Wright-Patterson Air Force Base

Wright-Patterson Air Force Base (WPAFB), also referenced in earlier eras as Wright Field, is a United States Air Force installation located near Dayton, Ohio, spanning Greene and Montgomery counties. The base comprises the former Wright and Patterson Fields — originally Wilbur Wright Field and the Fairfield Aviation General Supply Depot — and was established in its consolidated form in 1948. The 88th Air Base Wing serves as the host unit, supporting more than 60 associate units; the base hosts the National Air and Space Intelligence Center (NASIC) and the National Space Intelligence Center (NSIC), the U.S. Air Force's primary intelligence organizations for strategic air and space threat analysis. In 2010, the base employed 27,406 military, civilian, and contract personnel.

In crash retrieval testimony and exopolitics literature, Wright-Patterson is alleged to have served as the primary repository for recovered non-human craft and biological specimens from the late 1940s onward. The crash-retrieval researchers Tom Carey and Donald Schmitt, in their book The UFO Secrets at Wright-Patterson, characterize the base as "Area 51 before there was an Area 51" — the primary site at which recovered extraterrestrial materials were analyzed, artifact samples investigated, and early back-engineering research carried out. Its Foreign Technology Division — later redesignated under Air Force Materiel Command — is the specific organizational unit named across multiple witness accounts as reportedly responsible for analyzing recovered materials and housing classified biological samples and craft debris.

History

The lands now occupied by the base contain prehistoric Adena earthworks, including the P Street Mound (33GR31) catalogued in the North American Database of Archaeological Geophysics. Huffman Prairie — the field where the Wright brothers perfected their flying technique — is part of the base; Wilbur Wright Field was established in 1917 alongside the Fairfield Aviation General Supply Depot.

In World War II, the Wright Field complex became the principal Army Air Forces engineering and procurement center. In 1948 the merger of Wright Field and Patterson Field formed Wright-Patterson Air Force Base under Air Materiel Command. Postwar, German Operation Paperclip rocket-engineering personnel briefly transited Wright Field as part of the broader Army Ordnance program.

UFO studies and the Foreign Technology Division

Wright-Patterson, and its predecessor Wright Field, were the headquarters of Project Sign (1947–1948), Project Grudge (1948–1951), and Project Blue Book (1952–1969) — the U.S. Air Force's three successive public-facing investigations of unidentified flying object reports. The Foreign Technology Division — and its later organizational successors within Air Force Materiel Command — is the unit most frequently named in UFO crash-retrieval testimony as the receiving body for recovered exotic materials.

Roswell materials

Following the 1947 Roswell incident, the recovered craft debris and alleged non-human bodies were reportedly transported by military convoy through Fort Riley, Kansas, to Wright Field. Major Jesse Marcel — the intelligence officer dispatched from the 509th Bomb Group to recover the debris — stated that the fragments "were transported by military carry-all to the Air Base in Roswell and from that point he was instructed by General Ramey to deliver the 'hardware' to Ft. Worth, to be forwarded to Wright-Patterson Field for analysis."

Brigadier General Arthur Exon — then stationed at the Foreign Technology Division — confirmed that the division's labs were specifically prepared in advance to receive the Roswell materials, and that analysts were unable to cut, burn, or drill through the debris under any test condition. Exon stated on the record that "it was the unanimous consensus at Wright Field, at foreign technology, that the materials from Roswell were from space. They were not manufactured here. They were manufactured off the planet." Operation Paperclip scientists were also brought to Wright Field to examine both the wreckage and the bodies, to determine whether the craft could have been of German origin.

Carey traced the onward chain of custody, holding that the wreckage and bodies recovered by the 509th Bomb Group passed first to Fort Worth — headquarters of the Eighth Air Force under General Ramey — and then to Wright-Patterson, where he believes they remained until the early 1980s before being transferred to Area 51. Carey also documented the account of a woman who took dictation from the Paperclip rocket engineer Wernher von Braun at Wright-Patterson in 1952 and who recalled von Braun stating that, as of that year, he knew of three UFO crashes — of which she could name only Roswell.

ZODIAC records

Jacques Vallee's Forbidden Science journals record that Eric Davis, briefed by Dale Graff — who had directed remote viewing experiments at Wright-Patterson — was told that "there are ten vinyl-bound volumes at Wright Patterson with Roswell data concerning two crashes of manta ray shaped craft, recovered bodies, foil type material, and a special study by TRW." The volumes were associated with a secret reverse-engineering project designated ZODIAC, involving former TRW employee Marcia Elliott.

Battelle Memorial Institute and memory metal analysis

The Battelle Memorial Institute, a defense research contractor based in Columbus, Ohio, received materials from the Roswell debris for analysis under contract. Hal Puthoff stated that "material of that type was provided to Battelle and they worked on it for some years to try to see if they could reproduce it," noting that the publicly known shape-memory alloy nitinol — a nickel-titanium alloy — emerged from this research program, though it did not fully reproduce the properties of the original material. Researcher Jeremy Rys identified Battelle progress reports from 1949 showing "a specific interest in nickel titanium alloys" with "five pages with the phase diagrams for nickel titanium alloy," which he attributed to analysis of the Roswell memory metals.

Bodies and Walter Reed

Jacques Vallee, when asked on air where the alleged Roswell bodies were taken, identified Wright-Patterson and "Walter Reed Hospital, in the basement" as the locations named in the accounts he had encountered.

Philip J. Corso stated that at the Army's Foreign Technology Division in 1961 he learned that Walter Reed Hospital had carried out the official autopsies on the Roswell beings, with all copies of the reports routed back to the Army.

Hangar 18 and the Blue Room

The materials and biological remains were allegedly housed in a restricted area at Wright Field referred to as Hangar 18 and internally as the "Blue Room." In 1963, Senator Barry Goldwater — a Major General in the Air Force Reserve and a personal friend of Roswell base commander Colonel Blanchard — requested access to this area and was refused by Air Force Chief of Staff General Curtis LeMay, who "cursed him up one side and down the other" and threatened court martial if the request were repeated.

Crash retrieval researcher Schmitt clarified that what is commonly called "Hangar 18" is in reality a complex of four interconnected buildings — Buildings 18A, 18B, 18C, and 18D — all part of the Foreign Technology Division compound. A sealed underground tunnel once allowed classified materials to be moved covertly into the Building 18 complex without surface observation; it has since been permanently cemented shut. The complex also incorporates Hangar 23, where both reverse-engineering operations and medical-biological research facilities were co-located; Leonard Stringfield documented accounts from physicians who claimed involvement in alien autopsies at that compound in 1947. Schmitt also noted that by the time the Foreign Technology Division had exhausted its capacity for independent reverse engineering, the classified programs were transitioned into the private sector — with firsthand witnesses located at Boeing, Lockheed, the Battel Institute, RAND Corporation, former Hughes Aircraft facilities, Los Alamos, and the Bureau of Standards, all describing independent efforts to reverse engineer the Roswell technology.

Greer's reported 1993 visit

Steven Greer has stated that in September 1993, immediately following a meeting with Laurance Rockefeller at the Y Ranch in the Grand Tetons, he traveled directly to Wright-Patterson Air Force Base to meet with "the director of that part of that compartment and operation" — a senior official overseeing what Greer describes as the classified section responsible for the original Roswell biological specimens and related material.

Foreign Technology Division

In 1961, Lieutenant Colonel Philip J. Corso was assigned to the Army's Foreign Technology Division (Research and Development) under Lieutenant General Arthur Trudeau, where he claimed to have inherited what he called "the Roswell File." According to Corso, under Trudeau's instruction he covertly seeded recovered materials and technical data to U.S. defense contractors including IBM, Hughes Aircraft, and Bell Labs, allegedly resulting in technologies including transistors, fiber optics, lasers, and Kevlar. Dr. Michael Wolf — in his semi-autobiographical Catchers of Heaven — lists the Foreign Technology Division labs at Wright-Patterson as one of the underground facilities at which he conducted covert extraterrestrial research from 1972 to 1977.

Bill Uhouse, prior to his assignment to a flying disc flight simulator project at S-4, worked for four years at Wright-Patterson as a civilian Air Force flight tester on exotic experimental aircraft.

Aztec crash and Research and Development Board meetings

The 1948 Aztec craft, transported from Los Alamos following its alleged recovery, is reported to have been shipped onward to Wright-Patterson. Physicist Robert Sarbacher, who served as consultant to the Defense Research and Development Board under the Truman administration, confirmed that crash retrieval meetings had been held at Wright-Patterson by the Research and Development Board in 1949–1950, involving John von Neumann, Vannevar Bush, and J. Robert Oppenheimer. Eric A. Walker, executive secretary of the Research and Development Board from 1950–1952, confirmed in a 1987 phone interview that he had attended "meetings concerning that subject matter" — recovered saucers and occupants at Wright-Patterson in 1949–1950 — and stated he had known of Majestic 12 "for 40 years."

Alleged body storage

Leonard Stringfield, described by Richard Dolan as "the OG of crash retrieval research," collected multiple witness accounts specifically naming Wright-Patterson as an alleged biological storage site. One account, from a guard who reportedly performed a security detail at Wright-Patterson in 1966, described guarding nine alien bodies on one occasion; Stringfield's reporting indicated there were purportedly 30 bodies at the base in total, with those encountered by this witness described as approximately four feet tall. Dolan notes that Stringfield also documented accounts of mobile recovery units allegedly kept in a constant ready state at certain bases to recover downed craft — a logistical infrastructure consistent with the base's purported role as the primary repository for non-human biological material. Stringfield also collected accounts from a radar specialist at Fort Monmouth who was ordered unexpectedly into a military theater in 1953 for what appears to have been a debriefing or presentation related to crash retrieval operations.

See also

• Pieces of the Roswell craft
• The Day After Roswell
• Roswell EBE survivors
• Roswell bodies
• List of UFO retrievals

References

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