Monday, February 17, 2020

Cash-Landrum UFO Documents and Ancient Aliens


The Ancient Aliens episode of February 15, 2020, featured a segment on the Cash-Landrum case with a new interview with witness Colby Landrum. Improbably, it was part of “The Real Men in Black,” a show focused on the mythical MIB first made famous by Gray Barker in the 1956 book, They Knew Too Much About Flying Saucers. In the C-L segment, the show is talking about “men in black helicopters.” It seems like they filmed the Colby Landrum interview and didn’t know where else to put it, so they sandwiched in this episode with MIB commentary from the show’s regulars.

The key credits for the episode:
Producer: Eric Murphy. Writers: Max Thompson, Sapna Chhabra, Eric Murphy.


There was nothing new in Colby Landrum’s brief recap of the events, but emphasis was placed on the claim that military helicopters were involved, the central position of the failed attempt to bring a lawsuit against the U.S. government. Colby said:

”In my belief, the government definitely knew about it. There's no way that something of that size is gonna have 23 Chinook helicopters. They were in, like, escort mode. They were definitely transporting it.”

The show presented it as a matter of fact that the victims were exposed to ionizing radiation, despite the fact that tests given to Betty Cash came back negative. Dr. Peter Rank, was a radiologist and a consultant for MUFON. Early in the case, he was asked by the investigator to evaluate the medical aspect. While Dr. Rank thought Cash had been injured, he couldn’t determine the cause, however, he didn’t consider it serious or life-threatening. From his letter to Vickie Landrum:
See page 27 of this file: https://app.box.com/s/momf6fpbuq7on2rb6r8u

Getting back to the "History" show…

The only thing new Ancient Aliens presented was something suspect, a short bit with comments from JoAnn Donaldson, labeled on screen as “Former Bio-Medical Research Engineer, NASA.”


Narrator: "Following the incident, all three witnesses were examined at a NASA-run laboratory for radiation exposure. JoAnn Donaldson was a member of the NASA medical team that conducted the examination."
JoAnn Donaldson: "Our role was to make sure all of the readings, uh, were recorded correctly and accurately, and that everything was documented accordingly to the established protocols for doing a radiation testing. They did get radiation exposure, and I fully believe that their story was absolutely true. There was no fabrication in that experience.”

Examined by a NASA medical team? That’s news to me. JoAnn Donaldson from her description on Instagram:
"From being a old Apollo era Engineer to working for the DEA, then retiring. Now I am a minor cast member of the History Channel #AncientAliens.”

There were a few medical examinations of the C-L witnesses several months after the fact, but there’s no records to support the radiation findings that Donaldson states. Or that she was part of such an alleged examination team.

In case you missed it, here's a site with a transcript:
Ancient Aliens s15e04 Episode Script: The Real Men in Black


Dr. Gary Posner's C-L Investigation

There is some more substantial news related to the Cash-Landrum case. Dr. Gary Posner became interested in the medical aspects of the Cash-Landrum case in late 1981 and conducted his own research. At his website he’s just created a new page on the case, presenting his correspondence with people involved, including the previously mentioned radiologist, Dr. Peter Rank. As Dr. Posner states in the correspondence, he was an Internist, but he familiarized himself with medical texts on types of radiation in order to understand if the reported injuries were consistent with documented effects of  radiation exposure. His results were negative.


In addition to the documents and his analysis, he’s also shared his audio recording made of the 1981 segment on the Cash-Landrum story from That’s Incredible!, famous for the hypnotic regression of Vickie Landrum by Dr. R. Leo Sprinkle.

It’s rare to have pristine copies of correspondence documenting UFO investigation, so Dr. Posner should be applauded for sharing this collection with the public.

The link to his site:

Friday, February 14, 2020

AATIP's UFO Medical Study and the Cash-Landrum Case


The Cash-Landrum UFO case was a small part of the Pentagon's AATIP studies.

Popular Mechanics has a new article out by Tim McMillan, Inside the Pentagon's Secret UFO Program, and it looks at a number of issues concerning the AATIP and AAWSAP story. One of the questions it seeks to answer is whether or or it was a UFO program. He points to one of the studies contracted by the program, one written by Dr. Christopher "Kit" Green, “Clinical Medical Acute & Subacute Field Effects on Human Dermal & Neurological Tissues.”

McMillan quotes Dr. Green as saying:
However the 2019 documentary, Third Eye Spies by Lance Mungia disclosed that:
"(Kit Green) tells me he regularly collaborates with Hal (Puthoff), but on what, neither one of them will say. ...Turns out that Kit and Hal really were collaborating. Kit brought Hal into a top-secret Pentagon UFO assessment program revealed in December 2017 by the New York Times. Oh, and Hal says they have recovered UFO debris, but that’s another story.”

For some background on the UFO-related carerer of Dr. Green, I recommend Keith Basterfield's article: Christopher 'Kit' Canfield Green - further information

About Dr. Green's AAWSAP paper, McMillan says that:

"In light of the cumbersome clinical language, just a cursory scan reveals the entire focus was on examining injuries that may have occurred after contact with UFOs or UAP. In fact, the very term 'UFO' appears 16 times in the report; the word 'anomalous' is used 27 times... 'Advanced Aerospace Systems Applications Program' is mentioned in bold on four occasions."

The paper also mentions the Cash-Landrum UFO encounter on 7 occasions, but does not contain a thorough examination of it. It's an important element though. The Cash-Landrum case is regarded as a benchmark of sorts for other UFO injury cases. Cash-Landrum investigator John Schuessler included the case in his 1996 booklet, and it was a key refence for Green's paper: 
“The Schuessler catalog, UFO-Related Human Physiological Effects, was complied in 1996 by MUFON's past Director, John F. Schuessler. Covering the time period 1873 - 1994, the catalog comprises a summary of 356 selected cases of UFO-induced physiological effects on humans during close encounters.”


McMillan also notes:

"Green also stresses that while his work focused on encounters with unknown or unidentified aerial objects, all of the injuries he assessed could be accounted for by known terrestrial means, and did not provide any evidence for extraterrestrial or non-human technologies."

McMillan's story included this link to the full AAWSAP study by Dr. Green archived from Scribd:


Keith Basterfield has done an analysis of the paper and some comments on what it contains.


Update:

In late March 2022, the DIA released 38 of the DIRDs, including Dr. Green's original paper.


. . .

For more information of the interest of the US government in the Cash Landrum case, please see our previous articles:



The US Government’s Cash-Landrum UFO Investigations

The US Government’s Cash-Landrum UFO Investigations, Part Two

For documents and literature on the C-L case, please check:
The Cash-Landrum UFO Case Document Collection