Something fell from the skies into onto the desert in June of 1947. Roswell, New Mexico, rancher Mac Brazel and his son Vernon discovered its debris field, which according to them included “rubber strips, tinfoil, [and] a rather tough paper and sticks.” Later that month, Mac read about the “flying saucer” sighting by Kenneth Arnold above Washington state, the incident that really kicked off the modern UFO era. Thinking this debris might possibly be the remains of such a saucer, Mac stored it and contacted the sheriff, who in turn contacted the 509th Bomb Group Intelligence Office at Roswell Army Air Field. In early June, the story hit the press when an official release from the Roswell Army Air Field stated that the “many rumors of flying discs became a reality” because the Bomb Group’s intelligence office had been “fortunate enough to gain possession of a disc.” Flying saucer mania went wild again for a brief time, but before long, higher authorities retracted the “flying disc” press release and asserted that the debris had only been the remains of a fallen weather balloon equipped with a radar reflector. The conspiracy theories and grand myth about the Roswell Incident did not spring up immediately. Far from it, in fact, it seems that most accepted the retraction and thought little more of it for more than thirty years. In the 1980s, of course, UFOlogists, eagerly seeking evidence of government cover-ups, latched on to the Roswell report and made of it a grand affair, with not only recovered alien spacecraft but also recovered aliens. In the 1990s, the official US Air Force explanation emerged, and it did indeed indicate some cover-up, clarifying that the radar-reflecting weather balloon recovered was actually part of the secret and sensitive Project Mogul, an attempt to gather data on Soviet nuclear bomb tests with equipment carried aloft by weather balloons, a kind of early form of reconnaissance drone. This version of events seems to explain much: Mac Brazel’s description accords well with the debris a Project Mogul balloon would leave behind, and any secrecy surrounding the debris can easily be understood. In fact, there appears to be corroboration from records showing a Mogul balloon had been launched on June 4th from Alamogordo and subsequently lost. But even if this itself was a cover story, there is no shortage of other, terrestrial candidates for what might have crashed that the government would have wanted hushed up. It was near enough to the White Sands test range that any Top Secret experimental rocket or aircraft may have crashed in the Roswell desert. If that were the case, though, why would the government still be keeping it a secret today? An even more curious question is why on earth the intelligence office of the 509th Bomb Group, an elite squadron that was no stranger to keeping classified information secure, having dropped the atomic bombs Fat Man and Little Boy on Japan in 1945, would issue a press release declaring that this was a downed flying saucer, thereby attracting attention to the crash rather than covering it up. Is it possible that the story had been purposely planted for some other reason besides the concealment of what crashed in the desert? There were significant fears among some in the military that Kenneth Arnold’s flying saucers were some kind of advanced Soviet aircraft. Could the story have been intended to convince Soviets that we had captured one of their strange craft or that we had developed one of our own, or might it simply have been a lure for spies? One thing is for certain, this has become a definite pattern for the U.S. government: discouraging belief in UFOs with one wagging finger while they encourage UFOlogists to believe with another beckoning hand.

As I write this, I am still awaiting the release of the Pentagon UFO report that inspired me to tackle this topic. For some time, I have been curious about whether some other purpose is being served by the recent release of classified information about UFOs. In December of 2017, back when the New York Times reported on the existence of the Pentagon’s black-money funded Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program and spread leaked video of Naval UFO encounters all over the media, I could buy that the story was a genuine piece of investigative journalism, prompted by a whistleblower, revealing information the government had not wanted revealed. Yet last year, when the Pentagon officially acknowledged the authenticity of the leaked videos, and when the existence of their active UAP Task Force was revealed by being openly mentioned in a Senate committee report, I began to wonder if something else might not be going on. Now, after the Coronavirus relief package included a requirement that the Pentagon disclose what it knows about UFOs, I find myself even more suspicious. The Pentagon has already briefed the House Intelligence Committee, and we may never know if what they told Congress was significantly more than what they end up revealing publicly in the report due before the end of June. However, simple logic and familiarity with the government’s handling of the UFO topic in the past tells us that we should not take what they have to say at face value. Early in June, the Times published a leak of the forthcoming UAP report’s contents, indicating that it will offer no evidence that UFOs encountered in the last couple decades are extra-terrestrial or that they are not, but that it will disavow the notion that they represent classified American technology, suggesting that Russia or China may have outpaced us scientifically when it comes to hypersonic technology, developing aircraft or drones capable of greater acceleration and maneuverability, and even trans-medium capabilities, flying and then submerging into the ocean, all without any discernible exhaust plumes. The problem with this is that the U.S. government does not typically want to show its hand so blatantly to the rest of the world. How does it help our standing on the world’s stage, our image of military primacy, to announce to the world that we’ve fallen behind? How does it help us to learn more about a rival’s technology to indicate that we are actively investigating it? The Times article states that some elements of their report will remain classified, which they acknowledge will continue to fuel UFO conspiracy theories, but this begs the question, why is our utter befuddlement at this technology being declassified? Unless we are not so clueless when it comes to this technology as the Pentagon is making out. Unless, as we have seen time and time again in the history of the intelligence world’s disinformation games surrounding the topic of UFOs, they are merely manipulating public perceptions to sow doubt and confusion. I know some of you may be thinking, this sounds like conspiracy theory nonsense… how unlike this podcast! But my principal source is an excellent book that I highly recommend, Mirage Men: An Adventure into Paranoia, Espionage, Psychological Warfare, and UFOs by Mark Pilkington, which views the UFO phenomenon and the US government’s disinformation related to it through a critical and rationalist lens. I hope you’ll see by the end of this series that, when it comes to government disinformation for espionage and national security purposes, conspiracy is the name of the game, and despite some reliance on conspiracy theory, this serves as a far more rational explanation for UFOs than visitation by Little Grey Men.

Maj. Jesse A. Marcel holding pieces of foil lined material related to the Roswell incident. Courtesy, Fort Worth Star-Telegram Photograph Collection, Special Collections, The University of Texas at Arlington Library, Arlington, Texas. - https://library.uta.edu/roswell/images

Certainly U.S. military intelligence did not invent the core elements of the UFO myth. Even before Kenneth Arnold’s 1947 sighting, science-fiction was planting those seeds. In one 1946 issue, for example, the sci-fi magazine Amazing Stories featured a piece on mysterious “circle-winged” aircraft appearing over San Francisco along with a horror story depicting alien abduction long before the first recorded claims of such experiences. And the editor of Amazing Stories, Ray Palmer, would himself be drawn into the flying saucer excitement of 1947. Just days after Kenneth Arnold’s much publicized saucer sighting, Palmer received a letter from one Harold Dahl, a harbor patrolman in Washington State’s Puget Sound, which described his boat being buzzed by balloonish, doughnut-like UFOs near Maury Island. The account described how five of these craft were circling a sixth that appeared to be failing and about to crash before it ejected some molten rock material, some of which struck Dahl’s son, burning his arm, and killed his dog. According to his account, after Dahl told his harbor patrol superior about the incident, a mysterious man in a black suit came to see him and warned him against spreading the story, an early example of the “Men in Black” stories about government men or eerie human-like entities mimicking men that would often accompany UFO accounts in later years. Dahl disregarded this figure’s warning, though, and wrote to Palmer, enclosing a piece of the slag-like material released by his UFO. Palmer then contacted pilot Kenneth Arnold, the original saucer-sighter, who was familiar with Washington state, and offered him $200 to investigate the Maury Island Incident. Arnold himself was visited by some government types after his first sighting, although these identified themselves by name as Brown and Davidson, representatives of Army Air Force Intelligence, questioning Arnold about the aircraft he had seen over Mt. Rainier, as well as about the Maury Island Incident Ray Palmer had asked him to investigate. His interest piqued, Arnold flew out to Tacoma to begin his investigation, but he found Dahl rather dim-witted, and thought the material Dahl showed him, which supposedly had been dropped from a UFO, was regular old lava rock. But when Arnold met Dahl’s supposed “superior,” Fred Crisman, things began to get stranger.

Crisman was an altogether more suave and convincing figure, to whom Dahl deferred even though it wasn’t Crisman who had witnessed the flying doughnuts. Crisman spoke confidently to Arnold, asserting that these aircraft could not possibly have been American, and suggesting they might represent the development of captured Nazi technology. Kenneth Arnold began to get paranoid. He already thought it strange that his lodgings had been arranged for him anonymously, and after a journalist called him saying there had been a tip about his saucer investigation, he began to think his hotel room was bugged. He then called his Air Force Intelligence contact, Brown, who strangely refused to take his first call and called him back from a pay phone. Brown said he and Davidson would fly right out, and thereafter, Arnold received another phone call from a journalist saying he’d received another tip about an Air Force investigation. Arnold searched his room for listening devices but found none, leading him to suspect that perhaps, inexplicably, Brown and Davidson had been leaking info about the Maury Island investigation to the press. Counterintuitively, though, if these Air Force Intelligence agents wanted a saucer flap in the news, they arrived and insisted the whole thing was a hoax cooked up by Dahl and Crisman. Taking the samples of UFO-discharged rocks, Brown and Davidson boarded a military plane bound for California, but the plane crashed, killing both Air Force Intelligence agents on August 1st, 1947, the very day that the Air Force became a separate branch of the U.S. Armed Forces. Thereafter, as a disturbed Kenneth Arnold wrestled with the notion that Brown and Davidson had been killed for their involvement with the Maury Island investigation, another Air Force representative arrived, one Major George Sander, who took Arnold out to an industrial smelting site near Maury Island, where piles of rocks identical to those Dahl had shown him could be found, making an effort to assure Arnold, once again, that the whole thing had been a hoax. But Arnold remained leery. According to him, he went back to Dahl’s house, but to his astonishment, he found it completely deserted: “there wasn’t a stick of furniture inside.” Deeply troubled, Arnold flew home, making only a brief a stop to refuel. Upon taking off again, though, his engine failed, necessitating an emergency landing that damaged his landing gear. Investigating after the fact, he said he discovered his fuel valve had been cut, leading him to suspect that he, perhaps like Brown and Davidson, had been a target of government assassination.

Newspaper headline reporting the plane crash that killed Brown and Davidson. Public Domain.

Certainly it can be argued that Arnold might have been imagining things. Was it so strange that a hotel room had been arranged for him? And is it such a mystery that the press had gotten wind of his UFO investigation? He was, after all, a very public figure since his own rather famous UFO encounter. And isn’t it possible that some elements of this story were exaggerated when Arnold wrote about them after the fact. For example, Kenneth Arnold claims to have had yet another UFO sighting during his flight to Tacoma to investigate Dahl’s claims, which during the Summer of Saucers in 1947 probably seemed reasonable, as it was suspected these mystery aircraft might become more and more commonplace, but in retrospect seems a bit hard to believe and smacks of embellishment. If Arnold took liberties with his story, perhaps we can disregard his claims of Dahl’s house being vacated, or of his own plane being sabotaged. What we cannot dismiss is the plane crash that killed Air Force Intelligence men and UFO investigators Brown and Davidson, as that is a matter of record. However, the engine fire that caused their B-25 to crash may indeed have been an accident. Conspiracy theorists refuse to believe in coincidence, though, so it is all too easy to presume that the crash was intentional and related to their investigation. Had Brown and Davidson gone rogue, leaking info to the press? And if so, would that have represented such a national security threat that the two had to be killed? Why not simply arrest them for treason if they were releasing classified information? One possible explanation is that these Air Force Intelligence men were believed to be Soviet moles. Less than a year earlier, the top secret Venona counter-intelligence project had uncovered through the decryption of some 3,000 messages the existence of Soviet moles embedded at every level of the U.S. government, even among presidential administrators and on the staff of the Manhattan Project, as well as in the Army Air Force. Considering this context, it’s feasible that Brown and Davidson’s seemingly odd insistence on communicating with Arnold via pay phone can be explained by their being spies looking for intel on America’s secret atomic aircraft. It may then also be suggested that the entire Maury Island sighting had been a honeypot, a false story planted as a lure meant to draw out Soviet moles intent on sniffing out secret U.S. technology, and that it worked. Supporting this notion is the surprising background of Fred Crisman, who formerly flew with the Army Air Force in the Pacific Theater and who didn’t actually seem to be Harold Dahl’s “superior” at all. Further rumor had it that Crisman had also worked for the Office of Strategic Services, forerunner of the CIA, before popping up at Maury Island, and his connections to the intelligence world would years later lead to his being named by District Attorney Jim Garrison as possibly being involved in JFK’s assassination. But of course, this is speculation. By the cold light of skepticism, Crisman was just a hoaxer, and Kenneth Arnold a storyteller with a taste for fame, and Brown and Davidson’s fiery death a tragic accident that had nothing to do with their investigation of the Maury Island Incident.

A month after the tragic plane crash that claimed the lives of Air Force Intelligence agents Brown and Davidson, General Nathan Twining penned an internal Air Force memo indicating that the flying saucer phenomenon was “real and not visionary,” but undermining the Roswell myth, he lamented a “lack of physical evidence in the shape of crashed recovered exhibits.” Twining suggested two possibilities: that the saucers were a top-secret American project about which the newly formed Air Force was kept ignorant, or that they represented some advanced technology developed by a foreign nation. The fears that Soviets had reverse-engineered secret Nazi technology were palpable, prompting the launch of Project Sign, whose remit was to investigate the nature and origin of flying saucers. Based in Wright Patterson Air Force Base, the hope of the project was clearly to obtain some of this supposed flight technology for the U.S., for right there on base was the Air Technical Intelligence Center, America’s own apparatus for reverse-engineering captured German aircraft. The next year, Project Sign issued its report, Estimate of the Situation. Legend has it this report declared that saucer sightings did not match anything in the German blueprints they had, and that all evidence pointed to some non-human technology. But we don’t actually know what Project Sign’s report concluded, because its contents upset the Air Force Chief of Staff so much that he ordered all copies destroyed. In the early days of the summer of 1947, as the Air Force came to be an independent service branch of the armed forces, saucer panic may have seemed a boon, ensuring ample budget apportionment to the branch of the military tasked with protecting our skies. But after a year of being constantly bombarded by mistaken sightings, along with, we might assume, sightings of some of our own aircraft that we didn’t want people talking about, the U.S. Air Force had had enough of flying saucers and seemed to want to extricate themselves from the whole phenomenon. To this end, and perhaps partly as a backlash against the supposed Extra-Terrestrial Hypothesis in Project Sign’s report, the Air Force launched a new UFO investigation, Project Grudge, this one operating under the assumption that flying saucers could not possibly be real, seeking to debunk all saucer sightings, and generating a public relations campaign intended to convince the world that flying saucers are nonsense. The fruit of their campaign, an article in the Saturday Evening Post, convincingly attributes all saucer sightings to Aviator’s Vertigo, balloons, and the reflection of light on clouds and aircraft canopies. The article went a long way toward laying the flying saucer excitement to bed.

Project Grudge's report of August 1949. Public Domain.

In December 1949, though, flying saucer mania returned. True, a popular magazine for men, featured an article by one Donald Keyhoe entitled “Flying Saucers Are Real,” in which it was alleged that flying saucers were indeed genuine aircraft, were alien in origin, and were being actively hushed up by the government. It is true that Keyhoe was a writer of pulp fiction, but his authority on this topic derived from his background as a Marine aviator, and he claimed to have reached his conclusions after interviewing numerous officials who had stonewalled his investigation. Thereafter, Commander Robert McLaughlin, Officer-in-charge of the Naval Unit at White Sands Proving Ground in Alamogordo wrote a follow-up for True magazine detailing a saucer sighting by five Navy scientists while observing a weather balloon. These articles served to refute the Saturday Evening Post article and paint it as part of the cover-up. But might there be more to these competing articles than meets the eye? Mark Pilkington, author of my principal source Mirage Men, points out that in 1949, the Navy and the Air Force were locked in a bitter rivalry. Supporters of the newly formed Air Force had begun to spread the idea that the Navy was obsolete, as future wars would be won exclusively through strategic intercontinental bombing. When the new Secretary of State, himself a proponent of this idea of Air Force supremacy, cancelled a Navy supercarrier project in favor of an Air Force bomber project, it meant war. Officials in the Navy command structure struck back by leaking evidence that Air Force generals had dealt fraudulently with certain military contractors in building their bombers. The entire affair got so out of hand that House Armed Services Committee hearing had to be convened to squash their beef. Thus, later that year, when two Navy men stoked the flying saucer fires after the Air Force had expended so much energy to dampen them, it is perhaps not so great a leap to suggest that it was just another barrage in their internecine conflict rather than a genuine disclosure of UFO activity. But this remains, as with almost all aspects of this topic, conjecture.

We begin to see a pattern here. As at Roswell, we see different people or different forces, within the military pushing and pulling, denying the existence of flying saucers while simultaneously insisting on it. One further story illustrates this yet again, if it can be believed. In March 1950, the same month that True magazine ran its second piece on flying saucers, a mystery lecturer presented to science students at University of Denver about flying saucers landing near Aztec, New Mexico, not far from Roswell, and that the military found several dead extra-terrestrials within, which they had since been studying, along with their recovered craft. The Denver Post later outed the lecturer as an oil man named Silas Newton, and further investigation showed that Newton had gotten his information from a nutty Nazi sympathizer, Leo Gebauer, who despite his eccentricities had at one time worked for Air Research Company in Pheonix, Arizona. But rather than some state secrets to which Gebauer had become privy, the Aztec story turned out to have been taken from a hoax published in the Aztec Independent Review a couple years earlier. Nothing to see here… except that Silas Newton, in his personal journals, wrote about two men from a “highly secret US government entity” approaching him, informing him that they knew his story was a hoax but encouraging him to continue telling it nonetheless, promising to provide protection to both him and Gebauer if they did so. It’s easy to dismiss this as BS from a BS artist, but interestingly, two years after this, when Newton and Gebauer were convicted of fraud for selling people mining gear they claimed was reverse-engineered from extra-terrestrial tech, their sentences were suspended. Had they finally called in a favor from the government men whose purposes their outrageous tales somehow served? And why were these shadowy figures, if they existed, so interested in the spreading of a flying saucer hoax among university students? Interestingly, Newton’s lecture concluded with a questionnaire to determine how believable these educated young people found the story. And there were further reports of follow-up surveys among the students conducted by none other than Air Force Intelligence. Having been foiled in their attempts to suppress flying saucer excitement, had the Air Force then decided to conduct some market research to see how they might use flying saucer tales to their own advantage?

Front page Denver Post story about fraudsters Silas Newton and Leo Gebauer. Public Domain. — Front page *Denver Post* story about fraudsters Silas Newton and Leo Gebauer. Public Domain.

Interestingly, major elements of this story about the recovery of alien spacecraft and corpses in the desert at Aztec, although a known hoax, would decades later show up as part of the resurgent myth of the Roswell UFO crash. And promised proof of this story would be used as a carrot by Air Force Intelligence on numerous occasions, coaxing UFO investigators to inform on their fellow UFOlogists and convincing them to seed disinformation into the growing community of UFO investigators. Things were going to get a whole lot crazier from there, and people were going to be driven a whole lot crazier, as you will see in the continuation of this series on UFO Disinfo. In the meanwhile, I await the release of the Pentagon UFO report with bated breath, certain that nothing of real interest will be contained therein and at the same time hopeful there may be something of interest to our topic. However, as I further unravel the Gordian knot of US counter-intelligence and perception management that has been all bound up with UFO sightings from the very beginning, I begin to doubt that this is anything more than stagecraft. Some in the upper echelons of the American intelligence and security apparatus seem to have concluded that it may benefit us to acknowledge recent sightings (and only the recent ones) and to admit or feign ignorance about them. And come to think of it in those terms, this is nothing we haven’t seen before. The only real difference seems to be that, because of advances in technology, it’s no longer possible to blame these sightings on vertigo and optical illusion.

UFO Disinfo: Part One - Roswell, Maury Island, and Beyond.

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