RANDLE'S OVERSIGHT GROUP Randle's discussions of those people he thinks would have been on an oversight group are also seriously flawed. They are based on the supposed testimony of two very different people: the late Frank Kaufmann of Roswell and Retired USAF General Arthur Exon. Kaufmann's many and varied claims about the whole Roswell incident were backed up by nothing. However, he was Randle's big important witness. He is heavily touted in Randle's "The Truth About the UFO Crash at Roswell," "The Roswell Encyclopedia," and the first part of "Case MJ-12." Kaufmann, though a civilian in Roswell after being discharged as a sergeant from the Army Air Force at the Roswell Army Air Force Base in October, 1945, was supposedly part of an all-powerful group of nine who could go anywhere, talk to anybody. He knew everything!  He was over in White Sands
watching radar on assignment from General Martin Scanlon of the Air Defense
Command in early July, 1947, because there had been many radar sightings of
unknowns. They observed one "exploding on the screen" north of Roswell. Somebody
from Roswell told Kaufmann that there was something causing a glow in
the sky west of the highway north of town. Then Kaufmann rushed back to the
base (over 100 miles over a mountain pass), woke Colonel Blanchard, Base
Commander, and Major Jesse Marcel, Base Intelligence Officer, in the middle of
the night. They then drove north, turned off the highway, covered many miles off
the road despite gulleys, gates and snakes, and discovered a crashed saucer with
several alien bodies. They called back to the base and a flat bed truck came
out, also miles cross-country to the site. The saucer which looked, according to
Frank's drawings, much like the triangular TR3 reconnaissance craft pictured in
Popular Mechanics in 1990, was lifted on board the flat bed and was back to base
by morning. Frank is a fine artist. Neither the craft nor the bodies looked
anything like anybody else had described.None of this made sense when Frank described this scenario in July, 1995, to Kevin, Don Schmitt, and me. I asked if Blanchard wouldn't have waited until a spotter plane could check things out in the morning. He said they didn't have any spotter planes. They certainly did. The notion that all kinds of daylight photographs would not have been taken is absurd. People who owned the land at the time, the McKnight family, said there was no way to get to the site, except on horseback, until years later. The story made no sense as I wrote in my notes. Don tended to agree with me. The radar range was also too little; an explosion filling the screen could only be very close to the radar. They used primarily tracking radar -- not search radar -- at White Sands. To his credit, when I asked Frank at his home (by invitation in December, 1999, with three other witnesses) if Blanchard had gone out with him, he said, "No." Did Marcel go out with you? "No." Certainly Marcel, if he had been at the crash site, would have responded altogether differently when called by the Sheriff after being visited by rancher Brazel, on Sunday, July 6, 1947. I discussed this in detail in my MUFON 2000 paper (Ref. 3). Finally after Frank's death in 2001, Don Schmitt was able to get permission to view Frank's papers and discovered that Frank had forged some documents and apparently had made up lots of stories. It was always strange that Frank claimed he could talk about the vehicles and the bodies, but couldn't talk about who was running the show. He said that they didn't stamp government documents that were classified with Security markings because everybody would know on the base very quickly, which is just plain crazy. He was a civilian clerk at the base for a couple of years until getting involved with the Chamber of Commerce. He showed me pictures of him with some military big shots, but with no indication whether he was present as a guard or as a tour guide. I think he is laughing his head off that he was able to get Randle to believe just about every phoney story. Randle even went so far as to attribute to Major Easley, base Provost Marshall, words that were actually Frank's. Finally in late 2002, Randle ("Frank Kaufmann: Roswell Witness") and Mark Rodeghier ("Frank Kaufmann: Roswell Hoaxer") who had worked with Don on some of Frank's papers, suddenly published long articles in the International UFO Reporter indicating that Frank's claims could not be substantiated and that certain documents had been faked. No credit was given to Schmitt. Randle made the foolish claim that "Challenges from the outside seemed born more of politics inside the UFO field than of investigative analysis." This would appear to be projecting onto other Roswell investigators his own politics about Roswell and the absence of investigative analysis on his part. 
Unfortunately, "Case MJ-12" was completed before Frank's denouement. He claimed
that several people were part of this oversight group. Most have never even been
shown to exist such as a General Thomas. The one who did exist was General
Martin Scanlon who supposedly ordered Frank to White Sands. General Scanlon had
been involved in Intelligence work for Army Air Force General Henry "Hap" Arnold
in the 1930s, had been based in Roswell heading a training group in the early
1940s, and had headed several other training groups over the next few years.
There seems to be no indication of intelligence activities. In addition, his
last post in 1947 before he left the military in early 1948 was as Public
Affairs man for the Air Defense Command in Mitchell Field in New York. The
notion that he could order a civilian at Roswell with no radar training, over to
White Sands where the ADC had no radar in 1947, seems frankly ridiculous.
Roswell was a SAC base.General Exon, unlike Frank who was basically a clerk while he was in the service and for a couple of years afterward, was a pilot during WW II, spent more than year in a German Prisoner of War Camp, was at Wright Field in 1947, and went on to be Commander of Wright Patterson Air Force Base from August 1, 1964, until December 20, 1965. I was very impressed with him when we went to lunch near his home in California. Randle had claimed that Exon had firsthand knowledge of the Roswell crash from his time at WPAF and from contacts when he served in the Pentagon. Randle claimed that Exon knew who was on the oversight committee naming such people as Secretary of Air Stuart Symington, Secretary of Defense Forrestal and several others. As I described in Ref. 1, when I checked with Exon after first hearing about him and sending a copy of what was written in "The Truth" (Ref. 9), he indicated that he was repeating probably reliable scuttlebutt about the crash and that he was speaking of those who would have known about the crash -- NOT those who would have been on the committee. I sent him a copy of "My Final Report" and relevant portions of "The Truth," then contacted him again. He immediately picked up on the split between military and civilian and Army, Navy, Air Force, and scientists and had no problems at all with the makeup of the MJ-12 group. He also had no objection to the use of generic ranks for the MJ-12 members. TIM COOPER MJ-12 DOCUMENTS Randle also attacks a few of the supposed MJ-12 Documents received by Tim Cooper of California. I went into gory detail on several of these in my MUFON 2000 paper, Ref. 3. I agree that I can find no good reason to believe any of these are genuine and very good reasons to say they are frauds. I had found in such books as "Wedemeyer Reports" (Ref. 10) original documents which were retyped in the Cooper documents with a few changes with the hand written items scanned or Xeroxed to create what I have referred to as emulations. These, at first blush, without access to the originals, look genuine as to signatures, etc. He gives one example: a July 9, 1947 directive to General Twining from President Truman which is clearly an emulation of a real one from President Truman to General Wedemeyer on the same date. But then apparently in a rush, he gives a wrong reason! He states, "But the final, and devastating, blow comes from a handwritten note at the bottom of the authentic document. Truman noted, 'I am keeping for further study.' The Twining memo contains the exact same message and the handwriting matches, exactly, that on the authentic memo." WRONG. 
The reasons the Twining directive is an emulation are that the three handwritten
items at the bottom (Truman's signature, July 9, 1947, and "Approved")
match exactly in the location on the page and in the handwriting, and the fact that
the Twining directive has essentially identical language even though Wedemeyer's
mission to China was very different from Twining's supposed mission to New
Mexico. Also the Twining one says, "When your mission in New Mexico is completed
you will proceed on a brief trip to the Sandia AEC facility." As it happens,
Sandia is in New Mexico. To Wedemeyer it was "When your mission to China is
completed you will proceed on a brief trip to Korea." Korea, of course, is
NOT in China.What is funny here is that indeed a Cooper document included the handwritten "I am keeping for further study" on an entirely different phoney document. I had spotted the identicality after reviewing 23 different sign offs from Truman on various items that I had copied (and distributed to some people including Tim Cooper) at the Marshall Archives. This was noted in my MUFON paper. I gather Randle did not want to give me credit for debunking this batch of supposed MJ-12 documents. Randle is sloppy in other places as well in "Case MJ-12." For example, he refers to the Billy Mitchell affair and his court-martial for his advocacy of the possibility of sinking ships with bombs dropped from aircraft as happening "back in the 30s." It happened in the early 1920s. In his reference to my "Operation Majestic 12? YES!" he lists it as being published by the Fund for UFO Research. It was not. It was published by my UFO Research Institute. It rebuts his anti-MJ-12 arguments in Ref. 11, "Conclusions on Operation Majestic Twelve" which was indeed published by FUFOR. He attributes my "Crashed Saucers, Majestic 12, and the Debunkers" (Ref. 5) to the MUFON Journal. It was actually presented at the MUFON Conference for 1992 and included in the Proceedings. He in one place says the roll of film containing the EBD and TF items was received in 1982. It was actually 1984. He talks at length about testimony from unnamed officers, a colonel and lieutenant. There is no way to evaluate anything from them, so what is the point in the inclusion? FINAL COMMENTS 
Some final comments are in order. If the EBD, TF and CT Items are genuine, as I
believe they are, one would certainly expect the intelligence community to flood
the market with garbage, relatively easily seen as such, and causing many
careless researchers to make the original ones sort of phoney-by-association.
Colonel Richard Weaver, who wrote the USAF's "The Roswell Report: Truth versus
Fiction in the New Mexico Desert" (he supplied the fiction) wrote Nick Redfern,
an excellent UFO Researcher, that the MJ-12 documents were bogus, and everybody
knew they were bogus, etc. He included a copy to Nick (living in the UK at the
time) of the eight pages with a hand written Large Print BOGUS on each page.I filed an FOIA request for all documentation leading to this statement made by a serving officer to a foreign national on official stationery. The response was there was nothing in response to my request. I appealed. There was still nothing. However, if one looks at the discussion about MJ-12 on the FBI site, one finds the same copy of the MJ-12 docs with the same handwritten BOGUS on each page. Colonel Weaver lied about a number of other items in his report (see Ref. 12). I guess lying about the MJ-12 documents isn't very surprising for an expert in disinformation. People want provenance. I would like it, too. But it is clear that the person who supplied the documents, if they are indeed genuine, is the one at risk, not the recipients. If it is a hoax, why has the hoaxer not come forward to say Gotcha? He wasn't breaking the law and could really thumb his nose at ufologists. On balance, Randle has not achieved his purpose of disgracing the original MJ-12 documents. They would still seem to stand as the most important classified government documents ever leaked to the public. Stan Friedman fsphys@rogers.com www.stantonfriedman.com
REFERENCES 1. Friedman, Stanton T. "TOP SECRET/MAJIC" 1996, Marlowe and Co, New York, 272 pages. Hard cover; List $22.95. 10-page bibliography, autographed. From UFORI, POB 958, Houlton, ME 04730-0958. SPECIAL $l5.00 including S & H. 2. Friedman, Stanton T. "Final Report on Operation Majestic 12" 108 pages, done for FUND For UFO Research, $10.00 including S & H from UFORI, autographed. 3. Friedman, Stanton T. "Roswell and the MJ-12 Documents in the New Millennium" presented MUFON 2000, St. Louis, MO; July, 2000. 29 pages, 20 References. $4.00. From UFORI, autographed. 4. Friedman, Stanton T. "Operation Majestic 12? YES!" August 5, 1994, 35 pages. $4.00. From UFORI, autographed. 5. Friedman, Stanton T. "Crashed Saucers, Majestic-12, and the Debunkers" Presented MUFON 1992, Albuquerque, NM. 19 pages, 48 Ref. $4.00. From UFORI, autographed. 6. "Symposium on Unidentified Flying Objects" Congressional Hearings, July 29, 1968, Testimony from 12 Scientists; 247 Pages, From NTIS, 5285 Port Royal Rd. Springfield, VA 22151. Item No. PB179541 Testimony from MacDonald, Menzel, Hynek, Sagan, Harder, Friedman, etc. 7. Friedman, Stanton T. "The Secret Life of Donald H. Menzel" International UFO Reporter, Jan/Feb 1988, pp20-24. 8. Goldberg, Leo "Sky and Telescope" April, 1977 appreciation of D.H. Menzel. 9. Randle, Kevin D. and Schmitt, Donald R. "The Truth about the UFO Crash at Roswell," M. Evans, l994, 251 pages (Avon Paperback, l994, 314 Pages). 10. Wedemeyer, General Albert C. "Wedemeyer Reports!" 1958, 496 Pages, Henry Holt & Co., New York. 11. Randle, Kevin D. "Conclusions on Operation Majestic 12" June, 1994. 30 Pages, Fund For UFO Research, POB 277, Mt. Rainier, MD 20712. 12. Friedman, Stanton T. "The Roswell Incident, The USAF, and the New York Times", 28 pages, September 26, 1994, $4.00. From UFORI, autographed. |
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