Keeping Secrets for Decades

In the mid-1980s, Time magazine reported that a Soviet intelligence agent, who had been carefully trained, who had been provided with a good "legend" had been set down in Wisconsin. The agent rented an apartment, got a job, and settled in to routine. His mission was to establish himself as a loyal American. He was to remain in deep cover until a situation arose that would necessitate his activation. While walking down a road, about a week after his arrival in the United States, the Soviet agent was arrested by the FBI. The arrest was a stunning upset for the Soviets who had little respect for American intelligence operations. The arrest was the result of one of the most incredible intelligence operations of the Cold War. The arrest demonstrated that American intelligence had penetrated the Soviet Union to the highest levels and provided invaluable information to the American leadership.

That penetration was evidenced as early as 1956. The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) had begun a policy to "create and exploit troublesome problems" for the Soviet Union. Nikita Khrushchev, speaking at the Twentieth Party Congress "laid bare many of the corruptions and rigidities of Stalinism in an effort to discredit competitors in the Politburo." It was Khrushchev’s idea to eliminate his competition for the top job by exposing the excesses that had been hidden during the Stalin regime. Khrushchev planned to consolidate his power around a denunciation of Stalin.

The speech was an explosive document that was only meant to be heard inside the highest levels of the communist party power structure. It was not meant to be heard by those under the communist government and certainly not meant to be heard by anyone in the United States. This speech, which discussed Stalin’s personal interventions in the affairs of Soviet satellites such as Hungary and Yugoslavia, resulted in a split that drove Yugoslavia toward alignment with the United States. From that perspective, it was a speech that shouldn’t have been made because of the far reaching political consequences outside the Soviet Union. Inside the communist power structure, it was a shrewd political move.

John Prados, in The Presidents’ Secret Wars, suggested that the speech was "political dynamite." He also suggested that a copy of the "secret speech reached the CIA from a contact with a European communist." The source of the speech was a tightly held secret that, in 1986, when Prados wrote his book had not been revealed. The real source of that speech was an American with the American Communist Party by the name of Jack Childs.

Childs knew the value of the speech and what it would mean to the view of communism held throughout the world. Childs knew because he, along with his brother, Morris, had been communists in the 1920s and the 1930s. They had both drifted away from the American Communist Party after they witnessed the discrepancy between what the communists said and what they did. Neither Jack nor Morris could understand how communist leaders could preach for the peasant and then participate in the purges that killed millions. Neither of the men could understand how the party leaders could live so well while so many of their fellow party members were starving.

Although Jack had given the FBI the text of Khrushchev’s 1956 speech that had done so much damage to the communist image, it was Morris Childs who provided the majority of the intelligence about Soviet internal policies. According to John Barron, Morris was the friend and confidant of Khrushchev, Leonid Brezhnev, Yuri Andropov, as well as leaders in China, North Vietnam, Cuba and Eastern Europe.

According to John Barron, "Many of the most famous figures of international communism personally knew Morris Childs and addressed him as Morris. To them, his credentials... were impeccable."

Childs was an American to be courted, to be trusted, and to be allowed to witness the workings of the communists throughout the world. From there he had a view that was better than that held be almost anyone else either communist or capitalist.

The information provided by Morris Childs was invaluable to American policy makers. On October 14, 1962, U-2 flights over Cuba took a series of photographs that were developed and submitted for analysis the next day. Late in the evening the photo interpretation specialists called the Pentagon to relay information that "ballistic missiles had shown up" in Cuba. Given the proximity of Cuba to the United States, the President (Kennedy) believed that such missiles could not be allowed to remain in Cuba. They were a threat to the safety of the entire free world.

On October 16, the President ordered more flights over Cuba and he ordered all "armed forces put on ‘alert 4,’ one step nearer a war footing." The President, by increasing the readiness of the American armed forces, was sending a message to the Soviets. He was telling the Soviet leadership that he considered the missiles in Cuba to be an important issue. By increasing the alert status, he was making a move that had no real world ramifications, other than moving the military to a higher level or readiness. American forces could be sent into combat faster than at a lower alert level.

On October 18, President Kennedy met with the Soviet Foreign Minister Andrei Gromyko. Khrushchev, through Gromyko, told the President that the Soviet assistance to Cuba was "by no means offensive." Of course, given the photographs of the ballistic missiles, Kennedy knew that wasn’t true. Ballistic missiles are an offensive weapon.

Two days later, on October 20, with additional evidence of missile sites in Cuba, Kennedy ordered a naval blockade. He delayed the implementation until American allies could be alerted. The blockade, according to some politicians was almost the same as declaring war. However, the Soviet Union did not challenge the blockade and no shots were fired. The situation was never pushed, by either side, to a point where they would have been no choice but to open fire. Once that threshold had been crossed, it would have been difficult to keep the situation from escalating into, at the very least, a naval war.

The Cuban missile crisis created a situation in which the power of the Soviet Union had been challenged. According to some politicians, if Khrushchev was pushed far enough, he would fight. The situation, as it developed in Cuba showed that such was not the case. Khrushchev was given an ultimatum which demanded the removal the missiles. He had but two choices. Remove them or face the very real threat of war.

The situation would seem to be extremely dangerous. President Kennedy was giving Khrushchev no real choice. The world, it seemed, was on the brink of war and then Khrushchev backed down. The Soviet dictator, who, in the United Nations had told the world he would bury the United States, ordered the withdrawal of the ballistic missiles. Kennedy drew a line in the sand and threatened a war. The situation in October 1962 was extremely grim and dangerous.

The question that can now be asked is if Kennedy was taking that big of a risk. Did he push Khrushchev because he knew what the Soviet response would be to the ultimatum? The answer, based on information supplied by Operation Solo and Morris Childs, is, "Yes. Kennedy knew what the Soviet response would be."

Childs had learned that the Soviet leadership were frightened by the prospect of nuclear war. They realized the devastation that would result and they knew that hundreds of millions, if not billions, of people would be killed. The Soviet leadership, while not overly concerned with the deaths of so many, did not want to be bombed back into an agrarian society. They had expended great national wealth in an attempt to enter the industrial age and compete with the free world. Nuclear war would turn that all around and the Soviet position of leadership would be lost. Kennedy knew this because of the work that had been accomplished by Childs. He knew, as he pushed Khrushchev, that Khrushchev would have no choice but to back down. While the rest of the world waited for the Soviet reaction to the American ultimatum, Kennedy knew what the eventual response would be.

Giving Kennedy the edge during the missile crisis was not the only important outcome of Operation Solo. Childs, in meetings with Soviet leaders, as well as with those in China, learned how wide the split between the Soviet Union and China was. American intelligence analysts believed that the rift between the two communist giants was not as wide as had been suggested publically.

In 1962, as the reports of a rift began to circulate, the analysts, cautioned against optimism. Roger Hilsman wrote in U.S. News and World Report, "So long as both partners [the Soviet Union and China] see the United States as the greatest obstacle to the attainment [of world revolution], they will try to patch over their differences and unite against the common enemy." Hilsman, like so many others believed that the communists would stick together simply because they were all communists. Their goal was to rule the world. Hilsman didn’t see the difference between Chinese communist and Soviet communist.

Morris Childs, however, listening to what the Soviets said in Moscow and what the Chinese said in Beijing, found that they were at odds with one another. When Khrushchev had renounced the policies of Stalin, the Chinese believed that it showed a Soviet move toward the west. Teng Hsiao-Ping, who lead the Chinese delegation during a negotiation in Moscow in July 1963, claimed that the Soviets were more interested in "better relations with the United States and India than with China." It was evidence for the rift, but it could also be interpreted as a negotiation tactic. The Chinese were attempting to position themselves in the most favorable place possible.

Childs believed, based on his discussions, that the Sino-Soviet split could not "be reconciled." Childs believed that there were fundamental differences in the Chinese and Soviet world view. These ideological differences were too great to overcome simply because both governments held a communist philosophy. Childs predicted that the rift would grow as the Chinese evolved their own theories of communism. The Soviet Union simply could not agree with the Chinese.

Childs intelligence value didn’t end there. He supplied consistent and important information until he finally retired in the 1980s. In 1987 he received the Presidential Medal of Freedom for his contributions to the security of the United States over several decades.

Now, having waded through all this, you might be wondering what relevance it has to UFOs. Well, this is a secret that was held by very few people for decades. Presidents were unaware of the operation. Other FBI agents, including those working in the same office building didn’t know about the operation. It was a closely held secret because if the Soviets ever learned about it, the conduit of information would be closed and more importantly, Morris would be killed.

The only exception to this secrecy, until the end of the mission, was President Ford. He had just taken over from Richard Nixon and was about to meet with the Soviets. He was nervous, even though he had been briefed on what to expect. To calm him, he was told about the source of the incredible information about the Soviets and their motives.

What this proves is that there are secrets that can be held for decades. They can be concealed from the president. They can be concealed from nearly everyone, if the stakes are high enough. So, when we say that governments can’t keep secrets, we have proof that they can. When we say that everything leaks, we can say that it doesn’t. There are people entrusted with secrets who can keep them, and keep them for years and years.

(Oh, for those interested in such things, Morris happened to be in the Soviet Union when President Kennedy was assassinated and the Russians received word. Although speaking to one another in Russian, because they believed that Childs couldn’t understand them, they disccused the ramifications of the murder. It was clear from their discussions that they had nothing to do with it.)

The story of Childs was reported by John Barron in his 1996 book, Operation Solo: The FBI’s Man in the Kremlin. It is a fascinating book and relevant because it turns some of our notions upside down.

Mogul Didn't Matter

I have discovered more evidence about the credibility of the secrecy around Project Mogul. This was the constant level balloon project blamed for the Roswell debris. It was a series of experiments, most of them in New Mexico, using a cluster of balloons and rawin radar targets, designed to keep balloons at a constant, high level in the atmosphere in an attempt to "listen" for Soviet atomic explosions.

When I say I discovered, it was really Robert Hastings, writing in his new book UFOS and Nukes: Extraordinary Encounters at Nuclear Weapons Sites. I have just applied an interesting paragraph from that book to what we know about Mogul and the secrecy around it.

Remember, the Mogul experiments began in New Mexico in early June and ended in September 1947. Stories about the balloon flights appeared in many newspapers beginning on July 10, just days after the officers at Roswell announced they had "captured" a flying saucer.

Hastings wrote, "In September 1947, Army Chief of Staff General Dwight D. Eisenhower directed the Army Air Corps to undertake the Constant Phoenix program, an on-going series of long-distance flights designed to detect atomic explosions ‘anywhere in the world.’ This high-priority activity was continued by the newly-created U.S. Air Force and, on September 3, 1949, radiation sensors abroad a USAF B-29 flying between Alaska and Japan confirmed the detonation of the first Soviet atomic bomb - some five years earlier than expected."

In other words, Mogul, to monitor Soviet atomic development was scrapped because a better method was found. Aircraft could maintain a constant level and could remain on station for hours at a time. A drifting balloon array moved with the vagaries of the winds and the sun (sun light could heat the balloon envelopes causing them to rise during the day). An aircraft could stay in virtually one place and when it needed to return for fuel or crew rest could be replaced in the same place by another aircraft.

At this point, Mogul was of no use. The secrecy requirement was gone. The original purpose, to spy on the Soviets wouldn’t be mentioned but the project no longer had the importance it once had. And, of course, with the deployment of spy planes and later satellites, the spying took on a much more sophisticated aspect than hanging some microphones on a balloon to drift over the Soviet Union.

With the collapse of the Soviet Union, and with everyone knowing that there are dozens of spy satellites up there photographing everything down here, there was no need to keep the Mogul secret, so the Air Force trotted it out to explain the Roswell crash debris. Mogul was a high priority project, they say. It was top secret, they say. But in the end, it was just a bunch of balloons tied together, sometimes with microphones attached and sometimes not. Nothing unusual to fool ranchers, Army officers, sheriffs or anyone else who might have found the remains of Mogul.

For those interested in more of what Robert Hastings has reported, you can only order UFOs and Nukes: Extraordinary Encounters at Nuclear Weapons Sites at ufohastings.com.

Mac Magruder and the Air War College

The skeptics often accuse those of us who are convinced that something alien fell at Roswell and that some UFOs represent alien visitation of being shoddy in our investigations and have a will to believe nearly everything. But that sword cuts both ways and we can document time and again where skeptics have made pronouncements that fit their belief structures without bothering to corroborate their negative information.

Take, for example, the claim made on a skeptical web site that the tale of Mac Magruder, the late Marine colonel who, while at the Air War College, traveled to Wright Field to see the wreckage of an alien craft and the bodies of the crew is untrue. They reject the story, because, according to this site, there was no Air War College classes in session in July 1947 when this was to have taken place. The class didn’t begin until September 1947, so the Magruder tale can be rejected.

Tony Bragalia and I have been chasing this. We both know that you sometimes can’t rely on the information provided by others unless you check it out yourself. Too often the both skeptics and believers run with the first thing they have and don’t worry about consequences. We have, for the last few weeks, been trying to learn what we can from the various Internet sources available and then from a number of people at the Air War College.

First were the official biographies of some of the men who were in what was the second year-long class at the Air War College. This is the class that Magruder attended and there really seems to be no controversy about that. He was in that second class.

The official biographies Brigadier General Ethelred Lundy Sykes, Brigadier General John E. Frizen and Major General Dale O. Smith only tell us a little about the starting dates. Skyes, according to the biography, "Entering the Air War College at Maxwell Field, Ala., in July 1947, he graduated the following year."

According to the biography of Frizen, "From August 1947 to July 1948, he was a student at the Air Command and Staff School, Air University, Maxwell Air Force Base, Ala."

Smith, according to his biography, "From the summer of 1947 to the summer of 1948, Smith attended the Air War College as a student."

Both Tony and I have talked to people at the Air War College including the registrar. We learned that the documents we needed, which were handwritten cards, the yearbooks, and other records, were currently boxed up because the office was undergoing a major renovation. This suggested that the claim the class didn’t start until September 1947 might be hearsay without the necessary corroboration.

Tony talked to the base historian and I talked to woman in the history office. They both said that they really didn’t know for certain because the records were unavailable at the moment, but those records would provide the information we sought. The woman I talked to told me in an email that the dates I had for the 1947 – 1948 class were correct, but since I had made queries about a couple of dates, her response wasn’t all that helpful.

Eventually we got to Dr. James A. Mowbray who had helped research and write the 1947 – 2007 AWC Alumni Review book. He is considered the resident expert on the subject.

Tony read to him a passage from Witness to Roswell by Tom Carey and Don Schmitt that said, "The Air War College had just commenced in mid-to-late July when they were all flown up to Wright Field in Dayton, Ohio."

Mowbray found the sentence to be historically accurate and consistent. Mowbray was "one hundred percent certain there were classes in session in July 1947…" But he also said that the handwritten cards, currently in storage would confirm this. He said that he had analyzed them "many times" for his research on the AWC.

He did confirm an AWC class trip to Wright Field, though he couldn’t be certain that it was in July 1947. These were trips to learn about base operations and management systems and that many of the students [though I would suspect all] held high security clearances. From my experience, I know that some schools, before a student is accepted, require top secret clearances and the Air War College would certainly be one of them.

On the downside. Tony told Mowbray about the Roswell crash and Mowbray said, "It didn’t happen. This Magruder couldn’t have seen anything, because there was nothing to see."

He also said that few if any of the AWC students would have had any substantial "black project exposure." He said that he couldn’t think of any situation like Roswell that would involve students.

These were, of course, his opinions, based on his belief that the Roswell crash didn’t happen and if it didn’t happen, then Magruder couldn’t have seen anything. All we wanted to do was confirm the dates because the skeptics and debunkers had rejected the Magruder testimony based on that piece of information. Had the class not started until September, then the story could be rejected. That was not the case.

What we know now is that Magruder was in the second class. We know that classes were held in the summer and according to Mowbray, were a year long then, rather than the ten months of today. We can’t nail down, at this point, the exact date that Magruder might have arrived, nor can we nail down the exact start date. We can say that the dates given and the trips taken do not rule it out at this point.

Mowbray also made comments about the elderly, suggesting that they often confused dates, events, locations and memories and thought that Magruder was mistaken because of his age. But many elderly are as sharp as they ever were and do not confuse the events of their lives. We cannot reject the story simply because Magruder was old when he related the majority of the details.

Yes, we need to follow up on this when we can at the beginning of next year. Then we should be able to establish when Magruder arrived and when his class made the trip to Wright Field. At that point, with the documentation in hand, we’ll know if we can reject the story, or if we should attempt further confirmation. Unfortunately for us, learning that Magruder was there in July 1947 and that the class traveled to Wright Field in 1947 doesn’t prove that they saw the remains of an alien ship and the dead crew. It only proves that they could have.

But, at the very least, we’re attempting to get at the facts, rather than rely on the shoddy investigations of the skeptics and the debunkers. I would hope that before they start slinging loaded terms and mistaken conclusions, they would be sure of their facts.

The Las Vegas UFO Crash

The other day I received an email from a woman who had wanted to see the article from the Las Vegas Sun from April 19, 1962 which was headlined, "Brilliant Red Explosion Flares in Las Vegas Sky." She also wanted to see the article that accompanied it.

She wrote to the newspaper and was told they couldn’t help her because their archives had burned on November 22, 1963.

I found the excuse just a little far-fetched and wondered if they had blown her off they way they had me so long ago. I was chasing the same story, but I happened to be in Las Vegas and while the newspaper wouldn’t help, the local library and its microfilm could. I found the article and the accompanying story.

But this reminded me of the conversation I had with one of the reporters at the newspaper. One of the people mentioned in the article was Frank Maggio, described as a staff photographer. And, of course, was Jim Stalnaker who was the reporter on the story.

The reporter I spoke to was friendly, right up to the moment I mentioned UFOs. Then she turned hostile, lecturing me about the subject, claiming that she had never seen one and that proof of their visitation didn’t exist. To her, I was chasing ghosts.

I told her that the initial information had come from her newspaper and she said, "It’s all heresay. You can’t believe anything you read in the newspaper."

Let’s stop for a moment and look at that. A reporter for the newspaper just told me that you couldn’t believe anything you read in the newspaper. I thought that was a strange attitude for a reporter and if I had a subscription I would have cancelled it right then, citing as the reason that one of their reporters had told me I couldn’t believe anything printed in their newspaper.

But, since I knew that one of the witnesses, Frank Maggio worked for the newspaper, I asked about him.

"They’re all dead," she told me.

"Family?"

"No family. They’re dead."

This, I believe could be called the classical "dead end..." if I wanted to make light of it. But since she was hostile, and lying to me, I hung up and then looked in the Las Vegas telephone book. I found no listing for Frank Maggio, but did find one for a Maggio Photo Lab. Thinking it had to be the same guy, I called. It was.

He couldn’t remember anything about the sighting that wasn’t in the newspaper story. He had said that it was a "tremendous flaming sword." There was a series of bright explosions that broke up the trail across the sky and that it had vanished east of Las Vegas.

Over the next few weeks, I talked to twenty or thirty people who had seen something that night, read the Project Blue Book files on it, and although there had been a rumor that nothing about this event was printed in the newspapers, I found many articles about it. The object, whatever it was, had been seen as it crossed the United States from east to west, was tracked by radar, and seemed to make a looping turn over Reno so that it was heading to the south and then east when it appeared in the Las Vegas sky. Those watching it lost sight of it out near Mesquite, which is on the Nevada - Utah border.

The story is quite complex and I have done a long write up about it in A History of UFO Crashes, for those who wish more information.

But the point here is that sometimes those with the information just don’t want to be bothered with supplying it. That’s why I have put the entire newspaper article here, for those who might want to see it and can’t to Las Vegas to look it up for themselves.

The article follows:

Edgar Mitchell and Roswell

Over the last couple of days, there has been a lot of talk about what Dr. Edgar Mitchell apparently told an audience in Great Britain. In some versions, these stories seemed to suggest that Mitchell had some sort of communication with alien creatures while on the moon, and said that there was, indeed, a cover-up.

On Friday, July 25, Mitchell had the opportunity to clear up some of these misconceptions when he appeared on BlogTalkRadio’s ShapeShifting, hosted by Lisa Bonnice. He did say there was a cover up at Roswell, but also suggested that NASA knew nothing about it, or rather he had no information to suggest that NASA knew about it.

In response to one of Bonnice’s questions about Roswell, Mitchell said:

I was talking about the Roswell incident, the Roswell visitation primarily, but there have been many others that have been reported that I have no personal awareness of but that was the one that I was really talking about... and my information comes from what I call "the old timers," because I grew up in the Roswell area and when I went to the moon, some of the old timers from that period, some locals, and others military and intelligence people, who were under rather severe oaths to not reveal any of this and kind of wanted to get their conscience clear and off their chests before they passed on, selected me and said, independently - this wasn't a group effort - independently that maybe I might be a safe person to tell their story to. And all of them confirmed, and what I'm saying is they confirmed the Roswell incident was a real incident and they in some way had some part in it that they wanted to talk about.

Mitchell continued by saying:

Well, that the crash of an alien spacecraft in the Roswell area was a real event and much of the lore, I can't say all of the lore, but much of the fact that dead bodies were recovered and live ones were recovered, that they were not of this world, was the story. And of course it was reported in the Roswell Daily Record one day and promptly denied the next day and a cover story of a weather balloon, and that was pure nonsense. That was a cover-up.

Later, Mitchell told Irene Klotz from the Discovery Channel:

Subsequent to that, I did take my story to the Pentagon - not NASA, but the Pentagon - and asked for a meeting with the Intelligence Committee of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and got it. And told them my story and what I know and eventually had that confirmed by the admiral that I spoke with, that indeed what I was saying was true.

The whole interview can be seen is at:

http://dsc.discovery.com/space/qa/alien-ufo-edgar-mitchell.html

And then, echoing the story related by Barry Goldwater and his attempts to see the crash material, the admiral told Mitchell:

...There was a UFO crash. There was an alien spacecraft. This gentleman [the admiral] tried his damndest to get me in and like so many others in the administration over the last 60 years, since JFK's time, was unable to. He was told 'Admiral, you don't have a need to know, and therefore go get lost,' essentially.

Let’s take a look at this carefully. Mitchell isn’t saying that he saw any of this, that he was working with inside information, but was talking to the people who were involved, in Roswell. Clearly these were people he trusted and that they felt they could tell him about it because of who he was. But this adds little to what we already know about Roswell. He provides no names, though I suspect we could identify some of them if we wanted.He then goes off on what I believe to be a tangent, but it also supplies us with a clue about the source of some of the information.

He said:

Here the Air Force is charged with presumably protecting the skies and the advanced technologies of our nation and the intelligence services didn't really know what to do with an alien spacecraft and didn't know whether they were hostile or otherwise, and didn't want the Soviets to get involved with that, or know about it, so the easiest thing to do was lie about it, cover it up and have it classified and deny that it happened. And that's what has happened and unfortunately, or maybe fortunately, I don't know, that President Truman then elected a committee of very high level military and civilian academicians and people and formed the Military and Joint Intelligence Committee.

This is the same sort of thing that Brigadier General Arthur Exon had told me a number of years ago. Exon said that he didn’t know the name of the committee, only that he knew some of the people involved and that he had information about some of the others. Exon provided names, such as Stuart Symington (seen here), who in July 1947, was the Under Secretary of War for Air, General Carl Spaatz, who was the commander of Army Air Forces, and he even suggests that Dwight Eisenhower, who was the Chief of Staff of the Army in 1947, was part of the committee.

Exon told me, "I just know there was a top intelligence echelon represented and the President’s office was represented and the Secretary of Defense [here meaning the Secretary of War] was represented and these people stayed on in key positions even through they might have moved out [meaning changed jobs such as Eisenhower becoming president and Symington eventually becoming a senator]."

Mitchell then identifies what he believed to be the committee. He said:

Abbreviated MAJIC or "Majic 12," that's what it was called, and gave them power to manage this so-called alien presence or crash or whatever they were going to do. And they passed a very secretive bill that gave authority, perhaps too much authority, and over the last 60 years since that incident, things have been continuously covered up, lied about, hidden, and people have not been able to get in to that - including Barry Goldwater when he was a presidential candidate - tried to crack into it and get the information out and was denied. President Ford later tried to get some information out and was denied.

This is where we enter into speculation by Mitchell. Both Mitchell and Exon suggested that a committee was created to investigate and to exploit the finds at Roswell. Exon called it the "Unholy Thirteen" simply because he had no other name for it, and that was the name he used when discussing it. Bill Moore, Richard Doty, and others received documents suggesting it was known as the Majestic-Twelve, or MJ-12, code named MAJIC.

At this point it doesn’t really matter who is right about the name of the committee, or even the exact nature of it. What is important is that we have two very highly placed people who were talking about an oversight committee that was investigating Roswell and setting policy about UFOs. We have the names of some of those people who appear on both lists. Exon, for example, said that Roscoe Hillenkoetter (seen here) was on, as was James Forrestal who became the first Secretary of Defense in 1947.

Now we have further corroboration of this committee and while we, inside the UFO community argue about who is right about it, the real story goes relatively unreported. First, we had an Air Force brigadier general, who was in the right place at the right time to know, tell us about this committee.

Now we have a former astronaut tell us about this committee and if he wants to call it the Majic 12, then so be it. But the important point is that we have another man who should be in a place to know. We should be looking for the committee rather than arguing among ourselves about who is right about this and who is wrong. Maybe the MJ-12 documents are fraudulent, or maybe not, but that really isn’t the point. The point is that there was, and is, a committee controlling this information and we should be searching for that.

When we look back into the history of UFOs, we see a couple of things. First, prior to July 8, 1947, the government and especially the military, didn’t care about all the stories of flying saucers. The newspapers are full of speculation, reports, eyewitness accounts, and columns attempting to explain what is going on.

Then, on July 9, the day after the story breaks in Roswell, we see newspaper articles saying that the Army and Navy moved today to suppress stories of the flying saucers whizzing through the atmosphere. This was a wire story and I have found it, and variations of it, in many newspapers. Why, suddenly, on July 9 does the Army and Navy care about these stories? I will note that many newspapers stopped reporting them.

Edward Ruppelt (seen here), who was, at one time the chief of Project Blue Book wrote in his book, The Report on Unidentified Flying Objects, wrote, "The only other people outside Project Blue Book who have studied the complete case of the Lubbock Lights were a group who, due to their associations with the government, had complete access to our files. And these people were not pulp writers or wide-eyes fanatics, they were scientists - rocket experts, nuclear physicists, and intelligence experts..."

So, rather than trying to prove the name MJ-12 is correct, we should be combining forces to find out all we can about the oversight committee. Searches in the past have been limited to the men whose names appear on the MJ-12 document. Maybe we should expand it to include those mentioned by Exon. Maybe we’ll find something there.

For now, we have Edgar Mitchell clearly on the record talking about the Roswell UFO crash based on his conversations with the people of Roswell he personally knew, talking about the oversight committee which he labeled MJ-12, and talking about the continuing government cover up about UFOs. We have an Air Force general telling us some of the same things. Isn’t it about time we began to take some of this a little more seriously and work together to unravel this rather than worry about who is right and who is wrong?

How Many Planets? Part V

The answer is still eight major planets, but now there is a fourth dwarf planet. This is another plutoid, out beyond Neptune and was named Makemake by the International Astronomical Union a few days ago.

As mentioned last time we talked about this, there were two that were about to be named, officially, Easterbunny, aka 2005 FY9 and Santa. Makemake is the one formally known as Easterbunny.

Remember, Ceres, which originally classified as a planet, lost its status as more asteroids were discovered. Pluto lost its status as other objects, some larger than Pluto were discovered out in the area known as the Kuiper Belt. Ceres was elevated to dwarf planet and is still the only one not also classified as a Plutoid.

Makemake is about two thirds the size of Pluto and is a red methane-covered dwarf. It is thought to be slightly smaller than Pluto and isn’t quite as bright.

In case you think they deviated from the tradition of naming these objects after mythological gods, Makemake is the chief god among the people of Easter Island, which Mike Brown, who discovered the dwarf planet thought appropriate.

For those keeping score at home, we have eight planets, one dwarf planet orbiting between Mars and Jupiter, and three dwarf planets that are also Plutoids orbiting beyond Neptune. There will be more to follow

Jason Kellahin and Robin Adair

Jason Kellahin (seen below) was an AP reporter in the summer of 1947 based in Albuquerque, New Mexico. He was dispatched to Roswell to write about the flying saucer crash and I interviewed him in January, 1993 in his home in Santa Fe. The interview was videotaped.

Ten months later he was interviewed by researcher Karl Pflock and we see that his story changed radically from that first interview. Pflock developed an affidavit from what Kellahin said to him and that affidavit was published in Karl’s book about Roswell.

There are two items of evidence that are important to us here. One is my video tape and the other is the Kellahin affidavit. By comparing these two items, we can learn something about the Roswell case, something about half-century old memories, and how we can be pulled from away from the truth.

Of course, by adding other items of evidence, including the stories written by Kellahin in July 1947, using the time line published in newspapers about the Roswell events, and other, limited documentation, we can figure out who should be believed and who should not. In this case, the answer is surprising.

Once I arrived at Kellahin’s home, I was invited in and we walked through to his rather plush office in the back. I had the chance to observe some of his books and magazines before I set up the video camera, made sure that it was focused, and then sat down.

With the camera running, and after introducing himself to the camera, he told me that he received a call from the New York office of the Associated Press telling him that he needed to get down to Roswell as quickly as possible. "We [Kellahin and Robin Adair, a photographer and according to Adair, reporter] were informed of the discovery down there... the bureau chief sent me and a teletype operator from the Albuquerque office."

Kellahin, said, "It must have been in the morning because we went down there in the daytime. It would take a couple of hours to get down there..."

Kellahin continued, saying, "We went down to Vaughn. Just south of Vaughn is where they found the material."

The ranch, according to him, wasn't very far from the main highway (Highway 285) from Vaughn to Roswell. They turned from that highway just south of Vaughn, onto the Corona road. They were driving to the west and saw "a lot of cars and went over. We assumed that [this] was the place. There were officers from the air base. There were there before we got there."

Kellahin described for me the military cars, civilian cars and even police vehicles parked along the side of the road. In one of the fields adjacent to the road, at the far end of it, were a number of military officers, no more than five or six of them. Kellahin left his vehicle and entered the field where he saw the scattered debris.

Ten months later, in an affidavit prepared for the Fund for UFO Research, Kellahin would say, "Our first stop was the Foster ranch, where the discovery had been made. At the ranch house, we found William ‘Mac’ [sic] Brazel, his wife and his small son. It was Brazel who made the find in a pasture some distance from the house."

He also told Karl Pflock, "Brazel took Adair and me to the pasture where he made his discovery. When we arrived, there were three or four uniformed Army officers searching some higher ground about a quarter mile to a half mile away. Apparently, they had been there for some time."

Kellahin told me, "This man from Albuquerque with me [Adair], he had a camera. He took some pictures of the stuff lying on the ground and of the rancher who was there... Brazel was there and he [the photographer] took his picture."

Kellahin asked Brazel a few questions, interviewing him there, in the field. "I talked to him. He told me his name [Brazel] and we had been told it was on his ranch."

Kellahin didn't remember much about what Brazel had said. "About the only thing he said he walked out there and found this stuff and he told a neighbor about it and the neighbor said you ought to tell the sheriff... it was the next day [Brazel] went down to Roswell."

Standing there in the field, near the debris, Kellahin had the chance to examine it closely. "It wasn't much of anything. Just some silver colored fabric and very light wood... a light wood like you'd make a kite with... I didn't pick it up. In fact, they [the military] asked us not to pick up anything... You couldn't pick it up and have identified it. You have to have known [what it was]. But it was a balloon. It looked more like a kite than anything else."

Which, of course, is not the description of a balloon but certainly is a good description of one of the rawin radar targets. That Kellahin suggested it was bits of a balloon here makes little difference. It is quite clear what he is trying to say.

The debris covered a small area, not more than half an acre (Army officers and one of the Japanese Balloon Bombs seen here). The military men were standing close by as Kellahin interviewed Brazel but didn't try to interfere. "They weren't paying much attention. They didn't interfere with me. I went wherever I wanted to go. They didn't keep me off the place at all. Me or the photographer."

In his affidavit, he described the scene by saying, "There was quite a lot of debris on the site - pieces of silver colored fabric, perhaps aluminized clothe. Some of the pieces had sticks attached to them. I thought they might be the remains of a high-altitude balloon package, but I did not see anything, pieces of rubber or the like, that looked like it could have been part of the balloon itself. The way the material was distributed, it looked as though whatever it was from came apart as it moved through the air."

Kellahin, in the video tapped story he gave me, said he tried to talk to the military people, but they didn't give him any information. "They were being very, very cautious because they didn't know."

He didn't have much time for the interview because the military officers came over and told him they were finished and were going to take Brazel into Roswell. With Brazel gone and the clean up of the debris finished, there wasn't much reason for the AP reporters to remain. Kellahin and Adair continued their trip to Roswell, arriving before dark.

He elaborated on this, saying in the affidavit, "After looking at the material, I walked over to the military men. They said they were from RAAF and were just looking around to see what they could find. They said they were going back to Roswell and would talk with me further there. They had a very casual attitude and did not seem at all disturbed that the press was there. They made no attempt to run us off."

Kellahin told me, "We went down to the Roswell Daily Record and I wrote a story and we sent it out on the AP wire... Adair developed his pictures and set up the wire photo equipment and sent it out."

To Pflock and for his affidavit, Kellahin said, "Adair and I, Brazel, and the Army men then drove down to Roswell, traveling separately. Late that afternoon or early evening, we met at the offices of the Roswell Daily Record, the city’s afternoon newspaper. The military men waited on the sidewalk out front, while I and a Record reporter named Skeritt interviewed Brazel and Adair took his picture. (Adair also took photos of Brazel and the debris at the ranch, but these were never used.) Walter E. Whitmore, owner of KGFL, one of Roswell’s two radio stations, was also present during the interview. Whitmore did his best to maneuver Brazel away from the rest of the press."

The story ended saying, "Adair and Kellahin were ordered to Roswell for the special assignment by the headquarters bureau of AP in New York."

Kellahin, in a break with what he said in his affidavit when he left the ranch, had expected to see Brazel in Roswell, the next day, but, "I don't recall that I did. I think the military was talking to him and wouldn't let him talk to anyone else to my recollection... I saw him there but... there were some military people with him."

Following the story as far as he could, Kellahin told me he talked to Sheriff Wilcox. "When we got down there to the newspaper, he was there. I saw him there or at his office... By that time the military had gotten into it. He was being very cautious."

And in his affidavit said, "After interviewing Brazel, I spoke with the military people outside and then went over to see Sheriff George Wilcox, whom I knew well. Wilcox said the military indicated to him it would be best if he did not say anything. I then phoned in my story to the AP office in Albuquerque. The next morning, Adair transmitted his photos on the portable wirephoto equipment (as seen here)."

"It was a weather balloon," said Kellahin. "In my opinion that's what it was. That's what we saw. We didn't see anything else to indicate it was anything else."

Once they finished in the office, Kellahin returned to Albuquerque and Adair was ordered to return to El Paso to finish his job there. By the time Kellahin returned to Albuquerque, there was a new story for him that had nothing to do with flying saucers. Another assignment that was just as important as his last.

There are some points that must be made. The raw testimony and the later affidavit from Kellahin must be put into context with that provided by others, including Robin Adair, who was also dispatched to Roswell. Both Kellahin and Adair were trying to answer the questions as honestly as they could, attempting to recall the situation as it was in July 1947. However, they are at odds with one another. There clearly is no way for Adair to be both in El Paso as he claimed during Don Schmitt’s interview with him and in Albuquerque as Kellahin suggested to me.

Given the circumstances, there are some things that can be established. A number of newspaper articles about the events, written in 1947, have been reviewed. Although many of them had no by-line, they did carry an AP slug and did identify the location as Roswell. Since Kellahin was the only AP reporter there, assigned by the bureau chief in Albuquerque at the request of the AP headquarters in New York, it is clear that he wrote the articles.

The first problem encountered is Kellahin's memory of getting the call early in the morning. That simply doesn't track with the evidence. Walter Haut's press release was not issued until about noon on July 8.That means there would be no reason for the AP to assign a reporter on the morning of July 8. There was no story until that afternoon. And, by the morning of July 9, the story was dead. No reason to send anyone to Roswell because photos had already been taken of the debris in Fort Worth and the information already released. Besides, the story in the July 9 issue of The Roswell Daily Record makes it clear that they, Kellahin and Adair, had already arrived in Roswell, coming down on July 8.

Second is the story that Kellahin saw the weather balloon on the Brazel ranch. His description of the location, south of Vaughn but just off the main highway to Roswell is inaccurate. The debris field, as identified by Bill Brazel and Bud Payne, is not close to the Vaughn - Roswell highway. In fact, the field where the debris was discovered is not visible from the road around it. It is a cross country drive.

Then in his affidavit, he suggests that he went to the Brazel ranch house where he interviewed Brazel. But with Brazel’s wife standing right there, he asks her no questions and offers no quotes from her in his story. That seems strange. He has what would be exclusive information from another witness, but provides no quotes from her.

More importantly, by the time Kellahin could have gotten to that field, the balloon should have been removed. In fact, according to Marcel and the newspaper articles, the balloon was already in Fort Worth if we believe what has been reported. After all, a balloon wouldn't have taken long to collect and Marcel had done that the day before.

Kellahin's testimony of seeing a balloon out in the field is intriguing, not because he is an eyewitness to the balloon on the crash site, but because of what it suggests. If there was a balloon, it would mean that the Army had to bring one in. In other words, they were salting the area, and that, in and of itself, would be important. It would suggest that the Army had something to hide, if they were planting evidence. That is, if we find Kellahin’s testimony about seeing the balloon in the field to be credible.

In his affidavit, we get the same basic story, but this time Brazel takes Kellahin and Adair out to the field. Adair, the photographer, takes pictures, but none of them are ever used. This makes no sense when it is remembered that all seven pictures of the balloon debris displayed in Ramey’s office were printed somewhere. The pictures of the balloon in the field, with Brazel, and with Army officers around it, would be more important than the pictures in Ramey’s office, or the one of Mack Brazel wearing his cowboy hat and smoking a cigar.

The best available is that Kellahin did not stop at the ranch on his way down. He is mistaken about that. The lack of the photographs, and evidence about the location of Brazel on the afternoon of July 8 suggest it. The location that Kellahin gives is in error. The ranch was not close to Vaughn, and the debris field is not close to any road.

By the time Kellahin and Adair arrived in Roswell and were ready to begin reporting, some of the pressure was off. Ramey, in Fort Worth, explained that the material found in Roswell was nothing extraordinary. No longer was New York demanding pictures. In fact, several pictures had already been taken in Fort Worth.

The interview with Brazel occurred on the evening of July 8, according to the newspaper article in the July 9 edition of The Roswell Daily Record. Brazel was brought into Roswell by the owner of KGFL, Walt Whitmore, Sr. and taken out to the air base, not accompanied to Roswell by the Army as Kellahin suggested much later. Brazel was then escorted to the newspaper office to be interviewed by Kellahin, as well as a reporter for the Daily Record. The pictures transmitted, those of Brazel and George Wilcox, are ones that had been taken in the office for that purpose. Kellahin wrote his story, which appeared in the newspapers the next day.

With the story dead, Kellahin was ordered to return to what he had been doing. He left Roswell. Kellahin believed that nothing extraordinary had been found and there was no reason for the events to stick in his mind.

There are a couple of other comments to be made here. First, I’m surprised that the skeptics haven’t made more of Kellahin’s testimony. It fits into their balloon theory and adds the weight of a first-hand witness.

Second, Phil Klass takes me to task for not questioning the testimony of Robin Adair with the same vigor that I addressed the Kellahin’s testimony. He is, of course, right about that. Some of his assumptions are wrong. He asks why Adair, if he was in El Paso would have been authorized to charter a plane while Kellahin had to drive. The distances are roughly equivalent. The answer could be that the drive from El Paso covers some wild territory including mountains while the drive from Albuquerque does not.

Anyway, Klass is correct and I should have been tougher on the testimony offered by Adair. Clearly both men can’t be right about the circumstances, and I now suspect that neither are.

Finally, Tim Printy makes the case that these nearly fifty-year-old memories (when the witnesses were interviewed) are probably unreliable. As I mentioned, once Kellahin and Adair arrived in Roswell, Ramey had already introduced the balloon explanation. The story went from one that might have been the greatest story of the last thousand years to the misidentification of a weather balloon. The story probably didn’t stick in the minds of either man until we all began asking questions about it a half century later.

So, what do we do with this? Take the testimonies, compare then with the records available and decide from there where to go. I believe, based on my observations of Kellahin, on what I saw as I walked through his house, and on the affidavit he produced, that his testimony is largely confabulation. These are the things that he thought he would have done, these are the descriptions of the debris that he remembers, though it sounds as if it was lifted from the newspaper of 1947 (which he told me he had read just prior to the interview), and these are the actions he would have taken. Unfortunately, there are just too many problems with his story.

And here I need to say that I didn’t interview Robin Adair. I worked from the notes and transcripts of the interview conducted by Don Schmitt. All this means is that I didn’t have the opportunity to study Adair the way I did Kellahin. I don’t know what sources he might have used to refresh his memory or why his testimony is so much different than that of Kellahin.

But Klass was right. I should have been more skeptical about Adair. There are questions that should have been asked that were not.

In the end, we’re left with two conflicting statements, one that bolsters the balloon and one that suggests the alien ship but neither of which is reliable. To learn the truth, we need to go somewhere else.

Another Mishmash of Fact

I know that I said I was done with responding to Kal Korff, and I know that when I watch Countdown with Keith Olbermann, I get tired of his rants about Bill O’Reilly and Rush Limbaugh, but sometimes it’s just so much fun.

Take the latest rant. He quotes from one of my books and goes into a typical rant.

The quotes that annoy him so much are these:

Marcel said about the debris, "I’d never seen anything like that. I didn’t know what we were picking up." He said that some of the debris was thin as newsprint, feather light but so strong they couldn’t dent it or burn it. He described foil-like material, I-beams, and "...other stuff there that looked very much like parchment that didn’t burn.'"

Marcel was so impressed by what he had seen that he stopped at his house on the way back to the base. He wanted his wife and son to see the debris. When Jesse Marcel, Jr. saw the strange material, he asked his father what it was. Marcel, Sr. "It’s a flying saucer."

Marcel, Jr. Said that he saw some foil material that was thicker than lead foil and that was much stronger. He mentioned the I-beams which seemed to be made out of layered foil and that was embossed with writing. Marcel Jr. described the writing as, "Purple. Strange. Never saw anything like it.

He then says, "Well, no folks, he didn’t say it was a flying saucer. They didn’t use that word back then. They said flying disk. That’s it."

Here is the front page of the Roswell Daily Record for July 8, 1947. Clearly it says, "RAAF Captures Flying Saucer On Ranch in Roswell Region."

The next day, the headline reads, "Gen. Ramey Empties Roswell Saucer."

In case you think that it was only in Roswell that they used that term, though it certainly proves my case because it shows the term in use in Roswell, here, from the Des Moines Register of July 4, 1947, "Army Probes ‘Flying Saucer’ Stories."

And from the Herald American (Syracuse, New York) "Flying Saucers Reported By Scores in 28 States."

So where did he get the idea that they didn’t use the term flying saucer in July 1947? I found lots more examples, so clearly they did.

The other part of the quote that sets him off is the term I-beam. He says that Marcel didn’t use that term and in fact, Marcel said that his son got it wrong.

Well, looking at the interview that Linda Corley did with Jesse Marcel, Sr. in 1981 (and not available until after 1993), it appears that Marcel did say that during her interview. At least it seems that way. Marcel drew a picture of the cross section of one of the smaller members and it is rectangular. If you look at the "I-beam" that Marcel, Jr. had made, you see that it is nearly rectangular as well. Yes, there is a "I" shape to it, but the top and bottom cross beams are small.

And something that Korff fails to report is that Corley said when she shared her tapes with Stan Friedman, she had to go back to create transcripts because the tapes, sitting on a shelf, had degraded quite a bit. They were difficult to understand and Corley had to interpret the words and phrases, so it’s possible that the senior Marcel wasn’t quite as positive as Korff and others now believe.

Korff goes on to say, "Jesse Marcel, Jr., he claims he saw an I-beam and he’s the only one who did... And his father Jesse Marcel, Sr. says, ‘No.’"

According to Korff, "Jesse [Jr.] got that wrong. He was a little boy. He was only 11 years old... No other Roswell witness reported I-beams at all. None. Zero."

Except, of course, for Robert Shirkey, who, in January 1990, in a personal interview described the scene as some of the debris was carried through the Operations building. In a telephone interview, Shirkey said, "Marcel was carrying a box that had the I-beams sticking up in one corner...

Much later, Steve Lytle, in an interview conducted with Don Schmitt and Tom Carey, used the term I-beams.

And another witness Jack Trowbridge said, "It was aluminum in appearance. There were fragments of aircraft skin, or whatever the thing was and also some girders with pictures of hieroglyphics..."

So, Korff goes off on a tangent here, claims that no one else ever mentioned the I-beams and yet, without much effort, I was able to locate two additional witnesses. Trowbridge doesn’t say "I-beam," but does say girders, which can be construed as an I-beam-like structure and that runs the score to three.

Finally, in this latest mishmash, Korff said, "The U.S. government did launch one [Mogul balloon] to spy on the Soviets..."

This isn’t quite right either. Yes, the purpose of Mogul was to spy on the Soviets, but they could never keep the balloons aloft long enough for them to drift over the Soviet Union, and the coming of the spy planes, and much later, satellites, did in the need for Mogul. It just never worked the way it was supposed to.

The real reason that I’m forced to post this here is that Korff, in his YouTube rants, disables the comments section. No one has the opportunity to suggest that maybe he’s off base on his claims. Had I been able to comment on YouTube, I would have done this there.

Once again I apologize for dragging you all along with me on this, but then, sometimes it is fun to see how badly he muffs the ball.

This will be the last time for a response to Korff here. There is a marvelous little blog at http://www.kalisanidiot.blogspot.com/ and I’ll try to get the host there to post any more responses I feel are needed. Maybe I should just let it go because no matter what Korff says, when all the facts are presented, the story is different than he says, sometimes wildly so.

How Secret Was Mogul?

Let’s talk a moment about this ridiculous notion that the officers and soldiers at the Roswell Army Air Field couldn’t recognize a balloon, or balloon array when they saw it. Let’s also talk about this notion that Project Mogul was top secret so that those soldiers wouldn’t know about it and therefore couldn’t identify it. This is something that we all have talked about before, but it seems that the skeptics and debunkers are having some trouble with the concept.

First, there are the balloon arrays themselves (seen here). They were made up of multiple balloons and rawin radar targets. The balloons were neoprene, flimsy, easily ripped and discolored in the sun. They were standard weather balloons, just like those launched four times a day by the weather department at Roswell. They were something that was easily recognizable because they were so common.

Not quite so common were the rawin radar targets, but they were nothing new and nothing extraordinary. They were made of easily snapped balsa, cloth-backed aluminum foil, and string. All materials with which the soldiers would have been familiar. In fact, many standard meteorological packages were made of one balloon and one rawin radar target. Mogul was made of multiple balloons and multiple targets but that shouldn’t have been so extraordinary that no one could recognize it for what it was.

The remnants of the balloons, targets, and arrays were considered unimportant. While they did attempt to recover them, they sometimes failed, and left them in the fields to rot. Not really how you would treat highly classified material.

But those balloon arrays were the ones lost in rugged terrain or that drifted far outside of New Mexico. That the arrays were not recovered was not considered a security breach by anyone. No one cared that the balloon arrays had disappeared.

In fact, all this was so unimportant, that pictures of the balloons and some of the activities around them were photographed and printed in newspapers across the country (as shown by thise photograph from the El Paso newspaper, July 10, 1947). This is a funny way to treat a highly classified project.

Second, let’s talk about this secrecy. The point that the skeptics and debunkers refuse to understand is that the balloon launches in New Mexico, the equipment used and science being conducted there was not classified. Get it. There was nothing classified about what was going on in New Mexico.

Charles Moore, one of the project scientists (seen here), told me that they had traveled to Roswell to ask for assistance in tracking their balloons. They had meant with the officers at the base, explained what they were doing, and asked for assistance. Colonel William Blanchard, the commanding officer, refused. Or one of his subordinate officers refused. At any rate, the base was going to offer no help chasing balloons.

The balloon launches were announced in advance in NOTAMS, that is, Notices to Airmen, because the long arrays and clusters of balloons could be a hazard to aerial navigation. So, the officers and soldiers at Roswell had a second way of learning about these balloon flights. All they had to do was read the NOTAMs. These NOTAMs would have described the nature of the hazard, or in the world of secrecy, compromised the project one more way.

So, what was classified? The ultimate purpose of the project. The stated purpose, the one that everyone knew was to create a constant level balloon. One that could sustain a certain altitude. Prior to this, balloons were at the whim of the atmosphere, rising and falling as the sun heated them, or the night air cooled them. The Japanese, in their Balloon Bomb campaign, took this into account, rigging a system of ballast with a barometer that would release the sandbags as the balloons dropped below a certain altitude.

That purpose of the project, was not classified. The ultimate purpose, to launch these constant level balloons and send them over the Soviet Union to spy on their atomic programs was classified. The men working in New Mexico probably didn’t know that. All they knew was that they were trying to keep the balloons at a certain altitude for a certain length of time.

What this means is that Mack Brazel should have recognized the balloons for what they were when he found them. He did tell the reporters in Roswell that he had found weather balloons on other occasions and this was nothing like that... except, if it had been Mogul, it would have been exactly like that. Weather balloons and radar targets.

This means that Major Jesse Marcel, Sr., should have been able to recognize the debris as a weather balloon, rather than believing it something truly extraordinary. If we are to believe the tale told by Sheridan Cavitt, he did recognize the debris as a balloon, but didn’t bother to say anything to Marcel who was on the field with him, to Blanchard who was the base commander, or to anyone else. Cavitt kept the important secret that these were weather balloons, even after Brigadier General Roger Ramey in Fort Worth had identified them as such.

So, this idea that Project Mogul was highly classified and therefore would be unrecognizable to the soldiers at Roswell is refuted (Tracking of Mogul flight by officers at Alamogordo, New Mexico). While the purpose was highly classified, the experiments and equipment were not. And, since the project was reported in the newspapers of July 10, 1947, this idea that the government was hiding the project is also refuted.

There is no reason for the extraordinary steps taken to cover up the incident in Roswell... unless it was something else and Mogul wasn’t nearly as important as that new information. This doesn’t take us to the extraterrestrial, but it moves us away from Mogul. It would be nice if the skeptics and debunkers could understand this so we didn’t have to keep repeating it.

Mack Brazel on the Front Page

Sometimes, as I’m doing research on another aspect of the Roswell case, I stumble onto something that I had forgotten and that now has become important. Remember that Kal Korff, in one of his video rants claimed that I had not looked at the Albuquerque newspapers or I would have known that a picture of Mack Brazel had never appeared on the front page. Overlooking the fact that I made no such claim, and did prove that stories about Brazel did appear on the front page of the Albuquerque Journal, I found something else that is just as important.

To refresh everyone’s memory, here’s the important part of Korff’s rant. "If you check every issue that's ever been published of the Albuquerque Journal or any newspaper in that area of the time of 1947 [emphasis added], you'll find that Mack Brazel's picture didn't appear anywhere in any newspaper at all. It just never happened. And nobody has ever produced a newspaper today that can show that he ever appeared on the front page."

Here is a picture of Mack Brazel from the front page of the Roswell Daily Record on July 10, 1947. The Roswell Daily Record is clearly a newspaper in that area and clearly July 10, 1947 is the right time frame.

Korff once said that if I proved him wrong on any point, he would make the proper correction.

Well, I’m waiting...

On a Personal Note

I had planned to append this at the end of the Medal of Honor article but was afraid that people would think I was attempting to equate the Combat Action Badge with the Medal of Honor. That isn’t the case. The Medal of Honor was created about 150 years ago and in that time only about 3000 have been awarded. All the recipients in Iraq or Afghanistan were killed while performing the acts for which they received the Medal of Honor.

On the other hand, since its creation about four years ago, tens of thousand Combat Action Badges (seen here) have been awarded. To qualify, a soldier must be in an area that qualifies for hostile fire pay or imminent danger pay and must be engaged by the enemy or have engaged the enemy. All the soldier is required to do is to perform in a manner expected of all American soldiers.

I mention this only because on July 2, I learned that I had been awarded the Combat Action Badge for an incident in Iraq. As our convoy rotated out of theater, my vehicle was taken under fire. SPC Daws, the gunner, and I returned fire, driving the terrorists from the field. I suspect that fewer than 150 rounds were exchanged and no one was wounded. About an hour later we reached the Kuwaiti border and our time in the Middle East was reduced to less than two weeks.

And I mention all this only because I have seen, in the last several days, articles suggesting that I have inflated my resume, that I was too fat to be a soldier, and a few questioning how I could have been a helicopter pilot in Vietnam, an intelligence officer in the Air Force, and suddenly a National Guardsman called to active duty in the Army in Iraq. I’ll just say that the National Guard is made up of lots of soldiers who have experience in other branches of the service. In our battalion, one of the first sergeants was a Marine Vietnam Veteran, the NCOIC of our MKT was a former Navy man, and I, of course was former Air Force. This eclectic make up of the National Guard is not at all unusual.

In another article some guy thought the claim I had written more than 100 books was a stretch. This guy, using his internal logic, thought writing two books a year was a difficult task and he could only find some 24 books that I had written when he searched the Library of Congress. Of course, he didn’t look at Amazon.com or he would have found about 50 titles before he ran into a duplication. Just a brief look would have found the four Scorpion Squad books I wrote as Eric Helm, twenty-one Vietnam Ground Zero books I wrote as Eric Helm (plus an additional four "Super" books), the fourteen Navy Seals books I wrote as Steve MacKenzie, the six Wings of Nam books as Cat Brannigan (hey, don’t blame me, I didn’t pick the name), the twenty-one science fiction novels, the book about lost gold and buried treasures, the two Bantam Books about the coming world war, the eighteen books about UFOs and the paranormal, and a handful of others on a variety of subjects... and not including the five that my agent has right now (nor the dozen that have never been published).

I once joked I was in the book a month club, having to write a book a month but one year I wrote nineteen. I wrote one book in six days... sure it was a short book and there wasn’t a lot of rewriting going on, but I handed it in on time.

So, I decided to mention these things to set part of the record straight. I’m not sure what causes these people to attack without bothering to gather all the facts. Simple Internet searches would have provided some of the information... I mean, for those who know where to look, they could have found a picture of my flight school class, a website that has a picture of me in Vietnam and a much later picture of me in Iraq, they could find listings of my bibliography, not always up to date but showing more than 24 books published, and other information proving that I’m not making these things up.

What often strikes me as funny is that those of us who have not embellished their credentials are held to different standards than those who do. I’m challenged to prove it, and do so, and those others say, "Well, my records have been changed to make me look bad." They aren’t challenged with the same vigor that I am... but I have the proof and they don’t.

So, once again, I mention that I was just awarded the Combat Action Badge as just another proof that I really did serve in Iraq.

Medal of Honor Heros

Don Ecker passed this along and I thought it appropriate, given that it is the 4th of July. Little scenes like this are difficult to create because they are normally spontaneous. This is a case of sailors acknowledging the heroism of one of their own and I wanted others to see this.

PO2 (EOD2) Mike Monsoor, a Navy EOD Technician, was awarded the Congressional Medal of Honor posthumously for jumping on a grenade in Iraq, giving his life to save his fellow SEALs.

During Mike Monsoor's funeral in San Diego , as his coffin was being moved from the hearse to the grave site at Ft. Rosecrans National Cemetery , SEALs were lined up on both sides of the pallbearers route forming a column of twos, with the coffin moving up the center. As Mike's coffin passed, each SEAL, having removed his gold Trident from his uniform, slapped it down embedding the Trident in the wooden coffin.

The slaps were audible from across the cemetery; by the time the coffin arrived grave side, it looked as though it had a gold inlay from all the Tridents pinned to it. This was a fitting send-off for a warrior hero.

This should be front-page news instead of the crap we see every day.

How Many Planets Part IV

To continue with a discussion that we started a couple of years ago, I will again visit the question of how many planets are there in the Solar System. The answer today is more complex than it was three or four years ago when we could say, simply, "Nine."

The International Astronomical Union (hereafter referred to as the IAU) created another category for objects that are large enough to be relatively spherical shape, that orbited the sun but that aren’t large enough to have cleared their obits of additional debris... which was the new, third criterion for a planet and which always struck me as a nonsensical way of demoting Pluto from its status as a planet.

Pluto and another Kuiper Belt object (Pluto on left, Eris on right), Eris, are now known as Plutoids rather than dwarf planets. That distinction belongs to Ceres which once was considered a planet and then the largest of the asteroids. It was demoted to asteroid when more and more of them were discovered. In fact, Ceres might be the only object of its kind and at the moment is the lone dwarf planet that is not also a Plutoid.

Plutoids, then, are objects that a spherical, orbit the sun beyond Neptune, and are objects in the Kuiper Belt known as Kuiper Belt Objects (KBO which seems to be broken down into Classical KBOs or Cubewanos and Resonant KBOs) and are also Trans-Neptunian Objects (TNO) and I’m sure that if I looked farther I could find more qualifications. Oh, yes, the moons of Plutoids (or more properly, the satellites) are not Plutoids and therefore not KBOs or TNOs. The question that springs to my mind is which is the satellite and which is the Plutoid in the Pluto - Charon system.

There are about another dozen objects that are being considered as Plutoids. These include 2003 EL 61, Sedna, 2005 FY 5, Quaoar, Orcus and Ixion, all larger than Ceres and then 2002 AW 197, Varuna and 2002 TC302 which are smaller. Now some of these are cubewanos, or SDOs (which are scattered disc objects) or plutinos (which, apparently are TNOs that orbit the sun twice for every three orbits of Neptune)... Are you confused now? Yeah, me too.

Well, let’s see if we can’t complicate this even more. There are two additional objects that are in the process of being named Plutoids. There are called Easterbunny and Santa and both have other, long designations. And, I seem to remember something about an object way out, maybe beyond the Kuiper Belt and into the area of the Oort Cloud. It’s about the size of Mars. What are they going to do about that if the size is verified?

In fact, in the last couple of days, astronomers have suggested a large object out there that would be, currently, the largest of the Plutoids, but this is not based on observation. It’s based on the gravitational permutations of the various objects out there. This is how Pluto was discovered in the first place. They were looking for a planet that caused disturbances in the orbits of the outer planets which makes me wonder if all that debris out there might not account for the trouble. What this means is that there might be something else out there that is the size of a "real" planet... or if this new speculation is true, there might be two.

What we can now say about the Solar System is that there are eight planets. These range in size from those small, rocky planets of the inner Solar System (Mercury, Venus, Earth and Mars) and the large gas giants of the outer Solar System (Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune). It strikes me that we could further define planet if we wanted to, breaking them into two additional categories because the inner planets are certainly different than the outer planets in size, structure and number of satellites (there are only three known for the inner planets and about 150 for those in the outer system... in fact two of these satellites are larger than Mercury, but I digress).

Beyond Neptune are the Plutoids, that is, Pluto and Eris (which between them have more satellites than the four inner planets combined). They might be joined by a dozen others, including two that are in the process of being accepted as Plutoids, as I mentioned. There are some estimates that suggest there might be fifty of these objects, some about a light year or so from the Sun. These objects, like Pluto and Eris (which is thought to be slightly larger than Pluto) have diameters between 2000 kilometers and about 700, making the smallest, smaller than Ceres.

Ceres, because of what it is, the size it is, and the location of it, is currently the lone dwarf planet that is not also a Plutoid. There is speculation that there will be other Ceres-class dwarf planets, though I don’t know where they would be hidden.

So, the answer to the question of how many planets, is still eight. But now we have several other large objects that are being grouped under a variety of categories, which falls under planet... more or less. If you have questions about this, don’t ask me. I’m as confused as the rest of you.

Black Sergeants and Roswell

I have thought long and hard about the following. I know that most everyone doesn’t care about the personal squabbles of various researchers. Instead they are interested in the best information available, and these squabbles become tiresome and distracting. Yet sometimes it is necessary to respond to allegations and sometimes it’s necessary to correct inaccurate information. Sometimes the debunkers believe that because you have said nothing about their nonsense they are either right or that you have no response. Sometimes I don’t bother to answer because the stuff is just so ridiculous that I’m sure everyone sees it for what it is.

But, once in a while you run into information that is just too perfect to ignore. Yes, I said that I would ignore Kal Korff but the other night I was looking up something in his poorly researched and misleading book when, on page 89 of the original hardback edition I found a statement that there were no black sergeants at Roswell. He mentioned there that he had proved, in a previous chapter, that there were no black sergeants.

So I looked that up in Chapter Two and on page 55 saw that in recounting what Bill Brazel had said, Korff was making the point that Bill’s testimony could be ignored because Bill had said something about a black sergeant being among the soldiers who had visited him and retrieved the few bits of metallic debris he had recovered. If there were no black sergeants at Roswell, then Brazel, at best, was mistaken. This overlooks the fact that the team who visited Brazel might have come from Albuquerque or Alamogordo and that Brazel wasn’t sure that they were from Roswell.

What Korff should have been able to deduce, and if he couldn’t have deduced it, he should have been able to learn about through some of the published discussions about Brazel, was that Stan Friedman had taken an interview that Don Schmitt and I had conducted with Bill Brazel (recorded on audio tape) and used it in his book. Brazel had told me that the four soldiers who visited him, an officer, a sergeant and two others had been real nice. Friedman, using that quote, inserted the word black, parenthetically, into the quote. There was no justification for that insertion, other than to attempt to corroborate the tales told by Gerald Anderson and Glenn Dennis who talked of a black sergeant. Anderson’s tale has been discredited while Brazel’s has not.

I called Bill Brazel when Friedman’s book first came out and asked him about the racial identity of the soldiers who had visited. He made it clear that they all have been white. So, the mistake here wasn’t Bill Brazel’s, but was Stan Friedman’s. There was no black sergeant with that small group which means that Korff’s criticism of Brazel, on this point, breaks down. We’ll wait for Korff to admit his mistake on the point, though the real criticism here belongs to Friedman for inserting the word.

Now to the other part of Korff’s criticism. The idea that there were no black sergeants in Roswell is also in error. He claims on page 55, "Indeed, a check with Air Force officials revealed there were no black sergeants (emphasis in original) stationed at Roswell Army Air Field in 1947." He said that the services had been segregated in 1947. That was true, but you had units made up of black soldiers. They were mostly in support roles but some found themselves in combat environments and preformed as we have come to expect of all American soldiers. But the point is that there were many black soldiers serving in the military in 1947.

Anyway, Korff said that this information came from Air Force officials. His footnote suggests they were historians at the Pentagon, but by my count, there were, at least, twenty-four black sergeants stationed at Roswell in 1947 and that count might be off slightly. Walter Haut told me that ten to twenty percent of the soldiers assigned to the base did not appear in the Yearbook he produced in 1947 (A page of the Yearbook shown here, including six black sergeants). This means there could have been another four or five. Rather than call someone who wasn’t in Roswell in 1947, Korff should have tried to find something a little more relevant.

As I say, this was such an egregious error, that I thought I should point it out. Maybe if Korff wasn’t attempting to gain the moral high ground by suggesting his book was so far superior to all others, I wouldn’t bother with this. But it does suggest a pattern. One that any information that suggests Roswell can be explained is accepted without verification, or improper verification, and any positive information is attacked without regard to the truth. This is just one of the many examples.

This does go beyond mislabeling the V-2 as a buzz bomb as Korff did. That is a simple mistake. This is one in which he claims that Air Force officials bear out his conclusion, but a single telephone call to the right place would have provided the truth. There were black soldiers assigned to Roswell and, at least, twenty-four were sergeants.

In keeping with this idea that Bill Brazel can’t be trusted, Korff has come up with another horrible mistake but blamed me for it. In one of his YouTube diatribes, Korff said :

"I'm going to read to you a very short sentence that... Randle has printed in his book, and then I'll easily prove how it's just one example of how he keeps telling repeated falsehoods about Roswell... He says here on p. 84: 'Bill Brazel makes one other point that is important. When he read about his father in the Albuquerque newspaper, he knew that his father needed help on the ranch. He knew that no-one would be there to take care of it. When he arrived, he found the place deserted.' What Kevin Randle is referring to folks is the myth that Bill Brazel, Jr. was somewhere in town one day and all of a sudden he reads in the newspaper that his father has recovered some sort of flying saucer and is involved with the Air Force, or something unusual was recovered on the ranch, so he apparently saw his dad on the front page of the paper and ran out to help him. Well, this is a myth because I did one thing Randle didn't bother to do... If you check every issue that's ever been published of the Albuquerque Journal or any newspaper in that area of the time of 1947, you'll find that Mack Brazel's picture didn't appear anywhere in any newspaper at all. It just never happened. And nobody has ever produced a newspaper today that can show
that he ever appeared on the front page. So what is Bill Brazel, Jr. talking about when he says he saw his father on the front page... well, he couldn't be referring to anything that was real or true, because it never happened."

Let’s overlook the typical Korff nonsense of changing the words to suit his perspective (note I said read about his father and nothing about a picture of him), the rest of the statement is wrong as well. First, I did search the Albuquerque newspapers, both of them and have copies of the relevant articles in my files (Which, of course, means Korff is wrong about me not checking the Albuquerque newspapers because I have copies in my files as seen here). On the front page of the Albuquerque Journal of July 9, 1947, we can read, "Sheriff Wilcox said W. W. Brazell [sic], about 50, made the find on the Foster ranch near Corona 85 miles northwest of Roswell..."

In the Albuquerque Tribune (what? There’s another newspaper in Albuquerque?), the headline said, "NM Rancher Sorry He Said Anything about ‘Disc Find’." The lead said, "W.W. Brazel, the New Mexican rancher who was originally thought to have found the nation’s first flying disc..."

The other thing that Korff gets wrong is the idea that Bill Brazel was somewhere in town one day and he suddenly reads the newspaper that his father has recovered some sort of flying saucer. Bill Brazel told me in a personal interview that he actually lived and worked in Albuquerque at the time, so it wouldn’t have been unusual for him to have read one of the two daily newspapers.

And, of course, both mentioned Bill’s father in connection with a flying saucer. Doesn’t matter what the outcome was, whether you want to believe the weather balloon (Mogul) story or it was a flying saucer, the facts are that Brazel’s name appeared in the newspapers including a front page story in the Albuquerque Journal. So, everything I reported in the paragraph is accurate.

By the way, for those of you keeping score at home, here is a picture of Mack Brazel that did appear in newspapers around the country. This one happens to come from the Oregon Journal.

What we see here, is the evidence that Korff has created a non-issue. Clearly I had checked the Albuquerque newspapers and reported, accurately, that Bill Brazel read about his father. Clearly I did this during the investigation because I had copies in my files. And Clearly, Mack Brazel's picture did appear in some newspapers, because I have a copy of that as well.

(Apropos of nothing at all - Have you noticed how some of us engage in intelligent dialogue, arguing points without resorting to name-calling and some of us answer no questions but do attempt to smear those who might disagree?)