Chasing Footnotes (Sort of): Kingman Edition (Update 1)

(Blogger’s note: This is the result of weeks of research into the various tales about the Kingman UFO crash. David Rudiak assisted by chasing other aspects of what was happening in Arizona in the time frame. While this is not exactly chasing footnotes, there is a component of that here. Given what I have learned, this is probably not the end of the investigation, but I have reached a point where I believe I have straightened out part of the problems with the tale and have unraveled some of the dating errors. I suppose I should say that this is something of a work in progress, but given that many of the primary players are no longer with us, some of the questions might never be answered.)

Kingman, Arizona. Photograph by Kevin Randle.

Long after I thought we were through with the Kingman UFO crash, it has been resurrected again. This latest round began when Christopher Mellon, who is described as a former Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Intelligence, released an email exchange that was partially redacted. We don’t know who the recipient was other than a senior member of the government but given what we have seen of senior government officials in the last decade or so, I’m not sure that it is particularly impressive. Many of them seem to accept UFO cases that we know are less than credible and demonstrate little overall knowledge of the topic, even with their alleged government insider status.

In the email Mellon wrote, “Right now we haven’t gone that far back. We’re dealing with the recovered UAP that landed in Kingman, Arizona in the 50s… We now know the management structure and security control systems and ownership of the C/R.”

C/R is crash/retrieval, which is a term invented by the late Len Stringfield as he began his research into this area of the UFO phenomena.

Mellon continued, “We also know who recovers landed or crashed UAPs under what authorities. We also know that a still highly classified memo by a Secretary of the Air Force in the 1950s is still in effect to maintain the cover on UAPs. We also know the SES-2 who’s the Air Force gatekeeper.”

That email tells us nothing that we didn’t already know or what we suspected, and it does not provide names or organizations that can be easily accessed. We could, of course, learn the names of all the Secretaries of the Air Force in the 1950s, but I suspect all of them are dead by now and if we found the right one alive, he would tell us nothing. We can’t verify much of anything in the email, and it provides us with no real corroboration about the Kingman crash other than mentioning something that has been in the public arena since the mid-1970s. Remember that timeframe.

I’ll note here that Mellon is associated with others who have been identified with current UAP research including crash/retrievals. This means that Mellon heard about Kingman from those others. We’re still left with no first-hand witnesses other than the unreliable Arthur Stansel who begin this whole thing when talking with two teenagers about UFOs. All we have now is a former government official suggesting that there was a UFO crash near Kingman without providing the date or anything in the way of evidence. An email with all the critical data redacted provides us with nothing useful and provides no clues as to where to go to learn more.

Like so many of the other crashed UFO tales, this one was originally told by a single witness without much in the way of corroboration. Or rather, a single identified witness, and then some testimony from another source that suggests corroboration for the first witness, but information that came long after the Kingman story had become known throughout the country.

That second witness is second hand, allegedly having heard the story from her late husband. And then a hint of additional witnesses that seemed to have leaped on the Kingman bandwagon later. In other words, in the final analysis, it is not a strong case but seemed to have the potential to become one.

But then, as I noted recently, the case was opened again when Mellon released the email. That original story, first reported by Raymond Fowler in the April 1976 issue of Official UFO is not convincing. Without some additional corroboration, additional witnesses and some documentation for verification, it would be impossible to accept as true, and it is next to impossible to verify. Remember, this was 1976 when virtually no one had heard of Roswell and crashed saucer tales were rejected out of hand by nearly every UFO researcher.

Fowler, however, accepted the report as true because he had personally interviewed the witness, had a signed affidavit by that witness, and a few documents that seemed to support the tale. The witness, Arthur Stansel, had an impressive resume and was a respected engineer who had worked on several important government projects. The evidence was flimsy, but it did exist. And that put Fowler, at least in the minds of some, ahead of most who had found other single witness UFO crash/retrieval cases.

I covered all this in a long post about the early history of the Kingman crash and you can read that post here if you are unfamiliar with the case:

https://kevinrandle.blogspot.com/2025/04/kingman-ufo-crash-again.html

At the risk of becoming redundant, I’ll note here, because it helps understand what is coming next, more about this on aspect of the Kingman story because there is a long history of research into it. According to Len Stringfield’s 1980 MUFON Symposium paper, Retrievals of the Third Kind, Cincinnati researcher Charles Wilhelm said that a man identified only as Major Daly had told Wilhelm’s father that in April 1953, he had been flown to an unknown destination to examine the remains of a crashed flying saucer. He had been blindfolded and driven to a point out in the desert where it was hot and sandy. Inside a tent the blindfold was removed, and he was taken to another location where he saw a metallic ship, twenty-five to thirty feet in diameter. He saw no signs of damage. He spent two days analyzing the metal from the ship, which he claimed was not native to Earth.

Len Stringfield

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

Daly’s information didn’t agree exactly with that given by Arthur Stansel, but it was close enough to raise some questions. The discrepancies can be explained by the point of view of the teller. He saw things from a different angle and under slightly different circumstances. It does seem to provide some corroboration for the Kingman crash story if Daly’s date is correct. The real problem is that it is second-hand, and that is always problematic. In fact, no one knows if Daly exists, or existed at all, though I will note that Len Stringfield was a careful investigator. And I will note that Daly didn’t mention Kingman, only that he was flown to an unknown location destination. We might be complicating the matter by assuming that it was Kingman in 1953.

Stringfield also reported on a man who was in the National Guard (though I wonder if it wasn’t the Air Guard, a distinction that those who haven’t served in either might not make) claimed that he saw the delivery of three bodies from a crash site in Arizona in 1953. He mentioned that the creatures had been packed in dry ice, were about four feet tall with large heads and brownish skin, which does corroborate Werner to a limited extent.

Stringfield, in his 1994 self-published monograph UFO Crash/Retrievals: A Search for Proof in a Hall of Mirrors, reported still another claim suggesting a crash in Kingman. According to Stringfield, “My new source JLD, a resident of Ohio, north of Cincinnati, in a surprising disclosure claimed that a close relative, the late Mr. Holly, who had served in a top command (in a defense department capacity [whatever that might mean]) at Wright-Patterson in 1953, told him about one of two crashes in Arizona. He also told him three bodies, one severely burned, and parts of the wrecked craft, were delivered to the base.”

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

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

June (Kaba) Crain in her backyard.

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

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

The problem is clearly that the secretary did not remember the exact time frame, location or the name of the sergeant. To suggest this was part of the Kingman case, we must resort to speculation based on the limited documentation of her employment experience at Wright-Patterson and her original claim that it had to do with Roswell. The only crash tale that fits her work history and mentions a craft and bodies is the Kingman event. That connection is extremely weak.

I am bothered by the colonel coming around to tell them to forget it, that the story is just a rumor and then demanding they sign statements requiring them to keep the tale to themselves. The only thing the colonel did by doing this was tell them the story was true. He hadn’t come around to stop other rumors, only this one. Then he underscored the importance of it by demanding they take an oath of secrecy.

Jim Clarkson spent a great deal of time investigating the June Kaba story, though she was now using the name June Crain. Clarkson’s assessment was that she was telling the truth, and he published, online, a long transcript of his interview with Crain. That transcript is still available and can be found at https://www.ufocasebook.com/pdf/crainclarkson.pdf. Clarkson also wrote a book about this, Tell My Story – June Crain, the Air Force and UFOs. Clarkson has also been interviewed on several podcasts and radio shows for those who wish to dive down this rabbit hole. The connection to Kingman is speculation without corroboration and is based on the time she worked at Wright-Pat and little else.

There is still another complication to the Kingman crash case. After I published the long article about Kingman, there were several comments that supplied the same set of facts to me. That, of course, caught my attention, and I started down those rabbit holes, much to my horror. Keeping this in something of a chronological order in my investigation, the first new source  I found was Preston Dennett’s UFOs Over Arizona. He wrote:

Another possible source [for corroboration for the Kingman crash] comes from Leonard Stringfield. Reportedly, the witness was taken in April (May? [note in Dennett’s book]) 1953 to a desert area to examine the crash of a flying saucer. The witness described the object as thirty feet in diameter. It had no apparent damage. He was not allowed to enter the ship, but did see a hatchway about four feet tall and two feet wide. His job was to analyze the metal. He spent the next two days on the site. After his tests, he concluded that the object was not constructed on Earth.

In 1977, after Stringfield gave a lecture talking about the Kingman UFO crash, a National Guard employee approached him and said that back in 1953 he was stationed at Wright-Patterson AFB in Ohio. He was there when a group of crates arrived from a UFO crash site in Arizona. The crates, he learned, contained three humanoid bodies. They were four feet tall with large heads and brownish skin. Each was packed in dry ice to preserve it. One of bodies was apparently female.

That information from Dennett, who didn’t supply complete sources, did mention Stringfield’s UFO Crash/Retrievals: Search for Proof in a Hall of Mirrors, which is Status Report VII, dated February 1994. Stringfield wrote:

In spite of interruptive moments of feeling subservient to the negative influences of UFO crash/retrieval surreality, there are some moments of reward, too. One, euphorically happened March 24, 1993, when I spoke before an open-to-the-public meeting at the Milford Public Library near Cincinnati…

In my extemporaneous talk, I reviewed my crash/retrieval research in which I cited the first of my firsthand sources in 1977, who revealed that he had witnessed three alien bodies at Wright-Patterson AFB fresh from a crash in Arizona, 1953. This revelation prompted a member of the audience to stand up and ask that I repeat the place and time and number of retrieved aliens. When I finished my talk, he took me aside to reveal that he had information that would back up my 1977 source 100 percent.

The case in question, published first in the paper I had presented at the MUFON Symposium in Dayton, Ohio, 1978, and republished, in greater detail in Status Report II, 1980…

All this is good, but according to Stringfield, the man became unapproachable once he became a leader in the National Guard. Once again, we are left with intriguing information but no way to verify it. We have second and third-hand sources of information and speculation that they are related to the Kingman crash though there is no direct link to it. We still have no solid information.

Jenny Randles, in her UFO Retrievals: The recovery of Alien Spacecraft, mentions much of this and adds a wrinkle to it. She reported, “However, the earliest reference seems to have been made to MUFON researcher Richard Hall in April 1964. He was told the story by a future commander about whom Hall said, ‘I could not imagine a less likely hoaxer.’ He spoke about a 1953 crash in the Arizona area from which four small bodies were recovered. The descriptions of the craft and of the bodies were, again, extraordinarily consistent.”

This same claim was made by Preston Dennett in UFOs Over Arizona. He wrote, “The next hint of the case was perhaps revealed to Richard Hall back in 1964. Hall spoke with a man (soon to be a commander in Vietnam) who said that, in 1953, A UFO crashed in Arizona.”

This revelation is important because it predates the Stansel claim by about a decade. I needed to find the original source of this claim and contacted several UFO researchers who had a long history with Hall. No one was able to provide the source including Randles. Her response indicated an uninterest in this and possibly all things related to UFOs. Given her quick, but unenthusiastic response, I didn’t want to bother her again about it

I finally did track down the source of this early date and learned that those reporting on it had misread part of Stringfield’s 1980 MUFON presentation. Stringfield wrote that he had a copy of a letter dated April 8, 1964, that he received from Richard Hall in 1977. That letter from Hall to Stringfield caused the confusion. It said:

Here at the school there is an instructor who, during the Korean conflict was an adjutant to an Air Force General at one of our New Mexico proving grounds. I got the following story from him.

In 1953 a flying saucer crash-landed near the proving grounds. Air Force personnel immediately rushed to the area and found the saucer, unharmed and unoccupied with doors open. Upon searching the surrounding area they came upon the bodies of the saucer’s four occupants, all dead.

Shortly after this certain top level personnel were given the true saucer story by Air Force officials. My source was included in this. They were shown the bodies of the four occupants of the ship, which he described as three to four feet tall, hairless, and otherwise quite human in appearance. An autopsy had been performed on one of them to try to determine the cause of death. No cause for their deaths was ever found. Also at this time they were shown three saucers. He described then as ovoid, with a length of twenty-five feet and a width of thirteen feet. They were shown the interior as well, and there were no visible means of control, no visible propulsion. He told me that since that time the Air Force has been working intensely, though unsuccessfully, at trying to discover the means of propulsion.

I can vouch for the validity of this information as well as the reliability of the person I got it from. This you can state as a positive fact. Due to the fact that he is still affiliated with the armed forces he prefers that his identity remain hidden. He also told me that this is top secret information which is highly guarded to prevent leaks.

Stringfield made no personal comment about the information but quoted from Dick Hall’s cover letter dated December 23, 1977. This indicated, not to put too fine a point on it, that Hall had received the 1964 letter in 1977, which makes Hall’s involvement much later than believed. Hall wrote:

The chap mentioned in the letter is the one Todd Zechel finally tracked down and I went to interview the man and had a face-to-face meeting with him here in the Washington area. He was here on some church-related business. As former aid to a general and command pilot in Vietnam, I couldn’t imagine a less likely hoaxer. He clearly took UFOs seriously. He wouldn’t directly talk about what he had seen, but in company with the general, they saw the evidence at Langley AFB in Virginia. Also our informant told us of an Air Force pilot telling him of the southwest crash story.

This is not a ringing endorsement of Zechel’s claims. The unnamed source said they saw evidence at Langley AFB, but didn’t necessarily say it was a craft or bodies. This simply doesn’t validate the letter or Zechel’s claims about it.

Following additional leads, I looked at Hall’s book, Uninvited Guests, published in1988. There are reports of three crashes in the southwest in 1953 mentioned there. Hall wrote:

1953; near White Sands, New Mexico. Army helicopter pilot who served as an aide to Air Force General states that a “crashed saucer” of ovoid shape (about 18 ft. x 30 ft,) and bodies about 4 ft. tall were retrieved and later stored (at least temporarily) at Langley AFB, Viriginia. Investigator: Todd Zechel. [Zechel is the source of the 1964 letter that has caused so much confusion].

1953; Arizona (crash site); Wright-Patterson AFB (viewing site). Air National Guard Commander reports seeing four alien bodies in crates being offloaded in hangar, packed in dry ice. Bodies approximately 4 ft. tall, large heads. Report coincides in all major particulars with following reference and could very well be an independent confirmation. Investigator: Len Stringfield.

May 21, 1953; Kingman, Arizona. A project engineer [Stansel] on Air Force contract with the Atomic Energy Commission reports being one of a group of specialists taken to the crash site in a bus with blacked-out windows to study the craft. He observed a supposedly alien body about 4 ft. tall in a nearby tent. Investigator: Ray Fowler.

A bit of commentary on these entries by Hall in his book. Todd Zechel was not a reliable source and is largely responsible for much of the nonsense around the Del Rio UFO crash. It is clear that he invented testimony, changed dates and was more concerned about publishing a book than the accuracy of the information that he would put in it. I have reported this problem on this blog several times as much of it relates to Robert Willingham, who also radically altered the story on multiple occasions and who claimed to be a retired Air Force colonel. His tale was completely fabricated, and Willingham was never a commissioned officer in the Air Force. For those interested in this rabbit hole, you can read more about Willingham here:

https://kevinrandle.blogspot.com/2014/04/eisenhower-briefing-document-mj-12-and.html

https://kevinrandle.blogspot.com/2010/07/del-rio-ufo-crash-and-mj-12.html

This, I believe should provide more than sufficient information about the Zechel/Willingham collaboration. It outlines the major changes in the Del Rio story and the deception practiced by both Zechel and Willingham. I discussed it beyond these two postings. Type Willingham into the provided search engine to find more information to reinforce my conclusions.

Dick Hall

One other point that bothers me. The tale mentions an Army helicopter pilot who was the aide to an Air Force general. Neither are identified nor does it seem likely that an Air Force general would have an Army pilot for an aide. Those appointed aides to general officers are normally from the same branch of the service. The general’s aide is not only a position to aid the general but is training for those officers considered for promotion to higher levels.

In the second entry, there is a question that didn’t seem to be answered. The unidentified witness said, “[Witness] reports seeing four alien bodies in crates being offloaded in hangar.” Elsewhere, the witness talked about seeing the crates being offloaded by a forklift. This is not clear, but there is nothing to suggest that the crates were open at that point. How is it the witness was able to see the bodies, describe them and even mention that they were packed in dry ice? This makes me wonder if the witness saw the bodies or just the crates. Later someone told him what had been inside of the crates, but he didn’t see anything himself.

There is still another complication to this which I believe has caused a dating problem which suggests knowledge earlier than he had it. Hall referenced an article in the July/August issue of the International UFO Reporter. He wrote there:

1953: Arizona: Businessman-pilot, former Naval Intelligence officer. Observed bodies in crates being off-loaded at Wright-Patterson AFB from Arizona crash site. Direct witness interviews and background check by Len Stringfield. Witness discouraged from further cooperation by reference to security oath. Report coincides in all major particulars, with the following reference and could well be an independent confirmation. (Source: Stringfield, 1980 monograph, Case A-1.

This information was gathered by Stringfield who wrote that in the summer of 1977, after he had been at the first meeting of the Cincinnati Chapter of the World War Wings, that a businessman approached him and told, according to Stringfield, “I have seen the bodies. That’s approximately where the saucer crashed [indicating northwestern Arizona on a map]. It was in a desert area, but I don’t know the exact location. I’m almost positive it happened in 1953.”

He added, “I saw the bodies at Wright-Patterson. I was in the right place at the right time.”

Here’s where the tale gets dicey. He said that he stood inside a hangar, about twelve feet away, “peering at five crates on a forklift.” There was a guard close by, but he apparently didn’t remove the witness, who remains unidentified. Stringfield wrote that his informant had heard that one of the creatures had been alive. They gave it oxygen, but that failed to save it.

Wright-Patterson AFB. Photograph by Kevin Randle.

The other strange comment was that the informant believed that one of the creatures was female. He said, “Either one of the aliens had an exceedingly muscular chest or the bumps were female breasts.”

In Hall’s 1985 article, there is another notation that complicates all of this. Hall wrote:

1966: Wright-Patterson AFB, Ohio: Ohio businessman, former Army Intelligence officer. Observed alien bodies in storage. Direct interviews by Len Stringfield. (Stringfield, 1980 monograph A-3.)

Both these cases have remarkable coincidences in them. Both don’t take place at the crash site but instead at Wright-Pat. Both are reported by former military intelligence officers, and both come from individuals described as businessmen. I wonder if some of the later authors didn’t realize there were two sources telling the same basic tale and lumped them together, giving rise to some of the confusion about the dating. Neither of the men reported the tales to Stringfield until the late 1970s.

Importantly, J.K., the witness from the 1966 “sighting” at Wright-Pat, did not mention 1953 or Arizona, or Stringfield did not report it in that entry in his Status Report. Stringfield also noted that J.K. knew about Goldwater’s attempt to see the alien bodies but was refused permission by General Curtis LeMay. J.K.’s story was not used by Hall in his book which suggests that he learned there was a problem with the tale and excluded it.

Stringfield wasn’t done with these sorts of second-hand stories. In his UFO Crash/Retrievals monograph, that is Status Report VII and published in February 1994, he comes up with another witness identified only as JLD. That man, according to the tale, related a story told by a close relative, the late Mr. Holly. Holly allegedly served in a top command at Wright-Patterson in 1953 and told him, that is JLD, about one of two crashes in Arizona. There were three bodies, one severely burned. Parts of the wrecked flying saucer were sent to Wright-Pat.

It was in 1993 that JLD told Stringfield that Holly had seen the bodies that were housed in a building that was off limits to all but a few. Holly said that the aliens were free of harmful bacteria and their teeth did not decay.

Stringfield said that he was given the name of the relative, his title and that he held the highest security clearance. Because of that, he was told about the crash in Arizona, but Stringfield kept those secrets to himself. We have no way of verifying the information unless there are notes about this in Stringfield’s files, some of which are held by MUFON. Much of Stringfield’s original research is not widely available to UFO researchers.

Again, there is nothing here that provides us any way of learning more about these cases. That brings to a rather complicated “chasing footnotes,” segment. In Hall’s book he noted that information about several earlier cases had come from Len Stringfield’s 1980 presentation at the MUFON Symposium. I couldn’t find the reference in the paper, but I did locate the information in Stringfield’s 1980 Status Report II: New Sources, New Data. This is the original source of much of this information.

I’ll note here that Mellon, who started this latest round of research, is associated with others who have been identified with current UAP research including crash/retrievals. This means that Mellon heard about Kingman from those others, but I don’t believe he knows anything from first-hand observation. We’re still left with no first-hand witnesses other than the unreliable Arthur Stansel. We have a former official suggesting that there was a UFO crash near Kingman, but we don’t know the source of his knowledge. It could be based on the unreliable information provided by Arthur Stansel or any of those confusing mentions in various books and articles.

It did, however, send me and later David Rudiak down several additional rabbit holes that do not confirm the crash but do supply several strange incidents. We both were trying to learn more about the Kingman crash and in the search from that information, we came up with two names of proponents of that claim, Preston Dennett and Harry Drew. I reached out to both.

Drew, who had been researching the Kingman crash for years, suggested that not one, but three UFOs had crashed in Arizona in a short period of time. Drew wrote that one of those craft had been destroyed when it flew into a mountain, a second had hit a rocky butte and fell into a reservoir and the third had found embedded in the sand intact. The military had recovered one of them and took it to Nevada, which I suspect is an oblique reference to Area 51. That, by the way is different from the suggestions that the bodies, at least, had been sent on to Wright-Pat.

The second man, Dennett, is posting to Facebook. I have attempted to contact him several times through Facebook and his website but have not received a reply (until today, July 1, which clarified some reports). In interviews conducted by the media, Dennett was clear in his belief there had been the crash of an alien spacecraft near Kingman. But there was no clear evidence that such was the case.

David Rudiak made a detailed search of the newspaper files for the time, beginning in 1950 and working toward 1953. He found no hints of a crash in any of those newspapers though he did find some strange events recorded in them. None of these strange events, some of which hinted at an alien presence, related to the crash/retrieval stories as they are being told today. They are a distraction… an interesting distraction, but a distraction, nonetheless.

David Rudiak in Roswell. Photograph by Kevin Randle.

What he did find was Harry Drew’s claim of three crashes in six days in May 1953. There was another crash in the area in June 1950 in which the UFO crashed into Hualapai Peak. Drew seemed to claim that the first of the “Kingman crashes” happened on May 18 southeast of Kingman. Drew thought this wasn’t so much a crash as it was a landing. An Air Force recovery team arrived within two hours of landing. It makes you wonder where they were stationed that they could respond that quickly.

The second crash was north of Kingman on May 21, 1953. This is the tale told by Arthur Stansel. According to Drew, those involved in the recovery only spent a short time on the crash site and were told this was a secret Air Force project. That information didn’t show up in the early interviews with Stansel.

The third crash took place on May 24. This is another craft that was alleged to have been brought down by a high-powered radar that was being tested in the area. According to those who believe the 1948 Aztec crash there is a theory that the craft was brought down by powerful radar.

What Rudiak didn’t find was any newspaper references to a crash in the Kingman area in May 1953. Roswell, on the other hand, was announced in newspapers around the world at the time of the event. There are pictures of some of the primary players in the Roswell case that were published in early July 1947. Kingman, not so much.

I’m not sure that I need to review all this but will do so. It is important to note, once again, that the first two “witnesses” to the Kingman crash have admitted to embellishing their tales. Arthur Stansel was the first to talk about the Kingman crash based on the dates, but he was talking to two teenagers. He didn’t seem to worry about the truth. When he spoke to Ray Fowler, he might have been more honest but his credibility was already ruined.

Judie Woolcott, to me, was originally an important witness because she seemed to corroborate some of Stansel’s claims. She was only a second-hand witness because she received the information from an alleged husband. He’d send her a letter but she never produced that letter. The testimony from her daughter is quite important here.

I’ll note here, for clarity, that, what I now think of as the Hall letter, dated April 8, 1964, does not mention Kingman or Arizona but New Mexico proving grounds, which should take it out of the running. It is clear that Hall did not receive the 1964 letter until 1977. It came from Todd Zechel, who is unreliable. There is no specific day, just the mention of 1953. Given the number of reports from 1953, to suggest it was in May is just speculation.

That brings us to what I have written here. I have read Jenny Randles’ book that, I believe, added to the confusion. She provided information about Charles Wilhelm who learned about the crash from his father, apparently in 1966. She wrote that it matched the information for the Kingman crash in 1953, but the information is, at best second hand.

She wrote about Dick Hall’s assessments suggesting that he learned about this in 1964, or six or seven years before Ray Fowler broke the tale in a UFO magazine. As I have said, the dating of these tales gets confusing. The 1964 date came from the letter Zechel had. Others picked up on the 1964 date, not realizing that Hall didn’t receive a copy until much later.

Stringfield added to the overall confusion with the reports in his various Status Reports. I believe that he was relaying information accurately, but those providing the testimony are, at best, second hand and sometimes third-hand witnesses. When dealing with this extraordinary information, second and third-hand sources are very weak. I’m usually inclined to reject them if they don’t have some sort of corroborative testimony or documentation. We need the statements from those who actually saw something, not those who were told that friends saw something.

There might be some additional information floating around out there. (I learned from Preston Dennett that he talked to no firsthand witnesses, but gathered his information thought various other sources.) He reports on much of the information cited here, using the same sources that I did.

He also mentions Linda Moulton Howe’s interview with Richard Doty at Kirtland Air Force Base on April 9, 1983. In a document that Doty showed Howe, there is a reference to the Kingman case but Doty didn’t allow Howe to keep it. Given the mention of other reported crashes, I believe the document to be faked. I detailed all this in Case MJ-12 (updated in 2018) for those who wish to slither down that rabbit hole.

Yes, I know about Bill Uhouse and his suggestion that the disk was given to the US military. He said that it was taken to Area 51, which is problematic because the base didn’t exist in 1953. According to the documentation, the site was acquired in 1955. I will note, however, that this is a remote detachment administered by Edwards Air Force Base, for those who wish to keep this myth alive.

Given the trouble with tracking some sources and that some of the researchers are no longer available to provide context, I believe I have sorted out the problems with the Kingman case. We are still at a point where the first public report is the teenager’s story that appeared in a local newspaper. Ray Fowler published the first national story in April 1976 and from that point much more has been learned.

I reject the letter that Zechel presented with the April 1966 date because it didn’t surface until 1977. The real reason is that Zechel is unreliable in that aspect of it.  I believe I have the chronology worked out so that it makes sense and I believe understand what has transpired. Arthur Stansel, by his own word, was unreliable. Judie Willcott’s story is untrue based on the available evidence. We have a roster of second and third-hand witnesses but some only speculate about the date and the location. In the end, I find nothing to support the tale of a UFO crash in the Kingman case…

But I do end with this caveat. If new and better information is found and presented, I reserve the right to study that evidence and change my mind if it is persuasive. I doubt that will happen, but history is filled with what we thought we knew only to be surprised by later events.\

Ray Stanford is Gone

Ray Stanford

Ray Stanford, died over the weekend. He was born in 1938 and had a nearly lifelong passion researching UFOs. But he also had an interest in many topics, some firmly in the realm of the paranormal and others embedded in the science of paleontology. Riley Black, writing in Smithsonian magazine noted:

Amateur ichnologist Ray Stanford has a knack for finding dinosaur tracks and traces in the Baltimore, Maryland and Washington, D.C. area. Among his recent finds are an impression of a baby ankylosaur–on display at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History–and a track made by an adult of a similar dinosaur on the grounds of NASA’s Goddard Space Flight Center. As our paleontology curator Matthew Carrano says in the video above, Stanford’s talent for tracking dinosaurs has helped fill out our understanding of east coast dinosaurs in deposits where bones are scarce.

If you’re interested in Stanford’s work in paleontology, you can access his paper here:

https://www.jstor.org/stable/23020141?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents

There are other stories about his paleontology work that provides credibility for his work in that field. In feature in the Washington Post, on April 19, 2012, Brian Vestag wrote about their experiences in searching for dinosaur evidence. I searched the story for a quote but there were so many. I finally settled on this because of the name of world renown paleontologists who seen Ray’s collection of dinosaur fossils known as the Stanford Museum. Robert Bakker said, “My jaw stayed dropped for an hour. You can read the full article here:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/magazine/tireless-tracker-rewrote-the-book-on-dinosaurs-in-maryland/2012/04/17/gIQARzRcTT_story.html

He wrote a variety of books on UFOs, including an early work about George Adamski and some of those in the Contactee movement. Asked about it later, he said that was much younger then.

He also wrote Fatima Prophecy, What Your Aura Tells Me and other books in a similar vein but his passion was UFOs. He was on the scene quickly when the story of Lonnie Zamora’s landed egg-shaped craft had landed in Socorro, New Mexico, broke. That culminated in Socorro ‘Saucer’ in a Pentagon Pantry, which was the first book about that historic case. For many years later he would joking say that he wrote the book on the case.

The book wasn’t without controversy and Dick Hall, a respected UFO historian, suggested that there were some exaggerations in the Ray’s book. Stanford and his followers argued that it was the nature of the story rather than the research that went into it. Ray and Hall argued about it in the pages of The MUFON Journal. I think the support was about evenly spread between those accepting Ray’s point of view and those who preferred Hall’s. That’s the very definition of controversial and seem to be where Ray lived in the UFO field.

One of those controversies surrounded a picture that Ray took some months after the Socorro landing. He hadn’t noticed an egg-shaped object until the picture was developed. Although it would be interesting proof for the Socorro case, he kept it hidden. The man who has it has said that with Ray gone, it’s time to release the picture. He also noted that there had been some interesting research of the picture that leaned more to authentic than hoax.

He was the director of Project Starlight International, which employed a broad array of scientific instruments for recording the passing of UFOs. He was also the editor-in-chief of the Journal of Instrumented UFO Research. Over the years he founded and participated in several organizations that studied UFOs, hoping to find that one bit of evidence that would eventually silence his critics.

If nothing else, it can be said that he polarized what he touched and created an interesting, if sometimes irrelevant controversy throughout his career. It will be interesting to see if the photographs that he kept hidden will now be produced. That would certainly change the course of the dialogue… if the pictures are as advertised.  

Ray Stanford was 87 when he passed. 

AARO, UAP, Wall Street Journal: A Somewhat Personal Response

 

Just last week, I suggested that we were reliving the history of UFO investigations and the attempts by various government agencies including the Air Force to discredit witnesses, dismiss evidence and convince us that there was nothing to the tales of flying saucers. Although not mentioned in the article, one of the best examples of this was the claim that a nonexistent Project Mogul flight was responsible for the debris found by Mack Brazel and taken to Roswell in 1947. And that’s not to mention the 1953 CIA sponsored Robertson Panel that suggested ways of convincing the public that aliens were not visiting Earth.

(Note: This article is much longer than it should be but I thought the topic important. For those unfamiliar with the Robertson Panel, you can read more about it here:

https://kevinrandle.blogspot.com/2021/07/coast-to-coast-operation-mockingbird.html

There are other links embedded in the text that will take you down other rabbit holes in this long-term debunking of UFO sightings.

For those interested in the equally ridiculous claim that Project Mogul explained the Roswell crash, might I suggest reading Roswell in the 21^st Century which contains a long appendix about Mogul and all the lies told about it. Just click on the link to the left. For those who dislike me sending you off to buy one of my books, you can read more about Mogul here:

https://kevinrandle.blogspot.com/2025/02/david-rudiaks-analysis-against-mogul.html

https://kevinrandle.blogspot.com/2022/03/the-end-of-project-mogul.html

Or, you can just type Project Mogul into the search engine to the left you’ll find all the other postings I have made on this topic.)

Now, thanks to the Wall Street Journal, we are treated to the latest deception about UFOs. We are told that the DoD spread stories about UFOs and flying saucers to hide the development of the latest weapons systems. We are told that ALL, and I stress that, all significant UFO sightings are mistaken sightings, institutional misunderstanding and Cold War pranks. Really? Cold War pranks? Are we dealing with a professional military or a bunch of college boys engaging in hazing pledges?

This frat boy mentality apparently lasted for decades. According to one of AARO’s investigators, a former Air Force officer, who was unnamed in the article, said that he had been briefed on a secret alien project decades earlier which frightened him. He was warned that if he ever repeated the secret he could be jailed or executed. Really? Executed? This same claim would be repeated to more AARO investigators by other retired military men who were also unnamed. After decades of unnamed sources who had been feeding misinformation to reporters who repeated it without attempts to verify it, I’ll take a pass on more unnamed sources.

Sean Kirkpatrick, one time head of AARO.

According to the story, certain new commanders of the Air Force’s most classified programs, as part of their induction briefings, would be handed a piece of paper with a photo of what looked like a crashed flying saucer. The officers were told that the program they were joining, dubbed Yankee Blue, was part of an effort to reverse-engineer the technology on the craft. They were told never to mention it again. Many never learned it was fake. In the spring of 2023, the defense secretary’s office sent a memo out ordering the practice to stop immediately. 

This tale was printed without comment. No one realized how dumb the claim was. Why would they brief incoming officers on a project that was highly classified and for which they had no need to know? Holding a top-secret clearance does not allow the holder access to everything classified as top secret. The person must also have a “need to know.” This tale strikes me as a poor attempt to dismiss the tales from officers who were exposed to information about UFO events without a good reason but who now are talking. It was just another frat boy prank, but I suspect any commander who engaged in this nonsense would lose his command if caught by his superiors spreading the lie and then threatening execution.

But then, the first sentence in the WSJ article tells us all that we really need to know about their reporting and the reason for the leaks. “U.S. military fabricated evidence of alien technology and allowed rumors to fester to cover up real secret-weapons programs.”

This wasn’t the first time that this dodge had been attempted. We have read about the CIA use of UFOs to disguise secret projects and to their claim that many UFO sightings were of spy planes but the true answer couldn’t be offered because of national security. National security was often used as the dodge so that the difficult questions could be ignored.

This was all part of a “public disclosure that left out the truth behind some of the foundational myths about UFOs: The Pentagon itself sometimes deliberately fanned the flames, in what amounted to the U.S. government targeting its own citizens with disinformation.”

So, the question that is not answered is when did all that disinformation begin. Was it in 1947 when the idea of flying saucers first burst into public conscience or was it something designed after the CIA’s Robertson Panel decided that the public should be deceived about UFOs… not as a cover for classified projects but as a way of diverting interest in the topic? And is this why every chief of Project Blue Book can be described as hostile to the idea of alien visitation with one notable exception?

Probably the most egregious example of this is the claim that the 1967 shut down of a flight of ballistic missiles at Malmstrom AFB was part of an experiment to determine if the electromagnetic pulse from the detonation of an atomic bomb would disable the weapons system. We are now supposed to believe, that at the height of the Cold War, the Air Force decided to attempt to disable the missiles by an outside source on an active flight of ballistic missiles. The artificial EMP, they claim took down the whole flight. Of course, the missiles were brought back on line rather quickly, which overlooks the fact that the EMP pulse would fry the electronics, rending the missiles useless without extensive replacement or repairs, something would take weeks if not months.

But a moment of digression. During one of the hearings, two men from DoD, including Under Secretary of Defense for Intelligence & Security Ronald Moultier and Scott Bray, described as the Deputy Director of Naval Intelligence, were providing examples of recent UFO sightings. The hearing was chaired by Congressional Representatives Andre Carson, who by the way, is a Democrat providing proof of the bipartisan nature of the interest in UAP, contrary to WSJ’s allegation this was only Republican interest and this is a digression in the digression.

Scott Bray pointing at a UAP.

During the Q&A, one of the participants asked about Malmstrom event in 1967. Both men said they knew nothing about it, which tells us a couple of things. First, they were either not as fully informed as many of us in the UFO community as they should have been or they were lying. Later, one said he was vaguely aware of the case, which meant the first answer had been a lie. They did know something about it. I believe this was a cover up of that mistake by suggesting there was nothing alien involved and therefore it would outside they investigation.

(Once again, I wrote a detailed analysis of the case in The Government UFO Files. If you are annoyed when I promote a book here, you can read my take on this particular hearing here:

https://kevinrandle.blogspot.com/2022/05/coast-to-coast-am-more-on-congressional.html

It provides the details of the exchange between the DoD representatives and the  Congressmen.)

While the WSJ article focuses mainly on the report made by former Air Force missileer Robert Salas and his testimony about the evident, they conveniently omit the series of UFO sightings in the area at that time. There were multiple witnesses to an object hovering near one of the missile control centers. The official story now is that Salas was telling the truth about disabling the missiles, but it was part of that radical and dangerous experiment I mentioned earlier. According to documents in the Project Blue Book files, “Between the hours of 2100 and 0400 MST numerous reports were received by Malmstrom AFB agencies of UFO sightings in the Great Falls, Montana area.”

There were reports of a landing near Belt, Montana that were made by several witnesses including Cascade County sheriff’s deputies. The Project Blue Book files contain lists of a few of the witness statements but all reference to radar reports are missing. In the end, the case, investigated by LTC Lewis Chase, the UFO Officer at Malmstrom, was labeled as unidentified.

Project Blue Book reveals that on March 24, 1967, near the small town of Belt, Montana, a truck driver, Ken Williams, saw a domed object land in a canyon near the road. He was curious enough that he stopped, got out of his truck and began to walk toward the object. The UFO then lifted off, flew further up the canyon and touched down again, now hidden from the highway by a ridge.

Williams, in a handwritten document filed with the National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomenon, a NGO, told the whole story of what he had seen that night. In response to their request, on April 7, 1967, Williams wrote:

Gentlemen:

Object was first observed approximately 5 miles southeast of Belt, Montana. I was traveling North on Highway 87 enroute to Great Falls, Montana. Object was approximately 1 mile to my left and appeared to be about 5 or 6 hundred yards [1500 – 1800 feet] altitude. I would estimate its speed to vary from 40 to 50 miles per hour. I am judging this speed by the speed I was traveling as object seemed to be running evenly with me. Its appearance was that of a large doomed [sic] shaped light or that of a giant headlight. Upon climbing up the Belt Hill in my truck, I looked to my left and about ½ mile up a gully. I witnessed the object at about 200 yards [600 feet] in the air in a still position. I stopped my truck and the object dropped slowly to what appeared to me to be within a very few feet from the ground. [Underlining in original]. It was at this time that I felt something or someone was watching me. As a very bright effecting light emerged from the object it momentarily blinded me. This extremely bright light seemed to flare three times. Each time holding its brightness. By the third time the light was so bright [underlining in original] that it was nearly impossible to look directly at it. It was at this time that I drove my truck onto the top of the hill which was about another ½ mile. I stopped a car and asked the people [Don Knotts of Great Falls] if they would stop at a station at the foot of the hill and call the Highway Patrol. I went back down the hill and viewed the object for several more minutes. It was while watching it the second time that it rose and disappeared like a bolt of lightning. I went back to the top of the hill where my truck was parked and just as the Highway Patrolmen [sic] Bud Nader, arrived the object appeared once again. About 2 miles away and traveling in a Northeast direction, whereas it stopped once again and appeared to drop to the ground [Underlining in the original.]. There are several deep gullys [sic] in the area where it appeared to drop out of sight. This was my last sighting of the object.

The Project Blue Book file on this case contains what was known as a Project Record Card, which was a 4 x 6 card that outlined the details of the case. While the case is labeled as “unidentified,” it also noted that there was “(1 witness),” which they believed to be so important that it was underlined. But that isn’t true and other documents in the Blue Book files prove it.

According to a letter written by LTC Lewis D. Chase, and addressed to Dr. Edward Condon at the University of Colorado, there was, at least, one other witness. According to Chase, “Mr. Nader [sent by the Highway Patrol] reported that upon reaching the scene he observed an unusual light emanating from the area that the truck driver, Mr. Williams, claimed the object had landed a second time.”

The Newspaper Accounts

The Great Falls Leader carried a series of articles about the UFO sightings in the area at the time. Interestingly, some of what was printed in the newspaper was not found in the Blue Book files. Those who conducted the military investigation should have been aware of these other sightings, but there is no mention of them. It seems that, to the Air Force anyway, those sightings never happened.

Ron Rice, a staff writer on the newspaper said that there had been UFO sightings all over the state that day. He wrote, “Before midnight it was the Belt area; after 3 this morning, Malmstrom Air Force Base where one was picked up on the bottom of a Federal Aviation Agency radar scope which tracked it for a time before it disappeared in the direction of the Belt Mountains.”

There were visual sightings as well. Airman Second Class (A2C) Richard Moore, a communicator-plotter said that he had seen something about five or ten miles from the base at 3:30 a.m. Airman Third Class (A3C) said that he had seen an object that he said was a bright light with orange lights on the bottom. This, according to Moore, was close to the ground and it was what the FAA radar had detected.

Moore also said that a sabotage alert team had located another object about 4:40 a.m. directly over Malmstrom. Moore said that he saw it as well, but it was more a point of light moving across the sky than anything else. He said it wasn’t a satellite because it was zigzagging.

Another airman, Warren Mahoney, said that Moore had told him about the UFO at 3:10 a.m. and that at 3:42 he had received a call from the FAA that there was an object on their radar northwest of the base providing corroboration for the sightings. Three minutes later it had turned, flying toward the southeast. At 4:26 a.m. it disappeared from the FAA radar.

Rice also mentioned that there had been a search of the canyon where Williams and Nager saw the UFO that appeared to be landing and they found some evidence, though it isn’t clear exactly what that evidence was. Sheriff’s deputies Keith Wolverton, Jim Cinker and Harold Martin, searched the ground for about two and a half hours and discovered some freshly broken twigs on bushes and branches of the trees around the alleged landing site. They thought it might have been cattle, but there were no cattle in the area at the time of the sighting. Martin was also reported as saying, “Some of the trees are 25 feet high, and had limbs broken from them, and some bushes below them were broken. All were fresh breaks.”

According to the Great Falls Tribune, Trudy Fender provided a rough drawing of an object she had seen with a steady white light on one end, a blinking white light on the other and a red light in the center. She had been waiting for her ride on March 26. The sighting isn’t important because of the object, but the fact that she saw something and drew make an illustration of it. That refuted a theory that there had been no UFO sightings in Montana other than Williams sighting two days earlier.

The Project Blue Book file

With all that was going on that night, with the news media alerted and with local law enforcement involved, there wasn’t much that the Air Force could do other than respond. Air Force regulations in affect at the time required it. The Blue Book file, in a teletype message that was unclassified revealed, “Between hours of 2100 and 0400 MST numerous reports were received by Malmstrom AFB agencies of UFO sightings in the Great Falls, Montana area.”

The message noted that “Reports of a UFO landing near Belt, Montana were received from several sources including deputies of Cascade County Sheriff’s Office. Investigation is being conducted by LTC Lewis Chase… The alleged landing site is under surveillance. However, daylight is required for further search.”

The investigation was apparently completed several days later and on April 8, 1967, LTC Chase wrote a report that he sent on to Dr. Edward Condon at the University of Colorado who was leading the Air Force sponsored “scientific” investigation into UFOs. After setting the scene, Lewis wrote:

Numerous reports were being received by the dispatcher at Base Operations, plus questions from the public. At 2205 [10:05 p.m.], Lt. Col. Lewis D. Chase, Base UFO Investigating Officer, was notified by the Command Post of a reported landing. Sequence of events following notification were as follows:

2215 – Check was made with Base Operations as to aircraft movement in the area. An outbound transient aircraft departed Great Falls enroute to Glasgow, Montana. Departure time was 2109 [9:09 p.m.]. All other aircraft were accounted for.

2230 – Discussion with the Sheriff of Cascade County revealed that he had dispatched additional deputies to the area. Requested that he notify me of any significant findings. While talking to the sheriff, he contacted one of his mobile units. The man reporting said that they were at the scene and that there was no activity at the time. Requested the sheriff to forward any subsequent developments.

2330 – I called the Sheriff of Cascade County for a status report. He put one of his deputies on the line (Ziener?) who had been at the scene and had interviewed the truck driver and highway patrolman. While on the phone, Sheriff Martin from Belt, Montana, called in from the scene. He discussed the possibility of manpower assistance from Malmstrom and/or helicopter support. Informed him that daylight would be the first possible helicopter support and that I would discuss the other manpower request with Colonel Klibbe.

2345 – Discussion with Colonel Klibbe. He suggested that I go out and evaluate the situation and make my recommendations from there.

0030 – Departed the base in radio equipped station wagon accompanied by Major John Grasser of the Helicopter Section, for an evaluation of the terrain for any possible helicopter survey at daylight, a driver, and the alert photographer.

0100 – Arrived at the scene. Was met by Sheriff Martin, who repeated the previous reports. He had been on the scene continuously. A study of the terrain revealed the hopelessness of any ground survey at night. A tentative plan was agreed upon – the sheriff’s office to conduct a ground search of the reported landing area on the morning of 25 March 1967, while concurrently a helicopter survey of the area would be performed by Malmstrom. (It had been reported by Major Grasser that a helicopter training flight was scheduled for 0730 Saturday morning. This procedure was later approved by 15^th AF, provided no landing was made). Sightseers were in the area due to radio publicity and Martin reported some had gone on the ridges before he could stop them.

0215 – Reported to Colonel Klibbe the tentative plan agreed upon with Sheriff Martin. He approved.

0230 to 0340 – Numerous sightings reported.

0350 – Discussed the make-up of a message with Captain Bradshaw, Wing Command Post, IAW [In Accordance With] AFR [Air Force Regulation] 80-17, to notify concerned agencies, including CSAF [Chief of Staff, Air Force], of numerous sightings, plus the reported landing under investigation. Was concerned with resulting publicity and the need to notify other agencies prior to press releases. Message will merely state reported landing, that it is under investigation, that daylight hours are required to complete investigation, and that a subsequent report will be submitted. Preliminary message dispatched.

0800 – Sheriff’s ground search and Malmstrom aerial survey completed with negative results. Follow-up messages dispatched to interested agencies (AFR 80-17) stating negative results of the investigation.

The last part of the report confirmed that Chase had conducted it and provided contact information for him. He later, in a teletype message reported, again, that there had been negative results but this does show that AARO and the WSJ omitted this information from their reports because it would conflict with their EMP effect theory.

All mention of the radar reports is missing from the official files, as are the reports from Air Force personnel. Even if Chase was uninterested in most of the civilian sightings, he should have interviewed airmen who saw something, if for no other reason than to explain those sightings. This is a flaw in that investigation.

The radar sightings, with the corroborative visual reports would seem to be a very important part of the case. This would make it a stronger case, but Chase didn’t follow up on it. He didn’t explore the radar sightings, he did not request information from the FAA, and he didn’t interview any of the radar operators. The newspaper files suggest that the information had been reported the next day. Chase should have known about it given that it already knew of the sightings.

There might have been something else operating here, and that was the mission of Malmstrom AFB. It was a minuteman missile base, and just days before, an entire flight of missiles had suddenly fallen into a “No-Go” situation which meant that they had been deactivated. This was an issue that was a matter of national security and that might explain the reason the Belt, Montana sighting was so poorly investigated.

Echo Flight

Years later, Robert Salas and Jim Klotz were the first to tell the story of Echo Flight, originally in an online article at cufon.org and later in their book, Faded Giant. Robert Hastings, in his UFOs and Nukes, provided additional information. The story they told started early on the morning of March 16, 1967, when two missile maintenance teams who had been working on two of the flight’s widely scattered launch facilities said they had seen strange lights in the sky near where they were located. A mobile security team confirmed this, saying they had seen the lights as well. All of this was told to Colonel Don Crawford by Captain Eric Carlson and 1^st Lieutenant Walt Figel as Crawford came on duty, at least and according to what Salas had been told during his 1996 taped interview with Figel. Hastings had been told virtually the same things during his own interviews with Figel, confirming that Salas had reported the information accurately.

About 8:30 a.m., that same morning, as both Carlson and Figel were performing routine checks, the flight’s missiles began to drop off line. Within seconds, though Figel would later suggest it was minutes, all ten missiles were inoperable. In the event of war, they could not have launched. This was a major national security issue and a point that would become important later.

Hastings wrote, “Immediately after the malfunctions at Echo, the launch officers ordered two separate Security Alert Teams to drive to each of the launch facilities where the UFOs had been sighted. Nevertheless, the maintenance and security personnel at each site reported seeing UFOs hovering near the missile silos.”

He added, “…some months after my book came out, in July 2008, I interviewed Figel on tape. He said one of the two SAT teams reported seeing the UFO over one of the silos. In 1996, he told Salas that both teams had seen it. A faded memory, it seems…”

But the story wasn’t quite so mundane, as Hastings learned during his interviews with Figel. When Hastings talked to Figel, a retired Air Force Colonel on October 20, 2008, he was told that one of the guards had suggested the UFO had shut down the missiles. Figel thought the guard was joking. He told Hastings, “I was thinking he was yanking my chain more than anything else.”

Hastings asked, “He seemed to be serious to you?”

And Figel responded, “He seemed to be serious but I wasn’t taking him seriously.”

Hastings wanted to know what the man had seen and Figel said that it was just a large, round object that was directly over the launch facility.”

To clarify the situation Hastings and Figel discussed the security procedures. Figel said, “[When] the missiles dropped off alert, I started calling the maintenance people out there on the radio… [I asked] ‘What’s going on?’ … And the guy says, ‘We got a Channel 9 No-Go. It must be a UFO hovering over the site.”

Figel, of course, didn’t believe him. He said that one of the Strike Teams, they had dispatched two, but one of them thought they had seen something over the site. They told Figel that a large object was hovering there.

All of this, of course, suggests that UFOs were somehow involved with the sudden shut down of the missile systems. Although the government officials rejected the idea, there is a great deal of eyewitness testimony for the UFO sightings in the area.

The maintenance teams were dispatched and once they had located the problem, they were able to bring the missiles back on line, but the process was not simple and required hours for each missile. There was an extensive investigation that involved not only the Air Force but also the contractors who had designed and built the missiles.

According to the 341^st Strategic Missile Wing Unit History, recovered through Freedom of Information:

On 16 March 1967 at 0845, all sites in Echo (E) Flight, Malmstrom AFB, shutdown with No-Go indication of Channels 9 and 12 on Voice Reporting Signal Assemble (VRSA). All LF’s in E Flight lost strategic alert nearly simultaneously. No other Wing I configuration lost strategic alert at that time.

Guidance & Control channel 50 dump data was collected from E-7 facility and E-3 Facility and all 10 sites were then returned to strategic alert without any LF equipment replacement. All 10 sites were reported to have been subject to a normal controlled shutdown…

The only possible means that could be identified by the team involved a situation in which a couple self test commands occurred along with a partial reset within the coupler. This could feasible cause a VRSA 9 and 12 indication. This was also quite remote for all 10 couplers would have to have been partially reset in the same manner…

In the researching of other possibilities, weather was ruled out as a contributing factor in the incident.

A check with Communications maintenance verified that there was no unusual activity with EWO-1 or EWO-2 at the time of the incident.

All of which, in the short term, did not explain why the missiles all went off line at virtually the same time. In a very technical aspect of the Unit History, it explains that a “30 micro sec Pulse… was placed on the Self Test Command (STC) line… Seven out of 10 separate applications of a single pulse would cause the system to shut down with a Channel 9 & 12 No-Go.”

Or according to the Blue Book files, a randomly introduced electronic pulse which might be considered an EMP, which shouldn’t have affected the missile systems, had shut them down. The point of insertion was apparently the Launch Control Facility, but all those areas should have been shielded from just such an occurrence and that includes an EMP.

The information about the Echo Flight was, quite naturally, communicated to the Condon Committee, and Dr. Roy Craig responded. Craig was working on the government contract for the Air Force when he made his notes on his meeting with LTC Chase at Malmstrom. Craig’s notes on the meeting said:

After Colonel Chase and I exchanged pleasantries in his office, I asked him about the Echo incident. The Colonel caught his breath, and expressed surprise that I knew of it. ‘I can’t talk about that’… If I needed to know the cause of this incident, I could arrange through official channels, to see their report after the completion of the investigation… Although local newspapers carried stories of UFO sightings which would coincide in time with Echo, Colonel Chase had assured me that the incident had not involved a UFO… I accepted the information as factual and turned review of Major Schraff’s report (on the Echo incident) over to Bob Low [Dr. Robert Low, also a member of the Condon Committee], who had received security clearance to read secret information related to the UFO study… Low, in turn, had to interface with his Air Force Liaison in Washington, Col. Hippler [Lieutenant Colonel Robert Hippler] …. [Low wrote to Craig] ‘Roy, I called Hippler and he said he would try to get this, but he suspects it’s going to be classified too high for us to look at. Says he thinks interference by pulses from nuclear explosions is probably involved.

So, it seems that a cause had been found, or rather it seemed to have been found, but the ultimate source of the pulse was not identified. Hippler, speculating about the source of the pulse came up with an electromagnetic pulse (EMP) from a nonexistent atomic blast. That the pulse shut down all the missiles made it a national security issue, which changed the level of the classification.

(To digress one more time, there had been communication between Hippler and Low before the contracts were signed to begin the investigation. Hippler told Low what the Air Force wanted and Low responded in the positive. If you wish to dive into that rabbit hole, you can read more about it here:

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

And, of course, I have published additional information on this. Just type Hippler Letter into the search engine at the right.)

Oddly, in the 341^st SMW Unit History, it noted, “Rumors of Unidentified Objects (UFO) around the area of Echo Flight during the time of the fault were disproven. A Mobile Strike Team, which had checked all November Flight’s LFs [Launch Facilities] on the morning of 16 March 67, were questioned and stated that no unusual activity or sightings were observed.”

But that doesn’t seem to be quite accurate. Hastings interviewed James Ortyl who had been assigned as an Air Policeman at Malmstrom. Ortyl said:

I was an Airman 2^nd Class [A2C] at the time. We were working the day-shift at Kilo Flight in March of 1967… It was mid-morning and three or four Air Policemen were gathered in the launch control facility dispatch office. Airman Robert Pounders and I were facing the windows looking out to the yard and parking lot. The others were facing us. As we were conversing, I witnessed a shimmering, reddish-orange object clear the main gate and in a sweeping motion pass quickly and silently pass by the windows. It seemed to be within 30 years of the building. Stunned, I looked at Pounders and asked, “Did you see that?!” He acknowledged that he had.

To be fair, Ortyl didn’t know the exact date, but said that in was near his birthday of March 17^th. But then there is Craig’s interview with Chase which also moves in the direction of UFO sightings on the proper date. Craig’s notes indicate that he had the names of some of those involved with the UFO sightings at the time of Echo’s shut down, but he never contacted any of them.

Craig also had the name of Dan Renualdi who, in March 1967, was a member of the Site Activation Task Force (SATAF). He said that he had been within a few feet of an object. There was also a sergeant with the Air Force Technical Evaluation Team who said he had seen a flying saucer. There is no record of Craig talking to either of these men, nor are there any reports in the Project Blue Book files to suggest that the sightings had been reported through official channels. That was a violation of the regulations in force at the time, although it could be argued there were contradictory regulations.

All this demonstrates is that there was another reported UFO around the time that Echo Flight had gone down, contrary to what the Unit History said. It does not prove that the UFOs had anything to do with the anomalous pulse.

There is another aspect to this. Quite naturally, the Air Force wanted to know what had happened. The man who conducted the investigation for Boeing, the Defense Contractor for the missile systems was Robert Kaminski. In a letter dated February 1, 1997 to Jim Klotz, he wrote:

At the time of the incident, I was an engineer in the MIP/CNP (Material Improvement Project/Controlled Numbered Problem) group…. The group was contacted by the Air Force so that Boeing could respond to specific Air Force Minuteman Missiles problems that occurred in the field…

I was handed the E-Flight CNP assignment when it arrived by the group supervisor. As the internal Boeing project engineer I arranged meetings necessary with management and technical personnel required to determine a course of action to be taken, in exploring why 10 missiles had suddenly fallen from alert status – green – to red, with no explanation for it. This was an unusual request and we had no prior similar incident or experience to this kind of anomaly….

Since this was a field site peculiar incident, a determination was made to send out an investigative team to survey the LCF and the LFs to determine what failures or related incidents could be found to explain the cause…. After a week in the field the team returned and pooled their data. At the outset the team quickly noticed a lack of anything that would come close to explain why the event occurred. There were no significant failures, engineering data or findings that would come close to explain how ten missiles were knocked off alert. This indeed turned out to be a rare event and not encountered before. The use of backup power systems and other technical system circuit operational redundancy strongly suggests that this kind of event is virtually impossible once the system was up and running and on line with other LCF’s and LF’s interconnectivity….

The team met with me to report their findings and it was decided that the final report would have nothing significant in it to explain what happened at E-Flight. In other words there was no technical explanation that could explain the event… Meanwhile I was contacted by our representative… (Don Peterson) and told by him that the incident was reported as being a UFO event – That a UFO was seen by some Airmen over the LCF at the time E-Flight when down.

Subsequently, we were notified a few days later, that a stop work order was on the way from OOAMA to stop any further effort on this project. We stopped. We were also told that we were not to submit the final engineering report. This was most unusual since all of our work required review by the customer and the submittal of a final Engineering report to OOAMA…

However, as I recall nothing explained this anomaly at E-Flight.

I’ll step in here again to note that if an EMP was responsible for the missiles going off line, there were have been evidence of that when the engineers checked. The fried circuits would have been a clue, but according to this, they found no reason for the failure.

Hastings, in a review of the material in 2013, wrote, “Actually, the large round object sighted by the missile guard, and reported to launch officer Lt. Walter Figel, had been hovering over one of the Echo missile silos, not the launch control facility itself. Nevertheless, Boeing engineer Kaminski’s revealing testimony essentially confirms Figel’s account of a UFO presence during the incident.”

Oscar Flight

In March 1967, Robert Salas was a Deputy Missile Combat Crew Commander (DMCCC) at Malmstrom AFB. When he first told his tale in 1995, he had thought he had been assigned to Echo Flight, later he thought it might have been November Flight, but once he located his former commander, Fred Meiwald, he learned it was Oscar Flight. The story he told, in 1995, was essentially the same as that about Echo Flight, or in other words, that all ten missiles had gone off line within seconds of each other.

According to what Salas would report, while he was sixty feet underground in the capsule, he received a call from an NCO in the Launch Control Facility telling him that they had seen some UFOs nearby. They were just lights and they just weren’t sure what they might be. But not long after that, the NCO reported that the object, later described as a red glow that was saucer shaped, was now over the gate. Before the NCO completed the report, he said that one of the men had been injured, apparently by the UFO. He hung up to go assist.

Salas said that he woke the commander and began to tell him about the UFO sightings. Within seconds, their missiles began to go off line. Later, there would be some question as to how many of the 10 missiles they lost. It might have been part of them or it might have been all of them. In May 2013 Salas told me he had believed it was all of them but his commander thought it was only five or six. In his first reports, Salas just split the difference.

In fact, Salas would say that once he mentioned what was happening outside, his commander, Meiwald said that he had heard about a similar event the week before. Meiwald said that there had been an intrusion alarm that went off and that a two-man security team had been ordered to respond. As the team approached the site, they saw a UFO hovering over it. They raced back to the Launch Control Facility, shaken by what they had seen.

In a letter to Salas dated October 1, 1996, Meiwald wrote, “…Topside security notified us the mobile team had reported observing the “UFO” while responding… to the situation at an outlying LF…”

Hastings interviewed Meiwald in 2011 about the events at Oscar Flight. Meiwald said:

…essentially, I was resting—whether or not I was sound sleep I don’t recall—but I know Bob got me up because we had unusual indications on the consol [sic], plus we’d had a security violation and, uh, the response team that [inaudible] had gone out to investigate at one of the LFs. They reported unusual activity over there and—by that time I was up—and saw consol indications. [I] also directed that the strike team return to the LCF while maintaining radio contact on the way back. As they came back we did lose radio contact for a short period of time, however, the flight [security] leader—the person who was in charge at the time—recognized the team as it was approaching the LCF and opened the gate so that his troops could get in.

He also confirmed that those above ground had seen something in the sky. Meiwald didn’t remember much about that but did confirm they had seen something in the sky. Hastings asked him about the Flight Security Crew saying that it was a bright red oval-shaped object but Meiwald said that he could only remember something about a bright object, confirming, at least, the UFO sighting.

Later, Meiwald said that he and Salas had been called in for a debriefing by the AFOSI. He confirmed that they had been asked to sign nondisclosure statements, but to him that was not a big deal. That sort of thing apparently happened occasionally. At the Citizen Hearing in May 2013, Salas told me, as well as others, that they had been required to sign the nondisclosure statements. “It was then designated a highly classified incident,” according to Salas.

The trouble at Oscar Flight was also reported by 1^st Lieutenant Robert C. Jamison, who was Minuteman ICBM targeting officer at Malmstrom in March 1967. According to what he told Hastings and reported in UFOs and Nukes, he, Jamison, said had been tasked to assist in the restart of “an entire flight of ten Minuteman ICBMs which had simultaneously and inexplicably shut down immediately after a UFO was sighted in the vicinity…”

More importantly, Jamison said that before he was sent into the field, he and his team were told to remain at Malmstrom until all UFO activity had ended, and then they received a “special briefing.” They were told to report any UFO they saw in the area. If they saw something they were at the missile silo, they were to enter the personnel hatch and wait until the UFO left. The Air Police guards, who were to accompany the team, would remain outside to watch the UFO.

While he was in a hangar waiting to go into the field, Jamison overheard a two-way radio conversation about a UFO on the ground. This is a clear reference to the Belt sighting and dates Jamison’s recollections to March 24. Jamison said that one of the highest-ranking officers on the base was on the scene of the landing. According to the newspaper accounts and the Blue Book files, this was Colonel Fred Klibbe.

The special briefing apparently was not just a one-time affair. He said that for two weeks after the missile shut down, his team received a UFO briefing prior to heading into the field. This is something that would be repeated in other, similar events at other Air Force bases.

This seemed to be a repeat of the situation that happened just days earlier. Salas was convinced, later, that this happened on March 24, which was the date of the Belt, Montana sightings.

But unlike the Echo Flight incident, there was no official record of this event. The Unit History doesn’t mention it, and there is no documentation for it. It is as if it never happened and for that reason, there are some who think that this is a hoax. The only reason for the mention of UFOs in Blue Book files is that the news media was already involved with the Belt sightings and they couldn’t be ignored. Had that not happened, then neither the Echo Flight nor the Oscar Flight events would have leaked into the public arena.

I will note here that if what Salas said was true, and the latest AARO confirms what he said, they just provide a non-alien reason for it. AARO’s investigation saying that Salas witnessed part of the experiment, then two missile flights were shut down, not just one. That is, twenty missiles, part of the MAD strategy were taken off line by a US experiment that was conducted during a series of UFO sightings, made by civilians, law enforcement and military personnel. These sightings were corroborated by FAA radars but apparently the AARO investigative team never bothered to verify this information. They boiled it down to a single witness and then provided what seemed to be a plausible explanation counting on the media failing to ask the legitimate follow up questions about the timing. WSJ seemed to ignore the idiocy of conducting such an experiment on part of our missile defense shield. Rather than be outraged by the risk of doing that, they all just nodded and said, “Got it.”

The WSJ concedes there was a cover up, but it wasn’t of an alien event but of a ridiculous experiment to use an EMP to shut down an active missile flight rather than conduct the experiment away from the Air Force base where no harm could be done. They fail to mention the UFO sightings in the area at the time of the experiment or that the EMP is nearly impossible to reverse, rending the missiles useless.