Looking inside, the investigative team spied an oval-shaped cabin, two swivel chairs, and a variety of instruments and screens that did not resemble conventional aircraft technology.
Area 51 The Revealing Truth of Ufos, Secret Aircraft, Cover-Ups & Conspiracies
Although these issues raised some justifiable suspicions about the legitimacy (or otherwise) of the Stansel account as related to Fowler, it was still one that cried out for scrutiny and investigation—which is precisely what Fowler did. On June 7, 1973, Fowler procured a signed affidavit from Stansel, albeit one in which Stansel’s name was changed to the pseudonym of Fritz Werner— which, of course, in law, rendered the affidavit wholly meaningless and worthless. Nevertheless, the very fact that Stansel had been willing to put at least something in writing was encouraging if nothing else.
According to Stansel’s new—or, to be precisely accurate, modified— version of events, it was while on a very short assignment with the Air Force’s Project Blue Book that on May 21, 1953, he was flown to Phoenix, Arizona, then driven in a bus with blacked-out windows to a location not too far from the nearest significant landmark: Kingman. When Stansel spoke with Fowler, however, what he had originally described to Young and Chetham as a twelve- foot-long teardrop/cigar-shaped object had suddenly been transformed into an oval-shaped craft with a diameter of at least thirty feet—a definitive flying saucer, Stansel stressed to Fowler. That’s quite a difference. The exterior of the vehicle resembled brushed aluminum, Stansel added, and the craft had only penetrated about two feet into the ground, which suggested that a light, semicontrolled descent had occurred, rather than a violent crash.
The affidavit also described some kind of a hatch, about three feet high and roughly one foot wide, on the side of the craft that provided entrance to its interior. Looking inside, the investigative team spied an oval-shaped cabin, two swivel chairs, and a variety of instruments and screens that did not resemble conventional aircraft technology. Most significant of all, a small body was retrieved from the interior of the vehicle and was taken to a nearby, hastily constructed tent. Very humanlike, if small in stature, the presumed pilot had a pair of eyes, two nostrils, a small mouth, and two ears. It wore a silver-colored, one-piece suit, and atop its head sat what appeared to be a small skullcap made out of the same material as the suit.
Quite naturally and wholly understandably, Fowler had some concerns about the differences between the two narratives, but he did not discount Stansel’s story entirely. Quite the opposite: he continued to investigate it—and Stansel, too—with vigor. What he uncovered added a degree of credibility to Stansel’s new or reworked version of the events. Fowler was able to confirm that between June 1949 and January 1960, Stansel held a variety of engineering and management positions at the Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Dayton, Ohio, and that during the period in which the incident supposedly took place, Stansel worked in what was known at the time as the Air Materiel Command Installations Division within the Office of Special Studies. Stansel certainly did not appear to be a fool or a fantasist—quite the opposite, in fact.
These welcome discoveries with respect to Stansel’s career did not negate the fact that he had clearly told one story to Young and Chetham (after having had a good old head-spinning time quaffing a few martinis with his new buddies) and a very different one to Fowler. Many UFO researchers would have been inclined to walk away from the sorry saga, shaking their skeptical heads and uttering weary sighs; however, something happened that kept the Kingman candle burning: other sources came along with their own accounts of crashed UFOs in Arizona in 1953. A dubious case with just one solitary source suddenly became something much more.
In a 1978 research paper titled “Retrievals of the Third Kind”
In a 1978 research paper titled “Retrievals of the Third Kind” presented at the annual Mutual UFO Network (MUFON) Symposium of that year, former intelligence officer Leonard Stringfield related the story of a UFO researcher named Charles Wilhelm, whose father had, in turn, heard an account by a certain Major Daly of Daly’s flight to the site of a UFO crash in April 1953. Daly described how he was then blindfolded and driven out to a desert location. Once there, his blindfold was removed, and he was shown an undamaged, metallic craft close to thirty feet in diameter. All of this sounded very similar to what Fowler had heard from Stansel. Granted, the date was a month off, but Stringfield, a dedicated collector of crashed UFO stories, suggested a possible connection to the Stansel revelations.
Two years later, in 1980, Stringfield revealed how, midway through 1977, after lecturing on UFOs at Cincinnati’s Lunken Airport—to a group of pilots from the Cincinnati chapter of the World Wings group that used the airport’s administration building for its meetings—he was approached by a pilot who claimed to have been present at the site of a UFO crash in Arizona at some point in 1953. Again, shades of the Kingman affair.
Stringfield’s informant was unsure of the precise location of the 1953 crash, but he did add that it was a desert environment and that an unknown number of alien bodies had been transferred from the site in sealed crates to the Wright- Patterson Air Force Base. Like Stansel, the pilot claimed that these bodies were short in height and possessed eyes, a nose, and a mouth. He also claimed that one alien reportedly survived the initial impact but died shortly afterward, despite the best efforts of military medical personnel to save its life. A full fourteen years later, in 1994, Stringfield was still reporting on the Arizona events of 1953. In February of that year, Stringfield revealed the testimony of a new source—only identified as J. L. D.—who claimed knowledge of two UFO crashes in Arizona in 1953. Were these events connected with the Kingman case? We may never really know the answer to that question, as Stringfield passed away that same year, steadfastly refusing to ever reveal the true identity of J. L. D.
On December 3, 2006, Arthur Stansel died at the Good Shepherd Health Care Facility in Jaffrey, New Hampshire, thus taking with him to the grave whatever it was that he really knew about the Kingman conundrum. He was laid to rest at the Central Cemetery in New Ipswich, New Hampshire. Still, the Kingman saga rumbled on.
In the 1990s, a UFO investigator named Don Schmitt—who has cowritten several books on the Roswell controversy of 1947—spoke with a woman called Judy Woolcott, who had an intriguing tale of her own to tell concerning the Kingman crash. Her story centered on a strange letter that she had allegedly received in 1965 from her husband, who she said was serving in Vietnam at the time. In his letter, her husband expressed his fears that he would not be returning home alive. He also told her about something strange that he had seen twelve years previously. While she could not be absolutely certain of the exact month, Woolcott was positive that her husband had mentioned Kingman, Arizona, as the location. He was a military officer and was on duty when an unidentified flying object was picked up on radar. It soon began to lose altitude, however, and summarily vanished from the radar screen. Woolcott said that her husband felt sure that something had crashed, adding that casualties of the extraterrestrial kind had apparently occurred. She further claimed that her husband’s fears had proved to be ominously correct: he never did come home from Vietnam.
The tale of Judy Woolcott had the potential to take the Kingman case to a whole new level. After all, here was an outside source, with no ties whatsoever to Arthur Stansel, speaking on the record about a crashed UFO in 1953—and in the vicinity of Kingman, Arizona, no less. Unfortunately, her story ultimately crashed to the ground, too. Midway through 2010, the UFO investigative author Kevin Randle revealed his findings on the now deceased Woolcott’s claims, and those findings cast a degree of doubt upon the Kingman story: her tale utterly collapsed upon investigation, said Randle. No husband was killed in Vietnam, and even Woolcott’s own daughter, Kathryn Baez, admitted that her mother was prone to embellishing and sensationalizing stories and certain aspects of her personal life. The yarn was discarded.
This did not put an end to the Kingman controversy, however.
One of the most intriguing figures to surface vis-à-vis this affair was Bill Uhouse, a retired mechanical engineer from Las Vegas who claimed to have worked on classified projects at certain governmental locations in Nevada that focused upon the reverse engineering of recovered UFO technology. UFO investigator Norio Hayakawa says of Uhouse, in concise fashion: “Conspiracy theorists cite testimonies by several whistle-blowers as proof of ongoing work at Area 51 to reverse-engineer alien propulsion technology. One of the whistle-blowers was Bill Uhouse, a man in his 70s, who claimed he worked from 1966 through 1979 as an engineer at the top-secret Area 51 facility in collaboration with a Grey alien. According to Uhouse, who passed away in 2009, he worked as a mechanical engineer at Area 51 with a Grey alien known as ‘J-Rod.’” Uhouse’s story is a strange one, and much of it is beyond the scope of the Kingman story. However, the UFO researcher Bill Hamilton dug deep into the claims of Uhouse, who also asserted that no fewer than four alien entities had been found alongside the Kingman UFO and that all of them had survived the crash, albeit with varying degrees of injury. Somewhat ominously, Uhouse also asserted that several members of the team involved in the retrieval were later afflicted by what was suspected of being an unknown biological agent: possibly a dangerous, alien virus. In 2006, new and provocative data surfaced regarding this last statement via an unnamed source who claimed a background within the U.S. intelligence community. This source’s story can be found at www.serpo.org. According to the information on the website, the Kingman crash did indeed occur, and, just as Bill Uhouse claimed, four aliens had been found at the site, two severely injured and two in reasonably good condition. As well, a number of the military retrieval team members suffered adverse physical affects by their exposure to the craft and the bodies.
Uhouse died in 2009, but back in the early 2000s, he prepared a statement —made public and for open consumption—regarding his involvement in the Kingman affair and its ties to Area 51. I was fortunate enough to meet Uhouse at one of Ryan Wood’s annual UFO Crash-Retrieval Conferences in Las Vegas, Nevada (which ran from 2003 to 2009), and Uhouse generously gave me permission to use his statement. It reads as follows:
I spent 10 years in the Marine Corps, and four years working with the Air Force as a civilian doing experimental testing on aircraft since my Marine Corps days. I was a pilot in the service, and a fighter pilot; fought in after the latter part of WWII and the Korean War Conflict, I was discharged as a Captain in the Marine Corps. I didn’t start working on flight simulators until about—well the year was 1954, in September. After I got out of the Marine Corps, I took a job with the Air Force at Wright Patterson doing experimental flight-testing on various different modifications of aircraft.
While I was at Wright Patterson, I was approached by an individual who—and I’m not going to mention his name—[wanted] to determine if I wanted to work in an area on new creative devices. Okay? And, that was a flying disc simulator. What they had done: they had selected several of us, and they reassigned me to A-Link Aviation, which was a simulator manufacturer. At that time they were building what they called the C-11B, and F-102 simulator, B-47 simulator, and so forth.
They wanted us to get experienced before we actually started work on the flying disc simulator, which I spent 30-some years working on.
I don’t think any flying disc simulators went into operation until the early 1960s—around 1962 or 1963. The reason why I am saying this is because the simulator wasn’t actually functional until around 1958.
The simulator that they used was for the extraterrestrial craft they had, which is a 30-meter one that crashed in Kingman, Arizona, back in 1953 or 1952. That’s the first one that they took out to the test flight.
This ET craft was a controlled craft that the aliens wanted to present to our government—the U.S.A. It landed about 15 miles from what used to be an army air base, which is now a defunct army base. But that particular craft, there were some problems with: number one—getting it on the flatbed to take it up to Area 51. They couldn’t get it across the dam because of the road. It had to be barged across the Colorado River at the time, and then taken up Route 93 out to Area 51, which was just being constructed at the time. There were four aliens aboard that thing, and those aliens went to Los Alamos for testing.
They set up Los Alamos with a particular area for those guys, and they put certain people in there with them—people that were astrophysicists and general scientists—to ask them questions. The way the story was told to me was: there was only one Alien that would talk to any of these scientists that they put in the lab with them. The rest wouldn’t talk to anybody, or even have a conversation with them. You know, first they thought it was all ESP or telepathy, but you know, most of that is kind of a joke to me, because they actually speak—maybe not like we do—but they actually speak and converse. But there was only one who would.
The difference between this disc, and other discs that they had looked at was that this one was a much simpler design. The disc simulator didn’t have a reactor, [but] we had a space in it that looked like the reactor that wasn’t the device we operated the simulator with. We operated it with six large capacitors that were charged with a million volts each, so there were six million volts in those capacitors. They were the largest capacitors ever built. These particular capacitors, they’d last for 30 minutes, so you could get in there and actually work the controls and do what you had to—to get the simulator, the disc to operate.
So, it wasn’t that simple, because we only had 30 minutes. Okay? But, in the simulator you’ll notice that there are no seat belts.
Right? It was the same thing with the actual craft—no seat belts. You don’t need seat belts, because when you fly one of these things upside down, there is no upside down like in a regular aircraft—you just don’t feel it. There’s a simple explanation for that: you have your own gravitational field right inside the craft, so if you are flying upside down—to you—you are right side up. I mean, it’s just really simple, if people would look at it. I was inside the actual alien craft for a start- up.
There weren’t any windows. The only way we had any visibility at all was done with cameras or video-type devices. My specialty was the flight deck and the instruments on the flight deck. I knew about the gravitational field and what it took to get people trained. Because the disc has its own gravitational field, you would be sick or disoriented for about two minutes after getting in, after it was cranked up. It takes a lot of time to become used to it. Because of the area and the smallness of it, just to raise your hand becomes complicated. You have to be trained—trained with your mind, to accept what you are going to actually feel and experience.
Just moving about is difficult, but after a while you get used to it and you do it—it’s simple. You just have to know where everything is, and you [have] to understand what’s going to happen to your body. It’s no different than accepting the g-forces when you are flying an aircraft or coming out of a dive. It’s a whole new ball game.
Each engineer that had anything to do with the design was part of the start-up crew. We would have to verify all the equipment that we put in. I’m sure our crews have taken these craft out into space. I’m saying it probably took a while to train enough of the people, over a sufficient time period. The whole problem with the disc is that it is so exacting in its design and so forth. It can’t be used like we use aircraft today, with dropping bombs and having machine guns in the wings.
The design is so exacting, that you can’t add anything—it’s got to be just right. There’s a big problem in the design of where things are put. Say, where the center of the aircraft is, and that type of thing. Even the fact that we raised it three feet so the taller guys could get in—the actual ship was extended back to its original configuration, but it has to be raised. We had meetings, and I ended up in a meeting with an alien. I called him JROD—of course, that’s what they called him. I don’t know if that was his real name or not, but that’s the name the linguist gave him. I did draw a sketch, before I left, of him in a meeting. I provided it to some people and that was my impression of what I saw, an art picture of an alien that is working in cooperation with earth-people as told here.
Bill Uhouse’s strange and controversial story ends there. Like that of Bob Lazar—who we will get to later—Uhouse has his believers as well as those who conclude that his story is pure garbage or government disinformation.
Now we come to the story of a man named Truman Bethurum, whose testimony relative to UFOs extends more than half a century into the past but whose relevance to Kingman I only came to fully appreciate in early 2009, when I began an extensive study of his UFO-themed tales. Beyond any shadow of doubt, the number of people who can claim that aliens wrecked their marriage is infinitely small, but such claims have been made, the most memorable being that of the construction worker Bethurum. His idea of a “close encounter” was apparently quite different from those of other UFO witnesses and abductees: his alleged 1952 liaisons atop Nevada’s Mormon Mesa with Space Captain Aura Rhanes, a supposed citizen of the planet Clarion, ultimately led his outraged wife to file for divorce! Allegedly, it must be stressed.
Mormon Mesa is a 1,893-foot-high summit that dominates Nevada’s Moapa Valley. Between the mesa and its two near-identical neighbors are two huge chasms created by the Muddy and Virgin rivers, which carved the mesa eons ago. The visually stunning Mormon Mesa was about to become a veritable hotbed of alien activity—literally—when, in the latter half of 1952, Bethurum was contracted to do some work in the area. Because the area had been covered by ocean during prehistoric times, after he finished his shift one particular night, Bethurum headed out to the Mesa to see if he could find any fossilized shells as a gift for his wife, an avid collector of seashells. (She had decided not to accompany her husband to Nevada and instead elected to remain at their home back in Santa Barbara.) Bethurum searched in virtual darkness for a couple of hours but failed to find anything, so he returned to his truck to catch some welcome sleep.
It was while snoozing—or, perhaps, one might argue, in an altered state of consciousness—that Bethurum was visited by the inhabitants of another world: the Clarionites. An hour or so after falling asleep, said Bethurum, he was awakened by what he described as mumbling. As he began to stir, Bethurum was shocked to see that his truck was surrounded by between eight and ten “men.” They were all olive-skinned, around five feet tall, and wearing uniforms and black baseball caps. They were soon joined by a beautiful woman—the captain of the craft—who introduced herself as Aura Rhanes. Bethurum was instantly smitten.
The pair spoke at length about politics, history, and the dangers posed to the human race and the planet itself by atomic weapons. A few hours later, Captain Rhanes and her crew were gone, but not for long. Overall, Bethurum had close to a dozen meetings with his gorgeous space woman. The liaisons got more and more flirty as time progressed.