Filename: Omni-3.Art Type : Article Author : Jerome Clark Date : 00/00/00 Desc. : UFO Crash Landings ----------------------------------------------------------------------- The following article was originally published in the science magazine OMNI. It is reproduced here exactly as it appeared in its original form, without so much as a misplaced comma, period, or question mark. ----------------------------------------------------------------------- From "OMNI"--December 1990 CRASH LANDINGS by Jerome Clark In one of her sketches, Lily Tomlin plays a bag woman who has encountered some little green men not from outer but from inner space-- from the cracks within the world. After talking to them, the bag woman finds a police officer and tells him what she's seen. "You got evidence, lady?" he asks. Such is the predicament of UFO researchers. The following five cases of purported UFO crash landings are some of the more curious pieces of evidence about extraterrestrials. Although far from conclusive, each of these cases is still under investigation. THE ROSWELL INCIDENT After a UFO crashed in remote Lincoln County, New Mexico, in early July 1947, the Air Force base at Roswell Field announced in a press release that it had a "flying disc" of the kind being reported in newspapers. When the material was taken to the Eighth Air Force Headquarters in Fort Worth, however, the commander, Brigadier General Roger Ramey, said it was from a weather balloon. Ramey's own assistant, Brigadier General Thomas DuBose, as well as Major Jesse Marcel, who led the recovery operation, and others held to the Air Force's original statement. By 1990 the Center For UFO Studies had interviewed some 250 individuals who were somehow related to the incident--everyone from members of ranch families who lived near the crash site to high-ranking Air Force officers. Those who expressed an opinion about the debris' nature suspect it is not of earthly origin. For one thing, witnesses claimed the craft contained an undentable thin foil that after folding, returned to its original shape with no crease mark. Some of the center's informants independantly claimed that bodies-- not of human beings--had been recovered a mile or two away. THE KECKSBURG "ACORN" At 4:15 P.M. on December 9, 1965, thousands of people in several Midwestern and Eastern states observed the passage of a glowing object whose long smoke trail remained visible for as long as 20 minutes after the object itself was gone. Investigators who later tracked its trajectory concluded that the object had been moving slightly faster than 1,000 miles per hour (meteors travel at a minimum of 27,000 mph) in a southeasterly direction from Flint, Michigan, to the Cleveland area, where it made a 25 degree turn and headed east. Outside Kecksburg, Pennsylvania, a number of local people observed the object descend in a smooth and controlled fashion. Those who ventured into the woods in the evening darkness, according to reports, discovered a large gold, acorn-shaped object that emitted a strange blue light. In a band along side the object was hieroglyphic- like writing. Soon, as members of the Aerospace Defense Command's 662nd Squadron appeared on the scene, civilians were ordered to leave the area. Later, Kecksburg residents reported an Army flatbed truck carrying something covered with a tarpaulin; its shape was that of a giant upright acorn. The official explanation of the Kecksburg object is "meteorite," although no such object has ever been produced and none of the eyewitness testimony supports that particular interpretation. THE TEX-MEX EPISODE In 1977 a retired Air Force lieutenant colonel swore in an affidavit that many yeasrs ago (probably 1950, ivestigators deduced) he and another pilot (since deceased) had been flying an F-94, then in the experimental stage, out of Texas Air Force base when ground radar operators told them a UFO was about to come into view. They watched a disc-shaped object make a 90 degree turn but were denied permission to chase it. Radar tracking indicated the UFO crashed near the Texas- Mexico border. The colonel and his companion landed their jet, boarded a light plane, and flew to the crash site alighting "in the pasture right across from where it hit." They saw the object in the sand, the colonel now says, surrounded by soldiers. The Tex-Mex story first surfaced during an investigation by W. Todd Zechel, who heard of it through an Army associate whose uncle said he had participated in a UFO recovery along the border. During the exercise, the uncle claimed, the body of an alien being had been recovered. In later years Zechel managed to locate the uncle, a retired Army colonel. He neither confirmed nor denied the story but refused to discuss it, citing national security concerns. NEVADA CRASH On April 18, 1962, North American Air Defense Command radar tracked a glowing red object moving west across the United Statres at a high altitude. By the time it reached the Southwest, it was close enough that witnesses on the ground could hear a roaring sound associated with its passage. According to investigator Kevin Randle, witnesses reported the UFO landing near Eureka, Utah, for a few minutes before resuming its flight. It disappeared from radar screens 70 miles northwest of Las Vegas just as observers saw an aerial explosion. The incident is an obscure one--the only press account appeared in the Las Vegas Sun on April 19--and few UFOlogists even know of it. In the Eighties Randle interviewed witnesses, one of whom had been stationed at Nellis Air Force Base at the time. The man claimed that he and other soldiers had been put on a bus with closed windows and taken to a site in the desert to pick up the wreckage of what looked like a flying saucer. The soldiers were told only the craft was something secret. Randle is now looking for other members of the alleged recovery team. DISC IN THE DESERT In the Seventies veteran UFO researcher Raymond Fowler investigated the case of the pseudonymous "Fritz Werner," an engineer who served at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base and later at the Atomic Proving Ground in Nevada. In an affidavit Werner swore that on May 21, 1953, he and others were driven to nearby Indian Springs Air Force Base, put on a bus with blackened windows, and informed that they were to participate in the recovery of a "supersecret Air Force vehicle." After four hours they were let out in what Werner surmised was the Kingman, Arizona, area. They were shown an oval object that "looked like two deep saucers, one inverted upon the other," about 30 feet in diameter. His particular job, as he asserted, was to determine how fast the craft had been traveling when it hit the sand. At one point, Werner claimed, he happened to look into a tent at the site; there he saw the "dead body of a four-foot, humanlike creature in a silver, metallic-looking suit." As he was leaving, he talked briefly with an airman who said that he had seen the interior of the craft, where there were "two swivellike seats as well as instruments and displays." All participants were sworn to secrecy. Another investigator, Leonard Stringfield, interviewed a former Air Force metallurgist who claimed that in the spring of 1953 he had been flown to a "hot and sandy area" to participate in the recovery of a vehicle much like the one Werner described.