Another Mogul Rant (But Deserved!)

Just yesterday, I stumbled onto an interview with a reporter or researcher who knows little about the UFO field but who is now considered some sort of expert. I know that these sorts of things happen in every field and those old cronies, such as me, are often resentful when the new breed shows up with their new ideas and theories. All too often, in this field, those new ideas are just old ideas that are recycled but sometimes it’s just they haven’t bothered to dive deep enough into the rabbit hole.

What inspired this latest rant? Another expert, explaining the history of UFO research, pointing out that 1947 was the big year, sparked by Kenneth Arnold but then the find of the remains of a flying saucer outside Roswell. Of course, the Air Force floated the balloon explanation the next day (Yes, the pun was intended) and that was the end of the Roswell story… at least for a while.

Nearly fifty years later, the cover up was admitted by the Air Force. It wasn’t a weather balloon, but a huge array of balloons known as Project Mogul, a highly classified project with the ultimate purpose of spying on the Soviet Union. They were hiding this because we didn’t want the Soviets knowing that we were creating constant level spy balloons.

This is, of course, utter nonsense.

Here’s what I know, based on interviews with soldiers stationed at Roswell at the time, including the man in charge of the Counterintelligence Office, Sheridan Cavitt, the base Provost Marshal, Major Edwin Easley, soldiers responsible for the recovery of the debris and civilians Bill Brazel who handled the debris and Charles Moore who was an engineer working on the balloon launches from Alamogordo that are now wrapped in the mantle of Project Mogul.

We also have comprehensive records of the activities of the University of New York people in Alamogordo because Colonel Richard Weaver was able to obtain the rough field notes created by the leader of that project, Dr. Albert Crary and, of course the more formal record of the results of their experiments. These are the keys to my research because they end the Mogul explanation.

Dr. Albert Crary

According to that documentation, not to mention what Moore told me in a series of interviews, the first of the balloon launches in New Mexico was to be Flight #4. There had been earlier flights on the east coast, but the weather and population density made it problematic. They switched their operation to New Mexico in 1947 where the weather was better, there were large areas that were uninhabited, and large military ranges where they could control access. All that made Alamogordo a much better location for what was actually the University of New York Balloon Project.

Charles Moore reviewing winds aloft data.

Given the records, there were only two dates that worked for the Project Mogul explanation to be viable. These were June 4, 1947, which was Flight #4 and July 3 which was Flight #9. There is no recorded data for either of those flights and they are not listed in the official documentation. We do know the existed and we know what happened to them. Other information including interviews and documents provide those answers.

Flight #9 was originally considered the culprit in the debate about what fell. There was no data recorded for the flight. According to Dr. Crary’s diary notes, which are somewhat confusing on this point, linked several flights together. In those notes, Crary wrote:

Balloon tests? 7, 8, 9, and 10 off this week. Test 7, slated for July 1 postponed until 2 July as equipment not ready. 100 tanks Helium obtained from Amarillo Monday evening. Also radiosonde receivers set up by NYU personnel Monday but were not operable. Test 7 at dawn on July 2 with pibal 1 hr first following with theodlite [sic]. Winds were very light and balloons up between A [sic] air base and mountains most of the time. Included cluster of met balloons. Followed by C-54? For several hours & finally landed/in [sic] mountains near road to Cloudcroft. Before gear could be recovered, most of it had been/stolen [sic]. Stations operating at north hangar, Cloudcroft and Roswell (emphasis added). Shots made unfortunately at Site #4 and picked up good from north hangar and from Cloudcroft for awhile. Nothing from Roswell. On Thursday morning, July 3, a cluster of GM plastic balloons sent up for V2 recording but V2 was not fired. No shots fired. Balloons up for some time. No recordings from Roswell as pibal showed no W winds. Balloons picked up by radar WL [Watson Labs] and hunted by Manjak C-45. Located on Tularosa Range by air. Out pm with several NYU by weapon carrier but we never located it. Rocket postponed until 730 Thursday night but at last minute before balloon went up, V2 was called off on account of accident at White Sands. Sent up cluster balloons with dummy load. Balloon flight #10 at dawn on July 5.

I emphasized that that part of the NYU team was in Roswell to track these flights. Moore told me that they had gone to the air base to ask for assistance, but the officers had refused to cooperate. Instead, the NYU team rented a hotel room and used it as their base for tracking the balloon arrays. Moore was telling me that they had been in Roswell to get assistance for their work, which meant they would have revealed exactly what they were doing in New Mexico. Moore, fifty years later, was still annoyed that the soldiers were unimpressed with what Moore said the officers called “college boy” antics. The soldiers were too busy with important work (and before anyone criticizes the use of soldiers for the men, I point out that in July 1947, there were Army Air Forces but no United States Air Force.)

Moore also gave another example of this lack of cooperation with the military that evolved into the idea that Mogul was highly classified. He said that he another of the engineers had been attempting to recover an array that came down near Roswell. He wrote:

As far as the claim that “Roswell AAF” knew about MOGUL operations prior to July, 1947, I have this to offer. On June 5, 1947, after chasing, in an Alamogordo weapons carrier, NYU Flight #5 to its landing about 26 miles east of Roswell, my vehicle was low in fuel so I drove to Roswell AAF and requested entry to refuel. I identified myself, displayed the Alamogordo AAF motor trip ticket to no avail; after lengthy telephone conversations between the guard at the gate and headquarters and an interview by the Officer of the Day to whom I showed the recovered equipment [emphasis added] from Flight 5, I was turned away and had to go to a commercial gas station to pay for refueling. Admittedly, I did not use the term Project MOGUL to the Roswell OOD because at that time, the term MOGUL, was not known to any of the NYU balloon crew and was never used by anyone in our hearing at Alamogordo. I did tell the OOD about the NYU balloon operations in Alamogordo. I came away with the impression that the Roswell AAF personnel were so impressed with their own operations and security that they had no interest in what else was occurring in their vicinity.

There are a couple of statements here that should be addressed. First is this idea that Moore, in his weapons carrier, was turned away from the gate at Roswell. On May 20, 1947, according to Albert Crary’s diary, “[Crary and Edmondson] Went over to Roswell Army Air Field, filled up with gas.”

Or, in other words, Crary had been able to refuel his weapons carrier on the Roswell base, apparently with no trouble. This was only a couple of weeks before Moore said that he was turned away after “lengthy telephone conversations between the guard at the gate and headquarters and an interview by the Officer of the Day to whom I showed the recovered equipment from Flight 5, I was turned away and had to go to a commercial gas station to pay for refueling.”

According to the records, Flight #8 was launched on July 3 at 303 MST time which suggests it was launched prior to dawn. Unlike its predecessors, it was not a 600-foot array, but according to the schematic, it was about 400 feet long and there were no rawin radar targets on it. The other point is that “entire flight period was accomplished with C-54 aircraft.”

Typical Mogul array with Rawin
Radar reflectors. None were
attached to Flight #4.

There is no other information about Flight #9 in the official record. However, newspaper accounts suggest the accident injured several people and was a late evening launch on July 3. Karl Pflock, in his book, Roswell: Inconvenient Facts and the Will to Believe wrote, “Six years ago [1995] I thought NYU Flight 9 was the Roswell culprit. This Mogul service flight is missing from the Project 93 reports on the NYU team’s July 1947 operations, and it seemed likely to have been one of the flights lofted with the new polyethylene balloons, which I thought could account for Major Marcel’s mystery material. Information recorded in the field diary of Alamogordo Mogul group chief Albert Crary deflated this idea [pun in Pflock’s book].

All this information, once discovered by various UFO researchers including Don Schmitt and me, removed Flight #9 from the possible culprits for the debris recovered by Mack Brazel. The timing simply does not work out.

Then we learn that Flight #10 was launched on July 5. It was the first to use the large plastic balloons. Data were collected, but again, according to the schematic, there were no rawin radar reflectors on it. That alone, would remove it from the list of culprits. Without the rawin targets, there was no such debris to be collected and transferred to the Fort Worth Army Air Field, as shown in the pictures taken on July 8 in General Ramey’s office.

Balloon debris displayed in General Ramey's office
on July 8, 1947. This material was not that
recovered outside of Roswell.

All this returns us to Flight #4, set to be launched at dawn on June 4, 1947. According to Crary’s diary and field notes:

Jun 4 Wed. Out to Tularosa Range and fired charges between 00 [midnight] and 06 this am. No balloon flights again on account of clouds [emphasis added]. Flew regular sono buoy up in cluster of balloons and had good luck on receiver on the ground but poor on plane. Out with Thompson pm. Shot charges from 1800 to 2400.

This should eliminate Flight #4. They cancelled the flight at dawn because of clouds. This would have been a full array. Charles Moore had told Karl Pflock that Flight #4 had been configured just as Flight #2, which had been launched months earlier on the east coast. According to the schematic, Flight #2 had several rawin radar targets on it. This was done for tracking purposes on the east coast where there was good radar coverage.

Moore, however, told me that Flight #4 was configured like Flight #5, which contained no rawin targets. Remove the rawin targets from the equation, then Flight #4 is taken out of the running as the culprit. It was now just a bunch of off-the-shelf neoprene weather balloons, just like those used several times a day by numerous weather stations around the country. In fact, in Circleville, Ohio, a farmer, Sherman Campbell found a weather balloon and rawin target on his farm in early July. He was able to identify it for what it was. When he showed it to the local sheriff, he too, knew what it was.

Where does that leave us?

Much of what has been written about this slice of the New York University balloon project. Much of it is documented and much of it is based on the memories of Moore, gathered nearly half a century after the events. Sometimes the two accounts do not match.

Next is the idea that those on the NYU team in Alamogordo didn’t know the name of Project Mogul. Karl Pflock, in an interview conducted by members of New Jersey MUFON on August 27, 1994, said, “This [Mogul] was a top secret, very, very sensitive project that was being run by New York University for the Air Force’s Watson lab.”

Moore carried on this tradition, not only in the paragraph quoted above, but throughout his writings and statements about the project. According to Dave Thomas, “The Mogul project was so classified and compartmentalized that even Moore didn’t know the project’s name until Robert Todd informed him of it a couple of years ago.” In a handwritten note on a copy of the magazine article sent to me by Jim Moseley (of Saucer Smear fame), Thomas added, “Moore told me this when I met him.”

The problem is that this is entirely false. Crary, in his diary, mentions the name, Mogul, more than once. On December 11, 1946, Crary wrote, “Equipment from Johns Hopkins Unicersity [sic] transferred to MOGUL plane.”

On December 12, 1946, he wrote, “C-54 unloaded warhead material first then all MOGUL eqpt with went to North Hangar.”

On April 7, 1947, Crary, according to his diary, “Talked to [Major W. D.] Pritchard re 3^rd car for tomorrow. Gave him memo of progress report for MOGUL project to date...”

In the letter, dated May 12, 1949, Robert B. McLaughlin was describing, for Dr. James A. Van Allen, who C. B. Moore was. He then wrote “In addition to this, he had been head of Project Mogul for the Air Force.” That might be something of an over statement but shows that there were many in on the great Mogul secret at the time. Again, I point out that the ultimate purpose was highly classified, but the name, Mogul, was known to those in Alamogordo in 1947.

The documentation then, shows that the name was known as early as 1946, and was used by the NYU scientists and engineers in that time frame with little concern about security. Although no longer as important, the name was even used to introduce Moore to Van Allen. Moore did know the name while in New Mexico with the project and that the claimed classification was not about the activities in New Mexico or the balloon flights, but the ultimate purpose which was to spy on the Soviets. That is single point is the fact that Moore might not have known. This might seem like spitting hairs, but the truth is, the activities in New Mexico weren’t classified. They were even published in newspapers around the country on July 10 including pictures.

The Alamogordo News front page story exposing the "Mogul"
balloon launches in New Mexico.

Third, Moore himself said that he showed part of the recovered Mogul array to the Officer of the Day at Roswell, who should have noted the confrontation in his log. It would have been part of the debriefing and should have come to the attention of the Provost Marshal and the Operations Officer. In other words, Moore was confirming that some of the officers at Roswell had seen one of the balloon arrays, this from Flight No. 5. When Brazel arrived with bits of the debris a few days later, they would have recognized it.

Fourth, there is another fact that shows there was nothing unusual about these arrays, or rather nothing that would conceal their nature from those not involved in the project. Crary’s diary for Sunday, June 8, said, “Rancher, Sid West, found balloon train south of High Rolls in mountains. Contacted him and made arrangements to recover equipment Monday. Got all recordings of balloon flights…”

Finally, it should be noted, again and probably should be unlined in bold typeface, that there was no Flight #4. Crary’s diary is not confusing on the issue as Moore would claim. It stated quite clearly that the flight had been cancelled because of clouds, as required by the CAA and their instructions to Crary and his team. The second entry said they flew a cluster of balloons with a sonobuoy but said nothing about radar targets or other equipment or that this was the cancelled Flight #4. Moore told me when the flights were cancelled, they stripped the equipment, but let the balloons go because there was no way to get the helium back into the bottles. Sometimes they used them for service flights, but those sorts of flights would not have required a rawin radar target.

There is another point here that demands comment. Flight #4 was to be launched at dawn but was cancelled them. Moore, however, wrote that the flight had been launched earlier than that. How could the flight be cancelled after it had been launched. Moore based this statement on a weather front that moved through the area about dawn, which changed the wind directions. For his calculations to put the balloon close to the Brazel (Foster) ranch, it had to be launched before dawn.

More evidence can be found in a Moore letter dated August 10, 1995. He wrote about the mythical Flight #4 and its cancelation:

The jury-rigged flight #4 of meteorological balloons that we launched as AMC contractors from Alamogordo Army Air field on July [sic] 4, 1947 was no big deal; it was a test flight, the first in a series and there was no announcement of our plans, either on base or to the Army Air Forces authorities. Since we launched from just within the restricted air space associated with the White Sands Proving ground and expected the balloons to rise high above the civil air space, we did not notify the CAA in El Paso. As I remember, we launched before sunrise with only our Watson Laboratories associates and the B-17 crew knowing about the ascent. This flight was not successful due to the failure of the Watson lab radar to track the balloons and the poor transmission of the acoustic data caused by use of out-dated [sic] World War II batteries. The only mention of these flights in 1947 came in the unclassified progress report for June.

There is a very telling point of contradiction in the above statement by Moore. He was saying that it was a jury-rigged flight of meteorological balloons. Later, as he began to really push the idea that Flight #4 was the culprit in the Roswell crash, he said that the flight was as successful as Flight #5 without explaining why Flight #4 was not listed and no data were recorded. That suggests it wasn’t a jury-rigged contraption that was apparently launched before the flight had been cancelled. This is one of many evolutions in Moore’s story as he began to claim that he was the man who launched the Roswell UFO crash. Unfortunately for him, he produced too many written statements and later granted too many interviews. He just couldn’t keep the story straight.

The problem that concerned the CAA about the flights wasn’t the balloons ascent but their descent, as he noted. They expected that the array would rise quickly and reach stability, or relative stability, at a constant level, in a short period. Once the balloons began to fail and the array began its fall back to the ground, it would be expected to drift for a time in the civil airspace, and this was a real hazard to aerial navigation. This was the point at which the danger existed, and it was why the CAA required the NOTAMs.

Moore was being disingenuous here. He is attempting to explain the lack of a NOTAM, if records for June 4, 1947, could be found. He knew that no NOTAM had been filed because of the nature of this alleged jury-rigged flight. It was not expected to leave the restricted area of the range. And he knew that the NOTAMs were only necessary for the constant level balloon flights, not the test flights that would fall back quickly.

The second point is that there is nothing to suggest that radar was a factor in this flight and nothing to suggest that radar reflectors were included on the cluster. The evidence, partially provided by Moore when he told me the configuration matched Flight #5, showed no rawin radar targets attached to the array. There was a cluster of balloons launched later in the day and was used to lift a sonobuoy to test its capability of detecting the explosions.

In fact, there is no evidence that rawin radar reflectors were used in those first flights in New Mexico. According to Crary’s diary on June 9, “Bill Godbee and Don Reynolds went out to Sid West’s ranch south of High rolls and brought back recovered balloons – clock, 2 radiosondes, sonobuoy and microphone and lower part of dribbler.” He mentioned nothing about the radar reflectors. If they are recovering damaged balloons, they surely would have recovered the remains of the radar reflectors.

Moore supplied an illustration for Flight #5, dated June 5, 1947. There are no radar reflectors on this flight. Given that the balloons sent aloft on June 4 were referred to as a cluster carrying a sonobuoy, there is no reason to believe there were rawins on jury-rigged Flight #4. In other words, Flight #4 would have been configured just as was Flight #5, which contained no radar targets, and if there were no radar targets, then one aspect of the Mogul theory for the Roswell debris has been eliminated. There is no mention of radar tracking until Flight No. 8, launched on July 3. An illustration for Flight No. 2, which provided no data, did contain radar reflectors, but again, there is no evidence they were used until later. I hate to keep beating this dead horse, but this aspect rules out Mogul and tells us that the material photographed in General Ramey’s office on July 8 was not recovered near Roswell.

As with the cluster of balloons on June 4, there was no mention of any radar targets with the recovery at Sid West’s ranch. There is almost no mention of radar for the tracking of the balloons, though Moore suggests that the Flight #4 proved that the radar wouldn’t work so they changed the array. This does not seem to be accurate, based on the records that available. The only suggestion of radar in these first flights was based on Moore’s memory of the targets being included but not from the documentation available now or to the records of the recovered flights.

Moore himself provides some answers to the questions. In the final report on NYU’s balloon activities there is a tabulation of all the flights. Both Flight #4 and Flight #9 are missing. This tabulation also notes about Flight No. 5, “First successful flight carrying a heavy load.” This is just another indication that there was no Flight #4.

That would seem to suggest that the cluster of balloons was not a full Mogul array. Moore, however, with no documentation to support the conclusion, wrote, “I think that Flight #4 used our best equipment and probably performed about as well as or better than Flight No. 5.”

The logical question to be asked is if Flight No. 4 performed as well as or better than Flight No. 5, then why was it not listed in the tabulation. It would have been the first successful flight, unless, of course, it wasn’t a full Mogul array.

Given the time it took to build the full array and prepare it for launch, it would not have been possible to build a new array for Flight #5. Crary’s diary is clear on the point. Flight #4 was delayed by weather. Flight #5 was, in fact, Flight #4, redesignated and launched on June 5. That flight was recovered, as Moore noted.

Finally, if the June 4 flight was just a cluster of balloons launched only with a sonobuoy, then it would not have been a constant level balloon and speculation about its flight path is just that… speculation. If it didn’t reach the altitude that Moore claimed, then its flight dynamics would have been different. It would be impossible to provide any flight path for it simply because the data don’t exist.

Winds aloft data, as measured in 1947, only reached from the surface to 20,000 feet. Anything above that was not measured and certainly not recorded except for a weather station in Orogrande, New Mexico. They measurements reached 50,000 feet. In addition, the reporting of the winds aloft data was erratic. Some stations missed many reports over the few days in early June. These data are incomplete.

Moore himself indicated that if he had changed one number in his assumptions, the balloons could have landed as much as 150 miles away. On page 93 of his book, he wrote, “If the balloons had not entered the stratosphere but had continued in the upper troposphere, they would have passed 17 miles south of the actual landing site and would have landed more than 150 miles to the east at the end of the [assumed] 343 minute flight.”

But, of course, there were no data for this flight, so the height, distance and performance were all speculation built around Moore’s memory of the event. That memory is in direct conflict with the written record about the flight, a flight designed for one thing and that was to test the sonobuoy.

The evidence proves that Flight #4 was cancelled. The evidence suggests that a cluster of balloons lifted a sonobuoy up for testing but was not a full Mogul array. Moore himself referred to this as “jury-rigged” which in and of itself tells us it was something thrown together for a specific limited test of short duration. There are no indications that it left the restricted areas around Alamogordo, no evidence that it carried the materials necessary to create the debris field, no evidence that it was what Mack Brazel found, and no evidence that Mogul was so secret that very few knew the name. As Moore said, repeatedly, there was no project Mogul in New Mexico. There was only the New York University Balloon Project.

The Observer Anti-Roswell Article: A Brief Response

 The Observer published an article by Bernie O’Connor suggesting that the story of an alien event in Roswell is a hoax based on the recovery of a Project Mogul balloon. I don’t know why it is so difficult for those on the skeptical side of the fence to realize that the Mogul explanation doesn’t work. Simply put, Flight No. 4, the culprit in all this, was cancelled. That is based on the documentation available.

For those interested in the original article, I believe the current issue of The Observer can be seen here:

https://theobservermagazine.substack.com/about?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email

In the following rebuttal to this claim, and the interview that O’Connor conducted with Colonel Walter Klinikowski which is the source for his report, I provide some additional commentary. As most of you know, I have worked on the Roswell UFO crash story for about thirty years, I thought some of my insights might be helpful in understanding this latest piece. To show that I have been around for a long time, I’ll tell you the Delta pilot reference is Kent Jeffrey, who wrote the Roswell Initiative and later repudiated it. I covered this in an entry in The Roswell Encyclopedia that was published in 2000. Kent’s MUFON article, abbreviated and published with his permission is included in that book.

Kent Jeffrey, Tom Carey and Kent's father in New Mexico. 
Photo by Kevin Randle.

The reason that I, and others did not bother with Colonel Klinikowski, is his statement that he wasn’t in Roswell at the time of the event, though he was assigned to the base at time. According to the base telephone directory, he was assigned to Operations. In July 1947, the Operations Officer was Lieutenant Colonel Joe Briley, who made comments that contradict Klinikowski. But, like Klinikowski, he didn’t see anything himself, but in talking with others concluded that something important had happened. Briley told me that the story of Blanchard’s leave was a cover story so he could go to the crash site without reporters wondering where he had gone. Blanchard would not have gone to the site for what amounted to a weather balloon and common radar reflector.

Klinikowski clearly supported the Project Mogul theory, telling us that the project was highly classified, but the truth is, the ultimate purpose was classified, but the experiments in Alamogordo were not. Pictures of one of the arrays appeared in the Alamogordo News on July 10, 1947. Charles Moore, who worked on the New York University balloon project there told me that he had purchased the step ladder that appears in one of the pictures, linking it to what he insisted on calling the New York University balloon project rather than Project Mogul.

Charles Moore reviewing winds aloft data. Photo by
Kevin Randle.

The ladder to which Moore referred. Picture from the
Alamogordo News, July 10, 1947.

Here’s one of those facts that gets overlooked. Dr. Albert Crary, who was the leader of the balloon project, used the name Mogul at least three times in his unclassified journal and diary notes, proving that they knew about Mogul. Again, the ultimate purpose was not known, but the name, Mogul, was. I’ll note that in the book, Roswell in the 21^st Century, there is a long appendix that covers the whole Mogul tale.

Thanks to Colonel Richard Weaver, who ran the Air Force investigation about Roswell in the 1990s, we have copies of the data collected by Crary’s experiments in New Mexico. The problem here is that Mogul balloon flight in question, No. 4 was not flown. According to the documentation, it was to be launched on June 4, 1947, but was cancelled because of clouds. Charles Moore told me that the next flight, No. 5, was configured exactly like No. 4, and Flight No.5 had no radar targets, an important point. Moore would later claim that they received data from Flight No. 4, but there is nothing recorded for it. They did release a cluster of balloons later in the day, on June 4, that was not a Mogul flight and never strayed from the range.

In his article, Bernie O’Connor wrote: “I [meaning Klinikowski] wasn't even in Roswell when it happened and when I got back to town there was some mention of it. The debris landed on my cousin by marriage's ranch and his name is Dewey Stoke and he never saw this stuff because it was picked up by the Air Force people from the base of Roswell and they took the stuff and shipped it off to Wright Patterson Air Force Base which was the home of what was then called the Air Technical Intelligence Center.”

But here’s part of the problem. The debris landed on a ranch owned by the Fosters and Mack Brazel recovered some of it. He took it to the Chaves County Sheriff (Roswell) and George Wilcox called out to the air base. Jesse Marcel, Sr., responded and did not recognize it as balloon debris though he was familiar with weather balloons and radar targets. Some of that early debris was sent on to Fort Worth Army Air Field where Colonel (later brigadier general) Thomas DuBose had it sent on to Washington, D.C. Dewey Stoke never saw the stuff, so I must ask, “What is his purpose in this tale?”

Bud Payne, who was a New Mexico judge, told Don Schmitt and me, where he had seen the field of metallic debris. It was on the ranch managed by Mack Brazel, and he put us on the same bit of ground where Bill Brazel found some of the metallic debris days and weeks later.

We do have testimony from Bill Brazel who handled debris, and his description of a gouge in the terrain. He provided descriptions that vaguely match some modern material such as fiber optics. Jesse Marcel, Sr. and Jesse Marcel, Jr., provided descriptions that eliminate Earth-based technology.

Bill Brazel in 1989. Photo by Kevin Randle

There are eye witnesses to both the debris field and impact site. General Arthur Exon told me and Don Schmitt that he had flown over the two sites, which would tend to rule out a Mogul flight since it would not have gouged the terrain or been scattered over two separate sites that were miles apart. All of it would have stayed clumped together.

Finally, Bernie O’Connor wrote, “The problem with Roswell, as well as with any other classic UFO cases, is the fact that one small bit of new evidence presented—the offhand comment by an authority figure, or the rediscovered testimony or official document—can upend the whole belief scenario. Humpty-Dumpty could have a great fall.”

If anyone wishes for a little bit of documentation. Major Patrick Saunders was the base adjutant in 1947. On the fly leaf of The Truth About the UFO Crash at Roswell, Saunders wrote, “This is the truth and I still haven’t told anybody anything!” He signed it, “Pat.” Any yes, I verified the signature with Saunder’s son, using the flight records of the senior Saunders.

The Saunder's statement in The Truth
About the UFO Crash at Roswell.

The authority figure is Colonel Klinikowski. However, Colonel DuBose, who was responsible for sending some debris to Washington, D.C., said that the balloon material was substituted for the debris taken to Fort Worth by Marcel. Marcel said that the material in the photographs taken in General Ramey’s office was not what he had taken to Fort Worth. Brigadier General Arthur Exon provided testimony about the material arriving at Wright-Patterson in 1947, including comments about those who examined it saying they could not identify it. Do my authority figures, who were there and handled the debris trump those cited by O’Connor? Does it suggest that there is more to this story than meets the eye?

And I haven’t even mentioned Major (later Colonel) Edwin Easley, the provost marshal on the base who told me that the extraterrestrial path was the correct one to follow. I had asked him if we were on the right path. He asked, “What do you mean?” I said, “We think it was extraterrestrial.” He said, “Let me put it this way. It’s not the wrong path.”

Major Edwin Easley

Please notice here that I have quoted from members of Colonel Blanchard’s primary staff who were there and made their own observations of the debris and who were on the sites of the wreck. These are statements they made to me, or to Don, or Tom Carey or that were wrote down.

Butch Blanchard told Chester Lytle that four bodies had been recovered. Given the nature of their friendship and the high-level trust by Blanchard in Lytle, this is a somewhat telling statement. It is difficult to believe that Blanchard would say that to anyone if it was not true. Art McQuiddy, who was the editor of the Roswell Morning Dispatch told me that they put wreckage on an aircraft and flew it on to Fort Worth. Not exactly proof positive, but a suggestion that what was found was something more than an off-the-shelf-weather balloon and a somewhat degraded rawin radar reflector.

As can be seen, I was aware of Klinikowski through his conversations with Kent Jeffrey. He had nothing to contribute to the investigation beyond the balloon theory, one that Don Schmitt and I explored early in our investigation and rejected for lack of proof, meaning eyewitness testimony and the documentation of balloon flights that removed Mogul from the equation.

For those interested and who have read The Observer article, there is another problem. Bernie O’Connor reported that Klinikowski said, “Well with two other full colonels and a fellow named Weinbrenner (Col. George R. Weinbrenner) who was the Commander of the Foreign Technology Division and Walter Vitunac (Col. Walter Charles Vitunac) who was the former Director of Collection and then me, who was the Director of Collection.”

The suggestion that Weinbrenner was one of the top officers who did not believe in the alien explanation is repudiated here. Tony Bragalia provided additional commentary at his website. You can read it here:

https://substack.com/redirect/297ee407-8ebb-4cb0-a64b-5446b232dd65?j=eyJ1IjoiZ2ZicmIifQ.fyOy7XcsRMdZdNETog-CMWQrAzIY0u-O58q7WQBlqUU

What all this suggests is that there are far more witnesses, both first and second hand who have come down on the side of an alien event. Don Schmitt, Tom Carey and I have talked with dozens of them. To me, the weight of the evidence leans toward the extraterrestrial. All known terrestrial explanations have been eliminated.

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.\