Have We Ever Had A Piece Of A Flying Disk?

People have claimed a fair number of "artifacts" or debris from UFOs but rarely is there anything that remotely checks out as of any interest at all. For me, two, of a very small number of such possibilities, are metals from the Foster ranch [Roswell] debris field and the Brazilian Ubatuba magnesium fragment. This post will say a little something about each of them.---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------Many UFO-interested people will assume that, with the exception of first hand "holders" of the debris [like Major Marcel], there are no pieces of scientific interest on this Roswellian subject at all. They could be correct, but they could also be mistaken. I want to explain that a bit. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Roswell doubters usually lead off with comments like "if we really had a crashed alien spacecraft, everybody'd know it. Our government could never keep that a secret for this long. There'd be leaks all over the place". I'm continually boggled by that approach. We've been having "leaks" on the topic of crashed disks for many decades. I once spent some time cleaning up Dick Hall's files in his basement [long before he died] and came across an old NICAP file in which were a dozen or so pre-Jesse Marcel leaks sent to NICAP in the 50s and 60s. [Who knows where that file is now, or whether anyone ever followed any of them up? ]Leaks we've got aplenty. What we don't have is an authoritative admission that the leaks are true. One big leak was when an AF investigator told William Fortenberry that a crashed disk had been transported to Wright-Pat some time previous. Any secret that the government has, which engages a relatively small number of operatives, can continue to be held out-of-sight, and produces no public impact, can be "leaked till the mutes-come-home" and all it takes is the authorities to say: "nope, not true" and the secret is in effect kept. Other comments like "why would we be putting all that money into dummo chemical propellents to go to the Moon if we had an alien spacecraft?", are met in my mind with ...DUHHH, because we can't understand how it works? People who don't want to even entertain the possibility of Roswell are, to me, people who for some reason I do not understand, don't want it to be real. ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
I feel motivated to say what my guess is as to how the debris was handled and who probably was involved. Yeh, I'll admit it, I'm BSing here, but it's not completely uninformed. When Schmitt and Randle did their warrior research job on the crash, they got testimony that some small amount of the metals went [fast] to Washington DC [ArmyAir Force Intel in the Pentagon]. As this makes perfect sense, I see no reason not to go along with the idea as an assumption. If so, this stuff should have been hand-carried over to the National Bureau of Standards where it would have been able to be analyzed [and found to be not like any known terrestrially-made alloy] very quickly. Who would have been in on this? Some people very high up in the Pentagon [maybe Hoyt Vandenberg, maybe his right-hand, George Schulgen, some highly-trusted science advisors, probably Truman, the courier to NBS, the analysts at NBS--even though they probably wouldn't be told upfront what this was, their results would have given them the answer--and, maybe or maybe not the head of the NBS, Edward Condon.]No one else need be told. This includes most, if not all, of the folks pictured in the photos above. Would the whole of the National Security Council be told? I doubt It. Not until a lot more was known about this thing, and whether there were any security consequences within their purview. Would the Research and Development Board be brought in ? Not wholesale--maybe some person of special skill, but perhaps no one at all. Would the Air Force's Scientific Advisory Board be brought in? Same thing--no need to know, at least pending further developments. I believe that the problem of figuring out this debris was far beyond our science and these "further developments" never occurred. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
This doesn't mean that whoever was controlling this "project" wasn't trying everything they could. Schmitt and Randle have testimony putting the bulk of the crash at Wright-Patterson---specifically at Wright Field. That also makes perfect sense for the time. It was Wright Field [T-3 engineering] who were the boys who worked on actual aircraft and who tried to restore things like crashed German technology from the war. The Wright-Patterson Intelligence community also had no need to know. Did base commander Nathan Twining know? Probably.. but maybe no other office personnel did unless he was blabbing to them. So, what would the crash debris project leaders do? They'd apply their best technology, and hope to find something. When they didn't, they "put-the-stuff-away" until they got news of another technique, and then send out a sample to the techno-wizard who could do the new tests. Have we any information that such things happened? It seems we do. Relatively nearby Wright field is the leading metals development semi-secret [and totally secret if that is what a project required] materials laboratory, Battelle Memorial Institute. Battelle and the government worked on countless "sensitive" projects over the years, even including on UFOs. The famous Blue Book Report #14 was all Battelle's. Accomplished UFO researchers, Bill Jones and Irena Scott, who live in Battelle's backyard [in Columbus, Ohio] have heard the rumors and a few full-fledged stories of how apparent UFO debris was handled by Battelle. Bill's tale is precisely "logical" as to how something would go on. Bill had a best friend whose father was a big wheel at Battelle. He got both of them jobs as a matter of fact. The friend was in a close relationship with a girl whose father also worked at Battelle as a metals tester. That father told them that he was happy because he had just gotten a new project testing some metal parts that [he was told] had come from a Soviet device. They were small I-beams which had writing on them. This went on in the late 50s by the way. Some time later, the man came home half drunk and in a disturbed state of mind. Asked what was wrong, he would only say that the material was no part of any Soviet thing, and could not have been made by anyone on this planet. When Bill was told this story [a few years later], he called the friend's father [the Battelle big-wig] and asked about this. He got only a pleasant denial. But after he hung up, his friend told him that the father went in person to his son's [Bill's friend] residence and read him the riot act about talking ever again about matters such as this, especially to a UFO researcher even if it was Bill. Again, this tale makes perfect sense to me. The crash disk project hears of a new test procedure at Battelle, maybe to analyze orderly metallic crystal structure not possible previously. Battelle heavyweights accept the task, knowing what this is about, but assign the actual testing to the guy who can best do the actual technique--not telling him the truth [i.e. Soviet device]. In this case, the guy is so sharp, and the test good enough that he realizes that they've lied to him, and he's not dealing with anything vaguely normal at all. Even with the "leak" ultimately coming to Bill, the whole thing remains "secret" merely because no authority figure ever says that it's true. Without concrete evidence, nothing changes.----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

The Ubatuba magnesium samples were, of course, an entirely different matter. Unlike Roswell, they were "public", in the hands of the "open" research community. The origins of the case leave something to be desired in terms of solid documentation, and the original witnesses have never been interviewed. Still, people in Brazil like Olavo Fontes felt that the case had good enough bona fides to warrant testing the alleged fallen material. Brazilian testing allegedly found "absolutely pure" magnesium, and the legend of an "unmakeable" [by our hands] piece of metal raced around the UFO community. Fontes sent several of the fragments to Coral Lorenzen at APRO. Two things then happened: metallurgical analysis was done at the University of Arizona by Walter Walker, with significant outside partnership with Robert Johnson. This work looked at the composition of the samples and the details of the crystalline structure. Secondly, the University of Colorado [Condon Project] study wished to test the material. The Lorenzens provided chief case investigator, Roy Craig [a chemist], with some of the material in a spirit of cooperation with what everyone hoped would be a scientific project. -----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The Colorado project began correctly by bringing in the nation's leading experts in magnesium technology, Dow Chemicals of Midland, Michigan. From all the evidence, these guys, led by legendary magnesium expert, R.S.Busk, were good people and were willing to go beyond the minimum requests if anyone wanted them to pursue a particular idea. Everyone in the USA who tested the fragments found them not to be perfectly pure at all, and in fact Dow had many samples far purer. The metal did have some very odd elements mixed in with the magnesium [most unusual being Strontium] but this didn't indicate extraterrestriality as any metallurgical scientist could have created such an alloy. This indicates the difficulty one would have on testing any material substance and claiming that we could not make it [MIT physicist David Pritchard has written a brilliant paper showing the very stringent areas wherein such a conclusion might be possible]. The substance, just as in the evaluation of any true UFO, must have sufficient "strangeness" to make the case. One of the few areas wherein a reasonable case can be made concerns the ratio of isotopes of a given element that an artifact would contain. Earth substances have signature isotope ratios. Finding a significant difference would be pretty convincing that the material had come from "somewhere else". Here again, Colorado began well. Craig and Busk took the magnesium to a federal lab for the difficult isotope ratio analysis. What did they find?----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
The results are interesting and NOT as the Colorado Project reported. In the photocopied pages to the left, I have high-lighted certain things. [hope you can read them when you click on them--best I could do with these original documents]. In the top two pages Craig notes that the isotope ratio of the Ubatuba magnesium is 14.37% magnesium-26 to magnesium-27 abundance, whereas "Earth" magnesium's ratio is 11.2%. Craig even recalculates the lab's numbers [on the hand-written document] and finds them accurate, and adds that an error-bar [the known accuracy of the tests involved] is only +/- 0.7% and due to some statistical counting problems. The 14.37, even minus the 0.7, still has significant "separation" from the Earth standard so that one should take some notice. Craig and the Colorado Project did not---note the language he tosses to the Lorenzens in the letter illustrated. At best Craig was confused about this. At worst, he simply lied [remember, Roy Craig was a very intelligent man]. Why would he and Condon lie? I believe that it is because they think that UFOs are a priori bunk, this reading doesn't really prove anything, and reporting it [the actual numbers found are never stated either to the Lorenzens nor in the official report] would only agitate the gullible public and the wild UFOlogists. This is not the only instance wherein the project deliberately did bad science and incomplete reporting. All in the name of not rattling you and I, and, one supposes, Roy Craig's prejudices. [he by the way seems to be of those puzzling fellows who is actually quite nice as a person, but weirdly closed down on certain topics]. Later the outstanding Solar Plasma physicist, Peter Sturrock [in the spirit of full disclosure, a friend], did several runs at isotopic ratio determination, and found a clear separation of Ubatuban and Earth-normal distribution. This reading gives stronger meaning to Walter Walker and Robert Johnson's findings that the way this material was crystallized was extremely unusual, and not like metal samples that they were familiar with in normal metallurgy of this element. So...have we ever had a piece of a flying disk? It's up to each of us to answer that, knowing what we can. It's still has to be a bit "gray" for me, but I think Yes.