Skepticism vs. Pseudoskepticism

We have had arguments about the purpose of skepticism and what it means to be a skeptic. I have often thought it odd that the skeptics seem to embrace the explanations for UFO sightings with little or no skepticism but continue to demand boatloads of proof from those who believe UFOs might be alien. Sure, I get that the bar for the believers is higher because of what that belief is, but that doesn’t absolve the skeptics from presenting rational thought. The best example that pops into my mind is Project Mogul. They seem to embrace it even though the documentation suggests that there was no Flight No. 4. They point to the cluster of balloons as a real, full array, but the documentation doesn’t support that. It would seem to me that the skeptics would be as skeptical of this “official” answer as they are of the alien answer (okay, not quite as skeptical given that the believers must create interstellar flight but the documentation does argue against Mogul).

Although I really don’t want this to devolve into another endless and somewhat mindless discussion of all the minutia about Mogul (though I’m sure there will be those that just have to say something about it), the real point is what skepticism should really be and how it should really work. If I came up will all that follows, I’m sure it would be rejected simply because I was the one who came up with it. To prevent that, I suggest that everyone take a look at:

http://www.theepochtimes.com/n3/603148-what-is-unhealthy-skepticism/

Now you all can argue about what is skepticism and what is pseudoskepticism, but the point is that many of the arguments made here are outlined in the article. I could say more about it, but the arguments made in the article are more elegant than anything I could do here.

Oak Island and the Roman Sword

After most of a season of just screwing around and doing nothing more than digging up more areas on Oak Island that yielded bits of wood, stumps and a hunk of cable, they finally moved back to Borehole Number Ten and set up a dive. This was to get them to the bottom of the hole where it is alleged that there is a box of some kind, the remnants of a hammer or ax and the possibility of human remains.

We did see them attempt to make the dive. They got in the water and disappeared into what looked like a thick, yellow soup. The lights they carried disappeared in seconds. As did the communications. The dive master called off the dive at that point for safety reasons. One of the divers reappeared quickly, but the second didn’t. We see some tense minutes, knowing that if there had been some sort of tragedy we would never see it and, of course, one of the alleged news magazines on television would have reported it. The second diver appeared after about thirty minutes.

Don’t misunderstand, I’m all for calling off the dive under those circumstances. Diving into that narrow tube that goes down a couple of hundred feet is an incredible thing to do and obviously neither man had issues with claustrophobia. I wouldn’t do it and from their discussions in the “War Room” there are plenty of other divers who refused the opportunity as well.

The next day, the divers were back, having fixed the communications issue but there was some trouble with the masks. They didn’t want to make another dive without fixing that problem as well. Everyone was disappointed but all agreed was that safety had to be the paramount issue. That seemed to be a sane decision to me.

Before the hour was over, the divers were back to make another attempt. This surprised me because the episodes rarely return to a point made earlier in the program. The divers had their equipment with them with the dive mask issues resolved and the communications working. They made the dive and according to them, one of the divers got to the end of the borehole but was stopped by a huge drill bit that broken off some forty years earlier. It was lodged in the borehole, blocking access to the underground cave or room or whatever that supposedly holds the treasures.

There seems to be no plan to remove the drill bit (this isn’t something small like in your handheld drill but a huge auger used to professionally to drill deep holes that are several feet in diameter). It is wedged at the bottom of the narrowest part of the bore hole which is something like 140 feet (or deeper) so the challenge to remove it might be overwhelming.

Rather than attempt to solve this problem, they retreat to the War Room to meet with a couple of guys that have something concealed in a towel. This turns out to be a Roman sword, which might be about 1500 years old… or it might be a replica that is only a few decades old. It was apparently discovered somewhere close to Oak Island in the 1940s and everyone seems to believe this has some relevance. Maybe the Romans had sailed to Oak Island centuries before Columbus.

Now, they’re off on another tangent, trying to find out how old the sword is and how it might relate to Oak Island. I would think, with the amount of money they have spent in their attempt to learn what is hidden (or not hidden) there, they would not be interested in a Roman sword that probably has no relevance to Oak Island and what might be hidden there.

Or, in other words, they’ve dragged this out long enough. For crying out loud, stop screwing around draining swamps, following dowsers, using esoteric maps based on all sorts of strange theories, and stop running sonar off the coast of the island so they can look at triangular-shaped rocks that might or might not be natural. Just figure out a way to get the drill bit out of the borehole or put a camera down there that has some sort of high definition capability to provide some revelation because I won’t wait forever and I don’t think many others will either. 

Jesse Marcel Conundrum

I knew the “This and That” post would draw some interesting responses, but I didn’t see it moving into the arena it has. Some of the questions being asked are quite insightful and I have some of the answers. For those answers I don’t have, David Rudiak will probably provide some additional commentary to help us understand the situation.

According to Stan Friedman, he was in Baton Rouge on February 20, 1978, when one of the directors of a television station told Friedman he should talk to Jesse Marcel. Marcel said that he had handled pieces of a flying saucer, and though Friedman said he was dubious, he took down Marcel’s name and using directory assistance (does that still exist?) was given Marcel’s telephone number. At the airport with some time to spare, he called Marcel. According to Friedman, Marcel related to him, during that telephone conversation, the details of the crash, though Marcel couldn’t remember the date. He knew it was Roswell where it happened.

According to Friedman’s book, Crash at Corona, it seems Marcel had already

Jesse Marcel

formed the idea that the debris was left by something alien. Friedman quotes indirectly from Marcel (which means it is Friedman telling us what Marcel said), but I don’t know if the quotes came from that first conversation or if in writing the book and knowing the full story in the 1990s that he recreated the quotes from other, later interviews. Since this was a telephone interview using an airport telephone, I suspect there is no tape.

On April 7, 1978, according to Len Stringfield, he linked a Chicago reporter, Steve Tom (I use the term reporter though Stringfield actually identified him as an NBC radio newsman) to Jesse Marcel at his home in Houma, LA. Marcel again talked about the event, the strange material. According to Stringfield, Marcel said that when the press learned about the retrieval operation and “To get them off my back, I told them we were recovering a downed weather balloon.”

In his Status Report Number II, Stringfield wrote, “Since the Major’s story got publicity, it has been said by some researchers that the retrieved fragments were possibly part of the Skyhook balloon, at that time classified as Secret. On October 5, 1979, I called him and got this comment:

The material I gathered did not resemble anything off a balloon. A balloon, of any kind could not have exploded and spread its debris over a broad area… I was later told that a military team from my base was sent to rake the entire area.

I don’t know if Stringfield recorded any of these conversations with Marcel. After Stringfield died, his files were donated to MUFON which restricts access to them (and most of their other material). Those in the Chicago area might try to find a recording of Marcel on the NBC affiliate there in 1978, though I suspect Mark Rodeghier, who found the “Headline Edition” from ABC probably already checked on that.

Bob Pratt interviewed Marcel on December 8, 1979. I have posted the exact transcript of that interview to this blog at:

http://kevinrandle.blogspot.com/2013/09/jesse-marcel-sr-bob-pratt-and-interview.html

Karl Pflock published a cleaned up version of this in his book, Roswell: Inconvenient Facts and the Will to Believe. As I have noted, in his cleaned up version, some of the problems with the Pratt interview were, well, cleaned up. In one place the insertion of a comma changes the meaning of the sentence.

There is another point that raises questions and it surfaces in both the transcript and the article that Pratt wrote. According to that article:

Wreckage from the UFO “was scattered as far as you could see,” revealed Marcel who was awarded five air medals for shooting down five enemy aircraft on bombers in World War 2. [What a bizarre sentence from a professional writer.]

As we all know, Marcel was awarded two Air Medals for combat missions during that war. There are no indications that he shot down any enemy aircraft and I don’t know if the error was one of Pratt’s misunderstanding what Marcel said, or if it was a claim made by Marcel. I did ask Pratt if he had retained the tape recording but he told me that once the story had been published, they reused the tapes… It just shows that you never know what is going to become important.

Here’s what I do know at this point. The first Friedman interview was by telephone while Friedman was at the airport. Marcel didn’t say anything about the photographs and while in today’s world, if Friedman had photographs, he could have shown them to Marcel using the Internet, in 1978, that capability just didn’t exist. Besides, Marcel wasn’t sure of the date and it was Bill Moore who finally found the newspaper articles that included pictures of Marcel so Friedman didn’t have the pictures then and didn’t know they existed.

The subsequent Moore/Friedman interviews were apparently also conducted over the telephone, according to a quote attributed to him in Linda Corley’s book about Marcel and Roswell. According to her taped interview, Marcel said, “Now those guys, Charles Berlitz and William Moore, I bet I have spent as much as ten hours along these telephones with these two guys. I’ve never met either one of them.”

Corley questioned him on this point and Marcel said, “I never met them. They interviewed me on the phone.”

At that point, I’m sure that they have copies of the newspaper clippings some of which contained a picture of Marcel and the balloon wreckage and might have even gotten prints of the pictures from the Fort Worth Star - Telegram, but they couldn’t show these pictures to Marcel over the telephone. According to Berlitz and Moore, Marcel told them, over the telephone:

General Ramey allowed some members of the press in to take a picture of this stuff. They took one picture of me on the floor holding up some of the less-interesting metallic debris. The press was allowed to photograph this, but were not allowed far enough into the room to touch it. The stuff in that one photo was pieces of the actual stuff we found. It was not a staged photo. Then they allowed photos. Those photos were taken while the actual wreckage was already on its way to Wright Field. I believe these were taken with the general and one of his aides…

If we look at that, and the captions about where Berlitz and Moore got the pictures, we see that there was some manipulation going on there. They got a quote from Marcel that endorsed the picture of him with some of the real debris, but we don’t know if it was the whole picture or the cropped version they printed. What is clear is that when Johnny Mann showed him the pictures in The Roswell Incident, Marcel said they didn’t show the real debris.

Yes, I know some of the skeptics just can’t imagine Marcel not keeping copies of the newspaper articles that mentioned his name but then suggest the whole flying saucer brouhaha was such an embarrassment to him that he would, decades later, attempt to spin the story. But I know that things get lost as the years pass and I know that my picture appeared in the Denver Post in the early 1970s receiving a military award for service in Vietnam but I do not have a copy of that article.

I suggest that it is possible that Marcel, not having seen the heavily cropped pictures that would be published in The Roswell Incident because the interviews were conducted over the telephone, would remember pictures being taken at the time but might have not remembered the sequence. His statement about him being with the real debris when the pictures were taken could easily refer to another event and not what had transpired in Ramey’s office. So, when shown copies of the pictures from Ramey’s office, he rightly said, “That’s not the stuff I picked up.”

This seems to be a plausible explanation for this dilemma. He was photographed with some of the real debris, but those pictures were not taken in Ramey’s office. It wasn’t Marcel getting coached into what to say about it, but how he actually remembered the events. Though there is another problem with this analysis and that is Marcel told Corley that on orders for Ramey, he had covered the real debris with the brown paper that is seen in the uncropped versions of all the pictures taken in Ramey’s office. This suggests that Marcel’s memories of those events might not be completely accurate.

Jesse Marcel, standing and pointing, briefing flight crews during the Second  World War.
Photo copyright by Kevin Randle

There are other problems that arise from these transcripts of earlier interviews. Pratt said that Marcel was awarded five Air Medals for shooting down five enemy aircraft, but given Pratt’s transcript and other information, this mistake might be Pratt’s rather than Marcel’s. In the transcripts of the raw footage of UFOs Are Real, it said, “10 April 1942 volunteered for active service… 1^st assignment Washington five Air Medals, the Bronze Star and several comendations [exactly as written out in the transcript].”

Since there is no mention of the five enemy aircraft, it would seem that the mistake was Pratt’s. The other problem is that there is only documentation for two Air Medals. As I have said before, my records did not contain the correct number of Air Medals, so we might have a similar situation. This just might not be sufficient reason to reject, out of hand, all that Marcel said.

What is more disturbing is his claim to have received a commendation for performing an appendectomy while in the service. This is something that should be recorded in his military record but I find nothing about it. I did find mention of another commendation for Marcel, but it was for service during Operation Crossroads. Maybe the commendation for the emergency surgery slipped through the cracks, but there comes a point when you can no longer blame Army inefficiency for the errors in the record (though I have said that if you do something wrong, that note has the permanence of the Pyramids and if you do something right it has the half-life of a mayfly).

There are two things I found in these transcripts that are interesting. First, Marcel said that after loading his car with the debris, “I stopped by the house had left the day before and son and wife were waiting for me.”

This is curious because the story had always seemed to be that he had awakened them to show them the strange debris. This suggests that he had stopped by so they wouldn’t worry and that it wasn’t very early in the morning but late evening. A minor problem at best.

In the transcript (which, by the way, is strange) it is noted that on “Tape 2” at the 24:16 minute mark, Marcel apparently told them that Haut had issued the press release before he had even returned from the field. The exact quote on this transcript is, “He (Walt Haut had released statement to press before Jesse had even returned home that night.” (Yes, this is how it was written out, so it is not exactly Marcel’s words.)

Apparently Marcel said that his wife had been “pestered by the news media.”

In Linda Corley’s book, Marcel makes a similar statement. He said, “She [wife] didn’t even know where I was. By the time I got home, she had already faced the press that was out there.”

What this does is screw up every time line created for this because we have the press release going out before Marcel got home… which had to be late afternoon at best given the distance from the debris field to Roswell even making the best time possible. Then we need to get Marcel on an aircraft early enough to get to Fort Worth in time to have his picture taken with the balloon debris.

It is possible, of course, that Marcel had confused coming home from the debris field with his coming home from Fort Worth after his quick trip there. He seems to have mixed up elements of the two events, confusing the timing, but then, that is just my speculation.

Then it gets worse, if possible. Marcel is quoted in the transcript, apparently paraphrasing General Ramey, “You can go ahead and scatter some of those pieces on the floor for the photographers and press but make sure they don’t get any details about anything.”

There was a question, “Was that the actual material you had found?”

“I prepared that for the press. (That big piece was not part of it). [parens in original document.]”

And then it gets better. Marcel said, “Let me show you something. There’s a picture of the same room [Ramey’s office, I will assume here] It’s not the material I brought there.”

Then on “Tape 3” comes more information. The director or the interviewer or the one asking questions said, “I talk about book I’m showing him [Which has to be something with the various pictures from Ramey’s office.] Book in Jesse’s lap showing warrant officer [has to be Irving Newton and that rules out The Roswell Incident]. The director asked, “This is not the material you found?” Marcel said, “Definitely not.”

The trouble here is that Marcel in the same film said that if he was in the photographs it was the real stuff and if it was anyone else, it was the fake. But now we learn that he was shown those photographs during that filming and before anyone could teach him the right answer, said that it wasn’t the material he had brought from Roswell.

The questions then, have been answered, sort of. We learn that the first interview was probably not recorded and are treated to Friedman’s recollections of what was said. We learn that the interviews of Marcel by Berlitz and Moore were conducted over the telephone. We do find quotes from Marcel that seem to contradict the story as it has been told for all these years which is quite troubling. And we find other quotes that seem to support that story, which suggests some manipulation by the various UFO researchers. Is it enough to reject now what Marcel said? Depends on your point of view, but we do have more information that suggests Marcel’s memories are not completely reliable on many of these points and at this time, that might be the best we can do.

(Note: For those interested, this has grown much larger than I anticipated. I looked through Marcel’s service record again, I reviewed the other material in that file, rereading after decades some of the partial transcripts that I have which provide some disturbing information, looked again a Linda Corley’s book to see what she said about the early interviews with Marcel, and reviewed what Friedman had published. There is more to this story, which I’ll get into some form for publication.)

The Roswell Nuns - Again

It has come up again, that is, the case of the Roswell nuns seeing something in the sky late on July 4, 1947, and recording it in their diaries. I have reported on this several times on this blog as I attempted to clarify the problem. This all came about in a footnote I had provided in The Truth about the UFO Crash at Roswell. Lance Moody has suggested that if you “googled” Roswell nuns you would see many references to them on the Internet and I suspect he believed them to be positive.

Since I am responsible for the entry, and since I have arrived at the conclusion that if the diaries existed they might be beyond our capability to recover them, or worse still, they might never have existed, I thought I would discuss it once more. However, I see, by an Internet search that the first entries encountered are my blog postings about how that footnote came to be and then describing how this latest search for the diaries had failed to produce any documentation. I didn’t see anyone who gave much weight to this tale at this point.

 Given all this, I’m not sure that another posting is necessary. However, to make it clear for everyone, there were nuns in Roswell in July 1947. They kept diaries that were eventually sent on to Oklahoma and later to Wisconsin.  However, as near as I can tell, no one ever saw an entry that related to something falling out of the sky on July 4, 1947, and if the diaries existed, I do not believe they will be found now. I suspect they do not exist, or rather that specific entry does not exist, and the source of the information is a man who claimed to be a Special Forces captain but who was not. He pointed us, meaning Don Schmitt and me, to a nun in Roswell who said that she had seen the entry, and while she may be telling the truth, there is no way we can prove it now.

If I was chasing footnotes here, I could take this back to that Special Forces captain and at the point the trail ends. There is no documentation for this tale and, as I have said repeatedly, nothing to suggest it is true. My hope here is that those chasing the story using the Internet will arrive here and realize the problems with the tale. They will then remove any reference to the nuns and Roswell from whatever database they are using and we won’t be bothered by it again.

Anne Robbins and Roswell

In the course of investigating many UFO cases, there are witnesses who come forward to tell their stories. Depending on the nature of the story or the investigator who hears it, that story might be added to the case file or might be rejected. Anne Robbins, widow of T/SGT Ernest Robbins, told her story, or rather her husband’s story after he died in January 2000. It related to Roswell and had all the necessary elements including the late night telephone call, a mysterious trip into the desert and a secret that was reluctantly shared.

The story was told at the Odessa Meteor Crater Museum in 2003. She said that they, meaning her and her husband, had been to a dinner party at the RAAF NCO Club and didn’t get home until 10:30. They hadn’t yet gone to sleep when she said that “everything outside had lit up like it was daylight… and we both assumed that

Photocopy right by Kevin Randle.

it was probably helicopters from the base with searchlights on.”

It wasn’t long before he received a telephone call ordering him out to the base. She said that she assumed there had been a plane crash somewhere but she didn’t know why they would call her husband. He was a sheet metal worker who repaired airplanes and had no skills related to an aircraft recovery operation.

He returned the next day in a wrinkled and wet uniform. He told her he had had to undergo a decontamination. When she asked him more, he said that he might as well tell her because it was going to be in the newspaper anyway. She said he told her, “A UFO crashed outside of Roswell.”

She pressed him for details. He said that the craft had looked like two saucers pressed together and that along the top saucer there were oblong windows all around it. There had been three passengers. Two had survived and one had been killed.

Looking out at one of the cluster of craters near Odessa, Texas. Photo copyright by Kevin Randle.

While we overlook, for the moment, this original horrendous breach of security, Robbins then made it worse. Several days later he took her out to the crash site. All the debris was gone, as were the alien creatures, but there remained a burned spot in a perfect circle that “was so black that it was shiny. No normal fire could have made something like that.”

She wanted to know what happened to the craft but her husband told her he couldn’t tell her and to ask no more questions.

In the years that followed he never said much about the crash. While in high school, their son, Ronald, was writing a report on UFOs and asked about what had happened in Roswell. It would have been interesting to know about what year this was because anything much before 1980 wouldn’t contain much about Roswell. How would the son know to ask about Roswell if no one was actually talking about it?

According to Robbins, Ronald kept asking questions until her husband finally took a piece of paper and drew a “pear-shaped head with large black eyes.” He said that their skin was brown and he had seen no nose and no mouth.

Reporters attempted to reach Ronald but apparently failed. Anne Robbins said that it didn’t matter because he wouldn’t talk to them anyway. They did talk to the daughter who said, “All I remember was Dad was saying he was stationed in Roswell and that a UFO crashed there.” That isn’t very helpful.

We, of course, get the standard that the now long gone witness didn’t lie or embellish his tales and that he wasn’t given to pranks. She said that, if ordered to, he would not talk about matters he was told were secret… and yes, I see the contradiction here.

Before we get into that, let me address a few other issues, the first of which is that this information is all second hand. We have nothing from the man himself and were told that talking with his son would be useless. His daughter added nothing to the conversation that couldn’t have been said by anyone in the world. I will note that I am retired military and could tell family that a UFO crashed there but all of that comes from other sources. I saw nothing myself.

If I was going to chase footnotes, I could point out that the MUFON UFO Journal from May 2003, on page 3, carried an article about Robbins. But it is clear from that article that the information came from “Carlton Sowers” [sic], a reporter for the Dallas Observer, who apparently talked to Robbins at the opening of the Odessa Museum. The Dallas Observer seems to be a newspaper aimed at entertainment, meaning what there is to do in the Dallas/Fort Worth area rather than a paper filled with hard news. Everything then, goes back to Stowers and Anne Robbins.

One of the articles found on line at www.ufocasebook.com/roswell50years.html, provided additional information. It leads back to Carlton Stowers. He wrote, “For several nights, Roswell residents had reportedly seen a strange flying object in the night sky. Though no one would know about it for 30 years, two Franciscan Catholic nuns, working at the local St. Mary’s Hospital, even made notations in their diaries that as some time after 11 p.m. on July 7, 1947, they had seen a large flash in the night sky, assuming it to be a plane in distress.”

We all now know that story originated with an unreliable source and that the existence of the diaries has not been confirmed though it seemed to have been in the early 1990s. This is something that should be removed from the history of the Roswell case and reduced to a footnote.

Stowers mentioned Frank Kaufmann in the next paragraph describing him as a radar operator. We all now know that Kaufmann had no role in this, other than the introduction of false information and this is something else that should be reduced to a footnote in the history of the case.

Stowers followed this with the story of Jim Ragsdale who claimed to have seen bodies. Something that Stowers didn’t know is that Ragsdale would eventually claim that he walked down to the bodies to get a good look at them and would claim that they had helmets made of gold. I can think of very few things that are more useless than gold for helmets.  Ragsdale’s testimony has been exposed as the lie it was and this should also be reduced to a footnote.

I mentioned all this because I wanted something out there that would provide the latest and best information about the case and these three items have been exposed as fraudulent. And yes, these were my witnesses and my claim about the diaries, but I really thought the diaries had been located and Walter Haut told me that Frank Kaufmann was reliable and Haut provided the lead to Ragsdale.

Which, of course, tells us nothing about Robbins’ tale of being called out to help in the recovery operation. Here’s what bothers me about all this. Robbins is not in the Yearbook, but remember Haut said 15 or 20% of those stationed at the base were not in the Yearbook. I have found no other reference to him in the proper time frame, which in all these sorts of cases is worrisome but rarely fatal.

In 1947 there were no helicopters assigned to the base and helicopters, though flying in that time frame, were more experimental than operational. The Atomic Blast, the base newspaper made a big deal out of a helicopter visiting a few months after the UFO crash.

Robbins’ tale of the decontamination procedure doesn’t seem right to me, but then this was 1947 and the procedures might have changed. However, it doesn’t seem right that he went through the procedure and then had his clothes returned to him. It would seem that he would have been issued new fatigues to reduce the possibility of spreading the contamination once the other procedures were complete, but I don’t know if that is accurate for the time.

I do know that Sheriff George Wilcox’s deputies did claim to have found a large burned area, but they said nothing about a craft and bodies, which would have still been there, given the timing. The large blackened area of glass, which would be an aftereffect of extreme heat probably would have been destroyed by the Army because it would be physical evidence, if it existed.

And there is a real problem with Robbins taking his wife to the scene. She, herself said that he would keep this a secret if told to but seems to have spilled the story to her within hours of his return home. Making it worse, he took her out to the crash site, violating more orders. That seems to be a major contradiction in what she said.

Robbins’ story doesn’t seem to have been picked up by any of the Roswell researchers. I do mention it briefly in Roswell Revisited, but give it only a couple of paragraphs with no real commentary about it. Although I do have a file for Robbins, I have not used this anecdote in any other book. Studying it carefully in today’s world with more evidence and information available, it is just another second-hand story that provided nothing new, but seems to have drawn on much of the information that had been published in the past. Tom Carey and Don Schmitt did interview her, but the story didn’t make it into their book.

This is, then, another of those tales that falls into the footnote category which means we need to acknowledge it but certainly not use it as any sort of evidence for a UFO crash. There is too much wrong here and without the story from a first-hand source, we are better off not mentioning it again.

This and That

As many of you know, I have been reviewing a large number of UFO files and have found some things that don’t warrant a complete blog post but that are interesting. For example, Ramey Air Force Base in Puerto Rico was not named for Roger Ramey but for Brigadier General Howard Knox Ramey. This Ramey learned to fly in 1918 and by the time the Second World War broke out he had moved up the ranks. In

BG Howard Knox Ramey

January 1943 he was named the commanding officer of the V (Fifth) Bomber Command. In March 1943 while on a reconnaissance fight over the Torres Strait he disappeared. Neither his body nor any wreckage from the aircraft were found. If I had to guess, I would say that the Japanese spotted his aircraft and shot it down. 

The point is that Ramey Air Force Base was named for him, contrary to what some others have suggested. Roger Ramey’s widow told me it had not been named for her husband when I asked her about that in the early 1990s.

Here's something that a number of people might have seen but it might not have registered with them. In the Roswell Daily Record of July 9, in the article entitled, “Ramey Says Excitement Not Justified,” which, of course is his answer to the Roswell debris, there is a paragraph toward the end that says, “A public relations officer here said the balloon was in his office ‘and it will probably stay right there.’”

Although the article is in the Roswell newspaper, the dateline is Fort Worth which means the public information officer who was quoted is not Walter Haut but probably Major Charles A. Cashon, the 8^th Air Force PIO. (There are those who suggest that I haven’t carried out a complete investigation of the Roswell case, so, to prove a point, I will tell you that Cashon was not rated as flight crew and that his address in 1947 was Rt. 1, Box 220, Weatherford, TX, which was about a thirty-minute drive from the base.) This tells us where the debris from Ramey’s office went once he was done showing it to the press, though I wonder why Cashon would want it cluttering up his office and why no one bothered to take additional pictures (Oh, wait, this was 1947 when cameras were expensive and film was expensive and no one cared about a wrecked weather balloon anyway).

Speaking of balloons, Irving Newton, the warrant office who “identified” the balloon for Ramey and the press, said that he knew immediately that is was a balloon, though in interviews he said a colonel had met him before he got to Ramey’s office. Newton said the colonel told him they thought it was a weather balloon and wanted him to identify it (does leading the witness count here?) Anyway, Newton, in a February 20, 1995 letter to me, wrote, “The Rawin target and balloon in question was only used at limited locations and to my knowledge not at Fort Worth, not even all weather personnel were familiar with them, but we used them at Tinker Field (Okla City) during training and for Atomic tests…”

Atomic tests like that of Operation Crossroads in which the 509^th Bomb Group participated including Jesse Marcel. And, according to the L. J. Guthrie, of the Roswell weather station, they had been “dabbling with radar controlled balloons,” (which strikes me as a load… radar controlled balloons?) and that he believed based on the descriptions, what Brazel found could have been one of theirs. An Albuquerque weatherman said that they launched rawins with the weather balloons as well.

None of that proves much one way or another. I just thought these various items about the balloons or more specifically the rawin from Ramey’s office landing in the possession of Cashon to be interesting.

I thought I would just throw this information out there. I’m sure that I have opened the gates to all those who need to question absolutely everything even if there is nothing very controversial in the comments here. These are just little bits of information that probably add nothing to our overall understanding but I found them somewhat amusing.

June Kaba and Roswell

I see that June Kaba’s tale is making the rounds again and although I hate to mention it because it will probably result in more hate email; I find her story to be unbelievable. She seemed to me to be a very nice woman who might have been lonely in her old age but the stories she told simply do not hang together and her observations of military life and organization are in error.

June Kaba at a wedding celebration in Ohio. She has her back
to the camera on the right.

I first learned of her when she contacted me after the Unsolved Mysteries broadcast about Roswell in 1989. Her story was that she, along with her pals met for coffee every morning before they had to be at work at 8:00. She wrote, “The scoop was that two little greenish men (bodies) from a wrecked flying saucer had been flown into the base during the night and were in a freezer locker in one of the hangers [sic] and that Aero Med lad had charge of them for examination.”

According to what she told James Clarkson on June 27, 1997, “It [the flight] came from New Mexico. He [the airman relating the tale] said what I brought in this morning… He said that he brought two little men in… He called them little green men. He described them as greenish-blue and they were four feet tall and they were dead.”

She said that it was an airman who had told her the tale and that he “seemed to know what he was talking about…” Later she would describe him as a master sergeant who might have been the crew chief on the aircraft.

Less than two hours later there was a memo “hand carried” to the office and each of those there were required to read it and then sign it. For the most part it was a standard security agreement that outlined the penalty for giving those who had no clearances information that was considered classified. According to Kaba, “This was the jist [sic] of the memo:

Some irresponsible person has started a false rumor about 2 green men from [a] flying saucer. This is nothing but a rumor and has no truth. Anyone repeating this rumor will be liable for dismissal and will be liable for $20,000 fine or 20 years in jail.

According to Kaba, this memo was “over the signature of the Laboratory chief.” Later she would suggest that the order came from a higher authority than the laboratory chief.

Of course this makes no sense. If it is a rumor then no law would be violated by repeating it. The memo does nothing other than reinforce the validity of what the airman said. The best course of action for those in charge, if they were worried about anyone repeating the “rumor,” was to caution them verbally. Why put something like that in writing where it might suddenly appear in the newspaper? Or that someone might find while searching through correspondence some years later? It would be of no value in a trial because to try someone for violating the order, it would have to be produced and that gives out the information about the bodies and the craft.

Kaba’s story was originally interesting to me because here was a witness who had been at Wright Field and offered us some testimony about the bodies arriving there. True, she saw nothing herself, but the circumstances seemed interesting and I wanted to follow up on it. Kaba then sent me several documents proving that she had worked there (or more accurately at Patterson Field and later at Wright-Patterson AFB) and had a security clearance. No evidence was located suggesting that she held anything higher than a secret clearance though she claimed top secret and a “Q” clearance, (according to Clarkson’s interview) which seemed to be related to the Department of Energy. There seems to be nothing in her background that would require a DOE “Q” clearance.

Originally, then, this tale seems related to Roswell, but the documentation doesn’t support that. It shows that she didn’t work there in July 1947. Her work record was somewhat spotty. She worked at Patterson Field from July 3, 1942 until June 30, 1943, when she quite to have a baby. Next she worked there from May 13, 1948 to July 21, 1948 when she left for health reasons. Her final work was from March 8, 1951 to May 2, 1952 when she and her husband moved away from the Dayton, Ohio, area. This removed her tale from that of Roswell because she had made it clear that the aircraft had landed the night before. I supposed if you wanted, you could suggest that this had something to do with the Aztec UFO crash, if you believe that tale.

In fact, in the attempts to validate some of Kaba’s information, researchers have relied on the MJ-12 parade of documents. The suggestion is that the nonsensical El Indio UFO crash of December 1950 might be one of the three that she meant when she said she knew of three UFO crashes. Unfortunately (and this we can’t blame on her because it was speculation by others), it is clear that the El Indio crash was invented by Robert Willingham in 1968. It was not one of the three.

For some reason she was not asked what the three crashes were. Once I learned that she had not been employed at Patterson Field during July 1947, I put the case on the back burner. She hadn’t mentioned to me that she knew of three crashes, only that she had been in Dayton when the airman talked of the bodies arriving the night before. When it was clear that Roswell couldn’t have been that crash, and in fact, her dates of employment didn’t lead to any specific case, I wasn’t sure if there was any significance to her tale.

There was one other fact, which now that it no longer matters to her, I can mention. She wrote to me on March 31, 1991, “Although I am classed as legally blind, my vision is peculiar in that I have so called tunnel vision. I suffered brain damage as a result of loss of blood.”

This then, seems to be the tale told by a lonely woman. It seems to be a confabulation rather than a blatant lie. It is clear from my correspondence with her that she did have knowledge of UFOs and claimed to have seen three herself. Given all of this, I had no reason to pursue the investigation. It seemed to me that it was a dead end and nothing I have learned since has suggested anything else.

Art Bell Retires from Midnight in the Desert

For those interested in such things, or for the fans of Art Bell, he announced, abruptly, that he was retiring from his latest radio show, Midnight in the Desert. He cited concerns for his family and that someone was stalking him, even taking shots at him and at his house. To read his statement see:

http://artbell.com/art-hangs-it-up-for-the-last-time/

I will say that I always found his show entertaining and his enthusiasm for many subjects interesting. He seems to have had a strange radio career, especially since he gave up regularly hosting his old show Coast to Coast in the late 1990s. This retirement, however, seems to be permanent.

Jan Aldrich and the Ramey Memo Update

(Blogger's Note: With the kind permission of Jan Aldrich, I am posting his apology to us about the Ramey Memo. This isn't so much as a "gotcha" as it is an illustration on how gentlemen in our modern society should conduct themselves. Jan made an error because a couple of links didn't work when he first attempted to use them. He responded with what he believed to be an oversight on our part as we attempted to decipher the Ramey Memo. Realizing his error, and finding the links were now working, he reassessed his reaction and offered an apology. I would like to see more of this, which is not to say apologies but all of us acting or reacting with such class.)

I want to make a public apology to Kevin Randle, Isaac Koi and the Above Top
Secret website.  I based my criticism on an incomplete view of the so-called
Ramey Memo on the Above Top Secret website.

When I first tried to click on the URL Isaac provided on the Above Top
Secret Website, there was no response. Attempting a search I got various
discussions and claims above the item, but not the latest posting.  Talking
to Barry after I told him his efforts were not represented there. I did
know that Barry had provided his assessment of the item to Kevin Randle who
had used it on his blog.  Barry indicated that the blog and other items were
indeed on the Above Top Secret website not just a compilation of previous
items on the subject.  Checking again, they sure were!   The URL worked and
all items from Kevin Randle's blog and Barry Greenwood's work were on the
website.

I am not trying to excuse for my posting.  My responsibility was to
thoroughly check the site before shooting from the hip on something.  So I
am now on Patrick Gross' "UFO Stupid" list up close to the top.

Previously, I had rather sharp exchanges with the late J. Bond Johnson on
this subject both in public and off-line about this subject which moved to a
threatened law suit on his part so maybe I am too sensitive about this
subject.*

Again, I humbly apologize to all concerned and to the readers of the various
email lists for my irresponsible actions in this matter.

Jan L. Aldrich

*J. Bond Johnson threatened to sue me on a number of occasions if I didn't retract the statements I had made about what he told me, all of which were recorded on audiotape. Given the circumstances, I would have almost enjoyed the lawsuit which would have vindicated my position on the matter. Johnson, instead, insisted on claiming I had misquoted him, I had maligned him, I had recorded him without his permission (though on tape you hear me ask if he minded if I recorded the conversations) and other assorted allegations. He, of course, never initiated the legal action, I suspect because he knew the truth and knew he had said all the things I claimed he did. Too often in the world of the UFO, we resorted to lawsuits when it seems that a careful word here or there would resolve the issue.

Stan Gordon and Kecksburg

As I knew would be the case, Stan Gordon has provided information about his lengthy and unparalleled research on the Kecksburg UFO crash case. For those who wish to read his take on the latest, you can find it here:

http://www.stangordon.info/wp/2015/12/04/kecksburg-ufo-witness-says-object-was-not-ge-mark-2-reentry-vehicle-2/

New Kecksburg Explanation?

For those interested in the Kecksburg UFO Crash I offer the following news article. I have not reviewed the evidence offered here and am sure that my friend Stan Gordon will have some comment about it. However, for those who wish to read the story, it can be found here:

http://www.post-gazette.com/news/science/2015/12/06/50-years-later-the-Kecksburg-Westmoreland-County-UFO-is-identified-probably/stories/201512060146

I will note that others, Tim Printy, Robert Young and Jim Oberg have offered alternative explanations for the crash as well, all of which I explored in Crash: When UFOs Fall from the Sky. If Stan Gordon does have comment, I'll publish that as well.

Oak Island - Season Three

I suspect that we’re about halfway through the new season of The Curse of Oak Island and they have made some interesting progress. They have remotely explored the cavern at the bottom of the bore hole using a variety of technology that suggests there is a chest down there as well as some human remains. They’ve begun to clear out the bore hole so that they can send a diver down, though I’m

Oak Island in the late 19th century.

not sure that’s such a great idea. And they believe they have located the original site of the Money Pit. Some great progress, I would say.

But we are still being diverted by the nonsense. We have a couple of guys, who using some of their new technology, believe they have located other areas on the island that might hold some treasure. They did dig a pit where some iron was spotted by that technology near the surface and they did find a cable, which, of course, isn’t treasure but did suggest the technology might not be completely bogus.

A test hole dug to find gold failed, but they did find some blue clay in which gold is sometimes found. Of course that would be gold ore as opposed to gold coins, but it did suggest gold might be there. They didn’t find any though.

And they keep getting diverted by trivia. We were treated to an “expedition” to some boulders not all that far from Oak Island that had some interesting carvings on them. One was identified as a Portuguese Cross that might suggest a connection between that European country and Nova Scotia but certainly doesn’t get us any closer to what might be found at the bottom of the Money Pit. They thought the carvings were old but had no evidence of that other than their somewhat amateur examination.

Sure, I get that they have a lot of time to fill and while the results of the summer activity are known to those who were on the island last summer, getting right to that point would not allow them to fill another ten or twelve hours of programming. Why do in a two hour special what you can do over several weeks so that you can sell more advertising?

I was a little surprised by their attempts to pull one of those long pipes out of the bore hole. It was taking up space that would be needed for the diver when they finally get to that so they decided to pull it out. They had some success, but as they pulled it up and then cut off the first twenty feet of pipe, I wondered about the wisdom of what they were doing. I could see in my mind the chain slipping and the bottom of the pipe falling back into the hole. I though they should make a better effort to ensure that the pipe didn’t slip. They got the first twenty feet out, and when the cut the second section free, the other 140 feet of the pipe fell back into the hole, causing them additional work. They solved their problem. Now, before they cut away a section of pipe, they put a cross piece through it to ensure it couldn’t fall. With that, they were able to remove the whole thing. I just didn’t understand why they didn’t anticipate the problem and put in the cross pieces from the beginning.

I’m also thinking that they keep being diverted by things that don’t have much of a point. It delays what they are attempting to do, which is find out if there is anything of value at the bottom of the Money Pit. They drain the swamp (in seasons past), but find nothing of value for all the effort. It did fill a couple of hours of programming however.

They did toss dye into the bole hole to see if it connected to the ocean but that failed. I’m not sure of the mechanics of that but it simply didn’t work. Had I been there and someone suggested the experiment, I would have been on board, though I would think that if there is salt water in the pit, that would establish a connection to the ocean. I would think that the depth of the water in the pit, as it rose and fell with the tide, would have been another hint.

I wasn’t impressed with the discovery of old Spanish coins on the surface of the island (which they had to take to Florida to have a coin expert there examine… you have to wonder if there weren’t any coin dealers or experts in Canada that could have done that). Had they dug them up near the pit, that would have been something, but a coin found on the surface just smacked of someone tossing out these rather cheap, old Spanish coins to add a little drama… which is not to say that anyone associated with the program did it. Anyone who had been on the island for any reason could have done that. I know of people salting a couple of the Roswell crash sites with modern debris (such as fiber options) in the hopes of creating some excitement.

There have been some interesting revelations this season, but they keep dragging all this out. I guess the thought is that once they get to the bottom of the Money Pit or the bole hole, the show will be over. We’ll have the answers and there might not be much of a mystery left…

But wait, if there is a treasure down there, no matter what form it takes, it would seem to me that they would want to find out who put it there, how long ago they did it, and where did they originate. The coconut husks found lining the beach and the water traps suggest some elaborate engineering, and that would make an interesting follow-on series. But this continued dragging out of this with all the sideshows and nonsense trips is becoming annoying. If there is an answer, let’s get to it before this season ends. I don’t know about others, but my patience is wearing thin on this. 

Jan Aldrich, Barry Greenwood and the Ramey Memo

Jan Aldrich seemed to be upset that we are attempting to read the Ramey memo and has likened the effort to that of the promoters of the Not Roswell Slides. I fear that he has misunderstood our mission or maybe he assigned his own beliefs to what he thinks we are doing as opposed to what we are actually doing, but the point is that this is nothing like the fiasco that is the Not Roswell Slides.

We have not expressed a point of view about what the message says… Oh, sure, David Rudiak believes that it is a classified document that might hold important information, but that is not the driving force for us. David would be delighted if we were able to validate his interpretation of the memo including the phrase, “victim of the wreck,” but we have been unable to clarify the image enough to make that call.

Jan is concerned that we won’t mention Barry Greenwood’s interpretation of part of the memo, though such a concern is unwarranted. In fact, more than six years ago, I had explored Barry’s suggestion about his reading of part of the memo. You can read that posting here:

http://kevinrandle.blogspot.co.uk/2009/09/ramey-memo-and-barry-greenwood.html

At that time David argued passionately that Barry’s interpretation didn’t quite fit all the known facts. We have to remember that David has worked on all this extensively for many years and believes that he had established to a high degree of certainty what the memo says. There is a great deal of agreement with his analysis inside the UFO community… the problem is, as anyone who looks at the memo can see, there is ambiguity in the interpretations. If there was none, then we would be having another conversation.

Jan’s point seems to be that we’ll ignore the conflicting data pretending that it doesn’t exist. However, we have attempted to look at all the evidence, including much of what Barry has written and incorporate that in our paper as it deals with the history of the attempts to read the memo. I have, for example, explored the possibility that J. Bond Johnson, the reporter/photographer for the Fort Worth Star-Telegram, brought the document into Ramey’s office with him, which would make it wire service copy. David disagrees for several reasons including that while Johnson had said just this in some of his earlier interviews, he also repudiated that claim in many of his later interviews. Johnson realized that if it was wire service copy, then the importance of the memo was badly degraded but if it was a classified document, then this could be the “smoking gun.”

But here’s my point. It is true that David is quite passionate in his opinion, which doesn’t make it wrong. Jan is quite passionate in his opinion, which doesn’t make it wrong. Where Jan missed the boat is with his idea that we are attempting to recreate a Not Roswell Slides presentation that will ignore any evidence that conflicts with what Jan believes is our mission. But rather than hide the data, or obscure it with digital tricks, we have made everything available on line for those who wish to look at it. All we are attempting to do is clarify what the memo says not force an interpretation on everyone. We are attempting to solve the riddle and while no matter what we learn, there will be detractors, in the end we hope to have provided an answer for this… a true answer and not one that appeals to one end of the spectrum or the other… an answer that will resolve the issue.