Coast-to-Coast AM: The Rhodes Photographs Revisited

 

Given one of the developing situations in the world of the UFO, I thought I would revisit the information swirling around two photographs taken by William Rhodes in July 1947. There are two reasons for this. I have found a great deal of misinformation about Rhodes on the Internet recently, and the official investigation into the sighting shows the bias against witnesses, even when they have photographic evidence ignored by those charged with the investigation. This is something that persists even in today’s more enlightened environment. And that’s not to mention the recent NASA report that suggested no solid evidence of alien visitation had been found. Had the Air Force (yes, I know it was the Army Air Forces at the time) investigation in 1947 been conducted properly, the photos might have provided the sort of solid evidence that NASA desires, if they were inclined to research any of the history of UFOs.

Rhodes, according to what he told reporters and later military and government investigators, was on his way to his backyard lab when a “whooshing” sound caught his attention. He thought it was a jet, but when he spotted the object, he realized his mistake. He ran to his lab and grabbed his camera. Back outside, he photographed the UFO.

It was a black, heel-shaped object with what he described as a clear dome in the center. In the drawing he made it was more of a domed disc than heel shaped, but that might be a matter of perspective. He took one picture and realized there was a single frame left on the film. He hoped the object would come closer and when it didn’t, he took the last picture.

The best of the two Rhodes photos, showing the "dome" in the
center and the heel shape that would become important.

The Air Force investigated, were unimpressed with Rhode’s lifestyle, suggesting he was living off his wife’s occupation rather than earning a living himself. They noted he sometimes played piano in a local bar but I’m not sure why that would be a disqualification. They didn’t care for his claim to be the director of the Panorama Research Lab, which was the well-equipped lab in his backyard. They officially wrote the case off as a hoax. I believe that was mainly because they just didn’t like him.

However, Kenneth Arnold, the man whose sighting brought us the term flying saucer, had been asked by Ray Palmer, the editor of a science fiction magazine, to investigate the Maury Island sighting of June, 1947. That was because he and Arnold had something of a professional relation, meaning Arnold had supplied an article about his sighting to the magazine. Arnold traveled to meet the witnesses but found himself overwhelmed by the task. Arnold called on Lieutenant Frank M. Brown, who had investigated Arnold’s sighting.

None of that would be relevant to the Rhodes’ sighting, except that Brown and Captain William L. Davidson, joined Arnold in that investigation. Arnold asked Brown what was happening with that flying saucer business. Confidentially, Brown told him about Rhodes. Arnold asked what was happening with the whole flying saucer business. Brown said they, meaning the Army Air Forces had received two pictures that looked like Arnold’s original heel-shaped object. Although Brown didn’t supply much in the way of information, just mentioned evidence in Phoenix, but that was a clear reference to the Rhodes.

The original drawing Arnold provided to the Air Force. It shows the heel
shaped-object. Rhodes would not known about that in 1947.

The Air Force smeared Rhodes’s with allegations about his character. They interviewed his neighbors who said that Rhodes didn’t like their animals running around on his property. Most of it was trivia like that. And the investigation ignored information that would shed a more favorable light on Rhodes. Others since then have used the Air Force file as a source to reject the value of the Rhodes photographs. Not many look beyond what is found in the Project Blue Book file.

I have learned more about Rhodes. He claimed a Ph.D., but could not produce documentation except for a replicate of his diploma in a small, plastic sealed card. Rhodes explained that while serving with the Navy at the beginning of WW II, the Navy gave its civilian employees a test. Depending on the score, they were awarded the equivalency of a Bachelor’s, Master’s, or a Doctorate. Rhodes scored high enough for the doctorate. That might be the source of the confusion, though Rhodes seems to be a little vague about it.

I spoke with a friend of Rhodes who told me that Rhodes had something of an abrasive personality, but that he was a genius. Rhodes liked to solve problems and this man said that they had hired Rhodes to solve a problem at an Arizona university.

As I say, I have written more about this here and in a couple of my UFO books. You can find that information in no particular order here:

http://kevinrandle.blogspot.com/2023/05/coast-to-coast-am-flir-and-william.html

http://kevinrandle.blogspot.com/2012/04/kenneth-arnold-william-rhodes-and-maury.html

http://kevinrandle.blogspot.com/2006/11/more-of-best-ufo-photographs.html

http://kevinrandle.blogspot.com/2010/10/beyond-rhodes-photographs.html

http://kevinrandle.blogspot.com/2010/10/william-rhodes-and-his-phd.html

The point here is that we have some very good information about specific UFO sightings but they are overlooked because of controversy. Often that controversy is injected as a way of eliminating compelling testimony and evidence without a good reason. That’s where we are with Rhodes, and it is where we are going with much of the latest testimony. Nobody remembers the good, only the bad. Just ask Bill Buckner.

Mysteries Uncovered - A Semi-review of a Book

 

In this episode of why I’m beginning to dislike Ufology, I have planned something of a rant against all the negative comments directed at me. These are challenges to my military background, my education, and that I write science fiction, though Stan Friedman once accused me of writing romances. But rather than do that, I’m going to mention a book I stumbled onto that sort of underscores the trouble with the UFO field.

Mysteries Uncovered, with the subtitle of True Stories of the Paranormal and Unexplained by Emily G. Thompson, caught my attention because in the promotional material, it mentioned the Roswell case. Well, here was a writer who had never actually been to Roswell or who had never interviewed any of the witnesses, but who was providing us with an analysis of the case. Naturally, I had to see what she had to say.

The book is loaded with analyses of many of the things that catch our attention here beginning with the Lost Colony of Roanoke and the Mary Celeste and several UFO related topics. Yes, I turned immediately to the chapter cleverly entitled, The Roswell Incident.

On the first page of that entry, after a brief synopsis of the case, there is a quote from Dr. Robert A. Baker, a hardcore skeptic. He said “It’s a modern myth, a kind of religion. There is a common human need for salvation, and it’s always coming from above.”

That didn’t bode well for the entry, but the text wasn’t quite that bad. However, in the first sentence, she told us about Mac Brazel, not realizing that it’s been a couple of decades since it was discovered by Tom Carey that he was actually Mack Brazel. This suggested that she hadn’t done the in-depth research that would have provided that small nugget of information.

She provides some descriptions that are attributed to Mack Brazel, but he never said anything like that to anyone. She wrote, “The wreckage consisted of metal, some of which was dull and some of with was shiny and thin, resembling tinfoil. There was also something that looked like transparent plastic string or wire, and thin sticks shaped like I-beams, made from a material that Brazel was unable to identify.”

It was Bill Brazel who told Don Schmitt and me about those items. She missed the important point. Bill told us that when you shined a light in one end of that plastic string it came out the other. He said that it resembled monofilament fishing line but he was talking about fiber optics.

She wrote about the size of what we have been calling the debris field. She wrote that he, meaning Mack, estimated that the wreckage covered an area of three-quarters of a mile long and 200 to three hundred feet wide. “It appeared as though some kind of machine had exploded in midair and wreckage from it had rained down of the earth.”

But we know the size of the debris field is based on descriptions from both Bill Brazel and Jesse Marcel, Sr, the Air Intelligence Officer of the military unit stationed at Roswell. The description was not provided by Mack Brazel.

And all this is in just the first paragraph.

After some discussion of other, irrelevant sightings in New Mexico, she reported that Brazel drove into Roswell to talk to Chaves County Sheriff George Wilcox. She wrote that Brazel might receive a reward for the discovery.

On the July 4 weekend, there were reports of various organizations each offering a thousand-dollar reward for proof about the flying saucers. But, according to the newspaper reports, that information wasn’t available to Brazel until after he made the trek to Roswell and there has been no evidence presented that Brazel knew about that money. The reason for the trip, was, allegedly to sell some wool, but the real reason was he wanted to know who was responsible for all that debris and who was going to clean up the mess.

Yes, I could continue to pick apart this entry, but what is the real point? Instead, I’ll move to the discussion of Project Mogul, the culprit blamed for the wreckage. She reported, accurately, that the Air Force launched an investigation after several members of Congress asked for that investigation in the mid-1990s. But then wrote, “… the debris found near Corona was related to Project Mogul, a top-secret program aimed at using balloons to spy on Soviet nuclear tests. They claimed that the wreckage was part of a 600-ft balloon train…”

This really isn’t her fault but the balloon arrays launched in New Mexico had been reduced to 400 feet and contained common weather balloons and no rawin radar reflectors early in the New Mexico launches. She wrote, based on the Air Force report, “They claimed that this was peculiar material found at the crash site that neither Major Marcel or [sic] Brazel could identify.”

But they should have been able to identify it. There was nothing special, nothing classified about the balloon arrays being launched in New Mexico. They were standard, off the shelf neoprene weather balloons and rawin radar reflectors. A farmer in Circleville, Ohio, Sherman Campbell, found a weather balloon and radar reflector in one of this fields on that July 4 weekend, and knew exactly what it was.  He took it to the local sheriff, who also knew what it was. Even if Brazel hadn’t recognized it, Marcel should have.

While I hesitate to get back into the arguments about Project Mogul, there are other points to be made. Thompson quoted Charles Moore, who worked on what he was quick to point out to me that this was the New York University balloon project. She wrote, “Moore claimed that the balloons were equipped with corner reflectors [rawin radar targets] that were put together with balsa wood and coated with synthetic resin glue similar to that made by Elmer, to strengthen them.”

But Moore told me, when I visited him in Socorro, New Mexico, that the make-up of Flight No. 4, the culprit in this discussion, was the same as that as what was termed “the first successful flight,” Flight No. 5. However, the diagram of Flight No. 5, as published in the Air Force report had no radar reflectors on it and none were used on any flight in New Mexico until much later in the process.

The configuration of Flight #5. Charles Moore told me that Flight #4 was configured in the same way. Notice there are NO rawin targets on the flight Also notice the other components which were not among they types of debris described by the witnesses.

Charles Moore reviewing winds aloft data that I provided for him as we attempted to determine the flight path of Flight #4. Photo by Kevin Randle, taken in Socorro, New Mexico in the early 1990s. It was during our discussions that Moore supplied information about the activities in 1947.

Thompson then discussed the Alien Autopsy that surfaced about that time, meaning 1995. It has very little to do with the Roswell case and is an admitted hoax. Nearly everyone involved in the hoax have come forward and there are photographs of them putting together the “alien” creature that appears in the film.

To keep this from getting away, meaning too long, Thompson provided us with the Glenn Dennis tale of the nurse who saw the alien bodies. Dennis said that she had told him about seeing the aliens in the base hospital and within days she had been transferred out of Roswell. He had written to her once, but the letter came back marked, “Deceased.” Dennis said that she, with four other nurses, had been killed in an aircraft accident. But there is no record of any such aircraft accident that took the lives of five Army nurses at the time.

Thompson wrote, “The nurse was never identified.” However, Dennis, reluctantly, gave researchers the name of the nurse. In fact, her name, Naomi Self or Selff, was well known among those who were involved in research on the Roswell case. But no one could verify that there was ever a nurse by that name in the Army, let alone stationed in Roswell. The search expanded to the local hospitals with the same results. Told that there was no nurse named Naomi Self, Dennis then said that he hadn’t given anyone the right name, but then gave another one, which was a major change in his story.

The real point is that the Dennis testimony about the nurse was discredited more than a quarter century ago. That information has been published repeatedly. I covered in The Randle Report: UFOs in the 1990s, published in 1997. I wrote then, “But others, such as Glenn Dennis, who has been considered one of the important witnesses, have begun to collapse. There is little that can be said except that we have found nothing to confirm that his nurse exists or existed. And when challenged on these points, be begins to change the tale.”

In her book, Thompson discusses other UFO events such as the Flatwood monster, Barney and Betty Hill and the Rendlesham Forest encounter. I had thought about reviewing those segments here as well, but this is getting longer than I intended. I will only note here that she reports on the testimony of Larry Warren who claimed involvement in the Rendlesham Forest events, but that testimony has been discredited. Colonel Charles Halt noted that he didn’t remember Warren being there at all, and that contrary to Warren’s statements, he did not approach the object in the woods. Thompson does acknowledge this controversy.

Peter Robbins, who co-authored the book, Left at East Gate with Larry Warren, has since repudiated Warren’s involvement the case. You can read Peter’s long entries about his reasons for this here:

http://kevinrandle.blogspot.com/2017/08/peter-robbins-explains-his-take-on-left_10.html

and here:

http://kevinrandle.blogspot.com/2017/08/peter-robbins-explains-his-take-on-left.html

Those entries were written by Peter and were posted to this blog with his permission. Thompson does write about the controversy with Warren’s statements, but the account might have been stronger if she had left Warren out of the discussion or reduced him to a footnote. There were others, such as Jim Penniston and John Burroughs, not to mention Charles Halt, who were clearly there.

Again, this criticism is a little bit nitpicky, but when dealing with a case where there is so much information, testimony and legitimate players, it does seem to be a waste to mention Warren at all.

I guess I must say that I was disappointed in the quality of the reporting on the Roswell case, but then it is quite complex and there have been dozens of books written about it. I have contributed five of them, and, of course, mentioned the case in dozens of magazine articles and appeared in a dozen or more documentaries and television programs dealing with the crash. And if you look at my earlier work, you’ll find errors in it that are the result of publishing preliminary data. However, it just seems that a solid report on Roswell can be written. I saw that she didn’t reference any of the skeptical books about the case and mentioned Witness to Roswell by Tom Carey and Don Schmitt twice in the bibliography of the Roswell case.

The real problem is that I know the mistakes made in the segments that deal with UFO related events and I must wonder is there are similar problems with the other segments. Would someone well versed in the Lost Colony of Roanoke be able to find significant errors in the reporting? Or in the section about Amelia Earhart?

If this was a real review, then I would note that the book is 373 pages long and is available from Amazon both as an ebook and in a print version. There is no index but there are footnotes which are not quite as comprehensive as I would like. It just strikes me that this was a book written with no real passion for the subjects mentioned.

Although I rarely mention books that I do not like, the Roswell information was too far off the mark to allow it to pass. Unfortunately, this is not a book that I would recommend.

Coast to Coast: APRO Files and Iowa Landing

 

For those new to the field, they might not know much about the Aerial Phenomena Research Organization (APRO), which was created by Coral Lorenzen in the early 1950s. At that time there were two prominent UFO Organizations with APRO being one and the National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomena (NICAP) being the other. There were dozens, if not hundreds of smaller, local organizations. I was a member of the Denver UFO Society in the late 1960s, but that was a group that operated in the Denver area and had no real investigation arm.

Jim and Coral Lorenzen

I mention APRO because of its size, the membership in the thousands and Coral, and later Jim and Coral Lorenzen published several good books about UFOs. Unlike NICAP, which seemed to focus on Congressional investigations and pressing the Air Force for transparency, though they certainly collected thousands of UFO reports, APRO focused on what might have been seen as the fringe areas of UFO study early on. They collected reports on landings and occupant sightings and were the first American organization to research alien abduction cases. Although they had known about the Vilas-Boas abduction in 1957, they didn’t report on it officially until the 1960s when the Barney and Betty Hill case was investigated. Interestingly, Betty Hill contacted Don Keyhoe of NICAP about her sighting and abduction. Eventually, her interest was diverted to APRO.

The point here is that the files of NICAP, the J. Allen Hynek Center for UFO Studies (CUFOS) and even many if not most of the Project Blue Books files have been collected by various civilian research and investigation organizations. The exception was the APRO files. Upon the deaths of both Jim and Coral Lorenzen in the mid-1980s, the files ended up in the hands of the Lorenzen children after. Attempts by various organizations and individuals to obtain the files had been made over the years without success.

I provide this brief history to put all this into context. As many know, David Marler, who has created the National UFO Historical Records Center, a name that does not lend itself to an easily pronounceable acronym, has announced the acquisition of the APRO records. This means, that his Center is now the repository of the largest collection of UFO records. This includes the records and investigative activities of several foreign researchers and organizations.

Marler, and his team have been digitizing these records at the headquarters of the organization, which means that searches for specific cases, and all relevant data will become a searchable file, or as Marler wrote in his press release, the files are digitized for electronic storage, analyzation, transfer and ease of access.

Interestingly, there have been, in the past, UFO researchers who guarded their records and files with a tenacity that rivals various governmental agencies. That barrier seems to have been broken to some extent now.

As I say, the important point here is the transfer of the APRO files into Marler’s group. They are currently located in Albuquerque, New Mexico and can be found at www.nufohrc.org.

APRO was the first UFO organization to take reports of landing and alien beings seriously. They sent the first investigators into Pascagoula to interview Charles Hickson and Calvin Parker. And were in Socorro, New Mexico, within hours to interview Lonnie Zamora about the UFO landing and occupant sighting there in 1964.

One of those APRO cases was a landing in rural Iowa on June 6, 1972. The witness, identified in the APRO only as Mr. T., but his name was Edward Tieg. He said that a flash of light caught his attention. He thought it was an airplane, but the object came closer. He saw that it was egg shaped and as it began to land, legs grew out of the bottom. He said that it was about ten to twelve feet in diameter and fifteen to twenty feet tall. He said that it cast a shadow when it was sitting on the ground.

Illustration of the sighting created by Edward Tieg.
From the files of Kevin Randle

It was about a hundred yards away. A hatch opened and according to him, some people got out. The beings were about five feet tall and were wearing a one-piece flying suit. They messed around in the corn, returned to their ship and it took off.

Investigators on the landing site.
Photo by Kevin Randle.

He said that as it lifted off, a blue flame shot out of the bottom, there was a roar and the legs retracted. The corn stocks in that area looked as if they had been caught in a whirlwind but they weren’t burned. I’ll note here that Lonnie Zamora talked about a blue flame and a roar as that craft lifted off. I’m not sure if a farmer in Iowa knew about a New Mexico policeman who described some of the same features.

Although reluctant to talk about the sighting, he did provide an illustration of what he had seen. As happens so often in UFO reports, there were no other witnesses to this sighting, though there had been others in the area about the same time.

Blogger's Note

Blogger's note: Yes, I have derelict in posting here recently. Some of you know what a catastrophe year this has been... and it has not gotten much better. I have been diagnosed with cancer. It is not particularly aggressive and quite treatable, or I have been told. I am trying to kept up with my various commitments, but find my time taken up with other concerns here.

I have been publishing this blog for many years and have found it to be fun, for the most part. I'll try  to keep up with what is going on in the world of the UFO, I mean UAP, but sometimes I find it less exciting than it was.

So, if I'm slow in getting back to you, or answering some of the questions posted to the comments, I hope you'll understand. Life just gets in the way.

In the coming year, I hope to do a better job in adding to the information published here.

Oh, and one final comment that isn't related to the above. No, Project Mogul does not answer the questions about what fell at Roswell... just had to say that because I can't believe the number of smart people who have fallen for that nonsense. And I probably should say, that doesn't mean what fell was an alien spacecraft, only that we have eliminated all the terrestrial answer for the moment.  

New Documentation for Roswell: The Easley Letter

 

As anyone who has been following the Roswell case knows, we, and by we, I mean Tom Carey, Don Schmitt and I, have been searching for documentation for, literally, decades. We have, of course, all the newspaper articles, the FBI Telex, and one or two hints of something strange falling outside Roswell. We have no diaries, letters, journals or other written statements from the time of the crash that mention the crash. One of the possible exceptions is a magazine article written by Inez Wilcox, wife of the sheriff, that mentions the little men. The problem is that there is no date on it, and the article might have been written after the Roswell crash became prominent in 1978. We need something from 1947.

Don and me on the Impact Site.

We did find a diary that had been kept by Ruth Barnett. Her niece, Alice Knight told me that she had found the diary in a box of material she had received after the death of her aunt. The diary, a daily reminder book for the year 1947, was in there and Ruth used it as a diary. She made entries for the entire year of 1947 and there is no mention of any UFO crash on the Plains of San Agustin.

Stan Friedman, when I met him so that we could copy the diary, suggested that Barney Barnett had been warned about keeping quiet, so he wouldn’t have told Ruth about his adventures over on the Plains. However, according to Vern Maltais, a good friend of Barnett, said that he’d learned of the crash when Barney told him about it at Thanksgiving. That suggests that Barnett wasn’t cowed by the orders to remain quiet, and even if he hadn’t mentioned it in July, he was talking about it in November. There is no notation in the diary about this amazing story that Barney had shared with friends and family during that Thanksgiving get together. There is just nothing said about it until Bill Moore interviewed Barnett’s boss after 1978.

The other document, to surface recently was the alleged diary of Jesse Marcel. This was a standard Army “Memorandum” book that the Army handed out by the hundreds of thousands over the years. I’d had several of them during my military career. Since that book was found in Jesse Marcel’s the possessions, it might have provided a clue about the crash. Unfortunately, once again, there was nothing in it to suggest a crash. To make it worse, handwriting analysis suggested that Marcel had not made the notations in the book.

I have learned in the last several months there was another officer in the office with Marcel. Major Dalton Smith was assigned to the 509^th Bomb Group in 1947, and his office number matches that of Marcel. I know nothing much about Smith, other than he was there in 1947 and had the same number. It suggests to me that Smith might be the author of the notations in the Memorandum book. And since the notations aren’t all that personal, when Smith left the 509^th, he left that book behind… Or, when Marcel left, he threw it in box with other items. At any rate, there is nothing of consequence in the book.

The notable one exception to all this was a two-paragraph mention in a Saga magazine article published in the Winter 1974 issue. B. Ann Slate and Stan Friedman, in the article “UFO Battles the Air Force Couldn’t Coverup,” report that Lydia Sleppy had said that her attempt to put the story of the crash over the news wire had been interrupted.  You can read about that here:

http://kevinrandle.blogspot.com/2008/05/lydia-sleppy-1973-interview.html

http://kevinrandle.blogspot.com/2016/03/reports-of-roswell-crash-before-jesse.html

So, we now reach the latest bit of corroboration. I believe that I’m the only researcher to have ever interviewed Major Edwin Easley, the base provost marshal in 1947. He would have been responsible for security at the crash site and on the base. In my interviews, he told me, several times that he couldn’t talk about it because he had been sworn to secrecy. He said that he had promised the president he wouldn’t talk about it.

Skeptics, of course, criticized the statement, wondering if the president would talk to a lowly major. I was of the opinion Easley certainly could have made the promise to an emissary of the president. Both Don and I had learned of several secret service agents who had been dispatched to Roswell in 1947. 

Major Edwin Easley

In a letter dated December 30, 1947, and addressed to Colonel Blanchard, the Roswell base commander, we do have some corroboration for Easley’s help. While the opening paragraph seems to be seasonal boilerplate, meaning it talks about the season and “Your efforts in our behalf repeatedly served to great advantage.”

The second paragraph is the important one. It says, “In these regards, Major Edwin D. Easley, Provost Marshal and his able staff has been particularly helpful. Their intelligent understanding of investigative problems, their devotion and their untiring diligence, regardless of circumstances, had been directly responsible for the successful conclusion of many difficult undertakings.”

The Easley Letter

While this can be viewed as a generic “atta-boy” letter, it is relevant because of the timeframe, 1947, and that I currently know of no other event in which Easley would have been involved in something with the Secret Service. It does underscore Easley’s involvement and helps establish that Easley might well have promised the president that he wouldn’t talk about it by making that promise to the Secret Service representative rather to the president directly. As I have said, this is the latest document relating to the Roswell crash and one of the few that we have.

Don Ecker's Opinion about Disclosure

 Note: The following opinion is that of Don Ecker. He has spent decades investigating UFO sightings and events, has host hundreds of radio programs and has had his opinion and expertise sought by many who want to find the path to the truth. This article is published just as I received it, You can decide if you believe disclosure is close or that we are farther away than ever. Those who have listened to my radio show/podcast know where I stand on this. I suppose I should say, here is a different perspective.

Disclosure--A Dangle Just Out of Reach.

                                                         by Don Ecker

Disclosure! The “Great Holy Grail” of the UFO movement. The UFO faithful have been expecting something profound since at least December, 2017. With the announcement of the Nimitz battle group encounters with the “Tic-Tacs,” and then former Senator Harry Reid’s disclosure of a secret Pentagon operation to investigate “aerial anomalies,” for which he secured millions of dollars to finance, the anticipation has been intense. For some, it has been intense for well over 30 years.

Don and Vicki Ecker

The beginning of what is thought to be the modern UFO age hit the front pages of newspapers all across the United States--and then the world--around the July 4, 1947. The incident was the purported crash of a UFO outside of Roswell, New Mexico. At that time, Roswell was the military base of the Army Air Corps 509^th Bomber Command, the only military organization in the world with nuclear capability. The 509^th sent out a press release that the “Army” had recovered a “flying disc,” which in itself created a firestorm. A day later, the military command emptied the “Roswell Saucer,” claiming that what was actually found was a “weather balloon.” The lying has not ended since that day.

1947 was an incredible year for many reasons. Just weeks after the July 4 crash, a number of earth-shattering events happened.  The United States Army Air Corps became the United States Air Force. The Central Intelligence Agency was created and, perhaps most ominous of all, the National Security Act was placed into law. In effect, the American Republic was replaced, in worst case scenario, with a police state. Today, in the second decade of the 21^st Century, that police state has become very apparent.

Let’s take a moment to examine the National Security Act and what it means.

At the height of the Second World War, U.S. officials greatly feared that the Nazi German state was attempting to develop and build a bomb using a nuclear core that would release an unknown amount of energy. In other words, the very energy that fires our star, the sun, would be released by exploding such a nuclear weapon. At that time, the Nazis harbored a bitter hatred for Jews and others they viewed as sub-human; arresting, imprisoning and murdering every Jew and other sub-human they could lay their hands on. As a result, the Jewish intelligentsia sought every means to escape Germany before it was too late. People like Albert Einstein escaped to the United States, and it was well he did; Einstein was the final cap on the bottle that convinced President Roosevelt to begin the Manhattan Project, which ended up winning the war for us and saving millions of humans, both allied soldiers and Japanese civilians.

Even at the height of the most destructive war in all of human history and the most secret military project ever, we did not have or create a decisive federal hedge against exposure such as the National Security Act. What changed? Under the auspices of the National Security Act almost anything the controllers feel protects national security can be legally authorized and carried out. If it is determined an imminent threat to U.S. national security is at stake, even premeditated murder is legal. One might think this is draconian in the extreme, but the longstanding UFO problem clearly qualifies as potentially that sensitive. If Roswell was the site of a crash of one, and others may intrude on U.S. air space, how far will the military/intelligence/industrial forces go?

What are these unidentified phenomena?  Where do UFOs (now designated UAPS—unidentified aerial phenomena) come from, and most importantly just what is it that they want?

From our earliest written history, witnesses have been reporting sightings and even contact with the occupants of these mysterious machines. Yes, machines. Our military pilots of today report that these craft travel at almost impossible speeds, demonstrate impossible maneuvers and technology that almost appear magical within our understanding of avionics and physics. During the Nimitz encounters, radar operators reported that the objects dropped from an excess of 80 thousand feet to almost water level in only a second or so, a truly breathtaking maneuver. They out-flew our Naval F-18 Super Hornets with extreme ease, demonstrating that if hostilities broke out, we are totally outclassed by this purported UFO technology.

So, what is going on? The most potent human military technology (it is believed) currently available are human nuclear weapons. But even that is questionable, even if nuclear weapons are capable of being a deterrent. The UFO enigma has proved to be able to penetrate nuclear bases with impunity and manipulate the weapons to the point that they are unusable. This shocking revelation was disclosed in the excellent book by researchers and authors Barry Greenwood and Larry Fawcett. (CLEAR INTENT: The Government Coverup, First published January, 1984)

As it turns out, the United States is not the only nation to suffer UFO incursions into nuclear weapons sites. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, television journalist and UFO researcher George Knapp traveled to the former Soviet Union where he interviewed former and current Russian military personnel. Knapp reported the story of a UFO incursion over a former Soviet nuclear battery, where the unknown object activated a nuclear missile control panel and began a countdown. With only seconds to go, the UFO then apparently stopped the countdown and flew off. This was apparently a pure demonstration that if they chose to, they had complete control of the most powerful and delicate systems available to humanity at that time. Was this a warning  to humanity at large? “Beware humans, we are in charge.”

The CORE STORY/CORE SECRET

For all the hopeful ufologists waiting and hoping for UFO disclosure, what if I told you the real somewhat open secret of the UFO conundrum is actually the fact that UFOs are surrounded by a CORE STORY which is protected by a Special Access Program binder? An SAP designation means that unless you have a “need to know”-- you never will. A perfect example of this  follows:

 

(The following information comes from Gary S. Bekkum’s excellent primer on Spy Games: “SPIES, LIES, AND POLY GRAPH TAPE, Knowing the Future: The UFO Spy Games” Gary S. Bekkum. c. 2010, Gary S. Bekkum  p. 16)

A “core secret” is so sensitive, its very existence is a secret. In the U.S. Intelligence Community,  the tale of an extraterrestrial presence is known as the CORE STORY.

Another bit of alleged information to be aware of:

         “The strong rumor is there is a `disturbing’ aspect to this CORE STORY, something so dire it  leaves battle-hardened military types shaking in their boots.”

If any of this is even remotely true, the Disclosure ship sailed away long-long ago.

Dr. Edgar Mitchell, the sixth American astronaut to walk on the moon, became embroiled in the UFO controversy in what today is a rather infamous incident.  The following is taken from a paper I wrote on what today is known as the “Davis-Wilson” document.

Mitchell [Dr. Edgar Mitchell, 6th astronaut to walk on the Moon] spoke of his contact with a ranking Admiral at the Joint Chiefs who agreed to investigate the CORE STORY of alien contact and report back. Some reporters were miffed when Mitchell refused to disclose the name of the Admiral, but Mitchell did provide to me confirmation that another report was ‘essentially correct.’
Mitchell requested my help in clarifying why his testimony appeared to be contradicted by the Admiral, who had been identified by the Herald Tribune as Rear Admiral Thomas R. Wilson.
Quoting an article taken from the prestigious Jane’s Defence Weekly, Mitchell implied that the Admiral had discovered that the CORE STORY was protected by a “Special Access Program.” As explained by Jane’s, such a “black program” must remain unacknowledged when it is “considered so sensitive that the fact of its existence is a CORE SECRET, defined as `any item, progress, strategy or element of information, the compromise of which would result in unrecoverable failure.’ ”
As I write this paper, once again the subject of UFOs has exploded across the USA and especially social media. Two items have rejuvenated interest in the UFO/Paranormal/PSI arenas of late: The History Channel series “Unidentified” and the release of notes from an alleged meeting between Dr. Eric Davis (formerly of the National Institute for Discovery Science, NIDS, founded and operated by Robert Bigelow) and Admiral Thomas R. Wilson, former head of the Defense Intelligence Agency.
Taking an overhead view of this material, many names are apparently involved, and it is very complex situation. Prominent is Dr. Edgar Mitchell, astronaut and the sixth man to walk on the Moon, along with journalist Billy Cox, futurist and occasional “rogue” journalist Gary Bekkum, Wilson and Davis. Other prominent individuals include UFO researcher Grant Cameron and Attorney Michael Hall, who had released the Davis/Wilson “notes” that Davis allegedly made during a covert meeting he had with Admiral Thomas R. Wilson, which occurred in the parking lot of the Las Vegas headquarters of EG&G on Oct. 16, 2002. Also mentioned are retired Naval Officer Oke Shannon and retired Naval Officer Will Miller. The notes indicate that in April of 1997, Steven Greer, Miller and Edgar Mitchell gave a talk in the Pentagon Conference room to a number of military officers, including Admiral Mike Crawford and General Pat Hughes.

The shortened version had Mitchell meeting Admiral Thomas Wilson who at that time headed up the DIA (Defense Intelligence Agency). According to Mitchell, Wilson told him he would attempt to follow up with his contacts within the Pentagon, and allegedly his inquiries led to an aviation corporation in California. Wilson is reported to have called them, but they refused to discuss anything over a telephone line. (It was implied that this unnamed corporation had “recovered technology” they were studying.) Wilson, according to notes found in Dr. Edgar Mitchell’s papers after he died, then flew out to California to the corporation. After arriving, he was taken to a “secure vault” where he tried to get information. According to the notes recovered from Mitchell’s papers, while in Las Vegas Wilson told Eric Davis that they would not give him any information since he did not have a “need to know.”  Wilson left California enraged. Upon returning to the Pentagon, Wilson was prepared to raise some holy hell until cooler heads pulled him aside, reminding him he did not have long until he retired. Did he really wish to risk his retirement, pension and perhaps even receiving another star prior to leaving? Wilson then decided to quiet down.

So, if the subject of UFOs does contain a “Core Secret,” then the subject is protected by an SAP (Special Access Program.) If a Special Access Program is in play, even acknowledging one is aware of it is  a major breach of security. Despite its great national security implications, this appears to fall outside of the U.S. President’s “need to know.” This was demonstrated publicly by former President William “Bill” Clinton when Clinton reportedly tried to get Asst. Attorney General Webster Hubble to find out two things for him: Who really assassinated President Kennedy, and . . .  what is the truth about UFOs? Hubble was completely shut out and Clinton got an answer to neither.

As time moved along I struggled with what this “Core Secret” might entail. Over the course of 30 years I had interfaced with and interviewed possibly hundreds of people. During all that time, I heard many theories mixed with rumors of what might be the “real reason” for the draconian secrecy. Some of these conspiracy and rumor mill stories included amazing things like dead and mutilated human beings having been found on crashed saucers, or the presence of an ET conspiracy to replace highly placed humans with hybrid clones. And more!

Then … Ingo Swann entered the scene.

In the very early 1990s, while acting as research director for UFO Magazine, I began my first foray into broadcasting with my program “UFOs Tonite!,” which was carried on Cable Radio Network. Around early 1992, I did two shows with different guests, both shows dealing with lunar or moon phenomena, also known as Lunar Transient Phenomena.  I became aware of many questions and events that suggested there was some type of activity taking place on our moon prior to the Apollo 11 touchdown. Both guests mentioned a book that had been first published in 1976, titled “Somebody Else is on the Moon” by author and science writer George Leonard.

Leonard used many photographs directly obtained from NASA that showed startling images on the surface of the moon. These photos show what appear to be excavations of crater rims, indicating that huge vehicles had rolled up and out of lunar craters, leaving vivid tracks in the lunar soil, and what  appear to be structures, possibly constructed buildings. Prior to the manned lunar landing, NASA contracted out to academia a study to be conducted on lunar observations as reported by astronomers beginning as far back as 1540 A.D.  Hundreds of lunar anomalies were reported and documented in the NASA Technical Report, TR-R-277.

Leonard’s book disappeared almost as soon as it was published. As important as this book would prove to be, it later became a bit more important as it seemed to provide validation for a top- secret remote viewing session run by deep black intelligence officers and remote viewing legend Ingo Swann, which I’ll discuss in greater detail.

When NASA finally landed on the moon on July 20, 1969, what did they expect to find? Only they know for sure, but I discovered that the astronauts were armed when they landed on the moon. At first I found it hard to believe that the astronauts had weapons on board the lunar lander. I ended up calling their public affairs office and they finally admitted it. At that time, they tried to explain it by suggesting that if the astronauts crashed into a jungle somewhere, they had to have a means to protect themselves. I mentioned that our space program had no landings on the earth surface--everything landed in the oceans! They had no coherent response.

During the early Apollo period, many publications ran news articles on what was planned after successfully landing on the moon. We were told of future lunar colonies, manufacturing facilities, even military installations being planned. After Apollo 11 landed and the astronauts returned, there were five more missions that landed and returned, with only one failure--Apollo 13. By intensive NASA brain sweat we (the United States) were able to return them safely. Finally, with the final Apollo 17 mission (December, 1972), the Apollo program was canceled, even though other missions were planned. The rockets were built and the astronauts were trained, yet NASA pulled the plug. The reasoning NASA gave was as convoluted as any statement coming from government. They claimed that the American public now saw lunar missions as so routine they’d simply lost interest—so without public support, the agency canceled it.

During this fiery political year, the Viet Nam war was still raging and anti-war sentiment rife in the American public. Richard Nixon was running again as president against challenger George McGovern. Nixon steamrolled McGovern but more was to come on the political front: the Watergate scandal. As Watergate began to percolate in the news media, the rumor mill also began to pick up steam.  Stories began to float that the Apollo 11 crew witnessed activity on the moon that they were forbidden to disclose. It was rumored that when Apollo 11 returned to Earth, Neil Armstrong, Buzz Aldrin and Michael Collins were sequestered and kept incommunicado for several weeks. NASA claimed that the astronauts were kept in isolation because of the fear that they may have brought back alien organisms that we on Earth had no natural resistance or immunity to. When the astronauts were finally allowed to address the American public in their first news conference, they seemed deeply troubled and depressed. Later, Armstrong became a recluse, Aldrin developed an alcohol addiction and Collins basically slid into anonymity. (Aldrin subsequently became clean and sober.)

In 2014 on the 45^th Anniversary of the Apollo 11 landing, I was hired as a research producer on a SyFy Channel television show titled “Aliens on the Moon: The Truth Revealed.” After well over 20 years of lunar research, I was able to take much of my material to this show. At the insistence of the network, some material was included which I vociferously disagreed with. Unfounded segments claimed that top secret missions were sent to the moon following Apollo 11, including Apollo 18 to Apollo 20. This included the “Alien Mona Lisa,” what I consider pure disinformation.  One real coup on this show was the inclusion of former astronaut Buzz Aldrin, the second human being to step onto the moon during the first landing of Apollo 11. Aldrin’s interview followed mine where I presented a number of lunar photos potentially showing various anomalies. When the camera turned to Aldrin, I was absolutely shocked at his reaction. As the lunar photos were placed in front of him, he violently twisted his head to the side and refused to look at the pictures or discuss anything about them. He was willing to discuss future missions to Mars, more specifically the Martian moon Phobos. There is an odd protrusion on the Martian moon that some call an obelisk, the only seeming anomaly Aldrin would address.

Now going a little farther back in time. With the launch of the Soviet Union’s Sputnik satellite in 1957, the U.S. and the western alliance went into panic mode. There was a genuine fear of a “missile gap,” that the Soviets could launch nuclear weapons able to hit almost any target in under 30 minutes.  In those early days of the latter 1950s, our missiles experienced a huge failure rate, often exploding on launch. In the 1960s, with reports coming out of Europe of the Soviet Union researching psychic and paranormal phenomena, the west once again feared a gap, this one involving a race to understand and exploit paranormal phenomena. The CIA suddenly sat up and took notice.

In 1972, with CIA funding, Harold Puthoff and Russell Targ began collaborating at Stanford Research Institute to explore the “remote viewing” phenomenon. (At that time, Puthoff was closely associated with the Church of Scientology which later proved to be a huge embarrassment.) Remote viewing is the rarefied skill of “projecting one’s mind” to “view” distant objects, events or people in real time. Later it became apparent that some sessions could also include viewings seemingly from past or even future events, sometimes called “spooky action at a distance.”

In 1972, Ingo Swann was recruited to Stanford Research Institute, or SRI. At the time, Swann had been a fast-rising star in New York’s American Society for Psychical Research, also known as ASPR. Upon arrival, Swann was asked to use his psychic talent attempt to manipulate a magnetic field within a magnetic shield. His efforts were successful, seemingly with little effort. He also met another man who was regarded as a “super-star,” Pat Price, whose remote viewing  attempts were described as “scary accurate.”

 (I found one troubling commonality-- that all these people were either members of or closely associated with the controversial Church of Scientology, though I’m not sure what it could mean.)

As time went on, Swann began working with Puthoff and Targ on what Swann felt was a continuous string of mundane targets. As Swann explained in his book “PENETRATION–The Question of Extraterrestrial and Human Telepathy,” sampling repetitive targets can lead to boredom, ultimately “flatlining” the PSI talent. With this in mind, Swann suggested targets well beyond the boundaries of targets in the next office. NASA had launched two probes, Pioneer 10 and 11, to explore the outer planets. His idea was resisted by Puthoff and Targ, so Swann took the only step he had left in him: He threatened to quit. Puthoff and Targ relented, but with some conditions. The first expected data to arrive from the NASA probes were to be in September, 1973. To beat NASA there first, Swann knew that they had to start quickly, so his attempt at viewing such a far target began in April, 1973.

Stringent protocols were employed, although this was not an official test. It was conducted on his personal time on a Saturday, a non-working day. With the conclusion of this experiment, the raw data was recorded and circulated far and wide and included two scientists at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL). The raw data consisted of 13 factors, all verified. It was still early in the program, so Swann’s accuracy was astounding to everyone involved in the remote viewing project.

Of the number of troubling unsettling aspects of his job, one must be highlighted and detailed. Swann’s remote viewing “job” came at the behest of a deep black “intelligence” agency he originally feared could assassinate him.

In 1998, Swann’s just-published book “PENETRATION” arrived in our offices at UFO Magazine.” The book describes his role designing the protocols for what was known as Project Stargate, a remote viewing program that was discovered to have been in operation for 20 plus years using military remote viewers. Stargate had been under the auspices of the Defense Intelligence Agency and the Central Intelligence Agency, and had been continuously included in federal budget the entire time.  Obviously, the CIA and DIA were getting value from the program. Yet once the program became public, the CIA released a statement that Project Stargate had been canceled, which I find impossible to believe. It makes much more sense that the program had been transferred to another agency, like the National Security Agency (NSA), and this public disclosure was simply an attempt to obfuscate the facts and reality of what the intelligence agencies were really doing.

Today we know that what became the Stargate program was taken very seriously by government, and the people and groups involved prove this beyond doubt. They include—and may not be limited to--CIA, the U.S. Navy and Army, U.S. Missile Command, the U.S. Air Force, the National Security Agency, the Defense Intelligence Agency, and many other government clients that included the Joint Chiefs of Staff. So serious was the program and its success that “superstars” Swann and Pat Price were tasked to  remotely view what turned out to be a “super-black” NSA facility in West Virginia. Price even managed to view files, case names and some of the people working there.

This weird, ongoing spy opera reached new heights in 1975, when Swann was notified by an acquaintance that he would shortly receive a phone call from an unidentified source. He was to follow the caller’s instructions “to the letter.” A few weeks later at 3 a.m., Swann did receive this telephone call instructing him to travel to Washington DC. He was sent to the National History Museum where he was contacted by two operatives, then blindfolded and taken to a car that drove him to a helicopter where he was flown to an unknown destination and deposited in an underground facility.

Once there, Swann’s blindfold was removed and he was escorted to a room where he was met by a man who called himself “Axelrod.” Axelrod wanted Swann to conduct a remote viewing session on an unnamed target, for which he was offered the enormous sum of $1,000 per day.

I was to learn more when around 2002 Swann came to the west coast to visit family. He had a friend call me to see if I and my wife were available to have dinner. We met him and a friend in a small Italian restaurant for a very memorable evening. I had originally met Ingo in New Jersey while giving a lecture on my Lunar Transient Phenomenon research, and as I was to find out, his lunar interest was of the utmost importance to him. By this time I had read and re-read his book, and my questions were many. (Swann had questions for me also.)

Whoever they were, these operatives knew Swann to a “T”. They even had a supply of Swann’s favorite cigars on hand. Swann accepted Axelrod’s proposal, and after a night’s rest and “a good meal,” he began his task. After breakfast they retired to the room Swann was to use for the session, where he learned the target was the moon. This concerned him, as he always made it clear he needed feedback on what he viewed. Axelrod assured him he would get feedback and they proceeded on the “mission.” All while sitting in a room and following his original remote-viewing protocols, Swann described his mind’s “flight” to the Moon, then “landing” on the lunar surface facing Earth. He described “standing” near a high cliff formation, maybe a very tall, natural cliff on the moon. Axelrod then gave him his first set of coordinates. Trying twice, suddenly Swann was “there,” standing in lunar darkness.

Getting acclimated to the dark scene, he looked around and was surprised by seeing odd puffs in the lunar soil. He described these funny markings as almost looking at wind-driven sand on the beach, except there’s no wind on the moon. He realized they looked like machine-driven tread marks. He became confused, thinking at first somehow he transported back to Earth. Then he observed what appeared to be a bank of lights similar to what one would see at a sports stadium. Now very worried, he first thought maybe the Soviet Union had built a lunar base. But as he saw more, a realization hit him that moved him to tears. He was observing buildings, towers, tall structures of some type and what appeared to be living habitats. Swann wrote that he finally “lost it” when he next observed a crater that appeared to be covered by a transparent green dome. Looking down, Swann observed humanoids working on the lunar soil. Suddenly one of the figures stopped, turned around and looked up, then another and another until they all stopped working and began pointing and looking up. Shocked, Swann, told Axelrod what he was “seeing” and then Axelrod quietly but firmly told Swann to stop and return immediately. Still reeling from the shock of seeing what appeared to be living beings on the moon, Swann realized not only were the beings  there, but they were also very highly psychic since the beings knew he was seeing them when Swann wasn’t really, physically there. He later told me they weren’t friendly and seemed angry. He spent the next four to five months terrified these “aliens” might track him down and “fry his brain.”

The moon continued to engage federal interest and money. After 22 years since the last moon mission, Apollo 17 in January, 1994, the Department of Defense’s Ballistic Missile Defense Organization (BMDO) and NASA launched the Clementine Mission, its twofold task to do a flyby of an asteroid and to completely re-photograph and map the moon. Clementine was outfitted with the most powerful cameras available (think of our first line spy satellites), able to capture images in various spectrums, and hypothetically able to read a license plate from orbit, providing any license plates were on the moon’s surface! During this mission, 2.5 million photographs were taken, all at the behest of the BMDO. I contacted and spoke with the assistant director of Clementine, who informed me that all Clementine’s photographs were beamed to a separate department inside the mission quarters, and unless you held the proper security clearance, the photographs were classified. I was told by my source that even the director wasn’t cleared to see these lunar photographs. With the exception of literally a handful of them--nondescript photos such as unnamed craters and landscapes--the photos are blurry, seemingly void of resolution in the extreme. Images arriving from satellites such as the KH-11 or similar spy satellites with such blurry, indistinct resolution is unheard of. Usually, the clarity of such clear images can be truly scary.

So, to sum up: With the advent of Clementine, it had been over two decades since the Apollo Program had shut down. In the aftermath of the 1968 NASA TR-R-277 anomaly report, the many rumors of what the Apollo astronauts might have observed, verification that the lunar astronauts carried weapons to the moon, Buzz Aldrin’s shocking refusal to look at lunar photographs, and after the DOD and NASA go back to the moon to completely re-photograph and map the lunar surface—again—what can we conclude,  if anything?

While considering this I recalled my time in Viet Nam. Many times during that conflict, American reconnaissance aircraft would spot what was thought to be a new enemy site or installation, photograph it and perhaps attack it. Or the decision would be to simply wait for a while then go back and photograph it again. These photos would then be taken to the intelligence section for study and analysis. The intel officials would look for any noticeable changes--new buildings, vehicles, equipment, instillations for troops, and so on. I have no doubt that in the case of the Clementine photos, this is exactly what the BMDO was looking for, and I am further convinced one of their objectives was to scrutinize the images  for anything—or anyone--they consider a possible ET threat.

Such a stark realization has not escaped professional attention. Dr. Avi Loeb, the Frank B. Baird, Jr. Professor of Science at Harvard University, is an Israeli-American theoretical physicist who works on astrophysics and cosmology.  Since 2007 he has been Director of the Institute for Theory and Computation at the university’s Center for Astrophysics. In 2018, he suggested that extraterrestrial spacecraft may currently be in the solar system, using the example of the interstellar object Oumuamua.  He and his radical speculation came under very heavy criticism.

This did not deter Dr. Loeb’s open-minded exploration. He founded The Galileo Project in an effort to perform a systematic search for evidence of ET artifacts within our solar system. Then in June of 2023, well after the U.S. Department of Defense’s 2014 detection of a fireball streaking to earth, he announced that he and his group had retrieved material off the ocean floor near New Guinea. It is believed that this object came into the solar system from interstellar space because of the excessive rate of speed this object demonstrated--in excess of 45 km. per second. Dr. Loeb theorized that this could be the part of an ET interstellar starship. The debris retrieved from the ocean was telling. Upon close examination, the stuff showed elements of Cl (Chlorine), Si (Silicon), Be (Beryllium), Li (Lithium), U (Uranium), and finally Fe (Iron), all in a pure state.

Physicist Dr. John Brandenburg, with his background in nuclear weapons research, advanced propulsion systems and his reputation as a Mars authority, found Loeb’s chemical analysis very intriguing. He performed his own analysis in graphic form and sent it to me. He explained this to me, but in relatively complex scientific terms, “Therefore,” he said, “Solar/ Cl (Chlorine) indicates [a] shared pattern of relative elemental abundances. Be, (Beryllium) Li (Lithium) and U (Uranium) can be seen as being very rare elements. Fe (Iron) is fairly common in the universe, as are Al (Aluminum) and Ti (Titanium).  Plotting the ratio of abundances of elements relative to Si in a sample from outer space and then, in turn, its ratio to the ratio of relative abundance found in Cl is a measure of the `strangeness’ of a sample versus the natural cosmic background composition as represented by the sun. We will represent this `strangeness’ measure by EQ/Cl , where EQ means relative abundance of element Q to Si in a sample, and Cl represents the relative abundance of element Q to Si in the Cl. If this `strangeness’ ratio of ratios is much different than 1, indicating a substantial deviation from the Solar/Cl pattern of relative abundances, it could indicate a sample is actually a technologically produced material rather than a product of nature.” (Italics added)

Brandenburg further theorizes, “These elements could mean that the fireball could have come from an artificial craft, perhaps damaged, and the elements are what could be indicative of something like a landing gear.” However, the most terrifying possibility Brandenburg proposed was that this “object” had within it the components of a nuclear weapon. This above all would deeply trouble the national security state.

The original purpose of this paper was to explore whether we might be on the verge of mass public disclosure of the reality of the UFO phenomenon, or at least in the near future. I must answer this speculative desire with a resounding NO. Front and center, and with years of exposure to the topic, we must be aware that at the very least this UFO/UAP phenomenon  is very likely buried as a CORE secret, shielded and protected by a Special Access Program. The individuals in charge know something that terrifies them if it were to become public knowledge. Since public awareness of the Nimitz battle group encounters in 2004 and the late Sen. Harry Reid’s disclosure of getting finances for the ATTIP program, one branch of the uniformed military services has avidly kept mum: the United States Air Force. The Air Force, presumably the people in charge of UFO investigations since 1947, have discussed or released nothing about the phenomenon, other than some diversionary rationales or explanations. So far the CORE Secret appears secure.

I’ve thought about this a great deal and played many theories in my mind as to what the exact UFO secret might be. As I listened to purported “insider” David Grusch testify before Congress, one thing struck a nerve. He claims that he was told that the government has recovered at least a dozen off-world vehicles, and now has them in storage. If so, and if any of these vehicles are from another star system, the technology must be beyond belief—well beyond our own state-of-the-art technology. Does it make sense that these craft could travel light years to finally arrive at Earth, to then just break down? That makes no sense. But having survived two deployments to S.E. Asia during the violent Viet Nam war, I find this could make sense: Such “broken down” off-world vehicles might be combat wreckage.

Over the decades I have been made aware of many witnessed accounts of UFOs in conflict with one another. In 1991 and 1992, I broke two stories of what seemed to be hostile action having been observed then reported by reliable witnesses. The Soviet Union’s Phobos 2 probe was reportedly rammed and destroyed by a huge, unknown object observed in Mars orbit. Also consider the STS-48 space shuttle mission, where an unknown UFO was filmed taking drastic action to avoid what could only have been a weapons firing of some type. ET war in close space to Earth? Yes, that would be an excellent reason to shield the populace from the present threat posed by UFO reality.

To sum up, I cannot forget Ingo Swann’s rumination to me in one of our last conversations, and which he highlighted in his book “PENETRATION” (page 83). “Perhaps there was a space opera going on in which two different sets of ETs were fighting some kind of war here on Earth – while both at the same time were somehow ensuring that humans never realize that they, themselves, are psychic.” Remember, Swann was convinced the ETs he encountered on the moon during remote viewing found humans with psychic ability a threat.

Full disclosure in our lifetime? It will never be allowed to happen.

 

Links:

Davis-Wilson Memo

https://www.documentcloud.org/documents/20074164-wilson-davis-document

SRI

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SRI_International

Dr. Hal Puthoff

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harold_E._Puthoff

Dr. Russell Targ

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Russell_Targ

Ingo Swann

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ingo_Swann

Pat Price's Death

https://rense.com/general9/stranged.htm

Clementine Project

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Clementine_(spacecraft)

Dr. Avi Loeb

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Avi_Loeb

The Galileo Project

https://projects.iq.harvard.edu/galileo/home

 

Serving as its Director of Research and Media Liaison for 20 years, Don Ecker became the voice of what is considered the most journalistic American publication on the UFO subject, UFO Magazine  (now out of print). Beginning in 1991, Ecker began broadcasting his first hit show, “UFOs Tonite!” on the Cable Radio Network. Later his shows moved to the Liberty Works Network, Satellite Radio, then CyberstationUSA and finally KGRAdb. Ecker is a U.S. Army veteran of the Viet Nam War Upon returning home he became a Police Officer and later a Criminal Investigator.