X-Zone Broadcast Network - Lee Spiegel and The Phenomenon

 This week I talked with Lee Spiegel about the James Fox film, The Phenomenon. In the interest of full disclosure, I should mention that Lee had a big role in producing the film and was involved from the beginning. You can listen to that conversation here:

https://www.spreaker.com/episode/41687438

Lee Spiegel

We touched on a number of UFO cases. I did mention the Socorro UFO landing because, frankly, I believe it to be a good UFO case. James Fox was able to speak with and interview the widow of Lonnie Zamora and was granted access to his papers and letters. There were some interesting things that developed from that including a letter from a small boy who had asked some interesting questions.

Lee mentioned the sighting by then Major (later Colonel) William Coleman and his UFO sighting in July 1955. Coleman and his crew saw a silver object that was so close to the ground that its wake stirred up parallel lines of dust. Coleman said that he reported it to Project Blue Book, but when he became the press officer for Blue Book, he could not find his report. Lee wrote an article about it and you can read that here:

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/ufo-secrets-national-atomic-testing-museum_n_1902019

We did talk about the Zimbabwe UFO landing that was seen by some 110 children, who, according to Lee, reported or drew, basically, the same thing. You can read about it, and Dr. John Mack’s take on the case, here:

https://www.bostonherald.com/2009/05/31/film-takes-closer-look-at-african-ufo-sighting/

Student drawing of the incident

There are those who have dismissed this as a case of mass hysteria, suggesting that the children suffered from a common delusion. This was embedded in an article that appeared Malawi Medical Journal. Though it doesn’t seem that this case fits into the overall theory, you can read the article here to decide for yourself:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3588562/

We also, at the end, talked about the Roswell case, since that is a large part of the UFO history today. Lee mentioned his interviews with Major Jesse Marcel, in the late 1970s. What was interesting was Marcel saying that both he and Brigadier General Roger Ramey knew that the stuff in Ramey’s office was not the material he had brought from Roswell. I pressed that point with him because it is one of the critical bits of information about the Roswell case.

Next week, I’ll be talking with Ben Moss about his book about the Socorro UFO landing. As you all know, I too, have written about Socorro in Encounter in the Desert. I promise that we won’t get too deep into the correct symbol that Lonnie Zamora described.

And, the following week, if everything goes according to plan, I will be talking with Colonel Richard Weaver about the Air Force investigation into the Roswell case. You can find his book here:

https://www.amazon.com/Backstory-Roswell-Exclusive-Disclosures-Inquiry-ebook/dp/B08GY9WXCL/ref=sr_1_1?dchild=1&keywords=Richard+Weaver+Roswell&qid=1603934159&sr=8-1

Given our backgrounds, I think the conversation will be interesting.

If you have questions for either of these guests, put them in the comments section and I’ll get to them. Just mark it private and it won’t be posted.

Coast to Coast - Sightings (October 22, 2020)

 For the latest of the Coast to Coast report, I mentioned that James Fox’s film, The Phenomenon, had provided the source of the Navy Tic Tac videos. According to him, it was Christopher Mellon who leaked the footage.

This did open a larger issue that wasn’t talked about and it was some of the reviews of the film that suggested there was nothing new in the documentary. Of course, in doing a history of the UFO field, there is going to be a recap of information that has been published or broadcast in the past. The real point is the little nuggets that have somehow not been reported in the past. For those who are immersed in the UFO field, some of it will be familiar, but there are far more out there who are not aware of what has gone on before. It is necessary to recap all that information to bring everyone up to speed. For those who would like to evaluate the film for themselves rather than read what someone else thought, you can find it here:

https://www.amazon.com/Phenomenon-John-Podesta/dp/B08HR6QD3V

I did mention a UFO sighting on April 23, 2020, from Pennsylvania. I don’t have much more information than presented during the show. The case came from Rob Swiatek and from MUFON. Check out the MUFON website for additional information.

The final case is one that I have always found interesting, given that the explanation offered for it was that it was a “phenomenon so rare it had never been seen before or since,” which, is, of course, no explanation at all. According to what I could find, and what I published in The Best of Project Blue Book, following are the details.

The report was made Captain James R. Howard, a pilot for British Overseas Airways Corporation (BOAC), and who had crossed the Atlantic 250 times, and by members of his flight crew. On June 30, 1954, he spotted something that he could not identify and other crew members saw it as well. According to Howard’s statement as published:

I was in command of a BOAC Boeing Strato cruiser en route from New York to London via Goose Bay Labrador (refueling stop). Soon after crossing overhead Seven Islands at 19,000 feet, True Airspeed 230 kts, both my co-pilot and I became aware of something moving along off our port beam at a lower altitude at a distance of maybe five miles, in and out of a broken layer of Strato Cumulus cloud. As we watched, these objects climbed above the cloud and we could now clearly see one large and six small. As we flew on towards Goose Bay the large object began to change shape and the smaller to move relative to the larger…

We informed Goose Bay that we had something odd in sight and they made arrangements to vector a fighter (F94?) on to us. Later I changed radio frequency to contact this fighter; the pilot told me he had me in sight on radar closing me head-on at 20 miles. At that the small objects seemed to enter the larger, and then the big one shrank. I gave descriptions of this to the fighter and a bearing of the objects from me. I then had to change back to Goose frequency for descent clearance. I don’t know if the fighter saw anything as he hadn’t landed when I left Goose for London.

Jenny Randles, writing in The UFO Conspiracy, expanding on this, mentioned that Lee Boyd, the first officer, alerted Goose Bay that there was an unidentified object escorting them. Goose Bay told them that an interceptor would be launched with the call sign of Pinto One.

Although the BOAC crew never saw the interceptor, and the radar on the fighter never painted the object, the BOAC crew were told that the radar at Goose Bay did see it. That would, of course, eliminate some sort of natural phenomenon given the observations of the flight crew. It also provided a bit of instrumentality for the sighting, something that was outside the problems of human perception.

According to Randles, when the aircraft landed at Goose Bay at 1:51 a.m., the crew was met by both US Air Force and Canadian officials that included intelligence officers. Both pilots, Howard and Boyd, were taken away to be debriefed. The navigator H. McDonnell, said that the flight logs were taken by the Air Force and that he was questioned about their airspeed and direction. His interrogation didn’t last very long. He said the pilots were gone much longer.

That wasn’t the end of it. Once they reached London, the pilots were ordered to the Air Ministry. The explanation offered then for the sighting was that the crew and some of the passengers had seen a solar eclipse. The trouble was that the eclipse had not begun when the sighting was made.

Howard, in a report in the New York Times said that the objects resembled “a large burst of flak and six smaller blobs.” He had refined the description in other reports, saying that the UFO was opaque, dark and jelly-fish-like. He also said that all but one of the crew and many of the passengers had seen the object. In one newspaper article, Howard said, “sometimes it was wedge shape, sometimes like a dumbbell, sometimes like a sphere with tail-like projections. The six smaller objects dodged about, either in front or behind.”

McDonnell met up with Howard some months later. He asked Howard what had happened at the Air Ministry. Howard responded, “Sorry. I can’t say. You know the score.”

Howard, his crew and passengers, however, were not alone spotting the strange object. According to the Blue Book file, more information came from a ship, USS Edisto, in the area. They described the same thing. The ship’s crew identified the object as Mars and suggested that there were “mirage conditions” on that date which could have influenced the sighting from the air.

The file confirmed the attempted intercept. The fighter pilot, who wasn’t identified by name, said that no intercept was made, meaning he didn’t see the object. He also said that he did not make radar contract with it.

The file also contained a message that had been sent to various commands. It said, “NEAC evaluates sighting as unknown natural phenomena cma (comma) possibly a mirage as a temperature inversion in referenced area made this condition possible pd (period).” That information came from Project Blue Book.

The Blue Book file also provided some additional information. Howard estimated that they watched the objects for about eighteen minutes. Eleven other crew members verified the information. One of the messages ended with “No further information available. Duty officer regards as improbable threat to US.”

Given this lack of information, this certainly not one of Blue Book’s best cases. The explanation seems to be clear, and while some might reject that explanation because it came from the Air Force, it is based on observations made at the time by another set of witnesses. There seems to be no reason to reject their solution.

The Condon Committee, however, thought the case deserved more attention. That might be explained by their interest in weather related phenomena that could cause UFO sightings. In a chapter called, “Optical and Radar Analysis of Field Case,” it was noted, “Very little meteorological data are available for this part of the world on the date in question, so that the presence of significant optical propagation mechanisms can be neither confirmed nor ruled out. This sighting was examined because of the ‘Mirage’ explanation. In fact, the author noted, “Nevertheless, certain facts in the case are strongly suggestive of an optical mirage phenomenon.

The Condon scientists went on to explain that the mirage might have been caused by a reflection from over the horizon. This is called superior mirage and has been reported often over the ocean. They then qualified that by writing:

The principal difficultly with this explanation, besides having to hypothesize the existence of the mirage-producing layer, is how to account for the anisotrophy [being directionally dependent] of the mirage. Anisotrophy of this sort, i.e. a mirage limited to certain viewing azimuths, is common in earthbound mirages when viewed from a single location. But a mirage layer through which a reflected image could be seen only in one, constant principal direction (plus a view smaller “satellite” images over a distance of 85 n. mil [nautical miles] is quite unusual.

What this says is that the Air Force was happy with the mirage answer, and with the suggestion that Mars was the culprit. And it says that the Condon Committee, looking at cases in which some sort of weather phenomenon is suspected, ended up not agreeing with the Air Force.

They added that there was a “slim possibility” that the aircraft itself was responsible for the “image layer through intensification (by compression induced by the shock wave of the aircraft’s passage through the air) of a barely subcritical layer, i.e. one in which the temperature gradient is just a little bit less than the value required to produce a mirage.”

But none of this is really all that important. It is the final conclusion, published in the Condon Committee’s final report which says, “This unusual sighting should therefore be assigned to the category of some almost certainly natural phenomenon, which is so rare that it apparently has never been reported before or since.”

Or, in other words, they had no real explanation for it but believed it to be natural, but they didn’t know what that would be. They just refused to say that they had failed to identify the source of the sighting which would have been the honest thing to do. After all, they didn’t identify it.

And that last paragraph from the Condon Committee report on the sighting is what demanded the mention of the case. It gives an insight into the mission of the Condon Committee, and it provides a look at the Air Force investigation. True, the Air Force relied on the observations of the crew of a ship in the region, but that doesn’t seem to be unreasonable. Had the “mirage, Mars” answer been left intact, that would be a reasonable conclusion. Since it was taken a step further, there is no reasonable conclusion. It is “Unidentified.”

The Best of Project Blue Book contains many of the reports by hundreds of witnesses that the Air Force managed to ignore. It provides a glimpse into that investigation and shows how the data were manipulated. You can find the book here:

https://www.amazon.com/Best-Project-Blue-Book-ebook/dp/B0869SRQMK/ref=sr_1_1?dchild=1&keywords=Kevin+Randle&qid=1603479818&sr=8-1

Eric Davis, Again

 

The Devoid (Billy Cox), columnist at the Miami Herald, reignited the Admiral Thomas Wilson debate not all that long ago. Although it seemed that most of mainstream Ufology had realized that the story told by Dr. Eric Davis about his clandestine meeting with the Admiral was probably more hyperbole that truth, there are still those who believe the information is leading us to disclosure. You can read the article here:

http://devoid.blogs.heraldtribune.com/16000/eric-who-the-admiral/#comment-588557

I bring all this up because, a while back, Dr. Davis had suggested, on Coast-to-Coast, that the Del Rio UFO crash was real. That crash is based on the information of a single witness who had claimed to be a retired Air Force colonel, a former Air Force fighter pilot, and a veteran of the Korean War. I explored all this at length in a posting on this blog that you can read here:

http://kevinrandle.blogspot.com/2018/09/dr-davis-confirms-del-rio-ufo-crash.html

Given that the Del Rio story is a hoax, and the lone witness to it has been less than honest about it, this does cast a shadow over the credibility of Dr. Davis. I mean, if he truly had inside information, he would have known the Del Rio crash was a hoax.

Robert Willingham, pretend
Air Force Officer.

I exposed it as such in 2010 in my book, Crash: When UFOs Fall from the Sky. I also gave a presentation at the MUFON Symposium in Denver about Robert Willingham, the discredited source, and why his tale should be rejected. This merely means that the information I uncovered was available long before Dr. Davis had his conversation with Admiral Wilson (which, BTW, Wilson has denied ever having taken place).

In the last few days, a number of people have been discussing this on the Internet, and I wouldn’t mention it but their experiences seem to match my own. As I said in the post, I had emailed Dr. Davis a couple of times, even asking George Knapp for some help in making contact, but never heard a word back from Davis. The excuse was that Dr. Davis was getting plenty of emails from all over the world and I certainly could understand his failure to reply to me.

However…

I wasn’t the only one having that sort of problem. André Skondras told Philip Mantle had he had attempted to contact Dr. Davis but hadn’t heard back. Given that had been less than twenty-four hours after he had sent his email, that wasn’t all that surprising. Now, several days later, he still hasn’t had a response.

That’s not the end of it. Don Schmitt reported, “Tracy Torme had asked me to contact Davis after his failure when he and James Fox were shooting the forthcoming docu-film. He never responded to email or personal calls. Next, because Davis was listed at that time as a MUFON consultant, I asked Jan Harzan to make the same effort. Same result.”

This was important because of Don’s efforts and the suggestion that MUFON Executive Director Jan Harzan was involved (made long before Harzan’s arrest). While I fully understand Dr. Davis ignoring some of these requests, as a consultant to MUFON, you’d think that a response to the Executive Director would be forthcoming.

This has now taken a different path with a suggestion that we contact Admiral Wilson, who has repeatedly denied that he knew Davis and wouldn’t recognize him if he walked into the room. Since the Admiral has been contacted and responded a number of times, I don’t know what good it will do to bother him again. He’s not going to change his mind.

I’m reminded of the note Kent Jeffrey received from the late Colonel Robert Barrowclough, who, in 1947, was one of the senior officers at the Roswell Army Air Field. In that note dated June 15, 1997, Barrowclough wrote, “Thank you for the copy of the [MUFON] UFO Journal on the Roswell Myth. Maybe some of those crack pots will quit calling me up and say I’m covering up a deep gov’t secret.”

Even if Admiral Wilson did know something, he would be obligated to deny it if it was still classified. I’m not saying that he does, only that continued pestering of the man will not yield any positive results… especially since he is on the record, repeatedly, as saying he had no such discussion with Dr. Davis.

The key here is Dr. Davis, but it seems to be a key that is lost. Since Dr. Davis has proclaimed a well-known hoax (Del Rio) as being authentic, I fear that there is nothing more to learn from him. All we end up doing is chasing a claim that cannot be verified and it does nothing to advance our knowledge. It only diverts us from a path that could yield better results.

Chasing UFOs - Part Two

To be fair to Chasing UFOs, I suppose I should note that they have put up a response which seems to be because so many complained about their Roswell presentation. You can find it at:

http://tvblogs.nationalgeographic.com/2012/07/16/the-science-of-chasing-ufos-ufo-landing-zone-2/#.UAbeSNIM01o.twitter

But this is really too little too late. They concede the points that we all made about their investigation into Roswell but the mistakes should not have happened.

About the missile test footage, which they had originally said (or rather Ryder said couldn’t be a missile based on what her missile expert said), McGee wrote, “Again, in light of the evidence as detailed above without additional compelling evidence to the contrary, there is no scientifically compelling reason to question the hypothesis that the object captured on film is likely a rocket exhaust plume as viewed during an unusual missile or rocket bounce and crash. (To claim otherwise and invoke extraterrestrial technology is, again, to commit an argument from ignorance.)”

All well and good, but had they checked with White Sands, they would have known where the footage originated and wouldn’t have had to speculate. If they had checked the Internet they could have found the explanation.

McGee explains the initial excitement over the button. Those of us who know our history (and by this I merely mean the separation of the Air Force from the Army in September 1947) knew that no Air Force button would have been lost during the recovery operation. Those of us with military training knew that a button from a Class A uniform would have no significance in the Roswell case.

McGee now tells us, “Buttons of this nature were included on more formal uniform coats, which don’t necessarily make sense under a “hands-and-knees” recovery operation scenario. Field recovery personnel would not have been wearing more formal uniforms.”

Chasing UFOs' pristine Air Force
button. It is from 1949 at the latest.

Or, in other words, those out in the field would not have been wearing a Class A uniform. They would have been in fatigues. The buttons would have been different.

And he tells us, “The button was sent to an expert historian from the National Button Society during post-production, who concluded that the button (based on the manufacturer and button-backing) was at earliest from the year 1949.”

Without having to consult a “button expert” (okay, the unidentified expert clearly knew the history of buttons), many of us knew that the button couldn’t have been dropped during the retrieval. Had anyone been out there in a Class A uniform in July 1947, the button would have been Army and not Air Force.

Which leads back to the question of where did it come from?

Best guess… It was planted out there for them to find. It was planted by someone who knew of Frank Kimbler’s buttons but who had not seen them. It was planted by someone who just went out to buy an Air Force button. Did any of them, James Fox, Ben McGee or Erin Ryder do it?

Of course not.

Can we determine who did it?

Is that is really important now? Had we had some controversy over the button, then yes, it would be important. But, with all of us on the same page, it really becomes a moot point. The button was there, it didn’t belong there, it was from the wrong military service, from the wrong uniform, and it was manufactured some two years after the crash.

We now have the whole story. I do not understand why all this information had to wait until after the broadcast. I do not understand why, at the end, they couldn’t have mentioned these things with a scroll, which everyone seems to want to put at the bottom of our screens today. The information should have been included because it just wasn’t that difficult to find.

But kudos to McGee, and his fellows at Chasing UFOs, for giving us the rest of the story.

(A final and trivial note here. I did attempt to contact both Ben McGee and James Fox and have not heard back from them. I would guess that if you are on a national TV show, the public email addresses are probably overwhelmed with letters and comments. I didn’t expect that I would succeed in getting a response, but hey, I did try.)