Dr. Jon T. Kosloski Takes Over AARO and It's More of the Same

On Monday, August 25, the Pentagon announced that Dr. Jon T. Kosloski would be taking over the job abandoned by Dr. Sean Kirkpatrick several months ago. Kosloski comes to the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office, commonly called AARO from the National Security Agency.

Official government portrait of 
Dr. Jon Kosloski

We are told that he held several technical and leadership positions in the NSA’s Research Directorate and that he has extensive experience working in multiple scientific fields, including quantum optics and crypto-mathematics. He was described as NSA’s subject matter expert in free space optics and that he invented an advanced language-agnostic search engine.

While we are told, according to the press release, that he possesses the unique set of scientific and technical skills, policy knowledge and proven leadership, I note there is nothing in his background that suggests he knows anything about the history of UFO research or in the thousands of credible sightings that have been reported.

His background is impressive but I see this as similar to selecting a person skilled in esoteric anthropological research to run a program designed to create the next generation of fighter aircraft. That person might be a highly skilled, high trained anthropologist but that doesn’t mean this is a person who has the background to create a military aircraft. It seems the listing of Kosloski’s impressive background as an appeal to authority. This man has studied quantum optics and crypto-mathematics so you can believe that he knows what he is talking about.

In the past, we have been treated with military officers and scientists who tell us there is nothing to flying saucers, UFOs and now UAPs. The March report written by Kirkpatrick told us there was no evidence of off-world technology flashing through our skies, but did we really expect anything else.  There is nothing new in that report. It was what I expected and I’m sure that most of us who have been around the world of the UFO from more than a week or two expected exactly what was reported. I have discussed this sort of thing in the past and you can read it here:

http://kevinrandle.blogspot.com/2024/01/kirkpatrick-aaro-project-mogul-and-moore.html

http://kevinrandle.blogspot.com/2023/08/dr-sean-kirkpatrick-responds-to-david.html

I can point to half a dozen of other reports, authoritative studies that told us the same thing but the trouble is they were riddled with errors, mistakes and no real understanding of the history of the UFO phenomenon. There include the Air Force Project Grudge report, the 1953 CIA-sponsored Robertson Panel that advocated a strategy to convince people that there was no mystery and the alleged scientific study of UFOs that had the conclusions written before any investigation began. You can read more about that here:

http://kevinrandle.blogspot.com/2019/01/moon-dust-robert-hippler-and-project.html

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

And if you are interested in a long read that provides the evidence for this, you can find it here:

http://kevinrandle.blogspot.com/2024/03/the-latest-from-arro-more-of-same.html

Seems like we are now going down the same road again. We are told that this is a serious subject, investigations are proposed and eventually it devolves into what we have seen for decades. If there was nothing to this as Sean Kirkpatrick seemed to suggest (other than a threat to aerial navigation by terrestrial based problems such as drones), why hasn’t this been discovered by now.

If we could find an official study that wasn’t driven by an agenda of cover up and lies, that would be one thing, but every time the government gets involved in UFO research, the outcome is the same. And when the documentation is located and becomes available, we can verify that the fix was in. And now, we see it all happening again. 

Imminent and the Council Bluffs UFO Incident

 

Given what we have learned from Imminent, Lue Elizondo’s UFO book, which, of course, he refers to as his UAP book, there are some developing issues. He comes at the UAP phenomenon from the point of an insider. He is someone who has supposedly had access to those hidden files and investigations that those of us on the outside don’t have. But you have to wonder what those files were and what information did he have because there seems to be problems with what he has written about some of the well-known cases and some that have not received widespread publicity.

As just a single example is a case of recovered debris that might be remnants of some sort of off-world craft. He wrote:

In 1977, on a night close to Christmas, unusual lights were spotted in the skies over Council Bluffs, Iowa. When witnesses ran to where these lights neared the ground, they found not an aircraft but what looked like a small pool of molten metal. Had the craft melted when it hit earth? Had it melted in the air and oozed to the ground? Vallée had obtained materials recovered from this incident. He suspected the multicolored lights seen in the sky by witnesses came from a wobbling craft in distress. When no craft was actually found on the ground, it begged the question: Was the pool of molten metal some sort of by-product of the craft? After some sightings, researchers had recovered a fine metallic fiber on the ground. They called it “angel hair.” I have handled some of this material. It’s a little like steel wool. The working theory is that the exteriors of these aircraft are ablative in nature; that is to say, they are capable of self-sacrificing. When the skin of the craft interacts with the propulsion unit, the craft ablates, or peels off, some of its outer surface, resulting in these fibers. Back in 1977, the Council Bluffs case had undergone an unusually rigorous amount of investigation by local and federal authorities. It was a blue-chip legacy case.

But, like so much of the book, we don’t get many facts about the case. We don’t get names and in fact, we don’t get a date. I don’t know why that is left out. A simple Google search tells us the event happened on December 17, 1977, which is, of course, a “night close to Christmas.”

Here is the rest of the story, as the late Paul Harvey used to say. At 7:45 p.m., three people saw what they said was a red object at about 500 to 600 feet above the ground, falling straight down. They lost sight of it when it disappeared behind the trees in the Big Lake State Park in Council Bluffs, Iowa. That was followed by a flash of bluish-white light and what they said were two arms of fire shooting into the air. They believed that something had hit the ground.

Article from the Cedar Rapids
Gazette, December 17, 1977

They drove to the park to investigate and saw a glowing, orange blob with a bluish crystalline substance in its center. It had impacted on a dike that was about sixteen feet from the road. They said it looked like lava running down the dike and it seemed to be cooling. They said it too hot to touch.

They were not alone. A young couple saw what they called a big round thing that seemed to be hovering. They drove to the park and then called the fire department when the saw the glowing blob.

A third couple reported a bright red object falling to the ground at Big Lake. It is interesting that some of the witnesses reported that it was falling, suggesting something out of control.

Fifteen minutes after they had called the fire department, or about 8:00 p.m., Assistance Fire Chief Jack Moore arrived. The molten metal was still glowing and had spread out into a six by four-foot area. It was about three or four inches thick and said by some to have weighed a thousand pounds. Moore described it as “some kind of metal,” and said “you can’t break it and you can’t bend it.” That, of course, suggests that it had cooled enough so that they could now touch it.

Moore called the police and then Eppley Airfield and Offutt Air Force Base. There were no missing aircraft and though the Air Force knew nothing about what had fallen, they denied that there had been an aircraft accident. Moore said that the Air Force officers were not interested in what he was telling them.

Samples of the metal were collected. There was nothing exotic about the metal. It was high carbon steel that wasn’t at all uncommon. It was used in manufacturing. Two foundries in Council Bluffs could have produced the metal, though there is no evidence to suggest that either of them was the source of the material.

There is one other aspect to the story that might be significant. Four teenagers, in what was called a small, foreign car, arrived just after the first group got there. They asked the other witnesses if they had seen the thing fall out of the sky. The teens then drove off.

There was a scientific paper about the case published years later and that is available online. It provides additional information, including the names of some of the witnesses and an in-depth report on the analysis of the metal, including a photograph of two samples. You can access it here:

https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0376042121000907 Manuscript_0d3637b7965056e1f5526820849aa561

I suppose the real point here is that Elizondo presented nothing new about this case. In fact, just typing Council Bluffs UFO into a search engine provided a wealth of information, including the scientific paper that resulted from the analysis of the metal.

I’ll have more to say about Elizondo’s book and I am preparing a longer and more comprehensive review of the material found there. I’ll post that as soon as I can.

(Blogger’s note: In a world in which plagiarism is claimed even with the most innocuous failures to properly footnotes, I did read an article written by Dr. Richard Warner who serves on the board of directions of the Historical and Preservation Society of Pottawattamie County, Council Bluffs being in Pottawattamie County. I also used various newspaper reports and the scientific paper mentioned above.)

Kingman, Skeptics and UAP

 

Back on August 14, I had a chat with Robert Sheaffer, a reasonable skeptic. I have always thought that we need to know how the other side thinks if for no other reason than to prepare rational and intelligent counterarguments. We had a good conversation about a variety of topics, but concentrated on the information that has come out in the last few years. I was interested in his take on the Tic-Tac videos and if the skeptical community had an alternative to the suggestion of off-world craft preforming exotic and impossible maneuvers. He provided some interesting commentary on those videos.

Robert Sheaffer

For those who have been paying attention, I did interview Kevin Day, one of the sailors on one of the ships involved in the sightings from the USS Nimitz task group that sparked the renewed interest in UFOs. While Sheaffer provided a suggestion that involved electronic glitches, Day suggested that along with the sensor detections, there were visual sightings as well. You can review the Kevin Day interviews, both audio and visual here:

https://rumble.com/v58bktu-a-different-perspective-with-kevin-randle-interviews-kevin-day-uaps-and-tic.html

https://www.spreaker.com/episode/a-different-perspective-with-kevin-randle-kevin-day-us-navy-witness-to-nimitz-uaps-and-tic-tac--60795293

Toward the end of the interview, I did ask Robert what he wanted in the way of evidence that would suggest alien visitation. His answer surprised me. You and listen to the audio and watch the video here:

https://rumble.com/v5b6gx6-a-different-perspective-with-kevin-randle-interviews-robert-sheaffer-uap-an.html

https://www.spreaker.com/episode/a-different-perspective-with-kevin-randle-interviews-robert-sheaffer-uap-and-disclosure--61052753

The following week, based on the sudden interest in the Kingman, Arizona crash, I flew solo, which means there was no guest. I had reached out to several people about coming on the show but only heard back for David Rudiak. He was continuing his search for additional information and asked for a delay of a week or two. He’ll be coming up soon with some additional insight into the Kingman crash.

David Rudiak

I also reached out to proponents of the crash who have, in the past, been ready to tell their side of the story. Neither Harry Drew nor Preston Dennett bothered to respond to my invitations. I have seen Dennett talking about the Kingman crash on other venues and have read the relevant parts of his book that contains information on Kingman. There are many problems with his analysis.

I was also concerned because the Mohave Museum of History and Arts in Kingman, was reported to have documents relating to the crash. But given some of the research I was able to conduct from my armchair, I don’t believe they have anything from an official source. I do know that they have a copy of Ray Fowler’s report on the crash, though I don’t know if the have the whole file. I suspect they do, and we know that part of that file contains the information about Arthur Stansel’s claims of astral projection and interaction with alien beings. Other documents shown were a collection of newspaper articles, which is documentation, but not necessarily accurate information. You can read about that here:

http://kevinrandle.blogspot.com/2024/08/the-kingman-ufo-crash-connumdrum.html

Of course, the Kingman crash was the topic of my solo show. You can listen to the audio and watch the video here:

https://rumble.com/v5bvewk-a-different-perspective-with-kevin-randle-interview-the-kingman-ufo-crash-a.html

https://www.spreaker.com/episode/a-different-perspective-with-kevin-randle-the-kingman-ufo-crash-a-controversial-claim--61108883

The research into the Kingman crash has become important because it has been claimed to have happened and I believe it is one of David Grusch’s twelve UFO crashes. I did speculation on the list of possible crashes to which he referred and you can read that here:

http://kevinrandle.blogspot.com/2024/04/david-grusch-and-his-ufo-crashes.html

Granted my list is speculation but I believe, based on other research, it is fairly accurate. As I have said, I believe that Grusch is accurately repeating what he has heard which, of course, doesn’t mean the events he heard about happened. The lone exception is the Roswell case (though if Shag Harbour made the list, that would be a second).

There will be more to come on this topic. I have been reading Lue Elizondo’s book, Imminent, and will report on it later. My first impression is that it doesn’t advance our knowledge of UFOs, or as he calls them throughout, UAP. But that is a discussion for another time.

 

Strange Creature Videoed in West Virginia

I often come across reports that I find interesting, many of them from UFO researchers I respect, but do not have the time to investigate as thoroughly as I would like. Such is the following.

Stan Gordon reported on his website, “Stan Gordon’s UFO Anomalies Zone” that he had received an email from a family in West Virginia, telling of a strange encounter a few weeks earlier, on July 31. According to that, the witness, a minor, reported, in great detail, that he had seen two short, odd looking, “snowy white” humanoid beings. The child said that other children were there as well and all watched the “snowy white” beings running around in the distance.

Ron Lanham of the “Wild & Weird West Virginia” research group investigated the incident. Lanham provided a little more detail about the humanoids. The witnesses said that they looked like skeleton babies. There is a video of the creatures available on Stan Gordon’s website and additional information about the research conducted by Lanham. He interviewed the witnesses. And he provides precise details on the investigation of that video.

You can find this on Gordon’s website. The title there is “Was a Small Mysterious Humanoid Creature Photographed in West Virginia.” The precise address is: https://www.stangordon.info/wp/2024/08/19/was-a-small-mysterious-humanoid-creature-photographed-in-west-virginia-july-31-2024/

As I say, I have not investigated the case and am relying on both Gordon and Lanham. But there is video and Lanham provides an analysis of it. Any thoughts on what was videoed would be appreciated. 

The Kingman UFO Crash Connumdrum

 

Two years before Jesse Marcel, Sr. told Stan Friedman and Len Stringfield about the UFO crash in the Roswell region, Ray Fowler published the article, What about Crashed UFOs? in Official UFO magazine. Although he touched on a couple of stories, the thrust of the article was told by “Fritz Weaver,” a pseudonym for a man later identified as Arthur Stansel.

Stansel told of a crash of a large, disc-shaped object near Kingman, Arizona. He was part of a large team of specialists brought in to examine the wreck and the body of one alien creature. Although his specific task was to determine speed and trajectory of the object, he did have the opportunity to glimpse the alien pilot and the interior of the craft. This was on May 21, 1953, according to his calendar and for more than twenty years, he kept the secret.

In February 1973, Stansel told two teenagers who were interested in UFOs about his adventure in Arizona. It wasn’t long before Ray Fowler, a respected UFO researcher, learned about this sighting and went to interview Stansel, who not only added a few new details, but produced his calendar from 1953 and signed a statement attesting to the validity of his tale. Of course, that statement was not witnessed by a notary, only by Fowler, and had no legal status as an affidavit.

I had investigated the Kingman crash long ago and was unimpressed with it for several reasons. Originally, there was only Arthur Stansel as the witness, no real documentation for the crash, and a suggestion that Stansel, after he had been drinking, told wild stories. There was a point when a second witness was discovered, but her credibility was not very good and her daughter said that her mother was a liar. You can read about some of that here:

http://kevinrandle.blogspot.com/2010/05/kingman-ufo-crash.html

http://kevinrandle.blogspot.com/2021/03/kingman-rises-from-dead.html

http://kevinrandle.blogspot.com/2011/05/kingman-ufo-crash-really.html

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

This latest flap began when Christopher Mellon, who had been a Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Intelligence released a redacted email exchange he had with a person Mellon called a senior U.S. government member. We were not provided with a name. That meant, of course, that we could not verify that this source existed or if he had any inside knowledge about the Kingman UFO crash. That email, with the critical information redacted and with little in the way of useful information is seen here:

 

The Mellon email that tells us nothing of value but
does mention the recovered UAP from Kingman.

Over the course of the years, we have been treated to many accounts of the case, that began with Fowler’s article filled with direct quotes from Stansel. I do have a copy of the complete report that Fowler filed with NICAP about his rather comprehensive investigation. That includes a transcript of Jeff Young’s initial interview with Stansel that ignited Fowler’s interview and report.

I’m not going to recapitulate that story because it has been told several times. I used it in Crash: When UFOs Fall From the Sky, though my assessment of the case was critical of the data. But this latest flap (which, BTW, I think will impact on David Grusch’s UFO testimony, but that’s something for another time), inspired me to revisit Kingman. I found information from Fowler, in which he verified Stansel’s rather impressive credentials and resume. There were some problems, which centered around his claim that he had been a consultant for Project Blue Book. He originally suggested a rather long-term association, but later told Fowler that it was short-lived. Stansel suggested it lasted only a few days and was based on his examination of the crashed off-world craft.

There is one important interview that seems to have been left out of this whole tale. In a section of Fowler’s report entitled A Man Who Made Contact, we learn some disturbing things about Arthur Stansel. Fowler wrote, “On the next following pages I will explain the fascinating tales of Mr. Arthur Stansel’s flying saucer contacts.”

That part of the interview, conducted by Jeff Young and witnessed by Paul Chetham, began with the question, “Did you say that you had contacted beings from other planets?”

His astonishing answer was, “Yes, but now we’re getting into things where you’ll just have to take my word for it because I can’t produce it or prove it.”

After a short discussion about a group who met regularly met to explore the contacts with other worlds, and who Stansel said, “We were involved in the usage of seances, we weren’t out to contact relatives, but we were out to contact other things,” the questioning continued:

Q: Do you think that it’s possible for a person to convey himself to any place on or of Earth by just using his brain power?

A: Yes. I’m convinced that’s true. I know that can happen because I’ve done it…

Q: Did you gradually or all of a sudden receive contact with these extraterrestrials?

A: We did this on many, many occasions after about a year meeting once a week. We would contact beings, but we never really knew what we were going to contact that particular Sunday night. On many, many occasions we contacted beings from planets other than Earth.

Q: Were these the same beings or were these different beings each meeting.

A: Sometimes they were the same, but generally they were different.

Q: Could you see them or visualize them?

A: Onetime we had an experiment, which took place for about three weeks, in which we learned astral projection, in which you project yourself to the point where the contact is…

 

Q: That’s using your mind to convey yourself?

A: Right, using your mind.

Q: You actually conveyed yourself to some beings?

A: Yes, I did. As a matter I was the only one who was able to go to that particular space craft which was many light years away.

Q: You were on the craft?

A: I was actually on it.

The questioning then turned to what he could see and how he interacted with the beings on that craft, saying that it was some sort of prison ship. The beings had been on it for a thousand years and had no control over it.

Q: Did you [Stansel] have a physical feeling of being on the ship?

A: Yes, very much so. It’s just like I was sitting here.

Q: Would you describe the inside of the ship?

A: Well, the furniture was different than ours in the fact that it had no legs. It was as if it were suspended in the air, but I remember checking for wires holding them up…

 

Q: What were the colors in the room?

A: It was basically red and it seemed to be generated by everything in the room. I saw no light bulbs, but the room was dimly illuminated….

Q: Were they short beings?

A: They were various heights. They were short and tall, but I don’t remember seeing any fat beings.

Q: Were they uniformed or did they wear different types of clothes?

A: They were uniformed in a way, but they were in different colors.

Q: Do you think that could have signified a rank?

A: That could be and another interesting thing is that the dress of the people was no different between a man and a woman and there were males and females.

Q: Were the males in short hair and the females in long hair?

A: No, you couldn’t tell by that. You could just tell by a woman’s bodily characteristics and facial features.

They discuss some emblems that were attached where we would have put shirt pockets. Stansel said that one was in the shape of a leaf and was red against a sort of blue glistening jerkin. There was another which was just a round shape, probably three inches in diameter and it too was glistening.

With that line of questioning finished, the discussion went in another direction. Young wondered if the prisoners had met people from other planets:

A: Yes, they had talked with many, but I was the first one actually projected. They got pretty excited over my arrival, for they felt I was the savoir who could get them back to their home planet or make communication with home base.

Q: Could you have projected yourself back to their home world”

A: I tried but I couldn’t. I think they were beyond range.

They moved the discussion to the nature of the ship, meaning that it was some sort of prison. Stansel mentioned these alien beings were complaining about their incarceration. He then said:

They were complaining about being prisoners because they had so much to offer their own civilization, but they had no way to get back to their civilization except through some intermediary and they thought I could be that intermediary. They had been conducting experiments, but they had been about a thousand years on the ship, so that there had been many generations of these people…

Other things that came out of this interview. He was told that there were thousands of worlds “of intelligent occupation.” That line of questioning ended at that point.

There was more of this sort of thing but then Stansel mentioned that of all these alien worlds, there were none that were interested in Earth. Earth is too overcrowded. Stansel said that they had contact many ships but the beings weren’t interested in Earth.

Then, falling into what would become the David Jacobs theory or hybrid humans, Stansel said, “In fact, there’s more than one extraterrestrial planet that have implanted people here, but generally people don’t know it… they just become part of our civilization.”

There was more of this sort of thing that reads like poor science fiction. At one-point Stansel talked of switches and buttons on the ship but I think of our touch screens that eliminate buttons and switches.

There were other disturbing things in the interview. Stansel, at one point seemed to suggest that he had been a consultant to Project Blue Book for a long time, but there is no record of it. He claimed to have seen a UFO during one of the Atomic Tests, but later claimed he had only heard about it from others.

Stansel did say that when he was interviewed by Young and Chetham, he had been drinking. He’d had four martinis but when Fowler asked the boys about that, they said Stansel had not been drinking. So, was Stansel drinking too much and offered it as an excuse for the discrepancies between the interviews conducted by Young and Fowler. Was the alleged drinking an excuse for telling conflicting tales? Was the drinking the motivation in creating a tale of extraterrestrial contact?

Here’s where we are on this. Stansel is the only man who was involved with the crash in Kingman that had forty or more expert consultants to speak about this. He suggested those on the bus were not allowed to talk during the four-hour trip from Phoenix to the Kingman area, but when they arrived, they were called by name as they were assigned specific jobs. Everything was carefully orchestrated but Stansel managed to see the dead alien pilot and caught a glimpse into the ship. Again, poor security.

There are many reasons that I simply don’t buy this tale and the later interview with astral projection, visits to alien spaceships in flight and all that other nonsense argues that Stansel was adept at spinning tales even he had only had a beer or two and not several martinis.

What this means today, is that the leaked email from Christopher Mellon is irrelevant. There may well have been an email exchange but it is, essentially worthless. Mellon and his unidentified correspondent may well have exchanged the emails about Kingman but that doesn’t prove there is any substance to the report.

There is another element to this and that’s David Grush’s claim of twelve craft in government hands. He may well have talked with Mellon, or someone else who believes the Kingman tale, but without evidence, it is just, dare I say it, a conspiracy theory. And that also suggests that some of Grush’s claims are false, if this is one of the stories. Doesn’t mean that Grusch invented any of the tales, but he has heard them from people he believes are telling him the truth.

Finally, Len Stringfield added some commentary to the Kingman case in his 1978 MUFON Symposium paper on crash/retrievals, and later in his status reports. He suggests the possibility of additional witnesses, but he failed to supply names of any of those witnesses. I am following up on this and will report on it later.

For those interested, I have reached out to a couple of other people who might be able to shed some light on this, including some in the Kingman area. To this point I have not heard back, but will update my analysis as it is warranted by additional information.