Roswell - What's Next?

The other day someone asked me, “What’s the next step for Roswell?”

It was a question that I hadn’t thought about much but is one that needs to be addressed though I thought I had made a note of this in Roswell in the 21^st Century. (Sure, some of you might be annoyed at these little promotional mentions, but hey, I don’t charge you a membership to visit here.)

One of the displays in the Roswell UFO

Museum. Copyright by Randle.

Let’s look at it this way. If there is a first-hand witness still alive who saw anything, if he or she has not come forward and we all who have been searching for every possible witness hasn’t found that person, I would bet that person simply didn’t see much at all or is long past providing us with any useful information. Certainly nothing that would break the case open and provide the smoking gun. Everyone at the top levels of the Roswell command structure, whether officer or NCO, is dead. Some of the lower ranking and therefore younger members might still be out there, but the odds are that they are deep into their nineties with the 70^th anniversary looming. There has been an effort to find papers, documents, diaries, journals, letters, anything that mentions the crash and recovery and written prior to 1978 when Jesse Marcel first burst onto the scene. To this point there is simply nothing of value found, certainly nothing that can be properly dated and nothing that leads us into the realm of the alien.

So, witnesses can no longer be interviewed, unless you resort to talking to the children or the grandchildren of those stationed at Roswell. This is something that I don’t think bears much fruit. Those former service members certainly could have been spinning a tale or two, the listeners could have misinterpreted what was said, or thought they heard things that weren’t said. If someone had written it down in one of those seemingly nonexistent diaries or journals at the time the tale was uttered, then we might have something interesting or something that would provide a lead, but none of that has borne fruit either.

There really isn’t a next step, except for the search for documents, and that hasn’t gone all that well. Personally, I’ve made dozens of FOIA requests and I’m not alone in that. Hundreds, if not thousands, have been made, and I’m still waiting for responses on some of them. (Or I get snide letters such as the one from the CIA… I had asked about the analysis of the Ramey Memo done in the mid-1990s by an organization that was, at that time, part of the CIA… I mentioned that the photo had been taken in 1947 and they told me that the CIA didn’t exist in 1947. I didn’t bother telling that the Central Intelligence Group did but my question dealt with the Air Force inquiry that came in the 1990s not something from 1947).

We can review the information already collected. Many, if not most, of the interviews were conducted on audio and videotape so that a record of them exists that might provide some clues. These can be reviewed. As I was doing that, I did find some interesting tidbits overlooked at the time. Oh, nothing that would alter anyone’s view, but interesting tidbits that helped complete an overall picture. And, of course, we can compare later statements with earlier ones to see if any, or rather how much, those statements have changed. Sometimes it’s just little things and other times it is a major alteration. That also can provide information but that sort of data won’t lead us to the extraterrestrial, or any other answer for that matter.

We can continue the onslaught of FOIA, but the records sought, if they even exist, would be so highly classified that national security would come into play and the records would be withheld. We would be told that the specific agency under FOIA could neither confirm nor deny the existence of the records sought. And that’s if they even bother to look for them. We just might just be told that they have no records that are responsive to our requests. I once FOIAed a document, giving the title, the date it was written, the author, and the overall topic and was told that my request hadn’t been specific enough. I’m not sure that if I have even given them the first page or two that would have been specific enough. I just don’t know what else I could have included to make it clearer to them and there seemed to be nowhere to go with the next request.

Thinking about this carefully, I just can’t seem to think of anything more to be done except another “cold case” review of the information. The testimony has been collected, the documentation has been sought, and archives have been searched. A review might suggest something to someone who has not been immersed in the case for decades, or he or she might think of an avenue of research that hasn’t been explored, but I don’t know what it would be. We are now dead in the water, waiting for inspiration.

The Curse of Oak Island - Another Bust

Last week they dug another deep pit, this one wide enough for a diver (though Borehole 10X is barely wide enough, the new one is positively spacious), into what they thought of as a chamber or vault that might contain treasure. This chamber was apparently discovered in the late nineteenth century by one of the many other companies and individuals who searched for treasure on Oak Island. With the hole completed, with a metal casing that nearly penetrated that “vault,” they dug out the last few feet of soil, and were ready for a diver. They found two who would make the descent into what I thought of as a death trap.

One of the divers, with his metal detector, found what he thought of as three points where there were substantial hits that suggested metal and there was talk of having found some of the treasure. We got a description that suggested metal bars that the diver was unable to recover, but given the depth, the visibility and his lack of any real tools to extract anything, it wasn’t surprising. We were left with the impression that these metal deposits would be worked, and in the next episode we would see the results of all this activity.

Well, we did, and it was a bust. Another diver descended into what can only be called the murky depths and with his metal detector could find no trace of all this metal. In the hours or days between the dives, the metal had vanished… or more likely, was never there. The first results came from false readings. Attempts to duplicate the results failed. Attempts to extract any metal failed. It seemed that there had not been anything down there, but the water was so full of sediment and debris that the diver couldn’t see much of anything.

Now, we head back to the mainland and to another stone that might be some sort of giant head carved hundreds of years ago and might be some sort of acknowledgement of the Templars… though to me it looked like a weathered stone and they were seeing a face (which I could see as well) because of the shape and shadows on the stone. I’m not sure anyone, other than Mother Nature, carved that stone but never let it be said that they weren’t willing to draw a connection to Oak Island no matter how flimsy the evidence might be. Why the face was looking at Oak Island even if the island couldn’t be seen from that distance.

And it’s back to the War Room where they discuss their dwindling finances and what they should do next. Although they say that only have enough money left in the budget to either dig another great hole or re-explore Bore Hole 10X, they decide they’ll do both. They’ll watch their nickels and dimes and they’ll be careful, but they’ll do both.

Although the previews suggest something is dredged up (air lifted?) from 10X that is startling, why am I dubious? For four seasons we’ve been down this road and while they keep finding old debris, the island has been visited from what, three hundred or more years. They’ve found old English coins, a Spanish coin, other evidence of people on the island, but they have found nothing to suggest a substantial treasure. It is one tease after another and I suspect if they don’t find something soon, they’ll run out of money and viewers… and if the viewers go away, so will History’s cameras and nothing will be found.

I now suspect that there is nothing to be found and some of those who created all those companies are laughing in their graves… Do you want to buy stock into a company to search for buried treasure? How about stock in a gold mine? Or how about some advertising on a television show about a search for buried treasure that never pays off? At some point we’re all going to cease to care.

X-Zone Broadcast Network - Colonel Charles Halt

Colonel Charles Halt

The guest this week was Charles Halt who was the senior officer present for one of the nights of the UFO events in Rendlesham Forest near Bentwaters. We talked about those events, the affect they had on some of those who were involved and Halt’s belief that some sort of disinformation campaign and some sort of intense debriefings were held, including the use of chemicals. He confirmed the statement, “"I believe the objects that I saw at close quarter were extraterrestrial in origin and that the security services of both the United States and the United Kingdom have attempted – both then and now – to subvert the significance of what occurred at Rendlesham Forest and RAF Bentwaters by the use of well-practiced methods of disinformation," is something that he said and he believes. You can listen to the interview here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZsXqrFuMlC0

He also cleared up, at least in my mind, the controversy over how many nights the events took place. I had asked both John Burroughs and Jim Penniston about that, and they disagreed. One said it was three night and the other said it was two. Given what Halt said, they were both right. The first night involved a number of enlisted personnel who had seen something in the woods outside the base perimeter and went to investigate. The second night only involved two people, a second lieutenant and an NCO. They were the only two who saw anything on that night. On the third night, Halt, leading a small party went out as more lights were seen in the forest. He provides some of his observations that night.

He talked about some of the physical evidence that was recovered, some of the observations by instrumentality, which is to say radar confirmations that he learned of years after the event, and the enhanced debriefings that were undergone by the enlisted personnel. He was not debriefed on the sightings.

Next week’s guest: Ruben Uriarte

Topic: UFO investigations in Texas and Mexico.

The "Harassed Rancher" Roswell Article

Over at UFO Conjectures, hosted by Rich Reynolds, he reproduces the July 9, 1947, newspaper, article from the Roswell Daily Record, “Harassed Rancher Who Located ‘Saucer’ Sorry He Told About It,” suggesting that this is the final nail in the Roswell coffin. But I say, “Not so fast.” There are some disturbing things in that article, things that make no sense when you think about them.

According to the article, “Brazel related that on June 14 he and an 8-year-old son, Vernon were about 7 or 8 miles from the ranch house of the J.B. Foster ranch, which he operates, when they came upon a large area of bright wreckage made up on [sic] rubber strips, tinfoil, a rather rough paper and sticks.”

Okay, there is nothing extraordinary here and it sounds for all the world like the remnants of one of the Mogul balloon arrays that were being launched in June and July from Alamogordo. The article also suggests that “on July 4 he, his wife, Vernon and a daughter Betty [actually Bessie], age 14, went back to the spot and gathered up quite a bit of the debris.”

I’ll just overlook the fact that this seems to be a strange thing to have done on July 4, rather than say, June 15, or July 3. I’ll just move on.

Brazel, then on July 7, according to the Daily Record, visited with Sheriff George Wilcox and mentioned he might have had found one of the flying disks. Wilcox called out to the air base and eventually Jesse Marcel “and a man in plain clothes [Sheridan Cavitt]” arrived and they all, meaning Brazel, Marcel and Cavitt drove to the ranch. They gathered up the rest of it and “…tried to make a kite out of it but could not do that and could not find any way to put it back together so that it would fit.”

Now we get a few specifics about size of this debris. He didn’t see it fall or before it was torn up, “so he did not know the size or shape it might have been, but he though it might have been about as large as a table top. The balloon which held it up, if that was how it worked, must have been about 12 feet long… The rubber was smoky gray and scattered over an area about 200 yards in diameter.”

We learn, “When the debris was gathered up the tinfoil, paper, tape, and the sticks made a bundle about three feet long and 7 or 8 inches thick, while the rubber made a bundle about 18 or 20 inches long and about 8 inches thick. In all, he estimated the entire lot would have weighed maybe five pounds.”

According to the newspaper there were no words to be found, although there were letters on some of the parts. Considerable scotch tape and some tape with flowers printed on it had been used in the construction. No string or wire were to be found but there were some eyelets in the paper to indicate that some sort of attachment had been used.

Before we look at the final two paragraphs of the article, which do have some relevance, let’s talk about what we know here. If Brazel went to the Sheriff’s Office on Monday, and if, as Marcel said, he was eating lunch when he got the call, then we know that all this took place in the afternoon. According to the best information available, Brazel, Marcel and Cavitt didn’t leave Roswell until late afternoon, maybe as late as four or four-thirty, and if the drive to the ranch took three hours (which is the time it takes on the modern roads today) then the questions become, “When did they gather the material, where did they take it to attempt to put it together, and how did Marcel get back to Roswell in time to meet with Colonel William Blanchard, the base commander by 8:00 a.m. on Tuesday, July 8?” The timing simply doesn’t work because they would have arrived at the ranch about dusk and couldn’t have gathered the material in the dark and do the other things suggested by the newspaper, not to mention that the debris had already been gathered.

But let’s back up even a little more. Bill Brazel said that his father had taken some of the debris into town to show the sheriff. If this is true, and the material that Mack Brazel had found was as described in the newspaper, why did Marcel and Cavitt drive out to the ranch? Wouldn’t one of them, if not both of them, recognize the debris as mundane? Why go to the ranch at all? Brazel, along with family members, had apparently collected it all on July 4, again according to the newspaper. There was nothing to see in the field, and since there were samples of it in the Sheriff’s Office, there was no need to drive to the ranch to see what would have been an empty field.

If we believe this article, neither Marcel nor Cavitt recognized the material that Brazel brought into town. Cavitt, on the other hand, told Colonel Richard Weaver that he had recognized the debris in the field as a balloon as soon as he saw it laying out there. He didn’t explain why he hadn’t bothered to mention this to Marcel at the time or to Blanchard when he got back to Roswell.

If we look at the descriptions about the amount of material, there doesn’t seem to be all that much. Not a field filled with debris, but a small area that had been cleaned by the Brazel family. There was absolutely no reason to pursue this any further. There wasn’t a problem with who would clean it up because the family had already done that. In fact, at one time Bessie Brazel claimed that they had collected it all into three or four burlap bags and stored it under the porch of the ranch house.

The debris displayed in General Ramey's

office, July 8, 1947.

Had this been a Mogul array, there would have been evidence of more than a single balloon; there would have been multiple rawin targets (if you follow the illustration for Flight No. 2, but Flight No. 5 had no rawin targets), lots of cord to link it all, and given the size of the arrays, they probably would have been spread out over more than 200 yards. The descriptions given in the newspaper (and the photographs taken in Fort Worth) were more consistent with a single balloon and a single rawin, not a complete array with multiple balloons and multiple rawins.

When we get to the last two paragraphs, more trouble develops. Brazel said, according to the newspaper, that he had found two weather-observation balloons on the ranch but what he had found didn’t resemble them. He said, “I’m sure what I found was not any weather observation balloon.”

Of course, had it been Mogul, this was technically accurate because the function of Mogul was not weather observation. But, the Mogul arrays were made up of neoprene weather balloons and possibly some rawin radar targets, cord linking all the balloons together in a long line, sonobuoys to detect the sounds of detonation of atomic bombs, and devices to attempt to keep the balloons aloft. These would “dribble” out the sand of the ballast as the balloons began to descend.

The point is that if we read the article, it raises more questions than it answers, suggests that there was no reason for Marcel and Cavitt to drive to the ranch, suggests a time line that is impossible given the timing and the distances, provides a description of a single balloon and single target, exactly what appears in the photographs taken in General Roger Ramey’s office on the afternoon of July 8.

In other words, there is actually nothing in this article that eliminates any of the answers for the Roswell crash including both Mogul and the alien, and nothing in it to support any of the answers. It is a self-contradictory document that obscures more than it reveals. As evidence, it does nothing for either side of the argument. While skeptics can point to the description of the debris and say that it is a balloon the believers can point to the last two paragraphs and say that Brazel would have recognized the debris as a balloon had that been what it was. This is just another of the inexplicable items that pop up in this tale.

The Curse of Oak Island - The Fourth Season

I have been waiting for something to happen on Curse of Oak Island before I made comments about it. There seemed to be great promise this season. They had millions to spend on the Money Pit (reaffirming the idea that the term referred to throwing money into a pit rather than taking money out of it). They hinted of things to come, have found some coins that seem to have been minted by the

Oak Island

English, a hint that part of that stone allegedly found 90 feet down with strange symbols on it had been recovered, and that the shiny, glittering thing found so far beneath the surface in their borehole that captured their attention on the remote camera might be part of the treasure.

But so far the show has been basically the same. They drained the swamp again and found wood. (Did anyone notice they all stood around saying things like, “I’ve got wood?) They thought some of it might have been a plank from the deck of a ship and a spike that might also been from the deck of a ship but I’m just not impressed. They assume it was a ship scuttled with treasure on board but I wonder if the more likely scenario isn’t a repurposing of the wood and the spike for something else… but the real point is that they have found nothing in the swamp but trash.

They created a larger borehole as they attempted to penetrate a vault that might have been discovered in 1897… but once they pulled up the wood (Hey, we’ve got wood), it was clearly something from the late 19^th century or maybe early 20^th and had nothing to do with pirates burying treasure or anything else of real importance. It was just another example of all the tunneling that has been done on the island. I’m surprised the surface hasn’t collapsed entirely.

They’ve also sort of scraped the land around the original Money Pit flat so that they can bring in their machinery for these big projects. As they were looking at the dirt scraped up, Rick Lagina, I think, found a couple of bits of pottery and his pal, found a stone that might have some marking on it… an “X” with a tail that we’re told Scott Wolters had at some point on another show linked to the Templars (though I don’t think the connection is very solid). I wondered why, after finding these artifacts, they didn’t use a shaker box to search for more of the same which might have yielded a few clues but they were content with this pottery debris and single marked stone fragment… so much for archaeological research… but I digress.

I was going to talk about the coins found at an English campsite that they thought significant… Except, of course, the English had been all over the area hundreds of years ago, not to mention during the French and Indian War… so an English camp there in the mid-18^th century doesn’t seem to be so significant and wouldn’t have anything to do with the treasure anyway.

Here we get to the point of all this and it’s Samuel Ball. He owned quite a bit of Oak Island in the 18^th and 19^th centuries. They can’t explain his suggested wealth. They just note he also owned more land on the mainland, indicating he was a rich guy. He is established as a resident of the area who had won his freedom from slavery by serving in the British Army. There is a suggestion that he might have found some of the treasure and that was the source of his wealth…

But what I found interesting was that in some of the very early documentation of the discovery of the money pit, there were three young men involved. In those earlier reports, Samuel Ball was identified as one of the three. Why did his name drop out of the later reports? Did he get one of the chests that some have suggested were already removed? Did he get the only chest and the two have been looking for other, similar chests hoping there was more treasure buried on the island? I don’t know… just found it interesting that Ball had been reported as one of the original three in the earliest of accounts but then his name disappeared.

Randall Sullivan, who had written an article for Rolling Stone about Oak Island, was back to conduct more research for a book. I wouldn’t have mentioned him except that his favorite theory is that the Money Pit housed the original Shakespeare manuscripts which would be worth hundreds of millions if true… but my question is, “If they’re digging into areas that are submerged, in what did they store these manuscripts? Wouldn’t the water have turned them to pulp? I mean, everyone believes that the treasure is under water and has been for what, 225 years. The water would have destroyed a wooden chest, or that chest would have leaked so the manuscripts are probably gone, if they were ever there. Just my thoughts on that theory.

So, where are we after what, eight episodes in the fourth season? Well, they’ve found more coins on the surface. They’ve found wood from deeply buried areas that showed markings proving it was from about one hundred years ago. They’ve seen a map that is dated hundreds of years earlier but don’t seem concerned that the provenance is shaky at best. Really, someone found it in a book… can we be any more vague? They’re still worried about Borehole 10 X, in which nothing they thought was at the bottom, was there but they want to look again just in case the guy who walked around down there wasn’t good enough to make the proper examination.

Or, in other words, they haven’t found anything that can be linked to someone on the island burying a treasure of great importance, no matter how many times they tell us of missing Inca treasure or Templar treasure, and religious relics from long ago. They make leaps of logic but in the end, they have found nothing of consequence, but each “discovery” is labeled significant when all they have is the debris of human occupation from the last two or three hundred years.

X-Zone Broadcast Network - A Retrospective, Sort Of

Yes, it's me... photo copyright

by Kevin Randle.

For this week’s show, I did provided what I think of as my mission statement, something of a retrospective on what has transpired over the last few months, some thoughts on where we might go in the next year, and then some comments on Roswell in the 21^st Century. You can listen to it here:

https://youtu.be/YmUKGK_evu8

1. Mission Statement –

This was a talk about a search for the truth, whatever that truth might be as opposed to what I wish to believe or others might wish to believe. It was about how some of the old, classic UFO reports have been solved by modern standards of research. For example, the Chiles – Whitted cigar-shaped UFO with square windows was most probably a bolide and that this was underscored by the Zond IV reentry nearly twenty years later. As it broke up, some believed they were seeing a cigar-shaped UFO while the majority of people recognized it for what it was.

2. Year in Review –

I started by discussing the Socorro UFO case and how guests Ben Moss and Tony Angiola had sparked an interest by some of the things they said during that program. I began to look into it carefully with a search for other witnesses that Ben and Tony talked about. While there is nothing in the police log to verify this, their existence was verified by Captain Richard Holder’s interview with the police dispatcher on the night of the sighting. He wrote, in his report also written that night that three calls had come into the police station.

And as you all know, they also sparked a discussion of the shape of the symbol on the craft seen by Lonnie Zamora and how it had been altered in some documents as a way to verify other sightings.

This led me to Carmon Marano who had been an officer with Project Blue Book. He explained the situation at Blue Book at the end of the project and provided some interesting insights into what was going in the late 1960s as the project wrapped up.

3. Preview –

I had also thought we would move into the paranormal as part of our search for A Different Perspective. This would include examining tales of Near Death Experiences. I mentioned a book I had done on the topic, how I came to write the book, my interviews with people who had experienced NDEs, and research at the U of I libraries.

I also mentioned the case of alien abduction that I had researched in the mid-1990s that evolved into the book Conversations, a book about past lives and serial killers and what I think as an interesting read (but, of course, I’m biased).

4. Roswell Recanted –

Since it had come up on other shows, and the question had been asked of me several times, I did talk about what is in Roswell in the 21^st Century and how the information was gathered. Also talked about some of the discoveries in the cold case examination of the Roswell crash and some of the things that have been used to support the Roswell story that really tell us something else about the world in 1947.

Next week’s show: Colonel Charles Halt

Topic: Rendlesham Forest, of course…

X-Zone Boradcast Network - Noe Torres

Noe Torres

This week I chatted with Noe Torres who has published a number of UFO books and by published I mean published as opposed to having written. Make no mistake, he has written books as well and he, with his partner,Ruben Uriarte, have collaborated on other books that can be found at www.RoswellBooks.com.  During the radio interview, we talked at length about a reported UFO crash in Mexico in which a number of Mexican soldiers died when they attempted to recover the disk-shaped craft. Intervention by American soldiers sometime later, cleaned up and covered up the mess, and brought the object, whatever it was into the United States, eventually into the Center for Disease Control in Atlanta. This all was revealed in a document that was received by various UFO researchers anonymously in the 1990s called the Deneb Report (Deneb, coincidently was the star that was featured in my science fiction novel, On the Second Tuesday of Next Week). You can listen to the interview here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6SnXZF9zY-w

And as I say during the interview, you can often learn more about the topics discussed by visiting my blog. In this case Noe talked about what Len Stringfield had reported in one of his status reports. You can read the article about that and Len’s status report here:

http://kevinrandle.blogspot.com/2013/11/the-coyame-ufo-crash.html

Next Week: A retrospective show about what has been discussed over the last five months and what has been learned about some of those topics since then.

Those who might wish to ask questions should put them in the comments section of this post and I’ll try to answer them then.

Roswell Recanted?

Well, here is something that is interesting. It seems that an off-hand comment I made about the lack of skepticism in some avenues of UFO research has blown up into a debate on what I said about the Roswell case. It began with Robert Sheaffer making a few comments on his blog, Bad UFOs, which was based on the very nice review that Jerome Clark had published in Fortean Times about my book Roswell in the 21^st Century. From that interview, Robert extrapolated a point of view that might not be exactly what I had do say… though the headline in the Fortean Times suggests a recanting of the Roswell case.

On the positive side, for me, it seems to have sparked a debate online and drove a few people to Amazon and other ebook sites which helped sales. I certainly don’t want to do anything to stop the traffic because it is good for me.

But the question being asked about me, but never actually put to me, is if I have abandoned the alien model for the Roswell crash. The short, flip answer is, “Read the book.”

The more lengthy answer is, “Well, sort of.”

The book was meant to be a “cold case” look at the Roswell crash, starting at the beginning and shifting through the mountains of evidence that has been gathered by a number of researchers… all of whom seemed to have a biased opinion from “Yes, it was alien” to “No, it was a Mogul balloon.”

To all of them (which at one time included me with some of them), I say, “I don’t know.”

To quote Jerry Clark, “So what did happen? Here Randle, in conceding a truth so many avoid speaking, will infuriate believers on both sides. There is ‘no real answer,’ he says.”

And there you have it… I go through the whole story, document it as best I can, and in the end, I have to say that the case is built on testimony gathered decades after the fact and that everything we know about memory is that it really is no good when it comes to something like this.

I was going to point out some of the interesting things that I learned by going through all this material, but whatever I say will not be heard by one side or the other because they will be too busy formulating their counter arguments to listen. I did find mistakes such as the Lee Reeves tale of accompanying Dan Dwyer to the crash site that is contradicted by so much testimony and documentation that it shouldn’t even be discussed… and if we want to challenge testimony, Charles Moore provides many examples in his ever shifting tale about Mogul.

To understand my conclusions, however, it is necessary to read the evidence as has been gathered and the mistakes that have been made. This is a mystery that seems to have no solid conclusion except the skeptics will say that it can’t be alien because interstellar flight is impossible to believers who say there are so many witnesses that something alien must have happened.

And to give away just one thing that I learned in the reexamination of all the material was that the Air Force was not originally investigating the case in the 1990s… they were searching for documentation about the crash from all the various agencies that might have had some involvement in the original story.

As I say, it is interesting that much of this has blown up around me without anyone actually asking me anything. I have seen some of the Internet discussion but certainly not all of it. Before it goes much further, I would merely say, “Why not read the book and then we can talk about what it all means.”

The Roswell Slides - The Gift that Keeps On Giving

Not all that long ago I asked a general question about the effect of the Roswell Slides on UFOlogy as a whole. Seems that most of those responding on line suggested that the impact was little, especially outside the UFO community. Most seemed to believe that those who did not hold much interest in UFOs were unaware of the whole sorry fiasco.

But that came from those inside the UFO community. Those outside, or those who had an interest but didn’t consider themselves part of our community, had a much different take on it. To them, it was a disaster that changed their opinions. In the last couple of weeks I have had occasion to speak with some of those people and by some, I mean four and by speak I mean both on the telephone and through email.

One man called me, apologized for the intrusion, and then said that he had been interested in UFOs for decades; that interest beginning as a teenager. He said that it seemed to him that in the last year or so, many of the classic cases had been explained and that the mystery seemed to have been solved. He brought up the Roswell Slides as what he thought of as almost the last straw. The will to believe had been so strong in some that they had missed the red flags waving all over the landscape according to what he said.

Another, who emailed me, said that for her the destruction of the slides so quickly once independent researchers had the opportunity to review the data had proved that much of the information being printed in books and magazines or used in documentaries about UFOs was next to useless. The slide investigators had overlooked the information that disconfirmed their belief structure (which, I think, is a problem that we all face). We sometimes look at information that provides a clear alternative view and then find all sorts of reasons to ignore it.

There was a guy who wanted to know what to believe and what books to read because he was so unhappy with how the whole Roswell Slides investigation had progressed. Oh, he understood that the investigators had wanted to proceed without interference and speculation until they had some answers. But, once the information had leaked, they should have been more forthcoming, especially now that we had the answers to the questions. He thought it ridiculous that some still clung to the idea there was something alien on the slides and that further damaged his reliance on UFO researchers.

The point here is that no matter how we attempt to dress it up, the Roswell Slides was the final straw for some who had suffered through MJ-12, the Alien Autopsy, and the collapse of so many of the Roswell witnesses who had claimed to have been involved deeply, regardless of their positions in the military at the time. I, myself, was fooled by several who seemed to have the proper credentials, who supplied robust stories, and who turned out to have been inventing their tales (and their confirming documentation which is not a phenomenon restricted to UFOs) and claiming higher ranks than they held.

The Roswell Slides, which didn’t receive any real reporting by the mainstream media (because of all the other nonsense about UFOs that has been “leaked” over the years) did considerable damage to the Roswell case in particular and UFO research in general. People who had not studied the Air Force report or understand some of the content of it will tell you that it explained Roswell completely and that is that. They won’t have read the report, can’t tell you what was in it, but they remember the Air Force explained Roswell at a press conference that was carried by the cable news channels and in many newspapers. And that is all they remember no matter what else is said or done. The Roswell Slides underscored that point of view, another case of great claims destroyed by proper research and that is the damage that has been done. At one point we had many people interested in learning about Roswell and it seemed that we had evidence to support the alien answer, but the Air Force had better PR than we did.  We are left with a negative image of UFO research and researchers by those slides which did not show an alien creature but an unfortunate child. Under those circumstances, what would you think?

Oskar Linke - Update

The thing about the Internet is that it allows you to communicate with people all over the country and all over the world which helps us get at the truth. For example, J. Allen Hynek said the Oskar Linke UFO landing story was in the Project Blue Book files, so I looked for it. Hynek dated the case as July 9, 1952, but other sources said the sighting was June 17, 1950. I searched the Blue Book index around those dates. July 1952 was a period of intense activity and while, at other times in other years, the index might feature all the sightings received during two or three months on a single page, in July 1952, single dates sometimes took up two pages. In other words, there were a lot of sightings in July 1952. I found nothing in June, July or August of that year that mentioned Linke and his UFO.

There was nothing for the sighting around its correct date in 1950 either. I checked for several months on either side of the date. Some of the sources, other than Hynek, also suggested a report in Project Blue Book, which others said wasn’t there.

As those of you who read comments know, Ralf Buelow, left a comment about this and a link about Linke (I just couldn’t avoid doing that) that showed it was in the Blue Book file. If you haven’t seen that link, here it is:

http://www.bluebookarchive.org/page.aspx?PageCode=MAXW-PBB9-1194

That, of course, took me to Fold3 and their Blue Book file which was a single page entry. I looked at the entries before it and after it, which allowed me to find the entry in the Blue Book index. It is on the page for 1 – 31 March 1952 in the section labeled “Additional Reported Sightings (Not Cases).” It is entry number 1087. It is grouped with a March 15 sighting in Iran and another from Greenfield, Massachusetts. Linke’s sighting (Hasselback, Saxsoni) is from a retyped news clipping and the one from Massachusetts is from the newspaper. The source of the Linke news clipping, which is to say the newspaper, is not identified in the Blue Book file. It is not the same clipping as the one quoted by Hynek in his book, The Hynek UFO Report. Hynek’s report was from a Greek newspaper and the source is listed as I. Kathimerini. No source is provided for the Iran case.

For those of you interested in such things, the report that directly precedes it is from California, and is from either March 31 or April 1, according to Blue Book and therefore has nothing to do with Linke.

The Iran case is a single page that describes a luminous object traveling at great speed that probably wasn’t a meteor, according to the file. The sighting was representative of a number of sightings over the Iranian/Soviet border at the time.

The Massachusetts sighting is an actual newspaper clipping as opposed to a retyped version and it covers some sightings in that state. There is nothing about Linke in that either.

Here’s where we are on this, which says nothing about the sighting itself, but on the reporting of it. Hynek claimed that it came from the CIA, but the Blue Book file does not bear that out. He said it was one of the “unidentifieds” in Blue Book, but the index and the case file do not bear that out. His quotes, apparently from the Greek newspaper, do not match the quotes from the Blue Book file, though the information does match, which of course it would since both reports comes from Oskar Linke. I see nothing on the Blue Book report that identifies a newspaper which is why I say it is not the one Hynek quoted.

I thank Ralf Buelow for the information and the link.

X-Zone Broadcast Network - Chris Rutkowski

Chris Rutkowski

Chris Rutkowski showed up for the latest edition of the A Different Perspective on the radio. We talked, briefly about the number of UFO sightings in Canada and his annual survey of the sightings that had been reported. For the rest of the program we talked about cases from 1967, of which there were three he thought to be important. We spent the most time on Shag Harbour because there was a lot of Canadian government documentation about the case. You can listen to the program here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=36QkUP8IwrQ

Next week: Noe Torres

Topic: His UFO investigations and his books.

Oskar Linke, Blue Book and the CIA

As many of you know, I’m writing a book which is no surprise because I’m always writing a book of some kind. Sometimes they are even about UFOs. As I was wading through the material, I came across a sighting that Dr. J. Allen Hynek had reported in his The Hynek UFO Report. The details were a little confusing and a typo or two made it even more confusing but I think I have straightened that out, which isn’t important here.

J. Allen Hynek

According to Hynek, on July 9, 1952 (or rather the date of the report) Oscar Linke and his daughter saw a UFO in what would have been East Germany. Linke said that he saw two entities and when his daughter shouted at him, those two beings reacted with surprise. They climbed back into their craft and took off.

So what’s the problem?

First, according to Hynek, the report is in the Project Blue Book files. He wrote, “One of the more interesting but isolated Air Force ‘Unidentifieds’ came to Blue Book in the form of a (then) secret CIA document:”

That document is a newspaper report from a Greek newspaper and that’s where the July 9, date came from. Others quoted Blue Book as the source following Hynek’s lead and some had the 1952 date as the correct one. I checked the Blue Book Master Index and found nothing to support a sighting on that date in Germany that involved an occupant sighting. Later I learned that the case was actually from June 17, 1950, and the man’s name was Oskar Linke. That didn’t help because I still found nothing in the Blue Book files about this report. I believe others have also attempted to find it with the same negative results.

I’m not here to argue the merits of the sighting, but Hynek’s interesting revelation. He seemed to believe the case was in Blue Book, and as the scientific consultant, especially in the early 1950s; he was privy to a great deal of UFO data collected by the Air Force. I’m not sure how he came into possession of this report because it was classified, though it might have been routinely downgraded at three year intervals until it was ultimately declassified in 1958, and besides, it was from a newspaper which sort of argues against the classification being to protect collection methods. While this clipping came from a Greek newspaper, it was apparently widely reported around Europe about the same time which is two years after the event.

No, the important point here is that the CIA was collecting UFO material and providing it to the Air Force. This was some five years before the beginning of Moon Dust (that was 1957 and the document was published in 1952… I mention all this so everyone knows that I’m not talking about the actual date of the sighting).

Anyway, I found it interesting that there were secret UFO reports being transmitted and that the CIA was gathering the data from around the world. Since this report was fed into Blue Book, according to Hynek and I don’t know how he would have learned about it otherwise, it suggests that there was another level to Blue Book which we have yet to penetrate. It suggests a real concern for UFO information at some high level of the government. And remember, we have found UFO related documents in the FBI files as well, so there was an interest in UFOs by the intelligence services.

All we have is this single little bit of data and in and of itself, the fact the CIA reported it might not be overly important. I might be reading too much into this. I just found it interesting that Hynek mentioned the case was in the Blue Book files, but it’s not, that it was classified as secret and that it came from the CIA. It suggests a higher level of interest in UFOs but doesn’t tell us much about that level of interest.

Skeptics vs Mogul

The other day, when I had Robert Sheaffer on the program, I had asked him some questions about skeptics that always bugged me. It seemed, from my perspective, that skeptics would accept any anti-UFO document as authentic without question and reject any pro-UFO document regardless of the provenance.* I had thought the true skeptic would be, well, skeptical of everything until the evidence was in hand, which might mean the acceptance of a document or point of view as logical once the investigation was completed even if that might not reinforce the skeptical beliefs.

As an example of this, I suggested that skeptics accepted the Project Mogul explanation as if it had been proven, even when there was sufficient documentation to question it. I used Dr. Albert Crary’s diary and field notes as an example. Since the only possible culprit for dropping metallic debris on the Brazel ranch (and yes, I know that Brazel didn’t own it, the ranch belonged to the Fosters) was Mogul Flight No. 4 because all other flights have been accounted for or had been launched too late to leave the debris, and Crary’s diary said Flight No. 4 had been cancelled, why do skeptics seem to think that doesn’t matter. The point was not to argue about Mogul, but to suggest that the acceptance of that flight as the culprit in the face of the documentation that suggested otherwise seemed not to be a very skeptical position.

Again, the point is not to argue the merits of the Mogul explanation, but to question the skeptics about this apparent contradiction.

Look at the other side. UFO proponents, who believe Roswell was an extraterrestrial craft, have a similar problem with the Twining Letter. This is a document written in September 1947 that provided information about UFOs and in one line, said that the lack of crash recovered debris which would prove the existence of these objects, seemed to argue against the Roswell crash. Proponents reject it because any alien crash recovered debris would be classified Top Secret and the letter is only classified as Secret. Security regulations would prohibit the inclusion of Top Secret material in a Secret document. This argument is without merit.

So we have the same set of circumstances. Skeptics criticizing the proponents when the documentation is clear… of course it does not completely rule out the Roswell crash because of the way the document was created**… but then we add other documents to the mix, as I outline in Roswell in the 21^st Century, and the support of a UFO crash is significantly reduced.

If I can look at this documentation or these documents and admit this, then why do skeptics continue to support the Mogul explanation with the same religious fervor as the UFO proponents support Roswell? Sure, you can say that they launched a cluster of balloons later in the day and we don’t have a definition of what that meant… except that definition was outlined in another document relevant to Mogul. Sure, you can say that the lack of data for Flight No. 4, and the exclusion of it in the data table created for all the other flights means they recovered nothing of scientific value and that suggests the reasons for the exclusion… even when other flights that failed to produce scientific data are mentioned in that table. Aren’t the skeptics now doing the same thing of which they accuse the proponents? Aren’t they cherry-picking the data to support their conclusion and rejecting that data that do not support them?

Charles Moore: The man who launched the Roswell Craft

The point of my question then, and now, is that some skeptics seem to ignore what I think of the tenets of skepticism by not applying the same standards to both sides of the question. Are they any worse than the true believers, who know, absolutely know, that there is alien visitation, and reject negative data because of that belief? Shouldn’t the skeptics be questioning all the data before accepting it, and if they don’t, then aren’t they actually debunkers rather than skeptics? What are the reasons for rejecting the documentation supplied by the man who lead the Mogul team (yes, I know it was the New York University balloon project) in favor of testimony from a man who claimed he had launched the Roswell saucer but has no documentation to support his claim? Is this evidence of a double standard in the investigation of UFOs (or any other disputed claim) or is there some reason that allows the rejection of the documentation that doesn’t favor the skeptical argument that I don’t know?

I have said, many times, that this shouldn’t be a debate where we ignore the information that is inconvenient, but an investigation in which the truth is the standard. Not my truth, or your truth, or someone else’s truth, but the truth. The question remains unanswered at this point as we’re dragged off into a discussion about Mogul which is a red herring… my narrative here is about skepticism and not Mogul. The conversation has been diverted and this, I hope drags it kicking and screaming back to the point.

*Robert Sheaffer did his best to answer the question for himself and I have no complaint about it. I mentioned him only because the point arose in the interview I conducted with him and lead to this longer line of thought.

**For those interested, the Twining Letter was written by Howard McCoy in response to information passed to him by Brigadier General George Schulgen and Lieutenant Colonel George Garrett. They supplied 18 specific sightings and asked for analysis. In those sightings, they mentioned nothing about a crash and since the analysis was based on those cases and nothing else, the argument can be made that no mention was made of crash recovered debris because none was submitted with the original request. That is the reason there is nothing about crash recovered debris and not this ridiculous argument about levels of classification. But before everyone jumps on this, there are other documents and statements that are relevant to that discussion (which is not made here) that add weight to the anti-Roswell argument.

Duplicate UFOs?

While interviewing Rob Swiatek during the radio show, I asked why there were no duplicate pictures of UFOs, meaning the same craft or similar craft photographed at different times in different locations by different people. It seems that every UFO picture we have is unique. He said that he knew of a couple of pictures that were quite similar but didn’t have the facts of the cases at his fingertips. You can read the additional information here:

http://kevinrandle.blogspot.com/2016/12/x-zone-broadcast-network-rob-swiatek.html

And, for those who missed the interview, you can listen to it here:

https://youtu.be/l8W0PV1QVE8

The point of this, however, is that Rob sent the information to me. There are two photos that appear in the APRO Bulletin for November 1978. The first of the pictures was taken by Saul Janusas who was on business in Brazil. He had been at the Rio De Janeiro airport on either June 20 or 21, 1978, and had caught the bus home. Through the bus window he saw an object. He grabbed his camera and took two pictures.

Nearly two years earlier, on May 12, 1976, Joshua da Silva and Gesareo Goncalves were on the road between Iteri and Passo Fondo, Brazil when, at about ten in the morning, da Silva spotted a silver object that he described as like Saturn with a ring around the center. Both men thought the object was of brushed metal and some twenty to twenty-five feet in diameter. When they were close, Goncalves stopped the car and then grabbed his camera. He took two pictures and then the object began to accelerate and disappeared in seconds. Technicians at El Globo, a

Rio newspaper, said they could find no evidence of a hoax, which, in reality meant they could find nothing that suggested the negative had been manipulated in some fashion.

This briefly, is the information about these two cases. The objects do resemble that of the object in the first picture supplied by Rob Swiatek. This shows that some of the photographs, taken years apart, do sometimes reveal objects that look similar. While this might not be of overwhelming importance, it certainly is interesting.

X-Zone Broadcast Network - Robert Sheaffer

This week we moved into the realm of skepticism with Robert Sheaffer who hosts www.debunker.com and www.BadUFOs.com where he offers solutions to many of what some believe are the best UFO sightings. We discussed a question that has bugged me for years which is why skeptics are quick to reject the alien solution for UFOs and equally quick to embrace the explanations without much in the way of questioning those solutions. For those interested in minutia, we discussed the radar and visual sightings over Washington, D.C. in 1952, Roswell (well, of course, with him asking me a question that might have bugged him for a while) and a few other sightings along with some thoughts on the Kenneth Arnold sighting from June, 1947. You can listen to the show here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yC0I9zSj8E0

Next week: Chris Rutkowski

Topic: Canadian UFO Research (Yes, an international show).

Treasure Quest, PTSD and a Sheridan Resort Hotel

For those of you keeping score at home, I had sworn off publishing anything more about Treasure Quest – Snake Island (which has nothing to do with Snake Island this season) but the last episode outraged me. Keith “Cappy” Plaskett had collapsed in the jungle and when the rest of the team reached him and touched him, he began screaming and curling up into a ball. He then said something about Vietnamese and later we’re told he had a flash back to his Vietnam service. I’m always suspicious of those claims and read a statistic that suggested there are only 880,000 Vietnam Vets still alive though some nine to thirteen million people claim service in country. The vast majority of people who claim they are Vietnam Veterans are lying about it.

So, they reach Plaskett and suddenly one of the team members is screaming for the doctor and I’m thinking, “What doctor?” But, of course there is a doctor with them, along with cameramen, and sound engineers and other support personnel that we never see (until this show when the cameramen are shown in the background. Do the camera operators drag all that heavy equipment through the jungle themselves or do they have help? Just how large is that support team? Who all is on it?). Okay, that’s no surprise because it would be impossible for all of the team to appear on film together with changing angles and whatnot without there being camera operators around. Here, however we get the proof because the doctor appears and suggests that Plaskett is dehydrated. He doesn’t seem to respond at first, but eventually comes around telling them that it was a flash back from one of his two tours in Vietnam (and I have to wonder again if I’m the only service member in the world who had only a single tour).

Although his team understands about PTSD, and there is a cheesy announcement at the end of the episode about helping our vets, I’m outraged that they would bring this into a faked reality show about treasure hunting in Argentina for the purpose of building dramatic ratings. And, knowing that so many “Vietnam Vets” are vets only in their minds, I did a little checking. Posted to Plaskett’s Facebook page are pictures of him receiving a medal while in uniform. One of the pictures is of sufficient quality that I can see the medals he’s wearing and they include the Vietnam Service and Vietnam Campaign which, given the circumstances confirms a tour in Vietnam but not necessarily two. And, given that picture, I have no reason to doubt other aspects of his claim of lengthy naval service.

As I say, I’m just annoyed that they brought this PTSD thing forward in a dramatic way. It reinforces a stereotype of the Vietnam Vet. Back in the old days, when I had a real job that required I go to an office every day and do work to make a living, I let it slip one day that I had served in Vietnam (and hey, if you want proof, go to the 187^th AHC web site and look me up). One of the other employees couldn’t believe it. She said, “But you seem so normal.” So, yes, I’m a little sensitive to this and really don’t need to see it exploited on television in this cheap way.

I wouldn’t have even brought this up, except for a comment made to one of the postings I made about this show. A commenter, identified only as Claude (who just created his “profile” in December 2016 and has one view, me) wrote, “The team travels up river and travels hours through the ‘jungle’ to find the Santa Ana mission. Total BS! You can't get from the river to the mission without crossing the highway. Thanks to google maps, all they had to do is drive down highway 12 from the nearby town and take the small road to the visitor’s center and walk a hundred yards. In filming they were careful not to show the flood lights mounted on the ground to illuminate the mission at night. Not so remote as they would have us believe.”

I’m not going to comment on this unless I do a little checking myself which, given the Internet and Google Earth, isn’t all that difficult. I found the grid coordinates for Reduccion de Neustra Senora de Santa Ana which are 27 degrees 23 minutes South and 55 degrees 34 minutes west, which puts us in a field with highways running very close to it. No journey on a river into the remote jungle, no long trek through the thick vegetation, but a highway that runs very close and a town not too far away. In fact, you can stay in a Sheridan Resort Hotel for about three hundred bucks a night, which includes a buffet breakfast… so do the treasure hunters remain the jungle, in their tents, or do they set them up, talk about roughing it and retire to a hotel which probably has Internet, HBO, and that buffet breakfast?

Sure the jungle around them is remote and filled with dangerous creatures, but remember some of the Guarani showed up demanding to know what they were doing and eventually invited them to meet with village elders. Wasn’t one of these guys wearing an “Old Navy” T-shirt? Doesn’t that suggest the village might not be quite as remote as they suggest? And doesn’t it seem odd that some guy in a black market in Paraguay tells them he had a silver bar from this mission when it is apparently a big tourist attraction in Argentina with operating hours and recommendations for accommodations? Not to mention, didn’t anyone on the show think that some of us would resort to using the Internet to learn a little bit more about all of this? In the world today, it is very simple to use a variety of search engines to discover just what is going on and seeing just how “remote” the area is, and then find the hyperbole more than a little annoying.

X-Zone Broadcast Network - Rob Swiatek

Rob Swiatek, formerly of the Fund for UFO Research and lately as member of the board at MUFON joined me for this week’s show. We discussed the state of UFO research including how many reports have been made to MUFON in the last year (something like 3500) and why there don’t seem to be the same sort of robust reports that were made in the past. He suggested that sightings in which the occupants were seen were a mere handful of the reports made. And we discussed some of the better sightings from the last couple of years, including some interesting photographs. You can listen to the show here:

https://youtu.be/l8W0PV1QVE8

For those of you who were interested in the Kauai, Hawaii UFO photograph we discussed, Rob supplied additional information after the show. Following is the report and a black and white copy of the photograph.

For an in depth analysis of the photograph see Bruce Maccabee, “A Rare Photo Coincidence,” in International UFO Reporter for May/June 1990, pages 4-9, 22.

Next week’s guest: Robert Sheaffer

Topic: Bad UFOs (The name of his book).