by Timothy Good
“We were contacted by people down in South America who had seen these objects flying around and were very scared. So I went down there in an F-100 [Super Sabre] and we flew surveillance, looking for the UFOs in the places where they had been seen. Some of these were night missions, flying up and down the coast, hoping to run into something…. If something was sighted at night, one of the planes would be sent out, and another would take off shortly afterward to provide cover for the first plane. We were armed, but we were instructed to fire only when we faced danger to our own plane. If they were doing something to screw up our airplane, we could fire.”
He did not see any unidentified objects during these surveillance missions—officially logged as “test flights”—with the 192nd Interceptor Squadron.21 Of incidental interest, a USAF cover reference for UFOs is/was “Unusual Helicopter Activity.” Furthermore, I have learned that foreign cases were handled by Project Fang—not Blue Book.22
Willingham later learned about two other crashes of alien craft: one in North Texas, somewhere near Dallas, in the mid-1960s, when three alien bodies had been recovered. “They shut that one up really tight,” he recalled. “It was hushed up very quickly.” He was keen to visit the location, but access was denied. A second crash—also said to have involved the recovery of bodies—occurred in Colorado earlier in the 1960s. Yet again, the military clamped down on the incident.23 He did not dismiss the possibility that the craft he saw might have been damaged by U.S. military intervention—a strong likelihood, in my view, given that since the 1940s quite a number of alien vehicles have been brought down to earth by the military.
Investigator Kevin D. Randle, who has served with the U.S. Air Force and the Army National Guard, involving numerous tours on active duty as an intelligence officer, believes the entire Willingham story to be a fabrication. He cites, for example, the lack of any military documents proving his service in the Air Force Reserve. All he could find in St. Louis, Missouri, where records of former military personnel are housed, was a record of Willingham’s service in the Army from December 1945 to January 1947. What few records Willingham has produced are dismissed as fabrications or irrelevant. One is a Reserve Order which, Randle reports, “seemed to indicate that Willingham had served twenty years of combined active duty and reserve time and would be eligible for a pension when he reached age sixty. That applies for those who have not done twenty years of active duty.” And so on.24
Noe and Ruben sent me copies of several of the few documents pertaining to Willingham’s service record which have been located. Though I am no expert, the Reserve Order does appear to have some questionable anomalies. But it has to be said that pilots and other military personnel who encounter UFOs frequently discover that many of their service records are either missing, or, as in the previous case of Colonel Roy J. Edwards, altered significantly.
Both Noe Torres and Ruben Uriarte find Colonel Willingham highly credible. So do I. “Originally,” Noe explained to me, “we got started on the Robert Burton Willingham (RBW) case based on the recommendation of Dr. Bruce Maccabee [a retired U.S. Navy physicist], who had studied the case for years and considered RBW a credible witness with nothing to gain by lying. RBW showed us countless photographs and [pieces of] paperwork from his military days…. Randle contends that RBW never served in the U.S. Air Force or Air Force Reserve. When RBW has come forward with documents that show he served in these units, Randle has called them fraudulent.
“Ruben and I have cooperated one hundred percent with all Randle’s many requests for information about the case over the past two years, but it became increasingly frustrating due to his unsupported dismissal of key documents and his closed-mindedness about the case. Someone specifically assigned the task of discrediting RBW could not possibly have done a better job of it. Randle has stated to us several times that RBW should be charged with violation of a U.S. law that prohibits persons from falsely claiming that they received certain military honors or medals. But Randle can no more prove that these claims are false than we can conclusively prove that they are true, since the military has conveniently lost most of RBW’s service records.
“Willingham was ordered by military intelligence not to disclose, and he lives in fear about that to this very day. He has told us that ‘they’ have already tampered with his life, his military retirement benefits, etc. He admits to being deliberately vague and even misleading when Todd Zechel [ex-National Security Agency] and NICAP [National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomena] first contacted him in the late 1970s. If you read his 1978 affidavit, he does not give a date for the UFO crash. The 1948 date is something Randle injects to discredit RBW, but RBW never gave that date…. In his 1978 affidavit, he was being evasive in order to protect his own skin.
“We have spent hours face-to-face with RBW. He is a straight shooter, down-to-earth, matter-of-fact personality with an extremely conservative background. Like Randle, Ruben and I also wish we had more hard-core, indisputable documentary evidence regarding RBW’s military service, but the fact is, we may never get it….”25
Large Craft Intercepted Over the U.K.
It was the height of the Cold War. On the night of May 20, 1957, Milton John Torres, a 25-year-old lieutenant serving as a U.S. Air Force fighter pilot with the 514th Fighter Interceptor Squadron in the 406th Fighter Expeditionary Wing, was on standby at the Royal Air Force base at Manston, Kent, when he received an urgent order to scramble and intercept an unknown object. He raced to one of the two F-86D Sabre jets on permanent five-minute alert at the end of the runway and took off.
“The initial briefing indicated that the ground [control] was observing for a considerable time a blip that was orbiting East Anglia,” Torres later wrote in his unofficial report to the U.K. Ministry of Defence in 1988, released in a batch of documents in 2008:
“All the controlling agencies revealed that this was an unidentified flying object with very unusual flight patterns [and] motionless for long intervals. The instructions came to go ‘gate’ to expedite the intercept. Gate was the term used to use maximum power (in the case of the F-86D, that meant full afterburner) and to proceed to an Initial Point at about 32,000 feet. By this time my radar was on and I was looking prematurely for the bogey [unknown object]. The instructions came to report any visual observation, to which I replied, ‘I’m in the soup and it is impossible to see anything!’
“The weather was probably high alto stratus, but between being over the North Sea and in the weather, no frame of reference was available—i.e., no stars, no lights, no silhouettes; in short, nothing. GCI [Ground-controlled Interception] continued the vectoring and the dialogue describing the strange antics of the UFO. The exact turns and maneuvers they gave me were all predicated to reach some theoretical point for a lead collision-course type rocket release. I can remember reaching the level-off and requesting to come out of afterburner only to be told to stay in afterburner. It wasn’t much later that I noticed my indicated Mach number was about .92 … about as fast as the F-86D could go straight and level.
“Then the order came to fire a full salvo of rockets at the UFO. I was only a lieutenant and was very much aware of the gravity of the situation. To be quite candid, I almost s__t my pants! At any rate, I had my hands full trying to fly, search for bogeys, and now selecting a hot load on the switches. I asked for authentication of the order to fire, and I received it….
“The authentication was valid, and I selected 24 [2.75-inch Mighty Mouse] rockets to salvo. I wasn’t paying too much attention to [my wingman], but I clearly remember him giving a ‘Roger’ to all the transmissions … instructions were given to look 30 degrees to the port for my bogey. I did not have a hard time at all. There it was exactly where I was told it would be [on his radar]. The blip was burning a hole in the radar with its incredible intensity….
“I had a lock-on that had the proportions of an aircraft carrier. By that, I mean the return on the radar was so stron
g that it could not be overlooked by the fire control system on the F-86D [and] it was the best target I could ever remember locking on to. I had locked on in just a few seconds, and I locked on exactly fifteen miles, which was the maximum range for lock-on. I called to the GCI ‘Judy,’ which signified that I would take all further steering information from my radar computer….
“I had an overtake of 800 knots and my radar was stable,” Torres’s report continues. “The dot [on the screen] was centered and only the slightest corrections were necessary. This was a very fast intercept and the circle started to shrink. I called ‘twenty seconds’ and the GCI indicated he was standing by. The overtake was still indicating in the 7 or 8 o’clock position. At about ten seconds to go, I noticed that the overtake position was changing its position. It moved rapidly to the 6 o’clock, then 3 o’clock, then 12 o’clock, and finally rested about the 11 o’clock position. This indicated a negative overtake of 200 knots (the maximum negative overtake displayed). There was no way of knowing what the actual speed of the UFO was, as he could be traveling at very high Mach numbers and I would only see the 200-knot negative overtake.
“The circle, which was down to about an inch and a half in diameter, started to open up rapidly. Within seconds it was back to three inches in diameter, and the blip was visible in the blackened ‘jizzle’ band moving up the scope. This meant that it was going away from me. I reported this to the GCI site and they replied by asking ‘Do you have a Tally Ho?’ I replied that I was still in the soup and could see nothing. By this time the UFO had broken lock and I saw him leaving my thirty-mile range. Again I reported that he was gone, only to be told that he was off their scope as well….”26
Torres had the impression the craft was moving at no less than Mach 10 (over 7,000 mph) when it disappeared. “It didn’t follow classic Newtonian mechanics,” he told reporter Billy Cox. “It made a right turn almost on a dime. The [RAF radar] scope had a range of 250 miles. And after two sweeps, which took two seconds, it was gone.”27 The pilots were then vectored back to Manston.
A Cloak of Secrecy
“Back in the alert tent, I talked to Met sector,” the Torres report continues. “They advised me that the blip had gone off the scope in two sweeps at the GCI site and that they had instructions to tell me that the mission was considered classified. They also advised that I would be contacted by some investigator. It was the next day before anyone showed up.
“I had not the foggiest idea what had actually occurred, nor would anyone explain anything to me. In the squadron operations area, one of the sergeants came to me and brought me in to the hallway around the side of the pilots’ briefing room. He approached a civilian, who appeared from nowhere. The civilian looked like a well-dressed IBM salesman, with a dark blue trenchcoat. (I cannot remember his facial features, only to say he was in his thirties or early forties.)”28
In an interview with The Times of London in 2008, the 77-year-old Torres—by then a retired professor of civil engineering—told defence editor Michael Evans that the man flashed a National Security Agency (NSA) identity card at him and warned that if he ever revealed what had happened, he would never fly again.29 “He immediately jumped into asking me questions about the previous day’s mission. I got the impression that he operated out of the States, but I don’t know for sure. After my debriefing of the events, he advised me that this would be considered highly classified and that I could not discuss it with anybody, not even my commander [as in the case of Colonel Willingham]…. He threatened me with a national security breach if I breathed a word about it to anyone.”30 (In the Air Force Times, Dr. Torres elaborated that the agent had threatened to revoke his flying privileges and end his Air Force career if he talked about the mission.31)
“He disappeared without so much as a good-bye, and that was that as far as I was concerned. I was significantly impressed by the action of the cloak-and-dagger people, and I have not spoken of this to anyone until recent years.”32
Lieutenant Torres later became a range control officer at Cape Canaveral for the Gemini and Apollo space programs before flying 276 combat missions in the Vietnam War and earned thirteen air medals, including the Distinguished Flying Cross. He attained the rank of major prior to retiring from the military in 1971 and later became a professor of engineering at Florida International University, retiring in 2004.33
In other interviews, Dr. Torres expressed relief that he had not actually been ordered to fire upon the craft because he was certain he “would have been vaporized,”34 and asserted his conviction that the craft was designed by an alien intelligence.35 “My impression,” he concludes in his report to the Ministry of Defence, “was that whatever the aircraft (or spacecraft) was, it must have been traveling in two-digit Mach numbers to have done what I witnessed.
“Perhaps the cloak of secrecy can be lifted in this day of enlightenment and all of us can have all the facts….”36
A letter to Lt. Col. Roy Jack Edwards from former president Jimmy Carter. In 1955, while stationed at Edwards Air Force Base test-flying an F-100C Super Sabre, Edwards’s jet was attacked by a large unknown craft, temporarily blinding him and disabling the aircraft’s communications. The U.S. Air Force later falsified his whereabouts at the time of the incident. (The Carter Center)
Chapter Nine
“A New World—If You Can Take It”
Lieutenant Colonel Philip J. Corso served on the staff of the National Security Council (NSC) and became an inter-agency coordinator for the NSC’s Operations Coordinating Board—also known as the “Special Group,” “54/12 Committee,” or “5412 Group.” As such, I learned, it was “the most clandestine, covert, and senior secret intelligence authorizing and controlling committee in the executive branch of the U.S. government during the Truman and Eisenhower administrations.”
From 1961 to 1963, Corso acted as chief of the U.S. Army’s Foreign Technology Division at the Pentagon. In 1997, his book—The Day After Roswell—caused a sensation with the revelation that he had been instructed by his boss, Lieutenant General Arthur Trudeau, chief of U.S. Army Research and Development, to steward alien artefacts from the Roswell incident in a reverse-engineering project that led to today’s integrated circuit chips, fiber optics, lasers, and super-tenacity fibers.1 Corso also briefed Robert F. Kennedy, during his term as U.S. Attorney General, regarding the Army’s effort to seed extraterrestrial technologies into the private sector.2
Although Corso describes in detail his viewing of the recovered alien bodies at Fort Riley, Kansas, omitted from the book was his close observation of a grounded flying disc and, later, an encounter with an alien being, which occurred while he was in command of the Army’s missile firing range at Red Canyon, White Sands, fifteen miles west of Carrizozo, New Mexico, in 1957. Corso’s Record of Assignments (in my possession) shows that he served as Battalion Commander, based at Fort Bliss, Texas, from June 1957 through August 1958.
Described in a manuscript provided for me,3 which Corso had intended for inclusion in his book, the separate events began with the intrusion and subsequent downing of an unknown craft.
“I took my small military plane with pilot and headed for the area where my radars had last located the object,” he reports. “We flew over the site and I saw a bright, shiny saucer-shaped object on the ground.” He assumed it was a missile booster.4
Later that day, Corso drove an Army car to the area where the unknown object had come down. “I asked Fort Bliss to send me an old World War II command car. It was built high off the ground, had large tires and four-wheel drive [which] was ideal for cross-country over the desert. So I set off for the area about ten to fifteen miles from the down-range launching sites and well within my area of jurisdiction. I decided to go alone. I took my belt with pistol and canteen, a map and a compass and a Geiger counter which we used to test stray voltage in the connection between the booster and missile…. When I arrived at the spot I had marked on my map, t
here was nothing there but desert. I sat in my command car and surveyed the area with binoculars. Finally, I saw something shimmering like a heat wave…. Suddenly it materialized.
“It looked like a metal object [shaped like] a saucer…. Seconds ticked away and abruptly it disappeared. I approached closer. I stopped and waited. Then again after about ten minutes it materialized in the same shimmering manner, then quickly it disappeared. I timed its appearance (forty-eight seconds). Again after about twelve minutes it appeared again. I picked up a desert rock and threw it at the solid metal-appearing object. The rock bounced off but made no sound. It disappeared again. I placed a large rock in the spot and some sagebrush. When it reappeared, it crushed both stone and sagebrush.
“By the time interval I figured, I had a total of about five minutes to observe the object in its solid state. On this appearance I gathered my nerve and went and placed my hand on it. In the hot desert sun it was cool; the surface was smooth, and felt like a highly varnished table top. It had no rough edges, no seams, and no rivets or screws.
“When it disappeared, I went back to my command car and sat to observe the see, no-see sequence. Each time it appeared to shake, but more like a shiver or tremble. Suddenly on the next appearance my Army compass started to spin and my Geiger counter began to fluctuate. I thought, discretion is the better part of valor. I started the engine, put the command car in reverse, and gunned it. After about three or four hundred yards, the engine stopped. The object slowly rose, turned on edge, and with a streak disappeared…. The bright-colored streak as it disappeared remained embedded in my memory. I started the engine and made four or five widening circles around the site. I stopped and got down, and thought I saw footsteps on the ground.
