Cash-Landrum UFO illustration
by Kathy Schuessler


 
My 14-page chapter on the legendary 1980 Cash-Landrum "UFO-Radiation" case begins on page 166 of The Reliability of UFO Witness Testimony, a 711-page cross-disciplinary compendium of mostly skeptical papers by 60 authors from 14 countries (UPIAR, Turin, Italy, 2023).



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  Errata:

1)  In the bulleted item at the bottom of p. 175, my passive acceptance of Hendry's description of this matter as a "discrepancy" led me to inaccurately write that Betty had been telling others, including John Schuessler, that she had turned the engine off herself. I would have realized my error had I not been oblivious at the time to the obvious distinction between turning the engine off vs. merely stopping the car. Hendry's actual words were, "Cash has been telling others that she stopped the car rather than attempt to drive under the flames being emitted …" (emphasis added). So, and as Curt Collins confirms to me, the UFO subsequently killing the motor, though not a "discrepancy," was nevertheless a new and sensational (and therefore disturbing to Hendry and Schuessler) element introduced by Betty during that interview. In fact, Collins believes that this electromagnetic effect may have been "the first significant embellishment to have crept in after she began talking to a gaggle of ufologists."

2)  In my References list, the Texas Monthly article by Pamela Colloff contains an erroneous publication date of December 31, 1969. The error originated with the magazine (see the article as archived in November 2022), but I should have recognized that this date precedes the C-L incident by 11 years! The C-L portion (alone) of that article appears to have been first archived on July 23, 2001, but Colloff informs me by e-mail that she thinks she wrote it "during the very short period of time when I was freelancing for Texas Monthly, which was late 1996 and early 1997, but that is just a guess." (Per her Wikipedia page, she ultimately became an executive editor there and, among other accolades, "has been a finalist for the National Magazine Award on multiple occasions and has won once.")