This is the case many people may have heard in some form before, but they likely have not heard the true story.
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For the story frequently told, as is the case in UFOlogy, is so distorted that the original characters have been completely removed and an entirely mostly new narrative has been created.
This false story started to propagate in the UFO literature in the 1960s, thanks with the help of a few famous, if missed, UFO figures.
And this is a story of the Alvin Moore UFO fragment and how it got turned into the Wilbert Smith shoot-down story.
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Now, just a little background information on Alvin Moore.
Commander Alvin Moore was a very interesting character.
He had quite an impressive background.
That would seem to make him one of the more reliable and credible kind of like witnesses and people to talk about this topic, you would think.
Educated at the U.S. Naval Academy, the American University, George Washington School of Law, University of Florida, and Louisiana State, he held bachelor's and master's degrees.
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He apparently was just shy of a PhD, but was too busy working for the government to finish that.
He specialized in aeronautical engineering, and he was a patent engineer and attorney for Wernher von Braun's team at Huntsville, Alabama.
He also, he briefly worked as a border patrol agent in the newly formed Border Patrol in the mid-1920s along the Arizona-Mexico border.
And he wrote a book called Border Patrol about his experiences there.
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He was briefly the vice counsel for, I believe, Mexico for a while, and was a career, like I say, he was a career intelligence officer with the OSI and the CIA for a large part of his career.
In addition to being a patent examiner, specialized in aeronautics and propulsion patents, he also supposedly held over 50 of his own patents.
I wasn't able to find 50, but I found several, and part of it might be because they're under different names, like they're under Alvin Moore or A.E. Moore, and so they don't all different names, like they're under Alvin Moore or A.E.
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Moore, and so they don't all show up in the same listing.
But he had quite a few patents, including two for an airship design.
But, so the background is this guy is a seemingly intelligent guy, lots of education, lots of engineering knowledge, that was a career intelligence officer with the CIA and the Navy.
And he basically kept a diary that would be printed in the form of this book, The Mystery of the Skymen, later on.
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And that diary was also reprinted by Timothy Beckley in 1997 under a different title, The Secret UFO Diary of CIA Operative Commander Alvin E. Moore.
He actually had also written a book in 1952 called The World Republic, which he kind of advocates for a world federation or kind of like a world government.
And so he's quite an interesting guy.
He's written on quite a few different kind of topics there.
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But to get to our main story, on July 23rd, 1952, 69 year old Robert L. Lanham and his 14 year old grandson, Bitsy Robert Wilson Lanham Jr.
were walking through the woods near Alvin Moore's Pine Moore Estate, 20 miles outside of Washington, D.C. in Vienna, Georgia, I mean, Vienna, Virginia.
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And I'll point out, I spent some time trying to figure out kind of exactly where these estates were. And I had a little difficulty because the streets, the names don't really exist anymore.
His address was kind of just Pine Moore on Route 1 in Vienna, Virginia.
Only there's never been a Route 1 in Vienna, Virginia, unless he means Route 7.
And census data would imply he did actually live on Route 7.
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But anyway, I spent some time trying to find exactly where.
But really, all that's important to know is that it was kind of in the woods, kind of outside of Vienna, Virginia there.
And so they were walking kind of in these woods near Alvin Moore's estate.
Most of the literature reports this happened on Alvin Moore's estate.
That's where they found this thing.
That's actually not true. Some of the literature then says, actually, it was on these LanhamThat's actually not true.
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Some of the literature then says, actually, it was on these Lanham people's estate. That's actually not true either.
It was on an unknown neighbor's estate.
So we don't exactly know where it happened.
But they're out walking in these woods looking for a baby fox of a mother who had recently been killed in the area.
And they kind of stopped to take a break about 50 feet from a groundhog's den.
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And they paused to rest and watched to see if they can see this groundhog come out.
Suddenly, his grandson, Bitsy, says, Granddaddy, isn't that a funny looking stone?
And Mr. Lanham watches as Bitsy goes and he picks up the stone laying on a bed of pine needles. It's not embedded in the ground.
Or in a hole, as is frequently reported elsewhere.
In fact, some of the literature says it was found in a hole reeking of a sulfurous smell.
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I just had to get sulfur in there for you guys.
But no, that's not actually the case.
It was just found on a bed of pine needles.
None of the literature actually even says it was warm or still hot to the touch.
They just said that it had a burnt smell to it.
But it was just laying on these bed of pine needles.
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He felt it was no ordinary stone, though.
It was too heavy for its size.
And it had this kind of burned odor.
And these photos, they're not the best photos, but they're the only photos we have kind of by this object.
And they were taken by the National Bureau of Standards when they analyzed this object.
According to Moore's notes on the back of them, supposedly before they tested or cut the object up.
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So they're all we have to go on.
And they're not that legible.
You can't really see them all that well.
But it gives you an idea of a stone, the stone that they found anyways.
Now, two days later on February, July 25th at 4 p.m., Mr.
Landham was receiving a ride home from his neighbor and boss for the last four or five years, Commander Alvin Moore.
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So Mr. Landham basically kind of was like a caretaker and did work around his property for the last several years.
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And Moore would end up giving him and sometimes his grandson like a ride home from his property back to their place or to the grandson's house.
And at this occasion, he was doing that.
He was giving Mr. Landham a ride home with another guy.
And Mr. Landham decided to tell Moore about this curious stone and offered to show him this stone sample that his grandson had found out in the woods.
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He thought it might be a meteorite at first and wanted opinion on this curious stone he found.
Moore tells Landham about these newspaper accounts of these flying saucers, because this is just days after, you know, the Washington flap happened on the 19th and 20th.
And but Moore, Landham basically had not followed the stories.
He hadn't really heard of them and he didn't really seem interested in these flying saucer stories at all.
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But Moore was fascinated because realizing that this object was found underneath the path between Washington, D.C. and Herndon, Virginia, which is basically where Dulles International Airport is now, is where this object was found.
And it's where these radar operators and veteran pilots supposedly saw these flying saucers or glowing objects, as they'll be reported.
And so he became very interested in this object, thinking there might be a relation there.
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So examining the object closely, you can no longer smell the burnt smell that was present when the object was first found, but it had been two days since then it was found.
And Moore obtains Landham's permission to have the stone examined by the government.
And at this point, Moore works as the chief of the technical information branch at the Bureau of Aeronautics.
And the Bureau of Aeronautics, I was a bit confused at first, so I looked it up.
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It doesn't have anything to do with NASA or an early NASA.
The Bureau of Aeronautics was the U.S. Navy's material support organization.
They were for naval aviation from 1921 through 1959.
They had the responsibility for the design, procurement and support of naval aircraft and related systems.
And he was the chief of the technical information branch there.
And he wanted to send this object off for analysis, but he didn't kind of want to go off half-cocked without having done some preliminary investigation of his own.
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To see what he could kind of figure out.
And so on July 29th, after periodically studying the stone over the preceding weekend, he logged the following kind of description in his journal.
It obviously had been at some point fractured on two of its surfaces.
The edges of the fractures are very sharp and in places come to this sharp points.
One very small part of the fractures looked as though it was done recently.
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The stone is bluish gray in color, and I believe it is several times heavier than the same volume of an ordinary stone.
Its longest dimension is about four inches.
On the surface of it, it is cylindrical, with the core to the arc of the cylindrical surface being slightly over three inches.
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And with a distance of two and five eighths inches between the arc.
The cylindrical surface obviously has been intelligently shaped, either by casting or tooling.
There are fragment decodings of a cement-like substance on the cylindrical surface.
The largest of the fractured surfaces has yellowish or brown stains, mostly located along the sharp edges of the fractures.
These stains look like stains from a very hot flame.
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Also on this surface, as well as on parts of the other two fractured surfaces, there are embedded in the stone-like material a large number of little balls of sizes varying from one eighth of an inch in diameter to pinpoint size.
Note, by the time of this letter that was sent to Ruppelt on August 8th, the stains were not very prominent anymore.
And later in that evening, Moore accompanied Lantham to the area of the woods where this object had been found.
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And they examined this wooded area for about an hour and a half, looking for any kind of smashed trees or any additional evidence that would support that this object was coming from there.
But besides for a small kind of brush between where the object was found, that may have been exposed to heat, but it may have just died from the drought that I guess was taking place, they didn't really find anything of interest at that time.
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On July 30th, Moore finally decides to take this stony object to the US Bureau of Standards and shows it to five scientists, who all indicate after briefly examining the object, they could not identify it.
Most felt it was not a natural stone.
So, George Hockman of the Bureau of Stone Section, Mineral Products Division, weighed the stone and determined it had a dry weight of 53.9, 53.
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Sorry, 532.91 grams, or roughly 1.2 pounds, and that its specific gravity was 3.48, far outside the range of the specific gravity of common stones, which according to a book they referenced only had a range of 2.2 to 2.8.
Now, Hockman and Moore, they then measured the radius of that cylindrical surface, it's approximately 5.2 inches, and they extrapolate from that that if the object had come from a cylinder, it would have had a radius of roughly 10.4 inches.
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Elsewhere, I believe he's kind of closer to two feet, and later on other people kind of will describe, say, close to two feet for this sample.
Now, one of the people he showed it to is Dr. John McBurney, also the Mineral Products Division.
He examined many meteorites in his life and had stated that it was not a meteorite.
The object was eventually turned over to Mr. H.F. McMurdy,The object was eventually turned over to Mr.
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H.F. McMurdy, Chief of the Constitution and Microstructure Section, for further analysis.
And it is suggested by Moore that they don't tell any of the assistants where the object came from, so as to not bias the results.
And this is actually important to remember because many people, later on, people will make an issue of the fact that the analysts weren't told where it came from, and how could they possibly analyze it if they weren't told where it came from.
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But the fact of the matter is they were suggested by Moore himself to not say where the object came from, and frankly, you don't need to know where the object came from to perform a chemical analysis on it.
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So keep that in mind.
So they say the object, don't tell them it came from the air so they're not biased that results.
Later that evening, Moore decides to kind of return to the area where the object had been found, just spend another hour and a half exploring to see if he can kind of find any other evidence and checking the areas he didn't check on his last visit.
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And there's three kind of photos of the woods and the trees here.
They're even worse than the stone photos.
I almost didn't include them, but I did.
And during this search, he finds roughly 45 feet from where the object was, a smashed and fallen dead sassafras tree pointing generally in the direction that this object was found.
So the following day, he phones the US Forest Service and gets in contact with Mr. Eberhage-Clocker, who's a forester.
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And he kind of, he comes out to investigate the scene later that day and again on August 2nd.
And Moore kind of comes to the conclusion after going out there to investigate with him.
And he has kind of this to say about the fallen tree.
It was very recently hit at a point of 21 feet and nine inches above the ground by an object from the air, which had apparently sheared off the outer edge and broken off the butt end of the limb of a neighboring tree at a point 42 feet in the air.
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I surmise that the fallen tree was nearly broken in two by this object.
Now, unfortunately, the expert, Mr. Clocker with the Forest Service, does not really feel the same way about the tree damage.
He comes out and he says that this tree apparently has been dead for some time now.
And like all such trees, had to fall sooner or later.
And you can only add that evidently the tree had fallen very recently, perhaps within like the last week or two.
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A couple of days later, he gets a phone call on August 5th to receive an informal report from Mr.
that Mr. Mitchell, 8th Jeff McMurdy of the Constitutional Microstructure Branch that had been given the stone for analysis.
And he records the kind of following notes about the stone and from this phone call.
He reports, the object is not a natural stone.
The main part of the object is made up of silica and iron and magnesium and calcium with equal quantities of iron and silica, which were the main things in it.
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The balls, quite small to something like one eighth of an inch in the old fractured surface, made of glassy material with some pure iron rich in iron and silica.
They are magnetic and some are extracted with a magnet.
The cement coating was principally calcium carbonate.
The general opinion of the men in the Bureau of Standards to examine the object is that it's not a meteorite.
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It is not radioactive. And I quote, because it's important, it looks similar to slag.
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So Moore, actually, you might think he might be disappointed at this, that they kind of told him that his samples basically looks like slag.
But actually, he's kind of elated and satisfied with this result because it tells him that this object is artificial.
It's not just a natural stone that he found and it's not a meteorite, but it was constructed in some way by someone and that it had to get there somehow.
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And so for Moore, the answer was obvious.
One of these glowing objects flying over the Washington National Siding must have ejected this debris for some reason.
Now, perhaps, you know, it was shot off by an encounter with a jet or perhaps it was some natural process of the way this ship works.
But he was sure that this stone must have came from the sky.
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And because it was in the path where these objects were seen, he was convinced it must have came from one of those objects.
He did not believe it came from any sort of United States domestic or foreign aircraft.
And so satisfied with these results and his preliminary inquiry into the stone, he finally decides to send his results in and get the government to further look at this.
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And so he forwards the sample to Project Blue Book at the Air Force for further investigation.
And on August 13th, 1952, he sends his stone.
He sends this eight page report on the object's recovery.
And most of the quotes that I'm including to this point come from this eight page report letter that he wrote to Ruppelt.
And he sends in this letter, the forest to Crocker sent on the tree fall, which is a few pages.
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He sent in those three photos of the stone and those additional three photos of the fallen trees.
And he sent them all attention to Captain Edward Ruppelt, Blue Book's commanding officer, Wright Patterson, Air Force Base, Dayton, Ohio.
Now, the Air Force apparently either lost or misdirected the sample or report for some time, because on December 24th, a little irritated, Alvin Moore would write a four page handwritten letter addressed to Ruppelt again, expressing his displeasure that he has not heard anything back from the Air Force about the analysis of his stone.
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He reiterates that he asked the Air Force not to mutilate his sample too badly.
And after they had kept it for a few months so they could compare it, if there's any other UFO debris or hardware that came in, so they could do a comparative analysis, that they should then send it back to him, you know, as requested.
And so he asked Ruppelt to check his files and please return the stone back to him.
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Now, possibly spurred into action by Moore's letter in December, at the beginning of January 1953, the Air Force would send Moore's sample to Dayton, Ohio.
To Howard C. Cross, who's in the employment of the Battelle Memorial Institute.
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Now, in some of the stories about this, they just kind of mentioned this Cross guy is like a lab tech and they're unsure of where he works, whether he worked at Ohio State or Battelle.
But it turns out Howard Cross is actually pretty infamous in UFO circles.
He's a pretty interesting character.
He's perhaps most well known as the author of the infamous 1953 Pentacle Memo, popularized by ufologist and conspiracy theorist Jack Vallee, who basically this letter was written just about a month before he analyzed the Moore sample.
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And Vallee basically interprets this article as that there was a cover up, there was a secret UFO project that was going on that people didn't know about.
And that they were because they talk about a plan of like simulating UFO sightings to be able to like, you know, figure out how people report them and whatnot.
Only there was no cover up. There was no the secret UFO project.
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Well, it was sort of secret. It's the Battelle Special Report 14 statistical study they were doing.
There was nothing like otherwise secret going on.
So this memo got really famous by Jack Vallee, but it's actually pretty mundane.
And it's just the Battelle Institute basically like begging for time to finish their analysis before the Robinson panel, which is going to be taking place a week or so after this letter was written.
(00:31:40)
So all that conspiratorial sense kind of was nonsense.
But he's perhaps most famous for that letter.
And he's also considered by some to be the scientist, sometimes they call him the Roswell metallurgist, because they say he was involved with analyzing the supposed memory metal from Roswell.
And he was Battelle's expert on titanium.
And a lot of the research that went into titanium is a component of nitinol, which is actually a memory metal, which some conspiracy theorists believe came from the Roswell crash.
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It didn't. But he was involved in all the development of that stuff.
And so very interesting, very smart guy that was kind of downplayed in this original story.
They don't mention he's Dr. Howard Cross from Battelle.
And he essentially analyzes this metal.
He does a cursory examination.
And people, a lot of researchers get really kind of conspiratorial about this cursory examination.
They basically say that's code word for they debunked it.
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They didn't look at it. They just put out some nonsense like after just a quick check.
Like that, that doesn't really actually make sense.
Like that's not what they mean by cursory examination.
So what he did is he observed this object under transmitted and reflected polarized light.
They basically doing some spectroscopy on this object.
And he submitted this brief report in a letter to the Air Force on February 4th.
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In which he puts a further dent into the meteoritary, confirming the opinions of the National Bureau of Science scientists, a standard scientist, that neither the texture nor the mineralogical composition of the specimen is comparable with the texture and mineralogical composition of known stony meteorites.
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Cross also confirms that the sample is similar in slag as the National Bureau of Standard Scientists had suggested.
He elaborates, this cursory examination indicates that both texturally and mineralogically, the specimen bears a strong resemblance to very basic slag from an open hearth furnace.
The elemental composition of the object contains various orthosilicates, calcium ferrite, ferrous oxide, and metallic iron.
And orthosilicates are basically is a silicon molecule.
(00:33:58)
It's got four hydrogens, it's Si4 negative.
And so those tricalcium silicate, dicalcium silicate, those would be orthosilicates of like Na2SiO4 minus.
Not that anybody really needs to know that.
Anyways, so yeah, it's basically determined it was like common open hearth slag.
So an open hearth furnace, if you don't know, is a type of industrial furnace that used to widely be used to produce steel.
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It's not used so much anymore, although Ukraine is one of the few countries that still, I guess, use it pretty extensively.
But most people have moved on to other methods.
And it's used to produce steel by burning excess carbon and other impurities out of pig iron.
And how it works is the furnace is first charged with scrap metal and pig iron.
It is then heated using burning gases, which melt the charge.
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Atmospheric oxygen and iron oxide are then added in to help oxidize that carbon, forming carbon monoxide that they're trying to remove the excess of.
And then molten steel is formed as the impurities are removed.
Slag forming agents like limestone, so calcium carbonates and whatnot, are added to remove the impurities.
And the slag gets skimmed off, typically into these slag thimbles using these large ladles.
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This excess slag then gets dumped into sand pits as waste and allowed to cool.
So again, silica, you might be getting that from the sand pits.
And the process has largely been superseded in modern times by basic oxygen steelmaking using blast furnaces and electric arc furnaces.
It's still essentially the same process.
What happens is they have this vessel and the molten steel gets formed on the bottom underneath a layer of slag.
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And the slag layer also kind of protects that molten steel from oxidation and whatnot.
And they tap the molten steel off the bottom and skim the slag off the top.
And these furnaces, and even nowadays in the more modern ways of making steel with basic oxygen steelmaking, they're still using basically a furnace.
Only their ladle introduces oxygen through a pipe to oxygenate as they steel it.
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And they use things like electric arc furnaces for the heating of the vessels.
But it's still essentially the same process where the molten steel comes out the bottom and they skim the slag off the top.
Now, these furnaces, though, were quite popular back in the first half of the last century, even though they've been typically replaced now.
And they were quite popular in Virginia as well.
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And it was not uncommon to actually find slag in all sorts of obscure locations.
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The slag ends up getting commercially used in construction and road work.
And in this image here, you can see these slag thimbles and the kind of process.
And the slag gets kind of skimmed off the top and put in these little round thimbles, which may in fact end up being two feet or whatever diameter they determine from the curvature of the stone.
It may match where the edges of these thimbles here.
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And these thimbles dump it into sand pits like that.
And they collect all that little rock and they use it in road construction and other construction projects.
And so you can find this stuff like all sorts of places.
And I will point out, UFO researcher Michael Swords, who I mentioned I use some of this work.
He grew up, I believe, in West Virginia and pointed out that from looking at the photos of the stone, granted, the photos are pretty bad.
(00:37:37)
It looks almost identical to what he would see as a child that he would find, you know, exploring West Virginia on the ground, pieces of slag from these open hearth furnaces.
So this object basically, for all intents and purposes, was identical to what you would find from an open slag furnace.
Now, Todd Zeckel, which is a researcher who wrote an article on this case, and more, they make a big deal how the slag theory doesn't really work.
(00:38:06)
Because the object was the result of something coming through the air through the trees.
So how could it be slag if it came from the air?
Again, but the problem is they don't really have any evidence of that.
It's just a belief, as we know, the trees were actually rotten and had nothing to do with the sample.
The sample was found on the ground.
(00:38:24)
It does not explain how it got there from the furnace, but there's no reason to believe that it came from the air.
They also kind of make a lot of kind of conspiratorial statements about how Cross had not been informed about where the object came from.
And so how could he possibly, you know, analyze it?
But as I just pointed out, you know, Moore actually told people not to say where the object came from as to not bias the results.
(00:38:49)
But then he later goes on to get all conspiratorial and act like he couldn't have come to the right answer because he wasn't told.
So, yeah, it's, you know, and Zeckel also kind of goes on to say that they didn't take into consideration Moore's high caliber and status as a witness and credibility.
But I'll point out the only problem with that is that Moore wasn't a witness to anything.
(00:39:11)
He didn't even find the object. He's just kind of like a third party player.
So, quite frankly, his credibility doesn't have anything to do with anything in this situation.
Anyway, so six days later on February 10th, Air Force Major Robert Brown responds to Moore's handwritten letter to Ruppelt.
(00:39:30)
And he explains to Moore that his letter had gotten misrouted.
And that was kind of responsible for the delay in responding to his initial report.
He goes on to quote directly from Dr. Cross's February 4th report, stating, both textually and mineralogically, the specimen bears a strong resemblance to very basic slag from an oak and hearth furnace.
The Air Force promises to return the statement within the next week, the specimen within the next week.
(00:39:55)
And on February 16th, they do mail the sample back to Moore.
It's interesting because according to Moore, the sample wasn't returned until mid next year, mid 1954.
But the information we have from the Air Force implies it was mailed back on February 16th, 1953.
And Zeckel would say that it was only mailed back after repeated requests from Moore to get the sample back.
(00:40:23)
I think perhaps they just mean that handwritten letter that Moore wrote in December 1952.
There's no evidence of any other correspondence between Moore and the Air Force regarding this sample or trying to get it back.
And they responded pretty quickly saying they were mailing it back.
So I think that perhaps is just a detail that's gotten wrong elsewhere.
In early 1953, though, Moore, who had left the CIA, he was working at the CIA for a while.
(00:40:50)
He left to return to active duty for the Korean War.
And in early 1953, he retires from his active duty.
He joins the Navajo Reserves and was looking to go back to the CIA.
Because I guess he had a time period in which he had to exert his right to return to the CIA.
That if he didn't exert it, that he couldn't come back or something.
(00:41:08)
And so he wanted to return to the CIA.
But before he could do that, he wanted to take a brief sabbatical to finish this manuscript for UFO book he'd been planning to write based on those notes.
His diary, basically, that he'd been keeping.
And originally, this book was supposed to be titled The Space Island Menace.
And he felt that after he went back to the CIA, he would never be able to get it published.
(00:41:31)
It would never get through publication approval.
So he was worried about that DOPSER approval, I'm telling you.
But so he tried to get it published before he went back so he could sneak it in before they could tell him he couldn't put it out there.
Unfortunately, he had trouble finding a publisher that kind of wanted to print his book.
He spent some time in July 1953 talking to publishers.
(00:41:52)
I believe he talked to like Henry Holt, like Keogh's publisher.
And he talked to True.
And he talked to one publisher that was most interested in publishing the book.
But they were mostly a textbook publisher.
And they kind of felt his book was a bit too speculative and out there and it would hurt the credibility of the textbook publishing business.
(00:42:09)
And so they kind of backed out of it.
So he was unable to get anybody that wanted to publish his kind of UFO book.
And I can see why.
Even only going through half of it is pretty wild.
So he eventually scraps these plans, decides to turn to work full time at the CIA.
He goes back in October and to exert his right to return to the CIA.
(00:42:31)
They basically tell him they're not going to allow him to take off any more time at work once he comes back.
And so you better get ready.
It turns out due to some paperwork issues, he didn't actually wasn't able to return to work at the CIA until early 1954.
But in 1954, Moore is employed in the CIA's Office of Scientific Intelligence and was back in possession of this found object that he got from the Air Force.
(00:42:55)
And while working at CIA headquarters, he became friends with Captain Donald Goodspeed of the Canadian Army Intelligence, who was attached to the CIA in a liaison role.
And having expressed interest in UFOs and in Moore's Virginia Skystone, Moore decides to invite this guy to this Pine Moore estate on August 6th, 1954, where they spend the evening discussing his UFO theories and the UFO projects of this prospective government's blue book and project magnet up in Canada, as well as Moore's Virginia Skystone.
(00:43:27)
And at this meeting, Moore presents the cylinder sample to Goodspeed to take back to Canada and have it analyzed by their project scientist.
Moore felt that the Canadian project might be more open minded than its American counterpart in its analysis.
And he also gave Goodspeed a gelatinous blob that his wife had collected in their front yard.
And this kind of gets into some of his later theories on sky, sky stones and sky islands and sky chemicals.
(00:43:55)
That I might mention a bit later, but so the captain wraps up this material and foil so he can take it back to Canada and analyze.
But by the time he opens the package in Canada, this gelatinous blob is kind of turned into this cobweb like substance, which eventually kind of dissolves into a brown powder.
Basically, an angel hair kind of like case situation almost like it kind of dissolves away.
(00:44:16)
And in a letter to researcher Ted Zeckel, Goodspeed would report that he believes he gave the sample directly to Wilbert Smith, the former head of Canada's UFO project magnet for analysis.
Now, we know very little of what happened to the sample when it was in Smith's or the Canadian UFO projects custody.
We do know after examination by the project and allegedly it was examined by the A.V. Roe company, the people familiar with the Avro project.
(00:44:47)
At least according to Art Lundahl, who said they were interested in the material for, I don't know, a propulsion cylinder for their project or something.
And we don't really know where he gets that claim from.
(00:45:01)
But according to Art Lundahl, anyways, the Avro project was interested and they analyzed the sample.
But they didn't have it very long because the sample was returned to Moore in late 1954.
And, you know, they didn't even get it from him until August 6th.
So, you know, it wouldn't have been in Canadian government custody hands for all that long.
And Captain Goodspeed, he wasn't able to return the sample personally.
(00:45:29)
He had to send it back by courier.
But he did send a letter on January 31st, 1955, stating that our analysis concludes that your material, this cylinder, was neither a natural stone nor a meteorite.
You know, not really kind of telling us anything we didn't really already know.
He also basically says that it has iron and silica, the principal constituents with magnesium and calcium included as well.
(00:45:55)
Tiny balls up to 1 1⁄8 inch diameter of pure iron occur in the material.
The calcium carbonate cement occurs as fragmented coating on the apparently cylindrical elements of the surface.
So you might, you might. So, yeah, that's basically the Canadian government's results are identical to what the National Bureau of Standards kind of determined and everyone else already kind of determined.
Now, researcher Ted Zeckel reports that shortly after the object was returned by the Canadian government, Moore was approached by Dr. H. Marshall Chadwell, the CIA's director of scientific intelligence, in his office.
(00:46:37)
Chadwell had heard about this mysterious cylinder stone and asked if he could borrow it for further analysis.
Moore, apparently shocked after two years earlier being told to mind his own business when it comes to UFOs after he had proposed a UFO research project, still happily turned this project over to Chadwell.
And this is actually the article by Ted Zeckel using, Todd Zeckel using a pseudonym, Ted Zachary, that was published in the Saga's UFO report, November 1977.
(00:47:10)
And I actually scanned that myself because I own that.
And about a week later, Chadwell returns a sample by messenger, not by hand, and he doesn't include any comments, other results or any sort of analysis of it.
Now, Chadwell, if people aren't familiar, like I said, he was the director of the Office of Scientific Intelligence, but he was also heavily involved in the UFO topic, the Robinson panel, and tried to kind of corresponding with people like the MIT's Lincoln Group on their interest in study of the UFO topic.
(00:47:44)
So he was kind of like one of the main people of the CIA kind of spearheading the UFO project.
And if you recall, again, the Robinson panel took place in January of 1953.
Now, supposedly, after Moore gets the sample back, he puts it in a CIA office safe.
Two weeks later, Moore is supposedly going to get just go to the safe to get some documents out and notice the objects missing.
(00:48:09)
Zeckel makes a lot of fuss about how, how could something possibly get stolen from the CIA, from a CIA office safe inside of the CIA headquarters, one of the most secure places in the world.
(00:48:22)
And so that obviously means it was stolen by the CIA itself.
Now, unfortunately, elsewhere, Moore states he doesn't actually remember if the object went missing from his office at the CIA or at his home.
And just last night, I found an article or a letter that so Zeckel's article is basically essentially plagiarized or copied by his friend, Stephen Soiks and published in Fate.
(00:48:49)
And Moore read that in 1978 and wrote a letter to respond to kind of provide some details in which he states that actually, I don't believe it was ever at the CIA office and it didn't go missing from the CIA office.
I believe it was at my house where it went missing.
Only he does believe it was stolen.
Only he believed it was stolen by the men in black, a.k.a. the Skymen that are monitoring him and spying on him.
(00:49:13)
And they stole the sample from him, but that it was stolen from his home.
So a great deal of the narrative about the CIA's involvement that's published in magazines is nonsense.
I'll say Zeckel's article, while it has some details on that, that will address gets most of the details on the case wrong, which is surprising considering he talked to Moore himself.
So we kind of have to toss that CIA stole the piece example, but the CIA does get involved in Wilbert Smith's story here as well.
(00:49:45)
