Gray Barker: Rumors of NASA Suppression of UFO Evidence!

Since getting interested in the Cash-Landrum case, I’d wondered if Gray Barker had published anything about the story, and if so, what wild and wooly things he might have said about it. Barker is responsible for a lot of UFO mythology, and I was curious how he'd interpreted this one. 

I'm hoping to visit the Gray Barker Collection in Clarksburg, West Virginia, but until then, this fragment I recently came across provides some answers.

Gray Barker, Saucerian

 

Gray Barker’s Newsletter Hotline (Supplement 19-B) December, 1983

 

 WILD RUMOR DEPT: That James W. Moseley has evidence of a 

terrestrial origin of the famed “Cash/Landrum” sighting, during 

which witnesses were injured by radiation-like effects. also that

Moseley is under heavy pressure from NASA to withold printing it 

in his notorious “sheet,” Saucer Smear.

What’s interesting here is that Gray Barker was known for spinning straw into gold, but here he takes a very conservative approach on describing the C-L injuries as “ radiation-like effects,” more cautious and accurate than more reputable UFO journals.

Silenced by NASA?

The part about the Moseley "evidence" is much more Barker’s style. This almost certainly is an exaggeration of the story being circulated by Richard Doty and Bill Moore that the C-L UFO was a secret test vehicle from Kirtland AFB. The APRO Bulletin printed this rumor and Moore had discussed it with Moseley, who "leaked" it to Barker.  The “heavy pressure from NASA” may even have a sliver of truth in it, as John Schuessler, the C-L case investigator was a NASA contractor employee, and he rejected the Moore story as speculation and rumor. 

This short passage shows a good demonstration of the Barker method at work. Any information is dramatically turned into a puzzle, teasing the reader with possibilities, and leaving them hungry for more.

Sadly, Gray Barker was unable to see how the Cash-Landrum story developed. He died December 6, 1984.

Some mysteries are born, others are made.

Special thanks to debunker Robert Sheaffer for posting the collection of his Gray Barker correspondence and documents.

MJ-12, The "Pratt Sensitive" Documents, Cash-Landrum, Doty and Moore

Some big UFO news broke in 2007, about MJ-12 and how it came to be. Majestic 12, or MJ 12 was said to be the secret US government cabal that controlled UFO information. At the MUFON 2007 Symposium, Brad Sparks presented a paper that he co-authored with Barry Greenwood:

The Secret Pratt Tapes and the Origins of MJ-12 by Brad Sparks and Barry Greenwood (PDF)

The paper was based on documents from UFO journalist, Bob Pratt, notes from his meetings and calls with William L. Moore and Richard C. Doty. The key point of interest to the authors of the paper was that Moore and Doty were discussing MJ-12 and the related concepts before any documents were known to exist, and they planned to use it as the basis for a UFO science fiction novel.

Bob Pratt

Bill Moore

Rick Doty

There's discussion of Paul Bennewitz, Roswell, abductions, alien bodies, crashed and recovered flying saucers, ETs influencing our cultural and religious history (Jesus was one of theirs), espionage, disinformation and so much more! At the site Reality Uncovered, the article, Bill Moore's Disinfo- A Vehicle for Injected Social Memes examines the concepts and how they were spread.

Immediately after the release of the Sparks/Greenwood article, there was a round of heated debate, even among the author themselves! Some of the saga is chronicled at UFO UpDates starting Aug. 13, 2007.

The Documents: "Pratt Sensitive"

Shortly after the Sparks-Greenwood article was published, James Carrion, then MUFON director, released a PDF of the original 60 pages of Pratt documents:

Bob Pratt's documents on Moore and Doty: "Pratt Sensitive" (PDF)

It's a rare opportunity to see how fraudulent information was seeded and spread into UFO lore.

 

The Doty Cash Landrum Disinformation

My particular interest in the Pratt documents are the early bogus claims Richard Doty made about the Cash-Landrum case, which are very elaborate and colorful. A sample: 

Betty Cash, Vikie Landrum and Colby Landrum, were not contacted by AFINTEL because of their involvement with civilian UFO people. It was determined that these three could be used to further the "UFO explanation" and thus provide effective cover for the real nature of the affair.

Doty's "disclosures" on the C-L case are not the only comments he's made on it, and he was central in building the legend that the UFO was a malfunctioning US military experiment. He's been spreading lies about the case ever since. While I suspect he originally began exploiting the case chiefly because it was new and a hot topic. However, Doty's bogus input influences and contaminates the way the case is discussed, even now.

An illustration similar to Doty's description of the Cash-Landrum UFO shape

Richard Doty was there when the MJ-12 legend was created, and it's just one of the many pieces of disinformation he used to pollute the UFO topic. 

Military Secrecy: Black Ops Modus Operandi

Topic: Operational Security and how the reality may differ from the super-spy movie version.

While there is no evidence to support it, the best real world suspect for military involvement in the Cash-Landrum UFO case seems to be Operation Honey Badger.  The hardware, techniques and mission are intriguingly similar to the helicopters witnessed in the UFO encounter.

While training for Honey Badger their operation was nearly exposed, but first it's necessary to provide some context on the mission and location. We'll be going South...

OH-6 Little Birds Go Black

The Black Ops mission of Honey Badger consisted of "… the helicopters of Task Force 158, which included OH-6 Little Birds, UH-60 Black Hawks, and cargo-carrying and cargo-carrying Chinooks…" They were gathered to train for long range night missions using new night vision equipment, armament and extended-range fuel tanks.

In 1980, as part of Operation Honey Badger (an aborted 2nd mission to rescue American hostages held in Iran), OH-6 (Little Bird) Bell helicopters were secretly armed and modiifed. Army 160th SOAR History: "OH-6A scout helicopters (Little Birds) were chosen for the light assault role because of their small size and ease of transport. The Little Birds could carry only three soldiers and a single pilot, but they could land in the most restrictive locations." 

OH-6

Personnel at Fort Rucker, AL developed, tested and created armed AH-6 Little Bird gunships, and they were then transported to Gulfport, Mississippi for training flights, a classified program called “Nine-Whiskey-Whiskey." 

Dressed to kill

This was a priority mission and was given "White House Special Clearance" and superseded all normal orders and procedures. All participants had to be cleared by the FBI, security was tight. The pilots selected to fly the OH-6A helicopters came from the 229th Attack Helicopter Battalion and were sent to the Mississippi Army National Guard's Army Aviation Support Facility (AASF) at Gulfport, Mississippi, for two weeks of qualification training in the aircraft. The Gulfport operation was led by Jim Burns, director of the MS AVCRAD (Aviation Classification Repair Activity Depot).

Security is Threatened

Snowbird/Honey Badger directive: Avoid exposure by the Media

Charlie Something from Such & Such News

Colonel John J. Stanko describes an incident in Gulfport about how operational security was in danger of exposure by the local media:

    So about two days into this [special project] Jim Burns calls and says, “Hey Colonel, there's this guy down here—Charlie Smith (or something) from such and such a newspaper… He's a newspaper reporter and he's out in the parking lot and he's checking every car, every car tag, looking over the fence, trying to see what's going on. And he's gotten word from somebody in Washington, DC that something's going on at the  Mississippi AVCRAD. He wants to take a look at it.”

      “How the hell that got out so quick, I don't know.”      

      "So Jim Burns tells me—he walks out to the parking lot and says, 

“Hey, 'Charlie Reporter,' how ya doing? Come on in here. Let me tell you what's going on here". 

     And so Jim Burns takes him by the arm and walks him waaaay up the parking ramp there to an OV-1 Mohawk airplane. Jim says to the reporter, “See that? That's a Mohawk.” And he starts describing the Mohawk to him and says, “See this is a rare airplane and it does intelligence and surveillance. That airplane is from the Georgia Army National Guard and when they can't fix that airplane, they send it down here to Mississippi and we fix it and we do the maintenance and we test fly it. Jim talks real, real slow and goes into a lot of detail regarding the nomenclature, horsepower, radios, blade lengths, etc about each of the aircraft he had shown the reporter.      

     Later that afternoon, the reporter goes back and writes up his story, convinced that maintenance is the real story and sends it in.

Lords of Darkness by Col. Billy R. Wood

Jim Burns, using counterintelligence techniques learned from Huckleberry Hound and Foghorn Leghorn, was able to baffle the reporter and protect the secrecy of mission from the media. 

Speak slow… but do some fast talking!

Epilogue: Dark Desert Testing

When the Gulfport pilot training was completed, C-141 aircraft transported the aircraft and crews to Fort Huachuca, Arizona, for two weeks of mission training. The mission training consisted of loading onto C-130 transport aircraft which would then transport them to forward staging areas over night routes as long as 1,000 nautical miles (1,900 km). The armed OH-6 Little Birds aircraft from Fort Rucker joined the training program in the fall of 1980. Records indicate that there was little activity late  in the year as the mission was on hold.

Operation Honey Badger was canceled after the hostages were released on 20 January 1981, but the team was not dissolved. They became the 160th Special Operations Aviation Regiment (Airborne), better known as the "Night Stalkers."

Additional sources 

http://www.governmentattic.org/2docs/Army_160thSOAR_Histories_1991-2001.pdf

http://members.chello.nl/j.docter/pages/vehicles/AH-MH-6-little-bird.htm

UFO Debunking 1953: Review of Flying Saucers by Donald H. Menzel

Here's a review of one of the earliest books on UFOs, Flying Saucers, a skeptical look at the topic by a prominent astronomer. It's an interesting look into the state of things while the field was barely its infancy.

Discovery: The magazine of Scientific Progress 

November 1953, Mr. William E. Dick, editor

Flying Saucers by Donald H. Menzel (London, Putnam & Co., 1953 , 319 pp., 21s.) 

 The 'flying saucer' scare of 1947 was not the first of its kind, but no previous epidemic of this type of mass hallucination ever spread so far; 1947 provided a proof that modern mass media of communication can spread rumours as fast as they can spread true facts. Another reason for the difference was that in 1947 few scientists gave public utterance to what they knew to be the true facts of the case. In addition, the general public seemed to be rather more gullible in 1947 than on previous occasions; their their smattering of knowledge about aeronautical progress seems to have been associated with an attitude of mind which provided fertile ground for the pseudo-scientific belief in space travel, and even for the remote idea that the saucers were interplanetary space ships. Culmination of the affair was the report — a complete hoax which, however, many found quite plausible — that a wrecked saucer made of some unearthly metal had been found, and that this contained bodies of dwarf astronauts from Venus— described as "midgets wearing 1890 clothes" made of some untearable fabric!

There were, of course, some real flying saucers that gave rise to the fantastic rumours. As the author of this book says, these were as real as rainbows.

Dr. Menzel, astrophysics professor at Harvard, here provides full explanations of the different types of optical tricks which the atmosphere and its contents can play on human eyes and describes the optical phenomena which account for the flying saucers of 1947.  His account of these matters is excellent though he is far more entertaining when he is disposing of the various fanciful interpretations which people gave of those phenomena  He shoots to pieces the American book Behind the Flying Saucers [by Frank Scully] which was serialised in Britain and which did so much to propagate the hoax about the midgets from Venus.

UFO Case Review presents: the Cash-Landrum Incident, 1980

UFO Case Review has been releasing a series of Youtube videos presenting excellent entry-level mini-documentaries on famous UFO events. Recently the creator discussed covering the Cash-Landrum case, and now it's finished it ready for viewing. As he posted online:

"I'm very proud to be keeping up with my goal of releasing one video every month, and uploading my review of the Cash-Landrum Case of 1980. Big thanks to ufologist Curtis Collins for reviewing my script and ensuring it was as accurate as could be!"

From the video description:

"Too often, the UFO phenomenon is dismissed for its supposed exclusive reliance on eyewitness testimony. However, there are numerous examples of UFO encounters that have left tangible traces of their presence in the physical environment, or on the witnesses themselves. The so-called Cash-Landrum Case of 1980 is a notable example of the latter, having left all three of its witnesses with symptoms of severe radiation poisoning following a late-night encounter with an unidentified object. It is one case, at least, that cannot possibly be dismissed as a fabrication, a misidentification, or a hallucination, and one that points to a possible connection between the UFO phenomenon and the U.S. government."

The video does a very good job of sticking to the original details of the case, and provides just the kind of background needed to draw attention to it and promote further study.

Be sure to check out the videos on other cases and share them with others- a great educational resource:

https://www.youtube.com/user/UFOCaseReview/videos