Del Rio crash claim

Del Rio crash claim

Claimed date	Variously 1948, 6 December 1950, and 1954–1957
Claimed place	Texas–Mexico border near Del Rio; also El Indio–Guerrero, Laredo, south of Langtry
Main source	Robert B. Willingham (first told 1968, Skylook)
Willingham's record	Army 1945–1947 (E-4); Civil Air Patrol lieutenant colonel, not an Air Force officer
Other sources	1977 Zechel affidavit; MJ-12 "Eisenhower Briefing Document"; Stringfield reports
Popular book	The Other Roswell (Torres & Uriarte, 2008)
Assessment	Probably a hoax (Kevin Randle)
Date	13 August 1979
Topics	Crashes & retrievals (topic), Beings & bodies (topic), Secrecy & cover-up (topic)
People	Leonard Stringfield, Robert Willingham
Testimony	Shellenberger testimony, p. 89
Year	1979 in UFO history
Timeline	1979 on the UAP Timeline
Sources	8

The Del Rio crash is an alleged recovery of a crashed UFO near the Texas–Mexico border in the 1950s.^[1][2] The story rests almost entirely on the account of one man, Robert Willingham, and has been told in several conflicting versions, with the date moving from 1948 to 1950 to the mid-1950s.^[1][2][8] A version of it appears in the discredited MJ-12 "Eisenhower Briefing Document".^[8] Researchers who examined it, including some sympathetic to crash-retrieval stories, have concluded it is probably a hoax.^[1][2]

Origin of the story

According to the UFO researcher Kevin Randle, the story first appeared in 1968 in Skylook, the early publication of what became MUFON.^[1][8] The February/March 1968 issue said that "Col. R. B. Willingham, CAP squadron commander" had been interested in UFOs since 1948. That year, it said, he was leading F-94 jets near the Mexican border when he was told three UFOs were "flying formation" nearby, and that one had crashed a few miles away in Mexico. Mexican authorities kept him about 60 feet from the wreckage, which seemed to be "numerous pieces of metal polished on the outside, very rough on the inner sides".^[8] Willingham had first told the story to a Pennsylvania reporter interviewing Civil Air Patrol pilots. It reached the National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomena (NICAP), where it sat unnoticed for more than a decade.^[8]

The 1970s: Zechel and Stringfield

The researcher W. Todd Zechel found the story in NICAP's files, tracked down Willingham, and in 1977 obtained a signed affidavit from him with further details.^[8] Zechel was in contact with William Moore about a possible book. Moore's book The Roswell Incident notes that Zechel's group, Citizens Against UFO Secrecy, formed in 1978 to establish that the Air Force had recovered a crashed spacecraft "in the Texas – New Mexico – Mexico border area".^[8] According to Randle, the crash was dated 1948 in Leonard Stringfield's work, and it was after Zechel became involved that the date shifted to 6 December 1950.^[8]

According to the testimony, a retired airman wrote to Stringfield on 13 August 1979 saying he had learned of a 1950 crash near Del Rio. The account went into Stringfield's crash-retrieval status reports.^[4][7] Stringfield (1920–1994) was a former Air Force intelligence officer who collected hundreds of mostly anonymous, second-hand crash stories from the late 1970s onward. In 1978 he published the earliest version of Jesse Marcel's Roswell testimony.^[4][6] One of his status reports, published in Flying Saucer Review in 1983, is cited for the Del Rio material, but the online copy could not be retrieved.^[7]

The MJ-12 document

The Majestic 12 "Eisenhower Briefing Document", which surfaced on film mailed to Moore's friend Jaime Shandera, includes a passage on the case.^[8] It says that on 6 December 1950 "a second object, probably of similar origin, impacted the earth at high speed in the El-Indio – Guerrero area of the Texas – Mexican boder". It adds that the object had been "almost totally incinerated" and that recovered material went to the Atomic Energy Commission facility at Sandia, New Mexico.^[8] Randle traced a chain of contacts from Willingham's 1968 story to Zechel, then to Moore, then to Shandera. He argued that the document's use of the 1950 date proves it a fake. If no crash happened there, it could not be mentioned. If Willingham's later dates are right, the crash came after the document was supposedly written in 1952.^[8]

Willingham's later account

In the version promoted in the 2008 book The Other Roswell: UFO Crash on the Texas-Mexico Border by Noe Torres and Ruben Uriarte, Willingham was described as a retired Air Force colonel and former fighter pilot living near Wichita Falls.^[1][3] The book's publicity called him "an Air Force jet aviator who chased an intensely-bright UFO across Texas and watched it crash". Its foreword, by Bruce Maccabee, said it gave "important support" to the idea that alien craft had crashed and been covered up.^[3] In this version:^[1][3]

• In 1955 he was flying an F-86 escorting a B-47 over West Texas when a radio warning reported a very fast object.
• He followed it toward Del Rio and saw it wobble and descend.
• He later found Mexican soldiers guarding a long furrow south of Langtry, Texas.
• He took a hand-sized piece of metal that could not be burned or cut.

Willingham told Randle he was not sure whether it was 1954 or 1955, and at one point suggested 1957. He said only that it was not 1950.^[1][8] In other versions the location shifted to near Laredo.^[2] Willingham later claimed to have been present at six other crashes.^[1]

The popular version

Another widely repeated version describes about 40 objects detected flying from the north near Del Rio on 8 December 1950 at 32,000 feet. Interceptors were alerted, and one object fell from formation and crashed. In 1977, the story goes, a colonel said he had helped recover scattered, thin debris that sprang back to shape when bent and took samples to a government laboratory in Maryland. He was later warned by phone to keep quiet.^[5] No record shows that any interceptor or missile was fired.^[5]

Randle's investigation

Randle, a former Air Force and Army intelligence officer, checked Willingham's military record. He found the following:^[1][8]

• The Air Force records centre showed only that Willingham entered the Army in December 1945 and left as an E-4 in January 1947.
• He had a long association with the Civil Air Patrol, the volunteer Air Force auxiliary, which gave him a plaque as a lieutenant colonel for service with its Pennsylvania wing from 1948 to 1973.
• That service in Pennsylvania conflicts with his claims of a long military career.
• He had not been an Air Force officer or a fighter pilot, and had not served in Korea as he claimed.

"Twenty years of service to the CAP doesn't qualify one for a retirement pension from the military", Randle noted.^[8] In more than two decades of research, Randle found no other witness to the Del Rio retrieval.^[1][2]

Eric Davis

In 2018 the physicist Eric Davis said on Coast to Coast AM with George Knapp: "If you're going to throw your bets on Roswell, your bet's really good. Del Rio, Texas, that was a 1950s case, that was another one". He declined to discuss other cases that were "still classified".^[2] Davis, of EarthTech International and the Institute for Advanced Studies at Austin, has a PhD in astrophysics.^[2] Randle argued that Davis appeared to be relying on Willingham's story, which would call his other statements into question. Knapp and Uriarte knew nothing more, and Davis did not answer Randle's emails.^[2]

In 2025 Davis replied through an intermediary, André Skondras. He said Randle's conclusions were "based on flawed research", and that he, David Grusch and other cleared personnel "were briefed on classified evidence firsthand".^[1] Randle called this "the old dodge". He concluded that, unless there was something he had not discovered, the crash was "invented by Robert Willingham" and "is a hoax".^[1] The researcher Douglas Dean Johnson, commenting on Randle's post, called Davis a "fabulist" who had backed other hoaxes, such as the Trinity crash story.^[1]

People and topics

• Leonard Stringfield — Former Air Force intelligence officer and NICAP researcher who collected anonymous crash-retrieval accounts from 1978 to 1994.
• Robert Willingham — Man who claimed he saw a crashed craft near Del Rio, Texas.
• U.S. Air Force — The U.S. military service that ran the official UFO projects from 1947 to 1969.

On the Timeline

• Southeastern Oregon crash claim (1979) (27 June 1979) — An informant claims a craft crashed in southeastern Oregon and he helped load crates.
• NORAD's $294,157 search fee (September 1979) — NORAD says a search for UAP tracking data would cost $294,157.

See every 1979 event on the UAP Timeline →

References

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