Cape Girardeau UFO Crash, 1941

Charlette Mann wrote to Ray Fowler, a long time and well-trusted UFO researcher, who sent the letter on to Len Stringfield because Fowler thought Stringfield would be interested. Mann wrote that her grandfather, a minister, received a telephone call asking him to go to the scene of an aircraft accident. Stringfield, quite naturally, called her to ask for more detail and convinced her to rewrite her letter into a more structured report which he published in his UFO Crash/Retrievals: The Inner Sanctum and which is dated July 1991. He shared his report with many of his fellow UFO researchers, especially those interested in crash retrievals.

According to Mann’s letter, her grandfather, Reverend William Huffman was “born in August, 1888 and he grew up in Missouri. He attended college in Bolivar and after graduation, he went to a seminary. He was an ordained Baptist minister... he was a quiet man who was well respected.”

Alleged crash site. Photo copyright by
Michael Huntington.

Which, of course, means that his credentials are just fine. He was a well-educated man for the times and he was a minister which suggests he was also an honest man... again for the times. But he died before telling Mann about the case. This information came from her grandmother, known as Floy and I don’t believe I need to point out that it is, therefore, second hand and as related by Mann, third hand.

In her May 6, 1991 letter to Stringfield, she provided all the details that she had heard from her grandmother. She wrote:

It happened in the Spring of 1941. About 9 to 9:30 one evening, granddad got a telephone call from the police department, saying they had received reports that a plane had crashed outside of town and would he go in case someone needed him. Of course he said yes. A car was sent to get him, but my grandmother said it wasn’t a police car.

After grandfather returned that night, he explained what he had seen to grandmother, my father, Guy, and Uncle Wayne, but that they were never to speak of it again...

He said they drove out of town 13 - 15 miles or so, then parked the cars on the side of the road and had to walk 1/4 of a mile or so into a field where he could see fire burning.

Grandfather said it wasn’t an airplane or like any craft he’d ever seen. It was broken and scattered all around, but one large piece was still together and it appeared to have a rounded shape with no edges or seams. It had a very shiny metallic finish. You could see inside one section and see what looked like a metal chair with a panel with many dials and gauges – – none familiar looking to him. He said that when he got there, men were already sifting through things. There were some police officers, plain clothes people and military men. There were three bodies not human, that had been taken from the wreckage and laid on the ground. Grandfather said prayers over them so he got a close look but didn’t touch them. He didn’t know what had killed them because they didn’t appear to have any injuries and they weren’t burnt. It was hard for him to tell if they had on suits or if it was their skin but they were covered head to foot in what looked like wrinkled aluminum foil. He could see no hair on the bodies and they had no ears. They were small framed like a child about 4 feet tall, but had larger heads and longer arms. They had very large oval shaped eyes, no noses just holes and no lips just small slits for mouths. There were several people with cameras taking pictures of everything. Two of the plain clothes men picked up one of the little men, held it under its arms. A picture was taken. That was the picture I later saw. Then, one of the military officers talked to granddad and told him he was not to talk about or repeat anything that had taken place for security reasons and so as not to alarm people. Granddad returned home, told his family. That was all. About two weeks after it happened, he came home with a picture of the two men holding the little man.

After my grandfather died, my Dad kept the picture and was very interested in UFO info. Then when I was 10 or 11, a close friend of my Dad’s asked if he could borrow it to show to his folks so Dad let him have it and never got it back.

Stringfield was concerned about that picture. First, as has happened in all similar stories, the picture has disappeared, so we don’t have that bit of physical evidence. Of course, you have to wonder if there was actual security on the field, why were there people taking pictures… unless in an official capacity. Then you have to ask why Huffman was given one.

But Stringfield was also worried because he had seen, as I have seen, a picture that sounds similar and has been published around the UFO field for many years. In it are two military men holding the long arms of what is supposed to be an alien creature but what is clearly a monkey. It is an obvious but not a particularly well-known hoax.

Mann, in her May 6, 1991, provided a lengthy description of that photograph. She wrote:

My recollection from what I saw in the picture was a small man about 4 feet tall with a large head and long arms. He was thin and no bone structure was apparent; kind of soft looking. He had no hair on his head or body with large, oval, slightly slanted eyes but not like oriental from left to right, more up and down. He had no ears at all and nose like ours. His mouth was as if you had just cut a small straight line where it should have been. His skin or suit looked like crinkled-up tin foil and it covered all of him... I believe he had three fingers, all quite long, but I can’t be sure on this.

Stringfield got a copy of the picture he remembered from Michael Hesemann and sent it on to Mann. She replied, “It is nothing like what I saw. Your picture showed men in overcoats while in my picture, the man had no coats (sic)... Your picture shows two women; mine none. The alien in yours looks like a tiny doll, much smaller and shorter than mine.”

Mann has now granted interviews to many others and some of the details of her story have expanded. For example, in a 2008 interview she said that when her grandfather arrived, two of the alien creatures were dead but the third was still alive. She said that it, or he, or possibly even she, died while her grandfather was praying over it. He then moved on to the other two to offer prayers for them.

She also said that the symbols he had seen inside the craft “looked similar to hieroglyphics.”

Neither of these details were in the original story and I’m not sure that makes much difference. Oh, the skeptics will grab on to this and suggest it is proof that she is inventing the tale. I think a more likely situation is that she either remembered more as she thought about it or it could be a simple case of confabulation, which is not exactly lying, but just filling in missing details. That does nothing to negate the core of the story.

And, according to other reports, there is some corroboration. In what might be considered a not very persuasive bit of evidence, Clarance R. Schade, who is the brother of the sheriff in the Cape Girardeau area in the 1940s said that he remembered hearing of a crash and he seems to remember talk of little people

Ryan Wood. Photo copyright
by Kevin Randle.

associated with it. Certainly not startling information, but not a quick denial either.

Ryan Wood, in his Majic Eyes Only, reported that Mann’s sister provided a sworn affidavit, confirmed the story. In other words, other members of the family are aware of the family history and report they too have seen the photograph.

In February 2008, Tyler, Texas, television reporter Gillian Sheridan interviewed Charlette Mann. According to that report, Mann said, “We got validation by going to the archives in Washington D.C. and to see a top secret declassified document that stated that there was in fact a crash retrieval in 1941 in Cape Girardeau, Missouri, for me, I have not forgotten holding that paper in my hand and realizing that my families story was real, was solid, and for me was just an answer to a long time question.”

Samples of that document appeared on Frank Warren’s blog (found at www.theufochronicles.com) but they seem to be almost too good to be true. One of the samples said, “Based on all available evidence collected from recovered exhibits currently under study by AMC, AFSWP, NEPA, AEC, ONR, NACA, JRDB, RAND, USAAF, SAG and MIT, are deemed extraterrestrial in nature. This conclusion was reached as a result of comparison of artifacts (small part redacted) discovered in 1941. The technology is outside the scope of US science, even that of German rocket and aircraft development.”

The problem with this statement is that it proves that there have been extraterrestrial recoveries, and even uses that term. This is apparently part of a leaked MJ-12 document and is dated 24 Sep 47. The MJ-12 documents themselves are wrapped in controversy.

Which returns us to the original story. At the moment, the major witness is Charlette Mann. Her sister has corroborated hearing the family talk of the night their grandfather, Rev. William Huffman, was called out to pray over the bodies recovered from the wrecked craft, and the brother of the sheriff also seems to remember something about this.

The problem for me is simply this. If there had been this crash in 1941, then the military would have been aware of the possibility of interplanetary (as opposed to interstellar because people in the era thought in terms of interplanetary) travel, they would have been on the lookout for other examples. That means they wouldn’t have been caught by surprise with the flying saucers were first reported in June

Ed Ruppelt

1947 and would have been better prepared for the Roswell crash when it happened in July 1947.

In fact, Ed Ruppelt, the one time chief of Project Blue Book, reported that in the summer of 1947, those in the Pentagon were in a near panic because of the stories of the flying saucers. Ruppelt wrote:

The memos and correspondence that Project Blue Book inherited from the old UFO projects told the story of the early flying saucer era. These memos and pieces of correspondence showed that the UFO situation was considered serious; in fact, very serious. The paper work of that period also indicated the confusion that surrounded the investigation; confusion almost to the point of panic. The brass wanted an answer quickly and people were taking off in all directions.

That argues against the extraterrestrial nature of this case. If there had been a crash near Cape Girardeau in 1941, then the answer was already held at the highest levels. There would be no panic because they would know what was happening. They wouldn’t create a project to find answers in a hurry, because they had the answer already. Such an investigation ran the risk of compromising the classified project. A quiet word would have been issued and the whole investigation never have been started.

But there seems to be more than enough here. Additional investigation for the case is deserved. There is an old prospecting saying, “You don’t always expect to find the gold, but you have to look.” This is a case where you have to look. There are interesting leads that need to be followed and there are certainly witnesses that could be located, though time is growing short.

'X' Zone Broadcast Network - Michael Schratt

This week I talked with Michael Schratt who has produced a book that is interesting, not only for the information included in it, but for the beautiful, color illustrations of the UFO sightings featured in it. Schratt has a long history of UFO research and he has an extensive knowledge of the topic. You can listen to the show here:

https://www.spreaker.com/episode/50224682

And you can watch the show here:

https://rumble.com/v18nyur-a-different-perspective-with-kevin-randle-interviews-michael-schratt.html

First up, we talked about the Cape Girardeau UFO crash of 1941. I had explored that in my book, Crash: When UFOs Fall from the Sky. The problem is that the case is basically single witness and she didn’t see anything first hand other than a photograph that has been long lost. You can read a longer analysis here:

https://kevinrandle.blogspot.com/search?q=Cape+Girardeau

From there we moved on to some of the sightings for which Michael had supplied some of the paintings. First up there was the Temple, Oklahoma, landing in which the witness not only saw the landed craft, but one of the beings, though he said the being was human as opposed to humanoid. The case was investigated by Project Blue Book and is one of the three labeled as “unidentified,” in the files that involve occupant sightings. In almost all the other cases, if a witness reported creatures, it was labeled as psychological, meaning there was something wrong with the witness. You can read more about the Temple case here:

https://kevinrandle.blogspot.com/2019/12/temple-oklahoma-ufo-landing.html

And for those who would like to see some of the Project Blue Book documents, you can see them here:

https://kevinrandle.blogspot.com/2022/03/canadian-texas-vs-temple-oklahoma-minor.html

The illustration for the Temple, Oklahoma sighting based on the Air Force file.

The actual illustration from the Project Blue Book files.

We also talked about the Canadian man, Stephen Michalak, who was injured by the close approach of a UFO in 1967. Pictures of the injury have been published around the Internet, which provides some additional evidence of the sighting.  You can read some of the official documentation here:

https://www.bac-lac.gc.ca/eng/discover/unusual/ufo/Documents/1967-06-26.pdf

We also talked about a sighting from Mobile, Alabama, which interested me based on the illustration. It was a single witness sighting but the craft described was quite elaborate. The problem I have is that is single witness, and given the size of the craft, I am surprised there was no corroborative sightings. That might be explained by a reluctance of the witnesses to come forward with their stories. It also might be explained by there being no other witnesses. You can see all the illustrations and the accompanying stories at Dark Files: A Pictorial History of Lost, Forgotten and Obscure UFO Encounters, available at Amazom.

The illustration of the Mobile, Alabama sighting.

In the final segment, I talked about Moon Dust. I had just published an updated version of my 1998 book, Project Moon Dust. Brad Sparks had said that there was no Project known as Moon Dust, which I found difficult to believe because of all the documents we have labeled Moon Dust. It seems that Moon Dust was a code word that covered the Moon Dust activities. So, there was Moon Dust, just not as a project, but an activity.

Next up, I’ll be talking to Ron James about involvement in the UFO field and what his research has turned up. This was postponed from earlier in the month. 

X-Zone Broadcast Network - Ryan Wood and MJ-12

This week I spoke with Ryan Wood. He had sent out an email complaining about the anti-UFO bias on Wikipedia. I thought that would be an interesting topic, and since he is a proponent of MJ-12, I thought we could spend some time on that as well. But, as usual, the conversation took on a life of its own. You can listen to it here:

https://www.spreaker.com/episode/20493888

We veered off into the Cape Girardeau UFO crash of 1941, which, as everyone will tell you, is six years older than the Roswell case. The problem here is that there are no first-hand witnesses and while the granddaughter of minister who was called to scene heard about it from family, the problem is that she heard about it from family. There really is no documentation in the form of newspaper articles and diary entries, or anything of that nature. And while I didn’t make the comment

Ryan Wood. Photo copyright
by Kevin Randle.

during the show because, well, we went off in other discussions, I always worry about these pre-Roswell cases. If this had happened, it would seem to me that the military might have been better prepared for the events in Roswell.

Ryan said that his book, Majic Eyes Only, listed 74 crash retrievals. I thought that there just weren’t that many because it would be impossible to keep all that secret for so long. At some point one of those crashes would have produced evidence no matter how hard the various government agencies attempted to suppress it all. I did point out that in my book, Crash: When UFOs Fall from the Sky, I listed something like 110. One of those was an alternative look at the Cape Girardeau crash. An analysis of that case follows this posting.

Given there were so many alleged crashes, I asked what Ryan thought were the best. He suggested Roswell, Kecksburg and Shag Harbour. I mentioned that I thought of Shag Harbour as more of an emergency landing than an actual crash. But the real point was that each of these had documentation and newspaper articles while most of the other crashes were single witness with no documentation at all. Some were clearly mundane objects seen under unusual circumstances. Some were clearly meteors, others debris from missile tests, and a few outright hoaxes.

We finally did make it to MJ-12 and the so-called Operations Manual. I mentioned that there were some anachronisms in it. Ryan pointed out that skeptics said the War Department seal on the front was one, but that he had found that symbol on other manuals printed after the War Department ceased to exist in 1947, meaning that, in this one case, it might not be an anachronism.

I wondered about the lack of a provenance for the manual and asked if there were any MJ-12 documents from a legitimate government source that lead to support MJ-12. Ryan said that there was a letter from Lieutenant Colonel Robert Blount to Dr. Robley Evans that did lead to MJ-12. You can see that letter here:

http://www.majesticdocuments.com/pdf/blount_evans.pdf

I believe the top-secret report to which Blount referred is the Air Intelligence Report (AIR) 100-203-79 with a date of April 29, 1949. There is nothing in it about UFO crashes or anything like that. Blount seemed to think it was more of a psychological analysis, which the AIR report is not.

But there is a real problem with the Blount letter that I’m sure if obvious to everyone. To sort of prove that point, I think the Hottel Memo makes the case. Here is an FBI document that mentions a UFO crash. You can read it here:

https://vault.fbi.gov/hottel_guy/Guy%20Hottel%20Part%201%20of%201/view

The point is, the Hottel Memo refers to the Aztec crash hoax and is based on information from Frank Scully’s book, Behind the Flying Saucers. Time magazine, in January, 1950, printed an article about little men from Venus. That predates the Blount letter and might well be the source of the rumor.

Next week, John Burroughs is the guest. He’ll be offering some new information about the Rendlesham Forest events of December 1980. If you have questions for him, put them in a comment here, and I’ll try to get them answered during the program.

David Grusch and his UFO Crashes

 

About a year ago, David Grusch showed up on the UFO scene talking about UFO crashes. In the course of his revelations, he mentioned a dozen UFO crashes over the years. Now, I sometimes think that I’m the leading expert on UFO crashes, having inherited the title from the late Len Stringfield, so I believe can speculate with some expertise on the subject of UFO crashes. Without Len, we might not even be having this conversation but Len brought the whole subset of UFO crashes into the public arena.

David Grusch

For those who are unfamiliar with this, Len began investigating tales of UFO crashes, years before the rest of us climbed on that bandwagon. He collected the stories with little in the way of critical comment. His theory was to publish the information, knowing that someone would attempt to verify it. Without that beginning, we wouldn’t be having this discussion today.

That brings us to David Grusch, who “leaked” some information about crashes but not very much. He mentioned two crashes. One at Roswell that is so well known now that it was an answer on Jeopardy! The other was something alleged to have happened in Italy in 1933. Americans captured the craft from the Italians at the end of the Second World War.

Italian UFO researchers, who investigated the claims about the case some twenty to thirty years ago, concluded that it was a hoax. It would seem that anyone on the inside, that is the people feeding information to Grush, would have known that. You can see the evidence here:

http://kevinrandle.blogspot.com/2023/06/david-grush-and-1933-italian-ufo-crash.html

Connected to Roswell, is the reported case of a crash of a craft on the Plains of San Agustin in western New Mexico. This tale was linked to the Roswell UFO crash when Stan Friedman suggested that two alien craft had collided, one falling to earth near Roswell and the other much farther to the west. The best evidence is that this aspect of the Roswell case is a hoax. You can learn more about it here:

http://kevinrandle.blogspot.com/search?q=Plains+of+San+Agustin

http://kevinrandle.blogspot.com/2021/04/did-herbert-dick-lie-about-being-on.html

http://www.cufos.org/books/Plains_of_San_AgustinR.pdf

http://kevinrandle.blogspot.com/2015/02/the-plains-of-san-agustin-crash.html

http://kevinrandle.blogspot.com/2022/09/lue-elizondo-and-two-crashes-on-same-day.html

https://www.ufoexplorations.com/other-roswell-crash-secret-of-plain

From that point, Grusch has said that he has more information about the other ten, that he had talked to people who had seen some of these craft, but that he hasn’t seen anything himself. Don Schmitt, Tom Carey, and I can make the same claim. The difference is that we have named names. Lots of names. Some turned out to be charlatans, others just felt they wanted to tell an interesting story, and a few thought of it was a way to financial gain. But there is a solid core of individuals who were there and who were first-hand witnesses. You can learn about some of them here:

http://kevinrandle.blogspot.com/2007/07/edwin-easley-and-roswell.html

http://kevinrandle.blogspot.com/2009/09/paul-kimball-lance-moody-ufos-and-me.html

http://kevinrandle.blogspot.com/2023/11/new-documentation-for-roswell-easley.html

My point is that some of us have been around long enough that we can figure out what crashes Grusch has been told about. In no particular order, here is what I know about this. The Aztec, New Mexico crash on March 25, 1948, is probably the first UFO crash that gained any sort of national attention. Frank Scully published a book, Behind the Flying Saucers, that told the tale of the crash. Though he mentioned a couple of other alleged crashes, he focused on the Aztec event because he had talked to the men who knew all about.

The story was that craft was found near tiny Aztec, was recovered by the military and had contained bodies of the Venusian flight crew. The story was exposed as a hoax and for those interested in following this down the rabbit hole, I suggest reading Scully’s book, then William Steinman’s compilation of nonsense, UFO Crash at Aztec and finally Scott Ramsey’s The Aztec Incident on the pro side but with supporting evidence that is weak to nonexistent. Ramsey did a good job of running down alleged witnesses, but he didn’t have the opportunity to interview anyone with first-hand knowledge. In other words, Ramey and his team interviewed people who knew people who said they knew something about the case. And some of those witnesses said that there had been no crash.

There is good evidence on the other side of the argument, you can read Monte Shriver’s investigation on this blog here:

http://kevinrandle.blogspot.com/2013/02/aztec-in-perspective-by-monte-shriver.html

http://kevinrandle.blogspot.com/2013/02/aztec-in-perspective-by-monte-shriver_8.html

I suspect one of the better tales is that from Kecksburg, Pennsylvania on December 9, 1965. This case is the bailiwick of Stan Gordon who was on the scene within hours to investigate and has carried out that investigation over the decades. Working with Leslie Kean, Gordon even sued NASA in an attempt to gather additional information. However, like so much in this aspect of UFO crashes, there is a plausible alternative. You can read more about this case here:

http://kevinrandle.blogspot.com/2021/11/x-zone-broadcast-network-stan-gordon.html

http://kevinrandle.blogspot.com/2017/01/x-zone-boardcast-network-stan-gordon.html

The Del Rio, Texas, UFO crash has been the subject of an ongoing investigation for decades. It was accepted by UFO researchers in the beginning because a high ranking, retired Air Force officer, provided an affidavit proving the authenticity of his information. This crash, misidentified as the El Indio – Guerrero crash was included in the MJ-12 documents, providing even more credibility. The problem was the high-ranking officer, Robert Willingham was not a high-ranking officer, was not a fighter pilot as claimed and the documentation from both the military records center in St. Louis and the Air Reserve Personnel Center in Denver did not verify his officer status. He was, according to the available information, a low-ranking enlisted man who served only thirteen months on active duty. You can read more about that here:

http://kevinrandle.blogspot.com/2011/08/absense-of-evidence.html

http://kevinrandle.blogspot.com/2014/03/ihave-argued-for-years-that-eisenhower.html

http://kevinrandle.blogspot.com/2018/06/mj-12-and-cognitive-dissonance.html

http://kevinrandle.blogspot.com/2010/07/del-rio-ufo-crash-and-mj-12.html

One of the reports that has received traction in the last couple of years was the story from little San Antonio, New Mexico, about a crash there in 1945. Dr. Jacques Vallee, along with Paola Harris published a book, Trinity: The Best Kept Secret, that provided two eyewitness accounts of the crash and retrieval. Those witnesses, who were youngsters at the time of crash offered shifting accounts as to the date, the names of other witnesses, and the military recovery operation. Douglas Dean Johnson has made an in-depth study of that case and has provided amazing evidence that it never happened. You can read all about it here:

https://www.jasoncolavito.com/blog/douglas-dean-johnson-exposes-jacques-vallee-and-the-trinity-ufo-hoax

https://douglasjohnson.ghost.io/crash-story-file-the-reme-baca-smoking-gun-interview/

https://douglasjohnson.ghost.io/crash-story-the-trinity-ufo-crash-hoax/

http://kevinrandle.blogspot.com/2021/06/trinity-best-kept-secret-critique.html

I learned of the Las Vegas UFO crash as I was conducting research into the Roswell case. I interviewed witnesses in Utah who had seen a low flying UFO about fifteen minutes before the craft was seen to explode in the sky east of Las Vegas, Nevada. Hundreds of witnesses in Las Vegas saw that explosion. The Air Force wrote the case off as a bolide, that is a bright meteor, but I originally had reason to suspect that was not a good answer. However, additional investigation has led me to conclude the Air Force explanation was probably accurate, but there are many who still do not accept that answer. You can read more about it here:

http://kevinrandle.blogspot.com/search?q=Las+Vegas+UFO+Crash

http://kevinrandle.blogspot.com/2008/08/las-vegas-ufo-crash.html

One of what is considered among the first UFO crashes took place in tiny Aurora, Texas in April 1897. The craft allegedly hit a windmill and exploded. The local residents found the mangled body of the lone occupant and buried it in the Aurora cemetery. UFO researchers began to visit Aurora to validate this early case, which was a hoax started by a stringer for a Dallas newspaper. You can read more about this here:

http://kevinrandle.blogspot.com/2005/03/aurora-texas-story-that-wont-die.html

http://kevinrandle.blogspot.com/2018/04/aurora-texas-again.html

The case of a crash near Kingman, Arizona in 1953 might be included because the original story was told by a man who seemed credible. He said, and the evidence proved, that he had worked in the Frenchman Flats area of southern Nevada on a project that dealt with atomic energy. He also said that he was assigned in some capacity to Project Blue Book. There is no evidence that this claim is true.

Although originally called Fritz Werner by Raymond Fowler in an article published in 1976, his real name was Arthur Stansel. He said that he had received a call in May 1953 about some sort of important and classified event. As evidence of this, Stansel provided two pages from his work calendar that mentioned a special assignment, but no details were given.

He boarded a bus with many others and taken to a site where they were given specific jobs to do, they were not to speak to the others on the bus, and once their task was completed, they were loaded back on the bus, with warnings that they were never to mention this. In a rather stupid move, an Air Force NCO had a list of names that he called out to ensure that people got to the places they were to work.

Stansel did see a disk that had crashed, and by accident, saw the deceased members of the crew that were not human. He returned to Frenchman Flats and his regular assignment.

Years later, a woman, Judie Woolcott, said that her late husband had been part of the recovery team, which added credibility to the tale. She claimed to have a letter he had written to her while he served in Vietnam, providing some detail. However, she was unable to produce the letter. She said he had been killed in the Vietnam War. Her daughter later contacted me, explaining that her mother made up tales and that her father had not died in Vietnam. You can read more about that here:

http://kevinrandle.blogspot.com/2011/05/kingman-ufo-crash-really.html

http://kevinrandle.blogspot.com/2015/10/the-decline-and-fall-of-ufology.html

For those interested in tales that have some physical evidence, is the case from Ubatuba, Brazil. According to the most popular version, witnesses saw a craft explode in the air, raining debris down on a local beach in September 1957. Some of it was picked up by an unknown witness who sent it to a radio station reporter. The material eventually made it to APRO here in the US. It has been analyzed by several organizations including the Air Force that inadvertently destroyed its sample. You can read more about this here:

http://kevinrandle.blogspot.com/2010/05/ubatuba-ufo-sample.html

http://kevinrandle.blogspot.com/2021/12/jacques-vallee-and-ten-unexplained-ufo.html

Recently, Jacques Vallee reported that the date was wrong. The explosion took place much earlier, prior to World War Two. Vallee’s information contradicts the originally reported tale and Vallee offered nothing in the way of evidence.

According to Len Stringfield, he was contacted by a woman who claimed that her grandfather had been to the scene of a UFO crash near Cape Girardeau, Missouri, in 1941. She claimed there had been a picture taken of the off-world creatures, but the picture had been lost over the years. She only saw the picture and heard her father taking about the crash. She saw nothing else.

A man, who saw nothing himself but whose father had been involved also told his story of the alleged crash. Other than these two people, who apparently saw nothing themselves, no one else has come forward to validate the claim. There are those who accept the story as real. You can read more about it here:

http://kevinrandle.blogspot.com/2019/12/cape-girardeau-ufo-crash-1941.html

The one case that has some credibility to it, other than Roswell, was the crash that took place near Shag Harbour, Canada in 1968. It has been investigated in-depth by Chris Styles and Don Ledger. They have uncovered official Canadian documents, some of which were originally classified, proving that something fell into the harbour and that both the Canadian and the US governments and military responded, searching the downed craft. Like Roswell, everyone agrees that some fell, it is the identity of that something that is in dispute. You can learn more about it here:

http://kevinrandle.blogspot.com/2021/05/just-last-friday-may14-another-video.html

http://kevinrandle.blogspot.com/2017/02/x-zone-broadcast-network-don-ledger.html

So, this is my speculation about the most likely UFO crashes that David Grusch might have been talking about. It is basically a collection of highly suspect tales, but these are ones that many of the alleged insiders have talked about in the past. Some of what Grusch has said suggests that he has meet these people.

Much of what he has said is negated by his claim of inside information about the Italian crash. If it is a hoax, as it most certainly is, then the insiders feeding him information had no more inside knowledge that I do, or other UFO researchers do. Our access is through interviews with known participants, research into documents held by various federal and local government agencies, travels to archives and newspaper morgues. 

I came to these speculations through reports that I have received from many others in the UFO community. For example, I was told that Grusch spent time at Skinwalker Ranch. I’m not going to comment on that particular investigation here. I will note, however, that it did suggest that Grusch brushed elbows with several once important members of various administrations in Washington, D.C. And, I know what some of them have advocated in the past, which suggests where some of Grusch’s inside information originated.

The question really boils down to how many of the cases mentioned above are those that Grusch believes were true, and how much of that information did he feed in the various investigations conducted, in secret, to Congress?

The point here is that without more specific information from Grusch and some of those others, we are left with very little evidence. And if the majority of Grusch’s information is from fraudulent crash reports, why should we waste time chasing down the others.

True, I believe Roswell represents something that might have been constructed off-world, and there is good documentation for the Shag Harbour case, the best conclusion to be drawn is that those other reports are either mistakes or misidentifications. Unless Grusch can come up with something that is more concrete than he has heard stories of credible people, he is not advancing the case. In the long run, it will hurt it and no one will remember that I cautioned against acceptance until we had more evidence. They will only remember how Grusch’s inside information was little more than rumor, speculation, and science fiction.  So, while Grusch might be an honest man whose is beyond reproach, that doesn’t mean that the information he was given is any good. Just remember you heard it here first.

 

As a postscript, I will note that by typing the names of these cases in the search engine on my blog, you’ll find additional information. By typing the names of these cases into Google or other search engines, you’ll find additional information. Many sites will provide counterpoints to what I have listed here, but I reviewed many of those sites in the creation of my postings and often found them wanting for good sources and the like.

Trinity: The Best Kept Secret - A Critique

The much-anticipated book by Dr Jacques Vallee and Paola Harris, Trinity: The Best Kept Secret, finally dropped and we now have a very good idea of what is in it. The publicity running up to the publication suggested that we’d learn about a UFO crash that preceded Roswell by two years and was based on the eyewitness testimony of two men and as a surprise or special element, we’d learn of a third witness to these incredible events.

Dr. Jacques Vallee

The story as told, and outlined on this blog just a few weeks ago, was that two boys, ages 7 and 9, not only found a crashed object that didn’t resemble any Earth-based aviation technology, but they had seen the crash. There was a hint that it might have been brought down by lightning in one of those strong thunderstorms that frequent New Mexico in the late summer or it hit a tower that caused it to crash. For those who want to see that earlier post, you can read it here:

http://kevinrandle.blogspot.com/2021/05/the-san-antonio-ufo-crash.html

The boys, identified as Reme Baca and Jose Padilla, had approached the area cautiously and saw, not only the ruined craft, but small creatures that seemed to teleport from one position to another. Those beings provided telepathic pictures to the boys, who lingered in the area for longer than they should.

Ms. Paola Harris

Back at the ranch house, in San Antonio, New Mexico, they told family about what they had seen. There was no immediate follow up, but a day or so later, the fathers and a New Mexico State Policeman, made their way to the scene of the crash. Although the boys were told to stay back, the adults approached the craft. One or two of them might have crawled up inside. Today that makes no real difference because none of those adults are alive for interviews or to confirm the story.

There was no sign of the small creatures when the adults made it to the crash site. Speculation is that they might have been captured by the Army, but I suppose, it is equally possible that they were rescued by their fellow aliens. At any rate, the beings disappear from the story and are never heard of again.

The military arrived at some point. Eventually, they asked permission to cut a fence and install a gate and to cut a road across the ranch to the area of the crash. The boys, hiding from the military, kept a watch on this. The boys talked of the soldiers’ attempts to clean up the debris. Although the soldiers collected all of the debris, it seems they kicked pieces of it aside and dumped it into crevasses. They covered this with a thin layer of dirt meaning that it might be found in the world today… maybe.

Although the Army was interested enough in the crash to recover the vehicle, they seemed to be less than enthusiastic in protecting the find. Once they had brought in the flatbed truck to move the wrecked vehicle from the scene, the soldiers departed, apparently going into town for a meal or two. In other words, they left the truck, the spacecraft, the debris and everything else unguarded.

The boys, having spied on the soldiers, understood their routine and once the site was abandoned, they wandered down to the blue-tarp-covered object sitting on that unguarded flatbed. Now, Jose, apparently the more adventurous of the two, peeled back part of that blue tarp and crawled up into the UFO. He stole a bit of a panel from inside and explored part of the craft. These descriptions were overly detailed, and not really what would you expect from someone who was 9 at the time, telling the tale decades later. Very detailed but probably not precise.

The boys carried away a great deal of the debris. If I understood the story, some of that debris, thin strips of metal that is reminiscent of the memory metal described by Bill Brazel of Roswell fame, was divided up and handed out as decorations for Christmas trees… a fairly cavalier way to treat samples of metal created on another planet. At this point, meaning here in 2021, all that material has disappeared so that there is nothing left that can be tested and analyzed.

Eventually, the Army drove the tarp-covered UFO from the area, and life returned to normal, or as normal as it could be after seeing an alien spacecraft. Neither Reme nor Jose talked much about it in the decades that followed.

Or rather they did mention it once in a great while. Don Schmitt told me, during his recent appearance on the A Different Perspective Radio Show/Podcast, that he’d met with Reme in the late 1990s after some presentation that Don had given. Don lost interest when Reme mentioned the Plains of San Agustin as the location of the crash, suggesting some sort of confirmation of the Barney Barnett tale.

That isn’t the only worrisome part of the story the boys told and that is the cavalier way the Army operated. I simply do not believe that the Army would go to the trouble of cleaning the area, but bury some of the debris on site rather than picking it up to be taken away. I don’t believe they would have left the scene unguarded at all, but especially after they had loaded the craft onto the flatbed truck… and knowing that Army trucks, as most Army vehicles, do not use keys to start them. I can believe that the boys were clever enough to avoid detection by the soldiers as they spied on the operation from a distance, but I do not believe they were allowed to get inside the craft after it had been loaded on the truck. By allowed, I mean that the truck was left in the field without any guard on it. The soldiers might not have known the craft came from another world, but they would have known that it represented a technology unknown to American science at the time. That alone would have demanded an around the clock guard detail.

Two points need to be made here. Don was not the only UFO researcher to be approached with the story of the crash. In the book, Vallee and Harris note that Baca had also sought out Stan Friedman who seemed to be equally uninterested… and second, Don might have misunderstood about the location on the Plains. Seems that those living in San Antonio referred to the area around the town as the Plains as well. At any rate, neither Stan nor Don followed up on this bizarre tale.

But the Vallee/Harris book is about more than just the San Antonio crash. There is a section that deals with some of the other events concerning UFOs and crashes. The first is the Aurora, Texas, crash of April 1897. This is quite disturbing because of the history involved. I have written about this case a number of times. I was among the very first to visit Aurora in the early 1971. The consensus of those living there, at that time, was the story was a hoax. Those at the Wise County Historical Society (Aurora is in Wise County) told me that two histories of the county had been written in the decade that followed this alleged crash but neither history mentioned it. Since there was no Air Force or CIA to suppress the information, you have to wonder why, if it was a real event, that any mention of it was omitted in both those histories. That doesn’t bode well for the Aurora tale. You can read more about my investigation here:

http://kevinrandle.blogspot.com/2005/03/aurora-texas-story-that-wont-die.html

http://kevinrandle.blogspot.com/2018/12/jefferson-airship-vs-aurora-crash.html

http://kevinrandle.blogspot.com/2013/09/ufo-crashes-fifty-years-before-roswell.html

There is one additional comment to make. According to the Vallee/Harris book, a piece of metal picked during one of the modern treks to the crash site up in Aurora was scientifically tested. The tests showed that it was made of an alloy that did not exist in 1897 and wouldn’t be created until 1908. Seems like a bit of extraordinary evidence, except the fragment was recovered much later than 1908. Nothing ties it to the 1897 event, other than it was found somewhere around Aurora. Obviously, it was dropped sometime after 1908.

It is also disturbing that Vallee and Harris take the Maury Island hoax as something authentic. That story, actually investigated in depth by the Air Force, as well as many others, is also a hoax. Although Vallee/Harris acknowledge the hoax explanation, they also wonder how “…any such statement can be drawn by the reported facts.”

This statement is in error. I have looked at the Maury Island case extensively, and you can read about that in Alien Mysteries, Conspiracies and Cover-ups. The story has been well researched by a number of investigators. George Earley was one of those and reported his findings in UFO, issues 155, 156 and 157. According to Earley, Harold Dahl’s son, Charles, who was supposed injured during the sighting was interview years later and said that it never happened. A search for medical records to verify the injury failed to find any mention of it.

In other words, the reported facts in the Maury Island case, all of them, support Ed Ruppelt’s statement in his book The Report on Unidentified Flying Objects. Ruppelt described the Maury Island event as the direst hoax in UFO history. No evidence has been presented to reverse Ruppelt’s observation.

More problems develop in the discussion of the Socorro UFO landing. I was intrigued to learn that Lonnie Zamora was related, by marriage into the Padillo family. His cousin married Zamora, which connects them to another big UFO event in New Mexico. This is not to mention that Socorro is about fifteen or twenty miles from San Antonio.

For years researchers have suggested the Zamora case was single witness to the UFO landing. Vallee and Harris wrote that there were eleven witness who saw the object and two who were “auditory” witnesses, meaning they’d heard the roar but saw no object. The problem is that none of these witnesses are identified with the exception of Paul Kies and Larry Kratzer. The two men had told a reporter in Dubuque, Iowa, that they had been driving through Socorro about the time that Zamora was engaged with the UFO. They saw the thing take off in a cloud of dust and smoke.

The trouble here is that their stories just do not fit into the Socorro scenario. Kies said that there had been a large burned area in the desert and that the exhaust had melted a pop bottle. He couldn’t have seen these things given they were just driving through Socorro and hadn’t stopped to inspect the site. More importantly, the melted pop bottle description was from a sighting near La Madera, New Mexico, a day or so later, which also received some national attention.

Ralph DeGraw, an Iowa UFO researcher, interviewed both witnesses some years later. While what they said then generally agreed with the account in the newspaper, DeGraw found some important discrepancies, including Kratzer’s description of the craft. He said that it was silver with a row of dark round, mirror-like windows. This was a major departure from Zamora’s description that had no windows and suggests invention by the witness.

One of the other points of disagreement about the case is the description of the symbol seen by Zamora. Ray Stanford identified the “real” symbol reported by Zamora. The trouble here is that the symbol, three horizonal lines through an inverted “V” is not the symbol that Zamora drew for the military, nor is it the one that he drew on the scrap of paper moments after the UFO departed. While Vallee and Harris endorse the inverted “V”, Zamora, on the scrap of paper, drew an “umbrella” like symbol with an inverted “V” under it and a line, like the shaft of an arrow, up into the “V”. That scrap of paper was turned over to the Air Force and can be seen in the Project Blue Book file.

Zamora's drawing on the scrap of paper minutes after the UFO disappeared.

Ironically, that symbol was originally endorsed by Stanford in a letter dated May of 1964. He wrote that the inverted “V” was the fake symbol. In the years from writing that letter to writing his book, he changed his mind. But Zamora, on the night of the sighting, drew a number of illustrations for both the FBI and the Army and he signed them. The “umbrella” symbol was the one he signed.

Lonnie Zamora's drawing of the craft and the symbol made on April 24, 1964

In the end here, Stanford said there were eleven witnesses other than Zamora, but offers no names. Vallee and Harris repeat this without names, other than Kies and Kratzer, whose tale has been discredited. Vallee wrote that a single witness is no witness. I would suggest that an anonymous witness, or even nearly a dozen anonymous witnesses are of absolutely no value and worth less than that single witness. In 1964, no one bothered to get the names or tried to locate any of these witnesses. Now we are again treated to the information about a UFO sighting but that information has no real value.

The final chapters of the book are devoted to this new witness to the San Antonio crash promoted by Vallee and Harris. At the end of the book, they identify her as a relative of Padillo. The problem? She was born in 1953 or eight years after the sighting. She talks about handling some of the debris, but the piece, or pieces, she had been given, are long gone. She talked about family stories, but she witnessed nothing first hand other than a large burned area that might have had nothing to do with the original crash. She is emersed in the family history, she is aware of UFO history, but can’t contribute much of value to the story.

Here’s one of the things to take away from this latest book. Both Baca and Padillo talk about many aspects of the UFO field. They talk about knowing people at the Foster ranch near Corona where Mack Brazel discovered a field of metallic debris. We have the family relation to Zamora which suggests more infusion of UFO material into the family lore. Then, we have many aspects of the Roswell case inserted into this new tale. The UFO crashed during a storm, as was suggested at Roswell. Lightning brought it down, as happened at Roswell, but I wonder that if a race can create interstellar craft, they would be able to avoid destruction by lightning. There was memory metal and even a discussion of fiber optics, just like Roswell.

The big thing that caught my attention was a description that suggested the aliens looked something like the Jerusalem Cricket… the very description supplied by Frankie Rowe when talking about the aliens at Roswell. There are just too many of the descriptions that are drawn from the Roswell case. To me, this suggests contamination rather than corroboration. It suggests that both men were well aware of the UFO field long before they began to talk of their childhood experiences. They had a better than average knowledge of what had been reported about UFOs and UFO crash/retrievals before they began talking about the UFO crash near San Antonio.

To make this worse, if possible, it is claimed that this tale of a crashed spacecraft is the first in our modern era. This, however, isn’t true. In the Spring of 1941, there are reports of something crashing near Cape Girardeau, Missouri. The tale is told by one woman who, while she didn’t witness the craft and bodies herself, is aware of what her grandfather had seen and had done. She is well-versed in the family history. Len Stringfield laid out the details in one of his updates to crash/retrievals, this one published in 1991. There is another witness who knows the story including the brother of the local sheriff and even the report of a picture of one of the alien beings. Of course, that picture has been lost, but the evidence for the Cape Girardeau crash as just as solid as that for the Trinity crash. For some reason it is not mentioned in the Vallee and Harris book. I mention this only because it suggests a long history of UFO crash tales that are based on limited eyewitness testimony and family members who died long before they could be interviewed. And they are told in the same era, that is, the 1940s.

All this and I haven’t even touched on the structure of the book. It is filled with oat meal. This is a writing term that refers to filling to make a story longer. Sure, I enjoyed reading about some of the history of the creation of the atomic bomb, but it has no relevance to this story. The fact that the first nuclear explosion took place at Trinity, not all that far from San Antonio means nothing… unless you believe that the aliens had been watching for that flash everyone talked about. Of course, you have to wonder where they were to have seen that and gotten here so quickly. It matters not what their technology can do, the speed of light is the limiting factor. Even if these aliens can exceed the speed of light, or bend the universe to allow interstellar flight, the flash of the bomb would only travel at the speed of light. If the aliens could detect such a flash against the backdrop of the sun and if it happened on the side of the planet facing them, the fastest they could have detected the explosion is about four years afterward, if they inhabited a planet in the Alpha Centuri star system. If they live in another star system, then their response would take even longer.

Ignoring that, we still have a book filled with a family history that does nothing to validate the story. It is a travelogue. It is a walk though some of UFOs greatest hits, many of which have little in the way of evidence to back them up. And even if these ancillary tales were all true, that does nothing to validate this particular story.

It is filled with a wonder of the events but little in the way of analysis. It tells the story of two boys who seemed to have been wise beyond their years, able to avoid the Army which failed at even the barest level of security. We are told of soldiers who were lazy, not picking up all the debris, but hiding from their superiors. That debris would still be there for UFO hunters to find except is now beyond recovery. Flood control projects that altered the terrain significantly and buried the debris under twenty or thirty feet of mud and dirt. No way to find it now.

This is certainly much longer than I anticipated, but we need to understand what we have here. It isn’t a scientific search for evidence but more of science fiction story told for entertainment. There is no physical evidence presented but talk of such evidence just out of our reach. There is no real attempt to validate the story or provide citation for the claims. It is a story that has borrowed elements from other tales in the hope it will be seen as corroboration rather than plagiarism. Oh, I don’t mean that either Vallee or Harris stole the story from others, only that the witnesses have been contaminated by decades of UFO tales written about, broadcast and even incorporated into movies. It is too bad that no one wrote anything down in a letter or a journal in 1945 or 46 but that’s just too much to hope for. Somehow the alleged evidence is never found and, in the end, we are left with a tale told by two old men, and one old woman, who said they experienced it as youngsters.