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Don't take military records of dates/events as concrete law - here's why...


Creepy Green Light

Paranormal Adept
This happens all the time, but here's two events that people bicker over, Socorro & Roswell. Neither one of these things could be a lunar lander type vehicle or Mogul because dates don't match up, etc. I always take this stuff with a grain of salt, and because of my own experience in the U.S. Navy, here's why;

While on a 6 month deployment to Puerto Rico we had a cart that you attach to a giant truck to tow sonobuoys from the sonobuoy locker to the P-3C Orion & vice versa. All types of bomb carts/sonobuoy carts have a serial # stenciled on it in really big letters/numbers. Then there is a record card/logbook for each cart. So the people that are permanently stationed in Puerto Rico that handle the maintenance on these carts will have a book with all the carts maintenance records on it, which squadron it's attached to, etc.

So one day (after about 5 months in Puerto Rico), my boss is bored and not much was going on that day so he tells us he wants the cart painted. Wants it to look sharp with a couple of coats of fresh paint. So of course we do it and it get's done. Well say for example the carts # was XDCL-45, well we made up a new stencil that said EFK-069 (EFK was an inside joke for us that deployment - I wont get into what it stands for). So when our deployment was over, maintenance got a cart returned to them with EFK-069. They just started a new log book for it. Back in 1993 - there was too much confusion with keeping track of stuff like this so they never did figure it out. And they didn't care. They had a brand new sonobuoy cart that was looking sharp.

I had to go back to PR a year later for a torpedo exercise and the cart EFK-069 was still there being used. So that was a lengthy preamble to get to my point; just because the military's records say one thing - it doesn't necessarily mean it's true. So if someone wanted to investigate our buoy cart - researchers would say "...there was no record of a cart # EFK-069 in Puerto Rico in 1992...it didn't come into existence until 1993." Yeah, well - sorta. It's the same physical cart - but just out of being bored, we "invented" this new cart on the spot.

So every time I see a paperwork dispute with dates/times/places - I think of things like the buoy cart (and other things I experienced in my time in the Navy).

sonobuoy cart.jpg
 
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