Somewhere in the Skies - Tell My Story: June Crain, the Air Force & UFOs

Episode Date: November 5, 2018

On episode 81 of SOMEWHERE IN THE SKIES, we return to UFOs in full force with an explosive interview with military veteran, retired police detective, and current UFO investigator, James Clarkson. After lecturing about government secrecy pertaining to UFOs, an elderly woman approached him and told him that she agreed that the government wasn't sharing with the public all they knew about UFOs. Upon asking her how she knew, Clarkson was intrigued by her answer; "Because I worked there..." This is the June Crain story, placed into the context of the history of the UFO phenomenon since WWII. This is a strong indictment of the last official word from the Air Force on Roswell. Tell My Story explains why Roswell and UFOs, in general, are anything but "case closed." Clarkson runs us through some of the more compelling aspects of both June Crain's life and her handling of possible materials from the Roswell UFO incident. We also get the inside scoop on why Clarkson quit MUFON and recently rejoined, and his personal thoughts on To the Stars Academy and the future of UFO research. Guest Bio: James Clarkson is a career investigator with over 30 years’ experience in criminal investigation and in the mysterious world of UFOs. He brings these skills and a no-nonsense approach to bear on the mystery of UFOs. He has lectured extensively throughout Washington State, at symposiums across the country and in Paris. He also served as State Director for MUFON and continues to investigate UFOs up until today. He is the interviewer and author of TELL MY STORY – June Crain, the Air Force & UFOs. All of his current investigations and other work can be found at www.JamesClarksonUFO.com ALIENCON lands in Baltimore on Nov. 9th-11th. For discount tickets, use promo code: SKIES at check out. Visit: www.TheAlienCon.com/register Patreon: www.patreon.com/somewhereskies Website: www.somewhereintheskies.com Official Store: CLICK HERE Order Ryan's Book by CLICKING HERE Twitter: @SomewhereSkies Instagram: @SomewhereSkiesPod Opening and Closing Theme Song, "Ephemeral Reign" by Per Kiilstofte SOMEWHERE IN THE SKIES is produced by Third Kind Productions, in association with eOne Entertainment SOMEWHERE IN THE SKIES is sponsored by HelloFresh. To receive 50% off your first order, use promo code: SOMEWHERE50 at checkout by visiting www.HelloFresh.ca Support this show http://supporter.acast.com/somewhere-in-the-skies. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Greetings Skywatchers, this is Ryan Sprague, the host of the Summer in the Skies podcast, and I want you to join me at AlienCon. AlienCon lands in Baltimore, Maryland on November 9th, 10th, and 11th. Explore the Unexplained with your favorite ancient aliens contributors, UFO researchers, and stars from hit sci-fi and sci-fact television shows and films. I'll personally be giving my solo presentation, and I'll also be joining my good friend and colleague, Jason McClellan of Roke Planet to moderate and take part in panel discussions throughout the weekend. It's going to be a fun and informative weekend for families, serious researchers, and all curious minds alike. And right now, you can get an exclusive somewhere in the sky's discount on all tickets by visiting the aliencon.com

and using the code skies at checkout. We hope to see you at the Baltimore Convention. Center in November, and now on to the show. Today, on Somewhere in the Skies, we talked to military veteran, retired police officer, and UFO investigator, James Clarkson. You know, they would tell you, well, their job is to protect us and that there's some national security

or intelligence reason, why they need to conceal this story and or use it to manipulate the situation. See, we are also part of the game. Everybody, you and I, everybody, in the UFO community, we are also subject to manipulation. And that's one of the hardest things is to know when you're being plagued. This is Somewhere in the Skies with Ryan Sprague.

Welcome to Somewhere in the Skies. I'm your host, Ryan Sprague. Well, October is faded into the past yet again, and our Halloween series is over. I hope you enjoyed a month of ghosts, monsters, and terrifying legends. It's my favorite time of the year, and I'm thankful for those who listened and joined me. And now, we are back to UFOs in full force. He had been researching UFOs for decades. He'd spoken to hundreds of witnesses uncovered once classified documents

and had interviewed individuals connected to perhaps the most famous UFO event of all time, the Roswell UFO crash. After speaking at a conference about the secret government involvement into the UFO phenomenon and subsequent investigation of it, an elderly woman approached him and told him, you're right. The government does know much more than it ever says publicly about UFOs. He asked her how she knew. She told him, because I worked there. What followed was a highly extensive interview with June.

Crane, a woman who worked at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, presumably where the wreckage of the Roswell UFO crash once ended up. But this wasn't the only case that Wright Patterson found itself wrapped up in. And as June Crane's story took light, it was clear that it was a story worth hearing. His interview with her was transcribed into a book titled Tell My Story, June Crane, the Air Force and UFOs. And today, we talk to a retired police officer turned UFO investigator, James Clarkson, about his time with June Crane. And what she witnessed, touched, and was told to keep secret about in relation to the Roswell incident and beyond. James, thank you so much for joining me today on Somewhere in the Skies.

Oh, it's an honor, Ryan. Sort of the reason I wanted to have you on today, our main focus, is your involvement with the June crane story. But before we get to that, I want to sort of paint a picture for our listeners of you, James. So can you sort of tell us a little bit about your background in law enforcement and how it sort of evolved into your investigative work into UFOs? How the, your origin story, as it were. Ah, my origin story. Well, I guess I would describe myself as someone who came out of the the turbulence of the 1960s grew up in a middle class home south of San Francisco, California.

I ended up attending a high school in San Francisco, a prep school. I went on to the University of California, and to be honest, I was really sort of lost. And there were full-blown riots going on on the Berkeley campus on occasion. I watched cars overturned and burned, police firing, tear. gas, all that good stuff. And yet, as a young man, I always had an interest in law enforcement. But that was not a popular thing with my peer group. So I was kind of torn in two directions. Things were not as clear to me then as they are now. I ended up doing the one thing that I thought I would never do, wanting to get away from everybody and everything that I knew. I decided to

make a clean break, and I enlisted in the Army. And fortunately, this was when the Vietnam War was winding down, so they didn't have any money. And I ended up going to basic training at Fort Ord, Military Police School in Fort Gordon, Georgia. And then I was sent to Fort Lewis Washington, which is now called Joint Base Louis McGord, outside of Tacoma. I was a plain-closed military policeman, and I loved my job in the military. I have to say, it was really intense. Lots of of hours, but I learned basic criminal investigation skills backwards, forwards, and sideways. I ended up getting out. I became a reserve deputy sheriff. I was then hired by a police department on the coast of Washington State, the Aberdeen Washington Police Department. I did a 20-year

career there. During that time, I was promoted to the rank of sergeant about halfway through the 20 years. I was a detective sergeant. I supervised field training officers. I was in charge of the fatal accident team. I wore a lot of hats. I blew out my knee. I became a child abuse detective for two years. They were never quite able to fund the program, although the work was really intense, very difficult, but also very satisfying if you were willing to put up with a lot of frustration and heartache.

I ended up moving to Olympia, Washington, and I became a fraud investigator for the state working for the Department of Licensing in their professional licensing division. Ten years later brought me to retirement age. And in the meantime, throughout this whole progression of investigative experience, there was another aspect to my life that was there ever since I was little. And everyone always asked me, well, what is your UFO experience, you know, expecting me to tell them what I saw or which extraterrestrial I met? And the answer I always give people kind of jokingly is, always a bridesmaid, never a bride. Love it. I have been swayed by the evidence of all of the fields of study that there are. I cannot think of one that has a more fascinating history and cast of characters than euphology.

I mean, it really does. We've got the good, the bad, and the ugly. We've got wild speculative fantasies that are put forth for a variety of motives, people who want to make money, people who are convinced of their own story without any evidence to back it up. then we do have a group of fortunately highly educated highly experienced and professional people these are people like the gentleman you mentioned a while ago peter robins people like richard dolan you know dr j allen heinek from a long time ago we have uh so many people that are bright lights

in this field and they are the people that are worth studying i'm sort of taking a street detective approach to uphology and all my involvement really started because of a radio program. And I think if you've ever had the experience the first time that your parents leave you alone for the weekend in charge of the house. And I happened to tune in KGO radio in San Francisco and this was in the mid-60s and a man named John G. Fuller was debuting his brand new book called Incident at Exeter. Ah, yes. I'm very familiar. Oh, that's one of the greatest UFO stories ever. And the part that I loved, I was utterly

fascinated, is the encounter that the policemen have, where the officer is called back to the station and picks up this traumatized hitchhiker and takes him back to the scene. And takes him back to the scene of his UFO encounter, they pull up into the driveway of a farm, and everything is painted white. The fence is white. The buildings are white, et cetera. And all at once, everything lights up blood red because of this 50-foot disc with scintillating lights that it's going around its perimeter.

And it comes down so low that the officer shoves the witness down. he drops to one knee and starts to draw his sidearm at the same moment that the backup officer is arriving who yells at him don't you know don't like don't shoot and fortunately he doesn't well then of course the Air Force comes out with the explanation that these were just strato tankers that were flying high overhead and refueling jet planes as part of some military exercise.

And the longer I thought about it, I thought this is really interesting. We put a policeman out on the street with a loaded weapon, and we let him drive a car, and his eyesight is so bad that he can't tell the difference between something that's coming down out of the air that might flatten him like a bug and a jet airplane flying overhead at 30,000 feet. Right. So what's wrong with this picture? And sometimes in this field, we get more information out of a denial than we do out of an admission. And in law enforcement investigation, that's frequently true.

What a suspect tells you to deny that they were involved in the crime is often way more interesting than anything that they might tell you in an admission. And so that would be my first reference, indirect reference to Roswell, because we have the U.S. Air Force. I forget how many explanations we're up to. We're up to at least six or seven official explanations for Roswell. It's kind of like literally having the elephant in the room and someone has draped a bed sheet over him. Yeah, I always go back to that Shakespeare quote, you know, the Doth protests too much. Precisely.

If UFOs are not real and there's no, why do they go? to such absurd lengths to deny the validity of the story. If we're just a bunch of tinfoil hat wearing nuts, then nobody should care what we have to say. You know, you brought up Roswell, and this case never goes away, James. It seems to be making a resurgence again. You know, we have a new, I shouldn't say new, but a reboot of the Roswell television show coming out, a fiction. version, I must say, about the supposed aliens that crashed

and assumed human identities and integrated into society. Again, this is all fictionalized, obviously, perhaps fictionalized. We'll get to that a little later, but we have this case that never seems to go away. We have endless, you know, explanations by the Air Force, the military, even the government,

about what happened there, and it keeps changing. which fascinates me is we can't, nobody wants to let this one go, even the people who might have been involved with it. That's right. I guess that can sort of lead into what I really wanted to focus on with you today, James, is this fascinating story with June Crane. So before we even get to who she is, how did you first come into contact with this woman? Well, that's a function of the fact that I was a Aberdeen police officer, on the southwest coast of Washington, there is a large harbor, Graze Harbor, and you have to imagine a giant triangle. You have Aberdeen, Hoquium, and Cosmopolis

are three cities that are at the mouth of two rivers, Wichka River and the Hoquium River, and there's like a triangle on each side, there's two more legs. 25 miles to the north, you end up in ocean shores, 25 miles to the south, you end up in Westport, Washington. Well, in the interim of becoming a policeman, I had kept secret the fact that I was interested in UFOs for the first several years of my employment, because it's really not a good idea to come right out when you're a new policeman and tell people that you're interested in UFOs. Probably not going to give you a great reputation. But after a few years, I was established and I was able to give as good as I got, and policemen are the worst gossips and the worst kidders in the world.

I mean, to the outside world, they try to present a solid front. And if you threaten one of them, obviously they lock up really quick to protect each other. But amongst themselves, they're vicious gossipers. never let it be said that women gossip men gossip just as bad as women do if not worse and policemen are the worst and I say that because when you think about it they get paid to dig up dirt on everybody and they're merciless with each other so I eventually though let people know that I was interested in UFOs and the classic conversation occurred that has been repeated a bazillion times, I'm sure you've had this, you insert the subject of UFOs into a conversation,

either deliberately or accidentally, and watch what happens. Oh, my gosh, man. I've lost so many second dates because of that conversation. Yeah, I probably did too. That's all right. In the long run, that's a good thing. Exactly. What usually happens is there's the giggle moment, and everybody, you know, makes jokes about

little green men, people with tinfoil hats, blah, blah, blah, blah. blah, blah, blah. And then there's a calm and everybody, somebody will look around nervously in the group and then they will say something like, well, I had a relative or someone that they know really well and they trust them who had an experience and then they will go on to tell you a UFO story or they'll come right out and say that they did. And the conversation, it's like gravity. It always comes out the same way.

And there is just too much smoke for there not to be some fire in all of this. It's way, it goes way too deep. It's way too common. Now, having said all that, though, I'm not going to tell you that I still understand what the underlying forces are in this field. even after studying this for over 30 years, you know, we could spend hours speculating on the various primary explanations. Well, eventually, I ended up meeting Joanne, who fortunately is still my wife, and we were together

off and on for five years, but at the time that I met her, she was the Children's Library and for the Timberland Regional Library System. and one of the things that they always tried to do is to get more people to come into libraries and what they call adult evening programs, programs that are aimed at teenagers and above, are very popular and will usually draw in numbers. And UFOs turn out to be the hottest kind of program that you can have in a library in terms of getting people in the door. So she got me going on the notion of lecturing about UFOs.

That's kind of funny because we originally got together because I helped her carry a box that was filled with odds and ends related to a Sasquatch program. Of course. To include a giant plaster cast sticking out of the box. And when we got to her car, I saw that she had UFO books in the back seat and I thought I've died and gone to heaven. This is just too good. If I can't make a conversation with this woman, I'm going to give up. So fortunately it all worked out. But along the way, she got me to do library programs.

And one of the places that I went in 1993 was the Ocean Shores Library. And I gave my lecture. I had slides. I mean, this is backwards. I was still using 35 millimeter slides and thought I was hot stuff because I had managed to supplement it, you know, with some well-done pictures of UFOs and all of that. Now, of course, everyone is digital and nobody remembers what a color slide is. Right.

So after I was all done, a very stern, serious-looking elderly woman approached me and said, you're right. The government knows all about UFOs and they're keeping it a secret. And I said, how do you know? And she said, because I worked there. And I could tell. I mean, I was into, I'd been a policeman for quite a few years by then, and you kind of get used to reading people, trying to decide, are they serious? Are they faking?

Are they joking? You know, are they telling the truth? Are they lying? What's going on here? Well, this woman seemed to be very truthful, and she was dead serious. And I said, well, would you tell me more? I tried to draw her out, and she looked at me and said, I can't. They'll come and arrest me.

and I think she was afraid that I might do the arresting because I did not keep it a secret that I was an off-duty detective sergeant giving a presentation in a library about UFOs. And so it was entirely possible in her mind that I could arrest her if she disclosed the wrong thing. Well, I gave her my business card and I kept track of her because I was curious who she was. I found out that she was a well-known figure in the community. She had led the charity drive to build a brand new library. There were some hot community issues out in Ocean Shores. This was originally they were trying to promote legalized gambling, and this was going to be a huge real estate project.

Well, the legalized gambling never happened, and eventually it turned out to be a great place for people to have resort homes. but it never took off the way they had planned. But there were very wealthy people out there, and June had stood up and gone toe to toe literally with somebody who was connected with the mob. She got in this guy's face. Wow.

That's the kind of lady that she was. She didn't back down from anybody. But what nobody knew was what her life was like when she was young. So we have to flash forward to 1990. 1997. 1997 is a really important year for UFOs. It's extremely important. Not only because of the UFO events that occurred that year, but because of back to what I

mentioned earlier, the government response is so interesting. And you've got to think back and remember that July of 1997 is the 50th anniversary. of the Roswell UFO crash. I didn't go, but I know from people that I've met that it was so crowded with UFO people in Roswell that they had to hire off-duty policemen from all over New Mexico to do traffic control. So, I mean, it was a big, and you couldn't get a motel room anywhere. If you didn't already have one, forget it. I wanted to re-contact June, and in 1997, the opportunity presented itself.

But you've got to think back to earlier in the year. March 13th of 1997, we have the Phoenix Lights. The Phoenix Lights is another event that I put on the same level of magnitude as Roswell in UFO history. and there are many reasons for that. One of which was that I attended the UFO conference in McMinville, Oregon, several years ago, three or four years ago, and it was devoted entirely to presentations by people who had key knowledge related to the Phoenix Lights. And I was absolutely spellbound by that. That was a great, that was as much of a revelation to me as Roswell has been.

So I don't think this point was lost on the secret keepers that on March 13th of 1997, an extremely large, real UFO triangular-shaped flew over the central corridor of Arizona, and I believe that there was a government response, a very strong government response. In fact, Peter Davenport from the National UFO Reporting Center, his theory is that happens to be the same night by the way if you go back and check the news you'll find out that president bill clinton supposedly tripped on some stairs and then was grabbed by the secret service and rushed back to washington dc for emergency knee surgery peter davenport's theory is if he ever met bill clinton the first question he would ask is

Mr. President, will you please raise your pant leg? He thinks that there's no scar because there was no surgery because it was just a cover story. And the cover story was that the UFO event in Phoenix was so major and it was clearly obvious that this was an unearthly technology on a grand scale that they had to scramble jets they decided not to, you know, fire on this thing. And as a result of their military assessment of the potential,

they moved the United States up the def-con scale. And that meant that by protocol, they had to grab the president and get him into a secure facility. Interesting. Oh, it's fascinating. I mean, this is a big deal. Now, of course, a lot of this is pure speculation. We can't document it.

But it certainly plays out. All right. So we have. We're back to that being the kind of backdrop for the year of 1997. For some reason, along about June of that year, we're going to end up with too many June in this story, but I can't. So in the month of June, 1997, the Air Force announces that they are publishing a book. The book is titled Rosseman.

well, case closed. And you can still get copies of it. I've got one over here on the shelf. Pretty thick book from what I remember, yeah. Yeah, it's something like that. Well, interestingly enough, I actually interviewed the guy whose work supposedly was the basis for their new explanation. And he is angry because he was a career Air Force officer who took his work with parachute dummies very seriously. And they used the whole parachute dummy thing to explain alien bodies at Roswell. Right. That and Project Mogul.

So that's the text of this book. So the book comes out. And of course, because it's the Air Force and because UFOs are really a hot subject that year, the X-Files was also going full bore. so the X-Files had now become household word. You've got UFOs on everybody's mind. You've got the Phoenix lights. The secret keepers know they're in trouble.

They're coming up on the 50th anniversary of Roswell. So when they published their book, Roswell case closed, it's blasted all over CNN. It's the big story. Yep, I remember. Out in Ocean Shores, Washington, an elderly lady named June happened to be, watching the news.

And she got really angry. And I also think that the other backdrop to this is that her cancer had come back. And she never did quite admit to me how precarious her health was until the very end. But she called me on the phone with no warning. I have not heard from this woman in four years. The phone rings. I pick it up in its June's voice. And she goes,

it's a damn lie and I said well June good to hear from you quite a hello yes yes so we exchanged pleasantries and then she explains to me she says she had been watching the news she wanted to know if I had been watching and she wanted to talk about Roswell case closed and then she said the balloon story is the same story that we used to use when we wrote letters to the public telling them that they hadn't seen what they said they saw. And this went on for a while and finally I said,

why are you willing to talk to me now? And you weren't willing to talk to me then. And she said, I'm 72 years old. I've outlived two husbands and my cancer's in remission. What are they going to do? Shoot me or put me in prison. I can do either one. Well, that was good enough for me because I was already convinced that she was serious.

and so I asked her if I could come and visit her. And that began a whole series, mostly late-night meetings, because she was kind of a night owl. I was on a swing shift, so I would get off duty and then drive the 30 miles to her house out in ocean shores, and we would sit up half the night, me listening to her life story. Eventually she showed me her personal papers that she later gave to me. and finally I got her to go on audio tape. That was not easy.

She was not real happy with that, mainly because I think she was so concerned about being careful. It was very important to her that she would only tell me things that she was sure of. And that, of course, is kind of a good news, bad news thing. I only wanted the facts from her, but it made her extra careful. words, if she didn't know, she didn't know, and if she didn't remember, she didn't remember. That's gold when you're interviewing witnesses. The worst witness is the one who knows everything about everything. And we have them in the UFO field.

They never met an all-encompassing theory of extraterrestrial presence that they didn't like. So I gradually also, it happened to be, as a personal aside, this has a whole, happened to be during a time period when Joanna and I had one of our breakups. And so June and I became friends. And, you know, I don't mean in a romantic way, but I mean she was a lonely person. I was a lonely man. We talked about our lives, where we were going, where we'd been. I would have loved to have heard her story even without the UFO part because she grew up in Dayton, Ohio. She worked for the United States government three times between 1942 and 1952. She worked in classified laboratories.

She had a Q-level security clearance eventually. She was steadily promoted talking to June. The more I got to know her, the more I got to respect her. And, you know, little anecdotes like this. She told me, she said, if you grew up in Dayton, Ohio and you wanted a good day. job, you went to work for the government. That was just the way it was. And you got to remember that when she went to work there in 1942, the war had just begun, of course, on December 7th of 1941, they had Wright Field. Right Field was the one place where they had wind tunnels and they were doing

experimentation on aviation. But there was no Air Force then. The Air Force did not exist until afterwards. World War II in 1947 as a result of the National Security Act. Right, right. So when she went to work there, I actually have papers by her that are on war department stationary. And it's, you know, the Army Aviation, the Air Materiel Command, things like that. because none of the things that we take for granted even existed. So it was fascinating to hear like the night of Pearl Harbor.

Before Pearl Harbor, there wasn't even a fence around Wright Field. And she told me that that night that occurred, they sent out trucks of soldiers, sentries with rifles, to surround the entire base where each sentry could see the other one. because nobody knew whether or not the United States was about to be invaded by the Japanese. There was panic and chaos and confusion. And so, right field being a very important facility, they had to secure it. Right. And then, you know, eventually, James, when it becomes right, Air Force Base, which we'll get to, you know, this place becomes synonymous with the Roswell's UFO case. Again, that's a little fast forwarding.

I would love to hear, if you don't mind, a little bit more about June Crane's clearance, this Q clearance. And then also what really caught my attention, now this is all transcribed by you from the audio. And there were some really key points that stuck out to me. So I guess maybe we'll sort of focus on those. So the first two would be this Q clearance. And June's experience with catching a spy, this was. really fascinated me. Would you mind running us through these two things? No, I wouldn't mind at all. Okay. The Q-level clearance actually has an interesting evolution, and the way that I

confirmed it was from a completely unexpected source when it came to figuring out what a Q-level clearance was back then. And it came from my father. And the reason being that when he got out of the Navy, he ended up going to work for a nuclear fuel processing plant in Paducah, Kentucky. It was the second one in the United States after Oak Ridge. And actually, I think there was, of course, they were making weapons grade up here, but we had Hanford here in Washington State. But in any event, when my dad worked there in the control room, he had to have a Q-level security clearance. And back then, you literally wore a cardboard letter Q that was pinned to your clothing

that you had to wear at all times when you were in this high security environment so that everybody there would know that you were cleared to be there. So that's literally what a Q clearance was. Now, of course, it's different, you know, with key cards and, you know, fingerprints and retinas and all the other ways that, you know, a high security facility can operate. Right. But back then, that's all they had. And acute clearance meant that they would send the FBI to interview all of your friends and relatives to verify your identity, to see if there was anything in your background that should bar you from your clearance. So my dad actually went through that. So when I was telling him about the work I was doing on June's background,

he was immediately able to explain to me what the process was. And I do know that June worked on classified projects, and one of the ways that I know that is that she talked about Project Caucasian. And she did not remember all of the details, but she remembered things like, you know, what are the things I've learned along the way in interviewing people is that The thing that most people remember most strongly is not the event, but their emotional reaction to the event. Right, right.

I focus a lot on that with my work interviewing witnesses, so I couldn't agree with that more. If people remember how they felt. And she remembered that there was like a lot of nervousness and tension whenever she worked on something called Project Cocker. occasion. She recalled that her boss would become very, you know, he was like skittish because he was worried about the security around this particular project. Well, June passed away in 1998. I had all of this information and I eventually was able to get it to a team of researchers in 2000, quite an illustrious group of people that I never expected to meet. But there were no military historians that I was able to contact who could tell me anything about Project Caucasian.

It was a complete mystery. Nobody had ever heard of that as a code name for a project. Well, three or four years after that, I believe it was like 2003, 2004, they declassified Project Caucasian from top secret down to a public disclosure document. It was the parachute harness. It was the code name for the project to create a parachute harness for a hydrogen bomb to be dropped out of the back of a B-36 bomber. No wonder everyone was so nervous. Yes, no wonder everybody was so nervous.

And no wonder it was a highly classified project. Of course it was highly classified. And June worked in these laboratories doing what we would now call office manager work, but a woman could not have a title like manager. So she was doing all the clerical work. She was also doing security work, which meant she told me that she was in charge of multiple safes. Now, you've got to think back and remember this is before anybody even imagined the internet. So people are using manual typewriters. Everything is on paper and in folders and files. It had to be lost. in and out of safes.

And it was her job. She told me that she had a full bird colonel, who was her direct supervisor, who was in charge of the security of these documents in this laboratory, where she worked. And so she routinely associated with scientists and engineers. And in order to do her work, she had to have the same security clearance as the people who were working on these projects. So she told me, for instance, she kept using the phrase, she said that Kanaki wrote the Bible on parachutes. Well, there wasn't a whole lot on him at the time that I was talking to June, but later on I learned that there was a Walter Kanaki, who was one of the paperclip scientists who was brought over from Germany at the end of World War II and given a cushy job in the United States in return for his assistance in building. parachutes to drop payloads onto battlefields. In other words, he was an engineer who could design parachutes to drop vehicles and military equipment from an airplane. So this is all highly classified

work. This is military science being applied, as it were. Well, she was also tasked with writing letters to people related to UFOs. And back then, they were actually In other words, if you wrote them any kind of a letter at all, they would actually send you a real letter back, saying that, you know, we don't investigate UFOs or we think that what you have presented is impossible from an engineering viewpoint, etc. She was also privy to conversations. In other words, she works amongst scientists and engineers and military people, and they talked about some of their experiences in the Southwest when they would go down there to do some of the early. rocketry research. This is after World War II. We are now trying to benefit from the V2 technology. She mentioned the Aero B rocket, which if you go back and you look at the history of rocketry in the United States, you'll hear that the Aerobee was one of the first heavy lifter rockets.

One of the first rockets that could carry a substantial payload. And of course, that's the beginning of the space program. But then there's a personal side to this whole story. And it goes with the times that June lived in. And it deals with issues that are still important today. June was an attractive, intelligent young woman. She gets a good job. She's steadily promoted. She is praised by her coworkers and her supervisors. She marries one of the base security policeman. All he wants to do is to get out of the Air Force and go on with his life. And he does not want her to have a career. They eventually have a child. And there's a point in June's history that I could tell where she was always sad. And every time she would mention this one particular event,

she would get tears in her eyes. And the event was that she was recalling the night that she was ordered to stay very late and to take dictation from a German rocket scientist. She believes that it was Werner von Braun, or she did believe that it was Werner von Braun, except that there is no historical record that I have ever been able to locate that places Werner von Braun at Ravent. Patterson. But interestingly enough, the person who pointed that problem out to me was June.

When I first started talking to June, she had two or three of the key biographies of Werner Braun Braun that she had been looking through trying to find some reference to him being there. She couldn't find it. I couldn't find it. It's also possible that he may have sort of written out that part of his history because Werner-Vron Braun, of course, became a very famous scientist and kind of a spokesperson for our early space program. Right. And so references to the time when he was an involuntary guest of the United States government may have been sanitized from his history because he probably wouldn't want to talk about that time

period. And the last thing he would want to talk about is the work that he may have done under the Third Reich in Germany. Also, because some of the places where he worked use slave labor. This guy just gets worse and worse. Oh, it's Project Paperclip is, I mean, that's one of the most controversial things that ever happened in U.S. history. And you could debate endlessly. Was it right that we did that? Was it immoral? Did we aid in a bet people who were involved in genocide. I mean, you know, you could go on and on. If we hadn't taken those scientists, the Soviets probably would have taken them. And we would have been behind in the space program. I don't know how you argue that. It is what it is. But Project

paperclip is fascinating history. And the thing about June's story is she's not a smoking gun witness to many things, but because we can so firmly establish who she was and where she worked, much of what she has to say is what I would call key corroborating testimony. And that's what makes her story powerful. And her honesty makes her story powerful. She didn't claim to be all powerful or all knowing in the UFO movement. She had certain things that she was certain of that she had experienced that were very important to her.

and I mentioned that she had to stay late because of this dictation. Well, when she was told that she could not go home until it was done, this military officer who had escorted her to where this scientist was being held told June. He said, June, if you succeed in this project and we get the money from Congress that we're trying to get based upon partially the work you're doing, here transcribing this man's testimony, you will have had your moment in history because he believed that this was going to be part of the foundation of the space program. So June was very patriotic and she was really honored to be, you know, even a small part of something as historic as that.

and yet they wanted her to stay with the program doing her office managerial clerical work, but her husband wouldn't hear of it and told her that she had to quit her job, and so she did. And she always regretted that. Her husband was killed on their 10th wedding anniversary. And this is weird too. By then they had moved to Portland, Oregon, and June had, June and he had, had kind of a rocky road and she thought they were going to break up and they were just getting things back together and they were going to go out to celebrate their 10th anniversary and he went

out front of the house to put new license plate tabs on the car and a drunk driver came around the corner and smashed into the back of the car and he was caught in the middle and he was killed in that auto accident. Well, you know, I'm an investigator and I was also June's friend, so I actually dug up the newspaper article in the Portland newspaper

that documents that traffic accident. Even as wild as that story sounds, it sounds like something out of a novel, it's real. And then June gave me all of her papers that proved where she worked. And then independent of that,

I made multiple applications to the National Records Center in St. Louis because June was a civilian employee of the U.S. government. And at first, they told me they didn't have the records. There had been a terrible fire. The records were not available, et cetera, et cetera. I made multiple tries. And finally, without warning one day, I got a huge envelope in the mail that was like two

inches thick and someone had photocopied every paper in her file. and sent them to me. I already had about a third of those documents anyway because I had June's copies. But this, all that did was fill in the blanks. Right. And James, I should add here, I mean, a lot of the contention when it comes to quote unquote whistleblowers or people who bring this information forward is documentation of they worked where they worked. I mean, this is probably the biggest debate about the whole Bob Lazare controversy, which I don't want to get into now. But I think that's very important that you had it from June and you had this this third party who was able to corroborate that as well. Right. And that really, you know, that that puts you a long

ways up in terms of looking at this as an investigation as opposed to just thinking that it's a, you know, a whistleblower disclosure statement. And, and, you know, everything just screamed at me that this was the real deal. And June told me all. the details like the office where she worked. I, of course, am old enough that I remember what a manual typewriter is. And it had an inked ribbon, and you actually had keys that mechanically struck the ribbon and made a mark on a sheet of paper. When they went home at night, they had to lock up every piece of paper that they worked on in a safe. And that included the typewriter ribbon because they were afraid that enemy agents would get a hold of the typewriter ribbon

and would be able by studying the ribbon be able to reconstruct some portion of what they were writing. So they went to those lengths. Wow, that's pretty fascinating. It was their equivalent of preventing somebody from hacking your computer. Yeah. Only this was done with manual typewriters, paper, all that kind of thing. So there was a woman in June's office who was suspected of espionage.

And she ended up being a, I think she was used as some sort of a decoy. It was never clear to me exactly how it went down, except that June was walking home one night, and she was very afraid because she was worried that something bad was going to happen relating to this woman being suspected of espionage. and she remembers that at a certain point going home, suddenly there were all these cars and federal agents. And then when she went to work the next day, every trace of that woman was gone from the office,

and she never saw her again. And of course, espionage was a very real threat in World War II. The strangest part of it was, of course, and I guess a sad commentary on how people judging, each other, the Japanese were put in internment camps in California, and I believe in other places in the southwest. We were actually under far more espionage threat from the Germans than we were ever under threat from the Japanese.

Right. And nobody, you know, German immigrants up in camps and then making them fight our wars, right? Exactly. Exactly. And, of course, we don't like to admit it, but there was actually. some people in the United States were advocating either that we stay completely out of World War II or even that we should be on the side of the axis. I mean, we forget that.

We want to think that, you know, eventually, obviously the country was united in World War II, probably at a level that it has never been united since. But it wasn't always that simple. So June was part of all of these times. And so I loved all these little anecdotal stories that she told me about what it was like to work there, what it was like to live there. You know, she told me about how you couldn't, you know, you couldn't take your spouse to an office party. Why is that? Well, because the people might talk about something classified.

Very good point. Yeah, that didn't even dawn on me. So simple. No, everybody has to be, have the same level of security clearance and access. and she took that very seriously and you had to and she she showed me I have a copy of a document that she signed that said that you know she could be sent to prison or fine $10,000 for disclosing anything that she had seen or heard while she worked there and so you know in point of fact June did take a risk by telling me what she told me now of course one of the reasons that they don't go after people like this would be that if they went after

June because she disclosed things about UFOs, that would be like proving that what she had to say was real. Exactly. The lengths in which they went would, again, like you mentioned at the top of our conversation, you know, almost the actions and the denial is almost far more voluminous than doing something else. Yeah. So they're smart enough not to fall into that trap. Right. Well, James, let's get to some of that UFO information that June brought to you. Now, the first one that really stuck out to me, what she touched, this piece, this metal, this material. Oh, yes. Would you mind running us through this sort of first key point?

As I recall, she thought that one of the people who the person involved might have been named Lieutenant Rose. Okay. Unfortunately, there are too many Lieutenant Roses, but she was, you got a picture, June, tall, intelligent woman in a predominantly male environment. She's doing her work, an officer stops by her office, starts kind of flirting with her and making casual conversation, reaches into his pocket, and pulls out something about the size of a business card, and it's metal. And he says, June, you're a good worker, tear this up, and meaning take the scissors and do whatever damage you can. Well, not too surprisingly, she can't cut it, she can't pierce it, she can't dent it,

you can't do anything to it. And if you water it up into a ball, it returns to its original shape like water flowing back. And there's no wrinkling, there's no anything. And the metal weighs almost nothing. This, of course, is the, you know, the memory metal, the holy grail of of uphology. So she says, what is this? And the guy looks at her and says, it's a piece of a spaceship. And she goes, oh, come on, what is it really? And he goes, it's a piece of a spaceship. And about that time, somebody else starts to walk through the area, he gets fearful, grabs it, sticks it into his pocket, and then does one of these, we weren't really talking type looks. You know, and then he leaves. So that's, you know, that's the whole story. It's tantalizing because of how it fits into

the rest of the history of uphology. She told me the way that it fits in is one of the first bombshells that she dropped on me that I had never heard from anybody else, although I later heard this several years later from key researchers, June said that by the time she left the government's employ in 1952, the Air Force had been involved in not one, but three crash retrievals of UFOs. Roswell being one. Only one of them. Okay.

And that's, you know, that's one of the bombshells that came to me. Well, then, of course, we have some other interesting anecdotes. Probably the best one is, aside from the memory metal incident, is that one of the things that June gave me was a very faded Polaroid of some test pilots. And she said that they became friends with these pilots. And they would talk to people that were aviators that were going in and out of right. And of course, most of the planes are cargo planes. You know, they're carrying people and freight in and out of this increasingly important base. I mean, you can go back and look at the statistics that, you know, in the beginning, by the time World War II was over,

Wright-Patterson Air Force Base on an average day was as big as a medium-sized city. In terms of thousands of civilian employees, a hub of military activity related to aviation, research, and development. I mean, this became the heart of the Air Force. It still is in many ways. I would also add parenthetically, have you ever been to the right museum? No, I have not. I passed through Dayton briefly, James, but I wasn't able to actually stop and go there.

I got to go there, and I wished I would have had a couple more days. But I will tell you, and this is free, this is the finest aviation museum I have ever been in. It was awesome on a level that I didn't even imagine. I mean, I got to look at a reproduction of the plane that the Wright brothers flew, and later on in the tour, you actually get to stand next to a stealth bomber that's parked on the floor. I remember I went to an air show in my hometown of Syracuse, New York once where there was a bomber. And we got to actually go up the little step ladder, you know, and look inside. And that moment changed my life, James, like seeing this stealth technology for the first time, having had to be. a UFO setting only a couple years prior to this, when possibly what I'd seen that night was a stealth

bomber, possibly. You know, I'll never know what I actually saw. That was a pivotal moment for me as well. So being next to something like that, I can't imagine. Going from the Wright brothers up to a stealth bomber, that history gap is incredible. Well, they fill in all the gaps. And I have to say that that, you know, that gives, and that, of course, is just a museum that's attached to this huge, critically important Air Force base.

But interestingly enough, from the get-go, almost every Roswell researcher says that the key pieces of wreckage and the bodies went to right. Right. That's what we've been told, yes. And June's story fits right in with that, because she talked about how one day one of the pilots came in and he was looking very distraught and very tired out. And he was telling them during their kind of coffee room conversation that he had flown in from New Mexico with bodies and wreckage. So when he said bodies, they started questioning him about who had died, thinking that he was

going to say the name of someone that they knew. And this conversation goes on far enough. that this pilot realizes that they're not understanding him at all. And he says, you don't understand. They're not human. And we're talking about, you know, child-sized bodies, big heads, the classic description. And, and I mean, James, you've personally spoken to Glenn Dennis, am I correct, about the whole body thing as well? Yes. This might be a good tie-in here.

Well, that's an interesting thing. And it actually relates to June. I ended up going to New Mexico at first because my wife and I wanted to go someplace that neither one of us had ever been before and we ended up settling on the Southwest and that has been one of the best decisions we ever made. Well, we ended up going to Roswell and along the way I decided that I was going to donate a copy of the June Crane transcript. I had not written the book yet. I just made up a really well-printed, precise copy of the transcript. By the way, I used a off-duty prosecutor's office secretary who I paid to do the transcription because she's a legal transcriptionist to get her to transcribe the interview.

That's how I got it for the book. I'm not good enough at transcribing, nor do I have the patience to sit there and type every word. but these people do it for a living. So I wanted to get everything as precise as possible. And getting that part was essential. Right, absolutely. Okay, so we have, let's talk a little, I guess, you know, in terms of the bodies. Now, this is interesting because we have the whole test dummy theory that came out with Project Mogul in 1997.

And June actually had some knowledge on this whole test dummy thing. too, right? Having worked on parachute projects and whatnot, could you maybe sort of run us through that whole aspect? Well, the number one thing, the number one reason why there's, well, actually there's several really good reasons. The main reason why that's not an explanation for Roswell is that they didn't start doing the dummy drops until the mid-50s. And the other one is the dummies that they were dropping, if you imagine an articulated mannequin that looks like a six, a six-foot-high G-I. Joe, complete with a steel pot helmet and has a little tag on it that says, if found, please return for a reward. Now, if you think that that looks like an alien, well,

I don't know what to say. But that's what the dummies look like. They were doing entirely legitimate research to test out various kinds of parachutes. You know, that is completely correct military research and June spent a lot of time with the parachute division. So she knew a lot of the ins and outs of it. I ended up, when they did Roswell case closed, I've got a file in here where I actually contacted the officer who is now retired who was in charge of the dummy drop project. And interestingly enough, he is angry at the Air Force for not giving him credit for the work that he did because he says that they misused his work by using it as the explanation for the Roswell UFO crash.

Whereas he's saying, I did serious work for you guys. You know, I was doing research. I was in charge of a project. And instead of honoring my work, all you've done is use it as an alternative explanation for a UFO crash. That's a pretty powerful statement. mean, that pretty much proves the cover-up right there, amongst many other aspects to the cover-up. But anyway, June had this story about this test pilot, and they were all shocked when he said that. But later on, what was even stranger was that on the same day, later on in the day, they're going back and they're doing their usual clerical tasks.

here comes a courier with something that was called and June had the right phrasing. I had never heard this phrasing before, but it came back at me from another source, something called a too hot memo. A too hot memo meant that this isn't like having the base commander send out an email because you got to bear in mind there are no personal computers. An email did not exist back then. So how would you do a very important mail message back then? Well, you send a courier to every single employee and they are required to stop what they are doing

and immediately read and acknowledge this memorandum from the commanding officer. That is a too hot memo. And it said that some irresponsible person had been discussing bodies and flying saucers. and you will cease and desist immediately or face imprisonment and fines. So, I mean, that raises a whole bunch of questions. How would the base commander know about the conversation that June had with the pilot? How many conversations were going on? Maybe there was more than one person.

I mean, obviously, he didn't fly back by himself. He was part of a flight crew. And maybe his wasn't the only plane. We don't know any of that. Yeah, yeah, good point. Why would all the wreckage be on one, you know, one cargo? It probably wouldn't be. Yeah, like, let's, let's even to make it even harder for anyone to trace.

Let's spread it out. Let's put it at different places. Like, you just don't know. We don't know. And that's the problem. So, you know, I always, I like the word tantalizing, because that's what describes a lot of the information that I got from June. I mean, I wish that she had. lived longer. I wish that I could have asked her about 10,000 more questions. I don't know that she

would have known any more than what she gave me. I mean, there's no way I can ever know that. But, you know, like I said, she was very careful to always say, I don't remember that. Or, you know, I didn't know that. Like, she told me that the bodies, people said that the bodies from the crash went to the Arrow Med Lab. I asked her, I said, well, did you ever go there? She said, said, no, I had no reason to go there and you couldn't get in. Whereas you, you not only have to have the right security clearance, you have to have a need to know. Right, which, you know, even our top officials and president standing presidents don't even have the need to know many times. Compartmentalized security. Yeah. Yeah. So I would imagine, yeah, why would she have the clearance to, especially, you know,

there's a big difference between possible wreckage, metal alloys, anything like that, and victims of a crash or bodies of a possible ET. Yeah, the gap is huge when it comes to that. Well, I mean, another thing that really stood out for me, James, in the transcriptions, was June's talk about Project Blue Book and what this actually was in terms of kind of a smokescreen, I guess, would be a good way to put it? Would you mind sort of running us through your conversation with her about Project Blue Book? its relevancy and I guess irrelevancy when it comes to actually UFO investigation.

Well, she verified for me what many others had long suspected, which was that the best cases were shunted off somewhere else. There were already regulations in place. As I recall, the acronym is Janap, J-A-N-A-P. There's a regulation that goes with that, that already had established a protocol for reporting UFOs to higher and higher levels of command. You've got the Twining memo. Nathan Twining ended up retired, I think he was a three or four star general. He would have been June's boss, multiple levels above her, in charge of the Air Materiel command.

And he wrote a memorandum to his boss that at the time that he wrote the memorandum, that memorandum was top secret. It has since, of course, been declassified and is one of the most interesting of all of the documents that are available from that period of time, because in there, he says that the UFO phenomena is real and not fictitious. And then he goes on to describe that the craft are frequently described as circular and metallic, and that they exhibit a performance technique. that they can't duplicate and they have no idea who could.

And so when you think about who this man was and the fact that he's writing to his boss, he would have been extremely careful about what he drew as a conclusion. So that's pretty solid evidence that something was going on or may still be going on. Absolutely. I mean, we have the recent Pentagon program, which we'll get to in a little bit. So I guess sort of to wrap up the June Crane story here, James, what do you make of her entire claims? Now, you know her now better than anyone in the field probably did. You were face to face with this woman.

You heard all of her stories, having the knowledge and experience as an investigator with law enforcement. Other Roswell investigators, you know, some of them don't put. so much stock into the whole June Crane affair. So what would you say to those people who sort of detract this story? Well, I don't think that they've really studied her story, and they probably have not studied my claims about her. I don't make more or less out of her than she would have wanted. She was a very honest, sincere woman who went through some very important times, and she knew bits and pieces of this entire puzzle, but not the whole thing. She never claimed that.

She didn't claim, other than the time that she handled the medal, she didn't claim to be a smoking gun witness. And when I met her, I went into her home, and she did have the biographies of Werner von Braun and whatnot, but she did not have two shelves of UFO books. She didn't know any of the rest of this. She was telling me based upon what she learned while she worked there. And I think that she tried to the best of her ability to give me a sincere and honest account. And I think I could have gotten her sworn in as a witness in any court of law.

So that would be my answer. She is what she is. Her testimony stands as do the testimonies of, numerous other people who know parts of the cover-up with a capital C. Right. And it's just piecing those together that we're still trying to do up until today, which is challenging because all of our firsthand witnesses involved are pretty much gone at this point.

You know, not exactly firsthand, but someone you met was both Glenn Dennis and Frankie Roe. I would love to hear about those experiences. Well, when I took a copy of the June Crane transcript and I donated it to the UFO Museum, which is a converted theater on Main Street in downtown Roswell, I went in there and I explained who I was and that I wanted to donate this. They have a big research library, by the way, a very complete one. And I was met by Glenn Dennis of all people. And I was, you know, I knew the Glenn Dennis story, so I was like in awe that I would meet him. And so I gave him the book and he told me that he really, he looked at it and he said, well, this has obviously been very carefully put together.

And we will certainly put it in the library. And as his way of saying thank you, we got to go into an office and sit down and have coffee together with nobody else around. And that was fascinating to me. I got a chance to do the, you know, what kind of a witness is this? The saddest part of the Glenn Dennis story is that he admitted to me that he had lied to UFO researchers. And you will still hear UFO researchers who will swear up and down that this never happened. I don't know. I wasn't there.

I freely admit that. But here's how it was told to me. Glenn Dennis says he was a young man. He worked at the Ballard Funeral Home, which still exists on South Main Street in Roswell. And he gets a phone call from Walker Army Airfield. That was the name of the base there in Roswell, wanting to know how many child-sized coffins they had in stock. And he said they only had one. And they said, that's not enough.

Can you get more? and he said yes but it'll take a couple days. Later on that day, he gets another call where they wanted to know about how you would preserve a body that you found out in the desert without contaminating it. And he told them dry ice would be the best way to do it. The next part of the story is, in small towns like Roswell was back then, they did not have a paramedic ambulance service. If you called for an ambulance, you got the hearse.

Because if you think about it, the hearse is the only kind of a vehicle that's set up to carry somebody on a stretcher. So he ended up, there was an airman who was injured in a motorcycle accident. He drives him back to the base after the guy's been treated at the hospital. When he gets there, there are like way too many vehicles in people beyond normal. And everybody is really upset. There's like a busy beehive, a hornet's nest that's been stirred up. He goes in there and he had free access to the place.

This is, you know, this is 1947. It's a small town. Everybody knows everybody. He's been on and off that base many, many times, dropping people off, picking them up, you name it, et cetera. He goes in there and there are all these people that he's never seen before. He goes by this one particular room. The door opens, and there is this young nurse who he has friends with.

Now, I don't know. Glenn was married for many years, and I have no idea whether he was unfaithful to his wife, had an affair with this woman, whatever. No, that's been speculated on too. All I know is that he really cared about this woman and he was friends with her. Okay. She comes out of this room and she says, Glenn, you've got to get out of here right now.

And he says, well, what's going on? He says, you just got to leave. You've got to get out of here right now. And he takes her advice and starts to leave. And he gets confronted by some military people who want to know who he is and why he's there and everything else. And he basically tells him off and says, you know, I'm a civilian and I can, you know, do whatever I want. And I don't have to answer to you. And there's some officer in charge who makes the comment, you know, you can.

can be taken out in the desert and your bones will bleach in the sun like anybody else's. So he leaves, needless to say, and a few days later he finally gets to socialize with this nurse. And I think they're back on the base and they're having a beer and she is really, really upset. And she said that she did not get the phone call telling her not to report to work and that she had gone into work. and when she was there there were all these people that she didn't recognize and she ended up being

ordered to participate in an autopsy and it was an autopsy of an alien and she actually sketched some things on a cocktail napkin and when Glenn wanted to keep the napkin

she set fire to it in the ashtray and the part that gets complicated is she resigned her commission and left the service and literally became a nun. Glenn swore to her that he would never reveal her identity.

Glenn's story is that in the, I believe, the early 80s when the Roswell story started to break, he felt that he was being harassed by UFO researchers. And in order to get rid of them, he made up a name for the nurse, instead of just saying I'm not going to identify her because I promised her I wouldn't and he told me that that was one of his biggest regrets was that he told that lie

he said he should have never done it because it just made everything worse so that you know that was the Glenn Dennis story and I walked away with a whole new level of respect and appreciation and I guess it was the same kind of feeling that I had when I would sit up late with June and I would hear these stories about what it was like in 1947. It was like getting a little window into another time period. He was a what you see as

what you get kind of a man. He was a gentleman who grew up in the southwest. A man's word is his bond. You know, you make a promise, you keep a promise. Did he lie? Yes, he lied. He had admitted that he lied. I don't know what to make of that. I guess history will have to decide. Frankie Roe was an unexpected, wonderful event that happened in 2017. It was sad that she passed away

not too long after we met her and got to know her, but I never expected to have this experience. I had met Frankie Roe a couple times because there were about three years there where we went back to Roswell every year for the UFO festival. And then, of course, while you're there, you present, and then you also have a table, and people come by, and they look at your books, and you get to talk to everybody,

and it's kind of fun. Well, I had met Frankie Roe because she had everybody loved her. She was a friend of the UFO movement and of the museum in particular. Well, they always have a parade every year during the Roswell UFO Festival, festival, and they take all the speakers and the key people and they put them on a float, and you drive around with thousands of people on the sidewalk, and there's fireworks and lights and kids in alien costumes. I mean, it's a big deal.

It's a lot of fun. I sat next to her while we were in this parade, and we got to swap life stories, and I told her, needless to say about June. Well, this woman is in her 80s, and just recounting the story of what happened to her when she was 12 years old, you could still see the fear in her eyes and feel how terrified she was because of this event. And back when she was 12 years old, her father was a fireman for the city of Roswell, and they lived in town. And while she was coming home one day, she stopped by her father's place of work to

get a ride. She had been to the dentist. And there was a New Mexico state policeman there who was showing off this weird metal that he had found somewhere. And there was talk about a crashed vehicle, etc. Well, this was extraordinary, and she got to handle the medal, and she was very impressed by this. She was not quite so impressed when not too long thereafter. She was home with her mother and a military officer and two other soldiers showed up at her home and basically pushed their way into the house and started telling her mother and her that under no circumstances would they ever discuss anything about a crashed UFO or the metal. and he, this man, look right at Frankie Roe. Bear in mind she's a 12-year-old girl and says that if she ever talked about it, he would come back and murder her and her entire family and take them out in the desert and get

rid of their bodies. Now the weird part is, is that years later, that one of the places she lived, the phone company came out to do a repair and the repairman came to her afterwards and showed her that somebody had put a tap on her phone. I mean, this is strange stuff. It's very strange. And I've heard this from other members of prominent families involved with this case as well. Exactly.

And the part that was a good part of this story is that one day a man showed up on her door with a bouquet of flowers. And he said, I am the son of that officer who threatened you. when you were 12 years old. And he said that his father was a very brutal man and that he was there to apologize and make amends. And that's just a whole fascinating piece of history. And it turned out we were all staying in the same hotel there in Roswell. And the next morning we all had breakfast together before we went our separate ways.

and I got this wonderful photo of my wife Joanne and Frankie sitting together at a table. And that may be one of the last, if not the last photos that was taken of her because she passed away peacefully in her sleep just a couple of weeks later. And she was an amazing lady and a lovely, bright spirit. And I felt really honored to meet her. And there's, see, when I. hear, you know, you mentioned the word Roswell to some people, and they kind of laugh and they talk, you know, you'll hear all the usual cliches about little green men, blah, blah, blah. And then to me, when I hear the word Roswell, aside from the fact that I love that town,

it's a wonderful little city, I think about an investigation that has been going on for over 30 years that involves over 600 witnesses with interoperable. locking testimony. You know, do we have the smoking gun? Well, if somebody does, I wish they would bring it out. We probably don't. But we know that something really extraordinary crashed on Mac Brazel's ranch on the July 4th weekend of 1947.

And we know that the military went to extreme lengths to recover everything and to cover everything and to cover up all trace of that event, threatening people, picking up wreckage, monitoring citizens for years illegally. I mean, it goes on and on and on. We know that that's a real event. And I think in particular that's thanks to Don Schmidt and Tom Carrey, who themselves are not free of controversy. You know, people expect all of us euphologists are...

UFO researchers to always make perfect decisions and always know everything and whatnot. Well, I'm sorry to disappoint people, but all of these people, myself included, we are also living our lives. And we don't always have total knowledge and we don't always make the correct decision. And I'm speaking in reference to, you know, Tom Carrey and Don Schmidt, the Roswell Slides debacle. Yes. Which we could, you know, you could do, you probably did do one show or more about that.

Yes, I have. You know, that was a UFO horror story from one end to the other and a valuable lesson that we apparently have still not learned. That should not take away from the wonderful, detailed, extremely exhaustive, exhaustive research that was done by those two men to put. put together the Roswell story. I'm very honored that they included the June story. But again, just, you know, having that story now a part of the Roswell history, I think, is very important because yet it is. It's one more person willing to come forward. Like you said, while a lot of people perceive the Roswell case as, you know, this festival they have every year, little green men, this quirky feeling to it. This was life for death for a

of these people, James. The way they were threatened, the cover up everything. So I guess I want to sort of wrap up Roswell with this one question for you before we move on here of do you think we still have a chance of knowing

what happened out there? Do you think there's still material out there somewhere hidden in that desert that we can find that can be that smoking gun? Or is this going to be the case that mystifies us until, you know, we all part this earthly plane.

What do you think? I know that's a big hypothetical. Boy, that's a huge hypothetical. In terms of finding wreckage out there, I would defer to my good friend, Frank Kimbler, who does tremendous research out there and is thoroughly a scientist. And so far, he has not found any wreckage that would pass the smell test. and I think if anybody's going to find it, he will. Did they make a mistake somewhere and maybe they left something behind?

God, I hope so. I don't know that we're ever going to get the truth about Roswell or about UFOs until one of two things happens. One thing is if some other event is so overwhelmingly obvious that they have to come clean about contact with non-human intelligence. you know, where it's an arrival day, something that is so big that they can't put it under wraps. And they managed to do that pretty well with the Phoenix Lights, so it would have to be pretty spectacular.

The other thing is, if in the process we get evidence that they cannot get rid of or dispute because it is in their best interest to disclose it, then they will tell us something. You got to remember, they're not going to do it out of the goodness of their heart. they're going to do it because there is a political, strategic, or military reason to disclose. That's their job. You know, it's not, they don't see things the way we do. You know, they would tell you, well, their job is to protect us and that there's some national security or intelligence reason, why they need to conceal this story and or use it to manipulate

the situation. See, we are also part of the game. Everybody, you and I, everybody in the UFO community, we are also subject to manipulation. And that's one of the hardest things is to know when you're being played. So, no, I don't think it's going to happen anytime soon, but I'm not giving up on it. I'm excited for the future of investigating Roswell and beyond,

but at the same time, it is sobering as well to know, that possibly we never may get that answer. So many researchers have left this world not knowing what happened at Roswell or not getting the truth they sought for so long. So it is a game, a game that we don't know really who is in control of, whether it's a non-human intelligence, whether it's, you know, military, governmental. It's all just one big game that we're all playing and trying to figure out. So it's messy, it's exciting, it's terrifying, it's everything in between. But I don't know what to make of all of it, man. But, you know, sort of dovetelling off of that and moving away from Roswell, a lot of our listeners would be interested to know

about your stance with Mufon, the mutual UFO organization. Now, you left the organization last year and you rejoined recently. So you got it, tell us, man. What made you do both of these things? That's the second time that I've quit. I have to say, I guess it's getting to be a habit. The reason that- A love-hate relationship, yes.

Yes, sometimes it is a love-hate relationship. And, of course, it's a large organization. Next year will be the 50th anniversary. It started in 1969 after Project Blue Book ended. and I have to say I'm back in Mufon, but it's with my eyes open. I'm not, it doesn't mean that I drank the Kool-Aid. It doesn't mean that I slept too close to an alien seed pod and woke up as somebody else. It means that the field of Uphology looks like a desert to me.

I quit Mufon because I was angry at the people in charge for not more blatantly condemning a racist state director. to make a long story short. And I don't want to go through all of that. I mean, you can go on the Internet and dig up the whole thing. Yeah, we covered it briefly on the show in the past. So, yeah, I think our listeners know where to turn to hear that whole story. And, of course, I don't like what Mufon has had to do in terms of keeping the doors open. But then again, I'm not Jan Harzan, and I don't know what the bills are that come in every month.

You know, people think that having a UFO. investigator at your beck and call exists in a vacuum. It doesn't. You know, people who do this are volunteers. They're taking time out of their lives to do this research. I would like Mufon to appreciate that more because I think, I still think that sometimes they don't appreciate the level of commitment that their volunteers have. But back to my particular story, I was very angry and I left because I thought that

things are just going nowhere. Well, immediately I was courted by two or three different other UFO organizations that were filled with people who had been in Mufon, who, et cetera, you know, and I don't really want to get into all the details of that either, other than they all had one thing in common. Everybody was talking either about old cases. I remember one group, they wanted to talk about which old cases they were going to reinvestigate, and that degenerated into a big argument. and I thought, well, where is this going?

Eventually, I realized if I wanted to investigate UFO cases, I had to have a source of information. And I just wasn't getting it from anywhere. Then in the meantime, I moved from Olympia, Washington to Port Townsend, about 100 miles. And this happens to be the same place where the new director of Moufan in Washington State lives. In fact, that's not a big secret. I recommended her for the position. She was the obvious choice because of her level of commitment to getting people together to meet on a regular basis and talk about UFOs, Bigfoot, the paranormal, whatever.

She has an extremely successful meeting group, and that's what you look for when you want somebody to do organization. If I was going to participate at all in the UFO field, I've got to have some new information. I've got to investigate cases. I can't just keep sitting on the sidelines and going over old stuff. Much as I love the history, as we've already discussed, I do love the history of uphology. But I don't want to be completely marginalized and out on the fringe of everything. I want to be involved. I also want to be ready in case we do get another major event.

And of course, Washington State, that has happened before. On June 24th of 1947, about a week and a half before Roswell, Kenneth Arnold, observed a formation of saucer-shaped craft, crescent saucer shapes, going across Mount Rainier in broad daylight. and that led to the creation of the phrase flying saucer. That was a key event in UFO history right here in Washington State, which is why when I've gone and lectured in other places, I've jokingly said they came here first. Dems bragging rights, James. That's Dems bragging rights, right.

Obviously, when we study UFOs, we could go back way far into history. Oh, yeah, yeah. This was the modern UFO era, as we've sort of coined it. Yes, and it's fun to tell people that. But the main point is, I guess, I rejoin Mufon because it's not enough for me to just sit on the sidelines, and I want to be involved. And Mufon does contain all kinds of people. And could it be infiltrated by the government? It most certainly probably has been.

And that's no big secret because anybody can join Mufon. You know, could you get in there as a benefactor and donate a large. amount of money and influence something. Yes, you probably could. So unfortunately, Mufon is the, or fortunately, Mufon is the primary game in town if you want to investigate current UFO cases. And I just wasn't getting anything worth investigating any other way. It's a platform and it's as good or as bad as the quality of the people in the organization where you are. It's a national organization, and it's sort of like I haven't renounced my citizenship in the United States yet, you know, and I still have hope for the future, and I think there are a lot

of good people in Mufon. I also think there's some pretty shoddy people. It's a mixed bag. You're not going to get a pure organization in the field of uphology that's going to be all things to all people. it's not going to happen. I've only got so many years that I'm going to be around anyway, and I can either bemoan that fact or I can do what I can to do something positive where I am. So when all was said and done, rejoining Mufon, I think was a good decision. Now, I know some people are going to claim I betrayed my principles and all of that, and I would say, I think I made my point.

The message was clear. Like we're not going to stand for, first of all, blatant racism within an organization, which we also should mention this happens in any organization. This isn't just euphology or Mufon. This happens everywhere. No one is on the same page. Principles are different for every member involved with any organization, values, political stances, everything. You know, that's kind of the beauty of this country, but also the ugliness comes

out as well. So again, I think you're correct in saying you made your point. Now it's time to make change. And that can only come if, you know, instead of ignoring the problem, trying to change it. So I think that message is loud and clear for sure. So let's do something constructive. That's, you know, that's what I want to do. And I still want to investigate UFOs. And I still love the subject. And I want to talk about Roswell. And I want to be involved as much as I can. but I'm realistic about the limitations, maybe a little cynical. Never hurts. It never hurts to have a little bit of that. Yeah, and maybe that's sort of a good way. I know you mentioned that you wanted to talk about things that are currently going on.

Yeah, I mean, that's a big thing with this whole field is we're so stuck with these historical cases that a lot of people ask, well, what's going on now? Why don't we have these things happening now? We do. We do. And I think Muifai. is the place to go for current case reports. So what do you make of that whole argument that UFOs are kind of dead, that this is a historical subject at this point? Well, it is to a degree always going to be a historical subject because we're trying to understand a completely mysterious phenomena that is still occurring, only we have to try and put it in some kind of context, and obviously we have to turn to history to do that. I mean, I, just since I've been back, I mean, this is so classic for the UFO field.

I get this case. The gentleman is, he works for a high-tech company, highly educated man, zero background in UFOs. And he's taking a walk where he works in Vancouver, Washington, in broad daylight on a nice day. He sees a circular metallic craft come across the sky, and he's standing there watching this, and what really dumbfounds him is that it's scintillating strange colors, and he himself is also a pilot. He is a small plane pilot, and he's flown in the very same area. And he manages to take a cell phone video of the object. And so he contacts Mufon because he wants to know if anybody else has seen it.

And of course, when all is said and done, nobody else has seen it. So this is what drives you crazy with UFOs. Here I've got a highly qualified witness with no biases, no previous background in UFOs, who sees something and even photographs it and he can't possibly explain it. What are we going to do with that? How many of those cases are there? I think they're going on all the time. Absolutely.

And I mean, up until the present day, James, we have cases happening throughout the 2000s, which we haven't heard much about before this Pentagon UFO program came to the public eye. So I'd love to sort of dovetail into that here. So, you know, within the last year and a half or so, we learned that Project Blue Book was not the last time the government was involved with UFO investigations. We had this program, ATIP, it's gone under a few other acronyms as well, where the Pentagon was studying UFOs. And this was brought to our attention through the New York Times and through this new

organization to the Stars Academy. Now, this is all a huge, convoluted story, which we have covered in the past. But I want to sort of wrap things up here with your thoughts on, first the Pentagon UFO program and then to the Stars Academy. What do you make of all this having been involved with UFO studies for decades now? Well, unfortunately, you can't have a government program that isn't somehow rooted in politics. And as I recall, part of this money that was used to finance, I believe it was under the endorsement of Senator Harry Reid from Nevada. And this was, I think, intended to be a plum for Robert Bigelow.

So if you subtract out that part, whatever part that is, and you're left with this research organization, number one, it doesn't seem like a whole lot of money for a UFO research project. 22 million sounds like a lot to me, but you are correct. In terms of government funding, this is a drop in the hat at the most. And then you start subtracting out, you know, whatever was funneled to Bigelow, you know, what's left. and then I have to look at this whole thing. I have a lot of trouble with it. It looks to me if I had the one image that comes to my mind is Lucy and Charlie Brown and the football. And the football, of course, is UFO disclosure. The thing that is so weird to me is I look at the organization of the Two the Stars Academy.

And this is no secret. You can go on their website and look at the curriculum vitae of the, people that are in the organization. And it's pretty stellar. I mean, you've got like 30-year veteran CIA agent decorated. You've got people working on clearly, who have worked on clearly very classified research. And suddenly, they are now retired and they've all working together with Tom DeLong to bring about UFO disclosure. Hmm.

I see it as a scripted scene in a horror movie, and the scene goes like this. The little boy is coming home at dinner time as the sun is going down, and he comes up to the back door, and he's greeted by his mother, and he's telling his mom, mom, look who I met today while I was out. And when you look behind him, there are like some very large and extremely ominous looking wolves, kind of like wolfen, you know, the old horror movie and novel. It just looks to me, I don't necessarily think these people are sinister. I'm not saying that. They're only sinister to the point of view that I don't think they're really revealing how and why they're involved in the Two the Stars Academy.

me. They're not telling us the truth. Can you imagine what the non-disclosure agreement looks like for a 30-year CIA agent? So if this guy is out here being involved in disclosure, it's already been vetted. You know, somebody high up said, okay, do that. And they don't do that just for the fun of it. They don't do that because we're curious. They do that because there's some reason for it. And so once again, I think we're being played some way. And much as I don't necessarily like the guy, I got to give the guy kudos. Robert Schaefer, who is an arch UFO skeptic. I don't know if you've seen any of his work.

Yes, I believe he's definitely putting me to task a few times. Oh, yeah. Well aware, well respected in many ways. Yeah, we need him. We do need him in this field, no matter what anyone thinks. He did a thorough piece of detective work on the Two the Stars Academy, like actually went to the place that was listed as their office and started asking questions. And I think the financing of this whole thing is kind of, it's suspicious. Well, yeah, I mean, up until this past week, we had articles coming out saying that they're in a $37 million deficit.

Now, this is being debated by the organization saying, we're a startup company. You know, just like Amazon, you lose a lot of money before you make money or can really make any headway. So I don't know, James. The whole financial structure of this organization is so weird and convoluted. Many people have tried to break it down. But when it comes down to it, it's no doubt to me that these people are out to make money and they will use the UFO topic to do that. And maybe just maybe we'll get some interesting videos.

I know they're now looking at meta materials. Maybe we'll get some viable information onto this. But at the end of the day, it's a business. There you go. And actually, when you bring up the meta material, okay, I looked at that, if it's the one that I think of, I'm thinking of, that is exactly the same metal that Linda Moulton Howe had back in 2000.

And I was there in Newport Beach, California, with a group of researchers. I was invited to present the June story to Linda Moulton Howe. Oh, there was a whole crew. There was Jim Mars and many of the key people were in that room. I was amazed to get to meet them face to face. And Linda had a piece of that weird metal that she passed around. It was multiple layers of bismuth, metal, and magnesium. And it looked really weird when you held it in your hand.

It felt artificial to me. I mean, just looking at it like it was somebody had manufactured this, but according to her, there was no record of who had made this or why. And there was a video showing that when it was subjected to a magnetic field and to certain radio frequencies that it would float and move. Now, of course, there was no vetting on the video. I don't know when, you know, we only know what we were told. I can't tell you for certain that that video is legitimate or where it came from.

But that's what we were told then, and that was metal that was sent to her when she was working with Art Bell. And it supposedly came out of Grandpa's Box, who was at a... a military veteran who was in the southwest, who was obviously involved in the cleanup of crash retrieval debris, but there was no name assigned on the letter. The person said, I have a pension too, and I don't want to lose it. And just like, you know, many of these cases will never know the true source where it originally came from to the Star's claims they have materials from the Rendell Shum incident. How do we know? Like, we have nothing to corroborate that these materials actually came from where they say they came.

So at the end of the age, James, yeah, I'm with you on the whole material thing. Now, we had some fascinating videos come to light. You know, this, what was it, the gimbal footage, I think it's been coined. Right. The Tick-Tac incident, all very intriguing and things I, as a younger UFO researcher, had no knowledge of prior to Tom DeLong and his efforts and work. So this was all new to me, but like you said,

many of these players with To the Stars have been involved with other organizations in the past that yielded no results. So you do really have to wonder what's at stake here. They're promising us huge explosive bombshells within the next year. They promised this from the very start. But I don't know. I don't know what to do or what to make of it myself. I think you just have to, you have to always maintain your skepticism. It's my favorite prosecutor.

when he would charge a jury, he would always close by saying, ladies and gentlemen of the jury, don't leave your common sense at the door. In other words, always be clear in your own mind what evidence has some corroboration and what evidence or alleged evidence is just speculation. When you're an investigator or a researcher, you've got to know when you are to be. dealing with unverified information. That's probably my number one criticism of many people in the UFO field, is that they don't admit when things are not verified and they lose touch with reality.

They see something on the internet. It looks good. It looks sexy. It seems to point the way to some big revelation. And so they're all over it saying, oh, yeah, this has got to be it. Well, it may not be it. You know, we've all been here before. That's the reason for history, hopefully, is so you don't keep making the same mistakes over and over again.

Exactly. And that's, you know, what we have to keep in mind moving forward with a new generation of UFO investigators. So kind of closing things up here, James, if younger people who are interested in UFOs, which I've met many, if they want to get involved, where do you think they should turn to do that? I think number one you've got to be well informed you've got to be willing to read and study on your own and that means you've got to dig out some of the key historical works in euphology and there are some really really good ones any come to mind that you could really turn to right now putting me on the spot here oh no that's not a problem i thought you might ask i will tell you the one that got me going more than any other book and it came out quite a long time ago but you can still get copies of it. It came out in 1984. It was called Clear Intent. The government cover-up of the UFO experience. What does the government know about UFOs and why won't it tell us?

By Lawrence Fawcett, F-A-W-C-E-T-T and Barry J. Greenwood. Yes, yes. I have that right on my shelf looking at it as we speak. Mine is dog-eared, highlighted. It's a mess. as it should be. It's a wonderful book because it's based on actual documents. And that book will give you a broad view of the UFO field. It was also published a second time under another title called The UFO Cover Up. Another book, if you can get it, it's hard to get. It's called The Missing Times by Terry Hansen.

He lived up here on Bainbridge Island and died of a heart attack several years ago. The missing times is the history of news media complicity in the UFO cover-up. Fascinating book. Then I would say, if you want to look at the way things are right now, there is one man out there. He's still heavily involved, an extreme hard worker, one of the most level-headed and thorough researchers in this entire field. I cannot say enough about him. His name is David Marler. And his book,

Triangular UFOs, An Estimate of the Situation, I believe is an absolute must for anybody who wants to say that they are seriously in touch with the UFO phenomena. And I would say, then, of course,

if you really want to go down the rabbit hole, I would do UFOs and nukes by Robert Hastings, which is the defendant, incredibly intricate relationship between high-quality UFO sightings and all things nuclear. They go together like coffee and cream. And then, of course, Richard Dolan is another individual I have a huge amount of respect for. And if you wanted to wet your whistle and you just wanted to start, I would pick an older book.

I often thought when I first got involved in this, if I was going to teach a class in UFOs, I would use Jim Mars book called Alien Agenda. I think that was one of the first UFO books I ever got my hands on as a 13-year-old. Yeah, really well-organized, really straightforward presentation definitely makes the case. Leslie Keen's book on UFOs, generals, pilots, and government officials go on the record. See, if you ask me a question about what UFO books do I really like, I like, I like documents and testimony. I like meat on my bun.

I don't want to be like that old hamburger commercial where you have the two elderly ladies who open the bun up and they say, where's the beef? You know, I want a little evidence with my UFOs and aliens. Yep, some ketchup, maybe some cheese. Let's get this going old barbecue style. Yes. I love that, Jeeves.

Well, you know, wrap in things. things up here. Is there anything pivotal right now that you're working on, cases, anything you're willing to talk about before we leave here? Not really, to be perfectly honest. I just went through a major move and a serious health crisis, and we're getting reestablished. Everything is going along wonderfully and I'm looking forward to the future. Good. Well, obviously my thoughts and prayers of some higher power are with you with all of that. We all have to deal with personal issues beyond the UFO field as well. So, yeah, that's for sure.

Well, where can we find out more about what you're up to, James? Well, I do have, I'm pretty active on Facebook. I would also invite people to go to James Clarkson UFO.com. I have two email addresses. UFO reality, all one word, at comcast. Or UFO detective at hushmail.com. Perfect. Well, James, I can't thank you enough for coming on today.

You know, this has been an interview I've been wanting to do. since I started somewhere in the skies. And after meeting you in person, I knew you were one of the good people out there fighting the good fight, looking for, like we said, that beef in the burger. That's right. It was such an honor to get you on to talk about June Crane, Roswell, the future of ephology.

And just with this conversation alone, it shows me that the future is bright. So again, my friend, thank you so much for coming on. Thank you, Ryan, sincerely, for the work you're doing, too. That's it for this week's episode, again, to check out all of James Clarkson's work, visit James Clarkson, UFO.com. Please take a few moments to subscribe, rate, and review somewhere in the skies on iTunes and Apple Podcasts. Even if you don't use this platform to listen, it remains the largest podcast outlet

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visit the official website, Somewhere in the skies.com. Just a warning, I'll be gone next week for AlienCon in Baltimore. And I'm not exactly sure what's going to happen with next week's show. I'll be extremely busy all weekend. Hopefully I'll have a show. We'll have to see. But either way, just know you'll be getting some awesome content live during the event, and certainly after.

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