UFO investigator and researcher Richard Hall, now deceased, has long been reported to have known about the 1953 Kingman UFO crash-down and retrieval at least since April, 1964. Now, if he was officially on the record telling people about the the crash in 1964 is not clear. For sure, the date he told anybody about knowing about it in or since 1964 for the first time is not clear. Hall was said to have learned of the incident somewhere along the way via a GI, reported by Hall to be a professional military officer that was sent to Vietnam and while in county, killed. Eleven years before going to Vietnam the GI reportedly came across the recovery of the Kingman craft in some fashion and in doing so became a firsthand witness to the event, which in turn he apparently disclosed to Hall.
Paralleling the Hall story, UFO investigator Don Schmitt, while doing a series of interviews researching background material on abductees, came across a woman who intimated she had received a letter written in 1965 from her husband, later killed in Vietnam, that substantiated the Kingman crash, a la Richard Hall. However, before the letter could be documented or seen by anybody that could confirm that it existed, it disappeared. UFO researcher Kevin Randle, upon hearing of Schmitt's discovery, scoured military records to see if a GI with the same last name as the wife was killed in Vietnam during the appropriate time period without results. Come to find out the woman was married more than once. Investigating the records for the new last name produced zero positive results as well --- all of which cast a huge doubt on Schmitt's source and Hall's too, especially so if Hall's source and Schmitt's was one and the same person --- and for all practical purposes, because of the similarities integral to both accounts, it appears he was.
The person that had come forward stating she received the aforementioned letter was a woman by the name of Judith Anne Woolcott (1937-2009), sometimes Judy or Judie Woolcott, Woolcott being her last name from her second marriage, Fingal from her first, Miller her maiden name. Woolcott had a long history of UFO interests, having been first, an active member of the Fox Valley UFO Discussion Group, of Appleton, Wisconsin, then upon retirement and moving to Roswell, New Mexico, working for the International UFO Museum and Research Center.
It quickly became clear that neither of her husbands could have been the Vietnam GI letter writer. Both would have been somewhere in the 15 or 16 year old bracket at the time of the Kingman crash, eliminating either of them from the scene as military or military officers as it has been reported. Additionally, as it was, Woolcott didn't marry her second husband until 1980. At the time of the crash the GI would have been, lets say, as an officer, a minimum of 21 years old. That would make him no less than 33 in 1965 when the alleged letter was written and Woolcott would have been 29 years old.
My suspicion is, since more recent facts have surfaced that fully identify and account for the letter writer, that is, who he is and his background, that there was in fact a letter, but NOT from a Woolcott husband because the identified letter writer was never her husband, and why the letter itself so mysteriously disappeared. The letter writer may have been a pen pal, friend, or a friend of a friend, or maybe between the two of them, possibly even more. There is a chance there was something in the letter other than simply the Kingman incident that she just didn't want others to see.
Book reviewer for Magonia, Peter Rogerson, in a November 1995 critique of a couple of Kevin Randle's books writes:
"Take the story of Mrs Judy Woolcott, who was interviewed by Don Schmitt 'in connection with abduction research.' In what connection was Mrs Woolcott an abductee? At least twenty years ago in 1965 her former husband had sent her a letter from Vietnam, just before he died, containing not the expected declarations of undying love, etc., but a long account of a crashed flying saucer twelve years earlier in 1953."
(source)
Setting aside the question on abductees which can be and is answered in a link below, the question Rogerson raises about the GI just before he died, that the letter did not contain the expected declarations of undying love, etc., but a long account of a crashed flying saucer twelve years earlier in 1953 is what is of interest here. If, along with the Kingman crash, the letter contained any inkling of declarations of undying love, etc, the letter writer still would not have been Woolcott's husband --- and reason enough between friends, alive or dead, to hold a letter in abeyance.
It is my suspicion as well that it was from the basis of the 1965 letter that her interest in UFOs grew, although in September of 1986 Woolcott was quoted as saying she first became interested in unidentified flying objects when she photographed a streak of light she called a UFO "several years ago."
So entrenched had Woolcott become in UFOs --- and having done so basically out of nowhere with the timing of the nowhere following right on the heels of the letter from the GI --- that a very close, longtime friend of hers that did not believe in UFOs almost as strongly as Woolcott believed in them, after observing her commitment and listening to what she had to say changed her mind so much that she said:
"My name is Bonnie. I was first introduced to UFOs in my early 30's. A friend of mine got into UFOs so heavy that I began to wonder if she was losing her mind. Wanting to find out what they were feeding my friend, I went to every lecture and meeting in the area on the subject. Trying my hardest to figure out if UFOs were real or not. Little did I realize, that UFO's would be become a lifelong passion for me."
Bonnie went on to become a major mover in the abductee, contactee movement while Woolcott went on to a quiet retirement in 2003 and up until a few years before her death, RV'ing around the desert southwest with her husband and dogs out of Roswell. At the end of 2006 she was forced to stop traveling and living in the motor home due to poor health and bought a house in Roswell in February of 2007. She passed July 11, 2009 at age 72 without publicly revealing the letter writer's name nor changing her story.
I know because during the time that elapsed between Woolcott's retirement in 2003 and the need to end her RV travels for health related reasons in 2007 she and I met over an extended several hour period at the Owl Cafe in San Antonio, New Mexico located about 150 miles west of her Roswell stomping grounds and discussed both issues. Making the physical arrangements for the meeting was relatively easy in that the two of us simply aligned it with a road trip I was going on from Tombstone, Arizona to Amarillo, Texas. In the process I used the I-10 to the I-25 in Las Cruces then north to Albuquerque taking me right through San Antonio. Convincing her to meet me was a little tougher.[1]
Outside of certain circles she had been harassed on and off over the years and just did not relish more of it. At first I pulled the "uncle" card on her, my Uncle being well known at onetime, also in certain circles, albeit in the desert southwest, as a notorious biosearcher come curmudgeon and gadfly. However, because she was for the most part, new to the desert southwest and my uncle had passed in 1989, she wasn't familiar enough with him to be moved by it. So I used my second option, one more closely related to her own background, telling her when I was age 15 or so I had personally met one of the most famous of the early contactees, Truman Bethurum, over a couple of year period during the years 1953-1954. Since her experience was much more recent I told her I just wanted to compare notes. Seemingly impressed I had met Bethurum before he became famous she agreed to meet with me. Doing so in the little community of San Antonio was her suggestion. When I brought up the Kingman letter she waffled, especially when confronted in a polite sort of way with the seeming inconsistencies relative to the non-deaths of husbands, times when marriages occurred and/or when they were over, etc. Without her flatout revealing what I was after she skirted the issue requiring a filling in of the blanks, intimating as I have above, the actual circumstances. When I asked for the letter writer's name, thinking I could search down records for a confirmation in the same way Kevin Randle had tried, she told me the letter writer had three names.
Three names? As much as I semi-covertly cajoled and schmoozed her she was not about to give me any name or names. However, in a rattling along conversation, I think unbeknownst to her she let slip "Charles" --- not much, but something.
It turned out the letter writer did have three names, but not like I pictured the meaning initially. I thought he had three full names, each of them being aliases made up perhaps of one real name and two aliases, or possibly some combination thereof. Actually, Woolcott gave me a conundrum. The letter writer had three names alright, but they were three first names adding up to one name, that is, his full name was made up of three first names: Charles, Alan, and Roberts.
Charles Alan Roberts was a Ranger trained Tactical Intel Staff Officer with the rank of Captain in 1965, having arrived in Vietnam in February of that year. Eleven months later, on December 14th, 1965, Roberts received multiple fragmentation wounds and died from those wounds 12 days later in a military hospital at Clark Air Force Base, the Philippines, on the day after Christmas 1965.(see)
Before the military Roberts was a young boy to teenager growing up in Farmington, New Mexico, graduating from high school in 1950. Farmington is located only a few miles southwest of the small community of Aztec, the site of the suspected 1948 UFO crash made famous by Frank Scully in his 1950 book Behind the Flying Saucers. The alleged crash was said to have happened in March of 1948, but it wasn't until spring of his senior year when Scully's book came out that the story really took off for Roberts. He and some of his buddies, as did a lot of his classmates, went out to visit the crash site and shared and compared stories day after day. In 1949, before graduation, he joined the New Mexico National Guard and placed on inactive duty because most of his unit had been sent to Korea. In May of 1951, a year after his graduation from high school, he was placed on active duty status and sent to Fort Bliss, Texas bordering up to and just south of White Sands New Mexico. In December, 1952 he received an Honorable Discharge. By then the True Magazine article debunking Scully and the Aztec crash had been published letting a lot of wind out of his sails on his once youthful perspective on UFOs.
In the fall of 1953 Roberts started college, attending what is now New Mexico State University, Las Cruces, earning a B.S. degree in Electrical Engineering. Following his graduation Roberts rejoined the military and commissioned as an officer. Previously, while on active duty as a non-commissioned officer at Fort Bliss, he was a Radar Sergeant and Range officer for an anti-aircraft artillery battalion. During the time between his discharge in 1952 and starting college in the fall of 1953 Roberts maintained contact with many of his old Fort Bliss artillery buddies. Although classified, he caught wind some of them were on TDY to the Nevada test site for a test firing of the M-26 Atomic Cannon, something he wanted to see. He knew, as a civilian, there was no way he could actually observe the test up close, but figured his buddies might be able to put him in place as close as possible. On May 18th, several days before the test, found him in Kingman, Arizona on his way to make contact with the guys who were going to help him. He was told by one of his buddies that on the next day, in the pre-dawn hours of May 19th there was going to be a huge test he should be able to see the flash from even in Kingman.
OPERATION UPSHOT-KNOTHOLE, YUCCA FLAT, NEVADA 1953
The atomic test that Roberts' buddy was referring to was "Harry." On May 19, 1953 at 05:05 AM local time, at Yucca Flat, Nevada, around 175 miles north of Kingman, Arizona, Harry, one of a series of nuclear tests under the umbrella code-named Upshot-Knothole was set off. The day before, after checking around where the best spot to view such an event would be he was directed toward an area close by that in a few years would be given the name Radar Hill because of a radar installation that would be built there in 1955. Sunrise that day was around 6:21, so, at the time of the blast the whole of the night sky was dark except for a slight pre-dawn glow along the eastern horizon. Within seconds of the blast some sort of a dark airborne object moving at a ultra high rate of speed swept past east of him traveling in a southerly direction almost as though it came from the test site tracking on a slightly downward trajectory and headed toward the mountains to the south.
As the object lost altitude suddenly a huge flash of light lit up the sky in the nearby mountains forward of the southern horizon. All along the object appeared to be unsteady, fairly thin, and possibly flat-circular. Although the sun was still below the horizon from Roberts location and vantage point, the object was high enough when he first saw it that it was able to catch the direct rays of the sun, wobbling enough that it was able to throw off a brilliant glint of sunlight from some portion of its underside as it tipped upward only to disappear as it tipped back. The flash of light near the base of the mountains was soon followed by a sound like a single clap of thunder. Roberts scrounged around in the muted light and quickly found two sticks he aligned a few feet apart and shoved into the ground so he could sight across the top from one stick to the other and mark the spot where the flash came from.
He returned to his motel room, gathered up his GI issued lensatic compass and along with a bunch of area and local maps returned to the hill. Sighting along his sticks with the compass he was able to get a bearing on the direction of the flash, then, using the bearing provided by the compass, he drew a line from his location on the hill across the map. After which, taking the amount of time that elapsed between the second he saw the flash in the mountains and when the sound reached his ears standing on the hill in Kingman, he determined the distance, then penciled a circle around the general area --- all skills any advanced or accomplished boyscout might be able to do and that fell way within his abilities as a Radar Sergeant and Range officer for anti-aircraft artillery, but backed up with years of experience and professional finesse. Knowing that what he saw was not a conventional aircraft but possibly an unmanned errant missile or rocket of some type or other military hardware, he wasn't particularly concerned with how long it took him, nor worried about injuries. But, harkening back to how he felt during his high school years and how excited he was in those days about the Aztec incident he couldn't wait to see for himself if the object could have been something more exotic than simple military hardware.
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Not having an actual topographical map of the area at his disposal, to get as close as possible to the impact site using the roads shown on the commercial maps that he had in his possession indicated the best way would be to approach the object's trajectory face on --- that is, ahead of or forward of its direction of travel before it came down. After getting as close as he could following the roads on the map he began using lesser roads not shown. On the morning of the second day following the flash of light, found Roberts, after a restless night sleep in the front seat of his car, getting into areas too impassable for his two-wheel drive vehicle, albeit still a couple of miles from the site.
Switching to going by foot, in order to stay on the correct azimuth required a lot of zig-zagging caused by the ruggedness of the terrain, making an otherwise shorter hike much longer. Following his fresh start that morning, by mid-morning Roberts took a breather sitting in what little shade he could find. While coordinating his location on the maps one more time his concentration was suddenly shattered by two men that appeared in front of him basically out of nowhere. The men, both readily identifiable as Native American, began asking him a series of questions like who he was, why was he there, etc. Thinking he may have inadvertently stumbled onto tribal land and the men were possibly tribal security, Roberts, not looking for trouble, had no reason not to cooperate. After a few minutes of questioning and back and forth bantering the two men, who had been standing side by side fairly close in front of him widened the distance between themselves. When they did, between the widened gap Roberts saw a white man looking to be about age 50 or so with a close-cropped full beard walking up behind them. One of the men turned and spoke to him in his native tongue and the white man responded fluently in the same Native American language. The white man stepped between the two men and approached Roberts, introduced himself, then told him it sounded as though they were on the exact same quest. Roberts was told that the two Native Americans were trackers and had already been to the impact site. They were, the white man said, in the process of taking him there and that he, Roberts, was welcome to go with them if he so chose. Which he did.
The trackers along with a few other Native Americans had been at the site almost immediately, but by the time the bearded white man joined them and he and the two trackers had returned, a small contingent of men, appearing to be military, had arrived on the scene. The white man and the trackers had entered the area from the opposite direction than Roberts and at the time of their encounter were in the process of circling around to higher ground for a better vantage point with a clearer view with less likelihood of being detected. As the day progressed the military presence continued to grow with tents being erected, floodlights being put up and communication equipment installed and tested. As well, the access in and out of the area was being carefully and meticulously modified, at least by military standards, allowing much larger vehicles and equipment into the site without totally destroying the original physical appearance of the landscape. With the increase in activity, especially on the second day of their observation, one of the trackers circled around to their vehicle, which they had concealed some distance back to ensure its safety. Then, sometime later as the afternoon was waning and it appeared the military was close to moving the object after a day and a half preparing and loading it onto a trailer, the other two men decided to reposition themselves closer to their vehicle. Roberts chose to leave the men and get close as possible to all the goings on. After that he never saw the men again.
In conjunction with the Kingman event, but never spoken of much, was the existence of a second smaller entry-probe like vehicle or escape-pod type thing that was discovered some distance from the main object. When the trackers, the white man and Roberts reached their vantage point along the ridge above the main impact site, from their position they could see, undiscovered and unseen by the on-scene military at the time because it was over the crest of the hill from them, a metal oval-shaped object around 12 to 15 feet long that looked all the same as though it "belonged" to the main object. Obvious to the men that the smaller object had crashed as well, speculation between them was that it was following, traveling along side or just ahead of the larger one as both came in --- except the smaller object maintained just the right amount of height advantage above the ground that it cleared the hill in front of the larger object, ending against the rocks some distance away and out of view to those at the main site. The military contingent, as they widened their perimeter over a couple of days eventually came across it. By the time the three men left, even though the smaller object was being crawled all over and investigated, it was still there. On one of the nights before it was discovered several Native Americans came up in the dark bringing extra water and additional provisions. They and the white man removed themselves some distance from Roberts, carrying on a heated discussion in their native language. After awhile the white man returned and the Native Americans went down the mountain in the dark toward the smaller object. Soon the two trackers returned, but not the others.[2]
The white man was of course my Uncle and of whom figures prominently in the 1953 Kingman UFO crash as found in the link below. Charles Alan Roberts was the same person my uncle called Chukka Bob, coming up with the name Chukka Bob by combining Roberts three names. Charles became Chuck, Alan became the A forming Chukka. The Bob in Chukka Bob was his last name, Roberts, being changed into Bob. Hence, Charles Alan Roberts interest in Yucca Flats became not Yucca Bob to my uncle, but Chukka Bob.[3]
AND NOW THIS:
Frank Scully, in the first chapter of his best selling book Behind the Flying Saucers, speaking of Charles Alan Roberts' home town of Farmington, New Mexico, in the first person says:
I kept my own counsel for months. But when others less well informed began sounding off in all directions about flying saucers, I thought it was about time that I told the world if nothing more than proof that I knew more than I had read in the papers. In fact the night the Denver Post was exposing Scientist X and the Farmington citizens were exposing Operation Hush Hush, I was dining in Hollywood with the man all Denver was hunting for. He had just talked to George Koehler in Denver by long distance. Koehler had worked for him and had married his nurse. The Farmington report had set Denver uproar, Koehler told him. "Do you remember my telling you that the first flying saucer was found on a ranch twelve miles from Aztec?" I remembered when he reminded me "Yes," I said, "I remember now." "Well," he said, "Farmington is only twenty-eight miles from that ranch. In fact they flew over the exact place where one of their number had fallen a year ago."
Farmington is a small New Mexico community in the northwest corner of the state. For most of it's existence it was a quiet rural-western town. Then in 1950 it was suddenly thrust on to the national scene by Scully's nation-wide best seller "Behind the Flying Saucers." In that same book on page 16, of the Farmington Daily Times, Scully writes:
So when on the morning of March 18 (1950) it ran an eight-column banner headline proclaiming "Hugh Saucer Armada Jolts Farmington," it was reporting the news as the entire staff and most of the town's population saw it. Clayton J. Boddy, the paper's business manager, and Orville Ricketts, the associate editor, had a hand in it, but the story was actually written by Walter Rogal, the managing editor. The main story told that fully half the town's population was still certain the morning after that it had seen space ships or some strange aircrafts-hundreds of them-zooming through the skies on the previous day. The estimates ran from several to more than five hundred. "Whatever they were," the writer reported, "they caused a major sensation in this community which lies only a 110 air miles northwest of the huge Los Alamos Atomic installation." The objects appeared to play tag high in the sky. At times they streaked away at almost unbelievable speeds. One triangulation estimated the speed at 1,000 miles an hour, and guessed the saucers were about twice the size of a B29.
That same year, 1950, was Charles Alan Roberts senior year in high school and unlike what came a few years later, Roberts and his high school buddies didn't have a continuous stream of drive in theater SciFi and horror movies like This Island Earth, The Day the Earth Stood Still, and Man From Planet X every weekend, yet here they were, right in the middle of the Flying Saucer craze. True, Scully's book "Behind the Flying Saucers" was pretty much debunked by 1952, but that was two years later. In the meantime, as a teenager, he was actually living up to his ears in Flying Saucers in his own back yard.(see)
It was those highly exuberant years Charles Alan Roberts was harkening back to when he was swept up in regarding the Kingman UFO.[4]
(for larger size please click image then a second time)
ELEMENTARY MY DEAR WATSON:
Part way back up in the main text I write:
"Three names? As much as I semi-covertly cajoled and schmoozed her she was not about to give me any name or names. However, in a rattling along conversation, I think unbeknownst to her she let slip 'Charles' --- not much, but something."
So, how did I jump from a simple "she let slip 'Charles'" to a full-on and complete name Charles Alan Roberts?
Even more simple.
During the period my uncle and the Hualapai trackers were watching the military going-on's relative to the Kingman incident they did so over a several day period 24 hours a day, all at a distance, silently and secretly hidden away. They racked up a huge amount hours just watching with lots of down time. The Native Amercans basically spoke in their own tongue, in of which my uncle was fairly proficient. However, the man my uncle called Chukka Bob wasn't, so more often than not he ended up sharing down time in conversations with my uncle.
When a subject matter concentrated around UFO's, one of the things my uncle hated hearing about more than anything was the 1948 Aztec UFO crash-down incident. A book on the incident had become a huge nationwide best seller, then suddenly the story was thoroughly debunked as being nothing more than one giant hoax. The whole thing cast a giant shadow over all the other UFO incidents, incidents my uncle was personally involved in and/or knew were authentic. He would grit his teeth and clench his fists everytime anything Aztec came up, which is exactly what happened during the early stage conversation with Chukka Bob because Chukka Bob had been totaly immersed in Aztec events. He was attending high school in Farmington, New Mexico during the exact same years that the Aztec incident happened, rose to the top of the charts, then totally imploaded. Re the following:
"Before the military Roberts was a young boy to teenager growing up in Farmington, New Mexico, graduating from high school in 1950. Farmington is located only a few miles southwest of the small community of Aztec, the site of the suspected 1948 UFO crash made famous by
Frank Scully in his 1950 book 'Behind the Flying Saucers.' The alleged crash was said to have happened in March of 1948, but it wasn't until spring of his senior year when Scully's book came out that the story really took off for Roberts. He and some of his buddies, as did a lot of his classmates, went out to visit the crash site and shared and compared stories day after day."
(please click image>
So, again, how did I jump from a simple "she let slip 'Charles'" to a full and complete name Charles Alan Roberts? Well, I sure didn't have to be Sherlock Holmes. My uncle told that in one of those long, down time conversations with Chukka Bob he revealed how and why he ended up there in the first place. He had been a non-commissioned officer at Fort Bliss as a Radar Sergeant and Range Officer for an anti-aircraft artillery battalion. Buddies were going to try and get him as close as possible to the firing of an atomic cannon at Yucca Flats, Nevada, not far from Kingman. My uncle also told me Chukka Bob had attended high school in a small New Mexico town called Farmington, graduating in 1950. I just went down to the high school and asked if they had a list of students or graduates who had been in or killed in Vietnam, more specifically a 1950 graduate killed in 1965. Although Farmington has a population of 40,0000 or more now days, when Chukka Bob attended high school in the late 1940's early 50's, Farmington's population was small, only around 4,000. Everybody knew everybody. When I was there seeking information, although the town had grown into a fairly good size, most of the positive-like residuals of a small town were still in place and I was treated as such. After a little schmoozing here and there I was handed his name on a platter. I even learned among other things that in 1955 Roberts had married a 1953 Farmington high school graduate named Norma.
For the record, my uncle gave the name Chukka Bob to Chukka Bob because there was already a Charles or Chuck in their immediated UFO field investigation circle. Also, for those of you who may want to do research on Roberts veteran-wise, VA records almost always refer back to the state they were born in, not on a listed home town. In Roberts case for example, if you wanted to search down his name on the wall (Panel 4E, Line 40) you would have to refer to his birth state Pennsylvania, not his home town state New Mexico.(see)
EPILOGUE
CHARLES ALAN ROBERTS
The Kingman UFO crash occurred sometime during the early morning hours of May 19, 1953. Before a full day had elapsed my uncle was on scene, or at least the Hualapai trackers were, and not long after that Charles Alan Roberts and my uncle met. At the time Roberts, who my uncle soon began referring to as Chukka Bob, was in his early 20's working on an electrical engineering degree in college on the G.I. Bill following an earlier stint in the Army. After earning his degree he rejoined the service and in May 1955 was commissioned a 2nd Lieutenant. In 1960 Roberts was sent to Wertheim, West Germany, returning stateside in late October 1962. Then, a week later, two at the most, in November 1962, just at the start of the Cuban Missile Crisis, Roberts was sent to Homestead Air Force Base, Miami, Florida for "advanced training." It was during that period the Army sent me to McCoy AFB, Florida, located only a short distance from Homestead, joining "B" Company of my home military unit, the 121st Signal Battalion, the 121st at the time totally off the record for being in Florida, and still unrecognized by the government for having had been deployed there.
121st SIGNAL BATTALION PLACING BARBED WIRE ON THE BEACH IN KEY WEST FLORIDA
FACING CUBA ON NOVEMBER 1, 1962. MILITARY ARMAMENT RUSHED IN FOR THE CUBAN
MISSILE CRISIS, INCLUDING SURFACE TO AIR MISSILES, SHOW UP IN THE BACKGROUND
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I was assigned as a radio operator to a clandestine paramilitary unit run by a "Colonel Rawlston" out of a small secluded base hidden on Point Mary on Key Largo, one of the Florida keys. The base, on an acre or so I was told, was built after clearing back just enough of a thick mangrove forest, but still leaving enough as camouflage, to make room for a few sheds and a couple of habitable structures, as well fueling facilities and a floating dock anchored to a coral reef. The unit, using twin V-bottom double-hulled aluminum high speed powerboats, was said to be making midnight raids to the northern coast of Cuba, offloading U.S. trained anti-Castro Cuban commandos and weapons.[5]
My radio operator duties were carried out using an AN/GRC-26 van, which was, except for the power unit, a fully self contained portable radio rig, with all the radio stuff inside what was sometimes called a "hootch," the hootch being mounted on the back of a duce and a half truck with the power unit in a trailer attached to and pulled by the truck. So said, the radio equipment could be operated if need be while in transit. Rawlston asked for two things, first the hootch taken off the truck and permanently mounted on the ground, and secondly some kind of air defense. Rawlston felt he had access from the ocean covered, but for low flying planes his site was defenseless. The Army said no to the first one, the radio rig had to remain portable and completely within Army control. On the second request they said absolutely no surface to air missiles, but might consider alternatives, especially if manned by other than U.S. troops or regular Army personnel.
This was when something amazing happened. During the period Charles Alan Roberts rejoined the Army becoming an officer and being sent to Germany he was stationed mostly at Fort Bliss, Texas. While there, because of his history with radar controlled anti-aircraft artillery he was sent TDY to Raco Army Airfield for reasons unknown, but thought to be related to downsizing or the base closing. The following is what Wikipedia says about Raco Army Airfield:
"After the war, the United States Army retained ownership of the Raco site and used it as an anti-aircraft artillery site. Two former taxiways to the west of the runways were turned into roads, and over two dozen aircraft dispersal pads were modified into round artillery pads where 75-mm Skysweeper anti-aircraft guns were located. The guns were used to provide air defense against incoming aircraft flying at low altitudes to attack the entrance of the Soo locks & shipping narrows. Peak deployment for Skysweeper battalions at Raco was achieved in the mid-1950s when 8 battalions were deployed."
RACO ARMY AIRFIELD, NORTHERN MICHIGAN
Military powers that be felt the 75-mm Skysweeper anti-aircraft gun might just be the right answer to Rawlston's concern for defense against a low level aircraft attack, and get him off their back besides. Since both Raco and the Skysweeper were being phased out, the Army found itself overwhelmed with the fact that the Skysweeper and it's 75-mm ammunition was piling up as surplus, which meant getting one would be easy. Nobody would know the difference. In the meantime they discovered Charles Alan Roberts, who was experienced in the same weapon having been TDY to Raco, was stationed just a few miles north up the road at Homestead AFB. So Roberts was sent down to Rawlston's clandestine Point Mary site to look over the possibilities of installing a Skysweeper weapons system. It was while Roberts was at the Point Mary site I met him.
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Of course, I had no clue of, or any way of knowing, Roberts was one and the same as my uncle's infamous Chukka Bob. Although things did come up in general conversation, nothing specifically Kingman or UFO related did. Even if it would have I wouldn't have had the wherewithal to put it all together. When I was doing Point Mary stuff with Rawlston, whose real name was Johnny Roselli, it was late 1962 early 1963. I didn't learn about Chukka Bob from my uncle for another ten years.
Roberts arrived at Point Mary to explore the possibility of installing an anti aircraft defense system to use against incoming low flying planes. While there the two of us had easy going conversations over beers a few of times. He told me he had served a couple years as an enlisted man before being commissioned an officer. He also said he didn't like what we were doing as it reeked with, as he called it, a certain sense of illegality about it. As for anti-aircraft guns, except for the air raid that erupted over portions of my hometown during World War II known as the Battle of Los Angeles that caused shells to be unleashed all over the city, with some landing only a few blocks from my home, the only thing I knew about them was the ack ack guns seen firing off the sides of aircraft carriers in old World War II movies. About Raco Army Airfield I knew nothing, although I did know about the nearby Sault Ste. Marie canal because as a kid one day during an oral quiz in grade school I called it "Salt" Saint Marie and didn't hear the end of it for weeks. Roberts told me there was a legend surrounding the base that during World War II a huge camouflaged six engined bomber type plane with German markings came into Raco field late one night from Canada and refueled by a team of commandos that took over a section of the base before heading out towards New York. He also told me when he went TDY from Fort Bliss to Raco he took some R&R and drove because he wanted to see the Kensington Rune Stone in Alexandria, Minnesota. On his return trip from Raco Roberts drove through Appleton, Wisconsion. Appleton just happened to have two of Thomas Edison's earliest electricity generation sites, the Vulcan Street Power Plant and the Hearthstone House, with a lot of the original wiring, light bulbs, and generating equipment still around, in place, or close by. Having recently graduated with a Bachelor of Science degree in electrical engineering Roberts wanted to see some of the historical aspects of it all, so Appleton was not only a perfect place to start, it was convenient. Appleton if you remember, at least during the exact same time period Roberts' was there, was Judy Woolcott's stomping grounds.
"I do not pretend that the conversations I have recorded can be regarded as verbatim reports. I never kept notes of what was said on this or the other occasion, but I have a good memory for what concerns me, and though I have put these conversations in my own words they faithfully represent, I believe, what was said."W. SOMERSET MAUGHAM: The Razor's Edge
How am I able to recall any of Roberts passing remarks and little Innuendos from our small chit chat conversations over beers in my radio van so long ago, especially since none of them carried any amount of weight, nor too, were they expected to be eventually connected to future events. Well, while it is true I might not have any reason to recall the city of Appleton, I did know who Thomas Edison was, so remembering "about" his earliest electricity generation site wasn't that hard. So too, it just so happened that when I was around ten years old my uncle had taken me to see the Kensington Stone. At the time it was on exhibit at the Smithsonian Institution in Washington, DC., being shown there starting February 17, 1948 through to February 25, 1949, after which it was going to be returned to its owners in Minnesota. My uncle was concerned that it might not be put back on public display where it could be seen in real life after being returned. Hence, because my uncle thought it was important for me to see it in real life, he arranged for our trip to Washington D.C. Several years before as an even younger boy waiting late one night in a train station, a man who's son was a P-40 pilot, gave me a comic book with an illustrated story called the P-40 Goose Shoot. It was a true story about a small number of P-40 pilots shooting down close to a hundred German transport planes trying to escape following their disastrous North Africa campaign. It was one of my favorite P-40 stories and I carried the book with me for years. It just so happened my uncle knew the artist, Harry Ramsey, who drew the illustrations for the story, so when we were on our trip to D.C. my uncle introduced me to him. The interesting part was that Ramsey drew all of the German transport planes as having six engines, something that was either unknown or top secret at the time he drew them and the comic book published.
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KINGMAN UFO 1953
WORLD WAR II COMES TO REDONDO
THE CUBAN MISSILE CRISIS AND THE MOB
THE NEARLY UNBELIEVABLE COINCIDENCES OF IT ALL
KINGMAN CRASH: FACT OR FICTION?
(PLEASE SCROLL DOWN THE PAGE FOR COMPLETE ACCESS)
LIKE ROSWELL, KINGMAN NEVER GETS OLD. PEOPLE LOVE TALKING ABOUT IT
It's hard to believe, but still to this day, because of the controversy surrounding the Kingman crash and the response I posted in the comment section in the above KINGMAN CRASH: Fact or Fiction link I continue to receive emails about it--- even though the response is dated over five years ago. Below is an example of what is included in my response by going to my Getting Letters and Emails page:
" My Kingman site may be accused of being for entertainment by some, but it is usually done so by those who never go to the footnotes or my sources. One thing, unlike mine, so many UFO sites and others as well, are simply designed to rope a person in enough in order to push advertisements and hawk books, not to fulfill the desire of the reader for the information sought."
NOTE: Because of so many requests to see my response to the Kingman Fact of Fiction comments I've made a direct link to my responses by clicking:
UFO OVER L.A
THE BATTLE OF LOS ANGELES
ROSWELL UFO
AND SIMILAR INCIDENTS UPDATED
ROSWELL ARCHAEOLOGISTS
THE DIRT BEFORE THE DIG
THE WANDERLING
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Footnote [1]
Woolcott's suggestion that the two of us to meet in the small New Mexico community of San Antonio was NOT the first time I had ever heard of San Antonio, New Mexico --- especially so in how it relates to the subject matter we are speaking of here. That is to say, the Kingman incident. Two years before the Roswell crash and a full eight years before Kingman, there was what is still a little known similar incident, the 1945 San Antonio New Mexico UFO crash encounter by my uncle, and of which he got caught up in innocently enough. Re the following from the source so cited:
"A few years before, in August of 1945, he was out in the middle of the desert doing some biosearching on BLM land not far from the little town of San Antonio, New Mexico, when a huge object of an unknown nature, seemingly made of metal, flew over the top of him at a fairly low altitude traveling at an extremely high rate of speed. The object, apparently not being able to maintain even the slight height advantage it had above the ground, after what appeared to be one last grasp at regaining altitude, slammed hard into the ground some distance away."
(source)
In the early days of World War II, as a very young boy, I was an eye witness to the so-called UFO Over Los Angeles, otherwise known as the The Battle of L.A. The "battle" was witnessed by thousands and thousands of ordinary L.A. area citizens, myself included, as a huge flying object as large as a Zeppelin and still to this day of an unknown nature, overflew the Los Angeles basin withstanding a heavy barrage of over 1400 rounds of anti-aircraft fire --- in the end escaping unscathed. In those days my uncle and I were not together and later he just did not take my comments, from the mouths of babes, all that seriously. But, after Roswell in 1947 then backtracking in time to what he experienced in San Antonio in 1945, what I had to say, even though being the young boy I was, began to take on a much different tone about it. That is why he was so pro-active with the Kingman incident. He didn't want such potential prospects to slip through his fingers at the level as the other two events had.
So too, where I state in the above paragraph in the quotation marks that my uncle was "biosearching on BLM land," he was doing so for a major specific reason, the detonation of the atomic bomb at Trinity site some weeks before the bombing of Hiroshima. He had gone deep into the desert to test for radiation for the following reason:
"(B)ecause of the strong ties he had forged over the years with a wide spectrum of the area's Native American population and a deeply dedicated interest in their use of specific or sacred plants for medicinal and ritual purposes, he wanted to investigate how any actual or potential radioactive fallout from the bomb may have adversely impacted indigenous plants. So said, he decided to field test similar and like plants both in and out of the fallout zones as quick as possible then come back over a period of time and compare how they and their offspring withstood or modified in some fashion from normal states of growth."
My uncle just didn't think up the idea of radiation testing of the soil out of whole cloth. The idea stemmed from an incident that occurred in 1943, a rather unfortunate incident by the way, that not only impacted him adversely, but could have killed him.
In 1943 the U.S. was at war. My uncle, a staunch patriot, was a civilian and for sure a non-combatant, actually falling more into a role of a conscientious objector type than anything else. He had long been established as an artist in the Santa Fe, Taos area, but he was as well what I have called in the above main text a biosearcher. Prior to his death in 1989 he had, as a biosearcher, more than a half dozen plant species named after him following years of trekking, searching, and discovering previously unknown and unnamed plants all over mostly remote and hidden areas and sections of the desert southwest. In 1943 he was biosearching alone in the then largely uninhabited mountainous and desert-like terrain in the central section of New Mexico between the New Mexico and Arizona border on the west and the north-to-south flowing Rio Grande on the east.
In the process of his biosearching he came across two men, and unusually so, both Asian. One of men was flat on his back all but unconscious and visibly quite ill after apparently having been bitten by a rattlesnake with the bite being left untreated. My uncle, after using the healing properties of indigenous plants he gathered up, soon found the man up and around. One of the men who had a rudimentary use of English told my uncle they were Japanese, were testing soil samples for radioactivity, and had been left off in Mexico by a submarine. By then my uncle was wanting to beat a hasty retreat but before he could one of the men shot him right in the back at point blank range. They took his truck and although they left him to bleed out he survived. In 1985 a book titled The Japanese Secret War authored by Robert K. Wilcox was published. In the book Wilcox writes about the two Japanese men my uncle encountered and the U-boat they arrived in, of which I turn around and write about as found in the sourced link below the quote so cited:
"Wilcox's book that, for the first time brought to the public's attention Japanese agents having been in the desert southwest during World War II specifically tasked with testing soil samples for radiation, was published in 1985. It was in 1970, fifteen years before Wilcox's book was published that my uncle told me about his 1943 encounter with Japanese spies soil testing deep into state of New Mexico and the fact that according to their own testimony, they had initially been brought to Mexico via German U-boat from Europe. "
THE JAPANESE SECRET WAR
THE 1944 GERMAN ATOMIC BOMB
Footnote [2]
The 1953 Kingman UFO crash is one of those incidents that gets it from both sides. Of course, UFO non-believers simply disregard it along with all the others. UFO advocates are divided. Advocates that are anti-Kingman, which for some reason seems to carry an inordinate amount of pro-Roswell folk, usually point out the the inconsistancies or discrepancies in testimonies cited by the same witnesses done at different time by different interviewers. The strongest of those discrepancies typically cited are those provided by a man named Arthur Stansel.
In the early 1970s the first researchers to officially conduct an interview with a firsthand Kingman witness emerged, Jeff Young and Paul Chetham. Their source, who they called Fritz Werner for security reasons --- but who was later identified as Arthur Stansel, a project engineer with the Atomic Energy Commission on "Operation Upshot-Knothole" --- claimed he had been involved in the recovery of the alleged downed craft near Kingman in 1953. He described the object as being twelve feet long and fairly intact, more like a teardrop-shaped cigar or streamlined cigar and made of a material he had never seen before.
A few years later UFO researcher Raymond Fowler interviewed the same source who, during the interview, provided a much different version of what he told Young and Chetham. He told Fowler the object resembled two deep saucers pressed together at the rims. It was about thirty feet in diameter and had a dark band running around the center. The craft was dull with the outside surface look of brushed aluminum. He also estimated from its size and shape and the amount of soil displaced around its base as it apparently plowed into the ground that the craft weighed about five tons.
However, if what the trackers, white man and Roberts observed when they reached their vantage point along the ridge above the main impact site is taken into consideration, the inconsistancy seems to weaken. If you recall, from their position they were able to see, undiscovered and unseen by the on-scene military at the time because it was over the hill from them, a metal oval-shaped object around 12 to 15 feet long that looked all the same as though it "belonged" to the main object.
Footnote [3]
The obituary linked below says that Charles Alan Roberts married his wife Norma on June 5, 1955 in Farmington, New Mexico, and that he died from wounds received in action in Vietnam on December 26, 1965. Nowhere is there anything said about a divorce during that 10 year period. The obituary does say in that same 10 year period that Charles and Norma had four children, a daughter, Dawn Roberts, and three sons Craig Alan Roberts, Clay Alden Roberts, and Clyde Andrew Roberts.
It is my thought that what appears to be 10 years of faithful marriage and four kids would be enough in a letter to consider as a married man to a "pen pal" woman not to include "expected declarations of undying love, etc." What G.I.s say to women in letters 5,000 miles away from the battlefield and what they say face-to-face are sometimes two different things. If such was the case, for a true admirer of another person, it's surely enough to make sure the letters either became scarce or to disappear altogether. Even after Roberts' death and his wife remarried she still chose to be buried in the same cementery as her deceased husband as the headstones below show. To me that seems to indicate an unflinching love, at least on her part.
Curiously, notice in the obituary the initials and play on the names of the three sons. Woolcott did the exact same thing herself in identifying Roberts. In each case the boys have the same initials as their father and each has three "first names." Interesting the same would be true with their father and how Woolcott perceived it. The whole idea is kind of odd, weird actually.
NORMA ROBERTS: OBITUARY
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Footnote [4]
Scully's book Behind the Flying Saucers was published September of 1950, becoming an instant overnight best seller. As Scully laid it out a metallic disc-like airborne like craft thought to be extraterrestrial had supposedly crashed near a small northwest corner community of New Mexico called Aztec in 1948. A number of dead alien bodies scattered around the craft were also said to have been found as well. In 1952, two years after the book went on the market, in the first of two articles published in True Magazine, Scully's story was totally debunked and proven to be nothing but a full on hoax.
Although the content of the book was debunked top to bottom, what came up about the debunking, was that the author Scully, didn't try to pull a fast one but that he himself had totally been scammed. The "scammers" who bamboozled Scully into thinking their story was true as made up of two men, one named Newton and the other, a scientist said to be a doctor, named GeBauer. Their idea for the book was to widen the circle of the number of people who would be willing to buy an electronic device they "invented" that had the ability to find oil by just scanning it over the ground. Such a device was known as a doodlebug in the industry and worked like a divining rod to find water only Geiger counter-like, electronically. The two were taken to court after swindling a rube out of $18,500 for such an oil finding device that could easily be bought for $3.50 in a surplus store, the device being really no more than a tuning unit from surplus Army radio transmitters.
However, between the two year period between the time Scully's book came out and the time it was debunked, as a best seller, it did just what the the two scammers wanted, heighten interest in the possibility of finding oil using an electronic device. Not to be left out, the traditional oil companies began their own searches on the side, electronically and otherwise, especially in the desert southwest. Because of that up-tick in interest and use a former World War II OSS stereograph photo interpreter and geologist came into the picture.
During routine viewing of aerial surveys of the outwash plain due west of the Colorado River and about 70 miles south-south-west of Hoover Dam he came across a land form that had all the appearances of being the remains of a very ancient meteorite impact crater. As far as he was concerned, although previously unidentified and unnamed, the aerial photographs clearly showed discernable remnants of a circular crater outer ring sporting a diameter of approximately 18 miles with a well defined vestige of a central peak. Right away, hoping to possibly get credit for the discovery of a previously unknown impact crater, maybe even having it named after him, he headed out to the desert to see if any conclusions to what he saw in the photo-survey might have merit.
During his exploration he came across a man made metal structure he was sure he recognized from his World War II days as a stereograph photo interpreter, a man made metal structure that looked all the same as a V-1 launch ramp. The V-1 itself was what was known as a flying bomb. In order to get a V-1 airborne required a launch ramp of several hundred feet in lenght.
The ramp location was not far across the California Nevada state line on the California side, around 50 miles south-southwest of Hoover Dam roughly 35 miles parallel west of Davis Dam. The launch starting point, i.e., the lower end of the ramp, was on the south-southwest end, the higher part, the terminus of ramp launch on the east-northeast end. So said, such positioning made the long-length axis of the ramp low end to high launch direction aimed directly straight toward Hoover Dam. Once altitude was achieved the fully unobstructed south facing outside downstream front surface of the dam was fully exposed to an unhindered impact of a potential V-1 launch.
In an offside, it should be noted that one of the nicknames for the V-1 was doodlebug.
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Footnote [5]
WASHINGTON MERRY-GO-ROUND, by Jack Anderson
THE WASHINGTON POST: Tuesday, February 23, 1971, Page B-11
Roselli made midnight dashes to
Cuba with his hired assassins in
twin powerboats. Once a Cuban
patrol ship turned its guns on
the darkened boat, tore a hole
in the bottom and sank the boat.
Roselli was fished out of the
water by the other boat, which
escaped into the shadows.
CASTRO STALKER WORKED FOR CIA
------------------(original source for the above quote)
THE RAZOR'S EDGE: TRUE OR FALSE?
THE BEST OF THE MAUGHAM BIOGRAPHIES:
- WILLIAM SOMERSET MAUGHAM
Good biography. Lots of Maugham graphics, from early childhood to late adult.
- W. SOMERSET MAUGHAM: A BIOGRAPHY
- MAUGHAM
- MAUGHAM IN INDIA
- LITERARY AMBULANCE DRIVERS
Everybody knows Hemingway drove an ambulance during WWI, nobody knows Maugham did.
- THE ART COLLECTION OF W. SOMERSET MAUGHAM
SPIRITUAL GUIDES, GURUS, AND TEACHERS INFLUENTIAL IN THE RAZOR'S EDGE:
- BHAGAVAN SRI RAMANA MAHARSHI
- SWAMI RAMDAS
- YASUTANI HAKUUN ROSHI
- FATHER ENSHEIM
Includes a section on the missing years of the Razor's Edge- KOSTI
SRI RAMANA AND SOMERSET MAUGHAM
THE HOLY MAN, LARRY DARRELL, AND THE RAZOR'S EDGE
