The UFO Phenomena
Almost every civilization that has kept a written history has recorded the sighting of strange objects and lights in the skies. Today, unexplained aerial phenomena are generally referred to as unidentified flying objects or flying saucers. Though there has been much skepticism about whether such objects are merely the product of our imagination or in actuality a physical existing entity, the question still holds; are we alone in the universe? The great UFO wave that has swept the American nation during the 1940’s has left many to question the existence of alien life forms in our vast universe; from mere sightings or indistinct evidence exemplified in this paper the reader may perhaps decide for them selves the answer to this age-old question.
What is a UFO one may ask? Well it is an abbreviation for unidentified flying object. Many people associate the term with mysterious objects seen in the sky that have no similarity to what is regularly seen. The twentieth century did not invent them; rather it inherited an age-old preoccupation of mankind with strange sights in the sky, and a rich legacy of observations preserved in writing as long as historical writings have existed. Human ideas about the nature of these sights have changed over the centuries and a history of these ideas divides into three distinct eras. The modern view associates aerial mysteries with machinery of advanced design, a notion that set in during the late nineteenth century with the appearance of unidentified airship sightings and continued into this century with mysterious aircraft, foo fighters, ghost rockets, flying saucers, and UFOs. Mechanical wonders have increased and in large part replaced the idea of anomalous natural phenomena that took hold in the eighteenth century and dominated the nineteenth. In naturalistic terms anything mysterious in the sky had to be peculiar meteors, auroras, or electrical discharges, freak manifestations of astronomy or the atmosphere.
The UFO phenomena burst into the world scene in 1940, the United States was in the midst of a World War not to mention tensions with the Soviet Union and there was much government paranoia. The United States government has records of thousands of UFO sightings, including photos of alleged UFOs and interviews with people who claim to have seen them. Since UFOs were considered a potential security risk, the report on these sightings was originally classified as secret. Most of the sightings turned out to be celestial objects, such as stars or bright planets like Venus, or atmospheric events such as auroras or meteors falling through the atmosphere. Many other sightings turned out to be such objects as weather balloons, satellites, aircraft lights, or formations of birds. Often these sightings were accompanied by unusual weather conditions. However on July 4th 1947 something unusual crashed in New Mexico that would later be known as the greatest find in history. Not only were there witnesses that seemed to tell a consistent story. There was evidence of unusual debris and witness of non-humanoid beings.
Though most government officials deny that the crash was extraterrestrial by producing claims that what crashed in New Mexico was a weather balloon, many still believe that something unearthly crashed in the fields of that night of July. 4th 1947. The Roswell Incident continues to be of interest to many researchers and UFO fanatics eager to discover the truth. Government concealment seems to provoke an increase in public interest in the UFO phenomena, which questions the relationship between the government and the people. If indeed the government is keeping information from the public then the concern is should the government be trusted. On the other hand it may be for security reasons with intentions to protect the public for what the future may hold, and we must not rule out the fact that the government may not even have the slightest clue in what they are dealing with.
Before there were UFO’s, there were remarkable meteors and mystery airships, foo fighters, and ghost rockets. Strange unidentified objects in the sky can be traced as far back in history as one is willing to explore. According to Stanton Friedman drawing’s interpreted, as someone’s idea of spaceships and spacemen have been found on the walls of European caves dating back tens and thousands of years. (Friedman, Crash At Corona, p.1) Unfortunately the credibility of clues older than a few centuries ago is hard to believe. “The original references are too vague and the witnesses are long since dead, so all the remains are amusing tales and the intriguing link between ancient unknowns and their modern counterparts.” (Friedman, Crash At Corona, p.1). Even scriptures as old as the Bible contain many references to mysteries from the sky, such as the "pillar of fire" that led the Israelites through the wilderness, the Star of Bethlehem, and the following from the book of Ezekiel:
Ezekiel 4:1-4:
“As I looked, behold, a stormy wind came out of the north, and a great cloud, with brightness round about it, and fire flashing forth continually, and in the midst of the fire, as if it were gleaming bronze.”
Few pre-1800 aerial phenomena reports resemble modern UFOs, and few offer any genuine strangeness. Our ancestors recorded odd sights, but their descriptions confirm only the constancy of human interest in aerial mysteries, not evidence that aliens have flown over the earthly skies for hundreds or thousands of years. We cannot at this late date declare with certainty that people in our distant past witnessed the same UFO phenomenon we know today.
While there were occasional UFO reports in the earlier decade of the 1800’s, the modern UFO phenomenon emerges clearly in the late 1890’s. In the United States between late 1896 and the spring of 1897 objects, dubbed “ airships”, generally ruled the skies. These brilliant nocturnal lights often compared to as an arc light moving through the sky at a notable speed, had swept across America in the latter part of the 1800’s. Rumors of airships go back to the California Gold Rush in 1848. As news of the gold discovered at Sutter's Mill spread across the country, people rushed to get to California to stake a claim. Transportation from "Back East" to the west coast was slow, mostly horses and wagons. The transcontinental railroad wouldn't be completed for twenty more years. There was no Panama Canal yet, so sailing involved going around South America. Anyone who could have come up with a quick method of transport would have made a fortune. One company, "R. Porter & Co," of New York City, advertised something that they could not deliver, an airship. In the latter part of 1840s the company distributed an advertising flyer in the eastern United States that read "THE BEST ROUTE TO THE CALIFORNIA GOLD!". The company said it hoped to begin making flights from New York to California around April 1, 1849, and that the round trip would take only seven days. However it would be over thirty years before the first practical, steer-able airship was invented in Europe, and commercial airship travel would not begin until the turn of the century, and it wasn’t until 1904 that Roy Knabenshue would test the first American airship.
“The Great wave started in California but by March 1897 it had moved eastward into Nebraska and by the next month had swept over much of the Midwest and south. Early on the evening of November 17, according to the next days Sacramento Evening Bee, a light resembling an ‘electric arc lamp propelled by some mysterious force’ passed over the city and was seen by hundreds of persons as it traveled at low altitude and, as if intelligently controlled, took evasive action as it approached buildings and hills.” (Clark, The UFO Book, p.28). Some observers claimed to have gotten a good look at the object and to have heard voices. If the records are to be believed, there were nearly a hundred sightings of airships in the United States in 1896-1897, most of them in the mid west. In at least three of these sightings, the occupants are described as a young woman, a young man, and an older man with a long beard. They supposedly survived on pigeons, which they netted from the deck of the airship, and occasionally landed for water and a change in diet. This was later proved to be a huge publicity stunt. The climax of these sightings seems to have occurred in, “Apr. 17, 1897.Aurora, TX: An airship supposedly crashed into Judge Proctor's windmill and disgorged the mangled body of a little man believed, for unspecified reasons, to hail from the planet Mars. This turned out to be a publicity stunt for the town, whose population and economy were on the decline.” (www.foia.af.mil).
Even though the media coverage was typically more of ridicule, or outright exaggeration, hardly a newspaper in the country failed to take note of airship sightings. These mysterious aircrafts continued to be spotted all over the world, and were frequently reported on for decades afterwards and even up till present day. However except for those who directly experienced them, memories faded quickly and each sighting was treated as a distinct event unrelated to any larger phenomenon. Were the Great Airship sightings real? Well if one plots all of the reported sightings on a map by date and location, one will find that either most of them must have been hoaxes, or else there must have been not one, but a dozen or so airships flying around the U.S. in 1897. The sightings are widely regarded as having been invented and propagated by imaginative newspaper writers throughout the mid west region of the U.S.
It wasn’t until the age of mechanical flight, with the voyages of the Wright brothers in 1903 could reports of aerial oddities be judged in the light of a rapid advancing technology. It wasn’t until around this time and age that any aerial phenomena would attract serious attention. The first writer to collect UFO reports from a wide range of sources and locations and to see them in broad context was the American Charles Fort. He was the author of what is arguably the
First UFO book, The Book of the Damned (1919). Two other Fort books include New Lands (1923) and Lo! (1931), which also chronicled early UFO reports. Charles Fort died in 1932 leaving the UFO scene with catalogs of mysterious phenomena reports for the latter generations to unravel.
Airship sightings were just the beginning of what was to come in the following years. In
1939 World War II began; bombs, missiles, and warplanes were now appearing in the skies. There were many advances in technology by the 1940’s. Radio waves were heard from Mars, the radio telescope was invented, the sound barrier was broken, and the parabolic dish antenna was invented. In the 1930’s similar waves of mystery airplanes failed to conform to known activity reported from both the United States and Europe, and it wasn’t until the latter part of World War II that the press and the government would began to gear their attention towards another similar phenomena known as foo fighters. These sightings gained much popularity in early 1944 and the late 1950’s, but were mainly disregarded once World War II was over.
The name “ Foo Fighters,” originated from a cartoon character named Smokey Stover who used to say, " Where there's foo, there's fire, " somebody called them Foo Fighters, and the name stuck. These odd balls of light or shiny metal that would fly circles around U.S. pilot planes used to follow ships at sea during World War II sometimes even playing ‘tag’ with the vehicles. As Sergeant Stephen J. Brickner, U.S. Marine Corps could remember, the objects seemed to "wobble" slightly as they flew over at a speed that was "a little faster than Jap planes." He also stated that their appearance was of highly polished silver that shimmered brightly in the sun. (Clarke, The UFO Book, p.230).
In the midst of World War II the Allies suspected that the foo fighters were devices built by the Axis powers, and the Axis powers held the opposite view. In reality, though, no one knew what the mysterious odd balls of light were. Hitler thought they were a U.S. secret weapon, and set up an organization to study them. The British thought they were German and allegedly set up a group called the "Massey Project" to study them. The United States 8th Army even scrutinized them, but once it was determined that the foo fighters were not of German or Japanese origin the studies were dropped. Various explanations were given for Foo Fighters. The official explanation was that they were the effect of magnetic fields created across the wings of aircraft. But why none of these effects are present on modern aircraft and why the objects were not always observed in contact with the wings and were often seen far away from aircraft has never been explained. Later in 1953 The Robertson Panel, a CIA- sponsored meeting, reviewed air force UFO data. The panel concluded that foo fighters were believed to be electrostatic or electromagnetic phenomena or possibly light reflections from ice crystals in the air, but their exact cause or nature was never defined.
Even stranger phenomena were ghost rockets. If foo fighters were unexplainable try the ghost rockets that appeared in the skies after WWII. In 1946 Scandinavian countries reported over 2,000 unidentified flying objects over their airspace. These objects usually looked like rockets with fiery exhausts, and they sometimes performed unusual maneuvers as they passed overhead. At first they were thought to be captured German V-2 missiles that were being tested by the Russians, but British radar experts said they did not come from the U.S.S.R. Oddly, the objects appeared over some of the southern European countries also, such as Greece, where an official investigation was conducted in 1947. The leader of that investigation, Professor Paul Santorini, revealed in 1967 that their investigation showed that the objects were not missiles. He also said that before they could precede any further, the army ordered the investigation stopped. Even today, fifty years later, official files on the ghost rockets are still classified documents.
“The UFO phenomena burst onto the world scene in the wake of a sighting made over the Cascade Mountains on June 24, 1947, when private pilot Kenneth Arnold spotted nine shiny discs moving in formation at a speed of more than 1200 mph.” (Craft, The UFO Book, p.xi). Kenneth Arnold was a US Marshall and a member of the Sheriff's "aerial posse” of Ada County, Idaho who would sometimes fly prisoners to the Federal Penitentiary. On June 24, 1947, he was returning home from a business trip when he made a detour into the Yakima, Washington area to help in an aerial search for a missing C-46 Marine transport plane that was believed to have gone down in the area. At around 3:00 in the afternoon, he was flying at about 9,000 feet, near Mount Rainier, when a flash of light caught his eye. He turned and saw a procession of nine very strange objects flying from north to south in front of his plane. “ They were flat discs, like pie tins, very shiny, and they moved erratically, like a ‘saucer would if you skipped it across water.’ Arnold estimated their size at about two-thirds that of a DC-4, and he calculated their speed at over 1500 mph by timing their travel between two mountain peaks of known distance.” (Clark. The UFO Book, p.61). This inspired an anonymous headline writer to coin the phrase “flying saucer.” The term “ unidentified flying objects” did not come into popular usage until the mid 1950’s.When Arnold arrived at Yakima, Washington, he told several other pilots about his sighting who believed it was some type of military "secret weapon". Arnold would later be stunned to find that the U.S. military was as mystified by the objects as he himself was. In Pendleton, Oregon, Arnold went to make a report to the FBI, but the local office was closed, so he talked to the editor of the East Oregonian newspaper and it was the editor who put the story in the media. Because of Arnold's background and reliability as a witness, the story got wide circulation. More sightings immediately followed it, in the Pacific North west and elsewhere.
Regardless of strange aerial phenomena in 1939, just before the start of World War II, German scientists Otto Hahn and Fritz Strassman discovered nuclear fission in 1938. It was a process in which atoms of a heavy element, such as uranium, are bombarded with neutrons until they split into fragments of approximately equal mass, producing more neutrons in the process.
Immigrant scientists living in the United States feared that Germany might be able to use nuclear fission to build a weapon of incredible power. The result is a chain reaction that releases tremendous amounts of energy. Albert Einstein wrote to United States President Franklin D. Roosevelt, urging him to set up an American program on nuclear fission. The goal was to design a weapon of mass destruction, the atomic bomb, before German physicists were able to do so. With a meager 6,000 dollars, the project was started in 1940. In December 1941 the project was put under the direction of the Office of Scientific Research and Development, headed by Vannevar Bush. The War Department was given partial responsibility for the work in 1942, and called it the Manhattan Project. More than 100,000 people were working on it at the height of its activity in early 1945. Research progressed during the war, and a successful test of an atomic bomb using plutonium was held on July 16, 1945, in the desert 120 miles (193 kilometers) south of Albuquerque, New Mexico. Nuclear fission testing was just a start in the many nuclear trials to occur in New Mexico, and in 1947 government tested missiles or airships were not the only objects seen to crash, but perhaps the most famous controversial UFO crash in history to take place was The Roswell Incident in Corona, New Mexico.
“Ordinarily we do not draw a distinction between experiences and events. We human beings tend to think that either thing happens or they don’t, and if they happen, they happen in the world. If someone sees something that is not an image from a dream or a hallucination or a misperception, that thing so we assume implicitly-exists in the world. Certainly, where UFOs are concerned, an object that shows up on radar or leaves anomalous traces on the ground where it was seen to land may be assumed to exist in the world. Cases like these comprise the core of the evidence for the proposition that UFOs are both physical and extraordinary.” (Clark, The UFO Book. p.xiv).
From time to time in 1947, some people in various parts of the United States and some other countries reported seeing strange objects in the sky and claimed that they were spacecraft piloted by space aliens. In the midst of this "flying saucer" craze, some unusual material fell to the ground on or about July 4 near Roswell, N.M. What really happened? Who knows? Why the government would want to cover it up? No one seems to know for sure. There are many sides to the Roswell story. There are so many unanswered questions. But what seems to be certain is that something crashed that night. What it may be is still questioned. Something strange occurred that night and there are witnesses that claimed to have seen it. One would have to decide between the truth and what is just a mere fabrication simply based on the stories that were told about the night “something” crashed on the barren fields of New Mexico.
The story begins when two innocent people stumble upon what is known as the greatest find of the millennium. The account was taken out of Stanton Friedman’s Crash at Corona pages 72-79: William W. "Mac" Brazel was a stereotypical cowboy, although he actually tended sheep, he was foreman of the Foster Ranch in rural Lincoln County near Corona, New Mexico. On the evening of either July 2 or July 4 (the various sources disagree) there was a severe thunderstorm in the area with lots of lightning. But this time there was a “different sort of sound among the booming thunderclaps.” The next morning, July 3 or 5, Mac rode out as usual to check on his sheep and to "ride the fences". A seven-year-old neighbor boy, William D. "Dee" Proctor, accompanied him. Riding south of the ranch headquarters, they suddenly came upon an area about a quarter of a mile long and several hundred feet wide that was strewn with debris, shiny bits and pieces unlike anything Mac had ever seen. Mac picked up some of the material and carried it with him back to the ranch headquarters, where he put it in a shed.
Bessie Brazel Schreiber (Mac's daughter):
"There were what appeared to be pieces of heavily waxed paper and a sort of aluminum-like foil. Some of these pieces had something like numbers and lettering on them, but there were no words you were able to make out. Some of the metal-foil pieces had a sort of tape stuck to them, and when these were held to the light they showed what looked like pastel flowers or designs. Even though the stuff looked like tape it could not be peeled off or removed at all…. [The writing] looked like numbers mostly ... They were written out like you would write numbers in columns to do an addition problem. But they didn't look like the numbers we use at all. What gave me the idea they were numbers, I guess, was the way they were all ranged out in columns… No, it was definitely not a balloon. We had seen weather balloons quite a lot - both on the ground and in the air. We had even found a couple of Japanese-style balloons that had come down in the area once. We had also picked up a couple of those thin rubber weather balloons with instrument packages. This was nothing like that. I have never seen anything resembling this sort of thing before - or since..." (Friedman, Crash At Corona, p.72).
Later that day, Mac put a small piece of the debris in his pocket when he drove Dee Proctor to his home about ten miles away from the ranch headquarters. He showed the debris to Dee's parents, William and Loretta Proctor, and tried to get them to go back and look at the debris field with him.
Loretta Proctor:
"The piece he brought looked like a kind of tan, light-brown plastic...it was very lightweight, like balsa wood. It wasn't a large piece, maybe about four inches long, maybe just larger than a pencil… We cut on it with a knife and would hold a match on it, and it wouldn't burn. We knew it wasn't wood. It was smooth like plastic; it didn't have real sharp corners, kind of like a dowel stick. Kind of dark tan. It didn't have any grain...just smooth…we should have gone [to look at the debris field], but gas and tires were expensive then. We had our own chores, and it would have been twenty miles."
The next night, Mac went into Corona, where he told his uncle, Hollis Wilson, about the debris. Wilson and another man who was present told Mac about the "flying saucers" that were being reported around the area and advised him to report his find to the authorities. So, on July 6, when Mac was going into Roswell to see about trading for a new pick-up truck, he took some of the debris with him and stopped off at the office of Chaves County Sheriff George Wilcox. At first, Wilcox paid little attention, but when Mac showed him a piece of the debris, he realized that this might be important, so he called Roswell Army Air Field and spoke to Major Jesse A. Marcel, the base intelligence officer. Meanwhile, Frank Joyce of radio station KGFL either called Wilcox looking for news, or Mac called him. Sources differ on this point, but since Mac was hardly the type to seek publicity, it's less likely that he called KGFL. Either way, Joyce interviewed Mac over the phone. Marcel arrived at the Sheriff's office, questioned Mac, and was shown the debris. Then Marcel went back to the base to make his report. He reported to Colonel William H. Blanchard, the base commander, and they decided that Marcel should go out to the site and investigate further. Marcel took his Buick, and an Army Counter Intelligence Corps officer named Sheridan Cavitt drove a Jeep carry-all, and they followed Brazel back to the ranch. Frank Joyce of KGFL had told his boss, Walt Whitmore Sr. about Brazel's find, and Whitmore drove out to the ranch and picked up Mac. Whitmore took him to his own home in Roswell, where Mac spent the night. There, on a wire recorder, Whitmore recorded an interview with Mac that would never be aired.
The next morning, Whitmore took Mac down to KGFL and called the base. The military came out and picked Brazel up and carried him back to the base, where Mac was kept under guard in the "guest house" for several days. On July 8, Mac was escorted by the military to the offices of the Roswell Daily Record, where he gave a press interview. The story he told them was a bit different from what he had told before, however. Now he said that he and his son had originally discovered the debris on June 14, but that he was in such a hurry that he ignored it. Then, on July 4, he and his wife and two of his children rode out to the site and picked up some of the debris, which consisted of smoky gray rubber strips, tinfoil, heavy paper, and some small sticks. He said that he had twice before found weather balloons on the ranch but that this material in no way resembled what he had found before. He went in and began telling Frank Joyce the same story he had told at the Record. Joyce interrupted him and asked why he was telling a different story than he had told earlier. He later said that Mac became agitated and said, "It'll go hard on me." At the end of the interview, Brazel went back out to where his military escort was waiting, and they took him back to the base. When he was finally released by the military, Brazel refused to say anything other than that he had found a weather balloon. He privately complained of his treatment by the military, whom he said wouldn't even let him call his wife. He told his children that he had taken an oath not to talk about the incident.
On July 8, 1947, 4 days after the crash evidence was found, the government had to give an explanation of the military build-up in the area and report the findings. Base Commander Colonel William Blanchard was head of one of the investigative teams in Roswell. He summoned William Haut, a 509th Public Relations officer, to write up and send out a press release to the Roswell Daily Record and many other local and state media teams. Before the materials could be sent anywhere, Brigadier General Roger Ramey of the 8th Air Force intercepted the hauling and ordered the supplies back to Roswell pending further explanation. After Ramey looked over the debris again, he claimed that it was nothing more than a busted weather balloon. With expert advice and counsel from a prominent weathercaster, Warrant Officer Irving Newton, Ramey concluded that the material was remnants of a high-altitude weather balloon. He claimed that the sticks and tin foil like debris mirrored that of the reflectors used to track the balloons.
News traveled fast, and eventually the press discovered the find and all of a sudden the quiet western town, whose main claim to fame is it’s the home of the first A-bomb carrying 509th bomb group, was instantly transformed into the center of something. Everyone wanted to know about the momentous event, and was curious to find out about the crashed wreckage. However the announcement from general Ramey killed the story. At this time, Major Jesse A. Marcel, an Intelligence Officer present at the debris sight, came forward to refute the claims made by Ramey and his expert consultant.
Marcel had been a highly skilled aerial cartographer before the U.S. entered World War II, and after Pearl Harbor, the Army had sent him to intelligence training. At the end of the war, he was chosen to become part of the 509th Bomb Wing, and as such handled security for the 1946 atom-bomb tests called "Operation Crossroads". He was awarded a commendation for this work. Marcel’s story was similar to Brazel’s, however it is just from a different perspective. Major Jesse Marcel:
" When we arrived at the crash site, it was amazing to see the vast amount of area it covered.... it scattered over an area of about three quarters of a mile long, I would say, and fairly wide, several hundred feet wide…It was definitely not a weather or tracking device, nor was it any sort of plane or missile…I don't know what it was, but it certainly wasn't anything built by us and it most certainly wasn't any weather balloon.... small beams about three eighths or a half inch square with some sort of hieroglyphics on them that nobody could decipher. These looked something like balsa wood, and were about the same weight, except that they were not wood at all. They were very hard, although flexible, and would not burn at all. There was a great deal of an unusual parchment-like substance, which was brown in color and extremely strong, and great number of small pieces of a metal like tinfoil, except that it wasn't tinfoil. I was interested in electronics and kept looking for something that resembled instruments or electronic equipment, but I didn't find anything ...Cavitt, I think, found a black, metallic-looking box several inches square. As there was no apparent way to open this, and since it didn't appear to be an instrument package of any sort, we threw it in with the rest of the stuff … it had little numbers with symbols that we had to call hieroglyphics because I could not understand them. They were pink and purple. They looked like they were painted on. I even took my cigarette lighter and tried to burn the material we found that resembled parchment and balsa, but it would not burn - wouldn't even smoke.... the pieces of metal that we brought back were so thin, just like the tinfoil in a pack of cigarettes...you could not tear or cut it either. We even tried making a dent in it with a sixteen-pound sledgehammer, and there was still no dent in it.” (Friedman, Crash At Corona, p.74).
When Marcel got back to the base, Colonel Blanchard ordered him to load the debris on a B-29 and fly with it to Wright Field in Ohio, stopping at Carswell AAFB in Fort Worth, Texas on the way. Marcel did so, but as soon as he landed at Carswell, Brigadier General Roger Ramey, Commander of the 8th Air Force, took over. The debris was taken to Ramey's office and spread out on brown paper. Marcel said later that one photo was taken of him with the real debris, then Ramey took him into another room, and when he came back, a weather balloon had been substituted for the debris. A weather officer, Warrant Officer Irving Newton, was brought in, and he immediately identified the material he saw as a weather balloon and a Rawin radar target. A Rawin radar target was a reflector made of metal foil and balsa wood sticks that was attached to a weather balloon so that it could be tracked on radar. Ramey announced to the press that the "flying saucer" was only a weather balloon. After more photographs with the weather balloon, Ramey ordered Marcel back to Roswell with a strong hint to keep quiet about the incident. When he was interviewed in 1978, he maintained that the debris he found on the Foster ranch was definitely NOT a weather balloon. He insisted that it was like nothing he had ever seen. Was the debris found by Mac Brazel just part of a craft that got struck by lightning or collided with something? Did the main part of the craft crash somewhere else, and were there aliens aboard? Was there a second crash site? The stories that there was a second crash site are what keeps the Roswell story going.
At about the same time one hundred and fifty miles west of Corona, NM something even stranger happened. In 1978, after a lecture in Bemidji, Minnesota, Vern and Jean Maltais first told Stanton Friedman, that in February, 1950, an engineer friend of theirs named Grady "Barney" Barnett told them that he had been working out in the field near Magdalena, New Mexico on July 3, 1947 when he came upon a crashed disc-shaped object with dead, non-human bodies both inside and outside the craft, that was some kind of metallic instrument of some sort - a kind of disc. It seemed to been made of stainless steel. The machine had been split open by explosion or impact. These were not Barnett’s actual words for he died in 1969 before anyone in the UFO community had become aware of his involvement in the New Mexico crashes. But a diary kept by Barnett's wife was later recovered that stated that Barney Barnett was not on the Plains of San Agustin on July 3, 1947.
The San Agustin story was given new life when a man named Gerald Anderson came forward after television's Unsolved Mysteries telecast a segment about Roswell in January of 1990. Anderson claimed he and his family had been hunting rocks on the Plains of San Agustin in early July 1947, when they came upon a crashed UFO with four alien bodies inside. Although Gerald was only six years old at the time, he told of vivid memories of the scene, including the presence of an archaeologist named Dr. Buskirk and five of his students. What these civilians saw were what appeared to be an unknown craft with non-human bodies inside and outside the craft. Around a dozen people were swarming to see the wreckage. When the U.S Army arrived everything had changed. Charges have been made that Anderson made up the whole story, but a polygraph examination was taken of Anderson that proved there was no evidence of deception from Anderson and that he had an outstanding memory.
Meanwhile on July 4th 1947, Jims Ragsdale and Trudy True Love were driving north from Roswell, NM. “ Lightning crashed and thunder boomed, and the wind was blowing at thirty or forty miles per hour, it whipped across the desert where dust and dirt filled the air. Rain came briefly, roaring for a moment, hiding everything, and then evaporating in minutes. About 11:30 PM, brightness flashed as an object roared overhead… It was a flaring bright light, blue-gray like that from an arc welder. At first he thought that it was a lightning strike not far from him, but then he saw the object as it roared over the campsite. Seconds later it slammed into the ground about a mile or so from the camp.” (Randle, The Truth About the UFO Crash in Roswell, p.3).
At around the same time several other witnesses believed they have seen something in the sky. South of Roswell, William Woody was watching the night sky with his father when he spotted a white light with red streaks in it. It glowed brilliantly and, unlike the many meteors he had seen in the past, took a long time to fall. In Roswell proper at Saint Mary’s Hospital, Franciscan Catholic nuns Mother superior Mary Bernadette and Sister Capistrano making routine night observations, saw a brilliant light plunge to earth, due north of their location, they recorded it’s passage in their logbook. Fifteen miles southwest of the base, Corporal E. L. Pyles, on a detached facility, looked up to see what he thought was a shooting star, but larger. It moved across the sky and then arced downward. There seemed to be an orange glow around it, a halo near the front.
Civilians weren’t the only ones who knew something strange was happening. Military officials had been tracking on their radars an unidentified flying object in flight over southern New Mexico since July 1st. The object had appeared over the highly restricted areas near the White Sands Proving Ground about one hundred miles from Roswell. On July 2, Steve MacKenzie, stationed at the Roswell Army Air Field, had received a call from Brigadier General Martin F. Scanlon of the Air defense Command, ordering him to report to the radar sites at White Sands. MacKenzie was to monitor the objects movement and report them directly to the general. Nothing changed for the whole time MacKenzie was in surveillance. However that evening the situation changed drastically. “ The object as seen on the radar seemed to pulsate, blip growing larger and brightening before shrinking to its original size and dimming. This activity kept up for a short period of time and then the object blossomed into a sunburst and disappeared from the screen at about 11:20 PM.” (Randle, The Truth About the UFO crash at Roswell, p.5). The next day the Army was going to search the area to see what exactly crashed.
The number of people involved in the recovery of the wreckage and the bodies, and the subsequent elimination of clues to the crashes, was growing rapidly. Once the materials got back to the military facilities that had been hurriedly prepared to deal with this extraordinary challenge, more people joined the inner circle, and the job of security became more even more complex.
So many people have testified to the presence in New Mexico of very strange substances from the wreckage of the two crashes. The fact that the bodies of as many as eight small humanoid aliens accompanied the wreckage is another matter. “ Few people have described, in limited but highly consistent detail, their awareness or even direct observation of miniature, out-of-proportion bodies at the crash site and elsewhere. The evidence for them is increasingly impressive, but perhaps not yet completely convincing.” (Friedman, Crash At Corona, p.114).
In 1994 the Air Force admitted that the recovered material was in reality from a United States spy balloon. Part of Project Mogul, it was an attempt to monitor anticipated nuclear tests by the Soviet Union. In 1997 an Air Force report ventured the opinion that stories of alien bodies may have come from civilian witnesses who saw parachute crash test dummies, a severely injured airman parachutist, and charred bodies from an airplane crash during the 1950s. However, according to Stanton in an interview, “One of the silliest official USAF stories is the crash test dummy nonsense… Remember that the dummies had to be the same height and weight as air force pilots. None were dropped anywhere near the two crash sites and none were dropped earlier than 6 years after the 1947 events,”
Still other Roswell hoaxes included the notorious "MJ-12 documents" of 1984, which purported to show a secret operation was launched by President Truman to handle the Roswell incident; a bogus alien autopsy film of 1995 purporting to show the dissection of an alien corpse, which in an interview Stanton Friedman stated was just for higher ratings and in the words of Peter Robbins “ It is an expensive fabrication...”(Robbins Interview); a fake Roswell UFO fragment delivered to a UFO museum in 1996; and so on. Such sensational hoaxes helped to make the term "Roswell incident" almost universally familiar to the point that it has achieved the status of myth.
The Roswell case has been extensively researched by Stanton Friedman and independently by the team of Kevin Randle and Don Schmitt. Between them they have discovered around 200 witnesses who claim to have been involved in the recovery of the Roswell material. Researcher John Keel has suggested that the Roswell material might be the remains of a Japanese Feugo balloon, a balloon with a bomb attached launched towards the USA during World War II. These were still being discovered in remote parts of the USA in the late 1940s. Keel’s theory gained little credibility with the masses in part because he had no documentation, eyewitnesses, or proof of his accusations and the American fear of vulnerability. In 1994 at the request of US Senator Steven Schiff the General Audit Office started an inquiry into the incident and subsequent cover-up. The GAO required the US Air Force to reopen the enquiry. After a nine-month study the Air Force announced that the Roswell object had not been a weather balloon but a balloon involved in a top-secret project to study Soviet missile launches. Many UFO investigators remain unconvinced by this explanation.
The question still holds, why the government cover-up? “ Flying saucers finish the job Copernicus started in taking man out of the middle of the universe. Priests fought Copernicus's ideas. Today guys in lab coats, rather than priestly robes, fight alien visitations…”
(Stanton Friedman Interview). For days, weeks and years after the supposed sighting and crash of an unidentified flying object in the barren fields of the New Mexico desert, the United States government and the UFO intrigued community have been on opposite ends of a bitter battle to once and for all expose the truth of the Roswell Incident.
The decade of the 1940s was in the middle of an era of heightened Communists threats as well as increased military build up and technological advancements. The need to ensure national security and protect the American citizens was of top priority. After the finding of the unidentifiable debris in the New Mexico desert, the government took control in order to determine the origins of the matter, its supposed purpose or usefulness, and most importantly, its possible potential to harm the United States as a military or biological threat. Engaged in World War II and immediately followed up by the Cold War conflict, the United States was in no position to take the abandoned debris lightly or overlook any possible explanations of its identity. The United States government, trying to conceal allegations of extraterrestrial involvement and ensure national security, created a series of false explanations for the supposed Roswell incident over the course of fifty years. The crash, which occurred in 1947, followed a famous 1938 radio broadcast entitled the “War of the Worlds.” This infamous program is notorious for the mayhem and panic its fictionalized report of alien life forms instilled in the American public. The fictional story carried reports of inhumane violence and brutality against the American people. Reports from local police agencies in areas that heard the broadcast informed officials of the overwhelming amount of frantic calls from fearful listeners. Some reports even maintained that people committed suicide in order to escape the possible annihilation from the extraterrestrial visitors (Balthaser Interview). Not wanting to repeat the same hysteria with real possible evidence of a UFO, the government maintained the need for secrecy.
Similarly, the United States had just ended World War II and was on the brink of joining the arms race with the Soviet Union, better known as the Cold War. Before analysis of the debris had taken place, the government was very speculative as to the inherent nature of the finding. Always fearful of foreign attack, the government speculated that the debris was remnants of an experimental Soviet weapon that reached the United States mainland. Lastly, in the absence of any other concrete information implying enemy weaponry, the government had to speculate the possibility of an extraterrestrial craft. In order to prevent the hysteria that followed the radiobroadcast and ensure American invulnerability, the government created a series of supposed excuses to try to explain to the American public mundane reason for the mysterious Roswell UFO crash.
Now since the government was faced with objects that seemed to be unexplainable to the human intelligence, the government became more involved in the “flying saucer” craze. The Army Air Force was, in one form or another, involved in investigating UFOs beginning with the 8th Army's investigation of foo fighter reports during World War II. The AAF also sent intelligence officers to investigate many of the early sightings, but did not take them very seriously. In the late summer of 1947, when the Air Force had become an independent branch of the military, Air Intelligence at the Pentagon requested a report from Air Materiel Command regarding what was known about "flying disks". The Commander of the Air Materiel Command at Wright-Patterson, Lt. General Nathan F. Twining, held a conference with persons from the Air Institute of Technology, Intelligence T-2, the Office of Chief Engineering Division, and the Aircraft, Power Plant, and Propeller Laboratories of Engineering Division T-3. As a result of this conference, on September 23, 1947, Twining sent a secret memorandum to Brig. General George Schulgen, Chief of the Air Intelligence Requirements Division that concluded: “the phenomenon reported is something real and not fictitious…it is recommended that …Army Air Forces issue a directive assigning priority, security classification and Code Name for detailed study of this matter.” (Clark, The UFO Book, p.489). By this time, U.S. intelligence had completed its analysis of German projects that were in existence during the War, and had found nothing that could account for UFO sightings, even with post-war continued development in the Soviet Union. On December 30, 1947, Major General L. C. Craigie, Director of Research and Development, issued an order establishing Project Sign. Project Sign, decided to make a formal Estimate of the Situation. The Estimate was a top-secret document that contained unexplained sightings by pilots, scientists, and other reliable witnesses. The report concluded that UFOs were of extraterrestrial origin. Air Force Chief of Staff General Hoyt S. Vandenburg promptly rejected the Estimate of the Situation. It is said that he deleted the strongest parts of the original report, sent it back, and then, when he received the revised report, he rejected it on the grounds that there was not enough evidence to support the conclusions. Then, after rejecting it, he ordered all copies destroyed. Those inside Project Sign said that their morale and enthusiasm for the project declined sharply after this. Decidedly skeptical towards the extraterrestrial origin hypothesis for the origin of UFOs, reflecting a shift towards explaining all sightings as misidentifications of natural phenomena, Project Sign would soon have its name fittingly changed to Project Grudge. The new name reflected the change in policy towards UFOs.
This change in policy by the Air Force brought with it a campaign of characterizing those who believed UFOs were extraterrestrial as insane. Now the project was becoming less active and it was “recommended that the investigation and study be reduced down to scope.”
(Clark. The UFO Book.p.487). The Air Force was now closing down the Project putting the files into storage. Project Grudge, however, while "officially" closed, was still functioning at a reduced level. This reduced level consisted of a private investigator, Lt. Jerry Cummings. He left the Air Force in 1951, then him and an Air Force intelligence officer Captain Edward Ruppelt, was appointed to take over the project, which was renamed Project Bluebook. Captain Edward Ruppelt took the task seriously and completely reorganized the project. He established means for speeding the receipt of reports, established liaisons with other agencies, systematized reporting procedures, and obtained the services of a scientific consultant in the person of astronomer Dr. J. Allen Hynek.
The "Flap of 1952" was a huge increase in sightings peaking in July with massive sightings both visual and on radar over Washington, D.C. These sightings were so numerous that they became known as the Washington Nationals. Even the CIA became concerned, so much so that they ordered the Office of Scientific Intelligence to review the data collected by Bluebook and the Air Technical Intelligence Center at Wright-Patterson AFB and to make recommendations based on their findings. The OSI review of the existing data resulted in a recommendation, predictably, that the phenomena required more study. The main concern of the CIA was not that UFOs were a direct threat to the U.S., but that they were an indirect one. During this period, the peak of the Cold war, the fear was that the many UFO sighting reports might conceal a very real threat from the Soviet Union. So, the CIA asked a Cal-Tech physicist, Dr. H.P. Robertson, to assemble a panel of respected scientists to study the UFO phenomenon. These included Dr. Samuel A Goudsmit, a nuclear physicist with the Brookhaven National Laboratories, geophysicist Dr. Lloyd V. Berkner, radar & electronics expert Dr. Luis Alvarez of the University of California, and Johns Hopkins University astronomer Dr. Thornton L. Page. Astronomer and Project Bluebook consultant Dr. J. Allen Hynek and Frederick C. Durant, president of the International Astronautical Foundation, were associate members of the panel. This distinguished panel, which would become known as the Robertson Panel, spent four days, reviewing the existing evidence. At the end of this time, they issued a report, known as the Durant Report which merely restated that UFOs were not a direct threat to U.S. security, but which reiterated the fears of the CIA that the Soviets might somehow use the phenomenon to mask an invasions of the United States: Further, the Panel recommended a policy of debunking UFO sightings in order to suppress the growing public preoccupation with the phenomenon. By the mid-1950’s the Air Force’s Project Blue Book, following recommendations laid down by the CIA-sponsored scientific committee (known as the Robertson panel, after its head, physicist H. P. Robertson), had become no more than a debunking exercise. It conducted little real investigation even as it rendered regular negative judgments on the UFO reports that came to its attention. Many who took a skeptical view of the official pronouncements suspected that the Air force was covering up big UFO secrets, and from 1957 onward the Washington-based National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomena (NICAP) led by the author. Retired Marine Corps major, and proponent Donald E. Keyhoe, pushed vigorously for congressional hearings and challenged the Air Force at every point. The end of Project Bluebook was heard in April 1966, when the House Armed Services Committee recommended that the Air Force contract with a University for a scientific study of UFOs.
On October 7, 1966, the Air Force announced that a program to study UFOs would be conducted by the University of Colorado and headed by Dr. Edward Condon. “In reality, the Condon Committee, as it was called, had one task, and that was to provide a reason for the Air Force to end its official investigation of UFOs.” The report essentially is a collection of case histories and special reports by members of Dr. Condon's staff and investigators working under contract with the University of Colorado.
Meanwhile, speculation of UFO’s became a national craze, with popular opinion divided between those who dismissed the phenomenon as a hoax or hallucinations and those who saw it as enormous potential significance. Most were saucer fan clubs, but some were actually disciplined and intellectually serious, and capable of the sophisticated investigation and analysis. Some even claimed they communicated with aliens in different realms, etc. Cults and such were devoted to UFO’s especially. In January 1969 The Condon Committee formal report “ opened it’s introduction which declared that no further investigations of UFO’s were justified; those who read past the introduction found that a third of the cases reviewed in the text remained unexplained…” (Clark, The UFO Book. p.xiii) As Project Blue book was closing down, public interest also plummeted.
But it wasn’t long until another UFO wave emerged in America. Periods of intense sightings of activity were reported between 1964-1973. Daylight discs and radar/visual cases would fade into the background as ufologists turned their attention to experiential claims of strangeness. For a growing number of UFO students, extraterrestrial theories no longer enough, and parapsychological, and often occult, approaches shoved aside speculations about spaceships. Many “new ufologists” sought to link themselves with ghosts, poltergeist, etc. The abduction phenomenon rose to prominence, largely thought the writings and investigations of Bud Hopkins, and played an ever-larger role in discussions about the nature and the meaning of the UFO phenomenon.
Approaching a new decade the public became less interested in the debris of crashed space ships or relying on sightings to tell them that there are UFO’s amongst us. The focus shifted on the aliens themselves. People started to report alien abductions. UFO’s were not sighted just in the skies. Now they were visiting earth to take humans back to their spaceship to perform some experiments of their own. Stories of close encounters, where victims were said to be taken abroad an alien spacecraft are called abductions. These abduction victims often experience memory loss and "missing time.” Some of them have been able to recall their abductions from memory and others have recalled their abductions by the aid of hypnosis. Often these encounters involve being taken aboard an alien craft and examined by the aliens and put through a variety of physical and mental procedures. Then the individuals are returned. Many of the abduction victims have shown signs of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder.
The controversy was transformed in many ways from a debate about aerial phenomena into one about experiences at ground level. Close encounters dominated the UFO-reporting of the period as much as daylight discs and nocturnal lights had defined the previous 15 to 20 years. The strangeness of these claims seemed to escalate. The distinction between a hoaxers tall tale and a frightened witness’ sincere testimony blurs when the content of one is barely outlandish than the other. Both shameless liars and earnest souls told of meetings, sometimes with extended communication, with alien humanoids. Some even claimed to have sexual experiences with extraterrestrials.
Yet as the investigations grew more sophisticated, both ufologist and the scientists working on their own or with professional organizations uncovered new evidence for a physical dimension to the UFO phenomenon. In the late 1970’s several American ufologists reopened the long-closed question of the “crash/retrievals,” once disparaged as tall tales of “ little men in pickle jars.” Veteran ufologist Leonard H. Stringfield led the way, collecting and compiling anecdotes from sources of varying or indeterminate credibility. But in the new climate two ufologists, Stanton T. Friedman and William Moore, were encouraged to start the long, complicated probe of the now famous Roswell incident. The effort would stretch all the way long into the 1990’s and involve other investigators. They would find that nearly most official records of the event are missing, are presumed missing. Despite the setbacks many investigators and researchers are still persistent in seeking out the truth about extraterrestrial beings in our presence.
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------
This section is known as the Interview Section. Interviews were conducted with three different people who are known specialist and very knowledgeable to the topic pertaining to this report. They were given different sets of questions in which referred to their background of research. These were not only lecturers, but also authors and researchers some even worked for the government. Nevertheless, all three were presumed experts in the UFO phenomena.
The First Interview was conducted with Mr. Peter Robbins. He is a researcher, investigator, writer, lecturer, and best selling author and currently is an Executive Assistant to Budd Hopkins’ Intruders Foundation. He also serves as head of the UFO media Group of Central Park Media Corporation and is Editor-In-Chief of the website UFOcity.com. Mr. Robbins has lectured on the subject of UFO’s in the United States, the United Kingdom and in Europe. He has also been a guest and consultant on many TV and radio shows. These include: “ Unsolved Mysteries”, “ Current Affair,” “Good Day New York,” and many more.
The Second Interview was conducted with Stanton T. Friedman. He worked for 14 years as a nuclear physicist for such companies as GE, GM, Westinghouse; TRW, Aero jet General Nucleonics, and McDonnell Douglas on such advanced, highly classified, eventually canceled projects as nuclear aircraft, fission and fusion rockets, nuclear power plants for space. Since 1967, he has lectured on the topic ' "Flying Saucers ARE Real" at more than 600 colleges and over 100 professional groups in 50 states, 9 Provinces, England, Italy, Germany, Holland, France, Finland, Brazil, Australia, Korea, Mexico, Turkey, Argentina, and Israel. He has published more than 70 papers on UFOs besides his dozens of, conventional articles, and appeared on hundreds of radio and TV shows. These include the TNT Larry King UFO Special on Oct.1, 1994, Nightline, Sally Jessie Raphael, Unsolved Mysteries, Entertainment Tonight, Leeza, and many more. He is the original civilian investigator of the Roswell Incident, co-authored Crash at Corona, instigated the Unsolved Mysteries Roswell program, and is known as “ The Father of Roswell.” Mr. Stanton Friedman has provided testimony to Congressional Hearings, appeared twice at the United Nations, and pioneered many aspects of Ufology.
The final interview was conducted with Dennis Balthaser. He served 3 years ('59-62) with the United States Army in the 815th Engineering Battalion. After some 33 years in Civil Engineering, Dennis retired from the Texas Department of Transportation in 1996. Having been keenly interested in the Roswell Incident of 1947, Mr. Dennis Balthaser decided to move to Roswell, New Mexico. Initially he worked as an Engineering Consultant in Roswell, volunteering his time at the International UFO Museum and Research Center on weekends. Nine months later he resigned from the engineering firm, assuming the duties of IUFOMRC Operations Manager, served on the Board of Directors and became the UFO Investigator for the Museum, as a full time volunteer. He began his own investigations, providing the public with some of the most informative lectures ever presented at the museum. Currently, he is no longer affiliated with the Museum; he is able to devote his full time as an independent
researcher/investigator to the Roswell Incident, Area 51 and underground bases research, and frequently lectures on these and other topics, related to ufology.
The three interviews were obtained through request in email and telephone. Since Mr. Stanton Friedman and Dennis Balthaser did not reside in New York it was difficult to obtain a face-to-face interview. However Mr. Peter Robbins did reside in New York but was much occupied with his work and that interview was also conducted through the telephone, which resulted in paraphrasing a lot of what the three had to say. In obtaining the interviews the three were glad to assist a student and were very cooperative in answering the questions. The information provided from the interviews was very helpful to the project.
Name: Peter Robbins Interview # 1
Gender: Male Location: (Phone interview)
Age: Late thirties Time/Date: 12/18/00
Ethnicity: Caucasian Length: 5:30 PM to 6:00 PM
Educational Background:
BFA in painting and Film history from Manhattans School of visual Arts where he taught for 14 years, and has worked as theater manager and assistant director for New York’s Repertory Company between 1982 and 1988.
Occupation: Heads the UFO Media Group of Central Park Media
Q: Why did you become interested in this field of study?
A: According to Peter when he was a teenager growing up in Long Island him and his sister experienced a UFO sighting. It was on a clear day and they were outside in the yard when they saw five silvery disc shaped objects. When asked how he differentiated that it was a UFO, he replied, “ It was almost like an ellipse…moving at a high rate of speed.” From then on he pondered if we were alone in the Universe. The sighting was an experience he could never forget.
Q: How does the Government censor the media regarding the UFO phenomena?
A: According to Peter the media censors itself and the government downplays the media. Since 1947 when the start of the UFO era became publicly known pranks, hallucinations, and newspapers still were usually covered by the government. “ The Media does a very good job…the government policies are hidden and dealt with in a discrete manner, …” replied Peter.
Q: Why do you think the government would want to keep an incident such as Roswell a secret?
A: According to Peter the crash could be of top-secret advances from unknown. America is one of the largest super powers in the world and here the government is faced with unknown technical advances and beings. “ It would be of embarrassment to our country who believes that we are the only intelligent life form… It may cause great concern if there were others out there…” replied Peter. In addition it may be better kept to prevent public panic and in history it has been proven that national political events can affect the economy causing a stock market crash.
Q: How do you think the society would react if UFO’s existed?
A: According to Peter, most intelligent people will acknowledge that we are not alone in the vast universe. Scientists, and even religion say that man is the most advanced being. “ It would be quite threatening, …” replied Peter. In a Bible passage of Ezekiel there were suggestions of a supernatural nature. Religious people may think that this opens the question of the Bible. Countries that believe in more then one god and reincarnation; ones that are more esoteric in belief would possibly adjust more easily then the western word or religions with one god. As for scientist, there would be much research done to better understand the extraterrestrial life forms.
Q: In what truth do you find the alien autopsy video?
A: According to Peter he was invited to a private screening of the film in 1997 in England around the time of the 50th anniversary of the Roswell incident. “ It is an expensive fabrication...” replied Peter, and an outright hoax. When asked if he was a skeptic then if he felt so strongly about the video being a hoax he replied, “ All great researchers should be skeptical… because not everything your hear or see is the truth.”
Q: What do you believe is the greatest UFO myth?
A: According to Peter, the greatest UFO myth was that nothing extraterrestrial crashed in Roswell, New Mexico. “ The revelation that the bodies found in the crash were just test dummies is nonsense, …” replied Peter. The evidence doesn’t match-up. The crash at Roswell according to Peter was something that was definitely not from this planet.
Name: Stanton T. Friedman Interview # 2
Gender: Male Location: (Phone Interview)
Age: 66 Date/Time: 12/18/00
Ethnicity: Caucasian Length: 6:15 PM to 7:15 PM
Educational Background:
Valedictorian of his 1951, Linden, NJ, high school class, and spent 2 years at Rutgers Univ., New Brunswick, NJ, before switching to the University of Chicago in 1953. He received BS and MS degrees in Physics from UC in 1955 and 1956.
Occupation: Former nuclear physicists and now independent researcher.
Q: Why did you become interested in this field of study?
A: According to Stanton he was a man who liked to see the facts on paper. As a nuclear physicist at the time he would be interested in reading sci-fi novels, and became especially interested in UFO’s. The book that affected him the most was Project Blue Book: Special Report 14. “ I’m a man of facts … the book had so many documents never before seen… it was an eye-opener…”
From then on he wanted to learn the truth about UFO’s.
Q: How does the government censor the media regarding the UFO phenomena?
A: According to Stanton the media does it’s own censoring. It is however important. He refers to the government cover up as a, “Cosmic Watergate.” meaning that some few people in major governments have known since July 1947, when two crashed saucers and several alien bodies were recovered in New Mexico. The evidence is overwhelming speaking from a forty-two year scientific study of the topic. According to Stanton many major media people will concede that if indeed aliens are visiting earth, that would be a major story. But because they take great pride in their knowledge of major stories, if this were happening they would know about it. But they don't. Therefore, anybody who says visits are real must be a crackpot
Q: Why do you think the government would want to keep an incident such as Roswell a secret?
A: “ I prove at every lecture that the NSA and CIA are withholding UFO data. Having worked under security for 14 years, visited 17 document archives, … I know how easy it is to keep secrets…” replied Stanton. The reason for all this is ego, fear, and economic failures. “ Flying saucers finish the job Copernicus started in taking man out of the middle of the universe. Priests fought Copernicus's ideas. Today guys in lab coats, rather than priestly robes, fight alien visitations…” Many fear ridicule and therefore would not take the government seriously if the truth about aliens were exposed. Naturally for security reasons as well.
Q: How much truth is the Air Forces revelation about the incident?
A: According to Stanton it isn’t true. The Air force wanted to cover-up the incident and chose a time such as the 50th anniversary to do so because they wanted to take attention of the phenomenon. “One of the silliest official USAF stories is the crash test dummy nonsense… Remember that the dummies had to be the same height and weight as air force pilots. None were dropped anywhere near the two crash sites and none were dropped earlier than 6 years after the 1947 events,” replied Stanton.
Q: What do you believe is the most solid evidence proving the incident in Roswell was extraterrestrial?
A: According to Stanton since he has been researching this topic for an ample amount of time witnesses and the first hand accounts, and of course the evidence of wreckage. When asked how he would differentiate between a hoax and truth. He replied there should be consistency in the evidence. The consistency in the stories obtained in witness accounts and the credibility of the witness. “ None of the anti-UFO arguments stand up to careful scrutiny …” so what other reason is there.
Q: In what truth do you find the alien autopsy video?
A: According to Stanton its phony! None of the evidence proved consistent and was more for publicity then anything else. “ It was mainly for the ratings…” he replied.
Q: If aliens do indeed exist what would they want on Earth?
A: According to Stanton, just as what we want to know about them; they want to find out as much about us. When asked if aliens would be a threat, Stanton replied, “It seems we are more of a threat to them…” Even possibly we are a colony of theirs and they have come to check up on us. Who really knows, but so far it doesn’t seem they have been a threat to our society.
Q: What do you believe is the greatest UFO myth?
A: According to Stanton, the greatest myth is that there is no evidence that aliens exist or have not even visited earth.“ The evidence is overwhelming that planet Earth is being visited by intelligently controlled extraterrestrial spacecraft … The greater the education, the MORE likely to accept this proposition … In an Oxford University Debate on the resolution ‘Planet Earth is being visited by intelligent extraterrestrial life’, the affirmative side, of which I was a part, garnered 60% of Debate Union Member votes on the question. 92% of 100,000 people calling during a TV Debate in London, said Earth has been visited by aliens…”
Name: Dennis Balthaser Interview # 3
Gender: Male Location: (Email Interview)
Age: late 40’s Date/Time: 12/18/00
Ethnicity: Caucasian 9:00 PM
Educational Background: Extensive civil engineering courses and a diploma in Highway
Engineering.
Occupation: Civil engineer and currently an independent UFO researcher focusing on the Roswell Incident of 1947, Underground Bases and Area 51
Q: Why did you become interested in this field of study?
A: “My background is civil engineering (3 years in the Army and 33 years with the Texas Highway Department). I’ve been interested in Ufology for 20-25 years after I bought my first book " Revelations" by Jacques Valee, and I'd lay in the back yard looking up into the sky wondering what was out there. I moved to Roswell in 1996 to pursue my interest and was the Operations Manager, UFO Investigator and on the Board of Directors at the UFO Museum from 96-98 before I went into research as an independent investigator.”
Q: How does the government censor the media regarding the UFO phenomena?
A: “The government censors the media by lying about what they know about the subject and possibly controlling the media, threatening people involved with the subject and generally denying any knowledge about UFOs.”
Q: Why do you think the government would want to keep an incident such as Roswell a secret?
A: “Several reasons:
CONTROL---- they will not admit to anything they can't control and if its been going on as long
as we think they have no way at the present time to do anything about it. Also in case of Roswell, perhaps they are still trying to figure out the technology involved if in fact they have a captured craft from the Roswell Incident. Remember if they can get here they are ions ahead of us in intelligence and technology, as we can't go there yet.”
Q: How do you think society would react if UFO's existed?
A: “50 years ago a lot of people would have panicked and in fact did. Orson Wells’s radio show about Martians invading in the late 1930's caused several people to commit suicide. Things were different then too. If you were told to shut up for National Security you did it, because they respected and trusted the government, unfortunately today because of what are leaders do and say we have less respect for them. Today people are more educated and young people like you grew up with Star Wars, X-Files, Star Trek, NASA, etc., and are more willing to accept
the fact that we are not alone in the universe.”
Q: If indeed they do exist what would they want with Earth?
A: “Beats me as we have nothing to offer. We can't get along with each other, with our neighbors, or other countries and are destroying the planet as fast as we can by destroying the rain forest, ozone layer etc. I tell people at lectures when they ask why don't they communicate with us? why would they want to?”
Q: Do you believe UFO's are a threat to our national security or our society?
A: “ I have not seen evidence that they are threat. They have had ample time to take us out if that was their intention. I think we should try to learn from them rather than probably being hostile toward them.”
Q: In what truth do you find the alien autopsy video?
A: “None. I think it was a real woman with a genetic disorder. Santilli who owns the film will not allow it to be analyzed. It may have been a government film released and then debunked as a fraud as part of their mis or disinformation policy.”
Q: How would you differentiate between a hoax and a true sighting?
A: “A true sighting should have multiple witnesses from different locations not affiliated with each other with good documentation. With computers and analyze available today its easy to distort photographs. Witness credibility also must be considered such as pilots, law enforcement
officer and other professional people.”
Q: What do you believe is the greatest UFO myth?
A: “The Greatest myth would be that we are alone in the universe and that the military and government have no interest in UFOs. Historical ufologists who have volumes about the military involvement in UFOs over the years have disproved the latter.”
So what happens now? The future is undecided. Did an alien spacecraft really crash in New Mexico that night of July 4th 1947? Maybe one would have to decide for oneself. Hundreds of theories that the United States government and many crazed citizens have tried to compile just have not seemed to be enough. Instead of admitting to the possibility of alter life forms in the universe or on American soil, the government has spent numerous years trying to convince the American people that an extraterrestrial did not land here in July 1947. The truth to the Roswell Incident is still out there. But as long as the United States government continues to run the show, we may never know.
Some people don't agree with the possibility that there might be extra terrestrial intelligence or life. A very thorough investigation carried out by a University of Colorado group, supported by a panel of scientist from the National Academy of Sciences, issued a lengthy report in 1969 to the effect that virtually all UFO sightings are due to natural phenomena-balloons, meteors, reflections of light and so on-and that little could be gained by investigating them further. There are some who want very much to believe that extra terrestrial life particularly the intelligent variety is common throughout the universe; and there are those who are committed to the view that extra terrestrial life is impossible, or so rare as to have neither practical nor philosophical interest.
As for the government keeping secrets from the public, they have every right to. However United States law provides public access to federal government files. The foundation of the act is the belief that the government is accountable for its actions and that the public possesses a right to obtain information about those actions. This act is called The Freedom of Information Act, which went into effect on July 4, 1967. FOIA provides that each government agency publish descriptions of its operations and procedures. Each agency must also make available opinions, orders, and statements of policy that affect the public. Any person or organization can also obtain data from a government agency through a FOIA request. Many people who are interested in the UFO phenomena could obtain information from these files. (http://www.foia.af.mil)
So are we alone in the Universe? If we were then many of people who witnessed sightings must have been lying. “ The evidence is overwhelming that planet Earth is being visited by intelligently controlled extraterrestrial spacecraft …” (Friedman interview). However it’s obviously not enough to prove to everyone that we are not alone. But take this into consideration the size of the universe; there are probably even planets or galaxies we have not discovered yet. Maybe we should stop thinking in a geocentric manner and open up to new possibilities.
What if UFO’s do exist? For most hard-working people, for whom life is already demanding and challenging enough, the UFO problem may seem peripheral to their life. After all, millions of people slave away throughout the world trying to make it through the day. One can hardly think that such people would be much worse off worrying about an alien invasion. However if they do exist humans may be able to learn a lot from these extraterrestrial beings. Contact with another civilization may provide us with technological information, scientific information, information about social systems, governmental systems, and possibly even art forms and recreational forms that would greatly enrich our own civilization. The results if contact with a greater intelligence than humans will undoubtedly lead us to new discoveries, whether or not they are good or bad.
