MJ-12 and 1985

While I know that many people are tired of the arguments about the authenticity of MJ-12, and while I really don’t want to open up another assault on my integrity based on my objections to MJ-12 documents, I have discovered something about them that hasn’t been reported. It suggests, once again, who might have had a hand in creating the documents, and it reinforces the idea that these documents were created in the mid-1980s for personal gain and not in 1952 for the President-elect.

I was searching for another file, when I noticed one that was out of place. I opened it out of curiosity and found some notes that related to MJ-12. What this told me was that at the UFO Expo West in Los Angeles on May 11, 1991, Jaime Shandera was lecturing about the Plains of San Agustin. He had this to say:

The people that supposedly found stuff in Socorro did not find stuff in Socorro. The party of archaeological people and the Barney Barnett part of the story; they were at the Corona site, not in Socorro [Plains of San Agustin]. I know [this is] the way you understand it because it’s the way it’s always been written and even the way it was written in The Roswell Incident. That’s wrong. There is new evidence that it was all in the Corona site. The way it happened was this – there were not two sites that were more than one hundred miles or so apart … and the so-called Roswell site was just outside of Corona. The archaeologists and Barney Barnett part of it, that was over in Corona. There was no person that found anything in San Agustin.

Remember, this was in May 1991, and had nothing to do with what Don Schmitt and I had written in our book, UFO Crash at Roswell, that would be published in July 1991, though we had come to the same conclusion. Barnett was not over on the Plains. In May 1991, no one had seen Ruth Barnett’s diary, which, of course, ended the discussion. Karl Pflock and I would publish an article some ten years later that not only suggested that Barnett had not seen the object on the Plains, but that his story had nothing at all to do with Roswell crash.

On that same day, that is May 11, 1991, Antonio Huneeus and Javier Sierra interviewed Bill Moore about some of the things that Shandera had said earlier. Moore was talking about the Gerald Anderson tale and why he did not accept it as authentic. (Interestingly, one of the reasons he rejected it was because the military was segregated in 1947, not realizing that white officers commanded the black units, so one of his reasons for rejecting the tale is false, but that doesn’t matter here.) He confirmed that he was on board with Shandera about the Plains, saying, “There is no reason to believe anything occurred on the Plains of San Agustin on that particular date.…”

Which is, of course, what I and many others have been saying for years. Nothing happened on the Plains. But then Moore said the thing that is quite revelatory. He said, “The original hypothesis was that the object had come down in two places, the first being the Brazel site, the second being the Plains of San Agustin, and that in 1985 I abandoned [it] simply because the only witness who put the thing in the Plains of San Agustin at all was Barnett’s boss, Danley, [who] it turned out, was not sure of the place, and it turned out that Barnett could have been up at the Brazel site…”

Here’s what we know now. According to the documentation supplied by Moore in various arenas, Shandera received the Eisenhower Briefing Document on December 11, 1984. This is based on their displaying of a mailing envelope with a December 1984 date on it (postmarked from Albuquerque, which I mention simply because if I don’t someone will criticize the lack of my noting it) but we have no way of knowing if that envelope actually contained the film. There is nothing to tie it to the film and the EBD. We can document the first public mention of the EBD by a London newspaper on May 3, 1987, though Just Cause did publish a list of members of MJ-12 in December 1985 but not the documents themselves. Prior to that, we have nothing that is reliable about the EBD. We can accept the December 11, 1984, date as reliable, or we can reject it. It actually means little because it is impossible to prove that the date is accurate.

Now, based on the 1991 interview, we have Moore’s statement that he had rejected the idea of a Plains of San Agustin crash in 1985 which, as I noted, is interesting. He tells us that he has rejected it because Danley couldn’t actually provide a location or date for Barnett’s story. This is something that I had noticed when I interviewed “Fleck” Danley in October 1990. It was clear that he couldn’t remember much about what Barnett had said and had I been of a mind, I could have convinced him of almost anything. I realized that his information was severely compromised.

But here’s the thing. Moore, in 1991, was saying that he rejected the Plains of San Agustin in 1985, not because he had in his hand the EBD which mentioned nothing of a crash there, but because he found the Danley information to be wanting. It would seem to me that if I was in possession of a document which gave me precise information about a UFO crash and that had been prepared for the man who would be taking over as President in a few months, that would be the most important source for a change in the basic story. If the Plains was left out of the briefing that would tell me that the information about the Plains was inaccurate and that would be a better source than that of a witness who was easily confused. Or, in other words, I would have said I have a document that tells me the Plains story is no good.

That is, unless I know something about the EBD that others don’t know. If I know the source of the EBD, and I know the document can’t be trusted, then I don’t use it to suggest there was no crash on the Plains. I say something about the lack of reliability of Danley’s testimony.

The other side of this is that we can trace the EBD back to Bill Moore and Jaime Shandera and no further. They are the sources for this document and it seems that they, or at least Moore, are not confident enough in it to use is as source material for his analysis of the situation in 1947. That tells us something very important about the EBD. It tells us that Moore finds the EBD unreliable, and if he has no confidence in it, why should the rest of us?

I will say one other thing. The information contained in the EBD was the best available in the mid-1980s. This is proved once again by Moore’s comment that he abandoned the Plains idea in 1985. He is telling us quite a bit in that one short statement. We should all listen to what he had to say about this because it does answer a couple of burning questions.

The United States Air Force vs. the UFO Witnesses

As I was completing my last UFO book, I ran into a number of things that were somewhat disturbing. Some of those were the ongoing Air Force attitude that these things weren’t alien in nature, those who saw them were somehow deluded, and it was the Air Force mission to convince people that UFOs were an illusion. It didn’t matter to them how honest the witnesses might be, how carefully they had made their observations, or what their level of education or expertise might be. The Air Force mission was to stop the UFO reports. If they had to lie about it, misrepresent the situation, hide evidence or smear witnesses, that was all for the greater good… though they don’t seem to have an idea what that greater good might be.

I have pointed out time and again, including the posting that preceded this, the clash between the Major Donald Keyhoe, he of the original NICAP and the Air Force in their discussions about what had happened in Levelland, Texas, in 1957. The short version is that Keyhoe, in the national press said there were nine witnesses to the UFO and the Air Force countered with there were only three who saw the object. The Air Force files carried the names of more than three witnesses and I now believe they were splitting a fine hair. They were saying only three had reported a craft and Keyhoe was talking about nine who had seen something in the sky including a craft. As I have said, repeatedly, both were wrong. More than three saw the craft (more than three names were available in the Blue Book files) and there were more than nine witnesses scattered throughout the Texas panhandle around the Levelland area who saw something strange that night.

This can be taken a step further, as I learned in working on the book. The Air Force sent a single NCO to Levelland to investigate. It seems he spent the lion’s share of a day there and returned to file a report that suggested a variety of answers that really explained nothing. By way of contrast, just days later when a fellow named Reinhold Schmidt told Nebraska authorities that he had been taken onboard a craft, the official response was officers from two separate command structures. They spent quite a bit of time with Schmidt and his clearly invented tale.

You have to ask yourself, “Why?”

The answer is simple. Schmidt was quite obviously making it up, the physical evidence he claimed was motor oil of a type found in his car’s trunk, and the public relations benefit for the Air Force was clear. “Look at the nonsense we have to investigate wasting time, money and personnel resources.”

At the other end, they do nothing to call attention to Levelland, dispute Keyhoe even though they knew that he was right based on what was in their own files, but that didn’t matter. Smear Keyhoe as someone just in it of the money and who had no worry about what the truth might be. That sort of outlines the Air Force position because, when Levelland is examined in a dispassionate light, Keyhoe’s report was much closer to the truth than that of the Air Force.

This isn’t the only time that the Air Force went after Keyhoe. A scientist in Australia, Harry Turner, produced a report that suggested there was something extremely strange going on Down Under and he believed it to be alien in nature. In his report, he quoted Major Donald Keyhoe, who, in his book Aliens from Space, had suggested that he, Keyhoe, was working from official and classified documents not to mention discussions with those in high places who had some of the inside information. Keyhoe was drawing his conclusions on what he had seen and what he had learned from various officials and Turner was basing his report on many of the claims made by Keyhoe.

The Royal Australian Air Force queried their counterparts in the USAF, asking about Keyhoe and his claim of access to important but classified documents and his access to important and high-ranking officials in the US government. The USAF response was that Keyhoe didn’t have the access to classified information he claimed, the documents from which he quoted did not exist, and his access to these important people was limited. He had exaggerated the information for the financial gain of a successful book. Keyhoe and his information were not to be trusted. The RAAF, believing they had received the straight information from the USAF, rejected Turner’s report because of the negative comments about it and ignored, as best they could, UFO sightings reported inside Australia.

The truth was that Keyhoe had not been overly exaggerating and the documents he claimed he had seen or used as reference did exist saying much of what he said they did. While Keyhoe might have engaged in some hyperbole, or slanted his take toward his bias, the USAF did the same thing in their attempts to discredit him. It turns out that Keyhoe was closer to the truth than the Air Force was which is sad state of affairs but also tells us something about the climate of the time.

And finally, though I don’t mean to keep harping on the November 1957 sightings, these cases offer some of the most compelling evidence of Air Force duplicity and showed that when they couldn’t find anything else, they attacked the witnesses themselves. The James Stokes sighting is a case on point. Everyone around him suggested he was an engineer. Even his bosses in the Air Force at Alamogordo referred to him as an engineer. But the Air Force couldn’t find a college degree and labeled him as a mere technician. That Stokes worked as an engineer and was called that by others in the Air Force made no difference. In the press, the Air Force investigators made it clear that Stokes couldn’t be trusted because he had been disingenuous in describing himself, or, at least that was the situation according to the Air Force.

The point here is that we just can’t take anything for granted when we look at the UFO files created by the Air Force. We can see that they were less than candid, and while it might be said, based on what I’ve presented here that this was limited to 1957, the truth is there are other examples scattered throughout the files, up to and including the letter that Lieutenant Colonel Robert Hippler to the Condon Committee explaining what the Air Force expected for their half a million bucks. I’ve explored that in earlier posts here.

Or, to put a point on it, everything the Air Force claimed should be verified because we have found the errors in their files. Some of those errors were simple mistakes, some of them born of incompetence, and more than a few were lies designed to hide the truth.

UFO Sightings on November 3, 1957

In my quest to verify UFO information that has been reprinted and analyzed for years, and as I was working on my last UFO book, I began looking at the UFO sightings at White Sands Missile Range on November 3, 1957. To put this into context, the Levelland sightings took place during the evening and night of November 2. About the time the sightings were ending in Levelland, they were beginning at White Sands some 250 miles away. Those who made the first reports in New Mexico had not heard of the sightings in Texas and were unaware of what was happening.

Two MPs on patrol out near the Trinity Site, on the northern edge of the missile range saw something strange. In a sworn statement given to his commanding officer written on the day of the event, November 3, Glenn Toy said:

At about 0238 – 0300 Sunday Morning [November 3, 1957] I, CPL X [Glenn H. Toy] and PFC Y [James Wilbanks] were on patrol in Range Area when we noticed a very bright object high in the sky. We were proceeding north toward South Gate and object kept coming down toward the ground. Object stopped approximately fifty (50) yards from the ground and went out and nothing could be seen. A few minutes later object became real bright (like the sun) then fell in an angle to the ground and went out. Object was approximately seventy-five (75) to 100 yards in diameter and shaped like an egg. Object landed by bunker area approximately three (3) miles from us. Object was not seen again. /END OF STATEMENT

Wilbanks also gave a statement to his commander. Later Toy would be interviewed by an Air Force investigator but Wilbanks was unavailable. According to the files, he was on a three-day pass. Thinking about it, and knowing what I know about Army regulations, this made no sense to me. A three-day pass has a limited travel radius because the Army didn’t want soldiers attempting to travel farther than was safe. They didn’t want soldiers killed in traffic accidents. Besides that the soldier had to leave contact information. Had the Army wanted him to return, they could have gotten him back so that the Air Force could interview him. Why hadn’t that been done?

According to one source who had been there in 1957, Wilbanks was not available because he was in the hospital, the result of the sighting. That information was kept out of the Air Force file and to cover the point, the story of the three-day pass was created.

For those who have only bothered to look at the Air Force file on the case, we see that these two soldiers were young, Toy was 21 (according to one document in the Project Blue Book files) at the time and Wilbanks younger. The Air Force thought that discussions of flying saucers might have influenced their reports by, according to the Air Force records, “the famous Levelland case,” though nothing had been reported prior to Toy and Wilbanks’ sighting. Both suggested they had heard nothing about this until after the event.

The Air Force eventually solved the sighting. According to the Project card, Toy and Wilbanks were “very young (18 20), impressionable & on duty in a lonely, isolated desert post. Interviewers agreed that their sightings were magnified out of proportion.” According to the Air Force, it was the moon.

To get to that point, the Air Force ignored the information from the witnesses which suggested that the object was close to the ground. They ignored the estimate of the size and that there were references on the ground to help Toy and Wilbanks in those estimates. It wasn’t as if the object was a pinpoint of light in a dark sky with no points of reference.

While it seems that the Air Force made a solid investigation, they actually spent little time on it, sent a single officer to White Sands, and then slapped an explanation on it as quickly as possible. Reinhold Schmidt who claimed to have been taken on-board a UFO that had landed in Nebraska in the days that followed the White Sands sightings, was interviewed by officers from the Continental Air Defense Command and Army Intelligence. For some reason they thought this case more important, though Schmidt had a shady background and he was talking about seeing the inside of the craft, escorted by alien creatures.

The point here? The Air Force, in 1957, was not engaged in investigating UFOs, but was more interested in offering explanations. These cases prove the point. Ignore the reliable reports from military personnel, slap ridiculous explanations on them with little or no real investigation, and move onto the obvious frauds which can be explained easily. Make it seem as if there is a real interest in all UFO cases, but remember, they controlled the sighting at White Sands. It wasn’t very dramatic so there wasn’t a widespread interest in it.

Instead, make a real show of investigating a case that was an obvious fraud. Send in several officers and then explain the sighting with solid information. It creates a mindset in the general public that allows the Air Force to avoid having to answer any tough questions about UFOs. It buries the important sightings at White Sands where people were injured by the UFO (this would be the Stokes UFO sighting on November 5 not far from Alamogordo and that might include Wilbanks), and focuses on the ridiculous.

These White Sands sightings deserve another look. They deserve a proper investigation and there are enough problems with the official files that show something more was happening there at the time. But then, the Air Force didn’t want an answer for the case, other than one they dreamed up. Looking at the facts might suggest something other than the moon. 

America Unearthed: Son of the Custer Treasure

I couldn’t help myself and I got sucked into another episode of America Unearthed. This one about the lost treasure of George Custer, yeah, that guy who managed to get about half of the Seventh Cavalry killed in June, 1876. Contrary to what the program said, he wasn’t that smart of a guy and his problem at the Little Big Horn was that he didn’t have another Union unit out there to come to his rescue. This had happened during the Civil War, where he rode too far forward to an attack and another unit had to bail him out.

Anyway, there was talk that Custer left the Dakotas on the campaign into Montana taking the payroll for the Seventh with him. Legend had it that it was made up of gold and silver and after the battle no one could find the money. Maybe the Lakota took it and hid it. Or maybe it was the Cheyenne who got it. Rumor was that a fellow named Two Moon was instrumental in hiding the treasure and even had a map to the point where it was buried. He entrusted this map to a Caucasian for some inexplicable reason, and when Two Moon died, he was buried in a skinny pyramid that contained some artifacts and an envelope with the map inside. Of course, long before Scott Wolter got there the map was stolen… if it had ever been in the envelope… a fact that no one bothered to check.

One thing that annoyed me about this episode was the claim that the Seventh had been decimated at the battle. Well, no. If you are referring to the five companies that followed Custer to the end, they weren’t decimated. They were wiped out completely. If they have been decimated, there would have been at least nine survivors. A trivial complaint based on semantics? Of course, but if you’re going to rewrite history, you should get the facts right and the language right and this isn’t only point that they failed on.

So, anyway Wolter heads off to talk to a journalist friend who lives in a neat looking house, but doesn’t seem to know much about the battle or the missing treasure. He suggests that Wolter talk to a coin dealer who wants a hundred and forty bucks before he’ll talk. He holds up a Buffalo Nickel that has a price of $140.00 on it. Wolter insists on calling it an Indian Head Nickel and then starts talking about Indian Head pennies, telling us that the Indian on the penny is really Lady Liberty so that coin is misnamed… Well, she’s wearing what looks like a Lakota war bonnet but this is just more trivia and completely irrelevant.

They finally get to talking about the Custer treasure, which the coin dealer seems to be sure exists and that the value of it was something like $25,000.00 in 1876, but with today’s prices for gold and silver it would be much more, not to mention the premium value on each coin minted prior to 1876. Each one could fetch $50,000.00 or more from a collector. Suddenly the value of the treasure has skyrocketed into the millions and no one has found any evidence that it even exists.

So off to Montana goes Wolter. He talks to a guy who knows the tale of Two Moon and shows Wolter a magazine article written more than half a century ago that mentions the envelope containing the treasure map, but that envelope disappeared a long time ago… and there is no evidence that there was a map inside because no one alive today ever saw it, but since we’re looking for Custer’s treasure, well, there just has to be a map.

Now, rather than take a look at some of the research on Custer that has been done since the battle including Evan Connell’s Son of the Morning Star, Wolter is off to the battlefield… or a facsimile there of. He meets up with a group of re-enactors (a hobby that I have never really understood) who suggest that Custer was loved by his men (yeah, sure, especially after he had ordered several of them gunned down for desertion but that’s another story).

The re-enactor who is Wolter’s escort into this says that the Lakota had been waiting for Custer because they had spotted the cavalry earlier that day. But that just doesn’t square with history and in fact, had Major Marcus Reno pressed his attack rather than stopping and then retreating, the outcome might have been different. The Lakota had been caught by surprise according to what they said in the years that followed the battle.

Wolter and his boys mention two of the chiefs in the battle, Sitting Bull, who didn’t participate and wasn’t a chief but a medicine man and Crazy Horse. They show pictures of both and while the picture of Sitting Bull has been authenticated; there are no known pictures of Crazy Horse… They sort of imply the picture is Crazy Horse but never mind.

So, now Wolter is signed up as a private in this fake Seventh Cavalry re-enactor group and there seems to be hints that it is some sort of official government organization but it’s not. We are treated to Wolter riding around in his fake Army uniform, charging down into the Lakota camp or whatever, and then he tells us about the thrill of such an adventure. Okay, maybe it was thrilling for him, but then no one was shooting real bullets at him and this has nothing to do with the hunt for Custer’s treasure. What this is, is filler because they just don’t have anything else to use to fill the hour… no documents, no records, no witness testimony, nothing but this rumor that Custer carried gold and silver coins to pay his soldiers… yeah, that’s what I want to do… ride into combat with a pocketful of loose change.

Now, Wolter, using his IPad or whatever, learns that a stash of gold coins had been found in California and he wonders if this somehow isn’t related to the Custer treasure. Estimated value of the gold coins found there is ten million… So back in Minnesota, he asks the coin dealer if there is any possibility that this is the lost Custer stash… but some of the coins are dated long after the fight at the Little Big Horn, so no… except, well, maybe it started with the Custer treasure and these newer coins were added to it afterwards. Never let the facts get in the way of a treasure hunt.

Anyway, had they done any real research into this and not become fascinated by re-enactors, or had Wolter read Son of the Morning Star (he referred to Custer as the Warrior of the Morning Star because he always attacked at dawn… really? Where did you pick up that tidbit?) Wolter would have known that the soldiers were paid with paper money. In fact, some of that money was found later, being used as “saddle blankets” on toy horses made for the Lakota and Cheyenne children. So much for the historical evidence that Custer had all that gold and silver with him.

Here was a whole hour devoted to a treasure that never existed and that anyone who had spent twenty minutes on the Internet, or who had called me, could have learned was merely rumor. About the only facts presented were that Custer did attack the Lakota and Cheyenne on the Greasy Grass (Lakota name for the Little Big Horn, which they did actually mention) and that about half of the Seventh was killed in the battle. They offered no evidence that the gold and silver treasure ever existed and I had to wonder what was this sudden fascination with treasure… we’d already learned about the Aztec treasure in Utah that they didn’t find and had no facts to establish it… and the Lost Dutchman Mine (with Wolter telling us repeatedly that the Dutchman had been German) but he didn’t find it… personally, I don’t think the mine exists. If it had, at one time, an earthquake in the mid-eighteenth century probably destroyed it… and now we have a search for a nonexistent Custer treasure.

Well, all this tells me all I need to know. He’s no longer offering alternative history; he’s just out chasing ratings… I mean, he’s at the Alamo and now the Little Big Horn… next he’ll probably be out at Area 51 telling us about the secret projects there and then off to Roswell with a metal detector to find saucer wreckage (yeah, I’ve seen the rest of the schedule for the season and those things aren’t there but just wait)… anything to boost ratings. But as for his claim that we didn’t learn the “real” history in school, well, that seems to be just more hype because he hasn’t offered much in the way of evidence that his alternative history is accurate.

The Roswell Slides and the Aztec UFO Crash

For a couple of decades I have been chasing stories of pictures of the Roswell crash. I have been given the names of some of those who supposedly had pictures, talked to others who thought they might have seen pictures, and tried to find those who might have taken pictures as part of the official investigation. In this I have failed, other than finding lots of pictures of alien bodies, all of which seem to be traced to hoaxes, frauds and science fiction movies.

I have not seen the Roswell slides but have heard descriptions of what they show as many of us have. I know a little about how they were discovered and who owns them now, but I have not been involved in the investigation of them. I know that Tom Carey said that they have been dated to 1947, but I don’t know how that dating was accomplished, I don’t know how accurate it might be, and I’m not sure of the relevance of it.

All of this, however, set me to thinking. If the slides were made in 1947, as has been alleged, then what was the motivation for it, if it was a hoax? In other words, why would someone in 1947 make something like that? What would be the purpose?

Then, taking this line of speculation further, and I must point out this is all speculation now, were there any flying saucer cases that hinted at such things, other than Roswell? Well, yes there were. There were many reports of flying saucer crashes, all of them, other than Roswell, seemed to be invention by the participants and few of them talked of alien creatures.

There is one, though, that reached a wide national audience in the late 1940s, and that is, of course, Aztec. Now, I think Aztec was a hoax created by two con men who were attempting to sell some cockamamie metal detector or mineral detector and were claiming that alien technology had been used to create the machine. That doesn’t matter right now. What is important are pictures and that does relate to Roswell.

According to Scott Ramsey in The Aztec Incident, some guy named McLaughlin, had pictures of a flying saucer crash, and according to documentation found by Ramsey, it relates specifically to Aztec. This document doesn’t prove that there was a crash at Aztec, only that some guy was attempting to sell pictures that he alleged were taken at the crash site. The document was dated October 9, 1950.

Now the question seems to be what do the pictures show, if there were, in fact pictures. The only description available is that they show the crash which would imply that they were taken in the field and not inside a building or of a body on a Gurney. If there were bodies lying around, it would seem that pictures of them would have been taken, but without a description, we just don’t know.

Here’s the thing… This is a story about the Aztec crash, and the desire for evidence of it… Newton carried around some little bits of metal that he claimed came from the crash… and that tale would be enhanced if there were pictures of bodies. Someone might have conjured them up as further evidence of the Aztec crash.

What I’m saying is that here we have a motive for the invention of the pictures in the right time frame. We aren’t locked into 1947 and pictures created in 1948 or 1950 for that matter, could have been taken with film made in 1947. I simply don’t know enough about how the dating was done to know how close it is. I suspect the best they could do was tell us that the film was processed in the correct era, give or take a couple of years, but I just don’t know.

I could point out many of the parallels here. The land where the Aztec crash is claimed to have happened is oil land so that people from Midland involved in oil could have been there just as they could have been over in Roswell. The Aztec crash is alleged to have taken place within months of the Roswell crash, both were in New Mexico, but only Aztec got any real publicity in the late 1940s and early 1950s.

Please don’t misunderstand here. I’m not saying that we can now elevate the Aztec crash to the level of Roswell. I think the evidence is pretty clear. Aztec was a hoax that did include claims of physical evidence. It is not outside the realm of possibility that someone created pictures of alien creatures in an attempt to validate Aztec, and the documentation clearly mentions Aztec.

There are two flaws in my theory. One is that I don’t know if anyone ever saw the alleged pictures of the Aztec crash. The man who had them apparently never showed up for the sale and the documentation that relates to it makes it clear that the pictures were never shown.

Two: According to what Tom said, the slides relate to Roswell and have nothing to do with Aztec and if they can be dated precisely, that would tend to rule out Aztec. I just don’t know exactly what the slides show. All I know at this point is that the connection to Roswell seems a little thin, at least according to what Tom said recently (and the connection to Aztec is even thinner). Tom and Don Schmitt have a witness, who isn’t named (and given the nature of the UFO field, I’m not at all surprised that they wish to protect him) who says the creature on the slides resembles those he saw in 1947 at Roswell.

Here’s where I am on this. There are slides of some sort of creature. These slides are alleged to have been exposed in 1947, though I don’t know how firm that information is. There is a story, backed up by documentation, which says someone was trying to sell pictures of the Aztec crash in 1950. There is no reason to assume that these Aztec pictures have anything to do with the Roswell slides that Tom was talking about. I am just suggesting that there was stuff going on back then that could lead to someone creating the slides for Aztec. I’m not saying that it happened only that it could have.

The one major caveat is that I don’t know how accurate the dating of the slides is. If they can be shown to have been taken and processed in 1947, then Aztec is not an issue. If the dating isn’t that precise, then other evidence, which Tom and Don might possess, could eliminate Aztec as a possibility.

Here I’m as guilty as so many others. Speculation without a solid foundation, but then, not much has been offered in the way of evidence here and that leaves the door open to all this speculation.

A Little Help

As you all know, I have been working on a new book and in the course of that, I was looking at the November 3, 1957, sightings at White Sands Proving Grounds, now White Sands Missile Range. According to the information I have, one of the soldiers who saw the UFO (identified as the Moon by Project Blue Book investigators) was unavailable for the Air Force to interview a couple of days later. They were told that he was on a three-day pass. The story told by a reporter in the area in 1957 was that the man, James Wilbanks, had been put into the hospital.

In early August I sent a request to the Records Center in St. Louis, asking for the morning reports of his unit for the week of November 3 through 10. The morning reports should tell us if he was on his pass or in the hospital. After nearly four months, I received a form letter telling me how much the search would cost and that I couldn't ask for the morning reports for more than a 90 period. I am assuming that it will be another four months before I get a reply.

However, the Public Affairs Officer either at White Sands or Holloman Air Force Base had issued a press release about the soldiers and their involvement in the UFO sighting and might have addressed the problem of where Wilbanks was. I have tried to search on line for copies of the Alamogordo newspaper but the only records I can access go back to 1997 or there abouts.

I'm hoping that someone will be able to look at the newspaper files for November 1957 and find an article that talks about the soldiers from White Sands and what happened to them....

Oh, and I should mention that the White Sands Missile Range has been less than helpful. In the past they have been quite prompt in answering email, but after asking a bunch of irrelevant questions, they too have gone silent.

Anyway, I'm hoping that someone in that area can learn a little more from reviewing the microfilm from November 1957 and tell me what happened to Wilbanks. The tale of his three-day pass doesn't not hold water.

Project Pounce and MJ-12

While working on my new book, I stumbled across a reference to Project Pounce and I remembered that it was one of those projects that had been associated with MJ-12. Linda Howe might have been the first to have heard of Pounce, or I suppose, I should say the first outside of those inventing these things.

According to the information I have, Howe met Richard Doty, he of the AFOSI at the time on, April 9, 1983, in Doty’s office at Kirkland Air Force Base in Albuquerque. He told her that his superiors had told him to show her a document. He handed her several sheets of paper and told her that she could read them but that she couldn’t copy them.

The document was called, “A Briefing for the President of the United States on the Subject of Unidentified Flying Vehicles.” There was no date on the report, and the president wasn’t named. Howe didn’t know for which president it had been prepared though later information from others would suggest that this was part of the Carter Briefing.

Mentioned on this document were several classified projects including Aquarius, Snowbird, Sigma and Pounce. According to these documents, Snowbird was a cover for Project Red Light, which was a project to fly recovered alien craft. Snowbird was to develop some type of flying saucer using conventional technology as a cover for Red Light.

Snowbird was an actual project and has been described by Barry Greenwood as a “Joint Army/Air Force peacetime military exercise in the sub-arctic region in 1955, according to Gale Research’s Code Name Dictionary, 1963.” (See MUFON UFO Journal Number 236, December 1987, p. 12) It had nothing to do with UFOs, aliens, or MJ-12.

And now we have the information on Project Pounce. According to the MJ-12 documents, Pounce was created in 1980. It would use the Air Force “Black Berets” for crash retrievals including the recovery of the craft and the bodies of the occupants, if there were any. Steve Wilson, who claimed to have been an Air Force colonel, said that he had been the executive officer of Pounce. Wilson’s story unraveled when it was established that he had not been an Air Force colonel (See the entry here on November 16, 2006 for more information about Wilson).

According to Ed Ruppelt who mentioned Project Pounce in his 1956 book, and Joel Carpenter writing in the International UFO Reporter in the Fall 2001 issue, page 4, Pounce began when an Air Defense Command colonel, tired of all the UFO reports near his base in New Mexico, proposed converting some of the F-94C fighters into “UFO interceptors,” equipped with cameras and placed on 24 hour alert. While Pounce did have a UFO component, it had nothing to do with recovery of alien craft and there is nothing to connect it to the mythical MJ-12.

All of this is another example of how the information about MJ-12 and some of the ancillary projects used to support MJ-12 actually were something else entirely. These real projects were used in an attempt to give legitimacy to MJ-12, but when we learn the truth about them, we see another fallacy of MJ-12. Had these projects been what the proponents of MJ-12 said they were, it would tend to validate it. However, when we learn what they actually were, it tells us, once again, that MJ-12 is a myth.