The Washington National Sighting Press Conference -- Final

Blogger’s note: It seems to me that some have grown bored with this, so in the interest of rapidity, I have put the remainder of the press conference here. Yes, Tim Banse warned me about long postings, but then, this seemed to be dragging on forever. I will note that privately, I have heard that some appreciate the effort to provide the entire text of the press conference, and for them, this is all that it left.

A reporter asked, “In view of practicalities, what would an ordinary citizen do if he saw one? Would you be interested in his information? What can he do to help you?”

Ruppelt: Actually, we are very much interested. However, there isn’t much we can do with their information. It’s possible that you might get a series of sightings. In other words, if you get everybody up and down the East Coast looking, you might be able to plot a ground track from it, but the information we get from the general public or from a scientist -- there’s no difference. In other words, well, let’s take a meteor-like object, for example. If you’re out some night and see a meteor, what can you tell me about that meteor? You don’t even know in which direction it was going. Actually, it looked to you maybe like it was going across the sky from east to west, but you’re not sure. You’re just looking at horizontal projection of that meteor. And a scientist the same way. Just because he’s a scientist doesn’t mean he’s got better eyes.

The most impressive series of sightings came from Portland, Oregon, where police officers and civilians in widely separated locations watched as a variety of disks flashed through the sky during the July 4, 1947 weekend. The first was reported by C.J. Bogne and a carload of witnesses north of Redmond, Oregon when they saw four disk-shaped objects flash past Mount Jefferson. The objects made no noise and performed no maneuvers.

At one o'clock, an Oaks Park employee, Don Metcalfe saw a lone disk fly over the Park. A KOIN news reporter in Portland saw twelve, shiny, disks as they danced in the sky high overhead.

A few minutes after 1:00, Kenneth A. McDowell, a police officer who was near the Portland Police Station, noticed that the pigeons began fluttering as if frightened. Overhead were three disks, one flying east and the other two south. All were moving at high speed and appeared to be oscillating.

About the same time two other police officers, Walter A. Lissy and Robert Ellis saw three disks overhead. They were also moving at high speed.

Just across the Columbia River, in nearby Vancouver, Washington, sheriff's deputies, Sergeant John Sullivan, Clarence McKay, and Fred Krives, watched twenty to thirty disks overhead.

Not long after that, three harbor patrolmen on the river saw three to six disks traveling at high speed. According to the witnesses, the objects looked like chrome hubcaps and oscillated as they flew.

About 4:00 P.M., more civilians saw the disks. A woman called police, telling them she watched a single object as "shiny as a new dime, flipping around." An unidentified man called to say that he'd seen three discs, one flying to the east and the other two heading north. They were shiny, shaped like flattened saucers and were traveling at high speed.

Finally, in Milwaukie, Oregon, not far from Portland, Sergeant Claude Cross reported three objects flying to the north. All were disc-shaped and were moving at high speed.

The question that must be asked is why none of the aircraft on alert, in that area, on orders from the Pentagon, responded to this series of sightings. It would seem logical that they would have spotted the disks at some point, but there was never any indication that such is the case. Nothing appears in the Project Blue Book files to suggest that gun camera footage was obtained by the Oregon National Guard, which had been alerted because of the increase in UFO sightings in the area. A few days later, it was announced by the Pentagon that the searches would be discontinued. The lack of concrete results was the suspected reason.

The point, however, is that here was a series of sightings, in a single location, spread over a single day, that had been reported to the official Air Force project. No real investigation was carried out by military officials. Instead, the case was ignored by the Air Force.

A reporter asked, “What about a report, for example, about one week ago from an engineer who sighted six or seven who followed a definite pattern and then all turned in the same direction and went straight up at an estimated speed -- I forget what he said it was.”

Ruppelt: I couldn’t pick that one out from the mass and size -- I’m not familiar with that one.

Reporter: Have you investigated these so-called saucers here in Washington.

Reporter: The ones we’ve been seeing on radar screens.

Ruppelt: We’ve got data on them.

Reporter: Have you investigated them yourself?

Ruppelt: Well, what do you mean by that, now -- gone out and personally talked to all these people?

Reporter: Yes.

Ruppelt: No; I haven’t.

Reporter: Has anybody from the Air Force talked to Harry Barnes, who’s the Senior Controller in the CAA radar?

Ruppelt: We have a report from the CAA Controller.

Reporter: But nobody’s interviewed him?

Ruppelt: I couldn’t tell you that.

Reporter: General, you started to say you wanted certain means of measuring these things and you mentioned this camera. Were you going to name others or is that the only thing you have in mind as a possible way of identifying and measuring these phenomena?

Samford: Mr. Griffing is here from the Electronics Section. Would you address yourself to that, Mr. Griffing?

Griffing: I didn’t hear the question.

Reporter: The question was we’d ask what -- the General had said the greatest need now was to get some way of measuring these reports in terms that you can turn them over to a scientist and I asked him what was he seeking in that way, what he was getting. He mentioned this camera. I connected the question with some way of measuring the gases and lights. I asked him were there other things than that that he might mention that they’re now ordering or procuring for that purpose.

Griffing: The refraction camera should tell whether it’s an incandescent source or whether it’s illuminous (sic) gas. Well, that would immediately tell whether it was a meteor or reflection of a headlight, a mirage theory and it might also identify what kind of gases.

Reporter: What other than this camera? Are there any other tools that you’re seeking now?

Griffing: There is another proposal which also uses de-fraction grating, which is a continuously operating Schmidt telescope, and that will give a continuous record over the night.

Reporter: What’s this?

Reporter: That’s a telescope to photograph the entire heaven in one whole picture?

Griffing: Yes, sir.

Reporter: Would you repeat that? What is this Schmidt telescope?

James: It’s a type of telescope.

Reporter: What type of telescope are you talking about, Mr. Griffing?

Griffing: The Schmidt, S-c-h-m-i-d-t, telescope is an optical system that has a wide aperture. That is, you can have a wide range or aperture, in this case, about 150 degrees, or nearer the whole hemisphere can be photographed in one plate and you can have a continual record of what happens in the sky at night, meteor trails or what-have-you and make a photographic record.

Reporter: Where is this being used?

Griffing: This is a new development, this particular one, but there have been ones similar to this in use in many observatories. Palomar has a Schmidt telescope.

Reporter: Are you ordering a number of those for placing around the country?

Griffing: That is a possibility.

Reporter: Is that a movie-camera type?

Griffing: Not exactly. The plate is exposed for ten minutes and then is replaced with another plate and then so on through the night. That is, one can expose a photographic plate for ten minutes without overexposure, in fact, a longer time, but a continual record will be made. Any motion that can be indicated with a time exposure can be found with considerable accuracy.

Reporter: Does the Air Force have access to any of these right now?

Griffing: That particular thing is not in production yet.

Reporter: How much does it cost?

Griffing: Shall I go into it, General?

Samford: Well, go ahead.

Griffing: The cost will be between three and five thousand dollars apiece.

Reporter: General, has there been any indication that any of these radar sightings have been made by electronic countermeasures being used by U.S. Strategic Air Command bombers practicing?

Samford: No; they haven’t. We’ve investigated that and come up negative.

Reporter: Is that Schmidt camera telescope the only one, astronomical telescope that’s capable of being used on a project like this?

Samford: Probably not.

Griffing: It’s not the only one, but it is the most practical telescopic method. Any telescope can be used but the probability of getting a flying object is very remote. Because it has such a wide aperture it makes it more useful.

Reporter: Well, are you planning any other measurement tools other than this camera and telescope?

Griffing: Well, of course, the difficulty is if we have a high-powered instrument, we can’t guarantee that they’ll intercept flying objects so there are other simple measurements that can be made with trained personnel. There are measurements of time. One can time the appearance and disappearance with his own watch and then check his watch. Accurate measurements of time are one thing and simple measurements of angle can be made by trained people with very crude apparatus, and they can tell whether an object is one mile or fifty miles high.

Reporter: Haven’t we already had some trained personnel, so-called trained personnel, who timed these appearances?

Griffing: There perhaps have -- Captain Ruppelt can answer that. The point is in any of these operations there have to be two simultaneous observers to get altitude. You can’t use one observation, and it may be that two simultaneous observations have not been in the reports.

Reporter: General --

Samford: I think that the gentleman here has been waiting quite awhile with a question, if you don’t mind.

It should be noted here that the question was not answered. Ruppelt was not given an opportunity to answer it and it could be suggested that Samford didn’t want it answered. That is why he cut off the discussion at that point.

By the same token, it must be noted that the reporters let him get away with it. They didn’t come back to the question which was a very important one. It was not the first time in the press conference that they had let an important answer get away from them.

Trying to learn a little about the Air Force investigation, a reporter asked, “General, you mentioned that eight per cent of the reports come from airline pilots. Some of these men have as much as twenty years’ flying time, twenty years’ experience flying. What’s the reaction of the Air Force to creditable observers like that who give you a detailed description?”

Samford: It’s very high. We react to them as saying this is an important item.

Reporter: Do you classify that, some of those things, as phenomena?

Samford: Well, what else can we call it? His terms of the statement about it are not placeable in anything else as phenomena. I have one that a friend of mine who is an Air Force officer reported from the Middle East. He said, “I thought that my mental processes were adequate to avoid seeing these things, but I did see something that didn’t belong there.” He was no more able to put a precise measurement on it although he had competent witnesses. He’s a creditable observer. We’re not trying to discredit observers. That’s the reason that I said that we have many reports from creditable observers of incredible things. They also say they’re incredible.

Reporter: Are these phenomena capable of change of direction and speed such as has been reported?

Samford: There is nothing else known in the world that can do those things except phenomena! (Laughter)

Reporter: General, while we’re in this mass of areas for a minute, suppose some super-intelligent creature had come up with a solution to the theoretical problem of levitation, would that not be massless in our observations either by radar or by sight? No gravity.

Reporter: A balloon has no gravity but its rate of movement is distinctly limited.

Samford: Well, I don’t know whether I can give an answer to that, sir, that makes any sense because I’m not a metaphysician. I think, probably, just to return to saying that -- we believe most of this can be understood gradually by the human mind.

Reporter: So far as we know, have any of these manifestations been reported over Russia or any of the satellites?

Samford: Well, we don’t know if there have been any reported over there, no.

Reporter: General Samford or perhaps General Ramey, you have described fighters over the District here in the last few weeks. Is there any kind of a policy as far as the rest of the country of the Air Defense Command on such sightings?

Samford: I would like General Ramey to speak to that, if he will, please.

Ramey: There’s no special policy as a result of these reports. We have a standard operating procedure that would call for an investigation of reports that can be tracked on a reasonable assurance of some sort of intercept or some direction to (inaudible). Those instructions are standard, however, and are not especially caused by this.

Reporter: General, is it true that there was a two-hour delay between the sighting of these objects last Saturday night and the dispatch of the jets from New Castle?

Ramey: Yes; that is true because there was never a track established. As soon as a track was established to tell the airplane the direction to go in and the authenticity of the thing was established, then the pilots got off. As long as there’s a sporadic report with no identification, no track established, there’s no use sending a very short-range short-field-duration interceptor in the air because he wouldn’t know where to go or what to do.

Reporter: In other words, it was the decision of the operations officer that occasioned the delay and not any error in transmission of the alert.

Ramey: That’s correct; yes, sir.

Reporter: General, it’s been rumored that the Air Force has been picking up blips of this sort for quite awhile but waited until civilian radar picked it up. Is that true?

Samford: I think I mentioned earlier our past experience in dealing with these things in many areas where we have had, oh, hundreds of fruitless intercept efforts in response to radar blips. It’s not new with us at all.

Reporter: But of those same caliber as recently as the past couple of weeks, I mean, the same caliber blips. I think we’ve all heard about this blip, but is that the thing that you sighted before in the past by the Air Force? That’s what I wanted to ask.

Samford: Well, I can only say that I feel fairly sure that they were the same or reasonably the same. No two blips on radar are alike.

Reporter: Have these been better, clearer, bigger?

Samford: I wouldn’t say better or clearer. These are good returns. Other people have said, “There are good returns.”

Reporter: General Samford, to clear that point up, I think Captain James indicated earlier in this reference to temperature inversion you now say that these are good returns. Can you get good returns on this temperature inversion reflection?

Samford: Yes.

Reporter: Can you get a return that’s as sharp as the ones you get off aircraft.

Reporter: That moves.

Reporter: Captain James said they were sharper, larger, awhile ago.

James: I said it depended upon the target.

Reporter: I’m referring to these seen Saturday night. Were those good returns? Could the good returns have been caused by this reflection against heat (inaudible)?

Samford: We think so. We think that that is probable.

Reporter: General, do you think that’s probably what they were?

Samford: My own mind is satisfied with that, but my obligation to learn more is not. My own mind is satisfied with that explanation.

Ruppelt, in writing his own book about UFOs, suggested that the temperature inversion explanation “had been construed by the press to mean that this was the Air Force’s answer...” While it can be suggested that the reporters had not understood what was being said, it was at this point in the press conference that General Samford told them that he, and by extension, the Air Force, was satisfied by the temperature inversion explanation. What were the reporters to believe, given the nature of the answers supplied by Samford?

We begin to see that the Air Force is not there to answer questions about their UFO investigations, or what they might have learned in the six years of study. Much of that was still classified and would remain so until 1976. With that in mind, the officers provided what information they could and as we’ve seen, dodged the questions when they couldn’t answer.

Reporter: General, if after six years of studying these things you’re now convinced that they do not constitute a threat to the safety of the country, is the Air Force thinking about turning this over to some other scientific investigating body or something?

Samford: Well, I think that we would want to move into it with them rather than to say turn it over.

Reporter: Is there any thought of that, bringing in other governmental scientific bodies perhaps?

Samford: Yes.

Reporter: Have you any program along that line? You spoke in the beginning that you wanted the methods of measuring things. You mentioned two or three little things like the possibility of buying some cameras and telescopes. Is there a program being set up to go about this scientifically, and what other organization are you thinking of bringing in on it?

Samford: I believe that Colonel Bower of the Technical Analysis Division at Dayton is here. Are you here, Bower?

Bower: Yes, sir.

Samford: Would you address yourself to that point, please?

Bower: Our idea on that is to implement our present study with instruments wherever possible, as Mr. Griffing mentioned, the refraction grid camera and other pickups that we might get.

Reporters: How many of these telescopes have been ordered, the Schmidt telescope?

Bower: The Schmidt telescopes are not on order by us. The refraction grid camera is an item which we are --

Reporter: Is the Schmidt telescope project an Air Force project or --

Griffing: Yes. Yes, sir.

Samford: I think the point that the gentleman over here wanted to have answered is can you explain from memory the kind of structure that I know that you have in ATIC for, well, I’ve seen it somewhere in my memory that you have this step and this step and this step.

Bower: We have several steps in analyses and that might explain to you one reason why we cannot give you an instantaneous answer. I mean this requires a study just like any technical problem. First of all, we need technical data. Our first step is to collect the data and check it against other identified objects such as balloons, if aircraft or missiles or such things as meteors are following that, and it comes back and we make an analysis of it within our own groups. We have specialists in our own organizations, people on electrodynamics, physics, geophysics, and various other specialties that would fit into this. Following that, if it is necessary, we will send it to consultants or specialists in the field. Your mention of a contractor -- we are considering that with the idea, if we can’t come out with an answer, of giving it to a contractor to study it. That won’t be a short-time job.

Reporter: Are you taking a new approach in this whole thing?

Bower: I would say implementing the past approach.

Reporter: Going at it more systematically.

Bower: Yes, I think that’s the thing to stress. In a lot of these things you can’t get technical data and without technical data you can’t get a technical answer very well.

Samford: Maybe I have a thought that might help in answering that problem. When we started to say this is an obligation we must learn more about, we thought initially that we could learn something from the volume of reports. We say we want all the reports we can get and then see that through that volume maybe we can make a pattern. I think we’re beginning to believe now that the things which we can sense from volume are not necessarily the things which we value. In other words, volume can come from many different things. It can come from external stimulus. It can come from an unusual opportunity. It can come from such a variety of meaningless things so that the volume of reports is not going to be our answer. We have thought we’d get thousands and thousands of reports and out of these we will develop something through better reports with equipment or with a trained reporter specifically attempting to report the valuable things about these items are we likely to produce material that is suitable grist for a scientific analysis. The stuff we have now hasn’t enough meat on its bones to interest scientific people.

Reporter: Well, General, would you say a qualified observer would be the pilot from New Castle -- I believe his name was Lieutenant Patterson -- who got within what he estimated was two miles of this object last Saturday? Have you questioned him?

Samford: He has no measurement that you can put in scientific hands.

Reporter: Well, other than his eye as a pilot.

Samford: He says -- if the quality of the observer is that of seeing something, he was a qualified observer. If the quality is measuring something, he is not a qualified observer.

Reporter: Well, the reason I’d implied that he’d be qualified is he was probably concentrating with all of his intensity upon this object that he was pursuing. He must have been thinking about it pretty intensely; therefore, can probably give you some pretty good information. Have you questioned him about it?

Samford: Yes. He had motive; he had direction; he had interest; he had opportunity. But he had no measuring devices to measure this thing, or these things that need to have measurement before it can become anything other than a sighting.

Reporter: Well, do you explain his sighting on the basis of this heat inversion theory too, now?

Samford: Not necessarily. That very likely is one that sits apart and says insufficient measurement, insufficient association with other things, insufficient association with other probabilities for it to do any more than to join that group of sightings that we still hold in front of us as saying no.

Reporter: Hasn’t he admitted that that might have been a ground light that he was looking at?

Samford: I don’t recall that I --

Reporter: Well, have you formed any conclusion as a result of interrogating this pilot?

Samford: None other than that this is another one of the thousand or two thousand sightings.

Reporter: General, this fellow that almost flew into the ground, did he go around a corner as if on a bent return? What were the circumstances of that flight?

Samford: Did I get the information of the ground lock-on from you, James?

James: Yes, sir; you did.

Samford: Would you answer the question?

James: I’m sorry. I didn’t hear it.

Reporter: Did he lock on a reflected image, go around the corner, and go down to the ground? Was that the pattern?

James: Yes, that’s true. That was the pattern, and he did that three times and each time it led him to the same point on the ground.

Reporter: Captain, what about the man who saw four lights, Saturday night?

James: Well, I’ll have to ask Captain Ruppelt to explain the lights.

Reporter: General --

Samford: There’s this difficulty. May I make this statement? I was trying to -- let’s take any one of these reports and pull it out and say, “Well, what is the meaning of that one report?” None of these things in the period of our entire experience with them has had any validity on its own. The only thing that we hope for is to find enough similarity in sequence of these things so that you can begin to pull something out. There is no validity in them as individual sightings to mean any particular thing.

Reporter: General, did you notice in all of your, say, twenty per cent of the inexplainable (sic) reports a consistency as to color, size, or speed, estimated speed.

Samford: None whatsoever.

Reporter: None whatsoever.

Samford: No.

Reporter: Have you ever tracked the speed by radar of any particular object that you can explain?

Samford: There have been many radar reports giving speed.

Reporter: What did they range from, sir?

Samford: They run from zero to fantastic speed.

Reporter: General, how do you explain this case, now. The CAA, as I understand the story, after picking up these objects on radar, also got this Capital Airlines pilot named Pierman on their radar as he was going out west and, as the Senior Controller told me, he said whenever a blip, one of the unidentified blips, appeared anywhere near Pierman’s plane, he could call Pierman on the radio and say, “You have traffic at two o’clock about three miles,” and Pierman, in return, would look to the given range and bearing and say, “I see it. I see the light!”

Reporter: Happy New Year! (Laughter)

Reporter: Pierman described it as a light that was zooming and all such things and this was done not once but Barnes told me he instructed him on that target three times and then, Saturday night, this past Saturday night, when they all saw all these blips, Barnes vectored at least half a dozen airline pilots and planes into these things and they all reported seeing lights.

Reporter: Many of them didn’t see them, according to Barnes.

Reporter: Yes. Many of them didn’t see them, but then some did.

Samford: I can’t explain that.

Reporter: Well, how do you explain this directing? Is that autosuggestion or --

Samford: I can’t explain it at all. I think maybe --

Reporter: Have you investigated that phase of this thing, this vectoring the planes into that?

Samford: You can investigate, but the technique of investigating a process or mind-reading, for example; or the technique of investigating the process of mesmerism. You can say will you investigate those things? I think probably we know no more about mind-reading than the technique of investigating that or the technique of investigating evidences of spiritualism than we do about these fields, but for many years the field of spiritualism had these same things in it in which completely competent creditable observers reported incredible things. I don’t mean to say that this is that sort of thing, but it’s an explanation of an inability to explain and that is with us.

Reporter: General, I understand that the wavelength of the radar has something to do with what it can pick up in the way of phenomena. Were these relatively low or relatively high wavelength radar?

Samford: I couldn’t say and I don’t know whether Captain James can or not, but I’d like him to have him have the opportunity.

James: These were relatively high frequency or short wavelength. However, the same effect can be observed on long wavelength equipment with differing degrees.

Reporter: You say very short wavelength?

James: In this case, yes.

Reporter: They were designed for different purposes?

Samford: Yes, sir.

Reporter: General, why has the Air Force refused to disclose the substance of Captain Mantell’s air-ground conversations before he died? Do you remember the case?

The Mantell case took place in January 1948, when a National Guard, and former Army Air Forces transport pilot, was killed chasing a UFO over Fort Knox, Kentucky. Mantell’s fighter was not equipped with oxygen and Mantell climbed above 25,000 feet. He blacked out and his aircraft crashed, killing him. Although the case has been discussed at length in other books, suggesting that UFOs are hostile, the truth, now available is that Mantell had been chasing a Skyhook balloon. These huge balloons, made of polyethylene were classified in 1948. No good explanation, without knowledge of the Skyhook project was possible. There is little doubt today that Mantell was killed in a tragic accident that did not involve an alien spacecraft.

However, in 1952, this explanation was not readily available. There were also rumors of the discussion that Mantell had with ground controllers and tower personnel before his crash. None of the rumors were ever confirmed, and with a good solution to the Mantell incident, the questions about the rumors are now irrelevant.

Getting at the idea that the Air Force was withholding UFO information, a reporter asked, “Well, a popular book made quite a point of that, that the Air Force was holding back on that because it told the true nature of the saucer, that he had approached it, and –“

Samford: Well, I wish that that were true, that he did say something that had enough substance in it for use. I haven’t the slightest idea what he said.

Reporter: Are you withholding any information about these so-called --

Samford: Are we now?

Reporter: Yes. Is anything –

Samford: There is one thing that we have asked our -- some of our informers have asked -- I don’t like the word “informer” either -- reporters had asked –

Reporter: We don’t like that word either.

Samford: I like the word. Reporter is all right. But many people are reticent about reporting these things if their names are mentioned because they are frequently looked on by others as being publicity seekers or maybe people will avoid them and go on the other side of the street for awhile (laughter), so they ask us to not say who made this report and sometimes information is received that deals with the credibility of a reporter saying he’s drunk all the time or he never did do anything but lie. (Laughter). Well, those things we get are not revealed, but in so far as the statement of what they saw, when and where they saw it, the measurements that they took, such as they were, we are not withholding any of that data.

Of course, it can be shown that this is simply not true. There are any number of sightings that were classified. Two photographic cases, the Montana Movie and the Tremonton, Utah film were not viewed outside of the military for a number of years. The Air Force was clearly withholding information and Samford knew it.

The question to be asked was if that was justified, given the nature of the work being done and the world situation at the time. A fair answer is, “Yes.” Some of the secrecy was justified. Samford, if he answered in the positive, would be giving away one secret and so, he was forced into a position where he said they were not withholding data.

Reporter: How about your interpretation of what they reported?

Samford: Well, we’re trying to say as much as we can on that today and admit that the barrier of understanding on all of this is not one that we break.

Reporter: General, have you ever said flatly that these are not machines that the United States has made or is developing?

Samford: What was that?

Reporter: Have you said this afternoon these are not machines or weapons that the United States is developing?

Samford: I would say that these that we have been speaking about in this locality are definitely not. However, many reports that we have received and we’ve been able to correlate and put in their place we have been able to do so through association with an activity we had somewhere, a jet aircraft line, a missile, certain balloons. We could say, well, the report probably was associated with this thing which we’ve done, but in so far as what you are thinking about in his locality --

Reporter: These are not missiles or rockets?

Samford: -- there is nothing.

Reporter: Well, General, could you turn that over a little bit? A lot of people keep saying that all this talk is a cover-up and that saucers are really the result of some experiments the United States, either the Air Force or Atomic Energy, is carrying on. Can you make a flat statement and say that these unexplained flying saucer manifestations are not the result of any American weapons or other experimentation or test?

Samford: I’d say that those that we categorize as unexplained or unidentified have gone through the process of trying to associate them with something we were doing and when we fail to associate them with something we’re doing, we say that is one other clue that ran to nothing. Now, to say that sightings everywhere are -- none of them could possibly be associated with what the United States is doing, isn’t quite true because we know that a particular jet fighter has been flying in a certain area; somebody has reported thus and thus and thus, and we get those two things together and we say something that we were doing caused this report. As General Ramey said a minute ago, there is a fair degree of probability that two fighters locked on each other and saw and received senses. That was certainly something we were doing that cause those two reports.

Reporter: What I was aiming at was this popular feeling –

Samford: Of mystery?

Reporter: -- of mystery, of something, that it’s some very highly secret new weapon that we’re working on that’s causing all this.

Samford: We have nothing that has no mass and unlimited power! (Laughter)

Reporter: General, somebody asked you before how much money you’d spent on this investigation since the start. How much have you spent on it?

Samford: It’s very slight. I don’t know.

Reporter: General, in connection with withholding information, I’d like to ask General Ramey a question. That is, how many times have fighter planes been brought down over the Washington area in the last couple of weeks to investigate reports of flying objects?

Ramey: That’s a matter of record -- three, I believe. I think two flights one night and one flight Saturday night. I don’t remember the night the other two were up. I think there have been six sorties.

Reporter: One flight the first Saturday night and two flights --

Ramey: In this immediate area, yes. We have airplanes that investigate various reports all over the country or places where we have these fighters, but --

Reporters: I thought the Air Force had said that it couldn’t send any fighters up because it didn’t have them.

Ramey: No. I don’t believe it said that.

Reporter: The first night.

Reporter: How about the last night, General?

Ramey: No; there were no fighters up last night.

Reporter: Were there fighters sent in here from New Castle on both those Saturday nights in questions?

Ramey: That’s right; yes.

Reporter: Last night, was that because of lack of a track?

Ramey: Lack of a track.

Reporter: General, are sightings from military personnel made public generally, or are they --

Samford: There’s no reason why they shouldn’t be.

Reporter: Thank you, General. Thank you.

That ended the press conference without any answers being given. The press would believe that the sightings had been temperature inversions and eventually, the Air Force would endorse that claim. But the truth was, temperature inversions did not explain all the sighting and some of them were, and are quite interesting.

The Washington National UFO Sighting Press Conference Part 9

Reporter: What percentage of your unexplainable ones that you’ve got are around
there?

Ruppelt: A few of them.

Reporter: Is it the same pattern?

Ruppelt: I wouldn’t say that every sighting around an atomic installation is unexplained. There’s really no -- I don’t quite follow you.

Reporter: His question is what percentage of the unexplainable percentage of the sightings are grouped around atomic energy --

Ruppelt: We’ve never broken it down.

Reporter: Is it uniform to the general percentages?

Ruppelt: It followed the general percentages. In other words, if twenty per cent of the sightings are unexplained, twenty per cent of the sightings around Los Alamos are --

Reporter: Unexplained.

Ruppelt: -- unexplained; right.

Reporter: What percentage of these have come from
technical men in science at these installations?

Ruppelt: It varies with the type of people. In other words, at Los Alamos most of the people are fairly technical people. However, you run the guards in a place like that. Now, that may be another factor. All those installations have guards that stay out twenty-four hours a day and those people are in a better position to observe than other people.

Reporter: Have many of the scientists though, for instance at Los Alamos, the scientists or technical people, reported these things?

Ruppelt: Yes; they have. We have reports from very high technical people.

Reporter: If your reports, some of them, come from these technical people, what type of information would they Air Force like to have?

Ruppelt: The Air Force wold like to have -- can I answer that, sir?

Samford: Go ahead.

Ruppelt: The Air Force would like to have a size, speed and altitude and what-have-you on these things.

Reporter: Number of men inside it?

(Laughter)

Interestingly, the type of information that Ruppelt suggested had already been provided by some of the very best of the sightings available in the Blue Book files. For example, in 1949, a technical crew in New Mexico, using various scientific equipment made observations of a high flying disk. They provided exact measurements and the sighting was forwarded to Project Blue Book. It was labeled as an "Unidentified."

The Washington National UFO Sighting Press Conference, Part 8

Note: This is the series that I began before the recent death of Charles Moore. I rejoin the series here.

The reporters now drag Samford back to the current sightings. One of them asked, "General, does that -- the kind of involved explanation you just gave us -- does that apply to the recent Washington sightings or upon your observations over the past years since 1946 based on all your experience with it?"

Samford: Well, our reaction to the recent Washington sightings is related to the past experience in terms of -- we have dealt with radar blips before.

Reporter: General, if these were vehicles or materials of our own making, they wouldn’t be a menace to the United States. Do you exclude that?

Samford: I’d exclude that, definitely.

Reporter: General, let’s make it clear now you are excluding -- if you’ll affirm that -- you are excluding vehicles, missiles, and other tangible objects flying through space, including the subhuman bodies from other planets.

Samford: In my mind, yes.

Reporter: Anything material -- would that be a clear statement.

Samford: When you deal with a scientific man, maybe he might quarrel with you by what is the real meaning of "material." With my limited knowledge of material I would say yes. In my own view the thing is excluded as being a material evidence.

Reporter: In other words, General, if you remove the EEI [Essential Element of Intelligence] from that statement, it could apply to any missile, material, or object that is in the air, regardless of whether it’s a menace to the United States or not?

Samford: Well, yes.

Reporter: In other words, it just isn’t there.

Samford: I believe that, that there is no -- well, now, that is a little bit in error because a minute ago I said birds do these things. Now, a bird has substance, you see. I don’t want to go out and say that these things are reflections of nothing. If they’re reflections of something. That’s why the thought of saying that this thing satisfies us in having no real pattern other than that of phenomena.

Reporter: General, you said there’d never been a simultaneous radar fix on one of these things.

Samford: I don’t think I wanted to say that. Reporter: You didn’t mean to say that?

Samford: I meant to say that, when you talk about simultaneously, somebody will say, "was it on 1203 hours, 24 and a half seconds?" and I don’t know.

Reporter: Well, I’d like to point out this fact that the officer in charge of the radar station at Andrews Field told me that on the morning of July 20th, which was a week from last Saturday, he picked up an object three miles north of Riverdale and he was in intercom communication with CAA and they exchanged information and the CAA also had a blip three miles north of Riverdale and on both radars the same blip remained for about thirty seconds and simultaneously disappeared from both sets. Now --

Samford: Well, their definition of simultaneous, yes. But some people won’t be satisfied that that is simultaneously.

Reporter: Well, it is pretty damned simultaneous (laughter) for all purposes, it is satisfied by the inversion theory, Captain.

Samford: Well, I’m talking about the split-second people who want to say you’ve got to prove now that this happened at such-and-such a time and they’ll say your observations are delayed by half a second; therefore, you can’t say it was simultaneous.

Reporter: And does your inversion theory explain away that situation?

James: It possibly could, yes. Reporter: It possibly could, but could it?

James: We don’t have the details. Reporter: Is there any reason why it couldn’t.

Reporter: General, can we get this clarified?

Samford: I believe -- I’m trying to let this gentleman ask a question. Excuse me.

Reporter: Isn’t it true, sir, that these show a definite grouping, the sightings around atomic bomb plants or areas? Doesn’t your map at Wright Field show that?

Samford: I find no pattern in this dispersal of sightings than I do in a radar screen. You can perhaps take distribution of sightings and say that you arrange it this way and you take this group during this period and that gives you a dispersal that may have some significance in it. But I’d like to have Captain Ruppelt develop that because he probably knows more about what has been done to try to plot these things and say, "Does that have any meaning?" I am not satisfied that any effort we’ve made toward a dispersal pattern has developed one shred of evidence or meaning. Would you correct me or speak to that point?

Ruppelt: We’ve plotted these things out on a map and they do come out grouped around some of the atomic installations in the country. However, there’s one point, you don’t know, maybe people in that area are a little more jumpy and, if they see a meteor, they’ll report it in to the guards. If some farmer out in the middle of Iowa saw a meteor, he’d just forget about it. Now, that is one possibility that we can’t eliminate. A lot of sightings that occurred around these atomic installations have turned out to be balloons, etc., but it may be that the story has gone out that those are vital areas and more people are reporting. We don’t know.

Ruppelt’s concluding remark, that "We don’t know," is about the only thing said here that is true. Everything else is speculation. The data are incomplete. The Air Force simply didn’t know what percentage of sightings was legitimate, how many sightings had not been reported, or if the explanations offered were real. They were there to answer questions and convince the reporters that they had the situation in hand. To suggest otherwise would have been to nullify the purpose of the press conference.

Charles B. Moore Dies

Blogger's note -- The following was picked from the New Mexico Institute of Technology web site is the following article on the passing of Dr. Charles B. Moore. Moore is seen here as he and I check atmospheric records in an attempt to learn if a Mogul balloon could have reached the Brazel (Foster) ranch in July 1947. I have interrupted the series on the Washington National UFO Sighting Press Conference for what I think of as important news.

SOCORRO, N.M., March 4, 2010 – Charles B. Moore, renowned researcher on atmospheric physics, passed away on March 2, 2010, in Socorro.

Moore was professor emeritus of physics at New Mexico Tech and former chairman of Tech’s Langmuir Laboratory for Atmospheric Research. Although he retired in 1985, he remained active in his research until the last few years, when Alzheimer’s disease affected him. He is survived by his wife, Wilma, and their three children, Charles III, Rita, and Malcolm.

Moore took a long and circuitous route to the heights of his profession, managing to bypass a Ph.D. along the way, until 2003, when he was awarded an honorary Ph.D. by New Mexico Tech. He received numerous awards from fellow scientists, including a fellowship awarded by the American Geophysical Union, the Otto C. Winzen Lifetime Achievement Award of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics, and the Lifetime Achievement Award of the Atmospheric Electricity Community.

Moore was born on October 28, 1920, in Maryville, Tenn. He started college at Georgia Institute of Technology in 1940, but like many of his generation, his education was interrupted by service in World War II. He served as a weather equipment officer for the U.S. Army Air Corps in the China-Burma-India theater, and later was a weather observer in occupied China.

Moore returned to Georgia Tech, where he completed his bachelor’s degree in chemical engineering in 1947. He was then recruited for Project Mogul by New York University, which conducted the project for the U. S. Army Air Corps.

He later recalled that the extended field trips were what ended his graduate schooling.

Project Mogul involved launching balloons to carry microphones up to the base of the stratosphere, where the temperature of the atmosphere is highly effective at refracting sound waves. At the time, 1947, the United States was concerned with listening for nuclear testing by other countries, especially the Soviet Union, so the microphone-bearing balloons were launched to listen for the sounds.

The experiment succeeded in detecting U.S. nuclear tests in the South Pacific, 6,000 miles away, but it also added an important footnote to American cultural history. A balloon launched by Moore in June of 1947 later proved to be the item that is enshrined at Roswell as a “UFO.” Moore didn't realize the part he had played in the drama until he happened to see a newspaper picture of the pieces of the “UFO” in the 1990s.

Moore was considered a pioneer in the development and testing of modern polyethylene balloons as atmospheric research tools. In 1947, he made the first flight in a such a balloon, and in a later test, he made a 24-hour balloon flight from Minneapolis to New Jersey. In 1957, he made a record-breaking flight to the altitude of 82,000 feet in a pressurized balloon gondola, with Commander Malcolm D. Ross. During this flight, he made the first measurements which discovered traces of water vapor in the atmosphere of Venus.

After he carried reconnaissance cameras to high altitude for the U.S. Air Force, a program to fly balloons carrying these cameras over the Soviet Union was established by General Mills, for whom Moore worked until 1953. He was then offered an opportunity to work for Arthur D. Little, a research company in Cambridge, Mass., again on a project involving research by balloon. While there, he designed and built the first alkaline-metal vaporizers used in rocket-borne ionospheric probes. Also at Little, Moore met and began his long collaboration with Dr. Bernard Vonnegut.

Vonnegut was well-known as the scientist who had discovered that silver iodide could be used for cloud seeding. In 1956, Moore and Vonnegut were invited to New Mexico by E. J. Workman, then president of New Mexico Tech, to conduct thunderstorm research at Mt. Withington, some 70 miles west of Tech. For three successive summers, Moore and Vonnegut hauled truckloads of equipment to and from Boston each year, until the fateful day in 1958 when Moore suggested that what they needed was a mountaintop lab where the equipment could be kept year round.

Workman and his colleague Marx Brook liked the idea, but instead of Mt. Withington, as Moore proposed, they decided to put their lab in the Magdalena Mountains, closer to Socorro and within line-of-sight of the campus. By 1964, their lab – Langmuir Laboratory for Atmospheric Research – was built and ready to put into operation. In 1965, Dr. Stirling Colgate, the new president of New Mexico Tech, offered jobs to both Moore and Vonnegut. The latter chose to stay at Arthur D. Little – and later moved to SUNY Albany – but Moore was delighted at the opportunity and came to Tech as an associate professor of physics and research physicist.

In 1969, he became the chairman of Langmuir Laboratory. During his time at the helm, Moore greatly expanded the lab's facilities. He obtained funding for and organized the construction of a large addition to the Main Building, a balloon hangar, an airplane hangar, and underground shielded rooms (Faraday cages) on South Baldy Peak for studying nearby lightning. He was also responsible for the construction of a vertically-scanning radar and for solving the political problems to allow the launching of instrumented rockets into thunderstorms over Langmuir Laboratory. In addition, he organized the modification and instrumentation of an airplane that has flown into thunderstorms for many years.

Moore also taught techniques of launching balloons in severe weather to a number of Tech faculty members and students, many of whom continued their work in the field. Thus, he was the mentor of many of today's scientists who study electrical properties of severe storms.

Moore nominally retired from New Mexico Tech in 1985, but continued to be active in research. He developed the first real improvement to the lightning rod since Benjamin Franklin invented it in the 18th Century, by proving that blunt-tipped rods were more effective than pointed-tipped ones. As a result of his work, most of the lightning rods manufactured in the United States today are blunt-tipped.

Moore was a Fellow of the American Geophysical Union and received New Mexico Tech's Distinguished Research Award in 1984 and the Lifetime Achievement Award of the American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics in 1997. He was a fellow in three scientific societies: The Royal Meteorological Society, American Meteorological Society, and the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Upon presenting Moore with an honorary doctorate in 2003, Dr. Daniel H. Lopez of New Mexico Tech said, “In a real sense, this is not an honorary doctorate at all. Charles B. Moore has been a leader in the field of atmospheric physics, and he has done research that would have earned him a Ph.D. many times over, had he consented to accept one before now.”

Dr. Paul Krehbiel, an atmospheric researcher who knew Moore well, commented, “Charlie was a person of many talents. He was a pioneer in the study of thunderstorms and lightning and a font of scientific knowledge. He was a true student of history and a historian in his own right, and possessed an excellent memory. He was a mentor and educator of many, myself included. His legacy lives on in the ideas, studies and projects that he developed and worked on over his long and amazingly varied career.”

Dr. William Winn, who worked with Charles Moore for many years, said, “Charles inspired me and many other young investigators with his enthusiasm, independent thinking, and precise use of the English language, and he was a delightful companion because of his good humor and storytelling skills."

-- NMT --

The Washington National UFO Sighting Press Conference, Part 7

Please note, as we begin to talk about Major Fournet and Lieutenant Holcomb, who were in the radar room on the second Saturday, they are nowhere to be found at the press conference.

Reporter: You had two experts over there last Saturday night, Major Fournet and
Lieutenant Holcomb, who described themselves as radar technicians and intelligence officers. What was their opinion?

Samford: May I try to make another answer and ask for support or negation, on the quality of the radar operator. I personally don’t feel that is necessarily associated with quality of radar operators because radar operators of great quality are going to be confused by the things which now appear and may appear in radar. The ability to use the radar for the thing it was designed for is, I believe, dependent upon the thing that they see doing a normal act. If it does a normal act, then it becomes identified as the thing that they thought it was and then it pulls itself along through this mass of indication and they say, "That one has normal processes." I think that a description of a GCA landing has some bearing on that in which to get associated with the GCA you have to make a certain number of queries and do a certain number of things and then you become identified through the fact that you obey. If you obey, then you have an identity and you can then be followed with precision. So I wouldn’t like to say that this is a function of inadequate radar operations. I think it’s a thing that can happen to any radar operator. If he sees something in there and says, "That one is neither behaving nor any other normal pattern." What is it? Curiosity stimulus, any other kind of stimulus can result in overemphasis at any particular time on any radar scope. These recently appear to have been much more solid returns than ordinarily classifiable by the arguments that I have just given. Would you address yourself to what I’ve just said.

Reporter: Yes. What do the experts think? That was the question.

Samford: The experts?

Reporter: The ones that saw it last Saturday night. What did they report to you?

Reporter: Two of them saw it in --

Reporter: What did they say?

Samford: They said they made good returns.

Reporter: Did they draw any conclusions as to what they were, whether they were clouds?

Samford: They made good returns and they think that they ought to be followed up.

Reporter: But now you come to the general belief that it was some either heat inversions or some other phenomena without substance.

Samford: The phrase "without substance" bothers me a little.

Reporter: Well, could you --

Samford: -- say what we do think?

Reporter: Yes.

Samford: I think that the highest probability is that these are phenomena associated with the intellectual and scientific interests that we are on the road to learn more about but that there is nothing in them that is associated with material or vehicles or missiles that are directed against the United States.

Reporter: General, you said that -- can you stop that short of the United States, sir, or the menace to the United States?

Samford: Well, that was the -- I think that is the part that I believed. Now, what was it that I would have said otherwise?

Reporter: Well, you said were not associated with vehicles --

Reporter: Materials.

Reporter: Missiles.

Reporter: Period.

Reporter: Material, vehicles, and missiles directed against the United States.

Reporter: The question whether these are hostile or not makes very little difference. What we’re trying to get at is are you eliminating, excluding from consideration a missile, a vehicle, or any other material object that might be flying through the air other than sound or light or some other intangible.

Reporter: Somebody from this planet or some other planet violating our air space.
(Laughter)

Samford: The astronomers are our best advisers, of course, in this business of visitors from elsewhere. The astronomers photograph the sky continuously perhaps with the most adequate photography in existence and the complete absence of things which would have to be in their appearance for many days and months to come from somewhere else. It doesn’t cause them to have any enthusiasm whatsoever in thinking about this other side of it.

Reporter: Have any astronomical laboratories reported any sightings whatsoever or any astronomers?

Samford: I don’t recall. Captain Ruppelt, do you know whether we’ve had reports from astronomical laboratories or observatories?

Ruppelt: No, sir. None have ever had any real bearing.

The question as posed and the answer as posed, at this point are misleading. Astronomers had made UFO reports on a number of occasions. Dr. Clyde Tombaugh, who discovered Pluto, had made a UFO sighting report to the Air Force. He was not at an observatory at the time, but in his backyard, with his wife, but the real point is that here was a scientist, one with impressive credentials, who had made a UFO report to the Air Force.

More recently, studies have been conducted using professional astronomers and engineers as the subjects. It was reported that these people reported UFOs at a higher rate than the general population. In other words, it would be expected that astronomers, who watch the sky on a regular basis, would see UFOs more frequently that the general population and they did, according to a scientifically reported study.

In fact, because they are familiar with the sky and the astronomical phenomena in it, they would be able to eliminate many of the mundane answers that confuse and confound the general population. Their sightings, normally of longer duration, are not easily explained by the mundane and are, therefore, more likely to be labeled as unidentified.

But there was another point that is generally overlooked. According to Dr. J. Allen Hynek’s survey of his fellow astronomers, most astronomers, in 1952, would not have been inclined to report a UFO sighting. Hynek wrote, "I took the time to talk rather seriously with a few of them, and to acquaint them with the fact that some of the sightings were truly puzzling and not at all easily explainable. Their interest was almost immediately aroused, indicating that their general lethargy is due to lack of information on the subject. And certainly another contributing factor... is their overwhelming fear of publicity. One headline in the nation’s papers to the effect ‘Astronomer Sees Flying Saucer’ would be enough to brand the astronomer as questionable among his colleagues."

So, there is a very real possibility, according to the information available, that astronomers do see UFOs, but they don’t report them with any frequency. Ruppelt had to know that Hynek was conducting the study, even if it had not been completed, and he had to know that, at least, one astronomer had reported a UFO.

To be fair, it must be noted that General Samford might not have had the information, or that it might not have been reported to the Air Force at the highest lever. The general attitude of the Air Force was that if something wasn’t reported to them, it simply didn’t exist.

The Washington National UFO Sighting Press Conference, Part 7

Having exhausted, for the moment, that line of questioning, a reporter asked, "General, do you have any tentative conclusion or even a trend towards a belief of what these local radar blips are? There’s been talk that you did have the heat inversion those nights. Are you all inclined to believe that’s what it is?"

Samford: I think that we’re learning progressively more and more about the radar and that these instances very likely are maybe good observations that the radar can make of something but not likely to be observations of the things the radar was designed to observe (laughter). Now, (laughter) -- all right. Now, let’s say -- we don’t know much about -- and I’ll be getting far afield here technically -- we don’t know much about the Northern Lights. We’d like to be able to measure that a little bit better. That is the kind of thought I was trying to express by saying radar was intended to observe aircraft for control of aircraft and to deal with aircraft. Now, you may have scientific advantages for observation that it wasn’t intended for.I wonder if you’d speak to my point on that, Captain James, whether I’ve gotten too far afield on something I don’t know anything about.

James: Yes, sir; that’s quite true. We find that sometimes the radar set will be formed in a manner not desirable and due to the fact that it doesn’t happen every day everyone isn’t familiar with those characteristics and it sometimes turns out to be a mystery.

Reporter: Well, getting back, if I may follow it up, on these local radar observations, then you come to the tentative conclusion that they’re physical phenomena? Would you say that?

Samford: I think so, yes.

Reporter: How is it we haven’t had them before?

Reporter: Well, that’s what I was going to get to. What’s the history of this thing? Radar operators in the past, when you inquire of them, have they seen similar lights
in the past and because they never bothered to associate them with flying saucers they’ve never gotten in the newspapers?

Samford: Oh, they have associated them in the past with things that were thought desirable to intercept. I said a minute ago we’ve intercepted flocks of ducks and similar things. There’s some history of the lack of identification of friendly aircraft which causes a lot of unnecessary interceptions in some parts of the world, being mixed up with a lot of this sort of thing too in which we’ve had many interceptions that went out and identified a friendly that should have been established by some other method, but mixed up with those there have been many of these attempts to identify an unknown that fizzled out in the same way that the current ones have fizzled out.

Reporter: In other words, it is not a rare phenomenon, this thing that happened Saturday night and the Saturday before that?

Samford: It is not a rare phenomenon.

Reporter: It’s not radar, and it occurs often enough so that you do have a history, and radar experts have been trying to find out what causes them; is that right?

Samford: That is correct. Yes, sir.

Reporter: General Samford, has the Air Force conducted any independent research through universities or through radar people, the Gilfillen people or whoever?

Samford: Yes, sir. We have a number of available consultants, some contracts that have been initiated, some of them are being thought of, but, again, I think I’d like to go back to the point of profit in this thing perhaps being a measurement first, an adequate measurement that can do science. Reports of the same kind we’ve been getting except for this additional mechanical asset or opportunity called the radar have been going on since Bible times. Now, the radar gives an additional opportunity to observe something about that, but it still doesn’t measure it with the kind of precision that is needed to put it into analysis.

Reporter: Are you getting something to do that?

Samford: We have some hope with a camera that has on the front of it a -- will you describe what that --

James: It has a de-fraction grid.

Samford: Yes, a de-fraction grid on the front of it that will be useful against lights because through that de-fraction you’ll be able to say, from what substance the light was made? What gases were burning? Was it gas? Was it incandescence? And so forth. Now, those cameras -- the lens is about a $15 item, or this grid is, and the camera is about a $15 item. We have on order a small quantity, two hundred plus of those. We hope to be able to distribute those into the hands of people who might have opportunity. Now, with the great diversity of people who report it’s not too easy to put your finger on who has the highest opportunity to report, into whose hands such a device should go, but we think we may learn who might be the most optimum reporters. A great volume of these cameras to scatter around to try through the shotgun approach to get reports doesn’t look like too valuable a project but that is one way of trying to measure what there lights are.

Reporter: For what purpose -- they have had similar gadgets before, I mean, to measure and to determine the origin of what generates the light. Is this a new type?

James: The grid is.

Samford: It’s not new except that it hasn’t been aimed specifically at these items or focused on these items as far as we know.

Reporter: General, the Captain mentioned a moment ago or had the thought that when there is temperature inversion the men know who are observing radar. Is it all right to ask if the Air Force thinks that these objects the other night were a result of temperature inversion?

Samford: Well, I’ll answer that first, try to, and then ask Captain James for an opinion. I don’t think that we are quite sure that the [Dr. Donald] Menzel theory of temperature inversion or that scientists are sure that that is a good theory. It’s supported by some people. Other people who have equal competence, it would appear, discredit it. So the game as to whether that is the cause or not is about a fifty-fifty proposition. It’s appealing. It does satisfy certain concerns. Is that a fair statement or answer to that question?

James: Sir, the Menzel theory applies mainly to light rays.

Samford: Yes.

James: In regard to the temperature inversion effect on radar waves that is fairly well established.

Reporter: There’s no doubt about the latter, is there?

James: That’s right.

Reporter: That’s been established.

Reporter: And it was not --

James: We don’t have sufficient information to say definitely that that was the cause.

Reporter: You said an experienced radar operator could tell the difference.

James: I would say so.

Reporter: Wasn’t there a naval battle during the war in which there was a great engagement fought against an inversion of radar?

This refers to an incident during the summer of 1943 in which a Navy task force fired a thousand rounds at objects that had appeared on radar. Lookouts reported seeing flares from the Japanese navy. Vice Admiral Robert C. Giffen had commanded the American forces in what he described as a battle of the blips. In other words, Giffen was suggesting that the Navy had fired on targets that were a result of temperature inversions and not on something real, that is Japanese, that was attempting to invade one of the Aleutian Islands. James said that he understood that this had happened.

The Washington National UFO Sighting Press Conference, Part 6

They continued the discussion about the temperature inversions and what would be visible to the unaided eye. A reporter asked, "Would that account for the fact that these images disappeared and reappeared on these screens recently?"

James: I’m not positive about that. There’s a possibility.

Reporter: Captain, was there temperature inversion in this area last Saturday night?

James: There was.

Reporter: And the Saturday night preceding?

James: I’m not sure about the one preceding, but there was last Saturday night.

Reporter: Was there one last night?

James: I don’t know.

Reporter: Captain, did any two sets in this area get a fix on these so-called saucers around here?

James: The information we have isn’t good enough to determine that.

Reporter: You don’t know whether Andrews Field and Washington National Airport actually got a triangulation on anything?

James: You see, the records made and kept aren’t accurate enough to tie that in that close.

Reporter: What is the possibility of these being other than phenomena?

Samford: Well, I’d like to maybe relieve Captain James just a minute. Your question is what?

Reporter: What is the possibility of these sightings being other than optical or atmospheric phenomena? In other words, what is the possibility of their being guided
missiles launched from some other country, for example?

Samford: Well, if you could select out of this mass any particular one or two and start working on them and say, "What is the possibility of them being these things?" Then you come to the point and say this one is reported to have done things which require for it to do those things either one of two conditions, absolute maximum power or no mass. If this is a thing in terms of a guided missile, it does these things if there is theoretically no limit to the power involved and there is theoretically no mass involved. That’s one of the conditions that would say, well, if someone solved one of those problems, this could then be explained as one of those things. You find another one and it has -- it just develops into no other purpose or no other pattern that could be associated with them, a missile. Those which we might identify as being missiles will be tracked. They’ll have a track to develop, something that people can put a measurement to. I don’t know whether that answers the question. It satisfies some of it, but maybe not all of it.

The truth is, that Samford’s response didn’t answer the question which was simply if the objects spotted could have been missiles launched by another terrestrial government. The answer was a simple, "No." Instead Samford begins to talk of an object that has access to virtually unlimited power and that has no mass. He never did explain what these two conditions had to do with the question that had been asked, but is certainly sounded as if he was rendering a scientifically sound answer.

Reporter: Have there been any such instances so far in which you had information that indicated that either of these two conditions were fulfilled?

Samford: Absolute, no mass?

Reporter: No limit to the power.

Samford: You know what "no mass" means is that there’s nothing there! (Laughter).

Reporter: How about the power?

Samford: In terms of earthly weights and earthly value.

Reporter: Yes.

Samford: And unlimited power -- that means power of such fantastic higher limits that it is a theoretically unlimited -- it’s not anything that we can understand. It’s like my trying to understand -- I want to be careful because I was going to say a million dollars, but I can’t understand a hundred! It’s one of those questions of unlimited power that just gets beyond your comprehension that has to be used to meet this.

The Washington National UFO Sighting Press Conference, Part 5

Moving back to the Washington Nationals, one of the reporters asked, "On what did they report sightings?"

Samford: Lights.

Ramey: In one or two instances, they reported sighting lights. In one instance, they reported locking on an object. It is pretty clear from the discussion of the pattern of two airplanes that went out that one of them was locked on the other one.

Samford: Yes.

Reporter: General --

Samford: Yes, sir?

Reporter: Back to the ionized cloud. Were the blips picked up recently comparable to the ionized cloud or were they different in maneuvering or motion?

Samford: They were different.

Reporter: General Samford, I understand there were radar experts who saw these sightings Saturday night or early Sunday morning. What was their interpretation of what they saw on the scope?

Samford: They said they saw good returns.

Reporter: Which would indicate that these were solid objects similar to aircraft?

Samford: No, not necessarily. We get good returns from birds.

Reporter: Well, you wouldn’t get as large a blip from a bird as --

Samford: No, unless it was close.

A point must be interjected here. The radar operators were all trained men who had been working at the nation’s capital’s airport. They would have, in the past, seen birds and temperature inversions on their radar scopes. They would be familiar with these sort of natural phenomena and wouldn’t be easily fooled by them, especially when it is remembered that they had years of experience. This wasn’t the situation ten years earlier when radar operators were poorly trained and the operations of radar were poorly understood.

Reporter: Did they report that these could have been birds?

Samford: No.

Reporter: Can you get a good return from a reflected ground target, General?

James: You can get a very large return from a reflected ground target.

Reporter: Just as good as you might get from an object actually in flight in the air?
James: Actually thicker. It depends on the amount of bending.

Reporter: And just as sharp on the scope?

James: Yes.

Reporter: Can you get a blip from the (inaudible) created by temperature inversion?
James: On the ground target, yes.

Reporter: In other words, something that’s on the ground that’s reflected off a refracted cloud bank would throw off a blip on the radar screen?

James: Yes, sir. That’s true.

Reporter: Would a nearby radar set get that blip at exactly the same speed?

James: Not necessarily; no.

Reporter: In other words, you can have a light and something that lacks substance and material and still have a blip?

James: I don’t quite understand the question.

Reporter: You can have a radar image that’s created without the necessity of radar striking the solid object or a semi-solid object, such as a cloud.

James: Well, eventually, it does have to strike an
object.

Reporter: But you said it can be simply a reflection of something on the ground.

Reporter: I see.

Reporter: In other words, it doesn’t have to be in the air.

James: That’s correct.

Reporter: In the area covered by the sweep on the radar?

James: It has to be in the area covered by the radar set.
It has to be within the range.

Reporter: But not in the air.

James: But not in the air.

Reporter: What sort of ground targets give these reflections?

James: It depends on the amount of temperature inversion and the size and shape of the ground objects.

Reporter: Would this reflection account for simultaneous radar sightings and visual sightings which appear to coincide on the basis of conversations between the radar operator and the observer outside?

James: There is some possibility of that due to the same effects.

Reporter: Why would these temperature inversions change location so rapidly or travel?

James: Well, actually, it can be the appearance or disappearance of different ground targets giving the appearance of something moving when, actually, the different objects are standing still.

Reporter: Would these pseudo-blips cause any difficulties
in combat at all?

James: Not to people that understand what’s going on. They do cause some difficulty.

Reporter: Then the experienced operators really can tell the difference between --

James: That’s correct.

Reporter: How about the CAA men?

James: I don’t know.

It is clear from the questions that the reporters understood little about radar operations and temperature inversions. Captain James made it clear with his answers that trained, qualified, experienced men could tell the difference between real targets and those caused by temperature inversions.

It is also clear that the reporters had somehow come to the conclusion that the temperature inversions were responsible for creating the lights reported by both airline and military pilots and the men on the ground. The reporters had begun to think of a temperature inversion as a "cloud." That is, they seemed to think that it was something that could be seen, not realizing that a temperature inversion was merely a cold layer of clear air under a warmer layer of clear air. There would be nothing for anyone to see.

Reporter: Would the disappearance or reappearance of these blips be accounted for by the movement of a cloud bank that reflected a ground target?

James: Well, actually, it’s not a cloud bank. It’s a temperature inversion of the atmosphere. You see, if warm air comes in over a cool area, you have a temperature inversion and the atmosphere is perfectly clear, and still the rays will be bent.

The reporters have become confused, believing, for the moment, that the visual sightings were a result of the temperature inversion. They are searching for an explanation for what was seen by the pilots and ground observers, but a temperature inversion is, essentially, invisible to the human eye.

The Washington National UFO Sightings Press Conference Part 4

Now we get to the point of the press conference and that was to talk about the sightings from Washington National Airport.

Reporter: General, have you talked to your Air Force Intelligence Officer who is over at the National Airport when they were sighting all these bandits on the CAA screen?

Samford: Yes, sir; I have.

Reporter: And have you talked to the Andrews Field people who apparently saw the same thing?

Samford: I haven’t talked to them myself, but others have.

Reporter: Well, could you give us an account of what they did see and what explanations you might attach to it?

Samford: Well, I could discuss possibilities. The radar screen has been picking up things for many years that, well, birds, a flock of ducks. I know there’s been one instance in which a flock of ducks was picked up and was intercepted and flown through as being an unidentified phenomenon.

Reporter: Where was that, General?

Samford: I don’t recall where it was. I think it might have been in Japan but I don’t recall the location of that. That’s just a recollection of what that sort of thing could happen and I do know that at Wright Field there was one of these things on radar -- that was in 1950, I think -- maybe Captain James would reinforce that. Was that in 1950?

Captain James: That’s correct.

Samford: -- in which the local radar produced the effect of the encircling phenomenon that caused quite a lot of concern and it was gone out and intercepted and found to be a certain kind of ice formation that was in the air in various parts of the atmosphere around Wright Field on that
day.

Samford is on fairly safe ground here. There are any number of reports in which the capabilities of the radars were not fully understood. During the Second World War, radars in Great Britain produced a strange phenomenon every morning as a blip came off the ground and then seemed to expand until it disappeared. They found that birds, taking off in the morning were the cause.

Samford: Again, there are theories like the men whose theory of light refraction which says that temperature inversion in the atmosphere can cause an image from somewhere else to be reflected in positions where it is not. If that is a correct theory, related to it is another oddity with respect to the ground effect that you get in radar.

We have one instance in which a night fighter with radar is reported to have locked on, as they say, to an object in flight, which, after he’d followed it beyond this curve, found that he was locked on to the ground and he had only a very few minutes to recover because the ground target had gone up and then misplaced this phenomena, and he locked on to it in a position where he wasn’t, but, following it, he eventually found himself directed toward the
ground.

Now, the conditions that seem to produce these temperature inversions and possibly the same kind of thing for ground targets being misplaced in altitude -- I don’t know that it is worded that they’re misplaced in azimuth -- is somewhat typical of the kind of hot humid weather that we’ve been having here in the last three or four weeks. There’s no reason to relate those phenomena to those atmospheric conditions positively, but it is a possibility.

Please note here something that the reporters failed to understand. Samford suggested a possible explanation but also said that there was no reason to believe that the sightings were related to the weather conditions. The reporters apparently didn’t hear this part of Samford’s statement.

Samford: Yes, sir?

Reporter: Did interceptors go up on any of the three
occasions?

Samford: Here.

Reporter: Yes.

Samford: Yes, sir.

Reporter: What did they see on their radar scopes?

Samford: I don’t recall that they saw anything. Do you remember, Roger, whether anything was sighted on their radar scopes?

Major General Roger M. Ramey: There have been no radar sightings. One or two reported (inaudible) --

Reporter: There have been no airborne radar sightings, General Ramey? Is that --

Ramey: That’s correct.

Actually there were airborne radar locks. This is based on the testimony of Norman Sykes, one of the interceptor pilots who was involved in some of the attempted intercepts on July 26. He had no visual sighting, but his radar operator did, in fact, detect some of the UFOs that night.
It is possible that Ramey didn’t know this, but given the history of UFOs, I believe that Ramey would have been quite interested in these sightings and would have taken the time to learn something about them. To the reporters, however, he continued with th proper Air Force line... as his orders would have been to do.

The Washington National UFO Sighting Press Conference Part 3

Samford, having suggested that the official study was now just an intellectual exercise, that the Air Force is no longer worried about national security said, "Now, I think with those opening remarks I could invite questions. Questions, yes, sir?"

Reporter: Have there been more than one radar sighting simultaneously -- that is, blips from several stations all concentrating on the same area?

Samford: You mean in the past?

Reporter: Yes, sir.

Samford: Yes. That is not an unusual thing to happen to this sequence at all. Phenomenon have passed from one radar to another and with a fair degree of certainty that it was the same phenomenon. To say that there have been simultaneous sightings, the same thing by different radar, I think that we could be quite sure that that has occurred simultaneously. Now, when we talk about down to the split second, I don’t know, but simultaneously in time sufficient for us to argue that they’ve been two mechanical observations of the same thing.

Reporter: Enough to give you a fix so that you can be sure that it is right in a certain place?

Samford: That is most rare.

Reporter: Has there been any?

Samford: Most rare. I don’t recall that we have had one that gives us that kind of an effect.

Reporter: Could that be due to ionized clouds?

Samford: There are thoughts that ionized clouds do have some influence on this. We do know that the thunderstorm activity is quite nicely identifiable by radar because we use the radar for the purposes of avoiding thunderstorms and we do have some that show the storm area that’s coming in towards principal stations where protection is necessary in terms of high winds and thunderstorms.

Samford is avoiding the question here. The Washington Nationals were just the sort of sightings that the reporter had been trying to identify. The sightings involved multiple targets on multiple sets in which, those who attempted visual confirmation found lights where the radars showed them to be. This question was the whole point of the press conference, but Samford just didn’t answer it.

Reporter: How much money would you say the Air Force spends a year tracking down these flying saucer reports?

Given the circumstances of the press conference, and what had just been reported in the newspapers, the question is somewhat irrelevant. If the phenomenon is real, then regulations required investigation. If it posed a threat to national security, again, regulations required it. The investigation was something that was required to learn the truth, so the amount of money spent meant virtually nothing.

Samford: Well, the energy that’s going into it at the present time is outside of anything except the normal reporting procedures. Most of our reports come from individuals or, we might say, I think, on the order of sixty-odd per cent comes from the civilian population straight out. I think there might be something like eight per cent come from civil airlines pilots. You might find that another percentage, in the order of twenty-five, might come from military pilots. And the effort to further analyze them and profit in going after that in a big way is going to have in some way to be related to a standard measurement that makes this material for workman to work on.

I suppose that it not necessary to point out again that Samford did not answer the question. Instead he suggested the percentages of those who report flying saucer sightings to the Air Force. He offered no evidence that his statistics were accurate, and in reality, it makes no difference.

The Washington National UFO Sighting Press Conference Part 2

Having told his first lie (well, maybe made his first distortion would be a better way to phrase it), that the Air Force had something called Project Saucer, which I point out because some skeptics, okay, CDA, seems to believe that these officers would breach security while standing in front of a bunch of reporters, the conference continued.

Samford: However, there have remained a percentage of this total [of sighting reports], in the order of twenty per cent [sic] of the reports, that have come from credible observers of relatively incredible things. And because of these things not being possible for us to move along and associate with the kind of things that we’ve found can be associated with the bulk of these reports, we keep on being concerned about them.

However, I’d like to say that the difficulty with disposing of these reports is largely based upon the lack of any standard measurement or any ability to measure these things which have been reported briefly by some, more elaborately by others, but with no measuring devices that can convert the manageable material for any kind of analysis that we know. We take some of these things and we try to bring to the good honest workmen of science a piece of material that has no utility because it doesn’t have the kind of measurements on it that he can use. And, as a consequence, he has to reject these things and say, "Until you can bring me something more substantial than that, I can’t make any progress."

So our need, really is to get the measurement value on these and, in the interim, lacking sufficient measure of these things to make them amenable to real analysis, we have to say that our real interest in this project is not one of intellectual curiosity but is in trying to establish and appraise the possibility of menace to the United States. And we can say, as of now, that there has been no pattern that reveals anything remotely like purpose or remotely like consistency that we can in any way associate with any menace to the United States.

To this point, Samford has said little of real value. He has admitted there is a problem and that they have studied it, but they found nothing for science to investigate. An examination of UFO sightings prior to this point reveals that such is not the case. There had been a number of photographic cases, including movie footage, which can be measured and studies in the lab. There have been a number of radar cases, including the Washington Nationals which spawned the press conference, in which measurements could be made and examined by science. Samford was being less than candid, assuming that he knew what was in the Project Blue Book files, and as the Director of Intelligence, he should have known, at least something about that. This might be construed as his second lie, though that is somewhat strong language. Once again, he is protecting the classified information. We can argue about the reason it was classified, but as classified information he would not be able to talk about it with those who were not cleared to hear it.

This statement also provides a clue as to the nature of the official investigation in the summer of 1952. The Air Force had attempted to learn if there was a threat and had convinced itself that flying saucers were not a threat to the security of the United States. Satisfied that alien invasion fleets were not about to land, the Air Force attitude was that flying saucers did not warrant any sort of investigation by them. Air Force officers had fulfilled their mission when they determined there was no threat to national security. Besides, there was nothing they could about them anyway.

Samford: Now, we do want to continue in the interests of intellectual curiosity or the contributions to be made to scientific measurements, but our main interest is going to have to continue in the problem of seeing whether the things have [the] possibility of harm to the United States, and our present dilemma of lack of measurement that can be turned to analysis and a complete lack of pattern in any of these things which gives us any clue to possible purpose or possible use, leaves us in some dilemma as to what we can do about this remaining twenty per cent of unidentified phenomena.

The volume of reporting is related to many things. We know that reports of this kind go back to Biblical times. There have been flurries of them in various centuries. 1846 seems to have had a time when there was quite a flurry of reporting of this kind. Our current series of reports goes back, generally, to 1946 in which things of this kind were reported in Sweden.

There are many reasons why this volume goes up and down, but we can’t help but believe that, currently, one of the reasons for volume is that man is doing a great deal more. There’s more man-made activity in the air now than there was, certainly, in Biblical times or in 1946. In addition to that, our opportunities to observe have been enhanced greatly.

The difficult part of it, as far as advancing the program is concerned, is that our ability to measure doesn’t seem to have advanced in any way as well as our opportunity to observe and greater recurrence of more disturbing things of this sort that are actually in existence from man-made air participation that we know about.

So our present course of action is to continue on this problem with the best of our ability, giving to it the attention that we feel it very definitely warrants in terms of identifying adequately the growing or possible or disappearing, if it turns out to be that, menace to the United States to give it adequate attention.

While General Samford is giving lip service to the idea that Air Force officers treat the subject seriously, the truth is that they didn’t. In less than a year, the staff of Blue Book, as it had existed in July, had been reduced to the point where it could do nothing. At its lowest, it was "commanded" by an airman first class, one of the lowest ranking of the enlisted grades. No officer was assigned.

Ruppelt himself wrote that in December 1952 he asked for a transfer. He agreed to stay with Blue Book until February 1953 so that a replacement could be assigned and trained but no replacement arrived. Ruppelt left Blue Book in the hands of a single officer and one enlisted man. By July 1953, the enlisted man was the sole soldier manning the office. When Ruppelt returned to Wright-Patterson Air Force Base he learned that the investigation had collapsed.

The Washington National UFO Sighting Press Conference, Part 1

I have been advised, by a friend, Tim Banse, who seems to understand these things, that some of my postings are waaaaaaaay too long. He suggested that I break them up into smaller bites. In keeping with what I believe to be sage advice, here is the first part of the entire transcript, with my editorial comments, of the Air Force press conference about the Washington National UFO sightings in 1952.

This came about after the second round of Saturday night radar and visual sightings, and after a number of failed intercept attempts. The Air Force believed it necessary to call a press conference to explain the situation, at least as they saw it. Ed Ruppelt called the conference the largest and longest that had been held by the Air Force since the conclusion of the Second World War. Ruppelt also suggested that the cards had been stacked again Major General John A. Samford, the Director of Intelligence, who was the senior officer at the conference. Because Samford had to "hedge" on many of the answers to questions because the investigations had not been concluded, it seemed, to many of the assembled reporters, that the Air Force was attempting to hide the truth.

The press conference was held at the Pentagon, in room 3E-869, to be precise. Also attending for the Air Force was Major General Roger M. Ramey, then the Director of Operations for the Air Force and the same Roger Ramey who had been at 8th Air Force Headquarters in Fort Worth during the Roswell UFO crash briefings in July, 1947, as our old friend CDA thought to advise me, as if I didn’t know. Others there for the Air Force included Colonel Donald L. Bower, of ATIC, Captain Roy L. James, an expert in radar operations and also from ATIC, Ed Ruppelt, the chief of Project Blue Book, and Mr. Buroyne L. Griffing, a civilian from ATIC.

Conspicuous by their absence were Major Dewey Fournet, the military liaison officer between the Pentagon and Project Blue Book, Al Chop, the official Pentagon spokesman on UFOs, and Lt. John Holcomb, the Naval officer who was an expert on radar and electronics. Since all three had been at Washington National during the second set of sightings, their inclusion would seem to be a natural event. Apparently the Air Force had other ideas because none were there to answer questions even though all were assigned to the Pentagon in Washington.

The press conference began with an introduction by a civilian Pentagon press relations official who said:

Ladies and gentlemen, let me remind the military that, while they are welcome here, this is a press conference and let’s be sure that the press is all seated before the conference begins.

This refers to the fact that many military officers who had no role in the press conference were in the room to listen to it. They were being told to sit down and shut up.

Let me introduce General Samford, Air Force Director of Intelligence, and General Ramey, Director of Operations. General Samford.

Major General Samford: I think the plan is to have very brief opening remarks and then ask for such questions as you may want to put to us for discussion and answer. In so far as opening remarks is [sic] concerned, I just want to state our reason for concern about this.

The Air Force feels a very definite obligation to identify and analyze things that happen in the air that may have in them menace to the United States and, because of that feeling of obligation and our pursuit of that interest, since 1947, we have an activity that was known one time as Project Saucer and now, as part of another more stable and integrated organization, have undertaken to analyze between a thousand and two thousand reports dealing with this area. And out of that mass of reports that we’ve received we’ve been able to take things which were originally unidentified and dispose of them to our satisfaction in terms of bulk where we came to the conclusion that these things were either friendly aircraft erroneously recognized or reported, hoaxes, quite a few of those, electronic and meteorological phenomena of one sort of another, light aberrations, and many other things.

It is important to note that there never was a Project Saucer in a real sense. When the Air Force created its first investigation, code named Sign, it publicly called the project by the name of Saucer. Later, after the code name Sign was compromised, the Air Force announced that it had ended its investigation, but, in reality, continued it as Project Grudge. Eventually Grudge evolved into Project Blue Book, but when speaking with civilian officials and members of the press, the unofficial name of Project Saucer was often used.

The actual press conference began then and will be noted in the next installment of this posting.

The Best UFO Headline Ever

I’m not sure why I haven’t posted this before. It is the best UFO headline ever. It is something right out of a science fiction movie.

It refers, of course, to the sightings that took place in July 1952 over Washington, D.C. The Air Force eventually claimed that these sightings were the result of a temperature inversion but the problem was that there were sightings on the ground, sightings in the air, radar sightings, and a rather “hairy” intercept by jet fighters. In fact, fighters were scrambled on a number of occasions during the sightings, and yes, the fighters got a radar lock on the objects and the pilots saw them in the air.

There has been much written about these sightings (including my own book on them) and while the Air Force is happy with the explanation, as are the skeptics, there were just too many sightings, too many witnesses and even observations using instrumentality to write them off so easily.

National Personnel Records Center and UFO Witnesses

In today’s world, not everything is as it seems. Not all that long ago, I ran a feature that suggested a witness claiming a long military background could produce no documents showing this, other than a couple that looked to be forgeries. When I requested his records from the National Personnel Records Center, part of the National Archives system in St Louis, they showed a short military history in the Army and nothing from the Air Force. In other words, the records that I received from them did not agree with what he was saying or with the four other documents that he had supplied.

So I decided to run a test. Using my mother-in-law’s name, I requested my records for my Air Force service from the same source. What I received from them was a surprise.

Let me point out here that I have, in my possession, literally, hundreds of documents from my military career. I have DD 214s from my service as an Army enlisted man, as a warrant officer, as a commissioned officer in the Air Force, and finally from my service in Iraq. I have copies of orders, I have commendations, I have OERs (one of which always brings a smile because it mentions that I had worked with the CIA, FBI and Special Forces). And, of course, I have the ID card supplied to retired members of the military that showed my rank at retirement. In other words, if there was nothing in St. Louis, I have backup documents.

What did I get back from St. Louis? A document so riddled with errors and mistakes, that it frightens me. Others who might request my records, to find out if I have been honest about my military service would have a field day. They could point to these errors as evidence that I have been less than candid.

This document, which says my branch of service was the Air Force (which would be correct for part of my career) also has my Army serial number on it. It gives my dates of service for the Air Force, that are actually my dates of service on active duty with the Army, my first service with the National Guard, and then the termination or discharge date which is the date I was commissioned in the Air Force. It notes my "Rank/Grade" as 1LT and provides nothing about any military education, shows that I have been awarded an Air Medal, a Good Conduct Medal, the National Defense Service Medal, the Vietnam Service Medal, the Republic of Vietnam Campagign (sic) Medal and oddly, the Air Force Small Arms Expert Marksmanship Ribbon.

Finally, they include a portion of what was known as the Form 2, which provides information on assignments and geographic locations... all of which related to my first active duty service... with the Army. It notes assignments as a helicopter pilot which means there should have been a note on the form showing that I had earned an Army Aviator’s Badge. It does, at least, confirm service in Vietnam and that I had been promoted to CW2, which means, at some point, I had been a warrant officer. I had not been commissioned until after the last date on this document.

I have tried to figure out how this got so messed up. I did request my Air Force service and this was what came back. It is a document that is useless in verifying anything. It tells me that the information supplied by the National Personnel Records Center, for verifying the claims of those who say they have military service are next to useless. Oh, it verifies my claims, but only part of them and then most of the information is inaccurate, twisted and warped.

I suspect part of the problem here is the Privacy Act of 1974 and today’s concerns with identity theft. What they are doing is designed to protect the individual, but what I don’t understand is how that information can be so twisted.

The moral of this little story is that we need to be careful as we move forward and make sure the facts are correct. We need to check other sources. For me, I found a picture of my flight school platoon on the Internet and there is a web site (a really nice one) that lists me as one of the pilots in the unit complete with a picture from 1969 and one from my service in Iraq (Standing under the Crossed Swords in downtown Baghdad). There are other ways to verify what I have said in the past, but the one source that everyone thought they could rely on turns out to be less than accurate.

MJ-12 is Bogus?

This is not the promised new information about MJ-12, but it is something that I came across not all that long ago, which is not to say that it wasn’t published several years ago. Nick Redfern, in his anti-alien Roswell book (he proposes a terrestrial explanation), noted that the FBI investigation hadn’t turned up any evidence for the authenticity of the MJ-12 documents.

Redfern quoted an FBI headquarters message that apparently was sent to the Dallas field office. It said, "The Office of Special Investigations, U.S. Air Force advised on November 30, 1988, that the document was fabricated. Copies of that document have been distributed to various parts of the United States. The document is completely bogus."

Apparently Redfern talked to a former OSI agent who told him there were no records found pertaining to MJ-12 or any investigation of the documents. Some seem to think that proves the documents were disinformation because there was no OSI investigation. The thinking goes if OSI had a hand in faking them, then, of course they wouldn’t have to investigate because they already knew the source.

Here’s what’s important here. The FBI investigated the documents and found them to be bogus. If there had been a hint of a security breach, if there had been any evidence that authentic classified documents had been leaked into the public arena, then the FBI would have followed up. The FBI would have been interested in finding the guilty parties and having them prosecuted... and, since this would be a matter of national security, those arrested could be tried without revealing the nature of the information that had been leaked.

Oh sure, we all would have been able to figure it out, but those responsible would have suffered consequences because if they didn’t, then others would feel safe leaking classified material... to the Russians (Soviets at the time), the Chinese, the Israelis, to our enemies and our friends. They might do it because of ideology or for money or just because their bosses had pissed them off. The point is, others would be encouraged to breach national security for whatever reason tripped their trigger.

The significance here is that the FBI did investigate and they reported that the documents are bogus. No one has uncovered a document that mentions MJ-12 that is from an official government agency (yes, I know about the Cutler-Twining memo and will deal with that later) or from anywhere else that validates the authenticity of MJ-12.

There has been absolutely no confirmation of the existence of MJ-12 in all the years that researchers have attempted to do that. All we have are a couple of documents without a provenance, that are riddled with the sorts of errors you wouldn’t expect in documents created at the highest level, and an official investigation that concluded they were bogus. Do we really need to go on?

Roswell UFO Crash Survey Results

Once again I’ll start by pointing out that this is not a scientific survey. The participants were self-selected and although should have voted only once, the mechanism to stop multiple votes is relatively simple to defeat.

The results were almost what I expected, except for the high number of votes to explain Roswell as an experimental aircraft and the two votes that suggested some kind of White Sands missile off course.

Those reading this blog, for the most part, accept the idea that some UFOs represent alien visitation, so I expected the large number of votes for Roswell being extraterrestrial. I also know that many skeptics visit and I expected many votes for the Mogul explanation.

What I don’t understand is why anyone would think that Roswell could be explained as an experimental aircraft. What could they possibly have been testing in 1947 that isn’t overwhelmed by our technology today? There is nothing that would have been classified and experimental in 1947 that isn’t superceded by the latest, 21st century, technologies. By 2010 standards, anything from 1947 would look primitive (unless, of course, it was extraterrestrial).

If this had been some kind of experimental craft, don’t you think the Air Force would have trotted it out in 1995 when they pretended to investigate the Roswell case? If the attempts to build an atomic engine for aircraft is well known today... even the plans to dump the atomic engine, if it began to fail, have been documented, then what could they be hiding? We know where they would have dropped it according to the information easily available through multiple sources.

In fact, some of the biggest mistakes made last century are now public record. For example, that the Air Force dropped an atomic bomb close to Albuquerque in the late 1950s is a matter was published in the newspapers. And no, the bomb didn’t detonate.

So, I don’t know what logic would suggest some sort of failed experimental aircraft. The same is true of missile launches. All of them are accounted for in the records of the White Sands Missile Range. Nothing is missing, and there certainly isn’t anything in the 1947 technology that isn’t replaced by much better equipment of today.

No, neither of those two answers make sense and I’m surprised at the numbers, though relatively small, who thought these would explain what had fallen at Roswell.

To me there are but two answers currently on the table that make sense. One of them, Project Mogul simply does not cover all the facts and the documentation to prove there was even a Mogul flight in the right time frame is somewhat ambiguous.

The other is, of course, the extraterrestrial, which does a better job of covering the facts... oh, I know, the skeptics will say that the government couldn’t keep a secret like this for more than 60 years, but really, they haven’t. I mean, we’re talking about it today and have been for the last forty or so years.

And all I am saying here is that the extraterrestrial doesn’t require us to overlook testimony and other evidence. It’s by no means perfect and a bit of physical evidence would be nice, but it does cover the facts better than Mogul.

So, the results here are not very surprising. They are in keeping with those who regularly visit this blog. In the long run, they provide us with little insight into the thinking around here and tell us nothing about the reasons for those thoughts. To understand that, we need to read the comments section. Maybe someone will tell us why he or she believed that experimental aircraft made sense. If not, then we’ll just have to keep guessing about that or move on to other issues.

UFOs and Stolen Valor

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

MJ-12 vs The Unholy Thirteen

I have said for a long time that I believe MJ-12 to be a hoax based on the research I have conducted, the evidence as offered by others, and the admissions and statements attributed to various participants in the research of it. I have also said that I believe that if the Roswell crash was extraterrestrial, we would expect the creation of some sort of committee to exploit the find. That just seems to follow naturally.

But, if not MJ-12, then what?

Brigadier General Arthur Exon, who was a lieutenant colonel at Wright Field in July 1947, and later, in the 1960s, was the base commander at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, told me of a committee he labeled "The Unholy Thirteen." This was, of course, just the name he used to describe this group of military officers and civilians at the Pentagon who seemed to control the UFO data that was outside the scope of Project Blue Book, the Air Technical Intelligence Center and most other projects.

I had assumed that Exon was talking about an oversight committee that had been created after the Roswell crash to deal with the debris. We know that some sort of committee was created at some time because, Ed Ruppelt (seen here), in his book, The Report on Unidentified Flying Objects, talked about it. He talked about the attitude of those in the Pentagon in July 1947, and suggested there was a great deal of concern about them at the top. He wrote that the security lid was down tight. "No one, outside a few high-ranking officers in the Pentagon knew what the people in the barbed-wire-enclosed Quonset huts that housed the Air Technical Intelligence Center were thinking or doing."

Which is not to say that this committee grew out of the Roswell crash, only that such a committee did exist in July 1947.

Exon told me that Truman knew something about UFOs and the implication was about Roswell as well, as did "General Spaatz (immediate right, the chief of the Army Air Forces), the Secretary of Defense (Forrestal, directly below) and other people who were close to them..." He suggested a few others, such as Stuart Symington (last on the right), at that time, the Undersecretary for War for Air, or the first civilian encountered in the military chain of command for the Army Air Forces was involved. He suggested that those at the highest levels in intelligence and the military were represented on this committee, whatever and wherever it might be.

Taking this a step farther, there are the reports of a project known as Moon Dust that was so highly classified that an Air Force officer felt that he could lie about it to a United States Senator. When the lie was exposed, another Air Force officer said that there was a project known as Moon Dust but it had never deployed. This too was a lie. State Department documents released under the Freedom of Information Act proved that Moon Dust had deployed on a number of occasions and that the project did involve UFO research, which again doesn’t take us to that committee created in 1947.

With the name Moon Dust compromised, the name was changed and remains classified to this day, according to information supplied to the late UFO researcher Robert Todd. What this tells us is that while the Air Force might have ended Project Blue Book, there was another investigation classified at a higher level that survived the closing of the "official" UFO investigation. And if this is true then there is no reason that something else, even more highly classified existed then and exists now.

Here’s what I know. There was a committee, as suggested by Ruppelt and Exon to control UFO information. It was housed in Washington, D.C. (okay, Arlington, VA, the location of the Pentagon) and it was made up of high-ranking officers and civilians. There was the public relations scam known as Blue Book but the true investigation was conducted at a higher level, survived the end of Blue Book, and continued on until the mid-1980s, when we lost track of it in the corridors of secrecy and the alleged national interest.

Was all this a result of the Roswell crash or was it the result of both public opinion and Congressional interest in the subject of flying saucers? Did those high-ranking individuals, whether military or civilian believe that something of importance could be learned by studying UFOs? Were they, and are they, responsible for the continued investigation of UFOs and the continued suppression of UFO information?

A committee existed and does exist and if Roswell was extraterrestrial, then such a committee would have been created if for no other reason than to exploit the find. Even ignoring the Roswell case, we know that such a committee existed in the late 1940s and into the 1950s because both Ruppelt and Exon told us it did. And, we know that one such committee existed beyond that when the information about Project Moon Dust was accidently revealed by the State Department.

Did the committee have a name?

Probably. It operated under a number of directives and organizations including Project Moon Dust and the 1127th Air Activities Group.

What was the name?

Other than Moon Dust, who knows for certain? The Unholy Thirteen, as it was called by Exon will do as well as any for now... but that wasn’t an official designation. Until we learn the name, we might as well use that.

Are they still in control of UFO information?

Probably... which explains that idiotic Air Force investigation of Roswell that was designed to confuse the issue... which it did. But it provided no answers for anyone who didn’t already believe that there are no UFOs and therefore no alien crash at Roswell. They provided an answer that was full of holes, was inadequate, but did allow them to slap a label on the case.

And MJ-12, which I don’t believe to have been an official disinformation project, has done much the same thing. We need to jettison MJ-12 and begin to search for answers in a different arena. Of course, in the UFO field, nothing is that simple and we’re stuck with MJ-12, just as we’re stuck with the contactees, crop circles, and cattle mutilations.