One of my long-lasting projects is organizing and
reviewing the 13,000+ letters in the very extensive Wendelle Stevens archive,
now housed at AFU. More than fifty percent of the correspondence file consists
of book orders, but now and then I find letters and documents of special interest.
One such document is a letter to Wendelle Stevens, written on June 13, 1987, by
an anonymous engineer involved in secret retrieval projects of crashed ”air
craft” . The seven-page letter give detailed data on several retrieval
operations in the U.S. of ”craft” crashing on land and water and then simply
disappearing, exactly like the Swedish Ghost Rockets of 1946 and later.
British ufologist and artist David Sankey´s drawing of a Swedish Ghost Rocket made specially for AFU
The American engineer was involved in retrieval
operations from 1975 to 1980, code-namned Project Pluto. The first assignement
in 1975 took him to a remote place in upstate Pennsylvania. ”We were some of
the first one´s on the scene other than lots of security people. The wreck had
already been covered by very large canvas blankets… I did manage to get a very
good look at the wreck on several occasions… It was later suggested to us that it
was a new type of air craft, and it was super hush-hush project. The air craft
was nothing like I have ever seen as probably ever will again… I don´t really
like to use the term cigar, but since I could not see the front part, it
certainly appeared to have once been shaped like a large cigar… The piece of
physical evidence that I held in my hand, was a material that I really can´t
identify… It weighed no where near enough to be any metal we had ever seen. It
even weighed less than any plastic that I had seen of a similar size.
I tried to scratch it with a pocket knife, and even
cut away a small piece of the edge, but the knife did nothing to it. The
surface was clear as glass, and stronger than any thing we hade ever seen…
After the site was secure, the first groups that included myself were taken
away. There was a very thorough strip search prior to us being given jumpsuits,
and put into a truck for the transportation to a waiting plane. We were taken
to another area and debriefed before we were allowed to return to our normal
way of life…
First page of letter from unknown engineer
In 1978, I was again sent to a crash site. We
arrived the day after the security people. This time the air craft landed in a
lake in upstate Pennsylvania… Lots of Navy equipment was flown in, and there
were divers everywhere… It seems that the divers had located the exact spot
that the air craft had rested on the bottom, but it was gone. There was lots of
evidence on the beach that something very large had crashed into the lake
causing the water of the lake to splash ashore, over thirty feet… There were
some thoughts at first that the craft may have been buried under the
bottom of the lake, but by this time, we knew enough about the craft to know if
that were the case. It was not – it just vanished.”
In this document the American engineer mention several
retrieval operations where the crafts have crashed or landed in water and simply
disappeared. His conclusion: ”I don´t really believe that the air craft belongs
to our Government or any other government on this earth… In addition, I have no
way of knowing if I had been on every crash site that occurred. There may have
been many more during that period and many more since. I really don´t know if
any one had ever been removed from the two wrecks, that I had personally seen…
Perhaps the medical people were only there – just in case. And/or to test the
wreck for any form of unknown bacteria prior to removing it. Their being
present is not really evidence that a life form was found. It could go either
way.”
Since 1946 there have been hundreds of well
documented Ghost Rocket reports in Sweden. Always with the same scenario,
apparently physical objects crashing into lakes and the military finding
nothing in spite of intense search. Swedish ufologist Clas Svahn have
investigated the Ghost Rocket phenomenon for many years and regard these
reports as one of the most intriguing type of UFO observations in our country.
Lieutenant Karl Gösta Bartoll searching for a ghost rocket in the Swedish lake Kölmjärv, July 19, 1946
These types of incidents continue in Sweden. Late
afternoon on July 27, 1999 several witnesses observed a missile or rocket
shaped object crash into lake Backsjön,
north of the town Arvika in the province of Värmland, Sweden. The object was
about three meters in length with small wings at the sides. It hit the lake
with a splash resulting in a large water cascade. One of the witnesses called
the local rescue service and eventually a unit from the Swedish military began
an intensive search for the missile. During the first days of investigation the
military gave various cover stories to the press of what had happened. They
interviewed seven witnesses who were all regarded as very credible. After some
preliminary dives in August a ten days search was initiated in September with a
small submarine equipped with ultrasound and cameras. In spite of a very
detailed search in the lake, nothing was found and this was very confusing to
the military. ”We considered this report as credible. The search resulted in
nothing and we really don´t know what we are looking for”, commented colonel
Yngve Johansson.
Although most of the reports of vanishing crafts
involve water there are a few cases where a crash or landing have been on the
ground. In the beginning of the 1950s American contactee George Van Tassel was
sometimes visited by military men from the Air Force who had a personal
interest in or had become involved in UFO incidents themselves. He related
several such incidents and talks in his magazine Proceedings. In 1953 an Air
Force Major, stationed at George Air Force Base, at Adelanto, California, spent
many weekends with the Van Tassel family at Giant Rock Airport. The major was
officially in charge of UFO investigations in Southern California. An
interesting case he had been involved in told of jet pilot who radioed George
Air Force Base tower that a round unidentified object had crashed into the
ground near San Jacinto Mountain. The Tower phoned the Major and hurriedly he
and other Air Force personal climbed into a helicopter and headed for Mt. San
Jacinto. They spotted the jet circling the area and landed the helicopter in a
clearing about 200 feet from the unknown object.
”The Major said they walked slowly toward it and
when they were about 25 feet from it they stopped in awe because the couldn´t
figure out what was happening. The Major said the object was apparently remote
controlled, and was in the process of some automatically activated ”self
destruct” proceedure. He said the object had a pulsing bright light in the
middle of an ovoid mass, of what looked like black tar about two feet thick and
about 12 feet in diameter. The entire black mass was quivering like jelly, shaking
and getting smaller by the minute.” (Proceedings, vol. 10, no. 6, Oct-Dec 1974,
pp. 11-12).
In a short time the black blob dimished until there
was nothing left and the pulsing light just vanished. The group took samples of
the ground where the object had been and also samples of the earth a hundred
feet away. George Van Tassel never heard what the results were as the Major
then stopped visiting Giant Rock when security and secrecy regarding UFOs
increased in 1954. Perhaps the 1958 American science fiction-horror film The
Blob was inspired by rumours of these type of cases? The story by a strange
co-incidence also transpires in rural Pennsylvania. Several writers claim that The
Blob was inspired by a story published in Philadelphia Inquirer, September 27,
1950:
It was around 10 pm on September 26, 1950, in the
city of Philadelphia in Pennsylvania, USA... Patrolmen John Collins and Joseph
Keenan were driving on Vare Boulevard near 26th Street when they saw something
resembling a parachute at tree-top level drifting down into a field near 26th.
They estimated the 'parachute' looked to be about six feet across. The officers
called in backup -- Sgt. Joseph Cook and his driver, Patrolman James Casper --
and once they arrived, all four men went to investigate the parachute. It
wasn't a parachute. The odd object was draped across the weeds, and so light
that it wasn't bending the plants. The officers' flashlights made the strange
mass give off a sort of misty, purplish glow that made it look as if the object
contained crystals. Collins tried to pick the thing up but the part of the
object he touched just dissolved, leaving a slightly sticky and odorless
residue on his hand. As the four officers watched over the next twenty-five
minutes or so, the whole object just slowly evaporated away.
There is a very fascinating description of this
process in George Adamski´s Inside the Space Ships. During one of his contacts
Adamski was told by one of the space people:
”Whenever possible these complex and highly sensitive little machines are returned to their parent craft, but sometimes, for one reason or another, the connection is broken and they go out of control or crash to the ground. In such cases emergency procedure is immediately brought into action. On each side of the mother ship, just below the disk-launching ports, is a magnetic ray projector. When a disk goes out of control, a ray is projected to disintegrate it. This accounts for some of the mysterious explosions that take place in your skies which cannot be accounted for by artillery, jet planes or electrical storms.
”Whenever possible these complex and highly sensitive little machines are returned to their parent craft, but sometimes, for one reason or another, the connection is broken and they go out of control or crash to the ground. In such cases emergency procedure is immediately brought into action. On each side of the mother ship, just below the disk-launching ports, is a magnetic ray projector. When a disk goes out of control, a ray is projected to disintegrate it. This accounts for some of the mysterious explosions that take place in your skies which cannot be accounted for by artillery, jet planes or electrical storms.
On the other hand, if a disk goes out of control
near the surface of the planet where an explosion might cause damage, it is
allowed to descend to the ground where a milder charge is sent into it. Instead
of an explosion, this causes the metal to disintegrate in slow stages. First it
softens, then turns into a kind of jelly, then a liquid, and finally it enters
a free state as gases, leaving not a wrack behind. This latter process is
without danger to anyone or anything should the disk be touched while in
process of disintegration. The only harm could come if, by chance, someone
should see it fall and touch it at the moment the ray is applied.” (George
Adamski, Inside the Space Ships, 1955 ed. p. 155).
I don´t know if any ufologist has made a thorough study of UFOs vanishing and dissolving as in these reports. If some of my readers are aware of such a study I hope to hear from you.
