Garrison, Utah crash and burial claim (1953)

Garrison, Utah crash and burial claim (1953)

Claimed date	1953, perhaps May
Location	A dry lakebed about three miles from the Desert Experimental Range station, western Millard County, Utah; nearest town Garrison
Reported by	Linda Moulton Howe, Earthfiles, 10 November 2005
Evidence offered	About two dozen government aerial photographs of 11 June 1953 showing a triangular feature about 4,400 by 2,700 feet; an anonymous former Air Force pilot; a local memory of an explosion
Linked claim	The alleged Kingman, Arizona crash of May 1953
Status	Unverified; the pilot is unnamed and no record of a crash or burial has been released
Date	20 May 1953
Topics	Crashes & retrievals (topic)
People	Linda Moulton Howe
Testimony	Shellenberger testimony, p. 46
Year	1953 in UFO history
Timeline	1953 on the UAP Timeline
Sources	10

In November 2005 the journalist Linda Moulton Howe reported on her Earthfiles website that an unknown craft may have crashed in 1953 on a dry lakebed in western Utah and been buried there.^[1][6] The nearest town is Garrison. Her case rested on three things: an anonymous former U.S. Air Force pilot, a local recollection of an explosion, and government aerial photographs of a large triangular feature in the lakebed taken on 11 June 1953.^[2][6] She tied the story to the alleged crash near Kingman, Arizona, in May 1953. Neither claim has been supported by any official record.^[3][6]

The site

The lakebed lies east of Fishlake National Forest, about three miles from the U.S. Forest Service's Desert Experimental Range station, which Howe called the Desert Research Experimental Station (DRES).^[6] The station's history:^[6][8]

• Founding. President Herbert Hoover set aside 87 square miles of public land in 1933 "as an agricultural range experiment station". Drought had ruined rangeland in the 1930s, and no one knew how to manage desert plants.
• Construction. The Civilian Conservation Corps built the station and 135 miles of boundary fence, with more than 40,000 hand-cut posts. Most of the posts still stood in 2005. By 1935 it had added two stone obelisks as a gate.
• Today. The range lies in Pine Valley, about 40 miles west of Milford. It is maintained by the Forest Service's Rocky Mountain Research Station and is listed on the National Register of Historic Places as a historic district.
• UNESCO. On 26 October 1976 UNESCO dedicated it as part of the international network of biosphere reserves. Howe wrote that the legal implications of the designation were "still not clear". The range was withdrawn from the UNESCO program in June 2017.

Garrison is about 30 miles northwest of the station, and Baker, Nevada, is about ten miles beyond it.^[6] Garrison is a small unincorporated community in Snake Valley, just east of the Nevada line. Some of its farms are legally in Nevada.^[9] Howe placed the site about 175 miles south of the Dugway Proving Ground, which she called "highly classified", and about 200 miles due north of Kingman.^[6]

The evidence offered

Howe's report rested on these points:^[2][6]

• The photographs. About two dozen high-altitude photographs were taken in a grid pattern on 11 June 1953, all centred on the triangle. One carries the marking "M 14 AMS 11 June 53 126".
• The triangle. It measured about 4,400 feet long and 2,700 feet wide, figures Howe took from a 1999 geologist's analytical report.
• The pilot. At least one former Air Force pilot said he had firsthand knowledge that a large aerial vehicle "not from this world" impacted there in 1953. In his account the triangle was dug to bury the craft, and perhaps to leave a permanent marker in the lakebed "for unknown purposes".
• The explosion. At least one resident of Baker remembered a vivid explosion in the direction of the lakebed around 1953.

The pilot was not named, and the geologist's report was not published with the article.^[2][6] The PDF reprint of the article on UFO Scans has no extractable text, but the site's summary page matches the article.^[1][2]

The visit

Howe stood inside the triangle on 16 July 2005, photographed by Steve Jones, and returned to photograph the dry, cracked lakebed and the station on 17 July.^[6] She described a contrast at the station:^[6][7]

• Neglect. Paint was peeling badly on all the buildings, windows were boarded up, and the circular driveway was weed-filled, with an empty flagpole.
• New security. There were new padlocks, new doors with solid locks and fresh caulking around them.
• New power. A new single-direction antenna was powered by a new solar array several hundred yards away, fenced with chain link and barbed wire. Powerlines ran into what looked like abandoned buildings next to new fuel tanks.

Stan Kitchen, the station's manager since 1999, told Earthfiles that the new doors and locks were needed because vandals had broken in. He said he knew nothing about the triangular feature.^[2][6] A second part of the report asked whether the station was "an intelligence safe house hiding in plain sight". Most of it is available only to subscribers.^[6][7]

Kingman

Howe opened her report with the claim, made "by a variety of sources", that a craft crashed near Kingman, Arizona, on 20 May 1953. She drew a line 200 miles north from Kingman to the lakebed and suggested the Utah crash happened "perhaps in May 1953".^[6] The Kingman story has its own history, set out by KLAS-TV's Mystery Wire:^[3]

• 1973. The story first surfaced in a newspaper. A retired Nevada Test Site technician, Arthur Stansel, said he and others had been flown from Indian Springs, now Creech Air Force Base, in May 1953 to recover a crashed "secret experimental craft".
• Harry Drew. The historian and former museum curator argues in his book Seven Days in May that three craft came down near Kingman. One was destroyed against a mountainside, one was found intact, and one crashed beside a small reservoir. He attributes the crashes to powerful experimental radar sites around the town.
• The tests. UFO writers have speculated that the spring 1953 nuclear tests in Nevada knocked craft from the sky. The story, Mystery Wire noted, "is hotly debated, even within UFO circles".

The tests were Operation Upshot–Knothole, a series of eleven nuclear shots at the Nevada Test Site in 1953.^[10]

Linda Moulton Howe

Howe is an investigative journalist and documentary maker who began with environmental reporting. She is best known for her 1980 documentary A Strange Harvest, which argued that cattle mutilations were the work of extraterrestrials.^[4] She has been described as an advocate of a variety of conspiracy theories. The author John Greer wrote that she offered no evidence for her claims of secret government documents beyond "the very ambiguous evidence provided by rotting cow carcasses".^[4] Earthfiles, her news site, publishes much of its reporting to subscribers.^[5] In the same period she published a series of crash-retrieval reports, including on Fort Dix–McGuire, Flatwoods and Roswell.^[6]

Assessment

The pilot has never been named, and the geologist's report and the full set of 1953 photographs have not been published for independent review.^[2][6] The only person on record with direct knowledge of the station, its manager, gave an ordinary reason for the new locks and said he knew nothing of the triangle.^[6] No official record of a crash or burial has been released, and the triangular feature has not been shown to be connected to any crash. The Kingman account it was linked to rests largely on testimony that remains disputed.^[3][6]

People and topics

• U.S. Air Force — The U.S. military service that ran the official UFO projects from 1947 to 1969.
• Linda Moulton Howe — Journalist and filmmaker who runs the Earthfiles website and has reported many crash-retrieval claims.
• Earthfiles — Linda Moulton Howe's website.
• Kingman UFO crash — Kingman UFO crash
• Nevada Test Site — The U.S. nuclear testing ground in Nevada.

On the Timeline

• Submarine encounters study (1952) (24 April 1952) — Air Force and Navy intelligence study nine undersea UAP encounters reported by U.S. submarines.
• Whitley Strieber's childhood memories (October 1952) — Author Whitley Strieber says he may have been tested at a Texas air base during childhood encounters.

See every 1953 event on the UAP Timeline →

References

Facts in this article are drawn in part from the Wikipedia articles “Linda Moulton Howe”, “Desert Biosphere Reserve and Experimental Range”, “Garrison, Utah”, “Operation Upshot–Knothole”, “Desert Biosphere Reserve and Experimental Range”, “Garrison, Utah”, “Operation Upshot–Knothole”, available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 licence.