By Billy Cox
De Void
4-17-09
De Void
4-17-09
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In this 40th year since the USAF abandoned its public UFO studies and went underground, maybe it’s time to time to trot out some sort of commemorative Greatest Hits in Lame-o Denials anthology.The 2008 Stephenville fiasco leaps immediately to mind, and Gerald Haines’ “CIA’s Role in the Study of UFOs 1947-90” was an instant classic in its attempts to blame it all on the mistaken identities of SR-71 and U-2s.
But for epic status in the Theatre of the Insipid, the USAF’s “Roswell Report: Case Closed” is like Sinatra, Elvis, James Brown, Don Ho and Maria Callas all rolled into one.
Like “Nightmare on Elm Street” or “Friday the 13th,” the “Case Closed” report is the third sequel in the Roswell franchise that began in 1947 with a press release stating that a crashed disc had been recovered in the desert. Hours later, Roswell Army Air Field put the kibosh on the initial euphoria over its technology coup with a weather balloon cover story.
In 1994, under pressure from a New Mexico congressman, the USAF ejaculated a new riff, that what field investigators discovered was actually Project Mogul, a secret balloon train with monitors designed to record any evidence of Soviet nuclear activity. It was informally known as the “Final Word” report.
Three years later, with the 50th anniversary of its initial press release bearing down, the “Case Closed” rendering amended the Project Mogul story with its most regrettable contortion yet: Witnesses who reported seeing alien bodies were confused by anthropomorphic balloon-drop dummies, an experimental program that began in 1954, seven years after the Roswell event.
Even the MSM, which relegates UFOs to a couple of rungs lower than celebrity skank, howled when author Capt. James McAndrew released that stink bomb in 1997.
McAndrew’s punch-bowl floater resurfaced last week when researcher Tony Bragalia posted his interview with one of the fall guys at http://www.ufocon.blogspot.com/. Turns out that retired USAF Lt. Col. Raymond Madson is still steamed about how McAndrew used him a dozen years ago.
“I hadn’t read the report in years,” says Bragalia from his home in Florida. “I knew when it initially came out that was totally absurd, but when I picked it up and re-read Madson’s statement, I thought, this is a reasonably intelligent man, and he’s linked to a story that even a 5-year-old would laugh at.
“So I gave him a call, and he went on and on. He just had to vent.”
Madson, 79, was directing the USAF’s crash-test dummy program in the 1950s, called Project High Dive. His “Case Closed” affadavit provided a routine recounting of his role in the air drops over New Mexico’s outback. When he read how McAndrew was suggesting that 6-foot tall dummies could be mistaken for significantly smaller alien cadavers reported from a decade earlier, Madson hit the roof. He told Bragalia he repeatedly tried calling McAndrew, to no avail.
“I didn’t trust McAndrew. In fact, I don’t even like him,” said Madson, who suspects the military was telling the truth in the first press release that ignited the enduring controversy. “I don’t like the way that he operates.” He accused McAndrew of being “sent on a mission” to “produce a specific directive.” Read: debunking.
This is all old news, and amid the larger patterns of official obfuscation, a mere morsel. What it suggests is that there are more gems to be mined in the fine print, and that the Greatest Hits will keep getting better and better.
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