by Mark Frost
As to the “flying saucers,” there are indications in Crisman’s CIA file that right after the war he was intimately involved in what was known as Project Paperclip, the covert postwar effort by Allied forces to bring to America key Nazi scientists who were involved in Hitler’s missile and jet programs. Many of these scientists--most famously Wernher von Braun--became leading figures in the U.S. rocket and space program, which was based at White Sands Missile Range in New Mexico. In exchange for changing sides, none of these men were ever prosecuted for their potential war crimes.5
But there were a few others--most notably the Horten brothers, Walter and Reimar--who resisted the West’s overtures. One of the Hortens and many other hard-core Nazis escaped to Argentina after the war. In the opinion of many they were the most talented and advanced aeronautical engineers in the world. Late in the war they had designed a jet-powered flying-wing aircraft called the Horten Ho 229. Although it arrived too late to see active service for the Luftwaffe, this aircraft was the source of rumors that in the war’s final months the Nazis were developing “alternate aircraft,” including saucer-shaped and flying-wing fighters. It is not hard to study the surviving Horten prototypes and look ahead 40 years to the B-1 and B-2 bombers.6
Many of these same scientists also went to work for the Soviets. Most of the UFO intrigue and subterfuge in the U.S. military was driven by the fear that these unknown and superior craft suddenly appearing over Western skies could be Soviet aircraft. If the Russians did possess them, from a Cold War Soviet perspective, the strategy makes perfect sense:
Send in waves of technologically advanced aircraft to operate openly over America, against which we had no possibility of defending ourselves, as a way to intimidate us and deflate confidence in our new atomic weapons--which the Soviets did not yet possess. Whatever these craft were, there’s no question they created panic and uncertainty in the military.
What if the “weather balloon” narrative out of Roswell was a rushed, clumsy attempt to cover up the crash of one of these Soviet spy planes? Could the UFO stories in the Northwest similarly have been a cover for squadrons of these craft operating openly over our airspace?7
There is, of course, another, however improbable, possibility: What about the original conclusion of Project Sign that these mysterious aircraft were of “no earthly origin”? That their technology was “outside the scope of U.S. science, even that of German and Soviet rocket and aircraft development”?
There are numerous references to earlier sightings of strange airships in 1946 over Northern Europe, then Greece, Portugal, Spain and Italy. Pilots at the time called them “ghost rockets,” of which over 200 sightings are on the record, all registered by radar.8
Then there are the “foo fighters,” strange flying balls of light and other aerial phenomena witnessed by Allied pilots that were presumed to be some kind of Axis secret weapon--until it turned out, after the war, that German and Japanese pilots at the time were seeing them too.9
And it doesn’t stop there. In the 1970s, a European author named Erich von Däniken--often derided, for good reason, as a fraudulent hack--provided an authentic missing piece to this conundrum. He connected the UFO phenomenon to the oldest sources on record. Turns out there are even earlier references--to sightings, going back to biblical times--check out Ezekiel’s encounter with “angelic chariots” in the sixth century B.C., in what is now Iraq--up through the Dark Ages and the Renaissance, in virtually every country in the world, including “mystery airships” that appeared soaring over the American West in the 19th century, strange tales of abductions, crashes in Texas and Missouri six years before Roswell, and massive sightings over Los Angeles in the early 1940s.
The point about the whole subject is this: Once you open the top on this thing, the genie won’t get back in the bottle.10
The following is a modern translation of Ezekiel (1:4-1:21)--which I somehow missed in Sunday school--if you need something to keep you up at night:
11 12
1 Milford was working for Project Sign—TP
2 Verified—TP
3 Verified – TP
4 Confirmed—TP
5 Verified—Project Paperclip did exactly that—TP
6 Verified—which makes me wonder the following: What if the U.S. got its hands on these designs and was attempting to develop “flying-wing” aircraft of its own at White Sands, New Mexico, or Hanford in the Pacific Northwest? Could “flying-wing” prototypes have been the objects seen in the sky by Kenneth Arnold, Emil Smith and countless others? And if they were American in origin, could the military have been using these craft—which perhaps had the ability to fly and hover, as many contemporary aircraft do—to discreetly dispose of nuclear waste from Hanford in the Puget Sound? Is that what the Archivist is hinting at here?—TP
7 All sound reasoning, except … a wave of similar stories about UFOs over Russia date from that same time frame. Rumors also exist that the Nazis recovered a crashed flying saucer in 1937, and that technology recovered from that crash formed the basis of their “fixed-wing” aircraft program. It’s a hall of mirrors.
I’ve also just found a recently declassified report from Fourth Air Force Headquarters in San Francisco that there were at least three UFO sightings directly over the Hanford site as early as January of 1945, described by the pilot who gave chase to one of them as a “bright ball of fire, so bright you could hardly look directly at it.” The brass moved to install batteries of searchlights after the incident and deployed additional fighters on constant night patrol over the area. At least one more sighting occurred after taking these measures—TP
8 Verified—TP
9 Verified—TP
10 There are, in fact, verifiable accounts of all incidents he mentions. Which, of course, doesn’t make them facts—TP
11 I’m assuming all of this is best explained as describing the exterior of an aircraft itself—TP
12 Okay, I will admit my mind is reeling. It’s after three in the morning and I feel like I’m teetering on the edge of a mine shaft. It seems clear that the Archivist, by walking the reader through these more reasonable theories—and then logically discounting them—is nudging us toward acceptance of the impossible, but I’ll need more time to process this before I start embracing meta-theories that shatter the foundation of my Western education and philosophy. I’m going to have to start drinking either a lot more or a whole lot less coffee. Another chapter tomorrow—TP
*** TWIN PEAKS SIGHTINGS, DISAPPEARANCES AND ABDUCTIONS:
*1* PROJECT SIGN
Mysteries are as much a part of nature as sunrises. They may not yield to us, but they are freely available for all to wrestle with. The hoarding and withholding of “secret” knowledge is the trademark of covert societies and governments, for the purpose of concentrating power and resources within a powerful elite, the few against the many. These polarities stand in direct opposition to one another; mysteries enliven existence, secrets strangle it. The battle continues to this day, and the flow of information--in any “free” society--depends on the outcome. Regarding the UFO phenomenon, this conflict was about to be enacted within the U.S. government and military.
Our minds are wired by nature to detect patterns. I have disciplined mine for decades to recognize and draw out patterns where none might first seem apparent. But even the untrained eye begins to sense the emergence of a peculiar pattern particular to a specific geographical area like Twin Peaks. A comparable sample size taken from any other similar community’s history--I’ve compiled over a dozen, at random, as an exercise--yields nothing like the catalog of misfortune in evidence here.
The challenge is to trace it, if possible, to its origins. That becomes a search for common threads. One of those threads, in the person of Douglas Milford, we’ve already identified. Let’s follow it.
In the aftermath of the Maury Island incident in 1947, Douglas Milford next turns up a few months later at the newly minted Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio, for
the first “official” meeting of Project Sign.1
A lot to unpack here: First of all, Milford is now listed as a USAF major. He’s obviously been promoted, perhaps for his effective service during the Maury Island incident.
Kenneth Arnold’s sighting is #4 on this list; his friend the airline pilot E. J. Smith’s is clearly #8. We also notice that the confounding Maury Island incident does not make the roster. Make of that what you will.
Far more interesting to this correspondent are the final two sightings on the list, which occurred in or around Twin Peaks in early September--because the minutes make it clear that the witness to incident #18 was in the room that day: none other than Doug Milford himself.2
Searching deeper for secondary accounts of these two sightings, a check of Twin Peaks’ local biweekly newspaper yielded the following:
3
REPORTER ROBERT JACOBY as a young man
ARCHIVIST’S NOTE
No other local eyewitnesses came forward, but this article is a clear reference to incident #17 on Project Sign’s list, what became known as the “UFO dogfight.” The pilot of the Phantom was Lieutenant Dan Luhrman.
I have transcribed here an excerpt from his account in Project Sign’s files:
“I was ten minutes into my patrol when I spotted a brightly lit object on the horizon due north of my position, flying at approximately the same altitude. After determining there were no other known aircraft on radar in the area I gave pursuit to determine its identity. Reaching full power I realized the object was maintaining the same distance from me, and was too fast to catch in a straight run, dropping in altitude by this point down to around 500 feet. I engaged in a series of turns, trying to cut the object off, but it continued to elude me with a series of effortless maneuvers. When it went into a sudden vertical climb I tried to follow, until my plane stalled out at 14,000 feet. The object passed out of my visual range and I returned to base.”
After curiosity swelled in the local press, Fairchild’s information officer released a statement that the jet had been pursuing the by now familiar, all-purpose Air Force standby, a “derelict weather balloon.”4
Established in 1942 as a repair depot for damaged aircraft returning from the Pacific theater in WWII, in the summer of 1947 Fairchild Air Force Base was turned over to Strategic Air Command, which made it home to the 92nd and 98th Bomb Groups. Located 15 miles west of Spokane in southeastern Washington--less than half an hour by jet from Twin Peaks--it became home to the B-29 Superfortress bomber, a key component of U.S. air defense during the Cold War. There were also rumored to be ICBM nuclear missile silos on the base.5
The second confirmed sighting in Twin Peaks occurred four days after Jennings’s encounter, on September 8. As we shall soon see, this event made the local paper only indirectly, but it is the subject of this report offered by Major Douglas Milford during that first Project Sign meeting at Wright-Patterson AFB:6
7 8
ARCHIVIST’S NOTE
So Douglas Milford’s personal UFO experience went considerably beyond the other 17 entries on Project Sign’s initial list to conclude with what appears to be the first officially recorded instance of a UFO “abduction,” or in the parlance of the later Project Blue Book, a “close encounter of the third kind.”
There is unfortunately no record of how Milford’s story was received by the other officers in the room at Wright-Patterson. Nor is there any mention of whether Milford showed them any of the photographs he’d taken that day in the woods, or if, in them, he had captured anything of interest.9
1 This document is authentic—TP
2 I’ve identified a number of high-ranking Air Force officers who claim to have personally witnessed UFOs. They tend, perhaps not surprisingly, to be the most sympathetic among military personnel to the possibility of extraterrestrial origins—TP
3 I have confirmed that the reporter for this story is the older brother of Dr. Lawrence Jacoby, a psychiatrist who figures prominently in Agent Cooper’s notes on the Laura Palmer case.
The Jacoby family had moved in 1939 from Twin Peaks to Pearl Harbor, where the father, Richard, was stationed in the Navy. He and his wife abruptly divorced in 1940. The next year Richard returned to Twin Peaks with the older son, Robert, while the younger, Lawrence, remained in Hawaii with his mother, Esther, who shortly after the divorce officially changed her first name to “Leilani”—TP
4 Verified—TP
5 This is one of the first of what soon emerges as a clear pattern over the next two decades of UFO sightings over nuclear missile silos—TP
6 I am curious how the Archivist gained access to these confidential files—and what that tells us about his identity—TP
7 If he did not present himself to Jennings as an Air Force officer, he nevertheless ends up performing a similar function: intimidating a witness—TP
8 Milford was spot-on about Emil Jennings running out a bad string of the local gene pool: In 1964, he passed out drunk and drowned in the steel tub of his basement beer-brewing apparatus. His only son, Hank Jennings—onetime football hero at Twin Peaks High, according to its 1968 yearbook—
compiled an even more impressive rap sheet in his postgraduate career, including a stint in the Washington State Penitentiary for vehicular manslaughter—TP
9 Was this an actual “UFO” encounter, or something else altogether? Milford never mentions actually seeing a craft or ship, only a dark space that he infers is something of the kind. Did he have an observational bias to find what he was seeking? As subjective as it sounds—and given Milford’s earlier reputation for fanciful exaggeration—I find it problematic to accept his account at face value. Independent corroboration is required—TP
*2* THREE STUDENTS VANISH
TWIN PEAKS GAZETTE FRIDAY, SEPTEMBER 12, 1947
1
One other local source confirms the basic chain of events in this story, and also provides a hint to the identity of at least one of the three children in the woods.
2
ARCHIVIST’S NOTE
The medical evaluations of the two male children could not be located, but I was able to ascertain their identities: Carl Rodd and Alan Traherne, both of them third grade classmates of Margaret Coulson at Warren G. Harding Elementary School in Twin Peaks. Carl Rodd and Alan Traherne graduated from Twin Peaks High School, along with Margaret, in 1958.
*THE SECOND CHILD
After two years of community college in Spokane, Alan Traherne moved to Los Angeles, where he worked for a number of years as a sound technician in the motion picture and television industry.3
Before this correspondent could question him about this event in his childhood, Traherne passed away in 1988 from cancer.
*THE THIRD CHILD
Carl Rodd joined the Coast Guard the year he graduated from high school and eventually climbed to the rank of boatswain’s mate, serving on a patrol boat under heavy combat during the early years of the Vietnam War.
This correspondent was able to locate a photograph of Carl Rodd during his Coast Guard service that suggests he had a similar tattoo or marking to the one Margaret received on the back of his right knee.
Rodd was later reported missing while on duty off the Alaskan coast during the devastating Anchorage earthquake and ensuing tsunami of 1964. He was rescued by a Native American fishing crew, but Rodd’s patrol boat and the bodies of his shipmates were never recovered. Rodd lived with the Aleuts who rescued him for five months while he regained his strength. It was often later said by Rodd himself that he underwent a spiritual conversion while in their company that “saved his life,” adopting their deist or animist form of shamanism. He married a young Aleut woman during his time with them, but the following year, after her and their baby’s tragic death in childbirth, Rodd abandoned the Aleuts and, for a time, wandered the trackless wilds of the Yukon, British Columbia and Northwest Territories.
He eventually settled in the town of Yellowknife, working as a tracker for hunting expeditions.
During this time he was known to write poetry and songs, and occasionally appeared as a folksinger at local cafes, performing his own compositions. He was also hired to perform stunts in a few movies that occasionally shot on location in the area.4
In the early 1980s Rodd returned to his hometown for the first time in nearly 30 years and took up residence outside Twin Peaks in a brand-new trailer park. He eventually became the manager of this park, and part owner as well. He quietly gained a reputation there and in the rest of the community as a sensitive, caring and, despite his meager means, generous soul. He lives there in the park to this day.5
1 When Major Milford writes how this event brought back a “flood of memories” and what sounds like the onset of a panic attack, a question arises for me: Did Douglas Milford experience something like a “close encounter” of his own at this same location back in 1927? The one mentioned in his brother Dwayne’s account where he claims to have encountered a giant and “a walking owl as tall as a man” that resulted in his falling-out with the scouts’ regional council as well as his brother Dwayne?
Also: No follow-up article appears in the next or any other edition of the Gazette, leaving one to wonder if Douglas paid a subsequent visit to reporter Robert Jacoby—TP