'X' Zone Broadcast Network - Clas Svahn: Ghost Rockets, Swedish UFO Research and the AFU

 

My guest this week was Swedish Ufologist, Clas Svahn. Like me, he had become interested in UFOs at a young age, and like me, he wanted to get the first-hand observations of those who reported UFOs. We both were interested in checking the information that was circulating about UFOs. You can watch the show by accessing it on the video log to the left and listen to it by accessing the audio version just below.

Clas Svahn

One of the first things I asked about was the Ghost Rocket sightings made in Scandinavia and then in northern Europe. It had seemed that they began in 1946 and by the end of the year, had tapered off. According Clas, that wasn’t quite accurate. He mentioned sightings from the 1930s, though these seemed to be more about strange lights in the sky rather than some solid craft. After the end of the Second World War, the sightings of cigar-shaped craft began in depth, and although it was reported that the phenomenon disappeared by the end of 1946, sightings continued until the 1990s.

One of the interesting aspects of this were reports of the rockets dropping into lakes around Sweden. According to Clas, they were seen o hit the water and caused huge splashes. Comprehensive searches by military divers failed to find wreckage or evidence of these events. Clas said that there were no crashes onto land, contrary to what had been reported by others.

I did ask about reports that the Swedish military had suppressed newspaper reports of the Ghost Rockets, but Clas said that wasn’t the case. He also mentioned that he had seen the military files about the Ghost Rockets. Like others, I had heard that the Soviets (as opposed to the Russians) had been using the Ghost Rockets to intimidate the Swedish government, but that seemed to be wrong as well. Clas had the opportunity to review the Russian files on the rockets and there was no evidence of the Soviets using them or knowing what they were.

In the end, there seems to be no solution. The identity of the Ghost Rockets, whatever they might be, was not discovered. The important thing here was that the man who had done extensive research into the Ghost Rockets said that he didn’t know what they were which seems to be the same conclusion reached by the Swedish military.

Clas said that there was a serious attempt by the military to find an answer. Unlike the situation here, in Sweden, there was good cooperation between the military authorities and the civilian researchers. Having had access to more than a thousand reports made over the years, Clas found no evidence of the sort of sloppy and biased work done in the United States by the Air Force, the CIA and the Condon Committee.

We also talked about the Archives for the Unexplained (AFU), which began in 1973 and continues until today. According to Clas, that archives span more than 7000 square feet and is expanding. The collection includes the files and data from around the world but seems to have a disproportion of English-speaking files, many of them collected from Great Britain. This is an on-going project and much of the material has been scanned so that it is digitally available to researchers around the world. As noted in the name, they collect more than just UFO data, but have an interest in all paranormal activity. They are cooperating with the CUFOS project designed to digitize the Center’s UFO files. Those interested can find more information at www.afu.se.

Next week, I’ll be chatting with Tom Deuley about his investigations into UFOs. He has been around this field about as long as I have. We’ll get some interesting insights from him.

How the US Influences other Countries Policies on UFOs

For years, decades actually, the skeptical community has wondered how the US has been able to suppress information about UFOs in foreign lands. Why would foreign governments submit to a US demand that UFO sightings and UFO reports remain hidden behind a curtain of secrecy? The answer is probably a little more complex than I can attack here, on this blog.

However…

First, let me point out that during the Ghost Rocket wave that began in Finland but swept into all of Scandinavia in 1946, the Finnish government response was to suppress the news reports about them while those in Sweden were free to report every sighting until it became nearly overwhelming. At that point the Swedish military and the government began to actively suppress the sighting reports as well. Their reasons were varied, but they enacted that policy with no guidance from the US. A policy, BTW, that seemed to have ended the reports though not necessarily the sightings.

Second, let’s take a longer look at the situation in Australia. On August 14, 1952, with the United States buried hip deep in UFO reports from a wide variety of sources from all over the country, William McMahon, the Minister for Air told the Australian Parliament that the flying saucers were nothing more than “flights of imagination.” Even with that, he believed that a thorough investigation was warranted, which, of course, didn’t set it off on the right foot. His conclusions might have been inspired by the information released by Major General Samford in his press conference about the Washington National UFO sightings in July of that year.

This idea was reinforced in the United States by the CIA sponsored Robertson Panel, which was a five-day investigation into UFOs, especially after the summer of 1952 sightings. The Panel concluded that there wasn’t much to the sightings, suggesting that stories about UFOs be debunked, which then became an unofficial policy of

Captain Ed Ruppelt

ridicule. Remember, Ed Ruppelt explained the difference between flying saucers and UFOs. Calling then “flying saucers” had a note of ridicule in it as in “You don’t believe in flying saucers, do you?”

On November 20, 1953, many months after the Robertson Panel met, McMahon suggested that the UFO question was one that belonged to the psychologists rather than the defense authorities. He wrote, “The Royal Australian Air Force has received many reports about flying saucers, as have the Royal Air Force and the Royal Canadian Air Force, but the phenomena have not yet been identified… The Royal Australian Air Force has informed me that, so far, the aerodynamic problems relating to the production of flying saucers have not been solved.”

The response was a “Note of Action,” that indicated that “…all reports are still being investigated closely and recorded as an aid to further research into future reports of this natures.” Or in other words, they thought the sightings should be investigated and the Royal Australian Air Force was the responsible agency. But, as was the case in the United States, they simply weren’t investigating all the reports and they were not looking at them for evidence of alien visitation but thought they belonged in a more psychological arena. Delusions, illusions and other psychological problems were the answer.

Australian Richard Casey, the Minister for External Affairs and the Minister for Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation (CSIRO), who originally thought little of the “saucer” reports, changed his mind and this is the point where the USAF and Donald Keyhoe come into play, which is the real point of all this. And yes, it has taken a while to get here but some background was

Donald Keyhoe

necessary. I laid much of this out in The UFO Dossier (pp. 237 – 254) and Michael Swords and Robert Powell did the same thing UFOs and Government (pp. 373 – 422) for those of you who would like to learn more.

Casey sent Keyhoe’s book, Flying Saucers from Outer Space, to his Chief of the Division of Radiophysics, Dr. E. G. Brown, along with a note that suggested he had also seen the USAF statements “… about ‘Unexplained Air Objects,’ which are always carefully worded and are at pains to explain that the greater part of the ‘sightings’ are explainable as natural phenomena or on some other grounds.”

Bowen wasn’t too impressed with the information. He wrote that he “found the book by Major Keyhoe intensely amusing and entertaining… I am far from convinced by any of the anecdotes or arguments.” He also claimed that he knew many scientists involved with defense matters in the United States, and that they rejected Keyhoe’s suggestions.

In keeping with a belief held at high levels, Bowen thought that Keyhoe’s book, while entertaining, would eventually lead to the conclusion that there was nothing to the tales of flying saucers. The public would eventually become disillusioned with the UFOs and that would be the end of it. Of course, that didn’t turn out to be the case.

It might be said that all of this caused a change in the way the Australians dealt with the UFO problem. Melbourne University’s O. H. (Harry) Turner was asked by the DAFI to undertake a classified study of the early investigations held in their files. It could be said that this was the Australian equivalent to the Robertson Panel, that is, a review of the evidence gathered earlier with respected scientists studying the data. The outcome was certainly different.

According to Swords, based on information recovered by Australian researcher Bill Chalker, Turner, in his detailed report, recommended greater official interest with a concentration on radar-visual reports. One of his conclusions was “The evidence presented by the reports held by the RAAF tend to support… the conclusion… that certain strange aircraft have been observed to behave in a manner suggestive of extra-terrestrial origin.”

In what can only be considered a case of irony, Turner cited Keyhoe’s Flying Saucers from Outer Space, using the reports he described as coming from the USAF. Turner did qualify his report, saying “if one assumes these Intelligence Reports are authentic, then the evidence presented is such that it is difficult to assume any interpretation other than that UFOs are being observed.”

Given that Turner had used Keyhoe’s interpretation of what official USAF reports and intelligence documents said, the DAFI did communicate with the USAF to confirm the accuracy of Keyhoe’s statements, which isn’t surprising. The response from Washington, D.C. was “I have discussed with the USAF the status of Major Keyhoe. I understand that his book is written in such a way as to convey the impression his statements are based on official documents, and there is some suggestion that he has made improper use of information to which he had access while he was serving in the Marine Corps. He has, however, no official status whatsoever and a dim view is taken officially of both him and his works.”

As a result of this, the report was weakened considerably. The Department of Air concluded, “Professor Turner accepted Keyhoe’s book as authentic and based on official releases. Because Turner places so much weight on Keyhoe’s work, he emphasized the need to check Keyhoe’s reliability. [The Australian Joint Service Staff] removes Keyhoe’s works as a prop for Turner’s work so that the value of the latter’s findings and recommendations is very much reduced.”

The problem here was the RAAF and the DAFI believed the information that was provided by the USAF. In the Levelland, Texas, sightings in November 1957, the Air Force and Keyhoe got into another such battle with the Air Force suggesting that Keyhoe was wrong about the number of witnesses. Keyhoe had claimed there were nine but the Air Force said there were only three who had seen an object. A study of the case, including an examination of the Project Blue Book files, shows that both were wrong. There is good evidence that witnesses at thirteen different locations saw something, and there is a very good possibility that the sheriff was one of those who saw a craft.

The relevance here is that the USAF was not a fan of Keyhoe so that when the Australians asked for an analysis of Keyhoe and his book, they got a biased report that was not based on the evidence but on what the USAF had claimed about Keyhoe’s reliability. It is now evident that the Air Force had engaged, as Swords wrote, “an act of either conscious or unconscious misrepresentation on the part of the U.S. Air Force. They were engaged in a campaign to undermine the popularity of Donald Keyhoe’s books. While Keyhoe may have slightly overstated his USAF data, the intelligence reports quoted by Keyhoe and used by Turner to support his conclusions to DAFI were authentic. Eventually the Air Force admitted that the material Keyhoe used was indeed from official Air Force reports.”

Or, in other words, the USAF was able to manipulate the investigation being conducted in Australia to match their conclusions. If nothing else, it should be obvious based on this that after the negative conclusions of the Robertson Panel in 1953, the Air Force was actively attempting to implement the various debunking recommendations and were not interested in gathering UFO information. They were more interested in convincing everyone that there was nothing to UFO reports.

But in the world of 2018, we now know that Keyhoe was right more often than not, and that his work was based, at least in part, on official investigations and classified information. According to Frank J. Reid, in the International UFO Reporter for Fall, 2000, “For a little over five months – from August 1952 through February 1953 – a narrow window opened into Project Blue Book… According to Dewey J. Fournet Jr., an Air Force major assigned as Pentagon liaison to Blue Book, ‘The entire press had the privilege of requesting this [UFO] info: Don Keyhoe happened to be one who found out quickly about this [new] policy and took maximum advantage of it.’… Especially good cases were volunteered to him…”

What this means, of course, is that Keyhoe’s information was solid and had been rejected by the RAAF because their counterparts in the USAF told them Keyhoe was unreliable. I don’t know if the USAF officers were lying or simply didn’t know the truth. They were reporting to the RAAF what their superiors had told them. Keyhoe couldn’t be trusted.

Which brings us back to the original point. The USAF was able to influence the RAAF, leading them to a conclusion that was ill advised. What would have happened had they known that Keyhoe did have the inside sources, some of them official, who were providing him with quality information about the UFO situation. Instead, there was a watered-down version of their official report because they believed it was based on tainted information when, in fact, the information was good.

In other words, the prominence of the USAF in the world of UFO investigation suggested to the RAAF, that there wasn’t much to UFOs, and the RAAF responded in kind. They thought the USAF had the “goods” but it turned out to be more fool’s gold. It looked good, it looked right but it just wasn’t what everyone thought it was. And today we have to live with that misguided interpretation so that we continue to have these discussions rather than moving forward… but we see how, at least in part, the US can suppress UFO information in other countries.

Twining vs Roswell

There are those who believe that Lieutenant General Nathan F. Twining’s letter of September 23, 1947, closes the door on the Roswell crash. They cite the line about the lack of crash recovered debris as proof that there was no crash because all the testimony gathered from so many of the officers in Roswell and Fort Worth pointed to Wright Field as the destination of the crash debris. If such was the case, then Twining had to know because he was the commander there and since he mentioned the lack of crash debris, it must not exist.

Stan Friedman has countered this by claiming that the letter was only classified secret and if Roswell was an alien spaceship, then that information would have been classified as top secret. That would prevent the information being included in

Wright Field, now Wright Patterson AFB. Photo
courtesy of the USAF.

a letter with a lower classification… and to include it would have raised the classification to top secret. He is right that the inclusion of top secret material raises the classification but he is wrong about why there is no mention of the Roswell crash in the letter. That answer lies in the history of its creation, something that is rarely examined.

Those whose responsibility it was to determine the nature of the saucers  in 1947 wondered if the saucers might not be a highly classified research project, which meant that a few, at the very top of the chain of command, would have access to that information. Army Brigadier General George Schulgen and FBI Special Agent S. W. Reynolds believed that it was a waste of time, money, and personnel to investigate something that would eventually lead to that classified project which would remain classified but might be compromised by the investigation.

Major George Garrett, working under Schulgen, also believed that nothing useful would be found by additional Air Force investigation. Garrett and Schulgen decided that the answer was held above their pay grade and thought of a way to pass the buck back up the chain of command. They were quite certain that when they assembled their information in what might be considered an intelligence Estimate of the Situation, they would be told that those at the top knew what the flying saucers were and there would be no need to continue to investigate.

Garrett began his work on this, what I think of as a mini Estimate in July, 1947. He selected sixteen flying saucer reports with two to be added later, that seemed to demonstrate the truly unusual nature of the phenomenon, and then provided his analysis of the data that had been collected. It might be said that he drew on these specific cases because he, along with Schulgen, believed they most accurately described the objects seen, the maneuvers they performed, and they would most likely lead to the conclusion that these sightings were of a classified project then in development. They thought they would be told to quit because of that.

Typical of those reports was a sighting, from Manitou Springs, Colorado, that happened sometime between 12:15 and 1:15 p.m. on May 19, 1947 (and I note here that I found no evidence that it was reported prior to Arnold, which is an important consideration for me but not necessarily anyone else). This was a silver object that remained motionless, giving the three witnesses a good look at it, and then made a number of aerobatic maneuvers before disappearing at incredible speed. The sighting report mentioned that it had been watched through optical instruments and had been in sight for over two minutes meaning they had time to study it carefully.

Garrett also reported on a case from Greenfield, Massachusetts on June 22, 1947. According to the files:

Edward L. de Rose said, “...there appeared across his line of vision a brilliant, small, round-shaped, silvery white object” moving in a northwesterly direction as fast as or probably faster than a speeding plane at an estimated altitude of 1,000 feet or more. The object stayed in view for eight or ten seconds until obscured by a cloud bank. It reflected the sunlight strongly as though it were of polished aluminum or silver… He said it did not resemble any weather balloon he had ever seen and that “I can assure you it was very real.” 

According to the information available, this was a case that had been secretly investigated by the FBI, and given Special Agent Reynolds’ participation with Schulgen and Garrett it is not difficult to believe that the FBI was involved.

Garrett’s Estimate also included a sighting that involved multiple witnesses and pilots. The information shows that two Air Force (at the time Army Air Forces) pilots and two intelligence officers saw a bright light zigzagging in the night sky over Maxwell Air Force Base on June 28, 1947. The sighting lasted for about five minutes.

Captain Ed Ruppelt, one time chief of Project Blue Book reported it this way:

That night [June 28, 1947] at nine-twenty, four Air Force officers, two pilots and two intelligence officers from Maxwell AFB in Montgomery, Alabama, saw a bright light traveling across the sky. It was first seen just above the horizon, and as it traversed toward the observers it “zigzagged,” with bursts of high speed. When it was directly overhead it made a sharp 90-degree turn and was lost from view as it traveled south.

Though not relevant to our discussion here, the eventual label applied to the case was that this was a balloon. Although it seems that four officers, including the intelligence officers, would have been able to identify a balloon if that was what they had seen, the Air Force concluded otherwise. It would also seem that the maneuvers of the object would rule out a balloon, regardless of how strong the winds aloft were blowing.

This gives a brief glance at a few of the cases that Garrett selected for his Estimate. With Schulgen’s approval, the document was submitted to those at the Air Materiel Command for analysis. It is clear that it received some attention and it is clear that the report was given to Colonel Howard McCoy for his review.

Colonel Howard McCoy. Photo courtesy of the USAF.

McCoy, as those of you who have read my most recent books know, had been involved in the investigation of these aerial phenomena since the Foo Fighter sightings of the Second World War. And, when the Ghost Rockets were sighted over Scandinavia beginning in 1946, McCoy had a role in investigation of them, though that role was in the background. The Swedish government, fearing the Ghost Rockets were some sort of intimidation ploy by the Soviets, didn’t want overt participation by American military officers.

According to information developed by Wendy Connor and Michael Hall, McCoy had been tasked in December 1946, to create an unofficial project to gather and analyze data about all this. It was a small investigation operating from a locked office that had very restricted access by a limited number of officers. When the Arnold sighting was reported six months later and caused all that trouble, the unofficial investigation evolved into an official one. And when Garrett’s Estimate arrived in Ohio, McCoy was the natural choice to review it.

McCoy then, wrote the response to be signed by Twining. I seriously doubt that he undertook the task without consultation with Twining. It seems that this response was drafted using only the information supplied by Schulgen and Garrett and that McCoy added nothing to it or more accurately, those at Wright Field added no additional data to it. As I have mentioned in the past, I think of this in the vein of lawyers at a trial who are aware of other relevant information but do not include it because of some outside force. They make their case based on the evidence at hand and admissible and not on other information floating around them. The jury never learns about it or in this case Schulgen and Garrett never learned about it.

On September 23, 1947, Schulgen, Garrett and the others received the written response from Twining’s staff. This response was telling them that the phenomenon was “something real and not visionary or fictitious.” Not only that, Twining was telling them that his command didn't know what the flying disks were and that they should be investigated, though it can be argued they had a good clue based on what had fallen near Roswell.

If the flying disks were a U.S. project, then the last thing anyone at the higher levels of the chain of command would have wanted would be an official investigation. Any investigation would be a threat to the security of the project. To end such an investigation one of those on the inside of the secret would have to drop a hint to someone on the outside. If, for example, it was such a secret project that General Twining and the AMC were outside the loop, then another general, on the inside, could call Twining to tell him to drop the investigation. He wouldn't have to spill any details of the secret project, only tell Twining that it was something he didn't need to worry about and the answer was not Soviet or anything else that could threaten national security. Twining would then end his inquiries secure in the knowledge that the solution to the mystery was already known to someone inside the US military and the government.

That didn't happen. Instead, Twining suggested that a priority project, with a rating of 2a, be created to investigate the flying saucers. He wanted information found and reported to his office. The priority level of the new project also suggested that Twining wanted his answers quickly because he was under pressure from above to end the panic that Ruppelt had reported in the Pentagon in the summer of 1947.

According to Ruppelt, there were two schools of thought about all this. One believed that the Soviets, using their captured German scientists had developed the flying disks (I reported this in The Government UFO Files). ATIC technical analysts searched for data on the German projects in captured documents in the United States, and intelligence officers in Germany were doing the same there.

It became clear, however, that the second school of thought, that is, that the UFOs were not manufactured on Earth, began to take hold when no evidence was found that the Soviets had made some sort of technological breakthrough. Even if they had, it seemed unlikely that they would be flying their new craft over the United States. If one crashed, the Soviets would have just handed their breakthrough to the US government. This is probably the inspiration for the paragraph that laments the lack of crash recovered debris, which is a reference to the lack of this sort of information contained in the material written by Garrett.

All this really does, however, is suggest that the door to the Roswell crash was not completely shut by Twining’s (McCoy’s) letter. Those on the extraterrestrial side of the argument should be disturbed by Twining’s letter but those on the skeptical side of the fence should also note that there is still a gap through which the Roswell saucer can be flown. The Twining letter does not completely rule out the crash when the history of that letter is understood.

Flying Saucers and Kenneth Arnold

(Blogger’s Note: Yes, I’ve touched on this before but in the last week or so the MSM, that is to say Time, published a UFO story that made the point that flying saucer was based on an error so of proving there is nothing to the sightings. I thought I’d take another run at this idea.)

I have seen recently more suggestions that the term, “Flying Saucer,” is a misnomer because Kenneth Arnold wasn’t describing the shape of the objects he saw but their motion through the air. Reports from June 1947, however, seemed to indicate that some objects were saucer shaped, and others, who were busy

The original drawing made by Arnold for the Army in 1947.

misidentifying mundane objects, whether natural or human constructed, began talking of flying saucers regardless of shape. It is a point that I find interesting.

When I was working on The Government UFO Files, I tried to track all this down. Looking at the newspaper reporting, at the Project Blue Book files, at the documentation that came from APRO, NICAP and other organizations, I tried to find any story published prior to June 24, 1947, that mentioned disk-shaped or saucer-shaped craft. I found virtually nothing.

Photograph by William Rhodes in July 1947.

There were many stories in the newspapers after Arnold about strange craft, and many of them referred to flying saucers even when the object reported was not saucer shaped. The term became a catchall for anything that people had seen and had been unable to identify. The best seemed to be a report in the newspaper from Cedar Rapids, Iowa, that predated Arnold, but the truth was that while it seemed the man had seen the objects on June 24 (as best as I can figure) it wasn’t reported until days after Arnold so was no help in my quest. You can read about it here:

http://kevinrandle.blogspot.com/2013/03/the-june-23-1947-ufo-sighting.html

On April 1, 1947, a series of sightings made by Walter Minczewski began near Richmond, Virginia that involved the U.S. Weather Bureau and seemed to meet my rather arbitrary conditions. This would later become Incident No. 79 in the Project Grudge final report. According to the information provided:

A weather bureau observer at the Richmond Station observed on three different occasions, during a six month period prior to April, 1947, a disc-like metal chrome object. All sightings were made through a theodolite while making pibal [balloon] observations.

On the last reported sighting, the balloon was at 15,000 feet altitude, the disc followed for 15 seconds. It was shaped like an ellipse with a flat level bottom and a dome-like top [emphasis added]. The altitude and the speed were not estimated, but the object, allegedly through the instrument, appeared larger than the balloon.

Another observer at the same station saw a similar object under corresponding circumstances, with the exception that her balloon was at an altitude of 27,000 feet and possessed a dull-metallic luster. There was good visibility on days of observation. Report of this sighting was not submitted until 22 July 1947.

AMC Opinion: There is no readily apparent explanation. If there were only one such object, it seems amazingly coincidental that it would be seen four times near the pibal of this station only. On the other hand, there would have to be a great number of these objects to rule out coincidence, and as they number of objects increases so do the chances of sightings by other witnesses.

Project Astronomer’s Opinion: There is no astronomical explanation for this incident, which, however, deserves considerable attention, because of the experience of the observers and the fact that the observations was made through a theodolite and that comparison could be made with a pibal balloon. The observers had, therefore, a good estimate of altitude, of relative size, and of speed – much more reliable than those given in most reports.

This investigator would like to recommend that these and other pibal observers be quizzed as to other possible, unreported sightings.

This series of reports, made by Minczewski, are not mentioned in the Project Blue Book Index, which lists only a couple of reports made prior to the Kenneth Arnold sighting. All were reported after the press coverage of the Arnold sighting, so there is no way to document the actual date of the sighting.

Ted Bloecher, in The Report on the UFO Wave of 1947, added some important details to the case. He wrote:

As early as the middle of April 1947, at the Weather Bureau in Richmond, Virginia, a U. S. Government meteorologist named Walter A. Minczewski and his staff had released a pibal balloon and were tracking its east-to-west course at 15,000 feet when they noticed silver, ellipsoidal object just below it. Larger than the balloon, this object appeared to be flat on bottom, and when observed through the theodolite used to track the balloon, was seen to have a dome on its upper side. Minczewski and his assistants watched the object for fifteen seconds as it traveled rapidly in level flight on a westerly course, before disappearing from view. In the official report on file at the Air Force's Project Blue Book, at Wright-Patterson Field, in Dayton, Ohio, this sighting is listed as Unidentified.

The point here is that we have a case of a disk-like object, and a date assigned by the Air Force about the sighting, but we have no documentation that I can find dated prior to the Arnold sighting. There might be something hidden away in the Weather Bureau records, or somewhere else, but I have nothing that pre-dates Arnold for this case.

And before I hear of all those sightings of disks and saucers from early in the 20^th century, I was looking for something in the months prior to Arnold. I arbitrarily set a year as the outside limit though I did look at the Foo Fighter reports. The Swedish Ghost Rockets in 1946 all seemed to be of something that resembled German vengeance weapons as opposed to flying saucers.

While the claim that “flying saucers” are the result of bad reporting and people leaping onto the bandwagon, there is some evidence that saucers had been seen prior to Arnold but there is virtually nothing in the record to show these sightings were reported prior to Arnold. That might be because no one thought much about it until the Arnold sighting hit the national press, but whatever the reason, the point is, I could find nothing about a saucer-shaped object dated in the months prior to Arnold (and to beat a dead horse, I have the reports published after Arnold that refer to events before Arnold, but nothing in the newspapers or anywhere else published prior to it). 

Ask an Expert and Project Mogul

Once in a while (okay, more often than that) I engage in the beating of the dead horse and an opportunity for that arose today (February 25). It is my opinion that few thinking people actually believe the Project Mogul explanation for what fell near Roswell, but I have found some interesting things about this as I was researching another question and having been inspired by the Smithsonian’s latest “Ask an Expert.” I’m not sure what this Roger Launius is an expert in but clearly it is not the history of UFOs. He makes some elementary mistakes suggesting, for example, that Kenneth Arnold saw one flying saucer, crediting him with the creation of the term. He takes the American-centric view that this UFO craze started with Arnold, overlooking the Foo Fighters and the Ghost Rockets as I outlined in Government UFO Secrets which is a not subtle way to plug the book. And he was unaware that an unofficial investigation began in December 1946 at Wright Field so that it had been collecting this “aerial phenomena” data for months before Arnold entered the scene.

Anyway, he buys into the Project Mogul explanation and like too many he buys the Air Force document, their huge report that has very little relevance to the Roswell case (hundreds of pages are devoted to all sorts of reports on balloon flights) that “explains” the Roswell crash. He apparently was unaware that Flight No. 4 had been cancelled, that Brazel (whose name he mispronounces) was in the field where the debris was found nearly every other day so that the debris would have been found long before Brazel took it to the sheriff had that been true and that the configuration for the array used in the diagram does not match the configuration of the flights in New Mexico, no matter what Charles Moore claimed. In fact, we can see some of this deception in the Executive Summary of that massive report. I found the following statement on page 26. “Doctor Spilhaus, Professor Moore, and certain other members of the group were aware of the actual purpose of the project, but they did not know of the project nickname at the time.”

This struck me as silly. If you have a highly classified project and you can accomplish your mission without explaining the ultimate purpose to a bunch of civilians who are doing the “grunt” work with no need to know, it seems silly to compromise that mission by sharing information that is irrelevant to their goal. I mean, there was no reason for those in New Mexico working on what Moore was careful to claim was the New York University Balloon Project to know that it was to spy on the Soviets. They could have just as easily been told they needed the constant level balloons to measure radiation in the upper atmosphere so that they might better protect pilots of aircraft flying at those altitudes and later to astronauts as the orbited the Earth (if they were thinking that far ahead in 1947). Or they were engaged in attempts to study the “Jet Stream” which was not well understood in 1947.

I believe that the statement was the result of Moore saying, repeatedly, that he didn’t know the name of the project until Robert Todd told him in 1992 or thereabouts. However, the idea that those in New Mexico didn’t know the name is demonstrably false. All anyone had to do was flip back to Dr. Albert Crary’s diary that is published in the same massive report. You can read Crary referencing the “Mogul equipment” and the like on several occasions. The name wasn’t important, it was the ultimate purpose that was classified… and the research going on in New Mexico was anything but classified (though the recorded data was, for some reason, classified).

Taking this just one step farther, on page 27, the report tells us, “However, on July 10, 1947, following the Ramey press conference, the Alamogordo News published an article with photographs demonstrating multiple balloon and targets at the same location as the NYU group operated from at [sic] Alamogordo Army Air Field. Professor Moore expressed surprise at seeing this since his was the only balloon test group in the area. He stated, ‘It appears that there was some type of umbrella cover story to protect our work with Mogul.’”

Yeah, well, this doesn’t quite agree with what he had told me when I showed him the picture before the Air Force entered the case. He pointed to the ladder in one of those pictures and said that he had bought it with petty cash because they needed it to launch the balloons. So, he was aware of the demonstration in Alamogordo and while he might not have participated in it himself, it is clear that the Mogul equipment was being used.

You might ask, “What does this all prove?” And, who really cares for all this minutia? Well, I just thought it was it somewhat interesting because it demonstrates a willingness to accept anything said by those who claim it was a balloon and not a spacecraft. Many are quick to condemn the decades old memories of the witnesses who had talked about the crash, but accept without question those who say it was a balloon. Here, clearly, Moore’s recollections of the events are in error, documented error, but are accepted without question. And this lack of critical thinking is exhibited throughout Launius’ expert opinion.

Launius showed this to us in his video explanation of the Roswell case. If you have an interest in seeing it, it can be found here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=foJWblpzEjA&app=desktop

And, no this doesn't prove that what fell was alien. It simply provides additional evidence that it wasn't a Mogul balloon... and confirms that a high level of secrecy around Mogul existed is nothing more than a myth. It shows that some very smart people just don't care enough about UFOs to ask the skeptical questions.

General Exon and the Unholy Thirteen

When I began the Roswell investigation with Don Schmitt, I thought we’d find a solution quickly and that would be it. That didn’t happen, but as we talked with various witnesses, prowled various archives, museums and newspaper morgues, and found some limited documentation, it became clear that something had happened back in 1947.

When I interviewed retired Brigadier General Arthur Exon on the telephone on May 19, 1990, I began the discussion by saying that we were doing some research into the activities at Wright – Patterson Air Force Base. The discussion began with him mentioning that some outside agency would call, tell him they needed an aircraft for a mission, and then people would arrive by commercial air to be carried to the site of the investigation by an Air Force aircraft. This was all in the mid-1960s when Exon was the base commander. Seemed like a good way to disguise what you were doing.

Eventually we got around to the events of 1947 and Exon said:

As a result of that, I know they saw the one sighting and then where there… a good bit of the information came down. There was another location where it was, where apparently the main body of the spacecraft was… where they did say there were bodies there. I’ve been in… I’ve got special information but it may be more rumor than fact about what happened to those bodies although they were all found apparently outside the craft itself but were in fairly good condition. In other words, they weren’t broken up a lot.

I know what some of you are thinking. This doesn’t get us to Roswell and 1947 but it does mention bodies and does mention a spacecraft which means he wasn’t talking about an aircraft accident. He then said (after my question wondering if the bodies had come into Wright – Patterson which was simply “And they came to Wright – Patterson?):

Well, that’s my information. But one of them was that it went to the mortuary outfit… I think at that time it was in Denver [Lowery Field] where these people were being identified. But the strongest information was that they were brought into Wright – Pat. But whatever happened to the metal residue, I imagine it’s still there in the [unintelligible] some place.

But back in that ’47 time period, everybody was, it happened and why wasn’t there more information and who kept the lid on it. Well, I know that at the time the sightings happened it went to General Ramey who is now deceased, who was at Carswell AFB [Fort Worth] and he along with the people out at Roswell decided to change the story while they got their act together and got the information into the Pentagon and into the President.

Of course President Truman and General Spaatz, the Secretary of Defense [actually Secretary of War] who has now passed away, and other people who were close to them were the ones who made up the key investigative teams in relation to the released information. In one of my officers who did some research, who worked for me at Wright – Patterson, who had done some research on this part of his school came up with a deal that there was great concern at the time and there was fear that the people would panic if the sketchy information that they had such as what was it and where did it come from and what was their mission and so on and so on got out. So they decided to make it a national cover up. And that there probably wouldn’t be much released until everybody who was involved in it, including the thirteen people I’m talking about and their immediate staff who made up the, oh what was it, the twelve people who made up the investigative team had passed away. So they wouldn’t divulge information or information wouldn’t come out that they may or may not have been involved while they were alive.

That’s the logical thing and I know most of those people were around. I did know that they’re numbers one and two people were at the top of the staff including the Secretary of Defense and the Chief of Staff and the intelligence circle including the President’s office, I never heard of any elected officials…

I cut in to ask a very basic question. I asked, “Now, is this personal knowledge that you have of this?” Exon said:

This is stuff that I’ve heard from ’47 on to the present time, really. About why wasn’t it… about who was responsible and it was no problem to find out who was in those positions in ’47 and ’48 and I just happen to remember them because the Air Force was being formed and I was in the Pentagon and worked around a lot between the Pentagon and the field so I knew these people.

Given this information, I wondered who would have been the controlling agency. Who had the overall responsibility for this? Exon said:

I just know there was a top intelligence echelon represented and the President’s office was represented and these people stayed on it in key positions even though they might have moved out to investigate all sightings and stuff and get pictures and get information and bring it into the central repository

From that point, the discussion shifted into who might be able to provide additional information. He did tell me of a man who had been in charge of the Foreign Technology Division at one time by the name of Cruikshank. I actually found him and called him. That conversation was very short and I could think of no way to keep him talking. He was too clever. He just told me that he didn’t know who I was, he didn’t know what was still classified and what wasn’t, and he had nothing else to say. While I didn’t appreciate the short telephone call, it made perfect sense to me. It was what I would have done in a similar circumstance.

I did ask about other crashes, but Exon said that the only one he knew about was the one in New Mexico. We finished our conversation with Exon saying, “…I’d be surprised if you found much in the records of FTD or like that because it was so closely held… If it originated there it ended up being part of the unholy thirteen group… people that I know who were involved in it, they were sworn to secrecy.”

Now here’s something that I came to realize later. We all assumed, and it is almost engraved in stone, that the modern UFO era began on June 24, 1947, when Ken Arnold made his sighting and report. We assumed that nothing else was going on in the world of the UFO, but as I was working on Government UFO Secrets, I learned that the UFO investigations actually went back to the Foo Fighters. There were the Ghost Rockets in Scandinavia in 1946 and finally the flying saucers of the US. But the intelligence networks had been looking into these things since World War II, and one guy’s name surfaced throughout this. Howard McCoy was the man and he was involved in the Foo Fighter investigation, was part of the US Ghost Rocket investigation and was then charged with investigating the flying saucers that were being reported prior to Arnold. And then in September 1947, when Twining’s letter was written, it was McCoy who wrote it for Twining’s signature.

So, if what fell at Roswell was alien, the committee to study these things already existed. It might have been expanded at that point but it was not created in response to anything that happened in July 1947. This was the mistake that I think we were all making. The people who were going to study this were already worried about the national security implications of the flying saucers, though they wouldn’t have called them that until after Arnold. So this committee, these “Unholy Thirteen” as Exon called them, was already at work trying to determine what was going on. If we postulate that they were already in existence because of what had been happening before Arnold it changes the complexion of UFO history.

So, when Exon revealed what he knew, he was talking about something that existed prior to July 1947. When what he told me, and later amplified for Don Schmitt, is looked at in this context, we see something a little different. What he says makes a little more sense, when what we know today is added to what Exon said in 1990.

In the end here, we see Exon’s words with a little more clarity, and we understand a little more about what he was saying. That doesn’t diminish the importance of them, just changes the context slightly and gives us a better understanding of what he said. 

Anecdotal Testimony and Scientific Observation

Here is a question that will become increasingly important in the coming years. When does anecdotal testimony become scientific observation? Or conversely, when does scientific observation deteriorate into anecdotal testimony?

We have been gathering data in the UFO field for decades (I’m not sure when a real effort began because we have divided everything into periods... The Great Airship of 1897, the Foo Fighters of WW II and the Ghost Rockets in Europe in 1946.) During some of those periods serious scientific investigations were attempted. The Foo Fighters were of intelligence interest during the war and were taken quite seriously by the military according to the good work done by Keith Chester. The Ghost Rockets were investigated by Lieutenant General Jimmy Doolittle in 1946, and the Air Force began a serious look at UFOs in 1948.

We have seen, in scientific enquiry where what would be considered in our world as anecdotal testimony has become scientific observation. Back in 1803, French naturalist, Jean-Bastiste Biot undertook a study of rocks that had fallen from the sky. The French Academy of Sciences, just the year before, had suggested that there were no rocks in the sky.

Here’s what is significant today. He talked to the witnesses of the falling rocks. These were untrained and unschooled people who had been on the scene when the rocks fell. He didn’t reject what they had to say because he knew that rocks couldn’t fall from the sky. He listened to them and recorded, carefully, what they had seen. He was careful to separate interpretation from the facts. This anecdotal testimony became scientific observation because it had been properly recorded even though the witnesses themselves were not scientists, and often had no formal schooling at all.

In today’s world, when we have witnesses to a UFO event, we are quick to dismiss their observations because they are anecdotal. They are not trained witnesses, even when we can talk to them within days of their sighting, even when they have written down what they have seen, and even if there is some sort of independent observations by instrumentality or photography. We argue about the validity of what they have seen because they are not reporting what we wish them to say.

A couple of years ago two young skeptics decided to perform an experiment to prove that eyewitnesses were unreliable and that UFO investigators were incompetent. They launched flares attached to balloons and waited for the UFO reports to come in...

But what we saw was that the witnesses, if they didn’t identify the balloons and flares for what they were, described, accurately, what they had seen. They talked about the nature of the lights, meaning they were red and moving slowly. They didn’t, for the most part, talk about anything other than the lights moving through the sky, though one of the witnesses did talk about a strange formation.

UFO investigators, called in, immediately identified the lights as of terrestrial manufacture and one police officer even told reporters that the lights were flares on balloons.

The point was that the witness testimony, and a careful listening to what the witnesses said, proved that they had been accurate. Trouble emerges when everyone begins to speculate about the nature of the lights... and most of these were reporters who tried to turn the story into something alien. One reporter even asking a child about aliens, when none of the witnesses had said anything about spacecraft or aliens.

Yes, I understand that with UFOs we need more than witness testimony, but the real question is why do we reject that testimony by labeling it as anecdotal? At what point can we accept the testimony as something more than the unschooled observations of the rube?

And why is it that only that testimony that seems to suggest that the observation was mundane is accepted at face value while that which suggests something strange is rejected automatically?

In other words, when does anecdotal testimony become scientific observation?