Reports of Unidentified Flying Object – Part 2: . . . To the Burst of Dawn
From my perspective, the official cover-up and the ways to control it seem as effective as ever up to the Fall of 1987. Both the Kentucky and Ohio incidents, described in Part I, which involved civilians, show that anything goes, from trickery to threats, to keep the facts hidden.
Then, throughout 1988, like the burst of dawn, some thing changed. Whether or not the iron lid had loosened, more people, and concerned people, suddenly became more vocal. Of concern were the implications of MJ -12, the meaning of abductions, the flap of low-level UFOs in the Blue Ridge Mountains of Virginia, the Gulf Breeze affair, and what was said and left unsaid on the TV documentary, UFO Cover-Up? Live about alien-human relations by two disguised informers, “Condor” and “Falcon. ” (The identities of both “birds” are known to me. Condor was an Air Force officer stationed at Wright Patterson AFB in September 1985, during which time he called me on several occasions. Expressing interest in my research and my sources, he claimed to know a colonel with sensitive information relative to my work, but his proposal for me to meet with this source fell through and I heard no more. Later I learned that he confided with a member of the Fund for UFO Research and after that with Bill Moore, etc .) Yes, things have changed: this is reflected in my volume of mail and the phone calls I get at all hours. Is the cover up, then, in a “calculated” countdown from ten to a three, two, one, and lifting?
Frankly, I do not think the time is right for a sudden formal announcement of alien “visitors” by the world powers, which would have unpredictable effects on society. If the press were suddenly to wake up and demand the bottom line on all the UFO happenings in the MJ- 12 files, or were to confirm the horrors described in an expose of the alleged secret Project Grudge Report #13, re leased by a former Air Force officer, Bill English, then we would have more to worry about than just the stock market.
But maybe the cover-up is loosening a little because of new pressures, or guilt, or leaks, or the fear of more Falcons and Condors. Maybe we are being spoonfed in various ways, and the masqueraded Falcon and Condor are only doing their job. But, while the media still sleeps, amid all the UFO “noise,” I have seen a change on my thermostat. For whatever reason, I am suddenly getting more C/R input.
Pennsylvania, 1965
Thanks to the in-depth research of Stan Gordon, Director of the Pennsylvania Association for the Study of the Unexplained (PASU), the Kecksburg crash/retrieval case of December 9, 1965 may now find recognition as a classic in the annals of ufology. Considering the number of wit nesses tracked down by the PASU group, it may even rank with Roswell.
As Case B-2, the incident -was originally reviewed in Status Report II by Clark McClelland, but at that time, save for knowing that something had crashed and was retrieved, there was some uncertainty about the nature of the object. The Air Force, of course, explained it away as a meteorite; others suggested space debris. Gordon, how ever, accepted neither explanation as more information and Freedom of Information Act data surfaced. In the spirit of cooperation, he kept me informed.
Then in 1987, by good fortune, Stan met “Pete,” who showed up at a PASU UFO exhibit at a local mall. Having feared ridicule for twelve years, he finally decided to tell his story. It began at the age of nineteen, as a fireman, when his unit in a nearby village was summoned by the Kecksburg authorities to help in the search for something that had crashed in a wooded area-possibly an aircraft.
But the shocker came, he said, when the crash site was located . Instead of an aircraft, they found something else a large acorn-shaped object embedded deep in the ground.
Armed with Pete’s new information, Gordon published the full Kecksburg story in the final quarter issue of Pursuit, in which he reports the UFO’s flight pattern across several states, tells of the first-hand experiences of local residents who saw the “fireball ” crash and of others who witnessed the sudden, incursive “take-over” by the military to perform the retrieval operation. According to Gordon, many of the local citizens viewed the action as constituting a state of martial law, and he comments, “Many were influenced enough by their contacts with military or local authorities to the effect that they refused to discuss what they saw or were told, even to this day. “
Before being chased from the crash site by the retrieval team, Pete and COIJlpanions had a close-hand look at the semi-submerged mystery object. To them, it appeared that the object had descended at about a 30° angle and had broken tree limbs and knocked down a fifteen- to twenty foot-high tree before impacting. The trench was about twenty-five feet long and at the greatest depth was about seven feet. It was puzzling that there were no signs of fire.
The size of the acorn-shaped UFO (which had no windows or seams) could not be determined because of its sub merged position, but it was estimated to have been about seven feet high and wide.
In trying to give a better description of the craft, Pete said that it gave him the impression of a deflated beach ball pushed in, and toward the bottom there was a ring or bumper-like structure about eight to ten inches wide that seemed to cover the circumference of the object. He said that on this bumper, which was raised up off the surface, was a writing that looked like Egyptian hieroglyphics. He remembered the characters of broken and straight lines, dots, rectangles and circles. As a machinist for twenty five years and familiar with metals, solid and liquid, he observed, “Never in my life have I seen the color of that metal in any shape or form. “
Pete said that he will never forget the excitement on his return to the Kecksburg fireball, which had been set up as a command post. It was swarming with military personnel mostly Air Force-and a lot of equipment was being carried in. Soon guards were at the front entrance and the firemen, before being dismissed from the building, were told to use the outside toilets .
There is much more to Gordon’s article, like his learning later that Air Force records showed that NORAD’s Space Detection and Tracking System (SPADATS) did not have any space junk re-entering Earth’s atmosphere that day. Thanks to Gordon, I was privileged to interview Pete on the basis that I would not use his name. Once this was agreed, Pete gave me his complete story, confirming Gordon’s version.
I asked Pete about the hieroglyphics, wondering if they could be Russian. “No way! ” he said. “I’m of Russian Polish descent and can read Russian. It was not Russian, nor American. ” He added, “I ‘ll stake my life on it: the object was not man-made. “
New Mexico, 1947
The crash and recovery of an “?lien” object near Ros well, New Mexico, in July 1947, so well-documented by Bill Moore and Stan Friedman and others, is a case that should cause skeptics to think twice before they impugn the existence of UFOs or the plausibility of the extra terrestrial hypothesis.
Though most of Roswell’s first-hand witnesses were civilian , the overall evidence supporting this ” nuts-and bolts” incident is massive, and of significance, ironically, is the report that news of the UFO ‘s discovery at the base slipped out in an “uncleared” press release by the PIO, 1st Lt. Walter Haut. Had it not been for a fast and effective cover-up, the full story, once in the public domain, could have re-written what we know as history. Having been informed, perhaps mankind in his philosophical and geo political pursuits would have chosen a wiser course.
Except for rumors, the truth about Roswell did not sur face until 1978, when the late Jesse Marcel told a NBC radio newsman, Steve Tom, in Chicago, about his official role as the intelligence officer assigned to the crash site to retrieve the scattered debris. On April 7, 1978, Tom called me and linked me up with Marcel in Houma, Louisiana, to get his story first-hand. This led to other calls to Mareel, and upon learning that we had both served in the 5th Air Force during World War II, in the same combat areas in Leyte, Philippines, we developed a feeling of camaraderie and talked about meeting together for a UFO discussion in the near future.
Marcel confirmed that the debris he combed from the crash site on the Brazel ranch was not the remains of a balloon and that he had observed on a fragment of metal beam a row of symbols looking like hieroglyphics. (See Status Report II, case A-10, and the foregoing Kecksburg case. ) Regretfully, I never got to meet Jesse Marcel. Stan Friedman did conduct an interview which appears in The Roswell Incident (see Appendix), and the following extract is a statement by Marcel that left some questions unanswered:
” . . . that afternoon, we loaded everything into a B-29 on orders from Colonel Blanchard and flew it all to Ft. Worth. I was scheduled to fly it all the way to Wright Field in Ohio, but when we got to Carswell at Ft. Worth, the general nixed it. He took control at this point, and ordered me not to talk to the press under any circumstances . I was pulled off the flight and someone else was assigned to fly the stuff up to Wright Field . . . ” [Author’s italics] My status reports do pay off. Thanks to one reader, John August, in Hawaii, I got the “missing link” referred to by Marcel as his replacement who flew the Roswell remains to Wright Field. August followed up his initial phone call with a letter, dated Labor Day 1988, which states in part: ” . . .
Confirmation of the Roswell crash reached me through a Maui resident, who claimed that her father, Captain O.W.Henderson, flew the retrieved spaceship from Roswell to Wright Field on a B-29. According to Henderson’s wife who was reached by phone, a news officer reported the incident but it was quickly quieted down. On February 17 , 1981 , the story appeared in the tabloid, Globe, and Henderson admitted to his wife and daughter that the story was true. The crew, she said, were little people with exceptionally large heads.
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. . . At the time, Henderson was stationed with the 509th Bomb Group at Roswell . . . an elite group for which all involved required high-security clearances. Besides being a highly decorated pilot during WWII, with over 30 combat missions, Henderson was in charge of the movement of all passengers and freight trans ported by air for organizations participating in the atomic bomb tests and the Manhattan Project . . . “
Enclosed, as a result of August’s attentive spadework, were copies of photos showing Captain Henderson and flight crew, and a letter of commendation for an “excellent job accomplished” from Carl Spaatz, Commanding General, AAF, forwarded to Colonel William Blanchard, Commander, 509th Bomb Group.
For verification, August footnoted his letter with Mrs. Henderson’s address and phone number. Calling her on October 1 , 1988, I explained my work; asked many questions to which she cordially responded, and got approval to publish her name in this report. She said that her husband, known as “Pappy” among his buddies, passed away in 1986, and stated unequivocally that he transported the Roswell wreckage to Wright Field and kept the secret faithfully until 1981 . She remembers .his comment, “I ‘ve been dying to tell you for years, but couldn’t. It was top secret. “
When I asked Mrs. Henderson i f her husband had ever described the object he transported, she replied that all he said was that “It was strange, ” avoiding details.
Avoiding details, it seems, goes with the business of co vert work if one must talk at all . And so it was with an other source who revealed some information about his stealthy activity at Roswell in 1947 .
The source, Bev, is British; her father a former American serviceman, a staff sergeant who took up residence in England following duty in the Pacific theater, World War II, and notably with the 509th Bomb Group at Walker Field, Roswell. According to records, he was at Roswell during the same time as Major Jesse Marcel and Captain O. W.Henderson.
Bev, referred to me by Timothy Good in 1988, is, by the tone of her letters and phone calls , sincere in trying to verify her dad’s alleged participation in the Roswell retrieval case. She sent me copies of all his military records, which confirm his assignment at Walker Field in Roswell, such as medical records, one with orders “cut” for hospitalization at the base for both him and Jesse Marcel , and his pass to the base’s Non Commissioned Officers’ Club, dated July 1947. (These records are also in my files. I have had several meetings with Bev, her sisters and mother, and am convinced that they are telling the truth-Editor.]
As a child, Bev recalls her dad talking about his hush hush work at Roswell, and whenever he described the non descript bodies, her response was to giggle. The subject never came up much, she said, until she was a teenager. Once, she recalls, he had read a feature story in a news paper about a UFO crash and, looking grim, he told her about his experiences of standing guard where the wreck age was stored and during the retrieval of the bodies, and cautioned his family to keep it quiet lest he get into trouble. According to Bev’s letter, she recalled the following: “
. . . he stood guard once outside a hangar where a crashed saucer was stored. He couldn’t see anything as it was all packed up and ready to be flown out to Texas the next day . . . . W e disagree on the number of bodies he saw. I ‘m sure he said two, but one of my sisters said three . . . All available men stood guard duty around the site where a crashed disc had come down and they couldn’t understand why [the bodies] had to be kept cold, as there were trucks office . . .
Although he and others were told they would get into trouble if they saw too much, they did look under the cover and saw two small dead bodies. He said they were like us, but not like us. They were smaller than a nor mal man with large heads and slanted eyes. He also said they looked yellowish, a bit Asian . . . .
I remember when I got older and asked for more in formation, he got angry and said, ‘That’s all I know and I shouldn’t have told you that much . ‘ Whenever he talked about it, he always looked worried . . . . ”
His last words, according to Bev, were about Roswell, before he died in hospital in February 1986.
Fort Dix-McGuire AFB, 1978
When I last made contact in January 1987 with Jeff Morse, the former “Blue Beret” who lifted the lid off the Ft. Dix McGuire affair, I felt that my chase for more supportive information, at least through him, had ended, and I was back on the treadle of the proverbial squirrel’s cage.
As agreed, Morse met with Dick Hall, his brother William, Dr. Bruce Maccabee, and myself in a busy mall near Washington, DC. Over lunch, he openly answered any questions about the incident, but grimaced over the tangled and costly prospects of his current legal pursuits in Federal Court involving an incident of harassment (see MUFON UFO Journal, June 1987). On departure, he said he planned to return to his work overseas. I wished him well and thought of the seven years I had spent investigating his case. There has been no word from Morse since, but his words that day left the four of us believing that he was telling the truth about the ill-fated alien interloper.
Since I presented Morse’s story in .Status Report IV at the MUFON Symposium in St. Louis in 1985, there was a spark of hope in 1986 of getting a new source as a backup; a former master sergeant who was stationed at Ft. Dix in January 1978. According to Pat Marcattilio, a MU FON investigator in New Jersey, the source, “Mr. S. , ” whom he knew at a place of previous ·employment, told him that he heard the rumors about the incident and, in his own time, tried to round up the facts. But he got no where and learned that all records, tapes, etc . , had been destroyed. He was also advised to stop snooping. When Marcattilio later tried to get more details from “Mr.S. ” he said, “He seemed very nervous and refused to talk about it. “
In September 1988 a new source with convincing credentials called me about the incident. As a MUFON state section director in New Jersey, presently serving as Vice President of the Air Force Association, he had been an intelligence officer with the rank of major at McGuire AFB in January 1978. Although not a witness to the retrieval operations, he had been in a key position to put the twos-and-twos together enough to give credence to the story told by Morse.
His letter of September 6, in part, follows:
. . . I attempted to recall as best I could the report of the alien being shot on the base back in January 1978. My job was Deputy Director of the 21st Air Force Intelligence 438th Mil itary Wing Intelligence. In this dual role, we were responsible for briefing both the 21st Air Force Commander, who con trolled all military airlift aircraft in half the world over to India, and the Wing Commander at McGuire AFB.
I remember walking into the 21st Command Post and most people were talking about an incident that had occurred on the base during the night. The report was that an alien, a short little guy, had died from a gunshot wound. No one seemed to know where he came from or what he was doing on the base. At first it was treated as a joke and that the Security Police must have meant an alien from another country, like Mexico.
Usually, I would brief the Commander, Major General Tom Sadler, on anything important that occurred during the night. We were concerned about acts of terrorism, hijacking, and Soviet movements that could be a threat to our aircraft. Normally, if something was felt to be important, I would either brief the General in a stand-up briefing in the Command Post, or if it was classified above “Secret, ” in his office . . . .
Later in the morning I was told that Intelligence would not brief the General on the alien; that the Security Police Commander or a Liaison Officer was handling it. Later in the day I saw the officer, who was a Lt. Colonel (name unknown), coming out of the General’s office. He looked tired and some what under pressure. He said “Hello. ” I expected the Lt. Colonel to fill me in on the situation, but he avoided saying anything . . . Assuming this was an alien , I wonder how he got lost from his craft?
The answer to my source’s question comes from still another officer, allegedly on the scene in early January during a phase of significant UFO activity over the two large military compounds. During this phase, I was told, one of the craft had malfunctioned and crash-landed. One survivor of the crew, lost and starving, managed to reach the outer perimeter near a guard post at Ft. Dix and was shot by an MP. My source said that the interloper, mortally wounded, was later found dead at McGuire. Here (relying on Morse’s testimony), the “alien” was retrieved from an abandoned airstrip.
The Lt. Colonel who briefed General Sadler (referred to by the intelligence officer in his letter) had been previously identified by Morse as his commanding officer, whose name was made known to me. His name, rank, and serial number, as well as the officers who interrogated Morse at Wright-Patterson AFB following the incident, had all been authenticated by the National Personnel Records Center, St. Louis, in 1985 .
Also of interest is a letter of September 12, 1985, from the New Jersey State Police, in response to a letter from Robert Bletchman, an attorney in Manchester, Connecticut, asking about accessibility to their records of alleged involvement in the incident.
They replied:
” . . . Please be advised that it has been , and continues to- be, the policy of the New Jersey State Police, that the records, radio logs and other documents maintained at our stations are privileged and are to be kept confidential. We further advise that we do not consider them to be within the public domain in conjunction with general disclosure, etc . . . . “
This information should answer those who queried the State Police about its involvement and were told that they have no such records. For me, the evidence collected over eight years of investigation into this case may not prove that UFOs are real or extraterrestrial , but it does show that such incidents , if true, would be difficult to explain to a benighted public. Thus, the cover-up. ·
Norton AFB, 1973
John Lear, an airline pilot who is MUFON State Director for Nevada, undaunted in his pursuit of people, anywhere, to get UFO facts, has lectured extensively and broadcast on radio and TV in Las Vegas. Listening on one occasion was “Mike” (real name withheld on request), who sur faced in September 1988 to tell Lear his first-hand story.
Admittedly troubled by his experience, Mike explained that in 1973 he had been an Air Force photographer stationed in Hawaii, following duty in Vietnam. His prime duty there was processing gun-camera film. One day, he said, he was notified that his security clearance had been ungraded, and several weeks later he and another photographer in his unit were flown for a temporary duty assignment to Norton AFB in California.
Lear’s letter to me, dated November 21 , 1988, recounting briefly his interview with Mike, is paraphrased as follows:
On landing at Norton, Mike and his companion were taken by Air Force vehicle with windows blacked out on a two hour drive. During the drive, Mike was told by the driver, “So you guys are going to photograph the UFO, eh?”
The vehicle came to a halt on a platform which was then lowered into a large underground installation. Escorted to a briefing room, they were told that they were to photograph a flying saucer and the autopsy of three dead aliens. Ordered to disrobe, they were issued white smocks and combat boots for security purposes. Mike was then escorted into the installation where he saw a disk-shaped craft about thirty feet in diameter, contained in a heavy net suspended from a large crane.
Mike was boosted into the opening of the disk (there were no stairs or ramp) and proceeded to crawl inside. He was shocked, he said, to find that the inside looked to be about ten times the size of the outside. “I could have thrown a football as hard as I could and not hit the other side,” he commented. Disoriented, Mike poked his head back outside to check the size, which appeared to be about thirty feet in diameter as before. Once inside, he met two persons similarly clothed who showed him what they wanted photographed. He shot many photos of control panels and various other fixtures, and was later asked to photograph the exterior from different angles and distances.
Mike was later taken to a room in which there were three dead aliens. He described them as approximately five feet tall, with almost normal human heads, except that the eyes were more rounded. The skin texture was like baking dough, and very white. Before the autopsy the aliens had been dressed in blue uniforms, like flight suits.
As the initial incisions were made for the autopsy, Mike saw green fluid and black innards. At this time he became ill and called for the other photographer to continue the assignment. Later that day they were driven back to Nor ton, where they spent the night before being flown back to Hawaii the next day. About two months later Mike’s companion disappeared, and neither Mike nor his family have heard from him since.
The year 1973 brings to mind Case A-2, Status Report II, where three humanoids were examined at Wright-Patterson AFB. While the head sizes described in each case differ, and the body heights also differ by a foot or so, the description of the skin is strikingly similar. According to the sergeant in Case A-2, who stood guard in the underground facility, the color was “off-white or cream . ” Both observers, it should be noted, were admittedly traumatized by the sight of alien bodies, which could account for visual differences of anatomical sizes and heights.
Suspicious Deaths
For those of us in research who wonder or worry about the rigors of the cover-up, so effective for a long time, there is the suspicion that the reason for it must be compelling; in fact, so compelling that it may explain why it is maintained at any price-even at the price of sudden death for those having sensitive information who may talk too much.
Evidence of such thinking finds support in the recent disclosure of a retired police officer, with twenty-two years of service, in an eastern state. Through the co-operation of John Ford, head of the Long Island UFO Network, I first received word, on August 5, 1988, that his source had information concerning a crashed disk and the recovery of seven bodies in a western state, which in some way also involved the FBI.
Fulfilling Ford’s request for a notarized statement, ensuring his source’s anonymity, I then received his video taped interview with him. After viewing this, which firmly established the former officer’s credentials, I reached him by phone for his first-hand story.
It was in 1973, he said, that he was joined by two FBI agents in a special three-day training program for cadets on “behavioral science” at the police academy. One evening, after a long day’s work, he and the two agents went out to dine and relax, and the subject of UPOs came up. To his surprise, one talked about a crashed disk in Colorado and the recovery of bodies. “What he said next, ” added my informant, “I could tell by his ‘body English’ [body language] that he was disturbed. ” His concern was the means used to ensure the cover-up, stating that a doc tor, who had been called upon in the night for urgent medical needs, died suddenly of “cancer” three weeks later. At that point, according to my informant, he observed that the talkative agent was booted under the table by his companion. The subject was dropped and nothing was said about the FBI ‘s role in the affair.
Sudden and accidental death stories I have heard before. Never finding any substantiation, I relegated them to a quirk of orchestrated propaganda; probably a scare tactic to intimidate potential whistle-blowers.
Reports of suspicious deaths, darkly and deeply linked to UFOs, persist, however, and continue to cause speculation. Word comes from Gordon Creighton, editor of the informative Flying Saucer Review, who notes a possible deathly tie-in with the U.S. ““Star Wars” program.
He wrote to me in November 1988 as follows:
“…here in Britain 22 scientists have recently either taken their own lives or died in very strange or mysterious circumstances. And it seems that most . . . w ere engaged in British work on behalf of, ·or related to, the U.S. ‘Star Wars’ program. The British government, it seems, was trying to hush it up. But press statements here say that the U.S. government had put our government on the spot and demanded a full inquiry. So, quite clearly, it is either the Russians or THEM . . . “
As many researchers have surmised, “Star Wars,” ostensibly conceived as a defensive system against Russian missile attack, may have had from its beginning a “defensive” UFO connection. Whatever the case, a “mock test” in September 1988, of an earth-shattering warhead-much like “Star Wars” in reverse-was conducted at the Tonopah Test Range in Nevada. Announced as a proposed super-weapon designed to destroy Russian underground command centers dug in solid rock down to 1 ,000 meters, some UFO analysts believe that the real target is not Russian but another adversary deep down in cavernous installations in Nevada and New Mexico.
According to the Pentagon , the proposed earth penetrating warhead is “urgently needed. ” According to the rumor-mills, an alien race-the “grays” -in their fortressed underground laboratories, are genetically experimenting with the human race. Even more ominous, rumors say that their intransigence today may lead to new perils tomorrow.
It is beyond the scope of this paper to speculate on all the sinister machinations attributed to the alien super-race, but news of the British death syndrome and my awareness of other suspicious deaths and disappearances, allegedly connected to UFO crash and retrieval events, must be reckoned with. They may, indeed, have at least a peripheral pertinence to fears, causing suicide, or extreme security measures to maintain a monstrous cover-up.
At the time of writing (December 1988), I have four other sources with UFO crash/retrieval information not included in this report. Most, as far as I know, are in positions to throw strong light on the humanoid factor and other phases of retrieval operations, which could confirm information already cited in my previous paper. But at this stage, and in some instances being dependent on intermediaries, I find the material to be either too fragmentary, or too sensitive, to even hint at as to its nature.
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