UFO Crash Retrievals: Three with Explanations

 

Blogger’s Note: Periodically I feel the need to commit Ufological suicide. This means, simply, that a reference in some of the latest material about UFOs annoys me because I believe I have a solution for the cited cases. In the last few days, I have been asked questions about certain UFO crash/retrieval cases in which I have inside information. Or maybe a better way is to point out that my investigations include being on the site, interviews with witnesses, and a review of documents that suggest a solution that others have glossed over.

First on this agenda, is the report of a crash in Aurora, Texas, in April, 1897. I may have been one of the first of the current crop of investigators to have actually gone there and talked to some of those residents who were still alive in 1971 when I made the trip. I have covered this case several times on this blog and you can read those analyses here:

http://kevinrandle.blogspot.com/2005/03/aurora-texas-story-that-wont-die.html

http://kevinrandle.blogspot.com/2018/04/aurora-texas-again.html

There are three facts that are often overlooked in a discussion of Aurora. First, in the decade that followed, and according to the Wise County Historical Society (Aurora is in Wide County), two histories of the county were written. Neither contained an account of the UFO crash. Since the histories were written so close to the event, there would have been many witnesses available but none were found… well, that’s not exactly accurate. There were none to be found because the case is a hoax.

Photo of Aurora, Texas by Kevin Randle

Second, in the interviews that I conducted in 1971, I talked with the man, Brawley Oates, whose hands were badly deformed. He told me then that the crash hadn’t taken place. We are now told that others, who never spoke to Oates, but who did interview his widow, that there are reports of radioactivity in the area.

Third, we are told of all the other Airship reports from the era. I’ve reviewed, literally, hundreds of them. The Airship landed in various locations and the crews were interviewed. Some said they were on the way to bomb the Spanish as the Spanish-America War was not far off. There were tales of secret testing the Airship which would soon be revealed to the world, but never was.

There are dozens of illustrations of the Airship and one photograph. The Airship had landed in Waterloo, Iowa, when the leader of crew fell overboard and drowned in the Cedar River. Later is was all admitted to be a hoax.

The Waterloo Airship, 1897.

Second, let’s talk about the Del Rio, Texas, UFO crash. I’m not going into depth here because I have provided much more information about my investigations and other aspects of this case. It is single witness, the report provided by a man who lied about his military service, who changed the data of the crash repeatedly, and did sign an affidavit for CUFOS. I am convinced that his name was Robert Willingham, but nearly everything else he said was untrue.

I mentioned the changing date. I found the first reference to the crash in Skylook, the original publication of MUFON. It said:

Col. R. B. Willingham, CAP squadron commander, has had an avid interest in UFO’s for years, dating back to 1948 when he was leading a squadron of F-94 jets near the Mexican border in Texas and was advised by radio that three UFO’s "flying formation" were near. He picked them up on his plane radar and was informed one of the UFO’s had crashed a few miles away from him in Mexico. He went to the scene of the crash but was prevented by the Mexican authorities from making an investigation or coming any closer than 60 feet. From that vantage point the wreckage seemed to consist of "numerous pieces of metal polished on the outside, very rough on the inner sides."

Please note that in one of the latest reports on this, the date is December 6, 1950. When I interviewed Willingham, he said that he didn’t remember the exact date but it was either 1954 or 1955. Willingham told Noe Torres and Ruben Uriate, that he had served in Korea in the fall of 1950. Given that tale, it would have been impossible for him to be flying fighters in the United States at the time he was in Korea.

Willingham in his CAP Uniform. He never served as an
officer in the Air Force and was not a fighter pilot.

I will point out there is no official documentation showing that Willingham was ever an officer in the Armed Forces of the United States. He did serve with the Civil Air Patrol which is not the same thing. For those interested in this whole, sad tale, you can find all the information here:

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

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

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

http://kevinrandle.blogspot.com/2012/02/willingham-1978-interview.html

http://kevinrandle.blogspot.com/2011/08/roswell-festival-part-two.html

http://kevinrandle.blogspot.com/2018/06/mj-12-and-cognitive-dissonance.html

There are other articles, but they often repeat much of the same information. To research all of them, just type “Willingham” in the search engine and scroll through the articles. I’ll note that some of the comments do get interesting.

Finally, the Kingman UFO crash has reared its ugly head again. This was one of the first crash/retrievals to gain some traction. The original story is traced to Arthur Stansel, who was interviewed by to teenagers, Jeff Young and Paul Chetham. During that interview, Stansel told of a UFO crash near Kingman, Arizona, on May 21, 1953.

Kingman, Arizona. Photo by Kevin Randle.

He talked about taken by bus from his base in Nevada to the crash site where he put his engineering background to work. He said that the windows of the bus were blacked out and those on the bus were not allowed to share any information about themselves including their names. But, once at the crash site, their names were called as they exited the bus. That really makes no sense.

Again, rather than go through all this, I’ll just point to a series of postings here for review.

http://kevinrandle.blogspot.com/2015/10/the-decline-and-fall-of-ufology.html

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

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

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

There are two points to be made here. First, Stansel said, repeatedly, that when he drank, he tended to make up stories. He told Young and Chetham that he had been drinking on that Saturday afternoon prior to the interview.

Much had been made about the affidavit he signed. The trouble is that it was in the name, Fritz Werner, which, of course, invalidates the affidavit, since that was not his real name and was a lie.

The overall problem is that in these three cases, there is clear evidence of hoax. Often these aspects are not fully reported. My philosophy has always been to report are relevant facts and let the reader decide what to belief. I’m not trying to build a case for alien visitation, just report, accurately on what I had learned. Often, I have investigated the cases myself in an attempt to discover the truth.

These are just three of the UFO crash/retrieval stories being circulated in the world today. If there were as many crashes as some have claimed, we would be having a different discussion. My hope here is to provide, well, a different perspective on some of the ongoing reports of UFO crashes. In too many cases, it is the will to believe that gets in the way of credible investigation.

Jacques Vallee, Trinity and New Information

 

Jacques Vallee has been heard from again defending the nonsensical story of a UFO crash near San Antonio, New Mexico in 1945. According to Douglas Dean Johnson, that defense was published briefly on Paola Harris’ website. You can learn more about this here:

https://douglasjohnson.ghost.io/crash-story-file-my-dad-is-a-pathological-liar/

https://douglasjohnson.ghost.io/trinity-ufo-crash-fictions-clash-with-real-atomic-history/

As I noted here a few months ago, I had communicated with Dr. Vallee about an interview of Reme Baca conducted and recorded by Tom Carey. In a cordial email, Vallee suggested that the fact that Baca wanted to make some money off his experience was no different than all of us who research, investigate and write about UFOs. You can read some of that analysis here:

http://kevinrandle.blogspot.com/2023/05/my-latest-communication-with-jacques.html

And I would certainly grant that point. There are many of us out there who have made money off our research in magazine articles, books and even movies. I often joke about what I call my SAGA scholarship. SAGA magazine published the UFO Report in the 1970s and I was able to sell them enough articles that it basically paid my college tuition. I will note that I had other income streams as well but that’s a story for another time.

I emailed Dr. Vallee that I wasn’t all that interested in Baca’s financial motivation, but in the major changes in the story related to Carey and the story as told to Harris and Dr. Vallee. I asked specific questions about it. I suspect that there was no good answer to any of those questions because I heard nothing more about it.

Tom Carey

I did interview Dr. Vallee and Paola Harris on my radio show/podcast when their book was first published. You can listen to that interview here:

http://kevinrandle.blogspot.com/2021/06/x-zone-broadcast-network-jacques-vallee.html

https://www.spreaker.com/user/xzoneradiotv/adp20210602ep162emjacquesvalleeandpaoloh_1

Douglas Johnson, at his website, published a series of articles exposing the contradictions and outright lies being told about this alleged event. I believe that anyone who reads those articles dispassionately will realize that there had been no crash near San Antonio, not in 1945 as now claimed or in 1947 as originally suggested.

The real fear here is that those in the government who are suddenly interested in UFOs, I mean UAP, will take this alleged event seriously because of Dr. Vallee’s reputation. They will not bother to dig any deeper than the book and an interview with Dr. Vallee. They won’t access Douglas Johnson’s website because they don’t know who he is even if they know about the website. They won’t be aware of the major contradictions and the outright lies told by the witnesses about this case.

Instead, when they finally learn the truth, they will then assume that all stories of UFOs and UAP are some sort of terrestrial phenomena if not just lies. They will only remember that this case, cited by a respected scientist has now been found to be a hoax, and they will assume, by extension, other cases fall into the same category.

If this case is one endorsed by David Grusch and some of those other witnesses alleged to have testified in front of Congressional committees or representatives of the various intelligence organizations, it will suggest that much of the other sightings cited will be similarly explained.

If I was a paranoid person, and if I didn’t know the best way to seal an intelligence leak is to pump bad information into that leak to discredit it, I would suggest we’re seeing some of that here. Of course, the intelligence community didn’t have to investigate the bad information. They had Reme Baca’s story as a starting point. Shove in the discredited 1933 Italian UFO crash and many people will just nod and say, “I knew it.”

Now add the Aurora, Texas crash of 1897, and a very strong case can be made that these sorts of stories are the result of active imaginations and hoaxes told for personal gain, and whole investigations collapse. I mention Aurora only because it figures in the Vallee/Paola book, Trinity. I investigated the case before it became famous back when I lived in Texas. You can read the results of that investigation here:

http://kevinrandle.blogspot.com/2005/03/aurora-texas-story-that-wont-die.html

http://kevinrandle.blogspot.com/2018/04/aurora-texas-again.html

http://kevinrandle.blogspot.com/2013/09/ufo-crashes-fifty-years-before-roswell.html

As I say, I’m worried that those conducting the government investigations will accept what Dr. Vallee says without critical comment. When they learn the truth about the “Trinity” UFO crash, they’ll begin to reject all other, similar data because of the poor investigation of Trinity. They will assume that all research is equally flawed. And they will use this when describing their work to the public.

Yes, I have seen this before. Nearly everyone scoffed at the Project Mogul explanation for the Roswell debris when it was first pushed in the mid-1990s. Now, in our world, we see that solution trotted out without any critical comment, even when the documentation proves that Mogul wasn’t the answer.

I am interested in what others think about this analysis and what they believe about the Trinity UFO crash, given the information available today.

X-Zone Broadcast Network - Jacques Vallee and Paola Harris and Trinity.

In what I think of as a special edition of A Different Perspective, I had the opportunity to speak with Dr. Jacques Vallee and Paola Harris, authors of Trinity: The Best Kept Secret. The program was an hour long, as usual, but we didn’t get to half the questions or comments on my list. You can listen to the show here:

https://www.spreaker.com/episode/45140594

Paola Harris

We did get into the background of the story and those of you who visit here, know the tale. Two young boys see something crash, see the occupants of the craft, and then witness the lousy attempts at retrieval by the Army. It is clear that both Vallee and Harris accept the tale as authentic, with Vallee going into detail at how well youngsters can recall an event without embellishment. Of course, this overlooks the fact that the interviews were conducted, not with children at the time of the event, but with men decades later. It is clear that there are areas of contamination.

Much of the detail seemed to be reminiscent of the Roswell crash including the claim that lightning might have brought down the craft, about the Army recovery, and finally the descriptions of the aliens as looking like Jerusalem Crickets. This was the description provided by Frankie Rowe based on her experiences in the Roswell case. To me it was one more proof that the tale told isn’t so much about an observation by the boys but a borrowing of details from the widespread literature from Roswell.

I did ask Vallee about his use of the Aurora, Texas, UFO crash of 1897 as part of the history of UFO sightings. I mentioned that I had been to Aurora before all those others arrived, that I had interviewed some of the long-time residents who still lived there, and that two, count them, two, histories of Wise County had no mention of the crash. I have written about all that on this blog.

We did get to the Socorro UFO landing. I asked about his support of one symbol over the other, that Zamora himself had drawn, but again, the conversation diverted to other matters. Trivia? Sure, but it suggests something about the scholarship in the book.

There were many other matters as well. In the end, however, it was clear that there were only two witnesses who said anything about the crash who could be thought of as eyewitnesses. The third witness interviewed for the book, Sabrina Padillo, hadn’t even been born in 1945 to see the crash, but did inspect the alleged crash site in 1960.

Rather than go on, I’ll just point out that Vallee and Paola said that there was no documentation, the physical evidence that was talked about didn’t exist in today’s world, other than a couple of pieces that, when analyzed didn’t demonstrate an extraterrestrial origin. In other words, it was metal that could have been manufactured on Earth but that didn’t rule out an extraterrestrial origin, according to the analysis.

I will mention a fourth name, Bill Brophy, who talked about his father having flown over the crash site in 1945 (Exon and Roswell springs to mine here). According to Brophy, his father saw the two boys on the scene, the burned area and possibility the crashed object. But, again, the information was second hand and I have been working with those in Alamogordo in an attempt to verify both Brophy’s story and try to find any of those others assigned to the base at the time. Given it was 1945, and you can presume that nearly everyone assigned there would have been at least 20 in August 1945. It means the likelihood of finding anyone still alive is remote.

Next week, I’ll be talking with Kathleen Marden, who has an updated or expanded version of her book, Captured!. It deals with the Barney and Betty Hill abduction and we’ll see where it goes. 

Trinity: The Best Kept Secret - A Critique

The much-anticipated book by Dr Jacques Vallee and Paola Harris, Trinity: The Best Kept Secret, finally dropped and we now have a very good idea of what is in it. The publicity running up to the publication suggested that we’d learn about a UFO crash that preceded Roswell by two years and was based on the eyewitness testimony of two men and as a surprise or special element, we’d learn of a third witness to these incredible events.

Dr. Jacques Vallee

The story as told, and outlined on this blog just a few weeks ago, was that two boys, ages 7 and 9, not only found a crashed object that didn’t resemble any Earth-based aviation technology, but they had seen the crash. There was a hint that it might have been brought down by lightning in one of those strong thunderstorms that frequent New Mexico in the late summer or it hit a tower that caused it to crash. For those who want to see that earlier post, you can read it here:

http://kevinrandle.blogspot.com/2021/05/the-san-antonio-ufo-crash.html

The boys, identified as Reme Baca and Jose Padilla, had approached the area cautiously and saw, not only the ruined craft, but small creatures that seemed to teleport from one position to another. Those beings provided telepathic pictures to the boys, who lingered in the area for longer than they should.

Ms. Paola Harris

Back at the ranch house, in San Antonio, New Mexico, they told family about what they had seen. There was no immediate follow up, but a day or so later, the fathers and a New Mexico State Policeman, made their way to the scene of the crash. Although the boys were told to stay back, the adults approached the craft. One or two of them might have crawled up inside. Today that makes no real difference because none of those adults are alive for interviews or to confirm the story.

There was no sign of the small creatures when the adults made it to the crash site. Speculation is that they might have been captured by the Army, but I suppose, it is equally possible that they were rescued by their fellow aliens. At any rate, the beings disappear from the story and are never heard of again.

The military arrived at some point. Eventually, they asked permission to cut a fence and install a gate and to cut a road across the ranch to the area of the crash. The boys, hiding from the military, kept a watch on this. The boys talked of the soldiers’ attempts to clean up the debris. Although the soldiers collected all of the debris, it seems they kicked pieces of it aside and dumped it into crevasses. They covered this with a thin layer of dirt meaning that it might be found in the world today… maybe.

Although the Army was interested enough in the crash to recover the vehicle, they seemed to be less than enthusiastic in protecting the find. Once they had brought in the flatbed truck to move the wrecked vehicle from the scene, the soldiers departed, apparently going into town for a meal or two. In other words, they left the truck, the spacecraft, the debris and everything else unguarded.

The boys, having spied on the soldiers, understood their routine and once the site was abandoned, they wandered down to the blue-tarp-covered object sitting on that unguarded flatbed. Now, Jose, apparently the more adventurous of the two, peeled back part of that blue tarp and crawled up into the UFO. He stole a bit of a panel from inside and explored part of the craft. These descriptions were overly detailed, and not really what would you expect from someone who was 9 at the time, telling the tale decades later. Very detailed but probably not precise.

The boys carried away a great deal of the debris. If I understood the story, some of that debris, thin strips of metal that is reminiscent of the memory metal described by Bill Brazel of Roswell fame, was divided up and handed out as decorations for Christmas trees… a fairly cavalier way to treat samples of metal created on another planet. At this point, meaning here in 2021, all that material has disappeared so that there is nothing left that can be tested and analyzed.

Eventually, the Army drove the tarp-covered UFO from the area, and life returned to normal, or as normal as it could be after seeing an alien spacecraft. Neither Reme nor Jose talked much about it in the decades that followed.

Or rather they did mention it once in a great while. Don Schmitt told me, during his recent appearance on the A Different Perspective Radio Show/Podcast, that he’d met with Reme in the late 1990s after some presentation that Don had given. Don lost interest when Reme mentioned the Plains of San Agustin as the location of the crash, suggesting some sort of confirmation of the Barney Barnett tale.

That isn’t the only worrisome part of the story the boys told and that is the cavalier way the Army operated. I simply do not believe that the Army would go to the trouble of cleaning the area, but bury some of the debris on site rather than picking it up to be taken away. I don’t believe they would have left the scene unguarded at all, but especially after they had loaded the craft onto the flatbed truck… and knowing that Army trucks, as most Army vehicles, do not use keys to start them. I can believe that the boys were clever enough to avoid detection by the soldiers as they spied on the operation from a distance, but I do not believe they were allowed to get inside the craft after it had been loaded on the truck. By allowed, I mean that the truck was left in the field without any guard on it. The soldiers might not have known the craft came from another world, but they would have known that it represented a technology unknown to American science at the time. That alone would have demanded an around the clock guard detail.

Two points need to be made here. Don was not the only UFO researcher to be approached with the story of the crash. In the book, Vallee and Harris note that Baca had also sought out Stan Friedman who seemed to be equally uninterested… and second, Don might have misunderstood about the location on the Plains. Seems that those living in San Antonio referred to the area around the town as the Plains as well. At any rate, neither Stan nor Don followed up on this bizarre tale.

But the Vallee/Harris book is about more than just the San Antonio crash. There is a section that deals with some of the other events concerning UFOs and crashes. The first is the Aurora, Texas, crash of April 1897. This is quite disturbing because of the history involved. I have written about this case a number of times. I was among the very first to visit Aurora in the early 1971. The consensus of those living there, at that time, was the story was a hoax. Those at the Wise County Historical Society (Aurora is in Wise County) told me that two histories of the county had been written in the decade that followed this alleged crash but neither history mentioned it. Since there was no Air Force or CIA to suppress the information, you have to wonder why, if it was a real event, that any mention of it was omitted in both those histories. That doesn’t bode well for the Aurora tale. You can read more about my investigation here:

http://kevinrandle.blogspot.com/2005/03/aurora-texas-story-that-wont-die.html

http://kevinrandle.blogspot.com/2018/12/jefferson-airship-vs-aurora-crash.html

http://kevinrandle.blogspot.com/2013/09/ufo-crashes-fifty-years-before-roswell.html

There is one additional comment to make. According to the Vallee/Harris book, a piece of metal picked during one of the modern treks to the crash site up in Aurora was scientifically tested. The tests showed that it was made of an alloy that did not exist in 1897 and wouldn’t be created until 1908. Seems like a bit of extraordinary evidence, except the fragment was recovered much later than 1908. Nothing ties it to the 1897 event, other than it was found somewhere around Aurora. Obviously, it was dropped sometime after 1908.

It is also disturbing that Vallee and Harris take the Maury Island hoax as something authentic. That story, actually investigated in depth by the Air Force, as well as many others, is also a hoax. Although Vallee/Harris acknowledge the hoax explanation, they also wonder how “…any such statement can be drawn by the reported facts.”

This statement is in error. I have looked at the Maury Island case extensively, and you can read about that in Alien Mysteries, Conspiracies and Cover-ups. The story has been well researched by a number of investigators. George Earley was one of those and reported his findings in UFO, issues 155, 156 and 157. According to Earley, Harold Dahl’s son, Charles, who was supposed injured during the sighting was interview years later and said that it never happened. A search for medical records to verify the injury failed to find any mention of it.

In other words, the reported facts in the Maury Island case, all of them, support Ed Ruppelt’s statement in his book The Report on Unidentified Flying Objects. Ruppelt described the Maury Island event as the direst hoax in UFO history. No evidence has been presented to reverse Ruppelt’s observation.

More problems develop in the discussion of the Socorro UFO landing. I was intrigued to learn that Lonnie Zamora was related, by marriage into the Padillo family. His cousin married Zamora, which connects them to another big UFO event in New Mexico. This is not to mention that Socorro is about fifteen or twenty miles from San Antonio.

For years researchers have suggested the Zamora case was single witness to the UFO landing. Vallee and Harris wrote that there were eleven witness who saw the object and two who were “auditory” witnesses, meaning they’d heard the roar but saw no object. The problem is that none of these witnesses are identified with the exception of Paul Kies and Larry Kratzer. The two men had told a reporter in Dubuque, Iowa, that they had been driving through Socorro about the time that Zamora was engaged with the UFO. They saw the thing take off in a cloud of dust and smoke.

The trouble here is that their stories just do not fit into the Socorro scenario. Kies said that there had been a large burned area in the desert and that the exhaust had melted a pop bottle. He couldn’t have seen these things given they were just driving through Socorro and hadn’t stopped to inspect the site. More importantly, the melted pop bottle description was from a sighting near La Madera, New Mexico, a day or so later, which also received some national attention.

Ralph DeGraw, an Iowa UFO researcher, interviewed both witnesses some years later. While what they said then generally agreed with the account in the newspaper, DeGraw found some important discrepancies, including Kratzer’s description of the craft. He said that it was silver with a row of dark round, mirror-like windows. This was a major departure from Zamora’s description that had no windows and suggests invention by the witness.

One of the other points of disagreement about the case is the description of the symbol seen by Zamora. Ray Stanford identified the “real” symbol reported by Zamora. The trouble here is that the symbol, three horizonal lines through an inverted “V” is not the symbol that Zamora drew for the military, nor is it the one that he drew on the scrap of paper moments after the UFO departed. While Vallee and Harris endorse the inverted “V”, Zamora, on the scrap of paper, drew an “umbrella” like symbol with an inverted “V” under it and a line, like the shaft of an arrow, up into the “V”. That scrap of paper was turned over to the Air Force and can be seen in the Project Blue Book file.

Zamora's drawing on the scrap of paper minutes after the UFO disappeared.

Ironically, that symbol was originally endorsed by Stanford in a letter dated May of 1964. He wrote that the inverted “V” was the fake symbol. In the years from writing that letter to writing his book, he changed his mind. But Zamora, on the night of the sighting, drew a number of illustrations for both the FBI and the Army and he signed them. The “umbrella” symbol was the one he signed.

Lonnie Zamora's drawing of the craft and the symbol made on April 24, 1964

In the end here, Stanford said there were eleven witnesses other than Zamora, but offers no names. Vallee and Harris repeat this without names, other than Kies and Kratzer, whose tale has been discredited. Vallee wrote that a single witness is no witness. I would suggest that an anonymous witness, or even nearly a dozen anonymous witnesses are of absolutely no value and worth less than that single witness. In 1964, no one bothered to get the names or tried to locate any of these witnesses. Now we are again treated to the information about a UFO sighting but that information has no real value.

The final chapters of the book are devoted to this new witness to the San Antonio crash promoted by Vallee and Harris. At the end of the book, they identify her as a relative of Padillo. The problem? She was born in 1953 or eight years after the sighting. She talks about handling some of the debris, but the piece, or pieces, she had been given, are long gone. She talked about family stories, but she witnessed nothing first hand other than a large burned area that might have had nothing to do with the original crash. She is emersed in the family history, she is aware of UFO history, but can’t contribute much of value to the story.

Here’s one of the things to take away from this latest book. Both Baca and Padillo talk about many aspects of the UFO field. They talk about knowing people at the Foster ranch near Corona where Mack Brazel discovered a field of metallic debris. We have the family relation to Zamora which suggests more infusion of UFO material into the family lore. Then, we have many aspects of the Roswell case inserted into this new tale. The UFO crashed during a storm, as was suggested at Roswell. Lightning brought it down, as happened at Roswell, but I wonder that if a race can create interstellar craft, they would be able to avoid destruction by lightning. There was memory metal and even a discussion of fiber optics, just like Roswell.

The big thing that caught my attention was a description that suggested the aliens looked something like the Jerusalem Cricket… the very description supplied by Frankie Rowe when talking about the aliens at Roswell. There are just too many of the descriptions that are drawn from the Roswell case. To me, this suggests contamination rather than corroboration. It suggests that both men were well aware of the UFO field long before they began to talk of their childhood experiences. They had a better than average knowledge of what had been reported about UFOs and UFO crash/retrievals before they began talking about the UFO crash near San Antonio.

To make this worse, if possible, it is claimed that this tale of a crashed spacecraft is the first in our modern era. This, however, isn’t true. In the Spring of 1941, there are reports of something crashing near Cape Girardeau, Missouri. The tale is told by one woman who, while she didn’t witness the craft and bodies herself, is aware of what her grandfather had seen and had done. She is well-versed in the family history. Len Stringfield laid out the details in one of his updates to crash/retrievals, this one published in 1991. There is another witness who knows the story including the brother of the local sheriff and even the report of a picture of one of the alien beings. Of course, that picture has been lost, but the evidence for the Cape Girardeau crash as just as solid as that for the Trinity crash. For some reason it is not mentioned in the Vallee and Harris book. I mention this only because it suggests a long history of UFO crash tales that are based on limited eyewitness testimony and family members who died long before they could be interviewed. And they are told in the same era, that is, the 1940s.

All this and I haven’t even touched on the structure of the book. It is filled with oat meal. This is a writing term that refers to filling to make a story longer. Sure, I enjoyed reading about some of the history of the creation of the atomic bomb, but it has no relevance to this story. The fact that the first nuclear explosion took place at Trinity, not all that far from San Antonio means nothing… unless you believe that the aliens had been watching for that flash everyone talked about. Of course, you have to wonder where they were to have seen that and gotten here so quickly. It matters not what their technology can do, the speed of light is the limiting factor. Even if these aliens can exceed the speed of light, or bend the universe to allow interstellar flight, the flash of the bomb would only travel at the speed of light. If the aliens could detect such a flash against the backdrop of the sun and if it happened on the side of the planet facing them, the fastest they could have detected the explosion is about four years afterward, if they inhabited a planet in the Alpha Centuri star system. If they live in another star system, then their response would take even longer.

Ignoring that, we still have a book filled with a family history that does nothing to validate the story. It is a travelogue. It is a walk though some of UFOs greatest hits, many of which have little in the way of evidence to back them up. And even if these ancillary tales were all true, that does nothing to validate this particular story.

It is filled with a wonder of the events but little in the way of analysis. It tells the story of two boys who seemed to have been wise beyond their years, able to avoid the Army which failed at even the barest level of security. We are told of soldiers who were lazy, not picking up all the debris, but hiding from their superiors. That debris would still be there for UFO hunters to find except is now beyond recovery. Flood control projects that altered the terrain significantly and buried the debris under twenty or thirty feet of mud and dirt. No way to find it now.

This is certainly much longer than I anticipated, but we need to understand what we have here. It isn’t a scientific search for evidence but more of science fiction story told for entertainment. There is no physical evidence presented but talk of such evidence just out of our reach. There is no real attempt to validate the story or provide citation for the claims. It is a story that has borrowed elements from other tales in the hope it will be seen as corroboration rather than plagiarism. Oh, I don’t mean that either Vallee or Harris stole the story from others, only that the witnesses have been contaminated by decades of UFO tales written about, broadcast and even incorporated into movies. It is too bad that no one wrote anything down in a letter or a journal in 1945 or 46 but that’s just too much to hope for. Somehow the alleged evidence is never found and, in the end, we are left with a tale told by two old men, and one old woman, who said they experienced it as youngsters. 

History, Aurora Crash, Coast Guard Pictures

So, it has happened again. One of those specialty magazines, this one from History, that delves into the paranormal, gets some of it wrong. In the world today, paranormal includes UFO (or UAPs or flying saucers), along with ESP, ghosts, hauntings, the Bermuda Triangle and Bigfoot. I am, of course, somewhat biased. I don’t believe that UFOs should be lumped into the paranormal (and I could probably say the same thing about Bigfoot).

Yes, I was annoyed because they fell back on the Project Mogul explanation for Roswell. I had hoped for something more than the cursory examination given to that and an acknowledgement that Flight No. 4 had been cancelled, but that was too much to expect. For those interested in the long history of this explanation, just type Mogul into the search engine here or look at the long discussion in Roswell in the 21^st Century.

What first caught my attention was the brief little note about the Aurora, Texas, crash of 1897. They noted that it allegedly hit a windmill and published a picture of a “UFO” near a windmill. The picture was taken in Michigan in 1966 and is of a lens flare. Anyone who has been around UFOs or cameras long enough recognized it immediately for what it was. Here is just an example of someone with no knowledge of photography or UFOs, selecting a picture because it fits the general narrative and not concerned with the truth.

Illustration used for the Aurora crash hoax.

The second problem for me was the photograph taken on July 16, 1952, in Salem, MA. For some reason, the Project Blue Book file is labeled as Beverlym (which is, of course, Beverly with a superfluous m at the end) in the Blue Book index but correctly as Beverly on the Project Card. Although it is difficult to read, the card is apparently marked as “unknown.”

But here’s the problem. According to a report in the file, “the results of this analysis indicated that the photo was a hoax. Extensive photographs were taken under similar conditions. Failure of the light source to cast reflections on the highly polished cars below indicated that the light was not outside and it was assumed by the analyst at the time, that the photo was a double exposure and for this reason was a hoax.”

Later, in that same report, it was noted, “It is believed that the photos represent light reflections from an interior source (probably the ceiling lights) on the window through which the photo was taken.”

In another report, the witness (name redacted but is Thomas Flaherty) said, “While working on daily reports I was summoned by Base Photographer (name redacted but is Shell Albert) … who called me to hurry and look at airborne lights. Looking out the window to the North West there appeared to be what was thought to be a quick flash. I actually could not say it was anything. It could have been reflections from passing cars or from the ocean.”

Not exactly the best of corroborating statements.

In another document, paragraph b said, “Three (3) objects glowing bright and then light and disappeared like a light being dimmed with a rheostat. Objects appeared to waver slightly and glow as a light source. [Name redacted but is Albert] could not determine the shape nor formation, aerodynamic features, or propulsion system. [Name redacted] did not see any trail, exhaust, or maneuvers. [Name redacted] did not hear any sound and could not tell if the objects were moving. After ALBERT [failed to redact the name here] developed the photograph, he noted there was a difference in numbers that what he had observed.”

In Albert’s statement to the investigators, he said, “It was an extremely hot day and I think that perhaps some sort of reflection of ground reflections could possibly have accounted for the lights, but in my estimation this is an improbable explanation. The lens was quite dirty and so was the window screen. I cannot in all honesty say that I saw the objects or aircraft, merely some manner of lights.”

I will note here, for no other reason than I found it interesting, that Lieutenant Commander, W. D. Strauch, Jr., wrote, “All personnel interviewed or questions were informed that any information concerning the objects was ‘SECRET’ [emphasis in original] and should not be discussed with any one without the permission of the CO.”

The final note in the investigation, after attempts to duplicate the pictures under various conditions had been made, Colonel Delwin B. Avery wrote, “It is therefore concluded that the authenticity of the picture, taken by the Coast Guard photographer, is open to serious doubt.”

Given the statements by the photographer, the ambiguous statement by Flaherty, and what is the inconsistencies between those statements and what is shown in the photograph, I do not understand why the Air Force would have labeled the case as “unidentified.” Everything in the file, including the witness statements indicate that the photograph is some sort of reflection if not an out and out hoax. Albert’s weasel words in his statement suggest he knew the source of the lights in the photograph and was attempting to avoid directly lying about it.

My point here is that there are better photographs that are not wrapped in the ambiguity we see here. I think the point that has been overlooked is that neither witness has a good idea what was seen and suggest something rather mundane. The statements of those involved seem to take it from unidentified into another realm, one in which we don’t need to dwell. 

X-Zone Broadcast Network - Jerry Clark

This week I discussed the UFO Encyclopedia, 3^rd Edition, with the author, Jerome (Jerry) Clark. Before we began our discussion, I mentioned that it was the 50^th anniversary of my destroying a UH-1H helicopter by triggering a land mine in South Vietnam. Knowing full well that there are many people who claim Vietnam service who were never there, and knowing some might be not believe the story, you can read it in the unit history of the 187^th Assault Helicopter Company here:

http://www.187thahc.net/Incidents/incident_69.htm

Just scroll down to May 16, and you’ll find it… and yes, this has nothing to do with UFOs and I mentioned it only because it was fifty years ago today that it happened.

But on to the UFO stuff and Jerry Clark.

Naturally, given the timing of the show, we had to mention the passing of Stan Friedman a few days earlier. I thought it important to acknowledge his passing and

Jerry Clark

we devoted the first segment of the show to that.

We did get around to talking about his UFO Encyclopedia, which is a massive resource, that is a must for anyone who is serious about UFO research. To me, one of the most important aspects of the Encyclopedia, is the list of sources at the end of each of the articles. That allows the reader to find additional information, some of it providing an opposing view or giving an alternative solution. You can listen to the show here:

https://www.spreaker.com/episode/17940170

Although I wanted to cover the questions that readers had sent, we did run out of time. I tried to ask at least one question from each of those who supplied them. One of them concerned the airship wave of 1897. I had thought that Jerry believed there was a core of good reports that began in late 1896, but that many of the sightings in 1897 were, shall we say, imaginative. Jerry quickly corrected me.

I did go back and look at the entry from the 2^nd Edition of his Encyclopedia so that I could compare it with the latest version. The entry had evolved, and covered sightings that began in other parts of the world some fifty years earlier. It seems that the sightings involve some sort real experiences but when we reach April, 1897, it is clear that the majority of those reports are faked. I asked specifically about the Aurora, Texas, crash, which, given what we know today, is laughable, when you read the original report. I am astonished that there are those who still believe this was a real event. You can find more information about it, and the Alexander Hamilton calf-napping here:

http://kevinrandle.blogspot.com/2018/04/aurora-texas-again.html

http://kevinrandle.blogspot.com/2013/09/ufo-crashes-fifty-years-before-roswell.html

Jerry tells me, "The point I was trying to make about airship reports was that they were real experiences, not "real events" as you have it.  I try to make clear that radars/visuals and CE2s exemplify event anomaliess, i.e., strange things that occur within the boundaries of consensus reality, and high-strange phenomena exemplify experience anomalies, which take place in liminal space between the real and the imagined, with characteristics of each mixed together."

We also talked, briefly about contactees and abductions. Time prevented us from going into depth about these topics. I think you get a feel for where Jerry is on the topics and I do mention that George Adamski’s tales of Venus failed to account for the surface temperature that is hot enough to melt lead… not the tropic environment that so many envisioned in the 1950s.

Next up is Dr. Dan Farcas and his theory about Hyper-civilization. It is an interesting take on a number of questions about UFOs and other topics. For those who have questions, as always, append them here in the comments section and I’ll try to get them asked.

Jefferson Airship vs. Aurora Crash

As I was working on the articles about the Jefferson Airship crash, I wondered what was the difference between that event and the Aurora, Texas, crash. Both were reported in the newspaper which was supposed to add some credibility to the stories. But Aurora has been splashed all over the media since the 1960s including documentaries, magazine articles and mentions in books, and even a movie about the disaster. Jefferson is rarely mentioned and often relegated to a mere couple of sentences in obscure books or buried in the detail of more popular ones.

Aurora, Texas. Photo only important to show that I was
there. Photo copyright by Kevin Randle.

Here’s the thing. I have found more evidence for the Jefferson crash than for the Aurora crash. True, I interviewed several people who had lived in Aurora and Wise County, Texas, in 1897 but know of none who are alive today who would have seen the Jefferson crash. I was in Aurora, Texas, in the early 1970s, but knew virtually nothing about the Jefferson event until the last few days.

Now, we have great detail about Jefferson, Iowa. We have good descriptions of the craft, we have letters to the newspaper that describe the crash, and we even have illustrations that match those descriptions. For Aurora, we have none of that, other than the original newspaper article. There is no follow up on it, the descriptions are vague and the debris that had apparently been scattered all over the streets of Aurora has vanished into thin air.

If we are to look just at the documentation from 1897, then the Jefferson crash is the better tale. Again, I point to the letters printed in the newspaper written by witnesses who were there. In Aurora there is no such documentation. That, of course, gives the nod to Jefferson.

Even more important is the illustration that appeared in the Cedar Rapids newspaper three days later. It does set up something of a conundrum. How was

The airship from the Cedar Rapids Gazette and
as description in the Jefferson Bee.

the letter writer able to describe the object days before the illustration appeared? It is a match and suggests a bit of reality… or a level of coordination between the writer of the letter and those who were talking about the landed craft in Waterloo.

At the other end of the spectrum, there are two books written about the history of Wise County, Texas, within a decade of the crash. Neither of those books mentions the Aurora crash, which, given the timing of it, should have had a prominent place in both those books. That it was not even mentioned is suggestive of a hoax rather than a real event.

I could mention that we do have names of real people in the Aurora case. T.J. Weems, however, was not a signal corps officer as reported but was the local blacksmith. That certainly does nothing for the veracity of the tale. Others who were identified turned out not to be what they were said to have been.

The names associated with the Jefferson crash are not identifiable as real people living in the area. George Washington was mentioned, but I thought this had more to do with Washington’s reputation for truthfulness than it did the name of the person who wrote the letter. George could not tell a lie, but it seemed the letter was full of them. Sort of ironic, I would say. In fact, that seems to be the very definition of irony.

Both events suggest that there was wreckage. In Jefferson, it was at the bottom of a huge crater created by the crash. In Aurora, the debris was dumped down a well, which is a good way to get rid of it, although not a very smart way. Searches of the well have produced no evidence that could be confirmed as having come from an advanced technology.

The real point here, however, is that there are many more details from the Jefferson crash than there are from Aurora. Had Jefferson been found by researchers in the 1960s, we might have seen all those documentaries, magazine articles, books, and the film made about Jefferson rather than Aurora. The Jefferson story is much more interesting.

In the 21^st century, none of that is important. We know, today, that the Jefferson tale is a hoax, and the letters were written by people who might have been inspired by the newspaper… or the original article was inspired by those letters, which in turn, were inspired by the tales of the Great Airship. In fact, it seems that several tales from Iowa were linked and that might have given a note of credibility to the Jefferson story had we not already found those tales from Cedar Rapids and Waterloo to be hoaxes. That tales are all linked is important and everything resulting from that linkage collapses under dispassionate scrutiny.

I have said for decades that the Aurora crash is a hoax. Most accept that once they examine the evidence or the lack thereof. True, there are some hardcore believers, but for them, all the evidence of a hoax is just a CIA or Air Force plot to keep the truth hidden. In the case of these two crashes, the only truth is that sometimes newspapers get caught up in the moment. Sometimes their reporting is more with tongue in cheek than in the reality of a situation. And, sometimes, they just want to have some fun

Chasing More Footnotes

I have complained in the past that I am becoming less than thrilled with the UFO community. The reasons for this are varied but come down to a couple of basic ideas. One of those is that no matter how often a case is proven to be a hoax, a misidentification, a misinterpretation, or an inability to recognize the mundane, there are those who will argue the point forever. A recent post was partially inspired by this. How many times do we have to delve into the Oliver Lerch tale when everything that can be found points to an invention of the tale rather than a real event?

The point here, however, is that part of the problem is that some people who claim to be researchers or investigators just don’t follow the path to its end. This is what lead to the chasing of footnotes because sometimes the footnote is simply inadequate. Sometimes the information is not complete.

Not to pick on Richard Dolan, but just the other day as I was looking for something else, I noticed a couple of problems. These sorts of things are not restricted to Richard because we all have

Richard Dolan. Photo copyright by
Kevin Randle

fallen into the trap. On page 16 of his UFOs and the National Security State, he reported on a sighting by railroad engineer in Cedar Rapids, Iowa, who saw ten shiny disks on June 23. His footnote leads us to a number of sources, which cover a number of sightings in that same paragraph. Unfortunately, the information about the Cedar Rapids sighting is wrong, as I have noted in an earlier posting. The report was not made until after the Arnold sighting, was apparently for the afternoon of June 24 rather than the 23, and the railroad man was not in Iowa, but in Joliet, Illinois. Among those who reported this information as Dolan had, were Dick Hall and Frank Edwards. I believe Hall got it from Edwards, who must have seen something in the Cedar Rapids Gazette about the sighting a couple of days after Arnold. Edwards, or those others, had not followed the story to the source, or they would have found the discrepancies.

As I say, not to pick on Dolan, but later, on page 25, he wrote about Bill Brazel and the finding of the metal debris from the Roswell crash. The footnote takes us to Stan Friedman’s Crash at Corona in which he quotes from an interview with Bill Brazel. The quotes are accurate, for the most part, but there is no footnote to explain how the information was gathered because Friedman supplies no information about that. The trail ends there.

However, I know how that interview was conducted because I had

Stan Friedman. Photo copyright by
Kevin Randle

arranged it, and Don Schmitt and I were there. I recorded it. The more accurate footnote would have taken us not to Friedman’s book, but to UFO Crash at Roswell, where the footnote explained the circumstances of the interview. In other words, the original source was that interview that Don and I conducted and not the information printed in Friedman’s book.

A side problem with this is that Friedman altered one portion of the interview without justification. Those who follow Dolan’s footnote to Friedman will get the inaccurate information… Friedman inserted the word “black” into the interview to describe one the sergeants who came to the Brazel ranch to collect the bits of debris Bill had found. Brazel made no reference to the racial identity of those four men but Friedman inserted the word to bolster the Gerald Anderson fairy tale. You can read the whole story here (if you are so inclined):

http://kevinrandle.blogspot.com/2008/09/black-sergeants-and-stan-friedman.html

This problem is not confined to UFO research. I was looking for information for a post on the new version of the Treasure Quest show and found a couple of sites that provided what seemed to be accurate information. Reference was made to someone named C. H. Prodgers and in this day of the Internet, I thought I would find out what he had said about the treasure.

Twenty-five years ago, I couldn’t have gathered the information. True, one of the articles referred to Prodgers, but in the world today, I was able to find a copy of Prodgers’s book online. I didn’t have to rely on what others had written about it. I could read it for myself. And, I found that much of the information published, that referenced Prodgers, was incorrect. After all, they were quoting Prodgers as the source, but what Prodgers had written did not match what they were reporting. Could Prodgers have been making up the tale of the treasure? Sure. But that didn’t matter because he was the original source. He was writing from the point of view of having been there, lived the adventure, and there wasn’t much documentation that preceded him. The others were quoting him as their source.

That is, I chased the references to the ultimate source. I corrected the errors made by others who had used the same source, and came away unimpressed with the information. It reads more like fiction than fact and there really is nothing to back up the story. And now that the first season is over, we have seen a large number of problems with this treasure hunting quest.

So, now you’re wondering how all this relates to Ufology. It is about getting to the original source. In the past, the only way to do it was go to the location or find a library that had the proper resources in its collections. You had to read the microfilms and search endlessly for the articles. That is what I had done with the Cedar Rapids story. I could search the microfilm of the Cedar Rapids Gazette and I found the original article about the railroad man and his UFOs. Took about an hour. Had I lived elsewhere, I might not have found it… until I could make an Internet search.

Here’s another example. As I point out in another post, Don Keyhoe, in writing about the 1948 Mantell case, got some bad information and therefore some of his conclusions wrong. He didn’t have access to the documents available to us online today. He assumed that the timing of the events fit into a specific sequence. He assumed that the times given in various reports was when the object was seen over that specific town. What this means that the sighting of the object from Madisonville, Kentucky, wasn’t of an object overhead as Keyhoe believed, but of one to the northwest. The claim that the object was over the Godman Army Airfield tower as Keyhoe believed, is not true. The documents in the Blue Book files proved that the men in the tower saw the UFO somewhere to the southwest at the very limits of human ability to see it. Given those two facts, Keyhoe’s estimate of the speed was way off. That’s not Keyhoe’s fault. He was relying on information that had been reported to him orally rather than seeing what the documents said. He couldn’t have reviewed those documents easily until 1976.

Those who cite Keyhoe’s estimate of the speed have not followed up on the information which was published in the early 1950s. Had they done so, they would have realized that his claim the object was moving at 180 miles an hour was badly flawed. Information available today gives us a much clearer picture. This isn’t to fault Keyhoe because he was relying on the information he had, but to fault those who haven’t bothered to update the information when they began their research.

What all this means is that in the world today, we can look much deeper into the past. We have access to nearly all human knowledge through the Internet. We can study newspaper files in cities hundreds or thousands of miles away (though some services require a subscription). The files of Project Blue Book are on line for all to review… and there are other sources of information about Blue Book that we have today that Keyhoe and others in the 1950s and 1960s didn’t have.

There is then, no real excuse for continuing to report information that is out of date or inaccurate. We can clear up these things by taking our research to the next level, which has always been the real point of chasing footnotes. This isn’t about “gotcha” but about cleaning up the information so that we can come to the proper conclusion. It isn’t about making someone look bad, but about searching for the answers to the mystery, whatever that mystery might be.

While I find chasing footnotes to be fun, I guess there are those who can’t be bothered with following the trail. They already know the truth so there is no need to search any further for it. Why clutter up a good UFO report with a lot of facts that provide us with an identification? Sometimes, however, we do learn something important about a case, which is why I do what I do. I just wish that there wasn’t a constant fight inside Ufology, protecting the sacred cows, when the facts take us somewhere else. 

I can cite examples here. Tales that are told and retold by those who are enthusiastic about their favorite cases. They ignore facts that don’t fit into their view of the world. They know the “truth,” and the facts be damned.

The airship crash in Aurora, Texas, in 1897 proves the point. The evidence and documentation shows that the story was invented by a stringer for a Dallas newspaper. Other documentation, in the form of histories of Aurora or Wise County where Aurora is located, that were published within a couple of years of the alleged crash mention nothing about it. Had such an event taken place, even if it didn’t involve a craft from another world, these histories would have contained some information about it. There is none. But we still have to listen to tales of the Aurora, Texas, UFO crash and put up with television documentaries in which they are digging “for the truth.” Of course, when they’re done, they have not advanced our knowledge. They have just added another level of nonsense to the tale.