PART SIX: EVERYTHING IS A UFO

"Maybe it's one of those Roswell UFOs?" my father-in-law Elwood Johnston said half joking.  Whatever it was was outright spooky. 

It was absolutely nothing like the UFO I had witnessed as a child in 1964. In fact it was the the antithesis, black, silent, stealthy. The UFO in 1964 seemed to be almost childlike in actions, almost playful, shining like a earthbound star. Like it wanted you to chase it, notice it. How could you not?

But as this black whatever it was passed quite close to us, the hairs on the back of my neck actually stood up. The closest thing I can liken it to is being in a pitch dark room and you realize there's something unknown in there with you. 

My best guess is that it was a flying wing of sorts, possibly related to the F-117 and the B-2 but much more advanced. What really stood out was how impossibly quiet it was. There was no rumble of an engine. Not at all like the loud and  proud F-14s and B-1Bs that had blasted out of Roswell just over an hour ago. 

photo illustration (C) Steve Douglass 

One thing was sure, it was built to sneak up on you. My guess is the only reason it had the red strobe on the centerline was to keep any civil or military jet flying from colliding with it as it passed less than a mile away from the end of the runway at RIAC. It's interesting to note that although we were monitoring every found VHF civilian aircraft and UHF military aircraft frequency in the area, there were no indications this triangular aircraft was in communication with anyone. 

It sure wasn't on Roswell approach frequencies, which is required when flying anywhere near a civil airport, nor was it talking to Albuquerque Center, Cherokee Control (on the White Sands Missile Range) or Holloman AFB. 

Every aircraft flying in the exercise that night out of Roswell,  I logged. I noted when  they took off from Roswell and when they returned. Later, I matched all the callsigns with everything I had recorded onto cassettes that were connected to my scanner array. I'm pretty sure I  logged all the "players" as they checked in with The E-2C Hawkeye and the E-3 AWACS who basically controlled the exercise and kept both civil and military aircraft from a deadly merger in the sky. Maybe there was a secret player taking part in the exercise but it seemed highly doubtful that any test project aircraft would be flying on the range that hadn't checked with Cherokee Control. 

photo (C) Steve Douglass 

Earlier, I did log an unexpected aircraft RYDER 11 (an F-117) who shot one approach at Holloman as the sun was going down. I got a magnificent snap of him against a New Mexico, sunset. Although the F-117 is a stealth aircraft, it isn't silent. The Nighthawk sounds similar to a T-38 on approach. The pilot radioed Cherokee Control for permission to work the Red Rio Range but was informed the range was busy due to Roving Sands. Ryder 11 then requested routing back to Tonopah, Nevada. 

Although it was a real treat photographing  an F-117 it was no surprise. I heard him talking to Albuquerque Approach an hour before I saw him. I don't think the F-117 was part of the exercise.

That night I was eager to get back to my in-laws house and look at the video. Before viewing it I made a quick backup copy. I copied the entire day's shoot on to a VHS cassette. As it copied I played back my scanner recordings, looking for any mention of the ghost player. Other than that odd F-117, there were no callsigns out of the usual.

Once I was through making my safety copy, I played the original back to see if the aircraft was even visible in the murky sky.. It was a black slab, flying against a slightly lighter (but still dark) Roswell sky.  

I had captured it for a whole 7.5 seconds. Later when the tape was analyzed by video and imagery experts brought in by Popular Science west coast editor Stuart F, Brown the results weren't what I would call stellar. The contrast between the object was only separated from the background by five gray-scale pixels. 

Today it would most likely be written off as another blurry UFO photo, thousands of which infest the internet.

If only I could have captured on tape what our eyes could see. The pixelized blob was a poor representation of what Elwood and I saw at observed at close range. 

I was convinced I had captured on video the existence of hitherto unknown and unacknowledged secret stealth aircraft, possibly the much talked about and mysterious TR-3A Black Manta. 

This was not a moniker invented by me but had appeared first in Aviation Week and Space Technology Magazine. 

According to speculation by one person on the Dreamland Resort forum, "The TR-3 was a misinterpretation by William Scott (who wrote reports regarding the supposed Black Manta) of Tier III, an ambitious USAF program for a stealthy and large high-altitude UAV that evolved from the CIA's canceled Quartz program, and which was eventually split into the Tier II+ and Tier III- Minus programs that led to the RQ-4 and RQ-3 respectively. The book "Weapons of the 21st Century" by Bill Yenne (published in 1993) even claimed on page 65 that the supposed TR-3 was first tested by Northrop in 1981 based on the Tactical High Altitude Penetrator concept, but without supporting evidence."

However, Phil Patton (while doing research his book Dreamland Travels inside the Secret World of Roswell and Area 51) visited the Nasa/Dryden archives (located at Edwards, Calif., on the western edge of the Mojave Desert, 80 miles north of Los Angeles) found a folder marked; TR-3A Test and Evaluation Program, but the file was empty.

The Black Manta as it was known would become one of my unicorns. As Stuart F. Brown would state it best, "We know there aren't any unicorns, but there are black aircraft." 

I would photograph it (or something very much like it) decades later on more than one occasion. Others would see it and photograph too it but each time the government apparatus would spare no expense in denial and disinformation, only reinforcing the idea that they were hiding a triangular-shaped craft. At one point spending hundreds of thousands of dollars staging an elaborate dog and pony show by flying a  a trio of B-2s over Amarillo in a text-book attempt at discrediting the sightings - desperately trying to dial back the accidental disclosure of a secret program. READ more about it here on my other blog Black Horizon.

I wrote about the Roving Sands story in Monitoring Times. That article had unexpected legs and led to other articles in other magazines and eventually (because it happened near Roswell) garnering so much interest I ended up on national TV talking about it.

The Today Show and Unsolved Mysteries came calling and I chose the latter to tell my story of the sighting, for two reasons. First I thought the sighting deserved more time than two minute on a morning talk segment and Unsolved served an audience who was inquisitive about their world and the universe more so than moms readying their kids for school.  Although I was made aware they were going to try and connect it to the Roswell UFO Crash of 1947 (because it would garner a big audience) I was adamant that it was to be made clear that I myself made no such claim.

That said, after it aired I became known as the guy who captured on video a UFO flying near Roswell, New Mexico. Although I wasn't happy about it I understood the connection people would naturally make and dealt with it. I didn't know it at the time but that sighting would be the keys and the inroad to all things Roswell.

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Interestingly, at that time (in Roswell) talking about the "crash" in 1947 was something frowned upon in public circles. Roswell hadn't yet embraced the idea that there was money in them-thar UFO tourists and it was kind of thing the chamber of commerce didn't exactly promote. 

Roswell was a dairy town, an agricultural area with a downtown area that smelled like baked bread, promoted more for it's military academy and where American pioneer of rocketry, Robert Goddard built and tested his rockets that led to the space age. Roswell was also a town of artists, with many museums and a zoo and nature centers. 

The almost-legendary UFO crash near Roswell was something everyone in town knew about but didn't talk about with strangers, especially since the publishing of The Roswell Incident by Charles Berlitz and William Moore. Since then there have been many more books published on the subject. The U.S. government tired of  the media circus and public inquiries tried to kill the Roswell story outright and lay the legend to rest with the Project Mogul answer.  

Although the explanation seemed plausible for the majority of  the press, for the true-believers it was just more evidence of a government white wash. The citizens of Roswell (especially those who where there at the time) didn't believe it either. They knew what they saw in 1947 and it wasn't mannequins and Mogul balloons coming down in 1953.  This was long before the thought of  aliens as a money-making industry had caught on in the sleepy city of Roswell.

I had read The Roswell Incident  and although it was interesting, I wasn't at all convinced it wasn't a weather balloon or some military hardware that had gotten of the leash from the White Sands Missile Range.

Once I saw the photo of the debris, I was pretty convinced of that. It looked like just sticks and aluminum foil.  I dismissed Roswell as being one of those saucer-crashes that most likely had a more terrestrial origin, albeit a  most likely a secret government program gone awry.  

I could not have foreseen that myself (and everyone else for that matter)  was looking at the incident from an entirely wrong perspective. More on that later. 

                                         I now liken it to trick image that could either be either a old lady or a

young lady. 

Once someone points out there was another way of looking at it, only then do you see it for all that it truly is. Once you figure that out you won't see it any other way. 

My father-in-law was a used car dealer in Roswell as well as a well respected and liked  member of the Roswell business community. He was gregarious, social and known by everybody. As a result he introduced me to many of the citizens of Roswell who were there in 1947. 

I talked to them informally about the Roswell Incident, not like an interviewer. They were more open to me that way. I played the long game and would let them initiate talking about Roswell in 1947.

It was clear that since the Berlitz/Moore book had come out that not only their veracity but sanity had been called into question. After the Project Mogul balloon explanation came out, the majority of the public (at least for now) accepted the Air Force's depiction of the event and the subsequent negative scrutiny had left a bad taste in their mouths. As far as the Air Force was involved Roswell was a dead issue, although many of the original players were very much alive and crying cover-up.  Blue Book's J. Allen Hynek would go on to say in an interview, "You can't convince a person who has had a real UFO experience that he hasn't had it." 

Elwood introduced me to some of the key witnesses such as Glenn Dennis and Walter Haut. who would later go on to found the International UFO Museum and Research Center in Roswell. It was clear that these were honest men who knew what they had witnessed and nobody could tell them different. There was lot's more to what they knew that wasn't in The Roswell Incident.

My article on the TR-3A and Roving Sands generated interest in other ways I couldn't foresee. The next year, I wasn't alone at the fence. Aviation Journalists and Interceptors (some who would go on to be some of my life-long friends)  soon joined me every spring when the jets gathered at Roswell. 

What was once just me and a couple of scanners, became a dozen or more like-minded radio hobbyists, aviation aficionados and black project watchers all packing cameras, scanning radios and night vision gear. It became an event (albeit an esoteric social one)  where people came from all over the world to stare out into the New Mexico desert all hoping to catch a glimpse of what I had seen. 

I met so many interesting people from all walks of life. At one point I convinced my good Friend Ken Hanson to use his 40 foot RV as a sort of roving command center, bristling with antennas, packed with scanners and all the comforts of home. We parked it at a public park just on the south side of the Roswell Industrial Air Center only about a thousand yards from the flight line. On the back window we had a printed sign that identified us as The Roving Sands Green Force because as taxpayers we supplied the green and an unofficial oversight committee there to see how the military was spending our hard-earned dollars, plus it was great fun.

However, as the size of our presence increased so did the scrutiny. 

It peaked when a Learning Channel producer asked to document our unofficial Interceptor Convention and soon an Australian TV crew with big professional crews joined us at the fence. This did not make the military very happy, and they'd do things like buzz us with helicopters to make us go away, which to us only made us dig in harder. 

There was little they could do because everything we did was legal, but they did not like it. We weren't there to hamper their operations but just to observe and by some small chance hope to see something unacknowledged. 

And many times we did.

 

There are those people who ask me, how come you see all this weird shit? How come I've never seen the things you have claimed to have seen?

I'll answer that by asking them a question, "How many times during your average day you think to look up?" 

My life's story has been an adventure, and it's that way because I've spent a lifetime looking up.

As an example. As I write this there is an amazingly beautiful moon out there tonight. I not only went out and looked at it, I photographed it. When was the last time you really looked at the moon and not  just a passing glance?  

When was the last time you watched a light crossing the sky and wondered what it was. Is it a airliner, a satellite, some natural like a meteorite or a passing comet? Would you know the difference?

The majority of humans can't tell the difference between a military aircraft of a Southwest Airlines passenger jet. 

Forget looking up, imagine being able to tell what kind of aircraft is flying over by the sound it makes? I and most of my friends can do that.

If you are a hammer, everything is a nail. If you know nothing about aircraft, satellites, comets, birds or clouds, everything is a UFO.

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UP NEXT: AND THEN I MET "MARK"