X-Zone Broadcast Network - John Steiger

This week I spoke with John Steiger, a long-time friend who has just published a book of plays called The UFO Trilogy – Dramas for the Stage. You can, of course, listen to the show here:

https://www.spreaker.com/episode/37816825

Although I hadn’t planned on spending so much time on the Roswell “trial,” the discussion just went in that direction. John’s idea was to present the Roswell case

Sheridan Cavitt. Photo
copyright by Kevin Randle.

as a civil trial by questioning the “witnesses” on the stand. Although the majority of the witnesses are those who saw some aspect of the Roswell debris, or participated in the recovery of that debris, there were witnesses on the other side, including Sheridan Cavitt, Charles Moore and Irving Newton. We did spend some time identifying who the witnesses were so that everyone would be able to understand the relevance of the people called to testify.

The second drama is a Board of Inquiry that is investigating the Rendlesham Forest events of December 1980. Here there are only three witnesses, Jim Penniston, John Burroughs and Charles Halt. Each has his own act, and providing their perspective on the observation and landing of a craft. The idea was to have a single

John Burroughs.
Copyright by
Kevin Randle

interrogator, but fill out the other four Board slots with members of the audience. As John put it, they might have the best seats in the house.

The last of the dramas is “Will to Believe: The Brooklyn Bridge UFO Investigation.” This involves the Budd Hopkins’ investigation into the Linda Cortile abduction which might have included a Secretary General of the United Nations. John expressed his concern for the accuracy of the information as reported by Hopkins originally. I would have been a little more forceful, suggesting that this case wasn’t nearly as strong as Hopkins might have suggested.

I fear that we didn’t have enough time to properly examine the last two dramas. All three are intriguing. The dramas are available in a single volume which can be found at Amazon, quite naturally. They were published by Flying Disk Press, and in the interest of full disclosure, my recent book, The Best of Project Blue Book has the same publisher.

Next up is Rob Swiatek, who will be telling us a little bit about the beginnings of MUFON, which is the outgrowth of an accusation levelled a number of months ago. Of course, we won’t be limited to that and will delve into the current crop of UFO sightings as well. If you have questions for Rob, submit them here and I’ll get them asked during the program.

And a follow up for last week... Philip Mantle, by way of Robert Fischer, supplied the following link to an interview with Charles Hickson. It might be of interest to those of you who were intrigued by last week’s interview with Calvin Parker about their abduction in 1973. You can listen to it here:

https://archive.org/details/TheForceBeyond_201609

This and That

As many of you know, I have been reviewing a large number of UFO files and have found some things that don’t warrant a complete blog post but that are interesting. For example, Ramey Air Force Base in Puerto Rico was not named for Roger Ramey but for Brigadier General Howard Knox Ramey. This Ramey learned to fly in 1918 and by the time the Second World War broke out he had moved up the ranks. In

BG Howard Knox Ramey

January 1943 he was named the commanding officer of the V (Fifth) Bomber Command. In March 1943 while on a reconnaissance fight over the Torres Strait he disappeared. Neither his body nor any wreckage from the aircraft were found. If I had to guess, I would say that the Japanese spotted his aircraft and shot it down. 

The point is that Ramey Air Force Base was named for him, contrary to what some others have suggested. Roger Ramey’s widow told me it had not been named for her husband when I asked her about that in the early 1990s.

Here's something that a number of people might have seen but it might not have registered with them. In the Roswell Daily Record of July 9, in the article entitled, “Ramey Says Excitement Not Justified,” which, of course is his answer to the Roswell debris, there is a paragraph toward the end that says, “A public relations officer here said the balloon was in his office ‘and it will probably stay right there.’”

Although the article is in the Roswell newspaper, the dateline is Fort Worth which means the public information officer who was quoted is not Walter Haut but probably Major Charles A. Cashon, the 8^th Air Force PIO. (There are those who suggest that I haven’t carried out a complete investigation of the Roswell case, so, to prove a point, I will tell you that Cashon was not rated as flight crew and that his address in 1947 was Rt. 1, Box 220, Weatherford, TX, which was about a thirty-minute drive from the base.) This tells us where the debris from Ramey’s office went once he was done showing it to the press, though I wonder why Cashon would want it cluttering up his office and why no one bothered to take additional pictures (Oh, wait, this was 1947 when cameras were expensive and film was expensive and no one cared about a wrecked weather balloon anyway).

Speaking of balloons, Irving Newton, the warrant office who “identified” the balloon for Ramey and the press, said that he knew immediately that is was a balloon, though in interviews he said a colonel had met him before he got to Ramey’s office. Newton said the colonel told him they thought it was a weather balloon and wanted him to identify it (does leading the witness count here?) Anyway, Newton, in a February 20, 1995 letter to me, wrote, “The Rawin target and balloon in question was only used at limited locations and to my knowledge not at Fort Worth, not even all weather personnel were familiar with them, but we used them at Tinker Field (Okla City) during training and for Atomic tests…”

Atomic tests like that of Operation Crossroads in which the 509^th Bomb Group participated including Jesse Marcel. And, according to the L. J. Guthrie, of the Roswell weather station, they had been “dabbling with radar controlled balloons,” (which strikes me as a load… radar controlled balloons?) and that he believed based on the descriptions, what Brazel found could have been one of theirs. An Albuquerque weatherman said that they launched rawins with the weather balloons as well.

None of that proves much one way or another. I just thought these various items about the balloons or more specifically the rawin from Ramey’s office landing in the possession of Cashon to be interesting.

I thought I would just throw this information out there. I’m sure that I have opened the gates to all those who need to question absolutely everything even if there is nothing very controversial in the comments here. These are just little bits of information that probably add nothing to our overall understanding but I found them somewhat amusing.

The Marcel Pictures

While I'm not sure why it is important in a discussion of the Ramey memo, there are those who wanted to see the scans of Marcel. These are the full negative scans and the copyright, as it has been defined, still resides with the University of Texas - Arlington Special Collections. If they ask that the pictures be removed, then I will comply.

These scans allow us all to see the full photograph along with the edges of the negatives. I do not believe these have been published before in this form.

And, for those who haven't seen the picture of Irving Newton, taken sometime after those of Marcel, Ramey, and Ramey and Dubose, this is the best copy I have. The photo credit that I have on it is the Bettmann Photo Archive, which has been acquired by Corbis, I believe.

It should be clear to anyone looking at these pictures that they show the remains of a weather balloon and a rawin radar target. There is no sign of any other debris in the pictures and certainly nothing that could be considered alien.