On the Trail of Delusion, Episode 24, Lawrence Haapanen on UFO’s, Jim Garrison, & the JFK murder
TRANSCRIPT:
(INTRODUCTION:)
I want to thank everybody for coming this afternoon. My name is Fred Litwin.
Noted author Fred Litwin. And of course, Fred is also the author of I was a teenage JFK conspiracy freak, On the trail of delusion. and Oliver Stone’s film Flam. The demagogue of Dealey Plaza.
Fred Litwin is here. He’s a longtime author and certainly watcher of politics.
Joining us, Fred Litwin, great to have you here.
Thank you very much.
[Music]
Welcome to another edition of ON THE TRAIL OF DELUSION, where I try to separate the wheat from the chaff and try to give you something substantial on the JFK assassination rather than the usual gruel you find on YouTube and around the internet.
Today my guest is Larry Haapanan who is an historian out west um who’s been long involved with the JFK assassination.
He’s been involved with the military and investigating UFOs and he’s got a long career on the history side uh both JFK the presidency and the assassination. So welcome Larry. And uh first question is how did you get into the JFK assassination? Well, um I guess because it happened. Uh and at that time, November 22nd, 1963, I was attending u college at the University of Washington. I was a history major and um I also happened to be an ROTC cadet. So the day it happened, I was wearing my army uniform, Army ROC. I later shifted over to Air Force, but I I happened to be home for lunch and uh an older woman from down the hall knocked on the door and said she wanted to use our phone and apparently she was having trouble with hers and she said the president had been shot and of course I was dumbfounded and so I watched the coverage on TV for a while. Then I went to uh back to class. Everything was cancelled that afternoon and uh of course that whole weekend was kind of a you know a bewildering uh unreal kind of a experience uh all the way through the shooting of Oswald and the the funeral the following Monday in Washington. And uh so as a history major, I kind of perked up my ears and was, you know, paying maybe more attention than the average person to what seemed to be history in the making. I um in my teenage years, I was a kind of a Civil War buff and that peaked an interest in the Lincoln assassination, right? And I had a book by Otto Eisenchiml that I picked up at a secondhand bookstore. And uh you know, so I had I had a past interest in that. So the Kennedy assassination wasn’t the first one I got interested in, but I waited, you know, of course, uh eager to find out what the Warren Commission would decide, right? uh immediately after the report was made public, the networks, TV networks had special programs on the Warren Report and so I audio taped uh I think ABC’s special report right on that and for quite a long time then afterwards I was kind of you know pretty content to let the Warren report be a accurate summation, you know, of of what had happened. I guess maybe I wasn’t going as far as Gerald Ford when he said the Warren report would stand like a gibraler of factual literature through the ages to come. But nevertheless, during the years to come, I I uh pretty much um thought the War Report had dealt with it adequately. But then in 1966, I made the dubious choice, I guess, that that kind of changed my life in a way of of getting a copy of Rush to Judgment by Mark Lane right after it came out, right? And that made me think that perhaps there was a conspiracy. And so then I started delving into the 26 volumes at the university library you know and getting books by Weissberg for example and later Sylvia Maher and Edward j. Estein of course
nd looking you know what articles began to appear in magazines like look and ramparts and Saturday Evening Post and Minority of One and Esquire. Then of course in I guess February 1967, I was walking down a street in Los Angeles. I think I was there on a debate trip and you know there was a headline, Jim Garrison is investigating the assassination. So of course I began following the u the Garrison investigation which I probably will touch on later. So that’s how it happened. So yeah, I mean I mean Mark Lane was very very influential. I mean, did you start corresponding with some of these people back then? Uh, no, I didn’t. In 1967, I graduated and got my commission in the Air Force and went on active duty. From the money I got from my first paycheck, I ordered the 26 volumes of the Warren Commission. I hadn’t been able to afford the $76 before that. That doesn’t sound like a lot today, but back then it would be like a whole month’s rent. You know, it was many hundreds of dollars in today’s money. and and so I began researching the 26 volumes on my own. And then in 1968, I joined up with a couple of other guys from Seattle, my hometown, in the Washington State Citizens Committee of Inquiry. Then I began to meet, you know, know other people. You knew you knew George Renard from Seattle and Paul Hul and Halverb and Bill Turner in the Bay Area and Fred Nukem in Los Angeles and through him David Lifton and Ray Marcus I met uh William Costalano other people of that area and George Renar, right? You knew you knew George? Oh yeah, George Rener was a lifetime friend of mine. We Right. Yeah. I continued to uh know him for decades. He passed away in 2017 and and uh I really lost a friend when he passed away. Yeah, he has some of the more interesting letters and stuff uh that are out there. I don’t know if there’s anything more in his papers, but it was always interesting to read a George Rener uh letter. Well, yeah, he had a terrific sense of humor as did Fred Nukem. They they their letters would sometimes, you know, turn to satire and jokes. And George mailed uh Fred a dead cockroach on one occasion and that was named Andy. And you know, they they had in particular a real uh humorous uh take on things at time. What was your experience just curiosity with Raymond Marcus? Because I I sort of gather from some of his letters he seemed rather pedantic, but what what was your experience with Raymond Marcus? I met him once when he came over to Fred Nukem’s house and I happened to be staying with Fred. Okay. Fred and Ry had a very contentious relationship to put it mildly because Fred loaned him a copy of the Zapruder film and Ray wouldn’t give it back and you probably know about that. Yeah. That’s all related to the Farewell America story. Uh you bet. Yeah. Okay. So, look, tell how did you get involved with the with the Garrison investigation and what did you do um for for Jim Garrison? Well, yeah. The ironic part of it is I was a serving officer in the US Air Force. Therefore, I had a kind of a arms length relationship with the garrison investigation. But uh what happened was um Ed Jeffs who was a reporter for the Tacoma News Tribune and chair of our committee in the Seattle Tacoma area, he um called me one day when I happened to be home in Seattle because I would go there uh sometimes on weekends or on leave and um he said, “Hey, we’re southern cops.” which of course wasn’t technically true, but you know, he was trying to joke around a little about it because he had gotten these letters from Garrison’s office appointing him and me as representatives of Garrison’s office. This is in like September 68, you know, several months before the Shaw trial, right? And uh the office would send those letters out to literally God only knows who or how many. And I know I had one, Ed had one, Fred Nukem had one, which I’ve seen, and you know, I’m sure others. Do you still have yours? Oh, definitely. Okay. Love to see that. Oh, yeah. Well, you know, I take I have mixed emotions because on the one hand, I thought there was um some hope for the Garrison investigation and then Fred and I turned out to be disillusioned about that after the Shaw trial, but at the same time, I felt like I was doing something, right? The president had been shot down like a dog in the street, and there were what seemed to be good questions that had been raised about it. And the vast majority of Americans, you know, may have thought that there was a conspiracy, but they weren’t doing anything. They weren’t lifting a finger, right, to look into it themselves. And so, um, I didn’t have any direct communication with Garrison’s office. And that was I I think the way I wanted it, but I did go through uh Steve Burton occasionally. He was the uh citizens committee of inquiry chairman in Los Angeles, right? A young college student at the time. Basically, I went out on my own, you know, to kind of uh pursue a u a avenue of inquiry that nobody else was pursuing on Garrison’s investigation. And that was looking into G. Clinton Wheat. Clinton Wheat is a uh another fellow who was subpoenaed by Garrison, I think at the same time as Dr. Stanley Drenin, right, in Los Angeles. And that came about because Lauren Skip Hall had uh told Garrison about these two guys and and he knew them both well. and um you know he talked to Garrison about how they had been uh leaders in the right-wing movement in the LA area and um and wheat had had meetings in his home in Los Angeles where where uh people like uh Colonel um Gail of the California Rangers and Edward Eugene Bradley and uh Paul and you know other people right Garrison was u at least somewhat interested in uh you know they were uh people that would go to these meetings these so-called patriotic meetings at wheat’s house and so Garrison wanted to talk to wheat and Dannon Dannon went to court and got a judge to um turn down uh Garrison’s request for Drenin to go testify on the grounds that Grant Drenin said he had patience as a physician. He had patients that depended on him for uh treatment and he just couldn’t tear himself away from LA, right? And the judge went along with that. Wheat, on the other hand, just went on the lamb. He just picked up uh and it so happened that he had been living for several years just outside Clamoth Falls, Oregon, which is where I was stationed at the Air Force at the time. So I was uh you know we and and I had been in the same place. Um so that put me kind of Johnny on the spot to uh look into wheat. So Wheat was from Louisiana. He was a convicted murderer who had gotten a pardon. Um he was um a heavy equipment operator by occupation and had moved to LA, owned a very large house and um set himself up as you know kind of a leader of the far right there. In 1964, he chaired something called uh committee of 1 million Caucasians to march on Congress. Uh they didn’t actually have a million people show up at that time. And he was also a guy who the FBI had an eye on. And um he he moved to LA or from LA to to Oregon. Was Was he a Minute Man as well or? Well, I’d put him You know, it’s hard to separate the groups in LA. That’s right. The California Rangers, the Christian Defense League, the NSRP, right? They they over overlapped. Yeah. Uh I think in their membership and in their uh certainly in their goals. So whether he was ever officially a Minute Man, I doubt. But um he was part of that paramilitary. Right. Right. Yes. So I set off to try to find out what happened to him and I got in touch with reporters at the Reading Record Search Light newspaper down in California, right in California. And they were covering this because wheat had been traced to a cabin in a remote location in Shasta County, California. and they had actually interviewed his wife. Uh but he had disappeared a second time. Uh one day a car arrived. He piled in and people drove him away leaving his wife behind. And um so I was able to, for example, you know, listen to a taped interview with Mrs. Wheat. Uh one one reporter in particular um Wes Hughes was very uh active in uh investigating wheat and that that and also you know other associated characters. So, um, I kind of teamed up with Wes Hughes for a while, and I also got myself acquainted with Hal Hunt, who lived in Bernie, California, and he was the right-wing racist publisher of, uh, the National Chronicle, uh, which had a rather wide readership, I think, in the far right. and he was an old fellow who was sort of uh I guess hungry for some kind of company or someone to pay any attention to him. So I would occasionally drop by and talk with him at his office and um we got along pretty well although of course I was totally out of step with his uh political beliefs. But he thought that I was kind of a fellow traveler with his cause. So or else I wouldn’t be there. Uh so he would um he would tell me things and uh was you know quite um talkative uh and and so that was interesting. And then I talked to people in law enforcement. I really don’t know why some of these I talked to right-wingers in Los Angeles about wheat and his male. Uh, one lady in particular, her daughter, a teenager, had uh, apparently run off with a fellow named Joseph Raymond Kerry who was originally from Texas and been living in Southern California and and he was apparently a minute man. and uh Carrie and this lady’s daughter had disappeared and she had written to all kinds of the local hardight paramilitary types in these different groups I previously mentioned. So she gave me a list of the people that she’d written to to look at and it was, you know, kind of like a who’s who of the more notorious characters, right? White wing in the LA area whose names I ran across in print in various places or newspaper stories or so on, but I never found wheat despite my uh digging. Do we know what ever happened to him? Yes. He he died in 1979 in Shasta County, California. In other words, he eventually came back to Shasta County with his wife, right? In the 70s, I guess, and lived there until his death and then he was buried back home in North in Louisiana, right? Yeah. His his wife told the story that she had heard from somebody who said they were an army man and that she would go to Colorado Springs. She could see your husband again. And apparently he made some illusion to an army fort. Uh I forget the name of it off hand that was near Colorado Springs. She herself seemed to be kind of doubtful about where he had initially gone. Hal Hunt told me something interesting though because we were talking about wheat, you know, basically uh taking off for parts unknown after he was subpoenaed. And and Hunt told me that if Wheat went to New Orleans and talked to the DA, the whole right wing would be finished. And I think that’s kind of an exact quotation of what he said. I guess there was a fear that wheat had um such an inside knowledge of this far right wing of of characters. It would not be a good idea for him to sit in front of a grand jury. Yeah. I mean I think of I mean uh Edgar Eugene Bradley who was in the middle of that crowd. I mean, it appears that the only reason Garrison got interested in him was basically a feud between him and some of the other right-wingers. Oh, you bet. Yes. In August 1968, I went to Los Angeles and a meeting was set up between me and the two major witnesses against Bradley. Uh, and I guess I can name them because I doubt they’re alive, but Carol and Tom Thornhill, right? Yeah. Yeah. names that a lot of people I think will recognize if uh and they told me all kinds of things, you know, about how Bradley was this uh leader of a faction of the Minutemen that wanted Kennedy dead, not really a Dew faction, but a rival faction. And then um I went down again in early ‘ 68 after the Shaw trial. And one night at Fred Nukem’s I said, “Why don’t we phone Bradley and see if we can talk to him?” And Fred was a little dubious about that, but I got on the phone and I talked to Bradley and he said, “Come on over.” So Fred and I went to Bradley’s house and u he met us at the door and said, “Don’t you Garrison guys ever give up?”
Well, we assured him that we were not strictly speaking garrison guys at that point. And then he um he proceeded to tell us the ins and outs of that feud, right? And how there had been an attempt to firebomb his house, you know, and he had been more or less thrown out of his own church. Not that he was the preacher, but he was a I guess founder or leader of a uh church there in Los Angeles, right? And um you know, and and how he had been feuding with people like Adelot Thornhill and um Yeah, you’re right. Yeah. Well, there was even a lawsuit. They were they were suing each other as well. There was a big lawsuit going on. Oh, I know. I went and I’m thinking in 1971 I went to LA and yeah attended one of the court sessions in that lawsuit. Oh really? Wow. Yeah. Carol uh Inelot and Tom Thornley were out in the hallway. I guess if they looked at me they they perhaps didn’t recognize me from meeting me in ‘ 68. Dennis Mau was there with them. Okay. Yeah, of course he was the young fellow who had supposedly known about a uh rattling plot to kill Kennedy in LA in 1960. Am I right, I think. And that’s when he was like 14 years old or something. I was Yeah. 15, 14, right? Um but I didn’t actually I never met Mau, but I did see him because he was there. And then I sat in the courtroom with the with Bradley or near Bradley and yeah that was yeah eventually he won the suit and was awarded $1.
I he suffered all kinds of personal uh u difficulty and uh you know he was a u reserve deputy sheriff and when Hubert Humphrey visited LA in 1968 he was told you know we we don’t want you in on any security arrangements concerning Humphrey’s visit because if something happened to Humphrey you know and you were there uh it would be you know terrible. So it did that was one way it affected him but of course his reputation suffered. He talked about going in a store once and you know the proprietor you know when they found out who he was said and oh are you’re the guy that killed Kennedy. Yeah. He had to suffer through that. Now, in uh August 68, Fred Nukem and I went to Edgar Eugene Bradley’s house again and we had a sitdown interview with Jerry Patrick Heming and Lawrence Howard and that of course Patrick Heming um dominated the conversation to the point where I don’t remember anything that Howard had to say, but Right. P Jerry Patrick Heming of course is, you know, well known as having been a a teller of tall tales and a and a blabbermouth and and somebody you know that you just really had to ask yourself uh what what what has he said that is true or you know he he he he told us for example you know that he met Oswald in LA or rather a suburb of LA in 1959 right Oswald was a murdered um El Toro at the at the home of the uh Cuban council in LA. You know, he had very interesting stories, but that was kind of uh a unique I thought it was kind of a unique place where we would end up interviewing Howard and and Heming at Edgar Eugene Bradley’s house. Fascinating. I mean, my my favorite Heming story is this the year that he he he u he was on a panel at JFK Lancer, the conference in Dallas, and he was so rambling and incoherent that everybody started laughing and there’s a write up on the web of that of that session where they just can’t believe just like how, you know, this guy’s completely incoherent, you know, just making up these stories. It was it was quite a funny little writeup. between 68 and 71, I met Bradley on several different visits to LA, you know, and and he was a very personable guy. Uh seemingly, you know, very sincere and uh it was a, you know, I had a whole different take on him, of course, than the one I had when I first went to LA. And all I knew was Garrison has had this guy arrested, you know, and wow, I’m in the same city as Edgar Eugene Bradley. I didn’t even know him. But what I did know him, of course, are and and he he went on being uh in in associated with Fred Nukem. I think Fred testified I I’m not sure about this, but I think Fred testified at his uh tri at the trial, you know, when he sued Okay. Bible. He was going originally to sue other people. Yeah. As well. I think Mark Lane. I have I have a copy of of like the four-page uh suit against Mark Lane. Yeah. But I don’t I don’t know. I assume it didn’t really go anywhere. Yeah. I didn’t meet Mark Lane until 71, but Well, it’s it’s it’s just it’s f I mean fascinating. I mean, I really feel for Bradley. I mean I when I point out to people that you know Garrison I mean I mean he made a he charged Bradley with with conspiracy to to assassinate Kennedy and then like oops I made a mistake. I mean that’s it’s quite a mistake to make. Yeah. Yeah. Um Bradley told me once that he was visiting the Pacific Northwest and dropped in on Fred Chrisman uh after this was all over. It would have been, I think, between 68 and 70. And I guess they had a I would have loved to have been there for that. I guess they had a chat, you know, where they compare notes on what it’s like to be a garrison suspect. So, you know, this is all amazing material. What So, tell us a bit about Fred Chrisman and and and that part of your work uh for the for the Garrison investigation. Yeah. Well, I occasionally got asked to do something to look into Chrisman. Uh, we had kind of a division of labor in that up in the Seattle Tacoma area. Uh, Ed Jeffs who covered Chrisman as a reporter, you know, for the Tacoma News Tribune. Uh, so Eds and George Rener. Um, my two uh, comrades up there. I hope the word comrade doesn’t get misinterpreted. uh in in the committee they they hand did most of the investigating of Chrisman and um I did the wheat into things, you know, because by by mere chance I guess um you know we organized the committee of inquiry before either Weat or Chrisman had actually been subpoenaed. They were not yet subpoenaed as witnesses by Garrison. So, and then it just so happens that Chrisman crops up in Ed and George’s backyard, so to speak. And then a few months later, uh, or excuse me, earlier, um, Wheat, who lived just outside the town where I lived in Oregon, uh, got subpoenaed. So, we were both kind of, uh, lucky to be so close. some of his characters and so but occasionally I would get asked to do something or I would talk to people about Chrisman. Uh like I went to Veil, Oregon where he went to high school and I talked to a couple of people there who knew him. Uh another occasion I u was asked to look into some gypsy who uh was supposed to be tied up with uh with Chrisman, right? And this lived in Oregon. So I I kind of got the Oregon end of the Chrisman um u detective work. Yeah. And well, didn’t he have a house in Oregon or his wife his wife or his wife’s father had a house in Oregon? Well, his father, Fred Chrisman, Senior, right, uh lived in Portland and um had raceh horses. He had a, as I understand it, a concession at the racetrack there. And yes, he does seem to have had a ranch or farm. Now, that got made into a big deal. And that’s what brought Fred up the coast from LA in July 68 after uh Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy had been assassinated. Fred wanted to leave the country for a while. He just, you know, couldn’t put up with it. He wanted to go to Canada to Vancouver Island and just get away from America and Americans for a while, which he did. But on the way up, he stopped and visited me in Clamoth Falls, Oregon. Right. Yeah. Out of the blue, I got a knock on the door one day after after I came home from the base. And here’s Fred Nukem in a, you know, with a beard wearing sandals and I was there in my Air Force uniform. So, we kind of made a contrast. And but we really, you know, warmed up to each other very quickly and we went out to dinner together. I I took him out to the wheat place after wheat disappeared for parts unknown. The house he’d been living in, an old school house, burned to the ground. And I I would imagine he was the one that burned it, right? But um yeah, so I took I took the Nukems out there and showed him that. So um and then Fred kept going up the coast on the way to Vancouver Island and uh stopped to see George and Ed or you know and then on his way back I was in Seattle. So we all had another little reunion then. But yeah, Fred uh was sent up north uh as kind of a u side to his heading for Vancouver Island to look into Chrisman. And he did find a Chrisman farm in u the rural part of Oregon west of Portland. Well, I I have to laugh because Garrison Babe, pardon? No. Well, Garrison was the one who wrote a a memo to the HSCA saying, you know, look, isn’t it strange? Shaw went to Portland after San Francisco after the assassination. And guess what? You know, uh, Chrisman has a farm or his father has a farm out there. Isn’t that strange? Yeah. And one rumor had it that uh G. Clinton Wheat fled to that farm before he went back down to Chasta County, which I think is ridiculous, right? Yeah. And another version was that there were uh Sato masochistic parties or something that went on there. I mean there there were rumors uh going around about the Chrisman farm or the white farm uh you know that never of course had any uh any real basis but but yes his father does seem to have had a farm. And so Chrisman was involved in the sort of the Mory Island uh hoax. Yeah. 1947. Do you want to talk a bit about that or you had recently I know as a guest Adam Golitlightly? Yeah. And he mentioned my name I two or three times. I I’ve been trying to uh do some research that might be helpful to him. And uh yeah, Maui Island of course was this case where Fred Chrisman and another guy named Harold Doll, you know, supposedly reported um these doughnut shaped flying saucers going over Doll’s boat out in Puget Sound near Mauy Island and dropping debris on the boat that killed the dog and injured uh Doll’s son. And then a couple of early UFO spotters, Kenneth Arnold and Amil Smith, came to Tacoma. Arnold had been hired by Ray Palmer, you know, who was a publisher of Amazing Stories and Flying Saucer Magazine and Fate magazine later, right? Uh Palmer paid um Arnold to go there to look into Mari Island and Arnold recruited Smith to come with them. And then um and they had discussions with Chrisman and Dah. And then a couple of uh at their behest, a couple of Air Force uh UFO investigators from Hamilton Air Force Base in California flew up in a B25 and talked to Chrisman Adall and supposedly got a hold of some of these fragments and then the two the two officers Davidson and Brown in flying back their their B25 crashed and they were killed. So that’s kind of the whole thing in a nutshell. Of course, it was written off by the FBI and the Army Air Force as a hoax. It got a lot of newspaper publicity, particularly after the B25 crash. Yeah. Um, I think what separate, you know, I’ve asked myself, what makes Mari Island unique, if anything in that early period where there were UFO sightings and other hoaxes going on all over the country, but particularly in the West Coast. And I guess what stands out is number one, it had this dramatic element to it. This kind of sci-fi approach to what happened that none of the other UFO sightings had. They were all just visual sightings of shiny things uh or bright things in the sky. Here you had donutshaped flying saucers that were dropping debris on people, right? Uh, and you know, so it had this sci-fi element to it that nothing else had going. And and also, um, secondly, oh, by the way, Chrisman was a big fan of sci-fi. Um, I had somebody tell me that he should have been a science fiction writer. uh you know, somebody who knew him uh told me that, but he he perhaps Maui Island was his way of u you know, making some money if they could get their story published and number two, you know, allowing him to be kind of the sci-fi author in a way. The other thing though about Mari Island was the death of the two pilots or or officers, you know, that was just a terrible tragedy. Yes. And again, put a whole different cast on it. It made it a bigger more more uh I guess as uh as Ed Rupel the the project blue book chief later called it. You know he he said it was the second biggest hoax and the dirtiest hoax you know that they ever that ever happened in UFOs. So the deaths just added to the sensationalism and the publicity and all that kind of thing that it got. So it stood out. Yeah, it was tragic. I mean, it’s hard to then to admit, you know, it was a hoax after two people have been killed. I mean, it’s just a it was horrible, horrible thing. Yeah. I met the nephew of one of the pilots or the officers, Philip Lipson and Charlotte Lever, who I’ve known for years. Uh they wrote a book about Mahari Island and then they appeared and I came along at a UFO festival south of Seattle a number of years ago and uh two guests showed up. One was the nephew of one of the pilots and the other was a lady who was Hal Doll’s or Harold Doll’s daughter. But but his Yeah. the pilot the pilot’s uh nephew he he was just very broken up and this is like you know decades later but he just seemed to be very broken up and emotionally affected by uh kind of you know reminiscing about that whole event. Yeah. That was really tragic. Yeah. Yeah. Very tragic. And so then Crispen went on and he I mean he he met Thomas Beckham and they they were sort of two characters who got involved in a variety of little schemes. I mean at one point Chris Chrisman even did a UFO conference I think at one point. Oh yeah. He he went to one or two UFO conferences that I know of. Yes. Um yeah, he continued occasionally to try to get some mileage out of the fact that he had been, you know, at the there at the beginning, you might say. And uh he he, you know, he was touted or at least by him or or Harold Dah, you know, as being a kind of like a character out of the Invaders television show and that he was the most knowledgeable guy on UFOs around and so on. So what is the theory? What’s the theory that about Chrisman and the JFK assassination? Where how does how does he supposedly fit into the assassination? after Beckham was subpoenenaed I think in December uh the around the end of 1967 and he was subpoenaed because of his association in New Orleans in the early 60s you know where the anti-cast movement and was supposed to be kind of a knowledgeable guy when it came to people like uh Banister or Yeah or whatnot Jack Martin too. Yeah. So he got subpoenaed, but also there had been letters and contacts from people to Garrison’s office saying, “You ought to look into Beckham.” Beckham after got subpoenaed said, “Uh, gosh, the only time I was ever in Dallas was with my manager.” You know, I I was a country singer, still am, and my manager then was uh Fred Chrisman, and we did make a trip to Dallas, but that was 1966. So he publicly brought Chrisman’s name up uh almost a year before Chrisman got subpoenaed and um somebody in Garrison’s office made a you know had had had noticed an anonymous letter that mentioned Chrisman and Beckham that had been written in I think May 67. So in February 68, Bill Boxley, who was a investigator for Garrison, sat down with Bob Lavender in San Francisco and Lavender met Beckham in Omaha. And then not that long later after Beckham had a, you know, parted company with Chrisman in the Puet Sound area, Lavender shows up in uh in Olympia, Seattle, Tacoma, that area associated with Chrisman. And Lavender told Boxley, you know, all kinds of things uh about Chrisman. There were uh you know the anonymous letters particularly the one from Florida which I think was written in late ‘ 67 it uh you know spelled all kinds of allegations about Chrisman that he knew Klay Shaw that he knew Tippet which is really I think crazy uh that New Orleans dozens of times you know and so on and so forth. all these things kind of piled up and eventually led to uh and then Ed Jeffs who who you know would report on Chrisman in Tacoma um he was investigating and in touch with Garrison’s office and so eventually you know in November 68 uh uh Chris got called as a witness and he he went down to New Orleans and testified and didn’t have anything very valuable to say about anything. And uh you know there are several things about Chrisman though that I think deserve to be brought up. One is he had a very brave and distinguished record as a um Army Air Force pilot in World War II right in the China Burma India Theater. He did, I think, what looks to me like some good work on behalf of the gypsies in Tacoma that really got uh quite a bit of notice and drew attention to the plight of gypsy people, not just there, but across the country. It’s kind of an underrepresentative, ignored, left behind kind of a segment of the population. So, I think he did some good work on behalf of gypsies. I personally don’t consider that to have been a a con job on Chrisman’s part as much as it was, you know, a sincere attempt to help them. And then of course he had a many years as a teacher uh and school administrator you know so he really did some positive constructive things in his life but he would also turn around and get involved in in some dubious activities from time to time. Uh some of which maybe he didn’t even want to get involved in. So tell tell us a bit about um you know the fact Garrison included Chrisman in in the first draft of his book on the trail of the assassins. Yeah. Before that was published he he had Chrisman in there and then uh so he he had contact you know he had trouble getting it published and I think he had contacted you and and Fred Nukem for some help in adding some information about Chrisman. Yeah I had continued to to research Chrisman over the years. I got I met a fellow named Khani Hanohano in Seattle in 1971 at a UFO study group and he after I got out of the Air Force and Colani uh was a had a strong interest in Chrisman. So Colani and I collaborated for many years in researching Chrisman. Um, and uh, you know, in 1978, I was listening on radio to the broadcast on NPR, I think, of the, uh, House Select Committee hearings. Uh, and one day they bring up Chrisman, you know, and their photographic panel had looked at those photos of the tramps, right? You know, one of them could not be ruled out as Chrisman. They couldn’t say definitely it was, but they couldn’t. So I contacted the House Select Committee and ended up talking because they called me back. I think Cliff Fenton, the chief investigator for the House Select Committee. I told Fenton that when I taught high school in Oregon in the mid70s, I met a woman who had been a teacher with Chrisman at Reineer High School. And I, you know, I asked her, “Well, do you remember what went on and so on?” And and she told me about distinctly remembering Chrisman being in high in the high school the day of the assassination. And so I told Cliff Fenton about that. They ended up, as you know, I’m sure, getting u uh you know, affidavits, the teachers that had taught with him and could vouch for that. And of course, even in his book, Murder of a City, that came out in 1970, he said that’s what he was doing. But that hadn’t gotten much attention or that would that been pretty much overlooked. That book wasn’t a bestseller. It wasn’t widely read. Um, so anyway, the House Committee’s report ended up saying, you know, we we were able to exclude Chrisman despite what the photographic panel said. He, you know, he he’s clearly not one of the tramps, right? So, in n in the late 80s, Jim Garrison was working on his book on the trail of the assassins, and he contacted Fred Nukem and asked him if he could help him out in any way with the Chrisman end of his research, which at that time, as you said, was going to be a big part of the book. Yeah. And by that time, you know, he thought Chrisman was a CIA agent. And uh well, Fred turned to me because he knew I had been doing research on Chrisman far beyond, you know, what we did back in the 60s. So I wrote to Garrison and I later had a phone call with him, uh, you know, where I said basically, it’ll do your book more harm than good to put Chrisman in it. Well, on the phone call, Garrison explained to me some of the reasons, you know, we had for wanting to uh finger Chrisman, like the fact that Chrisman taught in a town in Oregon that wasn’t too far from Dallas, Oregon, where Larry Craford was from originally. And it was kind of like, yeah, but not even at the same time. um you know so he gave me some very weak reasons. But one thing that you had a a uh installment of your blog cover was was something that I independently arrived at myself and that was that Garrison thought Chrisman because he’d worked at Boeing represented this conglomeration of aerospace companies that was behind the assassination. Right. Yes. Yeah. in the late ‘ 68 that that was a big revelation for Garrison that aerospace companies like General Dynamics or Lockheed or North American or Boeing in particular uh you know that some group of those companies uh I don’t need I don’t mean to indict all of them that was his bag but uh you know he really thought that was who was behind the assassination and Chrisman was obviously uh still working for Boeing. Yeah. In fact, he worked there from 60 to 62 in the personnel department. I I talked to a woman who had worked in the personnel department back when Chrisman was there and she told me that he had a pretty mundane job and um you know, it definitely didn’t involve u any cloak and dagger kind of stuff that Garrison described to it. Well, I spoke I spoke to uh the publisher I think apprentice hall, one of the companies that turned down Garrison’s book and I spoke to him and he basically said one of the problems was that Garrison had promised all this information about Chrisman and the CIA and nothing materialized and that was one of his chief reasons for turning down the book. Yeah. I found on the internet and and you may have done so as well the actual letter from the editor or publisher. Yeah. Explaining that to Garrison. Yeah. That that what you just have the material you have on Chrisman is just too weak. So it turned out back when I talked to Garrison, of course, I had no idea that that was happening. So, it turns out my call to Garrison wasn’t the only or even an important reason why he dropped Christmas in the book, but maybe it had a little bit to do with it. I don’t know. Well, I’m sure it had a lot to do with it, but uh perhap what I don’t know is is did uh didclar, who is the editor of his book, did he also help uh or take, you know, tell Garrison to take out Chrisman? Okay. I I don’t know the answer to that. I mean, the the scar papers are locked up in the AARC, and I’m just dying to get to look at those papers, which might tell us more about um the editing of Garrison’s book. You bet. Well, there’s so much we know and even so much more that we don’t know and would like to, you know, and it’s a shame that we don’t have access. But, of course, it would take a hundred people a lifetime of work to to go through a lot of what’s out there that that we unfortunately uh don’t have the time to look at or or have access to. Yeah, I’m I’m hoping that the ARC does digitize a lot of their stuff because they have an awful lot of interesting material um that’s just sort of sitting there in like they have like five different warehouses um in the DC area. So, I’m I’m wish they would digitize it. Well, right. or as another example of what’s sitting around somewhere, I hope, you know, is the uh 40 filing cabinets and stuff that David Lifton accumulated because I don’t think everything in it would be garbage, you know. No, I’m sure he had a lot of Garrison material and he had all sorts of stuff, letters from other other researchers and Oh, yeah. and the results of interviews that he did. Yeah. Some of which he never mentioned in print. Yeah. I know. Oh, I mean that that stuff is somewhere and I’m I wish somebody would digitize it. I I can tell you that somebody is now digitizing Gayan Fon’s records. Mhm. Which is I have like a banker’s blocks full of correspondence with Lifton. Okay. He was, you know, I only met him once in my life, but uh 25 years ago or so, you know, we kind I I became in close contact with him again. And for years, you know, he would share and I was, you know, not always convinced by what he was sharing, but uh I I enjoyed knowing him. I enjoyed knowing Lift. Yeah. I I had one phone call with David Lifton and and uh I had called him in Las Vegas. I wanted to talk about the the the question whether uh General Lameé was at the autopsy. And it was a very very it was a fun conversation with with David in his apartment. There was only one small space where he got good cell reception. And so if he moved slightly, he would lose connection. At one point we did lose connection. And he immediately sent me an email. Call me right back. And I called him back and we spent over an hour on the phone. He was reminiscing about, you know, the different different uh publishing companies that took on best evidence. And it was a bit of a reminiscing time for him. I think, you know, he appeared to me a bit lonely or wanted somebody to talk to. Yeah. I had a lot of long conversations with him or conversations that would come at late pretty late at night for me and uh it was always enjoyable to talk to him. Uh and he yeah he would reminisce quite a lot. So, just uh you know, we don’t have that much time left, but can you tell us a bit about your um your work in the military uh on investigating UFOs? Sure. Yeah. I was stationed at Kingsley Field, an Air Force base in uh Clamoth Falls, Oregon for three years. And um it wasn’t long after I got there that they decided that I ought to be as a you know brand new second lieutenant with not enough work I guess to do. Uh that in addition to my job as base disaster preparedness officer that was my main duty there for three years. They would make me the uh UFO project officer for the base. And that meant that u I would investigate in the field UFO reports that arrived from people generally in the southern Oregon northern California area because we were very close to the California border. We were kind of what I thought of as the greater Mount Shasta area in the manner of speaking. So, and a few months went by before I got my first uh report to look into, but over a period of time from 68 on, and of course, this was for project blue book. So, I would send reports to them and also to the Condan Committee at the University of Colorado, which was investigating UFOs under an Air Force contract. And some cases I investigated I didn’t report because they just didn’t seem to have anything to go by. You know, like somebody saw a little light in the sky going over at night, which could be anything, right? So, I would talk to them and then I would, you know, and take the written report. they’d fill out a form and you know then I would decide not to send it into project blue book because they wanted something that was more sub you know sub had some substance right so um every few months on average I would get a report uh and I think maybe twice I sent in a report in writing you know or by fax to um to project blue book and the conan committee And then after the con or after the project blue book was shut down in December 69, a few months went by. And in April 70, I got another report. At that point, I decided, well, I may not be working for Project Bulbick anymore, but I’ll go investigate it anyway. It was a report by a couple of Air Force sergeants of what they thought was a landing of a UFO on a mountain in Northern California. That turned out to be very interesting. Um, they were good witnesses. They they showed me a picture that they made of the UFO that looked very interesting, right? It it looked a lot like a picture I’d seen of a UFO in France. And um I had a geer counter with me and a Polaroid camera. And when I took a photograph of what they said was where the UFO landed, you know, with a Polaroid camera, you’d pull the thing out and then you could watch it develop, as you may remember. Yep. Yeah. So, I’m looking at this photograph, visualize in front of my eyes, and what I’m looking at is the sergeant off in the distance, trees and logs, and then what looked like flames of fire coming out of the ground. I thought, you know, now that may have been an anomaly of the film. I I totally recognize that in retrospect, but you can imagine my reaction and looking at this photo and seeing what I couldn’t see with the naked eye that looked like fire coming up, right, from the ground. But so that turned out to be very interesting. But I had nobody to report it to. Project Blue didn’t exist anymore. So um I just put it in my file, which I still have. I still have my file of all my reports and notes and photos and things like that because otherwise I would have just it would have gotten thrown away, right? Project blue ended. So, what what do you make of the current activity with UAPs that’s going on right now? I you know, I don’t know really what to make of it. It’s kind of bewildering. Um, I never been much of a believer in u in the actual existence of of some kind of alien hardware flying around in our skies. So, uh, even though I have a interest in flying saucers that goes back to my real really back to my childhood, I was a regular reader of Fate magazine as a teenager and I bought books about UFOs back when I was maybe 10 or 12. And as I Yeah. So I had this long history of interest in UFOs. But when I actually started investigating them, I found that the witnesses were very reputable, credible people. But my the difficulty is how do I as the investigator establish what it was they saw or even really for sure what it looked like or how it behaved, right? So they would draw me diagrams and give me a description, but then you know it was a case of do I really think this is truly unidentified? Um I’ve got some statistics here. the two years uh 1968 and 1969.
Um 68 there was only project rule book only uh categorized three sightings that whole year as unidentified and then in ‘ 69 only one. So, I came in at a point where Project Blue Book was treating very very few UFO sightings as being truly unidentified. Um,
for what? Well, I’m I’m just amazed that like Luna has her hearings uh in Washington and then she she actually was on Joe Rogan show claiming that our advanced technology today is because of of aliens. I mean, it’s just it’s I I couldn’t believe she actually said that. And uh Well, I can believe she said it, but I can’t believe it’s true.
That’s true. Yeah, you’re right. Yeah. Well, yeah, go ahead. Oh, well, yeah, go on to another topic if you have time. Yeah. I mean, I think what I’d like to do is just sort of um there’s so much more to talk about. I mean, I’d just like to get your thoughts on the current state of JFK assassination research, what you think about the assassination today, and how that’s changed over the years. I It’s a just a generally broad topic. Well, I think I’ve grown more skeptical over the years, you know, about many of the claims that are made, the conspiracy theories and so on. I’ve decided now that I’ve got to a certain point in life that I would like to be neutral on the subject of the JFK assassination. I know that’s a way of probably alienating everybody else who has any interest in this subject, but I’d kind of like to take the stance that I’m neither pro- conspiracy theory nor totally anti-conspiracy theory because I think there is some uh possibility, you know, kind of thinking from an epistemological viewpoint that we don’t know quite enough to be able to say flatly that there was no conspiracy of any kind. Um Oswald might have conspired with the groundkeeper at Daily Plaza, you know, so that that guy would make his lawnmower backfire and be a distraction as Oswald fired the shots. I’m not saying that happened. Please don’t get that. I’m saying that would be But that kind of conspiracy, of course, would thrill no one. No one would knock themselves out for decades trying to prove that kind of conspiracy. It it just wouldn’t rise to the level of what would make people who believe in a conspiracy happy, right? Yeah. But on the at the same time, some kind of low-level conspiracy that doesn’t have to include everyone and their brother uh or every, you know, every letter agency of the government. uh you know you can’t rule totally 100% with 100 you know moral conviction rule that out and I don’t imagine um the uh you know what I’m saying is going to make some people happy but uh on the other hand the conspiracy theories that have come along you know the the the thing is to look at them each in turn and see what’s wrong with them and there’s always something wrong uh or there’s always something lacking or something more that I’d like to see before I would buy into them. So individual conspiracy theories I have yet to be convinced. Um, but you know, I think debunkers, if you want to use that term, it’s really kind of a unpleasant term in a way, you know, like UFO debunkers. But, um, you know, the the people that that the conspiracy theorists would would despise as being debunkers are really doing the conspiracy theories a service as cons, you know, being critics of what they do. Uh it’s setting up guard rails. It’s saying, “Look, if you want to have a decent conspiracy theory, don’t do this or don’t bring up that, right?” But, you know, uh uh yeah, kind of narrow your thinking and try to weed out the garbage and the untruths and the mistakes that you’re making and then see what you have left and maybe build on that. Um yeah, I totally agree. I totally agree with that. I’m surprised that more conspiracy believers don’t do some of that work. Um, policing themselves. It’s it’s very important. The other thing I would say about a possible conspiracy is I think the one thing that I don’t know about is was somebody egging Oswald on that we don’t know about in Jim Host thought so. You know, Jim Hosty, who I got to know back in 1983 when he came and talked to my uh JFK assassination class in Kansas. He came on two different occasions and and spoke at link both times. I also met him once at his home and we talked on the phone and corresponded for years after that. Um, you know, he talked about the Castro regime murder mount. That’s the way he put it. that he thought that perhaps not with intent as far as Oswald was concerned, not that they were particularly addressing him, but you know, he was just influenced by and egged on in a way by the rhetoric that was coming out of Havana. Now I think eventually Hosty went a little bit further than that because in his book Assignment Oswald, you know, he says in in a he makes an assertion that I think has gotten very little if any attention. He asserts in Simon Oswald that Oswald was photographed in Mexico City on a street with Kikakov.
I think by the time he wrote ASSIGNMENT OSWALD which was like around 10 years after I met him,
he brought that up which he had never mentioned to me but you know so I think Hostie over time became a conspiracy theorist but thought that it was the Cuban and or the Russian uh governments that were behind it. Right? more than just Oswald picking up something from the news that Castro may have said. Yeah. Castro did it theory was also bought into by other people like um you know two men that in ‘ 63 were very much involved in Cuban affairs in the department of the army were Alexander Haig and Joseph Calfano. and they both expressed over the years their conviction that Castro was behind the assassination. And uh I don’t know that we can totally rule that out. Also Gus Russo’s theory about uh Oh yes, Gus Russo. You bet. Yes. Yeah. And we I guess we normally think of him as being anti-conspiracy, but on the other hand, he he certainly uh did some intriguing research on the on the Castro angle. Yeah, very much so.
Okay, look, I think there’s a lot more we can talk about in this. We’ll we’ll probably have to do another interview at another time, but thank you very much for session.
It was a lot of fun.
Thank you very much
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