Part 1 of this 3-part article began as follows, in relation to my research into the Roswell “UFO crash” of 1947.

“Last week I was interviewed on the subject of my 2017 book, The Roswell UFO Conspiracy. It is a follow-up to my 2005 book, Body Snatchers in the Desert. Both books focus on the theory that what happened outside of Roswell, New Mexico in the summer of 1947 had nothing to do with aliens, but everything to do with classified programs connected to high-altitude experiments in New Mexico, exposure to radiation, huge balloons and much more. As for that interview, it was for a new book that the guy is writing on Roswell from the E.T. perspective. As a full-on believer that aliens did come down on the Foster Ranch in forty-seven, he was having none of what I had to say. He basically said there was no way that terrible experiments – of the types described in my books – would ever have been undertaken back in the 1940s. Clearly, he didn’t know his history. I said something to the effect of: “You’re joking, right?” He assured me he was not joking. So, I told him to check out the ultimate report on this angle of “human experimentation” back in the 1940s (and onward). It is titled Advisory Committee on Human Radiation Experiments: Final Report. Dated October 1995, it runs to no less than 925 pages and was published by the U.S. Government Printing Office. One of the days I’ll share with you the very strange story of how I got my copy and how it’s filled to the brim with annotations from the retired person who provided it to me. But, that’s for another day. Back to those experiments.”

If all of the above is true  – that what happened at Roswell, New Mexico in early July 1947 involved not a UFO and an alien crew, but a homegrown, top secret experiment of highly disturbing proportions – then why can’t we prove it? Well, first and foremost, no theory that has been put forward for the incident has proved to be the precise answer. For example, even the U.S. Air Force admitted that it couldn’t state with 100 percent certainty that their conclusions told the correct story. Many of you will know that in 1997 the Air Force presented a theory that the so-called “alien bodies” were really crash-test dummies. Actually, that’s not quite right. If you read the 1997 report on Roswell carefully, you’ll see that the Air Force said that the bodies were “probably” dummies. Yes, probably. That was their word, not mine. That’s because the Air Force couldn’t find any papers that confirmed dummies came down in Lincoln County, New Mexico in July 1947. If even the USAF couldn’t find the files back in 1997, then what chance do we have today? The answer is, to be honest, not much of a chance at all. The same goes for the Mogul balloon theory, for the idea that Roswell was a hoax initiated by the Russians, for Mac Tonnies’ “cryptoterrestrial theory” and for the data in my 2017 book, The Roswell UFO Conspiracy.

Can the data in the 1995 report help us to solve the enigma of Roswell? If, in the late-1940s, people were used against their collective will, and used in experiments that led to the creation of a UFO legend, we could make a case – based on logic – that the files on Roswell should be held deep somewhere in the government’s, mindbogglingly-massive collection of “human experiment” files, rather than in hidden UFO records, right? Yes, that should be the case. Unfortunately, however, the report does not help us to solve Roswell. And why might that be? Almost certainly for one particular, eye-opening reason: numerous files that the Advisory Committee hoped to examine couldn’t be found. Let’s see what the Committee had to say about all of this. Its staff stated: “One of the most difficult tasks before the Committee was determining how many federally sponsored human radiation experiments occurred between 1944 and 1974 and who conducted them. When President Clinton established the Committee, he also directed the Human Radiation Interagency Working Group to provide us with all relevant documentary information in each of the agencies’ files. Teams were formed to identify the hundreds of government sites where relevant documents might be located. We discovered there was no easy way to identify how many experiments had been conducted, where they took place, and which government agencies had sponsored them [italics mine].”

The Committee asked an important question: “What rules or policies, if any, existed, to govern federally sponsored experiments in the pre-1974 period?” The response was: “The prevailing assumption was that, with a few notable exceptions, it was not until the mid-1960s that federal agencies began to develop such policies in any significant way…As we began our search into the past, we found that it was necessary to reconstruct a vanished world. The Committee and the agencies had to collect information scattered in warehouses throughout the country.”

In other words, it wasn’t just a case of examining the old “human experimentation” files; it was also a matter of trying to find them. And, we know that a significant body of old material was not found. Just maybe, if Roswell was a secret experiment, rather than the crash of a UFO, then – for decades- we may have been looking in all of the wrong directions for the answers. Instead of searching for tales of dead aliens, we should be looking outside of the box. By that, I mean if people were used in terrible experiments in New Mexico in July 1947, then the truth of Roswell may be buried somewhere – yes, still, more than seventy years later – in a warehouse that has yet to be addressed and examined that remains overlooked. Perhaps, today, there is no Roswell cover-up. Maybe, the files are just sitting somewhere, out of sight, stored away on a dusty shelf and overlooked. Shades of the final seconds of Raiders of the Lost Ark? Kind of. Just maybe, to get the answers to Roswell we –  just like the Committee – need to “reconstruct a vanished world” too.

With this three-part article now at its end, I’ll say this: I’m as certain as I can be that if the files on Roswell still exist, they won’t be found in the UFO archives of the U.S. Air Force, the NSA, the CIA, the DIA, the FBI, NASA, the…well, the list goes on. Where they will be found, I predict, is in a decades-old file that details tales of shocking, secret experiments on people that crossed the line.

There are perhaps no stranger cases among cryptid or alien reports than what have been described as humanoid insect creatures. I have covered this topic before, but there are many other accounts that seem to really go beyond the bizarre to enter realms that are in no way easy to classify or categorize at all. Here we have reports of encounters of what can only be described as walking giant bugs, and they are every bit as completely off-the-wall as you might imagine.

One place where one might expect to see something odd and beyond the explainable would be out in rural or wilderness areas, but nothing likely could prepare some witnesses for their surreal and outlandish experience of seeing an insectoid humanoid in the wilds. This is exactly what allegedly happened to a witness called “Ricky,” who called in his experience on the show Coast To Coast AM on September 27, 2016. He says that at the time he had been on what was supposed to be a fun, family camping trip at the Sequoia National Forest, located in the southern Sierra Nevada mountains of California and known for its towering, ancient giant sequoia trees. With its majestic trees lending it an otherworldly ambiance, this place already looks like something from a dream world, but it would get utterly bizarre one evening after everyone had gone to bed and the witness stayed up gazing upon the flickering embers of the bonfire they had made. He explains:

At about 9 o’clock, everyone decides to go to sleep and my friend and I were left staring at the bonfire. I decided it was a good time to listen to music so I went to my sister’s forerunner and I was opening the back to grab my Ipod. And as I opened the back door, I heard something come out of the tree. It didn’t come out of the tree. It was almost like it was holding on and it fell. And I heard this huge thump. I could feel it. And as I… I had a flashlight on me. I looked over at the tree I heard the fall from and I swear on my life and I swear to God, honest to God, I saw a 6 to 7-foot-tall praying mantis. And as I laid eyes on it, I completely lost breath. I was completely taken aback. It took a step back and it became completely invisible. I could not believe what I saw.

I slammed the door and I ran back to the campfire. I alerted my friend. I woke everyone up and no one would believe me. I was really upset because I knew what I’d seen. So that happened and my friend didn’t believe me. He was laughing at me and then all of a sudden I could hear all these things surrounding us and finally when I brought it to my friend’s attention, he kinda put his ear to it and he heard it too. Finally, I was patrolling the campground with my flashlight and I could just hear these things surrounding us and I heard like this clicking sound, it was like (makes clicking sound). It was really strange. I was so scared.

What was this creature and how can we reconcile it with anything known to exist in those woods? From researcher Albert Rosales we have another account of a camping encounter, this time from the country of Poland. The witness purportedly had been camping out in the remote wilds of Wielkopolska province, Poland, and had her experience as she was walking through a meadow on her way back to the camping site from a hike. As she approached her tent, her attention was drawn to an odd figure squatting down next to a nearby lake. Not knowing what exactly she was looking at and startled that anyone else would be out there in this isolated place, she approached until she was only 8 meters away, as she did realizing that this was not a human being. She would describe it as looking like a humanoid insect, estimated to be around 5 feet tall and with extremely long thin limbs, gray or beige in color, and possessing oversized black eyes that were very much like those of an insect, and thin, fragile looking wings. The witness also expresses that the creature seemed to be surprised that it had been discovered, and would say:

It gazed at me and I knew that it did not know what it would do. Our encounter had no meaning or aim; it appears to have been a total surprise for both of us.

It is unclear what happened after this, but it is certainly not something that anyone wants to run into out in the middle of nowhere in the woods. Another such bonkers report comes to us from the site Phantoms and Monsters, from a witness who says that he has had multiple encounters with some sort of bizarre insectoid, and was just a boy at the time his first. He claims he had lived with his family in a remote mountain area of the wilderness of Ontario, Canada when one day he looked out the window to see something that would leave an indelible impression on his young mind, and which he can clearly remember to this day. He says of what happened:

We had the windows open in the house as air conditioners were not common in 1968. It was a very hot that night. I shared a room with my brother and sister. I woke up during the night and looked out the window into the backyard and in front of a bush about 8 feet away was a small thin creature with shiny black skin. It looked like a small girl but at the same time it kinda looked like an insect. It was crouched on its legs and was leaning forward with one hand on the ground and was looking at me. It had what looked like thin antennas or like needles sticking out from each side of its head and one on top. That’s all I remember and when I told my mom she said it was a dream.

He would have two more sightings of the same creature over the years, each time being told that it was a dream, but he isn’t so sure. Was this all in his head or was there something more to it? The witness himself goes on to say that he feels it might have been an alien presence, and this would certainly fit into numerous reports that seem to definitely be linked to the UFO phenomenon. One report of this kind compiled by Albert Rosales comes from the files of the Mutual UFO Network (MUFON), and describes a very weird encounter that purportedly occurred in April of 2016, in the area of Zygi, Cyprus. The witness explains that she had been hanging out with friends in her yard when they saw a UFO, followed by what they assumed to be its occupant, which was of a decidedly insectoid appearance. She says:

My two friends and I had just finished our meal and were out in the garden talking and drinking (not alcohol). One of my friends had gone into the kitchen to refill their glass, whilst me and my other friend remained outside. After a moment of silence, my friend pointed out an unusually bright ‘star’ moving across the sky, assuming it may have been a comet or something. After a brief moment, I looked up at it again to realize that it was stationary; around 75-100ft above the treeline. I sat there, staring at this ‘thing’, just in complete shock. Every 15 seconds or so it would lower its altitude, until it was only a couple of feet from the tree tops. The weirdest part about this is that absolutely no noise had been emitted thus far. I tried to get out of my chair to hurry inside, but I felt an overwhelming feeling of paralysis, as did my friend. I turned to her and asked her what was going on, but she looked frozen in fear.

After what felt like hours, something appeared from around the trees underneath the triangular craft. It was a humanoid figure, with a head similar to that of an ant, and skin like a crocodile. It had extremely small eyes in proportion to its head, and long, thin appendages. It walked right up to the fence, before sharply turning and sprinting into the darkness of the trees. After a brief moment of complete fear, dread and anxiousness, the craft moved in a linear path towards the West, before becoming no longer visible. During this time, my friend who had gone to refill her glass watched the entire event through the window. She recalls, although neither me or my other friend do, that the creature had some sort of device in its ‘hand’, and that it held it up briefly before its disappearance.

Other reports are really hard to classify as one thing or the other, and serve to be just plain odd. From an episode of Coast to Coast AM comes a report on August 16, 2017, from a caller in a small town called Harwood Heights, just outside of Chicago, Illinois. He says that one evening he came home from work at around 1:30 AM and looked out the widow to see something outlandish looking back at him from the darkness. He says of the incident:

I looked out to the window to across the street and I saw a crypto, if you will, a Mothman-type insectoid; small body, unusually large head normal, no red eyes, and it kept staring. I went to make tea, fed the cats, came back, rubbed my eyes to see if I was tired and seeing things and, sure enough, it was there. One important thing, there was no foreboding fear. None whatsoever. That I found interesting. I was shocked as many people that had seen similar things. I went several times. I would say about four to five times, just peering outside, looking at the window and it just stood there. I live in a small town near Chicago. I figured police would do their rounds or someone would see it. You could hear a pin drop. It’s a very small community, sure enough, no one was around. It did not faze me to take a picture. I did have a smartphone at the time right but overall no fear and absolutely, you’re just there in the shock because you just can’t believe what you’re seeing. You listen to accounts but you never think you will be in that situation. I went back several times. I was listening to your show that night, peering out every now and then. It just kept standing there.

In the morning I went to see any trace of anything. It was gone, so, yeah. Above all, I would say the strangest thing would be I was not afraid at all and it shocks me to even say that now. Thinking back over the several months and years, I talked to friends, they have an interest in it – I kept thinking it was crouching like a runner would be so it could have been taller as many people claim to it being six or seven feet. It was almost as if definitely the body was much smaller and the head came to a point, almost as if, you know the old cartoons from Mad Magazine Spy Vs Spy, with the nose, if you will, comes into like a parrot’s or a bird beak, but there’s no beak, so it is very kind of pointed protruding face, if you will, but again, there were no eyes and there were no facial features, but again, in that humanoid design that’s where the face would be, of course, so yeah, but the head was much bigger than the body.

The Chicago area has several other strange insectoid reports like this that are really hard to classify. One comes again from the files of Albert Rosales, and describes the experience of a witness who had been sleeping on the sofa at a friend’s house in Chicago, Illinois, when he was suddenly roused from his slumber by a crushing sensation of terror, made even worse when he discovered that he was unable to move. When the paralyzed man glanced around the room in terror, he claims he saw looming by the doorway a 7-foot-tall humanoid entity that looked like “a large praying mantis that was wearing something resembling a black and purple cloak.” This horrifying creature apparently then approached the man and reached out to touch his shoulder with a skeletal hand with long, thin fingers, after which the witness lost consciousness. When he awoke the creature was gone.

Another report from Chicago comes from Phantoms and Monsters, and describes some sort of flying insectoid humanoid at Chicago’s Willis Tower. The witness supposedly outside having a cigarette when he looked up to see a winged humanoid figure ominously crouched up on the tower as if perched there like a gargoyle. Then the creature allegedly moved, unfurled its wings, and leapt off the building to go soaring into the sky. It was then that the witness realized that the creature was very insect-like in form, and Lon Strickler says of the report:

The witness states that the being’s outstretched wings were not very large, maybe 6-8 from tip-tip, but were very jagged and insect-like (shaped similar to a moth). The being was also dark green in color and had a body form like that of a mantis. The legs seemed to be human-like and extended beyond the body while flying. He called it a ‘human, insect and bird mix’…that seemed to mutate while in flight.

Joining the ranks of all of this bizarreness is an encounter originally published in the October 8, 2017 edition of Strange Magazine, that supposedly occurred back in 1948 at the shipbuilding port city of Bremerton, in the U.S. state of Washington. One day, a young woman named Virginia Staples was just going about her usual daily household chores, carrying a load of laundry down to the washing machines in the basement of her run-down apartment building. It was a mindless chore she had done countless times before, and there would have been no reason for this time to be any different, but it was to prove to lead to a shocking experience, indeed.

The dim basement was described as enormous, its volumous floor constantly covered with a sheen of water that leaked from the walls and was rumored to come from passageways leading to the nearby sea, but although it all had a rather creepy foreboding atmosphere, Virginia was used to working in this dark and dank place. Yet on this day something was not quite right, as she felt an undefinable sense of unease and dread, as if she were being watched from the ample shadows clinging to everything in there. She tried to cast the odd feeling out of her head, chalking it up to nerves, but it would not abate, indeed becoming stronger the longer she lingered there, graduating to sheer terror for no discernible reason. She would say of what happened next:

It was such a creepy feeling I finally turned around and looked toward the back of the basement and froze. I was so scared I can still feel it. I couldn’t move. In one of the huge holes in the basement there stood this thing. It was horrible! I stand five feet tall and this creature was as tall as I was. It had a bright orange colored body and little spidery thin legs and antennae on its head that kept moving back and in and out. That thing started towards me. I backed out of the basement and got up to my apartment and packed up all my things and moved. I was so scared. I moved over to Seattle to my cousin’s. Really no one would really believe this, but as God is my witness it really happened.

She would say that it looked to her almost like a humanoid shrimp, and that for years afterwards she says she had potent, chronic nightmares. The interesting part of this tale, other than the sheer outlandishness of the entity described, is that this was in the basement of an apartment complex, and not even a remote one out in the boondocks. At the time Bremerton was a bustling Naval port city home to around 80,000 people, so it makes no sense at all that there should be this thing, even if there were passageways to the sea. Where did it come from and why didn’t anyone else see it? The strange abomination was only seen this one time and we are left to wonder just what it could have possibly been or whether it ever really happened at all.

That is a recurring message we are left with in cases like these. Did they ever really happen at all? They are so completely and utterly bizarre that we have to at least accept the possibility that they are hallucinations, misidentifications, or straight up lies. But what if they are real? If that is the case, then what are we dealing with here? Are these aliens, interdimensional interlopers, or something else altogether? How do we even know where to begin? Whatever the answers may be, this is a very outlandish and little known area of humanoid encounters that really lodges out into the outer periphery of the odd, and as long as cases like these come in we are left to wonder what they all mean, if anything.

There’s an interesting new article over at The Drive, as you’ll see from the title of that same article they have published: “Visitors to Area 51 Have to Wear ‘Foggles.’ That Severely Limit Vision When Moving About.” In part, the article – written by Tyler Rogoway – states: “The term refers to goggle-like eyewear that have fogged-out wrap-around lenses and a notch or bifocal-like area at the bottom that allows a wearer to see what is immediately in front of and below them. With the vast majority of the goggle’s viewing area frosted over, nothing can be made out at any meaningful distance.” There is a particular reason why I say that The Drive’s story is interesting. In July 2006, I interviewed a guy named John who told me that while working out at Area 51 – way back in the early 1970s – he had to wear such goggles when he was in certain portions of the base that were sensitive and secret. I first publicly told the story of John and his weird, vision-limiting goggles in 2006. I also publicized it, with new material, in 2010.

As I said back then: “John spent his days off in Las Vegas, playing the slots and getting to know the ladies of Sin City. Then, when his time away from the base was over, he would be flown aboard a Cessna aircraft to Area 51 – with the window blinds permanently down. On each occasion, the other passengers were always the same: three men who he got to know over the course of the following year. Indeed, they all became good friends, and looked forward to their time off in the big city. Weirdest of all, on each occasion when the team arrived at the base – which was only a short flight from Las Vegas – they were all ordered to put on pairs of goggles. These were not ordinary goggles, however.

Far from it: They had split lenses, the top part being so thick and distorted that it was only possible to see anything out of the lower part. There was clearly method to this seeming madness. By preventing the men from seeing out of the top portion of the goggles, they were forced to look down – pretty much at their feet. This was obviously orchestrated to ensure that the men would not be able to get a good look at the surface portions of Area 51. In single-file, awkward, shuffling fashion they would follow their supervisor to a bus with blacked-out windows.”

While working out at Area 51, John was exposed to documents that told incredible stories of wrecked flying saucers, deceased aliens, the autopsies of extraterrestrial corpses, and the study of alien science – with a goal to try and replicate that very same E.T. science. Rather notably, despite being exposed to a truly astonishing wealth of material out at Area 51, John slowly began to wonder if his whole time spent there was nothing but a ruse. He speculated to me on the possibility that this was all some sort of intricate mind-game: to flood John’s mind with bizarre tales and documents relative to dead extraterrestrials, alien autopsies, and spacecraft from other worlds. Maybe, John suggested, it was a loyalty test: to see if he ran to the Washington Post or to the New York Times. John did neither: he stayed quiet (at least until the 2000s, when he was well into his old age), and as a result of his silence he was offered prestigious positions for another decade.

John also speculated on another possibility, a possibility that involved the Soviets. Although he was somewhat reluctant to address the matter in-depth – which is intriguing – John said he heard a few nuggets of information suggesting there was a small program that was trying to convince the Russians that the United States government had not just alien bodies in its hands, but extraterrestrial technology; even highly advanced, powerful alien weaponry. John wondered if all of this was a game – one designed to scare the Russians into thinking we had something that we never really did, but which the staff at Area 51 were hoping the Russians would come to believe. And to fear.

John died in 2013. His widow stated that in his final years John came to believe more and more that what he saw and read out at Area 51 in the early 1970s amounted to a huge mind-game; a fabrication to have the Russians running around like headless chickens, wasting their time on lies dressed up as incredible truths. Ingenious, Cold War-era disinformation, in other words. For John, the whole situation was well and truly fogged. And, it seems, the fogging is still going on.

Last week I was interviewed on the subject of my 2017 book, The Roswell UFO Conspiracy. It is a follow-up to my 2005 book, Body Snatchers in the Desert. Both books focus on the theory that what happened outside of Roswell, New Mexico in the summer of 1947 had nothing to do with aliens, but everything to do with classified programs connected to high-altitude experiments in New Mexico, exposure to radiation, huge balloons and much more. As for that interview, it was for a new book that the guy is writing on Roswell from the E.T. perspective. As a full-on believer that aliens did come down on the Foster Ranch in forty-seven, he was having none of what I had to say. He basically said there was no way that terrible experiments – of the types described in my books – would ever have been undertaken back in the 1940s. Clearly, he didn’t know his history. I said something to the effect of: “You’re joking, right?” He assured me he was not joking. So, I told him to check out the ultimate report on this angle of “human experimentation” back in the 1940s (and onward). It is titled Advisory Committee on Human Radiation Experiments: Final Report. Dated October 1995, it runs to no less than 925 pages and was published by the U.S. Government Printing Office. One of the days I’ll share with you the very strange story of how I got my copy and how it’s filled to the brim with annotations from the retired person who provided it to me. But, that’s for another day. Back to those experiments.

A careful study of the massive report demonstrates that as far back as the 1940s highly classified experiments were undertaken on people  – revolving around the effects of radiation. Although, it’s important to note that the report doesn’t just focus on radiation-based issues. For example, there is a section on the CIA’s “mind-control” program, MKULTRA and other controversial topics. One of the things that I was told by some of my sources was that in the summer of 1947 – when the Roswell affair occurred – there was not just one experiment, but somewhere in the region of seven or eight (maybe more…), all of which failed miserably. They involved massive balloon arrays, lifting body-type craft, and high-altitude activity. Those same sources claimed that prisoners were used in several of those various experiments.

So far, no evidence has surfaced to show that the 1947 experiments near Roswell, New Mexico involved prisoners. There is, however, plenty of data available that shows prisoners most definitely were used in top secret experimentation. Notably, plans (that were ultimately shelved) show that some of those experiments involved then-newly-planned radical aircraft. Chapter 9 of the Advisory Committee on Human Radiation Experiments: Final Report states that: “In July 1949 a medical advisory panel met in Washington, D.C., to discuss psychological problems posed by radiation to crews of a then-planned nuclear-powered airplane. During the meeting an Air Force colonel noted that crewmen were concerned about anything physically harmful…” The report continues that although the nuclear-powered plane was never built, the military still had concerns regarding “…space flight, weapons plants, nuclear power plants, and on an atomic battlefield…”

Also from the 1949 panel, there are these eye-opening words: “The Committee is not in a position to make recommendations as to where these tests can be conducted other than that they should be carried out at some federal, state, or Armed Services prison, where life prisoners are incarcerated and where arrangements can be made with the prison authorities to cooperate in the experiment.  The selection of the prison is a matter for top military consideration. Continued cooperation of the prison staff and prisoners for a matter of many years will be required.”

As the report also notes, between 1963 and 1973 “…131 prisoners in Oregon and Washington submitted to experimental testicular irradiation with national security and other societal goals, but no potential for therapeutic benefit for the subjects.” The report also states that two, specific studies were initiated: they were run by Carl G. Heller, M.D., and C. Alvin Paulsen, M.D. As the documentation shows, “The government was interested in the effects of ionizing radiation on workers, astronauts, and other Americans who might be exposed, in a nuclear attack for example.” There’s this, too: “Both doctors viewed prisoners as ideal subjects. They were healthy, adult males who were not going anytime soon. In 1963 few if any researchers had moral qualms about using them as subjects, although there seems to have been a consensus in the research community on the rules that should govern such experimentation. By 1973, however, some ethicists, researchers, and others, such as the investigative journalist Jessica Mitford, pointed out that incarcerated people were not well placed to make voluntary decisions.”

And, there’s more: “In 1976, the National Commission for the Protection of Human Subjects of Biomedical and Behavioral Research recommended the banning of almost all research on prisoners. Prison experimentation effectively came to an end in this country a few years after the commission offered its recommendations.” Does any of this prove that prisoners may have been used in highly-classified test-flights in New Mexico in the summer of 1947? No, it does not. What it does do, however, is to show that prisoners were used in secret experiments. The idea that some of the New Mexico tests of the summer of 1947 may have involved prisoners no longer seems quite so unlikely, after all.

Part 2 will soon follow…