I was told the story in segments over the course of four decades:
I recall the first discussion being in the spring or summer of 1974. My family was living in West Virginia and my dad had pulled out his old magazines which included the now classic Look and LIFE issues[1] on UFOs. I recall it was one of those Sunday afternoons mentioned previously because I have a memory of looking at the color funny pages that day and those were featured only in the Sunday newspaper.
During a discussion on what UFOs might be, he vaguely alluded to having learned about something that crashed in the New Mexico desert years before he was in the air force. He suggested that it might have been from another world. Imagine my intrigue.
The next time I recall it coming up was during a TV show about UFOs sometime in 1975, after we had returned to California. I had recently seen the Sun Classic Pictures’ release of The Outer Space Connection[2]. Again, my father alluded to the possibility that something from another world had crashed in New Mexico. By this time, my sisters and I had many times heard his stories about his days at George AFB and of Chuck Yeager, Scott Crossfield, Iven Kincheloe and the altitude chamber.
When Columbia Pictures released Steven Speilberg’s Close Encounters of the Third Kind[3] a couple of years later, I was hooked on the UFO mystery. Between the popularity of the film and the growing number of UFO related shows on television in the year or so leading up to it, our family could not avoid the discussion. Again my dad alluded to the crash in New Mexico and this time he said that what had crashed was a small craft, and there was an additional detail: He said the people aboard the craft were not like the aliens that had begun to appear in UFO stories, certainly not like the little beings in Spielberg’s film.
How did he know?
Because he had seen the bodies at Wright-Patterson AFB in the late 1950s, so he said.
The next time we had a significant conversation about the subject was in 1980 when I discovered William Moore’s and Charles Berlitz’ book The Roswell Incident. I showed the book to my dad but he merely glanced through it, more insistent that the beings on the craft were not little aliens, rather they were like us and virtually hairless. He also said there was nothing to fear from these beings. And, he added, the 1947 incident in New Mexico was not the only time such a thing had happened.
Six years later, I was revisiting everything I had learned about the UFO phenomenon to that time. It was in the spring of 1986 when I sat down with all my UFO books and re-examined them, coming to a new and unexpected personal insight: There was something very earthly going on with this stuff. At the time, my suspicion was that secret military technology might indeed explain much of the reports. I was certainly not the first guy to consider that idea but for me it was eye-opening in its implications. I thought of my what my dad had been saying over the years about the Roswell case. He could very well have learned something about it while in the air force.
By this time, my mentor had begun to work with me and I was hearing things from him that augmented what my dad had been saying about the 1947 New Mexico incident. Within two years, I would be reporting for duty with the FBI[4], and just a few years after that would come the next major leap forward in my dad’s tale.
Wilson
But I mustn’t get ahead of myself for there’s an episode in my life which I later realized had bearing on this Wilson business. I’m referring to 1987 when I first visited the Integratron in Landers, California, out by Yucca Valley. I’d been working at a hospital while waiting for FBI employment. My jobs were cashier part of the week and physical therapy aide two days per week. Turned out that the head of the PT department was a USAF veteran and enthusiast of weird stuff including UFOs and esoteric technology – and when he was a kid was acquainted with George W Van Tassel, the builder of the Integratron. After an interesting story about a camping trip in Yucca Valley and meeting Van Tassel the first time, he suggested I go out and see the curious structure myself. I did just that three days later, taking along a friend and her boyfriend. I also took along my Ruger handgun (just in case) (at the suggestion of my mentor). The short version is that there were rough-looking glaring men parked outside the Integratron when we got there and two vehicles came speeding from the direction of old Giant Rock Airport, apparently alerted by our presence. The weird thing is that my friend, Tracy, was describing her psychic viewing of some individuals inside the Integratron at that moment. She said there was a smaller man being bullied by two large men – and there was a third man, older, urbane and well dressed, who somehow knew we were there. She said he knew our names!
With the vehicles speeding our way – a small white compact sedan and a small yellow pickup truck – I decided we could look from somewhere else and I got us out of there, heading back to Highway 62, where I pulled over beside a bunch of boulders stacked high enough to give a vantage point. We had no longer pulled over and got out of the car to climb the rocks than here came the yellow pickup and the white sedan. They pulled over and stopped just a few car lengths behind our car. A man got out of the pickup and ran back to speak to the female driver of the white car, both of them watching us. I told my friends it was time to go, so we got into our car and I turned back to Yucca Valley. The man ran back to his pickup and he and the white car did a U-turn and followed us. We sped back to town, pulling into the Carl’s Jr at Old Woman Springs Road and the main drag through the town of YV. The pickup and car turned back and went away. Though we intended to eat, we hit the restrooms first. As I waited for them, I noticed an older gentleman dressed very neatly in jeans, plaid western shirt with pearl buttons, and perfectly cut silver hair, clean shaven. He was reading a paperback (which I wish I could recall the title) but had no tray, no food, no drink. And he was calmly smiling. I got a feeling about him.
When my friends came out from the restrooms, I told them we weren’t staying. As we walked past the man at the table, he closed his book and got up and followed us out! We walked to our car and got in – his small white pickup truck happened to be parked next to our spot, oddly. Yes, he followed us out of the parking lot and all the way through town and back toward Interstate 10. If you’ve been out there, you know it’s not a few blocks, to say the least. When it was clear that we were heading away from the area as fast as possible, the gentleman’s pickup did a U Turn and headed back to Yucca Valley. There is no way it was a mistake. He intended to follow us.
Who was he? Had he been the man Tracy ‘saw’ inside the Integratron? He certainly would have had time to change into the jeans and western shirt and head to Carl’s Jr in town before we got there.
In 1991 my father was hospitalized for a blood clot. I was working in New York as a counterintelligence specialist for the FBI and flew out on short notice, that’s how concerned we were for his life. Naturally, being the one who lived farthest away, by the time I could quickly get a flight to California, and drive directly from the airport, he had made it through the danger zone. He was still heavily sedated when I walked into his hospital room.
It was the next day when I was alone with him for a couple of hours that my dad started muttering about a ‘crystal house’ and a man getting killed. He seemed agitated. And then he mentioned the name for the first time: Wilson.
At the time I had no idea who this Wilson was or what his significance might have been. My sisters came into the room just moments after he was saying this stuff so I didn’t press him and said nothing to them about it. I did call my mentor as soon as I got to a phone at my mom’s house.
“Was there anyone else in the room when he was talking about Wilson?” he asked.
I told him there was not. The nurse was at the station and I was alone with my dad.
“Good,” he said, “Keep him off that subject when anyone else is around, if you can.”
I asked about Wilson.
“We’ll talk about Wilson when I see you next time.”
I was hooked.
All I learned over the years from my mentor is that Wilson was the smartest man in the world whom you’d never heard about. What I learned from my mentor is that Wilson had been the civilian in charge of the deeply classified project my dad had been assigned to in 1958 – the strange project for which he claimed to have been briefed on Roswell, all of which I wrote about in my book Shimmering Light. The next person who seemed to know about Wilson was my friend Joseph P Farrell the summer we met at a conference, and he was surprised I knew much about Wilson. Joseph introduced me to the Harbinson book Genesis which features a (VERY) loose adaptation of the mysterious Wilson. In the years that followed, I learned about the Sonora Aero Club and much more than I previously knew about the 1896 Airship Mystery – both legends which featured multiple genius Wilsons. The last bit I learned about Wilson was from my father in the last year of his life. He told me that Wilson had been doing hush-hush research into an alternative fuel source in the California Channel Islands. These are the islands of which Catalina is one along with the others mostly controlled by the US Navy where deeply secret exotic technology research is conducted – and is likely the true explanation for the wildly exaggerated Tic Tac UFO report. The source of the alternative fuel which Wilson was investigating, according to my father, was rather curious.
It was apples.
Were ‘apples’ a code for something? My father didn’t say. He died before I could get anything more on Wilson. My mentor died a few years later, not telling me anymore about Wilson. But I suspect Wilson may have known something about me. After all, my mentor told me that my dad had worked for the man back in ‘58 on the secret project.
It may be that I sort of met Wilson. On that day I first went to the Integratron in 1987, in the Carl’s Jr in Yucca Valley at the corner of Old Woman Springs Road.
Stranger things have indeed happened since then.
– Walter Bosley
[1] These were the 1967 special ‘Flying Saucer’ edition of Look and the edition of LIFE Magazine which I haven’t been able to find online but don’t recall it being the 1952 issue with Marilyn Monroe on the cover. It would have been an edition after my dad was out of the USAF.
[2] Imdb.com lists this as a February 1975 release. Narrated by Rod Serling, it was given a limited theatrical run. I likely saw it at the movie theater in Arlington, a suburb of Riverside, California.
[3] Columbia Pictures’ release date, according to Imdb.com was 14 December 1977.
[4] 14 March 1988, Los Angeles Field Office. From there I went to the San Jose RA, then to an undercover squad of the San Francisco Field Office. After eleven months with the Baltimore office for training in Russian, I was assigned in late 1990 to an undercover operation in Manhattan, working against the GRU and the KGB.
