Ed Ruppelt's Anti-UFO Crash Statement

As many of you know, my book Roswell in the 21^st Century is out in a few weeks.

Captain Ed Ruppelt

While reviewing the case files, documentation, witness interviews, the hundreds of video and audio tapes, and books and magazine articles, I had my eyes open for something new in the way of documentation. While I didn’t find any that mentioned Roswell specifically, I did find a few that referred to UFO crashes. Although some of those such as the Twining Letter and the Air Intelligence Report are covered in the book, I have made another discovery which is not to say I am alone on this but that others have referenced it as well.

I was looking for some information about Ed Ruppelt and came across a briefing he had given to the Air Defense Command on January 24, 1953, or more accurately, a rough draft of that briefing. Originally classified as “secret” it was, of course downgraded over the years and when the Project Blue Book files were declassified, this report found on Roll 87, after an entry in what was called Box 4 and just after the transcript of Major General Samford’s July 1952 press conference, was Ruppelt’s briefing. What caught my eye were a couple of paragraphs in that rough draft. It said:

It can be stated now that as far as the current situation is concerned, there are no indications that the reported objects are a direct threat to the United States nor is there any proof that [all underlining in the original] the reported objects are any foreign body over the United States or, as far as we know, the rest of the world. This always brings up the question of space travel. We have gone into this with many people and it is the opinion of most scientists or people that should know it is not impossible for some other planet to be inhabited and for this planet to send beings down to earth. However, there is no, and I want to emphasize and report the word “No”, evidence of this in any report the Air Force has received. I would like to go back over that once more for the sake of the record. We have no evidence in any of our reports that the earth is being visited by any people or beings from outer space [italics indicated a section that had been crossed out in the original].

We have arrived at the conclusion that these reported objects are no direct threat to the United States for several different reasons. One, we have never picked up any “hardware”. By that we mean any pieces, parts, whole articles, or anything that would indicate an unknown material or object. We have received many pieces of material to be analyzed but in every case there was no doubt as to what this material was.

Before we talk about what all this might mean, I will point out that these paragraphs have been published elsewhere, but they have been edited. While the editing doesn’t actually alter the information, it does seem to provide a slightly biased assessment which is to say, that it underscores the lack of recovered debris. I have seen it reported as:

However, there is no, and I want to emphasize and report the word “No”, evidence of this in any report the Air Force has received… WE HAVE NEVER PICKED UP ANY HARDWARE [emphasis added by one of those reporting]. By that we mean any pieces, parts, whole articles, or anything that would indicate an unknown material or object.

The major point here is some of the information has been deleted, but as it turns out, it does not alter the statement. It consolidates the information but I think the whole context is something that we should note.

I could make several points here. First, Ruppelt is undoubtedly arguing based on what is in the Project Blue Book files, and in that context we know that his statements are accurate. There is but a single mention of the Roswell case in those files which appears in a four paragraph newspaper clipping about another UFO case. That mention is only that those at Roswell had received a “blistering rebuke” for their announcement that a flying saucer had crashed. The point is, now that we all have access to the complete Blue Book files, we know Ruppelt’s statements are true, if he used only the information in the Blue Book files.

Second, I could suggest that Ruppelt’s briefing was originally classified as “secret” and we all believe that if there had been an alien spacecraft crash at Roswell, it would have been classified as “top secret.” Therefore, nothing could be mentioned about it without, I believe, defeating the purpose of the briefing by limiting the number of people who could attend. Many of those in the audience would not have been authorized at the briefing at a higher level of classification.

Third, it could be argued that even though Ruppelt was the chief of Blue Book, he didn’t have a need to know about Roswell. His job was to investigate sightings and collect data about them and not worry about the reverse engineering of anything that had been found… and yes, I know this is lame.

Fourth, if you are attempting to protect a secret, you don’t want to suggest something that might lead to that secret. True, one of the best ways to stop questions is to tell people that something doesn’t exist or hasn’t happened, but here Ruppelt was talking about a subject, UFO crashes, that might have been best left unsaid. He did, apparently scratch out part of the statement, but that could have been for no other reason than to eliminate redundancy.

If this statement was stand alone, meaning that it was the only example of such a comment in the vast majority of documents that I have searched, and others have searched, we might be able to ignore it. But it is not, and we see the top of the Air Force intelligence community all saying basically the same thing. Lieutenant General Nathan Twining, mentioned the lack of crashed recovered debris and while I believe the letter was written by Colonel Howard McCoy, Twining signed it, meaning he had read it and approved its content.

McCoy, the top intelligence officer at AMC, that is Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, not only wrote the letter for Twining, he said the same thing a number of times, that is, no recovered crash debris. Again, it seems unlikely that McCoy wouldn’t have known about the crash even if he wasn’t directly involved in the research, and he surely wouldn’t have been mentioning the subject if there was a secret to protect.

What we have here is another officer, Ruppelt, involved with the UFO research and investigation who is saying that there is no crash recovered debris and there is no material submitted for analysis that was not identified as something terrestrial. Ruppelt’s words are direct and definitive. It is not the sort of words used when someone is attempting to inhibit inquiry when he knows the situation is different. It suggests that Ruppelt is telling the truth as he knows it and while it might be said that he was outside of the loop on crash recovered debris, I believe it is also fair to point out that who he was, where he was and when he was there would have put him in contact with the people who should have known the truth. Under those circumstances he would have heard something and that he says otherwise in such strong language suggests there was nothing for him to have heard…

Remember General Exon was not directly involved, but he heard things from his friends. He knew things based on what they had told him, probably out of school as they say. My point here is that Ruppelt would have been in the same boat but apparently heard nothing so that he was confident in making the statements he did. In other words, this does not bode well for any crashed saucer tale.

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.

Roswell, Nathan Twining and the Mini-EOTS

There is a misunderstanding about the Twining letter and it is about what caused it to be written. To understand it in the context of the time, it is necessary to understand why the letter was written.

In July 1947, an officer who worked for Brigadier General George Schulgen put together an Estimate of the Situation, which is not to be confused with the big one that was written later. This mini-EOTS covered a number of sightings that had been made early in 1947, including a few that had preceded Arnold. LTC George Garrett was the officer who wrote this EOTS that was sent to LTG Nathan Twining at Wright Field for analysis. I covered all this in Government UFO Files, which, if I was smart, is all I would say about it, making those interested in this discussion buy the book. However, and with the help of many others including Dr. Michael Swords ...

In July 1947, Garrett believed that nothing useful would be found by additional Air Force (really Army Air Forces) investigation of the flying saucer reports. Both 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 so they would no longer have to deal with it. 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. Or, I suppose, you might say that this is what they hoped would happen.

Garrett began his work on his Estimate in the beginning of July, 1947. He selected sixteen flying saucer reports that seemed to demonstrate the truly unusual nature of the phenomenon, and then provided his analysis of the data that had been collected.

The first case he mentioned preceded that by Kenneth Arnold; the man many believe “launched” the UFO phenomena as we know it today, by over a month. That sighting, from Manitou Springs, Colorado happened sometime between 12:15 and 1:15 p.m. on May 19, 1947. 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. This sighting does not appear in the Project Blue Book files, though it was used as support for Garrett’s conclusions at the end of this study which in and of itself is interesting.

The second report that was mentioned was from Oklahoma City on May 22, 1947. There are few details available other than it was made by a businessman pilot and he saw the object or light from the ground and not the cockpit.

The third case came from Greenfield, Massachusetts on June 22, 1947. According to the report:

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’ (who has a role in these early investigations as outlined in The Government UFO Files) participation with Schulgen and Garrett it is not difficult to believe that the FBI was involved.

Next was the report that got everyone talking about flying saucers and this is the Kenneth Arnold’s sighting. In 1947, as Garrett was putting together his Estimate, it was still considered an unknown by those who had officially investigated it and who had talked to Arnold.

Garrett’s next sighting involved two Air Force (at the time Army Air Forces) pilots and two intelligence officers who 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. The eventual label applied to the case was that this was a balloon.

Garrett’s next case was witnessed by three scientists at White Sands, New Mexico. The object was silver in color and no external details were reported. There was the possibility of a slight vapor trail and none of the three were sure how it disappeared, suggesting that the angle changed and they lost sight of it.

Civilian pilots were responsible for the next sighting that Garrett quoted. Captain E. J. Smith was piloting a United Airlines plane when one of the flying saucers appeared coming at them. The first officer, Ralph Stevens, reached down to blink the landing lights, and Smith asked what he thought he was doing. Stevens responded that another plane was coming at them. As it closed, they realized that it wasn't another aircraft but one of the flying disks.

Although the case was thoroughly investigated, the Air Force found no solution for it. In the Project Blue Book files, it is still carried as “Unidentified.”

Three airmen on a B-25, near Clay Center, Kansas said they saw a silver-colored object pacing their aircraft was the next case cited. One of the witnesses was the pilot who said that a bright flash called his attention of the object, which he said was thirty to fifty feet in diameter and very bright. He said the object appeared to be pacing the aircraft at 210 miles an hour. When they turned toward it, the object seemed to accelerate to high speed and disappeared. Later the Air Force would suggest that the sighting was caused by a reflection on the windshield.

Garrett next reported that Captain James H. Burniston, on July 6, 1947, while at Fairfield-Suisun Army Air Base saw one of the flying disks. According to that report:

…He observed an object traveling in a southeasterly direction at an estimated height of 10,000 feet or more and at a speed in excess of that of any aircraft he had ever seen. The object was in his view for approximately sixty seconds during which time it travelled over three-quarters of the visible sky. Burniston could distinguish no definite color or shape. It appeared to roll from side to side three times during his observation and one side reflected strongly from its surface while the other side gave no reflection. He estimates the size to be about that of a C-54 and states that between the time the top of the object was visible and the time it rolled over … the bottom became very difficult to see and almost disappeared.

Although the next two reports seem to be related, Garrett broke them into two separate incidents, one from Koshkonong, Wisconsin and the second from East Troy, Wisconsin. They are listed on the same “Project Card,” which supplies very little information. Both sightings lasted under a minute, and in both sightings the witnesses were members of the Civil Air Patrol, an official civilian auxiliary of the Air Force. The first of the sightings was reported at 11:45 (CST) in the morning and the second at 2:30 (CST) in the afternoon. Both were made on July 7, 1947.These two cases were marked, “Insufficient information for proper analysis.”

Following his theory of who might make the best witnesses, the next case involved an Army National Guard pilot flying near Mt. Baldy, California on July 8, 1947. The flat object, reflecting light, was about the size of a fighter. The pilot said that he gave chase attempting to keep the object in sight but was unable to do so.

A police officer, among others, in Grand Falls, Newfoundland, reported an egg-shaped object with a barrel-like leading edge about thirty minutes before midnight on July 9, 1947, in the next case reported by Garrett. There were four objects that had a phosphorescent glow.

The next day, and next on the list there was a series of sightings in Newfoundland. Garrett used the sighting that took place about four in the afternoon, and was seen by a “TWA Representative and a PAA Representative [who was identified as a Mr. Leidy] on the ground. The object was “circular in shape, like a wagon wheel,” and was bluish-black with a fifteen foot long trail. The object “seemed to cut clouds open as it passed thru [sic]. Trail was like beam seen after a high-powered landing light is switched off.”

The case took on added importance because there were color photographs of the disk as it cut through the clouds. Dr. Michael Swords reported in the Journal of UFO Studies:

The bluish-black trail seems to indicate ordinary combustion from a turbo-jet engine, athodyd [ramjet] motor, or some combination of these types of power plants. The absence of noise and apparent dissolving of the clouds to form a clear path indicates a relatively large mass flow of a rectangular cross section containing a considerable amount of heat.

In 1947, this was an important case and provides a hint as to what Garrett and the others thought. They believed that the solution here rested in terrestrial technology, or in other words, this was something of Soviet manufacture. While the sighting itself is interesting for the photographs, it was important because it seemed to suggest the Soviets were responsible rather than aliens.

The final case that Garrett cited was from Elmendorf Field in Anchorage, Alaska on July 12. A major in the Army Air Forces said that he watched an object that resembled a grayish balloon as it followed the contours of the mountains some five miles away. The major said that the object paralleled the course of a C-47 that was landing on the airfield.

With these sixteen reports, and two added later, Garrett composed his study. 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 research project then in development. They thought they would be told to quit because of that. The answer they received, after they had forwarded their report to the Air Materiel Command and to Twining must have surprised them. It was not at all what they had expected.

On September 24, 1947, Schulgen, Garrett and the others received the written response from Twining’s staff. This analysis of the situation was based wholly on the information supplied by Garrett through Schulgen. Twining’s staff looked at the reports that had been included and then produced a draft of the response for approval by Twining.

Given the information they had to work with, and it seems those at Wright Field added nothing to the mix themselves; they reached their conclusions based on the information supplied. These reports, for the most part, came from pilots, both military and civilian including airline pilots. They came from scientists, police, and aviation personnel who should have been able to recognize aircraft in the air. The reports were selected because they were, for the most part, from multiple witnesses and one must have been selected because of the photographs. These were some of the best sightings that had been received beginning with the May reports that did not make it into the Project Blue Book files.

This response, then, from Twining's AMC staff 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 saucers were and that they should be investigated.

If the flying saucers 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.

Swords, commenting on this, wrote, "What explains this confident display of mediocrity? Although we are apparently not dealing with genius here, neither should we assume complete stupidity. This report was not put together with any greater intensity because the authors did not feel that it was necessary. They did not think that UFOs were any great mystery. It was obvious to them that UFOs were mechanical, aerial devices. Whose devices was still up in the air (so to speak), but the indications were fairly clear: despite assurances to the contrary, they must be our own. 'Lack of topside inquiries' [meaning, of course, those higher up in the chain of command] made this the only reasonable conclusion in their eyes."

What this does explain, for those who haven’t figured it out yet, is why there was a mention of a “lack of crash recovered material.” None had been included in the mini-EOTS. The response by Twining, which was written under the supervision of Howard McCoy, used only that information included in the original EOTS. They added nothing to it because they could accomplish what they wanted in that way. Had they added additional information or mention information that was classified “Top Secret” that would have changed the nature of the discussion and, of course, the classification of the response.

And this is why the Roswell crash wasn't mentioned in Twining's letter. It wasn't part of the original query, there was no reason to add it, and the investigation could continue as they searched for additional answers... or more importantly, they scrambled around trying to find out if national security was at risk. This they could accomplish without compromising the Roswell information.

Colonel Howard McCoy and MJ-12

There is another aspect to this MJ-12 nonsense that hasn’t been mentioned and that is Colonel Howard McCoy. Here’s the situation we find ourselves in. In the early 1940s, McCoy was involved in the investigation of the Foo Fighters. In 1946, McCoy was pulling records and observing the Ghost Rockets in Scandinavia and in late 1946, he was tasked with setting up an unofficial investigation into these “aerial phenomena.” And finally, in September 1947, McCoy was the man who drafted the letter signed by Lieutenant General Nathan F. Twining in which it was concluded that the phenomenon was something real and not illusionary. In other words, McCoy had been heavily involved in the investigations from the very beginning and he was the subject matter expert.

So, you might ask, “What does this have to with MJ-12?”

When this committee was organized, it involved people who were at the top of their fields and who could bring specific expertise to the research. Twining is on the list but Twining wasn’t all that familiar with the situation as it had been delegated to subordinates. He relied on one man and that man was Colonel Howard McCoy. He was the top officer involved in the research, he had the files, he had the resources and he was running the unofficial investigation into what had become the flying saucers.

McCoy should have been on the list. He probably knew more about any of these things than any other officer in the United States military. He held the highest of security clearances, and he would have been involved in the investigation of the crash at Roswell. There would have been no reason to exclude him, especially when some of the other members of the MJ-12 had no real knowledge of the situation and whose expertise wasn’t all that relevant to the research.

For those studying the situation in 1947, meaning here, looking at who was where in the government and the military, and what would be said about MJ-12, there are some names that are absent. Where was General Eisenhower, for example? He was the Chief of Staff of the Army. And where was Carl Spaatz? He was the Chief of Staff for the Army Air Forces in 1947.

These two would have been involved simply because the information about the Roswell crash would have worked its way up the chain of command. They would know what happened and both controlled assets that would have been valuable to the research to be conducted.

But again, the man they would have asked was McCoy. He had been involved for four or five years when these aerial phenomena were considered an enemy weapon and the need to learn more about them was critical. While the situation had changed with the end of the war, it became critical again with discovery of the craft at Roswell and McCoy was the man who would have been in charge of exploiting the find. His role would have been the most important and yet there is no indication of McCoy on any of the MJ-12 documents or anywhere near it.

Again, you might ask, “Why not?”

And the answer is that no one had realized what his role had been until I was able to outline this in Government UFO Secrets. McCoy had been in the background of the investigations and wasn’t as high profile as those named. Those who created the Eisenhower Briefing Document didn’t know him and therefore couldn’t name him. Had they had that information and included McCoy, it would have gone a long way to establish the authenticity of the documents.

But, this is just one more problem with the original MJ-12 documents. They didn’t have the right names included on it and that might be the result of those who created it being unaware of high level chains of command, especially in Intelligence community. Their research was good, but not great. They missed a big opportunity because they didn’t know about McCoy and this is just one more example of the problems with MJ-12.

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.