Stavros Chatzopoulos, PhD

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2023

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Introduction

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In Chapter 1, we examined the elements we have regarding the origin of the UFO phenomenon and offered some pointers about the available substantive data and the important role of the human observer. One of the key hypotheses in that material was that the various categories of UFOs (NL, DD, and CE) may be generated by different liminal phenomena. Incorrectly lumping together all of these different data makes it impossible to arrive at a serious explanation for the phenomenon.

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Typical UFO data usually include: witness descriptions, photographs, videos, and recordings of electromagnetic or infrared signals (signatures in technical language). A few reports refer to metallic fragments from UFOs, such as in the Ubatuba case in 1933 in Brazil. Witnesses on a beach are said to have seen a disc plunge down and explode, flooding the area with silver colored fragments of extremely pure magnesium (Vallée, 1990). Analyses of these fragments by Garry Nolan did not find anything particularly anomalous (Vallée and Nolan, 2017). Even fewer reports allude to “remains from crashed UFOs.” These last two categories belong to a kind of “dark” portion of the evidence, since their highly classified nature makes open access to the available information almost impossible.

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In the great majority of cases, the data do not include all the necessary elements required to reach a scientifically valid result. The photographs of the objects have never been particularly clear (see Vicente Ballester Olmos’ FOTOCAT collection), the videos lack sufficient points of reference, the electromagnetic and infrared characteristics require additional kinds of information (see Mick West’s analysis of the Gimbal video), etc. The striking development of Photoshop and AI based image and video tools, along with some people’s tendency to fabricate false evidence, has led to these types of data no longer being taken seriously.

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The official social emergence of “crashed flying discs” took place in 1980, when Charles Berlitz and William Moore published their book on the Roswell case. Although the Roswell story on the internet has a distinctly extraterrestrial flavor, there are many versions of the events by different authors who hold different positions on the matter. It is very interesting that, in the same period as Roswell, there are other testimonies about strange crashes of “craft.” The reader will find additional thematic material in Curt Collins’ excellent article on his blog “Flying Saucers Foiled Again!!”

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As for the number of “extraterrestrial objects” that have reportedly crashed or been shot down, the internet is full of intriguing and very likely unreliable information. Recently, the numbers of crashed craft were “upgraded” through an interview Steven Greer gave to YouTuber Chris Lehto (see the detailed information in Vortex No. 4, 2023). Dr. Greer stated that there is information about 145 secret military locations containing material from disc crashes. In total, there are 752 witnesses and 121 cases of recovery of crashed craft.

This large number of incidents inevitably brings the researcher face to face with a very simple question: “But whose craft are crashing?” Hypothetically or rather, plausibly accidents may occur even with craft of extremely advanced technology, but the sheer number of accidents suggests that the crash retrieval programs probably have to do with earthly craft from various secret (black ops) programs.

The aim of this chapter is first to delineate a chronological frame of reference. In this way, the stories of crashed craft and the various technologies allegedly obtained through reverse engineering can be analytically evaluated by the reader.

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2.2. Data from the 20th Century – The Roswell, Aztec, and Trinity Cases

Classical references in the literature (Clark, 1978 Vallée, 1990) mention roughly 7–19 crashed craft in the mid 20th century. The Roswell and Aztec cases are the best known. The mythology of these incidents is based on the idea that, after the atomic explosion at Nagasaki, various extraterrestrial civilizations visited us to see how we would manage our knowledge of nuclear energy.

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2.3. Roswell, New Mexico – 2 July 1947

(One week after Kenneth Arnold’s sighting)

A luminous disc was seen flying over Roswell on a northwesterly course, and an object likely the same one crashed on a ranch 95 kilometers northwest of the town. The wreckage was discovered by the ranch manager (Bratt Brazel) and two of his children, but for various reasons they did not immediately report the incident to the authorities. On 7 July, Major Jesse Marcel, intelligence officer of the Army Air Forces at the local base, recovered part of the debris, and Lieutenant Walter Haut announced to the press that a crashed flying disc had been retrieved. Marcel was ordered to load the wreckage onto a B-29 and transport it to Wright Field in Ohio. The plane made a stop at Fort Worth, where General Roger M. Ramey took over the operation, ordered the men not to speak to journalists, and issued a statement attributing the whole affair to a weather balloon.

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William Moore (1980) and later Don Berliner & Stanton Friedman (1994) interviewed ninety two individuals about the case, including thirty first hand witnesses. Marcel told them that the material consisted of small beams made of something like balsa wood, hard yet flexible, with “some kind of hieroglyphics” on them. There was also an unusual brown substance resembling parchment, and a quantity of lightweight, extremely tough metal that looked like aluminum foil, as well as “a black metal box a few square centimeters in size.” In other versions of the Roswell story, researchers are said to have found a crashed egg shaped craft and three or four humanoid bodies several kilometers from the original site.

In 1994 the U.S. Air Force gave its final official explanation, stating that the metallic debris collected belonged to a secret program for detecting radioactive Soviet weapons (the Mogul Project). Kevin Randle (2022), in a post on his personal blog, challenged the official Mogul explanation, but the evidence for any kind of extraterrestrial craft remains highly uncertain.

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2.4. Aztec, New Mexico – 13 February 1948

Three radar units are said to have detected an object on a falling trajectory. When it failed to respond to attempts at radio communication, local military personnel were alerted and a message was reportedly sent to Secretary of State General George C. Marshall, who in turn requested that a survey team be dispatched from Camp Hale in Colorado. According to William S. Steinman (1987), the helicopter team located the crash site on a rocky mesa twelve miles northeast of Aztec. After breaking one of the “portholes,” the scientists managed to open a door. They found the remains of two charred humanoids. One team member, Dr. Detley W. Bronk, is said to have examined the bodies.

This story was first reported by Robert S. Carr, a lecturer in mass communications at the University of South Florida, who worked for the Walt Disney Company on “classified projects involving non verbal communication.” Carr placed the site 22 kilometers west (rather than northeast) of Aztec. He claimed that the disc was 9 meters in diameter and contained sixteen (not two) humanoids, which were transported to Wright Patterson Air Force Base near Dayton, where they remain in cryonic suspension. The humanoids, one meter tall, wore “dark blue suits made of metallic, flexible fabric.” Although the case is generally considered a hoax, the reader can find additional information in the corresponding Wikipedia article.

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2.5. The Trinity Case (1945)

The case became known through a book published by Jacques Vallée and Paola Harris in 2021. The book’s claims are extensive and have unfortunately triggered much debate. In a rather odd way (given Vallée’s impeccable ufological career), the entire story rests on the testimony of two children, aged 7 and 9, who claimed to have seen an oval object crash on a family ranch exactly one month after the explosion of the first atomic bomb at the Trinity site in 1945. Their names are Reme Baca and Jose Padilla.

On the day of the crash, the children reported that when they approached the object, they were able to see through binoculars strange occupants (insect like) moving erratically around the craft and emitting distressed sounds. The day after the accident, the children visited the crash site again with their father and a family friend who was a police officer, without seeing any occupants. A few days later, the army arrived, built a road to reach the object, and removed it within a few days. The implication of this date is highly significant, because the event would have taken place two years before Roswell.

Naturally, various questions arise about the reliability of the witnesses’ memories from their early childhood years. As has been observed scientifically, experiences from adult life can distort memories from early childhood.

Another key aspect of this case is that the witnesses took a “souvenir” from the crashed craft a component resembling an arm. Unfortunately, material analyses showed nothing unusual in its structure and indicated an object manufactured in the mid 1940s. This caused significant waves in the story, and Vallée was arguably forced to propose some rather unlikely explanations (the craft deliberately crashed at Trinity the arm belonged to military personnel who transported the craft from its original position, etc.).

The final negative blow to the case came in May 2023. Doug Dean Johnson published a lengthy article in the UFOUpdates Facebook group, based on his personal investigation of the Trinity case. He showed that the key witness, Eddie Apodaca (the one who supposedly visited the craft with the children’s father), could not have done so because he was serving in Germany at the time. Based on this and other inconsistencies in Padilla’s account, Johnson suspected that the two brothers had created a story which Vallée and Harris ended up believing. The reader can follow all the developments in the Trinity affair on Johnson’s personal website (https://douglasjohnson.ghost.io).

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2.6. Final Thoughts

The idea of crashed craft/UFOs follows very closely the idea of contacts with extraterrestrial pilots (CE3), abductions by such entities (CE4–CE5), and so on. If extraterrestrial craft are visiting our planet, it is natural that at some point accidents might occur. And this is roughly how the basic mythology of the crashed flying discs arose.

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The difficulty with these stories is the next step namely, the use of reverse engineering in order to understand how these craft can do what they are alleged to do. Here, the reader is invited to follow the following example: if an iPhone from 2025 were delivered to Leonardo da Vinci, would he be able to understand and reconstruct the integrated circuits inside the device? Absolutely not, because he did not possess the concepts of physics necessary to fully understand the phone’s operation. And this is the basic idea: at present we have not yet discovered the corresponding concepts in physics needed to understand the functioning of these supposed technologies. Thus, stories of technology created from recovered flying discs seem to belong to a mythological framework.

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Can we rule out the possibility that an “extraterrestrial” craft has had an accident? We cannot rule it out, but we can state that it is unlikely we have had all of these supposed “accidents.” This logic follows the same line as the number of CE3 observations: there are far too many. This abundance of data (if it is truly so) suggests that we are dealing not with an extraterrestrial reality, but rather with different liminal phenomena or secret terrestrial tests. Ufological mythology has been used for decades to cover developments in classified operations (black ops) and military activities. It is much more reasonable to assume that the majority of the reported accidents are related to secret military craft rather than extraterrestrial or extradimensional objects.

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Chapter 2 is based on an article by Dr. Chatzopoulos presented in Vortex 4, 2023, Locus-7 & Alloste editions.

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ABOUT THE AUTHOR

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Stavros Chatzopoulos was born in 1957 in Athens. He is a professor at the University of Ferrara (Dept. of Neurosciences) in Italy. He has a background in Electronics and Biomedical Engineering, with an emphasis on Hearing Science and Medical Audiology. His interest in the UFO phenomenon began in the early 1970s after meeting George Balanos and Omiros Karatza. In 1975 he became a founding member of the Panhellenic Union of Researchers of Unknown Phenomena (P.E.E.A.F.).

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Since the early 1980s, following the research findings of Jacques Vallée, he has developed a paraphysical model for approaching the UFO phenomenon.

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He is an active member of the Italian Center for Ufological Studies (Centro Italiano Studi Ufologici – CISU), the European groups EuroUfo.net and UAPcheck, the American group Society of UAP Studies (SUAPS), and the Greek group GRUFON – ErENZo.

Dr. Chatzopoulos can be contacted at: sdh1@unife.it.