EMMETSBURG UFO CRASH

     LINKED TO 'ROSWELL INCIDENT'

     Are we or they Lords of the World? . . .

     And how are all things made for man?

     ---Johannes Kepler (quoted in The Anatomy of Melancholy)

     However, the next day, 8 July, the USAAF completely reversed itself, saying that what had actually been recovered at the Brazel ranch was nothing more than an Army weather balloon.

     On the same date as the initial Roswell press release, 7 July, according to documents recently obtained under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), and the eyewitness accounts of participants, Army, Naval, and Civil authorities responded to an apparently identical crash just outside of Emmetsburg, Iowa. A crash which was not reported to the world at large, but is closely related to the Roswell incident---though with the added, sinister twist of interstellar conflict.

     The "Emmetsburg Saucer", as the incident is widely referred to in Palo Alto County, is, like Roswell, denied officially by the U.S. Government...

     7 July 1947, 1813 Hours CDT: Emmetsburg area farmer Joseph O'Malley (now deceased) reported seeing a lighted, disc-shape flying over his farm from the southwest, pursued by 6 USAAF F-51H fighter planes. The disc-shape, after executing violent evasive maneuvers was, according to Mr. O'Malley's report, "cornered" and shot at by the pursuing Mustangs.

     Mr. O'Malley then reported that the object, now trailing smoke, climbed rapidly, in a northeasterly direction, attempting to gain altitude. The F-51s, though outclassed by their target's speed and performance, had gravely damaged it and were following at a discrete distance. Mr. O'Malley lost sight of them when they flew into a nearby cloud-bank. A short while later, the Mustangs reappeared in formation, flying off to the southwest. Twenty minutes after the fighter planes departed, the object came out of the clouds, still trailing smoke.

     "It come out in a shallow dive," recalled Mr. O'Malley, "and then disappeared behind the tree line over by my east pasture."

     The farmer saw a bright flash and thereafter heard a muffled detonation, followed by a series of lesser crashing noises. Flabbergasted, Mr. O'Malley and his son, Joseph Jr., recently discharged from the Army, jumped into Mr. O'Malley's 1931 Ford truck and drove hell-for-leather to where they thought the object had come down; a distance of nearly two miles. As Joseph Jr. recounted in a recent interview:

     "This thing had come down in the east pasture, over by the pond, and broke up when it hit. There was wreckage everywhere. Me and Pap didn't know what it was. Since our fly boys were chasing it, we thought it might be some kind of Russian bomber. You know, an enemy sneak attack. We looked around a bit for the bodies of the crew, but as it was getting dark, we drove back to the house and Pap called Sheriff Gunderson."

     Palo Alto County Sheriff Harvey Gunderson had received two other calls concerning an "airplane crash" somewhere in the vicinity, and was trying to ascertain the location when Mr. O'Malley senior called his office. After learning what happened on O'Malley's property, the sheriff reproted the crash to the regional office of the Civil Aeronautics Board (now the FAA) in Des Moines, and then called the Headquarters of the Hemisphere Defense Command at Offutt Field, Nebraska.

     After being assured by both parties that their respective representatives would be on the scene as soon as scheduling permitted, Sheriff Gunderson and one of his deputies drove out to the O'Malley farm, where they were met by the farmer and his family. By this time, however, it had grown too dark to conduct a thorough search. So, the group determined to wait until morning when a larger search party could be assembled, concluding as well that anyone aboard could not have survived the crash.

     At daybreak, the Sheriff assembled his search party. It consisted of local volunteers, police officers from Emmetsburg, and discharged veterans attending the University of Emmetsburg on the GI Bill.

     By 530 Hours, CDT, they set off for the crash site. As dawn brightened into sunrise, other people from town began to gather, including some university ROTC students who were repeating courses they had failed that spring. These were put to work with some of the local police to help keep the growing crowd away from the still-smoldering crash-site.

     "There were all kinds of vehicles," recalled O'Malley, Jr. "There were jeeps and Dodge 3/4 ton weapons carriers and deuce-and-a-halfs."

     An olive drab Packard staff car pulled up next to the Sheriff's patrol car. Out of it emerged an Army officer, two Naval officers, and a bearded civilian. They immediately conferred with the sheriff, their voices all but drowned out by the aerial noises overhead and the shouted commands of soldiers.

     "Then a lieutenant and two MPs went and got Pap, and began questioning him," remembered O'Malley, Jr.

     Walter Kragenspiegel, now retired, of the local newspaper, the Emmetsburg Guardian-Chronicle, arrived on scene a quarter of an hour before (approximately 630 Hours, CDT) to file a story on the "crash of an experimental Army bomber".

     He reports that the high-ranking officers were an Army Air Force full colonel and two U.S. Navy lieutenant-commanders. The civilian with them wore a trench coat, unusual for the humid July weather, and spoke English with a German accent.

     Reporter Kragenspiegel inched closer to the knot of law-enforcement and military officers, and tried to make out their dicussion amid the roar of aircraft engines and jeeps, a tank recovery vehicle and two large flatbed trucks.

     "The Air Corps colonel was asking old man O'Malley to describe what he had seen, time of day, what happened, that kind of thing. When he told them that our fighters had shot this thing down, I thought, 'That's crazy. Why would our guys shoot down one of our own planes'. You see, I still thought that one of our new jets had crashed. Then the colonel asked Mr. O'Malley to describe the thing. When he did, a little light bulb kinda went off in my head. I put two and two together, remembering that Arnold story the month before. I said, out loud, 'Why that's crazier'n hell.'"

     It just so happened that when Kragenspiegel spoke his mind, the Superfortress and the helicopter were on the outer legs of their search paths, leaving a relative aural void.

     '"They all heard me. They all looked at me. I was no more than six feet away by this time. Fortunately, Sheriff Gunderson said, 'Walt, come on over here'. I went over, had my note pad out, and flashed the press pass in the band of my fedora. When the Sheriff introduced me, I flat out asked, 'Colonel, do you think this was a flying saucer?'"

     "'It sure as hell wasn't a weather balloon,' he answered, and kicked at a chunk of metal that was lying on the ground at his feet. It bounced away like no piece of metal that I had ever seen. His shoe had put a dent in it, but when the fragment quite rolling, the dent smoothed itself out. Then one of the soldiers started yelling something about a body. Things really got crazy."

     Recalls O'Malley Jr.: "Everyone ran toward it. At first I thought one of our cattle had gotten into this pasture, and the thing landed right on it when it come down. But when I got over to where they were gathering, I saw that it weren't no steer. All that was left was the lower body, but it sure didn't look like any body I had ever seen, and I had seen plenty in Italy during the war. "

     As the officers and police bent over the remains, one of the locals also shouted that another one had been found. This time, as the search party and the military crowded round it, there was no doubt, at least in the minds of those present.

     "It definitely wasn't human," says Kragenspiegel. "Well, it bore a superficial resemblance to a human. It was real short, maybe about four feet tall, with two arms and two legs, and real smooth, grayish skin. But the head," the former reporter shudders with the memory to this day. "It was shaped like an upside down pear and completely bald, like a cue-ball. It had a slit for a mouth, and two big, black almond shaped eyes, kinda like a Jap's, but bigger, y'know? Gave me the heebie-jeebies. The civilian took one of the Geiger counters from a soldier and ran it over the thing. The civilian told the officers the rad count was merely residual and acceptable. While the Army Air Force colonel, the two Navy commanders and the civilian examined the body, which had really begun to smell, an Army photographer came over and took their picture.

     Members of the Army search team, combing the far edge of the crash site, had come upon the almost intact remains of a fair sized portion of the craft, half-submerged in the pond that bordered the pasture.

     The colonel made this announcement:

     "We have just received information from Hemisphere Defense Command that this craft is in fact a secret variation of an A-4 test rocket which was fired last night from a classified base in the southwest. Shortly after launch, it's remote guidance systems malfunctioned, forcing Hemisphere Defense Command to scramble a flight of P-51's from Offutt Field to intercept and destroy the rocket before it could crash on a populated area. We are fortunate that and no one was hurt."

     "Except the crew," I said. "Whatever they were."

     "An experiment," the civilian with the German accent said. "Merely Rhesus monkeys; they were onboard to simulate a human crew, as it were.

     Reporter Kragenspiegel was still taking notes. As he recalls:

     "When I asked him, 'Can I get your name for my story, sir?' The colonel took my notebook and put it in his uniform pocket. He said, 'Doctor Stahl is a German rocket scientist. He knows all about these things. And because this is an event which involves National Security, we're going to have to ask all of you to keep mum about this whole thing. Also, due to the high levels of radiation, we're going to evacuate all non-essential personnel until the area is secured and the radiation contained. Thank you.'"

     "Well, German rocket scientists were a dime a dozen over here in those days, and since we were all so shocked at we had seen, I guess we all, at the time, pretty much believed what he said. But there was never anything else officially said about what happened. Yeah, we all read about the Roswell thing that very day. Sure we made the connection, but let it drop. It's been fifty years, after all."

     During the week that followed, the military sealed the O'Malley farm. However, eyewitness reports from local residents and military participants speak of crash wreckage being loaded into sealed crates and trucked away and the largest intact piece being airlifted by helicopters, all in the dead of night.

     Destination: Unknown.

     Rumors within the military intelligence and scientific communities, sources well known to this author, persist concerning the existence of "flying saucers" locked away, secured at secret military installations: Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, near Dayton, Ohio. Area 51, somewhere within the labyrinth of bases that make up Nellis AFB in Nevada. Aerodyne Propulsion Laboratories.

     Yes, Aerodyne Propulsion Laboratories, located at the University of Emmetsburg, and headed by that famous paper clip, Dr. Immelman Stahl...

     Consider: APL was set up with the help of a generous Department of Defense grant in 1950, shortly before the Korean War, specifically to study various methods of jet-propulsion and new theories of aerodynamics for the Defense Department and, later, NASA.

     There the matter would have rested as far as this reporter was concerned. But while pursuing an entirely different story that left me waiting for an interview with Dr. Immelman Stahl, I chanced upon a framed photograph hanging on the wall of the Director's anteroom. Judging by the clothing worn, it was taken around the end of the Second World War, and showed four men standing in an open field. The handwritten caption reads: Dr. Stahl, Lt. Cdr. Alan Cavatelli, USN; Lt. Cdr. Hugo Gernsback, USN (ONI); Col. Richard "Bull" Ostwinkle, USAAF, 509th BG (H), A-2.

     The reader may find it interesting that this author, then an Army Major, served under the command of then-Major-General Ostwinkle in Military Intelligence, Special Forces Covert Operations, Psy-War Section, during the Vietnam War.

     While there are no extraterrestrial bodies at their feet, it bears a disturbing similarity to the photo described by Walter Kragenspiegel. As Dr. Stahl was unable to keep our appointment and had to re-schedule, I was unable to ask him about the incident.

     Oddly enough, the photo described by the reporter arrived in my mailbox, in an envelope with no return address, along with the documents obtained under the FOIA. The photo was accompanied by an unsigned, typewritten note:

     Colonel Campbell,

     I thought you might find this little memento interesting. I'll call you, we'll do lunch.--- B.O.

     This very perplexing note arrived the same day as the official Government documents requested by this reporter under the Freedom of Information Act. It is this author's opinion that the "BO" of the note is none other than General Bull Ostwinkle, who, while retired, is far from inactive in Military Intelligence. Indeed, he is something of a living legend within that community. This author hopes that if the sender is in fact General Ostwinkle, some more concrete evidence may emerge concerning this case and the subsequent Government cover up and denial.