Coast to Coast AM - Levelland and Sightings

The Internet is a wonderful tool. It provides us with the totality of human knowledge. Such is the case in and around Levelland, Texas, from November 1957. My pal, Rich Reynolds, at his UFO Conjectures blog, reported on October 6 of this year that a video of Sheriff Weir Clem, the Hockley County sheriff, meaning, of course, Levelland, as well as other witnesses, had been interviewed by a reporter in 1957. All this before the Air Force investigated. You can watch those interviews here:

https:youtu.be/8JgR0jpNb3A

Levelland was the scene of several UFO sightings in which the craft stalled car engines and dimmed headlights. As but a single example, Newel Wright, a nineteen-year-old college student at Texas Tech in Lubbock, was nearing Levelland when he glanced at his dashboard ammeter. Wright told the Air Force investigator, "I was driving home from Lubbock on state highway 116 at approximately 12:00 a.m. when the ammeter on my car jumped to complete discharge, then it returned to normal and my motor started cutting out like it was out of gas. After it had quit running, my lights went out. I got out of my car and tried in vain to find the trouble.

“It was at this time that I saw this object, I got back into my car and tried to start it, but to no avail. After that I did nothing but stare at this object until it disappeared about 5 minutes later. I then resumed trying to start my car and succeeded with no more trouble than under normal circumstances."

Sheriff Weir Clem and his deputies.

There were others who independently reported similar experiences. The UFO remained in the area for about two hours and witnesses reported watching the UFO for several minutes before it would lift off and leave the immediate vicinity. Once the UFO disappeared, the witnesses reported their cars could then be started. I have reported on all these sightings in depth in the book, Levelland.

And, in conflict with the Air Force report, the sheriff said that he saw an oval-shaped, brightly glowing object as he searched the area. He was accompanied by other law enforcement officers and there are indications that Air Force officers were there with him as well.

The sightings in the area didn’t end on November 3. Sightings of the UFO continued in New Mexico, stalling more cars. Military Police at Whites Sands also had encounters. The series of sightings are an important part of UFO history and have never been adequately explained, though the Air Force claimed ball lightning was responsible.

The White Sands MPs. Photo courtesy Glen Toy.

Moving into the modern world, on July 9, of this year, the witness and his family were water skiing in the Spencerville, Indiana, area. The main witness had stopped the boat to pick up his son who had fallen and looked toward a tree line on shore. He saw a white, round object travelling east to west at a high rate of speed. He said that it was moving faster than anything he had ever seen and was in sight for a minute or two. Both his son and wife saw the UFO as well.

The witness also operates MADAR Node 81 in Spencerville. Although there was no alert, a review of the recorded data showed a spike in the magnetometer, that is an electromagnet effect, at the time of the sighting. This also relates to the Levelland sightings in which there were reported EM Effects.

The investigation showed that object the witness reported was too slow for a meteor and too fast for an aircraft. He heard no sound associated with it and believed that it had been flying at about 10,000 feet. The witnesses saw no wings, or vertical stabilizer.

On October 6 of this year, the witness in Palm City, Florida, said that he saw a straight, long, white object that was not moving. He said, “The object appeared… to be bigger than a plane I’m flying… it did not move like a plane.” The UFO was in sight for about a minute. The witness said that he looked down to check his airspeed and when he looked back, the object was gone.

From Lynwood, California, on October 5 of this year, the witnesses saw what looked like fireballs. Five of them were close together and the sixth some distance off. The one farthest away was moving rapidly and changed color from orange to green. The witness reported that it had a cylindrical shape and was moving super-fast. The sighting lasted for a total of fifteen minutes.

The witness did take the following photograph of the UFOs. I have cropped the photographs to fit better on this space. 

Photographs are courtesy of the National UFO Reporting Center and the photographers.The upper photograph has the cylinder in the upper left and the bottom photo is the street scene with the formation of lights.

Coast to Coast - The Levelland UFO Landings

 

I have talked about the Levelland UFO landings and their importance here and on radio shows. Not only were there witnesses at least at thirteen separate locations, but the UFO interacted with the environment by stalling car engines and dimming headlights. In most of the cases, the witnesses had minutes to study the UFO. Many of those witnesses mentioned attempting to restart their cars or trucks. That failed until the UFO left the area. Then the vehicles began working properly again.

You can read about this case, which I have explored on this blog, here:

http://kevinrandle.blogspot.com/2016/03/one-of-best-cases-levelland-texas.html

http://kevinrandle.blogspot.com/2020/06/levelland-and-four-witnesses.html

http://kevinrandle.blogspot.com/2020/07/frank-williams-and-levelland.html

http://kevinrandle.blogspot.com/2020/06/levelland-and-four-witnesses-part-two.html

http://kevinrandle.blogspot.com/2010/08/levelland-ufo-sightings.html

 

The Air Force investigation of the Levelland sightings is badly flawed. Staff Sergeant Norman Barth spent about seven hours in Levelland and interviewed only six witnesses. One of the most interesting of those interviews was with Hockley County

Sheriff Weir Clem

Sheriff, Weir Clem. His office received many of the phone calls that came in over a two-hour period about the strange events. According to the Air Force report, Clem, along with a couple of other law enforcement officers, left the office to search for the UFO. Clem was quoted in the Air Force report as saying that he had only a streak of light in the distance for about two seconds.

However, according to newspaper reports published the day before Barth arrived in Levelland, Clem said he was much closer to the UFO and that it was oval shaped. Don Burleson, of Roswell, investigating the case two decades ago, said that Clem’s car was checked by a mechanic the next day.

Burleson also interviewed the wife and daughter of the Sheriff and was told that he had gotten closer, much closer, to the UFO, which I verified through newspaper reports from the era. The daughter also talked about a burned area that the Sheriff had seen. It means that there was other evidence of something landing that night in November, 1957.

To be fair, according to the newspapers of the time, there was a mention that the Sheriff and the Provost Marshal from Reese AFB did go out in search of the landing traces. They reported negative results, but you have to wonder what they might have seen and what the Provost Marshal might have said. You have to wonder why the Air Force Provost Marshal was involved. You have to wonder about the influence that Barth brought with him so that the truth could be buried and mention of Air Force involvement disappeared from the narrative.

Additional questions are: Why the changes in the Air Force report about how close the Sheriff got and only the mention of a steak of light, and, why have a mechanic check the car if he hadn’t gotten close enough for the UFO to affect its operation?

There is another interesting aspect to this that no one seems to have noticed. When the Sheriff headed out to search for the UFO, he was accompanied by other law enforcement officers, some of whom were not interviewed by Barth. But, more importantly, the Sheriff, according to newspaper reports, was also accompanied by Air Force officers. They would have come from Reese Air Force Base in Lubbock, only fifteen or twenty minutes away from Levelland. There is no mention of those Air Force officers in the Project Blue Book files. I have yet to identify who they were, but I can document that they were involved.

It is clear from all this that the Air Force investigation was inadequate and that it was designed to answer questions but to avoid the truth. The reality of the case is that it was much more important than many realized at the time. Too many UFO researchers missed the significance and the Air Force got away with the misdirection. It only proves that we can learn something by prowling the archives. There are gems hidden there.

Frank Williams and Levelland

Some time ago I interviewed Robert Sheaffer about UFOs and I brought up the Levelland landing and EM effects case. Robert said that four of the witnesses had been discredited. I asked for the source and he provided it. You can read about all that here:

http://kevinrandle.blogspot.com/2020/06/levelland-and-four-witnesses.html

and here:

http://kevinrandle.blogspot.com/2020/06/levelland-and-four-witnesses-part-two.html

and you can listen to the interview with Robert here:

https://www.spreaker.com/episode/29233178

As you can see there is some question about the original source of the material. It seems, based on what I have found, that all four of the mentioned witnesses were

not discredited. However, there is a problem with one of them. Here’s what I know about Frank Williams, or more accurately, what Williams was reported to have said or done:

At about 12:05 a.m. or maybe a few minutes later, Frank B. Williams, of Kermit, Texas, reported that he had seen a large, egg-shaped object sitting on the ground. Williams said that his engine quit and his lights faded immediately. The object was pulsating as it glowed and it seemed that the lights might have been synced to the pulsation of the craft. He said that every time the object came on, his car lights would go off.

Williams got out of his car and the object rose to about 200 or 300 feet with a roar like that of thunder. It stopped glowing and disappeared. When the object was gone the headlights came on and Williams was able to start his car.

Although it was reported that Williams had actually gone to the police station to make his report of his sighting, other sources suggested he had telephoned the police instead. Don Berliner, writing in Official UFO nearly twenty years later seemed to confirm that Williams had only called the sheriff rather than visiting him.

Williams, it seems, then fell off the face of the planet. According to newspaper sources, Sheriff Weir Clem, the Hockley County sheriff, which included Levelland, wanted to interview Williams the next day, November 3. Clem asked his counterpart, Winkler County Sheriff L. B. Eddins, which includes Kermit, to search for Williams. “Eddins said he ‘turned Kermit upside down’ today, even to having an appeal broadcast on the Kermit radio station but he was unable to find Williams or any trace of the man having lived in Kermit.”

What can we deduce from this?

First, it could be suggested that Williams lied about who he was because he didn’t want people to think he was crazy, but felt the need to report what he had experienced.

Second, it could be that he lied about where he was located for the same reason given above.

Third, he might have lied about both his name and his location for the same reason given above.

Finally, he could have made the whole thing up for reasons of his own.

Given the timing, that is, Williams had called the Sheriff just after midnight, there is no way that he could have heard about the other sightings. They hadn’t made the news at that point. Unless there had been some discussion over the police radios and Williams was able to monitor those radios, then his report is independent of the others.

However, that is just not a good argument for Williams. The sheriff, either Clem or Eddins, couldn’t find the man, and they had resources that should have allowed them to do it. Although it seems that Clem did speak with Williams, by the time they were ready to gather additional information, Williams was gone. We have nothing more on which to judge his tale or his credibility.

That, of course, does not negate the other three witnesses that were named with Williams, nor those who interviewed by the Air Force, law enforcement officers or by various newspapers. Those other three specifically, Long, Wheeler and Alvarez, hadn’t disappeared as had Williams.

What might have happened is that the information about Williams, which was published and which suggested he might not have existed or had been involved in some sort of a prank, suggested that others might not have been real as well. Long, for example, was from Waco, Texas, several hundred miles from Levelland, though he was attending college in Lubbock. Given that he didn’t tell his story until the next day, suggested the possibility of contamination. The Sheriff accepted Long’s report as real.

Anyway, we can, if we wish, eliminate Williams from the mix or assign a lower importance to it, but that in no way negates all the other stories that have been told about the Levelland case. Yes, this has taken us deep into the weeds, but in the effort to be fair, I thought I would point out that Williams is sort of a non-witness. It means that Robert was not completely off base, only that he extended his net a little farther than the data warranted… And I have discovered a little more about this aspect of the whole Levelland event.

The Levelland Landing and Sheriff Weir Clem - Updated

(Blogger's Note: After I completed this posting, I found additional, relevant information. It has been added toward the end of this article and has been highlighted.)

As many of you know, I have long thought that the Levelland sightings of November 2/3, 1957, are among the best. There are multiple witnesses in multiple locations who reported their cars stopped and their lights dimmed at the close approach of a glowing red (and sometimes blue) egg-shaped craft.

Dr. Don Burleson, who lives in Roswell which is not all that far from Levelland (which is near Lubbock), made a personal trip there. While he was unable to interview Sheriff Weir Clem, who had died, he did speak to the daughter. According to an article in the Roswell Daily Record, “Aided by the Chamber of Commerce, we [meaning Burleson and his wife Mollie] were able to find one of the late sheriff’s daughters and I interviewed her twice.”

Levelland, Texas. Photo copyright by Kevin Randle

According to Burleson, “She [Ginger (Clem) Sims] described her father having tried to drive close to an airborne object, and having his engine and lights die.”

That, of course, put him in conflict with what had been reported by the Air Force in 1957. The story was that he had only seen something in the distance, described as a streak of red light. The Blue Book files suggest that it was too far away from him, and those with him, including police officers in another car, to have seen anything important.

But if his motor died and his lights dimmed, he was much closer to the object than had been reported by the Air Force. If he was close enough to the object that it would stall his engine, he was close enough to get a good look at it. And if Clem was that close, so were the policemen in the car following behind. How would the Air Force explain four law enforcement officers confirming the stories that were being told by so many others about their Close Encounters?

Site of the first reported encounter in 1957. Photo
copyright by Kevin Randle.

The real question is if Clem was so involved in this in 1957, why didn’t he say anything at the time. Again, according to Burleson and to Clem’s daughter, “The Air Force visited him after his sighting(s) and advised him to ‘drop it’ and forget that he had ever seen anything.”

Such a request by the military is not unprecedented in UFO history. Sheriff George Wilcox of Roswell fame said much the same thing. He told reporters that he was working with the boys out at the air base and their questions should be directed to them. Wilcox offered nothing of value to the reporters who interviewed him.

There are other examples as well, though some were grounded in protecting classified information. A request to law enforcement not to reveal details of a sighting to the media seem to have been routine. To be fair, sometimes it was just to protect the witness. Lonnie Zamora was told by an FBI agent that he should keep the descriptions of the beings he saw to himself. Arthur Byrnes thought it would save Zamora some embarrassment, but by the time the suggestion was made it was too late. The information had already been reported.

So, we come back to the Levelland story, told by Clem’s daughter, that her father had gotten closer than had been reported. Skeptics will point out that the official records in 1957 showed that Clem was only reported to have seen the object, or lights, in the distance, some 900 feet away and they’ll reject, out of hand this new information. It is, after all, from the sheriff’s daughter, a second-hand witness, and was told nearly fifty years after the fact. In today’s world, it is interesting, but it is believed there is no way to verify any of it.

Ironically however, there was some corroboration for this tale that was provided in 1957 and was found in the Project Blue Book file. An article published in the Indianapolis Star on November 4, 1957, seemed to confirm the daughter’s claim. According to that article, “’It [the UFO] lit up the whole pavement in front of us for about two seconds,’ said Clem. He called it oval shaped and said it looked like a brilliant red sunset.” 

There is still additional corroboration for Clem’s closer approach. In the Blue Book files is most of one of the Air Force forms about UFOs. At the top, in a handwritten note, it says, “Sheriff’s statement given telephonically to Sgt. [illegible] 3 Nov 1957 re this case.”

According to that document, the sheriff said that he was within 200 yards of the object, or much closer than has been reported. He said the object was circular, as opposed to a streak of light and that it was dark orange. A drawing made, by the NCO taking the statement verified that it was circular. Inside that drawing it seems to say 50 yards, but the 50 might be crossed out and replaced by 100. That makes it a huge craft.

Yes, I know what the response from the skeptics will be. It’s just a newspaper article and now part of an official investigation and the form was not filled out by the sheriff. To them I say, “It is a claim that was published within 48 hours of the initial reports, and it does add some weight to what the daughter told Burleson. It is the Air Force form filled out based on the interview with the sheriff.” This is some confirmation but each one of us is going to have to decide how much weight to give it.

Just as has been said about the Socorro landing… “If only…” If only the Air Force had been interested in gathering data. If only Donald Keyhoe’s mission hadn’t been to force congressional hearing, but to gather data. If only there had been cooperation rather than acrimony, what might we have learned.

One of the Best Cases - Levelland, Texas

In the last few weeks I have been asked a couple of times about which UFO cases I believe have credibility. I have avoided these sorts of questions in the past because I know the pitfalls of providing a list like that. Debunkers (as opposed to skeptics) will then attempt to explain those cases in the mundane with little regard to the facts. A good example of that was Philip Klass’ explanation of the Coyne helicopter case as a meteor and ignoring the testimony of the pilots and crewmen. Rather than learn the procedures used by Army helicopter pilots, he talked to some unidentified guy who had flight time in helicopters never telling us if that flight time was at the controls or riding in the back.

Ignoring that, and my own trepidation, I will note that the best of the cases will have multiple chains of evidence, including multiple witnesses, interaction with the environment, measurements by instrumentality such as radar, landing traces, and photographs. You would think that after seventy years or so we’d have just such a case. Although we don’t there are a few that meet some of these requirements and one of the best is that from Levelland, Texas, in November 1957.

I have reported on this series of sightings in the past, including featuring it in several books, and in postings here that can be seen at:

http://kevinrandle.blogspot.com/2014/06/levelland-texas-revisited.html

http://kevinrandle.blogspot.com/2010/08/levelland-ufo-sightings.html

http://kevinrandle.blogspot.com/2014/04/levelland-and-electro-magnetic-effects.html

Here’s the thing about the Levelland sightings. There is some evidence that investigations of that case from all points of view was less than stellar. According to the records I have reviewed and the documentation available from various

Levelland, Texas
Photo copyright by Kevin Randle

sources, there were witnesses at thirteen separate locations who reported engines that stalled, lights that dimmed and radios that filled with static. The Air Force claimed in press releases that only three people had seen the object, though they would eventually claim six observers, and to them, if they hadn’t interviewed the witnesses, they didn’t exist. Donald Keyhoe claimed nine but his estimate, as we now know, was low.

The number of witnesses around Levelland would fulfill one part of that chains of evidence argument. We can say that we have multiple, independent witnesses. Given the circumstances, most of them were unaware that others have made reports. They called the Levelland Sheriff’s Office to report what they had just seen. A few, after hearing the news reports the next day, called to say they had seen the same thing.

These witnesses also reported an interaction with the environment which, of course, is their stalled engines, dimmed lights and static filled radios. The witnesses at each of those thirteen locations reported the same things, though not necessarily all of them. Although this information is based on witness testimony it is fairly consistent among them and it suggests an interaction with the environment.

The Condon Committee study a decade later didn’t bother to research this case other than talk to a businessman who claimed his car had been stalled by a UFO in 1967 under somewhat similar circumstances. Although they did make an investigation of that report, they concluded that there were discrepancies in the witness’s statements, no evidence, according to them, of a strong magnetic field near the car based on their mapping of the magnetic points on the car, and because there were no other witnesses, there was no need to continue to investigate. Given what they said, I would be inclined to agree with their assessment of that particular case. However, they also suggested that because the Levelland case was ten years old and the cars involved were no longer available, they couldn’t conduct their magnetic mapping of those vehicles. They decided they weren’t going to follow up on it. Had anyone tried the magnetic mapping in 1957, that might have resulted in some interesting information that hadn’t been found at the time. It seemed that they used the results of their single investigation to reject the Levelland case and this is only place in their study (page 108 of the Bantam paperback) where it is mentioned… Or, in other words, a chance to gather some interesting scientific evidence in 1957 was lost because no one thought to attempt it and nothing new was learned by the Condon Committee because they thought the case too old so they didn’t bother.

Had the magnetic mapping as suggested by those at the Condon Committee been done in 1957 that would have also, to a lesser extent, fulfilled the requirement for instrumentality. This would have provided some additional indirect evidence that something had happened at Levelland or maybe shown that there was no good evidence of a strong magnetic field which might also be important information.

As I have mentioned in the past, there is a hint of a landing trace as well. Before the skeptics point it out, let me note that it comes not from Levelland sheriff Weir Clem, but members of his family and is a claim made nearly half a century after the fact. Family members said that a rancher north of Levelland had found a large burned area on his land. The sheriff had seen it, but then there are no reports from the time, no pictures of it, and no first-hand witnesses to it. If that indirect evidence had existed, it could have formed another chain of evidence if properly investigated, but then that just didn’t happen.

And, of course, no photographs of the object have ever been found. In today’s world everyone who had experienced a sighting like this probably would have had a cell phone to take a picture. In 1957 most people, on routine business, didn’t carry a camera. Pictures, especially if taken from multiple locations, would be powerful evidence.

In what is a somewhat hilarious conclusion, the Air Force wrote off the Levelland sightings as “ball lightning,” a phenomenon that in 1957 was still a subject of scientific debate. Today ball lightning is described as appearing almost simultaneously with cloud-to-ground lightning, have diameters that can reach about three feet and that lasts from a second to about a minute. This, of course, suggests that what was seen in Levelland was not ball lightning. This doesn’t mean it was an alien spacecraft, only that the Air Force explanation for the sightings was bogus and because of that should be listed as “unidentified.”

The point here, however, is that I see Levelland as a very good case given the evidence that was collected. I also see it as a missed opportunity. If Keyhoe and the Air Force hadn’t been so busy arguing about the number of witnesses and what the effects of the close approach of the UFO might be, or that some of it was caused by a cracked rotor in a car, we might have learned something very important. It was certainly a missed opportunity and while there are hints of what else might have been collected, we simply can’t verify it as proof of alien visitation in today’s world.

Levelland, Texas Revisited

In an earlier post I had suggested the Air Force lied about some of the information hidden away in the Project Blue Book files. I had been going to expand on the comments about the Portage County UFO chase, but then remembered some of the things I had read about the Levelland, Texas UFO landings and EM Effects case of November 2, 1957.

What struck me as I read the file in years past was that the Air Force and Donald Keyhoe, at the time the Director of the civilian National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomena (NICAP), were engaged in a publicity war, each suggesting the other was lying. The Air Force said there were only three witnesses but Keyhoe said there were nine. Well, both couldn’t be right so I thought I would take another look at what appears in the Blue Book files.

In a document from those files, I found the following statement. “Contrary to Keyhoe’s and Washington Press reports only three, not nine persons witnessed the incident.”

But later in the file, there is another document that said, “A mysterious object, whose shape was described variously as ranging from round to oval, and predominately bluish – white in color was observed separately by six persons near the town of Levelland.”

In a separate document which was apparently part of a newspaper account of the Air Force investigation, the reporter wrote, “The investigators said further (note the plural) [which is a parenthetical comment in the document] that they could find only three witnesses who actually saw the object.”

This could explain the discrepancy inside Air Force file which is to say that only three saw the object but the others were involved in the incident. This would mean that the Air Force, while not telling the whole story was only slightly shading the truth.

Except, in another part of the file, that included newspaper reports, it is clear that more than three saw an object as opposed to a streak of light. For example, the sheriff, Weir Clem, is reported to have said, “It lit up the whole pavement in front of us [he and a deputy] for about two seconds.” He called it oval shaped and said that it looked like a brilliant red sunset.

This brings up a separate issue, which is the color of the object. The Air Force focused on the blue-white light, suggesting that this was related to lightning, supposed to be flashing in the area at the time. But in several of the cases the witnesses talked about a bright red and if that was accurate, then the Air Force explanation fell apart or partially fell apart.

The Air Force eventually explained the case as ball lightning, a phenomenon that science was still investigating in 1957. Those descriptions found by the Air Force claimed it was a bright blue-white and ball shaped. What the Air Force didn’t bother to mention was that ball lightning was short lived, just seconds, and that it was extremely small, something on the order of eight or nine inches in diameter. The witnesses suggested something much larger.

This newspaper quote about the sheriff seeing something larger and oval from the time seems to corroborate statements made by Clem’s wife some forty or forty-five years after the fact. According to a report by Richard Ray of FOX News 4, Oleta Clem, the sheriff’s widow said, “Well, he just said he’d seen a thing that lit down in that pasture with lights all around. It come down and then it went back up as fast as it come down.”

So, we have Clem describing, in 1957, an oval-shaped object and we have his wife saying, in 2002, that he had seen a thing with lights all around. She is telling us he was closer than the Air Force gave him credit for and we had him, making statements in the public record in 1957 that says the same sort of thing. Is this good proof? Not really, but it is interesting testimony and it does suggest that the Air Force was playing fast and loose with the facts.

The Air Force file contains newspaper clippings that have the names of many of the witnesses, statements made by them about what they saw and what happened to their vehicles, and giving the hometowns or locations of these witnesses. Without too much trouble, it is possible to come up with the names of more than three people who saw an object, all available in the Project Blue Book files which negate the Air Force statements about the case.

And yes, I would agree that these newspaper reports are not the most reliable source of documentation, but it would have provided the Air Force investigators, if there had been investigators, a place to begin. Instead, they noted in the file that they hadn’t interviewed one of the primary “sources” because he didn’t live in Levelland, but outside the town… and as an aside, there was but a single investigator who spent most of a day attempting to find and interview witnesses rather than investigators.

What we have here is a clear case of the Air Force pretending to investigate a major sighting and then writing it off as ball lightning when everything argues against that explanation. There were multiple sightings of an object made by more than three people in separate locations, and who made the reports independently to various agencies including the Levelland sheriff and the news media.

The other thing that caught my attention was the NICAP investigator who showed up, one James A. Lee of Abilene, Texas, and said that he had been studying these things for twenty years. Since this was 1957, that would mean he started his investigations in 1937. I would have liked to know what sparked this interest. Had he seen something? Had he read Charles Fort? Did he know of the Great Airship of 1897, or one of the other airship waves that had happened? Or was this some sort of hyperbole to show his long and deep interest in UFOs? I don’t know, but found the qualification, mentioned several times, interesting.

The point here, however, is simply the nonsense of an argument over the number of witnesses rather than an attempt to interview them. Had this happened in 1957, in the days that followed the sightings, we might have learned something about UFOs, electromagnetic effects and a possible landing trace case. Instead we have a file labeled as “ball lightning” and witnesses who were not interviewed in 1957. Everyone dropped the ball.

The Levelland UFO Sightings

At the most recent MUFON Symposium, I talked several people about creating multiple chains of evidence for our UFO cases. I based this on the study done in France in 1803 that proved rocks could fall from the sky... rocks we now call meteorites. The French Academy of Sciences had rejected the idea until a French researcher, Jean-Baptiste Biot, put together a study, with multiple chains of evidence, that proved in at least one instance, rocks had fallen from the sky. (As we say in ufology, it only takes one).

Which leads to another point. I had been discussing UFOs with a skeptic (Hey! I talk to them... most are reasonable people) and I mentioned, as one series of good sightings, the Levelland events of November 2, 1957. There were many reports of the close approach of the UFO interacting with the environment, meaning that it stalled car engines, dimmed headlights, and filled radios with static.

My skeptical friend said something like, "Oh yeah. The Condon Committee investigated that but even with the most powerful magnets available could not duplicate the alleged effects."

To him that meant the case had no merit because the electromagnetic effects (EM) claimed by the witnesses could not be replicated in the laboratory. But as I thought about this, I realized it could be taken another way. If the witness statements were accurate, then the UFO was displaying a technological capability that was beyond our science and could therefore be seen as proof that some UFOs were superior technological craft and were of alien manufacture.

In other words, we had a second chain of evidence, the first being the eyewitness testimony. See, in the French case, the eyewitnesses, who described the rocks falling from the sky and the resulting sound effects and smoke trail were counted as reliable. No one then thought to reject the eyewitnesses simply because they had only seen the rocks in the sky. Their testimony was collected, regardless of social station. None was rejected because he was merely an uneducated farmer, or because she was only a farm wife, or they were only children or because they might have talked to one another about the fall. All testimonies were carefully recorded so that a complete record could be made.

In Levelland, and contrary to what the Project Blue Book files allege, there were witnesses in at least thirteen separate locations who reported the EM effects without the time necessary for the news media or the local grapevines to pass that nugget. Although you could argue that one or two of the witnesses who surfaced the next day might have heard or read something about the sighting prior to making a statement, the majority of them told their tales without knowing there were other witnesses in other areas who had seen, heard, and experienced the same things they had.

Now, today, it is impossible for us to make any sort of meaningful measurements to corroborate, or disprove, this bit of observation. That so many made it, in such a restricted time frame, it seems reasonable to conclude that most, if not all, such reports were made without contamination. These EM effects are not reported in most of the UFO sightings, so we have something here that might provide a clue about the nature of some of the UFO reports.

The third chain of evidence is one reported by Don Burleson, based on his reinvestigation some forty years after the fact. Burleson said that he had talked to the daughter of the sheriff, Weir Clem, and Clem had been called out to a ranch north of Levelland where there were markings on the ground. In other words, a "footprint" of the UFO.

Had this bit of evidence surfaced in 1957, meaningful measurements might have been made. Coupled with the work of Ted Philips, who has cataloged some 4000 landing trace cases, we might have had the UFO sighting that would have moved UFOs from myth to accepted fact, just as the French study moved thunderbolts (rocks from the sky) into the realm of science.

But here is the problem... The French were interested in the truth, and in 1957, the Air Force was interested in explaining all UFO sightings in the mundane. It mattered not what the facts were. If they could generate an answer that stopped the interest in the case, they were happy. They had fulfilled their mission.

Yes, the Project Blue Book files prove this. On a Joint Messageform prepared by Captain G. T. Gregory and dated November 3, 1957, in PART III, paragraph a., it says, "Contrary to Keyhoe’s and Washington Press reports only three, not nine persons witnessed the incident."

Later, in his book, The World of Flying Saucers (and found in the Levelland papers and reports in the Project Blue Book files), Donald Menzel would write, "Three persons, not ‘dozens,’ had seen the phenomenon near the ground. Some ten or fifteen others (including the sheriff) had not observed it at close quarters but had merely seen brilliant flashes of light in the sky."

Neither the Air Force statement nor Menzel’s words reflect the reality of the situation. There were people at thirteen, widely separated locations who were close enough to the craft to report EM effects. And, there were more than fifteen people who saw the object at a distance but none of them described the UFO as a flash of light in the sky.

The other evidence of this is that the Air Force explained the sighting as "ball lightning." In 1957, you could get any number of scientists to argue that there was no such thing as ball lightning. In other words, the Air Force was attempting to explain one phenomenon with another that had yet to be proved. And they forgot to mention that ball lightning was short–lived and rarely larger than eight inches in diameter.

The real point here, however, is that this case, the Levelland sightings, had they been treated with any sort of scientific curiosity at the time, would have yielded a report with multiple chains of evidence. We would have been able to develop some very interesting evidence, if the government in the form of the Air Force and the scientific community in the guise of Donald Menzel hadn’t been more interested in proving themselves right than they were in gathering the information. In other words, we would have had those multiple chains of evidence that would independently lead us toward the extraterrestrial. Instead, we have another controversial case that has been compromised by those who know that there can be no aliens visiting Earth.