Recanting Roswell Certainty

At the risk of annoying a few and because it seems that some people have absolutely no reading comprehension, I thought I would address, once and for all, this notion that I have recanted on Roswell. I believe it came about because some people are incapable of understanding a simple title of three words. They seem to understand the first two, but not the third. And, I thought that since there have been many commentators on this, but none of those with two exceptions bothered to communicate with me I would clear the air. In the time of “fake news” it is easy to understand how this happens but that doesn’t make it right.

North Main Street, Roswell. Photo

copyright by Kevin Randle.

Jerry Clark wrote a review of my book, Roswell in the 21^st Century for Fortean Times. It was titled, “Recanting Roswell certainty.” That third word should have put the whole thing into the proper perspective, but some couldn’t get past the first two which were, “Recanting Roswell.” Adding that third word certainly changes the meaning of the title.

In the early 1990s, after Don Schmitt and I had interviewed dozens of witnesses, from senior members of Colonel William Blanchard’s staff to ranchers living in the Corona area, I was absolutely convinced that what had fallen was an alien craft. We had testimony from those who claimed to have been deeply involved, who had seen the craft, the bodies, the clean-up efforts, and participated in the movement of all that material to Wright Field. We had many leads to follow, we had more witnesses to interview, and I believed that for the most part, these people were relating what they had seen and done back in July 1947. We even had learned of a diary kept by Catholic nuns that told of the object in the sky which would have been a nice bit of documentation.

This was before I had read a book, Stolen Valor, about alleged Vietnam veterans who were lying about their service in Vietnam. Some had been clerks. Some hadn’t served in Vietnam. Some hadn’t even been in the military. The best example of all this is that in 1990 there were an estimated 2.5 million Vietnam vets. Men and women who had actually served in country. There was a question on the 1990 census that asked if you were a Vietnam vet. Thirteen million answered, “Yes.” That meant that 10.5 million were lying about it for no apparent reason other than it made them feel good. All this provides an insight in to the Roswell case and the number of people who claimed inside knowledge.

In the world today, as I have learned more about the witnesses and have been able to cross check information, it is clear to me that the Roswell case is nowhere as robust as we had thought. I laid out the case, as I understand it, based on the evidence I have seen, the interviews I have conducted and the research I did and we are left with a multiple witness case without sufficient documentation and without any sort of physical evidence. Not exactly the robust case I had once believed it was.

The trick for everyone is to read the entire title of the review. We all know that something fell at Roswell. The debate has been over what it was. At one time I would have told you it was alien. Today I tell you that I just don’t know. For me there isn’t a good explanation which I guess means that the solution is unknown rather than alien.

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.

Jonah Lehrer Strikes Again

Jonah Lehrer has done it again. I had thought that his invention of quotes and the like had been limited to his essays and books that dealt with people. I had thought that his science reporting had been more careful because, well, there would be scientists reading it and for that reason, he would be careful.

Turns out that was wrong. Turns out he was inventing stuff for his science articles, or maybe misinterpreting stuff… in any case, we now have to reassess what he wrote in his science articles, including his recent revelations about memory.

I found his original piece to be interesting… it seemed to fit in with what Elizabeth Loftus and Richard Ofshe had written in the past. It fit in with the idea that memory is not the big video camera that had been claimed, but was more random and sporadic than that. Memory might be untrustworthy and we would all be well advised to remember that as we interviewed those who had seen a UFO in years past.

The arguments can still be made. Those older sources are still reliable, and those sources that Lehrer used are still good. It means that if we find something interesting in what he wrote, we’d better see if we could find the primary source to ensure the accuracy of quote and the information interpreted correctly. He was no longer someone to be trusted.

As we move through the UFO field, we all make mistakes. I have been taken to task for believing the tales of Frank Kaufmann. He spun a good story and he did have some documentation that backed up what he said. He’d shown some to me but he wouldn’t let me have copies… that should have been a red flag. Those documents that could have been checked would have revealed the truth. He did provide copies of his Separation papers and I had no reason to doubt their authenticity. Who would alter those?

After reading Stolen Valor, it turned out that quite a few people would. I have wondered if anyone checks my military credentials with St. Louis now that such things are easier. I’m sure they have, and they found that I was who I said I was… Oh, there are some errors in them. But, if someone claims a military record, we would all be well advised to check it from the primary source.

The point, here however, is that Lehrer has let us all down… We should check out all that he has said about various topics in science to be sure he was right, and I suppose go to the primary sources and bypass him. I suppose I believed what he wrote about memory (which, BTW, still might be accurate) because of what I had read from Loftus, Ofshe and others. Now, I’ll just go one step further and look up the primary source to make sure it agrees with what he said but he won’t be used as a source.

(Blogger's Note: I have just learned that Wired magazine will continue to publish Jonah Lehrer's material. I don't know what vetting process or fact checking they plan to do. I am surprised at this, which just shows nothing around us is ever easy. As for my, if I am ever inclined to use his material as a source again, I will make sure that his information is accurate.)

UFOs and Stolen Valor

I was searching the web the other night and came across an interview with a man I had written about in the past. He was not pleased with my assessment of his tale and wondered why I had not contacted him before I posted it. I was a little disturbed by his comments and then realized that I was suggesting he had been less than candid about his UFO involvement and he certainly had the right to feel annoyed. Of course, I believed then what I written and I have seen nothing in the last several years to change that opinion.

The point is that I find myself in a similar position today. I have been researching, for the last year, a story told by a man who claimed to be a retired Air Force colonel. Based on his supposed high rank, I accepted the story he told as authentic. I believed that a man who had obtained high military rank wouldn’t be lying about something like this... but that was before Philip Corso entered the picture and proved me wrong.

In this case, however, the man had not been a high-ranking Air Force officer as claimed and the only record of military service I could find was a short period starting in December 1945 and ending in January 1947. This would technically make him a veteran of World War II, though he entered the service after the surrenders of Germany and Japan. The war wasn’t declared officially over until some time in 1946.

He claimed that he had been an Air Force fighter pilot, but I could find no record to substantiate this, and if he wasn’t a fighter pilot, then his tale of a UFO crash was no longer credible. He had been, according to him, flying a chase plane during some kind of a bomber mission when he saw the UFO. But if he wasn’t a fighter pilot, then the reason for him being where he claimed to be was eliminated and his tale collapsed.

I did learn that he had a long association with the Civil Air Patrol, the official auxiliary of the Air Force, but that is a civilian, volunteer organization. I don’t know if Air Force personnel, who can also serve in the CAP, receive retirement points for that service. If so, I suppose he could claim some kind of lengthy Air Force service, but the truth is, he wasn’t in the Air Force as claimed, nor in the Air Force Reserve, so the point is moot.

According to documentation, he rose to lieutenant colonel in the CAP, but again, that is not the same as being a lieutenant colonel in the Air Force. When questioned about his service, he provided several photographs and documents, but all of them related to the Civil Air Patrol. I have never seen a picture of him in an Air Force uniform, though it is clear from the photographs supplied that he was attempting to mask his CAP service by making alterations to the uniform.

I have since been given some documents that suggest service in the Air Force, but these came from the man, and I have been unable to verify their authenticity. I believe one of them to be a forgery and not a very clever one at that.

So, who is this guy you ask? This is where the trouble arises. In 2005 the US Congress passed the Stolen Valor Act which makes it a crime to wear ribbons or medals not earned. I have two pictures of him and in each he is wearing medals for which I can find no documentation. He is wearing an officer’s uniform and he is claiming to have served in the Air Force, either on active duty or the reserve long enough to have earned a pension. He claims it was denied because he talked to civilians about UFOs.

To identify this man now, who is 84 and whose health isn’t all that great, would be to bring addition attention and pressure to him. This is something that I’m not sure I want to do...

On the other hand, I understand the anger of veterans toward those who didn’t serve, or served in a limited way but who claim great things. One estimate, published in Military History magazine this month suggests there are 26 million people claiming to be veterans who are not. Thousands have received veteran benefits to which they were not entitled, taking money from the veterans who had earned it. I have seen men, and a few women, interviewed about their service, making claims that then tarnish the reputations of all of us who did serve.

But this guy is old, sick, and his family is not nearby. At the moment, nothing is gained by identifying him, at least in my mind. His story, however, does have a great impact on some avenues of UFO research, and that will be explored a little later.

FAKERS! Part Two

We talked about fakers a while ago, meaning people who have claimed to be things they are not. We have looked at UFO witnesses, researchers, advocates, and whistle blowers who used supposed military backgrounds or high levels of education to prove that what they say is true. What they tell us is often in conflict with what their records say and the apologists have excuses for that including that the government, in its all powerful, all knowing capability has been able to alter the records of those people to make them look bad.

Now we have more evidence of fakers in our world. According to an article published in the Seattle Times and written by Jennifer Sullivan, Jesse MacBeth, 23, who claimed to be a decorated hero who fought in Iraq, who said he was an Army ranger, and who said that he had killed more than 200 people including some who were praying at a mosque, has been sentenced to jail from making false statements to the Department of Veteran Affairs. MacBeth had spoken at anti-war rallies and had appeared in an anti-war video that had been circulated on the Internet. It was learned that MacBeth had spent only six weeks in the Army at Fort Benning, and never completed basic training. He had claimed to be a corporal who had been awarded the Purple Heart.

The whole story can be seen at:

http://seattletimes.nwsource.com/html/localnews/2003895483

_webmacbeth21m.html

Yes, I know this has nothing to do directly with UFOs and the paranormal, but it does address, again, this growing trend to make up things, find a forum, and have your point of view published so that the world can see it. We don’t know how much damage this guy might have done and here I’m only thinking of the soldiers in the field in Iraq. We know these sorts of things are picked up and broadcast around the world and once the man, or woman, is exposed, that is not as actively reported. His false claims are out there for future generations to find and read and many times these are not linked to the stories exposing the faker. It tars his with lies all those who have served honorably.

As just one example, there is the discredited "Winter Soldier" hearings organized in 1971 by Vietnam anti-war protestors. There men told their tales of horror, of atrocity, and even John Kerry was there smearing the names of all those who had served honorably in Vietnam (and his attitude then didn’t stop him from trying to promote himself as a war hero when it became politically expedient to do so in 2004 by claiming two tours in Vietnam... one on a deep water Navy ship that patrolled for some weeks off the coast of Vietnam and the second for maybe three months on a Swift Boat on the rivers in Vietnam... total time "in county" about four months as compared to 12 months for soldiers and 13 for Marines, but I digress). Rarely in the stories about those "hearings" reported during the 2004 election was it mentioned that the hearings had been discredited and those telling their tales of horror had not served in combat, had not served in Vietnam and in some extreme cases, had not served in the military (For a better discussion of this see B. G. Burkett’s Stolen Valor, page 131 - 134.)

So now I have that off my chest, I’ll move this on to UFOs and paranormal phenomena. I saw, not long ago, an attempt to rehabilitate Philip Corso. He was the man who claimed to have been promoted to colonel after his retirement, though he had only served as a lieutenant colonel on active duty. His excuse was that he thought he had been promoted upon retirement though no evidence for that promotion had ever been offered.

In this attempt, it was noted that the Congress, in the 1950s, had passed a law that gave officers in the Reserve a promotion on retirement to make up for the disparity of promotions while they served. Their counterparts on active duty were promoted faster. The problem is that the law didn’t apply to Corso. While he may have held a Reserve commission as opposed to a regular commission, he was serving on extended active duty. In other words, he was promoted as a member of the Active Component and not as a member of the Reserve.

Here’s the difference. Reserve officers served one day a week for four hours and then were required to attend annual training for two weeks a year. Their rate of promotion, because of the limited time in training was longer than that of the soldiers on extended active duty. Note here, this is the situation in the 1950s when Corso was on active duty. Later it changed to one weekend a month made of four, four-hour training periods and, of course, the two weeks (fifteen days, actually) for annual tour.

So, even though the law existed, it didn’t apply to Corso. This misunderstanding comes from those in the civilian world who don’t know the some of the terms and methods of the military. Reserve officers serve on extended active duty and are promoted with their fellows with regular commissions. In fact, officers often hold two ranks... that is the grade in which they serve and their permanent rank. So a colonel might hold the permanent rank of major and when released from active duty would revert to that permanent rank.

There is one other problem here. Upon retirement, a soldier would retire in the highest grade held. At Roswell, in 1947, there was a master sergeant serving out his last year or so on active duty. During World War II, he had served as a brigadier general. When he retired, he would retire as a brigadier general.

And we haven’t even touched on bevet ranks, which were used quite a bit during the Civil War. George Custer was a captain until bevetted to brigadier general of volunteers. When the war ended, he should have reverted to captain but friends in high places secured him a commission as lieutenant colonel in the Seventh Cavalry, and we all know how well that worked out.

When you get right down to the bottom line on this, an argument over the "real" rank of Corso isn’t of overwhelming importance and it could be argued that he made a simple mistake. This whole Reserve-Active thing with two different grades and types of commissions can be confusing to those of us who are involved in it, not to mention those outside the military.

If we are concerned about the veracity of Corso, we can find our answer in other areas, including the slippery way that he got Senator Strom Thurmond to write an introduction for his Roswell book. When the book was released, Thurmond was outraged, saying that the book for which he had written an introduction was not the book that had been published. For those who wish to know more, look for Roswell Revisited from Galde Press (FATE magazine, PO Box 460, Lakeville, MN 55044) Chapter Seven.

What this demonstrates is that we have people claiming to be soldiers who were not, but get publicity because they say the things people want to hear. MacBeth lied about his military experiences, but since he was anti-war, he was given a forum. Certainly not the first one to do this nor the first one to be exposed. And to the credit of the Seattle Times they exposed him as soon as they had the evidence.

Corso bumped himself up a grade for no reason I can understand. All he had to do was admit the truth, say it was a mistake and carry on. Instead he decided to say that he had been promoted in the Reserve and when no evidence of that was found, his defenders began to look for other excuses.

So now we come to me. I have read, on the Internet, from a number of places, including an exopolitics and UFO site in Australia, that I look too fat to be a soldier (and they do publish a picture that makes me look fat) but they have also picked up a picture of me in uniform, sitting in the throne room of an ancient Babylon king. Since Babylon is in Iraq, this pretty much puts me into that conflict.

But they ask exactly what my background is and I’m thinking that it’s a fair question. After all, I have said I was in the Army and in the Air Force and then in the National Guard. Seems like I am jumping all over the place.

Unfortunately, I must now reveal that I entered active duty with the Army in July 1967 (more than forty years ago) having just graduated from high school about a month earlier. I went through basic training (which all soldiers do) and moved on to my advanced individual training, which, in my case was helicopter flight training (See below for picture of me with part of the flight school class). In August 1968, I finished flight school, was discharged from the Regular Army, appointed a warrant officer in the Reserve and immediately called to active duty (and yes, that’s how they did it with nearly all of us who went through the warrant officer flight program. In my class only one pilot was assigned duty other than Vietnam and that was because his brother, also in that class, was going to Vietnam with the rest of us).

In September 1968 I was sent to Vietnam (See below for a picture of me at Cu Chi, RVN) and in September 1969, I returned home. I spent another two years on active duty and then was honorably discharged. I moved to Iowa, joined the Iowa National Guard as a helicopter pilot and began attending the University of Iowa.

I learned that the Air Force was looking for men (at that time, women did not receive flight training) to teach to fly jets. It sounded like a good idea so I joined Air Force ROTC, which, by law, meant I had to sever my association with the National Guard. I was taken into the Air Force Reserve as an enlisted man (which was the custom at the time) and began the training. About the time we all were to graduate, we were told that the Air Force was experiencing a reduction in force (RIF, for those you like acronyms) and we were told that few of us would receive slots for pilot training but we could all take our commissions or not, as the mood moved us.

I took mine and waited for a pilot slot to open. I learned it would be more than two years, but there was another choice. I could serve 90 days of active duty and that would be it. Well, I didn’t want to get my life in order for two years and then the Air Force turn it upside down, so I opted for the 90 days. At the conclusion, I was offered a job with the Reserve unit and I took that, entering into the Air Force Reserve. Eventually, I was promoted (on schedule) and reached captain. Finally, I finished with that, entered what is known as the Inactive Ready Reserve (IRR) and was eventually discharged, honorably. After more than 14 years of active and reserve duty for retirement purposes but with more than 23 years of overall service (yes, this is another confusing mess created by military regulations and their attempts to calculate retirement points), I had little connection to the military.

Then came 9/11. I had completed some advanced education including a MA in Military Studies with an emphasis in Intelligence and I believed I could offer some sort of help. I talked to the Army first, for some reason wishing to rejoin it. I talked to the Army Reserve and the National Guard and while they both were enthusiastic, they didn’t get very far. I talked to the Air Force, but they were less than impressed. I even talked with the Navy, thinking I hadn’t been in the Navy yet. Nothing seemed to work well. I was offered the chance to join the National Guard, as a sergeant rather than a captain, but I wasn’t too keen on that idea.

Finally, I was offered a commission as a captain in the Iowa National Guard and accepted it. Less than four months later that unit was called to active duty and three months after that, we were on our way to Kuwait and then Iraq. I spent over eleven months in theater before we were rotated home (See left for picture of me sitting in Saddam's chair in the Green Zone and below for me staninding on top of a building at the Baghdad International Airport). From that point, I spent another three months on active duty as the OIC (Officer in Charge) of the redeployment effort. About a year later I was promoted to major and continue my service in the National Guard with various calls to active duty for short periods.

I will point out here that I do have an appointment as a major general in the State Guard Association of the United States, the same organization to which Stephen Lovekin belongs. I belong to the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America and have published science fiction stories and books.

I mention all this because I have criticized the Disclosure Project and Michael Salla of Exopolitics fame for not vetting their witnesses, believing that the vetting process would solve many of their problems. If you build a structure based on the stories told by these witnesses and some of them are inventing their tales, then your structure is flawed. If you don’t understand the backgrounds, then you can make mistakes.

But, if I am going to criticize the backgrounds of these people, then I should be willing to provide some information about my background. It is one thing to sit on the sidelines and snipe and it is something else to jump into the fight.

I will note one other thing. Sometimes others make mistakes for you. On my first UFO book, the editor identified me as a captain, USAF (Ret). That was his mistake. He had seen my name saying, Captain USAFR and thought the "R" was for retired, not realizing it was for Reserve. Someone wrote a long article explaining that I had lied about this and there was no way that I could be retired. Forgetting for a moment that I had joined the Army in 1967 and this article was written in 1989 (which meant that I could have retired after twenty years), I wrote to him explaining the mistake. He seemed to have accepted this because he didn’t publish the article.

This just proves that mistakes are made, often by those who don’t know the military very well. Corso could have said that the publisher had made a mistake with his rank and we all would have nodded and said, "Happens all the time," but instead he made up an excuse. Then, to compound it, another excuse was invented, mentioning a public law that was irrelevant to the discussion. All of this simply cast a shadow over Corso and his inclusion in the Disclosure materials.

And once again, we reach the main point here. There are fakers out there who claim military service when they have had little or none. They claim medals they didn’t earn and ranks they didn’t obtain. There are those who claim to be colonels in mythical organizations as if this somehow improves their credibility. Until recently, there wasn’t much that could be done. Now, there are various new laws and some of these people are being prosecuted.

We, in the UFO community, have enough problems that we don’t need to get mixed up in these little fights. All we need to do is check the information as best we can. Sometimes we do make mistakes (and do I really have to mention Frank Kaufmann here?) and we should correct those when made. What we don’t need to do is to defend those who have lied to us, reach for explanations that don’t apply, and continue to hang on in the face of new information.

Maybe we can learn something from the Seattle Times. I hope that we do, but I have been around the UFO field long enough to know that we won’t.