conducted on October 26, 1962, over the Pacific Ocean, was part of Operation
Fishbowl and occurred amidst the
Cuban Missile Crisis.
The narrative suggesting a UFO was brought down by the test gained traction in
early 2025, notably through assertions by former Ambassador
Harald Malmgren. Malmgren claimed to have investigated the incident on President Kennedy's
behalf and to have handled recovered UFO materials at Los Alamos. However,
Johnson's investigation reveals that Malmgren was a mid-level analyst at the
Institute for Defense Analyses during that period, with no direct involvement
in such high-level operations. Furthermore, there is no credible evidence
supporting Malmgren's claims of a UFO recovery linked to the Bluegill Triple
Prime test.
Johnson concludes that the association between the Bluegill Triple Prime test
and a UFO incident is unfounded, arising from confirmation bias and
speculative interpretations rather than verifiable evidence. He emphasizes the
importance of rigorous scrutiny in evaluating such extraordinary claims,
especially when they intersect with historical events of significant
geopolitical tension.
claims with archival evidence and declassified government documents.
While Malmgren had legitimate roles under Presidents Nixon and Ford, primarily
related to trade negotiations, Johnson’s research reveals that many of his
grander claims — including key advisory roles to Presidents Kennedy and
Johnson — are unsubstantiated.
A particularly sensational aspect of Malmgren’s legacy is his claimed
association with the UFOs/UAP, aliens and or UFO crash debris. In his later
years, Malmgren claimed high-level insider knowledge of classified UFO
programs and extraterrestrial-related national security concerns, painting him
as someone deeply embedded in secret government deliberations about non-human
intelligence and unidentified aerial phenomena (UAP).
However, Johnson finds no credible evidence to support these assertions.
Malmgren’s official records, including declassified FBI files and government
employment documents, show no involvement in national security or intelligence
matters outside of his economic advisory capacity. Notably, Malmgren’s own job
applications from the 1960s make no mention of such roles, describing instead
modest academic and advisory functions. Furthermore, thorough searches of
presidential archives and correspondence — including efforts by historians
affiliated with the JFK Library and the Sargent Shriver Peace Institute —
yielded no mention of Malmgren in the contexts he later claimed.
Johnson concludes that Malmgren, while not entirely a fabricator, skillfully
blurred the lines between fact and fiction, leveraging real but limited public
service into a legacy laced with dramatic and unverifiable embellishments. His
late-in-life elevation to quasi-mystical insider status in UFO and conspiracy
circles illustrates how unchecked personal narratives can metastasize into
accepted lore — a cautionary tale in the age of viral misinformation and
selective memory.
On May 19, 2023, the Joint Staff (J3, Operations; J36 Homeland Defense Division) of the Joint Chiefs of Staff disseminated to all unified military commands worldwide a set of uniform procedures to be followed for gathering data and reporting on contemporary military encounters with Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena (UAP), using a detailed standard reporting template.
[...]
The Joint Staff message was designated as "GENADMIN Joint Staff J3 Washington DC 191452ZMAY23 Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena Reporting and Material Disposition." The entire nine-page document, along with the Final Response letter that I received
By Douglas Dean Johnson 3-26-2024
from the Department of Defense Freedom of Information Act Division (dated March 15, 2024, but transmitted on March 18, 2024), and my original FOIA request (all with minimal redactions to protect privacy), are embedded as a single PDF document below ....
"We have been attempting to verify the veteran's military service from the
information that has been provided. We have conducted extensive searches of
every records source and alternative records source at this Center; however,
we have been unable to locate any information that would help us verify the
veteran's military service."
TWO STORYTELLERS DECEIVE AN ICON OF UFOLOGY
In their years of promoting the story of a 1945
alien-craft crash and recovery, Jacques Vallee, Ph.D., and Paola
Leopizzi Harris constructed a towering skyscraper of speculation on a
thin foundation made of chalk. The foundation has disintegrated, yet
By Douglas Dean Johnson
1-25-24
Vallee and Harris continue to engage in tortured exertions, seeking to avoid
acknowledging the reality that their skyscraper has collapsed.
In June 2021, Vallee and Harris self-published a co-authored book,
Trinity: The Best-Kept Secret, reciting a story of the crash and recovery of an alien craft. The event
supposedly occurred a month after and not many miles away from the site of the
first atomic-bomb test, the Trinity test of July 16, 1945. [1] An expanded
Second Edition followed in August 2022. Vallee hired a publicist to promote
the book and the story. By January 2023, the Trinity-crash story had been
featured by media outlets as diverse as the New York Times,
Tucker Carlson Tonight on the Fox News Network, and the
Daily Mail in the UK, and on innumerable UFO-oriented websites and
podcasts. [2]
The "Trinity" crash tale was originally based solely on the claims of two men
who were both over age 60 when they first told the story in 2003 – Remigio
(Reme) Baca (born October 26, 1938; died June 12, 2013) and Joseph Lopez
(Jose) Padilla (born November 24, 1936, currently age 87). [3] Beginning in
2003, both men made public claims to have witnessed the crash, associated
alien beings, and the subsequent recovery of the damaged alien craft by Army
personnel, all of this ostensibly occurring during August 1945.
The far-reaching implications of the Trinity crash-recovery story, were it
true, are the only reason why it is worth my time, or anyone's time, to
further scrutinize the credibility of the witnesses, including the
still-living Joseph Lopez Padilla. Padilla is now an 87-year-old man of whom
few people would ever have heard, were it not for years of public promotion of
his UFO crash tale by Vallee and co-author Harris, with Padilla's active
cooperation. If the Padilla-Baca story is true, then the U.S. government has
concealed custody of a crashed alien craft since August 1945, a span of more
than 78 years – a very big deal indeed. [4]
'On July 23, 2022-- many months before I published a word about the Trinity UFO-crash story or even thought about doing so-- Sammy Padilla told a New Mexico State Police officer that "my dad is a pathological liar," and expressed the belief that the Trinity UFO story was untrue.'
Sammy Padilla, now age 61, is the son of Joseph Lopez (Jose) Padilla, age 86. The two men share a single dwelling place in La Joya, New Mexico. In recent months, Jacques Vallee and Paola Harris have pointed to Jose Padilla as their primary and most trustworthy witness to the Trinity UFO crash of 1945
(which I believe to be a non-existent event, a sloppy hoax). The other claimed 1945 eyewitness, Remigio (Reme) Baca, died in 2013.
Sammy Padilla's statements to the New Mexico State Police (NMSP) were recorded in video and audio by the body cam of a NMSP officer who was dispatched in response to a request from Sammy Padilla, who wished to discuss certain alleged behavior by his father Jose, and who also seemed to have some things he wanted to get off his chest about the UFO story.
Sammy Padilla told the NMSP officer, "My dad claims he saw a UFO when he was small. Well, there's these people from Europe. There's a woman especially named Paola Harris, and she has gotten him to back things up. And now they wrote a book about it, and now she's writing a life story about him, and it's going to be made into a movie, supposedly, and all this stuff. A lot of people knew it was bullshit what he's saying."
In an audio-recorded conversation with the NMSP dispatcher earlier the same day, Sammy Padilla said, "There's some people that my dad got involved with, because he claimed to see a UFO. And now this woman– it's not my cousin, but this other woman, who is writing a book about him, and telling him that this book is going to become a movie, and he's going to be famous. And so he's going on this stuff. And I can tell you, from what I have heard from what he has told other people, they're not true."
Additional statements by Sammy Padilla pertaining to certain public claims by Jose Padilla are found in transcripts below, and in the body-cam recording.
New Mexico law requires law enforcement officers to activate their body-cams during such interactions with members of the public. Such recordings (with certain redactions specified by law) are public records under the Inspection of Public Records Act (IPRA), which is a state law that is in some ways similar to the federal Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), but with fewer exclusions and exceptions. In New Mexico, many interactions between law enforcement officers and members of the general public are accessible to anyone who submits a properly formulated request, which is what I did. I received the body-cam recording on May 24, 2023, along with an audio recording of an earlier conversation between Sammy Padilla and a NMSP dispatcher, and also a written report ("Event Information") summarizing some of that day's communications between Sammy Padilla and the agency personnel. All of these records were generated by interactions between Sammy Padilla and NMSP personnel on July 23, 2022.
The Event Information report attributes to Sammy Padilla the additional statement that his father "is a very good liar."
"... to notify the director of the
All-domain Anomaly Resolution Office (AARO)
within 60 days of enactment, and to provide within 180 days (six
months) "a comprehensive list of all non-earth origin or exotic
unidentified anomalous phenomena material" possessed and to make it
available to the AARO director for "assessment, analysis, and
inspection.'"
The
U.S. Senate Select Committee on Intelligence (SSCI)
has unanimously approved legislation containing language that appears
intended to dig out any UAP-associated technology that is or ever was
controlled by the federal government.
The new UAP/UFO
provisions are being publicly reported in detail in this article for the
first time anywhere.
Wood
also said, "You,
Doug, have done a much richer and more masterful job of investigating this
story and pulling out the inconsistencies and finding all sorts of good
primary sources to compare and contrast."
Ryan S. Wood, whose 2005 book Majic Eyes Only was
the first book to describe the Trinity UFO Crash story, and who at that
time rated the story as "medium-high...60-80%" on his credibility scale,
now believes that the widely disseminated story was "most likely" a
hoax.
"... the "eyewitness" account that Reme Baca presented to Thomas J.
Carey—who audio-recorded it—was very different from
the UFO-crash story
that Baca and Padilla presented to the public less than one year later.
"
Less than a year before going public with what
became the
Jacques Vallee-Paola Harris story
of the 1945 crash of an avocado-shaped UFO, Reme Baca was tape-recorded
peddling a very different story about a boyhood encounter that he and
Jose Padilla had with a very different sort of UFO: a tale of their discovery of
a classical flying saucer, crashed-- in 1946. And that's just the start.
"The current elaborate version of the
Trinity UFO crash tale
has been constructed in layers over the past 20 years. The story has been
entertained by some in the mainstream media and by some in the halls of
Congress. In the dismantling of this hoax, the devil is indeed in the
details."
The astonishing story of the “Trinity UFO crash” --
an alien craft crashing in August 1945 near the site of the first atomic
test, witnessed by two boys, carted off by the Army and hidden ever
since-- has been presented to a wide audience in two editions of the
book Trinity: The Best-Kept Secret, by Jacques Vallee and Paola
L. Harris (in June 2021 and August 2022), and
through promotional efforts spun off the book. In late 2022 and early 2023, the
story reached a substantially expanded audience through amplifying treatments by
Fox News Network host Tucker Carlson, writers Josh Boswell and
Christopher Sharp of the UK Daily Mail, the hosts of various UFO-themed
podcasts and platforms– and even a respectful spin-off feature story in the
New York Times, written by Remy Tumin.
through promotional efforts spun off the book. In late 2022 and early 2023,
the story reached a substantially expanded audience through amplifying
treatments by Fox News Network host Tucker Carlson, writers Josh
Boswell and Christopher Sharp of the UK Daily Mail, the hosts of
various UFO-themed podcasts and platforms– and even a respectful spin-off
feature story in the New York Times, written by Remy Tumin.
