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 I was able to find an email address for him but it was no longer active.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?”