Balloon Train

Union as recently as nineteen twelve. Since Coronado brought the first horses and sheep into the territory, the raising of live stock has been one of New Mexico's most important industries. At one time, sheep dominated the state's agricultural life, leading clothing and helping support her people. Today, cattle are perhaps of equal importance. The cattle round up is a familiar site in the Great Southwest, Cowboys driving the cattle of shipping points along the railroad and along the way. A

man's got to eat. That grub is plenty good too, Hey, partner, I'm Toby Ball and this is Strange Arrivals Episode nine. The Land of Enchantment, the beginning of the modern UFO era, is generally pegged to Kenneth Arnold's UFO sighting around Mount Rainier in but arguably the most famous UFO event in history, took place less than three weeks later in Roswell, New Mexico.

I'm sure the story is familiar, at least in its outline, but you may have the sense that it has played an important part in UFO lore since the wreckage of something was found in the scrub on mac Brazil's ranch. But that's not the case, retired Air Force pilot James mcgahey, The Roswell incident was never in Project Blue Book. It wasn't a case in there. It was never investigated by

the United States Air Force. Earlier this season, we heard Joe Nicol talk about his model of the Roswellian syndrome. It's a five step process that some UFO stories undergo. First, there's a UFO encounter. Second, the encounter is quickly explained. Third, the story doesn't really go away, it just goes underground. Fourth, While underground, the or is subjected to what Nickel calls myth making processes, as some mixture of rumors, changing memories, hoaxing,

and so on is added to the original story. Finally, five, the story resurfaces in a new form that explains away the original skeptical explanation. I don't want to spend much time on the actual seven Roswell event since many of you probably know all about it, so here's a brief recap. Skeptical investigator Joe Nicol. The Roswell incident really started on July the eights in when a whip behind the years press officer put out a press release claiming the recovery

of a quote unquote flying disc. The local paper, the Roswell Daily Record, ran a story about how Mac Brazil had come into town on with a collection of wreckage that had been strewn over a large area of his ranch. This wreckage consisted of sticks, tape, pieces of rubber, and foil paper. Were these the remains of a crash flying saucer? The newspaper quickly printed an update with an explanation for what was the weather boat and the material sticks tape, rubber,

foiled paper. We're from a weather boat, weather device, and that pretty much debunked the whole affair and was basically the death knill to that story. From a wo R news report else where, the spot of seeing flying sauces or disks was left behind. In the excitement over the discovery on the ground of a number of objects resembling desks or sauces. One object found on the ranch near Roswell, New Mexico, turned out to be a battered army weather below.

But I have to pause here and say that the story that it was a weather balloon was not true. And here is a controversy in the whole Roswell story whether the people who said it was a weather balloon were sincerely mistaken or whether they knew what it really was.

And we're putting out a false story. But what was actually found at mc brazil's ranch instead of a weather balloon, and i'll lower my voice, here was a secret United States government spy balloon from something called Project mokel James mcgahey. So the whole story ended at that point. The Air Force put out a statement saying it was just a weather balloon. Now it was a bit more than a

weather a loon in one sense. There was a secret classified project going on at Alama Gordo called Project Mogul, which was actually top secret a way to release some instrumentation in to the high atmosphere at six thousand feet carried up by a number of regular weather blooms. In this case, it was like twenty three weather balloons connected

together in a six foot train. And they have been doing this for a while, and on one of their missions they lost the weather below train when it came down, and it just so happened to come down on the ranch at which the rancher found this debreeding got drug across the desert, and that was sort of the story. But anyway, the story was was appropriately deboned, but the secrecy of local begins to work its way into the

story to make more of a conspiracy tale. But what happened the whole story went underground, and then there were lots of rumors and various things around Roswell, and there's some other Air Force tests that happened years later causing all kinds of effects of a local population believing this. And then finally a UFO believer, Stanton Freedman, found the intel officer from the original event. This intel officer was Jesse Marcel, who was a major at Roswell Army Air

Force Base. He was a TV repairman, and he told a slightly different story about what had happened those U thirty one years before. Here's Jesse Marcel talking about the materials he saw from the crash site. It was not anything from this earth that I'm quite sure of, because I was bigger and tell us almost I was familiar just about all of the two he was in aircraft and our air travel. And then a number of books got written about it, and it became one of the

most famous UFO cases in history. In Bill Moore and Charles Burlitt's published a book called The Roswell Incident, which reintroduced the crash story to the public. The book not only tells the story, but introduces new elements that are now familiar, such as government cover up and alien bodies. Though not credited as an author, Stanton Friedman was one of the primary researchers. Here he is talking about the work he and Moore did. I'm the original civilian investigator

about the Roswell incidents. Starting in Night Dylan, I located sixty two people. Within the next year and a half we were connected with the story. The first book came out, Crash at Corona, laid out the claim that what was found on mac Braswell's ranch was not a top secret balloon, but a flying saucerer, and that alien bodies were recovered. This was the basis on which the new Roswell mythology

was formed and from which it grew. Can we get this elaborate story of the Christ flying saucer and alien bodies and the alien bodies? This was an old done in one story. You know, these are handed on and the aliens were kept at some secret location, and pretty soon there's another Christ site that we've never heard of, and so on. This is just what happens over time.

I got my doctorate in English literature and folklore. Folk Ors know that given enough time, stories proliferate and told and retold and retold, and you will get these very different versions of a story that you can recognize though that's the same story, but it's now a very different version of the same story. The Roswell Crash dates back almost seventy five years. It has been in the public eye for about forty. It is the most famous UFO

case in history. As David Clark said earlier in this season, really what can you say about wasn't being said, But it turns out that people still have plenty to say about Roswell and it fits with the dynamic that we

looked at in the Ryndolshom Forest incident. There remains no public insensus for what happened at Roswell, whether the debris found there was from a secret balloon program or a crash flying saucer, and that leaves room for stories to be proffered, evaluated, and neither absorbed into the folklore or forgotten.

I talked to Ryan Sprague, the host of the Somewhere in the Skies podcast, about a number of topics for this season, and he told me about some work he had done for a television show about Roswell, and without trying to evaluate the merits of the evidence he saw and stories he heard, his experience shows how the Roswell's

story remains dynamic. I had the opportunity to do an independent investigation on Roosvelt, and this is for a television network, and I told them off the bat, I said, look, if there's nothing new that you've discovered or you want me to look into, I don't want to be a part of this because it's Roswell. People know this, they've seen it a million times, and I don't want to be connected to it. If we're just rehashing the same

stuff over and over. And to their credit, the rees archers on this television program, working in conjunction with me and my co investigator, a private investigator and Navy veteran, we found new evidence. We flew to Roswell. We met with a geologist who claimed to have debris from a possible crash of a craft and that was it for me. Man the minute this guy said he had physical evidence that he found, presumably at the Roswey UFO crash site,

I needed to see it. The guy with the evidence was Frank Kimbler, an associate professor of Earth science at New Mexico Military Institute. He has appeared in a number of UFO documentaries and television shows. We went right to the military institute where this geologist taught, and he showed us exactly how he found the location where the crash happened. Kimbler claimed that he had found metals a couple of

feet beneath the surface of the crowd our site. He also said he had found buttons consistent with army uniforms at the same time at the same site, and then he showed us the medals at first glance, it looked like any other metal out there, so that was, you know, a little I guess deflating for me. We brought it to a prominent aerospace lab in California and had attested and that's where things got really interesting. We got the results back and while the result didn't scream alien, what

you found is alien or extraterrestrial. The composition and the makeup of the medal that he claims is what he found in this desert. It was manufactured, and the alloys within this medal where things we can only dream of our aerospace flabs using right now. So again, if this was found in the desert in nineteen or had been underground for fifty something years, it was what is being used on our most sophisticated aerospace technology and shuttles right now.

So that begs the question. Was this some highly secretive advanced spacecraft that America was working on at the time, It had a crash, they needed to clean it up. Let's use this alien thing as a cover story possibly? Or what is it? Or it could be from an alien spacecraft or it could be an advanced modern alloy. The Kimbler only says he found in the desert. There was one other experience that I've never really shared with anyone.

My investigative partner Jennifer Marshall and I we were unbreak during filming for this television show and we're covering was it Aliens? Was it? This a guy in the town of Roswell. He comes up to us, he sees in our camera crew, and he starts asking questions, as anyone in a small town would when outsiders come in and you seek cameras and all of this. This guy asked what Ryan's angle on the show is going to be. Is he going to claim it was an extraterrestrial craft?

Ryan says, not necessarily, and he's like, well, I could tell you this it was an aliens and that perked our interest and they're like, okay, well what do you think it was? And he said, look, everyone in this town knows everybody. We all had a friend or a family member who was directly involved with that incident. He said, for me, it was my great grandfather, and I can tell you right now it was not aliens. So of course we're going to press him on that. We're like, okay, well,

what was it? What was it? And he went into this story that I'd heard in the past, but I didn't put much credence into it. This was a very early, top secret program for spaceflight. I mean we're talking the

early early days of high altitude tests and whatnot. So this guy told us that the American government, we're using individuals, children to be specific, who were runaways or who were um left to the corners of society, whether they were mentally disabled or physically disabful, and they would use these kids, put them in these high altitude balloons or or craft of some sort, and send them up to see how

far they could survive in the atmosphere. And one of these things came down and that's what they found on the ranch and Roswell. This is a pretty dark story, obviously, and as Ryan says, it's a variation on an existing story about test flights and crashes and government cover up of advanced weapons systems. And that's why so many military officials claimed we've seen bodies at the time, and that

they were they didn't look human. If we're going to go back to this idea that they could have been children, they were very small, some of them had physical disabilities. So these are two stories from one person who is actively involved in looking at the UFO phenomenon. You'll notice that the stories point to different explanations for the crash,

use different methods of authentication, and are mutually exclusive. One explanation points to either an advanced military craft of some sort or an alien vehicle, and supports this story with a piece of alleged physical evidence. The other story takes the evidence that the wreckage was from a high altitude balloon and adds the part about children being victimized in

a terrible experiment. These explanations cannot both be true, but these are the kind of stories that keep the Roswell legend going, creating new narratives or adding twists to old narratives. My sense is that there's no pulling the Roswell incident back to the original story that was reported in the legend is too deeply ingrained in our culture at this point. There are innumerable books and episodes of television programs about Roswell.

A series of young adult books about human looking alien teenagers at Roswell High School that was turned into a TV show, The Alien Autopsy Special of Fox Television, The Alien Autopsy version of The Child's Game Operation, an annual UFO Festival and on and on. It is the foundational event from which our perception of the government and UFOs sprang. And it's a special interesting that when the story reserviced

in it was brought back by civilian researchers. When Project Bluebook closed and with it the official government inquiry into UFOs, the impetus for investigation fell on people outside the government, and while civilians took the lead in the nineteen seventies and eighties, the Air Force was not content to leave them to their own devices, and the efforts undertaken by the Air Force to undermine this civilian research has played a role in shaping our understanding of UFOs today after

the break. One of the stranger aspects of the developing folklore was the part that the US government and in particularly the Air Force, played in advancing disinformation about UFOs. We're going to look at some of the alleged instances of this disinformation campaign in the next few episodes. A lot of the insight we have into this effort comes from the tricky figure of Richard Doughty. I'm Richard Doughty. I'm a former intelligence officer with the Air Force Office

Special Investigations. I worked in intelligence from nine seventy eight to nine. I was in the regular Air Force for four years. I went to college. After college, I was recruited in the Intelligence Service and I worked at Curtland Air Force Base here now Buquerque. I worked at DEBT three Flight Test Center and what you call what they call Area fifty one in Nevada. The Air Force often Special Investigations is the criminal investigative arm of the United

States airf Force. They investigate criminal activities, fraud activities, and counter intelligence counter espionage. And that's what I did. I did exclusively just counterintelligence and counter espionage for a FOS I. Richard Doughty is an important figure in our story because he admittedly passed disinformation to the UFO community in the nineteen eighties, and this disinformation became part of the greater

UFO narrative. But when listening to him, it's very important to remember that his job was to lie to people about UFOs, and there's no reason to believe that he's telling the truth now. I interviewed him over the course of about two hours about a number of subjects and found that when he was talking about people that he knew and operations he was involved in. What he said often lined up what others involved in these incidents have

written or said. When the conversation strayed into the subject of actual UFOs and alien contact, I definitely felt that he was promoting the same false stories that he has

for decades. So as we look at some of these intrigues, particularly in the nineteen eighties, I want to be very clear that many of the claims that he makes are in keeping with his past as an agent of disinformation, and as we talked about earlier in the season, whether the story he is telling is factual or not is less important than the story itself, but don't take his

claims about aliens as factual. With that said, I didn't ask Rick specifically about Roswell, but it came up when I asked him about how he was oriented to his job infiltrating the UFO community. At the time, he was stationed at Curland Air Force Base in Albuquerque, New Mexico, an enormous facilit of the encompassing about eighties square miles.

While stationed at Curtland, there was an incident that occurred in a remote secretive area of the base, and it fell within my purview of counterintelligence operation, so I didn't have a proper clearance to access to certain information pertaining to this. So I was then briefed into the program. And the program involved the United States government's knowledge in contacts with extra trustrials, the investigation of UFO activities on or near a base or all all over the United States.

It was a highly classified program. I had to get a special clearance for it. The films and the briefings that we obtained, it was just wasn't just me. There were some others in the room and we were being briefed pertained to the United States involvement with E T S and UFOs from on and this was in Vight. So the briefing brought us right up to the current nineteen seventy eight at that point, and that um explained

to us that Roswell happened. Incident Roswell happened. There are two crashes, one at cronin New Mexico, which was north of Roswell in the second one out west of Magdalena Polona's Peak, which was south of horse Mesa. The Roswell of the Corona crash was found almost immediately in July of n but the other crash in uh western part of New Mexico wasn't found until nine. The UFO crashed in a very very remote area of New Mexico and

no one really had access to that area. In and rancher was taken his cows to a higher pasture and he located it. In seven we the Army was involved in recovering a craft that crashed Necrona, New Mexico with four bodies for dead bodies of E. T s and one live body that live creature found in the craft. It was later called by the government an extra trustrial biological entity or EBA, and he remained into captivity at Los Alamos until two when he died. So this will

be the beginning of a pattern. Doughty takes ideas that are already out there in the UFO culture, the Roswell crash, the recovery of bodies, even the existence of a live et, and puts them in an official context, in this case a top secret Air Force briefing. Doughty says he was briefed at Kirtland Air Force Base in about the government's involvement with UFOs in seven or seventy eight. A man who lived just out side the base named Paul Benowitz

started seeing some strange lights in the night sky. Author of the two thousand and five book Project Beta, Greg Bishop. Paul benn and Witz was an electrical physicist. He had his own business in Albuquerque, New Mexico. It still exists. He's deceased now. The business is called Thunder Scientific and it is located just outside Curtland Air Force Base. He had a government contract. He made censors and humidity sensors

and other types of sensors. Paul lived in the Four Hills area of Albuquerque, which is right outside Curland Air Force Base. His backyard butted up against the perimeter of the base. You can see the most of the north part of the Curtland Air Force Space from his house. From his his top deck porch in Albuquerque, he'd go out on his porch at night near the Air Force space and he can see lights flying around. So he started making films of these and I think some video,

but this was nine when they started or so. Most things were done on film. So I had eight millimeter film mostly of these lights lifting up off the ground and then taking off and going behind this mountain now not far from where the perimeter is located is a place called Manzano Storage Area. It was one of the largest nuclear weapons storage areas in the United States, probably in a free world. And there were other classified things

at Manzano and this isn't classified anymore. Paul placed some electronic sensors outside on his patio facing Manzano and he was picking up strange signals. He was also photographing airplanes flying military airplanes taking off from Curlin Air Force Base. He was taking all sorts of pictures. Paul was a Navy Vorlo two veteran, highly decorated. He felt that there was some danger to the base. Benewitz became convinced that these lights that he was filming were in fact advanced

vehicles being piloted by extraterrestrials. In worried that these UFOs posed a serious threat to the base. Benewitz got in touch with Kurtland security. So they said, well, this is interesting. So they called him in and said, so what are you saying? And he stood there in front of a whole bunch of based security people at Colonel's and the guy that ran the base and told him what he

was seeing. You know, because they knew what it was, but they wanted to know what he knew, one because they didn't think anybody's watching, and too because if he's talking to anybody, they wanted to know who those people were, and he possibly foreign nationals or somebody that just wasn't supposed to be seeing that stuff. So they listened to his report. As his report went on, security staff would leave the room as they realized that what Benewitz was

talking about was not under their purview. So the two or three people that were left that had something to worry about about what he was seeing told him, this is very interesting, Paul. Why didn't you keep telling us what's going on. We want to keep in touch with you. This is important to national security, etcetera. What they did not say was don't worry about it. We know what you're seeing and they are not a threat. Just go on about your life and don't worry about it anymore.

So Bennewitz kept at it. So he continued to film these things, and he also built a radio receiver and was starting to pick up signals which he thought were where UFO or alien transmissions, but apparently what they really were were coded transmissions being used to either control weapons or who knows what. It's basically electronically coded and this

is before there was digital encoding decoding all that. They spent tons of money to developed this, and he just can get up and started to figure out what the messages were saying. But he didn't interpret them in the way that that that made sense as weapons systems. He interpreted them as as alien transmissions. Kirtland Security eventually decided

that Bennewitz needed to be more carefully monitored. They assigned a security person from the Air Force Office of Special Investigations to basically, I guess his contact or case officer or whatever, and that was Richard Doughty. So Doughty not only listened to what he said, he also encouraged his his reporting and encouraged I think some of his delusions about being alien because they wanted him to stay interested, but they didn't want him to know what was going on.

If he wants to think it's aliens, that's fine. And so as far Paul Benowitz goes, that was a a super operation by the government and that wasn't just my operation. It was the government had planned that operation. And if you look back at what Paul did and what Paul found out in the entire history of the Paul Bennewitz's incident and look at it at a rational with an open mind. Most patriotic Americans would say, you did what you had to do, and I did what I had

to do. The government did what we had to do to prevent Paul from delving into something that was highly, highly classified at that point. Next time on Strange Arrivals. Strange Arrivals is a production of I Heeart, three D

Audio and Grimm and Mild from Aaron Manky. This episode was written and hosted by Toby Ball and produced by Miranda Hawkins and Josh Thame, with executive producers Alex Williams, Matt Frederick, and Aaron Manky, and special thanks to Wendy Connors, creator of the Faded Discs archive of UFO related audio

on archive dot org. Learn more about Strange Rivals over at Grimm and Mild dot com, and find more podcasts from my Heart Radio by visiting the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. H