Well, it’s certainly not every day you receive a letter like that in the mail — and from a U.S. senator and a presidential candidate no less. The building to which Goldwater was referring is allegedly a super-secret location that many UFO researchers believe houses the remnants of one or more crashed UFOs, along with the cryogenically preserved remains of their deceased alien crewmembers. Its memorable moniker is Hangar 18.
Whether it really is a literal hangar or a myriad of underground chambers and tunnels still remains to be seen. That it exists at Wright-Patterson in some fashion, however, is — according to many retired military and intelligence personnel, at least — not a matter of any doubt. Yet the Air Force vehemently disagrees. For its members (publicly, at least), Hangar 18 is no more than a tiresome albatross forever hanging around the military’s collective neck. Oh, how they want to strangle that bothersome bird.
Staff at the base categorically (and at times wearily) deny that alien bodies and extraterrestrial spacecraft are secretly held at Wright-Patterson. The terse, official word from the Public Affairs office at Wright-Patterson today, to anyone who dares ask them, is as follows: “Periodically, it is erroneously stated that the remains of extraterrestrial visitors are or have been stored at Wright-Patterson AFB. There are not now nor ever have been, any extraterrestrial visitors or equipment on Wright-Patterson Air Force Base.”[16] The Air Force’s statement is polite and to the point…one suspects they are constantly itching to scream something along the lines of, “Take that, ufologists, and stick it where the sun don’t shine!” Nonetheless, Wright-Patterson has a longstanding and undeniable link to the whole UFO kit and caboodle.
In 1947, General Nathan Twining, who was then the Chief of the Air Materiel Command at the base, initiated the creation of Project Sign, an official operation designed to investigate the burgeoning mystery of UFOs. Sign was shortly thereafter replaced by Project Grudge, which continued to operate from Wright-Patterson. In 1952, Project Blue Book took over the reins from Grudge, before finally closing its pages in 1969. Officially, no evidence was ever found by Sign, Grudge, or Blue Book staff that UFOs were anything more than hoaxes, the results of psychological aberrations, or misidentifications of either natural phenomena or conventional aerial vehicles such as aircraft, balloons, rockets, and satellites. Again, a black eye on the face of ufology — or maybe an outrageous attempt to hide a startling truth of non-terrestrial proportions.
Stringfield’s Research
One of the most persistent sleuths who have attempted to force open the impenetrable doors of Hangar 18 is Leonard Stringfield. Having served within the shadowy world of intelligence-gathering and analysis during the Second World War, Stringfield was a prime character to pursue the convoluted mysteries of Hangar 18. Stringfield had deeply investigated the UFO conundrum since the early 1950s; it was not until the latter part of the 1970s, however, that he began to almost exclusively focus his research upon Hangar 18, which he did with success up until the time of his death in late 1994.
Of the multitude of accounts that reached Stringfield, one truly fascinating tale came via a dedicated UFO investigator named Charles Wilhelm. It went like this: In 1959, Wilhelm, who was a youngster at the time, was hired by an elderly lady living in Price Hill, Cincinnati, to do yard work at her home. Throughout the course of their various conversations, the issue of UFOs occasionally came up, and the pair mused upon the matter and what its impact might be if one day revealed to an unsuspecting populace. When the woman developed terminal cancer, and with her life hanging in the balance, she elected to confide in Wilhelm a remarkable story of jaw-dropping proportions.
As Wilhelm listened, enthralled, the woman revealed how, while serving with the U.S. Air Force at Wright-Patterson in the early 1950s, she held a Top Secret clearance, and on one occasion had seen two flying saucers that were held at the base in what she described as a secret hangar. One such craft, she recalled, was in very good shape, whereas the other showed clear structural signs of having been involved in a serious accident or crash. Wilhelm’s informant quietly told him of her personal knowledge of the preserved remains of two nonhuman creatures held at the base. She even had occasion to view the autopsy reports on the entities, Wilhelm told an excited Stringfield. The woman’s final words on the matter, which succinctly explained the reasons behind her brave decision to take Wilhelm into her confidence: “Uncle Sam can’t do anything to me after I’m in the grave.” Right on, lady.
If Wright-Patterson is indeed home to such astonishing alien evidence, from where and when did it originate? Many suggest the answer is the ufological granddaddy of all granddaddies: Roswell, New Mexico, in the summer of 1947.[17]
Roswell
It was the first week of July 1947 when something strange crashed on ranch land in a remote part of Lincoln County, New Mexico — approximately a 90-minute drive from the town of Roswell — and got the military into a state of total turmoil. The incident has since captured the collective imagination of the general public and the media, has been the topic of more than 20 books, has led to investigations undertaken by both the General Accounting Office and a grumbling U.S. Air Force, and, finally, has ensured Roswell and its people a place on the map and a regular influx of tourists eager to get the scoop on everything extraterrestrial.
The undeniably strange event has provoked an avalanche of explanations from those who have valiantly sought — but ultimately failed — to conclusively resolve the matter. Here are a few:
A weather balloon.
A more cumbersome balloon array designed to secretly monitor for early Soviet atomic-bomb tests.
A balloon-based high-altitude-exposure experiment utilizing human guinea pigs.
The crash of a captured German rocket with small monkeys onboard.
Beyond a doubt, the one explanation that, more than any other, just refuses to go away is the theory that a spacecraft from another world crashed in the wilds of Lincoln County, in the process killing its strange crew and accidentally revealing to the U.S. military that we are not alone in the universe. Much of the available data and testimony suggests it was to Wright-Patterson in Ohio that the Roswell debris and dead entities — whatever they might have been — were secretly transferred.
Norman Richards, who served with the 25th Tropic Lightning Division of the U.S. Army, had his own Roswell story to tell. In the summer of 1950, he and a number of other personnel were flown to Lowry Air Force Base in Colorado for a month and a half of training. One day, while on base at Lowry, Richards’ group attended a lecture — from a colonel who just happened to be stationed at Wright-Patterson — on the subject of new, experimental aircraft. During the course of the lecture, the controversy surrounding UFOs surfaced. One of the attendees wanted to know if UFOs exist. Richards recalled that the colonel got very excited and told the group they had better believe UFOs exist. Alien bodies, along with wreckage from one of their ships, said the remarkably talkative colonel, had been found and secretly retrieved. The colonel, said Richards, told the group that the recovered materials were under investigation at a secure locale on Wright-Patterson after having been covertly flown in from Roswell.