PART 2: CONTEXT of the first kind - CLOSE ENCOUNTERS of the third kind

July 27, 2023

PART 2: CONTEXT of the first kind - CLOSE ENCOUNTERS of the third kind - and an EPIPHANY of the smartest kind.

PART TWO

“Sometimes it is the people no one can imagine anything of who do the things no one can imagine.”

― Alan Turing - father of the modern computer.

Before we go further down that road to Unraveling Roswell, some context.

First off - I'm not a UFOologist, if that even is a thing. I'm not a true believer. I've spent more time debunking UFO claims than supporting them and later I will reveal why.

Furthermore I never served in the military, I hold no secret clearances, never signed a non-disclosure agreement and I speak without any authority other than my own. I am neither a dis-informationist or part of any government conspiracy, although some have claimed I am.

I'm well aware (if the powers that be) take notice of what I write here (and that if by some small chance it causes anyone to question the popular narrative of the Roswell UFO crash incident) then this blog will have served its purpose.

As such, I'm aware that I (and it) will then become subject of much scrutiny and (including) the standard Intelligence OSP (operational security procedure) put in place by those who keep the secret of secrets) of Roswell. Those procedures are textbook, Deny, Disprove and Discredit.

That said, let it be known as a journalist I'm also well keenly aware of the consequences of revealing my sources and as suck I will refuse to do so and my accounts (like the majority of UFO history) is based on anecdotal material.

Either, all of it is true, some of it is true or none of it is true. I leave it up to you to decide.

I guess that makes me somewhat a wildcard or as one of my idols (aerospace engineer John Hoboult) would put it best. "As somewhat a voice in the wilderness..."

For those reasons that makes me a nobody, a nothing special who can offer no proof of what I post and yet (when all is said and done) I'm sure you'll look at it and you'll think, that makes perfectly logical sense.

My day job, is as the chief video-journalist for a television station in Texas, which requires me to get the story, interview people involved in the story, assemble the story and report the truth without exaggeration or bias.

Still, you (the reader) don't know me from Adam. I encourage you to do your own research, be skeptical, ask questions, educate yourself and take nothing at face value, just like I did. If you think I made it all up, I don't really care. I know what I know to be true, but your truth may be different.

That said, ask yourself one question: How do you know anything at all?

The answers is, the things you know to be true are based on three things:

1: What you have learned through observation.

2: What you have learned through experience.

3: What someone else has told you.

You then decide what you want to believe to be your truth.

You believe in gravity because you feel it pulling you down, and you see it when you drop anything. You depend on it to be a constant whenever you lie anything down. You've observed that to be true.

You've read or were taught in school that the Earth is a planet floating in a solar system in a universe in space among billions of universes. Very, very few of us have been off the planet and have witnessed that as fact, but we take their word for it.

We've also been told that so far we are the only intelligent beings known to exist. Yes, there are theories, speculations, videos, fuzzy photos and stories of others who claim they've seen craft not of this world but so far, not one has not landed on the White House lawn on national TV, popped the hatch and a little grey alien has come out saying, "Take me to your leader."

And yet on 7/26/2023 special hearings were held in U.S. Congress (and televised internationally) exploring the claims by military pilots and Pentagon insiders that the U.S. is in the possession of extraterrestrial technology and "non-human biologics."

That's something I never thought I'd see.

Could disclosure be far behind?

Maybe, but it seems as illusive as ever. Even with the huge influx of whistleblowers and videos of UAPs and despite most True Believers shouting to the rooftops, "Disclosure is imminent!" .... it never really happens.

-------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

In the previous post I wrote about my first sighting of what then was called an Unidentified Flying Object (UFO) and now renamed Unknown Anomalous Phenomena aka UAPs.

Soon after the sighting it was relegated to the unsaid family history bin as just one of those things and something we just didn't talk about especially in front of my father.

As a scientist of sorts (a geologist) to him UFO's were just pop-culture hokum and crazy talk. From his standpoint, talking about them did not foster intelligent thought nor were they worthy of discussion.

They were non-science, or more to the point nonsense. UFO became a dirty word in our household, one covered in the stink of lunacy.

--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

I went on with my life as a typical American boy, having (what I assumed to be) a relatively normal upbringing. I was creative like my mother, loved to draw and paint. I loved animals, catching frogs and turtles and releasing them. I was a daydreamer and my teachers told my parents I spent too much time in class staring out the window.

To me, school was boring and restrictive. I would much rather spend my time outdoors, lying on the green grass staring up into the skies which was a favorite pastime of mine. The UFO encounter in Ohio faded into my consciousness but I realize now, somehow it was always in the background. I wasn't much of a participant and more of an observer, a trait that would serve me well later in life.

My interests naturally gravitated to all things aerospace. I grew up during the space race and whenever they aired a space launch on television I was there taking in every word. Everytime I heard a plane fly over I'd run out in the yard to see it. I devoured books on the subjects of rocketry, aircraft and space.

In the third grade I won a art contest with a detailed drawing of the Mercury capsule. The prize was a field trip trip to Columbus, Ohio where I got to shake the hand of a real astronaut, John Glenn, the first American to orbit the earth three times. He wouldn't be the only astronaut I would meet, just the first.

I remember my mother buying a complete set of World Book Encyclopedias and at first my father was angry, thinking she had been hoodwinked by a sick-talking door-to-door salesman but after they started arriving (one book a month) and he saw how much I loved reading them, he changed his mind.

He considered science and knowledge good things plus he'd rather me reading the encyclopedia than Mad Magazine or comic books, which (if ever he found) he threw promptly in the trash, usually making a big show and exclaiming for all to hear, "This trash rotting your brain!"

Even though I may not have read my school text books I did enjoy reading the encyclopedia. It's also a because of those encyclopedias my schoolwork improved considerably. My least favorite classes became my favorite classes, in particular, science, history and English.

I discovered I also liked to write.

When I was thirteen I once wrote a 12 page essay on the meaning of the ending of Stanley Kubrick;s 2001 A Space Odyssey. My teacher accused me of either copying it or one of my older siblings having written it for me.

I remember my mother confronting the teacher and scolding her for even suggesting I cheated. These are not humble-brags but facts pertinent to the back-story and the beginning of understanding what contributed to the course my life would take.

Before our family moved to Oklahoma City, we summered at a place called Buckeye Lake. It was there where another seemingly fleeting encounter with a piece of technology would become an important tool in my future investigational arsenal.

I saw it as we came through the front door.

Up against one wall was this enormous and intriguing device. I was immediately drawn to it. I eagerly plugged in the huge tube-filled Hallicrafters general coverage receiver.

My father explained to me what it was and what it could do. He said I could listen to the entire world though shortwave radio. I had no clue what "shortwave" meant, but even the word sounded intriguing. He told me he had one while in the service that was very similar. TV was in it's early days and radio was still the best way to get current news. Later that evening he plugged in an outside aerial antenna and we fired it up.

I can still recall the deep hum as it came to life. The back was open and I could see the vacuum tubes start to glow. As the tubes warmed up there was a distinct smell of dust being heated up and burning off

My father let me spin the big dial and tune through the shortwave bands. I heard far away sounding voices speaking in strange languages that I had never heard before, strange garbled voices drifting in and out a Morse code operators tapping out messages in a way I couldn't understand. There was even a pulse, the sound of distant radio stations fading in and out like an invisible electronic tide,

We happened on ship-to shore telephone transmissions from sea-going vessels on the open oceans. We listened in as operators placed radio phone calls to passengers on ships at sea.

I was hooked although I didn't realize it at the time. Although the cottage we rented was at a gorgeous lake, I probably spent more hours in font of that big radio, especially at night when the radio-magnetic tide came rolling in. To me it was magical. It to faded form consciousness only to re-manifest itself when I was a young man,

Many years later I would get my college degree in photographic studies and mass media, but writing was where my heart was. My skillset and interests would eventually lead to a secondary career as a technology writer, specializing in aerospace, and communications technology. I would go on to write articles for magazines such as Popular Science, Popular Communications, Aircraft Illustrated and I became a monthly columnist for two magazines, Monitoring Times and Popular Communications. I even authored my own publication known as The Intercepts Newsletter, which was directly linked to that old Halicrafters radio that had somehow turned on a switch on in my brain.

I also became a novelist and wrote a book for children, Mekay's 1st Life and The Interceptors Club & The Secret of the Black Manta . Neither were best sellers but they provided a constant stream of income during a time when freelance work was far and few between.

Enough of my resume let's get back to the subject at hand, what placed me on the road to unraveling Roswell.

It was in November of 1977 my life changed. I was 20 years old, attending Amarillo College in Amarillo, Texas majoring in photographic studies. I liked photography. It was a great way to meet pretty girls who wanted to be models. I was good at it and was told so by one of my instructors who said I had a natural eye for photographic composition.

He told me that I should seriously consider a career in photography. Photography was fun and social,, I had never thought I could make a living at it. When I told my father that being a photographer is what I decided to do with my life, he was livid. He had this idea of me following in his footsteps and embracing Geology which I thought was incredibly boring. The last thing I wanted to be was like was my father, an abusive man who beat his wife and his kids, besides,"Photography is a hobby, not a real career one should pursue!" he told me.

About this time my mother had finally come to the same conclusion that the whole family had had years earlier that she didn't need to spend the rest of her life being told she was dirt. She divorced him while I was in my first year in college, found herself a job and began the long road to reclaiming her life and being herself. She is and will always be my hero.

One day I was walking through the college quad when a stack of flyers caught my eye. It was for a special advance audience test screening of a film by renowned director Steven Spielberg called Close Encounters of the Third Kind.

The title was intriguing and I was a fan of Spielberg's work. I loved Jaws and especially the cinemaphotography of Sugarland Express. Vilmos Zsigmond's photography had a certain look that I was trying to emulate in my own work.

Attached to the flyer were tickets. I scooped up a handful and planned to attend. The showing was in the middle of the afternoon and I would have to skip a class but didn't see the harm in it.

After all it wasn't high school, it was college which I really enjoyed because it made me feel like an adult, free from teachers who scolded me for being a daydreamer or coloring outside the lines.

I loved college were encouraged to color outside the lines. It fostered my creativity which was the exact opposite of what my father wanted me to do. As a result he decided he would not help me fund my college education and I would have to go it alone. It was a small price to pay for my freedom and to be who I wanted to be.

Back to the movie ...

I decided to take my mother and sister. We decided to make a day of it, see the movie and then go have dinner after. We bought our popcorn and found our seats. To my surprise the audience was made mostly of college students, some in the very classes I was skipping. Seemed I wasn't the only rebel.

There movie opened up with the famous orchestral build to a loud crescendo that not only startled you but sucked you in. This was also the first movie any of us had attended with surround sound and it was totally immersive.

Then came the first scene where we saw the UFOs flying down a road being chased by the protagonist character and the police. That scene floored me. In an instant it brought me back to that night in 1964 Ohio. Although the UFOs in the film didn't look the same, the grace in which they moved over the road, and around bends with a fluidity was amazingly similar. I instantly flashed back to Ohio, 1964.

I looked over at mom and it was clear she was feeling the same way. During the course of the movie the memories came flooding back as if it was yesterday. It was if Spielberg had been there.

After the movie ended it was clear to both me and my mother that not only had we seen a marvelous film but one that had awoken a shared memory we had been told to suppress and never speak about again.

We dropped my sister off at her home (she was married at that time) and although she liked the movie, it didn't seem to evoke the same feelings it had with me and my mother. I was still living at home at the time (now having to cut corners to fund my continued education) and also to help support my mother who was struggling after the divorce.

We went and grabbed a burger at a place called Char-Kel which had these amazing tasty smoke-flavored hamburgers that were also incredibly cheap.

As we ate in the car we discussed the film and what happened in 1964 at great length. She talked about how my father had branded her as crazy and forbade her to never talk about it again. She said it was the first of many death-nails pounded into the plank that was their marriage. I could tell it was still hard for her to talk about the incident even after all these years, but not the UFO chase itself.

She also was very surprised I remembered the incident with such clarity. This was the first time we had spoken about the 1964 UFO.

The date we saw Close Encounters was in November 1977. That's when it all changed.

When Close Encounters of the Third Kind was released nationwide, both me and my mother would go see it many times, sometimes with multiple viewings in the same day, but as much as we loved the UFO scenes there was another that scene triggered a epiphany that lead to an idea, then an obsession and finally would be key to unraveling Roswell.

It was the air traffic controllers scene:

Watching it over and over it dawned on me that the way to prove UFO's were a real thing was to listen in on the radio communications of aircraft and aircraft traffic controllers!

I remembered the old Hallicrafters radio at Buckeye Lake and that one of the bands was marked Aviation Band.

The communications of airplanes and air traffic controllers were easy to monitor and new inexpensive and portable multi-band radios made relatively it easy.

Surely pilots were encountering UFOs just like in the movies and reporting them on frequencies I could monitor?

It became crystal clear to me that the next time I got paid, I was not only going to buy a multi-band radio with aviation monitoring capabilities, but I would become a master at monitoring the radio spectrum.