MJ-12 is Bogus?

This is not the promised new information about MJ-12, but it is something that I came across not all that long ago, which is not to say that it wasn’t published several years ago. Nick Redfern, in his anti-alien Roswell book (he proposes a terrestrial explanation), noted that the FBI investigation hadn’t turned up any evidence for the authenticity of the MJ-12 documents.

Redfern quoted an FBI headquarters message that apparently was sent to the Dallas field office. It said, "The Office of Special Investigations, U.S. Air Force advised on November 30, 1988, that the document was fabricated. Copies of that document have been distributed to various parts of the United States. The document is completely bogus."

Apparently Redfern talked to a former OSI agent who told him there were no records found pertaining to MJ-12 or any investigation of the documents. Some seem to think that proves the documents were disinformation because there was no OSI investigation. The thinking goes if OSI had a hand in faking them, then, of course they wouldn’t have to investigate because they already knew the source.

Here’s what’s important here. The FBI investigated the documents and found them to be bogus. If there had been a hint of a security breach, if there had been any evidence that authentic classified documents had been leaked into the public arena, then the FBI would have followed up. The FBI would have been interested in finding the guilty parties and having them prosecuted... and, since this would be a matter of national security, those arrested could be tried without revealing the nature of the information that had been leaked.

Oh sure, we all would have been able to figure it out, but those responsible would have suffered consequences because if they didn’t, then others would feel safe leaking classified material... to the Russians (Soviets at the time), the Chinese, the Israelis, to our enemies and our friends. They might do it because of ideology or for money or just because their bosses had pissed them off. The point is, others would be encouraged to breach national security for whatever reason tripped their trigger.

The significance here is that the FBI did investigate and they reported that the documents are bogus. No one has uncovered a document that mentions MJ-12 that is from an official government agency (yes, I know about the Cutler-Twining memo and will deal with that later) or from anywhere else that validates the authenticity of MJ-12.

There has been absolutely no confirmation of the existence of MJ-12 in all the years that researchers have attempted to do that. All we have are a couple of documents without a provenance, that are riddled with the sorts of errors you wouldn’t expect in documents created at the highest level, and an official investigation that concluded they were bogus. Do we really need to go on?

Roswell UFO Crash Survey Results

Once again I’ll start by pointing out that this is not a scientific survey. The participants were self-selected and although should have voted only once, the mechanism to stop multiple votes is relatively simple to defeat.

The results were almost what I expected, except for the high number of votes to explain Roswell as an experimental aircraft and the two votes that suggested some kind of White Sands missile off course.

Those reading this blog, for the most part, accept the idea that some UFOs represent alien visitation, so I expected the large number of votes for Roswell being extraterrestrial. I also know that many skeptics visit and I expected many votes for the Mogul explanation.

What I don’t understand is why anyone would think that Roswell could be explained as an experimental aircraft. What could they possibly have been testing in 1947 that isn’t overwhelmed by our technology today? There is nothing that would have been classified and experimental in 1947 that isn’t superceded by the latest, 21st century, technologies. By 2010 standards, anything from 1947 would look primitive (unless, of course, it was extraterrestrial).

If this had been some kind of experimental craft, don’t you think the Air Force would have trotted it out in 1995 when they pretended to investigate the Roswell case? If the attempts to build an atomic engine for aircraft is well known today... even the plans to dump the atomic engine, if it began to fail, have been documented, then what could they be hiding? We know where they would have dropped it according to the information easily available through multiple sources.

In fact, some of the biggest mistakes made last century are now public record. For example, that the Air Force dropped an atomic bomb close to Albuquerque in the late 1950s is a matter was published in the newspapers. And no, the bomb didn’t detonate.

So, I don’t know what logic would suggest some sort of failed experimental aircraft. The same is true of missile launches. All of them are accounted for in the records of the White Sands Missile Range. Nothing is missing, and there certainly isn’t anything in the 1947 technology that isn’t replaced by much better equipment of today.

No, neither of those two answers make sense and I’m surprised at the numbers, though relatively small, who thought these would explain what had fallen at Roswell.

To me there are but two answers currently on the table that make sense. One of them, Project Mogul simply does not cover all the facts and the documentation to prove there was even a Mogul flight in the right time frame is somewhat ambiguous.

The other is, of course, the extraterrestrial, which does a better job of covering the facts... oh, I know, the skeptics will say that the government couldn’t keep a secret like this for more than 60 years, but really, they haven’t. I mean, we’re talking about it today and have been for the last forty or so years.

And all I am saying here is that the extraterrestrial doesn’t require us to overlook testimony and other evidence. It’s by no means perfect and a bit of physical evidence would be nice, but it does cover the facts better than Mogul.

So, the results here are not very surprising. They are in keeping with those who regularly visit this blog. In the long run, they provide us with little insight into the thinking around here and tell us nothing about the reasons for those thoughts. To understand that, we need to read the comments section. Maybe someone will tell us why he or she believed that experimental aircraft made sense. If not, then we’ll just have to keep guessing about that or move on to other issues.

UFOs and Stolen Valor

I was searching the web the other night and came across an interview with a man I had written about in the past. He was not pleased with my assessment of his tale and wondered why I had not contacted him before I posted it. I was a little disturbed by his comments and then realized that I was suggesting he had been less than candid about his UFO involvement and he certainly had the right to feel annoyed. Of course, I believed then what I written and I have seen nothing in the last several years to change that opinion.

The point is that I find myself in a similar position today. I have been researching, for the last year, a story told by a man who claimed to be a retired Air Force colonel. Based on his supposed high rank, I accepted the story he told as authentic. I believed that a man who had obtained high military rank wouldn’t be lying about something like this... but that was before Philip Corso entered the picture and proved me wrong.

In this case, however, the man had not been a high-ranking Air Force officer as claimed and the only record of military service I could find was a short period starting in December 1945 and ending in January 1947. This would technically make him a veteran of World War II, though he entered the service after the surrenders of Germany and Japan. The war wasn’t declared officially over until some time in 1946.

He claimed that he had been an Air Force fighter pilot, but I could find no record to substantiate this, and if he wasn’t a fighter pilot, then his tale of a UFO crash was no longer credible. He had been, according to him, flying a chase plane during some kind of a bomber mission when he saw the UFO. But if he wasn’t a fighter pilot, then the reason for him being where he claimed to be was eliminated and his tale collapsed.

I did learn that he had a long association with the Civil Air Patrol, the official auxiliary of the Air Force, but that is a civilian, volunteer organization. I don’t know if Air Force personnel, who can also serve in the CAP, receive retirement points for that service. If so, I suppose he could claim some kind of lengthy Air Force service, but the truth is, he wasn’t in the Air Force as claimed, nor in the Air Force Reserve, so the point is moot.

According to documentation, he rose to lieutenant colonel in the CAP, but again, that is not the same as being a lieutenant colonel in the Air Force. When questioned about his service, he provided several photographs and documents, but all of them related to the Civil Air Patrol. I have never seen a picture of him in an Air Force uniform, though it is clear from the photographs supplied that he was attempting to mask his CAP service by making alterations to the uniform.

I have since been given some documents that suggest service in the Air Force, but these came from the man, and I have been unable to verify their authenticity. I believe one of them to be a forgery and not a very clever one at that.

So, who is this guy you ask? This is where the trouble arises. In 2005 the US Congress passed the Stolen Valor Act which makes it a crime to wear ribbons or medals not earned. I have two pictures of him and in each he is wearing medals for which I can find no documentation. He is wearing an officer’s uniform and he is claiming to have served in the Air Force, either on active duty or the reserve long enough to have earned a pension. He claims it was denied because he talked to civilians about UFOs.

To identify this man now, who is 84 and whose health isn’t all that great, would be to bring addition attention and pressure to him. This is something that I’m not sure I want to do...

On the other hand, I understand the anger of veterans toward those who didn’t serve, or served in a limited way but who claim great things. One estimate, published in Military History magazine this month suggests there are 26 million people claiming to be veterans who are not. Thousands have received veteran benefits to which they were not entitled, taking money from the veterans who had earned it. I have seen men, and a few women, interviewed about their service, making claims that then tarnish the reputations of all of us who did serve.

But this guy is old, sick, and his family is not nearby. At the moment, nothing is gained by identifying him, at least in my mind. His story, however, does have a great impact on some avenues of UFO research, and that will be explored a little later.

MJ-12 vs The Unholy Thirteen

I have said for a long time that I believe MJ-12 to be a hoax based on the research I have conducted, the evidence as offered by others, and the admissions and statements attributed to various participants in the research of it. I have also said that I believe that if the Roswell crash was extraterrestrial, we would expect the creation of some sort of committee to exploit the find. That just seems to follow naturally.

But, if not MJ-12, then what?

Brigadier General Arthur Exon, who was a lieutenant colonel at Wright Field in July 1947, and later, in the 1960s, was the base commander at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, told me of a committee he labeled "The Unholy Thirteen." This was, of course, just the name he used to describe this group of military officers and civilians at the Pentagon who seemed to control the UFO data that was outside the scope of Project Blue Book, the Air Technical Intelligence Center and most other projects.

I had assumed that Exon was talking about an oversight committee that had been created after the Roswell crash to deal with the debris. We know that some sort of committee was created at some time because, Ed Ruppelt (seen here), in his book, The Report on Unidentified Flying Objects, talked about it. He talked about the attitude of those in the Pentagon in July 1947, and suggested there was a great deal of concern about them at the top. He wrote that the security lid was down tight. "No one, outside a few high-ranking officers in the Pentagon knew what the people in the barbed-wire-enclosed Quonset huts that housed the Air Technical Intelligence Center were thinking or doing."

Which is not to say that this committee grew out of the Roswell crash, only that such a committee did exist in July 1947.

Exon told me that Truman knew something about UFOs and the implication was about Roswell as well, as did "General Spaatz (immediate right, the chief of the Army Air Forces), the Secretary of Defense (Forrestal, directly below) and other people who were close to them..." He suggested a few others, such as Stuart Symington (last on the right), at that time, the Undersecretary for War for Air, or the first civilian encountered in the military chain of command for the Army Air Forces was involved. He suggested that those at the highest levels in intelligence and the military were represented on this committee, whatever and wherever it might be.

Taking this a step farther, there are the reports of a project known as Moon Dust that was so highly classified that an Air Force officer felt that he could lie about it to a United States Senator. When the lie was exposed, another Air Force officer said that there was a project known as Moon Dust but it had never deployed. This too was a lie. State Department documents released under the Freedom of Information Act proved that Moon Dust had deployed on a number of occasions and that the project did involve UFO research, which again doesn’t take us to that committee created in 1947.

With the name Moon Dust compromised, the name was changed and remains classified to this day, according to information supplied to the late UFO researcher Robert Todd. What this tells us is that while the Air Force might have ended Project Blue Book, there was another investigation classified at a higher level that survived the closing of the "official" UFO investigation. And if this is true then there is no reason that something else, even more highly classified existed then and exists now.

Here’s what I know. There was a committee, as suggested by Ruppelt and Exon to control UFO information. It was housed in Washington, D.C. (okay, Arlington, VA, the location of the Pentagon) and it was made up of high-ranking officers and civilians. There was the public relations scam known as Blue Book but the true investigation was conducted at a higher level, survived the end of Blue Book, and continued on until the mid-1980s, when we lost track of it in the corridors of secrecy and the alleged national interest.

Was all this a result of the Roswell crash or was it the result of both public opinion and Congressional interest in the subject of flying saucers? Did those high-ranking individuals, whether military or civilian believe that something of importance could be learned by studying UFOs? Were they, and are they, responsible for the continued investigation of UFOs and the continued suppression of UFO information?

A committee existed and does exist and if Roswell was extraterrestrial, then such a committee would have been created if for no other reason than to exploit the find. Even ignoring the Roswell case, we know that such a committee existed in the late 1940s and into the 1950s because both Ruppelt and Exon told us it did. And, we know that one such committee existed beyond that when the information about Project Moon Dust was accidently revealed by the State Department.

Did the committee have a name?

Probably. It operated under a number of directives and organizations including Project Moon Dust and the 1127th Air Activities Group.

What was the name?

Other than Moon Dust, who knows for certain? The Unholy Thirteen, as it was called by Exon will do as well as any for now... but that wasn’t an official designation. Until we learn the name, we might as well use that.

Are they still in control of UFO information?

Probably... which explains that idiotic Air Force investigation of Roswell that was designed to confuse the issue... which it did. But it provided no answers for anyone who didn’t already believe that there are no UFOs and therefore no alien crash at Roswell. They provided an answer that was full of holes, was inadequate, but did allow them to slap a label on the case.

And MJ-12, which I don’t believe to have been an official disinformation project, has done much the same thing. We need to jettison MJ-12 and begin to search for answers in a different arena. Of course, in the UFO field, nothing is that simple and we’re stuck with MJ-12, just as we’re stuck with the contactees, crop circles, and cattle mutilations.

The Fermi Paradox

A recent post I read suggested the writer did not accept the reality of UFOs because no one had come up with a good explanation for the Fermi Paradox. This was the idea that if there was other intelligent life in the galaxy it would already be here.

I am inclined, flippantly, to say, "But they are here now. Look at all the unexplained UFO reports."

In fact, the history suggests that the Fermi Paradox grew out of a discussion about UFOs, as Fermi and others walked to lunch. According to that history, they were talking about the latest UFO reports. Fermi then said that if there were a multitude of civilizations in our galaxy, it was strange that no evidence of them had been found.

So, how do we answer the question?

We can always look at the assumptions made. First, that there are a multitude of civilizations out there. Maybe there are but a few scattered throughout the galaxy which would mean they are probably separated by tens of thousands of light years. Contact among them would be sparse until one or more conquered the problem of interstellar distances.

Maybe we have found no radio trace (or limited radio traces) because they have not reached that level of technology... or more likely, have reached it and moved beyond it. We search for alien radio signals based on some human assumptions given the nature of the radio sources in the sky, but other creatures on other planets might not use those same assumptions. We might be searching in vain because we think like humans and not aliens.

Carl Sagan has postulated that we could expect visitation by an extraterrestrial civilization about once every ten thousand years... though I don’t know how he came up with that number. But let’s say it’s accurate. That would mean that sometime in the last ten thousand years aliens arrived on Earth, and that would mean that they would have found our civilizations.

It really doesn’t matter when they arrived or the state of the civilizations they found. I would think that once you found something like that, you’d be inclined to keep watch on it, if for no other reason than it is another intelligent race. And if that is true, then the number of visits would increase as we advanced. Once we reached an industrial civilization, once we began developing machines to make our lives easier, rockets that could leave the planet, atomic power, and began radiating electromagnetic signals that would make us brighter than almost anything else in the Solar System in that spectrum, they would come by to take a look. They would visit with more frequently...

And isn’t that the situation we have today? Reports of UFOs growing from the beginnings of the industrial revolution until we have the thousands of good, solid cases.

Don’t we have some good physical trace cases including radar/visual sightings? Aren’t there some good photographs that can only be explained as either alien spaceships or hoaxes with no middle ground? Aren’t there some very puzzling sightings that involve multiple witnesses, instrumentality and other evidence?

So, the answer to the Fermi Paradox might not seem so flippant when we look at all the evidence. Maybe the answer is that we have been visited but we have failed to recognize the visitors. We’re so busy arguing about the reality of UFO sightings that we have ignored the bigger questions which is who are they and why are they here.

Betty Hill's Star Map

I was reading the National Geographic not all that long ago and was struck by a paragraph in a story about life on other worlds. It suggested that the search for extra solar planets was targeting M class dwarf stars, which, of course, include those known as Red Dwarfs. It mentioned that seven of the ten closet stars to Earth were dwarfs.

Here’s what struck me. I remembered reading about Marjorie Fish, the school teacher and amateur astronomer who had located the area of the sky that Betty Hill seemed to have drawn after seeing a star map on a UFO. Fish built a model (actually a series of models) of our section of the galaxy and viewed them from various angles until she found a pattern that was representative of the star map.

Don’t get me wrong. This was an impressive feat and took years to accomplish. In fact, it wasn’t until some of the star catalogs were updated with new and better information that she was successful.

Here’s where the problem arises. She assumed that the map represented our section of the galaxy, that alien travelers would be interested in stars of the same type as our sun, the travel patterns should make some sense and travel patterns would avoid the largest stars and those that are not on the main sequence (that is, stars that are basically stable for long periods of time and like our sun). These assumptions would become important later.

But others were also searching for the pattern. Charles W. Atterberg found a pattern that had Epsilon Eridani and Epsilon Indi as the base stars rather than Fish’s Zeta 1and Zeta 2 Reticuli. Atterberg’s map also fits with the Hill map, and two of the stars on it Tau Ceti and Epsilon Eridani were targets by Project Ozma, one of the first of the SETI searchs. In other words, astronomers involved in the search for extraterrestrial intelligences believed that two of the stars in the Atterberg interpretation were likely candidates for planetary systems and intelligent life. Tau Ceti was also one of the candidates on the Fish map.

Suddenly we have two published interpretations of the Betty Hill's star map, both of which make sense (and I haven’t even discussed Betty Hill’s interpretation which was another section of the sky). But Marjorie Fish disagreed with Atterberg. Of the Atterberg interpretation, she noted that he had included some red dwarfs as stars visited by the aliens. She said that she had ruled out red dwarfs because there are so many of them and if she used red dwarfs in a logical construction, then all the lines were used before she reached Earth. She had assumed that the sun would be one of the stars connected to the others on the map although the "leader" of the alien crew had provided no indication that this was true.

She also assumed that if they, the aliens, were interested in red dwarfs, that is, that they visited some, then there should have been lines connecting other red dwarfs but there were not. Her assumption was that one red dwarf would be as interesting to a space faring race as the next. But it could be that some red dwarfs were more interesting because of things we could not see. Because we could detect no difference between one red dwarf and another doesn't mean that there aren't differences.

Fish made those assumptions thirty or forty years ago and they are now invalid. The article in National Geographic suggested that these M Class stars have long periods of stability, longer than those postulated for stars like our sun. While the dwarf stars are smaller, dimmer and cooler than the sun, they do have zones in which the conditions ideal for life as we know it exist and given the discovery of planets around some of these stars, including planets known as "Super– Earths," it is possible that life, including intelligent life, would be found on those planets.

There was also a recent announcement of a Super Earth that has oceans. This planet, thought to be about two and a half times the size of Earth, with a mean temperature higher than that on Earth, suggests that some dwarf stars might hold a great deal of interest for any space faring race. And while all stars that have planets where life is possible might not have life, some of them might and that would certainly make them interesting to space travelers.

What this means, simply, is that the criterion used by Marjorie Fish in her groundbreaking work should be revisited. With computer models available, scanning for the Betty Hill pattern wouldn’t take the years that Fish devoted to her search. We could now look at more stars closer to Earth because we have much better astronomical records and catalogs available. We might find a pattern closer to Earth and that might suggest to some where the search for extraterrestrial intelligence should be concentrated.

Predictions That Didn't Work Out

It is the time of the year when psychics trot out their predictions for the new year, and in this case, the new decade, if you believe the decade begins with a zero... and no, I don’t want to start a debate on this.

I bring this up because I have been converting my audio tapes to CDs, and in 1996, I interviewed Irene Hughes on my old radio show on KTSM-AM in El Paso, Texas. I wanted to get some predictions from her so that we might revisit them in the future and see how she had done. Well, she didn’t give us much to go on, remaining vague about what was going to happen, but we did pin her down a couple of times... and I have found other predictions she made over the years, predications, rather than claims of accuracy that were published after the fact.

One of the callers to the January 6, 1996 show wanted to know what the Stock Market would do. She talked about a four hundred point difference and how she had made that prediction prior to the crash of 500 points in the days before that happened in the late 1980s, all without answering his question. The caller asked where the market would be on December 31, 1996.

She said, "Sir, it will have crashed... I think it’s going to go way down... it’s going to lose a thousand points... this market is going to start losing a lot of points, like a thousand points and two weeks later, it may lose a thousand and then you see it trickle down a little, come up a little and trickle down... by the end of this year and April of next [1997] that [it’s] maybe 400 points..."

By the end of 1996, the Stock Market was up1400 points at 6448.27. The trend for the entire year was upward with the normal little retreats as the climb continued.

I tried to pin her down on the presidential election. She said that the Republicans were leaning toward Buchanan and that Dole would retire... but anyone paying attention to the election news at the time might have been able to predict that. The Republicans eventually selected Dole over Buchanan, but she was vague enough about exactly what she said and what she meant that she could call it a hit. I was left underwhelmed.

She said that Clinton would win in a landslide in 1996. But Clinton was the president and they aren’t defeated often. Clinton won, but not in a landslide. He didn’t even get 50% of the popular vote with a third party candidate bleeding off some of Dole’s support.

In a similar vain, back in the 1970s, Hughes predicted that Jimmy Carter would win a second term and he would have a black vice president. She said that Barack Obama would not win the presidency, and now says that he will be a one term president. She said that the president elected in 1980 would die in office and it would be somewhere near Russia. So far she was wrong on just about everything. We don’t know if Obama will only have one term.

She also suggested, back in the 1980s, that the two-party system would expand to three and that this new party, whatever it was, would win in 1984. Of course, there have been many attempts at creating a viable third party, but all have failed. Ross Perot came the closest but he self-destructed and we still have the two parties in power.

Of the Super Bowl that year, she said that it would be Kansas City and Green Bay, though that might change. In the end it was Dallas and Pittsburgh, which is what I said. I even said that Dallas would win by ten. She couldn’t even predict which two teams would be in the game, let alone predict the winner.

She predicted in 2007 that the Cubs would win the Pennant in 2008. They won their division but not the Pennant and they did not appear in the World Series.

She predicted that the Ayatollah Khomeini would be assassinated in 1983. He died of a heart attack, in a hospital, in 1989

I could go on, but is there a point? Her answers, for the most part were vague, and as she discussed things with the callers, I could hear her gathering information and then giving it back in different words. If a caller asked about finances, she talked a little about that and then said things should improve in the next year, especially after she learned that a caller was moving to another job.

She told a caller that he was involved with two children, meaning that there were two children somewhere in his life. He had no kids, he had no nieces or nephews, he wasn’t dating a woman with kids, but she insisted that there were two kids somewhere... maybe in the future.

I though she was rude to some of the callers but she was quick to take me to task as she was grilled by a caller. I should have stopped the call she said. But he was saying all the things I wanted to say, but felt, as the host, I had to be polite. Besides, had she been a true psychic, she should have known it was coming and been able to deal with it. She couldn’t... and that I suppose, says all that needs to be said.

MJ-12 Survey Results

The first thing to say about this MJ-12 poll is that it was not scientifically conducted. That means, simply, that the participants were self-selected, which could skew the results.

I also noticed, though it was unintentional, that there were three positive answers and one negative. It means that I could group those three together since they suggested a belief that there was some merit to the MJ-12 documents. That too, would skew the results.

But, I could also group two of the answers together, meaning that now the negative answer could be paired with the needs more research answer and that too, could skew the results.

And, though people were only supposed to vote once, and there was supposed to be a restriction built into the poll, it was easily defeated which means that either proponents or opponents could have voted more than once.

Even with all that, nearly 50 percent believed that there was nothing more to be learned from MJ-12, or that they believed the documents were not authentic. About a quarter believed the documents authentic, though you can add those who believed the first few authentic so that over a third believed some or all of the documents are of value.

About an eighth thought that more research needs to be done, though I confess I don’t know what that research might be. Archives have been searched. Various government officials questioned and their records have been reviewed. The FBI and other government agencies have investigated this under the idea that true classified documents had been leaked but found no hint that this is the case. There is not a single, independent document that suggests any of MJ-12 is real.

In fact, there is new information to suggest that the Eisenhower Briefing Document, one of the first few, is a hoax. After the first of the year, I’ll be exploring this in more detail here. This is known as foreshadowing... or creating a cliffhanger ending.

In the end, it could be said that 62% (those who voted no and those who thought more research needed to be done] do not now accept the documents as accurate. About 37% believe that some of the documents are authentic. In other words, just under two-thirds of the respondents, believe there is nothing currently of value in MJ-12, and over one-third believe there to be some value in them.

Or...

We could say that just under half believe there is nothing to MJ-12 while just over half believe there is enough to MJ-12 to require additional research if you group the answers differently.

And, of course, these are opinions. I don’t know what the rational was for voting one way or another, and that could tell us something more about those responses. That too, could shade this poll.

These results, by the way, are similar to another unscientific poll I conducted about ten years ago and that is sad. It means that we’ve made no progress one way or the other.

Now, let the interpretations by others begin.

The UFO Supporters

For a long time I have been bothered by the term, "UFO Believer." It implies that we accept that some UFOs are alien spacecraft on faith rather than evidence. It suggests that our understanding of the UFO phenomenon is less than scientific.

At the far end of the spectrum are the UFO Debunkers*, who seem to be anti-believers, meaning they accept that there are no UFOs on faith rather than evidence. They know that if there is some evidence that UFOs represent alien visitation it must be faked. They know there are no alien spacecraft and that is the end of it.

Closer to the center point are the Skeptics. These are people who don’t know if there is alien visitation or not. They suspect there is none, but only because the case has yet to be proven, one way or the other, in their opinion. They will look at evidence, evaluate it based on their own understanding, training, education, and belief structures. They have open minds but require those of us who support the idea of alien visitation to prove it... and right they are.

There is, however, no word on the other side of the center, between that point and Believer. We are all lumped into a single category without consideration or thought. We are all Believers.

I purpose that we add a gradation to this that would rival Skeptic... (which, by the way, is a marvelous little word). I suggest that we become known as UFO Supporters because we accept that some UFOs are of alien creation but we simply don’t buy into everything from Exopolitics to cattle mutilations to the tales of the contactees, or this latest idea of a great air war between the US Air Force and the aliens in the 1950s.

Like the Skeptics, we will look at evidence, and if that evidence is weak, or nonexistent, then we are free to reject it, just as the Skeptics are. We aren’t True Believers just as the Skeptics aren’t Debunkers. We understand the gradations and we can look at the evidence.

If you spend much time studying the UFO situation, you’ll find that the Supporters are just as likely to provide a solid solution for a case as are the Skeptics. The Debunkers are just as likely to provide some far out solution as are the Believers to give us some outlandish claim.

So, I see it as Believers, Supporters, Skeptics and Debunkers. Now we can begin to find subcategories and really make this fun.

*In the real world, debunking is a good thing but in the world of the UFO, a Debunker is actually a Denier. Maybe that would be a better word for them, but I doubt that it will catch on.

UFOs and SETI

I’m not a big fan of SETI but only because it seems to have made some early assumptions in its search for extraterrestrial intelligence that might be too human in nature. That is, originally, they were looking for radio signals at what the called the water hole or the most common radio frequencies because they believed that any advanced civilization would be using radio and looking in the same place. I can think of all sorts of things that are wrong with that assumption, but hey, you had to start somewhere. Yes, I know they have now expanded beyond that and that they can search huge portions of the sky fairly rapidly.

As one who supports the idea that some UFOs represent alien visitation, I was always a little annoyed at the SETI attitude that UFOs had nothing to do with what they were attempting to do. That is, contact an extraterrestrial intelligence. I’m not saying they should have signed up UFO supporters but they should have made a pass at that evidence in case there was something relevant to their search.

But, of course, I supported the idea behind SETI because if they were successful, then one of the reasons to reject UFOs as alien would be eliminated... just as the discovery of extra solar planets have eliminated one of the reasons.

Given all this, I was horrified to learn, according to KPHO-TV in Phoenix, that Brad Niesluchowski, had resigned as a teacher from the Highley Unified School District because he had signed up the district’s computers to participate in the SETI@home project (and for those of you who don’t know what it is, Google it).

A spokeswomen for the district said that they would support cancer research but not something like the search for "E.T." She pointed out that it was costing the district about a million a year to support the program because it kept the district’s computers working all the time which upped their utility fees and caused additional wear and tear on the computers causing more repairs and replacements.

Okay. Fair enough. If the fellow had done this on his own, and it was costing the district that much, then, hey, he made a bad call... except the software used to download the program had been authorized by a previous school administration.

Wait a minute. He didn’t decide for himself to do this. He got permission... then why is he out of a job and why is there now a police investigation? And this has been going on for ten years.

The SETI folks see him as a hero. I have to agree. Seems to me that someone in the school administration didn’t see that it was going to cost so much (and I wonder if it really does) but Nez, as he is known in the SETI world, got authorization to do it. Shut it down if you must but don’t punish the guy for something he was given permission to do.

UFOs and Full Disclosure

In October there was an announcement that the President would make a full disclosure about UFOs. He would tell the world on November 27, 2009, that we have been visited. Since this was to be full disclosure, I will assume that it would be an admission that these visitors were extraterrestrial in origin, that Roswell was the crash of an alien spacecraft, and abductions of humans by aliens was happening with frightening regularity.

I will note here that there was no such announcement on November 27.

I will remind you all that it was Dave Wilcox who said that Bill Ryan of Project Camelot who said that the announcement would be made on November 27. He also cautioned that if there was too much advance publicity, then the announcement would not be made. Apparently there was too much publicity and there was no hint of any such announcement.

For this, I suppose, I must take some responsibility because I did, after all, write about this. I know the White House, among other high level and extremely important government sources regularly read this blog. I can tell by the breakdown of readers based on the "Analytics" and they show people in Washington, D.C. who have visited these pages... though I wonder why they don’t disguise this by using a server outside of Washington... But I digress.

Well, I suppose I should just say, I told you so and let it go at that. No full disclosure this time, but surely something will be announced prior to December 21, 2012 when the world ends if it is nothing more than where we can catch a ride on a spaceship to save ourselves.

Socorro UFO Landing and New Witnesses?

There are those who feel the Socorro UFO landing is a weak case because it is single witness. Nearly everything comes down to what Lonnie Zamora, the Socorro police officer who saw the craft on the ground and the two humanoid occupants near it, said he witnessed. This is not completely true.

Opal Grinder, owner of a service station reported that a tourist had said something about jets flying very low over the town. That tourist has never been found and interviewed so any description of the craft and the incident is second hand. It might have provided some important corroboration for the case. As it is, it is simply an interesting anecdote.

There are, however, two other witnesses who have been named and have been interviewed. According to an article published in the Dubuque Telegraph-Herald on Wednesday, April 29, 1964, Paul Kies, who was 24 and Larry Kratzer who was 26 (seen here), had been in Socorro the previous Friday when the object took off.

Kratzer told the reporter, "We saw some brown dust, then black smoke – like rubber burning – then a fire. The smoke hid the shiny craft as it flew away."

Then they began to talk about things they couldn’t have seen, but might have heard on the news or read in the newspapers. Remember, they were talking some five days later, after there had been a great deal published and broadcast.

Kries said that federal agents had cordoned the area and that government sources had denied they had anything like the observed craft near Socorro. Kries said that there were four depressions, about twelve feet apart, left by the object. He also claimed that there was a large burned patch on the desert and that the exhaust had melted a pop bottle when it took off.

Sometime later, an Iowa UFO researcher, Ralph DeGraw interviewed the two men, but he was not impressed with their story. He said that it seemed to be in conflict with what Zamora had described. He believed their testimony was not trustworthy.

The descriptions offered by the two men, of what was found on the landing site seems to imply that they had been there and seen it. They suggest the area was condoned. They talked about the landing traces left by the craft as it took off, implying they had seen that as well.

However, there is no evidence that any civilians were on the scene that night. Almost all the testimony that was offered by Zamora, Sergeant Sam Chavez of the New Mexico State Police, FBI agent Bynes and Army Captain Richard Holder and some later filtered through Col. Eric Jonckheere seemed to suggest no civilians on the scene that night. The descriptions given by those we know were there based on the documentation differs from what the two new witnesses said. I’m most bothered by the melted pop bottle. No one we know who was on the scene talked about anything like that. Charred cardboard and other trash, yes, but no melted pop bottles.

Their description of the landing marks were nothing that new. It could have been picked up by anyone who had watched the story unfold for the last couple of days. There had been plenty of stories about what was seen.

While it would be nice to have additional witnesses to the case, and these two men claim to have been on the scene, there are many problems with them. Had they left it with having seen something in the sky, as they drove by, it would be one thing, but it seems they were suggesting they were at the landing site. It might be the way the story was written, or it might have been they incorporated the additional information without thought about ramifications. They might just have been trying to give the reporter the impression of something other worldly, but it is clear that neither man had walked the field.

This report doesn’t seem to add much to the Socorro story. It suggests corroboration, but as it stands now, it doesn’t help.

Socorro UFO Landing Part 4

Just recently I was reading the Skeptical Inquirer (of course I read it... there is some interesting stuff in there) and they repeated the story that the Socorro landing was a hoax because the land where the object touched down belonged to the mayor of Socorro at the time, Holm Bursum, Jr.

In Watch the Skies by Curtis Peeples (Berkley Books, 1995) also makes mention of this fact. He wrote, "The final factor was where the ‘landing’ took place. The site was between the two main roads into town – U.S. 60 and 85. The land itself was owned by Socorro’s mayor. After the landing, the nearly impassible road was graded and plans were made to use the landing site as a tourist attraction. (The town lacked industry and was dependent on tourists.) The implication was the landing was a hoax, to bring in tourist dollars."

Even Jerry Clark, in his massive UFO Encyclopedia, wrote about this, saying, "...conspired with Mayor Holm Bursum, Jr. (who owned the property on which the UFO landing reportedly occurred)... though it's clear that he is not persuaded by this and suggests that it is of no more consequence than Phil Klass' original explanation of some sort of plasma.

All well and good, but this implication was created by Klass who originally floated the idea in his book, UFO’s Explained. The skeptics have accepted this as the truth, meaning that the mayor owned the land, but none of them bothered to check to see if that was true.

According to the local newspaper, El Defensor Chieftain, which did a long story about the Socorro landing after it was suggested in 2008 that a historical marker be erected at the site, noted that the land in question had been part of the estate of Delia Harris in 1964. In 1968, the land was bought by the Richardson family and they apparently still own it. Mayor Bursum had never owned it. I don’t know where Klass got that idea. Maybe someone mentioned it to him and he believed it, figuring they would know.

Or maybe it was because in 1966 the Chamber of Commerce president, Paul Ridings suggested they do something to promote tourism and thought the landing site would be a good place to start. They created a path lined with stones around a landing site, but it was in the wrong place. Apparently there was a lack of vegetation at the real site that frightened people. Some believed there was residual radiation, so they just moved the site over an arroyo or two. Maybe Klass, there a couple of years after the case, went to the wrong site and believed it as the place where the UFO landed and believed that the land belonged to the mayor.

And maybe Klass, who was there about the time that the Chamber of Commerce began to float the idea of a tourist attraction, thought there was some connection. Given the timing, Klass was there in 1966 as well, he made the leap of logic.

Anyway, we can put this particular bit of misinformation to rest. It really changes nothing. It just removes one motivation for a hoax... this one by the mayor and Lonnie Zamora. I don’t think anyone who met Zamora believed that he was a participant in a hoax. Nearly everyone said that he seemed to be honest, and if a hoax had been perpetrated, he had no part in it.

That does not exclude other explanations or other culprits in a hoax. It just takes this one out of the running.

Socorro UFO Landing Analysis

I thought, given the tenor of the conversation, that I would attempt to establish some common ground. I believe there are some facts on which we all can agree, and I believe there is some analysis that we can make which would provide a jumping off point.

I believe that we can all agree that Lonnie Zamora saw something in the desert on April 24, 1964. We can agree that he described, as accurately as he could, what he had seen at that time. I’m not going to talk about apparent changes, additions, deletions from his testimony over time because human memory, being what it is, allows for these adjustments that are neither right nor wrong, but often just different.

We all seem to agree that it was more or less egg-shaped, with a red symbol on it. We all agree that he saw two figures near it, that he described as humanoid, that were dressed in white, and that they disappeared behind the object, whatever it might have been. This object lifted off in short order and disappeared, flying into the strong wind. There were no other reliable or identified witnesses to the sighting (and yes, I know about Opal Grinder’s tourist and the two men from Dubuque, Iowa who reported they had seen the craft).

There are a limited number of possible explanations for the case. It was a hallucination. It was a illusion. It was a misidentification. It was an experimental craft from White Sands (or somewhere else that is terrestrially based). It was a hoax. It was a craft from another world.

I have tried to think of any other alternatives, but haven’t come up with anything. By saying this, I hope to draw out someone who might have thought of something different.

Let’s look at the solutions. I discount hallucination because of the physical evidence left behind. I see no reason for Opal Grinder to have invented a tourist and am disappointed that this witness, who surely heard about the case, has refused to ever come forward. The two men from Dubuque, if they accurately reported what they had seen also argue against hallucination. Their reliability is another question.

The problem with illusion is that there is no real good source for the illusion. Some, or maybe one, thought, given the time and location, a bright star near the horizon, seen though the dry air, might have given the impression that it was on, or near the ground. There are many factors that argue against it including the markings left on the ground, and given the history since the sighting, it has little viability.

There is a possibility that it was a misidentification and this is the explanation favored by some such as Charles Moore. Arguing against it is the nearly fifty year history since the sighting. Even a top–secret vehicle would now be known and the records for White Sands, easily available now, have been accessed to no avail. If it was a vehicle from another installation, the same applies. The records would now be in a public arena and someone would have found them by now because there have been a number of people looking for that sort of thing. This seems to have little viability.

There was also a discussion that what he saw was a lunar lander being transported under a helicopter in some sort of test. Of course, Zamora never mentioned the noise that would be generated by the helicopter, the clouds of dust that would have been thrown up by the rotor wash, or that what he saw was lifted under something else. Of course the records don’t support this explanation. There seems to be little reason to accept this as an answer either.

I should point out here that some have suggested the misidentification of a dust devil, which is a whirling cloud of dust blow up by the wind... or stirred up by the rotors of a helicopter. The same reasoning applies here as it does to the lunar lander and I mention it only because someone suggested it.

There was a suggestion, briefly, that Zamora had seen a hot air balloon. This would have explained the blue flame and the roaring sound, but doesn’t explain how the balloon envelop, which would have had to be larger to lift two people, even small ones, could have fooled him or how the balloon would have lifted off into a strong wind. Hot air balloons do not do well in any windy conditions anyway. While the idea is somewhat interesting, given the reported wind conditions, it doesn’t seem plausible.

Of all the solutions, only hoax and extraterrestrial seem to have any real viability, and frankly, and offending my pro-extraterrestrial friends, hoax would seem to be more likely. It is a question of logistics more than anything else. You have to come a very long way to reach Earth from another world, so it is easier for it to be hoax than a question of interstellar travel.

Yes, there are many arguments in favor of this explanation and I won’t go into them all here. Tony Bragalia and his colleagues have already done that, and they have offered some evidence in support of it. They have latched onto the claim that this was done as revenge against Zamora for his alleged harassment of New Mexico Tech students and that the charred cardboard found on the site is proof.

Well, it is evidence, but I’m not sure that it is relevant, given the statements by the man who picked it up, but it is out there. Each person is going to have to decide what significance he or she attaches to this particular and rather isolated evidence.

And then the extraterrestrial... this too, has viability. Arguing against it are the vast distances in space and the complex technical problems that must be solved to travel interstellar distances. Then there is likelihood they would land on the outskirts of a small city in New Mexico only then take off when approached by a local resident.

To me, this boils down to either a hoax or an alien visitation. I can’t see any other explanation, given what we know and the evidence that is available in a variety of sources. The arguments seem to fall into one of those two categories as well. Some believing it to be a hoax and some believing that it was alien visitation.

What is left for us to do is a dispassionate examination of the evidence and that is what has been lacking... not the examination, but the dispassion. It is quite clear to me that those involved in the debate are very passionate about their positions, and there is nothing inherently wrong with that. The problem arises when one side or the other refuses to look at all the evidence or begin to call one another names...

That is what we need here, an examination of all the evidence and I have seen both sides picking the evidence that suits them and forgetting some of the rest. I will note that Ockham’s razor states that the simplest solution that accounts for the facts is probably the correct answer. But note, it must account for the majority of the facts, not just those that point in one direction or the other.

Now, nearly fifty years later, we have yet to arrive at a point where we can all agree. And yes, I know that we’ll never get to that point because no matter what evidence is provided, there will always be some on the other side who refuse to accept the truth when they see it. We can point to examples throughout history where people have refused to believe the truth even when confronted by it with their own eyes. I have no hope that this will turn out any different.

But by looking at this, somewhat dispassionately, we now know why this case was labeled as unidentified. There simply isn’t the evidence necessary to make the proper call. Sometimes, that is the only solution that we can find and it is not a satisfactory one. It leaves us guessing and in a vacuum.

Hector Quintanilla and The Socorro UFO Part 3

Hector Quintanilla (seen here) wrote a memoir about his experiences as the UFO officer for the Air Force. It is an interesting document, in which it becomes clear that his time at Project Blue Book was not a good one. He seems to have detested many people, including Dr. J. Allen Hynek and he believed that no UFOs were the result of alien visitation.

He did, of course, cover the landing at Socorro and it seems to be a fair account. Following is his opinions on the sighting, relevant today because of the discussion going on here. Following is his take on the Socorro sighting.

All hell broke loose on April 24, 1964, and I started smoking again. On that date at approximately 17:45 hours, at Socorro, New Mexico, police officer Lonnie Zamora was headed south chasing a speeding automobile when he suddenly heard a roar and saw a flame in the sky to the southwest. He decided to let the speeder go in favor of investigating the flame, because he knew there was a dynamite shack in the area and it might have blown up. He turned onto a gravel road that led by the shack.

As he was driving slowly along the road, Zamora saw above a steep hill just ahead a funnel-shaped flame, bluish and sort of orange. The base of the flame was hidden behind the hill, there was no smoke connected with the fla me. He had trouble getting the car to the top of the hill because of loose gravel; he had to try three times before he made it. As he reached the top of the hill, he saw a shiny object to the south, this side of the dynamite shack, about 150 to 200 yards away.

It was off the road to the left in the arroyo, and at first glance it looked like a car turned over, but when he drove closer it appeared to be aluminum clay, not chrome, and oval-shaped like a football. Zamora drove about fifty feet along the hill crest, radioing back to the sheriff’s office, "10-44 (accident), I’ll be 10-6 (busy out of the car), checking a wreck down in the arroyo". From this point, seated in the car, he could not see the object over the edge of the hill. As he stopped the car, he was still talking on the radio, and while he was getting out he dropped his mike. He picked it up and put it back and started down towards the object.

Just then he heard a very loud roar, not exactly like a blast, but also not steady like a jet engine. It was of low frequency at first and then became higher. At the same time he saw a light blue flame, sort of orange at the bottom. Zamora believed the flame came from the underside of the object; he could see no smoke but he did see some dust in the vicinity. He panicked, thinking the object was going to blow up. The following is his report of what he experienced (with slight rearrangements for the sake of clarity).

As soon as I saw flame and heard roar…ran away from object but did turn head towards object. Object was in shape It was smooth—no windows or doors. As roar started, it was still on the ground. Noted red lettering of some type like______________________. Insignia was about two and one half inches high and about two inches wide, I guess. Was in the middle of object, like _______________. Object still like aluminum white.

(Running), bumped leg on car back fender area. Car facing southwest…fell by can [sic] and (sun) glasses fell off, kept running to north, with car between me and object…rose to about level of car, about twenty to twenty-five feet, guess. Took I guess, about six seconds when object started to rise and I glanced back…it appeared about directly over the place where it rose from.

I was still running…(then) about fifty meet from car. I ducked down, just over edge of hill…I stopped because I did not hear the roar. I was scared of the roar, and I had planned to continue running down the hill. I turned around toward the object and at the same time put my head toward ground, covering my face with my arms…when the roar
stopped, heard a sharp tone whine and the whine lasted maybe a second. Then there was complete silence about the object.

That’s when I lifted up my head and saw the object going away from me…in a southwestern direction…It did not come any closer to me. It appeared to go in straight line and at same height—possibly ten to fifteen feet from ground, and it cleared the dynamite shack by about three feet. Shack about eight feet high. Object was traveling west fast. It seemed to rise up and take off immediately across country.

I ran back to my car and as I ran back, I kept an eye on the object. I picked up my …sunglasses, got into the car, and radioed to Nep Lopes, radio operator, to look out the window to see if he could see an object. He asked, "What is it?" I answered, "It looks like a balloon". I don’t know if he saw it. If Nep looked out his window, which faces north, he couldn’t see it. I did not tell him at the moment which window to look out of.

As I was calling Nep, I could still see object. The object seemed to lift up slowly, and to get small in the distance very fast. It seemed to just clear the Box Canyon or Mile Canyon Mountain. It disappeared as it went over the mountain. It had no flame whatsoever as it was traveling over the ground, and no smoke or noise.

Feeling in good health. Las drink—two or three beers over a month ago. Noted no odors. Noted no sounds other than described. Gave direction to Nep Lopes at radio and to Sergeant Chaves (of New Mexico State Police at Socorro) to get there. Went down to where the object had been, and I noted the brush was burning in several places.—I got my pen and drew a picture of the insignia on the object.

Then Sgt. Chaves came up, asked me what the trouble was because I was sweating and he told me that I was white, very pale. I asked the Sgt. To see what I saw and that was the burning brush. Then Sgt. Chaves and I went down to the spot and Sgt. Chaves pointed out the tracks.

When I first saw the object (when I thought it might be a car) I saw what appeared to be two legs of some type from the object to the ground. At the time, I didn’t pay much attention to…the two legs. The two legs were at the bottom of the object, slanted outwards to the ground. The object might have been about three and a half feet from the ground at the time…

Lonnie Zamora experienced an event which left quite an impression on him. He was a serious officer, a pillar of his church, and a man well versed in recognizing airborne vehicles in his area. He was puzzled by what he saw, and frankly, so am I. And yet, I’ve always had some doubt about this case, even though it is the best documented case on record. In spite of the fact that I conducted the most thorough investigation that was humanly possible, the vehicle or stimulus that scared Zamora to the point of panic has never been found.

During the course of the investigation and immediately thereafter, everything that was possible to verify was checked. The communications media must have been waiting for a case like this, because immediately after Zamora reported his sighting all hell broke loose. The telephone at my house was ringing off the hook. I went to my office so that I could direct the investigation from there and at the same time contact Kirtland, Holloman, and White Sands via our telephone communications system. As I walked into our building, and turned into the hallway towards my office, I could hear the telephone ringing, ringing, ringing. The operator informed me that I had ten or twelve calls waiting for me. I decided not to accept the calls until after I had talked with my UFO investigating officer at Kirtland. Major Connor was my primary investigator at Kirtland, but he was inexperienced.

Fortunately, my chief analyst, Sgt. David Moody was on temporary duty at Kirtland. I asked Major Connor to get in touch with him and for Moody to get in touch with me regardless of the hour. It was hours before the investigation could be organized and on its way. A Geiger counter had to be found and the base photographer had to be called. The staff car, which had been provided for the investigation had a flat tire midway between Albuquerque and Socorro. Socorro is located fifty-five miles south of Kirtland Air Force Base.

The Stallion Range Officer had already conducted a preliminary investigation and had also interviewed Zamora. This information was turned over to the Air Force investigators as soon as they began their interview with Zamora.

Connor and Moody kept in touch with me and provided me with good information, but there was nothing from which we could draw a definite conclusion or a decent evaluation. The news media was on SAFOI’s back and SAFOI was on my back. I didn’t have any idea as to what Zamora saw and reported, but by God, I was going to find it. Because of the pressure from the news media, I decided to send Dr. J. Allen Hynek, Project Blue Book consultant, to Kirtland to help with the investigation. I felt that Hynek could concentrate on Socorro while Connor and Moody could check all other activity at the other bases in New Mexico.

In the meantime, Marilyn Beumer Stancombe, my secretary, and I began checking for some sort of positive activity. Radiation had been checked by Connor and Moody and the readings were negative. I checked the Holloman AFB Balloon Control Center for balloon activity. All local weather stations and Air Force bases in New Mexico were checked for release of weather balloons. Helicopter activity was checked throughout the state. Government and private aircraft were checked. The reconnaissance division in the Pentagon was checked. I checked with the immigration division hoping they might help. Finally, I was at my wits end, so I told Marilyn, "Get me the White House Command Post". She looked at me with those beautiful blue eyes of hers like I was nuts. I said, "Yes, Marilyn, the White House Command Post".

She never asked me a question, she just started dialing. I was afraid she would ask me how she could reach them, but she didn’t. It took her five or six calls, but she got me the Command Post. A Major General answered and I explained to him my situation. He was very sympathetic, but off hand he couldn’t recall any type of activity in my area of interest. However, he’d check and call me back.

Fifteen minutes later the General called back and told me that the only activity which he had was some U-2 flights. That was no help, so I thanked him for his cooperation and put my thinking cap on again.

It took days for us to check all of these agencies and activities. I finally received Dr. Hynek’s report; it was one of his typical reports which contained few technical details and added practically nothing to what had already been submitted by Connor and Moody. Actually, Hynek added very little to the investigation, however, his typical press interviews added more flame to the fire. The more press coverage the sightings got, the greater the number of sightings which were reported throughout New Mexico.

I was determined to solve the case and come hell or high water I was going to find the vehicle or the stimulus. I decided that it was imperative for me to talk to the Base Commander at Holloman AFB. I wanted to interview the Base Commander at length about special activities from his base. I needed help to pull this off, so I called Lt. Col. Maston Jacks at SAFOI. I told him what I wanted to do and he asked, "Do you think it will do any good?" I replied, "God damned it Maston, if there is an answer to this case it has to be in some hanger at Holloman". He went to work from his position at the Pentagon and the approval for my visit came through. Colonel Garman was the Base Commander during my visit. He was most cooperative and told me that I could go anywhere and visit any activity which interested me. I went from one end of the base to the other. I spent four days talking to everybody I could and spent almost a whole day with the down-range controllers at the White Sands Missile Range. I left Holloman dejected and convinced that the answer to Zamora’s experience did not originate and terminate at that base.

On my way back to Wright-Patterson, I hit upon an idea. Why not a lunar landing vehicle? I knew that some research had been done at Wright-Patterson; so as soon as I got back I asked for some briefings. The briefings were extremely informative, but the Lunar Landers were not operational in April 1964. I got the names of the companies that were doing research in this field and I started writing letters. The companies were most cooperative, but their answers were all negative.

It was now time for me to pass judgment on the case after a careful review of all the information at hand. I hate to use the word "judgment", but that is exactly what it boils down to. As President Truman used to say, "The buck stops here", and in the world of UFO’s my desk was the end of the line. It was time for the Air Force to make a formal decision on the sighting of Socorro, New Mexico. I reviewed the Air Force Materials Laboratory Analysis of the soil samples which were gathered at the alleged landing area. Conclusion: no foreign residue. Laboratory analysis of the burned brush revealed no chemicals that could have been propellant residue. Radiation was normal for the alleged landing area and for the surrounding area. There was no unusual meteorological activity, no thunderstorms; the weather was windy, but clear. Although we made an extensive search for other witnesses, none could be located. There were no unidentified helicopters or aircraft in the area. Radar installations at Holloman AFB and at Albuquerque observed no unusual blips, but the down-range Holloman MTI (Moving Target Indicator) Radar, closest to Socorro, had been closed down for the day at 1600 hours. All the findings and conclusions were negative. The object was traveling at approximately 120 miles per hour when it disappeared over the mountains according to Zamora’s best estimate.

I labeled the case "Unidentified" and the UFO buffs and hobby clubs had themselves a field day. According to them, here was proof that our beloved planet had been visited by an extraterrestrial vehicle. Although I labeled the case "Unidentified" I’ve never been satisfied with that classification.

I’ve always felt that too many essential elements of the case were missing. These are the intangible elements which are impossible to check, so the solution to this case could very well be lying dormant in Lonnie Zamora’s head.

So, even with his inclination to write off everything, he is left with a case involving a landed UFO, two apparent occupants from it and an investigation by his NCO that found no solution. It would have been simple for him to just claim it was a hoax though the media attention seems to have prevented that. Now, in a document that had no media scrutiny, we learn that he still doesn’t have an explanation and that he didn’t like the unidentified category here.

The Socorro UFO Landing Part 2

I seem to have been deeply drawn into the latest investigations of the Socorro UFO landing. The latest theory to be floated was that it was a hoax perpetrated by students at New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology. One of the items in support of the theory is the cardboard found at the landing site and the suggestion that this cardboard was the remains of some kind of pyrotechnics that gave the object its alleged blue – colored flame. I say alleged because there is some discussion about this flame and whether or not it was ever there, but that is a discussion for another time.

I have read, carefully, the file that was held by the Air Force and Project Blue Book and I find no mention about how this cardboard was recovered. Hynek, in his reports, sort of brushed by it and I did find a list of materials submitted for analysis that does mention it.

The first real discussion about the cardboard is in a letter from UFO debunker, Dr. Donald Menzel, who questioned Dr. J. Allen Hynek about it. Since it, the cardboard, was found on the site, though no one seemed to have noted exactly where it was collected which seems to be a little sloppy for both the police officers and scientists involved, there was a question about it being related to the sighting.

In a letter dated February 19, 1965, Menzel, writing to Hynek, noted, "There was also a piece of charred cardboard. ... How big and what shape was the cardboard? Maybe it played a significant role in the enacted UFO drama. Did it, for example, support part of the aluminum foil? Were there holes in the cardboard to which aluminum might have been attached, or indentations carved by paper clips or the like?"

Hynek, in his notes to the chief of Blue Book, wrote, "As far as the cardboard is concerned, Menzel’s conjectures here fall completely flat. The cardboard was portions of very old and weathered corrugated [emphasis added] paper from a packing box [which also seems to answer questions about shape and holes]. There are many examples of this all over the region. There is a city dump not too far away, and when the wind, which blows tumbleweeds all over the place, gets hold of some of this stuff, it scatters the papers pretty well all over the region. Many of the bushes, I noticed particularly this time, have papers caught on their underneath side. In any case, some of this paper was still there, and I shall send Menzel a sample of what this cardboard really looks like. I would say that the cardboard had been there through many rains and had suffered successive dryings [emphasis added]. The original piece I picked up was definitely charred."

The charred cardboard was not part of a tube, but of a packing box so it did not contain pyrotechnics. Hynek, who recovered it, seemed to believe that it was only associated with the sighting by proximity but had nothing to do with the case. It was Menzel who tried to turn it into evidence of a hoax, which is, of course, something that is going on today.

The records are quite clear about this. The cardboard was old and weathered. The landing site was near a dump and there was a lot of cardboard, and paper, and other debris blowing around the area. The most logical conclusion is that the cardboard had nothing to do with the sighting.

There is an ancillary issue here and that is the suggestion that this charred cardboard was part of the pyrotechnics used to create the original flame and give Zamora a reason for driving off into the desert. The Project Blue Book files and our old friend Colonel Eric T. de Jonckheere provides an answer for us. In his May 28, 1964 letter, which was sent to "Hq USAF SAFOI PB (Mrs Gaiser)* he wrote:

(5) Soil Samples: The soil samples obtained at the sighting were given to Dr. J. Allen Hynek by Capt Holder. They were turned over to Captain Quintanilla who in turn submitted them to ASD for analysis. Laboratory analysis of the soil was completed on 19 May 64. It included spectrographic analysis which revealed that there was no foreign material in the soil samples (emphasis added). Also, no chemicals were detected in the charred or burned soil which would indicate a type of propellant (emphasis added). There was no significant difference in elemental composition between the different samples.

The evidence that was collected at the time of the sighting including the charred cardboard and the soil samples seem to rule out a pyrotechnic display. That is, all the evidence and not just the pieces that fit into a narrow window, seem to rule it out.

And again, I can ask, "Where does that leave us?"

Right back where we were. One side saying it was a hoax, but without the evidence necessary to sustain that conclusion, and the other side saying it was an alien spacecraft, but with only the eyewitness testimony of Lonnie Zamora to the strangeness of the craft. What he reported doesn’t lead us to the extraterrestrial.

In other words, this case is unidentified.

*I believe the translation of this is Headquarters, United States Air Force, Secretary of the Air Force, Office of Information and Mrs. Gaiser is the point of contact there.

The Socorro UFO Landing -- Part One

In the last few weeks, a controversy about the Socorro UFO landing has erupted when it was suggested, again, that a hoax had been perpetrated. The theory was, now changed slightly, that students at the New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology had created the spaceship and the landing evidence in an elaborate plan that fooled not only Lonnie Zamora but a group of investigators that included the FBI, Army Intelligence, the Air Force and its scientific consultant, and, of course, Jim and Coral Lorenzen of APRO and Ray Stanford the researcher from NICAP.

According to the latest, the one time president of the school, Stirling Colgate, in the late 1960s, told Nobel Laureate Linus Pauling that the whole thing was a hoax. Donald Menzel, the UFO debunker, said that it was as hoax almost from the beginning, but he based that on his own opinion that there were no alien spacecraft and anything that suggested otherwise was inaccurate at best.

But that is just one side of the argument. Like almost everything in UFO research, those arguing for the hoax haven’t presented all the information, though, according to them, they have looked at all the relevant information. I have, in my files, the complete Air Force report on the Socorro landing, and it provides ammunition for other side.

Dr. J. Allen Hynek was the Air Force scientific consultant for UFOs and he visited Socorro in the days after the sighting hit the national press. He interviewed dozens, including the police officer, Zamora, the FBI man and many in the general population.

On page seven of his lengthy report, Hynek wrote, "I also questioned, while in Socorro, my old friend, Dr Jack Whotmen, President of the New Mexico School of Mines (emphasis added), who said he knew of no geophysical or other types of experiments going on in the area at the time. He, as the rest of the townspeople, were puzzled by the event, but the general underground slull (sic) of opinion was that it would turn out to be some device which the government still had under raps (sic)..."

Okay, that doesn’t completely rule out hoax and that idea isn’t mentioned specifically, but we can infer that Whotmen had no indication that it might be a hoax. He, along with many others, believed it to be a government project, probably from White Sands.

Hynek, in his report does write, "No paraphernalia of a hoax were ever found. It would be rather hard to have done away with all the tell-tale evidence, such as tubes of helium, release mechanism, etc. Finally, it was LaPaz’s (that would be Dr. Lincoln LaPaz at the university in Albuquerque and the leading expert on meteorics) feeling had it been a hoax, it surely would have leaked by now."

One of the arguments against this is that there had been a secret society at the New Mexico Tech that engaged in such pranks. They never wanted to reveal what they had done because that was part of the fun. We know about this secret society because they have a website on which they talk about such things. And, if I have understood this correctly, they weren’t in operation in 1964. They came after that.

Finally I turn to my old nemesis, Dr. Charles Moore (seen here) who has claimed that Project Mogul was responsible for the Roswell UFO crash. According to Volume 41, No. 8, November 1, 1994 of Jim Moseley’s Saucer Smear (available for a nominal "love offering" from Moseley at PO Box 1709, Key West, FL 33041) Moore wrote, "At Jim McDonald’s request, I investigated the residue of the Socorro sighting in 1967 or 1968... Despite Phil Klass, I found no indications suggesting that this was a tourist-attracting ploy by the local Chamber of Commerce, nor was it a prank by the New Mexico Tech students (emphasis added)."

So here is a man at New Mexico Tech, who taught there for decades, who worked with the students directly, who had investigated the Zamora story, and he found no evidence of a hoax. This in contrast to Colgate who, for no currently justifiable reason has said that it was a hoax.

But in an interview conducted by Moseley, and published in his Saucer Smear on July 15, 2000, Moseley wrote that Moore said, "Something went wrong (with the Surveyor lunar module undergoing testing at White Sands on the day of the Zamora sighting) and they don’t want to admit it. I have good reason to believe that."

Isn’t that just as good an explanation as the hoax story. Neither has any solid evidence to push it forward as the final answer, but it comes from men who were at New Mexico Tech at the time and who have investigated the story. The hoax hypothesis fails because there have been no students identified as the tricksters and the Surveyor theory fails because Moore was unable to establish a time for the Surveyor tests.

And had the Surveyor been the answer, I suspect that Hynek, or the Chief of Project Blue Book at the time would have been given the answer. On a Joint Messageform (DD Form 173] and dated June 19, 1964, Colonel Eric T. de Jonckheere (seen here) wrote, "The possibility of a research vehicle being involved with the Socorro sighting has been investigated... at great length; however, they have no knowledge of an Army research vehicle which would leave marks such as those found at Socorro. Lt. Col Conkey and Maj H. Mitchell of the AFMDC have also been contacted... However, neither one of them has any knowledge of a vehicle in the Holloman [AFB, Alamogordo] area, such as described in our report."

Which means that if such a research project was going on, or if the Surveyor had strayed off course, Col. Jonckheere would have been able to learn about it. And the Air Force, believing the files would be classified for a long time, would have had their answer. Nothing in the file indicates that any such project was ever seriously considered and no evidence was ever found to corroborate that opinion.

Once again, it appears that the hoax idea fails because we have no information about the tricksters. Moore’s idea of a research vehicle fails because Air Force officers, following that trail failed to find any documentation that would support it despite the fact the Air Force wanted this case solved. We are where we began, with a police officer telling, honestly, what he had seen, and no evidence yet presented to suggest either of these alternative answers are viable.

V-2 Launches and UFOs

In the continuing argument about the UFO crash at Roswell and the mundane solutions offered, there came a new question. As noted in my blog about the V-2 and biological samples, someone had released a document about a missile launch on July 4, at White Sands Proving Ground. The records from White Sands for missile launches, copies of which I have, show no launch on July 4. Lance Moody wondered what, exactly, those records looked like, so I scanned the relevant portions.

I will note here, as you look at them, that two "rounds" in July seem to be missing. What the records show is that those rounds were postponed and show up later in the records. Apparently the test firings kept the original number, but was noted out of sequence. I have included the page for those later rounds.

There was also a launch of a "Corporal ‘E’" in July 1947. I have included the document for that launch as well. Finally, there was a table that showed all launches from White Sands for 1947, as well as many other years. I have included that page.

First, the page for V-2 launches in July 1947.

Next, the page to show that the missing rounds are accounted for in th record at a later date.


Third, is the page for the Corporal "E" launch in July 1947.




Finally the overall totals page that includes July 1947 that shows only three launches that month, and all are accounted for.

I will say here that I looked at the records at White Sands, at the Space Museum in Alamogordo, at the National Archives, and at Fort Bliss (El Paso, Texas) to see if I could find anything that would account for the debris recovered on the Brazel ranch. Nothing appeared in any of the records, there were no suspicious gaps in the data, and nothing that was still classified.

Everything is accounted for in the record, so this new document is clearly a forgery. This report provides all the documentation necessary to refute the idea that what fell was a V-2.

Lonnie Zamora Has Died

Lonnie Zamora, the policeman who reported the Socorro landed UFO, died on Monday, November 2. Colleagues in the police department said that it was heart failure.

Zamora zoomed into national prominence when he reported seeing an egg-shaped craft with two small creatures near it outside of Socorro, New Mexico. The Air Force, then charged with the investigation of UFO sightings sent Northwestern astronomer and their scientific consultant, Dr. J. Allen Hynek, to Socorro to investigate. No matter what Zamora saw, it seemed that the investigators, that also included the FBI and Zamora’s fellow police officers, believed he was describing what he had seen and was not a participant in a hoax.

I never met him, but a good friend, Robert Charles Cornett, who had an interest in UFOs and in astronomy had been in the Socorro area a couple of decades ago to visit the Very Large Array Radio Telescope. On a whim, he called Zamora and was invited to a backyard barbeque, providing that Cornett asked nothing about the UFO sightings. Zamora was tired of talking about it.

Cornett told me that Zamora was a nice man. Friendly to those from outside New Mexico. But he didn’t want to talk about flying saucers.

Those who knew him much better have said that he was a good man and a good police officer. Had it not been for his brush with the unknown, he would have passed a quiet life in New Mexico and might have been happier for it.

Lonnie Zamora 1933 – 2009.