X-Zone Broadcast Network - Stephen Bassett and Unidentified

I had been watching Unidentified on History. I wasn’t a big fan of the show, though it seemed to be presenting UFO research and government investigation into the phenomenon in a positive light. My pals Rich Reynolds and Stephen Bassett had a higher opinion of the show than did I. After the season finale, both seemed more

Stephen Bassett. Photo
copyright by Kevin Randle.

than a little annoyed. Both were critical of that episode and what it suggested or what it had implied. Bassett published a highly critical review of that show which is reprinted at the end of this post. This inspired me to invite Bassett back on my radio show to explain his thinking on this. You can listen to the show here:

https://www.spreaker.com/episode/18575335

I will note that my last week’s show, with Robert Sheaffer, a well-known skeptic, provided additional detail about that particular episode of Unidentified. It was surprising to me that both men, Sheaffer and Bassett, seem to have reached similar conclusions about the evidence presented in this last Unidentified episode. In other words, both thought the investigation trip to Italy and the details of the helicopter incident and burned areas had nothing to do with UFOs. The helicopter had been forced down by birds through the rotors and the burned areas were shown to be arson.

During our discussion on all this and the relation of it to the To the Stars Academy, Bassett raised some disturbing points about Tom DeLong, his involvement with UFOs and a few things that he had said in the past. You can take a look at some of that here:

https://docs.google.com/document/d/1CJdBo0DnKaqCCr7wenAZt7cGH6jjgTa0UPapFw1aylY/edit#

https://www.reddit.com/r/UFOs/comments/c4o51n/ttsa_disclosure_plan_revealed_trough_tom_delonge/

https://ufos-scientificresearch.blogspot.com/2019/07/ttsa-new-filing-with-us-securities-and.html?m=1&fbclid=IwAR1FeotAN8eTITCW9ycFoz4L5hlBnmSU-G7rV0-Ksdt-8D9ZfCpJp5jXl_0

Our discussion did provide some history about the last couple of years, the creation of the To the Stars Academy, and how this might be pushing us closer to Disclosure. Bassett did suggest a few things that were somewhat disturbing about various alien groups who have visited Earth, and proxy wars fought using humans. DeLong suggested that the major wars had been instigated by these various alien races. The links above note some of this.

This was something of a wild program, given some of the information provided and gives us a glimpse into some of the factors that have dogged UFO research for decades. You’ll have do decide just how much of that information is important for your own research and how much you wish to reject. If nothing else, it is interesting.

For those interested in what inspired the invitation to Stephen Bassett, here is the analysis he published:

From its launch on October 11, 2017 Paradigm Research Group has aggressively supported the core mission of the To The Stars Academy of Arts and Science in lectures and media interviews, on Facebook and Twitter, and to the PRG international email list. Hundreds of links to TTS/AAS related articles and media interviews are earmarked on PRG's website.

PRG fully expected this initiative to be heavily scrutinized and criticized, and has tried to impress upon the public the complexity and degree of difficulty in putting together this unprecedented effort from within the military/intelligence complex (MIC). Seven decades of government imposed embargo on confirming the extraterrestrial presence created considerable distrust and frustration particularly with those researcher/activists quite familiar with the evidentiary basis underpinning the reality of the phenomena. Many other actions by political leadership in concert with the MIC over the same period have added to this distrust. 

PRG's support of the TTS/AAS mission continues, but not without nontrivial concern regarding a narrative thread running through the Identified series. That narrative is about the UAP "threat."

The research program impelled upon the Pentagon by Senator Harry Reid was eventually named the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (AATIP). This was appropriate to ensure a basic acceptance within the DOD and avoid push back, as well as receiving high level media coverage such as the New York Times.

The Unidentified series would bring with detail the mission of the TTS/AAS to a large audience over a six episode season that ended on Friday, July 5. PRG watched the series with keen interest in how the TTS/AAS would address the threat meme.

There is a distinctive difference between "threat" and "potential threat." PRG noted "potential threat" was never used, or was used perhaps once or twice. On the other hand direct and indirect references to the threat posed by the UAPs escalated as the series progressed culminating in he final episode - The Revelation.

The sixth episode of Unidentified was flawed to the point of being grotesque. Every aspect of the production was designed to be dark including the cinematography, editing, and content, which was drenched in "threat" projection.

The TTS/AAS decided to go to Italy to address an incident involving a helicopter allegedly damaged and forced to land by a UAP. Meetings were held with Italian officials and researchers. Within the context of these meetings there was reference to a series of mysterious fires that occurred in the Italian village of Canetto di Caronia in 2004, 2005 and 2014. It was suggested these fires were caused by rays beaming out the sea where a UAP underwater base was located. Really?

It seemed clear to PRG the TTS/AAS had gone to some length to find a case that involved an "attack" by a UAP on a military vehicle. PRG was surprised at the TTS/AAS's lack of credulity regarding these assertions by the Italians.

The fires. In March of 2015 Giuseppe Pezzino and his father Antonio Pezzino were arrested and charged with arson, conspiracy to commit fraud, and sounding a false alarms pertaining to the events in Canetto di Caronia. Insurance fraud was the likely motivation. The Italian military police had installed hidden cameras in the streets after the fires started again in July 2014. Video captured about 40 incidents implicating Giuseppe and Antonio. There was also phone tap evidence. They were found guilty.

The TTS/ASS could have found this information on the Internet in 10 minutes.

The helicopter. Helicopter rotors hit birds. Also, it was not a "military" helicopter. It was the equivalent to a "police" helicopter.

How intense was the treat meme in Episode 6? Researcher Vern Lovic transcribed threat related statements from the Episode. Many of these takes are shown below this statement. That said, only by watching the full episode can one truly appreciate how drenched in threat was this program.

The TTS/AAS has been meeting with members of Congress - including committee chairs - for over a year. The potential threat aspect of UAPs would be helpful in bringing those members to the table and in convincing committees to hold the needed hearings. The concern is whether or not this is a strategic maneuver to get the appropriate attention (if so, then use "potential threat") or is it a core mission of the TTS/AAS to drive fear into the politicians and the American people leading to massive funding of a "space force."

If the latter, the TTS/AAS should not underestimate the knowledge base of the citizen ET researcher/activist community, its collective power or the ability of that community to marshal the media to push back.

If the TTS/AAS team has clear, compelling evidence UAPs and their creators are not just a potential threat, but a real and present danger, they should produce that evidence sooner not later.

Stephen Bassett

San Pedro, CA

July 9, 2019

His website is: https://paradigmresearchgroup.org/

Next week, as promised earlier, I’ll be talking with Don Schmitt about the Festival in Roswell in the beginning of July.

X-Zone Broadcast Network - Robert Sheaffer and Unidentified

Given the interest in History’s Unidentified, with the suggested connections to UFO insiders in the government, I reached out to noted skeptic Robert Sheaffer. I, along with others such as Rich Reynolds and John Greenewald, had wondered about

Robert Sheaffer

Luis Elizondo’s credentials and military background which, to this point, have been ill defined. We all, however, had separated that problem from the Navy fighter pilots’ observations of some sort of unusual craft. I wanted to get the take of someone who had his feet planted firmly on the other side of the fence.

Before getting into that discussion, however, I asked a question that had been bothering me for a long time. Do skeptics ever research a case and find no terrestrial explanation? Do they ever just say, “I don’t know what it was?”

You can listen to the discussion here:

https://www.spreaker.com/episode/18515850

We did talk about Levelland and to be fair, I’m well-versed in that case and the question came spontaneously. Robert hadn’t been prepared for it, but did provide some interesting ideas about it… and I found our discussion about ball lightning, as a possible solution, to be, well, funny. The Air Force used a phenomenon that was not well understood, and that might not even exist as theoretically postulated to explain another phenomenon that was theoretically postulated and might not exist as described.

Given that I was in Roswell on Friday when the last episode aired, I had not seen it. I did, however, read several reviews of it. I was surprised that both Rich Reynolds and Stephen Bassett found the episode wanting. Robert, in our discussion, suggested that the Italian officer featured might not have been as credible as he was portrayed by those on the program.

We did, eventually, get about to the AATIP, the To the Stars Academy and the Navy sightings that were the basis of Unidentified. Robert’s suggestion that the video of the objects that had been played in every episode were recorded in infrared as opposed to normal digital equipment in our normal range of vision. He mentioned an analysis available at Metabunk.org. which might be illustrative of the problem. This link should take you to the proper video:

https://www.metabunk.org/?from=%40

And, you can read Robert’s take on all this at his blog which you can find here:

https://badufos.blogspot.com/

Yes, yes, at the end of the program, I said that Don Schmitt would be the next guest. However, events have over taken me, and some interesting things have been said about the last episode of Unidentified. Given that, and that one of those voices belongs to Stephen Bassett, he will be the guest next week. Don Schmitt will follow the week after that.

New Socorro UFO Landing Information

The other day Rich Reynolds over at the UFO Conjectures blog, sent me a link to a skeptics site. He wondered if I had seen the information published there about the Socorro UFO landing. I had not, but found the information interesting. You can see that here for yourself:

http://www.nmsr.org/socorro.htm

Dave Thomas, who hosts the site, gave me permission to quote from the two new stories that he had put up there. Neither had been available when I wrote Encounter in the Desert. Had they been, I would have mentioned them, though one is a tad bit farfetched.

Thomas published a letter from Ron Landoll, whose mother lived in Socorro at the time of Lonnie Zamora’s sighting. He related what she told him, but I am disinterested in it. The tale is second hand, but in this case, it turns out that this second-hand testimony accurately reflects what his mother told him. I’m ignoring it because the second letter published by Thomas is from Landoll’s mother, Dorothy.

There are some very interesting things in that letter. First, she wrote that she was at home, in Socorro, taking care of the baby (Ron) when her husband called. He was a senior at New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology (NMIMT) and said that the campus was “abuzz with a UFO that had been sighted.”

She turned on the radio and said that it was tuned to KOMA, which was (or is) an Oklahoma City station. I know that at one time it played rock and roll, because when I lived in Texas some four or five years after the Zamora case, I listened to it. But the real point here is that an Oklahoma City radio station was broadcasting the news of the UFO landing within, what minutes, certainly hours, of the landing. They, like other members of the media got onto the story quickly. This is a point that would become somewhat important later when two men from Dubuque, Iowa claimed to have been in Socorro at the time. Their story seemed to surface almost as did that from Zamora, but a careful reading of suggests it was an invention by those men for some reason. Some of the details they gave turned out to be from a different sighting. They’d gotten their facts mixed up.

The next morning, which would be April 25, 1964, the Landolls drove out to the site. Dorothy Landoll wrote to Thomas:

The next morning we drove out to the site. There was a police car sitting off to one side. There were perhaps 7 or 8 cars parked over to the other side and folks just standing around looking. There wasn't a lot to see. There was one round indentation in the dust near where we were standing (I don't know how many total) - about like what our tires were making. There was no indentation into the hard packed ground as some later stories said. I walked up to the little mesquite bush in the middle and it was somewhat blackened. I didn't touch it but it may have been burned a little and might have had a bit of oil on it. We stood around for a bit too and then left to go home.

While it is interesting to have another first-hand account of what was going on that next morning, it is also necessary to point out that there were impressions in the ground. These were seen by nearly everyone else and either the Army or the police had surrounded the markings with rocks to protect them. They were photographed by

Landing impression. Photo courtesy
of the USAF.

several people including members of the military. Jim and Coral Lorenzen published a picture of one of the landing gear imprints in the May 1964 edition of The A.P.R.O. Bulletin. That picture was taken by State Police Sergeant Sam Chavez.

Dorothy Landoll continued her narrative of the incident. She wrote that:

Holm Bursum III was president of the First State Bank and Polo Pineda was his right-hand man [were there]. At the time of the sighting, Polo was acting sheriff… [I worked at the bank and] still took my morning breaks with her, Polo and one of the tellers. On Monday morning we were in the kitchen when Polo came in… He was as mad as a hornet. Ruth asked him what was going on with the UFO. His first comment was that he'd been told that he wasn't to talk to anyone about what had happened but this was his town and he'd talk to whoever he pleased! He sat down with his coffee and proceeded to tell us.

She provided a synopsis of the Zamora tale and then added an interesting note. She wrote:

Lonnie Zamora was pursuing a vehicle going south near the edge of town when something caught his eye. He drove up on the mesa and looked down to see a round craft with two individuals in silver suits walking around it. After a minute or two they got in and it took off. Describing the craft, he said that it had markings on it similar to what Boeing puts on its planes. Lonnie was so upset/scared that he first headed to the Catholic church for confessional and then contacted Polo. Shortly after that, I was in the front of the bank and there were two obviously FBI men - black suits and sunglasses (which they took off as they entered). They went up to one of the tellers and asked for Polo. I went back and told Polo they were looking for him.

I would like to have known if there was anything more to this encounter between the sheriff and the FBI. We know that one FBI agent was there from the beginning. I don’t know of a second FBI agent in the area, but that doesn’t mean that there hadn’t been one.

It also seems a little strange that the FBI would tell the sheriff not to talk about this when the information had been broadcast on April 24, on a radio station that had the power to reach all the way to Socorro. And that station reached into several other states as well. It was one of the powerhouses of that era.

I do know that Captain Richard Holder, an Army officer involved within about 90 minutes, and the FBI agent Arthur Byrnes, had spoken to Zamora, suggesting that he not talk about seeing any beings associated with the sighting, and to keep the true insignia to himself. Byrnes thought the news media might be a little rough of Zamora for seeing “little green men,” and Holder thought keeping the insignia hidden would help to weed out copycats.

Landoll, in her letter to Thomas, also suggests a solution for the Socorro craft that Zamora reported. She wrote:

The following year we were living in Midland, TX, I'm guessing maybe May or June, my husband had brought in the newspaper and it was lying on the couch. I glanced down at it and hollered to my husband that Lonnie's UFO was on the front page of the paper. What I saw fit the exact description that Polo had given us. It was a photo of a LEM with an article. I wish I had kept that newspaper but it simply wasn't anything of consequence at the time.

And, for those of us who have been paying attention, the illustration drawn by Rick Baca, under the guidance of Zamora, does resemble the LEM. But documentation suggests that the prototype LEMs being tested in New

Rick Baca holding the illustration he made in
consultation with Lonnie Zamora. Photo
copyright by Rich Baca.

Mexico at the time were not powered. The testing involved a helicopter. It seems unlikely that this is the explanation, especially when it is remembered that the Captain Hector Quintanilla, the chief of Blue Book at the time, looked into that possibility. He carried a top-secret clearance, and personally checked at Holloman Air Force Base and the White Sands Missile Range to see if they might have the explanation for the sighting.

But this isn’t the only new additions to Thomas’s skeptics website. He received another communication that provided a much more exciting solution for the case. Kevin J. Ashley wrote that he had been a student at the NMIMT a few years later and that he had been interested in the Zamora sighting. According to him, once he graduated and was employed, he told co-workers about the case. He wrote:

In short, I know the answer to the Socorro Saucer Siting [sic] because I talked to one of the people who was on the other side of the arroyo that morning when Officer Zamora showed up. His name is Bruno R____ and he was a mining engineering student at Tech in the early 1960’s…

As I finished the story I noticed one of the other mining engineers who worked there leaning against the door and laughing. When I asked him what he was laughing at he said, “It was me.”

He then told his story about the incident. He said that he and another mining student were bored and looking for something to do that day. They got their hands on some dynamite (possibly from the dynamite shack mentioned in Officer Zamora’s account) and decided to have some fun setting it off under an old overturned metal barrel. The first time they did this the barrel went flying into the air which they found very amusing so they did it a couple more times. (It was probably the third explosion that attracted the attention of Officer Zamora.) Delighted with the result of the barrel being thrown in the air again, they set about putting together one more explosion. As they were bending down getting everything set they were apparently seen from across the arroyo by Officer Zamora. The two of them, who were wearing white coveralls, were seized with a sudden need to get the hell out of there because being caught doing a stupid stunt like this with dynamite would get them both expelled. (Officer Zamora notes in his statement that one of the persons looked at him and seemed very concerned.) Evidently the fuse had already been lit when Bruno and his friend legged it for their vehicle to get away. Office Zamora started toward the site when the explosion went off and as he dived for cover he lost his glasses. What he saw the couple of times he glanced up was the oil drum being projected upwards with flame coming out from the bottom. Bruno and his friend kept a low profile throughout the entire affair after that and I may have been the first person he told this story to. This was in 1980, sixteen years after the affair.

I suppose, we could believe that two college students, in their early 20s would be dumb enough to play with dynamite in that fashion. And we could believe that Zamora somehow concocted a craft that roared off into the sky out of this.

Ashley did, however, elaborate on what he had been told. This according to what Bruno R. told Ashely:

Reading over the account by Officer Zamora his original description seems to fit well with Bruno’s account. It is the “filling in” of details where the mystery arises. For instance, when people went back and found four burn spots, these became a configuration of thrusters from a vehicle, not the scorched remnants of multiple dynamite explosions. Also important is that this was not a hoax. Bruno and his friend were not trying to fool anyone. This is just a case of an observer trying to explain something that they have not seen before.

The problem here, however, is that the four markings were never considered to be marks of the thrusters, but marks made by the landing gear. The area that would have been under the center of the craft had showed evidence of high heat. No evidence that would have been left behind by dynamite explosions was found, which, I believe rules out this explanation.

Tony Bragalia, who is a proponent of the hoax theory, noted that Bruno R. thougt Ashely, had gotten some of the facts right. Bragalia theorized that three students had been involved, Zamora had been chasing a speeder and the roar of the craft did capture his attention. Bragalia also noted that this wasn’t “innocent” fun as suggested by Ashley, but that it was a planned hoax.

Ashley supplies a little more information about Bruno R. Apparently, he lives in Felton, California. Thomas didn’t follow up on the story imediately. I think he thought the same thing as me. It really is rather farfetched. But then, I do believe we should follow up because we don’t know exactly what Bruno said. I have tried to locate him given the information supplied, but have had no success. Bragalia is also trying. His resources in this are better than mine, so there might be more learned.

The real point here is that we have some new information. I find the tale told by Dorothy Landoll quite interesting because she said she was on the scene the next morning. She described what she saw… and importantly, felt no obligation to share that information with anyone until decades after the sighting. I’m hoping to reach her to find out why she didn’t come forward before now.

If I learn anything new about this, I’ll post it here. For now, you can read the entire text of the letters from the Landolls and Ashley at Thomas’s New Mexico Skeptics website, and for the complete story, you can take a look at Encounter in the Desert, which provides quite a bit of new and additional information about the Socorro Landing.

Treasure Quest, Socorro, and the Zamora Symbol

I was watching Treasure Quest when they flashed the document that supposedly launched several expeditions into the Sacambaya region of Bolivia. I really wasn’t paying much attention because, well, we’re in the first couple of episodes where nothing much will happen. On the document were a couple of symbols. One of them I recognized.

Now, we go back to last year when I was working on a book about the UFO landing near Socorro, New Mexico. On the craft, as described by Socorro policeman Lonnie Zamora, was a strange symbol. I’m not going

into the controversy about the “real” symbol. I’m just going to concentrate on the one that was released to the press of an inverted “V” with three lines through it.

The alleged symbol seen on the Socorro spacecraft.

Friends, such as my pal Rich Reynolds, have searched for the symbol in various locations, documents, libraries, and archives, without finding a duplicate. But now, I’ve found one.

I don’t know if there is any significance to this. I don’t know what the symbol on the Treasure Quest document represents. I just happened to notice that the symbols were the same and found it odd

Symbol seen on the Sacambaya Document.

that this symbol is found on a document that was supposedly created a couple of hundred years ago matching one that was allegedly painted on the side of a spacecraft seen in New Mexico in 1964.

This is probably just a coincidence. The world is filed with coincidences. I just found it interesting and wondered if there was a connection…

For those interested in the Socorro landing and the trouble with the symbol, all that is outlined in the book Encounter in the Desert. Yes, I wrote it, but the chapter on the symbol explains the situation. While I believe the real symbol on the side of the craft was different than that originally reported, the real point is that someone came up with the inverted V with the three lines through it, and I just wondered where he got that idea. Is there some sort of terrestrial connection between that seen on that document and that Zamora had seen?

For those interested in more detail about the Socorro symbol controversy, see:

http://kevinrandle.blogspot.com/2016/10/the-socorro-symbol-resolved.html

The "Harassed Rancher" Roswell Article

Over at UFO Conjectures, hosted by Rich Reynolds, he reproduces the July 9, 1947, newspaper, article from the Roswell Daily Record, “Harassed Rancher Who Located ‘Saucer’ Sorry He Told About It,” suggesting that this is the final nail in the Roswell coffin. But I say, “Not so fast.” There are some disturbing things in that article, things that make no sense when you think about them.

According to the article, “Brazel related that on June 14 he and an 8-year-old son, Vernon were about 7 or 8 miles from the ranch house of the J.B. Foster ranch, which he operates, when they came upon a large area of bright wreckage made up on [sic] rubber strips, tinfoil, a rather rough paper and sticks.”

Okay, there is nothing extraordinary here and it sounds for all the world like the remnants of one of the Mogul balloon arrays that were being launched in June and July from Alamogordo. The article also suggests that “on July 4 he, his wife, Vernon and a daughter Betty [actually Bessie], age 14, went back to the spot and gathered up quite a bit of the debris.”

I’ll just overlook the fact that this seems to be a strange thing to have done on July 4, rather than say, June 15, or July 3. I’ll just move on.

Brazel, then on July 7, according to the Daily Record, visited with Sheriff George Wilcox and mentioned he might have had found one of the flying disks. Wilcox called out to the air base and eventually Jesse Marcel “and a man in plain clothes [Sheridan Cavitt]” arrived and they all, meaning Brazel, Marcel and Cavitt drove to the ranch. They gathered up the rest of it and “…tried to make a kite out of it but could not do that and could not find any way to put it back together so that it would fit.”

Now we get a few specifics about size of this debris. He didn’t see it fall or before it was torn up, “so he did not know the size or shape it might have been, but he though it might have been about as large as a table top. The balloon which held it up, if that was how it worked, must have been about 12 feet long… The rubber was smoky gray and scattered over an area about 200 yards in diameter.”

We learn, “When the debris was gathered up the tinfoil, paper, tape, and the sticks made a bundle about three feet long and 7 or 8 inches thick, while the rubber made a bundle about 18 or 20 inches long and about 8 inches thick. In all, he estimated the entire lot would have weighed maybe five pounds.”

According to the newspaper there were no words to be found, although there were letters on some of the parts. Considerable scotch tape and some tape with flowers printed on it had been used in the construction. No string or wire were to be found but there were some eyelets in the paper to indicate that some sort of attachment had been used.

Before we look at the final two paragraphs of the article, which do have some relevance, let’s talk about what we know here. If Brazel went to the Sheriff’s Office on Monday, and if, as Marcel said, he was eating lunch when he got the call, then we know that all this took place in the afternoon. According to the best information available, Brazel, Marcel and Cavitt didn’t leave Roswell until late afternoon, maybe as late as four or four-thirty, and if the drive to the ranch took three hours (which is the time it takes on the modern roads today) then the questions become, “When did they gather the material, where did they take it to attempt to put it together, and how did Marcel get back to Roswell in time to meet with Colonel William Blanchard, the base commander by 8:00 a.m. on Tuesday, July 8?” The timing simply doesn’t work because they would have arrived at the ranch about dusk and couldn’t have gathered the material in the dark and do the other things suggested by the newspaper, not to mention that the debris had already been gathered.

But let’s back up even a little more. Bill Brazel said that his father had taken some of the debris into town to show the sheriff. If this is true, and the material that Mack Brazel had found was as described in the newspaper, why did Marcel and Cavitt drive out to the ranch? Wouldn’t one of them, if not both of them, recognize the debris as mundane? Why go to the ranch at all? Brazel, along with family members, had apparently collected it all on July 4, again according to the newspaper. There was nothing to see in the field, and since there were samples of it in the Sheriff’s Office, there was no need to drive to the ranch to see what would have been an empty field.

If we believe this article, neither Marcel nor Cavitt recognized the material that Brazel brought into town. Cavitt, on the other hand, told Colonel Richard Weaver that he had recognized the debris in the field as a balloon as soon as he saw it laying out there. He didn’t explain why he hadn’t bothered to mention this to Marcel at the time or to Blanchard when he got back to Roswell.

If we look at the descriptions about the amount of material, there doesn’t seem to be all that much. Not a field filled with debris, but a small area that had been cleaned by the Brazel family. There was absolutely no reason to pursue this any further. There wasn’t a problem with who would clean it up because the family had already done that. In fact, at one time Bessie Brazel claimed that they had collected it all into three or four burlap bags and stored it under the porch of the ranch house.

The debris displayed in General Ramey's

office, July 8, 1947.

Had this been a Mogul array, there would have been evidence of more than a single balloon; there would have been multiple rawin targets (if you follow the illustration for Flight No. 2, but Flight No. 5 had no rawin targets), lots of cord to link it all, and given the size of the arrays, they probably would have been spread out over more than 200 yards. The descriptions given in the newspaper (and the photographs taken in Fort Worth) were more consistent with a single balloon and a single rawin, not a complete array with multiple balloons and multiple rawins.

When we get to the last two paragraphs, more trouble develops. Brazel said, according to the newspaper, that he had found two weather-observation balloons on the ranch but what he had found didn’t resemble them. He said, “I’m sure what I found was not any weather observation balloon.”

Of course, had it been Mogul, this was technically accurate because the function of Mogul was not weather observation. But, the Mogul arrays were made up of neoprene weather balloons and possibly some rawin radar targets, cord linking all the balloons together in a long line, sonobuoys to detect the sounds of detonation of atomic bombs, and devices to attempt to keep the balloons aloft. These would “dribble” out the sand of the ballast as the balloons began to descend.

The point is that if we read the article, it raises more questions than it answers, suggests that there was no reason for Marcel and Cavitt to drive to the ranch, suggests a time line that is impossible given the timing and the distances, provides a description of a single balloon and single target, exactly what appears in the photographs taken in General Roger Ramey’s office on the afternoon of July 8.

In other words, there is actually nothing in this article that eliminates any of the answers for the Roswell crash including both Mogul and the alien, and nothing in it to support any of the answers. It is a self-contradictory document that obscures more than it reveals. As evidence, it does nothing for either side of the argument. While skeptics can point to the description of the debris and say that it is a balloon the believers can point to the last two paragraphs and say that Brazel would have recognized the debris as a balloon had that been what it was. This is just another of the inexplicable items that pop up in this tale.

Rob McConnell Interviews Tom Carey

Rob McConnell, on the X-Zone Broadcast Network interviewed Tom Carey about the Roswell Slides, and Carey said some very interesting things. You can hear the interview here: 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oQ0V-Xuzzp0

Tom Carey

We learn from Carey (at about 04:15 into the interview) that it was Joe Beason who contacted him after Beason had attempted to interest Stan Friedman in the slides. Friedman, according to Carey, was too busy to follow the lead and suggested Carey to Beason. This bothers me because it would seem that Stan, who has been very protective of his leads about Roswell, handed to Carey what could have been the most important evidence of the Roswell case. I wonder if there was something in that communication between Stan and Beason that suggested to Stan that he be wary. 

At the 5:24 (all times approximate) point, Carey said that he received an email with the scan of two slides in it. 

At 6:31, according to Carey, Beason suggested that the slides were related to Roswell. 

At 11:57, Carey said that when he first saw the slides, he thought the image matched the descriptions of the aliens that he had received from various witnesses who had claimed to have seen the bodies. 

At 15:46, in what is an important point, Carey said that Beason told him that the codes on the edge of the film matched that used by Kodak in 1947. The problem is that that code was used for motion picture film and that slide film had a different coding system (though there seems to be some suggestion that some of the slide film might have had the motion picture code on it). The problem is that when we were all shown the whole frame from one of the slides, there is no coding on it. That coding didn’t appear on every slide, but was spread out through the length of the roll of film. 

I had noticed that the slides in play were number 9 and number 11, but number 10 was missing. Carey mentioned this as well (at 17:51), but said that Beason claimed that slide number 10 was lost. Carey mentioned that this seemed to be a problem, but clearly it wasn’t a big one for him. I wondered, of course, if what was seen on number 10 wouldn’t have clearly identified the image. 

At 20:36, Carey talked about the anthropologists that he attempted to get to review the slide. He said that he sent it to the smartest anthropologist he knew and that man told him the image was not of a human. 

Screen Grab for the documentary. This is close to the

image that Tom Carey shared with anthropologists.

Rob asked, if he had permission because of the non-disclosure agreements he and Don Schmitt had signed. Carey said that Adam Dew, who had partnered with Beason, had produced a trailer of a documentary he planned, and in that documentary, the image on the slide was revealed, possibly by mistake. This image was seen at an angle on a computer screen so that those outside the inner circle now had a poor image with which to work. This lousy image is what Carey was sharing with those anthropologists whose opinion he wanted. He said that the idea of UFOs and Roswell was toxic so that the anthropologists wouldn’t discuss it with him. He gave the impression that these anthropologists refused to even look at the image. 

At 29:00 he mentioned that MUFON has an anthropologist as one of its consultants and the consultant thought it was a genetically deformed human. Then Carey mentioned that some of the anthropologists provided opinions off the record which, of course, is not the same thing as refusing to even look at the slide which is what he had claimed. They too seemed to believe in some sort of genetic deformity but according to Carey, no one said that it was a mummy (which is strange because that was the thought that most of us had even looking at the poor image captured from the documentary trailer). Of course, the real problem is that he was giving them the poor image and not the best resolution scans he had which might contributed to the lack of cooperation. 

In a big revelation, found at 36:28, Carey is talking about the logistics of the situation with everyone involved scattered over two countries. The five principals, however, met in Chicago long before the great reveal in Mexico City. At this meeting, according to Carey, they were shown the slides to prove that slides actually existed. This brings up lots of questions, especially about how clear those slides were and if they were projected on a screen… which would provide a better look at the background, meaning it should have been obvious that it was a museum setting, and if the placard which became so critical to the story could be read. Two or three minutes later, Carey again addressed the problem of reading the placard and how no one could do it at that time. 

At 40:07, after Rob McConnell asked him about the image and the identity, Carey explained that although the placard does suggest it was a child, Carey didn’t believe that the image on the slide was a two-year-old child, because it was too tall. He doesn’t believe that it is a 900-year-old mummy but something that had died more recently. He doesn’t believe it was the child found by Palmer in 1898, though it resembles it. He seemed to base this belief on the size of the mummy, but he, like everyone else is working off the image on the slide so the analysis of the size of the image can be disputed and given the documentation that exists, it is clear to nearly everyone else that the image is of a child. No measurements on the mummy can be made because the remains have been returned to the native peoples, as, of course, they should have been. 

At 57:03, Carey makes the statement that the mummy in the museum is “Not our guy.” 

This is a very interesting interview with Tom Carey providing his take on how this fiasco developed. You can read more about it on this blog beginning in 2015 or head over to Rich Reynolds UFO Conjectures to review his take on much of this. Just look for Roswell Slides in the search engine provided. 

And, for a differing take on this given by the other participant, you can listen to my interview with Don Schmitt. You can hear it here: 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fo-gK4nwZ_k 

Finally, for those who would like a more concise review, a long, heavily footnoted chapter in Roswell in the 21^st Century details this information and also notes some of the arrogance by those who had seen the slides before the big reveal in Mexico City.

Turning the Field Over to the Youngsters

Several years ago, over at UFO Iconoclasts, now known as UFO Conjectures, Rich Reynolds thought it was time for all us geezers to get out of UFO research and turn the field over to the youngsters. His theory seemed to be that we’d gotten too set in our ways, weren’t coming up with anything new and had had seventy years to find a solution and we hadn’t done it. The young blood, not locked into any one theory, would think in new and innovative ways, progressing rapidly if we’d just get out of their way.

When I was studying for a Ph.D., one of the things we learned was to make a literature search of our topic to ensure that we weren’t merely covering old ground. The literature search would provide a springboard into new arenas and new thought so that we could build on what had gone on before rather than just duplicating research. We could advance the field, the theory, and the thought rather than just repeat the same mistakes that had been made before. We could actually contribute something new.

All well and good but in the last year, as I see more and more of what the new blood has brought to the field and the advances they have allegedly made, I suspect that Rich was wrong. The new blood and the younger researchers are doing nothing to advance the work. They are just grabbing onto the same nonsense that has distracted and derailed us. They don’t bother with any sort of literature search that today, with the Internet, is so much simpler. They just keep filling the air with the same tired rhetoric, learning nothing from the mistakes we made or advancing thought at all. It is a case of the same old same old.

You want an example?

Sure. I’ve been engaged in a discussion of the MJ-12 Manual SOM 1-01. It suffers from the same problem of all the other MJ-12 documents which is a lack of provenance, but that seems to make no difference to many. We don’t know where it came from, we don’t know what agency is responsible for it (though the logo on the front seems to suggest the War Department which disappeared in 1947 when the Department of Defense was created) and there seem to be anachronisms in it. It was suggested that wreckage from crashed and recovered UFOs be sent to Area 51/S-4. The trouble is that when the manual was allegedly written, there were no facilities at Groom Lake as it was known then to house the wreckage and no personnel available to exploit it if something did arrive.

One of those believing the manual was real, provided a link to a declassified document to prove that the term, Area 51, was in use because it appeared on maps of that part of Nevada. But that source also described exactly what was there in April 1955. It said, “On 12 April 1955 Richard Bissell and Col. Osmund Ritland... flew over Nevada with Kelly Johnson in small Beechcraft plane piloted by Lockheed's chief test pilot, Tony LeVier. They spotted what appeared to be an airstrip by a salt flat known as Groom Lake, near the northeast corner of the Atomic Energy Commission's (AEC) Nevada Proving Ground. After debating about landing on the old strip, LeVier set the plane down on the lakebed, and all four walked over to examine the strip. The facility had been used during World War II as an aerial gunnery range for Army Air Corps pilots. From the air the strip appeared to be paved, but on closer inspection it turned out to have originally been fashioned from compacted earth that had turned to ankle-deep dust after more than a decade of disuse. If LeVier had attempted to land on the airstrip, the plane would probably had nosed over when the wheels sank into the loose soil, killing or injuring all of the key figures in the U-2 project.”

(see:  http://nsarchive.gwu.edu/NSAEBB/NSAEBB434/docs/U2%20-%20Chapter%202.pdf)

What was the response? Well, maybe there were facilities in the area they didn’t see. Maybe there was a secret, underground AEC base. Maybe the CIA historian who wrote that section lied about it to keep the secret safe. No evidence of any of that. Just some wild speculation to reject the evidence that there was nothing there to be seen by those who had actually been there.

That same document also said, “Bissel and his colleagues all agreed that Groom Lake would make an ideal site for testing the U-2 and training its pilots. Upon returning to Washington, Bissell discovered that Groom Lake was not part of the AEC proving ground. After consulting with Dulles, Bissell and Miller asked the Atomic Energy Commission to add the Groom Lake area to its real estate holdings in Nevada. AEC Chairman Adm. Lewis Strauss readily agreed, and President Eisenhower also approved the addition of this strip of wasteland, known by its map designation as Area 51 to the Nevada Test Site.”

This would seem to be a fatal flaw in a document that has no provenance. We have a description of the area that would eliminate it as a site to send anything at that time. There was nothing there except an invisible facility. Doesn’t this one point actually make defense of the manual a very shaky proposition? Unless something else, with a proper provenance can be found, shouldn’t this guide our thinking?

Is there more?

Carlos Allende/Carl Allen

Well yes. We’ve just had another example which is the Allende Letters. I’m not going through that again but will say there is nothing left to this myth. Allende, who was born Carl Allen said that he had made it all up. Robert Goerman found Allen’s family and they said that Allen made up things like this all the time. Some of the problems discussed in the annotations in the book sent to the Navy have since been solved. Here I think of the disappearance of the Stardust, a BOAC passenger plane that disappeared allegedly in sight of the airport at Santiago, Chile. A decade and a half ago, the wreckage was found, providing us with a fatal flaw in those notations. For more details see:

http://kevinrandle.blogspot.com/2006/08/disappearing-aircraft-part-1-stardust.html

More?

How about the Bermuda Triangle?

Back in the early 1970s, I believed there was something mysterious going on in the Bermuda Triangle. The list of ships and planes that had been lost in the area seemed to be overwhelming and nearly every one of them was gone without a trace. I remember being at a conference in Denver, Colorado, when Jim Lorenzen explained that it was truly mysterious because there was a case in which five Navy aircraft flying formation all disappeared. There was just no way that mechanical failure, weather, or about anything else could explain that disappearance.

440th C-119 like this one lost
in the Bermuda Triangle.

In the mid-1970s I spotted a book, The Bermuda Triangle Mystery – Solved by David Lawrence Kusche. I bought it thinking that I needed to understand what the skeptics were saying if I was going to be able to intelligently refute their arguments. But the book was filled with documentation and explanations that made perfect sense. Couple that to my talking with members of the 440^th Tactical Airlift Wing who had lost a plane in the Triangle and who told me the plane had crashed and the solution seemed confirmed. Not only that, they had bits of the wreckage to prove it… one of the mysteries solved to my satisfaction without having to read Kusche’s book. See:

http://kevinrandle.blogspot.com/2014/02/the-bermuda-triangle-and-c-119.html

Oh, and in the Navy records concerning the disappearance of Flight 19, we learn that five aircraft disappear when the flight leader orders it. He was hopelessly lost, flying around in circles and ignoring the advice from the rest of the squadron. Finally he said, “When the first man is down to ten gallons, we’ll all ditch together.” And that explains how five aircraft disappear at once.

I could go on, but need I? Sure there are those of us who are older that still subscribe to these things and there are those who are younger who do not. We older folks have learned ways of conducting the research that does provide us with some answers. Those younger folks are sometimes too willing to accept what they are told as the truth without asking some additional questions. I learned that lesson after believing some of those who told wonderful stories of their involvement in the Roswell UFO crash and reading Stolen Valor about all these people, men and women, lying about their military service, especially that in Vietnam. In other words, many of those telling us stories about the Roswell crash were lying about it and this included some of the most important witnesses.

Where does all this leave us? It would seem that we, of the old guard (aka old school) could provide some useful tips on conducting these investigations if those who are new school would bother to listen. This is where Rich slipped off the rails… we should be working together, those of us from years gone by providing information and guidance, and those who are relatively young providing new ways of looking at UFOs and providing new theories on what is going on. One group shouldn’t be forced out by another and all should be open to reevaluating what we sometimes think of as the proof positive. There is room for everyone if we’re all smart enough to recognize the abilities and experience of each other.

An Experiment about Page Views

A couple of days ago Rich Reynolds over at the UFO Conjectures blog put up a brief article that has something to do with Roswell. Apparently some of his readers took issue with his return to Roswell and made comment on it. Reynolds said that each mention of Roswell boosted the page views of the blog and he provided a screen shot to prove his point. There was a spike on it. And in the comments section, there was a post by Gilles Fernandez remarking that he had just posted to his website a rebuttal of one of Jaime Maussan’s expert’s latest comments on the Roswell Slides.

I thought I would perform an experiment about this and because, as Gilles had mentioned, Jaime Maussan had released another “expert’s” opinion of the image on the Roswell Slides, this was a timely story. I believed that the issue had been settled about forty-eight hours after the Mexico City disaster and while some of those original participants in the slides fiasco were reluctant to let go, it was clear to the vast majority of people that the image was not an alien. To prove that it was, Maussan published another opinion on why it was alien. All this, I thought, would be a good target for the experiment.

I posted a short article about the Roswell Slides and within minutes had the first response to it. There was an immediate spike in the page views, and oddly, a dip and then another spike and twelve hours later an even larger spike. Clearly the Roswell name brought in page views. Just add Roswell to the title and people came to see if there was anything new.

Last year, as the run up to the Great Reveal was a major topic, this blog was averaging more than three times the normal page views that I see today… and Roswell is an on-going topic that peaks the interest of those out there who visit blogs like this one. (But then, so did the articles on Oak Island which doubled the daily average.)

All this really proved was that Reynolds’ observation was accurate and you can pull people to your blog by mentioning Roswell. That some still believe that the Roswell Slides show an alien gives you a feeling for the state of UFO research. That others attempt to hijack the Slides, dragging in other nutty ideas isn’t all that surprising either.

In any case, the experiment revealed the high interest in Roswell and provides us with a clue as to how to drive traffic to a blog, if that is the only mission of a blog. Just stick Roswell in the title and they will come.