Karl Pflock

Karl T. Pflock (6 January 1943 – 5 June 2006) was an American UFO researcher and former Central Intelligence Agency officer whose eight-year investigation of the Roswell incident led him to conclude that no craft crashed near Roswell, the debris on the Brazel ranch having come from Project Mogul, while he continued to hold that Earth has been visited by non-human intelligence. His reading set him against the Stanton Friedman–Don Berliner and Randle–Schmitt reconstructions, and it came from a man who belonged to the Center for UFO Studies, the Mutual UFO Network and the Society for Scientific Exploration and who had interviewed the Roswell witnesses himself.

Pflock held government posts and a security background but no access to any UFO crash retrieval program: the Roswell material reached him as an investigator, through witness interviews and the 1947 press and military record. That biography can be read two ways. A former intelligence officer concluding that nothing crashed at Roswell is, to those who accept the crash, exactly what a cover-up would produce; to others it is an informed judgement. Neither reading amounts to evidence. Those who accept a crash reject the Mogul reading of the debris, though Pflock's own book allows that Mogul accounts for the 1947 descriptions of the debris while failing to explain the later additions to the story.

Career before ufology

Pflock took a philosophy and political science degree at San Jose State in 1964, served in the Marine Corps and Air Force reserves from 1960 to 1966, and was a CIA intelligence officer from 1966 to 1972. He then worked as an editor and in Republican congressional staff posts, as publications director of the House Republican Conference in 1981 and legislative aide to Congressman Ken Kramer from 1983, before his 1985 appointment under the Reagan administration as Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Operational Test and Evaluation, which earned him the Defense Outstanding Public Service Medal in 1989. From 1989 to 1992 he was a senior strategic planner with BDM International, the United States Department of Energy and other agencies on nuclear test site environmental restoration, and in 1992 he turned to writing about UFOs full time.

The Roswell investigations

Roswell in Perspective (1994), published by the Fund for UFO Research, concluded that no flying saucer came down near Roswell or on the Plains of San Agustin and attributed the debris to Project Mogul. The UFO community labelled him a debunker, though Pflock said he had no doubt that UFOs are real and did not believe Earth had never been visited by alien intelligence; Roswell, on his reading, was a case of mistaken identity. In Roswell: Inconvenient Facts and the Will to Believe (2001) he set out the whole investigation and traced his own path from hopeful agnostic to skeptic.

His second title is the argument in miniature: the "will to believe" is offered as the explanation for why the case persisted, not a claim that its witnesses were lying, so the disagreement is about inference from testimony rather than the honesty of those who gave it. He observed that crashed-saucer proponents tended to compile supporting elements "without adequate scrutiny," and he is cited alongside Robert Sheaffer and Kal Korff as a skeptical reading of the case.

Pflock also worked the witnesses. A 1995 Omni piece presented the mortician Glenn Dennis as breaking his silence, and by the 2001 book he judged Dennis's story one that "sounds like a B-grade thriller conceived by Oliver Stone." He interviewed Frank Kaufmann, who told him unprompted that the beings were not the standard Grey type but "just like us, only better" and "more perfectly formed." He treated the Plains of San Agustin story as resting on the secondhand legend of the deceased engineer Grady Barnett.

The Aztec journal and other work

In 2000 Pflock published in The Anomalist what he presented as a handwritten testament of Silas Newton, one of the two men behind the Aztec crash story popularised by Frank Scully, shown to him by an anonymous source, and asked whether Newton had been used to discredit the idea of crashed saucers so that a real captured one could be kept out of sight.

Shockingly Close to the Truth!: Confessions of a Grave-Robbing Ufologist (2002), written with James W. Moseley, is Moseley's account of his decades in the field. Encounters at Indian Head, on the Betty and Barney Hill abduction, appeared posthumously. He met Philip J. Corso in 1993 and in private correspondence called him "a blowhard loony tune," placing The Day After Roswell far outside mainstream Roswell research.

The Society for Scientific Exploration and the other bodies above counted him a member, and he was named Ufologist of the Year in 1998. Pflock was diagnosed with amyotrophic lateral sclerosis in 2005 and died the following year at Placitas, New Mexico.

Open questions

References

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