UFO'S of UAP'S, ASTRONOMIE, RUIMTEVAART, ARCHEOLOGIE, OUDHEIDKUNDE, SF-SNUFJES EN ANDERE ESOTERISCHE WETENSCHAPPEN

It’s hardly surprising that 1997 was the year in which the Roswell “UFO” affair reached its pinnacle. It was, after all, the 50^th anniversary of the mysterious event. Just about everyone who was anyone in Ufology was commenting on, or writing about, the case. And, unsurprisingly, mostly from the perspective of promoting and championing the alien angle. That was not the case for exactly everyone, however. In 1997 – three years after the U.S. Air Force championed its 1994 “Mogul Balloon Report” on Roswell was published – the Air Force made a surprising acknowledgement that the reported sightings of strange bodies at Roswell did have a basis in fact. Not only that: so compelled by then was the Air Force to address the bodies issue that it authorized the release of yet another report on Roswell. The last word, lo and behold, was not the last word. The last word was not even anywhere in sight. Entitled The Roswell Report: Case Closed, it did very little – if anything at all – to dampen the notoriety surrounding the case, however. In fact, the question of why the Air Force had concluded there was a pressing need on its part to explain the reports of unusual bodies found in New Mexico (when it could quite easily have summarily dismissed them as hoaxes or modern-day folklore), only heightened the interest in what did or did not occur in early July 1947.

The Air Force report focused practically all of its 231 pages on the alleged recovery of the strange bodies and asserted that: “‘Aliens’ observed in the New Mexico desert were probably anthropomorphic test dummies that were carried aloft by U.S. Air Force high altitude balloons for scientific research. The ‘unusual’ military activities in the New Mexico desert were high altitude research balloon launch and recovery operations. The reports of military units that always seemed to arrive shortly after the crash of a flying saucer to retrieve the saucer and ‘crew,’ were actually accurate descriptions of Air Force personnel engaged in anthropomorphic dummy recovery operations.”

(Nick Redfern)

Aliens, human guinea-pigs, or dummies?

There is no doubt (it is, actually, a matter of historical record) that the Air Force conducted a wide array of tests using crash test dummies in New Mexico and that at least some of these tests did occur in the vicinity of both the White Sands Proving Ground and the town of Roswell. But were those same tests responsible – either in part or in whole – for the stories concerning highly unusual-looking bodies recovered by the military during the summer of 1947? At the time of its release, the conclusions of the Air Force’s latest (final…?) report provoked a furor of controversy. While there is absolutely no doubt that tests utilizing anthropomorphic dummies were widespread in New Mexico, the Air Force’s report largely and very carefully glosses over the fact that these particular tests did not even commence until the early 1950s.

(Nick Redfern)

Driving by the White Sands Missile Range, New Mexico

This was an issue not lost on the mainstream media during the Air Force’s press conference at the Pentagon, which accompanied the release of the report in July 1997. A reporter asked, “How do you square the UFO enthusiasts saying that they’re talking about 1947, and you’re talking about dummies used in the 50’s, almost a decade later?”” Air Force spokesman, Colonel John Haynes replied, slightly and noticeably awkwardly: “Well, I’m afraid that’s a problem that we have with time compression. I don’t know what they saw in ‘47, but I’m quite sure it probably was Project Mogul. But I think if you find that people talk about things over a period of time, they begin to lose exactly when the date was.”

It should be said that the Air Force still stands by its Mogul balloon and crash-test dummy scenario. And, it’s unlikely that those two scenarios will go away. Unlike so many people in Ufology, however, I don’t think that the Air Force of today knows what happened way back in 1947. And that also goes for the Air Force of 1997, when the 50th anniversary of the near-legendary affair came around. My tentative view is that someone knows what happened back in 1947 on the Foster Ranch, and someone knows where the old files are still kept. Or, rather a select group knows the truth. But, the numbers of people who are “in the know” are small. Indeed, small enough to make sure that the truth doesn’t leak out. And, finally, both Ufologists and the Air Force have one thing in common: they have both been denied the real story of Roswell.

Over the years, numerous UFO-themed movies have been made; some good, some bad, and some right in the middle. There is, however, one particular UFO caper that definitely deserves to be turned into a big-bucks movie. As you will see now. The strange story of the alleged UFO crash at Aztec, New Mexico in March 1948 – and the recovery of a number of dead “little men” at the site – is a real hotbed of lies, disinformation, and shady characters. Most of those same characters were best avoided by those with dollars to spare. The tale was made infamous in the pages of Frank Scully’s 1950 blockbuster, Behind the Flying Saucers; it was a book which turned out to be a huge seller. Today, the Aztec affair is seen by some ufologists as Roswell’s “little brother.” As its “skeleton in the cupboard” might be a far more apt description, however. Many researchers of the UFO phenomenon dismiss the Aztec incident as nothing but a hoax; one which was perpetrated by a shady businessman/conman named Silas Newton. His far-less-than-shining FBI file can be accessed, right now, at the FBI’s website, The Vault. When it came to stories of aliens from faraway worlds, making money was always the goal for Newton. And the only goal. Along for the ride with Newton was Leo Gebauer. He was a quasi-scientist and the Igor to Newton’s ego-driven Dr. Frankenstein. There is, though, a very interesting and extremely odd aspect to the Newton/Aztec story. It serves to demonstrate how the UFO phenomenon was becoming the tool of manipulative disinformation specialists in the intelligence community. And not just of the Soviet Union. The United States was getting into the strange game, too.

Rumors of the alleged Aztec crash quickly reached the FBI. The Bureau’s files on Aztec are now in the public domain, thanks to the the terms of the United States’ Freedom of Information Act.

Back in 1998, the late Karl Pflock, ufologist and CIA employee (and sometimes at the very same same time…), was approached by a still-anonymous source who had something very interesting to say about the Aztec caper, and about Newton too. It was a decidedly weird series of revelations that Pflock surely never anticipated receiving. To his dying day, Pflock refused to reveal the name of his informant in the shadows – rumors, however, were that the person may have been a nephew of Silas Newton – but, Pflock did say that all of the lunchtime meetings with his source occurred between July 11 and September 24, 1998 and took place in a restaurant in Bernalillo, New Mexico. So the story goes, Pflock’s informant had in their hands twenty-seven pages taken, or rather torn, from an old and faded, lined journal. No prizes for guessing who that journal had belonged to. That’s right, sly, old Silas Newton. Pflock was told that Newton had kept journals and diaries not just for years, but for decades. They were jammed with entertaining tales of sexual conquests, of Hollywood starlets, of the fleecing of the rich and the gullible, and of wild adventures across the United States. The outcome of all this? Newton decided, around the turn of the 1970s, that it was right about time for him to write-up his version of the Aztec controversy. It would surely have been a definitive page-turner. Death, however, inconveniently intervened in 1972, when Newton passed away in his mid-eighties. What happened to all of those journals is anyone’s guess.

(Nick Redfern)

Aztec, New Mexico: the site of a crashed UFO? It very much depends on who you ask and you believe

As for those few pages that Pflock was allowed to see – and to transcribe word for word – they tell a tale of undeniable weirdness. By his own admittance, and a couple of years after the Aztec story surfaced in Frank Scully’s book, Newton was clandestinely visited by two representatives of “a highly secret U.S. Government entity,” as Pflock carefully and tactfully described it. Those same representatives of the government told Newton, in no uncertain terms, that they knew his Aztec story was a complete and bald-faced lie. Utter bullshit, in fact. Incredibly, though, they wanted Newton to keep telling the tale to just about anyone and everyone who would listen. This caused Pflock to ponder on an amazing possibility: “Did the U.S. Government or someone associated with it use Newton to discredit the idea of crashed flying saucers so a real captured saucer or saucers could be more easily kept under wraps?” Far more intriguing, though, and highly relevant to the theme of this book, is the next question that Pflock posed: “Was this actually nothing to do with real saucers but instead some sort of psychological warfare operation [italics mine]?” With the Newton revelations in hand, Pflock, no later than 1999, came to believe that back in the early fifties someone in the government, the intelligence community, or the military of the United States – and maybe even a swirling combination of all three – wanted the Aztec story further circulated. The purpose: as a means to try and convince the Russians that the U.S. military had acquired, or captured, alien technology. When, in reality, it had no such thing in its possession at all.

(Nick Redfern)

Aztec, New Mexico, a cool, atmospheric place

For the record, in 2002, when Pflock and I were corresponding regularly on the matter of these particularly curious revelations, he told me that he had been able to confirm who the two men that approached Newton worked for and specifically when their meeting with Newton occurred. The time-frame was late March 1950 and the pair of spooks came from a small group within the CIA. Slightly more than a year later, Pflock learned, that very same group was absorbed into the Psychological Strategy Board. Staff at the President Harry S. Truman Presidential Library & Museum state of the PSB that it… “……was established by Presidential Directive on April 4, 1951 ‘to authorize and provide for the more effective planning, coordination, and conduct within the framework of approved national policies, of psychological operations.’ An abbreviated version of the Presidential Directive was released to the public on June 20, 1951. The PSB was composed of the Undersecretary of State, the Deputy Secretary of Defense and the Director of Central Intelligence, or their designated representatives. The founding Presidential Directive instructed the PSB to report to the National Security Council “on the Board’s activities on the evaluation of the national psychological operations, including implementation of approved objectives, policies, and programs by the departments and agencies concerned.”