America Unearthed and Davy Crockett Survives the Alamo

I try to give everyone the benefit of the doubt and that was the reason that some months ago I posted a column about America Unearthed that was mostly positive. Scott Wolter, the forensic geologist who is the host, had touched on some subjects with which I had a passing interest but no real in depth knowledge. He seemed to be interested in finding the truth and the story of the great wall in Texas, this massive thing that some believed had been built in ancient times by a race of giants, ended with his conclusion it was a bizarre natural formation. That seemed to suggest an unbiased look at these strange things he investigated.

But then he learned from a tipster that Davy Crockett hadn’t been killed at the Alamo, but survived for decades after that fight and had been granted land in Alabama by President James Buchanan. Well, the topic caught my interest and here was something with which I had a good working knowledge. I had researched the battle for a number of books and articles, have visited the Alamo twice, and knew about many of the controversies that surround it. Here was my chance to see exactly how careful his research was and how unbiased he really was.

A family in Alabama had a land grant, signed by a David Crockett and dated long after the Alamo fell. They believe that Crockett survived the battle and then a couple of decades later he was living in Alabama. In fact, they showed a newspaper article that suggested Crockett had survived the battle. And to increase the proof, they had some artifacts found on the land including a hunk of pottery and an arrowhead. They also had the story of some human bones found that were identified as human, but the bones were reinterred so that no DNA could be extracted and they had no idea if they were bones of a male or female.

My first reaction on seeing the land grant with Crockett’s signature on it was to wonder if they could compare it to real, known, authenticated signatures of Crockett. It would certainly be an easy and inexpensive way to end the story, which, of course, is not what they wanted to do because they had an hour to fill.

My second thought was to take a look at other newspaper articles published at the time of the battle… something that I had actually done as an assignment in graduate school. There are dozens of them suggesting that William Travis, one of the commanders had survived, that Jim Bowie survived and all sorts of various and inaccurate stories. A single newspaper clipping doesn’t change the historical perspective of the battle. But this isn’t questioned by Wolter; it seems to impress him greatly. I thought that maybe he should have taken a trip to a university library to look at some microfilm. He might not have been quite so impressed with a clipping that isn’t supported by stories in other newspapers.

Instead, he calls a local archaeologist with a backhoe (though I thought it was an excavator, but that would be splitting a hair) and ground penetrating radar to search a section of the farmland. I’m not sure how they determined what to check, but they found nothing more astonishing than a rock.

He also made a trip to San Antonio to show us what remains of the Alamo, or rather, the chapel. He didn’t show us any of the other structures that have survived, and he meets with a historian out in front of the chapel. He eventually tells him what he is investigating and then, to my horror, the historian said that he was a fan of the de la Pena diary (which they don’t bother to explain).

This was a diary written by Jose Enrique de la Pena, an officer with Santa Anna at the Alamo. In the diary, it is alleged that a number of the Texans surrendered at the end of the battle, only to be executed on orders of Santa Anna. Included in this number, according to the diary was Crockett. This diary, however, appeared in the 1950s with little or no provenance (which is the case we find with the MJ-12 documents, which is irrelevant here but I mention to drag some kind of paranormal or UFO aspect into this). I won’t go into the arguments about that here, but there is quite a trade in faked documents from the Texas War for Independence.

The one thing that never seems to be mentioned, even if the de la Pena diary is real is that someone inside the Alamo, thinking that Crockett’s name might save his life, lied about who he was. There is eyewitness testimony that Crockett was killed in the fighting, that his body was seen in the courtyard in front of the chapel, but I digress.

So, he talked to an expert historian who told him that Crockett had been killed in the battle, but finally got him to say that Crockett, as a Free Mason, might have given the signal of distress and therefore been allowed to escape. This is a farfetched theory but one Wolter is happy with so he travels to Minnesota to talk with a Mason to discuss some of this. He even takes the theory further suggesting that Santa Anna, identified throughout the program as a Mexican general but no mention that he was also the president of Mexico at the time, had made the same distress sign so that Sam Houston, leader of the Texas army, spared his life… no mention that Santa Anna was saved because he signed a document giving away Texas but let’s not let a little history get in the way of a good story.

Finally, we’re off to a place in Tennessee to interview a real, live, direct descendant of David Crockett. She told Wolter that Crockett preferred to be called David and signed everything as David rather than Davy… wow, some confirmation that maybe the land grant is real and Wolter overreacts to this relatively well known fact… but wait, she has copies of documents that Crockett had signed. As the program is about to end, we hear the results of the comparison of signatures. They had been given to a handwriting expert who declared they were signed by two different men… two different men named David Crockett. I hope that Wolter had concealed the date of the land grant to keep from contaminating the analysis, but we’re only told about the results, not shown anything about that analysis.

But no, the amateurs stand around and say that while the capital letters are different, the rest of the signature seems to match. They point out that a person’s handwriting and signature chance over time so that the two signatures might belong to one man. They mention that there is a story that Crockett had been shot in the arm, and if it was his right arm, then his handwriting might have been altered. Of course, this is assuming he was shot in the right arm and that he survived the battle, both of which are highly unlikely.

But then we learn that a man named David Crockett had lived in the area and had served first in the rebel army during the Civil War but changed sides. This, of course, couldn’t be the David Crockett of the Alamo because by the time the Civil War came about, Crockett would have been an extremely old man. It turns out that this man’s name was David Crockett with a surname that I’ve forgotten. David Crockett Crawley or something like that and they wonder why he didn’t use his last name. Who knows and there is no one to ask at the point which is actually not all that important.

In the end, we’re left with the real possibility that the man who signed the land grant was the David Crockett who “allegedly” died at the Alamo. They have no evidence of this, the signatures, according to the expert do not match, and the story is at odds with everything that we know… but they still think there is a possibility that Crockett had survived to live in Alabama.

This then, tells me all I really need to know about this program. I could have conducted the research from home using a computer  and a scanner… scan the land grant signature and have it emailed, then compare it to known Crockett signatures. Drive over to the university library and look at the microfilm collection of newspapers from 1836 to see all the various rumors that were printed. Call the history library at the Alamo and talk to them about the idea that Crockett survived the battle. All done from home for a buck and a half  (which is the cost of the gas if the university is close enough) but then that doesn’t make for dynamic television even if the story is a crock (yeah, I used that term on purpose).

Anyway, TV shows are all about ratings and if the show hadn’t been about Crockett, I wouldn’t have watched it. This one sucked me in, but then, I could see all the padding to make it an hour long, I could see where it slipped badly off the rails, and I knew what the historical errors were. There wasn’t new history here, or alternative history, just poor research and a desire to “set the record straight.” Too bad all they did was clutter it up with irrelevancies, half-truths and faulty research.

One Million Page Views

For those interested in such things, this blog had its 1,000,000^th page view this morning. No, I don’t know exactly when or who it was, only that last night, I was some five hundred views short and this morning, I’m over the top.

This, of course, doesn’t mean that there has been one million different visitors because, as with most blogs, there are some regulars who read the postings, and add their own comments. It just means that there have been one million page views.

For those who wonder about this after looking at the “Flag Counter,” that was added a couple of years ago and therefore didn’t register all those who had been here before I installed it. The blogger stats are different than the Flag Counter stats for that reason.

Now, if we can reach two million a little faster… not that it matters. Just another mile stone… and thanks to all of you who have visited here. I hope that you have enjoyed the discussions. 

Chasing Footnotes and the Fort Monmouth Radar/Visual Sightings

I have been chasing footnotes again as I work on my new book. This time the trouble wasn’t as outrageous as it has been in the past.

I was researching the series of sightings at Fort Monmouth, New Jersey. These were radar and visual sightings that took place on September 10 and 11, 1951. It all began when a student radar operator tracked an object at a speed faster than fighters at the time. Not much later, the pilot of a jet trainer saw an object that he believed to be a flying saucer. Other radars were involved, though one of those sightings on the tenth was clearly a balloon. The next day there were some additional sightings. For our purposes here, the details of the sightings aren’t all that important. It is the footnote.

As I always do, I check the skeptical side of the argument to see if there is a plausible answer. The skeptics are not always wrong. In Curtis Peebles Watch the Skies, I found an explanation for the sightings and he referenced Ed Ruppelt, one time chief of Project Blue Book and the author of The Report on Unidentified Flying Objects published in1956, as the source. Peebles, I have noticed, wrote as if there are no UFOs, meaning alien craft, and tended to ignore the situation if the explanation was shaky… sort of the opposite of the true believers who write as if nothing anomalous has an explanation.

Given how Peebles had footnoted his entry, I checked my copy of Ruppelt’s book. Peebles had been discussing how the transition from Project Grudge to Project Blue Book had been handled, the involvement Major General Cabell and his outrage when he learned that nothing was actually being done to investigation the sightings at Fort Monmouth and the appointment of Ruppelt to take over the project.

The pages Peebles cited, while talking about all that, and mentioning Fort Monmouth, didn’t offer the explanation for the sighting he cited. That was nowhere to be found there. But I remembered that Ruppelt had seemed to dwell on the Fort Monmouth sightings more than what was in the sections noted by Peebles, so I flipped through the rest of the book until I found Ruppelt’s explanation for the sightings, which matched what Peebles had written. So, he wasn’t wrong in suggesting the sightings were solved and citing Ruppelt as the source. He simple didn’t get the page numbers right (providing, of course, that the edition I used was the one he used. It’s difficult to say for certain because all of them have the same copyright date to add to the confusion).

The other thing that I did and I’m not sure that Peebles did, was search the Blue Book file on the Monmouth case. It is clear from some of the documentation that part of the purpose of their investigation was to mock those who had reported the UFO. It came in a climate in which the Air Force wasn’t taking UFO sightings seriously, which explains why no one had bothered to investigate until Cabell, or one of his aides, had a meltdown about the lack of investigation. If nothing else, they should have been concerned about something unidentified flying along the coastal defense zones of the United States. Such an attitude might have overlooked something more dangerous than a radar image traveling at high speed.

There is one other aspect to this. Ed Ruppelt’s papers were purchased long after his death. In those papers is a report of a wire recording made by Jerry Cummings, who, at one point in early 1950, was the ranking officer for the UFO investigation. Apparently the Fort Monmouth case isn’t quite as cut and dried as Ruppelt, and later Peebles, made it seem. And to add to the confusion, in Grudge Special Report No. 1, dated December 28, 1951, the T-33 sighting made by Lieutenant Wilbert S. Rogers was listed as “probably a balloon.” Later, in line with the Project Blue Book policy, the “probably” was dropped and it became a balloon though Rogers denied that he had been fooled by a balloon.

The real point here is that in chasing the footnotes, I discovered a minor error in Peebles’ book that is easily correctable. All he needed was to add an additional page number. He did, however, point to Ruppelt’s book as his source and with that I was able to verify that he had quoted the material correctly. That it partially disagrees with the Blue Book information that is buried under a pile of rhetoric, changing investigative policy and a desire to eliminate all the unidentified cases is really a minor point. It’s just that sometimes you have to look beyond the answer you want to hear to the one that complicates everything ever more.

Curse of Oak Island, Part II

I first became interested in the mystery of Oak Island when I lived in Texas and read a book about several different mysteries. One of them was Oak Island. Later I read another book, The Big Dig, by D’Arcy O’Connor which filled in details and since it was a decade newer, provided more information.

It all started at the end of the eighteenth century when three teenage boys found something strange on Oak Island and were inspired to dig to see what was buried there. They did find something that looked like flagstones which they pulled up, then found, every so often, a layer of logs. Using only shovels and picks, they only managed to dig down some thirty feet before they gave up.

Since that time others, always with newer and bigger equipment tried to dig deep enough to retrieve the treasure, whatever it might be. One of those groups tripped a booby trap that filled the pit with water. Others tried to sink parallel holes to defeat the trap creating such a mess that the original pit can’t be located with any degree of accuracy today.

Six people have been killed in these attempts to solve the mystery, and those digging today, on History’s Curse of Oak Island make light of that, even offered up the possible sacrificial lamb for the necessary seventh victim while sitting around a table in a Nova Scotia bar discussing this whole thing. Yeah, I found that a little less than funny but I’m probably in the minority there.

Last season they seemed to screw around, spend a pile of money and accomplish almost nothing. They found an old Spanish copper coin, which they used to open the new season. That means they took it to Miami (really? Miami? They couldn’t find someone in Nova Scotia to tell them what it was…?). He cleaned it, found a date that he interpreted as 1652 which pleased them. They showed this to Dan Blankenship, who has been hanging around Oak Island looking for the treasure for fifty years. Blankenship was quite excited and said that it was the most valuable thing that had been found. Tens of millions of dollars, maybe hundreds of millions, all for a copper coin that I could buy on EBay for less than fifty bucks. Not exactly an Earth-shaking discovery.

This season seems to be more of the same and is even more boring than last. The guys sit around a table in their “war room” and discuss things while waiting for the government to approve their permits to drain the swamp. They take off on a trip to some stone site 46 miles from Oak Island to look at a petroglyph that supposedly has a connection to Solomon’s Temple and that might explain what is hidden in the money pit. Of course it is all a diversion because there is nothing new to report.

Now they have found a second coin, found basically on the surface, that is so badly degraded that they aren’t sure exactly what it is, but that excites them because they believe it is another ancient Spanish coin. If it is, then that is an interesting discovery, but then, they didn’t pull it out of the money pit either.

In fact the only thing of value that has ever been pulled up by all those people who had dug all those holes is a small gold chain of only three links. There probably isn’t an ounce of gold in it, meaning it is, as of today, worth less than 1200 bucks… and that is not to mention that some dispute it actually came from the money pit.

I get it that they have to make a show, and since it is a series, they have to make several shows, but so far this season, it just hasn’t been all that great. I keep falling asleep and then have to look at it online to be sure I didn’t sleep through something interesting or important.

And next week, they apparently find another coin, which might be gold but I have to wonder how it is that all those other people over all those centuries have been wandering around on the island and they best they can come up with is a short, gold chain. Nobody had found anything that resembled minted coins from the days of pirates until these guys get there and then they don’t find them in the money pit.

The subject matter, meaning the mystery of Oak Island, can carry this thing for a while, but if they don’t do something more spectacular than scuba diving in five feet of muck, a computer display that suggests that might be gold or silver hidden underneath the swamp, and newspaper articles that show the Canadian government might hold out their hands for part of anything recovered, this is just going to fizzle out.

Oh, I’ll continue to watch but I fear that this is going to end like all those others… searching for Bigfoot but they never finding it, chasing UFOs where they find a planted button on what was once the Brazel ranch, and now Oak Island… a treasure that is just out of reach and they’ll somehow just miss getting it. 

Ryan Wood and the Majestic Documents

In the interest of fairness, and remember this is my blog so that I get to decide what is fair and what is not, I mention that I have been in communication with Ryan Wood, which is to say, he emailed me. He pointed out that the documents under discussion have been on his website www.majesticdocuments.com and that these specific documents can be found at:

 http://www.majesticdocuments.com/official.documents.nara.php.

In the email he argues, “I don’t think a it has any bearing (positive or negative) on “Operation Majestic-12”; the right hand was not talking to the left hand (which was classified in a different vault). Majestic Joint Logistics plan replaced Masthead the previous plan.”

I would, of course, disagree simply because, as I have mentioned, the code names from projects, whatever the nature of that project, are picked from a list so there should be no duplication. That would suggest that “Majestic” as the code name for a specific war plan shouldn’t also be the code name for the oversight committee and its creations. That would cause confusion and would probably lead to compromise. That would be someone whose orders noted that he was cleared for “Majestic” meaning the war plan and those at the other end thought it was “Majestic” meaning the alien recovery operation.

But this is just one of those little things that you probably can find an exception to, meaning, we might find a duplication of code names if we looked long enough and far enough. Majestic was apparently also the code name for part of the invasion of Japan just prior to the end of World War II and yet here it surfaces as the code name for a war plan to deal with a possible Soviet invasion into Europe (and for those who don’t know, war plans are created with certain scenarios in mind so that if the war happens, there is some sort of guide… history shows that for years, many war games started with a sneak attack on Pearl Harbor by the Japanese… you have to wonder how it was that our top officers in the Pacific were so ill prepared, but I digress).

The next question is really how many of these little deviations must we tolerate in an attempt to validate MJ-12? One or two might be acceptable in the EBD but there are so many that it seems to me that it weighs heavily against authenticity.

Ryan also mentioned, “Now right above that majestic documents website entry to is the Blount to Evans Memo from NARA…now that’s an interesting memo…mentions “Unidentified Aerial Objects; Aero Medical Laboratory (links to other leaked Majestic documents); saucers crashed in Mexico.’”

That is a single, short paragraph reference in the letter dated March 10, 1950, that says, “It has recently been rumored that one of these so-called flying saucers crashed in Mexico; however, details are somewhat bizarre at the moment.”

This too is interesting. Oh, it doesn’t validate the El Indio – Guerrero crashed saucer of the EBD, because, as you can see, it is dated many months before that event is alleged to have happened. And there isn’t much in the literature about crash. The only thing I can find is reference to the Ray Dimmick who claimed to have a strip of metal which he, Dimmick, was told came from the spacecraft. Dimmick himself hadn’t seen the craft or the body of the 23” tall alien creature. He heard the tale from two Mexican businessmen and an American, whom he declined to identify. The Project Blue Book files contain newspaper clippings about the case, but made no effort to investigate it (which is probably the right thing to have done, given the facts, or the lack thereof.)

In the clipping I have, there is an interesting note that is not at all relevant to this discussion or MJ-12. It said, “Reminded that the Air Force announced last December it was dropping its investigation of flying saucers because of preponderance of evidence that they do not exist, Dimmick said, ‘I’m big enough to take the consequences of what I’ve said and stand my ground.’”

I probably should note that this paragraph is in a letter about other things, and there is no mention of MJ-12 or anything related to it… unless you count the sentence about a crashed saucer. But there is no mention of Majestic or MJ-12.

When I mentioned this to Ryan, he said, “Blount may have been sloppy, certainly could have meant New Mexico. It may be ‘recent’ to Blount’s understanding and actually happened years before.”

Well, I had thought of the same thing, but I’m just not sure that it holds up. Dimmick is a better fit because it was just days before the Blount letter and it was in Mexico as opposed to New Mexico… but anyone who had read the Dimmick tale and who had any reading comprehension at all must have realized that it was not grounded in reality.

The point here, however, was to note that Ryan Wood had found the Majestic war plan documents before Tony found them and had posted them to his Majestic web site. I am a little surprised that they didn’t trouble him a little more than they have, but then, I might be a tad bit more cynical than Ryan… too many people have lied to me about too much.

Boyd Bushman

So the Internet is all ablaze with the “deathbed” statement of Boyd Bushman who apparently has some fine credentials and who said that he had proof that aliens have visited Earth. He even held up a picture of an alien that some claimed was the same sort of fuzzy, hard to see pictures that are often offered as evidence of aliens. The picture he held up didn’t look all that fuzzy to me. It seemed to be quite easy to see the alien.

Bushman’s claim was that he had worked at Lockheed – Martin (and some other defense related corporations) and a few wondered if that was true. It seems, however, that there is documentation to verify that. On some patent applications or the like, Lockheed – Martin had given him credit. This sort of verifies that he worked there and that he was involved in some sort of research. Here was a man with some fine credentials telling a story that was quite difficult to believe.

Among the questions to be asked are, “If he was who he said he was why would he make up such a tale? There could be no financial benefit from it given that this information didn’t appear until after his death.

This is a puzzler. But people do make up these incredible tales. A judge in Illinois, Michael O’Brien, claimed that he had been awarded two Metals of Honor but it was a lie. For twenty or so years he had maintained this until the truth came out. He had applied for the special car license plates for Medal of Honor recipients. As they checked out his claim, they learned the truth. He was confronted and resigned from the bench.

The publisher of the Arizona Republic, Clarence Darrow “Duke” Tully, claimed to be an Air Force lieutenant colonel, a fighter pilot with over 100 missions in Vietnam and a veteran of Korea. He showed up to functions in a well-tailored dress uniform complete with all his awards and decorations. The problem is that he had never served in the military, didn’t deserve to wear the uniform and had earned none of the decorations.

Now we come down to Boyd Bushman. He apparently had a rather distinguished career in the aviation industry. He worked for some of the big name organizations and filed a number of patents. In this respect he was who he said he was.

Where all this comes off the rails is when he begins to talk of aliens being held, (living?) at Area-51. In the video on YouTube and in pictures circulated on the Internet, he is holding a photograph of an alien. Apparently it was sent to him by one of his buddies. The problem is this is an alien doll that was sold at Walmart a number of years ago. There is a video of it on YouTube as well in which the man is showing us his little alien. He said it is rather delicate after all these years, but it is exactly like the one in the picture being held by Bushman which calls the picture into question. (Yes, I know that now someone will claim that the doll is based on accurate information… but really, is that a good argument for authenticity?)

I don’t know if Bushman was pulling a last minute gag on everyone or if someone had pulled a gag on him claiming the picture was real. He provides other information about the aliens, such as their 200-year life span and that they come from Quintonia, a planet somewhere in the Milky Way (or I assume it is the Milky Way because the other galaxies are just so damn far away).

But the real problem here, as it is with so many of these claims, is that there is no corroboration. We are left with having to take the word of a man no longer available to answer questions and whose credibility suffers because of the alien in the picture.

For those who don’t understand the subtleties of what I’m saying, it’s this. I don’t believe this story and unless or until there is some corroboration for it, I’ll store it with all those others I’ve been told over the years that are as thinly supported.

MAJESTIC FOUND !

A document labeled with the Majestic tag has been found. It has a proper provenance, which means the origin of the document can be traced by anyone who wishes to do so and there is no doubt it is authentic.

The first page, which was classified as Top Secret is entitled, “Report by the Joint Logistic Plans Committee the Joint Chiefs of Staff on Joint Logistic Plan for ‘Majestic.’”

There are some interesting things on that page. It identifies the problem, saying, “1. Pursuant to the decision by the Joint Chiefs of Staff on J.C.S. 1844/126, to prepare the Joint Logistic Plan in support of MAJESTIC*.”

The asterisk references the same document mentioned in the body of the text. It provides no more information about it, but it is interesting because it is a reference to another document which could be traced to provide additional authentication. It also suggests something about how these highly classified documents are created and how many of them are inter-related.

The rest of the document is merely other paragraphs that tell us very little about what Majestic is and everything that it does say could, in fact, be considered as evidence of MJ-12. This is a document that deals with logistics, which can be simply defined as the support needed for military operations. It could be said that this is a document that relates to the movement of an alien craft, the wreckage or debris, and the bodies of the alien flight crew from one location to another. This would be the plan to explain the mode of transportation, how many soldiers would be needed, how they would be fed and housed, the fuel supplies, weapons and ammunition, route information and bases where additional support could be found and anything else rated to all of this.

The second page is a list of those who will receive the information which is quite long. It is labeled, “Top Secret Security Information,” and is stamped, “Special Handling Required, Not Releasable to Foreign Nationals,” and for those keeping score at home is dated 25 September 1952. Please notice the dating format that is not 25 September, 1952.

But here is where we run into the first problem with all of this. At the bottom it is noted, “Forward herewith is a copy of the Joint Outline Emergency War Plan for a War Beginning 1 July 1952 MAJESTIC. This plan supersedes Joint Outline Emergency War Plan MASTHEAD, which was forwarded by SM-1197-51, dated 14 May 1951, copies of it will be either returned or destroyed by burning.”

This suggests that it has nothing to do with UFOs or the Majestic-12, but the argument could be made that this is “typical boilerplate,” meaning that the paragraph is sort of standard without a specific meaning other than instructions of removing the obsolete plan and replacing it with the new one. In today’s world it would be a “cut and paste” error. In 1952, such a thing is more difficult to explain.

The third page makes it clear what is being discussed and what Majestic really is and ends all our speculation. Stamped with a date of 2 OCT 1952 (as opposed to 02 OCT, 1952) and with “Top Secret Security Information, the letter, in paragraph one said, “Enclosure (1), with attached copies of Joint Outline Emergency War Plan “MAJESTIC’, is forwarded.” This is a war plan and has nothing to do with UFOs. The markings on it, made in 1952, show what they should have been as opposed to what they are on the MJ-12 documents and the EBD. Yes, there might be variations depending on military service branch and the level of classification, but here is something that shows what was being used at the time, how it was used and what the specific wording was and should have been. This does not bode well for MJ-12, not to mention the duplication of code words.

By duplication of code words, I mean that all code words for classified projects come from a master list so that there is no accidental duplication (Yes, the military sometimes uses civilian code words for projects, such as Project Saucer, but the real name was Project Sign). To use the same or similar code words would lead to compromise. Someone cleared to deal with the War Plan – Majestic - wouldn’t be cleared for the MJ-12 material, but the duplication of code words wouldn’t make that clear.

This is the same argument made for Majic. During WW II there was a highly classified project known as Magic. This similarity could lead to compromise, if you had two projects with such similar names.

The last page of the documents that I have makes it clear that there is no reason to assume this has anything to do with the investigation of alien craft, alien bodies or the recovery of an alien spacecraft. Paragraph 4 says, “The estimate of the Soviet Union’s capability to execute campaigns and her probable courses of action contained in the Enclosure does not take into consideration the effect of opposition by any forces now in position or operational, or of unfavorable weather or climate conditions.”

This is also classified as “Top Secret Security Information,” and is dated 12 September 1952 (again is relevant because it puts it into the time frame of the EBD and it shows the dating format as it should have been written), is signed by W. G. Lalor, Rear Admiral, U.S. Navy (Ret.), and is also noted as “Reproduced at the National Archives.”

This then, should be the absolute, final blow to the MJ-12 nonsense. There simply wouldn’t be two highly classified projects with the same code name operating at the same time and we have the documentation here to prove that Majestic existed but it wasn’t what we have been told.

It should be noted that I was alerted to this by my colleague Tony Bragalia. He suggested that this might have inspired the name Majestic-12 because here was a real project with that name. If the documents were still classified, meaning they couldn’t be released into the public arena, and in the 1980s, the classification might have held it would have been an interesting bit of corroboration. Someone could have stumbled over the top secret project with the name being found but nothing to identify exactly what it was. This would have hinted at a provenance and a high classification. Without some of the follow up documents, there could be speculation about what it meant, but no one would know. It would have provided an interesting time… until all the documents were found. Too bad that those proponents of MJ-12 couldn’t have found some of this twenty years ago. Oh, we’d know now what it was all about, but it sure would have given them a fine run.

And I have to wonder if Bill Cooper, in his claim to have seen documents labeled as Majestic might not have seen these documents. Given his claimed position in the Navy, he might have seen the cover sheets for this but had no chance to read the document to see what it was all about.

Tony added a note about all this, and how he came to find the documents. He provided the link so that those who wished to see the provenance would know where to look. He wrote that, “The reference linked below is what got me going down this research avenue. The Emergency War Plan -codenamed MAJESTIC - is highlighted in yellow in the military history book seen here:

http://books.google.com/books?id=SeeNAQAAQBAJ&pg=PA164&lpg=PA164&dq=%22plan+majestic%22+1952&source=bl&ots=jB7mbVYG8S&sig=GU5KwjiTYMHUIgPGzenVyGL00uI&hl=en&sa=X&ei=uWhbVMehBYKgyATchYDADw&ved=0CDAQ6AEwAw#v=onepage&q=%22plan%20majestic%22%201952&f=false

Added to the failure of the El Indio - Guerrero UFO crash that is part of the EBD and for which there is no evidence of it other than Robert Willingham’s obviously bogus tale, this should end, for all time any doubt about the fraudulent nature of the original MJ-12 documents. And for those who would now retreat to the argument that “Absence of evidence isn’t evidence of absence,” I would say, until you find something tangible, “Absence of evidence is, in fact, evidence of absence.” I have looked, others have looked everywhere that something like this would be noted, and nothing has been found.

This seems to be “Game Over.”

The Socorro Landing and Corroborating Witnesses

The problem with the Lonnie Zamora, Socorro, UFO sighting was that it was single witness. There were hints that others might have seen something, but the names never seemed to surface. Opal Grinder, who managed a gas station in Socorro, told Dr. J. Allen Hynek that a family had stopped for gas and the father had said something about the aircraft flying low over the town. Grinder didn’t understand the significance of the statement at the time and he didn’t know who the man was. There was no credit card receipt so there was no way to track them and they have never come forward to tell their tale, if they had one to tell.

On April 29, 1964, just days after the sighting, two men who lived in Dubuque, Iowa, told the local newspaper that they had seen the UFO. Paul Kies and Larry Kratzer, who had been in New Mexico to retrieve a boat that had been left behind, when they drove through Socorro. The story that appeared in the newspaper was fairly inaccurate. Since no one had actually talked to them since that initial report, Iowa UFO researcher, Ralph DeGraw decided he would some fourteen years later. According to an article that he published in The UFO Examiner in September 1978 and republished in The MUFON UFO Journal in October 1978, DeGraw recounted what he had learned.

He wrote, “Although the circumstances such as the time, location, etc. were described the same by both men, descriptions of what they saw were entirely different!”

Kies, according to DeGraw, said that he had seen a cloud of dust followed by black smoke. He thought they were about a mile away, and that it was coming up, from the ground. There seemed to be something bright and shiny in the smoke. He wasn’t sure if the reflection, as he called it, had been from the low hanging sun, if it was reflecting from something on the ground or if an object was emitting the light. At that time, he didn’t think about having seen a UFO.

Kratzer told DeGraw that they were about a mile west of Socorro when he saw a cloud of black smoke coming from the ground ahead of them. Kratzer said that he pointed it out to Kies and watched as a saucer or egg-shaped object lifted off vertically, from the black smoke. He wasn’t sure how far away they had been, especially since it had been so long (fourteen years) ago. He thought it was about one-half to a mile away and might have been a thousand feet in the air.

He said that after it had climbed vertically out of the smoke, it leveled off and then disappeared behind the black smoke that was coming out of the rear. He said that the object itself was shiny silver with a row of darker, mirror-like windows that he assumed wrapped around the craft. There was a red Z toward the right end of the object. It made no noise and when DeGraw asked what he thought it was Kratzer said that it might have been a vertical lift aircraft.

They drove on into Socorro and stopped for gas. He thought that Kratzer might have mentioned the sighting to the attendant but he wasn’t sure. There might have been an attempt by some, certainly not DeGraw, to suggest that these were the people that Opal Grinder had seen, but Grinder was sure that it had been a man and woman and their three children.

Kies said they were listening to the radio late that night, as they headed back to Iowa, when he heard about the Zamora sighting. They realized that they might have seen the same object after it had taken off but said nothing about it to others until they arrived back in Dubuque.

DeGraw wasn’t impressed with the testimonies. He noted that the stories differed from one another and that neither matched very closely that given by Zamora. It suggested that they had made up the story, and while that certainly is a possibility, it would seem that had that been the case, one or the other might have said that to DeGraw, especially since it have been nearly a decade and a half since they had talked to the newspaper reporters.

I’m not sure that these discrepancies found in the stories after so long are all that significant. They did agree on the general descriptions and it is only some of the details that are different which could be explained by the time elapsed and the different perspective of the witnesses. I’ve always worried about two guys from Dubuque, Iowa, being in a position to see this but their explanation of that seems reasonable. They called the newspaper when they got home, so it was all recorded, however inaccurately by the newspaper, at the end of April 1964.

If the two men did see something outside of Socorro on April 24, 1964, then it suggests that something unusual was seen by Zamora. This would seem to reduce the possibility of a hoax. It makes the case stronger, and sometimes, after all these years, that’s about the best that can be hoped for.

Roger Wescott, Roscoe Hillenkoetter and MJ-12

Although I really don’t have time for this, meaning more nonsense about MJ-12, Stan Friedman has complained that I, and Barry Greenwood and Robert Hastings, have ignored the report by Dr. Roger Wescott, who examined the Eisenhower Briefing Document to determine if it had been written by Rear Admiral Roscoe Hillenkoetter.  There is nothing to say that he had been the author, no real reason to assume that he was, except that he had been the Director, Central Intelligence Agency, but this seems to be the belief. To me this is a ridiculous exercise simply because, without additional information, that question cannot be answered.

Here’s what we know. Wescott was a linguistics professor at Drew University and Stan wanted him to try to determine if Hillenkoetter had written the EBD. Along with the EBD, he gave Wescott some twenty-seven samples of what he believed to be Hillenkoetter’s writings. I’ll explain that “believed to be” in a moment.

Wescott, in his first analysis said, “In my opinion, there is no compelling reason to regard any of these communications as fraudulent or to believe that any of them were written by anyone other than Hillenkoetter himself.”

Okay, not exactly a ringing endorsement, but certainly doesn’t eliminate Hillenkoetter as the author. But then, in his book on MJ-12 (oh, I suppose I could be petty and not mention the title… Top Secret/Majic) Stan wrote, “Some people are upset that Dr. Wescott didn’t make a positive statement that his work proves Hillenkoetter wrote the briefing. Obviously, no such statement could be made. Somebody working for the CIA, for example, could have read Hillenkoetter’s papers and simulated his style.”

Seriously? You’re saying that someone could have simulated Hillenkoetter’s style? You’re saying that no matter how valuable Wescott’s analysis might be, it would never prove that Hillenkoetter wrote the EBD… then what is the point of even bringing him in to the discussion in the first place?

Wescott, in a letter in the July/August 1988 International UFO Reporter, wrote, “First, it’s clear that I’ve stepped into a hornet’s nest of controversy. Since I have no strong conviction favoring either rather polarized position in the matter, I may have been a bit rash to become involved, even as a somewhat detached consultant, in what amounts to an adversary procedure. On behalf of those who support the authenticity of the memo, I wrote that I thought its fraudulence unproved. On behalf of its critics, I could equally well have maintained that its authenticity is unproved. Whatever the probabilities of the issue, inconclusiveness seems to be of its essence.”

There is an additional problem here. Wescott was a NICAP special advisor in the late 1960s. He was familiar with the world of the UFO. It might be suggested that his analysis wasn’t that of a disinterested third party, and while he might not have had a dog in the MJ-12 fight, he knew something about UFOs.

Wescott’s analyses are not all that impressive. They are best described as he said himself as “inconclusive,” which means that Wescott’s analyses proved nothing and certainly are not supportive of the conclusion that Hillenkoetter wrote the EBD.

Now, here’s what I meant by those documents were “believed to be” written by Hillenkoetter. At the time the EBD was written, Hillenkoetter was a high-ranking military officer in a position of great responsibility. Are we to believe that he actually wrote all these sample documents himself, or is it more likely he turned to an aide, a secretary, a staff officer to actually write the various documents? In other words, Hillenkoetter said, “I need a briefing (or whatever, just insert your own sort of document in here) on (insert the situation here) and have it to me by Friday.”

This means that while Hillenkoetter might have provided the initial information, would have reviewed and edited the document, he didn’t actually write it. I can’t tell you how many times I was given information and told to put it together for a report or briefing for a higher ranking officer. While in Iraq, I was involved in a white paper in which I interviewed a number of generals, took documents created by operations officers and combat commanders, to create a single document which was authored by that higher ranking officer. Or, to put it bluntly, there were so many of us involved that no one author’s voice came through.

Sure, you all are thinking that MJ-12 was classified much higher and access to the information would have been available to far fewer people. But the overall concept still holds. Hillenkoetter would have assigned the initial work to some other officer, and while it might only have been one or two others, the point is, those one or two others would have been responsible for the first draft of the paper. Hillenkoetter would have reviewed it, and knowing how these things work, would have made alterations to it, but the overall voice would not have been his.

And before I have to hear that this was so highly classified, that there just wouldn’t have been those others involved, are we really supposed to believe that Hillenkoetter typed the thing himself. Regardless of the classification, there would have been underlings involved in the process. Think of the Manhattan Project here. Weren’t there many involved who weren’t physicists or scientists who took care of all the various documents that were created in the process of making an atomic bomb? They might not have had access to everything, but in each compartment, they would have been those responsible for all the paperwork.

So, even if you stipulate that Hillenkoetter is the author of the EBD, he probably wasn’t the writer. That was done by someone else (and let’s not forget about all those tabs which would not have been written by Hillenkoetter but by others considered experts in those specific topics).

This explains why I, and most of the rest of us, ignore what Wescott had to say. First, he suggested his analysis was inconclusive. Second, even though there were all those samples offered of Hillenkoetter’s writing style, they were probably written by someone else. And third, the same can be said of the EBD. The initial drafts probably weren’t written by Hillenkoetter, but probably by someone at a lower level which would have altered the “voice” and made it impossible to determine if Hillenkoetter was the author.

Or, to be blunt, all of this is an exercise in futility. None of it proves anything and our best course is to just ignore it as one more failed proof that MJ-12 is authentic.

And before anyone asks, there is no evidence that the EBD is anything other than a fraud, written by someone who had a specific agenda, and that agenda was not to brief Eisenhower.

Fort Itaipu and Footnotes

I’ve been working on my new book, which is sort of a follow up to Government UFO Secrets (notice that I’ve slipped the name of my last book into this) and I have been doing something that I don’t think is being done very much. I’ve been chasing footnotes again. This means as I research a case, looking for all the information available on it, I attempt to return to the original source as much as possible. One way of doing that is look at the footnotes in other books to see where they gathered the information.

The case in question here is the attack on Fort Itaipu, Brazel on November 4, 1957. According to all those other sources, two sentries on duty saw a “new” star blossom in the distance, over the Atlantic Ocean, fly toward them, hover and then slowly descend. It was an orange disk that was humming slightly. There was a blast of heat that caused the sentries to panic. One fell to the ground unconscious and the other torn at his clothes screaming. That alerted the garrison, all of whom apparently reacted to the UFO.

About the same time, as the confused soldiers attempted to find out what was happening, the lights failed, as did their communications ability, their generators and even their weapons.  The electricity came back quickly and the clocks, set to ring at 5:00 a.m., began at 2:03 a.m.

The injured soldiers were removed, first to the infirmary, and later to an Army hospital. The fort commanding officer ordered an information blackout, telling the soldiers not to discuss the case with anyone, not even their fellow soldiers. Someone did talk, and Dr. Olavo Fontes, APRO’s representative in Brazil learned of the case some two or three weeks later. Though he tried to interview the soldiers, using his contacts as a medical doctor, he failed. His information came from some of the officers at the fort, but he never mentioned their names, nor did he identify the soldiers.

This is the bare bones of the sighting. As I was conducting my research, I looked to see what others had written about the case. In The A.P.R.O. Bulletin of September 1959, Fontes’ tale was published apparently as it appeared in his book Shadow of the Unknown. Later, in 1962, Coral Lorenzen, in her 1962 book, The Great Flying Saucer Hoax: The UFO Facts and Their Interpretation, repeated the information supplied by Fontes but in her own words. She suggested that Fontes had talked to an officer who was at the fort, but she didn’t supply his name or that of the sentries.

Jacques Vallee, in Anatomy of a Phenomenon, quotes from Lorenzen’s book, and adds nothing new to the case. Donald Keyhoe, in Aliens from Space, reports on the case in his own words, but there is nothing in that report that is new or different. He does speculate about alien motivations and their worries about our first tiny steps into space. Keyhoe wrote, “It would also mean that the burnings were intended as a demonstration of superior weapons they could use against aggressive explorers from Earth.”

But the point is that everything comes back to the article by Fontes in The A.P.R.O. Bulletin. I could find no new information about the case that wasn’t traced to Fontes. I did email Thiago Luiz Ticchetti, a Brazilian UFO researcher and a co-editor of Revista UFO and Coordenador da Revista UFO Brasil: www.ufo.com.br, who did update the case for me. He wrote that he had been unable to verify the tale of the injured soldiers, and unable to verify the power outage whether it was momentary or something a little longer. According to what he told me, most Brazilian UFO researchers believe that there had been a UFO sighting, but the details of what would be a Close Encounter of the Second Kind, meaning a sighting in which there are some sort of physical effects, remained unverified.

Fontes, according to his own writings, never got the chance to talk to the sentries, so much of what he wrote about their reactions had to come from the officers that Fontes said he had interviewed. The problem is that he never identified them. The tale then is based, at best, on second-hand testimony and we have no way to verify the information supplied by Fontes. We must trust him based solely on the trust that Coral Lorenzen had in him and if we have no faith in that, then almost everything he wrote about the Fort Itaipu case must be carefully scrutinized. In the end, the best we can say, based on what we know, is that there was a UFO sighting and the other elements are yet to be verified.

Roswell, Nathan Twining and the Mini-EOTS

There is a misunderstanding about the Twining letter and it is about what caused it to be written. To understand it in the context of the time, it is necessary to understand why the letter was written.

In July 1947, an officer who worked for Brigadier General George Schulgen put together an Estimate of the Situation, which is not to be confused with the big one that was written later. This mini-EOTS covered a number of sightings that had been made early in 1947, including a few that had preceded Arnold. LTC George Garrett was the officer who wrote this EOTS that was sent to LTG Nathan Twining at Wright Field for analysis. I covered all this in Government UFO Files, which, if I was smart, is all I would say about it, making those interested in this discussion buy the book. However, and with the help of many others including Dr. Michael Swords ...

In July 1947, Garrett believed that nothing useful would be found by additional Air Force (really Army Air Forces) investigation of the flying saucer reports. Both Garrett and Schulgen decided that the answer was held above their pay grade and thought of a way to pass the buck back up the chain of command so they would no longer have to deal with it. They were quite certain that when they assembled their information in what might be considered an intelligence Estimate of the Situation, they would be told that those at the top knew what the flying saucers were and there would be no need to continue to investigate. Or, I suppose, you might say that this is what they hoped would happen.

Garrett began his work on his Estimate in the beginning of July, 1947. He selected sixteen flying saucer reports that seemed to demonstrate the truly unusual nature of the phenomenon, and then provided his analysis of the data that had been collected.

The first case he mentioned preceded that by Kenneth Arnold; the man many believe “launched” the UFO phenomena as we know it today, by over a month. That sighting, from Manitou Springs, Colorado happened sometime between 12:15 and 1:15 p.m. on May 19, 1947. This was a silver object that remained motionless, giving the three witnesses a good look at it, and then made a number of aerobatic maneuvers before disappearing at incredible speed. The sighting report mentioned that it had been watched through optical instruments and had been in sight for over two minutes meaning they had time to study it carefully. This sighting does not appear in the Project Blue Book files, though it was used as support for Garrett’s conclusions at the end of this study which in and of itself is interesting.

The second report that was mentioned was from Oklahoma City on May 22, 1947. There are few details available other than it was made by a businessman pilot and he saw the object or light from the ground and not the cockpit.

The third case came from Greenfield, Massachusetts on June 22, 1947. According to the report:

Edward L. de Rose said, ...there appeared across his line of vision a “brilliant, small, round-shaped, silvery white object” moving in a northwesterly direction as fast as or probably faster than a speeding plane at an estimated altitude of 1,000 feet or more. The object stayed in view for eight or ten seconds until obscured by a cloud bank. It reflected the sunlight strongly as though it were of polished aluminum or silver… He said it did not resemble any weather balloon he had ever seen and that “I can assure you it was very real.”

According to the information available, this was a case that had been secretly investigated by the FBI, and given Special Agent Reynolds’ (who has a role in these early investigations as outlined in The Government UFO Files) participation with Schulgen and Garrett it is not difficult to believe that the FBI was involved.

Next was the report that got everyone talking about flying saucers and this is the Kenneth Arnold’s sighting. In 1947, as Garrett was putting together his Estimate, it was still considered an unknown by those who had officially investigated it and who had talked to Arnold.

Garrett’s next sighting involved two Air Force (at the time Army Air Forces) pilots and two intelligence officers who saw a bright light zigzagging in the night sky over Maxwell Air Force Base on June 28, 1947. The sighting lasted for about five minutes. The eventual label applied to the case was that this was a balloon.

Garrett’s next case was witnessed by three scientists at White Sands, New Mexico. The object was silver in color and no external details were reported. There was the possibility of a slight vapor trail and none of the three were sure how it disappeared, suggesting that the angle changed and they lost sight of it.

Civilian pilots were responsible for the next sighting that Garrett quoted. Captain E. J. Smith was piloting a United Airlines plane when one of the flying saucers appeared coming at them. The first officer, Ralph Stevens, reached down to blink the landing lights, and Smith asked what he thought he was doing. Stevens responded that another plane was coming at them. As it closed, they realized that it wasn't another aircraft but one of the flying disks.

Although the case was thoroughly investigated, the Air Force found no solution for it. In the Project Blue Book files, it is still carried as “Unidentified.”

Three airmen on a B-25, near Clay Center, Kansas said they saw a silver-colored object pacing their aircraft was the next case cited. One of the witnesses was the pilot who said that a bright flash called his attention of the object, which he said was thirty to fifty feet in diameter and very bright. He said the object appeared to be pacing the aircraft at 210 miles an hour. When they turned toward it, the object seemed to accelerate to high speed and disappeared. Later the Air Force would suggest that the sighting was caused by a reflection on the windshield.

Garrett next reported that Captain James H. Burniston, on July 6, 1947, while at Fairfield-Suisun Army Air Base saw one of the flying disks. According to that report:

…He observed an object traveling in a southeasterly direction at an estimated height of 10,000 feet or more and at a speed in excess of that of any aircraft he had ever seen. The object was in his view for approximately sixty seconds during which time it travelled over three-quarters of the visible sky. Burniston could distinguish no definite color or shape. It appeared to roll from side to side three times during his observation and one side reflected strongly from its surface while the other side gave no reflection. He estimates the size to be about that of a C-54 and states that between the time the top of the object was visible and the time it rolled over … the bottom became very difficult to see and almost disappeared.

Although the next two reports seem to be related, Garrett broke them into two separate incidents, one from Koshkonong, Wisconsin and the second from East Troy, Wisconsin. They are listed on the same “Project Card,” which supplies very little information. Both sightings lasted under a minute, and in both sightings the witnesses were members of the Civil Air Patrol, an official civilian auxiliary of the Air Force. The first of the sightings was reported at 11:45 (CST) in the morning and the second at 2:30 (CST) in the afternoon. Both were made on July 7, 1947.These two cases were marked, “Insufficient information for proper analysis.”

Following his theory of who might make the best witnesses, the next case involved an Army National Guard pilot flying near Mt. Baldy, California on July 8, 1947. The flat object, reflecting light, was about the size of a fighter. The pilot said that he gave chase attempting to keep the object in sight but was unable to do so.

A police officer, among others, in Grand Falls, Newfoundland, reported an egg-shaped object with a barrel-like leading edge about thirty minutes before midnight on July 9, 1947, in the next case reported by Garrett. There were four objects that had a phosphorescent glow.

The next day, and next on the list there was a series of sightings in Newfoundland. Garrett used the sighting that took place about four in the afternoon, and was seen by a “TWA Representative and a PAA Representative [who was identified as a Mr. Leidy] on the ground. The object was “circular in shape, like a wagon wheel,” and was bluish-black with a fifteen foot long trail. The object “seemed to cut clouds open as it passed thru [sic]. Trail was like beam seen after a high-powered landing light is switched off.”

The case took on added importance because there were color photographs of the disk as it cut through the clouds. Dr. Michael Swords reported in the Journal of UFO Studies:

The bluish-black trail seems to indicate ordinary combustion from a turbo-jet engine, athodyd [ramjet] motor, or some combination of these types of power plants. The absence of noise and apparent dissolving of the clouds to form a clear path indicates a relatively large mass flow of a rectangular cross section containing a considerable amount of heat.

In 1947, this was an important case and provides a hint as to what Garrett and the others thought. They believed that the solution here rested in terrestrial technology, or in other words, this was something of Soviet manufacture. While the sighting itself is interesting for the photographs, it was important because it seemed to suggest the Soviets were responsible rather than aliens.

The final case that Garrett cited was from Elmendorf Field in Anchorage, Alaska on July 12. A major in the Army Air Forces said that he watched an object that resembled a grayish balloon as it followed the contours of the mountains some five miles away. The major said that the object paralleled the course of a C-47 that was landing on the airfield.

With these sixteen reports, and two added later, Garrett composed his study. It might be said that he drew on these specific cases because he, along with Schulgen, believed they most accurately described the objects seen, the maneuvers they performed, and they would most likely lead to the conclusion that these sightings were of a classified research project then in development. They thought they would be told to quit because of that. The answer they received, after they had forwarded their report to the Air Materiel Command and to Twining must have surprised them. It was not at all what they had expected.

On September 24, 1947, Schulgen, Garrett and the others received the written response from Twining’s staff. This analysis of the situation was based wholly on the information supplied by Garrett through Schulgen. Twining’s staff looked at the reports that had been included and then produced a draft of the response for approval by Twining.

Given the information they had to work with, and it seems those at Wright Field added nothing to the mix themselves; they reached their conclusions based on the information supplied. These reports, for the most part, came from pilots, both military and civilian including airline pilots. They came from scientists, police, and aviation personnel who should have been able to recognize aircraft in the air. The reports were selected because they were, for the most part, from multiple witnesses and one must have been selected because of the photographs. These were some of the best sightings that had been received beginning with the May reports that did not make it into the Project Blue Book files.

This response, then, from Twining's AMC staff was telling them that the phenomenon was “something real and not visionary or fictitious.” Not only that, Twining was telling them that his command didn't know what the flying saucers were and that they should be investigated.

If the flying saucers were a U.S. project, then the last thing anyone at the higher levels of the chain of command would have wanted would be an official investigation. Any investigation would be a threat to the security of the project. To end such an investigation one of those on the inside of the secret would have to drop a hint to someone on the outside. If, for example, it was such a secret project that General Twining and the AMC were outside the loop, then another general, on the inside, could call Twining to tell him to drop the investigation. He wouldn't have to spill any details of the secret project, only tell Twining that it was something he didn't need to worry about and the answer was not Soviet or anything else that could threaten national security. Twining would then end his inquiries, secure in the knowledge that the solution to the mystery was already known to someone inside the US military and the government.

Swords, commenting on this, wrote, "What explains this confident display of mediocrity? Although we are apparently not dealing with genius here, neither should we assume complete stupidity. This report was not put together with any greater intensity because the authors did not feel that it was necessary. They did not think that UFOs were any great mystery. It was obvious to them that UFOs were mechanical, aerial devices. Whose devices was still up in the air (so to speak), but the indications were fairly clear: despite assurances to the contrary, they must be our own. 'Lack of topside inquiries' [meaning, of course, those higher up in the chain of command] made this the only reasonable conclusion in their eyes."

What this does explain, for those who haven’t figured it out yet, is why there was a mention of a “lack of crash recovered material.” None had been included in the mini-EOTS. The response by Twining, which was written under the supervision of Howard McCoy, used only that information included in the original EOTS. They added nothing to it because they could accomplish what they wanted in that way. Had they added additional information or mention information that was classified “Top Secret” that would have changed the nature of the discussion and, of course, the classification of the response.

And this is why the Roswell crash wasn't mentioned in Twining's letter. It wasn't part of the original query, there was no reason to add it, and the investigation could continue as they searched for additional answers... or more importantly, they scrambled around trying to find out if national security was at risk. This they could accomplish without compromising the Roswell information.