Trinity UFO Crash, UAPs and Jacques Vallee

 

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

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

Nick Pope at the Las Vegas Crash Conference

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Nick Pope, Nick Redfern, David Clarke, Philip Mantle and a Few Documents

 

As I have mentioned, I waded into this swamp on purpose. I had heard the negative things being said about Nick Pope and thought I’d provide him with a platform for his response. I did ask for some documentation. He didn’t send much, and again, as I mentioned, it didn’t actually verify his claims.

In response, I received a number of emails from Nick Redfern, Philip Mantle and David Clarke, often accompanied with documentation that seemed to effectively refute what Nick Pope had said. As usual, the fight deteriorated into name calling, though most of that was done by others whose comments I have refused to post here.

I thought I would make a couple of observations, and that I would post, at the end here, some of that documentation. That way readers can make up their own minds about who is right and who is wrong. I would hope that those opinions would be formed on the basis of the evidence, but this is Ufology and too often evidence isn’t all that important.

By way of qualification, I thought I’d add a bit about embellishment, which might be at the heart of all this. I sometimes say that I served as a company commander in Vietnam by virtue of being the senior surviving officer. It sounds quite dramatic and there is a nugget of truth in it. But I always then tell the rest of the story.

We’d had a rather bad month. The platoon leader and another pilot had been badly wounded when a grenade hit the front of there aircraft. The Aircraft Commander (AC) had been able to take off, and I was flying chalk two, meaning I was now lead.

There had been an aircraft accident that might have been the result of hostile fire, taking out the tail rotor of another helicopter. It crashed and the crew was injured. No one figured out if it was enemy fire or an accident, but those injured were evacked. We lost another AC due to ground fire and still another on a single ship mission.

Oh, and there had been those who DEROSed (Date Estimated Return from Over Seas) which meant they had gone home. The First Platoon was down to a single AC and a couple of Peter Pilots, that is FNGs.

We had learned, through intelligence, that the NVA and the VC planned an assault on Tay Ninh. We had been ordered to take the aircraft to another location, which meant that nearly every pilot, and every officer, was going to be gone. I had been assigned a new pilot before takeoff, and he climbed up on the stinger (that rod sticking out of the end of the helicopter to protect the tail rotor). When he grabbed the linkage, it broke, which meant we weren’t flying anywhere. In other words, he and I, were left behind.

It turned out, based on who had been with the flight and the evacuation of the aircraft and who was left behind, I was the senior officer present. I don’t really know if that seniority was based on rank or that I had been in Vietnam the longest of those of us left behind. Anyway, for ten or twelve hours, I was considered the senior officer present. I made one decision. We were required to supply an officer for bunker duty and no one had been designated. I was consulted by one of the senior NCOs left behind and told him who to send. That, I believe, is the extent of my “command.”

For those interested in more of my experiences in Vietnam you can find it here:

www. vietnamgroundzero.blogspot.com

The point here is that I could tell the tale without the qualifications. People who search records would find no documentation for it, though I think I could prove we had evacked the aircraft. And I can prove other aspects of this tale, so, as I say, there is an element of truth in it. It’s just when I tell the rest of the story, which I always do, the nature of that little hiccup in the command of the company is really not all that important. Just a fun little story about being the senior surviving officer.

And that brings us back to Nick Pope. It is clear that he was on the UFO desk at the MoD. It also clear that he was involved in the UFO investigation, though that involvement was taking down information about UFOs when someone called in or sent a letter. There is no doubt that he investigated UFOs, as he has said, but it is also clear that those weren’t official, MoD motivated investigations.

Leaving out some of the vitriol that has permeated this discussion over the years, and yes, I mean years, I think this puts it all into perspective. Now I returned to my regularly scheduled blog.

 

Nick Pope Revisited

 

Let’s start again. I was a little disturbed about the allegations slung at Nick Pope by Dr. David Clarke recently and that Nick Pope had not had the opportunity to respond to them. I also want to point out that I have no dog in this fight and was looking for a little fairness in all this. I expected some pushback, but, in this world today, who wouldn’t expect some pushback. I have now heard from a number of others about all this.

First, I suppose, is to answer the question of why Dr. David Clarke would bring this up now, if the issue had been settled decades earlier. According to what he told me; the simple answer is that he didn’t. He was responding to a question asked by Martin Willis during Willis’ podcast.

Nick Redfern - Photo copyright by
Kevin Randle

Second, all those who emailed me seemed to object to my use of the term “allegations” against Nick Pope. All who emailed me said that there had been no allegations, just statement of facts. One of those facts, an important one, had to do with Nick Pope’s duty at the MoD and whether or not he, Nick Pope, had conducted official UFO investigations. While serving in the MoD, Nick Pope had other duties and devoted only 20% of his salary to dealing with UFOs. In other words, the majority of his time went to other things. His UFO duties involved taking down the initial information about a UFO sighting and then passing it on to another organization. To quote Nick Redfern (and now you know why I kept saying Nick Pope), back in 1994, Nick Pope told Nick Redfern, “There is no specific ‘UFO budget,’ except the staff costs, i.e. around 20% of my salary, together with a tiny percent of some other salaries, reflecting my line management’s supervisory role.”

For those interested, here is a link to an article an Nick Redfern published a number of years ago that dealt with some of this:

https://mysteriousuniverse.org/2018/08/u-k-government-ufo-research-the-real-picture/

That, of course, does not rule out Nick Pope having investigated UFO sightings. It suggests that there wasn’t much of a budget for any investigation. It could be said that the initial intake of information over the telephone is part of an investigation, though certainly not the most important aspect of it. However, there is additional information that is relevant to the discussion.

David Clarke noted in communication with me, “Sec(AS) [Secretariat Air Staff] where Nick worked 1991 – 1993 was not authorized or funded to investigate UFO reports.”

That seems to be fairly definitive but there is more relevant information. According to what David Clarke provided, “This is set out clearly in the attached policy document from 1997, written by Pope's line manager, that says any follow-up investigations that were required were carried out by the DI55 intelligence staff and/or the Royal Air Force.”

In still another document that came from official sources, and of which I now have a copy, it says:

Mr. Pope at one time served as EO (Band D) in the Secretariat Air Staff [a junior civil servant grade] ... [and] left Sec(AS) in 1994...and his knowledge of this issue, other than from publicly available sources, must be regarded as dated. Mr. Pope elected to describe his position as the "Head of the MoD's UFO Project", a term entirely of his own invention, and he has used his experience and information he gathered (frequently going beyond the official remit of his position) to develop a parallel career as a pundit on the topic, including writing several books, some purportedly non-fiction. Mr. Pope constantly puts himself forward in various parts of the media, solicited and unsolicited, as an "expert" (despite his lack of recent knowledge about the work carried on in the branch concerned) and seeks credit amongst other aficionados for having "forced" the MoD to reveal its "secret" files on the subject. The latter is far from the truth...

Finally, in what might be the final straw here, David Clarke provided the following, “In another document from the same period, the head of the Air Historical Branch (RAF) is even more forthright, saying ‘Far from accurately representing the Department's position, he [Pope] has sought to embellish the truth at almost every turn’.”

I suppose, that if you wish to be generous, you could say that taking the initial report and asking questions about it could be considered part of an official investigation. But that is really stretching a point and doesn’t accurately reflect the situation. The actual investigation into the reports that demanded additional work was carried about by other British government organizations and Nick Pope had virtually nothing to do with that.

But the real problem here is what Nick Pope published on his own website. Any errors, embellishments, alterations of fact can’t be blamed on the webmaster. Nick Pope approved the content. This biography said:

Nick Pope ran the British Government’s UFO project. From 1991 to 1994 he researched and investigated UFOs, alien abductions, crop circles and other strange phenomena, leading the media to call him the real Fox Mulder. His government background and his level-headed views have made him the media, film and TV industry’s go-to guy when it comes to UFOs, the unexplained and conspiracy theories.

Another aspect of this was that Nick Pope had apparently accused David Clarke of plagiarism and of being a needy, dishonest ufologist. The direct quote from David Clarke is, “Nick Pope has called me dishonest, a liar, a nut and a serial plagiarizer - despite providing absolutely no evidence for any of these things all of which are seriously defamatory.”

But this particular allegation has been debunked by Hayley Stevens a post to her blog which you can read here:

https://hayleyisaghost.co.uk/a-needy-dishonest-ufologist-revisiting-nick-popes-claims/

I mean you can disagree with someone but this is unreasonable. There is additional information contained in this post that sheds additional light on the problem. Some of the sources or documents she mentions I have seen and have copies for verification.

Philip Mantle

I’m not sure if this is piling on, or if it is relevant information. As noted above, Nick Pope claimed that he had investigated claims of alien abduction, crop circle formations or animal mutilations as part of his job at the MoD. Philip Mantle supplied the following information:

Just read this from UK documentary producer Matt Quinn. This was posted in the comments section of the martin Willis podcast:

From that reference Phillippe... "From 1991 to 1994 Mr. Pope worked as a civil servant within Secretariat (air staff). He undertook a wide range of secretariat tasks relating to central policy, political and parliamentary aspects of non-operational RAF activity. Part of his duties related to the investigation of unidentified aerial phenomena reported to the Department to see if they had any defence significance." This doesn't actually contradict what David Clark has said, and what has been 'common knowledge' for a very long time... it also completely fails to support in any way, Nick Pope's ridiculously-aggrandised claims... But in reality? I can only paraphrase Martha and the Muffins...

" _From nine to five, he had to spend his time at work His job was very boring as an office clerk The only thing that helped him pass the time away Was knowing he'd be back at Echo Beach someday_ " As we're 'buying' UK government publications (when it suits) do a search with the UK's National Archive service... And I do very much encourage you to do your own legwork; don't just take my word for it. I can tell you (as a media professional) that when 'Open Skies Closed Minds' was published it was generally received by the press as highly entertaining bollocks... riding a wave that was well in motion at the time. Just a 'jolly japes' type romp through an over-egged fantasy world... Good copy, bit of a laugh. But Nick Pope always had more in common with Dilbert than Mulder. The woman who got Nick Pope's job after him is called Kerry Philpott, and is on record stating there was no "strange phenomena section" at the MOD and that whilst Nick had been an 'EO' - Junior management grade administrator - just as she now was, she wrote "neither he nor indeed am I the head of any 'UFO' section"...

There is a chap called James Easton who is fairly well known here in Scotland as something of a 'UFOlogist'. Way back in 1999 he wrote an open letter to the MOD which posed many questions about Nick's duties and the MOD's locus in relation to various 'Fortean' phenomena... The response he got was. “The main duties of the post concern non-operational RAF activities overseas and diplomatic clearance policy for military flights abroad. A small percentage of time is spent dealing with reports from the public about alleged ‘UFO’ sightings and associated public correspondence. The MoD has not investigated a claim of alien abduction, crop circle formations or animal mutilation.” I'm sure it's now well over a decade since David Clark put that information up on his own site - over 20 since James got the response he did from the MOD and I honestly cannot tell you of anyone (except the incredibly non-credible) to whom that was in any way, shape or form a surprise. David Clark hasn't lied. - You don't have to like the guy, or not be disappointed at Nick. But David hasn't lied.  

This then, is the other side of the coin. I provided Nick Pope with a platform for his comments, and it is only fair that I supply the others with a similar courtesy. I’m inclined to say that the reader should take his or her own view of the material and decide what to believe. However, that is a somewhat weasel-worded claim for me to make. I waded into this swamp because I believed that Nick Pope should be heard, but now, having seen the other side, and although I think of Nick Pope as a friend (and can say the same about Philip Mantle and Nick Redfern), I must come down on their side of the fence.

What we see here is just another of the nasty fights that erupt in this field, though this one played out in the UK rather than here in America. If you care to comment, then you must be prepared for the consequences of that commentary. It had seemed to me, originally, that this was a bit of a fight over semantics, but it has, of course, ranged far beyond that. I don’t like the name calling or the allegations of plagiarism, having had that directed at me for a long time, but sometimes you just have to make a stand.

Here then, is what I believe to be the whole truth of the matter. And while I could say that I wish I had not involved myself in it, I would rather say that I think here is enough information that we all know the truth.

Following is one of those documents that seems to clarify the situation. I append it here for those who wish to see a little more of the evidence.

One of the documents that seems
to refute some of Nick Pope's
claims.

Did Nick Pope Investigate UFOs for the UK MoD?

 

In the UFO community, there are always disagreements and sometimes allegations are slung that have no basis in fact. I have been called a shill for the Air Force, I have been accused of working for Hector Quintanilla and Project Blue Book, and that I am an anti-abduction propagandist who writes fiction. The only truth in all that is that I do write fiction including science fiction but does that really disqualify me from UFO investigation? Wouldn’t my background in the military and my training in various fields suggest I can bring some important insights to UFO investigation?

Nick Pope

I say all this because Dr. David Clarke has again suggested that Nick Pope, sometimes described as Britain’s Fox Mulder (because the news media loves to reduce everything to the lowest common denominator) didn’t investigate anything officially. Clarke told Martin Willis, during Willis’ recent podcast, “There was a UFO desk when he was an incumbent for three years but he was just one of dozens of people who did that task and he didn’t actually investigate anything.”

Clarke went on to say that Nick Pope merely received the reports and that he then filed them. The people responsible for the investigations was the Defence Intelligence Staff, DISS. It was their job to conduct the UFO investigations that were believed to have some sort of military significance.

Clarke said, “I’ve interviewed most of the people who worked on this subject in DISS at that time and they tell me ‘well, Nick Pope didn’t have any involvement in this. We did the investigations, we didn’t share information with them because we didn’t trust them.” He meant that the civilian servants tended to leak information into the public arena which is why they didn’t trust them.

Of course, this really is nothing new. Clarke has raised these allegations in the past and Nick has refuted them in the past. This sort of thing seems to dot the UFO landscape. It doesn’t matter how many times the allegations are challenged; they seem to pop up again and again.

Philip Mantle, the force behind Flying Disk Press, and someone who can’t be seen as a skeptic, wrote to a number of UFO researcher around the world this last week:

Over the past few days social media has been buzzing regarding allegations made by Dr. David Clarke. Dr. Clarke was interviewed by Martin Willis on his podcast on the 18^th of November. At around halfway through this one hour interview Martin asked David about Nick Pope. As most of you will know Mr. Pope claims to have run the UK government’s UFO project and had officially investigated UFOs, crop circles and alien abductions as part of his MoD job. Dr. Clarke publicly stated that his is not the case and that Mr. Pope undertook no such work and there never was nor is there a UK government ‘UFO PROJECT’…

Dr. David Clarke is not the only source of information regarding Nick Pope. Personally I have been making my own enquiries which are still on-going. Although my enquiries are not yet complete I have seen and heard enough to convince me that Dr. Clarke is indeed correct. As a result just yesterday [November 25] I removed Nick Pope’s foreword for the revised edition of my book “WITHOUT CONSENT”.

Of course Nick Pope denies these allegations but now the ball is [simply] in his court. Can Nick Pope provide any official documentation that states he ran the UK government’s UFO Project? Well the MoD also claims that he did no such thing. If he can’t then is this the beginning of the end of Nick Pope?

Still, there is some smoke, but is there any fire. I particularly liked the idea that Nick present some sort of documentation. I have had the same sort of requests made of me when people wondered if I had been completely honest about my background. I provided the documentation, though a couple of times it took some convincing for the controlling agencies to release the data. I always attempt to supply the information requested to stop the rumors.

Nick Pope

I have also found that those who can’t provide the evidence tend to come up with the “I’m not going to dignify that request with any sort of response defense.” I’ve always taken that to mean that they can’t provide the evidence so they just dodge the question with this non response… Or they fall back on the old the records have been altered or have been destroyed. Huge red flags when dealing with these sorts of allegations.

I reached out to Nick Pope, who was, of course, aware of this latest brouhaha. Within minutes, I had an answer from Nick. He mentioned that this allegation had been around for years and it had been answered time and again. He pointed out that he had been interviewed on a number of high-level television, radio, and newspaper reporters and had appeared in numerous documentaries. He suggested that those reporters had vetted him and found his claims to be credible…

Well, given the state of journalism today, and knowing that documentary producers often have their own agendas, I wasn’t particularly swayed by that argument. Some might have checked, but I figure most hadn’t. They just believed what they were told because that was easier than doing any real investigation.

That wasn’t all he said. He provided a link to an official document that seemed to underscore what he claimed. You can read that here:

https://publications.parliament.uk/pa/cm200506/cmhansrd/vo060418/text/60418154.htm

If you scroll down slightly, you’ll find a question that was asked in the British parliament that seemed to suggest that Nick did investigate UFOs. It is not a ringing endorsement, but does suggest that Nick was telling the truth about his involvement, officially, in UFO investigations.

So, to answer Philip Mantle’s question, it seems that Nick did supply an official document that states he ran the project. For those who don’t want to go to all that trouble, here is that brief statement:

From 1991 to 1994 Mr. Pope worked as a civil servant within Secretariat (air staff). He undertook a wide range of secretariat tasks relating to central policy, political and parliamentary aspects of non-operational RAF activity. Part of his duties related to the investigation of unidentified aerial phenomena reported to the Department to see if they had any defence significance.

As I say, not exactly a ringing endorsement, but it the same sort of endorsement we’ve seen for Louis Elizondo and the AATIP project he might have run. We are now in a world of secrets and bureaucracies and double speak so it is hard to define the truth. At the moment we have no real answer, other than Nick did supply official documents but it didn’t go quite as far as I would have liked.

That’s not all. Since the bar was set very low, it wasn’t very difficult to overcome. Other official documents show that Nick did investigate UFOs while serving at the MoD. You can see some of them here:

https://documents.theblackvault.com/documents/ufos/UK/defe-24-1972.pdf

http://documents.theblackvault.com/documents/ufos/UK/defe-24-2086.pdf

As a final bit of evidence, Nick was interviewed for a documentary and according to tht documentary, was the spokesman for the MoD UFO program. For those interested, you can watch it here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=L2klCuyv5Tg

I will note, for those who don’t wish to watch the whole thing, that the relevant part begins at the fifteen minute mark.

Nick also wrote, “I don't think there's rivalry between David Clarke and I. I remember Clarke from the British UFO Research Association, so we're not rivals - merely people who come at this subject from different sides of the fence: him as a ufologist, me as someone who's looked at the phenomenon as part of my government job. Obviously, it's frustrating when someone misunderstands or misrepresents my government work, but the lie that I didn't investigate UFOs for the MoD was nailed years ago, and obviously the official website of British parliament is an unimpeachable source. QED.”

This whole thing might just boil down to one man making claims about another and that man providing evidence that those claims are false. Given that this has played out long before, this might just be much ado about nothing.

X-Zone Broradcast Network - Nick Pope

This week I spoke with Nick Pope, he of the UK’s Ministry of Defence UFO desk. This started because I had seen a couple of posts on the Internet suggesting that Nick was some sort of dupe or shill hiding the real UFO program. He was an agent of disinformation. I have been accused of much the same thing, so we talked about that briefly before moving onto more exciting aspects of UFOs. You can listen to the interview here:

https://www.spreaker.com/episode/17385894

One of the things that I wanted to clear up, at least in my own mind, is just how big was the UFO investigation when he was there. According to him, he had a small staff, much like that at Project Blue Book, but he had any number of subject

Nick Pope. Photo copyright by Kevin Randle.

matter experts he could query when he needed them. It seemed, from what he said, that the attitude, at least around him, was a little less rigid than that at Blue Book. In other words, they weren’t pressed to provide a solution. They could say, “I don’t know.”

I did ask about some of the best of the cases out of the UK. He provided some details about sightings that involved multiple witnesses to a triangular object, one with a pilot seeing a huge object that did have some radar confirmation, and a brief discussion of the Rendlesham Forest landing in 1980.

For me this was an interesting discussion because I had faced some of the same criticisms that Nick had faced. He said he had been criticized for writing science fiction, and that, as a former member of the intelligence community, he was often met with comments about hiding the real information. We did touch briefly on some of the misconceptions about work in intelligence.

On future shows, I hope to learn more about Calvin Parker’s second encounter, a discussion of Project Blue Book the television show with someone who didn’t care for it, and about skepticism and proper UFO research. There are many other shows dealing with paranormal subjects that can be found at http://xzbn.net/.

Tom DeLonge and UFOs

I must be doing something wrong.

For months I have been hearing about Tom DeLonge, he formerly of Blink-182, who has entered the UFO arena with, allegedly, some highly-place contacts who will assist him in bringing the truth about alien visitation to the public. This began around 2015.

According to Rolling Stone:

DeLonge contacted [John] Podesta [Hillary Clinton’s campaign manager] again this January [2016], sending an email with the subject, "General McCasland," apparently a reference to a former Air Force official with (according to DeLonge) information relating to the infamous Roswell crash. In the email, DeLonge insisted that McCasland was not a skeptic — despite the General's own previous insistence — and added, "When Roswell crashed, they shipped it to the laboratory at Wright Patterson Air Force Base. General McCasland was in charge of that exact laboratory up to a couple years ago. He not only knows what I'm trying to achieve, he helped assemble my advisory team. He's a very important man."

Of course, I suppose, we could look at this as so much hyperbole. It does sound impressive to say that he was in communication with an Air Force general who was

Tom DeLonge

in charge of the exact laboratory where the Roswell material was sent. The problem is that William McCasland didn’t take over the post until 2011, according to his official Air Force biography and the laboratory was created in October 1997. It was, however, a combination of four other labs, but there is no way of knowing if any of them were the ones to which Roswell material would have been sent in 1947 or if material had been sent there it would have remained until 2011.

Anyway, that just sort of shows that DeLonge had been talking about UFOs and mentioning Roswell for a number of years. He did have, and does have, the ear of some people with impressive sounding credentials, which, of course, doesn’t mean they have anything of interest to say about UFOs or Roswell, only that they have been around the government for a very long time and moved in some of the rarified atmosphere in Washington, D.C.

However, it does seem that DeLonge’s messages have been heard by the UFO community. In February, 2017, at the International UFO Congress, he was named UFO Researcher of the Year. This seemed a tad bit odd since he hadn’t done much in the way of original research or published much in the way of what he had learned that hadn’t been said before. He did say that in a couple of months that he would make an announcement about some “serious sh*t” he was into and that he was making some serious progress.

During the next several months, there had been hints about this announcement, some of them centering around Disclosure and some of them hinting about new information or new evidence concerning the Roswell crash. The speculation was that he had some incredible inside information that came about through his association with his former band. Somehow that had resulted in the contacts that provided the information.

After months of waiting, the announcement came on October 11. No, there wasn’t anything about new UFO evidence, it had nothing to do with Disclosure or government secrecy but everything to do with making money. Let’s look at that.

According to a story in the Huffington Post, by Leslie Kean, there had been “something extraordinary revealed today [October 11].” It told of high-level officials and scientists who had not been seen by many but who, apparently “have long-standing connections to government agencies which may have programs investigating unidentified aerial phenomena (UAP/UFOs). You can read the whole article here:

https://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/fmr-manager-of-dod-aerospace-threat-program-ufos_us_59de2f4be4b0b992a8214874.

What strikes me in that very first paragraph is that we have been provided with a number of conditions. They have connections to agencies that may have been investigating UFOs… but then, may not. We eventually find out who these people are, but they are those in middle management or maybe in second tier bureaucrats but not the top people.

Then we learn that this is not about Disclosure, or about providing some stunning evidence of alien visitation, but about the “official launch of To The Stars Academy of Arts and Science,” or as they abbreviate it, TTS/AAS which they describe as a public benefit corporation. This organization will have three components, which are science, aerospace and entertainment. That last concerns me. Entertainment is not necessarily restricted to fact and we learn in other places that DeLonge has been planning the entertainment aspect since he left Blink-182. According to Rolling Stone:

But since DeLonge parted ways with Blink-182 in 2015, his interest in extraterrestrials has become more than a hobby. "The more I got into it, the more I realized it was all real," he tells Rolling Stone. "Then I was like, 'OK, what am I going to do about it?'" So he started spreading the word. He began creating a multi-part, multi-platform rollout of an entirely new philosophy, one based on the theory that aliens have been visiting Earth for most of our species' existence – and the only way for us to have a prosperous future on the planet is if we take that into account, and soon.

The newest addition to this project is the book Sekret Machines: Gods, the first in a non-fiction trilogy he's co-writing with occult historian Peter Levanda.

Already we see some promotion for the books that DeLonge is writing which would be incorporated under the umbrella of TTS/AAS and get a hint about the financial aspects of all of this. In fact, Jason Colavito, on his website, looked deeper into the financial arrangements of the organization. You can read his entire analysis here:

http://www.jasoncolavito.com/blog/not-quite-a-ufo-ipo-tom-delonge-is-seeking-your-investment-in-to-the-stars-to-give-himself-a-700000-or-more-payday

Colavito lays out, in detail, how money will be raised by selling stock in the company and how much DeLonge is guaranteed for his part in all this. Colavito wrote:

DeLonge is soliciting investment by registering TTS AAS as a public benefit corporation—notably not a nonprofit—and he is framing his sale of $5 per share stock in the company as a chance to democratize investment. Under the 2012 JOBS Act, companies may sell stock directly to the public through a crowd funding website without needing to file an IPO with the SEC. DeLonge is taking advantage of this to sell $200 stock packages. The 2015 Title IV Regulation A+ allows companies to raise up to $50 million without a formal IPO…

It's interesting to see the difference between TTS AAS’s public face and what they confess in their financial filings. Publicly, TTS AAS is an educational enterprise divided into a number of units focused on cutting-edge fringe research. The science division is pursuing consciousness research and psychic phenomena. The aerospace division is looking for exotic propulsion technologies. The entertainment division is producing the Sekret Machines books, and a dystopian young adult franchise. Note carefully that space aliens and “disclosure” don’t occur as a research subject or a purpose for the company. And yet, the public protestations about using the company to promote human knowledge are belied by what we see in the financial documents. That’s not to say that there won’t be “educational” material, only that the company’s primary purpose isn’t science and education, as it pretends…

DeLonge, though, is certainly a beneficiary. Documents laying out what he gets paid make pretty clear that this is intended to be a very lucrative investment for him. DeLonge has a constellation of corporate entities that control the intellectual property he creates as a musician and now filmmaker. TSA, which the company abbreviates as TTS AAS, is legally obligated to pay all of DeLonge’s expenses in using his existing intellectual property to develop new TTS AAS multimedia products.

But, those of us interested in all aspects of UFOs and not the inner workings of a corporation created to make some money and produce multi-media products wanted to hear something about UFO sightings. Eventually we treated to one UFO report provided by “TTS Academy member Chris Mellon” who was, at one time, Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Intelligence for two administrations. “He gave a synopsis of an event from 2004 that involved the battleship [sic] USS Nimitz.” I’ll give Mellon the benefit of the doubt here by saying that in his position he should have known that the Nimitz was an aircraft carrier and not a battleship. I suspect the reporter got it wrong. According to the story:

“Two F-18s approach, the four aviators see that the object has no wings or exhaust — it is white, oblong, some 40 ft long and perhaps 12 ft thick”, he [Mellon] said. “One pilot pursues the craft while his wingman stays high. The pilots are astonished to see the object suddenly reorient itself toward the approaching F-18. In a series of discrete tumbling maneuvers that seem to defy the laws of physics, the object takes a position directly behind the approaching F-18.”

The lengthy event occurred in broad daylight off the California coast, and gun camera footage was taken. At one point the object went from hovering at 80,000 feet to dropping at supersonic speeds, and came to a complete stop at 50 feet above the ocean. “More F-18’s are dispatched but with similar results,” Mellon stated. “The secret machine easily evades the F-18s. Dozens of military personnel aboard the various planes and ships involved are privy to these interactions.”

Okay. Not an overly spectacular sighting but it does suggest some evidence in the form of gun camera footage. It mirrors other sightings that have been reported over

USS Nimitz complete with aircraft.

the years that include radar images, photographs of the radarscopes and many witnesses on the ships involved. Investigation into them have yet to provide the evidence to prove that there is alien visitation.

There was one other aspect of all this that bothered me as well. One of those now part of this was identified as Luis Elizondo. The Huffington Post reported:

Lue had resigned his position at the DOD literally the day before we met. I was able to verify who he was and what his tasks were at the Pentagon. He received the highest commendatons [sic] from his superiors. I was told that important unclassified [emphasis added] data and documentation are expected to be released through the Academy’s on-line Community of Interest (COI) in collaboration with the US government, which will be set up soon.

Unclassified data? The Internet is awash in unclassified data. The vast majority of the Project Blue Book files can be found at Fold3. John Greenewald’s Black Vault is loaded with all sorts of unclassified documents relating to UFOs. Even the FBI’s website provides information about UFOs. And now we are to be treated to another source that will provide us with unclassified documents. Wow.

In fact, this was underscored when Rolling Stone reported, “Subsequent books in the Sekret Machines trilogy will move away from ancient texts to focus on claims of interactions with aliens documented by government agencies since the 1940s, many of which are available by Freedom of Information Act requests and a recently digitized cache of CIA documents.” More unclassified documents that can be obtained by anyone who cares to do so.

Which, of course, moves us away from any meaningful research and puts us back in the entertainment camp. There are too many shows today that rely not on solid research but on the entertainment value of the show. Tell us a story, no matter how ridiculous and we’ll climb onboard even if it is so incredible that it can’t be true. Entertain us first and worry about the reality later. Ironically DeLonge and his co-author had something to say about that. According to Rolling Stone, “…they’re not claiming that everything you've seen on shows like Ancient Aliens is real. ‘Humans are responsible for building the pyramids, for instance,’ says [Peter] Levanda. ‘I think we can agree on that. But what was the impetus behind it? What we're saying is the initial contact is what prompted all this. Not that there were aliens out there telling us how to build pyramids. I think that just devalues the entire conversation, and we're trying to get beyond that.’"

That, of course, is something that many of us have said for years. I didn’t single out Ancient Aliens in the past but have pointed a finger at Hangar 1 and Unsealed: Alien Files which seemed to be based more on speculation and wild stories than on cases that added some real value to UFO research.

There is one other point that has been mentioned in the past that should be bothersome to all those interested in UFO research. According to Rolling Stone, “DeLonge's plan is bigger than just a few books. In addition to the nonfiction series, he is writing a historical-fiction trilogy with novelist A.J. Hartley, the first book of which was released last spring, as well as a documentary and a scripted film, all of which discuss the theory that we're not alone.”

And the additional irony here is that I point this out. Almost since I published my first book on UFOs, one of the criticisms is that I also write science fiction as well. I have kept the science fiction away from my UFO writings and I’m not the only one who has investigated UFOs and who has written science fiction. Bruce Maccabee, Whitley Strieber, Don Ecker and Nick Pope have all written fiction. The difference here, subtle though it might be, is that we have not put the science fiction under the same umbrella as our UFO research. And, of course, DeLong’s plan might not affect the rest of the organization’s goals, but it is just one more worrisome aspect of all this.

We learn, at the end of the news conference, that TTS/AAS “… intends to release game-changing information of the type interested people have been seeking for a long time.”

But the problem here is that this is the same claim that has been made for months about DeLonge’s research and activities and no matter who he has pulled in, he has yet to make any stunning revelations, other than he is forming a corporation to exploit the UFO field. This announcement ended, not so much with a bang, but with a whimper. We have learned nothing that we didn’t already know and it seems that we were promised much the same thing that has been promised by so many others over the last half century. The real point doesn’t seem to be research but entertainment, which, of course, is not always a bad thing… it’s just there has been too much entertainment in the UFO field and not enough research.

Ufology in Decline

Jim Penniston (left) and John
Burroughs.

There are many sides to the Roswell case but what might be most disappointing and more evidence of a decline in UFO research is how contentious the debate has become among those investigating the case. The real problem is not the skeptics or the debunkers, but those who supposedly support the theory it was extraterrestrial in origin. Rather than consolidate the evidence and work for an ultimate solution whatever that solution might be, they argue over trivia, are unwilling to entertain another’s explanation and work to destroy the credibility of the witnesses they don’t like for whatever reason. A united front could provide a path to convincing evidence. Instead, the arguments lead to claims of poor investigation and a presentation of contradictory evidence that inhibits proper research and annoys just about everyone else.

Roswell isn’t the only case that suffers from these multiple viewpoints. The Rendlesham landing of December 1980 has the same problems. There were rumors about the case that began when Art Wallace (a pseudonym for Larry Warren) began to talk about the events. Later others came forward including John Burroughs and Jim Penniston who apparently approached closer to the landed object than anyone else. There was even a letter written by then Lieutenant Colonel Charles Halt confirming some sort of unusual event had taken place during those nights in the forest.

Peter Robbins

Eventually Warren would team with Peter Robbins to write Left at East Gate about Warren’s experiences during some of the event. Others would investigate the case, learn the names of other service members who were involved and gather additional evidence. Skeptics provided what they thought of as logical explanations for the events, suggesting that the airmen had been fooled by a number of manmade and natural objects.

Burroughs and Penniston would team with Nick Pope who at one time worked for the British government investigating UFOs and write Encounter in Rendlesham Forest. Although they discuss Warren’s involvement in that book, or maybe alleged involvement, they don’t give it much weight. They do, however, credit him with being among the first if not the first to tell the tale.

So there is a point of contention between the two camps, with one side supporting Warren and suggesting that the other side is, shall we say, less than accurate. The other side points to the problems, briefly, with Warren’s account and his ever changing tale. It does little or nothing to provide a clear picture of what happened. In fact, Robbins was inspired to write a long rebuttal to Pope’s book and post it free online. It can be downloaded here:

http://www.kgraradio.com/peter-robbins-deception-a-review-and-critical-analysis-of-the-book-encounter-in-rendlesham-forest/

I suppose, in fairness, I should mention this is not a new problem. APRO fought with NICAP in the 1950s and 1960s and later with MUFON. Each pushed its own agenda and the truth sometimes got lost in the process. This infighting, which has been lamented in the past, seems to have become worse in the age of the Internet and the truth suffers. Or, in other words, Ufology is in decline.