Chasing More Footnotes

I have complained in the past that I am becoming less than thrilled with the UFO community. The reasons for this are varied but come down to a couple of basic ideas. One of those is that no matter how often a case is proven to be a hoax, a misidentification, a misinterpretation, or an inability to recognize the mundane, there are those who will argue the point forever. A recent post was partially inspired by this. How many times do we have to delve into the Oliver Lerch tale when everything that can be found points to an invention of the tale rather than a real event?

The point here, however, is that part of the problem is that some people who claim to be researchers or investigators just don’t follow the path to its end. This is what lead to the chasing of footnotes because sometimes the footnote is simply inadequate. Sometimes the information is not complete.

Not to pick on Richard Dolan, but just the other day as I was looking for something else, I noticed a couple of problems. These sorts of things are not restricted to Richard because we all have

Richard Dolan. Photo copyright by
Kevin Randle

fallen into the trap. On page 16 of his UFOs and the National Security State, he reported on a sighting by railroad engineer in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, who saw ten shiny disks on June 23. His footnote leads us to a number of sources, which cover a number of sightings in that same paragraph. Unfortunately, the information about the Cedar Rapids sighting is wrong, as I have noted in an earlier posting. The report was not made until after the Arnold sighting, was apparently for the afternoon of June 24 rather than the 23, and the railroad man was not in Iowa, but in Joliet, Illinois. Among those who reported this information as Dolan had, were Dick Hall and Frank Edwards. I believe Hall got it from Edwards, who must have seen something in the Cedar Rapids Gazette about the sighting a couple of days after Arnold. Edwards, or those others, had not followed the story to the source, or they would have found the discrepancies.

As I say, not to pick on Dolan, but later, on page 25, he wrote about Bill Brazel and the finding of the metal debris from the Roswell crash. The footnote takes us to Stan Friedman’s Crash at Corona in which he quotes from an interview with Bill Brazel. The quotes are accurate, for the most part, but there is no footnote to explain how the information was gathered because Friedman supplies no information about that. The trail ends there.

However, I know how that interview was conducted because I had

Stan Friedman. Photo copyright by
Kevin Randle

arranged it, and Don Schmitt and I were there. I recorded it. The more accurate footnote would have taken us not to Friedman’s book, but to UFO Crash at Roswell, where the footnote explained the circumstances of the interview. In other words, the original source was that interview that Don and I conducted and not the information printed in Friedman’s book.

A side problem with this is that Friedman altered one portion of the interview without justification. Those who follow Dolan’s footnote to Friedman will get the inaccurate information… Friedman inserted the word “black” into the interview to describe one the sergeants who came to the Brazel ranch to collect the bits of debris Bill had found. Brazel made no reference to the racial identity of those four men but Friedman inserted the word to bolster the Gerald Anderson fairy tale. You can read the whole story here (if you are so inclined):

http://kevinrandle.blogspot.com/2008/09/black-sergeants-and-stan-friedman.html

This problem is not confined to UFO research. I was looking for information for a post on the new version of the Treasure Quest show and found a couple of sites that provided what seemed to be accurate information. Reference was made to someone named C. H. Prodgers and in this day of the Internet, I thought I would find out what he had said about the treasure.

Twenty-five years ago, I couldn’t have gathered the information. True, one of the articles referred to Prodgers, but in the world today, I was able to find a copy of Prodgers’s book online. I didn’t have to rely on what others had written about it. I could read it for myself. And, I found that much of the information published, that referenced Prodgers, was incorrect. After all, they were quoting Prodgers as the source, but what Prodgers had written did not match what they were reporting. Could Prodgers have been making up the tale of the treasure? Sure. But that didn’t matter because he was the original source. He was writing from the point of view of having been there, lived the adventure, and there wasn’t much documentation that preceded him. The others were quoting him as their source.

That is, I chased the references to the ultimate source. I corrected the errors made by others who had used the same source, and came away unimpressed with the information. It reads more like fiction than fact and there really is nothing to back up the story. And now that the first season is over, we have seen a large number of problems with this treasure hunting quest.

So, now you’re wondering how all this relates to Ufology. It is about getting to the original source. In the past, the only way to do it was go to the location or find a library that had the proper resources in its collections. You had to read the microfilms and search endlessly for the articles. That is what I had done with the Cedar Rapids story. I could search the microfilm of the Cedar Rapids Gazette and I found the original article about the railroad man and his UFOs. Took about an hour. Had I lived elsewhere, I might not have found it… until I could make an Internet search.

Here’s another example. As I point out in another post, Don Keyhoe, in writing about the 1948 Mantell case, got some bad information and therefore some of his conclusions wrong. He didn’t have access to the documents available to us online today. He assumed that the timing of the events fit into a specific sequence. He assumed that the times given in various reports was when the object was seen over that specific town. What this means that the sighting of the object from Madisonville, Kentucky, wasn’t of an object overhead as Keyhoe believed, but of one to the northwest. The claim that the object was over the Godman Army Airfield tower as Keyhoe believed, is not true. The documents in the Blue Book files proved that the men in the tower saw the UFO somewhere to the southwest at the very limits of human ability to see it. Given those two facts, Keyhoe’s estimate of the speed was way off. That’s not Keyhoe’s fault. He was relying on information that had been reported to him orally rather than seeing what the documents said. He couldn’t have reviewed those documents easily until 1976.

Those who cite Keyhoe’s estimate of the speed have not followed up on the information which was published in the early 1950s. Had they done so, they would have realized that his claim the object was moving at 180 miles an hour was badly flawed. Information available today gives us a much clearer picture. This isn’t to fault Keyhoe because he was relying on the information he had, but to fault those who haven’t bothered to update the information when they began their research.

What all this means is that in the world today, we can look much deeper into the past. We have access to nearly all human knowledge through the Internet. We can study newspaper files in cities hundreds or thousands of miles away (though some services require a subscription). The files of Project Blue Book are on line for all to review… and there are other sources of information about Blue Book that we have today that Keyhoe and others in the 1950s and 1960s didn’t have.

There is then, no real excuse for continuing to report information that is out of date or inaccurate. We can clear up these things by taking our research to the next level, which has always been the real point of chasing footnotes. This isn’t about “gotcha” but about cleaning up the information so that we can come to the proper conclusion. It isn’t about making someone look bad, but about searching for the answers to the mystery, whatever that mystery might be.

While I find chasing footnotes to be fun, I guess there are those who can’t be bothered with following the trail. They already know the truth so there is no need to search any further for it. Why clutter up a good UFO report with a lot of facts that provide us with an identification? Sometimes, however, we do learn something important about a case, which is why I do what I do. I just wish that there wasn’t a constant fight inside Ufology, protecting the sacred cows, when the facts take us somewhere else. 

I can cite examples here. Tales that are told and retold by those who are enthusiastic about their favorite cases. They ignore facts that don’t fit into their view of the world. They know the “truth,” and the facts be damned.

The airship crash in Aurora, Texas, in 1897 proves the point. The evidence and documentation shows that the story was invented by a stringer for a Dallas newspaper. Other documentation, in the form of histories of Aurora or Wise County where Aurora is located, that were published within a couple of years of the alleged crash mention nothing about it. Had such an event taken place, even if it didn’t involve a craft from another world, these histories would have contained some information about it. There is none. But we still have to listen to tales of the Aurora, Texas, UFO crash and put up with television documentaries in which they are digging “for the truth.” Of course, when they’re done, they have not advanced our knowledge. They have just added another level of nonsense to the tale.

Reports of the Roswell Crash before Jesse Marcel's Revelation

Since this point comes up periodically, I thought it time to deal with it. There are those who suggest that there was nothing about a crash mentioned in the 1947 newspapers and other documentation. The claim is that no one was really talking about a crash until Stan Friedman and Bill Moore put the idea into the heads of the witnesses with their leading questions and their enthusiasm for the crashed saucer tales.

Len Stringfield

To refute this idea, we need to look at the rather sparse history of tales of the Roswell crash. Oh, and we’ll overlook the tales of the Aztec crash here, though it can be argued that this story, which began appearing in 1948 and was published in Behind the Flying Saucers in 1950 prove that talk of spacecraft crashes in New Mexico predated the Roswell revelations by Jesse Marcel, Sr., in 1978. Even Time got into the act with a story about recovered alien bodies in 1950, but the source of that was the reports by Frank Scully and of Aztec. The Hottel memo to the FBI about flying saucer crashes in that same era suggests that the story was widespread, but we’ll just ignore that to explore Roswell.

In the Winter 1974 issue of Saga’s UFO Report, B. Ann Slate and Stan Friedman, wrote about the Roswell crash. The two paragraphs buried deep in the article said:

During that same time in New Mexico, a woman with a responsible position at a radio station received a call from the station manager. He had been out checking reports of a UFO which had crashed in a field and was trying to track down the rumor that pieces of the object were supposedly stored in a local barn. In his excited call to the newsroom, the station manager verified the UFO crash report, and also claimed he had seen metallic pieces of the UFO being carried into a waiting Air Force plane which was destined for Wright-Patterson Air Force Base.

As the woman began typing out the fantastic news over the teletype to their other two radio stations, a line appeared in the middle of her text, tapped in from somewhere, with the official order: “Do not continue this transmission!”

Okay, there is a lot wrong here because the information you might really want to see, rather than this unattributed tale, are names, dates and locations. Without that there isn’t much of value. But then investigation in other arenas have lead back to this and we all now know that the woman was Lydia Sleppy, she worked for Merle Tucker at his fledgling New Mexico radio network and she was talking about the Roswell crash. The reporter talking to Sleppy was Johnny McBoyle who, when I talked to him so much later, sort of confirmed the story for me.

Before the skeptics rush to point all this out, Sleppy’s order to not transmit mentions nothing about the FBI though when I talked to her, she said the FBI had ordered her to stop typing… and yes, we can all discuss the foibles of human memory again, or we can just look at the point being made here which is that this story pre-dates Marcel’s revelations by four years and she certainly wasn’t influenced by all that discussion. She interjected the crashed UFO into the tale without prompting by anyone.

This isn’t the only documented evidence of a discussion of Roswell prior to Marcel. In 1966, Frank Edwards published Flying Saucers – Serious Business. In chapter four, “Pick Up the Pieces,” he wrote:

There are such difficult cases as the rancher near Roswell, New Mexico, who phoned the Sheriff that a blazing disc-shaped object had passed over his house at low altitude and had crashed and burned on a hillside within view of the house. The sheriff called the military; the military came on the double quick. Newsmen were not permitted in the area. A week later, however, the government released a photograph of a service man holding up a box kite with an aluminum disc about the size of a large pie plate dangling from the bottom of the kite. This, the official report explained, was a device borne aloft on the kite and used to test radar gear by bouncing signals off the pie plate. And this, we were told, was the sort of thing that had so excited the rancher. We were NOT [emphasis in original] told, however, how the alleged kite caught fire – nor why the military cordoned off the area while they inspected the wreckage of a burned-out kite with a non-inflammable pie plate tied to it.

Again, there is quite a bit wrong here and I’m not going to bother with it. The point is here are the basics of the story printed in 1966, or more than a decade before Marcel told his story to Friedman and then Len Stringfield. We know, of course,

Mack Brazel in 1947.

that the rancher was Mack Brazel, he didn’t telephone the sheriff but went to visit him, he couldn’t see the flaming wreckage from the house and in fact, there is no mention of a flaming disk at all in any of the accounts or by Bill Brazel. But the basics are here.

Yes, but this was published nearly two decades after the events. What about news reports from 1947? While I have found none in my hasty search (and if they are out there, I’m sure David Rudiak will chime in), there are stories that suggest a crash. For example, the Oregon Journal (which also carried a picture of Brazel smoking a cigar) reported, “Headquarters of the Eighth army air force at Fort Worth, Texas, announced that the wreckage of a tin-foil covered object found on a New Mexico ranch were nothing more than the remnants of a weather observation balloon.”

While the story doesn’t use the word “crash” it does say “wreckage” and that implies a crash of some kind. It trots out the official explanation which, in fact, explains nothing. But the point is that there is talk of wreckage which certainly puts the idea of a crash in the minds of those who might have read it back there in 1947.

For those who believe that the officers at Roswell wouldn’t be reading the Oregon Journal, that article was from the United Press which means it was a wire service story. Looking further I found the same line in the Phoenix Gazette. If Phoenix isn’t close enough, the same story ran in the Albuquerque Tribune. That is a newspaper that could easily have been seen by some at Roswell.

This, I believe, eliminates the theory that the idea of a crash was somehow created after Jesse Marcel had talked to researchers in 1978. The idea was in play in 1947 unless someone wishes to dispute the idea that wreckage suggests a crash. I have been able to provide documentation for that idea that precedes Marcel’s statements to Friedman and Stringfield and that the documentation extends back to 1947. This doesn’t prove that what fell and was recovered was a spaceship but it does prove that the idea that something crashed had been in play from the very beginning.

Chasing My Own Footnotes

(Blogger's Note: This probably not all that interesting to many people, but I thought of it as important, if only to improve the quality of footnotes and endnotes that we see in many books... Besides, at the moment I'm tired of the whole Roswell Slides saga and there is nothing new happening there at the moment. So, enjoy if you can.)

While I continue my quest to improve the footnotes used by us all, I thought I should detail my latest challenge. While working on another project, I was looking at the Spitzbergen UFO crash. I was aware that there was a report for it in the Project Blue Book files, but I couldn’t seem to lay my hands on it. I looked at my A History of UFO Crashes which had a footnote reference that said, “Project Blue Book files, September 1952.”

That didn’t tell me much and I pulled out the master index for Blue Book but couldn’t find the file there in September. I went back to the files and notes I had created for the Spitzbergen case but could find nothing there that was helpful. I went to a number of other sources, none of which seemed to have drawn on Blue Book for their information or if they did, they didn’t mention it.

There are, in the Blue Book index, a large number of cases that fall outside of the investigation. These are newspaper clippings and other sources that have provided information on a case but that is all that is available about them. I thought Spitzbergen would be included among these but that didn’t help.

Frank Edwards and Ryan Wood, who both had written about the case, provided some source material, but according to Ole Jonny Braenne, who wrote a detailed account of the sighting in the November/December 1992 issue of the International UFO Reporter, the story couldn’t be traced to any specific individual or organization. Some of those sources, as quoted by Edwards and Wood, couldn’t be verified and were nothing more than dead ends. An article was attributed to a reporter with the initials J.M.M. but no one was able to identify him. These various sources seemed to be circular meaning one lead to another that eventually led back to the first.

All of this was interesting, and Braenne’s report suggested that the story was a hoax, but that didn’t get me to the Blue Book source. I tried using Fold3 and their Blue Book archives but Spitzbergen didn’t come up in the search engine. I finally went back to the Blue Book Index and starting with June, ran down through them, searching for anything from Norway or Spitzbergen. I finally came to a notation for a sighting there on July 9, 1952, but the solution was “aircraft.” That didn’t seem right but it was the only reference I could find to Spitzbergen in the files in the right time frame.

I went to the microfilm and searched for the case. There is no “Project Card” for it. The case follows another in which there is no Project Card but I did find it. After all this, I found that the footnote should have read, “Project Blue Book files, July 9, 1952, case no. 1411.” That tells you everything you need to know about it, even to the handwritten case numbers that appear in the index and if you went to the NICAP Blue Book site, you could have gotten to it quickly and easily providing you knew the proper date.

I will note here that there are several different dates associated with the case which complicated my search and I knew that it was in the Blue Book files when I started. In A History of UFO Crashes the date is September 9, 1952 and in Crash: When UFOs Fall from the Sky it is listed as September 12, 1952. Frank Edwards in Flying Saucers – Serious Business quotes from a newspaper report dated September 4, 1955 (as if this wasn’t complicated enough already) published in the Stuttgarter Tageblatt (which apparently is the Stuttgarts Dagblad). The Stuttgarter Tageblatt does not exist. The first mention of the Spitzbergen crash, at least according to Braenne was in the June 28, 1952 Saarbrucker Zeitung and mentions that the disc-shaped object was apparently tied to the Soviet Union. Markings and lettering in the craft were in Russian. The original story did not mention an alien craft. Although this is the source of the following stories, as it spread, the information about the Soviet origin of the craft was lost and it soon became an alien spaceship.

For those interested in Spitzbergen, avoid most of the articles about this case and look for the IUR article by Braenne (though in Crash I do cite the Braenne article and provide a more detailed analysis that I have here). Braenne provides the most comprehensive examination of the information. For those who don’t want to look at all this varied information in varied sources, I tell you this case is a hoax … even though that is suggested in the documentation, it is listed in the Blue Book files as an Earth-based aircraft.

In today’s world, if I was to write a footnote for this case, it would be a little more comprehensive and would look like this:

For the most comprehensive analysis of the Spitzbergen crash, see Braenne, Ole Jonny. “Legend of the Spitzbergen Saucer.” International UFO Reporter, 17,6 (November/December 1992): 14 – 20. See also, Randle, Kevin D. Crash: When UFOs Fall from the Sky. Franklin Lakes, NJ: New Page Books. 2010:  146 – 152: Wood, Ryan. Majic Eyes Only, Broomfield, CO: Wood Enterprises, 2005. 102 – 104; Steinman, William S. and Wendelle C. Stevens. UFO Crash at Aztec, Tucson, AZ: Wendelle Stevens, 1986: 353 – 357; Edwards, Frank. Flying Saucers – Serious Business. New York: Bantam Books, 1966: 44 – 48.

I could also mention that Donald Keyhoe in Flying Saucers from Outer Space, Harold T. Wilkins in Flying Saucers on the Attack and Jimmy Guieu in Flying Saucers Come from Another World do mention the story briefly, but I only have the Wilkins’ book which contains no index. I haven’t bothered to search out the information in it simply because I know that the case is a hoax. In fact, I mention these other works, including those in the footnote to provide a balanced view of the report. I could have avoided all this effort had I properly provided the information in my original footnote, but then, I did cite the source and in the end I did find the information there. It just wasn’t all that easy to do.

Historical UFO Research

After reading the article about the research into the June 23, 1947 Cedar Rapids UFO sighting, a few suggested that maybe we should do that for all these older sightings. I think that the idea might be more trouble than it is worth. Here’s why.

The Cedar Rapids case was important because it was alleged the sighting of a disc took place prior to Arnold and more importantly, it was documented prior to Arnold. Granted, the documentation was in a newspaper, but if the witness said that he had seen a disc-shaped object and it was reported before Arnold, it became important. It would suggest that the Arnold description didn’t have the influence that some have since claimed.

Now, as I explained, I looked at several sources, including Dick Hall’s The UFO Evidence. Some sources suggested the sighting was published in newspapers but I could only find a single footnote and it didn’t reference a newspaper article as the source. Instead, it cited Frank Edwards in a 1956 speech.

So I began the search which eventually revealed the sighting was not made on June 23, but on the 24^th, it didn’t happen in Cedar Rapids or Iowa, and it wasn’t published until sometime after Arnold. It became just another single witness sighting of something in the sky that did nothing to advance our knowledge of UFOs.

Many of these early sightings have nothing in them to help us. Many of the 1947 sightings that preceded Arnold were reported after Arnold. If there is no documentation to support the date, meaning something dated before the Arnold sighting hit the streets (meaning when it was published), then it does nothing for us. There are many of these, but in every case I have looked at, they were noted after Arnold.

I went back through Keith Chester’s marvelous Strange Company, looking for sightings of Foo Fighters that were described as disc shaped. The trouble was all of the sightings he collected were told to him long after Arnold had told his tale. That doesn’t mean that they were no good or were confabulations; it just means that they couldn’t be documented prior to Arnold.

This all came about simply because I wanted to document disc-shaped craft before Arnold… and there is very little to do that. Yes, I know that John Martin used the term in the late 19^th century but it was a description of size rather than shape.

Yes, I know that we can track through sighting reports from the early 20^th century and find some. But these are all prior to 1940. What I wanted to find was some disc-shaped craft reported between 1940 and Arnold in June 1947.

All this is a long-winded way to suggest that looking into the sightings that were reported after Arnold but claimed to have been made before Arnold isn’t going to help in what I wanted to do. Some of these sightings are of no real scientific value no matter when they were published. They were single witness and any evidential value they had has long eroded.

There is one thing that could be done. Everyone can do what I did with the Cedar Rapids sighting. Chase it down. If you live in a town with one of these old sightings, you might want to see if you can get to the original story and not the one that is currently being reported. If you find the information is accurate, so much the better… but I’ll bet that it has been skewed somehow. I don’t know how many times I have tried to chase a sighting to the original source only to find it is significantly different or even worse, was never reported. Someone made it up long after the fact.

The point is that some sightings are just of no real importance… others should be taken to the original source and see how that stacks up with what we see today… and finally there are some very important sightings that should be stripped of the rumors so that we can concentrate on the facts.

The June 23, 1947 UFO Sighting

I believe that I have found the original source for the story of a Cedar Rapids engineer who saw the flying discs. A headline in the Cedar Rapids Gazette said, “Flying Discs Seen By Railroad Man.” The problem? The newspaper is dated June 28, 1947 and appears two days after the Arnold story. And it didn’t happen in Cedar Rapids.

The article, which is not six lines or six paragraphs, but a little longer than that, said:

A railroad man said Friday [which is June 27, 1947 and eliminates the need for further information right there because the story appeared after Arnold] he saw “about nine” spinning discs speeding through the sky last Tuesday [June 24] the same day an Idaho flyer said he saw some flashing objects in the air.

Charles Kastl [yes, that is the way it is spelled consistently in the article], 60 [which means he would be 126 today], an employe [sic] of the Elgin, Joliet and Eastern railroad for 38 years, saw he saw the discs about 1:50 p.m. (CST) as he was walking along the highway to work.

No other person in the Joliet area reported anything unusual.

Kastl said he saw a string of flat, circular objects going faster “than any plane I ever saw” about 10 to 12 miles east of Joliet [Illinois]. They were flying about 4,000 feet, he said.

“They appeared to be very high, and were going from north to south,” he said. “I could see no connecting link between them, but they acted as though the leading disc had a motor in it to power the others, because when it flipped, the others would too. When it would right itself, the others would right themselves.”

Kastl said he did not tell anyone but his wife about seeing the objects until Friday, “because I didn’t think anything about it.”

When he returned from a railroad run Friday, however, he learned that Kenneth Arnold, Boise, Idaho, pilot had reported seeing objects similar to the ones he claimed to have seen. Arnold said he saw objects over the Pacific Northwest.

Charles Preucil, head of the Joliet astronomical society, said there would be no natural cause for a display such as Kastl described.

Given the information in this article and given the descriptions given for the Cedar Rapids sighting, I believe this is the source. It did not happen in Cedar Rapids, nor did it happen on June 23. I will assume here, risking fate, that someone (Frank Edwards?) miscalculated the date of Tuesday, believing it to be the 23^rd, and not realizing it was the 24^th.

In Alfred Loedding and the Great Flying Saucer Wave of 1947 by Michael Hall and Wendy Connors, the story was reported on page 22 as:

Thus, neither of those sightings made the papers before Arnold's account, but one story was actually reported to newspapers on the 23rd. The tale came from a railroad engineer in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. As he was climbing off his engine, he observed ten shiny disc-shaped objects flying in a string-like formation, "like wild geese." The six line story it generated produced little attention at the time.

 

Their footnote indicated that this information came from a speech given by Frank Edwards on April 28, 1956, to the Civilian Saucer Intelligence.

As I have mentioned, Richard Hall, in The UFO Evidence, reported, “6-23-47. Cedar Rapids, Iowa. 10 shiny discs “fluttering along in a string.”

Even if we wish to keep the entry as a reliable report, we now know that it didn’t happen on June 23 and it was not Cedar Rapids but Joliet, Illinois.

And as also mentioned, Robert Loftin, in his Identified Flying Objects reported, “June 23, 1947 – Cedar Rapids, Iowa. Railroad engineer saw ten shiny disc-shaped objects, very high, fluttering in a string toward the northeast.”

This should put to rest the idea that there was a sighting in Cedar Rapids on June 23 by an engineer. It should end the discussion that this case preceded Arnold by a day. Everything I have learned about it suggests that it happened on the day of the Arnold sighting but was not reported until two days later.

I will confess one other thing about this case. I don’t believe it. I think the guy was just spinning a tale about seeing something and because these things were now part of that news cycle, a reporter talked to him and wrote the story. The original importance of it had been the suggestion that it preceded Arnold, and without that, it is another single witness case that does not advance our knowledge…

And I will add this. It is frightening because of how far it has been circulated and how distorted it has become. I don’t know what motivated Edwards to quote it, and quote it so badly, but quote it he did. Others picked up on it without checking the original sources, and it took me quite a while to chase it down. If I could, I would strike if from the UFO literature, but books last a long time and the Internet might be forever. This will live on but I can hope that others will stumble across this information as they search for evidence.

Cedar Rapids Engineer Sees Disks - Beats Arnold by a Day?

I’ve been working on a new book and I was chasing down stories of flying saucers, flying discs, seen prior to June 24, 1947. Sure there are some, but all, or almost all, seem to have been reported after Kenneth Arnold’s story appeared in newspapers.

One of the best of these, reported in many sources, came from Cedar Rapids, Iowa, and according to one document, “Thus neither of those sightings [one from El Paso, Texas and one from Wapakoneta, Oregon] made the papers before Arnold’s account, but one story was actually reported to newspapers on the 23^rd. The tale came from a railroad engineer in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. As he was climbing off his engine, he observed ten shiny disc-shaped objects flying in a string-like formation, ‘like wild geese.’ The six line story it generated produced little attention at the time.” The source of this, according to the footnote, was a speech given by Frank Edwards in April, 1956.

I have found references to it in other publications. Richard Hall, in his 1964 book, The UFO Evidence, lists it in two places, Section XI, page 129 and Section XII, page 152. Neither supplies much in the way of information. It is basically a recap of this other story and in neither place is there a source.

An Internet site listed Ted Bloecher’s The Report on the UFO Wave of 1947 as a source, but I was unable to find it there. If it is, I would hope that someone would point it out to me, but I don’t think they’ll find it. Bloecher used newspaper files for his documentation and so, if he didn’t find it in a newspaper, it was probably not published anywhere.

Now I was reading, the other day, a criticism of a UFO book, and it was suggested that primary sources were the best. Not witness testimony, but something that had been written down, such as a newspaper article or military document created at the time. If nothing else, that article could help establish the credibility of the sighting. Someone quoting another book would not be a primary source… it might be a secondary source, but might be even further removed from the primary source.

So, rather than quote those other books, rather than make a list of Internet and web sites that quoted the story, I thought about looking in the Cedar Rapids newspapers to find the original story. In June 1947, there were two newspapers in Cedar Rapids, The Cedar Rapids Gazette and the Cedar Rapids Tribune.

I carefully read the Gazette for June 23 and did not find the story. I went through the issue twice. I looked on June 24 but it was not there either. Nor was it there on the 25^th, 26^th, or 27^th. Of course, if printed after June 24, it was just another of the many cases that surfaced after Arnold’s report hit the national circuit.  Yes, I did find the Arnold story in the Gazette and thought the engineer story might be appended to it, but it was not.

The Tribune was not a daily paper and did not have an issue on June 23. I looked at several issues, but they didn’t even carry any flying disc reports. The newspaper was more geared to the local area.

And I was even allowed to search the library’s database for the newspaper articles. It wasn’t there, but then, I was told that they missed things in preparing the database. That it wasn’t there didn’t mean anything other than it wasn’t there. When appended to the other failed searches, that information becomes more significant.

While this sighting, if published on June 23, or even on June 24, would have been an important contribution to the UFO history, I was unable to find any documentation for it prior to Edwards’ 1956 speech. It does not appear in the Cedar Rapids newspapers, and I seriously doubt that any other newspaper would have carried it. Just nothing there of interest for them in it.

There is a school of thought that the case is listed in the Project Blue Book files, but it is from the Des Moines, Iowa area, happened on June 29, and involved a bus driver rather than a railroad engineer. But the details of the sighting are a match. The story was reported on July 8. If this is the right case, then it does nothing for us. It is just another of those sightings made after Arnold, reported after Arnold, and involves a single witness. The Air Force wrote it off as coming from an unreliable source.

I really wanted to document the details of the Cedar Rapids case, but simply could not do it. This is another “sighting” that should be removed from the various listings and databases. I don’t know how Edwards got it so twisted around, but I do know he didn’t get it from a newspaper in Cedar Rapids.

The Nevada Fireball - April 18, 1962

(Blogger's Note: While researching another case, I stumbled across this article written by Scott Holloway. I had planned to adapt it, with permission of course, but in his reply, he gave permission to reprint the whole thing and I saw no advantage to adapting it. This then, is the article that Holloway wrote about his research into the Las Vegas UFO crash. It shows what can be done by someone who lives in the area. The only changes I made were a couple of grammatical and spelling changes.)

 

Written By: Scott Holloway

(http://www.paranormalnews.com/article.aspx?id=1425)

On April 18, 1962, an unidentified flying object , most commonly referred to by witnesses as a “fireball” or a “meteor”, crashed in Nevada after a near cross country flight. The event received coverage in newspapers, was documented by Project Blue Book, and the object was tracked on radar by the Air Force to a specific area in Nevada, before it vanished from the radar screen, in the same area noted by witnesses in Las Vegas, just before an apparent explosion, followed by a “column of brilliant smoke.” Witnesses in Utah and Nevada compared the explosion to a nuclear detonation. Spokesmen from Nellis Air Force Base confirmed that jets were scrambled from Phoenix, Arizona, by the Air Defense Command.

And yet, the odds are that you have never heard of this incident, and if so, but vaguely. Frank Edwards covered the incident for the August, 1962 issue of Fate magazine. He revealed no new information, but did revive the case after most of the country had presumably forgotten about it. Edwards also devoted a brief chapter from his 1964 book, Strange World, to the Nevada crash.

Beginning in 1989, researcher Kevin Randle, in various books, progressively documented the case, culminating in A History of UFO Crashes. Randle interviewed witnesses, searched Blue Book documents and newspaper articles, and provided by far the most complete picture of the events of April 18, 1962. Randle concluded that the object which crashed that night was an extraterrestrial craft.

It was Randle’s research which inspired me to begin my own inquiry into the case, as well as my proximity to the original event. I moved to Nevada in 2002, and began my investigation in May, 2008. I recalled that Edwards and Randle had not determined a precise crash site for the object, the true heart of the matter for me.

The April 19, 1962 edition of the Las Vegas Sun,, stated that the object was tracked by radar to the Mesquite area. Mesquite is approximately 75 miles from Las Vegas, where I live. I placed an ad in a Mesquite newspaper in search of witnesses, but received no substantial reply. Consulting a map, I noticed that Bunkerville, Nevada, is directly adjacent to Mesquite. Despite Bunkerville’s approximate population of 1,000, I was surprised to find a listing for a branch of the Clark County Library system there. I called the librarian, and was given the name of a prominent local historian. I called him immediately. When I explained the purpose of my research, he related to me the following account:

Several years ago, two brothers, residents of Bunkerville, were working at the Key West mining claim southwest of town, near sunset, when they suddenly noticed an extremely bright, white object pass directly overhead. The object continued in a straight path for about five miles, before it crashed into the side of a mountain. The brothers intended to find the crash site, but for some reason, never did. They were unable to determine the exact nature of the object.

This was the story related to him by the two brothers. Unfortunately, the two witnesses were deceased. I received the names of their surviving children, and contacted them as soon as possible. From them, I received slightly different versions of the incident. The daughter of one witness agreed that the brothershad never made it to the actual impact site. However, the two sons of the other witness told me that the brothers did in fact reach the site - they had come within 100 yards of an “object.” Later, their father took them to the site, which was
now obscured by overgrowth.

One of them was adamant that the object was a meteorite, and he refused to divulge the location of the site, until he was able to recover the meteorite for himself. His brother was unable to take me there due to his physical condition. He told me later that his brother was upset with him for speaking to me about the incident.

The historian in Bunkerville had been told that the object crashed near a mining claim familiar to both witnesses. After searching through several mining documents, and speaking to other residents in the area, I was able to gain a rough idea of the mine’s location. On my second trip into the area, I found the mine, but no evidence of an impact site. However, the terrain is vastly uneven, forested, covered with overgrowth and the remains of rockslides, and, on my last visit, by a thick carpet of snow. There is much ground left to cover, and my search for the crash site is ongoing.

To better understand the perception of this case, it is necessary to examine the original media coverage of the incident. The object was first sighted over New York state, and last sighted near Mesquite, Nevada. Oddly enough, though, only the Las Vegas Sun, of April 19, 1962, contains any mention of the sighting over Las Vegas, and the explosion near Mesquite. The April 19 edition of the Nevada State Journal mentions a sighting over Reno, Nevada, but not the Las Vegas sighting, and not the explosion near Mesquite. Other newspapers from April 19 include references to an explosion over Utah, nothing about sightings in Nevada. Several wire service articles quoted Robert Kadesch, an associate professor of physics at the University of Utah, who had not witnessed the object, as expressing the opinion that the object was a bolide, or an exploding meteor. The official Air Force explanation, issued on April 19, declared the object to be a meteor that came down in Utah.

There were reports from Stead Air Force Base in Reno of an object landing near a power plant in Eureka, Utah, which rendered the plant inoperable for 40 minutes. Accounts from many newspapers, but not the Las Vegas Sun, indicated explosion in Utah, and nothing further. The Utah papers quoted witnesses by name. Anyone without access to the Las Vegas Sun edition of April 19 was led to believe that a meteor, exploding or possibly crashing in Utah, was the most likely explanation, especially since Kadesch’s comment was widely circulated.

But the Las Vegas Sun article paints quite a different picture. It mentions the previous sightings, including the alleged landing in Utah, but also the sightings over Reno, Las Vegas, and the final explosion near Mesquite. This was not a wire service report, as most accounts were. It is not made clear from the reports outside Nevada if the explosion in Utah was actually the explosion
from Nevada. Bunkerville is approximately 10 miles from the Arizona state line. The explosion was seen in Reno, so the possibility that it was also seen in parts of Utah is not farfetched. The majority of the country, not aware of the Nevada sightings, but of the Utah sightings, and Kadesch’s uninformed opinion was left with only the meteor explanation. This, coupled with the official Air Force explanation of April 19th, effectively killed the story. Even the Las Vegas Sun, on April 20th, printed this explanation.

After the publication of the Fate article, the case lay dormant until 1964, when Frank Edwards resurrected it in Strange World. To further confuse the issue, Edwards now listed the crash site as “south of Reno,” on the opposite side of the state from Bunkerville! Whatever the reason for the slip-up, it only helped to bury the incident deeper, since there was no record anywhere else of a crash “south of Reno.”

Going back to Randle’s research, I decided to contact surviving witnesses in Utah. Randle had uncovered valuable information, such as the fact that the object changed speed, shorted out the engine of a vehicle, and even landed near Eureka, Utah, before taking off again. Though some witnesses were unavailableor deceased, one, Betty Robinson, related some new information to me. Betty’s late husband, Bob, had witnessed the object as it flew over his truck, stalling his engine, before continuing on its path. She was at home, bathing her children, when she heard a loud noise, and the house was filled with a bright light. Outside, she witnessed a bright light, and the noise seemed as if it would burst her eardrums. The streetlights were all out.

“It’s something that I’ll take to my grave,” she told me.

When her husband came home, he was “white as a sheet.” He told her, “You won’t believe what we saw.”

Betty also revealed that, in the wake of the passing light source, she noticed an electrical smell, like something burning. She also said that a short time after the incident, a producer from a television show came to Eureka, for a potential episode devoted to the incident, though nothing ever came of it. Betty could not recall the name of the program.

Her contention that the local media reported the object as crashing into the Pacific Ocean puzzled me, until I read the front page article from the Salt Lake Tribune of April 19, entitled “Flash Splits Area’s Sky.” In the article, this passage appears, in parentheses - (And early Thursday, Associated Press added a report of a “flash” in the skies over Ocean Beach, California, Wednesday about 8:55 p.m, PST (9:55 p.m. MST.) The California fireball “seemed to move west over the Pacific toward a spot some 30 miles off San Francisco”, the report said.)

The time of this sighting is well after the last known sighting in Nevada, at approximately 7:32 PST. To date, I have found no other corroboration of the California sighting.

The Project Blue Book file on this case contains this letter from Mrs. Pebble Cox of Boise, Idaho, addressed to J. Allen Hynek, dated May 11, 1962:

I understand you are interested in the meteorite which fell in Utah on the night of April 18. My husband, 3 sons and I left Salt Lake City, Utah Wednesday evening April 18 at about 5:30 p.m. traveling east on hiway 50. We traveledat 45 or 50 miles per hour and you can probably judge about where it fell fromfrom tracing our route. The meteorite came down right by the side of hiway (not on driver’s side) about 50 feet from road bed, about 100 miles out of Salt Lake City. It was quite low as my husband just looked out the pickup window(a son was driving)and didn’t have to look up to see it pass by. If this will be of any help to you in locating it I sure hope so.

We were on a trip to Missouri at the time after visiting our daughter and family in Salt Lake City, and have just returned to Boise, Idaho recently.

 
The significance of this account, if true, is plain: it demolishes the Kadesch theory of the object as a “bolide”, that “probably exploded 50 to 60 miles in the atmosphere”, and raises the question of why a “meteor” landing 50 feet from a main highway was never reported as found, unless the “meteor” again took flight soon after it touched down.

Also important is that the “meteor” was visible in Mr. Cox’s direct line of sight, as he “didn’t have to look up to see it pass by”, and that it is not described as a violent impact, but simply “came down”, as if in a controlled descent. It is unclear why the Cox family did not investigate the landing of the object.

My attempts to locate Pebble Cox have so far been unsuccessful. There is no indication that Hynek replied to this letter, or made any attempt to follow up on it. Perhaps this is because he, along with the Director of Project Blue Book, Robert Friend, had already visited Utah on May 8, 1962, in what amounted to a one day “field investigation”, during which they predictably found nothing. Hynek did not visit Nevada. While there are newspaper clippings in the Blue Book file, none are from Nevada. There is only a Project Record Card which, as Kevin Randle has pointed out, logged the incident in Zulu time, a difference of eight hours!

In 1962, responsibility for recovery of downed space objects rested with the 1127th USAF Field Activities Group. One example of this unit’s deployment is documented in a Blue Book file dated September 28, 1960, for an incident near Sheppard AFB in Texas. A Joint Message Form states, “On 28 Sep 60, an UFO was rptd to have fallen in the vicinity of Sheppard AFB, Tex. It is requested that the 1127th investigate this sighting.” The document is addressed to “1127 USAF FLD ACTY GP, FT. BELVOIR VA.”

Another document in the file states, “Moon Dust sighted by lcl (local) police to have landed in fld ten miles ssw Sheppard AFB, Texas at 28/1025Z. Search will begin at daybreak.” Documentation from 1967, in a group history of the 1127th for the last half of that year, confirms the function of the unit at that time. My requests for documentation for this unit’s group history in 1962 have so far been denied, but are ongoing.

 In a book authored by Berthold Schwarz, “UFO Dynamics,” there is a possible corroboration of the Nevada crash, given by an anonymous military witness. Beginning on page 532, the witness describes a craft recovered from Nevada after a “horrendous explosion”, which was “brought back” to a base in Arizona, where the witness was allowed to view it, and provide a detailed description of its interior.

I contacted Schwarz to ask about the availability of this witness, but was told that he will not discuss the matter with me, though he did indicate that there is something worth looking into. I have recently addressed a letter directly to the witness, through Schwarz. There has been no response from the witness to date. Schwarz has described the witness as a “war hero”, who served with the Air Force Office of Special Investigations. In “UFO Dynamics,” he also describes a UFO related incident in Vietnam which he personally investigated. There have been various suggestions by Schwarz to this witness about contacting me, and I am grateful for his efforts. He has made every effort to assist my investigation, and provided needed encouragement along the way.

The long rumored Project Redlight, allegedly an Air Force program established to analyze and exploit recovered space vehicles, also figures into the story of the Nevada crash. In 1980, a man named Mike Hunt, in a letter to researcher David Dobbs, related that, from 1961-63, he served in the capacity of radio maintenance at the Nevada Test Site, specifically at the section known as Area 51. Hunt wrote that he witnessed a “UFO” on the ground that was “20-30 feet in diameter and sort of a pewter color”. (Schwarz’ military witness described the craft which he witnessed as “almost 20 feet across.”)

Hunt further claimed that he saw crates marked “Project Redlight”, and “Edwards AFB.” Several times when he was working on radios at Area 51, “they just died.” Later that year, in 1962, Hunt recalled reading an article in Reader’s Digest about a UFO which exploded in Nevada after a cross country flight. Shortly after the date given in the article for the crash, Hunt said, “everything came to a screeching halt at Area 51.” Hunt concluded, “I am satisfied that the UFO of the Digest article and the UFO of Project Red Light are/were one and the same.”

As reported in William Steinman’s UFO Crash At Aztec, Wendelle Stevens heard rumors in Las Vegas in 1980 of the crash of a UFO, piloted by humans, at Area 51, in which both pilots were killed. After the crash, the project to test recovered crafts was abruptly halted.

Regarding Hunt’s mention of a Reader’s Digest article about the crash, I searched every issue of that magazine for 1962 and 1963. There is no article about the incident in any of these issues. I believe Hunt was actually referring to the Fate article from August, 1962. To the best of my knowledge, this is the only magazine article from 1962 which mentions the incident.

There are other newspaper accounts which add puzzling dimensions to this case. On April 19, 1962, the Pasadena, California, Star-News, in a page one article, asked, “Anyone Else See a Meteor Hit the Moon?” The article quoted Brent Myers, 9, of San Marino: “It was a white light with blue flashes. It hit the lower left part of the moon. It had a light tail.” The article elaborated that Myers reported his sighting to the Mt. Wilson Observatory, “which had failed to note the phenomenon.” The time given for the sighting was 8:10 PST, after the last known documented sighting of the object in Nevada.

The Salt Lake Tribune, April 21, 1962, on page 34, featured the headline, “Rock ’Growing’ In Lawn a Product of Meteor?” A “porous” rock, five inchesin diameter, was discovered embedded in the lawn of the Pollock family of Midvale, Utah, on April 19. Jack Pollock “said the rock appeared to have been driven into the lawn with great force and from a southwesterly direction.”

Randy Pollock, age 10, is pictured holding the rock, which was described as “red in color, and has the appearance of having gone through extreme heat.” The article further states that,”a friend of the Pollock family will take the rock to Utah State University Saturday to let scientists there examine it...” Whatever the results of this analysis were, is unknown, but the proximity of this “rock” to the sightings in Utah of the object is intriguing.

A report from the Charleston Daily Mail, April 19, 1962, features an account by Mel Paisley, a foreman for the McLean Trucking Company. McLean witnessed the “tail” of a bright object which left a “blue-white trail 50 times as broad as that of a falling star”, that was visible for about three seconds. And yet Paisley witnessed this “tail” on April 19, between 4:30 and 4:45 a.m. The article was from the evening edition of the paper, one day after the crash.

Another fireball was reported on April 23, 1962, in the Ogden Standard - Examiner. Harry Koepke, a night watchman, described it as “whiter than the strongest light,” a description also used for the object which crashed in Nevada. While it is entirely possible that this fireball was part of the Lyrid meteor shower, known to occur from April 19-22, the articles notes that, ”although the watchman has seen numerous shooting stars, this is the first time he has ever seen anything as large or brilliant as the object he observed.”

Again on April 20, a fireball was seen near Torrington, Montana, which produced a “red flash and explosion.” The Albuquerque Journal, April 6, 1962 contains another report of a fireball coming to ground in New Mexico, and points out that “meteorites falling on federal property belong to the Smithsonian Institution.” The fireball was investigated by Dr. Lincoln LaPaz, director of the University of New Mexico Institute of Meteoritics, a man with extensive previous experience in this area, including field research into the “green fireballs” prevalent in New Mexico in 1949-50. LaPaz had gone on record as stating that the green fireballs were not meteors.

The connection of these various sightings is unclear, but indicates the presence of perhaps other unknown objects traveling through the same states as the object which crashed in Nevada. These objects were seen for a shorter duration, and in a far more limited area, making detailed analysis impossible. However, they demonstrate a pattern for the month of April, and a similarity to the object seen on April 18. Only this object is known to have been tracked by radar by the Air Force. As stated by a spokesman for Nellis AFB, “A meteor cannot be tracked on radar. And this object was.” This clearly contradicts the official Air Force explanation of April 19, as does testimony which indicates that the object changed direction, changed speed, caused power outages, and was pursued by Air Force jets.

It is highly improbable that there has ever been a “meteor” which can be accurately described in these terms. And yet, there are any number of reliably reported UFO sightings which fulfill these criteria.

That said, this incident is far from resolved. My research is ongoing. I have withheld names of witnesses for the present for this reason. Some who might have been directly involved are now deceased, including:

Oscar Abbott, the Deputy Sheriff for Bunkerville and Mesquite in 1962. Abbott served in this position because the two towns did not have their own police department. He was assigned by the Las Vegas Police Department.

Robert Stenovich, Superintendent of the Nevada Highway Patrol in 1962. I spoke to Stenovich’s widow, who cannot recall any involvement of his in the incident. Given the isolated area in which the crash occurred, it is quite plausible that the NHP had at least some peripheral participation.

Hank Greenspun, Publisher of the Las Vegas Sun, the only newspaper to present a somewhat complete picture of the incident, including the crash of the object in Nevada. I contacted Greenspun’s widow and surviving children, who claim no knowledge of the incident.

 Another witness at the Key West Mine, name unknown, likely deceased.

Bob Robinson, from Utah, who saw the object pass over his truck.

 The two brothers from Bunkerville, who may have seen the object on the ground after it crashed, and one of whom showed the exact location to his two sons, who refuse at this point to divulge it to me. The brothers were familiar with the mining claim nearby, and one even owned a claim in 1972 in the same general area. One of their sons also worked at the mine near the crash site years later.

Then there is the story of George Huntsman, 80, of Bunkerville. Hunstman told me that he witnessed a “fireball” several years ago while on his back porch in Bunkerville. He said that this fireball appeared about dusk, coming from the east, and moved away from Bunkerville. He was unsure of the exact year, but said that 1962 “sounds about right.” If this was the same object which later crashed, it was appearing here at an earlier time, moving in a different direction, and also in a straight line. Huntsman reported a loud boom after the object passed by, after which it “disappeared into some clouds”, to the west. He described the color as “bright red”, one color used to describe the object which crashed near Bunkerville.

Huntsman does not recall a later crash of a fireball near town. The fireball was sighted from approximately 1/2 mile away, and appeared from that distance to be “five to six feet in diameter.” It was also traveling below the mesa when he spotted it, making it unlikely the object was meteor.
 
There is no definite corroboration with the crashed object here, but the odds of two such anomalous objects appearing near Bunkerville in perhaps the same year seems remote. The further similarity of the two sightings is also intriguing, such as color, sound, altitude, and time of day.

A man named Cliven Bundy told me of a “blue-gold” object, with a “white tail”, pass over his father’s truck as the two were driving to St. George, Utah. The object was moving from east to northwest, similar to the direction reported by witnesses in Utah. Bundy’s family has driven cattle through the canyon where the object is said to have crashed for several generations, and lived about ten miles from the mine near the alleged crash site in 1962. He was uncertain of the exact year of his sighting, but believes it was in that approximate time frame. He also said that the object was travelling horizontally when he saw it, another characteristic of the crashed object.

These sightings are indicative of a pattern if they occurred on the same day, but of course are hard to confirm as to the exact date. There are undeniable similarities in appearance and behavior when all sightings are correlated, including corroboration through military documents and various media reports.

 The object, according to a Project Record Card in the Blue Book file, was first sighted over Cuba. Later reports indicate a sighting over Oneida, New York, then in various states, including Colorado, Kansas, New Mexico, Utah, and Nevada. It was seen closest by witnesses in Utah, where it flew low over Bob Robinson’s truck, temporarily shorted out his engine, and was seen to have possibly land near Highway 50, pass over Eureka, Utah, tripping the photoelectric cells in the street lights with its brightness, and possibly landed near town. One witness claims the object descended, then took off again, moving west. It was later seen over Reno, Nevada, and also over Las Vegas, Nevada, where witnesses reported it last moving horizontally northeast, in the direction of Mesquite, Nevada, before a blinding flash was seen, followed by a column of “brilliant smoke”, about 7:35 p.m., PST, according to an Air Force document in the Blue Book file.

 
To date, I have received no documentation through FOIA requests, other than Blue Book records, which confirm the reality of this incident. Though documentation of the 1127th USAF Field Activity Group is available for other years, I am unable to locate records for this unit from 1962. The U.S. Navy has not yet resolved my FOIA request made on March 3, 2009. No clear answer for this has been forthcoming. Other requests are pending.

I would welcome any new information from any source. The picture is far from complete, but I believe the pieces are there. My primary need is for witnesses to step forward. Confidentiality will be respected. I have revealed I have revealed names here with permission. Only the raw data matters, and a secret kept for forty eight years.

Email Scott Holloway