The Trinity UFO Crash – Reconsiderations

“Did Aliens Land on Earth in 1945?” the august New York Times demanded in a headline last January 13. The newspaper’s answer, based on a respectful interview with UFOlogist Jacques Vallee, is a qualified yes. On the basis of the brilliant, meticulous investigative research of Douglas Dean Johnson, published on the web this past month, […] The post The Trinity UFO Crash – Reconsiderations first appeared on David Halperin.

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Apr 7, 2024 - 02:56

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The Trinity UFO Crash – Reconsiderations

“Did Aliens Land on Earth in 1945?” the august New York Times demanded in a headline last January 13. The newspaper’s answer, based on a respectful interview with UFOlogist Jacques Vallee, is a qualified yes.

On the basis of the brilliant, meticulous investigative research of Douglas Dean Johnson, published on the web this past month, it ought to have been a thundering NO!!!

The second edition of Jacques Vallee and Paola Harris's — The second edition of Jacques Vallee and Paola Harris’s “Trinity.”

The extraordinary fact, of the nation’s “newspaper of record” endorsing such a wild–and, it turns out, baseless–claim, is a cultural datum of the greatest importance. I’ve published several posts on the Times‘s about-face with respect to UFOs, which began in December 2017 and seems still in place. But today I want to talk about the Trinity “crash” itself, as set forth in the two editions of Vallee and Paola Harris’s book Trinity: The Best-Kept Secret.

Johnson has proven beyond any reasonable doubt that Jose Padilla and the late Reme Baca, Vallee and Harris’s key witnesses to the supposed 1945 crash, were serial fabricators, Baca at least motivated by the hope of making money off his story. A third, supporting witness, with his recollections of his deceased father having flown an airplane over the spot where the two boys encountered the crashed UFO and essentially confirmed what they saw–well, his connection with reality turns out to have been on the shaky side.

It’s a complicated story, and it will take you a few hours to work your way through the web of interconnected posts in which Johnson proves these facts. If you have time only for one, read the blockbuster post published on May 20, in which Johnson reveals–and you can listen to it as well as read the transcript–a taped interview given by Baca to UFOlogist Tom Carey in late 2002 or early 2003. The date is important: the Carey interview precedes, by some months, the first appearance of the “canonical” version of Baca’s story on which Vallee and Harris based their book. And it contradicts that “canonical” version in crucial details, that can’t possibly be explained as wavering memory.

Says Johnson:

“In retrospect, it appears that what Baca presented to Carey was what might be regarded an unsuccessful first draft of the hoax tale. After Carey failed to take the bait (which followed earlier such failures by Baca), Baca clearly made extensive revisions in his script, producing a more complex and interesting story. In the revised story, key characters went forth with a different purpose, in a different year, encountered very different situations, and did very different things than in the version that Carey recorded. It is only the extensively revamped version that the public has ever heard, beginning in late 2003.”

Yes: a different year. in the “canonical” story, Baca and his friend Padilla found the crashed spaceship on August 16, 1945, exactly a month after the infamous nuclear test at the Trinity Site of what’s now the White Sands Missile Range. But in the “rough draft” they make their discovery in 1946, “about a year since the bomb.” No way to see this as faulty recollection. It has to be conscious fiction-making.

Johnson’s discovery spells D-O-O-M for the Vallee-Harris claim that the crash really happened, that aliens landed here (as the Times puts it) in 1945. But it’s not good news either for the interpretation I advanced in a two-part blog post in September 2021, that the Trinity story “is important because it documents a variant of the Roswell myth that makes explicit what is implicit in the standard version: that at the heart of the myth is death. Specifically, the mass death of nuclear annihilation.” At the end of the post, I wrote:

“The memories of the crash took shape in the witnesses’ minds as a fantasized doublet of their more or less accurate recollections of the horrific, world-transforming event [the nuclear test] that they’d actually lived through. The contours of this doublet were shaped in some measure by the Roswell story, which by 2003 had become a fixture of the American consciousness, but without effacing its roots in the Trinity test. (The date is left in 1945, for example, and not shifted to 1947.)”

I supposed that the “witnesses” really were witnesses, that their “memories” of the crash were indeed fantasies, but honestly believed to be recollections of things that really happened. If Baca consciously crafted his faux-Roswell story as part of a money-making scheme, and Padilla played along for reasons that were perhaps less mercenary but no less deliberate and corrupt–how much of my “mythic variant” interpretation will survive?

I’m honestly not sure. I find myself ruminating over the question.

It does appear that in the “rough draft” as well as the more or less final version of the tale, a link between the nuclear test and the UFO crash is somehow embedded. In their school, Baca told Carey, he and Padilla heard “the older kids were talking about Ground Zero, the bomb test … we were interested in that, but there wasn’t a lot of information. … So what we did is, we decided that we wanted to go out and look for that … for the Ground Zero.”

(He adds, “We wanted some of that green stuff,” which Carey seems to have understood. I don’t. Money? But why would visiting Ground Zero bring them money?)

This explanation for the motive for the boys’ excursion is not really necessary, since Baca goes on to offer Carey another one, in accord with the “canonical” version: they were looking for a calving cow that had gotten lost. Does this linkage, which persists through the different versions of the story, point to some unconscious awareness embedded in all the fraud–that UFO crash and nuclear test are somehow one and the same?

Or is this just me, trying to resuscitate a dying hypothesis?

Really: I’m not sure.