Jesse Marcel - A Dispassionate Look

There has been, again, an assault on the integrity of Jesse Marcel, Sr., by one who has never served in the military and who seems to believe that if it didn’t appear in Marcel’s service record, then it must be a lie. Such simplistic thinking has, for too long, influenced both sides of the UFO question. In the real world there are shades of gray and we must remember that to understand much of what happens in UFOlogy we must be aware of that.

I thought that if we attempted a dispassionate look at Marcel, we might learn something. Oh, it’s not going to lead us to flying saucers and alien bodies, but it might teach us something about the case anyway.

Marcel, in discussing flying saucers (a term very much in use in 1947, though there are those who deny this) with his ham radio buddies in the late 1970s, said that he had picked up pieces of a flying saucer while he was stationed in Roswell (do I need to append New Mexico to this). It was just conversation among friends, but one of those friends was also a station manager in New Orleans who mentioned Marcel to Stan Friedman.

Friedman, and then Len Stringfield, interviewed Marcel who told them about picking up pieces of flying saucer. By searching newspaper files starting with the Arnold sighting on June 24, 1947, they found (or rather I am told William Moore found) a picture of Marcel holding up some of this alleged flying saucer debris on July 9, 1947.

So we come to the first question. In 1947 what did flying saucer mean? Was it a term applied only to alien spaceships or did it have a more general connotation?

Given what I have read in the newspapers and magazines from that era, it would seem to me that flying saucer meant any sort of object, mirage, or apparition seen in the sky. It didn’t necessarily mean spacecraft and I think that it rarely meant spacecraft.

True, that was sometimes the definition applied then but it wasn’t as fixed as it is now. So, when Marcel told his son he had pieces of a flying saucer, he might not have meant it was an alien ship.

I can, of course, interview the son about that and I remember the words he said his father spoke when Jesse Jr. found the writing embossed on the small I-beam. His father said that Jesse Jr. might have been the first person in the world to have seen writing from another world... but in this discussion, I’m thinking that flying saucer was a more generic term than it is today, which, of course doesn’t mean that Marcel wasn’t thinking alien in 1947.

If we look at his statements to various investigators, in front of the media, and to others he talked to, what he described is mainly bits and pieces of debris that had no real shape and provided no real clue to what the overall craft, or object, might have been. Bits of metal, thick paper and thin foil are basically bits of metal, thick paper and thin foil. It is not what you would expect to find littering a crash site, but then, you would certainly find that sort of thing scattered among the larger pieces unless the thing disintegrated or that the field Marcel walked was only part of the crash site. Others suggest that the main body of the craft had come down elsewhere and Bill Brazel told me there was a gouge suggesting something heavy had hit and skipped. Marcel didn’t mention the gouge and as far as I know, no one asked him about that specifically.

So, we have some metallic debris and the like which suggests a technology that was advanced beyond ours but the problem is not with the descriptions of the debris by Marcel but the interpretation put on it. It would seem that everyone, debunker, skeptic, researcher and believer concedes that Marcel handled the material that he claimed to have handled. No one is accusing him of lying about this.

The darling of the debunkers, Sheridan Cavitt, in his official statement to the Air Force, said that he didn’t remember if Marcel had gone out to the field with him or not. He didn’t deny it, he just wasn’t sure. What is important is that Cavitt talked about the debris, but his interpretation of it was that it was something of terrestrial manufacture and unimportant. He never explained why, after he had returned from the Debris Field he didn’t mention this to Colonel Blanchard, the 509^th Bomb Group commanding officer.

Yes, I know that Cavitt’s chain of command did not pass through the 509^th Headquarters, but instead to the CIC office in Albuquerque. But then, if Cavitt had accompanied Marcel to the Debris Field, Blanchard would have asked both what they had seen. Apparently Cavitt did not mention he thought it was all a balloon when he spoke to Blanchard.

But again, we have no evidence of Marcel lying. We have a disagreement as to interpretation of the debris they saw. Cavitt thought balloon and Marcel thought flying saucer.

We all seem to agree that Marcel went out to the Debris Field. We all agree that he found material that he believed to be exotic. We agree that he took it home and then out to the base. Marcel had not lied about any of that. Others witnessed various parts of that activity so we have independent corroboration.

We all agree that Marcel had been a major in 1947, he was the air intelligence officer of the 509^th Bomb Group, and that he held bits of what he believed to be a flying saucer, whatever definition we wish to apply to those words today. So where does this idea that Marcel was a liar come from?

It can all be traced to a transcript of an interview that was conducted by Bob Pratt in 1978. Pratt’s transcript is sometimes garbled with his questions or comments inserted into the middle of Marcel’s statements. I believe that Pratt was careful in transcribing what Marcel said, was less careful with his own comments, and while he would have understood the transcript completely though today we are sometimes confused.

Karl Pflock, in his Roswell book, printed the transcript, but he cleaned it up. He put his spin on some of the words, and as I have said before, the insertion of a comma in one place changes the meaning of the answer to one of those confusing questions.

Again there is little dispute about what he described as seeing on the Debris Field. The problem arises when we begin to compare his service record with what he said in the Pratt interview. Some of the things said here were not repeated to others, which makes me wonder how this came about.

At the being of the interview, Marcel said, "I had flying experience before going in service, started flying in 1928, so being in the air was not foreign to me."

This has been interpreted to be Marcel suggesting that he had been a pilot as far back as 1928, yet when he was asked, in a pre-commissioning interview in 1942 what his hobbies were, he mentioned photography and ham radio. He said nothing about aviation. But he did mention was a cartographer and that he worked from aerial photographs and part of his experience was flying over the areas.

However, and this is important, he said only that he had been flying since 1928 but not that he was a pilot. As part of his job as a cartographer, he flew but did not pilot the aircraft. We have a wash on this. No lie from Marcel, but a misinterpretation from those who wish to assassinate his character. I know from my own experience that when I first joined the Army I mentioned nothing about my previous flying experience, although most of it was as a student with limited hours as a pilot. What this all means to me is that Marcel had flown as part of his job but hadn’t piloted the aircraft and in his interview entering active duty simply did not mention this because, at the time, it was irrelevant and unimportant.

There are two other points in the Pratt interview that talk about flying experience. Marcel mentioned that he had 438 hours of combat time, which meant that he had flown into combat as a member of a crew. Some suggest he was a passenger in an aircraft that was flying into combat, but I suggest he was a member of the crew rather than just a passenger. The exact nature of his position in the aircraft is irrelevant and we have documentation to support his tale of combat flying hours.

He then mentioned that, "...[I] was intelligence officer for bomb wing, flew as pilot, waist gunner and bombardier at different times..."

Now we have Marcel saying he was a pilot, at least to those who weren’t paying attention. He said he had flown AS a pilot, not that he was one and this is a vital distinction. He was not claiming to have been rated and his military record reflects that he was not a military pilot. This does not mean he hadn’t flown as a pilot.

No one seems worried that he also said that he had flown as a bombardier or waist gunner. Again, he wasn’t saying that he had been trained in those positions, only that he had flown in them. This, to me, means he wasn’t lying, but giving an accurate accounting of his experience. In aviation units, those not rated in specific positions sometimes fly in them.

There is a scene in 12 O’Clock High in which they have returned from the first bombing mission in Germany. General Savage learns that half the ground staff has made the mission flying as waist gunners, men who were not rated in those positions but made the mission anyhow.

Yes, this is fiction, but my own experience in an aviation unit bears this out. I gave "stick time" to crew chiefs and door gunners and myself flew as a door gunner on occasion. Nothing in our records would reflect this.

In other words, I don’t see this as a lie by Marcel either. He had the opportunity to do those things and did them. They just weren’t mentioned in his military record and I wouldn’t expect them to be.

The problem is actually when he apparently said he had 3000 hours of pilot time. This is a huge number for someone who is not rated. I have something like 16 – 1700 hours, if you count everything, and I was rated.

But I don’t know how this number came up. In Pflock’s version of the interview, he has Pratt asking the question. According to that version, "Pratt: You had three thousand hours as a pilot – "

Marcel said, "Right [and] eight thousand hours [total] time."

The way it appears in the Pratt interview is "Q – 3000 hrs pilot (right) 8000 hrs flying time."

I could argue that it was Pratt who introduced this number into the discussion and we don’t know where it originated. I could argue that we don’t have Marcel saying this, but to be fair, he seems to be agreeing to it which is really the same thing.

In the end, it seems to me that the 1928 as the date when he started flying is irrelevant because that was when he started flying as a map maker. He didn’t say he started flying as a pilot in 1928. That is an assumption that others have made over the years and I don’t think anyone ever asked Marcel about this.

Later he said that he had flown as a pilot, and this too, is the truth. He wasn’t saying that he was rated or a pilot but that he had flown as one, as well as a waist gunner and bombardier. This too, seems to be the truth.

The problem for me is this claim of 3000 hours as a pilot and 8000 flying time. While I can ignore the 8000 hours total time simply because he was in aviation units and we know he had nearly 500 hours in combat make that total number a little more palatable.

But the 3000 hours of pilot time is quite worrisome... I can’t see how that is possible for a non-pilot even in an aviation unit. This would seem to be an embellishment but I have no evidence that the number is inaccurate... and in the end, no one else does either. Marcel never really did say he had been a pilot.

I suppose this could be seen as splitting a fine hair but do we really want to trash a man’s reputation for something like this... something that we can’t prove is a lie. It might just be true, though I find it hard to believe.

Those attacking Marcel also accuse him of lying when he said he was shot down once, on his third mission and that he claimed he was the sole survivor. The debunkers have gone wild with this claim which is really one that we can provide a resolution to.

Debunkers have said there was nothing in his file to show that he was shot down and I say there wouldn’t be unless he had been put in for an award of some kind. There is no place to make such a note and it was such a common occurrence that it didn’t merit mention.

Pflock, in his interpretation of this wrote, "Marcel: I got shot down one time, my third mission, out of Port Moresby.

"Pratt: Did everyone survive?"

"Marcel: All but one crashed into a mountain."

In this interpretation, Marcel is saying that everyone but one crashed into the mountain which means there was another survivor.

However, if I add a comma, I change the meaning. "Marcel: All, but one crashed into a mountain."

Now everyone, but a single poor soul survived.

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

No matter how you slice it, Marcel didn’t claim he was the only survivor as many of the debunkers allege. This is a clear win for Marcel. No evidence that he was lying and no evidence that he claimed he was the only survivor.

For me, the most troubling is the claims in the Pratt interview are for college credit and a college degree. Again, the Pratt transcript is garbled. In the Pratt interview, it said (and reproduced here exactly as it is in the transcript), "... degree in nuclear physics (bachelors) at completed work at GW Univ inWash. attended (LSU, Houston, U of Wis, NY Univ, Ohio State) , Docotr pool? and GW..."

Prior to entering the Army, Marcel mentioned that he had attended LSU for a year and a half, but there is a qualification on one of the documents. In parentheses, it said, "Uncredit." I have no idea what that means. Did he merely audit the classes? Did he flunk out? Did he receive an incomplete?

I did check with the other universities mentioned, asking each if there were any kind of extension courses that Marcel might have taken while on active duty. All replied that he hadn’t attended their schools in any official capacity. I do know that some of the military courses he took were taught at universities, but nothing to suggest any civilian education at them. The Pratt interview seems to be the only place he made these claims and they are not true.

In the end we have seem to have a single example of Marcel lying but even this makes no sense. Why claim to have attended so many schools? Why say this at all because someone was going to check?

Does this really suggest that we could trust nothing that Marcel said? We all agree that he walked the Debris Field. We all agree that he picked up the material. We all agree that something fell. But because we have some ambiguous statements on a transcript that is sometimes garbled, we’re simply going to reject everything that he said, even when it is corroborated by others whose testimony is trusted.

Since this is a dispassionate look, which means I’m not debating the point, but attempting to understand it, there is one other interview that is important. I don’t understand how the skeptics have missed it for the last decade but I have seen little mention of it (and now I’m sure it will be quoted to prove that Marcel was a liar... I can see the headline, "Jesse Marcel admits the Roswell case a lie.")

Dr. Linda Corley is from Houma, Louisiana, which was where Jesse Marcel lived. She said that in 1981, while working on a school project, she called Marcel and asked for an interview. She spent about four hours with Marcel and his wife, Viaud, and said that she "can’t remember a more pleasant or interesting visit."

Rather than repeat what she heard from Marcel during that interview because it is essentially what he said to everyone else, I’ll mention what happened in the days that followed. According to Corley, she received a telephone call from Marcel. She said, "I can still hear Jesse’s frantic voice on the telephone saying NOT to use any of the material obtained from my conversation with him. He seemed almost hysterical when he called my home, the first time, several days after the interview."

Then, according to Corley, "He stated that everything he told me was a lie."

She also said, "Well, I knew most of what he said was previously published material, given on other interviews, so I figured that this was only his way of trying to prevent me from using the information given me. But I did not know why. My heart really went out to him. He sounded so scared. The second telephone call was similar to the first. A day or so later he called to inquire if I had released any of the information to the press. I assured him that it was only for a school project but he insisted that I was going to the press with it. I tried to calm him and promised him that I would not use any of the personal information if he did not want me to. However, that did not seem to console him. I just didn’t know what to make of his strange behavior..."

So, contrary to what a debunker has written, Viaud Marcel never said it was a lie. That quote came from her husband under what sounded like duress. I don’t know why he would want to repudiate what he had said in the past, though I can speculate. However, this is to be a dispassionate look, so I’ll leave those speculations for later.

What we all really disagree about here is the interpretation that Marcel, in his later life, put on what he had found in New Mexico in 1947. Because some of us don’t agree with that interpretation, they’re going to smear his reputation, even though we know that the military records are often incomplete, that we can see how some conclusions about his statements were drawn both by Pratt and others who read his interview transcript later, and that there is confusion in what was actually said by Marcel.

I understand that some believe that if Marcel is eliminated from the Roswell case, major damage has been done, which I suspect is the reason for the smear campaign. But when you look at it carefully, all you see is that Marcel claimed to have picked up strange debris that he couldn’t identify. He was who he said he was, which means he was the air intelligence officer in 1947. He was on Blanchard’s staff and every other staff officer who was interviewed with a single exception agreed with him. He believed the material was of alien manufacture.

The confusion then, comes from the Pratt interview and Marcel’s actual record. You can decide if those discrepancies are enough for you to reject what he said or if they are the sorts of trouble you run into when looking at the written words of an interview made decades earlier and a set of military records that are even older.

Personally, in the end, I will not label Marcel a liar for those discrepancies simply because there are enough problems with my military records and what I know to be the facts in my record to suggest similar problems exist with Marcel’s records.

We can disagree about the interpretation but the case for Marcel being a liar is not proved. This, I believe, is the conclusion that a dispassionate look will sustain. We haven’t reached the extraterrestrial, but I think we understand a bit more of the situation in Roswell in 1947.

UFO Cover Up - The Early Days

The other day I was on a radio show and the host asked if there was a cover up. I said, "Yes," and that I could prove it. The documentation available shows that the military tried to hide what it was doing with UFO investigations, sometimes in a not very clever way. Sometimes, I think it was just a case of incompetence rather than anything particularly nefarious.

In my search of UFO files, at the National Archives, at the Center for UFO Studies, and using the Project Blue Book files, I learned how some of this transpired. The following will provide a glimpse into the convoluted trail that leads into the cover up.

The military, after the code name Project Sign, the first of the official UFO investigations was compromised, claimed that the UFO investigation had been closed. They had merely changed the name and kept going under the code name of Grudge. Then, in December 1949, they announced that Project Grudge had been ended. The study hadn't ended, but continued, still using the code name Grudge. Later that name was changed and Blue Book was born.

In the beginning, Blue Book was a solid investigation of UFOs. But after the summer of 1952, that situation changed. Clearly UFOs were not something that were going to go away. Clearly the public interest, after more than five years, was at an all time high. Newspaper reporters and magazine writers were trying to learn everything they could about UFOs. Books on the topic sold well and more were scheduled to be published that year. Something had to be done to end the interest.

One of the responses was the CIA's Robertson Panel which would determine that there was nothing to UFOs, but more importantly, they didn’t threaten national security.

The other was a new set of regulations and a change in the way the UFO investigation was going to be handled. ATIC and Project Blue Book, who had been the main action addressees on UFO related items of intelligence were about to lose that distinctive status. New regulations, issued by the Air Defense Command on January 3, 1953 created the 4602d Air Intelligence Service Squadron (AISS). Other new regulations, including Air Force Regulation 200-2, dated August 1953, tasked the 4602d with the investigation of UFOs. All UFO reports would pass through the 4602d AISS prior to transmission to ATIC. That was a major change in the UFO investigation.

It is interesting to note that Ed Ruppelt, after briefing the members of the Robertson Panel, was on his way to Ent Air Force Base near Colorado Springs, the headquarters of the 4602d. He was scheduled to arrive on January 24, 1953 to "present a one hour briefing at Officers Call." The trip was arranged by Major Vernon L. Sadowski on January 7, 1953, or about a week before the Robertson Panel began its meetings.

But Ruppelt, in describing how the 4602d entered into the UFO investigation business, seemed to think it was the result, not of manipulation at the top, but because of his pushing from the bottom. He wrote, "Project Blue Book got a badly needed shot in the arm when an unpublicized but highly important change took place: another intelligence agency began to take over all field investigations...the orders had been to build it up - get more people - do what the [Robertson] panel recommended. But when I'd ask for more people, all I got was a polite 'So sorry.'...I happened to be expounding my troubles one day at Air Defense Command Headquarters while I as briefing General Burgess, ADC's Director of Intelligence, and he told me about his 4602d Air Intelligence Squadron, a specialized intelligence unit that had recently become operational. Maybe it could help..."

Ruppelt explained that he didn't expect much from Burgess. Ruppelt expected to write memos and letters and seal "it in a time capsule for preservation so that when the answer finally does come through the future generation that receives it will know how it all started."

This time things were different. Ruppelt writes, "But I underestimated the efficiency of the Air Defense Command. Inside of two weeks General Burgess had called General Garland, they'd discussed the problem, and I was back in Colorado Springs setting up a program with Colonel White's 4602nd."

In Ruppelt's book, he implies that all this happened late in the summer of 1953. Ruppelt's tour at Blue Book was scheduled to end in February 1953, and he departed for two months of temporary duty in Denver. He writes, "When I came back to ATIC in July 1953 and took over another job, Lieutenant Olsson was just getting out of the Air Force and A1/c (Airman First Class) [Max] Futch was now it...In a few days I again had Project Blue Book as an additional duty this time and I had orders to 'build it up.'"

So, Ruppelt, at the end of the summer, is talking to General Burgess and within weeks, he is told that the 4602d is available to investigate UFOs. Documentation, however, doesn't bear this out.

On March 5, 1953, months before Ruppelt met with General Burgess, a letter headed, "Utilization of 4602nd AISS Personnel in Project Blue Book Field Investigations," is sent to the Commanding General of the Air Defense Command and to the attention of the Director of Intelligence at Ent Air Force Base. The plan of action, outlined in the letter was approved on March 23, 1953.

In the letter, it was written, "During the recent conference attended by personnel of the 4602nd AISS and Project Blue Book the possibility of utilizing 4602nd AISS field units to obtain additional data on reports of Unidentified Flying Objects was discussed. It is believed by this Center that such a program would materially aid ATIC and give 4602nd AISS personnel valuable experience in field interrogations. It would also give them an opportunity to establish further liaison with other governmental agencies, such as CAA, other military units, etc., in their areas."

The interesting statement here, as in many of the other documents relating to the 4602d, is the idea that the field teams, by interrogating witnesses to UFO sightings, can gain valuable experience in interrogating people. Ruppelt pointed out that the 4602d had a primary function of interrogating captured enemy airmen during war. In a peacetime environment, all they could do was interrogate "captured" Americans in simulations. According to Ruppelt, "Investigating UFO reports would supplement these problems [wartime simulations] and add a factor of realism that would be invaluable in their training."

All this went on while Ruppelt was on temporary duty and someone else was heading Project Blue Book. It would seem that some correspondence between the ADC and ATIC would have been on file at Blue Book. Ruppelt, when he returned to ATIC, should have been aware that negotiations between the 4602d and ATIC were in progress. Yet his own book suggests he didn't understand that.

Upon publication of Air Force Regulation 200-2, in August 1953, a briefing about implementation of the regulation was held at Ent Air Force Base for members of the 4602nd. Publication of a regulation suggests that the changes had been in the planning stage for a long time. It suggests that the implementation of ADC regulation 24-3, published on January 3, 1953, was part of a larger plan. All of it was probably an outgrowth of the wave of sightings from the summer of 1952.

During the briefing, one of the officers asked, "What is the status of the 4602d in regards to this new UFOB regulation?"

Major BeBruler said, "I want to say that on this UFOB regulation that ADC will designate the 4602d as the agency to discharge its responsibility for field and certain preliminary investigations. Secondly, there will be a criteria established as a guide to determine when the field units will conduct a detailed follow-up investigation and when they will not."

This is important because it marks the shift in the UFO investigations. The Robertson Panel recommended no secrecy. They wanted to share everything with the public to prove there was nothing to hide. But that didn't happen. Instead, Blue Book was stripped of its investigative function and became little more than a public relations clearing house. The real investigations were conducted by the 4602d AISS, an intelligence agency of which no one outside a limited circle inside the intelligence community knew. Public questions about UFOs went to Blue Book but no one asked the 4602d what they were doing. They operated outside the spotlight of the media.

From the documentation available, it is clear that the investigative function after 1953 rested with the 4602d. UFO sighting reports were transmitted electronically to the closest of the field units for investigation. Once that investigation was completed, those sightings which were not identified were transmitted on to ATIC and supposedly provided to Project Blue Book.

Although AFR 200-2 was first published in August 1953, implementation of it seems to have lagged until August the following year. Reports available in the 4602d Unit History, originally classified secret, show that there was some reluctance to take on the task of UFO investigation.

This is not to suggest, from some of the early reports, that the 4602d was operating to suppress UFO data, though that was the effect. The men at the meetings, from the questions asked, seemed more concerned with the logistical support available to them to complete their mission rather than hiding anything about their work. The regulations at squadron and flight levels had not yet been written.

During the initial briefing held in 1954, Lieutenant Vaughn, said, "General Carey is very vehement in his desire to see these reports before they are sent anywhere. What will be done about that? He has seen this AFR 200-2, but before they are sent in, he still wants to see them."

Colonel White answered, "I see no objection to that, if they don't get tied up. There is nothing in 200-2 that says that written reports (AF 112) should go to General Carey. Again this is in his division area of responsibility. General Carey is one of the sharpest officers in the Air Force today, and if he wants you to do something like this in his area, it, of course, should be done. The one arrangement that I would make is that you should hand carry the reports to him."

The question that begs to be asked is if this was in some way an attempt to circumvent AFR 200-2 by General Carey. And why should the reports be hand carried to him?

The simplest answer is that General Carey, because the UFO program was moving into his area of responsibility wanted to be kept apprised of what was happening in the field. Hand carrying the reports just expedited the process. There seems to be nothing underhanded or nefarious in the operations as they were being established by the 4602d. They were tasked with a job and were attempting to carry it out to the best of their abilities.

What is important here is the shift of investigative responsibility. Ruppelt complained that his tiny shop was overworked and undermanned, and a splendid compromise was found. In reality, since none of this was made public until long after the fact, it is clear that it was one more aspect of the conspiracy of silence.

In 1947 and 1948 when Project Sign was created, the public name given it was Project Saucer. A review of the magazine articles and books released in that time frame speak of Project Saucer. Once the real name, Project Sign, was compromised, the public name of Saucer was scrapped. Officials then suggested that Sign had been closed and no new investigation had been undertaken. Of course, it was only a name change, the project still existed.

This time the name was left in place, but the location of the investigation shifted. Blue Book would issue press releases and reporters would call the project for information, but the investigation was now housed in the Air Defense Command and conducted by the 4602d as part of their training.

While it can be argued, persuasively, that military secrets are a necessity, and since Blue Book was well known by the beginning of 1953, the policy makes sense. But it can also be argued that the policy is an outgrowth of a desire to mislead the public about the reality of the situation. The question that can be asked, and frequently was, "How can anyone suspect the Air Force takes UFOs seriously if the investigation consists of an officer, an NCO, an enlisted man or two and a secretary?" The answer is, of course, not very.

But, of course, that wasn't the true picture. Investigation was continuing at a very high level with the addition of the 4602d's intelligence teams. More information comes from the unit history (originally classified as Secret) and dated from 1 January - 30 June 1955. "The 4602d Air Intelligence Service Squadron continues to conduct all field investigations within the zone of the interior to determine the identity of any Unidentified Flying Objects." The unit history also noted, "The responsibility for UFOB investigation was placed on the Air Defense Command, with the publication of AFR 200-2, dated 12 August 1954."

This merely confirms what we had suspected before. There was a secret study of UFOs conducted by the Air Force that was not part of the Blue Book System. Clearly ATIC was involved because regulations demanded it, but there is nothing to suggest that every report forwarded to ATIC made its way down to Blue Book.

I Understand the Skeptics

I have always, in the past, rejected the idea of producing a top ten list of UFO sightings. I thought of it as a trap by the skeptics and the debunkers. They would take the list, find implausible solutions and then report that they had identified the UFOs as something mundane. They wouldn’t care if the solutions made sense or not. They would report that they had solved the cases and UFOs were nothing more than misidentifications and hoaxes.

There is good reason to believe that. Philip Klass was infamous for finding solutions that didn’t fit the facts. In Socorro he suggested it was a conspiracy between the then Socorro mayor and police officer Lonnie Zamora. Klass believed that the mayor had wanted to find an excuse to develop some land he owned and believed a UFO landing there would create a tourist attraction. We have since learned that the mayor didn’t own the land in 1964 and no real tourist attraction was ever developed.

Donald Menzel offered multiple explanations for the photographs taken over Lubbock, Texas in September 1951 but finally settled on "Hoax!" There is no evidence that it was a hoax and when I talked to the photographer, Carl Hart, some forty or so years later, he told me that he still doesn’t know what he photographed.

But there is no evidence of a hoax, unless, of course, you have the Menzel mindset. That is, there is no alien visitation and anything that suggests otherwise is either a misidentification or a hoax.

I now find myself in the same dilemma as the skeptics when it comes to the UFO subset of cattle mutilations. I entered the investigation in the early 1970s when Jim Lorenzen, then the International Director of APRO, asked me (and several others in several other locations) to look into some mutilations in Minnesota. After a week or so there, I had the answers to the questions about those specific mutilations and the extraterrestrial had nothing to do with it.

And in the years since, I have investigated other mutilations and I have kept up with the current literature on mutilations. I have read from both sides of the controversy including the two works that I think of as most important: the Rommel investigation done for the state of New Mexico, and Mute Evidence. I believe that anyone interested in cattle mutilations should have read both works but that isn’t the case. When I asked a proponent of mutilations about it quite recently, she said that she was unfamiliar with them.

Here’s the deal. Every case of mutilation that I have investigated has a rational, terrestrial explanation. Every one.

The answers ranged from scavengers to humans who thought it funny to carve up an already dead animal, but nothing with an extraterrestrial influence. There were suggestions, but those were based on speculation and the observations of those who didn’t understand the process of decay.

Periodically, I would look again at cattle mutilations, believing that as time passed, new information would surface. Instead it was the same sorts of arguments that hadn’t seemed all that persuasive in the 1970s. Ranchers who said they had never seen anything like it in the past. A surgical precision that couldn’t be duplicated by vets or doctors. Laser instruments that suggested a technology that was far beyond ours.

But, in the end, no one could explain why the aliens were doing it. What was the motivation? Why not just take the whole animal and not leave the remains?

As I have mentioned in the past, some one over at UFO UpDates asked for a list of reading material about mutilations and, of course, all those saying that UFOs were responsible were noted. I merely suggested that they also look at Mute Evidence and Rommel’s investigation for the state of New Mexico. I wasn’t advocating a position, merely providing, what I thought to be some useful references.

The response was typical. I was asked how I would explain various anomalies that some investigators had reported. I was asked how I would explain a lack of copper in the blood of the mutilated animal. I was asked how I would explain the lack of scavenger tracks on the ground near the dead and mutilated animal.

Well, the answers were there. Today, I would point to Fact or Fiction: The Paranormal Files on the SyFy Channel. They showed a picture of a dead and mutilated cow and said that there had been no animal tracks around it. But they didn’t mention the bird droppings that were quite obvious on the animal, even in the picture. There are many bird scavengers and no one seems to think of them.

They also tried to duplicate, using various instruments, the precision of the cuts on a mutilated animal and failed to do it. But they did run an experiment that suggested that some of these precise cuts were the result of the natural decomposition of the animal including some seemingly straight line incisions.

Their conclusion, which I’m sure annoyed not only some of the local ranchers but those who studied cattle mutilations, was that there was no evidence to suggest anything alien was involved.

Here’s the real point. Every time I believe that we had ended the conversation, someone says, "Yes, those are solved but what about this new and different case. How do you explain...?"

Usually it is just more of the same. What is anomalous to one is explained in the mundane to another. The solution, I suppose, would be a list of the ten most mysterious cattle mutilations and see if we could find solutions.

There are some truly mysterious cases and I learned of one in England not all that long ago. While mysterious, the solution, I believe, will be terrestrial rather than alien. I won’t say that I would be delighted if is was alien, but if that is the direction it took, then we who argue for the extraterrestrial nature of some UFO sightings would have some good evidence.

In a similar vein, Chris O’Brien, out there in Colorado, in the San Luis Valley is attempting to put up web cameras that could be used to spot the mystery mutilators and any space craft they might be flying. While I sort of trivialize it here, I do think it is a good idea. Anything that is done in an attempt to further our knowledge and to resolve an issue is a good thing. But the question is how long does it go on before he decides that there are no alien mutilators...

Obviously, if he caught something on tape, that would prove his point and we would have a very interesting bit of evidence. But I wonder if the same thing I heard about the lack of "classic" mutilations while Kenneth Rommel was investigating in New Mexico would be said in the San Luis Valley. While the cameras were operating, there just were no classic mutilations in front of them... Or if there was evidence of scavengers in what might look to be a classic mutilation, it would be dismissed because the damage didn’t mirror, exactly, some other mutilations.

The skeptics, I imagine, think the same thing about UFO sightings. They wonder just how many of the once classic cases that are now solved, at least for many of us, have to be defined as mundane before we give up the argument. In the last decade or so, many of them have fallen. I now believe that the Chiles-Whitted case of the cigar-shaped craft that rocketed past their aircraft was a bolide... an extremely bright meteor that seemed to come directly at them and fooled them.

I believe that the Mantell case, in which Thomas Mantell was killed chasing a huge object, is explained by a Skyhook balloon. I base that on the descriptions of the object that were provided by those who saw it as it drifted at 80,000 or a 100,000 feet above the ground.

I do not believe that a Project Mogul balloon is responsible for the debris found near Roswell. That doesn’t mean it was extraterrestrial, only that it wasn’t a balloon. I get to the extraterrestrial by other means and I reject Mogul because it doesn’t work, for all the reasons I have outlined here in the past.

So I understand the skeptics desire to have a list of the ten best cases so they could tackle them. I can easily think of ten cases with multiple chains of evidence but I fear that we have lost the opportunities that those cases would have supplied. We were so busy arguing about whether or not some UFOs represented alien spacecraft that none of us looked at the really good evidence when we had the opportunity.

I also know that some of the skeptics, but by no means all of them, would fail to make a dispassionate argument. They truly believe there is no alien visitation and therefore no evidence can prove alien visitation. Others would take that dispassionate look, but they would insist an very compelling evidence and rightly so.

I have no hope that anything will ever be resolved. Even if the spacecraft landed there would be those who believed it was some kind of fake. These are the same kind of people who believe the moon landings were a hoax, that the president’s birth certificate was faked, and that there is a colony on Mars (where I suspect the really rich will hide when the asteroid collides with Earth on December 21, 2012 and remember you heard it here first).

My real point is that I understand the skeptics frustration with UFOs, but then, I understand the other side of the coin as well. And I understand that nothing will be resolved until we can remove the emotion and belief structure from the equation. Humans haven’t been able to do that in all of recorded history and I doubt we’ll do it here. We can try, but I have little hope.

UFOs and the Main Stream Media

The Main Stream Media (hereafter MSM) has, in the last few weeks reported on a couple of UFO related stories that could have had some significance if any of the alleged reporters had ever had an original thought. The clues were there, if they could think beyond the next martini... though I suppose their battle cry, “Fake it until you make it,” tells us something about them.

First there was the big hoopla over an FBI document that suggested there had been a UFO crash. But there were no names attached as the source and the information seemed to be that from the Aztec, New Mexico hoax of 1948. All of the information had appeared in magazines and books in the late 1940s and early 1950s. Without any names, vague locations, and general information, there wasn’t much to do with it.

What the MSM missed, was the fact that the document existed at all. Why would an FBI agent submit something like this? Obviously because he had orders to do so. No, not him specifically, but FBI agents in general. They were to be on the lookout for UFO related information.

We could go back to the July, 1947, when the then Army Air Forces requested FBI assistance in UFO investigations. J. Edgar Hoover, the then director, said that he would do it, but they had to be let in on all UFO information. Hoover mentioned “discs recovered” in his response, in this case a hoax from Shreveport, but the point is the FBI was interested in UFOs. The document in question showed that several years later, the FBI was still gathering UFO information regardless of the source or reliability.

If the situation had changed in those years from Hoover’s order... if the situation was such that the Air Force knew that there were no flying saucers, wouldn’t they have told the FBI? And then, wouldn’t the FBI stopped gathering UFO information, especially when that information was on the lunatic fringe side?

So, the reporters just told us that the document was out there, though we had known that for more than two decades. They didn’t bother to check around. They didn’t bother to see if there was anything important in the document. They just wrote their stories, their superficial stories, and ran off to the next one. They simply didn’t understand.

And then, second, we have to put up with the latest nonsense about Roswell, from a MSM reporter whole knows nothing about the case, has little clue about Area 51 and apparently knows next to nothing about aviation history. Hell, she doesn’t even know that Area 51 didn’t exist in 1951 and that it wasn’t named that because of alien bodies brought there in 1951.

Here’s the point. The MSM rejects the idea of alien spacecraft, looking down their noses at those of us who believe the evidence for visitation is persuasive. They are uninterested in looking at the evidence, but they do know that UFO stories and documentaries are good for ratings. So, while they’ll make fun of UFO reports and UFO sighters, they will also be sure to devote time to them to boost their ratings.

In fact, I just heard someone on television make the crack that those who see UFOs live in the rural south and don’t have a full set of teeth. Of course the MSM doesn’t know, and doesn’t care, that the best sightings come from those with college degrees and who had an opportunity to observe the UFO for a minute or more. It’s just easier to continue with the stereotype because to do otherwise would require some research.

For more than twenty years I have been publishing books about UFOs and UFO sightings. They range from The UFO Casebook which looked at a history of UFO reports with some commentary about those sightings to the highly skeptical The Abduction Enigma which suggested that alien abduction has a terrestrial explanation.

Of course The Abduction Enigma was overlooked by the MSM, though it would have reinforced their belief structure. They were more interested in a book published a decade later that reached the same basic conclusions that we did with The Abduction Enigma. We even had some of the academic credentials that the MSM like, but they ignored our book. The preferred the derivative book that came out later that gave no credit to the work we had done.

The real question here is if the MSM can’t be bothered with learning about a topic before they report on it, if they can’t be bothered with understanding what is happening, why should we accept anything they have to say about... well, anything?

Sure, you can say that reporting on UFOs is not up there with combat reporting, or election reporting, and those in the MSM take that seriously.

I say, “Oh really?”

Two examples.

While in Iraq, I happened to see Ted Koppel reporting on the conditions of the schools in Baghdad. He was at a school where he had found an open sewer just inside the school grounds. He was reporting on how horrible the conditions were.

My response? We had repaired, updated, and donated books, supplies and even computers to some 2500 schools in Iraq and he found the one we hadn’t gotten to yet. He made no mention of all that good work done by American soldiers.

Second, as I was working on a paper in a master’s program, I was reviewing the TET Offensive of 1968. Never mind that the reporters were caught off guard, though the military wasn’t... just look at how many high-ranking officers and political leaders predicted the offensive in the months before (even the ARVN First Division recalled its soldiers 48 hours before the launch of TET). Never mind that the reporters all reported from the Colon section of Saigon where there was great damage (for historic and racial reasons) but not from much of the rest of the city which was not on fire (flames and burning buildings look much better on the news than a downtown street with no damage).

What I learned was that many of the political leaders were not listening to the generals who were in Vietnam... they were taking their opinions from the reporters whose agenda was to look brave and to present their personal yet uninformed views of the situation. The question would be, “Just where did they get their military training, and how is it that they couldn’t understand the situation as it was rather than reporting on what they thought it was?”

So, they don’t get it when it comes to UFOs and in the greater scheme of things, that’s not as important as so much of the other things they don’t get. They just quote one another and worry about filling their time on the air rather than understanding what is really going on.

It is time that we stopped listening to them, their “informed” sources, and realize they just don’t have any inside track, inside knowledge, or even a realistic comprehension of the world around them. They are there to promote themselves, get into the big time, and make the big bucks. They often just don’t care about the truth.

How do I know? Nearly twenty years ago, just before an interview with a reporter for a major daily newspaper, I said that we could prove much of what we said about UFOs. The intern (no they wouldn’t waste the talent of a real reporter on this) said that the editors didn’t care. They knew there were no UFOs.

Just how do you fight that?

Annie Jacobsen, Area 51 and UFOs

Okay, let’s see if I have this straight. In 1947, the officers and men of the 509th Bomb Group found the remains of a crashed flying saucer. They took parts of it to Fort Worth where Brigadier General Roger Ramey and one of his weather officers, Warrant Officer Irving Newton (seen here), identified it was a common weather balloon and radar reflector.

The press, which had been very interested, suddenly couldn’t care less and didn’t ask how the highly trained officers of the only nuclear strike force in the world at the time could make such a stupid mistake. They didn’t wonder if the men with their fingers on the triggers might not be as trustworthy as everyone hoped. No, they bought the story and went on their way.

Then Jesse Marcel Sr., who had been the air intelligence officer in 1947, began to tell ham radio friends that he had picked up the pieces of a flying saucer in 1947. Articles were written, followed by a book, but the Main Stream Media (hereafter MSM), yawned because they knew that there were no flying saucers The Air Force had said so.

Interest in the Roswell crash built anyway and move articles and books were written. Television documentaries were made, many times without unnamed sources, but the actual people appearing on camera to tell their tales. MSM yawned because these were crazy old men and women whose memories were playing tricks on them. Besides, there were no flying saucers because the Air Force said so.

But suddenly there was real interest and a New Mexico congressman began to ask questions about the Roswell UFO crash. He wanted an investigation into this. The MSM paid attention because Steven Schiff was a real congressman and that made the story credible... though why escapes me... which is not so say that I didn’t find Schiff credible.

The Air Force investigated, issued a final report, and found that what fell at Roswell was a... weather balloon. Oh, no longer was it just a regular weather balloon, it was Project Mogul, so highly classified that not even the scientists working on it knew the name. This became the accepted truth because the Air Force said so.

Of course Project Mogul (balloon launch seen here) was just regular weather balloons and rawin radar reflectors, just like the tens of thousands that had been launched all over the country for years and there was no reason to be fooled by them even if they were tied together in long arrays. Project Mogul turned out not to be so highly classified... just the ultimate purpose was. But the MSM bought the story because there were no flying saucers. The Air Force said so.

No one in the MSM bothered to ask a couple of simple questions like, “If you’re investigating a UFO crash in New Mexico, why didn’t you interview the more of the men who were there at the time? Why just Sheridan Cavitt? Why not Brigadier General Arthur Exon? Why not Patrick Saunders? Why five men who worked on Project Mogul, some of whom weren’t even in New Mexico in 1947?

No one in the MSM thought about that.

“But what about the bodies?” someone, not a member of the MSM, asked.

The Air Force came out with a second final report to explain the bodies. These were anthropomorphic dummies dropped during high altitude parachute and balloon tests in the 1950s. Never mind that the earliest any were dropped near Roswell was 1957 and that the dummies looked exactly like what they were. This is the solution and the MSM believed this nonsense because the Air Force said so.

Then my friend (at least I think of him as a friend) Nick Redfern (seen here) said, “Not so fast.” He had uncovered information that suggested the recovery at Roswell was really the end result of experiments using deformed Japanese and some kind of experimental craft. At least this provided a reason for the cover up... not some kind of secret balloons.

Not many accepted this and the Air Force remained silent. I think they had learned their lesson. Don’t get involved in these crazy flying saucer stories. Leave it to the kooks, which is not to say that Nick is a kook.

But Redfern was wrong about this and we know because a “journalist” meaning a person with ties to the MSM has said that the Roswell crash was the result of a collaboration between Joseph Mengele and Josef Stalin using stolen Horten Brothers “flying wing” type aircraft to give it an alien appearance. Never mind that the Air Force had access to the Horten Brothers designs after the collapse of Nazi Germany and should have recognized the craft if that is what it was.

But the MSM media listens to this because Annie Jacobsen, who is a contributing editor of the Los Angeles Times Magazine said that she interviewed a guy, who remains nameless and he said so. Deformed children the result of the horrific “experiments” of Mengele in some kind of Horten Brothers flying wing for the extraterrestrial flavor. Stalin thought this “War of the Worlds” scenario would create public panic, though I’m at a loss to understand what he would have gained by this.

Did anyone ever notice that the Nazis and Stalin were enemies? Did anyone notice that Mengele had fled to South America and was no longer any sort of important person in 1947?

Enough of this latest nonsense. I do not understand why the MSM will listen to this sort of uncorroborated crap, but will ignore the information provided by the men and women who were there. Clearly the MSM does not have a grasp of history, they don’t know that we, meaning the Roswell researchers looked at the Horten Brothers aircraft designs(seen here) (and that we know the flying wing is inherently unstable and didn’t work well until computers could compensate for the tendency of the craft to flip) and we looked at many alternative explanations.

We can stop now because we have the answer... Stalin, Mengele, deformed children and a bizarre attempt to create a panic in the US is responsible for the crash... But when the Air Force buried the story, why didn’t Stalin pull a few strings at his end to interest the MSM? Why’d he let it die?

And for those interested, I have said for years that the big secret at Area 51 was that it was where the next generation of military aircraft were tested. It has nothing to do with UFOs... but the MSM isn’t interested in that opinion either.

Real Aliens, Space Beings and Creatures from Other Worlds

Brad and Sherry Steiger (seen here) have turned out another winner with their Real Aliens, Space Beings and Creatures from Other Worlds. The title, I think, says it all. This is a book about aliens, though not necessarily from other planets.

“What does that mean?” you might ask.

We’ll get to that in a moment. First I should point out that I have known Brad Steiger for decades. We have talked on the telephone many times, we have emailed one another frequently, and we have appeared on radio shows that the other hosted. I knew, when I had a Saturday evening show on KTSM that I could always call Brad at the last minute if a guest canceled, and I knew that he would be an interesting interview.

The first time that I spoke to him, which I’m sure he doesn’t remember was as I was writing my first book on the paranormal. As a reference, I was using a book he had written. I was interested in the story of Oliver Thomas, a Welsh lad who had vanished in 1909 as he carried water from the family well.

I happened to know where Brad lived at the time and I was able to get his telephone number from directory assistance. I called and asked my question about the case.

“It’s a hoax,” Brad told me.

He said that he had learned that after his book was published, but he was quick to point out the truth, now that he had it. His philosophy at the time was to believe what people told him until he learned that they couldn’t be trusted. I thought it was a fine philosophy even if it let you down sometimes...

My own experience has been that too many people will lie about too much for reasons that seem to be vague. They’ll lie for the personal glory. They’ll lie for the little fame it might bring them. They’ll lie to put one over on someone else. They’ll lie just for the hell of it.

Anyway, Brad was quick to tell me the truth and I certainly appreciated that.

So now we have a new book by Brad and Sherry and it is a compendium of tales about alien creatures that might come from other planets, might be travelers from our future or might be interdimensional beings. They cover all the theories here.

They begin with the biggest of the UFO cases which is the Roswell UFO crash and wind their way through the history of alien contact whether from the contactees of the 1950s, the abductees of the 1990s or the sightings by people of strange beings throughout the centuries.

This is a book for the novice, who has just discovered the UFO field. It provides the basics to understanding where we have gone since the beginning, providing a glimpse into UFOs.

This is a book for those who have been around for a while but who have had their research diverted into one of the many subset of the UFO phenomenon. It provides the basic information so that detailed research can be designed for a long term study.

For those who wish a good primer on UFOs, and for those who wish an encyclopedia of information about the last fifty or sixty years of alien adventures, this is the book to have. It is literally everything to everyone.

If I were to complain about it, I would mention that it is not as detailed as I would like, but then the book would probably have been so big that you’d need a crane to lift it. If there is a case for which I need additional information, Real Aliens, Space Beings, and Creatures from Other Worlds provides the starting point. It gives me the clues I need for my specialized research.

This is one of those books that belongs in every UFO researchers’ library. And if you’re not one of those, a UFO researcher, then it is just a fun read. Informative, provocative, and intelligent. A valuable resource.

Kingman UFO Crash... Really?

To prove my point, that those who offer solutions to some of the UFO cases are not invited to many conferences, I have just learned of an event in Kingman, Arizona in celebration of the UFO crash there. It seems to make no difference that the sources for this information about the crash is shaky at best. Anyone who has an alleged UFO crash near them seems to be gearing up for a festival of some kind.

Let’s review the facts.

The original story, as near as I can tell, came from a fellow who was originally identified as Fritz Werner. He told of a classified mission he had been assigned in May 1953. According to what he told UFO researchers, he had been flown to Phoenix and then bused to a site in Arizona that he believed was near Kingman. Once on site, he engaged in important and classified work.

He told Jeff Young and Paul Chetham about this in 1971. He said, “the object was not built by anything, obviously, that we know about on Earth. This was 1954 [clearly his memory was in error because he later corrected it to May 21, 1953]. At that time I was out of the atomic testing, but I was still with the Air force and this was the time I was on Blue Book. There was a report that there was a crash of an unexplained vehicle in the west and they organized a team of about forty of us. I was one of the forty.”

All well and good, but there is no evidence that Werner was ever a member of Project Blue Book.

Later he would be interviewed by Ray Fowler. He would give a slightly different version to Fowler, but explained that he’d had been drinking martinis prior to that first interview with Young and Chetham. That would explain the discrepancies because he tended to make things up when he drank, according to him.

Later we would learn that Fritz Werner was really Arthur Stancil and later that his name was Arthur Stansel. The story would be unsupported by any documentation other than a notation on Stansel’s personal calendar for May 20 and 21, 1953.

The May 20 entry said, “Well, pen’s out of ink. Spent most of the day on Frenchman’s Flat surveying cubicles and supervising welding of plate girder bridge sensor which cracked after last shot. Drank brew in eve. Read. Got funny call from Dr. Doll at 10:00. I’m to go on a special job tomorrow.”

The entry for the next day said, “Up at 7:00. Worked most of the day on Frenchman with cubicles. Letter from Bet. She’s feeling better now – thank goodness. Got picked up at Indian Springs AFB at 4:30 p.m. for a job I can’t talk about.”

And that’s it. That’s the extent of the documentation. Jottings on a calendar that could mean practically anything... and a note that he had a job he couldn’t talk about. Not the brightest thing to have written down if he truly had a job he couldn’t talk about.

I will note that searches of the local newspapers, meaning those within 100 miles including Las Vegas, have turned up nothing. No UFO sightings at the right time and nothing to suggest that something crashed. Just the story told by Arthur Stansel, first to two young neighbors and later to Ray Fowler.

And with Stansel telling everyone that when he drank, he told stories, his credibility suffers. He told Fowler that he had had four martinis before the young men showed up. I don’t know why he would continue to push the story when Fowler arrived except that he might have liked the attention the tale drew.

But then Don Schmitt told me of a second witness... well, not exactly a witness, but someone who could corroborate the tale. According to the information he gave to me, Judie Wolcott said that her husband had been in the control tower the night the object crashed. Later, after he had been sent to Vietnam, he wrote her a letter that mentioned the UFO crash. He didn’t supply many details and said that he would tell her more when he returned. Unfortunately, he was killed in Vietnam and the letter he wrote had disappeared.

Okay, that was corroboration, after a fashion. It would have been nice to have the letter, especially since it would have been dated before Stansel told his tale to Fowler and that tale found its way into a national UFO magazine.

Then the daughter of Judie Wolcott called me and told me that her mother tended to make things up and that her father had not been killed in Vietnam. In fact, neither of the men Wolcott had married were killed in Vietnam. There was no letter and no strange confession.

So, there really was no evidence for a Kingman crash. We can find no trace of it in any of the documentation and this includes the newspapers of the time. Remember, all the crashes that have some solid supporting information also have newspaper articles about them. Roswell, Las Vegas, Shag Harbour, Kecksburg and so on. Many of the alleged crashes listed on so many web sites have newspaper articles about them, even when we are able to put a mundane answer on them... but not so Kingman.

Hey, I hope their festival was a great success and that those in attendance learned something of importance. I hope they do it again next year and that it becomes a tradition in the town. Kingman is a nice little city and I have always enjoyed my time there, limited though it might have been.

This little piece is not quite as altruistic as it might seem. I have a long article about the entire Kingman Crash story in Philip Mantle’s UFO Matrix, which has just been published. You can view information about the magazine at http://www.ufomatrix.com/.

But there was no UFO crash there... there was one a couple of hundred miles northeast in Nevada in 1962 but nothing near Kingman. Maybe Las Vegas incident was close enough.

UFO Crashes and Len Stringfield

Not all that long ago, I found a report on the MUFON Symposium held in Denver, Colorado in 2010. The author reported on my presentation which was a tribute to Len Stringfield (seen here) and the pioneering work he had done on UFO crash/retrieval cases.

I pointed out that Len had opened the door for the rest of us, and a subset of the UFO field, that is crash/retrievals, was now something that was viewed with new interest and new respect. If not for Len’s work, we wouldn’t be looking at these cases simply because we had been "educated" by the destruction of the Aztec UFO Crash case and the information about the reliability of the two men who were at the heart of it.

In his landmark paper, Len began with what seemed, in 1978, to be a strong report given the source of the information. I confess that the fact the witness claimed to be a retired Air Force colonel colored my thinking about it. In fact, in A History of UFO Crashes, I gave the case high marks. Later, in Crash - When UFOs Fall from the Sky, I would reevaluate the case. I thought of it as taking it to the end, which, I believe Len would have wanted.

In his 1978 presentation in Ohio at the MUFON Symposium, Len reported:

In 1948, according to reports from hazy sources, a UFO with occupants numbering anywhere from one to sixteen, had crashed in a desert region of the southwest United States or Mexico and was retrieved by U.S. military authorities. But the reports never got beyond rumor because 1948 was the year when Frank Scully’s book unloaded an alleged hoax on the public about a crashed UFO in Aztec, New Mexico.

In the Fall of 1977 new word of a 1948 crash came to me from a well-informed military source. His information, however, was scanty. He had heard from other "inside" military sources that a metallic disc had crashed somewhere in a desert region. His only details indicated that the craft had suffered severe damage on impact and was retrieved by military units.

By coincidence, months later in 1977, I was to learn more about a crashed disc occurring in 1948. This came from researcher Todd Zechel, whom I had known since 1975 when he became Research Director of Ground Saucer Watch. Formerly with the National Security Agency, Zechel stated that an Air Force technician told him that his uncle, then a Provost Marshal at Carswell Air Force Base near Ft. Worth, Texas, had taken part in the recovery of the crashed UFO which was described as a metallic disc, 90 feet in diameter.

The crash occurred about 30 miles inside the Mexican border across from Laredo, Texas, and was recovered by U.S. troops after it was tracked on radar screens. The job assigned the Provost Marshal, now a retired colonel, was to cordon off the crash site.

The retired colonel [Provost Marshal], now living in Florida, was tracked down by Zechel. Among other facts revealed by the colonel was that one dead alien was found aboard the craft which was described as about 4 feet, 6 inches tall, completely hairless with hands that had no thumbs.

Zechel learned from his source that the troops involved in the retrieval were warned that if they said a word about the incident they would be the "sorriest people around".

Continuing his investigation, Zechel pieced together other eyewitnesses to the 1948 event. In his statement, Zechel relates the following: "I traced another Air Force colonel, now retired in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. He had seen the UFO in flight. He was flying an F-94 fighter out of Dias [in reality Dyess] Air Force Base in Texas and was over Albuquerque, New Mexico, when reports came of a UFO on the West Coast, flying over Washington State. Radars clocked its speed at 2,000 miles per hour.

It made a 90 – degree turn and flew east, over Texas. The colonel, then a captain pilot, actually saw it as it passed. Then suddenly it disappeared from radar screens. At Dias base, the radar operators plotted its course, and decided it had crashed some 30 miles across the Mexican border from Laredo. When the captain got back to base, he and a fellow pilot got into a small plane and took off over the border after the UFO. When they landed in the desert at the crash site, U.S. troops were there before them.

The craft was covered with a canopy, and the two pilots were not allowed to see it. They were then called to Washington, D.C. for debriefing and sworn to secrecy about the whole event.

Those are the basics of the case, and I selected this one, I say, not only because it was the first in his original paper, but because he had more to say about it later. And, I have found a great deal of information about the case in the last year or so. Some of you might have recognized the details as presented here, but are puzzled by the date.

In his The UFO Crash/Retrieval Syndrome published in January 1980, Len reported that a fellow named James Minton had told him about another fellow, named William Draeger who talked about a UFO crash in 1950.

Len wrote, "I knew the incident well, and that it had been disputed by some researchers, however, I had not pursued the case beyond having referred to the alleged crash in my pervious paper. At that time, I had used information related by Todd Zechel to the Midnight Globe (not exactly the most reliable of sources). Since, further research into the case by Zechel and others has revealed that not only the year of the incident was wrong, having changed from 1948 to 1950, but also the crash site was changed."

He printed a letter from Draeger who said that he had learned more about the crash, including information from an unnamed high-ranking Mexican Army officer. Draeger said he talked to the general on the telephone who told him that he knew about the crash but he had no papers or documents to prove it. Draeger asked if the general would go on camera for an interview and the officer agreed. When they arrived at his home, however, the general denied any knowledge of the incident. On camera, the general said he knew nothing about the crash.

Since that time, I have learned that Zechel never bothered to "vet" the retired colonel he had found in Pennsylvania. Everyone, including Len, believed that Zechel had done that. When I attempted to verify the "colonel’s" credentials, all I could learn was that he had been a low ranking enlisted soldier who entered the service in December 1945 and was released from active duty in January 1947.

I have learned that the this colonel, the Pennsylvania man, was an officer in the Civil Air Patrol who has now changed the date of the crash to 1954, or 1955, or maybe 1957. He wasn’t flying F-94s out of Dyess because the F-94 didn’t exist as an operational fighter in 1948 and Dyess didn’t exist in 1948. He has made many changes to the original story as some of his "facts" were found to be inaccurate.

And, I found, in the forerunner to the MUFON UFO Journal, Skylook, an article from 1968 that gives us the original information that set Zechel on his quest, and which, I believe, would have tipped off Len to the believability of the sighting if he had known about it. According to that article:

Col. R. B. Willingham, CAP squadron commander, has had an avid interest in UFO’s for years, dating back to 1948 when he was leading a squadron of F-94 jets near the Mexican border in Texas and was advised by radio that three UFO’s "flying formation" were near. He picked them up on his plane radar and was informed one of the UFO’s had crashed a few miles away from him in Mexico. He went to the scene of the crash but was prevented by the Mexican authorities from making an investigation or coming any closer than 60 feet. From that vantage point the wreckage seemed to consist of "numerous pieces of metal polished on the outside, very rough on the inner sides."

Len’s research here, then, provided some of the basics of the case and opened it up to the research of many others. When Len first reported the case in 1978, it seemed to be a very good one, especially because of the high rank claimed by the witness. Later, as I became interested in UFO crash/retrieval stories, I accepted it as well because an Air Force colonel had signed an affidavit about it. High-ranking military officers simply wouldn’t jeopardize their reputations by telling a story that was so incredible unless it was true. I knew of many witnesses who claimed high military rank who had not attained it but just claimed it, but I was also convinced that a real officer who had worked all his career to get to this high rank would not make up such a story. I believed then, as Len did, there was some truth to this. But it all hinged on that Air Force colonel. Without him, the tale took a nose dive.

As I have reported in the past, the man was not an Air Force officer, but a CAP officer. The difference is that CAP officers are volunteers in a civilian auxiliary of Air Force, but they are not Air Force officers. Those who have served in the Air Force or the CAP know the difference. This guy, Robert Willingham tried to blur the difference to make him into something that he wasn’t.

So now I have taken one of Len’s first reports, actually Abstract I from his 1978 MUFON presentation and followed the investigation to the end. We now have what I believe to be a solid answer for this case which is, simply, it didn’t happen. Len started this process by publishing his information about it and I ended it for him. I believe Len would appreciate what we all have learned about this case. He would appreciate that we could now close it.

But this was not a criticism of Len or his work. He used, in 1978, the best information available to him. In 1980, he added to our knowledge by reporting on the changes to the case which made him suspicious. It wasn’t until 2008, as I was preparing my book on UFO crashes, that I found, originally through the Internet, more data, and that I discovered no one had bothered to learn if Willingham was telling the truth about his military career. Len thought others had done it and I thought others had done it. It wasn’t until I asked those others what they knew that I learned that truth.

This case unraveled because of Len’s work. He raised the original suspicions about it. He was the one who supplied the information about the shifting date, and without Len, we would never have learned what we did.

In that article I saw, it seemed to suggest that I was criticizing Len, but such was not the case. He was a valuable member of the UFO research community, and would have published the latest and best information the moment he had it. Len’s work and legacy can’t be ignored. He was a true pioneer, a true researcher, and the UFO community is much poorer with him gone.

The Disclosure and UFOs Poll

The latest poll has been concluded and I have to say that the overall results do not surprise me, but I am stunned to see that so many still believe Disclosure is at hand. I don’t know if these votes were cast by the same people who voted that way last time and didn’t bother to read the analysis or if they are simply that clueless.

As everyone can see, the majority of the 192 votes (58 or 30%) were cast by those who believe there is nothing to disclose. This suggests we might have a nice mix of skeptics who visit the blog, and those who believe the government has been honest in its reporting on UFOs.

Over on the Magonia blog, the majority, 61% (47) votes, were cast by those who believe there is nothing to disclose. I think that addresses the difference in the average readers there. More of their readers are skeptical and maybe leaning toward the debunking end of the scale.

Magonia voters didn’t have a chance to vote for “Not for Years.” Fifty-two people (27%) suggested that it wouldn’t be for years here.
I had a category of “Never, but They Know) which received 34 votes or 17% of the total. Magonia had a similar category of “They Know but Won’t Tell Us,” which got 17 votes or 19%.

We both had a “It’s Coming,” category. Twenty-seven (14%) thought it was coming sometime in the future. At Magonia, it was simply labeled “Sometime,” and received 17 votes or 19%.

I had a category of “Disclosure is at Hand,” that received 21 votes, or 10%.

Anyone who has been around the UFO field for a while knows, as I pointed out last time, that rumors of Disclosure have been around for nearly as long as the public interest in UFOs. The first rumor of Disclosure that I know of was the one swirling around The Day the Earth Stood Still (no, the good one in 1950 and not the latest one that sucked all the charm, wit, and intelligence from the movie). Disclosure didn’t happen in 1950 and it is not going to happen now unless something radically changes.

That change could be the landing of an alien craft that can’t be denied, hidden or covered-up. It would be a world event that would require the governments to acknowledge that aliens are here. Until the aliens, if they are visiting, decide to announce it, I don’t see our government making any change in its policies.

What we learned in this poll was that on both sites (and both sides of the ocean) the largest number of voters agreed that there was nothing to disclose. My majority was half of that at Magonia.

Interestingly the “Never, but They Know,” category over at Magonia commanded at larger percentage than it did over here... that is 19% to 17%, but then I have five categories to their three.

The bottom line seems to be that the majority of the voters don’t believe there will be any sort of Disclosure, either because there is nothing to disclose, or that the government is not inclined to disclose any time in the near future.

All of this suggests that those suggesting Disclosure is at Hand have failed to convince the majority of the people that such is the case. It might be that they have failed to make a case for Disclosure is at Hand, or we all are so aware of what is happening, we know that Disclosure will not be coming. Either way, the poll suggests it won’t happen for a long time if ever.

Project Mogul, UFOs and Soviet Nuclear Detonations

There has been a rumor circulating about the success of Project Mogul. It has been said that Mogul did detect some American atomic testing and it was successful in detecting the first Soviet nuclear test on August 29,1949.

I was dubious.

I have, in the past, read through all the massive information published about Mogul and the tests. My interest, naturally, centered around the June and July, 1947 flights in New Mexico. These are at the heart of the Roswell controversy. From all that I had read or seen, Mogul was never deployed. It was too expensive and wasn’t all that reliable, though in later years they were very successful on some very, long-range flights.

I also believed that the first Soviet nuclear test had been detected through atmospheric monitoring and seismic recordings. Radiation from the test drifted over monitoring stations and the seismic readings allowed intelligence agents (well, the scientists who monitored such things) to pinpoint the location. I found nothing about Mogul being used.

Tony Bragalia in an email to me, mentioned that Mogul had been successful in detecting that first Soviet test. I asked for the source and he pointed me to an Internet report by Richard A. Muller, who is a professor of physics at the University of California at Berkeley.

That web address if fairly long. It is:

http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:8F__2Z3Ne9kJ:muller.lbl.gov/teaching/physics10/old%2520physics%252010/chapters%2520(old)/9-SecretsofUFOs.html+%22project+mogul+and+the+%22lying+disks%22%22&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&gl=us&client=firefox-a&source=www.google.com

I emailed Dr. Muller and frankly, expected no response. I mean the guy has published books, does television shows and teaches classes. His website is quite complex and interesting. I figured that he would be too busy to answer my question about the source and I was afraid my name might annoy him. I am, after all, on the other side of the debate.

Dr. Muller responded within a couple of hours, and given the time (early morning) I sent my email, I was surprised. He was quite courteous in his reply, and supplied what information he could.

He wrote, "I am afraid that I don’t have a hard source for that information; it was something that I was told, and I’m not sure by whom... I don’t have a hard reference for that. Sorry."

In the grand scope of Roswell research, this means very little. Even if Mogul had eventually worked, it doesn’t change what people believe about the Roswell case. All this does is suggest that reports of Mogul success are little more than rumors.

If someone has better information than this, I’m sure that he or she will let me know. But, until we can verify it, the fact is that there is no hard source for the suggestion that Mogul worked (which means in this context, that it didn’t detected the Soviet test).

Lazy Journalists and UFOs

What in the world has happened to journalism in this country? Over the last weekend (15 – 16 April 2011) there was quite a stir about an FBI document (seen below) that some had found on a web site that posted a bunch of FBI documents. This one concerned a crash of a UFO in New Mexico with the recovery of alien bodies.

A real find...

Except those of us who have been in the UFO field for more than twenty minutes already had copies of the documents. I found them last century and when I say I found them, it was in a package of documents that the FBI had released to Dr. Bruce Maccabee in response to one of his FOIA requests. He, through the Fund for UFO Research, provided many of us with copies of the documents.

The document, with a subject of "FLYING SAUCERS, INFORMATION CONCERNING," (who developed this style for subject lines in government communications anyway) said, "An investigator for the Air Forces [sic] stated that three so-called flying saucers had been recovered in New Mexico. They were described as being circular in shape with raised centers, approximately 50 feet in diameter. Each one was occupied by three bodies of human shape but only 3 feet tall, dressed in metallic cloth of a very fine texture. Each body was bandaged in a manner similar to the blackout suits used by speed flyers and test pilots."

The important clue in this document, which the journalists didn’t find and didn’t understand was, "According to Mr. (Redacted) informant, the saucers were found in New Mexico due to the fact that the Government has a very high-powered radar set-up in that area and it is believed the radar interferes with the controling mechanics of the saucers."

The consensus of UFO researchers is that the information came from Frank Scully who wrote Behind the Flying Saucers, about three UFO crashes, though only one was in New Mexico, and that the saucer had been brought down by radar. The journalists just didn’t know the history of this information and didn’t bother to check.

Scully reported on three crashes. The one in New Mexico and two in Arizona. Originally, he reported on one in northern Africa, but that seemed to disappear from his writings in later versions of these events.

Time magazine contained a story that was clearly the Aztec crash (from Scully) in January 1950. That might have inspired the tale given to the FBI.

To make this worse, if possible. Some of those lazy journalists, who apparently didn’t bother to check with any of us who have been around for a while, added the MJ-12 Operations Manual to the mix. This document surfaced in the 1990s and again the consensus is that it is a fake.

Yes, there are those who believe that manual to be authentic, but their arguments are weak. That is a debate that we’ll hold off until another time.

In the end, we have a sudden spike in interest in documents that have been around the UFO field for decades. The source of the original information is known and the events to which it refers have been identified. Very few believe it refers to real events. It seems the document was forwarded to the FBI as a matter of routine by an agent in Washington who had heard someone talking about this.

The real question is why would the agent have done that? Hoover, as we know, was interested in UFOs, so maybe the agent believed it was something the director would want to know. At any rate, we know the importance of this document... It has none.

Neil deGrasse Tyson and UFOs

Dr. Neil deGrasse Tyson, the man who killed Pluto, has entered a new arena but it is one with which he is unfamiliar...

Okay, he didn’t kill Pluto and I’m not sure this nonsense about planets and dwarf planets is worth much debate. In the 19^th century we had Ceres as a planet and then the king of the asteroids and now a dwarf planet with Pluto, and with three other objects that are so far from the sun in it was only recently that they were found.

My problem was his suggestion that there is nothing to UFOs because the government is lousy at keeping secrets. The thinking, I guess, is that if UFOs are extraterrestrial and the government knows it for whatever reason, why that information would have leaked long ago. I’m not sure why he, and so many others, believe this nonsense, but clearly he does.

Has the government kept secrets?

Here is the conundrum. If it can keep secrets, then we wouldn’t know because the secrets would be, well, secret. How do we know if it has successfully kept secrets?

I suppose we could look at the track record. We know about the Tuskegee Syphilis study only after it had been going on for forty years. A whistle blower provided two newspapers with the information which led to the end of the study. I’m not going to comment on the ethics of something like this, other to say I am horrified by it.

Yes, you say, they kept the secret for forty years, but it did come out. Only shows that some secrets are kept for a long time.

Then I could mention Operation Solo, which I have addressed before. This was an FBI operation that put a spy into the top reaches of the Soviet government. Morris Childs was a leader of the American communist party in the 1930s until he became disillusioned with it. Cooperating with the FBI, Childs maintained his association with the communists in the Soviet Union, becoming a trusted communist. He was so highly respected that they shared many of their secrets with him... and sometimes shared secrets they didn’t know they were sharing because they didn’t know he spoke Russian.

This operation was so secret that others working in the FBI office in New York which oversaw Childs didn’t know about it unless they were directly involved. It was so secret that presidents were not briefed on it. The only exception was right after Gerald Ford became president and he was to meet with Soviet officials. The FBI told him the source of their information to boost his confidence in his dealings with the Soviets.

This operation ran from the 1930s to the 1990s when Childs retired and the Soviet Union collapsed. Only then was he recognized for his contribution to the United States, after there was no longer a need for the secrecy and there was no longer a danger to him.

This proves that secrets can be kept. So, to Dr. Tyson, I say, one of your reasons for rejecting the notion of UFOs is invalid.

As for Roswell, I would say, the secret hasn’t been kept. We are talking about it. People have come forward, credible people, to tell us what they saw. It’s just that those editors of newspapers, which would jump at the chance to expose another government secret do not believe that there has been alien visitation and since they don’t believe, they are not going to listen to anyone who suggests otherwise.

Oh, I know that we have let this get away from us. We had to put up with the contactees who told of visits to the other planets of the solar system, talking of environments that we know now do not exist.

We have been the victims of hoaxes. Nearly every photograph ever taken of a UFO has turned out to be a hoax.

And we have had Roswell witnesses who were once respected but who are no longer considered credible.

And we have had the Air Force providing explanations that are preposterous but people believe them because it is easier to accept these answers than suggest something alien has visited. I would throw out the Mogul explanation right here because anyone who looks at it rationally realizes that it doesn’t fit the facts. But there are many people who believe it anyway.

Alien visitation is, you might say, a self–keeping secret. It is such an astonishing secret that people just refuse to believe it. I tell you about a UFO crash and you just cannot accept that such a thing has happened so you don’t bother to look into it... or invent reasons to reject it.

In the end, all I can say to Dr. Tyson is one of your expressed reasons for rejecting alien visitation is invalid. With that eliminated, maybe we should move the discussion to the evidence that does exist and not the speculation that interstellar travel is impossible. Maybe we should all look at the evidence.

The Betty Hill Star Map - Revisited, Again

I was reading an article by John A. Johnson in the latest Sky & Telescope (which suggests something about my eclectic interests) and was struck by his opening comments. He suggested that an alien astronomer searching for Jupiter-like planets would not be inclined to look at our solar system. And, he mentioned that if you were searching for small, rocky planets, then you would be more likely to find those orbiting dwarf stars.

What has this to do with us, you might ask.

Glad you did. See, back in the 1970s Marjorie Fish, in attempting to find the star system from which the abductors of Barney and Betty Hill originated, made a model of our section of the galaxy. She assumed, and I’m not sure that it was a bad assumption at that time, that those aliens’ home world would be close to us, galactically speaking. They probably didn’t come from a world across the galaxy, though when we begin to speak of interstellar flight, we really have nothing on which to base our assumptions. Once you have solved the problems of interstellar travel, the distances, however great, might not mean all that much. We just don’t know.

But I digress...

When Fish put together her model, she ignored the red dwarf stars because there were so many of them in the vicinity of Earth and they probably didn’t have anything interesting going on around them anyway. Astronomic thinking at that time suggested that dwarf stars wouldn’t have planetary systems. We now know there are planets circling many of these stars.

What all this means, simply, is that the Fish model, and the conclusion that some of the aliens originate from Zeta I and Zeta II Reticuli has been superceded by better information. The evidence that suggested this is no longer accurate. Fish needed to include those dwarf stars in her models.

Again, this isn’t a criticism of the work done by Fish. At the time she constructed her models and did her research, she had the best information available. In today’s world we know that some of her basic assumptions were wrong.

And I haven’t even mentioned that the newest star catalogs have revised the distances to some of the stars that she did use and that earlier information has been found to be inaccurate. In other words, some of the stars that she included in her survey are now outside the parameters that Fish set.

This means that we can no longer say, with any degree of certainty, with any degree of confidence, that the Zeta Reticuli system is the home of any alien race. Until this research is redone, we can no longer say that we know where some of the aliens originate. The evidence just is no longer there.