The Roswell Slides - The Gift that Keeps On Giving

Not all that long ago I asked a general question about the effect of the Roswell Slides on UFOlogy as a whole. Seems that most of those responding on line suggested that the impact was little, especially outside the UFO community. Most seemed to believe that those who did not hold much interest in UFOs were unaware of the whole sorry fiasco.

But that came from those inside the UFO community. Those outside, or those who had an interest but didn’t consider themselves part of our community, had a much different take on it. To them, it was a disaster that changed their opinions. In the last couple of weeks I have had occasion to speak with some of those people and by some, I mean four and by speak I mean both on the telephone and through email.

One man called me, apologized for the intrusion, and then said that he had been interested in UFOs for decades; that interest beginning as a teenager. He said that it seemed to him that in the last year or so, many of the classic cases had been explained and that the mystery seemed to have been solved. He brought up the Roswell Slides as what he thought of as almost the last straw. The will to believe had been so strong in some that they had missed the red flags waving all over the landscape according to what he said.

Another, who emailed me, said that for her the destruction of the slides so quickly once independent researchers had the opportunity to review the data had proved that much of the information being printed in books and magazines or used in documentaries about UFOs was next to useless. The slide investigators had overlooked the information that disconfirmed their belief structure (which, I think, is a problem that we all face). We sometimes look at information that provides a clear alternative view and then find all sorts of reasons to ignore it.

There was a guy who wanted to know what to believe and what books to read because he was so unhappy with how the whole Roswell Slides investigation had progressed. Oh, he understood that the investigators had wanted to proceed without interference and speculation until they had some answers. But, once the information had leaked, they should have been more forthcoming, especially now that we had the answers to the questions. He thought it ridiculous that some still clung to the idea there was something alien on the slides and that further damaged his reliance on UFO researchers.

The point here is that no matter how we attempt to dress it up, the Roswell Slides was the final straw for some who had suffered through MJ-12, the Alien Autopsy, and the collapse of so many of the Roswell witnesses who had claimed to have been involved deeply, regardless of their positions in the military at the time. I, myself, was fooled by several who seemed to have the proper credentials, who supplied robust stories, and who turned out to have been inventing their tales (and their confirming documentation which is not a phenomenon restricted to UFOs) and claiming higher ranks than they held.

The Roswell Slides, which didn’t receive any real reporting by the mainstream media (because of all the other nonsense about UFOs that has been “leaked” over the years) did considerable damage to the Roswell case in particular and UFO research in general. People who had not studied the Air Force report or understand some of the content of it will tell you that it explained Roswell completely and that is that. They won’t have read the report, can’t tell you what was in it, but they remember the Air Force explained Roswell at a press conference that was carried by the cable news channels and in many newspapers. And that is all they remember no matter what else is said or done. The Roswell Slides underscored that point of view, another case of great claims destroyed by proper research and that is the damage that has been done. At one point we had many people interested in learning about Roswell and it seemed that we had evidence to support the alien answer, but the Air Force had better PR than we did.  We are left with a negative image of UFO research and researchers by those slides which did not show an alien creature but an unfortunate child. Under those circumstances, what would you think?

Oskar Linke - Update

The thing about the Internet is that it allows you to communicate with people all over the country and all over the world which helps us get at the truth. For example, J. Allen Hynek said the Oskar Linke UFO landing story was in the Project Blue Book files, so I looked for it. Hynek dated the case as July 9, 1952, but other sources said the sighting was June 17, 1950. I searched the Blue Book index around those dates. July 1952 was a period of intense activity and while, at other times in other years, the index might feature all the sightings received during two or three months on a single page, in July 1952, single dates sometimes took up two pages. In other words, there were a lot of sightings in July 1952. I found nothing in June, July or August of that year that mentioned Linke and his UFO.

There was nothing for the sighting around its correct date in 1950 either. I checked for several months on either side of the date. Some of the sources, other than Hynek, also suggested a report in Project Blue Book, which others said wasn’t there.

As those of you who read comments know, Ralf Buelow, left a comment about this and a link about Linke (I just couldn’t avoid doing that) that showed it was in the Blue Book file. If you haven’t seen that link, here it is:

http://www.bluebookarchive.org/page.aspx?PageCode=MAXW-PBB9-1194

That, of course, took me to Fold3 and their Blue Book file which was a single page entry. I looked at the entries before it and after it, which allowed me to find the entry in the Blue Book index. It is on the page for 1 – 31 March 1952 in the section labeled “Additional Reported Sightings (Not Cases).” It is entry number 1087. It is grouped with a March 15 sighting in Iran and another from Greenfield, Massachusetts. Linke’s sighting (Hasselback, Saxsoni) is from a retyped news clipping and the one from Massachusetts is from the newspaper. The source of the Linke news clipping, which is to say the newspaper, is not identified in the Blue Book file. It is not the same clipping as the one quoted by Hynek in his book, The Hynek UFO Report. Hynek’s report was from a Greek newspaper and the source is listed as I. Kathimerini. No source is provided for the Iran case.

For those of you interested in such things, the report that directly precedes it is from California, and is from either March 31 or April 1, according to Blue Book and therefore has nothing to do with Linke.

The Iran case is a single page that describes a luminous object traveling at great speed that probably wasn’t a meteor, according to the file. The sighting was representative of a number of sightings over the Iranian/Soviet border at the time.

The Massachusetts sighting is an actual newspaper clipping as opposed to a retyped version and it covers some sightings in that state. There is nothing about Linke in that either.

Here’s where we are on this, which says nothing about the sighting itself, but on the reporting of it. Hynek claimed that it came from the CIA, but the Blue Book file does not bear that out. He said it was one of the “unidentifieds” in Blue Book, but the index and the case file do not bear that out. His quotes, apparently from the Greek newspaper, do not match the quotes from the Blue Book file, though the information does match, which of course it would since both reports comes from Oskar Linke. I see nothing on the Blue Book report that identifies a newspaper which is why I say it is not the one Hynek quoted.

I thank Ralf Buelow for the information and the link.

X-Zone Broadcast Network - Chris Rutkowski

Chris Rutkowski

Chris Rutkowski showed up for the latest edition of the A Different Perspective on the radio. We talked, briefly about the number of UFO sightings in Canada and his annual survey of the sightings that had been reported. For the rest of the program we talked about cases from 1967, of which there were three he thought to be important. We spent the most time on Shag Harbour because there was a lot of Canadian government documentation about the case. You can listen to the program here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=36QkUP8IwrQ

Next week: Noe Torres

Topic: His UFO investigations and his books.

Oskar Linke, Blue Book and the CIA

As many of you know, I’m writing a book which is no surprise because I’m always writing a book of some kind. Sometimes they are even about UFOs. As I was wading through the material, I came across a sighting that Dr. J. Allen Hynek had reported in his The Hynek UFO Report. The details were a little confusing and a typo or two made it even more confusing but I think I have straightened that out, which isn’t important here.

J. Allen Hynek

According to Hynek, on July 9, 1952 (or rather the date of the report) Oscar Linke and his daughter saw a UFO in what would have been East Germany. Linke said that he saw two entities and when his daughter shouted at him, those two beings reacted with surprise. They climbed back into their craft and took off.

So what’s the problem?

First, according to Hynek, the report is in the Project Blue Book files. He wrote, “One of the more interesting but isolated Air Force ‘Unidentifieds’ came to Blue Book in the form of a (then) secret CIA document:”

That document is a newspaper report from a Greek newspaper and that’s where the July 9, date came from. Others quoted Blue Book as the source following Hynek’s lead and some had the 1952 date as the correct one. I checked the Blue Book Master Index and found nothing to support a sighting on that date in Germany that involved an occupant sighting. Later I learned that the case was actually from June 17, 1950, and the man’s name was Oskar Linke. That didn’t help because I still found nothing in the Blue Book files about this report. I believe others have also attempted to find it with the same negative results.

I’m not here to argue the merits of the sighting, but Hynek’s interesting revelation. He seemed to believe the case was in Blue Book, and as the scientific consultant, especially in the early 1950s; he was privy to a great deal of UFO data collected by the Air Force. I’m not sure how he came into possession of this report because it was classified, though it might have been routinely downgraded at three year intervals until it was ultimately declassified in 1958, and besides, it was from a newspaper which sort of argues against the classification being to protect collection methods. While this clipping came from a Greek newspaper, it was apparently widely reported around Europe about the same time which is two years after the event.

No, the important point here is that the CIA was collecting UFO material and providing it to the Air Force. This was some five years before the beginning of Moon Dust (that was 1957 and the document was published in 1952… I mention all this so everyone knows that I’m not talking about the actual date of the sighting).

Anyway, I found it interesting that there were secret UFO reports being transmitted and that the CIA was gathering the data from around the world. Since this report was fed into Blue Book, according to Hynek and I don’t know how he would have learned about it otherwise, it suggests that there was another level to Blue Book which we have yet to penetrate. It suggests a real concern for UFO information at some high level of the government. And remember, we have found UFO related documents in the FBI files as well, so there was an interest in UFOs by the intelligence services.

All we have is this single little bit of data and in and of itself, the fact the CIA reported it might not be overly important. I might be reading too much into this. I just found it interesting that Hynek mentioned the case was in the Blue Book files, but it’s not, that it was classified as secret and that it came from the CIA. It suggests a higher level of interest in UFOs but doesn’t tell us much about that level of interest.

Skeptics vs Mogul

The other day, when I had Robert Sheaffer on the program, I had asked him some questions about skeptics that always bugged me. It seemed, from my perspective, that skeptics would accept any anti-UFO document as authentic without question and reject any pro-UFO document regardless of the provenance.* I had thought the true skeptic would be, well, skeptical of everything until the evidence was in hand, which might mean the acceptance of a document or point of view as logical once the investigation was completed even if that might not reinforce the skeptical beliefs.

As an example of this, I suggested that skeptics accepted the Project Mogul explanation as if it had been proven, even when there was sufficient documentation to question it. I used Dr. Albert Crary’s diary and field notes as an example. Since the only possible culprit for dropping metallic debris on the Brazel ranch (and yes, I know that Brazel didn’t own it, the ranch belonged to the Fosters) was Mogul Flight No. 4 because all other flights have been accounted for or had been launched too late to leave the debris, and Crary’s diary said Flight No. 4 had been cancelled, why do skeptics seem to think that doesn’t matter. The point was not to argue about Mogul, but to suggest that the acceptance of that flight as the culprit in the face of the documentation that suggested otherwise seemed not to be a very skeptical position.

Again, the point is not to argue the merits of the Mogul explanation, but to question the skeptics about this apparent contradiction.

Look at the other side. UFO proponents, who believe Roswell was an extraterrestrial craft, have a similar problem with the Twining Letter. This is a document written in September 1947 that provided information about UFOs and in one line, said that the lack of crash recovered debris which would prove the existence of these objects, seemed to argue against the Roswell crash. Proponents reject it because any alien crash recovered debris would be classified Top Secret and the letter is only classified as Secret. Security regulations would prohibit the inclusion of Top Secret material in a Secret document. This argument is without merit.

So we have the same set of circumstances. Skeptics criticizing the proponents when the documentation is clear… of course it does not completely rule out the Roswell crash because of the way the document was created**… but then we add other documents to the mix, as I outline in Roswell in the 21^st Century, and the support of a UFO crash is significantly reduced.

If I can look at this documentation or these documents and admit this, then why do skeptics continue to support the Mogul explanation with the same religious fervor as the UFO proponents support Roswell? Sure, you can say that they launched a cluster of balloons later in the day and we don’t have a definition of what that meant… except that definition was outlined in another document relevant to Mogul. Sure, you can say that the lack of data for Flight No. 4, and the exclusion of it in the data table created for all the other flights means they recovered nothing of scientific value and that suggests the reasons for the exclusion… even when other flights that failed to produce scientific data are mentioned in that table. Aren’t the skeptics now doing the same thing of which they accuse the proponents? Aren’t they cherry-picking the data to support their conclusion and rejecting that data that do not support them?

Charles Moore: The man who launched the Roswell Craft

The point of my question then, and now, is that some skeptics seem to ignore what I think of the tenets of skepticism by not applying the same standards to both sides of the question. Are they any worse than the true believers, who know, absolutely know, that there is alien visitation, and reject negative data because of that belief? Shouldn’t the skeptics be questioning all the data before accepting it, and if they don’t, then aren’t they actually debunkers rather than skeptics? What are the reasons for rejecting the documentation supplied by the man who lead the Mogul team (yes, I know it was the New York University balloon project) in favor of testimony from a man who claimed he had launched the Roswell saucer but has no documentation to support his claim? Is this evidence of a double standard in the investigation of UFOs (or any other disputed claim) or is there some reason that allows the rejection of the documentation that doesn’t favor the skeptical argument that I don’t know?

I have said, many times, that this shouldn’t be a debate where we ignore the information that is inconvenient, but an investigation in which the truth is the standard. Not my truth, or your truth, or someone else’s truth, but the truth. The question remains unanswered at this point as we’re dragged off into a discussion about Mogul which is a red herring… my narrative here is about skepticism and not Mogul. The conversation has been diverted and this, I hope drags it kicking and screaming back to the point.

*Robert Sheaffer did his best to answer the question for himself and I have no complaint about it. I mentioned him only because the point arose in the interview I conducted with him and lead to this longer line of thought.

**For those interested, the Twining Letter was written by Howard McCoy in response to information passed to him by Brigadier General George Schulgen and Lieutenant Colonel George Garrett. They supplied 18 specific sightings and asked for analysis. In those sightings, they mentioned nothing about a crash and since the analysis was based on those cases and nothing else, the argument can be made that no mention was made of crash recovered debris because none was submitted with the original request. That is the reason there is nothing about crash recovered debris and not this ridiculous argument about levels of classification. But before everyone jumps on this, there are other documents and statements that are relevant to that discussion (which is not made here) that add weight to the anti-Roswell argument.

Duplicate UFOs?

While interviewing Rob Swiatek during the radio show, I asked why there were no duplicate pictures of UFOs, meaning the same craft or similar craft photographed at different times in different locations by different people. It seems that every UFO picture we have is unique. He said that he knew of a couple of pictures that were quite similar but didn’t have the facts of the cases at his fingertips. You can read the additional information here:

http://kevinrandle.blogspot.com/2016/12/x-zone-broadcast-network-rob-swiatek.html

And, for those who missed the interview, you can listen to it here:

https://youtu.be/l8W0PV1QVE8

The point of this, however, is that Rob sent the information to me. There are two photos that appear in the APRO Bulletin for November 1978. The first of the pictures was taken by Saul Janusas who was on business in Brazil. He had been at the Rio De Janeiro airport on either June 20 or 21, 1978, and had caught the bus home. Through the bus window he saw an object. He grabbed his camera and took two pictures.

Nearly two years earlier, on May 12, 1976, Joshua da Silva and Gesareo Goncalves were on the road between Iteri and Passo Fondo, Brazil when, at about ten in the morning, da Silva spotted a silver object that he described as like Saturn with a ring around the center. Both men thought the object was of brushed metal and some twenty to twenty-five feet in diameter. When they were close, Goncalves stopped the car and then grabbed his camera. He took two pictures and then the object began to accelerate and disappeared in seconds. Technicians at El Globo, a

Rio newspaper, said they could find no evidence of a hoax, which, in reality meant they could find nothing that suggested the negative had been manipulated in some fashion.

This briefly, is the information about these two cases. The objects do resemble that of the object in the first picture supplied by Rob Swiatek. This shows that some of the photographs, taken years apart, do sometimes reveal objects that look similar. While this might not be of overwhelming importance, it certainly is interesting.

X-Zone Broadcast Network - Robert Sheaffer

This week we moved into the realm of skepticism with Robert Sheaffer who hosts www.debunker.com and www.BadUFOs.com where he offers solutions to many of what some believe are the best UFO sightings. We discussed a question that has bugged me for years which is why skeptics are quick to reject the alien solution for UFOs and equally quick to embrace the explanations without much in the way of questioning those solutions. For those interested in minutia, we discussed the radar and visual sightings over Washington, D.C. in 1952, Roswell (well, of course, with him asking me a question that might have bugged him for a while) and a few other sightings along with some thoughts on the Kenneth Arnold sighting from June, 1947. You can listen to the show here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yC0I9zSj8E0

Next week: Chris Rutkowski

Topic: Canadian UFO Research (Yes, an international show).