Tim Cooper's German saucer source (1991)

Tim Cooper's German saucer source (1991)

Date	July 1991
Topics	Crashes & retrievals (topic), Beings & bodies (topic), Nuclear & missile sites (topic)
People	Tim Cooper, Horten brothers, Ryan Wood, Albert Collins
Testimony	Shellenberger testimony, p. 110
Year	1991 in UFO history
Timeline	1991 on the UAP Timeline
Sources	13

Tim Cooper's German saucer source was an unnamed retired Air Force colonel. According to the California researcher Timothy S. Cooper, the colonel told him that in the early years the military thought flying saucers might be German. The craft, he said, used nuclear power "in a way not understood" and were made of metals and plastics unknown on Earth.^[12] The account appeared in July 1991 in Leonard Stringfield's crash-retrieval Status Report VI, and was later summarised in a 2024 timeline submitted to Congress.^[1][12] The colonel also described panicked recoveries of discs in the Mojave Desert and New Mexico, famous scientists studying the wreckage, and secret projects called "Black Book", "Black Sky" and "White Book".^[12] He has never been identified. The story is known only through Cooper, who later became the main source of the "Cooper documents", a large set of MJ-12 papers widely regarded as forgeries.^[3][9]

The colonel's account

The 2024 timeline compiled by Michael Shellenberger and submitted as written testimony to the House Oversight Committee summarises the colonel's statements as follows. It cites the reprint of Stringfield's report on Linda Moulton Howe's Earthfiles website.^[12]

• Thought to be German. Early UFOs were thought to be German. They used nuclear power in a way not understood, and were made of metals and plastics "not known on Earth".^[12]
• Panic over recoveries. The Air Force "panicked" when it recovered flying discs in the Mojave Desert and New Mexico. It took them to Muroc Air Force Base and to Langley.^[12]
• The craft. They were "lifting bodies" shaped like inverted bathtubs, resembling a "pod" or short-range reconnaissance probe.^[12]
• The scientists. Wernher von Braun, Edward Condon, J. Robert Oppenheimer and Edward Teller worked on the scientific study of the wreckage.^[12]
• Help from outside. Asked who had helped them, the colonel said "no comment". He hinted at extraterrestrials but did not explain.^[12]

Other projects

• Black Book or Black Sky. Besides Project Blue Book, the colonel said, there were other Air Force UFO projects. "Project Black Book" or "Project Black Sky" used advanced cameras and sensors on high-altitude aircraft such as the X-2, X-15 and U-2, and on rockets launched from White Sands and "the Cape", to look for UFOs.^[12]
• White Book. He had heard of an Air Force "Project White Book" that studied historical sightings, including some from Vatican records going back to the 15th century. He said the Vatican was rumoured to hold UFO photographs dating from 1915 in a locked vault that even the Air Force could not get into.^[12]
• Satellites. He said the Talon Gold and Teal Ruby programs were for satellite reconnaissance and led to the founding of the National Reconnaissance Office. Raw UFO data, he said, was processed by Technical Reconnaissance Squadrons at NORAD headquarters at Ent Air Force Base.^[12]

The free portion of the Earthfiles reprint opens with a very similar quotation attributed not to the colonel but to Albert Bruce Collins, "Metallurgical Engineer, 1990". It says the Air Force wanted to counter the "Black Sky" UFO threat with the "High Frontier" space-weapons programs of the early 1960s, that Talon Gold and Teal Ruby followed from satellite photographs of orbiting craft "of unknown origins", and that this led to the NRO's founding in 1960.^[1] Whether the colonel and Collins said the same things, or whether one statement has been misattributed, is not clear from the sources read here. The rest of the reprint is behind a subscription paywall and was not read.^[1]

Tim Cooper

• Stories for Stringfield. Before he became known for documents, Cooper passed stories to Stringfield.^[3] In Status Report VI Stringfield thanked him "again", this time for the story of "Barnabas": Albert Bruce Collins, a metallurgical engineer, who died aged 87 at Big Bear Lake, California, on 31 December 1990.^[1] (See Albert Collins.)
• MJ-12 documents. Cooper said he began receiving MJ-12 documents from anonymous sources in 1992. In all he supplied more than 100 of them. The Wikipedia account notes that the MJ-12 papers in general existed only as copies of photographs.^[3]
• Suspicion. The researcher Karl Pflock wrote that he personally suspected Cooper of writing bogus documents and passing them to established researchers.^[3]
• The Monroe document. One Cooper-supplied MJ-12 document linked Marilyn Monroe's death to her supposed knowledge of UFOs. The CIA concluded it was fraudulent.^[3]
• Later documents. The 2024 timeline records several more documents and letters Cooper said he received from supposed CIA insiders in 1998–1999. They include a "Jehovah" teletype and a "burned memo" supposedly saved from a fire, as well as claims that the UFO control group had been privatised in 1969.^[13] (See Jehovah teletype and Burned Kennedy MJ memo.)
• The Woods. The researchers Robert and Ryan Wood hired Cooper as a consultant on the documents. In 2001, when Cooper was short of money and wanted to become a television scriptwriter, Robert Wood bought all of Cooper's documents. The Woods published them on their Majestic Documents website.^[9]
• A critic's view. In a detailed critique for the website Kennedys and King, the JFK researcher Seamus Coogan called Cooper's Kennedy-related documents almost certainly forgeries. He mocked the Woods' defence of Cooper and Howe's uncritical interviews.^[9]

The earlier version of this article said Cooper began receiving documents "from the mid-1990s". The Wikipedia account dates the first to 1992.^[3]

The German theory in context

The idea that the first "flying discs" might be foreign, and particularly German, technology was plausible for the period.^[4]

• Foreign aircraft. During the Second World War, the Army Air Forces evaluated foreign aircraft through its T-2 Intelligence Department at Wright Field and Freeman Field.^[4]
• German experts. After the war, Operation Lusty brought German technical experts to the United States. Colonel Harold Watson had been sent to Europe in 1944 to find advanced German aircraft.^[4]
• Later analysis. The successor organisations, from the Air Technical Intelligence Center (1951) to the Foreign Technology Division (1961), analysed captured Soviet aircraft and other foreign equipment.^[4]

That background fits the colonel's first claim in general terms. The claims about nuclear propulsion, unknown materials, famous scientists and secret projects rest only on the anonymous colonel, as relayed by Cooper.^[12]

Stringfield's status reports

• The series. Stringfield (1920–1994) self-published "Status Reports" on alleged crash retrievals from 1978 until his death on 18 December 1994. Status Report VI, subtitled The Inner Sanctum, appeared in 1991.^[1][2]
• The reprint. Linda Moulton Howe later reprinted the reports in parts on Earthfiles, behind a subscription paywall.^[1][11]
• Howe. Howe is a documentary maker and ufologist best known for investigating cattle mutilations, which she attributes to extraterrestrials.^[10]

Assessment

• Unverifiable. The colonel has never been named, and his account exists only as Cooper relayed it to Stringfield.^[1][12] No document supports projects called Black Book, Black Sky or White Book in the sources read here.
• The messenger. Cooper's reliability as a source is doubted: researchers including Pflock suspected him of forging documents, and the CIA judged one of his documents fraudulent.^[3] Most of the wider MJ-12 material has been shown to be forged; the FBI called the documents "completely bogus".^[3]
• Sources not loaded. Several other sources listed for this article could not be loaded for this rewrite: an Atlas Obscura article on the FBI's handling of MJ-12, a 1990s web archive page on the Cooper documents, and Stanton Friedman's review of a Kevin Randle book.^[5][6][7] An archived page titled "Cooper/Woods 'Majestic' leak grows into paper flood" survives only as a heading.^[8]

People and topics

• Unidentified anomalous phenomena — The U.S. government's current term for unidentified objects in the air, in space and underwater.
• Tim Cooper — California researcher who said he received many MJ-12-style documents from anonymous sources in the 1990s.
• U.S. Air Force — The U.S. military service that ran the official UFO projects from 1947 to 1969.
• Unidentified flying object — An object in the sky that can't be identified; the older term for UAP.
• Horten brothers — German aircraft designers of the Ho 229 jet flying wing, investigated in 1947 as a possible source of the discs.
• MJ-12 — Disputed documents describing a secret committee managing crashed saucers.
• Ryan Wood — Researcher who published the Majestic documents with his father Robert Wood.
• Albert Collins — Metallurgist described by author Tim Cooper as having studied recovered crash material; his existence is unconfirmed.

On the Timeline

• White Sands tracking-camera saucer claim (July 1991) — A retired sergeant says tracking cameras recorded a saucer resting on the White Sands range.
• Navy linguist and the Soviet crash report (July 1991) — A Navy linguist says he decoded a Soviet report of a crash split between England and Germany.

See every 1991 event on the UAP Timeline →

Further reading

References

Facts in this article are drawn in part from the Wikipedia articles “Leonard H. Stringfield”, “Majestic 12”, “Foreign Technology Division”, “Linda Moulton Howe”, available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.