Editing UFO Crash at Aztec (Full Text)/CHAPTER (section)

===ALASKAN THEATER ===


Within six months of the Roswell crash on 2 July 1947 and the find- 
ing.of another crashed UFO at San Augustine Flats near Magdalena, New 
Mexico on 3 July 1947, a great deal of reorganization of agencies and 
sudden shuffling of people took place, as we have now seen. Some of 
the observable things that were happening at that time, that didn't 
seem to make much sense then, now fit perfectly into the scenario now 
visible from a broader perspective. 

In September 1947 Captain Wendelle C. Stevens, a young test pilot in 
the Performance Test Division, with a desk in the Air Technical Intel- 
ligence Center, was suddenly rotated, out of specialty, to a remote 
station, an Army Airfield at Fort Richardson, Alaska, where he was one 
of the two Air Force Officers assigned to Base Operations. The other 
was Major Charles W. Moss, an Air Operations Specialist. Stevens became 
the Assistant Operations Officer with no prior training in that field. 

Stevens soon discovered that his principal duty was operational sup- 
ervision of a special team of scientists and NCO specialists from Air 
Material Command who were engaged in a special project that was known 
only by a TWX number. ‘his project was one of the classified riders 
on the unclassified "Ptarmigon Project", a weather reconnaissance pro- 
gram surveying and mapping the Arctic in several different ways simil- 
taneously. 

Another classified rider project provided mich of the funding for 
what was going on. The weather reconnaissance missions were flown by 
combat ready B-29 crews from the combat ready squadrons in the Zone of 
Interior, back home. The combat ready crews arrived in Alaska fully 
trained and qualified in their defense mission, bringing their actual 
Target Folders with them. When they arrived their airplanes were put 
through a winterization program and the crews were run through the 
Arctic Survival School. Then they were helped to plot a "profile mis- 
sion" to be flown against their real target, with simulated legs and 
ranges over the true Arctic, as real as they could be made. After fly- 
ing their profile mission they were briefed to fly a preassigned grid 
pattern with certain equipment turned on to carry out the mapping, 
surveying and other reconnaissance projects. The Strategic Air Command 
provided the airplanes and crews, and paid for gasoline and consumable 
support out of their Operations and Training budget, and called these 
flights training missions. The Weather Service provided the special 
mapping and surveying equipment, equipment supplies, and reconnais- 
sance processing, out of a weather research project paid for by the 
Weather Service, and they called them research missions. Air Material 
Command set up the modification depot for Arctic winterization of the 


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aircraft, and they called it upgrading of the fleet, picking up that 
part of the tab, and justifying the big cold weather hangars and the 
store of modification equipment and supplies collected there. They 
paid for that out of their fleet upgrading budget. The Signal Corps 
handled all special communications requirements in a research project 
of their own. In this manner no big expenses stuck out to attract any 
attention. It was all absorbed in other very normal things. 

One of the highly classified rider projects pertained to what that 
team of scientists from AMC were doing. They would install special 
classified equipment aboard the aircraft only a few hours before the 
scheduled mission. This consisted of electromagnetic emission scanners 
which searched the RF spectrum and when an emission on any frequency 
was detected, it would lock-in on it and record it for a time, and 
then it would cancel that one and search again, continuously through- 
out the 14 and 15 hour missions. Other equipment included a surge de- 
tector wired into the airplane's electrical system to pick up and re- 
cord any electrical surges or blackouts anywhere in the ship. Then 
there were special cameras and a magnetics field detector. The cameras 
included 16m movie cameras in fixed installations rigged for time 
lapse programs, and portable |6mm versions for hand held use, a 35mm 
movie camera, and even a 70m movie camera. The still cameras included 
35mm snapshot versions, 4x5" Press Cameras, and a Fairchild K-20 
aerial camera that took a picture on an 8"xl0" negative. Then there 
were the vertical and side-mounted aerial mapping cameras with which 
every inch of the Arctic was photographed. Besides that the regular 
gun positions had their turret mounted gun cameras. 

Those crews were briefed on what they had aboard and how to use it 
and sent out. When they came back they were immediately de-briefed on 
what they did and saw, and what they thought they had recorded. ‘The 
film rolls, cartridges and canisters and recording tape cassettes and 
reels were down loaded and the equipment was removed from the bombers 
and locked up for the next one. The record in the form of film and 
tape was packed in a metal box after every day's missions, which was 
padlocked to an Officer's wrist and flown back to the ZI every night. 

The field crew in Alaska never got to see anything of the recorded 
data or pictures, and only knew what was mentioned in the verbal de- 
briefing of the crews after the missions. But what was occasionally 
heard was of interest here. 

Those Ptarmigon crews reported encountering disc-shaped metallic 
craft in Arctic airspace that could fly faster than anything we had 
and could stop suddenly in the air, or were seen to come in head-on, 
stop, and reverse to exactly the speed the bomber was flying. They 
could descend vertically and land on the icecap, and rise vertically 
at prodigious speed and fly out of sight in seconds. They could even 


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land on water and submerge, and emerge again and fly away. Somebody 
had certainly achieved some remarkable breakthroughs in the aeronaut— 
ical sciences. Major Moss, who did not come out of AMC and had an op- 
erations background, could only believe they were new Russian develop- 
ments, obtained possibly from the Germans. Stevens was certain that 
they exceeded the technologies he was familiar with. The strange fly- 
ing machines were a mystery to both, but it is quite obvious now that 
they were no mystery to the special team of scientists putting that 
equipment aboard the bombers to collect data; and somebody knew what 
equipment they needed to do the job. This was no wild guessing there. 

All of this was planned and operational before the Kenneth Arnold 
story hit the press and flying saucers became popular. 

Only a few weeks after Stevens assignment, General Nathan F. Twining 
became the theater commander, taking over all that operation directly. 
We can only guess as to why such emphasis was shifted north to the 
Arctic, and our guess is that more approaches to Earth were being ob- 
served up there than any other place then known, and that became the 
place to look. 

We are also quite convinced that we were not the only ones observing 
this activity in the Arctic, and that the race for more information 
than the other was getting was very serious indeed. 

One may question, why Alaska? Why go up there when these first UFO 
crashes took place in the Zone of Interior? Though we can make no 
claims to having answers, a number of interesting speculations come to 
mind: 

1. Radar may have detected unusual activity or a greater degree of 
penetration into the Earth's atmosphere from the Arctic. 

2. The DEW and Pinetree radar picket lines were often disturbed by 
“bogies" that have never been identified. 

3. Our biggest potential threat comes from over the Arctic, the rea- 
son for the radar picket lines. 

4. If we suddenly needed a scapegoat for a diversion, the potential 
enemy threat from the north can be effectively used. 

5. There are less pairs of eyes to observe what we are doing. 

6. Canada, and even the USSR were experiencing unusual UFO activity 

from the north -- and of course that is us to the Russians. 

7. There is less ambient interferrence in the collection of radio, 
electrical, and magnetic data produced by artificial sources. 

8. The remoteness reduces more of the potential for false disturban- 
ces of instruments and equipment. 

9. The data collectors are isolated from their friends and families 
while collecting, and can be suitably rebriefed before they get home. 


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