Can We Believe The Accounts Of Crashed UFOs?

Sean Casteel

11 years ago

From Roswell To Central Park

In a new book from Global Communications called “The Case For UFO Crashes: From Urban Legend To Reality,” author and publisher Timothy Green Beckley argues that the many stories and rumors about the UFO crash phenomenon are basically true and that the government is hiding its knowledge of that truth because of National Security concerns. And just how does Beckley make his case?

By a combination of both anecdotal evidence – the stories that are told about the numerous crash incidents – and with evidence of a more concrete kind – actual government documents that have been leaked or obtained through Freedom of Information Act requests.

At this point, it may be relevant to say something in defense of anecdotal evidence. Budd Hopkins, the late abduction researcher, once stated that while no one has ever provided absolute proof that UFOs and their attendant phenomena are real, nevertheless there is plenty of evidence, the kind of evidence that would convince any jury in any courtroom that the UFOs did indeed exist and represented an alien or otherworldly technology.

Hopkins went on to say that ALL evidence presented in a trial is itself anecdotal. For instance, when the prosecution presents DNA evidence against a defendant, the jury never actually “sees” the DNA evidence. What they get instead is a law enforcement DNA expert telling them a “story” about that evidence. In other words, all the jury really has to go on is the anecdotal testimony of a scientist, the spoken words of an allegedly credible spokesperson who “talks” about the evidence in an attempt to bolster the prosecution’s case.

So it is with the UFO phenomenon. We often have only the stories people tell to go on, but ignoring those stories is a self-defeating way to close our eyes to some very important truths.

In “The Case For UFO Crashes,” convincing anecdotal evidence abounds, sometimes from sources that command our respect and are seemingly beyond reproach. Beckley writes about the late astronaut Gordon Cooper, who stated publicly that he first encountered UFOs in the 1950s while he served as a jet fighter pilot stationed in Germany. He and his comrades-in-arms witnessed an over-flight of strange objects that could stop on a dime and make 90-degree turns in the middle of their flight paths. Cooper later said that reports of crashed UFOs seemed credible to him and the entire subject warranted further study.

Beckley also quotes movie producer Peter Kares, who claimed to have known an ex-Air Force pilot who was at the scene when a crashed disc was carted away.

“Later, he was harassed,” Kares said, “sent to a psychiatrist and nearly drummed out of the service because he refused to sign a pledge that he would never talk about what he had inadvertently seen. We were even able to talk with a full colonel who claims he saw with his own eyes a UFO that was being kept in storage. In one case we investigated, motion picture footage was taken of several UFOs traveling along at speeds upwards of 10,000 miles per hour.”

When Kares followed up on what he had heard, he was told by the government that no such film existed, which the producer attributes to the government’s not wishing to cause panic in the streets.

Beckley also provides a fascinating retelling of the Frank Scully story. Scully was a Hollywood reporter who found out about a saucer crash said to have happened in Aztec, New Mexico, in 1948 that left several alien corpses behind. The resulting scramble by the military and FBI to cover up the incident and discredit Scully and his sources makes for an interesting case history of just what happens in the wake of a UFO crash. (To learn more about Scully and to read the book he wrote about the Aztec crash, read the Global Communications bestseller “Behind The Flying Saucers, Updated Edition.”)

In chapter after chapter of “The Case For UFO Crashes,” Beckley recounts the details of his own investigations into the phenomenon. The many leads he followed up on, the extensive correspondence and phone calls with witnesses and others privy to information on the subject, as well as the dead ends when important sources would apparently die or simply disappear along with whatever proof they had hidden away from their relentless pursuers. Beckley’s tireless, dogged pursuit of the truth produced no dramatic “smoking gun,” but it does serve as evidence that something is going on, that the tip of an iceberg of information is undeniably there.

One of the more fascinating stories told in “The Case For UFO Crashes” came to Beckley when he was in Florida doing media appearances to promote his now defunct magazine, “UFO Review.” One of his regular correspondents told Beckley about a health food store owner in Orlando, Florida, who made an important discovery in 1977. While jogging across the United States to promote exercise and fitness, John Peele discovered what he thought was a UFO crash site near the California desert town of Octotillo, a short distance from the Mexican border.

“There, jutting up out of the desert,” Peele told Beckley, “were several large pieces of what resembled Plexiglas.”

Peele had served in Vietnam as an army helicopter pilot and knew immediately that the Plexiglas was not from any earthly military aircraft. He also discovered pieces of lightweight metal similar to aluminum that were honeycombed on one side and refused to bend as such a light metal should.

But the real surprise was Peele’s finding a glove similar to the pressurized gloves worn by our high-altitude test pilots and astronauts. This would not be too unusual except for the fact that the glove was in miniature, as if it were intended to be worn by a child.

“Of course, children do not pilot high-altitude planes,” Beckley writes, “nor does the government allow individuals under a certain size to join the service, ruling out that the glove might have been manufactured for a midget.”

Peele found another glove a few feet away, but that one appeared to have been badly burned in the crash. Since Peele was jogging at the time, it was impossible for him to cart the material away, so he buried it with the intention of returning later in his vehicle to retrieve it. However, when he attempted to go and reclaim the artifacts, a peculiar storm came up, rendering the desert skies pitch black, a phenomenon unknown to even the locals.

All Peele managed to return to Florida with was the badly burned glove, which he felt surely had to have been designed for a small, humanoid saucer pilot. The thumb on the glove was not positioned correctly for a space-faring primate, such as the monkeys sent into orbit in the early days of our space program. The thumb was positioned higher up, indicating it was most likely worn by a more advanced species than a chimp-astronaut. The glove was double-stitched, unlike anything issued by our military, and appeared to zip from the inside. The word “Large” in English was stamped on the innermost layer of material in the glove, but given that it was half the size of what would be worn by a normal human, this appeared to be another indication that the pressurized glove was not manufactured by our earthly military.

Representatives from Martin-Marietta, NASA, and Rockwell International have all examined the glove and reached no definite conclusions, at least none they were willing to pass along to Peele. When the movie “Close Encounters of the Third Kind” opened in late 1977, Peele offered the glove to a local movie house to put on display. The theater at first accepted his offer but then quickly declined, saying it might frighten moviegoers expecting to see only a work of science-fiction. Peele remains convinced that the glove is some kind of outer-space artifact and that the remains of a crashed saucer are likely still buried beneath the shifting sands in the California desert where he first discovered the mysterious debris.

As further crash lore, there is of course the well-known belief that the government conceals a great deal of evidence in Hangar 18 at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio, or alternately, in a location on the base called “The Blue Room.” The late Arizona senator, Barry Goldwater, openly declared that, “I have never gained access to the so-called ‘Blue Room’ at Wright-Patterson, so I have no idea what is in it. I have no idea of who controls the flow of need-to-know information because, frankly, I was told in such an emphatic way that it was none of my business that I’ve never tried to make it my business since.”

One wonders if Goldwater’s diplomatic use of the phrase “emphatic way” is a euphemism for some kind of violent threat. Just what lengths do the secret-keepers go to in order to maintain their hold on UFO information? Who, if any, among our elected officials are ever told what the military is concealing in terms of crashed UFOs, alien bodies, or anything else to do with the phenomenon? Former president Bill Clinton stated on at least two occasions that he was denied access to classified information both on the Roswell incident and alien-related activity at Area 51 in Nevada.

The book also contains additional anecdotal evidence, stories that sound like science fiction but have been handed down through various sources as true. There is the night a UFO came crashing down over an Ohio shopping mall, for example, or the unbelievable eyewitness account of a UFO that fell inside New York City’s bustling Central Park after being shot at by the military. One story details the rescue of a living alien from a downed spaceship as it rested on a military runway in New Jersey. The UFO pilot later died in captivity, but not before witnesses saw what happened and eventually went forward with the story. Allegedly there exist photos of an entity named “Tomato Man,” another crashed UFOnaut, photos that to this day have never been satisfactorily explained.

As promised, “The Case For UFO Crashes” also contains a prodigious amount of government documents from the files of the Department of Defense, the FBI, and even a bizarrely named agency called “The Interplanetary Phenomenon Unit.” The reader can see actual files written by – and correspondence between – members of the military and various intelligence agents as they struggle with responding to the alien presence while at the same time keeping the truth from the very citizenry they are sworn to uphold and serve.

The reprinted documents, including the legendary Majestic-12 material, are numerous and too many to go into detail about here. The book also includes an interview I did with Ryan Wood, a researcher, investigator and author who has made a career, alongside his father Robert, of vetting and authenticating leaked government documents on UFOs as well as others obtained through FOIA requests, but their main emphasis is on the MJ-12 papers.

The younger Wood’s interest in UFOs began at age 15, when his father brought well-known UFO researcher Stanton Friedman home for dinner. At the time, Friedman worked for Robert Wood at the McDonnell-Douglas aeronautics company researching antigravity. As an adult, Wood says he now specializes in analyzing documents while ignoring other aspects of UFOlogy.

“We don’t do abductions,” he said. “We don’t do lights in the sky. We don’t do anything other than military and intelligence history as it relates to the Majestic documents. That’s our focus.”

In the interview, Wood tells the story of how the MJ-12 documents were initially obtained when Navy and Marines veteran Timothy Cooper began to receive portions of them in his mail; Cooper has since amassed the largest collection of MJ-12 documents and original Blue Book files in the United States. It is not clear why Cooper was chosen as a conduit of the leaked files, another mystery to add to the already large pile. As of when the interview with Wood was conducted, the flow of documents to Cooper continued, giving the Woods and their team plenty to keep them busy.

Woods offered one particular document as an example.

“One document that is very interesting,” he said, “is called The Interplanetary Phenomenon Unit Document, and it’s an intelligence summary. It’s a draft, an assessment. It has fourteen points. It was written on 22 July 1947, after the team went to the Roswell area to deal with some of the crashes.”

The document is very specific, detailing the longitude and latitude of Mack Brazel’s ranch, where the Roswell debris was strewn over a wide area, and pinpoints the location of a second crash near Socorro, New Mexico, around that same time. Meanwhile, Wood is confident that the saucer crash documents are not “disinformation” or “psychological warfare,” saying he doesn’t think that over the long haul it would be to our government’s advantage to use fake documents simply to lie to us, our allies or even our enemies. Somehow, backstage and under a heavy covering of secrecy and classification, a real life drama is being acted out that supersedes any attempt to deceive those outside the loop.

Given that UFO crashes happen on a worldwide basis, resulting in many headaches for governments both allied and “hostile” to the United States, the question must be asked, are the aliens simply inept pilots of their own spacecraft?

“That’s another good question,” Wood responded. “Why do they crash? I’m speculating. The data shows that there are crashes. I think it has to do with the human anthropomorphic view of the alien agenda. We think they don’t want to crash. We value human life. We rescue our pilots from the ocean or from behind enemy lines. These alien bodies are disposable, biological robots that are like toilet paper to us. Their mission in the universe is to hop from galaxy to galaxy, star system to star system, gather information and move on.

“And they may be less well-equipped than with a mother-ship for interstellar space. They may be using something more like a scout ship, and when they encounter radar or some freak lighting bolt, they malfunction and have a problem.

“Then of course there’s the deliberate thought – that they’re crashing on purpose, because it helps man develop new technologies and advances our civilization without shocking us. It may take decades or centuries to understand and catch up, but it’s like you’re shown the future. Then you begin to do the reverse science thing, or the reverse engineering.”

It’s hard to imagine the UFO crashes are intentional and have the benign purpose Wood is talking about, but one quickly learns when studying UFOs that nearly anything is possible.

Wood feels some of the documents may be leaked by people who regard it as a matter of conscience to do their part in revealing the UFO phenomenon to the world.

“People feel that it’s wrong to hide the fact that we’re not alone,” he reasoned, “to have hidden the greatest technological advances from the masses and in essence slow the advance of global humanity by scores of years.

“What they did,” he continued, “which is hide it all, forced a few cloistered scientists working in secret to push the ball down the field with a paperclip instead of hitting it with a baseball bat. That’s really the great crime, that they’ve hidden the technology and the evidence and thwarted the standards of civilization.”

In the interview with Wood, he also speculates on the assassination of JFK and the mysterious death of Marilyn Monroe as being connected to MJ-12. Were the two murdered to prevent them from going public with what they knew about UFOs and the government cover-up?

Such questions continue to haunt us regardless of the fact that they may seem ridiculous on the surface, even crazy or in the category of “fringe beliefs.” Still, what Timothy Green Beckley has achieved in “The Case For UFO Crashes: From Urban Legend To Reality” deserves an open-minded look. There are any number of reasons that flying saucers come hurtling from the sky, and just as many reasons for the truth of that to be withheld from us.