The 2010 MUFON Symposium

So, as many of you know, I was at the MUFON UFO Symposium in Denver recently and have to admit I had a good time. Most of those attending were serious researchers, investigators, writers, and interested parties who wished solid answers based on evidence rather than wild speculations based on imagination. I was disappointed when one retired military officer seemed to be an exception to this rule. He seemed to embrace everything without worrying about evidence, but he was in a very small minority.

The programing was exquisite. The first was Richard Dolan who talked about what would happen after the government disclosed UFOs were extraterrestrial craft. He preached gloom and doom and I tend to be more optimistic about it. Dolan, however, made a good case for the changes faced by society, especially if the disclosure came at a time when the alien craft were landing. I know that no technologically inferior society has ever survived contact with a superior technology. Even the introduction of the horse to the plains radically alter the Indian way of life.

I looked forward to the presentation by Linda Moulton Howe because it dealt with the Bentwaters UFO landing and she had brought John Burroughs (seen here) with her. I had met him years ago while I was in Phoenix at a UFO conference. We traveled together to do a early morning radio talk show and I gained some insight into the case. Howe has spent a great deal of time investigating this case and she presented some very interesting points, including one that seemed to remove a skeptical explanation from the mix... though I suspect few believed that the airman and officers were fooled by the spinning of a lighthouse beam that had always been there.

I also enjoyed the talk by Marc D’Antonio but only because he lets his personality loose while on the stage. His presentation was interesting as well as informative.

Stan Friedman was, well, Stan Friedman. Say what you will about him, he’s very good on the stage and he presents his information in a very entertaining way. He’s been at it for decades and the polish shows. John Greenewald had the hosting duties again and was as brilliant as ever. He takes the job seriously and tries to provide each speaker with a build up that will impress the audience. He’s a fine and entertaining speaker in his own right.

I had a chance, brief though it was, to talk with Nick Redfern (seen here), who is going to review my latest book. I couldn’t help but ask what he thought and was pleased to learn that he had enjoyed it... which, of course, doesn’t mean that he won’t have some criticism about it (and provides me an opportunity to another plug of Crash: When UFOs Fall from the Sky).

And I sat next to Frank Salisbury (seen here) in the vendor area, who was there with a couple of his books, including an interesting update on his The Utah UFO Display: A Scientist’s Report. I had first run into him many years ago at a UFO convention sponsored by APRO. He had this book with him then. I didn’t know that in the new, updated version, I would actually find my own name, but there it was, in a short discussion on the Roswell UFO case in the introduction.

I didn’t know what a funny guy he was either. We had a couple of nice chats about UFOs, computers, and stealing customers from one another... He would often point them toward me, and if I couldn’t sell something to someone, I’d point them back to Frank.

One thing I did notice was a preponderance of geezers, which, for a moment troubled me but then I had an epiphany. The problem wasn’t that the youngsters weren’t interested in UFOs, or that they didn’t care what we geezers had to say, but that they probably couldn’t afford the time or money to attend the symposium. In this shaky economy, the youngsters, just starting out, might not have had the disposable income for a rather expensive weekend in Denver, not to mention children at home and a work schedule that might intrude.

Which is not to say that there weren’t many younger people there. There certainly were and they were just as excited about the symposium as were we geezers.

If I had a complaint, it was only that the WiFi connections in the common areas, the lobby, the vendor area (seen here), the restaurants, was not as reliable as it could have been. Of course, it seemed that every time I managed to logon, someone would appear to ask a question or two. Before I could get back to the computer, the connection was lost.

Next year they have decided that the symposium will be held in Orange County, California. I’m sure it will be a fine venue and I’m sure they’ll have no trouble transferring the expertise from Denver to Orange County. It might be good to move the symposium around, as they have done in the past, but frankly, I’ll miss Denver. I grew up there and I like the chance to get back into the old stomping grounds again.

Roswell, Ron Regehr, and Me

At the most recent MUFON Symposium, I had a chance to talk with Ron Regehr (seen here), who, at one time was working with the late J. Bond Johnson. Now I had seen Regehr at other conferences, but I had never brought up Johnson and neither had Regehr. This time I asked some questions about this and got an interesting answer or two.

Johnson was the reporter/photographer from the Fort Worth Star–Telegram who had taken the pictures of Brigadier General Roger Ramey in his office with what was alleged to be the debris found outside of Roswell, New Mexico. Given the style of the pictures, it seemed that Johnson had taken six. Two of Roger Ramey, two of Ramey and his chief of staff Colonel Thomas DuBose (seen next) and two of Major Jesse Marcel (seen last). A seventh picture, of Warrant Officer Irving Newton was taken by someone else at a later time.

Johnson had, at one point, claimed that only he had been in Ramey’s office and only he had taken pictures. He seemed to be hung up on this and suggested that the picture of Newton didn’t count and that it hadn’t appeared in any newspapers. This would prove to be wrong, though Johnson seemed to have a difficult time understanding this.

Johnson told me, during our first interviews he was confused by the photograph of Marcel. He didn’t think he had taken it, yet the negative was in an envelop with a picture of Ramey. Many of us, including Johnson, concluded that he must have taken the pictures, but didn’t remember doing it.

Not so, Regehr told me. He said that photo analysis suggested the picture was taken with a different lens than those of Ramey and Ramey and DuBose. The difference in the lens size was so insignificant that it made no sense for Johnson to have switched lenses to photograph Marcel.

That meant a third photographer in the room at some point. Johnson was one, another who took two pictures of Marcel, and because the negatives ended up in the same envelop, that would suggest the photographer was from the Star–Telegram... though that makes little sense. They already had the pictures of Ramey and Ramey and DuBose so why send someone else out there to take two of Marcel.

And, of course, the picture of Irving Newton, which is so different from all the others it is obviously from a different photographer and a different camera.

What does this bit of minutia mean? Well, we have, in the past, come across information that suggested that the material on the floor in Ramey’s office got there before Marcel arrived with the stuff from Roswell. Johnson said that he was the first photographer out there and I have no reason to discount that.

So, Johnson took four pictures of the stuff and went back to the newspaper. Marcel arrived and someone else took pictures of him with the stuff, which were printed all over the next day. Later, Newton arrived, identified the weather balloon... after the Dallas Morning News had talked to Major Kirton who said it was a weather balloon, and someone took his picture.

But the point here is that Regehr said that his analysis of the pictures of Marcel showed that there was a third photographer who has never been identified. Interestingly, Regehr told me that Johnson, once he had seen the math, believed Regehr.

I confess I don’t know if this is an important addition to the Roswell story, but it certainly is an interesting one. It suggests a time frame for the photographs in Ramey’s office, and coupled to other information, suggests the balloon arrived before Marcel, which might be the most important outgrowth of this. A suggestion of duplicity by the Army Air Forces, but one that remains, at the moment, speculation.

Del Rio UFO Crash and MJ-12

There is a flaw in the Eisenhower Briefing Document (EBD) that has gone unnoticed since the MJ-12 controversy first erupted more than two decades ago. It is one that gives us a time frame for the thinking in the early 1980s and tells us that the document is a hoax. It goes beyond the misspellings, beyond the grammatical errors and beyond the flawed history. It tells us that the document is not authentic and even points a finger at one of those who might have had a hand in creating it... and no, it wasn’t the US government, the Air Force Office of Special Investigation (AFOSI) or any other official agency.

First, however, one question that has not been answered. If the document is authentic and if there were UFO crashes on the Plains of San Agustin and at Aztec, New Mexico, why is there no mention of either event in this briefing? It covers the Roswell crash and references one near Del Rio, Texas. It would seem that if a briefing was prepared to advise the President-elect, in this case Dwight Eisenhower, it would cover everything on the subject. That those two events were left out seem to indicate some kind of fraud somewhere.

That, however, is not the main point in this discussion. What I’m looking at is the case from Del Rio, Texas, as reported in the EBD. It said, "On 06 December, 1950, (sic) a second object, probably of similar origin, impacted the earth at high speed in the El-Indio – Guerrero area of the Texas – Mexican boder [sic] after following a long trajectory through the atmosphere. By the time a search team arrived, what remained of the object had been almost totally (sic) incinerated. Such material as could be recovered was transported to the A.E.C. facility at Sandia, New Mexico, for study."

The only report I know of that talks of a crash in December 1950 and on the Texas – Mexican border came from a man who said that he was a retired Air Force colonel. He originally told the story, in the late 1960s, to a reporter in Pennsylvania who was asking Civil Air Patrol (CAP) pilots about UFO sightings. Robert B. Willingham (seen here in his "Air Force" uniform) said that he had seen something fall close to the border. That story was sent on to the National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomena (NICAP) in Washington, D.C., where it sat unnoticed for more than a decade. I now wonder if those making the original report about the story might have gotten the organization wrong. This will become clear later.

W. Todd Zechel, a researcher of mediocre ability, found the story and tracked down Willingham. He got an affidavit from Willingham, signed in 1977, giving additional the details of the crash. At the same time, Zechel was talking to William Moore about the case, hoping to write a book about it.

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

According to the work done by Len Stringfield, the original crash story was of an event in 1948, but it was after Zechel entered the case that the date shifted to December 6, 1950. The best evidence was the affidavit signed by Willingham, who was the witness and who, as a retired, high-ranking officer, gave credibility to the report.

But it seems that no one had bothered to check Willingham’s military record. I asked a number of people about it and they all assumed that Zechel had done so. I saw nothing to verify this, so I attempted to do it.

Robert B. Willingham, according to the Air Force Records Center in St. Louis, entered the Army in December 1945 (which technically makes him a veteran of World War II) and left the Army as an E-4 in January 1947. That is all the military service that I have been able to verify and we all now know how accurate that information is (see National Personnel Records Center and UFO Witnesses from February 6, 2010).

I did learn that he had a long association with the Civil Air Patrol and I have seen a plaque given to Lieutenant Colonel Robert Willingham for his years of service to the CAP. It is dated 1948 to 1973 and was from the Pennsylvania Wing, meaning he was in Pennsylvania at that time, which is in conflict for some of his claims of lengthy military service.

For those who don’t know, the CAP is an official auxiliary of the Air Force, but the members are all volunteers who have no real standing in the Air Force. Twenty years of service to the CAP doesn’t qualify one for a retirement pension from the military. Those who serve perform a valuable service in search and rescue and during times of local emergency. They just aren’t Air Force officers even though they wear modified Air Force uniforms and are addressed by military rank.

And if all that is true, then Willingham’s story, of seeing a UFO crash falls apart because he wasn’t an Air Force fighter pilot as he claimed, is not a retired military officer as he claimed, and wouldn’t have been in a position to see what he claimed to have seen when he claimed to have seen it.

But even if Willingham was less than candid about his military service, he now claims that the crash didn’t take place in 1950. That had been Zechel’s influence. According to Willingham he had seen the crash in 1954, or 1955, or maybe in 1957. He is no longer sure of the date. He only knows that it wasn’t in 1950... and even if Willingham is telling the truth now, it suggests that the information about Del Rio as it appears in the EBD is inaccurate which undermines the validity of MJ-12.

Of course, nothing is that simple in the world of the UFO. I had searched for the original article because I wanted to know what it said, in relation to what the 1977 affidavit implied and what Willingham has said over the last five or six years. While I have been unable to locate the newspaper article, I have found the next best thing.

In the February/March 1968 issue of Skylook, once the official publication of MUFON, I found a single paragraph that causes even more trouble for the Del Rio crash, and tells us something more about Robert B. Willingham. That article said:

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

So, let’s connect the dots. We know that Willingham told his story to a reporter in the late 1960s and that article may have gone to NICAP but certainly found its way to MUFON. Zechel allegedly discovered the article in the NICAP files and tracked down Willingham who confirmed what he had said and even signed an affidavit about it in 1977. Zechel, in communication with Bill Moore, told him about the Del Rio crash and provided details, which is verified, to an extent by the paragraph in The Roswell Incident. Bill Moore’s friend, Jaime Shandera received, in the mail, the film on which, when developed, he and Moore found the EBD. That document contains the information about Del Rio that we all now know is inaccurate, to put it kindly.

Now, if there was no Del Rio crash, then there is no reason for it to be mentioned in the EBD... and if it is, then the document must be a fake. Even if you accept the last dates provided by Willingham, the crash happened years after the document was written and couldn’t have been included unless the writer was clairvoyant or wrote the document sometime after 1952.

There is no other evidence of a crash at Del Rio. There are no hints in other documents, no other witnesses contrary to Willingham’s claims, and nothing to support the idea. Eliminate it completely, and the EBD falls with it. Change the dates because of what Willingham has said and the EBD fails again. This might be the final proof that the document is a fake... especially when all the other evidence is added in. This should put the whole thing to rest (though I now expect the vilification to begin).

Maury Island UFO Crash

It seems that the Maury Island hoax has reared its ugly head once again in an article in which the author proclaims that it is a... HOAX. And this is news?

Captain Ed Ruppelt called Maury Island the dirtiest hoax in UFO history in his 1956 book. Jerry Clark, in the first version of his massive UFO encyclopedia refers to the Maury Island hoax. I call is a hoax in my latest book, Crash: When UFO’s Fall from the Sky (yet another shameless plug).

Here is what I said about Maury Island, in the book, which was officially published on May 20, which is prior to the posting of the lastest Maury Island is a hoax story.

Kenneth Arnold’s "flying saucer"sighting of June 24, 1947, when he learned of it, excited the editor of a science fiction magazine, Ray Palmer. Palmer had taken a science fiction magazine on the verge of folding and turned it into one with wide circulation in a matter of months. One of the stories, or more accurately, a series of stories, were the tales of Richard Shaver that Palmer hinted were true and that he credited with the amazing turn around of the magazine. Shaver, in his rambling style, told of an underworld accessed through deep caves, of a war between the Deros and Teros, two "robot" societies, one good and one bad and of their impact on the human race. Almost all that impact was bad in our world could be traced to the evil robots. By coincidence, the June 1947 issue of Amazing Stories was filled with more of Shaver’s tales.

Palmer had suggested as he published the stories, that these underground entities, good and bad, did leave their caves occasionally, and when the flying saucers first appeared in over Washington state in June 1947, Palmer was convinced that this was the proof of the reality of Shaver’s tales. In fact, in an editorial published in October 1947, Palmer excitedly wrote, "A part of the now world-famous Shaver Mystery has now been proved!"

When the Arnold story broke in the national press, Palmer saw the opportunity to publicize his case and by doing that, validate the Shaver mystery. Palmer, as did so many other times, wrote to Arnold, asking that he, Arnold, prepare a report for the magazine. Arnold didn’t want to do that but did send Palmer a copy of the report that he had written for the Army Air Forces.

In a few days, Palmer wrote again, this time telling Arnold that he, Palmer, had a letter from a harbor patrol officer telling of a flying saucer sighting three days before Arnold had seen anything. Palmer asked if Arnold would investigate and Palmer would pay him $200, which, in 1947, was quite a bit of money.

The story, as it was told by Palmer and later by the harbor patrolmen, was that Harold Dahl, his teenaged son and two other harbor patrolmen sighted six doughnut-shaped objects in the sky near them. Five of the craft seemed to be circling the sixth which was in trouble. As that object passed overhead, no more than 500 feet above them, it started "spewing a white type of very light weight metal," and some kind of "dark type metal which looked similar to lava rock." That injured Dahl’s son and killed the dog. When the object stopped dropping the metal, it took off but not before Dahl took some pictures of it.

In another, slightly different version of the story, the sixth object landed, or crashed, on Maury Island in Puget Sound and disintegrated, leaving behind some strange debris or some kind of residue. Dahl collected some of this material and then returned to Tacoma, Washington.

Now things get a little more confused. According to what Dahl told Arnold, he hadn’t said a word to anyone about the damaged object but the next day a dark-suited stranger who seemed to know everything about the sighting appeared to warn Dahl not to talk about it. But Dahl ignored this warning and told his "supervisor" Fred Crisman about it. Crisman then went out to the beach and found some more of the metallic debris, or so he said. He collected his own samples, which, when you think about it, makes Crisman almost as important as Dahl to the story.

Having interviewed Dahl, or rather talked to him, Arnold and Dahl then headed to Crisman’s home to interview him. Crisman showed Arnold the debris that he had recovered but Arnold was unimpressed. He recognized it as lava and began to suspect the story being told was a hoax.

Even with his suspicions aroused, Arnold wasn’t sure what he should do. He called Captain E. J. Smith, a United Airlines pilot who, along with his crew and passengers, had seen several disk-shaped objects during a flight on the July 4, 1947 weekend. Arnold, as a private pilot, had respect for Smith, an airline pilot, and Smith joined Arnold in Tacoma to assist in the investigation. For those interested in such things, Arnold had Room 502 in the Winthrop Hotel.

The next day Crisman and Dahl visited Arnold at the hotel. Crisman now added a new detail. He told Arnold that when he had gone to the beach, he’d seen one of the doughnut-shaped flying saucers that seemed to be searching the bay for something. Crisman, who hadn’t been on the boat when the six objects had been seen, now dominated the conversation, as if he knew everything about the situation.

Arnold was less than impressed with all this and ordered breakfast in his hotel room. There wasn’t much talk as Arnold ate and read some of the newspaper clippings he had brought with him. Later Arnold would tell others that one story caught his attention. Flying saucers over Mountain Home, Idaho had dropped or expelled cinder or lava ash. Here, suddenly, was another, independent report about a craft, or several craft, dropping the same kind of material that Dahl and then Crisman had talked about.

Sometime in the night, Arnold received a call from Ted Morello, a reporter for the United Press, and who seemed to know everything that had happened in Arnold’s room during his discussions with Dahl and Crisman. Fearing the room was bugged, Arnold and Smith began looking for hidden microphones. They found nothing.

The next morning, at the hotel, but downstairs, Dahl and Crisman introduced Arnold to a couple of tough-looking men who were supposed to be the crew who had also seen the object. Arnold didn’t question them but did study some of the debris that Dahl and Crisman had brought with them. Arnold thought it looked more like aluminum such as that used in large military aircraft rather than something from another world.

That wasn’t all. Dahl, or Crisman, also suggested that photographs of the objects had been taken. Crisman had the film, he said, which had been given to him by Dahl. Once they saw the film, everyone would know the truth. Pictures wouldn’t lie. Well, in 1947, it was believed that pictures wouldn’t lie.

Arnold didn’t know what to do at this point. There was physical evidence and there were photographs, but the story told by the men seemed to have holes in it. During the Army Air Forces investigation of his sighting, Arnold had been interviewed by an officer from the Fourth Air Force, Lieutenant Frank Brown. Arnold decided to call him and let him take a turn at trying to figure all this out.

Ed Ruppelt, one time chief of Project Blue Book, the Air Force study of UFOs, put it this way, "For the Air Force the story started on July 31, 1947, when Lieutenant Frank Brown, an intelligence agent at Hamilton AFB, California, received a long-distance phone call. The caller was a man whom I’ll call Simpson [which, of course we all know was Arnold, Ruppelt changed the name because of privacy considerations] who had met Brown when Brown investigated an earlier UFO sighting... He [Arnold] had just talked to two Tacoma Harbor patrolmen. One of them had seen six UFOs hover over his patrol boat and spew out chunks of odd metal."

Brown left California with another officer, Captain William Davidson and they met with Arnold at his hotel in Tacoma. Arnold showed the two officers the fragments and both apparently recognized it as worthless slag which probably hadn’t come from a flying saucer and lost interest. Neither told Arnold this, apparently not wanting to embarrass him. Ruppelt later wrote, "Simpson [Arnold] and his airline pilot friend [Smith] weren’t told about the hoax for one reason. As soon as it was discovered that they had been ‘taken,’ thoroughly, and were not a party to the hoax, no one wanted to embarrass them."

Davidson and Brown, claiming they had to return their aircraft to California went back to McChord airfield where their B-25 was parked. They spoke, briefly, with the intelligence officer there, Major George Sander, telling him that they believed Dahl and Crisman had made up the tale.

Not long after take-off, the engine on the left wing caught fire and though the two passengers, the crew chief Woodrow D. Matthews and a "hitchhiker" identified as Sergeant Elmer L. Taff, bailed out safety, the wing burned off and smashed into the tail. The aircraft spun out of control and neither of the pilots, Brown nor Davidson got out. They were killed in the crash.

The story had suddenly turned deadly. The Army Air Forces, or maybe more appropriately, the FBI, investigated and learned that contrary to published reports, there was no sabotage of the aircraft and no one had shot it down. It was a tragic accident that seemed to focus more attention on the UFO sighting than it warranted.

Ruppelt in his 1957 book, The Report on Unidentified Flying Objects, wrote, "Both - (the two harbor patrolmen, Dahl and Crisman] admitted that the rock fragments had nothing to do with flying saucers. The whole thing was a hoax. They had sent in the rock fragments to [Ray Palmer] stating that they could have been part of a flying saucer. He had said the rock came from a flying saucer because that’s what [Palmer] wanted him to say."

The Army Air Forces, then, found a solution to the case and although two men had been killed investigating it, that had nothing to do with the UFO sighting. The men were not prosecuted for inventing the story.

According to Jerome Clark, Arnold apparently never learned the truth about Maury Island. As late as 1977, Arnold was still talking about the case. He also used it in an article he did write for the first issue of Fate and in his book, written with Palmer called The Coming of the Saucers.

But there was another problem, as laid out in the Project Blue Book files about the case and in the FBI document that is a part of the file. The mystery caller, who had been telling reporters everything that went on in Arnold’s room, was able to substantiate part of the tale. The first wire stories of the crash didn’t mention the names of the officers killed, but the mystery caller knew them anyway. He suggested that the aircraft was shot down, by 20 mm cannon, and that was because it carried some of the fragments picked up in the Maury Island area. He suggested that if he had the names of the officers killed right, then they could believe that the rest of his information was also correct.

It turned out that the mystery caller had the right names and the Tacoma Times, and a few other newspapers including one in Chicago, carried the story that the B-25 had been shot down. Ted Lantz, one of the reporters learned that both men had been intelligence officers. With that story out, the Army Air Forces, among other agencies now had to find the truth.

But the story turns again. The mystery caller turned out to be one of the two harbor patrolmen, so of course, he knew what had gone in Arnold’s room, knew the names of the pilots killed because he had met them, and, of course, with that information verified, the newspapers printed the rest of his information.

Then, as so often happens, there was still another twist. Fred Crisman, it seems, and according to John Keel, among others, had written a letter to the editor of Amazing, Ray Palmer, in 1946. He warned Palmer about continuing the story of Deros and Teros because he knew it was all true. He had seen them in the caves of Asia while he had been assigned to the Second Air Commando, an aviation unit designed to use special tactics against the Japanese in the China-Burma-India Theater. He wrote:

Sirs:

I flew my last combat mission on May 26 [1945] when I was shot up over Bassein and ditched my ship in Ramaree roads off Chedubs Island. I was missing five days. I requested leave at Kashmere (sic). I and Capt. (deleted by request) left Srinagar and went to Rudok then through the Khese pass to the northern foothills of the Karakoram. We found what we were looking for. We knew what we were searching for.

For heaven's sake, drop the whole thing! You are playing with dynamite. My companion and I fought our way out of a cave with submachine guns. I have two 9" scars on my left arm that came from wounds given me in the cave when I was 50 feet from a moving object of any kind and in perfect silence. The muscles were nearly ripped out. How? I don't know. My friend has a hole the size of a dime in his right bicep. It was seared inside. How we don't know. But we both believe we know more about the Shaver Mystery than any other pair. You can imagine my fright when I picked up my first copy of Amazing Stories and see you splashing words about the subject.

What surprised me here is that Crisman knew about the Second Air Commando, which did serve in CBI Theater, and the place names all have the ring of authenticity. Of course for a con to work, there must be some elements of truth in it and these little nuggets put Crisman into the right place at the right time to tell his otherwise outrageous story. Besides, Palmer now had another man telling "eyewitness" stories of the Deros and the Teros.

Palmer kept that mystery alive as long as he could, but the Army was more than annoyed about the deaths of two officers for what seemed to be nothing more than a magazine article and some science fiction stories. The investigation, that included the FBI, resulted in both Crisman and Dahl saying that it had been a hoax that had gotten out of hand. They had never meant it to be taken nearly as seriously as it was.

In fact, Crisman tried to blame Palmer, saying he only told Palmer what Palmer wanted to hear. But it was Crisman who contacted Palmer with his story of debris from a flying saucer and while it might be suggested that Palmer ignored the shaky nature of the information and evidence, it was Crisman who was there pushing his own agenda. Palmer knew Crisman from his earlier letter, which was published without a name attached. Palmer would later admit that Crisman was the author.

The military investigation, or rather the documents in the Project Blue Book files suggest that neither Dahl nor Crisman were harbor patrolmen, but owned a salvage boat which they used to patrol Puget Sound for anything they could find. Ruppelt suggested they had a couple of beat up old boats they used in their salvage work.

Others who investigated privately later said that the characterization of the boats was unfair. They didn’t have a couple of boats, they had a single boat known as the North Queen which was only five years old and had been renovated not long before the sighting.

Palmer, of course, was not going to allow Ruppelt or the Air Force destroy a good story. He claimed that Crisman wanted investigators to believe the story was a hoax. Crisman suggested that the Maury Island case could not be separated from the Shaver mystery and that flying saucers didn’t come from outer space but from the inner Earth. Maury Island proved that, at least in Crisman’s mind and if Palmer didn’t believe it, he sure wanted to promote it. The Shaver mystery had boosted the sales of his magazine by tens of thousands.

The metallic debris, that everyone had been so concerned about, was identified as slag and suggested it bore a resemblance to similar material from a smelter near Tacoma. Although some suggested the slag had been radioactive, there is nothing in the FBI report to confirm this.

But to show that some things just can’t be simple, Crisman pops up on the radar in the late 1960s as New Orleans district attorney Jim Garrison began to investigate Clay Shaw and his relation to the Kennedy assassination. Crisman became one of the minor players when it was claimed that he was one of the three hobos seen in the railroad yards not long after the fatal shots had been fired. Crisman was in the photograph of the hobos that has become part of the assassination legend.

So now we have moved from the possible crash of an alien spacecraft, to the possible crash of a craft from the inner Earth, to a story of a disabled craft that dumped metallic debris and maybe disintegrated, to the Kennedy assassination. But in all that, we have seen no evidence of anything extraordinary. There are only the tales told by Dahl and Crisman and even those are undercut by retractions of the two men. They both told investigators that the story had started as a joke and that it had gotten out of hand.

Dahl’s son, Charles, located years after the event, said that it had never happened. Of Crisman, Charles Dahl said he was a smooth-talking conman and that the Maury Island incident was a hoax.

It should be noted that no material with anything unusual about it has ever surfaced, though Crisman had suggested in the 1960s he still had some of it. The photographs were supposedly taken by the military, through no one ever saw them and in the 1960s, Crisman suggested that he had made duplicate negatives so that the military had not gotten them all, but, of course the pictures never surfaced.

Finally, in Crisman’s obituary, they mentioned his military service and suggested that he had received the Distinguished Service Cross. No record to support this has been found and it is easy to check these things online these days. It’s probably only fair to note that nothing suggests Crisman made the claim. It surfaced after he died.

Project Blue Book UFO Case #1313

I have, in the past, received a number of emails about Project Blue Book case #1313. For those who don’t know, there is a long index of all the Project Blue Book cases, beginning with #1 (which is not the Kenneth Arnold sighting, but one labeled as "Summer 47 – 48, a partially blacked out location and then a note that says it is a File ((INFO) meaning they didn’t investigate) to #12,750 (which is a civilian case from Dec 1969 and was labeled as insufficient data).

The case that has reached some level of fame is #1313 from June 20, 1952 in Korea reported by Marine Corps pilots. I received a couple of emails about it but there wasn’t much information in those emails and frankly, I was busy with various projects including finishing my last tour with the National Guard. But the last couple of emails intrigued me, so I thought that I would look it up.

According to the information I found, case #1313 was a report from two operations NCOs who saw a glowing object about four feet in diameter. It was from Korea and was labeled as "unidentified." Not too impressive and it didn’t involve any Marine pilots as those emails had suggested.

I was confused by that. I checked the cases on either side but found nothing. I did find a comprehensive database that listed all the Project Blue Book unidentified sightings and on it, case #1313 said, "June 20, 1952. Central Korea. 3:03 P.M. 4 USMC Capts. and pilots of F4U-4B Corsair fighters with 7302nd Sqd saw a 10 –20 ft. white or silver oval object make a left-hand orbit at terrific speed."

That is not what I had found. So, I searched a little deeper and found case #1323, also unidentified and also from Korea. This was the one that was the subject of the emails. Sometime right after the Project Blue Book files were declassified, someone confused the two Korea entries and labeled the second as #1313 rather than #1323.

Here then, is the story, as told by Captain Bob Foster, who, tragically was killed in action the next day. In his statement, he said:

At 1415/I I took off from K–6 [airfield designation], Korea with five F4U-4B’s on a prebriefed flight to work a Close Air Support flight with the First Marine Division. We reported in to Shirley, Bromide, Dentist, Anaconda, Devastate Baker and Childhood 14, our TAC(A) [which would be the control for the Close Air Support mission]. We were directed to our target by our TAC(A) and we were in a left orbit over the target at CT091129 [grid coordinates]. At 1503/I I observed a white or silver object below me on a north course. At the time I was on an east heading observing the object down at 2 o’clock passing below and in front of me. The object was coming from friendly area. I thought at first it was a shell but observed that it was in a left turn and not in the shape of an artillery shell. This object made a 630 degree turn and was in sight at all time. It made a approximately a 4 mile circle and retired to the east toward friendly lines. At 1504/I I notified my flight when the object was over the target and 4 of 5 saw it over the target. I estimate object was 10' to 20' in diameter. Bomb craters on the ground were about 3 or 4 times as large as the object and I later estimated the bomb craters to be 40' to 50' in diameter. It circled our target area and retired east. I started a dive on the object and at an indicated speed of 250 knots at 4000 feet the object went out of sight still low on the ground (below 1000') estimated speed 1000 MPH or 4 times mine. I pulled back into flight and we continued our Close Air Support flight. This is my first sighting of such an object.

The other pilots who saw the object gave statements, but none were as detailed as that of Foster. These included Captain Richard Francisco, Captain T. L. Pittman, and Captain Ronnie A. McDonald.

That evening, Foster wrote home and told his family about the UFO sighting. He wrote the same thing he did in the report that went to Blue Book, adding that his other pilot, who hadn’t seen the object right away, saw it later. He didn’t know if there were any ground sightings. He also mentioned that there had been a lot of flying saucer sightings in the area, which is interesting.

If nothing else, I have been able to correct a minor mistake in this case. It really matters little if it was #1313 or #1323. Both are unidentified, both took place in Korea, both out of the same field and both by military personnel. There are no other important details in the cases. Just a little bit of history that needed to be told.

The Alien Autopsy Poll

This poll, unscientific though it is, certainly opened my eyes and made me ask, "Are 78 of you crazy?"

Here is a case in which nearly everyone involved has admitted to making it up. Ray Santilli told us all, years ago, the tent footage was faked. We have people who were involved in all levels of this thing coming forward to tell of their roles in creating the various footage. Why, they even explained how that English word, "video" ended up on a rather crude I-beam that was supposed to have come from a wrecked flying saucer.

And 78 of you still think that some or all of the autopsy footage is real. What will it take to convince you otherwise?

Almost every UFO researcher or investigator who has expressed any opinion on this said that it was a hoax. There are so many red flags flying over the case that it looks like a May Day parade in Moscow. The story has changed so often that you need a scorecard to keep up. If there were any more twists in this tale, it would look like a deformed pretzel.

And 78 of you still think there is something real here?

I thought this one would be a slam dunk for rational thought. I believed that there were be a couple of people who wanted to hang onto the belief there was something of value in the autopsy footage... but 13% of the respondents in the poll?

Well, the results showed that 39 people (7%) thought it was real. Ten people (1%) thought it was mostly real. Twenty-nine people (5%) thought it was partially real. Thank goodness for the 466 (85%) who said that it was a hoax.

I mean, how much evidence do you believers in this require? Admissions don’t seem to be enough. Evidence of fakery isn’t enough. Photographs of the process of creating the hoax don’t do it. Just what do you require?

I will note here, quickly, that there are some other great UFO hoaxes that have yet to be wiped from the field. Admitted hoaxes that don’t seem to convince the diehards. Carlos Allende said he made up the Allende Letters, but there are those who won’t listen. Frank Kaufmann was exposed when his real documents were found but there are those who think he was a disinformation agent. Gerald Anderson admitted to creating a fake telephone bill, was caught with other forged documents, and people still believe his nonsense.

Anyway, those are the results of the poll. I am stunned that so many still believe in this autopsy nonsense, but then, there is no convincing some, regardless of the facts.

Nazi UFOs and Roswell

Oh, this is really fair. The book (Roswell and the Reich by Joseph P. Farrell) came out in March and I hadn’t heard about it until either Gene Steinberg or Paul Kimball asked about it on the Paracast show in May. I said I hadn’t read it but I was bothered by the Nazi aspect. It seemed logical to me that had the Nazis been able to develop something like that the war would have ended differently. And I just don’t see this great secret Nazi network hidden in South America that can control such things... Yes, I know of Odessa and I knew that many of the Nazis fled to South America, but they weren’t developing flying saucers.

First we have to put up with the Air Force and their recapitulation of the weather balloon, now in the guise of Mogul. Then we have to put up with the anthropomorphic dummies dropped a decade later. Then Nick Redfern tells us of deformed Japanese and Unit 731. Next is Jim Carrion at the MUFON Symposium talking about Project Seal and secret weapons. And now we have Nazi UFOs and I’m the bad guy because I hadn’t heard of this book back in May.

Well, now I’ve looked at it and I find it flawed.

"Why?" you ask.

The reliance of the nonsense spouted by Kal Korff, if for no other reason. Korff never heard an anti-Roswell theory he didn’t like and if he had to misinterpret information, it didn’t matter. He said, for example, there were no black (African-American) sergeants at Roswell. He knew because he asked some unidentified Pentagon historian who told him the military was segregated in 1947. Apparently Korff didn’t know that this meant that African-American soldiers were in their own units and at Roswell this was Squadron S. According to the Yearbook produced in 1947 by Walter Haut in Roswell, there were at least 24 black sergeants at the base.

Korff dismisses and then Farrell dismisses (in his Roswell and the Reich) the Beverly Bean testimony for no legitimate reason. Korff complained that we had not been fair in our assessment of the Melvin Brown body story as related by Bean. Farrell quotes Korff, but doesn’t bother to analyze the validity of what Korff had written.

Let’s examine this one bit of nonsense that Farrell finds so important.

Korff in his poorly researched book which Farrell quotes, accuses us, meaning Don Schmitt and me of "journalistic license" and suggests that a more honest way to convey Brown’s testimony would have been to have written, "According to Beverly Bean, Brown’s daughter, he said..."

What Korff objects to is that in describing the Brown information, we had written that Brown had seen the bodies and that he had been involved in escorting two or three of them back to the base. Korff thought this unfair because in our time line of events, and in our description of the events early in the book, we hadn’t mentioned, specifically, that this information came from Bean rather than Brown. But this is an invalid criticism because the footnotes make it clear how the information was obtained. Korff is criticizing me for using a footnote, which is a proper thing to have done and Farrell seems oblivious to this fact, not mentioning it.

On page 96 of UFO Crash at Roswell, we do explain exactly how the information was obtained. The reader knows that the information came from Brown through Bean... and they know who was present at the interview and that it was videotaped... Something that both Korff and Farrell ignore.

On page 82 of The Truth about the UFO Crash at Roswell, we again mention Brown and write, "Melvin E. Brown, a sergeant with the 509th , told family members that..." Which, of course, means that we have been fair with our treatment of the Brown testimony. Korff should know this because all of this information was published prior to the publication of his book, but he choose to ignore it.

I can say Korff deceives the public by writing in his highly misleading book, "Finally as the pro-UFO Roswell researchers will admit when pressed, Beverly Bean is the only person in the Brown family who has made these claims about her father. Bean’s sister and her own mother have never confirmed the account."

This is, of course, not true and since Korff referenced the 1991 interview conducted with the Brown family, he should have known that both her sister and her mother confirmed the account on video tape. So, Korff rather than writing, "In 1991, both Bean’s sister and mother who had failed to corroborate the story earlier, are now on the record..." Korff chose to conceal this evidence from his readers.

Farrell dismissed the Brown story because of the misinformation published by Korff. Had he bothered to follow through, or had he bothered to ask me, I could have supplied the proper information.

And what makes all this so funny is that Korff, at one point in his book, chastises Don and me for talking about weather casters who were able to identify the rawin target and balloon from the photographs in Ramey’s office. We don’t say who they were, and I’m not sure that it mattered. We were suggesting that anyone could take the pictures to virtually any weather caster and have them attempt to identify the items in the picture. The irony here will become clear later.

Farrell, in his book, again quotes Korff and the Lydia Sleppy story of having her teletype interrupted. Korff knew it was untrue because he checked with the FBI and according to him, they didn’t do it, though Sleppy, in later interviews said they did.

Two questions spring to mind. Why should be believe the FBI on this point? It wasn’t has if they hadn’t been spying on Americans for a long time and it wouldn’t have been difficult for them to tap into the main AP lines at the AP headquarters if they wanted... though I don’t believe this to be the case.

And second, why should we believe Korff on this? He said he checked with the various offices, but provides nothing in the way of documentation for it. He notes in his book, "Kal K. Korff, personal phone conversation with representatives of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Washington, D.C., and Dallas, Texas, August 1, 1996, through October 15, 1996."

One hell of a bit of documentation. Not a name of who he talked to, not a letter to prove that he had contacted them. Just his bold statement that he had and the FBI denied that they had been running any sort of an operation.

As noted earlier Korff, in his footnotes, also failed to name the Pentagon historian who told him that the military had been segregated in 1947 so no one can check on the validity of his claims. And he had the guts to accuse us of failing to provide names on a point that was more of a side note than an important revelation. Korff, of course, does the opposite by not supplying the names of those who he claims provided him with important information.

Farrell makes another, somewhat similar mistake in discussing the Gerald Anderson story. He wrote that Anderson and I had a falling out sometime during or just after that first interview. But the truth of the matter is, there was no bad blood between us until Stan Friedman interviewed Anderson. During that interview, you hear Friedman tell Anderson not to talk to me, that I’m strange because I write Romances (which is not true... that is, I don’t write Romances but I might be considered strange by some) and that he, Anderson, should only talk to him, Friedman. At that point Anderson would no longer talk to me.

In fact, if you listen to my tape of the interview with Anderson, as noted by John Carpenter in the MUFON Journal (March 1993, No. 299, page 7), you’ll find out that such is not the case. Carpenter wrote, "I finally was able to learn that Gerald had indeed had a friendly 54-minute phone call just as Randle had claimed". So the conclusions drawn by Farrell on this were incorrect and the documentation was out there for him to find.

I always believed that when I’m looking at the writing of someone else I need to make sure that the facts, as presented, are accurate. It took me nearly a year to find the first mention of the Del Rio crash by Robert Willingham so that I could compare it to his later statements. I mean, I want to be sure that the writer actually checked the information for himself and that it is accurate. Farrell apparently didn’t do that.

I only bring all this up because I had been criticized for not reading Farrell’s book even though I hadn’t known of its existence until mentioned on the Paracast. I have read where the research in the book is the best of any that has been done by we UFO investigators, though I wonder how you get around the fact that it seems that Farrell has only reviewed the literature, whether other books, articles or documents. Apparently he did not conduct many personal interviews and did nothing to verify the information in his book.

No, I really shouldn’t be ragging on Farrell this much because it is his fans who have gone off the deep end. My point was that he relied too much on the nonsense spewed by Korff and that he didn’t fact-check what Korff had written.

I think too often that those who haven’t written a book or dealt with a publisher assume that they do fact-checking. Mostly, what publishers do is check to make sure that something won’t get them sued, but the data in a book is not fact-checked. That’s how Korff was able to confuse witness testimony, make claims that weren’t true, and actually have a few people believe what he wrote. Farrell assumed that there was some good there but didn’t check it out.

Yes, I know that Farrell will probably look at this criticism (if he even sees it) and think about it. Korff will launch into another diatribe, threaten lawsuits, threaten more audits of the facts by financial institutions and make up more facts to support himself. He will stamp his foot, insist that we call him "colonel" because of his employment by some mythical organization and continue to slander others. But he won’t offer anything to validate his claims.

Sometimes you just have to risk the wrath of the unwashed to make an important point.

UFOs, Youngsters and Geezers

There has been another call for we geezers to retire from the UFO field so that the younger, more energetic, more enlightened, and better equipped to investigate can move to the front. I say, speaking from my position as a geezer, "Nonsense."

This idea that the youth will be able to move forward without we rearward looking geezers in the way doesn’t float... not just because they’re young and not just because they’re more enlightened but because we’ll end up fighting the same battles again and again.

There are any number of reports that I thought we’d driven the stake through so that we wouldn’t be forced to study them again, but such is not the case. Take the Allende Letters. Here is a case in which there is no evidence beyond the demented musings of a man who didn’t seem to have a firm grasp on reality and who admitted that the whole thing was hoax more than thirty years ago. That’s right, Carlos Allende, or as he was born, Carl Allen, admitted, in a written statement to Jim Lorenzen, then the international director of APRO, that he had made up the whole tale.

And today we have to fight through those who still accept the Philadelphia Experiment, which is part of the whole Allende Letter episode again. Not to mention those who claim their identities were changed so that they can say they were part of the original experiment without having to explain why their names don’t surface anywhere in the case until much later or why they aren’t old enough to have participated. They time travel... There are some who actually believe this nonsense.

Oh, and we have to explain, again, that the Office of Naval Research didn’t take the letters and the annotated book seriously. That much of what was suggested in the book and the letters has been proven to be in error. And that Allende annotated everything he got from birthday cards to traffic citations.

Finally, I received, just a couple of days ago an email from someone who had new information about the Philadelphia experiment. He seemed to be unaware of the history of the case.

Or we can look at the Aurora, Texas UFO crash from 1897. Here was a story that appeared in the newspapers of the time but seemed to have no follow up written about it and a case that disappeared until the 1960s.

So, there I was, living not all that far from Aurora, Texas. It seemed that it might be a good idea for me to drive up there and see if I could learn anything about the crash. Now, remember, this was the early 1970s, and while 1897 was seventy or seventy-five years earlier, there were still people living who had been in the town in 1897. I talked to some of those same longtime residents who told me that nothing had happened in 1897.

There was one old fellow, his hands all twisted and disfigured who had been there in 1897 and who would later appear in some of the documentaries about the crash. He told me, when I was there, that nothing had happened. Had it been as big a deal as had been reported in the newspaper, he surely would remember something about it.

Later, as the story grew and many others arrived, he told them a different tale. Now he was suggesting that there had been a crash. He described some of what he saw, but I just couldn’t accept these new and better tales. I’d talked to him before it became a way to find some local fame. I’d talked to him before the people showed up with the television cameras and bright lights.

I also talked to the historians at the Wise County Historical Society (Aurora is in Wise County) who told me that it hadn’t happened, though they wished it had. I learned that T.J. Weems, the famed Signal Corps officer was, in fact, the local blacksmith. I learned that Judge Proctor didn’t have a windmill, or rather that was what was said then. Now they suggest that he had two windmills. I wandered the grave yard, which isn’t all that large (something just over 800 graves) and found no marker with strange symbols carved on it, though there are those who suggest a crude headstone with a rough airship on it had been there at the time. I found nothing to support the tale and went away believing, based on my own research and interviews, this to be another of the airship hoaxes.

A large number of people, including Hayden Hewes of the now defunct International UFO Bureau, Jim Marrs, who has suggested the story was real, and even Walt Andrus, the former International Director of the Mutual UFO Network (MUFON) at various times journeyed to Aurora in search of the truth. They all reported they found a strange grave marker in the Aurora cemetery, they found strange metal with metal detectors, and they gathered reports from long time Aurora residents who remembered the story, remembered seeing the airship, or remembered parents talking about the crash. There was also discussion of government attempts to suppress the data. To them, that made the story of the crash seem even more real.

Isn’t interesting that the strange grave marker has since disappeared and there is no real photographic record of it. There should be for all the research that has been done and the single picture that has turned up showed not an airship but a coarse triangle with circles in the center. And isn’t interesting that there were never any follow up reports from Aurora. First the big splash with the crash in 1897 and then nothing for more than sixty years.

The final, fatal blow for the airship and Aurora crash comes from the original reporter. H.E. Hayden, a stringer for the Dallas Morning News, who claimed to have invented the story in a vain attempt to put his dying community back on the map. He hoped to draw attention, and people, to Aurora, Texas. He was successful. The problem was that he succeeded sixty years too late and those who arrived only wanted to learn about the airship, not settle down to rebuild the community as he had hoped.

The point, however, is that we revisit cases that have been solved. These youngsters, the alleged new blood with their fresh ideas might have new blood, but their ideas are not fresh. We can expect them to get excited over the old cases that we geezers have eliminated and will now have to disprove once again.

In Ufology, there is a cycle that used to run about every five years, though it has expanded in recent times. New people enter into the study of UFOs, find these old cases and are excited by them and begin to push them. Eventually, they reach the same conclusions as we geezers, but only after a lot debate about the value of the cases and a lot of wasted time, effort and money.

So bring in the new blood but please don’t be surprised when I am unimpressed with their new methods and their new insights. They aren’t advancing the study at all. They are retreating into a past that we could warn them about, but they are too smart to listen to we geezers. We need to just get out of the way so they can follow the old, overgrown paths because they’re just too smart to listen. We need to get out of the way so they can waste their time doing what we’ve already done. They’re too smart to think we have anything more to contribute.

The Demise of Ufology

(Blogger's note: Ufologist Chris Rutkowski posted this at http://www.uforum.blogspot.com/ and I thought it an eloquent description of our UFO world today. I'm afraid he's all too right about this and that doesn't bode well for Disclosure or our acceptance into the mainstream world. I'm afraid that I share his view.)

I caused a bit of a stir several months ago when I called UFO case investigation a lost art. I'll go further this time: ufology looks like it's near death.

The bad news is: I'm an optimist.

I was having a conversation with Brian Savage recently, and he made the observation that the UFO phenomenon has been derailed. He was formerly with the Alberta UFO Study Group, an earlier incarnation that produced in-depth investigation reports and scoured government documents for historical Alberta cases. Brian's comment was in reference to the many popularized UFO-related developments over the past 20 years which have destroyed the legitimacy of serious UFO research.

Examples of these derailments include the alien autopsy film, Lazar's Element 115, the strawberry ice cream nonsense, Greer's telepathic vectoring of UFOs, crop circles, exopolitics, Nibiru, and the resurgence of the contactee phenomenon. These and others have served to draw public and popular attention away from serious UFO case investigations and into the realm of wild arm-waving speculation and wide-eyed fanaticism.

It's too bad; it really looked like there was something developing there, for a while.

UFO cases themselves have radically shifted characteristics. Things seemed so simple when Hynek formulated his Close Encounter classifications: CE1 was a sighting at close range; CE2 was a trace case; and CE3 involved seeing occupants. There was no CE4 or CE5, as adopted by some ufologists now, reflecting abductions and contactee incidents. Only three categories, nicely defined and delineated.

The CE2s went extinct first. Ted Philips had several thousand physical trace cases documented by the time crop circles arrived on the scene. Then - poof! No more CE2s. People stopped seeing UFOs landing and taking off; aliens stopped landing their scout craft and leaving behind scorched patches and tripod marks in fields. Instead, mysterious circles (and later, patterns) appeared, almost always without accompanying UFO sightings, and it was assumed that the aliens were using some kind of "rotating vortex" to power their ships.

Then the CE3s went AWOL. No more sightings of landed UFOs where entities were seen exiting and re-entering their crafts. Instead, abductions ballooned in number, eventually overtaking classic CE3s. Really, have you heard of a decent CE3 case recently? No bedroom visitations, no alien faces in windows, no telepathic instructions about saving the human race. Just a simple CE3 observation. No? No.

Even CE1s are mostly gone now, too. Instead, we have YouTube videos of "mysterious orbs" and "Galactic Lightships" seeming to dance all over the pace because the witness couldn't hold the video camera steady. On the other hand, we have goofballs with too much time on their hands using video toasters to create obvious hoaxed UFO videos that experienced UFO investigators can tell are not worth bothering with but go viral anyway, getting retweeted and reblogged everywhere by UFO fans.

But a well-witnessed, well-investigated CE1 case? Rarer than a straight-talking politician or oil executive. Sure, if you look at popular UFO websites that list UFO reports, there are dozens and dozens from all over the world, posted by witnesses. But follow-up to get additional details to make an evaluation, such as direction of movement, where the UFO was in the sky compared with other things, and even an accurate time? Forget it. Onsite investigation? Impossible. Referral to one of the few reliable UFO investigators who lives nearby the witness, to allow proper investigation? Can't, sorry; privacy of witnesses is guaranteed.

So what we have in ufology today is the maintaining of a high number of UFO sighting reports, but a decrease on information content of the cases. Public attention surges when UFO stories in the news go viral, but critical thinking goes out the window.

Part of this is because no one person is viewed as someone who can speak for ufology today. Following the death of Allen Hynek, no one was easily identifiable as someone to take his mantle. (Not even Philip Mantle.) Not Stan Friedman, not Jerome Clark, Mark Rodeghier, not Jenny Randles, not Kevin Randle, not Bill Birnes, not any other of the dozen or so who might (or might not) fit the bill.

(Similarly, who speaks for debunkery? After Phil Klass passed away, is it now Phil Plait? James Oberg? James Randi? Bill Nye? Even Larry King can't decide who is an authority and whom to have on as guests to debate UFOs.)

Poor MUFON and CUFOS, the few remaining doggedly determined UFO groups. They're hanging on, with declining revenue, losing staff and trying desperately to carry on with serious UFO study, when UFO fans have not the slightest interest in that.

Ufology is greatly fractured. With thousands of UFO-related web pages, everyone (and anyone) can be an expert. Anyone can tell you the "REAL Truth" about the aliens' presence on Earth and their nefarious dealings with the government and how Obama is an alien and why I've been chosen as their emissary and why alien hybrids have pale skin and why aliens will arrive in 2012 and where the underwater alien bases are in the Gulf of Mexico and why the hundreds of orbs in my photograph are mental images of aliens and not dust particles and why some UFO craft disguise themselves as airplanes and why chemtrails are not just contrails and why this blog is passing through into another dimension....

Kingman UFO Crash Revisited

I have received new information on the Kingman, Arizona UFO crash of 1953 an it doesn’t look good for the validity of this case. Remember, this all started when Arthur Stancil told Ray Fowler he had been involved in part of a crash retrieval operation. It was, at that point, a single witness case and the witness himself said that he tended to embellish his stories when he had a little bit to drink.

But then came Judith Woolcott who corroborated the tale with one of her own, saying that her husband had a small role in the retrieval. He had been in Vietnam when he wrote to her about this, but he was killed shortly after he had mailed the letter.

Then, on June 1, 2010, I heard from Kathryn Baez, the daughter of Judith Woolcott and the entire tale as told by her mother blew up...

She said that her step-father, William Woolcott was not only still alive but he had not served in Vietnam. He made it clear that he was a Vietnam era veteran, and his ship had served somewhere off the coast of Vietnam. The sailors were told they had not been in Vietnam. Further, Woolcott did not marry Judith until 1980 so he clearly was not the soldier killed in Vietnam after having participated in part of the Kingman retrieval.

But Judith had been married before. Kathryn told me that her father was Elmer E. Fingal who was born in 1938 and died in 2006. At the time of the Kingman crash, he would have been fifteen and clearly wouldn’t have been in the tower working and he wouldn’t have been an officer in the military at that time.

Fingal had also served in the Navy and Kathryn said she didn’t think he had been in Vietnam. It makes no difference because he clearly had not been in the tower and just as clearly he had not been killed in Vietnam.

Where does that leave the tale told by Judith Woolcott? No where. It never happened. Neither of her husbands had been a witness to anything. Kathryn told me that her mother liked to embellish stories and this was just another of them. In fact, Kathryn said, "I often felt that my mother sensationalized her life for which I didn’t agree and we would often butt heads."

So, we fall back to Stancil who killed his own credibility with his varying tales and his admission that he liked to spin stories, especially after he’d had a few.

There is now no independent corroboration for the case, no newspaper articles, no documentation and no solid witnesses. I think we must label this case for what it is. A hoax.

2009 Minnesota UFO Crash

While talking with the host of a radio program about my new book, Crash: When UFOs Fall from the Sky (shameless plug number two), he asked if I knew anything about a crash in Minnesota in July, 2009. I said that I didn’t but that I would see what I could learn.

The incident took place on July 27, 2009 (which, coincidentally is the same date as the last entry in the book, but that crash was in Ottawa, Canada), in the Forest Lake area of Minnesota. According to the original reports, an eyewitness said that something fell out of the sky and hit the surface of Lake Sylvan, causing a thirty foot wave.

Several local agencies including the Forest Lake Fire and Rescue, and the Washington County Dive Team responded. They searched the lake about 165 yards from the shore, to a depth of 26 feet, but could see little in the murky water.

The county team used side-scanning radar and, according to the sheriff’s office, something about the size of washer or dryer was located. No one suggested that what had been found was either of those, only that it was about the size of them.

Rich Webb, who was described as a MUFON Field Investigator and a member of the MUFON Star Team, left Omaha and made the trip to Minnesota, after someone had left a tip about the crash on the MUFON website. Webb made it clear that no one had reported anything falling, they had just seen the rippling of the water and it was assumed that something had fallen. There had been a report to the Forest Lake Police Department that there had been a large swirl of water, the waves rippling out and the water churning.

Reports indicated that the disturbance lasted from five to seven minutes and that the waves had gone out from the center for about thirty to forty feet, but they were not that high. No debris suggesting any sort of aircraft accident had been found. Only the Washington County Sheriff’s Office report of the object found by sonar on the bottom of the lake. Webb did say that there were two unusual things. There was a centrally circular wave moving outward and a twenty-foot diameter of air bubbles coming from the bottom of the lake.

Richard Lang, another of the MUFON investigators who made the trip, said that based on their findings, they didn’t believe a UFO had fallen into the lake.

By October, things had settled down, but there still had been no answers about what caused the disturbance. On September 10, divers found a rock, boulder really, that weighed about forty pounds that had a hole drilled in it and a bit of nylon rope attached to it. Clearly this was nothing from a UFO, but sounds suspiciously like an old-fashioned, or homemade boat anchor.

Sheriff Bill Hutton said that they didn’t know what had fallen into the lake though dozens of rescue workers had responded in July. He just said he didn’t think it was a meteor or anything from an airplane.

In contrast, Steve McComas, who appeared on Joe Soucheray’s KSTP-AM radio’s, "Garage Logic" thought it might have been something that fell from an aircraft. He thought it might be "blue ice" which is a mixture of human waste and blue liquid disinfectant that sometimes leaks from the lavatories of commercial airliners. I prefer the term, "Icy BM."
But then, no one saw anything fall.

Frank Kvidera said that he might have a solution for the rock that had been found. He said that something like forty years earlier, he had been out in a row boat with a friend who had a rock with a hole drilled in it. They lost their makeshift anchor when the rope broke. Odd as it might seem, this sounds like a plausible answer for that one small part of the mystery.

In the end, there is no explanation for the swirling mass of water. It could have been some sort of natural release of gases trapped at the bottom of the lake, which Webb had sort of suggested earlier. Such things have been reported in the past. Something might have dropped into it but no one saw that.

While interesting, there is little reason to suspect any sort of alien or extraterrestrial explanation here. Claiming it as a UFO sighting of some kind is a bit of a stretch. For us, that ends the tale. For others, well, good luck to them.

Kingman UFO Crash

Not long ago someone asked about the Kingman, Arizona crash of May 1953. I hesitated answering the query simply because my new book, Crash: When UFOs Fall from the Sky was about to be published and the answer could be found there. And yes, that was a shameless plug.

Most people know that this story has been circulating from the 1970s when Ray Fowler published the information he had in Official UFO. Most of the story then came from Arthur Stancil whom Fowler had called Fritz Werner in the article in order to protect Stancil’s identity.

Stancil said that he had been involved in a top-secret, preliminary survey of a wrecked UFO somewhere in the desert around Kingman. Stancil’s credentials seemed good and there was limited documentation, but nothing solid. Besides, Stancil had been caught telling multiple versions of the tale and claimed that when he had been drinking he tended to embellish stories. That certainly didn’t bode well for the tale.

In the intervening years there have been some others who talked of the crash, and I’ll let you all look that information up in Crash. What I want to talk about is the Judie Woolcott story that suggested to me that there might be something important here.

Woolcott said that her husband, a professional military officer, was on duty at the air base control tower somewhere around the Kingman area. They had been tracking something on radar when it lost altitude, seemed to disappear and then, in the distance, there was a bright flash of white light.

So, okay, something crashed. Military police, according to Woolcott began talking about something being down and they drove out in the general direction of the flash. They found a domed disk stuck in the ground.

Woolcott had gotten these details from a letter that her husband had sent her from Vietnam. He indicated that he knew more, but he didn’t want to write it down. Yes, it seems odd that he would send such a letter from Vietnam, but then guys in a combat environment do some strange things.

While the letter would be an important document, it certainly wouldn’t prove the crash real. Unfortunately, the letter was lost and we only have Woolcott’s memory of it.

But that’s not the worst part. In today’s world there are all sorts of databases available and there is one that lists every American soldier who died during the Vietnam War... including those non-combat related deaths. The only Woolcott listed is a PFC, Randall Woolcott, who was born in 1948 and died in Vietnam before his 20th birthday. He was unmarried.

But, I have learned that Judie Woolcott had been married a number of times and her UFO spotting husband’s name might not have been Woolcott. In her obituary, she was Judith Anne Woolcott (Miller, Fingal). New searches of the databases have failed to produce any corroboration for her story and that suggests this tale is not accurate.

So, where does that leave us? Well, Stancil provided a copy of his desk calendar that shows him on some unidentified assignment on May 21, 1953, but that doesn’t really tell us much and doesn’t really confirm his tale. There are a couple of other witnesses, but their stories are dubious and the dates don’t track, though they both mention Kingman.

The Woolcott story has imploded, which means that it simply is not reliable, given the history there. If she had been able to produce the letter, then that would have been something. But she lost it.

Other attempts at verification have failed. Maybe we should make another attempt to verify something, but the odds are stacked against us. We have no Yearbook like Walter Haut supplied us for Roswell that held hundreds of potential witnesses. We have no newspaper stories like those for Kecksburg and Shag Harbour that helped pin down the tales and name the witnesses. We have no real corroboration. Just a couple of vague stories.

It seems the thread is about played out on Kingman... but that doesn’t mean the story will die. Someone will come up with something to revitalize the Kingman crash, and that might be the most frightening aspect of all.

The Alien Autopsy is a HOAX

Over at UFO UpDates, Errol Bruce Knapp has just ended another in the long and useless conversations about the Alien Autopsy film. I believe his thinking was that nothing new was being added to the already tedious discussion.

He was right... because it is clear to anyone who has paid attention during the last couple of years, that the autopsy film was a hoax. Although some of those involved in the hoax suggest it wasn’t for money or fame but just something interesting to do, the real point is that it was a HOAX.

Yes, there are those who still insist the film is real and all you have to do, according to them, is study the film frame by frame, pay attention to the cameraman’s directions so that you can travel to the actual crash site, and review the analysis of some of the minerals picked up there. If you do, you will know that the alien autopsy is something real, at least in their fevered brains.

I’m going to mention something here that the believers of the autopsy might not realize. There is no cameraman. Never was. The interview offered with him, or rather the transcript of that interview, was filled with British terminology. Had the man been an American soldier as alleged, then the words used to described his military service would have been different. When all that was pointed out, the transcript was changed. That should have raised a red flag.

Second, when some markings suggesting a high classification were seen on the film canisters, many realized they were not real. When that was pointed out, the classification markings disappeared and that should have raised a red flag.

Third, the man who presented the film to the world, Ray Santilli, said in an interview that the tent footage, which was dark and nearly impossible to see, had been "recreated" from the real thing. In other, more precise words, it had been faked and that should have sent up sky rockets trailing red flags.

Finally, those who participated in many of the other autopsy footage segments have been identified and confirmed their role in the hoax. Philip Mantle, a British UFO researcher who had been studying the film from almost the moment that the film became known, wrote an article for the CUFOS International UFO Reporter that detailed the whole story.

Mantle interview Spyros Melaris, who said that he was one of the principals in the creation of the film. A transcript of that interview was published, online at www.outtahear.com/beyond_updates/autopsy.html.

In short, what it is, is the confession of Melaris on how he became involved, how the segments were created, and who was responsible for what. In other words, those who participated in the hoax have "confessed" their roles in it. Of course, for the true believers, this is just a scam to discredit the film.

In the interview published in IUR is a short segment called, "The Wreckage and I-Beams." I found it interesting because I had spotted an English word on one of those beams. Mantle explained:

Melaris created the "alien writing" from Greek lettering, ancient Egyptian stylizing, and his own artistic license. (Humpreys then manufactured the wreckage.) The writing on the main large beam, if translated correctly, reads "Freedom." He thought this a fitting name for an alien spacecraft. While designing the letters that spell Freedom, Melaris noticed that if the word is turned upside down, the word "Video" could be discerned. He adjusted some of the letters to better facilitate this reading, so the piece would throw a little red herring into the mix.

It would seem to me that the appearance of an English word, one referring to the medium that would tell the world of the find, is too big a coincidence. Would anything in an alien language and writing show an English word, especially one that suggested video?

So, the cameraman didn’t exist (and if he had, his identity would have been immediately known to any authorities who wished to arrest him for unauthorized release of classified material) and Santilli never produced him for interviews as promised. The number of reels of film changed frequently and when markings or part of the story were found wanting, they were changed as well. There was no real provenance for the film which screamed fake from the very beginning. And if that wasn’t enough, Santilli, said that the tent footage was faked and now we have another participant telling us that the other scenes were faked. Isn’t that enough to end the discussion?

I sincerely hope that this is the last time we need to address the alien autopsy nonsense. It is a hoax, an admitted hoax and there is not a shred of evidence to suggest otherwise. I am astonished that there are still some who believe it to be real, and that explains why we just never get anywhere. No matter what the evidence, no matter what is known, there are some who refuse to acknowledge it.

The Ubatuba UFO Sample

For those who are interested, here is a quick rundown on the latest on the Ubatuba sample. I am assuming here that those visiting this blog have a basic knowledge of this case so that I don’t have to recap everything.

The very first problem is that the magnesium samples that allegedly came from an exploding UFO cannot be traced to the beach in Brazil where they were recovered. Instead, they can be traced to the columnist in Brazil who first reported the case in the newspaper and that alerted Dr. Olavo Fontes (seen here), the APRO Brazilian representative to the crash. No one has ever come forward, nor has anyone been located, who can corroborate the tale told in the letter to the columnist nor who actually saw the explosion or the UFO. The metal appears in the columninst’s hands and from there goes to Fontes, then to Jim and Coral Lorenzen (seen below)at APRO and then to various others. The chain of evidence is severed before we reach the beach in Brazil and that is a real problem.

Secondly, the claims of purity have not held up to scrutiny. When the early lab reports suggested no sign of contaminates, Fontes inferred this to mean that the metal was 100% pure, which is not quite the same thing. It meant that the labs conducting the tests had not found anything other than magnesium, not that there weren’t other compounds present. It would seem that subsequent tests have shown that the metal, while extremely pure, was not 100% pure.

Yes, I’m aware that the sample tested in Brazil was lost during the testing so it could be argued that this sample was that pure, but it seems that a more logical conclusion is that it suffered from the same contaminates as those other samples. The problem was in the technology available in 1958 as opposed to that even eight or nine years later.

Third, the samples have been handled in a fairly cavalier fashion. Once they arrived in the United States, no one had kept track of them and it could be argued that the chain of custody was broken here as well. The Air Force destroyed a small sample given them for testing without obtaining any results. The Lorenzens loaned various samples and pieces of samples to any number of people and some of those samples have been lost. In the end, it might be nearly impossible to say that the samples as they exist today are in any way related to those that were first sent to APRO. Dr. Fontes died decades ago, as did the Lorenzens. That is another stumbling block.

But then we come to interesting conundrum. While magnesium of a purity equivalent to the Ubatuba metal was available, and that the testing done to date, regardless of the quality of the equipment or competency of the researchers, no one has been able to identify a source of the original sample. It is unlikely that it is of extraterrestrial origin, but no one can rule that out.

Analysis of the Brazilian sample was made by Dr. Roy Craig of the Condon Committee, who has given a narrative account of his experiences with the Colorado Project. The results of his investigations into the Brazil magnesium are summarized in the Condon Report on pages 94 – 97 of the paperback edition.

According to the information published by Dr. Peter Sturrock, Craig said he had been informed that Dow had, for about 25 years, produced a number of batches of very pure magnesium by the process of repeated sublimation, and provided him with a specimen of triply sublimed magnesium. Craig was advised that the most sensitive tests for impurities would be neutron activation analysis. He therefore arranged to take a specimen of the Brazil magnesium and (for comparison) a specimen of the Dow triply sublimed magnesium, to the Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms Laboratory, Washington, D.C. This visit took place on February 5, 1968, and the specimen was analyzed by Mr. Maynard J. Pro, whose report on the analysis was mailed to Craig on February 29, 1968.

The results of Pro’s analysis of the Brazil specimen and of the Dow specimen are included in the Condon Report. Clearly, this specimen of the Brazil magnesium was not "100% pure." In fact, it was not as pure as the triply sublimed Dow specimen.

Condon then commented, "...the magnesium metal was found to be much less pure than the regular commercial metal produced in 1957 by the Dow Chemical Company at Midland, Michigan. Therefore it need not have come from an extraterrestrial source, leaving us with no basis for rational belief that it did."

But this wasn’t quite accurate either. First is the point that the magnesium created at Dow was not a commercial grade but a piece of triply sublimed magnesium. It was, you might say, magnesium created to see how pure they could make it, but not something they created for commercial application.

The analysis also reported on a high content of both strontium and barium in the Ubatuba sample. Neither is an expected impurity in samples made under normal circumstances but Dow, in their experimentation with ways to improve the "hardness" of the magnesium had used the strontium as an alloy.

So, the Condon Committee didn’t actually discredit the Ubatuba sample, and their discussion of the Dow metal is more of a red herring than scientific analysis. That said, we are left with a couple of samples of metal that have no provenance, that have not been found to represent a technology that didn’t exist when the metal was discovered, and with no real way of knowing if the samples of today are related to those samples found in 1957.

In the end there are several samples of magnesium that seem to be unique. There is nothing in them to suggest the extraterrestrial, yet there is a hint that these samples might not have been made on Earth. This, I think, would be the classic definition of "unidentified." But even with that, it is not proof that some UFOs are from other planets in other solar systems. In the very end we are only left with questions that might have no answers.