Coast to Coast (Oct 28, 2020) EM Effects and a Canadian Report

As I have said in the past, the really great UFO cases have multiple chains of evidence. Those cases would have the following attributes.

1.           Witness testimony, preferable multiple independent witnesses

2.           Photographs

3.           Instrumentality – i.e. Radar

4.           Physical Evidence – Pieces of debris, landing traces

5.           Interaction with the environment

Levelland for example had two of the elements, maybe three. These were:

1.           Independent witnesses at 13 separate locations

2.           Interaction with the environment – stalling car engines

3.           Possible landing traces

A much later report, known as MUFON Case #74282 took place in August 2013 and has three or four of those chains of evidence. Here I need to give credit to Philip

Robert Powell

Leech for first interviewing the witnesses and to Robert Powell of the Scientific Coalition for UAP Studies for telling me about the sighting.

According to the information, three Americans hunting in Canada had an encounter with a huge craft that they described as dumbbell shaped. The hunter, described as Witness #1 (though the names of all three of them are known to Leech and Powell), had made a video of his experiences hunting which is important because this demonstrated that the camera was working properly prior to the encounter. Witness #1, with two others, had left the hunting area by truck. It was completely dark when they left, and as they came around a bend, Witness #1 saw some lights approaching. These lights were so bright they were difficult to look at. Witness #1 said that he tried to photograph the object behind the lights with his Sony Cybershot but couldn’t get it to “power up for more than 1 or 2 second.” It would then shut down.

Witness #1 then used the 3x9-50 Nikon scope but had to dial back the magnification to get the best view of the object. He had enough time to examine the craft carefully, looking for anything that would identify it as terrestrial, but it was like nothing he had ever seen before.

Witness #1 gave the scope to Witness #2 and Witness #1 got out his Sony HD camera, which stayed on when he tried to use it, but the screen was totally black. He then attempted to use his cell phone but said it felt hot and the battery was dead. At this point the craft was about a quarter mile away and they all could easily see it now.

They did see another, similar craft that was much farther away, and then one of the men, Witness #3, said that there was a third craft, but it was at an incredible altitude that he estimated was over 100,000 feet, and moving at a very high speed. The sighting lasted for several minutes and as I mentioned, it was viewed through a telescopic sight, and there were attempts to record the event using multiple devices, all of which failed. Once those devices were removed from the situation, meaning that the UFOs were now gone, they began to function properly.

The electrical field from the craft, the EM Effect, was strong enough to scramble the operation of cell phones and cameras, radios but did not affect the truck engine or lights which, in and of itself is interesting.

The chains of evidence here are the witness testimonies but we must remember they were altogether rather than making independent observations. There were the attempts at taking pictures and while the photographs didn’t turn out, there was data that had been captured during the attempts. And there was the interaction with the environment, meaning the failure of the cameras and cell phones.

You can read more about the sighting here in the MUFON Journal for March and April 2016. It is much more detailed than I have been here.

For those interested, you can listen to my interview with Robert Powell describing some of the case here (at 53:16 of the interview):

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cN6ckulSwGo

Back in 1957, there was another case that had some the same elements. About two and a half hours before the sightings began in and around Levelland on November 2, a young couple was heading toward Amarillo, Texas, from the south, when they saw an object blocking the road. It was surrounded by a fog that obscured their view. The couple drove slowing toward the object, entering the fog. As they did, the engine died and the battery failed. At some point the UFO left but the couple was left stranded until another car stopped to help. Their battery was dead and they couldn’t restart their car. They later had the battery recharged in Amarillo and then drove to the Amarillo Police Department where they asked, “Where do you report flying saucers?”

In keeping with the normal skepticism concerning UFOs, the desk sergeant didn’t get the names of the witnesses. He would later describe them, saying they were in their early twenties; the man about six feet tall, the women just over five feet tall. Both were wearing red coats.

Highway Patrolman Gilbert Ray was sent to check the landing site but only found that a crowd had gathered, searching for the UFO. As mentioned, the incident took place before the series began in Levelland.

There is little more to this sighting because the witnesses were never found after the initial reports and while their experience fit into the general nature of those around Levelland, the Levelland sightings were much more dramatic.

But the point here is that they approached the UFO, there were EM Effects, and whatever electrical field surrounded the object, it killed the battery. The men in Canada had similar problems during the close approach of the UFO.

X-Zone Broadcast Network - Lee Spiegel and The Phenomenon

 This week I talked with Lee Spiegel about the James Fox film, The Phenomenon. In the interest of full disclosure, I should mention that Lee had a big role in producing the film and was involved from the beginning. You can listen to that conversation here:

https://www.spreaker.com/episode/41687438

Lee Spiegel

We touched on a number of UFO cases. I did mention the Socorro UFO landing because, frankly, I believe it to be a good UFO case. James Fox was able to speak with and interview the widow of Lonnie Zamora and was granted access to his papers and letters. There were some interesting things that developed from that including a letter from a small boy who had asked some interesting questions.

Lee mentioned the sighting by then Major (later Colonel) William Coleman and his UFO sighting in July 1955. Coleman and his crew saw a silver object that was so close to the ground that its wake stirred up parallel lines of dust. Coleman said that he reported it to Project Blue Book, but when he became the press officer for Blue Book, he could not find his report. Lee wrote an article about it and you can read that here:

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/ufo-secrets-national-atomic-testing-museum_n_1902019

We did talk about the Zimbabwe UFO landing that was seen by some 110 children, who, according to Lee, reported or drew, basically, the same thing. You can read about it, and Dr. John Mack’s take on the case, here:

https://www.bostonherald.com/2009/05/31/film-takes-closer-look-at-african-ufo-sighting/

Student drawing of the incident

There are those who have dismissed this as a case of mass hysteria, suggesting that the children suffered from a common delusion. This was embedded in an article that appeared Malawi Medical Journal. Though it doesn’t seem that this case fits into the overall theory, you can read the article here to decide for yourself:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3588562/

We also, at the end, talked about the Roswell case, since that is a large part of the UFO history today. Lee mentioned his interviews with Major Jesse Marcel, in the late 1970s. What was interesting was Marcel saying that both he and Brigadier General Roger Ramey knew that the stuff in Ramey’s office was not the material he had brought from Roswell. I pressed that point with him because it is one of the critical bits of information about the Roswell case.

Next week, I’ll be talking with Ben Moss about his book about the Socorro UFO landing. As you all know, I too, have written about Socorro in Encounter in the Desert. I promise that we won’t get too deep into the correct symbol that Lonnie Zamora described.

And, the following week, if everything goes according to plan, I will be talking with Colonel Richard Weaver about the Air Force investigation into the Roswell case. You can find his book here:

https://www.amazon.com/Backstory-Roswell-Exclusive-Disclosures-Inquiry-ebook/dp/B08GY9WXCL/ref=sr_1_1?dchild=1&keywords=Richard+Weaver+Roswell&qid=1603934159&sr=8-1

Given our backgrounds, I think the conversation will be interesting.

If you have questions for either of these guests, put them in the comments section and I’ll get to them. Just mark it private and it won’t be posted.

Coast to Coast - Sightings (October 22, 2020)

 For the latest of the Coast to Coast report, I mentioned that James Fox’s film, The Phenomenon, had provided the source of the Navy Tic Tac videos. According to him, it was Christopher Mellon who leaked the footage.

This did open a larger issue that wasn’t talked about and it was some of the reviews of the film that suggested there was nothing new in the documentary. Of course, in doing a history of the UFO field, there is going to be a recap of information that has been published or broadcast in the past. The real point is the little nuggets that have somehow not been reported in the past. For those who are immersed in the UFO field, some of it will be familiar, but there are far more out there who are not aware of what has gone on before. It is necessary to recap all that information to bring everyone up to speed. For those who would like to evaluate the film for themselves rather than read what someone else thought, you can find it here:

https://www.amazon.com/Phenomenon-John-Podesta/dp/B08HR6QD3V

I did mention a UFO sighting on April 23, 2020, from Pennsylvania. I don’t have much more information than presented during the show. The case came from Rob Swiatek and from MUFON. Check out the MUFON website for additional information.

The final case is one that I have always found interesting, given that the explanation offered for it was that it was a “phenomenon so rare it had never been seen before or since,” which, is, of course, no explanation at all. According to what I could find, and what I published in The Best of Project Blue Book, following are the details.

The report was made Captain James R. Howard, a pilot for British Overseas Airways Corporation (BOAC), and who had crossed the Atlantic 250 times, and by members of his flight crew. On June 30, 1954, he spotted something that he could not identify and other crew members saw it as well. According to Howard’s statement as published:

I was in command of a BOAC Boeing Strato cruiser en route from New York to London via Goose Bay Labrador (refueling stop). Soon after crossing overhead Seven Islands at 19,000 feet, True Airspeed 230 kts, both my co-pilot and I became aware of something moving along off our port beam at a lower altitude at a distance of maybe five miles, in and out of a broken layer of Strato Cumulus cloud. As we watched, these objects climbed above the cloud and we could now clearly see one large and six small. As we flew on towards Goose Bay the large object began to change shape and the smaller to move relative to the larger…

We informed Goose Bay that we had something odd in sight and they made arrangements to vector a fighter (F94?) on to us. Later I changed radio frequency to contact this fighter; the pilot told me he had me in sight on radar closing me head-on at 20 miles. At that the small objects seemed to enter the larger, and then the big one shrank. I gave descriptions of this to the fighter and a bearing of the objects from me. I then had to change back to Goose frequency for descent clearance. I don’t know if the fighter saw anything as he hadn’t landed when I left Goose for London.

Jenny Randles, writing in The UFO Conspiracy, expanding on this, mentioned that Lee Boyd, the first officer, alerted Goose Bay that there was an unidentified object escorting them. Goose Bay told them that an interceptor would be launched with the call sign of Pinto One.

Although the BOAC crew never saw the interceptor, and the radar on the fighter never painted the object, the BOAC crew were told that the radar at Goose Bay did see it. That would, of course, eliminate some sort of natural phenomenon given the observations of the flight crew. It also provided a bit of instrumentality for the sighting, something that was outside the problems of human perception.

According to Randles, when the aircraft landed at Goose Bay at 1:51 a.m., the crew was met by both US Air Force and Canadian officials that included intelligence officers. Both pilots, Howard and Boyd, were taken away to be debriefed. The navigator H. McDonnell, said that the flight logs were taken by the Air Force and that he was questioned about their airspeed and direction. His interrogation didn’t last very long. He said the pilots were gone much longer.

That wasn’t the end of it. Once they reached London, the pilots were ordered to the Air Ministry. The explanation offered then for the sighting was that the crew and some of the passengers had seen a solar eclipse. The trouble was that the eclipse had not begun when the sighting was made.

Howard, in a report in the New York Times said that the objects resembled “a large burst of flak and six smaller blobs.” He had refined the description in other reports, saying that the UFO was opaque, dark and jelly-fish-like. He also said that all but one of the crew and many of the passengers had seen the object. In one newspaper article, Howard said, “sometimes it was wedge shape, sometimes like a dumbbell, sometimes like a sphere with tail-like projections. The six smaller objects dodged about, either in front or behind.”

McDonnell met up with Howard some months later. He asked Howard what had happened at the Air Ministry. Howard responded, “Sorry. I can’t say. You know the score.”

Howard, his crew and passengers, however, were not alone spotting the strange object. According to the Blue Book file, more information came from a ship, USS Edisto, in the area. They described the same thing. The ship’s crew identified the object as Mars and suggested that there were “mirage conditions” on that date which could have influenced the sighting from the air.

The file confirmed the attempted intercept. The fighter pilot, who wasn’t identified by name, said that no intercept was made, meaning he didn’t see the object. He also said that he did not make radar contract with it.

The file also contained a message that had been sent to various commands. It said, “NEAC evaluates sighting as unknown natural phenomena cma (comma) possibly a mirage as a temperature inversion in referenced area made this condition possible pd (period).” That information came from Project Blue Book.

The Blue Book file also provided some additional information. Howard estimated that they watched the objects for about eighteen minutes. Eleven other crew members verified the information. One of the messages ended with “No further information available. Duty officer regards as improbable threat to US.”

Given this lack of information, this certainly not one of Blue Book’s best cases. The explanation seems to be clear, and while some might reject that explanation because it came from the Air Force, it is based on observations made at the time by another set of witnesses. There seems to be no reason to reject their solution.

The Condon Committee, however, thought the case deserved more attention. That might be explained by their interest in weather related phenomena that could cause UFO sightings. In a chapter called, “Optical and Radar Analysis of Field Case,” it was noted, “Very little meteorological data are available for this part of the world on the date in question, so that the presence of significant optical propagation mechanisms can be neither confirmed nor ruled out. This sighting was examined because of the ‘Mirage’ explanation. In fact, the author noted, “Nevertheless, certain facts in the case are strongly suggestive of an optical mirage phenomenon.

The Condon scientists went on to explain that the mirage might have been caused by a reflection from over the horizon. This is called superior mirage and has been reported often over the ocean. They then qualified that by writing:

The principal difficultly with this explanation, besides having to hypothesize the existence of the mirage-producing layer, is how to account for the anisotrophy [being directionally dependent] of the mirage. Anisotrophy of this sort, i.e. a mirage limited to certain viewing azimuths, is common in earthbound mirages when viewed from a single location. But a mirage layer through which a reflected image could be seen only in one, constant principal direction (plus a view smaller “satellite” images over a distance of 85 n. mil [nautical miles] is quite unusual.

What this says is that the Air Force was happy with the mirage answer, and with the suggestion that Mars was the culprit. And it says that the Condon Committee, looking at cases in which some sort of weather phenomenon is suspected, ended up not agreeing with the Air Force.

They added that there was a “slim possibility” that the aircraft itself was responsible for the “image layer through intensification (by compression induced by the shock wave of the aircraft’s passage through the air) of a barely subcritical layer, i.e. one in which the temperature gradient is just a little bit less than the value required to produce a mirage.”

But none of this is really all that important. It is the final conclusion, published in the Condon Committee’s final report which says, “This unusual sighting should therefore be assigned to the category of some almost certainly natural phenomenon, which is so rare that it apparently has never been reported before or since.”

Or, in other words, they had no real explanation for it but believed it to be natural, but they didn’t know what that would be. They just refused to say that they had failed to identify the source of the sighting which would have been the honest thing to do. After all, they didn’t identify it.

And that last paragraph from the Condon Committee report on the sighting is what demanded the mention of the case. It gives an insight into the mission of the Condon Committee, and it provides a look at the Air Force investigation. True, the Air Force relied on the observations of the crew of a ship in the region, but that doesn’t seem to be unreasonable. Had the “mirage, Mars” answer been left intact, that would be a reasonable conclusion. Since it was taken a step further, there is no reasonable conclusion. It is “Unidentified.”

The Best of Project Blue Book contains many of the reports by hundreds of witnesses that the Air Force managed to ignore. It provides a glimpse into that investigation and shows how the data were manipulated. You can find the book here:

https://www.amazon.com/Best-Project-Blue-Book-ebook/dp/B0869SRQMK/ref=sr_1_1?dchild=1&keywords=Kevin+Randle&qid=1603479818&sr=8-1

X-Zone Broadcast Network - Susan Swiatek

 

This week my guest was Susan Swiatek, the MUFON State Director for Virginia, a member of the MUFON Board, and a woman who has been around the UFO field for longer than she probably wishes to mention. We had an interesting discussion that covered many topics. You can listen to it here:

https://www.spreaker.com/episode/41575288

Susan Swiatek

We began talking about some of the problems with Stan Friedman’s Crash at Corona, including the rather dubious testimony of Gerald Anderson. Anderson’s credibility collapsed when he forged a telephone bill disputing the length of our first, and as it turned out, only conversation. He said that he had done it to make me look bad, but, of course, it had the opposite effect when I was able to prove it was a forgery. One of the first articles outlining the problem with Anderson can be see here (though the Anderson information is toward the end of the post):

http://kevinrandle.blogspot.com/2020/08/stan-friedman-vs-philip-klass-whats.html

There is more about Anderson and the tales he told, but that gives you the idea. I put an entire Appendix in Roswell in the 21^st Century, outlining all this in great detail for those who wish to pursue it farther.

Special Colletion at UTA

Moving away from that part of the Roswell story, but continuing in that vein, we talked about the Ramey Memo, which has been a topic here on several occasions. I have even been to the Special Collections at the library at the University of Texas Arlington twice. You can read about this here:

http://kevinrandle.blogspot.com/2017/10/josh-gates-ramey-memo-and-meme.html

http://kevinrandle.blogspot.com/2015/12/jan-aldrich-barry-greenwood-and-ramey.html

http://kevinrandle.blogspot.com/2018/12/the-ramey-memo-latest-information.html

http://kevinrandle.blogspot.com/2015/09/ramey-memo-update.html

http://kevinrandle.blogspot.com/2015/10/ramey-memo-and-victims-of-wreck.html

And, we did talk about the Fort Dix/McGuire Air Force Base incident in which it was alleged that an alien creature had been killed during an encounter there. Susan provided some insight to the event because of her friendship with George Filer, who was assigned to the base at the time. We both had read the book written by Filer that included the incident in it. I wrote a review of the book and you can read it here:

http://kevinrandle.blogspot.com/2020/09/george-filer-and-strange-craft.html

Finally, we talked about one of the UFO sightings in Virginia that she investigated recently. As usual, there was much more that we could have talked about, but time just slipped away.

Coast to Coast - Calvin Parker

 

Those of you who visit here regularly know that I’m not a big fan of tales of alien abduction. I believe that the solution for most cases is based here on Earth and that some of the investigation has been less than stellar. I do think that if there are alien abductions, I believe they would be targets of opportunity rather than some sort of longitudinal study conducted over years or decades. As I have said to Kathleen Marden, I’m more inclined to accept the tales told by Barney and Betty Hill, Travis Walton, and Charles Hickson and Calvin Parker.

For those interested, I have interviewed Calvin Parker of Pascagoula fame, a couple of times on the radio version of A Different Perspective. You can listen to those interviews here:

http://kevinrandle.blogspot.com/2019/03/x-zone-broadcast-network-calvin-parker.html

http://kevinrandle.blogspot.com/2020/07/x-zone-broadcast-network-calvin-parker.html

Like many others, I have always been somewhat skeptical of single witness reports, or in the case of Hickson-Parker, two guys telling the same story from the same point of view. That means they were together and there didn’t seem to be any corroborating witnesses. In the case of the latest investigation by Philip Mantle, it seems that additional witnesses have

Calvin Parker

been uncovered, and Calvin and I talked about that in the second link listed above.

But now, however, their seems to be some additional corroboration. Rather than witnesses who appeared nearly fifty years after the fact, there is a document found by Mantle that was written literally hours after the abduction took place. Mantle wrote:

After the book was published [Pascagoula – The Closest Encounter: My Story by Calvin Parker] … I continued my search for any formal documentation related to the incident as any that had been in the possession of Calvin Parker had been washed away by hurricane Katrina. I contacted all of the major UFO groups one of which included the J. Allen Hynek Center for UFO Studies in the USA. They were very obliging and sent me a PDF file of what they had on the case. Most of what they sent was newspaper cuttings but buried in the middle of this file was a very curious and possible ‘smoking gun’ type-written document.

Although this document, dated 13^th of October 1973, just two days after the alien encounter, is unsigned it was written by Dr. James Harder. We know it was written by Dr. Harder as he was the only person to examine the witnesses which has been confirmed by Calvin Parker. Dr. James Harder’s academic credentials are as follows: BS (Caltech), MS, Ph.D., (U.C. Berkeley). He is a Fellow, AAAS; Life Member, ASCE; and Founding Member, Society for Scientific Exploration. Professor Emeritus, U.C. Berkeley. He was also a director of the UFO research group APRO.

Dr. Harder along with Dr J. Allen Hynek were on site in Pascagoula within 36 hours of the event happening. They interviewed Calvin Parker and Charles Hickson and at a press conference confirmed that they believed what the witnesses were saying.

It is important, in attempting to understand, the relevance of the document, to read first, what Calvin had to say about it:

At the time of my abduction on October 11^th, 1973   when the alien reached out to take me on board the ship. From the first time I saw them it was the fear I felt that is hard to describe. I just knew I would not live through this fear. As the alien made contact to my left arm, I heard a whisk of what I thought was air then all at once I got became really relaxed then all the fear was gone. Later on, after being examined by Dr. James Harder I heard him telling Dr Hynek that I had a puncture marks on my arm and later at the hospital I found out that I was given not one shot but two shots the second was while I was on board the craft. This document simply confirms what I have always known and that is both Charlie and I were given injections by these creatures and we had the puncture wounds to prove it.

Rather than me type in what is found on the document, the best course is to provide the document itself so that you can read it here.

Document found by Philip Mantle.

 Although the provenance of the document is not rock solid, the fact that it came from CUFOS and was among Hynek’s papers is relevant. It’s not as if the document appeared from an unknown location in the mail box of a UFO researcher. It does have a certainly level of credibility attached to it.

However, it would have been more powerful had it been signed by Dr. James Harder, and given what is known, it is reasonable to believe that Harder was the author. Given what is known, given the date of the document, it does provide us with some corroboration for the event told by Calvin Parker. It is up to each of us to decide what weight to give to it.

Coast to Coast - The Levelland UFO Landings

 

I have talked about the Levelland UFO landings and their importance here and on radio shows. Not only were there witnesses at least at thirteen separate locations, but the UFO interacted with the environment by stalling car engines and dimming headlights. In most of the cases, the witnesses had minutes to study the UFO. Many of those witnesses mentioned attempting to restart their cars or trucks. That failed until the UFO left the area. Then the vehicles began working properly again.

You can read about this case, which I have explored on this blog, here:

http://kevinrandle.blogspot.com/2016/03/one-of-best-cases-levelland-texas.html

http://kevinrandle.blogspot.com/2020/06/levelland-and-four-witnesses.html

http://kevinrandle.blogspot.com/2020/07/frank-williams-and-levelland.html

http://kevinrandle.blogspot.com/2020/06/levelland-and-four-witnesses-part-two.html

http://kevinrandle.blogspot.com/2010/08/levelland-ufo-sightings.html

 

The Air Force investigation of the Levelland sightings is badly flawed. Staff Sergeant Norman Barth spent about seven hours in Levelland and interviewed only six witnesses. One of the most interesting of those interviews was with Hockley County

Sheriff Weir Clem

Sheriff, Weir Clem. His office received many of the phone calls that came in over a two-hour period about the strange events. According to the Air Force report, Clem, along with a couple of other law enforcement officers, left the office to search for the UFO. Clem was quoted in the Air Force report as saying that he had only a streak of light in the distance for about two seconds.

However, according to newspaper reports published the day before Barth arrived in Levelland, Clem said he was much closer to the UFO and that it was oval shaped. Don Burleson, of Roswell, investigating the case two decades ago, said that Clem’s car was checked by a mechanic the next day.

Burleson also interviewed the wife and daughter of the Sheriff and was told that he had gotten closer, much closer, to the UFO, which I verified through newspaper reports from the era. The daughter also talked about a burned area that the Sheriff had seen. It means that there was other evidence of something landing that night in November, 1957.

To be fair, according to the newspapers of the time, there was a mention that the Sheriff and the Provost Marshal from Reese AFB did go out in search of the landing traces. They reported negative results, but you have to wonder what they might have seen and what the Provost Marshal might have said. You have to wonder why the Air Force Provost Marshal was involved. You have to wonder about the influence that Barth brought with him so that the truth could be buried and mention of Air Force involvement disappeared from the narrative.

Additional questions are: Why the changes in the Air Force report about how close the Sheriff got and only the mention of a steak of light, and, why have a mechanic check the car if he hadn’t gotten close enough for the UFO to affect its operation?

There is another interesting aspect to this that no one seems to have noticed. When the Sheriff headed out to search for the UFO, he was accompanied by other law enforcement officers, some of whom were not interviewed by Barth. But, more importantly, the Sheriff, according to newspaper reports, was also accompanied by Air Force officers. They would have come from Reese Air Force Base in Lubbock, only fifteen or twenty minutes away from Levelland. There is no mention of those Air Force officers in the Project Blue Book files. I have yet to identify who they were, but I can document that they were involved.

It is clear from all this that the Air Force investigation was inadequate and that it was designed to answer questions but to avoid the truth. The reality of the case is that it was much more important than many realized at the time. Too many UFO researchers missed the significance and the Air Force got away with the misdirection. It only proves that we can learn something by prowling the archives. There are gems hidden there.

Kevin Randle on Coast to Coast

For those of you who might have missed it, I did a short, very short, segment with George Noory on Coast to Coast on Friday night, October 2. This is to be a regular feature on Coast to Coast, with me talking about what is new in the world of the UFO... might be a sighting update, might be some information about a past case or might be some revelation that has escaped notice because, frankly, there are millions of pages and billions of words out there about UFOs. Some important things just get missed in all the information out there.

For those wishing to comment, just append your comment here and if you wish it to remain private, mark it as such. I do monitor the blog so that I read all the comments. If you'd like a reply, and I have one that is appropriate, I'll do that. 

So, listen for me on Coast to Coast every week in the first hour on either Thursday or Friday... and if you have a suggestion, sent that along too. 

George Filer and "Strange Craft"

 

Given that we were without electricity for more than 8 days, and that my iPad is filled with books that I haven’t read (thank you Book Bub*), I used the time to catch up. I mention this because one of the books I read was Strange Craft: The True Story of An Air Force Intelligence Officer’s Life with UFOs by John L. Guerra with Major George Filer III, USAF (Ret.) and published by Rayshore Publishing Company in Tampa, Florida.

Before we start, let me say that I was a little annoyed with one of the first pages that said, “What reviewers say about ‘Strange Craft.’” Oh, not that the reviews were all good but that none of the reviewers were named. In most books which quote reviews, there is a source mentioned. That none were identified is a little, dare I say it, “Strange.”

As a retired military officer myself, I’m always interested in the career paths of those who took a similar journey. In that respect, I enjoyed the book. I thought Filer’s description of his UFO sighting was vivid and interesting, if not a bit frightening. I did think it strange that the aircraft commander would put his aircraft into a dive that pushed the envelope and red lined the airspeed, but hey, I wasn’t in the aircraft and don’t really know what pressures were put on that officer to intercept the UFO.

The 116th AHC, preparing for a combat
assault, 1968. Photo copyright by
Kevin Randle

I learned that my tour in Vietnam overlapped Filer’s, though his began at the very beginning of 1968 (well, the last couple of days of 1967) and mine some months later. During the Tet Offensive, Filer mentions the helicopters landing on Ton Son Nhut, and the gunships attacking the VC attempting to overrun the air base. I mention this only because one of those units was the 116^th Assault Helicopter Company, which I would join a few months after this.

And, since I have leaped right into the Tet Offensive, I thought I’d mention a couple of points. Filer suggests that he, and his pals in the Air Force, predicted the Tet Offensive and advised MACV (Military Assistance Command, Vietnam) and General William Westmoreland, that an attack was planned. According to Filer, his warnings, and those of his cohorts, fell on deaf ears. Once the attacks were launched, to the surprise of the Army, both American and Vietnamese, his predictions were validated. Westmoreland was demoted and replaced by Creighton Abrams… but the truth is, Westmoreland was promoted to Chief of Staff of the Army. He’d already been in Vietnam for four years and he wasn’t all that surprised, except, possibly by the tanks used to attack Lang Vei Special Forces camp.

The trouble here is that history doesn’t reflect the theory that the Army and the Vietnamese were ill-prepared for Tet. Filer suggests that Westmoreland had rejected the idea because Tet was such an important holiday and both sides had honored a tacit cease fire during Tet. There would be no attack because of that.

Except… the Vietnamese, centuries earlier, had launched a surprise attack on the Chinese during Tet. General Earl Wheeler, who was in Australia in November, 1967, told an audience that they expected a big attack, probably around Tet. American forces in Vietnam were moved into more centralized locations in late January 1968 so that they would be able to redeploy quickly into hot spots expected during the attacks. The only people really surprised by the Tet Offensive were the reporters who didn’t understand military strategies and were astonished by the initial gains and the politicians who would be expected to have something negative to say because they just don’t know better. In the years that followed, it would be acknowledged that it was a defeat for the VC but seen as a psychological victory for them… again an assessment by a press who simply don’t understand what happened… and, once again, I digress.

As I say, I was interested in the track of Filer’s military career and the problems that he faced during it. I was surprised when he was offered an opportunity to go to Vietnam at the invitation of a general who wanted Filer on his staff but Filer declined. Seems that he missed a golden opportunity, but then he had young children and such a deployment is tough on the family. He went a couple of years later. I think, during our military careers we all face tough choices and sometimes we chose wrong. I believe I always chose wrong, but that’s a tale for another time.

After twenty years in the Air Force, Filer retired as a major. He believes that his interest in UFOs, and possibly his involvement in a big UFO sighting might have derailed his career. He believes he missed promotions because this.

But, his interest in UFOs didn’t stop with his retirement. Instead, he jumped into the world of the UFO with both feet. According to him, he had been involved in the shooting of an alien creature at the Fort Dix/McGuire Air Force Base complex. Well, maybe involved is too strong a word. He was assigned to McGuire when the events took place and was near the scene as the military police and Air Force officials took care of the problem. Filer was to brief a general about what had happened, based on his interrogation of some of the participants. Unfortunately, events intervened so that Filer didn’t see the alien, didn’t see the photographs of the alien, and was just around the periphery of the event… but then he was there on the morning of the incident so that provides him with a better perspective than those of us who just read about it much later.

And now, for those interested in the workings of MUFON and the UFO field, we learn how Filer joined MUFON, what he did in the beginning and what he continues to do today, even though he is in his eighties. He helped establish or refine some of the procedures that MUFON uses and eventually became a regional director.

The problem for me here, is that he accepts, as authentic, some of the UFO events that worry me. He talks of multiple crashes and suggests that General George Marshall, who was the Chief of Staff of the Army during WW II and later was the Secretary of State under President Truman, was on the scene of two UFO crashes. I might have missed it, but I don’t believe that those crashes were ever identified by Filer and I don’t believe that Marshall was involved in any such activities.

Filer hints at other crashes as well. The problem for me is that I can accept one or two, but this idea of many crash retrievals has moved into the realm of fantasy. It seems to be illogical to believe that there could be so many UFO crashes without much better evidence slipping into the public arena. Too many crashes and so many of them with dubious testimony.

I guess the long and the short of it is that I enjoyed reading the book and was especially interested in a fellow Vietnam veteran’s military career. I was interested in his insights in the world of the UFO but reject much of the information provided there. True, many will accept it, but I found the lack of names, dates and locations of this to be troublesome. There is no way for us to independently verify the information because there are simply too few clues for us to find or paths for us to follow.

Bill Brazel, 1989. Photocopy 
right by Kevin Randle

I get that UFO witnesses, once their names are known, are subject to many, many UFO investigators, or maybe just UFO enthusiasts, wanting to talk with them. Too many of those enthusiasts have no social skill when it comes to talking with witnesses, meaning they call at all hours, demand all sorts of information, and don’t realize they are intruding on another’s life without invitation. Bill Brazel told me that he would sometimes receive calls from drunks in bars at 2 or 3 in the morning, wanting to know if the Roswell story was true… for those interested, I sent him a letter with my telephone number in it and asked him to call me collect if he could help me. He called and he did.

Oh, I do recommend the book but remember, the evidence for many of the tales is lacking. If that doesn’t bother you, well, good for you. For me, I’d have liked a little more detail, a few more documents, and some hints of where to look for corroboration. Other than that, it was fun.

And, yes, I have invited him on the radio show, twice, but have yet to received a response to that invitation.

*Book Bub is a website that sends out a daily list of books that can be picked up for free or for a buck or two, rather than the full price. This explains why there are something like 100 titles on my iPad which I haven’t yet read, but thought those books would be interesting. You can select the type of books that interest you (science fiction, true crime, biographies, history, action adventure, etc.) and the list sent is tailored to your personal tastes. Check it out when you have the chance. This is my small gift to those of you visit here regularly.

X-Zone Broadcast - Robert Sheaffer Discusses Klass and Friedman

 

I invited Robert Sheaffer back on the program as a response to another radio show in which the host and the guest attacked Philip Klass. I didn’t think that it was a fair assessment of who Klass was and that his personality was similar to that of Stan

Robert Sheaffer

Friedman, who had partnered with that guest. You can listen to my show here:

https://www.spreaker.com/episode/41089664

and the second hour here:

https://www.spreaker.com/episode/41089667

We did examine some of the things that Klass had done that were fairly nasty, but then we did the same thing with Friedman. You can get a better idea, along with some documentation here:

http://kevinrandle.blogspot.com/2020/08/stan-friedman-vs-philip-klass-whats.html

And to learn a little about what Klass has done, in a somewhat similar vein, you can read it here:

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

I did look at other aspects of some of Klass’ UFO investigations and you can see them by typing his name into the search engine on the blog. I also looked at Klass’ investigation into the Travis Walton abduction and Klass’ attempts to convince Steve Pierce to “confess” to the Walton hoax. Pierce never did, even with an offer of a large amount of cash offered by Klass.

In other words, we looked at how Klass had operated in the past and compared it to some of the things that Friedman had done in his campaign to become the Number One Guy in the world of UFOs.

As we discussed this, we also looked at some of the famous UFO cases, such as the Coyne helicopter sighting. I explained why I found some of what Klass had said about it to be inaccurate based on my experience as an Army helicopter pilot who had been through the same training as Coyne and his co-pilot. Naturally, you can read about that here:

http://kevinrandle.blogspot.com/search?q=Coyne

We also talked about the Lubbock Lights case and in a discussion that was reminiscent of our Levelland discussion on another edition of the radio show. That means, simply, that Robert offered a possible explanation for the Carl Hart photographs taken in Lubbock. He supplied a link to that analysis, which, with luck, you can read here (I say that because the link might not work for everyone):

https://www.facebook.com/groups/470983769757563/permalink/688177534704851

I am not a fan of the explanation but will note, as I did on the show, that there seems to be only two solutions here. Hart either perpetrated a hoax or he photographed something that is truly anomalous. Having interviewed Hart in the 1990s, I accept his statement to  me that “I still don’t know what I photographed.”

The best part of the show, I believe, is that you had two guys on it, who look at the UFO phenomenon from opposite sides of the room. We could agree on a number of points without the discussion devolving into insults and accusations. We might disagree, but we did look at the other side to see if there were good points to be made. We also, in the course of the show, tried to provide references for those who were interested to follow up on what we said.

We pretty much left it at that point. What we did prove, if that is the right word, is that Klass was no worse than Friedman, and Klass might have been more honest in his assessments. He might have been blinded by his bias but there seemed to be no evidence that he fabricated or suppressed evidence… the same can’t be said about Friedman.

Note: Before I published the article about Klass and Freidman, I invited Kathleen Marden on this program. She declined the offer.

X-Zone Broadcast Network - Joe Murgia's Investigation into the Davis/Wilson Meeting

 

Joe Murgia, aka UFOJoe, sent me a comment about my posting about Dr. Eric Davis and his mention of the Del Rio UFO crash. We had a brief email exchange, and I asked him to talk about this on the radio show/podcast version of the blog. We didn’t limit the conversation to the fifteen pages that were notes of an alleged meeting between Admiral Thomas Wilson and Dr. Davis but did explore related topics. You can listen to the conversation here:

https://www.spreaker.com/episode/40941141

Joe had written a 24,000-blog posting about the meeting and his investigation into it. This document provided a good analysis of what

Joe Murgia

allegedly happened. The trouble was, as we worked our way through it, we learned, or rather, I learned, that the fifteen pages of notes surfaced in the UFO related papers of NASA astronaut Dr. Edgar Mitchell. It wasn’t until Mitchell’s papers were being reviewed after his death that the tale of this meeting with Admiral Wilson was exposed. The results of the meeting, and the point of the fifteen pages of notes was that the US had a captured (retrieved?) alien craft. You can read his posting, in four parts, here:

http://www.ufojoe.net/wilsondavis1

http://www.ufojoe.net/wilsondavis2

http://www.ufojoe.net/wilsondavis3

http://www.ufojoe.net/wilsondavis4

 

When all was said and done, and after having read, carefully, that 24,000-word treatise on the meeting, I found no solid evidence. Admiral Wilson denied, repeatedly and vehemently, the meeting had taken place and Dr. Davis, when asked about it, said, “No comment.”

Oh, there was a meeting with Admiral Wilson but it wasn’t the one referenced in those fifteen pages of notes. This one took place in the Pentagon, in Wilson’s office, and didn’t seem to have the same surprising outcome. In other words, it was only a discussion about UFOs that didn’t seem to turn into anything other than a discussion about UFOs. I believe the meeting was arranged because Edgar Mitchell was involved and for no other reason. Who wouldn’t want to sit down with the sixth man to walk on the moon?

This discussion seemed to provide little in the way of illumination but certainly demonstrated the problem with UFO research and dealing with bureaucrats (not that I would consider Admiral Wilson as a bureaucrat).

Anyway, we do learn about the depth of some research into specific UFO related questions. A lot of people talking about what they claim to know, but with nothing that would be considered hard evidence and too many unnamed sources.

Next week, I’ll be talking with Robert Sheaffer about Phil Klass and Stan Friedman and their contributions to UFO research. Or maybe I should say their attempts to limit the research to what they believed. This interview was originally scheduled for August 12, but a storm took down both the power grid and the Internet around here, so I had to postpone. I’m finally able to get this all put back together. If you have questions, append them in the comments section and I’ll do my best to get them answered.

Eric Davis, Again

 

The Devoid (Billy Cox), columnist at the Miami Herald, reignited the Admiral Thomas Wilson debate not all that long ago. Although it seemed that most of mainstream Ufology had realized that the story told by Dr. Eric Davis about his clandestine meeting with the Admiral was probably more hyperbole that truth, there are still those who believe the information is leading us to disclosure. You can read the article here:

http://devoid.blogs.heraldtribune.com/16000/eric-who-the-admiral/#comment-588557

I bring all this up because, a while back, Dr. Davis had suggested, on Coast-to-Coast, that the Del Rio UFO crash was real. That crash is based on the information of a single witness who had claimed to be a retired Air Force colonel, a former Air Force fighter pilot, and a veteran of the Korean War. I explored all this at length in a posting on this blog that you can read here:

http://kevinrandle.blogspot.com/2018/09/dr-davis-confirms-del-rio-ufo-crash.html

Given that the Del Rio story is a hoax, and the lone witness to it has been less than honest about it, this does cast a shadow over the credibility of Dr. Davis. I mean, if he truly had inside information, he would have known the Del Rio crash was a hoax.

Robert Willingham, pretend
Air Force Officer.

I exposed it as such in 2010 in my book, Crash: When UFOs Fall from the Sky. I also gave a presentation at the MUFON Symposium in Denver about Robert Willingham, the discredited source, and why his tale should be rejected. This merely means that the information I uncovered was available long before Dr. Davis had his conversation with Admiral Wilson (which, BTW, Wilson has denied ever having taken place).

In the last few days, a number of people have been discussing this on the Internet, and I wouldn’t mention it but their experiences seem to match my own. As I said in the post, I had emailed Dr. Davis a couple of times, even asking George Knapp for some help in making contact, but never heard a word back from Davis. The excuse was that Dr. Davis was getting plenty of emails from all over the world and I certainly could understand his failure to reply to me.

However…

I wasn’t the only one having that sort of problem. André Skondras told Philip Mantle had he had attempted to contact Dr. Davis but hadn’t heard back. Given that had been less than twenty-four hours after he had sent his email, that wasn’t all that surprising. Now, several days later, he still hasn’t had a response.

That’s not the end of it. Don Schmitt reported, “Tracy Torme had asked me to contact Davis after his failure when he and James Fox were shooting the forthcoming docu-film. He never responded to email or personal calls. Next, because Davis was listed at that time as a MUFON consultant, I asked Jan Harzan to make the same effort. Same result.”

This was important because of Don’s efforts and the suggestion that MUFON Executive Director Jan Harzan was involved (made long before Harzan’s arrest). While I fully understand Dr. Davis ignoring some of these requests, as a consultant to MUFON, you’d think that a response to the Executive Director would be forthcoming.

This has now taken a different path with a suggestion that we contact Admiral Wilson, who has repeatedly denied that he knew Davis and wouldn’t recognize him if he walked into the room. Since the Admiral has been contacted and responded a number of times, I don’t know what good it will do to bother him again. He’s not going to change his mind.

I’m reminded of the note Kent Jeffrey received from the late Colonel Robert Barrowclough, who, in 1947, was one of the senior officers at the Roswell Army Air Field. In that note dated June 15, 1997, Barrowclough wrote, “Thank you for the copy of the [MUFON] UFO Journal on the Roswell Myth. Maybe some of those crack pots will quit calling me up and say I’m covering up a deep gov’t secret.”

Even if Admiral Wilson did know something, he would be obligated to deny it if it was still classified. I’m not saying that he does, only that continued pestering of the man will not yield any positive results… especially since he is on the record, repeatedly, as saying he had no such discussion with Dr. Davis.

The key here is Dr. Davis, but it seems to be a key that is lost. Since Dr. Davis has proclaimed a well-known hoax (Del Rio) as being authentic, I fear that there is nothing more to learn from him. All we end up doing is chasing a claim that cannot be verified and it does nothing to advance our knowledge. It only diverts us from a path that could yield better results.