As
many of you know, I have been reviewing a large number of UFO files and have
found some things that don’t warrant a complete blog post but that are
interesting. For example, Ramey Air Force Base in Puerto Rico was not named for
Roger Ramey but for Brigadier General Howard Knox Ramey. This Ramey learned to
fly in 1918 and by the time the Second World War broke out he had moved up the
ranks. In
January 1943 he was named the commanding officer of the V (Fifth)
Bomber Command. In March 1943 while on a reconnaissance fight over the Torres
Strait he disappeared. Neither his body nor any wreckage from the aircraft were
found. If I had to guess, I would say that the Japanese spotted his aircraft
and shot it down.
 |
| BG Howard Knox Ramey |
The point is that Ramey Air Force Base was named for him,
contrary to what some others have suggested. Roger Ramey’s widow told me it had
not been named for her husband when I asked her about that in the early 1990s.
Here's
something that a number of people might have seen but it might not have
registered with them. In the Roswell
Daily Record of July 9, in the article entitled, “Ramey Says Excitement Not
Justified,” which, of course is his answer to the Roswell debris, there is a
paragraph toward the end that says, “A public relations officer here said the
balloon was in his office ‘and it will probably stay right there.’”
Although
the article is in the Roswell newspaper, the dateline is Fort Worth which means
the public information officer who was quoted is not Walter Haut but probably
Major Charles A. Cashon, the 8th Air Force PIO. (There are those who
suggest that I haven’t carried out a complete investigation of the Roswell
case, so, to prove a point, I will tell you that Cashon was not rated as flight
crew and that his address in 1947 was Rt. 1, Box 220, Weatherford, TX, which
was about a thirty-minute drive from the base.) This tells us where the debris
from Ramey’s office went once he was done showing it to the press, though I
wonder why Cashon would want it cluttering up his office and why no one bothered
to take additional pictures (Oh, wait, this was 1947 when cameras were
expensive and film was expensive and no one cared about a wrecked weather
balloon anyway).
Speaking
of balloons, Irving Newton, the warrant office who “identified” the balloon for
Ramey and the press, said that he knew immediately that is was a balloon,
though in interviews he said a colonel had met him before he got to Ramey’s
office. Newton said the colonel told him they thought it was a weather balloon
and wanted him to identify it (does leading the witness count here?) Anyway,
Newton, in a February 20, 1995 letter to me, wrote, “The Rawin target and
balloon in question was only used at limited locations and to my knowledge not
at Fort Worth, not even all weather personnel were familiar with them, but we
used them at Tinker Field (Okla City) during training and for Atomic tests…”
Atomic
tests like that of Operation Crossroads in which the 509th Bomb
Group participated including Jesse Marcel. And, according to the L. J. Guthrie,
of the Roswell weather station, they had been “dabbling with radar controlled
balloons,” (which strikes me as a load… radar controlled balloons?) and that he
believed based on the descriptions, what Brazel found could have been one of
theirs. An Albuquerque weatherman said that they launched rawins with the
weather balloons as well.
None
of that proves much one way or another. I just thought these various items
about the balloons or more specifically the rawin from Ramey’s office landing
in the possession of Cashon to be interesting.
I
thought I would just throw this information out there. I’m sure that I have
opened the gates to all those who need to question absolutely everything even
if there is nothing very controversial in the comments here. These are just
little bits of information that probably add nothing to our overall
understanding but I found them somewhat amusing.
