All Episodes
Previous Next
Feb. 2, 2022 - The Unexplained - Howard Hughes
55:55
Edition 608 - Levelland - Kevin Randle

Prolific author and investigator Kevin Randle - ex USAF - on the "Levelland" UFO incident of 1957 and a number of related incidents where "strange craft" seemed to produce electro-mechanical effects.... Why was much of this information not properly recorded or covered up?

| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
Across the UK, across continental North America, and around the world on the internet, by webcast and by podcast, my name is Howard Hughes and this is The Unexplained.
Thank you very much for being part of my show and my world.
Thank you for the lovely emails that have come in recently.
And if you've made a donation to the online version of this show, thank you very, very much.
There have been some very, very kind people since Christmas who've made donations.
If you would like to, then please go to the website, theunexplained.tv.
Follow the link and you can do that from there.
And the website, of course, designed and created and maintained and kept going by Adam from Creative Hotspot in Liverpool.
If you want to send me an email, you can always go to my website as well.
Follow the link on the website, theunexplained.tv, and that'll get straight through to me.
And if your email requires a response, I'm a bit slow at the moment with it all.
It's an avalanche of guest booking and all kinds of stuff at the moment, but I will get back to you.
And if I haven't yet, then get back to me and remind me.
I think that's more or less what I'm saying.
Now, what you're about to hear is an extended version of a conversation.
Yes, it's another UFO podcast, but this is a fascinating story.
We've touched on it before here.
Leveland in Texas.
Strange events there.
Kevin Randall has written a book about that.
We're going to talk about the book and the exhaustive, intensive research Kevin Randall has put into this.
And also a little bit about his upcoming Roswell book, marking 75 years since that.
So Kevin Randall is the guest on this edition of The Unexplained, and we'll cut to my radio conversation very, very soon here.
Thank you very much for being part of this.
If you have a suggestion for a guest that you'd like to make, then you can email me with it.
And if you want to put in the subject line guest suggestion, then that's going to do it.
Okay, we're heading into February now.
Can you believe what happened to the first month of this year?
It's just kind of gone like that.
That was me snapping my fingers.
I hope that everything is okay with you, and I hope that you're as warm as you can be in this era of ridiculously rising fuel prices.
Don't get me started on that.
Okay, here is my conversation about Leatherland with Kevin Randraw.
I want you to just put yourself into a scenario here.
And if you've been in this scenario for real, I want you to get in touch with me.
But this is the scenario.
Imagine you're driving along a lonely country road, okay, anywhere in England, Ireland, Scotland, or Wales.
Or indeed anywhere in the world if you're listening now.
And above you appears a large cigar-shaped bright object.
It is completely silent.
Your car, which you've been diligently driving to the speed limit, suddenly comes to a stop.
The headlights fail.
The radio fails.
And you are just left there with this thing above you.
It's there for a couple of minutes and then blasts its way upwards into space and you're left thinking, what the hell happened there?
This has happened to a lot of people around the world over the years.
They don't always report it, but it has.
That is the starting point for what we're going to talk about now.
A very famous case in the United States, in Texas, called Leatherland.
It's a place.
There were a number of incidents which are connected together in 1957, which is kind of an era when UFOs were all the rage all over the newsreels and newspapers at that time.
But there are many other phenomena connected with it.
Kevin Randall has written a book about this instance and its various ramifications and connections.
Let me just tell you that Kevin is a retired Army Lieutenant Colonel, served in Vietnam as a helicopter pilot and aircraft commander, and in Iraq as a battalion intelligence officer.
He began his writing career contributing to UFO magazines and for more than 40 years has published more than 100 books, including sci-fi, action-adventure, 30 books or more on UFOs, including a number of definitive works on Roswell, another one which is in the pipeline.
We'll hopefully get some time to talk about that.
Kevin Randall is in Iowa, USA, where it's freezing cold.
He's online to us now.
Kevin, thank you for doing this.
How are you?
I'm fine.
How are you doing?
I'm very good, Kevin.
I'm a little wary to start this because I spent such a long time drawing this scenario.
Do you think that that sets the scene for where we're going to go with this?
Absolutely.
But I think that we should have started in 1909 in England because the very first case that I've come across of a UFO interacting with the environment, stalling a car or dimming a headlight, comes from England.
A fellow riding his motorcycle neared an object sitting in the field and the headlight of his motorcycle went out.
And when the object took off, the light came back on.
And so we can kind of blame the English for starting this.
Like so many things in this world now, Kevin, I think you'll find.
But look, if it all goes back to more than 100 years ago, that's fascinating.
But it makes me wonder how would people have handled that in 1909?
They wouldn't have had a clue what that might be.
All he knew was his light went out.
And when this object in the field disappeared, his light came back on.
So he continued on his way happily, I suppose.
There was a great number of sightings in France in 1954, France and South America, that involved an interaction of that nature with the environment.
But it all sort of comes to a head when we get to Level Land, Texas, which is near Lubbock.
So if you've got your maps out, look for Lubbock, and Level Land is just to the west of it.
We have to say that Texas is a massive state.
I think you can fit the entire United Kingdom, the British Isles, into it a number of times.
But I take your point.
But the thing is, with Level Land, you had witnesses at multiple locations independently reporting the same phenomenon, which is the stalling of the car engine, the headlights dimming, the radios filling with static.
And when the UFO took off, when it moved away, then the engines could be started.
And I say engines could be started because in most cases, the witnesses said that they had to do something to start their car, except for one guy who said it started spontaneously.
But it's all these independent witnesses telling basically the same thing, interacting with the law enforcement, the sheriff's office, and the Level Land Police at the time, and even the United States Air Force.
So we had this great series of sightings that took place over about two hours on November 2nd, 1957.
It spread out from there.
An hour or so later, there was a number of sightings at the White Sands Missile Range is probably three or four hours west of Levelhand.
And there were sightings earlier in the day in Amarillo, Texas and Canadian, Texas of similar type phenomenon.
So we had a very great body of information about this sort of thing.
And it's not like...
I just want to explain to my listener, Kevin, if that's okay.
There is a humming noise in the background.
I'm suspecting because it is deeply, deeply sub-zero where you are, that is probably your heating furnace.
And I don't want you to turn it off because I don't want you to freeze.
No, the furnace hasn't come on.
I don't know what the noise is.
Oh, maybe your computer.
It's not too distracting.
Don't worry about it.
Just want my listener to know that that's what it is.
If I may, because we're talking here about cases of so-called spacecraft interacting with our environment, if I might start with a few words from chapter one here, which with your permission, I will read.
Okay?
Go right ahead.
Okay.
Leverland, November 2nd, 1957.
The Leverland series began with the close approach of a UFO that dimmed a car's headlights at about 3.30 a.m. on the morning of November 2nd, 1957, near Canadian, Texas.
According to the information provided to Project Blue Book in the days that followed, the observer whose name was redacted by the Air Force rounded a curve.
He then drove over a slight knoll so that his headlights played across an object sitting in a field near the road.
As he approached, there was a flash of light over the car and his headlights went out.
He then stopped about 100 feet beyond the submarine-shaped craft.
He estimated the UFO as being as long as two or three cars and about eight feet high with a conning tower.
Now, that is a hell of a story, and there are a number of others that we'll go through that are connected with that.
But that's the starting point, yeah?
That's the first.
It kind of points us into the panhandle of Texas and down into the Levelland area.
So yes, that's kind of the starting point for the November of 1957 wave of UFO sightings, certainly.
Okay, and you talk, you mentioned Amarillo.
In the book, you say about two and a half hours before the sightings in and around Leveland, a young couple was heading towards Amarillo, Texas from the south when they saw an object blocking the road.
So that's one.
Sheriff V.S. Fleniken reported that a man who either wished to remain anonymous or who didn't give his name said at 8.30 p.m.
He was on the road between Sea Graves and Seminole, Texas.
There were lights on the road ahead of him as he drove closer.
His engine stalled.
The headlights failed.
And there were other sightings.
There's a guy that you state here, Pedro Sorcedo.
There are a couple of versions of his name that you give, but Pedro Sorcido quotes, it was so rapid and quite some heat that I had to hit the ground.
It had three colors, yellow, white, and it looked like a torpedo 200 feet long moving at about 600 to 800 miles an hour.
Then a man called Jose Salas.
The object rested on the ground for three or four minutes.
He sat still as if any motion would attract its attention.
As frightened as Socido, he remained sitting in his truck.
There are apparently a number of discrepancies between the accounts, but there are similar sorts of accounts.
And that's not all of it, yeah?
There's many, many accounts.
When you move down to the Sea Graves area, now you're not that far from Level Land.
You're within a few miles of Level Land.
So now we've moved into the Level Land area.
And Pedro Sacito is the first one to call the law enforcement in Level Land about the sighting.
And he said he was so frightened by what he had seen that they didn't want to go into Level Land.
They were afraid they'd meet the object again.
So they went to another town and called the Level Land police to tell them what's going on.
And of course, the police there thought Sacito was drunk and paid no attention to it.
But then they started getting other calls from other people who are talking about similar circumstances.
And one of the things that we have to understand in today's environment, all of this would be on the internet immediately.
People would be texting about it.
There would be Instagrams and photographs and all of that kind of stuff going on.
But in 1957, it didn't work that way.
So when you had people making multiple calls to the police from multiple locations independently of one another, they don't know that the other cases have taken place or the other sightings have taken place.
All they know is they've had this experience.
So we have multiple independent witnesses in this location at the same time or around the same time telling us basically the same story.
And it becomes much more impressive that way.
But the witnesses are not known one to another because, as you rightly say, they don't have access to what we call social media today.
And I guess also, may be wrong about this, but that makes it easier.
If anybody wanted to cover this up, slow it down or keep it quiet, then it's a hell of a lot easier in 1957 than in 2022.
Absolutely.
Absolutely.
You've got to understand Level Land is semi-remote.
And I say semi-remote because it's near Lubbock, Texas.
It's not all that far from El Paso, Texas, and these are two fairly big towns.
Actually, it's not all that far from Roswell when you get to looking at the maps.
But you don't have the access to the media.
And even the newspapers would be telling the story the next day.
You didn't have the radio reports or the television reports because that information hasn't gotten to them.
So it's very easy for the military or the government to suppress the information because it hasn't spread the way it would today with photographs and everybody texting one another.
The sheriff said at one point that he had gotten, and I say, I think a couple hundred phone calls about this object, although we only know about a small minority of those.
There were dozens of that.
The sheriff eventually went out to look for the object himself and actually saw it, found it.
And he was with a, I think it was a convoy.
He was in one of the sheriff's department cars with a sheriff's deputy.
Behind him was a highway patrol car.
I think it's now the Texas Department of Public Safety and behind them, which gets very little play, and I found only vague references to it, there was a car of Air Force officers.
So we have the Air Force observing this object, and I think the sheriff got close enough that it stalled his car, although he claimed later on that he only saw a streak of light in the distance.
But the next day, he went to the Sheriff's Department mechanic and had his car checked.
And the only reason I can think of him doing that would be if the car stalled, and he wanted to see if there was a mechanical problem with the car that would account for the stalling of his car engine.
And do we have a report as to what the mechanic found?
There was nothing wrong with the car.
Okay.
And that's the thing.
The only car that had a problem was Pedro Sacido's car, a pickup truck, and it said that he had a damaged rotor on the distributor, which might have caused the car to short out and stall.
But the problem is that doesn't explain why it only happened when the UFO was close at hand.
And once it was gone, he could start his car and drive it wherever the heck he wanted to.
So the Air Force explanations, when they started trying to explain this, fall apart.
You have to remember, the Air Force official investigation took place over seven hours.
Two days later, three days later, it was a mid-level NCO who conducted the investigation.
He came down from Colorado Springs to Level Land, spent seven hours in Texas.
I don't know if he was in Level Land the whole seven hours, if he spent some of the time at Reese Air Force Base, which was 20 minutes away, and talking to people there.
He interviewed only six people.
And so the Air Force tells you only three people saw the object, yet if you go through their file carefully, you can find the names of five people who saw an object.
And then when you look even a little bit deeper, I found people at 13 separate locations that I could identify that saw the object.
So you've got the fight between the Air Force and the civilian UFO organizations about the number of witnesses, which kinds of divert the conversation from the interaction with the environment and the other ancillary things going on and kind of changing the conversation.
So we're no longer talking about the UFO, but we're talking about the number of witnesses.
The person you talked about who went there to collect witness reports was this Norman Barth, I think it is.
Yes, Staff Sergeant Norman Barth with the 1006th Air Intelligence Service Squadron, which was an organization designed to gather intelligence during time of war.
And they didn't have a war for which them to practice on.
So they had an ancillary mission of interviewing UFO witnesses because they would be interrogating people who may have seen enemy flight crews downed over the United States in time of war and that sort of thing.
So they were using this kind of practice their techniques.
But yes, it was Norman Barth who had gone down from Colorado Springs.
And you have to ask yourself, why did they send Barth down from Colorado Springs?
Reese Air Force Base was 20 minutes away, and they had all the intelligence people there they needed to conduct the investigation.
And it was to keep, I guess, the reporters away from Rees Air Force Base.
Because if you get to Reese Air Force Base, now you're beginning to look for people who had seen the UFO, and we know that there were people there.
It was actually reported in the newspapers that the Provost Marshal from Reese Air Force Base had accompanied the sheriff the next day to look for landing traces.
The night before, there were officers clearly reported in the newspapers with the sheriff when he went out looking for the object.
And originally in the newspaper reports, the sheriff said, well, we saw this bright glowing red football-shaped or oval-shaped object within about 200 yards of us.
When you get to the Air Force report, it becomes a streak of light seen for two seconds in the distance.
And then when you get to 1975, 1976, Don Berliner interviewed the sheriff, and I hate his name, but it's his name.
It's Weir Clem.
And he told Berliner again that he had seen the object close up and that it was football or oval shaped.
So we've got the Air Force investigation bracketed by reports from the sheriff prior to the Air Force getting there and after the Air Force getting there.
Don Burlinson, and I'm filling this conversation with all kinds of Dons, apparently.
Don Burlinson, who lives in Roswell, by the way, interviewed the sheriff's widow in 2000 and got additional information from her and the sheriff's daughter and then other people in the Leveland area, including the mechanic, the sheriff's mechanic.
Right.
Was the sheriff closed down?
Was he told not to speak?
Oh, absolutely.
Obviously.
When you change your story from seeing an object as close as he did and stalling the car engine to, well, it was a streak of light in the vast distance.
Yeah, you've been given your instructions.
There's also indications that the FBI was involved in some of this investigation as well.
And I think that sheriff might have taken his instructions from the FBI as opposed to the Air Force.
So this was not an investigation.
This was not about divining information that we're going to come to some conclusions to give to the public about.
This was about shutting this up.
You say, and just skipping back very slightly, the initial reaction of law enforcement in Levland was that somebody was playing some kind of elaborate joke.
Nobody there believed that a glowing red egg or a bluish-green oval was terrorizing the populace.
So that was the starting point.
And frankly, you know, even if Norman Bath hadn't arrived there by that point, once you start with that assumption, you're not really going anywhere, are you?
Well, you have to remember that you're sitting around in the police station as the dispatcher and you're taking police calls and you get some guy talking about a glowing egg-shaped object landing close to him installing the car, your initial reaction is going to be, this is kind of a joke.
Once it became clear it was not a single witness or Sacido and the passenger in his pickup truck, but there were other people in other locations telling you the same story, suddenly it becomes much clearer to you, and then you go out to investigate, which the sheriff did.
He went out and looked for it.
And the next day, he and the provost marshal from Reese Air Force Base went out looking for burned areas.
Now, according to the reports, they didn't find one.
But according to what Burlinson found later on, there was a burned area, a circular burned area.
I think it was north of town on a ranch there.
And Burlandson even talked to one of the daughters of the farmer where it landed who'd seen the burned area.
Right.
So this story is straight out of The Invaders, the famous TV series, if this thing landed and left some kind of trace of itself.
Hold that thought, Kevin.
Kevin D. Randall, we're talking about the strange events of Levland in Texas, but not just that.
Other connected events and what all of this means for ufology in general.
Kevin Randall is here.
We're talking about, partly about, anyway, the events at Leatherland in Texas in 1957 and everything that flowed from them.
So Kevin, we had a vast variety, more than were reported at the time, experiencing something there, something that stopped cars, turned out their headlights, made people scared because they wouldn't have understood what they saw.
Some of them reported it.
The sheriff was involved in this because he virtually pursued the thing.
There were traces we later discover of a landing site.
Somebody from the Air Force is sent there.
You know, I've got this vision of a guy with a buzz cut, stars on his shirt, collar, you know, thick pair of glasses, a clipboard, with a mission to basically collect the information and shut everybody up.
That's where we're at, yeah?
I don't think Barth came down to collect information, really.
Well, he was just going to shut people up.
Yeah, there was enough information or names out there that he could have conducted a more lengthy investigation than the seven hours.
I believe there were other Air Force personnel in civilian clothing there gathering additional data.
And I believe that they talked to those Air Force officers who accompanied the Level Land Sheriff out when he saw the object.
We find nothing about them in any of the documentation I can find.
They're just disappeared from the discussion, from the experience.
But I'm sure that Barth must have talked to them about this.
But Barth showed up with a mission, and the mission, I think, was to close down the investigation.
At one point, there's documentation, a letter from the Air Force, or a memo from the Air Force to various other organizations saying they're waiting for NICAP, which was Don Kehoe's surveillance organization that was a thorn in the side of the Air Force in the 1950s, to make their statement about what happened so that they could respond to it.
They felt that responding to Kehoe's statement would be simpler than issuing a press release prior to that.
So they waited for NICAP to get involved.
NICAP had an investigator down there who spent a long time talking to people.
But as I say, the Air Force, he only talked to six people, and one of them just saw something in the distance and didn't have his car stalled.
One of them saw an object in the distance, but it was so far away it didn't really stall the car.
They didn't really look for anybody who could add to the information about it.
I think Barth was there to kind of show the colors and then retreat into the distance.
And I believe there were FBI people there that talked to the sheriff and influenced the investigation from the sheriff's department at that point.
But the sheriff made it clear to family members that he wasn't supposed to talk about it.
He did talk about it to the family and he did talk about it to friends.
And as I say, I think it was in 1976, he talked to Don Berliner about what he had seen.
So we have a good pile of information from the sheriff, but we don't have as much as we could have had a proper investigation been conducted in 1957, because had that been done, we would have had the Air Force officers interrogated.
We would have had the lead to the landing traces so information and samples could be gathered there.
We would have been testing all the cars involved to see if there was something wrong with them.
We would have tried to find more of the witnesses.
As I said, the sheriff talked about there literally being hundreds of witnesses to this object in the level land area.
Instead, the Air Force retreats to Colorado Springs and issues a report and says, well, what happened was they had a sighting of ball lightning in 1957.
Ball lightning was a poorly understood phenomenon.
And even today, scientists argue about whether ball lightning even exists.
But ball lightning is usually about 18 inches to 24 inches in diameter, you know, a foot and a half to two feet in diameter, lasts mere seconds.
And it's an extremely rare phenomenon.
Instead, we have this event taking place in the level land area over a period of two hours.
And the object is much larger, and it's stalling car engines.
There's no evidence that ball lightning has ever stalled a car engine.
And it's highly unlikely that.
It's a special explanation.
Highly unlikely, as you say, that the electromagnetic effects, including stalling cars and turning off their radios and all the rest of it, would be caused by ball lightning.
But the Air Force was pushing the idea that weather, rainy weather, low-hanging clouds, obscuring mist had something to do with it all.
And then, of course, you introduce ball lightning.
And you have a reason to assume that the people who've made reports had simply been mistaken.
But the problem is the weather report that the Air Force was operating from, saying, well, it was drizzly and rainy and that sort of thing, turned out not to be true.
There's a weather report, which coincidentally is from Roswell, New Mexico, talking about the conditions around that area at that time.
And the sky was basically clear.
I think it was four tenths cloud cover.
And if you're a pilot, you understand what that means is there are clouds at various levels, but it's not really obscuring the sky.
So the sky was clear.
It wasn't rainy.
The front, according to Dr. James McDonald, who was an atmospheric physicist, so he would have known, had gone through the level land area early in the day that could have caused some rain, but that is long gone.
So there was no drizzle.
There was no rainy weather.
There was no lightning going on.
And yet that's the explanation that they came up with, and that's the explanation that's in the files today.
And you said twice here that the FBI seems to have been involved in this.
I don't understand what the Federal Bureau of Investigation would want with this.
What are the homeland security implications of this.
You know, if it's ball lightning, then there's nothing to see, is there?
The ball lightning explanation came about after the investigation, the alleged investigation.
But you go back to other UFO sightings back in 1947 when the first sightings were made in the United States.
You know, I remember about the ghost rockets in Scandinavia and Northern Europe, and of course, there were the Foo Fighters from World War II.
But the United States became officially interested in it in 1947.
And so you look at it from that point of view.
They're looking at it to investigate UFOs, but then they decide that they're not that interested in it.
So the investigation kind of peters out at that point.
So we've got this long period of investigations.
But the FBI in 1947 was asked to conduct background investigations of the witnesses.
They're thinking there might be something in their backgrounds that would suggest why they would see these manifestations of alien craft.
J. Edgar Hoover, in a handwritten note on a memo, said we should do this, investigate it.
There was another case in July of 1947 where the FBI guy was the lead investigator and the counterintelligence guy, the Army counterintelligence guy, was just introduced as another government agent.
We look at the Socorro case from 1964, Lanni Zamora seeing the landed craft near Socorro, New Mexico.
And the FBI was involved from the very beginning of that case.
And there's other documentation from the FBI files that shows that they were involved in investigations on and off for years and years and years.
So the fact there was FBI guys in level land is not surprising.
Right, so the modus operandi is always similar.
You mentioned the Lonnie Zamora case.
Wasn't he the cop who was ridiculed and silenced?
Well, I don't think he was not really silenced in the classic sense.
I did a book on this called Encounter of the Desert and had an opportunity to kind of straighten some of this stuff out.
And what happened was once Zamora talked to Captain Eric Holder, I believe it was, who was an Army officer who lived in Socorro and an FBI agent named Arthur Burns, within hours of seeing the UFO, I think it was Burns that suggested that he not mention the occupants, the creatures, because the media would ridicule him for that.
And Holder suggested he not talk about the symbol he had seen because they could use that to eliminate copycat sightings.
If somebody says, yes, I saw the same object with this symbol on it, and they couldn't produce the same symbol that Zamora had seen, then they would know that the guy was making the story up.
So the idea that the government suppressed Lonnie Zamora isn't quite true.
They were just trying to help him out.
Of course, the idea that there was occupants leaked almost immediately, and then Zamora and other police officers were subject to a great deal of ridicule on that case.
But there's that.
There was a lecture in Denver, Colorado, in 1960, I think, attended by an FBI agent.
It was a contactee, a guy who claimed it.
He'd taken trips to Venus or Mars or one of the places with the alien creatures, and he was there in Denver to lecture, and an FBI attended the lecture and submitted a document to the FBI about it.
So the FBI had a long history of interest in the UFO phenomenon.
Isn't that interesting?
So they were aware at a very early stage that there were aspects to this that were to do indeed with security.
Maybe they didn't understand them, but they felt they had to get those people involved in it at a high level.
White Sands, you mentioned White Sands.
Now, I know the name White Sands because of nuclear missile, or rather nuclear bomb tests.
There were events a couple of days later, weren't there, after Levland at White Sands.
Well, White Sands Missile Range, then I think it was White Sands Proving Ground, was the place where we were testing rockets and missiles in the late 1940s, 1950s.
And there were a couple of MPs on patrol of their great expanse of the area, make sure that the civilians hadn't penetrated the base, who saw an object close up.
They didn't talk about their Jeep engine being stalled, but they did talk about the object being near the ground.
The Air Force investigated and said, well, it was just the moon.
These young, impressionable MPs were caught in the hysteria of the moment of the UFOs.
Of course, when they made their sightings like an hour or so after Level Land, they didn't know a thing about what was going on at Level Land because they had been on duty and they weren't listening to the radio and there's been no publicity for this, no social media for them to glum onto.
And hysteria is a hell of a word, isn't it?
I mean, these people were trained not to be hysterical.
Well, the Air Force, the Air Force, because they were Army MPs, military police, did a nice job of attempting to smear them by pointing out, well, they were both very young and very impressionable, and they were high school graduates, and they weren't well trained, and so they were caught up in the hysteria of the moment.
I talked to one of the guys.
But the other thing is, if you look at the reports, you find out the guys are 20 and 21.
And I'm thinking, at 19, I was an aircraft commander in Vietnam.
I was in charge of that aircraft.
I was responsible for the crew.
I was responsible for the passenger.
I was responsible for that.
And I was 19 years old.
And what always cracked me up is we had a guy in our unit in Vietnam, one of the helicopter pilots, we called Pappy because he was the oldest guy.
He was 23 for crying out loud.
So you can't say, well, because they were young, they were impressionable and they weren't well trained and they didn't do this and they didn't do that.
That's just attempting to belittle their cognitive abilities and their observational abilities so that you don't have to deal with their reports.
Now, some 12 hours later, there was a second group of MPs who also saw things and the Air Force said, well, that was like Venus seen in the sky.
Now, those guys had probably heard stories from the first set of MPs and that sort of thing.
So you could say, well, they were kind of influenced by what they had heard in the barracks during the day.
But the Air Force, of course, smeared those guys.
Then we moved to Oro Grande, New Mexico, and a guy named Jim Stokes, whose car was stalled and he saw the object, and he manifested a slight sunburn-like effect on one arm and one part of his face.
And if you remember close encounters of the third kind, Richard Dreyfus in his pickup truck is watching the UFO, and he gets home.
His one arm is sunburned, and his face is partially sunburned.
That's kind of the Stokes story.
The Air Force worked very hard to smear him by making him sound like he was not a credible witness.
This guy was retired Navy.
He was working as an engineer at Alamogordo for the Air Force.
Exactly.
He was an Air Force engineer.
And as you say, he was ex-Navy.
So if that's not a credible witness, I don't know what it is.
But he wasn't alone.
According to your account in the book, he said, ahead of me, several cars were stopped and the people were pointing to the sky.
So he wasn't on his own there.
No, he certainly wasn't.
But I think the point here is he manifested a slight sunburn from that that faded fairly quickly.
But the real point is the Air Force attempts to smear this guy.
The Air Force attempts from outside Alamogordo.
And yet the Air Force guys in Alamogordo rose to his defense.
They said, well, yeah, he's working as an engineer here.
We call him an engineer.
He's an engineer.
Whether he had formal training in an engineering school or not, he is performing the duties of an engineer.
He's an engineer.
And yet the Air Force was trying to belittle him because he didn't have the formal degree that they expected him to have.
And the Air Force did that quite a bit with people, looked at their educational background and made fun of them and suggested that they may not have been most credible observers.
There was a guy named William Rhodes, which doesn't really impact the Loveland case, who took two photographs of the thing within two weeks of the Arnold sighting.
And the Air Force worked very hard to smear this guy, saying, well, he was unemployed.
His wife was a school teacher and he was living off her income.
And you get into his background and you discover he had a number of patents.
He'd worked for the Navy as a PhD during the Second World War.
And the problem was he had a very abrasive personality.
He didn't get along well with people.
And yet, when they had a technical problem they needed to solve, they would call on him.
He was great at solving the problems.
He loved the challenge of solving the problem.
But once it was over, he just didn't want to deal with the people.
And the Air Force worked very hard to smear him and belittle his case because there's two photographs that they can't explain.
And we have to again say that there isn't social media, and the media is pretty pliable and pliant.
You know, the newspapers and the radio stations, TV, you had then, but not to the extent that you have it now.
But all of those were easily controlled in those days.
Well, there's another aspect to this, and I think the reporters didn't want to seem to be unsophisticated.
And so you start talking about flying saucers.
And when you get to 1957, you've had 10 years of the government and the Air Force and the deep state attempting to convince us that only crazy people see UFOs or uneducated rubes in the backwoods of rural America with three teeth wearing bib overalls with one of the suspenders unbuttoned see UFOs.
And when you look at the statistical analysis of it, you find out that the longer the object is in sight and the higher the educational level of the observer is, the less likely you're going to come up with a mundane explanation.
And yet the Air Force tried to smear everybody as being unsophisticated.
And I think the reporters caught on to that and they didn't want to be labeled as unsophisticated.
So when they were reporting the stories, they always reported it with their tongue firmly in their cheek.
There was a series of sightings not too long ago.
And one of the reporters was about interviewing a kid with her lollipop.
And I'm thinking, you've got a UFO sighting and you want to know what the little girl thinks about aliens.
What kind of a report is that?
There's much greater things that you can do.
That's just kind of the things.
We're seeing a little bit of a change now where it's getting a little bit more serious coverage.
But we still have the same kind of things going on.
I always think of it as the keepers of the flame.
They want you to believe what they believe because there cannot be alien visitation.
Therefore, there is no alien visitation.
And if you think otherwise, then you're just uneducated and easily persuaded that something strange is going on.
And I don't understand the motivation for that.
I don't understand why they don't want to look at the evidence.
They instead want to browbeat you into their way of thinking.
And yet when we look at the Leveland sighting, and I think over the course of ufology, there's literally a thousand reports from around the world of the manifestation of the UFO, close approach of the UFO, stalling car engines or knocking radio stations off the air or television stations off the air or shutting down part of a power grid in a city.
So there's all these kinds of things going on, and yet we're being told, well, there's nothing to it.
You don't need to worry about it.
So the events at Levland and also the connected events at White Sands, it appears that some kind of concerted effort to keep these quiet, to discredit the witnesses, to play it all down was underway.
But, you know, the effects of what happened were very clear and clearly described by the people.
Something that can stop your car, if you're the sheriff or whoever you are, has to be something.
Now, there were subsequent attempts to look at this.
One of the people who looked into it was J. Alan Hyneck, the master interrogator and investigator in all of these things, working for the Air Force.
But he suggested, according to the book, that the stalled engines of cars were just coincidences.
So, you know, even Hyneck seemed to be on side with keeping this downplayed.
You have to remember that Heine came on board with Blue Book, actually was Project Sign at the time as a scientific consultant.
He happened to be at the Ohio State University, I believe, which is close to Dayton, Ohio, where Project Sign was based.
So they looked for a scientific consultant.
And in that period, He was among those who believed that there was no way there was alien visitation, ergo, anything that suggested otherwise must be wrong.
But he only had the Air Force file.
He didn't go to Leveland, Texas.
He had the reports issued or written by Barr.
So when he's looking at that stuff, he doesn't understand that there's all these other ancillary witnesses involved.
He doesn't know that the sheriff's car was stalled and that the sheriff got that close to it.
He doesn't know about the, as I said, the number of witnesses around the area.
He's got that one report.
And if you go to the internet, you can find the Lovelland, Texas sightings on there.
So you can look through the file yourselves.
But you can see that the investigation was only of six people.
And only three of them said they saw something, the official documents that were created.
So that's what he's working from.
And so when you look at it that way, his actions weren't quite that nefarious.
He was working with the evidence he had, and he thought it was all the evidence that there was, or all the information there was.
He didn't understand that there was a great deal of additional information out there until later on, when he began to see, say, see the light, that there was something more to these sightings that needed to be looked at.
But yeah, he looked at that and he thought that, you know, you've got two or three cars stalling.
It may be coincidence.
Once you get up into the numbers that are eventually reported, well, coincidence just flies out the window and you have to ask yourself, is there some kind of causal event going on there that makes these cars stall?
And if there is some kind of coincidence, why don't we see it elsewhere without a manifestation of UFOs?
And we really don't see that.
We see other instances where there are multiple cars stalled at the same time, but they're separated in time.
The Condon Committee, which was a University of Colorado study for the Air Force in the late 1960s, didn't even look at the level land sightings.
There's one reference in their massive report.
You say that in the book, you say that they would not reinvestigate level land.
Why do you think that was?
I think the Air Force persuaded him not to.
And the other thing is they were operating under the misapprehension.
If you read the reports, it suggests once the UFO is gone, the car started.
Well, did it start spontaneously or did the driver take some action to start the car?
And if you read the reports carefully, it becomes clear that the drivers, for the most part, were restarting the cars.
But they were under the impression that if you used a massive magnetic field to stall a car engine, that when you remove that magnetic field, the engine should not restart spontaneously.
They could not think of any physical reason for that car engine to start spontaneously.
So they were operating under that misapprehension.
In Level Land, there was only one guy that said the car started spontaneously.
Everybody else, when you get down and you look at the reports carefully, you realize once the object was gone, well, the car restarted or I could restart my car.
It's all in there to see.
But the idea had become prevalent that the cars, when you remove the magnetic field, would restart spontaneously.
They looked at, the conduct committee looked at two reports of electromagnetic effects during their investigation.
Neither one of them were very good, but they were operating under the misapprehension that you couldn't gather any additional information.
If they had gone there in 1967 to Level Land, they could have talked to the witnesses.
They could have talked to people who were still around in Level Land at the time and got a much clearer picture of what happened.
But they blew that off.
And I always wondered if it's because they were dissuaded from doing that.
If you look at the documentation surrounding the creation of the Condon Committee, you find the Air Force tells them before the contracts are signed, here's what we want you to find.
There's no threat to national security.
There is no reason to continue the investigation because nothing of a scientific value is going to be learned.
And the Air Force did a good job of their investigation.
And lo and behold, when the report comes out, what do they say?
Well, there's no threat to national security, which is untrue.
They knew that was untrue.
The Air Force had done a good job of the investigation.
Well, we know that's not untrue.
And we find in the Condon Committee a report, which always cracked me up, of an investigation of an object in the Atlantic Ocean.
And they said it was a phenomenon so rare it had never been seen before or since.
And I'm thinking, there's something of a scientific value to be learned if you can identify this natural phenomenon.
So it turned out that was all bogus.
But they were always operating from basically 1948 with a short period in 1952 when Ed Rupo was in charge of Project Blue Book.
They were always operating as a debunking agency and a public relations agency and really not an investigative agency.
Is there still that impetus to close stuff down in the era of Tic Tac revelations and the fact that we've got a new organization in Washington being formed to investigate these things?
And Professor Ave Loeb has been on this show a number of times, has started the Galileo project.
Could close downs of that kind happen today?
Or are we beyond that now?
We've already seen evidences of it.
They had to report to Congress on June 25th of last year.
And I always think of it as the great disaster because it's the anniversary of the Custer Massacre as well.
But what did they tell you?
Well, we looked at 144 reports.
Well, how many cases is that?
You know, how many reports were from a single case?
And what did they say?
Well, we don't know what it was, but we'll come back in 90 days and tell you a little bit more.
90 days passed and nothing happened.
And nobody cared.
And now we've got a report.
And if you look at the words of what they're going to be doing, the Department of Defense and I think the Director of National Security is required to investigate reports from military personnel and pilots so that they're not looking at civilian reports.
And if you're looking at that sort of thing, they can clamp down the mantle of national security at any point they want.
Say, well, there's national security implications here, so we can't release the report into the public.
I think it's just more eyewash, like we got in 1948.
I call it Twining 2.0.
Nathan Twining was the general in charge of the Air Materiel Command, which had responsibility for investigating UFOs in 1947.
And he wrote a letter on September 23rd, 1947, which said right out, the phenomenon being discussed is not anything illusionary or fictitious.
There's something real going on.
We need an investigation, a priority investigation to determine what it is.
Within a year, that mandate had shifted to, oh, there's nothing going on, and they were just paying lip service to it.
I think we're going to have the same thing there, that they're going to pay lip service to it.
I'm very pessimistic, obviously, but they're going to pay lip service to it.
They may issue a report.
It's going to be classified.
It's not going to get into the public arena.
And it's going to be the same sort of thing.
Well, we looked at it and we couldn't find anything to suggesting alien visitation.
And some of the sightings are manifestations from the electronic gadgetry being used.
There was a video on YouTube not long ago where a guy had hooked his cell phone camera up to night vision goggles and recorded through them.
And he was getting some kinds of the images that were reported by the Navy.
And it was all electronic manifestation in the way that the electronics meshed.
So that some of the sightings that they were talking about, if there wasn't a visual component to it, an eyewitness component to it, but it was all electronically generated, then you're looking at something that may have been a glitch in the system.
And I think that's where they're going to go.
And when the interest kind of fades on it, it's all going to fade away as it has in the past.
I don't have good hopes for it.
I know my friend Jerry Clark is much more enthusiastic about this, and a number of people in the UFO field are very enthusiastic about it.
But I just think it's more of the same.
It's hard to know.
You know, the genie may be out of the bottle, or indeed it may be being in the process of put back into that bottle.
I put that badly, but you know what I mean.
In the book, just quickly, you go through a number of other events to back this up that are like Levland.
In 1962, in 67, a witness described as a waitress in a local cafe.
You'll tell me where this was.
So she was driving home when a large round object rose from the ground and began to follow her car.
Then there's the case of police patrolman Herbert Shermer, who says that he was abducted in Nebraska.
Details of this came out under hypnotic regression.
1973, Laurel, Mississippi.
Police officer chased a strange object shaped like a top for a number of miles.
As he approached to within about 200 feet, his car stalled.
The lights on the radio died.
The object moved away.
The lights on the radio came back on.
And so it goes, yes?
Absolutely.
And you have to remember there's other manifestations for it.
I just did a report on Coast to Coast about a fellow walking his dog, and the dog began to bark and called his attention to a UFO.
So we have reports of animals being influenced by the fields generated by UFOs.
And there's lots of reports of that as well.
Cattle moving to another part of the pastures, for example, or becoming very, very agitated when there's something close by, animals reacting to it all the time.
So we have a great body of information of a manifestation of some kind of field generated by the UFO that is detectable.
And Fran Ridge from what's now the NICAP site has something called MADAR, which is a series of nodes around the world, mostly in the United States, with radar, not radar, but UFO detectors.
And they use a variety of sensors to detect anomalies in various fields so that then they cross-check it with UFO reports to see if there is a corresponding UF report.
And indeed, you say in the book that there are occasions where, many of them, where MADAR sightings, rather MADAR readings correlate with actual sightings, which is a real interesting scientific way of doing this.
Yes, and I mentioned it to Avi Loeb when I had him on my radio show talking about this and wondered if that wouldn't be something that they would want to explore.
And he just didn't want to have anything to do with that.
He wanted to generate new scientific evidence.
And I'm thinking, what's the difference here?
We're using instrumentality to collect the data and cross-checking it with UFO reports.
What's the difference between you collecting your data electronically without human interference and then looking back for other things?
I don't understand the difference.
I thought it would be interesting for them to understand the history of the UFO phenomena, but Avi Loeb is busy looking out from Earth for objects moving through the solar system that may be artificial.
And I applaud the effort.
I love the idea of them doing that.
But how often are we going to detect an artificial object moving through the solar system, given the vast distances?
And second of all, there's pushback from other scientific communities about him wasting his time and effort by doing this.
I think it's a good idea, and I don't know why a science wouldn't want to look at that sort of thing.
Here's something that may be artificial.
It suggests life in other parts of the galaxy.
Wouldn't that be something that we would be interested in doing?
We've got all these things on Earth looking for radio signals.
Maybe these civilizations move beyond radio, and they're not using that to communicate.
They found better ways of communicating.
So looking for a radio signal may not be the best way to detect an alien civilization.
But I think that all of that should be looked at in a scientific arena.
But we still have the pushback from the scientific arena and the academic community and the military and the government in trying to gather this information, even though it seems in today's environment, it's more conducive to gathering that kind of data.
You sound very frustrated.
You sound very frustrated, Kevin.
I mean, you've done such a huge amount of research for this book.
I mean, I'm very impressed with the level of documentation, the photographs, the cross-referencing.
It is a great book.
But you're very pessimistic, it seems to be, about the future.
Because I've seen all of this go in the past.
I've seen how it's operated in the past.
You know, like I said, it's Twining 2.0, but we have the Condon Committee, which was supposed to be the scientific investigation.
And it turns out it was a put-up job.
You know, The Air Force said, we want you to find this.
And the Condon said, yeah, we can do that.
And they did.
And then everybody says, well, there's nothing to UFOs.
Well, look at the evidence in the report.
30%, I think it's 30% of the cases in the Condon Committee aren't identified.
And there's a number of them where the identification is very, very shaky.
They don't look at some of the great cases.
Level land, I would have thought they would want to go there.
We see from that, they were in Belt, Montana in 1967 when a flight of missiles was shut down from the outside, which supposedly is physically impossible to do.
Yet it happened.
There's the national security implication because there was a UFO sighting at the time, and the condon committee had a representative there with a security clearance talking to the UFO officer on the base.
And he says, I can't talk about it.
It's national security.
And so there's nothing in the report about that.
And yet we find out about this later on as we're looking at other cases and other information.
We can put all of this together.
So I've seen it all before.
And I can't see where there's any press for a change.
I think the deep state is pressuring this because if it gets out that this technology exists, it shakes their power structure.
And I think that that's why they're suppressing the information even today.
It makes you wonder why would they have gone as far as they have gone?
I mean, I can't answer that question, and you can't answer that question.
We're just going to have to wait and see, I think.
Okay, just at the end of this, and thank you for talking to me about the Levland book, because I think it is a great book.
I spent time going through it over the last couple of days.
I want to go through it in more detail when I've got a little more time, but I was very impressed.
You've got a book coming out, another one, about Roswell, a 75th anniversary book.
We've got about a minute or so.
Just talk to me about that and when it's out.
It's called Understanding Roswell, and I tried to look at it from the point of view of somebody who doesn't know a lot about Roswell because there's so much misinformation out there.
We've got the alien autopsy, which is irrelevant now.
It's a hoax.
We know that.
We have MJ-12, which we know is a hoax.
But all of this covers up the information about the Roswell UFO craft.
So we dealt with the mythology in that way, but we also look at the people who were involved.
I published the transcripts of the interviews with these people that I conducted so that you can see exactly how the interviews were conducted and what they said, and that I'm not interpreting the information or leaving out data to lead in a direction.
So it's an attempt to sort of bring an understanding of Roswell to the person who may not be as deeply enmeshed in the minutiae of the case as I am.
Right.
So this is absolutely the year to do it because it is the 75th anniversary.
Kevin, wow, that was a hell of a conversation.
Thank you so much.
The book is Levoland, the one that we've been talking about for most of this hour.
It's published by Philip Mantle's Flying Disc with a K Press here in the UK.
And he's got every reason to be very, very proud of this one and all of the stuff that he does.
And the other book about Roswell is called Understanding Roswell.
Yes, and it'll be coming out from Flying Disc Press.
Philip was the one that inspired that book.
We need Philip Mantle in this world.
Kevin, thank you so much, and I hope that Iowa gets warmer, if that's what you want quite soon.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Kevin Randall, the book is published by the excellent Flying Disc Press.
It's called Leatherland.
And the next book about understanding Roswell is also published by Philip Mantle's Flying Disc Press.
More great guests in the pipeline here at the Home of the Unexplained.
So until next we meet, my name is Howard Hughes.
This has been The Unexplained.
And please, whatever you do, stay safe, stay calm.
And above all, please stay in touch.
Thank you very much.
Take care.
▲
Export Selection