Nazi UFOs and Roswell

Oh, this is really fair. The book (Roswell and the Reich by Joseph P. Farrell) came out in March and I hadn’t heard about it until either Gene Steinberg or Paul Kimball asked about it on the Paracast show in May. I said I hadn’t read it but I was bothered by the Nazi aspect. It seemed logical to me that had the Nazis been able to develop something like that the war would have ended differently. And I just don’t see this great secret Nazi network hidden in South America that can control such things... Yes, I know of Odessa and I knew that many of the Nazis fled to South America, but they weren’t developing flying saucers.

First we have to put up with the Air Force and their recapitulation of the weather balloon, now in the guise of Mogul. Then we have to put up with the anthropomorphic dummies dropped a decade later. Then Nick Redfern tells us of deformed Japanese and Unit 731. Next is Jim Carrion at the MUFON Symposium talking about Project Seal and secret weapons. And now we have Nazi UFOs and I’m the bad guy because I hadn’t heard of this book back in May.

Well, now I’ve looked at it and I find it flawed.

"Why?" you ask.

The reliance of the nonsense spouted by Kal Korff, if for no other reason. Korff never heard an anti-Roswell theory he didn’t like and if he had to misinterpret information, it didn’t matter. He said, for example, there were no black (African-American) sergeants at Roswell. He knew because he asked some unidentified Pentagon historian who told him the military was segregated in 1947. Apparently Korff didn’t know that this meant that African-American soldiers were in their own units and at Roswell this was Squadron S. According to the Yearbook produced in 1947 by Walter Haut in Roswell, there were at least 24 black sergeants at the base.

Korff dismisses and then Farrell dismisses (in his Roswell and the Reich) the Beverly Bean testimony for no legitimate reason. Korff complained that we had not been fair in our assessment of the Melvin Brown body story as related by Bean. Farrell quotes Korff, but doesn’t bother to analyze the validity of what Korff had written.

Let’s examine this one bit of nonsense that Farrell finds so important.

Korff in his poorly researched book which Farrell quotes, accuses us, meaning Don Schmitt and me of "journalistic license" and suggests that a more honest way to convey Brown’s testimony would have been to have written, "According to Beverly Bean, Brown’s daughter, he said..."

What Korff objects to is that in describing the Brown information, we had written that Brown had seen the bodies and that he had been involved in escorting two or three of them back to the base. Korff thought this unfair because in our time line of events, and in our description of the events early in the book, we hadn’t mentioned, specifically, that this information came from Bean rather than Brown. But this is an invalid criticism because the footnotes make it clear how the information was obtained. Korff is criticizing me for using a footnote, which is a proper thing to have done and Farrell seems oblivious to this fact, not mentioning it.

On page 96 of UFO Crash at Roswell, we do explain exactly how the information was obtained. The reader knows that the information came from Brown through Bean... and they know who was present at the interview and that it was videotaped... Something that both Korff and Farrell ignore.

On page 82 of The Truth about the UFO Crash at Roswell, we again mention Brown and write, "Melvin E. Brown, a sergeant with the 509th , told family members that..." Which, of course, means that we have been fair with our treatment of the Brown testimony. Korff should know this because all of this information was published prior to the publication of his book, but he choose to ignore it.

I can say Korff deceives the public by writing in his highly misleading book, "Finally as the pro-UFO Roswell researchers will admit when pressed, Beverly Bean is the only person in the Brown family who has made these claims about her father. Bean’s sister and her own mother have never confirmed the account."

This is, of course, not true and since Korff referenced the 1991 interview conducted with the Brown family, he should have known that both her sister and her mother confirmed the account on video tape. So, Korff rather than writing, "In 1991, both Bean’s sister and mother who had failed to corroborate the story earlier, are now on the record..." Korff chose to conceal this evidence from his readers.

Farrell dismissed the Brown story because of the misinformation published by Korff. Had he bothered to follow through, or had he bothered to ask me, I could have supplied the proper information.

And what makes all this so funny is that Korff, at one point in his book, chastises Don and me for talking about weather casters who were able to identify the rawin target and balloon from the photographs in Ramey’s office. We don’t say who they were, and I’m not sure that it mattered. We were suggesting that anyone could take the pictures to virtually any weather caster and have them attempt to identify the items in the picture. The irony here will become clear later.

Farrell, in his book, again quotes Korff and the Lydia Sleppy story of having her teletype interrupted. Korff knew it was untrue because he checked with the FBI and according to him, they didn’t do it, though Sleppy, in later interviews said they did.

Two questions spring to mind. Why should be believe the FBI on this point? It wasn’t has if they hadn’t been spying on Americans for a long time and it wouldn’t have been difficult for them to tap into the main AP lines at the AP headquarters if they wanted... though I don’t believe this to be the case.

And second, why should we believe Korff on this? He said he checked with the various offices, but provides nothing in the way of documentation for it. He notes in his book, "Kal K. Korff, personal phone conversation with representatives of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Washington, D.C., and Dallas, Texas, August 1, 1996, through October 15, 1996."

One hell of a bit of documentation. Not a name of who he talked to, not a letter to prove that he had contacted them. Just his bold statement that he had and the FBI denied that they had been running any sort of an operation.

As noted earlier Korff, in his footnotes, also failed to name the Pentagon historian who told him that the military had been segregated in 1947 so no one can check on the validity of his claims. And he had the guts to accuse us of failing to provide names on a point that was more of a side note than an important revelation. Korff, of course, does the opposite by not supplying the names of those who he claims provided him with important information.

Farrell makes another, somewhat similar mistake in discussing the Gerald Anderson story. He wrote that Anderson and I had a falling out sometime during or just after that first interview. But the truth of the matter is, there was no bad blood between us until Stan Friedman interviewed Anderson. During that interview, you hear Friedman tell Anderson not to talk to me, that I’m strange because I write Romances (which is not true... that is, I don’t write Romances but I might be considered strange by some) and that he, Anderson, should only talk to him, Friedman. At that point Anderson would no longer talk to me.

In fact, if you listen to my tape of the interview with Anderson, as noted by John Carpenter in the MUFON Journal (March 1993, No. 299, page 7), you’ll find out that such is not the case. Carpenter wrote, "I finally was able to learn that Gerald had indeed had a friendly 54-minute phone call just as Randle had claimed". So the conclusions drawn by Farrell on this were incorrect and the documentation was out there for him to find.

I always believed that when I’m looking at the writing of someone else I need to make sure that the facts, as presented, are accurate. It took me nearly a year to find the first mention of the Del Rio crash by Robert Willingham so that I could compare it to his later statements. I mean, I want to be sure that the writer actually checked the information for himself and that it is accurate. Farrell apparently didn’t do that.

I only bring all this up because I had been criticized for not reading Farrell’s book even though I hadn’t known of its existence until mentioned on the Paracast. I have read where the research in the book is the best of any that has been done by we UFO investigators, though I wonder how you get around the fact that it seems that Farrell has only reviewed the literature, whether other books, articles or documents. Apparently he did not conduct many personal interviews and did nothing to verify the information in his book.

No, I really shouldn’t be ragging on Farrell this much because it is his fans who have gone off the deep end. My point was that he relied too much on the nonsense spewed by Korff and that he didn’t fact-check what Korff had written.

I think too often that those who haven’t written a book or dealt with a publisher assume that they do fact-checking. Mostly, what publishers do is check to make sure that something won’t get them sued, but the data in a book is not fact-checked. That’s how Korff was able to confuse witness testimony, make claims that weren’t true, and actually have a few people believe what he wrote. Farrell assumed that there was some good there but didn’t check it out.

Yes, I know that Farrell will probably look at this criticism (if he even sees it) and think about it. Korff will launch into another diatribe, threaten lawsuits, threaten more audits of the facts by financial institutions and make up more facts to support himself. He will stamp his foot, insist that we call him "colonel" because of his employment by some mythical organization and continue to slander others. But he won’t offer anything to validate his claims.

Sometimes you just have to risk the wrath of the unwashed to make an important point.