Raymond Fowler
Raymond E. Fowler (born 1933) is an American UFO researcher, author, and former NICAP investigator best known for his multi-decade investigation of the Betty Andreasson abduction case and for conducting the first formal investigation of the 1953 Kingman UFO crash, producing the earliest signed affidavit and corroborating documentation for that event.
Career
Fowler served as a research director and investigator for the National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomena (NICAP) and later for the Mutual UFO Network (MUFON). He was employed as an engineer at Raytheon in Sudbury, Massachusetts, where he discovered that Arthur Stansel — the primary witness to the Kingman crash — worked at the same facility.
Kingman investigation
Main article:
1953 Kingman UFO crash
In 1971, teenage UFO researchers Jeff Young and Paul Chetham interviewed Stansel and published their findings in the Middlesex News (Framingham, Massachusetts edition) on April 23, 1973. Fowler met Stansel in May 1973 and conducted a formal investigation that produced a 65-page confidential report for NICAP and a sworn affidavit signed by Stansel on June 7, 1973.
Fowler's verification contacted the AEC in Washington and Nevada, Stanford Research Institute, Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, and former Project Blue Book personnel. The AEC confirmed the test dates, names, and Stansel's test director, Dr. Ed Doll; Eric Wang, Stansel's supervisor at Wright-Patterson, had died before Fowler could interview him. One former Blue Book official "got very nervous" when Fowler mentioned Wang's Office of Special Studies. Despite confirming all peripheral details, Fowler could locate no additional firsthand witnesses.
Fowler also noted discrepancies between Stansel's 1971 account (a twelve-foot cigar-shaped object) and his 1973 affidavit (a thirty-foot disc), and corresponded with the Mohave County historian, who suggested Luke Air Force Base's range southwest of Phoenix was a more likely crash location than Kingman itself.
Fowler first disclosed the case publicly in June 1973 and published the affidavit in "What About Crashed UFOs?" in Official UFO magazine in April 1976. The full account appeared in his book Casebook of a UFO Investigator in 1981.
Selected publications
- Casebook of a UFO Investigator: A Personal Memoir (Prentice-Hall, 1981)
- The Andreasson Affair (Prentice-Hall, 1979)
- The Andreasson Affair: Phase Two (Prentice-Hall, 1982)
- The Watchers (Bantam Books, 1990)
- SynchroFile (2004)