Call of Chicago: UFO Crash Crash Recovery

29 May: [Royal Nepalese Army] gives three objects to [REDACTED] and tells [REDACTED] that a complete nose cone (fourth object) exists but cannot be seen

— US Embassy Nepal, Defense Attache Office report, 23 July 1968

On the night of 25 March 1968, something unknown crashed into Nepal from outer space. Project MOON DUST was notified, and removed three of the four pieces of wreckage. The final piece, a cone- or saucer-shaped object, was not recovered. This is the absolute truth.

Pokhara, Nepal (UFO crash site probably behind the hill center-right)

And if the US government simply had the common courtesy to keep things classified instead of dumping out its documents to every Tom, Dick, and Harry with a Freedom of Information Act request, we could have all kinds of fun with that recovered fragment of UFO lore. In fairness, you still can. Most people — even most UFO fans — don’t know a lot more than this, and its details are at least buried in long tiresome badly-Xeroxed PDFs, not colorfully explained in a loopy eliptony column (until now). If you have the kind of player who has already assembled the dozen or so declassified pages on the “Kathmandu UFO Crash” as it is occasionally known, they will almost certainly not be the one to call shenanigans when you go ahead and make up wonderful things about it.

Even the CIA “Information Report” on the incident, marked Confidential on 11 April 1968 and declassified probably in 2009, still holds that wonder in potential. Its context is suspected Chinese activity along the Himalayan border between Tibet and Nepal, and it includes not just a lovely picture of UFOlogist Donald Keyhoe but also details of three other UFO sightings in the area: a long thin very bright UFO over northeastern Nepal and Sikkim on 19 February; a blue light over Bhutan on 21 February; and a white light and a red light over the Kashmir border region of Ladakh on 4 March. (The blue light also returned on 25 March, the night of the crash, and buzzed Ladakh.) All these UFOs flew from the northeast (Tibet) to the southwest until the crash.

Ah yes, the crash. Let’s go to the CIA report verbatim now: “A blazing object, flashing intermittently accompanied by big thunder sound disintegrated over Kaski region. A huge metallic disc-shaped object with a six-foot base and four feet in height was found in a crater at Baltichaur, five miles NE of Pokhara. Portions of a similar object were found at Talakot and Turepasal.” Pretty great, eh? CIA reports a UFO crash in the Himalayas, Men in Black spring into action and recover the wreckage, smash cut to Area 51 or Hangar 18.

Sadly, also-declassified Defense Intelligence Agency reports on the same incident (on 23 and 30 July 1968) go into bruising bureaucratic detail. And since quotidian realism is the key to proper Lovecraftian horror, so too shall I. According to the Defense Attache (DATT) in the US Embassy in Kathmandu, the Royal Nepalese Army (RNA) sat on the incident for a month, only showing “two objects” to the DATT on 23 April, and providing the DIA with photos of the wreckage and the site on 20 May.

On 29 May Project MOON DUST enters the picture (the DIA report is helpfully tabbed with the MOON DUST clearance, and the 30 July report even mentions briefing the Ambassador “on MOON DUST situation”) and the RNA gives “three objects” to some party redacted in the declassified report. Two weeks after that, [REDACTED] gets off its butt and visits the crash site, five miles northeast of the city of Pokhara, and spends ten days there (15-25 June). The final report describes the objects in some detail and even includes (badly reproduced) sketches: the “disc shape” is 15 inches across, not six feet. The “nose cone” is probably a motor nozzle; the report recommends that a technical team “not repeat not” be sent “unless visual examination of fourth object is felt essential.” To tie things off with a bow, the British Ministry of Defence (whose military attache horned in, and who may have gotten their own wreckage to examine) decreed the wreck to be the failed Cosmos 208 spy satellite that the Soviets launched on 21 March.

I am, of course, one of the men who have become allied with the outside beings visiting our planet. I met them first in the Himalayas, and have helped them in various ways. In return they have given me experiences such as few men have ever had.

— H.P. Lovecraft, “The Whisperer in Darkness”

So what can we, ourselves, recover from the wreckage of our beautiful story? How can we salvage it for a Moon Dust Men or Fall of DELTA GREEN operation? First of all, there is plenty of space for that operation in the official record: note that the DIA doesn’t even get a whiff of the crash (officially) for a month and the CIA (assuming those are the [REDACTED] boys) doesn’t show up for almost three months! That’s forever in RPG time.

Second of all, here’s something I’ve noticed. The more information you have on a topic, the more weird inconsistencies you can find in that information. There may be no historical moment better documented or more scrutinized than Dealey Plaza between 12:15 and 12:35 on 22 November 1963 and there are literal libraries of books based on the inconsistencies in those documents and that scrutiny. Fifteen or so measly pages shouldn’t veil us out so easy. So note the weird anomalies: are there three pieces of wreckage or four? Why does the CIA list two places that don’t exist (“Baltichaur” and “Turepasal”) in its list of crash sites like some Space Age Mandeville? Where did the British come from? Did somebody slip the Nepalese a ringer when we returned the pieces? How did that disc shrink from six feet to 15 inches? (Insert your own ‘it was cold’ joke here.) What about all those other UFOs? Why did the Nepalese insist the “nose cone” could not be seen and then let the CIA (or whoever) go look at it? Or did they mean it was invisible? Cloaked? Infradimensional?

Third, of course, we can look into Pokhara itself. In 1968 it didn’t even have a paved road leading to it from outside, although it did have a lot of Tibetan refugees from Mao. It’s a pilgrimage site (and before Mao a caravan site from Tibet), full of Hindu and Buddhist and mixed temples going back to medieval times. It’s less than 30 miles from the Annapurna mountain range — and from the CIA base for Tibetan rebels on just the other side of the ridge in Mustang. It’s also full of caves, sitting on porous rock near a big shiny lake, with the Patale Chango (Hell’s Falls) just to the south. In other words, it’s born to hold secrets from Yuggoth or Agharti or both.

Finally, there’s the DIA’s mushmouth bureaucratese, reeking of cover-up. The weird insistence to “not repeat not” send technical experts. The eagerness to wish away the wreckage as insignificant. And the lovely final words of the 30 July DIA memo, explaining that the Ambassador expressed his “desire we give the Government of Nepal positive info if at all possible.” Well that’s our mission here: to give positive info about UFO crashes, and Mi-Go macrodimensional metal, and [REDACTED].

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