1997 News Abstracts

The Orlando Sentinel, Orlando, FL, Wed Jan 22, 1997:
p.  , c.   -

AVIATOR
LANDS
NATIONAL
HONOR

Orlando native Joe
Kittinger's high-flying
feats earned him a place
in the National Aviation
Hall of Fame.

By Roger Roy
------------
of the Sentinel Staff
=======================

        Joe Kittinger, a soft-spoken Orlando native whose feats as an
aviator made him a legend has been named to the National Aviation Hall
of Fame.

        Kittinger, who set one world record with a 102,800-foot
parachute jump as an Air Force test pilot in 1960, and a second in
1984 when he made the first solo trans-Atlantic crossing in a helium
balloon, will be inducted into the Hall of Fame in a ceremony in July.

        The Hall of Fame, in Dayton, Ohio, honors aviation pioneers
including Orville and Wilbur Wright and Charles Lindbergh.

        "I'm very honored to be named to the Hall of Fame," Kittinger
said Tuesday from his home in Seminole County.

        As an Air Force test pilot in the 1950s, Kittinger worked on
escape and parachute systems for high-altitude flight and for
astronauts. On Aug. 16, 1960, wearing an electrically heated pressure
suit, Kittinger rode a balloon to a height of more than 19 miles
before bailing out.

        In the thin atmosphere, he fell at more than 700 mph, becoming
the first human to break the sound barrier without an aircraft. A
photo of Kittinger leaping from the balloon appeared on the cover of
LIFE magazine.

        Kittinger, who has flown thousands of hours in more than 60
kinds of aircraft, flew 483 missions during three tours in Victnam,
before being captured and held as a prisoner of war.

        Joe W. Kittinger Park, on the southwest corner of Orlando
Executive Airport, is named in his honor.

        Kittinger joins another Orlando native in the Hall of Fame:
astronaut John W. Young, who walked on the moon during the Apollo 16
mission and commanded the first space shuttle flight.



AIR & SPACE Smithsonian, April/May, 1997:
Volume 12, Number 1, p. 42-49 -

Vietnam Memoir

PLAUSIBLE
DENIAL

"If shot down and captured,
are you willing to be
disowned by your government?"

          -Question put to volunteers for the
       U.S.Air Force's first combat mission in Vietnam

by Susan Katz Keating

     ...Sometimes the pilots themselves did not know what they were
truly being used for, as evidenced by an incident that took place in
early November 1963.  "I had just taken off from Bien Hoa in a B-26,"
Joe Kittinger says, "when I happened to look over to the side and saw
the most amazing thing:  Airplanes were bombing the palace in downtown
Saigon!  I said, 'My Lord, what is happening?'"
     Kittinger immediately radioed the Air Force command center in
Saigon to relay the information.  He was instructed to report what he
saw.  It was the beginning stages of the coup that would result in the
overthrow and assassination of South Vietnamese President Ngo Dinh
Diem.
     "I could see tanks and bombing, and a battle was going on," says
Kittinger.  "They kept running me from place to place to see what was
going on.  I was an airborne command post."  The amazed pilot remained
aloft nearly four hours before he began to run low on fuel.
     In retrospect, Kittinger believes that his commanders had
intended for him all along to witness the coup, which the United
States - although it had earlier supported Diem - had come to believe
was necessary....
     ...Night operations also led to a novel signalling technique.
"We worked out a system with [the South Vietnamese army] at these
little outposts, where they would set up a flaming-pot system pointing
out the direction of the enemy," King says.  "Later on it became a
flaming metal arrow."
     The large arrows, covered with woven bamboo, were laid directly
on the ground.  "They would point the arrow in a certain direction,
and it would come over the radio: 'Drop your ordnance 200 meters away
from the fire arrow,' or 100 meters, or some such," says Farmgate
pilot Joe Kittinger....
     ...Other problems plagued Farmgate.  The dangerous missions had
produced a high rate of casualties:  In 17 months from early 1962 to
mid-1963, 16 Farmgate crewmen were killed in action.  But crews in
some B-26s and T-28s were dying as a result of what some
euphemistically termed "equipment failure." In fact, the airplanes
were falling apart in mid-air.
     "These airplanes had been used in World War II and Korea, and
they were tired," Kittinger says.  "And we were using them as
fighter-bombers."  The old airframes simply were not up to the new
task:  "The wings started coming off them.
      "If a wing comes off, you get just violent roll," Kittinger
says.  "The G-force would preclude you from doing anything.  You can't
get out.  You don't have a chance."...

The Kansas City Star, Kansas City, MO, Weds June 25, 1997:
p. , c.  -

FROM 'ALIENS' TO THE AIR OVER KC

Pilot for casinos
earlier had a role
in Roswell tests.

By STEVE EVERLY Staff Writer
Date: 06/24/97 22:20

        The man who helped reintroduce skywriting to Kansas City says
he knows why the government workers decades ago rushed into the New
Mexico desert to recover "aliens."
        Cows were eating the parachutes the "aliens" rode in on -- and
dying -- Joe Kittinger says.
        On Tuesday, the Air Force said in a briefing that the "aliens"
were actually crash test dummies it was flinging out of balloons
during the 1950s to simulate pilots bailing out of high-flying jets.
        "We were dropping dummies all over the place," Kittinger said
in an interview from his home in Florida.
        In early tests, Kittinger said, cows had munched on the
parachutes, and the material used in the parachutes had killed them.
So government workers were ordered to recover the dummies and
parachutes quickly, he said.
        Kittinger, a highly decorated retired Air Force colonel, is
widely known in aviation circles. He helped establish Station Casino's
skywriting marketing campaign last year and hopes to be back in the
area periodically to fly the smoke-producing biplane. Another pilot, a
Kittinger protege, now flies it.
        Kittinger was mentioned several times Tuesday during the Air
Force briefing, which was the government's most complete answer yet to
people who believe that in July 1947 an alien spaceship crashed near
Roswell, N.M. -- and that the government has been covering it up.
        The Air Force said that when the dummies, balloons and their
gondolas fell to earth, people mistook them for aliens.
        Kittinger said he was the project officer for the government
program and worked on it from 1953 to 1962. It was called Project
Excelsior.
        Although the so-called Roswell incident occurred years before
the program began, Air Force officials were unable to fully explain
the discrepancy in dates other than to say that the spaceship legend
grew from honest misunderstandings and distortions by publicity
seekers.
        Kittinger on Tuesday pointed out that stories about the
Roswell incident and alien bodies didn't blossom until the 1960s.
        Kittinger said he was proud of the Air Force study and hoped
it would put an end to the stories. But he said he doubted it.
        "There are people who want to believe it occurred no matter
what the proof," he said.
        And Kittinger himself is proof that truth can be almost as
interesting as fantasy.
        In 1957, in one of his many aviation feats, Kittinger rode a
balloon to 96,000 feet -- more than 18 miles. It was the highest a man
had gone at that time, almost into near space.
        But that's not all.
        In 1960, he made the highest parachute jump ever -- from
102,000 feet -- a record that still stands, according to the Air
Force. Before his chute deployed, he fell so fast that his body broke
the sound barrier.
        The jump, of course, occurred near Roswell.

© 1997 The Kansas City Star


The New York Times, New York, NY, Weds June 25, 1997:
p. , c.  -

AIR FORCE OFFERS DETAILED THEORY ON ORIGINS OF ROSWELL
UFO TALE

By WILLIAM J. BROAD

No bodies. No bulbous heads. No secret autopsies. No spaceship. No
crash. No extraterrestrials or alien artifacts of any sort. And most
emphatically of all, no government cover-up.

        The Air Force on Tuesday made public its latest report on the
famous 1947 incident in the New Mexico desert near the town of Roswell
that is at the heart of claims by flying-saucer fans that
extraterrestrials have visited the Earth and which has become a
celebrated part of American popular culture.

        The report, in voluminous detail, says the supposed mountain
of alien evidence is a mirage.

        Just as old sightings of squids and whales spawned tales of
sea monsters, so too, the Air Force says, the shadowy doings of brave
fliers, high-altitude balloons, lifelike crash dummies and saucerlike
craft in the southeastern New Mexico desert at the dawn of the space
age were glimpsed and embellished over the decades into false evidence
of aliens.

        For instance, one serviceman who crashed in a test balloon 10
miles northwest of Roswell suffered an injury that caused his head to
swell and resemble the bulbous cranium of the classic science-fiction
alien, the report says. This secretive 1959 mishap, it adds,
apparently led decades later to tales of a crashed extraterrestrial
that walked under its own power into a military hospital.

        So, too, dummies were routinely dropped from balloons to test
parachutes and were sometimes lost in the desert and disfigured in
suggestive ways, their hands often missing a finger.

        A distinguishing characteristic of the aliens supposedly
sighted near Roswell, the report notes, is four fingers.

        Sheila Widnall, secretary of the Air Force, in a foreword to
the report, said the service worked for more than three years to find
the truth behind the rumors and make it public. "With this
publication," she said, "we have reached our goal."

        She praised the "dedication and accomplishments" of the men
and women who served their country in the Southwest decades ago,
several of whom were killed or injured in the line of duty.

        Some critics fault the government for addressing the topic of
alien visitations, laughing it off as ludicrous.

        But other experts say America's obsession with unidentified
flying objects has never been greater and praise efforts to combat
what they view as a dangerous mania. They note the recent suicides of
39 members of the Heaven's Gate cult, who believed an alien spaceship
passing near the Earth would take them to an ethereal paradise.

        Not surprisingly, true believers in Roswell are unshaken,
seeing the new report as evidence of the most egregious government
cover-up of all time, one whose 50th anniversary is to be celebrated
early next month with a bash in the New Mexico desert.

        "This is the biggest story of the millennium, a visit to the
Earth by extraterrestrial spacecraft and the cover-up of the best
evidence, the bodies and the wreckage, for 50 years," said Stanton
Friedman, who has written about the Roswell incident and who is to be
a featured speaker at the upcoming gala.

        In an interview, he accused the Air Force of false reasoning,
selective use of data and lying.

        "The evidence is overwhelming that planet Earth is being
visited by extraterrestrial spacecraft," said Friedman, who lives in
New Brunswick, Canada, and whose 1992 book, "Crash at Corona," is in
its sixth printing. (Corona is a village closer to the purported crash
site than Roswell.)

        Critics of the report bridle at its main thesis: that
civilians are confusing military activities that took place over more
than a decade and falsely recalling them as a single incident. Such
memory failures, critics say, are highly unlikely.

        But the Air Force in its report says the witnesses are often
recalling events more than four decades old and could have easily
mixed up the dates that badly.

        Joseph Kittinger Jr., a retired Air Force colonel who was much
decorated for his pioneering jumps from balloons high over the New
Mexican desert, praised the report as exhaustive and overdue.

        "I'm insulted at how this fraud has been perpetrated and
delighted that the Air Force has taken it on," he said in an
interview. "Most of those people know it's a fraud, and the others are
deluded." The report, he added, "is a great piece of work."

        The much-debated incident took place on a desolate stretch of
desert that was surrounded by a number of secret military bases.
Increasingly, the site or sites (the faithful disagree on its exact
location) are today ringed by tourist attractions that play on the
extraterrestrial theme.

        More than 100,000 sky watchers and conspiracy theorists are
expected to visit Roswell for the incident's golden anniversary
celebration during the first week of July. Festivities are to include
a soapbox derby-style race of homemade alien vehicles.

        The hullabaloo got started in July 1947 when a ranch foreman,
W.W. Brazel, found strange, shiny material littering the ground. He
turned it over to the sheriff, who gave it to the military authorities
at the nearby air base.

        On July 8, the Roswell Army Air Field issued a news release
about the crash of a flying disk, prompting a local newspaper, The
Roswell Daily Record, to run an article under the headline: "RAAF
Captures Flying Saucer."

        Military officials retreated the next day, calling the curious
debris merely a downed weather balloon. With that, the matter was
largely forgotten until the late 1970s with the birth of what
eventually became a small industry of experts, books, articles and
television shows recounting alien visitations and conspiracy theories.

        Under growing pressure from true believers and curious
congressmen, the Air Force in February 1994 began to investigate just
what took place many decades ago, its review including military data
that had been classified secret during the cold war.

        A 23-page report made public in September 1994 said the
silvery wreckage in the desert had been part of a top-secret system of
atomic espionage. That admission made the 1947 story about a weather
balloon a white lie. Carried high into the atmosphere by balloon, the
spy sensors listened for weak reverberations from Soviet nuclear
blasts half a world away.

        But the 1994 report said nothing about extraterrestrial
beings, who in various accounts of the Roswell crash number between
two and eight, dead and sometimes alive. The silence arose because the
Air Force found nothing in the balloon saga to account for the reports
of aliens, so it ignored the topic at the time and only later came up
with a detailed and intriguing explanation.

        The new Roswell report, titled "Case Closed," was written by
Capt. James McAndrew, an intelligence officer assigned to the
Secretary of the Air Force's Declassification and Review Team. Its 231
pages are designed to go beyond the 1994 report by revealing more
about federal work in the desert and examining what apparently
inspired sightings of not only alien artifacts but of the
extraterrestrials themselves.

        In places it is grim. For instance, it describes the crash of
a KC-97G military plane near Roswell that killed 11 fliers, leaving
their bodies badly burned and reeking of fuel. The stench was so foul
that identification work at the Roswell air base was moved from the
small hospital to the commissary, which had a large refrigerator.

        The Air Force report suggests that this crash, recalled
decades later by a civilian who visited the air base and talked to
workers there, prompted his account of small, black, mangled, dead
aliens who smelled so bad that their autopsies were moved from the
base hospital to a facility better suited to the dissections.

        This civilian, W. Glenn Dennis, has been called the "star
witness" of the Roswell incident. Dennis is president of the
International UFO Museum and Research Center, which was founded in
1991 and is on Main Street in Roswell.

        The new Air Force report focuses on military work and
accidents from 1947 to 1976 and says many of the claims about
extraterrestrials are based on mistaken memories and, in fact, are
pieced together from military work that took place over many years.

        The finding of shiny wreckage in July 1947, it says, "was the
first of many unrelated events now collectively known as the 'Roswell
Incident."'

        The desert work focused on the development of spy gear and
high-altitude escape systems. Starting in 1950, for instance, balloons
rising as high as 19 miles dropped dozens of lifelike dummies to
perfect parachutes for pioneering pilots, including those in the X-15
rocket plane and the U-2 spy plane.

        The dummies landed all over the New Mexico desert, with
several lost.

        The report quotes one witness as saying of the Roswell aliens,
"I thought they were plastic dolls."

        "It was either dummies or bodies or something lying there,"
another witness to the extraterrestrials was quoted as saying in the
report.

        Starting in 1957, test pilots began to join the dummies in
bailing out at high altitudes, culminating in Kittinger's 1960 leap
from a balloon nearly 20 miles up, which remains the highest parachute
jump ever.

        At times this human research was also quite suggestive of
aliens.

        A balloon flight in 1959 ended in a landing accident that
caused Capt. Dan Fulgham's helmet to shatter and his head to swell.
His eyes became mere slits in a puffy face. He was taken to the
Roswell base with a high-security escort and eventually was
transferred to Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio for treatment.

        The new Air Force report says this accident probably accounts
for reports of an alien that walked into a Roswell air base hospital
under its own power, and of the shipment of aliens to the
Wright-Patterson base, where, according to Roswell lore, they
underwent close scrutiny.

        The report also tells of other activity in New Mexico that
conceivably was mistaken for extraterrestrial craft. A V-shaped
balloon flown in 1965, for instance, bears a striking resemblance to
the sketch of an alien spacecraft drawn by an anonymous witness.

        And the report notes that desert balloons between 1966 and
1972 lifted and dropped mock interplanetary probes. The program was
designed to aid NASA research, but to the untrained eye the probes
looked like flying saucers.

        "The incomplete and inaccurate intermingling" of actual
events, the report concludes, over the decades has resulted in a
"sensational story" about aliens from another world crashing in the
desert at Roswell. But the tale "cannot withstand close scrutiny when
compared to official records."

        It seems unlikely that the Air Force report will end the
debate between the federal government and flying-saucer fans. If
anything, as the 50th anniversary of the Roswell incident draws near,
the subject is likely to become as hot as the smoking wreckage of analien spaceship.

        "The arguments of the critics collapse of their own weight,"
said Friedman, the Roswell author, who added that he had not yet read
the new Air Force report. "I hope it doesn't have as many lies as the
previous one."


© 1997 The New York Times Company


The Orlando Sentinel, Orlando, FL, Sun, June 29, 1997:
p. 1, c. -

KITTINGER: UFO MYSTERY MAN

From the report: Old photo (top left) shows then-test pilot Joe
Kittinger, outfitted in a pressure suit, talking with Dr. J. Allen
Hynek. Another illustration (above) shows 3 three dummies of the kind
that Kittinger used to drop from high altitudes for tests. AIR FORCE
PHOTOS

By Roger Roy
of The Sentinel Staff

Photo:  50 years later. Joe Kittinger, at home in Altamonte Springs, buys
the Air Force's analysis of the so-called Roswell incident.

Among the shadowy figures in the tales of crashed spaceships and alien
corpses in the desert Southwest is a young Air Force captain who
mysteriously appeared to spirit away the creatures' remains.

Like one of the sinister characters in an X-Files television episode,
the officer in the recurring alien stories circulating on the Internet
and by word of mouth is known not by a name, but by a distinguishing
trait: Call him the red-headed captain.

But after decades at the center of the conspiracy theories, the
captain's identity is no longer a mystery. He's Central Florida
aviation legend Joe Kittinger. And he has never met a space alien.

"In my aviation career, I have never run across any little green men
-- at least sober little green men," Kittinger said.   "Over the
years, I will have to admit to working with some dummies."

Kittinger, 68, who on July 19 will be inducted into the National
Aviation Hall of Fame, is a renowned aviator who holds several
world records and who can still be seen skywriting over Central
Florida.

In a 213-page report released last week, the U.S. Air Force
confirms that Kittinger is the red-headed captain. Its investigation
into claims of purported alien encounters near Roswell, N.M.,
concludes that the "aliens" actually were lifelike dummies used in
high-altitude balloon research conducted in the deserts of the
Southwest by Kittinger, then an Air Force test pilot, in the 1950s.

The growing Roswell fascination centers on claims by civilians and
former military personnel assigned to a nearby air base that in 1947 a
flying saucer crashed, killing several aliens aboard. The Air Force
announced it had recovered a "flying saucer" -- a story it retracted
the next day with the explanation that the wreckage was that of a
weather balloon.

Among UFO believers, the Roswell Incident, as it's known, has become
the most celebrated case in which the U.S. military purportedly seized
and covered up proof of extraterrestrial contact.

This week, a Roswell festival celebrating the 50th anniversary of the
flying saucer crash is expected to draw up to 100,000 visitors.

But in 1947 the story drew little attention. It was largely forgotten
until the 1970s, when several people claimed that at the time of the
crash they had seen or heard of creatures that came from the alien
vessel.

The story mushroomed, becoming the topic of books, an upcoming
made-for-television movie, innumerable Internet sites, and references
on television shows and in the 1996 blockbuster sci-fi movie
Independence Day.

Growing criticism prompted the Air Force to launch a full-scale
investigation, which ended in last week's report, optimistically
titled, The Roswell Report; Case Closed.

The report's author, Capt. James McAndrew, assigned to track down the
myriad leads and tangled eyewitness accounts of the Roswell
happenings, was intrigued by a common description of the Air Force
officer who frequently showed up to seize the alien corpses. The
description was repeated in popular versions of the Roswell story as
well as a 1989 television re-creation.

"They didn't know his name, but they agreed that he was a captain and
he had red hair," McAndrew said.

McAndrew already suspected that the witnesses might have mistaken the
dummies used in the high-altitude tests for aliens. But because 1950s
photos of the Air Force crews involved in the tests were
black-and-white, McAndrew was at a loss to explain the red-haired
captain.

When McAndrew found a later, color photo of Kittinger, he hit pay
dirt.

It was more than a year ago that Kittinger, who lives in Altamonte
Springs, got a phone call from McAndrew: Had Kittinger, he asked, ever
dropped anthropomorphic dummies from high-altitude balloons around the
Roswell area?

Only about 50 times, Kittinger replied.

Kittinger ended up working closely with McAndrew and helped edit the
final report.

'Just a crock'

Until he heard from McAndrew, he said, he'd never realized how he
figured in Roswell alien lore.

"I had heard about it, of course, but I didn't pay a whole lot of
attention to the flying saucer stuff," Kittinger said. "I always
thought it was just a crock."

McAndrew's explanation of the "aliens" makes sense, Kittinger said.

But critics of the Air Force report point out that it means witnesses
mistook as simultaneous a mix of events that actually happened a
decade or more apart, since Kittinger's dummy parachute drops took
place from 1953 through 1958.

Still, McAndrew and Kittinger believe the witnesses are simply
confusing 40- to 50-year-old events, and they note that no one claimed
to have seen or heard of alien bodies until the 1970s.

The timing of other events that fit in with the Roswell story also was
confused by witnesses, they contend.

For example, one witness did see the small, blackened bodies at the
air base that one witness described, but they were those of Air Force
crewmen killed in an air tanker crash in 1956.

An "alien" with a large head seen walking on the base after the crash
was actually a pilot whose head was grotesquely swollen after a
parachuting injury, they said.

And the connection to Wright-Patterson Air Force Base in Ohio -- where
UFO lore holds that the alien bodies are being held -- makes sense
both because the injured parachutist was sent there and the dummies
were manufactured there, Kittinger said.

Dropped from 100,000 feet

The dummies' lifelike design -- they had jointed metal skeletons and
plastic skin -- probably contributed to the stories, he said. The
dummies were being used to determine how a human would fall in a
high-altitude parachute drop -- a crucial test for the nation's
nascent space program -- so they were carefully weighted and balanced
and stuffed with instruments.

In a typical test, a balloon would take aloft a hook-like platform
with two dummies, which would parachute back to earth, followed by the
platform and then the balloon.

Recovering the equipment was difficult, Kittinger said. Because the
balloons were so high -- often 100,000 feet, or nearly 20 miles -- the
dummies, platforms and balloons would end up 50 miles or more apart,
while crews tracked tracked them with radio beacons, aircraft and
ground spotters.

"We went to a lot of trouble to recover that equipment," Kittinger
said. "Those dummies were expensive -- I mean like $50,000 or
$60,000."

Still, some were never recovered, despite notices printed on the
dummies offering rewards.

"Some of them are still stuck out there somewhere," he said.

While pursuing the events around Roswell has been the life's work of
many among the UFO faithful, the latest episode is little more than a
footnote to Kittinger's career.

In 1957, Kittinger rode a 3- by 7-foot capsule suspended by a balloon
to a record 96,000 feet -- a feat some say made him first man in
space.

In 1960, Kittinger rode in an open balloon gondola to 102,800 feet --
19 miles -- then leapt out to parachute back to earth. In his 4 1/2
-minute free fall, he reached a speed of 714 miles per hour --
becoming the first man to exceed the sound barrier without an aircraft
-- and set a parachute altitude record that still stands.

Later, Kittinger would serve three tours of duty in Vietnam, flying
hundreds of combat missions in bombers, helicopters and fighters.

In 1972, Kittinger's F4D Phantom jet was shot down over Laos, and he
was captured. He was promoted to colonel while being held in a North
Vietnamese POW camp, where he spent a year before being released.

A cottage industry

After retiring from the Air Force, Kittinger returned to Orlando and
flew skywriting and banner-towing planes for Rosie O'Grady's Flying
Circus and chased other aviation records. In 1984, he made the first
solo transatlantic crossing in a balloon.

Kittinger said he was glad to help in the Air Force report of Roswell
because "I think the Air Force has gotten a bum rap."

He claims no sympathy for those who think the Air Force holds proof of
life from another planet.

"It's a fraud," he said. "The Roswell thing is a fraud that's been
made into a cottage industry, and people are making money off of it.

"People want to believe that there are UFOs, people want to believe
that there are aliens. People want to believe that there are
conspiracies and cover-ups," he said. "I don't give a damn what
extremes we go to, they are still going to believe it."

Still, the door mat at Kittinger's home features a space creature with
the greeting: "Welcome UFOs and Crews."

"I figure if I'm wrong about this," he said, "that could come in
handy."


© 1997 Orlando Sentinel Online



Dayton Daily News, Dayton, OH, Sat, July 19, 1997:
p. 6A, c. 5-6 -

National Aviation Hall of Fame

INDUCTEE RECALLS
RECORD JUMPS,
ROSWELL RUMORS

* A distinguished test pilot and parachutist is remembered by some for
a day in the desert.

By James Cummings
Dayton Daily News

Joe Kittinger broke a parachuting record that has stood since 1960,
participated in experiments that paved the way to send Americans into
space and continues to win awards as a barnstorming pilot.

But he only started making national headlines when he was recently
connected to an event that almost certainly never happened: the flying
saucer crash at Roswell, N.M., in 1947.

Retired Air Force Col. Joseph W. Kittinger Jr., 68, will be inducted
into the National Aviation Hall of Fame this evening during black-tie
ceremonies at the Dayton Convention Center. His induction recognizes
his achievements as a test pilot, balloon pilot, test parachutist,
combat fighter pilot, prisoner of war, civilian pilot and barnstormer.

"It's the biggest honor I've ever had," Kittinger said Friday. "Just to
think I could be considered in the same league with people like Neil
Armstrong and Chuck Yeager. I never dreamed I'd be in that type of
company."

He also said he's delighted to be a central figure in a report the Air
Force released recently called Roswell Report: Case Closed. He said
he's always "been insulted by the idea that my Air Force would cover
something uplike that," and he's glad the record is being set straight.

Many UFO enthusiasts believe an extraterrestrial craft landed near
Roswell in 1947, and the government recovered the craft as well as its
alien occupants.

The Air Force said the legend is based in part on the 1959 Roswell-area
crash of a high-altitude balloon that carried Kittinger and two other
men. One of the men, Dan Fulgham, was injured in the accident, and when
witnesses saw his swollen, sunken, yellowed face, the story of a
surviving alien was born.

"There was always a rumor that there was a red-haired captain sneaking
around collecting alien bodies in the desert and telling people to keep
quiet about it," Kittinger said. "That red-haired captain was me."

Kittinger said the "bodies" were actually crash dummies that were
pushed out of high altitude balloons to test methods of surviving
high-altitude aircraft evacuations.

He said he and other Air Force personnel collected the dummies and any
debris that might have fallen with them to keep the area clean and to
keep cows from swallowing dummy parts.

"It wasn't classified work, but we didn't give people details of what
we were doing," he said. "And we were always polite; I never threatened
anybody."

Balloon tests conducted with crash dummies set the stage for
Kittinger's 1960 jump from a balloon at 102,800 feet, a parachute
record that still stands.

About 750 people are expected to attend the Hall of Fame induction
ceremonies that begin with a 6 p.m. reception.

In addition to Kittinger, former astronaut and test pilot Thomas P.
Stafford will attend and be inducted into the Hall of Fame tonight.
Stafford flew on Gemini and Apollo space missions and commanded the
Apollo 18 flight that docked with the Soviet Union's Soyuz craft.

The two other inductees are deceased.

One is Clayton Brukner, who formed the Weaver Aircraft Co. in Lorain
with George Weaver in 1920. The company moved to Troy in 1923, and
ultimately became the Waco Aircraft Co., the world's largest commercial
aircraft builder in the 1930s.

The other is Herbert Dargue, who in 1907 piloted the first Army plane
to transmit and receive radio messages in flight. After the Japanese
attack on Pearl Harbor in 1941, Dargue was assigned command of Army
units in Hawaii.

Also to be honored tonight is the Air Force Association, a
70,000-member nonprofit, civilian organization that conducts programs
to increase public understanding of national security issues. The
association will receive the Milton Caniff Spirit of Flight Award.

The special guest mistress of ceremonies will be actress Maureen
O'Hara, who was the first female CEO of a commercial airline.

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*Contact James Cummings by phone at 225-2395 or e-mail at
james_cummings@coxohio.com

© 1997 Dayton Daily News