Chasing Footnotes (Sort of): Kingman Edition (Update 1)

(Blogger’s note: This is the result of weeks of research into the various tales about the Kingman UFO crash. David Rudiak assisted by chasing other aspects of what was happening in Arizona in the time frame. While this is not exactly chasing footnotes, there is a component of that here. Given what I have learned, this is probably not the end of the investigation, but I have reached a point where I believe I have straightened out part of the problems with the tale and have unraveled some of the dating errors. I suppose I should say that this is something of a work in progress, but given that many of the primary players are no longer with us, some of the questions might never be answered.)

Kingman, Arizona. Photograph by Kevin Randle.

Long after I thought we were through with the Kingman UFO crash, it has been resurrected again. This latest round began when Christopher Mellon, who is described as a former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Intelligence, released an email exchange that was partially redacted. We don’t know who the recipient was other than a senior member of the government but given what we have seen of senior government officials in the last decade or so, I’m not sure that it is particularly impressive. Many of them seem to accept UFO cases that we know are less than credible and demonstrate little overall knowledge of the topic, even with their alleged government insider status.

In the email Mellon wrote, “Right now we haven’t gone that far back. We’re dealing with the recovered UAP that landed in Kingman, Arizona in the 50s… We now know the management structure and security control systems and ownership of the C/R.”

C/R is crash/retrieval, which is a term invented by the late Len Stringfield as he began his research into this area of the UFO phenomena.

Mellon continued, “We also know who recovers landed or crashed UAPs under what authorities. We also know that a still highly classified memo by a Secretary of the Air Force in the 1950s is still in effect to maintain the cover on UAPs. We also know the SES-2 who’s the Air Force gatekeeper.”

That email tells us nothing that we didn’t already know or what we suspected, and it does not provide names or organizations that can be easily accessed. We could, of course, learn the names of all the Secretaries of the Air Force in the 1950s, but I suspect all of them are dead by now and if we found the right one alive, he would tell us nothing. We can’t verify much of anything in the email, and it provides us with no real corroboration about the Kingman crash other than mentioning something that has been in the public arena since the mid-1970s. Remember that timeframe.

I’ll note here that Mellon is associated with others who have been identified with current UAP research including crash/retrievals. This means that Mellon heard about Kingman from those others. We’re still left with no first-hand witnesses other than the unreliable Arthur Stansel who begin this whole thing when talking with two teenagers about UFOs. All we have now is a former government official suggesting that there was a UFO crash near Kingman without providing the date or anything in the way of evidence. An email with all the critical data redacted provides us with nothing useful and provides no clues as to where to go to learn more.

Like so many of the other crashed UFO tales, this one was originally told by a single witness without much in the way of corroboration. Or rather, a single identified witness, and then some testimony from another source that suggests corroboration for the first witness, but information that came long after the Kingman story had become known throughout the country.

That second witness is second hand, allegedly having heard the story from her late husband. And then a hint of additional witnesses that seemed to have leaped on the Kingman bandwagon later. In other words, in the final analysis, it is not a strong case but seemed to have the potential to become one.

But then, as I noted recently, the case was opened again when Mellon released the email. That original story, first reported by Raymond Fowler in the April 1976 issue of Official UFO is not convincing. Without some additional corroboration, additional witnesses and some documentation for verification, it would be impossible to accept as true, and it is next to impossible to verify. Remember, this was 1976 when virtually no one had heard of Roswell and crashed saucer tales were rejected out of hand by nearly every UFO researcher.

Fowler, however, accepted the report as true because he had personally interviewed the witness, had a signed affidavit by that witness, and a few documents that seemed to support the tale. The witness, Arthur Stansel, had an impressive resume and was a respected engineer who had worked on several important government projects. The evidence was flimsy, but it did exist. And that put Fowler, at least in the minds of some, ahead of most who had found other single witness UFO crash/retrieval cases.

I covered all this in a long post about the early history of the Kingman crash and you can read that post here if you are unfamiliar with the case:

https://kevinrandle.blogspot.com/2025/04/kingman-ufo-crash-again.html

At the risk of becoming redundant, I’ll note here, because it helps understand what is coming next, more about this on aspect of the Kingman story because there is a long history of research into it. According to Len Stringfield’s 1980 MUFON Symposium paper, Retrievals of the Third Kind, Cincinnati researcher Charles Wilhelm said that a man identified only as Major Daly had told Wilhelm’s father that in April 1953, he had been flown to an unknown destination to examine the remains of a crashed flying saucer. He had been blindfolded and driven to a point out in the desert where it was hot and sandy. Inside a tent the blindfold was removed, and he was taken to another location where he saw a metallic ship, twenty-five to thirty feet in diameter. He saw no signs of damage. He spent two days analyzing the metal from the ship, which he claimed was not native to Earth.

Len Stringfield

Daly was not allowed to enter the ship, though he did note that the entrance, or hatch, was about four or five feet high and two to three feet wide and was open. When he finished his analysis, he was escorted from the area.

Daly’s information didn’t agree exactly with that given by Arthur Stansel, but it was close enough to raise some questions. The discrepancies can be explained by the point of view of the teller. He saw things from a different angle and under slightly different circumstances. It does seem to provide some corroboration for the Kingman crash story if Daly’s date is correct. The real problem is that it is second-hand, and that is always problematic. In fact, no one knows if Daly exists, or existed at all, though I will note that Len Stringfield was a careful investigator. And I will note that Daly didn’t mention Kingman, only that he was flown to an unknown location destination. We might be complicating the matter by assuming that it was Kingman in 1953.

Stringfield also reported on a man who was in the National Guard (though I wonder if it wasn’t the Air Guard, a distinction that those who haven’t served in either might not make) claimed that he saw the delivery of three bodies from a crash site in Arizona in 1953. He mentioned that the creatures had been packed in dry ice, were about four feet tall with large heads and brownish skin, which does corroborate Werner to a limited extent.

Stringfield, in his 1994 self-published monograph UFO Crash/Retrievals: A Search for Proof in a Hall of Mirrors, reported still another claim suggesting a crash in Kingman. According to Stringfield, “My new source JLD, a resident of Ohio, north of Cincinnati, in a surprising disclosure claimed that a close relative, the late Mr. Holly, who had served in a top command (in a defense department capacity [whatever that might mean]) at Wright-Patterson in 1953, told him about one of two crashes in Arizona. He also told him three bodies, one severely burned, and parts of the wrecked craft, were delivered to the base.”

Those two reports, Major Daly and JLD are the classic friend of a friend stories. The information doesn’t come from the source, but from someone else who heard it from someone else and when you are that far removed from the original source, the chances for mistakes, misunderstandings and confabulation increase. Yes, the information is interesting, and it does provide little corroboration for the Kingman case, but the fact is, such reports are quite dubious and of little evidentiary value.

There is more second-hand information about Kingman. A woman, June Kaba, who worked in the Parachute Branch (WCEEH-1) at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, reported that a sergeant, who she didn’t identify, and who had a special clearance needed to enter the office, claimed that he had just come in on a flight from the Southwest. Thinking about the event years later, she had believed he was talking about the Roswell crash, but an examination of her work history documents, supplied to me, showed that she had not been working at Wright-Patterson until the early 1950s. That excluded Roswell from the discussion.

June (Kaba) Crain in her backyard.

Further checking suggested that the incident she remembered took place in late 1952 or early 1953. The sergeant told all the people in that small office about bringing alien bodies to Wright Field. Naturally, the people in the office didn’t believe the story because it was so outrageous.

Within an hour, however, the base commander, Colonel (later Brigadier General) C. Pratt Brown, arrived at the office. He explained the story the sergeant told was just rumor and speculation and that no one was to repeat these wild rumors anywhere. In fact, he brought an official form for them to sign, explaining that they were not to tell anyone what they had heard under penalty of a $20,000 fine and twenty years in jail.

The problem is clearly that the secretary did not remember the exact time frame, location or the name of the sergeant. To suggest this was part of the Kingman case, we must resort to speculation based on the limited documentation of her employment experience at Wright-Patterson and her original claim that it had to do with Roswell. The only crash tale that fits her work history and mentions a craft and bodies is the Kingman event. That connection is extremely weak.

I am bothered by the colonel coming around to tell them to forget it, that the story is just a rumor and then demanding they sign statements requiring them to keep the tale to themselves. The only thing the colonel did by doing this was tell them the story was true. He hadn’t come around to stop other rumors, only this one. Then he underscored the importance of it by demanding they take an oath of secrecy.

Jim Clarkson spent a great deal of time investigating the June Kaba story, though she was now using the name June Crain. Clarkson’s assessment was that she was telling the truth, and he published, online, a long transcript of his interview with Crain. That transcript is still available and can be found at https://www.ufocasebook.com/pdf/crainclarkson.pdf. Clarkson also wrote a book about this, Tell My Story – June Crain, the Air Force and UFOs. Clarkson has also been interviewed on several podcasts and radio shows for those who wish to dive down this rabbit hole. The connection to Kingman is speculation without corroboration and is based on the time she worked at Wright-Pat and little else.

There is still another complication to the Kingman crash case. After I published the long article about Kingman, there were several comments that supplied the same set of facts to me. That, of course, caught my attention, and I started down those rabbit holes, much to my horror. Keeping this in something of a chronological order in my investigation, the first new source  I found was Preston Dennett’s UFOs Over Arizona. He wrote:

Another possible source [for corroboration for the Kingman crash] comes from Leonard Stringfield. Reportedly, the witness was taken in April (May? [note in Dennett’s book]) 1953 to a desert area to examine the crash of a flying saucer. The witness described the object as thirty feet in diameter. It had no apparent damage. He was not allowed to enter the ship, but did see a hatchway about four feet tall and two feet wide. His job was to analyze the metal. He spent the next two days on the site. After his tests, he concluded that the object was not constructed on Earth.

In 1977, after Stringfield gave a lecture talking about the Kingman UFO crash, a National Guard employee approached him and said that back in 1953 he was stationed at Wright-Patterson AFB in Ohio. He was there when a group of crates arrived from a UFO crash site in Arizona. The crates, he learned, contained three humanoid bodies. They were four feet tall with large heads and brownish skin. Each was packed in dry ice to preserve it. One of bodies was apparently female.

That information from Dennett, who didn’t supply complete sources, did mention Stringfield’s UFO Crash/Retrievals: Search for Proof in a Hall of Mirrors, which is Status Report VII, dated February 1994. Stringfield wrote:

In spite of interruptive moments of feeling subservient to the negative influences of UFO crash/retrieval surreality, there are some moments of reward, too. One, euphorically happened March 24, 1993, when I spoke before an open-to-the-public meeting at the Milford Public Library near Cincinnati…

In my extemporaneous talk, I reviewed my crash/retrieval research in which I cited the first of my firsthand sources in 1977, who revealed that he had witnessed three alien bodies at Wright-Patterson AFB fresh from a crash in Arizona, 1953. This revelation prompted a member of the audience to stand up and ask that I repeat the place and time and number of retrieved aliens. When I finished my talk, he took me aside to reveal that he had information that would back up my 1977 source 100 percent.

The case in question, published first in the paper I had presented at the MUFON Symposium in Dayton, Ohio, 1978, and republished, in greater detail in Status Report II, 1980…

All this is good, but according to Stringfield, the man became unapproachable once he became a leader in the National Guard. Once again, we are left with intriguing information but no way to verify it. We have second and third-hand sources of information and speculation that they are related to the Kingman crash though there is no direct link to it. We still have no solid information.

Jenny Randles, in her UFO Retrievals: The recovery of Alien Spacecraft, mentions much of this and adds a wrinkle to it. She reported, “However, the earliest reference seems to have been made to MUFON researcher Richard Hall in April 1964. He was told the story by a future commander about whom Hall said, ‘I could not imagine a less likely hoaxer.’ He spoke about a 1953 crash in the Arizona area from which four small bodies were recovered. The descriptions of the craft and of the bodies were, again, extraordinarily consistent.”

This same claim was made by Preston Dennett in UFOs Over Arizona. He wrote, “The next hint of the case was perhaps revealed to Richard Hall back in 1964. Hall spoke with a man (soon to be a commander in Vietnam) who said that, in 1953, A UFO crashed in Arizona.”

This revelation is important because it predates the Stansel claim by about a decade. I needed to find the original source of this claim and contacted several UFO researchers who had a long history with Hall. No one was able to provide the source including Randles. Her response indicated an uninterest in this and possibly all things related to UFOs. Given her quick, but unenthusiastic response, I didn’t want to bother her again about it

I finally did track down the source of this early date and learned that those reporting on it had misread part of Stringfield’s 1980 MUFON presentation. Stringfield wrote that he had a copy of a letter dated April 8, 1964, that he received from Richard Hall in 1977. That letter from Hall to Stringfield caused the confusion. It said:

Here at the school there is an instructor who, during the Korean conflict was an adjutant to an Air Force General at one of our New Mexico proving grounds. I got the following story from him.

In 1953 a flying saucer crash-landed near the proving grounds. Air Force personnel immediately rushed to the area and found the saucer, unharmed and unoccupied with doors open. Upon searching the surrounding area they came upon the bodies of the saucer’s four occupants, all dead.

Shortly after this certain top level personnel were given the true saucer story by Air Force officials. My source was included in this. They were shown the bodies of the four occupants of the ship, which he described as three to four feet tall, hairless, and otherwise quite human in appearance. An autopsy had been performed on one of them to try to determine the cause of death. No cause for their deaths was ever found. Also at this time they were shown three saucers. He described then as ovoid, with a length of twenty-five feet and a width of thirteen feet. They were shown the interior as well, and there were no visible means of control, no visible propulsion. He told me that since that time the Air Force has been working intensely, though unsuccessfully, at trying to discover the means of propulsion.

I can vouch for the validity of this information as well as the reliability of the person I got it from. This you can state as a positive fact. Due to the fact that he is still affiliated with the armed forces he prefers that his identity remain hidden. He also told me that this is top secret information which is highly guarded to prevent leaks.

Stringfield made no personal comment about the information but quoted from Dick Hall’s cover letter dated December 23, 1977. This indicated, not to put too fine a point on it, that Hall had received the 1964 letter in 1977, which makes Hall’s involvement much later than believed. Hall wrote:

The chap mentioned in the letter is the one Todd Zechel finally tracked down and I went to interview the man and had a face-to-face meeting with him here in the Washington area. He was here on some church-related business. As former aid to a general and command pilot in Vietnam, I couldn’t imagine a less likely hoaxer. He clearly took UFOs seriously. He wouldn’t directly talk about what he had seen, but in company with the general, they saw the evidence at Langley AFB in Virginia. Also our informant told us of an Air Force pilot telling him of the southwest crash story.

This is not a ringing endorsement of Zechel’s claims. The unnamed source said they saw evidence at Langley AFB, but didn’t necessarily say it was a craft or bodies. This simply doesn’t validate the letter or Zechel’s claims about it.

Following additional leads, I looked at Hall’s book, Uninvited Guests, published in1988. There are reports of three crashes in the southwest in 1953 mentioned there. Hall wrote:

1953; near White Sands, New Mexico. Army helicopter pilot who served as an aide to Air Force General states that a “crashed saucer” of ovoid shape (about 18 ft. x 30 ft,) and bodies about 4 ft. tall were retrieved and later stored (at least temporarily) at Langley AFB, Viriginia. Investigator: Todd Zechel. [Zechel is the source of the 1964 letter that has caused so much confusion].

1953; Arizona (crash site); Wright-Patterson AFB (viewing site). Air National Guard Commander reports seeing four alien bodies in crates being offloaded in hangar, packed in dry ice. Bodies approximately 4 ft. tall, large heads. Report coincides in all major particulars with following reference and could very well be an independent confirmation. Investigator: Len Stringfield.

May 21, 1953; Kingman, Arizona. A project engineer [Stansel] on Air Force contract with the Atomic Energy Commission reports being one of a group of specialists taken to the crash site in a bus with blacked-out windows to study the craft. He observed a supposedly alien body about 4 ft. tall in a nearby tent. Investigator: Ray Fowler.

A bit of commentary on these entries by Hall in his book. Todd Zechel was not a reliable source and is largely responsible for much of the nonsense around the Del Rio UFO crash. It is clear that he invented testimony, changed dates and was more concerned about publishing a book than the accuracy of the information that he would put in it. I have reported this problem on this blog several times as much of it relates to Robert Willingham, who also radically altered the story on multiple occasions and who claimed to be a retired Air Force colonel. His tale was completely fabricated, and Willingham was never a commissioned officer in the Air Force. For those interested in this rabbit hole, you can read more about Willingham here:

https://kevinrandle.blogspot.com/2014/04/eisenhower-briefing-document-mj-12-and.html

https://kevinrandle.blogspot.com/2010/07/del-rio-ufo-crash-and-mj-12.html

This, I believe should provide more than sufficient information about the Zechel/Willingham collaboration. It outlines the major changes in the Del Rio story and the deception practiced by both Zechel and Willingham. I discussed it beyond these two postings. Type Willingham into the provided search engine to find more information to reinforce my conclusions.

Dick Hall

One other point that bothers me. The tale mentions an Army helicopter pilot who was the aide to an Air Force general. Neither are identified nor does it seem likely that an Air Force general would have an Army pilot for an aide. Those appointed aides to general officers are normally from the same branch of the service. The general’s aide is not only a position to aid the general but is training for those officers considered for promotion to higher levels.

In the second entry, there is a question that didn’t seem to be answered. The unidentified witness said, “[Witness] reports seeing four alien bodies in crates being offloaded in hangar.” Elsewhere, the witness talked about seeing the crates being offloaded by a forklift. This is not clear, but there is nothing to suggest that the crates were open at that point. How is it the witness was able to see the bodies, describe them and even mention that they were packed in dry ice? This makes me wonder if the witness saw the bodies or just the crates. Later someone told him what had been inside of the crates, but he didn’t see anything himself.

There is still another complication to this which I believe has caused a dating problem which suggests knowledge earlier than he had it. Hall referenced an article in the July/August issue of the International UFO Reporter. He wrote there:

1953: Arizona: Businessman-pilot, former Naval Intelligence officer. Observed bodies in crates being off-loaded at Wright-Patterson AFB from Arizona crash site. Direct witness interviews and background check by Len Stringfield. Witness discouraged from further cooperation by reference to security oath. Report coincides in all major particulars, with the following reference and could well be an independent confirmation. (Source: Stringfield, 1980 monograph, Case A-1.

This information was gathered by Stringfield who wrote that in the summer of 1977, after he had been at the first meeting of the Cincinnati Chapter of the World War Wings, that a businessman approached him and told, according to Stringfield, “I have seen the bodies. That’s approximately where the saucer crashed [indicating northwestern Arizona on a map]. It was in a desert area, but I don’t know the exact location. I’m almost positive it happened in 1953.”

He added, “I saw the bodies at Wright-Patterson. I was in the right place at the right time.”

Here’s where the tale gets dicey. He said that he stood inside a hangar, about twelve feet away, “peering at five crates on a forklift.” There was a guard close by, but he apparently didn’t remove the witness, who remains unidentified. Stringfield wrote that his informant had heard that one of the creatures had been alive. They gave it oxygen, but that failed to save it.

Wright-Patterson AFB. Photograph by Kevin Randle.

The other strange comment was that the informant believed that one of the creatures was female. He said, “Either one of the aliens had an exceedingly muscular chest or the bumps were female breasts.”

In Hall’s 1985 article, there is another notation that complicates all of this. Hall wrote:

1966: Wright-Patterson AFB, Ohio: Ohio businessman, former Army Intelligence officer. Observed alien bodies in storage. Direct interviews by Len Stringfield. (Stringfield, 1980 monograph A-3.)

Both these cases have remarkable coincidences in them. Both don’t take place at the crash site but instead at Wright-Pat. Both are reported by former military intelligence officers, and both come from individuals described as businessmen. I wonder if some of the later authors didn’t realize there were two sources telling the same basic tale and lumped them together, giving rise to some of the confusion about the dating. Neither of the men reported the tales to Stringfield until the late 1970s.

Importantly, J.K., the witness from the 1966 “sighting” at Wright-Pat, did not mention 1953 or Arizona, or Stringfield did not report it in that entry in his Status Report. Stringfield also noted that J.K. knew about Goldwater’s attempt to see the alien bodies but was refused permission by General Curtis LeMay. J.K.’s story was not used by Hall in his book which suggests that he learned there was a problem with the tale and excluded it.

Stringfield wasn’t done with these sorts of second-hand stories. In his UFO Crash/Retrievals monograph, that is Status Report VII and published in February 1994, he comes up with another witness identified only as JLD. That man, according to the tale, related a story told by a close relative, the late Mr. Holly. Holly allegedly served in a top command at Wright-Patterson in 1953 and told him, that is JLD, about one of two crashes in Arizona. There were three bodies, one severely burned. Parts of the wrecked flying saucer were sent to Wright-Pat.

It was in 1993 that JLD told Stringfield that Holly had seen the bodies that were housed in a building that was off limits to all but a few. Holly said that the aliens were free of harmful bacteria and their teeth did not decay.

Stringfield said that he was given the name of the relative, his title and that he held the highest security clearance. Because of that, he was told about the crash in Arizona, but Stringfield kept those secrets to himself. We have no way of verifying the information unless there are notes about this in Stringfield’s files, some of which are held by MUFON. Much of Stringfield’s original research is not widely available to UFO researchers.

Again, there is nothing here that provides us any way of learning more about these cases. That brings to a rather complicated “chasing footnotes,” segment. In Hall’s book he noted that information about several earlier cases had come from Len Stringfield’s 1980 presentation at the MUFON Symposium. I couldn’t find the reference in the paper, but I did locate the information in Stringfield’s 1980 Status Report II: New Sources, New Data. This is the original source of much of this information.

I’ll note here that Mellon, who started this latest round of research, is associated with others who have been identified with current UAP research including crash/retrievals. This means that Mellon heard about Kingman from those others, but I don’t believe he knows anything from first-hand observation. We’re still left with no first-hand witnesses other than the unreliable Arthur Stansel. We have a former official suggesting that there was a UFO crash near Kingman, but we don’t know the source of his knowledge. It could be based on the unreliable information provided by Arthur Stansel or any of those confusing mentions in various books and articles.

It did, however, send me and later David Rudiak down several additional rabbit holes that do not confirm the crash but do supply several strange incidents. We both were trying to learn more about the Kingman crash and in the search from that information, we came up with two names of proponents of that claim, Preston Dennett and Harry Drew. I reached out to both.

Drew, who had been researching the Kingman crash for years, suggested that not one, but three UFOs had crashed in Arizona in a short period of time. Drew wrote that one of those craft had been destroyed when it flew into a mountain, a second had hit a rocky butte and fell into a reservoir and the third had found embedded in the sand intact. The military had recovered one of them and took it to Nevada, which I suspect is an oblique reference to Area 51. That, by the way is different from the suggestions that the bodies, at least, had been sent on to Wright-Pat.

The second man, Dennett, is posting to Facebook. I have attempted to contact him several times through Facebook and his website but have not received a reply (until today, July 1, which clarified some reports). In interviews conducted by the media, Dennett was clear in his belief there had been the crash of an alien spacecraft near Kingman. But there was no clear evidence that such was the case.

David Rudiak made a detailed search of the newspaper files for the time, beginning in 1950 and working toward 1953. He found no hints of a crash in any of those newspapers though he did find some strange events recorded in them. None of these strange events, some of which hinted at an alien presence, related to the crash/retrieval stories as they are being told today. They are a distraction… an interesting distraction, but a distraction, nonetheless.

David Rudiak in Roswell. Photograph by Kevin Randle.

What he did find was Harry Drew’s claim of three crashes in six days in May 1953. There was another crash in the area in June 1950 in which the UFO crashed into Hualapai Peak. Drew seemed to claim that the first of the “Kingman crashes” happened on May 18 southeast of Kingman. Drew thought this wasn’t so much a crash as it was a landing. An Air Force recovery team arrived within two hours of landing. It makes you wonder where they were stationed that they could respond that quickly.

The second crash was north of Kingman on May 21, 1953. This is the tale told by Arthur Stansel. According to Drew, those involved in the recovery only spent a short time on the crash site and were told this was a secret Air Force project. That information didn’t show up in the early interviews with Stansel.

The third crash took place on May 24. This is another craft that was alleged to have been brought down by a high-powered radar that was being tested in the area. According to those who believe the 1948 Aztec crash there is a theory that the craft was brought down by powerful radar.

What Rudiak didn’t find was any newspaper references to a crash in the Kingman area in May 1953. Roswell, on the other hand, was announced in newspapers around the world at the time of the event. There are pictures of some of the primary players in the Roswell case that were published in early July 1947. Kingman, not so much.

I’m not sure that I need to review all this but will do so. It is important to note, once again, that the first two “witnesses” to the Kingman crash have admitted to embellishing their tales. Arthur Stansel was the first to talk about the Kingman crash based on the dates, but he was talking to two teenagers. He didn’t seem to worry about the truth. When he spoke to Ray Fowler, he might have been more honest but his credibility was already ruined.

Judie Woolcott, to me, was originally an important witness because she seemed to corroborate some of Stansel’s claims. She was only a second-hand witness because she received the information from an alleged husband. He’d send her a letter but she never produced that letter. The testimony from her daughter is quite important here.

I’ll note here, for clarity, that, what I now think of as the Hall letter, dated April 8, 1964, does not mention Kingman or Arizona but New Mexico proving grounds, which should take it out of the running. It is clear that Hall did not receive the 1964 letter until 1977. It came from Todd Zechel, who is unreliable. There is no specific day, just the mention of 1953. Given the number of reports from 1953, to suggest it was in May is just speculation.

That brings us to what I have written here. I have read Jenny Randles’ book that, I believe, added to the confusion. She provided information about Charles Wilhelm who learned about the crash from his father, apparently in 1966. She wrote that it matched the information for the Kingman crash in 1953, but the information is, at best second hand.

She wrote about Dick Hall’s assessments suggesting that he learned about this in 1964, or six or seven years before Ray Fowler broke the tale in a UFO magazine. As I have said, the dating of these tales gets confusing. The 1964 date came from the letter Zechel had. Others picked up on the 1964 date, not realizing that Hall didn’t receive a copy until much later.

Stringfield added to the overall confusion with the reports in his various Status Reports. I believe that he was relaying information accurately, but those providing the testimony are, at best, second hand and sometimes third-hand witnesses. When dealing with this extraordinary information, second and third-hand sources are very weak. I’m usually inclined to reject them if they don’t have some sort of corroborative testimony or documentation. We need the statements from those who actually saw something, not those who were told that friends saw something.

There might be some additional information floating around out there. (I learned from Preston Dennett that he talked to no firsthand witnesses, but gathered his information thought various other sources.) He reports on much of the information cited here, using the same sources that I did.

He also mentions Linda Moulton Howe’s interview with Richard Doty at Kirtland Air Force Base on April 9, 1983. In a document that Doty showed Howe, there is a reference to the Kingman case but Doty didn’t allow Howe to keep it. Given the mention of other reported crashes, I believe the document to be faked. I detailed all this in Case MJ-12 (updated in 2018) for those who wish to slither down that rabbit hole.

Yes, I know about Bill Uhouse and his suggestion that the disk was given to the US military. He said that it was taken to Area 51, which is problematic because the base didn’t exist in 1953. According to the documentation, the site was acquired in 1955. I will note, however, that this is a remote detachment administered by Edwards Air Force Base, for those who wish to keep this myth alive.

Given the trouble with tracking some sources and that some of the researchers are no longer available to provide context, I believe I have sorted out the problems with the Kingman case. We are still at a point where the first public report is the teenager’s story that appeared in a local newspaper. Ray Fowler published the first national story in April 1976 and from that point much more has been learned.

I reject the letter that Zechel presented with the April 1966 date because it didn’t surface until 1977. The real reason is that Zechel is unreliable in that aspect of it.  I believe I have the chronology worked out so that it makes sense and I believe understand what has transpired. Arthur Stansel, by his own word, was unreliable. Judie Willcott’s story is untrue based on the available evidence. We have a roster of second and third-hand witnesses but some only speculate about the date and the location. In the end, I find nothing to support the tale of a UFO crash in the Kingman case…

But I do end with this caveat. If new and better information is found and presented, I reserve the right to study that evidence and change my mind if it is persuasive. I doubt that will happen, but history is filled with what we thought we knew only to be surprised by later events.\

Chasing More Footnotes

I have complained in the past that I am becoming less than thrilled with the UFO community. The reasons for this are varied but come down to a couple of basic ideas. One of those is that no matter how often a case is proven to be a hoax, a misidentification, a misinterpretation, or an inability to recognize the mundane, there are those who will argue the point forever. A recent post was partially inspired by this. How many times do we have to delve into the Oliver Lerch tale when everything that can be found points to an invention of the tale rather than a real event?

The point here, however, is that part of the problem is that some people who claim to be researchers or investigators just don’t follow the path to its end. This is what lead to the chasing of footnotes because sometimes the footnote is simply inadequate. Sometimes the information is not complete.

Not to pick on Richard Dolan, but just the other day as I was looking for something else, I noticed a couple of problems. These sorts of things are not restricted to Richard because we all have

Richard Dolan. Photo copyright by
Kevin Randle

fallen into the trap. On page 16 of his UFOs and the National Security State, he reported on a sighting by railroad engineer in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, who saw ten shiny disks on June 23. His footnote leads us to a number of sources, which cover a number of sightings in that same paragraph. Unfortunately, the information about the Cedar Rapids sighting is wrong, as I have noted in an earlier posting. The report was not made until after the Arnold sighting, was apparently for the afternoon of June 24 rather than the 23, and the railroad man was not in Iowa, but in Joliet, Illinois. Among those who reported this information as Dolan had, were Dick Hall and Frank Edwards. I believe Hall got it from Edwards, who must have seen something in the Cedar Rapids Gazette about the sighting a couple of days after Arnold. Edwards, or those others, had not followed the story to the source, or they would have found the discrepancies.

As I say, not to pick on Dolan, but later, on page 25, he wrote about Bill Brazel and the finding of the metal debris from the Roswell crash. The footnote takes us to Stan Friedman’s Crash at Corona in which he quotes from an interview with Bill Brazel. The quotes are accurate, for the most part, but there is no footnote to explain how the information was gathered because Friedman supplies no information about that. The trail ends there.

However, I know how that interview was conducted because I had

Stan Friedman. Photo copyright by
Kevin Randle

arranged it, and Don Schmitt and I were there. I recorded it. The more accurate footnote would have taken us not to Friedman’s book, but to UFO Crash at Roswell, where the footnote explained the circumstances of the interview. In other words, the original source was that interview that Don and I conducted and not the information printed in Friedman’s book.

A side problem with this is that Friedman altered one portion of the interview without justification. Those who follow Dolan’s footnote to Friedman will get the inaccurate information… Friedman inserted the word “black” into the interview to describe one the sergeants who came to the Brazel ranch to collect the bits of debris Bill had found. Brazel made no reference to the racial identity of those four men but Friedman inserted the word to bolster the Gerald Anderson fairy tale. You can read the whole story here (if you are so inclined):

http://kevinrandle.blogspot.com/2008/09/black-sergeants-and-stan-friedman.html

This problem is not confined to UFO research. I was looking for information for a post on the new version of the Treasure Quest show and found a couple of sites that provided what seemed to be accurate information. Reference was made to someone named C. H. Prodgers and in this day of the Internet, I thought I would find out what he had said about the treasure.

Twenty-five years ago, I couldn’t have gathered the information. True, one of the articles referred to Prodgers, but in the world today, I was able to find a copy of Prodgers’s book online. I didn’t have to rely on what others had written about it. I could read it for myself. And, I found that much of the information published, that referenced Prodgers, was incorrect. After all, they were quoting Prodgers as the source, but what Prodgers had written did not match what they were reporting. Could Prodgers have been making up the tale of the treasure? Sure. But that didn’t matter because he was the original source. He was writing from the point of view of having been there, lived the adventure, and there wasn’t much documentation that preceded him. The others were quoting him as their source.

That is, I chased the references to the ultimate source. I corrected the errors made by others who had used the same source, and came away unimpressed with the information. It reads more like fiction than fact and there really is nothing to back up the story. And now that the first season is over, we have seen a large number of problems with this treasure hunting quest.

So, now you’re wondering how all this relates to Ufology. It is about getting to the original source. In the past, the only way to do it was go to the location or find a library that had the proper resources in its collections. You had to read the microfilms and search endlessly for the articles. That is what I had done with the Cedar Rapids story. I could search the microfilm of the Cedar Rapids Gazette and I found the original article about the railroad man and his UFOs. Took about an hour. Had I lived elsewhere, I might not have found it… until I could make an Internet search.

Here’s another example. As I point out in another post, Don Keyhoe, in writing about the 1948 Mantell case, got some bad information and therefore some of his conclusions wrong. He didn’t have access to the documents available to us online today. He assumed that the timing of the events fit into a specific sequence. He assumed that the times given in various reports was when the object was seen over that specific town. What this means that the sighting of the object from Madisonville, Kentucky, wasn’t of an object overhead as Keyhoe believed, but of one to the northwest. The claim that the object was over the Godman Army Airfield tower as Keyhoe believed, is not true. The documents in the Blue Book files proved that the men in the tower saw the UFO somewhere to the southwest at the very limits of human ability to see it. Given those two facts, Keyhoe’s estimate of the speed was way off. That’s not Keyhoe’s fault. He was relying on information that had been reported to him orally rather than seeing what the documents said. He couldn’t have reviewed those documents easily until 1976.

Those who cite Keyhoe’s estimate of the speed have not followed up on the information which was published in the early 1950s. Had they done so, they would have realized that his claim the object was moving at 180 miles an hour was badly flawed. Information available today gives us a much clearer picture. This isn’t to fault Keyhoe because he was relying on the information he had, but to fault those who haven’t bothered to update the information when they began their research.

What all this means is that in the world today, we can look much deeper into the past. We have access to nearly all human knowledge through the Internet. We can study newspaper files in cities hundreds or thousands of miles away (though some services require a subscription). The files of Project Blue Book are on line for all to review… and there are other sources of information about Blue Book that we have today that Keyhoe and others in the 1950s and 1960s didn’t have.

There is then, no real excuse for continuing to report information that is out of date or inaccurate. We can clear up these things by taking our research to the next level, which has always been the real point of chasing footnotes. This isn’t about “gotcha” but about cleaning up the information so that we can come to the proper conclusion. It isn’t about making someone look bad, but about searching for the answers to the mystery, whatever that mystery might be.

While I find chasing footnotes to be fun, I guess there are those who can’t be bothered with following the trail. They already know the truth so there is no need to search any further for it. Why clutter up a good UFO report with a lot of facts that provide us with an identification? Sometimes, however, we do learn something important about a case, which is why I do what I do. I just wish that there wasn’t a constant fight inside Ufology, protecting the sacred cows, when the facts take us somewhere else. 

I can cite examples here. Tales that are told and retold by those who are enthusiastic about their favorite cases. They ignore facts that don’t fit into their view of the world. They know the “truth,” and the facts be damned.

The airship crash in Aurora, Texas, in 1897 proves the point. The evidence and documentation shows that the story was invented by a stringer for a Dallas newspaper. Other documentation, in the form of histories of Aurora or Wise County where Aurora is located, that were published within a couple of years of the alleged crash mention nothing about it. Had such an event taken place, even if it didn’t involve a craft from another world, these histories would have contained some information about it. There is none. But we still have to listen to tales of the Aurora, Texas, UFO crash and put up with television documentaries in which they are digging “for the truth.” Of course, when they’re done, they have not advanced our knowledge. They have just added another level of nonsense to the tale.

The June 23, 1947 UFO Sighting

I believe that I have found the original source for the story of a Cedar Rapids engineer who saw the flying discs. A headline in the Cedar Rapids Gazette said, “Flying Discs Seen By Railroad Man.” The problem? The newspaper is dated June 28, 1947 and appears two days after the Arnold story. And it didn’t happen in Cedar Rapids.

The article, which is not six lines or six paragraphs, but a little longer than that, said:

A railroad man said Friday [which is June 27, 1947 and eliminates the need for further information right there because the story appeared after Arnold] he saw “about nine” spinning discs speeding through the sky last Tuesday [June 24] the same day an Idaho flyer said he saw some flashing objects in the air.

Charles Kastl [yes, that is the way it is spelled consistently in the article], 60 [which means he would be 126 today], an employe [sic] of the Elgin, Joliet and Eastern railroad for 38 years, saw he saw the discs about 1:50 p.m. (CST) as he was walking along the highway to work.

No other person in the Joliet area reported anything unusual.

Kastl said he saw a string of flat, circular objects going faster “than any plane I ever saw” about 10 to 12 miles east of Joliet [Illinois]. They were flying about 4,000 feet, he said.

“They appeared to be very high, and were going from north to south,” he said. “I could see no connecting link between them, but they acted as though the leading disc had a motor in it to power the others, because when it flipped, the others would too. When it would right itself, the others would right themselves.”

Kastl said he did not tell anyone but his wife about seeing the objects until Friday, “because I didn’t think anything about it.”

When he returned from a railroad run Friday, however, he learned that Kenneth Arnold, Boise, Idaho, pilot had reported seeing objects similar to the ones he claimed to have seen. Arnold said he saw objects over the Pacific Northwest.

Charles Preucil, head of the Joliet astronomical society, said there would be no natural cause for a display such as Kastl described.

Given the information in this article and given the descriptions given for the Cedar Rapids sighting, I believe this is the source. It did not happen in Cedar Rapids, nor did it happen on June 23. I will assume here, risking fate, that someone (Frank Edwards?) miscalculated the date of Tuesday, believing it to be the 23^rd, and not realizing it was the 24^th.

In Alfred Loedding and the Great Flying Saucer Wave of 1947 by Michael Hall and Wendy Connors, the story was reported on page 22 as:

Thus, neither of those sightings made the papers before Arnold's account, but one story was actually reported to newspapers on the 23rd. The tale came from a railroad engineer in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. As he was climbing off his engine, he observed ten shiny disc-shaped objects flying in a string-like formation, "like wild geese." The six line story it generated produced little attention at the time.

 

Their footnote indicated that this information came from a speech given by Frank Edwards on April 28, 1956, to the Civilian Saucer Intelligence.

As I have mentioned, Richard Hall, in The UFO Evidence, reported, “6-23-47. Cedar Rapids, Iowa. 10 shiny discs “fluttering along in a string.”

Even if we wish to keep the entry as a reliable report, we now know that it didn’t happen on June 23 and it was not Cedar Rapids but Joliet, Illinois.

And as also mentioned, Robert Loftin, in his Identified Flying Objects reported, “June 23, 1947 – Cedar Rapids, Iowa. Railroad engineer saw ten shiny disc-shaped objects, very high, fluttering in a string toward the northeast.”

This should put to rest the idea that there was a sighting in Cedar Rapids on June 23 by an engineer. It should end the discussion that this case preceded Arnold by a day. Everything I have learned about it suggests that it happened on the day of the Arnold sighting but was not reported until two days later.

I will confess one other thing about this case. I don’t believe it. I think the guy was just spinning a tale about seeing something and because these things were now part of that news cycle, a reporter talked to him and wrote the story. The original importance of it had been the suggestion that it preceded Arnold, and without that, it is another single witness case that does not advance our knowledge…

And I will add this. It is frightening because of how far it has been circulated and how distorted it has become. I don’t know what motivated Edwards to quote it, and quote it so badly, but quote it he did. Others picked up on it without checking the original sources, and it took me quite a while to chase it down. If I could, I would strike if from the UFO literature, but books last a long time and the Internet might be forever. This will live on but I can hope that others will stumble across this information as they search for evidence.

Cedar Rapids Engineer Sees Disks - Beats Arnold by a Day?

I’ve been working on a new book and I was chasing down stories of flying saucers, flying discs, seen prior to June 24, 1947. Sure there are some, but all, or almost all, seem to have been reported after Kenneth Arnold’s story appeared in newspapers.

One of the best of these, reported in many sources, came from Cedar Rapids, Iowa, and according to one document, “Thus neither of those sightings [one from El Paso, Texas and one from Wapakoneta, Oregon] made the papers before Arnold’s account, but one story was actually reported to newspapers on the 23^rd. The tale came from a railroad engineer in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. As he was climbing off his engine, he observed ten shiny disc-shaped objects flying in a string-like formation, ‘like wild geese.’ The six line story it generated produced little attention at the time.” The source of this, according to the footnote, was a speech given by Frank Edwards in April, 1956.

I have found references to it in other publications. Richard Hall, in his 1964 book, The UFO Evidence, lists it in two places, Section XI, page 129 and Section XII, page 152. Neither supplies much in the way of information. It is basically a recap of this other story and in neither place is there a source.

An Internet site listed Ted Bloecher’s The Report on the UFO Wave of 1947 as a source, but I was unable to find it there. If it is, I would hope that someone would point it out to me, but I don’t think they’ll find it. Bloecher used newspaper files for his documentation and so, if he didn’t find it in a newspaper, it was probably not published anywhere.

Now I was reading, the other day, a criticism of a UFO book, and it was suggested that primary sources were the best. Not witness testimony, but something that had been written down, such as a newspaper article or military document created at the time. If nothing else, that article could help establish the credibility of the sighting. Someone quoting another book would not be a primary source… it might be a secondary source, but might be even further removed from the primary source.

So, rather than quote those other books, rather than make a list of Internet and web sites that quoted the story, I thought about looking in the Cedar Rapids newspapers to find the original story. In June 1947, there were two newspapers in Cedar Rapids, The Cedar Rapids Gazette and the Cedar Rapids Tribune.

I carefully read the Gazette for June 23 and did not find the story. I went through the issue twice. I looked on June 24 but it was not there either. Nor was it there on the 25^th, 26^th, or 27^th. Of course, if printed after June 24, it was just another of the many cases that surfaced after Arnold’s report hit the national circuit.  Yes, I did find the Arnold story in the Gazette and thought the engineer story might be appended to it, but it was not.

The Tribune was not a daily paper and did not have an issue on June 23. I looked at several issues, but they didn’t even carry any flying disc reports. The newspaper was more geared to the local area.

And I was even allowed to search the library’s database for the newspaper articles. It wasn’t there, but then, I was told that they missed things in preparing the database. That it wasn’t there didn’t mean anything other than it wasn’t there. When appended to the other failed searches, that information becomes more significant.

While this sighting, if published on June 23, or even on June 24, would have been an important contribution to the UFO history, I was unable to find any documentation for it prior to Edwards’ 1956 speech. It does not appear in the Cedar Rapids newspapers, and I seriously doubt that any other newspaper would have carried it. Just nothing there of interest for them in it.

There is a school of thought that the case is listed in the Project Blue Book files, but it is from the Des Moines, Iowa area, happened on June 29, and involved a bus driver rather than a railroad engineer. But the details of the sighting are a match. The story was reported on July 8. If this is the right case, then it does nothing for us. It is just another of those sightings made after Arnold, reported after Arnold, and involves a single witness. The Air Force wrote it off as coming from an unreliable source.

I really wanted to document the details of the Cedar Rapids case, but simply could not do it. This is another “sighting” that should be removed from the various listings and databases. I don’t know how Edwards got it so twisted around, but I do know he didn’t get it from a newspaper in Cedar Rapids.