Free Earth by Timothy Good Page B

225 men, on two consecutive sessions, in the supply hangar and/or the base theater. Eisenhower spoke only for a few minutes on each occasion.
    Asked by Reiner what had been discussed, the lieutenant colonel replied that the subject matter was classified “higher than Secret.” I share Art Campbell’s opinion that since Eisenhower was supposed to be hunting in Georgia, base personnel were ordered not to mention his presence at Holloman. The actual purpose of the visit would obviously never have been disclosed to so many “uncleared” personnel.
    Three months later, while serving in Japan, Kirklin was talking to some airmen, one of whom confirmed that he had heard Eisenhower talk at the base theater. The subject matter was not discussed. Kirklin also said that a mutual acquaintance had learned from a man who had been stationed at Holloman that people were still talking about Eisenhower’s visit two years later.
    Captain Joseph W. Kittinger, Jr. (retired), who was well acquainted with Kirklin at Holloman, is best known for his daredevil leaps from high-altitude helium balloons as part of research into high-altitude bailout, known as Project Excelsior, culminating in August 1960 when he jumped from Excelsior III at 102,800 feet (31,300 meters). In freefall in his pressuresuit for four and a half minutes, he reached Mach 0.9—almost the speed of sound. He served three combat tours in the Vietnam War, during which he commanded the F-4 Phantom 555th Tactical Fighter Squadron and vice-commanded the 432nd Tactical Reconnaissance Wing. He was shot down by a MiG fighter in 1972 and spent eleven months as a prisoner-of-war in the notorious “Hanoi Hilton.” 6
    What is much less known about Kittinger’s background, as I discovered, is his extensive professional contact with Dr. J. Allen Hynek, a scientific consultant on UFOs to both the Air Force’s Project Bluebook and the CIA’s Office of Scientific Intelligence (OSI). 7 I noted that part of their professional relationship involved, in 1962, Project Stargazer, a balloon-borne project to carry out astronomical studies at high altitude, Kittinger as balloon pilot and Hynek as astronomical adviser. In The Roswell Report: Case Closed —the Air Force’s second book attempting to deny the July 1947 incident—Kittinger’s sworn testimony states as follows:
    â€œI worked very closely with Dr. Hynek over a period of five years from 1958 to 1963. Dr. Hynek would typically spend a half day working on Stargazer and then the rest of the day participating as one of the consultants on the UFO study, Project Bluebook, that was also conducted at Wright-Patterson AFB. [He] was very familiar with the techniques and capabilities of the Air Force high altitude balloon program [and] once approached me and we discussed at length the possibility that Air Force high altitude balloons were responsible for many UFO sightings…. I was therefore ‘flabbergasted’ when Dr. Hynek appeared to believe that some of these sightings were of extraterrestrial origin.” 8
    During this period at Wright-Patterson, Captain Kittinger also worked at the U.S. Air Force Aerospace Medical Research Laboratory in connection with Project Excelsior, mentioned earlier. In 1959 and 1960, the laboratory collaborated with the Holloman Balloon Branch for Excelsior, the culmination of high-altitude free-fall studies that began in 1953 using anthropomorphic dummies 9 —the same dummies cited in The Roswell Report as probably being responsible for the alien bodies reported by witnesses to the Roswell events in 1947!
    Interestingly, according to June Crain, who worked in the RocketrySection Lab at Wright-Patterson with top-secret clearance at the time, the deceased alien bodies were brought to the Aero Med Lab (as it was widely known). “They had been flown in to the base during the night and were in a freezer locker in one of the hangars and Aero Med had