UFO Blitz in the Bluegrass Triangle

Found in the labyrinthine recesses of my archives: a newspaper clipping from a 1978 National Enquirer, exact date indeterminate. Says here that central Kentucky was reportedly experiencing a "UFO blitz" back in those long-gone days of disco and punk.


What exactly did this blitz consist of? According to the article, one of the incidents involved a pair of Madison County firemen called upon to put out a grass fire that turned out to be a "blazing red UFO" - which they then proceeded to follow across Richmond in hot pursuit for over an hour. One of the firemen, Robert Murphy, described it as a "classic" flying-saucer shaped spaceship.


Another case was a preacher and his wife who, and I quote, "encountered a gigantic, dazzling UFO on the way to church." Elmer Hardy, then 73 years old and pastor of Bybee United Methodist Church, said they were driving to Sunday night services when the UFO approached them head-on and hovered above them. "It was about 10 stories high and 20 stories wide, with a zillion lights on it," Hardy is quoted as saying.

Then there's 16-year-old Terry Kirby from Irvine, who the Enquirer says was chopping wood when suddenly a glowing oval-shaped UFO descended upon him. Kirby had the quick wits to run in the the house, grab a polaroid camera, and snap a shot. The article also quotes other Irvine citizens like police chief Marcus Cole, who says there have been many eyewitness of flying saucers in Irvine; and Guy Hatfield, publisher of Citizen Voice & Times, is quoted as defending the experiencers: "These were all solid citizens, with no reason to say it unless they saw one".

Another Irvine sighting report was from a Kentucky State Trooper, Jim Whitaker. He spotted a car-sized UFO with red/white/blue/green pulsating lights hovering over a field in Irvine on "February 19" (presumably 1978). "Whitaker, a veteran of 1,500 flying hours in Navy helicopters, said the craft definitely wasn't a helicopter or airplane." He chased the car for two hours in the Estill County night, and made a very interesting observation: "When an aircraft approached it, the intensity of its lights would die down... and once the aircraft was clear, it would light up again!"


The article, although rather well-written for a tabloid rag, fails to mention the presence of the Blue Grass Army Depot at the epicenter of this "Bluegrass Triangle" of UFO activity they posit.

Welcome to Your Depot

The Richmond Register is reporting that the Blue Grass Army Depot wants to "give back to the community".

Seriously, guys, you've given us enough already. No, really. We'd like to re-gift some of your previous presents, like nerve gas explosions, broken deadline promises, Raytheon, black helicopters, and as the Los Angeles Times has been reporting, disastrously unsafe conditions and terminated whistle-blowers. Not to mention the Men in Black.

The Depot's latest attempt to put a good PR spin on things: "Lake Buck Lodge", a 4,420 sq. foot building with restaurant, pool and golf course. The Register quotes Col. Brian Rogers:

“What’s important about this plan is that it’s not just big and has a beautiful view and is located smack dab in the middle of Berea and Richmond and that it seats 200 and has a full kitchen, but that we’re reaching out to the community and saying welcome to your depot."

Sounds lovely. But on the exact same day, the same paper also reported that unstable and defective mustard-agent rockets stored there are posing a problem for their eventual disarming and destruction.

The 15,000 mustard-containing artillery projectiles now housed in protective igloos at the depot once were stored outside where they were exposed to rain, heat and snow, according to Jeff Brubaker, the military’s civilian manager of the depot’s destruction program.

Exposure to the elements led to some corrosion that may make difficult removing the chemical warheads of the projectiles from the “bursters” designed to disperse the mustard agent, the project’s citizen advisory board was told Tuesday...

If detaching the warheads from their bursters is not possible in the automated destruction plant, workers would have to enter the building to retrieve them, slowing the process. If the chemical warheads are unstable, the workers, even if wearing protective suits, could be put at risk.

Nevertheless, all criticism and ribbing aside, Lake Buck Lodge does sound a pretty cool place. I do look forward to checking it out; playing golf in the shadow of enough chemical weapons to kill everyone in Kentucky definitely sounds like a destination for some unusual road-tripping. Come spring, I'm so there.

Solar Bag Creates UFO Scare

A number of people saw an unidentified flying object over the city of Berea a few days ago. Thanks to the spooky goings-on at the Depot, weird things in the skies aren't that big a deal, but this time one of the puzzled witnesses was none other than Scott Powell, editor of the Berea Citizen.

Powell and his neighbors watched the strange wiggling, undulating UFO for about 10 minutes. Channel 18 News quoted him as saying, "It looked like the Gateway Arch in St. Louis had come up and was flying in the air, because it had that arch shape to it and it was kind of a metallic - it had a shine to it."

As it turned out, the tubular floater wasn't an alien nor a cruise missile and it wasn't even a secret government project. It was merely a giant 50-foot-long solar bag that a local schoolteacher had released into the air as part of a class demonstration of solar energy. Solar bags act like helium balloons (some have risen to over 120,000 feet) but are filled with nothing but ordinary air, heated via convection by the sun's rays.

Men in Black

In the course of researching the Weird Kentucky book, I spoke to a man in Madison County who told me an interesting tale. He didn't want to be named on the record, and I lost track of the story while hoping he'd reconsider going on the record. Now I've lost track with the guy entirely.

In a nutshell, he claimed that in the 1970s he was visited by a pair of suspicious-acting, pale, cadaverous men wearing dark glasses and dressed in old, musty-looking black suits and ties.

In other words, the classic Men In Black mythical archetype. As Wikipedia describes them:

Men in Black (MIB), in popular culture and in UFO conspiracy theories, are men dressed in black suits who are government agents who harass or threaten UFO witnesses to keep them quiet about what they have seen. It is sometimes implied that they may be aliens themselves. The term is also frequently used to describe mysterious men working for unknown organizations, as well as to various branches of government allegedly designed to protect secrets or perform other strange activities.

The fellow in Madison County said the men were claiming to be selling subscriptions to the Richmond Daily Register and other periodicals. However, their patter was rambling and unpracticed, like someone uttering the words for the first time rather than someone who had been saying the same thing over and over at every door he knocked on. Rather than have a stack of "take one" flyers with more information, they had only one flyer, and it looked water-damaged and dog-eared as if they'd found it on the ground. And he definitely felt as if one MIB was craning his neck to peer inside the house while the other MIB was distracting him.

I can't go into why he felt the men were part of some secret agency, without divulging key information regarding his identity. But I found his story compelling.

That's because I had an MIB experience myself.

In 1991, I was living with a girlfriend in a house in Lexington's Bell Court, and hosting a weekly rockabilly radio show on WRFL. I was just wrapping up my show at the station when I got a phone call. It was a man from Richmond, who said he just happened to be driving through Lexington and just happened to hear my radio show and just happened to have a carload of ultra-rare rockabilly records that he'd like to get rid of, cheap. Would I be interested? Oh hell yeah.

I gave him my address and told him I'd be right home in minutes, since I lived close to the station. Did he know where Bell Court was? "I think I can find it." He was already waiting there when I rolled up just moments later. He was of average height, short dark brown hair combed back, mustache. He was very friendly and professional-seeming in a nice dark suit and tie.

I invited him up, and we hauled the boxes of records up to my room. It was a treasure trove of some of the rarest vinyl possible - Elvis on Sun, super-rare Elvis white-label RCA DJ copies, Bill Haley DJ copies on pink-label Decca, Gene Vincent LPs, and various valuable 45s of obscure artists. And all in fantastic condition. We're talking thousands of dollars worth of classic rockabilly vinyl.

I told him I couldn't even begin to be able to afford to buy the collection, but if he'd let me cherry-pick some of the best ones out, I'd buy those now and try to buy more later. He smiled a warm and friendly smile and said, "Tell you what. I'm in Lexington all the time. I live in Richmond and work at the Blue Grass Army Depot. You keep the records and I'll stop back here in a couple days. That'll give you a chance to look through them and make your decision."

I was stunned that he would trust someone he had just met with all these valuable records, but gladly agreed. He wrote his name and number down on a scrap of paper for me, we shook hands, and he headed to his car. And I never saw him again.

When he didn't show up after a few days, I called the number he'd given me. I got the loud shrill three notes and the recorded robotic message: "We are sorry, you have reached a number that is disconnected or is no longer in service." I looked up the name he'd given me in the phone book. He wasn't there. I called the Depot and asked for him but was told they'd never heard of him.

What the hell?

At the time, I hadn't connected him with the Men In Black myth. I was just thinking "Well, I guess the records are mine now." But it bothered me that he knew exactly how to find me, so why wasn't he trying? Even if he lost my number, he knew where I lived. Even if he forgot that, he knew I worked at WRFL. Even if he forgot where that was, he knew I did a rockabilly show there and could have called the station.

For a third Kentucky MIB story, there's purportedly one in Bart Nunnelly's Mysterious Kentucky, but I haven't read it yet because Bart never sent me my copy ;)

And then there's yesterday's Masked Ninja Home Invasion story.

BGAD in LA Times

The Los Angeles Times has a new and extensive article on the rapidly corroding nerve gas cannisters at Blue Grass Army Depot in Richmond. In addition to the chemical dump, the BGAD is also home to alleged UFO technology, spooky Raytheon projects, and the occasional black helicopter. Choice excerpts:

Behind armed guards in bulletproof booths deep in the Kentucky woods, workers have begun pouring the foundations for a $3-billion complex designed to destroy America's last stockpile of deadly chemical weapons.

The Obama administration has pushed to speed up the disposal operation after decades of delay, skyrocketing costs and daunting technical problems. The arms must be destroyed by April 2012 under international treaty and by December 2017 under federal law. But the Pentagon notified Congress in May that, even under what it called an accelerated schedule, it would not finish the job until 2021...

"We do experience leakers from time to time at very, very low levels," said Lt. Col. David Musgrave, commander of the Blue Grass Chemical Activity, as the storage site is called. He said no toxic plumes have escaped the igloos or threatened the surrounding community...

Concerns about safety at Blue Grass were highlighted last month when lawyers for Donald Van Winkle, a former chemical weapons monitor who claims he was forced out of his job at the facility after he uncovered unsafe conditions, obtained an Army investigative report through the Freedom of Information Act...

Another self-described whistle-blower, Kim Schafermeyer, 59, alleged he was fired as a chemist in 2006 in retaliation for citing safety and pollution problems at Blue Grass. A judge dismissed his lawsuit last year on a technicality.

Schafermeyer contends that the aging munitions are decomposing faster than officials admit. "They are highly unstable," he said. "These things should be destroyed next week."

Read the article in full here.

By the way, in the above photo, note that the BGAD igloo workers have gas masks strapped to their faces but their rest of the flesh on their heads remains exposed to the open air. But nerve gas is readily absorbed through the skin with even the slightest contact, so, uh, WTF?

Shocking New BGAD Revelations

Shocking to some, that is. Nothing shocks me anymore about the Pentagon's toxic dumpsite in Madison County.

Turns out that the Blue Grass Army Depot went for two years without any means to detect nerve gas leaks in their rapidly decomposing nerve gas igloos, then fired a whistleblower who dared to say "hey, Chief, maybe we oughta fix 'em."

From Environment News Service:

WASHINGTON, DC, July 20, 2009 (ENS) - The U.S. Army has acknowleged that the nerve gas leak monitors at a Kentucky chemical weapons storage depot were not working for nearly two years, 2003-2005. The admission is contained in a U.S. Army Inspector General report dated February 2006 but released today.

Managers of chemical weapons storage at the Blue Grass Army Depot, located outside of Richmond, 30 miles south of Lexington, had rendered the detectors inoperative and the problem was remedied only after a whistleblower was forced to file a complaint, according to the Inspector General investigation posted today by Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility, PEER...

PEER points out that the Army Inspector General's report confirms the chief concerns raised by whistleblower Donald Van Winkle, a chemical weapons monitoring operator at Blue Grass.

Van Winkle expressed his concern that leak detectors were improperly removed from inside the igloos holding highly lethal VX nerve gas.

As a result, from September 2003 to August 2005, after Van Winkle came forward, Blue Grass had no means, other than visual observation, to determine whether the odorless, colorless nerve gas was seeping from the rockets in which the agent is stored.

These changes were contrary to Army protocols and safety standards but only minor disciplinary action was taken against the responsible managers, Van Winkle said.

The Army Inspector General concluded that despite the lack of working leak detectors there was no evidence of worker or public exposure to escaped chemicals, citing the "historically low rate of leakers" in VX nerve gas rockets and warheads.

The Inspector General withheld the report from PEER Freedom of Information Act requests for more than three years due to "an ongoing U.S. Army Criminal Investigation Command investigation." PEER has requested information on the status of that criminal investigation...


At the time this report was being finalized, whistleblower Van Winkle was removed from Blue Grass after being stripped of his certification to work with chemical weapons because, according to the base command, he showed "signs of behavior of a disgruntled employee and … lack of a positive attitude."

"In the Army, senior officials who screw up get slapped on the wrist but whistleblowers get banished," said Dinerstein, who is leading Van Winkle's legal effort to restore his chemical weapons program certification.

She notes that the Inspector General's report contains information at variance with sworn testimony from Blue Grass officials in the Van Winkle legal action. "Given how this case was handled, no wonder major problems go unreported," she said.

And that's not all. Apparently things still aren't been so peachy out there. The article goes on to note:

While the Army Inspector General did not substantiate related operational troubles at Blue Grass, in late 2007, the Kentucky Department of Environmental Protection confirmed some of Van Winkle's other disclosures...

Violations verified by Kentucky DEP in 2007 include failure to test spills from rockets containing agent that are stored inside the igloos; improper storage practices which crush the shells of rockets and cause leaks; and failure to ensure employees are properly trained to prevent release of chemical warfare agents.

The state agency also warned that Blue Grass staff may have been exposed to nerve agent but never notified or monitored; managers "scrub" or falsify monitoring reports, and in some instances turn off monitoring equipment to mask problems; and the base routinely transfers or blackballs whistleblowers.

Nerve Gas incineration to continue past 2017

Some cheerful news about the Blue Grass Army Depot in Madison County, from Global Security Newswire:

The U.S. Defense Department yesterday said it would need until 2021 to finish off chemical weapons stored in Kentucky, despite the congressional mandate that operations be finished four years earlier, the Louisville Courier-Journal reported (see GSN, May 8).

The Pentagon last week requested hundreds of millions of dollars in additional funding for the next fiscal year to speed up preparations for demilitarization operations at the Blue Grass Army Depot in Kentucky and the Pueblo Chemical Depot in Colorado. A recent report indicated that military officials would seek $1.2 billion through fiscal 2015 in hopes of finishing work earlier at the two sites (see GSN, May 6).

The chemical neutralization plant now being built at Blue Grass would start destroying the site's chemical-weapon stockpile in 2019 and wrap up the effort in 2021, said Jean Reed, deputy assistant to the defense secretary for biological defense and chemical demilitarization. Operations at the Pueblo Chemical Depot are set to begin in 2014 and last through 2017.

Disposal operations at all other U.S. chemical-weapon storage sites are completed or under way. The Chemical Weapons Convention requires that the arsenal be eliminated by April 2012, but Pentagon officials have acknowledged they cannot meet that deadline.

BGAD's Spaced-out Insignia

Here's a good shot of the Blue Grass Army Depot's logo, as it actually appears at their front gates. Click to enlarge.

In the foreground we have a depiction of what would appear to be Daniel Boone. Daniel Boone, of course, is a symbol of the pioneer. And what is the literal definition of being a pioneer? Leading the way in exploring unknown territory. Behind Boone's image we have a backdrop depicting a rocketship in space! The implications of this juxtaposition seem clearly to point to space exploration.

Coincidence? Possibly. But consider that much of the Depot houses private research facilities for the major NASA contractor Raytheon, as well as entities called Serv-Air and E-Systems, which are both also tentacles of Raytheon under different names.

The corporate watchdog group CorpWatch had this to say about E-Systems:

One of Raytheon's more secretive subsidiaries is E-Systems, whose major clients have historically been the CIA and other spy agencies like the National Security Agency and the National Reconnaissance Office. An unnamed Congressional aide told the Washington Post once that the company was ''virtually indistinguishable'' from the agencies it serves. ''Congress will ask for a briefing from E- Systems and the (CIA) program manager shows up,'' the aide is quoted as saying. ''Sometimes he gives the briefing. They're interchangeable.''

E-Systems is also the creator of the "Doomsday Plane", which would be the U.S. President's escape vehicle in the event of a nuclear attack, and double as a temporary airborne command post for the Pentagon and the White House.

It's also rather odd that there's a very prominent star on the image of Kentucky. Now, you'd think the purpose of said star would be to denote the location of the Depot... but the star's location isn't even close. Maybe the insignia designer took a drastic liberty with it, since Daniel Boone's figure is obscuring the actual location of the Depot? Why not just design it another way then?? The star seems to be on Lee County (which, according to rumor, was the location of a 1980's CIA psych-op installation - which may or may not still exist).

If anyone is able to recognize what, if any, specific star background area is shown in the logo, please let us know. (I wouldn't think that any specific constellations or actual star patterns would be depicted, but then again, I once read some conspiracy article that found some sort of arcane significance in the stars on NASA's insignia. I forget what now, though.)


Oh, and hey, did you know that Raytheon means ""light from the gods"?

The Blue Grass Army Depot

The Blue Grass Army Depot is located in Madison County, KY and is well known for being a storage facility for nerve gas. Each year they release free calendars to local citizens, as part of a public relations drive to show everyone "We're really just a simple ammo dump, and there's nothing to fear. Just ignore the Black Helicopters and UFOs. Really. Trust us."

Back in the early 90s, when I ran an antiques business from Richmond and Berea, I had a series of conversations with an eccentric old fellow (who will go unnamed here), who used to tell me a great deal of tall tales and unsubstantiated rumors about what was going on in the Depot. How he could possibly know this information, he refused to say. I do know he served in Vietnam, but that's the only military connection I ever gleaned for certain about him.

Among his grandiose claims were:

1. Alien technology recovered from a crashed alien spacecraft was being reverse-engineered and used in experimental aircraft being tested at the Depot.

2. He said he had it on authority from people he trusted, that the alien spacecraft was stored, at least at some point in time, underground at the Depot. Why Kentucky?, I asked. "They wouldn't keep it where everyone expects it", he said.

3.All manner of cutting-edge secret aircraft are tested at the Depot, including the Stealth Bomber, and many others that no one's ever heard of. He mentioned one such secret plane in particular, one that was completely invisible because its hull acted as both a camera and a monitor, projecting what was on one side of the plane to the other side, no matter what angle you were facing the plane from.

4.He said that the Depot was the military's main headquarters for Chemical Warfare, and that the first Gulf War was practically run from within the Depot.

He made a great many other wild claims, but these are the ones that are most relevant to our field of study here. At the time, I didn't take anything this person said too seriously. He didn't look or act like the type of guy you'd expect to have security clearance anyplace. He was pretty much drunk a large percentage of the time, too. But I often thought back to the bizarre "truths" he'd confided to me, especially when seeing UFOs in the area and hearing other talk about the UFOs they'd seen.

But gradually, I began to find out that at least some of what I had been told was true. The Blue Grass Army Depot is the main source for the Department of Defense's chemical weapons, according to information found right on their own web sites.

I considered his "invisible plane" story to be the most outlandish detail of all, even more so than the alien story. Then I found out years later that such an aircraft does exist, with a technology called "Electrochromatic Panels", which have been researched extensively by respected journalist Norio Hayakawa.

The more we learn about the Blue Grass Depot, the more questions arise. One thing is for certain, and that is they are not just a simple army ammo dump.


Were one to compile an exhaustive list of all UFO sightings in the Kentucky area (and more specifically, the Depot area), it would be massive enough for a site all its own. But UFOs do not get reported around here much anymore, even though they're seen on an almost nightly basis. It's something the locals have grown accustomed to, much like people near Area 51. One gentleman who resides within sight of the depot made that connection himself, saying "I guess you could say this is like the Area 51 of the South."

The types of UFO reported run the gamut of all the traditional variants: saucer-shaped, cigar-shaped, triangular, mystery lights, etc. Unmarked Black Helicopters are also a recurring sight, almost daily, in the area. They are frequently seen coming in and out of the depot, even in broad daylight. Some seem to be coming or going in the general direction of Fort Campbell, or sometimes the nearby Madison County Airport. Some are very advanced and of unknown make, others appear to be Blackhawks or "Little Birds".

There have also been numerous reports of the Stealth Bomber being seen in Kentucky, especially around the northern border near Cincinnati.


Above photo: note the charming bomb motif at the Depot's Operation Golden Cargo checkpoint.

The Airports of Madison County

Okay, so we here at Unusual Kentucky are admittedly given to paranoid and conspiratorial conjecture at the drop of a hat. But the Madison County Airport really does give us the Creeps. It's tucked back in the woods far, far, far from civilization and there are almost no signs pointing how to get there from the main road. There is a real feeling of uneasiness out here, and everyone here seems very paranoid and wary of outsiders. (It's been this way for years, incidentally - long before the Sept.11th incident made all airports a little more tense) Though airnav.com lists the military as accounting for only 3 percent of their traffic, we've seen an awful lot of military planes in and out of here at times. The airport, it should be noted, is not far from Blue Grass Army Depot, who of course have extensive airport and helipad facilities of their own.
On Menelaus Road, on the way to the Madison Airport, there is yet another airport, apparently called "The Berea/Richmond Airport" according to one map. Never seen planes come or go here but the planes parked in the weed-filled field change from time to time so evidently they do get some traffic. It's a tiny field next to a barn and farmhouse, with a small half-hangar towards the back.
And while you're out in this neck of the woods, also check out the Hanging Bridge.

The "Kentucky Anomaly"

This is apparently one of those things that tend to get buried and lost in the shuffle of mountains of government-generated paperwork and bureaucracy - check this out.

"A very prominent magnetic anomaly measured by MAGSAT over the eastern mid-continent of the United States was inferred to have a source region beneath Kentucky and Tennessee. Prominent aeromagnetic and gravity anomalies are also associated with the inferred source region."

Okay, so a huge magnetic anomaly under Kentucky is cool, and is right in line with everything I've been saying about the "Kentucky Vortex", the "Dark and Bloody Ground", and the old William S. Burroughs bit about old evils lurking under the soil. But gravity anomalies specifically under Kentucky? Damn! This is hardcore!

And of course, the first things that come to my mind are the stories about the ancient civilizations of people that were supposedly here before the Native Americans, and then I start thinking about why the Blue Grass Army Depot is said to be the Area 51 of Kentucky. (And then I start thinking about the guy who claims there was a UFO that crashed in Burnside, KY... but only for a moment.)

Could this "Kentucky Anomaly" be a sort of Unified Field Theory for everything that's weird about this area? I'm intrigued. They fed this anomalous data into a NASA computer and asked it to come up with a theoretical model that might explain the anomaly. As the NASA website tells it:

"A crustal model constructed to fit these anomalies interpreted the complex as a large mafic plutonic intrusion of Precambrian age. The complex was named the Kentucky body."

How X-Files is that? It's called "The Kentucky Body" and they don't know exactly what it is but they do know it's causing huge magnetic and gravity anomalies?

Did they really say "gravity anomalies"??? Yes, yes they did. Whoa.

Now I know the Pre-Cambrian era well - that's back in the old, old, times before everything. Actually, to call it an "era" is a misnomer - it actually comprises the entire first seven-eighths of the Earth's history, about which we know practically zip.

It's not just all about this "Kentucky Body" though: a subsequent report notes that "the source region for the satellite anomaly is considerably more extensive than the Kentucky body sensu stricto."

Aside from a mention in some grad student's online paper, I can't find any further analysis of the Kentucky Body and the Kentucky Anomaly by NASA (or anyone else) after this initial flurry of papers in the 1980s. Why? Did the subject become classified?

UFO over Richmond Wal-Mart

On June 29, 2002, having just driven back into Richmond after taking photos of the Blue Grass Army Depot, a friend and I saw a strange object floating across the Eastern By-pass, from the K-Mart side over to a position above Wal-Mart's parking lot.

At first we thought the object was a kite. I used the digital camera as a binoculars by looking through the zoom lens, and after close inspection I clearly saw a person's legs move, which put the whole object in size perspective. The object was scarcely bigger than the person himself, like he was in a flying chair. It could only be one thing: an Autogyro.

Autogyros are basically super-tiny and super-simple helicopters, essentially a guy strapped to a chair with copter blades attached. They've been used for spy and reconnaisance missions by our government and others.

Was this someone from the Blue Grass Army Depot running a test flight over civilian airspace? Or just some shmo who built one himself (they're actually no harder to build than a go-kart) and took it for a spin?