Immaculate Constellation, Moon Dust, and Sean Kirkpatrick

 

There have been several interesting developments recently into what the officials insist are UAP reports and what we still think of as UFOs. All this provides us, indirectly, with additional information about Immaculate Constellation and ongoing covert investigations.

According to Matthew Phelan, the Senior Science Reporter for the Daily Mail, Dr. Sean Kirkpatrick, who was until recently the man in charge of AARO, revealed what he described as a new government program to recover alleged alien technology in the event of a shoot down. I believe he mentioned shoot down in reference to the Chinese balloon that flew over a great deal of North America recently. I don’t think he was referring to shooting down an alien spacecraft, though in the 1950s, there were orders to do just that.

Dr. Sean Kirkpatrick at a poorly attended Senate Hearing. He is sitting
with his back to the camera.

Anyway, the retrieval program’s protocols covered what he called UAP recoveries that ranged from balloons to alien technology. This, it was claimed, is the first time that a government official acknowledged any UFO retrieval program, even if that retrieval program referred to terrestrially manufactured objects. He suggested the retrieval program began early in 2023.

But there was a program called Moon Dust that began in 1957, according to documents recovered by Robert Todd, Cliff Stone and me, that had, as one of its missions, and I quote, “to collect and analyze raw intelligence reports from the field of fallen space debris and objects of unknown origin.” Unknown origin certainly could refer to craft from off world.

The late Cliff  Stone.

I found this information in an official US Air Force Message, #54322 and dated December 23, 1957. Although it doesn’t mention Moon Dust specifically, it is clear from the document that it is describing Moon Dust and the Moon Dust mission involving UFO information.

Kirkpatrick said, “AARO is Congressionally directed to come up with not just standard reporting procedures, but also mitigation and response procedures in the event of a shoot down or a collection of any sort of UAP.”

But, as earlier documentation proves, that sort of mandate had already been put into place and despite Air Force original denials that no program known as Moon Dust existed, the documentation proved otherwise. And for those who claim that its mission was directed at recovering what was then Soviet debris, the mention of unknown origin suggests otherwise. You can read more about Moon Dust in my book, Project Moon Dust and here:

http://kevinrandle.blogspot.com/2021/04/coast-to-coast-am-moon-dust-controversy.html

http://kevinrandle.blogspot.com/2024/06/moon-dust-documents-online.html

http://kevinrandle.blogspot.com/2024/03/aaro-and-project-moon-dust.html

http://kevinrandle.blogspot.com/2018/04/moon-dust-and-4602nd-aiss.html

I should point out here, that I can demonstrate the UFO connection to Moon Dust. While examining the Project Blue Book files several years ago, I found reference to Moon Dust cases. The cases are not very impressive, but are important because they are labeled “Moon Dust” and reinforce the theory that Moon Dust had a UFO component. You can read about that here:

http://kevinrandle.blogspot.com/2013/11/project-moon-dust-revisited.html

I want to acknowledge that the Air Force, when asked about Moon Dust by US Senator Jeff Bingaman from New Mexico, the Air Force response was that no such program existed. When documents, with a clear and established provenance were provided, the Air Force amended the statement claimed that it did exist, but had never been deployed. That was not true as other documents proved. There was an added note that the name Moon Dust had been changed and it was properly classified. That was in 1985. From that point on, there had been no inadvertent disclosures about this program.

There is another, important point. There no evidence that this program under whatever the new name it had been given, had been terminated. We can’t use FOIA because we don’t know the name in use after Moon Dust, and Immaculate Constellation didn’t begin until years after this other long ongoing program was discovered. Immaculate Constellation is not a follow-on project, but a new one invented by those now charged with UAP research.

But you have to wonder if this new program doesn’t have a secondary purpose and that is to disguise what had been learned under Moon Dust and that follow-on project. You don’t look for another program if you have been told that this is something that began in 2023.

While these government officials who have just been tasked with dealing with UAP, who have tried to sever this new investigation from the history of UFO research, and seem to be disinterested in that earlier history, aren’t attempting to sidetrack legitimate questions about alien visitation. They’re looking at it as a new phenomenon rather than something that it over eighty years old. They don’t need to worry about the massive stacks of evidence that was accumulated prior to 2017 when the Leslie Kean and Ralph Fromental story was published by the New York Times. That earlier information is hidden behind a thick national security wall and what we are allowed to see now just doesn’t have the impact of some of those earlier UFO events.

(Note: There is additional information on this blog. Use a keyword in the search engine to bring up that information.)

Cliff Stone Has Died

 

Clifford E. Stone, known for his relentless pursuit of UFO documentation through his use of FOIA died on February 10, in Roswell, New Mexico.

Stone rose to fame in the field with his chase of Project Moon Dust and Operation Blue Fly, two Air Force missions that dealt, in part, with UFOs and the recovery of material of either foreign manufacture or of unknown origin. Many of the documents he recovered hinted at secret programs, which the Air Force, at first, denied existed. With the help of United States Senator, Jeff Bingaman, Stone forced the military to admit that the programs did exist.

Cliff Stone. Photo copyright
by Kevin Randle

But Stone was also a figure of controversy. He claimed, repeatedly, that he had been involved in some of the biggest UFO cases and said that he had been a member of a secret crash retrieval team. As a teenager, he said that he had been near the Kecksburg UFO crash and had seen the military flatbed that removed the object from the woods near the Pennsylvania town. Later, he would say, that as an enlisted soldier, he had glimpsed part of the Alien Autopsy film when it was shown to high-ranking officers on the military post where he had been assigned. The film was later admitted to be a hoax.

Stone spent 22 years in the Army, entering right out of high school, and was trained as a clerk typist. He was deployed to Vietnam and claimed four tours, though his military records showed that he had been overseas for 37 months and not all of it in Vietnam. He said that on arrival in Vietnam, he had asked for an assignment to a combat unit, but that the first sergeant rejected his request. Instead, he would sneak out at night, according to him, to hunt the enemy. There is nothing in the record to support that claim.

I met Stone in February, 1989, in Roswell. He joined Don Schmitt and me, at the Burger King on North Main. For some reason, he appeared in uniform. We eventually, retired to his house where he paced up and down, smoking a big cigar and lecturing Don and me about UFOs. His knowledge was extensive, demonstrating a long and deep interest in the topic.

It was later that he would tell us about his brushes with government agents, who harassed him repeatedly. He would say they would call at all hours and demand he meet them in some deserted location for interrogation often threatening him with firearms. There was no proof that any of this took place.

Later he would say that his involvement on a crash retrieval team gave him inside knowledge of UFOs and that alien beings from 57 different worlds were visiting Earth. The documents he had did not prove this, but did suggest a continuing US interest in UFOs.

After Stone retired from the Army, he worked for a time as a security guard at the Roswell Mall, which would be irrelevant here, except for a tragic circumstance. He was called to the scene of a motorcycle accident not knowing that the victim was his son. I can think of no more horrific circumstance than arriving to assist only to see that it was his son who had been killed.

Stone made the rounds of the talk shows, the radio programs, documentaries and UFO conventions and symposiums, describing his activities with crash retrievals. While his tales were met with an enthusiastic response, there was little in the way of evidence that what he was saying was grounded in reality.

Although I enjoyed talking with Stone, visited him at his home many times, I found his tales to border on the incredible.

Cliff Stone was 72.

Moon Dust and the 4602nd AISS

For years, decades really, there has been this idea that Project Moon Dust began with the creation of the 4602^nd Air Intelligence Squadron (AISS) in early 1953. Ed Ruppelt, one time chief of Project Blue Book, had complained to his superiors after the massive UFO sighting wave of the summer 1952, that he needed help in the investigations. He was surprised when it was suggested, and later put into an Air Force regulation, that the investigation of UFO sightings would be accomplished by the 4602^nd.

If you go back and read what Ruppelt wrote, and if you look at the unit history of the 4602^nd along with an examination of the Project Blue Book administrative files, you’ll see what was going on. The 4602^nd was created at the time of the Korean War and during the Cold War in which military, governmental and strategic planners were worried about an aerial assault on the continental United States. This means, naturally, they worried about a Soviet bombing campaign which would see bombers shot out of the sky and Soviet airmen trying to escape and evade inside the US borders.

The thought was they needed trained teams who could search for these downed crewmen, who had lots of skills that normal service members didn’t need such as riding horses, Russian language skills, the ability to question civilians who might have seen something in the

Wright-Patterson AFB, home of Project Blue Book. Photo courtesy USAF.

sky, and other similar skills. The 4602^nd was designed with this in mind and to gain experience in interrogating civilian witnesses, they would be investigating UFO sightings. This put them in contact with untrained, sometimes uneducated, and often nervous civilians who had seen something strange. They would become experienced investigators.

Regulations written dictated this and it was, in fact, implemented. Going through the Blue Book files, there are sighting reports that were written by members of the 4602^nd about their investigations of UFO sightings. There is correspondence from the commanders of the 4602^nd to ATIC and other offices about UFOs. There is no dispute that this happened, and it interesting if only because it wasn’t until much later that this connection was made.

But, that does not give us the date of the beginning of Moon Dust. Others, and me among them, have suggested it and run with that idea that the 4602^nd was the beginning of Moon Dust. It seemed to be a logical conclusion, but it wasn’t actually supported by the documentation.

This idea was reinforced when New Mexico Senator Jeff Bingaman, working with Cliff Stone of Roswell, requested information about Project Moon Dust from the Air Force. Lieutenant Colonel John E. Madison, of the Congressional Inquiry Division, Office of Legislative Liaison wrote, “There is no agency, nor has there ever been, at Fort Belvoir, Virginia, which would deal with UFOs or have any information about the incident in Roswell. In addition, there is no Project Moon Dust or Operation Blue Fly.”

Documentation obtained through the Freedom of Information Act, first by Robert Todd, later by Stone, and also by me, proved the statement to be untrue. I found, in the Project Blue Book files four cases that had been marked as “Moon Dust.” Clearly, the project existed.

When that documentation was presented to the Air Force, they changed their response. Colonel George M. Mattingley, Jr., wrote that they wanted to amend their response, suggesting that Moon Dust did exist. Mattingley wrote:

In 1953, during the Korean War, the Air Defense Command organized intelligence teams to deploy, recover, or exploit at the scene of downed enemy personnel, equipment, and aircraft. The unit with responsibility for maintaining these teams was located at Fort Belvoir, Virginia. As the occasion never arose to use these air defense teams, the mission was assigned to Headquarters, United States Air Force in 1957 and expanded to include the following peace-time functions: a) Unidentified Flying Objects (UFOs); b) Project MOON DUST; to recover objects and debris from space vehicles that had survived re-entry from space to earth; c) Operation BLUE FLY, to expeditiously retrieve downed Soviet Bloc equipment.

This seems to suggest that the beginning of Moon Dust was in 1953, but what it actually tells us, which we already knew, was that it was the beginning of the 4602^nd, which is not the same as Moon Dust. I have been unable to find a single reference to Moon Dust in the 4602^nd unit history which was classified as secret when it was written. That means there would be no prohibition to mentioning Moon Dust in the context of the unit history because it was classified.

Mattingley, in fact, gives us the information about the creation of the 4602^nd and what its mission was in 1953. It wasn’t created in response to the UFO sightings of 1952, but as an outgrowth of the conflict in Korea and the escalating cold war. The UFO mission was secondary, thought of as a way to train their personnel.

But there is additional information. As I was researching another aspect of the UFO field, I found another document that provides a clue about the beginning of Moon Dust. A document from Headquarters, US Air Force, Message #54322 and dated December 23, 1957, discussed a new project, obviously developed after the launch of the Soviet satellite in October, 1957, that had a mission “to collect and analyze raw intelligence reports from the field on fallen space debris and objects of unknown origin.”

This is the earliest reference that I have found to Moon Dust. We also know that it had a UFO component based on other documents that define several terms including UFO and that there are reports in the Blue Book file that refer to Moon Dust.

Note also that Mattingley mentions that the mission was given to Headquarters, USAF in 1957, which corresponds with the launch of Sputnik, and the message issued by that Headquarters in 1957. The creation of the 4602^nd, then, was not the beginning of Moon Dust.

The upshot of all this is that Moon Dust did not begin in 1953, but late in 1957. It was in operation until 1985, and contrary to Mattingley’s claim, it was deployed and was not shut down. When the name was compromised in 1985, the code name was changed. In a letter to Robert Todd, dated July 1, 1987, he was told the “nickname Project Moon Dust no longer exists.” The new name was not releasable because even the code name was classified.

In the years that followed, we have not been able to learn the new name, and we don’t know if it is still in operation today. All I can say for certain is that we know, based on other information, that the Pentagon did engage in UFO research not all that long ago and though they say that project ended, we don’t know if that is true. After all, they told us that Project Sign, the first official UFO project had ended, but the name was merely changed to Grudge. We were told that Grudge had ended, but the name was changed to Blue Book. We were told that Blue Book had ended, but we know that Project Moon Dust survived the end of Blue Book and was still in operation in 1987 when the name was changed.

What we really see here, and what we can document, is a long history of Air Force investigation of UFOs, Air Force saying one thing and doing another, and that UFO investigation continued beyond the end of Blue Book, and that other studies of UFOs have been conducted into the 21^st century. What this tells us that there are many aspects of the UFO problem that have not been revealed to us and that there are still secrets being kept.