UFO Investigation Still in a Familiar Holding Pattern

In “Blue Book Redux,” Billy Cox as only he can—lays bare the apparent history repeating, present-day government UFO investigation debacle. The repeated stepping on the UFO rake is demonstrated by Billy as he weaves through the historical

By The UFO Chronicles 8-2-2025

narrative, newly declassified documents and present day progress, or more accurately lack thereof salted with the Billy Cox style of editorial perspective.

In his latest piece, the longest, career mainstream journalist who regularly paid heed to UFO happenings dives in by recounting the recently uncovered facts (by way of declassified documents) that the CIA acted deceitfully in withholding information about Lee Harvey Oswald and orchestrated obstructions during Congressional inquiries into the JFK assassination. The exposure of George Joannides, a secret CIA operative who functioned under an alias and was deliberately positioned to manage the flow and suppression of information to Congress, highlights entrenched systemic deception and manipulation by intelligence agencies (surprise!) This is emblematic of the broader governmental pattern of secrecy and controlling narratives, particularly on contentious issues generally speaking and UFOs/UAP specifically.

The article then shifts towards contemporary efforts from lawmakers, specifically praising (in this instance) Rep. Anna Paulina Luna’s activist role in pushing for declassification and transparency, contrasting it with the often superficial or ineffective declassification measures from White House directives. Luna’s pragmatic approach, involving direct engagement and negotiation with intelligence bodies, is recognized as a positive force but is portrayed as potentially facing significant obstacles as the scope of investigation widens—especially into the UAP (Unidentified Aerial Phenomena) domain, which eclipses even the JFK files in complexity and political sensitivity.

Billy’s core focus turns to the All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO), the (relatively) newly established agency tasked with investigating UFOs/UAPs, and the skepticism and frustrations voiced by former insiders like Tim Phillips. His insider commentary reveals multiple dysfunctions: many reports labelled as UFOs are actually misidentified classified military tech; disinformation campaigns muddy the waters; and even critical evidence from high-profile events like the 2004 USS Nimitz Tic Tac encounter has vanished or been confiscated without transparent explanation. Phillips’ abrupt early termination from government service after speaking candidly is framed as indicative of the institutional resistance and punitive culture confronting those who push for genuine transparency within the UFO investigation apparatus.

The piece underscores a deep dichotomy between the kind of strategic, integrated analysis that independent researchers from the Scientific Coalition for UAP Studies (SCU) advocate—focusing on long-term behavioral patterns of UAPs—and the case-by-case, fragmentary approach taken by official agencies. Despite some academic rigor and well-received submissions to AARO from scientific groups, the agency demonstrates a preference of bureaucratic procedure over substantive inquiry and generalizable understanding. Moreover, military investigators exhibit a troubling tendency to deprioritize civilian UFO incidents, overlooking the threat or significance of non-military UFO encounters that could have national security implications.

Legislative efforts to fund and expand AARO’s capabilities, including advanced surveillance technology called “Gremlin” and mandated comprehensive data sharing with military commands, but Billy reminds us that it’s all for not without transparency. While publicly framed as a serious step toward accountability and national security, commentators including Larry Hancock from SCU caution that without provisions ensuring public transparency and independent oversight, such measures might become more efficient internal data collection tools rather than genuine disclosure mechanisms. Historical precedents from the 1950s Project Blue Book era inform this pessimism, where early promises of serious UFO investigations yielded decades of secrecy instead.

Billy paints the all-to-familiar picture of significant institutional inertia and intentional obfuscation with UAP research under governmental auspices, warning that efforts to establish independent, credible, and authoritative civilian bodies capable of enforcing disclosure and advancing scientific study have repeatedly failed in Congress. His article quotes and critiques key players within the intelligence bureaucracy who defer responsibility, avoid direct engagement with inquisitive lawmakers, and refuse to publicly share consolidated intelligence assessments on the nature and potential origins of UAPs—even while intelligence leaders publicly acknowledge that non-human or extraterrestrial origins remain viable hypotheses.

Billy’s disillusionment with the prospect that any government agency can deliver full disclosure or scientific clarity on the UFO mystery isn’t new—it’s the result of decades of investigative journalism and research. History repeats ….

READ BILLY'S ARTICLE HERE ►

See Also:

	Pentagon's UFO Office (AARO) Seeks to Improve it's UFO Case Management System
	New Counter-Drone Task Force to Team with Pentagon UFO Office
	Senate Briefing on The Skinwalker Ranch and AARO’s Sean Kirkpatrick

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Elizondo's 'Imminent' Stands Alone

“Senior officials told me continuously and confidentially that big aerospace companies have been part of the Legacy Program to retrieve and reverse-engineer crash materials ..."

“Well, I got a couple of thousand damn questions, you know? I want to speak to someone in charge. I want to lodge a complaint. You have no right to make people crazy. . . What the hell is going on around here? Who the hell ARE you people?” — from “CE-III” Since Lue Elizondo’s just-released memoir is already a New York Times No. 1 bestseller, it’s easy to imagine the big-screen treatment opening with a replay of a closing scene from “Close Encounters of the Third Kind.”

By Billy Cox lifeinjonestown

The little alien is greeting Earthlings with Curwen hand gestures that groove to the movie’s five-note tonal signature. ET’s huge eyes glisten with emotion, and his/her/its facial expression lays it on thick with beatific awe. The camera pulls away as human volunteers suit up and file aboard for the ride of a lifetime.

Before the grand finale, however, the fairy tale ending jumps the rails. The film stutters, then shrivels amid white-orange heat, and cuts to a nightmare unfolding in Colares, Brazil. The small coastal village and surrounding locales are under assault by UFOs, of all shapes and sizes, orbs, discs, cylinders, you name it, triangles. Disembodied lights chase residents inside their own homes. The afflicted break out in blisters and rashes; others endure nausea, blinding headaches, puncture wounds, abduction, temporary paralysis, catatonia.

Government investigators descend on the region to document the chaos, compiling as many as 3,500 case files. By one estimate, the incidents leave 300 animals dead, dozens of victims with chronic illnesses, and claim the lives of 10 Brazilians. Authorities are at a loss to identify the aggressors or their motives, and no one is held accountable.

In 1977, as “Close Encounters” was thrilling the global village in theaters, this real-life flip side of Steven Spielberg’s space-brothers fantasy was happening simultaneously, under the radar, in South America. But the repercussions from those events hadn’t been fully realized until last week’s publication of Imminent: Inside the Pentagon’s Hunt for UFOs.

Anticipated in growing circles with the fervor of a Harry Potter book-drop, Imminent fills in some of the blanks on the secret Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (AATIP), which the NY Times parlayed into a groundbreaking expose in 2017. But as the handiwork of censors’ pens at the Defense Office of Prepublication and Security Review indicates, there’s more to the story than we’re allowed to know.

In this latest installment on the Pentagon’s twisted relationship with infinitely advanced nonhuman technology, former counterintelligence agent and AATIP director Lue Elizondo goes big from the outset.

More than 30 years have passed since “Close Encounters,” and in 2009, Elizondo gets recruited by U.S. Strategic Command intelligence officer Jay Stratton for an opaque assignment. A former Army combat veteran with counterintelligence experience in “locking down” classified defense technology from foreign spies, Elizondo will create a secure space for a mysterious project called the Advanced Weapons System Application Program (AAWSAP). But it falls to a senior Defense Intelligence Agency analyst named James Lacatski to read him in on it.

For two years AAWSAP sponsored a secret UFO study set for termination in 2010 by squeamish higher-ups at the Pentagon. Undeterred, Stratton and Lacatski, a rocket scientist, hatched a successor called AATIP. It would be funded by resources under the broad umbrella of Intelligence, Surveillance, and Reconnaissance, or ISR. Keeping it alive would require discretion and finesse.

Elizondo signs on, but he doesn’t get the full monty until attending an informal private dinner meeting off-site. Guests include remote-viewing pioneer physicist Hal Puthoff, hotel tycoon/aerospace entrepreneur Robert Bigelow (the prime contractor leading AAWSAP’s UFO investigation) and Brazilian Gen. Paulo Roberto Yog de Miranda Uchoa.

And that’s when Elizondo learns about the hair-raising scenes from Colares in the 1970s.

This is the stage-setter for Elizondo’s immersion into the wild-ass behavioral range of the phenomenon. What begins as a catch-up course into the military’s long dyspeptic history with the UFO/UAP enigma rachets into a full-spectrum assessment of the challenge it poses not only to national security, but for the human race at large.

And those blue-chip suspects . . .

Elizondo’s work with AATIP soon puts him on the scent of even more deeply concealed UFO projects. And these “Legacy Programs,” he charges, have been working the problem for generations, beginning with the Roswell crash in 1947.

“Senior officials told me continuously and confidentially that big aerospace companies have been part of the Legacy Program to retrieve and reverse-engineer crash materials,” he writes. “The big names included Lockheed Martin, TRW, McDonnell Douglas, Northrup Grumman, Boeing, Raytheon, BAE Systems, and the Aerospace Corporation, all of which have been principal members of the US military-industrial complex. I was also told that Monsanto, a biotechnology corporation absorbed by Bayer in 2018, may have historically been involved, most likely dealing with biological specimens.”

Retired DIA program manager Lacatski himself has independently contributed considerable detail to the back story. He co-authored Skinwalkers at the Pentagon: An Insiders’ Account of the Secret Government UFO Program in 2021, and in 2023’s Inside the U.S. Government Covert UFO Program: Initial Revelations, he claimed to have personally “gained access” to the interior of a recovered craft. But Lacatski stepped up only after Elizondo left the reservation seven years ago and made history with the NY Times.

Operating quietly for the Office of the Undersecretary of Defense for Intelligence (OUSD(I)), AATIP’s collective blood ran cold during a presentation by physicist Puthoff, whose intelligence work for the Pentagon spans decades. Working the math on a whiteboard, the CEO of EarthTech International unveiled a formula for UFO propulsion that operates entirely within the laws of general relativity. By using high energy to compress space into a “warp bubble” that can be wrapped around an object, said object can move freely without being encumbered by gravity, light speed, the environment, etc.

“It is no longer a theoretical challenge,” Puthoff informed his small audience. “It is now a technological challenge.”

Recalls Elizondo: “The voices in the SCIF went silent — and stayed silent.”

If in fact physics is on the brink of a technological breakthrough, nobody has a monopoly on the math. Given the murderous history of our species, engineering that math into weapons platforms would be the first order of business. In that event, a level playing field would obviously threaten technologically superior observers keeping tabs on our progress. A threat of that nature would lend more coherence to their motivations; government files, after all, are crammed with reports of UFO interactions with military assets, from drones to nukes to jet fighters to aircraft carriers to restricted infrastructure.

How might “they” respond if we cross that threshold?

Dispensing with ‘compromised individuals’

“The worst-case scenario for us is that they’re bad,” Elizondo writes. “If they’re bad, they could be conducting what the military calls an IBP operation – initial preparation of the battlefield.”

Stratton proposes a “honey pot” experiment, dubbed Operation Interloper, to acquire more data that might ultimately expose their vulnerabilities. The bait would be a nuclear-powered strike group – carriers, destroyers, subs, many of them with histories of UFO interactions – dispatched on maneuvers in the Atlantic. The fleet would be armed to the teeth with the latest innovations in sensor technology; given UFOs’ patterns for operating above and below oceans, the ambush stands to reap a windfall of knowledge.

With OUSD(I) “infested with compromised individuals,” according to Imminent, Stratton and Elizondo decide to circumvent the chain of command and run the Interloper proposal straight up to the Joint Chiefs of Staff. The inevitable brick wall dashes those aspirations at the end of 2016, when JCS rejects the idea. “Where I saw a bold initiative to make sense of what our servicemen and -women witnessed in the skies,” Elizondo writes, “leadership saw a great bucket of weirdness that was not within their usual daily list of tasks.”

What follows is a masterclass on the art of legal subterfuge.

Hoping to pre-empt catastrophic communications failures that preceded Pearl Harbor and 9/11, Elizondo in Imminent describes AATIP’s plan for the official verification and release of the Navy’s now-iconic Tic Tac, GoFast, and Gimbal videos. There’s a critical assist from rainmaker and former Deputy Assistant SecDef for Intelligence Christoper Mellon. Then comes an unlikely private platform from rock star Tom DeLonge, called To The Stars Academy, which enables a public discussion. It culminates in a media strategy to unclog the bureaucratic stovepipes, if only briefly.

The payoff results in unprecedented — and continuing — congressional legislation to excavate the truth behind the coverup. The fate of those endeavors, however, is pending.

Pulling the trigger by taking it to the press is also a kamikaze move that requires a proactive resignation from a career Elizondo loved. Imminent details its aftermath, the professional retaliation, its impact on his family, and the loss of income that has led to a still unsettled lifestyle. As for the “great bucket of weirdness” the DoD leadership so rigidly shrugs off? It continues to slosh over the edges, with or without Pentagon approval.

In a 2022 analysis for the EdgeScience journal, microbiologist and chemist Colm Kelleher – who co-authored Lacatski’s two books – wrote of a “hitchhiker effect” that can sometimes rattle paranormal researchers. He classifies the consequences for many of those who studied UFOs and related oddities at Bigelow’s “Skinwalker Ranch” in Utah as “profoundly altered perceptual environments.” But the particulars read more like notes from John Carpenter’s scratchpad:

“Nightmarish dogmen,” “black shadow people standing over their beds,” “orbs routinely floating through their homes,” and an “inferno of unexplained phenomena.” Furthermore, Kelleher wrote, all five DIA investigators who pursued anomalies out west reported experiencing spectral pop-ups long after they completed their field work. Some families and neighbors of the researchers also talked of seeing apparitions, a development Kelleher likened to a social contagion.

When the fairy tales end

Once he committed to joining AATIP, the Imminent author wasn’t spared either. Soft green, basketball-sized orbs began materializing in the hallways of his home and disappearing through walls. Elizondo’s wife and kids saw them as well.

“Was this some sort of adversarial technology being used to conduct surveillance against my family and me? Or worse,” he writes, “was this all part of the UAP issue? Maybe another more advanced intelligence was looking into me and my colleagues because they knew we were looking into them?”

Imminent thus becomes the latest addition to an immense and expanding UFO corpus, but it is arguably its most exceptional. In the foreword, Mellon characterizes Elizondo as “a singular individual whose intrepid actions changed the course of history.”

“Absent Lue’s persistence and courage,” he continues, “the US government would still be denying the existence of UAP and failing to investigate a phenomenon that may well prove to be the greatest discovery in history.”

Time will decide that – just as it may reveal whether the terror in Colares was an outlier or an indicator of more authentic intention by an Other we want to believe is benevolent or, at worst, apathetic. We are a dangerously insecure species addicted to fairy tales. But as Imminent makes clear, we are also in dire need of leaders with enough guts to tell us when they’re over.

VISIT BILLY'S WEBSITE ►

See Also:

	Pentagon Utilized UFOs and Nukes Data Collected by R. Hastings
	Former Pentagon Official Talks UFO 'Occupancy' and 'Biological Samples'
	Former Pentagon UFO Official To Reveal Shocking Never-Before-Shared Details

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'Alien Abduction Has Been Thumping Against the Floorboards Of The UFO Controversy 60 Years'

Of stars and bonfires

At home on the range with Robert Hastings, UFO abductees

"Extraterrestrials are kidnapping human beings in order to harvest sperm and ova and create a new species. Their subjects/victims descend from previously abducted family members in a timeline that spans generations. How and why certain families are targeted remains a mystery."

Like a drooling chimera locked away in the cellar, alien abduction has been thumping against the floorboards of the UFO controversy for nearly 60 years. John Fuller’s seminal The Interrupted Journey broke the ice in 1966, with notable additions by Travis Walton (The Walton Experience) in 1978, Budd Hopkins in 1981 (Missing Time), Whitley Strieber’s Communion in 1987, and John Mack’s Abduction in 1994. Simultaneously horrific and the object of standup comedy ridicule, voluminous first-person accounts of getting snatched for medical and breeding experiments by spindly little lightbulb-headed

By Billy Cox Life in Jonestown

grey extraterrestrials may have done more to deter scientific inquiry than anything the CIA’s debunking panel recommended in 1953. Abduction is pure kryptonite — it leaps light years beyond upside down physics and dares us to reimagine ourselves as lab rats.

"It’s only when you meet other abductees that you
start to make some sense of it, because you recognize
that these people don’t want to feel the way they do
any more than you do"

In 2022, retired British entrepreneur Steve Aspin produced an exceptionally confident take on the phenomenon called Out of Time: The Intergenerational Abduction Program Explored. It rolled decades of testimonials, surveys and anecdotal patterns into the scope of his own personal waking nightmare. The ordeal inspired a unified field theory, of sorts, regarding the end game of the abduction “program.” Aspin predicted the truth as he saw it would be received with the sort of disconnect expressed by former SCOTUS Justice Felix Frankfurter to an eyewitness briefing on Nazi death camps.

In 1943, Polish resistance fighter Jan Karski huddled with Frankfurter in hopes of persuading him to alert FDR to the industrial-grade extermination of Jews in occupied Europe. Frankfurter’s reply: “I don’t believe you.” The Associate Justice quickly clarified for Poland’s ambassador, who was in on the meeting and vouched for Karski’s credibility: “I did not say that he is lying. I said that I did not believe him.” Aspin’s truth, however, makes Karski look like a piker.

“A race of extraterrestrial visitors,” he writes in Out of Time, “has been executing a covert program of subtle genetic modification of a small percentage of the human race for more than a century with the prime objective of quietly taking over control of human societies on Planet Earth.”

As Aspin makes his case, hardcore abduction researchers acquainted with the work of retired Temple University history professor David Jacobs will note familiar themes in Aspin’s narrative; other threads, however, are a bit more novel. Broadly speaking:

Extraterrestrials are kidnapping human beings in order to harvest sperm and ova and create a new species. Their subjects/victims descend from previously abducted family members in a timeline that spans generations. How and why certain families are targeted remains a mystery.

Also:

multiple ET species, often characterized by hierarchies and divisions of labor, participate in this racket. The most common are little humanoid greys. These guys are the frontline worker bees, presumed by some to be manufactured biologically. They appear to be genderless and incapable of reproducing. Less common are the taller greys. They come across as mid-level managers, and abductees often report “male” or “female” vibes emanating from the taller ones. At the top of the ladder are the “mantis-like” beings, seven feet tall or more. These insectoid-looking omnipotents are the ones running the show.

Exchanges between abductors and subjects are intensely telepathic. Through stare-downs with the intruders’ spellbinding and massive black eyes, details of abductees’ interior lives are extracted through “mindscan” sessions. From the opposite direction flow information “downloads” – false or screen memories, amnesia, rote reassurances that things are OK – which obscure or disfigure accurate recall of the event.

Out of Time also reviews trace evidence, scars, scoop marks and other dermal aberrations associated with the alleged implantation of tracking devices. At last glance, 16 tiny metallic curiosities removed from digits and extremities by the late podiatrist Roger Leir emitted radio frequencies in the hertz, kilohertz and megahertz bands – only to cease transmission within weeks of excision. A 2009 analysis on one sample revealed that the isotopic ratios in four component elements – nickel, copper, magnesium and boron – suggested non-terrestrial origins. Scanning electron microscopy also detected “nanoscale” structures in the material, hinting at a potential for electrical current conductivity.

he real kicker, however, is the stealth ascendancy of the hybrids, or “hubrids,” into human society, perhaps the culmination of the program’s final phase. Ringing with cultural echoes from the Red Scare to Robert Heinlein’s The Puppet Masters, the abduction scenario is, of course, unthinkable. And it’s also suspected of being the ultimate firewall against UFO transparency. If the defense establishment were to formally confirm its inability to prevent UFO/UAP from making a joke of restricted airspace, then literally anything could be possible. Literally anything.

Last month, Aspin, and his wife Janis, crossed the ocean and traveled to the middle of nowhere in order to speak freely with fellow draftees into the “program.” The author turned out to be right about at least one thing. These are stories that the uninitiated are not likely to embrace.

[...]

Continue Reading ►

See Also:

	Big Sur UFO Film: Government Whistleblower Reveals He Watched It - PART 2
	Self-Confessed UFO Abductees Robert Hastings and Dr. Bob Jacobs to Appear on Coast to Coast AM
	Seeking USAF Veterans Who Had Abduction-Like Experiences at Nuclear Missile Sites

REPORT YOUR UFO EXPERIENCE

Senate Briefing on The Skinwalker Ranch and AARO’s Sean Kirkpatrick

The Skinwalker Strikes Back

Former AARO boss get clobbered by friendly fire

"But the first question we should ask is, why is this guy [Sean Kirkpatrick] still doing press interviews in the first place? Is it vanity? Are there rhetorical or other scores he feels the need to settle with real or imagined antagonists?"

Well that interview didn’t go according to script, did it? See, this is what happens when an ostensibly smart guy like Sean Kirkpatrick surrounds himself with hand-picked beat reporters who, in pursuit of access to power and sourcing, swallow each and every pronouncement on faith and refuse to call him out on anything. Like Muhammad Ali, Kirkpatrick should’ve been preparing for the unexpected juke with sparring partners like Tim Witherspoon or

By Billy Cox Life in Jonestown

Larry Holmes, not the housecat palookas who softened him up for what should’ve been a non-event last week. Instead, the former director of the Pentagon’s wretched All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office got inadvertently tripped up by one of his own media allies – and now he looks like just another tired cliche.

But the first question we should ask is, why is this guy still doing press interviews in the first place? Is it vanity? Are there rhetorical or other scores he feels the need to settle with real or imagined antagonists?

The former CIA operator left AARO in December after 18 months for a job more suited to his impulses, i.e., Chief Technology Officer for defense and intelligence programs at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. He no doubt checked the “Exceeds Expectations” box of his year-end review by ignoring the really weird UFO cases and hyping the explainable ones, which nobody gives a shit about. And for good measure, he dropped a floater in the punchbowl on the way out with that “Historical Report,” which scrupulously avoided any mention of (among many other omissions) nuclear-base incursions and WMD tampering. And the Tic Tac incident, which rejuvenated the global UFO conversation in 2017? Forget about it, nowhere to be found in that masquerade of an official record.

But Kirkpatrick set the table for last week’s snafu by joining several round-table discussions – December 2022, October 2023, and last November – with oblivious and largely legacy-media homies who either didn’t know about or failed to ask what AARO’s position was on two of the most conspicuous and well-documented UFO cases this century.

And, um, what did the pilots say?

The most visually intriguing, of course, is the 2013 Aguadilla encounter, involving footage of transmedium UFO activity off Puerto Rico recorded by Customs and Border Protection. It was declassified by the Department of Homeland Security in 2023. More portentous, however, are the implications from a radar data harvest reaped by the 2008 Stephenville incident.

Eyewitness accounts of the spectacular UFO that buzzed the Texas cowtown 16 years ago rated international coverage, in no small part because FOIA action by Robert Powell forced the Air Force to reverse initial denials and admit that 10 F-16s from Carswell AFB were operating in the Stephenville region that night, per numerous folks on the ground. Plus, the unknown radar target (no transponder) was cruising like a dorsal fin for the no-fly zone around President Bush’s residence in Crawford some 70 miles southeast of Stephenville. Inexplicably, by time the bogey hit the perimeter, no jet fighters were in the area. But radar records did track a surveillance plane, likely an AWACS, keeping an eye on things at 41,000 feet by flying figure-8 patterns for nearly four hours.

During Bush’s presidency, at least three illegal breaches of restricted airspace over Crawford’s “western White House” made headlines, with private pilots being forced down by F-16s. According to FOIA-acquired FAA records, a total of nine violations occurred during Bush’s term, all from 2001-2005. Every violator was apprehended and cited. There is no mention of the 1/8/08 visitor from Stephenville in the data provided by the FAA. One also wonders: where was the air cover that confronted the other guilty interlopers? Given some hairy historical precedents about what can happen when combat aircraft mount aggressive responses to UFO activity, might there be some tacit military policy to back off in the absence of demonstrably hostile intent? That’d be one helluva story.

But during Kirkpatrick’s media Q&As, not a single reporter asked what the pilots or crew members who participated in Stephenville or Aguadilla incidents – reconstructed with federal data – had to say. Because nobody dared to mention either case in the first place.

A ‘UFO religion’ in the Pentagon

Enter New York Post reporter Steven Greenstreet.

Greenstreet is a tenacious journo on a mission. The UAP mystery insults his intelligence. He dismisses researchers as “true believers,” “spooky hustlers,” and “paranormal crusaders.” For the last few years, he’s been engaged in his own crusade to goad Congress into investigating the Pentagon’s credulous engagement with the UFO issue. He describes the $22 million for the Advanced Aerospace Weapon Systems Applications Program (AAWSAP) in 2007 as a “misappropriation of funds.” The focus of his obsession is Skinwalker Ranch, a nexus of reported UFO and other paranormal activity in Utah, where ongoing investigations are now five seasons deep into a History channel reality series.

Greenstreet is, in other words, the perfect vessel for Kirkpatrick. In the interview he dropped last week, Greenstreet virtue-signals by blaming “the UFO hysteria of the past six years” on the New York Times. He accuses the media of being asleep at the wheel for failing to appreciate the sketchy (at best) UFO history report released by AARO in March. He attempts to score points with Kirkpatrick by describing AARO detractors as zealots.

“A UFO religion has infiltrated the Pentagon,” Greenstreet declares after getting Kirkpatrick to characterize even receptive DoD colleagues as part of “a religion,” a religion that even threatens national security. “This seems like front page news,” Greenstreet adds, “but you won’t find it on the front pages of the American mainstream media, who mostly ignored Kirkpatrick’s AARO report and who continued to publish stories about aliens and UFOs.”

The media ignored AARO’s report with headlines like these: “Pentagon finds ‘no evidence’ of UFO technology in new UFO report” – NPR; “Pentagon study finds no evidence of alien life in reported UFO sightings going back decades” – Associated Press; “Pentagon report says most UFO sightings ‘ordinary objects’ and phenomena” – Reuters; “Pentagon says no evidence of UFO cover-up by U.S.” – NBC; “Alien, UFO mothership is not being hidden from you: Pentagon report” – USA Today; “Pentagon finds no evidence of alien visits, hidden spacecraft” – Washington Post; “Pentagon review finds no evidence of alien coverup” – New York Times. But to itemize Greenstreet’s myriad inaccuracies is beside the point.

Whoops . . .

Twenty-two minutes through the half-hour split-screen interview (see below) Greenstreet asks if SK had “any interest at all in UFOs” prior to his appointment to lead AARO in 2022. Kirkpatrick says not beyond the movies. “Before AARO, did you perform any duties regarding UFOs or paranormal phenomena?” SK says no. “Did you attend a 2018 Senate Armed Services Committee briefing on Skinwalker Ranch?”

Kirkpatrick gets this blank deer-in-the-headlights look like Trump did when asked six years ago if he knew anything about payoffs to Stormy Daniels. SK pauses, gaze climbing the walls, and says “Nnnno . . . I attended a briefing at the request of Senate Armed Services Committee on what was at that time associated with the AATIP/AAWSAP research that was going (on) as an independent outside, uh, reviewer, and I gave them my opinions at that time.”

Because that’s just what the Senate does – invite people who know nothing about a subject to share their uninformed opinions.

Kirkpatrick tries a little damage spin by clarifying “this was not a government briefing” and winds up sounding like Trump trying to explain why he did or didn’t favor Putin’s word over American intelligence at a summit in Helsinki. During Greenstreet’s trip to Skinwalker Ranch a few years ago, he explains to SK, ranch owner Brandon Fugal claimed he attended the very same SASC meeting — and Kirkpatrick was there too. Moreover, Fugal insisted, Kirkpatrick actually ran the meeting himself, informing attendees that he, Kirkpatrick, “was already fully aware of the reality of UFO phenomena.”

The dead end blues

Kirkpatrick denies leading the meeting, or making “aliens are real” statements. In a subsequent email exchange, SK tells Greenstreet “I did not know that it was about Skinwalker Ranch until later. I don’t recall it being referenced by that name during the briefing.” Greenstreet responds with slides from Fugal’s 2018 Power Point briefing, which feature logos that read “Confidential Briefing/Skinwalker Ranch/U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence.” Kirkpatrick denies being in on that particular meeting – the one he attended, he assures Greenstreet, “was less polished.” Kirkpatrick doubles down by saying he didn’t, in fact, attend any such briefing on The Hill in 2018 – “I believe it would have been 2017.”

“I don’t recall ever meeting Fugal,” SK adds. “Maybe he’s confusing the two meetings.”

Fugal responds to Greenstreet’s followup email query with the exact date of the meeting – 19 April 2018 – along with assertions that he (Fugal) possesses photos, videos, and the names of every witness in the room. “This is all very confusing,” Greenstreet confesses at the end of his piece, “and at this point, I simply don’t know who to believe.”

Fugal settled matters last Thursday by releasing a photo (below) from the 2018 briefing – with Kirkpatrick staring into the camera.

On April 19, 2018, my team from Skinwalker Ranch was asked to provide a confidential briefing in Washington D.C. to the U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence & United States Armed Services Committee. Sean Kirkpatrick was at the head of the table. It lasted 2.5 hrs. pic.twitter.com/1tkb9vnO5h

— Brandon Fugal (@BrandonFugal) May 9, 2024

Don’t expect Steven Greenstreet to go to the dark side – his dragonslayer shtick compelled him to bury the lead of this surprising interview with an intro that allowed Sean Kirkpatrick to proclaim his victimhood, once again, at the hands of UFO crazies. As for the former AARO boss, who could and should have disappeared quietly into shadowland five months ago, a little advice – if you’re actually enjoying this public figure gig, get better sparring partners than the stroke jobs who helped pave the road to this dead end.

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UFOs and Nuclear Weapons Sites: 'These Craft Have Disrupted Our Weapons'

A line in the sand

'Nukes' author contemplates the last taboo

“The nuclear bomb is the most irrational weapon ever invented. It can be employed to no rational purpose. It is not even an effective defense against itself” — George Kennan

It’s been fascinating to watch the UFO conversation evolve from a political campaign killer to a re-election campaign logo over the past 15 years. Who would’ve thought, after watching Dennis Kucinich getting mauled by laughter during a 2007 presidential primary debate, that Congress would ever contemplate inviting federal employees to talk openly about what they saw or discovered while on duty? Well, if Rep. Michael Gallagher’s (R-WI) proposed add-on to the

By Billy Cox The UFO Chronicles 7-11-22

2023 National Defense Authorization Act survives peer scrutiny in the House and the Senate, military intelligence is going to be facing hard choices. Among other things, the amendment would create a safe haven for federal employees and contractors to speak freely about their UFO experiences without getting penalized for violating security oaths. Co-sponsored by House Democrat Ruben Gallego, the bill would install a “secure system” – within the Pentagon’s UFO office, whatever they decide to name it – for banking those reports. Congress would then have full access to that data, although the proposal avoids language about public release.

Similarly, in the Senate, a bill backed by Mark Warner (D-VA) and Marco Rubio (R-FL) will advocate “enhancing oversight of the IC and Department of Defense collection and reporting on Unidentified Aerospace-Undersea Phenomena,” whatever that means. Details are forthcoming.

Back in May, during the 21st century’s first UFO hearing on Capitol Hill, Gallagher was the guy who managed to drop the controversial Wilson-Davis notes into the Congressional record. He also tried pressing Pentagon bureaucrats Scott Bray and Ronald Moultrie for answers on the ticking bomb nobody wants to discuss – UFOs’ unmitigated access to the nuclear arsenal.

While Bray and Moultrie sat poker-faced, the investigator who wrote the textbook on the phenomenon’s ability to tamper with America’s strategic assets wonders if lawmakers are fully aware of what they themselves are about to tamper with.

“I’m amazed at what’s happened since 2017 and the New York Times article came out – I never expected to see these kinds of developments in my lifetime,” says Robert Hastings from his home in rural Colorado. “But it’s clear the nuclear cases are still a taboo subject for any kind of acknowledgement.

“Aside from (the late Senate Majority Leader) Harry Reid, no public official has publicly stated they’re messing with our nukes. But if you’re willing to talk about it openly, that this surveillance is ongoing and on some occasions these craft have disrupted our weapons – well, once you let that horse out of the barn, you pretty much can’t go back.”

Author of the groundbreaking UFOs and Nukes: Extraordinary Encounters at Nuclear Weapons Sites in 2008, Hastings’ decades-long expedition into the Cold War’s darkest secret also generated a companion documentary. Both give voice to the 167 mostly Air Force veterans who’ve been willing to speak out. Last year, Pentagon whistleblower Luis Elizondo cited Nukes as a must-read for the ostensibly uninitiated like Bray and Moultrie. Launch control officers, targeting officers, maintenance officers, security personnel – some gave real names; others, fearing reprisal, remained nameless. Either way, Hastings says his book is just the first draft of a national security breach whose scope is incalculable.

“If what (Gallagher, Gallego, et al) propose goes into effect, I think it could indeed be a gamechanger for some of these folks,” he says of the pending NDAA amendment. “There must be thousands, if not tens of thousands, maybe even more veterans since the 1940s who’ve had these experiences and who are gonna take their stories to the grave because they’re afraid of losing their retirement or whatever. So this is a step in the right direction.”

Want real answers? Hastings says calling administrators to testify is pointless. Ask the veterans themselves instead, the ones who were there. Who knows – maybe a congressional appeal for witnesses could even embolden any surviving airmen to step up and vouch for David H. Schuur. Schuur’s testimony in UFOs and Nukes is the most undie-staining chapter in the book.

Schuur couldn’t remember which year it happened, 1966 or 67. The evidence places him with the 455th/91st Strategic Missile Wing at North Dakota’s Minot AFB from December ’63 to November ’67. He was a 1st lieutenant on alert duty at Echo Launch Control Facility that unforgettable summer night long ago. Echo Flight was one of 15 LCF platforms designed to fire Minuteman missiles at the Soviet Union. Each flight was armed with 10 missiles apiece.

Schuur was below in the LCF when the UFO approached the missile fields and topside security started freaking out. He followed the drama as it unfolded in real time via network communications. Described only as a large bright object, the intruder first hovered over Alpha Flight, apparently “moving from missile to missile” and scrambling control panels with “spurious indicators.” Wing command alerted SAC headquarters as the object visited one LCF after another, Bravo, Charlie, Delta, etc., in the sequential order of their semi-circular configuration, finishing up with Oscar at the end.

As it passed over Echo, the console boards also lit up with “spurious indicators” on “maybe six, seven or eight” missiles, which indicated the UFO had triggered a terrifying “Launch in Progress” signal. Schuur’s team had to stop the countdown with manual overrides. The grid returned to normal after the object departed; Schuur was convinced the UFO had “scanned” each and every missile in Echo’s subterranean holsters. Expecting a full debriefing the next day, Schuur said a base operations officer told them only “there was nothing to discuss.”

One would obviously like to hear more from Mr. Schuur, but he died in 2013 at age 73. Are the other airmen on duty that night all gone as well? Any Congressional probes into mid-20th-century nuke incidents – including those where entire flights were rendered inoperable – will be racing the undertaker for witnesses. Back then, says Hastings, there were likely no standardized protocols for tightening nondisclosure agreement screws on service personnel because the materialization of UFOs no doubt caught command by surprise as well.

However, a number of witnesses in Hastings’ book – some of whom had signed NDAs – also reported being grilled by Air Force Office of Special Investigations units. He predicts legislators investigating nuclear breaches won’t get far without bringing heat on the AFOSI.

“That’s where the family jewels are, that’s where the files are,” Hastings says. “And until they’re made public, or at least where congressional members can publicly talk about those records, I don’t see any real movement forward on the nuclear cases.”

Given how the USAF has been ostentatiously invisible during the last four years of disclosures, that begs the question of where the Pentagon will draw the line from which no outsider, lawmakers or not, may cross. Is it the nukes? Or something else?

“I’ve said to my lecture audiences over the years that, let’s suppose someone in the Pentagon finally publicly acknowledges the nuclear cases,” says Hastings. “Presumably a large number of Americans are gonna go, holy cow, if that really happened, what about everything else? What about alien abductions – are they real too?”

Along with co-author and USAF veteran Bob Jacobs, Hastings produced a first-person response in 2019 with the publication of Confession: Our Hidden Alien Encounters Revealed. Whether anyone believes him, he says, is irrelevant.

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See Also:

	New Witness To UFO Incursion at Nuke Missile Complex, Tom Delonge's New Gig and The Media
	"U.S. Nuclear Arms are the Subject of Ongoing UFO Surveillance" | VIDEO
	Former Radar Operator Recounts Tracking UFO Near Nuke Equipped AFB

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The Heat-Spewing UFO and the Flanking Military Helicopters

The last living witness

Colby Landrum: 'If I could get some closure . . .'

We were both on the front end of things, back then – me in newspapers, Colby Landrum as a reluctant young media celebrity. Maybe I should’ve paid more attention to his demeanor than to his words. It wasn’t like he was going to say anything he hadn’t already told millions before on national TV. His grandmother and legal guardian, Vickie, stayed in the living room, no need to coach the boy at this point. I wrote that he twiddled a flyswatter between his toes as he

By Billy Cox The UFO Chronicles 5-9-22

sat on the edge of the bed in the room he shared with his cousin. I noticed the rims of his eyes were slightly pink, as if he’d “been swimming in chlorine.” Nine years old, maybe a tad small for his age – Vickie said she’d had trouble getting food in him lately.

I pressed the record button. His version of the events that forever rocked his world along a rural stretch of highway outside Houston on Dec. 29, 1980, spooled onto Side A of the audiocassette. Colby talked dispassionately about the heat-spewing UFO, the flanking military helicopters, and the immediate aftermath, the nightmares that woke him up crying. “Every night, I’d vomit a whole buncha times,” he recalled in a monotone, “and they’d have to keep a pan in my room.”

His eyes narrowed when I asked if he thought he’d ever learn the truth. “We’re gonna find out what it is,” Colby vowed. “I don’t care how long it takes – we ain’t giving up ‘til we find out what it is.”

I wondered, as we wrapped it up, if maybe I could get a few photos. I wasn’t a shooter, the paper was getting this story on the cheap, as usual. But by now, Colby was a pro – “You want me to hold my football or something?” I interpreted his dutiful but unsmiling accommodation as poise. A few clicks and we were done. September 1983.

I woke up one morning and I was 39 years older. The adults who were in the car with Colby — grandma and driver Betty Cash — were long gone. But American history had become unmoored from its traditions; all of a sudden, Congress was acting serious about UFOs and national security. And I wanted to know if Colby had any hope left.

The voice on the phone agreed to meet, but told me to lower my expectations, that things had gone “sideways” for him lately. “It could be raining vaginas,” he muttered, “and I’m gonna get hit with one dick right between the eyes.” Whatever I was swallowing came spraying out my nose. But Colby wasn’t laughing.

I rummaged through some filing cabinets and discovered the negatives from 1983. I got them developed and studied the black-and-white prints as if for the first time. Staring back was something I’d short-shrifted back then; the face of a kid who’d been through the wringer was — for better or worse — already toughening up. And for everything he’d said in the 20th century, his expression back then signaled that he was also holding back.

Easter weekend, two weeks ago: In the living room at his latest address, in Clinton, west Oklahoma, population 9,000, Colby Landrum pulled up a chair, contemplated the image of the bullied child he once was, and began filling in the back story.

“I didn’t tell nobody about it because everybody was saying, well, if we said something it might go bad on us, so I didn’t wanna be telling all the kids at school. But then,” he continued in his Lone Star drawl, “it all came out on TV, and of course all the kids took it however their parents rolled, y’know? People started messing with me and I took a lotta heat and eventually it just got to the point where, when they embarrassed me, I’d jump on ‘em. I was getting in fights left and right – I’d fight at the drop of a dime.

“People said look, it’s that alien kid, he got abducted by aliens or whatever. They automatically went to the alien shit because the tabloids had loaded up on it.”

Bullied in school following the 1980 UFO encounter that made international headlines, a 9-year-old Colby Landrum vowed to discover what happened back then, “I don’t care how long it takes.”

We were nearly a month into spring, but on this day, winter hung on for dear life, leaden skies whipping raw winds into “feels like” temps in the 40s. Down and out, Colby had moved into this house two years ago to be with relatives. After high school, he learned welding, became a pipefitting a supervisor, and was pulling in $100k a year outside Houston; today, in Oklahoma, the roller coaster was parked and he was earning subsistence wages by “laying asphalt.” He talked about maybe someday returning to his roots in east Texas, where suburban sprawl is swallowing the scene of the accident, or crime, or whatever it was. For now, stability is its own reward.

I asked if he had heard about the roughly 1,500 pages of documents just released by the Defense Intelligence Agency, or the secret AAWSAP/AATIP initiatives in the Pentagon, or the new congressional language legislating UFO accountability from an insulting Defense Department acronym called AOIMSG (Airborne Object Identification and Management Synchronization Group). It was all news to Colby. I asked if he’d read the landmark New York Times story in 2017, or if he’d seen the accompanying F-18 jet fighter videos.

“I’m almost embarrassed I ain’t followed this shit,” he said. “It’s almost like I’m afraid to, like if I do, things might start coming back up on me. It’s like – OK, I been here for two years now, knowing these people, and you don’t want ‘em to look you up on the Internet and … you know? The people I kinda like and trust, I say, hey, just so you know? If you look up my name, you might kinda freak out.”

I showed him the lengthy Defense Intelligence Reference Document (DIRD) titled “Anomalous Acute and Subacute Field Effects on Human Biological Tissues,” produced in 2009 but only now released through FOIA. It was commissioned to analyze “evidence of unintended injury to human observers by anomalous advanced aerospace systems.” It argued that continued work on such injuries “can inform (e.g., reverse engineer), through clinical diagnoses, certain physical characteristics of possible future advanced aerospace systems from unknown provenance that may be a threat to the United States interests.”

In other words, according to the 31-page report prepared by former CIA forensic scientist Dr. Christopher “Kit” Green, a complete analysis of those injuries might yield enough details to produce the schematics for replicating whatever it was that created those injuries in the first place. Colby didn’t say much. “I’m listening,” he said.

I pointed out the DIRD’s specific references to the “Cash-Landrum Incident,” as well as the report’s mention of the 1996 “Schuessler Catalog of UFO-Related Human Physiological Effects.” John Schuessler, co-founder of the Mutual UFO Network, had compiled a list of 356 worldwide close-encounter cases, dating back to 1873, in which observers’ health had been altered by exposure to high strangeness. And Schuessler was a name Colby knew well.

An aerospace engineer at Johnson Space Center, John Schuessler was the first researcher to take the story seriously back in early 1981. Thanks to the outstanding archival work of Curt Collins, a virtual library of what happened is available at Blue Blurry Lines. It’s packed with primary-source material, handwritten notes, niche-journal articles and a mixed bag of medical opinions, some of which blamed radiation for the injuries, others citing exposure to chemicals.

On file are photocopies of Betty Cash’s scalp visible through clusters of ragged hair that hadn’t yet fallen out, Vickie’s ghastly skin lesions, letters from Texas senators John Tower and Lloyd Bentsen directing the victims to contact the Judge Advocate Claims Officer at Bergstrom AFB. Also included are links to contemporaneous media coverage, from the lowbrow Weekly World News (“3 Survive UFO Attack”) and The National Enquirer (“UFO Terrorizes and Burns Three in Car”) to local splashes in the Monroe Courier, the Houston Chronicle, KHOU-TV.

Bits and pieces of the mystery – ABC’s “That’s Incredible!” and “Good Morning America,” HBO’s Undercover America, “Sightings” on Fox, NBC’s “Unsolved Mysteries” – were heavily popularized during the Reagan years. Betty’s story was the most gruesome. She told of being sequestered in a room at Houston’s Parkway Hospital where attendants initially wore hazmat gear. Her daughter described seeing her unrecognizable mother in the hospital for the first time, raw skin peeling from her swollen face and arms, boils and bursting watery blisters, everywhere, inside her nostrils, inside mom’s eyelids. Betty never recovered. She gave up the diner she owned, moved back to Alabama to be with relatives, and spent the rest of her life getting bad medical news. She died in 1998 at 69.

By 1982, the story had generated enough buzz to prod an investigation from the Department of the Army’s Inspector General. That’s because the witnesses reported the UFO was accompanied by double-rotor helicopters, CH-47 Chinooks, possessed only by the Army.

The paper trail includes a buzz-off note from the DAIG to then-freshman congressman Ron Wyden – now on the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence – assuring him that no Army assets were involved in the incident. The three-page results of the IG’s official query (with redactions) state the witnesses were “credible,” and that there was “no perception that anyone was trying to exaggerate the truth.” Furthermore, “the medical evidence of deterioration of health seems almost irrefutable.”

But the IG’s job was to get the Army off the hook, not to identify the UFO or the cause of the injuries, which included “blackened fingernails, constant diarrhea, and diminished eyesight.” Concluded IG Lt. Col. George Sarran, “There was no evidence presented that would indicate that Army, National Guard, or Army Reserve helicopters were involved.” In 1985, a federal judge tossed a Cash-Landrum bid to sue Uncle Sam for damages, citing lack of evidence.

There’s a remarkable link to a UFO Hunters episode from 2009, two years after Vickie died at 84. The producers arranged for the first face-to-face meeting between Sarran and the sole survivor, Colby Landrum.

On the show, the retired Sarran restated the findings from his ‘82 verdict. “Twenty-three helicopters would be a real logistical operation, being so close to a major international airport,” he told UFO Hunters. Houston International, located less than 30 miles from the Dayton area, could offer no corroborating radar evidence of the event. Nor did flight records from any regional Army-connected facilities indicate they had birds in the air that evening.

When UFO Hunters confronted Sarran with his own handwritten notes, acquired through FOIA, which stated “100 helicopters – Robert Grey (sic) airfield, came in, for effect,” Sarran had no answer. “I …” he paused. “I have no idea why I might have wrote that down.”

Thirteen years after that History channel episode aired, Colby still chafes at the colonel’s response: “I wanted to whip (Sarran’s) ass.”

Robert Gray Army Airfield is adjacent to Fort Hood, home to the Army’s 1st Air Cavalry Division, just under 200 miles from Houston Intercontinental. Researchers agreed that only Fort Hood could’ve mobilized enough hardware to stage an operation of the magnitude described by Cash-Landrum. But they weren’t the only ones reporting military helos in the vicinity on the evening of 12/29/80. A handful of Dayton-area residents, including a police officer, stated they’d seen double-rotor helicopters in the mix as well, lights blinking, flying low, as if hunting for something.

On a living room wall rests a small shrine to Colby’s late grandfather Ernest. The shelf hosts a folded American flag, a portrait of the aging Army veteran, an old watch, and a Purple Heart from World War II. “That man up there, he almost give his life for this country,” Colby says. “Yet, he had to sit there and watch my grandmother go through everything she went through. And the government he fought for calls us liars.”

Details dim in the fog of memory, but the spectacle lingers: Around 9 p.m. on 12/29/80, Colby was wedged between Betty and Vickie in the front seat of Betty’s new Cutlass Supreme. Vickie worked for Betty as a waitress at Betty’s diner, and the two were in futile search of a bingo game in the shuttered space between Christmas and New Year’s. As they headed for home on two-lane 1465 cutting through a pine forest, Colby was the first to see it.

“It looked like just a big ball of fire coming over the trees, and the trees on both sides of the road were about 100 foot tall, so it was clearing that and then some, maybe 80 feet, I don’t know.”

Betty hit the brakes as the thing began to cross above the opening in the straightaway ahead, illuminating the woods below. But Colby had his eyes on the helicopters.

“As a kid, I was obsessed with Army-type things, so that’s what I’m focusing on. Betty and grandma were talking about the object, but I didn’t think it was scary because the helicopters were there. And when they seen the helicopters they pulled up a little bit farther.”

Betty nudged the Olds maybe 100 yards ahead before stopping the car again amid a blaze of heat. Betty said she had to turn on the air conditioner “to keep from burning up.” Vickie would leave her left handprint in the dashboard. Colby remembers the object on a leisurely course, “like a blimp,” but he kept watching the choppers. “I counted 23 of ‘em, double-rotor deals,” Colby said. “And they were in formation, like they were rounding up cattle or something.”

Afraid to go farther due to the heat, Betty opened the door to get out for a better look. Vickie climbed halfway out the passenger side. Both women described a diamond-shaped object making beeping noises and belching flames from its belly, seeming to right itself with each “whooshing” blast, as if experiencing stability problems. Colby said he never got that good a look because “my grandma started hollering ‘Jesus is coming back!’ and told me to get down on the floorboard. And that’s what scared me.” The women watched for what seemed an eternity to Colby – 10 minutes? 15? Longer, maybe?

Vickie ducked back inside first. Betty tried opening the door handle but burned her hand, and had to use her coat for a grip. As the weird fleet moved on – “They looked to be in no great hurry,” Colby said – he, Betty and Vickie drove ahead and kept watching until they turned toward home and the air show disappeared over the horizon. End of encounter. Within hours, he and grandma began experiencing varying signs of trauma. They checked Betty, immobilized on her bed, into the hospital a day or two later.

As the news found a mass audience, speculation flourished in the vacuum, ranging from space aliens to a secret nuclear propulsion experiment that jumped the rails. Hacks like Aviation Week reporter Philip Klass weighed in: “I believe the story is a hoax. There is absolutely no evidence. The women’s story is supported only by the claim of Betty Cash that she had serious health problems after the alleged incident." For fellow debunker James McGaha, the Army’s final word was good enough: “The military, in my experience, does not lie.”

And then there were peculiar parallels with the so-called Rendlesham Forest Incident, which unfolded at a U.S. air base in southeast England just days, perhaps even hours, before the Cash-Landrum encounter. Over consecutive evenings between Christmas and New Year’s 1980, officers and NCOs alike reported interactions with glowing UFOs in the woods near the installation, which warehoused tactical nukes. Some witnesses experienced radiation-related health problems; former Air Force MP John Burroughs, for instance, is unable to look at his own service-connected medical records because they’ve been classified for 42 years.

All of which begs the question: Did Colby have health concerns he could connect with 12/29/80?

“Well, right afterwards I was pretty sick, I mean, I was itching a lot, I felt like a poisoned rat, like I was burning up inside. My whole body was feverish and cold all at once. It’s hard to explain,” he said. “But remember, I was down in the floorboard for most of it, so I was kinda protected.”

Colby’s had dental issues and kidney stones, and there are a couple of bumps on the back of his head “I need to get to.” But nothing he’s willing to blame on the encounter. “Anything long-term, it would’ve killed me by now, right?”

So far as he can remember, no one ever drew blood samples – “I was afraid of needles, I think I would’ve remembered that” – but he suspects he was tested for radiation. Decades ago, some strangers came out to the house “and they had these little black bags that you stick your hand in or something, it was weird ... All I remember is a metal box and a black deal that went over your hand when you stuck it in there. Like a shiny silver metal box."

But then, some things never crop up in lab results, things he’d rather keep to himself, guilt over things he can never recover. He thinks about Misty, his wife, killed in a car wreck in 2009, and fatherhood has been a challenge. The what-ifs don’t really matter anymore, but he’d stand a better chance of losing his own shadow.

“Had that (UFO) encounter not happened? Maybe I would’ve lived a normal life without being set up as this crazy kid at 6 years old. Maybe it affected the choices I made, I don’t know, maybe I would’ve had a little different life.” He paused. “Probably not.” Shrug. “We live by the choices we make, right, so it’s all pretty much on me.

“Did it mess my head up along the way, though? Yeah, I’m sure it did. But one thing you better learn early on is, you better fix it yourself or else it ain’t gonna get fixed. If I could get some closure, that might make it better.”

There’s a plaque on the wall, words arranged in the shape of a cross: “Amazing Grace, How Sweet the Sound.” Colby lights a cigarette and looks off into the middle distance.

At home in Clinton, Oklahoma, 48-year-old Colby Landrum, says Uncle Sam owes him an apology for making him look like a liar.

“I don’t believe in —look, I’m sure they’re out there. But unless it affects my life right now at this moment, I’m not gonna read into it. But whatever hurt me didn’t have little green men in it. Whatever it was, was being controlled by our people. It was not out of control. And there’s a record of it somewhere. There’s records on everything.”

Closure?

“Apologize. Say, ‘Look man, this is what happened. We couldn’t tell the whole world but we had something going on that would’ve probably freaked everybody out, but you’re not crazy.’

“That’s what I want to hear. I don’t need no money. The money ain’t gonna do me no good. Make right by my family and tell us what the hell’s going on.”

The future? An ideal situation?

“I don’t set goals anymore. It’s hard to set two weeks in advance, to be honest with you. I just go day to day and try not to look back.”

But if?

Without hesitation: “I’d like to work with the homeless, to be honest with you. There’s people out there that don’t have any options at all. I’d like to see what I could do to help people like that.”

VISIT BILLY'S SITE ►

See Also:

	The Cash - Landrum Incident | ". . . The UFO Ascended and Cleared The Treeline, The Three Counted 23 Helicopters, Some with Military Markings . . ."
	Is The Cash-Landrum UFO Incident Solved?
	The US Government’s Cash-Landrum UFO Investigations

REPORT YOUR UFO EXPERIENCE