Roswell, UFOs and the Unusual

Alien Bases, Area 51 and UFOs

While I was at the Illinois MUFON Symposium at the end of May, I was asked, a couple of times about underground alien bases and what, exactly, is at Area 51. I gave the same answers there that I have given for more than a decade, or since I first heard about these things. I have seen no compelling evidence of alien bases and I believe that the next generation of military aircraft are being tested at Area 51. I don’t believe the stories told by Robert Lazar and the others.

First, I have heard about the underground alien bases since the early 1980s. I have attended the lectures of those who claim to know about them, I have seen the computer generated maps and seen the pictures of lights in the night sky. But I have seen nothing that proves there are any alien bases.

When I’m asked about Dulce, New Mexico, I always ask, “Which one.” There is a ghost town in the central part of the state labeled as Dulce on some maps. Clearly the people asking mean the one up north, nearly in Colorado close to the Archuleta Mesa.

Yes, I’ve been there and no, I saw no evidence of an underground base. Even a secret base would show some sign. History’s UFO Hunters went there in search of evidence and used infrared to detect a heat signature that would have revealed an underground installation, or, at the very least, an entrance to it.

The UFO Hunters used ground penetrating radar as well and found nothing. They looked at other underground installations that had been built including what would have been the seat of government had the atomic war happened. This was a massive installation under the Greenbrier Hotel in West Virginia but the point is, there were clues if anyone bothered to look. No one did.

So, what we know is that there is no evidence of a massive alien base hidden somewhere on the Archuleta Mesa in northern New Mexico and near the town of Dulce. True, locals, including members of the Jicarilla Apache have reported strange lights in the area but strange lights do not translate into a hidden alien base.

It seems to me that if some as large as is claimed was hidden there, those looking for it would find something. And people have been looking for more than two decades. Here’s the kicker. Without some kind of evidence, all we have are the reports of the residents talking of strange lights and the speculations of those who believe that the base exists. There has been nothing to prove it to the rest of us.

Which is not the case with Area 51 an Groom Lake. These places do exist and they are part of a secret government installation.

The Allende Letters

I had been going to do a brief overview of the Allende Letters episode and move on and while this is still brief, it is more detailed than I planned. For those interested, more information can be had about the case, and I had no trouble finding the Fatemagazine article mentioned later, on the Internet. It should drive the final nail into this coffin… and sometime later I’ll explain the ramifications to the Majestic-Twelve mystery.

The story, as it is usually told, is that a copy of Morris K. Jessup’s The Case for the UFO, apparently annotated by three unidentified, but very knowledgeable men, was received at the Office of Naval Research. Over a period of weeks, a number of letters, obviously written by one or all of those mysterious men, arrived at the home of Jessup. When he learned of the annotated book, he turned the letters over to the ONR. Officers there were so impressed with all this, according to the legend, that they had the book and the letters duplicated, notations and all. The Navy began to investigate the claims in the book and because the Navy was involved, it lent a note of authenticity to the story.

And the story was a wild one. According to the letters, the Navy, during the Second World War had teleported a ship in an experiment that had something to do with Einstein’s Unified Field Theory though how Einstein and his theory were involved is not fully explained. According to Carlos Allende (the man who signed two of the letters, the third was signed by Carl Allen), the experiment had been a success. The ship, identified by some as USS Eldridge, was teleported. The sailors, however, were failures. They manifested all sorts of bizarre side effects from their teleportation.

Allende claimed that he had witnessed this, including the failure of the sailors and said that it was all written down in the newspaper for anyone who wished to verify the story. Or rather, a fight in a waterfront bar was written down in a Philadelphia newspaper which would corroborate part of his tale. The story has been located, or rather, one researcher claimed to have found it, but that report is as suspect as the rest of the tale.

In the early 1970s, while I was still on active duty with the Army, and right after I had returned from Vietnam, I learned that UFO one researcher had gotten a copy of the annotated book from the Navy and I figured if he had one, then I should have one. I wrote to the Chief of Naval Operations, which, when you think about it, should have been the end of the quest. The Chief of Naval Operations in 1970 had probably never heard of the book or Jessup, not to mention having important matters to attend to. He was, after all, the Chief of Naval Operations.

In a couple of weeks, however, the Navy had written back and told me that they had no copies of the book, but to check with Varo Manufacturing in nearby Garland, Texas. So I looked them up in the telephone book and called Varo. The secretary there knew what I was talking about without asking a bunch of questions and put me through to Sidney Sherby.

He told me that contrary to the published information, the Navy had not been interested in the Allende Letters or the annotated copy of the book.

Two of the officers there were (Sherby and a guy named George Hoover) and the Navy had no objection to their following up on it as long as it didn’t involve any Navy resources or personnel. In other words, according to Sherby, the Navy had no interest in the matter and the investigation was not Navy sponsored.

That, of course, kicked one leg out from under the stool upon which the Allende Letter credibility rested. The Navy was uninterested, but two of the officers were. The fact they were in the Navy followed them, but their status in this was not as Naval officers, but as interested men.

Sherby showed me the Varo version of the book, which was covered in blue and the size of regular typing paper. Jessup’s text was in black and the notations by Allende and his cohorts were in red. I couldn’t have that book, but if I had a way to copy it, Sherby would lend it to me. In those days, copy machines had two colors… black and white, so I have a copy but all the text is in black.

There were, supposedly, three men involved in this. A Mr. A, a Mr. B and one called Jemi. They seemed to have passed the book around, each making notations in different colored ink.

Sherby said that he had talked to Jessup about the annotated book in 1956, but Jessup wasn’t all that interested in it. Jessup tended, in 1956, to agree with the official Navy position which was that it was all the work of a trickster. It was a hoax. Sherby or Hoover had contacted Jessup and had learned of the letters that way.

Then, in the 1970s Carlos Allende appeared at the headquarters of the Aerial Phenomena Research Organization (APRO) and told the international director, Jim Lorenzen, that the whole thing was a hoax. Allende said he’d made it up because the writings of Jessup had scared him. He signed a statement saying that, deposited a suitcase or two with Lorezen for safe keeping, and left.

Before he went, he suggested that he was sick with cancer and didn’t expect to live much longer. Of course, the cancer didn’t kill Allende and you have to wonder if this wasn’t just another of his tales. He returned, or reappeared some time later, but, according to what Lorenzen told me, he left one or both of the suitcases at APRO.

But in the world of the paranormal and UFOs, nothing is that easy. Allende surfaced again several years later saying that his claim of hoax had been coerced by, who else, the CIA, and that the story contained in the letters was all true. The CIA had made him claim it was all a hoax for some nefarious and nebulous reason. Allende was back pushing the Allende Letters for the limited fame and notoriety they provided.

Still later, Robert A. Goerman, a researcher living in Pennsylvania, discovered that Allende, or rather Allen’s family, Allen being his true name, lived nearby. Goerman investigated and in an article published in the October 1980 issue of Fate, explained the whole tale, concluding, based on the evidence and based on his interviews with the family, that the Allende Letter saga was a hoax. It is a conclusion that should be noted but, like so much else, it is often ignored.

I will note here that, according to what Goerman learned, there weren’t three men involved, but only Allende. The name, Jemi, one of those men, was a reference to Gemini, the twins, and the other two designated as Mr. A and Mr. B, referred to each other as twins. All the “analyses” of the text proved to be wrong, according to what Goerman discovered.

Oh, you want to know about that newspaper article mentioned earlier. William Moore and Charles Berlitz wrote a book about this whole affair called The Philadelphia Experiment. On page 244 of the Fawcett paperback edition, they reprint an article they allegedly found in a newspaper, or more precisely, they were given a copy of the clipping, which they defend by saying, “In a secure safety deposit box there exists a photocopy of a newspaper clipping which was received from an anonymous source and which, up to now, has managed to survive all efforts to discredit its authenticity.”

They reprint the clipping which reads:

Several city police officers responding to a call to aid members of the Navy Shore Patrol in breaking up a tavern brawl near the U.S. Navy docks here last night got something of a surprise when they arrived on the scene to find the place empty of customers. According to a pair of nervous waitresses, the Shore Patrol had arrived first and cleared the place out — but not before two of the sailors involved allegedly did a disappearing act. “They just sort of vanished into thin air… right there,” reported one of the frightened hostesses, “and I ain’t been drinking either!” At that point, according to her account, the Shore Patrol proceeded to hustle everyone out of the place on short order.

A subsequent chat with the local police precinct left no doubts as to the fact that some brawl had indeed occurred in the vicinity of the dockyards at about eleven o’clock last night, but neither confirmation nor denial of the stranger aspects of the story could be immediately obtained. One reported witness succinctly summed up the affair by dismissing it as nothing more than “a lot of hooey from them daffy dames down there.” who went on to say, were probably just looking for some free publicity.

Damage to the tavern was estimated to be in the vicinity of six hundred dollars.

Here’s the problem. It has no provenance. It comes from an anonymous source and it is undated and not referenced so there is no way to verify that it actually appeared in any newspaper anywhere. In fact, to make it worse, they don’t even have a clipping but a copy of the clipping. That right there smacks of hoax.

And please notice the neat way that naming names is dodged. It’s the Navy Docks, the local police, an unnamed tavern, two unnamed waitresses, in the vicinity of the dockyards, and an unnamed male witness… can you name a newspaper editor who would print this without a single identifying reference to anyone or anything? Did anyone ever hear of “Who, What, When, Where, Why and How?” There’s not even a dateline to give us a clue.

I suspect there have been no real attempts to discredit the clipping’s authenticity because no one had enough information to attempt anything of the sort, not to mention that no one has seen the real clipping. There just is no way to verify anything… So, one more feeble attempt to prop up the hoax has failed.

Well, maybe that’s not quite true. In the Journal of Scientific Exploration, Vol 8, № 1 from 1994, Jacques Vallee provides some additional information about this alleged brawl. Although highly critical of some of the UFO researchers who have looked into the Allende case, Vallee seemed to accept the authenticity of the newspaper clipping without a single word of criticism.

He then presents the tale of Edward Dudgeon who claimed that he had been in the tavern during the fight… not that he had been on the ship that was teleported, only that he was involved in the fight.

Oh, and his ship, USS Engstrom, was part of the experiment, which had nothing to do with teleportation, but was about rendering the ships invisible to Nazi detection techniques. TheEldridgeand theEngstromwere “de-gaussed” so they wouldn’t attract the magnetic torpedoes, which, of course sounds good but has nothing to do with teleportation or invisibility.

But, Vallee believed Dudgeon because he had been in the Navy at the right time as proved by his discharge papers, and there is the wonderful newspaper article that arrived from an unknown source from an unknown newspaper about a fight at an unknown bar in an unknown city as testified to by three unknown witnesses and so on and so on.

I, of course, don’t believe Dudgeon’s story because the Allende Letters are a complete fraud and there is no evidence anywhere that any of the things mentioned in them happened. In fact, according to the information available through the Navy and housed at the Naval Historical Center in Washington, D.C. (on microfilm NRS–1978–28, if you must know) the Eldridge was not in Philadelphia at the right time for the experiment. The logbooks show it to be elsewhere, so, another leg of the confirmation stool has been kicked loose.

In the end we learn that the man who created the Allende Letters said it was a hoax, those who were at the Office of Naval Research said there was no interest in the book or the letters by the Navy, and independent investigation has shown the case to be a hoax. Jessup was uninterested in the letters, and the family of the man who created them, according to what they told Goerman, was in the habit of annotating everything he touched, including birthday cards. The Navy ship, the Eldridge, according to the log books, was not in Philadelphia and crewmen laugh at the story. In other words, there has never been a scrap of evidence to prove the experiment took place or that Allende had any sort of inside knowledge of it or anything else, and yet, we still discuss it today. Such is the world of the paranormal.

In Search Of… Answers

Not all that long ago the History Channel repeated a number of the old "In Search Of" episodes. These were interesting, not so much for the content, but because some of them were so out of date. Answers to questions that were once puzzling and mysterious have been found in recent years. The producers of the programs, in the 1970s when they were made, could not be expected to see into the future for these reports.

Take, for example, the story of Anastasia, one of the daughters of the last Russian Czar. History had told us that the Czar, Nikolai II (or Czar Nicholas if you prefer an anglicized version of the name), with the members of the royal family, had been assassinated by the communists in the summer of 1918. The bodies were taken from the murder site and buried miles away. The communists controlled all that information, and while we outside the Soviet Union were aware of the assassination, we knew very little about it.

Enter Anna Anderson (seen here) (or Andersen, according to some information), a poor woman who was pulled from a canal in Germany about 18 months after the murders. Although her memory was faulty, she did suggest that she was Anastasia. She had been badly wounded during the assassination but she had survived. She spent her life trying to convince the world of who she was. Of course, surviving Romanovs, other relatives of the Czar living in other parts of Europe, thought she was lying about it. Former members of the royal house were split on the authenticity of Anderson’s claim. There were a few who believed her. She did seem to know things that only a member of the royal family would know, she did seem to have memories that confirmed her claim and she did have some scars that were like those on the real Anastasia.

So Anna found supporters, lived in the shadow of her former royalty but never really gained the wealth that the old European family controlled. She died more than two decades ago. With her, died her secret, or so claimed "In Search Of…" There was no way that we would be able to resolve the questions, now that Anna was dead.

The collapse of the Soviet Union, however, provided clues. Information that had been buried in state archives was now open for scrutiny. According to that new information, the royal family was awakened late at night, told to dress and then escorted to a basement room. There, believing that photographs were going to be made, the family arranged themselves in two rows.

Without warning, armed men entered the room and began to shoot. The Czar’s daughters might have survived the first shots because they had sewn jewels into their clothes. The Czar’s son might have survived as well, only to be shot in the head when he was heard moaning. Anastasia (seen here as a teen) crouched in a corner, wounded but not badly. A maid who was not killed by the bullets was bayoneted. Anastasia was also bayoneted.

The Assassins

The assassins first took the bodies to a mineshaft and tossed them in. Later they were recovered, some were burned and others covered with acid. Eventually they were buried in a forest, the location hidden by the Soviet government.

There were rumors that one of the Czar’s children survived. In fact, several women claiming to be Anastasia appeared over the years. Anna Anderson is the most famous. Eugenia Smith was another but the lion’s share of the attention went to Anderson.

When Anderson was pulled from the water in 1920, she had no identification and she refused to give her name. She was transferred to a mental hospital where someone supposedly recognized her as a Grand Duchess. Not Anastasia, but Tatiana, one of her older sisters. She didn’t deny it, but she never said it either. When given a list of the Czar’s daughters, she crossed out all the names except Anastasia.

Trying to prove her identity, officials arranged for one of her mother’s ladies-in-waiting to visit her. Anderson hid and the lady-in-waiting declared she was an imposter. Anastasia’s tutor, Pierre Gilliard said that he thought she might be Anastasia but later said she was not.

Nikolia’s cousin, Grand Duke Alexander, after spending time with Anastasia said, "I have seen Nicky’s daughter." And a cousin, Princess Xenia (do you really think I could have not mentioned a princess with that name) was a supporter of the claim.

Anderson filed suit in a German court in 1938, attempting to prove her identity. Anthropologist Otto Reche testified that Anastasia and Anna Anderson were one in the same, or that they had been identical twins. The suit was finally settled in 1970, with the court ruling, not that Anderson wasn’t Anastasia, but that she had failed to prove that she was.

Then, of course, came the collapse of the Soviet Union. Included in the state archives, now available to researchers from around the world, was information about the gravesite. Excavations found that all but two of the Romanovs had been buried together. Missing, based on the evidence, were Alexei who would have become Czar and Anastasia. At least that was the consensus. Those other two had been buried somewhere else.

The door that had remained slightly open was quickly closed. The "In Search Of…" program predated the discovery of DNA "fingerprinting" and DNA mapping. It predated the research that is so common now, that proves paternity in so many cases, and solves so many crimes to a high degree of certainty. It was used to confirm that the Czar, his wife and three of his daughters, along with four others, servants, maids, and a doctor were buried together.

Samples of Anna’s DNA (thought of as hair and blood samples so long ago) had been preserved. DNA of the Romanov family line existed in the members of that royal family. And with the majority of the bodies found, other DNA sampling was possible. The conclusion, based on the DNA evidence, was that Anna was an imposter. She was not the sole surviving member of the Czar’s family. The real Anastasia died with the rest of her family.

But as is so often the case, the believers simply would not let go. The hair sample, which came from a North Carolinian who had outbid others for some cartons of books owned by Jack Manahan, who had married Anna Anderson late in life was challenged. In the box, packed by Althea Hurt, one of Jack’s relatives, was a sample of hair. There is no positive way to link it to Anderson, other than the box came from Anna’s husband and it was deduced that it was Anna’s hair. The provenance of it is somewhat shaky.

The second sample is a section of intestine that had been kept at the Martha Jefferson Hospital. Here the provenance is much better. The sample was sent from Charlottesville to England where the testing was done by those who had originated the technique. Although mailed, it required special handling so that it could be tracked the entire way. The provenance, and a chain of custody because it had to clear customs, has been preserved.

Believers suggest that the Romanov family, which has much to gain if Anna was proved not to be Anastasia, might have intercepted this package along the route and switched it for another DNA sample. One that surely would not match.

But here we move into conspiracy a little too deeply. We have the definitive evidence in the form of DNA. We have the evidence from the Russian archives. We have the testimony of the men who carried out the assassination, in the form of careful reports made in 1918 and hidden by the Soviets. Reports that were detailed enough that the majority of the bodies were found. Clearly there is no longer a doubt that Anna Anderson was not Anastasia.

And as if that wasn’t enough, it seems that the DNA proved that Anna Anderson had been Franziska Schanzkowska, a Polish factory worker who disappeared the night that Anderson appeared. A factory worker, by coincidence who had been injured by a grenade that detonated in the factory where she worked and therefore having some scares that matched, generally, those of the real Anastasia. (And no, I’m not going to wonder how they managed to get a DNA sample of this woman for comparison. I’ll merely note that it seems a tad bit incredible.)

So, while the producers of "In Search Of…" in the 1970s believed that the question of Anastasia might not be resolved, it seems that it was. The documentation found in the Russian archives and the DNA evidence proves that Anna Anderson was not Anastasia.

In Search of… Anastasia Part 2

Back when I began this blog, I had in mind that I would explore those things that interested me, especially in the realm of the unusual and the paranormal. I have, in the past, talked about global warming on

Mars (and, apparently on Pluto), how many planets are in the Solar System (eight for those of you who haven’t been keeping track), and if Anna Anderson was really the Russian princess Anastasia (seen here in 1910). In that column, based on DNA, I thought the answer was no.

Some disagreed. Although the bodies of the Czar and most of his family had been found ending part of the mystery, two of the children were still missing. That could mean that they had survived and that Anderson could have been Anastasia. Anderson wasn’t the only woman who made this claim. She was merely the most famous. Certainly all of them couldn’t be telling the truth, and as so often happens, it was pretty clear that none of them were.

The story that had circulated for years was that Nicholas II, his wife, five children, a doctor and three servants were killed in the basement of a house where they had been imprisoned after the Russian Revolution. The records of those murders became available to the world after the collapse of the Soviet Union confirming the story that had been a fairly well known “secret”. In 1991, the remains of several bodies were found… with a couple of important exceptions.

And, to complicate the story even more, there seems to be some confusion about who was found in 1991. Aleksei, the 13-year-old son, and one of his sisters seemed to be missing from the mass grave. Many believed the missing girl was Anastasia, but others suggested it was her sister, the 19-year-old Maria.

And there the mystery remained until this year. Vitaly Shitov (and yes, that name bothers me too), who is reported to live in the Yekaterinburg (Russia) area where the bodies were found, said that he believed that the two missing children would be located in the same place, just not in the same, common grave. This year, he, and fellow amateur archaeologists discovered, on a raised area about 70 yards from the first grave, a second. It contained two bodies, (or rather bones of two bodies), believed to be those of Aleksei and one of his sisters.

If the information is verified and the DNA tests are conclusive as expected, this ends the mystery once and for all. The Czar and his family were all murdered on that July night in1918. Anastasia did not survive and escape into the West, and the DNA tests on the genetic material of Anna Anderson that proved she wasn’t Anastasia is further confirmed.

I will note one thing here and it is an outgrowth of the tabloid mentality that was so prevalent in the 1970s and 1980s. These supermarket newspapers often made claims that couldn’t be verified, naming experts in foreign lands and providing those experts with degrees from equally vague universities. And this is not to mention the nonsense that circulates on the Internet.

Here we’re dealing with a man living in the region with a name that looks like it was invented for the humor it provides. I believe that this mystery has been solved and I believe it was solved with the DNA tests conducted on Anna Anderson and with the discoveries in the Russia archives and in the Russian fields in the 1990s.

So, there is really little doubt. Anna Anderson kept the story going during her life and though many thought we would never learn the whole truth, science, the collapse of the Soviet Union, and amateur archaeologists have given us the answer. Anna Anderson wasn’t Anastasia. The Czar and his family were all murdered and then buried in two graves that were hidden to prevent them from becoming a rallying point for opponents of the Communists. Another of the mysteries of the 20^thCentury didn’t survive very long into the 21^st.

In Search of… Anastasia — Part 3

YEKATERINBURG, Russia (Nov. 25) — On the outskirts of this burly industrial center, off a road like any other, on a nowhere scrap of land — here unfolded the final act of one of the last century’s most momentous events.

A short way through a clearing, toward a cluster of birch trees, the killers deposited their victims’ bodies, which had been mutilated, burned and doused with acid to mask their origins. It would be 73 more years, in 1991, before the remains would be reclaimed and the announcement would ring out: the grave of the last Russian czar, Nicholas II, and his family had been found. But the story does not end there.

Russia's Czar Nicholas II and his family (seen here) were detained and killed almost 90 years ago during the Russian Revolution. In 1991, the family's remains were found with the exception of two people.

Eleven people were said to have been killed that day in July 1918 on Lenin’s orders. Just nine sets of remains were dug up here and then authenticated using DNA. The remains of the czar’s son and heir, Aleksei, and one daughter, whose identity is still not absolutely clear, were missing. Did their bones lie elsewhere, or could it actually be that they had escaped execution, as rumor had it for so long?

Only in the past few months have these questions dating from the Russian Revolution in 1917 apparently been resolved here, and only by a group of amateur sleuths who spent their weekends plumbing the case. In fact, it appears that the clues to what happened to the two children were always there, waiting to be found. All that was needed was to listen closely to the boastful voices of the killers.

Their accounts are in secret reports in Soviet-era archives, one of which offered the most tantalizing hint: a single phrase in the recollection of the chief killer that seemed to suggest where the two bodies might have been deposited (Anastasia seen here).

“All of them wanted to leave a trace in history, for they considered that this was a kind of heroic deed,” said Vitaly Shitov, who lives in the area and undertook a review of the testimony to hunt for the remains. “They wanted to promote their roles.”

Following that wisp of a clue that summer, Mr. Shitov and other amateur investigators went to where the other remains had been found — and they kept walking. Away from the road, about 70 yards from the first burial ground, is a slightly elevated area among the trees.

It is there that the bodies of Aleksei, 13, and his sister were apparently consigned by the assassins.

The amateurs found the bones, many of them charred by fire, scattered among bullets and pieces of jars that held acid used to disfigure the bodies. These fragments appeared similar to those from the first grave.

So it seems that for all the years since the first discovery, even as people made pilgrimages to the site and wondered what had happened to Aleksei and his sister, their remains were hidden in the trees only a short stroll away.

Scientists in Russia and the United States are testing the new finds extensively. The sister is believed to be Maria, 19, though that is not entirely settled.

Others long conjectured that the sister was Anastasia, 17, a theory that fed a belief that she survived. (A woman named Anna Anderson was one of several who over the years claimed to be Anastasia, but DNA testing later disproved her.)

If, as expected, results of DNA tests on the two sets of remains are conclusive, they would put to rest many of the doubts that have arisen in Russia and worldwide about the inquiries into what had happened to the royal family.

Among the most skeptical has been the Russian Orthodox Church, which has never recognized the authenticity of any of the bones here, in part because it said that the missing remains raised questions about whether the nine sets were authentic.

Among some Russians and foreigners alike, the fate of Aleksei and his sister drew intenseinterest in recent years, as if the inability to find their remains and give them a proper burial was a final affront to the royal family by the Bolsheviks. People looked for bones all over Yekaterinburg, which is in the Russian heartland, 900 miles east of Moscow, on the divide between Europe and Asia.

They painstakingly went over the events of July 17, 1918, when the killers knifed and gunned down Nicholas II, his wife, five children, his doctor and three servants in the basement of a house where they were being held after Nicholas was forced to abdicate the throne. It was not easy determining what had occurred — the efforts to dispose of the bodies were poorly planned and completely inept. Subsequent recollections in the Russian archives are sometimes seen as contradictory.

The killers wanted to conceal the bodies so their graves would not become rallying points for the czar’s supporters. They first dumped them in a mine shaft, then moved them to the burial site off the road.

In recent years, the mine was searched for the missing two sets of remains. People also periodically hunted in the immediate area around the grave where the first set of bones was found.

Then Mr. Shitov and his colleagues decided to scrutinize a statement by the chief killer, Yakov Yurovsky, in the archives. Yurovsky related how he had set aside two corpses, believing that if they were burned and buried separately they would confuse royalists who later might be seeking 11 bodies, not nine.

But how separately? The amateur investigators focused on a Russian phrase that Yurovsky used to describe the sequence of events in the second burial. The phrase — “tut zhe” — can mean “nearby,” “right here” or “right now.” It had often been interpreted as indicating that the second grave was next to the first.

But now a different thought arose. From the context, the experts wondered whether Yurovsky meant that the grave was in the area, but not very close to the first. They also presumed that to burn the bodies he needed to find a place away from the wet ground near the road.

Working weekends this summer, they began searching away from the first grave and road, and first found the remnants of the bonfire that was apparently used to burn the two bodies.

Sergei Pogorelov, an archaeologist who was called in to oversee the work, said that about 15 intact bone fragments were recovered, and more than 40 pieces of charred bone.

Mr. Pogorelov emphasized that many of the reservations about the discoveries at the first site cropped up because the excavation there had been done haphazardly. This time, he said, a professional archaeological dig was done, and the Russian Orthodox Church was invited to observe.

“We have tried to avoid the mistakes that they made in 1991,” he said. “Before, there was simply not any scientific method.”

The nine sets of remains were interred in a lavish ceremony in 1998 at the Cathedral of Saints Peter and Paul in St. Petersburg, which contains the crypts of earlier Russian royals. But the Russian Orthodox Church would notformallytakepartinthatceremonybecauseofits concerns about authenticity.

For now, the church has declined to say whether it considers the newly found remains genuine, pending further tests. But people who have long sought the remains say they are hopeful that once the results are in, the church will formally conduct a service at the cathedral in St. Petersburg to lay to rest the final remains of the Romanovs.

“This brings closure to a very sad chapter in Russian history,” said Peter Sarandinaki, an American of Russian descent who started an organization to help find the remains and had conducted several searches here. “It is because their murder symbolizes the start of a diabolic era in world history. And now that has all come to an end.”

Out of Place Artifacts (OOPARTS)

I am always surprised when what I write, which I believe to be clear and unmistakable is misunderstood. For example, I was not suggesting that the Masons were running around the world planting OOPARTs (see the following article) but that they might have planted this particular article, or they inserted Tubal Cain’s name into it for some private reason.

I also understood who Tubal Cain was, or was supposed to be. I’d read the various articles on the Internet. It was quite clear to me that Tubal Cain was not an early resident of Dorchester county, but an ancient blacksmith.

And thinking about it, maybe the misplaced “L” was not the letter slipping out of alignment, but was purposefully put there as just one more way of “hiding” the true name so that it looked like Tuba Cain rather than Tubal Cain.

And for those of you keeping score at home, I too have had a long interest in OOPARTs, or the name that I prefer, OOPTHs for Out Of Place Things. I did not invent the term. I think Ivan Sanderson came up with it three or four decades ago.

But, since this article struck a chord, let’s take a look at some other examples. In an account given before the British Association for the Advancement of Science, Sir David Brewster said that a nail had been found embedded in solid rock. About an inch of the nail was protruding and the rest was lying along the stone and projecting into a layer of ground, where it had rusted. The report suggests that the nail was partially in the stone but had not been driven into it. In other words, the nail was part of the sedimentary material that had congealed into granite so that it was part of the rock. That would mean that the nail had been manufactured millions of years earlier if all aspects of the report were true and the observations about it accurate.

Many more such objects seem to have been found in coal. Brad Steiger (seen here), in Mysteries of Time & Spacereported that Wilbert H. Rusch, Sr., Professor of Biology, Concordia

College, Ann Arbor, Michigan, quoted a letter from a friend had received from Frank J. Kenwood (yes, this sounds like the old friend of a friend), who said that he had been a fireman at the Municipal Electric Plant in Thomas, Oklahoma in 1912 when he split a large piece of coal and found an iron pot encased inside.

Quoting from the letter, Steiger wrote, “This iron pot fell from the center leaving the impression or mold of the pot in this piece of coal. I traced the source of the coal and found that it came from the Wilburton, Oklahoma, mines.”

Others have made similar discoveries in lumps of coal. Mrs. S. W. Culp, according to the Morrisonville, IllinoisTimes, published on June 11, 1891, found an artifact when she broke a lump of coal as she was preparing to toss it in a stove. According to the story, “Mrs. Culp thought the chain had been dropped accidentally in the coal, but as she undertook to lift the chain up, the idea of its having been recently dropped was at once fallacious, for as the lump of coal broke, the middle of the chain became loosened while each end remained fastened to the coal.”

The coal was identified as coming from mines in southern Illinois. Steiger suggests that the coal is from the Carboniferous era.

I queried the Smithsonian about this and several other like reports a number of years ago. They suggested, “… manufactured items… would not normally be found in rocks or coal since the latter were formed before the advent of man. The only such inclusion would be the rock material had been broken, and the artifacts had gotten lost among it and then moss had recemented it by sedimentary action.”

This is certainly a conventional explanation and is, of course, possible. It is also possible, as in the case of the metal vessel from Dorchester (see the following article) that it had not been embedded in the rock, but was associated with material around the rock. That means, simply, that it could have been something buried in softer ground that was uprooted by the explosion and fell in among the debris of the quarry where it was found giving the impression that it was blown out of solid rock.

Some support for that conclusion comes from the study of the history of OOPARTs. Info Journal, #59 reported that about 1900 an Englishman found a coin embedded in a lump of coal. The coin was clearly dated 1397. So, we have an artifact that was found in coal that was clearly dated long after the coal was formed unless we are willing to believe that some ancient, unknown or alien civilization used a numbering system just like ours. We have seen, since the beginning of written history a variety of numbering systems so why believe the ancients would use the same system we do. Why wouldn’t they have invented their own? And would they have a base ten?

There is further information that sheds additional light on this and we don’t need philosophic discussions of numbering systems to understand it. After Mount St. Helens blew up a group of scientists discovered that peat deposits had developed in an unexpectedly short time at the bottom of a lake. It suggested that some coal beds could theoretically form in far less time than conventionally believed.

What all this tells us is that there are some interesting enigmas out there and that there seem to be some rational explanations for some of these strange finds. But, and this is critical, those explanations rely partly on speculation. Further study is required on this before we can either accept the data as proved, or reject it as flawed.

Tubal Cain and the OOPARTs

There is a class of ancient artifacts such as iron nails found in solid rock, a delicate gold chain found in a lump of coal in the 1890s, or an ornate bell-shaped vessel inlaid with silver blasted from rock in a Massachusetts that are called Out Of Place Artifacts, known popularly as OOPARTs. They seem to suggest that someone had been manufacturing objects millions of years before the human race was capable of such fine and precise work or even before humans existed on this planet. These artifacts are, in essence, a form of proof that another intelligence had once walked the Earth, maybe before the dinosaurs disappeared and that those sophisticated beings probably originated in outer space given the fossil and geological records relied on by our modern day scientists. It is circumstantial evidence that, if accurate, provides us with the proof that some ancient sightings were of alien spacecraft (An old fashioned, library search of the Scientific Americanseen here).

One of the first of the Out of Place Artifacts (OOPARTs) I came across was a reference in several UFO books to some sort of “bell-shaped vessel” discovered during blasting in a quarry in Massachusetts in the mid-19th century. For some reason I have always envisioned this as a “gravy boat.”

According to those UFO books, the original source was the Scientific Americanin 1851. The story was headlined “A relic of a by-gone age” although some suggested it was labeled as “A Curiosity.”

The story, as reported in those other UFO books, was that the blasting in the quarry “threw an immense mass of rock… in all directions.” Among the shattered debris, the workmen found a small metallic vessel in two pieces that when reassembled formed a “bell shape” about four and a quarter inches high and about six inches wide at the top. The whole thing was something like an eighth of an inch thick.

The report continued, saying that it was made of zinc with “a considerable portion of silver.” The sides were inlaid with silver and the carving was “exquisitely done by the art of some cunning workman.” The magazine concluded, again according to all those other UFO books, that the find was worthy of additional investigation because the vessel was extremely old, pre-dating the first inhabitants of the continent.

I discovered that the University of Iowa library, in it’s bound periodically section, held the entire run of Scientific American.It would be easy enough to check the primary source of the story. So I did. To my disappointment, but not great surprise, there was nothing in the 1851 issues about anything like the metal vessel being found. True, there were a number of things labeled as “curiosities” but nothing that told of manufactured items coming out of a quarry.

But research isn’t always that simple, and there is always the chance that someone had written down a date wrong and it was then copied by all those others who failed to do primary research but who believed the others had. So, I decided to look in both 1850 and 1852, and being somewhat compulsive about such things, I quite naturally started in 1850 because it came before 1852.

The article appeared in the June 5, 1852 edition of the Scientific American, on page 298. The details as listed in most of the UFO books were substantially correct. There was some additional information in that article, including that “On the sides there are six figures of a flower or bouquet, beautifully inlaid with pure silver, and around the lower part of the vessel a vine, or wreath, inlaid also with silver. The chasing, carving, and inlaying are exquisitely done by the art of some cunning workman.”

The entry continues, noting “There is no doubt that this curiosity was blown out of the rock… but will … some other scientific man please to tell us how it came there?”

While I had been at the mercy of those other writers in the past, until I began to roam the stacks in the bound periodicals section of the University of Iowa library, researchers today aren’t so restricted (and I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that some of them have never seen the inside of a library). I typed “Scientific American1852” into a search engine and in seconds was looking at a complete listing for Scientific American available on-line.Since I already knew the date, I could easily pull up what I wanted. Anyone with access to a computer and an on-line service could do the same (and therefore stay out of the library).

Like so much else in the UFO field, there is always something left out of the stories in all those UFO books. What is rarely mentioned is a paragraph at the end of the article in which it is suggested that Tuba Cain, one of the first residents of the area, meaning from the 17^thcentury, had made the vessel.

But sometimes UFO research takes off on strange tangents. On closer examination of the Scientific American, it begins to look as if the mark at the end of the sentence that I thought originally was an artifact caused by the microfilm process, and right after the word Tuba, is an “L” that slipped out of alignment and into the margin. This means the name is a reference to Tubal Cain and Tubal Cain probably wasn’t an early reference to one of the first residents of Dorchester County, but was a descendent of Adam and Eve. Tubal Cain refers to blacksmiths from antiquity and the original Tubal Cain supposedly worked with bronze and iron in the far distant past and no where near the New World.

Here is something else from outside the UFO field (and that I wouldn’t have known if it hadn’t been for access to the Internet), Tubal Cain is a secret Masonic phrase, and something that certainly wasn’t well known in 1852. So now the question becomes is this tale of a metallic vessel found in solid rock true or does it have some significance to the Masons and the use of Tubal Cain is the clue. I confess that I don’t know. I am more than a little disturbed to learn of the history of Tubal Cain and the reference to it, or him, in this particular article. There is no reason for those other writers to have made anything out of the reference, unless they themselves were Masons and knew the code. Without the Internet, I certainly would not have made the connection, nor would I have been able to ask the question.

Ignoring that little bit of diversion, we find that if we are going to look at the rest of the case with a scientific detachment, we must ask a couple of other questions. First, did they find anything to suggest the vessel had been embedded in the rock? Did they find bits of rock that matched the contours of the vessel? If we were to date the “vessel” according to standard archaeological methodology we would be forced to conclude that the vessel was millions of years old because that was the age of the material in which it was found.

Second, they suggest that a scientific man should take a look at the vessel and named Professor Agassiz, as someone to study the find. The Scientific Americanwondered what Agassiz’s credentials were to make any sort of study. I confess that in today’s world, I’m a little curious about the man’s credentials as well, though there is nothing to suggest that he ever looked at the vessel or rendered an opinion about it so this is really a dead issue.

In the end, we’re left with many unanswered questions, including that of the placement of the vessel and if it was actually embedded in the stone as originally suggested. It is always possible that it was not embedded in the stone but was associated with it. That means, simply, that the vessel was in the ground on top of the stone maybe lost in it, but had not been embedded in the stone.

And we now wonder if there was a hidden meaning in this article that was meant for the Masons because of the use of Tubal Cain. In a world filled with speculations about a da Vinci code, Templars, and a bloodline related to Christ, it is not difficult to believe that the Mason of the 19^thCentury planted the article for some, probably trivial reason.

The Fermi Paradox

A recent post I read suggested the writer did not accept the reality of UFOs because no one had come up with a good explanation for the Fermi Paradox. This was the idea that if there was other intelligent life in the galaxy it would already be here.

I am inclined, flippantly, to say, “But they are here now. Look at all the unexplained UFO reports.”

In fact, the history suggests that the Fermi Paradox grew out of a discussion about UFOs, as Fermi and others walked to lunch. According to that history, they were talking about the latest UFO reports. Fermi then said that if there were a multitude of civilizations in our galaxy, it was strange that no evidence of them had been found.

So, how do we answer the question?

We can always look at the assumptions made. First, that there are a multitude of civilizations out there. Maybe there are but a few scattered throughout the galaxy which would mean they are probably separated by tens of thousands of light years. Contact among them would be sparse until one or more conquered the problem of interstellar distances.

Maybe we have found no radio trace (or limited radio traces) because they have not reached that level of technology… or more likely, have reached it and moved beyond it. We search for alien radio signals based on some human assumptions given the nature of the radio sources in the sky, but other creatures on other planets might not use those same assumptions. We might be searching in vain because we think like humans and not aliens.

Carl Sagan has postulated that we could expect visitation by an extraterrestrial civilization about once every ten thousand years… though I don’t know how he came up with that number. But let’s say it’s accurate. That would mean that sometime in the last ten thousand years aliens arrived on Earth, and that would mean that they would have found our civilizations.

It really doesn’t matter when they arrived or the state of the civilizations they found. I would think that once you found something like that, you’d be inclined to keep watch on it, if for no other reason than it is another intelligent race. And if that is true, then the number of visits would increase as we advanced. Once we reached an industrial civilization, once we began developing machines to make our lives easier, rockets that could leave the planet, atomic power, and began radiating electromagnetic signals that would make us brighter than almost anything else in the Solar System in that spectrum, they would come by to take a look. They would visit with more frequently…

And isn’t that the situation we have today? Reports of UFOs growing from the beginnings of the industrial revolution until we have the thousands of good, solid cases.

Don’t we have some good physical trace cases including radar/visual sightings? Aren’t there some good photographs that can only be explained as either alien spaceships or hoaxes with no middle ground? Aren’t there some very puzzling sightings that involve multiple witnesses, instrumentality and other evidence?

So, the answer to the Fermi Paradox might not seem so flippant when we look at all the evidence. Maybe the answer is that we have been visited but we have failed to recognize the visitors. We’re so busy arguing about the reality of UFO sightings that we have ignored the bigger questions which is who are they and why are they here.

Project Blue Book and NARA

Back in the olden days, while I was still in college and a member of Air Force ROTC, I learned that the Project Blue Book files were available for study and review at the Air Force Archives at the what was then called Maxwell Air Force Base. The announcement was made in an internal Air Force document, meaning, simply, that it was circulated inside the Air Force but not necessarily in the civilian world. It said that anyone who traveled to Alabama could see the material.

During those days I wrote articles for SAGA and its companion magazine, UFO REPORT. I called my editor there, who normally didn’t speak to me but had his secretary tell me to call back later. I mentioned that I could get into the Project Blue Book files. I didn’t say that anyone could, only that I had the opportunity. One of the senior editors called me back immediately, giving me an assignment and telling me what he would like to know.

I drove to Maxwell AFB with fellow writer and researcher Robert Charles Cornett. We had no trouble getting onto the base because we were both members of the Air Force Reserve based on our status in AFROTC. In fact, we had a letter of introduction written by the detachment commander so they would know that we were members of the Air Force. We told the people there what we wanted but they hesitated, telling me that I had to request specific items from Blue Book, not just a vague desire to see the “files.” I knew something about UFOs so requested specific files from Kinross and Levelland, for example. They just weren’t sure that they should be handing us this information.

After they had talked to a “Mr. Smith” in Washington, cooperation increased and we learned that there was an index, which we requested to see immediately. I never knew if they initiated the contact, or if, somehow, Mr. Smith knew we were there and wanted us to have what we needed. All I knew was that after this mysterious man talked to the archivists, they were happy to assist us in anyway they could.

They eventually told us about a master index to the sightings. This master index gave the dates of the sightings, location, names of the witnesses and the Air Force conclusion. Cornett and I went through the whole thing and copied the information of all the unidentifieds, most of the photo cases, landing trace cases, and anything else that struck us as important. I didn’t know how valuable that information would become later.

In the mid-1970s, Jack Webb decided to do a show called Project UFOfor NBC (two of those involved seen here). To assist him, the Air Force moved the Blue Book files to the National Archives (NARA… ever notice how everything is being reduced to letters because, I guess, it’s too difficult to say National Archives), where it was microfilmed. We have Jack Webb to thank for that. Webb, as I understand it, paid the cost of the microfilming.

Over the years I have acquired a complete set of the Blue Book files on 94 rolls of microfilm. That collection is in no way unique. The J. Allen Hynek Center for UFO Studies has a complete set and I suspect MUFON does too. What makes all this interesting is that the National Archives has now put all of Project Blue Book on line at: http://www.footnote.com/image/

Then go to page three and scroll down. At the moment, you can search the files for free. I don’t know how long that will last.

These are high quality scans, for the most part and provide a glimpse into the Air Force handling of the UFO project. The problem is that before these files were released into the public arena, Air Force officers spent weeks going through them taking out the names of the witnesses. Oh, they did a terrible job of it. In the Arnold file, they went so far as to take Arnold’s initials out of a transcript of an interview with him, but left, scrawled in large letters on one page, “Arnold Sighting.”

In other files, they took the names out of the Air Force generated reports, but left the names in newspaper articles that were filed with the reports. In other words, in some cases, you can put the names back in.

But remember, Cornett and I copied the names from so many of the case files that I, too, can put them back in. In fact, in Project Blue Book Exposed, Appendix B is a listing of those cases, including the date and time, location and the witnesses, along with a brief description of the sighting.

Saucer Smear, Jim Moseley and Me

Jim Moseley of Saucer Smear (the second oldest continuously published UFO “zine” if you count its various incarnations, banner seen here)) and I have been in a bit of a dust-up about Jesse Marcel, Sr. and the champion of the Mogul theory, Charles Moore.

The latest started when I suggested that Moore, based on the documentation available, had been told Mogul’s name long before Robert Todd arrived in 1992 to tell him. The point had been that Mogul was so secret that even those who worked on it had not known the name until more than forty years had passed. Documentation, from the Air Force showed Dr. Albert Crary, the project leader had known the name in 1946 and had mentioned it in his unclassified diary a couple of times… a clear security violation unless, of course, the name wasn’t classified as we had been told.

In a letter dated in 1949, Moore was introduced to James A. van Allen as one of the Project Mogul engineers. This letter, too, was unclassified and another security violation if the name had been classified. And, importantly, it came from Moore’s files, proving that he had known the name before Todd told him.

Now before we go farther, let me point out that I believe that Moore had forgotten the name when he told researchers he hadn’t known it until Todd told him, and there was nothing more nefarious in his claim than that. However, we can no longer say that Mogul was so secret that even those working on it didn’t know the name. Clearly, based on the documentation, they did.

I pointed all this out to Jim Moseley and asked him if we didn’t label Moore a liar for his mistake, shouldn’t we grant the same courtesy to Marcel? Rather than answer that question, Moseley sent me copies of articles that were more than a decade old and in which these same mistakes about the secrecy of Mogul were repeated. He also sent articles, more than a decade old in which Marcel is characterized as a liar and far worse, though his offenses seem to be no worse than those committed by Moore. Clearly all this information was outdated.

So, let’s look at some of these criticisms. Marcel told Bob Pratt, then of the National Enquirerthat he had flown as a pilot, bombardier and waist gunner while in the service. Todd, and by extension Moseley (seen here), suggests that this proves that Marcel was less than candid when he was interviewed based on what Todd found when reviewing Marcel’s service record. There was nothing there to indicate that Marcel had flown in those positions.

But I believe the wording in Marcel’s statement is crucial and has been overlooked. Marcel said he had flown AS a pilot, bombardier and waist gunner, not that he served in any of those positions in any official capacity. For those who have never been in an aviation unit, Marcel’s claim isn’t that farfetched.

Those who have no rating, meaning they are not on flight status, are often provided with an opportunity to fly in aviation positions. I have flown as a helicopter door gunner, but you’ll find nothing in my record to support that. And, I have given “stick time” to door gunners and crew chiefs but you’ll find nothing in their records to reflect that. The point is that all of us can say, truthfully, that we flew in those positions.

Todd, and by extension Moseley, also make a big deal out of Marcel’s claim to have been a private pilot because there was no record of a license with the FAA. This is true because I asked the FAA about it and although their records do go back into the 1920s, when Marcel would have started flying and the government began to attempt to license pilots, this really isn’t the whole story.

If you check out the FAA site and take a look at the licensing history, you’ll learn, as did I, that in the 1920s the forerunner to the FAA tried to induce private pilots to voluntarily get licenses without much success. It wasn’t until the mid-1930s that most pilots were finally licensed and it wasn’t until after the Second World War that there was a real requirement for a license. Even with that many who had started flying in biplanes didn’t bother with the licenses. It could be argued here that Marcel, having no need to fly any more, simply didn’t bother. Before the war he had been a cartographer with Shell Oil but after the war and after he left the Army his interest shifted to electronics and any interest he had in aviation ended.

What this suggests to me is that much of what Todd claimed about Marcel simply is unimportant. It proves nothing about Marcel’s veracity. Everything Marcel said could be true and the lack of documentation in the military files is simply irrelevant given the many circumstances surrounding the creation of military records. Just ask about any veteran if his or her records are accurate and you’ll learn that few are.

We can conclude then that the discrepancies between what Marcel told Pratt and what is found in the military are not necessarily the result of LIES told by Marcel. It is clear from the record that Marcel did fly on military missions and was awarded the Air Medal twice, and for those of you keeping score at home, the only way to be awarded an Air Medal is to participate in aerial flight (which is what the regulation says… aerial flight, as if there is another kind, but I digress…)

Now, if we want to be completely fair in this brief analysis, we have to look at one other aspect of the Pratt interview. According to what Pratt wrote in his transcript, Marcel, Sr. said, “I was working for Shell Oil Co [note, I’m going to reproduce this as closely to the transcript as I can rather than use Karl Pflock’s cleaned up interpretation] as a photographer when the war began. all my map making for the engineers and Shell oil co was derived from aerial photographs… no degree then. got one later, 6 diff schools…”

Later in that same Pratt interview, Marcel said, “…degree in nuclear physics (bachelors) at completed work at GW Univ inWash. attended (LSU, Houston, U of Wis, NY Univ, Ohio State, Docotr pool? [In Pflock’s cleaned up version, that last part is marked as unintelligible and while it doesn’t make sense, it certainly is relevant to our discussion] and GW…”

So, what do we know. Well, Todd and others make a big deal that Marcel’s military record showed only a year and a half at LSU. There seems to be no dispute with that. Could it be that Marcel received his degree after his military service? Could it also mean that while in the service he took extension courses offered to members of the service by various universities, often with the classes taught on the bases?

Here’s all we really know about this. GW has no record of a degree being issued to Jesse Marcel but then Marcel didn’t really say that in the interview. Marcel was assigned to the Washington, D.C. area after his service in Roswell so it’s not impossible for him to have attended extension courses, which we might now call distance learning, while there and I have been unable to learn if GW offered any such classes and who would have kept the records of them. I suspect that the wrong questions were asked, so I’m now trying to find these answers which I’ll report on when I get them.

The fact that Marcel’s military record contains nothing about this could be irrelevant. If the schooling was taken after his military service, then it wouldn’t be in there. My Army records show that I have a high school diploma and little else. The Air Force required me, after several years of service, to prove I had a bachelor’s degree even though the source of my commission was ROTC and the only way to receive a commission that way was to have graduated from an accredited college or university. Just one more example of how fragmented these records sometimes are.

After all these years, it seems to me that a new set of questions needs to be asked about Marcel’s college career. I don’t believe the right questions were asked originally so now we have to go back and do it again. Those claiming that Marcel lied about his college education might have been so caught up in proving Marcel a liar that they ran with the first negative results they received. Maybe a little digging will resolve this.

I’m going mention one other thing here. Todd, in his publication The KowPflop Quarterly, suggested that he had asked Jesse Marcel, Jr. about some of the discrepancies with what his father had said. In a quite reasonable conclusion, Todd wrote, “Marcel hasn’t even acknowledged my letter, much less furnished an explanation for this rather significant discrepancy.”

But Todd’s letters to Marcel, Jr. were certainly not reasonable. Todd, as was his habit, turned nasty in his communications with those who didn’t agree with him. In a letter to another researcher, Todd wrote, “I have already been told that he [Friedman] and Randle both have been slandering me at every opportunity. Apparently these two shameless liars…” and this is one of his less inflammatory statements. Of course it is not true. I rarely discussed Todd with anyone.

About Jesse Marcel, Jr., he wrote, “It should be noted that Jesse Marcel, Jr., now conveniently claims his father told him he had some ‘bootleg’ flying time which presumably wasn’t documented [which, of course, is the definition of bootleg time]… Given Major Marcel’s numerous other lies, and the younger Marcel’s obvious and understandable desire to salvage his father’s credibility, there is no reason to take the younger Marcel’s claim seriously.”

You might say this is still fairly tame, though he does manage to call Jesse Marcel, Sr. a liar and suggest that Jesse Jr. is lying as well.

But then we have a May 10, 1996 letter from Todd that begins, “Dear Junior,” meaning Dr. Jesse Marcel, Jr. Not exactly the kind of salutation you put on a reasonable letter to a physician.

Todd then wrote, “The spelling, punctuation, and capitalization errors in your ‘960420' letter didn’t surprise me, given the level of ‘intelligence’ you’ve demonstrated in the past. The disgraceful obscenities didn’t surprise me either, given the scum with whom you’re known to associate. Likewise, the fact that you actually bothered to send me a letter, telling me that your letters are a waste to me, is a clear demonstration of the cutting edge ‘logic’ I’ve come to expect from the hysterical little girl who has come to be know as ‘the alien spaceship doctor.’”

I will note two things about the above. It explains why Todd didn’t get responses to some of his letters, and on this one, Jesse Marcel, Jr. wrote, “I did not send a letter with this date [960420 which I suppose it Todd’s convoluted dating system for April 20, 1996] to him.

Todd was often nasty, didn’t believe anyone had the analytically ability that he did and believed all his conclusions to always be right. There was no room for disagreement in his world. If you did, you became an enemy, at best.

I mention all this, because it was Todd who worked so hard to destroy the reputation of Jesse Marcel, Sr. believing, I guess, that if Marcel crumbled, then the whole of the Roswell case crumbled. Had Marcel been the lone voice, that would have been true, but Marcel was backed up by every officer on Colonel Blanchard’s 509^thBomb Group staff with a single exception. Marcel had lots of company.

Moseley, who knows most of this about Todd, still believes the Mogul balloon story despite mounting evidence to the contrary and Moseley still believes that Todd contributed something to the case with his release of Marcel’s entire military file. But Todd drew conclusions from the slightest information and proved time and again that he had no knowledge of how the military worked. Moseley has almost none himself, despite the fact that his father had been a major general and one time the Vice Chief of Staff of the Army (when major generals held that post).

Moseley clings to the ridiculous Project Mogul answer for the Roswell case while many others admit now that Mogul is not the answer. But the real point here is that Moseley still believes that Marcel lied to Pratt when the evidence isn’t as cut and dried as he thinks it is. He relies on what Karl Pflock wrote about Marcel and Pflock relied on Todd and Todd simply didn’t understand how the military works. Todd believed that everything in the record was totally accurate and when it disagreed with what a witness said, then the witness must have been lying.

I have sent Moseley another letter asking him the same question again. If we grant Charles Moore the benefit of the doubt when the records clearly show them in conflict with his testimony, then don’t we owe the same courtesy to Jesse Marcel, Sr.? All of these discrepancies are over relatively minor points and can be explained by the fog of time and the frailty of memory. I still await his answer.

SETI and Nez

I’m not a big fan of SETI but only because it seems to have made some early assumptions in its search for extraterrestrial intelligence that might be too human in nature. That is, originally, they were looking for radio signals at what the called the water hole or the most common radio frequencies because they believed that any advanced civilization would be using radio and looking in the same place. I can think of all sorts of things that are wrong with that assumption, but hey, you had to start somewhere. Yes, I know they have now expanded beyond that and that they can search huge portions of the sky fairly rapidly.

As one who supports the idea that some UFOs represent alien visitation, I was always a little annoyed at the SETI attitude that UFOs had nothing to do with what they were attempting to do. That is, contact an extraterrestrial intelligence. I’m not saying they should have signed up UFO supporters but they should have made a pass at that evidence in case there was something relevant to their search.

But, of course, I supported the idea behind SETI because if they were successful, then one of the reasons to reject UFOs as alien would be eliminated… just as the discovery of extra solar planets have eliminated one of the reasons.

Given all this, I was horrified to learn, according to KPHO-TV in Phoenix, that Brad Niesluchowski, had resigned as a teacher from the Highley Unified School District because he had signed up the district’s computers to participate in the SETI@home project (and for those of you who don’t know what it is, Google it).

A spokeswomen for the district said that they would support cancer research but not something like the search for “E.T.” She pointed out that it was costing the district about a million a year to support the program because it kept the district’s computers working all the time which upped their utility fees and caused additional wear and tear on the computers causing more repairs and replacements.

Okay. Fair enough. If the fellow had done this on his own, and it was costing the district that much, then, hey, he made a bad call… except the software used to download the program had been authorized by a previous school administration.

Wait a minute. He didn’t decide for himself to do this. He got permission… then why is he out of a job and why is there now a police investigation? And this has been going on for ten years.

The SETI folks see him as a hero. I have to agree. Seems to me that someone in the school administration didn’t see that it was going to cost so much (and I wonder if it really does) but Nez, as he is known in the SETI world, got authorization to do it. Shut it down if you must but don’t punish the guy for something he was given permission to do.

The Best UFO Headline Ever

I’m not sure why I haven’t posted this before. It is the best UFO headline ever. It is something right out of a science fiction movie.

It refers, of course, to the sightings that took place in July 1952 over Washington, D.C. The Air Force eventually claimed that these sightings were the r e s u l t o f a t e m p e r a t u r e inversion but the problem was that there were sightings on the ground, sightings in the air, radar sightings, and a rather “hairy” intercept by jet fighters. In fact, f i g h t e r s w e r e scrambled on a number of occasions during the sightings, and yes, the fighters got a radar lock on the objects and the pilots saw them in the air.

There has been much written about these sightings (including my own book on them) and while the Air Force is happy with the explanation, as are the skeptics, there were just too many sightings, too many witnesses and even observations using instrumentality to write them off so easily.

The Hippler Letter

It seems that more often than not, as I put together the material for this blog, that it is negative. I have explanations for UFO sightings and I have information about aspects of the phenomenon that is more explanatory than mysterious. I believe that most people want information that advances the mystery rather than explains it, but I also believe that if there is a good, solid explanation, they would rather have it than continue to accept the mystery if there is a good, rational answer for it.

So, I look for things that I believe to be mysterious, that I can legitimately suggest have no explanation. And when I can’t, I provide the best available answer. But this is a two-way street, which means that sometimes the information breaks for us rather than against us. Skeptics like to trot out the University of Colorado (seen here) study of UFOs that was commissioned by the Air Force in the 1960s. They like to say that here is what we all wanted, a scientific investigation of UFOs except that came to the conclusion that we have not been visited.

Unfortunately, the Condon Committee, as it has become called, was neither a good investigation nor a very scientific one. The conclusions were drawn before the check was even signed, and Dr. Edward U. Condon, the chairman, knew what answers the Air Force wanted. All he had to do was slant the information in that direction.

When we look at the whole of the committee’s final report, (grandly entitled, Scientific Study of Unidentified Flying Objectsand published by Bantam Books in1969) we find strange problems… 30 percent of the sightings unexplained and some of the explanations less than helpful. In one case it was described as a phenomenon that was so rare it had never been seen before or since (which could, of course, mean it was a flying saucer in the classic sense) but they fail to explain what that phenomenon was. But, I think this underscores the point that the Condon Committee was, and is, bad science. The conclusions, written by Condon (seen here), do not come from the evidence included in the report but from Air Force direction prior to the beginning of that investigation. The contradictions have since become part of the whole story of the Condon Committee.

Condon, in his sort of executive summary of the overall report, wrote, for example, “It has been contended that the subject has been shrouded in official secrecy. We have no evidence of secrecy concerning UFO reports.”

Then how to explain the case files that were labeled as secret? Clearly there was secrecy and there were secret studies (Air Intelligence Report No. 100-203-79 as just a single example, declassified long after the Condon Report was published). The question is if this was “an intelligent policy of delay in releasing data so that the public does not become confused by premature publication of incomplete studies or reports,” or if there was something more nefarious involved here. The point is there were secret studies of UFOs, some were not released for years and the documentation that Condon and his committee reviewed was still classified in 1969. After 1976, when the Project Blue Book files were finally declassified, we find all sorts of secrecy imposed and not necessary as an intelligent policy.

Let’s take a look at some of this that has come to light since the publication of the Condon Report and see if we can prove that there was something of a conspiracy to find specific information during the investigation.

On January 16, 1967, before the real work began, Lieutenant Colonel Robert R. Hippler, of the Science Division, Directorate of Science and Technology, part of the HQ, USAF in Washington, D.C. wrote to Dr. Edward U. Condon. The letter was received by on January 23.

Hippler wrote:

Hippler signed his name.

Robert Low, in his response wrote:

For the skeptics, Low wrote:

Low then signed off, after suggesting that he and Condon would be in Washington, D.C. and they could “perhaps” get together.

This attitude (of getting rid of Blue Book as suggested by Hippler) that had been established in official communications for a long time. For example on April 1, 1960 (Yeah, the timing sucks):

And in 1962, Lieutenant Colonel Robert Friend, at the time chief of Project Blue Book wrote should be handed over to a civilian agency that would word its report in such a way as to allow the Air Force to drop its study.

Edward Trapnell, an assistant to the Secretary of the Air Force, when talking to Dr. Robert Calkins of the Brookings Institute said that they should find a civilian committee to study the problem and then have them conclude it the way the Air Force wanted. One of the stipulations was that the organization, whatever it might be, should say some positive things about the Air Force handling of the UFO investigation.

Now, I realize that reasonable men and women can disagree as to the interpretation of these letters. However, given the other documents from the Blue Book files, the Archer and Trapnell letters, for example, I see an attempt to end Blue Book with the sham of an “objective” scientific study. The course for Condon was laid before Condon and the boys in Colorado even entered the picture.

The language in both Hippler’s and Low’s letters can be seen as benign, but it can also suggest an attempt by Hippler to tell Low what they want to find and what recommendation they want. End the study of UFOs by the Air Force. Get the Air Force off the hook for UFO investigations. The other letters and documents prove that this is the case.

In fact, just three days after that letter was received, Condon delivered a lecture to scientists in Corning, New York telling them, “It is my inclination right now to recommend that the government get out of this business. My attitude right now is that there is nothing in it. But I am not supposed to reach a conclusion for another year.”

My point remains, the Condon Committee is bad science. Yes, it should be read, but it should be understood that it does not adequately answer the questions that it set out to answer. And when skeptics point to it as a scientific study, we should be prepared to point that it was not scientific. It was propaganda.

The Airship Solution

Since I have been accused of staying in the past when the solution for the UFO phenomenon rests in the present, I thought I’d point out that sometimes the past leads the way to the future. Back in 1896 and 1897 there was a wave of “UFO” sightings throughout this country (A 1912 airship seen here). Every aspect of the modern era was present from alien abduction to UFO crashes. There were cattle mutilations, contacts, claims of rides, and everything else. And just as in the modern era, there were lots of theories about what was really going on.

Many of those classic cases have been “solved.” Jerry Clark took care of the great Alexander Hamilton calf-napping. The Aurora, Texas UFO crash has been researched and researched and only recently was it the subject of another UFO TV documentary. When it was over, and the had excavated the well that was supposed to be the location of some of the mysterious wreckage we knew nothing more about the case. The only thing they found in the well was a snake.

There was on theory proposed in 1897 that makes sense to me. And it is one that could be applied to the modern era, if we take a look at our history and understand it.

The Des Moines Register in 1897 put forth another theory about the reliability, and the genesis of the airship, at least in Iowa. The reporters noted that the airship was mentioned in Cedar Rapids on April 14 and on the next night it was seen near Fairfield. It was also seen near Evanston, Illinois “worrying the Chicago papers greatly.” The most remarkable account of the airship came on April 15 near Pella, Iowa. According to the newspaper, “many people, among them the Western Union operator had seen the machine… if it was true, the Pella airship looked like a sea serpent, a balloon, a winged cigar, a pair of balloons hitched together with a car swung between them, a car with an aeroplane and three sails, and 19 or 20 other things.”

The Register article continued by reporting that the telephone in the Leader(another Iowa newspaper office) rang and the town of Stuart was “found to be clamoring for fame.” They had seen the airship. The story went out over the wire and the Western Union operator said that he could produce dozens of witnesses if anyone cared. He said that the airship had come from the southeast, was traveling about fifteen miles an hour and had a red light in front and a green one in the rear. The operator’s feelings were hurt when he was asked if it was an April Fool’s joke.

While the conversation between the newspaper reporters and the telegrapher was evolving into a heated argument, a report came in that the airship was now over Panora, Iowa. The Western Union operator there said that they had seen the airship over their own town coming from the direction of Stuart. It was now moving faster, but had the same appearance as it did in Stuart which the Register labeled as a “neat attempt at getting around the description.”

As the argument increased in intensity, the number of telegrams about the airship also increased. From Clinton, Iowa came a telegram saying the airship had flown over the town on April 10. Although the airship was reported to have been seen by several prominent and reputable citizens, the telegram was almost apologetic in its tone.

Immediately came a telegram from Ottumwa reporting they had seen the airship more than once. “An Eldon (Iowa) operator discovered the airship at 7:25 p.m. Ottumwa was prepared for its appearance. It was seen here by half the population. All agreed that it appeared as a red light moving up and down and traveling northwest. Albia caught sight of it at 8:10 and at 9 o’clock it was still visible… This was the third time that it has been seen in Albia.”

The Register reported, “The fact seems to be that the airship has been exploited beautifully by telegraphers along certain lines of the railroad. They managed it beautifully for awhile and never allowed it to travel too far too fast.” The reports were always well done showing a certain amount of genius. But the rest of the public began to take a hand and the airship reports got too numerous. Some would conflict and it became evident that someone would have to have a whole fleet of airships for all the sightings to be true.

What all this suggests is that the vast majority of the airship stories were hoaxes. Some originated by individuals such as Alexander Hamilton or the people in Cedar Rapids, others were initiated by the newspapers looking for something spectacular to report, and the last bunch were created by the telegraphers along the railroads who were bored late in the evening.

It is now clear that there was no great airship invention just before the turn of the last century. Heavier-than-air flight would become a reality in six years. Airplanes would soon begin flying across the country, then across the oceans, and finally around the world. Great airships would be built by the military to search for enemy subs, or to hover above battlefields so that generals could gather intelligence about enemy movements. Eventually there would even be airship flights across the Atlantic. These would end when the Hindenburg exploded in New Jersey in 1939.

But there is no evidence that a human inventor had flown a Great Airship in 1896 or 1897 anywhere in the country. Although some stories suggested the announcement of the airship’s was about to be made to the world, it never was. Or, those on their way to Cuba to bomb the Spanish never made it to drop those bombs.

A few modern investigators have suggested that there was a solid core of airship sightings. Something had to trigger the tales in 1896. They have suggested that we examine, more closely, those stories told in the Sacramento area in November 1896. Those might provide a clue as to where and why these stories began to circulate. It might be that some kind of airship was seen in northern California but then newspapers in other parts of the country climbed on the bandwagon.

There are no witnesses left to tell us what they really saw in 1896 and 1897 and we have no real records or photographs to examine. Few have interviewed anyone who was around in 1897 and who claimed to have seen the great airship. Ed Ruppelt, while chief of Air Force’s Project Blue Book, wrote that he had had a long conversation with a man who had been a copy boy at the San Francisco Chroniclein the time of the airship. He remembered almost nothing about those long ago events except to tell Ruppelt that the editors and a few others at the newspaper had seen the airship themselves.

But even if that was true, there were so many tales invented by newspaper editors and reporters that a single, fading memory of a copy boy means very little today. Maybe something unusual was seen near San Francisco and Sacramento. Maybe there had been some kind of cigar-shaped object flying over California so long ago. Those seeing it did the best they could in describing it, using the terminology available to them at that time. Maybe there was a sighting or two of something that was not invention, imagination, delusion, misidentification or outright fabrication in the fall of 1896.

What we know today is that the vast majority of the airship cases can be explained as hoaxes but they shouldn’t be completely ignored. They provide us with an insight that will help us better understand the UFO situation as it stands today.

And that is why the airship stories are so frightening for UFO researchers today. How many of those stories mirror the reports made at present? Everything we find in the modern UFO era was predicted by the airship stories in 1897. That means that if we can write off the airship stories as hoaxes and misidentifications, why can’t we do the same thing today? The evidence we find is just as nebulous and nearly unobtainable.

Of course we can argue that we have better information, we have instruments that help us record the flying saucers, and we have many more, trained witnesses. The UFO of today isn’t quite the same thing as the airship of the 19^thcentury because the airship, for the most part was a human invention and the flying saucers are alien in origin, and that is the difference.

But the real point here is that studying history can lead us to insights in the present. We see the mistakes made then and can try to avoid them today. We’re not always successful, but we do have a path to follow if we can stay on it. So, sometimes the past tells us a little about the future.

V-2s and the Biological Samples

The Roswell UFO crash story has seemed to have spawned another fake document. This one, supposed to have come from the CIA, comes to me via England, which always raises my suspicions. Why would a classified, American document find its way to British hands first? But even if one did, this particular one didn’t. It isn’t real.

The report, as posted to various places on the Internet, claims, in part:

"…Another rule of secrecy was: You always camouflage your operations from prying eyes. It was not widely known to many that the Air Force and Navy were conducting classified rocket-launched reconnaissance payloads from White Sands, New Mexico, which failed to reach orbiting altitudes and subsequently crashed off range and generated considerable public interest in the United States and abroad.

"As part of a top secret Air Force atomic weapons detection project called MOGUL involving radiation dispersal in the atmosphere, selected monitoring sites across the United States were not acknowledged to by the Air Force and Central Intelligence Group

(CIG) and as a result, wreckage from one of the payloads was accidentally discovered by a sheep rancher not far from the Air Force’s Roswell Army Air Field.

"Also, another fact not widely known among military intelligence was that CIG had planned to utilize artificial meteor strikes as decoy devices ejected from V-2 warheads at 60 miles above the earth to record dispersal trajectories and possible psychological warfare weapons against the Soviets in the advent of a war in Europe.

"One of the projects underway at that time incorporated re-entry vehicles containing radium and other radioactive materials combined with biological warfare agents developed by I.G. Farben for use against allied assault forces in Normandy in 1944.

"When a V-2 warhead impacted near the town of Corona, New Mexico, on July 4, 1947, the warhead did not explode and it and the deadly cargo lay exposed to the elements which forced the Armed Forces Special Weapons Project to close off the crash site and a cover story was immediately put out that what was discovered was the remains of a radar tracking target suspended by balloons.

"In 1994 and again in 1995, the Air Force published what it considered the true account of what lay behind the Roswell story but omitted the radiological warhead data for obvious reasons.

"It may also be pointed out here that this kind of experiment was very similar to those conducted by the Atomic Energy Commission and the military in the late 1940’s. It was known in the CIA that the Soviets were conducting the same kind of radiological and biological warfare experiments in the early 1950’s after their successful detonation of a [sic] atomic bomb based on stolen documents and materials from Los Alamos forwarded to Moscow by communist espionage agents in the United States.

I suppose I should point out that in 1947, no one was thinking in terms of placing any sort of payload into orbit using the V-2. All the missions would be considered “sub-orbital” though many of them failed long before even that term could be applied. And for those who have forgotten their history, the Soviets first put a payload into orbit in late 1957, or ten years after the Roswell crash, whatever it might have been.

The real problem with this new document is the claim that “When a V-2 warhead impacted near the town of Corona, New Mexico, on July 4, 1947, the warhead did not explode and it and the deadly cargo lay exposed to the elements which forced the Armed Forces Special Weapons Project to close off the crash site…”

No record of this flight can be found. Back in the early 1990s, I researched all this carefully. I went to Alamogordo, to the Space Museum there and learned that something about the various flights out of White Sands. And, I went to White Sands to talk to the people there. I have a copy of White Sands History which “…narrates the development and testing of rockets and missiles at White Sands Missile Range, New Mexico, during the years 1945 through 1955.” It contains a record of every launch and according the documentation, no launch information is missing. All launches are accounted for.

Here’s what I know. On July 3, there was an attempted launch. According to the Albuquerque Journal of July 4, 1947, “Two men were burned seriously by acid and six others suffered minor burns early tonight as they prepared for the launching of a German V-2 rocket… A statement from Lt. Col. Harold Turner, proving grounds commandant, said an investigation has been ordered. Launching of the rocket, 25^thto be fired in a series of experiments here, was postponed indefinitely.”

That would certainly suggest there was no July 4 launch to fall to the ground near Corona. But the listings of all rockets in July 1947 suggest it was well. According to the White Sands History, a WAC Corporal E was launched on July 17 (much too late to drop material near Corona) with a note that said, “Small thrust developed and missile rose and impacted near launchers… main air regulator at fault.”

For the V-2, there was a launch on July 10 and it was noted, “Set yaw angle caused faulty course.” and for a second launch on July 29, the note said, “Steering vane 4 failed to operated at 27 secs — Success.”

There is nothing in the record to suggest there were any launches not mentioned in the history and all launches have been accounted for. There was nothing on July 4, 1947, and for all these reasons, I believe the document to be a fake.