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Hello and welcome to API Conversation number 20.
I'm your host Paul Carr and this is our first anonymous conversation. Now, not entirely anonymous, we are going to use the witness's first name. We're calling him the witness, not just the person with whom we're having a conversation. The decision to make this a conversation was only after we recorded the interview primarily for historical purposes and then decided the story should be told and there is some hope that someone who served with our witness will have seen the same thing or seen something similar and be able to come forward and help us clear up the record. So if you know Airman Pat, this is what we're going to call him, Airman Pat.
Let me set the stage for you a little bit. This was in the mid-1970s. It was either 1975 or 1976. We will clarify the exact date hopefully at some point, but right now there is some uncertainty.
And it was at Cannon Air Force Base in New Mexico. Now, Cannon is in northeast New Mexico, very close to the border with the Texas Panhandle and only a few miles from the town of Clovis, New Mexico, which is just off to the east. Cannon was at the time host to the F-111 aircraft, which was at the time a very advanced fighter bomber aircraft, as you'll hear. And Airman Pat was a well-trained technician for the avionics of the F-111. And his story is something I want told.
I think it may be related to sightings in Clovis in January 1976, although that's not certain.
And so we're going to just let him tell the story. It involves multiple parts and multiple people. And if you serve with Pat, do contact us. You can go toreportaufo.org and click on the Contact Us tab and you can contact us in complete confidence. We'll never tell anyone what your name is or your phone number or anything else that might identify you. And we'd like to get your story as well. So this is Airman Pat, Cannon Air Force Base in the mid-1970s. What follows is an edited version of a conversation that we had on the 7th of June 2023.
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I had had an interest in UFOs, but I'd say I was open-minded, but I wasn't a believer. And I was in the Air Force. The year was 1975 and I was stationed at Cannon Air Force Base. I think it was 27th or 24th Tactical Fighter Wing. I was an integrated avionics systems specialist. Basically, I worked on airborne radar navigation, inertial navigation system, airborne computers.
And this was the first generation digital aircraft in history. Specifically designed to penetrate all weather, all conditions, all radar. You know, I had some electronic warfare measures on it. And basically to drop a nuke on Moscow or wherever we needed to at any time, day or night, any weather, and any kind of, you know, radar systems or, you know, anti-aircraft. I was an Airman First Class A1C. I didn't put in the email that what was the first weird thing that happened was north or northwest. Well, I don't know. I may have put it.
There were cattle mutilations. And first thing, first time I'd ever heard of such things, and organs surgically removed, cuts cauterized, strange lights in the sky. And it really had my attention. All the cattle had been exsanguinated. There was no blood on the ground, no tracks in or out. This was bizarre. And then maybe a few days later, a week later, there were reports of UFO sightings in and around close Mexico, eastern New Mexico, just off the Yano Estacado, as you drive from Texas. I made it a point to talk to people that had seen these things. I wanted to do my own personal investigation, if you will. I probably talked to 20 people over a period of a week that all described virtually identical objects, silver discs, ring of lights around the perimeter of the disc. It was really getting my attention. And I worked swing shift, which is, like, 4 in the afternoon till 11, something like that, or 3.30 to 11.
And I came in on a Friday night, and of course, being a young party enthusiast on a Friday night, the first thing we do is we check the op board to see if we've got anything going up, any lights, any training stories, typically. Because when they landed, they had a tendency to land broken, rather than call midnight shift. You know, they're weekend. It's their weekend. And so, rather than call them in on their Saturday morning, whether Saturday off, we would always stay late until the serious problems were taken care of, the red X prevents an aircraft from flying at all. A red diagonal that can fly under conditions or conditions. Anyway, nothing was on the job board. We were cleared. All we had to do is take care of what we had. And then I could start my weekend as soon as I was up. Well, I heard F-111 afterburners. And I ran out on the front porch, you know, landing, whatever in front of the shop. And I saw two Yellow Squadron F-111s taking off. And what I found out later was an emergency combat formation, which is essentially too abreast staggered. In war games, we didn't do that. In exercises in the Mediterranean, we did not do that. But here, two aircraft were taking off in that formation. And initially, I was just peeved because we weren't supposed to be flying. And one of these things landed with, you know, an inoperative radar system or any other red X. I might end up staying till two or three in the morning. I didn't want that. I walked in. Our dispatcher was Staff Sergeant John Zondor.
And I said, "Hey, I thought we weren't flying tonight." And he said, "We're not." And I said, "We just did. We launched too. I just saw him, Yellow Squadron." And he's like, "Are you sure there are?" I said, "Yeah, John, I'm sure there are." And he said, "Well, let me find out." And he calls base operations. I think it was. And he hung up the phone and he looked at me and had kind of a strange look in his face. He said, "That wasn't training sorties. That was a hot scramble."
Well, a hot scramble is an emergency. Oh, and we've got bogeys in the air. That's an emergency. Hot means you've got live weapons. And they were scrambled with orders to intercept. I don't know anything more than that. And I said, "Geez, are you sure?" He says, "Yeah, man, I don't know what the hell is going on. I'm thinking flying saucers? Really?" And the report came in from the radar shack, which is just not ATC, but it's a ground air search radar that sits out in the middle of the pasture, basically, on base.
I said, "Do you know anybody out there? It's Friday night, about 10-ish." And as a matter of fact, I do. My buddy from Thailand, they were stationed together there, should be operating tonight. I said, "Let's call them." So John got on the phone, put the little squat box on it, and we're talking to him real time. And he's totally freaked out. He's like, "I don't know what this is." He says, "They seem to appear and disappear." But it's hard to tell, because if you paint an object once in position A, by the time these old analog radars sweep back physically to paint it, that's how you clock at speed. If it's left range of your radar, it disappears from your scope. But he said, "I can't tell quite how many, three or four." And he clocked some of them in excess of 4,000 miles per hour when he was able to get an accurate reading on their speed. Well, we had nothing that got anywhere close to that. And I'm just beside myself. And I even asked him, because being a radar tech myself, I said, "So you've done all the checks and self-tests on your radar. You said, "Listen, man, I've been running these things for 12 years. There's nothing wrong with my radar. Besides, I see our birds chasing after these things." And so that eliminated any possibility of a radar malfunction. And anyway, 30 minutes later, the two aircraft landed. They didn't have any trouble tickets for us to fix. I wrote down the number of the radar shack before I left to put it in my fatigue pocket, complex pocket. And I got out of work, went over to the Airman's Club, shot some foosball, drank a couple beers, get back to the barracks. And I'm passing the CQ's office, Charge of Quarters, which is where the only phone of them pay bonds is. And I said, "It's 2 a.m. on Saturday morning." And I'm thinking, "Hmm, I'm going to call out there and see if anything else is going on." I was very curious about this. And I call up, and a very loud, gruff voice answers the phone.
And says, "Captain Kowalski speaking, identify yourself." Well, there are two things weird about that. First of all, in the Air Force, they train everybody how to answer the phone. And exactly what you say, it is Airman speaking, "May I help you, ma'am or sir?" It used to be "sir," but women started getting into the field at that time. And so it was "ma'am or sir." That is the only way anyone answers the phone in the Air Force. And anyway, I thought that was weird. The other thing, it's 2 a.m. on a Saturday, one hell of a captain doing out in the middle of the pasture at the radar shack. That doesn't make sense. And anyway, I said, "Airman first class [redacted]."
And he says, "State your business." Well, you know, I was just calling to follow up on the bogeys. And he blows up. He starts yelling at me. And cussing and raving and ranting. He said, "First mistake." He said, "What's your serial number?" Well, in the Air Force, we don't have serial numbers. We don't have them. It's your SSAN had been since the Army Air Corps separated from the Air Corps part and from the Army. And they went with SSAN. Nobody in the Air Force calls it a serial number. But my dad being retired Army, I knew what he was wanting. And so I gave him my serial number, SSAN. And then he says, "Who's your CO?" Well, again, that's another mistake in the lingo in the Air Force at that echelon of the hierarchy. It's squadron commander, not CO. But I knew what he was asking for. I gave him, you know, Major Reese. And he proceeds to just berate me. He said, "Where did you get this information? What makes you think we were along scrambling aircraft?" He said, "You're either on drugs or you're insane," which is, I said, "None of the above, sir." And then he just rants and threatening. And then he said, he basically coerced me to say that nothing happened. And he said, "We'll be watching you. We will be watching you. You breathe a word of this to anybody. We can do things that will make Leavenworth, maximum security, security military prison. We can do things to you that make Leavenworth look like a picnic or cakewalk or something to that effect." And I'm freaking out. I'm 19 years old. My knees are shaking. And then he says, "It's a big desert. People go missing all the time." And then, "Am I clear?" And, "Yes, sir. Sir, yes, sir." And I'm totally beside myself. Anyway, I get off the phone. It's for the next day or so. I mean, I was just paranoid, looking over my shoulder. Who's watching me? Where are they?
But by the time early Halloween week rolled around, maybe Tuesday, I was getting angry about the way I was treated. I was considering reporting to this officer, alleging conduct on the cousin and officer, because he was calling me every name in the book. No military bearing, anybody that's been in the military knows what that means. This man had none. He talked with kind of a Brooklyn sort of accent, and he talked like a street dog. You know, MFCS, every word, every curse word in the book. And he made me the target of that. And anyway, I gave that consideration. I said, "Okay, I'm going to look him up and find out where he's at." So I called over to the comm squadron who run, communications squadron. They run the radar site, and I asked for Captain Kowalski. And that was his name. It's burned into my brain. They have no Captain Kowalski. And I thought, "Well, that's odd. Why was he at a radar site at 2am?" So I called the security police squad, SP squadron, asked for Captain Kowalski, "There's no such person." I thought, "Well, that's weird." So I called the base locator, which was military equivalent of a 911. And she said that they hadn't unlisted. I said, "Look, I just talked to him. It's important. How could that..." And she said, "Well, call the bachelor officer quarters, BOQ. Maybe he's transient and staying there. We wouldn't have unlisted." So I called the BOQ. He's not there. And I'm like, "Wow, this is really weird." So I decided the guy that I should talk to was radar operator. And I don't remember his name. I only talked to him that one time while he was cracking the UFOs. And I called up there and asked to speak to him. Now we're talking a few days after the occurrence. He's...and I'm told he's no longer stationed here. So what do you mean? I just talked to him a few days ago. He's been transferred out. He got TDY papers and he's gone. And I'm stunned. And so I hang up the phone. I say, "Zondor," because I was at work at that time. And I said, "Did you know your buddy had orders?"
And he said, "No." I said, "Well, he did. He's gone." What do you mean? And Zondor is shocked, especially at Canon, because if you got orders to anywhere, the first thing you do is you tell your buddies and rub their nose in it. You're going to have...because everyone hated the place, out in the middle of nowhere, nothing to do, no terrible, terrible place, armpit attack. That's what we called it. And he said, "Well, where'd he go?" I said, "I don't know." He said, "Call back and find out. I want to keep in touch with him." I said, "Okay." So I called back and asked for the first sergeant.
And the first sergeant tells me that he got TDY orders. I said, "Where to?" And he said, "That's classified." And I was being kind of a smart ass, but kind of peeved. And I said,
"Classified?" I said, "The war is over, man." "What are we doing?" "Classified?" And he blows up and starts yelling at me. And so I'm getting yelled at all over again. It's like, "What is going on here?" And then maybe that...anyway, who knows where he went? He was literally disappeared. I mean, overnight, he's got TDY orders to some classified location. I have no idea what happened to him. And then we get this memo from base commander, wing commander, and it basically reads the SIRIAD Act and cites Air Force regulation, which I personally researched that says, "No information, citing data, anything about UFOs unidentified flying objects may be communicated in facsimile, verbal, video, any way, one, any kind of way to any civilian person under penalty of court martial." And I'm like, "Why do they have a law, a regulation, about something that doesn't exist, according to that?" I thought it was bizarre. But anyway, so that was the...I don't know what happened to the guy. A few days later, I actually saw this myself hovering over the base. I thought there were helicopters. I was driving back to base from Clovis. I kept driving, and I'm still seeing these flashing lights over the base, and they don't really look like helicopter lights. And besides, ATC would have given them clearance to land because occasionally we'd have jolly greens land and refuel. And so it got my attention, and I'm making out the silhouette of a round, disk-like object with multicolor lights, I think red, blue, white, maybe yellow, rotating. One thing I noticed was as the rotation of the lights wasn't a constant speed, and when the lights would start spinning faster, the object would move, and then the lights would slow down. Its movement was like what we call a square wave, immediate and full accelerate...well, full speed, velocity. And then when it stopped, it was full stop. There was no curve to the acceleration or deceleration. It was immediate, and I'm getting closer and closer, so the images are getting clearer and clearer, and it's totally got me crazy. About that time, there's a bright blue light out of the left-hand side of the freeway, the highway, leading out to the base, and I look, and one of those big transformers on a power pole is blowing up, and there are these huge balls of blue arc shooting out into the highway and into the prairie grass next to the highway, and it's like, "Holy crap!" And I'm kind of...I think I dodged one of them because it was rolling across the freeway. It was reflexive, and I look back up, there's only one of those objects left hovering over the base. I decided I was not going to lose sight of it, and so I'm cranking up the throttle. I'm watching this object, and lights start spinning faster and real fast, and it seemed like for a fraction of a second, the colors all blurred, melded into a white ring. That's the impression I got. It was so quick, but that was the subconscious impression, and it burst into this super brilliant pure white light ball, and then zipped out of sight. It was probably parallel. I didn't think...I didn't look like it rose. It looked like it followed what we call NOE, "NAP of Earth," and was out of sight in probably less than a second. It just shot out of sight. Later, I did rough calculations using my limited knowledge of trig and stuff, and geogra, geometry, of what? Anyway, curvature of the earth, and I estimated...I think the speed I clocked it mathematically was over 4,000 miles an hour, coincidentally. Later, I talked to a guy from MMS,
Munitions Maintenance Squadron, and he said what rattled him so much was that one or two multiple discs were hovering over the weapons storage bunkers that contained our new mark for whatever it was, thermonuclear bombs. The following January, there was another encouragement. I was reading Richard Goode, or what's this, G-O-O-D-E, Timothy Goode, his book, and a brilliant book, by the way. He had a copy of a document from MCCI, military command, whatever, anything big that happens on any base in the United States is reported to MCCI. They get a whatever, teletype probably back then, from Canis saying they've got discs hovering over the runway, and they can't. What do we do? The MCCI responds and so forth, but I did hear about more sightings that would have been the right time frame, January 76, and I didn't want to have anything to do with it. I had been so traumatized by the first time through. It was like, "Oh, more UFOs? Yeah, I don't want to know. I don't want to know." But anyway, you might reference that book. I forget the name of it, but it's really good work. Anyway, so there's a lot of elements to the story, everything from freaking cattle mutilations to nuclear weapons being maybe interfered with. I don't know. I don't know, but that's my story. Okay. I'm a little confused on the date.
Yeah, June of 75. June of 75? Okay, you don't know the exact date? No, I really don't. It's been so long. I won't swear it was June of 75, but I believe it was. You could look in the newspapers, because it was all the news. I mean, there were UFO experts flying into Clovis from all across the United States, according to the local newspaper reports and radio reports. It was a big thing. Reports of 76, as you just mentioned. Yeah.
But you're saying the ones of 75 drew a lot of attention as well.
Well, we scrambled aircraft after it. 70, you know, winter. You know, and I hope I'm right. Because I got there, I was transferred. I got out of tech school in 75. That would have put me there pretty much a newbie in June of 75. Maybe I flipped the date around. I don't know. I don't know. Maybe it was 76, but I joined in June of 74, went to tech school at Lowry Air Force Base in Colorado. And you can find the NCCI communique in Timothy Good's book, a copy of it. I think it's at above top secret. It may have been. It may have been. I'm terrible with titles of books. But yeah, I believe it was. I think I might have that book somewhere. And he had the report. It was before. It was a June before that. And I don't know. Maybe it wasn't as big a deal. But yeah, apparently a runway was shut down to some discs hovering over it. Which is what you saw, right? You saw it. Well, I can't swear they were silver because it was dark. And what I was seeing, you know, there was no reflectivity. About what time it was it when you saw them.
I'm going to say around 11 11 30.
There was a report in the newspaper the next day of an unexplained blackout on that side of Clovis.
And you saw the transformer exploding, which
Yeah, it literally was blowing up and throwing out these blue balls. Eight inch in diameter to 12 inches. More than one. I didn't count them.
Now you saw this. You were walking.
No, I was driving.
You were driving.
Duke Skylark 350 high, high compression engine. Yeah, it was my my little quasi hot rod.
But you didn't notice any interference to your vehicle.
None. No, I don't know if there I probably would have been listening to raise AM radio. But I don't recall. I you know, the what I was seeing had my full attention. So I'm not aware of any interference with the electronics or anything else in my car. It ran like normal. So this Captain Kowalski character, you couldn't find out who he was. No idea he that's why I use the term men in black.
Our man in black, even though I didn't see him, I have no idea what he was dressed in.
This guy, I think it'd be safe to say was trained in the art of intimidation. He knew exactly what to say, how to say it. And and I, it seemed to me he and that was the whole point. You know, no officer in the Air Force would ever conduct himself like that to an enlisted man. Never, it would never happen in a million years. Not even a rogue PI, they call them DIs and other branches, but we call them training instructors and boot camp. They'll cuss you sometimes, but not like that. This guy was vicious. Absolutely vicious. Okay. He never heard from him again, or anybody like him again. Never, never. The only thing it was auto in the early days of the internet. I ran across the transcript of an interview because I was searching for the people that maybe knew about Canada Air Force Base close to Mexico back then. And I ran across the transcript of a fairly recent interview that a guy named bike, the V is in Victor IKE. I think he's in Michigan or Minnesota. I'm familiar with him. Yes. Really? I think he said that as Canadian. I'm not mistaken. Okay, well, maybe that's it then. But he did an interview with a guy who was an intern for National Public Radio. He worked as some sort of technician, I think. And he was really pretty young college age. And he had an, during that exact time period, he had an encounter. And, you know, 30 years later or 40 years later, he gets, after he did that interview, he gets a phone call from somebody said, telling him he's talking too much.
And then they said, you know, how's your daughter? Does her husband still work at XYZ company? They still live at such and such address.
I mean, he totally, totally freaked him out. But he was there. And what's really weird, he talks about a sergeant that took him up on top of Hotel Clovis during the sightings. And he had a laser measurement from the military laser laser measurement device. I knew that guy, I knew that sergeant, I believe he was a staff sergeant, he worked at PMEL, which is permission for precision measurement electronics lab or something like that. And they were testing out one of the military's early portable laser range finders. And he told me, yeah, we went, I went up on top of the Hotel Clovis, initially to ping the water tower, and, you know, get a reading off of it. He never told me he took a kid up there with him or young young man with him. But he told me a story about how the little red dot from the laser, they would he would play with it, a drunk would come walking out of Hotel Clovis because it had the only real bar in town. And the red dot would be on the ground, you know, and these people would freak out because never seen anything like that. But this guy apparently went up on top of Hotel Clovis with him, the seven story building the highest point probably from miles around because that part of eastern New Mexico is exceedingly flat. And, and so yeah, yeah, and I thought that was really interesting. But he talks about a sighting he had of a silver disc, it ejected something, and it fell to the ground near school, he goes he and his buddy race to it, they had that they were they had a car, and they got there, and they put the collected it and put it in their trunk. And he said before they could leave a black Lincoln and these classic men and black guys get out and said, what's in your trunk, and they confiscated material, the thoughts and jets from they saw fall from the disc and take off. And that's the last he heard of that until he went on bike and did that interview. And then he gets a call from me and he said the guy had a real because I tracked him down, we had a conversation, a long conversation. And he said this guy had a like a southern gentleman accent. I recall that about our conversation. Anyway, yeah, and that's where I learned that he was up on top of Hotel Clovis with an Air Force Sergeant that had this laser rangefinder. Now this is 1975, mind you. So I use a rangefinder for like future, you know, but he, we had gotten a couple in and he, he wasn't supposed to take out a face, but he did. He was toying with the thing, I guess. But yeah, this, this guy, and I don't remember his name, he did the interview was up on Hotel Clovis with the Sergeant from the Air Force with the laser rangefinder. I cannot believe there were more than one, you know, so I figured it was this guy that, that told me about, you know, he never pinged it off of a UFO, but he told me, yeah, we were up to where, or I was up there looking for him and trying to get a rangefinder on the thing, but never did. Interesting. Okay.
Is it possible you think this Captain Kowalski might have been another branch of the service or?
Unlikely. I mean, you know, military bearing is military bearing. The fact that he used terms that were common to Army and, you know, I think Navy, they don't call them COs, they call them XOs.
Marines may call them COs, probably do, but I don't know. But definitely not Air Force and probably not military, unless maybe he did a tour, you know, back in Vietnam and got picked up by whomever.
Okay. Anything else you want to add?
No, I, that pretty much sums it up. I can't think of anything else. I do know that, you know, base command got involved in squelching the whole incident. Right.
You got this memo, right? Sure. Right. Shortly after the scramble. Immediately after. Yeah. Yeah. Within days. And it had become, everyone was talking about it. Everyone was talking about it. Now they're citing a regulation that you could be court martialed if you were, if you said anything. In any way, former fashion, communicate any information about any unexplained flying object that to any civilian. And it was written in such a detailed way, you could tell a lawyer had to have written it. It may not be communicated by telecommunications, by facsimile, in writing verbally, blah, blah, blah. They covered every possible form of communication. Do you remember what that was called or what its number was? The reg? No, I don't. You know, I thought I might have AFR, like 111 something because I worked on the F-111 at the time, the D model, but I tried to research it by that. I couldn't find it. Now it may no longer be on the books. I have no idea. But I went to the base library and I pulled out the volume and I went to the page and I, cause I wanted to see it for myself. Cause I thought, you know, these things quote, don't exist. Why would we, why would you bother writing regulations about it? You know, nothing in there about the tooth fairy. I mean, you know, come on guys. What is this? But it was an air force regulation. It was an air force reg AFR.
Okay. Well, maybe I can find somebody who knows how to research those from 50 years ago. Yeah. And like I say, those, those, yeah, yeah. Good luck. Those, and those things change. They may have, I don't know. I don't know. Well, it's entirely possible that I could submit a FOIA and wait two years to see what happens.
Yeah, it would be great if you could find the pilots, you know, I was moved to, I shipped out to RAF upper Hayward in England and transferred into debriefing. That's where we get to talk to the pilots after they land. If they have problems with your shop system, they'd explain and then you query them about, well, you know, make sure that we're using it correctly. And anyway, I got to be kind of friends with a couple of the pilots. There's a your aircraft commander AC, and then you've got your weapons system operator WSO. And I asked, and I asked, I asked a couple of the guys one time, I said, Hey, you guys ever see any weird things flying around up there? And one said, you mean like flying saucers? And I said, yeah. And they took both of them looked at each other. And then look back at me and said, you know, it says something, but the bottom line was, yeah, we don't talk about that. And that
if you file a report, your flight physician is going to see that report. And the Air Force doesn't like to interest it. This was a $26 million aircraft. And at the time, that was the most expensive thing the Air Force owned in terms of aircraft. Yeah, they don't like to interest people that see things with $26 million aircraft. I said, Yeah, I get that. So yeah, it was no, we don't talk about that. Interesting.
Okay. Yeah. Well, I think I've got enough to go on. I'm gonna do a little historical research, see if I can learn find any contemporaneous press coverage.
It's something that kills me not to know. Yeah. I
you know, after I saw the two discs above cannon Air Force base, after the second one shot off, I pulled over to the side of the road, I was in such a state, open the car door, a cigarette, I put my feet out the car door onto the road shoulder. And I just kind of sat sideways in the car. And it didn't feel like it was coming from me. It felt like it was coming from outside of me. But the thought to commit all of this, every detail to memory, because it would be very important one day, that overwhelming thought was at the forefront, besides the fact that this kind of experience has now is raised in a Baptist church and had your typical worldview, it takes that and stands it on its ear. It's like, everything I know is wrong, everything I do everything, you know, so, but despite that, there was this overwhelming impetus to remember, never forget this, there was such an great importance imparted to me, maybe it was of my own making, it didn't seem like it. But anyway, okay. Well, let's see. Just to let you know, we have assigned your case the number 23019-019.
Okay. So if you have any questions, we're probably not going to do because it was so long ago, we won't be able to investigate a lot. Well, it might be useful to corroborate somebody else's Well, that's what we'll find somebody else who,
You know, check out Vike’s archives. I'm sure he's got an archive. And this was an interview he gave, I'm gonna estimate late 90s. But it was some time back. And it was can't Clovis, New Mexico, during that period of time that I relayed to you, he may have a better lock on the actual date, because I know the sergeant I knew who was taking the laser rangefinder up on top of the hotel Clovis. That was during the height of these sightings.
Well, yeah. And so that would have been probably January 76. I'm still trying to get the trying to understand the timeline. Yeah, I don't believe it was cold. And I, you know, I, I'm really terrible with days. So I could be wrong. I could be I could be wrong. It can get pretty cold up there. It was. Yeah, yeah, yeah, indeed. Well, yeah, I know, I know North Texas a little bit. I don't know that part of New Mexico very well. Yeah, it's pretty close to Port Dallas, about 100 miles west, southwest of Lubbock.
Right. Yeah. It's near where the famous 1957 level in sightings were. Levelland.
Yeah.
That was 18 years previous. Yeah. Yeah. Um, that's a lot of cars got that the reports, a lot of reports of cars ignition and being interfered with.
Well, you guys do a great job. That's why I got into it.
Thank you. Well, I just wanted, like I said, your case number is 23-019. It's 23-019. Okay, I'll send you a link. There's a something called a supplemental questionnaire that we, okay. It's some fairly personal questions, but there it's completely anonymous. Is only you'll only be known by your case number. And of course, we don't really, we won't release your name at all to anyone. However, I would like to ask you if it's okay, if we use an edited version of this conversation in our podcast.
Yes. Anytime, any, absolutely no problem.
We won't use your name. We'll just, just,
you can if you want to. I've really, um, it's time we come out. Okay. Well, I understand that happened. I, I, you know, I, I'll sign an affidavit to that effect. I would, uh, could this have all been a figment of my imagination? Yeah. I guess. Do I have any history of mental illness, schizophrenia, hallucinations? No. Uh, but could it have happened that one time, but I guess, you know, I'm no psychiatrist. I can't say. Well, yeah. Um, I'm certainly not qualified to say that either. Um, okay. Well, thanks a lot for your time. And, uh, and thank you for following up. It makes me, it makes me feel good. Okay. Well, thanks a lot. All right. Bye now. [Music]
I'd like to thank Airman Pat for telling us his story. And yes, I do know that it is just a story, as many people are fond of saying, we don't have corroboration. The radar tapes, if they were ever available to anyone, probably don't exist anymore. But even if they do, they'd be very difficult to find. And other corroborating evidence like other eyewitnesses. Well, as we heard, as the story goes, that was strongly discouraged by the base authorities and by Captain Kowalski, whoever he was.
Now, we certainly, if we take this story at face value, we have a lot of questions, not so much skeptical questions, but simply questions about things like who was Captain Kowalski? What really caused the base commander to issue a, what is essentially mounted to a gag order? Um, and what really happened in Clovis? And what was the timeline?
According to the news reports, people in Clovis went up to the top of the Clovis Hotel, or possibly to the top floor, it's not clear which, and had observations in January of 1976 of rapidly moving lights, or even in some cases, some people would say they saw something fall from a saucer. I don't know how much of that we can put much trust in, since that's second hand from, from our point of view. But what we have from firsthand, from Airman Pat, is really interesting and compelling. Even if we say, okay, it's not evidence of anything, and please tell me what the hypothesis is that it, it would either support or refute if we took Airman Pat's testimony at face value. I, I don't know how to even formulate it, but let's say that we can corroborate, and that's why we're here. Please forward this to anyone you know who served in the Air Force in the 1970s, especially if you know that they were at Cannon Air Force Base. Let's find out what they know.
You can contact API in complete confidence, your real name, your telephone number, your email, none of that will ever be made public. And you can tell us your story. And who knows, it could be another API conversation if you're willing to go to that extent. Pat did tell me that he was quite happy to let us use his entire real name. We chose not to do that, but we did use his first real name because we want the people who served with him to recognize who he was after all these years. They may not recognize his voice. So anyway, please get in touch if you know anything, or if you just have a question. We're always happy to field questions about our cases, even cases that we have to leave as historical because we can't really find corroboration.
And this case was closed as an historical case. That is, we're not going to do an in-depth investigation, but we are poking around looking for leads. And if you have any, please let us know. We'll even reopen the case and redo our report if we find more information that's really credible and helpful. So thanks, Pat, once again, for telling us your story. And if you have a story you want to tell, even if it was long ago and far away, we're happy to listen. We only have enough resources to do investigations in more recent cases, but the cases that we do look into are sometimes rather uninteresting. This is certainly not that. This is an interesting case, even if there's not much we can do with it. Once again, thank you for listening to API Conversations. Please, if you want to report your own UFO sighting or you know somebody who does,
go to reportaufo.org. There's a link in the show notes down below. And also, if you want to learn more about this podcast, just go to apikasefiles.com, where we have a list of all the episodes and all the API Conversations. We are now up to, I believe, 39 total. So dig in and learn and listen. It should be fun. The music for this episode was provided by the minivanels for the intro and outro music. And the bumpers were excerpted from a piece by someone named Carl Godot, or maybe Godot, I'm not sure. But anyway, thank you for your music. The API Case Files podcast and API Conversations are published under the Creative Commons Attribution Share-A-Like License.