The Very End of Oliver Lerch

As you all know, I like to chase footnotes. Sometimes that pans out and you read the results here. Sometimes it goes nowhere and there is no reason to publish it here. And sometimes someone will send me a note that launches a bit of a search that leads to a footnote chase that was initiated by someone else. That is the case here.

But, before we get to that, let me say that I was interested in the disappearance of Oliver Lerch from the moment I read about it. Here was a true mystery and I wanted to learn more. I think it was Morris K. Jessup, in his book, The Case for the UFO that first alerted me to the tale. Jessup had written that the documentation was available for all to see in the South Bend Indiana Police Department. You can read about my search for the data here:

http://kevinrandle.blogspot.com/2008/09/disappearance-of-oliver-lerch-larch.html

I won’t keep you in suspense. According the information I received from the police department, their records did not go back any further than 1920. There had been a fire that destroyed earlier records, which would have included those about Oliver Lerch, regardless of the date of his disappearance, reported as either 1889 or 1890.

Article that appeared about the Lerch disappearance in which the relatives were interviewed about the story. Written in 1957, it is clear that Sherman Lerch's father would have been around at the time of the disappeared. There is nothing in the article to suggest that there is any truth to the story. First page of the article printed here for the appropriate citation.

I was able to chase this back to 1906 in something called The Scrapbook. But that isn’t the earliest known telling of the tale. It seems that Theo Paijmans and Chris Aubeck might have chased this to the very end publishing their results in the Christmas 2015 edition of Fortean Times (pages 42 – 47). You can read about their journey at:

https://bizarrevictoria.livejournal.com/160730.html

Now, I’m going to assume that those of you really interested in this, have read my earlier blog post so that I don’t have to go into great detail here. I will note that according to the legend, Oliver, who was somewhere between 11 and 20, had been sent out to draw water from the well because his father was hosting a Christmas party (I always liked one of the sources telling us that throats were parched from singing but not telling us how he knew that). Anyway, somewhere between the door and the well, he was grabbed a bunch of useless speculation) had got him and his voice came from somewhere above the ground. Oliver was gone forever.

Paijmans and Aubeck tell us that one of those who wrote about the story in Fate in 1950, Joseph Rosenberger, said he had made it up for a quick buck. Jerry Clark said that he had information that the story was told to another writer in 1932 and, of course, we know about the 1906 version, so Rosenberger, who apparently plagiarized the tale thought it better to admit the hoax rather than admit the plagiarism. At any case, Rosenberger wasn’t the original source.

Paijmans and Aubeck found that some rich guy in New Zealand thought so much of the tale, he would spend his entire fortune to finding what had happened to Oliver. This was in 1914 and he might not have found anything, saving him his fortune.

More importantly, they found a story published in the New York Sunday Telegraph in 1904 by a man named Irving Lewis [who is apparently C. I. Lewis] that gave them a ray of hope for the veracity of the tale. Bizarrevictoria, told us that Paijmans and Aubeck had found:

Lewis’s story had stayed much the same after 50 years of retelling. What was different – and extremely important – however, was that Lewis included a sworn statement [ahh, those sworn statements from more than a hundred years ago… are any of them true?]at the end of the story signed by ten people claiming to have witnessed the disappearance of Oliver Lerch.

The authors [Paijmans and Aubeck] then looked into the identities of the witnesses listed in the 1904 article. To my extreme disappointment (because, come on, I know you, too, are holding your breath, hoping the sworn statement was legit [parenthetical statement in original], all of the witnesses were either completely made up, or (assuming census records revealed the existence of people by those names) could not have POSSIBILY been in the area at the time or known the Lurch [sic] family. The sworn statement was a giant load of hooey.

This should drive the final stake through this tale. We’ve chased it to the end or rather Paijmans and Aubeck have chased it to the end. I found many flaws in the tale when I wrote about it on this blog years ago. Others have found other flaws in the reporting of it which suggests it was untrue. Just a tale invented for whatever reason. Now, Paijmans and Aubeck have found additional information which suggests that Ambrose Bierce had inspired the tale. In 1888, Bierce wrote an article that contained three stories of strange disappearances and the Lerch story was just one of them. The end of the trail, or in this case, tale, has been reached. 

Chasing Footnotes - The Coyne Edition

In an abbreviated version of chasing footnotes, I found some information that is relevant to the discussion about the Coyne helicopter case. I took a look at Richard Dolan’s UFOs and the National Seurity State. He wrote, on page 384 “When he [Coyne] tried

UH-1H helicopters in flight. Photo
copyright by Kevin Randle.

to confirm the existence of a craft out of Mansfield, his UHF and VHF frequencies went dead (Mansfield later confirmed there were no aircraft in the area).”

Dolan’s endnote, which included a couple of sources, mentioned Jennie Randles (no relation, please note the “S” at the end of her name), and her The UFO Conspiracy. On page 103, she wrote, “Mansfield later confirmed that they did not have any aircraft in the area.”

She didn’t use endnotes, but the whole, short chapter was devoted to the Coyne and she noted her information came from Flying Saucer Review, Volume 22, No. 4 (1976). I don’t have a copy of that magazine so that I couldn’t chase this any farther.

Jerry Clark covers the case in his UFO Encyclopedia but mentions nothing about Mansfield saying they had no traffic in the area.

Zeidman, in her MUFON Symposium presentation in 1989, mentioned nothing about there being no other traffic in the area.

What all this means here, simply, is that I’m currently at a dead end, but not at the end of the discussion. If someone has a copy of the Flying Saucer Review article, I’d appreciate knowing what it said. A copy would be better.

So, at the moment, I have Dolan quoting Randles who was quoting Zeidman. I have not found the Zeidman quote at this time, which means only, that I haven’t found the quote. The search goes on.

Socorro, Fused Sand and Mary Mayes (Update 5)

When I was researching my book on the Socorro UFO landing, I had come across information about some fused sand that had been recovered at the site. Both Ray Stanford and Jerry Clark had reported on it. The information source seemed to be unidentified, the fused sand wasn’t mentioned in the Project Blue Book files, and the analysis of other physical evidence seemed to be about whatever you wanted it to be. Jerry Clark wrote, “If such ‘notes and materials’ exist [about the fused sand], they have never come to light. They are not in the Blue Book file on the case.”

This seemed to be more of the unconfirmed information that dot this case. We have those pesky three people (or rather the three telephone calls) to the Socorro police about the flame in the sky as noted by Captain Richard Holder. We have the car of tourists talking to Opal Grinder about low-flying aircraft that nearly smashed into them. We have the auditory witnesses, mentioned by Ray Stanford, who heard the roar of the object but who apparently didn’t see an object and whose names have been lost. Given all that, and the fact that this information, about the fused sand was not very well documented, I reported what I knew and let it go.

Dick Hall

But, as always happens, once the book is published, new information is found. This time it was spurred by a question at this blog about that particular aspect of the case, one that I didn’t think of as important. I decided that I needed to know more about this, so I went back to Stanford’s book, Socorro Saucer in a Pentagon Pantry. His entry was somewhat misleading, given the way he reported on it. Although he credited Dr. James McDonald as the source, he failed to mention it was in a letter to Dick Hall of NICAP, who provided a copy to him. Stanford wrote:

…a woman who is now [1968] a radiological chemist with the Public Health Service in Las Vegas [Nevada]… [who] was involved in some special analysis of materials collected at the Socorro site, and when she was there the morning after, she claims that there was a patch of melted and resolidified [vitrified] sand right under the landing area. I [McDonald] have talked to her both by telephone and in person here in Tucson recently. Shortly after she finished the work [on the Socorro specimens], air force personnel came and took all her notes and materials and told her she wasn’t to talk about it anymore (My [Stanford’s] emphasis. A copy in my files.)

That, of course, is not the whole story. In fact, as noted, this is very misleading based on everything that McDonald put in his letter. When you read what McDonald wrote, it tells us some more about all this. He wrote (differences highlighted in bold:

One last point: Have you ever heard of any reports that there was a patch of “fused sand” near the site of the Socorro landing? As a result of a remark that Hank Kalapaca made to me at lunch in the Rayburn building on 7/29 [I will assume here the year was 1968], I followed up a lead that Stan Friedman picked up when he spoke to a nuclear society in Las Vegas. I’m still in the process of checking it, so won’t elaborate the details here. Briefly, a woman who is now a radiological chemist with the Public Health Service in Las Vegas was involved in some special analyses of materials collected at the Socorro site, and when she was there, the morning after, she claims that there was a patch of melted and resolidified sand right under the landing area. I have talked to her both by telephone and in person here in Tucson recently, and am asking Charlie Moore to do some further checking. I must say, it’s very hard to imagine how such material could have been there not only on the evening of the 24^th but still there on the morning of the 25^th without it ever having been reported before. She mentioned it to Stan rather casually, as if she assumed that everybody knew about the fused sand. She was surprised to be told, especially by me, that nothing like that had ever before been reports. She did the analyses on the plant-fluids exuded from the stems of greasewood and mesquite that had been scorched. She said there were a few organic materials they couldn’t identify, but most of the stuff that had come out through the cracks and blisters in the stems were just saps from the phloem and xylem. Shortly after she finished the work, Air Force personnel came and took all her notes and materials and told her she wasn’t to talk about it anymore. Grand coverup? Not necessarily. The fused sand might be another matter.

By comparing the two reports, that is, what McDonald actually wrote with what Stanford provided, you can see that this information isn’t quite as strong as Stanford suggested. In fact, McDonald didn’t seem to be particularly impressed with it, but he did what all good researchers would do. He decided to see what he could learn about the witness, who isn’t named here but whose name appears in other correspondence written by McDonald, and to see if he could find additional information.

The first thing that I wanted to know, now that I had a copy of the letter, is what Stan might have remembered about this. It was, of course, fifty years ago, so his

Mary Mayes, 1959.

memory might be a little vague. He told me that as best he could recall, “Mary Mayes approached me after I lectured to a technical group saying that she had been a student at NMIT [New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology] at Socorro when she was asked to check on the soil which she had done. I told Jim [McDonald] about it as he was much closer obviously than I was. No need for me to be a middleman.”

The next question was if this Mary Mayes’ name could be verified since it wasn’t mentioned in the original letter. On November 25, 1968, Charles Moore (yes, that Charles Moore) reported that he had talked with both Raymond Senn and Sam Chavez about the melted sand. Neither of them saw any melted sand on the site and neither remembered Mayes, though in his letter, Moore incorrectly identified her as Nayes. He also mentioned a Mary Rumph, which as I have just learned from Don  Ecsedy was her maiden name. 

And, since we’re trying to get to the bottom of all this, I’ll note here that Moore wrote, “Our instrument man at the Institute, Mr. John Reiche, visited the Zamora site on the night of April 24^th, 1964. John, an active amateur scientist and rock collector, tells me that he saw nothing unusual other than a burned bush, the markings on the ground which were at that time ringed by stones. Reiche appears agnostic about the whole sighting but places no high value on Zamora’s credibility. He says that Zamora reported other highly unusual events such as deer passing through the Socorro plaza at night when no one else has ever seen such things in modern times.”

This, is, of course, disturbing. It suggests something about Zamora that had not been mentioned by anyone else over the years, and while this letter, from Moore to McDonald has been available to researchers for a long, it seems that information from it had been overlooked.

One of the landing pad impressions found by Zamora. Photo courtesy USAF.

Moore goes on to say, “Reiche has also told me that the markings on the ground (presumably made by the support gear of the flying object) seems ‘wrong’. The soil on the sides of the indentations was loose and appeared as though it had been moved by a shovel; it did not appear to have the character that it should have, had it been made by the intrusion of a load bearing support.”

Which is another bit of information that hasn’t seen much in the way of publicity. While it seems that Reiche doesn’t care about any agenda, only the truth, it is also clear that he has raised some questions about Zamora and about the landing gear traces. I haven’t seen much like this in the research that I had conducted until now. But I will note that some of that loose dirt seemed to be explained by the landing gear sliding in the dirt as the weight was applied to the landing pad and the dirt shifted under the added weight.

Charles Moore at the Institute Library. Photo copyright
by Kevin Randle.

As for the melted sand, Moore wrote, “As I told you earlier, I screened the dirt in the arroyo bottom in an effort to find any evidence of fused material and found nothing that suggested the spalling off of rhyolite, melting of any vesicular lava nor the fusing of any sand. While it is true that the arroyo is subject to washing during summer thunderstorms, the fragments of the burned bush are still there, and I examined carefully the vicinity of the roots of the burned bush but found no evidence of fusing heat.”

We now have evidence that suggests Mayes’ tale might not be true. Although Moore called her Nayes in his letter, it would seem that if Senn heard the name Nayes, he would have mentioned that he knew someone named Mayes. Instead, he denied knowing her.

To complicate the issue, McDonald asked Mayes about these negative results. He talked to her on the telephone and then in person. He said that she had “remarried as Mrs. Mary White.”

According to McDonald’s letter to Moore dated April 2, 1970, mentioning the investigation, he wrote:

She [Mayes/White] seemed to be quite astonished that Senn said he did not know her, and she said not only had her family known him for many years, but she, herself, had “stood up for him” at his wedding… I had frankly tended to dismiss her story on the basis of what you’d turned up and Senn’s not knowing her. She again went very briefly over it - - where the fused sand lay relative to the impression, etc. No signs of evasive coverup or backtracking to mend her story. And reexpressed surprise at Senn’s saying he didn’t know her.

I pointed out that Reiche saw nothing like that when he was there, and she seemed genuinely puzzled.

Don Ecsedy tells me that there was a fellow namd Rumpf at Senn's wedding and is mentioned on the documentation available on line. So it seems possible that Mayes was at the wedding but that Senn knew her as Mary Rumpf rather than Mary Mayes. But I also have to wonder why, when McDonald asked her about this, she didn't mention that she was Mary Rumpf at the time. It would have cleared up this one point of disagreement and that she didn't seems curious.

There are more technical aspects to this claim of melted sand. According to a report from McDonald to Colonel L. DeGoes (apparently an officer assigned to ATIC at the time), “Charlie [Moore] took to the lab at NMIMT specimens of vesicular lavas that are abundant near the site and also a sample of a rhyolite present in abundance. A welding torch melted the vesicular lava to a smooth obsidian-like form, without sputtering. The torch would not melt the rhyolite, but it flaked off. A thorough search by Moore and a graduate student failed to turn up any sputtered-drop spherules in the dirt near the center of the site.”

But here’s the rub. Moore told McDonald that he had gotten to know Zamora and according to that same report by McDonald:

It came out a few weeks ago in the course of a rather careful recheck done by C.B. Moore of NMIMT at Socorro. Charlie has been out to the site with Zamora and… Zamora happened to volunteer the information about a “bubbly lava” rock one side of which had melted down. It was something like a foot across… and was located near the geometric center of the four leg holes i.e., right in the most heavily charred by the flame of the object in takeoff. Zamora said “some official” took it away that night… Holder makes no mention of such a rock…

Going through the entire Blue Book file on the case, there is no mention of the fused sand by anyone who was on the scene. From the moment that Zamora saw the thing in the arroyo there were people on the site. Holder even had military

Although this picture has been published suggesting it is Mary Mayes on the scene, this photograph was staged some time later with Zamora looking on.

police from White Sands cordon the area, take measurements and preserve the scene. Although it is not clear if the MPs were there overnight, but next day, there were any number of people on the scene, but no one mentioned Mayes and her colleagues being there. They would have needed some guidance to find the right place, so they would have had to come into contact with the Socorro police or the government officials (Holder and FBI Agent Byrnes). Photographs, taken the evening of the 24^th and at other times give no hint of the melted sand, and those taking samples, from the damaged bush, from the soil around the landing area, and from other parts of the arroyo have nothing to suggest a high heat that would melt the sand.

Here's something else. According to Stanford, when he was on the site with Hynek and Zamora, he, Zamora, spotted a rock with what looked like metal scrapings on it. He pointed it out, but it seemed that no one cared about these possible metal sample from an alien spacecraft. Once the site was cleared, sometime that afternoon, Stanford returned and retrieved the rock and its metallic samples. This does not seem to be the same rock that was near the melted sand that Mayes mentioned and that Zamora seemed to confirm existed some two years later but I wonder if Zamora wasn’t confused by the disappearance of the rock taken by Stanford.

Zamora, and others, thought that the Air Force had retrieved the melted sand sometime later and that it was taken to a secret lab for analysis. Again, there is no testimony anywhere in the Blue Book files to confirm that this melted sand existed or that there was any analysis done of it. There are, in the documents I now have, a suggestion that Holder had written a five-page report, but I have not located it yet.

To recap what we’ve learned here. Mayes told Friedman about the melted sand some two years after the landing and that she had analyzed it. Friedman passed the information to McDonald, who followed up on it. Mayes said she was at the scene the next day, April 25, but that seems to be unlikely given the statements of others. At any rate, she claimed to have found an area of melted sand near the burned bush and recovered it, taking it to her lab for analysis. Once that was completed, the Air Force arrived, confiscated all the material and her notes, and told her not to talk about it. She had nothing to prove any of this, though there are those who accept the story without question.

Apparently, no one who was on the site on the evening of April 24^th, who examined the burned bush carefully, who studied the landing gear impressions, and made measurements, noticed the area of melted sand near the bush and therefore none reported it. Other examinations of the site, in the months and years to follow found no evidence of heat high enough to fuse the sand, or any other indications of fused sand. It would seem, if we accept Mayes as telling the truth, that she collected the entirety of this evidence.

We have found, or rather Don Ecsedy Reported, that Mary G. Mayes is listed as a junior in the University of New Mexico 1959 Yearbook (page 42). He also reported that she had two years of college in Texas, but then she seemed to have claimed that she had attended NMIMT at some point so that she was familiar with the Socorro area. She told McDonald that she was a doctoral student at the University of New Mexico. She drops out of the picture after telling her tale to Stan and the beginning of the investigation by McDonald. In a letter dated March 13, 1969, McDonald wrote, “You 11/25 letter, for which thanks, indicated that neither Senn nor Chaves could in any way confirm the statements made to me by Mrs. Mary Nayes (sic) concerning the ‘fused sand.’ That certainly tends to cast strong doubt on her account. I have written to her but she has never replied, which may be further indication of something seriously amiss there.”

This was, of course superseded by his April 2, 1970 letter that actually explains nothing, other to reaffirm her original story. In the long run, no one can place her at the scene, no one saw the fused sand she talked about and she had no documentation to back up what she had claimed. All of this might have gotten more attention than it deserved, though there are still some avenues to pursue. (I will note here that Rumpf/Mayes/White died in 2007.) For those who wish to know who is Colonel DeGoes see:

 ftp://rock.geosociety.org/pub/Memorials/v29/degoes.pdf. 

Overall, this might be as far as we can take this, which is farther than I thought we could get. I have a couple of inquiries out that might pay off, but then again, we are pursuing something that is now over half a century old. Time might just be the one hurtle that we are unable to leap.

Recanting Roswell Certainty

At the risk of annoying a few and because it seems that some people have absolutely no reading comprehension, I thought I would address, once and for all, this notion that I have recanted on Roswell. I believe it came about because some people are incapable of understanding a simple title of three words. They seem to understand the first two, but not the third. And, I thought that since there have been many commentators on this, but none of those with two exceptions bothered to communicate with me I would clear the air. In the time of “fake news” it is easy to understand how this happens but that doesn’t make it right.

North Main Street, Roswell. Photo

copyright by Kevin Randle.

Jerry Clark wrote a review of my book, Roswell in the 21^st Century for Fortean Times. It was titled, “Recanting Roswell certainty.” That third word should have put the whole thing into the proper perspective, but some couldn’t get past the first two which were, “Recanting Roswell.” Adding that third word certainly changes the meaning of the title.

In the early 1990s, after Don Schmitt and I had interviewed dozens of witnesses, from senior members of Colonel William Blanchard’s staff to ranchers living in the Corona area, I was absolutely convinced that what had fallen was an alien craft. We had testimony from those who claimed to have been deeply involved, who had seen the craft, the bodies, the clean-up efforts, and participated in the movement of all that material to Wright Field. We had many leads to follow, we had more witnesses to interview, and I believed that for the most part, these people were relating what they had seen and done back in July 1947. We even had learned of a diary kept by Catholic nuns that told of the object in the sky which would have been a nice bit of documentation.

This was before I had read a book, Stolen Valor, about alleged Vietnam veterans who were lying about their service in Vietnam. Some had been clerks. Some hadn’t served in Vietnam. Some hadn’t even been in the military. The best example of all this is that in 1990 there were an estimated 2.5 million Vietnam vets. Men and women who had actually served in country. There was a question on the 1990 census that asked if you were a Vietnam vet. Thirteen million answered, “Yes.” That meant that 10.5 million were lying about it for no apparent reason other than it made them feel good. All this provides an insight in to the Roswell case and the number of people who claimed inside knowledge.

In the world today, as I have learned more about the witnesses and have been able to cross check information, it is clear to me that the Roswell case is nowhere as robust as we had thought. I laid out the case, as I understand it, based on the evidence I have seen, the interviews I have conducted and the research I did and we are left with a multiple witness case without sufficient documentation and without any sort of physical evidence. Not exactly the robust case I had once believed it was.

The trick for everyone is to read the entire title of the review. We all know that something fell at Roswell. The debate has been over what it was. At one time I would have told you it was alien. Today I tell you that I just don’t know. For me there isn’t a good explanation which I guess means that the solution is unknown rather than alien.

Tehran - September 18, 1976

(Blogger’s Note: John Greenewald and I discussed this case on the radio and I thought many would like to see a more information about it including the names of the various participants in the sighting. This is adapted from my book, The UFO

John Greenewald

Dossier, which details the UFO situation as it is seen around the world. This provides the best information available. You can look at the documents themselves by visiting www.theblackvault.com.)

A Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) document would later say, “A remarkable report. This case is a classic that meets all the necessary conditions for a legitimate study of UFO phenomenon.”

The series of sightings began with a routine telephone call made to the control tower at the Mehrebad Airport in Tehran. The night supervisor, Hossain Pirouzi, would later say that the first telephone call came in at about 10:30 p.m., from the Shemiran area of Tehran. The woman said that the object was about 3,000 feet above her, that its color changed from orange to red to yellow. It had a shape that she described as a fan with four blades. She wasn’t sure if it was a single object or two because it seemed to sometimes separate into two distinct pieces. Pirouzi told her not to worry about it because he would check it out.

But he didn’t bother to check it out. His radar systems were down because they were undergoing repair. At 10:45 p.m., he received a second call from a woman who had been on the roof of her house when she saw an object seeming to dart around. Like the first, she wasn’t sure if there was one object or two. She said that they seemed to divide into two and then joining up again. As he had done with the first, Pirouzi told her not to worry about it.

By 11:15 he had received four telephone calls about the object and although the trainees with him had been outside to search for the object without results, he was now curious. Taking a pair of binoculars with him, he walked out onto the balcony that surrounded the tower. Although he didn’t see it at first, he finally did spot it and as he would tell investigators, “I was amazed, flabbergasted.”

He said that the object looked like a bright star to the unaided eye, but through the binoculars he saw a rectangular shape that was about 6,000 feet overhead. Both the right end and left ends were blue and there was a red light in the center that while not flashing seemed to be rotating. The object also seemed to be oscillating.

Interestingly, four aircraft that transited the area reported that they had received an emergency radio beacon signal. They called the tower to ask if there had been some sort of aircraft accident or a crash but of course there were none. With this new information, Pirouzi began to worry and decided that it was time to alert the Iranian Air Force. At 12:30, now on September 19, Pirouzi called the duty officer and told him what he had seen. There still was no radar contact and other facilities that were alerted had nothing showing on their screens, but the distances and mountains might account for that.

The Duty Officer also alerted General Parviz Youssefi, who stepped out on his porch and saw the object. It was Youssefi who contacted the other radar facilities asking what they had on their scopes. Even without the radar confirmations, Youssefi ordered an F-4D Phantom into the air to investigate.

The Phantom launched at 1:30 a.m. and the pilot spotted the UFO almost immediately. Using Pirouzi as a relay, Youssefi ordered the aircraft to get as close as possible to the UFO to get a good look at it but to do nothing else. The pilot approached above the speed of sound and said the object was about half the size of the moon, and that it had violet, orange and white lights that were much brighter than moonlight.

He chased the object until he thought he was over the border and into Afghanistan. At that point he turned to head back to Tehran and saw that the object was still in front of him, but closer to Tehran. He was ordered to close on the UFO and when he was about 30 miles away his avionics, radios and electronics failed. When he maneuvered away from the UFO, the electronics came back on line but he was now running low on fuel. He had to end the chase.

According to Lawrence Fawcett and Barry Greenwood in Clear Intent, Charles Huffer using FOIA, received a report from the Defense Intelligence Agency that covered the details of the attempted intercepts. According to that document, the description of the second attempted intercept began:

At 0140 hrs [when] a second F-4 was launched. The backseater [the radar officer who sits behind the pilot in the F-4 cockpit] acquired a radar lock on at 27 NM [nautical miles] 12 o’clock position with the VC [rate of closure between the fighter and the object] at 150 NMPH [nautical miles per hour]. As the range decreased to 25 NM the object moved away at a speed that was visible on the radar scope and stayed at 25 NM.

The size of the radar return was comparable to that of a 707 tanker. The visual size of the object was difficult to discern because of its intense brilliance. The light that it gave off was that of flashing strobe lights arranged in a rectangular pattern and alternating blue, green, red and orange in color. The sequence of the lights was so fast that all the colors could be seen at once. The object and the pursuing F-4 continued on a course to the south of Tehran when another brightly lighted object, estimated to be one-half to one-third the apparent size of the moon, came out of the original object. This second object headed straight toward the F-4 at a very fast rate of speed. The pilot attempted to fire an AIM-9 [sidewinder] missile at the object but at that instant his weapons control panel went off and he lost all communications (UHF and interphone). At this point the pilot initiated a turn and negative G dive to get away. As he turned the object fell in trail at what appeared to be about 3 – 4 NM. As he continued in his turn away from the primary object the second object went to the inside of his turn then returned to the primary object for a perfect rejoin.

Shortly after the second object joined up with the primary object another object appeared to come out of the other side of the primary object going straight down at a great rate of speed. The F-4 crew had regained communications and the weapons control panel and watched the object approach the ground anticipating a large explosion. This object appeared to come to rest gently on the earth and cast a very bright light over an area of about 2 – 3 kilometers. The crew descended from their altitude of 25,000 to 15,000 and continued to observe and mark the object’s position. They had some difficulty in adjusting their night visibility for landing, so after orbiting Mehrabad [Airport] a few times they went out for a straight in landing. There was a lot of interference on the UHF and each time they passed through a mag. [magnetic] bearing of 150 degrees from Mehrabad they lost their communications (UHF and interphone) and the INS fluctuated from 30 degrees to 50 degrees. The one civil airliner that was approaching Mehrabad during the same time experienced communications failure in the same vicinity (Kilo Zulu) but did not report seeing anything. While the F-4 was on a long final approach the crew noticed another cylinder-shaped object (about the size of a T-bird at 10M) with bright steady lights on each end and a flasher in the middle. When queried the tower stated there was no other known traffic in the area. During the time that the object passed over the F-4 the tower did not have a visual on it but picked it up after the pilot told them to look between the mountains and the refinery.

During daylight the F-4 crew was taken out to the area in a helicopter where the object apparently had landed. Nothing was noticed at the spot where they thought the object landed (a dry lake bed) but as they circled off to the west of the area they picked up a very noticeable beeper signal. At the point where the return was the loudest was a small house with a garden. They landed and asked the people within if they had noticed anything strange last night. The people talked about a loud noise and a very bright light like lightning. The aircraft and area where the object is believed to have landed are being checked for possible radiation.

Attached to the report was an internal form that was titled, “Defense Information Report Evaluation.” This was an assessment of the quality of the Iranian sighting information that indicated the information was “confirmed by others sources,” and that the information value was “High (Unique, Timely, and of Major Significance),” and the information was “Potentially Useful.”

In the remarks section of the report, and as noted by the COMETA officials, this case was considered:

A remarkable report. This case is a classic that meets all the necessary conditions for a legitimate study of UFO phenomenon:

a. the object was seen by multiple witnesses in different locations [(i.e., Shemiran, Mehrabad, and the dry lake bed) and viewpoints (both airborne and from the ground)].

b. The credibility of many witnesses was strong (an Air Force general, qualified aircrews, and experienced tower operators).

c. Visual sightings confirmed by radar.

d. Similar electromagnetic effects (EME) were reported by three separate aircraft.

e. There were physiological effects on some crew members (i.e., loss of night vision due to the brightness of the object).

f. An inordinate amount of maneuverability was displayed by the UFOs.

The final comment about this in the COMETA report is, “The attempt by Klass to trivialize this case shows how solid it is.” This refers to Klass’ book, UFOs: The Public Deceived in which he claimed that the first witnesses saw Jupiter and pilot incompetence and equipment malfunctions accounted for the remained.

But one of those ground witnesses was General Youssefi who eventually ordered the interceptors into the air. When the launching airfield is taken into consideration which was west southwest of Tehran and the distance the first fighter traveled, Jupiter was about 90 degrees off where the UFO was reported.

Klass also claimed that the Westinghouse technician who was stationed at the Shahrokhi Air Base said that only the first of the F-4s reported equipment failure and that particular aircraft was known for equipment failures and had a history of electrical outages. This same man also suggested that the F-4 radar could have been in manual track causing a wrong interpretation of the radar lock. Or, in other words, the radar officer in the rear seat of the F-4, made an error that caused him to believe he had radar contact.

And keeping with his belief that meteors cause many UFO sightings, Klass pointed out that the Gamma Percids and the Eta Draconids meteor showers were at their height. He believed that it was likely that witnesses had been fooled by bright meteors.

He also suggested that where the falling light that supposedly crashed they found a beeping transmitter that came from a C-141 aircraft, according to a report filed by Lieutenant Colonel Mooy. But that isn’t exactly accurate. According to Mooy’s report, “… but as they circled off to the west they picked up a very noticeable beeper signal. At the point where the return was the loudest was a small house with a garden. They landed and asked the people within if they had noticed anything strange last night. The people talked about a loud noise and a very bright light like lightning….” So there was no mention of a C-141 in that report.

Jerome Clark, in his UFO Encyclopedia, probably put it best. He wrote of Klass’ attempted explanations:

No satisfactory explanation for the incident has ever been proposed, though Philip J. Klass, author of several debunking books on UFOs, would attempt one. In Klass’s view, the witnesses initially saw an astronomical body, probably Jupiter, and pilot incompetence and equipment malfunction accounted for the rest…. Klass’s theory presumes, without clear or compelling evidence, a remarkable lack of even rudimentary observing and technical skills on the parts of the Iranian participants. In some ways it would be easier to credit the notion, for which no evidence exists either, that the witnesses consciously fabricated the sighting.

Or, in other words, the skeptical argument against the reality of the sighting fails because of the assumptions made about evidence that does not exist. Klass is forced to invent explanations rather than look at the evidence that is gathered. And this does not address his dismissal of the aircrews as incompetent, based it seems, on their nationality rather than their actual abilities.

Lake Area Paragon Conference and a Little about the Roswell Slides

On Friday, July 10 and Saturday, July 11, I attended the Lake Area Paragon conference in Long Prairie, Minnesota. It appealed to me because it was close to home and wouldn’t cause any additional health problems that have been plaguing me in the last few months.

Lorna Hunter was the organizer and host of the conference and did everything in her power to make sure that we, who were on the program, didn’t have to worry about anything, except maybe where to find ice cream late at night (there was a Dairy Queen about 100 yards away).

For the Friday night program, Hunter gave us a review of some of the more interesting Minnesota UFO cases, especially those around the Long Prairie area. One of them is known as the Tin Can case and was reported on October 23, 1965, by James F. Townsend who was just 19 at the time. According to the documentation available in the Project Blue Book files, which isn’t always the most objective source, this is the story:

Project Blue Book description on the Project Card.

Project Blue Book description of the sighting.

Saturday began with Adrian Lee talking about his research into the paranormal and the weird things that he’d seen. While it was all interesting, the still photographs that seemed to show some sort of apparitions could have been the result of various strange occurrences caused by the lighting, the camera or a combination of both. The videos, especially where he had set up three houses of cards, one beside the other to see what would happen were much more interesting. One of those houses flew apart as if hit by an invisible hand while the others remained intact and unmoving. As I say, it was an interesting bit of video.

After lunch Jerry Clark was up with his explanation of “Experience Anomalies.” He described it as such:

I call them “experience anomalies,” or the secondary phenomenon as opposed to the core phenomenon. They sometimes (though not always) have a parasitic – one might say parodic – relationship to a core anomalous event. The anomalous event takes place in the world and can be empirically demonstrated, or potentially demonstrated. Its experiential correlate borrows its imagery from the anomalous event but is ontologically unrelated to it. Experience anomalies are open-ended. Nearly anything can be “seen,” though cultural traditions and expectations play a large, in some ways determining, role in shaping their particular content. In experience, individuals perceive supernatural or at least unlikely entities like fairies, merbeings, angels, the Blessed Virgin Mary, gods, monsters, space people, and phantom airship crews.

 These are not hallucinations as hallucinations are ordinarily defined. These encounters, which at times occur collectively, are profoundly mysterious and their cause or stimulus is unknown. Yet, to all available appearances, earnest witnesses and clear viewing conditions that enhance confidence in the anomalousness of the observation do not translate into anything that transcends memory and testimony. We lack a vocabulary with which to conduct a useful discussion of such matters. Perhaps “visionary” comes closest, even if it is merely descriptive and not, as some presume, explanatory. It is as if, indeed, a supernatural landscape has briefly overlaid the physical landscape. The ufologist Jenny Randles calls this the “Oz Factor,” defining it as the sensation sometimes reported by UFO witnesses of “being transported temporarily from our world into another, where reality is but slightly different.”

 He did provide information or ideas on how to precede in an investigation of these anomalies, suggesting that the search in not for authenticity or inauthenticity, but in what the witness had experienced. He said:

Where experience anomalies are concerned, the focus of investigations and debates ought to be on causes, not on the specific content of the occurrences in question. It is surely futile by now to argue that all anomalous experiences must bow to conventional explanations; yet it is also unwise to extrapolate too broadly from such experiences – which may well not mean what they appear to mean – in order to concoct, with no other justification than a witness’ story, an extraordinary phenomenological context in which the reported phenomenon is said to make sense.

Anomalies of the deepest strangeness dwell between the daylight of science and reason and the dark night of dreams and superstition. You may have “seen” one, but it does not necessarily follow that the anomaly lives on in the world after it has briefly occupied your vision and scared the hell out of you. We may experience unbelievable things, but paradoxically, all that may signify is that they can be experienced. You can “observe” a fairy or a merbeing or something equally outlandish, but however resonant the experience may be to you, the rest of us cannot infer from your testimony that such creatures are “real.” To the contrary, to all available evidence and virtually none to the contrary, they are not. And that is all we can be assured of, because all we have done here is to remove one explanation from consideration – that such things exist at event-level reality – while failing to put another in its place. 

Still, the concept of experience anomalies relieves us of the false demands of literalism. We no longer have to argue for the authenticity or inauthenticity of the described phenomena. Not that a profound enigma does not remain – a mystery of imagination, culture, perception, consciousness, being, and more – a mystery so impenetrable that it eludes vocabulary itself, our very sense of the assumed relationship of event to experience. Happily, though, it removes from us the most onerous burden of all. We can now believe our informants without having to believe their explanations. 

This might not explain Clark’s “Unified Theory” adequately, but gives an idea on a method of investigation that might be more productive than others. The original theory was published as “Experience Anomalies” in Fortean Times 243 (2008) on pages 42-47 for those interested in reading the whole report.

My presentation was the last and concerned the theory that the modern era of UFO sightings didn’t begin with Kenneth Arnold, but started during the Second World War when many were concerned with the Foo Fighters, and after the war with the Scandinavian Ghost Rockets. Arnold sort of marked the middle of the beginning of all this, and I have published the whole idea in Government UFO Files.

The last of the presentations was the panel discussion and while I had been asked by some about the Roswell Slides, none of that had been discussed completely until the panel. When Lorna Hunter and I discussed my presentation before the conference, she suggested that we wait until the panel to talk about the slides.  I fear it took 20 to 25 minutes to outline the problems with the case, and to explain how this fiasco could happen. I made it clear that while there was enough blame to go around, the majority of the fault fell on Adam Dew and Joe Beason as the owners of the slides. They would have had a high quality picture and as soon as better quality scans were offered, the placard was read and the identity of the body revealed.

This isn’t to say that the others were blameless. There were plenty of red flags for those who would have opened their eyes. As I said during the discussion in Minnesota, Tom Carey had told me that it wasn’t a mummy because they had looked at more than 500 pictures of mummies. I think he was looking for that specific mummy rather than an examination of the characteristics of mummies, especially those from the desert Southwest which should have given him and the others a clue as to the identity of the being in the picture.

I was also interested to learn that the slides had not been a topic of discussion in Roswell during their annual festival. There had been a scheduled second big reveal, but when the placard was so easily read by so many different people, it seems that those sponsoring the festival just didn’t want to get drawn into the controversy, or I should say that is my guess. They probably figured that the wisest move was to say nothing about it and hope that the slides didn’t harm the Roswell case or Roswell research. Whatever the motives, we obviously said more about them in Minnesota than was said in New Mexico and I would note that there was a lot of interest in the case and how it had unraveled so quickly.

For those interested in the whole tale, there are plenty of articles about that on this blog up to and including letters from Tom Carey and Don Schmitt and what some of the experts are saying today.

Although the conference sort of officially ended with the final panel, around 5:30 or 6:00 on Saturday evening, that didn’t mean there wasn’t more to be done. Adrian Lee lead a well-attended tour of Long Prairie’s haunted sites. This is something of an annual event, the tour as opposed to the paranormal conference, and those who took the opportunity were provided with some interesting paranormal facts.

The Latest on the Trindade Island Photographs

The photographs that were taken at Trindade Island off the coast of Brazil in 1958 are again the subject of a number of new reports. The most comprehensive of those was published at

www.ufo.com.br.

You need to click on the picture of the UFO and then on the English translation to read the whole story of the investigation of the pictures and the evidence they present. You probably should also be aware that the picture on the home page rotates among several so you need click on the proper one.

The upshot of the article, written by Alexandre de Carvalho Borges and translated by Eduardo Rado and Thiago Ticchetti, is that the pictures of the Saturn-shaped UFO are a composite created by Almiro Barauna and not of a craft from another world.

This was a theory floated just last year when a Brazilian television program suggested this was a hoax. I wrote in a previous blog (which you can now skip if you read it before):　

Back on January 1, 1958, a photographer on the Brazilian ship, Almirante Saldanha, took four pictures of a "Saturn-shaped" object as flew over the island of Trindade off the coast of Brazil. Almiro Barauna developed the film about an hour later. He and Captain Viegas entered the ship’s darkroom together. After developing the negatives, Barauna at first, thought that no image had been picked up, but Viegas, looking carefully, spotted the UFO.

That, in a nutshell, is the story. There are, according to some sources, many witnesses to the craft. Skeptics suggest that few others saw anything at all. That is a matter for another time.

What brings all this up is that a Brazilian TV network, Fantastico, just broadcast a story that suggests, finally, an answer about authenticity of the pictures has been found. According to Fantastico, "This Sunday (August 15), for the first time Fantastico reveals the truth about the Trindade Island UFO. A friend of the family told what she heard from the photographer himself [Almiro Barauna] he had hoaxed the images, it was a montage. ‘He got two kitchen spoons, joined them and improvised a spaceship, using as a background his fridge. He photographed the fridge door with the object in perfect illumination. He laughed a lot about it,’ revealed Emilia Bittencourt. Barauna’s files are in possession of his niece, who didn’t want to record an interview, but confirms the hoax."

The idea that the pictures were faked has been around almost from the moment they were taken. Donald Menzel, the Harvard astronomer who never met a UFO case he liked, claimed, at first, that an aircraft, "flying through humid but apparently super-cooled atmosphere," could become so completely enveloped in fog that it could take on the appearance of a Saturn-shaped object.

Okay, but I’m not buying this.

And apparently Menzel wasn’t either because later, in his book The World of Flying Saucers, he wrote that the case was a hoax. He said that Barauna had faked the pictures with a double exposure.

More likely than the fog-shrouded airplane but a statement without a fact to back it up. You can’t just declare something a hoax because you don’t like it and have no other evidence except your opinion that it is a hoax.

My first thought on reading this latest revelation from Fantastico was that the explained the case.

My second thought was, "Not so fast."

Yes, I’m aware of work done by many researchers in their analyses of the pictures and that some have said they found evidence of fraud in the photographs. Some of it is impressive work.

But I’m also aware of the claim that there were many witnesses to the object’s flight, and it would mean that a couple of dozen were in on the hoax and never breathed a word about it... until now.

But the person making this new claim of hoax is not a relative, or a witness for that matter, but a neighbor and she has no evidence to back up her accusation. There is also a niece, unidentified other than as a niece, who says she has Barauna’s files and she confirms it is a hoax.

Here’s the deal... and I’m sure even the skeptics will agree with this. Let’s wait on the final pronouncement until the files surface and prove the hoax. In the last few years, we’ve had several people come forward explaining that their UFO photographs, none quite as famous as these, were faked. I have no problem with the photographer telling me he or she faked the pictures. That seems to be solid evidence.

In this case, however, we don’t have the photographer, but a neighbor. And the niece who has the files. Let the documentation from the files be reviewed before we completely close the case. If it is a hoax, so be it, but let’s wait until we have the absolute proof before we label it. That might be coming soon.

Now we have more of that evidence thanks to UFO Brazil and Carvalho Borges. The new information comes from the nephew of Barauna, Marcelo Ribeiro, who said he kept the secret for fifty-three years. According to him, the photographs are faked.

Asked what is the truth about the pictures, Ribeiro said that they are not true because there was no flying saucer. He asks, "If there had been one, wouldn’t some of the others on the ship have taken pictures of it?"

Strangely, he then refutes the tale from Fantastico TV, saying that Emilia Bittencourt had told nothing but lies. She knew nothing about the pictures or how they were created.

Ribeiro said that the people on the boat did see something but that it was a strange cloud formation or something else natural. He said that his uncle, who had been taking pictures underwater when the object was first seen, climbed onto the boat but had no unexposed film in his camera. Figuring out that he could make money, he pretended that he took a number of pictures before returning to his cabin for another roll of film. When he returned, there was nothing in the sky but he took several pictures anyway.

Ribeiro makes it clear that there was something in the sky, but it wasn’t a spaceship. Ribeiro doesn’t believe in alien visitation because they would be billions and billions of light years away. I mention this only because it is so wrong. The closest star is only 4 light years away and there are many, many stars within fifty lights... which is not to say that travel among them is possible, only that it is more likely than dealing with another galaxy a billion light years away.

Anyway, Ribeiro claims that his uncle, once he had taken pictures of the landscape, developed them on the ship on the orders of the ship’s captain. He had no photographic paper and showed the captain the wet negatives. Ribeiro suggested that by pointing to certain areas on the negatives, his uncle was able to convince others including the captain that the object was there when it was only some artifact in the clouds.

I do know that it is difficult to identify things on a photographic negative and I know that if you point to something and suggest it is an object, many people will agree with you. I don’t know how successful this might be in the circumstances described here.

But now we move into an area that suggests that the photographer was able to think ahead... or an area that suggests this latest explanation falls short. According to Ribeiro his uncle realized the commercial value of a high quality photograph of a UFO and knowing that set the stage while on the ship. He knew that he would make money.

Once the ship returned to port, Ribeiro’s uncle, Barauna, left, taking with him, the negatives he had shot. At home, in his studio (or laboratory as they suggest in the article) he experimented with various objects until he settled on bus tokens. He photographed them against a black background and then printed his pictures with one negative and then another creating a composite that held both the ground details and the UFO.

At this point I suppose I should mention that Barauna had, in the past, done an article about the creation of UFO photographs. He was a skilled technician, some might say an artist with a camera, and creating the composite and then a negative from that wouldn’t have been difficult for him. Done properly, no one would be able to tell that the composite print and negative made from it were a double exposure, at least according to Ribeiro. The print would look just like, well, the photographs that we’re all familiar with.

Now comes the rest of the story. Ribeiro said that Barauna shared the story with him but didn’t want him to tell anyone because he would be "demoralized" which might be a poor translation. It probably should be discredited. At any rate Barauna didn’t want his nephew to say anything until after he was gone.

So now, with his uncle safely buried, Ribeiro is saying that the pictures were faked for the money they would make. It was sort of a spur of the moment plan conceived on the ship as the crew and others were standing around thinking they had seen the Saturn-shaped object.

The article’s author, Alexandre de Carvalho Borges, said that in 2003, he had called Barauna,s friend, Amilcar Vieira, who had been on the ship and asked about it. Vieira said that he had seen the object. Ribeiro agreed that Vieira had seen something, some object, just not the thing in the photographs and certainly not a craft from another world. Ribeiro suggested that if others were standing around, pointing at the object in the sky, that strange cloud formation or natural phenomena, Vieira would have seen it too. That’s just human nature. It is the interpretation of the object that is in question here... and, of course, the real shape of it.

I asked both Jerry Clark and Brad Sparks what they thought of the newest information. Both had studied the case in the past.

Jerry (Jerome) Clark detailed the case in the second edition of his classic The UFO Encyclopedia, wrote, "The latest developments, like the ones last year, look pretty questionable, with some very serious problems coming out of the gate.

Sparks wrote, "All I would say is that the double exposure theory is rubbish and a violation of the basic physics of photography. A double exposure cannot possibly take away light from an image, it can only add to it (a "double" exposure is the taking of two pictures on the same frame of film without advancing the frame). Yet, parts of the UFO image are darker than the sky, which is not possible for a double exposure. If the fake UFO is photographed over the sky-and-Trindade island background then no part of the UFO image can be darker than the sky onto which the fake UFO is filmed."

And both of them suggested that I contact Martin Slough for his opinions on the case. Slough had been studying the case in depth for many years and had been one of the first to suggest that we not take the new information at face value without some further research.

Martin Shough was quick to respond. He hadn’t been very impressed with the revelation of Emilia Bittencourt last year, isn’t much more impressed with this latest story. He wrote to me:

I should perhaps add that the possibility ...that Ribeiro is [blending] memories of various discussions related to the several "trick shots" which everyone knows Barauna was involved with.

Ribeiro mentions the Mundo Illustrado photos and the Carioca fleet bus tokens, making an explicit connection to what he remembers Barauna telling him re[garding] the Trindade case... We know Barauna must have been often asked 'Did you fake it?' and 'How did you fake it?' or 'If you had faked it, how would you have done it?' - the latter being the question that the Navy technicians astutely asked him in 1958.

Ribeiro no doubt correctly characterises Barauna as a great talker and a joker who loved to hold forth, and he must have talked about his escapades many times. ...Of course he may have told Ribeiro that he faked them. Ribeiro may have added some confusion to the core of a true memory. But given the inconsistencies in the story I'm afraid we have to place it in the category of questionable hearsay. Sadly no amount of questioning of Ribeiro now is likely to encourage him to reflect on the story he has made so public, and the witnesses he says he could have added in his support are unfortunately dead. It's a shame he didn't produce this story years ago.

I'm not sure it is true that microscopic examination of grain structure would fail to spot [douible exposure]. The double exposure doubles the numerical grain density in the region of the UFO on the final fake negative. It may be difficult to spot this doubling, given that the background is not very emphatic and of course the grain structure is a fuzzy, flocculent mess that's difficult to quantify, but it is not the case that there is just no possible physical trace of the operation in the grain structure, as Ribeiro seems to suggest. There could be a detectable trace and the Navy people might have looked for it. I would like to see this tested.

And there is something here that Martin, Clark and Sparks didn’t address and that is Ribeiro’s story is second hand. We are warned, repeatedly, about the value, or lack of value, of second-hand testimony. It is often flawed, misunderstood, and many times impossible to corroborate. Here we have a story told by the nephew of the original photographer about how the Trindade Island photographs has been faked, but we don’t have the same sort of confession by the original photographer.

All three of them said that we shouldn’t accept this new claim as authentic without some kind of corroboration... just as we shouldn’t accept a UFO claim as authentic without the supporting evidence.

I will note here that over the years many of those who took pictures of UFOs have come forward to tell us that they faked them. Some of those were teenagers when they did it and a few were young adults, but the point is that they did confess. With the Trindade Island photos we have no such confession except for the uncorroborated claims of a nephew... and interestingly, those of Bittencourt, who he says was lying about it.

It seems to me, given all this that we don’t have a real solution. We have some uncorroborated testimony from the nephew of the man, but we don’t have anything like that from the photographer himself. Barauna said, repeatedly, that the pictures were authentic... except, allegedly, to a couple of family members.

I had hoped, with this latest revelation, we would come closer to a solution for this case but that hasn’t happened. We still don’t know if the object photographed was real, was alien, or a trick whipped up in a photo lab. I’m afraid it just might remain that way.