Wright-Patterson guard and the tarp-covered craft (1952)
From the UAP Encyclopedia, the open encyclopedia of UFO and UAP history · 🗓️ Event
Contents 10
| Date | 1952 |
|---|---|
| Topics | Crashes & retrievals (topic), Beings & bodies (topic), Secrecy & cover-up (topic) |
| People | Leonard Stringfield |
| Testimony | Shellenberger testimony, p. 44 |
| Year | 1952 in UFO history |
| Timeline | 1952 on the UAP Timeline |
| Sources | 6 |
The Wright-Patterson guard and the tarp-covered craft is an account by an unnamed man who said he was a guard at Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio in 1952. He said he saw a craft covered by a tarpaulin taken into a tightly secured area of the base. He also said he saw bodies, described to him as "little people", recovered from a "UFO" in the Southwest. "Everything delivered had to pass by me," he said.[6] According to Michael Shellenberger's 2024 UFO timeline, submitted to the House Oversight Committee, the guard was a family friend of the McDonnell Douglas engineer John Schuessler. The account appeared in Leonard Stringfield's 1978 paper Retrievals of the Third Kind.[6] The guard has never been named.
The account
Shellenberger's timeline, citing page 8 of Stringfield's paper, summarises the claims as follows.[6]
- The witness. A family friend of John Schuessler, an engineer at McDonnell Douglas, said he was a guard at Wright-Patterson in 1952.
- The craft. He saw a craft covered by a tarp taken into a tight security area at the base.
- The bodies. He also said he saw bodies recovered from a "UFO". He was told they came from the Southwest, and that the bodies were "little people".
- His position. "Everything delivered had to pass by me," he said.
The account is partly second-hand, both in its route to Stringfield through Schuessler and in its claim about the bodies' origin, which the guard said he was told.[6]
Stringfield's paper
Stringfield presented Retrievals of the Third Kind: A case study of alleged UFOs and occupants in military custody at the Ninth Annual MUFON Symposium in Dayton, Ohio, in July 1978. It became known unofficially as his first "Status Report".[1][5] According to the writer Charles Lear, most of the paper consisted of numbered "abstracts", stories from unnamed sources. Stringfield himself acknowledged that, without names, these could be "construed as hearsay", and asked readers to rely on "the merits of my credibility" built over 29 years. Many of the stories were similar: some described military witnesses taken blindfolded to crash sites, and "some involve a witness observing just the alien bodies packed in crates full of dry ice".[3] The paper also contained the earliest published version of Jesse Marcel's Roswell account, under the name "Major J.M.".[2][3]
Other 1952 accounts
Shellenberger's timeline lists, next to the guard's story, another 1952 account from the same paper. A source "ZO" said a colleague at Rocketdyne attended a meeting on celestial navigation at another aircraft company that year. There, an Air Force officer said he had been at a crash retrieval where a piece of metal broken from the ship proved impervious to diamond saws and torches, and a small, badly burned body was recovered.[6] (See also Hangar 18.)
Leonard Stringfield
According to the Wikipedia account, Stringfield (1920–1994) directed the civilian group CRIFO and its newsletter Orbit, and was public relations adviser to NICAP from 1957. He served as an "Early Warning Coordinator" for the Condon Committee from 1967 to 1969, and self-published "Status Reports" on crash retrievals until his death.[1] Mental Floss describes how, during his Air Force days, he saw unidentified lights from a cargo plane flying from Ie Shima to Tokyo, about three weeks after the atomic bombings of Japan, and calls him a systematic investigator.[4] Patrick Gross notes that Stringfield was not persuaded that every crash story was a fraud, despite the discredited Aztec case.[2]
Assessment
The account rests on an anonymous witness, relayed through a third party and published by Stringfield without a name. It cannot be checked against records in the sources read here.[3][6] Its elements, a craft under a tarp, small bodies and a delivery to Wright-Patterson, recur across many of the anonymous accounts in Stringfield's reports.[3]
Notes on the earlier version
- The bodies. The earlier version mentioned only the tarp-covered craft. The timeline's summary also has the guard saying he saw bodies of "little people" from the Southwest.[6]
- Schuessler. The earlier version did not say how the account reached Stringfield. The timeline describes the guard as a family friend of John Schuessler.[6]
- Stringfield's background. The earlier version called Stringfield "a former Air Force intelligence officer". The sources read here mention his Air Force service, but not an intelligence role.[4]
- Wright-Patterson's role. The earlier version said Wright-Patterson was home to the Air Force's foreign technology intelligence centre and to Project Blue Book, and that Air Force spokesmen have long denied holding alien craft or bodies there. Those statements are not covered in the sources read here.
People and topics
- Wright-Patterson Air Force Base — The Ohio air base that housed Project Blue Book and is linked to the Hangar 18 legend.
- U.S. Air Force — The U.S. military service that ran the official UFO projects from 1947 to 1969.
- Project Blue Book — The Air Force's public UFO investigation from 1952 until its closure in December 1969.
- Hangar 18 — The legendary hangar at Wright-Patterson said to hold alien craft and bodies.
- Leonard Stringfield — Former Air Force intelligence officer and NICAP researcher who collected anonymous crash-retrieval accounts from 1978 to 1994.
- Unidentified flying object — An object in the sky that can't be identified; the older term for UAP.
- MUFON — The largest civilian UFO organization in the United States.
On the Timeline
- MJ-12 Fifth Annual Report (1952) — A disputed, possibly hoaxed 'Majic' report describes the 1947 recovery of craft and five bodies.
- Air Force officer's crash-retrieval remark (1952) (1952) — A source says an Air Force officer told an aerospace meeting he had been at a crash retrieval scene.
See every 1952 event on the UAP Timeline →
Further reading
- Wright-Patterson Air Force Base — Wikipedia · en.wikipedia.org · archived copy
- Hangar 18 (the legend and 1980 film) — Wikipedia · en.wikipedia.org · archived copy
References
- Leonard H. Stringfield — Wikipedia · en.wikipedia.org · archived copy
- Stringfield's 1978 report — Patrick Gross · ufology.patrickgross.org · archived copy
- Leonard Stringfield's status report at the 1978 MUFON symposium — Podcast UFO · podcastufo.com · archived copy
- Retrobituaries: Leonard Stringfield — Mental Floss · mentalfloss.com · archived copy
- UFO Crash Retrievals: Status Report I — Goodreads · goodreads.com · archived copy
- Michael Shellenberger, written testimony to the House Oversight Committee (13 November 2024), p. 44 · oversight.house.gov
Facts in this article are drawn in part from the Wikipedia article “Leonard H. Stringfield”, available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.
This page was last edited on 29 October 2026. Articles are written in our own words from the sources listed under References; disputed claims are attributed to the people who made them.
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