Let's Kill Ufology?

Many years ago, my pal, Rich Reynolds, thought that we geezers in the UFO field should step aside and allow the youngsters to take over. I don’t think he phrased it quite that way but the implication was clear. We had failed to solve the riddle of the flying saucers, so let someone else, with newer ideas, come forward. Maybe they would do better than we had.

Now we have Lue Elizondo, a late comer to the party, saying that he wanted to kill Ufology so that whatever replaced it might by more holistic and harmonized. He wanted a community that was far more academically serious and representative of the topic. You know, like the To The Stars Academy of Arts and Sciences. Yes, I know that he is no longer associated with it, but then, it certainly wasn’t, exactly, serious and representative of the topic.

What he seems to have missed was that Ufology has always been relegated to the civilian world for any serious investigation. The Air Force spent its time ridiculing the topic, often suggesting that those who see UFOs are not the most reliable of observers and providing useless answers to high quality cases.

Oh, you want an example?

In a word, “Levelland.”

Here was a case in which witnesses, who had observed a UFO close to the ground, that stalled their car engines, dimmed their headlights, and filled their radios with static, provided multiple chains of evidence. Sightings lasted for minutes, giving the witness enough time to get a good look at the UFO before it took off in a bright red glow. The craft interacted with the environment and there are even hints of landing traces having been found. The local sheriff saw the UFO but if you read the Air Force report, it said that he’d only seen a streak red light in the distance rather than an object. Before the Air Force investigator arrived, he told reporters that he had seen a glowing red object that was oval or football shaped. After he talked with the Air Force investigator, and according to the Project Blue Book file, he said he had only seen a streak of red light in the distance. Later still, he told Don Berliner that he had seen an object.

Witnesses around the Levelland, Texas, area independently reported the craft, reported the electromagnetic effects, and there were reliable reports of landing traces. The Air Force said that only three people saw the object and ignored most of the reports of stalled engines. The Air Force concluded that the sightings were the result of ball lightning even though, at the time, scientists argued about the reality of ball lightning. Doesn’t really matter because ball lightning has been described as never being larger than a foot to two feet in diameter and existing for mere seconds. Witnesses talked of large craft that remained close to them for five or more minutes. The sightings by multiple witnesses lasted for two and a half to three hours in and around the Levelland, Texas, area.

The Air Force didn’t issue an immediate explanation for the Levelland sightings because they were waiting for NICAP to issue theirs first. The Air Force believed that it was easier to respond to NICAP than it was for them to issue the first report. By waiting, the Air Force was able to change the tone of the discussion from the sightings to the number of the witnesses to those sightings, and then to lie about those numbers. They claimed that only three witnesses had seen an object but their own files provide five names and newspapers, some of the clippings in the Air Force file, reported on many other names.

This wasn’t the only deception by the Air Force related to the sightings in November, 1957. James Stokes, an engineer working at Holloman Air Force Base, reported that just days after the Levelland sightings, his car had been stalled by a low flying UFO

James Stokes

near Orogrande, New Mexico, just south of the Air Force base and near the White Sands Missile Range. Stokes also spoke of a slight, sunburn effect, that reddened his skin. Although the sunburn was seen by others, including the news director at an Alamogordo, New Mexico, radio station, the Air Force investigator, who arrived two days later, didn’t see the burn. The Air Force officers also made a big deal out of the claim that Stokes was an engineer, saying that there was no record of his graduating with any sort of engineering degree and that he was just a technician assigned to the base. It was a smear designed to reduce Stokes’ credibility by suggesting that he was misrepresenting his job status.

The problem was that the Air Force officers assigned to Holloman AFB and who knew Stokes, refuted the other Air Force claim. They said that Stokes was an engineer, had been doing the work of a trained engineer for some eighteen months, and was a twenty-year veteran of the Navy. It was an example of the attitude suggesting that if you can’t explain it, then ridicule it. We had two Air Force organizations dueling over Stokes’ qualifications which, of course, changed the discussion from the reality of the sighting to the credibility of the witness which was what some in the Air Force wanted anyway.

The point here is that the problem wasn’t the quality of the civilian investigations into UFO sightings, but the government and the Air Force attitude and interference in them. Rather than conduct a real investigation, the Air Force just labeled the cases, smeared the witnesses, and went on about their business as if they had supplied accurate analysis.

There are other examples of this, including the case of the photographs taken by William Rhodes in 1947. I have detailed this on the blog and you can access some of that information here:

http://kevinrandle.blogspot.com/2010/10/still-more-on-rhodes.html

http://kevinrandle.blogspot.com/2010/10/rhodes-wrap-up.html

I certainly could supply additional examples of these tactics but after a point it becomes tedious. For those who wish to read more information about Air Force attempts to smear witnesses, including members of the Air Force, I point you to:

http://kevinrandle.blogspot.com/2014/07/air-force-character-assassination-and.html

Elizondo complains that some self-professed Ufologists (is there really another kind) on social media have been less than productive. He reminds us that the Intelligence Community and the Defense apparatus watch social media. I’d suggest their time might be better spent engaging those of us who stay away from social media and the nonsense produced there. While Elizondo mentions a “few naughty children… that have decided that no other children are allowed to play in their sandbox…,” I would suggest that these spats, once called flame wars, have little to do with the scientific work being done by those of us associated with the Center for UFO Studies and the recently formed Scientific Coalition for UAP Studies (SCU), which embrace the scientific method and rejects these other spats as counterproductive.

Many of these “spats” are not between members of the UFO community on the side of alien visitation, but are the result of half-truths and lies created by the so-called skeptical community. Philip Klass had a habit of attacking those with whom he disagreed. In the past, I have enumerated some of these allegations. Rather than go into them, at length now, you can read find the information here:

http://kevinrandle.blogspot.com/2011/09/philip-klass-and-his-letter-writing.html

I would also point out that there are scientific journals that routinely report on UFOs. The Journal of Scientific Exploration, a peer reviewed scientific journal, publishes research into the UFO phenomenon. This is the sort of thing that Elizondo advocates but seemed to know nothing about.

And there is the MADAR system created by Fran Ridge and others. These are stations around the world with sensor arrays that detect and record a wide range of anomalies in the environment. Then, tracking with MUFON and the National UFO Reporting Center, they search for visual observations of UFOs, looking for correlation. Although the results have been slim, there have been some interesting correlations between alerts from the MADAR array and UFO sightings. This brings another level of science to the investigations that provides corroboration for the visual sightings and adds another link in a chain of evidence.

Elizondo wrote that the first place the newcomers go for information about UFOs is social media and that suggests a rather superficial look at UFOs. There are some very good websites and blogs that provide solid and well thought out examinations of the evidence but, of course, there are those that are filled with conjecture, conspiracy, and conflicting data. Shouldn’t anyone interested in the topic seek out multiple sources of information rather than just searching social media? Shouldn’t they be given the opportunity to draw their own conclusions rather than have some suspected and self-appointed authority tell them what the truth is and where to find it?

Elizondo wrote, “Sadly, the UFO Community as of late has become somewhat of an irrational morass of mob rule and popularity seekers.  Gone is the respect and decorum, in favor of mosh pit elbow shoves and boot kicks.  Voices of those who would otherwise apply a scholarly focus are being drowned out by those social media personalities sensationalizing their efforts as ‘disclosure activists’ in order to generate revenue through viewers and subscribers.  Those who seek ‘credit’ instead of cooperation are hijacking the topic for their own enrichment at the expense of genuine truth advocates.”

While I might point out that science is often driven by the same sad motivations, and would point to the Dinosaur Wars of the late 19^th and early 20^th centuries as but a single example, it would seem that some of these newcomers are driven by the same motivations. Some of these newcomers have engaged the services of agents and public relations specialists for the very purpose of enriching themselves and propelling themselves into the spotlight. Others have used their connections, however indirect those connections might be, to suggest inside information and knowledge as a way of improving their access to media and those important monetary rewards.

I have often wondered, however, why researching and writing about UFOs is about the only field in which it is a sin to profit from hard work. I can name several older UFO researchers who have written books and given presentations about their research to share the information for the purpose of sharing that information. For those who visit my blog, there is no pay wall or donation button. The information is offered freely. But I still wonder why I am criticized for publishing books on the topic when the compensation rarely covers the expenses for gathering the information. I don’t know how many times I have been accused of only being in it for the money, when there are easier and better ways for me to make money such as historical fiction. The accusation is hurled as a way of dismissing my work, and that of many others, without having to do much research into how we gathered the data or what credentials we might hold.

And while Elizondo condemns us for many of the problems in Ufology, I would suggest they grow from the attempts to cover up what is happening. I can point to the CIA-sponsored Robertson Panel from early 1953 as a good example. Their recommendations after their alleged investigation were to debunk the phenomenon, have teachers deny students permission to use UFOs as research projects and reject reports on UFO books. They suggested an “education” program to demystified UFOs so that the public would lose interest all the while knowing that the truth was much more interesting.

We also have had the Air Force sponsored, University of Colorado “Scientific Study” of UFOs, commonly called the Condon Committee. We have the documentation showing that the conclusions were written before the investigation began. Air Force Lieutenant Colonel Robert Hippler wrote to Dr. Robert Low of the committee telling him what the Air Force wanted, that is, there was no national security threat, there was no scientific benefit in continued in the investigation of UFOs, and that the Air Force had done a good job with their investigation. For the next fifty years, science beat us all over the head with the results of this “scientific endeavor” only to learn that it was more anti-UFO propaganda paid for by the US Government and the Air Force. You can learn more about this here:

http://kevinrandle.blogspot.com/2007/03/hippler-letter.html

Now we learn that “the social media circus of today has challenged the government’s confidence in UFOlogy as a worthy area of study.” I submit that this social media circus might be driven by the government that has worked for 75 years to prove that UFOs do not exist and are not worth the expenditure of government resources. I suggest that the podcasts, YouTube channels, Twitter fees, and Instagram pages are not the problem here, but the decades of ridicule, misinformation and outright lies spread by official government and Air Force sources are the reason that there is the confusion and division that Elizondo condemns as he attempts to propel himself into a leadership role in the UFO community. That ridicule and division was exactly what the Air Force and the government wanted to keep the answers hidden and it has worked for 75 years.

And now we have a bunch of ex-government officials, some with questioned credentials, lecturing us on what is wrong in the world of UFOs. While many of us have been toiling for decades to bring science to UFOs, have written about it, made suggestions about it, and have attempted to apply science, we have the newcomers telling us that we should now embrace science as if we hadn’t thought of that all by ourselves long ago. Well, thanks for the enlightened view of the situation and I’m sure everything will now change… except, of course, the government is again wrapping its investigation in the cloak of national security so that they can bury the information. John Greenewald just reported that the Navy has determined that the majority of the information and video evidence they have gathered is a national security issue and will not be released to the general public anytime soon. This is the same dodge they used for the last 75 years.

But that’s okay because we have these newcomers who have the answers as they find themselves on the lecture circuit and writing the books, for which they are paid, sometimes quite handsomely, all the while condemning us for writing books and appearing on the lecture circuit. But that’s okay because their motives are pure. We know this because they have told us so.

So, obviously, I find it difficult to read the suggestions made by someone who doesn’t seem to know the history of UFO research. I find it difficult to listen to the suggestion that we embrace science when many of us have done that for years. I wonder just how useful Elizondo’s suggestions are because they seem to address a symptom of the problem but not the problem itself. The problem isn’t the current state of UFO research, but to interference by government, DoD, and Air Force officials. Had they not attempted to hide the information, we would be having a completely different discussion and we would have “solved” the problem decades ago without the help of the enlightened newcomers.

 

PS: I do wonder if putting in links to other articles that have relevance here is worth the effort. Those links lead to other links so that a comprehensive picture can be drawn. The problem is that it can take a long time to wade through the material. Does putting in the links help or hinder the discussion. I would like to know. Please provide a comment with your thoughts. 

"X" Zone Broadcast Network - Tom Carey and a Lot of Things

 

Tom Carey was the guest in a two-part interview. In the first part, we talked about Roswell and his investigations into it. He explained what had dragged him into the investigation and how it seemed to dominate his life for some thirty years. You can listen to both parts here:

Tom Carey

https://www.spreaker.com/episode/51261982

and here:

https://www.spreaker.com/episode/51262024

I did ask him for his assessment of the Glenn Dennis tale of the missing nurse and her role in getting information about the alien bodies to him. There were elements of the Dennis tale that Tom found problematic and said that if we were in a court of law, the changing story would be enough to impeach him as a witness. If I understood correctly, Tom believes that there are elements of the Dennis story that are credible, but only because he might have heard them from others who were involved. He also mentioned that several witnesses had said that Dennis had told them about the bodies over the years. I, of course, don’t believe Dennis and have written about it in the past. You can read more about my investigations and impressions of the Glenn Dennis story in Understanding Roswell and on this blog here:

http://kevinrandle.blogspot.com/2020/04/glenn-dennis-lies.html

and here:

http://kevinrandle.blogspot.com/2020/05/x-zone-broadcast-network-tom-carey-and.html

And to delve even deeper into this, if you wish, you can just type Glenn Dennis into the provided search engine and find all references to him that I have published here.

Tom did say that investigations were not a straight path to the answer, unlike what is seen on TV. One person leads to another who might have a document that leads somewhere else. Sometimes the trail just runs cold and there is nowhere else to go, but sometimes there is a nugget waiting at the end that furthers the investigation. It is those nuggets we often chase.

We also talked about the Gerald Anderson tale of seeing a crashed craft over on the Plains of San Agustin, and the connection between Anderson and Winfred Buskirk, who held a Ph.D. in anthropology. Anderson had identified Buskirk as having been on the Plains to see the crash. Unfortunately for Anderson, Buskirk was still alive when Anderson began to spin his tales, and Buskirk denied had been involved. Both Tom and I had communicated with Buskirk. We were able to put them, Buskirk and Anderson together at the Albuquerque High School while Anderson was a student and Buskirk a teacher. Anderson’s tale unraveled and it was clear that his involvement was an invention by him to inject himself into the Roswell tale.

In the second part, we moved away from Roswell, and I asked about what he thought about alien abduction. I knew that Tom hadn’t wanted to get into it, but I thought, as someone around the UFO field for decades, he might provide some insight into the subset of the UFO phenomenon.

Tom said that we had never discussed alien abduction and I can confirm this. Our work, our conversations and our studies took us away from the world of alien abduction. Tom said that he had attended, well, not a party but a gathering, hosted by David Jacobs of alien abduction and alien hybrid fame. Tom danced around the description of many of the men there, but I understood immediately what he was suggesting. I pointed out that Russ Estes, Bill Cone and I had interviewed some 316 abductees in the course of the investigation that led to the writing and publication of our book about abduction, cleverly called, The Abduction Enigma.

What is interesting is that I told him that we had discovered a disproportionate number of gay men in our sample. We weren’t making any claims about their homosexuality, only that they were overly represented, given the number of gay men in the general population. Tom added, that his observations at the Jacob’s gathering, seemed to have more gay men than would be expected in a general gathering. Or, in other words, Tom had noticed something that we had found in our research but it was something that we had not talked about. Tom had never said anything because it was a discussion that he didn’t really want to get into and given the world of cancel culture, it becomes problematic. Neither of us were saying anything pejorative about homosexuality, only that we had noticed a disproportionate number gay men in the abduction population. I have said that this is something that needs to be explored in the interest of scientific research, and that our observations are based on our investigations into the abduction phenomenon.

Also, in that part two, in the last two segments, Tom talked about his new passions. One is the reoccurring suggestion that FDR and the governmental leadership had known the Japanese were going to attack Pearl Harbor, but did nothing so that the United States could get into the Second World War. I have heard this idea for a long time but Tom suggested there was a smoking gun, found in a diary kept at the time, which he explained. It is an interesting theory and there is some evidence for it.

His second passion was bigfoot but he was distracted by sightings of some sort of dog man in eastern Pennsylvania. He mentioned a documentary about this that is in the final stages of being completed.

Next time, I will be talking with Chris O’Brien about cattle mutilations. I think of this as his counter to my solo show on that topic. I’ve known Chris for a long time and we have, occasionally talked about these mutilations. It should be an interesting show.

'X' Zone Broadcast Network - Cattle Mutilations

I had thought that the interest in cattle mutilations had waned in recent years. I thought that the evidence had suggested terrestrial explanations for those mutilations. In fact, I had thought that those terrestrial explanations dealt mostly with nature at work with an occasional intervention by a human agency.

I would be wrong.

Tucker Carlson is revitalizing the mutilation controversy without understanding the years of investigation that had solved the mystery, contrary to what he might think. His interest is that of a novice who believes that he had discovered something that the rest of us have missed.

My problem here, which I freely admit, is that I haven’t seen his whole documentary. I have seen the promos for it and I have seen an interview with him, but the documentary is hidden behind a paywall known as Fox Nation and I refuse to add money to their coffers.

The first thing that I noticed in the promo was the claim that more than 10,000 cattle had been mutilated. It seemed that this was a current figure, but those of us who had been around this aspect of the UFO phenomenon for very long, recognized it. I believe it was Tom Adams who created that number in the 1970s. At the time it was admitted to be an estimate based on the numbers of cases that were being reported then, but not on any recognized statistical analysis.

That number was reinforced when Jack Hitt reported in GQ (February 1997), “Since 1967, 10,000 cows have inexplicably turned up dead, their ‘soft tissues’ removed.”

That Carlson was using that 25-year-old quote seems to suggest that no animals had been mutilated in the last two and a half decades. Sure, I’m playing something of a semantics game here, but seriously, isn’t that number suggestive of superficial research into a topic that has been around for a lot longer.

I got involved in this in the mid-1970s when Jim Lorenzen of APRO called to ask if I could look into a series of mysterious cattle deaths in Minnesota. Let’s think about that for a minute. In the mid-1970s, the news media was worried about cattle dying in the field. I even remember the CBS Evening News reporting on it. Dead cows taking up part of their 22-minute broadcast of the important news of the day.

But I digress…

Lorenzen told me of reports of cattle slaughtered, circles melted in the snow that were reminiscent of UFO landing cases, landing marks in the ice on a nearby lake, and, of course, dead animals. The was also a mention of Satanic Rituals that were somehow involved. I called Bob Cornett and we made plans to travel to Minnesota as quickly as possible.

Bob and I spent a week in Minnesota. We learned that the landing traces talked about had mundane explanations. The farmer told us that the circles melted in the snow were the result of decomposition of silage left behind when silos were moved, creating the illusion that something round had landed. The landing gear marks were the result of a farmer chopping holes in the ice to get water for his livestock.

In fact, working with Michael J. Douglas, the news director at a local radio station, we were not able to find any evidence that UFOs were involved. It seemed, based on our work there, that misinterpretation of the evidence was the problem rather than some agency, meaning human or alien, was responsible. Everything we saw there related to the mundane.

We weren’t the only ones who had found little in the way of a mystery. Dane Edwards, publisher of the Brush, Colorado Banner, said that the mutilations were not a recent development. He first heard about them in 1963, when he lived in Texas. He said that he had traced the history back to 1961. He didn’t follow up until 1969 when eight cows were killed along the Texas-Mexico border. Again, there wasn’t any coverage and he thought nothing of it until the mutilations began in Colorado. He said that there had been six cows killed in one night.

Edwards was now interested in the phenomenon but he didn’t like the theories proposed by the local authorities. The Colorado Bureau of Investigation said that the cattle were dying of natural causes. Predators and scavengers were attacking the carcasses. According to them, the areas most vulnerable to animals were the very parts that were “removed” by the mutilators, whoever or whatever they might be. Carl Whiteside of the CBI, released a report that there had only been a single mutilation in Colorado that couldn’t be explained as something natural.

That sort of idea wasn’t confined to Colorado. Craig Beek of the Iowa Bureau of Criminal Investigation said that he didn’t think there had been a single mutilation in Iowa. At the height of the mutilation scare in the fall of 1975, there had been a rumor that Satanic cultists had used a gas grenade to kill six cows in Dubuque, Iowa. Vets who examined the cows reported that all six had died of Blackleg.

Roy Kebech, assistant director of the Attorney General’s Division of Criminal Investigations said that about ninety percent of the mutilations they investigated happened after the animals had died. Kebech was quick to point out that the mutilations he was talking about had been caused by scavengers.

Back in Iowa, I think I might have solved another part of the mystery after talking with men who worked at a local packing house. They had found the remains of several cows and had cut them up as a joke. They laughed at veterinarians’ claims of surgical expertise of the mutilators, though I’m not certain that it was veterinarians who had originally made the surgical precision claim.

CBS News reported that in one case, a blue plastic valise containing a cow’s tongue, ear and a scalpel had found at a mutilation site in Colorado. They didn’t know how it had gotten there, but believed it had been dropped by humans rather than aliens.

Robert Lounsberry, the Iowa Secretary of Agriculture claimed in 1977, that he might have accidentally solved the mutilation problem. He thought that insurance companies should investigation some of the reports. He noted that farmers with policies that didn’t pay for the natural caused deaths of the animals, might be inclined to mutilate the body for the insurance money.

I found some evidence of that in Wisconsin. Percy Stitch, the Grant County Sheriff told me that a cow found mutilated on a Grant County farm had died of respiratory failure. A local vet, Dr. Jeff Davis, told me that he knew of a mutilation in which an ear had been raggedly hacked off a dead animal. He said mutilation had happened after death. Davis said that the animal had been sickly from birth and the death would not be compensated by the insurance company, unless there was another cause of death.

According to Whiteside, Beek, and Kebech, there was another factor in play here. Ranchers and farmers never really looked at the dead animals before the hysteria about cattle mutilations swept the country. Now, any cow found with any sort of mutilation damage, whether it fit into a pattern or not, was another victim of the mysterious mutilators.

In fact, there was article published in an obscure and now defunct magazine, The Zetetic, which evolved into The Skeptical Inquirer. A sociologist, Dr. James R. Stewart, studied two groups of mutilation reports, one from Nebraska and another from South Dakota in 1974 in an article entitled “Collective Delusion: A Comparison of Believers and Skeptic.” He suggested that the mutilations began as an expression of concern for the herd. The death is seen as unusual when the rancher is anxious as outside forces, such as the prices of feed, climb wiping out any profit. He noted that it seemed the mutilations didn’t affect dairy herds because of government subsidies, which meant the farmer was not concerned about some of those outside influences.

Stewart showed there was a positive correlation between the number of reported incidents in a prescribed area and the number of news inches devoted to livestock mutilations by the media.

Steward also wrote, “Local law enforcement personnel have little, if any, experiences in determining the causes of cattle deaths. Consequently, they were inclined to adopt the farmer’s explanations in the absence of any solid refuting evidence of their own. The same was true of some local veterinarians. Rarely do they examine dead cattle; instead they are usually asked to treat living animals.”

This sort of thing has been seen in the past. In 1954, there was the great windshield pitting epidemic in Washington state. It seems that after there were stories about the H-bomb tests in the Pacific, a few people living north of Seattle noticed small, pinhead-sized nicks in their windshields. There were a few reports from a Naval base not that far from Seattle and then, in one two-day period, there were more than 3,000 reports of damage to the windshields in cars in Seattle.

And then the hysteria faded. The explanation was not damage caused by radioactive fall out but by asphalt kicked up from the roads. It wasn’t something new. The damage had always been there, it was just that most people didn’t notice it. They never really looked at the windshields as opposed to looking through them.

To try to determine what was happening in the world of cattle mutilations, retired FBI agent Ken Rommel was commissioned to make an independent study. His report, which ran to 297 pages, was an investigation of the mutilations in New Mexico. I corresponded with Rommel a number of years ago and he provided me with a copy of his lengthy report.

One point that Rommel made, and something that I heard in either the promo for Carlson’s documentary, or in the interview of him, was the term surgical precision. Rommel suggested that you have sheriff “Numnutz [his term, not mine] saying it looks like laser surgery.” The reporters love the quotes like that but never ask about the sheriff’s experience with laser surgery or bother to get some sort of confirmation from a real expert.

In keeping with those thoughts from Rommel, I noticed that one of the comments made back then and repeated today is that the mutilation phenomenon goes back hundreds of years. Supposedly, there was an unexplained death of dozens of sheep in 1606. It was claimed that “nothing was taken from the sheep but their tallow and some inward parts, the whole carcasses, and fleece remaining behind. Of this sundry conjectures but most agree that it tendeth towards some fireworks.”

I confess that I have no real idea what the last part of the entry means. The idea that what was taken was tallow, makes some sense, since tallow was used for a number of things including making soap and candles. The inner parts, which I suspect were the “offal meats,” would be the nutritional value.

There is additional information about these mutilations. The Washington County Sheriff Herb Marshall, in 1979 kept a recently dead cow under observations for two full days. Over that time, bacteria caused the skin to tear in a manner consistent with the cuts described by ranchers and farmers. Expanding gas split the stomach to expose the internal organs. Blowflies laid eggs in the soft tissues of the eyes, lips and anuses. The maggots, hatched in as little as ten hours, then would eat the soft tissues to the bone. For Sheriff Marshall, that ended the controversy and explained the mutilations.

These observations were duplicated in Alberta, Canada, in 1989, when researchers there published the results of their investigation. They concluded, “The parts reported missing from mutilated cattle are the same as those known to be removed by scavengers, primarily coyotes and birds, in the early stages of scavenging a carcass… the mutilations are the work of scavenger animals, mainly coyotes and birds; the mutilations occur after the animal has died; and any investigation of bizarre gross findings in dead cattle must rule out scavenging beyond any reasonable doubt before proceeding to investigation of other possibilities.”

I have heard these precision incisions, these surgical cuts as a reason we can rule out natural causes. I don’t know how they came up with this idea and I have never seen anything to suggest it is true. The Arkansas observations argues against this idea. It’s just one of those statements that is repeated without any sort of documentation or evidence. I had to wonder where the idea originated and what evidence produced the theory, but I have never found a satisfactory answer. Maybe Tucker Carlson has one.

I also noticed that in one of the photographs used during the promo there was a New Mexico State Trooper near the body of a cow. We are told that there are no footprints around it and by extension, there is no evidence of scavengers. But a look at the cow shows bird droppings all over it.

Mutilated animal with bird droppings suggesting a mundane cause for the mutilations.

Yes, I have looked at the other side of the debate. Criticism has been directed at Ken Rommel, suggesting that during his investigation he didn’t see a “classic” mutilation. I read where he didn’t personal inspect the dead animal but sat, upwind, in the car while someone else gathered the evidence. An examination of his report that is now backed up by these other observations in Arkansas and Canada and additional conclusions drawn by experts rather than ranchers and farmers, and my own investigations that revealed a profit motive (I’ll freely admit, a rather limited explanation) and copycat mutilations, reduces the overall mystery to virtually nothing.

This is now much longer than I intended. Of course, had I paid to see Carlson’s report, it might have been much longer. It was the promo and the interview that suggested the direction of his documentary. I would assume that someone on his staff found a copy of Rommel’s report, and I would hope some would read Mute Evidence by Daniel Kagan and Ian Summer. And, yes, I have read the books by Christopher O’Brien and Linda Moulton Howe, the reports written by Tom Adams and others.

But, based on my investigations and my research, I believe that the solution to the cattle mutilation phenomenon has been discovered. It is not aliens with a taste for cow anus. It is not a government program of either searching for evidence of biological contamination or test of biological weapons. The rather mundane solution is simple scavenging and predation by animals and insects. I don’t know what Tucker Carlson has decided to bring this back into the limelight but he had done a real disservice by doing so.

Coming up on September 28, I’ll talk with Chris O’Brien who has written several books about cattle mutilations including Stalking the Herd to provide, well, a different perspective on the topic. Chris has worked with sheriffs and others during his years long investigation.

Next week, I’ll be talking with Tom Carey about his investigation into the Roswell case and other aspects of the UFO phenomena. Since he had been around UFO research for decades, it will provide and interesting commentary on the state of UFO research.

 

Sightings and Photograph from Coast to Coast

 

For those interested in more about the Hottel Memo, see the following posting. It contains a link to the conversation with John Greenewald.

Much more recently, on May 30 of this year the witnesses were walking on a trail in the Toms River area of New Jersey. One of the witnesses spotted a fireball that was, at first hovering, and then began to move to the northeast. The object seemed to be swirling in a clockwise rotation. The witness said something and the woman with him said that she saw it too.

There was no noise from the UFO and the motion was not constant. It would move slowly and pick up speed and then slow down. It was in sight for two to three minutes before it disappeared behind a tree line and they lost sight of it.

On August 28 of this year, the witness in Littleton, Colorado, saw a “tic tac” shaped object. The UFO hovered and moved slowly without making a sound. The witness took video using an iPhone 12 camera. William Puckett suggested that this was a high-flying jet aircraft but looking at the photo, I’m not convinced that is the explanation.

Photo courtesy of William Puckett at UFOSNW website

I’m not a fan of lights in the sky but on August 15, near Lehi, Utah, the witness reported his car suddenly stalled. As he got out to look under the hood, he saw a light hovering overhead. He said that he didn’t see a shape behind the light and would have thought nothing of it, but once that light was gone, having flown to the northeast, he was able to start his car without a problem.

'X' Zone Broadcast Network - John Greenewald

 

John Greenewald was the guest this week and I invited him on the show because he had finally obtained an unredacted copy of the Hottel Memo. This was short note about the crash of three UFOs in New Mexico sometime prior to 1950. John said

John Greenewald

that the unredacted version had the names of sources, though the names were not those he had expected. You can listen to the show here:

https://www.spreaker.com/episode/51099167

Or you can watch it here:

https://rumble.com/v1i63g3-a-different-perspective-with-kevin-randle-interviews-john-greenewald.html

Rather than finding the name, Silas Newton blacked out, the names seem to indicate a connection to Washington, D.C. law enforcement, though Washington, D.C. wasn’t specifically mentioned. I wondered, given the timing, if the Metro Police being mentioned in the memo might be Denver. On March 8, 1950, Silas Newton gave a lecture at the University of Denver about three UFO crashes that had taken place a couple of years earlier.

The Hottel Memo mentioned New Mexico specifically as the crash sites and the source of that information seemed to be Behind the Flying Saucers by Frank Scully, and possibly a Time magazine article from January of that year. Everything is rather vague and without the original sources, which were not mentioned in the memo, nothing new can be learned.

That is not to say, that the names in the memo won’t lead to those original sources. All we have are the names of men who apparently received the story from others. According John, the information was relayed to the FBI through the sex crimes unit of the Metro Police. Yeah, we don’t know why sex crimes were mentioned.

We also talked about NASA and its move into UFO research. I wondered if that suggested that “Disclosure” might be closer. John noted that the NASA investigation was going to be more transparent than that of the DoD. He said that the NASA scientists who would be involved did not have the proper security clearances to be fully “read into” what the DoD was learning. He thought this would inhibit the NASA investigation because the solution of something strange could be a clandestine project of the US military. Without access to that information, any analysis attempted would be skewed. They wouldn’t have all the proper data.

Next week, I’ll be talking about cattle mutilations from my perspective, which is not the one that seems to be favored in the UFO community. I will note here that that was inspired by some of the nonsense spread by Tucker Carlson, who doesn’t seem to have a real handle on this. At the end of the month, I’ll be talking with Chris O’Brien, getting his perspective on the mutilations and see if we can’t find some common ground.

Project Galileo and Sightings for this Week.

 

It’s been just over a year since Dr. Avi Loeb announced the formation of the Galileo Project, which was a response to what he suggested was an alien artifact passing through our Solar System. It was a slower than light probe that he suggested was sent out by an alien intelligence searching for other life but had been in space for tens of thousands of years. Although his theory was not universally accepted, it resulted in the formation of an organization with the mission for systematic scientific research to look for similar artifacts or remnants of extraterrestrial technological civilizations that he postulated were flying around the galaxy. Project Galileo is, I suppose, a more robust search than SETI, though it certainly retains some of the elements of SETI.

In the coming year, he said that they hoped to “get our full suite of instruments to work, filming a movie of the entire sky in radio, infrared and visible light, as well as audio.”

From our perspective, meaning those of us in the UFO community, Loeb said, “We hope to get new high-quality data in a location where UAP were reported, and make our data open after publishing our results in peer-reviewed journals. The goal is to accomplish all of that within a year, before our next in-person conference." That conference was held at the beginning of this month.

I did wonder what his position on the new NASA effort was. Loeb said that he thought it was wonderful that NASA would be attempting to understand the mystery of UFOs, though he actually said, “UAPs.”

He did say, in something of a paraphrase of Stan Friedman, “But even if we have high-quality data on just a single object that demonstrates something else, such as an extraterrestrial technological origin, it would represent the most important discovery in human history.”

Stan had always said that it only takes one to prove the case.

But closer to home, a group partying on a boat near Port Orchard, Washington, on August 21 of this year, saw a group of very bright orbs in the sky. They thought the UFOs were near the SeaTac Airport but they didn’t look like any aircraft they had ever seen.

The lights were very bright and steady. They moved from being in a row, one trailing the other, to a triangle. Then another would join as one faded out. They watched the lights with binoculars and had a good view of them. They all agreed that it didn’t look like the usual line of up aircraft in a landing pattern, and the lights didn’t resolve themselves in the binoculars.

They did take a series of photograph, two of which follow. William Puckett published them on his UFOSNW website.

A day later, on August 22, a man and woman, driving along Interstate 80 near Grand Island, Nebraska, noticed a single bright light in front of them. They thought it was another car coming toward them until they realized that there were no mountains for the car to be on in the area. They thought it was Venus but the colors changed from a blue-white to a red to a green and back again. Confused, they pulled over to get a better look at the UFO.

They only saw the bright light as it cycled through the colors and just as they were about to get into the car, the UFO shot straight up and disappeared in seconds. For a minute or two they stood there, thinking it might come back, but it was gone. They said they had never seen anything like it and hadn’t thought about their cell phones until it was too late.

'X' Zone Broadcast Network - Brian Dunning on Belt, Montana and Cattle Mutilations

 

As I mentioned during the interview, I had found a reference about the Belt, Montana, UFO sightings and its relation to a shutdown of an entire flight of Minuteman Missiles in March 1967. Brian Dunning of https://skeptoid.com suggested that he had investigated the events and was less than impressed. I reached out to him and he agreed to come on the program to talk about his research. You can, of course, listen to it here:

https://www.spreaker.com/episode/51021375

And, as I say, those of a more visual mindset, you can watch the discussion here:

https://rumble.com/v1h7vqz-a-different-perspective-with-kevin-randle-interviews-brian-dunning.html

I mentioned the Belt, Montana, sightings at the beginning of the show, but he wasn’t that interested in them. He was more interested in the tale of the missile shutdown.

Brian Dunning

For those interested in the UFO sightings, which were investigated by the Air Force, and are carried as unidentified… or I probably should say, more accurately, the sighting is carried as unidentified, I have provided the statement from the witness. According to the Air Force, there was but a single witness, Ken Williams, who also reported his sighting to NICAP. He wrote to NICAP which shared the information with the Air Force:

Gentlemen:

Object was first observed approximately 5 miles southeast of Belt, Montana. I was traveling North on Highway 87 enroute to Great Falls, Montana. Object was approximately 1 mile to my left and appeared to be about 5 or 6 hundred yards [1500 – 1800 feet] altitude. I would estimate its speed to vary from 40 to 50 miles per hour. I am judging this speed by the speed I was traveling as object seemed to be running evenly with me. Its appearance was that of a large doomed [sic] shaped light or that of a giant headlight. Upon climbing up the Belt Hill in my truck, I looked to my left and about ½ mile up a gully. I witnessed the object at about 200 yards [600 feet] in the air in a still position. I stopped my truck and the object dropped slowly to what appeared to me to be within a very few feet from the ground. [Underlining in original]. It was at this time that I felt something or someone was watching me. As a very bright effecting light emerged from the object it momentarily blinded me. This extremely bright light seemed to flare three times. Each time holding its brightness. By the third time the light was so bright [underlining in original] that it was nearly impossible to look directly at it. It was at this time that I drove my truck onto the top of the hill which was about another ½ mile. I stopped a car and asked the people [Don Knotts of Great Falls] if they would stop at a station at the foot of the hill and call the Highway Patrol. I went back down the hill and viewed the object for several more minutes. It was while watching it the second time that it rose and disappeared like a bolt of lightning. I went back to the top of the hill where my truck was parked and just as the Highway Patrolmen [sic] Bud Nader, arrived the object appeared once again. About 2 miles away and traveling in a Northeast direction, whereas it stopped once again and appeared to drop to the ground [Underlining in the original.]. There are several deep gullys [sic] in the area where it appeared to drop out of sight. This was my last sighting of the object.

The Project Blue Book file on this case contains what was known as a Project Record Card, which was a 4 x 6 card that outlined the details of the case. While the case is labeled as “unidentified,” it also noted that there was “(1 witness),” which they believed to be so important that it was underlined. Even with that, they still labeled the case as “Unidentified.”

The important point here is that the sighting took place about a week after the missile shutdown that caused the national security uproar. Brian suggested that the week, and the fact that the UFO sighting near Belt was about a hundred miles from there suggested the two events, are unrelated.

The real problem is that most of the information about the missile shutdowns at both Echo and Oscar Flights is a bit confusing. While it seems that all the missiles at Echo were shutdown, those at Oscar, only part of them went off-line, at least that’s what Robert Salas said to me a number of years ago. There is no documentation to back up the claim.

Anyway, the shutdown was apparently caused by a transient event, that is an electrical spike sent as a power substation failed, according to Brian. Salas seemed to suggest that the missiles were off-line for hours while the evidence seems to suggest seconds, as the back up generators cut in and the missiles rebooted. At any rate, there is some controversy about all this, meaning that there are those who believe that some sort of UFO event was the cause. Listening to Brian, and going back through the documentation I have on this, I’m not so sure there is much in the way of controversy about the missile shutdown. Brian’s point of view, you might say his different perspective, is outlined during the program.

We also had an interesting discussion on cattle mutilations. We both are on the same page there, suggesting that the evidence points to terrestrial solutions rather than anything in the paranormal or alien. I have been looking into this for, literally, decades, and have yet to see anything that points to other aspects of this, other than natural and terrestrial causes. I’ll have more to say about it in a couple of weeks.

At the end of the interview, we did talk briefly about Brian’s attitude about NASA entering into UFO investigation and Dr. Avi Loeb’s Galileo Project. I was a little surprised at his attitude.

Next week, I’ll be talking with John Greenewald about the UAP/UFO information he has recovered through FOIA, and his latest victory about the Hottel FBI memo. He just received an unredacted version, which really doesn’t tell us much more about the case, but is interesting.

Chasing Footnotes - Cattle Mutilation Edition

In the past, I have mentioned that it is sometimes difficult to find footnotes that need to be chased. I usually just stumble on them and this is another case of that. While researching another project, I stumbled on the claim that cattle mutilations had a long, century’s old history, which suggested something truly anomalous. I’m not sure how that proved the paranormal or UFO connection to the mutilations, but I was more concerned with the claim that they extended into the distant past.

I found a reference that suggested there was an unexplained death of dozens of sheep in England in 1606. It was claimed that “nothing was taken from the sheep but their tallow and some inward parts, the whole carcasses, and fleece remaining behind. Of this sundry conjectures but most agree that it tendeth towards some fireworks.”

The footnote associated with this said that the source was Christopher O’Brien’s Stalking the Herd. I have a couple of O’Brien’s books in my library but Stalking the Herd was not among them. This wasn’t a major problem and I emailed my friend about this.

He responded quickly, telling me that the reference came from Tom Adams’ Project Stigmata, and Adams had received it from Elizabeth Hills, who lived in Regina, Saskatchewan. According to what Chris sent, Adams published it in his:

private book of ‘Oddities’ and appears to derive from a diary (or other personal papers) from the court of James I of England. The quotation is:

10 February 1606: The minds of men are much troubled with a strange accident lately fallen out, which yet by no means can be discovered, about the City of London and some of the shires adjoining. Whole slaughters of sheep have been made, in some places to number 100, in others less, where nothing is taken from the sheep but their tallow and some inward parts, the whole carcasses and fleece remaining still behind. Of this sundry conjectures, but most agree that it tendeth towards some fireworks.”

That does take us into the seventeenth century, but sometimes these things get garbled in the translation. But in the world of the Internet, it is often easy to trace a quote or a book. I was able to find the more information at:

https://archive.org/details/courtandtimesja00willgoog

What I learned there was that the book had been published in 1848 and was a collection of letters and other writings and the quoted material could be found on pages 44-45. Specifically:

The Court and times of James the First: illustrated by authentic and confidential letters, from various public and private collections

 

By Thomas Birch, Robert Folkestone Williams

Publication date: 1848

Topics: James I, King of England, 1566-1625, James I, King of England, 1566-1625, Great Britain -- History -- James I, 1603-1625, Great Britain

Publisher London: Henry Colburn

Collection” americana

Digitizing sponsor: Google

Book from the collections of Harvard University

Or, in other words, this seemed to be an exact copy of those letters, though I suspect the language might have been “modernized” somewhat so that we would be able to understand it. The original English, at that time, 1606, would have been somewhat different than we would speak in the modern world.

Anyway, I have found the original source, though I was led there by Chris. What has been reported by both Tom Adams and Chris is accurate. It seems that only the interpretation might differ. We are talking about one of the first reported cases of large-scale animal mutilation. But does it equate with our modern cases? I’m not so sure.

The description, vague though it is, does not sound like something we would see today. There is talk of the tallow being removed and apparently some of the soft, internal organs, though there is no description of them. The fleece and the meat are left behind which would seem to have been of greater value than what was taken. I mean, the tallow, according to various sources, was used for many purposes at the time such as candle making and soap. That seems to be the motivation here. The crime is of an economic nature. Tallow would be difficult to trace and of value to those making the candles and other things, but a sudden glut of meat and fleece might lead back to the butchers.

I will also note here that I have seen the documents that proceed and those that follow and there is nothing in any of them that would suggest the tale is taken out of context. I have little hope of actually seeing the originals, meaning the letters and diary entries that were made in the early seventeenth century.

But rather than argue about interpretation, I will note that the information provided by the sources cited was accurately repeated. Nothing was added, left out or altered. All that is left is our interpretations of the event. For those interested in a little more context, though I’m not sure about the relevance, Stalking the Herd provides it, suggesting that it had to do with Guy Fawks and his attempt to assassinate James 1, which gets us to the reference about fireworks. Anyway, Chris provides some interesting points about all that in his very readable book.

I suppose what is amazing is that I can sit here, in 2022, and find, rather easily and quickly, documents from so long ago without leaving my chair. At the moment, it seems that the information is correct and I’ll let it go at that. 

NASA and UAPs (UFOs)

 

More than a half century ago, the Air Force sponsored at the University of Colorado, a study of UFOs. Lead by Dr. Edward U. Condon, they concluded that there was no national security issue, that nothing of scientific value would be learned by further study, and that the Air Force had done a good job during its twenty-two-year investigation. From that point on, other scientists, journalists, news organizations and DoD officials used those conclusions to ignore the UFO phenomenon and often to ridicule those who took it seriously or who claimed to have seen an alien spacecraft.

Dr. Edward Condon

None of this came as a surprise to those who were paying close attention. The conclusions for the Condon Committee as it became known, were written at the very beginning of the investigation. Lieutenant Colonel Robert Hippler wrote to Robert Low of the Condon Committee to outline the Air Force expectations. These were to find no national security issues, to find nothing of a scientific value in additional research and to say some positive things about the Air Force investigation. As noted, all this came to pass.

For those interested in exploring this aspect of the “scientific study” of UFOs, you can read about it here:

http://kevinrandle.blogspot.com/2007/03/hippler-letter.html

Condon even expressed his belief about UFOs and what the ultimate conclusions would be at a meeting in Corning, New York, on January 25, 1967, where he told the audience that UFO’s “are not the business of the Air Force… It is my inclination right now to recommend that the government get out of this business. My attitude is that there’s nothing to it… but I’m not supposed to reach a conclusion for another year.” That was reported in the January 26, 1967, edition of the Elmira Star-Gazette.

Ten years later, Frank Press, who was the Director of the Office of Science and Technology Policy, and was President Jimmy Carter’s science advisor, wrote to Robert Frosch, the administrator of NASA. In a friendly letter, Press suggested that UFOs were a subject that should be a focal point for NASA. In other words, Press seemed to be suggesting that NASA take an interest in UFO reports and sightings.

In his response, Frosch, mentioned the negative conclusions of the Condon Committee, cited other organizations with opposite views, including CUFOS and NICAP, but also thought that some sort of inquiry might discover significant new findings. He also suggested that NASA had to be assured that there was a justification for opening such an inquiry because of the time and resources that would be involved.

In a response to this, Noel Hinners, the Space Science director, was appointed to formulate a response. There were rumors, or leaks (which I suppose are much the same thing) that Stephen P. Maran, of the Goddard Space Flight Center (GSFC), would spend two months examining the UFO world post Condon, meaning he would look at the developments from 1969 to 1977. Instead of this, and other positive ideas, Hinners sent a letter to Forsch. In keeping with the skeptical view, Hinners wrote, “There are two major problems involved in considering any review of the UFO phenomenon, by NASA: first, an apparent lack of any tangible or physical evidence for laboratory analysis (emphasis added); second the absence of any sound scientific protocol for investigating the phenomenon firsthand. There is a plethora of secondary source material – human observation and reports thereon – but hearsay is difficult to deal with scientifically…”

Finally, on December 21, Forsch wrote to Press, telling him that NASA was leaving the door open to examine any evidence, though he again mentioned the lack of any physical evidence. He wrote, “I wish in no way to indicate that NASA has come to any conclusion about the phenomena as such; institutionally we retain an open mind, a keen sense of scientific curiosity and a willingness to analyze technical problems within our competence.”

While they continued to cite the lack of physical evidence, Dr. Peter Sturrock of Stanford University, wrote Frosch on December 30, saying, “my colleagues and I in the Study Group on Anomalous Phenomena have obtained access to some physical evidence such as films, material samples, etc.”

NASA Headquarters was somewhat surprised and was unprepared to deal with Sturrock’s suggestion about “obtaining meaningful assessment of these items of evidence.” NASA did, however, think that Dr. Stephen Maran of Goddard Space Flight Center was the man to take on the task of assessing the materials because “He is a skeptic on UFOs; he is extremely sharp and energetic; and he is politically acute.”

Assigning a skeptic to the investigation is not a bad thing. I would think that someone of a skeptic nature, who is interested in reviewing the evidence would be the man to do the job. But, for some reason that never happened. It seemed that NASA decided that any sort of study would consume time, money and resources and it would distract the agency from its original and primary mission which dealt with rocketry, launching satellites and developing a vehicle that could be reused.

I will also note that this idea that he is “politically acute,” suggests that he might have been swayed by the political arena surrounding UFOs, believing that any finding suggesting alien visitation would not be well received. In other words, the wrong conclusion might jeopardize his career. I have no evidence that such is the case other than that one minor phrase.

Today NASA is now saying, according to Daniel Evans, the assistant deputy associate administrator at the Science Mission Directorate that, “We’re going full force on the UAP study… This is really important to us and we’re placing a high priority on it.”

But this wasn’t the only thing said by the NASA representatives at the town hall meeting where this was discussed. They had to add a disclaimer, saying, “NASA has said there is no evidence that UAPs are visiting aliens.”

Please note that this is the same thing they said decades ago. They now reduce the observations of witnesses to little more than anecdotal testimony because that diminishes the important of that evidence. And yet, I would have told them about important observations in and around the Levelland UFO sightings from November, 1957. As I researched the book, Levelland, about those sightings, it became clear that it was much more complicated and robust than we thought. Here was a sighting that had many of the elements that science demanded. There were multiple, independent eyewitness to the object, seen at close range for as long as five to fifteen minutes. It interacted with the environment by stalling car engines and filling the radios with static. There are reports of landing traces, again with multiple witnesses. And what was the official investigation about? The number of witnesses. The Air Force said only three had seen an object, but their own investigation produced more than that.

In the past, while it seemed that NASA was interested in UFOs, there were those who were less than enthusiastic, especially when scientists outside of NASA and the editors various magazines with a more skeptical tone mentioned the nightmare of having to deal with a subject that many considered to be phony and a waste of time. This is, of course, an outgrowth of the Condon Committee’s negative findings which, as I mentioned, were bought by the Air Force with half a million bucks (which in today’s dollars would be something much higher).

Skeptics (or I should say, “debunkers”) entered the discussion at some point. Philip Klass wrote that President Carter had barely had time to find his way around the White House his inauguration before he was inundated with letters and telegrams from people Klass described as uneducated, inarticulate and confused. There was also the allegation that 87% of those who wrote NASA about UFOs were eleven or twelve years old. Or, here was a group of people who didn’t know what they were talking about trying to force a policy on a government agency. The attitude of hostility grew out of this.

NASA, though it seemed would be the perfect agency to investigate claims of alien visitation, rejected all suggestions they do so. While it would seem that evidence that interstellar flight was possible would increase their research budgets, they seemed to think it would bring discredit on the agency.

But now we seem to have come full circle. We have moved from a time in which many of those at NASA thought UFO investigation might be worthwhile, to those who worried that it would damage the agency in some way, back around to it being something NASA should do. Of course, they mention again, that there is no evidence of alien visitation and that they believe the answers are all terrestrially based, but they are now going “full force on the UAP study…”

Please paint me as skeptical, but hopeful. I fear that this will end up where all other good intentioned investigations in the topic had ended up… There is no evidence that they find acceptable no matter what that evidence might be.