Keep Out!: Top Secret Places Governments Don't Want You to Know About

On March 28, 1975, the late Barry Goldwater — who served as a major-general in the Air Force, a senator for Arizona, the Republican party’s nominee for president in the 1964 election, and the chairman of the U.S. government’s Senate Intelligence Committee — wrote the following words to a UFO researcher named Shlomo Arnon: “The subject of UFOs is one that has interested me for some long time. About 10 or 12 years ago I made an effort to find out what was in the building at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base where the information is stored that has been collected by the Air Force, and I was understandably denied this request. It is still classified above Top Secret.”[15]

Well, it’s certainly not every day you receive a letter like that in the mail — and from a U.S. senator and a presidential candidate no less. The building to which Goldwater was referring is allegedly a super-secret location that many UFO researchers believe houses the remnants of one or more crashed UFOs, along with the cryogenically preserved remains of their deceased alien crewmembers. Its memorable moniker is Hangar 18.

Whether it really is a literal hangar or a myriad of underground chambers and tunnels still remains to be seen. That it exists at Wright-Patterson in some fashion, however, is — according to many retired military and intelligence personnel, at least — not a matter of any doubt. Yet the Air Force vehemently disagrees. For its members (publicly, at least), Hangar 18 is no more than a tiresome albatross forever hanging around the military’s collective neck. Oh, how they want to strangle that bothersome bird.

Staff at the base categorically (and at times wearily) deny that alien bodies and extraterrestrial spacecraft are secretly held at Wright-Patterson. The terse, official word from the Public Affairs office at Wright-Patterson today, to anyone who dares ask them, is as follows: “Periodically, it is erroneously stated that the remains of extraterrestrial visitors are or have been stored at Wright-Patterson AFB. There are not now nor ever have been, any extraterrestrial visitors or equipment on Wright-Patterson Air Force Base.”[16] The Air Force’s statement is polite and to the point…one suspects they are constantly itching to scream something along the lines of, “Take that, ufologists, and stick it where the sun don’t shine!” Nonetheless, Wright-Patterson has a longstanding and undeniable link to the whole UFO kit and caboodle.

In 1947, General Nathan Twining, who was then the Chief of the Air Materiel Command at the base, initiated the creation of Project Sign, an official operation designed to investigate the burgeoning mystery of UFOs. Sign was shortly thereafter replaced by Project Grudge, which continued to operate from Wright-Patterson. In 1952, Project Blue Book took over the reins from Grudge, before finally closing its pages in 1969. Officially, no evidence was ever found by Sign, Grudge, or Blue Book staff that UFOs were anything more than hoaxes, the results of psychological aberrations, or misidentifications of either natural phenomena or conventional aerial vehicles such as aircraft, balloons, rockets, and satellites. Again, a black eye on the face of ufology — or maybe an outrageous attempt to hide a startling truth of non-terrestrial proportions.

Stringfield’s Research

One of the most persistent sleuths who have attempted to force open the impenetrable doors of Hangar 18 is Leonard Stringfield. Having served within the shadowy world of intelligence-gathering and analysis during the Second World War, Stringfield was a prime character to pursue the convoluted mysteries of Hangar 18. Stringfield had deeply investigated the UFO conundrum since the early 1950s; it was not until the latter part of the 1970s, however, that he began to almost exclusively focus his research upon Hangar 18, which he did with success up until the time of his death in late 1994.

Of the multitude of accounts that reached Stringfield, one truly fascinating tale came via a dedicated UFO investigator named Charles Wilhelm. It went like this: In 1959, Wilhelm, who was a youngster at the time, was hired by an elderly lady living in Price Hill, Cincinnati, to do yard work at her home. Throughout the course of their various conversations, the issue of UFOs occasionally came up, and the pair mused upon the matter and what its impact might be if one day revealed to an unsuspecting populace. When the woman developed terminal cancer, and with her life hanging in the balance, she elected to confide in Wilhelm a remarkable story of jaw-dropping proportions.

As Wilhelm listened, enthralled, the woman revealed how, while serving with the U.S. Air Force at Wright-Patterson in the early 1950s, she held a Top Secret clearance, and on one occasion had seen two flying saucers that were held at the base in what she described as a secret hangar. One such craft, she recalled, was in very good shape, whereas the other showed clear structural signs of having been involved in a serious accident or crash. Wilhelm’s informant quietly told him of her personal knowledge of the preserved remains of two nonhuman creatures held at the base. She even had occasion to view the autopsy reports on the entities, Wilhelm told an excited Stringfield. The woman’s final words on the matter, which succinctly explained the reasons behind her brave decision to take Wilhelm into her confidence: “Uncle Sam can’t do anything to me after I’m in the grave.” Right on, lady.

If Wright-Patterson is indeed home to such astonishing alien evidence, from where and when did it originate? Many suggest the answer is the ufological granddaddy of all granddaddies: Roswell, New Mexico, in the summer of 1947.[17]

Roswell

It was the first week of July 1947 when something strange crashed on ranch land in a remote part of Lincoln County, New Mexico — approximately a 90-minute drive from the town of Roswell — and got the military into a state of total turmoil. The incident has since captured the collective imagination of the general public and the media, has been the topic of more than 20 books, has led to investigations undertaken by both the General Accounting Office and a grumbling U.S. Air Force, and, finally, has ensured Roswell and its people a place on the map and a regular influx of tourists eager to get the scoop on everything extraterrestrial.

The undeniably strange event has provoked an avalanche of explanations from those who have valiantly sought — but ultimately failed — to conclusively resolve the matter. Here are a few:

A weather balloon.

A more cumbersome balloon array designed to secretly monitor for early Soviet atomic-bomb tests.

A balloon-based high-altitude-exposure experiment utilizing human guinea pigs.

The crash of a captured German rocket with small monkeys onboard.

Beyond a doubt, the one explanation that, more than any other, just refuses to go away is the theory that a spacecraft from another world crashed in the wilds of Lincoln County, in the process killing its strange crew and accidentally revealing to the U.S. military that we are not alone in the universe. Much of the available data and testimony suggests it was to Wright-Patterson in Ohio that the Roswell debris and dead entities — whatever they might have been — were secretly transferred.

Norman Richards, who served with the 25th Tropic Lightning Division of the U.S. Army, had his own Roswell story to tell. In the summer of 1950, he and a number of other personnel were flown to Lowry Air Force Base in Colorado for a month and a half of training. One day, while on base at Lowry, Richards’ group attended a lecture — from a colonel who just happened to be stationed at Wright-Patterson — on the subject of new, experimental aircraft. During the course of the lecture, the controversy surrounding UFOs surfaced. One of the attendees wanted to know if UFOs exist. Richards recalled that the colonel got very excited and told the group they had better believe UFOs exist. Alien bodies, along with wreckage from one of their ships, said the remarkably talkative colonel, had been found and secretly retrieved. The colonel, said Richards, told the group that the recovered materials were under investigation at a secure locale on Wright-Patterson after having been covertly flown in from Roswell.

Similarly, the late Brigadier General Arthur E. Exon — who held the position of commanding officer at Wright-Patterson — confirmed that alien bodies, and the remains of their ship, were secretly transferred to the base after their recovery in Lincoln County, New Mexico, in the summer of 1947. If anyone should know, it would surely be the base’s commanding officer, right?

Wright-Patterson

As Stringfield’s research into crashed UFOs and Hangar 18 continued, he secured the testimony of further sources who maintained that a secret, off-limits hangar or vault existed somewhere at Wright-Patterson, where the prized alien evidence could be found if one only knew where to look. One such source was a retired major who advised Stringfield — on the condition that his true identity never be revealed to anyone — that in 1952 he had attended a Top Secret briefing at Wright-Patterson on the UFO issue, after which he was given access to a hidden, underground chamber at the base where a number of extraterrestrial corpses were cryogenically preserved. The bodies, Stringfield’s Deep Throat told him, were gray-skinned, approximately 4 feet in height, and had large heads.

There was an even more amazing (many might say outrageous) story to come. And if Stringfield wasn’t the victim of some bizarre practical joke, cruel prank, or officially orchestrated leg-pull to try and demolish the credibility of his quickly expanding dossier of data, it’s a tale that takes the saga of Hangar 18 to a completely different level of cosmic controversy. If the story is true, it’s not just dead aliens that are held at Wright-Patterson; live ones are running (or shuffling) around too!

It was a weekend in 1965 when Stringfield’s informant, dubbed only “R.M.,” chose to visit the National Museum of the United States Air Force — formerly the United States Air Force Museum — located on the grounds of Wright-Patterson. While his wife was busy studying a captured Nazi V-2 rocket, R.M. wandered off, soon became lost amid the maze of corridors, and finally found himself confronted by a pair of doors adorned with two, large, ominous words: Off Limits. Faced with such a sign, I suspect very few of us would be able to resist the temptation to take a peek at what might be on the other side.

Indeed, the sign did not deter R.M. in the slightest, and he tentatively pushed the doors open. On the other side was a room containing a small, large-eyed, heavy-browed creature, clearly unlike any terrestrial life-form, that, in a somewhat comical fashion, shuffled towards R.M. and pointed one of its fingers directly at him. Unsurprisingly, all R.M. could do was stare, utterly dumbstruck, at the alien entity. Suddenly, alarms began going off all throughout the facility, and R.M., fearful that he might soon find himself being grilled by menacing, cigar-chomping generals, high-tailed it out of the room. He finally found his shaky way back to his wife, while military police proceeded to quickly usher everyone out of the building. The alien who gave R.M. the finger, so to speak, apparently elected not to follow and was not seen again.

R.M. told Stringfield that, in his opinion, the alarm was raised because the presumed alien creature had broken free of its confines on the base and was now on the loose, no doubt trying to make good its escape. Notably, R.M. later learned from a retired Air Force colonel that two living alien creatures were held at Wright-Patterson in the 1960s, military scientists having, supposedly, successfully created a suitable atmosphere in which to house the interplanetary pair.

As for Stringfield, although he conceded that R.M.’s story was an undeniably fantastic one, he added that, “The Wright-Patterson complex is vast and so are its underground facilities. It is conceivable, if truly live aliens exist, that one may have slipped by the guards into the passageways and surfaced in an upper chamber of the museum.”[18] A crazy tale, no doubt, but for Stringfield, nothing was ever too over-the-top when it came to Hangar 18, hence why he chose not to quietly file the story in his gray basket, but instead championed it widely.

As the 1960s became the 1970s, the tales of Hangar 18 continued to proliferate and circulate.

Sensitive Activities

Victor Marchetti, a former executive assistant to the deputy director and special assistant to the executive director of the CIA, went on record in the late 1970s that while he was serving with the CIA, UFO-related reports were filed under the heading of what he termed very sensitive activities. Far more significantly, Marchetti admitted that, from time to time, and via high-level sources and colleagues within the CIA, he was privy to accounts relative to alien bodies and at least one crashed UFO, held by Wright-Patterson’s Foreign Technology Division. Marchetti’s story is far less sensational than that of R.M., but it’s made far more important due to Marchetti’s prestigious — and provable — background. As was precisely the case with Senator Barry Goldwater, Marchetti was most certainly no tinfoil-hat-wearing wacko.

Hacking into Hangar 18

On October 27, 1992, Dateline NBC devoted a segment of its show to the subject of computer hacking, and chose to include certain Q&As with a number of self-confessed hackers. With one of the hackers talking about his ability to easily break into government and military computer systems, NBC flashed across the screen a variety of documentation that had supposedly been obtained by the hacker from Wright-Patterson’s computer system. In part it stated, “WRIGHT-PATTERSON AFB/Catalogued UFO parts list, an underground facility of Foreign….”

At that point, to the disappointment of everyone watching, the camera flashed away and the rest of the document was not shown; however, it was later revealed that at least part of the material downloaded by the hacker was said to reference Top Secret alien-autopsy data stored on Wright-Patterson’s computer systems. That’s right: to the utter joy of UFO hunters everywhere, Hangar 18 was not dead.

In 1993, Dateline NBC broke its silence on this controversial issue, and Susan Adams, who had been the producer of that particular segment of the program, expressed considerable amazement at the incredible response that NBC had received following the airing of the episode.

Hang on a minute. Let’s see if we have that right: NBC broadcasts — on primetime television, no less — imagery of secret UFO files and data on alien-autopsies, obtained under circumstances that were wholly illegal, from Wright-Patterson’s secret computer banks, and Adams is amazed by the response? What, pray tell, did Adams and her bosses expect? The production team should have considered itself extremely lucky that the notorious Men in Black of UFO lore did not come knocking — or perhaps banging hard — on the doors of NBC.

Adams continued that the hacker desired to remain anonymous, primarily because his material had allegedly been acquired under circumstances that were hardly lawful, via delving into classified American governmental and military computerized files and archives. Hell yes, he wanted to remain anonymous! One can scarcely begin to imagine what fate — or Air Force security personnel — would have had in store for the unknown hacker if he had been chased down and caught. It wouldn’t have been good, that’s for sure.

On the matter of the precious data, Adams state that NBC’s lawyers had scrutinized it to the finest degree possible, and had become convinced of the complete legitimacy of the acquired, alien-themed material. Moreover, Adams explained that, as the hacker was technically committing a felony, there was absolutely no way that his identity could ever be revealed. Surprising no one who had followed this story, Adams added that although the hacker was acutely aware of the interest his apparent UFO data had provoked, he did not wish to respond in any way.

Matthew Bevan

Matthew Bevan is a self-confessed, and somewhat proud, computer hacker from Wales, United Kingdom, who, as a teenager in the mid-1990s, chose to hack into the gigantic complex of computer systems at Wright-Patterson in search of data on Hangar 18, crashed UFOs, and dead aliens. Bevan, whose story sounds like it strode right out of the 1983 movie Wargames, had an interest in computers as far back as the age of 11, when his parents bought him a ZX81 (which is of course now considered a dinosaur) for his birthday, which he eventually traded in for a Commodore Amiga 1200—the computer Bevan was using when he hacked Wright-Patterson in 1994 and 1995.

Wright-Patterson, said Bevan, was an extremely simple computer system to get into, and he relished the opportunity to briefly rummage around classified e-mails, Top Secret work files, and Eyes Only documentation on futuristic aircraft. Bevan’s teenage naiveté actually led him to confidently believe he had successfully penetrated the secrets of Wright-Patterson without detection by U.S. authorities. Come on! He hacks the Air Force and they don’t even get wind of it? Sadly for Bevan, of course the Air Force got wind of it. They became extremely irate in the process, and soon contacted British authorities.

It wasn’t long before the boy wonder was arrested by Scotland Yard’s Computer Crimes Unit (CCU) and charged with hacking Wright-Patterson, NASA, Lockheed, and a variety of additional entities within, or with ties to, the U.S. government. Deep shit didn’t even begin to describe the position in which Bevan found himself. Notably, at one point while being questioned by personnel about his actions, a Detective-Sergeant Simon Janes, of the CCU, asked Bevan what the term Hangar 18 meant to him. Bevan — for whom much of this episode merely seemed like an exciting episode of The X-Files—replied enthusiastically that it was a storage area for extraterrestrial craft and dead aliens.

Throughout the interview, Scotland Yard’s finest kept coming back to Hangar 18, and pummeling him with questions like, Did he view anything unusual on the Wright-Patterson computers? What was his motivation? Bevan nonchalantly told them he was hot on the trail of the U.S. government’s most guarded UFO secrets, and nothing more. A few months later, a hearing at Bow Street Magistrates Court in London went ahead; Bevan was out on bail at the time. To add to his problems, the American authorities were now claiming that certain things on the computers he had supposedly hacked into had been changed, perhaps maliciously. Cripes.

Having the audacity to hack the U.S. Air Force in search of alien secrets was one thing. Deliberately altering entire computer systems and creating major headaches for the military, said the U.S. government, was beyond the pale. Uncle Sam wanted swift justice. Bevan’s lawyer swung into action and asked to see the evidence demonstrating that Bevan had altered the computer systems. Amazingly, the U.S. military flatly refused to provide any form of evidence, and insisted that the judge just take them at their word. He was not impressed.

It was during this hearing that a U.S. Intelligence operative named Jim Hanson took the stand and said that he was there to represent the U.S. government’s interests in the Bevan affair. Bevan’s defense continued to push for information to back up the claims of the American government that he had somehow altered their systems, but Hanson would not budge.

As the hearing continued, the prosecution asked Hanson what the American government thought about Bevan’s motives regarding his hacking of Wright-Patterson. Hanson admitted that, although Bevan’s actions were illegal, no one within officialdom was of the opinion that Bevan was after anything more than UFO data. In other words, Bevan wasn’t considered by the Americans to be a secret spy in the employ of the Russians, the Chinese, or the North Koreans, or as someone using his UFO research as a cover for far more nefarious snooping.

Ultimately, Bevan proved to be an extremely lucky young man: U.S. authorities continued to refuse to reveal any evidence relative to the computerized files that he reportedly accessed and supposedly altered — possibly due to legitimate fears that such action might open up even more tricky questions relative to the Hangar 18 controversy. This lack of evidence allowed Bevan to walk free in November 1997.

Today, a naïve teenager no more, Bevan’s illegal hacking days are long behind him. But U.S. officialdom has certainly not forgotten its failed attempt to teach him a lesson, the likes of which he would surely never, ever have forgotten. Off the record, officialdom has quietly made it clear to Bevan that, should he contemplate making a trip to the United States, he would be very wise to think again. Accidents can, and do, happen, after all…especially when they’re not really accidents.

P.O.W. Art

Irena Scott, a UFO researcher with a special interest in the stories of extraterrestrial bodies secretly held at Wright-Patterson, has reported on another facet of the controversy. Could the story of Hangar 18 get any more convoluted? Yes, it could. Scott’s is an intriguing addition to the story that takes us back to the heart of the Second World War — but it has absolutely nada to do with aliens. From 1943 through 1946, a particular section of the base served as a prisoner-of-war camp for several hundred German troops who had been captured during hostilities in both North Africa and Italy.

Scott discovered that on a particular stretch of wall approximately 70 feet long by 20 feet high in the prisoners’ mess hall, the captured soldiers had passed their time by painting huge murals that depicted mythological figures from German folklore. Monstrous and gargoyle-like in nature, their green-color, Scott suggested, might very well have provoked rumors pertaining to the remains of little green men housed at Wright-Patterson. It’s as good a theory as any, some might say, but it’s highly unlikely to satisfy those who see the real story as being far more sensational than a bit of old artwork done by a few bored prisoners-of-war nearly 70 years ago. The curious legend of Wright-Patterson’s Hangar 18 and its attendant little men from the stars, it seems, is destined to live on.