Unmarked helicopter claim (1975)

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Contents 5
Unmarked helicopter claim (1975)
Illustration of wreckage at a crash site
Illustration: wreckage at a crash site. An artist's impression drawn for this site, not a photograph of the event.
Date14 March 1975
TopicsBeings & bodies (topic), Nuclear & missile sites (topic), Military encounters (topic)
PeopleLeonard Stringfield, Kenneth Rommel
TestimonyShellenberger testimony, p. 80
Year1975 in UFO history
Timeline1975 on the UAP Timeline
Sources5

Unmarked helicopter claim (1975) — An Air Force officer says unmarked helicopters are sent to UAP-related sites.

According to an anonymous Air Force officer quoted by Leonard Stringfield, unmarked helicopters were sent to sites connected with UFO incidents in the mid-1970s. The officer suggested these were part of a quick-reaction capability for recovering material or controlling witnesses.

The 1970s saw many reports of mysterious unmarked helicopters, especially in connection with cattle mutilations in the western U.S. Several states, including Colorado and New Mexico, investigated, and in 1979 a former FBI agent, Kenneth Rommel, studied the mutilations for New Mexico, concluding most were caused by scavengers. Military and law enforcement agencies denied flying the helicopters.

The officer's claim was published in Stringfield's crash-retrieval papers, and like his other anonymous material, it can't be independently checked. No records of such a helicopter unit have been released.

In the testimony

Illustration of lights in formation over the landscape
Illustration: lights in formation over the landscape. An artist's impression drawn for this site, not a photograph of the event.

The testimony cites: Retrievals of the Third Kind presented at MUFON 1978, Leon Stringfield, p155.

People and topics

US National Park Service marker for Wright-Patterson Air Force Base
US National Park Service marker for Wright-Patterson Air Force Base Photo: Pi3.124 · CC BY-SA 4.0 · via Wikimedia Commons
  • U.S. Air Force — The U.S. military service that ran the official UFO projects from 1947 to 1969.
  • 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.
  • Federal Bureau of Investigation — The U.S. federal police agency, which helped check flying disc reports from 1947 to 1950.
  • Kenneth Rommel — Former FBI agent whose 1980 report attributed most cattle mutilations to natural causes.
  • Crash retrieval — The alleged recovery of crashed non-human craft by governments.

On the Timeline

B-24J-180-CO Liberator Serial 44-40807 of the 784th Bomb Squadron, 466th Bomb Group, based at RAF Attlebridge , England.
B-24J-180-CO Liberator Serial 44-40807 of the 784th Bomb Squadron, 466th Bomb Group, based at RAF Attlebridge , England. Photo: assumed USAAF · Public domain · via Wikimedia Commons

See every 1975 event on the UAP Timeline →

References

Further reading

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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