Wednesday, March 31, 2021

Did Mike Rogers Repudiate the Travis Walton Abduction?

 

There has been a bit of a controversy lately. Travis Walton and Mike Rogers are at odds with one another and some have interpreted this to mean that Rogers no longer supports the story of Walton’s abduction. I read a number of posts about it and they were confusing. It was unclear if Rogers was saying, finally, that the abduction was a hoax, or maybe something less exciting. His words were that he no longer supported Travis Walton.

Travis Walton

I know Rogers to some extent. We have communicated over the last couple of years. I did meet him once, in 1997, in Roswell. Nothing long and involved. He and Walton were finishing a presentation and the next person up was Russ Estes. I was there with Estes and we all just said, “Hello.” Walton and Rogers left before Estes took the microphone and began to speak.

I have had Rogers on my radio show and you can listen to that interview by scrolling through the listings on the embedded audio player. Just look for Mike Rogers. I believe there is a problem with one segment in the first or second hour of the interview that we failed to get fixed. You can read about it here:

http://kevinrandle.blogspot.com/2019/09/x-zone-broadcast-network-mike-rogers.html

Anyway, I emailed Rogers about all this. I thought I understood the situation. It seemed that Walton and Rogers had a falling out over a personal matter. It was strong enough that Rogers wasn’t going to support Walton, which I took to mean that he wasn’t going to be with him on any interviews or at any presentations. It wasn’t that Rogers was repudiating the abduction tale. He was severing his connection to Walton over this personal matter.

However, during the email exchange, Rogers sent the following, “You must realize that none of us witnesses saw Travis get abducted.  That in itself speaks volumes. The further this goes the more I wonder.” The emphasis is in the original. He added, “You can quote me on that.”

Yes, we can say that they all passed polygraph tests, or rather most of them did. But those first tests were about the Rogers’ team having murdered Walton and not about the abduction. Walton failed his first polygraph but subsequently passed two others. Walton has said that the first test was flawed because the polygrapher didn’t believe in UFOs and thought the whole thing was a hoax. The alleged test wasn’t a properly conducted test. Walton has a point here. You can, of course, read all about that in Walton’s Fire in the Sky.

Steve Pierce Photo copyright by Randle

I did talk with Steve Pierce several years ago about this, and the story that he and Philip Klass had talked about Pierce recanting. Klass would pay ten thousand dollars for that. I covered all this years ago and you can read about that here:

http://kevinrandle.blogspot.com/2012/07/steve-pierce-and-travis-walton.html

http://kevinrandle.blogspot.com/2012/03/philip-klass-travis-walton-and-steve.html

I will note here that none of those who were involved in the sighting and the subsequent events that night has ever said that it was a hoax. All have remained a solid front about the case. The statement by Rogers to me just hours ago is the first crack in the wall. You have to wonder about the line, “You must realize that none of us witnesses saw Travis get abducted.” Is there a deeper meaning hidden there?

When I began this minor quest, I had hoped clarify the situation but I now fear that I have muddied the water even more. I’m not sure what to make of all this?

And, I have reached out to Walton although he hasn’t answered an email from me in a couple of years. I had invited him on the radio show but his last comment was, “What’s the point?” I have not heard back from him, but then, I didn’t send the email all that long ago. If there is a reply, I’ll post it too.

Calvin Parker is Seriously Ill

 I have received word that Calvin Parker, one half of the Hickson-Parker abduction story has some serious health issues. Philip Mantle, who published Calvin’s books wrote, “My friend and colleague Calvin Parker in the USA hasn’t been well for a year or two now. After a number of medical tests his doctors have decided that he has to undergo surgery, possibly next week. I’ll not go into specifics but will say that he has a very serious medical problem the cost and the cost of constant hospital visits, tests and now an operation is simply beyond his means.

Calvin Parker
As those of you who visit here often know, I’m not a fan of alien abduction stories. I believe there are terrestrial explanations for most of them running from poor interview technique, to psychological issues to outright hoaxes. There are few cases that I find intriguing and that don’t seem to fit that pattern. These are usually single events that take place outside in what I would consider targets of opportunity. The Hickson-Parker abduction fits into that pattern. Two guys, outside, when the abduction took place.

I met Charles Hickson many years ago at a UFO convention. His story was virtually the same as always with little in the way of corroborative detail. The big plus was that the local sheriff, after the abduction, left Hickson and Parker alone in an interrogation room with a recorder running. They said nothing to one another that would suggest hoax.

It was only in recent years that Calvin told his side of the story. I interviewed him twice for the radio version of A Different Perspective. I really didn’t detect anything that would suggest hoax. I just don’t believe that he is sophisticated enough to construct an elaborate hoax. Maybe a better way to say it is that there seemed to be no motive for it and his wasn’t the sort of character that would agree to do something like that.

You can listen to the two interviews I did with him by scrolling through the interview lists on the audio player to the left. You can decide for yourself. But I will note that others have been located that saw something strange that night and have been interviewed about those experiences. They tend to corroborate the story being told by Calvin today.

For those interested in supplying some financial assistance to Calvin, there is a Go Fund Me page. You can access the page here:

https://gofund.me/8b4b0e46

Normally I wouldn’t do anything like this, but then Calvin was kind enough to appear on the radio version of the blog twice and share his tales. Too often, those of us who do these sorts of interviews seem to forget about the guests when the show ends. I just thought Calvin deserved a little help with what will probably be monstrous medical bills.

Philip said that he would keep us all apprised of the outcome of the necessary surgery and I’ll post information here. Given that, I thought it only fair to repay his kindness with a note about his health and his needs. Help if you can and if you want to

Saturday, March 27, 2021

Memories That Seem Real

 

I have suggested for years that memory is unreliable and I have cited a study done by Ulric Neisser after the Challenger disaster. He provided his first-year students with a short survey asking them about how they heard about the disaster, where they were and the like. Three years later, he provided those same students, now seniors, with the same six questions. He added a seventh about how accurate they thought their memories were.

He found that nearly 75% of those were wrong about some of what they remembered. Nearly a quarter of them were completely wrong. Once of the students, when confronted by that information, said that she was sorry, but it was how she remembered it.

Why bring this up here and now?

I have been posting to a blog (www.vietnamgroundzero.blogspot.com) my experiences as a helicopter pilot in Vietnam. At the top of the blog, I note that these are the relative true stories of my year there. I said relative true because I’m aware of the foibles of memory and how it can fool us.

One of those stories was called “The Real, True Story of My Thanksgiving Dinner.” I had said for literally decades, that I had left the dinner on a tray in the serving line as the flight crews were scrambled. I won’t go into all the details but if you wish to read that story, you can find it here:

https://vietnamgroundzero.blogspot.com/2021/02/the-real-true-story-of-my-thanksgiving.html

And now for the rest of the story as the late Paul Harvey would say. I have all the letters that I wrote home more than fifty years ago. I hadn’t looked at them and hadn’t really cared to read them in all those years. But, for the blog, which, frankly, I created to help promote the Vietnam Ground Zero books I had written with Robert Charles Cornett in the 1980s, and to satisfy some of my friends and colleagues who were interested in what I had experienced, I pulled those letters out.

I will note here that, more than once, the flight crews were scrambled in the middle of a meal, often to either reinforce or extract a unit that had gotten into some kind of trouble. But, as you’ll read, it didn’t happen on Thanksgiving. One of the letters explained exactly where we were. We were not at Cu Chi but actually had been deployed to Tay Ninh for some sort of mission. We were told that the Thanksgiving meal would be provided there. Apparently, it wasn’t very good.

The Hornet Company area, circa February, 1969. Photo by Kevin Randle.


I have no memory of this. I must bow, of course, to the letter I had written a few days after that experience. I have to say that a document written at the time is surely more accurate than my fifty-year-old memories. This would be my fifty-year experiment in the reliability of memory. I offer this as a cautionary tale as we attempt to unravel mysteries that are decades old. Documentation created at the time is certainly better than memories related long after the fact.

There is one more caveat to be offered here. As I work through those letters and tell the stories that happened in Vietnam, I can verify some of the memories as correct, from the story of “Smokey” to that of Tet 1969 (I used, as an aid, an article I had written decades ago when those memories were fresher, but what I remembered now was reinforced by that article).

The point is simply this. Memory isn’t always reliable. We must search for additional corroboration but we much not reject the memory because it happens to be old.

Thursday, March 25, 2021

X-Zone Broadcast Network - Lawrence Spencer Polygraph Challenge

 

For those who listened to the interview with Lawrence Spencer on March 24, you heard me ask if he would take a polygraph test. This would help us understand the situation about the claim that he had received the information for his book from a nurse who had been stationed in Roswell in 1947.


His response was, “Absolutely.”

Given that, the following was sent to him on March 24:

Dear Mr. Spencer:

I have been asked to arrange a polygraph exam to be conducted on you in direct reference to the statements and comments that you made during your radio interview with Kevin Randle, earlier this afternoon – Wednesday, March 24, 2021 between 2:45 – 3:55 pm Eastern.

In order to proceed with the exam, which will focus on your self-published book, “Top Secret – Alien Interview” and statements made there in, we need to confirm that you agree to have this polygraph exam administered to you, and:

- You will not receive any money for having the polygraph exam given to you;

- You agree that REL-MAR McConnell Media Company will have the full and the exclusive access to the administration of, and the results of the said polygraph test, including video and audio recording and that REL-MAR will own the rights to the said polygraph exam;

- A formal release will be sent to you upon the agreement to this email.

Please let me know which state and city you reside in in order to secure the appropriate polygraph examiner who services the area where you reside.

I look forward to your reply.

Rob McConnell,

President & CEO,

REL-MAR McConnell Media Company

 

To be fair, in my communication with Spencer, there was always a delay in his response, meaning, of course, that he doesn’t send a response quickly. It could be a day or more before we hear anything from him. I will, of course, provide updates as I have them.

X-Zone Broadcast - Lawrence Spencer and the Nonexistent Nurse

 

Lawrence R. Spencer was the guest on the program this week. As noted in an earlier post, he claimed that a “Roswell nurse” had sent him a package of documents about the UFO crash and her telepathic communications with the alien survivor. You can read that earlier post here:

http://kevinrandle.blogspot.com/2021/02/roswell-and-matilda-odonnell-macelroy.html

Lawrence Spencer

Although he had said he would send a copy of his book to me, I told him that I already had it and didn’t need it. I did read enough of it to realize what it was, and enough of it to realize that it was not based in our shared reality. I did, however, ask him a few questions to set up the program, or as they would say in the world of courtrooms, lawsuits and legal dramas, to build a foundation. It was also meant to provide information for those who had not stumbled onto this particular nonsense. You can listen to it here:

https://www.spreaker.com/episode/44038805

(Of course, you can access this show and others in the embedded audio player on the left as well.)

He said that he had been sent all these documents about the “nurse’s” role in the Roswell case including the “top-secret” transcripts of her debriefing sessions. He said that he had retyped the documents and published them before destroying them. He said he was afraid of the government targeting him and his family for releasing them… he was afraid these documents had been stolen. He didn’t seem to understand my point that if he had retyped them and published them, he wouldn’t be safe because it proved he had had the documents. By destroying all the originals, he had no way to prove that the documents had ever existed and that he wasn’t just inventing the tale. There was no difference between publishing the originals so that we could see them and publishing his retyped versions of the originals since both could lead to the same place. But without the originals there was no way to verify anything about them.

I also noted that his attempts to vet the documents were nearly nonexistent. He said he looked on the Internet. I suggested that he could have contacted one of the Roswell researchers for help. His excuse was that he simply wasn’t “into UFOs and Roswell,” so he didn’t know about that. I thought typing in Roswell UFO crash would lead to our names… but he avoided all contact. And that tying this to Roswell was a way of drawing clicks to the nonsensical tale.

For those interested, you can listen to the interview and listen to his rather lame attempts to suggest the story and nurse were real. I made it clear that I didn’t believe there was a nurse or any documents. In fact, I suggested a polygraph to get at the truth and the invitation has been sent to him.

Next up is Bill Konkolesky to talk about his book, Experiencer 2: Two Worlds Collide. Should make for an interesting show.

Monday, March 22, 2021

Where is Calvin Parker?

 

For those who have been following the ongoing saga of the Pascagoula UFO abduction and specifically the revelations made by Calvin Parker, there is some sad news. Calvin has dropped out of the limelight in the recent weeks and Philip Mantle, publisher of Calvin’s book on the abduction, has told us that Calvin has been diagnosed with cancer. He is recovering from recent surgery.

Calvin, along with Charles Hickson, reported, in October, 1973, that they had been taken on board a UFO and subjected to a somewhat invasive physical examination. Dr. J. Allen Hynek, then the founder of the Center for UFO Studies and Dr. James Harder, APRO’s Director of Research, flew to Mississippi to investigate. Both scientists were impressed by the story and believed the men to be telling the truth.

Calvin Parker
Quite naturally, the case was wrapped in controversy because of the claim of alien abduction. There were elements of the report that were not easily explained or dismissed. Recently, as Calvin traveled the world telling of the abduction experience, other witnesses have been found. It adds a dimension of believability to the case.

I have interviewed Calvin twice on the radio version of A Different Perspective. You can use the audio file on the embedded audio player at the left here and scroll down to find and listen to those interviews.

I will confess that I don’t know what to make of this case. On the one hand it seems to be a stretch to accept the idea that alien beings are abducting humans for any sort of research. On the other, the facts as have been reported seem to support that very idea. I have said for a long time that I’m more inclined to accept these accounts of targets of opportunity than I am the tales of long-term longitudinal survey. I tend to believe Calvin’s account which doesn’t mean that there isn’t a terrestrial explanation, only that I don’t believe that he is engaged in a hoax.

Give a listen to those interviews and let me know your reactions in the comments section. As I say, I tend to believe that he’s telling the truth and I know of no real terrestrial explanation to cover the facts other than hoax. The case rests on the testimony of the two men and now on some of those who witnessed strange things that night.

Saturday, March 20, 2021

Coast to Coast - Did the Pentagon Reveal Crashed Saucer Debris

 

The big news in the last few days is the announcement by Tony Bragalia, that the Pentagon had confirmed to him that they had recovered UFO crash debris. Tony told me that he has been chasing the “memory metal” that was described by Bill Brazel. When I interviewed Brazel, he described three types of debris he had found in 1947. Brazel’s father, Mack, said it looked like the stuff from the contraption he had found on his ranch north of Roswell in 1947. One of those scraps was something that looked like aluminum foil but when folded or wadded up and released, would return to its original shape.

Bill Brazel

What that somewhat complicated paragraph is telling us is that material from the 1947 crash had properties that suggested metal with a memory, and Tony has been chasing that lead for several years. More than three years ago he submitted a Freedom of Information request to various government agencies. He asked for, “Associated with the Department of Defense Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program of the US Pentagon are warehouses in the Las Vegas, NV area scheduled to soon hold metal-like alloy material recovered from Unidentified Aerial Phenomena. This could include physical debris recovered by personnel of the Department of Defense as residue, flotsam, shot-off material or crashed material from UAPs or unidentified flying objects.”

All fairly specific. He received nearly 150 pages of material in response. The trouble was that there was no mention of alien spacecraft, UFOs, UAPs or anything like that in those documents. At one point, there was a mention of extraterrestrial material, but that referred using material found on other planets in construction of bases on those planets. Tony did tell me that there was nothing in the documents about anything alien.

According to him, the important connection is made in the letter that accompanied the documents. The FOIA officer, used the term, UAP in that response, and that, according to Tony is the connection. You can listen to that interview here:

https://www.spreaker.com/episode/43724887

It didn’t seem all that solid to me but I wanted more information. I contacted the expert in FOIA, John Greenewald, who had read the documents that Tony had recovered and issued his opinion on all this. John, like me, noticed no reference to anything alien in the documents. He found that worrisome. You can listen to that interview here:

https://www.spreaker.com/episode/43725610

More importantly, when I asked about the connection in the FOIA letter of response, John pointed out that it seemed to be a cut and paste job. What he meant was that as the FOIA officer wrote his response, he cut and pasted phrases from Tony’s original request into that response. That tended to mitigate the importance of the use of the term UAP in that response.

John Greenewald

Tony had suggested that the material that was to be sent to Las Vegas would be sent to Bob Bigelow of Bigelow Aerospace for reverse engineering. Bigelow when asked about this said that he had received nothing like that. He denied that he had any material created by aliens or on another planet.

It boils down to what the FOIA officer meant, and if the use of UAP meant that the Pentagon had recovered debris that was going to be provided into American industry for exploitation. Since many of the documents Tony received had already been released, and given that the classification on them was For Official Use Only, the lowest level of classification which doesn’t even require a locked drawer for storage, it seems to me, that the revelation wasn’t as exciting as Tony thought it was and didn’t actually confirm Pentagon possession of alien debris. Turns out that this was a near miss.

Friday, March 19, 2021

X-Zone Broadcast Network - Steven Bassett , Disclosure and Death Threats

Steve Bassett, he of the Paradigm Research Group, was my guest this week. I thought we would talk about Disclosure and what it would mean. We did take a few excursions into other arenas, however. You can listen to the interview here:

https://www.spreaker.com/episode/43938587

Steve began with providing a definition of Disclosure, but then moved onto the possibility of Congressional Hearings that would lead to Disclosure. He believes that

Steven Bassett

the time is ripe given what is happening in the world. Disclosure is the goal now, though I wondered if there was any political benefit to Disclosure. To me, the government operates not for the benefit of the governed, but to retain their power. We’ve seen plenty of examples of this in the last several years.

We did discuss, briefly, the erosion in trust, not only in the government but in the mainstream media as well. Although I didn’t mention it during the show, I was thinking of the Washington Post recent admission that they had run with a story about telephone calls and what was said based upon, apparently, a single source. Other outlets picked up the story, suggesting that the had confirmed the information. Recent events showed that the story was not accurate and the Washington Post printed a retraction.

We also talked about the implications of full Disclosure and what that might mean. Steven cited our bombardment of alien stories, programs, movies, books, documentaries and various other cultural aspects filled with the idea of alien visitation. He suggested that it was now so embedded in our culture that there wouldn’t be a big shock if the government announced that aliens had been visiting Earth for decades, if not centuries.

I did mention that contact with a technologically superior civilization resulted in the destruction of the technologically inferior civilization. Steven thought that I was talking about conquest but I was actually talking about the impact of the technology on the civilization. The technology could undermine the civilization causing radically alterations to it. Steven wanted to talk about the Aztecs and the Spanish, which wasn’t quite the point I was driving at.

Steve brought up some of the testimony by Roswell witnesses, suggesting dozens had been threatened with death if they talked about what they had seen. I thought that some of that might have been overblown and was the result of soldiers, who had been exposed to classified information being reminded that, well, disclosure of that information could result in prison and fines. Others, such as Glenn Dennis had been discredited.

Steve did send an email about this, naming several witnesses who had been threatened in this fashion, including George Wilcox, the Roswell Sheriff, quoting the Anaya brothers. Although I find that somewhat problematic, I will note two things here. One is that Barbara Dugger, granddaughter of the sheriff reported the same thing, and that this testimony is second hand at best.

He also said that Mack Brazel told radio station KGFL minority owner Bob Wolf that “Those people will kill you if I tell you what I know.” This happened in 1963 not long

Mack Brazel

before Brazel died. But once again, it is second-hand information related to researchers Tom Carey and Don Schmitt years later. It does seem odd that in all our discussions with Bill Brazel, he never mentioned anything like that.

During the show, I brought up Frankie Rowe, but it didn’t seem, in the initial interviews with her, that the threats had been, well, deadly. Instead, she said that she was told that her parents would end up in Orchard Park, which had been a POW camp during the Second World War.

Dr. Lejeune Foster, another of these “witnesses,” was not in Roswell in 1947. She was a doctor in San Diego, supposedly called in because of her expertise on the spinal cord and her high security clearance related to her work during the Second World War. According to the family members and her housekeeper, she returned from examining the bodies a changed woman. She said that as she was debriefed, she was told that if she talked she would lose her license to practice medicine and that she risked being killed. But researchers did not get that information from her, but her family who aren’t specifically identified.

My point was that we have no direct quotes from those involved that suggest death as the penalty for telling what they knew. We have the stories of family members and friends told literally decades after the fact. As I mentioned, the military members would have been told that the release of classified information to those not cleared would result in severe penalties of imprisonment and fine. Over the years, in the telling of the tales, those penalties might have been exaggerated. We have seen the sifting of stories as they are told and retold. Steve did mention that he didn’t believe that the military would have carried out the threats, but I have to wonder if they had been made.

Steve did predict that would we see some changes in the government position of UFOs in the very near future, suggesting the possibility of Congressional hearings in the weeks to come. He was explaining how these things come about, which, in and of itself, might be educational.

Next week is Lawrence Spencer. We’ll be talking about his book based on his contact with Matilda O’Connell MacElroy who claimed to be a technician in Roswell at the time of the crash. Should be an interesting interview. 

Thursday, March 11, 2021

Coast to Coast - Phoenix Lights, Triangular UFO Version

With the coming of the anniversary of the Phoenix Lights, I thought it time to revisit those sightings. However, I think the discussion of the lights seen over Phoenix actually masks the other, more significant sightings of a V-shaped or triangular-shaped craft that was seen over much of Arizona that night. In this discussion, I have eliminated the information about the lights to focus on that craft. I have written about it at other times. Some of the information here is based on my discussion of that craft with Mike Rogers, he of Travis Walton abduction fame. You can listen to that discussion here:

https://www.spreaker.com/episode/19005920

The sightings of an object that could be described as a flying wing with lights in a “V” formation were made first in Nevada rather than Arizona. Just before seven (Pacific Standard Time) a man living in Henderson, just outside of Las Vegas, said that he saw a “V”-shaped object that he thought was about the size of a Boeing 747 and that sounded like the rushing of wind. There were six lights on the leading edge. He watched as it flew to the southeast, eventually disappearing over the horizon.

A young Mike Rogers

Had this been the only sighting in that area that night, it would have been just another UFO report. A little over an hour later, at 8:15 p.m., a former police officer said that he and his family saw a cluster of lights in a “V” formation near Paulden, Arizona. He described them as red-orange balls of light. He said that there were four lights traveling together with a fifth bringing up the rear. He said that the lights were in sight for about two minutes and that they made no sound. He thought that each of the lights consisted of two parts. When he returned home, he watched them through binoculars until they vanished over the horizon.

Others reported the UFO as it flew from northern Arizona to the southern corner, a distance of about two hundred miles in about thirty minutes, or at about 400 miles per hour. The speed is not outside that of conventional aircraft, though the configuration suggests something else.

Peter Davenport, and his National UFO Reporting Center (NUFORC) received dozens of calls from witnesses in Arizona that night.  According to him:

One group of three witnesses, located just north of Phoenix, reported seeing a huge, wedge-shaped craft with five lights on is ventral surface pass overhead with an eerie “gliding” type of flight. It coursed to the south and passed between two mountain peaks to the south. The witnesses emphasized how huge the object was, blocking up to 70 – 90 degrees of the sky.

A second group of witnesses, a mother and four daughters near the intersection of Indian School Road and 7th Avenue [in Phoenix], were shocked to witness an object, shaped somewhat like a sergeant’s stripes, approach from over Camelback Mountain to the north. They report that it stopped directly above them, where it hovered for an estimated 5 minutes. They described how it filled at least 30 – 40 degrees of sky, and how it exhibited a faint glow along its trailing edge. The witnesses felt they could see individual features on the ventral surface of the object, and they were certain that they were looking at a very large, solid object.

After this point in the sighting, the facts are somewhat less clear to investigators. It is known that at least one object continued generally to the south and southeast, passing over the communities of Scottsdale, Glendale, and Gilbert. One of the witnesses in Scottsdale, a former airline pilot with 13,700 hours of flight time, reported seeing the object execute a distinct turn as it approached his position on the ground. He noted that he witnessed many lights on the object as it approached him, but that the number of lights appeared to diminish as it got closer to overhead. Many other witnesses in those communities reported seeing the object pass overhead as it made its way toward the mountains to the south of Phoenix.

Other sightings occurred shortly afterward along Interstate 10 in the vicinity of Casa Grande. One family of five, who were driving from Tucson to Phoenix, reported that the object that passed over their station wagon was so large that they could see one “wing tip” of the object out one side of their car, and the other “wing tip” out the other side. They estimated they were driving toward Phoenix at approximately 80 miles per hour, and they remained underneath the object for between one and two minutes as it moved in the opposite direction. They emphasized how incredibly huge the object appeared to be as it blocked out the sky above their car.

Many witnessed, located throughout the Phoenix basin, allegedly continued to witness objects and peculiar clusters of lights for several hours following the initial sightings. One group of witnesses reported witnessing a large disc streak to the west over Phoenix at very high speed. Others reported peculiar orange “fireballs,” which appeared to hover in the sky even hours after the initial sightings.

One of the more intriguing reports was submitted by a young man who claimed to be an Airman in the Air Force, stationed at Luke Air Force Base, located to the west of Phoenix in Litchfield Park. He telephoned the National UFO Reporting Center at 3:20 a.m. on Friday, some eight hours after the sightings on the previous night, and reported that two USAF F-15C fighters had been “scrambled” from Luke AFB, and had intercepted one of the objects. Although the presence of F-15’s could never be confirmed, the airman provided detailed information which proved to be highly accurate, based on what investigators would reconstruct from witnesses over subsequent weeks and months. Two days after his first telephone call, the airman called to report that he had just been informed by his commander that he was being transferred to an assignment in Greenland.

What all this demonstrates is that there were more sightings than have been reported by most of those commenting on the lights. More important, some of the explanations offered in the days that followed did not account for the variety of sightings.

But the sightings didn’t end; they just became more controversial and produced a number of video tapes. These were lights that inspired the investigations as well as the media attention because nothing excites the media like a good visual. One of the tapes, shown repeatedly on local, national, and cable television, was analyzed using an impressive looking array of computers and some very sophisticated software. The conclusions drawn in those early investigations were that the lights were not natural phenomena and did not exhibit any of the features of manufactured lights. In other words, they were unique. Later investigation suggested that flares were responsible for some of those sightings.

Quite naturally, the Air Force was questioned about this and the official spokesman said, as usual, the Air Force no longer investigates UFOs. Most people in Phoenix were unhappy with that answer and believed that the Air Force was hiding the truth about this.

Others, including private researchers began to gather the stories of the lights that had moved across Arizona, some of them believing that all the sightings were related. There were those who claimed to have a triangular-shaped object and others who claimed to have seen individual lights in a triangular or “V” shaped formation. Some thought the lights were white, others red, and still others saw various faded colors in the lights.

There is no radar data available for any of this. According to those at Sky Harbor these high flights would not be monitored on their radar. It would be controlled by FAA radar in Albuquerque. If such a flight had been made it would have been represented by an asterisk, but since they flight would have been far above their control zone, they would not have been concerned about. Radar records would have been kept in Albuquerque, but since no question about the radar displays was raised within two weeks, the tapes were reused. The record has been lost.

It might also be said that this is where things become confusing. There is good testimony that one formation of lights was identified as airplanes. While those in the UFO community were talking of multiple formations, it was reported by Steve Wilson of The Arizona Republic, that they might be right. He interviewed four people who saw the lights and whose testimony suggests there was more than a single formation. He reported:

Dr. Bradley Evans, 47, is a clinical psychiatrist from Tucson. He and his wife, Kris, were driving north on Interstate 10 to a swimming meet in Tempe. They watched the lights for 20 minutes or so move slowly south in a diamond formation and pass over them at an estimated 1,500 feet. Even then, with the car’s moon roof open, they heard not a sound from the sky. He was ‘awed’ by the experience and has no idea what he saw. Kris said she couldn’t explain it either and guesses it was ‘something military.’

…Max Saracen, 34, is a real estate consultant who lives in north Phoenix. He and his wife, Shala, were driving west on Deer Valley Road when they saw a huge triangular craft. They pulled off the road, got out and watched it pass overhead. “It was very spooky – this gigantic ship blocking out the stars and silently creeping across the sky. I don’t know of any aircraft with silent engines.

Adding to this was an investigation by Arizona MUFON investigator Richard F. Motzer who studied “all the videos I could find and interviewed other witnesses,” outlined his research in the July 1997 (number 351) of the MUFON Journal. He wrote:

The key to the solution was also the biggest mystery. Why did all videos of 3-13-97 at 10:00 p.m. have a different number of lights, different order of starting and decay, and shapes?

It was really dependent upon the observation point of the witness in the Phoenix area and, most important, how high their viewing point was. It turned out that the lights were not over Phoenix, but near the Estrella Mountains to the southwest. This determination was made after viewing all the video tapes and going to all but one of the sites and shooting 35 mm film in daylight. Using the point marked by the pilot, I drew a line from each of the sites where the Estrella lights were taped. On the Rairden tape there are nine lights, but only eight lights on the Moon Valley footage and just in the early part you see a light form briefly which then goes out, but did it really? No, something must have blocked it out, but it was still there in the Rairden footage. As the lights drifted downward, some lights were blocked out by the many small peaks making up the Estrella range.

…What I wanted to find was footage where a tripod was used and the zoom lens was left in one spot. To my surprise there were several clips that met these specifications. What I did next was to mark each segment the ground on a monitor and the ending position of each light. When I ran the editor video deck in reverse, I could see each light rise in altitude and drift to the right or to the left. In all the video clips the results were the same. Just before each light went out, there was an increase in the descent of each light.

What this suggested to Motzer was that the lights were, in fact flares. The witnesses believe that the lights were in front of the Estrella Mountains, but the video showed they were not. He learned that the Army had been firing flares that night and that these were parachute flares. The heat generated by the flare helps to slow the rate of descent of the flares, but as the flare begins to die out, the rate of descent increases. But there should be smoke visible and some of the witnesses said they had seen no smoke. Motzer reported that the control tower crew at Sky Harbor had seen the smoke.

With that, including the confirmation by the Army National Guard they were firing flares that night, that they were firing them at 8:30, 9:25 and 10:00 on March 13 and the evidence on the tapes suggests flares, that seems to end the questions. Contrary to the reports from Village Labs, the evidence available suggests flares as the most logical and best solution here.

But this does not explain the “V” formations that some people reported. Giving the timing of some of the reports and given the length of time that some of the “V” formations were visible to witnesses, it seems that there might have been more than a single event. That would mean that both Stanley and Contry saw airplanes but some of the others didn’t.

This seems to be where the March 13 events remains. As I mentioned briefly, I believe the video tapes show flares and some of the “V” formations are identified as aircraft, but there isn’t a good explanation for the sightings of the large, V-shaped craft. As I say, those sightings have been lost in the glare of the flares and the discussion of the Phoenix Lights. 

Friday, March 05, 2021

Coast to Coast - American Airlines Sighting and Cigar-Shaped Craft

 

There is more information about the American Airlines flight and their UFO sighting, though the information is very fluid. Fran Ridge has been working on the case and on Monday suggested that the object seen by the flight crew was a Lear Jet flying 5000 feet above the airliner. But then, on Wednesday, he reported that it couldn’t have been the Lear because the Lear’s transponder was on and it would have been seen on the airliner’s TCAS system, not to mention the jet would have been visible to the airline pilots.

He also reported that it wasn’t a missile test from White Sands because the FAA is notified about all missile tests. That left a black project that had gone off course or a UFO. I’ll stay on this until we have some sort of a solution. There are still numerous FOIA requests out there, including a search for the Lear Jet crew to learn if they had seen anything unusual. More information on the sighting can be found here:

https://apple.news/AIcV4UO_PQ_2jBFNk6tTh6Q

In this time frame, meaning since the beginning of the year, there have been other sightings of cigar-shaped or unusual craft in that area. On Feb 21, 2021, near Albuquerque, an object appeared directly over the witness. The UFO was described as a dull silver disk with a greenish-gold dome. It disappeared at a high speed and the witness managed to take three photographs.

On Feb 22, 2021, the witness on Hwy 285 between Artesia and Roswell, NM, saw two UFOs. One was missile shaped or cigar shaped and the other was reported as round. Both appeared to be on fire or glowing. The colors were said to be silver, pink and orange. They flew toward each other, then changed directions and left together. The witness said he had two pictures and claimed to have a video.

On January 9, a cigar-shaped craft was seen near Albuquerque. The object appeared in the east sky, above the silhouette of the mountains. There was a string of white lights, approximately 5 -10 lights, running horizontally. The object then quickly moved southward in an irregular zigzag pattern, and then rotated, causing the lights to shift from running horizontally to vertically. The lights remained in the vertical pattern. The object moved to a point slightly south from where the witness was standing and stopped. The object remained there for approximately a minute. The event lasted between 1 to 2 minutes and there was no sound coming from the UFO.

On January 12, 2021, the witness was turning on to Bookout Road south of Tularosa and noticed a bright star in the east over the Sacramento mountains. It was blinking and very large, and at first the witness thought it was a planet. The witness saw an orange orb slightly smaller than the bright star emerge from the star. It flew perfectly horizontally north of the bright blinking star. It paused, then a duplicate range light appeared from it and went in alignment with the star and the orange light. The final orange light emerged from the second orange light/orb, and they held a straight line for several minutes. The witness tried to get a picture but couldn’t because there was a car approaching. The orange orbs separated an equal distance from each other and the bright star. They moved in sequence further apart from each other and started to go bright and dim. All the orange lights but the bright star-like light began breaking formation.

Also, on January 12, and to show that these reports are from around the country, a man in Manhattan, NY, who described himself as sober, reported an object that had no lights. It was white and seemed to be reflecting the streetlights. He said it was moving too quickly to be a bird or a plane and was shaped like a butterknife.

Finally, on January 3, near the Buckley Space Force Base near Aurora, Colorado, and yes, the base has been redesignated as a Space Force Base, the witness and son were driving late in the afternoon. They spotted a cigar-shaped object that seemed to be hovering. They tried to take video of the object but failed. They wondered if it might be an airplane but were puzzled because it didn’t move. They also said that it was too long and was even from end to end making it more of a cylinder rather than a cigar suggesting that it wasn’t an airplane. They lost sight of it when they had to make a turn.

For those interested, an airline crew filmed a cigar-shaped craft over Utah in September, 2019. You can watch the video and learn more about the sighting here:

https://971zht.iheart.com/featured/it-came-from-the-web/content/2020-01-29-pilot-films-an-unusual-cigar-shaped-ufo-over-utah-video/

This is just one of many examples that are available of cigar-shaped craft. It was reported to MUFON.

X-Zone Broadcast Network - John Greenewald on the Nature of FOIA

 

In a follow up to Tony Bragalia’s interview, I reached out to John Greenewald, who I believe is the expert on FOIA. Tony and I had come to an impasse as he insisted that the FOIA officer’s use of UAP in his response was sufficient to connect the documents Tony received with tales of alien spaceship crashes. John had a different point of view and we discussed that. You can listen to that interview here:

https://www.spreaker.com/episode/43725610

John Greenewald

Probably the most important part of our discussion on FOIA was that many of the responses use the old cut and paste option, which plugs in parts of the original request into the response. John also talked about FOIA officers sometimes focusing on a single part of a multipart request. In this case it was UAP, which didn’t mean the Pentagon was admitting to anything, but attempting to respond to a request. In other words, the response was not an admission that they were pulling material that came from crash recovered debris. I think the discussion might clear up any questions about how some of this works.

We did take a look at the documents as well, known as DIRD (Defense Intelligence Reference Documents), many of which have been in the public arena for a number of years. There was nothing extraordinary in the documentation supplied, and as I had mentioned, I had just seen some of it in YouTube videos (that I found more by accident than in a real, concentrated search).

This interview was at the other end of the spectrum. Tony is convinced that the documents and the emails he has received prove that the Pentagon has crash recovered debris, and John believes the documents, and the emails, do not lead to that conclusion.

We did talk about the classification markings on the documents which was For Official Use Only (FOUO) which is the lowest of the classifications. It does not require the document to be safe guarded. You don’t even have to lock it in a drawer or cover it up when someone else approaches. It just keeps it from being disseminated to those on the outside… and if someone on the outside sees it, it doesn’t matter all that much. We agreed that had a spacecraft been recovered, the classification would be much higher than FOUO.

Next up is Steve Bassett, on the trail of discovery and a couple of other things he said are exciting. Questions, as usual, can be directed to the blog and I’ll try to get them asked during the show.

Wednesday, March 03, 2021

X-Zone Broadcast Network - Tony Bragalia and the Pentagon Uproar

 

Tony Bragalia received some interesting press with his website posting that the Pentagon had admitted, in a response to his FOIA request, that they had recovered alien debris. You can read the posts here (There is an earlier one as well):

https://www.ufoexplorations.com/

We did talk about his suggestion, talking first about FOIA and then how it works. We then discussed the documents he received and why he believed that they proved that the Pentagon had admitted to the debris. You can listen to the program here:

https://www.spreaker.com/episode/43724887

We did examine some of the information in the various reports he had, and I wondered about the low level of classification. I think part of our problem is that he was looking at this as something from a scientific and engineering arena, and I was thinking more in terms of military secrets. He thought that feeding the information into the private sector for study, using compartmentalization as a protection would be the proper way to study the debris. I think that it would be highly classified and held close to the vest by the military and by extension, the federal government (read Deep State).

We did get hung up on how he inferred, from the documentation he received, that alien debris was involved. To him it related to the specifics of his request, and to the response he received. Although the documents themselves make no reference to UFOs or alien debris, it was in the cover letter from the DoD FOIA officer and the use of the term UAP that was important to understanding the context. We might have spent too much time on this with neither of us budging on point of view.

You’ll notice that at the very end of the show, there was a bit of a problem. I was out of time and was attempting to wrap things up, but Tony had wanted to talk about John Greenewald. There just wasn’t time to do it and when you have two people talking at the same time, the listeners become annoyed. Besides that, in the notes I send to each guest prior to the show, I mention that I’ll take the last two or three minutes for the wrap up and we’ll sever the connection at that point. We had just run out of time and there wasn’t anything that I could do about it…

Ironically, next week’s guest is John Greenewald. We’ll be discussing FOIA, Bigelow Aerospace and the same documents that Tony and I discussed.

Kingman Rises from the Dead?

Like so many of the crashed UFO tales, this one is basically a single witness. Or rather, a single identified witness, and then some testimony from another source that suggests corroboration. That second witness is second hand, having heard the story from her late husband. And then a hint of additional witnesses that seemed to have leaped on the Kingman bandwagon later. In other words, in the final analysis, it is not a strong case but had the potential to be one.

Kingman, Arizona. Photo by Kevin Randle.

When first reported by Raymond Fowler in the April 1976 issue of Official UFO, it seemed that it might be one of those reports that went nowhere. Without some corroboration and some documentation, it would be impossible to accept, and it is next to impossible to verify.

Fowler, however, accepted the report because he had interviewed the witness, had a signed affidavit and a few documents that seemed to support the story. The evidence was flimsy, but it did exist. And that put Fowler, at least in the minds of some, ahead of most who had found other single witness UFO crash cases.

The first interview of the witness was conducted on February 3, 1971 by Jeff Young and Paul Chetham, two young men with an interest in UFOs. In fact, in a newspaper article published in the Framingham, Massachusetts, edition of the Middlesex News, Young was identified as a boy writing a book about UFOs for juveniles. The article mentioned that Young had interviewed a man who had claimed he worked with Project Blue Book and had made contact with a spaceship.

According to Young, the witness, later given the pseudonym “Fritz Werner” by Fowler to protect his identity (but known to us in today’s world as Arthur Stansel... I will use the Werner name throughout to avoid later confusion), had been at the site of a flying saucer crash about twenty years earlier. Werner, according to the information provided, was a graduate engineer who had degrees in mathematics and physics and a master’s degree in engineering. He graduated from Ohio University in 1949 and was first employed by the Air Materiel Command, which, according to UFO history, was responsible for the reverse engineering of the Roswell craft.

During the Young and Chetham interview Werner first told of just seeing a UFO during one of the atomic tests in Nevada. He and his colleagues had been drinking beer when they heard a humming and whistling noise and ran outside. The object, coming toward them, hovered for a while, but they couldn’t see much because it was night.

During the initial interview Werner told Young that he had worked for Project Blue Book. He speculated that Blue Book was created because the Air Force “was getting too much publicity and there were too many people, other than official people seeing these things and reporting them.”

Young and Chetham finally asked specifically about the UFO crash in Arizona and Werner said, “The object was not built by anything, obviously, that we know about on Earth. This was in 1954 [actually, according to other information, 1953]. At that time, I was out of the atomic testing, but I was still with the Air Force and this was the time I was on Blue Book. There was a report that there was a crash of an unexplained vehicle in the west and they organized a team of about forty of us. I was one of the forty.”

According to Werner, he had been alerted “through official channels and on a private phone line from the base commander at Wright Field [later Wright-Patterson AFB] saying that you’re a member of Blue Book and we would like for you tomorrow to get on a plane, go to Chicago and from there to Phoenix.” According to Werner, the object had crashed about twenty-five miles from Phoenix.

The object was twelve feet long and fairly intact, according to Werner. “It was more like a teardrop-shaped cigar... it was like a streamlined cigar.” It was made of a material that Werner said he’d never seen before and it was dull.

Young mentioned that there had been stories of an object crashing in Arizona and that one person had claimed to have photographed an occupant in a silver spacesuit. Werner responded, saying, “I saw the creature you’re talking about. It was real and I would guess about four feet tall.”

Werner described the creature as being dark brown and speculated that the skin might have darkened because of exposure to chemicals in the atmosphere. He saw two eyes, nostrils and ears. The mouth looked as if it was used “strictly for feeding, though Werner didn’t explain how he knew this. He hadn’t gotten a good look at the body because, at the time he saw it, the military had already moved it into a tent.

Once he left the crash site, Werner wasn’t through with UFOs. According to the second part of the interview, Werner claimed to have made contact with other beings from the saucers. It seemed that Werner had not only seen the body, but later conversed with the flying saucers. Werner told Young, “Now we’re getting into things where you’ll just have to take my word for it because I can’t... prove it.”

In subsequent interviews, Werner didn’t mention his “contact” with UFOs. He would provide those later investigators with an excuse for this, but one that seems to hurt his overall credibility rather than help it.

Raymond Fowler, who later learned of the crash and Werner though the newspaper, had figured it was just another tall UFO tale. He received a couple of telephone calls from friends interested in the case and decided to look into it. Fowler contacted the witness and set up his own interview.

Werner told a slightly different version of the story to Fowler. None of the changes seemed significant at the time, and most could be explained as the normal shifts in the retelling of a tale. However, Werner also made some disturbing claims.

According to Werner, he was working in the Frenchman Flats area of Nevada when he was called by his boss, Dr. Ed Doll, and told he had a special assignment. Werner boarded an aircraft at Indian Springs Air Force Base, north of Las Vegas, Nevada, and was flown to Phoenix. Once there, he was put on a bus with others who had already gathered. They were warned not to talk among themselves and then were driven into the desert to the northwest.

The windows of the bus were blacked out so that the passengers couldn’t see where they were going. Werner believed they drove about four hours until they reached an area near Kingman, Arizona. Night had fallen before they reached their destination.

This is the first of the problems. Anyone who looks at a map realizes that it would have been quicker to take them from the Indian Springs Air Force Base to the Kingman area rather than travel first to Phoenix. I suppose you could suggest that they, meaning those running the operations, did that in an attempt to hide the real location. Or it could mean that Werner’s guess about the location was in error. It might mean that the real site is somewhere in the Phoenix area rather than in the northwestern corner of the state.

When the bus stopped, they climbed out, one at a time, as their names were called. Although they had been told not to talk to one another, here was an officer providing the names of all those on the bus to everyone else by calling them out. It would provide those involved with a way of learning more about the assignment after they were returned to their regular duties because they now had the names of the others on the bus. That seemed to be a curious way to maintain security. It was a major breach. It also suggests the second of the problems with the Kingman report.

Werner was escorted from the bus by military police. Two spotlights illuminated an object that looked like two deep saucers pressed together at the rims. It was about thirty feet in diameter and had a dark band running around the center. The craft was dull, looking as if it was made of brushed aluminum. Werner estimated that the craft weighed about five tons.

There was no landing gear visible on the underside of the object and no sign of damage to it, although it had slammed into the ground. Werner could see no dents, scratches, or marks on the surface.

The only sign of impact was the evidence from the desert floor and the fact that a small hatch seemed to have sprung open. Werner said the hatch was curved and the interior of the ship was bright, but that could have been because of the lighting installed by the Air Force, rather than anything from the interior.

Werner made his examinations, including measurements of the trench the ship had gouged out of the sand, the compassion factors involved and estimated the weight of the ship. He believed that the craft had been traveling about twelve hundred miles an hour when it struck the ground.

According to Werner, as each specialist finished his examination of the craft, he was interviewed in front of a tape recorder and then escorted back to the bus. None of the others was allowed to listen to his debriefing and he was not allowed to listen to any of theirs.

Before he got to the bus, Werner saw a tent that had been erected on the site, guarded by armed military police. Inside the tent was a single body of a four-foot-tall humanlike being. Werner said it was wearing a silver suit that had a “skullcap” that covered the back of the head but left the face visible and unprotected. The skin of the face was dark brown, but again Werner thought the coloration might be a result of exposure to the Earth’s atmosphere or the effects of the crash. This would be another breach of the tight security around the site.

It is interesting to note here that in the descriptions of the aliens, that one theme is mentioned again and again. The skin is a dark brown and it is believed that the color is the result of either something to do with the crash, or exposure to the atmosphere. I’m not sure if this detail is significant. It might be a coincidence born of thoughts of fire during the crash.

Werner did have a chance to talk to one of the others. The man had looked inside the craft. He’d seen two swivel-like seats and instruments and displays, but that was about all. And here is still another breakdown of the security measures.

Before Werner learned much more from the man, one of the guards saw them talking and separated them, warning them not to compare notes. He did nothing else, such as getting their names and reporting the security breach to his superiors.

On the bus, everyone was required to take an oath of secrecy. They were not to talk about what they had seen or done to anyone at any time. They were then returned to Phoenix and their regular assignments.

Werner supplied a long professional resume that listed not only his engineering status, but his educational background and a list of his professional publications. It suggests that Werner is a highly trained engineer, and it doesn’t seem likely that he would jeopardize his professional standing with a hoax about a flying saucer crash. However, he didn’t want his name reported so it could be argued that he was not jeopardizing his career but having a good time with those interested in UFOs.

In fact, Fowler, in his report to NICAP, documented a number of contradictions between what Werner had told him and what he had said to Young during that first interview. The major problem was that Werner originally reported that the object was twelve feet long and five feet high and looked like a teardrop with a flat bottom, not like two deep saucers fastened together at the rims.

Fowler pointed out that Werner told him that the object was disk-shaped, thirty feet in diameter and about twenty feet from top to bottom. Fowler wrote:

When confronted with this contradiction, the witness appeared flustered for the first time and said that he had described the object he had seen over Thule, Greenland, to the boys [Young and Chetham]. I reminded him that he had described the Thule sighting to me as having been a black disc seen at a distance. He started to insist until I produced the copy of the transcript, which clearly indicated that he had described the crashed object, not the Thule object, to the boys. At this point, he backed down and admitted that he had lied to the boys. He said that the description given to me was accurate because I was really conducting a serious investigation into the matter. In my opinion, this is the most significant and damaging contradiction without a completely adequate explanation.

There were a series of other discrepancies between what Werner told Fowler and Young and Chetham. Most of them could be attributed to memory lapses, or, as Werner suggested, his exaggerations to the boys. It wasn’t that he was intentionally trying to mislead them, he just wanted to tell them a good story. This, he suggested was a result of the martinis he had consumed before the interview with the boys began. Note here that he drank the martinis before the boys arrived and continued with beer once the interview began.

For Fowler, he produced a page from his daily calendar dated May 20 and 21, 1953. It seemed to corroborate part of the story. The entries said, “May 20 – Well, pen’s out of ink. Spent most of the day on Frenchman’s Flat surveying cubicles and supervising welding of plate girder bridge sensor which cracked after last shot. Drank brew in eve. Read. Got fully call from Dr. Doll at 1000. I’m to go on a special job tomorrow.”

Stansel's calendar pages that prove very little about his story.

The only interesting point was the reference to the special job given to him by Dr. Doll. But it doesn’t tell us much and it could refer to practically anything at all. It could have been added at any point.

“May 21 – Up at 7:00. Worked most of the day on Frenchman with cubicles. Letter from Bet. She’s feeling better now – thank goodness. Got picked up at Indian Springs AFB at 4:30 p.m. for a job I can’t talk about.”

Again, nothing to suggest that Werner was involved in a crash retrieval, only that he had some kind of special assignment. And yes, it does seem strange that he would note in his unclassified desk calendar that he was involved in a special project that he can’t talk about.

Fowler, to his credit, tried to verify as much of the story as he could. He tried to verify Werner’s claim that he had worked with Blue Book. Fowler, in his report to NICAP, explained that he had spoken to Dewey Fournet, a former Pentagon monitor for Project Blue Book and Fournet had said that he didn’t recognize the witness’ name, but then, he didn’t know all the consultants assigned to Blue Book over the years.

Since that proved nothing one way or the other, Fowler talked to Max Futch, who had been a temporary chief of Blue Book. Futch said that he thought he had known all the consultants and didn’t remember Werner, under his real name, being among them. Importantly, Futch was assigned to Blue Book during 1953, the time frame suggested by Werner.

On the other hand, Fowler called three friends of Werner’s as character witnesses. Each of them said essentially the same thing. Werner was a good engineer and a trusted friend, and never lied or exaggerated, which, by the way, is probably a lie or exaggeration.

However, noticing the differences between this interview and that conducted by Young and Chetham, Fowler had his doubts. Fowler said that he met Werner at his office on May 25, 1973, to discuss the problems with him. Werner claimed that the discrepancies were the result of mixing up dates, which he later corrected by checking his diary.

Werner also said that he had been under the influence of four martinis when he talked to the boys. When he drinks, he said, he exaggerates and stretches the truth. Fowler checked with Young and was told that Werner had only had one beer on the day that he was interviewed. Of course, Werner mentioned he had his four martinis before the boys arrived. While they were there, he only consumed the one beer.

But what Werner had done was shoot down his own credibility. His friends said that they had never known him to exaggerate, but he had said he did, after he had been drinking.

There is no independent corroboration for it, and when the story was checked, those checks failed to produce results. Werner’s explanations for the failure of the corroboration left a great deal to be desired.



Although Fowler provided the test of the affidavit in his magazine articles, he
replaced Stansel's name with Friz Weeaver. Here is the affidavit as signed by Stansel.

William Moore, co-author of The Roswell Incident, in his 1982 presentation at the MUFON Symposium, reported:

Fowler’s source, the pseudonymous “Fritz Werner” (whose real first name and some of his background are known to me) claimed that on the evening of May 20, 1953, he received “a phone call from [his superior] Dr. Ed. Doll, informing [him] that [he] was to go on a special job the next day.” When I asked Fowler if he had checked this part of the story with Dr. Doll, he responded that his efforts to locate Doll had been unsuccessful.

In fact, in his report, Fowler said that he had confirmed that Doll existed, that Doll had been an employee of the Atomic Energy Commission and had been at the Stanford Research Institute. It seems unlikely that Werner would name a man for corroboration who could, if found, tear his story apart quickly.

Moore said that it took him just four days to locate Doll, and that he met with him on October 9, 1981. Moore asked him what he knew about the incident near Kingman, and Doll said that he knew nothing about it. Moore then asked him about Werner using his real name and wrote, “I was somewhat taken aback by his flat statement that no one of such a distinctive name and rather distinguished technological background had ever worked at the Nevada Test Site.”

Moore then dismissed the Kingman story, writing, “I don’t know quite what to make of this case... since my own investigations into the matter have produced nothing but dead ends... I am inclined to spend my time pursuing more productive matters.”

The single glaring error in Moore’s analysis is the claim that Fowler’s source has a distinctive first name. In the past year I have located a signed copy of the affidavit, along with the professional resume, and a full analysis of the case by Fowler. In other words, I have Fowler’s source’s name, Arthur Stansel, and there is nothing distinctive about it. Of course, knowing how Moore operates, it might be he said first name and actually meant last name, which is distinctive. It seems that Moore’s claims about the case might be without foundation. Of course, Moore has his own credibility problems.

Len Stringfield, however, found another witness who corroborates part of the Kingman story. According to Stringfield’s monograph, Retrievals of the Third Kind, Cincinnati researcher Charles Wilhelm said that a man identified only as Major Daly had told Wilhelm’s father that in April,1953 he had been flown to an unknown destination to examine the remains of a crashed flying saucer. He had been blindfolded and driven to a point out in the desert where it was hot and sandy. Inside a tent the blindfold was removed and he was taken to another location where he saw a metallic ship, twenty-five to thirty feet in diameter. He saw no signs of damage. He spent two days analyzing the metal from the ship, which he claimed was not native to Earth.

Daly was not allowed to enter the ship, though he did note that the entrance, or hatch, was about four or five feet high and two to three feet wide, and was open. When he finished his analysis, he was escorted from the area.

Daly’s information didn’t agree exactly with that given by Werner, but it was close enough given the different perspectives. Daly saw things from a different angle and his experiences were slightly different. It does seem to provide some corroboration for the Kingman crash story. The real problem is that it is second hand, at best. In fact, no one knows if Daly exists, or existed at all.

Stringfield also reported on a man who claimed that he saw the delivery of three bodies from a crash site in Arizona in 1953. He mentioned that the creatures had been packed in dry ice, were about four feet tall with large heads and brownish skin, which does corroborate Werner to a limited extent.

Stringfield, in his 1994 self-published monograph UFO Crash/Retrievals: A Search for Proof in a Hall of Mirrors, reported still another claim of the Kingman crash.

According to him, “My new source JLD, a resident of Ohio, north of Cincinnati, in a surprising disclosure claimed that a close relative, the late Mr. Holly, who had served in a top command (in a defense department capacity [whatever that might mean]) at Wright-Patterson in 1953, told him about one of two crashes in Arizona. He also told him three bodies, one severely burned, and parts of the wrecked craft, were delivered to the base.”

Those two reports, Major Daly and JLD are the classic friend of a friend stories. The information doesn’t come from the source, but from someone else and when you are that far removed, the chances for mistakes, misunderstandings and confabulation increase. Yes, the information is interesting and it does provide some corroboration, but the fact is, such reports are quite dubious.

There is more second-hand information about Kingman. A woman, June Kaba, who worked in the Parachute Branch (WCEEH-1) at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, reported that a sergeant, who she didn’t identify, and who had a special clearance needed to enter her office, claimed that he had just come in on a flight from the Southwest. Thinking about it years later, she had believed he was talking about the Roswell crash, but an examination of her work records, which she supplied to me, showed that she had not been working at Wright-Patterson until the early 1950s.

Further checking suggested that the incident she remembered took place in late 1952 or early 1953. The sergeant told all the people in that small office about bringing alien bodies to Wright-Patterson. Naturally, the people in the office didn’t believe the story because it was so outrageous.

Within an hour, however, the base commander, Colonel (later Brigadier General) C. Pratt Brown, arrived at the office. He explained the story the sergeant told was just rumor and speculation and that no one was to repeat these wild rumors anywhere. In fact, he brought an official form for them to sign, explaining that they were not to report what they had heard under penalty of a $20,000 fine and twenty years in jail.

The problem is clearly that the secretary did not remember the exact time frame, location or the name of the sergeant. To suggest this was part of the Kingman case, we must resort to speculation based on the limited documentation of her employment experience at Wright-Patterson. The only crash that fits is the Kingman event, and the connection to it is extremely weak.

And the colonel coming around to tell them to forget it, the story is rumor and then demanding they sign statements, is another problem. The only thing the colonel did was tell them the story is true. He hadn’t come around to stop other rumors, only this one. Then he underscored the importance of it by demanding they take an oath of secrecy.

The Kingman case has been blundering along on the periphery of legitimacy for a number of years. It would be easy to write off, especially with the problems of the Werner account, if not for another source, this one discovered by Don Schmitt.

During research into the abduction phenomenon, he learned of a woman, Judie Woolcott, whose husband had written her a strange letter from Vietnam in 1965, believing that he wouldn’t be coming back from overseas.

According to her memory of the letter, he had seen something strange twelve years earlier. Woolcott thought that it had been August 1953, and although she might be mistaken about the month but she was sure that it happened near Kingman. Her husband, a professional military officer, was on duty in an air base control tower. They were tracking something on radar. It began to lose altitude, disappeared from the screen, and then in the distance there was a bright flash of white light.

Woolcott wrote that the MPs began talking about something “being down.” Woolcott and most of the men in the tower left the base in jeeps. They drove in the general direction of the flash, searching. Eventually they came upon a domed disk that had struck the ground with some force, embedding itself in the sand. There didn’t seem to be any exterior damage to the craft, and there was no wreckage on the ground.

Before they had a chance to advance, a military convoy appeared. Woolcott and those with him were stopped before they could get close to the disk. They were ordered away from it and then escorted from the site. They were taken back to their base, where they were told that the event had never happened and they had never seen anything. Just as others have been, they were sworn to secrecy.

Woolcott didn’t write much more in the way of detail. There didn’t seem to be any external reason for the craft to have crashed, and he didn’t see any bodies. But there was talk of them. Some of the military police said that there were casualties that were not human. Woolcott made it clear that he hadn’t seen those bodies, he’d just heard talk.

The letter indicated that he knew more but didn’t want to write it down. According to Judie Woolcott, about a week later she learned that he had been killed.

Here was a source who knew nothing about the Kingman case who was able to provide a little more information about it. Although the time frame is off slightly, it is interesting that she was sure of the location. During his interview with her, Schmitt said that she brought up Kingman, and that stuck because he thought about calling Ray Fowler when the interview ended.

I need to note here something that I find curious about this end of the report and that is that Judie Woolcott doesn’t have the letter. It would seem to me that one of the last communications with her husband would be of significant sentimental value. It would be something that she would want to keep, even if it took a trip into the unusual by mentioning a flying saucer crash. That document, dated in the mid-1960s would be of value to researchers.

To make it worse, if possible, I did recent a telephone call from Woolcott’s daughter, who told me that her mother had a habit of inventing stories and that her father had not been killed in Vietnam. In fact, I could find no evidence to support the claim that Woolcott had been in Vietnam, and according to the daughter, he was still alive. You can read my blog post on this aspect of the case here:

http://kevinrandle.blogspot.com/2010/06/kingman-ufo-crash-revisited.html

Although we could say that no longer is the Kingman case built completely on the testimony of a single witness of dubious reliability, there is only the single first-hand witness. Werner seemed to be a solid citizen who, by his own admission, tells tales when he has been drinking. Given that, it would be easy to write off Kingman as nothing more than a delusion by someone who occasionally drinks and tells tall stories and leave it there.

The testimony and documentation for the Kingman event is still so thin that it is nearly transparent. We had one first-hand source who might have been telling a story that mushroomed after it appeared in a local newspaper. We have two apparently independent sources who could have supplied some corroboration, but both are second hand at best. Woolcott would have been interesting had anything she said been verifiable or true. Woolcott died in July 2009.

Without more information, more corroboration, more first-hand sources, and something a little more substantial than a tale told by a man who liked to spin tales when drinking, there is little that can be said for the Kingman case. It seems to be just another tall tale that has gotten more attention than it should.