Leon Davidson, the CIA, and UFOs

Leon Davidson was an avid “ufologist” – noted for his publication of the Flying Saucers: An Analysis of Project Blue Book, Special Report 14 pictured here:



Dr, Davidson and I communicated during the 1970s, and he provided his analysis of the Zamora/Socorro insignia; his analysis, unfortunately, irrelevant because it seems the Air Force had Lonnie Zamora fudge his observation (ostensibly to confuse hoaxers) and the symbol considered by Dr. Davidson, and others (including me and my gang) is nothing like the actual symbol that Zamora saw.

That aside, Dr. Davidson felt that the CIA was heavily involved with UFO sightings and peripheral elements.

He did an exegesis of the CIA’s involvement.

I’ve scanned his work for your perusal.

This is the cover:



To access readable content, click…

HERE-1

HERE-2

HERE-3

(Click on the image to enlarge it.)

I’ve appended Dr. Davidson’s work because of the mention in Goodavage’s Wanaque piece, below this posting, that a friend of his (Gordon Evans), who knew Allen Dulles, said that ex-CIA head Dulles confided in him that he (Dulles) had set up a CIA unit to deal with UFO matters, exactly what Dr. Davidson suggested in his evaluation and research.

Some find such a revelation intriguing, as do I…

RR

The 1966 Wanaque UFO sightings [Revisited, one more time]

I stumbled upon an article (Seeing is Prickles...) by Joseph Goodavage in the magazine above (from 1967).

He wrote about his first-hand, on-site experience(s) at the New Jersey Wanaque Reservoir during a spate of UFO sightings there in 1966; sightings which have fallen through the ufological cracks, but evaluated by Anthony Bragalia, for us, recently, yet left unresolved, pretty much.

This is the police officer who escorted Mr. Goodavage to various areas where sightings were occurring, and there were, apparently, many sightings over several days in early 1966 and later in the year (October):



While Anthony Bragalia is enthused by the (faked?) Wanaque photo showing a beam of light from the UFO to the ground, a fellow photographer of Goodavage provided this photo of one of the objects, no beam of light, obviously, and Goodavage writes:



“…there was no beam of light [his italics] descending from the pulsating red disc (or discs) I observed at Wanaque Reservoir.” [Page 12]

But the 2 inch thick ice was melted at the spots where “discs” hovered over the reservoir:



Mr. Goodavage also provides information on a Volkswagen and other cars that were stalled or incapacitated by the UFOs:



NICAP’s Don Berliner was there when the cars were affected, and noted that no occupants were found in the Volkswagen.

Something mentioned by Goodavage also caught my eye and interest, which I’ve mentioned to Nick Redfern (for his studies of U.S. agencies involved in UFO phenomenon)....

Goodavage was intrigued by the possibility that the Wanaque UFOs may have been using teleportation (because of their behavior) and contacted a UFO afficianado [sic], Gordon Evans of the American Management Association, who told Goodavage that he (Evans) knew Allen Dulles, ex-head of the CIA, and that Dulles told him he had set up a CIA investigating unit for UFOs. [Page 10]

There are clues to a CIA unit doing just that in Ellen Schrecker’s book, Many Are the Crimes: McCarthyism in America [Little, Brown and Company, Boston, 1998]

Like a few earlier flying saucer events and sightings, the Wanaque sightings of 1966 have been ignored by UFO hobbyists, to the detriment of “ufology.”

We’ll try to bring more to the table about this raft of sightings, which also involve Nick Redfern’s Men in Black, and hoaxing: the Wanaque photo that Mr. Bragalia likes so much:



RR

How the Trent/McMinnville photos were created?

This photo from The NEW Report on Flying Saucers magazine [True/Fawcett, NY, 1967] appears on Page 27 in a Lloyd Mallan article entitled “There’s More (and less) to Saucers than Meets the Eye.”

The saucer depicted consists of two paper plates glued together by Gary Buboltz, hung on a clothesline with a thin thread and photographed from fifteen (15) feet.

The photo may be found in the Project Blue Book files.


Here is the uncropped photo:


Ibid: Back Cover

It shows, as Mr. Mallan points out, how easy it is or was to fake flying saucer photos.

J. Allen Hynek authenticated this photo from 1967:



The saucer shown was a balsa-wood model, created and filmed by the Jaroslaw brothers of Michigan who hung it, by a thread, from a tree at the edge of Lake St. Clair:


Ibid: Page 31

The idea that the Trents may have strung a truck mirror from overhead wires rankles even me. The iconic photos have their supporters and defenders, such as Bruce Maccabee, and also their critics, such as Robert Sheaffer and deceased skeptic Phil Klass.

What allows me to accept the possibility [sic] of a Trent hoax is the time factors involved in the episode: the sighting by Mrs. Trent, the calling of her husband, his trip inside the house to get their camera, and the time to take two shots before the object departed.

Moreover, the object doesn’t move far enough in the sky if Bruce Maccabee’s estimate of the time between photo one and photo two taken by Mr. Trent is correct: 31 seconds.

(See a previous post here for copies of the Trent photos.)

Photos can offer proof or disproof of UFOs, as the Mallan article delineates, among other critiques of UFO photography; the advent of computer programs that can create or manipulate images exacerbates the problem of hoaxed UFO photos.

The Buboltz photo, above, emulates the Trent photos. Does it remove the “authentic” rubric given to the Trent pictures? You decide.

RR