The Latest on the Trindade Island Photographs

The photographs that were taken at Trindade Island off the coast of Brazil in 1958 are again the subject of a number of new reports. The most comprehensive of those was published at

www.ufo.com.br.

You need to click on the picture of the UFO and then on the English translation to read the whole story of the investigation of the pictures and the evidence they present. You probably should also be aware that the picture on the home page rotates among several so you need click on the proper one.

The upshot of the article, written by Alexandre de Carvalho Borges and translated by Eduardo Rado and Thiago Ticchetti, is that the pictures of the Saturn-shaped UFO are a composite created by Almiro Barauna and not of a craft from another world.

This was a theory floated just last year when a Brazilian television program suggested this was a hoax. I wrote in a previous blog (which you can now skip if you read it before):　

Back on January 1, 1958, a photographer on the Brazilian ship, Almirante Saldanha, took four pictures of a "Saturn-shaped" object as flew over the island of Trindade off the coast of Brazil. Almiro Barauna developed the film about an hour later. He and Captain Viegas entered the ship’s darkroom together. After developing the negatives, Barauna at first, thought that no image had been picked up, but Viegas, looking carefully, spotted the UFO.

That, in a nutshell, is the story. There are, according to some sources, many witnesses to the craft. Skeptics suggest that few others saw anything at all. That is a matter for another time.

What brings all this up is that a Brazilian TV network, Fantastico, just broadcast a story that suggests, finally, an answer about authenticity of the pictures has been found. According to Fantastico, "This Sunday (August 15), for the first time Fantastico reveals the truth about the Trindade Island UFO. A friend of the family told what she heard from the photographer himself [Almiro Barauna] he had hoaxed the images, it was a montage. ‘He got two kitchen spoons, joined them and improvised a spaceship, using as a background his fridge. He photographed the fridge door with the object in perfect illumination. He laughed a lot about it,’ revealed Emilia Bittencourt. Barauna’s files are in possession of his niece, who didn’t want to record an interview, but confirms the hoax."

The idea that the pictures were faked has been around almost from the moment they were taken. Donald Menzel, the Harvard astronomer who never met a UFO case he liked, claimed, at first, that an aircraft, "flying through humid but apparently super-cooled atmosphere," could become so completely enveloped in fog that it could take on the appearance of a Saturn-shaped object.

Okay, but I’m not buying this.

And apparently Menzel wasn’t either because later, in his book The World of Flying Saucers, he wrote that the case was a hoax. He said that Barauna had faked the pictures with a double exposure.

More likely than the fog-shrouded airplane but a statement without a fact to back it up. You can’t just declare something a hoax because you don’t like it and have no other evidence except your opinion that it is a hoax.

My first thought on reading this latest revelation from Fantastico was that the explained the case.

My second thought was, "Not so fast."

Yes, I’m aware of work done by many researchers in their analyses of the pictures and that some have said they found evidence of fraud in the photographs. Some of it is impressive work.

But I’m also aware of the claim that there were many witnesses to the object’s flight, and it would mean that a couple of dozen were in on the hoax and never breathed a word about it... until now.

But the person making this new claim of hoax is not a relative, or a witness for that matter, but a neighbor and she has no evidence to back up her accusation. There is also a niece, unidentified other than as a niece, who says she has Barauna’s files and she confirms it is a hoax.

Here’s the deal... and I’m sure even the skeptics will agree with this. Let’s wait on the final pronouncement until the files surface and prove the hoax. In the last few years, we’ve had several people come forward explaining that their UFO photographs, none quite as famous as these, were faked. I have no problem with the photographer telling me he or she faked the pictures. That seems to be solid evidence.

In this case, however, we don’t have the photographer, but a neighbor. And the niece who has the files. Let the documentation from the files be reviewed before we completely close the case. If it is a hoax, so be it, but let’s wait until we have the absolute proof before we label it. That might be coming soon.

Now we have more of that evidence thanks to UFO Brazil and Carvalho Borges. The new information comes from the nephew of Barauna, Marcelo Ribeiro, who said he kept the secret for fifty-three years. According to him, the photographs are faked.

Asked what is the truth about the pictures, Ribeiro said that they are not true because there was no flying saucer. He asks, "If there had been one, wouldn’t some of the others on the ship have taken pictures of it?"

Strangely, he then refutes the tale from Fantastico TV, saying that Emilia Bittencourt had told nothing but lies. She knew nothing about the pictures or how they were created.

Ribeiro said that the people on the boat did see something but that it was a strange cloud formation or something else natural. He said that his uncle, who had been taking pictures underwater when the object was first seen, climbed onto the boat but had no unexposed film in his camera. Figuring out that he could make money, he pretended that he took a number of pictures before returning to his cabin for another roll of film. When he returned, there was nothing in the sky but he took several pictures anyway.

Ribeiro makes it clear that there was something in the sky, but it wasn’t a spaceship. Ribeiro doesn’t believe in alien visitation because they would be billions and billions of light years away. I mention this only because it is so wrong. The closest star is only 4 light years away and there are many, many stars within fifty lights... which is not to say that travel among them is possible, only that it is more likely than dealing with another galaxy a billion light years away.

Anyway, Ribeiro claims that his uncle, once he had taken pictures of the landscape, developed them on the ship on the orders of the ship’s captain. He had no photographic paper and showed the captain the wet negatives. Ribeiro suggested that by pointing to certain areas on the negatives, his uncle was able to convince others including the captain that the object was there when it was only some artifact in the clouds.

I do know that it is difficult to identify things on a photographic negative and I know that if you point to something and suggest it is an object, many people will agree with you. I don’t know how successful this might be in the circumstances described here.

But now we move into an area that suggests that the photographer was able to think ahead... or an area that suggests this latest explanation falls short. According to Ribeiro his uncle realized the commercial value of a high quality photograph of a UFO and knowing that set the stage while on the ship. He knew that he would make money.

Once the ship returned to port, Ribeiro’s uncle, Barauna, left, taking with him, the negatives he had shot. At home, in his studio (or laboratory as they suggest in the article) he experimented with various objects until he settled on bus tokens. He photographed them against a black background and then printed his pictures with one negative and then another creating a composite that held both the ground details and the UFO.

At this point I suppose I should mention that Barauna had, in the past, done an article about the creation of UFO photographs. He was a skilled technician, some might say an artist with a camera, and creating the composite and then a negative from that wouldn’t have been difficult for him. Done properly, no one would be able to tell that the composite print and negative made from it were a double exposure, at least according to Ribeiro. The print would look just like, well, the photographs that we’re all familiar with.

Now comes the rest of the story. Ribeiro said that Barauna shared the story with him but didn’t want him to tell anyone because he would be "demoralized" which might be a poor translation. It probably should be discredited. At any rate Barauna didn’t want his nephew to say anything until after he was gone.

So now, with his uncle safely buried, Ribeiro is saying that the pictures were faked for the money they would make. It was sort of a spur of the moment plan conceived on the ship as the crew and others were standing around thinking they had seen the Saturn-shaped object.

The article’s author, Alexandre de Carvalho Borges, said that in 2003, he had called Barauna,s friend, Amilcar Vieira, who had been on the ship and asked about it. Vieira said that he had seen the object. Ribeiro agreed that Vieira had seen something, some object, just not the thing in the photographs and certainly not a craft from another world. Ribeiro suggested that if others were standing around, pointing at the object in the sky, that strange cloud formation or natural phenomena, Vieira would have seen it too. That’s just human nature. It is the interpretation of the object that is in question here... and, of course, the real shape of it.

I asked both Jerry Clark and Brad Sparks what they thought of the newest information. Both had studied the case in the past.

Jerry (Jerome) Clark detailed the case in the second edition of his classic The UFO Encyclopedia, wrote, "The latest developments, like the ones last year, look pretty questionable, with some very serious problems coming out of the gate.

Sparks wrote, "All I would say is that the double exposure theory is rubbish and a violation of the basic physics of photography. A double exposure cannot possibly take away light from an image, it can only add to it (a "double" exposure is the taking of two pictures on the same frame of film without advancing the frame). Yet, parts of the UFO image are darker than the sky, which is not possible for a double exposure. If the fake UFO is photographed over the sky-and-Trindade island background then no part of the UFO image can be darker than the sky onto which the fake UFO is filmed."

And both of them suggested that I contact Martin Slough for his opinions on the case. Slough had been studying the case in depth for many years and had been one of the first to suggest that we not take the new information at face value without some further research.

Martin Shough was quick to respond. He hadn’t been very impressed with the revelation of Emilia Bittencourt last year, isn’t much more impressed with this latest story. He wrote to me:

I should perhaps add that the possibility ...that Ribeiro is [blending] memories of various discussions related to the several "trick shots" which everyone knows Barauna was involved with.

Ribeiro mentions the Mundo Illustrado photos and the Carioca fleet bus tokens, making an explicit connection to what he remembers Barauna telling him re[garding] the Trindade case... We know Barauna must have been often asked 'Did you fake it?' and 'How did you fake it?' or 'If you had faked it, how would you have done it?' - the latter being the question that the Navy technicians astutely asked him in 1958.

Ribeiro no doubt correctly characterises Barauna as a great talker and a joker who loved to hold forth, and he must have talked about his escapades many times. ...Of course he may have told Ribeiro that he faked them. Ribeiro may have added some confusion to the core of a true memory. But given the inconsistencies in the story I'm afraid we have to place it in the category of questionable hearsay. Sadly no amount of questioning of Ribeiro now is likely to encourage him to reflect on the story he has made so public, and the witnesses he says he could have added in his support are unfortunately dead. It's a shame he didn't produce this story years ago.

I'm not sure it is true that microscopic examination of grain structure would fail to spot [douible exposure]. The double exposure doubles the numerical grain density in the region of the UFO on the final fake negative. It may be difficult to spot this doubling, given that the background is not very emphatic and of course the grain structure is a fuzzy, flocculent mess that's difficult to quantify, but it is not the case that there is just no possible physical trace of the operation in the grain structure, as Ribeiro seems to suggest. There could be a detectable trace and the Navy people might have looked for it. I would like to see this tested.

And there is something here that Martin, Clark and Sparks didn’t address and that is Ribeiro’s story is second hand. We are warned, repeatedly, about the value, or lack of value, of second-hand testimony. It is often flawed, misunderstood, and many times impossible to corroborate. Here we have a story told by the nephew of the original photographer about how the Trindade Island photographs has been faked, but we don’t have the same sort of confession by the original photographer.

All three of them said that we shouldn’t accept this new claim as authentic without some kind of corroboration... just as we shouldn’t accept a UFO claim as authentic without the supporting evidence.

I will note here that over the years many of those who took pictures of UFOs have come forward to tell us that they faked them. Some of those were teenagers when they did it and a few were young adults, but the point is that they did confess. With the Trindade Island photos we have no such confession except for the uncorroborated claims of a nephew... and interestingly, those of Bittencourt, who he says was lying about it.

It seems to me, given all this that we don’t have a real solution. We have some uncorroborated testimony from the nephew of the man, but we don’t have anything like that from the photographer himself. Barauna said, repeatedly, that the pictures were authentic... except, allegedly, to a couple of family members.

I had hoped, with this latest revelation, we would come closer to a solution for this case but that hasn’t happened. We still don’t know if the object photographed was real, was alien, or a trick whipped up in a photo lab. I’m afraid it just might remain that way.

The 1963 Santa Rosa UFO Crash

Since the publication of Crash - When UFOs Fall from the Sky, I have learned more about some of the cases mentioned. One of those, which I only reported in the Epilogue was from Santa Rosa, New Mexico and involved a hospital employee.

Given what I knew about the case, I wasn’t impressed with it. I wrote:

The Santa Rosa story by a medical technician who told of an emergency call that took her and an ambulance driver some 18 miles from town is a case in point.

She told researchers that when they reached the two police cars blocking the road, she and the driver got out of the ambulance to talk to one of the State Troopers. They saw three small bodies on the ground. The nurse thought immediately of children and asked about parents, but was told there weren’t any parents. She did see some wreckage, enough to suggest two cars might have collied, but she couldn’t identify the type of cars.

The little bodies were only 3 to 3 1/2 feet tall and had been burned. They were oozing a brownish fluid. One of the bodies had an arm that was broken or damaged in some way. She could find no vital signs, but they put them into the ambulance to return to town anyway.

At the hospital, she took x-rays of all three. About an hour after they reached the hospital, the Air Force arrived and she said an officer, who she thought was a colonel, ordered everything removed, including the x-rays and any notes she had. She also saw that the Air Force had a flatbed truck with something covered by a tarp. Once the Air Force had everything gathered up, they drove off.

According to Ryan Wood’s Majic Eyes Only, she had never mentioned the crash because she had been warned that the government had "a long arm." She was never to speak of this. And she didn’t talk about it until she saw pictures of hungry children in Somalia. She thought they looked like the little bodies that had been recovered, meaning the strangely shaped bodies and the overly large appearing heads look something like the starving children.

I suspected that the case was mostly invention because it was single witness and the reactions of the people involved, according to the story, just didn’t ring true to me. And I haven’t even mentioned that the Air Force would have had no authority to confiscate the hospital records, or that I would have thought that those at the hospital would think to hide some evidence. Surely someone would have had the foresight to keep some of the documentation on something so extraordinary.

Then I read an account of the case from Carol Rainey who had been married to Budd Hopkins. She was there, during the 1990s, participating in and documenting his research into alien abduction. It was Budd who stumbled across the Santa Rosa case in 1995 though Rainey’s involvement wouldn’t begin until 1997.

According to Rainey, in her article in Paratopia magazine available online at
http://tiny.cc/2pzis., Budd investigated the crash case in 1995 with Walt Webb, who had trained under Allen Hynek. They traveled to Santa Rosa to interview the retired X-ray technician, Bina "Beanie" Bean.

Rainey wrote that Bean had told local MUFON representatives that in either the spring or winter of 1963, she had been riding shotgun in an ambulance that sped to a crashed saucer site on a remote desert road and returned with severalnon-human little bodies. She'd X-rayed them, she said, and described them in detail.

That was when the military arrived and cleaned out every scrap of evidence, threatening the hospital staff to keep their mouths shut. Bean drew maps and named names. But, as Walt Webb wrote to Rainey several years later: "We had only one anecdotal story by one alleged eyewitness to a 32-year-old alleged episode!"

Rainey wrote, "In 1997, Budd and I returned to follow-up on the Beanie storywhile in nearby Roswell. I taped Budd's interview with the eccentric Beanie, noticing that she was starting to embroider a great deal around the edges of her original story of a crash retrieval, including claiming her own abduction experiences and asserting that her older sister was the famously elusive nursewho warned off the mortician at Roswell, shortly after that alleged crash."

At this point, I would have punched out of the story, simply because, by 1997, I was convinced that there had been no nurse and that Glenn Dennis was being less than candid with us, as I have recently detailed.

I probably wouldn’t have had much more to do with the case when I learned that, but according to Rainey, "Neither she [Beanie] nor Budd had tracked down or spoken to any of the long list of possible witnesses. The only glint of confirmation of this single eyewitness's story came during our visit to the elderly widow of the ambulance driver. When pressed, she seemed to vaguely recall that the Air Force had indeed once stripped the ambulance clean and taken the billable trip ticket, as Beanie claimed. But the widow had no idea what year or what decade that might have occurred in."

Rainey wrote that when they returned to New York, she had made a short film from the interviews. She thought that "Beanie was quirky and entertaining and I left the validity of the case up in the air."

Budd believed the case to have merit and again, according to Rainey, used it in his lectures and seminars. But she was upset that Budd had never attempted to find any of the other alleged witnesses so she began to dig a little deeper into the file.

She wrote, "In it were two letters to Budd from Walt Webb, written severalmonths after their 1995 expedition... Webb expressed grave doubt about Beanie's credibility, citing major discrepancies in her stories, told to three separate interviewers."

Beanie sometimes claimed there were three bodies and other times there were but two. She said that they had been lined up under a sheet near the wrecked ship and told MUFON investigators that the bodies were hanging out of the craft.

In what might be the biggest of the changes, Rainey wrote, "In that same report, Beanie talked of a ‘coroner's inquest’ at the hospital, bringing in people off the street as witnesses; in her account to Webb and Hopkins, she and a Dr. Galvin were the only people present for examination of the bodies. But it wastoo late for such reservations..."

I wanted to know what Walt Webb had to say about this case, and this case only. In an email to me he said that the material about the Santa Rosa UFO crash as published in Rainey’s article was essentially correct.

So now we all know a little more about this case. I didn’t think it was very solid based on the little I knew about it, but this seems to have cemented those reservations. Yes, witnesses change stories subtly in each telling but the major features don’t change. You don’t move from three bodies to two, and you don’t come up with a coroner’ s inquest using people off the street. That simply is too much.

And I know what you all are thinking. In the Roswell case, there are tales of three bodies, four bodies and sometimes five. But each of those numbers came from a different witness and where one might have only seen three, another might have seen four. If the witness changes the number, then we begin to wonder about all the observations by that witness.

I saw some of the same things in the Willingham – Del Rio crash where he changed the date three times, the type of aircraft a couple of times and was unable to provide any documentation for his alleged Air Force career.

Here is another UFO crash case that I believe we can eliminate from the listings. It is single witness and there is no corroboration for it. This case can join Del Rio on the list of those explained.

Cash Landrum and Crash Retrievals

One of the strange things about writing a book is that sometimes the comments or criticisms come in a short period of time.

What do I mean?

My book, Crash: When UFOs Fall from the Sky was published in May and in the last week or ten days I have heard from several people who wished I had included the Cash-Landrum case in the book. That is an interesting case and I believe John Schuessler did a very comprehensive study of it which has been published.

The problem for me is that I don’t view the case as a crash/retrieval. I see it as something that might have been an emergency close approach, or just a close approach without the emergency, or some kind of terrestrially-based test, but not a crash of an extraterrestrial vehicle. For that reason, I left it out.

What I know about the case is what everyone else knows and is based on the research of those who studied it in person. I have never spoken to any of those who were originally involved, though I do know John Schuessler. He is one of those who has devoted a great deal of time to the study of UFOs and this case took place almost in his backyard.

It was December 29, 1980, when Betty Cash, Vickie Landrum and Landrum’s seven-year-old grandson, Colby saw the strange object as they returned from dinner. Thinking that it was an airplane heading to a nearby airport, they thought nothing of it. But as they rounded a curve on the rural road, they saw the light approaching them at treetop level.

Fearing that they would be burned alive, Landrum screamed for Cash to stop. The road was narrow and Cash was unable to turn to car so that they could escape. But there was no other traffic, so Cash got out, walking to the front of the vehicle. Landrum also got out but her grandson so upset she got back in.

They could feel heat from the diamond-shaped object that was about 100 feet away. The car became too hot to touch and Landrum put her hand on the dashboard and left an imprint. Cash needed to use part of her leather jacket to protect her hand so that she could open the door.

There was a final blast of heat and the object ascended slowly. As it cleared the treetops, helicopters appeared from all directions. The object and the helicopters then disappeared from sight.

When her eyes adjusted to the darkness, Cash started the car and they began to head home. As they rounded another curve on that same road, they saw the object again, and Cash counted 23 helicopters near it. Landrum thought there were 25 or 26 of them. Cash was able to pull off the road. When the object and the helicopters were again out of sight, Cash then drove home.

Later that evening Cash became sick, the symptoms like that of radiation poisoning, at least according to some. She was hospitalized twice for treatment. The Landrums were also sick, but not to the same degree as Cash, which might be as simple as Cash being outside the car longer and her exposure greater.

The case was, of course, investigated. Cash eventually sued the government for 20 million dollars alleging that her illnesses were caused by the close approach of the craft. She was eventually treated for various cancers 25 times and had undergone two operations. The helicopters were obviously US government and they should have been protecting her. The case was dismissed in 1986. Cash died some twenty yeas later.

The suit was dismissed, according to the ruling, because there was no evidence that the diamond-shaped craft was any type of government test vehicle and they were hard pressed to find witnesses to the formation of helicopters. A few witnesses were found who said they had seen the fleet, but no physical evidence or documentation was ever located.

I will point out here, based on my experience as a helicopter pilot, that I find it difficult to believe they could hide an air operation of this magnitude. The helicopters would have had a crew of three and maybe four meaning almost 100 men (and given the date of this, I wouldn’t expect any women in the flight crews), not to mention the logistical support necessary. You’d have to supply a refueling point, as well as other considerations but no trace of any of that was ever found or documented. Something like that, on that scale, would be impossible to hide.

Nearly everyone, skeptics and believers alike, suggest that the illnesses sounded like radiation sickness. One of those who doesn’t is Brad Sparks. He presented a number of reasons including the rapid onset of the symptoms and the lingering nature of them as reason to suspect another cause. Philip Klass was interested in the health of the three victims prior to the encounter.

The bottom line for me, and my book on UFO crashes, is that there is no hint of a crash here. A close encounter of the second kind, meaning a close approach of a UFO, but not a crash. For that reason, I didn’t even consider this case for my book.

Philip Corso and MJ-12

There are many levels to UFO research and there are many different people adding to the confusion because of their own agendas. Sometimes those agendas are relatively benign, and sometimes they are almost evil.

All this is a way of saying that not all that long ago I was talking to Bill Birnes of UFO magazine and The Day After Roswell. He asked me where I had gotten a copy of the proposal for the book. I told him that I was not comfortable revealing the source and although he made a guess or two, I refused to provide any additional information.

Birnes took that well and then said that Philip J. Corso, his co-author on the book had never claimed to have been on the MJ-12 committee. That reference had been added by a movie company that had been interested in doing some sort of feature film based on the book. Neither Corso nor Birnes had endorsed that statement.

If you read the book, you’ll find no claim that Corso was a member of MJ-12, either as a primary, alternate or assistant. Corso’s story has nothing to do with MJ-12 or any such committee other than in passing.

My point here is not to suggest that the book is factual, fiction, or a combination of the two. It is only to point out that the reference to MJ-12 and Corso’s participation in it was made by others who didn’t understand these sorts of things. It was made by those whose agenda was to make a film and make money and not to necessarily advance the state of UFO research.

Being on MJ-12 was not a claim made by Corso according to what Bill told me.

What this really means is that I can’t, and you can’t, reject Corso’s story because he said he was a member of MJ-12. You can reject for other reasons if you must, but this is not one of them.

Glenn Dennis Revisited

A bit of a preface about all this. Several years ago I decided that I would like to be invited to speak at more UFO conventions. I knew the problem was that I held some views that were not universally accepted in the UFO community. I thought that if I had only a skeptical argument I would not say anything about a case. I would promote only those that I believed had some legitimacy.

But I just couldn’t embrace some of the more ridiculous notions in the world of UFOs. The real breaking point came when I listened to Robert Willingham on Jeff Rense’s radio program. Based on what I learned, I knew that Willingham had not been an Air Force colonel. He was not a decorated veteran of World War II or Korea and had not been a fighter pilot. His claims of this military service outraged me. I could not, in good conscience, remain silent when I knew that there was absolutely no evidence that Willingham had served in the Air Force and that his story of a UFO crash was not true.

I had, in the past, suggested that I did not accept the tale told by Glenn Dennis. There were just too many problems in it, the most obvious was the lack of supporting testimony from those who were there, in Roswell, in 1947.

As I said in the last post, the question arose about how I learned Glenn Dennis’ name and that I answered. Walter Haut told me. From there we, and by we I mean Don Schmitt and I began our investigation into the Dennis story. Later others would contribute to our knowledge including Victor Golubic who at the time lived in Arizona and Ted Oliphant who, at the time, was a police officer in Alabama.

When I first met Dennis, in November, 1990, he told the story that he pretty much sticks to today. There have been modifications to it but those have come about because the information we, and when I say we I mean a number of different researchers, had provided.

According to Dennis, he was working at the Ballard Funeral Home in Roswell when he received a number of telephone calls from the base mortuary officer. He was asking questions about caskets, if they could be hermetically sealed and if he had any small ones in stock. He answered the questions but said that he didn’t have enough of the small caskets.

Later, because the mortuary also ran the ambulance service, not that uncommon in small towns in the 1940s, Dennis ran a slightly injured soldier out to the base. While at the base hospital, he saw a number of military ambulances parked there with their back doors opened. Inside he saw metallic wreckage, again not uncommon if there had been some kind of aircraft accident.

He said inside that ambulance he saw a canoe-shaped object. Not the whole canoe, but just the bow of it. He said that there were some symbols on it but he never really described these for me.
Inside the hospital he saw they were unusually busy, which might have been accounted for by an aircraft accident. He thought he would look up a nurse he knew to learn what happened and maybe buy a Coke before he returned to the mortuary.

The nurse saw him first, in one of the hallways and told him to get out of there before he got himself into some kind of trouble. Before he could react, an officer that he described as having red hair and a nasty attitude caught him and asked him what he was doing in the hospital. The officer was accompanied by a black NCO, whose attitude was equally bad.

According to what Dennis said to me, and said to others, he was told there had been no aircraft accident, there had been nothing going on, and that he should get back to the city as quickly as he could. He would tell no one what he had seen, or thought he had seen, and if he ever mentioned anything about it, they would be picking his bones out of the sand.

He also mentioned that some of the threats came from the black NCO. This has always bothered me given the timing of these events. Yes, there were black NCOs in the Army and there were twenty-five or twenty-six assigned to the base at the time. However, it seems that neither the red-haired officer nor the black NCO were assigned there. They had come into Roswell from some other location.

But this was 1947 and I wondered about a black NCO threatening a white civilian. True, the officer had made the initial threats but given the era, given the racial divide in 1947, would a black NCO felt secure enough to threaten a civilian?

At any rate, Dennis left the base puzzled by all the activity and the security that was being maintained. It confused him, but a day or so later, he said that he had spoken to the nurse he knew. He had met her at the officers club and she had more to say. According to him, she told him that she had been involved in a preliminary autopsy of little creatures. She was sure that they were not from Earth and she told him not to tell anyone what about the events.

I will point out here because it does impact on the validity of his tale, that in the initial interviews, Dennis suggested that there was a romantic interest. He and the nurse had a relation that might have developed into something more permanent. This would explain why she felt she could tell Dennis about an activity that was classified even though she would have been ordered not to talk to anyone who was not cleared to know it.

Within days she was transferred from the base, apparently sent to England. Dennis said that he received one note from her, giving him her address in England. The letter he wrote came back marked, "deceased". She had been killed in an aircraft accident, according to what he was told by other nurses at the base.

This also suggests a relation that was more than casual. That she would write to him while enroute to England suggests a rather strong relation. If such a relation didn’t exist, then there would be no reason for her to communicate with Dennis so quickly.

All this kind of information gave us a witness to the bodies and testimony that those bodies were not human. It gave us information about transfers from the base, and it was a story that ended in tragedy. It would make great television, and we were in Roswell to make a documentary about the crash when I first talked to Dennis.

But this story also provided me with a lot of information I could check. There were components of it that would have been reported in other arenas and all I had to do was find the right information sources.

Yes, Dennis was reluctant to give us the name of the nurse. He said that he had promised her that he would never reveal what she said or who she was. But then she had been dead for decades and was beyond Army regulations and Army punishment for revealing classified information. There was no reason to keep this secret.

He did supply me with a name, with the promise that I would not tell anyone who it was. Naomi Self was the name of the nurse, and I have no trouble revealing it now because Dennis apparently shared that name with many others who released it. Even Philip Klass, in one of his SUN newsletters, gave the name as Naomi Maria Selff, a variation that Dennis had apparently given to Karl Pflock at some point.

Of course I checked the Yearbook that Walter Haut had produced in 1947 that gave us so many names. She wasn’t in it. But then many who had been at the base in 1947 were not listed.

She was not in the base telephone directory which held the names and base telephone numbers for many of the officers. Of course, as a nurse, her name might not appear in that book either.

I had noticed that the Roswell Daily Record, on the front page, nearly everyday, welcomed newly assigned soldiers and officers to Roswell. Her name didn’t surface there either... though I wondered if they would have printed the name of a young, single woman, again given the time frame.

I checked the New York Times Index, which, in the pre-computer age, was a great tool. I could look up aircraft accidents and found them broken down by date, type of aircraft, location, and when and where it had appeared in the newspaper. I searched everything from July 1947 through 1955 and found no aircraft accidents in England, Europe or the United States that had claimed the lives of five Army nurses as Dennis had said.

Don Berliner, who was conducting his own research along similar lines, searched the Stars and Stripes. This is a newspaper printed for the military overseas. Had such a tragedy occurred, then that information would have been published in it. He found nothing.

Not that this proved anything. The Army, in an attempt to stop people from searching for her, put out the rumor that she had been killed. It explained why she had never written to him again. The details he had could be wrong and that was why we could find nothing about it.

There was one source of information that we hadn’t tried and that was the Morning Reports. In the Army, at that time, each unit produced a report of the number of people available for duty that day. Those reporting into a unit were listed by name and serial number. Those sick in the hospital were listed by name and serial number. Those on leave, those on temporary duty and those transferred were listed by name and serial number. And all those morning reports were housed in the big National Archives center in St. Louis. All you had to do was write to them and ask for what you wanted.

Which, of course, I did. And in return I got the Morning Reports, not for the medical staff, but instead for the Headquarters Company. I went back to them a couple of times and was told that the Morning Reports for that particular unit were no where to be found.

You might think that the missing Morning Reports suggest a conspiracy to hide the information and keep us from verifying that the nurse had been stationed in Roswell. A researcher, Vic Golubic, wanted to pursue this. He called the Records Center and talked to several people there. Eventually they located the Morning Reports for the unit.

The critical dates, July and August, were available. Since Self or Selff had apparently been transferred not long after the UFO crash, her name should have been in the Morning Reports in July or August, but it was not. But Golubic had requested the Morning Reports for the whole year of 1947 and much of 1946, so that he had the names of many of the nurses, but no Naomi Maria Selff or Naomi Self or anything that sort of matched.

Golubic would work the problem many different ways according to what he told me, chasing doctors who might have known nurses, civilian agencies in Roswell that would have employed nurses, and even going to the Army which had records of nurses and nursing students that went back into the early 1940s including those from the Cadet Nurse Corps Identification Cards that listed some 124,064 names. He was unable to find any variation of Self’s name in any of these locations.

I worked with a police officer, Ted Oliphant, and we searched throughout the United States attempting to find her. Eventually we would find four women named Naomi Self (yes, it is some what rare name, and we found four), but none was the right one.

I also used one of the CD-ROM telephone directories containing millions of names but couldn’t find her. I tried variations, including those provided by Dennis and still had no luck. And yes, I realize that she might have gotten married and that her married name would probably be different than her maiden name. Still, we could find no trace of her.

Golubic confronted Dennis about this, saying that he could find no record that a nurse with that name even existed. According to what he told me, Dennis said that he had not given any of us the correct name because he had promised to protect her identity. He hinted to Golubic that her last name did begin with an "S" and there was some speculation that it might have been Sipes.

Golubic, like many of us, thought this was just a dodge because we had proved a negative. No record of her in any of the places that it should have been had been found, and when that information was presented, Dennis changed it. That meant we would have to begin all over again.

But I didn’t believe that Dennis had not given us the real name in the beginning. I don’t know why he picked the name he did, but I don’t think he was doing it to protect the nurse. I think he believed we wouldn’t have the resources to track this, and I don’t think he realized the level of documentation existed in the 1940s that did.

I had talked to him once and he said that he couldn’t understand why we couldn’t find his nurse because he had given us the name. He stressed that he had reluctantly shared the real name with us in the hopes of our finding her, or what had really happened to her. Why couldn’t we learn anything?

I pointed out that people have the same name and I had talked, that morning, with a Robert Slusher who had been in the Army during World War II. I was looking for a Robert Slusher who had been with the 509th in Roswell in 1947. The guy I talked to was not the right man.

Dennis then said to me, "Oh, I know Bob Slusher. He lives over in Alamogordo."

When I talked to that Slusher, I learned it was the right man. But the point here is that Dennis was pushing the name, telling us that he had given us the right name and we couldn’t find his nurse. When we said there was no nurse by that name, Dennis changed his story and his nurse’s name.

Given all that, I wasn’t a fan of Dennis. I also learned that he hadn’t been a mortician in 1947 but an embalmer. A slight embellishment and maybe not one of overriding importance. Skeptics would, of course, use this to hammer him if they had known it.

There were other minor alterations in his story but these seemed to be more of the problems with memory than an attempt to deceive. For example, he took us to what had once been the base hospital and laid out the scene for us. He pointed to where the ambulances had been parked, what door he had entered, and what loading area had been used by the military for the bodies (as seen in this picture). The problem here was that the hospital as it stood then, in 1990s was not the hospital in 1947. In 1947, the hospital was comprised of a number of separate buildings, each with it’s own function (as seen below). When I was there in 1990s, a single building had replaced all those others.

It would seem to me that Dennis, if he was telling us the truth, would have known that. It would seem that he would have said that this doesn’t look quite right but there had been no hesitation by him when he was describing the scene to me. This suggests an invented tale rather than a lapse of memory.

Is this another big blunder, or is it just a faulty memory that was fifty years in the making? Given the name trouble, maybe it was just more of the invented tale.

In fact, at one point he was telling people that we all had pressed him for a name, meaning that we UFO investigators had wanted the name. He said that he told us he’d give us a name but that it wouldn’t be the right name. We just hadn’t listened to him when he cautioned us. This was, of course, an attempt to blame UFO researchers for the Naomi Self name. That should have annoyed all of us, but apparently I was about the only one who thought this to be outrageous.

I can take this a step further, which I believe to be important. Dennis had told Karl Pflock that his, Dennis’ nurse, had told him that the autopsies had been performed by two doctors who came in from Walter Reed. That caused researchers to ask why they would have called Dennis about embalming the bodies as he had claimed. Dennis again said that he had been misquoted. The trouble was that he was on video tape saying that his nurse told him that the pathologists would have to do something when they got back to Walter Reed. He hadn’t been misquoted.

There is one other point that should be made and that is that in 1947, according to the City Directory, Dennis was married. His wife’s name was Dorothy. So, why would the nurse have been involved in a romantic situation with Dennis, especially when he described her as a good Catholic girl?

The big problem was the shifting nature of the nurse story and her name. And then his attempts to blame us, meaning the researchers for those changes. But that isn’t the way it was at all. Had he told me that he would give me a name, but it wouldn’t be right, I would have told him to save it. No, what he told me was that he had promised her he wouldn’t tell anything and that I had to promise not to reveal her name. I held onto that promise until it seemed that everyone, Roswell researcher, UFO researcher, UFO skeptic and debunker, and tourist had been given the name.

There was another the thing that bothered me the most about Dennis’s story. He had been unable to provide documentation that he had once promised. And, that the story might not really be his, but was that of another employee at Ballard’s who had received the telephone calls and the inquiries. But that man had died before Dennis entered the arena, which meant the core of the story was true, but Dennis had not been the man in the middle of it.

What I had been told, by some, was that the mortician who received the telephone calls was not Dennis, but another man. That man would later tell Dennis about this and Dennis adopted it as his own story.

While my disappointment hinged on the failed attempts to find his nurse and the changing of her name, there were others who were still looking for Naomi Marie Selff, as the name had evolved. A group calling itself News of the Force (NOTF) said they had contacted three officers at the Pentagon who searched the records available there for Selff but found nothing. One officer said that he found nothing about her in the archives of the Women’s Memorial at Arlington.

But as I say repeatedly, nothing is ever simple in UFO research. NOFT claimed to have found a web site of military records and in their search turned up two women named Naomi Marie Self. One of the entries suggested one of the women was about 87 and the other suggested was 101. However, not long after NOTF found the records they disappeared from the Internet... which means that I can’t verify the information.

NOTF had also initiated some Freedom of Information requests to the Air Force Personnel Center at Randolph Air Force Base in Texas. According to them, the reply said, "The Air Force Worldwide Locator searched all available Air Force and Civil Service file computerized indexes (sic) and based on the information you provided did not find any record of ‘Naomi M. Self’ ever having served with the U.S. Air force under that name. AFPC searched all records contained in the Defense Eligibility Enrollment Reporting System (known as DEERS to all of us who have served and retired) database and the National Archives Records Administration (NARA) database, the Automated Records Management System (ARMS) database and the Military Personnel data Systems (MILPDS)... There were no identifiable responses for that name."

I’m afraid they wasted their effort, other than proving, once again that Naomi Self was not the right name and I wonder if these databases were user friendly. Would they have kicked out a name if it had a single F on the end? And, what if Naomi Sipes was the right name? It probably wouldn’t have kicked that out.

Sure, I’ve read some of the supporting statements for Dennis. Tom Carey and Don Schmitt, in their book, Witness to Roswell, reported on a number of people who claimed to have heard the little bodies, little coffin story from Dennis.

Former Roswell police chief L. M. Hall in his 1993 affidavit for the Fund for UFO Search said that he remembered Dennis telling him only a few days after the newspaper stories that he had received telephone calls asking about the small coffins. Hall claimed that Dennis said they wanted "to bury [or ship] those aliens." Hall said that he thought it was some kind of a joke. But this isn’t documentation. It is hearsay.

Besides, there really is nothing in Hall’s statement to anchor this recollection in time. Yes, he says that it was just days after the events in the newspaper, but this might be where he is confused. I can’t think of a reason this should stick in his memory, nor can I think of a reason that it has to be 1947. Hall, here, I believe is, confused.

Carey and Schmitt found Roswell attorney Richard L. Bean who said that he heard the tale of the telephone calls within days of the crash, but it was a couple of years before he heard Dennis talking about it which doesn’t do us much real good either. The couple of years could be something more and again, this doesn’t anchor the event for us.

Most important, none of this information was reported before the explosion of the Roswell case. There is nothing to support the idea that Dennis had been telling this story since 1947 to selected friends.

There doesn’t seem to be any written documentation that transcends the publication of The Roswell Incident. Dennis’ story emerges in 1989 and has since undergone a number of evolutions. I have tracked the story from the beginning and haven’t seen any reason to alter my earlier opinion that there are some real problems with it, not the least of which is the changing name of the nurse.

Once again, I’m at odds with those in the UFO field. Most accept Dennis’ story as legitimate, but I can’t. There are too many red flags, too many discrepancies, and too many changes to it. I have learned, over the years, that a story that changes to incorporate new information is probably not accurate.

So, rather than not say anything about this and letting others fight it out here, I figured I would tell what I knew about Dennis and his missing nurse. Without some kind of verification that does not rely simply on the memories of people who believe that Dennis said something in 1947 to them, I find no reason to accept this tale as accurate.

How I Learned about the Roswell Mortician

Not all that long ago someone asked how I had learned of Glenn Dennis (seen below), the Roswell mortician. The correspondent suggested that he had searched the literature and couldn’t find out how I had learned of him, or how Stan Friedman had learned of him.

Stan, I believe, and he’ll be quick to correct me if I’m wrong, learned about the mortician through a friend of the mortician. I’m not sure if it was Robert Shirkey, a Roswell resident who had been a member of the 509th Bomb Group in 1947 or someone else. The point is that someone in Roswell gave Stan the name and he went in search of him.

I, on the other hand, had been told of a mortician and was given a name. The name I had belonged to a man who lived in Albuquerque and who worked at the main library there. I found the guy and talked to him but he had never lived in Roswell and had never been a mortician.

On that same trip to New Mexico, Don Schmitt and I visited with Walter Haut. We were sitting in the living room of his house and I was asking questions, trying to get a name for the mortician.

Walter said, "I know the name you’re fishing for. It’s Glenn Dennis."

So I learned of Dennis from Walter Haut.

Not long after that, while in Roswell to tape the documentary, UFO Secret: The Roswell Crash, Mark Wolf, with the help of Walter Haut encouraged Dennis to accompany them on a trip out to the Debris Field near Corona. On that trip, Wolf learned more of the Dennis tale and encouraged Dennis to tell it on tape.

The first of the interviews was done by Wolf late one evening. After we had him on tape, Dennis thought that he would like another interview done with him dressed in a suit and the ever present New Mexico string tie. I conducted that interview, following the lead that Wolf had established.

That should answer the question about how I learned of Glenn Dennis. I asked Walter Haut and he told me.

Rhodes Photo Poll Results

Well, the results are in... even if so many of you decided not to bother to vote in the Rhodes photographs poll. Only 38 people voted, which suggests that the interest in the pictures isn’t all that great. Most seem to have ignored the possible significance of them and I’m not sure why.

Clearly the majority of the votes, or about 64% thought the pictures represented something other than an alien spacecraft. Many thought it was a hoax and I know they believed that because Rhodes seemed to have been less than honest in his educational background.

Only 34% though the pictures showed something of extraterrestrial origin. I’m not sure if they were persuaded by the story told by Rhodes, his genius, the seeming connection to the Arnold sighting of about two weeks earlier, or they would just believe about anything that leads to the extraterrestrial.

One thing I haven’t researched is if the Arnold drawings, now available to us because the Project Blue Book files have been released publically, might have influenced Rhodes, if the case is a hoax. His photographs match, to some extent, the drawing offered by Arnold to Army investigators... that is, his original drawings and not the much more stylized illustrations he produced later.

I’m not really sure on this one. That Rhodes apparently lied about his education is bothersome. That he seemed to have embellished his job with the Navy is worrisome. But I’m not sure that we can reject the photographs on that basis alone.

That they sort of match with Arnold is a plus for them, but is it enough to overlook his embellishments on his "resume"? I really don’t know.

The best solution here is to slip this one into the "unidentified" file because there is no proof the pictures are faked... but to keep our eyes open for any better solution. This simply is not the case on which I’d want to argue for the reality of alien visitation, and in the end, I think that is the most important point

Mel Noel/Guy Kirkwood in the 1960s

I was working on my book, Confessions of a Ufologist, and reviewing the section on Carroll Wayne Watts, who was the man who claimed in 1967 and 1968 that he had been accosted... abducted... invited by alien creatures from Mars to ride on their ship. A lie detector test was failed, according to Watts, because he was threatened by two men as he traveled to Amarillo to take it.

In my file on Watt’s, I have a typewritten version of a paragraph about Watts that appeared in the March 1968 issue of the NICAP UFO Investigator. In today’s world, I have, on my computer, a complete run of the UFO Investigator. I wanted to know if the typewritten version agreed with the printed version. So I looked it up and found that it did.

Here’s the real point, however. Right after that short paragraph, in which they suggested they didn’t believe Watts, was another paragraph, this one from Mel Noel. It caught me by surprise because I didn’t know that Noel’s UFO activities had gone back that far. I only knew of him after his name and story was mentioned in Timothy Good’s Above Top Secret, where it was claimed that Noel had been an Air Force pilot on some kind of top secret UFO mission.

But here was another contactee claim, by a man calling himself Mel Noel, who described meeting with pink-haired, platinum-skinned, fish-eating Martians said to be running a Mars-Earth transportation system to introduce Earthlings to Martians.

This was wild enough that I wondered how Noel had managed to reinvent himself some twenty-five years later as a former Air Force pilot and why Good had given any credence to the story. Was it possible that no one was aware of this earlier claim?

As I have said, the Internet is a wonderful tool and I found that there were some who had made the connection, after Good had published his book. Don Ecker, at one time the Director of Research at UFO magazine did an expose on Mel Noel, who was also identified as Guy Kirkwood.
The relevant part of Ecker’s expose is this:

However Don Dornan had a different explanation. "Noall Bryce Cornwell(Noel/Kirkwood's actual name) is a red hot amateur scam artist. He has never pushed himself to the point where he will destroy himself on a national level. He loves doing his gag, that is now obvious. I was working for *Life Magazine then, and they were just getting into the muckraking stuff and they were getting impatient. I told them it would take a little longer for what I thought was Noel and Tomlinson's setting of the hook for their scam. *Life wanted to know just where the beef was. Just when would the fraud be committed? Who was going to lose money? There is always someone who loses money in a scam.

"I don't know where he (Kirkwood) was getting the money. He had to have been getting money, but I think he enjoyed the scam more than the money. It's funny, Kirkwood thought I was some kind of spy, but I wasn't. The real spy there, and he was sure that this was a scam and Kirkwood was a fraud, was Bob Klinn. (Klinn was an associate of J. A. Hynek)

"All this time" Dornan continued, "Mel (Kirkwood) was using his "Air Force" background that established his credibility. My brother (now Rep. Bob Dornan) had been a pilot in the Air Force, and when he had met Mel knew he had to have been a fraud. He (Bob Dornan) used to sneak in little things just to check out Mel, facts that if you were a pilot then, you would have known. Mel didn't pass the test. Also, some checks were made then to see if Mel held a pilots license and NOT ONE THING WAS FOUND. The Air Force was also aware that Mel had been passing himself off as an officer, and were considering filing criminal charges on him."

Dornan continued with "I always thought that Kent Tomlinson was the brains behind this scam. He was using Kirkwood and I finally brought it to a head in a meeting with Genovese. In front of everyone I asked Mel if he had ever been arrested? He said no and I ticked off the first couple of instances. I then asked him if he were a Fuller brush salesman. He said "yea". I then asked him if he were a dance instructor and he answered yea. I was then hoping that everyone else was getting it as I ran down the list. You know what? Almost total denial. `How do we know you're telling the truth, or I don't believe it!' I said to myself, I gotta tell these folks to get off the denial kick here. I told Mel that we didn't have anything to bring charges but that (he) played with these peoples emotions. They (group) did not want to hear this, but as I kept going on they finally got the point that they had been had. I told them that I was working for *Life Magazine. Several people were worried that the story would run in the magazine and I told them no, but that Mel had abused their friendship and he had abused their emotions.

Mel "crapped out" and did not deny anything. I asked him if he were ever an Air Force pilot and he said no, if he chased saucers and he said no. That was the end of the story there."

In October 1969 Mel Noel/Guy Kirkwood walked onto the studio of Channel 9. The program was Robert Dornan's *TEMPO, and when Kirkwood came out he said "Hi Bob, I know your brother." Host Bob Dornan had invited both Mel and Don Dornan onto the show to "Hash" the story over. Don Dornan immediatly called Kirkwood on the carpet to state his real name.

"Noall Bryce Cornwell" replied Kirkwood. Then Dornan said "Noall Bryce Cornwell is not a pilot and never has been a pilot. (Kirkwood later did get a 2nd Class Pilots License) All known aliases also show no record of you holding a pilot's license."

Bob Dornan then said "Were you a commissioned AF pilot at anytime?" Kirkwood said "No sir." And until Timothy Good's book "Above Top Secret" no more was nationally heard of him until the Fox Broadcast where once again he appeared as a former officer pilot with the U.S. Air Force.

But that didn’t take me back to this 1960s claim. It just showed that Noel/Kirkwood/Cornwell had no credibility. Here was another guy claiming to be a former Air Force officer, former military pilot, who turned out to be none of those things.

Further searching did reveal that some knew of the earlier story and while it suggested to a few that Noel wasn’t credible, there were others who thought nothing of it. After all, didn’t the CIA or the Air Force control those records so that a lack of documentation meant nothing about the guy’s credibility.

Of course, there were Noel’s admissions that he hadn’t been any of those things, but in the world of the UFO, even a claim by the man, denying that he had ever been in the Air Force isn’t good enough. I can’t tell you how many of these people, once exposed, managed to return, often with a new story and new claims.

So, once again, I have provided information about someone who said that he had been an Air Force officer, but who was not. I have shown that his tales go back to the 1960s, but few bother to mention that. Here is just another case where we shouldn’t be fooled by someone who isn’t who he said he was. How much longer are we going to put up with this?

ART, LIFE and UFOs by Budd Hopkins

Very early on in reading this book, I stumbled across a sentence* that got me thinking about other aspects of the UFO field and I sent a note to Budd Hopkins, telling him that I was reviewing his book and that I planned on looking mostly at the UFO aspect of it. Budd wrote back saying that the book was not just another of his UFO books, but more of a memoir that covered his life’s work. The UFOs were important, but so was the art and so was his life’s story.

I had thought that his book would be segmented into his early life, his art and his UFO research but it wasn’t. I think of my life with my military career separated from my writing career and my UFO research, but Budd has integrated all parts of his life so that his art is influenced by his UFO research and his UFO research is influenced by his art as he suggested to me and throughout this book.

On page 306, for example, Budd wrote, "...I was keenly aware that few people in the UFO research community had any knowledge of abstract art, mine included, and very few artists cared a fig for the idea of UFOs. I was pained by the disconnect between two groups with which I was so deeply involved..."

In a similar vein, just two pages later, he expressed surprise that science fiction writers have little regard for UFOs. He was writing about two specific examples, Kurt Vonnegut and Ray Bradbury. Vonnegut "coldly dismissed it [UFOs] as ridiculous. Bradbury, it seems, knew little about UFOs, the evidence for them and probably cared even less."

Those of us who have written science fiction and who have moved through the science fiction community know that it is the writers who most often express disdain for the idea of alien visitation, but the fans of science fiction seem to love it. They have a captivation with UFOs that is curiously lacking in the writers of it.

But this book has nothing to do with science fiction and it is certainly more than just a UFO book. It’s about his life and I confess that I was fascinated by the short look into the history of the Second World War through the eyes of a boy too young to join the military and whose father was a soldier involved in that war. Hopkins takes pride in his father’s position and high rank but clearly did not follow in his footsteps as a military officer or in his political philosophy.

In fact, in exposing his liberal leanings (can one really believe that an artist living in New York would be anything else?) he laments using student deferments to avoid the draft in the 1950s as the Korean War wound down, as did George Bush the Younger, Dick Cheney and Donald Rumsfeld in the1960s during the height of the Vietnam War. He didn’t mention Bill Clinton’s attempts to avoid the draft as well. I suppose the argument would be that Clinton hadn’t started any wars but the others had. And, I suppose it should be noted that taking advantage of an opportunity that is offered, when it is offered is not necessarily a bad thing to have done. Especially when it is remembered that the drafted soldier has his life turned upside down for two or more years.

I would have liked more about his early life during the Second World War simply because we have many histories of the war told from the point of view of the soldiers, from the adults who were involved in the war industry, the politicians who made careers at the time, but very little of how it affected the youngsters. At one point Budd tells us of watching military aircraft that is going down and he could clearly see one of the men in it, just before it crashes. This must have had a major affect on him but he writes relatively little about it.

Budd moves into his high school career and then onto college where we learn more about his sex life than I care to know. But this is his memoir and he’s telling us what is important to him.

But he also talks about the "fights" with his father over his choice of career and the college he would attend. This seems to be a fairly normal exchange driven by a father who would like to see his son succeed and a belief that art might not be the best, or the most lucrative of career paths to follow. Here Budd proves that some who have visions of art actually succeed at that as an occupation.

In fact, it seems that he is successful enough that he has a home away from Manhattan and I mention this only because it provides the backdrop for Hopkins’ UFO sighting.

As I say, I was more interested in his history with UFOs and it’s deep in the book when this begins to appear. He finally talks about his UFO experience, giving us all the details, including that it was a lens-shaped object that was clearly visible. He thought that it was as large as a car but also knew that size of objects in the sky without points of reference are difficult to judge accurately.

Budd wasn’t alone during the sighting. There were two others in the car including his wife at the time, Joan, and Ted Rothon, described as "a young English social worker." Budd eventually stopped the car and all three of them got out. They watched as the UFO began to move, into the wind, at the speed of a light plane.

This was 1964 and after the sighting, which changed his perception of UFOs he didn’t do much about it. He talked with friends who told of similar experiences in the area. He talked with his father who took the sighting seriously and he wrote to the Air Force, which did not. I also wonder if his listening to the famous Orson Welles 1938 War of the Worlds broadcast, to which he devoted a short chapter might also have influenced him.

A decade later, Hopkins learned of another UFO sighting, this one in North Hudson Park. He knew the witness and interviewed him. He then set out to find other witnesses and was successful. All of this might not have been important, but he eventually met Ted Bloecher, a long time UFO investigator who was interested after Hopkins told him about the sighting.

All this became important because Budd would eventually write an article about it for the Village Voice which later appeared in Cosmopolitan. This told people that he was interested in UFO sightings and as so often happens, once they have a point of contact, they will call with their UFO stories.

Yes, we do get very abbreviated stories of abduction research, telling those interested where to find more about it. This book is not a UFO book so that evidence to prove the UFO connections just isn’t included in it. Is that a flaw here? Not at all. It provides an interesting background for his UFO research, provides some insight into his thought processes, but in the end, this is a book about Budd Hopkins and not about UFOs or art. Besides, he tells us that it was all detailed in one of his other books.

We do get to see some of his beliefs. On page 287, he wrote, "One of my favorite comments of Mark Twain is his statement that ‘always telling the truth means never having to remember anything.’ For a deliberate liar or an emotionally confused confabulator to avoid mistakes in later testimony, he must first memorize many irksome, even trivial details from what he has claimed so far..."

But confabulation in not deliberate lying, but more of the mind filling in lost details. So, while the point about lying is valid, the detail about confabulation is not... and that, I suppose, would be one of those trivial details that I caught. A tiny misconception that means little in the greater scheme of things.

We move through these later chapters, one dealing with UFOs and another focusing on art, but we also see the intermingling of these two important facets of one life.

One thing surprised me about this book. Budd wrote, "But the truly bad news was the fact that my press and TV appearances on the UFO abduction phenomenon were apparently having a negative affect on the way that people – dealers, collectors, and even some fellow painters – viewed my work."

As I say, I found the book to be captivating, and while much of the UFO related material can be found in Budd’s other books, the condensed version here made it all easier to understand. It brought a bright light on his introduction and then immersion into UFOs and abductions. He had displayed here, simply, and compactly his thoughts and his beliefs.

At the beginning of the book I wasn’t all that interested in the art world aspects of this, but now that I have worked through it, I found that it was worth the challenge. Budd has provided a glimpse into a world that I would never have entered simply because I’m not an artist.

Those familiar with the UFO community know that Budd and I disagree on some major points, but this was a fascinating look into the man. Make no mistake. This is not a UFO book, but a book about one man’s life including his political beliefs and his observations on life. It’s about his struggle as an artist, his insights into that world and his eventual understanding of his father’s personality. He wrote, about his father’s, or rather the household lack of the positive confirming cliches such as "You should try to be a leader and not a follower," that "...he preferred us [Budd and his siblings] to be obedient rather than independent and to follow his dreams rather than our own," which, I think, is the attitude of many parents of the time.

So, in the end, we have a fascinating book about Budd Hopkins. We have a book that is necessary for the student of UFOs, but also for the student of the Arts. We learned how he arrived at the point he reached and if I have a complaint, it is that he skipped over what I think of as the turning points without providing any real motivation. He might have insisted on a career as an artist to spite his father, but if that is a motive, it is a relatively minor one for it is clear that he loves the world of art. His choice was made, not so much in defiance, but in love of art.

He was drawn into the world of the UFO because of his own sighting, but where most let it go at that, he searched for more meaningful and deeper answers. He found an interesting aspect of UFOs with the abductions, providing us all with an understanding of how he got there and what he believes.

There is also an undercurrent of his political beliefs throughout the book. Hints here and then until he reveals late that he is a liberal Democrat to his father’s somewhat conservative Republican beliefs. This seems to be an important point to Budd, but I’m not sure that it is important to the reader. Some might take offense, but the rest of us understand that people have a wide range of beliefs and values and to reject someone because of a political philosophy is to reject so much more without rational reason. And, of course, injecting one’s beliefs into a work sometimes alienates the reader, which is the right of the author to do and the right of reader to reject.

This, however, is a book that should be read by those interested in UFOs, in art, and in the human condition. It also provides, though I don’t think it was intentional, a history of the evolution of American society from the end of the depression to the point we have reached today. His review of his life seems to suggest that we are improving, and though there are bumps in the road, we’ll eventually get there. This, if for no other reason, is a good excuse to read the book.

You can find the book at http://www.anomalist.com.

*For those who are interested, the sentence that sparked the email was a note that Charles Hickson had been awarded two Purple Hearts for service in Korea and I wanted to know where that information originated.

Kal Korff Paint Ball Warrior

I know that in the past I have said that I was done with all things Kal Korff. I know that he attempts to stir hits to his website and his Facebook page by attacking anyone who expresses an opinion that differs from his. I know that no one in his world ever makes a simple mistake. It is always a LIE in capital letters and an attack on his expressed religious preference.

But his latest claim, and his latest rant, deserve some coherent comment. He has been claiming that he has been involved in wargames somewhere along the Pakistani and Afghan border. He is leading, according to his latest set of lies, an international team to fight terrorism. And when he finished with his afternoon of mock combat, he sat down to Thanksgiving dinner with the troops... the inference being that these were American service members because we are the only ones to have celebrated Thanksgiving on the day Kal was making his rounds.

None of this is true. It is a LIE. It is not a mistake, a distortion, or a misrepresentation. It is a LIE. He did not participate in wargames where he claimed he did. He did not feast with American soldiers as he claimed. I would be surprised if he had more than a turkey TV dinner heated in his microwave while staring at his computer wishing that he was a real colonel in a real organization.

Oh, I expect Kal to tell me Pavel Janousek, with whom he dines regularly, will be filing suit in the very near future unless I retract the above statements. I would, of course, inform Mr. Janousek that the truth is an absolute defense in these matters, and I can prove that Kal did not participate in any wargames with real soldiers anywhere in the Middle East.

Janousek, according to Kal, was going to file suit because of my blog postings in March 2007. In fact, in an email to me on March 9, 2007, which Kal claimed I deleted with out reading, Kal wrote, "You may send it [my response to Kal’s demand I remove the offending post] to me, since he [Jonousek] is leaving for Austria for one week (a luxury guys at his level can afford) and he said he expects this issue to be ‘resolved’ and that ‘Randle will step down’ by the time he is back, or he promised that he will be next in touch with you [meaning me] via his lawyers, and will proceed to bill you financially for every minute needed [bill away, but he has no legal authority to do that] to ‘deal’ with this. Not only lawyer time, but his time, and others."

And then the part I really like, which is typical Kal... "He desires to be amicable [Kal knows that word?] and says if you have any questions, to contact him via me... But for now, he said NOT for me to give you his email address, so I won’t." Why am I surprised?

Here we are three years later and not a peep out of Janousek, not a bill to be sent and not an email to me when I not only didn’t take down that post, but actually upped the ante later... but I digress.

So Kal wrote this last week, " Heading back to Pakistan, towards the Afghan border. I will be out doing drills all day and a fast war exercise before taking off... Looking forward to this, I’ll be the commander of a small op for our training."

He also wrote, "Our war game exercises included a FEMALE Indian sharpshooter who is a gold medalist in their country, she's a VERY nice lade. Another marksman who was a bronze medalist. It was interesting to see the different tactics Israel uses compared to India. In India and Pakistan they count their ammo, and measure each shot, as in shoot sparingly and try to get their targets with one shot. Since I am trained the Israeli way, this means to just open fire and advance while firing, so that the target is pinned down and cannot move nor dare show itself. As you advance you keep firing until you are on top of the target and it is then destroyed. The result was interesting...NO "casualties" on the Israeli side of things, the other side suffered mega hits. It was fun and educational. Often other personnel were taken out, leaving sharpshooters exposed and not exactly in the best position for them. It was quite a contrast."

And then, "It is not practical, at least in my opinion, to do one shot, one kill in this situation. I prefer steady firepower, because it paralyzes the potential enemy. Then you advance while the target is trapped and trying to survive. By the time you are within point blank range it is too late for said target. I have seen many such engagements, especially with tracers used on the mix, the poor person on the other end does not stand a chance. It is always easy to revert to one shot, one hit, but it is more risky, since one is more exposed and it is hard to cover 180 degrees in front of you at times."

And to prove what a hero he is, he wrote, "In my exercise, I was pinned down by three very different types of soldiers, so I had to take out all three. I went after the two and SAVED the sharp shooter for last. The sharpshooter should have been peppering me while I was laying mega rounds on them, but I kept suppressive firepower going across the 180 sweeping back and forth and just advanced like there was no tomorrow, using combination os Israeli tactics mixed in with some good ol American improvisation. :-)"

There is so much wrong here that I don’t know where to begin. He knows nothing of fire discipline. Spraying the area might look good in the movies but wastes ammunition and if you’ve had to hump it in with all your other gear, you might not be inclined to burn through it so fast. It might be difficult to get more, unless you happen to be using paintballs... but we’ll get to that in a moment.

He understands nothing about snipers, who would be five hundred to a thousand meters from his, or her, targets... and anyone who was exposed for two seconds would be targeted. A fifty caliber round can take out an enemy hiding behind a wall, as has been done more than once in Iraq and Afghanistan. Jumping up and running forward, spraying the area like you’re using a fire hose is a good way to get killed.

He does not understand fire and maneuver, though he does understand that in paintball war, you can jump up and run forward spraying the area. I doubt the Israelis train with paintball guns, or learn to run and gun.

Why am I so sure that Kal was playing paintball in Prague and not commanding wargames in Pakistan? Well, to show himself the hero, he posted pictures which prove my point. As you’ll see, Kal is holding a paintball gun, not a real infantry weapon, not anything in the NATO arsenal, and nothing used in combat training.

And below, Kal’s buddies are wearing chest protectors used in field hockey and in paintball exercises. You’ll also note that they are wearing helmets and face protectors just like those seen on other paintball ranges, but not something you’d see in a combat arena. No one trains with paintballs, and if you think about it, you’ll know why.

For those who would to see much more about all this, visit http:Kalisanidiot.blogspot.com. There you’ll find more evidence that Kal played his wargames in Prague and additional information about his activities.

The real reason I wanted to go through this has nothing to do with Kal’s claims that he is some sort of soldier, that he is a colonel in some mythical organization, but because he had the audacity to label Jesse Marcel, Sr., a liar. This from a man who can’t even keep it straight that he is married with a genius son or so he has said.

Kal, in another rant, said, "... I also was the first to publish Maj Jesse Marcel's military file which PROVES he was a LIAR — and yes, about Roswell. Since Marcel lied, the very nature of this dynamic ELIMINATES Roswell as being ‘ET.’"

"FACT: Marcel said he was a pilot. He said he flew the wreckage to Texas. Marcel was NEVER a pilot."

Truth: Marcel said he had flown as a pilot, not that he was one which is not quite the same thing. I can say that I flew as a helicopter doorgunner while in Vietnam because I did, but I was never rated as a doorgunner. We sometimes did things like that to learn about other aspects of our mission.

Marcel didn’t say that he flew the UFO wreckage to Texas. That came from Walter Haut, the public information officer, who regretted the line saying Marcel flew the stuff to Fort Worth. What he meant was that Marcel had escorted the wreckage to Fort Worth. So Marcel is in the clear on that.

Kal said of Marcel, "He said he had five air medals. He had two." (Which, BTW, is two more than Kal has.)

Given the nature of the interview in which this surfaced, I’m not sure that Marcel said he had five air medals. That might have been an assumption by Bob Pratt who recorded the interview and then transcribed it. The transcription is sometimes confusing and I asked Pratt if he still had the tape so that we might clarify these issues, but he had long since reused it.

We have found citations for the two air medals and I even went to the unit history in an attempt to discover additional citations but failed. I will note that my own military records were only recently updated to reflect the number of air medals that I had been awarded. Other decorations are not on my "official" record, though I do have the citations. So this is really a "So what?"

Kal, in his rant continuned, "He said he crashed off the coast neat [sic] Australia and was the only survivor. He was NEVER in any ‘plane’ crash and no one was killed."

I’m not sure what Kal means here but Marcel did say that he was in an aircraft shot down off Port Moresby, which, I suppose you could say was the coast of Australia, but he never said he was the only survivor. This comes about because of a comma.

Pratt, in his interview, wrote of Marcel’s answers, "I got shot down one time, my third mission, out of Port Moresby [Pratt inserted in parens] (everybody survive) [and Marcel answered] all but one crashed into a mountain."

This then is confusing. By adding a comma, I change the meaning. Pratt asks, "Everyone survive?"

And Marcel said, "All, but one crashed into a mountain." This suggests that everyone survived except one unfortunate airman who died when he hit a mountain.

Or Marcel said, "All but one crashed into a mountain." This means that everyone, with one exception, died when they hit the mountain. Either way, Marcel made no claim of being the sole survivor and Kal is flat wrong on this.

Kal then wrote, "He said he had a Bachelor's Degree in Physics from George Washington University. I was the ONLY UFO researcher to bother checking this."

This is not true. I actually checked (as did Robert Todd) with each of the universities that Marcel said he had attended, going so far as to inquire if there were any special programs in the 1940s, during the war, that would allow a soldier to attend some classes off campus and earn college credits. GWU told me that they did have some programs like that, but, unfortunately for us, Marcel’s name turns up on no rosters.

Kal said, "Marcel NEVER went to GWU."

And here, Kal has a point. The part of the paragraph in which Marcel made this claim is rather jumbled and unclear, but it does seem to indicate that Marcel told Pratt this. When I talked to Pratt, he had no memory of this specific. And this is apparently the only place that Marcel made such a claim, but it is untrue.Kal claimed that "Marcel said he retired from the AF because they had kept him so busy especially after he wrote the very report that Harry Truman read on TV re the Soviets exploding their first A Bomb."

Marcel said that he had been in the service for eight and a half years as well as the National Guard and felt he had a duty to his family, which is not what Kal said here.

He didn’t say that Truman read his report on TV, but read it on the air, which is not the same thing. Yes, it’s splitting a fine hair, but one that Kal would be quick to split if the situation was different.Kal continues his rant, writing, "Truman NEVER READ ANY SUCH REPORT on TV. Marcel was also NOT the author. The fact is, Project Mogul was as classified as the ABomb project during WW II. It was one of our top secrets."

We know that Truman didn’t read a report on TV, but on the radio, so Kal is wrong. We also know that Project Mogul came into existence after World War II so Kal is wrong here. The Mogul project in New Mexico was not classified as one of our top secrets. In fact, pictures of Mogul arrays appear in newspapers on July 10, 1947; Dr. Albert Crary, the leader of the project used the term "Mogul" in his personal, unclassified diary; and it was only the purpose, that is to spy on the Soviets, that was classified. The skeptics have been getting this wrong for years.Kal said, "Marcel did NOT have a ‘need to know’ and the term ‘flying disc’ did NOT mean ‘ET’ back then, but likely Russian."

Actually they were also called flying saucers, which Kal for some reason can’t comprehend, and one of the theories was that they were interplanetary (as opposed to interstellar), most likely from Mars... or that they might be Soviet.Kal tells us, via Facebook, "If you can disprove it, I will admit I was wrong, no problem. I'll also refund your money [if you bought his book]. Please let me know what you think of my book, I will revise it later, but fighting against Islamofascism is more important to me..."

Well, I proved that a number of Kal’s claims were wrong and I’ll wait for his clarification, but I doubt I’ll ever get it.

I also await the promised lawsuits that have never arrived.

I agreed to three debates... Kal agreed to one and then bailed at the last minute.

I await the KPMG audit of my work that was supposed to be published three years ago... but no such audit was ever undertaken.

I await proof of his 500 (yes five hundred) book deal... or that he will publish any book in the near future.

I await his apology for claiming that there were no black sergeants at Roswell in 1947 when there were, at least, 24.

I await his apology for suggesting that Mack Brazel’s picture never appeared on the front page of any newspaper in July 1947.

I await his apology for claiming that Jesse Marcel, Sr. wouldn’t have use the term flying saucer in 1947 because, according to Kal, that term hadn’t been invented... though the front paper of the Roswell Daily Record said, "RAAF Captures Flying Saucer...

And I wait his apology for calling me a coward and worse at almost the same time claiming he respects all those who served their nation in a combat role.

I could go on, but I believe the point is made.

What set this off was that a guy, Kal, lying about his "wargames" on the Pakistani border would call a man who served in uniform, who was decorated in World War II, who was a real colonel, albeit, a lieutenant colonel, a liar. Who really is the bigger liar here... the man masquerading as a colonel in a pretend organization or the man who might have embellished his educational background, something Kal also does... how goes that Ph.D. Kal?

UFO Crashes and the Public Record

I got an email from a fellow the other day talking about the Del Rio UFO crash. He said that he had gone through the local newspapers, had interviewed various long time residents, and completed other research without finding out anything about the crash. That got me to thinking.

True, you could say that the government had effectively covered up the whole story. But then I thought about the big five in UFO crash reports and realized that they had never effectively covered up the stories.

Roswell, as you may remember, was reported in the newspapers all around the world as a flying saucer crash for about three hours. Then the cover story of the weather balloon kicked in and everyone forgot about it.

Jesse Marcel, Sr., then told Stan Friedman and Len Stringfield about it and the race was on. Newspaper clippings were found. Government documents were found and here I’m thinking of the FBI Telex as a good example and not the laughable MJ-12 papers. And, there were many witnesses who were there in Roswell who did remember something about it.

The Las Vegas crash of 1962 was reported in newspapers, especially those in the west. There were illustrations of the object that flashed through the sky and there are many official documents in the Project Blue Book files about the event including the report from a general officer. I talked with a couple of dozen witnesses who saw the thing in the sky, who reported it interacting with the environment, and police officials who went in search of the wreckage.

The Kecksburg crash of 1965 was reported in the newspapers and I have lots of clippings from them. There are many official documents in the Project Blue Book files and Stand Gordon has talked to dozens of witnesses. There are reports of something being taken out of the woods on a flatbed truck.

The Shag Harbour crash of 1967 was reported in the newspapers. The Condon Committee, the Air Force sponsored study of UFOs even mentions the case. Chris Styles and Don Ledger have uncovered dozens of official documents, there is a picture of the object (well, light) in the sky and they have talked to dozens of witnesses including police officials, military officers and many civilians.

The Washington state crash of 1979 was reported in the newspapers. There are few official documents but Jim Clarkson has talked with dozens of witnesses who were in the area. There are some police reports and Clarkson has learned of a possible military connection, meaning they cordoned off the crash site.

So how do these cases differ from Del Rio, and a few of the other, well known hoaxes? There is a paper trail to them. There are multiple first-hand witnesses who have been identified and who had spoken about what they have seen...

And, no, here it really matters little whether these crashes are the result of a natural, though extraterrestrial cause, or if the object that fell had been manufactured on another world. The point is that any researcher can find lots of documentation even if that documentation suggests a natural event rather than an alien craft.

With Del Rio there was nothing in the local newspapers and the first mention I have been able to find is 1968 in Pennsylvania. There are no independent witnesses in the area who can verify something strange. There are no military witnesses either.

The conclusion to draw here is simple. Even if the event was eventually classified there is some kind of open source to lead us to it. We can find newspapers and government documents. We can find independent witnesses who share part of the story with us... witnesses who have a demonstrated connection with the area and the time. But with Del Rio, and some of the other crash reports, there is nothing like that. It is just one more reason to suspect that nothing happened in those cases.

Rhodes vs Willingham

There are those who had suggested that my opinions on Robert B. Willingham and William A. Rhodes are inconsistent. They wonder why I have suggested that there might still be something to the Rhodes photographs after he was caught without a degree and why I have written off Willingham completely. Why do I believe there might be something to Rhodes and not Willingham’s tale?

The answer is simple. Rhodes’ belief that he had the equivalent to a Ph.D., or that he had received an honorary degree from Columbia University, does not impact his being in Arizona, in his backyard, when the UFO flew over. In other words, we have him in a place where we could expect him to be and the Ph.D. doesn’t alter that.

You can argue, and I would agree, that this episode with the college degree, and the differing versions of how it came to be, suggest that he could spin a tale or two when the mood moved him. It impacts his credibility and if we were in court, such a discrepancy could be used to impeach his testimony. If he would lie about that, what else would he lie about?

But that doesn’t change the fact that he could have been in his backyard when the mysterious object allegedly flew over. Yes, I said allegedly because we could argue that nothing flew over and that the photographs are faked but that doesn’t flow directly from the nonexistent degree.

With Willingham and the Del Rio UFO crash, his story of being an Air Force officer and fighter pilot directly affects his story. If he was not an Air Force officer, then he wasn’t a fighter pilot and he wouldn’t have been in a position to see what he claimed. He could not have been in the cockpit of an Air Force fighter unless he was an Air Force officer.

The high rank he claims, which suggests credibility, works against him if he never achieved that rank. In other words, his lie about being an Air Force colonel directly impacts the validity of his story. He couldn’t have been in a position to see the UFO crash if he was not in the cockpit of the fighter and he couldn’t be in the cockpit unless he was an Air Force officer.

So, Rhodes claim of a Ph.D. is not a disqualification for his story. It impacts his credibility and requires us to take a deeper look at the photographs and what they show. To some, this embellishment is enough to reject Rhodes out of hand. For others, it "beclouds" the issue but doesn’t mean that the photographs are faked.

With Willingham, his claim of high military rank does disqualify his story. If he was not an Air Force officer he wouldn’t have been in the fighter and he wouldn’t have seen the craft. This should be enough for everyone to reject the story, especially since there are no other witnesses, no photographs and no physical evidence. This does mean the story is faked.