Satellite photo of Reunion Island. (image credit: Wikimedia Commons)

Let’s look at an interesting sub-genre of alien occupant, the so-called “Michelin man,” after the logo of the large French tire company Michelin. It’s a cute little man made out of tires of different sizes, which also looks like a spacesuit. (This type of spacesuit was depicted in the late 50s in the hugely popular comic series Tintin, when the hero and his companions go to the Moon.) Yet despite these cultural considerations, the two Close Encounters of the Third Kind (CE-III) with “Michelin men” were real enough, with both physical evidence and physiological effects, which make them Close Encounters of the Second Kind (CE-II) at the same time. Both cases were investigated and documented officially by the French Gendarmerie, a state police which operates throughout France and its overseas territories, and is charged by law to receive UFO reports from the public. They conduct all the interviews with witnesses and any necessary follow-up and then pass on the files to GEIPAN, the French space agency UFO bureau, for statistical analysis or further investigation. These cases, however, occurred before the establishment of GEIPAN (then known as GEPAN) in 1977.

The location of the two incidents was Réunion Island, a remote French outpost in the Indian Ocean. This volcanic island east of Madagascar in Africa is 969 square miles and has 827,000 inhabitants, according to 2009 figures. Annexed by France in the 17^th century, it’s now an overseas department. The first case of farmer Luce Fontaine occurred in the morning of July 31, 1968, while the second incident involving 21-year driver Antoine Séverin took place on February 14, 1975. The remoteness of Réunion Island is an important factor in ruling out sociological contagion, particularly in a period long before the global culture of the internet and satellite cable. Séverin, for instance, had not even heard of Fontaine’s case, which was reported in the press at the time.

A view of the Plaine des Palmistes in Reunion Island. (image credit: Jo Kerozen)

THE FIRST CE-III ON REUNION ISLAND

Cover of the French 1976 edition of Jean-Claude Bourret’s The New UFO Challenge, where the Gendarmerie documents on the 1975 CE-II were published. (image credit: Editions France-Empire)

Although we don’t have the actual police dossier of the first CE-III, we do have a good summary of the case in the massive book by Michel Figuet and J.-L. Ruchon, OVNI: Le premier dossier complet des rencontres rapprochées en France (UFO: The first complete dossier of close encounters in France), published in 1979. We also have the Nov. 1968 article published in the French journal Lumières dans la Nuit (Night Lights, usually referenced as LDLN) translated in England’s Flying Saucer Review ; as well as the beautiful color reproduction of the aliens made long ago by the defunct French UFO group GEOS (see illustration).

At 9 a.m. on July 31, 1968, 22-year-old farmer Luce Fontaine was in a plain called La Plaine des Cafres, specifically at the 21 KM signpost, picking some grass for his rabbits. “I suddenly saw a sort of oval-shaped cabin in the clearing,” Fontaine explained later. “It was 25 meters from me [about 75 feet], and as though suspended at a height of four or five meters [12 to 15 feet] from the ground. The extremities of it were dark blue, the center part lighter, more transparent rather like the windscreen of a [Peugeot] 404. Above and below it had what looked like two glass feet of shining metal.”

The GEOS painting puts the Michelin man outside the saucer, probably to highlight its funny shape since it was part of a set of slides of different types of aliens. But in the real incident at Cafres no such thing occurred. Basically, Fontaine described two humanoids about 90 cm. tall (less than 3 feet) inside the transparent cabin, dressed in the so-called Michelin gear and wearing a shiny metallic helmet covering their face. One of them was standing facing his back to him, but the one on the left turned and faced him. Fontaine’s statement continued:

“Then both turned their backs to me, and there was a flash, as strong as the electric arc of a welding machine. Everything went white around me. A powerful heat was given off and then as it were a sort of blast of wind, and a few seconds later there was nothing there any more.” Fontaine rushed to the site but couldn’t find any noticeable landing traces. He first told his wife, a local teacher, and then reported the encounter to the Gendarmerie. The inquiry was conducted by Captain Maljean of St.-Pierre, and Captain Legros of the Civil Protection Service. Luce Fontaine’s reputation was excellent and so everyone, including the police, believed the story without any doubt. But there was more.

Original reconstruction of the 1968 CE-III done by the French periodical LDNL. (image credit: LDLN)

The GEOS painting showing the 1968 CE-III with “Michelin” aliens in the Plaine des Caffres, Reunion Island. (Image credit: GEOS)

Capt. Legros checked for radioactivity in the landing area ten days later, and found eight radioactive spots on grass and pebbles of up to sixty thousandths of a Roentgen. This count is rather low but it was surmised that it might have been far higher right after the incident, since the checks were done ten days later and there had been heavy rains on the days before. Radioactivity was also found on Fontaine’s clothes, precisely on the side which faced the UFO.

All this led in the following months to a series of bizarre rumors, according to which Fontaine had been flown in secrecy to the Curie Foundation in Paris and was being treated for radiation sickness. All these stories were false, as it often occurs in even good UFO cases. According to Figuet and Ruchon, Fontaine experienced abundant nosebleeds and had to recover at home on the immediate days after the incident, but shortly afterwards he recovered fully. Antoine Séverin, the witness of the second CE-III on Réunion Island wasn’t so lucky. His physiological effects were quite traumatic.

BLINDED & MUTED BY A UFO!

Some of the Gendarmerie UFO dossiers from Bourret’s book. (image credit: J.-C. Bourret)

We do have the complete police dossier on the second CE-III with “Michelin” men in Réunion Island. It runs into dozens of pages of interviews with the witness, his family, neighbors, the doctors who treated him, his boss, etc. The inquiry was conducted by Lt. Col. Lobet of the National Gendarmerie and published by the French journalist J. C. Bourret, together with many other official documents, in his 1976 book, Le nouveau défi des o.v.ni. (The new challenge of UFOs). We also have an excellent summary of the whole case written by Capt. Guillaume Kervendal, the Gendarmerie’s top UFO expert, for the official military journal Armées d’aujourd’hui (Armies of Today) in September 1975, just a few months after the incident itself.

While little known, this case should be a classic of that very uncomfortable but at the same time convincing category of UFO incident: the physiological injury cases, which have been documented by John Schuessler, Bob Pratt and others. It also has some unusual aspects like a dream with a sound which preceded the encounter. Let’s quote from Capt. Kervendal’s summary:

“It all started with a dream during the night of February 11 to 12. But was it a dream? Antoine S., a young 21-year-old delivery chauffeur heard or believed to have heard a persistent ‘bip-bip,’ at times near, at times farther. That noise which broke his ears continued until the 14^th, at 12 hours 5 [min.]. After buying some candy, he was walking home. Without a reason, he started running; he stopped, as if impeded by a supernatural force. His eardrums were really bothering him. He left the road and advanced into a corn field. He then felt a strange heat accompanied by a burning sensation. Paralyzed by this force that he couldn’t conquer, he saw an object with aluminum color, stabilized about 1.5 meters [4.5 feet] above the ground, emitting always the lacerating ‘bip-bip.’ A ladder with three steps appeared in the object at a 45 degree inclination. A small occupant with brilliant clothing emerged from the object. He had on his hand some sort of stick. A second character had a satchel plus a third one joined the first as they scraped the soil. They had antennas on both sides of the head. A fourth occupant stayed inside the contraption and it could be seen through the saucer’s translucent dome. The third man suddenly became aware of the presence of young Antoine. A powerful flash came from the object and projected the young man to the ground. He could nevertheless see the beings returning quickly to the craft. The ladder retracted and the UFO rose with a very strong whistling noise. How long did Antoine remain on the ground? He couldn’t say.”

Exact location of the field of the 1975 Séverin case from the Gendarmerie files. (image credit: J.-C. Bourret)

During the next few days, until Feb. 19^th, the witness was in such a state of shock that he was both blinded and mute. He tried to explain what had happened to the gendarmes, gesturing wildly but unable to talk. Everyone in his family, neighbors and his employer vouched that he was a reliable and responsible individual. No solid landing traces or radioactivity were found on the site, but there was still one more troubling detail duly noted in the police reports and in Capt. Kervendal’s summary of the case:

“During the following days, he wanted to return to the site and take the gendarmes. But each time that he penetrated into the corn field, a strange force projected him into the ground and put him again unconscious. In the same manner that when he talked to the gendarmes on Feb. 19 [when he was able to talk again], he didn’t have any recollection of having been in a semi-coma for five days.”

Those are the basic facts of the second and troubling CE-III with “Michelin” men on Réunion Island. The police reports go naturally into much more detail, but at no point there is a suspicion of hoax or mental aberration from the part of the witness. Who were the beings that caused Antoine Séverin such disagreeable symptoms? Although the shape of the “Michelin” aliens may look funny or cute, their behavior and the effects they had on both Luce Fontaine and Antoine Séverin were anything but funny. Another question is why we don’t seem to have any more of this type of report nowadays.

I am afraid I don’t have a good response to any of these questions, but neither did the French Gendarmerie. As put by Capt. Kervendal in his article for the French army review, “the goal of our purpose is not to give here a response to the [UFO] problem. To our knowledge, nobody can, for now, pretend to know it.”

Illustration from a case in Jerez, Spain, where two “Michelin humanoids” were seen by a biker. (image credit: STENDEK)

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To find more about these cases on Reunion Island, you can check the excellent French website www.ufologie.net, which has plenty of material in English as well. The 1968 case of Luce Fontaine in the Plaine des Caffres can be found be found here. The 1975 physiological injury case of Antoine Séverin can be found here. This last report includes the translation of the actual Gendarmerie reports written by Lt. Col. Lobet.

If you want to get a feel of what Reunion Island looks like, we recommend you rent the 1969 film Mississippi Mermaid by François Truffaut (the famous French director who played the character of Lacombe in Spielberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind), in which a young and beautiful Catherine Deneuve plays a mail bride that arrives in Reunion Island to marry a tobacco farmer played by Jean-Paul Belmondo. It has nothing to do with UFOs but it’s a great movie filmed on location on this exotic island.

Movie poster of Mississippi Mermaid.

Major Dewey Fournet (image credit: NICAP)

I finally came face to face with former military Blue Book officers in 1988. A local ufologist from Arkansas, Bill Pitts, sponsored a conference on Blue Book in Eureka Springs in the Ozarks. (It later became a very successful annual UFO conference under Lou Farish where I have often spoken.) The star was Major (Ret.) Dewey Fournet, who was the Pentagon liaison officer with Blue Book in the early period under Capt. Ruppelt, which included the flying saucer wave of 1952 and the Washington, DC radar cases. Another speaker was Max Futch, Airman 1^st Class, who took over the project for a brief period after Ruppelt, and is a rather obscure figure in the history of the project.

I had the opportunity of conducting a lengthy and relaxed interview with Major Fournet about some of the key events he had lived, like working with Ruppelt during the ’52 wave, briefing the 1953 CIA-convened Robertson Panel, or serving later in the National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomena’s (NICAP) Board of Governors. Fournet was very frank and revealing. He confirmed having reviewed the first draft of Project Sign’s legendary ‘Estimate of the Situation,’ which concluded the saucers were not only real but also probably of interplanetary origin. The USAF Chief of Staff, Gen. Hoyt Vandenberg, wouldn’t sign it and the report was toned down and rewritten without the pro-ET conclusion. The revised version was declassified under the FOIA only in 1985.

Fournet also talked about the contents of his briefing to the CIA panel and his own ‘Estimate of the Situation’ to the USAF mentioned in one of Keyhoe’s books. Fournet explained that he intended “to show the probability of intelligent control, and admitting to the possibility that when we said that intelligent control is probable, admitting then the further possibility that they could be of extraterrestrial origin, but that’s all… my sole purpose really was to try to knock out the prejudices that certain people in the military and other parts of the government had, they were not being open-minded in my opinion, I wasn’t trying to force-feed them a definite belief, I was trying to open their minds a bit.” Excerpts of my interview with Fournet were published in the now-defunct ‘UFO Universe’ magazine (Nº 3, Nov. 1988).

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The Report on Unidentified Flying Objects by Edward Ruppelt

Antonio Huneeus: My first question is about Captain Ruppelt’s book. Since you worked with him I’d like some kind of personal portrait of Ed Ruppelt, what kind of person he was based on your experience with him.

Dewey Fournet: As far as I am concerned Ed was very objective, he tried to be very honest, he was trying to do the best job that he possibly could, still he might get carried away but he retained what I consider was an excellent balance, he was willing to take off and go… never complained about it, and every time that another report came in that we thought deserved some study he… so he was gung-ho on the seriousness of the subject and felt that he had to do as good a job as it could possibly be done, no biases, and I had discussed a couple of times all the implications that could possibly be, at least those that we could dredge out of our imaginations, and even though we would eliminate a lot of them as probabilities because of insufficient evidence, nonetheless he kept an open mind about it, he didn’t turn down ipsofacto some piece of information that somebody was offering him just because it didn’t fit with any preconceived conclusion.

AH: After you left the service, and he too, did you stay in touch with him?

DF: Well, I stayed in touch with Ed on and off, especially at the time that the movie was being made, the Al Chop Story, he and I did communicate quite a bit, because we wanted to be sure that Al wouldn’t be carried away into the wild blue yonder, and at one point it looked like he might have been, and Ed and I would have backed off.

From left: Fournet, Chop, and Ruppelt. (image credit: NICAP)

AH: So you all did work on the movie in one way or another?

DF: Oh yeah, we had to review the script, the portions of the script that involved either one of us, he (Ruppelt) reviewed those in which he was involved, I reviewed those in which I was involved, and I had a big brouhaha with Al over that portion of the National [Airport] thing, and that’s when Al finally reminded me–it suddenly came to Al that I had been called out of the Control Room–to talk to me about it on the phone, and that’s when the convergence, when the fighters occurred.

AH: Right, so you missed that part?

DF: I was not there, it was mentioned in the movie: in fact because I gave Al a real hard time on it, and he said, well, look, I’ll make it not only evident that that occurred while you were out, but I’ll call it to the attention of the audience, and that’s why it became so obvious that I was being called out and was still out when this incident was occurring. I am still not sure about that one.

Article on the movie about Al Chop titled, UFO: The Truth About Flying Saucers. Al Chop was the public information officer at Wright Patterson Air Force Base who had an inside look at the mechanics of how the Air Force was handling the UFO situation.

AH: Another question I have concerns the famous Project Sign’s Estimate of the situation, the one that Gen. Vandenberg burned down.

DF: That was the Project Sign report.

AH: I think it’s in the Keyhoe and Ruppelt books that you did see it.

DF: Oh yes, I studied it.

AH: And that’s the one that concluded that they (UFOs) were extraterrestrial?

General Hoyt Vandenberg (image credit: USAF)

DF: That’s correct, and Vandenberg never signed it, and I think with damn good reason, because what did we had after the first two years and two months, Project Sign folded up, there simply wasn’t enough to go on, there wasn’t enough hard evidence to arrive at such a conclusion. Now if they had said as I did with the Robertson Panel, look, let us acknowledge the fact that at least this is a possibility, and let’s always keep that in front of us, and never wander away from it, don’t turn it down because it doesn’t seem like an appealing thing to you; and the purpose was simply to stimulate completely objective views on the thing, to admit every possibility within the realm of our mentality, and not ipsofacto turned it down, but the Project Sign report did not do that, it was written as a staff study and normally in a staff study you got to come up with conclusions, one, two, three, four, you don’t bend the rod, …but they were straight laced, and coming up with a conclusion such as they did at that point in time when there were so little evidence to substantiate that claim, naturally anybody in the position such as Vandenberg would say, I am not going to sign it.

AH: What did the early portion of the report have, it just recounted sightings?

DF: It went through, yeah, in that kind of a study what you do is, first of all you start up with your assumptions, then you go through and show what evidence you have resulting from the study, and the conclusions which are supposed to be corroborated and supported by the information that you have already presented.

AH: And in this case they didn’t have enough evidence to arrive to those conclusions?

DF: Right, and they didn’t even put in any recommendations, so the thing sort of fell flat, but at least it was interesting to me and Ed that even at that early stage, at least there was enough open-mindedness in the project that they were acknowledging this as a possibility, even though they put it as a definite conclusion.

AH: Right, the second thing which you’ve already told me but I want to have it here on the record, is about your own ‘estimate of the situation,’ that last report you did just before leaving the Air Force.

DF: It was largely, it contained largely the same kind of thing [as in] the presentation I made to the Robertson Panel; all right, now remember whether it be Ed, or me, or my division chief, or General Samford or whoever, if you go about saying, look, I have arrived at this point in all these studies that we’ve made, I have arrived to these conclusions, but remember that none of them have been proven, we’re only acknowledging possibilities, I did that in the estimate of the situation that I made, using as a large part of it the same basic sighting reports that I used to put together my presentation to the Robertson Panel, intending to show the probability of intelligent control, probability in this case, and admitting to the possibility that when we said that intelligent control is probable, admitting then the further possibility that they could be of extraterrestrial origin, but that’s all.

Edward Ruppelt (standing center) at July 29, 1952 Pentagon UFO press conference. Also pictured, Major Generals Roger Ramey (seated left), USAF operations chief, and John A. Samford (seated right), USAF director of intelligence. (image credit: Wikipedia)

AH: Right, somebody had to be behind an intelligent control.

DF: Yeah, and my sole purpose really was, number one, to try to knock out the prejudices that certain people in the military and other parts of the government had, they were not being open-minded in my opinion, I wasn’t trying to force-feed them a definite belief, I was trying to open their minds a bit, so at least they could acknowledge this within the spectrum of their thinking as a possibility, and to also go to the Robertson Panel into letting this, admitting this as a possibility in their deliberations, and trying to help them in considering this aspect to come to grips with what should be done from that point on, and I was hoping in fact that they’d take it out of the Air Force.

AH: What? The UFO study?

DF: Yeah .

AH: And take it where?

DF: Put it in some other government agency, or on the presidential staff with volunteers from the scientific community, and I was hoping the Robertson Panel, being such noted scientists, would enlist the help of these other scientists.

AH: So that was your aim. I guess that’s connected to a question I have further down here; I was checking one of Keyhoe’s books, again I don’t know how accurate he is when he quotes you or Ruppelt or Chop, but he mentions there a plan that the three of you had of releasing all the UFO data to the public with a press conference, or something to that effect.

Major Donald Keyhoe

DF: No, no, we never would have done that, and I think I brought Don short on that at one point in the discussions I had with him right when I got out. No, what we did succeed in doing, Ed and I agreed that in order to avoid all the distress that we were having and the accusations from the public and the press in particular that we were covering up things, not releasing data, was to adopt a policy that said, and we did this in mid-52 now, any report that you know about, if you can ask for it by specific description, we will release everything that we can declassify to the requester, but as far as making the whole library available to the public, that would have been absurd because there was such a clutter of trash in those reports, I mean, let’s face it, the preponderance of the thing, when I say preponderance, over 50%, maybe 60 or 65% of it was absolutely trash, completely mistaken stuff that was miss-described, it didn’t sound like spaceships.

AH: Because there was a hype over the subject at the time?

DF: That’s correct, and we just didn’t feel that without us analyzing every single one of those in complete detail–which we didn’t have the resources to do–it was completely unwise to try to dump this out on the public, where they don’t know the wheat from the chaff, and that would have been a terrible disservice to the American public.

AH: That clarifies that episode from Keyhoe’s book. Now, about your dealings with Fred Durant, and Marshall Chadwell from the CIA, and other CIA people before and during the Robertson Panel.

DF: Well, Fred [Durant] really approached the Air Force, and I never did find out from Fred what instigated the interest by CIA on the subject, never bothered, I knew he had been given the authority to see me and I was told that I could tell everything that I possibly could about the UFO project, from day one as long as I knew what I was talking about.

AH: He was a consultant for the CIA, right?

DF: No, I don’t know if Fred was a consultant, I do know he was on the CIA payroll, I assumed he was just one of the project managers, and there again, you don’t go out asking questions like that of those people, because at that time CIA was fairly young, you know, it was a successor to OSS and it was considered to be a kind of cloak and dagger operation, so you don’t go banging around saying, hey tell me everything that you’re doing, but my superiors, I guess it started all the way from the Chief of the Air Staff, I don’t remember who it was in those days.

AH: Vandenberg?

DF: No, Vandenberg was gone.

AH: Twining, or he was later?

DF: Twining was later. Ah, I got the orders to go ahead and get with Fred at his request and brief him as completely as he wanted on everything that I could give him that was fact, how we operated, what the latest status of the project was, any conclusions that we may have ongoing at the time, and I got to know Fred fairly well, not very intimately though, because my closure to Fred was over about a 6-month period, less than that, 4 months, but I gave him everything that he asked for, everything that I could, that I felt would help him. He told me what his objective was, which was to take the stuff up in the CIA and they would determine whether they felt any further recommendations should be made to the Air Force or to the President or whomever, so the next thing I knew, I heard, I was on the phone with Fred quite a bit, he’d have further questions and I’d answer them on the phone if I could, otherwise we would get together, but I don’t think we got together personally that often, it must have been only three or four times  then he called me and asked me whether I would be willing to meet with a bunch of top people in CIA who apparently were potentially involved in this or would be involved in the recommendations that were going to be forthcoming, and brief them, not in great detail but at least enough to give them an overview, he said; so I did that, I met with them, and the next thing I heard from Fred was that the CIA had contacted certain scientists and asked them if they would meet as a panel to review all the pertinent material that we had, and they would render some conclusions and recommendations for the Air Force or the government, and that was the Robertson Panel.

AH: Did you have any dealings with this fellow that appears a lot in the Robertson Panel proceedings, Dr. Marshall Chadwell, he was the head of the CIA’s Office of Scientific Intelligence.

DF: The name is vaguely familiar, but I can’t say that I can recall him explicitly.

AH: OK, do you recall by any chance a report that is again mentioned by Keyhoe, about a sighting in April 52 by the Secretary of the Navy, Don Kimball, while he was flying over Hawaii? I’ve never been able to find corroborating evidence about this case.

DF: Yeah, it rang a bell, but I think the only place I saw that was in Don’s book, I must say that if I did know about it at the time I can’t remember that. Before we move from that question, Antonio, let me elaborate on that, just try. I was going to elaborate about the question supposedly submitted by the Secretary of the Navy. The reason I may have seen it–and I don’t remember it–is because it didn’t matter the source of the report, the sighting, it could have been from the President himself, but if it was treated as casually and incidentally as, hey I saw this light in the sky, and that’s all there was to it, well, certainly, you might have gone over and talked to the person if you’d gotten permission, and see if there was any additional information that could be added to the initial report, but in this case I feel certain that Kimball would have reported it through the Navy, and the Naval Intelligence were very close to us, and they knew what our rules were, they knew what our requirements were, and the report could have come in and been very vague, and just because Kimball saw something didn’t give it any more credence than another good observer, presumably we would have treated him as a fairly decent observer, and it would have gone in the files as insufficient information, and it would have been just more of [a mass of them?], so the source of the report, the observer, whoever it was, didn’t make that much difference to us.

AH: That’s important to know, unless the difference, let’s say between a pilot and a farmer, the difference in technical qualifications…

DF: Oh yes, well, definitely, we put more credence and we felt that we could ask more pointed questions of a pilot or a CAA controller if it was a radar sighting, or somebody with that qualification, naturally we’d pursue it a lot more, and let us say that we knew that Kimball was a private pilot, well, I’m sure if the report would have given some clues that, gee whiz, there could be more to this that it is being reported in this report that we received, we would have pursued it, but simply because he was a better qualified observer, a pilot, OK? but it would haven’t made any difference whether he was the Secretary of the Navy or it was an ensign flying a fighter, is what I am saying, as long as we felt that either of them had the same qualifications, we would haven’t given more weight to the Secretary of the Navy’s report that we would to the ensign’s report, just as we would haven’t given anymore to the President’s report than we would to a soldier on the field if neither was better qualified as an aerial observer.

AH: In any case, you think that because of his position, files about that case would be more easily found on Navy Intelligence.

DF: No, I don’t think so, I think they would have come to us because, as I said, we had a beautiful relationship with the Navy Intelligence, they were the ones, every time I needed help on photo analysis, I got with Navy Intelligence because they had that superb Photo Analysis Lab across the river at Anacosia, which is where the Tremonton movies were running parallel with the ones at Wright-Patterson, and the Navy people are the ones that gave the presentation to the Robertson Panel, because if anything they were better equipped in that particular field that was Wright-Patterson.

AH: OK, also other rumors from that period, the reaction from the White House after the Washington DC sightings. I think that in the movie they show a phone call from the White House or something.

DF: Well, not me, I think to Ed Ruppelt, and I can’t talk for Ed on that score because that didn’t excite either one of us; the fact that the President was taking interest because it was local, we understood, but that would have been one of his aids, I am sure, that would have gotten hold of Ed, and he would have not gotten hold of Ed directly, he would have called the Chief of the Air Staff, the Chief of the Air Staff would have gotten Gen. Samford, and Gen. Samford would say, OK, you go to this fellow or I’ll get him to call you, but I never had time to talk with Ed about that because things were moving too fast, and that was just a passing incident, because we were always getting requests, from Senators of tremendous seniority, from people in various Secretary’s offices, from all kinds of governmental positions, and it was a matter of course with us, we just told them what we knew, if they had a need to know.

Life amagzine article on the UFOs over Washington in 1952. (image credit: Life magazine)

AH: Another rumor that has been referred in books is that after the Washington sightings, supposedly Einstein called the President and told him, whatever you do don’t shoot at them. Did you hear anything about that?

DF: No, I didn’t hear anything like that, but we had standing orders, there was to be no firing unless there was definite indication that they were under attack.

AH: And those orders were from the moment you began working on the project?

DF: Oh, absolutely, they were from the very middle of 47 as far as I know, from the Kenneth Arnold sighting, I never saw any evidence to the contrary, even in Project Grudge days, because Project Grudge was an internal matter for Air Intelligence, and that had no authority at all over the field, the combat forces.

AH: Let’s move a little forward. What were your reasons for joining NICAP, and then about your relationship with Keyhoe.

DF: The latter part is more important, Don got hold of me right at the time that I was getting out of the Air Force.

AH: You didn’t know him before?

DF: No, because I didn’t deal with him directly, the reports he got were through Al Chop.

AH: But you approve them?

DF: I had enough respect for Don and his background as a Marine officer, a Marine flying officer, were enough to tell me, well gee wiz, we’ll bend over backwards to give him what I want him to get, which was the factual information rather than some of the trash that he’d picked up in one of his early books, so I thought he could be a big help to us to get some of this trash off display and not presented as factual stuff, instead deal with what we thought were the facts. I wasn’t trying to brainwash him, I was just giving him good information, and he came in on that policy that we had enacted, that anybody can ask for a report based on a specific incident that he can describe to us, we’ll release that information whatever is releasable in the report, and that’s how he had got the stuff through Al Chop, but I never dealt with any of those people directly. But Don, I don’t know when it was, he found out, I think it was after Washington National, he got word somehow, somebody asked why wasn’t Major Fournet in that press conference or whatever it was, because somebody knew, I think Al had mumbled it, and that’s I believe where Don could have gotten hold of my name, or else it was one of his buddies in the Navy, I am not sure, but he contacted me and said that he’d like to talk to me briefly if he could meet me, so I agreed, I’d go ahead and meet with him, because as I said I thought he could be [to] the government, [and] the public a big service, since he was well equipped to write about the [UFO] stuff with his background, and if he was dealing with facts, what we called the facts, it was more like it to come up with a good story for the public, for public consumption than if he had all this other stuff mixed up with it, so I talked to him and told him, OK, fine, look, and I described what my reasoning was for seeing it that he got fed all the stuff beforehand, and I said, I think you ought to go to it, but try to get the facts across to the public, so I met him briefly that way. Well, years and years passed, and it was early 60s sometime when Don contacted me and asked me if I would join the Board of Governors of NICAP, he was the Director, and I was very reluctant at first because I had promised myself when I walked out of the Air Force in 1953 I never wanted to hear about this thing again, I had a bellyful, but he kept saying, look, NICAP is a very sound organization, he mentioned the Admiral…

AH: Yeah, Hillenkoetter, I was going to ask you, did you ever met him?

DF: Hillenkoetter was one, I never met him.

AH: Knowles was another one.

DF: Knowles could have been, and it was an impressive list, and Doc Hartranft, who was the President of the Private Aircraft Pilots Association [Aircraft Owners and Pilots Association]; so after he twisted my arm considerably, I said OK, look, but let’s have one thing clearly understood, I am coming in to help you on your policy matters because I have certain definite opinions about how this type of thing should be handled, and I will even assist when I can on the business matters, because they were already having some business problems with money, and it was under that arrangement that I went in. Well, I would hear from Don maybe once a year, when he was starting to plead another case for contributions because NICAP’s finances were [getting worse] it’s in the mid-60s now–but otherwise I met with the Board only once, I happened to be on a business trip to New York, I arranged to come back through Washington and I stayed for a couple of nights, and met with the Board at a place near Dupont Circle, but that was the only time I actually met with them, but things went from bad to worse, that was in 1967, things went from bad to worse and finally Doc Hartranft called me and said that he had been in touch with a couple of the other board members, Don was getting ready to put out another final appeal for funds, it was a very, very sad appeal, really, you could tell that the bottom could be dropping out if NICAP didn’t get substantial contributions, and he said we can’t put up with this, we are losing members because of these constant appeals for additional funds besides the dues that they pay, and things are cluttering up.

AH: What was the problem, because I understand that they had a lot of members at one point?

DF: Yeah, I think it was, Don said it was because of the declining publicity, the declining numbers of sightings, the declining numbers of reports, and the loss of interest by the public, and I couldn’t stay up with that stuff, I had my own work to do and I was gone all the time, so I couldn’t say whether that was sufficient or not, I didn’t had the time to go up there and try to sit with Doc Hartranft and a few of the other people and figure it out what should be done, so it got to that point, I got the call from Doc, he said he had talked to so and so and such and such, and they decided that it was time for Don to go, and since I was the one that knew Don the best, they put the kiss of death on me to go ahead and call Don and tell him as gentle as I could that the Board had decided that he was to become Director Emeritus, and that they get the acting directorship, and it fell on my lap to do that and that was one of the toughest things that I had to do in a long time, because I liked Don as a fellow, but Don got carried away on certain things.

AH: Right, Don was one of the main ones that was always accusing the Air Force of cover-up and conspiracy.

DF: Yeah I know, that was another one of my purposes, to try to get him off that kick when I had all that material released.

AH: OK, Dewey, that should do it, those were all the questions I had.

DF: OK, very good, I hope it helps.

1960’s: PATAGONIAN USOS

When UFOs are reported entering and leaving bodies of water, whether the oceans, seas, large rivers or lakes, they are designated USOs for Unidentified Sea (or Submarine) Objects. In the 1960’s, the Argentinean Navy seemed to have its hands full with mysterious USO activity around the southern Patagonian coast. Official USO reports were rarely released by the Navy, but some cases were nevertheless tracked by two pioneer civilian ufologists. Both had excellent qualifications: Dr. Oscar A. Galindez was a judge and Oscar A. Uriondo worked in the Library of Congress in Buenos Aires. The two “Oscars” were the first to conduct a systematic scientific field investigation in the open, publishing their reports in books and articles. We can outline the following USO cases in Patagonia:

• Feb. 1960: The Navy detected two USOs in Golfo [Gulf] Nuevo and tried to catch them for two weeks. US Navy experts came to help with special sub-hunting equipment, but to no avail. Tons of explosives were used but the USOs got away, still unidentified. The late Ivan Sanderson, a British author specialized in USOs, wrote that the Golfo Nuevo subs “were able to stay submerged for several days and could outrun the surface ships… All nations owning submarines denied emphatically that the subs were theirs.”

• Nov. 12, 1963: Oscar Uriondo in his classic 1968 book, The Scientific Problem of UFOs, summarized another intriguing case from Golfo Nuevo: “The Navy transport ship ‘Punta Medanos’ was navigating on the South Atlantic facing Golfo Nuevo. Suddenly, a large UFO crossed rapidly at 2 km from the ship; although the passage was very quick, the needles on the compasses onboard jumped off course abruptly and continued to do so for 55 minutes.” The Navy Commission was unable to explain the case, and recruited the assistance of the Hydrographic Service to check the electromagnetic effect (EME) on the compasses. In the end, they could find no conventional explanation for the EME other than “the presence of the UFO.”

• July 28, 1964: Several USO cases are mentioned by Dr. Galindez in a 1974 article entitled, “Marine Implications of the UFO Phenomenon.” The judge revealed another USO case in the Patagonian Golfo San Jorge, involving two Argentinean oil tankers and the Norwegian vessel ‘Sumber.’ All these ships observed after 9 PM the apparent fall of an object, perhaps “an aerolite or small comet.” However, it was flying “horizontally” and “emitted a luminosity that, at times, became intense,” according to the official report submitted by the ‘Sumber’ skipper to Argentinean naval authorities. The ships looked for possible survivors, but nothing was found. This case has certain similarities to the famous Canadian 1967 UFO crash in Shag Harbour, Nova Scotia.

• March 18, 1966: The crash of a cigar-shaped object on the ocean was reported and sketched by farmer Carlos Corosan from a deserted beach near Deseado, south of Golfo San Jorge. Corosan had a good view of the object at 4 PM, estimating it was 65 to 70 feet long, with a metallic appearance and no wings, windows or markings. The UFO seemed to be in trouble, emitting “a short, muffled blast of smoke,” and then began to hum and “vibrate all over as though it were coming apart,” said Corosan. The farmer added the object finally hit the sea, but “it did not float at all, it just hit the water with a huge splash and went down quickly.” As far as we know, Corosan was the only witness, although Navy ships were reportedly seen in the area later on. The military neither confirmed nor denied his account.

1965: ANTARCTICA WAVE

Navy Captain Daniel Perissé (image credit: MUFON Proceedings)

One of the best documented Navy cases occurred at Deception Island, which belongs to the South Shetland Islands west of the Antarctic Peninsula in the Argentinean sector. Three nations (Argentina, Chile and Britain) maintained research stations in 1965 in this island of volcanic origin, formed by the remains of a crater flooded by the sea [see Map]. A detailed report of these sightings was prepared by Captain Daniel A. Perissé, who was in 1965 commanding officer of the Argentinean Navy garrison in Deception Island with the rank of Lieutenant. A total of seven UFO sightings occurred there between June 7 and July 3, 1965. An eighth incident followed in August at the Argentinean post at the South Orkney Islands.

On July 7, the Argentinean Navy Bulletin #172 stated that, “Lt. Perissé confirmed… that all the garrison personnel observed an extremely brilliant object, moving toward the north with variable speed, sometimes hovering, displaying sudden accelerations and changes of direction. The characteristics of the object and its motion, added Lt. Perisse, were such that the possibility of a weather balloon, a plane or a star were ruled out. The object was observed by a total of 17 persons, including three visiting Non-commissioned officers from the Chilean base ‘Pedro Aguirre Cerda’.”

The Chilean Air Force, in charge of the Antarctic bases ‘Aguirre Cerda’ and ‘Arturo Prat,’ confirmed their own UFO sightings in Deception Island with an official communiqué released the same day. “According to a message sent by Commander Mario Jahn Barrera from the Antarctic Chilean base ‘Arturo Prat,’ a luminous object was sighted for about 20 minutes by nine members of the garrison who were performing routine meteorological observations. It changed colors, speeds and direction, moving with an oscillatory motion at high speed.”

Capt. Perissé published later a thorough analysis of the sightings and particularly the more spectacular one on July 3. First seen by nine witnesses at the Chilean base beginning at 7:20 PM, the object moved to the Argentinean base by 7:42, where it was seen by 17 witnesses for 62 minutes, until 8:44 PM. Perissé wrote that “the shape of the object was similar to a rugby ball… with a red center and ill defined edges of changing colors (yellow, green, orange, blue and white)… The actual size of the UFO was somewhere between 75 and 90 meters.” There is still one more mystery concerning the July 3 event. The Navy Bulletin #172 quoted above added that, “from the Navy post at the South Orkney Islands comes a message of extreme importance: during the passage of the strange object over the base [earlier the same day], two magnetometers in perfect working condition registered sudden and strong disturbances of the magnetic field (at 17:03 Hrs.), which were recorded on their tapes.”

The public interest generated by these cases led the Navy to rescue the “problem from semi-clandestiness,” as put by the Director of the Navy UFO project, Capt. Pagani. In a famous 1965 press conference quoted in Part I, Pagani declared that “UFOs exist” and “their presence and intelligent displacement in Argentinean airspace has been proven.” There were no known photos taken during the July and August 1965 UFO flap in Deception Island, but in late 1967 the well known Argentinean weekly magazine Siete Días (Seven Days) published a very interesting UFO photo reportedly taken by a navy officer in the island during an underwater volcanic eruption on December 11, 1967 (see photo). Its authenticity, however, remains in question because the photographer’s name was never disclosed or identified.

Flying disc next to an underwater volcanic eruption reportedly taken on Dec. 11, 1967 by a Navy officer at the Antarctic Station in Deception Is., leaked to the weekly magazine Siete Días. The disc on the top is the real size of the object; the second an enlargement. (image credit: ICUFON Archives)

The Deception Island UFO flap was also covered in some detail by the U.S. military attachés stationed in Buenos Aires and Santiago, Chile, who digested and translated the local press coverage and the reports published in the Argentinean Navy Bulletin. These documents, released by the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA) years ago under the Freedom of Information Act, can be downloaded here.

Interestingly, the Deception Island incidents launched Capt. Perissé’s ufological career: first under the Navy Commission and, after his retirement from the service in 1984, as a civilian ufologist with the groups CEFAI and CIU, and in the 1990s with a semi-official study group within the Institute of Scientific and Technological Research of the Armed Forces (CITEFA in Spanish). Perissé presented a scientific paper full of charts and mathematical formulas entitled, “Correlation Between the UFO Phenomenon and Its Associated Entities,” at the MUFON International UFO Symposium at the American University in Washington, DC in July 1987, where I had the opportunity of meeting him.

View of Deception Island (image credit: Jerzy Strzelecki)

Location map of Deception Island in the South Shetland Islands (image credit: Giovanni Fattori over a GMT free license map)

THE AAF TAKES OVER

As the Navy UFO project was winding down and finally closed in 1974, the Argentinean Air Force (AAF) investigation was taking shape. The first public hint was provided by Brigadier Adolfo Alvarez, Commander in Chief of the AAF, in a radio interview in July 1968. The transcript was published in the influential Buenos Aires newspaper La Razón. When asked about flying saucers, Gen. Alvarez responded that “the Air Force has a specialized agency that has conducted investigations about this field for some time.” He cautioned, however, that he was not yet able to give a definitive opinion about the subject since “there are no sufficiently concrete facts.” Also in 1968, the military president of Argentina, General Juan Carlos Onganía, declared that, “I believe that flying saucers exist.”

AAF Captain Augusto Lima, head of the last UFO desk at the Air Force’s National Commission on Space Research. (image credit: Alejandro Agostinelli)

With the exception of the early reports published by the National Review of Aeronautics, the AAF UFO policy was never as open as that of the Navy. It eventually transpired that the man in charge of UFO investigations was Captain Augusto Lima, who worked at the AAF’s National Commission for Space Research (Spanish acronym of CNIE), Argentina’s main space agency. Unfortunately, the CNIE investigations were kept confidential and no reports were leaked to the press or to civilian ufologists. Moreover, according to journalist Alejandro Agostinelli, “Capt. Lima attempts to project a dispassionate image, but in private conversations he confesses that the totality of UFO sightings can be reduced to conventional explanations. Lima keeps busy receiving and particularly filing UFO data from the different military services. He conducts eventually an official investigation of cases which, in his view, have received too much publicity. He then proceeds to explain them away… Most investigators agree that Capt. Lima continues to hold a ‘chair’ in that Department for purely bureaucratic reasons.”

Nevertheless, a few interesting cases did leak to the press. During a flap in 1971, for instance, AAF pilot Francisco Sartorio filmed an unidentified object with a 16 mm movie camera while flying in Mar de Plata [see picture]. As far as we know, neither the full film nor the official report and analysis have been released. There are also reports that the CNIE obtained some metallic debris which reportedly came down from space. In early January 1979, news about small metallic pieces recovered in the rural area of General Ocampo in  Entre Rios province, surfaced briefly. The discovery was tied to a multi-colored UFO observed by hundreds of witnesses in the region on the night of December 21, 1978. On the following days, peasant Miguel Angel Romero went to work in the rice fields as he usually did, when he came across a piece of semi-hollowed bluish metal with a diameter of about 15 cm and a thickness of 2 mm. Another similar piece made its way during the same period to the newspaper El Heraldo in Concordia. Both were eventually requested by the CNIE for laboratory analysis.

AAF pilot Francisco Sartorio filmed this object with a 16 mm movie camera while flying in Mar de Plata in 1971. (image credit: J. J. Benítez)

When contacted by the weekly magazine Siete Días, AAF officers indicated that the piece, popularly referred to as “a door handle,” was made out of a very strong alloy resistant to the friction produced by contact with the atmosphere. They added that the piece was not part of a plane or a weather balloon, although they did not say what it was. More sensational was the crash of another alleged UFO on the evening of October 3, 1980 in a remote Andean area in the province of Río Negro, close to the Chilean border. The UFO had been sighted in the provinces of Río Negro and Neuquén, as well as in Chile, and there were several accounts of a loud explosion which shook the earth.

Despite the efforts of a group of Buenos Aires ufologists to reach the site in the high Andes, it was the Border Police and Capt. Lima who eventually located the crash site from a helicopter. They retrieved ash-like samples from what appeared to be three charred circular marks on the ground, but no further information on the contents of the samples was published. To this day, no final report on these or other cases investigated by the CNIE were ever released. By the mid-1980’s, however, the CNIE UFO project had practically faded away. The military lost political power after their defeat in the Falklands War with Britain in 1983 and were now facing budgetary cuts and renewed scrutiny from the new civilian democratic government. UFOs were no longer a priority. The CNIE project was finally closed officially with Capt. Lima’s retirement in 1987.

This attitude became evident in the case of airline pilot Capt. Jorge Polanco, who reported a close observation of a UFO while his Aerolinas Argentinas flight 734 from Buenos Aires was approaching Bariloche airport around midnight on July 31, 1995. The sighting coincided with a power blackout in the city (not uncommon in South America). Although Capt. Polanco was very outspoken to the media afterwards, stating that he thought it was an “extraterrestrial spaceship,” both AAF and the Civil Aviation authorities declined to make any public statements, giving the impression that they were not at all interested in the incident.

UPDATE: THE CITEFA EFFORT

Captain Daniel Perissé (left) with journalist Alejandro Agostinelli (right) during a UFO Congress in San Lorenzo in 1991. (image credit: Rubén Morales)

This total lack of official interest, however, was not entirely true. In the 1990s, a group of retired military officers and some scientists associated with the Institute of Scientific and Technological Research of the Armed Forces (Spanish acronym of CITEFA) attempted to revive an official military UFO project, tentatively named Commission for the Study of Space Phenomena (Spanish acronym CEFE) or National Investigations Commission for Anomalous Phenomena (Spanish acronym CNIFA). Although the group avoided any publicity and media attention whatsoever, veteran Buenos Aires journalist and ufologist Alejandro Agostinelli was eventually able to track them down. The group’s leader was Commodore (Ret.) Juan Carlos Mascietti, who served as chief of planning for the General Staff during the democratic government of President Alfonsín in the 1980s and secretary general of CITEFA. Other key members were Capt. Perissé and speleologist Julio Goyén Aguado, president of the Argentinean Center of Speleology, who had close links with the military. After being dodged by Agostinelli for months, Commodore Mascietti finally agreed to do a very short interview for the science magazine Descubrir (Discover).

“We are acting prudently because we are not interested in getting involved in any noise,” said Mascietti. “Moreover, we need to protect the privacy of scientists who are not interested in seeing their names in the headlines. Also, due to the characteristics of this type of work, we don’t want to contaminate or being contaminated.” When asked by Agostinelli if the CITEFA group had official backing, Mascietti responded that, “not yet, the group is formed by military and scientific personnel linked to official circles, but the support it receives is informal. We are hoping that the Ministry of Defense will officialize our activities, that’s all.”

Agostinelli then asked him for his opinion on UFOs and Mascietti’s response was very cautious: “Our compromise is not to reveal personal opinions. One shared criteria is that we must be skeptical. Another is that there are certain phenomena that must be explained. We are not interested in games: more than ufologists, we are scientists who are searching for the truth.” Despite Mascietti’s cautious statements, the CITEFA members were seen in various parts of Argentina investigating UFO cases and collecting data. They compiled eventually a 300-page report that was officially given to the Ministry of Defense in 1997. This report has never been released, but according to Agostinelli, it concluded that there are “unidentified phenomena which leave physical effects that can be proved,” even though “this does not show evidence on the nature of this phenomena, which remains without explanation.” Despite the group’s efforts, however, the Ministry of Defense never gave the go ahead for the UFO project, which faded away by the end of the decade due to several circumstances—some tragic—with its key members. Commodore Mascietti left CITEFA and moved out of Buenos Aires, Capt. Perissé became seriously ill and passed away a few years later, and Goyén Aguado died in an accident in 2000.

We contacted Alejandro Agostinelli by email recently to ask him about the CEFORA motion to request President Cristina Fernández to release official UFO documents in Argentina. His response was not optimistic: “In our country, you have to fight in government offices with lower level personnel to obtain these types of documents, not request them politely with signatures to a president that has to deal with very serious problems every single day. At best, she will smile and pass the request to an official with the recommendation of giving an evasive answer. To show interest in cooperating with a UFO request represents for a government reasonably paranoid with the press like this one, a risk of negative publicity that they don’t want to face.”

Agostinelli added that he doesn’t want to discourage the efforts made by CEFORA, especially since “my own efforts to obtain any type of documents came empty handed. But I understand that the reasons why I didn’t succeed in obtaining official documents become harder with the passing of time. The middle level civilian or military official usually doesn’t stay too long in his post; if they don’t give much importance to these papers, they can be lost; and if they are interested, they take them to their homes.” In any event, time will tell if the CEFORA motion will succeed.

Those who read Spanish, can check the CEFORA website here.

Alejandro Agostinelli’s complete report in Spanish, “The UFO Dossiers of the Argentinean Armed Forces,” can be read here.

Logo of CEFORA, the Commission for the Study of the UFO Phenomenon in the Argentinean Republic. (image credit: CEFORA)

Taking advantage of Argentinean President Cristina Fernández de Kirchner’s May 13, 2010 visit to Victoria, a city in the province of Entre Ríos, prominent Argentinean ufologist Silvia Pérez Simondini handed the president’s chief of security and protocol an envelope with a ten-page report about UFOs from CEFORA (Spanish acronym for Commission for the Study of the UFO Phenomenon in the Argentinean Republic). Pérez, who is the director of the Victoria-based Visión OVNI (UFO Vision) group and museum, had the opportunity of talking briefly with President Fernández during the ceremonies commemorating the bicentennial of Argentina’s independence. Forty-eight hours later, Pérez received a call from the Casa Rosada (the Argentinean offices of the president) acknowledging receipt of the CEFORA document and promising a quick response.

CEFORA is an umbrella organization of various Argentinean UFO groups and researchers, specifically created to lobby for the declassification of official UFO files in Argentina. CEFORA is also working on a campaign to collect one hundred thousand signatures petitioning UFO declassification to be presented to the Argentinean congress when completed. Andrea Pérez Simondini, Silvia’s daughter who is also a prominent ufologist and chemist who has documented dozens of cattle mutilation cases in Argentina, cautioned that the successful delivery of the CEFORA documents to President Fernández “may have extraordinary results or may end up in nothing.” CEFORA is clearly following the Brazilian model created a few years ago in a “Freedom of Information” public campaign that yielded significant results when the Brazilian Air Force instituted an official policy to declassify its voluminous UFO files, which is still ongoing.

Silvia Perez Simondini at the UFO Museum (Museo OVNI) in Victoria, Argentina. (image credit: Visión OVNI)

The president of Argentina, Cristina Fernández de Kirchner with Hillary Clinton. (image credit: Govt. of Argentina)

President Fernández’s political biography has been compared to that of Hillary Clinton. Her husband, Néstor Kirchner, was the former president of Argentina, and she was a powerful senator from Buenos Aires province when she won the presidential election in a landslide in October 2007 (she is the second female president in Argentina’s history). Whether President Fernández will implement pro-UFO policies remains to be seen, but there is no doubt that Argentina’s military has in its possession a certain amount of UFO-related documents and probably some physical evidence. Although very few actual documents were released in the past, the history of the military’s involvement in various UFO cases and investigations is, on the other hand, well documented. Back in 1997, I published a special report for the Japanese magazine Borderland titled, “Argentina’s Military UFO Dossier.” The article appeared in Japanese, but the original English version was never published…until now. Here, then, is the first part of that report.

ARGENTINA’S MILITARY UFO DOSSIER

Argentina is one of the few nations with a rich history of UFO military investigations. For almost 20 years beginning in the early 1960’s, its military authorities became involved in the ufological controversy sweeping across South America and the rest of the world. The Navy established a Permanent Commission for Studies of the UFO Phenomenon in 1962, which lasted until 1974 when its director, Captain Engineer Omar R. Pagani, retired from the service. A new effort was launched by Air Force Captain Augusto Lima at the National Commission for Space Research, which is sort of Argentina’s NASA but under Argentinean Air Force (AAF) supervision.

Cristina Fernández de Kirchner with Presdient Obama. (image credit: Govt. of Argentina).

The UFO projects faded away by the early 1980’s. Argentina’s military rulers now faced a number of crisis: the disastrous war against Great Britain over the Falkland Islands in 1983, followed by a return to democracy, trials for human rights abuses, and drastic budgetary cuts. While UFO sightings obviously continued to be reported by the media and investigated by local ufological groups, they were no longer a priority item for the military. Unfortunately, no final conclusions of either the Navy or AAF studies have been released so far, but a number of documents have been obtained by independent researchers like the Buenos Aires journalist Alejandro Agostinelli. These include a detailed 26-page UFO Questionnaire, memos summarizing incidents involving military personnel, photographs, and a few striking official statements acknowledging the reality of UFOs.

For instance, in the wake of an intense flap over several meteorological stations in Antarctica in 1965, Capt. Pagani declared in a press conference that, “Unidentified flying objects do exist. Their presence and intelligent displacement in the Argentine airspace has been proven. Their nature and origin is unknown and no judgment is made about them.” The first UFO flap in Argentina took place in mid-July 1947, right on the heels of the North American wave. Reports of “platos voladores” (flying saucers) in La Plata, Punta del Este and elsewhere were reported in local newspapers. The first official UFO project began in 1962, but some cases were investigated prior to that.

The AAF publication Revista Nacional de Aeronáutica (National Review of Aeronautics) became the focus of UFO discussions in official circles in the mid-1950’s. Some of the reports published include:

• A multiple-witness UFO sighting by personnel on duty at the Control Tower of the airport in Cordoba, the country’s second largest city, before dawn on Nov. 25, 1954.

• A UFO photo taken by a journalist in the Buenos Aires neighborhood of Dudignac on the morning of Aug. 30, 1955, investigated by the chief of the police precinct; the negative was analyzed by photo experts, which found it had “not been retouched or faked.”

• Another UFO photo taken by AAF Captain Niotti in Yacanto, Cordoba, on July 3, 1960. (Details below)

In addition, the Review reported on the investigations of the USAF Project Blue Book and lobbied for the establishment of “an organization devoted to the study of the [UFO] problem in our country.” Undoubtedly, one of the best AAF cases was the photograph taken by one its own officers.

1960: YACANTO PHOTO CASE

UFO photo taken by AAF Capt. Niotti in Yacanto on July 3, 1960. (image credit: A. Agostinelli)

The details of this case were provided by Captain Hugo Luis Niotti himself, who wrote a thorough account of his observation for the Review, submitted with the original print and negative of his photo for technical analysis by AAF experts. Capt. Niotti wrote:

“That photograph was taken on the day July 3 of this year [1960], approximately at 16:30 Hrs., with a 35 mm camera while driving on Route Nº 36, at a distance of about 70 KM from the city of Cordoba. Film 21º DIN was used, with diaphragm open at 2,8, 1/60 second speed, and distance focus on infinity.” The officer added he was driving from Yacanto to Cordoba when, “I observed an object suspended in the air some 100 meters to the right of the road. I estimate that between stopping the vehicle and getting the camera, I must have taken maximum 40 seconds, and the object took a few more seconds to disappear between the clouds… [it] was shaped like a cone rotating on its axis, slowly moving toward the south… The object was about 100 meters from the road and at an altitude of 15 m over the terrain.”

Close-up of UFO photo taken by AAF Capt. Niotti in Yacanto on July 3, 1960. (image credit: A. Agostinelli)

Computer enhancement of the Niotti UFO photo done by Ground Saucer Watch. (image credit: Ground Saucer Watch/A. Agostinelli)

Capt. Niotti estimated its size: “diameter of 3 to 4 m, by 6 to 8 m of height (axis); color: dark gray, opaque; speed between 5 to 7 km/h., with a final rapid acceleration that took it to 200 km/h. in 3 seconds more or less.” The original negative was analyzed by photo technicians from the AAF Aeronautical Information Service. The experts concluded: “From the analysis undertaken it can be determined that the developing process of its negative was normal; it can thus be asserted without any doubt that there exists a register of an object that could very well be linked to what the officer stated.” The analysts noted that the base of the cone appeared darker in the photo than the gray mentioned by Niotti, speculating that “this could be attributed to the sensibilization of the photographic film to the influence of radiations not within the light spectrum and of unknown nature.

Additional analysis of the photo was conducted years later by two leading Argentinean ufologists, Guillermo Roncoroni and Gustavo Alvarez, who concluded that Capt. Niotti’s photograph was “a unique case in Argentina” because of its official endorsement by the AAF. A first generation print was also sent by Roncoroni to Ground Saucer Watch (GSW) in Arizona for computer enhancement. GSW confirmed the authenticity of the photo, writing in its final report that, “the UFO is definitely not a small model thrown in the air or suspended by a wire,” and that “there is no evidence of photomontage or other photographic trick.” The Yacanto case shows that some UFO photos are indeed real and that careful, professional analysis can be undertaken if the photographer cooperates and facilitates the original negative.

MAY 1962: BAHIA BLANCA FLAP

Bahia Blanca, Argentina (image credit: Wikimedia Commons)

The launch of the Navy’s Permanent Commission for Studies of the UFO Phenomenon, headed by Capt. Pagani, was triggered by a UFO wave centered around Bahia Blanca, a city in the southern part of Buenos Aires province, in May 1962. The sightings began on May 11 and continued on May 13, 18, 21 and 22. The Navy’s top admiral in the area and his entourage were among the witnesses. A May 25 CIA report monitoring the foreign media mentions one case:

“The appearance of unidentified flying objects over the city of Bahia Blanca is causing the most varied comment among the people there. The most extraordinary occurrence was on 21 May when many people observed a strange luminous body suspended for several minutes over the city, and then saw it disappear quickly. A local photographer was able to take two pictures of the object, which looks like a luminous oval on the print. The Cordoba Astronomical Observatory is compiling data about this phenomenon which has been observed in other regions of Argentina, although not as clearly as in Bahia Blanca.”

On May 22, a formation of aircraft from the Naval Air Station Comandante Espora encountered several UFOs for 35 minutes. A 2-page “Confidential Official UFO Report” from the base, signed by Captain Sanchez Moreno, provides all the pertinent data [see Document]. The incident began at 7:10 PM with a first sighting by a student pilot. “At 7:20 PM,” continued the memo, “another student pilot flying at 4000 feet, reported that his tail section was suddenly illuminated by an object located behind his plane. A luminous UFO then flew under his plane, vanishing out of sight among the lights of the city [Bahia Blanca]. During this observation his radio ceased to function.” At 7:30 PM, the flight instructor, Lt. Galdos, also reported an “orange luminous disc” over the city. At 7:45 PM, officers at the Control Tower observed “a luminous object that was approximately ten degrees altitude above the horizon. The UFO was moving vertically and horizontally and 15 seconds later disappeared into the horizon.”

Famous photo of luminous object taken by Felix Carrizo in Alberti, Buenos Aires province, on Feb. 7, 1963, similar to the UFO reported in Bahia Blanca in 1962. (photo credit: A. Agostinelli)

There was no denying the incident since, the memo adds, “the Commander of the Naval Base at Puerto Belgrano, Rear Admiral Eladio M. Vazquez, also declared that he clearly saw a strange luminous object in space that night. Rear Admiral Vazquez was in the company of Captain Aldo Molinari, second-in-command of the naval zone, who was also a witness to the emotional experience. Both were waiting in Espora for a U.S. military mission when they saw the unidentified flying craft. With the objective to collect detail about the incident, the Department of the Navy sent a delegation by Captain Dr. Constantino Nuñez to the city of Bahia Blanca. The detection or sighting of the UFO by military personnel was kept in rigorous secrecy.” Argentina’s Naval Intelligence Service published a 26-page booklet entitled, “Questionnaire of Technical Information about Unidentified Flying Objects O.V.N.I.” (Spanish acronym for UFO). It is basically a Spanish translation of the standard reporting UFO form used at the time by the USAF Project Blue Book.

Page 1 of the “Official UFO Report” on the May 22, 1962 sighting by pilots and top Navy officers at the Naval Base in Puerto Belgrano.

Page 2 of the “Official UFO Report” on the May 22, 1962 sighting by pilots and top Navy officers at the Naval Base in Puerto Belgrano.

We only have Corso’s testimony for his briefing, so we made a thorough search of the public record to see if there were any clues about Bobby Kennedy and the UFO subject. Ironically, the best known document where he expresses a strong belief in UFOs—a letter to ufologist Gray Barker dated May 9, 1968—may be a forgery. We’ll discuss our research into this letter later on, but let’s look first at other letters written by Sen. Kennedy in the 1965-1966 period. Until recently, only the Barker letter and a couple of brief responses sent by Sen. Kennedy to Robert Barrow, were available. John Greenwald of www.blackvault.com, however, obtained a dossier of 127 pages from the Kennedy presidential library which gives a far more complete picture of the NY senator’s involvement with UFOs. The letters cover a period between 1965 and 1968 and contain 39 letters signed by Kennedy himself, plus the original letters he received from a number of constituents and UFO researchers, U.S. Air Force statements, some newspaper clippings, etc.

The period of 1965 and 1966 was the most active in Bobby Kennedy’s UFO correspondence. This coincided with a lobbying effort by the National Investigation Committee on Aerial Phenomena (NICAP) to have Congressional hearings on UFOs. NICAP was then the nation’s most influential UFO group led by the late Major (Ret.) Donald Keyhoe in the Washington, DC area. Out of the 27 individuals who wrote to Kennedy, most belonged to NICAP and some, like Robert Barrow, Raymond Konley and Ralph Rankow, wrote several letters to him. I was also surprised to see many names who were relatively well known in the UFO field—some of whom I knew personally—including the contactee Wayne Aho, the aviation journalist Don Berliner, the Rev. Frank Stranges, John Keel, author of The Mothman Prophecies and other important UFO and Fortean books, and the psychic Ted Owens, among others. When I saw the name of Terry Wilmot with an address in Roswell, NM, the name rang a bell. He was, in fact, the son of Dan Wilmot, who reported with his wife a UFO shaped “like two invert saucers faced mouth-to-mouth” on the night of July 2, 1947, shortly before the famous crash. His sighting was published in the Roswell Daily Record, although it’s not mentioned in Terry’s letter to Bobby Kennedy (Terry, too, was a member of NICAP).

Back in the 1960s, form letters had not been developed to the exact science than they are today, so Bobby Kennedy’s letters vary a little from one to the other, but some general themes nevertheless emerge clearly. He is of course a polished politician, always polite to his constituents, thanking them “for your thoughtful letter,” appreciating them for “your thoughtfulness in writing to me on this matter,” and so on.  He then tries to walk a thin line between appearing open minded enough while at the same time making it clear that, “from the evidence available to date, I do not believe that UFO phenomena are caused by vehicles of extraterrestrial origin.” Here is a typical response, in this case to Terry Wilmot of Roswell, NM, dated April 11, 1965:

Despite his mild skepticism, Kennedy hedges his bet by admitting that “scientists agree that not enough is known about UFO sightings, in some cases by reputable witnesses” and that, “I hope that science provides us with an answer to these unknown aspects of UFO sightings.” There can be little doubt that when it came to the allegation that the Air Force was covering-up some UFO evidence, an issue raised often by the NICAP members like Ralph Rankow and others, Kennedy rejected it. Here is his response to one of Robert Barrow’s letters, where he writes, “I do not believe that the Air Force is censoring any information of interest to the public of so-called ‘Unidentified Flying Objects’.”

In some cases, Kennedy attached Pentagon form letters with the standard line of “the Air Force does not withhold or censor any information on UFO’s.” In many of the letters, he mentioned Dr. Harlow Shapley, who was a then well known Harvard astronomer and author. For instance, in a letter to Anne Epple of New York City, dated September 10, 1966, Kennedy wrote that, “Dr. Harlow Shapley, for one, has stated that there is a high probability that there is other life in the universe.” But then Kennedy lowers the tone, adding that “to believe that there is other life in the universe is not, however, to believe that ‘UFO’s’ are manned vehicles.” He then adds a debunking line (which appears in several of the letters) that “one explanation of this phenomenon…connects the lights that are seen with the gaseous tails of comets.” Not one of the most convincing arguments to identify UFOs as prosaic objects, we may add.

As time went by, Bobby Kennedy was able to deflect the issue by referring people to the University of Colorado’s Scientific Study of UFOs led by physicist Dr. Edward U. Condon, which had been contracted by the USAF to conduct a supposedly independent and thorough study of the matter, later known as the Condon Report. That is basically the gist of the Bobby Kennedy UFO file. Generally speaking, many of the letters sent to the senator are more interesting than his responses. Author John Keel, for instance, wrote a long letter dated January 19, 1966. “I have been collecting information about UFOs since the appearance of the mysterious ‘Foo fighters’ in World War II,” wrote Keel. “But I did not fully believe in their existence until 1954 when I actually saw a ‘Flying Saucer’ maneuvering over the Aswan Dam in Egypt. It was hovering at a low altitude and was obviously a solid metal object, circular with a dome on top. After a few minutes the outer rim started to revolve rapidly and it moved off at very high speed. Similar objects…or the same one…were later reported over other areas of the Middle East.” As far as I can remember, Keel never wrote about this sighting in his books or articles, but there it is. He then goes on to criticize the Air Force’s incompetence on this issue, but basically received the Bobby Kennedy “form letter” with Dr. Shipley, the “gaseous tails of comets” and the final “appreciate hearing from you on this matter.”

You can download the entire Bobby Kennedy UFO file from the Black Vault here.

THE GRAY BARKER LETTER

Gray Barker

For years, the alleged letter to Gray Barker, dated May 9, 1968, was the only well known Bobby Kennedy statement on UFOs. Barker was a well known UFO writer from Clarksburg, West Virginia, who was the first one to publicize the subject of Men In Black (MIBs) with his classic 1956 book, They Knew Too Much About Flying Saucers. The Kennedy letter was reproduced, among other places, in the book The Age of Flying Saucers by Paris Flammonde.

For a long time I thought this was probably a genuine letter but now, having seen Bobby Kennedy’s other letters, I have serious doubts, and so do many other researchers. For one, Barker was well known for having pulled several ufological hoaxes. One of the most infamous ones, which he concocted with veteran ufologist Jim Moseley (then publisher of Saucer News, now of the entertaining gossip newsletter Saucer Smear), was the so-called “Straith letter” sent to famous contactee George Adamski. It was purportedly written by a U.S. State Dept. official called R. E. Straith, who endorsed Adamski’s claims of contact with benevolent Venusians. First of all, the Barker letter does not appear in Bobby’s UFO file at the Kennedy presidential library, where it should be if it was authentic. The second serious problem is the letter’s opening paragraph: “As you may know, I am a card carrying member of the Amalgamated Flying Saucers Association. Therefore, like many other people in our country I am interested in the phenomenon of flying saucers.” The Amalgamated Flying Saucers Association was a group founded by Gabriel Green, a California contactee and new age writer who ran for president in 1960, representing the Universal Flying Saucer Party, and in 1962 for the U.S. Senate in California, where he supposedly received 171,000 votes. It is frankly hard to believe that Bobby Kennedy would have been “a card carrying member” of this organization.

However, believing that a document is fake is not the same as proving it, so we contacted Jim Moseley, his partner in crime in the Straith letter, and David Houchin, the curator of the Gray Barker Collection at the Special Collections section of the Clarksburg-Harrison Public Library, to see if they had any insights into the subject. “There is a possibility that Barker did it [the Kennedy letter] himself, but I have a feeling that he didn’t,” Moseley said on a telephone interview, adding that “it sounds that it could be genuine.” Moseley then related that, just as Barker was getting ready to publicize the letter, “he supposedly got a call from someone associated with the Bobby Kennedy family” and he backed off for a while. This would have been right after the assassination at The Ambassador Hotel in LA since the letter is dated barely a month before the tragedy. “The only thing I remember is how easily Gray was intimidated,” added Moseley, “but if it was a hoax, I don’t think he did it.” So that adds another wrinkle into the web—the possibility that Barker himself was hoaxed by someone else, though this remains to be proven.

David Houchin, whom we met several years ago when I lectured at the Clarksburg-Harrison Public Library, told me that “we normally treat it as one of Gray’s inventions,” although he doesn’t have concrete proof of it. He said that unfortunately the original had been stolen from the library many years ago, but there is remote possibility that it’s still misfiled somewhere. I asked Houchin if there is a copy of any letter written by Barker to Bobby Kennedy and he said he’s not aware of any, but promised to look for any additional evidence. If he finds anything new we’ll publish an update.

Kirsan Ilyumzhinov, on the other hand, is not your average politician and Kalmykia is an unusual place—a Russian Federation republic with about 300,000 people in the Caucasus region on the Caspian Sea, and the only Buddhist enclave in Europe. A millionaire businessman who was elected President of Kalmykia in 1993, Ilyumzhinov is an eccentric politician whose heroes are Genghis Khan, the Dalai Lama and Bobby Fischer, the legendary American chess champion. One of the first things he did was to build, at his own expense, a number of Buddhist temples (they had all been destroyed during the Stalinist era of repression). Ilyumzhinov is also a chess master who was elected head of the World Chess Federation (which uses the French acronym FIDE) in 1995 and has made the small Kalmykian capital of Elista an international center for chess. In fact, the maverick Russian politician and chess official has been back in the news in the last few days because he is engaged in an acrimonious struggle for the FIDE presidency with Russian grandmaster Anatoly Karpov, but we are getting ahead of our story.

City Chess complex in Elista, capital of Kalmykia (Credit: Jialiang Gao www.peace-on-erath.org).

THE MOSCOW ET ENCOUNTER

Vladimir Pozner (Credit: Augustas Didžgalvis)

In an interview with the popular Russian TV host Vladimir Pozner in April, Ilyumzhinov revealed that aliens appeared in a transparent tube on the balcony of an apartment he owns in Moscow on September 17, 1997. “I was reading my book, watching television and had almost fallen asleep,” said Ilyumzhinov. “Then I felt that someone was calling. I would not have believed it, if I had not had three witnesses—my driver, my minister and my aide.” Although the Pozner interview received huge attention because of the Lebedev letter and the Karpov dispute, this was not the first time Ilyumzhinov had discussed his alien encounter. He mentioned it as far back as 1999 in an interview with the Svoboda radio station and again in interviews with Russian and British reporters in 2001 and 2006. Michael Specter, who wrote a comprehensive profile of the maverick Kalmykia leader for The New Yorker in 2006, quoted from Ilyumzhinov’s 2001 interview: “The extraterrestrials put a yellow spacesuit on me. They gave me a tour of the spaceship and showed me the command center. I felt very comfortable with them.”

Ilyumzhinov gave further details to the British newspaper The Guardian in 2006: “They took me from my apartment and we went aboard their ship. We flew to some kind of star. They put a spacesuit on me, told me many things and showed me around. They wanted to demonstrate that UFOs do exist.” In another interview with British TV, Ilyumzhinov elaborated further on his ET contacts: “They are people like us. They have the same mind, the same vision. I talked with them, I understand that we are not alone in this whole world. We are not unique. I am not a crazy man. But after that when I gave the first interview to Radio Freedom in Russian five years ago, thousands—not hundreds—thousands of people wrote me letters and called me on the phone saying, ‘Kirsan, you are a politician and you aren’t afraid to speak about it’. From the United States every year, it is an official statistic, more than four thousand people are contacted in such a way.” And then he linked two of his favorite subjects—chess and UFOs—with the bold statement that “my theory is that chess comes from space. Why? Because the same rules, 64 squares black and white and same rules in Japan, in China, in Qatar, in Mongolia, in Africa. The rules are the same. Why? I think it seems maybe it is from space.”

You can see this interview here:

Just a few days ago, on June 10, the Russian newspaper Gazeta published an in-depth interview with Kirsan Ilyumzhinov in which Kalmykian politics, his FIDE dispute with Karpov and his alien abduction are discussed. Regarding this last topic, Ilyumzhinov said he was surprised it had caused so much waves since he had talked about it many times before. “Twelve years ago there was no noise, everyone took this news normally,” he said. “After twelve years this has caused such an emotional discussion. I was glad to know this, that people from any part of the Earth write to me, I receive hundreds thousands of emails, photos and descriptions… I am only happy that a person starts to realize that he is not alone in this Universe, and stops being egoistic, being the only being with a mind, on this Earth… The faster we start feeling ourselves as part of universal intellect, the quicker wars and destruction of each other and creatures with mind shall stop.” He elaborated further on the spiritual significance on his alien encounter and how “this is something personal.” He also mentioned his close relationship with the famous Bulgarian seer Baba Vanga, who is revered throughout eastern Europe. He also stated for the record that, “for the first time I officially declared that I am not an agent of any extraterrestrial intelligence.”

Kirsan Ilyumzhinov (right) with Vladimir Putin (Credit: AFP).

Exo-politics, Russian style…

You can read the English transcript of the Gazeta interview with Ilyumzhinov here.

“Planet Kirsan,” The New Yorker’s long profile of Ilyumzhinov, can be read here.

Departure Herald, Ming Dynasty 15 century

Case Nº 487 from July 24, 1562 is summarized by Chang in the following words: “At dusk, an object dropping down from the northwestern sky of Dinghai County, Zhejiang Province. In the beginning, it looked like an oval-shaped measuring container, which had a pointed top, a yellow and white thicker bottom, and a maroon bracket holding it up. As it came down amidst blazing fire, it quickly grew to dou-sized; then boulder-sized; then as large as many large jugs put together.” (A dou is a 10-liter box-like grain measuring container.)

Man with a hat in Ming dynasty.

“The object was glowing extremely bright, which was illuminating the area that people could see tiny hairs. As it was about to crash, it suddenly jumped up in the air, then went up and down several times, and its shadows danced with it. Eyewitnesses from many provinces reported that they all have seen the same thing.” Kai-Chi Chang adds a final comment: “This incident had covered several provinces in a radius of 500 kilometers. This type of detailed UFO report is rare in the Chinese history.”

One of China’s top experts on ancient UFO is Ke Yang, a professor of literature at the University of Lanzhou in Gansu province. In a letter to Shi Bo, one of the founding members of the China UFO Research Organization (CURO), Yang explained how he became involved in his historical UFO research. “I am a teacher and a researcher in the field of popular literature,” wrote Ke Yang. “I was interested only in legends and ancient myths, without a link to UFOs. Nevertheless, I read many books dealing with the UFO problem and, little by little, I developed a passion for this subject. Once I read the descriptions of the shapes and movement of the UFOs, I found strong similarities between the modern cases and what I had read in ancient Chinese books.” This letter, as well as some of Yang’s discoveries, were published in Shi Bo’s book la Chine et les extra-terrestres (China and Extraterrestrials), which was written in French and published by Mercure de France in 1983. Shi Bo is a former Chinese diplomat fluent in French who currently lives in France.

XU FUZUO’S ACCOUNT

One of the cases discovered by Ke Yang is an account written by Xu Fuzuo (or Qiu Fuzuo, 1560-ca. 1629), an important dramatist and linguist from the late Ming period, in his Stories from the Flower Pavilion. It’s not easy to find biographical information in Western languages about this author, although he is mentioned in several books about the history of Chinese theater or the literature of the Ming dynasty. One book, The Tapestry of Popular Songs in 16th- and 17th-Century China by Kathryn Lowry, writes that “the dramatist Xu Fuzuo (style name Yangchu) hailed from Wuxian” and “was very much a Suzhou man.” (The city of Suzhou was the administrative seat for the counties of Wuxian and Changzhou.) She then mentions Fuzuo’s book, Conversations in the Root Pavilion, which includes a discussion “on dialects of different regions.”

Another book, Elite Theatre in Ming China, 1368-1644 by Grant Guangren Shen, summarizes Xu Fuzuo’s four-act opera The Red Pear Flower, in which the main protagonist, scholar Zhao Bochou, is led to believe “that the woman with whom he is intimate is an ogres in disguise… With many elements of a well made play, Red Pear Flower is an effective audience teaser with measured exaggeration of romance, comedy and horror.” Other works by Fuzuo are Notes on the Dawn and A piece of a Coin. As for the book with the close encounter, Stories from the Flower Pavilion, Ke Yang describes it as a book about “diverse facts.” I have translated the text in question from the French translation given by Shi Bo:

Emperor Jiajing

“During the second year under the rule of Emperor Jianjing [1523], a teacher called Lü Yu lived in the village of Yujiu. One day when it was raining without stop, this teacher noticed two ships that were navigating over the dense clouds above the ruins in front of his house. In these two ships, which measured over ten fathoms [55 feet], men were moving about, they were 11-feet tall and wore red hats and multicolored clothing. They all had a rod in the hands. The ships were moving very rapidly. That day were visiting the teacher’s house some ten men of letters, who alerted by Lü Yu, left the house and walked up to him to observe the phenomenon. The men with multicolored clothing passed their hand over the mouth of the men of letters; their mouth became immediately black and none of the scholars were able to talk. At that moment they saw a man, escorted by a mandarin, dressed as a retired man of letters, who appeared in one of the ships accompanied by a bonzo. Quite a time later, the ships left, as if pushed by the clouds, and proceeded to descend in a cemetery about one kilometer away. Once the ships departed, the men of letters noticed their mouths returned to normalcy. But five days later, Lü Yu died without known reasons.”

Whether this is a true incident or a fictional story created by the dramatist Fuzuo is hard to tell. Ke Yang cites a few factors, such as providing a date (1523) and a place (Yujiu) which in his opinion makes this case real. He also notes other details—like the paralysis experienced by the witnesses during the close encounter—common to UFO incidents. Even the sudden and unexplained death of the main witness, Lü Yu, could be interpreted as a lethal physiological injury case caused by the flying object’s propulsion system. There are a few unfortunate cases in the UFO literature where this in fact occurred. In the Anolaima Close Encounter of the Third Kind (CE-III) in Colombia on July 4, 1969, for instance, the main witness, Arcesio Bermudez, died of intense radiation sickness about a week after he approached a landed Saturn-shaped UFO in his ranch. Other ten witnesses, including family members and employees, saw the object, but only Bermudez came close to it.

Emperor Jiajing on his state barge.

THE JUMPING UFO OF ZHENG ZHONGKUI

Our final case was again uncovered by Ke Yang of Lanzhou University and, significantly, it was presented by the official Chinese government publication Beijing Information in March 1982, which has several editions in foreign languages. The article by Guo Li, “UFOs were already observed in ancient China,” profiled Ke Yang’s historical research, concentrating in particular on one incident taken from the book Er Xin (News) by the 17^th century writer Zheng Zhongkui. We have been unable to obtain any biographical information in Western languages about this author, although he is mentioned in passing or in the footnotes in a couple of books dealing with historical events during the late Ming dynasty. Here is the passage from Chapter VII, “Unusual Things,” in Zhongkui’s Er Xin, as transcribed in the 1982 French edition of Beijing Information and in the letter by Ke Yang published in Shi Bo’s book:

Emporer Wanli

“There are two little lakes in front of the residence of Xiong Xiofu. At noon on a summer day of the year Xuwu during the reign of emperor Wan Li (1618), a dark object, round like a ball, rose suddenly over the tree tops and then fell on the lake. It boiled the water upon contact and then in one jump the luminous ball reached the neighboring lake, making a terrifying noise. The water boiled again, becoming yellowish. A while later, the object resurfaced and rose in the sky, passing in front of the gate of Xiong Xiofu. We don’t know where it went.”

Zhongkui mentioned another incident in Chapter VIII, involving “a large, multi-colored luminous ‘monster’ producing a diffuse smoke trail” seen in Hunan province in July 1624. It was described as “an enormous multicolored bird flying from the southeast to the northwest. It spewed fiery flames in all directions. The prefect of the district of Lingxian and certain scholars, not knowing this bird, conducted prayers during seven consecutive days.”

While the second incident could be a fireball or some other astronomical phenomenon, the incident involving the object in the two lakes defies any conventional explanation. A meteorite could have fell on the lake with a roaring noise and even boil the water, but no meteor could then jump into the second lake and later resurface and fly over the terrain. From the few examples that we’ve shown—and there are surely many more in the Chinese records—there can be little doubt that something strange indeed was flying over, landing and even interacting in China during the Ming dynasty.

Chinese woodcut of Ki-Kung’s Flying Chariot. (Image Credit: B. Laufer, The Prehistory of Aviation)

It shouldn’t come as a surprise that many fascinating accounts of flying machines, unexplained celestial observations and close encounters with strange beings can be found quite extensively in historical and literary works from China. Many national and overseas Chinese researchers have pursued this topic, including Paul Dong, Shi Bo, Kai-Chi Chang and Ke Yang, among others.

One of the first to explore this field was the German-American scholar Berthold Laufer (1874-1934), long-time Curator of Anthropology at the Field Museum of Natural History in Chicago. Laufer discussed “the romance of flying in ancient China” in his classic monograph The Prehistory of Aviation, published in 1928, long before the modern UFO era. “The Chinese emperor Shun, who lived in the third millennium before our era (traditional date 2258-2208 B.C.),” wrote Laufer, “is not only the first flyer recorded in history, but also the very first who made a successful descent in a parachute, an experiment first made or repeated in the midst of our civilization as late as A.D. 1783.”

Laufer cited various ancient Chinese chronicles describing a ‘fei ch’o,’ a flying chariot, a term—he adds—still used presently in China “for the designation of an aeroplane.” [See Picture #1.] Some stories seem more legendary or mythological, but others seem to imply that a real flying contraption existed during the reign of certain emperors. Although the method of propulsion remains obscure, Laufer is inclined toward an “aerostatic principle,” noting that the Chinese were also the inventors of the flying-kite; therefore the chariot was probably some kind of “kite chariot.”

The statesman and poet Qu Yuan, author of the poem Li Sao, where an aerial journey is described. (Image Credit: Wikimedia Commons)

Laufer mentions the famous poem Li Sao (”Fallen into Sorrow”) by K’ü Yüan (modern spelling Qu Yuan, c. 332-295), who was an important statesman and poet in the southern Kingdom of Chu during the so-called Warring States Period. His name is associated to the Duanwu or Dragon Boat Festival, which is held on the anniversary of his death every year. Qu Yuan fell in disgrace due to palace intrigues and so, wrote Laufer, “he found solace in composing a poem, which is an allegorical picture of his search after a prince who would listen to good counsels in government. The poet kneels at the grave of the emperor Shun, and is then carried up into the air in a chariot built in the form of a phoenix to which are yoked four dragons smooth as jade. In this vehicle, through dust and wind, he suddenly ascends on high toward the K’un-lun range of mountains.” Here are some excepts from Li Sao dealing with the poet’s aerial journey:

“I ordered the phoenix to fly aloft,

And continue its flight day and night

…

I turned my course to K’un-lun;

Long was the way, and far and wide did I wander,

Amidst the dark shade were displayed the rainbows in the clouds,

While the jade bells about the chariot tinkled.

I started in the morning from the Ford of the Sky,

And in the evening I arrived at the extreme west.”

Stone Bas-relief of Aerial Contest of Dragon-Chariot and Dragon-Riders, Han Period, AD 147 (Image Credit: B. Laufer, The Prehistory of Aviation)

How much of Qu Yuan’s poem is a factual and how much poetical allegory is anybody’s guess. A chariot shaped like a phoenix powered by four dragons is probably not the most believable evidence, but luckily there are many other accounts which seem more precise and matter-of-fact. In exploring historical Chinese records one has to distinguish at least four categories: 1) descriptions of then unknown natural phenomena of atmospheric and astronomical kinds; 2) records of ancient, man-made flying contraptions; 3) purely mythical or literary creations; 4) possible genuine UFO observations.

Taiwan researcher Kai-Chi Chang published in 1991 the book, From The Record – UFO Sightings in the Ancient Chinese History Books, which catalogued 741 UFO incidents recorded in China between 139 BC and 1918 AD. Some cases are just a note on a log like this one from the year 32 BC during the first year of the Han dynasty: “Two moons appeared in the night sky all of a sudden.” Other observations, however, are far more detailed like this case from April 13, 905 AD during the Tan dynasty:

“In the middle of the night, a very large star that looked like a dou (a 10-liter box-like grain measuring container) suddenly appeared in the top of the sky and was floating toward the northwest. When it had reached about 30 meters above the ground, it suddenly stopped and remained still. The top of the star appeared to be burning, and red and yellow blazing flames were as high as 5 meters tall. Later the star started to serpentine. Wherever had it passed, little stars on its sides were moving toward the southeast, and they came down like raindrops that soon disappeared. Meanwhile, pale mist rose from the earth like bamboo thickets toward the center of the sky.” (The Astronomy Record II, The Book of New Tang, Year 2, Tang dynasty.) Kai-Chi Chang added that “this could not be a meteor, because meteors cannot pause when plummeting from the sky; in addition, a meteor cannot change direction or serpentine. It had to be a UFO.”

Astronomical observatory built in 1276 during the Yuan dynasty (Image Credit: China Reconstructs)

LIU YIN’S 1277 OBSERVATION

Some descriptions seem almost modern in their tone like, for instance, the observation of an “Occurrence at Dawn” by the 13th century medieval poet and scholar Liu Yin (or Liu Ying, 1279-1293). The event took place near the city of Baoding, Hebei province, on the early morning of June 3, 1277, when China was ruled by the Mongol Yuan Dynasty. Liu Yin is described in The Encyclopedia of Confucianism as “one of the important Confucian thinkers in the North during the early years of the Yuan dynasty.” Another book, Heritage of China, edited by Paul S. Ropp, provides the following interesting biographical sketch:

“The hermit-scholar Liu Yin (1249-1293), on the other hand, allegedly refused Khubilai’s [Kublai Khan, the Mongol Emperor mentioned in Marco Polo’s Travels] summons in order to maintain the dignity of the Confucian Way. To him, education was for self-realization. Loyal to the Chin culture in which he was reared and faithful to the Confucian Way that he had learned from the Sung masters, Liu Yin rigorously applied philological methods to classical studies and strongly advocated the importance of history. However, true to Chu His’s spirit, he took seriously the idea of the investigation of things and put a great deal of emphasis on the learning of the mind.”

A 1330 edition of the book by Liu Yin, Essential to the Collected Meaning of The Four Books. (Image Credit: National Palace Museum, Taiwan)

We see this emphasis on investigation in the way he described the UFO observed in 1277 and attempted to find what it was. Here is the text of Liu Yin’s poem “Occurrence at Dawn” as transcribed in the French book la Chine et les extra-terrestres (China and Extraterrestrials) by the Chinese ufologist Shi Bo, now residing in France:

“Rising at dawn, I saw through the window a brilliant light crossing the Milky Way. I then saw three glowing objects appearing in the southern part of the sky, two of which flew away disappearing rapidly from my view. What remained had five unequal lights underneath, while on its upper part I noticed something shaped like a dome. The unknown object began to move in zigzag in a similar fashion to a falling leaf. At the same time, something in flames fell from the sky. Shortly afterwards, the Sun rose but its luminosity was tarnished by the luminous object which moved rapidly in a northern direction. In the western part of the sky, a green cloud was suddenly agitated by another unknown object, which was oval in shape, flat, and was descending quickly. This object had a length of over nine feet and was surrounded by raging flames; it ascended and then descended. In view of this splendid and emotional spectacle, I ran towards the village to alert its dwellers. As my friends walked out of their houses, the flying contraption disappeared.”

Story-tellers and puppeteers during the Yuan dynasty in China, 14th century AD. (Image Credit: Cambridge Illustrated History of China)

After describing the object, Liu Yin devotes a final few words to attempt understanding what it could have been. He wrote that, “after the event I reflected a great deal, but I was unable to find a reasonable explanation. I had the impression of leaving a long dream. I immediately wrote down everything I saw, so that those who can understand these events can give me an explanation.” 700 years later, all kinds of experts have studied what we now designate as UFOs, yet no one has been able so far to find “a reasonable explanation” that can convince everybody.

In Part Two, we’ll explore some fascinating close encounters registered during the Ming dynasty in the 16^th and 17^th centuries. Berthold Laufer’s book, The Prehistory of Aviation, can be downloaded from the Internet Archives here.

Huanghe Lou painted by Xia Yong during the Yuan dynasty. (Image Credit: Yunnan Provincial Museum)

Mexico City World Trade Center.

If I hadn’t seen it with my own eyes I might have not believed it, but unknown small white objects were seen and photographed high in the sky for two days, right above the World Trade Center during Mexico City’s large World UFO Summit on March 19-21, 2010. The objects were first spotted Saturday afternoon March 20 by Italian contactee and UFO watcher Antonio Urzi, who was one of the Summit speakers. On Sunday, the objects were followed again by Urzi and also by several of Mexico’s “Vigilantes” (UFO watchers), whose videos are broadcast often by famous TV journalist Jaime Maussan, who was the Summit’s host. Open Minds’ own Alejandro Rojas was also able to film the objects and, although I was unable to catch them on my digital camera, I did see a small, round white object moving slowly high in the sky. I suppose it’s possible that it was just a balloon, but it was too far to say for sure. Moreover, this is not the first time it’s happened at a UFO Conference attended by Urzi—similar events took place in 2009 in Istanbul and at the International UFO Congress in Laughlin, Nevada.

UFO photo taken over the World Trade Center (image credit: Antonio Urzi).

People watching the UFOs over the Trade Center.

Antonio Urzi, Paola Harris, and Simona Sibilla watching UFOs.

Mexico’s “Cumbre Mundial OVNI 2012” (World UFO Summit 2012) was an extravagant event attended by well over a thousand people with 32 speakers from Mexico, the U.S., Italy, England, Switzerland, Holland, Brazil, Chile and Peru (including myself). Some of the main speakers were the Swiss ancient astronaut bestselling author Erich von Däniken, Roswell expert Don Schmitt, Sgt. Major (Ret.) Bob Dean, former British MOD UFO investigator Nick Pope, Brazil’s top ufologist A. J. Gevaerd who talked about the recent declassification of Brazilian Air Force UFO files, Peruvian contactee Sixto Paz, journalist Paola Harris, Turkish ufologist Haktan Akdogan; and the Italian contingent of Urzi, researcher Pier Giorgio Caria and controversial stigmatized Giorgio Bongiovanni. Besides the opening and closing lectures by Maussan himself and presentations by his two top researchers Yohanan Diaz and Fernando Campos, there were three big panels devoted to Mexican ufology.

Erich von Daniken being presented an award by Jaime Maussan.

The first panel included veteran ufologists from different regions of Mexico like Rubén Manrique, Fernando Tellez and Luis Ramirez, most of whom were investigating UFO cases back in the seventies long before Maussan appeared on the scene. One of the things that surprised me was the amount of Mothman-type sightings (the term Mothman was coined by the late John Keel for a weird flying creature reported in West Virginia in the late sixties). Perhaps this is not culturally surprising if we consider than Mexico has a long tradition of voladores or flying men since Mesoamerican times, which it’s still practiced with ropes on top of long poles. The second panel was devoted to UFOs and Mexican aviation and consisted of senior air traffic controller Enrique Kolbeck, airliner pilot Raymundo Cervantes Ruano, and Guadalajara pilot Daniel Monraz, who following his UFO sightings became an investigator himself.

Although he participated on a personal and not official basis, Mexico City Airport’s senior traffic controller Enrique Kolbeck was the closest to an official vie of the UFO phenomenon in Mexico. Kolbeck has confirmed the detection of unknown targets at Mexico City International Airport during many UFO sightings in the past. He stated the need for an official investigation of UFOs as it affects civil aviation, as other countries like Chile, Peru and France have. He also noted that releasing balloons—which have often been blamed on UFO sightings in Mexico and elsewhere—can pose a danger to aviation. The potential threat to aviation was highlighted by the next speaker in panel, airliner pilot Raymundo Cervantes Ruano, whose Aeromexico flight 129 between Guadalajara and Mexico City collided with a small unknown object on the night of July 28, 1994. Fortunately, Cdr. Cervantes was able to land safely in Mexico City and no one was hurt.

The Summit’s Pilots Panel: (from left to right) host Jaime Maussan, senior air traffic controller Enrique Kolbeck, airliner pilot Cdr. Cervantes Ruano, and pilot and UFO investigator from Guadalajara, Daniel Monraz.

The last Mexican panel presented the film and video evidence captured by the “Vigilantes” UFO Hunters—the best known is probably Arturo Robles—who showed their best UFO footage. Altogether, Mexico’s World UFO Summit was a professionally-run enjoyable and informative event.

Night watching with Giorgio Bongovanni (middle) and astronomer Fernando Campos.

*Read more about Antonio Urzi in our story: Antonio Urzi, the UFO Catalyst.

Air Force Materiel Command at Wright-Patterson AF Base, Dayton, Ohio (image: USAF).

While lecturing in Dayton in 1990, I finally had the opportunity of visiting Wright-Patterson, where Blue Book was stationed for years under the Foreign Technology Division. The only section open to the public is the famous Air Force Museum, which contains just about every known aircraft from the Wright Brothers to the Stealth fighter. I had read somewhere there was a small Blue Book exhibit at the museum, but it was not in the two main hangars with all the planes. My host from Dayton of course knew that the exhibit, a small glass panel, was at the entrance of the cafeteria. It consisted of a few photos (mostly hoaxes), various pieces of junk reported as UFO debris but all man-made industrial items, and a few other things. The most colorful item was the “UFO Pancake” from the Eagle River, Wisconsin, case of April 18, 1961.

This is one of the truly great stories of Americana saucer folklore. On that date, a flying saucer landed allegedly on Joe Simonton’s chicken farm in Eagle River, and its occupants offered him six pancakes in exchange for plain water. The “ET pancakes” were sent to Wright-Patterson when Col. Robert Friend was at Blue Book’s helm (1958-63). In 1992, I had the opportunity of interviewing the retired colonel at length at his home in Irvine, Calif., with my friend and colleague Alex Chionetti. He told us many stories, including that of Joe Simonton. It turned out that it was Friend who put the little Blue Book display together at the Air Force Museum, pancakes and all.

The Blue Book display at Wright-Patterson.

“Yeah, I put them there,” he told us, “there were six of them originally and after I brought them back, what I did was to send three of them to the labs. I sent one to the Food & Drug Administration, and I sent one to a lab in New York called Sam Tuttle [phonetic spelling], which we had under contract… FDA not only told me that they were pancakes, but they would tell me whose they were, and what the composition was, just everything laid down, Sam Tuttle lab in New York gave me the complete composition and they would match, that’s why I send them to two places… so then I talked the entire story over with the psychologist.”

Col. Friend also revealed how Blue Book’s UFO Questionnaire was developed: “The Questionnaire really and truly never basically changed, the Air Force had paid a lot of money to have that Questionnaire developed, it was developed by the psychologists at the University of Ohio, they came up with it, and the questions were supposedly devised so that you would be able to tell whether or not the person was fabricating or not. I never really understood how myself but that’s what you were supposed to do, and because the questions were directed so they would ask the same question some time later in a different form, see whether or not they compare the answers.”

Col. Robert Friend with Antonio Huneeus (Author) in 1993.
(Image: Alex Chionetti)

Antonio’s entire interview with Col. Robert Friend:

RF: No, it’s OK, when I talked with [Stanton] Friedman about it [The alleged Roswell crash], I talked a bit about some of the unrealistic aspects and I heard him recently on Michael Jackson’s show here, a radio show, and it seemed to me that what it happened he had softened some of these areas… if you go out and pick a piece of material and you say, boy, I can’t do anything with it, I can’t bend it, I can’t burn it, I can’t do anything to it in any way to destroy it, but yet you have a piece of it, where in the world you get a piece if nothing can happen to it, in other words, it still should be part of the entity, well and if, if all of what you say is true, it takes so much force in order to grate that material apart, there is no way in the world that anybody can convince me that a body should survive, I’ve investigated aircraft accidents, and I’ve found nothing of the individual when the aircraft was in pieces, and especially in a circumstance like that; and the other thing they indicated for instance that the bodies had been taken to Wright-Patterson.

AH: Hangar 18, right, that’s the legend.

Wright-Patterson Air Force Museum.

RF: Well, I don’t understand why they were taken to Wright-Patterson when Brooks, which is the medical center, was right there in Texas, it would seem to me it was near, logically, and the other thing, if that impact took place, certainly people all over the place should have heard if it was to the extent that it ruptured that thing…

AH: But it was in a very remote place, not near Roswell but Corona, you know, in a ranch.

RF: Yeah, but I understand remoteness, but the guy, it was on his place and he didn’t even know it was there until he went out to work on his place and came across it. He didn’t hear anything?

AH: But what you make of the fact that, I mean, that there is no doubt that they did find these pieces.

RF: I have no doubt they found something, that’s why I say that it’s unfortunate that people mix fact and fiction, or fact and imagination, because if you didn’t have to do anything except follow the fact all the time, I think they would a lot better off rather than trying to sift through information and say, this is good and this isn’t, because I don’t think I am smarter enough to be sure to pick what’s alright and throw out what’s all wrong, it’s like anybody that goes out, it doesn’t matter how open-minded you are, to investigate something, you can’t help but have your experiences color the way in which you view and the approach you take to the investigation, if for instance, who is to say if they are visitors here of any kind that they are our size, for instance they might be, you might be walking all over the evidence looking for something if you think…

Alex Chionetti: We were talking about yesterday, now everybody is mixing science-fiction like underground bases and mutilations…

RF: Well, these are some of the inconsistencies too, if we have had people or beings that have come here in a spacecraft and we have to presume that those individuals were not just dogs and cats and so forth riding in a vehicle but rather if you say under intelligent control, we have to mean direct intelligent control, not remote intelligent control, and that we have had this contact and these beings are still around, God, I would expect our space program would be a whole further ahead than it is, we wouldn’t be blowing Challengers up, certainly it would be a heck of lot more sophistication introduced into the program that what we currently have, it’s sophisticated enough from our viewpoint, but it isn’t as sophisticated as what we are thinking about.

AC: You saw this case of Bob Lazar?

AH: Area 51, you know, this guy who claims they have nine flying saucers, I don’t know if you’ve heard about him.

RF: Yeah, I just find it hard to feel that our government should function in such clearly defined segments, that these guys over here are trying to do space programs and these guys over here have far out sophisticated machines that can do a heck of lot more, I don’t believe it that the government, there is no way in the world that they could keep the two from mixing in some way.

AH: When you were in Blue Book, there were no rumors of these things, I mean among military people, not the writers.

RF: There were, let me put this way, there were views in both directions, OK, both directions I mean the Navy really ridiculed the program even to the extent that in the Pentagon some of the offices, the Air Force put their Unidentified Flying Objects report, the Navy would put Unidentified Floating Objects, you know, we got UFOs too, we got Unidentified Floating Objects, and the, but on the other hand, there was an element that in all the services, and I am sure it’s there, that there was something there that we really needed to investigate, by the way, we felt too that what we wanted to do if we could is to determine what it was that these people were experiencing, and we wanted to do that, even though it really and truly overstepped the limits of our charters in some way, our charter was to determine whether or not it constituted a threat to national security, and if we could get an answer to that, we weren’t necessarily interested beyond that, not because we personally weren’t interested but because the funds and so forth that were allocated to the program didn’t allow us to pursue it beyond that; if we could get an answer, we got it, but if we could answer the first question, then we didn’t worry too much about the follow-up questions, that was one of the areas where Dr. Hynek was most interested, what he was saying was that if there is some scientific paydirt here, then we really and truly ought to have it. Now, I wrote two staff studies and both of them were directed towards having the program either extended into an area such as research and development and/or advanced research, so that the people who had the funds allocated to a follow-on effort to see if they could indeed take the information and pursue it to the next step, OK, and I think that in both instances, one to have it transferred to NASA, and the other have it transferred to the Air Force Research and Development people, or to the Advanced Research Projects Agency, well, in both cases it fell through, in other words, somewhere the decision was made that, no, we’ll leave it where it is and we’ll do it the way we are doing it.

AC: You are talking about the late fifties?

RF: I am talking about, well, I can’t remember the exact time period, but it seems to me that I wrote one almost as soon as I was there, that was about 1959, and I think the next that I wrote was about 60, 61, somewhere like that.

AH: What was the time frame which you worked for Blue Book?

RF: I was there from 58 to 63, I really and truly was assigned to the job because the timing was right, I went in there really and truly with the job of being concerned with satellites, and to be concerned with those things that were happening in the scientific community that were associated with these things, so my job was actually much broader than the phenomena, the unidentified phenomena, but it was an extension of what I was doing.

AC: You were talking of spy satellites?

RF: Well, there weren’t spy satellites in those days, but we are talking about the early things like Sputnik, Echo.

AH: You were with the Foreign Technology Division?

RF: Yes, that’s correct.

AC: Communication satellites too?

RF: Well, those were things yet to come, but the idea was that we knew that the technology and the science that was being developed at that time would probably be able to evolve into these capabilities, like for instance, we used to keep moon watch information at that time the way in which the information as to where from these moon watch teams all over the world, these guys would sight, give us the information, plot it, orbit information, well, Gregory, who was running the program at that time, had applied to go to school, the Air Force had programs where what you would do, you wanted to get your college degree, you would do the first three years by correspondence, and then you would go to school for the last year, he had reached that point, so the job was vacant.

AH: So you took over?

RF: They gave me that part of the job in addition to the other things I was doing.

AC: And when you took the job was a kind of…

RF: Well, at the time that I took it over I had been involved with it indirectly once because I was stationed down in Alabama and there was a report that came in and I went out to investigate, and actually what it turned out to be was one of the Rawin [?] units, you know, what happens it goes up in a balloon, then it gets released in a parachute, it comes down and the parachutes are red, and what happened was, it fell into an area where the people had never seen one of these things, boy, they were scared to death, it was up on a tree, and they reported it, well, they didn’t know what it was, they really and truly didn’t think in terms of Martians or anything like that, but they were afraid of it, they wouldn’t come out of their homes, something was out there, you know, it would go on or explode or whatever, and the experiences that people had had from World War Two, we sometimes give the public enough credit to being able to know about things, and at the same time, don’t themselves spread the word, so there could be panic or what have you because the Japanese were indeed bombarding our country at that time by balloons.

AH: The Fugo balloons, right.

RF: Yeah, but these balloons they were just dropped, we had detachments strategically all over the country and that traced out each one of those things that were reported, anything that was reported like that, they would try to neutralize that, so anyway even though this is Alabama and you wouldn’t think in terms of getting that far because naturally you would think most of them would fall on the west coast, but those people, they would not leave their homes, we got it down and show it to them what it was and told them, but they still kept their distance.

AH: Blue Book worked that way, right, when there was a sighting, they would have the Air Force Intelligence in various bases do the investigation?

RF: That came later, it’s really strange as I said, the first paper that I wrote trying to get us into the Research & Development community, and the R&D community felt we were so bogged down with this thing has because of the public relations aspect of it, probably get us sidetracked from the kinds of things we wanted to do, which I think was reasonable, but later when they took, when the program first started it was a part of an intelligence organization that was within what was called the old AMC, the Air Materiel Command, and the Air Materiel Command had this organization which functioned to look into foreign technology–later they decided–at this point it was through Ruppelt, Ruppelt did everything himself, when they first started he went everywhere, now later, what they did was to take that foreign technology organization out from AMC and put it directly under the Assistant Secretary, the Assistant Chief of Staff Office for Intelligence, so now it was directly under Air Force level, even though it was still sitting in Wright-Patterson, they just took it, put it into another complex and said, you are on your own, right, so that’s what they did. Now, later they decided that since the information these people are getting is used mostly by our R&D people, for instance, if we found out that some foreign country is developing something that we feel either needs to be neutralized or we need to duplicate, or we have to worry about whether or not it’s going to have any kind of counter-active impact on something we are doing, that what we have to do is change the way we are approaching a problem in order to approach a new problem which is going to counter a threat this poses. Well, so now they took Foreign Technology and put into Research & Development, so R&D ended up with it anyway even though second-hand, so now before that, while it was still ATIC, the Air Technology Intelligence Center, what happened then was they had their own detachments and these detachments that they had were residuals from these people that were out in the field to look for those Japanese balloons, so they were all and that’s what they were using to do the investigation of UFOs, that’s one of the reasons why in the early days you could say that there was at least a measure of consistency in the capability of the people that were doing the investigation, one, they were trained for that sort of thing, two, they were technical people in all instances, OK, so they would go out and do this job. Now, gradually, that organization started to shrink, each one of the detachments started to disappear, I can’t remember the exact number that they were in the country, but I remember they went down to 12, then down to 4 and then finally down to 1, and that 1 was located in Virginia. Well, after the organization moved into the Research & Development community, now we had to redo all of the directives because originally all of those directives were written directly from the Air Force level, now we had under our directive that were written from the Research & Development Commander, they became R&D directives, and that directive said that each one of the bases would now be responsible for setting up a capability to go out and do this job, in conjunction with that I also wrote what is called the request for a special action on the part of the Inspector General, which meant that anytime an installation went through a routine inspection by the Inspector General, he was to take a look at how you were handling the UFO problem specifically, so it became a special question.

AC: What Questionnaire was used at that time?

AH: The Questionnaire really and truly never basically changed, the Air Force had paid a lot of money to have that Questionnaire developed, it was developed by the psychologists at the University of Ohio, they came up with it, and the questions were supposedly devised so that you would be able to tell whether or not the person was fabricating or not, I never really understood how myself but that’s what you were supposed to do, and because the questions were directed so they would ask the same question some time later in a different form, see whether or not they compare the answers.

AC: It was done by psychologists?

J. Allen Hynek (image: Northwestern University)

RF: It was put together by psychologists, because when Dr. Hynek first took on the job, he wasn’t at Harvard, that’s where he was.

AH: Ohio State University?

RF: Yeah, he was over there, so anyway, the next thing that we had the bases performing these tasks, I think you can appreciate because each base has a different mission, that you are going to find different kinds of people to do these jobs, like for instance, if you take the installation downtown in space division, they got a lot of scientific people and they got a lot people who are concerned with things that happen in space and so forth, so you would anticipate a really top notch job out of a guy like that, but if you have another base someplace else whose mission was principally to fly airplanes, right, you might get some better views of how pilots feel about what happened, but as far as a strong technical background, to give that information, you won’t necessarily have that… Now, as far as the analysis was concerned, when those things came in to us, then what we would do was to get them in the hands of those people that we felt were best qualified to answer the kinds of questions that seemed to be [contained] in the report; if it was a radar report, it went to the radar section, that’s what they were doing, they get that all the time; if it was something that had photographs involved, what we do was is get it to the photographic section, to the photo interpreters, and also we would send it on to people like Kodak for analysis.

AC: Which was the more enthusiastic department to receive information on UFOs?

RF: Really and truly, nobody ever really looked down at it because of the source, principally because the initial source as far as they were concerned was always possibly some field element, and when it came in then they knew it was important for them to be able to get, another thing to it is that in the intelligence community, you don’t throw anything out because you might be throwing the baby out with the water, you have to be very careful; if you are in the intelligence community and information is flowing in, you really and truly don’t have any way to know what the true source is because that wouldn’t be revealed to you, you get information, right?, and what you had to do is sift through this information and try to see whether or not there is anything there that will be beneficial, it could be anything, even though in a lot of instances what you try to do was to make a determination of, somebody somewhere in the system would rate the source from where it came, read the information and rate the source, that’s what intelligence information is, I don’t care what is on, because what they are trying to do is, the guy, you sit there and information is coming to you, swarms of information and you don’t want to sit there and complain all day long, somebody somewhere in the system says, hey, you don’t know, it’s very shaky, well because, as I am sure you can appreciate, UFO cases can come in classified and someone looks at it and says, Oh boy, this is classified report, but a report could come in classified for any number of reasons: the information can be classified itself, or the source can be classified, in other words, they say, well, we don’t want this to get around that this is where we get information, so they put a classification on it; and/or it can be classified because of timing…

AC: Were there many classified [UFO] cases?

RF: Well, yeah, we had some pilots in Alaska report when the Soviets exploded their first A [or air] burst and they reported a UFO, they saw this big, but the thing was that we knew the answer because we had gotten through other channels that they had one of these things off, and then all we had to do is to say, time, direction, and everything else, yeah, we knew what it was, right, and the reports that came in and supported it were classified because of sources, and their reports were wide open, but OK, we know what it is, no sense in bothering to either try to co-relate it or explain it. Now, later when they started publicizing the information that yes, and so forth, but in a lot of instances I think that people in the intelligence community don’t want the other guy to know that they know, and the only way you can keep that secret is to say, well, we can’t talk about it because the first time they hear us talking about they’ll know that we know, and also because sometimes timing in intelligence incidents can make them say, OK, this happened, they got this information and we know when they got it, so now let’s see, whom should we start trying to look around and see whether or not that guy passed it…

AH: Any memorable [UFO] case that you can think of that couldn’t be explained? They used to call them ‘Unknown’, right?

RF: Well, we always call them, we indicated that we just didn’t have an answer for them, it could say ‘Unknown’ or ‘Unexplained’ or what have you, I think to go ahead and say it’s unknown is I think an honest way to approach it, to say unexplained means like, maybe I can explain it but I won’t, right, so we just leave it unexplained, even though as I said, they were some things in these categories very much like I just explained to you, like the first Soviet air burst, and of course there were other things that could happen, for instance, they were testing some of the reentry vehicles and so forth, people could see these, it’s, I think all of us are aware that we have overt and covert intelligence and that sometimes we don’t mind being overt the things that we do, and in those instances where it’s covert the idea is that we are hoping something a lot bigger that the everyday kind of thing that gets reported, the air attachés go out, you know, and watch the parade to see the tanks go by and they see all these things, they can see all kinds of technical details, but that’s all well and good because external views and things like that while, in a lot of instances are cause for classification, depending on what you see they cover it up or disguise the shape or something like that if that was important, but it’s the guy that gives you the things that are going on inside…

AC: Would you say that in your period there was misinformation coming from the CIA?

RF: I don’t know, I don’t believe that any intelligence organization would not follow up a hot item that was brought to its attention, whether it had assigned responsibility for a particular area or not, like we, the Air Force, we had UFOs and that was supposed to be our baby, but I don’t believe that Navy Intelligence person some place would say, Oh, pass it to the Air Force and forget it, I think that if he thought that whatever it was needed investigating, he do it.

AH: Yeah, there are many documents now that have been declassified from other agencies.

RF: Sure, sure, and I think it’s the same thing from almost any agency, not only that, I would think that if these agencies, say like the CIA, if they were onto something, and they were not sure what their total ramifications were that probably, probably it would not find its way out of there, at least until, I mean, for incoming examination among the intelligence community because I think it’s the nature of the operation.

AH: So not necessarily all the information that the government was collecting would have gone to Blue Book?

RF: That’s what I would think, I would say that they would not mind giving it to us if they thought, you know, but if they thought that it had other ramifications that were probably well within their bearing I don’t believe that they would pass it on.

AC: Yeah, that’s the reason that I am suspicious with the story of MJ-12 [alleged secret UFO management group]. I remember I asked [Major Hector] Quintanilla if he heard sometime about MJ-12, and he said he didn’t and I believe him.

RF: Well, there is sort of inconsistencies there, too, some of the things about that, I saw that document, was a copy, and it was about the most terrible typing job that I’ve ever seen for the president, I don’t know who did that but certainly you would have been able to find somebody that could type better than that, and also whose English would have been a little better, the next thing is that, if you remember Dr. Menzel’s name was on that list.

AH: Right.

RF: OK, but Dr. Menzel in writing his book came to Wright-Patterson and stayed there and I helped him put together the information that went into his book, in other words, he needed the cases, we talked, discussed the cases, so forth, he didn’t know anything more about what was going on in that program until he came up there and got a chance to see.

AH: So you knew him quite well?

RF: Oh, I did quite well, in fact, we had talked quite a bit about a number of things, Dr. Menzel had been in the Navy.

AH: During the war.

RF: That’s right, and in the Navy what he had done was go out and make some flights through over the North Pole and in the Arctic region, and he had some personal experiences with things that were like this and were startling even to him, even though he was later able to now understand what it was that he saw, but the kind of phenomena that happens in those regions with extreme temperatures and these various other conditions, he talked about it, he talked openly about it because they were some of the same experiences that radar, that’s what he was doing, he was in the electronic transmissions area in the Navy, because they couldn’t understand why some of the radar was acting so strange up in that region like, for instance, they at one time thought they were being invaded because they saw all this activity going on, and they didn’t realize that what had happened that, even though radar line of sight that what happened is they had gotten a reflection and they were looking much further away that what they thought they were looking, you know, so the radar [image] was something like a mirage.

Stealth bomber being placed into the Air Force Museum at Wright Patterson (image: USAF).

AH: After you left Blue Book in ‘63, but you stayed in the Air Force?

RF: I stayed for that entire time, we had Congressional inquiries.

AH: So you were still somewhat interested or involved after you left?

RF: Well, after I left the program I was still in the intelligence community and I was in Japan right after I left the program, we had, there an awful amount of reports that came out of Japanese pilots.

AH: So you were having reports from Japanese pilots of UFOs?

RF: Well, they weren’t coming to me, but I learned of them, yeah.

AC: Was there a lot of activity in Japan?

RF: A lot of activity? Well, they had a lot of activity but all of a sudden it stopped, I think that the Japanese air force, not the air force, they were mostly airline pilots at the time, I don’t remember ever hearing of a report coming from one of the self-defense pilots, and I was interfacing quite a bit with the Commander of the Research & Development Command, and he was a Lt. General, he never said anything at all, and I was in Korea over that time, in Korea I never, never heard anything at all. Now, while I was still with the program we had had some reports out of the Southeast Asia area, some of from some of the religious people in the areas…

AH: Oh, that’s right, that was a famous case in Papua that was during your time?

RF: Yes, and also the Science Advisor to the Indonesian Air Force came to Wright-Patterson and he was very much interested over that, stayed around, he was in an Air Force-sponsored trip and stayed around there for about a week, and the things he was interested in mostly was anti-gravity devices, that’s what he was interested because they were doing a lot of work, his name was Harenoto, Dr. Harenoto.

AH: I have a letter from Marshall Nusredin, I think it was his name, he was the Commander-in-Chief of the Indonesian Air Force from around ‘67, it wasn’t written to me, it was written to a Japanese TV producer, where he says that they had many cases and that at one time they opened fire against the UFOs, it was very open-minded.

RF: Yeah, yeah, this guy, he told me a lot about that, he was…

AC: In that area [Asia] they are more believers because of spiritual or religion affects them.

RF: Well, you know, they are, I think all of us recognize a lot of things sometimes start to color the way in which we feel about something, I read [Kenneth] Arnold’s case time and time again, and one of the things in there, have you read it?

AH: Arnold’s case? Sure.

RF: Have you read his statements? You know what he was doing at this time, trying to search for wreckage?

AH: For a Marine plane, right.

RF: …he told everybody what the conditions were and if the conditions were like that, then it’s more than likely you are in a position to experience these looming mirages, and these looming mirages really and truly, if you’ve flown through these areas like I have, it looks like it cuts off the top of the mountains, that’s all, all you see is the top of the mountains, just the tops, and you see these tops like that, now as the geometry changes, as you move along, one would disappear and another would appear, and it looks like it moved from here to there, you’re sitting there…

AC: Like a kaleidoscope.

RF: Yeah, it’s, so I really and truly believe that’s what happened there, and he obviously had never experienced before, I think that that’s what happened to him. Now, a lot of the other things that have happened and the circumstances surrounding them are hard to explain.

AH: Did you ever have a sighting yourself?

RF: Yeah, well, I was coming back from Washington, DC, we were flying periodically, I used to fly the courier, and the courier went from Wright-Patterson to Washington and back, and we were coming back one night and the guy flying with me, he is seating flying the airplane, said all of the sudden, what an airplane, I looked and, dodge, what goddamn we just nearly got run over, we nearly got run over, it just went right by, right? I said, well, I didn’t see anything, you know, generally what happens to you is that you pass another airplane, right, normally the guy, boy, he sees you, you see him, on goes his damn landing lights, he lights the sky up in the air, something like that happens, well, I said to him, what in world do you think that was, he said, I saw it, he said I saw it. Well, we were there flying along with it and we heard that what they had had was a bolide and the bolide was over Indiana and we were just coming out of Pittsburgh, well, here once again what we were talking earlier about experiences, right, at night we see a light and we judge the distance by what? Two things: brightness and size, right, it’s the only thing if you see a light, the light is close, it’s big, it’s close, so what happened was that that thing was so bright, he thought that it was right out in front of us and it scared the hell out of him, well, it scared the hell out of me too because I didn’t know, I knew something was wrong, I thought the airplane was thrown, I had my head down, so anyway that was a case of where an incoming meteor that was brighter than usual, gave a pilot the impression that he was about to be run over by this thing, and he dodged and when he lost sight of it like that he thought that it had gone down, but as I said, from where I was, from my perspective, from the airplane when I looked up, I didn’t see any brightness, nothing at all that would leave me with the impression that we’ve met another aircraft that close, it was a bolide and what it happened, it burned itself out way out in front of us because it was reported, we heard it on the radio that it was reported in Indiana. And then there are other kinds of things that can happen, I don’t know if you remember a case of a P-51 pilot…

AH: Gorman, yes, in Fargo, North Dakota.

RF: Very, very strange things happen to you, you know, in the air force or any walk of life for that matter, but I had read that case any number of times, and I went back to Washington to, I forget what year we are talking, like ‘59 or ‘60, I went back to Washington for a meeting and I was going to come back so I said, hell, why don’t I just try to hitch a ride back, well, it turned out they had hurricane warnings all over the coast so they were evacuating the airplanes, they were evacuating a lot of the airplanes at Andrews Air Force Base back to Wright-Patterson and all the other places in the midwest, so I asked a guy, hey, can I hitch a ride back to Wright-Patterson, he said yes, and the guy flying the airplane was Gorman [laughs], you know, that was him, so I got to talking with him, and he went into a shock, he didn’t want to talk about it, so I told him, I said, hey, I am not trying to do anything to you, I said, the only thing is I am really interested in hearing first-hand what happened, right, because this guy had reported that he had a dogfight with one of these things over there, he didn’t have a good time up there, and I know that he had indicated there that it was his first night flight in a P-51, right, well, I also, that’s it because I had so much time in an airplane, I knew what can happen to you, he had an oil seal on a propeller and that oil seal that brought you wind [?] if you didn’t really and truly keep that thing clean before you left, you are going to have really sponged up, and it’s very tough to look through that thing, well, you start looking through the night, you see lot’s and lot’s of different things, that guy, he might have had that kind of an aberration, I really can’t say but he wouldn’t, he just really and truly wouldn’t talk, he didn’t want to talk, I think that he had probably gotten some bad publicity as a result of reporting it and consequently didn’t want to get pulled into it again, down to earth kind of guy, you know, I don’t think that he fabricated anything, I think he had a real experience, what we wanted to try to do was to dig deep enough to find out what that experience was.

AH: Right, another case that intrigues me, I think that Bob Emenegger wrote about it, you know, the one about the, they called it the Affa affair, the one with the Navy Intelligence.

RF: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

AH: Can you tell me a little bit about it? You were involved in it?

RF: Yeah, yeah, what happened there was that, here is a case where one of the other agencies did indeed investigate something, OK, it was reported that a lady in Maine had been having mental contacts with foreign, or not foreign but alien elements that were at that particular time patrolling our universe, they were patrolling it because they were representatives from Uranus and Venus…

AC: A Confederation like Star Trek.

AH: Yeah, but this is before Star Trek.

RF: That’s correct, so that she had gone into trance and had she had started to write information, you know, it was supposed to being passed to her from these beings, now, this information during the investigation they said that she really and truly was putting down things that were far beyond her educational level, right, and especially in the area of technology and astronomy, so during the investigation it surfaced that she was really and truly just a communication level, and what they were willing to do was to exercise the same communication link with someone else, so one of these [Naval] officers, he said OK, and he sat there, went into a trance and lo and behold he was being exercised as a communication link, so he came back to Washington and repeated it before several people in the intelligence community and they asked some specific questions, the way, as a communications link the way it works is that the person would go into a trance and then someone else would ask a question, and he would pass these questions on and then he would get the answer, which he would write it out, OK, so they during one of these episodes asked that they be given a sign that would convince them all that this was really happening, and they were told to go to the window, they all went to the window, they looked out, whoosh, a spacecraft of some kind goes by.

AH: So that really did happen?

RF: Well… this was the report, that’s all I, I never saw it myself.

AH: You weren’t there?

RF: I was not there, but and the report says that what they did then was to rush to the telephone to call the Defense people in Washington to find out whether or not they had picked up anything with their radar through that sector, and they were advised that they don’t know what happened but that sector was blacked out from them during the time of this episode. Well, when I went and the gentleman went through the self-same exercise, we asked him questions of him and he is putting down the answers, well, I tried to ask him a question that for some reason I could get no answer, so then I said…

AC: What kind of question was it.

RF: Well, I wanted to ask him about, I was going to ask him some really heavy scientific question that I thought I already knew the answer to it, but then the next thing I wanted…

AC: You received philosophical answers?

RF: Let me see, it took a while, I told the guy that was asking him the questions to ask him to give a demonstration again, so I could see, right, and the word came back that there was a disbeliever among us, and I was the only one there that wasn’t the time before, so it had to be me, and that’s what happened, and so in my suggestion then was that, why don’t we get this naval officer and the lady, actually ask them the same questions at the same time to see if we get the same answers, if you get the same answers you got something because you can come up with questions that obviously they didn’t have a chance to put together and I thought that Duke University, which was at that time [researching] the parapsychology, I thought why not take them there and let this happen.

AH: They did?

RF: I have no idea what happened, all I know is the man got transferred and I don’t know anything else.

AH: The Navy officer got transferred?

RF: Yeah, but his boss swore by now because I talked to his boss, his boss swore by him, said that he was without doubt one of the best officers he ever had, was certainly not a person to take a fantasy, and I will say this: he was in a trance, he was in a trance, no doubt about it, and I had seen his hand writing before and I saw it afterwards and it was different, there is doubt about that, he was indeed in trance. Now, self hypnosis? I don’t know, but he was in a trance, he was really gone.

AC: Did he have any kind of sightings or encounters with ET’s or UFOs?

RF: No, no, the only thing he did was talk about the names of some of the people like Affa…

AH: Oh yeah, right, Crill.

RF: Crill, c-r-i-l-l, a-f-f-a, you know, it was so these names were there, and they were indicating that they were part of an organization that was set about to patrol, make sure that no people in any of the planets got out of line, and of course they were talking hard with us because we’re starting to become a little rambunctious [laughs]…

AH: Like a bad case in the galaxy?

RF: [Laughs] Right.

AH: How about, did you ever, at the time you were in Blue Book did you ever hear of the Betty and Barney Hill case? That would have happened around your time?

RF: Right, no, I never, I read about it and I saw it on TV a little time later… Now, I saw, you know, the cases that Webb had on his show, what he did was to take several cases and put them together…

AC: You are talking about Bob?

RF: I am talking about Webb and his series [Project UFO], what he would do, the answer to that is that [he would take] several that were related and put them together and make them one.

AH: Were you involved in that project?

RF: I went there a couple of times because Coleman was really and truthfully his producer.

AH: [Col.] Bill Coleman [former public information officer for Project Blue Book]?

RF: Yeah.

AC: Coleman was the producer of Project UFO?

RF: Yeah and, see, he had all of the cases.

AH: Yes, because I remember when Hynek came up with his second book, the one called The Hynek UFO Report, I remember reading about an officer that had been on some survival training and was coming in the desert and had seen these lights and there was a board of inquiry or whatever, I remember I saw that on the Jack Webb program and then I read the document in the Hynek book, so that was really a true case but I think it was mixed with other stuff.

RF: Yeah, that’s what they did. Now, you know, I’ve become very curious, I don’t know if you remember a case by a guy who owned an electronics store named Fry.

Wright-Patterson Air Force Museum.

AH: Oh, Dan Fry, sure, yeah.

AC: In White Sands.

RF: That’s right, and you remember the White Sands and so forth.

AH: I read it.

AC: He was traveling…

RF: To New York, he is the guy that they took for a ride and he could read the marquees in New York from a thousand miles up, you know, because the portholes in the vehicle were like lenses, well, I saw here on the corner of Rosekrantz and Sepulveda, there is an electronics company by Dan Fry, it says Dan Fry’s Electronics Co.

AC: Really? It’s still there?

RF: I think it is.

AC: Is he still alive?

AH: Yeah, I met him a couple of years ago in Eureka Springs.

RF: I had an interview by the gentleman who was at that time the editor of Lighthouse… he came to Wright-Patterson to talk to me, and he, at the time I had on my board and it was written in Arabic, something about ‘don’t put off till tomorrow what you can do today,’ that’s really what it said.

AH: But in Arabic?

RF: Yeah, [laughs] but he thought, he made a big thing out of it, God, I can’t write it, but he had talked to Fry and he had tried, he said Fry wouldn’t talk to him, wouldn’t give him the time of the day, and he said, man, here you are with the damn story of the century and you won’t talk to me, so I don’t know what his attitude today is about that, but from that particular incident I would say he apparently had had some bad experiences that didn’t want or care to talk much about it.

AH: I guess he did work for Aerojet.

RF: Yeah.

AH: You remember a guy because he told me the story that he met at that time, Mosely, Jim Moseley?

RF: Uh-hu.

AH: You received him at Wright-Patterson at that time?

RF: Uh-hu.

AH: You do remember him?

RF: Yeah, well, you know, I can’t remember the names, there were a couple of guys who tried to pull a good policeman, bad policeman job on me, one of them came out and said, you know, this guy is going to try to make me say, but I really didn’t have anything else to say to him other that what I had said to his friend, which were the facts.

AC: You never met in your time Wendelle Stevens?

RF: Who?

AC: Wendelle Stevens? He was in the Air Force?

AH: Yeah, he was a Colonel.

RF: Wendelle Stevens?

AH: A Lt. Colonel, I guess eventually he became a Lt. Colonel.

RF: I don’t think I know him.

AH: Because he says he was with ATIC.

RF: He was?

AH: Yeah, but he was in Alaska, he says that I guess in the late 40’s he was involved with reports of UFOs and things.

RF: I am sure.

AH: And now he is a big promoter.

RF: Oh really? OK, what year was he there?

AH: He would have been all through.

RF: I mean, when he was in Alaska?

AH: I think Alaska would have been around 49.

RF: OK, he was before my time.

AC: Second World War.

AH: No, it was after Arnold.

AC: He is older than you, he is 73 I think.

RF: Well, that’s my age [laughs].

AH: And he was also an air attaché later in South America.

RF: Oh, he was?

AH: Yes, in Bolivia, so you don’t remember him?

RF: No, I don’t, but I can understand that he had become an air attaché because, well, most of the people who were in Foreign Technology, if they wished to pursue that area, became air attachés, or ATLO’s, it could be either one, an air attaché or an ATLO which is Air Technical Liaison Officer with the Embassy.

AC: And you met James MacDonald? Professor MacDonald, who was with NASA?

RF: You know…

AH: He wasn’t with NASA, or maybe as a consultant, but he was with the University of Arizona, Planetary or something.

RF: Yeah, that’s what I thought, he may, there is no doubt that a lot of these people were possibly with these organizations as consultants, which I could never understand [?], he was with Convair…

AC: He was involved with Boeing studies of the production of the ozone, OK?

RF: This is the man who proposed that a lot of these things were frozen gases.

AH: Wouldn’t be Klass, Phil Klass?

RF: No, he was with Convair, his name will come to me as I talk, but what he was indicating was that a lot of these things were really frozen gases and that’s why you can see these things that seem to defy the laws of physics, you know, they come in and suddenly whiz they shot right turns and things like that because what happens is they change state, as they come in and all of a sudden it’s simply a gas, does these various things, well, he lived right here in Costa Mesa after he retired and he also had been in NASA, had been head of their space program, one of their space programs, Dr., can’t get his name.

AC: From the 50’s?

RF: Yeah, well he was with Convair during the 50’s and later I guess became involved with NASA and he was responsible for one of their space programs.

AH: So what’s your feeling now after all these years of what UFOs are, I mean, I know that a lot can be explained. But you think there is something else going on?

RF: Well, I tell you how I feel genuinely, OK, number one is, I certainly believe there is other intelligence in this big, big thing that we live in, right, we are a very small part of it, but I do find it very, very difficult to believe that life as we know it…

AC: Human life.

RF: Well, I don’t know whether to call it human or whatever you may want to call it up there, it really wouldn’t all be human, after all, we are the ones that define human, I guess, OK, if we want to impose limits on what’s human, OK, but the thing is that life as we know it and life as we can appreciate it, I find it very difficult to believe that we have been visited by any beings that would fall within this category, now, one of the things that I’ve said, if we say, for instance, that to get, to be developed for instance to where we are today, that a sun has to have existed for a certain amount of time, that the planet had to go through all the evolutionary processes to get there, right, and we would say looking at something out there what, 25, 21, 21 and a half light years, and you say, I think I am going to leave here and I am going to go there because I know there is a planet, because we certainly have a capability that we don’t of seeing that, and one would think that if they have progressed to the same point that we are, that they generally wouldn’t, I wouldn’t anticipate that they would go this far with technology [a bit?] more sophisticated, now if it’s beyond that, then of course we would have to expect that life itself had evolved beyond that, and I really and truly don’t know what form it would take.

AH: Who knows?

RF: You know, it’s just like, for instance, I guess the people say, Oh Jupiter, and they think, well, it’s a very big planet, so if there is people there they must be great people, right, I would think that it’s the other way around, I would think that because of the gravity that they would probably be much smaller, you know, after all ants can adapt, look at the things they can do here that even we can’t do, and they are smaller so can do it, so I would anticipate that it being in the other direction rather than these great, monstrous people, and so while, as I said, while I believe that what we have here, this solar thing is probably duplicated any number of times, that we have yet progressed to a point where we can go from here to there and they can go from there to here, now if there is something else that, I said, it’s certainly far beyond my comprehension, and I’d be willing to accept it, if I can see something that I can identify with to prove it to me, as I said, I can’t say that person’s wife say, hey, I saw a UFO go by, I know it’s from someplace else, I can’t tell, no, it wasn’t anymore than he can tell that it was.

AC: And you think there is not any scientific proof they are visiting us from outer space, or from another dimension, a perfect case?

RF: Well, I don’t even need a perfect case, I would just have to need something that really and truly slanted in that direction a lot more than the kinds of things that’s happening here now, I think that the scientific community itself have a willingness to accept the possibility of living and space travel, we’ve accomplished that, I think they can appreciate that, OK, but to think that a person right now can say, well, I am going to navigate and I am going to go to that place which I don’t know what’s going to look when I get there, you know, you take, for instance, for us to travel at the speed of light, certainly we couldn’t stand the accelerations to get there unless it occurred at something in a reasonable G level, right, OK, so let’s assume, how long would a guy have to live in a 2-g environment to go up to the speed of light and how long would it take, right, God, he is sitting in an environment like that for almost a year in a 2-g environment to get to the speed of light, in 2-g acceleration, that’s a long time, you know, and then all of a sudden you get there and what, you are going to navigate to something that you don’t even know that that’s where it is, in fact you know it’s not there the way you see it because, well, where we see it today that light took what, 25 light years to get here, so it’s 25 light years out of place, we may know where it is if we project where it is and say that’s where we’re going, but even when you get there you don’t know that will be anything there that it can do you any good.

AC: In the law of conservation of energy it’s not logical that these people would come from outer space from universe and they would show around to a farmer to make pancakes [reference to a story that is reviewed later in this article].

RF: Well, that’s true, I can accept a lot of things like the business of using solar winds and so forth for power and things of that sort, but I also realize that if you’re using nothing more than that kind of energy, it will be a long time, if you don’t believe it all you have to do is look at a comet, they are a long time out towards and they go way out, it’s because that portion of the journey after they go around the Sun and swing out, that part of the ??? it’s very, the outer lips is very way out, what is it 86 years for Halley?

AH: Yeah, 76 years or something like that.

AC: Now when people throw their extraterrestrial hypothesis about UFOs using gravitational forces, also Hynek used to say, I talked to Hynek and Hynek always tell me, they could jump into space, time-space.

RF: Well, you almost have to accept certain things, you know, is like when somebody says that there is nothing faster than light, right, and you say, OK, if there nothing faster than light, then what causes a black hole? OK, it’s something that’s precluding a light from coming and moving, there is nothing, right, a black hole there is no light, right, so there is something keeping, making sure that the light doesn’t move, OK, we don’t get a chance to see it and, I can accept the fact that if at the present time the only thing that we know is the speed of light and the nearest things that we can identify with are out there at distances like in the 20’s in light years, it’s a long time, and as I said, we are not even talking about the fact that, hey, we got to accelerate from nothing up to, that’s why I added the time because if it takes you a year to get to the speed of light, that means that that’s two years because you only went half the speed of light for that period.

AC: Too much time.

RF: Yeah, when I said that I am talking as far as the travel, plus the fact that you have got to have the means to decelerate from the speed of light right down when you get to the other end.

AH: Right, but many investigators, you know, although the popular perception is that UFOs are extraterrestrial, but many investigators, especially in Europe, they don’t believe it anymore, they propose other things.

RF: Well, that’s what I said, if you want to identify with something that it’s currently beyond us, that’s fine, I can go along with that like the business of dematerializing and then rematerialize someplace else, but your point is, you got to get that material from here to there, and I don’t know, whatever that route is, and not only that, after you get it out there, you got to reassemble it and reassemble right.

AC: [Talks about some videos from Nevada]

RF: It’s possible, we believe relativity and certainly people can make that trip, the thing about it is that when they came back they wouldn’t know anybody that was there.

AH: Right, the Einstein paradox.

RF: [Laughing] Right, might not even find anybody who knows that they left, that’s what I said, it’s quite possible, the thing about is, with some of the experiences that people have, who knows, maybe these things are happening to us, right, I remember the story of the Brazilian peasant, the medical, the surgeon…

AC: Villas Boas?

RF: I can’t remember his name, but anyway, the thing about him was that while he was operating he spoke German.

AC: Ze Arigo.

RF: Right.

AC: So he had communication with a German.

RF: Right.

AH: In Chile there was a similar case too of a society lawyer [Jaime Galte].

RF: And some of these other cases, I read a story of the people in Texas watching their TV and all of a sudden there was a station that had been off the air for 5 years.

AC: Was that a true story?

RF: Well, there so many people that saw it, now, whether or not somebody down there did have a tape and pulled a hoax, I don’t know, but the thing is it was very widespread.

AC: The signal bounced on an asteroid and came back?

RF: Well, that’s what they said, the signal could be there and who knows, life is what? We may just be using these bodies for a little while, that’s the next big adventure, who knows what it is, so I think I can accept anything and whenever I went out on a case and I talked to the people, I let them know that beforehand, I am not here to ridicule you, I am just here to try to get the facts and hopefully we can all benefit from it, I know that they had an experience and, you remember the essence of the gentleman that had the cakes given to him, the space cakes.

AH: Oh yeah, they still have them at the [Wright-Patterson] Air Museum.

RF: I put them there.

AH: You put them there?

RF: Yeah, I put them there, there were six of them originally and after I brought them back, what I did was to send three of them to the labs, now I send one to the Food & Drug Administration, and I sent one to a lab in New York called Sam Tuttle [phonetic spelling] which we had under contract, and that was one of the other things, all of the agencies in the government used to be very, very willing in support of us, anytime I had anything I send it to the FBI, I send it to the Weather Service, I send it to anybody that I thought would be able to do the best job on it, so I send this [pancakes] to the Food & Drug Administration, now, they not only told me, FDA, not only told me that they were pancakes, but they would tell me whose they were, and what the composition was, just everything laid down, Sam Tuttle lab in New York gave me the complete composition and they would match, that’s why I send them to two places, I said, well, if get the same answer from both these guys, they don’t know [the other lab is also analyzing it], Food and Drug and Sam Tuttle, so then I talked the entire story over with the psychologist, that was the other thing too, because in Wright-Patterson there was awful lot of work going on that maybe people weren’t aware, that is in the preparation of the business of space travel, we had guys who used to sit in chambers for weeks at a time in isolation and the guys were just studied to see whether or not they would be able to survive and do jobs in space, right, and these people also were there to do other kinds of jobs for the Air Force, the psychological aspects of people who have to perform in combat, you can appreciate, and under very strenuous conditions, so when I talked to them [psychologist] and the guy went back up there with me and he said to me, this man had an experience, because if you remember the circumstances, this guy, he was isolated, I think snowed in and when the first time he was able to get back into the town, take the trip into town, this is when he came in and said that this spacecraft had landed and what they had done was to offer him these cakes, they actually traded the cakes with him for some water, right, and so this guy [psychologist] said, the most dangerous thing we can do was to convince the man that what he had had was a mental aberration, because he says, as long as he believes it happened, he can live with it and there is no problem, but if the Air Force was going and say, hey buddy, you don’t know, he said, the guy would really have a problem and there was nothing for us to gain… what the psychologist said to me was, he said there is only two people in this town who are out of step, you and me, everybody else is perfectly happy, the guy is happy with it…

Pancake in the UFO Museum.

And when Sputnik deorbited, what happened is that when Sputnik deorbited a bearing came in and hit in this little town in Wisconsin, and we recovered it, and at the time [we thought] well, we can prove this thing has been in space, right, because all we have to do is take it to two labs in the country, there were only two at that time, one was at Harvard, the other one was at the University of Chicago, where we could see if there was any tritium present, and the University of Chicago was tied up so we took it to Harvard because Dr. Whipple was the foremost authority on this business of meteorites, and so but, boy, at first he didn’t want to touch it because of the UFO, but after he got it and found that it was indeed something that had been in space he didn’t want to give it back [laughs]. We treated everything as seriously as we could, you know, one of the fraternities at Pittsburgh did a thing on us.

AC: Fraternity? Masons?

RF: No, it’s a college, and we had this report about this UFO seen down there with all kinds of strange things, and so we talked with the police, we had to cordon off the area, all these things to investigate it and what we found out it was a plastic unit that it was made, it had a mercury switch in it and batteries and a light on it was flashing, noise was coming out, it was coming from a little electric motor.

AH: Oh, that’s also in the [Blue Book exhibit] panel, you designed it?

RF: [Laughs] Yeah, well, it just happened, we put, one of the gentlemen that we had there at Foreign Technology, Pearce, was a kind of guy who said, hey, why don’t we put some of these things up where you can see them, when people come in we’ll tell them about it, so what we did, we had some of the pictures blown up and…

AC: You must have had a lot of pictures and souvenirs?

RF: Well, a lot of the photography, there was this lady who took a picture from one of the tour ships while she was going to the fjords, and it came with a big ray, a colorful thing, she said she saw it, she took the picture and everything else, but no one else saw it on the ship, she was the only one, so we look at it, it looked very much like as if there was some light source into her camera, but she would not release the camera to us, that’s what it looked but she wouldn’t release the equipment, and I know you saw a lot of the movie strips that were taken in Utah and Tremonton.

AC: Yeah, I have copies of them.

AH: They are very popular with the media.

RF: We put a Committee in addition to the scientific people also had the chaplain and also a lady on it, and the idea was to try to get as much of a cross-section as we possibly could, trying to get different views of how the people perceive the reports, you’d be surprised of how many reports we got from women, and also you’d be surprised of the candidness of kids, in the committee what would happen is we would get the report and we have an astronomer, we had an aeronautical engineer, the chaplain, the physicist, the electronics specialist…

AC: What was your relation with Hynek?

RF: Mine? Oh, mine was fine.

AC: Quintanilla didn’t like him and Hynek didn’t like Quintanilla.

RF: Well, I think that’s quite true. Gregory didn’t like Hynek, also I think he had his differences with Foreign Technology, whenever we talked to the Congressional people, I think the thing you needed to do was to tell them the truth as much as you possibly could, I think, I told them everything I knew, I also gave them my candid views…