David Grusch and the Canadian Letter

 

For all those who had asked, yes, I have seen the Canadian letter that George Knapp and Jeremy Corbell talked about. Yes, it is interesting, but not necessarily for the reasons some have suggested. And while it is interesting, it doesn’t, exactly, validate the information shared by David Grusch but does suggest an interest in the topic of UFO crashes by a Canadian government official.

George Knapp

Oh, and while some have questioned the authenticity of the letter, it is real.

In the last several weeks, we have been bombarded by UFO stories, NASA committee meetings and Senate hearings. Although nothing of real substance came from the meetings, hearings and now this letter, it does suggest a change in attitude. The letter does not confirm what David Crush was saying, but it does demonstrate a new interest in the topic at the higher levels of various governments. No longer are we subjected to the tongue-in-the-cheek snide comments by educated people who are too sophisticated to believe that UFOs might represent an alien technology. Now, we see those educated people wondering if the information leaking might not have an undercurrent of legitimacy. Just maybe this is something that should be watched.

I see from the various Internet discussions I have with colleagues around the world, that all this demands a cautious approach. We don’t want to be overly enthusiastic about the information without having the opportunity to vet that information. We need sources and documents to do that.

There is one point in the Canadian Letter that I haven’t seen addressed anywhere and that refers to a 1950 interest in the topic. A Manitoba member of Parliament, Larry Maguire, wrote to the Canadian Minister of Defence, concerning the new or renewed interest in what is now called UAPs. The sentence that caught my eye said, “As Minister of National Defence, you may not be aware Defence Research and Development Canada (DRDC) has participated in efforts to analyze UAP [UFO], which is publicly traceable to circa 1950.”

Larry Maguire

It was the 1950 date that drew my attention because that seems to relate to what has become known as the Sarbacher episode. According to William Steinman, he received a copy of an interview between Robert I. Sarbacher and Wilbert B. Smith that was conducted on September 15, 1950. The interview notes apparently were made by Lieutenant Colonel Bremer:

Smith: I am doing some work on the collapse of the earth’s magnetic field as a source of energy, and I think our work may have a bearing on the flying saucers.

Sarbacher: What do you want to know?

Smith: I have read Scully’s book [Behind the Flying Saucers] on the saucers and I would like to know how much of it is true.

Sarbacher: The facts reported in the book are substantially true.

Smith: Then the saucers exist?

Sarbacher: Yes, they exist.

Smith: Do they operate as Scully suggests on magnetic principles?

Sarbacher: We have not been able to duplicate their performance.

Smith: Do they come from some other planet?

Sarbacher: All we know is, we didn’t make them, and it’s pretty certain they didn’t originate on earth.

Smith: I understand the whole subject of saucers is classified.

Sarbacher: Yes, it is classified two points higher than the H-bomb. In fact it is the most highly classified subject in the U.S. Government at the present time.

Smith: May I ask the reason for the classification?

Sarbacher: You may ask, but I can’t tell you.

There was a final note that said the interview was written from memory but he, and I don’t know which he it was, though I suspect it was Lieutenant Colonel Bremer who “tried to keep it as nearly verbatum [sic] as possible.”

Steinman contacted Sarbacher about the conversation. Sarbacher confirmed that the interview had taken place. Steinman followed up with additional questions, which Sarbacher answered. On November 29, 1983, Sarbacher sent a letter to Steinman. The pertinent parts of that letter follow:

Relating to my own experiences regarding recovered flying saucers, I had no association with any of the people involved in the recovery [Steinman had supplied a list of names who were alleged members of MJ-12] and have no knowledge regarding the dates of recovery.

I did receive some official reports when I was in my office at the Pentagon but all those were left there as at the time, we were never supposed to take them out of the office.

About the only thing I remember at this time is that certain material reported to have come from flying saucer crashes were extremely light and tough.

I will note here that this exchange took place in 1983, after the publication of The Roswell Incident, but the idea of UFO crashes was not wide spread in the general public and I have no way of knowing if Sarbacher was familiar with the story. It was only after 1990 that the Roswell information exploded.

However, and relevant to the discussion is information reported by others. According to Dr. Bruce Maccabee and Jerry Clark, Sarbacher was “ignorant of UFO history.” They reported that he didn’t even know what Project Blue Book was, which suggests that Sarbacher had not been contaminated by all the reporting about the Roswell crash.

Sarbacher, in that same letter, wrote, “I remember in talking with some of the people at the office that I got the impression these ‘aliens’ were constructed like certain insects we have observed on earth, wherein because of the low mass the inertial forces involved in operation of these instruments would be quite low.”

This story received widespread coverage in the UFO community. Both Stan Friedman and Jerry Clark contacted Sarbacher and he confirmed the accuracy of what Steinman had reported, meaning that the notes and conclusions were accurate, but the information might be considered speculative. It was also noted that Sarbacher’s information was all second hand. He had read reports, he had talked with people involved but he had seen nothing himself.

There is one other important point. Sarbacher had been a member of the Research and Development Board, where some of the UFO information had been discussed. T. Scott Crain interviewed Fred A. Darwin who had served as the executive director of the board. Darwin told Crain:

Bob Sarbacher… had virtually no connection with the activities of the Research and Development Board… I got Bob appointed to membership on the Guidance and Control Panel. After a couple of months, the Chairman requested his replacement; he never came to the meetings.

This does not, of course, negate what Sarbacher had written to Steinman and told others. It only suggests that his information about the flying saucer crashes falls into the category of hearsay rather than observation.

I believe that the reference in Maguire’s letter was to this information, the Canadian connection to it and a desire to ensure that proper authorities in Canada were aware of some of the UFO history.

What this letter tells me is that Maguire was concerned about Canadian involvement in the renewed interest in UFOs, and that he wanted to alert the Defence Minister about it, in case he wasn’t current on UFO history.

While the letter does mention the renewed interest in UFOs, and the US Congress interest in the topic, it says nothing about the reliability of David Grusch’s information. And, if he was referring to the 1950 information, I suspect he was, then this does little to validate that data. We are left right where we began, which is without public corroboration of Grusch’s claims. It is just another instant of second-hand stories that seem to provide important clues about UFOs and it does suggest where some of the information that Grusch talks about originated. It just is not the smoking gun that we need.

X-Zone Broadcast Network - Robert Koford and the Aztec UFO Crash

This week I interviewed Robert Koford who has visited here frequently, commenting on various aspects of the UFO phenomenon. This discussion was inspired by his investigation into the Aztec UFO crash claim from March 25, 1948. This story has

Robert Koford

been around publicly much longer than the Roswell case but has far fewer witnesses and virtually no documentation to substantiate the crash. In fact, unlike Roswell where everyone agrees that something fell, with Aztec there are many members of the community who deny that anything happened. You can listen to the program here:

https://www.spreaker.com/episode/23484702

Bob bases his interest on a series of documents that suggest that General Carl Spaatz issued orders about an event on March 25. Although it seems to related to “flying discs”, one of the names given to the flying saucers, there is nothing to tie it to Aztec and apparently no one seems to know what triggered Spaatz’s response. You can see the documents and some of Bob’s arguments at his website found here: 

https://www.ourunconventionalskies.com/

As I mentioned on the show, I have addressed the Aztec crash on a number of occasions on this blog. For those of you interested in reading the background about the case, you can find it here:

http://kevinrandle.blogspot.com/2013/02/aztec-in-perspective-by-monte-shriver.html

http://kevinrandle.blogspot.com/2013/02/aztec-in-perspective-by-monte-shriver_8.html

http://kevinrandle.blogspot.com/2013/02/aztec-in-persspection-by-monte-shriver.html

http://kevinrandle.blogspot.com/2012/06/aztec-karl-pflock-and-scott-ramsey.html

http://kevinrandle.blogspot.com/2012/05/aztec-incident-by-scott-and-suzanne.html

http://kevinrandle.blogspot.com/2012/10/the-aztec-incident-review-by-jerome.html

http://kevinrandle.blogspot.com/2016/05/return-to-aztec.html

http://kevinrandle.blogspot.com/2016/05/the-real-honest-to-goodness-date-of.html

And for those who would like to hear what Monte Shriver has to say about the crash, I interviewed him on the radio show/podcast. You can listen to it here:

http://kevinrandle.blogspot.com/2017/05/x-zone-broadcast-network-monte-shriver.html

And for those who worry about not providing Scott Ramsey with the opportunity to refute many of these points, I will note that I have invited him on the program several of times. He had refused all those opportunities. I have no plans to invite him again.

I hope that all this provides enough information for those interested in the Aztec case to make some sort of intelligent decision about the reality of this crash. Just for the record, I have copies of Steinman’s book UFO Crash at Aztec, and, of course Ramsey’s book, not to mention a variety of other magazine articles about it, including Coral Lorenzen’s investigation in the mid-1970s reported in The APRO Bulletin.

Next week, I’ll be talking with Michael Hall about his UFO experiences and his UFOiTeam. If you have questions, send them as a comment here and I’ll get to them during the show.

Latest MJ-12 Documents: A Final Look

For those of you who tuned into Midnight in the Desert to listen to me discuss the latest MJ-12 document release, well, I was bumped early in the evening because Heather Wade had “overbooked the show.” At least I wasn’t dragged off by security for refusing to give up my place at the microphone… which couldn’t have happened since I was at home and she controlled the telephone system anyway.

But I did listen to the beginning of the program because like so many others, I wondered what Stan Friedman would say about the authenticity. Like many of us, he was interested in the source of the documents. They had seemed to excite him in earlier statements, but he now was somewhat more neutral though a careful reading of them should have given away the false nature of them... The mere mention that the Interplanetary Phenomenon Unit (IPU) was involved should have been a huge red flag. The IPU has been identified and it has nothing to do with aliens or UFOs or anything of the nature. For more about the IPU see:

http://kevinrandle.blogspot.com/search?q=IPU

I found one point hilarious and which nearly everyone has failed to mention. The first page says, “READ-AND-DESTROY. I have to wonder how the document survived with that instruction on the first page, which also argues against authenticity. I will note here that a top secret document’s destruction must be documented saying that it has been properly destroyed. Whoever “stole” this one would have had to violate that rule because he would have had to sign the destruction form.

Heather wouldn’t name names, and in one respect I understand that but that also tends to undermine the validity of the documents. She did say that the person who “stole” them originally had died so that he or she can’t be questioned about how he or she gained possession of them.

Heather hadn’t received the originals either. They had come to her in a .pdf file, which, as I have noted in the past, does not allow for much in the way of a forensic analysis of the paper, ink or anything else that might be gained by examination of the originals. We are left with a study of the format, the font, if the documents conformed to others created at the highest-levels of the government and if the documents fit into our current understanding of the situations being discussed in them.

Instead of analysis of these latest documents on the show, we were treated to another waltz down MJ-12 memory lane from the alleged moment the original documents first arrived at Jaime Shandera’s house in 1984 to the point we have reached now. There was nothing new here, other than listening to Stan talk about all his visits to archives, and he enjoys to do so (and hey, that is fun going through all this material, looking for that single and often elusive nugget) and things he had learned about the men who were named to the original MJ-12 committee, all of which was irrelevant to understanding these new documents.

For those who haven’t looked at them yet, though they can now be accessed through a variety of websites including that for Midnight in the Desert. You can still find them here if you are still interested:

http://midnightinthedesert.com/exclusive-ultra-top-secret-assessment-situation-statement-position-ufos/

I have outlined some of the many mistakes in these documents already and find it difficult to believe that something created at this level would be so riddled with errors. I am sorely tempted to enumerate the errors in the Roswell section but will refrain from doing that. Anyone interested can take a look at Roswell in the 21^st Century (or almost any of the other Roswell books) and compare the information there with that in this document. The errors will be apparent and we have to think that anyone who was far enough inside of the loop to be writing this document would be cognizant of the facts of the case.

I’m going to move onto the Aztec case which was covered in depth here. Stan had made a big deal out of the research in Scott Ramsey’s book while he was on Midnight in the Desert and how careful and meticulous it has been. But this document is at a wide variance with what Ramsey published. This sets up a conundrum… if the document is accurate, then Ramsey is wrong but if Ramsey is right, then the document is fake and I haven’t even mentioned the possibility that both are wrong and Aztec is a hoax.

According to the document, on March 25, 1948, the craft was watched on three radars “belonging to the recovery network of the White Sands Test Range and located in classified areas of southwest New Mexico.” In 1948, it was the White Sands Proving Ground, and if the radars were in southwest New Mexico, that would have prevented tracking of the object to low altitudes in northern New Mexico because the mountainous terrain would have been in the way. In fact, once you get very far north of White Sands, their radars aren’t much good for an object below 10,000 feet. Radar is line of sight.

Again, according to the document, the crash site was secured by 10:45 p.m. that night, which meant that no civilians would have been gathered at the site on the morning of March 25 to watch the military arrive because the object had yet to crash according to these new documents. And, if the civilians were on hand to see the military to arrive, it would have had to be on the morning of March 26, but then the site was already secured and the civilians would have been prevented from getting near.

We are treated to a reference to the base at Flat Rock, Nevada, which, of course, was the scene of much of the action in The Andromeda Strain. We learn that the Blue Berets (whoever they are… no, they don’t exist) came in disguised as National Guard, but I’m not sure how you pull that off since the uniforms worn by the National Guard are the same wore by those on active duty with the Army. I suppose they removed their Blue Berets and wore regulation headgear.

Stephen Bassett

But there really doesn’t seem much reason to drag this out. The documents are faked. I spoke with Stephen Bassett yesterday afternoon, and almost the first thing he said to me was that he too thought the documents faked. We discussed some of the bloopers in text, the problems with the classification markings, and all the other errors. Bassett said that he didn’t think these were disinformation, but more likely just someone outside the government who had too much time on his hands. I’ll add someone who didn’t actually know much but who had gotten his hands of William Steinman’s book UFO Crash at Aztec.

What we need to do now is place these documents in the same file folder with the Roswell Slides, the alien autopsy and little grey men who like strawberry ice cream and Tibetan music. Footnotes in the great journal of UFO information, or maybe, even better, have them all deleted from anything to do with UFO research because they have only distracted us. They have added nothing to our knowledge.

The Real, Honest-to-Goodness Date of the Aztec UFO Crash (Maybe)

It is now time to consolidate all the information we have gathered about the date of the Aztec UFO crash. It began when it was claimed that the date had been identified and agreed to by all the various UFO researchers for a long time. That didn’t seem to be right to me so I decided to take a look into it.

Yes, in my book, History of UFO Crashes, I said the date was March 25, 1948. I had gone through some of the literature on the subject and like everyone else; I liked the precision of having a single date for it. I also noted that this was a hoax, one that I believed everyone in the UFO community had accepted… well, there were a few who didn’t, but they seemed to be unaware of the history and in a relative minority.

Aztec, New Mexico. Photo courtesy of Paul Kimball.

I began a search for the original source of the March 25 date and couldn’t find it in the Scully’s early writing about UFO crashes. In fact, he didn’t even mention Aztec in the first article that he wrote in Variety in 1949.

I scanned his book, Behind the Flying Saucers, but found no date for the crash. There were a lot of dates in the book, but none for the Aztec crash. I also looked through J. P. Cahn’s article exposing the crash as a hoax. I found a reference for the Roswell crash with an exact date, or rather the date that the Army released the information that it had really been a weather balloon (or for the purists, it was the date that most of the newspapers in the country explained the Roswell crash.)

In the 1970s, the Aztec case resurfaced, but now there was a date associated with it. According to Robert Spencer Carr, the crash took place on February 13, 1948, (or more accurately, this is what Mike McClellan said in his Official UFO article.) But that date seemed to have slipped from the public consciousness because I don’t know if anyone else ever used it.

I also ran across a couple of references that suggested the crash took place in either the spring of 1949 or in October of that year. Both of these were rather obscure which might explain why no one mentioned them very often.

Then along came William Steinman and it seems that he was the one who pinned the date down to March 25. After Steinman, all who talked about the Aztec crash used that date.

All this actually proves is that the date had been relatively fluid with dates as late as October 1949 and as early as February 1948. That many now accept the March 25, 1948, date as accurate strikes me as somewhat absurd. Do we really want to accept this date by consensus or would we rather have something a little more tangible?

Here’s where I now dive into the pool. According to Scott Ramsey, his witnesses arrived at the scene of a fire that might have ignited some drip storage tanks that were nearby. He tells us that when Doug Nolan arrived, the fire was contained and the tanks were no longer in danger.

Okay, that makes sense, but what we’re being told is that this was not some small brush fire, but something larger that drew many people to the location of the UFO crash. The military arrived sometime later and took control of the area. Although this does not agree with much of what Scully had written in his book, the question that springs to my mind is, “What do the newspapers say?”

Granted, no one has found a newspaper article about the crash from that time in that area, but I think what we should have been looking for was a story about the fire. This is, or was, remote New Mexico and a fire of the magnitude of the one described would have drawn the interest of the local newspaper. There should have been an article about the fire in the newspaper.

Back in 1976, when McClellan wrote his article, he interviewed George Bowra, who had been the editor of the Aztec newspaper in 1948. According to that article, Bowra was convinced that “Nobody could have gotten in there and out without attracting a lot of attention.”

The follow up question is, “Did anyone check the newspaper for an article about a fire in Hart Canyon in 1948?” It would seem to me that if such an article appeared in the newspaper, it would be some corroboration for the tales told by some of these witnesses. Not much, but some.

I currently have no way of checking the newspaper records, other than a letter or email to the publisher, who might not be all that interested in looking for the story. I’ll give that a shot, but if there is someone in that area that wouldn’t mind taking a look through the newspaper (which would be the Aztec Independent-Review which ceased publication in the 1980s) for late March 1948 (or for some of the other dates mentioned for that matter), we might find the fire story and that might give us the opportunity to verify that much of the tale. If, and when, I get an answer, I’ll publish it here. Until then, the question remains, “Why did everyone settle on the March 25, 1948, date?”

Aztec and Roswell

As those of you who visit here on a regular basis know, there has been a question of when the Aztec crash took place. It was stated that March 25, 1948, was the agreed upon date by nearly everyone. It was considered solid, but I seemed to remember a number of different dates being offered, so, on a lark, I began looking into that. And I did find a number of different dates being offered until William Steinman seemed to settle on March date in his book UFO Crash at Aztec. After the publication in 1986, the date became solid.

The Roswell "Saucer" in Ramey's office.

But that's not the point here. In the search, I reread the J.P. Cahn story, "The Flying Saucers and the Mysterious Little Men," (who BTW, were described then as perfect humans of small stature with perfect teeth and dressed in 1890 garb), published in True in September 1952, I found an interesting sentence or two in that article. Cahn wrote, "Back on July 9, 1947, only two weeks after private flyer Kenneth Arnold had alerted the nation with his nine disks seen skipping 'saucer-like' near Mt. Rainier, Washington, Southwest newspapers headlined that a captured disk that had fallen on a New Mexico ranch was a dud. That one, when delivered to the Eighth Army Air Force, was identified as a tinfoil-covered reflector from a weather balloon. [which is seen in the photograph]."

Unless you're unable to read, that clearly is a reference to Roswell even though the town wasn't mentioned and it was made only a little more than five years later. I just found the reference interesting given that Cahn's article was about a different crash. I'm not sure that it means all that much, but thought I would mention it for what it's worth.

Roswell vs. Aztec

No, this isn’t what you think. It was something that I noticed in a Billy Cox column which addressed Tom Carey’s appearance at the American University. Cox was discussing the purpose of the panel discussion and interviewed adjunct professor John Weiskopf who asked his honors students to consider the impact of ET themes

Display in the International Museum and
Research Center in Roswell.

on popular culture. Cox wanted to know if he had any regrets about asking Carey to appear. That started a discussion about Carey and his revelation about the Roswell Slides at the discussion and also reminded me of another lecture in front of college students that was somewhat similar.

Some sixty-five years before that, on March 8, 1950, a lecture about flying saucers was held at the University of Denver. This lecture became part of the mythology involved in the Aztec UFO crash and was given by a “mystery man” who was later identified as Silas Newton. Frank Scully, in Behind the Flying Saucers:

The negotiations between the faculty and the spokesman for the lecturer took months to arrange, as the speaker wasn’t keen about being “evaluated,” but when the science students voted 100 per cent to hear the lecturer, he acquiesced. Of these, 80 per cent said, after the lecture, that they were “impressed.” By a show of hands 60 per cent indicated they believed the man knew what he was talking about, that he obviously was a member of the group of scientists he described as having examined space ships which had landed on this earth from, in all likelihood,  another planet. More, they believed the mystery man of science had the best answer to the secret propulsion behind these flying saucers and that it was neither combustion nor jet.

William Steinman added a little to this in his UFO Crash at Aztec, published in 1986. He identified the instructor of the class as Francis F. Broman, who taught a basic science course. Steinman wrote that Broman had actually invited George T. Koehler to give the lecture, but Koehler said that his friend knew more about the subject, so it was Newton who gave the talk.

Steinman also mentioned that an intelligence officer had contacted Broman to learn more about the lecture. When Broman said that he hadn’t believed the tale but that he didn’t speak for everyone in the class that seemed to satisfy the officer. The call was terminated.

William E. Jones and Rebecca D. Minshall took up the investigation and reported their findings in the International UFO Reporter for September/October 1991. While they suggest that Steinman had almost everything right about the lecture, they reported that the name of the class, rather than Basic Science was Science and Man.

And they report, “The purpose of the lecture was to provide the students with an assertion against which they could apply the critical thinking methods that Broman was teaching.”

They also noted, “Broman found Newton’s claim about the crashed saucer unconvincing, as did many of those who attended his lecture. Further, Newton failed to live up to an agreement to allow his story to be critiqued using the methods being taught by Broman. As a result of statements made later by Broman about some aspects of the lecture, Broman was reportedly threatened with a lawsuit by the author of a book entitled, About UFOs. The dispute was settled out of court.”

Well, I’m not surprised by the threats of a lawsuit. That seems to be standard operation procedure in the world of the UFO. But the important points here, are the facts about the lecture, including that the professor and the students found Newton’s claims and evidence unconvincing.

So, fast forward 65 years.

Back to the original question.  Did he have any regrets about asking Carey to appear?  According to Billy Cox:

‘Mr. Carey surprised attendees and participants alike that evening at a near full capacity event (170 people) with his disclosure,’ Weiskopf stated in an email, ‘but many attendees whom I spoke with afterwards (including my students) said that they were quite skeptical of Tom Carey’s claim. Mr. Carey got what he wanted, his disclosure eclipsed much of the substantial discussions by the other three panelists who have remarkable careers and credibility. The lead teaser for WTOP’s radio coverage the following morning beginning at 6 a.m. contained three points, the most dramatic being Tom Carey’s leak.’

Tom Carey was, as you say, ‘the odd man’ out, but that was deliberate; that was intended,” Weiskopf went on. “If we present knowledge and experience of the same or identical frequencies, then we are only limiting ourselves.” He preferred instead to reflect on how the course forced his students to stretch, which he says manifested during a session with the speakers before the public event that evening: “It was a remarkable luncheon to watch my honors students question, challenge, and in some cases, retort or refute statements that the panelists made in their books/articles/interviews. In my course during the book discussions, my students were ‘less than kind’ in discusssing Tom Carey’s co-authored book Witness to Roswell. At the luncheon, two students told Mr. Carey face-to-face that they did not like his book nor did they believe it. They told him that his logic and conclusions were faulty.”

Weiskopf said it wasn’t his job to tell the class what to think. “When I taught this course I never colored any book, film, television show or blog with my personal beliefs or what I thought about the extraterrestrial issue, either in general or specifically. I allowed my classroom academic environment to unfold as objectively as possible allowing the students to ‘conclude, be confused or indecisive or become staunch believers’ on their own after examining and evaluating all of the data for 14 weeks.”

Bottom line: “I would hope that other universities and colleges would take the same bold and courageous step that American University did in supporting this extremely important event.”

The whole article can be seen here:

http://devoid.blogs.heraldtribune.com/15296/au-prof-the-kids-are-alright/

And here’s my point. Not much has changed in those 65 years. In 1950, the students, according to the best accounts, were not impressed with Newton. The reason was probably the lack of evidence. It was heavy on speculation and if you reject the Aztec crash, then it was heavy on fabrication.

With Tom Carey, the students, according to the best accounts, were not impressed with Tom. The reason was probably the hyperbole of his remarks and the lack of evidence. Of course, today, we know that the major problem is that the source of his information, those slides have been uncovered and that the body shown is not alien.

The real point is that we all need to look at the evidence with a little bit more skepticism, we have to be more diligent in our research, and we have to reject this will to believe. If we don’t, some 65 years from now someone might be writing a similar story (and hey, if I’m around, I’ll do it.)

Aztec in Perspective by Monte Shriver - Part One

(Blogger’s Note: The following is reprinted by permission. Given the length of the original article, I have broken it into three parts and will publish all three over the next week. It was written by one-time resident of Aztec, Monte Shriver, and provides an interesting insight into the alleged crash. Again, reprinted by permission of Monte Shriver.)

 

IT’S ABOUT TIME 

(SOMEONE FROM AZTEC WROTE ABOUT THE HART CANYON UFO AND REPORT THEIR FINDINGS AND CONCLUSIONS) 

INTRODUCTION 

by

Monte Shriver

 

I was born in El Dorado, Kansas in 1934 and in 1937 we lost our ranch in the depression and moved to Aztec, New Mexico. My Grandfather Shriver bought the old experimental farm north of the Estes Arroyo and my Dad rented a farm on the Ruins Road. I entered the first grade in 1940 and had my first experience with riding a school bus. In 1941, my Uncle Jim Shriver joined the Army so my Grandfather sold the farm and we moved to town in 1941, purchasing a house on Mesa Verde Avenue. In May 1946 we sold the house in Aztec and moved to Falcon, Colorado where we lived until February 1947 when we returned to Aztec and purchased a home at 402 San Juan Ave - a home where my Mother lived until she passed away in 2006.

 

I graduated from Aztec High School in 1952 and enrolled at the New Mexico College of  Agriculture and Mechanic Arts in Las Cruces, New Mexico and graduated in 1957 with a degree in mechanical engineering. After various jobs including serving in the United States Air Force as an intelligence officer, I went to work for the Bell System in 1962 and retired in 1990. In 1989, I was transferred to Las Cruces, New Mexico by the telephone company and we have lived in southern New Mexico since that time.

I would like to thank my classmates from the Aztec High School Class of 1952 all of whom let me test my memories of the late 40’s and early 50’s with them during our recent 60^th class reunion. These included Herb Collins, John Franchini, Bruce Hare, Robert Sipe, Alice Crane Hardin and Lee Atchison and Betty Lawson Waggoner and Bud Crane from the Class of 1951. I would also like to thank Elizabeth Flores and her staff at the Special Collections Branch at the NMSU Library for providing me with access to old New Mexico State Highway Department Maps as well as other historical documents. Others I talked to included Gerald Williams,  Evaleene Andrews Dunn and Jack Dunning.

The first time I recall hearing of the UFO crash in Hart Canyon was when I

learned that the Aztec City Library was holding an annual symposium about the UFO crash. During the 2000s, I read about the symposium in the Aztec newspaper, the Talon and even wrote one or more letters to the Talon on the subject. Finally, I attended my first symposium in 2011 (the last one unfortunately) and revisited Hart Canyon for the first time in many years. 

As a result of the Symposium, I purchased  two books, Behind the Flying Saucers -- Updated Edition by Frank Scully with Bonus “Truth About Aztec UFO Crash” by Sean Casteel and published by Conspiracy Journal as well as William S. Steinman’s UFO Crash at Aztec - A Well Kept Secret. I also recently purchased Scott Ramsey’s book The Aztec Incident - Recovery at Hart Canyon. After reading these three books, I decided it was time that someone from Aztec reviewed these books and reported their findings and conclusions.  I hope that future researchers will find this information helpful in their quest to determine what really happened in Hart Canyon if, in fact, anything did happen. I know that the Ramsey’s believe that “…the Aztec Incident is a real event….” I start this work as a skeptic based on my research and interviews with my classmates who attended the Aztec Public School system in 1948. And you, dear reader, may make your own decisions based on the mistakes I have found and the questionable conclusions that have been reached. The question that must be answered is “How many errors and mistakes must be made before the entire work is invalidated?”

 

In Ramsey’s book, at page 20, he quotes a Virgil J. Riggs as saying “As a young kid growing up in Aztec, NM in the late 1940’s to the late 1950’s, I had heard many rumors and talk about the UFO crash north of Aztec.” At my recent class reunion with members of the classes of 1951 and 52, I asked them if they knew Virgil Riggs and if they remembered any talk of a UFO crashing north of Aztec. Many of them remembered Mr. Riggs, but no one, including me, could remember anyone talking about a UFO crash in the Aztec area during the 40’s and 50’s. As one of my classmates said, if we had heard about a UFO crash in Hart Canyon, we would have been all over the place looking for it. Robert Sipe told me he and his father had  cut fence posts in Hart Canyon in 1948 and never heard anything about a UFO landing there. Sometime between 1947 and 1950, I shined shoes at Ray Current’s barber shop for two years. During that time, I never heard anyone mention a UFO in Hart Canyon. The conversations always seemed to center on hunting, sports and farming. Of  course, Mr. Current would become quite animated when he would talk about how Farmington tried to steal the county courthouse from Aztec. The barbershop had hot showers and on weekends, it was quite common for farmers to come into the shop for shave, haircut and a hot shower since many of the farms did not have running water. Afterwards, they would sit around the shop and “bat the breeze” but no mention of a  UFO was ever made to my recollection.  I was a boy scout during 1947-49 and I remember camping at the cave about 5 miles up Hart Canyon and no one in the scouting group ever said anything about a UFO in the Canyon. I have know Jack Dunning for over 60 years and I never remember him mentioning it at all until I asked him about it in 2011.

Beginning at page 210, the Steinman book contains an article by Mike McClellan which indicates that Roy Sullivan was sheriff of San Juan County in 1948 and he “… had no recollection of a crash, aircraft being in the area or anything that would support Carr’s claims…”. Further, Bruce Sullivan (the sheriff’s son who would have been in Aztec High School at the time) is quoted as saying he lived in Aztec all his life and never “knew or heard anything about it”.

 

UFO CRASH AT AZTEC BY STEINMAN AND STEVENS

 

On page 24, Mr. Steinman states that “A flying saucer did indeed crash land …twelve miles of Aztec on 25 March 1948...This craft, of unknown origin, was recovered  by a team composed of military intelligence and scientific personnel…dismantled and secretly carted off to a covert hiding place…”.

At pages 27-28, he has the reported sighting of the 25 March 1948 UFO going directly to Secretary of State George C. Marshall and that Secretary Marshall was giving direct orders as to how this situation should be handled.  I would have thought the reports would have gone through the military chain of command to the Secretary of Defense.

On page 31, he states that the IPU scout team found the “crash landed disc” and gave directions to the recovery team on how to reach the disc. Further, he indicates that the IPU team members reached the crash-site virtually unnoticed by civilians living in the area. As soon as the IPU team arrived at the scene road blocks were set up two miles from the site on all roads leading to the area. Guards were then posted and only people with the appropriate pass could enter. This assertion is contradicted by the Ramsey book which states that oil field workers, Doug Noland, Bill Ferguson, people in route to California, a traveling preacher, local law enforcement and even a law enforcement officer from Cuba, New Mexico (more about him later) and others were on the site before military and/or government personnel arrived on the scene later in the morning.

Further, he states that the Dunning family was held incommunicado within their own ranch house and that the Dunning property upon which the disc was located was immediately transferred from the ownership of Harold Dunning to federal status. The Dunning’s  phone line was also monitored.

In 2011, I raised these issues with a long-time friend on mine, Jack Dunning, the son of Harold (Hy) Dunning. He told me that they were not held incommunicado on the ranch, no property of theirs was transferred to the government and that their phone line could not have been monitored because they did not have a phone.  He reaffirmed the same with me in 2012 after I visited Aztec for my 60^th class reunion June 29-30.

On page 38, Mr. Steinman says the government scientists reportedly gained entry to the disc by breaking out a porthole window with a hammer, then finding a long pole which they pushed through the porthole, barely reaching  a “pushbutton” which when pushed by the pole caused a door to open, allowing access to the disc. On page 139 (of the Conspiracy Journal’s Behind the Flying Saucers Updated Edition by Frank Scully), the scientists (Dr. Gee’s group) waited two days before deciding it was safe to approach the disc. They found a broken glass porthole and rammed a pole through this defect in the ship (No mention is made of breaking the porthole with a hammer). They prodded around with the pole used to push through the opening in the broken porthole, ultimately hitting a double knob which caused a door to fly open. Compare this to  Ramsey’s book, page 3, as related to Scott Ramsey by Doug Noland, Doug’s boss, Bill Ferguson “…was trying to poke around the craft with a fire pole or something…Soon, he hit some damn thing and a door or walkway appeared…”.  (No mention of pushing the pole through  a broken porthole.) When there are conflicting stories about the same event, only one can be right or they could all be wrong. You, dear reader, must decide.

On page 42, the saucer was disassembled, loaded on three trucks, covered with tarps with signs indicating the trucks carried explosives so that anyone seeing these trucks would be easily deceived. Contrast this with Ramsey’s book on  page 159 where his transportation expert speculated that separating the disc into thirds would result in 1/3 of the craft being 50 feet wide, 86.6 feet long and the top of the craft 17 feet above ground level and extending about 26 feet behind the trailer carrying it. Anyone seeing 3 trucks loaded like this and marked explosives must have had one hell of a scare and obviously they would have been easily deceived.  Unlike Mr. Ramsey who has extensive detail on how the disc could have been moved to Los Alamos, Mr. Steinman basically says the disc was moved to Los Alamos without giving any details of how the move actually took place.

Depending upon whose account you read, the roads in Hart Canyon were barricaded for anywhere from three days to two weeks or more. With oilfield workers and ranchers in the area, wouldn’t you think someone in Aztec would have heard about it?

On page 72, Mr. Steinman makes a statement that I am sure will come as a complete surprise to the citizens of Aztec as it did to me and I quote “MJ-12* ordered the entire town of Aztec, New Mexico placed under complete surveillance. The family of the ranch owner H.D. were under special watch. Their phone calls, all mail, and all movements were monitored at all times. All of their relatives, school mates, teachers, close friends, etc., were also watched like a hawk. This close surveillance is still going on 39 years after the event(that would be 1987), and will  continue (emphasis added) until MJ-12 sees fit to relax the net.” So watch it Aztec! Someone is watching you. Heck, they might even have been at my 60^th class reunion because I will admit there were some people there from the class of  ‘51 that I didn’t recognize”.

*Some people maintain that an MJ-12 organization never existed.

I should note that when Mr. Steinman visited Hart Canyon in 1982, he noted on page 257 that “…two huge unmarked helicopters followed me in and out of the canyon!! This didn’t bother me so much at first; but, when I got back home, the same type of unmarked helicopters circles very low over my house…over a period of several months….” REALLY??

On page 242, when Mr. Steinman arrived at the Durango airport in 1982, he states that he headed the back way to Aztec on Highway 172 which, I understand him to say, was the route the recovery team took from the airport to the crash site. The only problem with this is that in 1948, Highway 172 went from Ignacio to Arborles, CO and wasn’t rerouted south to meet NM Highway 511 until 1972. NM Highway  511 wasn’t extended north from the Navajo Dam to meet CO Highway 172  until the early 1970’s.  In fact, the 1948 New Mexico State Road Map doesn’t show any road going into Colorado on the route now covered by NM 511. That of course doesn’t preclude the possibility of dirt roads between the states but how the recovery team was able to travel over unnamed dirt roads and find Hart Canyon is a mystery to me. In fact, Jack Dunning told me that in 1948 there was no road that he knew of that would take you from Hart Canyon to Durango.  What I never understood was why not take the easy way to Hart Canyon? Just drive west from the Durango Airport to paved highway US 550 from Durango to Aztec  and drive south to the entrance to Hart Canyon.

A few other areas where Mr. Steinman is wrong:

1. On page 72, he states that “Admiral James V. Forrestal was the Navy Chief of Staff at the end of the war.” I could find nothing in the record to indicate that Mr. Forrestal was ever an admiral. Further, unlike the Army and Air Force who were headed by a Chief of Staff, the Navy is headed by the Chief of Naval Operations(CNO). The office of CNO was established in 1915. During the war, Mr. Forrestal was Under-Secretary of the Navy for several years, appointed Secretary of the Navy in May 1944 and in 1947 appointed the first Secretary of Defense. This is an example of rather shoddy research if you ask me.

2. On page 258, he reports finding an eyewitness  (V.A) whose place “…is a neatly kept little farm on the Animas River, on the outskirts of  Blanco….” The only minor problem here is that it is the San Juan River on the outskirts of Blanco, not the Animas. If you can’t get the name of the river right, what  do you get right? 

3. On page 259, he states that V.A.’s daughter told him that you could see the south side of the south walls of Heart(sic) Canyon from her father’s front yard. A friend of mine told me that to see Hart Canyon from Blanco, one had to have either a very long neck or be a world champion high jumper or both. When I drove the area on June 29-30, 2012 I found it impossible to see Hart Canyon from the Blanco Area.

Geezers vs Youngsters

Back when I was in graduate school and preparing to write my dissertation, I learned that the first thing you did to prepare was make a search of the literature… well, the second thing, after you have figured out what you wanted to research. You looked to see what others had done before you, if someone had already accomplished what you wanted to, and how you might improve on both your idea and what had gone before.

 

 Apparently in UFO research, this is not the case.

I don’t know how many times we must revisit cases that seem to have been solved, that seem to have nothing to do with UFOs, or that are hoaxes. Every five years or so another crop of interested people show up and we begin all over again… and somehow the blame is pushed on the “Geezers.” We just haven’t made the case, whatever the case might be.

 

Take the Allende Letters, that group of correspondence between Carlos Allende or Carl Allen and Morris K. Jessup. Allende/Allen wrote about Jessup’s UFO books. Allende/Allen suggested a knowledge that was based on inside information and personal observation. Part of it was the so-called Philadelphia Experiment in which it is claimed that the US Navy teleported a ship in 1943. Ignore the fact that no documentation has ever surfaced to prove it. Ignore the fact that the allegedly teleported ship’s logs place it elsewhere at the time. Ignore the fact that there is nothing to support this claim except Allende’s allegation.

 

Allende/Allen arrived in Tucson, Arizona in the 1970s, apparently on his way to Mexico for cancer treatment. While in Tucson he met with Jim Lorenzen, then the International Director of APRO and signed a statement that the whole Philadelphia Experiment, the letters, and everything else associated with it was a hoax. Allende/Allen said he made it up because Jessup’s writing frightened him and he didn’t want Jessup to write anything more.

 

To me, that admission, by Allende/Allen ends the discussion. It is a hoax. It is an admitted hoax. They guy who started it said it was a hoax. What more do we need?

 

Remember, that was in the 1970s. I even did a magazine article about this in the 1970s. Robert Goerman, a UFO researcher interested in the Allende Letters found Allende’s family who told him, Goerman, that Allende was slightly unhinged… bright but unhinged. There was nothing to the story he told…

 

But then the youngsters enter the field, bringing their “fresh” perspective to it, and we begin again to hear about the value of the Allende Letters. We hear there might be something to them. We hear how they might be the key to solving the UFO mystery… and away we go again, covering the same ground because Allende/Allen’s admission of hoax was forced by the CIA and should therefore be ignored.

 

Or take the latest of the Aztec “re-investigations.” We have a new book that suggests that there might be something to the Aztec UFO crash. Once again, this is a case that should have been relegated to a footnote a long time ago. It is clear that Aztec is a hoax started by a con man, Silas Newton, who is probably laughing his ass off in his grave because there are still people who believe it.

 

Newton told the story to Frank Scully who made fun of it in his newspaper column in 1948, but a couple of years later Scully seemed to have changed his mind and suddenly began to believe the tale. He wrote a book about it that became a bestseller… and then J. P. Cahn wrote an expose about it that should have put the whole thing to rest… but didn’t.

 

In the 1970s Robert Spencer Carr said that he had found five witnesses to the Aztec crash and the case was revitalized… but even the reinvestigation failed to find much in the way of evidence. Carr relied on unidentified witnesses and rumor and we don’t know who his witnesses were or why he accepted what they said. There was nothing new… until the 1980s when William Steinman began his new investigation, “proving” there was something to the crash tale. Of course, Steinman offered little evidence of anything other than he is a fan of garage sales and that he had been to Aztec annoying the locals with his less than gracious manner.

 

But even with all these investigations and the failure to find anything substantial, Aztec is back. We’re told that the proof is now incontrovertible, but it is weak at best. Though we’re told to ignore Newton and his con man buddy Leo GeBauer, they are still tied to the case. We are treated to links between alleged witnesses and the event, but when we look deeper, we find the links broken. There is simply nothing there that hasn’t been discussed before, yet we’re supposed to roll over and accept this new data as if it is proof.

 

I could go on in this vein. We have arguments that maybe the contactees had something important to say, but in reality, they merely cluttered the UFO field with their nonsense making it easier to hide the truth, whatever that truth might be. We hear about great air wars between the aliens and our Air Force, but the evidence doesn’t hold up to scrutiny. We have phenomenon, such as crop circles linked to UFOs, but that really should be another field of research…(get it? Field?).

 

True, there are some things that do need to be reexamined. The Majorie Fish Star Map that was based on Betty Hill’s memory needs new work now that we have better information. Some of the stars she used are not where we had thought them to be and she excluded red dwarves because she didn’t think there was anything interesting to be found near them, not to mention there are so many of them. Fish’s work was great when she did it, but it is now badly out of date. Maybe a youngster who plays with computers could do the work in minutes rather than the months it took Fish.

 

The point is that we geezers have something to add, if only it is to direct the youngsters into areas that should be explored. We don’t really need to study the Allende Letters again. We have all we need to know about Aztec, and if Scott Ramsey really spent a half a million dollars on his research, I can think of better areas that he could have explored with that kind of money.

 

So rather than dismiss us all as failures, maybe some should look to what we have learned. It just might save someone a half million dollar mistake; years of research that will go nowhere, or help focus the spotlight on areas that could provide a breakthrough or two.

 

And rather than pit the geezers against the youngsters as some are attempting, maybe we should all work together. Why does it have to be an either or propostion?