Yuma hangar photograph claim (1967)

Yuma hangar photograph claim (1967)

Date	1967
People	Leonard Stringfield
Testimony	Shellenberger testimony, p. 69
Year	1967 in UFO history
Timeline	1967 on the UAP Timeline
Sources	10

The Yuma hangar photograph claim is a crash-retrieval story collected by the ufologist Leonard H. Stringfield. An anonymous informant, identified only as "AF", said that his brother Pete saw a flying saucer inside a hangar at what the informant called the Naval Air Base at Yuma, Arizona, in 1967. According to the account, Pete photographed the craft, got into trouble over it, went absent without leave and fled to Mexico. The informant later added that Pete had been approached by an "agency" and wanted to avoid attention.^[7] Michael Shellenberger's 2024 written testimony to the House Oversight Committee lists the story in its timeline and cites Stringfield's Retrievals of the Third Kind, the paper he presented to MUFON in 1978.^[7][2] The earlier version of this article said the engineer Robert M. Wood later classed the case as a conclusively proven hoax. That assessment could not be checked against the sources read here (see Wood's review).^[1]

The account

The Shellenberger timeline gives the story in four parts:^[7]

• The sighting. Pete, the informant's brother, is said to have seen a saucer in a hangar at the Yuma base in 1967.
• The photographs. Pete is said to have taken photographs of the craft.
• The aftermath. He is said to have got into trouble as a result, gone AWOL and fled to Mexico.
• The later contact. In a later statement, AF said Pete had been approached by an "agency" and wanted to stay out of the public eye.

The timeline marks the entry as public-domain material and cites it to page 177 of Retrievals of the Third Kind "presented at MUFON 1978".^[7] It does not name Pete's service, unit or rank, and it gives no month or day for the sighting. The sources read here do not say what happened to the photographs.

The earlier version of this article said the informant's information came through his brother, who was in the military. That fits the timeline's account, which has the brother working at a military air base, but the timeline itself does not state his service. The earlier version also said that later summaries mention photographs and that none have ever been published. The timeline confirms that photographs were said to have been taken. That none have been published is not covered in the sources read here.^[1][7]

Where it was published

The two versions of this article disagree about where Stringfield first printed the story.

• Earlier version. It said the account appeared in Stringfield's Status Report III (1982), on pages 34 and 35.^[1]
• The testimony. Shellenberger's timeline instead cites page 177 of Retrievals of the Third Kind, the paper presented at the 1978 MUFON symposium.^[7]

The Wikipedia account of Stringfield confirms both titles. Retrievals of the Third Kind: A case study of alleged UFOs and occupants in military custody was presented at the Ninth Annual MUFON Symposium in Dayton, Ohio, in July 1978, and is unofficially known as Status Report I. UFO Crash/Retrievals: Amassing the Evidence was Status Report III, published in 1982.^[2] Goodreads lists a later edition of the first report as UFO Crash Retrievals – Status Report I: Retrievals of the Third Kind, with Charles Bowen as editor.^[6] Neither paper's text was available to the sources read here, so it was not possible to check which one contains the Yuma story, or whether both do. The page numbers in the earlier version are not covered in the sources read here.

The Yuma base

The earlier version noted that Yuma is home to both a Marine Corps air station and the Army's Yuma Proving Ground. Both points are confirmed by the Wikipedia accounts of the two installations.^[1][8][9]

• The air station. Marine Corps Air Station Yuma lies about 2 miles from the centre of the city, shares its airfield with Yuma International Airport and covers about 3,000 acres, most of it flat desert.^[8]
• Early history. The site began in 1928 as Fly Field, became the Yuma Army Airfield, a flight and gunnery training school, in the Second World War, and closed in 1945.^[8]
• Air Defense Command. The Air Force reactivated the airfield in 1954 as a training base for Air Defense Command interceptor squadrons. It became Yuma Air Force Base later that year and Vincent Air Force Base in October 1956.^[8]
• Transfer to the Navy and Marines. The Wikipedia account dates the handover to the U.S. Navy both to 1 January 1959 and to 15 June 1959, when the Air Force wing there was inactivated. The Marine Corps took over nine days after the June date. On 20 July 1962 it was renamed Marine Corps Air Station Yuma (Vincent Field).^[8]
• In the 1960s. During the 1960s the station was home to VMFAT-101, the Marine Corps squadron that trained crews on the F-4 Phantom II.^[8]
• The Proving Ground. Yuma Proving Ground is a separate Army test centre about 30 miles north of the city. Its history goes back to Camp Laguna and the Army Corps of Engineers Yuma Test Branch, both activated in 1943.^[9]

By this record, the air base at Yuma had been a Marine Corps air station for about five years by 1967. The informant's phrase "Naval Air Base" does not match its official name at the time. The sources read here do not explain the difference.^[7][8]

Wood's review

The earlier version of this article described a review of Stringfield's cases by Robert M. Wood. It said Wood presented it at the second annual UFO Crash Retrieval Conference in November 2004, in a paper on correlating Stringfield's crash-retrieval reports. By that description:^[1]

• The table. Wood drew a table of 80 crash-retrieval reports from Stringfield's papers and listed the Yuma hangar case as report 46.
• The hoaxes. He named it as one of four hoaxes that Stringfield had, in hindsight, been taken in by, and called it conclusively proven to be a hoax.
• The other three. These were said to be a 1979 story about bodies in the Pocono Mountains, a 1989 South African crash story, and a 1989 "recovered vessel" story from Carp, Ontario.
• Wood's argument. Wood was said to have argued that Stringfield's own detailed reporting helped expose some of the hoaxes, and that recognising them made the rest of the collection easier to judge.

The conference proceedings cited for these points are a scanned PDF with no readable text layer, so none of this could be checked. The report number, the hoax classification, the list of the other three hoaxes and Wood's argument are all not covered in the sources read here.^[1] What Wood actually concluded about this case, and on what evidence, therefore remains open on this page.

The Shellenberger timeline does cover Wood's background. In 1967, the same year as the alleged Yuma sighting, Wood was a physicist at the McDonnell Douglas Corporation. He was given the task of exploring breakthroughs in gravity propulsion, through laboratory tests of hypotheses, field observations and study of the UFO literature. The project, code-named BITBR ("Boys in the Back Room"), had four full-time and three part-time staff. Through it Wood met James E. McDonald and the Project Blue Book adviser J. Allen Hynek. He recommended in 1969 that the project be cancelled, because it had produced little technological payoff.^[10]

Stringfield and crash stories

Leonard Stringfield (1920–1994) was an American ufologist with a particular interest in stories of crashed flying saucers.^[2] His background helps explain how an anonymous, second-hand story like the Yuma claim entered the record.

• Early groups. He directed Civilian Research, Interplanetary Flying Objects (CRIFO) and published its monthly newsletter, ORBIT. In 1957 he became public relations adviser to NICAP under Donald Keyhoe, a friend since 1953.^[2]
• The Condon years. From 1967 to 1969, the period of the Yuma story, he served as an "Early Warning Coordinator" for the Condon Committee.^[2]
• MUFON and CUFOS. Patrick Gross records that he joined MUFON in 1971, was its state section director for southwest Ohio, became its public relations officer in 1974 and sat on its board. He was also a regional investigator for the J. Allen Hynek Center for UFO Studies.^[3]
• The status reports. He self-published a series of "Status Reports" on alleged crash-retrievals until his death from lung cancer on 18 December 1994.^[2]
• His papers. According to Mental Floss, his 60 volumes of papers were donated to MUFON in 2012, which was digitising them.^[5]

Gross describes the climate in which Stringfield began this work. Crash stories had little standing among ufologists in the 1970s, partly because Frank Scully's crashed-saucer story of 1949–1950 had been exposed as a fraud. In 1974 Robert Carr had also claimed, without verified evidence, that bodies and wreckage were stored at "Hangar 18" at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base. Stringfield was not persuaded that every crash story was false. He collected statements from people who said they had seen or heard of such events, most of whom wanted to stay anonymous.^[3] The Yuma informant, known only by initials and passing on a brother's story, is typical of these sources.

The 1978 Dayton paper was Stringfield's first major presentation of this material. Gross reproduces part of it as published in the MUFON UFO Journal, issue 129, in August 1978. That excerpt includes the earliest published version of the testimony of "Major J.M.", later known to be Jesse Marcel, about debris recovered near Roswell in 1947.^[3] A Podcast UFO page about the 1978 symposium paper is also listed among the references, but its content was not available to the sources read here.^[4]

Assessment

The Yuma claim rests on a single anonymous, second-hand account. The witness himself, Pete, is said to have fled and to want no attention, and no photographs have been produced in any of the sources read here.^[7] The account's description of the base as a "Naval Air Base" does not match the installation's official name in 1967.^[8] The earlier version of this article reported that Wood classed the story as a conclusively proven hoax. That may be the most important judgement on the case, but it could not be confirmed from a readable source.^[1]

People and topics

• Leonard Stringfield — Former Air Force intelligence officer and NICAP researcher who collected anonymous crash-retrieval accounts from 1978 to 1994.
• Crash retrieval — The alleged recovery of crashed non-human craft by governments.

On the Timeline

• Jack Pickett and the MacDill discs (1966-1967) — A retired pilot and a journalist say they saw Air Force-marked disc craft at MacDill AFB.
• Robert Wood's McDonnell Douglas study (1967) — McDonnell Douglas physicist Robert Wood says he was tasked with gravity propulsion research.

See every 1967 event on the UAP Timeline →

References

Facts in this article are drawn in part from the Wikipedia articles “Leonard H. Stringfield”, “Marine Corps Air Station Yuma”, “Yuma Proving Ground”, available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.