I recently received my second edition copy of Ryan Wood’s book “Majic Eyes Only: Earth’s Encounters with Extraterrestrial Technology” that discusses over one hundred alleged UFO crashes around the world. It’s honestly one of the best books on the subject since Leonard Stringfield’s Status Reports were published. Ryan is a friend of mine that I’ve spoken to off and on since I started my Ely, Nevada UFO crash research in 2008. The two Ely cases that I worked on and lots of others are talked about in Ryan’s book. I highly recommend ordering a copy of the book if you’re interested in the UFO subject.
Getting to the point of the post… I read the second edition of Ryan’s book and it reminded me of something that I’ve been dabbling in over the last year or so but haven’t mentioned openly to the public up until now. The case that I’m referring to is the alleged 1953 Garrison, Utah UFO crash.
The Garrison case is rarely talked about or mentioned anywhere outside of a few outdated websites on the internet. I’m not exactly sure why hardly anyone seems to even notice that this case exists because there really is some meat to this case once you start to look deeper into it.
Contacting The Original Investigator
I originally heard about the Garrison, Utah UFO crash around 2008 or 2010 when Ryan Wood had first interviewed me about what I knew about the Ely, Nevada crashes at that time and he sent me a copy of the first edition of his Majic Eyes Only book. The story sounded almost too good to be true… A very large UFO crashes into a remote valley and is so large that transporting the craft is impossible. The object is ultimately buried where it crashed, and it sits there undisturbed to this day. Sounds too good to be true right? Well, I thought the same thing myself. If you look up any information on this case, there’s no new information posted within the last 20 years, until now. I did a lot of digging, made lots of phone calls, and I managed to figure out the details to the case. Much of what I’m about to say can’t be found anywhere else on the internet. I’m going to tell you the whole story from start to finish. This one’s a doozy!
If you search “1953 UFO crash Garrison, Utah” on any search engine two of the first websites you’ll usually be led to are Earthfiles, which is a website run by UFO journalist Linda Moulton Howe, and the Utah UFO Hunters research group website. Both websites mention a man named Steve Jones and state that he’s the one that found out most of the information related to the case that’s written down on the internet. I knew that I had to find the mysterious Steve Jones.
I wasn’t quite sure where to start with tracking down Steve. Both the Earthfiles and the Utah UFO Hunters websites seem to be really outdated and have been sitting stagnant for years. I decided to start with the Utah UFO Hunters website since it’s the official website of Steve’s group that he belongs to. The emails listed didn’t work and weren’t used for a long time it appeared, so I was going to need to take another route. I noticed that the website kept referring to an individual that went by the alias “Alien Dave” and I knew that I needed to find out who this Alien Dave was. I knew that if I could find this Alien Dave that he could lead me to Steve Jones.
Through some digging, I found out that Alien Dave was the alias for a UFO investigator named Dave Rosenfeld. I called Dave who seemed surprised that I was asking about the Garrison case out of nowhere and he told me that he did know Steve Jones but hadn’t spoken to him in quite some time. According to Dave, Steve was in his late 70’s and if I wanted to get the whole story, I would probably need to get on that. He stated that he would write Steve a message and see if he would be willing to speak to me. I had to wait…
I would eventually talk to Steve the first time around March of 2023. Steve said that he had been out of the UFO game for a while, but he would be willing to tell me what he knew about the case. Since then, I’ve spoken to Steve numerous times, and we became friends. The details that I’m about to write are written exactly the way that I was told from Steve Jones and Dave Rosenfeld. The research associated with this case needs to be credited primarily to Steve Jones. He’s the one that did the legwork. I’m just the messenger!
Origins Of the Story
Steve Jones was introduced to the Garrison case back in 1993 by a group called the Phoenix Project. Steve never joined the group but would hang around them and attend some of their meetings.
The main players in the Phoenix Project for the purpose of this post are:
-Richard Miller
-Thomas (name withheld)
-Al
As I stated already, Steve attended one of the Phoenix Project meetings where a new group member named Al, made a presentation where he talked about a strange case involving a crashed UFO in the desert (Al is the one who originally found out about the location from an unnamed individual that belonged to an agency that he worked for. Al was said to have a security clearance). During the presentation, Al brought out a stack of about 10-15 large aerial photos that were dated early June of 1953 and started to pass them around to the audience. The photos all appeared to show a large valley, but focused in on a specific large, triangle-shaped area on the ground. Steve was told by the group that the photos were all taken from an area in western Utah called the Desert Range Experimental Station, or DRES for short.
“The Desert Range Experimental Station is an 87 square-mile research facility located about fifteen miles east of the Nevada-Utah border in Millard County, Utah, established in 1933 to study the effects of grazing in the fragile desert environment of the Great Basin. The DRES is managed by the U.S. Forest Service, an arm of the Department of Agriculture. In 1976, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) designated a portion of the DRES a biosphere reserve” (Ryan Wood states in his Majic Eyes Only book).
In short, the DRES facility is used to study desert plant life, farming, and grazing in a desert environment.
After the photos were shown, Richard Miller then tells Steve that they have further evidence in the form of a logbook. The logbook, or guestbook in my own words, had entries from everyone who had been there in 1979 and 1980. While most of the entries in the logbook made sense (biologists and researchers), there were some rather peculiar ones that made no sense such as: Air Force and U.S. Army personnel from Fort Carson, Colorado, USAF command center personnel, and representatives from a well-known company that builds rocket engines. Steve and the Phoenix project members believe that the DRES site is / was used for something other than researching plants and grazing. They think that the site is a front for a secret research facility that studied the crash. Whether that’s true or not, I’ll get into that in another post, but for now I’m going to continue discussing the case as it was told to me.
When asked where the logbook and photos came from, Richard stated that the logbook and the aerial photographs were acquired in 1991 or 1992 from one of the Phoenix Project’s many trips to the site that they had taken before they met Steve. Apparently one of the group members jumped down a coal chute in one of the old buildings out at the DRES site and took them unethically (stole them). Continuing on…
Witnesses
There are some witnesses that Steve managed to track down who claim to have seen the object crash. Here are their accounts:
-Bart Wright-
Bart was ten years old living in the town of Baker, Nevada which is approximately 8 miles from Garrison, Utah when he saw a strange sight. One night Bart claims to have seen a bright blue light streak across the sky and crash or land on the other side of the valley (near the DRES facility). When the light hit the ground, it caused the ground to shake, and the sky lit up. Bart said that he hid under his bed because it scared him badly.
-Horseback Riders-
Steve interviewed a man at a college in Utah who said that he was horseback riding with his brother and saw the same blue object crash into the desert somewhere in the Hamlin valley.
Evidence / Details, And Other Talking Points
Moving on, I asked Steve to talk to me about what other evidence he had to support the case and what he and his co-researchers figured out. He said the following:
-The DRES facility is in the Hamlin valley. There’s a missile silo allegedly at the south-end of the valley that was supposed to be used to test the MX missile. The missile silo was built, but never used. This might be the reason that military personnel were signed into the logbook at the DRES facility.
-The Dugway Proving Grounds are located close to Garrison, Utah. John Lear says that a contact of his knew of or saw the craft at the Dugway Proving Grounds. The road that runs from the lakebed where the strange triangle indentation is located at to highway 50 is the only two-lane dirt road in the area. The road starts at the lakebed and runs to the southwest corner of Dugway.
-In 1999 Steve hired geologist Lamont Sorenson from Salt Lake City, Utah to conduct magnetometer and seismic tests in parts of the triangular formation where the craft allegedly crashed, searching for evidence of subsurface anomalies. The geologist found no evidence of underground anomalies, but he did say that with his professional experience, that he does not think that the formation was made by nature. He thinks that some kind of digging appears to have taken place. In short, the tests were inconclusive.
-Steve thinks that the 1953 Garrison, Utah UFO crash could have something to do with the Kingman UFO crash which allegedly occurred a month earlier. Other than the dates being close, I’m not sure why he thinks this.
Were the Phoenix Project Investigators Visited by the Government?
A short time after the Phoenix Project presentation, Richard was at work one day where he lived in Carson City, and he claims to have been visited by a military intelligence officer. The officer told Richard that he had some “material” that he shouldn’t have in his possession and that he needed to give it back. Richard didn’t volunteer to give the photos or logbook back, but he told Steve that he thought that the military was following him somehow or was watching what he was doing.
Another Phoenix group member named Thomas (which is an alias Steve gave the man who took the actual photos from the DRES facility), who lived in Sacramento, California was jolted awake in the middle of the night by a knocking at his door after word got out that he had taken the materials. Once the door was opened, Thomas saw a man he had never seen before who identified himself as a government / intelligence official. The man told Thomas to get dressed because he needed to go with him to an undisclosed location. The man took Thomas to a government building located on the corner of 10th and L Street, which is the former Department of Equalization building.
Once in the building Thomas told Steve and the Phoenix Project members that he was taken to a room that was totally bare except for a table and some chairs. He was sat down at the table, and he was shown photos of various places that he visited often (where he worked, where he lives, etc.). The official apparently interrogated or threatened Thomas after that and it really scared him. Thomas wanted out of the Garrison, Utah UFO crash investigation immediately after this.
Richard Miller would pass away from brain cancer around 2001 after Thomas had his alleged visit from the government official.
The Research Ends
With the Phoenix Project pulling out of the case, Steve was intrigued and continued to pursue the story on his own. Steve, who was living in California at the time, contacted Les Velez, who was the assistant director of northern California MUFON, joined the investigation. Between 2001 and 2005, Les would meet up with Steve at the DRES facility. Les introduced Steve to UFO journalist Linda Moulton Howe and another investigator named Ryan Layton who joined them frequently. Linda Moulton Howe joining the case is what started the downfall of the investigation.
From what I was told from numerous sources involved, Linda started lecturing in 2005 about the Garrison UFO crash and acting as if she was the one that had done the research when in reality it was Steve, the Phoenix Project, and the Utah UFO Hunters (a group steve formed with Dave Rosenfeld that worked on the case later on after the Phoenix Project left the case) that did the legwork. Linda started adding fantastical details to her presentations such as the large UFO being buried by hand by a large group of soldiers which caused a lot of criticisms from the public and started to divide those who were involved in the actual research. Steve and some of the investigators had been investigating the case for 12 years or more before Linda got involved and they were getting angry that she was basically stealing their story from beneath them.
Linda also burned a bridge with some of Steve’s witnesses that wanted to remain anonymous. She was said to have specifically called Thomas relentlessly about his visitation from the government official and other things that he didn’t want to talk about. Linda pressed him hard to talk to her and was persistent even though he made it known that he didn’t want to. Thomas felt like the case was getting dangerous and wanted to pull out of the investigation prior to her joining up with Steve and the other researchers and Linda wasn’t respecting that.
I asked Steve during one of our conversations why he never called Linda Moulton Howe out about stealing his research and he said that he’s not about fame and fortune, his motivation is the research. He then said that another reason he quit looking into the DRES case because the Utah state MUFON director did a presentation trying to debunk the case and he heavily criticized Steve and his research, and he didn’t want to deal with him. It’s quite sad when you think about how much work Steve and his co-investigators put into this case and it was all ruined because of a power-hungry UFO celebrity was looking to make a buck at their expense. The Garrison UFO crash sounds like something might have happened but the public interest was cut short due to Linda Moulton Howe making fantastical claims and causing a rift among the investigators of the case. We might not ever really know what, if anything, occurred out near the DRES facility in 1953. For now, the case is closed it seems.
My Final Thoughts
I think that Steve Jones was sincere and genuine with everything that he’s told me up to this point when I’ve talked to him. I do think that the Phoenix Project, Steve, and the Utah UFO Hunters were onto something with this case. It sounds like something actually might have happened. The tests that Lamont Sorenson did and the witness testimony does lead to some credibility. Can I say without a doubt that a UFO did crash at the DRES site in 1953? I can’t 100% say that personally, but I’m definitely leaning in the direction that something occurred. If Linda Moulton Howe didn’t sour the case, I’m almost certain that Steve and his co-researchers would have dug deeper and found a lot more information whether it was UFO that crashed or something else. I’ll cover my personal opinion more in detail in an upcoming post when I talk about the DRES facility.
Ely UFO Crash 