Earth (16 page)

“The UFO had impacted very close to the edge of a flat rocky ledge overlooking the Rio Grande river. [It seemed as though] it had first bounced and then skidded about three hundred yards generally toward the south, plowing up a mound of dirt ahead of it as it went along. The main object split into three large sections, and smaller debris was scattered all along the skid line. The top of the object, which was dome-shaped, broke off and landed about fifty feet beyond the main body of the UFO. The main section, which originally was a flattened disc between twenty-one and twenty-five feet in diameter, broke into two larger pieces and many smaller ones.

“The bottom part of the UFO, ripped into two large sections, was partially embedded against a sand mound, while the dome lay about fifty feet beyond it. Willingham and his partner noted a long plume of shiny metal debris that extended along the long furrow, where the object hit and skidded on the sandy desert soil prior to coming to rest. Judging from the length of the furrow, Willingham guessed the object was traveling ‘pretty fast' before hitting the ground.”

After landing, Willingham eased the Aeronca onto the rocky ledge between the crashed disc and the edge of a small cliff leading down to the Rio Grande.
12

The Mexican military were “just looking at everything,” Willingham recalled. “Of course, it was still red-hot, and they were staying back from it.” At this time, a Langtry resident paddled across the shallow river to talk to Willingham and Perkins, relating his sighting of the flaming object, which had nearly clipped the top of his house. At first, the armed soldiers had assumed that Willingham and Perkins were part of an American recovery team they had been expecting. However, as the pilots followed the skid marks to the craft itself, they were ordered at gunpoint to leave the area, though they kept studying Willingham's Air Force uniform, as if still wondering if he was part of an official investigation.

Buying time, Willingham, who spoke Spanish, chatted with one of the officers, a Lieutenant Martínez of Mexico City, who offered to take Willingham closer to the main impact site. Perkins was not included in the invitation. As the pilot approached to within thirty-five or forty feet of the burning-hot object, two soldiers carrying rifles tipped with bayonets prevented him from getting any closer. Glancing in the direction of the separated dome section, he noted that it was more heavily guarded than the rest of the debris and was warned to keep away. Willingham also observed a number of Mexican government officials at the crash site.
13

“It was at this point,” Ruben and Noe told me, “that he [Willingham] saw the ET bodies, which is a fact he withheld from us during the writing of our book but later revealed on the Jeff Rense radio program on March 8, 2010. He disclosed for the first time his recollection of three strange,
non-human entities that he saw inside the ruptured hull of the crashed UFO. Willingham said two of the bodies were badly mangled but one was fairly intact. The entities wore no clothing of any kind. He was fascinated by the arms of the creatures, which he described as being ‘like broomsticks.'”
14

As the light was fading, Willingham joined Perkins and headed toward their plane. Determined not to take off without having retrieved some evidence (he had not thought to bring a camera with him), he picked up one of the many fragments of shiny metal, still warm, wrapped it in his handkerchief, and put it in his pocket. They took off at about 16:30. After a refuelling stop near Waco, they headed back to Corsicana.

The following day, Willingham filed a detailed report at Carswell Air Force Base about the incident, which was forwarded to Colonel Miller, commander of the Air Force Reserve unit. At some point later, Miller summoned Willingham to his office. Also present were two of the other pilots he had been flying with during the initial sighting. After Willingham had related details of his experience in Langtry, there was little response. But he was later to receive several disturbing telephone calls from various personnel, including a general and a major in Air Force Intelligence, warning of “consequences” if he related to others what he had seen.
15

The Metal Artifact

The curved metal artifact was about the size of a man's hand and half an inch thick, of a grayish-silver coloration and extremely light, with more than twenty precisely crafted holes in a honeycombed pattern on one side. (A sketch of the artifact made by Willingham in 1978 for a Japanese television program is reproduced in the Torres/Uriarte book.) Ridges on the other side or sides looked to Willingham “as if this piece had been broken off from a larger object…. The outside was kind of a dark gray and the inside of it was kind of orange-colored.”

A keen metallurgist, Willingham ran a series of tests, including several with a cutting torch. At temperatures from 3,200 to 3,800 degrees Fahrenheit, the metal became hot but would not melt. “The cutting torch made the metal turn slightly blue for a while, but it did no lasting damage,” he
reported. “We tried grinders and everything else, but nothing would even touch it.”

Most unfortunately—as it transpired—Willingham did not take any photographs of the metal. He flew the fragment from Texas to a Marine Corps metallurgy laboratory in Hagerstown, Maryland, where a major applied the same tests, with identical results. Further tests were needed, he said, after which he would get back to Willingham. The following day, the major phoned and apologized, explaining that he had to move out of the building. When Willingham called back later and asked to speak to him, he was informed that no such person worked there, and no records existed of either the metal or the tests carried out. A further visit to Hagerstown revealed only that it would not be in his best interests to pursue the matter.
16
Further warnings ensued. Two Air Force Intelligence personnel—a General White
17
and a Major Sealton—warned Willingham to tell no one, even if commanded to do so by a superior.

Within two weeks of the experience at Langtry, Willingham flew over the same area to see what had happened. Not a fragment of the device could be seen. As in other crash/retrieval cases, the entire site had been wiped clean by (I presume) a technical intelligence team,
18
also known as a “T-Force,” usually assigned the responsibility of collecting flying discs at that time.
19

In 1967, Colonel Willingham made the mistake of mentioning his experience to a reporter for a weekly newspaper in Pennsylvania. On retiring from the Air Force with many decorations in 1971/72, he was informed that he would not be receiving a pension. “Of course, they didn't tell me that it was because of what I said,” he told Torres and Uriarte, “but I figured it out. Twenty-six years of service went down the drain….”
20

Project Blue Book

From about 1959 to 1963, Colonel Willingham was assigned to Project Blue Book, the third of the U.S. Air Force's official investigations into unidentified flying objects (1952–69). “Of the two thousand cases that my Blue Book team looked at, I would say that at least half of them were totally unexplained,” he acknowledged—at variance, not surprisingly, with Blue Book's official figures. The cases Willingham investigated were mostly
on the East Coast, but occasionally he was ordered further afield, such as to Chile and Venezuela:

“We were contacted by people down in South America who had seen these objects flying around and were very scared. So I went down there in an F-100 [Super Sabre] and we flew surveillance, looking for the UFOs in the places where they had been seen. Some of these were night missions, flying up and down the coast, hoping to run into something…. If something was sighted at night, one of the planes would be sent out, and another would take off shortly afterward to provide cover for the first plane. We were armed, but we were instructed to fire only when we faced danger to our own plane. If they were doing something to screw up our airplane, we could fire.”

He did not see any unidentified objects during these surveillance missions—officially logged as “test flights”—with the 192nd Interceptor Squadron.
21
Of incidental interest, a USAF cover reference for UFOs is/was “Unusual Helicopter Activity.” Furthermore, I have learned that foreign cases were handled by Project Fang—not Blue Book.
22

Willingham later learned about two other crashes of alien craft: one in North Texas, somewhere near Dallas, in the mid-1960s, when three alien bodies had been recovered. “They shut that one up really tight,” he recalled. “It was hushed up very quickly.” He was keen to visit the location, but access was denied. A second crash—also said to have involved the recovery of bodies—occurred in Colorado earlier in the 1960s. Yet again, the military clamped down on the incident.
23
He did not dismiss the possibility that the craft he saw might have been damaged by U.S. military intervention—a strong likelihood, in my view, given that since the 1940s quite a number of alien vehicles have been brought down to earth by the military.

Investigator Kevin D. Randle, who has served with the U.S. Air Force and the Army National Guard, involving numerous tours on active duty as an intelligence officer, believes the entire Willingham story to be a fabrication. He cites, for example, the lack of any military documents proving his service in the Air Force Reserve. All he could find in St. Louis, Missouri, where records of former military personnel are housed, was a record of Willingham's service in the Army from December 1945 to January 1947.
What few records Willingham has produced are dismissed as fabrications or irrelevant. One is a Reserve Order which, Randle reports, “seemed to indicate that Willingham had served twenty years of combined active duty and reserve time and would be eligible for a pension when he reached age sixty. That applies for those who have not done twenty years of active duty.” And so on.
24

Noe and Ruben sent me copies of several of the few documents pertaining to Willingham's service record which have been located. Though I am no expert, the Reserve Order does appear to have some questionable anomalies. But it has to be said that pilots and other military personnel who encounter UFOs frequently discover that many of their service records are either missing, or, as in the previous case of Colonel Roy J. Edwards, altered significantly.

Both Noe Torres and Ruben Uriarte find Colonel Willingham highly credible. So do I. “Originally,” Noe explained to me, “we got started on the Robert Burton Willingham (RBW) case based on the recommendation of Dr. Bruce Maccabee [a retired U.S. Navy physicist], who had studied the case for years and considered RBW a credible witness with nothing to gain by lying. RBW showed us countless photographs and [pieces of] paperwork from his military days…. Randle contends that RBW never served in the U.S. Air Force or Air Force Reserve. When RBW has come forward with documents that show he served in these units, Randle has called them fraudulent.

“Ruben and I have cooperated one hundred percent with all Randle's many requests for information about the case over the past two years, but it became increasingly frustrating due to his unsupported dismissal of key documents and his closed-mindedness about the case. Someone specifically assigned the task of discrediting RBW could not possibly have done a better job of it. Randle has stated to us several times that RBW should be charged with violation of a U.S. law that prohibits persons from falsely claiming that they received certain military honors or medals. But Randle can no more prove that these claims are false than we can conclusively prove that they are true, since the military has conveniently lost most of RBW's service records.

“Willingham was ordered by military intelligence not to disclose, and
he lives in fear about that to this very day. He has told us that ‘they' have already tampered with his life, his military retirement benefits, etc. He admits to being deliberately vague and even misleading when Todd Zechel [ex-National Security Agency] and NICAP [National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomena] first contacted him in the late 1970s. If you read his 1978 affidavit, he does not give a date for the UFO crash. The 1948 date is something Randle injects to discredit RBW, but RBW never gave that date…. In his 1978 affidavit, he was being evasive in order to protect his own skin.

“We have spent hours face-to-face with RBW. He is a straight shooter, down-to-earth, matter-of-fact personality with an extremely conservative background. Like Randle, Ruben and I also wish we had more hard-core, indisputable documentary evidence regarding RBW's military service, but the fact is, we may never get it….”
25

Large Craft Intercepted Over the U.K.

It was the height of the Cold War. On the night of May 20, 1957, Milton John Torres, a 25-year-old lieutenant serving as a U.S. Air Force fighter pilot with the 514th Fighter Interceptor Squadron in the 406th Fighter Expeditionary Wing, was on standby at the Royal Air Force base at Manston, Kent, when he received an urgent order to scramble and intercept an unknown object. He raced to one of the two F-86D Sabre jets on permanent five-minute alert at the end of the runway and took off.

“The initial briefing indicated that the ground [control] was observing for a considerable time a blip that was orbiting East Anglia,” Torres later wrote in his unofficial report to the U.K. Ministry of Defence in 1988, released in a batch of documents in 2008:

“All the controlling agencies revealed that this was an unidentified flying object with very unusual flight patterns [and] motionless for long intervals. The instructions came to go ‘gate' to expedite the intercept. Gate was the term used to use maximum power (in the case of the F-86D, that meant full afterburner) and to proceed to an Initial Point at about 32,000 feet. By this time my radar was on and I was looking prematurely for the bogey [unknown object]. The instructions came to report any visual observation, to which I replied, ‘I'm in the soup and it
is impossible to see anything!'