Early 50’s Public Presentations about Crash Retrievals
In the early 1950’s, at least 2 engineers were semi-quietly giving public presentations about UAP/UFO Crash Retrievals (C/R’s) to local audiences. These people did not write any books or make any money from their talks, as far as I can tell. History has forgotten them both, and they made basically zero impact on the UAP/UFO literature. Engineer Norman S. Bean was the first engineer I found that did this.
I’ve found another engineer in Frank Scully’s papers. This note was found in Frank Scully’s archive (“Notes of Sightings”, Box 6 FF6, at the American Heritage Center). It says Jack Clerk, an Electrical Engineer attached to Army Ordinance as a consultant, was giving public presentations about three Crash Retrievals (“grounded saucers”) that occurred in the southwest. His talks were “cleared by Security”, and it says parts of his talk had to be “dummied up” at the request of the government.
It’s clear that somebody or some group wanted this information to be quietly spread to the public. Note that in the early 50’s the Roswell incident was unknown. It wasn’t until the late 70’s that Roswell became a thing.
As far as I can tell, “Jack Clerk” refers to Jack Charles Pryal Clerk, 1919–1996:
He was in the US Marine Corps Reserves of Burbank CA in 1939 (Company ‘’C’’, 13th Battalion). He lived in Glendale, CA and was buried in Hollywood Hills.
J. Robert Springer served two terms as the VP of the Glendale Chamber of Commerce, according to a press release in the Reagan Library:
A further search of Scully’s archive (the material I’ve OCR’d so far) found this hit for Jack Clerk (Box 3, Folder 2, Newton, AHC):
