This whole UFO
thing is becoming quite confusing with little bits
and pieces dropping in from all sorts of places.
As I wrote a while ago, I had been driving into
the Hy Vee grocery store parking lot when I got a
call from someone wanting to talk about William
Rhodes (See a series of postings in October 2010).
That set off a bit of an investigation into the
photographs he had taken on July 7, 1947, in
Phoenix, Arizona.
The Air Force worked hard, I thought, to discredit
Rhodes and their investigation into his background
was some what snarky on the surface. They maligned
his occupation, suggesting he was little more than a
third-rate musician who lived off his wife’s salary
as a teacher. They didn’t think much of his
Panoramic Research Laboratory which seemed to be a
well-equipped home lab, and overlooked that he held
a number of patents.
They mentioned that he claimed to be a doctor, but
could find no reference in the telephone director
showing that he was a physician or
a vet, apparently never considering that he might
hold a Ph.D or looking for other documentation
besides that in the telephone book.
As I have noted
before, this question of a post-graduate degree
is a somewhat murky area and as James McDonald
suggested, clouds his otherwise interesting tale
of taking two photographs of a flying saucer. For
some, this issue is enough to suggest the Rhodes
photographs are a hoax. For others it is an
aberration that suggests something about Rhodes’
personality but does not mean the pictures were
faked.
I mention all this
by way of background to a new point. I have been
working on a book for Visible Ink Press and one of
the things I have been doing is revisiting the
Maury Island sighting. This took place on June 21,
1947, which is only a couple of days before
Kenneth Arnold made his sighting, but it received
no publicity, or interest, until after Arnold’s
report exploded all over the newspapers and the
world.
George Earley, who
describes himself as an “Opinionated Oregonian,”
and who had researched the case for a long time,
published a four-part series in UFO
magazine about the Maury Island case. (I will note
here that Bill Birnes who is the publisher of UFO
and who, on UFO Hunters on History
(which used to be the History Channel,
but they do little history any more), investigated
the Maury Island case, published Earley’s series
which seems to conflict with Birnes’ opinion of
the sighting. It is always good to see opposing
opinions freely stated without acrimony, but then,
I digress).
You’re all
probably wondering what this means and how does it
all tie together. Simple. Earley, in part four of
the series, mentioned that Arnold, who was
investigating the Maury Island sighting for Ray
Palmer of Amazing Stories, believed that he had
gotten himself in over his head. Arnold just
wasn’t sure what to do, but remembered that
Lieutenant Frank Brown, who had investigated
Arnold’s sighting, had told him to call if he had
any questions. Arnold did that, calling Brown at
Hamilton Army Air Field in California.
Brown, with
Captain William Davidson, took a B-25 (with
permission, of course) and flew up to Tacoma,
Washington, where Arnold was investigating the
case. They all got together in Arnold’s hotel room
late in the evening where Arnold showed them the
debris that had been recovered on Maury Island.
Both Army officers seems to believe that the
material was nothing more than smelter slag and
believed the tale of the crippled UFO to be a
hoax. (And while all that is not critical to this,
I will note that I find no reason to disagree with
the two officers and their analysis.)
Anyway, the point
is, and according to Earley, Arnold asked the two
officers what Army intelligence had learned about
UFOs. Davidson then drew a picture and said, “This
is a drawing of one of several photographs we
consider to be authentic.”
All well and good,
but what has this to do with anything else, you
might ask? Well, Brown then said, “It came from
Phoenix, Arizona the other day. We have prints of
it at Hamilton Field, but the original negatives
were flown to Washington, D.C.”
Earley then wrote,
“If they were, the late Edward Ruppelt, one-time
head of Project Blue Book, made no mention of them
in his book.” (But there is a case file in the
Blue Book files so Ruppelt had to know about it.)
It is clear to me,
that those pictures were the ones that Rhodes had
taken since there are no other photographs taken
in July 1947 in Phoenix, Arizona. It is
interesting that Brown mentioned Hamilton Field
because Rhodes does the same thing. And Hamilton
Field was part of the Fourth Air Force in 1947,
and Rhodes had communications with officers at
Fourth Air Force about his photographs as well.
Now I realize
these statements, uttered so long ago by officers
who would be dead a few hours later (their B-25
crashed and burned), doesn’t mean much in and of
itself. But still it is an interesting bit of
information buried in a long story about the Maury
Island hoax written by Earley, a man who has long
studied that case and is well-versed on the ins
and outs of it.
And no, there is
nothing more we can do. Brown and Davidson died
within hours of the conversation., Captain E. J.
Smith, an airline pilot who was also in the room
during the discussion and who had his own UFO
sighting on July 4, 1947, and Kenneth Arnold who
asked the question are both gone as well. We only
have the information provided by Arnold so long
ago in his writings about UFOs, about a case that
he didn’t investigate with pictures he probably
didn’t see, and what we all know about the Rhodes
photographs. It is interesting, as I say, but
doesn’t prove much one way or the other.
