It seems to me that if some as large as is claimed was hidden there, those looking for it would find something. And people have been looking for more than two decades. Here’s the kicker. Without some kind of evidence, all we have are the reports of the residents talking of strange lights and the speculations of those who believe that the base exists. There has been nothing to prove it to the rest of us.
Which is not the case with Area 51 an Groom Lake. These places do exist and they are part of a secret government installation.
The Allende Letters
I had been going to do a brief overview of the Allende Letters episode and move on and while this is still brief, it is more detailed than I planned. For those interested, more information can be had about the case, and I had no trouble finding the Fatemagazine article mentioned later, on the Internet. It should drive the final nail into this coffin… and sometime later I’ll explain the ramifications to the Majestic-Twelve mystery.
The story, as it is usually told, is that a copy of Morris K. Jessup’s The Case for the UFO, apparently annotated by three unidentified, but very knowledgeable men, was received at the Office of Naval Research. Over a period of weeks, a number of letters, obviously written by one or all of those mysterious men, arrived at the home of Jessup. When he learned of the annotated book, he turned the letters over to the ONR. Officers there were so impressed with all this, according to the legend, that they had the book and the letters duplicated, notations and all. The Navy began to investigate the claims in the book and because the Navy was involved, it lent a note of authenticity to the story.
And the story was a wild one. According to the letters, the Navy, during the Second World War had teleported a ship in an experiment that had something to do with Einstein’s Unified Field Theory though how Einstein and his theory were involved is not fully explained. According to Carlos Allende (the man who signed two of the letters, the third was signed by Carl Allen), the experiment had been a success. The ship, identified by some as USS Eldridge, was teleported. The sailors, however, were failures. They manifested all sorts of bizarre side effects from their teleportation.
Allende claimed that he had witnessed this, including the failure of the sailors and said that it was all written down in the newspaper for anyone who wished to verify the story. Or rather, a fight in a waterfront bar was written down in a Philadelphia newspaper which would corroborate part of his tale. The story has been located, or rather, one researcher claimed to have found it, but that report is as suspect as the rest of the tale.
In the early 1970s, while I was still on active duty with the Army, and right after I had returned from Vietnam, I learned that UFO one researcher had gotten a copy of the annotated book from the Navy and I figured if he had one, then I should have one. I wrote to the Chief of Naval Operations, which, when you think about it, should have been the end of the quest. The Chief of Naval Operations in 1970 had probably never heard of the book or Jessup, not to mention having important matters to attend to. He was, after all, the Chief of Naval Operations.
In a couple of weeks, however, the Navy had written back and told me that they had no copies of the book, but to check with Varo Manufacturing in nearby Garland, Texas. So I looked them up in the telephone book and called Varo. The secretary there knew what I was talking about without asking a bunch of questions and put me through to Sidney Sherby.
He told me that contrary to the published information, the Navy had not been interested in the Allende Letters or the annotated copy of the book.
Two of the officers there were (Sherby and a guy named George Hoover) and the Navy had no objection to their following up on it as long as it didn’t involve any Navy resources or personnel. In other words, according to Sherby, the Navy had no interest in the matter and the investigation was not Navy sponsored.
That, of course, kicked one leg out from under the stool upon which the Allende Letter credibility rested. The Navy was uninterested, but two of the officers were. The fact they were in the Navy followed them, but their status in this was not as Naval officers, but as interested men.
Sherby showed me the Varo version of the book, which was covered in blue and the size of regular typing paper. Jessup’s text was in black and the notations by Allende and his cohorts were in red. I couldn’t have that book, but if I had a way to copy it, Sherby would lend it to me. In those days, copy machines had two colors… black and white, so I have a copy but all the text is in black.
There were, supposedly, three men involved in this. A Mr. A, a Mr. B and one called Jemi. They seemed to have passed the book around, each making notations in different colored ink.
Sherby said that he had talked to Jessup about the annotated book in 1956, but Jessup wasn’t all that interested in it. Jessup tended, in 1956, to agree with the official Navy position which was that it was all the work of a trickster. It was a hoax. Sherby or Hoover had contacted Jessup and had learned of the letters that way.
Then, in the 1970s Carlos Allende appeared at the headquarters of the Aerial Phenomena Research Organization (APRO) and told the international director, Jim Lorenzen, that the whole thing was a hoax. Allende said he’d made it up because the writings of Jessup had scared him. He signed a statement saying that, deposited a suitcase or two with Lorezen for safe keeping, and left.
Before he went, he suggested that he was sick with cancer and didn’t expect to live much longer. Of course, the cancer didn’t kill Allende and you have to wonder if this wasn’t just another of his tales. He returned, or reappeared some time later, but, according to what Lorenzen told me, he left one or both of the suitcases at APRO.
But in the world of the paranormal and UFOs, nothing is that easy. Allende surfaced again several years later saying that his claim of hoax had been coerced by, who else, the CIA, and that the story contained in the letters was all true. The CIA had made him claim it was all a hoax for some nefarious and nebulous reason. Allende was back pushing the Allende Letters for the limited fame and notoriety they provided.
Still later, Robert A. Goerman, a researcher living in Pennsylvania, discovered that Allende, or rather Allen’s family, Allen being his true name, lived nearby. Goerman investigated and in an article published in the October 1980 issue of Fate, explained the whole tale, concluding, based on the evidence and based on his interviews with the family, that the Allende Letter saga was a hoax. It is a conclusion that should be noted but, like so much else, it is often ignored.
I will note here that, according to what Goerman learned, there weren’t three men involved, but only Allende. The name, Jemi, one of those men, was a reference to Gemini, the twins, and the other two designated as Mr. A and Mr. B, referred to each other as twins. All the “analyses” of the text proved to be wrong, according to what Goerman discovered.
Oh, you want to know about that newspaper article mentioned earlier. William Moore and Charles Berlitz wrote a book about this whole affair called The Philadelphia Experiment. On page 244 of the Fawcett paperback edition, they reprint an article they allegedly found in a newspaper, or more precisely, they were given a copy of the clipping, which they defend by saying, “In a secure safety deposit box there exists a photocopy of a newspaper clipping which was received from an anonymous source and which, up to now, has managed to survive all efforts to discredit its authenticity.”