The UFO Bombshell Before Roswell: Missouri’s 1941 Crash and Cover-Up Copyright © 2026 by Paul Blake Smith. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever, including internet usage, without written permission from Llewellyn Worldwide Ltd., except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner for the purpose of training artificial intelligence technologies or systems. First Edition First Printing, 2026 Book design by Rordan Brasington Cover design by Kevin R. Brown Llewellyn Publications is a registered trademark of Llewellyn Worldwide Ltd. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data (Pending) ISBN: 978-0-7387-8315-4 Llewellyn Worldwide Ltd. does not participate in, endorse, or have any authority or responsibility concerning private business transactions between our authors and the public. All mail addressed to the author is forwarded but the publisher cannot, unless specifically instructed by the author, give out an address or phone number. Any internet references contained in this work are current at publication time, but the publisher cannot guarantee that a specific location will continue to be maintained. Please refer to the publisher’s website for links to authors’ websites and other sources. Llewellyn Publications A Division of Llewellyn Worldwide Ltd. 2143 Wooddale Drive Woodbury, MN 55125-2989 www.llewellyn.com Printed in the United States of America GPSR Representation: UPI-2M PLUS d.o.o., Meduli eva 20, 10000 Zagreb, Croatia matt.parsons@upi2mbooks.hr
Other Books by Paul Blake Smith President Eisenhower’s Close Encounters The Nixon-Gleason Alien Encounter
CONTENTS Preface … xi Introduction … 1 Chapter One: At the Crash Scene … 21 Chapter Two: The Craft and Bodies … 41 Chapter Three: The Cover-Up … 59 Chapter Four: What the Granddaughter Saw … 79 Chapter Five: Linda Wallace’s Research … 99 Chapter Six: A Couple of Curious Capitol Claims … 117 Chapter Seven: Two Deeply Masonic Presidents … 139 Chapter Eight: What Once Secret Documents Reveal … 175 Chapter Nine: More Than One Crash Site? … 187 Conclusion: A Modern Timeline … 205 Bibliography … 219 About the Author … 243
PREFACE
My first book, MO41, The Bombshell Before Roswell: The Case for a Missouri 1941 UFO Crash, was released by now defunct Argus Publishing in February 2016 and sold fairly well. It was certainly aided by its front cover appearing on the popular cable TV program Ancient Aliens, aired and later re-aired on the History Channel. For years I had researched various clues and rumors, facts and informed speculation regarding an alleged extraterrestrial spaceship crash landing just outside my original hometown of Cape Girardeau, Missouri, in the spring of 1941. I had more than enough data for a full-length book, but within the text, I made at least one major mistake: I decided to guesstimate the timing of the crash as April 12, 1941. A year after publication, I realized that this initial date was a substantial error and in need of correction, plus I came to understand that I’d made a few other, more minor xi
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mistakes that required amending, so here we are in 2026, revised and updated with some new information. Over eighty years after the fact, the cosmic occurrence has proven to be an extremely difficult modern case to research and get a firm grip on. Almost all Cape Girardeau business enterprise and government records from the early 1940s are long gone, and so are all the eyewitnesses, and even their offspring are by now deceased. Tangible physical evidence was swiftly scooped up and hauled away at the time, with observers somberly sworn not to speak of the macabre event, and most obeyed. Aiding the cover-up, Cape Girardeau was then a religious, conservative, and patriotic town, home to a Masonic lodge and a National Guard Armory, meaning some citizens who learned of the amazing event—without having attended it—could have been approached about loyally maintaining silence as well. Hence what should have been the biggest blockbuster—or mind-blowing front-page bombshell news story—in American history got swept under the rug, and pinning down definite hard facts about it today has proven tougher than nailing Jell-O to a wall. The facts in my circumstantial case herein are duly presented along with some logical conjecture. And in case you’re asking, yes, this author really believes that the aerial crash near Cape Girardeau took place; was extraterrestrial in nature; and was effectively hushed up to avoid a national, if not global, panic. Perhaps that was the right move for this otherworldly stunner in 1940s America, but it is not today, in my opinion. The unfolding 1941 drama, we must remind ourselves, took place before radar installations at military airbases and public airports; the forming of the United States Air Force, the Central Intelligence Agency, the National Security Agency, the Defense Intelligence Agency, and of course NASA; and even the creation
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of the worldwide internet. It was also a time before the explosion of tell-all magazine and newspaper articles, as well as candid film documentaries. Even television in 1941 was in an infant stage, barely broadcasted and scantly viewed. The celestial tragedy even went down, literally, eight months before America’s involvement in the ongoing Second World War. Obviously times have changed dramatically since. The subjects of ETs and UFOs have gone mainstream nowadays; back in prewar United States, these notions were fringe science fiction topics that few gave serious consideration to. Before continuing, it should be noted that our subject matter is what so many commonly refer to as a “UFO,” so I have utilized that quickly recognized phrase, even though we all know that Unidentified Flying Object is technically inaccurate here. What smashed into Missouri terra firma was clearly identified as a once flying nonhuman spacecraft. A visiting alien airship, by then broken open and inoperable on the ground. Since most people just say UFO as acceptable shorthand for all likely ET-themed encounters, I accept that, and not the more contemporary UAP (Unidentified Anomalous Phenomenon). In my humble opinion, that is a generic term that covers too much territory, including atmospheric conditions and various odd modern aerial circumstances that don’t fit this long-ago case. Admitting to bafflement at certain unexplained sightings and video recordings of odd flying objects at last, the American military, spurred by a startling 2021 segment within CBS’s 60 Minutes, slowly began to confess the obvious: The evidence is piling up that we are not alone.1 We’re being watched by foreign entities and their advanced technology. 1. Whitaker, “UFOs Regularly Spotted in Restricted Airspace.”
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Additionally, there are now an increasing number of sources once associated with our own US government that have seriously and most publicly alleged that we possess alien hardware, secretly stored in private aerospace facilities, undergoing great scientific scrutiny and even reverse engineering attempts. Testimony before Congress has been going on, mostly behind closed doors, but sadly little details have been spilled to the intrigued public. Frustratingly, at times the US government has proven very fickle; April 2023 congressional UFO hearings featured a Pentagon spokesperson carefully avoiding all video footage that wasn’t explainable, and after hearing eyewitness testimony claimed that the feds could find no solid proof of ET visitation, mostly just balloons floating around in our skies.2 In June 2023, NASA tried to state much the same thing in another special UFO committee hearing. Both governmental entities refused to publicly air accounts by actual firsthand experiencers and inside leakers. In a November 2024 congressional UFO hearing, there were mixed results, with former government insider Luis Daniel Elizondo3 (1972–) reminding citizens in his testimony, “Most Americans would be shocked to learn that the Pentagon’s very own public affairs office openly employs a professional psychological operations officer as the singular point of contact for any UAP-related inquiries from citizens and the media.”4 Careful psyops to dissuade belief evidently still exists, with some minor exceptions. Amid all this, in June 2023, one substantial ray of light began to shine through, in the form of a government whistleblower named David C. Grusch (1987–), a fourteen-year US Air Force captain and pilot. David was Chief of Intelligence for the 3rd Space 2. “Hearing on Unidentified Anomalous Phenomena/UFOs.” 3. Visit Elizondo’s website here: https://luiselizondo-official.com. 4. “Written Testimony of Luis Elizondo.”
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Experimentation Squadron (SES), a member of the National Geospatial Agency (NGA), and the National Reconnaissance Office (NRO). No underinformed or wildly speculative fool, he made many a contact while on the job for decades. Insider Grusch began giving public interviews about his insider knowledge of past alien crash landing bodies/materials that the feds have been collecting for more than eighty years. A June 5, 2023, report stated: “Grusch said the recoveries of partial fragments through and up to intact vehicles have been made for decades, through the present day by the government, its allies, and defense contractors. Analysis has determined that the objects retrieved are ‘of exotic origin (nonhuman intelligence, whether extraterrestrial or unknown origin) based on the vehicle morphologies and material science testing and the possession of unique atomic arrangements and radiological signatures … The material includes intact and partially intact vehicles.’”5 The fight for more long-protected government-held data and scraps of otherworldly evidence will continue, but it won’t be easy, since David Grusch candidly admitted “there’s a sophisticated disinformation campaign targeting the US populace, which is extremely effective” in squelching UFO/ET truths.6 This notion was recently buttressed by Mr. Elizondo. So we’re up against quite an imposing mountain of denial and disinformation. But outside world governments looking in, Australian investigative journalist and author Ross Coulthart (1956–), often working in America with various government sources, came to a somber conclusion in 2024 “with 100 percent confidence, that the United States and other countries have recovered nonhuman 5. Kean and Blumenthal, “Intelligence Officials Say U.S. Has Retrieved Craft of Non-Human Origin.” 6. Mazza, ed. “UFO Bombshell.”
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craft. There are intelligently crafted technologies that are in the possession of the US government.” He added firmly, “I’ve actually spoken to people who’ve told me that they’ve seen bodies and craft.”7 Inquisitive and probing US representative Eric Burlison (1976–), a Republican congressman from southwest Missouri’s seventh district, stated very clearly in a podcast interview in the spring of 2025 that he has “no doubt that there is a [UFO] crash retrieval program and that they [the government] are studying craft.”8 Add to that public comments by Dr. Eric W. Davis, PhD, an astrophysicist and aerospace engineer, and yet another public whistleblower on government machinations. He confidently testified on May 1, 2025, before Congress: “The craft that have been recovered are not of this earth. They aren’t made by human hands.”9 Admittedly as of now, the indisputable physical evidence for boldly and solidly proving the amazing Missouri 1941 allegation—actual retrieved alien bodies and hardware, or leaked and/ or officially declassified film footage, photos, police and/or fire department reports, for example—sadly remains missing, thanks to ongoing governmental censorship, but many a court case is won on gathered circumstantial evidence alone. So I hereby present 2026’s The UFO Bombshell Before Roswell: Missouri’s 1941 Crash and Cover-Up as my updated detailed case, plus a reminder that minds are like parachutes: They don’t work unless they are open. Let’s weigh the basic facts and some amount of logical speculation before coming to a conclusion and rendering a verdict. The court of public opinion is now in session.
7. Showmeufos, “Ross Coulthart.” 8. Deiner, “UAP EP 117: UFOs and Congress.” 9. “Eric W. Davis.”
INTRODUCTION
“The strange creatures died when atmospheric pressure proved fatal to them.”
It was nearly buried, this small article within the Friday evening edition of Cape Girardeau’s daily newspaper, Southeast Missourian, dated April 25, 1941.10 It had been overlooked for decades but is actually a most telling red flag clue for us today. The startling story ran under a City Briefs heading, on the second page. This is it, in its entirety: BOMBER—Girardeans, responding to the roar of powerful motors, glanced skyward early today and had a hunch that they were about to be bombed. A large US Army airplane, which some Girardeans, more or less familiar with types of aircraft, identified as a bomber, came in high over the city, then circled low over the buildings with its engines making plenty of noise. The ship was a twin motor type.
10. Archived here: https://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=Oc-rVwKPngoC&dat =19410424&printsec=frontpage&hl=en.
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Weird! How often did an ear-racking bomber event like this take place in any town? Especially the sleepy riverside city of Cape Girardeau, which featured only twenty thousand residents, no large military base, and two small civilian grass airfields? Well, probably never. What was the point of this powerful, unexpected aerial display first thing in the morning? In 1941, a US Army bomber plane was the largest and most expensive aircraft ever created. America was at peace on April 25, 1941, but increasingly worried about having to someday enter the ongoing World War II. The unavoidable sight and thunderous sound of a huge bomber of this immense magnitude—especially a B-25—guzzling enormous loads of high-octane gasoline as it buzzed over the community, was likely a great shock to citizens. It certainly was newsworthy. Necks were craning, eyes were straining, and ears were rattling. Was the US Army Air Corps about to attack … or in fact in search of something very important? Cavernous US Army bombers were intended for use in warfare only, but they were also outfitted with highly sophisticated cameras. They were sometimes flown on careful reconnaissance missions for critical espionage and photographic aerial mapping, no bomb-dropping involved. As historians recall, the enormous aerial vehicles featured photogrammetry and cartography equipment. So the pricey planes could buzz over a region and record what was down below, city or country, and have it appear in stereoscopic imagery using overlapping exposures, utilized for precise color mapping. They certainly weren’t doing so inconspicuously on a clear workday morning, however. What governmental explanation was given to the public about this remarkable incident?
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One week later, Southeast Missourian ran a follow-up article entitled “Army Pilot Tells of Test of Big Bomber.” Apparently the Army Air Corps pilot of the circling bomber notified the newspaper office a week later that he thought his mother was situated in Cape Girardeau, so he decided to take off from Patterson Field in Dayton, Ohio, home of the 10th Transportation Battalion, and fly the two hours to town, just to circle around and perhaps gain her attention, if she was awake and alert. The smallish Cape evening news story on Friday, May 2, 1941, further asserted that Lieutenant Howard C. Allers (1914–1993) was at the controls on April 25 because he was undertaking a mere “service test” of his twin-engine aerial vehicle.11 Therefore, such a flight must have left Ohio barely at sunrise, around 6:30 a.m., and used a great deal of gas as it covered about four hundred miles, just to fly over the small Missouri town “between 8:30 to 9:00 a.m.” Allers claimed his intimidating aerial vehicle made “several rounds over the city before returning to Dayton.” The airman added that he and his copilot took a full two hours to fly straight home in the twentyfive-thousand-pound “medium bomber B-25.” Those three-story warplanes could travel over twelve hundred miles with little or no refueling in those days, depending upon wind resistance. Yes, Lieutenant Allers was back in Cape, on the ground, that Friday, May 2, 1941, this time for mere socializing, the newspaper story related. Just fifteen days beforehand, Allers was stationed in Washington but by his own admission he was suddenly transferred to the Dayton airbase in mid-April, where one fine morning he took his spin to Cape Girardeau with a key copilot. Then young Mr. Allers felt it important enough to travel—flying again?—back to Cape a week or so later, days after that small page two article 11. Archived here: https://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=Oc-rVwKPngoC&dat =19410502&printsec=frontpage&hl=en.
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hit the local papers. He was now merely “visiting friends before returning to Dayton Sunday,” the brief asserted.12 So for the Missourian to obtain all this detailed explanation, Allers apparently contacted the newspaper offices while in town, feeling it important to relay his official version of the two visits to the very area of a startling UFO crash event, learned of nationally decades later. Its specific date in late April, 1941, has never been firmly determined, but as of now, we have a pretty strong indication which night was the most likely. Thursday evening, April 24, 1941, seems like a pretty good bet. In fully fathoming this story, we must bear in mind that minus some cheesy Buck Rogers or Flash Gordon movies shown in theaters, space aliens were far out of the mainstream in 1941. News about atrocities of a dreadful war, aggressively undertaken by brutal totalitarian regimes in Europe and the Pacific, regularly dominated the headlines. Wright and Patterson military airfields in Ohio were also largely unknown entities for the public in 1941. Only decades later has Wright-Patterson Air Force Base been featured in the media, mostly regarding enticing insider claims of hosting secretly recovered otherworldly spacecraft and bodies for cutting-edge scientific scrutiny. Most specifically and famously, the 1947 Roswell, New Mexico, aerial crash debris. Near the end of his life, retired seventy-two-year-old Major Jesse Antoine Marcel Sr. (1907–1986)13 a notable Air Force figure involved in the Roswell incident, typed a report discussing his own background in military intelligence, bomber flight training and assignments, and his memorable encounter with alien crash materials culled from the New Mexican desert in mid-1947. He lucidly 12. Archived here: https://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=Oc-rVwKPngoC&dat =19410502&printsec=frontpage&hl=en. 13. Miniature biography here: http://roswellfiles.com/Witnesses/Marcel.htm.
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asserted in print that on July 9, 1947, the Army Air Force “put all this on a B-29 and were going to take the material to Wright.” Other sources in the Roswell saga have supported this claim, that most of the ET bodies and spaceship wreckage in New Mexico (there were actually two crash site discoveries) were transported within wooden crates by a very large bomber airplane to Wright Field in Dayton, Ohio. At least one other notable secret flight—this a large C-54 Skymaster troop transport plane—was also utilized, taking some recoveries to Wright Field too. Each aerial vehicle was noted for its impressive, eye-catching size and noisy engines. Sound familiar? Whatever he did within that similar gigantic noisy airplane over the heartland previously, Howard C. Allers said in the May 2 newspaper article that he was aided by his copilot, Lieutenant Charles Ross Greening (1914–1957). Mature, experienced Charles was married with children in 1941, considered a superior airman and a brave warrior.14 Charles Greening’s eventual wartime exploits (partly as one of Doolittle’s Raiders), his talented artistry, and his many citations for bravery earned him news headlines, Pentagon posts, and decades later his own online biography. He was a serious, experienced, and trusted pilot in the Air Corps, not the kind superiors would foolishly send out on an aimless test flight that others could handle. America’s president and the US Congress had allocated only so much funding for defense in prewar 1941, thus fuel-burning cross-country joyrides were not permitted. As this book will detail as candidly and completely as possible, three alien bodies and their downed spaceship were allegedly discovered one southeast Missouri night in late April 1941, but the area needed much better scrutiny in the light of the next day. In 14. Miniature biography here: https://www.historylink.org/File/10320.
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hindsight, commanders from as high up as the war department or even the White House would logically have ordered such an immediate recon photo assignment. Realizing the enormous size of the American aircraft over downtown Cape Girardeau, and the Roswell evidence transfer saga, we have to consider the strong possibility that the B-25 vehicle was also intentionally sent to transport at least some of the recovered downed hardware, allegedly being held at a small town’s airfield thirty-five miles south of Cape. Perhaps sent to Wright Field (and nearby Patterson Field) so that it could be more properly assessed by their top aviation experts, if not filmed for the official record. This theory leads us to a fascinating interview with a respected, retired US Air Force pilot. Georgia-based UFO investigator and blogger Ed Komarek Jr. (1948–) conversed on tape on December 18, 1991, with a former jet pilot (we’ll call him Jim) who delved into how he learned decades earlier of the ET presence on earth.15 Jim said he was once allowed to view in the late 1950s “a five- or six-minute film clip” of a crashed alien disc. The classified footage was shown in a private briefing by his military bosses. It clearly revealed a metallic “dull gray” spacecraft resting within an airfield hangar (its exact location unknown). The captured ship sported a blasted-open section, damage described by Jim as a “ten-foot-by-ten-foot hole in the side, with what looked like piping and conduit hanging out the hole.” The craft, Jim was informed by his superiors, was quite lightweight and able to be picked up off the ground by just one man. One “room” within the round ship was “still inaccessible to the military” when the footage was taken. Some of the alien metal—perhaps pieces from the blown-open area—was found 15. Miniature biography here: https://www.exopaedia.org/Ed+Komarek; Komarek’s interview with a retired Air Force pilot in 1991 (no link due to subject anonymity request).
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to have been “very strong and pliable but when pounded would return to [its] original shape.” Near the odd craft were three small alien bodies, somewhat covered by a sheet or blanket apiece, stretched out on the hangar floor. Two military policemen stood guard over the amazing artifacts, with no date given for Jim to relate later. This might have been just after the unusual finds had been brought to the airfield but perhaps just before scientists and autopsy surgeons could begin inspecting the goods in tightly controlled laboratory settings. Thus, Jim’s description of the footage he was allowed to view, including details from the craft’s interior, matches the 1941 Missouri incident nearly to perfection (see chapter 2). A small but significant detail in Jim’s recalled film may also match the later-inlife memory of a southeast Missouri grandmother (mentioned in chapter 5), as told decades later by her grandson. It was still known as Wright Field, not yet merged with Patterson, in 1946, when another similar observation occurred, virtually confirming the pilot’s tale. Videos uploaded by researcher/ author Preston E. Dennett (1963–) have aired this tale and several other similar Wright-Patterson accounts within his online catalog.16 Mr. Dennett learned that according to a fortyish gentleman we’ll call Aaron, looking back on his Wright visit as a six-year-old with his dad to the Hangar #4 complex, riveting extraterrestrial goodies were indeed stored there. As an adult, Aaron contacted a UFO researcher/author to describe once getting a bottle of soda from a machine in the building when he peeked into an opening that revealed a restricted, attached hangar. Aaron furtively viewed within it a silver disc resting on tripod legs, obviously not of Air Force design. The six-year-old was astonished and never forgot the 16. Dennett, “Preston Dennett.”
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scene for the rest of his life. Next to the twenty-feet-in-diameter saucer, he estimated, were three small gray ET bodies, laid out on the floor, somewhat covered by sheets or blankets, plus two tractor-trailer lowboys parked nearby. Armed, uniformed military policemen stood guard over the shocking crash retrieval, as it was described later. Was this a staging site of the 1941 Cape Girardeau recovery, five years after it landed so roughly? In returning to Friday, April 25, 1941 (the morning after?), the popular US commander in chief since March 1933 held a White House press conference in his cluttered Oval Office. According to existing digitized secretarial notes, he arrived for duties from the upstairs residence at 10:30 a.m. (9:30 a.m. Missouri time). This was rather a late starting time for handicapped, asthmatic President Franklin Delano Roosevelt (1882–1945), who normally got his workday started a little earlier. Perhaps he was delayed after he had privately phoned and invited a key academic and science advisor to the Oval Office for lunch (speculation). Mr. Roosevelt transferred his polio-beset body from his wheelchair to his desk chair and got set. Reporters were then allowed in, pads and pencils ready. FDR had an emphatic statement he wanted to make to the press. Roosevelt could often be sphinxlike and difficult to discern, delighting in putting up roadblocks to reporters, scholars, historians, and future biographers, at least as to his true thinking, planning, and motivations.17 However, things were different on this Friday morning. Within the Missourian April 25, 1941, evening edition, an Associated Press syndicated story mentioned how President Roosevelt clearly “repeated several times the thought of hemispheric defense” when reporters tried to pin him down on
17. Fullilove, “The Personal President.”
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various other issues.18 Defending North America from any and all enemies, that was apparently and somewhat unusually foremost on the commander in chief ’s mind that midmorning, expressed over and over. Keeping an eye out for possible invasions or incursions, that was obviously a general theme for Franklin Roosevelt that entire 1941 spring and summer. He came up with an official Executive Order, Number 8757, issued on May 20.19 Among other things, this intriguing act created a federal emergency agency entitled the Office of Civilian Defense (OCD).20 The OCD was launched specifically to coordinate efforts to watch the skies for any suspicious foreign aircraft. Air raid wardens and aircraft spotters, blackout coordinators and even fire brigades were assembled and trained in most large and some small US communities in the weeks and months that followed the executive order from the Oval Office. The all-new Civilian Air Patrol was also initiated by FDR around this time. Keeping a closer eye on domestic skies was apparently pretty important, suddenly, despite no record or report of any Nazi or Japanese aircraft ever seen in America. Furthermore, in March 2023, a Canadian Member of Parliament named Larry Maguire (1949–) dictated a letter,21 revealed shortly thereafter, urging that his nation’s Minister of National Defense request an official briefing to confirm that an intelligencegathering alliance from long ago—dubbed the Five Eyes group22— had been involved in a secretive program to retrieve and study, if not exploit, advanced extraterrestrial technology from UFO 18. Archived here: https://news.google.com/newspapers?nid=Oc-rVwKPngoC&dat =19410502&printsec=frontpage&hl=en. 19. Roosevelt, “Presidential Executive Order.” 20. Watson, “How the Office of Civilian Defense Worked.” 21. Corbell, “Document.” 22. Tossini, “UKDJ Analysis.”
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crashes. Maguire wrote: “The Five Eyes Foreign Material Program (FMP), which, in Canada, is sponsored by the Canadian Forces Intelligence Command, aligned with several intelligence-sharing arrangements and treaties.” He added that through his “meetings with American officials” he learned “the United States Senate Select Committee on Intelligence and Senate Committee on Armed Services have been undertaking in-camera hearings with government and military subject matter experts on the recovery and exploitation of physical material from Unidentified Aerial Phenomena (UAP).” The recipient of Maguire’s letter, likely without all the facts from the past eight-plus decades of such top secret military recovery operations, responded via a public letter on June 26, 2023, denying the Canadian government ever participated in UFO accident studies. Yet on that same day, a US senator from Florida, Marco Antonio Rubio (1971–), confirmed that government insiders and whistleblowers—people with firsthand knowledge of American ET crash retrieval programs—had been quietly coming forward to spill what they know to key members of congress.23 Some of these testifying persons “have held very high clearances in high positions within our government,” Rubio admitted on camera. Hushing and scrutinizing nonhuman hardware and bodies had been going on for a long time, congressional leaders had been learning, probably to their great astonishment. History tells us that the special Five Eyes intel group was first proposed by President Roosevelt in June 1941. It was then officially established within the new Atlantic Charter between England and America and its allies, signed into formal agreement by FDR on August 14, 1941. The five nations involved were Canada, New Zealand, Australia, the United Kingdom, and the United States. While it is still not entirely clear 23. Christenson, “Top U.S. Officials Have First-Hand Knowledge of UFOs.”
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if UFO recovery studies were part of its original covert activities, it truly began as a new program for monitoring the actions of just whatever was flitting about in the skies. In another newly uncovered slice of our story, two unusual Saturday, December 31, 1949, newspaper articles now catch the eye, if not the imagination. In the first we learn of a well-respected military reporter for the New York Post named Murray Fletcher Pratt (1896–1956), who spoke at a public meeting that was sponsored by a science magazine. An article on this event was published in that evening’s edition.24 A very reputable historian who often focused on the US Navy, Mr. Pratt, had previously developed many high-ranking US military contacts while soberly reporting on the strategies and battles of World War II. In December 1949 he relayed publicly what his “confidential sources” had told him privately of the biggest story of all. “Bodies of 3-Foot High ‘Strange Creatures’ in American Hands” was the resulting December 31, 1949, newspaper headline. While not dating the event, Pratt revealed an actual otherplanetary flying saucer was secretly in America’s possession, one that had come crashing down somewhere not geographically pinpointed. Inside it were the bodies of three space beings, each “about thirty-five inches tall,” or three feet in height. The visiting ship and its humanoid aviators had been studied by scientists in great secrecy, supposedly. These “strange creatures” from another world were felt to have died when “atmospheric pressure proved fatal to them.” On that same exact date, a Texas newspaper writer/editor named Wesley Sherman Izzard25 (1900–1983) was the subject of a syndicated Associated Press article, centered around his startling page one Amarillo column about learning of secret American scientific studies of collected alien cadavers. These “tiny manlike creatures from another planet,” 24. Greenwood, “Bodies of Alien Creatures in the Hands of American Authorities.” 25. Anderson, “Wesley Sherman Izzard.”
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Izzard wrote, were taken from more than one crashed “flying saucers.”26 The columnist’s main source was not from a science confab but via talks with a Missouri man who had been meeting with a group of visiting scientists in the city of Denver, Colorado, over a period of eight months. They were actually “sober, sound, responsible citizens” who told him “several saucers” recovered “were made of a metal that defies analysis,” something the scientists had been scrutinizing for “nearly three years.” The ETs were “described as three foot tall and clad in fireproof clothing,” all deceased not from crash injuries but from exposure to Earth’s “atmospheric pressure.” An imported metallurgist even examined a portion of one of the metal ships and found “it could not be melted and defied analysis.” If these amazing stories were true, precisely who recovered in great secrecy at least one of these 1940s downed alien craft? Friday, April 25, 1941, was a quiet, routine day in the Cape Girardeau area, if one overlooked the noisy bomber’s circling overhead. It had been a most comfortable 67 degrees the day before and would be again soon, the local paper reported, with clear and calm skies, with sunset officially noted at 6:45 p.m. One small society news article that day mentioned this author’s paternal grandparents in Cape, readying to entertain some relatives visiting from Wisconsin. My grandfather, a Cape Girardeau judge—officially, a United States commissioner—was busy assessing legal cases presented in the city’s downtown courthouse overlooking the mighty Mississippi while his friend and occasional legal opponent— respected attorney Rush Hudson Limbaugh I (1891–1996), the famous contemporary radio broadcaster’s grandfather and one of Cape’s leading citizens—was said to be headed soon to Washington, DC, to argue a case. Still another small article printed that day was considered special to the Missourian from Sikeston, Missouri, a small city some three dozen miles south of Cape. It was 26. “Wes Izzard Columnist Tells Story of Saucers.”
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apparently a phoned-in report that fifty-five flying cadets of the Missouri Institute of Aeronautics had completed their ten weeks of primary flight training in the Army Air Corps and had left for San Angelo, Texas, for the basic flight course. Was this the military team that recovered the recent crash materials? No one knows with absolute certainty, but one very knowledgeable former Sikeston source indicates it was (see chapter 5). According to another overlooked Sikeston newspaper account that spring, their local aerial facility actually hosted over one hundred cadets who began their training in late March. They were trained by nearly forty experienced flight instructors, but evidently the young cadets had by late April only been instructed for just five weeks—not ten. It was as if they were perhaps being hustled out of the area early, nor likely to return. The 1941 Sikeston aerial training school’s military-affiliated instructors and students flew only small, lightweight, single-pilot planes on a grass runway. Such simple aircraft would have been dwarfed by a monstrous B-25 Mitchell bomber, in theory if it had landed there on April 25. Sikeston’s airport was much like Cape Girardeau’s two airfields, normally hosting small one- and twoseater planes on the sod fields, none of them illuminated for night business. But a group of assigned young fliers and their commanders could have driven at night back to the base with what was found on the ground near Cape. It would seem logical for the materials to have been stored overnight in a Sikeston hangar. One rumor— within chapter 5—is that a very large bomber-type plane landed under unusually heavy security at the Sikeston airfield one day in the early 1940s (no one is sure which year). The spring of 1941 was the dawn of the Atomic Age. Megabomb research commenced in 1938 when two German scientists initiated great advances in nuclear fission within their laboratory.
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American theoretical physicists and advanced chemists grew alarmed and yet intrigued, conducting their own similar lab experiments in the months and years after, urging President Roosevelt to fund and accelerate atomic research. An advisory committee was formed in late 1939 to hasten this process. By the spring of 1941, FDR was beginning his unprecedented third term in office as he pondered the merits of forming a peacetime American “super-committee” to push atomic power research to the next level. He was deeply concerned about Nazi Germany and Italy’s despotic military might, currently conquering so much of Europe and North Africa. Violent fascist regimes were threatening in fact to ultimately take over the planet someday as their own scientists worked to weaponize nuclear fission experimentation. To aid in their ruthless effort to destroy surrounding democracies and assume command of their governments to create a new world authoritarian power, Germany and Italy united with Imperial Japan and schemed to destroy American military/trade might and world diplomatic influence. Recent public statements by government whistleblower David Grusch—mentioned in the preface—have been highlighted by his eyebrow-raising claim that he learned while in US military service that the Italian government during this Great Depression era once locally recovered a crashed alien disc!27 It was about ten meters in diameter (or thirty-two feet) and came down close to the town of Magenta in northern Italy. And further that through the Vatican, FDR’s government was quietly informed of the northern Italian find and its subsequent scientific scrutiny. Eventually, Grusch asserted, the American military managed to take control of the ET technology, apparently during their successful WWII invasion 27. “Whistleblower, David Grusch and the 1933 Italian UFO Crash.”
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of Italy. The partially intact vehicle was allegedly imported undercover for secret American scientific study in 1944. This may sound a bit outlandish, but Mr. Grusch is not alone in espousing this astounding hypothesis, it seems. For years, Italy’s top UFO researcher, journalist Roberto Pinotti (1944–), collected data on the Magenta Crash.28 He feels the precise date for this aerial accident was Tuesday, June 13, 1933. The Vatican was led at the time by Piux XI (1857–1939). However, ruthless dictator Benito Mussolini (1883–1945) had been in ironfisted control of the Italian nation since 1922—the same year the pope ascended—and is said to have grown possessive and obsessive over the bizarre otherworldly find near Magenta. Supposedly Mussolini ordered his military to retrieve and stash the materials at a base; he personally inspected it many times and ordered a total media blackout on the subject. In Italy in that era, you either obeyed Prime Minister Mussolini or faced dire consequences. In 1996, investigative reporter Pinotti was given by an anonymous source some startling government documents as well as two Mussolini private telegrams about the closely held craft, bolstering his confidence that the Magenta UFO tale is genuine. Mr. Pinotti started to break down the wall of silence on the case after sixty years, but few in America paid much attention for another twentyseven years, when David Grusch finally spoke out supportively at a congressional hearing and in subsequent media interviews. To backtrack, supposedly Pope Pius XII (Eugenio Pacelli, 1876– 1958), who achieved the papacy on March 2, 1939, was the source who spilled the story of the fantastic find in back-channel talks with representatives of President Roosevelt’s government. One contemporary source claims he had learned that the crashed ET disc 28. Brodsky, “A Researcher Says the First UFO Really Crashed in Italy in 1933.”
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found near Magenta was initially stashed inside a well-guarded Italian airfield hangar, but was eventually moved, hidden down inside Mussolini’s enormous concrete underground bunker within Italy’s Mount Soratte. And that Franklin Roosevelt was made aware of at least some of this juicy top secret information, quite possibly in the months/years before April 1941. A contemporary source for the Italian tale also claims his own great-great-grandfather spoke of two bodies found in the crash, about five-foot-nine-inches tall apiece, with light hair and eyes. Pinotti however has stated his research shows the two deceased Magenta crash pilots were in fact child-sized, a description that tends to match the Cape Girardeau affair, not the former recollection. Either way, it’s riveting. Meanwhile Il Duce’s invasive armies began rampaging through other once peaceful nations and by 1936 had aligned politically and militarily with Nazi Germany, which that same year is reputed to have recovered their own crash-landed alien vehicle (supposedly in midsummer, near the town of Freiburg). If informed of either possible mystery craft in the 1930s, there was little President Roosevelt could do, privately fuming at the two closed-off aggressor nations. On February 23, 1941—just two months before the Cape Girardeau incident—Benito Mussolini addressed a group called the Federation of Fascist Combatants where a reporter was present. Mussolini was soon quoted in a syndicated press report as saying, “The United States are far more likely to be invaded, not by soldiers of the Axis, but by the not-so-well-known but warlike inhabitants of the planet Mars, who will come down out of space in their unimaginable flying fortresses.”29 Any person who had 29. Mussolini, “Speech Delivered by Premiere Benito Mussolini.”
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read these remarks at the time probably felt the Italian prime minister was either joshing or thoroughly nuts, but now, in hindsight, Il Duce may have been fairly well informed. If such tales are true, then President Roosevelt by the spring of 1941 was already quite aware of the reality of otherworldly visitation to earth, and of the past tightly controlled secret recovery operations undertaken in other powerful nations. Did this affect the president’s possible copycat reaction to the Cape Girardeau case? It seems most unlikely that the United States was allowed to grab Mussolini’s prized ET craft during his reign (which ended on July 24, 1943). A recently aired story, supported by researcher Pinotti, claims that invading American forces one year later forcibly took possession of Italy’s interplanetary disc and shipped it in secret conditions back to the United States. It is a notion Grusch confirms: “We scooped it.” “I thought it was totally nuts, and I thought at first I was being deceived, [that] it was a ruse,” Grusch recalled in 2023 of learning about the 1933 UFO in Italy, and then of America’s own quiet recoveries.30 But then, “People started to confide in me. Approach me. I have plenty of senior, former, intelligence officers that came to me, many of which I knew almost my whole career, that confided in me that they were part of a program” to scientifically examine the mind-boggling finds kept from the public. In November 2024, Liberation Times discovered data that seemed to reveal the Italian-recovered spaceship was transferred to America in mid-June 1944 thanks to newly revealed data within an unearthed microfilm roll.31 It had been copied and saved in 1945 by FDR’s Office of Strategic Services chief (and close friend), spymaster 30. Streiber, “The Duce, The Pope, and Guglielmo Marconi.” 31. “Microfilm 114”; Sharp, “CIA and DoD Engaged in Decades-Long Retrieval, Tracking, and Exploitation of UFOs.”
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William Joseph Donovan (1883–1959).32 As we’ll see, “Wild Bill” Donovan was named by President Roosevelt within a February 27, 1942, memo on “finding practical uses for atomic secrets learned from the study of celestial devices.” In other words, the Cape Girardeau retrieval case from ten months earlier. Also listed in the Donovan 1945 film roll of OSS memorandum index notes was someone helping with the Italian UFO’s transfer to the United States: the name of the very scientist/academic who was called in for lunch and private conversation with FDR in the Oval Office on Friday, April 25, 1941. As the keeper of major wartime secrets within the forerunner of the CIA, working out of Observatory Hill headquarters in Washington, Bill Donovan would have been trusted with the most highly classified facts around. Research shows that General Donovan was indeed in Italy in June 1944, implementing OSS policy, even meeting with Pope Pius XII, thus showing his likely hands-on operation of secretly transferring the amazing 1933 Magenta discovery to American shores. It seems ridiculous to hypothesize at first, but it might be true: Studies of the advanced atomic engines taken from the Missouri and Magenta alien crash recoveries may have helped perfect the very nuclear bombs that were then being developed. Perhaps even the two that were eventually dropped on Japan to end World War II. What took place in Cape Girardeau may have changed the war and the world forever. It should have been known then, and perhaps to this day, as the biggest overall bombshell news story ever, six years before Roswell, but it was quite effectively covered up. We’ll touch upon this seemingly wild notion a little more later.
32. Neven, “‘Wild Bill’ Donovan.”
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After the commencement of that tragic second global conflict for Americans in December 1941, southeast Missouri men were either drafted or enlisted, then scattered to all parts of the globe, with some dying in battle in foreign lands. The eye-popping yet largely shushed issues of springtime 1941 in Cape Girardeau, Sikeston, and even Washington, DC, likely seemed forgotten during and after the often horrific combat that obsessed the media and the public. Four years of brutal military combat, and occupying foreign land, and finally fitting back into autumn 1945’s peacetime American society—finding suitable employment, romances, and housing—was foremost on people’s minds when the weary troops came home. Well, for most, but the people and events of late April 1941 in Cape Girardeau were not forgotten or dismissed by all …
In 1941, America Encountered Aliens. Find Out Why the Government Covered It Up. There are plenty of books about the 1947 extraterrestrial contact at Roswell, New Mexico. But only this one uncovers the full story of the UFO crash at Cape Girardeau, Missouri—six years before Roswell. With some fascinating new information and updates, Paul Blake Smith reveals how and why this crash was covered up and where the evidence was hidden. President Franklin Delano Roosevelt knew about it. Harry S. Truman, Missouri senator at the time, knew about it. Did Albert Einstein know about it too? Did the alien technology culled from the crash help refine the atomic bomb? This impressive book presents meticulous research, historical documents, and thrilling witness accounts so you can decide what really happened that night.
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SMITH
Paul Blake Smith is the author of eight books, including Amazon bestsellers President Eisenhower’s Close Encounters and The Nixon-Gleason Alien Encounter. A frequent guest on Coast to Coast AM, Paul has been featured on many radio programs, TV news broadcasts, and podcasts, including The Paracast and The Paranormal Podcast with Jim Harold. Learn more at PaulBlakeSmith.com.
THE UFO BOMBSHELL BEFORE ROSWELL
Body, Mind & Spirit / Paranormal