I always find it fascinating when someone approaches a topic that I thought was a carcass stripped of every scrap of flesh, and yet from it manages to conjure up an entirely fresh-looking meat feast. Even though there is – of course – a danger that they simply dreamed it all up, there’s also the chance that they might have glimpsed (however imperfectly) something really big. So you always ask: is it smoke and mirrors, or behind the smoke is there some kind of fire?
In his (2005) “Body Snatchers in the Desert” and its (2017) sequel “The Roswell UFO Conspiracy: Exposing a Shocking and Sinister Secret”, long-time researcher/writer Nick Redfern took a hugely sideways look at the 1947 Roswell Incident (along with the often lurid crash site stories of oddly-deformed bodies) and found an entirely new story to tell.
Given that Redfern is an avowed Ufologist, what’s immediately unexpected about these two books is that they set out to tell a story about the 1947 Roswell Incident that was anything but extraterrestrial. Unsurprisingly, many (if not most) of his Ufological buddies and correspondents believe that he has drunk too deeply from the PsyOps poisoned well of UFO nonsense, and become befuddled by the many layers of cover stories laid down over the years.
All the same, the big question is: how on Earth (if you’ll excuse the phrase) did a Ufologist end up writing arguably the most anti-Ufological book ever? And might even a small bit of what he found hidden under that rock actually be true?
“Who Cares Where They Come Down?”
Historically, Redfern’s story pivots on the US Military’s actions in the years just after WWII, across a period bounded on the one hand by Operation Paperclip (and its Japanese analogue), and on the other hand by the Nuremberg Trials.
As is well-documented (even in Wikipedia), Operation Paperclip was a secret operation whereby “more than 1600 German scientists, engineers, and technicians” got spirited away from the bombed desolation of post-war Germany to start fresh new lives in the US. This programme was authorised by President Truman on 3rd September 1946, and led to an influx to the States of such famous rocketeers as Wernher von Braun. As Tom Lehrer memorably wrote (to a tune which I now inevitably can’t get out of my head):
Don’t say that he’s hypocritical,
Say rather that he’s apolitical.
“Once the rockets are up,
Who cares where they come down?
That’s not my department,”
Says Wernher von Braun.
Note that Redfern also stresses the other side of the political equation: that it was not just that the US was anxious to gain the services of these brilliant (if perhaps morally damaged) individuals, it was also that the US wanted to avoid the scenario where those same people were swooshed up by the Russians. (Did they ever have an Operation Paperclipski?)
So: the picture that Redfern paints is that from the start of 1946, technologists from the defeated Axis countries along with their technology (and documentation) resurfaced in America, influencing not only the type of science that was being done there, but also the way it was being done. They were, after all, domain experts, so why not bring ’em in?
The Nuremberg Trials
The reason that the Nuremberg Trials form a terminus ante quem for Redfern is – though I don’t think he says it explicitly – what happened in the IG Farben trial, which ran from 27th August 1947 through to 30th July 1948.
The directors of German chemical conglomerate IG Farben were in court not only because they had manufactured Zyklon B (the poison gas used in the Nazi extermination camps), but also because they had used slave labour. Though the single thing that seems to have tipped the balance for the judges was the fact that IG Farben had built a Zyklon B manufacturing plant right next door to Auschwitz, with the clear intention of using slave labour to manufacture the same poison that was then used to kill the same slaves.
(Personally, I find this extraordinary and awful, as though the only way someone could be convicted of murder is if they had shot someone with a gun they had previously forced the dead person to build for them.)
Five months later, one of the judges (Judge Hebert) filed a witheringly dissenting opinion, where he wrote (though possibly more for the benefit of his conscience than for its usefulness to later historians):
“Willing cooperation with the slave labor utilization of the Third Reich was a matter of corporate policy that permeated the whole Farben organization […] For this reason, criminal responsibility goes beyond the actual immediate participants at Auschwitz. It includes other Farben Vorstand plant-managers and embraces all who knowingly participated in the shaping of the corporate policy”
For Redfern’s narrative, this specific part of the Nuremberg trials is centrally important because the third group of crimes that the IG Farben directors were indicted was (again, as per Wikipedia):
“3. War crimes and crimes against humanity through participation in the enslavement and deportation to slave labor on a gigantic scale of concentration camp inmates and civilians in occupied countries, and of prisoners of war, and the mistreatment, terrorization, torture, and murder of enslaved persons.”
That is to say, the world now had the concept of war crimes, for which culpable individuals could be held accountable.
A Narrow Ethical Window
From this, you could say that Nick Redfern’s narrative (reconstructed from different witness accounts) falls within a narrow ‘ethical window’. This time period commenced with Operation Paperclip’s influx of scientists who brought with them a radically different experimental ethics – what we would now disparagingly call “Nazi science” – but then finished with the Nuremberg Trial judges’ clear signal to the world that the cruelty, terror and indeed murder carried out in the name of that so-called “science” was a war crime – what we would now call “crimes against humanity”.
For Redfern, key American military scientists seem to have been utterly seduced by the whole idea of carrying out inhumane experiments against “volunteer” (but utterly misinformed) prisoners, the mentally or physically handicapped, or even infant corpses in the pursuit of ‘scientific knowledge’. By way of support, he offers a large number of grotesquely shameful instances in post-war America (and indeed Britain) where exactly this kind of thing happened.
Even today, Josef Mengele’s chillingly inhumane experiments at Auschwitz (where he performed grotesque ‘operations’ on inmates, while also cheerfully selecting those to die of Zyklon B) remain utterly shocking. But the atrocities carried out during WWII by Unit 731 of the Imperial Japanese Army in their development of bacteriological warfare seem every bit as morally repugnant. As Wikipedia notes:
The Americans did not try the researchers so that the information and experience gained in bio-weapons could be co-opted into their biological warfare program, much as they had done with German researchers in Operation Paperclip. Victim accounts were then largely ignored or dismissed in the west as communist propaganda.
It should be noted that Unit 731 was located on mainland China (where Japan had occupied a sizeable region before WWII), and so the majority of its ‘test subjects” were Chinese. These “included common criminals, captured bandits, anti-Japanese partisans, political prisoners, the homeless and mentally handicapped, and also people rounded up by the Kempeitai military police for alleged ‘suspicious activities’.“
So when thousands of these morally-compromised Axis scientists (as Tom Lehrer jeered, were they “apolitical” or just plain “hypocritical”?) were absorbed into the post-WWII American military R&D complex, what was the cultural effect? Did everything run the same as before, or did their horribly dehumanised attitudes towards test subjects – people in Unit 731 referred to them as “logs”, or “long-tailed Manchurian monkeys” – also get integrated along with their science?
Fu-Go Balloon Bombs
Nick Redfern’s story hinges on a relatively little-known side of WWII: Japanese Fu-Go balloon bombs. Over 9,000 of these mulberry-paper balloon bombs were launched from Japan, flying at a relatively constant altitude (thanks to an ingenious bit of engineering trickery) all the way to America’s West Coast. These were launched from late 1944 until April 1945, because they were carried by a seasonal higher altitude wind that consistently blows across the Pacific during those months (though less than 10% of them actually reached their destination).
Though these balloon bombs caused hardly any casualties (a single family was blown up when they went to investigate a downed balloon up close), this wasn’t the whole story. According to Redfern, the Japanese actually had a much bigger Fu-Go attack planned for 22nd September 1945, with the intention of dropping toxins on San Diego. However, that particular attack never happened, thanks to Japan’s surrender a month earlier, following the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
Redfern also has a story about a manned Japanese balloon attack on California, observed late in the war by three witnesses. He also talks about further plans for a larger balloon being sent across from Japan carrying a bomb-filled glider beneath it, for a Kamikaze pilot to steer to its final (high-value) target.
A quick Wikipedia search reveals that these balloons were designed and built by the Imperial Japanese Army’s Number Nine Research Laboratory (Noborito Laboratory) under Major General Kusaba. According to a 2007 review of a 2001 posthumous memoir by former insider Ban Shigeo (“Rikugun Noborito Kenkyujo no shinjitsu [The Truth About the Army Noborito Research Institute]“): “the US Army” – to nobody’s great surprise – “quietly enlisted certain members of Noborito in its efforts against the communist camp in the early years of the Cold War.” I for one would gladly pay to read an English translation of Ban Shigeo’s book, wouldn’t you?
Actually, it should be noted that there’s also a long discussion of this in Amanda Kay McVety’s (2018) “The Rinderpest Campaigns: A Virus, Its Vaccines, and Global Development in the Twentieth Century”. McVety notes that the rinderpest toxin was developed not by Unit 731, but by the Noborito Lab itself: and that their big plan was to use a wave of balloon bombs to drop 20 tons of the stuff over the US to kill American cattle en masse. According to McVety, the plan was nixed not by the end of the war, but by a senior General fearing American reprisals against Japan’s rice harvest.
Yet even though the US Military developed its own range of – it has to be said extremely similar – balloon bombs (e.g. its E77 was developed in 1950) not that long after, I was unable to find any official military history charting how these Noborito balloon bomb researchers affected American thinking and balloon development. This sounds like a fascinating slice of secret history that military historians seem to have largely overlooked to date. Let’s hope that particular lacuna gets filled before very long.
Two Steps Forward, One Step Back
And so, from the normal historical fog, we can start to see the broad shape of Redfern’s account of the 1947 Roswell Incident starting to emerge. He presents the Roswell Incident as the crash not of an extraterrestrial spaceship, but instead of an unfamiliar balloon technology brought in via the Japanese equivalent of Operation Paperclip. And the oddly deformed bodies? For him, these were not X-Files “grays”, but instead handicapped Japanese test subjects, similar to the ones upon whom Unit 731 performed ghastly experiments. And the whole UFO story? According to Redfern, this was to cover up the “Nazi science”-style atrocities being carried out to gain high-altitude physiological (or possibly radioactive) scientific knowledge.
Admittedly, Redfern’s conspiratorial excitement then somewhat gets the better of him, to the point that he confuses Unit 731 with Noborito Laboratory, and then somewhat oddly throws a whole load of Nazi flying machine tech into the mix. I’m also far from convinced by his attempts to stitch the glider-beneath-the-balloon account into his own narrative. Even so, I thought he was doing perfectly well with just the actual history, so it’s not all bad, not at all. :-/
Finally, the “Bamboo” Bit Teased in the Title…
All in all, does Nick Redfern’s account really explain everything about the Roswell Incident? I think it’s fair to say that in its current form, probably not quite. But all the same, the idea that the incident revolved around a balloon built according to unfamiliar principles ‘acquired’ (Operation Paperclip-style) by the US Military from Japanese balloon bomb builders does strike me as entirely plausible (in a good way).
And moreover, his suggestion that the people involved were actually ‘involuntary volunteer’ test subjects whose deaths in that balloon crash subsequently got hushed up is also far from unreasonable. There was definitely an experimental moral laxity in that period, though the notion that the victims’ various deformities were due to specific genetically-linked conditions may well be a bit too… intense for some. Still, full marks for trying to cover all the bases, regardless.
For me, though, I can’t help but wonder whether the whole Roswell Incident was nothing more complex than a crashed balloon that used unfamiliar techniques and materials brought to America by the Noborito ‘acquirees’. Even though the US Military knew a fair bit about balloons, it may well not have developed suitable gondolas: so might the gondola in the Roswell crash (for if there were people on the balloon, it surely had a gondola, right?) have actually been a Noborito Lab-developed gondola quietly swooshed out of post-war Japan’s backdoor by the Americans?
As an aside: one of the unexplained things about the initial Roswell Incident crash site was the inwardly curved I-beams that so bemused Jesse Marcel, and which had some kind of strange writing imprinted on them (the ones that various witnesses remarked upon). This is, after all, why I’ve been treating the Roswell Incident as primarily a cipher mystery.
So here’s Nick’s thought for the day: might these inwardly-curved “I-beams” have actually been bamboo from the crashed gondola frame? And might the writing on those “I-beams” actually have been Japanese (e.g. assembly instructions)? In which case, might the real reason that no images of this writing have ever been made public is that it would be obviously Japanese, thereby opening up a whole world of awkward (and clearly non-extraterrestrial) questions about the roles Noborito Lab researchers were playing in post-war US Military R&D?
Jesse Marcel was certain that what he was looking at wasn’t any kind of American balloon he’d seen before: and, not knowing America’s (presumably still highly Top Secret) connection to Japanese bomb-balloon-makers, he (wrongly, I think) concluded that he could only be looking at debris from a crashed flying saucer. And so it could well be that Marcel’s quick rationalisation was inadvertently the well-spring from which all modern UFOlogy eventually flowed.
Regardless, if your job was to cover up a Top Secret US Military collaboration with Japanese balloon-bomb builders in 1947, how would you try to explain it away? It would be a bit of a tricky challenge, that’s for sure. Hmmm…
Anyway, paraphrasing Tom Lehrer slightly:
“Once the balloons are up,
Who cares where they come down?
That’s not my department”
Nick,
You might find of interest, “Are We Alone? The Stanley Kubrick Extraterrestial Interviews” by Anthony Frewin. Its been a awhile since I looked at the book, though one of Stanleys’s main interests in ufology was the idea of culture shock that would occur from a revelation of the existence of ETs. He inteviews in this very notable scientists about it, including Margaret Mead, it being a transcript of filmed interviews. The commentary covers some of the same ground that you do re: Roswell, and the bodies found. I think Stanley certainly understood the benefits of using a ETs as a dramatic device, though its likely he was a believer.
Matt
Matt: I firmly believe in the existence of cipher mysteries – it’s all the other stuff I’m not so sure about. 😉
Herr Pelling.
Sehr schöne Idee. Deutsche Ballonluft. Und darin flog Göring mit Adolf. Werner von Braun alles überwacht.
Nick, me too! Kubrick had some cipher mysteries I am sure. One notable one is what does CRM 114 mean? The earliest known reference is in Dr Strangelove, and it was a discriminator on a B-52 to filter out misleading transmissions to the plane with the incorrect code prefix. Very “ciphery” movie. It was also used in variations in A Clockwork Orange, and Eyes Wide Shut. Others include, what does Dave say to Frank when they are in the pod, ostensibly that HAL understands by reading their lips? If you hit slomo on that scene, it looks like it could be a series of passwords. Way too many to name, , actually. The ufo stuff with him is the stuff of legends.
Indeed, there is a grain of truth in every legend and reality can surpass imagination. Basically every document about the Noborito Laboratory was incinirated at the end of the war, with the exception of a late (August 31st) document about the laboratory mission and composition, which gives no insight about its biochemical weapons research nor about its other interesting activities. So there is next to nothing, besides the memories of Major Shigeo Ban. However I think that I found a sample of alien writings (page 3): https://www.meiji.ac.jp/noborito/report/6t5h7p00000ex70c-att/6t5h7p00000qivmf.pdf
P.S.: I didn’t know that John Sanders was proficient in German.
Stefano Guidoni: thanks very much for that very interesting page, I’ll be looking very closely at the intriguing writing on it…
As far as our good friend John Sanders goes, I must confess that I struggle to read his English sometimes, never mind his German. 😉
My effluence in German is legendary Stefano, came from my great uncle Liman Von Sanders who spoke high German, unless of course he wasn’t screaming out orders to his beloved Johnny Turks in inspirational low Farsi on the trenches..As for N.P.’s struggle with my Anglais, she’s ardly hever spoke here so ” Yez can stick it where de sun don’t shine Quin Lizzie Quin Lizzie” as they chant down Barbados way.
Dear Mr. Pelling:
We are somewhat confused by your Roswell posts. Contrast your first paragraph above (‘Even though there is – of course – a danger that they simply dreamed it all up, there’s also the chance that they might have glimpsed (however imperfectly) something really big.’) with what you wrote on 18 May 2019:
‘Once Claim X lands on our lap (Brexit, Trump, whatever), we find ourselves pressed to decide whether it is (a) outrageous, bare-faced, self-deluding nonsense on a grand scale, where the evidence is twisted to tell a story that appeals to base prejudices, or (b) a heroic outsider movement battling the Establishment, and whose noble cause is simply to Get The Truth Out To The People.’
As regards Nick Redfern, the Amazon.com blurb for his 2015 book ‘Final Events and the Secret Government Group on Demonic UFOs and the Afterlife’ reads in part: ‘For four years, UFO authority Nick Redfern has been investigating the strange and terrifying world of a secret group within the U.S. Government known as the Collins Elite. The group believes that our purported alien visitors are, in reality, deceptive demons and fallen angels. They are the minions of Satan, who are reaping and enslaving our very souls, and paving the way for Armageddon and Judgment Day.’
Based on this, we conclude that Redfern fits squarely into category (a) above.
Of course the Americans would have interviewed the Noborito engineers concerning their balloon research. But if they brought them to America as researchers, surely there would be some record. After all, Wernher von Braun’s presence to the U.S. was made public shortly after his arrival.
We tend to doubt that the writing on the “I-beams” was in Japanese, though interestingly two of the witnesses you quote on your 14 November 2021 post (Floyd Proctor and Lorraine Ferguson) mention a similarity to Asian writing. But the money quote comes from Major Jesse Marcel, who mentions hieroglyphics but not Japanese. During the war, Marcel served as an intelligence officer with the 5th Bomber Command in the Southwest Pacific. Surely he had previously seen Japanese writing and would remember it if it had appeared in the Roswell debris.
We also doubt the ‘handicapped Japanese test’ subject explanation for the Roswell bodies, for much the same reason. There were a quarter of a million Asians living in the US in 1940, and in 1948 the US had just concluded a war with Japan. It’s incredible none of the ‘witnesses’ would be able to identify Japanese people, deformed or otherwise.
One minor correction: A group of children on Sunday school picnic were lost when the balloon bomb exploded near Bly, Oregon. The minister’s pregnant wife was killed as well. The site is known as Mitchell Monument. We live in southern Oregon and pass through now and again.
And thank you so much for your posts, which we have enjoyed over the years.
Leif Allmendinger: “we find ourselves pressed” was the key part of that 2019 post on ‘fan fave’ Gerard Cheshire. The text continues: “This modern magic trick works by presenting us with two crazy extremes that we somehow have to choose between. […] Just as with Coke vs Pepsi, this is a fake two-way choice, particularly given that drinking your own urine might be a marginally healthier third option. Allegedly.”
What’s unusual about Nick Redfern is that even though he firmly believes in UFOs, he firmly believes that the Roswell Incident was entirely terrestrial. So it should be clear that his thinking is somewhat more refined than, say, Gerard Cheshire’s all-or-nothing nonsense.
As I previously reported, Major Jesse Marcel described the writing as a series of much simpler strokes (far more like Japanese), rather than hieroglyphics (which I think was his wife’s word). Perhaps he hadn’t seen Japanese writing: or perhaps he was reading the ‘I-beam’ writing as a horizontal script rather than a vertical one? He is dead now, so we can’t tell.
The ‘handicapped Japanese’ test subjects angle is explored in quite some depth in Redfern’s book, so there’s more of a discussion to be had there, which this margin is too small to contain.
As far as the Mitchell family goes, I wrote: “a single family was blown up when they went to investigate a downed balloon up close”, which I think wasn’t too far from what happened.
And thank you for your kind words! 🙂
Nick,
It’s true that the script isn’t available, so debating it may be futile, but just fyi, there are three types of Japanese writing; Kanji, Hiragana and Katakana. I won’t insult your intelligence by saying more.
Nick: I will…Japanese writing systems would not be complete without at least two other minor language forms; They being Ainuic and of course Romaji which the Papist missionaries devised for their converts. And you can betcha bippy that both had military code applications
Dear Mr. Pelling
By coincidence, I came across an essay Nick Redfern wrote for MysteriousUniverse.com (Why Can’t We Solve the Mystery of the Roswell “UFO” Crash? December 4, 2021.)
Redfern’s thesis is that the Air Force researchers fit the known ‘Roswell’ facts together in the most likely way but were unsure of their results– and therefore it is it is ‘quite plausible’ that classified material exists unbeknownst to the researchers.
Redfern discusses (and links to) three reports– two from the US Air Force and one from the US General Accounting Office. We’ve checked what Redfern says about one of the reports against what it really says. (McAndrew, James. ‘The Roswell report: case closed’. Headquarters of the United States Air Force, 1997.) We chose this because of the section on the crash dummy theory, a subject we commented about above.
Redfern: ‘It’s important to note that the Air Force never said that the crash-test dummy theory was the answer. Rather, the Air Force said, the “dummy” angle was the likely answer.’
McAndrew: ‘Though it is clear anthropomorphic dummies were responsible for these accounts, the specific locations of the events described was [sic] difficult, if not impossible, to determine since the witnesses were not specific.’
Our comment: We missed the part where McAndrew said something about ‘likely’.
Redfern: ‘…the Air Force made it clear (albeit briefly) that there was no hard evidence to prove that the Mogul and dummy theories provided definitive answers.’
McAndrew: ‘This conclusion [affirming the crash dummy theory] was based on the remarkable similarities and independent corroboration between the witnesses who described both of the “crash sites.” Statements such as “they was using dummies in those damned things” and a characterization of the crashed vehicle as, “I thought it was a blimp” are two of the many similarities. The extensive detailed descriptions provided by the witnesses, too numerous to be coincidental, were of the equipment, vehicles, procedures, and personnel of the Air Force research organizations who conducted the scientific experiments HIGH DIVE and EXCELSIOR.’
Our comment: Sounds like hard evidence to us. But Redfern’s sentence construction is obtuse, to say the least. Perhaps he expects McAndrew to prove his evidence is complete. How could such a thing ever be possible?
Redfern maintains that McAndrew admits his crash dummy theory is not a complete answer. This is technically correct, but disingenuous. McAndrew is cocksure about the crash dummies, but he is not sure about locations where the witnesses saw the crashes– simply because after many years they can’t be sure either.
From this, Redfern concludes it is ‘quite plausible’ that ‘the U.S. Force of the 1990s was not given access to the real story, whatever it was/is’. From there he concludes ‘…incredibly, what all of this means is that, just like us in the UFO research field, the U.S. Air Force has been denied access to the history, to the files, to the documents, to the photos, to the recovered whatever-it-was that crashed, and to the remains of the bodies.’
We agree with the incredible part. This is not to say that Redfern’s conclusion is wrong or that McAndrew is right. (Redfern could be right for wrong reasons, and McAndrew comes across as a bit like a defense attorney.) But check Redfern’s sources carefully.
Leif Allmendinger: on the one hand, I find both Redfern’s evidence and his argumentation quite hard to work with at times – I tried to get a flavour of this across in the post. On the other hand, there’s something refreshingly, ummm, historical about his suggestion of a cover-up of a colossally criminal cock-up that does make me feel rather more on home turf than with the whole ‘aliens akimbo’ Ufology cottage industry thing.
But by way of comparison, even though crash test dummies were indeed used for experiments, the suggestion that this was somehow the explanation for the Roswell Incident was immediately (i.e. during the original press conference) queried by journalists who were fully aware that such dummies weren’t even designed or constructed until the mid-1950s. This obviously broken timeline in turn gave rise to the risible “time compression” (non-)explanation, which is surely on a par with anything coming out of 10 Downing Street this week for sheer ridiculousness and outright impossibility. Hence I think the crash test dummy theory can only be false, however you try to spin it. 🙁
Nick Pelling: Nothing false about the dummies coming out of 10 Downing Street, this week or any other week since it became the official PM’s residence a while back. As for t’other test, not a chance unless Boris can get some enthusiasm back into the side by tomorrow. As for his chances of making it through to next week…?
Dear Mr. Pelling:
Thank you for your reply.
The crash dummy theory as set forth in ‘The Roswell report: case closed’ assumes the witnesses are wrong about the dates of the crashes by at least a half dozen years. This is a major problem that McAndrew skates over, and your skepticism is quite justified. What did the witnesses really say?
McAndrew cites two direct witnesses: Gerald Anderson and James Ragsdale. Gerald Anderson (born 1941 or 42) says he was five years old when he witnessed the crash, so it’s clear he believes the sighting took place in 1947. James Ragsdale’s interviewer (Donald R. Schmitt) suggests Ragsdale’s sighting took place in 1947. It is unclear if Ragsdale responds directly, but he does not disagree.
McAndrew also cites two secondhand witnesses, meaning they recall what the direct witness, Grady L. Barnett, told them. (Barnett is deceased.) Neither can fix a date for Bartnett’s sighting.
McAndrew assumes the witnesses are accurate on key details of the crashes, but vague on the locations and wildly inaccurate on the crash dates. This sounds like cherry picking to us.
Even so, we wouldn’t dismiss McAndrew out of hand, based on what we know about human memory.
Some of the interview transcripts illustrate how the witnesses might have become confused. The first example comes from Alice Knight, a secondhand witness, who tries to recall when her late husband, Grady L. Barnett, told her about his sighting (McAndrew page 213). ‘I remember that he saw– one time I went to visit– and I don’t remember whether it was before my husband and I married or after, I don’t recall the date.’ Mrs. Knight tries to associate her recollection with a landmark event, and comes up short. We commonly remember events by landmarks, such as major events in our lives. Without landmarks, it is much easier to become confused about the date of events long passed.
The second example comes from the James Ragdale interview (page 215). Donald R. Schmitt: ‘As far as the ranches go, driving around at that time, it could have been most any ranch, right? This would have been in ’47… You were with this woman?’ James Ragsdale: ‘Yeah. We were camped out there.’
Notice that the year is introduced in a leading question from the interviewer. Memory is quite malleable, and this kind of thing could lead to a false memory, especially if he does not have the incident fixed with a landmark. (Elizabeth Loftus is the researcher most closely associated with false memories.)
Additionally, the interview with Gerald Anderson (page 187) contains an astonishing amount of detail for something one might remember at age 5. Either he has a prodigious memory, or he remembers an event that happened when he was considerably older.
It is conceivable that the witnesses reconstructed the dates– something along the lines of ‘I saw a really strange crash with bodies what weren’t human. That had to be in 1947, because that matches the newspaper report.’
In the greater scheme of events the ‘what’ usually proved most important, the ‘where’ less so, and the ‘when’ less important than that. It would follow that human episodic memory evolved along these lines.
McAndrew’s dummy theory stands or falls based on dates recollected by two witnesses who were interviewed 45 years later. The possibility that they were mistaken does not, of course, mean that they actually were– but it surely means that additional, classified files may not exist.
Leif Allmendinger: for what I’m trying to do (which is to treat this whole sorry state of affairs as primarily a cipher mystery), I’d really like better starting points than the ones anyone seems willing or able to put forward for all this.
For example, if there is any kind of suggestion that “time compression” (by which he really means “time confusion”) may be necessary to make sense of the witness accounts, it would have been rather more sensible to tackle that specific issue before handing out copies of a heavyweight report at a press conference. Like, duh.
On this we agree, though there was little research on very long term episodic memory when McAndrew released the report in 1993. McAndrew includes evidence that supports his conclusions and omits what does not– writing like an attorney, not a researcher.
Leif Allmendinger: like a hard-working but not actually very good attorney, yes.
This morning I took the time to read some stuff about these balloons, Japanese biological weapons, the U.S. government and other gory stuff.
I read the introductory essay[1] on Japanese war crimes by the “Nazi War Crimes and Japanese Imperial Government Records Interagency Working Group” (NWCJIGRIWG ?), especially pages 34 – 39 where you can read an outline of the history of the allegations about chemical and biological warfare. It reads:
“When the Japanese military developed a secret program to use balloon bombs against the U.S. mainland, bacteriological agents were said to be the ultimate payload. Documentary evidence, however, is understandably scarce.”
I also looked at the list of documents about Japanese war crimes and Japanese biological warfare[2], by the same group. There is a number of documents that suggest that both Canada and the U.S.A. were concerned about the possible use of balloons as vehicles for biological weapons. There is also a POW suggesting this.
According to what I read, the Chinese government seriously investigated the activities of Unit 731 during the war of Korea, when it accused the government of the U.S.A. to employ the same tactics as the Japanese. Even wikipedia[3] (a.k.a. propagandapedia) says that experts are split on the subject. According to that wikipedia article, a Japanese book alleges that former Japanese biological/chemical experts/war criminals worked for the Americans at the Yokosuka Naval Base during the Korean War: that book is the “Rikugun Noborito Kenkyujo no shinjitsu”. I came full circle.
A CIA review of the “Rikugun Noborito Kenkyujo no shinjitsu” is available through the Wayback Machine[4]. It is short, but quite funny. It reads:
“the book leaves the reader disappointed that Ban did not include more information on his service to US intelligence.”
Signed: CIA.
However not all hope is lost. Once again, we can count on John (von) Sanders’s help. He could check the memoirs of Liman’s second cousin, his (not so) great uncle twice removed: Murray Sanders, the American leading investigator on Unit 731 and the balloon program, and chief of the American Biological Warfare program at Camp Detrick. Is it true that Sanders and Ishii met in 1945 to arrange a deal, as Ishii asserted, Sanders suggested and everyone else officially denied? That is the big question that could change the whole perspective.
[1] https://www.archives.gov/files/iwg/japanese-war-crimes/introductory-essays.pdf
[2] https://www.archives.gov/files/iwg/japanese-war-crimes/select-documents.pdf
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Allegations_of_biological_warfare_in_the_Korean_War
[4] https://web.archive.org/web/20080709105145/https://www.cia.gov/library/center-for-the-study-of-intelligence/csi-publications/csi-studies/studies/vol46no4/article11.html
Stefano Guidoni: Murray Sanders known to the guys as ‘Rivers’ doesn’t link to my mob, even though the like name Murri is common enough amongst kinfolk of my crowd. Seems your 731 US Light Colonel BW investigator was too small a voice to influence ‘King Douglas MacArthur’ as to what was going down with Ishii in ’45, the rumours of his being gifted a lifetime supply of Suntory Crown 5 star having similar credabilty as girls over ten in Yokohama prefecture being dosed up with an Incurable VD strain, preparatory to an anticipated allied seaborn invasion in ’46.