MJ-12 - New Documents, Old Story

(Blogger's Note: Normally I would take more time to edit this, but there is pressure to get something posted. This is my opinion based on what I have seen, read, and researched since I was alerted to the documents at 4:18 p.m. CDT on June 14. Excuse the typos...)

The field where Mack Brazel is alleged to have found the
metallic debris. Photo copyright by Kevin
Randle.

Okay, I’ve had time to review the document carefully, or rather given it a solid first reading and I have some points to make. I will note here that in my talks with Stephen Bassett, he suggested that all of us, meaning Stan Friedman, Richard Dolan, him and me, create a list of what our first impressions are, and the things that we spotted right off the top. I thought that idea had some merit. We’re not looking to authenticate or debunk, only at the things that disturbed us in some fashion.

I did ask Heather Wade about the source, or sources, and she didn’t give me names, only that they were ex-military and had possessed the documents for a very long time. She didn’t know which government agency had originated them,

Richard Dolan. Copyright by
Kevin Randle

and there seemed no way to verify them through government sources. We also seem to suffer from the same problems that we’ve always had and that is that we’re working from copies and not originals. This makes the whole process problematic… and I think we can point to many cases in which copies of documents have turned out to be forgeries (think CBS and George W. Bush’s military records and any number of MJ-12 documents).

The classification markings on the documents do not seem to be consistent with authenticity, that is, the classification is not marked at both the top and the bottom of the document.

The dating format, 07 July, 1947, is not one that was in use in 1947, but I suppose you could argue that this format is consistent with the other MJ-12 documents even if it is more consistent with a dating format used by Bill Moore.

The use of “Ultra Top Secret” also raises questions. Ultra was the British code name for their operation to intercept and read high-level, highly-classified Nazi message traffic. This code name seems inappropriate for use by the US government or military. In keeping with that, there are several mentions that these documents are classified “Above Top Secret,” but that is really a misnomer… Top Secret is the highest classification, but the number of people allowed to review certain documents can be further restricted by adding a code word. Only those who are code word cleared would have access to the document and by adding a second code word you restrict the numbers even further. So, if there are two code words, you have a document that can be said to be two points above top secret, though that is not actually a fact. While we can argue the semantics of this, I don’t believe someone on the inside would talk of a document being classified two points above top secret, but rather suggesting it was double code word protected.

Jesse Marcel, Sr.

The description of the Roswell case, and the chronology is not accurate based on all the documented evidence available. As but a single example, the document tells us that Mack Brazel alerted the authorities at Roswell Army Air Forces base (which is not the correct name of the facility) at “05:18” (which should have been written as 0518 hrs) though it is clear that it was the sheriff who alerted the Army and Major Marcel himself said that he learned about it as he was eating lunch.

One of the major red flags is, “At his arrival in Roswell, General Twining relieved Colonel Blanchard of command…” There is no evidence of any such order. The relief of a commanding officer is a major event. Had Twining arrived in Roswell and assumed command by virtue of being the senior officer present, that is not the same thing.

I’m going to leave the Roswell segment here, though I see many other problems, and move onto the “Aztec UFO Crash,” which is featured more prominently (which means I’m not even going to discuss the fraudulent IPU). As I was reading this, I thought the same thing that one of the commenters made on the previous post, that is, I was reminded of William Steinman’s nonsensical book, UFO Crash at Aztec. If we compare this to Scott Ramey’s book, The Aztec Incident, the chronology here is all wrong. If we accept Ramey’s book as accurate, then the document fails (which is sort of a point in another arena).

In this document, they have changed the times which had been Mountain Standard Time, to what they call Local Time or LT. If this was strictly a military document, I would have expected the times to be converted to Greenwich Mean Time or Zulu Time. Not really a fatal flaw but one that seems to be out of place.

I’m now going to skip all the trouble with the Aztec aspect of this simply because there is so much that is simply wrong. And if this is a real briefing, where is the mention of Del Rio, Plains of San Agustin and Kingman? They mention other crashes but provide no detail, probably because these details would be difficult to find and easy to refute.

Anyway, we are now treated to the transcript between an EBE and an assortment of interviewers who are never named for a reason that I can’t fathom (unless, of course, they don’t exist). At first glance, I was drawn to the comment about why the aliens had coming to Earth for centuries and learned, “And we like trees?” I wondered if this was the same group of aliens that liked strawberry ice cream and Tibetan music.

I did mention this to Stephen Bassett who wondered if someone had gone to all the trouble to fake the documents, all the study that it had taken and the time to create it, if he or she would then sabotage the effort with some ridiculous, off the wall comment about liking trees.

My first reaction was to think that was an interesting point, but I had yet to carefully read the document. Having now done so, I see that there really is nothing new here. The information about Roswell is wrong, the name of the base is wrong, the chain of command is wrong, and even the higher headquarters at Fort Worth is wrong (it wasn’t the 5^th Air Force, but the 8^th).

Stan Friedman. Copyright by
Kevin Randle

The Aztec material is derivative of Steinman’s book, the MJ-12 information is taken from there (or maybe from any of Stan Friedman’s many writings on it), and there is nothing that is suggestive of advanced scholarship. The writing does not sound as if it came from a government source, and without names, without government agencies, without any way to check things out, this just doesn’t seem to be authentic. I withheld my opinion on this, just announcing that the documents have been released so others would have a chance to review them, but it is now clear that this does nothing to further our knowledge and just confuses an already confused issue.

The Decline and Fall of Ufology

I think that the high point in Ufology was July 1997 when the fiftieth anniversary of the Roswell UFO crash was celebrated. I think that the low point, probably the lowest since June 1947 and Arnold’s sighting was May 5, 2015 when the fiasco of the Not Roswell Slides was presented to the world. This is underscored with many of the UFO documentaries that now populate the cable channel landscape.

The one that I’m thinking of, which I mentioned in another post that will probably annoy most of MUFON and the people in Kingman, Arizona, dealt partially with the

Kingman, Arizona, crash, the MJ-12 SOM 1-01, and a few other ancillary issues. It was the Kingman crash that caught my attention because I have done a great deal of research into this case and frankly, I believe it to be a hoax started by Arthur Stansel.

For those who wish to see an evolution of this case, or rather the evolution in my thinking about it see:

http://kevinrandle.blogspot.com/2010/05/kingman-ufo-crash.html

http://kevinrandle.blogspot.com/2010/06/kingman-ufo-crash-revisited.html

http://kevinrandle.blogspot.com/2011/05/kingman-ufo-crash-really.html

The point here is that Hangar 1 came up with some new information which may or may not have come from Stansel. It was not clear, at least to me, who the source was on this. In this new version, Stansel or someone reported that men in some sort of protective gear had entered the craft. They rushed out, all of them sick and vomiting, which, had I been on the scene would have been frightening. Why were they sick? Have I been contaminated? Is it fatal?

From that point they explained how the disk, whatever it was, had been floated down the Colorado River after retrieval. Kingman is about 90 miles south of Las Vegas and standing between Las Vegas and Kingman is the Hoover Dam. I’m not sure how they got the disc to the river and why they thought this was the best way to recover it, but that’s the claim.

Here’s the point. This case is virtually single witness. There are others who claim to have knowledge of it, but that all comes from hearing the story told by others. And Stansel is not a good witness. His educational background seems to be solid, friends who knew him believed him to be honest, and his assignments put him into the Kingman area, meaning simply he was working north of Las Vegas at the time, so he could have been involved.

But as you can read yourselves in those previous posts, he told a couple of versions of this tale. Some of what he said seems to discredit parts of his story. More importantly, he said that he had lied to the first investigators (who were teenagers with an interest in UFOs) and he said that when he drank, he tended to expand and embellish his stories.

To support the reality of the Kingman crash, they trotted out the SOM 1-01 which is supposed to be the MJ-12 Group Special Operations Manual. Oh, they mentioned frequently that it was controversial, but the language and the tone told us that the controversy was unimportant. The manual contained instructions about the recovery, retrieval and shipping of alien debris. It also suggests that these retrievals be covered by suggesting those in charge say that the debris was from a satellite… but, in 1954, when the manual was created, it didn’t say who had been launching these satellites. This is merely a single example of the flaws that surround the manual.

It struck me as odd that you’d use a controversial manual to support the case for an alien spacecraft crash which is also controversial. The manual arrived in the mail for Don Berliner who himself has said it was a hoax. There is no provenance for it and it violates some of the standards in place in 1954 for such documents. None of this makes any difference to the true believers because they know the manual is authentic.

Finally, to prove their case, they resorted to interviewing Cliff Stone as one of the whistleblowers about alien visitation. You can read about him here:

http://kevinrandle.blogspot.com/2005/11/exopolitics.html

There is a follow up article about Stone from Dr. Michael Salla, but Stone sinks his own boat with his tales of derring-do in Vietnam. In one of those ridiculous tales he talks about how he would sneak out of the camp, crawling through the wire to engage the enemy on his own. This was a recipe for suicide. Stone served in Vietnam as a clerk and not a combat soldier.

The point is that the episode here was filled with information that was faulty, untrue, fabricated, unverified and unsupported by any facts. It was written in such a way as to suggest that while the authorities might deny it; those at MUFON were telling us all the truth. Just never mind that they had no real evidence for their truth and that their witnesses were less than credible.

And that is why Ufology is in rapid decline. It is not about the research, it is not about finding answers for the unexplained cases and no alien visitation does not answer all the questions… there are many answers.  This is about ratings and making money. When solid evidence for a solution of a case is presented, there are always those out there who will scream cover up, that those offering answers are in the employ of the CIA, the Air Force or even MJ-12 as a way of hiding the truth but these programs often ignore those explanations as they underscore the alien nature of the reports. Alternatives are not offered.

But nothing will change as long as there is an audience for the UFO documentaries that have no truth in them, an audience for speakers who are clearly inventing their tales and people who buy books that do not provide solid information. We are stuck in the dark ages and I don’t see us climbing into the light any time soon.

Oh, for those who can’t deduce what I meant here… Kingman is a hoax and the single first-hand witness said that he lied about the details. The SOM 1-01 manual is a hoax and it provides us with no useful information. Many of the whistleblowers who are invited to tell their tales simply don’t have the credentials they claimed, weren’t in the positions they claimed, or have exaggerated their knowledge. All of this creates the problems for those of us who are more interested in the truth than in validating our own belief structures.

Kingman UFO Crash Revisited

I have received new information on the Kingman, Arizona UFO crash of 1953 an it doesn’t look good for the validity of this case. Remember, this all started when Arthur Stancil told Ray Fowler he had been involved in part of a crash retrieval operation. It was, at that point, a single witness case and the witness himself said that he tended to embellish his stories when he had a little bit to drink.

But then came Judith Woolcott who corroborated the tale with one of her own, saying that her husband had a small role in the retrieval. He had been in Vietnam when he wrote to her about this, but he was killed shortly after he had mailed the letter.

Then, on June 1, 2010, I heard from Kathryn Baez, the daughter of Judith Woolcott and the entire tale as told by her mother blew up...

She said that her step-father, William Woolcott was not only still alive but he had not served in Vietnam. He made it clear that he was a Vietnam era veteran, and his ship had served somewhere off the coast of Vietnam. The sailors were told they had not been in Vietnam. Further, Woolcott did not marry Judith until 1980 so he clearly was not the soldier killed in Vietnam after having participated in part of the Kingman retrieval.

But Judith had been married before. Kathryn told me that her father was Elmer E. Fingal who was born in 1938 and died in 2006. At the time of the Kingman crash, he would have been fifteen and clearly wouldn’t have been in the tower working and he wouldn’t have been an officer in the military at that time.

Fingal had also served in the Navy and Kathryn said she didn’t think he had been in Vietnam. It makes no difference because he clearly had not been in the tower and just as clearly he had not been killed in Vietnam.

Where does that leave the tale told by Judith Woolcott? No where. It never happened. Neither of her husbands had been a witness to anything. Kathryn told me that her mother liked to embellish stories and this was just another of them. In fact, Kathryn said, "I often felt that my mother sensationalized her life for which I didn’t agree and we would often butt heads."

So, we fall back to Stancil who killed his own credibility with his varying tales and his admission that he liked to spin stories, especially after he’d had a few.

There is now no independent corroboration for the case, no newspaper articles, no documentation and no solid witnesses. I think we must label this case for what it is. A hoax.

Kingman UFO Crash

Not long ago someone asked about the Kingman, Arizona crash of May 1953. I hesitated answering the query simply because my new book, Crash: When UFOs Fall from the Sky was about to be published and the answer could be found there. And yes, that was a shameless plug.

Most people know that this story has been circulating from the 1970s when Ray Fowler published the information he had in Official UFO. Most of the story then came from Arthur Stancil whom Fowler had called Fritz Werner in the article in order to protect Stancil’s identity.

Stancil said that he had been involved in a top-secret, preliminary survey of a wrecked UFO somewhere in the desert around Kingman. Stancil’s credentials seemed good and there was limited documentation, but nothing solid. Besides, Stancil had been caught telling multiple versions of the tale and claimed that when he had been drinking he tended to embellish stories. That certainly didn’t bode well for the tale.

In the intervening years there have been some others who talked of the crash, and I’ll let you all look that information up in Crash. What I want to talk about is the Judie Woolcott story that suggested to me that there might be something important here.

Woolcott said that her husband, a professional military officer, was on duty at the air base control tower somewhere around the Kingman area. They had been tracking something on radar when it lost altitude, seemed to disappear and then, in the distance, there was a bright flash of white light.

So, okay, something crashed. Military police, according to Woolcott began talking about something being down and they drove out in the general direction of the flash. They found a domed disk stuck in the ground.

Woolcott had gotten these details from a letter that her husband had sent her from Vietnam. He indicated that he knew more, but he didn’t want to write it down. Yes, it seems odd that he would send such a letter from Vietnam, but then guys in a combat environment do some strange things.

While the letter would be an important document, it certainly wouldn’t prove the crash real. Unfortunately, the letter was lost and we only have Woolcott’s memory of it.

But that’s not the worst part. In today’s world there are all sorts of databases available and there is one that lists every American soldier who died during the Vietnam War... including those non-combat related deaths. The only Woolcott listed is a PFC, Randall Woolcott, who was born in 1948 and died in Vietnam before his 20th birthday. He was unmarried.

But, I have learned that Judie Woolcott had been married a number of times and her UFO spotting husband’s name might not have been Woolcott. In her obituary, she was Judith Anne Woolcott (Miller, Fingal). New searches of the databases have failed to produce any corroboration for her story and that suggests this tale is not accurate.

So, where does that leave us? Well, Stancil provided a copy of his desk calendar that shows him on some unidentified assignment on May 21, 1953, but that doesn’t really tell us much and doesn’t really confirm his tale. There are a couple of other witnesses, but their stories are dubious and the dates don’t track, though they both mention Kingman.

The Woolcott story has imploded, which means that it simply is not reliable, given the history there. If she had been able to produce the letter, then that would have been something. But she lost it.

Other attempts at verification have failed. Maybe we should make another attempt to verify something, but the odds are stacked against us. We have no Yearbook like Walter Haut supplied us for Roswell that held hundreds of potential witnesses. We have no newspaper stories like those for Kecksburg and Shag Harbour that helped pin down the tales and name the witnesses. We have no real corroboration. Just a couple of vague stories.

It seems the thread is about played out on Kingman... but that doesn’t mean the story will die. Someone will come up with something to revitalize the Kingman crash, and that might be the most frightening aspect of all.