The Hippler Letter

It seems that more often than not, as I put together the material for this blog, that it is negative. I have explanations for UFO sightings and I have information about aspects of the phenomenon that is more explanatory than mysterious. I believe that most people want information that advances the mystery rather than explains it, but I also believe that if there is a good, solid explanation, they would rather have it than continue to accept the mystery if there is a good, rational answer for it.

So, I look for things that I believe to be mysterious, that I can legitimately suggest have no explanation. And when I can’t, I provide the best available answer. But this is a two-way street, which means that sometimes the information breaks for us rather than against us. Skeptics like to trot out the University of Colorado study of UFOs that was commissioned by the Air Force in the 1960s. They like to say that here is what we all wanted, a scientific investigation of UFOs except that came to the conclusion that we have not been visited.

Unfortunately, the Condon Committee, as it has become called, was neither a good investigation nor a very scientific one. The conclusions were drawn before the check was even signed, and Dr. Edward U. Condon, the chairman, knew what answers the Air Force wanted. All he had to do was slant the information in that direction.

When we look at the whole of the committee’s final report, (grandly entitled, Scientific Study of Unidentified Flying Objects and published by Bantam Books in1969) we find strange problems... 30 percent of the sightings unexplained and some of the explanations less than helpful. In one case it was described as a phenomenon that was so rare it had never been seen before or since (which could, of course, mean it was a flying saucer in the classic sense) but they fail to explain what that phenomenon was. But, I think this underscores the point that the Condon Committee was, and is, bad science. The conclusions, written by Condon, do not come from the evidence included in the report but from Air Force direction prior to the beginning of that investigation. The contradictions have since become part of the whole story of the Condon Committee.

Condon, in his sort of executive summary of the overall report, wrote, for example, "It has been contended that the subject has been shrouded in official secrecy. We have no evidence of secrecy concerning UFO reports."

Then how to explain the case files that were labeled as secret? Clearly there was secrecy and there were secret studies (Air Intelligence Report No. 100-203-79 as just a single example, declassified long after the Condon Report was published). The question is if this was "an intelligent policy of delay in releasing data so that the public does not become confused by premature publication of incomplete studies or reports," or if there was something more nefarious involved here. The point is there were secret studies of UFOs, some were not released for years and the documentation that Condon and his committee reviewed was still classified in 1969. After 1976, when the Project Blue Book files were finally declassified, we find all sorts of secrecy imposed and not necessary as an intelligent policy.

Let’s take a look at some of this that has come to light since the publication of the Condon Report and see if we can prove that there was something of a conspiracy to find specific information during the investigation.

On January 16, 1967, before the real work began, Lieutenant Colonel Robert R. Hippler, of the Science Division, Directorate of Science and Technology, part of the HQ, USAF in Washington, D.C. wrote to Dr. Edward U. Condon. The letter was received by the committee on January 23.

Hippler wrote:

This is an informal letter expressing some thoughts on our round- table discussion on the UFO program, and does not constitute the formal letter requested by John Coleman.

There are two items which leave me a little uneasy. The first is the Wertheimer Hypothesis, and its corollary that one cannot "prove" the negative on extraterrestrial visitations. The second is an apparently obscure understanding of what the Air Force wants. Since I will discuss this second item, you will see why this is an informal letter expressing my own opinion–and hence is not binding on you.

On the first item, I wish to present a slightly different approach. When we first took over the UFO program, the first order of business, even before approaching AFOSR, was to assure ourselves that the situation was as straightforward as logic indicated it should be. In other words, we too looked to see if by some chance the intelligence people have information other than what exists in Blue Book files. There were no surprises. While there exist some things which may forever remain unknowable in the universe, certainly an extraterrestrial visitation must fall in the "knowable" category. An alien would not come light years merely to pick up surreptitiously some rocks, or melt holes in reservoir ice (al la Edwards). He would have long since gone through the geologic bit, and would be fairly knowledgeable of the make-up of stars and planets. You have stated that President Truman was unaware of the Manhattan Project until he became President. In that same time period, physicists not connected with the project were aware of the possibilities and knew that something was going on.

No one knows of a visitation. It should therefore follow there has been no visitation to date. As you are aware, if UFOs are an Air Force "sacred cow," the other services in the usual competitive spirit would not be constrained by this "sacred cow." Nor is
the "fear of panic" holding anyone’s tongue. No one is reticent about the horror of an ICBM attack. Words such as "end of civilization" have been used many times.

This brings us to the second item. When you have looked into some sightings and examined some Blue Book records and become acquainted with the true state of affairs, you must consider the cost of the Air Force program on UFOs, and determine if the taxpayer should support this for the next decade. It will be at least that long before another independent study can be mounted to see if the Air Force can get out from under this program. If the contract is up before you have laid the proper groundwork for a proper recommendation, an extension of the contract would be less costly than another decade of operating Project Blue Book.

Hippler signed his name.

Robert Low, in his response wrote:

And here, I’m going to quote only sections because some of the response was simply, "yes, you’re right."

For the skeptics, Low wrote :

Maybe we will find that extraterrestrial visitations have occurred, but there’s no way to demonstrate that they haven’t. This is a logical problem that can’t be skirted, and I’m sure, if we were to miss the point, the National Academy would set us straight.

...We don’t know what technology exists on other planets. I think one can assert, however, that, for a spaceship to get to the earth from a planet outside the solar system, it would be necessary to employ a technology from more advanced than we enjoy. Since we have no knowledge of that technology, speculation on it brings one right into science fiction, and once one has crossed that boundary the sky is the limit. He can argue anything, and the rules of scientific evidence and methodology have been abandoned. So there is no point in stepping across the boundary, except to engage in idle speculation! Such speculation isn’t useful in helping to close in on an answer to the problem of whether there have been extraterrestrial visitors or not. And probability won’t help.

You mention that the fear of panic is not holding anyone’s tongue. That’s an extremely good point; I had not thought of it. On the second page, you indicate what you believe the Air Force wants of us, and I am very glad to have your opinion. In fact, you have answered quite directly the question that I have asked - you may remember that I came back to it a couple of times - at our meeting on Thursday evening, January 12.

Low then signed off, after suggesting that he and Condon would be in Washington, D.C. and they could "perhaps" get together.

This attitude (of getting rid of Blue Book as suggested by Hippler) that had been established in official communications for a long time. For example on April 1, 1960 (Yeah, the timing sucks):

I have tried to get Bluebook out of ATIC for 10 years... and do not agree that the loss of prestige to the UFO project is a disadvantage...

Francis Archer, a scientific advisor to Blue Book in a letter to Major General Dougher at the Pentagon...

And in 1962, Lieutenant Colonel Robert Friend, at the time chief of Project Blue Book wrote should be handed over to a civilian agency that would word its report in such a way as to allow the Air Force to drop its study.

Edward Trapnell, an assistant to the Secretary of the Air Force, when talking to Dr. Robert Calkins of the Brookings Institute said that they should find a civilian committee to study the problem and then have them conclude it the way the Air Force wanted. One of the stipulations was that the organization, whatever it might be, should say some positive things about the Air Force handling of the UFO investigation.

Now, I realize that reasonable men and women can disagree as to the interpretation of these letters. However, given the other documents from the Blue Book files, the Archer and Trapnell letters, for example, I see an attempt to end Blue Book with the sham of an "objective" scientific study. The course for Condon was laid before Condon and the boys in Colorado even entered the picture.

The language in both Hippler’s and Low’s letters can be seen as benign, but it can also suggest an attempt by Hippler to tell Low what they want to find and what recommendation they want. End the study of UFOs by the Air Force. Get the Air Force off the hook for UFO investigations. The other letters and documents prove that this is the case.

In fact, just three days after that letter was received, Condon delivered a lecture to scientists in Corning, New York telling them, "It is my inclination right now to recommend that the government get out of this business. My attitude right now is that there is nothing in it. But I am not supposed to reach a conclusion for another year."

My point remains, the Condon Committee is bad science. Yes, it should be read, but it should be understood that it does not adequately answer the questions that it set out to answer. And when skeptics point to it as a scientific study, we should be prepared to point that it was not scientific. It was propaganda.

Global Warming On Mars?

The thing with global warming is not that it is happening, but what is the root cause for it. We know that the Earth has both heated and cooled on a cyclic basis for billions of years. We know that about 100,000 years ago it was cold and the Neanderthal roamed southern Europe. We know that the Neanderthal was adapted to a cold environment and that global warming, in part, is responsible for his extinction.

The question for us today is if human activity is responsible for this latest round of global warming. Is there any sort of evidence to suggest that we, as humans are adversely affecting our environment, and if so, can we do anything about it?

I have heard, a couple of times though it has yet to make a real splash, that our climate changes might have less to do with the Earth and more to do with the Sun. Habibullo Abdussamatov, the Chief of Space Research at St. Petersburg’s (Russia) Pulkovo Astronomical Observatory has suggested that there is a long term increase in solar radiation that is heating both the Earth and Mars...

Wait a minute, is he suggesting that Mars is undergoing global warming?

Yes. According to data from NASA’s Mars Global Surveyor and Odyssey missions, the ice caps on Mars (seen at the left) have been diminishing for three years in a row.

And, there is evidence that Pluto (you remember Pluto, used to be a planet but is now something called a dwarf planet) is also heating up. Of course, on Pluto, that won’t make much of a difference, considering how cold it is there and how far from the Sun it is.

So, Abdussamatov said that the warming we see on both Earth and Mars (and now, possibly Pluto), is the result of the increase in solar radiation. Yes, he concedes that human contributions to greenhouse gases certainly contributes to the warming, but the real villain here (if villain is the right word) is the Sun.

To be fair, there are many scientists who dismiss this idea. Colin Wilson, a planetary physicist at Oxford (England) University disagrees, first pointing out that Abdussamatov’s theory is at odds with mainstream scientific opinion (When has that ever bothered those of us inside the UFO community... Galileo’s theories were at odds with science in his time) and that a wobble in the Martian axis would account for the observations about the Martian ice cap.

Abdussamatov said that this increased solar output began to drop in the 1990s and expects it to bottom out around 2040. That will cause a steep cooling of the climate on Earth in about 15 to 20 years.

As I say, this is interesting, mostly because no one in the mainstream media has bothered to mention it much. The National Geographic website had a article about it, but, of course, you had to go in search of it. FOX News mentioned it for a day on the "crawl" at the bottom of the screen. I saw nothing else about this and freely admit that I could have easily missed it if any of the broadcast networks reported on it.

I did see a CNN program on which the anchor said that on his program they were operating under the assumption that global warming was real and that humans were the primary culprit in that warming. I’m not sure, journalistically, how he could state that, but it was his program and he could operate under any assumption he wanted.

But it did set me thinking about the recommendations to reduce human contributions to global warming and how we could change that. None of the recommendations were really life altering. Just little things we each could do and I thought, why not? If it improves the environment and reduces waste, why not?

So now you often will see me in the slow lane on the Interstate, driving about five miles under the posted speed limit. My car has a little computer that gives me the gas mileage and I see a real difference (of course the best difference I saw was about a seven-mile a gallon increase when there was a very strong tailwind). I try to do other things that would be helpful, not because I believe that we can alter the course of global warming but because they seem to be sound ideas that reduce waste.

What this means is that I believe that the cause of global warming is still unknown for certain. Maybe Abdussamatov is right and the real culprit is the Sun. Maybe he’s wrong and humans are responsible. Or maybe both camps are wrong and there is something else that causes it. Whatever the causes, it really doesn’t hurt for each of us to do our part and if we can’t affect global warming, at least we’re not doing anything to contribute to it.

Kal K. Korff Strikes Again

Well, I had hoped to have nothing more to say about Kal Korff but I have been swamped with emails from him over the last several days. I hadn’t thought I had said anything too controversial, just commenting on his commission in an organization that no one had heard of and a suggestion that his claim of a truly astonishingly high IQ might be more hyperbole than established fact. I’m not sure about the validity of a self administered IQ test... nor am I certain of the validity of any IQ test, but that’s something else.

In my original post, which contrary to what Korff claims, is not on Paul Kimball’s blog, I didn’t mention the self-evident contradiction in Korff’s claims. He said he was a member of this supersecret anti-terrorist organization called Special Secret Services S3 (as proof of his claims, Korff at left in uniform). If it is so secret, why is Korff promoting it on radio, television and the Internet. Wouldn’t you think that a secret organization would want to remain secret? Wouldn’t my suggestion that nobody every heard of them make them happy?

But, according to Korff, they were annoyed at me. I would have thought they would want to thank me for helping them to hide. Now, rather than a passing mention in my notes on Korff, I actually identify the organization which has made Korff a captain (and why only a captain? Why not a major or colonel or general?).

But here is another point. Korff has let me know that he, and his buddies in the media, and possibly an attorney or two, are going to subject me to a forensic audit of my work in the UFO field and then publish the results. I wonder why everything is now forensic... forensic psychology, forensic artists, forensic bath mat creators, but that is a question for another time.

Korff, and his alleged pals, are annoyed that I haven’t apologized for Frank Kaufmann. Hey, I thought exposing the guy was enough. I mean, sure, I thought he was telling me the truth, he gave me documents to prove he was who he said he was, showed me pictures, and promised to prove the truth when the time came. So, yes, I thought he was credible. When I asked Walter Haut (seen at the left and Kaufmann seen below) about Kaufmann, Walter told me that anything Kaufmann said was golden. Hell, it was Walter Haut who told me about him.

So, the moment I learned the truth, that Kaufmann had created documents, that we had copies of both the originals and the fakes, I told Mark Rodeghier of the J. Allen Hynek Center for UFO Studies that we needed to publish the results. No waiting around for an opportune moment. No dancing around the question, but to publish the results as fast as possible, even if they shed a bad light on me.

What that means is that I helped expose the witness that I once believed. What is the problem there? I corrected the inaccuracies just as soon as I learned the truth. Is there anyone in the UFO community who hasn’t believed a witness who later turned out to be lying to them?

Have I made other mistakes? Sure. I believed Don Schmitt was my friend and a credible investigator. I didn’t know he was telling people that I had been planted on him and that he suspected me of being a government agent. When some of his lies began to crash down, I defended him. The last straw for me was to learn that he had been telling people not to talk to me. That from my partner in investigation and this doesn’t even begin to cover the damage he has done to the Roswell case and UFO investigation.

Stan Friedman will tell you that I’m wrong about MJ-12, though I don’t think so. He’ll tell you that I’m wrong about Gerald Anderson, though it’s clear that Anderson was making it up as he went along otherwise there would be no understanding of his contradictory statements. He’ll tell you there was a crash on the Plains of San Agustin but won’t tell you that the diary kept by Barney Barnett’s wife contradicts this and Anderson.

But I have drifted away here. Kal Korff seems to believe that I have maligned him. He thinks that I should now be investigated. Hell, I’ve been waiting for someone to do just that. I heard Stan Friedman once ask friends if I have ever served on active duty as an intelligence officer. I told them it was the wrong question. What Stan wanted to know was if I had ever served on extended active duty as an intelligence officer. The answer is yes.

If we wanted to look at just one aspect of Kal Korff’s genius, all we have to do is look at his claim to have a 500 book deal arranged. I know of no author, Stephen King, J.K. Rowling (who might hold the world’s record for making the most money off a book) has anything like that. Just how in the hell could you write 500 books. If you wrote one a week, that would take you around ten years and that doesn’t give you much time to eat (or cook American meals for your friends in foreign countries... see www.UFOWatchdog.com), or sleep, or engage in secret activities with your super secret anti-terrorism pals. But, once again, I digress.

So, once again, I have managed to offend someone in the UFO community. I have done this before and will probably do it again. The only way to avoid it is to believe everyone and everything. Question nothing, no matter how dumb it sounds and while you’ll be treated fairly well inside ufology, those outside will probably think you’re an idiot.

Kal Korff

World hero, super-intelligent human, and exposer of fakers, Kal Korff (seen on the left) has brought up my name in conversation on a radio interview. Now I confess that I didn’t hear it and all I have is the report from a friend who mentioned it to me. Korff, according to him, said that I was claiming my Iraq service was more important than it was. He suggested that I was called to active duty because the Army didn’t have enough people and I was just filling in.

Well, Duh.

That’s the purpose of the Reserve Component of the miliary (here Reserve Component means both the Army Reserve and the National Guard). We train one weekend a month and two weeks a year to perform in roles to assist the Active Component. For example, the only water purification units in the Army are in the Reserve. Most of the Civil Affairs soldiers are part of the Reserve Component.

What this does is provide a trained reserve (hence the name Reserve Component) for the Army at a fraction of the cost of the Active Component. It calls on those soldiers, both officers and enlisted when it has specialized missions, or the Active Component is stretched thin. Sort of the situation that we have today. The Active Force deployed into lots of arenas with the Reserve Component picking up the slack. At one point a couple of years ago the majority of the Iowa National Guard was either in Iraq or Afghanistan.

The other comment, that my role in the war wasn’t as important as I claim it to be, confuses me. I’m not sure what I might have said anywhere in Korff’s hearing that would suggest such a thing. I was on the primary staff of a battalion which had its soldiers stretched from Mosul in the north to Kuwait in the south and from the Iranian border in the east to near Al Fallujah in the west. We preformed our mission to the satisfaction of the brigade commander and many of the soldiers were singled out for special commendation.

I am the only officer in the battalion to engage the enemy, but the gunfight probably resulted in fewer than 150 rounds expended on both sides. The LA police shot up more ammunition trying to subdue two bank robbers than we did in that fight. We did, that is the gunner in my Humvee and I, drive the terrorists from the field, which, of course was all that we needed to do. None of the soldiers with us was injured and we continued out of the kill zone just as training had taught us. None of the other vehicles were engaged.

Or maybe Korff is referring to the article that appeared in Soldier of Fortune about the Easter firefight just north of our battalion area (The Quick Reaction Force about fifteen feet in front of my position fire on an enemy position). Only one of our soldiers was injured. About a half dozen or so of the terrorists were killed and another dozen captured by the Special Forces. A couple of thousand rounds were expended in this fight.

But, again, thousands of other soldiers and Marines in Iraq have been more actively engaged with the enemy than anything I experienced in Iraq. I just don’t know what he means by his suggestion my service wasn’t as important as I have made it out to be.

This is not the first time that Korff and I have tangled. He believes that Roswell can best be explained by a weather balloon (okay a Project Mogul balloon) and to read his book, you’d think the theory was unique to him. Both Robert Todd and Karl Pflock had the idea earlier and I believe that Pflock gives the credit to Todd for originating the idea. Col. William Coleman floated (yeah, pun intended) the idea as early as 1988 (a tip of the hat to Brad Sparks for the clarification).

In his book (which I’m not going to name here because I have already given him enough publicity for his poorly researched and badly flawed work), he takes me to task for misleading the reading public and attacks my research abilities... Okay again, I believed Frank Kaufmann, but then so did others. Korff goes after my reporting on Air Force Brigadier General Arthur Exon in a way that suggests Korff’s claims of a superior intellect might be overblown. Greg Sandow, a somewhat disinterested third party reported on this on UFO UpDates, which can be accessed at:

www.virtuallystrange.net/ufo/updates/1997/may/m28-007.shtml.

But enough of this. My point is only to suggest that Korff’s attack might be more sour grapes than anything. He claims to be a captain in some organization that no one has ever heard of and complains about my service in the United States Army, an organization that can be found by searching the web. It is real and I can prove it. (As just a single example, here I am on the road from Kuwait to Baghdad.)

Those who are interested in more Kal Korff might want to take a look at Paul Kimball’s blog at www.redstarfilms.blogspot.com so they can read about his assault on Kimball.

With luck, this will be the last I have to say on the subject of Kal Korff. And yes, I really hold a commission in a real live military organization. I didn’t have to invent one to call myself captain (which, for those of you keeping score at home, no longer applies. I have been promoted).

National Geographics and UFOs

I was watching the National Geographic Channel the other day because the topic was on alien life and SETI. I was curious about how a "scientifically" oriented channel would deal with this slightly outside the mainstream of science topic and if they would even address UFOs.

They did.

And in what has to be among the shortest segments ever broadcast about the Roswell case, they dismissed it in about a minute and a half. They said that some believed that Roswell represented the crash of an alien craft, but the Air Force explained that it was actually a balloon with the then top secret Project Mogul and the drop of anthropomorphic dummies during tests of ejection systems some six to tn years after the completion of Mogul. They made it sound as if this was the final answer and that any thinking person would know it.

The problem as I see it, based on my years of research into the Roswell case is that they ignored evidence because it didn’t fit into their preconceived notions of the case. The Air Force said that they had the answer and the Air Force must be right. This was an "appeal to authority" meaning that we should except the answer because an authoritarian organization said it is so.

Now, I don’t care if you believe Roswell represents the crash of a spacecraft or not. I will say that one of the poorest answers for the case is saying it was a balloon, or a balloon array, and dummies that were dropped near Roswell a decade later. Let’s take a look at these ideas, especially Project Mogul.

First, we must accept the idea that Project Mogul was highly classified and therefore wouldn’t be known to those outside the small group conducting the tests and the Air Force officers overseeing the project. This, unfortunately, is not the case.

Mogul used off-the-shelf weather balloons. These would just like those launched four to six times a day by weather stations and weather officers all over the United States. There was nothing about the Mogul balloons that would make them difficult to identify and no reason that a reasonably competent person, whether a rancher living near Corona, New Mexico or an Air Intelligence Officer stationed at the air field would be fooled by them.

True, the Mogul array (seen to the left in flight) contained enough balloons and rawin radar detectors to make it unusual, it still was made of common place balloons and radar detectors. Mack Brazel who found the debris said that he had found weather observation balloons on two other occasions and if this was basically the same, there was no reason for him to become excited and report the balloons to the military.

Second, Charles Moore, one of the engineers on Project Mogul told me, personally, that members of his team had traveled to Roswell to confer with the base personnel. They wanted the military to help them recover their balloons and to help them track them. The officers told the "college boys" that they had more important things to do and couldn’t be bothered with wasting time on this. So, the "college boys" were left to their own devices, but only after they had told the officers at Roswell they would be launching balloon arrays. And not, some sixty years after that, Moore gets a little payback. He’ll show them what "college boys" can do.

Third, the CAA (forerunner to the FAA) required the Mogul engineers to post NOTAMs. These NO tices To Air Men alerted pilots that balloon arrays were being launched from the Alamogordo area. In other words, the times, dates, and locations of the launches were not classified, and were, in fact, published. Roswell, being a flying base, would receive these NOTAMs so that they would be aware of the balloon arrays.

And finally, in what might be the biggest blow to the Mogul explanation, two days after the newspapers reported the recovery of a flying saucer, newspapers reported on the balloons being launched from Alamogordo. There were even pictures of the balloon arrays (similar to that seen at the left being assembled). So, Mogul was so secret, or rather the equipment was so secret that pictures of it were published in newspapers around the country on July 10, 1947.

What this means is that there is little doubt that the rancher, Brazel, or the Air Intelligence Officer, Major Jesse Marcel, should have been able to identify the debris as a balloon if that’s what it was. When they didn’t, it means that the debris was something else.

Oh, you say, it was an array of balloons and multiple radar detectors so that both might be fooled. Let’s grant that point for a moment. I will counter with the interview conducted with retired Lieutenant Colonel (then a captain) Sheridan Cavitt )seen to the left) who accompanied Marcel out into the field where Brazel showed them the debris.

On May 24, 1994, Colonel Richard Weaver, who was "investigating" the Roswell case for the Air Force, interviewed Cavitt at his home. Cavitt told Weaver that he had been out to the site where the debris was found (confirming the recollections of Jesse Marcel and others who said Cavitt had gone out there) and that they took some of it back to the intelligence room.

Weaver then asked, "What did you think it was when you recovered it?"

Cavitt said, "I thought a weather balloon."

Weaver said, "O.K. (Air Force interpretation of how to spell "Okay"). Were you familiar with weather balloons at the time?"

And Cavitt said that he was.

Think about this. Cavitt went out there and recovered the remains of a balloon. He recognized what it was immediately. He wasn’t influenced by the "flying saucer" hysteria that was sweeping the base because he knew it was a weather balloon.

It seems to me that Weaver’s next question should have been, "Did you report this rather vital piece of intelligence to Marcel or Colonel Blanchard (who was base commander in 1947). But Weaver goes off on a tangent so we never learn why Cavitt didn’t tell anyone that it was a weather balloon at the time. Instead he sits back and lets the press release out telling the world they had a flying saucer.

As an aside, I will note here that Lewis "Bill" Rickett, who was the senior sergeant in the Counter-Intelligence Corps (CIC) office at Roswell with Cavitt, had told us that he went out to the site with Cavitt. He said that they went through a check point manned by Military Police who examined their identification.

Cavitt, in his interview with Weaver said, "There were no, as I understand, check points or anything like that (going through guards and that sort of garbage)."

So, we now have Cavitt in conflict with Rickett, just as we have Cavitt in conflict with Marcel. Of course, he was also in conflict with Brazel but he agreed with Charles Moore, who wasn’t involved in the Roswell recovery, whatever it might have been.

We do have some records for Project Mogul. The project engineers published their findings and in those publications were indications of what happened with each of the balloon flights. They were tracked, and when possible, the equipment was recovered. Every Mogul flight was recorded with a single exception.

Skeptics have focused their attention on Flight No. 4 which was launched on June 4, 1947. It was not included in any of the official documentation. In fact, there were no real indications about a flight four and that is why the skeptics focused on it.

Charles Moore attempted to learn why the numbered flights jumped from three to five. He communicated with Dr. Albert Crary’s widow, Crary being the project leader. Crary kept a personal diary and that might explain what happened to Flight No. 4.

According to the diary, the flight was to be made of a cluster of regular balloons and a sonobuoy or type of microphone. It was to be launched in conjunction with a rocket from White Sands. The purpose was to determine if the noise made by the launch and some explosions detonated on the ground would be detectable by the array. Mogul’s overall purpose was to place balloons at a constant level in the atmosphere as a way to monitor Soviet research into atomic weapons.

According the information available the rocket launch was scrubbed, meaning there was no flight and therefore nothing to Mogul to monitor. Crary’s diary for June 4 said, "Out to Tularosa Range and fired charges between 00 [midnight] and 06 this am. No balloon flight again on account of clouds."

That would seem to end the controversy right there but this is the Roswell case and nothing is ever quite this easy. The entry continues, "Flew regular sonobuoy mike up in cluster of balloons and had good luck on receiver on ground but poor on plane."

Moore, in a document he called "The New York University Balloon Flights During Early June, 1947," suggests that this flight was made up of a sonobuoy, a cluster of balloons and the radar targets. They now have all the material on them that could possibly account for the debris that Mack Brazel found. But, of course, that isn’t what the diary said and there is no indication that they attached the radar targets to this flight.

Further, there are no records of where it went or where it came down. Moore suggests that it was lost somewhere around Arabela, New Mexico and that he remembered this because the exotic sounding names of the place.

Using winds aloft data that I supplied to him, he worked out the probable path and believes that the balloons might well have come down on the Brazel ranch, but he isn’t completely sure. There is a wide range of precise calculations necessary to understand this, and it seems that a relatively minor change in the data at one or two points changes the outcome radically. In other words, there is no evidence that the balloons ever moved north of Arabela, no evidence that they came down on the Brazel ranch, and certainly no reason for the radar detectors (if they had been attached and the evidence suggests they weren’t) to explode as indicated by the descriptions of the debris by those who saw it.

Given all this information, there is very little reason to believe that Mogul was responsible for the debris Brazel found. Descriptions of it, supplied by Marcel, Bill Brazel (the son of Mack and who had found some small fragments himself), the Proctors (who saw a small piece of debris that Mack Brazel carried with him), and a dozen other witnesses, suggest something more extraordinary than the remains of a balloon that should have been readily identifiable to those who found it. If Cavitt could tell it was a balloon, then why couldn’t Brazel or Marcel.

Which leads us all back to the anthropomorphic dummies (seen at the left with Air Force testers) which the Air Force trotted out to explain the tales of the bodies. Interestingly, the Air Force wasn’t saying that bodies of some kind hadn’t been found, they were saying that the witnesses who reported bodies had mistaken these dummies for alien creatures and were mistaken about the year they were found.

I’m not going to take a lot of time with this because it doesn’t deserve a lot of time. The Air Force suggested that people who had seen the dummies had just been mistaken about the time frame and over the years had come to believe that these sightings of the dummies conformed to the UFO crash.

The problem here is that descriptions of the bodies bore no resemblance to the dummies. The test dummies were about six feet tall, had human looking faces, arms and legs. The bodies reported were small, no more than five feet tall, had facial features that could be described as resembling that of humans but were not. The eyes were too large, the nose too small, and the placement of the ears all wrong.

Now, as I said, I don’t care if you believe that Roswell was extraterrestrial or that there is some more mundane answer, but I will say that Mogul and anthropomorphic dummies (seen in the field at the left) is no longer a viable explanation. It ignores too many of the facts, introduces explanations that have no basis in reality, and suggests a grasping at any straw to answer the questions. These explanations fail to take into account too much information that can be corroborated and documented.

For those interested in more information, I have a number of books that can provide that information including the coming Roswell Revisited.

Kinross Revisited

We have talked about the F-89 that disappeared over Lake Superior in 1953. The legend has been that the aircraft was scrambled to chase a UFO, the blips of both the fighter and the UFO merged, and then the single blip left the scope. The fighter was never found...

Then, just last year (2006), a company announced that they may have found the missing jet on the bottom of the lake and offered photographs to prove it. If true, one UFO mystery had been solved. But then, Gord Heath wrote to UFO magazine in November 2006 reporting on his investigation. He posted the same to UFO UpDates in January 2007. Following is his letter.

Dear Editor,

I read your article on the alleged discovery of the missing F-89 in your November issue and was quite surprised to note that it contained no mention that this discovery is now widely believed to be a hoax. Also, contrary to the brief follow-up comments by Dirk Vander Ploeg in the December issue of UFO magazine, there seems to be nothing of the story which can be verified.

Many individuals have checked into this story and it seems that no one has yet been able to verify even the most basic information. I am sure that your readers would be interested to know the findings of the investigation by James Carrion, international director of MUFON into the claims of Adam Jimenez.I will briefly summarize the findings:

1) No one has yet been able to verify the existence of "Great Lakes Dive Company" (GLDC) which Jimenez claimed to be an incorporated company or LLC in the state of Michigan.

2) No one in the Great Lakes shipwreck searching community or dive community seems to have any knowledge of Great Lakes Dive Company as an organization actively involved in the searches they mentioned on their web site.

3) No one seems to have any basic information about Adam Jimenez to validate he is who he claims to be, such as an address or current phone number.

4) While the GLDC web site was operational, no photographs of team members, boats or sonar equipment were ever posted to the website to document their alleged discovery.

5) Some experts in the field of side scan sonar believe the alleged sonar images may be fakes.

6) The initial story quoted in an email that was forwarded to the UFO Updates list, appears to be faked as an Associated Press story from a Port Huron, Michigan publication.

It should be noted that Adam Jimenez claimed to have video recordings obtained from an ROV survey of the alleged F-89. He claimed that the tail code was visible in the video and that the canopy of the craft was intact, implying that the crew were still inside. Despite these claims, he never shared any of this evidence with any of the family of the missing pilot, Lt. Gene [most reports suggest his name was Felix] Moncla.

It is unfortunate that persisting questions surrounding the mysterious disappearance have largely been side-stepped in your coverage of what seems to be an elaborate hoax. I have spent many years researching this incident and my findings are published on the UFOBC website at www.ufobc.ca/kinross.

I am sure your readers will be quite interested to know that parts from a military jet aircraft were found in the bush near the eastern shore of Lake Superior back in October 1968. A photograph of the tail stabilizer is shown with an Ontario Provincial Police officer and USAF officer on the front page of the Sault Daily Star newspaper, accompanying articles about the discovery. It appears that the identity of the mystery jet was never released to the public and the Canadian government claims they have no file records of this discovery.

Were these parts from the missing F-89?The article in UFO Magazine also reprints a map which erroneously places the last position of the F-89 in the accident report as being at coordinates 45 degrees 00 minutes north at a location near Sturgeon Bay, Michigan. The actual coordinates are printed in several locations such as the Search and Rescue report prepared by the RCAF and in several telexes. All state the last coordinates were 48 degrees 00 minutes north and 86 degrees 49 minutes west, north of the US Canada border over Lake Superior.

In closing, I wish to bring to your attention the photograph which you published in your magazine of Lt. Moncla, contains no caption mentioning this photograph was provided to me by his sister, Leonie Shannon and his cousin, Carol Campbell. I don't know where you obtained the photograph but I know it has been published several times on the web since we first posted it in an article printed in the UFOBC quarterly and now posted on our web page devoted to the missing pilot http://www.ufobc.ca/kinross/persons/personsMonclaMain.htm I enjoyed reading many of the other articles in your November issue, but I couldn’t restrain myself from responding to your articles referring to the missing F-89.

Yours truly,

Gord Heath

UFOBC

Captain Lorenzo Kent Kimball and Roswell

Cruising through the blogsosphere the other day I found Paul Kimball’s comments about Captain Lorenzo Kent Kimball (no relation and seen on the left) and how some of us, Stan Friedman and me to be specific, have ignored his testimony. Well, we didn’t really ignore it, we knew about it, but thought that it added little to our understanding of the Roswell UFO case.

Kimball (the captain and not the blogger) was indeed assigned to the base hospital in Roswell as a Medical Supply Officer. That put him into the base hospital and he should have been aware of any unusual activity there in 1947 because he would have been in the center of it. Or so he would have us believe.

Instead, he wrote, "Most of the medical staff spent their time at the Officer’s Club swimming pool every afternoon after duty hours. The biggest excitement was the cut-throat hearts game in the BOQ and an intense bingo, bango bungo golf game at the local nine hole golf course for a nickel a point!! There was absolutely NO unusual activity on the Base..."

He also presents some facts about what Don Schmitt and I wrote about the crash, the alleged autopsy in the base hospital, and Jesse Johnson who was assigned as one of the doctors in 1947. Kimball wrote:

1. There was a physician named Jesse B. Johnson assigned to the Base Hospital. However, he was a 1st Lt., not a Major, and he was a radiologist, not a pathologist. He had no training as a pathologist and would have been the last member of the medical staff to have performed any autopsy on a human much less an alien. He is identified as a 1st Lt. in the 509th Yearbook.

2. After I learned of these assertions, I called Doctor Jack Comstock (seen at the left), who, as a Major, was the Hospital Commander in 1947, and in 1995 was living in retirement in Boulder, Colorado. I asked him if he recalled any such events occurring in July of 1947 and he said absolutely not. When I told him that Jesse B. was supposed to have conducted a preliminary autopsy on alien bodies, he had a hard time stopping laughing - his response was: PREPOSTEROUS!!

Kimball also takes us, meaning Schmitt and me, and Stan Friedman and Don Berliner, to task for identifying a two story brick building as the base hospital. Well, according to Glenn Dennis it was, and according to documentation, it was. The problem is that it was not built until after 1947, and that might give us a clue about what Kimball could have seen. In 1947, the base hospital was made up of a number of different, one story buildings clustered together in an nice neat, military formation. In other words, you could work in one building and not know what was happening in the others. That we all got this wrong is true, but it’s not as if we invented the information for the sake of the story.

And, here’s a bit of a problem for Kimball. In 1947, Jack Comstock was not the hospital commander. He was just one of the doctors. In 1947, the hospital commander was Lieutenant Colonel Harold Warne (seen at the left). A minor point I grant you, but, with Kimball writing the things he has, it would have been nice had he been right about this.

But let’s talk about Jesse Johnson. Here, I’m going to run into a little it of a problem and it’s going to seem as if I’m trying to shift blame, but I am tired of taking flack for mistakes that others made. I will point out here that Schmitt, because of his claimed background as a medical illustrator (a story I believed until I learned otherwise) did the background check on Johnson because it seemed a natural. He would know where to go and he supplied the information that we originally published about Johnson. Later, after I had found that some of the things Schmitt had reported were less than accurate, I decided to look the stuff up myself.

I learned, during 1947, First Lieutenant Jesse Johnson was assigned to the base hospital at the Roswell Army Air Field. There is no evidence that he played any role in the alleged autopsies of alien beings found near there in July 1947, though his name has been connected to it.

Information published suggested that Johnson, a pathologist in 1947, was called upon to perform, or assist in the performance of preliminary autopsies conducted at the base hospital. That information was based on two flawed tales. One of them was by Glenn Dennis, who claimed that he had known a nurse assigned to the base in 1947 and she told him about the autopsies.

The other assumption was that in 1947, Johnson was a pathologist. Using the source that Schmitt had used, The ABMS Compendium of Medical Specialists, I learned that in 1947, Johnson had just completed his medical training. He had no training as a pathologist in 1947 so there was no reason to suspect that he would have been brought in to assist in the autopsies.

In fact, the information available suggests that Johnson did, eventually train as a pathologist at the University of Texas Medical Branch in Galveston from 1948 to 1949. In other words, he did not have the training in 1947 but completed it after his military service. That he began the training so soon after his military service suggests an interest in it, but certainly doesn’t translate into participation in any alien autopsies.

An interview conducted with his wife in the early 1990s revealed nothing to suggest that Johnson was ever involved in the recovery of alien bodies, or the autopsy of them. She had no knowledge of any connection between her husband and the U.S. government. The fact he had once trained as a pathologist seems to have confused the issue. Dr. Johnson died in 1988.

Finally, Kimball wrote, "I got to know General Blanchard very well as an officer under his command at Roswell AAF and with the 7th Air Division. He was, as his record surely reflects, an outstanding officer, who was highly respected. According to Lt. Haut’s testimony about the event, Colonel Blanchard ordered him to issue a press release announcing that a "flying disk" have (sic) been recovered. While I am sure this is how Lt. Haut remembers it, I would argue that this [is] not the action that a responsible commander would have taken given the importance of such a discovery..."

Say what he will, the truth of the matter is that a news release was prepared and issued and in the absence of evidence to the contrary it must be concluded that Blanchard ordered it. There is no indication that Haut was reprimanded for the release, which certainly would have happened had he issued the release on his own. Kimball is speculating here with no foundation.

Kimball raised some good points but his conclusion that nothing happened because he saw nothing and no one he talked to had seen anything is flawed. Kimball’s attitude and his arrogance comes through in his writing. His information needs to be balanced against that from so many others who say differently.

And a final point to be made was that Kimball, while assigned to the hospital was not a doctor himself. He was a medical supply officer. His expertise in ordering equipment might be sought by the doctors and nurses, but in the matter of an alien autopsy and highly classified medical matters, he would be out of the loop.

More of the Best UFO Photographs

Although the reliability isn’t quite as high as the pictures taken in McMinnville, two shots taken in Phoenix do rank right up there. William A. Rhodes, a self-employed scientist living in Phoenix, reported that he had taken what might be considered the first good photographs of one of the flying discs. Rhodes said he had been on his way to his workshop at the rear of his house at the rear of his house when he heard a distinctive "whoosh" that he believed to be from a P-80 "Shooting Star" fighter jet. He grabbed his camera from the workshop bench and hurried to a small mount in his backyard. The object was circling in the east about a thousand feet in the air.

Rhodes sighted along the side of his camera and took his first photograph. He advanced the film, and then hesitated, thinking that he would wait for the object to get closer. Then, worried that it would disappear without coming closer, snapped the second picture, finishing the role.

Rhodes’ story, along with the pictures, appeared in the Phoenix newspaper, The Arizona Republic. In the article, reporter Robert C. Hanika, wrote, "Men long experienced in aircraft recognition studied both the print and the negative from which they were made, and declined to make a guess on what the flying object might be."

He also wrote, "The marked interest Rhodes has for all aircraft has led most persons who have been in contact with other observers of the 'flying discs' to believe the photographs are the first authentic photographs of the missiles, since Rhodes easily can identify practically any aircraft."
Rhodes said that the object appeared to be elliptical in shape and have a diameter of twenty to thirty feet. It appeared to be at 5000 feet when first seen and was traveling, according to Rhodes, at 400 to 600 miles an hour. It was gray which tended to blend with the overcast background of the sky.

The object had, according to Rhodes and a confidential report from the Project Blue Book files, "what appeared to be a cockpit canopy in the center which extended toward the back and beneath the object. The 'cockpit did not protrude from the surface but was clearly visible with the naked eye." There were no propellers or landing gear, but there did seem to be trails of turbulent air behind the trailing points of the object. Speculation was that there were jet engines of some kind located there. The craft moved silently, although Rhodes had said that a jet-like roar was what called his attention to it.

The news stories apparently alerted the military to Rhodes' sighting. Various investigations were launched. On July 14, 1947, Lynn C. Aldrich, a special agent for the Army's counterintelligence corps (CIC) in a memo for the record available in the Project Blue Book files wrote, "On 8 July 1947, this Agent obtained pictures of unidentifiable objects (Exhibits 1 and 2) from the managing editor of the Arizona Republic newspaper. The pictures were taken by Mr. William A. Rhodes... [of] Phoenix, Arizona, at sunset, on 7 July 1947."

Then, on August 29, according to a "Memorandum for the Officer in Charge," George Fugate, Jr., a special agent of the CIC and stationed at Fourth Air Force Headquarters, interviewed Rhodes in person. Fugate was accompanied by Special Agent Brower of the Phoenix FBI Office. This interview is important because of some of the confusion about location of the negatives and prints of the photographs that would develop later.

During the interview, Rhodes again told the story, suggesting that he thought, at first, it might have been the Navy's "Flying Flapjack" (seen at the left) which had been featured on the May 1947 cover of Mechanix Illustrated. He rejected the idea because he saw no propellers or landing gear. Research shows that the Navy built a single "Flapjack" and that it never flew outside the Bridgeport, Connecticut area.

At the end of Fugate's report, he wrote, "Mr. Rhodes stated that he developed the negatives himself. He still had the negative of the first photograph (Exhibit III), but he could not find the negative for the second photograph."

On February 19, 1948, Lewis C. Gust, the chief, Technical Project Officer, Intelligence Department (though the Project Blue Book files fail to identify the man or his organization beyond that), wrote what might be considered a preliminary report on the analysis of the photographs. "It is concluded that the image is of true photographic nature, and is not due to imperfections in the emulsion, or lack of development in the section in question. The image exhibits a 'tail' indicating the proper type of distortion due to the type of shutter used, the speed of the object and the fixed speed of the shutter. This trailing off conforms to the general information given in the report."

On May 11, 1948, Rhodes was again interviewed but this time by high-ranking people. Lieutenant Colonel James C. Beam, who worked with the head of intelligence at Wright field Colonel Howard McCoy, and Alfred C. Loedding, who was a civilian employee at AMC and part of Project Sign, traveled to Phoenix. In their official report of their trip, they wrote, "Although Mr. Rhodes is currently employed as a piano player in a night club, his primary interest is in a small but quite complete laboratory behind his home. According to his business card, this laboratory is called "Panoramic Research Laboratory and Mr. Rhodes is referred to as the 'Chief of Staff.' Mr. Rhodes appeared to be completely sincere and apparently is quite interested in scientific experiments."

During the interview with Beam and Loedding, Rhodes mentioned that he did not believe that what he had seen was wind blown debris. This is an obvious reference to Dr. Irving Langmuir's conclusion published in the "Project Grudge Report," that the object in the photographs could be "merely paper swept up by the winds."

In fact, that same Grudge Report noted, "In subsequent correspondence to the reporter of this incident, the observer refers to himself as Chief of Staff of Panoramic Research Laboratory, the letterhead of which lists photography among its specialities. Yet, the negative was carelessly cut and faultily developed. It is covered with streaks and over a period of six months, has faded very noticeably."

The AMC opinion in the Project Grudge report, which followed Langmuir's statement about the possibility of wind blown debris, was, "In view of the apparent character of the witness, the conclusion of Dr. Langmuir [that the photographs be discounted as paper swept up by the wind] seems entirely probably (sic)."

On June 5, 1952, now nearly five years after the pictures were taken, and before the massive publicity about UFOs was about to burst on the public consciousness, Colonel Arno H. Luehman, Deputy Director of Public Information wrote about "Declassifying Photographs of Unidentified Flying Objects." In the first paragraph of his letter, he wrote, "This office understands that two photographs were taken by Mr. William A. Rhodes of Phoenix, Arizona, and that these photographs were turned over to Fourth Air Force Intelligence in July of 1947. This office has been contacted by Mr. Rhodes who is requesting return of his original negatives."

The letter continued, "The two photographs were copied by the Photographic Records and Services Division of the Air Adjutant General's Office at this headquarters and are in a confidential file of Unidentified Missiles as A-34921AC and 34921AC."

But the important part of the document comes at the end. Aldrich wrote, "...On the morning of August 30, 1947, when Mr. Rhodes called at the Phoenix office [of the FBI] to deliver the negatives, they were accepted only after he was advised that they were being given to Mr. FUGATE, a representative of the Army Air Force Intelligence, United States Army, and that there was little, if any chance of his getting the negatives back. Mr. Rhodes turned them over to this office with the full understanding that they were being given to the Army and that he would not get them back."

On July 14, 1952, in still another letter, we learn that the pictures and negatives were turned over to Air Force intelligence representatives at Hamilton Field on August 30, 1947. In that document, they are attempting to trace the course of the pictures from Rhodes to the FBI to Army intelligence. What this suggests is that the Air Force wasn't sure of where the pictures and negatives were. They were attempting to shift the blame to others for the apparent loss of those pictures, including Rhodes himself.

That same July 14 document, written by Gilbert R. Levy, noted, "A background investigation was run on Rhodes, by OSI, for the benefit of AMC, which reflected Rhodes had created the name PANORAMIC RESEARCH LABORATORY, to impress people with his importance. He was reported to be a musician by trade, but had no steady job. Neighbors considered him to be an excellent neighbor, who caused no trouble, but judged him to be emotionally high strung, egotistical, and a genius in fundamentals of radio. He conducts no business through his ‘Laboratory,’ but reportedly devotes all his time to research."

What all this means is that Rhodes had surrendered his photographs and negatives to the government. And, although there is a suggestion that he knew where they were, that simply isn't borne out in the documents. Even the Air Force officers didn't know where the photographs were. That was why there were letters written from one office to another.

But, more importantly, there has been no real discussion about why the Air Force investigators labeled the case as a probable hoax. The discussion seemed to center around Rhodes' lifestyle. He didn't have a "real" job and had letterhead that labeled him as the chief of staff of his laboratory. None of that is a good reason for labeling the case a hoax. If that was all their evidence, then it is fairly weak.

There is, however, one page of analysis of the photographs offered by John A. Clinton. There is no clue, in the files, about Clinton. The analysis is not on a letterhead and there is nothing in the signature block to tell us anything about Clinton, his expertise, or why he was consulted about this particular case.

In the undated analysis of the photographs, Clinton wrote, "Preliminary analysis of the negative and prints leads me to doubt the story told by Mr. William A. Rhodes. Judging from the dimensions, the negative was exposed in a simple camera of the box type, which usually has a fixed focus (about ten feet), fixed shutter speed (about 1/25 of a second) and a simple lens of the Meniscus type. Because of the above mentioned facts, it is unreasonable to assume that sharp outlines such as appears on the negative, could be secured from an object at 2,000 feet, traveling 400 to 600 mph. Furthermore, according to the story the object (flying craft) was painted gray to blend in with the clouds. But, even if the object would be painted jet black, under the circumstances described, to obtain a contrast such as appears on the negative is also very doubtful. On all the prints, excepting the print marked "exhibit A", judging from the outlines, the object has a rotating motion (revolves around its center) instead of a forward motion, contracting the version stated by Mr. Rhodes."

And that's all of the negative analysis of the photograph. Clinton, whoever he is, claimed the story told by Rhodes to be in conflict with that shown on the photographs. He assumed that the object is rotating based on something he saw on the prints. Besides, Rhodes talked of the craft circling east of his house, moving north to south when he first saw it. This seemed to be an explanation for the conclusion drawn by Clinton that might suggest the object is rotating.

More important are the suggestions about the limitations of the camera used and the sharpness of the photographs obtained. Of course, if Rhodes, for whatever reason, overestimated the distance and the speed, then those problems might be resolved.

By 1952, when Rhodes was trying to get the pictures back, Air Force investigators, including the then Captain Dewey Fournet suggested in a telephone conversation with the then Lieutenant Ed Ruppelt, that "There is no information available as to whether or not Rhodes ever sent his negatives to the Air Force or whether he just sent prints. We do have some rather poor quality prints of the object. As you know, we have concluded that these photos were probably not authentic. If seems as if Mr. Rhodes attempted to get on the 'picture selling bandwagon' and if he can prove he sent the negatives to ATIC or to the Air Force and they were never returned, it may lead to a touchy situation."

So now, after all this, Rhodes' photographs are going to be rejected because he wanted to sell them. Five years after the fact, without a single clue that such was the case, the Air Force rejected the photographs because Rhodes "may" want to sell them. There is no evidence anywhere that Rhodes ever sold the photographs nor is there any information in the Project Blue Book files to confirmed he made a dime from the pictures.

There is one disturbing thing about the case but is not evident in the Blue Book file. In the mid-1960s, Dr. James E. McDonald corresponded with Rhodes about his case. McDonald wrote to Richard Hall, of NICAP (and later of the Fund for UFO Research), on February 18, 1967 that "I did a lot of checking on Rhodes degrees, because there seemed something odd about an honorary Ph D based on the kind of work I could imagine him doing. Columbia said no record of any such degree. Geo. Washington said no record of a BA ever given to Rhodes in the period I specified. So I made a trip up there in December and spent an hour or so with him. Devoted most of my querying to the matter of the degree and his associations with inventory (sic), Lee DeForrest... He [Rhodes] showed me a photo-miniature in plastic of the alleged Columbia degree, and he said he had the original somewhere in his files but did not show it to me... As I kept going over the thing he finally volunteered the remark that he, himself, had checked with Columbia about a year after DeForrest presented him with the certificate, found no record of it, confronted DeForrest with the information, and was non-plussed by D F putting his arm over his shoulder and saying something to the effect, that, 'Well, my boy that's the way those things happen sometimes,' and saying no more about it... But the fact that he lists himself in the Phoenix phonebook as Dr. Wm Rhodes in the face of that history constitues (sic) a cloud that would be impossible to overlook. Everything else checks out solidly in his story."

There isn't much else to be said about the case. The Air Force eventually removed the possible from in front of hoax and listed it as "Other (Hoax)." They had no other explanation for it and too often, when they could find no plausible explanation, especially in cases of physical evidence such as this, they labeled it as a hoax. As we've seen, there simply is no justification for the label. Rhodes just fit no easy profiles so it was easy to label him an eccentric and his case as a hoax.

But the real facts that remain is that no one ever showed that Rhodes tale of seeing the craft was not as he described it. Analysis of the photographs left a great deal to be desired but there was nothing in the photos that suggested hoax.

Among the Best of the UFO Photographs

Let’s take care of a little business here. In the past I have been asked some questions and I think it’s time to deal with, at the very least, one of them. Paul Kimball, among others, wanted to know if there were any UFO photographs that I accepted as authentic. The answer should have been clear because I had posted an article that dealt with the pictures taken in Lubbock, Texas, in 1951 by Carl Hart, Jr. I thought I had made it clear that I believed the pictures showed something anomalous. There are but two answers for the Hart photographs. They are either genuine or they are faked. I don’t believe them to be faked.

Before I go further, I will say one thing. In today’s world it is so easy to fake photographs and video. There are so many programs available that allow for the manipulation of photographs and video tape and so few that allow us to spot th fakes, that nearly anyone can create a realistic picture. And that means that the pictures I’m going to point to were taken before the coming of computers, photoshop, digital cameras and digital recorders.

I believe that the best of the pictures (and this is my own opinion and not meant to be taken as the gospel) are the ones taken in McMinnville, Oregon in 1950. Paul Trent and his wife spotted an object in the evening, ran inside to get their camera and took two pictures of the UFO. Skeptics will tell you that the pictures were not taken in the evening as the Trents claimed, but in the morning and if they lied about that, what else have they lied about?

But the truth is that the Trents were not overly sophisticated people, they were using a rather basic camera, and no real evidence of a hoax has been found. The argument about the time of day is based on shadows under the eves on the garage which suggests a sun angle consistent with a morning picture. Bruce Maccabbe, a Navy physicist, said that the shadow is the result of "random light scattering" and is not consistent with a sun produce shadow. He believes the Trents on this and I confess I find no real reason to fault their story or Maccabee’s analysis.

If the object on the pictures is what it looks like, there really is no explanation for the pictures. A large circular object hovering over the ground suggests a foreign technology superior to ours, or, in other words, something extraterrestrial. It looks like nothing in the aviation inventory in the 1950s and you’d be hard pressed to find anything like it today. Those who had performed computer analysis on the pictures have failed to find evidence of a hoax, such as string holding up the craft.

The only place that th photographs are called a hoax is in the debunker camp and they do that because they have no other explanation. While the pictures do not prove the extraterrestrial case, they certainly can lead in that direction.

Colonel Steve Wilson

There have been so many people coming forward with claims of inside knowledge about UFOs that it is becoming difficult to separate the truth from the fiction. When we find someone whose claims do not match the documented background, we are told that the person’s records have been changed or erased to invalidate their claims. I always find this silly because there is no way the government, no matter how they tried, could get all the records altered and the files lost on the scale claimed.

For example, there are some out there in Cyberspace who have been suggesting that my claims of a recent tour in Iraq and claim of being a member of the U.S. Army now (meaning the National Guard) are some of the same sort of embellishment. They have no proof that I have made up these facts, but they don’t like some of the conclusions I have drawn about their favorite cases or witnesses. They speculate without foundation.

While I refuse to place, on the Internet, documents that would prove my point, I have no real trouble putting up pictures (as seen on the left). Sure, I know that pictures can be easily faked in today’s world, and I’m sure that some of these critics will delight in pointing out how these pictures have been faked, but the truth is, I spent about 11 months in the Iraqi Theater, I have a couple of a thousand pictures I took and there are several hundred soldiers who saw me there. Dozens saw me on a daily basis.

In fact, for those interested, I suggest looking at the February 2005 issue of Soldier of Fortune magazine for some confirmation of my tour in Iraq.

The point here is that the critics can say what they want and rather than say I don’t care what they say and ignore the criticism, I offer some evidence to the contrary. There are others whose stories simply don’t check out. Just recently I came across the story of Colonel Steve Wilson who had an interesting story about his insider status. He seemed to know who made up the Majestic-12 committee in the 1990s, he was the commander of Project Pounce, which had the mission of recovering UFO crash debris, and he had a long, impressive military career. Wilson died of cancer in 1997. Some have suggested his death was mysterious and have hinted that we know that cancer is one of the ways "THEY" get rid of those who are causing them trouble.

According to Dr. Richard Boylan as reprinted on a couple of different web sites, "Steve Wilson was born in the 1930s and spent five years in a state orphanage. In order to escape the savage beatings there, he ran away. He always dreamed of being a pilot. Befriend by a prostitute with the proverbial ‘heart of gold’, this tall 13-year-old was accepted into the Air Force, when his newfound mother stated he was 16 and signed for him to enlist."

First, to nitpick, it would have been the Army Air Forces in 1946 when Wilson joined. I have heard of cases of boys 15 or 16 joining the Army by using the birth certificate of a brother or a cousin, but I know of no cases of a 13-year-old being able to join the Army. In 1946, with the war ended, there was no longer the tremendous need for soldiers and someone who didn’t have the proper documentation wouldn’t have been allowed to join. He would have needed, not only a parental signature, he would have needed the proper documents. This idea is just not quite believable.

Boylan then wrote, "Starting out as a private, he worked hard to advance. He took U.S. Armed Forces Institute courses, earned his high school diploma and then the equivalent of a two-year college degree. Simultaneously he studied at Aircraft Mechanic School and became a certified mechanic.

"Finally getting his chance, Wilson went to flight school, emerged as a fighter pilot and eventually found his way to Korea. He saw a fellow pilot shot down. Searching for him, Wilson heard a telepathic cry for help. He spotted a clearing with enough room to land and set his plane down. He taxied to where the other pilot’s lane was ‘wedged under some trees.’ Wilson jumped out, pulled the injured pilot from the wreckage and dragged him back to the aircraft."

According to Wilson (as filtered through Boylan), "I threw the radio gear out to make room for him. With me sitting on his lap, I taxied out and to the end of the clearing. Swinging around, I was there was very little room for a take-off . . . I held the brakes, gunned the engine to the breaking point, let go of the brakes and rocketed across the clearing. The minute I felt myself off the ground, I began to raise the wheels. The enemy broke cover ahead of me and began firing. I passed overhead, and heard the crunch and ripping of metal as I left me wheels in the trees. My plane became hard to manage with the undercarriage ripped away . . . I finally made it back to base . . . I felt a jolt as my plane skidded down the side of the runway and came to a halt . . . "

I’m not sure where to begin with this story. There is a Medal of Honor winner, Major Bernard Fisher, who rescued a downed fellow flyer in a similar fashion, but he landed on a shot up air strip next to a Special Forces camp and was flying an A-1E Skyraider. Wilson suggested he landed in an open field in a Sabre jet and I just don’t believe there would have been room in the cockpit for two and I don’t know what radio equipment he could have jettisoned to make room. I also believe that if he had caught his wheels in the trees on take off he would have crashed the aircraft. This story just doesn’t make any sense the way it is told, and, of course, there is no record of it anywhere.

Boylan notes that he was given the Distinguished Service Award for gallantry . . . but there is no such award and if we believe Boylan just botched the name of the award, then it means he received the Distinguished Service Cross (which, had he done what he said, wouldn’t have been much of a stretch). But there is no record of the award on the web sites that track that sort of thing. On the site I checked, they make it clear they are fairly certain they have all the awards of the Distinguished Service Cross, but it is possible they might have missed one, especially those late in the war. The real point is that there is no Distinguished Service Award for gallantry and no one who won the Distinguished Service Cross doing what Wilson claimed in Korea . . . Just a note for those who will complain, there apparently was no Air Force Cross during the Korean War and no indication that anyone has ever been awarded one for Korea.

Boyan, and other web sites provided "Data from Col Wilson’s DoD 214 discharge papers."

Which in the 1960s, 70s and 80s were easy to forge with a typewriter, a bottle of white out, and a copy machine. I have seen no copies of his DD 214, so I don’t know what it does and doesn’t say. In fact, there are many who claim to have seen it and who have said they were obligated to keep it to themselves while Wilson was alive. Now that he is dead, it’s time to put the document out so that it can be properly examined.

These documents give his date of birth as April 5, 1933 and even have an Air Force serial number. According to Boylan and others, Wilson served for 40 years and 19 days. They claim that he had seven re-enlistments.

This isn’t quite right. Very few people remain on active duty for forty years. Some generals, such as MacArthur have served longer, and many officers were recalled for World War II, but rarely anyone below brigadier general have served that long.

The regulation as it reads today for colonels says, "Each officer in the grade of colonel shall be retired on the fifth university of the date of his or her appointment in that grade or on the 30th day after completion of 30 years of service, whichever is later."

This seems to close the door for forty years of service. The regulation says thirty years of service, not necessarily as an officer, so that time as an enlisted man would count against him, in this case. He would have had to be promoted to colonel in his 35th year of service, but he would have been mandatorily retired prior to that because, for lieutenant colonel, the regulation kicks in at 28 years of service. So, Wilson couldn’t, under normal circumstances, have remained in the military for forty years and nineteen days.

Under the heading of medals, we see a number of awards to him. According to Boylan and others, it says he received two distinguished flying medals. I confess that I don’t know what these are . . . Boylan, at one point in his listing mentions two Distinguished Flying Crosses and a Distinguished Service Medal. I suppose that those writing the lists could have confused the two decorations.

The list says he had 13 Good Conduct Medals. Here is a major error which suggests that whoever created the original story (in this case Wilson himself) didn’t know that the Good Conduct Medal is NOT awarded to officers. Yes, I know that some officers have them. I have one myself, but I received for service in the enlisted grades and not as an officer. For Wilson to have thirteen, he would have had to have 39 years of service . . . which seems to corroborate his story of forty years. Someone knew that the Good Conduct Medal is given for three years of service, so that simply calculated the number. They didn’t know that as an officer, Wilson was ineligible.

The list also gives him one National Defense Service Medal (which, BTW, is the correct name of the award) but he should have had two, one for Korea and one for Vietnam. These are given to anyone serving during a specific period (like 1 Jan 61 to 14 Aug 74 for Vietnam).

They also claim he was a POW from 12/07/50 to 01/08/51, or just a little more than a month. He escaped, killing two guards and was on the run for 23 days before he managed to get back to friendly lines.

Great story except, I found a couple of comprehensive listings of POWs from the Korean War and Wilson’s name does not appear. Once again, there is a chance that he was somehow overlooked, but given everything I know about this, I doubt it.

Now I know that records are sometimes incomplete. I have spent years trying to get my records up to date and have failed. There are things missing from them so that a discrepancy between what someone says and the record isn’t, necessarily, a make or break deal. With Wilson, however, it’s not only that records don’t exist, but that some of the things he claimed were contradicted by the records, regulations and rules. He just couldn’t have joined the Air Force (okay, Army Air Forces) at 13 and he couldn’t have served for more than 40 years. He took stories from science fiction movies and from the exploits of others and used them as his own. If you are among those who believe that MJ-12 is a hoax, then his claim of working with them is another indication of his fraud.

So, once again, we had an "insider" blowing the whistle on the great UFO cover up, but we have nothing in the way of records, documents or corroboration for this tale. I believe that we must reject it, as we do so many others in a similar circumstance . . . at least until someone can provide some proof these stories are true.