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.\

Eisenhower Briefing Document, MJ-12, and the Washington Alert

I am often stunned by the mental gymnastics of some to keep a cherished belief alive in the face of documented facts and reliable testimony. I am often surprised when something that I believe to be obvious from the evidence available is rejected for speculation that has no supporting proof. When the facts line up, when there is good evidence for a conclusion, when it all seems to be so obvious to me, I simply fail to understand how it is that others can’t see with the same clarity. And yes, I know there are those who believe Roswell to be a Mogul balloon will point at me and say the same things but this isn’t about Roswell or Mogul balloons (and besides, I can point at the Mogul explanation and say the same thing about that conclusion).

This is about the Eisenhower Briefing Document (EBD) and the fatal flaw that is contained in it. I am going to lay all the facts out at length because those other postings which contain the information are spread throughout this blog. I haven’t put it all together into a single document until now. There is a caveat, however. I am not going to review all the other problems with the EBD including a lack of provenance, the other factual errors, or the misspellings and incorrect security classifications. I am going to deal with the one paragraph that relates to another UFO crash that is a hoax and as such shouldn’t have been included in a briefing written for the incoming president. That entry said:

On 06 December, 1950, a second object, probably of similar origin, impacted the earth at high speed in the El Indio – Guerrero area of the Texas – Mexican boder [sic] after following a long trajectory through the atmosphere. By the time a search team arrived, what remained of the object had been almost totally incinerated. Such material as could be recovered was transported to the A.E.C. facility at Sandia, New Mexico, for study.

The first mention of this report of a crash in any sort of a public arena came from Robert Willingham, a pilot in the Civil Air Patrol (CAP), which is identified as an official auxiliary of the United States Air Force. To be clear, it is not a part of the Air Force, members of the CAP are not paid for their service, they do not earn retirement points, and they are not considered to be part of the Reserve Component of the United States military. They are civilians who wear modified uniforms and provide a valuable service in search and rescue operations. But understand, they are not part of the military.

Willingham, and several other CAP pilots, were interviewed in the late 1960s about their experiences with UFOs. This was done for a small “shopper” type of newspaper, and while I have been unable to find that specific article, I did find a summary of Willingham’s statements in MUFON’s Skylook, which was their newsletter/magazine in the 1960s. According to the March, 1968 issue:

Col. R. B. Willingham, CAP squadron commander, has had an avid interest in UFO’s for years, dating back to 1948 when he was leading a squadron of F-94 jets near the Mexican border in Texas and was advised by radio that three UFO’s “flying formation” were near. He picked them up on his plane radar and was informed one of the UFO’s had crashed a few miles away from him in Mexico. He went to the scene of the crash but was prevented by the Mexican authorities from making an investigation or coming any closer than 60 feet. From that vantage point the wreckage seemed to consist of “numerous pieces of metal polished on the outside, very rough on the inner sides.”

For those keeping score at home, please note that it clearly states that Willingham is in the CAP, that the date of the sighting is 1948, that he was flying an F-94, there were three UFOs instead of just one, that he saw them on his plane’s radar and was told that one had crashed in Mexico. I mention these things because this is the first time that Willingham told the story in public and it was written down in an article for those who wish to verify the accuracy of the statements… which is not to say that what he was saying was true, only that I have reported here exactly what was reported in 1968.

I did find another 1968 article about Willingham that is important to this discussion because it proves Willingham had a long interest in UFOs. I found, in the NICAP UFO Investigator for March 1968 on page one:

During the early morning hours of January 12, Colonel Robert Willingham, of the Civil Air Patrol, a member of the Subcommittee, was alerted by Chairman George Cook to a UFO seen by a police dispatcher near Camp Hill.

Col. Willingham sighted the orange-and-white glowing object at an altitude of not more than 150 feet, as it traveled toward North Mountain. The UFO appeared to be between 30 and 40 feet in diameter. The former jet pilot followed the object by car until it disappeared behind trees in the Mountain section.

In other words, NICAP was so unimpressed with the crash story, they didn’t even mention it. Instead, they published a Willingham UFO sighting that was rather mundane.  It was just an object in the sky, noting that Willingham was a colonel in the CAP but said nothing about any association with the Air Force Reserve. It also said that Willingham belonged to NICAP underscoring his interest in UFOs.

We all know that W. Todd Zechel tracked down Willingham and got a statement from him. Zechel made that point repeatedly, and there is no dispute that it is accurate. Zechel found Willingham and talked to him. In fact, Zechel was able to get Willingham to sign an affidavit about his experiences in 1977. That date does not seem to be in dispute.

That affidavit does little to enhance the credibility of the tale. It does allow us to make some comparisons, however. It said:

Down in Dyess Air Force Base in Texas, we were testing what turned out to be the F-94. They reported on the [radar] scope that they had an unidentified flying object at a high speed to intercept our course. It came visible to us and we wanted to take off after it. Headquarters wouldn’t let us go after it and it played around a little bit. We got to watching how it made 90 degree turns at this high speed and everything. We knew it wasn’t a missile of any type. So then we confirmed it with the radar control station on the DEW Line (NORAD) and they kept following it and they claimed that it crashed somewhere off between Texas and the Mexican border. We got a light aircraft, me and my co-pilot, and we went down to the site. We landed out in the pasture right across from the where it hit. We got over there. They told us to leave and everything else and then the armed guards came out and they started to form a line around the area. So, on the way back, I saw a little piece of metal so I picked it up and brought it back with me. There were two sand mounds that came down and it looked to me like this thing crashed right in between them. But it went into the ground, according to the way people were acting around it. But you could see for, oh I’d say, three to five hundred yards where it had went across the sand. It looked to me, I guess from the metal that we found, chunks of metal, that it either had a little explosion or it began to disintegrate. Something caused this metal to come apart.

It looked like it was something that was made because it was honeycombed. You know how you would make a metal that would cool faster. In a way it looked like magnesium steel but it had a lot of carbon in it. I tried to heat it with a cutting torch. It just wouldn’t melt. A cutting torch burns anywhere from 3200 to 3800 degrees Fahrenheit and it would make the metal hot but it wouldn’t even start to melt.

Please notice here that he is in his F-94 and that DEW line radar picked up the object but it says nothing about where the object was first sighted nor does it mention where Willingham was flying at the time. Most importantly, this affidavit gives no date for the sighting which is a major oversight. That becomes important later.

Len Stringfield, a well-respected UFO researcher who took an interest in UFO crashes when the rest of us were ignoring them, collected many stories of crashes. In 1978 he wrote a paper for the MUFON Symposium, which allows us to date this next chapter in this case. He wrote, “...Months later in 1977, I was to learn more about a crashed disc occurring in 1948. This came from researcher Todd Zeckel [sic], whom I had known since 1975 when he became Research Director of Ground Saucer Watch... The crash occurred about 30 miles inside the Mexican border across from Laredo, Texas, and was recovered by U.S. troops after it was tracked on radar screens... Zeckel pieced together other eyewitnesses to the 1948 crash event.”

According to Stringfield, Zechel reported:

I traced another Air Force colonel, now retired in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. He had seen the UFO in flight. He was flying an F-94 fighter out of Dias [sic] Air Force base in Texas and was over Albuquerque, New Mexico, when reports came of a UFO on the West Coast, flying over Washington State. Radars clocked its speed at 2,000 miles per hours.

It made a 90 – degree turn and flew east, over Texas. The colonel, then a captain pilot, actually saw it as it passed. Then suddenly it disappeared from radar screens. At Dias [sic] base, the radar operators plotted its course, and decided it had crashed some 30 miles across the Mexican border from Laredo. When the captain got back to base, he and a fellow pilot got into a small plane and took off over the border after the UFO. When they landed in the desert at the crash site, U.S. troops were there before them.

The craft was covered with a canopy [tarpaulin?], and the two pilots were not allowed to see it. They were then called to Washington, D.C. for debriefing and sworn to secrecy about the whole event.

It’s clear from the above information that Zechel was reporting on the story told by Willingham. We know, based on documentation available, that Willingham was living in Pennsylvania at the time and the other details of the story are close to what Willingham had originally reported. Please note here that Willingham is still flying his F-94, that the crash site is near Laredo, Texas, that it happened in 1948, and that it was tracked on radar. Also note that the radars put the UFO over Washington state which will become important later.

What we have here is a single witness tale that is believed because the man telling it is a retired Air Force colonel and a veteran fighter pilot. These two facts lend to his credibility and I know that when I first heard this story and was told it came from a high-ranking Air Force officer, I was inclined to believe it, especially since we had Jesse Marcel and so many others around Roswell talking of the crash there. This simply means that I was a little less suspicious of tales of crashes, given what I knew about Roswell. Please remember here, that I learned of Willingham’s crashed saucer tale after several trips to Roswell, rather than coming upon it cold.

There was another fact that came out later. According to Zechel, the crash didn’t take place in 1948 but in December 1950. Bruce Maccabee, another respected UFO researcher had been sending Freedom of Information (FOIA) requests to the FBI, among other places. His persistence paid off and he received a huge stack of documents that included some that related to some sort of alert in December 1950.

The question becomes did the alert have anything to do with UFOs. According to the documents found by Maccabee and others, on December 6, 1950, unidentified objects were spotted by radar heading toward the eastern seaboard. This triggered an alert and was discussed at the highest levels of the government. The consensus, from various memoirs and other documents, suggests that at about 10:30 a.m. Deputy Secretary of Defense Lovett called Dean Acheson, then secretary of State to tell him that the Pentagon’s phone system was about to shut down because the early warning system in Canada had picked up formations of unidentified objects, presumably aircraft heading to the southeast on a course that would put them over Washington, D.C. in two or three hours. Given the state of the world at the time, that is a major war in Korea that involved Chinese and UN forces (the majority of which were American and South Korean); it was thought that the Soviets might have been sending bombers toward the United States, probably armed with atomic weapons.

Truman, in his memoirs, suggested that the objects had been detected by radar stations and fighters had been launched to reconnoiter, though I personally would have wanted every fighter launched to intercept if I had thought the Soviets were sending bombers, which probably explains why I won’t be president.

There is another version of these events that suggest that the formations were over Alaska, which makes you wonder how they could have reached Washington, D.C. in just two or three hours unless their speed was considerably higher, that is, something on the order of 2000 miles an hour. This doesn’t have the same kind of documentation that the other version has and might be where Zechel got the idea that the UFOs were near Washington state and traveling at 2000 mph.

Within an hour, that is, by 11:30 a.m., the alert was cancelled, and once again there are multiple answers. Acheson reported that he was called back by Lovett who told him that the objects had disappeared. Lovett apparently thought the objects were geese but that seems a little strange to me… but I do remember reading about a strange event during WW II in which London radar operators reported that each morning an object appeared, rose into the sky and then seemed to fade away. It was found that it was caused by birds awaking and taking flight about the same time every day from the same London park.

Truman said that some sort of Atlantic weather disturbance had thrown off the radars. I suppose you could say that the disturbance could have caused the geese to be misidentified. The point is that the alert lasted about an hour.

These descriptions are based on the memories of the men (or the ghostwriters) who were there at the time. But as there is in many UFO–linked stories, there are some documents from the time. One of the major news services, INS reported:

A warning of an impending air attack resulted in a false alarm in this capitol [sic] city today. No air raid alarms were sounded, but functionaries charged with Civil Air Defense of Washington [D.C.] were alerted that an unidentified aircraft had been detected off the coast of the State of Maine at mid-day. Later, a spokesman for the Air Force stated that interceptor aircraft had been dispatched, and that the object in question had been identified shortly thereafter as a North American C-47 aircraft which was approaching the continent from Goose Bay, Labrador. The warning was said to have been useful in verifying the efficient of the Washington Civil Defense System. Civil Defense officials declined to comment on the incident.

Yes, there is a letter written by Colonel Charles Winkle, Assistant Executive in the Directorate of Plans that said that 40 aircraft were spotted at 32,000 feet. He noted that at 1104 hours the original track had faded out and it appeared that the flight was friendly.

While all this is interesting, it is irrelevant. This has nothing to do with the Willingham and his alleged sighting, which, until Zechel got involved was set in 1948. Then, seeing an opportunity to add some credibility to the Willingham crash report, he changed the date of the sighting to December 1950. Now Willingham’s sighting was not stand alone. There was a historical perspective to it.

There is one other aspect to this, again which is probably not related at all, other than it happened on December 8, 1950. Maccabee found, in the FBI files, an “Urgent” message that was labeled, “Flying Saucers.”

This office very confidentially advised by Army Intelligence, Richmond, that they have been put on immediate high alert for any data whatsoever concerning flying saucers. CIC here states background of instructions not available from Air Force Intelligence, who are not aware of the reason for alert locally, but any information whatsoever must be telephoned by them immediately to Air Force Intelligence. CIC advises data strictly confidential and should not be disseminated (sic).

And this would suggest some credibility to the Willingham tale. Here, just two days after the crash, the Air Force was requiring all intelligence information to be relayed to them. But, again, it is clear from Willingham’s original story, the crash took place in 1948, and not 1950. In fact, Willingham told me that in December 1950, he was serving in Korea (no evidence to support this claim), and the real date of the crash was in 1954 or 1955.

What that tells me is that no matter what Air Force Intelligence wanted in December 1950, this incident is irrelevant because there was no crash in December 1950. Remember, Willingham first claimed it was in 1948 and said that Zechel had changed the date to December 6, 1950. Willingham later said that it couldn’t have happened in December 1950 because he was in Korea at the time.

The question then becomes, how did this sighting get into the Eisenhower Briefing Document if it is a hoax? According to Zechel, he shared the information with Bill Moore and Moore, believing that Willingham was a retired colonel and that his story was credible, accepted it. We know that Moore was aware of this because he wrote about it, briefly, in The Roswell Incident. Moore wrote:

Then a second group, Citizens Against UFO Secrecy (CAUS), was formed in 1978 under the directorship of W. T. Zechel, former research director of GSW [Ground Saucer Watch] and a one-time radio-telegraph operator for the Army Security Agency. CAUS’s announced aim was nothing less than an “attempt to establish that the USAF (or elements thereof) recovered a crashed extraterrestrial spacecraft” in the Texas – New Mexico – Mexico border area sometime in the late 1940s.

This establishes that Zechel, as he claimed, had been talking to Moore about this crash. Since the book was published in 1980, and because the lead time between manuscript submission and actual publication is a year to eighteen months, it means that Zechel was talking to Moore in the late 1970s. In other words, it verifies part of what Zechel claimed when he said that Moore knew about this crash, and because Moore accepted the information from CAUS as authentic, it provides another reason that the Willingham crash had to be included in the EBD.  

They all thought it real, and if it was real, it had to be mentioned in the document.

It is clear from the details, that the Del Rio crash is the El Indio - Guerrero crash. The location selected is between the original site of Laredo and Del Rio. Zechel changed the date to correspond to the December 6, 1950 alert, though he suggested the event as December 5. The accepted date in the EBD is a compromise between that date and the December 8, 1950, request by the Air Force to the Army’s CIC. There were no documents to contradict this and Willingham said that he knew the December 6 date was wrong, but said nothing about that until years later.

Everything points to the December 6 crash as being the Willingham crash, and if that is true, then there was no such crash. And without a December 6, 1950 crash, anywhere in the Texas – Mexico border area, then the EBD must be a hoax.

You can reject everything that Zechel said, but the facts here are verified through other sources. Willingham confirms that he gave all this information to Zechel, he confirms that it was Zechel who came up with the December 1950 date, and Bill Moore, in his book, confirms that Zechel and CAUS were pursuing this crash case. 

All the dots line up and the facts now argue against the authenticity of the EBD because there is nothing true about the case except that Zechel investigated and the original source was Willingham.

Here is the real point. The December 6, 1950, alert has no relevance here. The information for the crash has come from a small circle of people and it all goes back to Willingham. He has changed the story to cover the facts that were in error and Zechel changed it to make use of the 1950 alert. There are no documents about it, nothing printed in any newspaper such as there was for Roswell, Kecksburg, or Shag Harbour to name just three, and there is a single witness, which again is unlike those other cases.

Unless someone can come up with some evidence that hasn’t passed through the hands of Willingham, Zechel or Moore, there is nothing left for this case. It is a hoax and if that is true, then the Eisenhower Briefing Document is a hoax. That is the only rational conclusion to be drawn.