by Timothy Good
Captain Joseph W. Kittinger, Jr. (retired), who was well acquainted with Kirklin at Holloman, is best known for his daredevil leaps from high-altitude helium balloons as part of research into high-altitude bailout, known as Project Excelsior, culminating in August 1960 when he jumped from Excelsior III at 102,800 feet (31,300 meters). In freefall in his pressure suit for four and a half minutes, he reached Mach 0.9—almost the speed of sound. He served three combat tours in the Vietnam War, during which he commanded the F-4 Phantom 555th Tactical Fighter Squadron and vice-commanded the 432nd Tactical Reconnaissance Wing. He was shot down by a MiG fighter in 1972 and spent eleven months as a prisoner-of-war in the notorious “Hanoi Hilton.”6
What is much less known about Kittinger’s background, as I discovered, is his extensive professional contact with Dr. J. Allen Hynek, a scientific consultant on UFOs to both the Air Force’s Project Bluebook and the CIA’s Office of Scientific Intelligence (OSI).7 I noted that part of their professional relationship involved, in 1962, Project Stargazer, a balloon-borne project to carry out astronomical studies at high altitude, Kittinger as balloon pilot and Hynek as astronomical adviser. In The Roswell Report: Case Closed—the Air Force’s second book attempting to deny the July 1947 incident—Kittinger’s sworn testimony states as follows:
“I worked very closely with Dr. Hynek over a period of five years from 1958 to 1963. Dr. Hynek would typically spend a half day working on Stargazer and then the rest of the day participating as one of the consultants on the UFO study, Project Bluebook, that was also conducted at Wright-Patterson AFB. [He] was very familiar with the techniques and capabilities of the Air Force high altitude balloon program [and] once approached me and we discussed at length the possibility that Air Force high altitude balloons were responsible for many UFO sightings…. I was therefore ‘flabbergasted’ when Dr. Hynek appeared to believe that some of these sightings were of extraterrestrial origin.”8
During this period at Wright-Patterson, Captain Kittinger also worked at the U.S. Air Force Aerospace Medical Research Laboratory in connection with Project Excelsior, mentioned earlier. In 1959 and 1960, the laboratory collaborated with the Holloman Balloon Branch for Excelsior, the culmination of high-altitude free-fall studies that began in 1953 using anthropomorphic dummies9—the same dummies cited in The Roswell Report as probably being responsible for the alien bodies reported by witnesses to the Roswell events in 1947!
Interestingly, according to June Crain, who worked in the Rocketry Section Lab at Wright-Patterson with top-secret clearance at the time, the deceased alien bodies were brought to the Aero Med Lab (as it was widely known). “They had been flown in to the base during the night and were in a freezer locker in one of the hangars and Aero Med had charge of them for examination,” she told investigator James E. Clarkson. “The people doing the telling seemed to know what they were talking about….”10
In 2007 Kirklin wrote to Colonel Kittinger—who had been transferred to the Air Force Missile Development Center at Holloman in 1954—asking if he recalled the Eisenhower visit, avoiding specifics. “First of all,” replied Kittinger, “I remember you and the flight that we made in the Beaver [a bush plane] looking for the downed balloon equipment which we found on the rancher’s field. I remember that you were one of the only ones that didn’t get air-sick…. I do not remember President Eisenhower visiting Holloman but it may have been after I left in 1958 when I transferred to the Aero Med Lab at Wright-Patterson AFB, Dayton, Ohio….”11
So, no confirmation from Kittinger. We can surmise, however, that, though well aware of the Eisenhower visit, he remains loath to violate his security oaths. Other witnesses, however, have been forthcoming.
In 2007, Art Campbell interviewed retired Master Sergeant Robert Boord, one of the former security guards who served on Columbine III, who said that although the usual complement of Secret Service agents was five or six, if they were flying to somewhere the president had not visited before, two agents would go ahead but five or six were usually on the plane. He learned from Master Sergeant Leo Borega, a colleague and friend, that one trip down to South Georgia had involved “a dozen or so going to this tiny little town [Thomasville]” and that at about 03:00 hours the following day (February 11), the crew received word that the president would be leaving in about an hour (from Spence Field). “We were always ready for this kind of thing,” said Borega, “and sure enough, the plane left one hour later.” He added that about half an hour before the plane left, two Air Force cars pulled up and six more agents went on board to accompany the flight “to somewhere out West.”
Art found another witness to Eisenhower’s arrival at Holloman, Albert D. Wykoff (pseudonym), whose military background included assignment as a tail-gunner to a B-29 bomber squadron with the 20th Air Force in the Pacific during World War II. As a staff sergeant on a U.S. Air Force cargo plane that flew into Holloman in February 1955 (he does not recall the exact date), he and the other crew members watched as Ike’s Constellation landed. They had no idea that the president was in it until the following morning.
As Wykoff and the rest of the crew were preparing to leave, an officer approached and told them to stay where they were. “But we have to leave,” Wykoff protested. “Well, President Eisenhower is here and you can’t leave the field until he’s gone,” retorted the officer. Wykoff and his colleagues were therefore required to kill time at Holloman until they had clearance to leave.
“While in the sergeants’ mess at lunchtime,” Art recounted to me, “a general invitation was given by an officer to hear the president speak at a nearby hangar. When Wykoff and several of his crew went there, they were denied entry as they did not have a proper Holloman badge. An officer overheard the badge discussion and was able to get them in to hear Ike at another presentation given at the base theater.”
Campbell also cites testimony he received from a lady whose father (pseudonym Bill Larson) had been a civilian electrician at Holloman. Larson and his crew worked from a pickup truck that had a Bell Telephone bed and many compartments for electrical gear, including a large spool of wire. From time to time, her father had discussed the day Eisenhower came to Holloman with his family and others. Here follows part of a letter he sent to his daughter a few months before his death:
“… Sometime after Christmas 1954 we were told President Eisenhower was coming, so George, our boss, went to a meeting to find out more. He would not be inspecting anything, they said, and [we should] just carry on as usual. ‘If you see the president, don’t gawk, wave or anything—just carry on.’
“So the day the president came, we went out in the truck to a job where we were replacing some wire down the flight line. It was really old stuff, put there in the Second World War. We heard the president’s plane in the morning line up for an approach, and watched it land on the far runway. We waited for it to taxi over to the flight line so we could see him. But we didn’t hear it anymore, and it had shut down somewhere out there. We went ahead and pulled wire for a while, and one of the men—I believe it was Charlie—said he could ‘see out there from that pole over there, so why doesn’t one of us go up the pole and see where the plane is?’
“Well, I had my climbers on and I started to unbuckle them and was waiting to give them to the first volunteer when someone said I should do it, as people were used to seeing me up the poles anyway. So, I started up, with my back to the sun—a safety measure—which also put my back to the runway where I thought his Connie [Constellation] was. As I started up, some of the guys reminded me not to gawk, and I heard them laugh. A few minutes later, I heard someone shouting, and some guys tarring the hangar roof nearby started to run, pointing out to the runway. Then I heard our truck start up and some of the crew jumped in, with one or two running after it, and they were pointing out to the flight line. And so I decided to turn around on the pole to see what the ruckus was about—and I could not believe what I saw.
“There was this pie-ti
n-like thing coming at me about 150 feet away. I thought it was remote-controlled or something, twenty-five to thirty feet across. And I started down the pole as fast as I could go. I was up about forty feet, and I threw my climbing rope out, gave it slack and only touched the spike on each side of the pole three or four times even before I got to the bottom. While I was running toward the big hangar, I looked back and it had stopped, and was just sitting there.
“Well, when we all got back to the shop, and we had a good laugh, one of the guys that saw me come down said, ‘He got down that pole a whole lot faster than a fireman!’ Apparently, soon after this incident, the saucer just stopped and hovered about three hundred feet over the flight line while the meeting took place on the far runway, near the UFO.
“Dad said that once the people there got over the initial shock, many just stood and watched it. He said it was a beautiful sight. It had an occasional wobble. He recalled that later that day many neon lights needed replacing….” (Art Campbell believes this was apparently the saucer that hovered over the flight line, which Dorsey Moore and his wife saw around 08:45-09:00.) “They all thought it was one of our secret aircraft that the president had come to see. Dad said he never considered it was anything but ours until years later when [the subject] got publicized more—in the 1960s or so. It was only then that he understood what was so secret….”
Collateral Evidence
There is, of course, no official evidence that Air Force One ever left Spence Field, Moultrie—or returned there from anywhere else—during Eisenhower’s trip to Holloman, as stated in the official “trip narrative” (see p. 62). Art believes nonetheless that at least one diversionary tactic was employed. For instance, on February 13, the Thomasville Times-Enterprise reported on a special dinner for the president’s entourage and numerous other guests, held at the Glen Arven Country Club on the evening of February 11, by invitation of Secretary George Humphrey. “About 30 visiting newspapermen, photographers and movie men were on hand for the delicious dinner,” noted the paper. “Entertainment [included] several amusing pantomime selections at the conclusion of the dinner.”
Art told me that in 2008 he had tracked down a bartender who had been in attendance that evening. “He said it seemed that every divorcee in the county had been invited to meet the lonely reporters: eight to ten had been invited, but sixteen showed up. The pantomime did not go over nearly as well as the southern belles in their strapless cocktail dresses…. We believe that Ike and Air Force One slipped into Moultrie at about 20:30 while the party was in full swing. This was the trip that no one knew about—and the party that everyone remembered!”
In May 2010, retiring New Hampshire State Representative Henry W. McElroy, Jr., revealed in a speech that President Eisenhower had been briefed about the presence of extraterrestrial intelligent beings on Earth. McElroy also stated that the document he viewed made reference to the opportunity for Eisenhower to meet the alien visitors. Here follow extracts from the transcript of his speech:
“… When I was in the New Hampshire State Legislature, I served on the State Federal Relations and Veterans’ Affairs Committee. It was, apparently, important that as a Representative of the Sovereign People who had elected me to this honorable office, that I be updated on a large number of topics … some of those ongoing topics had been categorized as Federal, State, Local development, and security matters.
“The document I saw was an official brief to President Eisenhower. To the best of my memory, this brief was pervaded with a sense of hope, and it informed President Eisenhower of the continued presence of extraterrestrial beings here in the United States of America. The brief seemed to indicate that a meeting between the president and some of these visitors could be arranged as appropriate and if desired.
“The tone of the brief indicated to me that there was no need for concern, since these visitors were in no way causing any harm, or had any intentions whatsoever in causing any disruption then, or in the future.
“While I can’t verify the times or places, or that any meetings occurred directly between Eisenhower and these visitors, because of his optimism in his farewell address in 1961 I personally believe that Eisenhower did indeed meet with these extraterrestrial, off-world astronauts….”12
There is some confusion regarding the dates of the prearranged meeting/meetings between Eisenhower and aliens at Edwards/Muroc in 1954. Former Royal Air Force fighter-pilot and author Desmond Leslie (who co-authored Flying Saucers Have Landed with George Adamski) learned from a U.S. Air Force officer that “on a certain day” a 100-foot-diameter disc landed on the runway and was housed under guard in Hangar 27. Eisenhower was taken to see it.13 Gabriel Green, another researcher, spoke to a military officer who claimed to have witnessed the arrival over the base of five UFOs, on February 20. A general ordered all anti-aircraft batteries to open fire—which they did, but with no effect. The men then held their fire and watched as one of the craft landed close to one of the base’s large hangars. Two other witnesses, Don Johnson and Paul Umbrello, also claim to have seen one of the discs near the base on the same day.14
A retired USAF test pilot reported to the Earl of Clancarty (better known as the author Brinsley Le Poer Trench) that three saucer-shaped and two cigar-shaped craft landed at the base (presumably on the same day). “The aliens looked human-like, but not exactly,” he said, adding that they had the same proportions as humans and were able to breathe our atmosphere. They did not say where they came from. In English, they explained to the bemused president that they would like to start an “educational program” for the people of Earth in order to make mankind more aware of their presence here.15
Unnerved, Eisenhower responded that he didn’t think the world was ready for such a revelation. The aliens seemed to appreciate this, though they indicated that they would continue making further isolated contact with humans. They then demonstrated their ability to overcome gravity and to make their craft invisible. “This disturbed the president greatly,” said the test pilot, “because now none of us could see them, although we knew they were there.”16
But it seems that another, related event took place. In a letter sent in April 1954 to N. Meade Layne, director of a quasi-occult group called the Borderland Sciences Research Associates (BSRA)—photocopy reproduced on p. 63—associate Gerald Light revealed details of events which—if true—must have occurred that month.
“My dear friend,” begins the first part of the letter, dated April 16, “I have just returned from Muroc. The report is true—devastatingly true! I made the journey in company with Franklin Allen of the Hearst papers and Edwin Nourse of Brookings Institute (Truman’s erstwhile financial adviser) and Bishop McIntyre of L.A. (confidential names, for the present, please).
“When we were allowed to enter the restricted section, (after about six hours in which we were checked on every possible item, event, incident and aspect of our personal and public lives) I had the distinct feeling that the world had come to an end with fantastic realism. For I have never seen so many human beings in a state of complete collapse and confusion as they realized that their own world had indeed ended with such finality as to beggar description….
“During my two days visit I saw five separate and distinct types of aircraft being studied and handled by our airforce officials—with assistance and permission of The Etherians! [a term used by BSRA]…. It has finally happened. It is now a matter of history.
“President Eisenhower, as you may already know, was spirited over to Muroc one night during his visit to Palm Springs recently. And it is my conviction that he will ignore the terrific conflict between the various ‘authorities’ and go directly to the people via radio and television—if the impasse continues much longer. From what I could gather, an official statement to the country is being prepared for delivery about the middle of May.
“I will leave it to your own excellent powers of deduction to construct a fitting picture of the
mental and emotional pandemonium that is now shattering the consciousness of hundreds of our scientific ‘authorities’ and all the pundits of the various specialized knowledges [sic] that make up our current physics. In some instances I could not stifle a wave of pity that arose in my own being as I watched the pathetic bewilderment of rather brilliant brains struggling to make some sort of rational explanation which would enable them to retain their familiar theories and concepts…. I shall never forget those forty-eight hours at Muroc!”17
Gerald Light makes no reference to the presence of Eisenhower at this meeting, though he makes the statement about “spiriting” Ike to Muroc just above. It is a matter of record that on the evening of February 20, 1954, while on a golfing vacation during which he stayed with his friend Paul Roy Helms at his ranch in Palm Springs, the president went “missing.” Nobody seemed to know where he was, and the press corps was left to speculate. United Press suggested there had been a medical emergency, while Associated Press wired that Eisenhower was dead. At a near-hysterical press conference, the “truth” was finally revealed: the president had simply knocked a cap off a tooth chewing on a chicken leg and had been taken by Helms to a local dentist. Officially, there is no record of such a visit.18
A handwritten note from Meade Layne on Gerald Light’s letter references both Miramar and Gillespie airfields, with an asterisk on the third paragraph seemingly indicating where the intensive security checks had been carried out prior to the Edwards/Muroc visit. The airfields are currently known as Marine Corps Air Station Miramar (San Diego) and Gillespie Field, El Cajon, California.
In Need to Know, I allude to information revealed to me that sometime after one of the Eisenhower encounters, two scientists were taken by jeep to a meeting with aliens “somewhere in the desert.” A friend of the source rode “shotgun” in the jeep, together with his buddy in the military. At the rendezvous point was a landed disc, and the scientists went aboard, where a “transfer of technology” ensued for a couple of hours. The source’s friend, who held “Alpha” clearance at the time, later became a CIA officer.
