Wheless memo on UFO impostors (1967)

Wheless memo on UFO impostors (1967)

Date	1 March 1967
People	Hewitt Wheless, John Keel, Albert K. Bender
Testimony	Shellenberger testimony, p. 70
Year	1967 in UFO history
Timeline	1967 on the UAP Timeline
Sources	9

The Wheless memo on UFO impostors was a 1967 U.S. Air Force memorandum, "Impersonations of Air Force Officers", signed by Lieutenant General Hewitt T. Wheless. It warned commanders that people posing as Air Force officers were approaching UFO witnesses.^[5][9] According to the memo as quoted in a 1988 magazine article, in one case "an individual who represented himself as a member of NORAD, demanded and received photos belonging to a private citizen". In another, a person in Air Force uniform gathered police and other witnesses in a school room and "told them that they did not see what they thought they saw and that they should not talk to anyone about the sighting".^[5] Michael Shellenberger's 2024 UFO timeline, submitted to the House Oversight Committee, dates the memo to 1 March 1967. It says the memo asked for any sightings of such men to be reported to the Air Force Office of Special Investigations (AFOSI).^[9] The memo is often cited in histories of the "men in black".^[5]

The memo

• Author and title. The memo, titled "Impersonations of Air Force Officers", was written by Lieutenant General Hewitt T. Wheless of the U.S. Air Force.^[9] A 1988 article by Anne Jablonicky in UFO Universe described it as a warning issued in the late 1960s by the "Defense Department's Vice Chief of Staff" to all branches of the service, to look out for people impersonating Air Force officers.^[5] The earlier version of this article described Wheless as the Air Force's assistant vice chief of staff. His official Air Force biography, which would confirm the post, refused automated access.^[2]
• The NORAD case. "In one reported case," the memo said, "an individual who represented himself as a member of NORAD, demanded and received photos belonging to a private citizen."^[5]
• The school-room case. "In another, a person in an Air uniform approached local police and other citizens who had sighted a UFO, assembled then [sic] in a school room and told them that they did not see what they thought they saw and that they should not talk to anyone about the sighting."^[5]
• Reporting. According to Shellenberger's timeline, the memo said men in uniform were approaching citizens who had seen UFOs, and asked that any sightings of these men be reported to AFOSI.^[9]

The Heflin photographs

Shellenberger's timeline links the memo to the case of Rex Heflin, who "claimed a man with a badge from NORAD confiscated his photos of a flying disc".^[9] The earlier version of this article gave more detail. It said Heflin had photographed a UFO in California in 1965, and that a man with NORAD credentials later demanded his original prints. NORAD denied involvement, and its chief of staff told Representative James Utt that it did not evaluate UFOs and would not knowingly collect UFO pictures. The originals were never returned, and the man was never identified. Those details are not covered in the sources read here.

John Keel's reporting

The memo appeared as the writer John Keel was popularising stories of mysterious visitors to UFO witnesses.^[3]

• The Orlando Sentinel, 1967. Keel's article "UFO Witnesses 'Silenced'" appeared in the Orlando Sentinel on 3 February 1967, according to a reference list in a 2023 history of the men in black.^[3]
• Unissued plates. Drawing on Keel's book The Eighth Tower, the same history says the Air Force and FBI tried without success to track the visitors down. It also says that witnesses who took the licence numbers of their cars found that the numbers were "always found to be unissued".^[3]
• "A generic term". In a 1989 lecture, Keel said "The Men in Black is a generic term", covering many kinds of "mystery men" in black Cadillacs and otherwise, some with "a lot of logistical support and financial support that's very mysterious".^[3]
• Mundane cases. According to the Wikipedia account, Keel also argued that some encounters were mundane events turned into folklore. In The Mothman Prophecies he described being mistaken for a man in black himself in 1967, while looking for a phone to call a tow truck.^[4]

The men in black

According to the Wikipedia account, "men in black" in UFO folklore are men in dark suits, said to be government agents, who question, intimidate or threaten UFO witnesses to keep them silent.^[4]

• Origins. In 1947 Harold Dahl claimed that a man in a dark suit warned him not to discuss his Maury Island sighting. In the mid-1950s Albert K. Bender said he was visited by men in dark suits who told him to stop investigating UFOs. He believed they were government agents.^[4] Jablonicky's 1988 article retells Gray Barker's account of Bender, director of the International Flying Saucer Bureau. Three men in black questioned him for hours, and one warned: "If we hear another word form [sic] your office you're in for BIG TROUBLE!" Bender suspended his newsletter.^[5]
• Two types. Jablonicky distinguished "secret agents" posing as Air Force or other officials, the kind the Wheless memo addressed, from sinister figures in black who seemed to appear "out of thin air". The second kind are often said to arrive in older-model black Cadillacs that look strangely new.^[5]
• Hoaxes. According to the Wikipedia account, John C. Sherwood said that in the late 1960s, at 18, he helped Gray Barker develop a hoax about mysterious "blackmen".^[4]
• Interpretations. The folklorist James R. Lewis compared men-in-black stories with tales of encounters with Lucifer. The ufologist Jerome Clark said such reports describe experiences that "don't seem to have occurred in the world of consensus reality". The historian Aaron Gulyas noted that conspiracy theorists of the 1970s to 1990s folded the men in black into "increasingly complex and paranoid visions".^[4]
• Popular culture. The idea inspired the 1997 film Men in Black, The Stranglers' album The Gospel According to the Meninblack, and many other works.^[4]

The Air Force in 1967

The memo was written while Project Blue Book was still the Air Force's official UFO investigation. A July 1967 document titled The Airmen: What Does The Air Force Really Know About Flying Saucers? is preserved in the "From the Desks of Project Blue Book" archive collected by the investigator Rob Mercer.^[7]

Significance

The Wheless memo is often cited because it shows that the Air Force itself was concerned about people impersonating its officers to silence UFO witnesses.^[5][9] The memo, as quoted, does not say who the impostors were. Explanations put forward over the years have ranged from hoaxers and other enthusiasts to intelligence agencies, and, in Keel's and others' more speculative work, to non-human "mystery men".^[3][4][5]

Notes on the earlier version

• Freeman's statement. The earlier version said Keel reported that a Project Blue Book spokesman, Colonel George Freeman, said men claiming official credentials were silencing witnesses, and that "these men are not connected with the Air Force in any way". The sources read here confirm Keel's 3 February 1967 article but do not quote Freeman.^[3]
• "Not from the Air Force". The earlier version said the memo stated that the impostors were not from the Air Force. The passages read here describe the men as impersonating Air Force officers, which implies this, but the exact statement is not quoted.^[5][9]
• Keel's descriptions. The earlier version said Keel described impostors who wore insignia in the wrong places and gave names his Pentagon contacts could not trace. Those details are not covered in the sources read here. The unissued licence plates and black Cadillacs are.^[3][5]
• Unread sources. The archive.org copy of Clear Intent (1984), cited for the memo, is a restricted lending scan and was not read.^[1] A university paper cited by Shellenberger's timeline refused access, and a blog review of a book on the men in black contained no readable text.^[6][8]

People and topics

• U.S. Air Force — The U.S. military service that ran the official UFO projects from 1947 to 1969.
• Unidentified anomalous phenomena — The U.S. government's current term for unidentified objects in the air, in space and underwater.
• Hewitt Wheless — Air Force general whose 1967 memo warned of impostors visiting UFO witnesses.
• Unidentified flying object — An object in the sky that can't be identified; the older term for UAP.
• NORAD — The U.S.–Canadian air defence command.
• Air Force Office of Special Investigations — The Air Force's criminal investigation and counterintelligence agency.
• John Keel — Writer and author of The Mothman Prophecies who popularized the Men in Black.
• Men in Black — Mysterious visitors said to intimidate UFO witnesses.
• Albert K. Bender — Founder of the International Flying Saucer Bureau whose 1953 silencing story began the Men in Black legend.

On the Timeline

• Robert Wood's McDonnell Douglas study (1967) — McDonnell Douglas physicist Robert Wood says he was tasked with gravity propulsion research.
• Camp Pendleton Marine's crash-site claim (1967) (3 July 1967) — A Marine says he flew to a crash retrieval site in the desert in 1967.

See every 1967 event on the UAP Timeline →

Further reading

References

Facts in this article are drawn in part from the Wikipedia article “Men in black”, available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.