Jake Barber: UFO Retrieval Whistleblower

Last Saturday night, (January 18) NewsNation aired a segment that featured Jake Barber who claimed that he had seen a “nonhuman” egg-shaped aircraft and had been recruited for a top-secret government UFO crash/retrieval program. Unlike David Grusch who talked of hearing of such things from credible but unnamed sources, Barber said that he had participated in retrievals.

I probably should point out here that neither of these “whistleblowers” was the first to make claims of an involvement in some sort of government UFO crash retrieval program. Among the first was Clifford Stone, a mid-level Army NCO, who claimed to have been involved in several such operations and had even seen the “alien autopsy file,” not long after he had joined the Army. I mention this because Stones’ revelations were little more than invention that was not backed up by any sort of independent evidence.

The late Cliff Stone, who claimed to be on the inside
of a secret program involved with crash retrievals.

According to NewsNation, which had checked Barber’s records, he was a talented airplane mechanic who was deployed on several presidential support missions. He had been recruited into the Air Force’s Elite Combat Control unit suggesting he was a helicopter pilot (though it is unclear if he had been a military pilot), freefall parachutist, expert marksman and the recipient of a NATO top-secret security clearance, known as Cosmic Top Secret and service in Bosnia, for which he earned an unidentified valor award. They don’t reveal what award that might be. Stones’ records provided no corroboration for his tales.

To indicate the off-world nature of the retrievals, Barber said, “Just visually looking at the object on the ground, you could tell that it was extraordinary and anomalous. It was not human.” The craft was metallic, pearly white, and about the size of an SUV.

Normally, I am skeptical of these sorts of claims and I believe we all should be as well. However, my own experiences in both Air Force and Army intelligence suggests there might be some truth to it.

Because of my status in the military, that is as an intelligence officer, and because some knew of my interest in UFOs, I occasionally received nuggets of information about UFO cases that haven’t been reported or that have had little military interest. Bob Cornett and I might have been among the first to gain access to the Project Blue Book records while they were still housed as Maxwell Air Force Base and had not been redacted, taking out the names of the witnesses.

Bob Cornett reviewing UFO records while on assignment from
a magazine in the 1970s.

One of the first cases we wanted to see was from November 1953 that involved the disappearance of an Air Force fighter. The Blue Book file was just two pages and it was noted that it was an aircraft accident rather than a UFO report. According to an Air Force colonel who was stationed at Kinross Air Force Base said that in November 1953, a jet fighter was scrambled to intercept an unknown target, meaning a UFO, over the Soo Locks on Lake Superior. The intercept was watched on radar, the two blips, that is the UFO and the jet, merged but never separated. That single blip flew off the scope and disappeared in the distance. From the point of the merge, there had been no further communication with the fighter. The jet was never found. The colonel told me that there had been two schools of thought. One was that the UFO abducted the jet and the second was that it had crashed into the lake.

That is the sort of thing that I believe David Grusch heard when he talked about UFO crashes. People who were at the right place at the right time to know something more than the public provided that information. The colonel believed that the jet had been abducted, or in his words, the UFO took it. I wasn’t there, but the source had been. I knew him and he was credible but then where do you go with such a tale. If it is highly classified, how do I, as a civilian now, break through that barrier. Besides, attempts to learn more about it, other than the mundane and unclassified, have failed. I’m pointed back to the information and documentation that I already had.

In a somewhat similar vein, Don Schmitt and I interviewed a general at the Pentagon. Well, interviewed might be an over statement. He agreed to meet us in a snack bar on one of the lowest levels. The tables were about waist high or higher, so that people had a place to set a plate, but there were no stools. It was a get in, get your food, eat it and get out place.

We wanted to talk about the Roswell case. Don had apparently chatted with him at some point, explaining what we were after which is information about Roswell. By this time, we had talked to many witnesses to the crash and knew more about it. We had rejected the balloon answer and had even interviewed three of those who had been in General Ramey’s office on July 8, 1947.

We were inside the Pentagon for about fifteen or twenty minutes. The general didn’t look nervous. He just told us that there was an area in the Pentagon to which he had no access. He said that our Roswell information was there. He didn’t elaborate. Just hinted that highly classified information about Roswell was in that area, and those entering had to have a specific request and their time in that area was limited. I would later talk to another man who had said he had seen the classified version Project Blue Book and described for me. He said he saw some of the pictures of crashed UFOs and the recovery operations that had been conducted. I don’t know if these classified Blue Book files were part of that section of the Pentagon to which the general had referred.

I have also talked with another general who said he knew the photographer who photographed Roswell bodies, but didn’t provide very much information about that. I need to point out that by the time the information got to me, it was third-hand. The general hadn’t seen the pictures, he had just talked to one of those men who took them.

I suppose I should mention the retired MSGT who said that he’d provided the rawin target for the Roswell explanation. What he had said to Cornett and me, was that he had taken a balloon into an area to show the witnesses what they had seen. This was before I had talked with Irving Newton, the weather officer who identified the wreckage in Fort Worth. He said they didn’t have rawin targets on the FWAAF, but did know where to get one if it was needed.

The MSGT was careful about what he told us, but the implication was that he had taken the balloon around the Roswell area. I have assumed that it was part it was part of the 1947 cover up, but when Bob and I talked to him, neither of us knew much about the Roswell case. I had read Frank Edward’s laughable description of the Roswell case in his Flying Saucers – Serious Business, but that didn’t contain much information other than it happened near Roswell and the Air Force had explained it, in Edward’s words, as a pie tin hooked to a kite.

All these are incidents, in which I was involved to some extent. Like those being talked about today, they suggest that these retrievals do happen. Sometimes the information is limited and we must deduce where it is going. Sometimes it is more explicit. What it does confirm is there was a cover up then and it remains in place now. 

Mysteries Uncovered - A Semi-review of a Book

 

In this episode of why I’m beginning to dislike Ufology, I have planned something of a rant against all the negative comments directed at me. These are challenges to my military background, my education, and that I write science fiction, though Stan Friedman once accused me of writing romances. But rather than do that, I’m going to mention a book I stumbled onto that sort of underscores the trouble with the UFO field.

Mysteries Uncovered, with the subtitle of True Stories of the Paranormal and Unexplained by Emily G. Thompson, caught my attention because in the promotional material, it mentioned the Roswell case. Well, here was a writer who had never actually been to Roswell or who had never interviewed any of the witnesses, but who was providing us with an analysis of the case. Naturally, I had to see what she had to say.

The book is loaded with analyses of many of the things that catch our attention here beginning with the Lost Colony of Roanoke and the Mary Celeste and several UFO related topics. Yes, I turned immediately to the chapter cleverly entitled, The Roswell Incident.

On the first page of that entry, after a brief synopsis of the case, there is a quote from Dr. Robert A. Baker, a hardcore skeptic. He said “It’s a modern myth, a kind of religion. There is a common human need for salvation, and it’s always coming from above.”

That didn’t bode well for the entry, but the text wasn’t quite that bad. However, in the first sentence, she told us about Mac Brazel, not realizing that it’s been a couple of decades since it was discovered by Tom Carey that he was actually Mack Brazel. This suggested that she hadn’t done the in-depth research that would have provided that small nugget of information.

She provides some descriptions that are attributed to Mack Brazel, but he never said anything like that to anyone. She wrote, “The wreckage consisted of metal, some of which was dull and some of with was shiny and thin, resembling tinfoil. There was also something that looked like transparent plastic string or wire, and thin sticks shaped like I-beams, made from a material that Brazel was unable to identify.”

It was Bill Brazel who told Don Schmitt and me about those items. She missed the important point. Bill told us that when you shined a light in one end of that plastic string it came out the other. He said that it resembled monofilament fishing line but he was talking about fiber optics.

She wrote about the size of what we have been calling the debris field. She wrote that he, meaning Mack, estimated that the wreckage covered an area of three-quarters of a mile long and 200 to three hundred feet wide. “It appeared as though some kind of machine had exploded in midair and wreckage from it had rained down of the earth.”

But we know the size of the debris field is based on descriptions from both Bill Brazel and Jesse Marcel, Sr, the Air Intelligence Officer of the military unit stationed at Roswell. The description was not provided by Mack Brazel.

And all this is in just the first paragraph.

After some discussion of other, irrelevant sightings in New Mexico, she reported that Brazel drove into Roswell to talk to Chaves County Sheriff George Wilcox. She wrote that Brazel might receive a reward for the discovery.

On the July 4 weekend, there were reports of various organizations each offering a thousand-dollar reward for proof about the flying saucers. But, according to the newspaper reports, that information wasn’t available to Brazel until after he made the trek to Roswell and there has been no evidence presented that Brazel knew about that money. The reason for the trip, was, allegedly to sell some wool, but the real reason was he wanted to know who was responsible for all that debris and who was going to clean up the mess.

Yes, I could continue to pick apart this entry, but what is the real point? Instead, I’ll move to the discussion of Project Mogul, the culprit blamed for the wreckage. She reported, accurately, that the Air Force launched an investigation after several members of Congress asked for that investigation in the mid-1990s. But then wrote, “… the debris found near Corona was related to Project Mogul, a top-secret program aimed at using balloons to spy on Soviet nuclear tests. They claimed that the wreckage was part of a 600-ft balloon train…”

This really isn’t her fault but the balloon arrays launched in New Mexico had been reduced to 400 feet and contained common weather balloons and no rawin radar reflectors early in the New Mexico launches. She wrote, based on the Air Force report, “They claimed that this was peculiar material found at the crash site that neither Major Marcel or [sic] Brazel could identify.”

But they should have been able to identify it. There was nothing special, nothing classified about the balloon arrays being launched in New Mexico. They were standard, off the shelf neoprene weather balloons and rawin radar reflectors. A farmer in Circleville, Ohio, Sherman Campbell, found a weather balloon and radar reflector in one of this fields on that July 4 weekend, and knew exactly what it was.  He took it to the local sheriff, who also knew what it was. Even if Brazel hadn’t recognized it, Marcel should have.

While I hesitate to get back into the arguments about Project Mogul, there are other points to be made. Thompson quoted Charles Moore, who worked on what he was quick to point out to me that this was the New York University balloon project. She wrote, “Moore claimed that the balloons were equipped with corner reflectors [rawin radar targets] that were put together with balsa wood and coated with synthetic resin glue similar to that made by Elmer, to strengthen them.”

But Moore told me, when I visited him in Socorro, New Mexico, that the make-up of Flight No. 4, the culprit in this discussion, was the same as that as what was termed “the first successful flight,” Flight No. 5. However, the diagram of Flight No. 5, as published in the Air Force report had no radar reflectors on it and none were used on any flight in New Mexico until much later in the process.

The configuration of Flight #5. Charles Moore told me that Flight #4 was configured in the same way. Notice there are NO rawin targets on the flight Also notice the other components which were not among they types of debris described by the witnesses.

Charles Moore reviewing winds aloft data that I provided for him as we attempted to determine the flight path of Flight #4. Photo by Kevin Randle, taken in Socorro, New Mexico in the early 1990s. It was during our discussions that Moore supplied information about the activities in 1947.

Thompson then discussed the Alien Autopsy that surfaced about that time, meaning 1995. It has very little to do with the Roswell case and is an admitted hoax. Nearly everyone involved in the hoax have come forward and there are photographs of them putting together the “alien” creature that appears in the film.

To keep this from getting away, meaning too long, Thompson provided us with the Glenn Dennis tale of the nurse who saw the alien bodies. Dennis said that she had told him about seeing the aliens in the base hospital and within days she had been transferred out of Roswell. He had written to her once, but the letter came back marked, “Deceased.” Dennis said that she, with four other nurses, had been killed in an aircraft accident. But there is no record of any such aircraft accident that took the lives of five Army nurses at the time.

Thompson wrote, “The nurse was never identified.” However, Dennis, reluctantly, gave researchers the name of the nurse. In fact, her name, Naomi Self or Selff, was well known among those who were involved in research on the Roswell case. But no one could verify that there was ever a nurse by that name in the Army, let alone stationed in Roswell. The search expanded to the local hospitals with the same results. Told that there was no nurse named Naomi Self, Dennis then said that he hadn’t given anyone the right name, but then gave another one, which was a major change in his story.

The real point is that the Dennis testimony about the nurse was discredited more than a quarter century ago. That information has been published repeatedly. I covered in The Randle Report: UFOs in the 1990s, published in 1997. I wrote then, “But others, such as Glenn Dennis, who has been considered one of the important witnesses, have begun to collapse. There is little that can be said except that we have found nothing to confirm that his nurse exists or existed. And when challenged on these points, be begins to change the tale.”

In her book, Thompson discusses other UFO events such as the Flatwood monster, Barney and Betty Hill and the Rendlesham Forest encounter. I had thought about reviewing those segments here as well, but this is getting longer than I intended. I will only note here that she reports on the testimony of Larry Warren who claimed involvement in the Rendlesham Forest events, but that testimony has been discredited. Colonel Charles Halt noted that he didn’t remember Warren being there at all, and that contrary to Warren’s statements, he did not approach the object in the woods. Thompson does acknowledge this controversy.

Peter Robbins, who co-authored the book, Left at East Gate with Larry Warren, has since repudiated Warren’s involvement the case. You can read Peter’s long entries about his reasons for this here:

http://kevinrandle.blogspot.com/2017/08/peter-robbins-explains-his-take-on-left_10.html

and here:

http://kevinrandle.blogspot.com/2017/08/peter-robbins-explains-his-take-on-left.html

Those entries were written by Peter and were posted to this blog with his permission. Thompson does write about the controversy with Warren’s statements, but the account might have been stronger if she had left Warren out of the discussion or reduced him to a footnote. There were others, such as Jim Penniston and John Burroughs, not to mention Charles Halt, who were clearly there.

Again, this criticism is a little bit nitpicky, but when dealing with a case where there is so much information, testimony and legitimate players, it does seem to be a waste to mention Warren at all.

I guess I must say that I was disappointed in the quality of the reporting on the Roswell case, but then it is quite complex and there have been dozens of books written about it. I have contributed five of them, and, of course, mentioned the case in dozens of magazine articles and appeared in a dozen or more documentaries and television programs dealing with the crash. And if you look at my earlier work, you’ll find errors in it that are the result of publishing preliminary data. However, it just seems that a solid report on Roswell can be written. I saw that she didn’t reference any of the skeptical books about the case and mentioned Witness to Roswell by Tom Carey and Don Schmitt twice in the bibliography of the Roswell case.

The real problem is that I know the mistakes made in the segments that deal with UFO related events and I must wonder is there are similar problems with the other segments. Would someone well versed in the Lost Colony of Roanoke be able to find significant errors in the reporting? Or in the section about Amelia Earhart?

If this was a real review, then I would note that the book is 373 pages long and is available from Amazon both as an ebook and in a print version. There is no index but there are footnotes which are not quite as comprehensive as I would like. It just strikes me that this was a book written with no real passion for the subjects mentioned.

Although I rarely mention books that I do not like, the Roswell information was too far off the mark to allow it to pass. Unfortunately, this is not a book that I would recommend.

David Grusch, UFO Crashes and Analysis (Updated June 12, 2023) (Updated June 13, 2023)

While Canada burns down and it seems that the leaders and former leaders of this country are accused, and in some cases indited, for breaking various federal laws, there are those more interested in crashed UFOs, or as is becoming the more correct term, UAPs. David Charles Grusch, whose credentials have been cited by many as impressive, claimed that the US Government has, in its possession, recovered alien spacecraft and the bodies of the alien crew. Overlooked here is the fact that he also said that he could produce no documents or pictures because of national security. I’ll concede that if he had pictures of aliens or alien spacecraft, that would be a national security issue.

Even without naming names and without the documentation, Grusch had been greeted with enthusiasm rather than skepticism by most of the mainstream media. Few worried about the lack of verifiable sources and fewer still mentioned it. Now, Michael Shellenberger issued his own statement saying that he knew of, at least, a dozen downed alien craft and that every five years we get one or two recovered for one reason and another. An unnamed source supposedly shared this information with AARO but AARO’s response suggests they don’t have access to that information.

Sean Kirpatrick at the Senate Hearing. He would say that he has seen no evidence
of alien material .

Of course, the Pentagon released a statement. Susan Gough told Fox News, “To date, AARO has not discovered any verifiable information to substantiate claims that any programs regarding the possession or reverse-engineering of extraterrestrial materials have existed in the past or exist currently.”

That is similar to the statements made after the NASA meeting held on June 7. Several of the participants, when addressing this particular claim, said that they had no knowledge or had seen nothing to suggest that the government or the military had any sort of alien material or recovered craft.

After the meeting, Scott Kelly said, "I want to emphasize this loud and proud.
There is absolutely no convincing evidence for extraterrestrial life
associated with unidentified objects."

And, of course, comes the part that I love. More than one reporter trotted out the stale line about the Roswell UFO crash, claiming it was a “test balloon from Project Mogul.” It doesn’t seem to have occurred to those reporters that the Mogul explanation is just another in a long line of lies about the Roswell UFO case. According to the documentation, published by the Air Force, but overlooked by the media, is that the culprit in this, Mogul Flight No. 4, was cancelled. It did not fly and neither does this explanation.

But that does take us to Roswell, where a great deal of this all started. Don Schmitt and I have interviewed many high-ranking individuals about crashed UFOs and some of them have gone on the record. One of the first was Brigadier General Thomas DuBose, who, in 1947, was the Chief of Staff of the Eighth Air Force with headquarters at Fort Worth Army Air Field, later Carswell Air Force Base.

Interviewed in 1991, on tape, DuBose mentioned that the debris displayed in General Ramey’s office was not the material recovered outside of Roswell. Skeptics have pointed at the pictures of that debris as evidence for the Mogul explanation. In one of the pictures, we see Thomas DuBose proving that he was there, in the office, when the debris was displayed and identified as the material found outside of Roswell. He explained that there had been a switch, and that this was not the material that had been brought from Roswell. He said, “…actually it was a cover story, the balloon part of it for the remnants were taken from this location and Al Clark took it to Washington… That part of it was a cover story that we were to give to the public and the news and that was it.”

Since the material displayed in Ramey’s office is clearly the remains of a weather balloon and a rawin radar reflector, and since General DuBose said, on video tape, that it was not the debris brought from Roswell, it seems that Mogul is removed as an answer.

General Roger Ramey (left) and Colonel Thomas
DuBose (right) with the alleged Roswell debris.
DuBose would say that this is not the material
brought from Roswell.

Also, in the Army Air Forces in July 1947, was Lieutenant Colonel Arthur Exon, later a brigadier general. He was stationed at Wright Field which would eventually evolve into the Wright-Patterson Air Force Base where he would later serve as the base commander. Exon acknowledged, more than once, that unusual material had arrived at Wright-Patterson. He told Don and me, on audio tape, “We heard the material was coming to Wright Field… It was brought into our material evaluation labs. I don’t know how it arrived but the boys who tested it said it was very unusual… [Some of it] could be easily ripped or changed… there were parts of it that were very thin and awfully strong and couldn’t be dented with very heavy hammers… It was flexible to a degree and some of it was flimsy and was tougher than hell and almost like foil but strong. It had them pretty puzzled.”

Exon also said, on tape, “The metal and material was unknown to anyone I talked to. Whatever they found, I never heard what the results were. A couple of guys thought it might be Russian, but the overall consensus was that the pieces were from space.”

And to quote just one more officer who was stationed at Roswell in 1947, Major (later colonel) Edwin Easley told me that it was something from space. Oh, not in so many words. During one of the interviews, I had asked him if we were following the right path.

He asked, “What do you mean?”

I said, “We think it was extraterrestrial.”

He said, “Let me put it this way, it’s not the wrong path.”

So, the officer in charge of the base security and who served as the Provost Marshal, and later retired as a colonel, said, basically, what was found was from outer space. He was in charge of security at the crash site and for the material, and the bodies, when they were brought to the base.

Here are three officers, two generals and one colonel who were suggesting that Roswell was a cover up and that we had something from space. Project Mogul doesn’t figure into it and offers no real counter to the statements of these men, or a few dozen others who were involved. And even though we used their names and provided copies of the tapes to other interested parties, the story didn’t get all that much traction at the time. Instead, we were attacked as charlatans who believed everything we were told and who cherry-picked the data to make our case.

As an interesting aside, Don and I met with a reporter at the Chicago Tribune in the early 1990s. We met her in a hallway for the interview. She was an intern who told us that her editors didn’t believe in UFOs and therefore weren’t overly interested in the testimony that we had recovered, even though we could name names, provide contact information, and even had limited documentation. The sophisticated reporters and editors were uninterested unless it was to prove they were all too sophisticated to believe in UFOs.

Here today, we are bombarded with stories about crashed UFOs and alien pilots, and the mainstream media seems to be bending over backwards to tell these tales without critical comment. What’s the difference? We could name names and they do not.

David Charles Grusch has said that he talked to several people, respectable people, highly placed people who would be in the jobs to know, that there had been several UFO crashes and that dead alien pilots had been found. He provided no names and said that he wasn’t allowed to provide any documentation. He just could tell us what he had heard.

We are told about his credentials which are impressive, but that doesn’t translate into evidence. It is second-hand testimony without any specifics. Did anyone notice that. He said there were multiple UFO crashes but didn’t tell us anything about them. Isn’t that interesting. The mainstream media has provided Grusch with a platform but hasn’t managed to get any of those specifics.

However, there is another player. Michael Shellenberger is on stage now. He claims that he knew there were twelve alien craft in the possession of the US government. He dodged the questions about the recovery of an alien flight crew. He mentioned that he had talked to multiple sources. He said they were high-ranking military officials, intelligence officers and civilian contractors who verified what Grusch had said. But here, again, he provided no names, no documents but only said that these unidentified people were reliable.

One of the reporters actually said that it was intriguing that there were things that he had left out of the story. I suppose that this means that Don and I should have left things out of the information that we published three decades ago. Maybe they would have listened to us then and followed up on the Roswell case while the witnesses, the dozens of witnesses, were still alive to tell their stories.

Shellenberger did mention a crash around the testing site for the atomic weapons. This might be a reference to Roswell, though it is more likely a reference to the 1945 San Antonio, New Mexico, crash referred to by Jacques Vallee. If it is the Trinity tale, that undercuts the reliability of what Shellenberger has to say because the Trinity story is a hoax.

That we have no information about any specific crashes and given that we have no idea who all these reliable sources are, I worry about the validity of the information. There is another point to be made here.

Several years ago, I communicated with a former Air Force Officer who said that in the early 1950s, he had been assigned to an Air Force communications center. He told me that he had seen classified documents pass through the center that mentioned a UFO crash in Scandinavia. He told me he had seen the documents personally and knew that it was true. He didn’t have copies of the messages because they were, at the time, classified, so he wasn’t allowed to keep them.

The Spitzbergen message sent through the Air Force communications
channels. It shows the officer was accurate in claiming he had
seen a classified message, but it was not the whole story.

I believe him, and if the documents referred to a real incident, that would be even more impressive. However, I do have copies of those documents, and they were released at the same time the Project Blue Book files were declassified. The document outlined the information about the Spitzbergen UFO crash in 1952. The best information currently available is that the story is a hoax, and the original newspaper cited as the source does not exist. It is just another of those stories that dot the UFO landscape.

What this demonstrates is that there are sources out there who can say, without lying, that they had seen official documents about crashed UFOs. The problem is those documents are often among the first to cite the information and it is in later documents that the truth is learned. That officer I communicated with told the truth. He just didn’t know the outcome. I’m not sure that once the hoax was uncovered, that another message, or group of messages would have passed through that communications center. If they did, the officer hadn’t seen them.

There is one other fact that I have just learned about. On Monday, June 12, at the National Press Club in Washington, D.C., Grusch is going to give the last presentation. This is something that is hosted by Dr. Steven Greer, whose CSETI organization once had a list of over 300 UFO crashes. I have been unable to find that list today, though it was once easily available on the Internet.

UPDATE (June 12, 2023) : Here is something that I just learned that has some relevance to the story: STATEMENT FROM DAVID GRUSCH - “I took my job very seriously, and early on, I allowed various individuals that alleged they had information to speak their truth as part of my evaluation process. I have not been mentored by anyone, and my public disclosure has been done independently under my own free will. I emphatically request that Steven Greer cease using my name to promote his personal agenda”

Update 2: (June 13, 2023): David Charles Grusch did not make a presentation at the Greer Press Conference on June 12. Douglas Dean Johnson tells me that he, Johnson, spoke with Grusch colleagues who confirmed that Grusch will not have an association with Greer. This should end the speculation that Grusch will appear on any venue that is associated with Greer. I will note, however, that the information published here about Greer is relevant to the discussion because of the talk of alien spacecraft crashes. And yes, I liked that last little bit of alliteration.)

Back on May 9, 2001, Greer held another event at the National Press Club. Interestingly, he excluded members of the Fund for UFO Research, though I don’t know what the rational for that might have been. However, Greer had made many startling claims then such as, “We have learned from three separate, corroborating sources that since the early 1990s, at least two extraterrestrial spacecraft have been targeted and destroyed by experimental space-based weapon systems.”

Dr. Steven Greer at the National Press
Club in 2013.

One of the claims that caught my attention was, “Multiple new independently corroborating witnesses told us of the crash and retrieval of ET spacecraft in 1947 in New Mexico and in 1948 in Kingman, Arizona.”

Clearly, the first reference is to Roswell but I’m unsure about the second. There has been a report, circulated for years, of a crash near Kingman, but that was in 1953, not 1948, and it is a hoax.

Here’s the point of this brief interlude. Greer is holding another such press conference, and as I say, it will feature Grusch, telling his stories. I had wondered about Grusch’s sudden appearance on the UFO scene with tales of UFO crashes and hidden information. This is, of course, the same drumbeat that Greer has been making for decades. Any association with Greer would raise red flags but in this case it seems to be a false flag. As noted, Grusch will have no association with Greer. (Added June 13, 2023)

Don’t get me wrong, I believe Grusch is telling the truth as he knows it, but without additional information, which we never seem to get, you have to wonder about the validity of it. Without sources, or with others who have been running in these same Ufological circles for years providing some sort of validation for Grusch, you must be skeptical. Had Grusch added just a bit more information, such as location of the crash sites, or the names of some of the witnesses, his revelations would, at least to my way of thinking, have been more plausible. But without that information we are at the same place we were thirty years ago.

Here’s where we are on this. We have no new information, just new faces. We have no documentation, photographs or names of the sources. We are just supposed to believe these anonymous sources but if the last few years have taught us anything, anonymous sources are nearly useless. There is no way to vet them or their information, and often times they are speaking of rumor rather than fact.

The few names we do have are those who have worked with and have known Grusch for years. They validate his character but not necessarily his information, which is a subtle but important point. And one of the names offered, Jonathan Grey, we are told is a pseudonym, which, again, allows for no vetting and does nothing to validate the information.

To my way of thinking, if just one of these new claims could be validated, it would be a great boost to my reporting, and the reporting of Don Schmitt and Tom Carey, and so many others. But while we named names and sources for those who wished to check our work, that hasn’t happened here. So, until we get some better information, I’ll be without a final opinion. I fear this will end up just like so many other attempts to bring this all to a conclusion. We’ll be left with questions but with no one to supply the proper and verifiable answers. 

When Einstein Went to Roswell by Dr. Peter Strassberg -An Interview

 

I had the opportunity to speak with Dr. Peter Strassberg about his book, When Einstein Went to Roswell. The material about Roswell and UFOs was limited with the majority of the book dealing with his theories about astrophysics and gravity. The real problem with the book was the sixty some pages at the back that were MJ-12 documents that had been copied from the Internet and published without critical comment.

Dr. Peter Strassberg

About the first thing I learned during the discussion, because I asked about it, was if he had been in contact with Tony Bragalia. Bragalia had published, on his website, the tale of Shirley Wright, who claimed that she had accompanied Einstein to Roswell. Her story and her description of the area does not fit in with Roswell narrative as we know it, which is not to say that she didn’t accompany Einstein somewhere else to see the wrecked saucer and alien bodies. I believe, based on what she said, on her description of the security in place, and several other factors, that her tale is, at best, dubious.

I had wondered what documentation that Strassberg had, or what testimony he had, to corroborate the Einstein story. I learned it was his opinion that the MJ-12 documents he published were legitimate and because of that, the tale of Einstein in Roswell was confirmed. We did talk about the history of MJ-12, but he had no real knowledge of that and seemed somewhat surprised to learn about it. To him, the complexity of the MJ-12 documents and the information included in them, suggested they were authentic. However, if they weren’t authentic, and the evidence proves they are not, then the corroboration of the Einstein tale fails at that point.

He was impressed with the Shirley Wright end of it, she claiming to have accompanied Einstein to Roswell, and he had both read Bragalia’s article and listened to the short audio segments of Wright’s story available on his, Bragalia’s, website. I had the impression that he didn’t understand that I too, had listened to the audio segments, given some of his comments. While I found those audio clips impressive given the detail on them, I also realized there were great areas of contradiction. Having served as an Intelligence Officer in both the Air Force and the Army (and yes, Stan, on active duty), I realized that security was broken several times. Wright seemed to be suggesting that because she held some sort of security clearance, though we don’t know what kind or how high (secret? Top secret?) her clearance was, she was cleared to see and hear all. But even if she held a top secret clearance, that doesn’t mean she was cleared to see and hear everything that had been classified at that level. There is that important “need to know” caveat, and she had no need to know any of this. She even admitted that she had been quartered away from the main party during this trip, which suggests that she wouldn’t have been allowed into the secure areas. And when Einstein was allegedly show the alien craft and the bodies of the flight crew, she had no need to accompany him into the hangar, wherever it might have been.

What all this boiled down to was that Strassberg had thought the documents interesting, but as he said, repeatedly, he couldn’t prove they were real. My thought was that since he was the one presenting them as real in his book, wasn’t he obligated to find out if they were legitimate? A simple google search would have led to some of the criticism of the specific documents he used and that might have altered his opinion. It might not, but he would have had a better perspective on them.

He did say, however, that his book was more for entertainment than serious research, and that he liked to write. He gives the book away to his patience and makes no money on them. His other books were more scientifically oriented and, according to him, dealt with problems in the universe. This little venture into UFOs was something of a departure, though he did say he had an interest in the paranormal.

The problem here was the title of the book. It had very little to do with Roswell and Einstein. Had he explored that claim a little deeper, he might have realized that it was unlikely though if he had found Bragalia’s website, he would have taken that as corroboration. This is obvious because he used that information repeatedly to suggest that the MJ-12 documents were real. Such is the problem with the Internet.

And although I hesitate to mention it, he also accepted the Aztec UFO crash as authentic. As we talked about it, he was aware of Scully’s book, Behind the Flying Saucers, and seemed to know a little about that case. But the tale as he told it matches virtually nothing that has been reported on it. I was surprised he hear Strassberg talk about it as a landing rather than a crash, in fact, insisting that it was a landing rather than a crash. To amplify the difference between the information and what Strassberg was saying, he said that there were survivors. I believe he said that twelve alien beings had been found in cryonic suspension, including a number of infants. In the attempts to resuscitate those individuals, most were lost. One survived for a while and provided all sorts of details about its life and mission.

He seemed to be unaware of the history of Aztec. It matters little here what side you fall on, the information he had doesn’t track with any of it. I don’t believe he was aware of either Steinman’s or Ramsay’s books on the subject. Strassberg struck me as overly naïve on the topic, and I did mention that his book was something of a disserve because of the uncritical nature of it. I suppose I could say, the bad information in it and the reliance of the MJ-12 documents as evidence of the disservice.

In the end, his rallying cry seemed to be that he was not out to prove anything. His mission was to entertain, and to be fair, I had an entertaining hour chatting with him about all this, though not so much in reading his book. Of course, I don’t think I made much of an impression on him. As they say, he just wasn’t that into the topic. For him, UFOs are mildly interesting but not to the point of diving below the surface before committing his thoughts to paper (or should I say to electronic data in his computer).

Oh BTW, the book is not for those who have any knowledge of the UFO field. As Strassberg said, it was more for entertainment and seen as a research tool. In fact, according to the publisher, Full Court Press, they are “For the discerning author: Self publishing with style.” There seems to be no vetting of the information, but then, that is often a problem in the world today.

Did Albert Einstein Visit Roswell

 

Probably not.

Which is not to say that the story told by Dr. Shirley Wright is completely in error. There are, however, some disturbing aspects of it. These are subtle things that civilians might not know when discussing military operations, military intelligence and military secrecy.

But first, there is the description of the base where Albert Einstein and Wright found themselves. It is not the Roswell Army Air Field. The description doesn’t really match much of what was there in 1947. It’s not all that isolated from the town and even if they had arrived by commercial air into Roswell, the drive to the base wouldn’t have taken all that long.

Albert Einstein in 1947.

I believe, at the point, that Wright, hearing all the conversation about Roswell just assumed that was the base. She originally said it was in the desert southwest and that covers a lot of territory. I could make a case for them landing in Alamogordo, which is about 100 miles from Roswell. And there would be a drive over to what was then the White Sands Proving Ground… though this isn’t quite right either.

Len Stringfeld thought it might have been Muroc, which became Edwards Air Force Base. That seems to be a better fit for what Wright described, but there really is no evidence that anything from Roswell was taken there. It was all flown out of Roswell and went to the east.

Could we have the sequence wrong? Sure. But I don’t think so. The testimony of too many suggest a transfer of materials to Wright Field and then to other points. General Arthur Exon talked of the bodies arriving at Wright Field and one of them being sent to Lowry in Denver. Given the timing, Lowry, which became surrounded by various communities, would have been on the edge of them in 1947. But then, it was just a single body and not the craft.

But the idea that this was from Roswell is probably the result of contamination by Stringfield. He wrote:

After pinning down the time-frame of her trip with the eminent scientist to the early part of July in 1947 (which wasn’t easy) [parenthetical statement in original] I asked the key question: Was the saucer you saw the one that crashed near Roswell” Her non-committal response: “No one said that it was from the Roswell crash, but I did hear that name pop up during my trip. Now, remember, I told you, they didn’t tell me anything of important, no secrets [emphasis added] or details. My boss who had the right clearance made a report, which I didn’t see. I was just told to keep my mouth shut.”

The real problem is the misunderstanding about how classified material is handled and what it means to have a security clearance. Just because you might hold a top-secret clearance, doesn’t mean that you have access to everything that is classified. You also need to have a need to know. If you don’t, then your access will be denied.

The situation described does not make sense in that arena. Wright told Shelia Franklin that she, Wright, was 18 in 1947 and was “one of the students chosen to study advanced physics with a world-famous scientist [Einstein] at an eastern university [Princeton].” All right, I suppose that might happen.

It was in that summer that Einstein found himself at an emergency meeting that was a gathering of many elite scientists and military leaders. Einstein had asked Wright to go with him. She had a security clearance because all his students studying with him that summer were required to have them.

But what does that mean? Was she cleared for top secret? Just secret? Were there any caveats on that clearance? We just don’t know. We’re told she had a security clearance that is supposed to answer all these questions. The level of the clearance is important and without that information, we have no way to evaluate this claim.

Anyway, Einstein and Wright are taken to this area, where the flying saucer and apparently the bodies of the alien flight crew are kept. An area that is probably not Roswell.

Here’s a point that makes little sense. Wright said that she and Einstein were taken across the desert to a base with scattered buildings. She said, according to Stringfied, “Unlike the others in her group, who probably stayed at the base, she was escorted to a small motel.” She had been segregated from the rest of them, suggesting that she was not needed to attend the meetings, nor was she wanted at them.

Then, according to what she told Len Stringfield; she became more involved in what was going on. According to Stringfield:

During her stay at this location, Professor Simpson [Wright, the pseudonym Stringfield gave her] recalls visits to a well-guarded old hangar. Inside, she got her first glimpse of the aliens on display for all to see. “Some of the specialists,” she said, “were allowed closer looks, including my boss. To me, they all looked a like, all five of them (emphasis in original). They were about five feet tall, without hair, with big heads and enormous dark eyes. And, yes, their skin was grey with a slight greenish tinge but for the most part, the bodies were not exposed, being dressed in tight-fitting suits. But I heard they had no navels or genitalia.” After a brief pause, Simpson [Wright] went on. “One of the aliens stood out above the rest. It had a bilious green fluid oozing from its nostrils. But it was strange; after exposure to the air, the ooze gradually became bluish, suggesting maybe a copper or cobalt base. I’m guessing it might have seeped from a gall bladder-like organ. In fact, I wondered if it was still alive, but I wasn’t close enough to see any body movement or hear any comment from the medics.”

She also said that at the far end of the hangar, she could see the spacecraft. It was disc-shaped. She said that she was bad at judging distances and size but that it took up about a quarter of the hangar floor, which is, of course meaningless without knowing the size of the hangar.

Given that she was on the periphery of the event, and given that she served no useful purpose on the trip, why was she allowed into the hangar at all? She already said that she had been separated from the rest of the group. She said she was told no secrets. What is important here is that even if she had a top-secret clearance (which I doubt) she had no need to know. Why bring her in on this at all? She is just one more potential leak.

To make this potential leak even more relevant, she told Stringfield she had 48 35mm photos of that scene in the desert. In a tale that is somewhat reminiscent of the Roswell Slides, we now have another civilian with a dubious connection to the case, photographing the scene. She said that she had photos, which, of course, would substantiate the tale. It would be difficult, if not impossible, to create four dozen pictures of alien bodies, body parts, the alien craft, and the scientists standing around them.

But as happens in all these stories, those photographs are unavailable. Most disappeared when her car was stolen. The pictures were in her briefcase in the car but you have to wonder why she was carrying them around in a somewhat cavalier fashion. However, she still had a few of the pictures. She promised to send copies but according to Stringfield, they never arrived.

Here’s where we are. We have a story told by a rather prominent university professor, who tells the story in a straight forward and convincing manner. Like Rich Reynolds, I was impressed with her answers during the short clips that were available. It sounded as if she was telling of an experience she lived rather than one she made up. She didn’t grope for the details.

We get a vague description of the base and her activities. I’m not overly concerned about that. If you are dropped into an unfamiliar environment, you might certainly be confused about the location. Her description of the trip out into the desert hints that there were no real landmarks or indications of where she was.

The trouble, for me, arises in the terrible lapse of security. If we grant that what fell near Roswell was an alien spacecraft, then we must also assume that it would be highly classified. You wouldn’t want our competitors in the world to know that we had an alien technology that if we could understand, would propel us far ahead of them. To this end, you would limit access to the information to a very few who might be able to help you understand that technology. That would not extend to young assistants to those summoned to the secret location. There is simply no way that she would have been allowed to see what she claimed to have seen.

To make it worse, she talked about dozens of photographs. We don’t know if she took them or how she gained possession of them, but this would be a horrible lapse of security. I’m not even sure that Einstein would have been in possession of these photographs, if they ever existed… But all this speculation is irrelevant. The photographs are gone and the claim of evidence that can’t be produced is no evidence at all.

While this doesn’t negate the entire story, for me it raises more than a few red flags. I would think that we might be able to learn what Einstein was doing in July 1947, and if he could have made a trip into desert southwest. Before we accept or reject this tale, we need to find additional data.

Trinity: The Best Kept Secret - A Critique

The much-anticipated book by Dr Jacques Vallee and Paola Harris, Trinity: The Best Kept Secret, finally dropped and we now have a very good idea of what is in it. The publicity running up to the publication suggested that we’d learn about a UFO crash that preceded Roswell by two years and was based on the eyewitness testimony of two men and as a surprise or special element, we’d learn of a third witness to these incredible events.

Dr. Jacques Vallee

The story as told, and outlined on this blog just a few weeks ago, was that two boys, ages 7 and 9, not only found a crashed object that didn’t resemble any Earth-based aviation technology, but they had seen the crash. There was a hint that it might have been brought down by lightning in one of those strong thunderstorms that frequent New Mexico in the late summer or it hit a tower that caused it to crash. For those who want to see that earlier post, you can read it here:

http://kevinrandle.blogspot.com/2021/05/the-san-antonio-ufo-crash.html

The boys, identified as Reme Baca and Jose Padilla, had approached the area cautiously and saw, not only the ruined craft, but small creatures that seemed to teleport from one position to another. Those beings provided telepathic pictures to the boys, who lingered in the area for longer than they should.

Ms. Paola Harris

Back at the ranch house, in San Antonio, New Mexico, they told family about what they had seen. There was no immediate follow up, but a day or so later, the fathers and a New Mexico State Policeman, made their way to the scene of the crash. Although the boys were told to stay back, the adults approached the craft. One or two of them might have crawled up inside. Today that makes no real difference because none of those adults are alive for interviews or to confirm the story.

There was no sign of the small creatures when the adults made it to the crash site. Speculation is that they might have been captured by the Army, but I suppose, it is equally possible that they were rescued by their fellow aliens. At any rate, the beings disappear from the story and are never heard of again.

The military arrived at some point. Eventually, they asked permission to cut a fence and install a gate and to cut a road across the ranch to the area of the crash. The boys, hiding from the military, kept a watch on this. The boys talked of the soldiers’ attempts to clean up the debris. Although the soldiers collected all of the debris, it seems they kicked pieces of it aside and dumped it into crevasses. They covered this with a thin layer of dirt meaning that it might be found in the world today… maybe.

Although the Army was interested enough in the crash to recover the vehicle, they seemed to be less than enthusiastic in protecting the find. Once they had brought in the flatbed truck to move the wrecked vehicle from the scene, the soldiers departed, apparently going into town for a meal or two. In other words, they left the truck, the spacecraft, the debris and everything else unguarded.

The boys, having spied on the soldiers, understood their routine and once the site was abandoned, they wandered down to the blue-tarp-covered object sitting on that unguarded flatbed. Now, Jose, apparently the more adventurous of the two, peeled back part of that blue tarp and crawled up into the UFO. He stole a bit of a panel from inside and explored part of the craft. These descriptions were overly detailed, and not really what would you expect from someone who was 9 at the time, telling the tale decades later. Very detailed but probably not precise.

The boys carried away a great deal of the debris. If I understood the story, some of that debris, thin strips of metal that is reminiscent of the memory metal described by Bill Brazel of Roswell fame, was divided up and handed out as decorations for Christmas trees… a fairly cavalier way to treat samples of metal created on another planet. At this point, meaning here in 2021, all that material has disappeared so that there is nothing left that can be tested and analyzed.

Eventually, the Army drove the tarp-covered UFO from the area, and life returned to normal, or as normal as it could be after seeing an alien spacecraft. Neither Reme nor Jose talked much about it in the decades that followed.

Or rather they did mention it once in a great while. Don Schmitt told me, during his recent appearance on the A Different Perspective Radio Show/Podcast, that he’d met with Reme in the late 1990s after some presentation that Don had given. Don lost interest when Reme mentioned the Plains of San Agustin as the location of the crash, suggesting some sort of confirmation of the Barney Barnett tale.

That isn’t the only worrisome part of the story the boys told and that is the cavalier way the Army operated. I simply do not believe that the Army would go to the trouble of cleaning the area, but bury some of the debris on site rather than picking it up to be taken away. I don’t believe they would have left the scene unguarded at all, but especially after they had loaded the craft onto the flatbed truck… and knowing that Army trucks, as most Army vehicles, do not use keys to start them. I can believe that the boys were clever enough to avoid detection by the soldiers as they spied on the operation from a distance, but I do not believe they were allowed to get inside the craft after it had been loaded on the truck. By allowed, I mean that the truck was left in the field without any guard on it. The soldiers might not have known the craft came from another world, but they would have known that it represented a technology unknown to American science at the time. That alone would have demanded an around the clock guard detail.

Two points need to be made here. Don was not the only UFO researcher to be approached with the story of the crash. In the book, Vallee and Harris note that Baca had also sought out Stan Friedman who seemed to be equally uninterested… and second, Don might have misunderstood about the location on the Plains. Seems that those living in San Antonio referred to the area around the town as the Plains as well. At any rate, neither Stan nor Don followed up on this bizarre tale.

But the Vallee/Harris book is about more than just the San Antonio crash. There is a section that deals with some of the other events concerning UFOs and crashes. The first is the Aurora, Texas, crash of April 1897. This is quite disturbing because of the history involved. I have written about this case a number of times. I was among the very first to visit Aurora in the early 1971. The consensus of those living there, at that time, was the story was a hoax. Those at the Wise County Historical Society (Aurora is in Wise County) told me that two histories of the county had been written in the decade that followed this alleged crash but neither history mentioned it. Since there was no Air Force or CIA to suppress the information, you have to wonder why, if it was a real event, that any mention of it was omitted in both those histories. That doesn’t bode well for the Aurora tale. You can read more about my investigation here:

http://kevinrandle.blogspot.com/2005/03/aurora-texas-story-that-wont-die.html

http://kevinrandle.blogspot.com/2018/12/jefferson-airship-vs-aurora-crash.html

http://kevinrandle.blogspot.com/2013/09/ufo-crashes-fifty-years-before-roswell.html

There is one additional comment to make. According to the Vallee/Harris book, a piece of metal picked during one of the modern treks to the crash site up in Aurora was scientifically tested. The tests showed that it was made of an alloy that did not exist in 1897 and wouldn’t be created until 1908. Seems like a bit of extraordinary evidence, except the fragment was recovered much later than 1908. Nothing ties it to the 1897 event, other than it was found somewhere around Aurora. Obviously, it was dropped sometime after 1908.

It is also disturbing that Vallee and Harris take the Maury Island hoax as something authentic. That story, actually investigated in depth by the Air Force, as well as many others, is also a hoax. Although Vallee/Harris acknowledge the hoax explanation, they also wonder how “…any such statement can be drawn by the reported facts.”

This statement is in error. I have looked at the Maury Island case extensively, and you can read about that in Alien Mysteries, Conspiracies and Cover-ups. The story has been well researched by a number of investigators. George Earley was one of those and reported his findings in UFO, issues 155, 156 and 157. According to Earley, Harold Dahl’s son, Charles, who was supposed injured during the sighting was interview years later and said that it never happened. A search for medical records to verify the injury failed to find any mention of it.

In other words, the reported facts in the Maury Island case, all of them, support Ed Ruppelt’s statement in his book The Report on Unidentified Flying Objects. Ruppelt described the Maury Island event as the direst hoax in UFO history. No evidence has been presented to reverse Ruppelt’s observation.

More problems develop in the discussion of the Socorro UFO landing. I was intrigued to learn that Lonnie Zamora was related, by marriage into the Padillo family. His cousin married Zamora, which connects them to another big UFO event in New Mexico. This is not to mention that Socorro is about fifteen or twenty miles from San Antonio.

For years researchers have suggested the Zamora case was single witness to the UFO landing. Vallee and Harris wrote that there were eleven witness who saw the object and two who were “auditory” witnesses, meaning they’d heard the roar but saw no object. The problem is that none of these witnesses are identified with the exception of Paul Kies and Larry Kratzer. The two men had told a reporter in Dubuque, Iowa, that they had been driving through Socorro about the time that Zamora was engaged with the UFO. They saw the thing take off in a cloud of dust and smoke.

The trouble here is that their stories just do not fit into the Socorro scenario. Kies said that there had been a large burned area in the desert and that the exhaust had melted a pop bottle. He couldn’t have seen these things given they were just driving through Socorro and hadn’t stopped to inspect the site. More importantly, the melted pop bottle description was from a sighting near La Madera, New Mexico, a day or so later, which also received some national attention.

Ralph DeGraw, an Iowa UFO researcher, interviewed both witnesses some years later. While what they said then generally agreed with the account in the newspaper, DeGraw found some important discrepancies, including Kratzer’s description of the craft. He said that it was silver with a row of dark round, mirror-like windows. This was a major departure from Zamora’s description that had no windows and suggests invention by the witness.

One of the other points of disagreement about the case is the description of the symbol seen by Zamora. Ray Stanford identified the “real” symbol reported by Zamora. The trouble here is that the symbol, three horizonal lines through an inverted “V” is not the symbol that Zamora drew for the military, nor is it the one that he drew on the scrap of paper moments after the UFO departed. While Vallee and Harris endorse the inverted “V”, Zamora, on the scrap of paper, drew an “umbrella” like symbol with an inverted “V” under it and a line, like the shaft of an arrow, up into the “V”. That scrap of paper was turned over to the Air Force and can be seen in the Project Blue Book file.

Zamora's drawing on the scrap of paper minutes after the UFO disappeared.

Ironically, that symbol was originally endorsed by Stanford in a letter dated May of 1964. He wrote that the inverted “V” was the fake symbol. In the years from writing that letter to writing his book, he changed his mind. But Zamora, on the night of the sighting, drew a number of illustrations for both the FBI and the Army and he signed them. The “umbrella” symbol was the one he signed.

Lonnie Zamora's drawing of the craft and the symbol made on April 24, 1964

In the end here, Stanford said there were eleven witnesses other than Zamora, but offers no names. Vallee and Harris repeat this without names, other than Kies and Kratzer, whose tale has been discredited. Vallee wrote that a single witness is no witness. I would suggest that an anonymous witness, or even nearly a dozen anonymous witnesses are of absolutely no value and worth less than that single witness. In 1964, no one bothered to get the names or tried to locate any of these witnesses. Now we are again treated to the information about a UFO sighting but that information has no real value.

The final chapters of the book are devoted to this new witness to the San Antonio crash promoted by Vallee and Harris. At the end of the book, they identify her as a relative of Padillo. The problem? She was born in 1953 or eight years after the sighting. She talks about handling some of the debris, but the piece, or pieces, she had been given, are long gone. She talked about family stories, but she witnessed nothing first hand other than a large burned area that might have had nothing to do with the original crash. She is emersed in the family history, she is aware of UFO history, but can’t contribute much of value to the story.

Here’s one of the things to take away from this latest book. Both Baca and Padillo talk about many aspects of the UFO field. They talk about knowing people at the Foster ranch near Corona where Mack Brazel discovered a field of metallic debris. We have the family relation to Zamora which suggests more infusion of UFO material into the family lore. Then, we have many aspects of the Roswell case inserted into this new tale. The UFO crashed during a storm, as was suggested at Roswell. Lightning brought it down, as happened at Roswell, but I wonder that if a race can create interstellar craft, they would be able to avoid destruction by lightning. There was memory metal and even a discussion of fiber optics, just like Roswell.

The big thing that caught my attention was a description that suggested the aliens looked something like the Jerusalem Cricket… the very description supplied by Frankie Rowe when talking about the aliens at Roswell. There are just too many of the descriptions that are drawn from the Roswell case. To me, this suggests contamination rather than corroboration. It suggests that both men were well aware of the UFO field long before they began to talk of their childhood experiences. They had a better than average knowledge of what had been reported about UFOs and UFO crash/retrievals before they began talking about the UFO crash near San Antonio.

To make this worse, if possible, it is claimed that this tale of a crashed spacecraft is the first in our modern era. This, however, isn’t true. In the Spring of 1941, there are reports of something crashing near Cape Girardeau, Missouri. The tale is told by one woman who, while she didn’t witness the craft and bodies herself, is aware of what her grandfather had seen and had done. She is well-versed in the family history. Len Stringfield laid out the details in one of his updates to crash/retrievals, this one published in 1991. There is another witness who knows the story including the brother of the local sheriff and even the report of a picture of one of the alien beings. Of course, that picture has been lost, but the evidence for the Cape Girardeau crash as just as solid as that for the Trinity crash. For some reason it is not mentioned in the Vallee and Harris book. I mention this only because it suggests a long history of UFO crash tales that are based on limited eyewitness testimony and family members who died long before they could be interviewed. And they are told in the same era, that is, the 1940s.

All this and I haven’t even touched on the structure of the book. It is filled with oat meal. This is a writing term that refers to filling to make a story longer. Sure, I enjoyed reading about some of the history of the creation of the atomic bomb, but it has no relevance to this story. The fact that the first nuclear explosion took place at Trinity, not all that far from San Antonio means nothing… unless you believe that the aliens had been watching for that flash everyone talked about. Of course, you have to wonder where they were to have seen that and gotten here so quickly. It matters not what their technology can do, the speed of light is the limiting factor. Even if these aliens can exceed the speed of light, or bend the universe to allow interstellar flight, the flash of the bomb would only travel at the speed of light. If the aliens could detect such a flash against the backdrop of the sun and if it happened on the side of the planet facing them, the fastest they could have detected the explosion is about four years afterward, if they inhabited a planet in the Alpha Centuri star system. If they live in another star system, then their response would take even longer.

Ignoring that, we still have a book filled with a family history that does nothing to validate the story. It is a travelogue. It is a walk though some of UFOs greatest hits, many of which have little in the way of evidence to back them up. And even if these ancillary tales were all true, that does nothing to validate this particular story.

It is filled with a wonder of the events but little in the way of analysis. It tells the story of two boys who seemed to have been wise beyond their years, able to avoid the Army which failed at even the barest level of security. We are told of soldiers who were lazy, not picking up all the debris, but hiding from their superiors. That debris would still be there for UFO hunters to find except is now beyond recovery. Flood control projects that altered the terrain significantly and buried the debris under twenty or thirty feet of mud and dirt. No way to find it now.

This is certainly much longer than I anticipated, but we need to understand what we have here. It isn’t a scientific search for evidence but more of science fiction story told for entertainment. There is no physical evidence presented but talk of such evidence just out of our reach. There is no real attempt to validate the story or provide citation for the claims. It is a story that has borrowed elements from other tales in the hope it will be seen as corroboration rather than plagiarism. Oh, I don’t mean that either Vallee or Harris stole the story from others, only that the witnesses have been contaminated by decades of UFO tales written about, broadcast and even incorporated into movies. It is too bad that no one wrote anything down in a letter or a journal in 1945 or 46 but that’s just too much to hope for. Somehow the alleged evidence is never found and, in the end, we are left with a tale told by two old men, and one old woman, who said they experienced it as youngsters.