The Occult Section

I always find myself on the fence about retired military personnel who come out in their twilight years and make claims that UFOs are real and that the government has aliens or alien bodies. On the one hand, it makes sense. I mean, what do they have to lose? They can’t get fired. They aren’t afraid oif the government retaliating against them in any way. So they spill their secrets. On the other hand, maybe their old age has just made them bat-shit crazy? But honestly, none of the guys I’ve seen have come across as anything but completely sane and full of conviction.

When Air Force Lt. Col. Richard French was an alleged lead investigator of Project Blue Book in the 1950s, his job was to shoot down false reports of UFOs.

Given his job, French never dreamed he’d end up in Newfoundland one day watching what appeared to him to be two extraterrestrials performing repairs on a submerged, unknown circular craft.

In Washington, D.C., recently, the 83-year-old retired officer testified at the Citizen Hearing On Disclosure panel of six former members of Congress about his work as a UFO debunker in 1952.

French recounted how the Newfoundland incident unfolded decades ago, in the early 1950s, after two UFOs were seen by many people off the coast of St. John’s. French’s superiors ordered him to look into the situation.

“They said, ‘We have a UFO report and we want you to investigate it,’ and that was standard for what I was doing,” French told The Huffington Post. “They told me there were two of them involved and that they were deep under the water, after entering the water doing roughly 100 miles an hour.

“There were a lot of people assembled on the wharf, at least 100 standing around just looking in amazement at the water, including several local policemen.”

French recalls the water was very clear and he could see two circular craft, each one about 18 feet in diameter and approximately 3 feet thick. He said the two objects were floating below the surface of the water, a couple of feet apart, not more than 20 feet from the shore. And he saw two beings in the water near the ships.

“The first thing I saw was the UFOs, and it was apparent to me that they were doing something to the craft, and I couldn’t really tell what because they were on the bottom side of it and not visible to me except when they would occasionally get over to the side where I could see them. The water was fairly clear and I could see without any trouble. They weren’t down at the bottom of the [seabed] — they were about half way down.”

French told HuffPost that the two beings he saw “were about 2 or 3 feet tall, light grey in color, very thin, long arms with either two or three fingers. The top of their heads was much wider than their jaw line, their eyes were very slanted and you couldn’t see pupils in them. They looked the way [aliens] have been depicted in motion pictures.”

As the Air Force UFO debunker watched, he claims one of the ships began to rise out of the water.

“When it hit the [surface], it was going about 100 miles an hour. It then accelerated to somewhere in the neighborhood of 2,500 to 3,000 miles an hour and disappeared. It returned about 20 minutes later, slowed down to nearly a stop before it entered the water, then went down, and the two [beings] worked together.

“It took them about 20 minutes and then the two ships departed together, again slow when they exited the water, and immediately they sped up to a very high speed. I believe they were repairing [the ship] and tested that the repairs had been adequate, and then away they went.”

Ironically, French’s job at the time — as a Project Blue Book investigator — was to debunk UFOs. So, what kind of report did he file with Blue Book about this case he had personally witnessed?

“Needless to say, it was a fictitious report, as all of them were. I didn’t really say that they were UFOs — I said that there was something we didn’t know — some type of foreign or unrecognizable vehicle there. In other words, I weasel-worded it.

“Oh, I think without a doubt it was a UFO and I think there were aliens aboard it. There’s no question in my mind that was exactly what it was, and my duty was to debunk the story, so I did my best to do so.”

The events of the Newfoundland UFO and alleged aliens took place some 60 years ago, in the days before everyone had a digital camera or image-capture cell phone in their pocket. Despite the fact that there are no photographs to substantiate the report, it’s still an amazing story.

So what are we to make of this? Because it’s not the first time French has stirred up the UFO-ET pot.

Last year, he told HuffPost exclusively that there wasn’t just one UFO crash near Roswell, N.M., in 1947 — he said there were two.

I’m not sure about this whole “two crashes at Roswell” thing. I’ve heard it before, and other versions have it as two crash sites for the same vehicle. Ultimately though, without any real proof, these are just interesting stories.

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Way back in 2011, we blogged about the FBI releasing The Vault, an online repository of FBI documents that were made public due to the Freedom of Information Act. Among those files were UFO reports, and one of those reports is now, unsurprisingly, the most popular in The Vault’s database.

The FBI says its most viewed public record is a memo from 1950 recounting a strange story someone told an agent about three “flying saucers” that were allegedly recovered in New Mexico.

The so-called Hottel memo was first released in the late 1970s under the Freedom of Information Act, but it’s been viewed nearly a million times since 2011, when the FBI launched an online database of public records called the Vault.

Dated March 22, 1950, the memo was addressed to FBI Director J. Edgar Hoover and written by Guy Hottel, then head of the Bureau’s field office in Washington, D.C. Hottel was reporting what an Air Force investigator said that someone else told him about the crashed saucers.

The following details of the report have perhaps fueled the hopes of those who want to believe: “They [the saucers] were described as being circular in shape with raised centers, approximately 50 feet in diameter. Each one was occupied by three bodies of human shape but only three feet tall, dressed in metallic cloth of a very fine texture. Each body was bandaged in a manner similar to the blackout suits used by speed fliers and test pilots.”

For the record, FBI officials said in a statement on Monday (March 25) that the Hottel memo “does not prove the existence of UFOs; it is simply a second- or third-hand claim that we never investigated.”

Bureau officials also say there is no reason to believe that the story has anything to do with the infamous 1947 Roswell crash in New Mexico.

Hoover did actually order his agents to verify any UFO sightings after the Roswell incident and until July 1950. That the Hottel report was never investigated suggests “our Washington Field Office didn’t think enough of that flying saucer story to look into it,” the FBI statement says.

It is an interesting memo, to be sure. But the fact that it came in three years after the Roswell Incident tells me it may land (or crash-land?) in the realm of fiction rather than reality.

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Looking for stories to blog about here is not always as easy as it seems. Sure, there are plenty of stories out there. But unfortunately, most of them are about people photographing dust and claiming the orbs are ghosts, or blurry photos of alleged UFOs or Bigfoot, or some yokel from a paranormal group claiming they have irrefutable “proof” of a ghost on an EVP that only they seem to be able to hear, or news that there are more paranormal shows coming to SyFy or Animal Planet or the Travel Channel (because, you know, we need more bastardization and embarrassment of the field). Frankly, it all makes me want to run away from the paranormal field completely. Then I saw this press release, and it made me very happy. So happy that I almost forgot about wanting to punch people in the brain. In Search Of… was the show that got me interested in the paranormal in the first place, long before I could voraciously read anything and everything about the paranormal I could get my hands on. And now, the complete series is on DVD.

Leonard Nimoy and the paranormal…how could you go wrong?

From the Press Release:
Entering our galaxy for the first time in any home entertainment format is In Search Of… The Complete Series, available December 4th in a special DVD collector’s set from Visual Entertainment, Inc. (VEI).

Hosted by the iconic, Emmy Award-winning Leonard Nimoy (“Star Trek”), this popular documentary television series (1976-1982) traversed the globe with a team of researchers, scientists and highly skilled technicians to conduct in-depth investigations of a wide variety of mysteries and to explore the unexplained.

So popular it spawned six books, “In Search Of…” took a fresh look at such controversial and mystifying topics as the paranormal; witchcraft; notorious murders; infamous cults; conspiracy theories; missing persons, cities and ships; naturally occurring phenomena; scientific breakthroughs; age-old myths; the lore surrounding historical events and figures; and the downright peculiar!

From the rumored existence of Nazi plunder to the real-life inspiration for Sherlock Holmes to tracking the Loch Ness monster to reincarnation to UFO cover ups (and much more!), it’s an entertaining romp that no sci-fi fan, mystery enthusiast, scientific devotee or history buff will want to miss!

INCLUDES:
152 episodes on 21 discs (approx. 63+ hours).

BONUS:
Two Rod Serling-hosted specials, which aired prior to the start of the Nimoy-hosted series, and the re-launched 2002 series (eight hour-long episodes) hosted by Mitch Pileggi (“The X-Files”).

In Search Of… The Complete Series is presented in full screen (aspect ratio: 4×3) and stereo.

Here’s to hoping that Santa Claus reads The Occult Section…

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This week’s photo is from the White Sands National Monument in New Mexico. Star trails, as one might suspect, are the trails of light left by stars on film when the camera is set to a long exposure. By looking at all of the star trails left in the picture, one can see how the Earth was rotating, and the stars almost appear to be moving. This star trails photo was taken in 2009 by our own Laura Pennace at White Sands, NM, a large, sprawling desert not far from Roswell. Roswell of course is famous because of the alleged UFO crash that took place in 1947.

You can see more of Laura’s work at Pennace Photography (www.pennacephotography.com)

Technorati Tags: alien, aliens, cover-up, debunking, extraterrestrial, flying saucer, paranormal, picture, roswell, star trails, ufo, ufos, white sands, white sands national monument

As we mentioned in our Photo of the Week from yesterday, the so-called “Roswell incident” happened 65 years ago this past weekend. The crash of a UFO onto the ranch of farmer Mac Brazel, which was then retrieved by Major Jesse Marcel is now legendary. It is still a very hotly debated issue, with a number of very reliable witnesses, an even larger number of pretty unreliable witnesses and fame-seekers, and a government that comes up with new explanations every few years, none of which make a lot of sense. Anyways, I suppose it’s not too surprising that on the anniversary of such a controversial legend, an ex-CIA agent has come forward to state that the Roswell event really was a crash of an alien spacecraft. It’s also not surprising that said ex-CIA agent is peddling a new book.

“Yeah, it was just a weather balloon. Yeah, that’s the ticket!”

Happy anniversary, Roswell, N.M. It was 65 years ago today that the Roswell Daily Record blasted an infamous headline claiming local military officials had captured a flying saucer on a nearby ranch. And now, a former CIA agent says it really happened.

“It was not a damn weather balloon — it was what it was billed when people first reported it,” said Chase Brandon, a 35-year CIA veteran. “It was a craft that clearly did not come from this planet, it crashed and I don’t doubt for a second that the use of the word ‘remains’ and ‘cadavers’ was exactly what people were talking about.”

Brandon served as an undercover, covert operations officer in the agency’s Clandestine Service for 25 years, where he was assigned missions in international terrorism, counterinsurgency, global narcotics trafficking and weapons smuggling. He spent his final 10 years of CIA service on the director’s staff as the agency’s first official liaison to the entertainment and publication industries. It was during this time, in the mid-1990s, that he walked into a special section of CIA headquarters in Langley, Va., called the Historical Intelligence Collection.

“It was a vaulted area and not everybody could get in it,” Brandon told The Huffington Post. “One day, I was looking around in there and reading some of the titles that were mostly hand-scribbled summations of what was in the boxes. And there was one box that really caught my eye. It had one word on it: Roswell.

“I took the box down, lifted the lid up, rummaged around inside it, put the box back on the shelf and said, ‘My god, it really happened!’”

What exactly did the box contain that had such a powerful impact on Brandon?

“Some written material and some photographs, and that’s all I will ever say to anybody about the contents of that box,” he said. “But it absolutely, for me, was the single validating moment that everything I had believed, and knew that so many other people believed had happened, truly was what occurred,”

None of this comes as a surprise to Stanton T. Friedman, a nuclear-physicist-turned-UFOlogist, who was the original civilian investigator of the Roswell UFO incident.

In the late 1970s, Friedman began to uncover former military eyewitnesses who had been involved with the original events that took place at Roswell in 1947.

Despite the fact that the military changed its story overnight, saying on July 8, 1947 that a flying disk had been captured but claiming on July 9 that a weather balloon had been recovered, Friedman’s early investigative efforts prompted many Roswell witnesses to come forward and tell their stories. Numerous researchers have dug up more facts in the years since.

“It’s been 65 years since things took place at Roswell,” Friedman told HuffPost. “How much more widely known could it be — everywhere I’ve spoken in the world, they ask about Roswell.”

“What we really need now is the Woodward-Bernstein of the UFO world to bring out the disclosure,” said Friedman. “Maybe Chase Brandon is a foresight of something going on.

“It’s time for the retirement of the mythical part — where we don’t have all the pieces — to be replaced by the true story of what happened, all the details, and we certainly don’t have them.”

Brandon is currently promoting his book, “The Cryptos Conundrum,” a science fiction story about the history of Earth, contact with extraterrestrials and imagined cataclysmic events on our planet.

He remains steadfast about the pieces of the Roswell puzzle he’s willing to share, and he emphasizes there’s no internal CIA policy that prevents him from revealing any details of what he saw in that box at the agency headquarters.

“Nobody tells any of us that we can’t say anything about sources, methods, classified information having to do with working for the Central Intelligence Agency,” Brandon said. “We all sign a secrecy agreement that says we understand we are forbidden to do that by law, and that is an inherent part of keeping and safeguarding what we do, how we do it, why we do it, out of national security concerns.

“I’m not reluctant to talk about it — I won’t talk about it. I’m telling you there was a box that had stuff in there having to do with Roswell, and I looked through it, and it validated everything I believed in, and that’s all I have to say about it. I will go to my grave being mindful of the two hats that I wear: My personal one and the one that will forever reside on my head as a former CIA officer.”

Once again, my bullshit meter is beeping pretty loudly. And I tend to fall into the category of people who believe that something strange did indeed crash into the New Mexico desert. The first thing that raises my suspicion is the fact that Mr. Brandon is releasing a new book. It’s a work of fiction, but tying it into this story, it’s getting a lot of press. Which is never a bad thing. But even if the book release is pure coincidence, I’m a little bothered by the fact that Mr. Brandon would say that he has unequivocal evidence that the Roswell crash involved an actual alien spaceship, state how he found that evidence, but then state that he can’t say any more because of security reasons. Even though he also states that there is no CIA policy that prevents him from saying more. Really? If you’re going to go 90% of the way, why not go 100%? I agree with Stanton Friedman, the excellent researcher who initially uncovered the Roswell story. Perhaps the time is coming where more higher-ups who were involved will start telling their stories in full. I believe something happened at Roswell. I believe it is completely possible that Mr. Brandon saw things that convinced him that the Roswell UFO was extraterrestrial. Major Jesse Marcel told everything. Why won’t Mr. Brandon?

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