- Note - Frank Batts appeared on Jeff's
show on 8-7-97 just a few months after his remarkable sighting near Area
51. The program is available in our RealAudio Archives.
-
-
- The sighting of a flying disk rising
out of the Nevada desert approximately seven miles from Nellis Air Force
Base's supersecret Area 51 aircraft testing facility could be the result
of a research and development effort inaugurated by the Air Force in 1955.
-
- Frank Batts, who works as Administrative
Coordinator for AIDS Project Central Coast in Santa Barbara, California,
took a trip to the Nellis AFB area the evening of April 30-31, 1997, in
the company of his friend Joe.
-
- Batts presents no documentary proof of
what he saw. His camcorder went dead on him as he tried to film the occurrences
he and his friend saw. He doesn't have any parts that fell off the craft.
He has presented no government documents that would tend to confirm or
deny the craft was one of ours or alien in nature. All he has is the story
that arose from a UFO watching expedition he and his friend took to Nellis
AFB in Nevada in 1997.
-
- But if his story is valid, what it could
confirm is that the proposed Project Silver Bug of 1955 may well have come
to fruition in flights through the night skies of Nevada.
-
- Batts and his friend planned to head
for the normal area that UFO hunters go to in the Nellis area--the general
vicinity of what is known as ``The Black Mailbox,'' which sits alongside
Highway 375 approximately 20 miles southwest of Rachel, Nev.
-
- The actual viewing area in the Mailbox
area lies some eight miles from the main highway on dirt roads, and UFO
enthusiasts normally camp out in that area some 15 or 20 miles from the
base proper. They also run into things like the main fence to the base
which features signs with the message about the use of deadly force being
authorized to keep interlopers off the base. Armed security personnel,
long distance observation via binoculars by the security guards, hill-mounted
security cameras and other security features are also things the UFO watchers
run across during their nightly forays to the perimeter of Nellis.
-
- They also manage to see mysterious flying
lights on some of those forays, performing aeronautical feats that normal
aircraft simply can't do. The flying lights do abrupt maneuvers, very rapid
accelerations and decelerations, and sometimes the lights pulse as the
apparent flying machines go through their nightly maneuvers.
-
- Frank Batts and his friend Joe had seen
video tapes of some of the airborne antics over Nellis and wanted to have
a look for themselves in person.
-
- They arrived in Rachel at 10 p.m. April
30, 1997, and got directions on how to get to the mailbox area, and were
on their way by 10:20 p.m.
-
- The problem was, Batts and his friend
got their directions confused and went in completely the wrong direction.
That put them on the north side of Nellis AFB instead of the south side,
consequently allowing them to stumble across evidence that Project Silver
Bug which began in 1955 might have gone beyond what it was designed to
do.
-
- What Project Silver Bug was set to begin
work on in 1955 was the research and development project to field jet propelled
flying saucers which could be dispersed underground in an attempt to get
away from the air bases of the day which featured long runways. The jet-propelled
disks were to be capable of vertical takeoffs and landings, and would be
capable of Mach 3.48--faster than the SR-71 Blackbird.
-
- What Batts and his buddy Joe saw at a
range of approximately 200 yards in 1977 was a 200-foot diameter flying
disk rising out of the ground of the desert with a bright light on its
belly and flashing sequential lights at its center. It was silver in color
and Batts says there is no way it could have been a case of mistaken identity
through swamp gas or a multitude of other common UFO debunking postulations
put forward by debunkers.
-
- The Report on Project Silver Bug, dated
Feb. 15, 1955, and declassified on March 29, 1995, proposed the development
of such a disk-shaped interceptor aircraft.
-
- The proposed craft would be capable of
vertical takeoff and landing; a maximum level speed of 2,300 mph with reheat
(afterburners); a ceiling of 80,600 feet; and a climb rate of 1.76 minutes
to 36,090 feet.
-
- Those performance figures were very advanced
for 1955, and are not too shabby today. Top speeds of American fighter-
interceptor aircraft of 1955 were around 1,000 mph, and they had a lower
ceiling than what the disk would have.
-
- But the big thing as far as the Air Force
was concerned was the potential such flying disks had for being dispersed
in underground facilities.
-
- The Report on Project Silver Bug was
issued by the Air Technical Intelligence Center along with the Wright Air
Development Center at Wright-Patterson AFB in Dayton, Ohio.
-
- While the Silver Bug project has been
officially claimed to have resulted in the ill-fated Avro Car, which turned
into perhaps the world's first air cushion vehicle instead of a supersonic
interceptor disk, UFO researchers have long questioned whether the project
actually came to a sudden stop with development of the Avro Car, which
was a flop at flight.
-
- Recent enquiries to the Public Information
Office at Wright-Patterson prior to Batts' account garnered the response
that no further information on the Silver Bug project has been declassified
at this time.
-
- That is not quite the same as an outright
denial that Project Silver Bug actually came up with a workable prototype
craft, or an operation disk-shaped interceptor. Nor does it rule out whether
or not the project originally resulted in a flop at first with continued
research into makinworkable prototype craft, or an
-
- The Silver Bug report noted that a pair
of ongoing U.S. projects involving the building of flying saucers had already
occurred, after a discussion of the perceived need to get away from long,
vulnerable runways was addressed briefly.
-
- The report noted that vertical takeoff
craft were the way to get around the vulnerability of conventional air
bases but ``tail sitter'' types of aircraft, equipped with turboprop engines,
were found to lack the ability to join VTO and landing abilities with the
high performance of a fighter aircraft.
-
- The report was more enamored of a proposed
classic flying disk aircraft, which exhibited performance characteristics
that were greatly advanced even by current standards.
-
- The largest of the proposed disks weighed
26,000 pounds, was powered by a radically new type of jet engine, and could
climb to 36,090 feet in approximately one minute and 45 seconds. This is
in the performance range of the current F- 15 fighter the Air Force uses,
and was attributed to a machine in 1955, some 20 years prior to the F-15's
first flight.
-
- But the Silver Bug report was not the
only publication in 1955 that contained information relating to the development
of flying saucers by the federal government.
-
- Look Magazine, in June 1955, said in
an article that persistent and fairly credible accounts claimed that A.V.
Roe, Canada, Ltd., a Canadian aircraft manufacturer, had a saucer design
under development since 1953. It had been abandoned since the cost factor
was too high for the Canadians--over $75 million to get a prototype model
into the air.
-
- That 1955 issue of Look also noted that
at a meeting of engineers it was indicated that while flying saucer or
sphere projects might have been purely hypothetical then, new air defense
problems were setting up requirements for aircraft performance which would
apparently be best met by a saucer aircraft.
-
- Brig. Gen. Benjamin Kelsey, deputy director
of research and development for the Air Force, was quoted as saying that
``Airplanes today spend too much time gathering speed on the ground and
not enough time flying in the air.''
-
- The fighters of that time, Kelsey said,
needed extremely long runways and there were few in existence then that
were long enough.
-
- Those few, he said, and the concentration
of planes using them, provided a worthwhile target for an A-bomb. With
one blow, the enemy might cripple a substantial portion of the American
air defense.
-
- Vertical takeoff planes would not need
long runways, he said, and could be dispersed widely and safely. Future
airports built for vertically rising flying saucers would have no need
of the many vulnerable runways the fighters of 1955 (and of today) require.
The complete operation could go underground, the Look article noted, with
tunnels with takeoff shafts set in the ground, complete with maintenance
bays, fuel, and crew quarters.
-
- Those underground bases, the article
said, would be bombproof shelters for a saucer squadron. The shafts would
be sealed after takeoff for camouflage and protection.
-
- The Look article also detailed what some
of the requirements of an ideal defense fighter would be. Those attributes
would be the ability to take off and land vertically; a high speed of over
Mach 2 (more than 1,500 mph); high rate of climb; excellent maneuverability;
heavy armament; and the ability to operate at 60,000 feet.
-
- It should be noted that the one disk
craft noted in the Silver Bug report met and exceeded all of the criteria
listed in the Look Magazine report.
-
- But Look's report also noted that such
a disk-shaped craft might include a one-man crew, housed in a glass bubble
that would provide excellent visibility. The prone position of the pilot
would not only allow improved streamlining, but also enables (original
wording) the pilot to withstand high accelerations and quick turns.
-
- There were some American disk-shaped
craft that were developed publicly, namely the Flying Flapjack and/or The
Flying Flounder, which did not come to operational use.
-
- Avro-Canada, meanwhile, was reported
to be working in 1953 by the Toronto Star to be working on a new flying
saucer at their plant in Malton, Ontario.
-
- On Feb. 16, 1953, the Minister for Defense
Production informed the Canadian House of Commons that Avro was working
on a ``mock-up model'' of a flying saucer which would be capable of flying
at 1,500 miles per hour and climbing vertically.
-
- The president of Avro-Canada also wrote
in ``Avro News'' that the prototype being built was so revolutionary that
it would make all other forms of supersonic aircraft obsolete. The new
plane's official name was the Avro Car.
-
- By 1960 it was being claimed officially
that the design had been dropped, and the so-called prototype of the Avro
flying saucer is reported to be housed in the U.S. Air Force Museum in
Fort Eustis, Virginia.
-
- A number of German aeronautical engineers
were reputedly brought to the United States after World War II to continue
their work on VTO flying disks which had originated as a Luftwaffe research
and development project, Popular Mechanics said in its August 1997 edition.
-
- The Germans, in the closing days of World
War II, had one big aeronautical problem--their airfields were under constant
Allied aerial attack which kept what fighters they had left from being
an effective deterrent against American and British heavy bomber raids
on German industrial targets.
-
- U.S. Army intelligence officers combed
Europe for two brothers called Walter and Reimar Horten following the war,
certain U.S. government files say. The brothers were trained as pilots
and engineers, and reputedly had close connections to the Reich's high
command.
-
- The two brothers were believed to have
persuaded German leaders to construct a fleet of saucer-shaped bombers,
a Popular Mechanics story in August 1997 said. U.S. military historians
acknowledge the Horten brothers built and flew prototypes of circular and
flying wing aircraft, the PM story said, but the historians also discount
the craft as aeronautical curiosities with no military value.
-
- A service-wide request for information
about the two brothers showed the two men had already been found, PM's
report said. They had already been released by the UK for exploitation
and allocated to the United States on Nov. 15, 1946, via Operation Paperclip.
-
- Operation Paperclip was the American
program that put a lot of German scientists and engineers on the U.S. payroll
following World War II. These included Werner Von Braun and some of his
associates, who were ultimately responsible for building the American ICBM
force and space program rocket boosters.
-
- But the existence of Paperclip was not
released publicly until Americans first set foot on the moon, due to the
fact that the laboratories at which many of the former German scientists
had worked were also Nazi slave labor and death camps. Apparently negative
public reaction was the reason the news was kept secret until the space
program resulted in a record-breaking moon landing.
-
- The Horten brothers, according to PM
and the files it got, had been working on a design for a new generation
of circular VTO craft just prior to their capture--with specifications
much like those described in the Report on Project Silver Bug.
-
- Other records, PM said, show that models
of the Hortens' design, possibly constructed by the brothers themselves,
were tested in the wind tunnel at Wright Field, now Wright- Patterson AFB.
-
- While the Air Force acknowledges the
Hortens were working on a flying disk craft, PM said, the AF also says
it was inherently unstable.
-
- Other declassified records gained by
PM in the course of its investigation, the magazine article said, suggest
the Avro Car built for the Army and a deteriorating plywood Horten flying
wing were both shills intended to disguise the existence of more formidable
flying machines.
-
- One of the more potent of those flying
machines, the PM report said, was developed under the secret Project Pye
Wacket. Its object was to design a five foot diameter liquid fueled missile
launch platform to protect American bombers penetrating Soviet airspace.
-
- Samisdat Publications, a right-wing organization
based in Toronto, Canada, has said that the Nazis did in fact develop the
Flugelrad, or ``Wingwheel,'' a saucer-helicopter which could take off vertically.
One of the scientists involved with the early Nazi saucer projects was
identified by Victor Schauberger by Samisdat.
-
- Schauberger was brought to America after
the war, where he was rumored to be working on a top secret flying disk
project in Texas for the U.S. government until his death in 1958.
-
- Some reports maintain that some prototypes
the government is now developing are as advanced in propulsion and other
areas over the Schauberger models as the space shuttle is over the biplane.
-
- Some of his prototypes include things
like the Model I, the most conventional design by today's concepts, which
used a standard German Walther rocket engine and was steered by a rudder.
-
- Model II, an improvement over Model I,
had a specially designed ``rotary wing'' which stabilized and steered the
craft. This model was more manuverable and faster.
-
- Model III was supposedly extremely fast,
capable of attaining speeds over 6,000 kilometers per hour and using a
jet vacuum propulsion system. The fuel mixture produced vapor trails, an
acrid smell, and sometimes flames and sparks. The saucer's propulsion system
produced high pitched, whining sounds. The craft was also capable of terrific
acceleration, or steady hover. It could also climb and bank steeply and
often startled observers with loud sonic booms as it accelerated through
the sound barrier. This model was reportedly equipped with telescopic landing
gear.
-
- Successors of the Model III, still in
the planning stages during the middle 1940s, were said to utilize the Earth's
magnetic field in their propulsion systems.
-
- And there is also one home-grown American
scientist who apparently had some input into the U.S. government's flying
saucer project--T. Townsend Brown, and his Project Winterhaven.
-
- Brown was an American physicist, who
was heavily involved in electrogravitics research. In the middle 1920s,
he discovered it is possible to create an artificial gravity field by charging
an electrical capacitor to high voltage.
-
- By 1958, he had managed to work his way
to the point where he had succeeded in developing a 15-inch diameter model
saucer that could lift over 110 percent of its weight. What his experiments
had inaugurated was the new field of electrogravitics, or the technology
of controlling gravity through the use of very high voltage electric charges.
-
- By 1952, Brown gave a demonstration to
a Air Force major general in which Brown flew a pair of 18-inch disc airfoils
suspended from opposite ends of a rotatable arm. The discs were electrified
with 50,000 volts and circuited at a speed of 12 miles per hour.
-
- Approximately one year later, he flew
a set of three- foot diameter saucers for Air Force officials and representatives
from several major aircraft companies.
-
- These discs were energized with 150,000
volts, and sped around the 50-foot diameter course so fast that the subject
was immediately classified. A report by ``Interavia'' magazine noted that
the discs would attain speeds of several hundred miles per hour when charged
with several hundred thousand volts.
-
- The secret to Brown's discs was that
they were charged with a high positive voltage, via a wire, running along
their leading edge. A high negative voltage ran along their trailing edge,
also on a wire. As the wires ionized the air around them, a study by Paul
A. LaViolette said, a dense cloud of positive ions would form ahead of
the craft and a corresponding cloud of negative ions would form behind
the craft.
-
- LaViolette said that Brown's research
showed that, like the charged plates of his capacitors, these ion clouds
induced a gravitational force directed in the minus to plus direction.
In short, a gravitational well formed ahead of the disc which pulled the
craft, while a gravitational hill formed behind the craft and pushed it.
As the disc moved forward in response to its self-generated gravity field,
it would carry with it its positive and negative ion clouds and their associated
electrogravity gradient. The discs in effect would ride their advancing
gravity wave much like surfers ride an ocean wave, LaViolette said.
-
- The occupants of one of the saucers,
if there were occupants, would feel no stress at all no matter how sharp
the turn or how great the acceleration, LaViolette said. This was because
the ship and is occupants and the load are all responding equally to the
wavelike distortion of the local grsharp the turn or h
-
- Brown by 1952 had put together a proposal,
code named ``Project Winterhaven,'' LaViolette said, which suggested that
the military develop an antigravity combat saucer with Mach 3 capability.
As early as 1954, according to a report prepared by the private aviation
intelligence firm Aviation Studies International Ltd., the Air Force had
begun plans to fund research that would accomplish Project Winterhaven's
objectives.
-
- That report, issued in 1956 and called
``Electrogravitic Systems: An Explanation of Electrostatic Motion, Dynamic
Counterbary and Barycentric Control,'' was originally classified as ``confidential.''
That report mentioned the names of more than 10 major aircraft companies
which were actively involved in the electrogravitics research in an attempt
to duplicate or extend Brown's work.
-
- Since that time, LaViolette said, much
of the work in electro-antigravity has proceeded in Air Force black projects
on a fairly large scale.
-
- LaViolette's study, known as ``The U.S.
Antigravity Squadron,'' has as its main contention that the Air Force is
using Brown's antigravity ideas to help the B-2 bomber operate.
-
- He says the B-2 accomplishes using high
amounts of electric charges on its leading and trailing edges through the
same method Brown described in his electrokinetic generator patent.
-
- The saucer craft Brown proposed was to
be powered by a flame-jet generator, a high-voltage power supply that had
the advantage of being both efficient and relatively lightweight, LaViolette
said.
-
- That generator design, he said, uses
a jet engine with an electrified needle mounted in the exhaust nozzle to
produce negative ions in the jet's exhaust stream. The negatively ionized
exhaust is then discharged through a number of nozzles at the rear of the
craft. By electrically insulating the engines and conveying their positive
charges forward to a wire running along the plane's leading edge, the required
positively charged ion cloud is built up at the front of the vehicle. Brown,
LaViolette said, estimated that such a generator could produce potentials
as high as 15 million volts across his craft.
-
- Whether or not Project Silver Bug ever
resulted in a prototype or operational jet-propelled flying saucer is publicly
unknown, given the fact that cutting-edge military development projects
are normally cloaked in tight security.
-
- Even the money trail which would normally
lead to the existence of top-secret or higher R&D projects is often
a closed door. Military aircraft and weapon systems developers normally
hide the funding for those projects in other projects, keeping sharp-eyed
researchers from finding R&D projects hidden in the federal budget.
-
- Various UFO researchers have long been
intrigued by the role the Air Technical Intelligence Center at Wright-
Patterson AFB has played in various projects like Silver Bug. ATIC has
since 1955 been known as the Foreign Technology Division, and is currently
called the National Air Intelligence Center.
-
- Over the years, despite the name, ATIC
has been rumored in UFO circles to be the place where the debris from the
alleged Roswell, NM, crash of an alien flying saucer was taken for study.
-
- ATIC was also the parent Air Force unit
for Project Blue Book, which for several years was the official study center
for unidentified flying objects.
-
- And, recently, Air Force spokespersons
at Wright- Patterson have said there are no other declassified reports
other than the Report on Project Silver Bug relating to that particular
research and development project.
-
- This was not a denial that other reports
had been issued about the Silver Bug project, merely a denial that there
were other declassified reports available to the public on Project No.
9961.
-
- With no further available declassified
reports, whatever Project Silver Bug finally arrived at remains as hidden
as an underground interceptor craft installation. Or at least there was
no information about any disk-shaped craft being tested by the U.S. Air
Force ... until Frank Batts and his buddy got their directions wrong in
1997 and wound up on the wrong side of Nellis AFB.
-
- Although Batts says the disk was lit
up to a great degree in the wee small hours of the morning, he said nothing
about it having a flashing neon sign on its side saying ``This is the result
of Project Silver Bug.''
-
- He also did not mention any sound of
jet engines, though he said the disk shaped craft was as big as a 727 passenger
airliner. But he did mention that his camcorder did not work during the
time he and Joe saw the craft, although it worked fine in Rachel earlier
that night and worked fine the next day.
-
- ``We saw red and yellow lights on the
ground out in the desert by around the 19 mile marker,'' Batts said. ``We
never found the mailbox but went back to where we saw the lights. They
seemed much closer and bigger than any shots of the base I had ever seen
on films.
-
- ``We parked on the side of the road by
the Rachel 20 miles sign, and waited,'' Batts said. ``After about an hour,
we saw a blue `ball' appear above the mountain ride and hover. After about
one minute it began hopping in a patter that looked like the letter `n.'
It did this twice and did some other left-to-right and right-to-left maneuvers.
The whole thing seemed to last about two minutes, but I was excited and
blown out. Then the blue light lowered behind the ridge.
-
- '' Batts noted that he found out later
that the point he and his buddy stopped at was only about seven miles from
Nellis AFB as opposed to the 15 or 20 miles distance to the base on the
opposite side of the installation, where the UFO buffs normally congregate.
Where he and Joe were at is known as the ``Back Door'' of the installation,
which had been used at times for flight testing but had reportedly been
shut down for that purpose in the time immediately preceding the sighting,
according to local persons and UFO watchers.
-
- After the blue ball vanished behind the
ridgeline there were still red, yellow, white and blue lights out in the
desert that Batts and Joe thought was actually the air base but wasn't.
Sometimes the red lights flashed like a revolving light, Batts said, and
sometimes the red lights were constant. The yellow lights were constant,
and the two men assumed they were observing activity on the base and the
red lights announced the impending testing of a different craft.
-
- ``After about an hour and a half, I was
watching (what we thought was) the base and it suddenly lifted off the
ground, hovering,'' Batts said. ``The white light reflected off the desert
floor and the starlight above suddenly revealed the perfect shape of a
very large silver saucer--the curved saucers on top and bottom with the
middle being a bank of lights.
-
- ``This thing was huge. I don't know sizes,
but it was really big--maybe about 200 feet across. We watched it do side-to-side
hovering maneuvers from left to right, right to left and up and down for
over an hour and fifteen minutes,'' he said.
-
- It was then that he discovered his camcorder
was not working, despite it having worked earlier in the day in Rachel
and it regaining its ability to operate later back at the sighting spot
when they returned to confirm the terrain they had observed in the dark
of night.
-
- The car they had been riding in had been
parked on the shoulder of the road so that it faced out into the desert,
and the sighting was actually at about 175 to 200 yards when the saucer
lifted off, Batts said.
-
- He noted that he originally thought the
disk shaped craft was a building due to the white light underneath it,
but when the lights across the middle of the structure came on constant
again he slowly realized that
-
- what he saw was lifting slowly into the
air and it was no building.
-
- ``It moved up quite a bit and I realized
the white light was attached to the rest of this `building' and suddenly
the ground under the `building' lit up from the white light, reflecting
up on the underside of the `building' and illuminating it quite clearly,''
Batts said.
-
- ``It was at that moment I realized the
curved bottom of the `building' and its silver coloring, and its enormous
size and close proximity,'' Batts said. ``The band of orange lights broke
up into alternating red and orange and began a series of patterns, which
lit the top half of the saucer up enough to see the curved top.
-
- ``The patterns were all red lights moving
left to right, right to left, alternating red and blank spaces, then all
orange lights doing the patterns, then a mix of red and orange and blank
spaces doing the patterns,'' Batts said.
-
- ``It was quite spectacular and sent both
of us into shock, literally gaping openmouthed and blown out literally,''
Batts said. ``Joe retreated into the corner of the car and I just sat there
unable to do anything for about five minutes. I asked Joe to tell me what
he was seeing and he wouldn't respond at all. I gave up after five or six
tries.
-
- ``Then I got out of the car and started
walking out into the pitch black desert to see if I could get under it,''
Batts said. ``My camera would not work and I began to notice an unbelievable
fear paralyzing me until I could not take another step. My body absolutely
would not respond to my thinking or will. I could move back, but not forward,
almost like there was an invisible energy wall there I could not pass.
-
- ``I ran back to the car but did not get
in, I just stayed outside watching this thing for another 45 minutes as
it moved fluidly from left to right, up and down and forward and back,''
Batts said. ``It eventually slowly went back and back and back and finally
disappeared over a faraway mountain range.''
-
- Batts said he did not attempt to start
the car the two men were in while they were observing the flying disk,
but tried the radio during the sighting and it only whined with high pitched
noises on a dialing point where a radio station had come in before and
after the sighting.
-
- After about an hour and 15 minutes, Batts
said, a mist o fog was rising off the desert floor and began to obscure
their vision, so they gave up on any further sightings and left.
-
- Batts said that he and Joe were really
excited on seeing that blue ball over the mountains, but it only deepened
when what they thought was a building started rising slowly off the ground
and revealed itself to be a disk shaped flying craft that lit up like some
of the spacecraft in ``Close Encounters Of The Third Kind.''
-
- Batts said he was really upset after
the entire episode, and this led to further information when the two men
stopped at The Little A'Le'Inn in Rachel, which is a landmark were many
UFO watchers gather.
-
- The morning after their sighting the
two men stopped at that meeting place in Rachel for breakfast. Batts said
he asked Pat Travis of that establishment if there was anybody there who
had sightings he could talk to since he was very shaken up by the event.
-
- Batts said she had a guy who has vacationed
in the area every three months for several years and who had many sightings
go to the inn to talk to him. That man, Batts said, told him that in all
his years and many many experiences he had never seen anything near as
close as Batts and Joe did.
-
- That man, whom Batts identified only
as Bob, told him that the area he and Joe were at is known locally as ``The
Back Door,'' and occasionally had been used for aircraft testing. But Bob
also expressed surprise they had come across their experience there since
there had not been activity there for several months, and the Air Force
must have resumed testing there.
-
- It was when Bob told him that the area
was known as The Back Door that it became apparent the directions had been
misunderstood, Batts said, and they had gone in the complete wrong direction
of how to get to the mailbox.
-
- Batts also described their coming across
their sighting as a ``fluke,'' due to the mixup in directions.
-
- The sighting does mean several things
to Batts, in addition to what he describes as being extremely upset and
excited by seeing the craft in the first place.
-
- One big thing it means to Batts is that
he really doesn't think the official Air Force explanation of the supposed
UFO crash at Roswell, NM, being explainable by a test dummy parachute test
is the truth. He figures he saw his sighting with his own eyes.
-
- ``I saw unmistakably a saucer WITH MY
OWN EYES,'' Batts said. ``It has been a really upsetting experience, which
surprises me. I thought I was so cool, and that it would be so cool. The
reality totally topples the order of beliefs and leaves one confused and
vulnerable. I ended up a crybaby, but I have gotten through it and I'm
definitely going back.''
-
- This past July 17 and 18 he did go back,
and said that on that trip he realized the place where the sighting had
taken place was less than a quarter of a mile away from the road.
-
- ``I am positive we fluked on one that
broke down outside the base perimeters and they had repaired it, and were
trying to get it back to the base without crashing it,'' he said.
-
- ``And yes, this time we saw stuff again.
Not at the Back Door ... nothing there at all. But at the `Mailbox' vantage
point I saw a red one and two white ones going through their paces above
the mountain ridges and then disappearing behind them to the Groom Lake
area ... the normal sightings stuff,'' he said.
-
- Batts also noted that ``As I have come
to understand, especially if what I saw with my own eyes was not one of
`ours,' then we should be in utmost concern that this thing flew uninterrupted
and unchallenged into the area of one of our nation's most top secret Air
Force bases.''
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- ______
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- This article was produced by George Belanus,
researcher from Bridgeport, Ohio. Belanus has been a part-time writer
and reporter for several newspapers including The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.
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