Coast-to-Coast AM: The Rhodes Photographs Revisited

 

Given one of the developing situations in the world of the UFO, I thought I would revisit the information swirling around two photographs taken by William Rhodes in July 1947. There are two reasons for this. I have found a great deal of misinformation about Rhodes on the Internet recently, and the official investigation into the sighting shows the bias against witnesses, even when they have photographic evidence ignored by those charged with the investigation. This is something that persists even in today’s more enlightened environment. And that’s not to mention the recent NASA report that suggested no solid evidence of alien visitation had been found. Had the Air Force (yes, I know it was the Army Air Forces at the time) investigation in 1947 been conducted properly, the photos might have provided the sort of solid evidence that NASA desires, if they were inclined to research any of the history of UFOs.

Rhodes, according to what he told reporters and later military and government investigators, was on his way to his backyard lab when a “whooshing” sound caught his attention. He thought it was a jet, but when he spotted the object, he realized his mistake. He ran to his lab and grabbed his camera. Back outside, he photographed the UFO.

It was a black, heel-shaped object with what he described as a clear dome in the center. In the drawing he made it was more of a domed disc than heel shaped, but that might be a matter of perspective. He took one picture and realized there was a single frame left on the film. He hoped the object would come closer and when it didn’t, he took the last picture.

The best of the two Rhodes photos, showing the "dome" in the
center and the heel shape that would become important.

The Air Force investigated, were unimpressed with Rhode’s lifestyle, suggesting he was living off his wife’s occupation rather than earning a living himself. They noted he sometimes played piano in a local bar but I’m not sure why that would be a disqualification. They didn’t care for his claim to be the director of the Panorama Research Lab, which was the well-equipped lab in his backyard. They officially wrote the case off as a hoax. I believe that was mainly because they just didn’t like him.

However, Kenneth Arnold, the man whose sighting brought us the term flying saucer, had been asked by Ray Palmer, the editor of a science fiction magazine, to investigate the Maury Island sighting of June, 1947. That was because he and Arnold had something of a professional relation, meaning Arnold had supplied an article about his sighting to the magazine. Arnold traveled to meet the witnesses but found himself overwhelmed by the task. Arnold called on Lieutenant Frank M. Brown, who had investigated Arnold’s sighting.

None of that would be relevant to the Rhodes’ sighting, except that Brown and Captain William L. Davidson, joined Arnold in that investigation. Arnold asked Brown what was happening with that flying saucer business. Confidentially, Brown told him about Rhodes. Arnold asked what was happening with the whole flying saucer business. Brown said they, meaning the Army Air Forces had received two pictures that looked like Arnold’s original heel-shaped object. Although Brown didn’t supply much in the way of information, just mentioned evidence in Phoenix, but that was a clear reference to the Rhodes.

The original drawing Arnold provided to the Air Force. It shows the heel
shaped-object. Rhodes would not known about that in 1947.

The Air Force smeared Rhodes’s with allegations about his character. They interviewed his neighbors who said that Rhodes didn’t like their animals running around on his property. Most of it was trivia like that. And the investigation ignored information that would shed a more favorable light on Rhodes. Others since then have used the Air Force file as a source to reject the value of the Rhodes photographs. Not many look beyond what is found in the Project Blue Book file.

I have learned more about Rhodes. He claimed a Ph.D., but could not produce documentation except for a replicate of his diploma in a small, plastic sealed card. Rhodes explained that while serving with the Navy at the beginning of WW II, the Navy gave its civilian employees a test. Depending on the score, they were awarded the equivalency of a Bachelor’s, Master’s, or a Doctorate. Rhodes scored high enough for the doctorate. That might be the source of the confusion, though Rhodes seems to be a little vague about it.

I spoke with a friend of Rhodes who told me that Rhodes had something of an abrasive personality, but that he was a genius. Rhodes liked to solve problems and this man said that they had hired Rhodes to solve a problem at an Arizona university.

As I say, I have written more about this here and in a couple of my UFO books. You can find that information in no particular order here:

http://kevinrandle.blogspot.com/2023/05/coast-to-coast-am-flir-and-william.html

http://kevinrandle.blogspot.com/2012/04/kenneth-arnold-william-rhodes-and-maury.html

http://kevinrandle.blogspot.com/2006/11/more-of-best-ufo-photographs.html

http://kevinrandle.blogspot.com/2010/10/beyond-rhodes-photographs.html

http://kevinrandle.blogspot.com/2010/10/william-rhodes-and-his-phd.html

The point here is that we have some very good information about specific UFO sightings but they are overlooked because of controversy. Often that controversy is injected as a way of eliminating compelling testimony and evidence without a good reason. That’s where we are with Rhodes, and it is where we are going with much of the latest testimony. Nobody remembers the good, only the bad. Just ask Bill Buckner.

David Grusch, UFO Crashes and Analysis (Updated June 12, 2023) (Updated June 13, 2023)

While Canada burns down and it seems that the leaders and former leaders of this country are accused, and in some cases indited, for breaking various federal laws, there are those more interested in crashed UFOs, or as is becoming the more correct term, UAPs. David Charles Grusch, whose credentials have been cited by many as impressive, claimed that the US Government has, in its possession, recovered alien spacecraft and the bodies of the alien crew. Overlooked here is the fact that he also said that he could produce no documents or pictures because of national security. I’ll concede that if he had pictures of aliens or alien spacecraft, that would be a national security issue.

Even without naming names and without the documentation, Grusch had been greeted with enthusiasm rather than skepticism by most of the mainstream media. Few worried about the lack of verifiable sources and fewer still mentioned it. Now, Michael Shellenberger issued his own statement saying that he knew of, at least, a dozen downed alien craft and that every five years we get one or two recovered for one reason and another. An unnamed source supposedly shared this information with AARO but AARO’s response suggests they don’t have access to that information.

Sean Kirpatrick at the Senate Hearing. He would say that he has seen no evidence
of alien material .

Of course, the Pentagon released a statement. Susan Gough told Fox News, “To date, AARO has not discovered any verifiable information to substantiate claims that any programs regarding the possession or reverse-engineering of extraterrestrial materials have existed in the past or exist currently.”

That is similar to the statements made after the NASA meeting held on June 7. Several of the participants, when addressing this particular claim, said that they had no knowledge or had seen nothing to suggest that the government or the military had any sort of alien material or recovered craft.

After the meeting, Scott Kelly said, "I want to emphasize this loud and proud.
There is absolutely no convincing evidence for extraterrestrial life
associated with unidentified objects."

And, of course, comes the part that I love. More than one reporter trotted out the stale line about the Roswell UFO crash, claiming it was a “test balloon from Project Mogul.” It doesn’t seem to have occurred to those reporters that the Mogul explanation is just another in a long line of lies about the Roswell UFO case. According to the documentation, published by the Air Force, but overlooked by the media, is that the culprit in this, Mogul Flight No. 4, was cancelled. It did not fly and neither does this explanation.

But that does take us to Roswell, where a great deal of this all started. Don Schmitt and I have interviewed many high-ranking individuals about crashed UFOs and some of them have gone on the record. One of the first was Brigadier General Thomas DuBose, who, in 1947, was the Chief of Staff of the Eighth Air Force with headquarters at Fort Worth Army Air Field, later Carswell Air Force Base.

Interviewed in 1991, on tape, DuBose mentioned that the debris displayed in General Ramey’s office was not the material recovered outside of Roswell. Skeptics have pointed at the pictures of that debris as evidence for the Mogul explanation. In one of the pictures, we see Thomas DuBose proving that he was there, in the office, when the debris was displayed and identified as the material found outside of Roswell. He explained that there had been a switch, and that this was not the material that had been brought from Roswell. He said, “…actually it was a cover story, the balloon part of it for the remnants were taken from this location and Al Clark took it to Washington… That part of it was a cover story that we were to give to the public and the news and that was it.”

Since the material displayed in Ramey’s office is clearly the remains of a weather balloon and a rawin radar reflector, and since General DuBose said, on video tape, that it was not the debris brought from Roswell, it seems that Mogul is removed as an answer.

General Roger Ramey (left) and Colonel Thomas
DuBose (right) with the alleged Roswell debris.
DuBose would say that this is not the material
brought from Roswell.

Also, in the Army Air Forces in July 1947, was Lieutenant Colonel Arthur Exon, later a brigadier general. He was stationed at Wright Field which would eventually evolve into the Wright-Patterson Air Force Base where he would later serve as the base commander. Exon acknowledged, more than once, that unusual material had arrived at Wright-Patterson. He told Don and me, on audio tape, “We heard the material was coming to Wright Field… It was brought into our material evaluation labs. I don’t know how it arrived but the boys who tested it said it was very unusual… [Some of it] could be easily ripped or changed… there were parts of it that were very thin and awfully strong and couldn’t be dented with very heavy hammers… It was flexible to a degree and some of it was flimsy and was tougher than hell and almost like foil but strong. It had them pretty puzzled.”

Exon also said, on tape, “The metal and material was unknown to anyone I talked to. Whatever they found, I never heard what the results were. A couple of guys thought it might be Russian, but the overall consensus was that the pieces were from space.”

And to quote just one more officer who was stationed at Roswell in 1947, Major (later colonel) Edwin Easley told me that it was something from space. Oh, not in so many words. During one of the interviews, I had asked him if we were following the right path.

He asked, “What do you mean?”

I said, “We think it was extraterrestrial.”

He said, “Let me put it this way, it’s not the wrong path.”

So, the officer in charge of the base security and who served as the Provost Marshal, and later retired as a colonel, said, basically, what was found was from outer space. He was in charge of security at the crash site and for the material, and the bodies, when they were brought to the base.

Here are three officers, two generals and one colonel who were suggesting that Roswell was a cover up and that we had something from space. Project Mogul doesn’t figure into it and offers no real counter to the statements of these men, or a few dozen others who were involved. And even though we used their names and provided copies of the tapes to other interested parties, the story didn’t get all that much traction at the time. Instead, we were attacked as charlatans who believed everything we were told and who cherry-picked the data to make our case.

As an interesting aside, Don and I met with a reporter at the Chicago Tribune in the early 1990s. We met her in a hallway for the interview. She was an intern who told us that her editors didn’t believe in UFOs and therefore weren’t overly interested in the testimony that we had recovered, even though we could name names, provide contact information, and even had limited documentation. The sophisticated reporters and editors were uninterested unless it was to prove they were all too sophisticated to believe in UFOs.

Here today, we are bombarded with stories about crashed UFOs and alien pilots, and the mainstream media seems to be bending over backwards to tell these tales without critical comment. What’s the difference? We could name names and they do not.

David Charles Grusch has said that he talked to several people, respectable people, highly placed people who would be in the jobs to know, that there had been several UFO crashes and that dead alien pilots had been found. He provided no names and said that he wasn’t allowed to provide any documentation. He just could tell us what he had heard.

We are told about his credentials which are impressive, but that doesn’t translate into evidence. It is second-hand testimony without any specifics. Did anyone notice that. He said there were multiple UFO crashes but didn’t tell us anything about them. Isn’t that interesting. The mainstream media has provided Grusch with a platform but hasn’t managed to get any of those specifics.

However, there is another player. Michael Shellenberger is on stage now. He claims that he knew there were twelve alien craft in the possession of the US government. He dodged the questions about the recovery of an alien flight crew. He mentioned that he had talked to multiple sources. He said they were high-ranking military officials, intelligence officers and civilian contractors who verified what Grusch had said. But here, again, he provided no names, no documents but only said that these unidentified people were reliable.

One of the reporters actually said that it was intriguing that there were things that he had left out of the story. I suppose that this means that Don and I should have left things out of the information that we published three decades ago. Maybe they would have listened to us then and followed up on the Roswell case while the witnesses, the dozens of witnesses, were still alive to tell their stories.

Shellenberger did mention a crash around the testing site for the atomic weapons. This might be a reference to Roswell, though it is more likely a reference to the 1945 San Antonio, New Mexico, crash referred to by Jacques Vallee. If it is the Trinity tale, that undercuts the reliability of what Shellenberger has to say because the Trinity story is a hoax.

That we have no information about any specific crashes and given that we have no idea who all these reliable sources are, I worry about the validity of the information. There is another point to be made here.

Several years ago, I communicated with a former Air Force Officer who said that in the early 1950s, he had been assigned to an Air Force communications center. He told me that he had seen classified documents pass through the center that mentioned a UFO crash in Scandinavia. He told me he had seen the documents personally and knew that it was true. He didn’t have copies of the messages because they were, at the time, classified, so he wasn’t allowed to keep them.

The Spitzbergen message sent through the Air Force communications
channels. It shows the officer was accurate in claiming he had
seen a classified message, but it was not the whole story.

I believe him, and if the documents referred to a real incident, that would be even more impressive. However, I do have copies of those documents, and they were released at the same time the Project Blue Book files were declassified. The document outlined the information about the Spitzbergen UFO crash in 1952. The best information currently available is that the story is a hoax, and the original newspaper cited as the source does not exist. It is just another of those stories that dot the UFO landscape.

What this demonstrates is that there are sources out there who can say, without lying, that they had seen official documents about crashed UFOs. The problem is those documents are often among the first to cite the information and it is in later documents that the truth is learned. That officer I communicated with told the truth. He just didn’t know the outcome. I’m not sure that once the hoax was uncovered, that another message, or group of messages would have passed through that communications center. If they did, the officer hadn’t seen them.

There is one other fact that I have just learned about. On Monday, June 12, at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C., Grusch is going to give the last presentation. This is something that is hosted by Dr. Steven Greer, whose CSETI organization once had a list of over 300 UFO crashes. I have been unable to find that list today, though it was once easily available on the Internet.

UPDATE (June 12, 2023) : Here is something that I just learned that has some relevance to the story: STATEMENT FROM DAVID GRUSCH - “I took my job very seriously, and early on, I allowed various individuals that alleged they had information to speak their truth as part of my evaluation process. I have not been mentored by anyone, and my public disclosure has been done independently under my own free will. I emphatically request that Steven Greer cease using my name to promote his personal agenda”

Update 2: (June 13, 2023): David Charles Grusch did not make a presentation at the Greer Press Conference on June 12. Douglas Dean Johnson tells me that he, Johnson, spoke with Grusch colleagues who confirmed that Grusch will not have an association with Greer. This should end the speculation that Grusch will appear on any venue that is associated with Greer. I will note, however, that the information published here about Greer is relevant to the discussion because of the talk of alien spacecraft crashes. And yes, I liked that last little bit of alliteration.)

Back on May 9, 2001, Greer held another event at the National Press Club. Interestingly, he excluded members of the Fund for UFO Research, though I don’t know what the rational for that might have been. However, Greer had made many startling claims then such as, “We have learned from three separate, corroborating sources that since the early 1990s, at least two extraterrestrial spacecraft have been targeted and destroyed by experimental space-based weapon systems.”

Dr. Steven Greer at the National Press
Club in 2013.

One of the claims that caught my attention was, “Multiple new independently corroborating witnesses told us of the crash and retrieval of ET spacecraft in 1947 in New Mexico and in 1948 in Kingman, Arizona.”

Clearly, the first reference is to Roswell but I’m unsure about the second. There has been a report, circulated for years, of a crash near Kingman, but that was in 1953, not 1948, and it is a hoax.

Here’s the point of this brief interlude. Greer is holding another such press conference, and as I say, it will feature Grusch, telling his stories. I had wondered about Grusch’s sudden appearance on the UFO scene with tales of UFO crashes and hidden information. This is, of course, the same drumbeat that Greer has been making for decades. Any association with Greer would raise red flags but in this case it seems to be a false flag. As noted, Grusch will have no association with Greer. (Added June 13, 2023)

Don’t get me wrong, I believe Grusch is telling the truth as he knows it, but without additional information, which we never seem to get, you have to wonder about the validity of it. Without sources, or with others who have been running in these same Ufological circles for years providing some sort of validation for Grusch, you must be skeptical. Had Grusch added just a bit more information, such as location of the crash sites, or the names of some of the witnesses, his revelations would, at least to my way of thinking, have been more plausible. But without that information we are at the same place we were thirty years ago.

Here’s where we are on this. We have no new information, just new faces. We have no documentation, photographs or names of the sources. We are just supposed to believe these anonymous sources but if the last few years have taught us anything, anonymous sources are nearly useless. There is no way to vet them or their information, and often times they are speaking of rumor rather than fact.

The few names we do have are those who have worked with and have known Grusch for years. They validate his character but not necessarily his information, which is a subtle but important point. And one of the names offered, Jonathan Grey, we are told is a pseudonym, which, again, allows for no vetting and does nothing to validate the information.

To my way of thinking, if just one of these new claims could be validated, it would be a great boost to my reporting, and the reporting of Don Schmitt and Tom Carey, and so many others. But while we named names and sources for those who wished to check our work, that hasn’t happened here. So, until we get some better information, I’ll be without a final opinion. I fear this will end up just like so many other attempts to bring this all to a conclusion. We’ll be left with questions but with no one to supply the proper and verifiable answers. 

New AARO Information and UFO Sightings

 

Back in 1947, as General Nathan Twining was ordering the creation of an office to investigate flying saucers, the theory of interplanetary travel was not high on the list of explanations. They were thinking in terms of a terrestrial vehicle. In today’s world, that isn’t necessarily the thinking.

Sean Kirkpatrick, who is the director of the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office and Dr. Avi Loeb, who exploded onto the UFO scene a couple of years ago, co-authored a research paper suggesting, “An artificial interstellar object could potentially be a parent craft that released many small probes during its close passage to Earth, an operational construct not too dissimilar from NASA missions.”

The research paper, entitled “Physical Constraints on Unidentified Aerial Phenomena,” comes after a month of intense scrutiny of unidentified flying objects inspired by the Chinese balloon invasion.

They wrote, “With proper design, these tiny probes would reach the Earth or other solar system planets for exploration, as the parent craft passes by within a fraction of the Earth-Sun separation — just like ‘Oumuamua’ (o mooa Mooa) did. Astronomers would not be able to notice the spray of mini-probes because they do not reflect enough sunlight for existing survey telescopes to notice them.”

There were calls for more funding but, according to various sources, “The Biden administration’s previous funding request for fiscal year 2023 failed to fund anything beyond the office’s basic operating expenses.” This one fact doesn’t bode well for AARO.

I will point out here that I wrote a science fiction novel, The Rat Trap, published in 1993, in which an alien space probe was discovered. Its mission was to determine the level of technology of a sentient species. If that species could detect it, it was one level. If they could hit it with a probe, that was another. If they could reach it and get inside, that suggested a higher level of sophistication. The point was a such a probe could travel through space at sub-light speeds for centuries. If it encountered another intelligent lifeform, it could test them and send the data back to the home world at the speed of light. There is an ironic twist at the end.

There are still many sightings of UFOs inside our atmosphere such as the one from Myrtle Beach, SC, from March 6 of this year. The witness said that he was on top of a parking garage and looking for Venus and Jupiter. The witness saw two bright slanted disks in the south, and not the west where the planets were and he took a picture. He took a second picture only seconds later but the UFOs were gone.

Two glowing disks above the bend in the road.

Same view with the objects now gone. Jupiter and Venus were in a different
part of the sky.

Close up of the disks.

On February 25 of this year, near Thornton, Colorado, a married couple were stargazing in their hot tub when the man saw a black, triangular object moving at what he described as three times the speed of an airliner. He said it was around 20,000 feet up, and made no sound. He pointed it out to his wife and she said saw it too. He said that the only military aircraft that resembled the UFO was the controversial TR-3b Black Manta, an Air Force black project.

I say controversial because there are those who don’t believe the project or aircraft exists. In the past, the Air Force has leaked information about a next generation of military aircraft to divert attention from the real thing. The Aurora aircraft that was all the rage a decade or so ago was one of those leaked but nonexistent projects.

According to the conspiracy theories, the TR-3 is a spy plane created to make contact with alien creatures and cement relations with them. It supposedly has an anti-gravity system for propulsion, but there is no evidence that the system has been invented.

Stylized illustration of the TR-3b, which looks like one of the mock-ups
of the UFO that crashed in Roswell.

I could go on, but the Pentagon denies the existence of the aircraft. This highly classified project, which is so secret, knowledge of it is kept from our closest allies, seems to be well known outside the Pentagon and Air Force which contradicts the claims of highly classified. The Colorado man, for example, knew enough about it to use the design of the TR-3 for the UFO he had seen. And, of course, there is the illustration of what it is supposed to look like.

I’m going to mention this again. I was reviewing the National UFO Reporting Center database and noticed many of the sightings were of two, glowing lights near one another. The solution, according to the Reporting Center, is Jupiter and Venus. More than half of the 80 sightings reported so far in March, were of Jupiter and Venus. It just proves that we have an educational problem with UFO sightings. Too many people are unaware of what is in the night sky and that does confuse the issue.

NASA and UAPs (UFOs)

 

More than a half century ago, the Air Force sponsored at the University of Colorado, a study of UFOs. Lead by Dr. Edward U. Condon, they concluded that there was no national security issue, that nothing of scientific value would be learned by further study, and that the Air Force had done a good job during its twenty-two-year investigation. From that point on, other scientists, journalists, news organizations and DoD officials used those conclusions to ignore the UFO phenomenon and often to ridicule those who took it seriously or who claimed to have seen an alien spacecraft.

Dr. Edward Condon

None of this came as a surprise to those who were paying close attention. The conclusions for the Condon Committee as it became known, were written at the very beginning of the investigation. Lieutenant Colonel Robert Hippler wrote to Robert Low of the Condon Committee to outline the Air Force expectations. These were to find no national security issues, to find nothing of a scientific value in additional research and to say some positive things about the Air Force investigation. As noted, all this came to pass.

For those interested in exploring this aspect of the “scientific study” of UFOs, you can read about it here:

http://kevinrandle.blogspot.com/2007/03/hippler-letter.html

Condon even expressed his belief about UFOs and what the ultimate conclusions would be at a meeting in Corning, New York, on January 25, 1967, where he told the audience that UFO’s “are not the business of the Air Force… It is my inclination right now to recommend that the government get out of this business. My attitude is that there’s nothing to it… but I’m not supposed to reach a conclusion for another year.” That was reported in the January 26, 1967, edition of the Elmira Star-Gazette.

Ten years later, Frank Press, who was the Director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy, and was President Jimmy Carter’s science advisor, wrote to Robert Frosch, the administrator of NASA. In a friendly letter, Press suggested that UFOs were a subject that should be a focal point for NASA. In other words, Press seemed to be suggesting that NASA take an interest in UFO reports and sightings.

In his response, Frosch, mentioned the negative conclusions of the Condon Committee, cited other organizations with opposite views, including CUFOS and NICAP, but also thought that some sort of inquiry might discover significant new findings. He also suggested that NASA had to be assured that there was a justification for opening such an inquiry because of the time and resources that would be involved.

In a response to this, Noel Hinners, the Space Science director, was appointed to formulate a response. There were rumors, or leaks (which I suppose are much the same thing) that Stephen P. Maran, of the Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC), would spend two months examining the UFO world post Condon, meaning he would look at the developments from 1969 to 1977. Instead of this, and other positive ideas, Hinners sent a letter to Forsch. In keeping with the skeptical view, Hinners wrote, “There are two major problems involved in considering any review of the UFO phenomenon, by NASA: first, an apparent lack of any tangible or physical evidence for laboratory analysis (emphasis added); second the absence of any sound scientific protocol for investigating the phenomenon firsthand. There is a plethora of secondary source material – human observation and reports thereon – but hearsay is difficult to deal with scientifically…”

Finally, on December 21, Forsch wrote to Press, telling him that NASA was leaving the door open to examine any evidence, though he again mentioned the lack of any physical evidence. He wrote, “I wish in no way to indicate that NASA has come to any conclusion about the phenomena as such; institutionally we retain an open mind, a keen sense of scientific curiosity and a willingness to analyze technical problems within our competence.”

While they continued to cite the lack of physical evidence, Dr. Peter Sturrock of Stanford University, wrote Frosch on December 30, saying, “my colleagues and I in the Study Group on Anomalous Phenomena have obtained access to some physical evidence such as films, material samples, etc.”

NASA Headquarters was somewhat surprised and was unprepared to deal with Sturrock’s suggestion about “obtaining meaningful assessment of these items of evidence.” NASA did, however, think that Dr. Stephen Maran of Goddard Space Flight Center was the man to take on the task of assessing the materials because “He is a skeptic on UFOs; he is extremely sharp and energetic; and he is politically acute.”

Assigning a skeptic to the investigation is not a bad thing. I would think that someone of a skeptic nature, who is interested in reviewing the evidence would be the man to do the job. But, for some reason that never happened. It seemed that NASA decided that any sort of study would consume time, money and resources and it would distract the agency from its original and primary mission which dealt with rocketry, launching satellites and developing a vehicle that could be reused.

I will also note that this idea that he is “politically acute,” suggests that he might have been swayed by the political arena surrounding UFOs, believing that any finding suggesting alien visitation would not be well received. In other words, the wrong conclusion might jeopardize his career. I have no evidence that such is the case other than that one minor phrase.

Today NASA is now saying, according to Daniel Evans, the assistant deputy associate administrator at the Science Mission Directorate that, “We’re going full force on the UAP study… This is really important to us and we’re placing a high priority on it.”

But this wasn’t the only thing said by the NASA representatives at the town hall meeting where this was discussed. They had to add a disclaimer, saying, “NASA has said there is no evidence that UAPs are visiting aliens.”

Please note that this is the same thing they said decades ago. They now reduce the observations of witnesses to little more than anecdotal testimony because that diminishes the important of that evidence. And yet, I would have told them about important observations in and around the Levelland UFO sightings from November, 1957. As I researched the book, Levelland, about those sightings, it became clear that it was much more complicated and robust than we thought. Here was a sighting that had many of the elements that science demanded. There were multiple, independent eyewitness to the object, seen at close range for as long as five to fifteen minutes. It interacted with the environment by stalling car engines and filling the radios with static. There are reports of landing traces, again with multiple witnesses. And what was the official investigation about? The number of witnesses. The Air Force said only three had seen an object, but their own investigation produced more than that.

In the past, while it seemed that NASA was interested in UFOs, there were those who were less than enthusiastic, especially when scientists outside of NASA and the editors various magazines with a more skeptical tone mentioned the nightmare of having to deal with a subject that many considered to be phony and a waste of time. This is, of course, an outgrowth of the Condon Committee’s negative findings which, as I mentioned, were bought by the Air Force with half a million bucks (which in today’s dollars would be something much higher).

Skeptics (or I should say, “debunkers”) entered the discussion at some point. Philip Klass wrote that President Carter had barely had time to find his way around the White House his inauguration before he was inundated with letters and telegrams from people Klass described as uneducated, inarticulate and confused. There was also the allegation that 87% of those who wrote NASA about UFOs were eleven or twelve years old. Or, here was a group of people who didn’t know what they were talking about trying to force a policy on a government agency. The attitude of hostility grew out of this.

NASA, though it seemed would be the perfect agency to investigate claims of alien visitation, rejected all suggestions they do so. While it would seem that evidence that interstellar flight was possible would increase their research budgets, they seemed to think it would bring discredit on the agency.

But now we seem to have come full circle. We have moved from a time in which many of those at NASA thought UFO investigation might be worthwhile, to those who worried that it would damage the agency in some way, back around to it being something NASA should do. Of course, they mention again, that there is no evidence of alien visitation and that they believe the answers are all terrestrially based, but they are now going “full force on the UAP study…”

Please paint me as skeptical, but hopeful. I fear that this will end up where all other good intentioned investigations in the topic had ended up… There is no evidence that they find acceptable no matter what that evidence might be.