Several
years ago, over at UFO Iconoclasts,
now known as UFO Conjectures, Rich
Reynolds thought it was time for all us geezers to get out of UFO research and
turn the field over to the youngsters. His theory seemed to be that we’d gotten
too set in our ways, weren’t coming up with anything new and had had seventy
years to find a solution and we hadn’t done it. The young blood, not locked
into any one theory, would think in new and innovative ways, progressing
rapidly if we’d just get out of their way.
When
I was studying for a Ph.D., one of the things we learned was to make a
literature search of our topic to ensure that we weren’t merely covering old
ground. The literature search would provide a springboard into new arenas and
new thought so that we could build on what had gone on before rather than just
duplicating research. We could advance the field, the theory, and the thought
rather than just repeat the same mistakes that had been made before. We could
actually contribute something new.
All
well and good but in the last year, as I see more and more of what the new
blood has brought to the field and the advances they have allegedly made, I
suspect that Rich was wrong. The new blood and the younger researchers are
doing nothing to advance the work. They are just grabbing onto the same
nonsense that has distracted and derailed us. They don’t bother with any sort
of literature search that today, with the Internet, is so much simpler. They just
keep filling the air with the same tired rhetoric, learning nothing from the
mistakes we made or advancing thought at all. It is a case of the same old same
old.
You
want an example?
Sure.
I’ve been engaged in a discussion of the MJ-12 Manual SOM 1-01. It suffers from
the same problem of all the other MJ-12 documents which is a lack of
provenance, but that seems to make no difference to many. We don’t know where
it came from, we don’t know what agency is responsible for it (though the logo
on the front seems to suggest the War Department which disappeared in 1947 when
the Department of Defense was created) and there seem to be anachronisms in it.
It was suggested that wreckage from crashed and recovered UFOs be sent to Area
51/S-4. The trouble is that when the manual was allegedly written, there were
no facilities at Groom Lake as it was known then to house the wreckage and no
personnel available to exploit it if something did arrive.
One
of those believing the manual was real, provided a link to a declassified
document to prove that the term, Area 51, was in use because it appeared on
maps of that part of Nevada. But that source also described exactly what was
there in April 1955. It said, “On 12 April 1955
Richard Bissell and Col. Osmund Ritland... flew over Nevada with Kelly Johnson
in small Beechcraft plane piloted by Lockheed's chief test pilot, Tony LeVier.
They spotted what appeared to be an airstrip by a salt flat known as Groom
Lake, near the northeast corner of the Atomic Energy Commission's (AEC) Nevada
Proving Ground. After debating about landing on the old strip, LeVier set the
plane down on the lakebed, and all four walked over to examine the strip. The
facility had been used during World War II as an aerial gunnery range for Army
Air Corps pilots. From the air the strip appeared to be paved, but on closer inspection
it turned out to have originally been fashioned from compacted earth that had
turned to ankle-deep dust after more than a decade of disuse. If LeVier had
attempted to land on the airstrip, the plane would probably had nosed over when
the wheels sank into the loose soil, killing or injuring all of the key figures
in the U-2 project.”
What was the response? Well, maybe
there were facilities in the area they didn’t see. Maybe there was a secret,
underground AEC base. Maybe the CIA historian who wrote that section lied about
it to keep the secret safe. No evidence of any of that. Just some wild
speculation to reject the evidence that there was nothing there to be seen by
those who had actually been there.
That same document also said, “Bissel
and his colleagues all agreed that Groom Lake would make an ideal site for
testing the U-2 and training its pilots. Upon returning to Washington, Bissell
discovered that Groom Lake was not part of the AEC proving ground. After
consulting with Dulles, Bissell and Miller asked the Atomic Energy Commission
to add the Groom Lake area to its real estate holdings in Nevada. AEC Chairman
Adm. Lewis Strauss readily agreed, and President Eisenhower also approved the
addition of this strip of wasteland, known by its map designation as Area 51 to
the Nevada Test Site.”
This
would seem to be a fatal flaw in a document that has no provenance. We have a
description of the area that would eliminate it as a site to send anything at
that time. There was nothing there except an invisible facility. Doesn’t this
one point actually make defense of the manual a very shaky proposition? Unless
something else, with a proper provenance can be found, shouldn’t this guide our
thinking?
Is
there more?
|
Carlos Allende/Carl Allen |
Well
yes. We’ve just had another example which is the Allende Letters. I’m not going
through that again but will say there is nothing left to this myth. Allende,
who was born Carl Allen said that he had made it all up. Robert Goerman found
Allen’s family and they said that Allen made up things like this all the time.
Some of the problems discussed in the annotations in the book sent to the Navy
have since been solved. Here I think of the disappearance of the Stardust, a
BOAC passenger plane that disappeared allegedly in sight of the airport at
Santiago, Chile. A decade and a half ago, the wreckage was found, providing us
with a fatal flaw in those notations. For more details see:
More?
How about the Bermuda Triangle?
Back in the early 1970s, I believed there was
something mysterious going on in the Bermuda Triangle. The list of ships and
planes that had been lost in the area seemed to be overwhelming and nearly
every one of them was gone without a trace. I remember being at a conference in
Denver, Colorado, when Jim Lorenzen explained that it was truly mysterious
because there was a case in which five Navy aircraft flying formation all
disappeared. There was just no way that mechanical failure, weather, or about
anything else could explain that disappearance.
|
440th C-119 like this one lost
in the Bermuda Triangle. |
In the mid-1970s I spotted a book, The Bermuda Triangle Mystery – Solved by
David Lawrence Kusche. I bought it thinking that I needed to understand what
the skeptics were saying if I was going to be able to intelligently refute
their arguments. But the book was filled with documentation and explanations
that made perfect sense. Couple that to my talking with members of the 440th
Tactical Airlift Wing who had lost a plane in the Triangle and who told me the
plane had crashed and the solution seemed confirmed. Not only that, they had
bits of the wreckage to prove it… one of the mysteries solved to my
satisfaction without having to read Kusche’s book. See:
Oh, and in the Navy records concerning the
disappearance of Flight 19, we learn that five aircraft disappear when the
flight leader orders it. He was hopelessly lost, flying around in circles and
ignoring the advice from the rest of the squadron. Finally he said, “When the
first man is down to ten gallons, we’ll all ditch together.” And that explains
how five aircraft disappear at once.
I could go on, but need I? Sure there are those of us
who are older that still subscribe to these things and there are those who are
younger who do not. We older folks have learned ways of conducting the research
that does provide us with some answers. Those younger folks are sometimes too
willing to accept what they are told as the truth without asking some
additional questions. I learned that lesson after believing some of those who
told wonderful stories of their involvement in the Roswell UFO crash and
reading Stolen Valor about all these
people, men and women, lying about their military service, especially that in
Vietnam. In other words, many of those telling us stories about the Roswell
crash were lying about it and this included some of the most important
witnesses.
Where does all this leave us? It would seem that we,
of the old guard (aka old school) could provide some useful tips on conducting
these investigations if those who are new school would bother to listen. This
is where Rich slipped off the rails… we should be working together, those of us
from years gone by providing information and guidance, and those who are
relatively young providing new ways of looking at UFOs and providing new
theories on what is going on. One group shouldn’t be forced out by another and
all should be open to reevaluating what we sometimes think of as the proof
positive. There is room for everyone if we’re all smart enough to recognize the
abilities and experience of each other.