His description of his encounters with the shapely and sexy Captain Rhanes read like a cross between Star Trek and Baywatch or a wild science fiction novel.
Area 51 The Revealing Truth of Ufos, Secret Aircraft, Cover-Ups & Conspiracies
On the night of November 2, 1952, Bethurum was out in the desert, actually very near to the town of Kingman, Arizona. Anxious to see his gorgeous Captain Rhanes again, Bethurum fired into the air one of several flares, supposedly given to him by his alien friends as a means of contacting them at any time. Sure enough, Rhanes and her crew were quickly on the scene.
For what was to be the final time, Bethurum was invited aboard the saucer, and the pair chatted at length about life on their respective worlds and their hobbies in much more of a friendly nature. Rhanes then escorted Bethurum out of the saucer and back to the desert floor, where they bid one another farewell. In a few moments, Bethurum was alone, standing in the stark desert darkness and watching in awe as the huge alien craft rose silently in the starlit sky.
It must be said at this juncture that much of Bethurum’s tale is, frankly, unbelievable. His description of his encounters with the shapely and sexy Captain Rhanes read like a cross between Star Trek and Baywatch or a wild science fiction novel. It would be easy to relegate Bethurum’s story to the realm of fiction and nothing else; certainly, many people within the UFO research community have done so without any hesitation whatsoever. Despite this, however, one particularly intriguing aspect to Bethurum’s otherwise fantastical tale may have a bearing on the story of Arthur Stansel that may even suggest that Bethurum wasn’t quite the fantasist that so many believed him to be.
When Arthur Stansel described the alien body found at the Kingman site in his 1973 affidavit, he stated that it was about four feet tall, dark brown in complexion, and had two eyes, two nostrils, two ears, and a small, round mouth.
It was also clothed in a silvery, metallic suit and wore a skullcap of the same type of material. Compare that with the aliens that Truman Bethurum claimed to have encountered in late 1952, mere months earlier, very near to Kingman: they were all olive-skinned, around five feet in height, and wearing uniforms and black caps. The location, the Kingman region, is the same in both stories (one of Bethurum’s encounters occurred right on the fringes of Kingman), and the aliens in both accounts were short in stature. Both Stansel and Bethurum said that the aliens wore uniforms and caps. As well, the body that Stansel saw had dark skin, and Bethurum’s aliens had olive skin. Bethurum’s encounters occurred in 1952.
The crash took place less than one year later. The similarities between the two accounts are admittedly striking. The wholly skeptical commentator might say that Bethurum simply made up his story after hearing of the Stansel revelations in the 1970s. However, this particular theory has an insurmountable problem: Bethurum’s account was published in 1954, less than one year after the alleged events at Kingman occurred and nearly two decades before Arthur Stansel even related his story to Jeff Young and Paul Chetham. Perhaps Bethurum was not the hoaxer that many people thought he was. All we can say with absolute certainty is that we have one controversial case—the Kingman affair—which seems to be somewhat corroborated by a highly emotive UFO story: the Bethurum saga.
Now we come to a story that takes the Kingman case in a completely different direction—but which still involves small bodies. U.S. Air Force files demonstrate that in the same precise time frame of the Kingman crash—specifically during the Atomic Energy Commission’s Operation Upshot-Knothole tests that Arthur Stansel played a role in on the Nevada Test and Training Range—the military was secretly test-flying drone aircraft in the Nevada/Arizona area with monkeys onboard. While the image of an unmanned drone aircraft packed with a crew of monkeys flying across the deserts of the Southwest might sound laughable and bizarre in the extreme, official papers establishing that such tests were indeed undertaken have surfaced.
They were released into the public domain via the terms of the Freedom of Information Act and are housed at the National Archives, Maryland, where they can be viewed and studied by the general public and historians.
A document titled “Early Cloud Penetration,” dated January 27, 1956, and prepared by the Air Research and Development Command at Kirtland Air Force Base, New Mexico, states in part: “In the event of nuclear warfare the AF is confronted with two special problems. First is the hazard to flight crews who may be forced to fly through an atomic cloud. Second is the hazard to ground crews who maintain the aircraft after it has flown through the cloud.…
In the 1953 Upshot-Knothole tests, monkeys were used so that experiments could be conducted on larger animals nearer the size of man. QF-80 drone aircraft were used, their speed more nearly approximating that of current operational aircraft.” The QF-80 aircraft were actually a modified USAF P-80 Shooting Star aircraft that had been converted to drone status via an operation known as Project Bad Boy, which fell under the jurisdiction of a contractor called Perry Gyroscope, and that’s not all. The document clearly states that the monkeys onboard the aircraft were dressed in “various types of protective clothing” and wore skullcaps. A closer match to Stansel’s admittedly alcohol-fueled and embellished description of the creature he saw would be very difficult to find, indeed.
Where, today, do we stand with this curious, cosmic case? We have initial testimony from a military source that seemed credible (the story of Arthur Stansel as related to Jeff Young and Paul Chetham in 1971) but which was subsequently thrown into a significant degree of doubt when it was revealed that Stansel had changed his story and exaggerated the facts after having imbibed his favorite beverages of the boozy kind. Of course, all of this means that we really have no choice but to look at the whole thing with a firm degree of caution.
However, the additional data on the Kingman story still suggests that we should give Stansel the benefit of the doubt. What about the bizarre story of Truman Bethurum? In retrospect, it does seem to fit in with certain salient points in the Stansel revelations, but the fact that Bethurum firmly stuck to such a bizarre tale of ethereal dalliances with a hot babe from the stars only adds even more controversy to the tale.
The question must be asked as to where I stand on all of this. Admittedly, for a significant period of time, I believed that a UFO of extraterrestrial origins crashed near Kingman, Arizona, in May 1953. Today, I am far less inclined to go down that path and far more inclined to believe—although, admittedly, cannot prove—that the object found in Kingman was indeed one of the secret drone aircraft remotely flown through the ominous mushroom clouds borne out of Operation Upshot-Knothole just one state over, in Nevada.
After all, recall that Stansel was informed by his superiors that the Kingman craft was a secret experimental vehicle of the U.S. military, although this assertion was complicated by Stansel’s later claim that this was merely a cover story to hide the crash of a UFO. Moreover, during the course of his first interview—with Young and Chetham—Stansel described the vehicle as being barely twelve feet long, metallic aluminum in color and appearance, and teardrop-or cigar-shaped. The resemblance of this description to a piece of fuselage of one of the QF-80 aircraft utilized in the Nevada Test and Training Range-based Operation Upshot-Knothole “monkey flights” can’t be ignored.
One only has to take a look at a photograph of one of these aircraft to get a sense of the undeniable resemblance. Finally, is it really feasible that a UFO piloted by a small alien entity should
happen to have crashed in the same location and within the same time frame that secret Air Force aircraft with a number of small primates aboard were flying around? The answer is surely no. Although I don’t usually subscribe to the false “either-or” dichotomy, in this case, it simply has to be one or the other.
That said, even though the Kingman UFO tale seems to have been borne out of exaggeration of a real but wholly down-to-earth event, which has largely been amplified by unnamed whistle-blowers of the type that contacted Leonard Stringfield in the late 1970s and early 1980s, we should perhaps not totally discount the story. We should always strive to be grounded, methodical, and, above all, logical in our pursuits of the UFO kind, and we should avoid falling into the trap of wanting to believe that the Kingman crash had alien or military origins; after all, this kind of bias or predilection is a huge impediment to getting to the truth of any matter. The subject of UFOs is a truly strange one: it is filled with halls of mirrors and smoke, with conspiracies within conspiracies, and with truths that may be lies and lies that may be truths.
Kingman RIP? To slightly mangle a well-used quote from The X-Files: The jury is still out there.
One final thing: we should not forget the location of the atomic bomb test— the Nevada Test and Training Range, which houses Area 51—that, according to Stansel, may well have inadvertently blasted the craft out of the sky, causing it to crash in the State of Arizona. Like the story of Bob Lazar, one takes it or one leaves it.