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From: Jan Aldrich <jan@CYBERZONE.NET>
Date: Mon, 30 Jun 1997 11:57:39 -0700
Fwd Date: Sun, 13 Jul 1997 03:29:34 -0400
Subject: Project 1947 - UFO Mystery Man Surfaces

Greetings List Members,

     Ed Stewart forwarded this post from the Skeptic's List.

Best regards,

Jan




Subject:
         UFO Mystery Man Surfaces
    Date:
         Mon, 30 Jun 1997 03:29:16 -0400
    From:
         tad@ssc.com
Reply-To:
         skeptic@listproc.hcf.jhu.edu
      To:
         skeptic@listproc.hcf.jhu.edu (Skeptic Discussion Group)


Floridian may be UFO believers' nefarious redhead

ORLANDO, Fla (Reuter) - Joe Kittinger retired to Florida, took up
hobbies and until a year ago never suspected he was a key figure in a
far-reaching conspiracy theory.

Then a U.S. Air Force captain called and asked Kittinger if he had ever
dropped crash-test dummies from high-altitude balloons near Roswell, New
Mexico.

"About 50 times," Kittinger said.

With that, the Air Force was one step closer to closing its books on
reports of flying saucers, alien autopsies and government coverups at
Roswell.

The 68-year-old Kittinger, when he was stationed there, sported a thick
head of red hair, wore captain's bars on his uniform and recovered
lifeless, anthropomorphic figures from the desert.

That made him a good fit for the mysterious Red-Headed Captain, a
nefarious figure in the annals of UFOlogy, the man who believers allege
spirited away the alien victims of a downed flying saucer in 1947.

If you search the many Internet sites devoted to Roswell, you'll find
dozens of references to the Red-Headed Captain. He also figures
prominently in many books and film and television reenactments. It was
he, according to believers, who first drew a curtain of secrecy on those
alien bodies that has not been parted in 50 years.

"It's all a crock," Kittinger said. "We needed the data (from the
dummies) and we went to a lot of trouble to recover them. If that meant
searching a wheat field in the middle of the night, that's what
happened."

Roswell this week celebrates the 50th anniversary of an event the Air
Force insists never happened. By naming Kittinger in its own recently
published investigation -- "The Roswell Report: Case Closed" -- the Air
Force hopes to drive the point home.

Although Kittinger fits the description of the Red-Headed Captain -- his
telephone answering machine now greets callers with the words "Hello,
you've reached the home of the UFO mystery man" -- he was nowhere near
Roswell when the events of 1947 did or did not take place.

But he was there in the 1950s, an expert in high-altitude balloons and
parachuting, conducting experiments on whether astronauts could one day
survive parachute drops from the edge of space.

He supports the Air Force conclusions that when UFO phenomena re-emerged
as a popular subject in the 1970s, the residents of Roswell confused
memories of events separated by years and tied them all to a 1947
newspaper headline about a "flying disk" recovered in the desert.

The Air Force, which originally said it had captured a flying saucer,
quickly reversed itself to say the disk was actually a high-altitude
balloon.

After exhaustive research, that is still what it says. UFO enthusiasts
accuse the Air Force of a massive coverup.

"People are going to believe what they want to," Kittinger said. "Too
many people have made too much money spinning Roswell conspiracy theories
to simply accept the Air Force's conclusions."

But Kittinger keeps a sense of humor about his alleged role in history.

Besides the answering machine, he has a doormat that says, "Welcome UFOs
and crews."

And he accepts that he may one day be remembered more for something he
did not do than for the many things he did.

In 1960, for example, he parachuted from an altitude of 19 miles,
becoming the first person to break the sound barrier without an aircraft.
It is a parachuting record that still stands.

Later he flew three tours of duty in Vietnam, spending the last year of
the conflict in a prisoner-of-war camp.