Eric Walker and the Penn State alumnus

Eric Walker and the Penn State alumnus

Subject	Eric A. Walker (1910–1995), president of Penn State 1956–1970
Claimant	T. Scott Crain Jr., Penn State alumnus and UFO researcher, with Grant Cameron
Work	UFOs, MJ-12 and the Government (about 180 pages, 1989–1990)
Reported	The Daily Collegian, 6 September 1990, "PSU may have investigated UFOs"
Claim	Walker attended secret meetings on recovered flying saucers while executive secretary of the Research and Development Board
Walker's response	Denied any knowledge or involvement
Date	6 September 1990
Topics	Crashes & retrievals (topic), Secrecy & cover-up (topic)
People	Eric Walker, Robert Sarbacher
Testimony	Shellenberger testimony, p. 108
Year	1990 in UFO history
Timeline	1990 on the UAP Timeline
Sources	6

On 6 September 1990 Penn State's student newspaper, The Daily Collegian, reported a new book co-written by the alumnus T. Scott Crain Jr. The book suggested that the university's former president, Eric A. Walker, had attended top-secret meetings about UFO investigations.^[1][3] Crain called Walker "the first scientist to admit knowledge" of "Operation Majestic Twelve". Walker denied any knowledge of or involvement in government UFO investigations.^[1] The claims rest on a researcher's notes of a 1987 phone call, an anonymous typed reply and other second-hand material. Walker died in 1995 without confirming them.^[2][4]

Walker

Walker was born in Long Eaton, England, in 1910 and came to the United States in 1923. He studied at Harvard, earning a bachelor's degree in 1932, a master's in 1933 and a doctorate in 1935.^[2][4] His career:^[2][4]

• Teaching. He taught at Tufts and the University of Connecticut.
• Wartime. During the Second World War he was associate director of Harvard's Underwater Sound Laboratory, where acoustics research went into the homing torpedo.
• Penn State. In 1945 the laboratory's ordnance section moved to Penn State as the Ordnance Research Laboratory, which he directed. He became dean of engineering in 1951 and president in 1956.
• Growth. As president until 1970 he oversaw growth in enrolment to 40,000 and the founding of the Milton S. Hershey Medical Center.

He was a founding member of the National Academy of Engineering, chaired the National Science Board, and became chairman of the Institute for Defense Analyses in 1981.^[2][4] His Who's Who entry lists him as executive secretary of the Pentagon's Research and Development Board in 1950–51.^[4] A Penn State building housing the meteorology department bears his name.^[2]

How Walker was identified

The UFO researcher Tom Mickus, writing for the CUFORN Bulletin in 1989, credited the researcher William Steinman with finding Walker:^[4]

• Sarbacher. The physicist Robert Sarbacher had told Steinman of a prominent Pennsylvanian who, unlike himself, attended all the Research and Development Board meetings at Wright Field.
• The list. A former official of the board's Guided Missile Committee then sent Steinman six names as possible members of a "hypothesized" saucer-recovery group. This was in early 1984, before the MJ-12 papers were released. Five matched the later MJ-12 list; the sixth was Walker.
• Friedman's view. Stanton Friedman, who spoke briefly with Walker in 1984, found him "cagey and careful" and concluded he "knew a great deal".

Walker's first known public reference to UFOs was in a 1969 lecture at Auburn University. In it he remarked that it might be "a good thing that ships from another planet are not sampling our atmosphere", since its pollution might suggest life could not exist on Earth.^[4]

The Steinman call and letters

Cameron and Crain's paper printed Steinman's account of a phone call on 30 August 1987. It was written up within ten minutes of the call, not taken from a recording.^[4] In Steinman's version:^[4]

• The meetings. Walker agreed he had attended meetings at Wright-Patterson "concerning that subject matter".
• MJ-12. He said he had known of MJ-12 "for 40 years". He also told Steinman he was "chasing after and fighting with windmills" and should drop the subject.
• His notes. He said he probably had notes of the meetings and might send copies.

Other material in the paper was stranger:^[4]

• The typed reply. Steinman's 1984 letter came back with a typed message at the foot: "STOP! DON'T TRY TO FIND ME I CAME ON THAT MACHINE I WILL LEAVE MAY 15 ERGOT QUIET QUIET QUIET".
• The "code letter". Another letter was returned with numerals over various letters.
• The signed letter. A typed letter signed by Walker described four alien bodies recovered alive. Cameron and Crain themselves judged it so sensational that they labelled it a poor attempt at disinformation.

By December 1988, Mickus wrote, Walker was telling Steinman by phone that he did not know who Steinman was.^[4]

The 1989 call

On 11 August 1989 Mickus, then a 24-year-old University of Toronto student running a UFO bulletin-board network, phoned Walker about the Cameron–Crain paper. He reported that about 80 of its 180 pages dealt with Walker.^[4] In the call:^[4]

• The researchers. Walker said he did not remember Steinman or Crain and asked whether Mickus had "the right Walker".
• The meetings. He said he had attended "a lot of meetings" in the early 1950s but could not remember their subject.
• Alien bodies. He quipped that he did not "have any alien bodies in my office".
• His dismissal. He called the matter "an awful waste of time" and said he would "get interested when I see one of those little green men". He declined to comment further and ended the call.

Mickus took this as evasion and "convenient memory loss". He wrote that a copy of the "code letter" had since been mailed to Crain, and that a campus magazine planned to confront Walker.^[4]

The Collegian report

The Daily Collegian's article, "PSU may have investigated UFOs", appeared as the work was due for release that September.^[1][6] The article reported:^[1]

• The transcripts. The book included transcripts of alleged conversations in which Walker discussed UFO sightings with officials.
• The meetings. Crain believed Walker attended the meetings while serving as the federal government's executive secretary of research and development in the 1950s.
• Crain's claims. Crain said MJ-12 was a group of 12 scientists, military and intelligence officials, allegedly approved by President Truman in 1947 to oversee UFO crash recoveries. He said, "We feel the U.S. government has developed teams to recover unknown aerial objects," and that it was trying to duplicate the technology.
• Walker's denial. Walker, still living in Centre County, denied any knowledge or involvement. Crain replied that the book contained evidence of his involvement, and suggested Walker still held security clearances that an admission could jeopardise.
• Crain. He was general manager of Crain Lumber Company in Port Matilda, had studied UFOs as a hobby for 22 years, and was the local director of the Mutual UFO Network (MUFON) and an investigator for the Pennsylvania Association for the Study of the Unexplained.

Kecksburg

The book also covered the 1965 Kecksburg incident in Pennsylvania. As the Collegian summarised it:^[1]

• The fireball. On 9 December 1965 a bright orange object was seen across Michigan, Indiana, Ohio, Illinois and part of Ontario.
• The landing. Witnesses described a gold, acorn-shaped craft coming down in woods at Kecksburg.
• The military. According to local firefighters, the military sealed off the area and used the firehouse as a command post.
• The meteor explanation. Many dismissed the object as a meteor.
• Television. MUFON's state director, Stan Gordon, said NBC's Unsolved Mysteries would open its season with the case on 19 September 1990, after six weeks of filming in Westmoreland County.

Later treatment

Walker remains a figure in arguments over MJ-12. A Gaia episode of Aerial Phenomena: The History of UFOs, "Confirming MJ-12: The Astonishing Dr. Eric Walker", presents Richard Dolan's case that Walker's private statements hinted at insider knowledge. In its own summary, Walker "never issued a formal public confession". The episode also links the subject to parapsychology.^[5]

Assessment

The claims about Walker rest on second-hand accounts that he publicly denied.^[1] The key "admission" comes from Steinman's notes of an unrecorded call. Walker's later calls were denials or evasions, and the letters attributed to him range from cryptic to what Cameron and Crain themselves considered disinformation.^[4] Walker died on 17 February 1995.^[2]

People and topics

• Eric Walker — Penn State president and Institute for Defense Analyses chairman named in MJ-12 claims.
• Unidentified anomalous phenomena — The U.S. government's current term for unidentified objects in the air, in space and underwater.
• Unidentified flying object — An object in the sky that can't be identified; the older term for UAP.
• Crash retrieval — The alleged recovery of crashed non-human craft by governments.
• Robert Sarbacher — Physicist who wrote in 1983 that he heard recovered UFO materials were studied.

On the Timeline

• SAIC electromagnetic-gravity coupling study (1990) (August 1990) — An SAIC study tests whether electromagnetism and gravity can be coupled for space propulsion.
• Aviation Week secret aircraft report (1990) (1 October 1990) — Aviation Week reports 45 sightings of craft in the Southwest that hover, then go supersonic.

See every 1990 event on the UAP Timeline →

Further reading

References

Facts in this article are drawn in part from the Wikipedia article “Eric A. Walker (engineer)”, available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.