So, I knew someone who knew Craigie, and I interviewed her. Well-connected, upstanding member of the community. I met her and learned she had lived in LA during the "Battle of Los Angeles"!and we got talking. She was very old, but had been the neighbor of Craigie. He told her that UFOs were real and we shouldn't be afraid of them, and that he couldn't talk about it because he had promised the Air Force that he wouldn't. She said he always seemed very distracted, and apparently had photos on the walls in his study that he would take down before guests arrived so that they wouldn't be alarmed. She had no interest in UFOs, wonderful woman who is passed now. She would have been all over the History Channel if things had gone differently…. I think my eyes visibly popped out of my head when she told me this stuff. I had brought the topic of UFOs up because she had been in LA during the infamous incident. I made a point of asking elderly folks if they had had any unusual sky-related experiences, as many who had lived through the '40s and '50s were still around, and I had already had my own two experiences.
This 2nd hand tale follows on from your overly sensationalized thread title. It's what happens when too many things are considered evidence of UFOs, cover-ups and other conspiratorial thinking.
It appears McCasland, the subject of this thread, retired from the Air Force in 2013. The notion that facilities he worked for at WPAFB had something to do with aliens and UFOs, is tied to some of the Roswell Mogal balloon wreckage being taken there and to the later claims of the infamous "Hanger 18", which doesn't really exist. Recall that, the Roswell event was in 1947, so not only before McCasland was at WPAFB, but a full 11 years before he was born.
McCasland headed the AFRL at WPAFB between 2011 and 2013, so the idea that he that he was in the line of succession from the previous different research facilities that Craigie was running in the late '40s is tenuous at best. McCasland did not directly follow on from Craigie as there is a ~60 year gap between their respective assignments.
Even the idea that McCasland had much to do with UFOs, is based on a few emails and a lot of talk from Tom DeLong. From the article you posted (bold by me):
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In the emails, musician Tom DeLonge, founder of Blink-182 and the UFO-focused To The Stars Academy (TTSA), referenced McCasland multiple times, claiming he had advised him on disclosure matters and helped assemble an advisory team.
DeLonge also suggested on a podcast that he was being advised by McCasland and several named and unnamed insiders to carry out a slow disclosure of UAP information to the American public from US government or contractor sources.
He claimed that the US government and contractor groups already possess free energy technology, sometimes referred to as zero-point energy, that could make conventional energy sources obsolete, stating: 'One inch of air could power the U.S. for hundreds of years.'
So, DeLonge was claiming he MAY have been talking to McCasland about zero-point energy. Why? Likely because DeLong was looking for investors (bold by me):
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DeLonge suggested that TTSA was being restrained from releasing all the information government insiders had provided, but that the organization sought investment from private sources to develop this technology for energy and aerospace purposes.
I'll not get deep into TTSA here, suffice to say it involved DeLong, Hal Putoff, Chris Melon, Lue Elizondo among others and faded away when it became apparent DeLong was benefiting financially from what little investments it raised. More importantly from the article:
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These claims come from DeLonge and have not been confirmed by McCasland or official records.
So, we have a 68 year old guy that appears to have medical issues and has gone missing. His last known sighting was at Quail Run Ct NE, which is on the edge of Sandia Heights, a suburb of Albuquerque, and just to the east of his neighborhood, is a whole lot of nothing to get lost in:
His UFO connections are dubious, though possible, if he was dealing with DeLong and TTSA. However, that was all long after his retirement. As usual we have fantastic claims of classified secret UFOs and zero-point energy systems being revealed by people that would have known about them but couldn't share the classified information they had. Except they did, at least to DeLong. According to DeLong. Who was looking for investors.
His only other UFO connection is that he headed the AFRL at WPAFB in the mid '00s. As there was no AFRL at WPAFB in the Roswell era, you have made a tenuous connection between McCasland and the AFRL and it's predecessor agencies from 60 years before by suggesting Craigie, who ran some of those agencies in the '40s told a Ms. McKinnon at some point that:
He told her that UFOs were real and we shouldn't be afraid of them, and that he couldn't talk about it because he had promised the Air Force that he wouldn't
This is known as a non-sequitur. Even if Ms. McKinnon's memory is correct, it could just be interpreted as Craigie offhandedly admitting he knew many UFOs were in fact Air Force/CIA assets, such as the A12. There is no context to this discussion, though it appears Ms. McKinnon spent some amount of time with Craigie if she knew about his
pin-ups redacted photos in his office:
. She said he always seemed very distracted, and apparently had photos on the walls in his study that he would take down before guests arrived so that they wouldn't be alarmed
Aside from both being in the Air Force and running some research facilities at WPAFB, among other places, there is no direct connection between Craigie and McCasland.
While we're at it, lets remember that while Ms. McKinnon was around for The Battle of Los Angeles, though she was only 7 (1935-2023), she ended up in West Linn OR, which is only about 40 miles from McMinnville and the Trent's famous UFO photo
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