| Kingman, Arizona in the late 1990s. |
As
those who visit here regularly know, I sometimes chase footnotes to the
original source and sometime I chase other information to a primary source. In
the last several weeks, as I worked on a new UFO book, I was engaged in
communications with others about the Kingman crash. This was not about Arthur
Stansel, the man who started the story after his interview with two teenagers,
Jeff Young and Paul Chetham, and then with Ray Fowler, but follow on
information and alleged additional witnesses.
This
has to do with the tales told by Judie Woolcott who claimed that her late
husband, an Army officer killed in Vietnam in 1965, had written to her and told
her about his involvement in the crash. She said that he had been in a control
tower in northwestern Arizona when the object hit the ground. He, along with
several others, drove out, in the direction of a bright flash that interested
them, finally finding it. They were chased from the site by military police
after being warned not to talk about what they had seen.
I
received a telephone call and later an email from Kathryn Baez, who was
Woolcott’s daughter. She wrote, “My Step Father, William Woolcott, served in
the Navy off the coast of Vietnam, however, they were never considered Vietnam
Veterans.”
I’m
not sure why they weren’t considered Vietnam Veterans if they served off the
coast of Vietnam, but that’s another problem. According to the email, dated
June 1, 2010, she wrote, “He is very much alive and living in Wausau.”
She
added that her mother didn’t know Woolcott until 1980. Both those facts seemed
to rule him out as the source of the extraordinary information provided by
Judie about the Kingman crash.
As
I have mentioned in older posts, David Rudiak and I, had been chasing down some
of this information over the summer. David came up with another name and an
explanation why Judie Woolcott might have lied about who sent the letter to her
from Vietnam.
David found a website hosted by
someone who called himself, “The Wanderling,” who might have identified the
real source of that mythical letter. According The Wanderling, he said the man
who sent the letters wasn’t married to Woolcott, but was a soldier and close
friend who was killed in Vietnam in 1965.
David thought the man, an Army
captain whose name might have been Charles Alan Roberts, and who was killed in
Vietnam in 1965, might have been the author the letter. David’s research did
put the man in Vietnam in the mid-1960s and confirmed that he had been killed
in action.
But there was a complication to this
speculation. According to his military record, which I discovered online a
couple of weeks ago, he had been in the Army but was discharged in December
1952. From 1953 to 1955, he was attending New Mexico A&M which became New
Mexico State University in Las Cruces. The record puts him nowhere near an air
control tower in Kingman in 1953 and rules him out as the writer of the letter
that Woolcott never produced.
Woolcott supposedly lied about him
being her husband because they had a thing going on and she didn’t want the
family to learn about it. The alleged letter was not released by Woolcott
because of that personal information. She was hiding it from her then current
husband or her family or maybe the government because of those personal
comments. It is just one more claim of corroboration that seems to have
vanished into the mists of time.
Oh, there is one other thing that
Baez mentioned in an email dated June 7, 2010. Her mother, Judie, was a teenager
in 1953 and in school. It seems unlikely that she would have developed a
relationship with a man who had been in the Army in 1952 and later college.
I’ll mention again, that there is now
a single first-hand witness to the Kingman crash, the wholly (I nearly wrote
holy) unreliable Arthur Stansel.
 |
| The Mellon email that started this hunt. |
Yes, I realize that this will not
drive the stake through the heart of the Kingman case, but the recent support
provided by Christopher Mellon, makes you wonder about his insider status.
There simply are no reliable witnesses to any Kingman crash… which, I suppose I
should note means that I haven’t found any but they might be out there, lurking
somewhere. Unless or until they surface, the only logical conclusion is the
case is a hoax originally created by Arthur Stansel as he chatted with the boys
back in 1973 and drank a bunch of martinis.
