Roswell, UFOs and the Unusual

Aurora, Texas — A Story That Won't Die

A while back I had the opportunity to appear on the late night radio show, Coast-to-Coast. I bring this up only because, apparently, the next night the host had on Jim Marrs (seen here) who talked about the Aurora, Texas airship crash of 1897. I wouldn’t have known this but someone who heard my interview the night before mentioned to me in an email that Marrs had talked about Aurora and suggested that it was a real event. That person wanted to know if Marrs was correct and if there is anything to the story of the crash.

And this provides us with an opportunity to examine one of the major problems in UFO research. No case ever dies, no matter how many times it is exposed as a hoax. This is true even when those exposing it range from the skeptics to the believers in extraterrestrial contact. And it continues even when no evidence for the reality of the case has ever been found… or none was found until people began to realize they could get their names in the newspaper or their faces on television if they said something to confirm the case.

The stories of the flight of the Great Airship of 1897 provides us with proof of both theories. Although many of the tales have since been shown to be jokes, there are a few that are repeated in the UFO literature with such regularity, and almost with such awe, that it is necessary to provide, once again, all the information about them so that we can work to remove them from that same literature. One of the most famous, and probably the most reported, is the Aurora, Texas, UFO crash that had been the subject of that email correspondence.

Typical of the airship sightings was that told by Patrick Barnes to the Fort Worth Register, "which hardly cares to repeat it." He claimed that he was traveling near Cisco, Texas, and spotted several men standing around a large cigar-shaped craft. He went over to talk to them and learned they were on their way to Cuba to bomb the Spanish. They had landed to make some repairs, and soon took off. Their immediate destination was the Ozarks where they planned to train for their self-designed mission.

The Aurora (Aurora, Texas seen here) crash story, as it is told just days later, suggests the airship appeared about dawn on April 17, 1897, came in low, buzzed the town square and then continued north, toward the farm owned at the time by Judge Proctor. There it hit a windmill and exploded into a shower of debris, damaging the Judge’s flower garden, and house, not to mention his windmill. The townspeople rushed to the scene and found the badly disfigured body of the pilot. T.J. Weems, a Signal Corps officer (think intelligence officer here in 1897), thought the pilot was probably from Mars.

Being good Christians, and apparently because no one had anything else to do, they buried the pilot after a short memorial service that afternoon. They also gathered several documents covered with a strange writing found in the wreckage, and picked up tons of material including silver and aluminum that came from the airship. All that evidence has long since disappeared.

And that’s it. No follow up stories as tourists flocked to Aurora. No mysterious scientists arriving to inspect the wreckage. No Army response, though one of their own was on hand to report what he had seen. And finally, most importantly, no one ever produced those documents or bits and pieces of the wreckage, though there had been tons of it, at least according to the newspaper report.

The story died at that point, and then was resurrected in the 1960s by UFO researchers who stumbled onto the airship tales which had been dormant for about six decades. Suddenly the story of the tragedy reappeared and Aurora, Texas was now on the map with those scientists, researchers and tourists finally making the trek.

A large number of people, including Hayden Hewes of the now defunct International UFO Bureau, Jim Marrs, who had most recently suggested the story was real, and even Walt Andrus (seen here), the former International Director of the Mutual UFO Network (MUFON) at various times journeyed to Aurora in search of the truth. They all reported they found a strange grave marker in the Aurora cemetery, they found strange metal (seen here) with metal detectors, and they gathered reports from long time Aurora residents who remembered the story, remembered seeing the airship, or remembered parents talking about the crash. There was also discussion of government attempts to suppress the data. To them, that made the story of the crash real.

The problem here is that I beat most of these people to Aurora by several years to conduct my own investigation. I talked to some of those same longtime residents who told me in the early 1970s that nothing had happened. I talked to the historians at the Wise County Historical Society (Aurora is in Wise County) who told me that it hadn’t happened, though they wish it had. I learned that T.J. Weems, the famed Signal Corps officer was, in fact, the local blacksmith. I learned that Judge Proctor didn’t have a windmill, or rather that was what was said then. Now they suggest that he had two windmills. I wandered the grave yard, which isn’t all that large (something just over 800 graves) and found no marker with strange symbols carved on it, though there are those who suggest a crude headstone with a rough airship on it had been there at the time. I found nothing to support the tale and went away believing, based on my own research and interviews, this to be another of the airship hoaxes.

Metal collected by all those others, when analyzed here, turned out to be nothing strange or unusual. Some of it was later analyzed in a Canadian lab and their results mirrored those of American labs. So much for the idea that the government, in the guise of the CIA, the Air Force, or the mythical MJ-12, conspired to suppress evidence of the Aurora UFO crash.

Isn’t it interesting, though, that none of the metal supposedly gathered by the town’s residents has ever surfaced. The metal analyzed was always recovered by researchers with metal detectors. Isn’t interesting that the strange grave marker has since disappeared and there is no real photographic record of it. There should be for all the research that has been done and the single picture that has turned up showed not an airship but a coarse triangle with circles in the center. And isn’t interesting that there were never any follow up reports from Aurora. First the big splash with the crash and then nothing for more than sixty years.

The final, fatal blow for the airship and Aurora crash comes from the original reporter. H.E. Hayden, a stringer for the Dallas Morning News, who claimed to have invented the story in a vain attempt to put his dying community back on the map. He hoped to draw attention, and people, to Aurora, Texas. He was successful. The problem was that he succeeded sixty years too late and those who arrived only wanted to learn about the airship, not settle down to rebuild the community as he had hoped.

The San Diego UFO Crash — 1947

I was reviewing some of the old cases in my files and I came across the notation for a UFO crash near San Diego in 1947. I had published all the information I had in A History of UFO Crashes and was looking for additional data.

In that book I wrote, “Unidentified witnesses reported that a flaming object was seen to fall into the ocean west of San Diego. A check at the local observatory suggested that it wasn’t a meteorite and there were no aircraft reported missing. Recently declassified documents suggest an investigation by the military into the unidentified flaming object, but the case file itself has not been discovered.”

Okay, that’s not much. There were a couple of sources on this material. One of them was Flying Saucers on the Attackwritten by Harold T. Wilkins and published by the Citadel Press (Ace Star Books, page 72) in 1967. The only additional and probably irrelevant information contained there was that someone had checked with the Observatory at Griffin Park which is in Los Angeles and not San Diego, and the person there didn’t think it was a meteor.

The footnote for the case relates it to Sherman Brown who had an unpublished manuscript called UFO Crashes and was dated 1990. I actually reference that book several times, but could find nothing in my files that tells me anything more about it.

The other thing is that I have several letters from people attempting to track down the original sources of this information and trying to find Sherman Brown. One of those writers said that he had looked through the San Diego newspapers of the time. He found nothing there that related to an event in October.

All this led to one important point. In the book I dated the crash on October 20, 1947, but the other sources suggest, instead, September 20. I don’t know the source of the error in my book but would guess that it belongs to me.

None of this matters for those trying to run this down in San Diego. They checked the newspapers starting with the Arnold Sighting of June 24, 1947 and ran through the end of October. One man sent me a list of people who had made sightings in 1947.

I tried some other sources including the J. Allen Hynek Center for UFO Studies. They checked through their records and they found nothing to relate to either Sherman Brown or a crash near San Diego. I have believed, since there was nothing in my files on this, I had picked this up, or researched it further at the Center. Unless something strange happened there, they were not the source of Sherman Brown.

I did find that the San Diego Unioncarried an article about John Kuder who said he had seen “a luminous flying disc” circling about a half mile off Mission Beach. It dipped into the ocean and there was a ball of fire visible for a few seconds after the disk disappeared. This could be the source of the original story. The date isn’t close, but the location is and but the description of the event would fit with the idea that there had been a crash of some kind.

Here’s where we are on this one. I have located some of the sources about this event. I can now correct the date to the proper time or, at least, to another date in those sources which suggest September 20. Other sources, including one newspaper suggest July 6 because the story was reported on July 7. Given the story, I would opt for July 6. The thing to do now is leave it as insufficient data. We have found a UFO sighting that goes with the report, we have a suggestion that the object might have dropped into the sea, and we have the report of a fireball moments later. At the moment, this is a single witness case and for that reason, I leave it as insufficient data, though I suspect that a mundane answer would be found with additional information.

Spitzbergen UFO Crash — 1952

For the last ten years or so, there has been a list of UFO whistle blowers circulating. There are many names on the list but few of them have anything spectacular to tell. Most of the stories are of seeing UFOs and reporting them up the chain of command. Some of these witnesses tell of seeing classified documents relating to UFOs and UFO crashes.

One such witness is former Air Force Lieutenant Colonel Dwayne Arneson. Now, don’t get me wrong here. I believe that Lt. Col. Arneson served in the Air Force just as he claimed. I believe that a check of his record will corroborate what he says about his military career. In fact, I was in email communication with Lt. Col. Arneson at one time but haven’t heard from him in months (I suspect it was because I suggested that the Spitzbergen crash was a hoax, but I get ahead of myself here).

According to Dr. Stephen Greer’s Disclosure documents, Lt. Col. Arneson said, “I was a top secret control officer. I happened to see a classified message go through my com [communications] center which said, ‘A UFO has crashed on the Island of Spitzbergen, Norway, and a team of scientists are coming to investigate it.”

I believe this to be true as well. In fact, I shouldn’t say that I believe it. I know it’s true. Classified communications among various Air Force locations about a crash in Spitzbergen did take place. I too have seen the documents. I have copies of them (one of those messages seen above). Lt. Col. Arneson is correct.

But, that isn’t the whole story. In a classified document available in the Project Blue Book files, we read, “Info derived from foreign broadcasts to effect that German newspaper CMA [meaning comma, used rather than punctuation] carried article stating that a flying saucer-like flying object crashed Spitzbergen 9 July and that NAF [Norwegian Air Force] recovered it [usually, when using CMA for comma, they use PD for period but here they didn’t]. Claim diameter of 47 meters CMA constructed of steel of unknown alloy and that operating instructions written in Russian. Info apparently has had big play in German press running continuously since shortly after 9 July. Request validity of this info…”

Most UFO researchers now consider the case a hoax, but the late Frank Edwards(seen here), in his book,Flying Saucers — Serious Business, carries the report, attributing it to Stuttgarter Tageblatt which quotes a Colonel who provides additional details. He suggests the case is authentic. Ryan Woods, in his book, Majic Eyes Only, recounts the case, mentions that some think it a hoax, but rates it as one requiring further study. In my own, History of UFO Crashes,I suggest it’s a hoax.

Here, however, this doesn’t matter. What we have is a claim by a Disclosure Project witness about classified documentation that he saw while working with the Air Force. His story is true. He did see what he claimed. The only question left is if the report was of a real event or a hoax. Take your pick.

Santa Rosa (NM) UFO Crash — 1963

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

More on the Santa Rosa UFO Crash

It seems that I am unable to get away from the alleged Santa Rose UFO crash of 1963. I have additional information about the episode that Budd Hopkins reported in his “Deconstructing the Debunkers: A Response.” Since this has become something of an important case, not for the information contained in it but because of the conflicting views about, I thought we’d take a last, final run at it.

I want to make one quick point that seems to have been lost, at least in my recital of the case. The Santa Rosa crash was originally discovered by two MUFON members identified by Hopkins as Brenda and Tom. They passed the case along, or rather, helped arrange for Hopkins to meet Beanie, currently the only known witness to the craft and bodies.

We pick up the narrative at the point that Hopkins wrote, “Meanwhile my friend Robert Bigelow agreed to pay my way to Santa Rosa, and that of astronomer Walter Webb, to look further into the case, and I immediately took him up on the offer… She [Beanie, the woman who witnessed the UFO crash/retrieval] was a short, plump, feisty woman who, like me, had suffered from both polio and cancer, but she seemed to be truthful and quite intelligent, speaking in a charming, homespun, country argot. Later, when Webb arrived, we chatted about the case which seemed to him rather dubious; for many researchers, UFO crash-retrievals were — and still are — a hard sell. I was also aware that he was not informed about many aspects of the Beanie case of which I had become aware. Essentially Walt was an astronomer, not someone with extensive experience in working face to face with people like Beanie and I was right to be concerned.”

I had suggested, early on that Webb thought, that the Beanie case wasn’t worth further research when he learned the preliminary details. I was, of course, looking at this with hindsight and knew that Webb eventually came to believe that the case wasn’t an important one. He told me, however, “In the beginning we both [Hopkins and Webb] were impressed with what seemed like a consistent and somewhat logical story.” This is, of course, in conflict with what Hopkins wrote.

And I think today, and even a decade ago, the idea of UFO crashes was not a hard sell for many researchers. The Roswell case had changed attitudes and almost everyone was now open to the theory that something might have crashed somewhere at some point. The idea had, in the 1970s and the 1980s, been a hard sell, but by the mid-1990s, many of us were looking at these stories carefully thanks to the work of Len Stringfield and his 1978 MUFON Symposium paper outlining many crash cases that he thought deserved another look. But this is a matter of perception and who is to say that my perception is correct and that of Hopkins is wrong?

Hopkins wrote, “In a rented car Walt, Beanie and I drove out to Santa Rosa and when we arrived at the house of the widow of the ambulance driver, I asked Walt to wait in the car for a few minutes until I came out and invited him in. I was afraid that two strangers 'from the East,' charging in together at an elderly woman's house, bearing a tape recorder and microphone, might seem a bit off-putting.”

I certainly understand this, especially if the way hasn’t been cleared. But then, the people must have expected something about why they were gathered there. The situation as described by Hopkins might be somewhat different. Rather than Hopkins and Beanie entering the house when they arrived, Beanie went in first, to get acquainted with her old friends while Hopkins and Webb left to eat supper at a local restaurant. This provided Beanie with the opportunity, and I stress this, opportunity to “coach” the witness. I’m not saying it happened, just that there was the opportunity.

As they returned from their meal and pulled up to the house, the widow’s son, wife and children “trooped in from across the street and stood in the crowded room,” according to what Webb told me. Webb speculated that there might have been some kind of signal to alert them or maybe they were just watching for the car to return. We now see that the situation, as described by Webb, suggests there had been some communication between Beanie and the widow and we weren’t going to see her facing the strangers from the east alone.

Hopkins then, according to his own report said that he entered the house and was “… received politely by our hostess…” He talked with them for a while and then mentioned he had a colleague out in the car. He said that he made up some excuse for leaving Webb in the car and went out to get him. Webb then entered the house and set up his equipment.

About Webb’s entrance, Hopkins wrote, “If Walter Webb had set off a small cherry bomb in the room he couldn't have caused more of a disruption.”

Webb told me that he brought in his tape recorder and that “Hopkins was aware that I had the device.” It wouldn’t make a lot of sense for Hopkins not to know that Webb had planned to record the witness. The best way to take notes is with a recorder because you have the witnesses words right there. I don’t know how many times I have been accused to having misquoted a witness only to be able to prove, with the tape, that the witness said exactly what I reported he or she said. According to Webb, and his notes of the session, “It was only afterward that the informant [Beanie] said the recorder might have been a distraction.”

Webb said later that they had agreed from then on not to pull out recorders or cameras until everyone was comfortable with the situation. Here, however, there seemed to be a sense of urgency to document the widow’s tale as it would support Beanie’s story.

Apparently both Hopkins and Beanie complained to Bigelow about this horrendous situation (yes, that is a little bit of hyperbole on my part). But what came from that was about twenty minutes of recorded interview with the various “participants.” (And again, the quotes are mine, suggesting that these people, other than Beanie, participated only in the interview, but had not been at the scene of the alleged crash.)

Hopkins, as I noted in an earlier post, said that he returned later, in 1997, to conduct additional interviews and believed he was no longer a stranger to the family and developed a warm friendship with the witness. I have no doubt that this is true. Hopkins seems to be a very nice man, able to relate well to a variety of people, except, in my experience, those who might disagree with him. I found myself on the enemies list after the publication of The Abduction Enigma.

No, I’m not surprised about that. I knew that the message of that book would not be one that those who embraced all of the alien abduction field would want to read. We, meaning Russ Estes, Bill Cone and I were suggesting that alien abduction was less about aliens than it was about researcher manipulation of the situation. We drew the parallels among alien abduction, Satan Ritual Abuse (SRA) and past life regression.

But at the far end of the spectrum, I have had some very cordial email conversations with Hopkins… of course I was reviewing his book, Art, Life and UFOs. Draw your own conclusions.

The point is, however, that Hopkins continued his investigation of the Santa Rosa crash/retrieval without the help of Walter Webb. As I explained in the earlier post, he gathered more information from Beanie but was unable to find any substantial corroboration for her tale. Hopkins suggests there would be no reason for the government, or in this case “the Air Force to have gone to the ambulance and removed everything from the rear area — the sheets, various pieces of portable equipment and so on.”

And there is no proof that this ever happened. All we know is that the widow seemed to corroborate that and the operative word here is “seemed.”

Carol Rainey, in her article about Hopkins had reported that there had been a long list of possible witnesses to the case. In rebuttal, Hopkins wrote, “The first time I visited Santa Rosa, Beanie and I made a long drive to another town some distance away. She thought that a certain young trooper just may have been the officer in the second car that day, and through Tom [another trooper] we learned his address. I suggested that we not call the man in advance, that we just show up to take anyone there by surprise and thereby get a thoroughly unrehearsed account. [An ambush with recorders and cameras?] So we drove and drove, endlessly it seemed [which, given this is New Mexico, isn’t all that much of a surprise], and when we arrived, the ex-trooper's divorced wife was home and told us that her husband had moved out years ago and she had lost contact with him, though she recalled that he was possibly working for a security company in the far east somewhere. That was that, and I only mention this abortive trip because my ex put it this way: "Neither she [Beanie] or Budd had tracked down or spoken to anyof the long list of witnesses." [Emphasis is Hopkins’] I wish we had had even a shortlist of witnesses from this thirty-year-old incident, but we didn't, so apparently the helpful Ms. Rainey invented such a list for us, but then scorns us for not trying to find them.”

But Webb suggests that there had been a long list of possible witnesses and other informants that he had supplied to both Hopkins and Beanie. According to him, neither acted on the list, meaning that no one attempted to find any of those people. And yes, I have seen the list. These included some relatives of Beanie who might have heard her talk about the crash in earlier years, people at the hospital who might have been involved in some fashion, and others who could have had some knowledge… not that they necessarily did, but the questions that should have been asked never were. There were names connected with each of Webb’s suggestions.

Yes, I know from my own experience that sometimes the importance of a witness gets jumbled in the telling. I had once been told of an Air Force officer who had flown President Kennedy in Air Force One to see the Roswell alien bodies. When I finally located the officer I learned that he had been an alternate pilot on Air Force One, had flown with President Kennedy on board and that he, the pilot, had seen a UFO with an alien pilot visible. So the lead, which was supposed to confirm the alien bodies in storage story turned into something else. But it was a lead that had to be followed.

Hopkins wrote, “She [Rainey] quotes from an early letter from Walt Webb in which he berates Beanie for reporting some details about her initial experience which vary, one from one another.”

But that’s not quite accurate. Webb said that he berated no one but had questioned Hopkins about some of the conflicting details that had emerged as he learned more about the case. Not embellishments, or additions to the story that could be memories that she had just accessed. Webb also pointed out that he was unaware of the changes when he traveled to New Mexico with Hopkins, and that when he wrote to Beanie, he hadn’t yet seen the transcript of the first interview. Webb’s letter to Hopkins was talking about changes in the story from the time that the MUFON representatives questioned Beanie and when Hopkins and Webb arrived on the scene. It wasn’t about embellishment. It was about contradictory information.

In fact, the one that caught my eye was that in the first interview, conducted by MUFON members in Albuquerque, Beanie said there were two bodies, one outside the craft and one partially out. She told Hopkins and Webb that there had been three bodies, all outside. Not the sort of detail that you would expect to change so significantly.

Here is something else to ponder. We now have information about the Santa Rosa UFO crash from three sources. You might say that two of those sources, Rainey and Hopkins have an interest in the way the story is perceived. I would say that Webb is a disinterested third party except that Hopkins called Webb’s investigatory skills, his experience working with potential abductees, and his motives in the case into question as a way to distract attention from the real weaknesses of the case.

The only person we haven’t heard from at this point is Beanie. I know what the various researchers will say. I know what the details are and have heard those details from three separate directions.

But I also know that there is simply nothing to support this tale. It is, in the end, single witness, and it doesn’t matter if you believe Rainey’s, Hopkins’ or Webb’s version. They all agree that it is single witness… No, the widow and her son didn’t see anything themselves. At best they heard about something strange and the son does seem to mention “alien bodies,” but he didn’t see them. Worse still, the son’s memory might have nothing to do with the Santa Rosa crash.

Now I believe we all have enough information to make an intelligent determination about the case and the controversy that has erupted around it. Is this a good sighting, based on the story of an admittedly likeable woman? Does the lack of corroborative detail, other than some vaguely remembered events that might or might not be relevant suggest there is something of value here? Or have we found ourselves in another of Ufology’s turf wars where the cult of personality is more important than finding our way to the truth?

The answers to those questions are, at least to me, obvious. There was no Santa Rosa UFO crash and unless, or until, some kind of corroborative detail is found, this is just another footnote to what is becoming a long and overblown list of UFO crashes. And that is all is should be.

Detroit UFO Crash — 1975

Once in a while, when I’m cruising the Internet, I come across a story that relates to me in some fashion. Many times I’m surprised at the misinformation that is put out there. The latest, or rather the latest I found, was the story of a UFO crash that I reported happened in the Spring of 1975. Some of those wondered where I got the date as published in my History of UFO Crashes.

The entry tells us that the event happened near the Ohio-Michigan border and I listed is as “Insufficient Data,” meaning that I didn’t have anything more than the information published. There are those that question this.

I wrote, “Bette Shilling reported to Len Stringfield that a friend, an Air Force officer, had told her that he’d seen a coded message telling of a flying saucer crash. According to that information, two of the aliens were dead and a third was still alive. The message was directed from a communications station in Detroit and sent to the commanding officer of a base somewhere in Ohio.”

That seems fairly straight forward. The information came, indirectly from Bette Shilling, and it went to Len Stringfield. The footnote told me that it was from his 1991 Crash/Retrieval publication, but that wasn’t helpful, and, as it turned out, not completely accurate. But more on that aspect later.

I found, from Stig Agermose, the following:

Here is another thought-provoking account that ought to be checked for sure. The alleged crash took place in 1974 and was announced two times by a tv station in Detroit, once in prime time news: a UFO with four aliens aboard had been intercepted by the United States Air Force and had crashed in the area. My check with Kevin Randle's "A History Of UFO Crashes" established that the incident might be confirmed by an entry in Len Stringfield's "Crash/Retrievals", but I haven't been able to compare with the latter. More on that presently.

In her book about the life with her ex-husband (Backstage Passes, Life On the Wild Sidewith David Bowie, Orion Books, London, 1993, p. 203ff.) Angela Bowie says that it was nice to leave the hectic life of New York once in a while, whether it was for a concert tour or a mystery one. This quote concerns a tour in 1974:

"The open road, for instance, was most refreshing. Yes…the limo purring along at a steady twenty-five, good old Brooklyn Tony Macia's bodyguarding bulk behind the wheel, Detroit back down the interstate unraveling behind us, Minneapolis-St Paul up ahead somewhere, the moonroof open, the powerful telescope surveying the summer night sky from its tripod mount, the aliens up there perhaps recognizing that we meant them no harm, that we were the ones who could be trusted…

They had been having a bad time, after all. One of their craft had been intercepted somewhere north of Detroit, engaged by the United States Air Force and — well, we never found out what happened after that. We didn’t know if the saucer had been forced to crash-land on earth, or blasted out of the sky so that it fell to earth, or what. We didn’t know if its occupants — its crew? — were dead or alive or somewhere in between, although we did know that there were four of them.

We knew all this because while we were in our hotel room in Detroit, we saw an afternoon TV news flash to the effect that a UFO had crashed in the area with four aliens aboard…more news at six. We tuned in again at six — of course we did, along with everybody in the state — and learned more, but not much more. The news crew confirmed the landing, yet avoided being specific about its location and presented what little information they had with great caution, as if doing their best to downplay the sensational and possibly paniccausing information they were supplying, straight-faced and soberly, to their public. These were the station's regular newscasters, reputable and popular, with everything to lose by creating a hoax and nothing but brief notoriety to gain.

That, however, is what we were told when the eleven-o'clock news came around: The prime-time news crew had perpetrated an irresponsible and inexcusable hoax, and had therefore been dismissed from their jobs. No UFOs had landed; no aliens were in custody, dead or alive; the United States Air Force had positively not engaged or intercepted any craft whatsoever in the skies above Michigan; and that, officially and absolutely, was that.

It was difficult to know what to make of this incident. At one extreme, it could have been just an overblown cosmic-hippie-cocaine dream, an instance of too much weirdness for too long crashing through into the perceived reality continuum. On the other hand, we had the videotape.

Yes, even in 1974. It so happened that the documentary filmmaker Alan Yentob was along with us on the trip, making the film that would become "Cracked Actor", and he had his VCR hooked up to the television set in our hotel room when the afternoon news flash first caught our attention. So we'd taped the whole six-o'clock and eleveno'clock news shows. There was no denying that the broadcasts had happened.

The broadcasts at least. In David's opinion, and mine too, what had just occurred was indeed a warp in the usual business of businessas-usual.

David believed very strongly that aliens were active above our planet, and so did (do) I. That's why we were so alert in the limo on the way to Minneapolis, watching intently for signs of further UFO activity in the bright night sky. It was mostly David who had his eye pressed to the telescope (purchased by Corinne Schwab, his personal assistant, during a lightning shopping spree in Detroit). He'd talked about the six-o'clock newscast during his show at Cobo Arena in Detroit, and he believed that the energy thus created might well have communicated itself to the beings monitoring from above our human reaction to their fallen (slain/captured/atomized?) fellows.

I don't know quite what David expected, because by now he'd moved beyond his manic-monologue mode into his silent, noncommunication state, but I suspect he wouldn’t have been surprised at all if the aliens had come right down to the limo and tractorbeamed him up for an exchange of ideas. He was feeling pretty much like the center of things here on earth at the time, after all, and it probably seemed obvious to him that some right-thinking human should take on the job of Man's ambassador…

No aliens heeded the call, though, and after a while he disappeared into his coke, sheltered by Corinne, and I lost interest. I left the tour, and them, the next day."

Evaluating the story I must admit the logic of Angela's views. It seems unlikely that a well-respected and popular newsstaff should risk its standing as well as its existence for the short mention, which reports like that might give.

Add to this that her account might be confirmed by Len Stringfield's "Crash/Retrievals":

Agermose then quotes the entire entry from my book, as I did above, adding the name of my book and the page on which it is found… 206 if you must know. He then wrote, “Unfortunately Randle doesn't say where he got the date from. Maybe Betty Shilling dated her experience to the spring of 1975, giving Randle a reason for referring the crash to this time frame. Stringfield himself might offer another and better basis for doing so, but as I don't have a copy of his book, I would very much appreciate if somebody could tell me how close Randle's rendering of the particulars is to Stringfield's own.

Well, I certainly can. In Stringfields The UFO Crash/Retrieval Syndrome, Status Report II: New Sources, New Dataand published in January 1980 by the Mutual UFO Network, Inc. he wrote as Item B-4 on page 21:

Bette Shilling, working on a college UFO project, first heard of my “Retrieval” paper when I was interviewed on a Los Angeles radio station in the Fall of 1978. She wrote to me and I responded by phone when I learned that her friend, an Air Force officer, had told her that he knew of a crashed alien craft occurring in the Spring of 1975. At that time, she said, he was Communications Officer at another base in Ohio (Wright-Patterson?) About a crash in a rural area near the Ohio border in Michigan. Two dead bodies, and one still alive, were retrieved. Name withheld by request.

There it is. All that Stringfield had to say on the subject, and I have seen nothing to suggest he ever learned anything more about it. I’m not sure that this is even the same event but I would like to make a few comments here.

First, if a news team had put the story on the air as a joke and then been fired for that joke, surely that would have made the news. We’ve seen all sorts of stories of reporters and anchors getting themselves into trouble over stories and losing their jobs. We would have heard about this. And even if it hadn’t made the national news, a possibility in 1974, it certainly would have made the news in Detroit and would be in the newspapers there. The sudden departure of a television news team would be mentioned in the newspaper which means there would be a record of this.

Second, there is talk of a video tape and those of us around in today’s world where everything is on tape or DVD and pops up on YouTube might not realize that in 1974 videotape was just beginning to hit the market and the only tape decks available were bulky and expensive, which is not to say that Bowie or the documentary maker wouldn’t have been able to afford it. So, granting the possibility they had the capability, where is the tape?

This strikes me as another of those stories that a friend, or a relative, or someone else remembers seeing, on the front page of the newspaper, a picture of a crashed flying saucer. Except no one is ever able to produce the newspaper. There is always something that prevents us from getting to that point.

So, without the video tape, we just have another story that is not corroborated by anything.

The criticism seemed to be directed at me, suggesting that I had either gotten the date wrong, or that I had something else that provided the date. What I had was everything that Len Stringfield had supplied to me. The report is second hand at best and we don’t know the name of the Air Force officer.

So why even discuss this? Well, I take a page from Len Stringfield’s book. He thought that by publishing what information he had, he might stir the pot and learn a little more. There are those who believe that he should have kept reports like this one to himself until he learned more about it. I think he was right. Put the story out there and see if any corroboration turns up.

Stig Agermose, I believe, was doing just that. He’d found something that was close and was trying to learn a little more about it. He was wondering where I got my date and my information and he was unable to check out Stringfield’s book.

Now it’s all out there. It’ll be interesting to see if this leads anywhere else, or if we have hit the end of that road.

Elk River, Washington UFO Crash — 1978

Although I had a hand in starting the tradition of listing UFO crashes, I have always been bothered by the sheer numbers of them. True, I believe there to be some very valid cases and Roswell leaps immediately to mind, as does Las Vegas in 1962, Kecksburg in 1965 and Shag Harbour in 1967. But the numbers are appallingly high when considering the engineering difficulties of creating an interstellar craft. If they can conquer that problem, I wouldn’t expect them to rain from the sky.

Given all this, James Clarkson(seen here), who appeared at the 6^thAnnual UFO Crash Retrieval Conference in Las Vegas, hosted by Ryan Wood, made a good case for adding another to the list.

According to Clarkson, on November 25, 1979, a number of people saw something fiery in the night sky and more than one of them thought of it as a craft without power. I use the term craft, though some of them described an airplane-like configuration with lighted windows and fire on one side.

Mrs. Ralph Case was riding in a car driven by her husband along State Route 12 and about four miles east of Aberdeen when she saw what she said was a plane with one side on fire. She reported this to the air traffic control tower at Bowerman Airfield, also near Aberdeen, Washington at about ten minutes to eleven.

Ernest Hayes, driving along the same highway as Case said that he had seen a very bright green flash overhead. He called the county sheriff at about eleven that same night or some ten minutes after Case had reported her sighting.

Estella Krussel, who Clarkson interviewed about eight years after the event, said that she’d seen an “unknown aircraft” fly over and thought of a passenger jet because of the illuminated windows. She thought it had a cigar shape, was narrower in front than the rear and had an intense blue-white light shining from each of the windows. She was one of those who had the impression that it was out of power.

Things got stranger, according to Clarkson. He interviewed a number of witnesses who had driven out into the rough country, a crazy pattern of logging roads and paved highways. Some of them in search of the object that others had seen.

Eight years after the crash, Clarkson interviewed Gordon Graham. Graham had heard about the crash from Donald Betts, and tried to drive out to find it. He was turned away by a military checkpoint.

Clarkson quoted Graham as saying, “I saw four military weapons carriers. There were at least ten soldiers there. They have the road blocked. They told us to get out of there. They didn’t say it very politely either.”

Here we run into a problem and one that I should have mentioned to Clarkson. Posse Comitatus is a federal law that does not allow the use of active duty soldiers in a law enforcement function except in a very narrow range of situations. These soldiers, if active duty, had no authority to block the roads. If they were members of the National Guard on “maneuvers” in the area, they would probably have been in what is known as Title 10 or Title 32 status and would have been in violation of the law when manning these roadblocks. This means that had Graham driven on, the soldiers had no authority to stop or arrest him.

I know that National Guard soldiers, except in very limited cases, such as when called to State Active Duty can then be used for law enforcement. If these soldiers were from Georgia, as Clarkson suggests, based on his investigation and the interviews he conducted, then they couldn’t be in State Active Duty and they had no authority to enforce the road block. Of course, if they are standing there with loaded weapons, you might not want to challenge that authority.

I point this out only because it suggests something about the legality of the roadblocks and it might be something to investigate. Under normal circumstances, soldiers in this sort of duty would be paired with a sworn law enforcement officer who would have the authority to arrest those who refused to obey the instructions.

Maybe this point is a little esoteric, but it seems to me that we all need to know about the limits of authority. Challenging them might not be the smartest thing to do, but then, they have no real authority to order civilians away from an area and they have no arrest powers except in limited cases such as drug enforcement and by presidential direction.

This is not to say that those reporting this are inventing their tales, only that the soldiers, whoever they were probably had no authority to stop civilians from using the public roads. If this had been an aircraft accident, then the checkpoints and access control would have belonged to law enforcement and not the military.

But I digress…

Clarkson reported that Henry Harnden was another of the local residents who said he was threatened and chased from the area by troops. Harnden was the one who suggested they were from a “special division from Georgia.”

An Elma, Washington police officer, Fred Bradshaw, said that two or three days after the crash, he saw an Army “low-boy truck with a boom… [and two] deuce and half [trucks]” and a couple of jeeps. The Army certainly has the authority to use the public roads to move stuff, whatever that stuff might be, so there is no problem here.

Clarkson tells us that there were a number of witnesses to the “arrival of a fiery object” on November 25, 1979. He tells us that it hit the ground and might have exploded in the Elk River Drainage Area in a fairly inaccessible location that contains mud flats, marshes or a nearby thick forest.

The official explanation of “helicopter exhaust glow,” offered later, is ridiculous. Even a quick look at the descriptions by the witnesses shows this to be untrue. I’ve flown in a lot of helicopter formations at night and the glow from the turbine just isn’t all that bright.

Clarkson never really says that the craft was extraterrestrial, though I take that as his meaning. He suggests the possibility that what fell might have been something lost by the military, specifically some sort of missile test that failed. He does note that no one lost an aircraft on that night. No reports of either a military or civilian crash and no reports of a missile gone astray.

As I say, there seem to be too many failures of alien craft. Some lists now top two hundred and a couple are closing in on 300. But still, there are some very intriguing UFO crash cases, many of which have no solid explanation… yet. This is another to add to the file. Until someone tells us what crashed, with the appropriate documentation, this is another well documented UFO crash.

The Needles UFO Crash — 2008

At the 6^thAnnual UFO Crash Retrieval in Las Vegas, George Knapp told of a UFO crash along the Colorado River near Needles, California on May 14, 2008. Make no mistake here. There was a UFO crash, but also remember that UFO doesn’t necessarily translate into extraterrestrial.

Knapp (seen here) told the audience during his Keynote address that he had investigated the case from the beginning, talked to the witnesses, and learned that five helicopters had flown into the area within minutes of the crash. Something real had happened.

According to witnesses, about three in the morning, a cylinder-shaped object with a turquoise glow, fell out of the sky and crashed west of the Colorado River. A witness, known as Bob on the River (because he lives on a houseboat and they “bob” in the water as they float) and who lives in Topock, Arizona said that he had seen the object as it flew over. He thought it was on fire. He didn’t see it hit the ground, given the terrain, but he did hear it. He told Knapp that it smacked into the sand.

Bob tried to call for help, but his satellite phone wouldn’t work. Not long after the crash, however, he heard the pulsating beat of rotor blades and saw five helicopters in a loose formation heading toward the crash site. One of them broke off to circle his houseboat and then rejoined the others. These might have been Huey’s, though it seems that’s a name applied to many helicopters. I suspect that they were Black Hawks, but no matter.

The helicopters located the wreck and according to Bob on the River, the fifth helicopter known as a Sky Crane retrieved the object. Although unseen by any of the witnesses, some of the helicopters had to land so that the object, whatever it was, could be rigged for lifting.

Bob said that the object, still glowing, was airlifted from the site, and carried away. All the helicopters went with it.

Had Bob on the River been the lone witness we might have been able to dismiss his story as the musings of a loner who lived on a houseboat. This is not to mention that not long after this happened, Bob disappeared.

Frank Costigan, once the chief of airport security at the Los Angeles airport and a retired police chief and a man who would seem to be more credible than Bob, said that he had seen the object when he got up at three to let out his cat. He said that he knew the object was not a meteorite because it seemed to changed speed. According to Costigan, it was bright enough to have illuminated the ground. It disappeared behind some hills and didn’t reappear. Clearly it was down.

In a bizarre incident, David Hayes, the owner of KTOX radio in Needles, said that on his way to work he saw a strange assortment of odd vehicles getting off the highway. He produced a rough drawing that he showed to George Knapp. This seemed to be a “Men in Black” sighting.

There were all sorts of other, seemingly related events. According to what Knapp learned, “Out of the blue the station got a call from a friend in Laughlin [also on the Colorado River] who said the Laughlin Airport had been inundated on the night of the crash with so-called Janet planes. That’s the airline that flies workers to top secret Area 51. Costigan says the airport could not confirm this because no one is on duty after 6 p.m… not even the tower.”

Knapp continued, “The black vehicles have left Needles. Bob the houseboat guy can’t be found either… The point is, something definitely happened.”

Knapp, of course, continued the investigation. He learned that the vehicles, sometimes black, were often seen in the Needles area and he, along with his camera crew were able to spot and photograph them. Knapp said that he joined in the formation as it drove down the road. One of the vehicles eventually pulled over and Knapp did th same thing.

There was an encounter with the crew, who were armed and who suggested they were federal agents. One of them flashed an ID at Knapp who said that he hadn’t gotten a good look at it and was shown it again.

Eventually the confrontation, if that’s what it was, ended and everyone went on their own way. Later Knapp received a call from a friend with the Department of Energy who told Knapp he was lucky that the confrontation ended as peacefully as it did.

Knapp would learn that these agents, black vehicles and all, had nothing to do with the UFO crash, if that’s what it was, but with a very real and security-wrapped federal mission. Knapp would be the first reporter allowed to see the training of the agents. These dark vehicles, often on the roads around Needles had nothing to do with the object’s crash.

So, one mystery solved, but what happened to Bob on the River? Knapp eventually found him and talked to him at length about what he had seen. Bob on the River couldn’t add much to the descriptions that others had, or rather, he had given to others. The object struck with a thud, like something smacking into sand.

Knapp said, at the Crash Retrieval Conference that he knew Bob’s real name and even showed us video of the interviews that hadn’t aired on Las Vegas television. Bob told a solid story and his somewhat unorthodox life style didn’t play into it. Bob on the River had seen something fall out of the sky.

Knapp, in his presentation made it clear the helicopters had been on the scene in less than twenty minutes and that meant that someone, somewhere, had been monitoring the progress of the object. Someone, somewhere knew what it was. Knapp gave the impression that he didn’t believe it to be of extraterrestrial origin.

The next day, meaning the next day after Knapp’s presentation and not the next day after the crash, I had a chance to talk to Knapp about this. He told me that he believed, based on what he had seen and learned, that the object was an experimental craft that had failed. The helicopters got there too fast for anything else.

In the end, there are two solutions to this. One is the extraterrestrial, but that seems to be the least likely. The other is that this was an experimental object, probably some sort of advanced unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) belonging to the US government. They retrieved it before anyone in Needles or Topock got a good look at it. At the moment, that is the explanation that I prefer.

The Ottawa UFO Crash of 2009

According to the newspaper account that appeared in The Welland Tribune, dozens of people in and around Ottawa saw something flash across the sky and smash into the river. They heard an explosion that was described as thunderous.

Witnesses said that the object appeared to change course a number of times and that there were lights on it rather than it glowing. Some thought it might have been a small aircraft in trouble and because of that, emergency search and rescue crews began to probe the river with sonar and underwater cameras.

A doctor, Dirk Keenan, who was out sailing with friends said that the object was a very bright light in the east, close to Quebec. He thought it was like the headlight of a car that was descending rapidly, leveled off, and then disappeared.

On the next afternoon, about 1:30 p.m. the police and rescue workers located an object about thirty feet below the river’s surface. The current prevented divers from entering the water. A police spokesman told reporters that the size and shape suggested it had not come from an aircraft and that it could be a rock or logs stuck together and that no one had come forward with any sort of photograph or video of it though there might be a reason for that. Some claim that the video footage had been confiscated bu authorities.

To this point it isn’ know if the object found under water is the same as that people reported or something that has been there for a long time. No aircraft were reported missing and it doesn’t seem that this was a piece of terrestrially launched space debris. In other words, this is the classic unknown.

But it turns out that one of the newspaper stories mentioned Chris Rutkowski, a UFO researcher in Canada, that I know. So I asked him what he knew about the case. He wrote that, “I can tell you what I know about the Ottawa ‘crash,’ although I’m not convinced anything really crashed!”

He said that he had called the MUFON representative in the area, but she hadn’t interviewed any of the witnesses. He said that some people who had seen the police searching the area stop the search after the mass was located, and some of them thought a cover-up was now in place because there was no new information. There was speculation that the US, here meaning the CIA I suppose, was now somehow involved, though Rutkowski didn’t subscribe to those ideas.

He wrote to me, “From piecing together what info I have, here’s what I think happened: Lights were seen in the sky and loud booms were heard along the Ottawa River. I spoke with a reporter, and he said that it was his impression that the lights were seen ‘towards’ the other side of the river from where the witnesses were located. (It’s a very wide river at that point.) I do not think anyone saw anything ‘crash’ or (more likely) ‘splash’ into the water. It was assumed that falling lights must have been on a falling object and that since the rive was in that direction, whatever was falling must have fallen into the river.”

Rutkowski did learn that some people had been setting off fireworks that might well account for the booming because sound carries well over water. He didn’t know what the object that had been detected was, writing, “Who knows? A car? Jimmy Hoffa? The Ottawa River is like the one that flows through my city, and they’re always pulling things out of it.”

Rutkowski said that the key would be to find the two witnesses who might have seen the lights smashing into the water. “Until then, we have no convincing evidence that a UFO crashed in Ottawa on July 27th.”

6^th Annual Crash Retrieval Conference

Don Schmitt led off the 6^thAnnual UFO Crash Retrieval Conference in Las Vegas on Friday, November 7 with his argument that many of the latest testimonies gathered about the Roswell case were deathbed utterances.

After the introduction by conference host Ryan Wood, Schmitt began his hour with a description of deathbed statements, their validity in court and if these Roswell testimonies were somehow ruled invalid, then all such testimony would be invalid. This was a theory with which I didn’t agree and I was a little disappointed with these legal arguments rather than updated Roswell information.

But then Schmitt began to talk of what he and Tom Carey had learned in the last several years from witnesses who had not been previously interviewed. Most of it was actually from family members, talking about what a father and husband had said in the last days of life.

Typical of these was that of Frank Cassidy who told his wife, Sarah, that he had been posted as a guard at Hangar 84. Cassidy was a soldier with the 1395^thMP Company who said that he had seen the alien bodies in the hangar. But as happens so often in the Roswell case today, it wasn’t Frank who told this tale, but his wife.

For me, the biggest revelation might have been Bessie Brazel Schreiber’s recanting of her earlier statements that she, with her father and little brother had recovered the remains of a balloon in July 1947, which explained the Roswell crash case. She was one of the darlings of the skeptical crowd.

Now Schmitt said that what she remembered might have been a different incident. She was no longer sure that it related to the Roswell UFO crash, but was a weather balloon and debris they picked up sometime later.

Following Schmitt and a short break, George Noory, host of Coast-to-Coast, held a meet-and-greet which was more of a free ranging question and answer session. Noory was smooth as always and that showed why his program was so popular. Noory was quick to thank Art Bell for establishing the show and building the international audience.

Noory left, with some of the speakers to do his Friday night show while most of his fans remained for a “Meet the Speakers” event and then a panel discussion. Ryan Wood started but had to join Noory for his radio show, leaving the hosting duties to Steven Bassett, who reminded me of Mel Brooks. It was the energy he brought to the table, his quick wit and sense of humor, and the way he moved around.

After all the questions were answered in the hall, after the lights were turned out, Don Schmitt and I went in search of a late dinner. This was like so many late night sessions we’d had in the past. We talked of many things, some of them relating to UFOs and the current state of the Roswell research. So many of the first-hand witnesses had died and those who still lived were low-ranking enlisted men. I believe that it because they were younger than the sergeants and the officers in 1947. After sixty years, their ranks have thinned.

On Saturday, the first speaker was Dr. Robert Wood who was going to talk about “Forensic Linguistics and the Majestic Documents.” This was one that I wanted to hear because, as most know, I have long suspected that the documents were faked. I know that Dr. Wood is sincere in his belief that they are real.

Although he began with a discussion of Albert Einstein and a document he had co-authored with Robert Oppenheimer, I was more interested in what Wood called the “Burned Memo.” This document, coming from Tim Cooper, recipient of many MJ-12 documents, interested me because it is an original. Though someone had tried to burn it, and the scorch marks are evident, it is a document that could be tested forensically.

This document is clearly related to MJ-12 and it lists MJ-1 as the Director of the CIA (DCI) and author, and was sent to MJ-2 — MJ-7 but not the other members of the organization. There is a list of tabs and these were included with the document.

Dr. Wood submitted the documents for forensic testing and Erich J. Speckin, a forensic chemist wrote, “… The red stamp ink is not inconsistent with stamp ink that was commercially available during that time. The typewriting is also consistent with carbon transfer that was available at that time frame.”

The one problem with this is the provenance, which has been one of the major stumbling blocks of MJ-12 from the beginning. Wood did say that the memo came from McLean, VA and that it had been tracked to a meter authorized to the CIA but not exactly where it had originated and who, exactly, had sent it to Cooper. Wood seems, however, to have moved closer to authenticated MJ-12.

Although Dr. John Alexander didn’t speak until Sunday morning, part of his speech concerned MJ-12. He used the example of Watergate to argue against the authenticity of MJ-12. He mentioned that in the Watergate leak, there had been direct contact between the reporters and the leakers, one of whom was Mark Felt, known then as “Deep Throat”. The MJ-12 documents had been dropped in a mailbox without anyone knowing who the leakers were.

He expanded on this noting that leaks about the Atomic Bomb, the Stealth Fighter, and the Glomar Explorer, all important government secrets and all leaked into the public arena, had not been dropped into mailboxes. All had been through direct contact. There was a provenance for each of them.

Keeping with this, Alexander said about Watergate that the identity of the sources had been vetted, but MJ-12 the sources were anonymous. The information about Watergate went to a powerful newspaper and the MJ-12 documents went to relative unknowns. He said that the information about Watergate was given to national reporters, there were massive resources to be brought to the investigation, that the President was responsible, there was hard evidence, and people went to jail.

With MJ-12, the documents were sent to people with limited or no experience, they had limited resources, claimed that “They” were responsible without explaining who they were, had conspiracy theories as evidence, and that those releasing the documents had committed treason. In other words, we could learn more by exploring the sources of the information on true leaks such as Watergate but we were left with nothing to corroborate the MJ-12 leaks.

So, we had two sides of the issue. One with new documents and new testing, and one with interesting questions that have yet to be answered. What this told us all was that the MJ-12 debate would rage for some time.

When Wood concluded, Nick Pope, who worked in the British Ministry of Defence and who had worked the UFO desk for three years, talked about what was in the British Ministry’s “X-Files.” Over the next several years, all the files will be released into the British National Archives that can be found at www.nationalarchives.gov.uk. Pope warned that there would be no “smoking gun” in the files and he should know because he was responsible for creating many of them and had certainly reviewed most. There are, however, interesting items in those files and one of them is illustrative. It provides us with a glimpse on how these things work and this insight might help in understanding MJ-12, though Pope certainly didn’t suggest that.

In the batch of files most recently released, Pope said, “…I discussed in my various media interviews was that of Milton Torres, a United States Air Force pilot who stated that on 20^thMay 1957 he was ordered to open fire on a UFO that was being tracked on radar. He was based at RAF Manston in Kent [England] and was scrambled to intercept a UFO that had been tracked over Kent. He claims that he came within seconds of firing off a salvo of 24 rockets when the UFO accelerated away at a speed of about Mach 10. Torres stated that he was subsequently warned t stay silent about the incident and only mentioned it years afterwards, at a reunion.”

All well and good, but the problem with this released file is that the information came from neither the USAF nor from the MoD. Instead it was a transcript of an interview taken years later by a UFO researcher. So, it comes from the MoD, but it is not an official document. That, according to Pope is a real but subtle difference.

Pope was followed by Jim Marrs who wanted to talk about the Rise of the Fourth Reich and what he thought of as “The Nazification of America.” He did provide a link to UFOs, suggesting that the Nazis had developed the craft and he suggested that the Nazis had created an atomic weapon and were preparing to attack New York using it. When the Third Reich fell, some of the material that would have been used in the German atomic weapons was transferred to the United States, according to Marrs, who then referenced his upcoming book. That allowed us to finish work on our atomic bomb.

He did point out how the equipment, especially the helmets of the American Army have changed to look more like those of the Nazi Army of World War II. I had been struck by that as well, but the explanation seems to be more rooted in protecting our soldiers with the new Kevlar helmets than a move to a Nazi tradition. The American helmet is undergoing a new design, one to offer protection but that will allow soldiers to fire from a prone position without the body armor pushing on the back of the helmet, forcing it down over the eyes. The new helmet doesn’t resemble the old Nazi one quite so much.

Linda Moulton Howe led off the afternoon session with her discussion of the Bentwaters case of 1980. She provided a look at the history of the base and into various radar operations there. This in an attempt to learn if there might be an electromagnet, or rather, a terrestrial explanation for what happened in 1980.

At Bentwaters, over the Christmas holidays of 1980, lights, and possibly an object was seen over the base and on the ground in the woods outside the perimeter. Air Force security police and Air Force officers responded. John Burroughs, one of those security policemen wrote, in 1980, “The lights were red and blue, the red one above the blue one and they were flashing on and off. Because I never saw anything like that coming from the woods before, we decided to drive down and see what it was.”

Later a letter written by the then Lieutenant Colonel Charles Halt would detail some of this. Halt, interviewed a number of times made it clear that he was as far forward as anyone, meaning closest to the lights with the exception of Burroughs and one other airman.

I met Burroughs once in Phoenix as the both of us were to be interviewed on a radio station. He offered me a ride to and from the station and we had time to discuss the case. He told me then that he had seen some strange things but didn’t go into great detail. Had I known then what I know now, I might have pressed for more information.

Burroughs, under hypnotic regression, and according to Howe a very trouble man, told more of what he had seen that night. He talked of communication with the lights, suggesting that the lights spoke to them. According to Burroughs, the light was the life from the craft.

Howe also had hypnotic regression sessions with Jim Penniston. He too reported communication with the lights and talked of them being travelers from the far future. They were attempting to gather chromosomes to prevent the race from dying.

Nick Redfern followed Howe and he revisited the Tunguska explosion of 1908, looking at the theories surrounding the event. He talked about it being caused by a comet, an asteroid, or an alien spaceship. He did mention that it was clearly an air burst. The devastation photographed by scientists in the 1920s resembled that of an atomic attack.

I had the opportunity to talk to the late Dr. James A. van Allen about this event. Redfern had said there was no crater or meteoric debris left and this was a point I raised with van Allen in the 1970s. He told me that the object, he believed it to be a comet, had virtually disintegrated so there would be no crater and that some meteoric material had been found that was consistent with a comet but the area is swampy. That might account for the lack of great chucks of debris.

Redfern left it in the hands of the audience, though my impression here was that he preferred the spacecraft scenario. I think it was a natural event and that we were lucky it hadn’t happened over a large, populated area.

Richard Dolan, author of UFOs and the National Security State, talked about his next book, providing an outline of the chapters. He added some detail as he worked through his presentation and much of it sounds intriguing.

The evening presentation and the keynote address was given by KLAS-TV investigative reporter George Knapp. Knapp had investigated the May 14, 2008 UFO crash near Needles, California. This case had everything from a UFO sighting and obvious crash retrieval, Men in Black, to mysterious government agents and disappearing witnesses.

Knapp, an entertaining speaker came prepared with video reports and witness testimony. He told of an object that fell at about three in the morning and a strange fellow he described as “Bob on the river,” meaning that he bobbed around like a boat. Bob told of a cylindrical-shaped object that fell with an audible shock. He said that five helicopters arrived within twenty minutes, recovered and carried the still glowing thing from the crash site.

Bob then disappeared, but that was more of Bob’s desire to remain left alone than anything else was. Knapp did find him and we all saw interviews that were conducted on Bob’s boat.

The Men in Black, were government agents, but their role had nothing to do with the UFO. They were responsible for transporting hazardous and valuable material. Knapp was allowed to see some of their facilities and training, but only after following them along the highway and provoking a confrontation… well, more of a meeting than a confrontation. They did stop to meet Knapp. Knapp was satisfied they had nothing to do with the UFO.

The thing that fell, a UFO by any definition probably wasn’t of extraterrestrial origin. Knapp told me in a private conversation, though he made it clear in his presentation, that he thought it was some kind of an experimental aircraft that crashed. It might have been one of the unmanned aerial vehicles that have become so popular with the military.

James Clarkson, on Sunday, told us of his investigation into something that crashed in the Elk River area in Washington State. According to the newspapers, and he found only five articles about the event, on November 25, 1979, something did crash. Clarkson found many witnesses to the “arrival of a fiery object… The unknown object impacted and may have exploded.”

Clarkson also found witnesses to a military presence, learned that roads had been blocked by armed soldiers, and that an explanation of “maneuvers in the area” had been offered. This answered no questions about the event.

Clarkson provided eyewitness testimony about an object that seemed to have brightly glowing windows and seemed to be on fire. He didn’t believe any of the explanations offered about the event and is continuing his work.

The second to the last presentation at the conference was that of Stephen Bassett. I’d watched him working on his computer almost the whole time we were there. He sat at his table with his laptop, outside the conference hall with his laptop, and nearly everywhere else with it. He told later me that he had been working on his presentation.

Like his impromptu hosting of the panel discussion on Friday, he seemed to fill the stage. He said that he rejected much of what John Alexander had said. Bassett believes in MJ-12 and exopolitics. In fact, not long before he had taken the stage, we had discussed some of the exopolitic witnesses and what I thought of as their lack of credentials. Although I think he might have been winning our debate when we had to quit, I really hadn’t had the chance to explain much of my reasoning.

Bassett wandered the stage explaining that the cover-up had started in 1947 with Brigadier General Roger Ramey who gave us the weather balloon explanation for the Roswell crash. He told us how to find lots of UFO articles archived and other relevant information published on his website at www.paradigmresarchgroup.org. He predicted that next spring something big was going to happen. The disclosure about UFOs was coming, thanks in part to the new president.

His was the only presentation to receive a standing ovation. I’m not sure if it was the content or a tribute to Bassett. He did make even the mundane interesting.

I closed out the conference, updating my work on the Las Vegas UFO crash. I showed how the Air Force manipulated the records, separating the sighting into two events so that explanations could be offered and provided the testimony of a general from NORAD who saw the thing in the air.

But a conference is more than just speakers on a stage. Here there were a “Meet the Speakers for Dessert and Drinks” and a banquet at which each speaker hosted a table. At the rear of the conference room each of the speakers had a table. All of this means that there was an ample opportunity for the speakers to interact with the attendees.

I heard a wide variety of stories such as that from those of a man who said his friend was killed in a gunfight with aliens at Dulce to the man who insisted that MJ-12 was real and I should listen carefully to what Dr. Wood said (which I had). I saw Don Schmitt surrounded more than once by people asking about Roswell and Jim Marrs always had people waiting to talk with him. Nick Redfern sat at his table most of the conference, as I did at mine, listening to the speakers and talking to those to wished to learn more about our specific points of view.

Before I arrived in Las Vegas I had worried that economic fears would inhibit turn out, but I was told that more people were at this conference than the one last year. People were interested in the subject and besides, it was in Las Vegas (and no, I didn’t spend a dime in the casino, though I threatened to enter one of the poker tournaments).

By Sunday night, most of the attendees had left, some of the speakers caught early flights and the rest were just tired. But I heard no one complain about the venue or the opportunity to share ideas and information. In the long run everyone seemed well satisfied and quite a few mentioned their anticipation of next year’s conference.

UFO Crashes and Meteorites

For those interested, I have been checking out some of the latest UFO crashes and find that few of them actually suggest UFOs. We’ve looked at the Needles, California crash that was investigated by George Knapp in May 2008 which was probably of terrestrial origin. Now it’s time to look at some of the others which are of extraterrestrial origin, though not of alien origin. It seems that we’ve reached the point where everything in the sky is labeled a UFO, if it comes close to the ground and especially if it hits.

A couple of interesting reports come from Colorado. On January 12, 1998, according to an article written by Jim Hughes and published in the Denver Post, a bright light flashed over the front range, lighting up the ground and then disappeared with a deafening explosion. Sounds like we might have a UFO crash.

The director of the University of Colorado’s Fiske Observatory in Boulder, Katy Garmany, said that it could have been a meteor, except meteors typically burn up some 20 to 40 miles high and

And there are those that do hit the ground creating craters that are sprinkled around the United States including the huge Barringer Crater near Winslow, Arizona and a cluster of smaller craters near Odessa, Texas.

And bolides, that is, very bright meteors, are often associated with a sound. A roaring like a freight train, or a series of detonations like sonic booms.

The Denver Post reported that the last big fireball that flashed over Colorado, in 1995, was recorded on video cameras. It seems that this latest one (well, later than the 1995 one) was recorded by that same camera.

There were those who were interviewed, such as a spokesman at Peterson Air Force Base in Colorado Springs, who said that it was nothing from there that would have caused the sighting. Apropos of nothing at all, how many times have we heard this from an Air Force spokesman, or spokeswoman, only to have it retracted a day or so later? No, I’m not suggesting that this was anything other than a meteor, merely pointing out that the Air Force Public Affairs Officers sometimes shoot from the lip (yes, pun intended).

Commander David Knox of the U.S. Space Command at Cheyenne Mountain, told the Denver Post reporter that he didn’t want to say it was a meteor because he didn’t know but that his agency tracks some 8,000 objects in orbit and that it wasn’t one of those.

In a weird coincidence, and again according to the Denver Post, but this time written by Stephanie Sylvester on January 28, 1998, several people saw a “fiery object trailed by a plume of smoke crash to the ground…” near Breckenridge, Colorado

Witnesses in Breckenridge saw it as if fell, disappearing behind some trees near the ski resort, which is not to say that it fell close to the resort or that it landed behind the trees. A spokesman for the Los Alamos National Laboratory said that he thought it was a daytime fireball… which, I suppose would be a bolide, for those who like technical terms.

Then, hours later, more people reported seeing another bright object flashing overhead and falling toward the ground south of Breckenridge. One of the witnesses, Jon Sperber, was reported by Sylvester to have said, “It looked like an egg and was so bright that we could see smoke behind it.”

In a strange twist to this story, others reported seeing a fireball about two hours before Sperber.

Doug Revelle at the Los Alamos National Laboratory was reported by the Denver Post to have said, “The key to this thing is the smoke. That means it was very big.”

Bill Steigerwald told the Denver Post reporters that they had received a high number of reported meteor sightings that year.

The thing here is that all these events have been put on some lists of UFO crashes and there really doesn’t seem to be much question about what they really were. Most of the witnesses said that they thought, originally, that an airplane was crashing, but then identified the meteor for what it was… a natural phenomenon.

Meteors of this size, especially those visible during the day are rare, but there are many examples of them. There have been pictures taken, and, in some cases, the remains have been found. For me, these things are interesting, but for others, they are just one more story that clutters up the newspapers.