In this episode of why
I’m beginning to dislike Ufology, I have planned something of a rant against
all the negative comments directed at me. These are challenges to my military
background, my education, and that I write science fiction, though Stan Friedman
once accused me of writing romances. But rather than do that, I’m going to
mention a book I stumbled onto that sort of underscores the trouble with the
UFO field.
Mysteries Uncovered,
with the subtitle of True Stories of the Paranormal and Unexplained by
Emily G. Thompson, caught my attention because in the promotional material, it
mentioned the Roswell case. Well, here was a writer who had never actually been
to Roswell or who had never interviewed any of the witnesses, but who was
providing us with an analysis of the case. Naturally, I had to see what she had
to say.
The book is loaded with
analyses of many of the things that catch our attention here beginning with the
Lost Colony of Roanoke and the Mary Celeste and several UFO related topics.
Yes, I turned immediately to the chapter cleverly entitled, The Roswell
Incident.
On the first page of
that entry, after a brief synopsis of the case, there is a quote from Dr.
Robert A. Baker, a hardcore skeptic. He said “It’s a modern myth, a kind of
religion. There is a common human need for salvation, and it’s always coming
from above.”
That didn’t bode well
for the entry, but the text wasn’t quite that bad. However, in the first
sentence, she told us about Mac Brazel, not realizing that it’s been a couple
of decades since it was discovered by Tom Carey that he was actually Mack
Brazel. This suggested that she hadn’t done the in-depth research that would
have provided that small nugget of information.
She provides some
descriptions that are attributed to Mack Brazel, but he never said anything
like that to anyone. She wrote, “The wreckage consisted of metal, some of which
was dull and some of with was shiny and thin, resembling tinfoil. There was
also something that looked like transparent plastic string or wire, and thin
sticks shaped like I-beams, made from a material that Brazel was unable to
identify.”
It was Bill Brazel who
told Don Schmitt and me about those items. She missed the important point. Bill
told us that when you shined a light in one end of that plastic string it came
out the other. He said that it resembled monofilament fishing line but he was
talking about fiber optics.
She wrote about the
size of what we have been calling the debris field. She wrote that he, meaning
Mack, estimated that the wreckage covered an area of three-quarters of a mile
long and 200 to three hundred feet wide. “It appeared as though some kind of
machine had exploded in midair and wreckage from it had rained down of the
earth.”
But we know the size of
the debris field is based on descriptions from both Bill Brazel and Jesse
Marcel, Sr, the Air Intelligence Officer of the military unit stationed at
Roswell. The description was not provided by Mack Brazel.
And all this is in just
the first paragraph.
After some discussion
of other, irrelevant sightings in New Mexico, she reported that Brazel drove
into Roswell to talk to Chaves County Sheriff George Wilcox. She wrote that
Brazel might receive a reward for the discovery.
On the July 4 weekend,
there were reports of various organizations each offering a thousand-dollar
reward for proof about the flying saucers. But, according to the newspaper
reports, that information wasn’t available to Brazel until after he made the
trek to Roswell and there has been no evidence presented that Brazel knew about
that money. The reason for the trip, was, allegedly to sell some wool, but the
real reason was he wanted to know who was responsible for all that debris and
who was going to clean up the mess.
Yes, I could continue
to pick apart this entry, but what is the real point? Instead, I’ll move to the
discussion of Project Mogul, the culprit blamed for the wreckage. She reported,
accurately, that the Air Force launched an investigation after several members
of Congress asked for that investigation in the mid-1990s. But then wrote, “…
the debris found near Corona was related to Project Mogul, a top-secret program
aimed at using balloons to spy on Soviet nuclear tests. They claimed that the
wreckage was part of a 600-ft balloon train…”
This really isn’t her
fault but the balloon arrays launched in New Mexico had been reduced to 400
feet and contained common weather balloons and no rawin radar reflectors early
in the New Mexico launches. She wrote, based on the Air Force report, “They
claimed that this was peculiar material found at the crash site that neither
Major Marcel or [sic] Brazel could identify.”
But they should have
been able to identify it. There was nothing special, nothing classified about
the balloon arrays being launched in New Mexico. They were standard, off the
shelf neoprene weather balloons and rawin radar reflectors. A farmer in Circleville,
Ohio, Sherman Campbell, found a weather balloon and radar reflector in one of
this fields on that July 4 weekend, and knew exactly what it was. He took it to the local sheriff, who also
knew what it was. Even if Brazel hadn’t recognized it, Marcel should have.
While I hesitate to get
back into the arguments about Project Mogul, there are other points to be made.
Thompson quoted Charles Moore, who worked on what he was quick to point out to
me that this was the New York University balloon project. She wrote, “Moore
claimed that the balloons were equipped with corner reflectors [rawin radar
targets] that were put together with balsa wood and coated with synthetic resin
glue similar to that made by Elmer, to strengthen them.”
But Moore told me, when
I visited him in Socorro, New Mexico, that the make-up of Flight No. 4, the
culprit in this discussion, was the same as that as what was termed “the first
successful flight,” Flight No. 5. However, the diagram of Flight No. 5, as
published in the Air Force report had no radar reflectors on it and none were used
on any flight in New Mexico until much later in the process.
 |
| The configuration of Flight #5. Charles Moore told me that Flight #4 was configured in the same way. Notice there are NO rawin targets on the flight Also notice the other components which were not among they types of debris described by the witnesses. |
 |
| Charles Moore reviewing winds aloft data that I provided for him as we attempted to determine the flight path of Flight #4. Photo by Kevin Randle, taken in Socorro, New Mexico in the early 1990s. It was during our discussions that Moore supplied information about the activities in 1947. |
Thompson then discussed
the Alien Autopsy that surfaced about that time, meaning 1995. It has very
little to do with the Roswell case and is an admitted hoax. Nearly everyone
involved in the hoax have come forward and there are photographs of them
putting together the “alien” creature that appears in the film.
To keep this from
getting away, meaning too long, Thompson provided us with the Glenn Dennis tale
of the nurse who saw the alien bodies. Dennis said that she had told him about
seeing the aliens in the base hospital and within days she had been transferred
out of Roswell. He had written to her once, but the letter came back marked,
“Deceased.” Dennis said that she, with four other nurses, had been killed in an
aircraft accident. But there is no record of any such aircraft accident that
took the lives of five Army nurses at the time.
Thompson wrote, “The
nurse was never identified.” However, Dennis, reluctantly, gave researchers the
name of the nurse. In fact, her name, Naomi Self or Selff, was well known among
those who were involved in research on the Roswell case. But no one could
verify that there was ever a nurse by that name in the Army, let alone
stationed in Roswell. The search expanded to the local hospitals with the same
results. Told that there was no nurse named Naomi Self, Dennis then said that
he hadn’t given anyone the right name, but then gave another one, which was a
major change in his story.
The real point is that
the Dennis testimony about the nurse was discredited more than a quarter
century ago. That information has been published repeatedly. I covered in The
Randle Report: UFOs in the 1990s, published in 1997. I wrote then, “But
others, such as Glenn Dennis, who has been considered one of the important
witnesses, have begun to collapse. There is little that can be said except that
we have found nothing to confirm that his nurse exists or existed. And when
challenged on these points, be begins to change the tale.”
In her book, Thompson
discusses other UFO events such as the Flatwood monster, Barney and Betty Hill
and the Rendlesham Forest encounter. I had thought about reviewing those
segments here as well, but this is getting longer than I intended. I will only
note here that she reports on the testimony of Larry Warren who claimed involvement
in the Rendlesham Forest events, but that testimony has been discredited.
Colonel Charles Halt noted that he didn’t remember Warren being there at all,
and that contrary to Warren’s statements, he did not approach the object in the
woods. Thompson does acknowledge this controversy.
Peter Robbins, who
co-authored the book, Left at East Gate with Larry Warren, has since
repudiated Warren’s involvement the case. You can read Peter’s long entries
about his reasons for this here:
http://kevinrandle.blogspot.com/2017/08/peter-robbins-explains-his-take-on-left_10.html
and here:
http://kevinrandle.blogspot.com/2017/08/peter-robbins-explains-his-take-on-left.html
Those entries were
written by Peter and were posted to this blog with his permission. Thompson
does write about the controversy with Warren’s statements, but the account
might have been stronger if she had left Warren out of the discussion or
reduced him to a footnote. There were others, such as Jim Penniston and John
Burroughs, not to mention Charles Halt, who were clearly there.
Again, this criticism
is a little bit nitpicky, but when dealing with a case where there is so much
information, testimony and legitimate players, it does seem to be a waste to
mention Warren at all.
I guess I must say that
I was disappointed in the quality of the reporting on the Roswell case, but
then it is quite complex and there have been dozens of books written about it.
I have contributed five of them, and, of course, mentioned the case in dozens
of magazine articles and appeared in a dozen or more documentaries and
television programs dealing with the crash. And if you look at my earlier work,
you’ll find errors in it that are the result of publishing preliminary data.
However, it just seems that a solid report on Roswell can be written. I saw
that she didn’t reference any of the skeptical books about the case and
mentioned Witness to Roswell by Tom Carey and Don Schmitt twice in the
bibliography of the Roswell case.
The real problem is
that I know the mistakes made in the segments that deal with UFO related events
and I must wonder is there are similar problems with the other segments. Would
someone well versed in the Lost Colony of Roanoke be able to find significant
errors in the reporting? Or in the section about Amelia Earhart?
If this was a real
review, then I would note that the book is 373 pages long and is available from
Amazon both as an ebook and in a print version. There is no index but there are
footnotes which are not quite as comprehensive as I would like. It just strikes
me that this was a book written with no real passion for the subjects mentioned.
Although I rarely
mention books that I do not like, the Roswell information was too far off the
mark to allow it to pass. Unfortunately, this is not a book that I would
recommend.
