An in-depth (re)view of the Cash/ Landrum case

reply to post by Dalbeck


yea, the amount of helos in the air at that time indicates some kind of teat or transportation evolution going on.. the helps must be filled with personell , and if the number of helo are true, that indicate a very major stuff going on..

what kind of technology being researched at that time ? DCX ?

Originally posted by milomilo
reply to post by Dalbeck

 

yea, the amount of helos in the air at that time indicates some kind of teat or transportation evolution going on.. the helps must be filled with personell , and if the number of helo are true, that indicate a very major stuff going on..

what kind of technology being researched at that time ? DCX ?

I think the Delta clipper technology can be dated back to the late 80's / early 90's... Since the Piney Woods incident took place in 1980 I think it has to be some other type of technology.

Maybe the DC-X technology is some kind of successor of the test vehicle in this incident.

I really want to know if the Piney Woods vehicle was manned and if it has any connections to the Iranian hostage scenario....

Excellent Thread! Has been a well worth while read (even though it took me around 3 hours reading to catch up!).

The Sling load under a chopper is a very plausable theory and one that i had also concidered as an answer to this case but ran into a few problems with this theory in relation to the eyewitness testimony only i mite add.

My opinion allways has been more towards an experimental vehicle that was part of or related to the Aurora project, witch led on to the development of the TR-3 series of nuclear powered MFD vehicles. As stated by Edgar Fouche, not all the TR-3 vehicles were triangle shaped. Earlier vehicles like the TR-3A were "Jelly Bean" shaped.

The Diamond shaped housing of the object in question seems to fit the known designs of nuclear powered rocket thruster units that both the USSR and USA were working on starting as far back as the early 60`s.

Another Point of interest is a possible link between this event and the Keksburg ufo crash in 1965. The problem with that tho is the Keksburg object apparently had strange lettering on the bumper area of the object that resembled egiptian lettering, but was more likeley to have been russian writing.

Originally posted by TheReligiousHoax
I've always been fascinated with this case. However some of you are jumping to some pretty astounding conclusions. It has been over 30 years since this event happened. Do we presently have technology that levitates water tower sized objects? I have yet to see anyone explain how a device emitting nuclear aerosol wouldn't harm the operator inside of the craft. Betty wasn't that close to the craft, yet suffered significant radiation poisoning. Wouldn't this intense of exposure be even more inside of the craft? What material is capable of shielding from radiation? Lead. Are we dealing with a lead constructed craft the size of a water tower? What Earthly tech could explain this?

Many of you find comfort in explaining this as secret military testing, but this is one of those rare cases where prosaic explanations sound sillier than the ETH, IMO. Even if this was a secret military testing program which they continue to lie about, are we supposed to overlook their obvious deceit when they obfuscate other stories about ET & UFO's? How do we know when they are lying and when they aren't? If you chose to buy the story that the govt is lying about a secret testing program that nearly destroyed three innocent lives, you better not believe a single word any US official has to say about ANY other sighting.

Yes The only known sheilding for Gamma/Beta radiation is a few inches (foot) of lead. The main nuclear fuel pressure vessel may have been made out of lead, or lead and Ceramic. Either way it would have been heavy. However if using a gravity negating technology (like the mecury plasma centifuge or MFD) the weight of the lead would have been reduced by some significant amount.... that is if this tech even exsists!!!!!!

This Vehicle may have been a manned flight. There was a malfunction of the reactor system in some way,like one of the heat exchanger on the primary circuit ruptured and began spewing radiation into the exaust (rocket) system and possibly the cockpit of the craft. The pilot suffered effects and would have become sick rather quickly possibly leading to the craft coming down where it did, possibly as the pilot was in no state to fly the craft elsewhere in his condition and accurately navigate, until the choppers arrived and guided him to a safe location where apon he landed and was removed from the craft and it was then airlifted to a secure location.

reply to post by spooknevada1


Hey thanks a lot for reading this thread and of course for your contribution!

I'm going with
Schuessler on this, and say it was not a man made experimental craft. A lot of things seem to point away from this. The sudden appearance of helicopters swarming on it, tends to make me think the military was surprised about this, unexpected. Also, the location of the incident. When the government builds something, even a prototype, that is heavily in the black area and tests it out, it does not do this in populated areas, especially when they have a number of super secret, and very remote bases in areas like Nevada, New Mexico, Arizona, Southern California, ect. This region, while rural, was not remote: there were numerous farming communities and small towns dotting the area. When the government plays with anything cutting edge and mobile like this, they do so on their own grounds, well away from the public's prying eyes. Also, this incident happened about 30 years ago. We'd be seeing, if only moderately, some fruits of this experimentation.

So I will remain in the camp of "non-terrestrial" on this incident, which I believe really did happen. Interestingly, it happened at the same time as the famous Rendelsham Forest incident all the way over in England. Which is also a very weird one.

Star and flag anyway, great thread on one of the best cases ever reported.

I agree with the fact that the military/government does not go and test stuff like this out in the open where the general public can see it. If this craft was intended to be able to obtain some high altitude possibly in a secure testing area but malfunctioned and came down where it did. Possible that as someone stated earlier in the thread that it was remote controlled via CCTV.

The US an former Soviet Union both freely admit that they had nuclear rocket programs starting as far back as the 1950`s. The fruits of this testing of nuclear rockets would be the alleged TR series of craft from the Aurora project.
The TR-3B Astra supposedly uses nuclear power and has "Multimode" thrusters on each corner of the triangle body.
These thrusters are more or less run from heat off the reactor mixed with hydrogen gas.

The Cash/Landrum craft could have been a testbed for perfecting this technology for the Aurora project to be used in the TR series of craft. It appears that the nuclear powered thruster/rocket program ended in 1972.

"NERVA was considered by the AEC, SNPO and NASA to be a highly successful program; it met or exceeded its program goals. Its principal objective was to "establish a technology base for nuclear rocket engine systems to be utilized in the design and development of propulsion systems"

Shelved for 8 years? The incident in question could have been on of the ffirst test runs that went wrong

Originally posted by Skadi_the_Evil_Elf
I'm going with
Schuessler on this, and say it was not a man made experimental craft. A lot of things seem to point away from this. The sudden appearance of helicopters swarming on it, tends to make me think the military was surprised about this, unexpected. Also, the location of the incident. When the government builds something, even a prototype, that is heavily in the black area and tests it out, it does not do this in populated areas, especially when they have a number of super secret, and very remote bases in areas like Nevada, New Mexico, Arizona, Southern California, ect. This region, while rural, was not remote: there were numerous farming communities and small towns dotting the area. When the government plays with anything cutting edge and mobile like this, they do so on their own grounds, well away from the public's prying eyes. Also, this incident happened about 30 years ago. We'd be seeing, if only moderately, some fruits of this experimentation.

So I will remain in the camp of "non-terrestrial" on this incident, which I believe really did happen. Interestingly, it happened at the same time as the famous Rendelsham Forest incident all the way over in England. Which is also a very weird one.

Star and flag anyway, great thread on one of the best cases ever reported.

Thanks Skadi for your contribution!! Although I'm on the side of the terrestrial believers I appreciate your input! Yes, the Rendlesham Forest incident bugs me as well, I wonder if there's a connection between those two cases...

As for your conclusion aboubt the fruits if this experimentation: maybe we didn't see the fruits because the program eventually was abandoned because of the hazardous nature of the craft....

Originally posted by spooknevada1
I agree with the fact that the military/government does not go and test stuff like this out in the open where the general public can see it. If this craft was intended to be able to obtain some high altitude possibly in a secure testing area but malfunctioned and came down where it did. Possible that as someone stated earlier in the thread that it was remote controlled via CCTV.

The US an former Soviet Union both freely admit that they had nuclear rocket programs starting as far back as the 1950`s. The fruits of this testing of nuclear rockets would be the alleged TR series of craft from the Aurora project.
The TR-3B Astra supposedly uses nuclear power and has "Multimode" thrusters on each corner of the triangle body.
These thrusters are more or less run from heat off the reactor mixed with hydrogen gas.

The Cash/Landrum craft could have been a testbed for perfecting this technology for the Aurora project to be used in the TR series of craft. It appears that the nuclear powered thruster/rocket program ended in 1972.

"NERVA was considered by the AEC, SNPO and NASA to be a highly successful program; it met or exceeded its program goals. Its principal objective was to "establish a technology base for nuclear rocket engine systems to be utilized in the design and development of propulsion systems"

Shelved for 8 years? The incident in question could have been on of the ffirst test runs that went wrong

As I proposed earlier in a post the NERVA approach is without any doubt an interesting one, but considering the technology to lift a rocket the way the craft did (and possibly having lead or iron shielding) doesn't seem to be pluasible anymore.

I'm more and more convinced that this thing was a kind of hot air ballon with an exhaust which emitted Hydrazin.

reply to post by Dalbeck


Great thread, always been interested in this case.
I too think it was a secret Army/Airforce aircraft.

reply to post by Gazmeister


Thank you Gazmeister

Has anyone ever seen any information that includes Houston IAH (Bush) airport in relation to this. That large airport isn't far to the southwest of the site. A lot of aircraft approach from the NE into it which is across the path this object seems to have traveled.

Originally posted by roadgravel
Has anyone ever seen any information that includes Houston IAH (Bush) airport in relation to this. That large airport isn't far to the southwest of the site. A lot of aircraft approach from the NE into it which is across the path this object seems to have traveled.

Thanks for this trace rg !!!

I'd definitely would love to check the records around this time but as an US foreigner I don't know where and how to start/ ask :/

Dalbeck, fantastic work mate - haven't had time to go through every page but there's a relevant interview below with John Schussler who makes further comments about the case in case you've not seen it.

RT: You wrote a book about the Cash-Landrum incident. What opinion do you currently hold about the case?

Being a futurist, one way I evaluate things is to come up with series of scenarios and then I try to refine each scenario down to its point of diminishing returns and when I did that – the way I did that was gather a group of local MUFON people in Houston together and brainstorm during the investigation various scenarios. We went out and gathered data which we then used to accept or reject the various scenarios. It wasn’t just myself but a number of people with various backgrounds, several of them from the space program who I can’t name who are part of the Invisible College. One of them is a flight director for the Space Shuttle right now. In our scenario work, we asked how could these people have faked this? and we ran that out every possible way and concluded that they did not fake it. Then we asked could this be a government device of some kind?

RT: All those helicopters.

The helicopters weren’t there initially but they came in. It looked like something was carrying it with the helicopter The object was there several minutes before the helicopters arrived. We even had people five miles away talking about the helicopters staged across their property and then flying in that direction after hovering for a few minutes, so it was like they came in waves and that’s exactly what was reported by people at the site, not only Cash and Landrum but other people who were around there.

So we concluded from that that there was a structured flying device. How could we conclude that if we didn’t have any evidence? Well, the evidence was multifold. Eyewitness, first of all, connected and disconnected eyewitnesses. Second, we had the effects on the highway underneath it where the blacktop was actually melted to the point that the yellow line was actually swirled, the no-passing line. Third, we had burns on the trees on both sides of the road which would indicate the heating the people had. Then there were effects, very unusual effects, on the car. And of course the best – or the worst scenario, the best evidence, was the medical effects on the people themselves. They could

tell what they saw, when they saw it, how they reacted, and what were the effects that developed over time. We had medical doctors of numerous backgrounds attesting to what they described, and their eventual cancer and the hair loss and all the things that happened. So we had a variety of evidence testifying to something real flying in there and being there. When we got to that point, we were convinced that this is not just a scenario any more, this is a fact.

Then we went from that fact to – we started getting leads from people like Bill Moore that this may have been a device that flew from Los Alamos to Ellington Field which didn’t pan out at all. Ellington Field was in the process of becoming a public airport. There was no evidence between the two sites that anything had flown across. IN fact, the evidence from the case was that the object came from the eats, not the west. We tracked it across a number of sightings, a number of towns, east of Houston clear over to the Louisiana line. When it left, it went in a southerly direction toward the Gulf of Mexico.

Then we began putting together other scenarios. Could it have been a misidentified special lighting arrangement platform used for a raid on something or could it have been an atomic device that went out of control. Could it have been an alien craft flown by humans who just screwed up. The last one in particular remained a scenario and a lot of people claimed on the Internet that that was the case but none of them any evidence there was zero evidence. With zero evidence you don’t accept it.

So our conclusion after a long time of looking at the technology and how technology unfolds … I follow it very closely even to this day, and the way you follow technology, you don’t just follow what’s written on paper or in magazines you follow even the ads where companies and building equipment or pieces of equipment and see if that could be used in an advanced craft, and in fact that’s how a lot of information on the stealth got out , form advertisers. We could find nothing that would go together. Even flight controllers from NASA and others were working with us and there was no evidence of a machine that the US government had built in 1980 that could do anything like this or fly like this let alone the sheer size of it. It was as big as a water tower in the tower of Dayton, that’s a nine foot tower. If it’s half that big, it’s still big for something without wings to fly..

We looked at what kind of saucer-type stuff that we have seen. There isn’t a flying program for saucers, the best we did was the AVRO disc which is a ground effects craft. We looked at well, if this was cigar-shaped that was upended and just looked diamond shaped, then what kind of cigar-shaped objects do we fly? We don’t have any except missiles and they don’t fly around, they go where we send them. Nothing panned out in our technology base that duplicates it. So some people say, let’s reject it out of hand, it couldn’t be true because we don’t have anything like that, and that’s as bad as saying it’s extraterrestrial without evidence. So to this day we have to leave it in the unidentified category like many of the Blue Book Bases, but we are convinced that it was solid physically real, it was there, and it did all the things they said it did.

RT: in other words, a physical machine with observable effects that you don’t think we can replicate by known technologies….

That’s exactly correct and that’s where we are on this case.

link

Cheers!

reply to post by karl 12


WOOOW!!! Thank you so much Karl for this link! In my initial research I was looking for some pieces of informytion by Schuessler but just found the TV show interview so this is a really great addition to this thread!!!

Great thread- glad to see the interest in this compelling case. Here's some more material, perhaps useful to those born after the events.

Some cultural and historical background for the study of the Cash-Landrum sighting:

UFOs were big in the media in those days. There was even an annual cash prize from the National Enquirer for the best UFO story of the year, judged by some prominent UFOlogists. Bob Pratt on the Nation Enquirer UFO Blue Ribbon Panel

A lot of the media attention was fueled by the success of a 1977 movie by Steven Spielberg,
Close Encounters of The Third Kind.

Project UFO, an NBC television series debuted in 1978 and ran for two seasons. It loosely adapted Blue Book cases, while taking its visual depiction of UFOs from CE3K- gigantic and brilliantly lit.

On April 24, 1980, there was a failed helicopter mission to rescue American hostages held in Iran. Operation Eagle Claw The secret training for this mission was conducted at Area 51 in Nevada and the mission failure led to the base's public exposure.
A second mission "Honey Badger" was planned and test flights involving CH-47s flew across much of the United States. When President Reagan was elected in November, it was clear that the mission was unnecessary, but the operation remained active until Jan 1981. Reports of these test missions likely fed into reports of "mystery helicopters" at the time. The Cash-Landrum case was initially linked to this phenomenon.

In August, 1980 Secretary of Defense Harold Brown disclosed details of secret US stealth technology experimentation. There was much press and speculation leading up to this. (Incidentally, the test flights for the F-117 stealth plane were conducted at Area 51, birthplace of many UFO legends.)

Another key media influence in the latter half of 1980 was the movie Hangar 18 (a Hollywood version of the Aztec UFO crash case). The advertising traded heavily on US Government cover-up and conspiracy, heavily drawing on distrust and paranoia following the Watergate affair. The Hangar 18 movie poster fostered government distrust:
"The government is concealing a UFO and the bodies of the alien astronauts.
Why won't they tell us?"
(Betty Cash's cardiologist recommended that she see this movie- it is highly likely she saw the television advertisements for it.)

Close Encounters of The Third Kind was rereleased nationwide to theaters August 1980 in a Special Edition. Almost every element of the Cash-Landrum UFO encounter was featured in the movie:
-Brilliantly lit, gigantic UFO,
-Car encounters UFO on lonely road
-Witnesses suffer skin burns from UFO
-Helicopter menaces witnesses
-US military has knowledge of UFO and has scheme to for cover-up

Whatever actually happened on Dec 29,1980, the incident was quickly absorbed and reshaped to fit into the existing UFO paradigm. The witnesses claimed it was a military exercise, but the chief investigator and promoter of the case preferred an extraterrestrial solution.

reply to post by CardDown


Thanks CardDown for your interesting links! Checked out all of them - good read! I more and more convinced this craft definitely had something to do with stealth technology and the Iranian hostage scenario! Just look at the Osama bin Laden raid... new technology was used and wouldn't have been revealed if one of the choppers didn't crash....

I just found a radio interview after a long search: John Schuessler remembers Betty Cash, from the Jeff Rense program which aired January 16th, 1999, right after the news of Betty's death got out.

While it is mostly a retelling of the familiar elements of the case, there are some very good question about the case from the host. The best one is about the markings on the helicopters, which is given a less-than-satisfying answer. Schuessler's answers seem a bit political- he steers the discussion back to the script and away from uncomfortable areas.

Another point of interest is that Schuessler mentions the burn to Cash's finger beneath her ring. Strangely, this injury was not mentioned in his book, when her medical records were presented. Burns were mentioned, but only by the doctors in conversation, not in medical records themselves.

Also, the legend of the helicopter pilot who admitted flying on the UFO mission and later denied it is included. This story was a big mistake and seems have derailed the investigation of the case. See Exonerating the Helicopter Pilot for how this false lead entered the mythology of the case.

UFO investigator Chris Lambright was recently interviewed by Martin Willis, and in May, he answered some questions on the forum there. One of the topics was the Cash-Landrum case:

In the 1980's everyone seemed to be interested in the Cash-Landrum case and, because I was also working on the paintings I mentioned in my book and the Cash-Landrum case definitely had dramatic visual appeal, I'd set out to gather as much information as I could. What was surprising was that it was not that easy to get specific details because MUFON and John Schuessler had...

He goes on to describe his interviews with Vickie Landrum, and how her description of the UFO was different form the MUFON version- worth a look!
Chris Lambright on the Cash-Landrum investigation PodcastUFO.com