I
am often stunned by the mental gymnastics of some to keep a cherished belief
alive in the face of documented facts and reliable testimony. I am often
surprised when something that I believe to be obvious from the evidence
available is rejected for speculation that has no supporting proof. When the
facts line up, when there is good evidence for a conclusion, when it all seems
to be so obvious to me, I simply fail to understand how it is that others can’t
see with the same clarity. And yes, I know there are those who believe Roswell
to be a Mogul balloon will point at me and say the same things but this isn’t
about Roswell or Mogul balloons (and besides, I can point at the Mogul
explanation and say the same thing about that conclusion).
This
is about the Eisenhower Briefing Document (EBD) and the fatal flaw that is
contained in it. I am going to lay all the facts out at length because those
other postings which contain the information are spread throughout this blog. I
haven’t put it all together into a single document until now. There is a
caveat, however. I am not going to review all the other problems with the EBD
including a lack of provenance, the other factual errors, or the misspellings
and incorrect security classifications. I am going to deal with the one
paragraph that relates to another UFO crash that is a hoax and as such
shouldn’t have been included in a briefing written for the incoming president.
That entry said:
On
06 December, 1950, a second object, probably of similar origin, impacted the
earth at high speed in the El Indio – Guerrero area of the Texas – Mexican
boder [sic] after following a long trajectory through the atmosphere. By the
time a search team arrived, what remained of the object had been almost totally
incinerated. Such material as could be recovered was transported to the A.E.C.
facility at Sandia, New Mexico, for study.
The
first mention of this report of a crash in any sort of a public arena came from
Robert Willingham, a pilot in the Civil Air Patrol (CAP), which is identified
as an official auxiliary of the United States Air Force. To be clear, it is not
a part of the Air Force, members of the CAP are not paid for their service,
they do not earn retirement points, and they are not considered to be part of
the Reserve Component of the United States military. They are civilians who
wear modified uniforms and provide a valuable service in search and rescue
operations. But understand, they are not part of the military.
Willingham,
and several other CAP pilots, were interviewed in the late 1960s about their
experiences with UFOs. This was done for a small “shopper” type of newspaper,
and while I have been unable to find that specific article, I did find a
summary of Willingham’s statements in MUFON’s Skylook, which was their newsletter/magazine in the 1960s.
According to the March, 1968 issue:
Col.
R. B. Willingham, CAP squadron commander, has had an avid interest in UFO’s for
years, dating back to 1948 when he was leading a squadron of F-94 jets near the
Mexican border in Texas and was advised by radio that three UFO’s “flying
formation” were near. He picked them up on his plane radar and was informed one
of the UFO’s had crashed a few miles away from him in Mexico. He went to the
scene of the crash but was prevented by the Mexican authorities from making an
investigation or coming any closer than 60 feet. From that vantage point the
wreckage seemed to consist of “numerous pieces of metal polished on the
outside, very rough on the inner sides.”
For those keeping score at home,
please note that it clearly states that Willingham is in the CAP, that the date
of the sighting is 1948, that he was flying an F-94, there were three UFOs
instead of just one, that he saw them on his plane’s radar and was told that
one had crashed in Mexico. I mention these things because this is the first
time that Willingham told the story in public and it was written down in an
article for those who wish to verify the accuracy of the statements… which is
not to say that what he was saying was true, only that I have reported here
exactly what was reported in 1968.
I did find another 1968 article about
Willingham that is important to this discussion because it proves Willingham
had a long interest in UFOs. I
found, in the NICAP UFO Investigator for March 1968 on page one:
During the early morning hours of
January 12, Colonel Robert Willingham, of the Civil Air Patrol, a member of the
Subcommittee, was alerted by Chairman George Cook to a UFO seen by a police
dispatcher near Camp Hill.
Col. Willingham sighted the
orange-and-white glowing object at an altitude of not more than 150 feet, as it
traveled toward North Mountain. The UFO appeared to be between 30 and 40 feet
in diameter. The former jet pilot followed the object by car until it
disappeared behind trees in the Mountain section.
In other words, NICAP was so
unimpressed with the crash story, they didn’t even mention it. Instead, they
published a Willingham UFO sighting that was rather mundane. It was just an object in the sky, noting that
Willingham was a colonel in the CAP but said nothing about any association with
the Air Force Reserve. It also said that Willingham belonged to NICAP
underscoring his interest in UFOs.
We
all know that W. Todd Zechel tracked down Willingham and got a statement from
him. Zechel made that point repeatedly, and there is no dispute that it is
accurate. Zechel found Willingham and talked to him. In fact, Zechel was able
to get Willingham to sign an affidavit about his experiences in 1977. That date
does not seem to be in dispute.
That
affidavit does little to enhance the credibility of the tale. It does allow us
to make some comparisons, however. It said:
Down in Dyess Air Force Base in
Texas, we were testing what turned out to be the F-94. They reported on the [radar]
scope that they had an unidentified flying object at a high speed to intercept
our course. It came visible to us and we wanted to take off after it.
Headquarters wouldn’t let us go after it and it played around a little bit. We
got to watching how it made 90 degree turns at this high speed and everything.
We knew it wasn’t a missile of any type. So then we confirmed it with the radar
control station on the DEW Line (NORAD) and they kept following it and they
claimed that it crashed somewhere off between Texas and the Mexican border. We
got a light aircraft, me and my co-pilot, and we went down to the site. We
landed out in the pasture right across from the where it hit. We got over
there. They told us to leave and everything else and then the armed guards came
out and they started to form a line around the area. So, on the way back, I saw
a little piece of metal so I picked it up and brought it back with me. There
were two sand mounds that came down and it looked to me like this thing crashed
right in between them. But it went into the ground, according to the way people
were acting around it. But you could see for, oh I’d say, three to five hundred
yards where it had went across the sand. It looked to me, I guess from the
metal that we found, chunks of metal, that it either had a little explosion or
it began to disintegrate. Something caused this metal to come apart.
It looked like it was something that
was made because it was honeycombed. You know how you would make a metal that
would cool faster. In a way it looked like magnesium steel but it had a lot of
carbon in it. I tried to heat it with a cutting torch. It just wouldn’t melt. A
cutting torch burns anywhere from 3200 to 3800 degrees Fahrenheit and it would
make the metal hot but it wouldn’t even start to melt.
Please
notice here that he is in his F-94 and that DEW line radar picked up the object
but it says nothing about where the object was first sighted nor does it
mention where Willingham was flying at the time. Most importantly, this
affidavit gives no date for the sighting which is a major oversight. That
becomes important later.
Len
Stringfield, a well-respected UFO researcher who took an interest in UFO
crashes when the rest of us were ignoring them, collected many stories of
crashes. In 1978 he wrote a paper for the MUFON Symposium, which allows us to
date this next chapter in this case. He wrote, “...Months later in 1977, I was
to learn more about a crashed disc occurring in 1948. This came from researcher
Todd Zeckel [sic], whom I had known since 1975 when he became Research Director
of Ground Saucer Watch... The crash occurred about 30 miles inside the Mexican
border across from Laredo, Texas, and was recovered by U.S. troops after it was
tracked on radar screens... Zeckel pieced together other eyewitnesses to the
1948 crash event.”
According to Stringfield, Zechel
reported:
I traced another Air Force colonel,
now retired in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. He had seen the UFO in flight. He was
flying an F-94 fighter out of Dias [sic] Air Force base in Texas and was over
Albuquerque, New Mexico, when reports came of a UFO on the West Coast, flying
over Washington State. Radars clocked its speed at 2,000 miles per hours.
It made a 90 – degree turn and flew
east, over Texas. The colonel, then a captain pilot, actually saw it as it
passed. Then suddenly it disappeared from radar screens. At Dias [sic] base,
the radar operators plotted its course, and decided it had crashed some 30
miles across the Mexican border from Laredo. When the captain got back to base,
he and a fellow pilot got into a small plane and took off over the border after
the UFO. When they landed in the desert at the crash site, U.S. troops were
there before them.
The craft was covered with a canopy
[tarpaulin?], and the two pilots were not allowed to see it. They were then
called to Washington, D.C. for debriefing and sworn to secrecy about the whole
event.
It’s clear from the above information
that Zechel was reporting on the story told by Willingham. We know, based on
documentation available, that Willingham was living in Pennsylvania at the time
and the other details of the story are close to what Willingham had originally
reported. Please note here that Willingham is still flying his F-94, that the
crash site is near Laredo, Texas, that it happened in 1948, and that it was
tracked on radar. Also note that the radars put the UFO over Washington state
which will become important later.
What
we have here is a single witness tale that is believed because the man telling
it is a retired Air Force colonel and a veteran fighter pilot. These two facts
lend to his credibility and I know that when I first heard this story and was told
it came from a high-ranking Air Force officer, I was inclined to believe it,
especially since we had Jesse Marcel and so many others around Roswell talking
of the crash there. This simply means that I was a little less suspicious of
tales of crashes, given what I knew about Roswell. Please remember here, that I
learned of Willingham’s crashed saucer tale after several trips to Roswell,
rather than coming upon it cold.
There
was another fact that came out later. According to Zechel, the crash didn’t
take place in 1948 but in December 1950. Bruce Maccabee, another respected UFO
researcher had been sending Freedom of Information (FOIA) requests to the FBI,
among other places. His persistence paid off and he received a huge stack of
documents that included some that related to some sort of alert in December
1950.
The
question becomes did the alert have anything to do with UFOs. According to the
documents found by Maccabee and others, on December 6, 1950, unidentified
objects were spotted by radar heading toward the eastern seaboard. This
triggered an alert and was discussed at the highest levels of the government. The
consensus, from various memoirs and other documents, suggests that at about
10:30 a.m. Deputy Secretary of Defense Lovett called Dean Acheson, then
secretary of State to tell him that the Pentagon’s phone system was about to
shut down because the early warning system in Canada had picked up formations
of unidentified objects, presumably aircraft heading to the southeast on a
course that would put them over Washington, D.C. in two or three hours. Given
the state of the world at the time, that is a major war in Korea that involved
Chinese and UN forces (the majority of which were American and South Korean);
it was thought that the Soviets might have been sending bombers toward the
United States, probably armed with atomic weapons.
Truman,
in his memoirs, suggested that the objects had been detected by radar stations
and fighters had been launched to reconnoiter, though I personally would have
wanted every fighter launched to intercept if I had thought the Soviets were
sending bombers, which probably explains why I won’t be president.
There
is another version of these events that suggest that the formations were over
Alaska, which makes you wonder how they could have reached Washington, D.C. in
just two or three hours unless their speed was considerably higher, that is,
something on the order of 2000 miles an hour. This doesn’t have the same kind
of documentation that the other version has and might be where Zechel got the
idea that the UFOs were near Washington state and traveling at 2000 mph.
Within
an hour, that is, by 11:30 a.m., the alert was cancelled, and once again there
are multiple answers. Acheson reported that he was called back by Lovett who
told him that the objects had disappeared. Lovett apparently thought the
objects were geese but that seems a little strange to me… but I do remember
reading about a strange event during WW II in which London radar operators
reported that each morning an object appeared, rose into the sky and then
seemed to fade away. It was found that it was caused by birds awaking and
taking flight about the same time every day from the same London park.
Truman
said that some sort of Atlantic weather disturbance had thrown off the radars.
I suppose you could say that the disturbance could have caused the geese to be
misidentified. The point is that the alert lasted about an hour.
These
descriptions are based on the memories of the men (or the ghostwriters) who
were there at the time. But as there is in many UFO–linked stories, there are
some documents from the time. One of the major news services, INS reported:
A
warning of an impending air attack resulted in a false alarm in this capitol [sic]
city today. No air raid alarms were sounded, but functionaries charged with
Civil Air Defense of Washington [D.C.] were alerted that an unidentified
aircraft had been detected off the coast of the State of Maine at mid-day.
Later, a spokesman for the Air Force stated that interceptor aircraft had been
dispatched, and that the object in question had been identified shortly
thereafter as a North American C-47 aircraft which was approaching the
continent from Goose Bay, Labrador. The warning was said to have been useful in
verifying the efficient of the Washington Civil Defense System. Civil Defense
officials declined to comment on the incident.
Yes,
there is a letter written by Colonel Charles Winkle, Assistant Executive in the
Directorate of Plans that said that 40 aircraft were spotted at 32,000 feet. He
noted that at 1104 hours the original track had faded out and it appeared that
the flight was friendly.
While
all this is interesting, it is irrelevant. This has nothing to do with the
Willingham and his alleged sighting, which, until Zechel got involved was set
in 1948. Then, seeing an opportunity to add some credibility to the Willingham
crash report, he changed the date of the sighting to December 1950. Now
Willingham’s sighting was not stand alone. There was a historical perspective
to it.
There
is one other aspect to this, again which is probably not related at all, other
than it happened on December 8, 1950. Maccabee found, in the FBI files, an
“Urgent” message that was labeled, “Flying Saucers.”
This
office very confidentially advised by Army Intelligence, Richmond, that they
have been put on immediate high alert for any data whatsoever concerning flying
saucers. CIC here states background of instructions not available from Air
Force Intelligence, who are not aware of the reason for alert locally, but any
information whatsoever must be telephoned by them immediately to Air Force
Intelligence. CIC advises data strictly confidential and should not be
disseminated (sic).
And
this would suggest some credibility to the Willingham tale. Here, just two days
after the crash, the Air Force was requiring all intelligence information to be
relayed to them. But, again, it is clear from Willingham’s original story, the
crash took place in 1948, and not 1950. In fact, Willingham told me that in
December 1950, he was serving in Korea (no evidence to support this claim), and
the real date of the crash was in 1954 or 1955.
What
that tells me is that no matter what Air Force Intelligence wanted in December
1950, this incident is irrelevant because there was no crash in December 1950.
Remember, Willingham first claimed it was in 1948 and said that Zechel had
changed the date to December 6, 1950. Willingham later said that it couldn’t
have happened in December 1950 because he was in Korea at the time.
The
question then becomes, how did this sighting get into the Eisenhower Briefing
Document if it is a hoax? According to Zechel, he shared the information with
Bill Moore and Moore, believing that Willingham was a retired colonel and that
his story was credible, accepted it. We know that Moore was aware of this
because he wrote about it, briefly, in The
Roswell Incident. Moore wrote:
Then
a second group, Citizens Against UFO Secrecy (CAUS), was formed in 1978 under
the directorship of W. T. Zechel, former research director of GSW [Ground Saucer
Watch] and a one-time radio-telegraph operator for the Army Security Agency.
CAUS’s announced aim was nothing less than an “attempt to establish that the
USAF (or elements thereof) recovered a crashed extraterrestrial spacecraft” in
the Texas – New Mexico – Mexico border area sometime in the late 1940s.
This
establishes that Zechel, as he claimed, had been talking to Moore about this
crash. Since the book was published in 1980, and because the lead time between
manuscript submission and actual publication is a year to eighteen months, it
means that Zechel was talking to Moore in the late 1970s. In other words, it
verifies part of what Zechel claimed when he said that Moore knew about this
crash, and because Moore accepted the information from CAUS as authentic, it
provides another reason that the Willingham crash had to be included in the
EBD.
They all thought it real, and if it was real, it had to be mentioned in
the document.
It
is clear from the details, that the Del Rio crash is the El Indio - Guerrero
crash. The location selected is between the original site of Laredo and Del
Rio. Zechel changed the date to correspond to the December 6, 1950 alert,
though he suggested the event as December 5. The accepted date in the EBD is a
compromise between that date and the December 8, 1950, request by the Air Force
to the Army’s CIC. There were no documents to contradict this and Willingham said
that he knew the December 6 date was wrong, but said nothing about that until
years later.
Everything
points to the December 6 crash as being the Willingham crash, and if that is
true, then there was no such crash. And without a December 6, 1950 crash,
anywhere in the Texas – Mexico border area, then the EBD must be a hoax.
You
can reject everything that Zechel said, but the facts here are verified through
other sources. Willingham confirms that he gave all this information to Zechel,
he confirms that it was Zechel who came up with the December 1950 date, and
Bill Moore, in his book, confirms that Zechel and CAUS were pursuing this crash
case.
All the dots line up and the facts now argue against the authenticity of
the EBD because there is nothing true about the case except that Zechel
investigated and the original source was Willingham.
Here
is the real point. The December 6, 1950, alert has no relevance here. The
information for the crash has come from a small circle of people and it all
goes back to Willingham. He has changed the story to cover the facts that were
in error and Zechel changed it to make use of the 1950 alert. There are no
documents about it, nothing printed in any newspaper such as there was for
Roswell, Kecksburg, or Shag Harbour to name just three, and there is a single
witness, which again is unlike those other cases.
Unless
someone can come up with some evidence that hasn’t passed through the hands of
Willingham, Zechel or Moore, there is nothing left for this case. It is a hoax
and if that is true, then the Eisenhower Briefing Document is a hoax. That is
the only rational conclusion to be drawn.
