As
happens all too often, as I’m searching for something else, I stumble onto a
document that helps explain information I had found in the past. Brigadier
General Arthur Exon, who was the Wright-Patterson Air Force Base commander, a
position similar to that of a mayor, told me during an interview on May 19,
1990, that he was responsible for dispatching aircraft to carry investigators
to important
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| Brigadier General Arthur Exon. |
UFO sightings. He said:
Well,
the way this happened to me is that I would get a call and say that the crew or
the team was leaving and they knew… there was such and such a time they wanted
an airplane and pilots to take “X” number of people to wherever, you know. They
might be gone two or three days or might be gone a week. The would come back
and that would be the end of it. So, there would be certain people in FTD [ATIC
evolved into FTD in 1961] that would lay the missions on… I know they went out
to Montana and Wyoming and the northwest states a number of times in a year and
a half… They went to Arizona once or twice.
These
special teams, or these people, would apparently come from around the United
States and their assignment was to investigate a UFO sighting according to Exon.
He didn’t have much in the way of details about these special flights, but the
implication I took away from this was that the teams, or the team members, were
a specially trained group who were investigating UFOs at a higher level than
Project Blue Book. It was clear that they weren’t part of the Blue Book
operation.
We
(Don Schmitt and I, who first interviewed Exon) asked if the men were assigned
to Wright-Patterson. Exon said, “No. They would come from Washington, D.C.” He
also said that the team would be made up of eight, maybe fifteen people, the
number probably dictated by the sighting they were investigating. The idea was
that if anyone checked, they would learn that the team had been dispatched from
Wright-Patterson as a way of disguising the nature of this somewhat secret
activity.
During
my interview with Exon, I wanted to know if he knew who the controlling agency
or agencies were. I thought FTD was one of those agencies, but Exon said, “I
don’t know they were controlling but I know where the assignments came from.”
I
asked, “That was basically your control? FTD?”
He
said, simply, “Yeah.”
The
conclusions that I drew, and the conclusions that Don drew, were that teams,
controlled at a different level, but that were not assigned to Blue Book were
called in for special investigations. This, according to Exon, was in 1960 and
1961.
But
it turns out, according to the documentation that I have just found, this
assumption is not true. Oh, the documents were there in the Project Blue Book
files for anyone to find who scanned through the boxes and boxes of data as it
is contained on microfilm. As, I say, I was looking for something else when I
found this.
According
to the documents, in a draft of a staff study that was declassified in 1969 but
suggested in a document dated December 17, 1958, that:
To
provide a flexible investigative force which will not cause a particular drain
on any one office within ATIC [think FTD at this point] the Commander has
approved the establishment of a volunteer force which will work under the
direction of the Aerial Phenomena Group of the Air Science Division when
actually engaged in field investigation of UFO sightings. The general ground
rules for their employment are as follows:
A
total group of from 18 to 20 volunteers will be selected from company grade
officers [lieutenants and captains] and NCO’s presently assigned within ATIC.
This group will for the most part be people who do not have much opportunity to
travel during the normal course of their duties. Once selected they will be
given a 20 hour course of instruction in interrogative and investigative procedures
and will be checked out on equipment pertinent thereto [the class syllabus was
included in the documentation]. Once trained two of these individuals will be
placed on alert each week to undertake such investigations as may arise during
the week. Orders required for TDY [temporary duty] travel will be processed by
the Aerial Phenomena Group citing funds programmed by that Group for such
travel. A separate project nick-named “Horse Fly” [which is the first time that
I have heard of this project] will be established to provide military airlift
for investigators to and from the nearest Air Force installation to point of
UFO sighting. Flyaway kits of equipment will be issued by and specific flight
arrangements will be made by the Aerial Phenomena Group.
It
is estimated that each investigator can plan on about 5 TDY trips of 3 days
duration per year.
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FTD Building at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base.
Photo courtesy of USAF. |
The
officer who signed the document was William E. Boyd, who was a colonel at the
time and listed as the Chief of Staff at ATIC. Although what I found was a draft,
there was additional discussion about this later but it apparently was
implemented. While the suggestion is that the alert teams would be made up of
two individuals, there was nothing in the original document to suggest that the
deployment teams were restricted to the two people on alert. This sounds
suspiciously like the teams that Exon spoke about when he talked to me, though
he seemed to have overestimated the size. They didn’t come from Washington, D.C
as he suggested, but they were not all consolidated in a single office within
ATIC. They would come from a number of locations within ATIC to deploy into the
field.
Given
that the documents were originally classified (confidential, I believe), and
given the nature of the assignment, I don’t believe that there was any reason
for Exon to have denied the request for the assets needed. It would have come
from inside ATIC [or later FTD], or possibly from the Pentagon, authorizing the
use of military equipment to move the personnel into the field. Since it
involved specific intelligence, which in this case would be a UFO sighting or
landing, there would be no reason to brief Exon on the specific mission. The
request would have the proper authorization, and in fact, given the nature of
it, and the various authorizations approved, there would be no reason for Exon
to handle this personally. Someone on his staff could certainly have made the
arrangements and if there were questions about the authorizations, those might
have been bumped up to Exon for resolution, but I doubt that would be
necessary. This suggests the reason that Exon was rather vague on the nature of
the assignments. He wouldn’t be doing the work himself, one of his staff did,
and Exon was probably briefed on this, as he would be on other aspects of the
operations at Wright-Patterson that fell under his area of authority. At the
time, this would not have been a big deal, but the routine movement of assets
to a location where their expertise would be of value.
This
means, I suppose, that we shouldn’t draw any specific conclusions about the
nature of these teams, simply because we now know about their formation, their
purpose, and their deployments. They were sent to investigate UFO sightings
that would require the expertise that these officers and NCOs brought to the
table based on their 20 hours of classroom work so that they knew, at least in
a rudimentary sense, what they were doing.
What
I don’t know at this point is where their reports would have been sent. Probably
to the Aerial Phenomena Group, which would have been housed at ATIC and then
FTD when the name change came about. All I really know is that the teams were
formed and were apparently deployed on a number of investigations. While all
this is interesting, it seems to lessen the importance of the information
supplied by Exon, but it does give another avenue of investigation. It will be
interesting to see if I can find the results of those investigations that Exon
mentioned.
