Jacques Vallee, Trinity and New Information

 

Jacques Vallee has been heard from again defending the nonsensical story of a UFO crash near San Antonio, New Mexico in 1945. According to Douglas Dean Johnson, that defense was published briefly on Paola Harris’ website. You can learn more about this here:

https://douglasjohnson.ghost.io/crash-story-file-my-dad-is-a-pathological-liar/

https://douglasjohnson.ghost.io/trinity-ufo-crash-fictions-clash-with-real-atomic-history/

As I noted here a few months ago, I had communicated with Dr. Vallee about an interview of Reme Baca conducted and recorded by Tom Carey. In a cordial email, Vallee suggested that the fact that Baca wanted to make some money off his experience was no different than all of us who research, investigate and write about UFOs. You can read some of that analysis here:

http://kevinrandle.blogspot.com/2023/05/my-latest-communication-with-jacques.html

And I would certainly grant that point. There are many of us out there who have made money off our research in magazine articles, books and even movies. I often joke about what I call my SAGA scholarship. SAGA magazine published the UFO Report in the 1970s and I was able to sell them enough articles that it basically paid my college tuition. I will note that I had other income streams as well but that’s a story for another time.

I emailed Dr. Vallee that I wasn’t all that interested in Baca’s financial motivation, but in the major changes in the story related to Carey and the story as told to Harris and Dr. Vallee. I asked specific questions about it. I suspect that there was no good answer to any of those questions because I heard nothing more about it.

Tom Carey

I did interview Dr. Vallee and Paola Harris on my radio show/podcast when their book was first published. You can listen to that interview here:

http://kevinrandle.blogspot.com/2021/06/x-zone-broadcast-network-jacques-vallee.html

https://www.spreaker.com/user/xzoneradiotv/adp20210602ep162emjacquesvalleeandpaoloh_1

Douglas Johnson, at his website, published a series of articles exposing the contradictions and outright lies being told about this alleged event. I believe that anyone who reads those articles dispassionately will realize that there had been no crash near San Antonio, not in 1945 as now claimed or in 1947 as originally suggested.

The real fear here is that those in the government who are suddenly interested in UFOs, I mean UAP, will take this alleged event seriously because of Dr. Vallee’s reputation. They will not bother to dig any deeper than the book and an interview with Dr. Vallee. They won’t access Douglas Johnson’s website because they don’t know who he is even if they know about the website. They won’t be aware of the major contradictions and the outright lies told by the witnesses about this case.

Instead, when they finally learn the truth, they will then assume that all stories of UFOs and UAP are some sort of terrestrial phenomena if not just lies. They will only remember that this case, cited by a respected scientist has now been found to be a hoax, and they will assume, by extension, other cases fall into the same category.

If this case is one endorsed by David Grusch and some of those other witnesses alleged to have testified in front of Congressional committees or representatives of the various intelligence organizations, it will suggest that much of the other sightings cited will be similarly explained.

If I was a paranoid person, and if I didn’t know the best way to seal an intelligence leak is to pump bad information into that leak to discredit it, I would suggest we’re seeing some of that here. Of course, the intelligence community didn’t have to investigate the bad information. They had Reme Baca’s story as a starting point. Shove in the discredited 1933 Italian UFO crash and many people will just nod and say, “I knew it.”

Now add the Aurora, Texas crash of 1897, and a very strong case can be made that these sorts of stories are the result of active imaginations and hoaxes told for personal gain, and whole investigations collapse. I mention Aurora only because it figures in the Vallee/Paola book, Trinity. I investigated the case before it became famous back when I lived in Texas. You can read the results of that investigation here:

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

http://kevinrandle.blogspot.com/2018/04/aurora-texas-again.html

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

As I say, I’m worried that those conducting the government investigations will accept what Dr. Vallee says without critical comment. When they learn the truth about the “Trinity” UFO crash, they’ll begin to reject all other, similar data because of the poor investigation of Trinity. They will assume that all research is equally flawed. And they will use this when describing their work to the public.

Yes, I have seen this before. Nearly everyone scoffed at the Project Mogul explanation for the Roswell debris when it was first pushed in the mid-1990s. Now, in our world, we see that solution trotted out without any critical comment, even when the documentation proves that Mogul wasn’t the answer.

I am interested in what others think about this analysis and what they believe about the Trinity UFO crash, given the information available today.

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?

X-Zone Broadcast Network - Don Schmitt and a Variety of Topics

 At the end of the show a week or so ago, I had said that I would be interviewing Robert Sheaffer about his take on UFOs. As we attempted to do just that, we ran into a number of technical issues that had to do with Internet connectivity at his end. He kept fading out and we were only getting about 45% of what he said. It just wasn’t working, so we postponed the show. I’ve invited him back, and we’re working out a date that will be satisfactory for him.

This week, given some changes, I decided to bring back Don Schmitt. We have both been around the UFO field for a very long time. We have many of the same interests and I find conversations with him to be easy and informative. I thought we could talk about Jacques Vallee’s book, Trinity, Avi Loeb’s Galileo Project and then for something completely different, we’d talk about a new book that seems to suggest the Texas War for Independence was based on a big land grab. You can listen to the show here:

https://www.spreaker.com/episode/45970787

Although we had begun to talk about Vallee’s book, we detoured into Roswell because the only living witness to the UFO crash at San Antonio, New Mexico, (which I kept adding New Mexico to it so that it wouldn’t be confused with the big one in Texas) had approached Don in the late 1990s. Reme Baca, the witness, suggested something over on the Plains of San Agustin, and according to Don, it seemed that he, Baca, was suggesting he had been there in 1947. Given that neither of us accept a crash on the Plains of San Agustin in 1947, Don wasn’t interested.

Don Schmitt on the Plains of San Agustin

Baca apparently also approached Stan Friedman, who wasn’t interested in pursuing that information either. And, I had a copy of an interview conducted with Baca in 2010 that didn’t impress me. There were anachronisms in it and there was no corroborating detail. In fact, I interviewed both Vallee and Paola Harris, authors of the book a couple of months ago. You can listen to that interview here:

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

Finished with the Roswell and the San Antonio (New Mexico) crash, we discussed Dr. Abraham (Avi) Loeb’s creation of the Galileo Project. This was an outgrowth of his observation of an object that entered the Solar System from outside, which, I suppose, can be the first confirmed extra-solar object ever discovered. Loeb was of the opinion that it was an alien artifact created long ago by an intelligence on another planet. I had the opportunity to interview Loeb in the spring. You can listen to that, and my commentary on the Galileo Project here:

http://kevinrandle.blogspot.com/2021/01/x-zone-broadcast-network-dr-abraham-avi.html

http://kevinrandle.blogspot.com/2021/07/galileo-project-and-avi-loeb.html

http://kevinrandle.blogspot.com/2021/02/coast-to-coast-dr-abraham-loeb-madar.html

I did want to get to this latest book about the Alamo. As Don mentioned, we both have been to the Alamo a couple of times and are well aware of the history. This “new” theory is that the Texas War of Independence was nothing more than an American land grab… except the Mexican government invited in the Americans as a way of populating this huge area that they, the Mexicans, had taken away from the Spanish.

My reading of history suggests that the war erupted because the Americans in Texas wanted representation in the Mexican government as other states in Mexico enjoyed. In fact, Texas didn’t declare independence until March 2, 1836, about a week after the siege of the Alamo began.

Our point with this was to discuss how investigations can degenerate into debates about facts. I have said for a long time, we are not in a debate about UFOs but in an investigation. I try to go where the facts lead, rather than to the place I want to go. I think our discussion could have provided something interesting comments on the Alamo and the attacks on American history, but, as always, we ran out of time.

Although we had planned on it, we didn’t talk about latest in the Walton abduction case. There are some questions being raised about it that are disturbing, but then, it might just be a matter of perspective. The case has stood for decades with little dissention among the witnesses. You can read a little more about that here:

http://kevinrandle.blogspot.com/2021/07/x-zone-latest-on-travis-waltons.html

http://kevinrandle.blogspot.com/2021/03/did-mike-rogers-repudiate-travis-walton.html

Next up, as we introduce the program to Zoom so that there is both the audio and the visual content, is John Greenewald. He has some strong opinions on the UAP report and just interviewed Avi Loeb about Project Galileo. If you have questions, let me know

Trinity: The Best Kept Secret - A Critique

The much-anticipated book by Dr Jacques Vallee and Paola Harris, Trinity: The Best Kept Secret, finally dropped and we now have a very good idea of what is in it. The publicity running up to the publication suggested that we’d learn about a UFO crash that preceded Roswell by two years and was based on the eyewitness testimony of two men and as a surprise or special element, we’d learn of a third witness to these incredible events.

Dr. Jacques Vallee

The story as told, and outlined on this blog just a few weeks ago, was that two boys, ages 7 and 9, not only found a crashed object that didn’t resemble any Earth-based aviation technology, but they had seen the crash. There was a hint that it might have been brought down by lightning in one of those strong thunderstorms that frequent New Mexico in the late summer or it hit a tower that caused it to crash. For those who want to see that earlier post, you can read it here:

http://kevinrandle.blogspot.com/2021/05/the-san-antonio-ufo-crash.html

The boys, identified as Reme Baca and Jose Padilla, had approached the area cautiously and saw, not only the ruined craft, but small creatures that seemed to teleport from one position to another. Those beings provided telepathic pictures to the boys, who lingered in the area for longer than they should.

Ms. Paola Harris

Back at the ranch house, in San Antonio, New Mexico, they told family about what they had seen. There was no immediate follow up, but a day or so later, the fathers and a New Mexico State Policeman, made their way to the scene of the crash. Although the boys were told to stay back, the adults approached the craft. One or two of them might have crawled up inside. Today that makes no real difference because none of those adults are alive for interviews or to confirm the story.

There was no sign of the small creatures when the adults made it to the crash site. Speculation is that they might have been captured by the Army, but I suppose, it is equally possible that they were rescued by their fellow aliens. At any rate, the beings disappear from the story and are never heard of again.

The military arrived at some point. Eventually, they asked permission to cut a fence and install a gate and to cut a road across the ranch to the area of the crash. The boys, hiding from the military, kept a watch on this. The boys talked of the soldiers’ attempts to clean up the debris. Although the soldiers collected all of the debris, it seems they kicked pieces of it aside and dumped it into crevasses. They covered this with a thin layer of dirt meaning that it might be found in the world today… maybe.

Although the Army was interested enough in the crash to recover the vehicle, they seemed to be less than enthusiastic in protecting the find. Once they had brought in the flatbed truck to move the wrecked vehicle from the scene, the soldiers departed, apparently going into town for a meal or two. In other words, they left the truck, the spacecraft, the debris and everything else unguarded.

The boys, having spied on the soldiers, understood their routine and once the site was abandoned, they wandered down to the blue-tarp-covered object sitting on that unguarded flatbed. Now, Jose, apparently the more adventurous of the two, peeled back part of that blue tarp and crawled up into the UFO. He stole a bit of a panel from inside and explored part of the craft. These descriptions were overly detailed, and not really what would you expect from someone who was 9 at the time, telling the tale decades later. Very detailed but probably not precise.

The boys carried away a great deal of the debris. If I understood the story, some of that debris, thin strips of metal that is reminiscent of the memory metal described by Bill Brazel of Roswell fame, was divided up and handed out as decorations for Christmas trees… a fairly cavalier way to treat samples of metal created on another planet. At this point, meaning here in 2021, all that material has disappeared so that there is nothing left that can be tested and analyzed.

Eventually, the Army drove the tarp-covered UFO from the area, and life returned to normal, or as normal as it could be after seeing an alien spacecraft. Neither Reme nor Jose talked much about it in the decades that followed.

Or rather they did mention it once in a great while. Don Schmitt told me, during his recent appearance on the A Different Perspective Radio Show/Podcast, that he’d met with Reme in the late 1990s after some presentation that Don had given. Don lost interest when Reme mentioned the Plains of San Agustin as the location of the crash, suggesting some sort of confirmation of the Barney Barnett tale.

That isn’t the only worrisome part of the story the boys told and that is the cavalier way the Army operated. I simply do not believe that the Army would go to the trouble of cleaning the area, but bury some of the debris on site rather than picking it up to be taken away. I don’t believe they would have left the scene unguarded at all, but especially after they had loaded the craft onto the flatbed truck… and knowing that Army trucks, as most Army vehicles, do not use keys to start them. I can believe that the boys were clever enough to avoid detection by the soldiers as they spied on the operation from a distance, but I do not believe they were allowed to get inside the craft after it had been loaded on the truck. By allowed, I mean that the truck was left in the field without any guard on it. The soldiers might not have known the craft came from another world, but they would have known that it represented a technology unknown to American science at the time. That alone would have demanded an around the clock guard detail.

Two points need to be made here. Don was not the only UFO researcher to be approached with the story of the crash. In the book, Vallee and Harris note that Baca had also sought out Stan Friedman who seemed to be equally uninterested… and second, Don might have misunderstood about the location on the Plains. Seems that those living in San Antonio referred to the area around the town as the Plains as well. At any rate, neither Stan nor Don followed up on this bizarre tale.

But the Vallee/Harris book is about more than just the San Antonio crash. There is a section that deals with some of the other events concerning UFOs and crashes. The first is the Aurora, Texas, crash of April 1897. This is quite disturbing because of the history involved. I have written about this case a number of times. I was among the very first to visit Aurora in the early 1971. The consensus of those living there, at that time, was the story was a hoax. Those at the Wise County Historical Society (Aurora is in Wise County) told me that two histories of the county had been written in the decade that followed this alleged crash but neither history mentioned it. Since there was no Air Force or CIA to suppress the information, you have to wonder why, if it was a real event, that any mention of it was omitted in both those histories. That doesn’t bode well for the Aurora tale. You can read more about my investigation 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

There is one additional comment to make. According to the Vallee/Harris book, a piece of metal picked during one of the modern treks to the crash site up in Aurora was scientifically tested. The tests showed that it was made of an alloy that did not exist in 1897 and wouldn’t be created until 1908. Seems like a bit of extraordinary evidence, except the fragment was recovered much later than 1908. Nothing ties it to the 1897 event, other than it was found somewhere around Aurora. Obviously, it was dropped sometime after 1908.

It is also disturbing that Vallee and Harris take the Maury Island hoax as something authentic. That story, actually investigated in depth by the Air Force, as well as many others, is also a hoax. Although Vallee/Harris acknowledge the hoax explanation, they also wonder how “…any such statement can be drawn by the reported facts.”

This statement is in error. I have looked at the Maury Island case extensively, and you can read about that in Alien Mysteries, Conspiracies and Cover-ups. The story has been well researched by a number of investigators. George Earley was one of those and reported his findings in UFO, issues 155, 156 and 157. According to Earley, Harold Dahl’s son, Charles, who was supposed injured during the sighting was interview years later and said that it never happened. A search for medical records to verify the injury failed to find any mention of it.

In other words, the reported facts in the Maury Island case, all of them, support Ed Ruppelt’s statement in his book The Report on Unidentified Flying Objects. Ruppelt described the Maury Island event as the direst hoax in UFO history. No evidence has been presented to reverse Ruppelt’s observation.

More problems develop in the discussion of the Socorro UFO landing. I was intrigued to learn that Lonnie Zamora was related, by marriage into the Padillo family. His cousin married Zamora, which connects them to another big UFO event in New Mexico. This is not to mention that Socorro is about fifteen or twenty miles from San Antonio.

For years researchers have suggested the Zamora case was single witness to the UFO landing. Vallee and Harris wrote that there were eleven witness who saw the object and two who were “auditory” witnesses, meaning they’d heard the roar but saw no object. The problem is that none of these witnesses are identified with the exception of Paul Kies and Larry Kratzer. The two men had told a reporter in Dubuque, Iowa, that they had been driving through Socorro about the time that Zamora was engaged with the UFO. They saw the thing take off in a cloud of dust and smoke.

The trouble here is that their stories just do not fit into the Socorro scenario. Kies said that there had been a large burned area in the desert and that the exhaust had melted a pop bottle. He couldn’t have seen these things given they were just driving through Socorro and hadn’t stopped to inspect the site. More importantly, the melted pop bottle description was from a sighting near La Madera, New Mexico, a day or so later, which also received some national attention.

Ralph DeGraw, an Iowa UFO researcher, interviewed both witnesses some years later. While what they said then generally agreed with the account in the newspaper, DeGraw found some important discrepancies, including Kratzer’s description of the craft. He said that it was silver with a row of dark round, mirror-like windows. This was a major departure from Zamora’s description that had no windows and suggests invention by the witness.

One of the other points of disagreement about the case is the description of the symbol seen by Zamora. Ray Stanford identified the “real” symbol reported by Zamora. The trouble here is that the symbol, three horizonal lines through an inverted “V” is not the symbol that Zamora drew for the military, nor is it the one that he drew on the scrap of paper moments after the UFO departed. While Vallee and Harris endorse the inverted “V”, Zamora, on the scrap of paper, drew an “umbrella” like symbol with an inverted “V” under it and a line, like the shaft of an arrow, up into the “V”. That scrap of paper was turned over to the Air Force and can be seen in the Project Blue Book file.

Zamora's drawing on the scrap of paper minutes after the UFO disappeared.

Ironically, that symbol was originally endorsed by Stanford in a letter dated May of 1964. He wrote that the inverted “V” was the fake symbol. In the years from writing that letter to writing his book, he changed his mind. But Zamora, on the night of the sighting, drew a number of illustrations for both the FBI and the Army and he signed them. The “umbrella” symbol was the one he signed.

Lonnie Zamora's drawing of the craft and the symbol made on April 24, 1964

In the end here, Stanford said there were eleven witnesses other than Zamora, but offers no names. Vallee and Harris repeat this without names, other than Kies and Kratzer, whose tale has been discredited. Vallee wrote that a single witness is no witness. I would suggest that an anonymous witness, or even nearly a dozen anonymous witnesses are of absolutely no value and worth less than that single witness. In 1964, no one bothered to get the names or tried to locate any of these witnesses. Now we are again treated to the information about a UFO sighting but that information has no real value.

The final chapters of the book are devoted to this new witness to the San Antonio crash promoted by Vallee and Harris. At the end of the book, they identify her as a relative of Padillo. The problem? She was born in 1953 or eight years after the sighting. She talks about handling some of the debris, but the piece, or pieces, she had been given, are long gone. She talked about family stories, but she witnessed nothing first hand other than a large burned area that might have had nothing to do with the original crash. She is emersed in the family history, she is aware of UFO history, but can’t contribute much of value to the story.

Here’s one of the things to take away from this latest book. Both Baca and Padillo talk about many aspects of the UFO field. They talk about knowing people at the Foster ranch near Corona where Mack Brazel discovered a field of metallic debris. We have the family relation to Zamora which suggests more infusion of UFO material into the family lore. Then, we have many aspects of the Roswell case inserted into this new tale. The UFO crashed during a storm, as was suggested at Roswell. Lightning brought it down, as happened at Roswell, but I wonder that if a race can create interstellar craft, they would be able to avoid destruction by lightning. There was memory metal and even a discussion of fiber optics, just like Roswell.

The big thing that caught my attention was a description that suggested the aliens looked something like the Jerusalem Cricket… the very description supplied by Frankie Rowe when talking about the aliens at Roswell. There are just too many of the descriptions that are drawn from the Roswell case. To me, this suggests contamination rather than corroboration. It suggests that both men were well aware of the UFO field long before they began to talk of their childhood experiences. They had a better than average knowledge of what had been reported about UFOs and UFO crash/retrievals before they began talking about the UFO crash near San Antonio.

To make this worse, if possible, it is claimed that this tale of a crashed spacecraft is the first in our modern era. This, however, isn’t true. In the Spring of 1941, there are reports of something crashing near Cape Girardeau, Missouri. The tale is told by one woman who, while she didn’t witness the craft and bodies herself, is aware of what her grandfather had seen and had done. She is well-versed in the family history. Len Stringfield laid out the details in one of his updates to crash/retrievals, this one published in 1991. There is another witness who knows the story including the brother of the local sheriff and even the report of a picture of one of the alien beings. Of course, that picture has been lost, but the evidence for the Cape Girardeau crash as just as solid as that for the Trinity crash. For some reason it is not mentioned in the Vallee and Harris book. I mention this only because it suggests a long history of UFO crash tales that are based on limited eyewitness testimony and family members who died long before they could be interviewed. And they are told in the same era, that is, the 1940s.

All this and I haven’t even touched on the structure of the book. It is filled with oat meal. This is a writing term that refers to filling to make a story longer. Sure, I enjoyed reading about some of the history of the creation of the atomic bomb, but it has no relevance to this story. The fact that the first nuclear explosion took place at Trinity, not all that far from San Antonio means nothing… unless you believe that the aliens had been watching for that flash everyone talked about. Of course, you have to wonder where they were to have seen that and gotten here so quickly. It matters not what their technology can do, the speed of light is the limiting factor. Even if these aliens can exceed the speed of light, or bend the universe to allow interstellar flight, the flash of the bomb would only travel at the speed of light. If the aliens could detect such a flash against the backdrop of the sun and if it happened on the side of the planet facing them, the fastest they could have detected the explosion is about four years afterward, if they inhabited a planet in the Alpha Centuri star system. If they live in another star system, then their response would take even longer.

Ignoring that, we still have a book filled with a family history that does nothing to validate the story. It is a travelogue. It is a walk though some of UFOs greatest hits, many of which have little in the way of evidence to back them up. And even if these ancillary tales were all true, that does nothing to validate this particular story.

It is filled with a wonder of the events but little in the way of analysis. It tells the story of two boys who seemed to have been wise beyond their years, able to avoid the Army which failed at even the barest level of security. We are told of soldiers who were lazy, not picking up all the debris, but hiding from their superiors. That debris would still be there for UFO hunters to find except is now beyond recovery. Flood control projects that altered the terrain significantly and buried the debris under twenty or thirty feet of mud and dirt. No way to find it now.

This is certainly much longer than I anticipated, but we need to understand what we have here. It isn’t a scientific search for evidence but more of science fiction story told for entertainment. There is no physical evidence presented but talk of such evidence just out of our reach. There is no real attempt to validate the story or provide citation for the claims. It is a story that has borrowed elements from other tales in the hope it will be seen as corroboration rather than plagiarism. Oh, I don’t mean that either Vallee or Harris stole the story from others, only that the witnesses have been contaminated by decades of UFO tales written about, broadcast and even incorporated into movies. It is too bad that no one wrote anything down in a letter or a journal in 1945 or 46 but that’s just too much to hope for. Somehow the alleged evidence is never found and, in the end, we are left with a tale told by two old men, and one old woman, who said they experienced it as youngsters. 

Coast to Coast AM - San Antonio UFO Crash/Harry Reid

 It’s been a wild one this week. Trending on social media lately was the tale of a UFO crash near San Antonio, New Mexico in 1945. The story is that two youngsters, searching for a lost cow, heard a loud rumble, saw a flash of light and then a cloud of dust and smoke. You can read the whole story here:

http://kevinrandle.blogspot.com/2021/05/the-san-antonio-ufo-crash.html 

They approached that area, saw the downed craft and three small, thin creatures.  They told their parents, who returned with them and saw the craft but not the aliens. Eventually, the military did arrive and cleaned the area and removed the craft but not before the boys managed to take samples of the debris. Jacques Vallee and Paola Harris are coming out with a book detailing this story. I’m skeptical of aspects of the case but want to see what the investigation has turned up. I will note here that pictures of two pieces of the debris have been published on the Coast-to-Coast AM website. You can see those objects here:

https://www.coasttocoastam.com/photo/ufo-crash-remnants-ii-photo/

Don Schmitt mentioned to me that he had spoken to Reme Baca a number of years ago. According to Schmitt, the crash had taken place in 1947 and on the Plains of San Agustin. It was later that the story evolved to San Antonio, NM, and to 1945. You can listen to Don’s discussion here (in the first segment):

https://www.spreaker.com/episode/44778844

Also gaining traction this week are a couple of statements by former Nevada senator Harry Reid. He is reported to have said, “I was told for decades that Lockheed had some of these retrieved materials. And I tried to get, as I recall classified approval by the Pentagon to have me go look at the stuff. They would not approve that. I don’t know what all the numbers were, what kind of classification it was, but they would not give that to me.”

I need to make it clear here that Senator Reid did not see the debris himself, and, although he has been to Area 51 a number of times, he saw nothing to indicate that alien spacecraft were housed there.

Curt Collins

Curt Collins reported Senator Reid clarified earlier remarks about recovered debris by saying, “I’ve never believed Lockheed had anything in that regard, even though a lot of people believe that — I don’t.” As to whether any UFO fragments are stored away in some other government or contractor’s warehouse, Reid is doubtful: “I never heard of anything, other than some conspiratorialists. So, I don’t think that they’re credible that they’re things from outer space.”

However, I’m reminded of Senator Barry Goldwater who talked of a blue room hidden at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base where much of the recovered material was stored. According to what Senator Goldwater said, on many occasions, when he approached Air Force General Curtis LeMay about permission to visit the blue room, he was told, “No, and never ask me again.” I have a letter from Barry Goldwater sent to Kent Jeffrey in which Goldwater confirms that information. 

For those worried about the authenticity, Kent Jeffrey gave me the 
original letter rather than a copy. I have it still.

These stories go back for decades and while we have had hints about the level of secrecy, it is only recently that we have seen how high that secrecy extends. When Jimmy Carter was the president-elect, he attempted to learn more about UFOs and asked then Director of Central Intelligence, George H.W. Bush, about UFOs. Bush told Carter that he was not yet the president and refused to provide that information. I explore that in UFOs and the Deep State, providing the details of that refusal and how such things are managed by the Deep State in Washington D.C.

Now we look forward to the release of the UFO/UAP report scheduled for next month, though I just heard it has been delayed, which is no real surprise. I have little hope that we’ll learn something new about UFOs, or that there will be any exciting revelations. I look for it being Condon 2.0, which is just another attempt to kill interest in UFOs by suggesting there is nothing to them. It is just an appeal to authority that doesn’t answer any questions we might have.

The San Antonio UFO Crash

There is now renewed interest in the crash of a UFO near San Antonio, New Mexico, on August 16, 1945. Notice that this is almost two years before the Roswell crash and less than a hundred miles from the debris field shown to me by Bill Brazel. This tale is told by Reme Baca and Jose Padilla, two boys, seven and nine at the time, who heard the crash and would have been the first humans on the scene.

Bill Brazel

The story, as originally told, was that the youngsters had been sent in search of a pregnant cow. The one boy’s father was afraid that if the calf was born out on the range and they didn’t claim it first, then someone else would find it and brand it. They had ridden over the high desert, climbed rocky formations, stopped to have lunch, and then dodged a thunderstorm. As the rain ended and they came out from under the ledge where they had hidden, there was a bright light with a rumbling sound that shook the ground.

The boys headed in the direction of the sound where there seemed to be a cloud of dust and smoke. They found a “giant-sized gouge” that they said looked like heavy machinery had created a road about one hundred feet wide, about a foot deep and maybe three hundred feet long. Through binoculars, Jose could see that the gouge ran up to a ridge where it stopped. At the far end they could see an object that had dug deep into the sandy soil.

As have been found near Roswell two years later, there was a debris field here. Reme said that he picked up a piece of thin, shiny foil, like that from a pack of cigarettes. When he folded it or wadded it, it returned to its original shape.

They worked their way closer, and through the binoculars, Jose saw three, small, creatures. They were moving around rapidly, almost as if they could teleport themselves from one position to another. The motion was described as sliding. The creatures had a buggy look to them. They had big bulgy eyes, had needle thin arms and were about four feet tall. The head was big and when pressed, he compared it to a Praying Mantis. Their skin was a light gray and they were either wearing very tight coveralls or their skin was very tight.

The New Mexico high Desert.

The craft was shaped something like an avocado, with a hole in the side. They tried to get an estimate of the size, deciding it was about 100 feet long. There was a noise coming from the craft. The sound was like that a jack rabbit in trouble would make or maybe like a baby crying.

As they watched it, both said that they got “pictures in their heads.” This seemed to be some sort of telepathic communication. Reme would later say that they didn’t know that these pictures were. Decades later, he said that he still didn’t know what the pictures meant.

By this time, they realized that it was getting late, actually getting dark, and they had to go home. Once there, they told Jose’s father, Faustino, about what they had seen and the humanoid creatures that they called Hombrecitos. Spanish for little men. Faustino said that they would check it out in a day or two.

Two days later they returned to the crash site. Not only were they accompanied by Faustino, but also by a State Policeman, Eddie Apodaca. As the party approached the crash site, they didn’t see the alien creatures, nor, at first did they see the craft. It was as if it had disappeared. But then, as they headed down into the canyon, the object reappeared, “as if by magic.”

It seemed that most of the debris had been cleaned up by someone. There wasn’t much of the wreckage left, other than the craft itself. There were odd pieces dangling all over. The two men told the boys to wait, as they crawled up, inside, through gash in the side of the object. When they came out, according to Reme, the men seemed to have changed, different. They were now more serious.

Faustino warned the boys about telling anyone what they had seen. He said, strangely, that the government calls these sorts of things, weather balloons. He added, “They’ll want this thing back.”

Reme said that it didn’t look like any weather balloon they had seen in the past. And, he wondered about the little men. He wondered what had happened to them.

Two days after that second visit to the craft, the recovery operation started in earnest. A sergeant named Avila, probably Army sergeant, approached those in the Padilla home. He wanted permission to cut a hole in a fence so that they could get their heavy equipment to the crash site. They would be removing the craft and needed to create a better access to the area. An agreement was reached, a road was built and the gate installed.

The youngsters, Reme and Jose, continued their surveillance of the crash site, even after the warning about possible trouble. Now, we learn, based on Reme and Jose’s observations, that the solders weren’t doing such a great job. Rather than collecting all the debris, they buried some of it on site. Other debris was kicked into crevasses and covered over. They watched as a flatbed truck was brought in. Using winches and a crane, the soldiers lifted the craft onto the truck. They covered it with a tarp and even though it was not ready for removal, the soldiers left for the day.

With the site now abandoned, the boys walked up to take a closer look. Jose untied the ropes holding the tarp in place and climbed inside the object. He found something interesting inside the craft and handed it out to Reme. It was very light and cold to the touch. The boys then left, carrying the bit of debris with them.

About two weeks after the recovery operation had been completed and the object removed, four soldiers arrived at the Padilla house. They were looking for something more and asked permission to search the premises. They wanted to know if Faustino had anything that might belong to them, meaning, of course, any metal or other items taken from the crash site. The soldiers were shown to a back room where they searched carefully, eventually confiscating a weather balloon or two and other odds and ends. Yes, apparently, Faustino had found weather balloons in the past and stored them in his house.

But the military didn’t manage to grab the bits of debris that the boys had found. According to Reme, the material was later analyzed but neither the facilities nor the scientists were identified other than one given the pseudonym of Dr. Smith. Apparently, the metal had a high concentration of carbon. Samples cut and polished showed “very weird structures… they look like skeletons of bugs…” You can see photographs of the metal here:

https://www.coasttocoastam.com/photo/ufo-crash-remnants-ii-photo/

Other scientists in other labs were consulted who confirmed the first results, which was that the metal was unusual. They also found that the metal could “transfer heat from one end to the other…a bit like the tiles o the space shuttle.”

But that wasn’t the end of the analyses. Further, and more comprehensive results were published at The Black Vault. The bottom line is that there doesn’t seem to be anything in the metal that suggests an extraterrestrial origin. It was noted that the objects are made of aluminum alloyed to copper and silicon. Isotopic ratios determined for the nickel, copper and zinc compare to terrestrial value but that does not rule out an extraterrestrial source for the material. You can view that information, including the request for analysis by MUFON, names of the scientists and the lab used, here:

https://www.theblackvault.com/casefiles/analysis-two-metallic-parts-purportedly-crashed-unidentified-aerial-object-san-antonio-new-mexico-august-16-1945/

So, where does that leave us?

Looking at this with a critical eye, I have some real problems. First, are the young ages of the witnesses at the time of the event. True, I can see kids trying to get closer and trying to discover what had happened, but the time line doesn’t seem to work out very well. In the interviews, time seems to flow rapidly and then slow down, only to speed up again. Is this a minor criticism? Sure, but it is not the only problem.

I was bothered by the description of the metal as being very thin aluminum, like that found on a pack of cigarettes. This was the description used by Jesse Marcel, Sr. talking about some of the debris he had seen on the Debris Field near Corona in 1947. This information was published long before either of the boys (now men) told their story to outsiders.

Later on, they talked about a metal that could be wadded up and that would return to its original shape. Reme said, “…so I pulled it out from under the rock and kind of rolled it up and folded it up… and it would go back into the same position that it was. So, I took that and put it I my pocket…”

Robert Smith, who had been assigned to Roswell in July, 1947, said one of the sergeants had taken a bit of debris. He told Don Schmitt and me, “It was just a little piece of metal or foil or whatever it was. Just small enough to be slipped in a pocket.”

Bill Brazel said, “The only reason I noticed the tin foil was that I picked the stuff up and put it in my chaps’ pocket… when I put the piece of foil in the box it started unfolding and flattened out.” Again, this information had been well reported before with Reme or Jose mentioned it.

It is also interesting that the boys talk about four military members coming out to the house to search for anything unusual. Bill Brazel talked about four soldiers going out to his house and confiscating the debris he had picked up. Of course, here they failed to find anything but Bill Brazel surrendered what he had found.

These points can be viewed two ways. One is that here was independent corroboration for the types of material found in Roswell. The other is that the boys, when interviewed decades later, had heard about the material found in Roswell and used those descriptions. It is clear in the interviews that they had been reading about UFOs and crash retrievals, based on their answer to some of the questions and their discussions with researchers.

One of the other problems I have is the fairly cavalier way the military treated the crash site. Although there are hints that they had secured the area, they seemed to leave it unguarded at times. No matter what had fallen, if the military had thought it important enough that they would build a road to the site, and put in a proper gate so that they could bring in a flatbed truck, then it was important enough to guard properly. That would mean soldiers out there twenty-four hours a day until the site was cleaned. However, according to the witnesses, that simply wasn’t the case.

The other aspect is the failure to properly clean the site. Apparently, they did send out soldiers to pick up the debris, but sometimes, the soldiers just kicked the material into a crevasse and buried it. There doesn’t seem to be any officers out there, and once again, given the nature of the material, and the craft that supposedly crashed, there would have been a real effort to clean up everything. They would want nothing left behind.

The final problem is the boys being told about weather balloons. Since this was 1945, two years before the Roswell case was “identified” as a weather balloon, this reference is anachronistic. It is out of place because no one was talking about weather balloons being used to explain UFO sightings. This is a major problem.

On a more positive side, a fellow named Bill Brophy said that his father had been a member of the 231^st B-29 bomber group (actually the 231^st Army Air Force Base Unit) at Alamogordo, New Mexico. According to Brophy, the 231^st was part of the recovery operation in August 1945. I was able to confirm that the 231^st was stationed at Alamogordo Army Air Field and had B-29s at the time claimed. This might be a third witness to the crash and does provide a clue about where to look for additional information.

In the end, I’m skeptical about this story. There are too many little things that bother me about it, from the descriptions of the material that match those from Roswell, the knowledge the two witnesses have of UFOs, including talking about books such as The Day After Roswell, and the lack of proper military security. Even if the officers didn’t recognize the craft as being extraterrestrial, they would have seen it as an aircraft of unique design that would require proper security.

For an even more skeptical point of view, you might want to visit Jason Colavito’s website at:

https://www.jasoncolavito.com/blog/new-book-from-jacques-vallee-claims-evidence-for-1945-new-mexico-ufo-crash

However, there is a book coming out in a month or so that might adequately answer these questions. This is my analysis of the situation now and I look forward to seeing what additional information surfaces.