by Charles Lear, author of “The Flying Saucer Investigators.”
Just before Stanton Friedman got Roswell fever, one of the earliest saucer researchers, Leonard Stringfield, was hard at work researching and investigating reports that involved military recovery of crashed flying saucers and alien bodies. He presented the results of his work in the form of a paper titled “Retrievals of the Third Kind” at the July 28, 1978 MUFON Symposium. A three-part series by Stringfield based on that paper was published under the same title in Volume 25, numbers 4, 5, and 6, in the British magazine, Flying Saucer Review, starting with the July-August 1979 issue.
Stringfield begins his paper by presenting the “facts” that the “world public at large” and the scientific community do not believe in UFOs. He then expresses the frustration of those in the UFO community who have “no doubt that a real interloper from somewhere exists.”
FSR V 25 No. 4He describes the field of UFOlogy as standing “at a critical crossroad” as a divergence was developing between those who hold the view that “the UFO is a paraphysical or psychical visitant from another realm or another dimension,” and those who believe that UFOs are nuts and bolts saucers driven by physical extraterrestrial beings.
Stringfield’s research into crash retrievals supports the nuts and bolts hypothesis and this became the predominant view throughout the last part of the 20th century with the popularization and commercialization of the Roswell story.
According to Stringfield, “Through patience, perseverance and careful courteous diplomacy,” he wove his way “through the many shadowy mazes” and found sources who described “events which I shall call ‘Retrievals of the Third Kind.” He proclaims “Now for the first time, sufficient data have been amassed to lend support to some of the old retrieval claims.”
He then brings up a point regarding the history of UFOlogy. According to him, researchers in the 1950s, including himself, “did little more than scoff” at crash retrieval claims because of “one grand hoax.” He tells the reader that what he is referring to is the Aztec story in Frank Scully’s 1950 book Behind the Flying Saucers, which was the second flying saucer book to be published, hard on the heels of The Flying Saucers are Real by Donald Keyhoe. He notes that Scully’s story was put down “so completely” that “some researchers today wonder, in retrospect, if the book and/or its exposure were contrived.” It is indeed the case, that before Stringfield’s MUFON presentation, there are very few crash retrieval cases in the annals of UFOlogy.
The bulk of Stringfield’s paper consists of a series of summations of purely anecdotal stories from un-named sources. Stringfield calls these summations “abstracts,” and each is titled and numbered with Roman numerals. Stringfield acknowledges that the cases he is presenting, “without names to back up the informant’s testimony can be construed as hearsay.” He tells the reader that he “must make my stand on the merits of my credibility” which he trusts “has already been established in my 29 years of UFO research.”
One of the stand out examples of something that “can be construed as hearsay” is a story in “Abstract XV: Claim to have proof that UFOs are extraterrestrial,” which he says he got “first-hand” from the son of a man who heard it from his cousin who was a Major in the Air Force. According to him, many of these “informants” came to him after reading his 1977 book, Situation Red.
The stories told in the abstracts are all similar. Many involve military witnesses being blindfolded and driven to a location where there is a crashed vehicle and alien bodies, and some involve a witness observing just the alien bodies packed in crates full of dry ice.
In “Abstract XVII: New light on the ‘Scully case,” Stringfield reconsiders the Aztec case. According to him, Robert Carr, a retired professor who taught mass communications at South Florida University and was director of research at Disney Studios, “made national news in 1975 when he reopened the ‘Aztec Pandora’s Box’ during a press conference in Tampa.” The story made its way through the wire services and “researchers were caught off guard” including himself. He says he “responded with skepticism” when approached by reporters.
In the 1950s, Stringfield ran an organization he called Civilian Research Interplanetary Flying Objects for which he put out the publication Orbit. According to him, Carr had corresponded with him in those days and he looked over Carr’s letters and found them to be “well-written, factual and conservative.
Stringfield says he got in touch with Carr, and Carr was willing to allow him to use some of his Aztec “data” in his paper, but he was reluctant to allow him to use the names of his sources. He then presents Carr’s version of the story, which is similar to Scully’s, except there were 12 alien bodies instead of 16, they were wearing tight fitting clothing instead of clothing in “the style of 1890,” and they had heads that were large for their bodies and eyes that were slanted instead of looking like small humans. According to Stringfield, one of Carr’s sources was a “now deceased,” nurse “who assisted in the autopsy.”
Stringfield says that Carr also told him about President Eisenhower’s visit to Wright-Patterson Air Force Base to view the wreckage and the bodies in 1952, using the cover that he was playing golf in Palm, Beach, Florida. This is a variation of an old story that Eisenhower had met with aliens at Muroc Air Force Base while on vacation in Palm Springs, California, that comes from a 1954 letter from Gerald Light to Meade Layne of the Borderland Sciences Research Association.
In the “comment” section of Abstract XVII, Stringfield says this: “Having discussed personally with Professor Carr the reliability of his sources, I feel the Aztec affair can now be viewed with new confidence and free of the Scully stigma.”
Abstract XVIII is sub-headed “Recovery of unusual metallic fragments of remarkable strength.” Here Stringfield describes being linked by telephone with an NBC radio newsman in Chicago, Steve Tom, for an interview with former Air Force Intelligence Officer Major “J.M.,” who was living in Houma, Louisiana. According to him, the call was arranged so he could get “an account of the major’s role in the retrieval of an alleged crashed UFO north of Roswell, New Mexico, in the summer of 1947.”
Stringfield then describes the material found by a sheep rancher who reported it to the “Air Force Base” (Army Air Field is the correct term as there was no Air Force at the time) as “debris of an apparent metallic aerial device, or craft, that had exploded in the air, or crashed.”
It can safely be assumed that “J. M.” was Major Jesse Marcel USAAF, Ret. According to Stringfield, Marcel said he was sent to investigate and found many fragments of metal and parchment strewn over a one-mile-square area. He said: “The metal fragments varied in size up to six inches in length, but were of the thickness of tin foil. The fragments were unusual because they were of great strength. They could not be bent or broken, no matter what pressure we applied by hand.”
Marcel said that when the press got wind of the story, “To get them off my back, I told them we were recovering a weather balloon.” According to Stringfield, when Marcel was asked for his opinion about the fragments, “because of his technical background, he was certain that the metal and ‘parchment’ were not part of any military aerial device known at that time.” The reader might note that there is no mention of recovered bodies in Stringfield’s report. In fact, under “Comment” he notes, “If there were entities aboard no evidence was found. Had there been any bodies aboard they would have been destroyed in what appeared to have been an aerial explosion.”
In “Abstract XXII: Biological data relating to retrieved alien bodies,” Stringfield provides a “composite” put together using “anonymous medical and military sources” of the typical creatures said to have been recovered.
The creatures described are humanoids 3 1/2 to 4 1/2 feet tall with heads larger in proportion to their bodies than a human’s. The skin is said to be grey “according to most observers” although brown, beige, and tan were also reported. The description is close to that of the grey alien except for the eyes, which are said to be “slightly slanted, appearing ‘Oriental’ or ‘Mongoloid.’”
Stringfield’s report at the MUFON Symposium helped to make crash retrieval investigations respectable among UFOlogists, just as Budd Hopkins’s “Missing Time” helped remove the contactee stigma from UFO abduction stories. While Stringfield and Hopkins may have begun their work in earnest, they were instrumental in raising the tent for the circus that UFOlogy was to become in the 1980s.
This is an excerpt from the upcoming book by Charles Lear, Press Reset: UFOlogy Gone Sideways In The Late 20th Century.