Is the December, 1980 Cash-Landrum UFO incident solved? That's precisely the question posed in the headline appearing in a July 9 online article by Shawn Jason for the Examiner.com.
The case has
been covered at length for years amongst numerous sources, so I won't repeat
all the details here. However, Jason's
attempts to re-explore and confirm what some suspected over the years -- that a
fleet of helicopters accompanying a strange, and peculiarly acting, object in
the air involved, not a UFO, but a secret United States project -- actually
leans toward a plausible explanation.
Final word? Who knows? In any case, what Jason has done is to reach
back to 1999 and the magazine, Popular Mechanics, which discovered under
the Freedom of Information Act the existence of a super-secret Lenticular Reentry Vehicle. It is a serious malfunction of one such nuclear-equipped
vehicle, suggests Jason, that caused mild to severe effects upon the three
automobile occupants, both outside and inside of their car.
During and after
this bizarre event, Betty Cash, Vickie Landrum and her grandson Colby
experienced a variety of symptoms, and a nuclear radiation aspect became
suspect from the start..
As updated by
Shawn Jason:
Dr.
Brian McClelland, Betty Cash's personal physician, later stated that the
witnesses suffered radiation exposure on a level felt three to five miles from
ground zero of Hiroshima or 2-3 grays of radiation. A full-body exposure at one
time to 5 gray or more from high-energy radiation leads to death within 14
days. The victims encounter only lasted for approximately 15 minutes. All three
had classic symptoms of exposure from nausea, vomiting and burns, to hair loss,
swelling and diarrhea. Their health issues were immediate, starting only a few
hours after the sighting.
Indeed, legal
action was eventually undertaken to sue the government for damages due to
chronic health effects and even death, but to this day there has not even been
an official admission that the U.S. had any involvement.
We touched upon
the Cash-Landrum incident way back in a blog entry of January 31, 2008, and if
you reference that date you'll find the entire letter from which only a portion
is featured here. I'm revisiting the subject
today simply to reaffirm that APRO's Coral Lorenzen, unlike a lengthy list of
folk intent upon screaming hysterically from the start that this was an extraterrestrial
craft event, instead saw a trail of obvious crumbs from the start, and waited
for medical evidence to support her opinion that this was no alien spacecraft
incident.
The visual
above, as well as the letter originally posted in its entirety, contains
extracted names, and I left these out because there's no point in revealing
them now. However, anybody familiar with
UFO research history may easily recognize missing name identities. For the rest of you, suffice it to say that
the late Coral Lorenzen conducted a long-running battle of condemnation
regarding the organization MUFON and its director -- quite likely for good
reasons -- and she was absolutely enraged that certain individuals affiliated
with MUFON were publicly touting the
extraterrestrial alien spacecraft hypothesis, despite the evidence. Her reference to the ABC-TV show,
"That's Incredible" merely denotes an audio recording of the
program's segment on the Cash-Landrum case.
Though
controversy continues regarding the Cash-Landrum event, Coral Lorenzen's
original concerns about the witnesses' experience of horror remain no less
relevant today, and "today" encompasses an era often burdened with
UFO "investigators" who see aliens around every corner, particularly
when financially lucrative encounters or TV cameras drooling for stories of the
incredible, true or not, come into play.
As usual, sensational nonsense frequently trumps sober voices and
reasonable documentation because the facts just aren't as sexy as bull crap
attired in an alien negligé. And
speaking of sex and bull crap. . .
