A Letter Sent to the late James Mosely - 2003

Editor's note:

This is a letter sent to the late James Mosely, editor of "Saucer Smear" in 2003. In it Mr. Crook talks about the unlikelihood of "The Philadelphia Experiment", "amature "scientists" at MUFON, and how they had refused to publish his paper concerning previously presented analysis of the EM effects which were originally reported in "Mark Rodeghier, UFO Reports involving Vehicle Interference: A Catalogue and Data Analysis", Evanston, IL: Center For UFO Studies, 1981"

This letter was originally written in 2003 and is presented as a "historical document". Therefore, no effort has been made to update or correct subsequent discoveries, research, or investigations. No attempt has been made to alter the original wording of the letter. 

The letter was found among the "electronic documents" recovered after Mr. Crook's death in 2013. I have slightly reformatted the paragraphs for legibility. 


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GAINES M. CROOK
XXX CHAMINADE AVENUE
WEST HILLS, CA 91304

PHONE/FAX 818-883-XXXX
E-MAIL gmcrook@XXXXXXX.NET

October 15, 2003

James W. Moseley
P.O. Box 1709
Key west, FL 33041

Dear Mr. Moseley,

In with the order of back issues which you sent on Sept. 29, you state that if I send a few more bucks I can be on your esteemed list of non-subscribers. I have enclosed “a few more bucks” for this esteemed privilege, plus an extra $28 for a copy of your book. The total submitted is $43.00. 

I have been watching the UFO scene for over 56 years and your reports of UFO confusion is the only entertainment I find any more.

You mention Al Bielek in the August 10, 03 issue, in connection with the “Philadelphia Experiment”. Doesn’t he know that this whole idea has been trashed by Jacques Vallee’s Paper, “Anatomy of a Hoax”, which appeared in Vol 8, No. 1 Journal of Scientific Exploration, 1994. I have enclosed a copy of Vallee’s paper, in case you don’t have access to one.

I am an engineer, now retired, and for a number of years, I had the privilege of working with one of the original Navy engineers who made the ship demagnetization project possible in WW II. For the years between 1962 and 1972, I was employed by the Physical Research Division of STL/TRW Systems, where my responsibilities were to develop physics experiments to be flown on scientific spacecraft with the additional duties to develop any special test requirements and instrumentation required to ensure that the experiment packages as well as the whole spacecraft was sufficiently “clean” of magnetic fields. 

In conjunction with the magnetic responsibilities, I met Ray Parsons (now deceased) of the NASA Goddard Spaceflight Center, one of the original members of the Navy Demag Project. Ray still thought in terms of demagnetizing with big cables and big DC generators which were brought up to full speed and then the driving motor was de-energized and the polarity of the coil input was repeatedly reversed, as the speed of the driving motor reduced, to remove the remnant magnetism from what was to be demagnetized. 

In fact, he had managed to find one of the old Navy generators and had it transferred to Goddard Spaceflight Center through the Government transfer channels. In this modern age, it is done by a more sophisticated electronic manner which I won’t go into, here. One other thing that would, alone, kill the story that all this special equipment was loaded on to the DE ships. Even though cargo ships have monstrous holds, there is hardly one cubic foot of usable space left on a Navy warship, regardless of what kind it is. 

Let me give you an example of this. In 1960, I was the Integration Group Leader on an Electronic Warfare Project at Ramo Wooldridge Corp. We had a contract both with the Navy for a shipboard unit and one with the Air Force for a Land based defense model. We were directed to visit the Admiral in charge of the Navy Yard in Long Beach, CA, to arrange to install the Navy unit on a ship for an operational test against real jammers. We needed space for one rack of electronic equipment, plus space for a technician to trouble shoot the equipment, plus electric power and cable access to the search radar was also needed.

At our visit with the admiral, the first question that admiral said was, “Where do you think you would put this thing?. A DE has no space for any extra equipment”. All of the previous contacts had been made with bureaucrats who really knew nothing about ships and what the facts were, that a fighting ship is more like a machine that it is a cargo ship. Our problem was finally solved by procuring an 8’X10’ Military battlefield shed for the installation of the equipment and it was temporarily installed on the fore deck of a heavy cruiser, in fact, the Admiral’s own ship!

After our business was settled, we were invited to lunch in the Admiral’s Dining room, green felt topped tables, real silverware, servants, and the whole shebang!


I don’t know the true story, but I am surmising that the original degaussing of the DE ships was done by rerouting the power from the DC propulsion generator to the degauss cables through a special portable controller which reversed the power polarity. This is, at least partly confirmed by the fact that the original ships to be degaussed were all electric propulsion DE types, as stated by the former Navy petty officer who was involved in this episode and contacted Jacques Vallee. 

There certainly wasn’t enough room to install additional equipment in the DE ships. The technique would be to thoroughly degauss the ship in port and then pass a small current through the cables and change the current when necessary, to keep the ship’s field nulled as the ship direction changed with respect to the Earth’s magnetic field.

I am thoroughly disgusted with MUFON. I have always been interested in the so-called “electromagnetic effects” reported to be exhibited by UFOs. Since I spent most of my career in related fields, including operating an FCC Authorized Electromagnetic Emissions Test Lab as a part of GMC Laboratories for 16 years, I was distressed to find that all sorts of amateur “scientists” were calling everything “electromagnetic” whether it really was or not. At one time, back in the 1980’s, I decided to look into it to see what I could come up with. 

I started with Mark Rodeghier’s “UFO Reports Involving Vehicle Interference” . I don’t know what area Rodeghier’s PHD is in, but he certainly misses it in the electromagnetics area and even includes things like what science fiction stories call tractor beams. But the most common error was calling a disruption of electric power, (AC or DC) from a remote source an electromagnetic effect. It may very well be an electromagnetic effect, but it is something that our particular technology has not yet solved. I was able to resolve that if one could manipulate the electric and magnetic fields remotely, then it may be possible. We consider this impossible because the driving FIELDS surrounding a conductor are supposed to be derived from the current and voltage, and not subject to external forces.

Anyway, I wrote up about a 50 page paper on it and sent it to Walt Andrus. Almost by return mail, I got one of Walt’s famous postcards, where the size of the card limits the complexity of the message. He said it was the best he had ever read. The only thing he would ask was that I split it into two parts so it could be put into two issues. I made the changes he asked for and sent it in to him. In about 6 months, I hadn’t heard from him and I called to see what the status was. His answer was that “one of MUFON’s officers” refused to allow it to be published because he disagreed with it.

In this paper, I reviewed some other published opinions, pro and con. One of the “cons” was a statement made by that officer of MUFON in a book which he wrote, to the effect that there is no characteristic exhibited by UFOs which can not be explained in terms of present day science. If that is what he believes, he is either very naïve or hasn’t read the literature, or knows very little about science. Right then I realized that UFOLOGY was a giant play pen in the sky!

This same book explained the extinguishing of car headlights as due to microwaves! “A physical basis for this effect on headlamps is the increased resistivity of tungsten in the presence of microwave energy. Increasing resistance would reduce the flow of current through the lamp filament thereby diminishing the heating. The lamp would grow dim as the temperature dropped, or become entirely extinguished when the current became too low to keep the filament incandescent”. A footnote at the figure 6 refers to one of the footnotes in the back of the book which reads: “This obscure point came to the author’s attention a few years ago and unfortunately, all efforts to locate the source have been unavailing”.

Mr. Scientist was not aware that the tungsten lamp filament normally operates at 2600 degrees centigrade. Since the focus of the parabolic reflector is on the filament, if irradiated by microwaves, the filament will just grow hotter and brighter until it vaporizes. There have been NO reports of burned out headlamps so this doesn’t work either!!!

So much for MUFON scientists!!!

Pleasant Smearing!!!


Gaines Crook