To understand how any topic functions one must understand the topic's origins, that from which it came. UFOs have a very deep, but very obscure base, which through the years has been twisted, molded, and manipulated to meet the needs of whoever had a belief to promote. One of the purposes of this publication is to reexamine the roots of UFO reports, using materials rarely seen in their original form.

       During the entire time that I had prepared my previous publication, Just Cause, I had made approximately twice-a-month visits to some of the various old universities and libraries in the Boston area, tapping their collections for old stories about peculiar aerial phenomena. Some would be used in the old publication if they related to government involvement in UFOs, but usually they didn't, so I kept them in files. The files grew to tens of thousands of items, and in the last several years enterprising efforts by researchers with Project 1947, headed by Jan Aldrich, have organized this research in ways never done before.

       The flow of information on unusual aerial phenomena now boggles the mind. Thousands of newspapers and journals have been, and are being, scanned, across the entire planet no less. A significant dent has been made in knowing what we haven't known about such sky mysteries, but only a dent. It hasn't been without a price. Such researchers get little or no funding, working with personal funds that could be used in more profitable directions. Time demands to do this are prodigious, a single roll of microfilm containing perhaps 15 days of daily newspapers requires an hour to search properly. That is time spent away from other things in daily life! Sports, movies, perhaps a date with Cindy Crawford are sacrificed. One library in the Boston area alone has 800,000 rolls of microfilm.

       I like to call this work the "final frontier" in UFO research because there was a time when doing a survey of the world press was considered too daunting a task. Much material had not been put on accessible microfilm, and the technology for retrieving clear reproductions was too primitive. Things have changed for the better in this way, but still..... a gross estimate of perhaps 8000 newspapers existed in the U.S. alone during the 1950's, a source of the rawest, but sometimes only, information on old reports of aerial phenomena. Project this worldwide and one can see why the "final frontier" is so daunting. So why do it?

       The motivation is the same as doing a 1000-piece jigsaw and finding one piece missing at the end..... it drives one crazy to have this incompleteness and you search high and low looking for that last piece. No knowing is simply not acceptable. Solving a mystery can sometimes require an amazing degree of completeness, so rather than chase the phantoms of modern UFOlogy, UHR chooses this greater challenge.

       UHR will be a world publication, things will appear from everywhere, not just English-speaking countries.

       WARNING:   UHR is a belief-free publication. It does not endorse or promote extraterrestrials, other dimensions, paranormal/psychic connections or any other fad belief related to aerial phenomena. UHR deals with the information because it is interesting, informative, nostalgic and sometimes mysterious. Long-time readers of my previous publication know that I interpret UFOs literally as unidentified flying objects, not space ships. If you are looking for aliens, get one of the newsstand magazines that will more than satisfy every fantasy. UHR will give only naked reality.

       Because UHR shifts more to general history, when my previous publications dealt with government involvement, it does not mean that UHR won't deal with government matters. Many of the most interesting historical developments have come through government records.

       Most importantly, UHR is beholding to no one, save the editor. It is connected to no other individuals or organizations, policies or philosophies. It was created and can be destroyed at this editor's whim. No outside influences or intrusions can occur. No one speaks for this publication without the editor's permission. These policies are cut in neutron star material and will remain in perpetuity. There will be no more January 1998s.

       The "UFO" on the masthead is from 1896. The old-style spellings in the title are archaeic because this is an archaeic publication. Otherwise, this will not be drastically different from my previous style.

       In this new age of the Internet it seems somehow more comfortable to sail into the new century/millenium with this old-style publication, sent through the old style mails, much like piloting a wooden sailing vessel to a new land, rather than plowing over the landscape at breakneck speed in an SST.

       UFOs had become a distinct topic of discussion beginning in 1947. Prior to that time the phenomena didn't have a particular title, so that observations of peculiar aerial objects fell into no organized category, other than being interesting recollections with most often no permanent record kept. There are some exceptions to this (airships of the 1890s, Foo-Fighters, etc.) but reports of UFO-type phenomena prior to 1947 are usually fragmentary, almost to the point of being uninvestigatable. Nevertheless, some of the observations still present a mystery, if only as a contribution to the cultural memory.

       A former aircraft observer, who we will call Shirley, recently related her memory of a peculiar object seen around 1943 or a bit later. She was a volunteer aircraft spotter in north central Massachusetts, helping to fill in one of the air defense needs in the days of primitive radar. Manning a tall building or specially built tower, these volunteers would maintain contact with other similar posts along the U.S. coast, ready to relay information about unknown aircraft overflying American air space.

       Another Massachusetts report during the summer of 1944 or 45 occurred at Wollaston Beach, just south of Boston. Mrs. Margaret Fornaro reported that on two consecutive days at 2PM a group of nine saucer-shaped objects were seen flying over the beach in view of hundreds. Traveling in echelon formation and spaced evenly, the discs occasionally tilted from side to side independently of one another. They were highly reflective and sometimes showed a golden color when tilted a certain way. The tilting had a two to three second cycle and the entire formation was in view for one to two minutes.

       Said to have been reported in the Boston press, UHR is checking this possibility as it would place press coverage of a classic flying disc sighting several years earlier than the first acknowledged disc report by Kenneth Arnold. There is, however, a possibility that the sighting occurred in the summer of 1947, as there were a number of beach reports of discs in the Boston area.

       Summer 1942: At Great East Lake, near Sanbornville, New Hampshire, David Townsend was visiting a friend. One night he was out fishing on the lake with a local girl. While David was watching the water where the line trailed, the girl let out a scream.

       Was it lightning? The night was clear with the moon either full or within a couple of days of being so. No storms were in sight anywhere. The streak didn't appear instantaneously but developed a path over a short period of time. And what were the odds of clear air lightning following a path around the two-thirds of the moon's circumference? Was it an aircraft? How does a plane leave a jagged, glowing path around the edge of the moon in just a couple of seconds?

       An aircraft spotter in Laguna, California was on duty in the early spring of 1943 at about 10AM. On a clear day the observer noted a large flashing, like a giant sparkler, discharging every 30 seconds high in the sky. A report was sent to Santa Ana Army Air Base and a P-38 was sent to investigate. The flashing continued until the P-38 closed in on its position when it ceased. AAF personnel were said to be quite upset by the event.

       A rarity, a dated report, was filed by a renown aviation writer, Gerry Casey. On April 3, 1943 at 9:50AM, Casey was a primary instrument flight instructor supervising a student in a BT-13A trainer. Cruising near Long Beach, California with a student flying, Casey had glanced eastward and had noticed a peculiar flash in the sky. As he looked more carefully, he saw an aircraft in a moderate dive toward the trainer. Preparation for evasive action was made ready in case it was needed as the craft continued to approach, and then pass on the trainer's left side.

       This "plane" was quite odd. It was radiant orange in color, with no openings or glass visible. There was no propeller or propulsion of any kind visible. It was elliptical, with a rounded hump on top and a smaller hump underneath. Size was difficult to determine without knowing the distance. It was unlike anything ever seen before.

       Suddenly, with the rear portion of the object moving slightly, it shot away, disappearing in a climbing turn toward the ocean in two seconds. It turned form orange to white as it accelerated. Total duration of the sighting was 90 seconds.

       By today's standards of UFO research, this report would probably draw a deep yawn from the majority of those following this topic. The pilot and student weren't abducted and dissected. Their memories weren't tampered with. They weren't visited by "men in black." And they never toured talk shows or ended up in tabloids. The instructor was simply recalling a detailed odd event of the distant past that was not resplendent with Hollywood-type glitter or a scripted story line. It is merely one of those strange kinds of little puzzles that constituted the 5% or so of what the Air Force could not identify - the technically detailed report with credible witnesses that present an interpretive challenge to intelligent people. Unfortunately this has become archaeic in today's showbiz world, belonging only to an archaeic publication like this!

       Activity continued in California in 1943. In Escondido one day in November around 1030PM, on a dark, moonless night, the Sledge family, husband, wife and son, were listening to the radio when Mrs. Sledge stepped outside for some air. She noticed an object hovering 15 feet above the roof of her house, shaped like a disc with a dome, some 12 feet in diameter. The dome had square windows all around, about 30 inches square each. Behind two of them she could see silhouetted shapes like men. The dome inside appeared to be like shiny chrome.

       As Mrs. Sledge flashed a flashlight on the ground, believing that the object wanted to land, it blinked out its lights and disappeared. The family kept silent about it until many years later.

       1944 produced a few more west coast incidents. J.S. Taylor of Los Angeles recalled a sighting while working at a manufacturing plant on Slauson Ave. One night at 1130PM, he saw an orange-reddish light come down from the sky and hover 100 yards above the road. When Taylor approached for a better view, the light moved upward and away. Upon his going back to the plant, the light returned to its original position and remained for 5 more minutes after which it disappeared. It was seen by Taylor one other time but at a much higher altitude.

       In a report to a NICAP subcommittee in Seattle in 1961, the following is described:

                                                                                                       Cdr. R. W. Hendershott
                                                                                                       U.S.N.R.

       A strange circular object, brilliant green in color, was seen from Vallejo, California during the summer of 1944 on a Friday afternoon. The object followed an arc toward distant hills, after which it followed the contour of the hills in straight, horizontal paths, with vertical steps corresponding to the need to elevate position to maintain contour. The object then arced again toward the horizon and disappeared. Duration: 3 to 5 seconds.

       UHR will have much more on the World War 2 era. There are still other domestic accounts as well as a large amount of new information on the "Foo-Fighter" phenomena abroad, many of these have been gleaned from government bombing mission reports and Air Force histories unearthed recently through the efforts of Project 1947 researchers.

       Unless otherwise stated, reports described in UHR come from case files created from letters by participants, or organizational report forms signed by witnesses. Occasionally, the witnesses desire anonymity, so if names are missing, this is why.

       So, what is the truth? According to Haines, in the unclassified version released on the Internet, the CIA was only involved with UFOs intensively until the early 1950s with the release of the Robertson Panel report (for background, see The UFO Cover Up [Clear Intent], chapters on the CIA). After this, the interest became sporadic.

       However, the core of the article's importance lies on pages 6-7, where, it is claimed, that more than half of all UFO reports from the late 1950s through the 1960s were due to flights of manned U-2 reconnaissance aircraft, which began test flights in August 1955, and SR-71 "Blackbird" flights, known as "Project OXCART." It was said that once flights began, there was a large increase in UFO reports from commercial pilots and air traffic controllers. The U-2's were originally painted silver and flew up to 60,000 feet, giving the impression of a strange flying object of high performance, surely leading to speculations of craft from other worlds.

       The article also claimed that the Air Force Project Blue Book investigation was aware of this, had consulted with the CIA's U-2 project staff in Washington, and coordinated dismissive explanations, like temperature inversions and other known phenomena to cover for the reconnaissance flights. The source for all of this? "The Central Intelligence Agency and Overhead Reconnaissance: The U-2 and OXCART programs: 1954-74," by Gregory Pedlow and Donald Welzenbach (CIA History Staff, Wash., D.C., 1992).

       The extraordinary nature of this article cannot be stressed more emphatically. The CIA is saying that the Air Force lied about more than half of all UFO reports logged from 1955 on. These reports that were explained were falsely identified, and many of the unknowns were known. Or perhaps none of the unknowns were linked to reconnaissance flights, which means that both CIA and Air Force scrutiny could not identify those unusual cases. At any rate, it can now be stated unequivocably that a major deception was conducted in government handling of UFOs, beyond doubt.

       However, not a single instance of linkage of a reconnaissance flight to a UFO report was provided in the article to support such an amazing conclusion, though it can be readily acknowledged that this may have been so in some cases.

       Now, which cases were U-2/OXCART flights and which weren't? Someone with the Air Force and the CIA had to sit down and figure this out. Where is the case material with such determination? Where is the documentation of cross-staffing between with the Air Force and the CIA? Is it all in the two pages cited by Haines from Pedlow's and Welzenbach's report? Obviously not. So there appears to be a huge "dark file," a Blue Book underground, that exists substantiating the greater-than-50% reconnaissance flight determinations up to 1969, the end of Blue book. To put it in numbers, there were 9278 cases from 1955 to 1969. According to Haines' article, there were more than 4693 reports, roughly, secretly determined to be due to U-2/OXCART. That is a lot of paper!

       But in 1979, at the conclusion of the GSW lawsuit against the CIA, we were given a bit less than 900 pages, none of which dealt with these facts. A small number of classified UFO documents were withheld and it was said that this was all there was in CIA files. Periodic releases since then by the CIA, clearly some of them the "small number: previously withheld, again do not allude to the U-2 connection. One needs only half a brain to tell that there is something rotten, but not in Denmark!

       It is ironic that the CIA had created much of the current UFO paranoia by conducting such deception and not releasing this information during the lawsuit, and at least trying to blunt the notion of ETs on our planet. What secret would have been compromised? That some UFO seen in 1956 turned out to be a U-2 or SR-71, aircraft already known to the public at the time of the court action.

       The real reason is likely a reluctance to admit to a substantial public deception until a time when the UFO topic had become largely irrelevant and unimportant due to the highly publicized excesses of UFOlogists like now. Far fewer people are angry about this now than they would have been during the decades of the 1960's and 1970's when the topic was taken more seriously. In releasing the article in August, the CIA was likely also trying to put an exclamation point on the Air Force's release about a month earlier of their negative assessment of the Roswell incident and ET bodies in storage, hoping perhaps that the whole business could be squashed once and for all.

       It could hardly be called a well-calculated move. A government historian was sanctioned by the CIA to publish a story saying that the CIA had deceived the public about their handling of UFOs, but it was for a good reason and that ETs still didn't exist. In fact, the CIA didn't have to release anything, there was hardly any pressure on them to do so. A CIA official might have thought that it was a good public relations move to make the CIA appear more truthful and forthcoming in the post-Cold War world, someone who may not have even been born during the Robertson Panel era of the early 50s. But there are some gaping holes in the CIA's new explanation, so admitting to lying and not qualifying it very well makes the effort appear lame, an attempt to capitalize on the Air Force's Roswell publicity. Whatever the intent might have been in releasing the report, it was not received very well. Newspapers blasted the story as another example of the reason to mistrust government. Claims that the government is forthcoming with UFOs can always be met by this bad example. And we still don't see the documentation linking U-2s to UFO sightings!

       Now with regard to the Air Force, where are their dark analyses of Blue Book UFO files? In 1969 we were assured that Project Blue Book was all of the Air Force's UFO data and that no more existed. We were then witness to a flood of UFO documents from 1975 onward that would rival Niagara Falls in volume, in the thousands of pages. Yet not a clue that any of this new story existed, though it was always suspected that we weren't getting the whole story on UFOs. Certainly, as we now know, it was a justified position.

       With all of the stress in the article on reconnaissance aircraft being responsible for most UFO reports from 1955 on, it is forgotten that they could not be responsible for reports from 1954 back. There were 3187 of those, of which 481 of the Air Force's historical grand total of 701 were unknowns, more than half of the so-called "good" reports. In one year alone, 1952, more than 20% of the reports were unknown. None were due to U-2s or SR-71s. Furethermore, distant sightings of reconnaissance aircraft cannot account for closer observations that dominate many of the better reports regarded as Air Force unknowns.

       To prove me wrong. We will have to see those Air Force/CIA determinations, won't we!

       This would seem to be a reversal of opinion on the Roswell incident, which the Center has enthusiastically endorsed for many years. Jerome Clark, editor of the Center's publication, "International UFO Reporter," has called Roswell, "..the most important case in UFO history," having the potential, "not to settle the issue of UFOs, but to identify them as extraterrestrial spacecraft." (Clark's UFO Encounters from Beyond, pg. 161, Signet, 1993)

       Rodeghier himself, writing a foreword to UFO Crash at Roswell, by Don Schmitt and Kevin Randle (Avon, 1991), called the book "the truth." What was the truth? "On July 3, 1947, a rancher came across the wreckage of an alien spacecraft (emphasis added) in the high desert of New Mexico," and, "Several days later, the bodies of four extraterrestrials were discovered a few miles from the alleged crash site." These are called "facts" on the back cover matter of the book.

       Whatever led to the reversal of opinion is unclear, but UHR applauds the statement, feeling that it injects some sanity back into the UFO controversy sorely in need of backpedaling from extreme positions.

       Dave and his wife Marge were the movers and shakers for much of the 1980s in Massachusetts for rational UFO research. When I was involved with Massachusetts MUFON, I spent many long hours discussing how to organize and present a polished view of UFOs through public information and public education, PIPE as the Christensens called it. Dave was particularly helpful through his computer knowledge, organizing file information to make it widely known to other researchers, and some of this work resulted in a computer catalog of UFO literature. Both Dave and Marge had campaigned for rigorous application of the scientific method to UFO research and investigations.

       They were cordial hosts during multiple visits I've made to Tucson to research Arizona UFO reports and the James McDonald papers stored at the University of Arizona. We made many memorable trips into the desert as well, including getting caught in a vicous thunderstorm outside of the biosphere while the biospherians inside watched our terror. We were rescued! I will miss his quiet, logical demeanor; a pleasant man.

                                                         -    -   -   -   -   -

     The flying saucer investigations were at a high pitch in the press during this period and Gorman's story was gobbled up by the country's news services. When the report reached Wright Field, an air force experimental center, several planeloads of army investigators in various fields who were assigned to trace down "saucer" reports left for Fargo immediately. Gorman, two airport tower operators who had reportedly watched his aerial chase of the mysterious object, and other 178th personnel in key posts were interviewed extensively. The airplanes and squadron equipment were also carefully checked with geiger counters, but apparently nothing was turned up.

     The investigators left amid heartfelt sighs from exhausted 178th officers. But the story didn't die. In fact, at this time, three and one-half years later, the saucer controversy is still raging and the Gorman incident is taken out and rehashed in company with other reports in an occasional publication or radio program.

         From: History, 178th Fighter Bomber Squadron, North Dakota, 1951.

     UHR will usually try to devote a page to direct reproductions of unusual items, clippings, or, as above, government documents. There is a significant backlog of Air Force histories uncovered by Project 1947 that will be used from time to time. In the case of press stories, the quality will vary depending on the source and the reproduction equipment available at the time of recovery. Sometimes it was very difficult to get readable accounts because the microfilm was dark or heavily scratched. Older press used ink that often blobbed or ran so even with clear reproduction, reading was hard.

     Bound volumes frequently were put together in a way that text near the fold of the pages was too close to the edge so that it was lost when bound in. And sometimes we found that people would tear whole items out rather than spend a dime to photocopy them. This prevented upgrading of poor copies that we already had.

     Government documents many times can be eight generation reproductions, which renders copy virtually unreadable.

     UHR will do its best to render the best quality out of what is available. I just wanted you to know what it is like to engage in this kind of research. Even in places where one expects things to be cared for, they aren't