Rich Reynolds, king of the RRR Group blog (www.rrrgroup.blogspot.com), asked a very good question in a comment to my most recent post re: radar bases. He wrote:
"Paul: Where did the idea generate that radar installations, secret radar installations, were established to protect New Mexico's nuclear infrastructure? Frank Warren and Scott Ramsey couldn't have come to their belief that such facilities existed from nothing could they?"
No, they didn't just cook up the radar base idea out of thin air. It comes - as does everything else with Aztec - from good old Silas Newton, and the stories he spread around the southwest back in the late 1940s.
I explained most of this a little while ago at my blog "Aztec and the Radar Bases" (http://redstarfilms.blogspot.com/2005/03/aztec-and-radar-bases.html). In Behind the Flying Saucers, there is no reference to "radar bases" but rather to "tenescope observers" who, according to Dr. Gee (aka Leo Gebauer, see my blog "The Aztec Incident & The Mysterious Dr. Gee, http://redstarfilms.blogspot.com/2005/03/aztec-incident-mysterious-dr-gee.html), worked 24/7 watching the sky for "evidence of objects or ships" (Behind the Flying Saucers, p. 121); when they saw one, they supposedly alerted the Air Force immediately to any flying saucer which crashed or landed.
So, by the time Behind the Flying Saucers had come out, the radar bases were out, and the tenescopes were in, presumably because they were (a) more exotic sounding and (b) harder to refute, as one could always claim that they were so super secret, nobody knew about them (you hear that excuse a lot in ufology, alas).
But, the radar bases had been part of the original con story, before it got refined (as all good cons usually do). That these stories can all be traced back to Silas Newton is shown in my blog "Aztec and the Radar Bases," which refers to an AFOSI memo that shows this to be the case.
For good measure, however, here's another, even more outlandish, radar base story, from another AFOSI memo, written in January, 1950. Here is the relevant text of that memo:
"Following information furnished from newspaper article appearing in Wyandotte Ehco, Kansas City, 6 January 1950... Two weeks ago, [Rudy Fick], well know Kansas City auto dealer stopped in Denver returning from Ogden, Utah. While there he called on the Manager of the Ford Agency [Jack M. Murphy, who got his information from Morley Davies, who got it from George Koehler, who got it from Silas Newton]. Their conversation was interrupted by some engineers arriving for a meeting. One of these arrivals, a man named [Koehler] revealed some startling information. According to the story told by [Koehler], he "crashed the gate" at a radar station near the New Mexico and Arizona borders. While there he saw two of the highly secret "flying saucers". One was badly damaged, the other almost perfectly intact. They consisted of two parts, a cockpit or cabin about six feet diameter and a ring eighteen feet across and two feet thick surrounded the cabin. The cabin was constructed of a metal resembling aluminium, but the actual make of the metal has defied analysis. [Koehler] had a portion of this metal in his possession and gave it to the Ford man to send to the Dearborne Plant to analyze it. Each of the ships had a crew of two. In the damaged ship the bodies were charred; the other ship's occupants were in a perfect state of preservation although dead... According to the information given [Koehler] there are around fifty of these craft that have been found in the United States in a period of two years. Forty of these are in the U.S. Research Bureau in Los Angeles." [Emphasis added]
Needless to say, neither the AFOSI nor the editor of the Kansas City Star, to whom the story was also told, took this seriously. The AFOSI memo identified the informant as "Coulter" but this was simply an improper (phonetic) spelling of "Koehler" - who got the story from Newton.
So, again, all of the radar station stories can ultimately be traced back to one man - Silas Newton!
Incidentally, Koehler is an interesting, often overlooked, piece of the puzzle. He was the guy who arranged Newton's "Scientist X" lecture at the University of Denver, and was a close pal of Newton. How close? Koehler was married to Newton's former nurse, and the two were living in a Denver house rented by Newton, which was filled with Newton's golfing trophies.
Was Koehler in on the con? It's quite possible, given his close relationship with Newton, his propensity for spreading Newton's stories, and the fact that he skipped town shortly after the whole thing unraveled, moving to the West Coast. Or maybe he was just another of Newton's suckers.
Either way, can one take the claims noted above seriously? That there were super secret radar bases in 1947, but that Koehler could just "crash the gate," rummage around, and walk off with parts of a flying saucer? Or that fifty flying saucers had crashed within a two year period?
Of course not - unless the "will to believe" has won out over the pursuit of the truth.
Paul Kimball
2 comments:
Paul:
There is a kind of plausibility to the Scully story; that's why it's a good con.
And while your material above explains the source of the secret radar installation aspect of the Aztec tale, it doesn't make clear why Ramsey and Warren (whom I just worship for his UFO diligence) are fixated on the non-existent radar sites and the Aztec story, in toto.
There is even less peripheral information than that which has infused Roswell with a credibility for some.
Warren is not a UFO fanatic, or out-and-out believer in all things ufological.
Ramsey appears also to be a sensible person -- generally -- from what you write and know about him.
I'm still baffled why, in the face of the "evidence" that Aztec was a concocted folly, these two guys (and others) are mining this "nonsense" for some kind of reality that just doesn't exist.
Roswell I understand; there were newspaper headlines and a military press release, et cetera.
MJ-12 has some elements that could be true.
But Aztec? Nothing substantive has surfaced, ever -- just the "witness" reports that you've shown to be not only weak but silly -- the 18 inch burial of suacer debris for example.
The continuing poring over of this story by normally intelligent persons is bizarre.
Rich Reynolds
Rich:
Who knows?
Hugh Trevor-Roper was one of the most respected historians of the 20th century, and unquestionably a bright guy - but he fell for the phoney Hitler Diaries, lock, stock and smoking barrel.
A large number of UFO researchers for years accepted the "re-typed" Schulgen Memo as authentic, until Bob Todd showed them it was not.
And so on, and so on...
As I said, "who knows" what motivates the Aztec proponents to go on, against all the evidence, other than the fact that the "will to believe" can overwhelm the senses of otherwise reasonable people.
I'm sure there's a psychological answer there, but that's not my area of expertise. As a guess, though? I suspect it has something to do with the deeply ingrained distrust of governmental authority down there in the U.S., which has informed so much of your historical development since the day that the first British settlers arrived, and continues more strongly now than ever (thanks Watergate; thanks Vietnam, thanks JFK / MLK etc). There is a cultural predisposition to distrust government, the corollary of which is a predisposition to believe conspiracy theories, even when the evidence shows there is no conspiracy.
Like I said - just a guess.
Paul
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