| Brigadier General William Garland in a 1952 Memorandum for Record (MFR) told a LIFE magazine researcher that the US Air Force had considered using a missile to shoot down a UFO. | By Jan L. Aldrich Project 1947 8-7-16 |
Showing posts with label Life Magazine. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Life Magazine. Show all posts
Monday, August 08, 2016
USAF Considers Shooting Down a UFO with a Missile – 1952
Sunday, July 29, 2012
Was Life Magazine in Collusion with Military in 'Roswell UFO Crash' Cover-Up?
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Famous LIFE Photographers' Roswell Crash Revelation
By Anthony Bragalia
The Bragalia Files
© 7-14-09 - 2012
With his passing last year, Allan Grant has been rightly elevated to legendary status in the world of journalistic photography. For decades Mr. Grant was a permanent member of the prestigious Life photographic staff. He captured on film some of the most recognizable images in history. Grant's legacy includes such memorable work as the first-ever public picture of Lee Harvey Oswald's wife Marina (taken after Lee's capture) to the haunting, last-ever picture of Marilyn Monroe. His work's "movie still" clarity, his many Life cover shots and his photographic studies were a gift left to all of us.
But Allan's best chronicle was left before he died- and surpasses any captured image of a politician or an entertainer that he ever took. His greatest gift to history was his revelation that he was involved in the Roswell saga- and his confirmation that what crashed in New Mexico those many years ago was not of a balloon or a secret aircraft experiment, but of an Unidentified Flying Object!
In 1997, Mr. Grant had written a very brief Letter to the Editor of the Los Angeles Times. Allan was upset after having read in the LA Times of the second Roswell "debunking" report issued by the USAF that year. In the letter he was somewhat cryptic- but adamant that he knew that Roswell was not what the Air Force was reporting as a balloon project. He explained that he had a personal experience fifty years prior that had left a life-long impression on him. It also left no doubt in his mind whatsoever that something "very significant" had happened. . . .
Tuesday, July 14, 2009
Famous LIFE Photographers' Roswell Crash Revelation
By Anthony Bragalia
The UFO Iconoclast(s)
© 7-14-09
Famed Life magazine photographer Allan Grant may have provided to us his greatest "picture" just before he died. The cameraman's portrait of the Roswell crash in 1947 illustrates that the event that summer was of urgent importance to the military. It also shows that the skyfallen object was in fact of a genuine "unknown."The UFO Iconoclast(s)
© 7-14-09
With his passing last year, Allan Grant has been rightly elevated to legendary status in the world of journalistic photography. For decades Mr. Grant was a permanent member of the prestigious Life photographic staff. He captured on film some of the most recognizable images in history. Grant's legacy includes such memorable work as the first-ever public picture of Lee Harvey Oswald's wife Marina (taken after Lee's capture) to the haunting, last-ever picture of Marilyn Monroe. His work's "movie still" clarity, his many Life cover shots and his photographic studies were a gift left to all of us.
But Allan's best chronicle was left before he died- and surpasses any captured image of a politician or an entertainer that he ever took. His greatest gift to history was his revelation that he was involved in the Roswell saga- and his confirmation that what crashed in New Mexico those many years ago was not of a balloon or a secret aircraft experiment, but of an Unidentified Flying Object!
In 1997, Mr. Grant had written a very brief Letter to the Editor of the Los Angeles Times. Allan was upset after having read in the LA Times of the second Roswell "debunking" report issued by the USAF that year. In the letter he was somewhat cryptic- but adamant that he knew that Roswell was not what the Air Force was reporting as a balloon project. He explained that he had a personal experience fifty years prior that had left a life-long impression on him. It also left no doubt in his mind whatsoever that something "very significant" had happened.
In online researching archived newspapers this author became aware of Grant's Letter to the Editor only last year, in 2008. Hoping that Mr. Grant was still alive and able to relate more, I tracked him down and emailed him.
Unfortunately Mr. Grant was very ill. As it turned out, Allan only lived for three more months after we began corresponding, passing at age 88. His wife Karin (also a Life magazine employee for many years) helped to facilitate these communications and she also replied with her own assessments about the Roswell event as she was "Mrs. Grant" back in 1947.
In early July of 1947 Allan stated that he had received an urgent call from his Life Editor in New York- "You have to get to Roswell, NM, and fast!"
All Allan was told at the time was that a very large "meteor" had apparently crashed "outside the Roswell area" and that the Army Air Force was attempting to recover the crashed object. Mr. Grant (and Mrs. Grant) maintained that the relationship between the US military and Life magazine at the time was "very strong and deeper than people will ever know."
In fact, Allan Grant said that the Army Air Force had informed his Editor that they would even provide an officer pilot from the Air Force who would personally fly Allan out there and put him in the vicinity of the crash to visually document the "meteor" event.
From Los Angeles, Grant was flown to Albuquerque, NM. Once there he was greeted by a US Army Air Force pilot officer named Major Charles Phillips. Grant stated that they both then boarded a "military training plane" (a single engine trainer) and departed. They later landed on a makeshift runway- a dirt landing strip. When they alighted the plane, Grant was handed a loaded semi-automatic pistol by Major Phillips. Disturbed, Allan asked of the Major "what the hell do I need that for?" Phillips replied that his orders were to see that Grant was armed with a weapon. When Grant asked of Phillips "Against what?" Phillips replied "we don't know!"
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Something seemed very strange about all of this to Grant. They then got into a jeep and began driving, seemingly on a "wild goose chase." But they never located a thing! No meteor, nothing. Allan could not understand why they could not find it, and the Major was oddly being of little help in trying to understand why this was so.
But we learn from Allan's widow Karin Grant that there was a reason for this strange scenario having played out in the desert those many years ago. She and her husband discussed his strange flight to New Mexico for many years after. Both had agreed that there were one of three reasons why Allan was taken out there-
1) Allan said, "Of course we never found the big "meteor' and I wonder whether or not we had arrived too early or too late."
2) He also thought that "perhaps we landed in the wrong place."
3) Ultimately though, the Grants decided that the best explanation was that "the government knew all along that there was something more than a meteor that had crashed- and what better way to deal with it than to "invite" the prestigious Life magazine to come take a look."
Grant's widow continues, "You take them someplace near -but not exactly to- the spot. Show the world there's nothing there- and everybody is happy and relieved, and you can go about your business." She believes that "perhaps they thought you could keep other media out of there if need be by saying that Life has already been there, and they found nothing." And she was right- no mainstream media reported on the event after the first wire stories based on military press releases.
Before Allan died, he told Karin that he always believed that he was "used" by the military as a "potential cover" to in some way obfuscate something. He told her that the "something" what he had always thought -even at the time- was much bigger- an unidentified flying object.
So incensed was Allan about the event -and the Air Force's 1990's reports that explained away the crash as that of a balloon crash and dummy drop- that he felt compelled to write to the LA Times. It was after he read the Air Force Roswell reports that he knew they were lying. It was then that he got the sinking, knowing feeling that Roswell was real. It was a UFO that had crashed to the desert floor decades ago.
This author decided to see if there ever was a "Major Charles Phillips" as alluded to by Grant. If so, what things was this Major associated with during his years of service in the Air Force? The answer was found in reviewing the records of the now-defunct civilian UFO organization NICAP.
Incredibly, Major Phillips -just one month after the Roswell crash- would become one of the US Air Force's first official UFO researchers! Phillips teamed with famed astronomer Dr. Lincoln LaPaz from the University of New Mexico. Together they would lead what they termed "ground survey teams" to investigate the mysterious -and still unexplained- "Green Fireball" sightings that plagued New Mexico for the next several years!
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Thursday, August 18, 2005
Flying Saucers, Foo Fighters and Green Fireballs
WHAT THEY ARE NOT – AND WHAT THEY MAY BE
Excerpt From Life Magazine
4-7-1952
What are the flying saucers, the luminous fuselages, the foo fighters and the green fireballs? The answer – if any answer at this time is possible – lies in the field of logic rather than of evidence. What the things are may be adduced partially by reviewing what they are not.
THEY ARE NOT PSYCHOLOGICAL PHENOMENA.
Although the Air Force cheerily wrote off its 34 unexplained incidents with this pat theory, the explanation does not hold up. There is no evidence, beyond textbook speculation, for such a supposition, and there is the direct evidence already cited against it. To doubt the observers in the foregoing cases is to doubt the ability of every human being to know a hawk from a handsaw.
THEY ARE NOT THE PRODUCT OF U.S. RESEARCH
LIFE investigated this possibility to exhaustion. Not fully satisfied by the public denials of President Truman, Secretary Johnson and others, the investigators put the question directly to Gordon Dean, chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission. He said: "There's nothing in our shop that could account for these things, and there's nothing going on that I know of that could explain them." Still unconvinced, LIFE checked the whereabouts and present business of every scientist who might have anything to do with the development of superaircraft. All were accounted for in other ways. Careful feelers through the business and labor world encountered no submerged projects of the immensity necessary to build a fleet of flying disks. And there is still the conclusive fact: U.S. science has at its command no source of power that could put a flying machine through such paces as the saucers perform.
THEY ARE NOT A RUSSIAN DEVELOPMENT
It is inconceivable that the Russians would risk the loss of such a precious military weapon by flying a saucer over enemy territory. No man-made machine is foolproof; sooner or later one would crash in the U.S. and the secret would be out. Nor is there any reason to believe that Russian science, even with German help, has moved beyond not only the practical but the THEORETICAL horizons of U.S. research.
THEY ARE NOT DISTORTIONS OF THE ATMOSPHERE RESULTING FROM ATOMIC ACTIVITY
To quote the answer David Lilienthal, former AEC commissioner, once made to that suggestion: "I can't prevent anyone from saying foolish things." Nor are they aberrations of the northern lights. Magnetic disturbances cannot account for them and neither can a notion (recently fathered by Dr. Urner Liddel, the Navy physicist) that they are "vertical mirages" – reflections from a vertical (instead of a horizontal) layer of heated air.
THEY ARE NOT SKYHOOK BALLOONS
This was the original Liddel explanation, and in a few instances it may have been correct. But not many. They could scarcely be "fireflies in the cockpit," as one Air Force colonel suggested, since most of the observers were not in a cockpit when they saw their saucers. And it is hard to believe that saucers could be the reflections of automobile headlights on clouds, when they are seen in daylight under cloudless skies. These being the dead-end alleys of negative evidence, is there hope of an explanation on the open avenues of scientific theory? The answer is yes.
The rank of science has taken the saucers far more seriously than the file of laymen and, after five years of close watch on all reports, a number of scientists were ready with some conclusions. One of these was Dr. Walther Riedel, once chief designer and research director at the German rocket center in Peenemunde, now engaged on secret work for the U.S. Dr. Riedel has never seen a saucer himself, but for several years he has kept records of saucer sightings all over the world. He told LIFE: "I am completely convinced that they have an out-of-world basis."
Dr. Riedel has four points to his argument: "First, the skin temperatures of structures operating under the observed conditions would make it impossible for any terrestrial structure to survive. The skin friction of the missile at those speeds at those altitudes would melt any metals or nonmetals available.
"Second, consider the high acceleration at which they fly and maneuver ... In some descriptions the beast spirals straight up. If you think of the fact that the centrifugal force in a few minutes of such a maneuver would press the crew against the outside, and do likewise to the blood, you see what I mean.
"Third.... There are many occurrences where they have done things that only a pilot could perform but that no human pilot could stand.
"Fourth, in most of the reports there is a lack of visible jet. Most observers report units without visible flame...and no trail. If it would be any known type of jet, rocket, piston engine, or chain-reaction motor, there would be a very clear trail at high altitude. It is from no power unit we know of..."
Dr. Riedel's arguments are reinforced by those of Dr. Maurice A. Biot, one of the leading aerodynamicists in the U.S. and a prominent mathematical physicist. From an aerodynamical viewpoint, says Dr. Biot, the saucer shape makes very little sense if the machine is to travel in the atmosphere. A disk has a high drag and is a poor airfoil unless stabilized; when whirled at high speed through the air, it "wobbles" distressingly – a movement observed in several of the saucers sighted. However, for space travel, where there is no atmosphere to oppose, the disk has significant advantages. The sphere, theoretically better, presents several difficult problems of construction and utilization. The disk, easier to build, has almost all the virtues of the sphere and some of its own. Reviewing the evidence presented here, Dr. Biot said: "The least improbable explanation is that these things are artificial and controlled. . .My opinion for some time has been that they have an extraterrestrial origin."
WHO? WHAT? AND WHEN?
There, at least, is a plausible explanation of the disk shape. But the real depths of the saucer mystery bemuse penetration, as the night sky swallows up a flashlight beam. What of the other shapes? Why do the things make no sound? How to explain their eerie luminosity? What power urges them at such terrible speeds through the sky? Who, or what, is aboard? Where do they come from? Why are they here? What are the intentions of the beings who control them?
;Before these awesome questions, science – and mankind – can yet only halt in wonder. Answers may come in a generation – or tomorrow. Somewhere in the dark skies there may be those who know.