Del Rio UFO Crash and MJ-12

There is a flaw in the Eisenhower Briefing Document (EBD) that has gone unnoticed since the MJ-12 controversy first erupted more than two decades ago. It is one that gives us a time frame for the thinking in the early 1980s and tells us that the document is a hoax. It goes beyond the misspellings, beyond the grammatical errors and beyond the flawed history. It tells us that the document is not authentic and even points a finger at one of those who might have had a hand in creating it... and no, it wasn’t the US government, the Air Force Office of Special Investigation (AFOSI) or any other official agency.

First, however, one question that has not been answered. If the document is authentic and if there were UFO crashes on the Plains of San Agustin and at Aztec, New Mexico, why is there no mention of either event in this briefing? It covers the Roswell crash and references one near Del Rio, Texas. It would seem that if a briefing was prepared to advise the President-elect, in this case Dwight Eisenhower, it would cover everything on the subject. That those two events were left out seem to indicate some kind of fraud somewhere.

That, however, is not the main point in this discussion. What I’m looking at is the case from Del Rio, Texas, as reported in the EBD. It said, "On 06 December, 1950, (sic) a second object, probably of similar origin, impacted the earth at high speed in the El-Indio – Guerrero area of the Texas – Mexican boder [sic] after following a long trajectory through the atmosphere. By the time a search team arrived, what remained of the object had been almost totally (sic) incinerated. Such material as could be recovered was transported to the A.E.C. facility at Sandia, New Mexico, for study."

The only report I know of that talks of a crash in December 1950 and on the Texas – Mexican border came from a man who said that he was a retired Air Force colonel. He originally told the story, in the late 1960s, to a reporter in Pennsylvania who was asking Civil Air Patrol (CAP) pilots about UFO sightings. Robert B. Willingham (seen here in his "Air Force" uniform) said that he had seen something fall close to the border. That story was sent on to the National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomena (NICAP) in Washington, D.C., where it sat unnoticed for more than a decade. I now wonder if those making the original report about the story might have gotten the organization wrong. This will become clear later.

W. Todd Zechel, a researcher of mediocre ability, found the story and tracked down Willingham. He got an affidavit from Willingham, signed in 1977, giving additional the details of the crash. At the same time, Zechel was talking to William Moore about the case, hoping to write a book about it.

In fact, in The Roswell Incident, Moore wrote, "Then a second group, Citizens Against UFO Secrecy (CAUS) was formed in 1978 under the directorship of W. T. Zechel, former research director of GSW [Ground Saucer Watch] and a one-time radio-telegraph operator for the Army Security Agency. CAUS’s announced aim was nothing less than an ‘attempt to reestablish that the USAF (or elements thereof) recovered a crashed extraterrestrial spacecraft’ in the Texas – New Mexico – Mexico border area sometime in the late 1940s emphasis added)."

According to the work done by Len Stringfield, the original crash story was of an event in 1948, but it was after Zechel entered the case that the date shifted to December 6, 1950. The best evidence was the affidavit signed by Willingham, who was the witness and who, as a retired, high-ranking officer, gave credibility to the report.

But it seems that no one had bothered to check Willingham’s military record. I asked a number of people about it and they all assumed that Zechel had done so. I saw nothing to verify this, so I attempted to do it.

Robert B. Willingham, according to the Air Force Records Center in St. Louis, entered the Army in December 1945 (which technically makes him a veteran of World War II) and left the Army as an E-4 in January 1947. That is all the military service that I have been able to verify and we all now know how accurate that information is (see National Personnel Records Center and UFO Witnesses from February 6, 2010).

I did learn that he had a long association with the Civil Air Patrol and I have seen a plaque given to Lieutenant Colonel Robert Willingham for his years of service to the CAP. It is dated 1948 to 1973 and was from the Pennsylvania Wing, meaning he was in Pennsylvania at that time, which is in conflict for some of his claims of lengthy military service.

For those who don’t know, the CAP is an official auxiliary of the Air Force, but the members are all volunteers who have no real standing in the Air Force. Twenty years of service to the CAP doesn’t qualify one for a retirement pension from the military. Those who serve perform a valuable service in search and rescue and during times of local emergency. They just aren’t Air Force officers even though they wear modified Air Force uniforms and are addressed by military rank.

And if all that is true, then Willingham’s story, of seeing a UFO crash falls apart because he wasn’t an Air Force fighter pilot as he claimed, is not a retired military officer as he claimed, and wouldn’t have been in a position to see what he claimed to have seen when he claimed to have seen it.

But even if Willingham was less than candid about his military service, he now claims that the crash didn’t take place in 1950. That had been Zechel’s influence. According to Willingham he had seen the crash in 1954, or 1955, or maybe in 1957. He is no longer sure of the date. He only knows that it wasn’t in 1950... and even if Willingham is telling the truth now, it suggests that the information about Del Rio as it appears in the EBD is inaccurate which undermines the validity of MJ-12.

Of course, nothing is that simple in the world of the UFO. I had searched for the original article because I wanted to know what it said, in relation to what the 1977 affidavit implied and what Willingham has said over the last five or six years. While I have been unable to locate the newspaper article, I have found the next best thing.

In the February/March 1968 issue of Skylook, once the official publication of MUFON, I found a single paragraph that causes even more trouble for the Del Rio crash, and tells us something more about Robert B. Willingham. That article 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."

So, let’s connect the dots. We know that Willingham told his story to a reporter in the late 1960s and that article may have gone to NICAP but certainly found its way to MUFON. Zechel allegedly discovered the article in the NICAP files and tracked down Willingham who confirmed what he had said and even signed an affidavit about it in 1977. Zechel, in communication with Bill Moore, told him about the Del Rio crash and provided details, which is verified, to an extent by the paragraph in The Roswell Incident. Bill Moore’s friend, Jaime Shandera received, in the mail, the film on which, when developed, he and Moore found the EBD. That document contains the information about Del Rio that we all now know is inaccurate, to put it kindly.

Now, if there was no Del Rio crash, then there is no reason for it to be mentioned in the EBD... and if it is, then the document must be a fake. Even if you accept the last dates provided by Willingham, the crash happened years after the document was written and couldn’t have been included unless the writer was clairvoyant or wrote the document sometime after 1952.

There is no other evidence of a crash at Del Rio. There are no hints in other documents, no other witnesses contrary to Willingham’s claims, and nothing to support the idea. Eliminate it completely, and the EBD falls with it. Change the dates because of what Willingham has said and the EBD fails again. This might be the final proof that the document is a fake... especially when all the other evidence is added in. This should put the whole thing to rest (though I now expect the vilification to begin).

Doctor Jesse Marcel and the Roswell UFO

There has been something that has bothered me for a long time. I have been trying to figure out the hatred directed at Jesse Marcel, Jr. by many in the skeptical and the non-believers arenas. Marcel, for the few of you who might not know, was the eleven-year-old son of Major Jesse Marcel who recovered some of the debris found on the Brazel (Foster) ranch. Both Marcels, in interviews conducted some thirty and forty years after the fact, suggested that the material they saw was extraordinary and extraterrestrial. Marcel, Sr. sort of started the whole Roswell craze with his statements to Stan Friedman, Len Stringfield and several others.

Okay, we can argue all day about what Marcel really saw back in 1947 and we can argue about how trustworthy the memories of an eleven-year-old boy might be after so much time. We can suggest that he was influenced by his father who told him it was a flying saucer and we can say that all this hoopla around Roswell in the last twenty-five or thirty years has certainly colored his opinions.

On the other hand, no one can deny that something was found and the remnants, whatever they might have been, were not easily identifiable to Marcel, Sr., and he certainly communicated that confusion to his son. But there was something found and none of the mundane explanations offered so far provide much of an answer.

But that’s not the point here. The point is that Jesse Marcel, Jr. (seen here), a retired colonel from the Montana National Guard, who spent a year in Iraq, and who was a successful physician, said that he had seen the debris, he had handled it, had seen the strange markings on it, and believes it to be of extraterrestrial origin. Is that a reason for dragging his name through the mud, or an excuse for some of the truly vicious letters, calls, emails, and Internet postings about him?

And here is one other point. In late May I was at a UFO symposium put on by Illinois MUFON. During one of the morning sessions a man who was about seventy began to feel poorly. He was dizzy, pale, and on the verge of collapse. He staggered into the hall and when I first saw him, he was lying on the carpet with a couple of people around him, trying to help.

As I moved toward the man, I saw Jesse Marcel, Jr., a real live doctor, crouched near this man, holding his hand, checking his pulse and vitals, and talking to him, gathering information. Marcel was doing all that he could for the man, calming him down, learning his medical history and treating him as best he could.

Others, at Marcel’s direction, made the telephone calls to 9-1-1, arranged for the medics to arrive, and as soon as they got there, they asked Jesse about the man. By that time the man’s color had returned, he was no longer dizzy, and his heartbeat had returned to normal. The medics asked Jesse about all this and then went about their business because they had their machines and medicines. But it was Jesse who took charge in that situation and helped the man until the medics arrived.

So, you’re thinking, "What’s the point?" Just this, many of those attacking Jesse Marcel would have been standing around wondering what to do to help the stricken man. They have nothing going for them except their attack columns and their meanspirited commentary. They have no training, they have no other skills and they do little but take up space in an already crowded world.

And many of them seem to hate Jesse Marcel, Jr. (seen here with me at the Illinois MUFON Symposium) because he said, as a boy, he’d held pieces of an alien spaceship. This seems to be something they just can’t forgive or forget, but in the great cosmos, does it really matter? It’s not as if Jesse is making this up. It’s not as if he came forward with this story in search of the spotlight and the fame this little tale would provide for him.

No, he just happened to be there, in Roswell, in July, 1947, when his father brought home some strange debris. Would his life be somehow diminished if that had never happened? No. He still would have gone to medical school and he still would have risen to colonel in a real military organization. He still would have saved lives in Iraq.

Can we say that Jesse is lying about this? Not really. There is evidence for his tale. Hell, the newspapers of the time talked about it. He did see something. All we can do is disagree with his interpretation of what it was. Is that any reason to attack him as a person, attack his integrity, or suggest that he is somehow less than human?

If Jesse was some kind of huckster, out there pedaling a product that hurt people, if he was swindling them out of their life savings, if he was endangering them, then yes, let’s stop him. But all he has done is tell those interested what he saw as a boy. His livelihood does not depend on this story, yet he is gracious enough to tell all who ask what he saw.

That is no reason for some of the viciousness that I have seen directed toward him. If some of those who seem so incensed had contributed a tenth of what Jesse has given to the human race, then we might want to listen to them. But most of them just seem to be unable to separate a memory Jesse has of a night encounter with debris that might well have come from an alien ship from everything good he has done as a man. Those detractors have done nothing but snipe from the woods, often because they are too chicken to come out into the light of day.

If nothing else, we all should be able to agree that Jesse saw something that to him was strange. We might disagree with the interpretation, but then, can’t we do that as civilized humans and leave all the other nonsense to those who have no class? Can’t we leave the name calling to others? Can’t we elevate the debate to a civilized level, remembering that Jesse has made an important contribution to society, and leave it at that?

Spooklights - 2009

As many of you know, I was at the Illinois MUFON Symposium hosted by Sam and Julie Maranto (seen here) and held over the last weekend in May. One of the speakers there, Ted Phillips, was a man I had heard about for years but had never met. He was involved in investigating and documenting UFO landing trace cases. These would be cases in which the UFOs interacted with the environment and left some sort of physical evidence behind.

I was interested in what he had to say and was surprised when he didn’t begin telling us about some of the physical trace cases. Instead he talked of an ongoing investigation in which lights... nocturnal lights... are seen on a regular basis in a relatively confined geographic location.

My first thought was of the Joplin Spooklight. I’d spent time in Joplin investigating that. It was a phenomenon that appears nightly at a certain location outside of Joplin, Missouri. I’d photographed it, though people all told me you couldn’t take pictures of it. The solution for that case was as simple as atmospheric refraction and car headlights from a stretch of road several miles away. There is no doubt in my mind that the Joplin Spooklight has a mundane explanation. Many others have reached the same conclusion (See The Joplin Spooklight, September 2006).

So I sat there listening to Phillips talk of his months long investigation, sure that some sort of mundane explanation would be offered. Lights in the night sky just didn’t do a thing for me.
But this wasn’t a repeat of the Spooklight that hung in the air in one location for hours on end. These were periodic lights that were seen in various locations doing various things. He called some of them amber lights.

Phillips said one thing that resonated with me. He said that he expected to see nothing when he got there because frequently these things do not show up for the investigators. But he had been told that they appeared irregularly, but they always, eventually appeared, if you were patient. And one night they did. He saw five of them and almost didn’t get any pictures of them.

Let me make a point here, and it is something that the non-believers always say. You had a camera right there and you didn’t use it. Phillips is an experienced investigator and he was standing right there with the video camera in his hand and thought nothing of it until the end of that sighting. Had this been his only opportunity to photograph anything, we could make all sorts of snide comments.

But it wasn’t. He did take a short video at the end of the sighting. And during other the months he spent in the area, he, and his team including Adam Johnston, made several tapes and took many photographs. Phillips said that they had gathered 223 witnesses, and that the records and testimony suggest that the sightings go back into the 1930s.

There are several locations in which the lights are seen. There are the amber lights (seen here) that seem to be very large and very bright and they have seen as many as 35 at once. There are very bright white lights sitting on the ground that they have seen from various angles but have been unable to approach. They said that the lights have interfered with cars and other electrical devices, have knocked the branches out of trees and left circular patterns of debris on the ground. This suggests something more tangible than lights in the sky.

But, here’s the thing. They don’t know what they’re seeing and photographing. All they know is that one of the witnesses said he first saw the lights in 1937 and that there have been no displays in the last six months. They believe the lights will return because they always have, but Phillips and his team don’t know when.

I had hoped to talk to Phillips about this while at the conference but there never seemed to be a couple of moments when the two of us crossed paths with one short exception. I told him that it was my impression, from his presentation, that he wasn’t looking toward the extraterrestrial on this. He confirmed that he thought it was some kind of terrestrial manifestation but didn’t know what it might be.

So, unlike the Spooklight in Joplin, this one remains a mystery. Yes, I thought of the earthquake lights that some scientists have talked about, but those seem to be relatively short-lived lights, not like the displays that Phillips has witnessed and photographed. And, no, it doesn’t seem that swamp gas fits the bill because the luminescence from swamp gas is close to the ground and is usually faint. None of the mundane explanations work here.

Phillips said he is continuing his research. He said that they would be back at it soon. The story is fascinating, mysterious, and at the moment, unexplained.

Jesse Marcel, James McAndrew and Me

I recently had the chance to sit down with Colonel Jesse Marcel, Jr. (seen here) and we had a chance to talk about many things including some new stuff about the Roswell UFO case. Well, relatively new anyway.

Back in the mid-1990s, as the Air Force claimed to be investigating the Roswell UFO crash story, one of the officers, First Lieutenant (later captain) James McAndrew, called many of the witnesses and many of the investigators to talk with them. I spoke to him on a number of occasions and the tone was normally him trying to convince me to admit that I was only in it for the money. He told me that no one would think any less of me if that was the case. People would understand the motive.

I told him that I would have conducted the investigation and written the books if there had been no money involved. This was an important story and one that needed to be told. I pointed out that I had tapes of most of my interviews and that I would give him the telephone numbers of many of the important witnesses. This was all he needed to do to verify that what I reported was what they had said.

Yes, I fully understood that having taped interviews didn’t mean that the witnesses were telling the truth, but it would prove that I had reported accurately what I had been told. And yes, we tried to verify the information which is why I didn’t report about the former Air Force pilot who had been one of the alternate pilots on Air Force One, who had flown the aircraft when President Kennedy was on board, and that he had taken the president to see the bodies.

I found the pilot and yes, he had been an Air Force officer and yes, he had flown President Kennedy on Air Force One and yes he had seen an alien creature. However, he had not flown the president to a location to see alien bodies. He had been flying a fighter when he had seen a craft off his wing and inside the domed structure he had seen a creature. So, all the elements were there, they just didn’t add up to the whole that we had been told.

What was interesting about McAndrew was that he wasn’t interested in the tapes. He didn’t want to talk to the high-ranking military officers. He was more interested in telling me that he KNEW I was in it for the money. Not the truth but his belief.

Now, over the weekend, at the MUFON conference put on by the Illinois chapter of MUFON and hosted by Sam and Julie Maranto (seen here), I spent time with Jesse Marcel. It was late on the last day when the topic of McAndrew came up at the question and answer session held by all the presenters. I mentioned that McAndrew wanted me to flip and that he wasn’t interested in the tapes and telephone numbers of some of the key witnesses. I figured the Air Force didn’t want to be in the position of calling high-ranking officers, including one brigadier general, liars at best. This whole thing might suggest that the Air Force was lead by incompetents.

Jesse mentioned that McAndrew had called him several times and always pressed him on the details, suggesting mistakes. Jesse always told me that it hadn’t been a balloon. The debris he held and the debris he saw was not part of a balloon, or a balloon structure, or a Project Mogul array. It was strange stuff that was very lightweight and very strong. He didn’t know what it was.

Jesse then said at the end of the last call, McAndrew said, "Well, Colonel, we don’t know what you saw."

When you think about it, that’s an important statement. Here was McAndrew, trying to convince Jesse that he had seen parts of a Mogul array, trying to convince him of the new Air Force answer about the Roswell UFO crash, and finally admitting that he didn’t know what Jesse saw.

No, this doesn’t mean that McAndrew was conceding to Jesse that it was an alien spacecraft or anything else. It just means that McAndrew was admitting that he didn’t know what Jesse had seen (Jesse Marcel holding a replicate of one of the I-beams).

I will note here that the Air Force, in their investigation, did not report on all the interviews they had conducted with the researchers, with the witnesses and with the former and retired officers. Instead they focused on the members of Project Mogul, the civilians who launched the balloons in New Mexico, and Sheridan Cavitt, the Counter-intelligence Corps officer who lied about where he was in July 1947 but told the Air Force just what they wanted to hear.

And now we learn that the chief investigator told Jesse Marcel that he didn’t know what Jesse had seen. This seems to be a curious admission for the man. A moment of honesty hidden in all that governmental deceit.

Of course I know why they worked so hard to prove that Roswell was a balloon and not an alien craft. No matter what they said today, they were going to look bad and in any case they would be painting some top officials as liars. True, the lies might have been justified because of national security considerations, but they were lies nonetheless.

We have one new bit of information that doesn’t mean all that much in the overall picture, but does provide a glimpse into the background. The man who would be pushing the Mogul answer telling a witness that, "Colonel, we don’t know what you saw."