Report on the Cash/Landrum New Caney CEII Case by Allan Hendry

Possibly the Most Important Cash-Landrum Case Report

Allan Hendry had a brief tenure with CUFOS working with Dr. Hynek, and also wrote The UFO Handbook. FUFOR, the Fund For UFO Research contracted Hendry to investigate the source of the  helicopters in the Cash-Landrum case. In John F. Schuessler’s paper at the Sept. 1981 CUFOS lecture, he downplayed Hendry’s investigation, stating that it was a brief inquiry conducted by telephone.  He went on to say that Hendry was unable to find a source for the helicopters, but believed the incident was a military exercise involving helicopters and a Harrier jet testing electronic countermeasures, which Schuessler disagreed with. If there was anything else to Hendry’s report, Schuessler never mentioned it.

Allan Hendry of CUFOS

Hendry played another unacknowledged role in the case, According to Betty Cash’s statement in the Bergstrom interview, Hendry called the victims and advised them to contact their senators, which eventually led to the legal action.

Hendry dropped out of UFO research about the time of this case. Interesting fellow and a great investigator, apparently now largely forgotten.

I recently dumped more files than the average reader can digest, one of the most important ones was Allan Hendry’s April 1981 FUFOR report on the Cash-Landrum case. Hendry’s charter was just the helicopters but in order to conduct a thorough investigation, he interviewed both Betty Cash and Vickie Landrum by telephone. This report is possibly the best document written on the case, objective, free of agenda or bias.

He provides a narrative of the case based on Schuessler’s original VISIT report and eyewitness statements. 

The single most startling item is that he reports:

Flames intermittently “whooshed” down towards the road; later examination showed no marks on the pavement.

This single remark seems to throw all Schuessler’s later claims of physical damage to the sighting location into the waste basket. 

The EM controversy: the Auto Engine

The report also includes a new claim of the UFO killing the car engine.

Hendry asks Betty about the motor stalling, and she replies:

BC: “It just quit on its own...”

Hendry mentions discussing discrepancy with Schuessler who admits it is troubling as his reports states the car stopped when Betty turned the engine off. Schuessler’s response to this major case detail about possible electromagnetic UFO effects was not to mention it. It remains under cover for seventeen years. There is no reference by Schuessler in the case literature until the publication of his book in 1998, where it is mentioned in quotes from Cash and also discussed in the narrative.

The Facts in Black & White

There’s also another matter that Hendry touches on that Schuessler doesn’t cover. In his conversation with Vickie Landrum she mentions having health insurance, but can’t explain why has not used it seek treatment of her (and Colby’s) injuries. 

The Helicopter Pilot

The report goes on to document Hendry’s contact with military bases plausibly in range that could have launched the helicopters reported by the witnesses. In one of the interviews, the base representative volunteers that one of their men was involved in a flight to investigate a 1977 UFO by the Montgomery County Sheriff’s Department. It names, pilot but slightly misspells his last name. Later, due to a misunderstanding, Vickie Landrum came to believe the same man was a pilot in her encounter. Had Schuessler been paying attention, or remembered Hendry’s report, he could have cleared the man’s name, rather than erroneously accusing the pilot and naming him as a participant in a military cover-up. (See Exonerating the Helicopter Pilot for full details.)

Burn After Reading

The Hendry report is one of the most valuable pieces of evidence in the case, an extremely rare early interview with the witnesses before the case became subject to pollution by manipulation and  rumors. It also gives us a glimpse of what kind of information was edited out of the  version of the story presented by chief investigator Schuessler in his promotion of this case as a UFO milestone.

The Hendy Report is marked "Fund use only." This document was not made public until 2013 and published here.  
There’s other great stuff on the case in this report that I’m forgetting. Read it yourself! 

A Preliminary Report on the Cash/Landrum New Caney CEII Case by Allan Hendry for the Fund for UFO Research undated (April 1981.11 pages w/cover) beginning on page 8 of linked PDF:

Allan Hendry illustration from the UFO Handbook, describing investigator pitfalls.

Exonerating the Helicopter Pilot

Cover-Up or Mix-Up?

You've probably heard this story if you are familiar with the Cash-Landrum case:
April 30, 1981, a CH-47 helicopter landed in Dayton, Texas, as part of The Future Farmers of America livestock show. Vickie Landrum attended, met the pilot and she asked him if they ever encountered UFOs. He told her that he'd been called out by the Montgomery County Sheriff's department to investigate a UFO. when she told him that she was one of the witnesses and was injured in the encounter, he clammed up and tried to rush her out of there.

Colby Landrum and the CH-47 in Dayton, Texas.

Later John Schuessler contacted the pilot by phone. According to reports, the pilot first admitted it, but subsequently denied it.

What Happened Before is Important

Before any of this happened, in April 1981, there was an investigation into the source of the helicopters in the incident. Allan Hendry worked with Professor J. Allen Hynek at the Center for UFO Studies (CUFOS). Hendry was contracted by the Fund for UFO Research (FUFOR) to investigate the helicopters in the Cash-Landrum encounter, but Hendry's report was far more inclusive (but much more on that later).

John Schuessler received a copy of this report and he either ignored or missed the connection detailed below.

From Hendry's FUFOR report.

Hendry wrote that during in his investigation on April 2 and 3, 1981, he contacted a Mr. Nidever from Ellington Air Force Base and was told that they while they were the only base in the area with matching helicopters, they were not in flight at the time of the incident. He did however, have an interesting story, Nidever said:

"We had a UFO sighting down here earlier about two years ago. We were called out on this by the sheriff's department of Montgomery county. they had spotted one about two or three times. They had a helicopter out there, we were supposed to go out when they saw it and go chase it down because Mr. Culverson (with the Army Guard) was involved in that."

Mr. "Culverson" is one letter away from the name of the accused pilot.

Hendry's report was distributed sometime in the spring of 1981, but Schuessler did not act on the information. Instead of investigating a possible connection between the two sightings, he missed it only to treat the pilot as a hostile witness. He gave his name to the officer during the DAIG investigation and later published the pilot's name in UFO literature, citing him as a participant in a UFO cover-up.

The UFO incident the pilot was connected with seems to match this case:

July 21, 1977; Porter, TX 4:15 AM. Officer John W. Bruner, a deputy sheriff, was on duty and was the first person to observe the phenomenon. Officer Bruner and his partner Officer Coogler were parked west of the object which appeared to be approximately 1/2 to 1 mile away. Bruner and Coogler got out of their vehicle and tried to observe the object better by shinning their light on it. The object moved toward the men and the officers turned off the light because they became nervous at seeing the object's response to their light. The object then moved back to its first location. The two officers concurred that the object appeared to have six portholes surrounding a type of framework. The two officers observed the UFO for approximately 45 minutes. During that time period, the UFO appeared to stand still in mid air, pulsated, traveled at incredible speeds and flew with erratic mobility. The officers described the UFO's apparent size to be about that of a grapefruit. Officer Bruner is convinced That the object he saw was not a balloon or a helicopter.

(from NICAP: The 1977 UFO Chronology
A similar incident on July 29, 1977 is the one where the National Guard was summoned to investigate by helicopter. Full report at: NICAP Investigator October 1977 (see page 4)

Based on the evidence, it seems that the pilot mentioned the UFO case. Vickie, in her excitement, made an overzealous mistaken connection. Emotion and the inattention of the investigator carried the story from there.

The pilot's denial was the foundation of the charges of US government and a cover-up. It was a false accusation. 

Update- further information found:

Billy Cox located the pilot, and interviewed him for an article appearing on the case in the December 5, 1983 Florida Today newspaper:

"(The pilot) conceded he told them he'd flown a UFO mission out of Ellington, and he even repeated the part about being called out by the Montgomery County Sheriff's Department. But what he really told them, (the pilot) says, was that he and another chopper investigated a UFO sighting near Sam Houston State Park - in the Dayton vicinity- in 'June or July' of 1977. Not 1980. And they came up empty handed." 

The pilot is quoted, “I guess those ladies just got what I told them mixed up.”