Area 51 The Revealing Truth of Ufos, Secret Aircraft, Cover-Ups & Conspiracies
Within the realm of UFO research, and even within the media and the general populace, very few people have not heard of the so-called Roswell Incident. It is a strange, sensational saga of conspiracy and duplicity that suggests that nothing less than an alien spacecraft, complete with a crew, catastrophically crashed on a remote ranch in the New Mexico desert during the summer of 1947. As of this writing, the Air Force’s official position on Roswell is that the affair can be explained in wholly conventional and down-to-earth terms: the unusual wreckage found at the crash site, says the military, originated with a secret, high-altitude balloon project, called Project Mogul, which was designed to monitor early Soviet atomic bomb tests.
As for the strange bodies found at the scene, according to the Air Force, they were nothing stranger than a bunch of crash test dummies that had been used in military parachute experiments. Die-hard UFO researchers scoffed at such assertions and accused the U.S. government of engaging in a cover-up of The X-Files proportions in order to hide the decidedly extraterrestrial truth. Roswell is not alone in this; far more than a few reports suggest that aliens may have visited the Earth, only to fatally crash and burn.
One such event, with a couple of Area 51-and Nevada-themed threads running through it, is alleged to have occurred in May 1953 in a desert locale on the fringes of the town of Kingman, Arizona.
The genesis of the story can be traced back to early February 1971. At the time, Jeff Young and Paul Chetham were two new and enthusiastic UFO investigators who were digging into a truly sensational story that, if true, strongly suggested that intelligent life existed outside of the confines of our own world. These amazing revelations came from a man named Arthur Stansel, who was a good friend of Young’s family and who claimed to have had personal, firsthand knowledge of a crashed UFO and alien body recovery near Kingman on May 21, 1953.
During the course of a face-to-face, tape-recorded interview with Young and Chetham, Stansel—who held a master’s degree in engineering and who took part in the D-Day landings at Normandy, France, during the Second World War —recounted that in 1953, he was working at the ultra-secret Nevada Test and Training Range, which, as you know, is home to Area 51. It was the location of a then-recent atomic bomb test that had been a part of a larger series of tests known as Operation Upshot-Knothole.
This operation was just the latest in a whole series of atmospheric nuclear weapons-based tests that fell under the jurisdiction of the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC), all of which were conducted on land overseen by the NT&TR from March 17 to June 4, 1953. Still on the issue of the matter of Operation Upshot-Knothole, on several occasions, Stansel speculated that perhaps the incredible blast from one of the bomb tests inadvertently caused the UFO to go wildly out of control, cascading and finally crashing in the next state over, Arizona.
Stansel began by telling the astonished-but-excited duo that late one night, he and a colleague observed nothing less than an honest-to-goodness UFO soar across the skies near the site. Ultimately, however, Stansel had much more to impart than a sketchy story of a hard-to-define aerial encounter. As he felt more and more comfortable telling his story, he gradually divulged the details of what would become known as the Kingman affair to the unsuspecting Young and Chetham.
Stansel stressed that the incident had taken place during his brief tenure with the U.S. Air Force’s UFO investigation program, known as Project Blue Book. He had received a telephone call from the base commander at Wright- Patterson in Dayton, Ohio, with orders for him to fly to Phoenix, Arizona. From there, Stansel was driven to the crash site of what he was told was a secret Air Force project gone awry. Upon his arrival at the site—which he was certain was situated on the fringes of Kingman—Stansel could not fail to see the unusual object.
This was no classic flying saucer, however; rather, the object was shaped like a cross between a teardrop and a cigar. Moreover, it was small, barely twelve feet long, but that was not all: it had a body. According to Stansel, this was no human body. Yes, it had arms, legs, a torso, and a head, but it was only about four feet tall, its skin was dark, and its facial features were manifestly different than those of a human being. The truth soon dawned on the shocked Stansel: a spaceship from another world had just crashed at Kingman … or had it?
The Kingman case is a truly unique one that contains a near-infinite number of curious plotlines and countless characters—some named and speaking on the record and others wholly anonymous, shadowy, and Deep Throat-like in nature. Numerous twists and turns abound. High-level conspiracies and halls of mirrors are all-dominating. Adventure, intrigue, fantastic truths, outrageous lies, official duplicity, and suspicious deaths are merely the collective tip of this allegedly intergalactic iceberg. Just like near Roswell, New Mexico, in July 1947, something strange and significant happened outside of Kingman, Arizona, in May 1953. Let’s see what.
Aside from being mentioned in an April 23, 1973, article in the Massachusetts-based Middlesex News, not much else came of the Kingman story —for a while, anyway; however, a man named Raymond Fowler, a well- respected UFO investigator and author, read the article and was intrigued. As Fowler began to dig into the story, he discovered something amazing and near- synchronistic: both he and Arthur Stansel were employed by the very same company. Fowler wasted no time in contacting Stansel, and the pair met in Stansel’s office at noon on May 4, 1973. The Kingman case was about to be taken to a whole new level.
Fowler, admittedly, had some deep concerns about both the witness and his story, since it soon became clear that the tale Stansel told to him was radically different from what had been imparted to Chetham and Young two years previously. Stansel explained, somewhat awkwardly and with a degree of embarrassment, that this discrepancy arose from a basic confusion regarding the dates as well as from the fact that he had been under the influence of four martinis when he was interviewed back in 1971. Stansel admitted that when the booze kicked in, he was often prone to exaggeration. Not a good thing when you’re trying to convince someone that you saw a dead alien whose craft may have been brought out of the sky from an atomic bomb detonated on the Nevada Test and Training Range.