The McChord AFB Encounter (1972)
In 14 October 1972, near TACAN navigation site near McChord Air Force Base, Pierce County, Washington, USA, the account describes the afternoon of 14 October 1972 at a Tactical Air Navigation (TACAN) site roughly eight miles east of McChord Air Force Base in Pierce County, Washington. This case file covers what witnesses reported, the official narrative, and a two-pass assessment with its evidence tier.
What did witnesses see at TACAN navigation site near McChord Air Force Base?
The account describes the afternoon of 14 October 1972 at a Tactical Air Navigation (TACAN) site roughly eight miles east of McChord Air Force Base in Pierce County, Washington. Two airmen, Airman First Class Steven Briggs and Airman Dennis Hillsgeck, were said to be running checks at the facility when, at about 2 PM, Briggs heard a high-pitched sound like a small plane engine and stepped out to see a saucer-shaped object hovering over the TACAN building. The craft was said to descend and land just south of the fenced compound.
According to the account, two humanoid figures then climbed out and moved toward the fence. Briggs is described as phoning base security, with Sergeant David Holmes taking the switchboard call about intruders. About seventeen minutes later Sergeant Dwight Reid and Airman First Class Michael Tash are said to have arrived and found Briggs and Hillsgeck dazed, with Briggs carrying burn marks on his face, and Tash noticing strange markings pressed into the soil. Reid is described as seeing the same saucer-shaped craft and as having his radio go dead, with the men evacuating in a hurry and the radio coming back to life about a mile away.
The story then has a larger security response deploy, including Sergeant Darren Alexander with a military dog named Champ. Roughly 400 yards out, near a remote power station, the dog is said to have barked at two figures. Alexander reportedly ordered them to stop, and when they kept coming and one appeared to hold a device, he fired six rounds from his service Smith and Wesson Model 15 .38 caliber revolver, unsure whether he hit anything. A Security Alert Team is described as finding the saucer on the ground, and the object is said to have lifted off and vanished just as Captain Henry Stone walked toward it. The account closes with investigators taking soil molds, photographs, the spent shell casings, and written statements, and the file being marked Top Secret and left unsolved.
Every one of these specifics, the names, the times, the burn marks, the six shots, comes from the single narrative Collins put forward decades after the claimed date. No independent witness has come forward under their own name, and no period document, photograph, or news report has surfaced to anchor any of it.
What is the official explanation?
There is no official narrative for this case, and the reason matters. Project Blue Book, the only standing United States Air Force program ever tasked with investigating UFO reports, was terminated by Secretary of the Air Force Robert C. Seamans Jr. on 17 December 1969, with operations officially ending in January 1970. The National Archives, which holds the Blue Book records, states plainly that the project closed in 1969 and that it has no information on sightings after that date. By October 1972 there was, by design, no Air Force office whose job was to take a UFO report, open a file, and run an investigation. So a claim that the Air Force Office of Special Investigations quietly worked a 1972 saucer-and-creatures case and buried it as Top Secret runs directly against the documented fact that the formal investigative apparatus had already been shut down and its records shipped off to the Archives.
The account itself supplies the only claimed paperwork: an alleged AFOSI report. That report has never been produced from any government archive. Researchers describe Freedom of Information Act activity around the case returning nothing that confirms it, and the only place the document and its narrative live is in Robert Collins's own publications and the websites that copied from them. There is no Blue Book entry, because Blue Book was closed. There is no contemporaneous AFOSI release, no base history entry, and no congressional or National Archives record that anyone has been able to point to.
It is worth being precise about what an official body has actually said here, which is nothing. The Air Force has not confirmed the incident, has not produced a file, and has not even been documented denying it, because there is no public record of the question ever being formally put to and answered by the relevant office with a located file. The case has no official footing at all. Its entire claim to officialdom rests on the assertion, made by Collins, that a real AFOSI report exists, an assertion that cannot be checked against the one archive that would hold such a thing.
What did the witnesses think it was?
The named airmen, Steven Briggs, Dennis Hillsgeck, Dwight Reid, Michael Tash, David Holmes, Darren Alexander, and Captain Henry Stone, are characters in the account but not voices in it. None of them has surfaced publicly to tell the story in his own words, give an interview, or confirm that he was at McChord on 14 October 1972. Everything attributed to them is relayed through the single source.
That source is Robert M. Collins, who went public with the McChord story around 2001 and printed it in Exempt from Disclosure, published in 2005 by Peregrine Communications. Collins presents himself as a retired Air Force captain who served as an intelligence officer at the Foreign Technology Division with a Top Secret clearance, and he has said the names, places, and events in the report are real and check out. Supporters note that some background details fit the period, for example the Smith and Wesson Model 15 .38 revolver as a plausible issue sidearm and the kind of handheld radios then in use, and they point out that the tale was reportedly already circulating as a barracks legend among McChord personnel in the late 1980s and early 1990s, before Collins published it.
The credibility question turns on who Collins chose to write with. His co-author on Exempt from Disclosure was Richard C. Doty, a former AFOSI special agent who has openly described his career role as creating false UFO material. In a HuffPost piece by Alejandro Rojas dated 13 May 2014, Doty says he was tasked with hoaxing documents and feeding false information to UFO researchers, most infamously in the campaign that fed fabricated alien-invasion material to Albuquerque businessman Paul Bennewitz, a campaign the reporter says he confirmed in part through FOIA documents. That is not hostile gossip about Collins, it is the documented, self-described specialty of the man who put his name on the same book as the McChord report. When the single chain of custody for an extraordinary claim runs through a self-admitted manufacturer of fake UFO documents, the testimony cannot carry the weight the story needs it to carry.
The dispute
The dispute is fundamentally about provenance and source credibility rather than a demonstrated forgery of a specific photograph or prop. The entire case rests on one man, Robert M. Collins, who brought the story forward publicly around 2001 and printed it in Exempt from Disclosure in 2005. There is no independent witness, no contemporaneous newspaper account from the Tacoma or Pierce County press, no NICAP or APRO file from 1972, and no government document that anyone has produced from an actual archive. The supposed AFOSI report at the center of the story has never been retrieved through the Freedom of Information Act or located in the National Archives. When the sole anchor for an extraordinary claim is a single later-dated narrative with nothing underneath it, the claim is weak on its face.
The credibility problem is sharpened by who stands behind the book. Collins co-authored Exempt from Disclosure with Richard C. Doty, a former Air Force Office of Special Investigations agent who has openly described his work as fabricating UFO documents and feeding false information to researchers. In a HuffPost article by Alejandro Rojas dated 13 May 2014, Doty states he was tasked with hoaxing documents, and the reporter says FOIA records corroborate at least part of Doty's role in the disinformation campaign against Paul Bennewitz, which involved handing fabricated material to a civilian and helping drive him to a breakdown. This is not motivated testimony from a hostile party, it is the documented and self-described specialty of one of the two names on the book that carries the McChord report. A document handled by a self-admitted document forger does not become evidence simply by being printed.
There is also a structural problem with the story's own framing. It describes a 1972 AFOSI investigation that was supposedly classified Top Secret and left unsolved. But the Air Force had terminated Project Blue Book on 17 December 1969, with operations ending in January 1970, and the National Archives states it has no information on sightings after that date. The notion of a routine, fully staffed Air Force UFO investigation in October 1972 sits awkwardly against the documented closure of the only program that did such work.
What the dispute does not include is a shown method proving the specific McChord paper is a fabrication, or any confession or recantation tied to this particular case. No named analyst has publicly dissected this exact document and demonstrated forgery line by line, and none of the named airmen has come forward to deny or recant. Because the counter-case is a powerful argument from absence and bad provenance rather than a demonstrated fabrication of this specific artifact or a positive identification of a mundane cause, the case is rated Barely Disputed. The story is very weak, but the formal threshold for the stronger rating, a confession, a recantation, recovered props, or a method-shown forgery of this item, has not been met.
Is the McChord AFB Encounter (1972) real? The two-pass assessment
Pass one, the ordinary reading. The simplest explanation is that there was no shootout with creatures at McChord in 1972, because there is no trace of one anywhere outside a single storyteller. The event leaves none of the marks a real armed encounter at a military navigation site would leave. A security policeman discharging six rounds triggers a weapons-discharge report, an ammunition reconciliation, and a medical look at injured airmen with burns. None of that exists in any locatable record. There is no Tacoma or Pierce County newspaper item, no NICAP or APRO case file from the period, no base history entry, and no FOIA-released document from the Air Force archive. The story instead surfaces around 2001 and reaches print in 2005, three decades after the claimed date, in a book co-written by Richard Doty, who has stated on the record that fabricating UFO documents was literally his assigned job. The reported AFOSI investigation is itself a tell, because the Air Force had closed Project Blue Book in December 1969 and, per the National Archives, was not investigating UFO reports in 1972 at all. A barracks legend that hardened into a typed report is a fully sufficient ordinary explanation, and it requires inventing nothing.
Pass two, if it were real. Taken at face value, this would be one of the most serious UFO events on record, a landed craft, physically affected airmen, ground traces, soil molds, photographs, recovered shell casings, and multiple military witnesses including an officer who watched the object leave. If even part of that physical evidence existed in a government safe, it would be a landmark case. But that is exactly the evidence that has never been shown. The two-pass split here is stark, because the real version depends entirely on documents and witnesses that no one has been able to produce, while the ordinary version needs only one unverified narrator.
This case is rated Barely Disputed, and the wording of that rating is deliberate. The dispute against it is strong on provenance: single uncorroborated source, no contemporary record, no producible file, and a co-author who admits to forging UFO documents for a living. That badly undercuts the story. What it does not yet meet is the bar for the harsher rating, because no independent analyst has taken the specific McChord document and demonstrated, with a shown method, that this exact artifact is a forgery, and no witness has confessed or recanted this particular case. The official-apparatus angle, the supposed Top Secret AFOSI handling, is logged here as part of the claim, not as a mark against the case, in line with the principle that an official debunk or an official file is evidence about the claim rather than a verdict on it. On the evidence actually in hand, the case does not stand on its own, but the formal grounds to push it past Barely Disputed are not present, so it stays there.
Sources
- www.abebooks.com/9780976642602/Exempt-Disclosure-Robert-M-Collins-0976642603/plp
- fortwiki.com/McChord_Air_Force_Base_Radar_Site
- rense.com/general18/etss.htm
- www.ufoinsight.com/aliens/encounters/mcchord-air-force-base-et-battle
More cases from this region: UFO sightings in United States
