Wednesday, February 11, 2015

The Plains of San Agustin Crash Revisited


Since it has been brought up here in the last couple of days, and since we might have beaten the Roswell Slides issue to death, at least for the time being, I thought we might look at the Plains of San Agustin crash scenario once again. Remember, to disagree with me doesn’t make you a liar, just someone with a different opinion. When you don’t bother with searching all aspects of an event, then you become an advocate for that event. I have looked into this case for a long time, and given everything that I have found, I simply cannot shoe horn it into a July 1947 time frame.

You might say that this story begins when Stan Friedman met a couple, Vern and Jean Maltais, in Bemidji, Minnesota, on October 24, 1978. They wanted to tell him of Barney Barnett and a UFO crash that Barnett had told them about many years earlier. He related the tale in his book, Top Secret Majic on pages 18 – 19.

According to Friedman, they were told by Barnett he had found a flying saucer crashed with four bodies lying around it. The military arrived and told Barnett and members of an archaeological team to leave the area. Friedman wrote, “They had no date for the Barnett story.” Please note here that Stan is making this claim about the lack of a date when first told this tale.

Later, however, the date was narrowed down when Vern and Jean Maltais told Bill Moore they visited the Barnetts in February, 1950 (See The Roswell Incident, pages 53 – 58). It was during this visit that Barnett said that he had seen the crashed saucer. Jean Maltais, when asked where the craft had crashed, said, “…I don’t exactly, recall. It was somewhere out of Socorro. He may have said exactly, but I don’t recall. I remember he said it was prairie – ‘the Flats’ is the way he put it… Barney traveled all over New Mexico, but did most of his work directly west of Socorro.”

According to what the Maltais told Moore during his interview with them, Barnett was out on assignment near Magdalena, New Mexico, which is west of Socorro. The story was that Barnett thought at first it was a plane crash but when he got closer, crossing a little more than mile of desert, he saw that it was a saucer-shaped craft, twenty-five or thirty feet in diameter. It was a flash of sunlight from the metallic craft that caught his attention.

Maltais said that Barnett saw some bodies. They were dead, according to what Barnett told Maltais. There were bodies both inside and out, and Barnett said that the ones outside had been tossed out by the impact. He described them as being like humans but they weren’t human. The heads were pair shaped, their arms and legs were skinny, the eyes were small and they had no hair. They were smaller than humans and the heads were larger than those on human bodies.

There were other witnesses there, according to what Maltais heard and what he told me during interviews in August, 1989 and July 1990. These were archaeologists who had been working nearby and apparently had seen the object fall the night before. Barnett seemed to think they were from an eastern university, but Moore reported they were from the University of Pennsylvania. These witnesses have never been located though searches for them have been made.

Not long after Barnett arrived, the military turned up, and took over. They condoned the area and escorted everyone off the site after warning them not to talk about it.

Barnett apparently didn’t keep the secret very long according to others interviewed. In 1947, J. F. “Fleck” Danley was Barnett’s boss. Bill Moore asked Danley about the story. Danley said that Barnett had come into the office one day and said that the flying saucers were real. Danley had been in a bad mood on that day, said that the flying saucers weren’t real and he wasn’t interested in discussing it further. But Danley, thinking about it, felt bad, so he asked him about it sometime later. Danley said Barnett mentioned something about the “Flats” but couldn’t remember much else including when this conversation might have taken place.

Moore returned to the topic four months later and again talked to Danley. At that time Danley said that he remembered the date and was sure that it was sometime early in the summer of 1947. In interviews I conducted with Danley in October 1990 and June 1991, he suggested that he didn’t have a clear memory of when Barnett had told him about the crashed saucer, and in fact, didn’t have a clear idea where Barnett had been on the day he told Danley about the saucer.

Danley mentioned that Barnett was a soil conservation engineer who worked out of Socorro and a satellite office in Magdalena. He did mention that Barnett occasionally made it into Lincoln County, New Mexico but that was rare. Please notice that it was Danley that provided the information that Barnett occasionally got into Lincoln County, in which Corona and the Foster ranch are located. Interestingly, Danley remembered Barnett said something about Carrizozo when he mentioned this in a May 14, 1991 interview. He said that Barnett told him about the crash but he didn’t remember him saying anything about bodies or creatures. Please note that Danley said that Barnett didn’t say a thing about bodies… yes that is redundant, but necessary.

To make this even more complicated, Friedman said that he had “reinterviewed Danley and several others who knew Barney in 1990 [clearly Friedman means he interviewed the people in 1990 and not that they knew Barnett in 1990] and again was told ‘in the Plains.’” Of course, many of those people said “the Flats,” which Friedman, with some justification, translated into the Plains.

These were not the conclusions of others. Jaime Shandera, at the UFO Expo West in Los Angeles on May 11, 1991, was lecturing about the Plains of San Agustin. According to information supplied by Antonio Huneeus and Javier Sierra Shandera 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. 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.
There were others who talked to Barnett about the case. Stan Friedman interviewed a military reserve officer from New York, William Leed who said that in “the early 1960s,” a fellow officer had told him about Barnett. Leed arranged to go to New Mexico soon after to talk to Barnett about the crash.

Leed did hear the story from Barnett, thought that Barnett was sincere and was impressed that Barnett wouldn’t talk to him until Leed showed him a military ID. Leed made it clear that he was there on a personal quest and this had nothing to do with the military or official business.

There is nowhere in the various interviews with Leed that provide a date or a location. It is assumed that the date is early July, often on the second, and the location is out on the Plains, not far south of Highway 60. Friedman wrote of this meeting between Leed and Barnett, “No reason to think it was other than ‘on the Plains,’ but offers no quotes suggesting that Leed believed this.

In the 1990s, Friedman placed an ad in the Socorro newspaper, asking for anyone who had information about the Barnett story to contact him. One of those who did was Harold Baca who in the 1960s lived across the street from Barnett. He said that as he helped Ruth Barnett take care of an ailing Barnett, he heard about the crashed flying saucer from Barney who was convinced that his cancer was the result of breathing contaminated air near the wrecked saucer and the bodies, at least that is what Baca told me in an interview in June 1991. Baca seemed to think that it had happened “out on the plains.”

Friedman found addition witnesses who suggested that Barnett had said that he was on the Plains. These included the late Marvin Ake, who said he had heard the story “many years earlier, but provided no date and an unidentified and retired postmistress from Datil who said the saucer had been trucked through Magdalena at night. 

Others in the area also remembered discussion of a flying saucer crash on the Plains, but some of them couldn’t remember if they had heard about it in the late 1940s, or sometime after the publication of The Roswell Incident. That was what Johnny Foard told me during an interview on February 9, 1992.

The problem with all this is that Barnett died in 1969 before anyone was talking about flying saucer crashes in New Mexico in 1947 other than mentioning the Aztec case. The interviews are all with people attempting to remember what was said decades earlier and give it some sort of time frame. The contamination of the witnesses can be seen in the evolution of their stories. Vern and Jean Maltais, for example, and according to what Friedman has written, had no date for the story. It wasn’t until later that they seemed to narrow it down and that it could be suggested as July 1947.

The same thing is seen with Fleck Danley. He did not have a time frame or a solid location for the crash until after he had talked to researchers. Other witnesses were vague saying that Barnett had said it was twenty years earlier (Baca) who talked to Barnett about it in 1968 so it provides something of a time frame but one that is still vague.

Then there are people who were on the Plains in July 1947 and said nothing happened. Herbert Dick was one of them. He was excavating the Bat Cave beginning on July 1, 1947, according to a letter I believe was uncovered by Art Campbell in a Harvard archive. The Bat Cave is situated on the eastern side of the Plains with a panorama view from Datil to Horse Springs. If something had fallen and then been recovered in early July 1947, Dick was in a position to see it. We know this because they were excavating the human habitation in the Bat Cave, which means they were near the entrance, and their camp site was on the only flat piece of ground near the cave and facing west. But, according to Dick, they saw nothing.

One other interesting point. In a communication I had with Dick he said that he was not a big fan of the government. If he had seen anything, he wouldn’t keep it a secret. He would tell, but unfortunately, he hadn’t seen anything.

It is for these reasons, that is the lack of first-hand corroboration of the Barnett tale, the inability of the first people to talk of what Barnett said to provide a location and date and that the only source of the information is Barnett that I say, with confidence, that nothing happened there in July 1947.


75 comments:

  1. Once again the question how do you explain the excavations of Art Campbell in the plains and what he found there when there "nothing" happened???

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  2. I can't help but wonder if there's any, slight possibility that Barnett himself was telling the story second-hand. Maybe from the students, or someone else? Here's why it's important: if Barnett was re-telling someone else's story, then we are no longer restricted to areas that he travelled and/or worked in. It would open some possibilities.

    My main takeaway from the Barnett tale is this; whatever Barnett saw, heard, or experienced, it definitely made an impression on him. Like Jessie Marcel Sr., he felt it was important enough to tell people about it.

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  3. I agree with your conclusion.

    Barnett was warned by the military at the site not to talk about it to anyone, whereupon he immediately informs his boss Danley when he gets back to his office. He then tells the Maltaises, and maybe others, in early 1950; so the story goes.

    Either Barnett was being a most unloyal citizen or...?

    I should add that Stan Friedman, by his own admission, usually sent his witnesses, whoever they were, a selection of his pro-ET UFO papers to soften them up, shall we say, towards the ET hypothesis of UFOs in general.

    At some point Moore discarded the San Agustin story but Friedman still fervently believed it, which helped to cause their eventual break-up.

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  4. Kevin wrote:
    "I simply cannot shoe horn it into a July 1947 time frame."

    That's because this crash happened
    on May 30th, 1947, in Nogal Canyon, which is on the very north western tip of the plains. There is physical evidence at the site: trees burned from the top down, and areas covered with chrisotobalite. You should visit it.
    http://www.ufoevidence.org/cases/case809.htm

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  5. Kevin,
    Sorry for the mistake:
    The very north eastern
    part of the plains.
    Ed

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  6. Michael Mu -

    Campbell claimed he has wreckage and it was tested proving it was extraterrestrial origin…. The scientist, Steve Colbern cited as conducting the tests is not exactly an unbiased and neutral source. It would be nice if there was some independent lab testing available which is something that isn’t done. Yes, I know that it is difficult to get the independent testing and the fees are usually prohibitive, but suggesting a scientist found what you wanted him to find and to learn of his particular bias does little to validate the claim.

    I mention this only to let you know that I'm familiar with the work... and that I believe his site is not on the Plains but actually to the west of it, across the road that leads from Datil to Horse Springs.

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  7. Kevin:

    A very good and reasoned recap, of course we come to different conclusions.

    I have discussed the San Augustin case with Art Campbell at length (as well as the Eisenhower/Holloman case) and some months ago he sent me his new book, "UFO Crash at San Augustin" that goes into great detail on the case.

    Art states in his book (pages 76-80) that Herbert Dick and his group set up camp near the Bat Cave site on July 1, 1947. After dinner and in the darkness the group noticed a glowing object near the Gallinas Mts. The object made several turns before it appeared to crash. It is this group that Campbell believes showed up at the crash site the next day with Barney Barnett.

    Why did Dick deny that he or his group saw anything unusual? There was professional conflict between Dick and Harvard on one side and Wesley Hurt and the University of New Mexico on the other. It's a very complicated and involved story that is covered in Campbell's book, but being admonished by the Army to keep their mouths shut worked in Dick's favor. He even initially denied that they were at the Bat Cave site until mid-July which has been proven false by his own letters.

    It seems to me the two saucer theory makes sense. What Marcel and Cavitt found on the Foster Ranch has always been called debris. What Blanchard authorized Haut to release stated that the Army had recovered a "disc." How do you make a disc out of debris. Thus I believed one saucer exploded and the other, somewhat damaged flew on to the Plains of San Augustin.

    I don't rule out the possibility that a part of the craft that exploded flew on a bit farther and crashed about 30 miles from Roswell. This would fit the Schmitt/Carey/Dwyer/Rowe picture.

    One other side story to this whole issue. When the Roswell story broke in 1980 I was mystified why no one had ever seemed to have heard about Roswell. From as early as 1960 Roswell had been as important to me as Wright-Pat concerning UFOs. The problem was I couldn't remember why Roswell was so important to me in my UFO study.

    When doing research for my book it started to come back to me. In 1960 I had read a couple of Keyhoe's books and was taken with his believability. At the time I had an older friend who I knew had been a judo instructor in the Air Force at Biggs AFB near El Paso. He told me he had been one of 24 men sent to Japan to learn Judo to train AF pilots in the art.

    I was reluctant to tell my friend of my new interest but finally did so. Expecting to be blasted for believing such nonsense he simply said it's all true. He went on to say that pilots he instructed told him of many UFO encounters that had really shaken these men. He also was told of downed craft and I believe bodies that were taken to Roswell and finally on to Wright-Pat. Roswell it seems was the center for UFO activity at that time.

    I've his service timeline and his story checks out. Gen. Curtis LeMay was behind the for pilot judo training and the program was run by Gen. Thomas Power.

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  8. @Kevin Randle

    With other words you try to say: There are liars! Right?


    Kevin... https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hiRacdl02w4

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  9. Michael Mu -

    Your reading comprehension worries me. No, they are not liars. They are mistaken. They have added detail because of the various details added by researchers. They have incorporated these details into their memories of the situation which does not make them liars. I do not understand your desire to label people as liars.

    All -

    Which date for the crash do you prefer? May 30? July 1? July 2? July 5? Just wondering.

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  10. If the San Agustin crash is at all related to the Roswell event, then I'd say May 30, or earlier. Why? Because Mac Brazel told the Roswell Daily Record that he found the Roswell debris on June 14. I realize some people think his testimony was "coached" by the Army, but even if it was, why would he lie about that particular date? Maybe an expert can explain this to me.

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    1. I'm a few years late here, but 14 June is a fairly important date to the Army, it's the Army birthday, 14 June 1775, and LTC Randle certainly knows this. I'm kind of surprised he didn't mention it though it's not that important in the grand scheme of things, it would stand out as odd to a Soldier that the Army insisted on that particular date.

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  11. Kevin makes some good points here.

    Unfortunately the same complaints he makes about this story could be applied in some great measure to his own Roswell mythology.

    Kevin (and his fellow dream team members) have gone down avenue after avenue on the trail of potential real contemporaneous evidence. Evidence that should exist: anything real that supports their claim.

    They have worked very hard and in some ways admirably.

    But, I suggest, also blindly and with what amounts now to a religious fervor. Why kind of mindset do you have to be in to not understand that a slide cannot be said to PROVE alien visitation?

    In every case there is a dead end.

    Not one document.
    Not one physical item.
    Nothing but dubious testimony that (as Kevin explains here) can't be accepted without support.

    And sadly all of the supposed "first-hand" "witnesses" have turned out to be unreliable (to be generous).

    It's all absurd.

    And this slide fiasco shows how the Roswell sausage gets made

    Just like the Nun diary "scholarship".

    Or the reprehensible "death bed confession" by Haut.

    Etc. Etc.

    Lance

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  12. In response to Lance:

    I thought this thread concerned the Plains of San Augustin issue. You seem to want to highjack it back to the idiocy of the slides issue.

    Since you bring this up let's look at the Air Force Report "Fact vs. Fiction in the New Mexico Desert" from 1994 and the later report "Roswell, Case Closed."

    As I know as a member of the military, and Kevin knows, nothing happened in moving troops without paperwork, period. If the crash at Roswell was a Mogul balloon top secret project clean-up than paperwork would have been generated. To use your question, where is that one document?

    With all of the the thousand plus pages of the two documents there is not one official document produced by the Air Force that authorizes the clean-up at the Foster Ranch of a Project Mogul crash. It would take only one, repeat one, official document and the entire Roswell story would vanish. Yet after 35 years the Air Force cannot produce that one document.

    You go on to defame first hand witnesses such as Jesse Marcel, Col. William Blanchard, Jesse Marcel, Jr. etc. as unreliable...to use your words, It's absurd!

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  13. @ Larry,

    Your comment is stupefying. I have heard some ridiculous arguments from true believers but I think this one takes the cake.

    The trip out to the ranch to pick up some foil paper and sticks might well have produced a report. And afterwards I'm sure that report was given all the care that a report on foil paper and sticks deserved.

    To equate that hypothetical single unimportant missing document with the mountain of documentation that would have been produced after finding A FLYING SAUCER WITH OCCUPANTS FROM ANOTHER WORLD shows a lack of understanding so monumental that it boggles the mind. Millions and millions of pages that should exist. Not one ever found. Not even a hint of one.

    Marcel demolished the entire thing right at the beginning. The buffs simply choose to ignore that since it doesn't fit into their religion. He said that the stuff we see him with in the newspaper pictures is the same stuff he picked up.

    That is foil paper, neoprene, and sticks.

    Your very act of saying, "yeah, I have no evidence for my spectacular claim but you have no evidence disproving my claim, either" shows a near bottomless lack of understanding of the way rational men go about trying to discover the truth through science.

    You have heard of science, haven't you?


    Lance

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  14. Lance, I respectfully disagree with what you have stated.
    This is because there are other incidences one may view for themselves in the archives of the UFO program that duplicate the balloon explanation version of the Roswell case, and yet, all of the material dealing with the incidences are there to read. This includes the lists of materials that were sent to the AMC Technical people, (wire, foil, balloon material, tags containing instructions on who to contact, etc.) sometimes by the FBI, and even with obvious knowledge at the time that the items being viewed were mundane.

    So, my point is, why are all of these other cases located in the files, but the Roswell mundane information is not? I think that's a legitimate question. I have wondered about this aspect many times.

    Do you have an opinion on this?

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  16. Lance:

    I want that document, period! All your idiotic rhetoric is meaningless because all of that "mountain of documentation" is still highly classified. I won't get that one document because it is part of that mountain of classified evidence.

    I want you to think again, it only takes one document about Mogul that is now declassified, to turn the whole Roswell issue to vapor. It's not a complicated issue my friend.

    I've spent to much of my money and my time in presidential library archives and traveling to interview people, as have many others like Kevin to take darts from keyboard debunkers.

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  18. One doesn't need to argue about Roswell minutiae add nauseam in order to discuss the Plains of San Agustin story. After all, there's really no connection between the two other than the date of occurrence, which is in dispute. I became convinced of the MOGUL explanation years ago, but that doesn't mean other crash retrieval stories aren't worth looking into, therefore the Barnett story still lives, in my opinion. So the question is, can it be connected to another crash?

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  19. @Bob,

    Bob, I want to better understand your question. Could you elaborate with some specifics? I am happy to discuss but I'm not quite sure what you are asking.

    ---

    @Larry,

    One Mogul document!? The entire program history is available? What on earth do you mean?

    Lance

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  20. If archaeologists from a university were indeed working at the San Augustin site at about the time the 'crash' occurred, presumably some of them would have seen either the actual crash or the wreckage or maybe even the bodies.

    So, following on the line of reasoning above from certain ET advocates, where is the documentation (in the form of field notes or written reports) that the said archaeologists saw what happened? Are these reports archived somewhere, and if not, why not? They are far too important for science to have been destroyed.

    I repeat: where are the reports of these archaeologists about the debris or bodies, allegedly from outside planet earth?

    Any ideas, anyone?

    And I do NOT want some dotty response that they were all confiscated by the military and are still classified top secret.

    (The same argument would apply to the whole Roswell affair, but Kevin would not, I am positive, want us to down that road again).

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  21. Kevin, I apologize for fanning the off-topic issue.

    Lance - I realize my question is too far removed from the actual point of this post. Perhaps Kevin will, at some point, visit/re-visit this issue of the lack of/the wealth of documentation dealing with recoveries?

    I feel it is an "elephant in the room" type of question.

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  22. Lance:

    I try one more time and then I'm through with this matter. In the military at that time and for years later nothing happened without paperwork being generated. A private didn't go to the motor pool for a can of gas without a hand receipt. Troops didn't move without paperwork authorizing them to do so.

    Now you are correct that Mogul has been declassified so where is that one document or documents that authorized troops to the Foster Ranch to clean up Mogul debris?

    Do you believe for one second that if the Air Force could produce that formally top secret document authorizing troops to the Foster Ranch to clean up Mogul debris they wouldn't produce it and see, with great joy, Roswell vanish as a UFO issue.

    Oh documents exist, or did exist, that are or were still highly classified because what crashed on the Foster Ranch was something far more exotic than a Mogul balloon train.

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  23. Bob...feel free to email me...you can find my email address at my blog, if you don't have it.

    Lance

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  24. Larry H:

    Please address my point above. There would be no need whatever for any documentation on the clean up of a civilian ranch of balloon/radar reflector debris (unless it really was something highly unusual). Such things were going on all the time. Do you really suppose documents exist for each and every balloon recovery that occurred in the US? Try consulting the weather bureau for these and see what you get!

    But there would CERTAINLY be documentation, by the archaeologists, on the discovery of an ET craft, its debris and bodies. It would be filed in the university research archives somewhere, wouldn't it?

    Why not have a go at locating it?

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  25. Larry,

    Ah, I see. You are laboring under the false impression that the various mythologies about Roswell are supported by evidence.

    There were no troops out at the ranch. There were a couple of guys in a jeep. As I mentioned, I wouldn't be surprised if Marcel did file some sort of report. But because of the prosaic nature of what he found and perhaps the embarrassment of the subsequent event , that report may be filed away somewhere or it may have been lost or discarded.

    Indeed, the entire myth of troops and cordoned off roads,etc, is directly contraindicated by the evidence at hand. As the myth makers would have it, everyone and his brother, cooks, sergeants, morticians, privates all knew that a huge operation to recover the sacred saucer was undertaken.

    But no mention of all the hubbub in the paper? Or in any diaries. Or anywhere.

    And one particular guy who didn't know anything about the gigantic intelligence operation surrounding the recovery of the mythical saucer?

    The base intelligence officer, Jesse Marcel!

    Seems legit!


    Best,

    Lance

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  26. cda:

    Why would Dick and his group make official notes when they were admonished by the military to forget everything they saw or suffer action against them? Dick was trying to move up the academic ladder at Harvard why ruin his climb up over something that had nothing to do with their Bat Cave dig?

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  27. Larry H:

    And I suppose they 'forgot everything' forever, to their deaths, did they? Never at any time thereafter did any of this archaeological team reveal their great discovery, despite its scientific importance. A likely scenario!

    Needless to say, I do not believe for one moment that any of them were silenced or "admonished" by the military.

    I see you are another of the conspiracy brigade. The ET proponents ALWAYS have this fallback, don't they?

    Without this fallback there is no ET case. None

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  28. Before I shut down this discussion which was originally about the Plains of San Agustin and has now drifted into Roswell, I will say this about Project Mogul Flight No. 4. It was cancelled. The documentation tells us that but the skeptics and debunkers seem to ignore that. Nor do they mention that the illustration used to show how long the array was came from Flight No. 2 on the east coast. A more proper illustration was of Flight No. 5, the first flight in New Mexico and it contained no rawin targets... gee, what can that mean?

    Okay, now if you all wish to discuss the Plains and all the evidence or lack thereof there, feel free. Roswell will have to wait for another time.

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  29. Kevin:

    I have said I agree with your conclusions about the Plains of San Agustin.

    My own point is that if archaeologists were present, as researchers insist they were, and if these same archaeologists did indeed witness a crashed ET vehicle and some of the ET bodies, do you not agree that there would be some record of this in the field notes and reports made by these people?

    When scientists go on an expedition they record their activities and discoveries, and these are retained for historical purposes. They are not thrown away.

    Since these people stumbled across a suspected ET craft and bodies, is there anyone who seriously believes this fact would not have been recorded, in a diary at least?

    So WHERE ARE these diaries & reports? The short, commonsense answer is that none exist or ever did exist. The reason being that no such ET crash ever occurred.

    Their reports were certainly not confiscated by the military (There is nothing to show the military ever went to this site anyway).

    Hence my conclusion, which agrees with yours, is that no such event occurred. Everything about San Agustin is tittle-tattle and hearsay.

    But obviously there are people (Stan Friedman and Larry Holcombe are two) who still insist it did occur.

    I am still waiting for someone, sometime, to locate those archaeologists' records to show that an ET crash took place on the Plains in summer 1947, or at any other time.

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  31. cda,

    2. To a layperson, the terms archeology, geology, and paleontology are easily confused. As this story was told second-hand, I would suspect there’s room for error. If, by chance, the group of people Barnett met in the desert was actually just a local group of rock-hunting enthusiasts, I doubt that any record of their visit would exist.

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  32. Given the time period, I wouldn't assume that even scientists would risk writing anything down about a crashed saucer and alien bodies, or if they did, would not immediately turn it over to the military if so ordered. And shut up about it.

    Most folks trusted the military back then. We had just finished a World War, with Russia looming as the new boogeyman. Patriotism was more than lip service, and heroes really were heroes. It was a very different world.

    To insist that documentation from civilians exists is just as silly demanding classified documents to be released by the gov't.

    If active (or even inactive) military personnel had found a crashed disk or alien bodies, you can bet that they would have pushed it up the chain of command. And shut up about it.

    I expect that it's no different today, only it's probably codified in the rules by now :)
    .
    I gotta go...

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  34. Sorry, David, but I said no more, not one which would turn into one each... Mogul is dead in this conversation.

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  35. All -

    Here's something else for you all to think about. Loretta Proctor, in one of the interviews with Don Schmitt and me referred to an area north of Capitan as the plains. It is a flat area in the high desert. In fact, there are several areas in New Mexico that are routinely referred to the Plains so that these second-hand memories of Barnett referring to the Plains might not be all that significant.

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  36. Albert:

    I think your comments are spot on. In addition, as I posted earlier Herbert Dick was in a touchy situation between his school, Harvard, and Wesley Hurt and the UNM. Both wanted rights to the Bat Cave dig and Dick didn't want to foul up his chances for academic advancement (he got his Ph.D. from Harvard in 1955).

    Writing anything official or unofficial about finding a UFO and aliens bodies would certainly not be helpful to his goal at Harvard. Just look at the example of Dr. John Mack and what he got into with Harvard, and he was a tenured professor department head.

    I feel sure Dick would have admonished his group to follow military orders and keep their mouths shut. As you correctly point out it was a very different and fragile time.

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  37. Larry H:

    You keep referring to military orders. Please tell us why you are so sure the military were present at San Agustin at all. Who were these military guys, and what caused them to venture out into this desert? How did they hear of this UFO crash anyway?

    We know that perhaps two or three military men went to the Foster ranch. Where is the evidence that they ever went out to the Plains of San Agustin?

    I submit it is all, as I said before, tittle-tattle and hearsay.
    I assume the only reason you believe this is because someone told you this some 30-40 years afterwards, someone who had become familiar with the "The Roswell Incident" book. I hope you do not think this book constitutes 'documentation'.

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  38. Kevin:

    A interesting a valid question. Do you remember the context of Ms. Proctor's comments about "the plains?"

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  39. Selecting ideas to suit a theory CDA posted

    "So WHERE ARE these diaries & reports? The short, commonsense answer is that none exist or ever did exist. The reason being that no such ET crash ever occurred."

    This whole event happened so long ago that the people who may have have written such reports or diary notes are no longer with us.

    Even if they were produced today then they would of course be classed as fakes by the skeptics.

    I agree that there was no crash on the "plains"... but something did crash elsewhere and it wasn't recognized as tin foil and sticks - which anyone would recognize as such...

    I understand the reason to be skeptical... but you need to look at ALL sides to the investigation (NOT debate).

    Lance - your sweeping statement "And sadly all of the supposed "first-hand" "witnesses" have turned out to be unreliable (to be generous)." is well worth a giggle - "how many" of these people are you referring to?

    Larry, I congratulate you on taking Lance down with some of your postings - he couldn't answer a question you raised earlier so I will repost it:

    "What Marcel and Cavitt found on the Foster Ranch has always been called debris. What Blanchard authorized Haut to release stated that the Army had recovered a "disc." How do you make a disc out of debris."?

    Lance I agree with you that on balance there has to be some sort of explanation for all of this - but the explanation has to be "unusual" - remember that...

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  40. Nitram,

    I have answered that question several times.

    Lance

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  41. Lance posted

    "I have answered that question several times."

    Which question and when/where did you answer it?

    My guess is your referring to the "disk out of debris" question - if I can ask for your patience to have the question answered one more time please...

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  42. cda:

    I must admit that you are a very good amateur UFO debunker. You employ the best techniques of the professional debunker. Changing the subject, smokescreens, twisting what people said or wrote, posting what you say are facts with absolutely no back up and so forth. You would make Phil Klass proud.

    However, against my better judgement I will reply to your most recent post to me.

    You said: "You keep referring to military orders. Please tell us why you are so sure the military were present at San Agustin at all. Who were these military guys, and what caused them to venture out into this desert? How did they hear of this UFO crash anyway?"

    I am not sure the military went to a crash at San Augustin. I'm not sure there was a saucer crash at San Augustin, but I believe from my research and the research of others that I've studied (something that I'm reasonably you have never done) that the odds are in favor that it did happen. As to military orders you once again are mixing events and something as per Kevin I won't discuss.

    What caused the "military guys to venture out into the desert?" Because these "military guys" had the most powerful radars on earth that constantly scanned the New Mexico skies over the most top secret and secure military and research installations on earth at the time. Any unknown object would have been tracked and if thought to have landed or crashed, military personnel would have been ordered to the site as quickly as possible. These are facts that are not arguable.

    What you call "tittle-tattle hearsay" I say is witness reports, many by very creditable witnesses who told their story to researchers who have spent their own time and money to interview them. There are many people now in prisons because of creditable witnesses but for some reason UFO witnesses don't have the same respect.

    From what I have read from your posts you don't know the subject and you don't understand the military. I respectfully submit that it would be wise for you to do some study before passing judgement on a subject of which you have little knowledge.

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  47. It is worth thinking for a moment of the dedicated investigators of cases such as these, putting in many hours of work in the knowledge that the vast majority of cases will have mundane explanations or never get to the point where mundane explanations can be positively excluded. Even rarer are cases that allow some element of testing of the ET hypothesis or related ideas such as possible propulsion models.
    Personally I don't have the temperament for that sort of work so I always feel for the investigators when some armchair analyst such as myself pontificates 'insufficient evidence'...but if there was ever a case where that conclusion fitted this is a perfect example.
    The default position must therefore be the same as Kevin's...most likely nothing happened and we certainly can't say anything did based on the currently available data.

    Maybe some dedicated investigator may turn up more evidence in the future, and then we can all think about it then but frankly I don't understand why there is even any debate about the situation as it stands at the moment.

    There are several dozen cases at least ( I'm not really familia with many cases where information is in languages other than English) which really do pose a serious challenge to the analyst ( to coin a phrase). I'm sure the hardline sceptics are happy to discuss the easy pickings such as San Augustine. It would've interesting to see how the debate goes with a casebook of the extremely well documented cases. Could we plausibly find rare natural phenomena etc to account for cases such as Fukuoka (1948) or Stephenville (2008) to give an early and late example of the standard of cases I am referring to...but I am off topic so that is one for another time.

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  48. Nitram:

    I will answer the question you put to Lance about 'debris' turning into a 'disc'.

    When Brazel turned up at the Sheriff's office he probably said that he had come across a 'flying disc' at his ranch. He described it as such, probably omitting that it was really a bunch of fragments. He used the term 'disc' because of all the publicity given to 'flying discs' the previous two weeks, and the fact that the stuff was strange to him.

    That is my feeling anyway.

    When the debris was recovered and brought back, parts of it resembled a broken 'disc' (even though it was not disc shaped). Hence Haut's press release. I assume there was a bit of excitement at the base and the press release went out prematurely and used the word 'disc' when it was unjustified.

    That is my view on the matter. Lance may have another answer.

    Remember that the term 'flying saucer' over the decades has NEVER meant the object(s) seen were necessarily saucer shaped.


    Larry H:

    You will have to do better than that if you want to prove, or convince, scientists that ETs have landed (or crash-landed) on earth.

    It is inconceivable that the military could manage to arrive at each and every site a UFO had crashed, before civilians got there, by some super-duper radar detection.

    They never went to the Foster ranch UNTIL a rancher reported the discovery! So much for their "most powerful radars on earth".

    So this idea that the US military (which I agree I know little about) had such magic powers is poppycock.

    Yes there would be reports archived somewhere if anything like an ET craft had crashed, be it on the Foster ranch or at San Agustin.

    Get cracking and find them, if you can. Then you can rightfully claim the event was documented.

    Providing this 'documentation' is not a forgery like MJ-12.

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  49. CDA makes a relevant point about the implausibility of the world's various militaries being able to contain a significant number of crash retrievals.
    Coming at the same point from a different angle the vast majority of alleged crash events have very little evidence to support the claim and we can safely assume they either didn't happen at all or are recovery operations of objects of terrestrial origin ( Kecksburg may or may not fall into the latter category).
    The only event of this type that really adds up ( OK...some will not agree, but in my opinion) is Roswell, and then after stripping the case back to its most solid elements. It seems an interesting coincidence to me that we have just one such event that coincided to within days with the start of the 1947 wave and the start of sustained interest in the phenomena by US authorities....
    The best estimates of the timing of the crash do not support a suggestion that either of these two coincidences were a causal result ( I.e the boys topside sending a pretty clear message of capabilities once recognition of their presence was inevitable, for example) but I have often wondered about this curious set of timings as it looks a little too neat to me to be totally coincidental. But that really is speculative and well off topic.

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  50. Anthony Mugan, I doubt Kecksburg involved a conventional object. If memory serves, the timing doesn't fit reentry of a Venera probe and there's no reason to cover that up for half a century.
    Besides Roswell there were other credible events, such as the '62 explosion near Reno, and Shag harbor '67 so this aspect of the phenomenon wasn't limited to the start, or '47.
    I doubt the "disc" as opposed to debris notion came from Brazel. He didn't see the object prior to the explosion, leaving wreckage, so had no clue as to its shape. It's more likely the "disc" idea came from the military, for reasons of its own, than some hick/cowboy.

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  51. Larry -

    We were talking about the debris field that Mack Brazel had found and his annoyance in having the field filled with all that metal. She said that it was south of her ranch house on what she said simply was "the plains." Nothing special about the comment, other than she referred to the area as the plains and she was clearly talking about a place not all that far away (meaning inside 20 or 25 miles).

    Now, please explain or identify, specifically these super radars in New Mexico... where were they? Who controlled them? What was their purpose? All important information rather than just a suggestion that there were these radars around in 1947.

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  52. Col. Randle wrote:

    "Now, please explain or identify, specifically these super radars in New Mexico... where were they? Who controlled them? What was their purpose? All important information rather than just a suggestion that there were these radars around in 1947."

    I noticed that assumption also. I think it is 'folklore debris' from Kaufmann's confabulation about setting up a MacGuyvered mirror relay system so he could watch the pre-crash UFO dances via his super radar abysitting assignment when he had to go to the head.

    Very cinematic, very false.

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  53. Kevin:

    There three original radar sites. One site was in El Vado a little southeast of Dulce. The other two sites were Moriarty and Continental Divide. These were big Radar installations with numerous buildings including a barracks or housing facility and a power generating facility.

    Atomic Energy Commission documents uncovered state that the El Vado site went on line in 1946. However Air Force records indicate that Moriarty and Continental Divide didn't go on line until 1950. What could cause this time difference is that the radar sites were originally built and owned by the Atomic Energy Commission and run by Air Corps/Air Force personnel. In 1950 the AEC turned the sites over to the AF and that may just be the date the Air Force took them over and they had actually been on line in previous years by the AEC.

    As stated these were powerful radars. Each facility had a power plant housing three huge diesel generators to run the radars. An interesting story on the power of the radars was from a local resident who as a young man worked near the El Vado site. Her ate several nights a week at a diner located at the El Vado dam. Some of the AF personnel that worked at the site would bring in half cooked ducks that had been knocked out of the sky by the beam of the powerful micro-wave radar and get the owner to finish cooking the birds.

    Their use was for protection of all of the top secret facilities in that area. Sandia Nat. Lab., Los Alamos Nat. Lab., White Sands Missile Range and so on. With the development of the A bomb and H bomb going on at the labs. and the missile tests at White Sands this was a very sensitive area. A large part of that area was restricted airspace and the military wanted to know everything that was in the air. Of course you know all of this.

    Also, as you know many of the top scientists out there had seen saucers. Dr.Charles Moore, who headed up Project Mogul for General Mills, saw one through a theodolite while tracking a Mogul balloon train. He wrote a report to Blue Book and blew his top when he found out they tried to debunk it. Another interesting tid bit is the famous Fermi Paradox came about because of a discussion Enrico Fermi was having with Edward Teller at lunch on the subject of flying saucers.

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  54. Not intending to shoot down anyone's theories, at all, but it doesn't appear, through normal historical channels, that anybody had super radars. Although there may have been radar set up to monitor the area, even for the discs, they couldn't have been all that advanced.

    It may have been considered advanced by someone at the time when compared to other radar, but from my own research, the new head ADC had his hands tied behind his back due to limited technology available to him. His needs were constantly circumvented due to competition from the first strike bomber crowd that became SAC.

    It took a technology competition between Michigan and MIT to force the issue, and pave the way for better radar. Higher quality height-finding, and longer range radars were not available. This is why the Ground Observer Corps were developed.

    According to published history of Air Defense, NOT having super-duper radar systems was exactly the problem, so I would be interested in the details available of these other radar systems.

    Thanks,
    /Bob

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  55. IIRC, most UFO sightings leading to gov/mil intervention were first reported by civilians (including LE officers). This does not imply that the military did not know about them at the time; that conclusion cannot be drawn. Roswell is a case where debris was claimed to exist. Do you think if Brazel had said he saw lights in the sky, that a team would have been dispatched to investigate? Possible, but highly unlikely.

    If the military had indeed detected a UFO crash and got there first, dollars to donuts* says the info would disappear in a black hole, and none of the experts here would know about it anyway.

    The only way such events become known to the public is if military personnel decide to talk about them. Bentwaters, and Minot AFB come to mind.

    Radar technology was under heavy development all during WWII, and goes on to this day. Russia represented a very different, even existential, threat to the US, compared to that of Germany. There probably were advanced radar systems in use, but they were 'advanced' for 1947, and orders of magnitude less sophisticated than what we're familiar with today. Nonetheless, they were capable of detecting 'terrestrial' aircraft at reasonable distances.

    That said, I don't believe we'll ever have evidence of radar data circa the Roswell incident, or any other for that matter. AFAIK, only films of the 'scopes, or recollections of the operators was possible back then. I think I can say with some certainty that such films weren't likely to be released to the Roswell Daily Record, or anyone else.
    ...
    *if donuts get any more expensive, I'll have to stop using that phrase.

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  56. "When the debris was recovered and brought back, parts of it resembled a broken 'disc' (even though it was not disc shaped). ... I assume there was a bit of excitement at the base and the press release went out prematurely and used the word 'disc' when it was unjustified."

    LOL - how did the yanks ever win the war??

    But we laughter louder after:

    "That is my view on the matter. Lance may have another answer."

    Lance stated that he has "answered the question many times"

    Maybe you could also tell us which question he is referring too?

    Seems strange that you are both Roswell novices/debunkers and yet you don't know or possibly share the same answer to question he has answered "many times".

    No wonder we are confused!

    As mentioned to Lance previously - on balance there has to be some sort of explanation for all of this - but the explanation has to be "unusual" - remember that...

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  57. Nitram:

    I had to chuckle at your post. I'm a Holcombe and on my mothers side an Alexander...so you know I love the Brits.

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  58. Nitram, Kevin has asked that Roswell not be discussed here in this thread.

    Feel free to email me and I'll be glad to answer.

    Lance

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  59. Lance

    Please provide your email address - and don't tell me that you've provided that many times before!

    Regards
    Nitram

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  60. :) Google for my blog, there is an email link there.

    Lance

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  61. Or, you could have just clicked on his name, here.

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  64. Kevin wrote:

    "Larry -

    We were talking about the debris field that Mack Brazel had found and his annoyance in having the field filled with all that metal. She said that it was south of her ranch house on what she said simply was "the plains." Nothing special about the comment, other than she referred to the area as the plains and she was clearly talking about a place not all that far away (meaning inside 20 or 25 miles)."

    ...huh...

    ...well, as a folksy aside, I recall when I was studying to become a Naturalized Texan... One of the definitions I was tasked to remember was that of the phrase "All hat and no cattle"...

    SO, might I respectfully request we add to the Roswell lexicon:

    "All hat, and no crash site"?

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  65. [Kevin, this comment is not really about Roswell, but rather about the more broad topic of faulty reasoning. Even so, if you block it, I'm okay with that.]

    @Larry

    > all of that "mountain of documentation" is still highly classified. I won't get that one document because it is part of that mountain of classified evidence.

    With respect, your reasoning is robustly paradoxical.

    You demonstrate the existence of these documents by reasoning 1) since you can't find them, 2) therefore, they must be hidden. That is not a necessary conclusion. There is another possibility: 3) the documents never existed.

    You need to demonstrate concretely they exist (or once existed) but are hidden. For instance, you may be reading a novel and note a jarring gap in the text's narrative; you see page 22 is followed by page 25; you may also observe a jagged piece of paper glued into the book between pages 22 and 25. From this, you could reasonably conclude the leaf with pages 23 and 24 was ripped out -- despite never seeing those missing pages.

    But you cannot infer the existence of a mountainous something by observing nothing. That is not science, it is theology.

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  66. The Fact this event is a. true event in time? ET has arrived . R emoves US from the -EqUAtion.

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  67. Post_ July 1947> time and tide has come And gone: We have been given a proper Amount of time to Prepare our selfs one and all`! to Come to terms with this Cold reality in the form of an ET Vehicle and her Crew arriving very hard near MT Palone out on the planes. once the truth is out About San agustin ? the atmosphere about a So Called DisK Shaped Vehicle of unknown origions Will no longer be So novel and humanly quaint. this I can Surmise*

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  68. The possibility that an et vehicle along with ITS or HER ET ENTITIES never did as in did not enter earths solver Atmosphere as our planet travels threw the vast empty vacume of this local space time continuum never entered our outer earth atmosphere along with other Alien beings at this time and proceeded to seemingly stage crash after crash in a given area around or in the state of NEW MWXICO. The odds or reality that it never happened is in terms of human events on a local level is o.ooooooo1oooo1oooo1oooo2oooo1oooooo yes something so much more than a manmade human event has indeed taken humanity off guard post word war two. Not so much as a problem for our solvern worldly reality that is Well No Longer Independent Of ET ALIENS From T he Vastness Of Space And Perhaps The Electomanetec Spectrum out of tune or sink with this dementional frequencie/ Hello How are You Today ? Detonate Any nukes latly. Ha Ha lol funney.

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  69. While it is true that Steve Colbern has a vested interest in establishing proof of alien visitation, due to the fact that he had a suspected alien implant removed, his "bias" cannot possibly affect the scientific results returned by the highly sophisticated machines used to test the Plains of San Augustin material of Chuck Wade and Art Campbell. To make this ignorant claim is to use a well-known tactic of debunkers, who lacking counter-evidence of their own, are left to attack the messenger rather than the message - in this case immutable scientific evidence provided by independent labs.

    Since the Roswell supporters (and I am one) have "never" produced a single shred of this caliber of potential proof, I am amazed they have not banded together to fund further testing of the Plains material. Then, if the Wade/Campbell material proves to extraterrestrial the Roswellians could scream "We told you so!" But that might cause a problem for the commercial Roswellians which could explain why some are bashing The Plains possibilities.

    Roswell has lots of "evidence" but no "proof". As long as there is no actual, physical proof of an alien crash, the Roswell books, full of their "speculation" about secret documents and all, can continue to titillate the book-buying public. But once we have the absolute proof that aliens did crash in New Mexico that Roswell mystery and the dollars generated by that mystery will all go away. And those who make their living or supplement their incomes selling the Roswell mystery might have to find new jobs.

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  70. As a Roswell skeptic, I have to admit the Vern and Jean Maltais story was always difficult for me to explain. The fact they approached Friedman in October of 1978 lent credence to the story. (I.e. before Roswell became a big media deal later.) But one thing I've never been to clear on is how much media put out about this between February of 1978 (when Friedman "discovered" Marcell) and October.

    In 'The Truth About The UFO Crash at Roswell' (1994) Randle & Schmitt say: " Later, Marcel grants interviews to various news organizations, but those reports do not gain wide dissemination." (p.176)

    Working from the theory that the Vern & Jean might have been confabulating this new info with other memories.....I've tried to track down these "interviews" to make a judgement as to whether they could have been exposed to them (i.e. what paper and where?). So far, I haven't found anything specific.

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  71. I must apologise for coming into this debate at such a late stage. I want to throw something into the mix thst perhaps needs serious consideration. I have a friend who is an expert on German U-boats. He also has an interest in the UFO phenomenon. During his research he came across an account of a U-boat that blew up off the East coast of the USA. My friends research turned up that this U-Boat was carrying an experimental rocket that could have been launched from the U-Boat. Now, this could have been a piloted version of a V-1 Flying Bomb as test flown by Hanna Reitsch. Hanna Reitsch was a test pilot during WW2 who test flew an adapted V-1 which had pilot controls. She made recommendations about further flights which included having smaller pilots. My friends research has led him to believe that the New Mexico crashes were in fact captured adapted V-1's piloted by small pilots. This would explain the people who saw the crashed objects not recognising what they saw and reports if small bodies. It's something I have debated with him as it's not a theory I subscribe to but may well have some merit.

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  72. Well this is a nice try to lift Hannah to a new level of recognition but unfortunately my friend the alien spaceship that crashed on the plains near Mount Jack was not made on Earth extraterrestrial from beginning no human hands ever touched vehicle and no human beings ever piloted this is when it entered our atmosphere around July 2nd 1947 had a midair Collision of sorts over Corona and barely made it to final resting place in the Arroyo embankment cheers thanks one at all get over it

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  73. I believe the Guy Hottel memo in the FBI archives supports the theory of a crash at the plains of San Agustin, as does the
    eyewitness testimony from Gerald Anderson on the Plains of San Agustin Crash https://youtu.be/ivaWnbKsBkM

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  74. Sorry, Blue Eyed Genie -

    The Hottel memo clearly refers to the Aztec case and is the result of the book, "Behind the Flying Saucers." The Plains of San Agustin are not mention in the book.

    Gerald Anderson was caught forging documents and identified his high school anthropology teacher as the leader of the archaeological expedition. He was not an eyewitness to anything on the Plains having invented his entire story. If you check his testimonies against one another you can see the contradictions. He should be nothing more than a footnote about this because he was not an eyewitness.

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