by UFO History Buff & Author, Charles Lear
In last week’s blog, we began looking at documents that provide a behind the scenes look at the rivalry between the Aerial Phenomena Research Organization and the Mutual UFO Network. APRO was founded in 1952 by Coral and Jim Lorenzen and MUFON was founded in 1969 by members who split off from APRO amidst bad feelings. Things came to a head during the investigation of the 1981 Cash-Landrum incident. As it was reported to have taken place in Huffman, Texas, APRO handed the case over to the director of the Houston-based Vehicle Internal Systems Investigative Team, John Schuessler, who was also the deputy director of MUFON. Coral wrote an article one and a half years after the reported incident that was published in the June 1982 Vol 30, No. 6 APRO Bulletin headlined “Rumors Permeate Cash-Landrum Case” wherein she claimed to know that what witnesses Betty Cash, Vickie Landrum, and Colby Landrum saw was a “U.S. experimental aircraft.” She also insinuated that Schuessler, MUFON director Walt Andrus, and former Project Blue Book consultant and founding director of the Center for UFO Studies J. Allen Hynek were part of a cover-up as they all had ties to various government organizations. Schuessler responded with a five-page letter to Jim Lorenzen defending himself and pleaded that if APRO had real knowledge of what it was the witnesses saw, he should share it as all three witnesses, particularly Betty Cash, seemed to have suffered the effects of radiation poisoning. This week, we’ll begin with Coral’s response.
While we noted that Schuessler responded to Coral’s claim and her insinuation, Coral’s main concerns were Schuessler’s complaints about the behavior of an APRO member who was, in Coral’s words, “hanging around the office” when the call came in about the C-L case. It seems he took the case out from under APRO and pursued it on his own in a manner not becoming an APRO investigator. According to Schuessler, this person told Mrs. Landrum that Mrs. Cash was going to die from her encounter. He also brings up the matter of a tape recording made by Cash and Mrs. Landrum that Landrum wanted back. He says they made the tapes and all they got “was a tabloid story in return.” He quotes Landrum: “I demand you (APRO) send our interview tapes back to us. We want to use them in our legal case.”
In Coral’s six-page letter to Schuessler dated July 6, 1982, she addresses the behavior of the “representative” and the situation with the recordings immediately after saying at the end of the first paragraph, “Let’s get the important material out of the way first, shall we?”
She starts by explaining that she and Jim never received a request for the tape recording (she refers to a “tape” rather than “tapes”) and were “met with frustration” in their attempts to locate it after learning of its existence in early March of 1981. According to her, when they finally did track it down in the fall of 1981, they learned it “did not come through normal APRO channels (the above address) and apparently was mailed to the office address.” She says they eventually found out that ‘“APRO’s representative’ (as you put it) had mailed the tape to Dick Donovan of the Weekly World News and received payment for it and the news lead provided.” Lorenzen concludes the third paragraph with the information that they asked Donovan for the tape and received it via registered mail on November 9, 1981.
Lorenzen then addresses the issue of the “representative” telling Landrum that Cash would die. She explains that she didn’t know about this until she talked with Landrum and was “horrified and said so.”
Lorenzen identifies the “representative” and it turns out to be Bill English, and this starts to put the Cash-Landrum incident into the context of a complex period in UFO history. English would become well-known in the UFO community due to his claim that he saw a document titled “Project Grudge/Blue Book Report 13” that had, among other startling “revelations,” alien autopsy photos and reports of human mutilations. He lectured about this along with fellow “UFO Darksiders” John Lear, Bill Cooper, and Don Ecker during the 1989 MUFON Symposium in a special room set up by Lear as they were not permitted to speak as part of the symposium proper due to protests by influential MUFON members even though Lear was hosting.
The night before at the symposium proper, Bill Moore had shocked his audience with the revelation that he had made a deal in 1980 with self-proclaimed Air Force Office of Special Investigations CIA-trained disinformation agent Richard Doty to spread disinfo among and keep an eye on certain members of the UFO community in exchange for inside information on government UFO secrets. The crowd became extremely hostile and Greg Bishop, who was present, is quoted in Adam Gorightly’s 2021 book Saucers, Spooks and Kooks saying “Bill English said ‘I’m going to get the firehose.’ and ran out.”
In 1980 Moore was a member of APRO and was on its board of directors. This presents the strong possibility that Doty was the “inside source” of the information Coral claimed to have had about the object seen by Cash, Landrum, and Landrum. Curt Collins wrote about this in a blog headlined “Cash-Landrum UFO Disinformation: Rick Doty & Bill Moore” on his blogspot.com site Blue Blurry Lines. There, he presents an excerpt from a group of documents archived on the Wayback
Machine at archive.org under the heading “The Bob Pratt Files: Sensitive” that supports this speculation.
Bob Pratt was working on a book with Moore that never got published that was to be a fictionalized account incorporating the “inside information” he was getting from Doty having to do with what would later become known to the world as the MJ-12 conspiracy. The excerpt (page 16 of the pdf) comes from a five-page typed report from Moore regarding a meeting he claimed to have had with Doty on December 29, 1981:
(4) With respect to the controversial Cash/Landrum, Dayton, Texas, case, Doty provided the following information which he said he had obtained directly from a Houston OSI agent whom he knows:
The object in question was actually an experimental craft, developed jointly by USAF/NASA. The craft, which was under development at Ellington AFB near Houston, had been flown before with a different (conventional) propulsion system. More recently it had been fitted with an experimental nuclear system using a conventional system as back-up. The craft was somewhat circular in shape, [handwritten addition: and looked like a stingray (fish)].
On the night in question (December 29, 1980), the craft was to be test-flown from Ellington AFB (a NASA support base near Houston) to Fort Hood (near Waco) with two pilots on board. Early on in the flight, the craft developed problems with its navigational system which caused it to stray from its designated flight plan. Helicopters were called out from Ft. Hood to help guide the craft, but as they were en route, the nuclear propulsion system also failed. The two pilots experienced some problem in trying to start the back-up propulsion system, and had just about decided they would try to ditch into Lake Houston when the back-up fired and the escort helicopters arrived on the scene virtually simultaneously.
The rest of this section describes nine witnesses, all of whom are said to have been contacted by AFINTEL except for Cash, Landrum, and Landrum, “because of their involvement with civilian UFO people.” The concluding portion names Schuessler and links him to a conspiracy to cover the incident up:
One curious aspect of this case is that the chief civilian investigator (John Scheussler of MUFON) is an employee of NASA and at the same time serves as an active CIA agent. (This, said Doty, was confirmed to him by ‘a friend’ who had checked the matter out.) Since it is certain that Schuessler is aware of the real nature of this case, it must be assumed that his activities on the part of the ‘UFO investigation’ are part of the concerted effort to confuse the issue in the eyes of the public.”
Coral may have gotten wind of this from Moore as she wrote in a letter to Bob Gribble included in the “C-L APRO vs MUFON” documents (page 1 of the pdf) dated 7-19-82 “The CUFOS-MUFON gang has got to be labelled for what it is. Hang in there – things are getting interesting!”
Thanks to Curt Collins for his original research and input.