Electromagnetic Beam Weapon

Taking the opportunity to again mention my latest book, The Government UFO Files, (for those who want to know about such things) I can use it to add something more to the discussion of EM effects and an Earth-based technology that is of interest to us. Please note, so that I’m not forced to explain this time and again, I am not offering this as a solution to those UFO reports that mention EM effects and stalled car engines, only that this is a somewhat interesting side discussion.

During World War II, as the allies attempted to learn something about the Foo Fighters, they sent a fellow, Dr. David Griggs to Europe. He was there to assist with radar and to investigate the Foo Fighters. When the war ended in Europe, he went to the Pacific Theater, to continue the investigation. He was part of the Compton Scientific Intelligence Committee, and he wanted, specifically to track down Japanese military technology with an eye to finding more about their electromagnetic beam experiments. There had been some discussion that these beam weapons could interrupt the smooth functioning of engines, as had been reported in some of the European Foo Fighter cases and, of course, was what Len Stringfield would report about his own sighting near Iwo Jima at the very end of the war in the Pacific.

Griggs did find some information about this electromagnetic “ray” technology. The ray was something primitive, but “[They could] stop the engines at short range… and one massive device could kill a rabbit…” The document is somewhat difficult to decipher, but it might have suggested that the ray killed the rabbit at a distance of about three feet. Apparently the device was discovered and captured, complete with its thirty-four foot dish. According to Michael Swords, the dish and its equipment were shipped to the US, but there is no record of it arriving and there seems to be no follow up into what happened to it.

So, apparently, the Japanese had invented a weapon that could stop the operation of an engine, and I would imagine that it was some sort of electromagnetic field that suppressed the flow of electrons. I would suspect that once the engine stalled under this scenario, it would not restart without some sort of action by the operator, meaning the driver or pilot. But the range was extremely limited so as a weapon it was a novelty but not effective.

For those interested in learning more about Griggs and his investigation into the Foo Fighters I would suggest:

UFOs and Government: A Histoical Enquiry by Michael Swords, Robert Powell, et.al, Anomalist Books, pp. 5 – 10

Or

Strange Company by Keith Chester, Anomalist Books, pp. 194 – 198 (as well as many other references to him throughout the book.)

Cars Stalled by UFOs - Part Two

I have long been under the impression that in many UFO EM cases in which car engines stalled, the car spontaneously started when the UFO departed. I then noticed in a couple of cases that it was reported that the car was restarted, which is not the same as it just restarting up on its own. I had suggested that we might want to revisit these cases of EM effects to see what we might learn from them.

Using various sources including my files, Project Blue Book, Dick Hall’s The UFO Evidence, Mark Rodeghier’s UFO Reports Involving Vehicle Interference (because, frankly, I wasn’t all that interested in UFO interference with radio stations, TV sets, and other such manifestations of EM effects) and The Scientific Study of Unidentified Flying Objects (known as the Condon Committee), I was able to learn some interesting things.

The first reported instance of a UFO (described as a globular light) causing any sort of EM effect was on May 19, 1909. A motorcyclist said that his headlight failed as the light passed overhead. When it was gone, the motorcycle light came back on.

The first case in which an engine was stalled was from California in the spring of 1944 or 1945. According to the APRO Bulletin of Jan/Feb 1968, two school teachers were driving in the mountains when their car engine stalled. They spotted a cigar-shaped craft hanging motionless in the air. After watching it for a while, the driver turned the key to start the engine, but it wouldn’t start. When the object left, the driver tried again, but the car still would not start. After several minutes a tow truck driver stopped to help but could find no reason for the engine to quit or why it wouldn’t start when it started by itself.

The first case in which the car had to be started after the UFO disappeared was reported on September 13, 1952 from Frametown, West Virginia, which is part of the Flatwoods Monster case. A couple said they were traveling with their daughter when they saw a bright light and their car stalled. They did see a creature, which is irrelevant to us here. When the UFO took off, apparently after recovering the creature, the car could then be restarted.

From then on, it seemed that the rule was that the car, if stalled, had to be restarted. According to an analysis of the cases, it seems that in only five to six percent of the reports that involved a stalled engine did the car start without an action taken by the driver.

I will note here that there were a number of cases in which it wasn’t clear if the car had to be restarted or if it restarted on its own. In those reports, it was noted only that once the UFO was gone, the “car acted normally.” That could mean almost anything, including that the engine started spontaneously or that the driver started it.

The other thing to be noted is that I found many cases in which the radios filled with static and the headlights dimmed or faded out completely, but the engine didn’t stall. In some of them the engine began to run roughly or sputtered, but never stopped. In these reports once the UFO was gone, the engine smoothed out and the lights and the radio began to operate properly as well.

Rodeghier reported that for a long time that it was only the gasoline engines that stalled but diesel engines seemed to be immune. Rodeghier wrote, “For example, a UFO passed over two tractors in Forli, Italy, on November 14, 1954, one tractor with a diesel engine the other with an internal combustion engine. The engine of the diesel tractor continued to operate, but the other tractor’s engine stopped and could not be started until the UFO had vanished.”

The Condon Committee, without much apparent enthusiasm, attempted to study EM effects. They looked at one case that had happened while their investigation was in progress. They found discrepancies in the witness story, didn’t like that it was single witness, and found no evidence that the car had been subjected to a powerful magnetic field. They concluded that, “Because of the vagueness of the witness’ description of the ‘object,’ the wide inconsistencies in his estimates of its size and distance, the fact that no one else observed the alleged event, and the fact that the car body did not show evidence of exposure to strong magnetic fields, more detailed investigation of this event as a source of evidence related to electro-magnetic effect on automobiles did not seem warranted.”

They eventually concluded the claims of interference with engines were the most puzzling. “The claim is frequently made, sometimes in reports that are impressive because they involve multiple independent witnesses. Witnesses seem certain that the function of their cars was affected by the unidentified object, which sometimes reportedly was not seen until after the malfunction was noted. No satisfactory explanation for such effects, if indeed they occurred, is apparent.”

Or, in other words, this is truly puzzling, but we’re just not sure that such things happen. We investigated one case of a single witness, and we just don’t like it because he was unable to estimate the size and distance to the UFO with any sort of reliability. And while we know about Levelland (as noted in their index with but a single reference to it), we just don’t think these things happen and therefore we reject them.

What I learned here is that very few of the cases in which the car stalled, did the engine seem to restart spontaneously. The number of them so low, that I wonder if, as has been suggested by others elsewhere, that those reports are in error. That the driver, without realizing it, did something to cause the car to restart. There seems to be no mechanical, chemical, or electrical reason for the engine to start without an action by the driver. Nearly everyone agrees with this from the scientists of the Condon Committee to mechanics and automobile engineers. Once the circuit is interrupted, the car will not start unless someone does something.

Electromagnetic Effects and Car Engines

I was doing some work for my book, The Government UFO Files, which is a cheap way to give it a plug and I noticed that I had included a sighting from November 23, 1957 made by an Air Force officer that included electro-magnetic effects. Given the discussions from the past several days, this case becomes relevant.

According to the story told by First Lieutenant Joseph F. Long, a pilot with the 321^st Fighter-Inceptor Squadron, he was near Tonopah, Nevada when his car engine stalled. He reported:

… Attempts to restart the engine were unsuccessful, and SOURCE [Long] got out of his car to investigate the trouble. Outside the car he heard a steady high-pitched whining noise which drew his attention to four (4) disc-shaped objects that were sitting on the ground about 300 – 400 yards to the right of the highway. These objects were totally unlike anything he had ever seen, and he attempted to get closer for a better look at them. He walked for several minutes until he was to within approximately fifty (50) feet from the nearest object. The objects appeared identical and about fifty (50) feet in diameter. They were disc-shaped, emitting their own source of light which caused them to blow brightly. They were equipped with a translucent dome in the center of the top which was obviously not of the same material as the rest of the craft. The entire body of the objects emitted the light, they did not seem to be dark on the underside. They were equipped with three (3) landing gears each that appeared hemispherical in shape, about two (2) feet in diameter, and some dark material. Source estimated the height of the objects from the ground level to the top of the dome to be about ten (10) to fifteen (15) feet. The objects were equipped with a ring around the outside that was darker than the rest of the craft and was apparently rotating. When SOURCE got to within fifty (50) feet of the nearest object, the hum, which had been steady the air over since he first observed the objects, increased in pitch to a degree where it almost hurt his ears, and the objects lifted off the ground. The protruding gears were retracted immediately after take-off, the objects rose about fifty (50) feet into the air and proceeded slowly (about ten mph) to the north, across the highway, contoured over some small hills about half (½) mile away, and disappeared behind those hills. As the object passed directly over SOURCE, he observed no evidence of any smoke, exhaust, trail, heat, disturbance of the ground or terrain, or any visible outlines of landing gear doors, or any other outlines or openings on the bottom. The total time of the sighting lasted about (20) minutes. After the objects disappeared, SOURCE examined the place where he had first seen them on the ground. There was no evidence that any heat had been present, or that the ground had been disturbed in any other way than several very small impressions were very shallow and bowl-shaped, triangular in pattern (in equally sided triangles). SOURCE did not measure the distances between the impressions, but estimated it to be about eight (8) to ten (10) feet. After his investigation of the impressions, SOURCE returned to his car, and the engine started immediately and ran perfectly.

This is important simply because it was another example of someone reporting that the car stalled when the UFO was near, but that Long was able to restart it when the UFO was gone. Or, in other words, it didn’t spontaneously start. Long had to turn the key.

Yes, there is much more to this story, including a rather annoying assessment by Captain G. T. Gregory who was the chief of Project Blue Book at the time. He made the normal condescending statements about the witness because Long was a member of the Air Force Reserve. All that is laid out in The Government UFO Files.

As I say, I found this interesting because the car didn’t spontaneously start when the UFO disappeared. Long had to start it… which, of course, was the point of the post about Levelland. 

The Hill/Fish Star Map Revisited

For those who remember, Barney and Betty Hill reported that they had been abducted by alien creatures in 1961. Under hypnotic regression, Betty remembered a star map the alien leader had shown her, but because she didn’t know where the sun was on the map, he didn’t provide any additional information. Marjorie Fish, a very bright woman, set out to find the home world of the aliens, and eventually settled on Zeta 1 and Zeta 2 Reticuli, a double star system some 37 light years from Earth.

The problem for us in today’s world is that Fish made a number of assumptions that are no longer valid, a few that might never have been valid, and she used the newest star catalog available at the time which are no longer accurate. Or, in other worlds, we need to revisit this star map using what we know today.

First, let me point out that NASA has announced that they have found the most Earth-like planet yet. It is the fifth planet circling Kepler – 186 (and is designated as Kepler – 186f), is about ten percent larger than Earth, is cooler than Earth, has a higher level of Carbon Dioxide and orbits its sun in 130 days. For those keeping score at home, Kepler -186 is some five hundred (okay 490, but what’s ten light years, more or less at that distance?) light years from Earth.

Now, why is this important?

Because Kepler – 186 is a red dwarf. According to Fish, she left the red dwarf’s out of her system because, she said:

If they go to one star of a given type, it shows interest in that type star – so they should go to other stars of that type if they are in the same volume of space. An exception to this might be the closest stars to the base star, which they might investigate out of curiosity in the early stages of stellar travel. For example, they would not be likely to bypass five red dwarfs to stop at the sixth, if all six were approximately equal in size, spectra, singleness or multiplicity, etc. Or, if they go to one close G [star type] double, they would probably go to other close G doubles.

This was point seven in her analysis for the alien thought processes and why they would visit certain star systems. She added to this when she wrote:

Concerning point 7, I had ruled out the red dwarfs fairly early because there were so many of them and there were only 12 lined points on the Hill map. If one used red dwarfs in logical consecutive order, all the lines were used up before the sun was reached… If they were interested in red dwarfs, there should have been lines going to Gliese 65 (Luyten 76208) which lies near Tau Ceti and about the same distance from Epsilon Eridani as Tau Ceti, and Gliese 866 (Luyten 789-6) which is closer to Tau Ceti than the sun.

Well, you get the point. Fish, logically rejected the red dwarf stars, but the problem is that we knew almost nothing about them. She assumed that one would be the same as the next and if they traveled to one, they should travel to the next. Her real problem was there were so many of them that if she included them, then all the lines were used… meaning that on the star map, the travel routes (lines of communication in the military world) were accounted for before she reached the sun.

So, I now say that some red dwarfs might include Earth-line planets, while others might not, so a spacefaring race, might find that interesting. They may well bypass five red dwarfs and be interested in the sixth because of the planetary system of that sixth star. We simply don’t know.

In fact, Fish argued a “logic” of what the aliens would do, based, I suppose on what she thought humans would do, but we can’t really make such assumptions. We don’t know what might appeal to an alien race, nor do we know what might tempt them to visit a star system, even if that system circles a red dwarf.

We now know that some red dwarfs are more interesting than others. That alone should tell us that we need to reevaluate Fish’s logic and her identification of Zeta 1 and Zeta 2 Reticuli as the home world of the aliens who abducted the Hills.

In fact, we don’t even know if the sun was on that map. The alien leader might have just pulled up one to show her the complications of travel through three dimensional spaces. It would also seem that he would be able to produce a three dimensional map that would have been more representative of interstellar flight than the two dimensional map he had or rather what Hill reports... and if it had been three dimensional but Hill represented in two dimensions, what sort of errors might that have produced?

Or, to put a point on it, now is the time, using our updated knowledge of the galaxy around us, our discovery of other planets in other star systems, and what I see as a flaw in the logic, it is time to revisit this. Given our personal computing power, it would seem that such a task would be much simpler than the one that faced by Marjorie Fish. Maybe a reevaluation of the Fish/Hill star map will yield new information and while it might not, we should, at the very least, look.  

Levelland and Electro-magnetic Effects

Here’s something I noticed as I was reviewing the sightings near Levelland, Texas on November 2, 1957. There were many reports that vehicle engines stalled, lights dimmed and radios filled with static at the close approach of the UFO. I’m not going to argue numbers here, or point fingers at the lack of substantive investigation, but comment only on one aspect of the case.

I will note first that the Condon Committee investigation at the University of Colorado, funded by the Air Force, attempted to learn something about these sightings. In an experiment, they could find no way to suppress the electrical energy of an engine that would allow it to restart when the suppression field, whatever it might have been, was removed. Dimmed lights might brighten and static filled radios might clear, but the engines would not restart automatically.

While I’m not sure that their experiments or conclusions were based on good science, I have noticed something in the reports. Here’s what one of the witnesses, Newell Wright, a 19-year-old college student, reported about his encounter with the UFO:

I was driving home from Lubbock on state highway 116 [the same highway that Saucedo was on] at approximately 12:00 p.m. when the ammeter on my car jumped to complete discharge, then it returned to normal and my motor started cutting out like it was out of gas. After it had quit running, my lights went out. I got out of my car and tried in vain to find the trouble…. It was at this time that I saw this object, I got back into my car and tried to start it, but to no avail. After that I did nothing but stare at this object until it disappeared about 5 minutes later. I then resumed trying to start my car and succeeded with no more trouble than under normal circumstances.

And just so I’m not accused of taking but a single example from these sightings and applying it to all of them, let me say that Jim Wheeler said that when the UFO took off, his lights came back on and he was able to start his car.

Ronald Martin, who also reported his car engine stalled and his lights dimmed, suggested that when the UFO left, the lights came on and his car engine started. But I’m not sure if that was something spontaneous or if he meant that he could now start it himself.

In other reports it does seem as if the cars started without any action by the witness once the UFO was gone. We have a discrepancy here. In some reports, the witness said that the engine would not start while the UFO was near but they were able to start it once the UFO was gone. That was what I found intriguing about Wright’s and Wheeler’s accounts. They reported they had to start their cars.

I wondered if the other witnesses, in the course of talking about it, might have been misunderstood, meaning they too started their cars… or if they had started them they hadn’t realized that they had.

I don’t know if this is a big deal or not. It was just something that I noticed that I hadn’t seen pointed out by anyone else. The electrical systems were suppressed, the lights and the radios worked fine when the UFO took off but the car needed to be started again, at least according to some. Different electrical systems and different ways of working. Maybe most of those who reported that the lights came on and the engine started meant that they were able to start it. Maybe some of them didn’t remember having to start it, only that it worked once the UFO was gone.

The solution here is simple. In future cases like this, the investigators should make sure that the engine started again without any action by the witness. Just a simple question to clarify the situation. That might give us an insight into this.

Eisenhower Briefing Document, MJ-12, and the Washington Alert

I am often stunned by the mental gymnastics of some to keep a cherished belief alive in the face of documented facts and reliable testimony. I am often surprised when something that I believe to be obvious from the evidence available is rejected for speculation that has no supporting proof. When the facts line up, when there is good evidence for a conclusion, when it all seems to be so obvious to me, I simply fail to understand how it is that others can’t see with the same clarity. And yes, I know there are those who believe Roswell to be a Mogul balloon will point at me and say the same things but this isn’t about Roswell or Mogul balloons (and besides, I can point at the Mogul explanation and say the same thing about that conclusion).

This is about the Eisenhower Briefing Document (EBD) and the fatal flaw that is contained in it. I am going to lay all the facts out at length because those other postings which contain the information are spread throughout this blog. I haven’t put it all together into a single document until now. There is a caveat, however. I am not going to review all the other problems with the EBD including a lack of provenance, the other factual errors, or the misspellings and incorrect security classifications. I am going to deal with the one paragraph that relates to another UFO crash that is a hoax and as such shouldn’t have been included in a briefing written for the incoming president. That entry said:

On 06 December, 1950, a second object, probably of similar origin, impacted the earth at high speed in the El Indio – Guerrero area of the Texas – Mexican boder [sic] after following a long trajectory through the atmosphere. By the time a search team arrived, what remained of the object had been almost totally incinerated. Such material as could be recovered was transported to the A.E.C. facility at Sandia, New Mexico, for study.

The first mention of this report of a crash in any sort of a public arena came from Robert Willingham, a pilot in the Civil Air Patrol (CAP), which is identified as an official auxiliary of the United States Air Force. To be clear, it is not a part of the Air Force, members of the CAP are not paid for their service, they do not earn retirement points, and they are not considered to be part of the Reserve Component of the United States military. They are civilians who wear modified uniforms and provide a valuable service in search and rescue operations. But understand, they are not part of the military.

Willingham, and several other CAP pilots, were interviewed in the late 1960s about their experiences with UFOs. This was done for a small “shopper” type of newspaper, and while I have been unable to find that specific article, I did find a summary of Willingham’s statements in MUFON’s Skylook, which was their newsletter/magazine in the 1960s. According to the March, 1968 issue:

Col. R. B. Willingham, CAP squadron commander, has had an avid interest in UFO’s for years, dating back to 1948 when he was leading a squadron of F-94 jets near the Mexican border in Texas and was advised by radio that three UFO’s “flying formation” were near. He picked them up on his plane radar and was informed one of the UFO’s had crashed a few miles away from him in Mexico. He went to the scene of the crash but was prevented by the Mexican authorities from making an investigation or coming any closer than 60 feet. From that vantage point the wreckage seemed to consist of “numerous pieces of metal polished on the outside, very rough on the inner sides.”

For those keeping score at home, please note that it clearly states that Willingham is in the CAP, that the date of the sighting is 1948, that he was flying an F-94, there were three UFOs instead of just one, that he saw them on his plane’s radar and was told that one had crashed in Mexico. I mention these things because this is the first time that Willingham told the story in public and it was written down in an article for those who wish to verify the accuracy of the statements… which is not to say that what he was saying was true, only that I have reported here exactly what was reported in 1968.

I did find another 1968 article about Willingham that is important to this discussion because it proves Willingham had a long interest in UFOs. I found, in the NICAP UFO Investigator for March 1968 on page one:

During the early morning hours of January 12, Colonel Robert Willingham, of the Civil Air Patrol, a member of the Subcommittee, was alerted by Chairman George Cook to a UFO seen by a police dispatcher near Camp Hill.

Col. Willingham sighted the orange-and-white glowing object at an altitude of not more than 150 feet, as it traveled toward North Mountain. The UFO appeared to be between 30 and 40 feet in diameter. The former jet pilot followed the object by car until it disappeared behind trees in the Mountain section.

In other words, NICAP was so unimpressed with the crash story, they didn’t even mention it. Instead, they published a Willingham UFO sighting that was rather mundane.  It was just an object in the sky, noting that Willingham was a colonel in the CAP but said nothing about any association with the Air Force Reserve. It also said that Willingham belonged to NICAP underscoring his interest in UFOs.

We all know that W. Todd Zechel tracked down Willingham and got a statement from him. Zechel made that point repeatedly, and there is no dispute that it is accurate. Zechel found Willingham and talked to him. In fact, Zechel was able to get Willingham to sign an affidavit about his experiences in 1977. That date does not seem to be in dispute.

That affidavit does little to enhance the credibility of the tale. It does allow us to make some comparisons, however. It said:

Down in Dyess Air Force Base in Texas, we were testing what turned out to be the F-94. They reported on the [radar] scope that they had an unidentified flying object at a high speed to intercept our course. It came visible to us and we wanted to take off after it. Headquarters wouldn’t let us go after it and it played around a little bit. We got to watching how it made 90 degree turns at this high speed and everything. We knew it wasn’t a missile of any type. So then we confirmed it with the radar control station on the DEW Line (NORAD) and they kept following it and they claimed that it crashed somewhere off between Texas and the Mexican border. We got a light aircraft, me and my co-pilot, and we went down to the site. We landed out in the pasture right across from the where it hit. We got over there. They told us to leave and everything else and then the armed guards came out and they started to form a line around the area. So, on the way back, I saw a little piece of metal so I picked it up and brought it back with me. There were two sand mounds that came down and it looked to me like this thing crashed right in between them. But it went into the ground, according to the way people were acting around it. But you could see for, oh I’d say, three to five hundred yards where it had went across the sand. It looked to me, I guess from the metal that we found, chunks of metal, that it either had a little explosion or it began to disintegrate. Something caused this metal to come apart.

It looked like it was something that was made because it was honeycombed. You know how you would make a metal that would cool faster. In a way it looked like magnesium steel but it had a lot of carbon in it. I tried to heat it with a cutting torch. It just wouldn’t melt. A cutting torch burns anywhere from 3200 to 3800 degrees Fahrenheit and it would make the metal hot but it wouldn’t even start to melt.

Please notice here that he is in his F-94 and that DEW line radar picked up the object but it says nothing about where the object was first sighted nor does it mention where Willingham was flying at the time. Most importantly, this affidavit gives no date for the sighting which is a major oversight. That becomes important later.

Len Stringfield, a well-respected UFO researcher who took an interest in UFO crashes when the rest of us were ignoring them, collected many stories of crashes. In 1978 he wrote a paper for the MUFON Symposium, which allows us to date this next chapter in this case. He wrote, “...Months later in 1977, I was to learn more about a crashed disc occurring in 1948. This came from researcher Todd Zeckel [sic], whom I had known since 1975 when he became Research Director of Ground Saucer Watch... The crash occurred about 30 miles inside the Mexican border across from Laredo, Texas, and was recovered by U.S. troops after it was tracked on radar screens... Zeckel pieced together other eyewitnesses to the 1948 crash event.”

According to Stringfield, Zechel reported:

I traced another Air Force colonel, now retired in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. He had seen the UFO in flight. He was flying an F-94 fighter out of Dias [sic] Air Force base in Texas and was over Albuquerque, New Mexico, when reports came of a UFO on the West Coast, flying over Washington State. Radars clocked its speed at 2,000 miles per hours.

It made a 90 – degree turn and flew east, over Texas. The colonel, then a captain pilot, actually saw it as it passed. Then suddenly it disappeared from radar screens. At Dias [sic] base, the radar operators plotted its course, and decided it had crashed some 30 miles across the Mexican border from Laredo. When the captain got back to base, he and a fellow pilot got into a small plane and took off over the border after the UFO. When they landed in the desert at the crash site, U.S. troops were there before them.

The craft was covered with a canopy [tarpaulin?], and the two pilots were not allowed to see it. They were then called to Washington, D.C. for debriefing and sworn to secrecy about the whole event.

It’s clear from the above information that Zechel was reporting on the story told by Willingham. We know, based on documentation available, that Willingham was living in Pennsylvania at the time and the other details of the story are close to what Willingham had originally reported. Please note here that Willingham is still flying his F-94, that the crash site is near Laredo, Texas, that it happened in 1948, and that it was tracked on radar. Also note that the radars put the UFO over Washington state which will become important later.

What we have here is a single witness tale that is believed because the man telling it is a retired Air Force colonel and a veteran fighter pilot. These two facts lend to his credibility and I know that when I first heard this story and was told it came from a high-ranking Air Force officer, I was inclined to believe it, especially since we had Jesse Marcel and so many others around Roswell talking of the crash there. This simply means that I was a little less suspicious of tales of crashes, given what I knew about Roswell. Please remember here, that I learned of Willingham’s crashed saucer tale after several trips to Roswell, rather than coming upon it cold.

There was another fact that came out later. According to Zechel, the crash didn’t take place in 1948 but in December 1950. Bruce Maccabee, another respected UFO researcher had been sending Freedom of Information (FOIA) requests to the FBI, among other places. His persistence paid off and he received a huge stack of documents that included some that related to some sort of alert in December 1950.

The question becomes did the alert have anything to do with UFOs. According to the documents found by Maccabee and others, on December 6, 1950, unidentified objects were spotted by radar heading toward the eastern seaboard. This triggered an alert and was discussed at the highest levels of the government. The consensus, from various memoirs and other documents, suggests that at about 10:30 a.m. Deputy Secretary of Defense Lovett called Dean Acheson, then secretary of State to tell him that the Pentagon’s phone system was about to shut down because the early warning system in Canada had picked up formations of unidentified objects, presumably aircraft heading to the southeast on a course that would put them over Washington, D.C. in two or three hours. Given the state of the world at the time, that is a major war in Korea that involved Chinese and UN forces (the majority of which were American and South Korean); it was thought that the Soviets might have been sending bombers toward the United States, probably armed with atomic weapons.

Truman, in his memoirs, suggested that the objects had been detected by radar stations and fighters had been launched to reconnoiter, though I personally would have wanted every fighter launched to intercept if I had thought the Soviets were sending bombers, which probably explains why I won’t be president.

There is another version of these events that suggest that the formations were over Alaska, which makes you wonder how they could have reached Washington, D.C. in just two or three hours unless their speed was considerably higher, that is, something on the order of 2000 miles an hour. This doesn’t have the same kind of documentation that the other version has and might be where Zechel got the idea that the UFOs were near Washington state and traveling at 2000 mph.

Within an hour, that is, by 11:30 a.m., the alert was cancelled, and once again there are multiple answers. Acheson reported that he was called back by Lovett who told him that the objects had disappeared. Lovett apparently thought the objects were geese but that seems a little strange to me… but I do remember reading about a strange event during WW II in which London radar operators reported that each morning an object appeared, rose into the sky and then seemed to fade away. It was found that it was caused by birds awaking and taking flight about the same time every day from the same London park.

Truman said that some sort of Atlantic weather disturbance had thrown off the radars. I suppose you could say that the disturbance could have caused the geese to be misidentified. The point is that the alert lasted about an hour.

These descriptions are based on the memories of the men (or the ghostwriters) who were there at the time. But as there is in many UFO–linked stories, there are some documents from the time. One of the major news services, INS reported:

A warning of an impending air attack resulted in a false alarm in this capitol [sic] city today. No air raid alarms were sounded, but functionaries charged with Civil Air Defense of Washington [D.C.] were alerted that an unidentified aircraft had been detected off the coast of the State of Maine at mid-day. Later, a spokesman for the Air Force stated that interceptor aircraft had been dispatched, and that the object in question had been identified shortly thereafter as a North American C-47 aircraft which was approaching the continent from Goose Bay, Labrador. The warning was said to have been useful in verifying the efficient of the Washington Civil Defense System. Civil Defense officials declined to comment on the incident.

Yes, there is a letter written by Colonel Charles Winkle, Assistant Executive in the Directorate of Plans that said that 40 aircraft were spotted at 32,000 feet. He noted that at 1104 hours the original track had faded out and it appeared that the flight was friendly.

While all this is interesting, it is irrelevant. This has nothing to do with the Willingham and his alleged sighting, which, until Zechel got involved was set in 1948. Then, seeing an opportunity to add some credibility to the Willingham crash report, he changed the date of the sighting to December 1950. Now Willingham’s sighting was not stand alone. There was a historical perspective to it.

There is one other aspect to this, again which is probably not related at all, other than it happened on December 8, 1950. Maccabee found, in the FBI files, an “Urgent” message that was labeled, “Flying Saucers.”

This office very confidentially advised by Army Intelligence, Richmond, that they have been put on immediate high alert for any data whatsoever concerning flying saucers. CIC here states background of instructions not available from Air Force Intelligence, who are not aware of the reason for alert locally, but any information whatsoever must be telephoned by them immediately to Air Force Intelligence. CIC advises data strictly confidential and should not be disseminated (sic).

And this would suggest some credibility to the Willingham tale. Here, just two days after the crash, the Air Force was requiring all intelligence information to be relayed to them. But, again, it is clear from Willingham’s original story, the crash took place in 1948, and not 1950. In fact, Willingham told me that in December 1950, he was serving in Korea (no evidence to support this claim), and the real date of the crash was in 1954 or 1955.

What that tells me is that no matter what Air Force Intelligence wanted in December 1950, this incident is irrelevant because there was no crash in December 1950. Remember, Willingham first claimed it was in 1948 and said that Zechel had changed the date to December 6, 1950. Willingham later said that it couldn’t have happened in December 1950 because he was in Korea at the time.

The question then becomes, how did this sighting get into the Eisenhower Briefing Document if it is a hoax? According to Zechel, he shared the information with Bill Moore and Moore, believing that Willingham was a retired colonel and that his story was credible, accepted it. We know that Moore was aware of this because he wrote about it, briefly, in The Roswell Incident. Moore wrote:

Then a second group, Citizens Against UFO Secrecy (CAUS), was formed in 1978 under the directorship of W. T. Zechel, former research director of GSW [Ground Saucer Watch] and a one-time radio-telegraph operator for the Army Security Agency. CAUS’s announced aim was nothing less than an “attempt to establish that the USAF (or elements thereof) recovered a crashed extraterrestrial spacecraft” in the Texas – New Mexico – Mexico border area sometime in the late 1940s.

This establishes that Zechel, as he claimed, had been talking to Moore about this crash. Since the book was published in 1980, and because the lead time between manuscript submission and actual publication is a year to eighteen months, it means that Zechel was talking to Moore in the late 1970s. In other words, it verifies part of what Zechel claimed when he said that Moore knew about this crash, and because Moore accepted the information from CAUS as authentic, it provides another reason that the Willingham crash had to be included in the EBD.  

They all thought it real, and if it was real, it had to be mentioned in the document.

It is clear from the details, that the Del Rio crash is the El Indio - Guerrero crash. The location selected is between the original site of Laredo and Del Rio. Zechel changed the date to correspond to the December 6, 1950 alert, though he suggested the event as December 5. The accepted date in the EBD is a compromise between that date and the December 8, 1950, request by the Air Force to the Army’s CIC. There were no documents to contradict this and Willingham said that he knew the December 6 date was wrong, but said nothing about that until years later.

Everything points to the December 6 crash as being the Willingham crash, and if that is true, then there was no such crash. And without a December 6, 1950 crash, anywhere in the Texas – Mexico border area, then the EBD must be a hoax.

You can reject everything that Zechel said, but the facts here are verified through other sources. Willingham confirms that he gave all this information to Zechel, he confirms that it was Zechel who came up with the December 1950 date, and Bill Moore, in his book, confirms that Zechel and CAUS were pursuing this crash case. 

All the dots line up and the facts now argue against the authenticity of the EBD because there is nothing true about the case except that Zechel investigated and the original source was Willingham.

Here is the real point. The December 6, 1950, alert has no relevance here. The information for the crash has come from a small circle of people and it all goes back to Willingham. He has changed the story to cover the facts that were in error and Zechel changed it to make use of the 1950 alert. There are no documents about it, nothing printed in any newspaper such as there was for Roswell, Kecksburg, or Shag Harbour to name just three, and there is a single witness, which again is unlike those other cases.

Unless someone can come up with some evidence that hasn’t passed through the hands of Willingham, Zechel or Moore, there is nothing left for this case. It is a hoax and if that is true, then the Eisenhower Briefing Document is a hoax. That is the only rational conclusion to be drawn.

Roswell, Bill Clinton and Jimmy Kimmel

Jimmy Kimmel had Bill Clinton on his show, and said that had he, Kimmel, been elected as president, almost before he had finished the oath of office, he would have run to the White House to look at all the classified files on UFOs.

Clinton said that he had “sort of” done that, though it came out it took him about four years to make the run. Then he talked about Area 51 and said that he had someone look at all the records for Area 51 to find out if there was an “alien hidden down there.” He acknowledged that a lot of our stealth technology was developed there and though he didn’t say it that would make it a place that should be shrouded in mystery. He did say that there were no aliens there.

And I have to agree with this. I have said for a long time that I believed the next generation of military aircraft would be developed there, but other than a few very weak claims that lack real evidence, there is probably nothing alien there. This, of course, puts me at odds with many of my colleagues in the UFO field, but I just don’t think the evidence supports the idea of aliens at Area 51. The development of military aircraft makes the high-level secrecy plausible.

Then Clinton said, “When the Roswell thing came up, I knew we’d get zillions of letters, so I had all the papers reviewed. Everything.”

Kimmel asked: If you saw there were aliens there would you tell us?

Clinton answered: Yeah.

Kimmel: You would?

Clinton: I think, look. What do we know? We know now we live in an ever-expanding universe. We know there are billions of stars and planets literally out there. And the universe is getting bigger. We know from our fancy telescopes that just in the last two years more than twenty planets have been identified outside our solar system that seem to be far enough away from the sun and dense enough that they might be able to support some form of life so it makes it increasingly less likely we are alone.

Kimmel: Oh, you’re trying to give me a hint there are aliens.

Clinton: No, I’m trying to tell you I don’t know but if we were visited someday, I wouldn’t be surprised. I just hope it’s not like Independence Day.

The conversation then degenerates into some jokes about Independence Day and Clinton’s thought that such an invasion would create a new spirit of cooperation around the world to repel the invaders… probably like shown in Independence Day.

But what I noticed is that Clinton didn’t really answer the question about Roswell. He moved onto other things and had Kimmel been hosting a more news oriented program, the lack of follow up would be inexcusable. But Kimmel’s show is entertainment and he seemed to run where the laughs were… not that I blame him.

So Clinton didn’t really talk about Roswell and what might have been found there. Yes, I know that he answered a similar question when he was president, saying that that he hadn’t been told if there were aliens at Roswell… and I also know that had he said anything other than the jokes he made or the rather mundane, trite, and useless speculation about other planets in other solar systems, he probably would never had heard the end of it.

And while he didn’t really answer the question about Roswell, he did say, when Kimmel asked, that he wasn’t hinting there were aliens. He was just suggesting he wouldn’t be surprised if we were visited someday… which is, of course, the general feeling by millions if not billions of people.

What did we pull from this interview? Not much. If you believe in the alien crash at Roswell, you can look at how he really said nothing about it. If you believe there has been no alien visitation, you can look at his response to Kimmel’s question about the hint of alien visitation.

Or, in other worlds, a little something for everyone… just a politician keeping everyone happy with these statements.