Additional Thoughts on the UAP Congressional Hearing

Here is a bit of fallout from last week’s UAP hearings in Congress. First, some of my colleagues were disturbed with Scott Bray’s suggestion that the discussion of the Undersea Objects (USOs) would be delayed until the classified portion of the briefing. This probably had little to do with the sightings or incidents themselves and more about the collection methods used. As I said, they didn’t want to reveal to our competitors our capabilities. This is truly a matter of national security.

Second, there was a solution offered to some of the sightings by Naval personnel in training areas in both the Pacific and Atlantic Oceans. We were told that the videos of the pyramid-shaped objects were the result of an artificial artifact created by the combination of night vision goggles and a digital camera.

However, what wasn’t talked about, though there were hints, is that some of those sightings were the result of drones. In July 2019, objects, identified in deck logs as UAVs, had swarmed ships in both oceans. Analysis of the collected data that included eye witness testimony and information recorded by various sensor arrays and radar, suggested drones as the answer. In fact, deck logs referred to the objects as drones, and as you remember, there was a discussion about RF signals, that is radio frequency signals, that had been detected in relation to the sightings. All that combined has led to the conclusion that some of these sightings were drones…

And I should point out that a couple of years ago there were sightings in Colorado and Wyoming of objects near or over the ballistic missile facilities in those areas that turned out to be drones.

Of course, there are continued sightings that have nothing to do with military operations or drones. A woman living north of San Francisco said she was taking the cover off her car before heading to a bible study on May 18 of this year. She spotted a low-flying, white oval-shaped object with yellow lights on the bottom moving toward to her. The object, which made no noise, was in sight for 5 to 10 minutes. The object flew behind some trees and she lost sight of it. The UFO was surrounded by some sort of cloud or mist. The sighting was near the decommissioned Hamilton Air Force Base. She said that the Coast Guard still uses the hangars there.

William Puckett of Northwest UFOs said the sighting is unidentified. He said the UFO was not a balloon, conventional aircraft or drone. The object was surrounded by a cloud or mist which makes the sighting more intriguing.

In Anchorage, Alaska, on April 18 of this year, the witness said that he was at work and stepped outside for a quick break. He said that lots of planes fly overhead because they are located near the airport. He said that he watched a smaller passenger plane as it turned towards the direction of Fairbanks.

He noticed a bright blue orb some distance from the plane and thought it was a large party balloon that got away. As he watched, he thought that the orb was traveling about the as fast as the aircraft. He was sure the UFO and the plane were about to collide, and they barely missed one another. The UFO flew past the nose of the plane. He said that he knew the pilots had to have seen that. The object looked metallic and completely round and was traveling very fast. Later he searched on line for any reports of this near miss, but haven’t found any. He tried to alert a co-worker to come film it with his camera but the UFO was so fast that by the time the witness called his friend, the object was gone. 

'X' Zone Broadcast Network - Skepticism and Michael Shermer

 

After Dr. Avi Loeb announced that the extraterrestrial object that had passed through the solar system was artificial, I had tried to get Dr. Michael Shermer on the program. He asked for time so that he could review the evidence that Loeb had presented and the request was reasonable but other factors intervened. Took a while, but we had a chat about that and many other things. You can listen to the show here:

https://www.spreaker.com/episode/49945825

Interestingly, Shermer didn’t reject the theory that the artifact was manufactured, merely suggested that other ideas were more likely. Any thinking individual would

Dr, Michael Shermer

have to agree that the artificial nature of the object was the least likely. That doesn’t mean that can’t be artificial, only that there are other explanations that have a greater chance of being accurate.

We also talked about the recent Congressional hearing about UAPs. Again, I think he and I were on the same basic page. I did express the opinion that the lack of knowledge about the Malmstrom AFB encounter in which a flight of ballistic missiles was shut down should have been something that Ronald Moultier and Scott Bray should have known about because it was an issue of national security. I’m not sure that Shermer understood my point.

We did have the same sort of discussion about the Levelland sightings. Now, I know that he wouldn’t have been as familiar with the case as I was, but my questions weren’t really about the details of the case. I didn’t ask, for example, why so many cars were stalled over such a wide area with the witnesses making independent reports. I wanted to attack the Air Force explanation of “ball lightning,” and ask if the skeptical mind shouldn’t have questioned that solution rather than embracing it.

While he brought up the Air Force claim of only three witnesses as explained by Curtis Peeples in his book, Watch the Skies!, even the Air Force file on the case gives us the names of five witnesses whose cars or trucks were stalled. He also brought up the weather, but that point had been refuted by a document in the Air Force files as well. A weather report that came from Roswell (Walker Air Force Base) that had the weather from various stations in the southwest showed that the weather in Lubbock was not overcast and there was no precipitation. I fear that I didn’t make it clear that it was not the weather over Roswell but the weather from Lubbock reported on the teletype message from Roswell. My mistake. And, I didn’t really want to get bogged down in a long discussion of the weather in Lubbock on November 2, 1957. Those who wish to see all that information can look it up in Levelland (link to the left).

Finally, because I had been asked to ask about the Hickson-Parker abduction Pascagoula in 1973, I did. Shermer said that Philip Klass, who never met a UFO sighting he couldn’t debunk, had said there were discrepancies and that Hickson had refused to take a lie detector test.

Well, Klass did say there were discrepancies, but he didn’t say that Hickson had refused to take a lie detector test. He said he refused to take it from a reputable firm, and that might be a justified complaint. However, by coincidence, I found the following just a couple of hours ago:

On the thirty-first of October, a UPI story out of Pascagoula announced that Hickson had been given a lie detector test and the test confirmed he was telling the truth as to what he believed happened. The test was conducted on Tuesday, October 30, in the offices of Pendleton Detectives, Inc., in New Orleans, Louisiana. Pendleton Detectives, Inc., is considered to be a very reliable Firm and the test took two and a half hours to complete. (ABDUCTED! Page 136, paperback edition.

It really comes down to how reliable the detective agency is. And how reliable lie detectors are. Klass, of course, was biased, but then again, so were the Lorenzens.

Next week, Michael Schratt will enter the arena to talk about his book, Dark Files: A Pictorial History of Lost, Forgotten and Obscure UFO Encounters.

'X' Zone Broadcast Network - Philip Mantle and the UAP Hearings (Among Other Things)

 

By coincidence, I had scheduled an interview with Philip Mantle before I learned about the open hearing about UFOs, I mean UAPs, that was held on May 17. We both watched that hearing and spent the first part of the show talking about our impressions of it. Again, I was not very impressed with that hearing and Philip had the same general reaction. You can see the show here:

https://rumble.com/v159qkr-a-different-perspective-with-kevin-randle-interviews-philip-mantle.html?mref=yqkns&mc=7zk0c

Or can listen to it using the audio player to the left or just click here for the audio only link:

https://www.spreaker.com/episode/49855180

We did talk about some other things as well. Philip, and his publishing company, Flying Disk Press, have been involved with Calvin Parker of Pascagoula fame. Parker

Philip Mantle

has written about his experiences in 1973 when he and Charles Hickson were abducted while fishing. I knew, based on the investigation that Philip and Dr. Irene Scott had conducted, that the witness base had expanded. This sort of thing is always worrisome when it comes about decades after the fact and I mentioned that to Philip.

Turns out that there were many witnesses to the blue, glowing object near the river that night that had been reported by Parker. Philip and Irene had talked to many of these witnesses, gathering more corroborative evidence. I, of course, am always a little skeptical of witnesses showing up long after the event. Here, however, not only were they interviewing the witnesses in our modern world, but they had evidence of those witnesses involvement in 1973. As I say, you can listen to Philip discuss this and verifying that many of the witnesses were interviewed in 1973. There is solid documentation to back that up. Makes the case just that much stronger.

We wrapped up the show with Philip talking about the new book he had written, UFO Landings U.K. It is, of course available on Amazon for those interested in learning about landing cases outside the United States. For ease, here is the Amazon link:

https://www.amazon.com/UFO-LANDINGS-UK-Philip-Mantle-ebook/dp/B09SD8LFJH/ref=tmm_kin_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&qid=1653008642&sr=8-1

Next week, I’ll finally talk with Michael Shermer, if everything works out. We had some trouble in the past with getting everything coordinated with him given his schedule and mine. This should be an interesting show given our diverging opinions.

Crime and Punishment and UFOs

One of the things that came out of the hearing on Tuesday was an idea of criminalizing the misinformation and disinformation in the world of the UAP. Ignoring for the moment that such legislation or law would probably be unconstitutional, who is going to decide what is disinformation… And, would the law apply to governmental agencies as well. What about the Air Force officers who wrote off the Levelland sightings as ball lightning when it clearly was no such thing? Would they have charged with knowingly claiming that ball lightning was the culprit when it was obvious that it was not?

I remember the passage of the Stolen Valor Act that made it a crime to claim military service that you did not have or medals that you had not earned. The Supreme Court decided that lying about military service came under the First Amendment’s right to free speech. The Act was modified to make it a crime if you claimed military service you didn’t have for financial gain. I wondered if that included using fake military credentials to gain a veteran’s preference on a job application. There was no immediate financial gain, but if you were employed because of that fake service over someone who hadn’t made any such claim, did that count?

But I digress…

Curt Collins took the UFO hoax ball and ran with it. He put together a list of some of the bigger hoaxes in UFO history. You can read his article here:

https://thesaucersthattimeforgot.blogspot.com/2022/05/ufos-crimes-and-punishment.html

I’m sure this is going to annoy some people, but I find nothing wrong with this analysis. It provides a look at some of the hoaxes and doesn’t really touch on all the fake photographs that have offered as proof over the years.    

Coast to Coast AM - More on the Congressional UAP Hearings

 

I sat through the 87 minutes of the public hearing on UFOs, I mean UAPs, and have to say, I pretty much predicted what would happen. The very second question or comment wondered about Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence & Security Ronald Moultier’s interest in science fiction and claim that he had even attended science fiction conventions. I might be a little sensitive about this because for decades, many criticized me as a science fiction writer who was capable of creating imaginative scenarios. I often wondered why my day job disqualified me from UFO research when dozens of members of the Science Fiction Writers of America were working scientists.

Moultier and Carson, the committee chairman, mentioned their discussion about all this last week, in which, I suppose, the science fiction connection was the topic. And watching the hearing as it progressed, or rather thinking about it later, I wondered if that was the only feature that was stage managed. Although the media reports focused on UFOs, I mean UAPs, I noticed, that as I had feared, the emphasis was on national security. There was repeated discussion about Russia and China developing technologies that were beyond those we had. They mentioned that it was necessary to collect intelligence on these encounters and because the collection methods and sensor arrays used could provide our competitors with information about our abilities, much of this will remain classified.

There was talk about reducing the ridicule factor so that our military personnel, regardless of job, would feel comfortable in reporting their observations and encounters. I wonder how affective that might be given the long history of ridicule directed at those who did report UFOs in some official way. It is very difficult to stamp out behavior that is decades old.

And, while some say that it is already working based on an “increase” in reports, that seems to be inaccurate. The increase from 144 to 400 refers to historic reports and very few new sightings. Everything in those hearings seemed to be misdirection and obscuration.

Almost all the discussion dealt with national security, though we were treated with two videos. One was used to explain the fleeting nature of some of the encounters. On the video, the image flashed by so fast that almost no one saw it. The presenter, Scott Bray, described as the Deputy Director of Naval Intelligence, repeated the video, attempting to freeze the frame on the image for several minutes. I have to wonder why he didn’t think to also bring in a still to show that image.

Scott Bray trying to find the UAP image at the congressional hearing.

The other video was of a triangular object that had been filmed through night vision goggles with a digital camera. I talked about that here months ago, complete with a link to show how it was done and what it meant.

Only one of the congressional representatives seemed to have arrived with any knowledge of UFO history. He asked about the sightings from Malstrom Air Force Base in April 1967. While a UFO was reported over a launch control facility, a flight of ten ballistic missiles went off-line, which meant, in the event of a war and a command to launch, they would have remained in the silos. A true matter of national security. Neither man said they knew of the sightings, but then one said he’d heard rumors. You can learn more about that here:

http://kevinrandle.blogspot.com/2020/12/coast-to-coast-belt-montana-ufo-sighting.html

And, I have a longer analysis about this case in Government UFO Files. You can find a link to the book on the left side of the blog.

This, of course, takes us to the short discussion of subject matter experts. I had thought they were referring to UFO researchers who’d been around for decades such as Jerry Clark, Michael Swords, Barry Greenwood and Jan Alrich, to name but a few. No, they were talking about physicists, meteorologists, aviation experts and the like. Apparently, no thought was given to asking for a little assistance in dealing with all the UFO information that has been collected over the years. I guess looking at some of this information like the Levelland sightings, or Rendlesham Forest or the Socorro Landing would lead in directions they might not want to follow.

To me, and many of my colleagues, these hearing were a great disappointment and the idea of alien visitation was rarely mentioned. As I say, the full analysis can be found in a couple of earlier postings here.

That doesn’t mean that good work isn’t being done even if it is considered as amateurist by these new experts. From MUFON’s Case Management System comes a report from Hopkinsville, Kentucky, on January 26 of this year. The witness said that he watched as a craft hover over the woods. There were three lights, that he thought were field lights until they moved. He said they performed low-level stealth maneuvers for three minutes. A military helicopter arrived, following the lights. The witness took video.

The sighting was investigated by Samuel Whittington, Kentucky’s MUFON Chief Field Investigator. In his report, he wrote:

The craft hovered about a forested area where… it then dipped below the trees as if to land. The craft remained briefly below the trees before I rose again and flew off, only to be intercepted by a military helicopter. Both aircraft soon left the area…. The way the object banks to maneuver is not unprecedented…

Although it was thought the UFO might have landed, Whittington was unable to visit that area. Weather, both rain and ice, intervened, and the witness wasn’t positive about the landing or where the craft might have touched down anyway.

Whittington’s conclusion was that the witness saw an Unknown Aerial Vehicle. This was reported in the May issue of The MUFON Journal.

For those interested, I’ll keep an eye on this new UFO investigating organization, but given what we have been told, and although they claim transparency, I suspect we won’t see much that will be of interest to us.

Congressional UAP Briefing

 

The anticipated open hearings on UAPs lasted less than 90 minutes and the blanket of national security was a topic that was addressed often, something that I had expected. Of course, when you’re talking about intelligence gathering, regardless of the focus of that intelligence gathering, means, methods and sources are something to be protected. As was mentioned more than once, we don’t want our competitors in the world to know what our abilities are… or what our shortcomings might be.

One of the first things we learned is that the pronunciation of the new office is AIMSOG and I was certainly glad that we could clear that up. And we were told that there had been no official investigation into UFOs, I mean, UAPs, since the closure of Project Blue Book, which, of course, ignored Moon Dust and other regulations that did require some reporting. There were also other investigations, or rather official panels, boards or organizations that dealt with the problem of UFOs, that the Air Force ran in the 1950s and 1960s.

The fellows on the hot seats were Ronald Moultrie, (seen here) listed as the Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence & Security and Scott Bray, the Deputy Director of Naval Intelligence.

To set the tone, the second question asked of Moultrie, was about his interest in science fiction. Moultrie confessed that he was interested in SF and that he had actually attended some science fiction conventions, but not in costume. He also mentioned that he had met with the chairman of the committee, André Carson, in the last week and I suspect the question was designed to mitigate attempts to belittle Moultrie by someone learning that he was interested in science fiction and therefore was a biased source or maybe somehow unqualified because he read science fiction.

It was clear from the questions of most of the congressmen in attendance that alien visitation wasn’t actually on their radar. The questions tended to be about the capabilities of our adversaries in the world and if they could be responsible for some of the intrusions into our airspace and the training areas. It was that national security thing again.

We learned that they now had 400 reports, some of which were historic in nature, meaning that they were mainly anecdotal, that they were just witness testimony, as if that was sufficient cause for them to be ignored. They did say that there were 18 of the reports that might represent an advance in technology, but I had the impression they thought that technology was terrestrially based and came from China or Russia.

There were two videos shown. One was a fleeting image, which, I suspect was selected because it demonstrated the fleeting nature of many observations. A look at any data base shows that there are many sightings that last less than ten seconds. For the most part, these sightings are nearly useless, and I believe that was why we were treated to Bray attempting to freeze the video to show the object in it and not having much luck in isolating the particular frame or frames. I’m not sure why he wasn’t prepared with a still image to show because someone should have anticipated the question.

Scott Bray attempting to point out the UAP in the video.

The second video was of a triangular-shaped object that we were told had been captured by using night vision goggles and a camera on two occasions in widely separated events. They explained, rather poorly I thought, that this image was an artifact generated by the use of the two electronic devices, the night vision goggles and a digital camera. I had reported on this months ago which included a YouTube video made of triangular-shaped object focused on a light source using night vision and a digital camera. In other words, we had the explanation months ago and I wonder why this was brought up at the hearing other than to suggest a terrestrial explanation. You can read my report on this here:

http://kevinrandle.blogspot.com/search?q=night+vision

And for those who don’t wish to read that report, you can find the video of that experiment and explanation here:

http://kevinrandle.blogspot.com/search?q=night+vision

The point is that we amateurs in the UFO field, along with those interested in finding answers, knew this already. You have to wonder, again, why these videos were the ones used at the hearings.

I will repeat here that we were warned about national security implications more than once, and, of course, about the hazards to our aircraft. Moultrie and Bray were asked if there had ever been a collision between one of these objects and one of our fighters. There had not, but there had been eleven close calls but we got no details about those incidents.

Back in the days of Project Blue Book, we learned that if a sighting had not been “officially” brought to the attention of Blue Book, it was pretty well ignored. We learn that there is a similar limiting factor here. That means that if it is not officially brought to the attention AIMSOG (I don’t really know if this is the correct way to display the acronym, but it’s the phonetic way of spelling it), then it will probably be ignored. It seems, based on what I heard, that the official reports are going to be restricted to military and government entities. Those made by civilians might simply be ignored. That lets them control the data and the narrative, which flies in the face of transparency.

In fact, at one point, they were talking about open-source reports, meaning those from the local news, magazines, Internet, civilian organizations and outside government secure channels, will not make it into their data base. Ed Ruppelt, back in 1951, as he reorganized Project Grudge, which would evolve into Project Blue Book, subscripted to a clipping service which sent him newspaper articles about UFOs. In this new investigation, that sort of information will be ignored.

They did take a shot at “amateur” groups, meaning organizations like MUFON and Scientific Coalition for UAP Studies. There is also a concern for individuals putting out misinformation or disinformation that is self-serving and not “factually” based. There was a brief discussion about creating some sort of penalty for putting out that sort of information. I thought of the Robertson Panel of 1953 which suggested a debunking program. We haven’t come all that far except to suggest some sort of criminal penalty for making false UFO reports.

About the only relevant questions for us here, meaning relating to alien visitation, was asked about the Malmstrom Air Force Base incident in which ten missiles, in their silos, were shut down as a large orange object hovered overhead. Not surprising, neither Moultrie nor Bray knew much about it, though one confessed to have heard rumors. For those interested in the details, you can read them here:

http://kevinrandle.blogspot.com/2020/12/coast-to-coast-belt-montana-ufo-sighting.html

In the end, this was about what I suspected. Very little dealing with UAPs as extraterrestrial craft. I wonder if the creation of UAP is a way to separate this new study from the UFO studies of the past. A way to ignore the history because they did say that their research or interest begins in 2000. That enables them to ignore everything that began in 1947 and dismiss the research that has gone on before.

The concentration on a national security aspect of this does negate the University of Colorado study, known as the Condon Committee, done under the auspices of the Air Force in the late 1960s. One of the Committee’s conclusions was that UFOs (not UAPs) were not a threat to national security.

There was one other thing that caught my attention and that was a suggestion that there might have been some sort of RF emissions detected in relation to some of the sightings. I thought immediately of the Levelland, Texas, sightings in which close approach by the UFO stalled cars and filled radios with static. That simply means there is a great deal of data available about this sort of thing, not only in and around Levelland but around the world. In fact, there were Air Force officers who experienced the car stalling affect of the UFO but their reports are not part of Blue Book. All this was explained in my book cleverly titled, Levelland.

In the end, they mentioned the USS Nimitz sightings that sort of sparked this overall interest in the unexplained. They said that those sightings were unexplained but that they weren’t necessarily non-human. Again, an attempt to take us away from the alien and move us to some sort of technological glitch or strange weather phenomenon or maybe a black project that they haven’t bumped into. It all revolves around national security.

The other thing was that they wanted to protect against leaks. Of course, when you are dealing with sensitive collection methods or the ability of various sensor arrays, you don’t want our competitors to know what we can do and see. But that allows them to wrap the data in the mantle of national security and evade transparency. They were telling us not to expect much in the way of information and that was what I thought would happen.

In the end we didn’t learn much of anything other than the person appointed to head the AIMSOG has been found but not who it is. That they expect there to be multiple answers to the questions about what is being seen and reported, which I could have told them months ago. They expect to go where the evidence leads them, but we’ve heard that before. If the answer is not to the liking of the person in charge, well, then the answer is changed.

And sadly, we seen all this before, beginning in 1947 and various evolutions in the past. We are at Twining 2.0 and I suspect the ending has already been written.

'X' Zone Broadcast Network - The Top Ten UFO Sightings

 

For the show this week, I did something a little different. There was no guest for the program. Instead, I provided a list of what I thought were the top ten UFO cases from around the world. As I mentioned in the very beginning of the show, there are many good sightings that involve multiple witnesses and multiple chains of evidence. These top ten were the ones that I thought of on the particular day that I created the list and that next week, I might have another list.

I did mention several cases that could have been on my list but weren’t there for now. These included the Michigan sightings in 1966 which precipitated congressional hearings called for by then Michigan congressional representative, Gerald Ford. The Rendlesham Forest series of sightings in December 1980 is another good case. I have interviewed Charles Halt, John Burroughs and Jim Penniston on this program and the case could easily be on the list. And I mentioned the Terry Lovelace abduction that might not have been alien inspired but was certainly a real event. He talked of his interrogation by agents of the Air Force Office of Special Investigation, which suggests possible manipulation. Those at Rendlesham also mentioned AFOSI interrogations. Charles Halt, the senior officer involved, confirmed that though he said he was not subjected to the interrogations. I still wonder about that.

I also mentioned that there were some important cases from the past that seemed puzzling at the time but are now “solved.” I included the Mantell incident of January 1948 in which Mantell died chasing a UFO. The best evidence available today suggests that this was a tragic accident caused by a Skyhook balloon that had been launched a day earlier in Minnesota. And I mentioned the Chiles-Whitted sighting which, in 1948, inspired the famous Estimate of the Situation, which is not to say it was the only reason the study was conducted. I believe that they sighted a bolide as it broke up. Jerry Clark and others disagree with that.

You can, of course, see the program here:

https://rumble.com/v14j7r5-a-different-perspective-with-kenin-randle-top-10-ufo-cases.html?mref=yqkns&mc=7zk0c

The cases that I discussed, in the order in which they were discussed are:

10. The French Wave of I954

9. The McMinnville Photographs of May 11, 1950

8. The Lubbock Lights of August and September 1951.

7. The Washington Nationals of July 1952.

6. The Montana Movie of August 15, 1951

5. The Coyne Helicopter Case of October 1973.

4. The Shag Harbour UFO Crash (Emergency Landing) on October 4, 1967

3. The Socorro, New Mexico (Zamora) Landing of April 24, 1964

2. The Levelland Sightings of November 2/3, 1957

1. What else? Roswell

In the future, I plan to do this again, if there is interest in it. Next up, for one of these solo shows would be UFO hoaxes… No, not MJ-12 or Aztec or the Alien Autopsy, but the government’s hoaxes such as the Mogul Deception, the Robertson Panel and the University of Colorado study, just to name a few. This would be sometime in June.

For those interested in such things, I have studied a number of the above cases in depth and have written books about them. Encounter in the Desert is about the Socorro landing witnessed by Lonnie Zamora. Levelland, is a close look at those sightings of a glowing egg-shaped craft that stall car engines. That book also contains detailed information about the French wave of 1954. I did a book called Invasion Washington about the Washington National sightings which you can read for free at the NICAP website. And finally, for those interested in the solid information about Roswell there is Understanding Roswell. All books are available at Amazon, and as they say, if you enjoy them, take a moment to leave a review or a rating.

The greatest newspaper banner headline ever (UFO related).

Next week, I’ll be talking to Philip Mantle of the Flying Disk Press about his new book about landings in the United Kingdom and his investigation, with Irene Scott into the Hickson-Parker Pascagoula abduction in 1973.

Coast to Coast - Open Hearings of UFOs and a Couple of Pictures

 

Anyone who has been paying attention knows that I have little faith that the new emphasis on investigations into UFO or UAP sightings will generate much in the way of increased information. We have been told that sightings by military personnel will be born classified, meaning that the information will not be freely available. And we have been told that the investigations will concentrate on those military sightings.

However, on next Tuesday, May 17, according to the latest information, there will be a briefing that will focus on last year’s briefing of 144 reports with 143 of them remaining unexplained.

Here’s the interesting thing about this. The House Intelligence Committee’s subcommittee on Counterterrorism, Counter Intelligence and Counterproliferation will hold the hearing that will be followed by a classified hearing by the Airborne Object Identification and Management Synchronization Group (AOIMSG). This a ridiculous name that does more to obscure than to explain. In the past there have been much better names but, in the world today, if it isn’t overly complicated, well, it just isn’t worth the effort.

And, all this doesn’t bode well because it seems the unclassified event has little relevance to UFOs and the part that would deal directly with the UFOs is classified. That, of course, is my reading based on limited information. There could well be an examination of some of the UFO (I detest the name UAP) that has been collected, but I suspect the national security blanket will be thrown around.

Adam Schiff said that the hearing would “give the public an opportunity to hear directly from subject matter experts and leaders in the Intelligence Community on one of the greatest mysteries of our time and to break the cycle of excessive secrecy and speculation with truth and transparency.”

I do wonder who these “subject matter experts” are. Will they be the same ones that have been talking about UFOs recently, or are they going to bring in someone who has been around the field for a long time (Jerry Clark and Mike Swords spring to mind here) … and will they be skeptical or from the other side of the fence? Depending on your point of view, it would be very simple to select the subject matter experts based not on their dispassionate research, but someone who had the proper orientation. Governmental transparency is a tricky thing. All we have to look at other governmental committee investigations and we can see the agenda of those who are participating.

I have to say, while Schiff might believe that, I don’t believe it will happen, given past experience. Project Sign, in 1948, was supposed to be a high priority investigation, but the Air Force Chief of Staff didn’t like some of the conclusions drawn and the project basically died. Ed Ruppelt came in with orders to revitalize the investigation, which he did, but the Robertson Panel of 1953 convinced both the military and civilian leadership that there was nothing to UFOs. The Air Force sponsored University of Colorado study was supposed to be unbiased and scientific, but it was compromised from the very beginning by bias and a lack of science. What happened was a real desire to find answers in the beginning eventually degenerated into public relations and explanations that make no logical sense. The Levelland sightings, spread over multiple witnesses and locations were eventually explained by ball lightning… something that scientists still wonder if truly exists.

But, as always, there are still interesting sightings to report from the last two months. On April 22 of this year, the witness, in Orlando, Florida, reported that she had set multiple hunting trackers which have produced a number of UFO photos. She said that she watched an alien climb into his spacecraft. She said that he allowed her to take photographs of his ship, but apparently none of him. The ship is dull black and slightly larger than a jet fighter.

She said that the alien is monitoring our space program. She said that the alien can jam cell phone signals to prevent a video. She also mentioned that the government has flown in to talk to her. And yes, I am somewhat reluctant to report this, but the report is real. I don’t want to make the mistake the Air Force did by rejecting nearly all reports of alien creatures as a psychological problem on the part of the witness. As the old prospector said, you don’t expect to find gold but that shouldn’t stop you from looking. The question here is whether or not the observations are real but there is the photo that can be seen here.

You can read the whole report here:

https://www.ufosnw.com/newsite/photo-taken-of-fast-moving-tic-tac-ufo/

On another note, is a photo from Vista, California on March 17 of this year. The witness was playing golf at the Vista Valley Golf Course when he sighted a circular object with a vertical fin. The UFO was a flat, circular craft with the back quarter cut off. There was no sound and he used a four-power rangefinder to get a better look at it. He took four pictures of it before it disappeared behind the hills.

The UFO is barely visible next to the tree on the hill on the horizon.

Now you can see the object. You can, of course, click on the pictures to get a better view.

As always, I provide some of this information because the cases are interesting, but don’t endorse them unless I can find additional confirmation. If I have an update on these sightings, I will post relevant information the blog.

Chasing Footnotes ) Kevin Randle Edition, Part Two

There are many avenues in the world today that allow us to take an investigation much farther than had been possible in the past. I mention this only because I started a search for L. G. Sikes who had investigated an interesting UFO sighting many years ago. I was able to find an email address for him but it was no longer active. I had the basic information about the case, posted it here, and mentioned I had taken this as far as I could, which is to say, as far as I wanted. There was nothing more to learn about the sighting but there might be something to be learned about the man.

A friend, John Steiger, picked up the ball and ran with it. He found an article from the January/February 1966 issue of The A.P.R.O. Bulletin that was a report of a UFO sighting by a police officer, Lewis Sikes. The UFO, which was hovering near Wynnewood, Oklahoma, was tracked by radar at both Tinker Air Force Base in Oklahoma City and Carswell Air Force Base in Fort Worth according to that information. You can read the article here:

My original idea, was to mention that Sikes, was a police officer, which increases his credibility but only because of the possible repercussions from reporting a UFO. That would tend to rule out hoax because he had something to lose by making the report if it was untrue. I can cite dozens of examples of police officers involved in UFO sightings who soon found themselves out of a job as a direct result of a UFO sighting.

Steiger also found a reference to a book Sikes had written in the 1990s entitled The Wizard’s Bible. We learn from the website that the book is Sike’s first “full length work.” We learn that the occult has been part of his life since childhood and that, apparently, the occult was part of his work as a police officer. You can see that information here:

https://darkstarmagick.com/product/wizards-bible/

Finally, capping all this off is a note that he was an ordained pastor in the religion of Dualism. Personally, I have no interest in following up on this, other than to note that it makes me question the reliability of the information supplied by Sikes. If you wish to learn more, you can read about Dualism here:

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/dualism/

For those interested, Sikes died in 2014. And that would be the end of this little chapter in the world of the UFO, but as I say, nothing is ever that easy. There is the impact on his investigation of the October 16, 1973, sighting by William and Donna Hackett which was part of an earlier posting here. While it can be seen as an unremarkable sighting, there is a feature that interested a number of UFO researchers including Walter Webb (which is where all this started a couple of weeks ago). Webb merely reported that the “air seemed charged and oppressive.”

I wrote, in The UFO Casebook, “Later, both Hatchett and his wife reported they felt the creatures in the UFO knew everything they were thinking.” This, of course, relates to Sikes’ interest in the paranormal, and you have to wonder if he didn’t unconsciously influence them as he was taking their report.

It was reported in The A.P.R.O. Bulletin that both the Hatchetts “had an intense feeling that the object, or its occupants ‘knew everything’, and that the power that they, or the object possessed was limitless.”

But that turns out not to be the most important aspect of this, and it does demonstrate the rabbit holes you can go down. As I noted, John provided the lead to The A.P.R.O. Bulletin article of the Sikes sighting. As you can see, “…the object was picked up on radar scopes at Tinker Air Force Base near Oklahoma City and at Carswell Air Force Base, Texas, according to the Highway Patrol.” What is not clear if that report came to the Highway Patrol via Sikes or if the Highway Patrol learned it from an independent source. That is an important distinction to be made. If the Highway Patrol had received the information from a source other than Sikes, then another level of corroboration is built into the case. If they didn’t, then we’re back to Sikes.

Here is the most important part of the article. “Later inquiries to Tinker Air Force Base brought forth the statement from a spokesman there that he could ‘neither confirm nor deny’ the radar confirmation. He referred future inquiries to the U.S. Air Force headquarters in Washington. Note that he did not refer them to Wright-Patterson AFB.”

I have scanned the Project Blue Book Index on the relevant date(s) but there is nothing listed for either Tinker or Carswell. My instinctive reaction was that the sighting, especially the radar sightings from two Air Force installations, should have been reported to Blue Book as regulations demanded. Here is just another example of the cover up in progress…

But then I thought, “What if there were no radar sightings because we don’t really have a corroboration from the spokesman at Tinker?”

That leaves us with one interesting fact. The Air Force spokesman directed further inquiries to Washington and not to Blue Book and that, if nothing else, suggests some sort of duplicity on the part of the Air Force. However, Air Force regulations at the time directed those inquiries to unidentified or unexplained sightings be sent to the Secretary of the Air Force Office of Information (SAF-OI). The relevant part of the regulation said:

c. Exceptions. In response to local inquiries regarding UFOs reported in the vicinity of an Air Force base, the base commander may release information to the news media or the public after the sighting has been positively identified. If the stimulus for the sighting is difficult to identify at the base level, the commander may state that the sighting is under investigation and the conclusions will be released by SAF-OI after the investigation is completed. The commander may also state that the Air Force will review and analyze the results of the investigation. Any further inquiries will be directed to SAF-OI.

What this means is that the spokesman at Tinker should have said that any information about the sighting would be coming from SAF-OI rather than neither confirming or denying the sighting. Unfortunately, all we can draw from this is one of two conclusions. The spokesman was ignorant of the regulations or that nothing happened but for some reason he fell back to the confirm or deny routine. If nothing happened, this confirm or deny statement would spark suspicion and if it did happen, it would just make others want to explore the case further.

My suspicion here is that the spokesman, who would be speaking with the authority of the base commander, didn’t have a clue about what was going on. He just used the phrase that he’d seen or heard others use in the past. The only real source of information is what Sikes reported, and what he reported might be what the Highway Patrol was saying because Sikes had told them about the radar sightings.

So, we have returned to the very first question in this rather tangled mess. Just how reliable is Lewis Sikes and does his interest in UFOs and the occult contaminate the case? And we can then ask, “Where do we go now?” 

Coast to Coast - Congressional Mandate and Current Sightings

 

We all know that Congress has demanded briefings about UFOs, which some now insist on calling UAPs. Apparently there have been classified briefings made to the Senate Intelligence and Armed Services committee and in leak heavy Washington, it is surprising that not much about this has leaked.

These briefings came some four months after Congress passed the National Defense Authorization Act requiring the creation of the Anomaly Surveillance and Resolution Office, which is supposed to be up and running by June. However, if the past performance is any indication, that being the Director, National Intelligence, who was responsible for that report on June 25 of last year, is any indication, that deadline will probably be missed. Nobody will do anything until they realize that someone else is keeping track.

Deputy Defense Secretary, Kathleen Hicks, is the one who is charged with getting the program going with a permanent office, but as I have said in the past, we’ve been through this before… first with Project Sign which began as a priority project, with a proper classification and a dedicated staff.  After 1948, Sign degenerated into a do-nothing operation with limited staff and propensity for labeling sightings to keep them from the “unidentified” category. Many simply were ignored completely. In 1951, Ed Ruppelt was ordered to revitalize the UFO investigation. With a new emphasis, and a desire to find answers, the investigation became more robust. That is, until the CIA sponsored Roberson Panel of 1953 decided, based on opinion rather than evidence, that there was nothing to UFO reports.

In the late 1960s, we had the University of Colorado study, financed by the Air Force and known as the Condon Committee which had the conclusions supplied by the Air Force before the investigation even began. Although that information has been available for years, there are those who still cite the Condon Committee as a scientific study. For those interested in the history of this Condon Committee “investigation,” see:

http://kevinrandle.blogspot.com/2007/03/hippler-letter.html

Each of these investigations whether conducted by the Air Force, the CIA or a civilian organization, was supposed to be a serious study of the UFO problem but became little more than a way of convincing people that there was nothing to UFOs. That, of course, was their real purpose.

There is even a new call in the latest Congressional interest to identify UFO hotspots and set up a way to monitor those areas, something Ruppelt tried in the early 1950s. This had to do with the Green Fireballs that were being reported over the desert southwest. No one was quite sure what they were or why they were limited to that one geographical region. They even called in Dr. Lincoln LaPaz, the expert in meteors, thinking that he would be able to find the remains of one of the fireballs using the techniques he invented for tracking other meteor falls. Although he had been quite successful in the past, this time he failed to find any fragments.

Ruppelt’s plan, or the one offered by one of the other military officers involved with the Green Fireballs, was to place a series of cameras in the region that would automatically photograph the sky. This way they would have some photographic evidence. The trouble, according to Ruppelt, was that only a single camera was deployed and they moved it every time one of the fireballs was seen in a different location. Ruppelt pointed to the flaw in that system mentioning that duck hunters knew what was wrong with it. The implication was that the attempt failed, but Ruppelt hinted that some evidence had been gathered. The camera had captured an image, but Ruppelt never described the image nor where the photograph had gone for study.

I did make a quick survey to find out where UFO sightings are most likely since that was one of the suggestions. The data seem to depend on which outlet you surveyed. One of them listed California as number one, then Florida. In fact, that list of top ten reflected the most populous states and the ones with the best weather, meaning that more people are outside looking up into the night sky.

On April 22 of this year, the witness was out walking and saw a black triangle with red and green flashing lights, which sounds suspiciously like the navigation lights on an airplane. In fact, his first thought was that it was an F-35 fighter from 29 Palms Marine Base near Palm Desert, California. He ran inside and grabbed his Celestron telescope. He said that some of the neighbors were out looking at the UFO as well. Through the telescope he saw a triangular-shaped object.

It hovered for about ten minutes when a commercial aircraft appeared, passed the UFO and twenty seconds later the UFO disappeared. He said that his spouse had also seen the object and after it had disappeared, he used the Internet to search for photos of drones and VTOL aircraft, but this was nothing like those.

And, by coincidence, also on March 22, from Haslet, Texas, the witnesses were driving home about 7:20 p.m. when they noticed four bright lights overhead. They took video and when they zoomed in saw the saucer shape. I’m not sure what to make of this after a preliminary glance, but the photo is interesting.

Texas flying saucer.

Yes, I have issues with the picture, but I do find it interesting. If I learn anything else, I'll update the information.

'X' Zone Broadcast Network - Dr. Don Donderi

This week, I reached out to Dr. Don Donderi, who has just published a new book on UFOs. He said that it was a sort of primer for those who have become interested in UFOs but have no real knowledge of the subject. It is an introduction to the field and we talked about that for a while. You can, of course, listen to the show here:

https://www.spreaker.com/episode/49669598

And for those who are not easily frightened, or who would rather be watching our discussion than listening to it, you can see it here:

https://rumble.com/v13kind-a-different-perspective-with-kevin-randle-interviews-don-donderi.html?mref=yqkns&mc=7zk0c

Frankly, I hadn’t realized that Don had been around the field for so long. We did begin with a short discussion of the Roswell case. I, of course, thought it was a topic we should ignore because I’ve covered it on the program more than once. I think Don wanted to engage me in a discussion of the case, but I deflected to points that I thought were more important and would be more interesting to the audience.

I wanted to know when he thought UFOs appeared… meaning when did people begin to notice many things in the sky. That, of course, led to the Great Airship of 1897. I wondered if he had noticed that the airship sightings mirrored the modern era, meaning all the types of UFO sightings we have today were reported at that time. That meant the wave was somewhat predictive of the situation today. I don’t think he understood that the majority of the sightings in 1897 were faked. There were people who approached the crews of the airship and were told all sorts of things. One crew found in Texas said they were on their way to bomb the Spaniards in Cuba. This predictive nature, that came from the hoaxes, is somewhat worrisome to my way of thought, but Don didn’t seem to know much about these sightings other than he seemed to think the majority were legitimate.

The airship that landed in Waterloo, Iowa in 1897, eventually proven to be a hoax.

We did touch of the nature of evidence, or what would be sufficient for most people to accept the idea of alien spacecraft. He believed that there is more than enough including radar sightings which seem to impress him greatly, photographs such as that from McMinnville, Oregon, and, of course, the testimony of so many witnesses. He seemed to be much more receptive of these things that I am. I would like something that leads us to the alien rather than the interpretation of eyewitness testimony that might suggest the alien.

He did mention the cockpit videos that the Navy released (more or less). He thought their pronouncement that they are real meant they were alien. I believe the Navy was just telling us that the recording had been made by the Naval aviators and other sightings were made by Naval personnel. They weren’t saying they were of alien craft, just that the information, the reports, had been made by Naval personnel. Too many have jumped to that conclusion that the Navy confirmed the alien nature of the reports.

We talked about alien abduction and I pointed out that the logistics of the situation were prohibitive. I suggested that by some estimates, more than three million Americans have been abducted and we hadn’t even mentioned people from other countries who claim they were abducted. The numbers are just impossible, especially when you begin to talk about longitudinal studies covering, basically, decades.

He wondered where I had gotten that number, I suppose figuring I had pulled it out of my hip pocket. I mentioned the Roper Poll conducted in the end of the last century. He was quite dismissive of it because he has no idea what the numbers are, but does believe, as David Jacobs does, that the aliens are creating a race of hybrids to take over the planet.

Anyway, as I say, you can listen to all that and decide for yourselves what you think. Next week, I’m going to try something a little different as I fly solo. I’ll be discussing an aspect of the UFO field with visual cut-ins. I’m not sure how well this will work. And in the next weeks I’ll be talking with Philip Mantle and to Michael Shermer. 

Chasing Footnotes: Kevin Randle Edition

 

Well, this is going to be a weird one…

For those who visit here regularly, you’ll remember, just a few weeks ago, we were talking about the DIRD reports, specifically, that one created by Kit Green. That one, which actually dealt with UFOs, referenced a number of sightings in which the witnesses were injured in some fashion. Dr. Michael Swords had connected some of those sighting reports to an article written by Walter Webb that appeared in Official UFO in 1976.

That launched a search for the article which I eventually published here. The problem was that the entries were not very detailed and while Webb did mention the sources at the end of the article, he didn’t provide any way to connect those sources to a specific report, which meant that we needed to search all the mentioned sources for the specific case we wanted to identify. A rather tedious task.

I was able to do it with a few exceptions and one of those was the case from Mannford, Oklahoma. Webb provided a little information about it. He wrote:

Mannford, Oklahoma. October 16, 1973. As the UFO hovered nearby, witnesses in a pickup truck heard or felt, or both, an intense and penetrating low-pitched hum. The air seemed charged and oppressive.

That was it. I went through my books and sources, looking for anything to provide additional information. Remember, I did have Webb’s list of sources, but since the list included The UFO Investigator published by NICAP and The APRO Bulletin, published by, well, APRO, it meant searching through many issues. The task was complicated because sometimes a case would be reported months or years after the fact. And, of course, there was the final note that some of the sightings were from his personal files, which I couldn’t search.

Anyway, there was only three or four that I couldn’t find anything beyond what Webb had published. The Mannford, Oklahoma, case was one of those. In the catalog that I was preparing of the sources Webb used, I was stymied by these cases.

George Eberhart, was doing the same thing, or rather, had cataloged a number of the cases in the past so that he was able to provide a long listing to those of us interested in it. His listing included additional sources, almost as if he was chasing the footnotes or sources back to their original appearance before the latest interest brought all this to our attention.

He did have a longer entry for the Munnford, Oklahoma, case, which was helpful. He wrote:

Night. William and Donna Hatchett are driving down a country road near Mannford, Oklahoma, when she sees a bright light coming from the south. They first think it is a security light on a pole, but then realize the object is pacing them and descending. When the Hatchetts stop the truck, the light also stops in front of them. As the object hovers, it gives off a blinding light and a penetrating low-pitched hum. They have a feeling that there are occupants who know everything they are thinking. Donna is so afraid that she twice leaves the truck cab and goes into the back. William manages to persuade her to return, and they set off, the object rising up in the opposite direction. 

That was something, and the names of the witnesses struck a chord with me. I mean I recognized the names but I didn’t know where I had heard or read them. That meant that his source was a real shock to me, when I reached that point. It said, “Kevin D. Randle, The UFO Casebook, Warner, 1989, pp. 143–144.

Unfortunately, The UFO Casebook was made up of magazine articles I had written back when I was starting out as a writer, and in keeping with the conventions of the time, sources were generally not included. There was a sort of “Reference” section in the back of the book, and for the entry on the October 1973, sightings, it didn’t provide much in the way of help for finding the original source. It said:

October 1973: The UFO Occupants

Charles Hickson [yes, I had actually interviewed him], Pat Roach, James Harder, Susan Ramstead, Leigh Proctor, Coral Lorenzen, the APRO Bulletin, various newspapers from October 1973, and a number of witnesses who asked their names be withheld.

In other words, I didn’t know now where that information had originated and wasn’t sure how to find it. There were hints, but suggesting the that I had found information in various newspapers and The APRO Bulletin, just didn’t tell me much. However, I had a very good working relation with Coral Lorenzen, and the entry in the book seemed to suggest more than just a newspaper report. I suspected it might have been something that Coral had provided. I do have a file labeled, “October 1973 Occupant Reports.” I was surprised to find that it contained several issues of The APRO Bulletin from 1973.

Yes, the information I sought came from the September-October 1973 issue. The Bulletin usually ran a month or two behind so that information gathered by APRO in October, would have appeared in the September-October issue. Credit is given to APRO Field Investigator L.G. Sikes for the investigation, whom I would guess lived in Oklahoma at the time.

This is about as far as I can take this. Rather than retype the entry for inclusion here, I’ve just scanned the relevant parts which you can read here:

The APRO Bulletin entry for the Mannford UFO sightings

 

Unless someone knows Sikes or how I might contact him, this is the end of the road. I did find an email address but it bounced as not existing now. I did, however, make it to the original published source that I had used and the only way to improve on it would be to talk with Sikes, or even better, the witnesses themselves. But, at least, I have found the source that I used to prepare the entry for The UFO Casebook.