UFOs in Wartime: What They Didn't Want You To Know

by Mack Maloney

  There were also reports that Brown and Davidson had passed on the same recommendation to Arnold shortly before they died.

  In any case, Arnold decided to take the advice. But upon takeoff from Tacoma, Arnold’s plane suffered a mysterious malfunction. A critical fuel valve in his engine had either gotten turned off or had inexplicably frozen over. Either way, Arnold suddenly found himself on the verge of crashing.

  It was only because Arnold was a seasoned pilot that he was able to land his plane safely. Yet, had he been airborne just a little longer, or flying just a little higher, there’s no doubt he would have been killed in the resulting crash.

  * * *

  Some UFO historians contend Dahl and Crisman later admitted to the FBI that the Maury Island Incident was all a hoax. There had been no UFOs. No mysterious alien substance. They had only been telling magazine editor Ray Palmer what he wanted to hear.

  But on closer examination, exactly what kind of hoax would this be? How could anybody come up with a plan to fool the government, the military and a national magazine with a story about flying saucers, when “flying saucers” did not come into the national vernacular until three days after the supposed event? And how could there be twenty tons of the “slaglike material” on Maury Island beach when there is no smelter anywhere near the lonely spit of land? And who was the mysterious man in black?

  Fred Crisman later told Fate magazine that any report that he called the Maury Island Incident a hoax was a “baldfaced lie.” Kenneth Arnold as well believed something happened in Puget Sound that day, talking about the incident at length many years later at the First International UFO Congress in Chicago.

  And reportedly, no less than J. Edgar Hoover, head of the FBI at the time, believed the incident was not a deception. Many of the Maury Island accounts cite a message sent on August 14, 1947, in which Hoover was quoted as saying: “It would appear that Dahl and Crisman did not admit the hoax to the army officers…” To which his special agent in charge of the FBI’s Seattle office responded: “Please be advised that Dahl did not admit to Brown that his story was a hoax but only stated that if questioned by authorities he was going to say it was a hoax because he did not want any further trouble.”

  * * *

  Fred Crisman died in 1975. Harold Dahl died in 1982, and Arnold, in 1984.

  But many questions still surround the strange Maury Island Incident.

  The slaglike material was eventually tested. Some reports say it was ordinary slag; others claim it didn’t contain enough iron to qualify as such.

  Some accounts claim the FBI reported that Dahl’s son disappeared in the middle of all the controversy, showing up in Montana, supposedly with no recollection of how he got there. Still another report says Dahl’s wife later stabbed him because he wouldn’t tell the FBI exactly what happened that day off Maury Island. And supposedly, the newspaper reporter involved in the mysterious tipster episode died two weeks after the incident.

  According to some who have studied the case closely (such as noted UFO researcher Jenny Randles) and who know the ins and outs of how intelligence agencies work, the overload of information, disinformation, rumors and half-truths that haunt the Maury Island case seem to bear the earmarks of a sophisticated intelligence operation, possibly one put in place to discredit Arnold’s original UFO sighting.

  But perhaps the strangest aspect of all of this involved Fred Crisman.

  In 1968, he was called before a congressional committee to testify about his whereabouts on November 22, 1963—the day President John F. Kennedy was assassinated in Dallas, Texas.

  12

  What Happened at Roswell?

  Probably the most publicized flying saucer incident in history is known as the “Roswell Crash.” Even people with only a passing interest in the UFO phenomenon know at least a little bit about it.

  On or around July 4, 1947—just days after Kenneth Arnold’s famous sighting, and while the United States was caught in the throes of saucer mania — a spacecraft reportedly crashed on a ranch in a remote part of New Mexico. A local ranch hand spotted the impact site and recovered bits of wreckage that looked a lot like aluminum foil and pieces of balsa wood. These items were scattered over a wide area.

  The ranch hand took some of the fragments to Roswell, New Mexico, which was actually about 30 miles away from the debris field. He contacted local authorities, and soon enough, the military was involved.

  Close to the town of Roswell was Roswell Army Air Field. At that time, the Roswell base was the only military facility in the United States whose aircraft were equipped to carry atomic weapons. This only added to the crash mystery.

  The air force eventually took ownership of the ranch hand’s fragments as well as all the debris found on the ranch itself, though a few civilians managed to view several of the pieces beforehand.

  After looking over these remains and hearing the ranch hand’s story as well as stories of other residents who’d seen a strange object flying over the area during the night in question, the air force made a startling announcement: They said they’d captured a flying saucer.

  This declaration, issued in the form of a press release by Roswell’s base commander, was accompanied by a photo showing some of the “saucer’s” pieces.

  The story made the local headlines, and soon enough the events at Roswell were news across the country. Again, it helps to remember that at the time, the summer of 1947, people from every state in the union were reporting flying saucers. Now it seemed as if the great flying saucer mystery was about to be solved.

  But the excitement only lasted one day. Twenty-four hours after making the startling announcement, the air force reversed itself and said the debris found — the aluminum strips and the balsa wood — were actually parts of a weather balloon that had crashed on the remote ranch.

  And for the most part, the public believed the air force. The story went away — for more than thirty years.

  It was revived in 1978 when a UFO researcher interviewed a military officer who was part of the original air force team that retrieved the Roswell wreckage. For the first time this officer said he believed the debris wasn’t a balloon, but rather was part of a wrecked alien spacecraft and that the military had covered up the crash.

  This interview led to an article in the National Enquirer. Then came books touting an almost completely different version of the previously accepted events. By the early 1980s, the speed and range of the media had increased a hundredfold from 1947. The “new” story of Roswell suddenly took off.

  This time around it was claimed that the debris found on the desolate ranch had possessed incredible properties. The aluminumlike foil now had superstrength and the ability to “unfold itself.” The balsa sticks now had indecipherable hieroglyphics written on them. And people were coming forward to say they’d seen alien bodies taken from the crash site as well.

  Most damning was the claim that the air force’s retraction back in July 1947 wasn’t a retraction at all. It was the beginning of a massive cover-up.

  * * *

  The tale quickly grew to immense proportions, including reports of a top secret U.S. military mission to retrieve more crashed saucers and more dead and dying aliens, at the same time terrifying the local citizenry and threatening witnesses with bodily harm if they didn’t remain silent. Suddenly there were claims of almost a dozen UFO crash sites in the Roswell area, with alien bodies strewn about everywhere.

  Finally, two UFO authors, Kal Korff and Karl T. Pflock, brought most people back down to earth. Korff’s The Roswell UFO Crash: What They Don’t Want You To Know and Pflock’s Roswell: Inconvenient Facts and the Will to Believe pretty much sought to blow the lid off the Roswell “crash.”

  Korff, for instance, went after the so-called witnesses involved with one of the most extreme books perpetuating the Roswell myth. Though ninety people were supposedly interviewed for this book, only twenty-five names actually appeared in it, of which only seven actually saw the “crash d
ebris” and only five had actually handled this debris.

  Pflock did some similar digging, revealing that of the three-hundred-plus people supposedly interviewed for another disputed Roswell book, only forty-one could be considered credible, only twenty-three of them might have actually seen the debris and of them only seven mentioned the fragments might be of an extraterrestrial origin.

  Both authors also pointed out that anyone who’d come forward claiming to have seen alien bodies either had credibility problems or had changed their stories frequently.

  The U.S. Air Force released two reports in the 1990s dealing with the controversy. In them they revealed the debris was not from a crashed alien spacecraft but rather from a top secret intelligence-gathering balloon, as well as its “kite,” which was the nickname for a radar reflector that helped track the balloon on its flight.

  The balloon’s purpose, as revealed by the air force, was to drift close to the Soviet Union and pick up sound vibrations that might indicate the Russians were testing a nuclear weapon.

  The U.S. military was loath to give out this information back in 1947, so to a certain extent there was a cover-up. But it might not have been the cover-up everyone thought it was. In this case, at least, it seems the air force could be believed.

  Books still come out promoting the more fantastic Roswell line. The town itself is a huge tourist attraction, complete with a UFO museum. Roswell has been featured in movies, TV shows, comic books, sci-fi novels and even toys.

  But after all is said and done, if the question is: What happened at Roswell — or more specifically, did some kind of extraterrestrial event happen at Roswell? Then the answer is: Probably not.

  13

  Opportunity Lost

  In the wake of the Arnold sighting and the tidal wave of flying saucer reports that followed, by midsummer of 1947, the fledgling U.S. Air Force found itself forced to investigate the UFO phenomenon.

  The bulk of this scrutiny fell to the Air Technical Intelligence Center (ATIC). It was the part of the air force charged with studying problems facing America’s national security, such as new weapons being developed by potential enemies. By all reports, the personnel at the ATIC were high-quality, clearheaded scientists and engineers, all well respected within the military community.

  So when in September 1947 they generated their preliminary internal report on the flying saucer matter, the air force took it seriously. And as it turned out, the ATIC investigators came up with a startling conclusion: They believed flying saucers were real. As recounted in the renowned Report on Unidentified Flying Objects, their exact words were: “The phenomenon is not visionary or fictitious.” The ATIC urged the mystery be studied further.

  The air force followed their advice. In January 1948, Project Sign was established at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio. Its mission was to evaluate all information concerning flying saucer sightings that might pose a risk to U.S. national security. To emphasize the gravity of the matter, anything Project Sign produced was to be classified as “Secret.”

  If there was ever a moment the U.S. military thought flying saucers should be studied objectively, this was it.

  * * *

  Meanwhile, the ATIC had no shortage of incidents to investigate. Reports of flying saucer sightings continued to pour in.

  Hundreds were seen across the United States in 1948. But three incidents were particularly noteworthy, with one being particularly tragic.

  On the afternoon of January 7, 1948, Kentucky State Police received reports of a large circular object flying over the city of Maysville. This same object was also spotted by control tower personnel at Godman Air Force Base, which is located near Fort Knox.

  Captain Thomas Mantell, a pilot in the Kentucky Air National Guard, was leading a flight of four F-51 Mustangs that happened to be passing through the area at the time of the sighting. Godman’s control tower asked the fighter pilots to check out the strange object. Low fuel forced one of the Mustangs to drop out, but Mantell and the two other remaining F-51s climbed to investigate.

  Again, as quoted in the Report on Unidentified Flying Objects, when Mantell reached 15,000 feet, he told Godman tower: “The object is directly above me now. It appears to be a metallic object… and it is of tremendous size… I’m still climbing… I’m trying to close in for a better look.”

  Mustangs are propeller-driven craft not generally equipped with the oxygen gear pilots need for flying at high altitudes. Passing up through 22,000 feet, and close to surpassing their safe altitude limit, the two other pilots turned back.

  But Mantell kept climbing…

  A couple of hours later, Mantell’s plane was found on a farm near Franklin, Kentucky, crumpled and burning. The pilot was still strapped inside, headless. His watch had stopped at 3:18 P.M., the moment his plane hit the ground.

  Why an experienced pilot like Mantell would so foolishly climb above a safe altitude remains a mystery. His last words leave no doubt, though, that he was mesmerized by whatever he was chasing.

  His death was highly publicized, generating rumors that he’d been shot down by a UFO. This in turn fostered the idea that maybe the earth’s mysterious visitors weren’t so friendly.

  Six months later, on the night of July 24, 1948, an Eastern Airlines DC-3 was en route from Houston to Atlanta with Captain Clarence Chiles and copilot John Whitted at the controls. Flying over the city of Montgomery, Alabama, a dull red glowing object suddenly appeared in front of them. Both pilots described the object as being about the size of a B-29 bomber, but with no wings or tail.

  The pilots were shocked when the object headed right at them. Before they could react, it streaked by their starboard side, barely missing a midair collision. As it went by, the pilots saw that the wingless craft had a row of windows running down its side. The UFO then climbed quickly and disappeared.

  As it turned out, people at Robbins Air Force Base, located near Macon, Georgia, also saw an unknown object about thirty minutes before the DC-3’s encounter. The witnesses’ description matched that of Chiles and Whitted. It was later determined no other planes were in the area of the sighting.

  The third perplexing UFO incident of 1948 happened a few months later. Lieutenant George Gorman of the North Dakota Air National Guard was piloting an F-51, the same kind of aircraft as the late Captain Mantell, on a routine night-training mission. Gorman was approaching his airfield when the control tower asked him to check out an unidentified object that had been detected flying in the vicinity of the base.

  Gorman did as asked and soon found himself within 1,000 feet of a brightly-lit disk-shaped object. But as he tried to get closer, the UFO started heading for him. Diving out of the way to avoid a collision, Gorman turned, only to see that the UFO had turned as well and was once again heading right for him. Gorman did not veer off until the last moment, but then found himself climbing with the object, straight up to 14,000 feet. That’s when Gorman’s F-51 began to falter. But as he leveled out, the UFO leveled out about a half mile above him. They each made a series of tight maneuvers, but suddenly the UFO came right at him for a third time. This time, though, the UFO broke off, went straight up and disappeared into the night at high speed.

  Gorman finally gave up the chase and landed.

  In UFO lore, this incident is commonly referred to as “the dogfight with a flying saucer.”

  But just like the previous two stories, it has never been explained.

  * * *

  In September 1948, the ATIC prepared a second, lengthier study on flying saucers. It was sent to General Hoyt Vandenberg, then air force chief of staff.

  Following up on its preliminary report, which had stated that flying saucers did “exist,” the ATIC investigators had now studied whether the saucers were something man-made — by the Soviet Union, or even perhaps by the U.S. military itself. However, they concluded this was not the case.

  Which left only one other explanation: Those flying saucer episodes that could not be explained
must have some kind of extraterrestrial origin.

  This had to be an exciting time for the ATIC researchers as, by their own words, they, specifically, and the world as a whole, were on the verge of investigating something whose implications for the human race were enormous.

  Unfortunately, the air force didn’t see it that way.

  While officially General Vandenberg returned the report to ATIC under the pretext of wanting more “proof,” unofficially, as pointed out by many UFO researchers, Vandenberg was essentially letting the ATIC know that they’d told him something he didn’t want to hear. Either the U.S. military didn’t want to admit that it didn’t understand UFOs and therefore couldn’t protect the country against them, or they knew what they were but had decided to keep the news from the public — that was the big question. But there was one thing they weren’t going to do: They would not go on record as saying flying saucers were from outer space.

  This was the moment when the door that was opened with Project Sign suddenly began to close again. Looking back on it, a total of six months of study had been done on what might have been one of the most momentous discoveries of all time.

  More time went by, during which flying saucer reports continued almost unabated. In December 1949, the U.S. Air Force’s UFO project, now known as “Project Grudge,” released yet another report.

  Despite what would seem to be mountains of evidence to the contrary, the report stated that no conclusive evidence had been found that could prove or disprove the existence of these unidentified flying objects.

  This is what the air force wanted to hear.

  The report went on to say, in effect, that all UFO sightings fell into two categories: one being instances that could be explained away, such as mistaken astronomical phenomena or aircraft or balloons, and the other, hoaxes, hallucinations, delusions or reports made by crackpots.

  Or as reported in Major Donald Keyhoe’s Flying Saucers from Outer Space, one air force colonel famously put it: “Behind nearly every UFO report stands a crackpot, a religious crank, a publicity hound or a malicious joke.”