Aaron Pressman reports A look alike Lee Harvey Oswald?
Air Force Sergeant Robert Vinson was an accidental witness to an Oswald double’s secret flight out of Dallas on the day of the shooting. Vinson was upset that despite his diligent work for NORAD (North American Air Defense Command) at Ent Air Force Base in Colorado Springs, he hadn’t been rewarded with a promotion, so he took a spontaneous flight to Washington DC on November 20, 1963, to demand an answer from his superiors.
On November 21, Sergeant Vinson met with a Colonel Chapman in the basement of the US Capitol about his promotion. During their meeting, Vinson remembered Col. Chapman, a liaison officer between Congress and the Pentagon, taking a call and telling the person on the other line that he “would highly recommend the president not go to Dallas, Texas, on Friday because there had been something reported.” After Chapman finished the call, he assured Vinson his promotion would be considered.
On the morning of November 22, Vinson went to Andrews Air Force Base with the intent of coming back home to Colorado Springs by nightfall. He gave an airman at the check-in counter his name and serial number, asking to be alerted when the next plane bound for the area would be departing, “if anything should come through that you don’t have a notice on.” Roughly 15 minutes later, Vinson was paged to the hangar, where he boarded a C54 plane that bore no markings or serial numbers other than a strange brown logo on its tail, of an egg-shaped earth crisscrossed with grid lines.
After boarding the empty plane, Vinson noticed two men in olive drab overalls board the plane and close the cockpit door without even saying a word to Vinson. Sergeant Vinson found it odd that he wasn’t asked to sign a flight manifest, as he had always done when riding Air Force planes. A little after the C54 took off, an unemotional voice announced over the plane’s intercom system, “The president was shot at 12:29.”
The C54 headed due South, and after another few hours, Vinson watched the Dallas skyline approach through the window around roughly 3:30 Central. Once the C54 landed in Dallas, the pilot emerged from the cockpit and opened the passenger door, whereupon two men in white construction overalls quickly boarded, after running there from a Jeep that was already backing away from the site. Sgt. Vinson recalled one of the men was between 6' and 6'1", looked Cuban, and weighed between 180 and 190 pounds. A shorter Caucasian man also boarded, whom Vinson estimated was between 5'7" and 5'9" and weighed between 150 and 160 pounds. The plane took off and headed West without anyone else on the plane saying a word to Vinson. Sgt. Vinson figured the silence of the crew was part of the mission the crew was on, and kept quiet during the flight.
When the plane landed again around sunset, Vinson approached a guard shack and asked an air policeman where he was. The AP told him he was at the Roswell Air Force Base in New Mexico. Vinson was trying to get downtown so he could take a bus back home, but the AP informed him the base was locked down and nobody could get in or out. Vinson thought this was especially strange, given that his plane had just landed with no interference.
By November 23, Robert Vinson was back home with his wife Roberta, watching the news on the assassination that evening, after telling her about his odd flight home. When Lee Harvey Oswald’s face appeared on the news, Robert said, “That guy looks just like the little guy who was on the airplane.”
“Are you nuts?” Roberta asked. “It couldn’t be him. He’s in jail.”
“I swear that’s the little guy who got on the plane,” Vinson insisted.
“Well, keep quiet about it,” Roberta said.
“Are you nuts?” Roberta asked. “It couldn’t be him. He’s in jail.”
“I swear that’s the little guy who got on the plane,” Vinson insisted.
“Well, keep quiet about it,” Roberta said.
After Jack Ruby murdered Oswald, Vinson vowed to keep quiet about what he saw. But he had still given his name and serial number to the airman at the Andrews Air Force Base check-in counter, and by Spring of 1964, when Vinson had been promoted to technical sergeant, federal authorities had tracked him down. Neighbors told the Vinson family that the FBI was interviewing residents about them, specifically about the Vinsons’ conversation topics in recent months. Vinson’s commanding officer made him sign a secrecy statement, and Roberta, for the first time as an Air Force wife, had to fill out a personal history form and sign an additional secrecy statement.
In November of 1964, Vinson was ordered to go to Washington and call a number for further instructions upon landing. After making the call, Vinson was told he would be spending the better part of a week at CIA headquarters in Langley, where he would soon undergo multiple physical and psychological tests. At the end of the fifth day, Vinson was interviewed by a semi-circle of men shrouded in darkness, who offered Vinson a job with the CIA. When Vinson refused, they offered him lucrative bribes, which he also declined. Vinson went back home to Colorado Springs, until he was contacted again three months later.
This time, the Air Force had Vinson report to a telephone number after landing in Las Vegas. Vinson learned the Air Force had assigned him to the CIA’s top-secret Blackbird SR 71 spy plane in the Nellis Mountains some 40 miles Northwest of Las Vegas. The base was renamed Site 51 and focused on experimental aircraft resembling saucers. Vinson later learned that similar flying saucer experiments were being conducted at the Roswell Air Force Base where the C54 had landed on the day of Kennedy’s assassination. Local lore about aliens was seen as convenient cover for the CIA’s top-secret projects.
Robert Vinson spent the last year and a half of his Air Force enlistment as the administrative supervisor for base supply at Site 51. The CIA supplemented Vinson’s Air Force income with monthly cash payments, which both Vinson and his wife suspected was the agency buying their silence about what Sgt. Vinson saw when he boarded the wrong plane on November 22, 1963. When Vinson asked an Air Force sergeant at Site 51 about the origin of a rust-colored egg-shaped Earth logo on the tail of a C54 landing at Site 51, the sergeant said, “CIA.”
Vinson kept quiet for 20 years as he and his wife quietly lived and worked in Wichita, Kansas. In 1976, Robert Vinson told a lawyer friend about the secret he had been keeping, who then told Vinson, “Don’t tell a soul. For your own safety.” Vinson followed his friend’s advice until the passage of the JFK Records Act in 1992, and subsequently went on Wichita’s KAKE-TV Channel 10 to tell the story to Larry Hatteberg. His story was so popular with viewers that the interview was re-broadcasted several more times. Vinson’s story of watching the CIA fly an Oswald double out of Dallas and the subsequent purchasing of his silence and complicity has since been chronicled in the book “Flight From Dallas” by Wichita civil liberties attorney James Johnston and journalist Jon Roe.
The testimonies of (later) Dallas mayor Wes Wise, auto mechanic T.F. White, concession stand operator Butch Burroughs, and hobby shop owner Bernard Haire, along with the story of Sergeant Robert Vinson all prove the sightings of more than one “Oswald” seen in different places at the same time. This is the biggest indicator of the CIA forcing a particular narrative around a particular person, inadvertently drawing more attention to themselves as a result.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JePCoo3W_Vs
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JePCoo3W_Vs
This story first ran in 1993 when retired Air Force Sargent Robert Vinson contacted me with a story...
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