The Bob White "UFO Artifact"

The Bob White UFO Artifact

The so-called Bob White UFO Artifact was first seen at the annual Ozark UFO Conference in Eureka Springs, AR, in the late 1990s.  The metal object is about 7½ inches long and looks somewhat like a metalized pine cone or something that grew organically and somehow turned into a metallic fossil. It certainly looked odd and back then no one could really say what it was.

Except, of course, Bob White, who was presenting the artifact in the vendors’ room at the Conference Center.  With a colleague he would show the strange object to the punters behind a curtain which screened it from plain view and gave the performance an air of mystery and secrecy.  At later UFO conferences in Eureka Springs the artifact was put on display again, sometimes in a room at the Joy Motel across the road from the Inn of the Ozarks where the conference is held.  To view it, conference goers and members of the public had to pay $5.  Then they were ushered in and were regaled with Bob White’s story of how he supposedly acquired this thing.

The first time that I saw the artifact at Eureka Springs I listened to White’s story of how he had been driving through the desert with a friend near Las Vegas at about 2 am one night and how they had seen a huge spherical UFO.  They had seen the UFO in the distance and had then driven for miles before seeing it much closer and low down, not far from the road.  They turned off the highway and drove towards what appeared to them to be a vast glowing spaceship.  Suddenly, as they approached, it shot up into the sky.  From high above them they saw a glowing object arc outwards from the UFO and fall down to the ground making a long groove in the desert sand (which seems highly unlikely!).  They rushed to find the piece that had detached from the UFO but had to wait for it to cool sufficiently before it could be picked up. White put it in the trunk of his car and they resumed their journey.

I listened to this tale with a growing conviction that it was completely false.  I am certainly open to the idea of extraterrestrial UFOs and, indeed, I am aware of the reality of the UFO phenomenon.  But Bob White was not a very convincing liar and his story simply didn’t ring true.  Intuitively I knew the tale was false.  Having listened to what he had to say, I asked him to let me have the name and contact details of his companion who had also seen the UFO and supposedly helped him recover the “artifact”.  He hesitated for a moment and then said “I’m afraid I can’t tell you her name. We were driving to Las Vegas and, since she was married to another man at the time, I am honor bound to keep her name secret.”  If there was any truth to the UFO story at all, this prevarication seemed a lame excuse.

A friend of mine who handled the Bob White object told me that a small bit of it had broken off and he’d put it in his pocket. A genuine piece of UFO!  We laughed at that, especially as White claimed the object was heavily insured and that he would not sell it for less than $10,000,000.  Nevertheless, I still hadn’t the slightest clue then what Bob White’s artifact really was.

His story of recovering the object –an event which he said changed his life for ever-- supposedly took place in 1985 but he didn’t tell anyone about it until 1996. Really?  And how about his secret companion at the time from whom no word was ever heard?  Apparently his career as a musical entertainer under the name Frank James might have suffered if he had revealed the UFO story and so nothing was ever said about it until after his retirement in 1996. 

In 1998 he swore an affidavit about how he had come by the “UFO artifact” and allegedly he passed polygraph tests that showed he was not lying though the value of such a test is highly questionable.  His sworn statement now put his encounter with the UFO somewhere off Interstate 70 between Grand Junction, CO, and Cisco, UT, rather than near Las Vegas which is what he had told me. His female companion in the car at the time had now acquired a name, Jan, but that was all we were told about her if indeed she ever existed.

In September 2000 Bob White and best friend and partner Larry Cekander opened the “Museum of the Unexplained” in the small town of Reeds Spring, MO, which is about 13 miles north of the glitzy Branson strip.  The “UFO artifact” was centerpiece of their exhibition in a converted video-rental store sandwiched between the Humane Society Thrift Shop and the Sunrise Cafe on Main Street.  The other exhibits were mostly newspaper articles or print-outs from the internet about the supposed UFO artifact and these were fixed to the walls with thumbtacks.  The museum closed in 2004.

Unfortunately for the proprietors of the museum they had been unable to draw the Branson spin-off crowd or promote it as a must-see visit for connoisseurs of the bizarre and paranormal. Cekander even purchased a special bus to take the “UFO artifact” on tour to more promising places like Las Vegas where it might be better appreciated by the average punter.  Despite the $10,000,000 price tag that Bob White placed on his prized artifact there were few paying visitors to the museum and none at all prepared to make an offer for the object at anything like the asking price.

The fact that very few people took it seriously gives a clear idea of what this exhibition really was: it was simply a sideshow of the type found at carnivals or circuses during much of the last century.  Some will remember the “Bonnie & Clyde Death Car”, a battered Ford V-8 riddled with bullet holes and with a blood-spattered interior that appeared in sideshows all over the United States.  Then there was the Fiji Mermaid, a dead but nevertheless grotesque monstrosity presented by P T Barnum; also Congo, the Killer Ape, alive but not quite what it purported to be. There were living freaks and dead ones known as pickled punks, preserved in jars of formaldehyde. Hucksters and carnies would present these prodigies to paying punters often with the ludicrous claim “$1,000 REWARD IF NOT ABSOLUTELY REAL”.

My favorite sideshow was a Spanish one billed as “Wilma –La Mujer sin Cuerpo”: Wilma --the woman without a body.  Having paid one’s money one was ushered into a tent where an ornate box sat on a table surrounded by curtains.  With a roll of drums one of the carnies would open the lid of the box inside which was the head of a young woman –quite clearly a living girl whose eyes moved and who spoke softly to the amazed audience. It looked as if Wilma was just a head with no body and some onlookers were visibly moved by the poor girl’s plight.  Few people could ever see the inclined mirror in the box that was used to produce this spectacular illusion.

These sideshow exhibits frequently displayed certificates of authenticity signed by doctors, law enforcement officers, or supposedly highly qualified scientists.  The Bonnie and Clyde Death Car exhibit included countless letters vouching for its authenticity but at one time there were half a dozen such Bonnie and Clyde Death Cars touring the country.  Which --if any-- was the real McCoy?  In general, sideshow certificates of authenticity were not worth the paper they were written on.

In similar fashion it was claimed that Bob White’s “UFO Artifact” had been tested at ten or more top scientific laboratories in various parts of the US and it was “proved beyond doubt to be of extraterrestrial origin”. Larry Cekander trumpeted this claim on a website called ‘UFO Hard Evidence’ saying “This isn’t the smoking gun –this is the bullet!”  However a closer look at the supposed test results from unnamed scientists at labs like Los Alamos gave no such indication of extraterrestrial origin.  Bob White said these scientists had examined the object and found it had extraordinary properties but he claimed they were not prepared to let their names be used.  In a 2008 episode of Bill Birnes’s program ‘UFO Hunters’ on the History Channel (see “Bob White Object Story, (Supposed Artifact from UFO) 1/2" on YouTube) the names of these alleged scientists at Los Alamos are bleeped out.  If you believe what White says, their findings had been suppressed and they were afraid to talk or else they now denied what they’d told him previously.  But in fact bleeps were used because the scientists had found no such indication and did not wish their names to be used to promote this fake UFO artifact.

The one thorough testing of a small sample from this object that we do know about was commissioned by Robert Bigelow’s National Institute for Discovery Science (NIDS) in 1996.  Testing was carried out at the New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology (NM Tech) under the direction of Professor Paul Fuierer. This showed that the metal sample was about 85% aluminum, 9% silicon, 2% iron with various other trace elements like Ca, S, Na and Cl.  It seemed to be an aluminum alloy and very similar to what is known as ‘360 Aluminum Casting Alloy’.  Many other tests were run on it and the analysis was double blinded but showed that the sample was not remarkable or unusual in any way despite the claims of Cekander and White. "The metallurgical analysis was pretty mundane," said Colm Kelleher, a scientist at NIDS. “We didn't find any evidence that it was extraterrestrial.”  Had there been anything to indicate that it really did come from a flying saucer, it is very likely that Robert Bigelow would have purchased it, even at the absurd price of $10,000,000.  Needless to say Cekander and White dismissed the NIDS test results as being unsound and insufficient.    

In November 2009 Bob White died from heart-related problems and injuries suffered in a recent one-car accident. He was 78. One effusive obituary in the MUFON UFO Journal, described him as a tireless “truthseeker” but I hardly think that’s an appropriate description.  Maybe an old rogue would be nearer the mark since he and his partner Larry Cekander must have known only too well what the alleged “UFO artifact” really was and it certainly wasn’t a piece off a flying saucer!

In May of that year on the Internet forum www.abovetopsecret.com a man who had spent many years as a metalworker and called himself darkprinc revealed what the Bob White object really was.  He said “I’m sorry for this post but you have all been duped.” The object was quite plainly accreted metal residue from an industrial metal-grinding machine that builds up during the grinding process.  He had seen hundreds of such build-ups when working with a table mounted disk-cutter and some of these accretions were larger than White’s object and, like it, had been hacked off from the grinder at one end.  

Tiny sparks which fly from a grinding disk are molten particles of metal that gradually accrete as a residue. It happens with aluminum alloys as well as steel and even with softer metals such as zinc. darkprinc later photographed a number of these metal accretion residues and posted the photos online for comparison. Few who saw them could have any doubt that this was the true solution but nevertheless he was fiercely attacked online by Larry Cekander who denied everything he had said.  It should be noted that darkprinc stated too that he knew UFOs of extraterrestrial origin exist “because I’ve seen them”.  But he was adamant the BW object was simply metal residue waste.

Then, in October 2011, Skeptic magazine ran an article exposing what the Bob White “UFO Artifact” was, but omitted to give any credit to darkprinc who had been first to reveal the scam.   Retired foundryman Ean Harrison from Seattle explained how these metal accretion stalagmites (as he called them) form when metal castings are “cleaned” on large stationary grinders.  The grinding dust is spewed downward into the wheel guard at temperatures near the melting point of the parent metal. When the metal dust and grinding wheel abrasive hit the bottom of the guard, melted epoxy wheel binder glues the mixture together. Over time a metal stalagmite is slowly created from the bottom up, fusing the parent metals into the characteristic form. Also, depending on the castings being ground, the composition of any stalagmite could be an exotic mix of steel, iron, manganese, aluminum, etc.—in other words, a puzzling metallurgical mix all combined in a seemingly impossible compound.  But in reality it is merely a product of the melted grinding wheel binder. If the final grindings were made with an aluminum alloy before the stalagmite was removed, it could show a higher proportion of aluminum on the outside than in samples taken from its core. The magazine had some custom-made carbide steel stalagmites (such as that in the photo below) made to show their undoubted similarity to the Bob White object.    

This article also elicited a furious response online from Larry Cekander. In attempting to refute the Skeptic article, he disclosed he was a metalworker himself with a metalworking shop of his own in Missouri.  A master mechanic with expertise in metal fabrication, welding, and casting of parts for racing motors, he even admitted to having some steel or iron accretion stalagmites that he had made himself.  This in itself was an eye-opener.

With these revelations from him it became very hard not to conclude that it was Cekander who produced the Bob White object in the first place. His friend Bob White with his UFO story was just the front man for this side-show.  This would explain Cekander’s furious denials that such stalagmites could form from aluminum (alloy) and his abusive online rants in which he disputed everything darkprinc and Skeptic magazine had separately averred.

By the end of 2011 one could see from the online UFO discussion forums that there was hardly anyone out there who gave any further credence to the Bob White “UFO Artifact” and most folk acknowledged that it was simply a piece of grinding residue scrap metal.  Nevertheless Cekander kept up his foul-mouthed rants against Skeptic magazine and anyone else who dared to question online his piece of “UFO hard evidence” whose attraction value as a sideshow exhibit had by now pretty well dropped to zero.

I would not have bothered to write this article to inform people about the scam were it not for the fact that I see Cekander has been invited to present his “UFO artifact” and to be a speaker at the annual Ozark UFO conference in Eureka Springs, AR, on April 12-14, 2013.  Either the Ozark conference organizers are not aware that the alleged artifact has been totally discredited or else they are showing remarkably poor judgment.  I won’t pretend that this UFO Conference --and indeed other UFO conferences-- haven’t hosted transparently false claims of alien contact and bogus UFO cases in the past, but this particular claim seriously devalues the whole subject of ufology.  If anyone in the UFO community wonders why most scientists and the media do not take our subject seriously, here is one very good reason why. It brings the whole UFO subject into disrepute.  There are of course many honest UFO researchers and to accept falsehoods like this does them no favors.

Do I expect Mr Cekander to withdraw from the conference and admit that his “UFO artifact” is bogus?  Not a bit, since he is far too brazen for that. So long as there are still a few gullible takers I’ve no doubt that he will continue to present the “UFO Artifact” and claim its “proven extraterrestrial origin”.  I suggest that he’s flogging a dead horse and his best bet would be to sell it to ‘Ripley’s Believe It or Not’ in Branson. They might give him $50 for it.

George Wingfield,  March 2013

The Bob White “UFO Artifact” –postscript for 2013/2014.

As had been announced, the Bob White “UFO Artifact” was the subject of a presentation by Larry Cekander at the April 2013 Ozark Mountain UFO Conference in Eureka Springs, AR.  Before the presentation I spoke to conference organizer, the late Dolores Cannon, and asked her why Cekander had been invited as a speaker when almost everyone knew his “UFO Artifact” was a fake and, indeed, that Cekander himself had made it. 

Dolores Cannon was a past-life regressionist and hypnotherapist who worked with those who claimed they were UFO contactees and abductees.  She specialized in recovery and cataloging of past knowledge and was best known for revelations she supposedly received psychically from the prophet Nostradamus (died 1566).   She told me that she felt certain Cekander’s claims were true and his UFO artifact was a piece off a flying saucer.  In my opinion this didn’t say too much for her intuitive and psychic abilities.

Cekander’s presentation was mainly taken up with the showing of a video featuring the late Bob White and his story about the alleged UFO artifact. In the video White pleaded –almost to the point of tears– that his story was true and added a little more to what we had been told previously.  He and his female companion (“Jan”) after supposedly encountering the huge UFO somewhere off the road between Grand Junction, CO, and Cisco, UT,  --and recovering the UFO artifact which fell from it-- drove to a late night filling station with a bar/restaurant beside the road near Cisco.

Cisco is a ghost town (that I’ve visited) a few miles off Interstate 70 in Utah.  Some of its abandoned and derelict buildings were used as a filming backdrop in such movies as Vanishing Point (1971), Thelma and Louise (1991) and Don’t Come Knocking (2005).  It featured too in Johnny Cash’s 1967 song Cisco Clifton’s Filling Station. Whether or not the old filling station and combined roadhouse on US Hwy 6 were still in business in 1985 at the time of White’s alleged encounter with that huge UFO is dubious.  Now closed for very many years and completely derelict, it had a colorful history and its proprietor was once jailed for shooting a biker who took off without paying for gas.  Bob White may have visited it during his time on the road working as a musician but embellishing his UFO story by including that old Cisco roadhouse in it didn’t make the tale any the more believable.

When Bob White and Jan arrived there at a very late hour and ordered a meal the improved story claimed that the roadhouse phone had rung and a military man had demanded to speak to Bob White (although his name at the time was Frank James).  We were told this officer was calling from a nearby secret base from which the military had supposedly tracked the flying saucer and that they were fully aware of White’s UFO encounter and his recovery of the artifact.  Bob White was, predictably, threatened with dire penalties and told that he must give the artifact back.  He claimed that he and his companion left rapidly and continued on their road trip to Las Vegas.  The alleged UFO artifact stayed hidden in the trunk of White’s car.

Apart from this extended version of his UFO encounter Bob White was shown in the video undergoing a polygraph test by an alleged polygraph examiner who was said to be a MUFON member.  The test appeared to be being carried out in a motel room and, predictably, we were told that White passed the test with flying colors thus confirming that his story must be true.

Larry Cekander’s presentation ended with further assurances that the UFO artifact had been tested at various unnamed “top scientific laboratories” and had been found to be of definite extraterrestrial origin.  The 7½ inch metal shard which was lying on a table during the lecture looked even less impressive now but Cekander had a further trick which may have fooled some of the more credulous members of the audience. 

He turned on an instrument which he said was a subatomic particle or gamma ray detector of some kind and held the UFO artifact near it on the other side of a small screen.  When the object was brought near an aperture in the screen the instrument began to click sounding rather like a Geiger counter.  One might have thought that the NIDS scientists who tested a piece of the alleged UFO artifact would have noticed this property if it had really been radioactive but there was never any mention of that.  A more likely explanation is that Cekander’s shielded detector device was merely a small metal detector which clicked --as a result of electromagnetic induction-- when any lump of metal was held near it.

Some people will ask me why I have bothered to describe the Bob White UFO Artifact case in such detail when it is so transparently false and adds absolutely zero to our understanding of the UFO phenomenon.  The reason for this is that I am very familiar with this fraudulent case and it is a good example of UFO fakery where the promoters of the scam, Larry Cekander and Bob White, were also the primary creators of the “UFO Artifact” plus its bogus background story.  There are many other cases --as with all sorts of stories of alien contact-- where the chief promoter of a scam is also primary creator of the falsehood.  Good examples of this would be such fraudsters as George Adamski and Billy Meier.    In addition, there are some UFO celebrities --such as Jaime Maussan and Linda Howe-- who promote various false claims although they are not creators of the falsehoods in the first place.

UFO conferences in the US and some radio shows like Coast-to-Coast AM have always been a magnet for UFO fraudsters. Their scams have often become completely accepted at such events, together with associated sideshows or their vendors’ tables dedicated to their own particular UFO story or myth.   At the 2013 Ozark (Mountain) UFO Conference I asked one speaker who had attended the conference many times what he thought about Cekander’s “UFO Artifact”.  Clearly embarrassed, he replied that he had no opinion one way or the other.  Yet again I was reminded that there is an unwritten rule that speakers at UFO conferences should not criticize each other, however false they may think a fellow speaker’s story.  UFO skeptics and those who question the authenticity of what some speakers are presenting are seldom given a hearing and are made to feel unwelcome.

Larry Cekander was at the Ozark (Mountain) UFO conference in April 2014 with a table in the vendors’ room.  On sale were photos of his “UFO Artifact” plus other such UFO merchandise. He had done this in previous years but he now added an opportunistic wrinkle.  It related to a well known account of a UFO maneuvering through the trees in Rendlesham Forest (UK) on the night of December 27/28, 1980, where it was witnessed by RAF Bentwaters Deputy Base Commander Col. Charles Halt, Bruce Englund, and a few other USAF personnel.

The strange flashing UFO observed in a forest clearing seemed to be spewing out spark-like bits of molten metal that fell to the ground. An account of this is related in Nick Pope’s book Encounter in Rendlesham Forest (published April 2014).  Nick was a speaker at the April 2014 conference and the Rendlesham UFOs were the subject of his presentation. Larry Cekander at his table in the vendors’ room told a friend of mine that some metal fragments from Rendlesham Forest had been brought to the conference.  “Nick Pope knows all about these fragments, so ask him for verification”, my friend was told.

There was no suggestion in his book that any metal fragments from the UFO had been recovered from the forest floor in 1980 but I asked Nick Pope nevertheless.  He said that he certainly hadn’t brought any such fragments to the conference himself but said that Cekander had cornered him and showed him various pieces of metal.  I suggest this was yet further scrap metal which probably came from the floor of Cekander’s workshop in Missouri.

George Wingfield,   November 2015  

Crop Circle Revelation: The Milk Hill Script

Crop Circle Revelation 

During the summer of 1991 interest in the crop circles in England reached a fever pitch.  Newspapers were awash with photos of new formations and articles about this strange phenomenon.  Fascinated members of the public converged on parts of Wiltshire where the circles were appearing and farmers often charged money for access to their cropfields.

Giving the subject a certain legitimacy was scientist Dr Terence Meaden, a meteorologist and author who had proposed that an elusive natural phenomenon, the Plasma Vortex, was causing these mysterious patterns in the crops.  To prove his theory he set up an observation project with a team of Japanese scientists on a hilltop between Calne and Devizes where a watch was carried out using radar and other scientific instruments.  Nevertheless the agency that caused the crop circles continued to evade detection and, despite the appearance of some circles in the fields below, nothing definite was established.

During the previous year the phenomenon had progressed from simple circles in the corn to highly elaborate shapes called pictograms which embodied both circles and rectilinear elements. Although most investigators, like me, saw clear evidence of intelligent design, Dr Meaden continued to insists that his “plasma vortex” was the answer, even suggesting that it might explode like some physical mechanism scattering cogwheels and springs, thus causing straight lines and possible key-shapes to result.  Other researchers would cautiously allow that some “unknown intelligence” was at work, but at the start of 1991 there were few who seriously believed that the crop circles were all man-made.

So for quite some time, Dr Meaden’s theory became the “official” explanation and puzzled journalists and TV interviewers would frequently turn to him when the subject was discussed.   On July 17^th 1991 a vast new crop formation appeared in the fields below Barbury Castle hill-fort.  This attracted huge interest from the public and the media.  But there was no possible way that this could be explained as resulting from a plasma vortex, and, to his credit, Dr Meaden declared it must be a man-made hoax.  Even so, there were many of us who saw this new wonder as a definite part of the genuine phenomenon.  All of this was just a few weeks before Doug & Dave came out with their claim in TODAY newspaper to have made all the crop circles --a claim that was not universally accepted since there were many formations, like this one at Barbury Castle, which they could not possibly have made.   

The Milk Hill Script

In early August 1991 a strange new crop formation looking like a line of some unknown script was found in a wheat field below Milk Hill near Alton Barnes.   Croppie John Martineau, who had been out on Milk Hill in the early hours, was first to report this and described it as a “line of runes”.   Runes are the characters of certain ancient secret alphabets, consisting mainly of rectangles, with one or two sides missing and in particular orientations, with such symbols corresponding to the letters of the alphabet.  With his talk of runes, some wrongly suspected John himself of having hoaxed this formation.

Most of us were deeply puzzled by the meaning of this weird cipher.  In due course The Cerealogist , ‘The Journal for Crop Circle Studies’, under the editorship of John Michell,  offered a prize of  £100 to anyone who could come up with a convincing solution to the riddle.   Many tried but no one succeeded.   The best known attempt was: OPPONO ASTOS.  This was suggested by the late Professor Gerald Hawkins, author of the book Stonehenge Decoded.   Hawkins claimed that it meant “I oppose acts of craft and cunning” in Latin, although the accusative plural ‘astos’ is a bit dubious.   The acts of craft and cunning, he held, were crop circle hoaxes.    Other cryptographers, similarly using a straight substitution code, produced EFFETE ORDER or else ESSENE ORDER, neither of which seemed relevant.   Few people saw any merit in these solutions.

Others offered interpretations more in line with their crop circle beliefs.   American mystery-hunter the late Erik Beckjord had stamped out TALK TO US in a cornfield a few miles away two days earlier, a message presumably aimed at the aliens or whatever other intelligence lay behind the crop circles.  The Milk Hill Script he saw as a reply, though curiously he decided that the message was in Korean.   Michael Green, Chairman of CCCS, found the meaning of the crop cipher was in an Atlantean language known only to him.  He claimed that the circlemakers’ message meant  “Creator, Wise and Loving”.

The message was bounded by a small circle at each end and these were not considered part of the text. That was indeed correct.  Hawkins assumed that the character ll indicated a word break.  It did not.  For some reason he thought the message was in Latin.  No, it was in English!  More importantly, it was far from clear which way up the text was meant to be.  That would determine whether it should be read from left to right or from right to left.  In fact the text is the right way up as it is shown in the accompanying photograph, and Hawkins in producing his incorrect solution read the text from back to front.

When I was editor of The Cerealogist a year later, I renewed the challenge to translate the Milk Hill Script and also our offer of £100.   Surely someone must know what these strange runes meant?   I had assumed that by now, at any rate, the human circlemakers responsible would step forward and claim the prize.  But that was not to be.

    Barbury Castle Crop Circle, July 17th 1991  (photo by George Wingfield)

The Message Revealed

I can now reveal the true meaning of the Milk Hill Script and I still hope (if I ever get paid for this article!) to award £100 to Steve Marshall of Yatesbury, Wilts, who was the first person to inform me of it in early 2005.  He is not the circlemaker who laid down the formation and I’m still unsure whether that person --let us call him ‘A’ – was ever aware of the prize that was on offer.  I used to assume that the creators of those magnificent crop formations back in 1991, which some referred to as the legendary “A-team” without knowing their identity, were probably people who were known to the croppies at the time.  These A-team circlemakers if they existed, I reasoned, would have found it difficult to resist hanging out in their newly produced formations during the day, and mixing with croppies who came to wonder at them.   They would have become familiar faces and might even have attended crop circle conferences at that time.  But maybe I was wrong, and maybe this supposed A-team shrank from public view.

About five years ago another more recent circlemaker ‘B’ was out walking at the Cherhill monument in Wiltshire.  He overheard a man he didn’t recognize talking to some other visitors to the monument about crop circles.  He clearly displayed a degree of inside knowledge on the subject.  B waited until the others had left and then went over and talked with the man who turned out to be A.  When A realized that this was a fellow circlemaker he became rather more candid.  He told B that he and his friends had made the Barbury Castle formation in July 1991 and also that they had made the notorious Milk Hill Script.  To prove that what he was saying was true he went on to reveal the meaning of this script.   The simple message consisted of just three words run together:-

                                                  MEADENTALKSSHIT

The A-team’s little joke was to first write the lower halves of the capital letters of this message up against a tractor tramline.  This would prove indecipherable –as indeed it did—and then, when it had attracted sufficient attention, they would return by night and complete it by adding the upper halves.  Lettering of the message used by the A-team is examined in more detail in the accompanying piece which is appended below (“The Milk Hill Script Lettering”).

However the best laid plans of mice and men sometimes go awry.  The farmer was not at all pleased by the appearance of this cryptic inscription in his wheatfield or by the subsequent invasion by croppies keen to examine it believing that it might be a message from the aliens or from spiritual beings of a higher order.  He destroyed it as soon as he could by harvesting the crop in that field.  The A-team had no opportunity to return and complete their mischief.   There were only a few aerial photos taken of this half-message during its brief existence, such as the one shown here taken by Jürgen Krönig. 

Although neither the aliens, nor indeed myself, would have phrased it quite so crudely, the message does express a sentiment with which I would have concurred at the time.  Meaden had indeed talked a lot of nonsense and this certainly helped give the crop circles a false scientific legitimacy.  This is not an attempt to shift the blame for the madness which the circles provoked at the time, since many of us were utterly beguiled by them and it took several years for some researchers to come back down to earth.  In 1990 and summer 1991 this madness was at its height and there were few people prepared to even entertain the possibility that the whole phenomenon might be man-made.

Today there are still diehard croppies who will dispute what I say, but they will find it hard to reject this solution to the mysterious 1991 cipher at Milk Hill. And, if they reluctantly accept that, they should also consider whether A and his friends made the great formation at Barbury Castle two weeks earlier.  It seems most probable to me that this was indeed the case. 

George Wingfield

September 2008  

                                                                        Steve Marshall  

The Milk Hill Script Lettering

It can be seen from the photograph that the lettering used in this message is composed entirely of straight lines and that no curved or diagonal components are present.    What sort of script lettering did the authors of the message intend using?

My suggestion is that the intention was to mimic a basic type of font that is widely employed in displays using LCD or LED electronic devices, such as digital clocks or signs.   The matrix used to represent each letter might, for example, be a seven-element LED display of the following shape:-  

This consists of two squares joined together by a common side.   As an LED device, each of the seven sides of the two squares can be lit or unlit and the resulting combinations are used to represent different numeric digits or letters. When such a matrix is used to represent the digits 0–9 only, the results are unambiguous and will be familiar to most people since such numbers are commonly used in digital clocks (with the vertical elements sloped slightly to the right).

Less familiar is the use of such a matrix to represent the capital letters of the alphabet.  Clearly some letters, such as those with diagonal components, will be more poorly represented than those without.  If we equate a “lit” LED with a side being present and “unlit” with it being absent, it can be shown how characters in this format can be used as an alphanumeric font.   The LED character shown in the previous paragraph, with all sides lit or present, could be used to represent the digit 8 or the capital letter B.

Some LED displays of this variety are used to represent capital letters only.  It can be seen that the capital letters  A  B  C  D  E  F  G  are represented fairly satisfactorily in this format:     

 

And likewise, the letters  H  I  L  O  P  S  U   are:    

 

 

     One may object to the fact that D and O are represented identically and the same would be true for A and R.   For these reasons a reduced character set of less than 26 letters must be used if one is to avoid ambiguity.  Some of the capitals such as  J  K  M  N  T  Y   are not so satisfactory but are still recognizable: 

                                                       

Clearly the representation of N as two verticals is not ideal, and there are capital letters such as  O  R  Q  V  W  X  Z   which cannot be easily represented without any ambiguity and are best avoided.  Therefore one’s short message might need to be restricted, say, by using a 19-character-only alphabet which avoids these letters.

Nevertheless the letters which we have defined above are sufficient to spell out the crop message.  Using this font it appears as: 

                                     

                            

When the upper half of this lettering is removed one gets the incomplete message which is what  actually appeared in the field :-   
                                     
Apart from the fact that the small gap in the middle was closed up a bit, that is exactly what was found below Milk Hill on that day back in August 1991. 

*******************************************

[This article explaining the Milk Hill Script was originally written in March 2005 and was to have been published in Fortean Times by editor Bob Rickard.  Despite Bob's assurance that it would be published soon it never appeared in that organ possibly due to the fact that he had handed over most of his editorial duties at about that time.   The article was later published in FATE Magazine.  I paid Steve Marshall the £100 prize money for this solution to the Milk Hill Script although I had long ceased to be the editor of The Cerealogist.  Mr A could have collected the prize money at any time but we have no idea whether he ever knew it was on offer.  Mr B (Matthew Williams) could equally well have collected this prize money but unlike Steve he was not the one who told me the solution.]    

A Fresh Look at the Cash-Landrum UFO Incident

The Cash-Landrum UFO Incident: Was this Honey Badger?

"There was no evidence presented that would indicate that Army, National Guard, or Army Reserve helicopters were involved." 

That was the conclusion of Lt. Col. George C. Sarran's report on his investigation for the Department of the Army's Inspector General’s office on the allegations of US military helicopters being present during the Cash-Landrum UFO encounter.   His investigation was carried out 18 months after that extraordinary encounter on a road near Houston, Texas, and it is quite possible that he was unaware the statement was not entirely true.  Despite what Sarran said, the truth about the presence of US military helicopters during the Cash-Landrum incident seems to have been covered up and denied at the highest level.   There is every reason to think that the helicopters that were seen at the time were indeed US military ones and they were engaged in a Top Secret exercise of the very highest priority. 

The story of what happened when Betty Cash, Vickie Landrum and her grandson Colby encountered a supposed UFO on a night in December 1980 near Huffman, Texas, is well known but no satisfactory explanation has ever been found.   Let us first briefly recap that event as related by Wikipedia:-

On the evening of December 29, 1980, Betty Cash, Vickie Landrum and Colby Landrum (Vickie's seven-year-old grandson) were driving home to Dayton, Texas, in Cash's Oldsmobile Cutlass after dining out.

At about 9:00 p.m., while driving on an isolated two-lane road in dense woods, the witnesses said they observed a light above some trees. They initially thought the light was an airplane approaching Houston Intercontinental Airport (IAH - about 35 miles away) and gave it little notice.

A few minutes later on the winding roads, the witnesses saw what they believed to be the same light as before, but it was now much closer and very bright. The light, they claimed, came from a huge diamond-shaped object, which hovered at about treetop level. The object's base was expelling flame and emitting significant heat.

Vickie Landrum told Cash to stop the car, fearing they would be burned if they approached any closer. However, Vickie's opinion of the object quickly changed: A born-again Christian she interpreted the object as a sign of the second coming of Jesus Christ telling her grandson, "That's Jesus.  He will not hurt us."

Anxious, Cash considered turning the car around, but abandoned this idea because the road was too narrow and she presumed the car would get stuck on the dirt shoulders, which were soft from that evening's rains.

Cash and Landrum got out of the car to examine the object.  Colby was terrified, however, and Vickie Landrum quickly returned to the car to comfort the frantic child. Cash remained outside the car, "mesmerized by the bizarre sight," as UFO researcher Jerome Clark subsequently wrote.    He went on,

The object, intensely bright and a dull metallic silver, was shaped like a huge upright diamond, about the size of the Dayton Water Tower with its top and bottom cut off so that they were flat rather than pointed. Small blue lights ringed the center, and periodically over the next few minutes flames shot out of the bottom, flaring outward, creating the effect of a large cone. Every time the fire dissipated, the UFO floated a few feet downwards toward the road. But when the flames blasted out again, the object rose about the same distance."

The witnesses said the heat was strong enough to make the car's metal body painful to the touch—Cash said she had to use her coat to protect her hand from being burnt when she finally re-entered the car. When she touched the car's dashboard, Vickie Landrum's hand pressed into the softened vinyl, leaving an imprint that was evident weeks later.  Investigators cited this handprint as proof of the witnesses' account; however, no photograph of the alleged handprint exists.

The object then moved to a point higher in the sky.  As it ascended over the treetops, the witnesses claimed that a group of helicopters approached the object and surrounded it in tight formation. Cash and Landrum counted 23 helicopters, and later identified some of them as tandem-rotor CH-47 Chinooks which are used by military forces worldwide.

With the road now clear, Cash drove on, claiming to see glimpses of the object and the helicopters receding into the distance.

From first sighting the object to its departure, the witnesses said the encounter lasted about 20 minutes.  Based on descriptions given in John F. Schuessler's book about the incident, it appears that the observers were southbound on Texas state highway FM 1485/2100 when they claimed to have seen the object. The initial location of the reported object, based on the same descriptions, was just south of Inland Road, approximately at 30.0926°N, 95.1109°W.

Investigators later located a Dayton police officer, Detective Lamar Walker, and his wife who claimed to have seen 12 Chinook-type helicopters near the same area the Cash-Landrum event allegedly occurred and at roughly the same time. These other witnesses did not report seeing a large diamond-shaped object.

Soon after their encounter with the mystery object Betty Cash and the Landrums once they had returned home all suffered from nausea, vomiting, diarrhea and generalized weakness as though they had suffered severe sunburns.  Betty Cash’s symptoms were particularly bad and worsened over the next few days.  She could not walk and lost large patches of skin and clumps of hair causing her to be hospitalized.  A radiologist was quoted as saying it appeared that all three patients must have been exposed to ionizing radiation (possibly from a nuclear source) and/or non-ionizing radiation such as microwaves or ultraviolet light.

Vickie Landrum telephoned a number of US government agencies and officials about the encounter.   When she phoned NASA, she was steered towards NASA aerospace engineer John F Schuessler who had long been interested in UFOs and became years later the International Director of MUFON.  Schuessler researched the case in great detail and later wrote articles and a book on the subject.  His undoubtedly sincere perspective of the incident was always that this must have been an extraterrestrial UFO or else testing by the US military of a recovered alien spacecraft such as the alleged Project Snowbird.

After contacting their US Senators Betty Cash and Vickie Landrum were advised to file a complaint with the Judge Advocate Claims office at Bergstrom AFB.  They were next advised to hire lawyers and seek compensation for their injuries.  Their attorney, Peter Gersten, who headed CAUS (Citizens Against UFO Secrecy), took the case pro bono and sued the US government for $20 million on their behalf.  On August 21, 1986, a District Court Judge dismissed their case noting that the plaintiffs had not proved the helicopters were associated with the US Government and that military officials had testified the United States Armed Forces did not have a large diamond-shaped aircraft in their possession.  

         

A Fresh Look at the Cash-Landrum Incident

There are very good reasons for thinking that the helicopters were real and were indeed ones belonging to the US military despite the conclusions of George Sarran’s inquiry.   The fact probably had to be covered up because this exercise required the very highest level of secrecy without which its whole purpose would have been lost.  Only the helicopter crews and the senior officers who ordered the exercise would have had the slightest idea about its purpose.

To make any sense of the episode one cannot afford to ignore the grave international political situation that had consumed the attention of the United States, the President, and various arms of the US military for all of the year 1980.  This was of course the Iran hostage crisis which blighted Jimmy Carter’s presidency and concentrated minds both in government and the military to find some way of rescuing the 52 Americans who were eventually held for 444 days.

Operation Eagle Claw used eight RH-53 helicopters and several C-130s in an attempt to rescue the hostages on April 24, 1980. It failed miserably with the loss of several aircraft and the lives of eight servicemen.  Subsequently the crisis deepened.  A second rescue attempt, Operation Credible Sport, was planned using highly modified YMC-130H Hercules aircraft, one of which crashed during a demonstration flight at Eglin AFB on October 29, 1980. This project was abandoned shortly afterwards and it was on November 2, 1980, the Iranian parliament set forth formal conditions for the US hostages’ release. At just this time Ronald Reagan was elected President, although obviously he would not take up office until eleven weeks later.

I believe that one cannot begin to understand the strange Cash-Landrum incident without first setting the scene.  New urgent plans for the US military to rescue the hostages in Iran were still being prepared as from October 1980 since few believed that the Iranians would keep their word on any agreements that had been reached.  These new plans resulted in the formation of the 160^th Special Operations Aviation Regiment (Airborne), the ‘Task Force 160’, who were also known as the Night Stalkers.  They are referred to in John Alexander’s 2011 book UFOs –Myths, Conspiracies, and Realities and there it was said they had been exonerated in Sarran’s report.  Even so, the 160^th and US Navy SEALs are most likely to have been the occupants of the helicopters involved in the Cash-Landrum incident.  For an appreciation of the role of the 160^th SOAR see:-

en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/160th_Special_Operations_Regiment_(Airborne)

There is known to have been a second projected rescue plan by the 160^th, known as Project Honey Badger,  to rescue the Iran hostages in early 1981.  This was finally called off when President Reagan came into office and the hostages were released on January 20, 1981. However, it is known that the Honey Badger exercises had continued until well after the November 4, 1980, US presidential election.  It was said that “Numerous special operations, applications, and techniques were developed which became part of the emerging USSOCOM repertoire" according to the Wikipedia entry on Operation Eagle Claw.   I suggest that it must have been Honey Badger which led to the extraordinary Cash-Landrum incident with near fatal results for Betty Cash, Vickie Landrum, and her grandson Colby.   

If that were the case, we need to explain what the diamond-shaped flaming object was that descended on the country road near Huffman, TX.  My suggestion is that it was some kind of “THW”.  That is my unofficial acronym for “Trojan Horse Weapon” and something of this kind was going to be needed for the hostage rescue mission to have any chance of success.

Illustration of a TV re-enactment of the Cash-Landrum Incident

Everyone is familiar with the story of the great wooden horse which the Greeks left outside the gates of Troy during the Trojan War (c. 1200 BC). The Trojans were very puzzled as to what this was but, thinking the Greek forces had sailed away, they took it inside the city anyway.  Inside the horse Greek soldiers were concealed and, in the dead of night, they climbed out and opened the city gates for their returning comrades to rush in.  This clever deception allowed the Greek army to destroy the city of Troy and bring the lengthy Trojan War to an end.

Any modern THW would have to be a totally unfamiliar object and one whose purpose was not obvious to the people it was intended to fool. Its objective would be to deceive, distract, and possibly even disable the enemy defenders at the position attacked. I don’t suggest that it was meant to look like a UFO but any such THW would have to descend from the sky at night, land close to where the rescue operation was going to take place, and distract –even injure-- the Iranians guarding the hostages.  If it worked, the hostages could be rescued from the large building where they were being held in Tehran.  Task Force 160 men would descend onto the roof of the building from helicopters and blast their way into where the hostages were being held.

It may have been planned as a similar sort of mission to Operation Neptune Spear which was sent to Abbottabad, Pakistan, in May 2011 to kill Osama bin Laden.  That was an easier proposition in that there were no hostages to be rescued and only a few armed defenders in the bin Laden compound.  Even so, it involved several helicopters and a staging point in the desert for refueling of the aircraft and a holding position for the back-up CH-47 Chinooks. 

If the Cash-Landrum “UFO” was indeed a THW we can only guess at the exact role it was meant to play.  One possibility is that it was an experimental nuclear lighting device powered by a small reactor which might have weighed 10 tons or more.  Output would have been used to produce an exceptionally intense light source (or sources) for, if need be, an hour or more.  If that could be made to work as planned, it could have been flown into Tehran slung under a Chinook helicopter, and fired up when it was landed near the Teymour Bakhtiari mansion in Tehran where the hostages were being held as from November 1980.  The device’s intensely brilliant light(s) would blind any Iranian guards or soldiers who tried to resist the rescue mission.  This would probably have been carried out by Navy SEALs wearing special goggles to shield their eyes from the intense beam.  

A number of Task Force 160 helicopters could have carried out such an operation and taken the rescued hostages to a waiting US Navy ship out at sea.  Such a THW –presumably unmanned—might have been intended to descend under its own power or else be lowered by cables from a Chinook helicopter high overhead.  During the Cash-Landrum incident the mystery object was said to be belching flames downward but whether that was from a descent rocket engine or simply part of its fearsome THW display is unclear.  It is most unlikely that any THW like this could fly the 400 miles between the Persian Gulf and Tehran under its own power and so it would possibly have to have been taken there inside a large aircraft --or else slung under a large helicopter-- before being deployed.    

Another possibility is that the THW was a weapon that would emit intense submillimeter (terahertz)  radiation intended to kill, or at least discombobulate, the Iranian guards who approached it on the ground.  Such a weapon whose deadly function would not at first be apparent to its victims may have been developed under US psychotronic* warfare programs that have always remained top secret. Another suggestion has been that such a THW may have emitted some chemical agent to disable those who approached it and that may have been what injured Betty Cash and Vickie Landrum rather than non-ionizing radiation.        

If either of these scenarios is correct, the operation that resulted in the Cash-Landrum fiasco must have been a dress rehearsal for the hostage rescue mission, probably flown from a US Navy carrier in the Gulf of Mexico.  The secret Trojan Horse Weapon (if that is what it was) when fired up, intentionally or otherwise, presumably went out of control and had to be temporarily put down on that road in Texas with the resulting radiation burns to the unfortunate women and grandson Colby who were in the car that happened to stop near it.

If this operation was as I have suggested, it was most certainly Top Secret --to the very highest level of security.  Whether or not such a Project Honey Badger rehearsal was sanctioned by President Carter in the last days of his presidency, we cannot tell.  It may well have been solely authorized by some senior figure in the Pentagon.  When it failed, all traces of the operation had to be covered up and it does seem quite likely that someone in the military may have steered those who were asking questions towards the extraordinary idea that this was a random UFO incident simply to prevent the real explanation becoming public knowledge.

This also raises the intriguing question of whether the UFO which landed in Rendlesham Forest and was approached by Jim Penniston and John Burroughs could have been another kind of Honey Badger THW which was also being given a completely secret dress rehearsal test.  That is pure speculation but it seems no less likely than an alien spacecraft landing by mistake in Rendlesham Forest during the very same week that the Cash-Landrum episode happened in Texas.   If there ever was a US Trojan Horse Weapon being tested by the 160^th SOAR (Airborne) or other Special Forces in December 1980, it never had to be used in anger since the US embassy hostages in Tehran were freed just three weeks later when President Reagan came into office.

George Wingfield

April 2015

* “psychotronic” was a word used to describe certain weapons or techniques that may have been developed for use by the US military during the 1980s and early 1990s.  These could have included the effects of electromagnetic submillimeter or microwave radiation on the brain of enemy combatants. The word “psychotronic” is evidently no longer used and does not even appear in most dictionaries.     

Also see "The DAIG Investigation of the Cash-Landrum UFO Incident, John B Alexander's Involvement and Opinions" at URL:-

www.blueblurrylines.com/2013/11/the-daig-investigation-of-cash-landrum.html

(Note:  When I asked John Alexander what the Cash-Landrum UFO and the associated 23 helicopters could possibly have been if the US military were in no way involved during this episode, he replied they could only have been a genuine UFO and that the helicopters must have been a virtual reality perception which was imprinted by the UFO on the minds of the witnesses, Betty Cash, Vickie Landrum and 7-yr old Colby.  I find that explanation very hard to accept --GW.)