Trinity UFO Crash, UAPs and Jacques Vallee

 

Once again, I find myself wondering just what in the hell is going on, though I suspect we are being set up. We have heard, in the last few weeks that the new government investigation into UFOs, I mean UAPs, is only going to deal with military sightings and then we’re told that they’re going to look at sightings going back to 1996. There was a story that NASA was going to investigate sightings starting in 1945. And now we learn that the government is going to investigate the crash of a UFO in 1945.

This latest is from Nick Pope who made the claims on Tucker Carlson’s show, mentioning what he called the “Roswell before Roswell.” The problem is that this refers to case that Dr. Jacques Vallee promoted in his book, Trinity: The Best Kept Secret. It is the story told by a man, who in 1945 was a child. He claimed that he, and his child-aged pal, stumbled on the recovery of this avocado-shaped UFO that crashed near the site of the first atomic explosion, known now as the Trinity Site.

Nick Pope at the Las Vegas Crash Conference

Vallee has contributed a great deal to the study of what we now must call anomalous phenomena, which are, of course, the latest in a long list of names that began with flying saucers. I do not understand Vallee’s interest in this tale, nor his lack of critical thinking about it. He seems to have embraced it when the evidence, from the source is dubious at best. I’ve gone through this at length in the past and you can read my analysis of his book and the tale here:

http://kevinrandle.blogspot.com/2021/06/trinity-best-kept-secret-critique.html

Let me point out here, that Reme Baca, the man with the story, approached Stan Friedman and later Don Schmitt in the 1990s. At that time, the crash seems to have happened over on the Plains of San Agustin. Baca wanted to know how to sell the story. Neither Friedman nor Schmitt were interested in it after doing a bit of the preliminary work. They recognized the flaws in the story, including details that seemed to have been borrowed from the Roswell crash.

When I heard about this story back in 2010, I was bothered by the military reaction, or rather, their lack of urgency when presented with the crash of an aerial vehicle that was obviously not of American design. The Japanese had bombed the American mainland starting in 1944 which killed six Americans using balloon bombs. These were the only deaths on the American mainland caused by enemy action. The point is, this avocado craft could be the vehicle created to kill Americans and destroy property. The military would have had no way of knowing anything about this craft at the time but would know that it was critical for them to find out immediately.

We learn that Baca and his pal watched the military retrieval operation from hiding off and on for a couple of days. Toward the end, when all, and I mean ALL, the soldiers left the site, they were able to explore the craft. I can think of no circumstance in which such an unknown vehicle, once loaded on the flatbed truck for removal, would have been left unguarded. Why didn’t they just drive off at that point?

And, we are told that the boys, and later several adults, walked the site, recovered samples of debris, some of which was later incorporated in Christmas decorations. But, of course, all that debris has disappeared and is therefore unavailable for analysis.

I believe that no one reading the book, which presents scant evidence for the event, would believe this fairy tale. It makes no sense at all. Vallee makes the case for other such events in the book as a way of validating the Trinity crash. But I have gone into that at length in other postings about some of that evidence, which you can read here:

http://kevinrandle.blogspot.com/2005/03/aurora-texas-story-that-wont-die.html

http://kevinrandle.blogspot.com/2018/12/jefferson-airship-vs-aurora-crash.html

http://kevinrandle.blogspot.com/2013/09/ufo-crashes-fifty-years-before-roswell.html

And you can listen to my interview with Vallee and Harris about Trinty and other aspects of the UFO phenomenon here:

https://www.spreaker.com/episode/45140594

As I said, this smacks of a set up. The government is now going to investigate this tale of a crash seriously, only to discover that it is not based in reality. They can then say, “Why, yes, we did investigate this, and like all other claims of a spacecraft crash, we found that it was not true. Like Roswell, there is no substance to this.”

Again, as I have said in the past, this is right out of the debunking playbook described by Dr. H. P. Robertson in 1953. He, and his CIA-sponsored panel, after a week of reviewing the UFO evidence assembled by Project Blue Book and the Air Force, decided that the evidence did not support the conclusion of alien visitation. They suggested that the public be told of mysterious UFO events and then trot out the explanations, removing the mystery. They suggested that teachers not allow students to read books about UFOs for book reports. They had a whole program to stimy interest in UFOs, which, for some reason they believed posed a threat to national security… but all that is a discussion for another time.

I wonder if we can find parallels with this thinking in our government today… but I digress.

Trinty is not a true story. It is based on two first-hand witnesses, only one of whom is alive today. They incorporate the statements of a second-hand witness or two in this tale. There are many better cases for the government to research if they truly wish to understand what has gone on over the last 80 years. If they’d like a list, I can provide one for them… cases of multiple witnesses with physical evidence, interaction with the environment, radar sightings and photographs and film (and no, I do not have a single case will all those elements, but I can name several that do contain multiple chains of evidence.)  

However, this story would not be on that list. And that’s the real point. Why waste time on a case that even the most enthusiastic UFO researcher knows isn’t true?

Satelloon - The Roswell Solution?

Almost from the moment that I became interested in the Roswell case, people were offering solutions for it. Like most everyone else, I thought that a balloon of some nature would answer the questions about the crash. After the first few days in New Mexico, as Don Schmitt and I talked to various people who claimed some inside knowledge of the case, we were disappointed. It seemed there was less than nothing… and then we met Bill Brazel whose tale matched that he had been telling for years about bits of metallic debris.

I mention all this by way of preamble. I didn’t begin believing that Roswell was the crash of an alien spacecraft, but something much more mundane. It was only after talking with Brazel and then many others that my attitude began to change.

At the same time, there were those who pushed the idea that it was some sort of balloon.   John Keel had suggested a Japanese Balloon Bomb, but that was quickly eliminated given the history of them and the circumstances in which they were launched. The Air Force settled on a Project Mogul array in the mid-1990s and at the risk of continuing a lot of unnecessary discussion that has been going on for years, I’m not sold on that. Documentation provided by the Air Force seemed to rule it out.

An inflated Satelloon.

Lately, Dr. Bob Gross introduced us to the Satelloon, which is, basically, a huge, aluminum-covered balloon designed for passive communications. These balloons would be launched into space, inflated, and then radio signals would be bounced off them. This idea was much more cost effective, according to various studies, than using a trans-Atlantic cable for worldwide communications. Of course, in 1947, there had been no artificial satellites launched into orbit. That was ten years away.

The idea of something like the Satelloon, however, was one proposed Arthur C. Clarke in the mid-1940s. He is considered the father of the modern communications satellite even though he had no hand in putting the things into orbit. And, of course, science fiction writers have always been on the forefront of scientific thought with visions of trips to the moon, to the planets of the solar system, and to thoughts of communications with alien civilizations to name just a few of the things they envisioned.

I have attempted to follow up on this Satelloon idea. I have contacted Dr. Gross, but his response was less than helpful. He said that he would think about my questions and decide if he wanted to answer them. These were such puzzlers as had he reviewed all the information supplied by Bill Brazel, meaning his descriptions of fiber optics and balsa-like material that was so touch he couldn’t get a shaving with his pocket knife. His response suggested he would think about it was dated July 21 but I have yet to hear another word from him.

What I have found, by reading his papers, listening to his interviews, is that he suggests that the testing of the Satelloons was imbedded in the testing of the Mogul arrays. Going through Dr. Albert Crary’s field notes on the New York University balloon project, and the other documentation available about these Mogul tests, there is no hint that this was done. Crary mentioned, not only the Mogul name in those notes, but other projects with which

A Satelloon.

they cooperated in some fashion and other equipment that could be relevant to their research. Had a Satelloon been embedded, there is a good chance that it would have been mentioned, but it was not. Is this proof positive? No.

I also note that the Mogul culprit, Flight No. 4, was cancelled according to the available documentation. That would have been launched at dawn on June 4 but wasn’t. There was a launch of a cluster of balloons carrying a sonobuoy later that day, but this was not a Mogul array, according to the documentation available. Charles Moore’s speculative track of Flight No. 4, required it to have been launched at 2:30 or 3:00 a.m., which would have been in violation of the regulations under which they operated. And, given that Dr. Crary noted that it was cancelled at dawn, it means that Moore’s calculations of the path were in error. I mention this only because the track that seemed to take the array in the direction of the Brazel (Foster) ranch is flawed. That means, of course, that whatever fell there did not include a Satelloon.

In my research, I noticed a couple of things. I see that there was nothing that suggested a Satelloon was available in July 1947 for testing with the Mogul arrays. The last relevant entry in Gross’s paper seems to be that no BoPET balloons, which were the type of balloon that would become the Satelloon, were available until 1952. Gross’s timeline then drops to the Roswell crash story and to speculation about satellites including Arthur Clarke’s 1945 paper. That doesn’t provide any documentation that a Satelloon was available in 1947.

Gross does point to the pictures taken in General Ramey’s office, suggesting they show the remains of a Satelloon. The truth is, the pictures show the remains of a rawin radar target and a neoprene weather balloon. There is nothing in those pictures to suggest the remains of a Satelloon.

Gross has suggested that he had other evidence, other documentation that will prove that a Satelloon is responsible for the debris found by Mack Brazel. He has yet to produce it, saying that he doesn’t want to lessen the impact of his upcoming book. This I understand. However, I have found nothing that would suggest that Satelloons were being tested in New Mexico in 1947 and nothing to suggest that they were being tested as early as 1947. The idea was there but the technology had not caught up with the theory. The best I can do is find information on testing in 1952.

Until, and unless, Gross provides the documentation, this is a theory that we must reject. If the documentation exists and we can verify its provenance, we have no choice. If the documentation is presented, at that point we can reevaluate the theory.

Foo Fighters and the USS New York

Well, it’s happened again. Got an email about a Foo Fighter sighting at the end of World War II which was radar confirmed. The ship, the USS New York apparently fired on the object without results which meant that they neither hit it nor drove it away. This all happened in the middle of March, 1945, sometime after the invasion of Iwo Jima and before the invasion of Okinawa.

USS New York in 1945.

According to the story, as told in several sources, it was about one o’clock in the afternoon when the captain of the New York sounded general quarters. While the crew searched the sky for the attack, down in the ship’s CIC the radar seemed to show a single object. It was then that the crew, including the captain sighted a bright, silver object overhead, seeming to follow the ship. According to Keith Chester’s Strange Company, the captain ordered his anti-aircraft batteries to open fire but there were no results. When it was clear that they were unable to engage the light, the captain ordered a cease-fire. “Within seconds,” according to Chester which, of course, means the witness, “… the object climbed up at fantastic speed until it was out of sight and off the radar scope.”

Not exactly a disk-shaped object but it happened more than two years before Arnold, and there was the hint of radar confirmation. The witness, eventually identified as Donald Pratt, said that he also had seen the report in a magazine (he thought it was “The Times” meaning Time, I suppose, but it was The New Yorker for October 27, 1945 but more on that later).

I haven’t done a very good job of describing this sighting, but only because it was a non-event. Oh the sighting happened and the New York opened fire, but the target was a bright light in the sky without a distinct shape and was way out of range of any of the anti-aircraft artillery on the ship.

According to the NICAP website, there is another side to this event, which does not negate what Pratt told researchers, only that the identity of the object was realized by the ship’s navigator sometime after the firing started. And it probably should be pointed out here that by this time, meaning March 1945, the US military, many in the civilian government and probably thousands of civilians knew of the Japanese Balloon Bombs. These were sort of “constant level balloons” designed to cross the Pacific Ocean, and then after a couple of cycles of rising and falling, would automatically release a cluster of bombs. The idea was to set fires in the Pacific Northwest and to cause other sorts of havoc on a really random game of hit or miss. The balloons did work, to a very limited extent, but the major fires were never started.

Anyway, it seems that the captain and crew thought they were looking at one of the balloon bombs or some other Japanese secret weapon. But, according to Arthur Criste, who wrote to Patrick Huyghe who had published Chester’s book, he had been on the ship during the incident and he had a different perspective (pun intended) of the sighting.

He wrote, “The object we were firing at that day was the planet Venus. It was thought to have been a Japanese balloon…”

Okay…

He continued, “The reason the radar failed to detect a target was due to the fact of its maximum which was 20,000 yards, well beyond the range of our anti-aircraft guns (which means in its somewhat convoluted way that the radar didn’t have the range to detect the object… Venus).”

He said that when the guns began firing, it woke up the navigator who thought they were being attacked. He ran topside and looked up. He recognized the object immediately. He said, “What the hell are you shooting at? That’s Venus…”

Okay…

But a letter from another sailor does not a solution make. According to The New Yorker, on pages 39 – 40, in a short article by William McGuire and Mark Murphy, they reported on what a young sailor had told them. It is essentially the same story but there was no mention of radar being involved. Sure, it mentioned that it seemed that this luminous object was following the ship, and the captain asked the gunnery officer for the range. That man said the object was about eight thousand, eight hundred yards from the ship. They opened fire but the rounds fell short, so they kept increasing the size of the weapons brought to bear. The rounds continued to fall short. Eventually they signaled to one of the destroyers to use their five-inch guns, but still had no effect on the object.

Finally, the navigator arrived topside and mentioned that they were firing at Venus. At that point the shooting stopped… and I wonder what the captain said to the young officer who told him the object was eight thousand, eight hundred yards away…but I digress

For those keeping score at home, Pratt was correct in almost everything he said, except for the object being first seen on radar and that it seemed to leave the area when the shooting stopped. The incident was mentioned in a magazine, though it is clear he had not read the magazine in a long time. Anyway, this solution seems quite logical to me and there is no reason to argue with it. The NICAP site contains all the information about this:

http://www.nicap.org/reports/4503XXsouthpacific_rep.htm

This is just one more example of getting to the final and original sources. Pratt told his tale which opened the door. Others went through it, but in the end, once the trail was followed, the logical solution was found. Chester, in his footnote about the object did mention that there was no documentation for the sighting (and in fairness to Keith, there are many new resources available today that he did not have when he put together his book).