Original Roswell Crash Photographer Recounts His Experience Interview Redux

JAMES BOND JOHNSON INTERVIEW BY DENNIS BALTHASER

By Dennis Balthaser

www.truthseekeratroswell.com

(c) 7-6-01 / 13

Bond, during your recent visit to Roswell for the first time (April 27-29, 2001), I had planned an in-depth interview with you, pertaining to your involvement in the 1947 Roswell Incident. Due to time constraints however that was not possible, so you agreed to answer some questions via an email interview. I know you have answered many of these questions before, but for my own benefit and others interested in the subject, I would like to officially have some points cleared up.

The questions or statements listed below are based primarily on comments I have heard from you either in previous emails or during your visit to Roswell. As a Roswell Incident researcher, www.truthseekeratroswell.com I am planning to add a new link to my site for interviews I have done or will do with personnel involved in the Incident. This will include photographs of those individuals and/or places when possible.

If any of the information I present below is incorrect please correct me, as my desire remains to obtain true statements and information. There will be no order to the questions or statements asked, but rather an accumulation of many concerns I have pertaining to the facts surrounding the Roswell Incident.

I have one request as you answer the questions below. I am asking that you rely completely on your own knowledge and memory of the events that transpired 50 some years ago. I am not interested in answers based on anyone else other than you personally. I anticipate and appreciate your candor in answering the questions.

INTERVIEW

DGB: Your career has included being a Consulting ">JBJ: In July 1947 I was a pilot officer in the Civil Air Patrol, an auxiliary of the U. S. Air Force, and an enlisted member of the U. S. Marine Corps Reserve. I had joined the Army Air Forces on 15 Jan 1944 at age 17 during World War II for pilot training. I was discharged on 29 Oct 1945 after the surrender of Germany and Japan. At the time of VJ Day, 14 Aug 1945, I was engaged in Liaison Pilot training at Sheppard Field, Texas, aimed at the impending invasion of Japan. Since there were as yet no helicopters available our mission would have been to launch our small L-5 liaison aircraft from jeep aircraft carriers (actually LSTs with the superstructure removed) and land on pontoons on the sea, taxi onto the beach and load casualties. Then we were to fly seaward to land on the water and taxi alongside Navy hospital ships for removal of the injured; then to repeat the operation as required. The abrupt end of the war after the atomic bombing of two major cities in Japan fortunately averted the need for this operation. Our flight training was suspended the next day after VJ Day. I think it would not be too dramatic to speculate that the dropping of the atomic bombs on Japan likely saved my life.

Earlier, during a delay in flight training, I was assigned as an interviewer for an EE (escape and evasion) flight crew returnees interrogation operation. This sparked an early interest in psychology and study of human behavior.

I enlisted in the U. S. Marine Corps Reserve in July 1946 and was commissioned in 1948. I was recalled to two years active duty during the Korean Conflict and after completion of infantry officer basic training at Quantico served as a public information officer in the rank of captain; I also served as additional duty as a chaplain at Marine Corps bases. Normally the Marines are provided with Navy chaplains but there was a shortage during the Korean War and I was invited to serve in that capacity, which I was glad to do since I was an ordained minister and had served three churches as a pastor in Texas.

In 1963 I transferred to the 40th Armored Division, California National Guard, as a chaplain and later served in Army strategic psychological operations assignments -- twice in Europe and twice in the Pacific as well as in the United States. I served four tours of duty at the Pentagon on the Army Staff and Joint Staff and as a consultant in strategic PSYOP to the National Security Council at the White House during two administrations. General Al Haig was my boss there and I later worked directly for him on special classified military assignments in Europe while he was NATO military commander.

I also was a consulting faculty member in psycho-political strategies at the U. S. Army Command and General Staff College at Fort Leavenworth, KS, and for 11 years was a faculty member at the Army Special Warfare School at Fort Bragg, NC and also at Fort MacArthur, CA. For three years I was founding director of the Army Reserve PSYOP Department at Fort Bragg. I retired from the Army in the grade of colonel 43 years after first enlisting.

DGB: You have indicated that you purchased your own 4"x5" Speed Graphic camera and used it for other newspaper work you were assigned to such as police stories. Why were you selected to go to Rameys office to take the photographs since photographer wasnt your primary duty with the newspaper?

JBJ: This is described rather fully in a similar online interview at Roswell Crash Photographer. If you still have any additional questions please address them to me.

DGB: To the best ability that your memory permits; who told you to go to Rameys office; for what purpose were you going there? What were you doing at the time you were told to go?, and how did you go and how long from the time being told until you arrived at Rameys office?

JBJ: I was assigned by my city editor, Cullum Greene. He simply came to my desk in the city room of the Star-Telegram and asked if I had my camera available. As far as I can recall this was the very first time that I had been specifically assigned to cover a spot news story as a photographer. I believe that I had purchased the camera in April, 1947, just three months prior to the Roswell Incident in July, 1947. Normally I used the camera to photograph events where I was engaged as a reporter, usually speakers at evening dinners or for police reporter breaking stories.

I drove to the air base in my nearly new 1947 Ford club coupe. I went immediately after being assigned to take the Ramey office pictures. The strongest recollection that I have is the extreme urgency involved in getting the Roswell crash photos. My city editor was quite concerned when he had just received a "flash" AP teletype alert message that a "captured" flying saucer was being flown from the Roswell Army Air Forces Base to the Eighth Air Force headquarters of General Roger Ramey located at Fort Worth Army Air Field and he was very eager to obtain photos of the craft. He underscored that we were close to photo deadline for East Coast newspapers and that I should go out and get the photos as quickly as possible and return to the office to process them. I recall that there were four other photographers who worked for the Morning Star-Telegram. I assumed then and now that I was the only photographer available at that moment even though I normally was assigned as the military editor for the Star-Telegram.

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See Also:

Former Editor of The 'Other' Roswell Newspaper Shares His Knowledge of The UFO Crash INTERVIEW (Redux)

VIDCAST REDUX: Jesse Marcel Sr. On The Roswell Crash

On The Road To Roswell 2007: A Discussion With Col. Jesse Marcel Jr.

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Noise In The Channel

My anomalistic research has been almost entirely in the field of UFO history, particularly using the U.S. government documents gained through the Freedom of Information Act to base it upon solid evidence. Rarely has this research cross-fertilized with my interest in the psychic and spiritual, but occasionally the two unlike paths do intersect. One such instance relates to today's post. Early in the history of the UFO subject [1950s] there arose a group of persons claiming to be receiving direct messages from people "flying" the disks. These persons got the nickname "contactees" and had a large and negative effect on the general public's willingness to take the UFO concept seriously. It was completely understandable. The Contactees claim to converse with people from every known planet plus many unknown ones. Although the messages often had themes of love and anti-war [even early pro-environment ideas], most of the "transcripts" were vague platitudes, and "scientific" nonsense bordering on gibberish. Almost all these Contactees got their messages by "trance-control" methods--so they claimed. I know for certain that this, in some sense, is true. It is true, because, some years ago, I decided to preserve the archival files of one of the most famous of these people, a man named George Hunt Williamson. GHW was a very influential person in this early "new age" movement and easily the most creative. [he's the fellow at the upper left]. My rationale for preserving his files was not that he could tell you much about UFOs, but he was an extreme case of an intellectual and behavioral response [for better or worse] to them. I've never regretted spending the money on this preservation as the files are endlessly entertaining if nothing else.
GHW got his contacts from outer space by Ouija. Several other of the contactees used Ouija or derivative methods to receive their messages as well. GHW believed that what was happening in Ouija was that one gave oneself over to the board and spiritual entities, not really "dead persons", took over your own body in order to communicate. [so, in some sense, "you" DO push the planchet; it's just where the "other" wants it pushed]. GHW would, at the drop of a whim, whip out a large sheet of paper, draw the requisite letters et al, and grab a glass and off he would go spinning the glass so rapidly around the make-shift "board" that a transcriber could barely keep up. When that became too cumbersome, he graduated to just "going into an altered state" and simply vocalizing what his spiritual contact had to say. Thus, in GHW's and most other "space brothers" contactees minds, Ouija and Trance-control Mediumship were exactly the same thing.
How true were the messages? To my reading of them, and given the advantage of 50 years of objective evaluative distance, they were utter nonsense. Take this bit of a trance reading as an example and you can make your own evaluation: Question-Is there a space group working under the name [of Ashtar] that's on the Black side? Answer-" There is a particular group that is nothing but a group of beings that operate a gigantic mechanical brain or computer, to which I believe you have heard your friend to the south refer [reference to another channeler]. It is one of the computers that was left after the collapse of the Galactic Administration, or Galactic Empire. Now Ashtar is then a code name for this great computer, and these many beings that operate it will pass through certain questions desiring answers. It is not infallible. There is a reason why it has the name Ashtar, which I will not go into at the moment, but it is also in connection with Astarte. In other words, it is the cause not the effect--it is the cause from which came the name Astarte in the first place (or "Ashtaroth") because the Ashtar computing system or the Ashtar computer was used primarily for the computation of sexual and physical problems of fertility, both in crops or plants, animals, and man. Is that point clear? Are you beginning to get the picture?"...actually I think that I am.
Now, I hope that it strains your credulity that anyone could take this sort of "revelation" seriously; but they most certainly did. That reading is taken from a book of trance readings compiled by GHW and a group of U.S. citizens who decided to call themselves the Brotherhood of the Seven Rays [no, I'm not kidding]. This was NOT a scam. These people believed all this completely. How do I know? These people quit their jobs, uprooted their families, and moved to the Peruvian jungles to outlast the coming Earth cataclysm and find the lost Temples of the Ancient Brotherhood and rejoin our long-lost Atlantaen forebears, still hermetically present waiting for those of us advanced enough to find them. This combination of Earth "doomsday-ism" and finding the lost super-civilization of Paititi in South America was a message begun by Dorothy Martin of Chicago, who, taking the name of "Sister Thedra", channeled various ascended masters who told her all this. [Thedra is at upper right]. This wowed Michigan State Professor Charles Laughead [lower left], who began warning the rest of us that doomsday was imminent. Michigan State was not amused and fired him. Undampened by this, since Michigan State and Michigan itself would be "gone" in the cataclysm soon anyway, Laughead, Thedra, GHW, and several others went first to New Mexico [to get precise directions from their Ouija masters] and then on to "rural", to put it mildly, Peru. Shockingly, the world did not end, nor have any easily recognizable cataclysms occurred [you may object by filling in the names of certain politicians if you insist, but I don't think that's what GHW et al were talking about]. The whole affair is chronicled in "When Prophecy Fails ", a book which uses only their aliases, but these are the real folks.
Part of the bottom line in this for me has been: don't underestimate the ability of some of us to fall for almost anything; and make life-changing commitments based on fear or wishful thinking. But I will not just leave this at that [foolish people fooling themselves]. The "evidence", anecdotal as it is, points, to me, towards the view that often the Ouija, or the "channeling", or the "automatic writing", truly contacts something. That contact may not always be deceptive, but it often is. In fact, deception seems to be the majority behavior in these stories, when taken as an aggregate. Young people are easily deceived. Fearful people and people with little "foundation" are easily deceived. What's behind that deception I can't claim to know, but it seems to require a certain degree of real spirituality to avoid turning you towards a personal "bad place". In UFO history, we also saw a somewhat similarly "led-astray" group [Heaven's Gate] mass-suicide on the basis of this deception. Is it all based on similar evil intent? No. I have a good and very spiritual friend who contacts his "spirit guide" through automatic writing, whatever that really amounts to. He thrives in this, I believe, because he is already a depth-spiritual and loving person. Are you?

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