ask, "What’s your source on that?"

He was of the opinion that a comet had disintegrated about five miles high and the resulting explosion, which would have been massive, was the reason that impact site resembled ground zero where atomic bombs had been tested.

We also talked briefly about UFOs on another occasion and he seemed to be willing to listen to the evidence. He wasn’t about to make a pronouncement based on what he thought to be the evidence, but rather on what the evidence showed.

He did say that if you were in the middle of Wyoming and heard the thunder of hooves, you don’t expect zebra. Which means, of course, you must eliminate the mundane before you graduate to the unusual.

With today’s keepers of the flame, those who profess to have the light while the rest of us wander in the dark unable to find our way, can we expect anything other than immediate dismissal? Without looking at a shred of evidence, they are able to tell us what is and what isn’t.
This debate, such as it was, next turned to Dr. Gregory Boebinger, the director of the National High Magnetic Field Laboratory in Tallahassee. He asked "Is the Brogan [the Mary Brogan Museum of Art and Science in Tallahassee which hosted Friedman’s presentation] planning to host future exhibits on palm reading and astrology? Surely, when a science museum hosts often-debunked pseudoscience, it is not only using ‘a variety of entertaining experiences to attract audiences to science,’ as Ms. Barber [the Executive Director of the museum] contends, but it also insidiously endorsing pseudoscience and attracting our children and the public away from science."

Nothing like reducing UFO study to that of palm reading and astrology. Nothing like calling UFO research pseudoscience without knowing a thing about it.

Let’s talk about pseudoscience. Let’s talk about th epitome of pseudoscience which is known as the Condon Report, or officially as the Scientific Study of Unidentified Flying Objects which was conducted at the University of Colorado and funded with more than half a million taxpayer dollars thanks to the Air Force. (For a little more detail, look at The Hippler Letter published on this blog in March 2007.)

In fact, in 1967, Condon delivered a lecture to scientists in Corning, New York telling them, "It is my inclination right now to recommend that the government get out of this business. My attitude right now is that there is nothing in it. But I am not supposed to reach a conclusion for another year." So much for science.

Condon did reach the conclusion that there was no threat to national security, which was one of his missions, but he also concluded that no further study was required, even after more than thirty percent of the reports in his study were not identified. Even after one sighting was identified as a phenomenon so rare it had never been seen before or since and certainly doesn’t tell us what it was. So much for science.

These other scientists, Cottle and Boebinger for example, are certainly familiar with the Air Force study of UFOs known as Project Blue Book (yes, that is sarcasm) and although the Air Force claimed they had identified all but three or four percent of the sightings, the true number is considerably higher. The Air Force often labeled a sighting as "Insufficient for Scientific Analysis," which, of course, doesn’t explain it, but kept it out of the "Unidentified" category.

The evidence, all the evidence that science could want, is out there. Instead of looking at it, we had scientists such as Donald Menzel who called the pictures taken by Carl Hart, Jr. over Lubbock, Texas a hoax without proof or evidence of a hoax. The problem for Menzel was that if those pictures hadn’t been faked by Hart, then there was no earthly explanation for them. So much for science.

And in keeping with that tradition, Cottle and Boebinger have not bothered to respond to these questions and points. Cottle just said that his letter to the editor was his message to the local community. Boebinger has yet to respond.

So much for science.