Sighting Report - November 17, 1975

On November 17, 1975, two college students, driving near the Palisades-Kepler State Park outside of Cedar Rapids, Iowa, spotted a "star-like" object in the southwestern sky. Both Suzanne Erenberger and Dave Vardeman watched as the object slowly descended (as illustrated in the drawing at the left). Vardeman then pulled onto a gravel road, and both got out of the car.

According to Erenberger, first interviewed within hours of the sighting, the object moved slowly, lost some altitude and a red light appeared under it. She said, "We watched it come down and as it hit about one to two hundred feet, this bright, white light came on.... There was a big red light on the bottom...."

Interviewed by a reporter for the Cedar Rapids Gazette two days after the sighting, she said, "We were very close to it, maybe about thirty feet away and it was about twenty-five feet off the ground.... It looked like it, or at least the top part, was made of glass."

When I interviewed Erenberger about ten days after the event, she told me that there had been a very bright, very intense light that was glowing inside the craft. Erenberger thought that the light came from some kind of cockpit and she thought that she could see two shapes behind the light. These were dark shapes of a torso with a head but with no sign of arms or legs and certainly no facial features.

Erenberger said, "We could see it quite well." She said that the craft was disk shaped, with a huge glass dome and about thirty feet in diameter. The UFO stayed close to the ground, and finally disappeared behind some trees, suggesting to her that it might be landing.

As the first object disappeared, according to Erenberger, a second began the same, strange descent. It was farther away and she couldn’t see the details as well. After it reached the ground and disappeared, a third, similar object, began its descent. While this was happening, she was sure that she could see another dozen or so lights in the sky above them, all looking as if they were waiting their turn to descend.

All of this frightened both Erenberger (seen at left at th location of her sighting) and Vardeman. They returned to the car and drove into nearby Mount Vernon. They called the police, and an officer accompanied them back to the site. Although Erenberger thought she could see a number of the lights still hovering in the sky, the officer thought they were just stars. He didn’t see anything strange.

The chief of the Mount Vernon police, although unsure of what Erenberger or Vardeman had seen, believed they had seen something frightening. Erenberger, according to the police chief, was terrified, nearly hysterical. He joke with her, trying to calm her down. He did not believe, at the time, that either witness was lying or participating in a hoax.

The chief said that checks at the local airports revealed there were no aircraft in the area. He did find that a smoky fire was burning in the field where the UFOs were supposed to have landed, or over which they had disappeared and he wondered if Erenberger and Vardeman might have seen lights reflecting off the smoke.

Erenberger also talked to the Cedar Rapids police, who told her that the airport had no reported traffic at the time of the sighting. She was also told that there was no meteor activity that might explain what she had seen.

Erenberger told reporters that she was upset by the attitude of the police. She said, "It really upset me because they took it so lightly. I was really afraid, too, and told them, ‘Hey, look, this thing is real. We know what we saw.’"

Erenberger and Vardeman weren’t the only ones to see something strange that night. Richard Manson, a young man who was a member of the local squadron of the Civil Air Patrol, told me that he had seen the same thing. He said that as he was driving home from Mount Vernon, he noticed a bright red light. He thought there might be a bright blue light on top of the object. He said that the UFO appeared in the south and drifted across the highway to the north. He lost sight of it and didn’t stop to look for it. He said that he would never have reported the sighting had it not been for the news broadcasts carrying Erenberger’s story.

Mount Vernon police also said that about an hour after Erenberger and Vardeman made their reports, two others called to say they had seen some type of strange object. The police didn’t bother to take the names of the additional witnesses and I was not able to find them.

This sighting is unremarkable. Yes, there were multiple witnesses, and there was a report of either a landing or a close approach to the ground, and there was the description of two somewhat vague beings seen. It would probably be relegated to the unidentified file, if not for a couple of important points. This is what turns this into an important case.

During the investigation, I was able to obtain several drawings, and copies of the interviews that were given by Erenberger. The first came within hour or so of the sighting, the second two days later and the last about a week or ten days later. In other words, I have an evolution of the testimony given by Erenberger over the space of about two weeks.

One of the first things I did, after hearing the news reports, reading the various available statements, and interviewing Erenberger, to hear her tell the tale, was to find the other main witness. Almost the first thing that he told me was that he believed that the media handling of the report was irresponsible. He said that the TV reporters had no interest in talking to him and he made it sound as if they actually attempted to avoid him.

But, he also said that he had only seen lights in the distance and nothing else. He said that he had seen no shape behind the lights and that he thought the pictures, of the domed craft, and of the alien shapes drawn by Erenberger were "ridiculous." The one thing that he said that might be of most importance was that "She remembered more than I do."

That was the critical point of this case. "She remembered more than I do." She has a story that is certainly much more interesting because it involves alien creatures, and if not a landing, certainly a close approach to the ground. But now we have two witnesses, who were riding together on the night of the sighting, who apparently did not discuss the case between them after the event, and who have two very distinct, almost mutually exclusive stories. How do we reconcile these differences?

That’s easy, we go back to the original statements and the original descriptions. On the night of the sighting, both talked of lights seen in the distance, lights that seemed to float to the ground, and that disappeared behind the trees. Two days later Erenberger was talking about a domed disk that had a glassed in cockpit (seen on the left). And just days after that, she was telling people that she had seen humanoid shapes behind the lights. It is clear that her story evolved. She was not consciously inventing details, and just as clearly, she believed that she remembered all the new details, swearing to all, "Hey, look, this thing is real. We know what we saw."

On the night of the sighting, Erenberger and Vardeman were interviewed by the Mount Vernon police. They made a sketch that not only contained the geographical details from the location of the sighting, but also a representation of the objects they had seen. On that sketch, the UFOs were represented by star-shaped objects with a point under them to show the bright light. There was no indication on that drawing to suggest that there had been a disk shape behind the lights, and certainly no indication of any alien creatures.

Erenberger was next interviewed for a high school newspaper by Wade Wagner. Erenberger gave him a sketch, this one showing a disk-shaped object with a big light on the bottom, a row of flashing lights around the lower edge, and large glass-topped area. The drawing was much more detailed than the original.

Finally, I had the opportunity to interview Erenberger. She gave me a sketch (seen on the left)as well. It resembled, to a fairly fine degree, the one that she had given to Wagner. The major difference is that she had added two shapes that represented the flight crew, as she remembered them.

The term that fits here is confabulation. Psychological texts define it as a "filling" in of memory, often associated with the black-outs that come from heavy drinking. This does not mean that Erenberger had been drinking, only that her mind had filled in details for her. She truly remembered seeing the disk with creatures inside it, though that was not what she reported on the very first night.

What happened to Erenberger is not all that uncommon, even with events that are considered "traumatic", and therefore, fixed in memory. Ulric Neisser, who was teaching at Emory University when the space shuttle Challenger exploded in 1986, realized that he had a perfect opportunity to study these sorts of "flashbulb" memories. The day after the disaster, he gave the students in his freshmen psychology class a short questionnaire about the events. He asked them where they were when they heard and how they had heard and other such questions. He then filed the questionnaires for three years.

The students, when they were seniors, were given the same questionnaire about Challenger. He added an additional question, which was about the accuracy of their memories. According to the results provided by Neisser and graduate assistant Nicole Harsh, a quarter of the students didn’t have a single memory that was accurate. In one case, a student said that he had been at home, with his parents, when he heard, though the questionnaire, prepared the day after the explosion, revealed that he had been in class when he learned of the disaster.

More important, however, was the reaction of the students to the proof that their memories were inaccurate. None disputed the accuracy of the statements they had made the day after the event, but one student, when confronted by the discrepancy between what she had written just hours after the explosion and with what she remembered three years later, said, "I still remember everything happening the way I told you. I can’t help it." She was defending the memories that were clearly an invention in her own mind.

This doesn’t mean that all memories are flawed. The rest of the students produced results ranging from a hundred percent agreement, to a point were there were some minor problems, on down to those who had no accurate memories. This suggests that when interviewing witnesses, just days after an event, the memories might not be wholly accurate. The evolution of Erenberger’s tale shows just how quickly these events can become clouded.

This suggests that it is important to talk to all the witnesses about the sighting. Such interviews can provide clues about what had actually happened rather than just what the witnesses remember. Had I only interviewed Erenberger, I might have believed that this was a close encounter of the third kind. In reality, I believe that the case can be solved.

Just days after the event, I drove out to the area and sat in my car looking in the same direction that Erenberger and Vardeman had been facing. Contrary to what the police in both Mount Vernon and Cedar Rapids reported, I did see aircraft in the area, apparently landing at the Cedar Rapids Municipal Airport. I saw the airplanes in the distance, I saw the bright red light, and I saw a sudden bright white light as the landing lights were turned on. I watched as the objects drifted down, and I saw them disappear behind the trees.

What the airport had told the police is that there had been no regularly scheduled flights into the airport on the night of the sighting. That didn’t mean that the airport was not open and it did not mean that private aircraft weren’t landing. In fact, it didn’t even mean that cargo flights, using multiple engine aircraft hadn’t been landing. It meant that there were no commercial passenger planes landing.

With the wind blowing away from the witnesses, there was no sound to the aircraft. They looked like distant lights, drifting silently through the sky. It was clear to me, based on the original descriptions, and on what I had seen, that this was a case of mistaken identity. The witnesses had watched the traffic at the airport.

Manson, a member of the Civil Air Patrol should have been familiar with aircraft and the Cedar Rapids airport. When I talked to him, it was clear that he had only the vaguest sense of what he had seen, and was basing his description, not on that observation, but on what had been reported in the newspaper. His drawing of the object (seen at the left) didn’t resemble that given by Erenberger, and certainly didn’t match that suggested by Vardeman. His sighting was clearly inspired by those others.

Again, I don’t believe that he was lying, or that he was seeking the spotlight. He was just trying to help with the investigation. And finally, based on the documentation that we were able to find, it turned out that he hadn’t even been on the road on the night of the sighting. His experience had taken place a day or two earlier.

The lesson, however, was that even when a witness reports a metallic, structured craft with great detail, that description can be a creation of the mind. Here, a point of light in the distance was turned into a spacecraft with a crew. Three descriptions were gathered, and all three were at odds. Even the descriptions given by Erenberger changed as time passed, distorting the facts, but providing an exciting story of alien visitation.

To learn what was actually seen, and to determine what had happened, it was necessary to interview everyone who had claimed some involvement. It was necessary to examine the scene because that provided clues about the reality of the sighting. Finally, it was necessary to compare the statements made at the time of the sighting with those made just days later. By investigating all aspects of the case, it was possible to remove the sighting from the "unidentified" file, into the "solved as an aircraft" file.

Probably the most important lesson here was that none of the witnesses told a lie. All reported as accurately as possible what he or she had seen. Unfortunately, some of the statements made just days after the event turned out to be inaccurate. Without the complete notes, we all would have been fooled.

Major Jesse Marcel, Sr.

You might say that the whole Roswell case began with Major Jesse Marcel, who, in July 1947, was the air intelligence officer of the 509th Bomb Group at the Roswell Army Air Field. It was Marcel who told the world that he had picked up pieces of a flying saucer while he was stationed there. Strange metallic debris scattered over a large area. Metal that was thin and tough, that resisted repeated blows from a sledgehammer, thin foil-like material that wouldn’t burn, and slender I-beams, not much larger than the supports of a kite but that couldn’t be broken.

Marcel seemed like a sincere man who was relating to UFO researchers, reporters, and even college students, what he had seen on that hot, July day. His conclusion was that he had found something that came to Earth but that had not been built on Earth. In other words, he thought it was something of extraterrestrial manufacture.

Since that time, Marcel’s credibility has been attacked by those in the skeptical community, suggesting that he was mistaken... or that he was incompetent... or that he was a liar trying to improve his reputation because of his claim he had found a flying saucer was quickly shown by a higher headquarters to be a weather balloon.

Much of the attack rests on an interview that Bob Pratt, the late reporter from the National Enquirer conducted. Pratt was a serious reporter who chased flying saucers like the rest of us and who tried to get the facts of a case before reporting them. Regardless of the publication for which he worked, he did solid research and many UFO investigators take his word as the truth.

Pratt was kind enough to share his transcript of the Marcel interview with many of us. It is a sort of stream of consciousness transcript with notes added here and there and points where it is difficult to understand the exact meaning.

The easiest example of this is where Marcel tells Pratt he have been shot down during the Second World War. Pratt asked if everyone survived and Marcel said, "All but one crashed into a mountain."

That seems to suggest that everyone but one other crashed into the mountain and were killed. Of course, if I insert a comma, it now reads, "All, but one crashed into a mountain." That suggests that everyone but one man survived.

In the Pratt interview it says (reproduced as Pratt typed it), "I got shot down one time, my third mission, out of Port Moresby (everyone survive) all but one crashed into a mountain."

I asked Pratt if he had the tape so that we could hear Marcel make the comment and decide exactly what he meant but Pratt said he didn’t. They used the tapes over and over, so the actual words were lost. We can’t hear the inflection so we don’t know exactly what Marcel said. Pratt probably got it right... but it points out how important punctuation can be. The comma alters the meaning.

But that isn’t really the problem with this interview. It is the other things that Marcel said during that have taken on importance. In a few cases, this is the only time that he made some of the claims and I have to wonder about it. Some of them can be easily understood in the context of a rapidly expanding Army at the beginning of World War II but some of it is quite disturbing.

He said, according to Pratt, "Entered the US Army Air Force in April 1942; was an aide to Hap Arnold..."

Karl Pflock, in his anti-Roswell book, noted that Marcel’s record precluded this, but Karl isn’t quite right. Looking at Marcel’s assignments, we see a period of about two months in which Marcel was waiting for a school date, not an uncommon experience in the Army. During those periods, a soldier is often given a temporary assignment so that he’s not wasting the Army’s money. So, during that time, Marcel could have worked as an aide for Hap Arnold and it wouldn’t be reflected in his record. It would just be a job he filled in at until he could go to school.

I was a general’s aide for about a month back in 1976. Although assigned to the unit as a Public Affairs Officer, when the general’s aide went on leave, I was asked to fill in. So, my record does not reflect that period, but I did do it. Marcel’s claim of having been an aide to Hap Arnold could easily be something similar and in the grand scheme of things, not all that important.

Yeah, I would be happier if we could document this, but again, the point is trivial and unimportant. He could have served as an aide until his school date rolled around. He had to be doing something.

In keeping with this, Pratt asked Marcel about combat missions and Marcel said, "I had a total of 468 hours of combat time... was intelligence officer for a bomb wing, flew as pilot, waist gunner and bombardier at different times...:

Pflock and others point out there is nothing in Marcel’s record to suggest he was a pilot, waist gunner or bombardier. And here again we have to look at the words. He didn’t say he was those things, only that he had flown as them, meaning, I suspect, that he got flying time in the right seat as a pilot, and as a waist gunner and as a bombardier.

This is not unheard of in Army Aviation. I was a helicopter pilot in Vietnam and depending on the mission, we sometimes allowed the crew chief to fly as the co-pilot, giving him a little bootleg stick time. I flew as a doorgunner a couple of times. So Marcel could have flown in those positions without being "rated" in them.

In the long run, this is a relatively trivial point as well, and shouldn’t really color our thinking about Marcel. No, there are other things that dominate the landscape. Important things.

According to Pratt, and here I’m going to try to reproduce the transcript as Pratt did so that the areas of confusion can be seen.

Q– 3000 hrs pilot (right) 8000 hrs flying time (medals) I have five air medals because I shot down 5 enemy aircraft in combat (from B24) yes. from waist gun of a B24 in south pacific. and I was given a bronze star for the work I did re-teaching personnel that came to fly combat, that were greenhorns that came out of the states."

Here’s what we know. Marcel, according to his records, and the notations are in multiple places, and according to citations found among the documents of the unit histories of the units to which he belonged, show that Marcel had received two air medals, both of them for participating in aerial flight into combat zones and doing his job as well as could be expected. Nothing suggests that he shot down five enemy aircraft. Nothing suggests that, while flying as a waist gunner, he shot down any enemy aircraft, or even engaged them.

This then, is a real problem and I have no idea what it means, other than to suggest that Jesse Marcel stretched the truth on this point (Yes, I’m being a little mealy mouthed about this, but then I know Jesse Jr. quite well and we’re talking about his father).

And, we have no indication that Marcel ever held a pilot’s license and he certainly wasn’t rated as a pilot in the military. Yes, he could have had bootleg time, but 3000 hours is an awful lot of bootleg time, even with missions that might have lasted ten or twelve hours. Besides, Marcel himself limited the combat time to something under 500 hours.

There really is no way around this unless Bob Pratt made a horrendous mistake transcribing the tape, and while there are areas of confusion, nothing like this. Jess Marcel must have said it and even with Pratt’s transcript, it’s pretty clear.

Marcel, in that same, long paragraph, continued, saying, "... around the world 5 times, been in 68 countries... degree in nuclear physics (bachelors) at completed work at GW Univ in Wash. attended (LSU, Houston, U of Wis, NY Univ, Ohio State, Docotr pool? and GW..."

Quite confusing, but also suggests that Marcel said that he had a bachelor’s degree which might have been given by George Washington University, or maybe that he completed his work there and the degree came from somewhere else... Not that it matters. GW has no record of him and neither do the other schools except LSU. According to his military record, he had completed one and a half years and I have found no indication that he attended any of these other schools as a student.

I will point out that military schools, especially during the build up during World War II were often held on the campuses of universities and this might be the reason that Marcel said he had gone to school at some of them. It’s a possibility but I don’t think it’s very likely.

There really is no way around this unless Bob Pratt made a horrendous mistake transcribing the tape.

It is important to note that I haven’t seen these claims made again by Marcel and I don’t know what happened so that he made them with Pratt. When the skeptics point to them, they are raising legitimate issues about Marcel.

But Marcel was who he said he was in 1947 and that is the air intelligence officer at the base. He was pictured with the balloon debris in General Roger Ramey’s office that was alleged to have come from the crash site. He was a trained intelligence officer who would have been familiar with weather balloons and no matter what the Mogul crowd says, the array they claim is responsible for the story was nothing more than common weather balloons and rawin targets. Something that Sheridan Cavitt, who accompanied Marcel into the field recognized immediately as a balloon, or so he eventually claimed. He never explained why he didn’t mention this to either Marcel or Colonel William Blanchard, the base commander at Roswell. For some reason Cavitt kept this to himself.

Not to mention that during my first face-to-face interview with Cavitt, he told me that he had never been out to collect any balloon debris. In fact, according to what he said, he wasn’t even in Roswell in early July 1947. Later he changed this to having just arrived there in time to go out with Marcel.

Where does that leave us? Well, it seems that which ever side you decide to come down on, you’re going to run into some trouble. Marcel apparently embellished his record, though it seems only a single time and that he was who he said he was in July 1947.

Cavitt, it seems, changed his story on a number of occasions and then never explained why he’d never told Marcel or Blanchard it was a balloon if he knew the truth. So, as in so much of the Roswell case, you can look at the spin of the researchers and skeptics, look at the records of the soldiers, and still not know, for certain, where the truth lies.

PS to Korff

I really had planned to add this to the last post about Korff because I wanted to avoid a public flame war. It serves no useful purpose but I kept finding things that needed to be pointed out. I mean, we could engage in the allegations all we wanted but without some sort of proof from one side or the other it boiled down to "he said... he said." I thought that maybe a little longer post might induce Korff to provide some evidence rather than continue to sling allegations and make threats.

Korff loves to accuse others of putting words in his mouth. He writes, "In a recent posting on his [meaning mine] blog [which he has now figured out is not part of Paul Kimball’s blog which, in his bellicose world would make it a LIE], Kevin Randle makes the false claim that Kal Korff ‘now suddenly describes’ the Israeli based Special Secret Services as a ‘meta-organization.’"

Well, here is what I actually wrote, "Kal Korff claims to be a captain in an Israeli organization that he now describes as a "‘meta-organization’..."

So, I didn’t say "suddenly".

Trivial point?

Certainly.

But, who is putting words in whose mouth?

Korff then writes, "By comparison, I was never stupid enough, literally, to fall for the LIES of Frank Kaufmann, Glen (whose name he misspells) Dennis, Frankie Rowe, Jim Ragsdale, Trudy Truelove, etc. — ALL of which Randle not only "fell for" but even force fit and fudged and hyped "evidence" to fit."

Here’s the problem with this. Frankie Rowe wasn’t lying and Trudy Truelove, according to Ragsdale was killed in a car wreck, so what story did she produce? Why smear her name when it was provided by Ragsdale and she said nothing? Ragsdale said that he was with her on the night he saw the crash. And since she never talked about this, should we now characterize Korff’s mistake as a LIE?

Korff then complains, "Finally, what Kevin Randle does NOT tell you is something he ALREADY KNOWS: The name "Special Secret Services" is a ROUGH TRANSLATION from the orignal (sic) Hebrew.

"KEVIN RANDLE DOES NOT SPEAK HEBREW. HE DOES NOT KNOW THE NAME OF S3 IN HEBREW. THEREFORE HE WILL NEVER FIND ANY INFO ABOUT IT WITHOUT KNOWING THE HEBREW NAME — DUH!"

But isn’t that what I said up front in the blog? I wrote, "He [Korff] says that you can’t 'Google' it because the English version of the name isn’t quite accurate and you need the Hebrew name". So, why not supply that as some have requested? You can decide for yourself if Korff’s criticism is valid. And notice that Korff still hasn’t supplied the Hebrew name for us so that we can independently verify the existence of this organization. Remember, it is up to him to prove this "meta-organization" exists and not up to us to disprove it.

In another post, he wrote, "For the record, I sent Kevin Randle only a few emails, and the last one was simply a friendly warning letting Randle know that he had upset other people with his false, liberlous (sic) and slanderous remarks and that I was giving him some friendly advice to try and spare him some pain from some parties who would not tolerate this."

We see here that his warnings weren’t very friendly and that there were a few of them.

He then makes the claim that if anyone else had made about him he would say that it is a LIE. He wrote, "But wait, folks, it gets worse for Randle. A real scandal in fact. Not only has he lied about me ‘bombarding’ him, but what Randle does NOT tell you is that he (Randle) DELETED the emails he claims he was ‘bombarded’ with!"

He adds, "In other words, Randle didn’t bother reading them. But yet he ‘comments’ on them, as if he alone was the final word and the right word."

Of course he doesn’t know if I read them or not, only that I deleted them when I was through with them. So, Korff, in a not very clever attempt to smear me has jumped to another false conclusion which, if I had said it about him, he would call a LIE. If he suggests otherwise, then I suppose I will have to post the contents of some of this so everyone will know the truth.

Korff reports about CPT Lorenzo Kent Kimball, who was the medical supply officer at Roswell in July 1947 and whose office was on the perimeter of the hospital complex (See my column published in December 2006 about Kimball, in which Paul Kimball and I discuss this), "After I (meaning CPT Kimball) learned of these assertions, I called Doctor Jack Comstock, 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!!"

What Korff has failed to report is that Jack Comstock was NOT the hospital commander in July 1947. He was just one of the doctors. In 1947, the hospital commander was Lieutenant Colonel Harold Warne. So Korff printed the inaccurate information without bothering to check it. If it was somehow negative, it must be true.

But look at it from another point of view. I asked some tough questions that weren’t answered. I showed some pictures to underscore the validity of those questions. And all Kal Korff can do is respond by saying that he has always called the Special Secret Services a "meta-organization" and add the word suddenly to my statement, then invent criticisms about what he thinks I said, makes more claims about witnesses he doesn’t believe and doesn’t know, and finally suggest that I don’t speak Hebrew, written in all caps as if this is some kind of important revelation. And he still dodges the questions...

So, decide for yourself who is being reasonable and who is not. Read what he has to say with all his hyperbole and what I have to say, and decide for yourself.

I now try to bow out of this once again.

Korffed Again

I haven’t wanted to turn this blog into a way to reply to others who disagree with me. I have attempted to be restrained in what I said about other researchers, especially those with whom I disagree. But Kal Korff just keeps sniping from the bushes, making allegations that are simply not accurate, and believing that somehow he will eventually be vindicated.

There are those who have advised me to ignore his comments and frankly, I’m inclined to agree with them. Why supply any sort of credibility to him by responding?

Good question.

Simply put, sometimes you just have to defend yourself. And sometimes its just fun.

But, before I get off on that, let me ask a simple question or two. Kal Korff claims to be a captain in an Israeli organization that he now describes as a "‘meta-organization’ so there won’t be some fancy building that can be targeted." He says that you can’t "Google" it because the English version of the name isn’t quite accurate and you need the Hebrew name. So, why not supply that as some have requested? The only things you can learn about this secret organization that Korff insists on naming only in the loose English translation takes you back to Korff driven documents. If another researcher attempted to pull off something like this, Korff would be all over him.

On the X-Zone radio show, Korff provided a little more information, saying that S3 was a civilian organization. So why the military rank structure? And if it is Israeli, then why is Korff wearing American captain bars (seen above at the left) rather than the Israeli insignia for the rank of Seren (seen at the left... the Israeli name for captain) in the picture he produced to "prove" that he was really a captain (seen below at the left... yeah it's difficult to see, but those sure look like American captain bars to me)?

But, once again, I digress. Korff seems to be obsessed with this idea of an independent audit of our respective works to find out who made the most mistakes. Or rather, he is going to audit my work because he believes his is so well done that there are no errors in it. Well, I know of one researcher, Greg Sandow, who did look at one aspect of this controversy and who did produce a review of the claims each of us made in our respective books.

But who really cares about such an audit? Isn’t that the job of the reader? Can’t he or she look at the information contained in each book and decide whose more closely follows the truth and who supplies the most credible explanation for the crash at Roswell?

As just a single example, I have a letter that Greg Sandow posted on UFO UpDates a number of years ago. Sandow looked at how Korff treated the testimony of the late Brigadier General Arthur Exon and provided an interesting commentary about Korff’s book and his opinions on about Exon. In response to some of the Korff nonsense, Sandow wrote:

Now a look at Kal's comments on General Arthur Exon. Remember my disclaimers -that I'm not commenting on the nature of the Roswell crash, or on the overall worth of Kal's book. I won't be drawn into arguments about those subjects. I'm only commenting on three passages in the book...

What does Kal say? Something really sharp: "There is no excuse for how Exon's 'testimony' is misrepresented in the Randle-Schmitt book. It is blatant fiction on the part of the authors...Randle and Schmitt were deceptive in their presentation of both Exon's recollections and his supposed 'involvement' in the Roswell affair."

So what's that about? The indictment, as it turns out, rests on one lone accusation, that Kevin Randle and Donald Schmitt presented Exon's remarks as if he were relating first-hand testimony, when actually he was only reporting things he'd heard from others. This, in some ways, is a remarkably trivial charge. Why do I say that? Well, suppose that it's true. Then we can shout "gotcha" to Randle and Schmitt, and we'll be careful to check anything either of them says in the future.

But then what did Exon say even as a second-hand witness? As Kal himself tells us (see p. 93 of his Roswell book), Exon talks about Roswell debris being flown to Wright-Patterson. "The boys who tested it," Exon says, "said it was very unusual....It had them pretty puzzled." First-hand, second-hand....either way we've got a banner headline, even if Exon never said one word beyond what Kal quotes. An Air Force general, even if he's only giving his general impression of what he's heard about Roswell, says the same things about the Roswell debris as some of the controversial first-hand witnesses do! If you put any weight on Exon's impressions, the Mogul theory [the glorified weather balloon explanation offered by the Air Force in 1994] takes a big hit. Isn't that more important, in the overall scheme of things, than any question about Randle and Schmitt? And, as we'll see, Exon said much more than that.

But then is Kal right to say Randle and Schmitt distorted Exon's remarks? I don't think so, for three reasons.

(1) I've heard Kevin's first interview with Exon on tape, and read Kevin's scrupulously accurate transcript. I thought Exon said exactly what he's quoted as saying in Kevin's book.

(2) Even the passage Kal quotes doesn't support his view. Here's how Kal presents it: "To read the Randle-Schmitt book, it appears that Exon corroborates the Roswell UFO recovery by providing impressive-sounding testimony that appears to be firsthand. 'We heard the material was coming to Wright Field....It was brought into our material evaluation labs. I don't know how it arrived but the boys who tested it said it was very unusual.' Exon described the material: '[Some of it] could be easily ripped or changed....there were other parts of it that were very thin but awfully strong and couldn't be dented with very heavy hammers....It was flexible to a degree,' and, according to Exon, 'some of it was flimsy and was tougher than hell and almost like foil but strong. It had them pretty puzzled.'"

"To almost anyone reading this," Kal writes, "it would appear that...[Exon] was a firsthand source who was present and personally saw what he describes." But I don't see it that way at all. Consider these statements: "We heard the material was coming....I don't know how it arrived, but the boys who tested it said...It had them pretty puzzled." Isn't it clear that Exon isn't speaking of first hand knowledge? Who wouldn't understand that Exon didn't handle this debris himself?

A page later in the Randle-Schmitt book comes another Exon quote, which Kal doesn't reprint: "The metal and material was unknown to anyone I talked to. Whatever they found, I never heard what the results were. A couple of guys thought it might be Russian but the overall consensus was that the pieces were from space."

Again, it's perfectly clear that Exon didn't handle or analyze the material himself, and even that his knowledge was limited. But he appears to think he'd spoken to people who knew at least something about what the analysis had shown. How sure was he of this knowledge? Let me quote a few suggestive passages. First, an Exon quote from Randle's book: "I know [my emphasis] that...[General Ramey] along with the people out at Roswell decided to change the story while they got their act together and got the information into the Pentagon." (UFO Crash at Roswell, paperback, p. 111.) Another Exon quote from Randle: "I just know [again my emphasis] there was a top intelligence echelon represented and the President's office was represented and the Secretary of Defense's office was represented..." (He's talking about the secret UFO
committee that he's sure existed; UFO Crash, p. 232.)

And here's something Exon said on the tape, which wasn't quoted in Randle's book. Kevin asks, referring to stories we've all heard about alien corpses at Wright-Patterson: "You've heard the rumors about the little bodies, haven't you?" "Yes, I have," answers Exon. "In fact, I know people that were involved in photographing some of the residue from the New Mexico affair near Roswell." [My emphasis.] Here's something else, about how Exon knows that there were alien bodies from Roswell at Wright-Patterson: "People I have known who were involved with that" told him so. [Sandow’s emphasis.]

Look back at the quote Kal thinks is so damning: 'We heard the material was coming to Wright Field....It was brought into our material evaluation labs. I don't know how it arrived but the boys who tested it said it was very unusual.' Exon described the material: '[Some of it] could be easily ripped or changed....there were other parts of it that were very thin but awfully strong and couldn't be dented with very heavy hammers....It was flexible to a degree,' and, according to Exon, 'some of it was flimsy and was tougher than hell and almost like foil but strong. It had them pretty puzzled.'"

Given the full context of Exon's remarks...and bearing in mind everything I've quoted from Kevin's interview with him....isn't it clear (a) that Exon certainly thought he knew quite a bit (even if not first hand) about the subjects he was quoted on, that (b) he says quite clearly that he'd talked to people who were involved first-hand, and (c) that therefore the passage Kal quotes from Kevin's book is really quite reasonable in both its tone and content? I don't think it misrepresents Exon at all. (Here's another quote from Exon, from the tape: "Most of the people you're talking to are a little bit like me. Close enough to know that there was something happening. They had no direct responsibility for any of it." Anyone who reads the complete sections on Exon from Randle's books will, I think, form exactly that impression.)

This is by no means everything that Sandow said about Korff’s reporting on Exon but does address the issue. Now, to be fair, I say once again, that I know Greg, he has visited my house, and I gave him access to everything I had on the Roswell case, letting him pick and chose what he wanted to see. He was able to review all of the Exon testimony and there is other later testimony that others have gathered about what Exon said.

So, here we are, at the end of the day, reviewing the same material that was reviewed ten years ago. It shows that an independent researcher, who has no dog in this hunt, reviewed part of Korff’s work on Roswell and part of mine. He concluded that my reporting of the Exon testimony was accurate and Korff’s conclusions were not driven by the facts. The question then becomes, "Who is misrepresenting the data?" Or an even more critical question, "Did Korff ever interview Exon, or was he working from my notes and letters from the general?"

But the real point of all this is that Korff slings allegations, threatens all sorts of dire consequences, but provides no evidence to make his case. I say, let the reader take a look at all the Roswell works and decide who is closer to the truth... And, I predict that it won’t be Korff.

Robert Todd is Gone

Robert (Bob) Todd
11/20/1953 - 3/22/2007

Matt Graeber, a UFO researcher from Pennsylvania reports "Robert Greer Todd - Expert government document procurer and analyst, UFO researcher and key-source of verifiable information on the1947 Roswell incident passed away on March 22, 2007 at home in Ardmore, Pa. after a lengthy illness. Todd was 53 years old and is survived by his brother Barry, sister Marjorie and life-long sweetheart Mary Zayas."

Graeber noted that, "Bob Todd's marvelous and detailed investigations were deeply appreciated and remarkably influential in the efforts of the late Karl Pflock and other top Roswell researchers over the years. Bob's clarity of thought and down-to-earth insights will be missed by many contemporary Ufologists as well as those who will be coming along in the future.

"Though often disliked because of his rock-solid objectivity, Bob Todd did not dismiss the reality of phenomenon's impact upon the observers. In fact, though few knew it, Bob had his own unexplainable UFO sighting while on a coffee break at his place of employment."

While I would disagree that Todd had a "rock-solid objectivity" and that his opinions were often colored by his beliefs, we all suffer from that affliction. Todd was often abrasive and resorted to inventing derogatory names for those he disliked. He seemed to believe that he held the keys to understanding UFOs and the rest of us just didn’t understand or didn’t want to understand.

Which is not to say that he didn’t contributed to the UFO field by finding little known and obscure documents that helped us all understand more about the field. It was his interpretation of those documents that I sometimes find less than objective.

It was also Todd who released all of Major Jesse Marcel’s service record into the public arena, and I have never understood how he obtained it. Privacy Act requirements suggest that only Marcel himself, or members of his immediate family upon Marcel’s death would have been able to get it, yet Todd did. And his interpretation of some of the information in that record, which Todd believed proved Marcel untrustworthy, is in error.

But the sad thing here is that Todd, like so many others in the field, is now gone at a much too young age. While he and I clashed over the Roswell case, and I found many of his conclusions to be off the mark, his work in finding and obtaining government documents, including the all important leads into Project Moon Dust, was invaluable. It provided us with more information about the government’s study of UFOs, which is not what officials would like us to believe.

Bob Todd, dead at 53.

Frankie Rowe and the Roswell Crash

Poor Frankie Rowe (seen below) is having her name dragged through the mud by the anti-Roswell crash proponents again. Rowe is a nice lady who told me about her connection to the Roswell case in the early 1990s. She said that her father, a fire fighter with the Roswell Fire Department had made a run outside the city limits where they found the crash remains of the alien craft, and according to Rowe, a living alien creature.She also said that she had handled debris from the craft. Skeptics have dismissed her testimony saying that it has been discredited, but the truth is, she has not been discredited. Saying, repeatedly, doesn’t make it so.

As just a single example, some have said that her tale of the Roswell Fire Department response to the crash is untrue because the site of the wreck is outside of Roswell and the fire department didn’t make runs outside the city limits. This came from a former city council member who was not on the council in 1947.

Karl Pflock, supporting this idea, wrote, "As part of my investigation of Rowe’s story, I interviewed three retired members of the Roswell Fire Department who served with Rowe’s father at the time of the incident. I also discussed the matter with a former member of the Roswell City Council who served on the council committee responsible for pubic safety policies. None of the former firefighters remembered the department making such a run. Moreover, they and the former councilman said it was standing department policy not to respond to calls outside the city limits, even if they were close in..."

To check this out, I went to the Roswell Fire Department and asked them about runs outside the city. One of the fire fighters asked what they were supposed to do. Let it burn? But what was true when I was there in 1992 might not have been true in 1947, so I looked at the log books that go back into the 1920s. The truth is the Fire Department did make runs outside the city as the fire logs show so it is not outside the realm of possibility. Unfortunately, there is no log for this particular run, which, of course, means one of two things. Either it didn’t happen, or they were told not to log it because of the secrecy of the event. Logically, we all should opt for number one here, but that is not to say that number two doesn’t make equal sense.

Pflock does acknowledge this, that I found, in the logs for June 1947, a run outside the city limits, which, of course, negates what the councilman said (Rowe's father, Dan Dwyer, is on the left, leaning against the car). I’ll also note here that Pflock identified the councilman as Max Littell, who was not on the council in 1947, and that Littell attempted to relate everything in the Roswell case to things that he could control and use to make a profit. In other words, this case has been tainted by so many claims and counterclaims that it is difficult, if not impossible to get at the truth.

And I might point out that because he talked to three men who were not involved in the run, doesn’t mean it didn’t happen. Sure, it would be nice if one of them had said that he had gone out there, but that none of the three said he did means only that those three did not. I might also point out that Pflock did cherry pick his data. We know that he believed Roswell was a Project Mogul balloon so anyone suggesting it happened is wrong and those who remember nothing about the fire run are, of course, telling the truth.

Rowe, who has granted several interviews to many different researchers and reporters, told her story in depth and on video tape to me in January 1993. She said that her father had come home after his shift at the fire station (which lasted about twenty-four hours) and had something important to say. He then told them, according to Rowe, that they had gone about thirty miles outside of Roswell and then a few miles back to the west. He said there had been some kind of a crash and that he had called it a spaceship or a flying saucer or something.

Then she said one of the most important things. According to her, "I remember him saying that some of them helped pick up some pieces of the wreckage. He said he saw two bodies in bags and one that was walking around."

She said, "...he said he was sure that there were bodies because the third one would go over to them... he talked about this third one would go back and forth between different parts of the wreckage and was walking around dazed. He didn’t say if anyone tried to talk to this person."

The creatures were, according to what Rowe remembered, about the size of a ten year old, meaning that they were smaller than a human adult. The color was like that of an insect called Child of the Earth (more commonly called the Jerusalem Cricket seen at the left) which is sort of copper color or maybe a sort of dark brown).

Rowe also saw a bit of metallic debris that a State Trooper claimed to have picked up in the field. Rowe said that she thought it was about a week later. She’d had some dental work done and had gone over to the fire house to wait so that her father could drive her home. The State Policeman was there and he walked up to a table and said to the firemen, "You guys aren’t going to believe what I’ve got." He pulled out his hand and had a piece of metal.

Rowe said, "I think I got to pick it up and crumple it one time. I can only remember doing it one time... It just didn’t feel like anything... it was kind of a pewter color... Everybody got out their knives or whatever and tried to cut and they tried to burn it."

Unfortunately, as has happened so often in this case, no researcher had a chance to talk with Rowe’s father. He died long before the investigation began. But I did have the opportunity to talk with her sister, Helen Cahill. She was married in 1947 and living in California at the time of the crash, but had heard some discussion about the events during a visit to New Mexico in 1960. Although her information wasn’t as complete as that of Rowe, it confirmed, for what it’s worth, that Rowe did not invent the tale of the crash. Of course, it does little to validate it, except to suggest that Rowe’s father was talking about a UFO crash long before the reports of the Roswell events came to light and at a time when few people thought of UFOs as being from other worlds. Other explanations seemed to make people happier.

There is one problem, with all this, however. According to Rowe, she’d had some oral surgery which had begun to bled, which was why she had been in Roswell in the middle of July 1947. That was why she had been at the fire house when the State Policeman had brought in the metallic debris. Although records are not complete, there are none to show that Rowe’s oral surgery was done in July 1947 or that there were later complications.

It now boils down to what you want to believe. Rowe’s tale, contrary to what Pflock suggested, is consistent with many of the other stories floated about Roswell. She has been consistent in what she said, though, originally, she left out many details. The addition of those details have caused some to believe that he story has been altered. It hasn’t. It became more robust.

The real problem is that we have been unable to find the documentation to corroborate what Rowe said. The fire records do not reflect a run outside of Roswell on the proper dates and her dental records do not reflect problems with oral surgery in July 1947. She could easily have been in the fire department waiting for a ride home for any number of reasons. She said that she, and the other children, if in Roswell for any number of reasons, often went to the fire house so that their father could give them a ride home.

Oh, and for those who wish to dismiss her testimony, it was Frankie Rowe who told me the records did not bare out what she said. She could have just kept quiet about it and we would not have known.

They suggest, also, that Rowe’s tale doesn’t fit into the overall Roswell picture, but if you allow for the vulgarities of memory and point of view, what she says in not all that far from the traditional story. She provides a glimpse into what it was like for those outside the military who might have had some contact with this extraordinary tale.

What it boils down to is this. For those who accept the Mogul balloon explanation for Roswell, Rowe must be lying (or badly mistaken) because there was no alien craft, no bodies, and no metallic debris with strange properties. Since there was no craft, her story has been discredited.

For those of us who realize that Mogul simply does not fit all the facts and not just those cherry-picked for convenience, Rowe’s tale could be the memories of the crash filtered first through her father’s descriptions of the events, and then filtered through time.

And contrary to what Pflock and others have suggested, members of her family I was able to interview, corroborated parts of it. Helen Cahill, for example (Rowe’s older sister) remembered her father talking about these events.

So believer Rowe or not, but do not reject her story for the reasons given by Pflock and others because they are not accurate. The Roswell Fire Department did make runs outside the city limits in 1947, Max Littell envisioned a huge Roswell UFO project with him in the center of it, and there is corroborative testimony for Rowe, but, unfortunately, no documentation.

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.