The
big news for the 1997 Fiftieth Anniversary of the Roswell UFO crash was that it
would be announced, with proper provenance and other documentation, that
metallic debris from the spacecraft had been recovered. Scientific analysis had
been performed by independent labs and by scientists with the proper training
in various disciplines. That debris, small though it might be, was of
extraterrestrial origin. All questions about it would be answered during a professional
presentation by one of the scientists involved in the analysis, would be held
in the auditorium at the New Mexico Military Institute.
It
goes without saying that the venue was jam packed with standing room only.
Dozens, maybe hundreds of reporters according to one source, were there to
learn about this extraordinary, earth-shattering discovery. Paul Davids, who was
the executive producer of the Showtime movie Roswell, was the spokesman for the show. He introduced the
scientist, Dr. Russell VernonClark (that was the way he
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| Paul Davids |
spelled it at the time)
who had done some of the analysis. VernonClark went through the methods used to
validate the claim of extraterrestrial origin.
VernonClark
explained that carbon, for example, had two isotopes, carbon-12 and carbon-13.
He then said, “Naturally occurring on the Earth, carbon is a mixture of 98.9%
carbon-12 and 1.1% carbon-13. This will be true for all naturally occurring
terrestrial carbon.”
He
said, “If a sample [of] carbon was found to be 50% carbon-12 and 50% carbon-13
mixture, we would have to conclude the sample was not naturally occurring on
the Earth.”
The
keywords here are “naturally occurring.” It makes no allowances for a
manipulation of isotopic ratios done in a laboratory setting of which
terrestrial science is capable. In other words, the ratios could be
artificially changed on Earth.
The
explanation about carbon had little to do with what VernonClark found in his
various tests of the debris sample. He said, “The sample, which we now know to
be nearly pure silicon, shows a striking variation from natural abundance.”
Going
a little further, based on tests conducted by an unnamed Texas lab, but was
probably Saber Enterprises, associated with Darrell Sims, VernonClark claimed,
“The Inductively Coupled Plasma/Optical Emission Spectroscopy or ICP/OES was
conducted on the material by a private laboratory in Texas. It was determined
that the material was most likely manufactured and not naturally occurring.”
Among
the other extraordinary claims made, VernonClark said, “The atomic mass so
differs from that found in known earthly elements, that it is impossible for it
to be from Earth.”
He
also said, “Therefore it should be considered that this material is both
manufactured and extraterrestrial in origin.” That meant it came from an alien
world and had been made by an alien intelligence.
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| Derrell Simms. |
After
making the extraordinary claims, VernonClark was rushed from the stage and out
a backdoor without answering any questions. He had been brought to Roswell by
self-proclaimed “Alien Hunter,” Darrell Simms. The same Derrell Simms who ran
the Saber Enterprises. Hardly independent laboratory confirmation.
Davids,
now alone on the stage, didn’t answer many questions with new and important
information. Davids told reporter Leslie Linthicum of the Albuquerque Journal, “You’ve seen what we’ve offered. Please accept
what you’ve been offered.”
The
trouble was, no one would say where the sample have been located, who recovered
it, what tests has been done and what were the credentials of those conducting
the tests except in a vague and not very helpful way. Davids said that security
was a major issue. He added that “The evidence is so sensitive, so unique, that
it’s being treated like the Moon Rock. When you have one sample and one sample
only, the risks are too great…”
It
was a nice way to dodge the questions, but the questions were an outgrowth of
the hype used before the presentation. None of these important questions were
answered. In fact, other scientists made it clear that while the isotopic
ratios found in the sample were not naturally occurring, the problem was that
they could be produced in a laboratory. That meant the sample was rare, maybe
unique, but this was not proof of alien creation.
In
the more than twenty years since that little hiccup in the world of UFOs,
nothing more has been heard about that sample. Nothing has been found to
suggest it was anything other than something manufactured on Earth, and that it
is no more important than the Roswell Slides that slipped into ignominy within
hours of being presented to the world in Mexico City a couple of years ago.
What
does that have to do with the latest announcement of recovered material of
alien origin? It just suggests that we have been down this road before with the
same sort of hype being made by a group with a vested interest in finding alien
material.
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| Tom DeLonge |
And,
it suggests nothing other than what has happened before is happening again. The
To the Stars Academy of Arts and Sciences’ (TTSA) leader, president, director, whatever,
former Blink-182 front man, Tom DeLonge, announced on July 5, 2019, that
something he called the Cooperative Research and Development Agreement (CRADA)
with the Army’s Combat Capabilities Development Command had been made. In other
words, the Army has bought into some of the hype presented by the TTSA to study
these possibly advanced technologies to learn if they might be applied to Army
vehicles.
Dr.
Joseph Cannon, of the Army Futures Command said, “Our partnership with TTSA
serves as an exciting, non-traditional source for novel materials and
transformational technologies to enhance our military ground system
capabilities… At the Army’s Ground Vehicle Systems Center, we look forward to
this partnership and the potential technical innovations forthcoming.”
They
would probably have better success by employing a number of science fiction
writers to predict the future. It seems that many of the innovations that have
been truly extraordinary came from science fiction. These range from Jules
Verne’s submarines to Arthur C. Clark’s communications satellites.
Steve
Justice, TTSA’s COO, and who is always mentioned as having been employed at the
Skunk Works, leaped on this idea of “potential technical innovations.” He
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| Steve Justice. |
said
of this exotic material, which might have been one of the major reasons for the
Army jumping on this bandwagon, “The structure and composition of these
materials are not from any known existing military or commercial application…
In some cases, the manufacturing technology required to fabricate the material
is only now becoming available, but the material has been in documented
possession since the mid-1990s.”
If
the idea that the material appeared before the terrestrial technology was
capable of producing it, and if there is a documented chain of custody, then
this could be a major find. According Justice, the material came from Linda
Moulton Howe, and was once known as Art’s Parts, since they had been shared
with the late radio host Art Bell which established the mid-1990’s time frame. In
the mid-1990s, Howe commissioned Nicholas A. Reiter, described as a
“technologist,” to examine this material, said to have come from the Roswell
UFO crash. Reiter however, said that the material was of terrestrial origin. It
was rare, it was unusual, but it was not alien. Something that Justice and
Cannon seemed to have missed in their hype of the TTSA partnership with the
Army.
But
that isn’t all. Reiter updated his findings in 2001 saying, “The combination of
bismuth and magnesium had eluded us for four years. But then one day, we found
a reference to an obscure industrial process used in refinement of lead. The
process, called the Betterton-Krohl Process, uses molten magnesium floated over
a surface of liquid lead. The magnesium sucks up, or pulls bismuth impurities
out of the lead! Often the magnesium is used over and over.”
But
rather being new technology, the process was patented in 1938. It produces a
thin crust of layered magnesium and bismuth, which is removed from the lead.
Howe rejected all of this, saying that they needed a sample of this “slag”
material to test against the “alien” sample that she had. Jacques Vallee
suggested that samples of this waste could be found in France, Argentina and
even the United States.
There
is another link to all this is the quite disturbing for the teaming of TTSA and
the Army. Dr. Hal Puthoff, also affiliated with TTSA, gave a lecture at the
Society
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| Dr. Hal Puthoff |
for Scientific Explanation’s thirty-seventh annual conference not all
that long ago. He didn’t answer many of the questions about the sample.
Instead, he fell back on the old standard of classified material. This is the
same sort of thing used in 1997 to dodge questions about the “alien debris”
presented in Roswell. Security issues required them to be closed mouth about
the chain of custody and the provenance of the debris.
Puthoff
is a smart guy. He has a Ph.D. from Stanford University. He worked with lasers
and electronic beam devices and apparently holds several patents. He also
published scientific papers that have been translated into French, Russian and
Chinese.
But
he was also a member of the Church of Scientology, and reached its top level. He
supposedly achieved “remote viewing” abilities, which is a way of seeing things
at remote locations using metal powers. In the 1970s and 1980s he directed the
CIA/DIA program to investigate various psychic abilities. He, along with
Russell Targ, studied the psychic abilities of Ingo Swann, Pat Price, Uri
Geller as well as others in the Stargate Project. Targ and Puthoff declared
that Geller had real psychic powers but in other experiments, Geller was caught
using magician’s tricks and sleight of hand to demonstrate his unusual talents.
This indicates the bias of the researchers.
In
other words, Puthoff, who has some impressive credentials, and who has had a
long interest in the paranormal, has been less than scientific in his studies
of the paranormal. David Marks and Richard Kammann tried to duplicate the
experiments validating remote viewing in a series of studies but were unable to
do it. They suggested that there had been clues hidden in the instructions
provided prior to the experiments which explained their high rate of success.
Puthoff and Targ might have unknowingly provided those cues, but there were
there for the astute subjects to use.
The
point is that Puthoff is hardly an impartial researcher but one who has a
specific bias that is often overlooked. Citing him is a simple appeal to
authority because he can append Ph.D. after his name. But he seems to hold some
beliefs that are, well, not conducive to impartial thought as demonstrated in
his work history and the records of the experiments he conducted in his attempt
to validate remote viewing.
Puthoff
did say that he could talk briefly about the metamaterial debris that Art Bell
had told him about years ago. These were bits of debris provided to Bell by a
man who claimed that he had gotten them from his grandfather, now deceased, who
had picked them up on the Roswell UFO crash site. These were Art’s Parts.
Jason
Colavito provided more information from Puthoff. You can read his whole article
here:
Colavito wrote “he [Puthoff] examined the
sample after a self-described military man said he had recovered it from a UFO
crash site and sent it ‘by email’ to Bell. It appears that Puthoff is not
describing an actual physical sample in Bell’s possession but rather a document
claiming to describe a government report on such a sample, but Linda Moulton
Howe claimed in the Roswell Daily Record…
that Bell had the actual sample (six in fact!) and that it had been ‘recovered’
from the Roswell UFO crash site and sent to Bell in 1996 by an Army sergeant
who got it from his grandfather.”
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| Roswell's UFO Museum and Research Center. |
But
the real point is that the chain of custody for this so-called metamaterial is
broken because there is no access to the man who actually picked it up. It
comes from a man who said that his grandfather had recovered it and then sent it
to Bell, who is also deceased. Without the names of the witnesses, without some
sort of notarized statement from the grandfather or other evidence linking him
to the debris, it is little more than hearsay. Unless the sample is truly
unique and that the components or the manufacturing technique is something not
found on Earth, all that is left is a strange bit of metal.
Puthoff,
however, had more to say about the metamaterial, continuing to claim that it
was something of alien origin. He said:
It
was a multilayered bismuth and magnesium sample. Bismuth layers less than a human
hair. Magnesium samples about ten-times the size of a human hair. Supposedly
picked up in the crash retrieval of an Advance Aerospace Vehicle. It looks like
it’s been in a crash. The white lines are the bismuth; the darker areas are the
magnesium separations. So, the question was what about this material, so
naturally we looked in all the national labs, we talked to metallurgists, we
combed the entire structure of published papers. Nowhere could we find any
evidence that anybody ever made one of these. … Well, years later, decades
actually, finally our own science moves along. We move into an area called
metamaterials, and it turns out exactly this combination of materials at
exactly those dimensions turn out to be an excellent microscopic waveguide for very
high frequency electromagnetic radiation.
The
problem here, as mentioned above, is that all that research Puthoff and his
colleagues had done in various libraries, in communication with research and
industrial facilities, failed to find that patent, granted in 1938. That
negates the claim that there was no terrestrial history that outlined this very
structure of a composite material. Odd, rare, unusual, but terrestrially based
with a provenance that goes back to the late 1930s. That negates the claim that
no one had ever made anything like the debris.
Although
there are claims that there are other metamaterial samples are out there, we
have yet to see them. The cast of those promoting these metamaterials are the
same as those who were out there, literally, decades ago, saying much of the
same thing. Testing results that were not favorable to the theory of alien
visitation were ignored or, at worst, buried. Those that suggested some sort of
extraterrestrial technology were heavily promoted. But the bottom line is that
twenty years ago, this went nowhere and is often forgotten. Today the Army has
jumped on the “alien technology” bandwagon believing that all this “research”
will lead to an ability to disguise, hide, improve the Army’s capability to
confuse, confound and defeat the enemy. Didn’t anyone bother to research the
history of the earlier claims to learn of the shaky backgrounds? Didn’t anyone
want to talk to those who had originally found the metal… or if that source had
died, to check the family members who inherited the material. And did anyone
think to check to see if the grandfather, if someone actually knows who it was,
had been in Roswell in July1947? These are basic questions that seem to have
been ignored or that have not been asked.
There
doesn’t seem to be much to this latest TTSA announcement other than
self-promotion and a certain amount of self-delusion. There is nothing new
here. Only some of the players have changed, but they are propped up by those
who have been around for decades. Their failures, their biases are ignored.
Instead we are treated to a list of credentials that suggest a superior
intellect that should be listened to because, well, they are smarter than we
are and they know all about this stuff and we don’t.
The
problem is what they are promoting today had failed in the past. The source of
Art’s Parts has been explained and there was nothing extraterrestrial about it,
but here we are again, getting half the story. It is surprising that no one in
the Army used Google to learn some of this background. It’s all out there. All
they had to do was look.
Epilogue:
I
did not mention the 1947 Maury Island hoax in this. It is essentially the same
as Art’s Parts, meaning that worthless slag recovered at the alleged site of a
UFO crash turned out to be industrial waste.
The
International UFO Museum and Research Center in Roswell received a bizarre
sample that didn’t look as if it had been made on Earth. It was driven across
New Mexico by the police to be tested in Socorro. It turned out to be some sort
of jeweler’s scrap. Certainly nothing suggesting an alien creation, other than
the bizarre look of it.
I
also want to mention Warren Smith’s claim that he had a piece of recovered
debris that was stolen from his hotel room, which is a nice story but no
evidence it actually happened. And, I didn’t mention Robert Willingham’s claim
that he had a piece of recovered debris from the El Indio UFO crash that
disappeared when he submitted it for analysis.
All
that proves is that for more than 70 years people have been claiming to have
found alien debris or alien technology but we have no independent corroboration
for it. We are at the same point today that we were in 1947 when the Maury
Island hoax erupted. We have no physical evidence in the form of recovered
debris to prove the case.
