SUBJECT: ALIEN BODIES AT WRIGHT-PATTERSON AFB FILE: UFO2389
Filename: Basement.Art
Type : Article
Author : Frank Kuznik
Date : 08/??/92
Desc : Article on Alien bodies at Wright-Patterson AFB
Note : Original From Air & Space Magizine Vol 7, Num 3 (Page 34)
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It's the story that won't die.
A legion of UFO buffs is convinced that
Wright-Patterson Air Force Base
is hiding...
ALIENS IN THE BASEMENT
The official fact sheet on 'Project Blue Book', the Air Force program
that investigated 12,000-plus unidentified flying object sightings from
1947 to 1969, reads like your standard military briefing paper -- until
the very end. Then it drops this incredible disclaimer: "There are not
now, nor have there ever been, any extraterrestrial visitors or
equipment on Wright-Patterson Air Force Base."
Little alien corpses kept frozen and hidden away on an Ohio military
base may sound like sci-fi lunacy to the uninitiated. But for 45 years,
this is one UFO story that's refused to go away. And for that the
military has mostly itself to blame. It was, after all, Roswell Army
Air Field in New Mexico that started the whole business in the summer
of 1947 by announcing that it had recovered a crashed "flying disc".
Never mind that they were quick to say, No, wait, make that a weather
balloon. Over the last decade in particular, a small army of authors,
researchers, and TV hucksters has done a highly imaginative job of
filling in the details of the "Roswell Incident," as it's come to be
known. Unlike most UFO yarns, their stories are based on enough
interviews, photographs, and other evidence to seem...well, not
impossible.
Ultimately all the stories lead to Wright-Patterson, the headquarters
of 'Project Blue Book' and the site where the wreckage of the spaceship
and the bodies of its crew were allegedly taken for analysis. Then they
come to an abrupt halt. "We know the material was taken to Wright-Pat,"
Mark Rodeghier of the J. Allen Hynek Center for UFO Studies says. "But
that's where the trail grows very cold: we don't have any sources
there."
That's enough to get the gears of any redblooded space writer racing.
What if I could spend some time poking around the labs at Wright-
Patterson? There's no telling what I might find. Admittedly, the odds
of actually coming back with the goods are slim. But as longtime UFO
investigator Don Berliner points out, "It's potentially the biggest
story ever."
My first contact with the base public relations staff makes me think
I might be on to something. "The little green men story? I get three
calls a week about it," says Major Aurelia Blake. She assures me
there's no crashed saucer or alien corpses under wraps, but says I'm
welcome to tour the base. A few hours later, however, she calls back.
"Why don't you think about doing something else?", she asks. "We've got
some great wind tunnels here."
The Roswell Incident dovetails with the birth of the modern era of
flying saucers, so named in June 1947 when a private pilot reported
seeing nine disc-shaped objects flying over Washington's Mt. Ranier
"like saucers skipping on water." That sighting triggered a nationwide
wave of UFO reports that made headlines for months afterwards.
Far and away the wildest headlines came out of Roswell, where two
weeks after the Mt. Ranier sightings a sheep farmer named Mac Brazel
clumped into the sheriff's office to report something he couldn't
identify cluttering one of his fields -- something, he said, that had
fallen out of the sky and broken into shiny pieces.
Brazel's ranch lay some 75 miles northwest of Roswell near a tiny
town called Corona, in a stretch of scrub desert neatly triangulated by
what were then arguably the three most security-sensitive military
installations in the world: the Roswell Army Air Field, home of the
509th Bomb Group, the world's only atomic bomb squadron; Los Alamos,
where the bomb had been developed and was still being refined; and the
White Sands Missile Range. Not surprisingly, Sheriff George Wilcox
suggested that Brazel report his find to authorities at the nearby
Roswell base.
After sending two officers out to reconnoiter the crash site and
retrieve some samples, the 509th brass went ballistic, mounting a full-
scale recovery effort and firing off its "flying disc" press release.
On Tuesday, July 8, newspapers across the country carried headlines
announcing that Roswell Army Air Field had captured a flying saucer.
The next day, though, many carried a follow-up story explaining that
the wreckage wasn't a flying saucer after all. After being flown to
Fort Worth Army Air Field, it was identified as the remains of a
weather balloon. An Associated Press wire story that ran in a number of
papers on July 9 described the wreckage as "consisting of large numbers
of pieces of paper covered with a foil-like substance, and pieced
together with small sticks, much like a kite. Scattered with the
materials over an area about 200 yards across were pieces of gray
rubber."
Before my trip to Wright-Patterson, I tracked down Walter Haut, the
retired base public information officer who wrote the infamous press
release, and asked him if he ever actually saw the wreckage. "No, and I
feel like an idiot every time somebody asks me that," he said ruefully.
"I got a call from the base commander, who basically dictated what was
in the press release."
And how did he feel when the bottom dropped out of the story? "I
probably wiped the perspiration from my brow and said Thank Goodness,
we're of the hook now," he said. "Very frankly, I don't think I
believed that we had something from outer space. I think most of us
felt we were being hoodwinked somewhere down the pike."
This is not, incidentally, what Haut believes today. "I feel there
was a crash of an extraterrestrial vehicle near Corona," he says
firmly. What happened in the intervening 45 years to change his mind?
For a long time, not much. Nobody questioned the military in 1947, so
when the captured disc metamorphosed into a weather balloon, the
explanation was accepted and the story largely forgotten. It was a
revival of the Roswell story in the '70s that convinced Haut and
thousands of others that the Air Force really hadn't been on the up and
up. It began inauspiciously in the person of Stanton Friedman, a
nuclear physicist and well-traveled UFO lecturer. At his talks,
Friedman would occasionally meet people who had been in New Mexico in
1947. Bit by bit, their stories began to form a picture startlingly
different from the official version's. Friedman dug further with the
help of a friend, William Moore, who in turn enlisted writer Charles
Berlitz of Bermuda Triangle fame to turn their findings into a book
published in 1980 called 'The Roswell Incident'.
The book blows off the weather balloon explanation as a hastily
concocted cover story and argues that the Air Force really did recover
a crashed saucer, as well as several alien bodies. The wreckage and
bodies were taken to Wright-Patterson for analysis, it said, and
everyone involved in collecting, transporting, and studying them became
part of a massive conspiracy of silence. There's a lot of chaff in 'The
Roswell Incident', including some blatant hokum about Gemini and Apollo
astronauts spotting flying saucers. But the main idea -- that the
government was sitting on a captured saucer -- fell on some fertile
ground. Other books followed, including last year's 'UFO Crash at
Roswell'. Television found the story irresistible. The series 'In
Search Of' did an episode on it. A trashy 1988 production called 'UFO
Cover-up? Live' featured two mysterious "intelligence sources" who
revealed that the captured aliens like Tibetan music and strawberry ice
cream. And in September 1989, 'Unsolved Mysteries' featured the story
on its season premiere, attracting an impressive 28 million viewers.
The captured saucer idea even took root overseas. "I was visiting
Kapustin Yar, a Soviet missile base, two years ago when the head of the
base asked me if we had any UFOs," recalls Gregg Herken, chairman of
the National Air and Space Museum's department of space history. "I
thought he was kidding at first, but he turned out to be quite
serious."
It's a good thing the Soviet commander never saw the UFO exhibit in
the world-famous United States Air Force Museum adjacent to Wright-
Patterson, which the PR staff had encouraged me to check out before
coming to the base. It turns out to be a single glass case filled with
fake photos and hoax items that wouldn't cut it on the old Flash Gordon
serials. A blob of melted plastic, a big hunk of cinder, a crumpled
metal ball stuffed with radio tubes, springs, and speedometer cable --
this is it? An Air Force museum so comprehensive it has a wall covered
with the history of spark plugs , and there's nothing to show for 23
years of UFO investigations but a pile of rusty junk? Very odd.
On to the base itself, a vast tract bigger than half of Dayton's
suburbs. An alien rescue team could search the place for six months and
not find their friends. But I know where to look. One place is the
infamous Hangar 18, where the bodies were allegedly stored in deep
freeze. Another is Wright Laboratory, one of four Air Force
"superlabs," where nearly $1 billion is spent annually on research in
propulsion and power, avionics, materials, electronics, and the like.
If they learned anything from the saucer, there should be signs of it
in the labs. I also, want to see the Foreign Aerospace Science and
Technology Center, the secret facility where the Air Force takes apart
foreign aircraft to see what makes them tick.
The first thing I learn is that there is no Hanger 18. There's a
Building 18 complex that at one time housed "cold cells," rooms that
could be cooled to sub-zero temperatures to test engines under Arctic
conditions. In 18A I meet Fred Oliver, a folksy division chief and
engineer who's become the base spokesman on the subject of aliens. He
commiserates with me in my disappointment at finding generic government
offices. "I know," he says, "you picture walking into a building with a
big curved top where you go through all these guards, and run your card
through a cipher lock, then there's this spaceship going 'rrrrr, rrrrr'
that gives off a green glow."
Exactly. How does he know that scene in such detail? Before I can
ask, he's deep into a Viewgraph briefing. You can't meet anybody at
Wright-Patterson without getting a Viewgraph briefing; it's as
automatic as a handshake. It's also a lot like the lessons you used to
get in high school on overhead projectors, except that instead of
scrawled equations or French verb conjugations you get to look at big
bright slides of organization charts and turbine engines. Finally
Oliver works his way to the bottom of a six-inch stack of slides and
asks, "Any questions?"
"Where are the bodies?"
"There are no bodies," he says kindly, like a dad breaking the bad
news about the tooth fairy. But if a saucer did crash-land, wouldn't
the remains be at Wright-Patterson? "That's a sensible conclusion," he
admits. "Since the beginning of time, this has been the nation's center
of aerospace R&D."
I suggest that a good strategy for hiding aliens might be to act like
you've got nothing to hide, bring reporters on base, then overwhelm
them with Viewgraphs. "And walk them till they drop," Oliver agrees.
"I'm going to get in trouble for saying this, but give us some credit -
- wouldn't you think we'd be smart enough to hide the bodies if they
were here? Do you really think you'd get to see them?"
In any case, after a tour of the Building 18 complex, it's clear I'm
not going to see them there. The cold cells are long gone, gutted and
replaced with recon-camera maintenance and repair shops and testing
equipment. The basement of 18A has a huge facility that can pump
pressure- and temperature-controlled air to a number of "environmental
chambers," but there's nothing resembling a 24-hour cryogenic
operation. If the bodies were here, they're gone now.
My next interview is with Keith Richey, chief scientist of Wright
Laboratory. The determined set of his face tells me he obviously has
better things to do with his time that talk about aliens. "Do you have
the Air Force fact sheet on Project Blue Book?" he asks as soon as I
broach the subject. "My own personal knowledge corroborates that. So
that's where we are on that subject."
Richey has fascinating tales to tell of running a superlab and
developing the kind of weaponry we saw in Desert Storm and how we'll be
able to launch the next generation of smart bombs from hundreds of
miles away instead of just a few and still park them up somebody's
keister. Eventually I steer the conversation back to aerodynamics and
ask how efficient a saucer shape would be for flying.
"Well, it's not very efficient," Richey says. "What you want is a
multiplication factor of 20 times the lift for the amount of drag you
generate, and it doesn't generate much lift."
I try a different tack. What if something dropped out of the sky
tomorrow and was brought to Wright Laboratory for analysis? Could
Richey and his 2,000 scientists and engineers figure out what makes it
go?
"We could do it," he says, pride getting the best of his no-nonsense
demeanor. "We could take it apart, analyze it, and I don't know how
long it would take, but with enough effort we could find out what it
would do." So presumably if a saucer had shown up at the base in
'47...? Richey doesn't hesitate. "You would have seen it flying. You
would probably be buying tickets for it by now."
Before I can weigh the implications of that remark, I'm hustled off
to the Flight Dynamics lab for a Viewgraph briefing by Colonel Dick
Borowski. A congenial fighter pilot who saw action in Vietnam, Borowski
smiles and says, "I know you came looking for little green men," then
unleashes a dazzling overview of the new technologies his division is
developing. Acoustic's testing. Thermoplastics. Forebody vortex flow
control. Flight simulation. By the time he's done, I'm too dazed to ask
him where he's hiding the bodies.
My pulse quickens as I'm led down a maze of hallways and through a
heavily locked door by Richard Moss, chief of cockpit development. No
bodies in the inner sanctum, though -- just a series of rooms with
liquid crystal display screens in various test stages. The first one
shows a simplistic terrain with targets in the air and on the ground,
all irritatingly out of focus. "Here, put these on," a technician says,
handing me a pair of Captain Video sunglasses with tiny on/off buttons
on the frames.
"Are these a souvenir?" I ask her.
She laughs. "Those cost $2,000."
I look at the screen, where suddenly everything is not only in focus
but in 3D. There's a truck in the forefront, then some mountains, then
-- wait a minute! A saucer-shaped object is hovering in the sky.
"That's a flying saucer," I tell the tech excitedly.
She squints at the screen. "The red thing? I don't know what that
is." She looks at Moss.
"That's a transport aircraft," he says.
There's more rooms and more screens, but I'm too preoccupied to pay
attention. When Moss finally escorts me from the building, he gives me
a meaningful look and says, "You've only seen the tip of the iceberg."
I start my second day at Wright-Patterson in the museum research
library, hoping to find the original Roswell documents that will cut
through some of the hype. When I tell the librarian what I'm looking
for, he gets a pained look and barks, "Every time they run that damned
Roswell thing in the tabloids all the crazies come out. The old man
[museum director Richard Uppstrom] says he wishes we had one of the
bodies to put downstairs and charge a dollar a pop to see. We'd never
have to ask Congress for money again."
Disappointingly, the museum's UFO files are in the same league as its
UFO exhibit. There's a ton of Blue Book summary reports along with
University of Colorado and National Academy of Sciences studies
agreeing with the Air Force's conclusion that UFOs don't merit serious
attention. There's a detailed aerodynamic analysis of virtually every
shape UFOs have ever taken, pronouncing them all "impracticable." And
in year after year of briefing papers, there are remarks like this one:
"It is unlikely that positive proof of [flying saucers] existence will
be obtained without examination of the remains of crashed objects."
Exactly.
This afternoon's lab run is through the materials directorate, where
after the obligatory Snoozegraph briefing I'm handed off to Lieutenant
Colonel James Hansen. He's got a basement full of wild machinery that
tests composite metals and ceramics for the National Aerospace Plane,
the hypersonic hybrid that will fly into space.
No bodies here either. But watching strips of exotic metals being
tortured under incredible heat and pressure, I realize I may be a lot
closer to pieces of a crashed saucer than I think. I ask Hansen the
same question I asked Richey yesterday about analyzing something that
dropped out of the sky -- only this time in the past tense.
"If somebody had brought in composite material 20 years ago, we
wouldn't have had any idea what it was," he admits. "Now, we could take
it apart down to its atoms." Suddenly it all begins to add up -- the
glowing spaceship scene Oliver described, Richey's cryptic boast about
selling tickets, the saucer on the screen, and now Hansen's admission
that we've only recently been able to figure out composites. It's taken
nearly 40 years to crack the secrets of the Roswell wreckage.
And today we're developing a freak craft that can take off from a
runway and fly into space -- just like flying saucers do.
Coincidence? Think about it.
My last shot at finding the bodies is the super-secret Foreign
Technology center. It took negotiations on the order of a Middle East
peace conference to get an appointment there, and I'm pleased to see
that the public information officer waiting for me is a novice filling
in for someone who just quit. No telling where she might take me.
We drive around the building first. It's a nondescript red and gray
affair, like a warehouse in a suburban industrial park, only a lot
bigger. My guide confides that you need top-secret clearance to get
almost anywhere inside. "It's basically a huge safe," she says.
We park at the front entrance, greet an officer on the way out, and
step into what might be the lobby of Krupp's Widget Works -- except for
the heavy-duty security desk with the big control panel. I look at my
guide and make an expectant move toward the desk. She doesn't budge.
"That's it," she says.
"That's it?"
"That's all you can see."
And that's that.
No flying saucer story would be complete without an anonymous highly
placed military source who spills A Big Secret. Mine didn't materialize
until I got back to Washington, where I brooded for days over what I
had seen -- or hadn't seen, actually.
Studying a map of New Mexico got me thinking about all the secret
flying and testing that was done at Roswell and Los Alamos and White
Sands after the war. If there was ever a place where something the
military wanted kept under wraps was likely to fall from the sky, it
was central New Mexico in 1947. That thought prompted me to call my
source -- a retired Air Force officer I met while touring Wright-
Patterson who is, alas, still in a position to sensitive to allow his
name to be used. He was way ahead of me.
"All these years I've been hearing about this Roswell incident," he
said, "and knowing Air Force history like I do, and how hush-hush the
509th was, I just set it in my mind that they must have crashed with a
nuke that came close to going off, or maybe [exploded but with] a low-
level yield that we don't know about. I could never prove anything one
way or another. But with the 509th that close, and -- well, B-29s
weren't noted for not crashing, let's put it that way."
It's a nifty theory, but just a theory. Like all good stories,
Roswell expands to accommodate whatever you bring to it. That's the
nature of myths and legends -- they're detailed enough to seem real,
yet fuzzy enough to stay always just beyond the reach of objective
proof.
In that sense, it was better that I didn't find any bodies. Naturally
I'm disappointed at not having broken the biggest story of all time.
But I've done my part for the legend. Substantive or not, Roswell grows
a little with each retelling. And this one lets you have it both ways.
If you prefer a purely rational, scientific world, you can take comfort
in the fact that my mission was -- just as you knew it would be --
doomed to failure.
If you prefer a world filled with mystery and intrigue, well, I
haven't disturbed that either. The Air Force is still covering up a
big-time screw-up...or just now cracking the secret of interstellar
propulsion...or sitting on the biggest cosmic kick in the pants since
the Big Bang.
Whatever.
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