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

There are countless tales of the strange lurking about all about the Internet, many of them in the dark corners where many do not think to even look for them. Occasionally one will come across an incredible story that is at once completely outlandish and eyebrow raising, seeming to be surely the stuff of tall tales, and this is certainly one of those. The somewhat dubious tale we are looking at here begins with a man named John Smith, who was supposedly born in 1941 into a military family, going on in his young adult years to enroll in the military college of the US Air Force in 1960, from where he allegedly graduated with flying colors. He would go on to fight as a pilot in the Vietnam War, earning a “Medal for Service in Vietnam” and quite the reputation as a respected ace pilot, after which he set his sights on becoming an astronaut. In this endeavor he apparently succeeded, and he was assigned as what is referred to as a “cleaner,” part of a space mission to clear Earth’s orbit of various space junk including pieces of rockets, out of service satellites, and other random detritus and trash to make the void safe for space travel. This is where his life would apparently get weird, and become a very strange tale of a man lost in space, only to reappear alive decades later under some very mysterious circumstances.

In the 1970s, the U.S. government was fully engaged in an anti-satellite program in order to monitor and possibly engage enemy spy satellites. This had been going on since the early 1960s, with the creation of Program 505 in 1962, based at the Kwajalein Missile Range, about halfway between Hawaii and the Philippine islands, and using the Nike Zeus anti-ballistic missile to intercept satellites. This went on to form the foundation of Program 437, which was the second anti-satellite weapons program of the U.S. military, this time using PGM-17 Thor ballistic missiles to intercept low Earth orbiting satellites, and which had its facilities on Johnston Island, an isolated island in the north central Pacific Ocean. Both programs carried out a series of tests of high-altitude nuclear explosions and both were very real, but the program that Smith would supposedly become involved in was a bit different. Even when official anti-satellite programs and development were ended in 1975, anti-satellite technology continued, and Smith would become involved in one such plan, using astronauts to supposedly act as a security patrol in space against enemy satellites.

In this case, the idea was apparently to use a top-secret network of manned space vehicles designed to detect, hunt down, and destroy enemy ballistic missiles as well as satellites. The story goes that in October of 1973, Smith was launched up into space on a mission aboard a vessel disguised as a satellite in order to remain undetected as he went about his mysterious, top-secret work. Three days apparently went by without incident, but then his ship entered an area of anomalous heightened radiation and his maneuvering and orientation systems inexplicably went haywire. At the time there were also purportedly several unexplained bursts of unexplained radio noise that could not be tracked. NASA apparently tried to save the stricken astronaut, but were unable to do so, and his communications equipment then shut down entirely to leave him lost to space.

Soon after the strange incident, NASA purportedly went about covering it all up, noting the failed mission as simply the result of an accident during a training flight, making no mention of the radiation or the radio interference, and highly classifying the whole thing. There it would remain, in the files of tragedies in space, Smith relegated to the files of lost astronauts and space mysteries, but then in 2000, the lost spaceship that had been carrying Smith was allegedly discovered quite by accident when an amateur astronomer in the Fiji Islands observed an anomalous orbiting object at an altitude of 470 kilometers and reported it to the proper authorities, who became convinced that it was Smith’s spacecraft based on its trajectory and appearance. They then went about trying to retrieve the craft, and as it had fallen into a stable and low orbit it was able to be collected during the next flight of the shuttle Endeavor in 2001. This is where things get really weird.

When the spacecraft was brought to earth, it was apparently opened and much to the utter shock of all present, Smith was not only found inside, but he was still alive even after decades of being lost in space. He was unconscious and seemed to be in some sort of state of suspended animation, but no one could figure out how this could be. Efforts were made to revive him, and a medical examination would soon turn up some strange anomalies. For one, although Smith’s heart was in the right location, the thing was that before the flight he had been one of those rare people whose heart lies to the right rather than the more common left, yet now it was where it should be. There was also the fact that there were no signs of the fracture of the ribs he had sustained as a young boy and several large moles that he had had were gone, as well as some scars that he was known to have had. It was as if his body had been somehow “fixed.” This would only be the beginning of the strangeness, as his personal notebook was found with him in the compartment, which happened to be missing 50 pages and supposedly had 24 pages full of cryptic symbols that resembled hieroglyphics and which no one could decipher.

When Smith was lucid enough to talk, he would turn out to have no memory of what had happened to him and no awareness that he had been lost in space for nearly three decades, no sense that any time had passed at all, and he was quite the conundrum. As authorities tried to figure out what was going on, Smith would allegedly pull off one last mystery, when he one day just suddenly vanished from the facility where he was being kept without a trace. There was no sign as to how he could have escaped the secured area undetected, no trace of him on CCTV footage, nothing. It was as if he had just evaporated into thin air.

That is where this bizarre tale apparently ends. The government came in and had the whole thing classified and buried, and that was that. Seeing as the case only seems to be talked about on a few conspiracy sites and Reddit, with no sources really given and the whole “government top-secret cover-up” angle played to the hilt, there is a very likely chance that this is nothing but the stuff of Internet legends and creepypasta stories, the result of some people getting a little creative and starting up “unsolved mysteries” that have never really existed outside of the imagination. Take it all with a grain of salt, but the story has made the rounds, and true or not, tall tale or otherwise, it is all pretty bonkers and eye-brow raising all the same.

On July 28, 1995, the U.S. Government Accountability Office’s report on the Roswell affair surfaced from its National Security and International Affairs Division. The GAO’s report did not provide any smoking-guns – such as old B&W photos of dead bodies and wreckage at the crash-site on the Foster Ranch, New Mexico. The report did, however, provide something interesting and controversial. And it’s something that has been misinterpreted for years. During the course of their search for records to try and better understand what had taken place at Roswell in early July 1947, the GAO learned that the entire outgoing messages from the Roswell Army Air Field generated during the period that the event occurred were missing. Vanished. Gone. And under circumstances that could not be fully determined and proved. Nor could the year in which the files went missing be confirmed. Maybe the late-forties. Maybe the fifties. The seventies? Who knows?

This, inevitably and very understandably, led certain Roswell researchers to proclaim that this was evidence of a significant event of UFO proportions having occurred. An event which certain elements of officialdom were determined to keep forever hidden from the populace, the media, and the UFO research community – and possibly, even, from anyone else in government who might dare to come looking, such as investigators of the GAO. Maybe, that’s precisely what happened. But, the story is not quite as straightforward as that. Matters are seldom straightforward when it comes to Roswell. Time and again, I have heard UFO researchers say, words to the effect of: “Because the 1947 files are missing, this must mean the government or the Air Force pulled them years ago, so no-one could get the files on the aliens.” Sure, that’s not impossible. But, there is another issue. The files in question that are unavailable to us do not cover just the key period of the Roswell affair. Rather, they extend as far back as March 1945 and as late as 1950.

(Nick Redfern)

Don’t get too exited: cool models at Roswell, New Mexico

We are led to believe that if aliens crashed a couple of hours’ drive from Roswell, then it was an event that occurred out of the blue, with little or no advance notice, and certainly not something that had been anticipated for a significant period of time. So, that being the case, why the need to pull files from as early as March 1945 to hide something that is said to have occurred, without much warning (if any at all), in the summer of 1947? Proponents of the notion that aliens crashed not too far from the city of Roswell might say that the government was just being overly careful, and wanted to make sure that (a) nothing was left behind, and (b) nothing had been misplaced in an earlier collection of material, or indeed, within a later collection of material, possibly held in secure safes at the base. So, they chose the best and quickest option available to them and scooped up pretty much everything that covered approximately two years or so before, and up to two-and-a-half years after the crash. And, maybe, that is exactly what happened. On the other hand, one can make a valid argument that the vanished files issue has no bearing on Roswell from an extraterrestrial perspective, because the documents that are missing include papers dating from two years before the event even took place. This also offers a theory (and, granted, that’s all it is) that there was another reason for the large-scale loss of material that the GAO sought to uncover. Let’s see what the GAO had to say about this matter of missing messages in its 1995 report:

“In addition to unit history reports, we also searched for other government records on the Roswell crash. In this regard, the Chief Archivist for the National Personnel Records Center provided us with documentation indicating that (1) RAAF records such as finance and accounting, supplies, buildings and grounds, and other general administrative matters from March 1945 through December 1949 and (2) RAAF outgoing messages from October 1946 through December 1949 were destroyed.” When the GAO demanded to know the reasons behind this development, they got an answer, as GAO files note: “According to this official [the Chief Archivist for the National Personnel Records Center], the document disposition form did not properly indicate the authority under which the disposal action was taken. The Center’s Chief Archivist stated that from his personal experience, many of the Air Force organizational records covering this time period were destroyed without entering a citation for the governing disposition authority. Our review of records control forms showing the destruction of other records – including outgoing RAAF messages for 1950 – supports the Chief Archivist’s viewpoint.”

(Nick Redfern)

At the crash site on the Foster Ranch, a few words about the legendary incident

So, in other words, we have yet another explanation that does not include high-level conspiracy to explain the loss and destruction of files, but which says far more about bureaucracy. So, what’s my point in all this? Well, this is my point: Yes, it certainly is intriguing that half-a-decade of certain files are missing from the old Roswell Army Air Field, and it may even be an issue of deep conspiracy to hide the remains of dead aliens and their craft. Or, it may not be. If UFO / Roswell researchers wish to maintain that the missing files from 1947 point to a specific cover-up of the Roswell event – and Roswell occurred out of the blue in July of that year – then they have to provide a viable reason as to why documentation dating back as far as March 1945 was pulled too, and why additional documentation remains missing from as late as 1950. Saying that “the outgoing Roswell messages from July 1947 are missing” is absolutely true, and it opens eyes and it catches the attention of ufologists and Roswell disciples everywhere. Noting that, in reality, the files actually cover 1945 to 1950, and also cover general administrative issues at the base, is far less attention-grabbing.

Ironically, the fact that the files which have vanished (files which still cannot be found) span 1945 to 1950, actually adds weight to the idea that Roswell was a military experiment. Just about everyone I spoke with while writing Body Snatchers in the Desert told me that the human experimentation began in 1945 and ended in the late 1940s – with a few additional tests having occurred in the early fifties. Pulling 1945-era files for a one-off event that didn’t occur until the summer of 1947 makes zero sense. Pulling certain 1945-era files that might have compromised the handful of pre-Roswell experiments – had they reached the public domain, of course – makes perfect sense. The same goes for the decision to make the 1948-1950 files vanish, too. The fact is that six years of files are missing, not just files from the time of the Roswell crash. This is indicative of a fairly lengthy series of ongoing tests that had to be hidden – not the out-of-the-blue crash of one solitary alien spacecraft midway through 1947.

(Nick Redfern)

“UFO Capital”

It should also be recalled that President Clinton’s Advisory Committee on Human Radiation Experiments revealed that “…a number of potentially important collections could not be located and were evidently lost or destroyed [italics mine]. Similarly, the Committee reveals, a number of those same document collections related to experiments undertaken in the fields of biomedicine, defense and space exploration; and in the great majority of these cases only fragmentary data remained. Where programs were legitimately kept secret for national security reasons, states the Committee, the government often did not create or maintain adequate records [italics mine], thereby preventing the public, and those most at risk, from learning the facts in a timely and complete fashion.” All of this is highly suggestive of an agenda to make Roswell go away – permanently.