{{Multiple issues|COI =July 2009|POV =July 2009|refimprove =July 2009}} The Del Rio, Texas UFO Crash is a 1955 UFO case reported by a former jet pilot in the United States Air Force Reserve, Robert Burton Willingham, who lives near Wichita Falls, Texas. While flying a North American Aviation F-86 Sabre jet on a bomber escort mission over West Texas, Willingham observed a large, highly-luminous orb moving toward him from the northwest at about 2,000 miles per hour. At one point, he saw it execute a sudden 90-degree turn without slowing. As the object moved past his aircraft, Willingham gave chase and later saw it fall to the ground and crash near Del Rio, Texas. After switching planes, Willingham returned to the crash site later in the day and was confronted by Mexican soldiers who were guarding the wreckage while waiting for the arrival of the U.S. Air Force. Before being forced to leave, Willingham observed the crashed object at close range and also took a metallic UFO fragment with him.
Although not as well known as the Roswell incident, this case has appeared in numerous UFO books and journals. It also shares some similarities with the Coyame UFO Incident of 1974, which reportedly also occurred along the Texas-Mexico border and involved both the U.S. and Mexican militaries.
Events Prior to Sighting
editRobert Willingham's encounter began on a clear spring day in 1955 in the skies over San Angelo, Texas. He was flying an Air Force F-86 in a Cold War bombing simulation, accompanied by three other F-86s. Willingham was in the lead jet forming a fighter escort for a slow-moving Boeing B-47 Stratojet bomber that was pretending to be on a bombing mission to the Soviet Union.
The bomber and its escort had taken off from Carswell Air Force Base in Fort Worth, Texas earlier in the day and were headed toward Fort Bliss in El Paso. The bomber would continue on from El Paso toward the northwestern United States, after which, if this had been a real mission, it would have proceeded on into Canada, across the Bering Strait, and into the USSR to deliver a nuclear payload.
“We heard on the radio that an object had been picked up by radar somewhere in the northwest. It was spotted by the DEW (Distant Early Warning Line radar system) in Canada. They said it was going very fast and was moving our way,” Willingham stated during a 2008 interview with UFO researchers Noe Torres and Ruben Uriarte.[1]
Initial Sighting
editOnly moments later, Willingham heard another radio report – this one was a call from one of the crewmembers on the B-47 he was escorting. “They called me on the close communications equipment and said, ‘What is it that you see over there?” Scanning the skies around him, Willingham spotted a “very bright light” entering his field of vision from the northwest and headed on a trajectory that took it directly in front of his aircraft. “It was bright, very bright, and looked like a star, except it was closer. It was maybe 30 or 40 miles ahead of us and traveling at about 2,000 miles per hour. It was just a very bright light. There was a little amber in it – it looked like to me.”[1]
Later, after the object crashed into the sandy soil just south of the Rio Grande River near Langtry, Texas, and broke up into several pieces, Willingham got a much better chance to observe it close up. He later described it as a flat saucer shaped object about 20 or 25 feet in diameter, with a dome-shaped section on top, measuring about 10 or 15 feet in diameter. The skin of the object was metallic silver, and the chunks of metallic debris he later examined at the crash site suggested to Willingham that the object was not of Earthly manufacture.[2]
During his initial sighting, Willingham and his fellow aviators were warned of the fast-moving object heading their way, saw it zoom past them at a speed of about 2,000 miles per hour, and then observed a maneuver that seemed to rule out conventional aircraft. “It suddenly made a 90-degree turn to the right, still going 2,000 miles an hour. At that point, I knew this was not any aircraft that we had, or that anyone on Earth had,” Willingham said.[3]
UFO Crash
editThe object then began a rapid descent, on a general heading toward Del Rio, Texas, located on the border with Mexico. “I could see from my position that it was descending and wobbling. Then it looked to me as if it went down and hit down by the river,” Willingham said.[3]
As the lead jet of the bomber escort, Willingham was given permission to chase the object. “I called and got permission to pursue. They told me, ‘Yes, we want to know what it was, too.’ So I followed it south - down to the Texas-Mexico border.”[3]
Shortly after, Willingham’s jet arrived over the tiny border town of Langtry, Texas, located on the north bank of the Rio Grande River, where he saw the object of his chase lying in pieces on the desert soil just inside Mexican territory. “It looked like someone had taken an aluminum building, cut it up into a bunch of little pieces, and then scattered it all out there in the desert,” he said.[3]
After surveying the crash site from the air in his F-86 for several minutes, Willingham decided that he needed to return to base, exchange his fighter jet for a smaller plane, and then return for an actual landing alongside the debris field, where he could get a much closer look at the fallen object.
Visiting the Crash Site
edit
Willingham flew his F-86 back to Carswell Air Force Base and then went to the local Civil Air Patrol headquarters in nearby Corsicana, Texas, where he picked up a small two-seater propeller-driven plane called an Aeronca. He piloted the small plane back to Langtry, Texas, accompanied by a friend, Jack Perkins. By the time the two men landed at the scene of the UFO crash, the entire site had been cordoned off and secured by soldiers of the Mexican Army, who did not seem pleased to see Willingham and Perkins arrive at the scene.
Using his limited command of Spanish, Willingham engaged in conversation with one of the guards, whose name he recalls as "Lieutenant Martinez." From Martinez, Willingham found out that the Mexicans had been ordered to secure the UFO crash site until the arrival of a special retrieval team from the U.S. Air Force.
Martinez also took Willingham on a short walking tour of the debris field, reaching a point within 35 feet of the main part of the crashed UFO. “The bottom, saucer section looked oval-like, but it had been broken in two.” About fifty feet beyond the broken saucer was the “dome,” which Willingham was not allowed to approach. He later heard rumors that strange bodies had been recovered from the wreckage, although he himself did not observe any. “They wouldn’t let me get up close to the dome section of it.”[3]
The metallic debris was still burning hot, and Willingham warned Martinez to keep his men away from the wreckage due to the intense heat and possible radiation. He noticed that, as night set in, a few of the Mexican soldiers were warming their blankets on some of the wreckage.
After about 30 minutes, the Mexican soldiers told Willingham and Perkins to leave the crash site. “There were a bunch of officers there, and other government officials. They came forward and made it clear that we needed to go.”[3]
Recovery of UFO Fragment
edit
As Willingham and Perkins walked slowly back to their plane, Willingham picked up a fist-sized piece of metallic debris, on which he later conducted a number of metallurgic tests in Fort Worth. It was a flat, slightly curved piece of metal with holes along one end. It looked like stainless steel and had a grayish silver coloration. “One side was kind of jagged, as if it had been broken off from a larger piece,” he said.[3]
Familiar with metals because of his father’s work as a metallurgist for an oil company, Willingham used a cutting torch to test the strange debris. “A cutting torch burns anywhere from 3,200 to 3,800 degrees Fahrenheit, and it would make the metal hot, but it wouldn’t even start the metal to yield,” he said. “We tried a cutting torch, grinders, and everything else, but nothing would even touch it.”[2]
According to Willingham, the characteristics of the metallic fragment led him to believe that the UFO was not Earthly in origin. “You can say I might have seen some kind of missile fly across the sky and crash. You can say that maybe it was some kind of experiment, although I’d never seen anything that looked like that. But, what you cannot say is that the metal I tested with my own hands was anything that was made here on our planet,” Willingham said. “My daddy started me welding when I was nine years old. I knew my metals. That thing was not anything we had ever seen before.”[3]
Because he did not have the proper equipment for more detailed testing of the UFO fragment, Willingham contacted an acquaintance who was connected with a government-contracted metallurgic lab in Maryland. Willingham flew the sample to Maryland and turned it over to lab technicians there for a detailed analysis of its composition. “When I got to the lab, I turned it over to one of the workers there, who proceeded to do all the same things I had already done. He tried to cut it, burn it, and so on. Finally, he said, ‘Man, this is good stuff.’”[4]
Alleged Military Coverup
editSeveral days later, Willingham made a phone call from Texas to ask about the specimen he had left at the Maryland lab. The person answering the phone told him that they knew of no such specimen, that the person with whom Willingham left the fragment no longer worked there, and that the lab was closing down and moving to another location. Willingham made further inquiries about the lab and his specimen until he received a phone call from a superior officer in the military instruction him to “stop asking questions and just forget about it.”[2]
Willingham claims that he then began receiving a series of phone calls from officers in military intelligence instructing him “never to speak about what happened down on the border.” One of the callers, a general in military intelligence, warned him that there would be “consequences” if he told anyone about what he saw.[2]
Within a week after his UFO incident, Willingham flew over the UFO crash site and could no longer see any visual evidence that anything at all had ever happened there. “It looked like they went through every inch of ground with a fine tooth comb,” Willingham said.[2]
Several years after his encounter, Willingham received an anonymous letter with a comment regarding the disappeared metallic fragment. According to Willingham, the letter said, "Remember the metal you left at our lab in Maryland? We have never tested anything like it, ever - before or since." Willingham believes the unsigned letter came from the lab technician he originally contacted in Maryland.[4]
The Story Goes Public
edit“I never told anyone – not even my wife, until I told it to a newspaper reporter in 1967,” Willingham said[3], referring to a brief mention about his UFO encounter that appeared in a weekly newspaper in Mechanicsburg, Pennsylvania in 1967. The article was clipped out by a member of the National Investigations Committee On Aerial Phenomena (NICAP) and sent to NICAP headquarters, where it sat for ten years before anyone followed up on it.
In 1977, NICAP member Todd Zechel contacted Willingham, got him to file a written affidavit about his sighting, and then arranged for the filming of a documentary for Japanese television. During this same period, the story of the 1947 Roswell incident was also released for the first time, following initial interviews by Stanton Friedman with Jesse Marcel, Sr.
Beginning in the 1980s, references to the Willingham case appeared in the writings of several major civilian UFO researchers, including Leonard Stringfield, Bruce Maccabee, Kevin D. Randle, Stanton Friedman, and Ryan S. Wood. In 2007, UFO investigators Noe Torres and Ruben Uriarte, following up on Zechel's earlier work, contacted Willingham and obtained his permission to write a book about his UFO case. The book, The Other Roswell: UFO Crash on the Texas-Mexico, written by Torres and Uriarte as told by Willingham (ISBN 978-0981759708), was published in May 2008 by RoswellBooks.com.
Controversy About Date
editBecause in his 1977 NICAP affidavit, Willingham did not give a date for his UFO encounter, confusion developed among some UFO researchers, and some later theorized that the event occurred on December 6, 1950 because on that date, the U.S. government issued an alert to its military forces due to waves of UFOs having been spotted on radar. Also, a UFO crash near Del Rio, Texas in December 1950 is mentioned in the Eisenhower Briefing Document, which is part of the controversial Majestic 12 Documents. However, in 2007 Willingham told Torres and Uriarte that he was absolutely certain that his UFO encounter did not take place in 1950[3].
Determining the Location of the UFO Crash
editIn March 2008, Torres and Uriarte used the Google Earth tm software to assist Willingham in pinpointing the location of the 1955 UFO crash site. After studying the satellite imagery of the area south of Langtry, Texas, Willingham confirmed the location as shown in the external link below[1], courtesy of WikiMapia.
About Robert Willingham
edit
Robert Burton Willingham was born on August 15, 1926 in Holliday, Texas and attended Archer City High School, dropping out in April 1944 to join the U.S. Army. During World War II, he served in with the Army’s 82nd Airborne Division and was also with the 288th Combat Engineers. He helped clear sunken boats out of the waters around Le Havre, France and later served under General George S. Patton. After the fall of Nazi Germany, Willingham assisted with the post-war reconstruction of Berlin.
Willingham, who had learned to fly at age 9 in a friend's World War I French biplane, was transferred to the newly-formed U.S. Air Force in 1950. He flew P-51 Mustangs in Korea, providing support for U.S. ground forces, until he was severely wounded when North Korean troops attacked the base where he was stationed in December 1950.
The injured pilot was flown to San Antonio, Texas, where he spent months recuperating from his wounds. When he was finally healthy, Air Force doctors ruled that he could no longer fly combat missions, and he transferred to the Air Force Reserve in order to continue flying in non-combat situations. During this time, he also became very involved with the Civil Air Patrol, an organization in which he served throughout his military career.
At the time of his UFO encounter in 1955, Willingham was flying in Cold War training exercises out of Carswell Air Force Base in Texas. He remained in the Reserve until around 1972, rising to the rank of Colonel. Interestingly, from 1959 to 1963, he served as a UFO investigator for Project Blue Book, assisting other investigators in taking over 2,000 witness testimonies from persons claiming to have seen UFOs.
Books
edit- Torres, Noe and Ruben Uriarte. The Other Roswell: UFO Crash on the Texas-Mexico Border. RoswellBooks.com, 2008 (ISBN 978-0981759708).
- Randle, Kevin D. A History of UFO Crashes. New York: Avon Books, 1995, pp. 192,193 (ISBN 0-380-77666-9).
- Wood, Ryan S. Majic Eyes Only: Earth's Encounters with Extraterrestrial Technology. Broomfield, CO: Wood Enterprises, 2005, pp. 95-98 (ISBN 0-9772059-0-8).
Television
editA 30-minute Japanese television documentary was produced in 1978, featuring interviews with Willingham. The TV production crew filmed at the location in Mexico where Willingham saw the crashed UFO. Although the program aired throughout Japan, it was never shown in the United States.
External links
edit- Video summary of the Del Rio UFO crash, featuring Robert Willingham.
- Excerpts from interview with Robert Willingham on 3/15/2008 by Noe Torres and Ruben Uriarte (mp3).
- Web page for the book The Other Roswell: UFO Crash on the Texas-Mexico Border.
- An article about the incident on UFOdigest.com
- Reference to the Del Rio case from Leonard Stringfield documents.
- Forum about the Del Rio case from AboveTopSecret.com.
- Article about the Del Rio case by Bruce Maccabee, from NICAP files.
- WikiMapia page showing UFO crash location, as identified by Robert Willingham.
See also
editReferences
edit- ^ a b c Willingham, Robert (March 15, 2008). Personal interview.
- ^ a b c d e Torres, Noe (2008). The Other Roswell: UFO Crash on the Texas-Mexico Border. RoswellBooks.com. ISBN 978-0981759708.
{{cite book}}: Unknown parameter|coauthors=ignored (|author=suggested) (help) - ^ a b c d e f g h i j Willingham, Robert (April–December 2007). Personal interviews.
{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: date format (link) - ^ a b Willingham, Robert (July 2, 2007). Personal interview.
