MUFON's Inner Circle

Last year I wrote about the MUFON Inner Circle and offered some criticism about a couple of the members. There was something of a debate about what exactly the Inner Circle was and what sort of influence it might have over the MUFON leadership and the directions the organization was taking. I published the list of the members which was no big deal because they could be found at the MUFON website. Periodically I had been looking to see if the membership of the Inner Circle changed.

And what I found was that it had. I do not know the reasons for the change but suspect it might have to do with the hefty price tag for membership. As of April 29, 2018, these are the members of the Inner Circle:

Ed L’Heureux, David MacDonald, Clifford Clift, Efroymson Family Fund, Jennifer Stein, Jan C. Harzan, John Schuessler, Debbie Ziegelmeyer, John Grace, Michael Limotte, Cindy Dupont and Holly Baker.

About the only comment I have here is that I wonder if Jan Harzan is

Jan Harzan

a member because he is the Executive Director or if he kicked in the five grand. None of my business really, and if he is in because he is the Executive Director, that makes sense. One of the benefits are consultations with the Executive Director… besides, membership might be a perk of holding the title. As I say, not really any of my business and I mention it only out of idle curiosity.

At the moment, these are the members. Twelve of them, as there were last year, but I think of that as more of a coincidence than a design. Anyone willing to fork over the fee can probably join the Inner Circle and I say, if I had the money laying around, I might give it a shot, just to see what it was like.

Aurora, Texas - Again

This probably should be another edition of “Why I’m Beginning to Dislike Ufology,” but I thought I’d just use it as a single example of what is wrong with us today. I had thought we had finally driven the stake through the heart of the Aurora, Texas, UFO crash of 1897. I thought that the overwhelming evidence showed no such event had taken place. It was, in the terminology of today, “Fake News.” If you wish to read that article that sparked this post you can find it here:

https://www.thesun.co.uk/news/6127496/bizarre-claims-us-government-has-dug-up-aurora-alien-buried-after-crash-landing-120-years-ago/

I have written about the Aurora crash on a number of occasions in both books and magazine articles, and a few times on this blog. Rather that revisit all that here and now, just take a look at these links:

http://kevinrandle.blogspot.com/2005/03/aurora-texas-story-that-wont-die.html

and here:

http://kevinrandle.blogspot.com/2013/09/ufo-crashes-fifty-years-before-roswell.html

and about halfway through the following article you learn about my personal investigation of the crash, which you can read here:

http://kevinrandle.blogspot.com/2010/06/ufos-youngsters-and-geezers.html

The point, however, is that there is no evidence that the crash took

Aurora, Texas. Photo copyright by
Kevin Randle

place. Attempts to find bits of the metal supposedly scattered all over the place have failed, excavations conducted in what was supposed to be Judge Proctor’s well found nothing other than a snake, the written record, which should have been vast given the written histories of Wise County published within a decade of the event refutes the idea, and those I interviewed in the early 1970s, before Aurora became the draw it is today told me that nothing happened… and this included people who were alive at the time, though they were youngsters in 1897.

As noted, this is another of the UFO stories that simply won’t die. There are those who wish to keep it alive for reasons that I can’t understand. When the evidence is stacked as high as it is suggesting there was no crash, I do not understand why some simply ignore it, reporting on the nonsense that has become associated with the tale.

The Aurora Cemetery. Photo copyright by
Kevin Randle

I will say one final thing about this because of a comment or two in the latest report on Aurora. What government organization or agency that existed in 1897 was attempting to suppress this information? There was no CIA, no FBI, and Army Intelligence, such as it was, had no reason to care about the airship sightings or a story that appeared in the Dallas – Fort Worth area newspapers… and if you believe that the Air Force of 1947 had some sort of reason to suppress the story at that late date, I would ask for some evidence that they cared enough to attempt it.

No, this is just another reason that UFO research seems to be in decline. Find a solution for a case and there will be those who scream government cover up or label us as “debunkers.” Rather than focus on the truly mysterious, on those cases in which there is no good solution (and yes, I’ll point to the Socorro UFO landing as one of those), they bring back this exciting case of a UFO crash in 1897. Sorry, but that simply isn’t adding to our knowledge and detracts from the good work that could be done.

John Greenewald's Thoughts on the Recent AATIP Article

(Blogger’s note: The article is reprinted with the permission of John Greenewald, he of the Black Vault fame. The following has to do with Tom DeLonge and his project that is related to disclosure. I have written about this a couple of times and you can read about that here:

http://kevinrandle.blogspot.com/2017/12/tom-delong-disclosure-and-analytical.html

and here:

http://kevinrandle.blogspot.com/2017/10/tom-delonge-and-ufos.html

And while the next link doesn’t deal specifically with the topic at hand, it does provide something about the knowledge being published. It might provide some insight. You can read it here:

http://kevinrandle.blogspot.com/search?q=Tom+DeLonge

What sparked John’s comments was an article about Britain’s Roswell which is, of course, the new name for the Rendlesham Forest encounter. Not to leave any of you hanging, you can read that article here:

https://www.dailystar.co.uk/news/weird-news/690452/Rendlesham-Forest-UFOs-Aliens-ET-Pentagon-Advanced-Aerospace-Threat-Identification-Program

Following is John’s take on all this.)

I love how the story is getting bigger and better every time it’s told.

Now, AATIP was a “massive” project – can I ask where this article

John Greenewald - Photo
copyright by Kevin Randle.

actually bases that off of?  $22 million over 5 years is not “massive” and the whole point that Mr. Elizondo claims he retired was because the DoD wasn’t taking it seriously.

Second, yet again, the name is published with the wrong title. I stand by the fact that the actual name is “Advanced AVIATION Threat Identification program” and not “Aerospace” which is often published and even said in interviews by Mr. Elizondo himself.  I also have this IN WRITING from the Pentagon as proof.

That is not semantics, but rather goes to accuracy of reporting on the project, along with truly defining the SCOPE of the project.  There is a big difference between Aviation and Aerospace, but I just can’t quite understand why no one is asking about the discrepancy, even since the one who ran the program seemingly has it wrong as well.

As this gets blown bigger and more out of proportion as the media fills in the blanks, I fear this lack of real reporting, the disregard of actual facts, and the reality no one is truly asking questions other than the softball ones asked over and over, it will come back and bite us.  I have tried now for more than THREE MONTHS to do an interview with Mr. Elizondo to get his side. Not to be confrontational, but rather, be ACCURATE in my writing. I have been asked now many times to comment on radio, print and television, and have turned some down because it isn’t right for me to comment without getting responses from Mr. Elizondo.   

However, after speaking many times with the PR agent from TTSA and she kept saying she was “trying” – I gave up.  I feel more than THREE MONTHS, along with the offer to do it in whatever medium he wanted (live/in person, online video chat, recorded phone call or even in writing via email) is more than enough time. I am not Tucker Carlson from FoxNews, I get that, but you’d like they may want to address some of this to resources that can continue to give them positive coverage. 

Others are now writing about FOIA extensions (which are perfectly normal and standard) and somehow reading into this as proof there is a massive cover-up.  At the end of the day, there very well may be, but some are claiming and alleging a cover-up with zero evidence (but rather, citing standard FOIA response protocols as proof) and as each day passes when we have no updates from TTSA or real answers (yet) from multiple FOIA requests still open, the media (and SOME UFO researchers/bloggers) are just filling in the blanks with whatever assumption they’d like.

We need to get beyond that, and work together to find answers, not just make up the middle because we don’t have answers yet.

For those interested in a large, and growing, article profiling quite a few FOIA responses I have received along with addressing with detail some of these erroneous facts, I invite you to:

http://www.theblackvault.com/casefiles/to-the-stars-academy-of-arts-science-tom-delonge-and-the-secret-dod-ufo-research-program/

There are my two cents…  

Anatomy of an Investigation

Once again, going through older material looking for nothing specific, I have stumbled over something that might be of some significance. It all began when, scanning a document created by the Air Force that listed 49 UFO organizations in the United States that investigated UFOs, I spotted Karl Pflock’s name. He was listed as the director of something called the National Committee for

Karl Pflock

Investigation of UFO’s. The name, I suspect was designed to feed off that of the bigger and better known National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomena which was listed by the Air Force as the National Investigative Committee on Aerial Phenomena providing a glimpse into how careful they were in their investigations.

I attached nothing of importance to this discovery, other than Karl had been interested in UFOs for a long time and that he had apparently created his own organization to study them. In the mid-1960s, a friend and I created the Office of Scientific Investigation, a name we learned from a science fiction film. We did hold some meetings, created an investigation form, did investigate a few sightings, and began a small library of UFO related books. Nothing nefarious in that. We all (and here I include Karl) were just interested in the topic.

All this lead to a bigger revelation and confirmation of something that has been said for decades. The Air Force did keep track of the civilian UFO organizations and were aware of the policies of some and were worried about their influence on public perception. This was included in a secret document from December 18, 1958. I will note for the purists out that that part of it was secret, part of it was confidential and some of it was unclassified. By government regulations, the entire document, at that time, would have been considered secret because that was the highest classification contained inside the document. For the record, the list of UFO organizations was confidential, a classification level just below secret.

In the secret part of that document, which was inclosure [sic] one, and labeled as a draft proposal, it was noted:

Forty-nine (49) UFO organizations… exist in the ZI [Zone of the Interior, which is to say, the continental United States]in addition to many individual self-proclaimed experts whose affiliations or specific intentions are not clear. It is clear, however, that for various reasons these individuals and agencies such as NICAP, CSI [oddly, there are two organizations on the list that could be this particular CSI – Civilian Saucer Intelligence or Civilian Saucer Investigation] APRO, etc. feel a need for, and do everything possible to discredit the Air Force, its investigations, and its ultimate evaluation of reported sightings. These organizations, and for the most part individuals, are well equipped, and do in fact conduct a very comprehensive, although biased, field investigation. These generally result in well documented reports which are used for their chosen purposes… Some, such as Mr. Haber [of an investigation of a UFO sighting] for reason known only to him, take advantage of every opportunity to incite others.

The real take away here is that the Air Force is tracking UFO organizations though their spokesmen sometimes denied that, and that they found these civilian investigators to be competent, producing comprehensive reports. They suggested that the investigations were biased, but then the same can be said for Air Force investigations, especially when a body of documentation suggests that UFO sightings were to be explained, and if not, then classified. See Air Force regulations, 200-2 and 80-17.

There is another part of this secret document that is relevant to the discussion here. It said:

Ed Ruppelt

Some of the UFO organizations, such as NICAP, well know the deficiencies in the Air Force Program and take advantage of every opportunity to place us in a defensive position. In fact, it is understood that Captain Ruppelt, who was responsible for the ATIC part of the UFO Program from early 1951 until September 1953, is now affiliated with NICAP. In this organization alone ex-marine corps Major Kehoe [sic], a political adventurist, [this description was toned down in subsequent drafts of this document], and Captain Ruppelt, an ex-ATIC specialist, represent a formidable team from which plenty of trouble can be expected in the future. Both appear to be in the business for the money involved. Comparable conditions involving eminent authorities of questionable intensions exist in other of the 49 organizations.

Donald Keyhoe

This is another example of an outrageous and false allegation. I’m not sure why it is thrown around. Isn’t nearly everyone in it for the money or some other reward? Are journalists reporting news because it makes them feel good, or are they looking to climb the ladder to bigger assignments, more prestige, and a higher paycheck?

I have been told on many occasions that I’m only in it for the money but the real driving force is that I wanted to be a writer. The money was, of course, an important component of that, but then, once I had sold four books (none of which dealt with UFOs), I quit my job that included health and dental benefits to write full time.

But there was also the desire to tell a good story, to get at the truth in the UFO field, and report that truth, which explains why there is no monetization on this blog. I provide the information, and of course, my point of view for no monetary reward.

And while Keyhoe was director at NICAP and paid for his leadership, Ruppelt was not being paid. He wrote his book and was paid for that, but anyone who writes a book expects some monetary reward… but for the majority of us, that works out to less than minimum wage, not to mention all the rip-offs created by many of the others in the book business… Did you know that as much as 60 or 70% of the cover price of a book goes to the bookstore and the distributor? Doesn’t leave much for the publisher, his or her employees and then at the bottom of the ladder – the writer. But I digress (please excuse the editorial comment).

What we see here is that much of the response to the UFO question by the Air Force is secret. More importantly, and the real point here as noted, is that the Air Force was keeping tabs on the UFO organizations. That is something that they denied and many believed to be paranoia based on nothing other than a delusion of importance for the work done by those civilian organizations.

And yet the Air Force denied all this, while understanding what was going on out in the field. They denied this surveillance while engaged in it. Makes you wonder what other things the Air Force said about UFO investigations that were untrue and hidden by that veil of secrecy. But, as I say, we now know that the Air Force was watching… though it might not have been all that close or all the time. Still, it tells us a little about the importance of the UFO research and how seriously the Air Force took that all the while denying that there was anything of value to be learned in UFO investigation. 

Why I'm Beginning to Dislike the UFO Field - Part Four

I was going through old files with an eye to weeding out the nonsense, the useless, the outdated and the duplications. As I was doing that, I turned over a newsletter from December 1996 and on the back found a note that I hadn’t seen before. It explained that I hadn’t been invited to participate in the Roswell 1997 celebration because I had libeled someone. My first reaction was that is a strange barb to throw at me considering all the false allegations that had been tossed my way over the years, including some from those on the committee to invite the speakers to the celebration.

But, I got to thinking about this and wondered to what it could refer. Back in that era, 1997, I did a monthly column for the Roswell Daily Record about all things UFO. I was asked to provide the column and I received no pay for it. I just thought it was a good avenue to promote the UFO situation as I understood it and to expose some of the nonsense that lingered in the field.

At one point, in that time frame, I was in the newspaper office when one of the editors approached me saying that they couldn’t run the latest column. I had libeled Dr. Donald Menzel in it. I pointed out that I had libeled no one and what I had written about Menzel was true… an absolute defense in a case of libel.

He didn’t want to debate the point even when I said that I could offer the evidence. He didn’t care because he saw it as libel. I then said that you can’t libel the dead and that since Menzel was a public figure, the threshold for libel was much higher. He didn’t care about that either and I told him he was free to print the column or reject it but I hadn’t libeled Menzel or anyone else.

And then I wondered if this could refer to the stories told by Gerald Anderson, he of the Plains of San Agustin crash. He claimed as a small boy he had been on the crash site and told a wonderful story about it, giving us the name of the archaeologist who was there, Dr. Winfred Buskirk. We, and by we, I mean Tom Carey, located Buskirk so that we had the chance to interview him. Buskirk, of course, said that he hadn’t been on the Plains in July 1947 because he was in Arizona doing research for his Ph.D. thesis. When I talked to Buskirk, he said that he had been a teacher at the Albuquerque High School and according to the school records, Anderson had been in his archaeology class… We had now connected Buskirk and Anderson, not on the Plains of San Agustin in 1947 but in the Albuquerque High School about ten years later.

Anderson, of course, denied the connection and even produced a Xerox copy of his high school transcript to prove he hadn’t taken Buskirk’s class but the real point is that we had put them into the same school at the same time. When we asked for a copy of that alleged transcript to be sent directly to a disinterested third party for verification, Anderson absolutely refused. It was obvious to most of us that Anderson had modified the transcript to validate his claim and actually hadn’t been very clever about it.

So, I was telling people that Anderson had lied about his high school class and his high school association with Buskirk. It was obvious that he had forged this document (and I have other documents that he forged as well) and it was clear that his tale of seeing a crashed alien craft on the Plains was complete fabrication. I was calling him a liar in the hopes he would sue me for saying those things. In discovery, as part of the lawsuit process, I would be able to get an official high school transcript to prove that Anderson was in Buskirk’s class and Anderson knew that would happen.

While it could be claimed that I had, in fact, libeled those people, the truth was a little more complicated than that. As I mentioned, the truth is an absolute defense so that all I had to prove was that Anderson had lied, and I had the documentation to prove it. The real problem was somewhat deeper than that.

From the left, Don Schmitt, Walter Haut and Max
Littell. Photo copyright by Kevin Randle.

Around that same time, I was in the International UFO Museum and Research Center in Roswell. Max Littell, one of the founding members along with Walter Haut and Glenn Dennis, came flying out of a back-office yelling that I was only in this for the money and that I wrote science fiction (I wonder where he had heard that?).

Truth be told, in all the various presentations I had made in Roswell, I always returned the honorarium to the hosts, taking only my expenses, except for the last time. I don’t know of any other researcher who has done this, and at the time Littell was shouting at me, I had not only donated money to the museum, I had arranged for a set of UFO magazines to be donated to them, which, of course meant that I had paid for them… and I never received a thank you for any of that.

But Littell had a bee in his bonnet about something and continued to make false statements. I think it all relates to the Jim Ragsdale tale that Littell began to push around that time. Ragsdale claimed that he had seen the object fall, had seen the bodies of the alien creatures, and had witnessed the military retrieval operation. Littell and Ragsdale entered into some sort of financial arrangement with an eye to developing the land where this alleged UFO fell. The trouble was that the site Ragsdale originally pinpointed was not the site that he and Littell were pushing at the time. I was a thorn in that idea because I knew what Ragsdale had originally said and had a tape of that interview. Later, it became clear that the Ragsdale tale was just that, a tale, with no basis in reality but in 1997 the financial rewards for Littell and Ragsdale were great. They had collaborated on a booklet about the case. Littell’s assault seemed to have grown out of that.

The point here isn’t all the nastiness involved, not to mention the false allegations about money or the suggestion that somehow writing science fiction disqualified me from UFO research (an allegation that only seems to apply to me because I had never heard any other researcher who has written science fiction to be disqualified by that same allegation).

The real point here is that you must toe the party line. You are not allowed to suggest that something might not be as accurate as thought and you must never question a witness story. You are required to believe it, all aspects of it, no matter how strange or ridiculous it has become. Deviate from that and you are a “debunker” whose mission is to divert attention from the truth, a pawn of the CIA, probably on their payroll, and to undermine the true stories being told that suggest alien visitation. Never mind where the evidence points, you are required to embrace it all whether it is crop circles, cattle mutilations, abductions, contact with the space brethren or any of the other sub-genres that can be appended to the UFO field.

I’m not sure who planted the story that I libel people, but I have a very good idea who it was. It was just another attempt to destroy my credibility because I didn’t happen to agree with some of his beliefs about UFOs.

As I mentioned earlier, this all began when I found that note on the back of a newsletter. I just thought I would mention it in the off chance that we all might be able to reduce the animosity in the field even if we disagree with one another, but I have little hope of that happening, given some of the emails I have received in the last few days… oh, I don’t take them seriously… I do read them and save them because you just never know when something said by someone in those emails will become important in proving a point at a later date. 

Moon Dust and the 4602nd AISS

For years, decades really, there has been this idea that Project Moon Dust began with the creation of the 4602^nd Air Intelligence Squadron (AISS) in early 1953. Ed Ruppelt, one time chief of Project Blue Book, had complained to his superiors after the massive UFO sighting wave of the summer 1952, that he needed help in the investigations. He was surprised when it was suggested, and later put into an Air Force regulation, that the investigation of UFO sightings would be accomplished by the 4602^nd.

If you go back and read what Ruppelt wrote, and if you look at the unit history of the 4602^nd along with an examination of the Project Blue Book administrative files, you’ll see what was going on. The 4602^nd was created at the time of the Korean War and during the Cold War in which military, governmental and strategic planners were worried about an aerial assault on the continental United States. This means, naturally, they worried about a Soviet bombing campaign which would see bombers shot out of the sky and Soviet airmen trying to escape and evade inside the US borders.

The thought was they needed trained teams who could search for these downed crewmen, who had lots of skills that normal service members didn’t need such as riding horses, Russian language skills, the ability to question civilians who might have seen something in the

Wright-Patterson AFB, home of Project Blue Book. Photo courtesy USAF.

sky, and other similar skills. The 4602^nd was designed with this in mind and to gain experience in interrogating civilian witnesses, they would be investigating UFO sightings. This put them in contact with untrained, sometimes uneducated, and often nervous civilians who had seen something strange. They would become experienced investigators.

Regulations written dictated this and it was, in fact, implemented. Going through the Blue Book files, there are sighting reports that were written by members of the 4602^nd about their investigations of UFO sightings. There is correspondence from the commanders of the 4602^nd to ATIC and other offices about UFOs. There is no dispute that this happened, and it interesting if only because it wasn’t until much later that this connection was made.

But, that does not give us the date of the beginning of Moon Dust. Others, and me among them, have suggested it and run with that idea that the 4602^nd was the beginning of Moon Dust. It seemed to be a logical conclusion, but it wasn’t actually supported by the documentation.

This idea was reinforced when New Mexico Senator Jeff Bingaman, working with Cliff Stone of Roswell, requested information about Project Moon Dust from the Air Force. Lieutenant Colonel John E. Madison, of the Congressional Inquiry Division, Office of Legislative Liaison wrote, “There is no agency, nor has there ever been, at Fort Belvoir, Virginia, which would deal with UFOs or have any information about the incident in Roswell. In addition, there is no Project Moon Dust or Operation Blue Fly.”

Documentation obtained through the Freedom of Information Act, first by Robert Todd, later by Stone, and also by me, proved the statement to be untrue. I found, in the Project Blue Book files four cases that had been marked as “Moon Dust.” Clearly, the project existed.

When that documentation was presented to the Air Force, they changed their response. Colonel George M. Mattingley, Jr., wrote that they wanted to amend their response, suggesting that Moon Dust did exist. Mattingley wrote:

In 1953, during the Korean War, the Air Defense Command organized intelligence teams to deploy, recover, or exploit at the scene of downed enemy personnel, equipment, and aircraft. The unit with responsibility for maintaining these teams was located at Fort Belvoir, Virginia. As the occasion never arose to use these air defense teams, the mission was assigned to Headquarters, United States Air Force in 1957 and expanded to include the following peace-time functions: a) Unidentified Flying Objects (UFOs); b) Project MOON DUST; to recover objects and debris from space vehicles that had survived re-entry from space to earth; c) Operation BLUE FLY, to expeditiously retrieve downed Soviet Bloc equipment.

This seems to suggest that the beginning of Moon Dust was in 1953, but what it actually tells us, which we already knew, was that it was the beginning of the 4602^nd, which is not the same as Moon Dust. I have been unable to find a single reference to Moon Dust in the 4602^nd unit history which was classified as secret when it was written. That means there would be no prohibition to mentioning Moon Dust in the context of the unit history because it was classified.

Mattingley, in fact, gives us the information about the creation of the 4602^nd and what its mission was in 1953. It wasn’t created in response to the UFO sightings of 1952, but as an outgrowth of the conflict in Korea and the escalating cold war. The UFO mission was secondary, thought of as a way to train their personnel.

But there is additional information. As I was researching another aspect of the UFO field, I found another document that provides a clue about the beginning of Moon Dust. A document from Headquarters, US Air Force, Message #54322 and dated December 23, 1957, discussed a new project, obviously developed after the launch of the Soviet satellite in October, 1957, that had a mission “to collect and analyze raw intelligence reports from the field on fallen space debris and objects of unknown origin.”

This is the earliest reference that I have found to Moon Dust. We also know that it had a UFO component based on other documents that define several terms including UFO and that there are reports in the Blue Book file that refer to Moon Dust.

Note also that Mattingley mentions that the mission was given to Headquarters, USAF in 1957, which corresponds with the launch of Sputnik, and the message issued by that Headquarters in 1957. The creation of the 4602^nd, then, was not the beginning of Moon Dust.

The upshot of all this is that Moon Dust did not begin in 1953, but late in 1957. It was in operation until 1985, and contrary to Mattingley’s claim, it was deployed and was not shut down. When the name was compromised in 1985, the code name was changed. In a letter to Robert Todd, dated July 1, 1987, he was told the “nickname Project Moon Dust no longer exists.” The new name was not releasable because even the code name was classified.

In the years that followed, we have not been able to learn the new name, and we don’t know if it is still in operation today. All I can say for certain is that we know, based on other information, that the Pentagon did engage in UFO research not all that long ago and though they say that project ended, we don’t know if that is true. After all, they told us that Project Sign, the first official UFO project had ended, but the name was merely changed to Grudge. We were told that Grudge had ended, but the name was changed to Blue Book. We were told that Blue Book had ended, but we know that Project Moon Dust survived the end of Blue Book and was still in operation in 1987 when the name was changed.

What we really see here, and what we can document, is a long history of Air Force investigation of UFOs, Air Force saying one thing and doing another, and that UFO investigation continued beyond the end of Blue Book, and that other studies of UFOs have been conducted into the 21^st century. What this tells us that there are many aspects of the UFO problem that have not been revealed to us and that there are still secrets being kept.

Art Bell Has Died

Art Bell, the creator and original host of Coast-to-Coast died on April 13, in Pahrump, Nevada. He was 72.

There isn’t much information available at this time. The announcement was made by the Nye County sheriff’s office You can watch it here:

https://www.facebook.com/nyecountysheriff/videos/1084985051644669/

Bell had been retired for a number of years, first leaving Coast-to-Coast but later returned to hosting duties for a short time. He said that he wanted to spend more time with his new wife and daughter. He was the host of Midnight in the Desert but soon retired from that as well.

I was a guest on Coast-to-Coast a number of times. Bell and I disagreed about the reality of MJ-12 and some of the other aspects of the UFO phenomenon but the interviews were always cordial, and I would hope, interesting.

Like so many others in the UFO and the paranormal fields, I did not know him personally, only through this radio programs and speaking with him on the telephone both privately and as a guest on his programs.

He brought conspiracy theories, UFOs and the paranormal to many with his radio programs. Until his retirement, he was a voice that presented many different ideas and while we might not have accepted all of them as based in our shared reality, at the very least, he got us talking about them. Sometimes that is the best than can be said and is certainly a way of providing information to a larger audience than might have been originally available. In other, more precise words, he facilitated conversations and opened us all to alternatives that we might not have even noticed.

Here There Be Giants (Maybe)

Several months ago, I had been watching a series about the search for giants, meaning, I suppose, a race of extra-large humans. I saw some newspaper articles from decades ago suggesting that an extraordinary tall man had lived and died in a small town. The doctor suggested he was, maybe nine feet, maybe eight feet tall. The point is that there seemed to be some evidence for the existence of this man that included measurements made by the doctor.

I also noticed that there were those who rejected the idea, saying that there were no giants. It was a wild goose chase, not unlike the search for treasure on Oak Island (okay, they didn’t say Oak Island, I just mentioned that because it seems to be me that Oak Island is/was a wild goose chase).

But, I wondered, just how tall was the tallest human who had ever lived. Anyone who had a computer can learn about Robert Pershing Wadlow, who, according to the documentation available was nearly nine feet tall when he died. He was huge. He was, dare I say it, “A giant.”

The Long and the Short of It.
Photo courtesy Roswell Yearbook.

There was also Angus MacAskill who was nearly eight feet tall, which would have qualified him for the NBA, had it existed in the nineteenth century and who was mentioned on some lists because he was what they called a natural giant. That meant, simply, that his size was not the result of a malfunction of his pituitary gland.

And, because the program had focused on giants in antiquity, I thought I would mention Maximinus Thrax, a Roman emperor, who died sometime around 238, and was claimed to have been just over eight and a half feet tall. In other words, in the Roman world of the time, he would have been considered a giant.

I thought, there is some compelling evidence that there had been some very tall people throughout history. They were so tall that they would be considered giants, especially in a world where people might not have averaged much over five feet tall. We don’t have to look for evidence that there were giants. That seemed to be established fact by the proper documentation.

But, of course, that wasn’t the point of the search for giants. They weren’t looking for the individual who suffered from a glandular problem, but for a race of humans who would have been considered giants. They weren’t really looking for someone pushing nine feet tall, but a race that was twelve or fifteen feet tall. They wanted to prove that there had been giants at one time, living among, or near the smaller humans.

In fact, there was a report not all that long ago, in December, 2014, in the World News Daily Report that claimed the Smithsonian Institution had destroyed thousands of giant human skeletons at the beginning of the last century. In a legal case that supposedly made it all the way to the United States Supreme Court, the Smithsonian was required to release documentation about all this, proving that these skeletons had existed and that those at the Smithsonian had destroyed them.

The allegations came originally from the American Institution of Alternative Archeology which claimed that the skeletons, which would have called the theory of evolution into question had been ordered by high-ranking administrators at the Smithsonian destroyed.

So, I have moved from the idea that there were individuals who might have been considered giants but that there was no race that would be considered giants, to a point where evidence of giants had been systematically destroy to preserve a specific idea. Evidence and documentation that was required to be released by the Supreme Court.

Frankly, the article made little sense to me. I don’t know why the Smithsonian would have classified documents about administrative details, I don’t know why they would have destroyed “tens of thousands” of skeletons” of what would have been historical significance, nor do I understand why the Supreme Court would have been brought in on this… and if they had, wouldn’t their ruling not only be of  interest to the media, but wouldn’t I (or a lawyer) be able to retrieve information about such a ruling because it would be in the public record?

I couldn’t find any information about this American Institution of Alternative Archeology. Anytime I see something like “alternative archaeology,” I become suspicious. The alternative suggests that it is not a recognized organization. But, in this case, I couldn’t any references to it, other than from the original article. All references ended up there.

Or, in other words, I don’t buy any this story, and it seems that while there is some very good information out there debunking it, not to mention some logical and internal inconsistencies, there still seems to be way too many who believe it. After all, the government is hiding the evidence of giants, or so they believe.

Here’s the truth about all this as I understand and my research, quick as it might have been, tells me about it. Yes, there have been some very tall people and I wouldn’t be surprised if there weren’t a couple who exceeded nine feet in height. Wadlow came very close at just over eight feet, eleven inches. However, they weren’t part of a separate race of giant humans, but individuals from the human race who grew very tall.

There is just no independent, corroborative evidence that a race of giants ever co-existed as a separate body from the smaller human race. (Yes, I know about Gigantopithecus but that is classified as an ape and not human,) The best evidence available to us today is that some people grow very tall, some just tall, some fit into the average, and some people are short. Other than that, this has become a non-story that is based on a bogus article about a non-existent organization and that is driven by those who make what we laughingly call documentary television.