Irena Scott

Having never heard of Dr. Irena McCammon (Chase) Scott, Ph.D while working closely with KY and OH MUFON in the 2000s, I was intriged enough to dig deeper after noticing she began hitting the UFO lecture circuit in the late 2010s, coinciding with numerous UFO book publishings, and held a background that leaves more questions than answers. Her name changes several times throughout her life, presumably explained by multiple marriages, and perhaps a desire to keep her gender unknown in what I’m sure many believed was a male-dominated field last century. She claims her most recent spouse, John Scott, worked at Area 51¹. She is apparently the great-great-grandniece of John Purdue, founder of Indiana’s Purdue University.² In 2024, she leaked that the Discovery Channel was working on a new series Alien Outpost with The Secret of Skinwalker Ranch’s producer Sebastian Keck based in Roswell, NM, and she was chosen to guest star in it but “couldn’t make it.”³ It was intended to air that summer, but to date no further information has been released.

Scott seems to leak a lot of information for someone who allegedly held the clearances and positions that she claims. In my opinion, she would be second only to Luis Elizondo in the impact of the classified information that she’s published and discussed. In fact, Scott reemerged in UFO circles the same year that Elizondo emerged (2017). Unlike Elizondo’s AATIP leak, Scott claims to have gone through the proper channels to release her insights, although no evidence of such is presented.

Scott claims to have worked for the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), a GS-11 with above Top Secret security clearances (“Keyhole, TK/Talent”) where she analyzed classified satellite imagery to identify flying craft as part of an “Air Order of Battle” team, Soviet/Eastern Europe Division, Eastern USSR Branch. “This work was done in a vault in a windowless building, where we had to work a safe combination, pass before a one-way mirror, and through a security check just to enter the workplace.”⁴ She claims to have worked with a Frank Reams (“high ranking civilian,” maybe GS-14), William Carlisle (“Air Force Major”), and Rick Shackelford (“a civilian”) at DIA⁵, of which I could only find confirming evidence of Rick Shackelford of “TASC” in a National Reconnaissance Office report,⁶ which would make sense given the description of her role. There were several William Carlisles in the Air Force⁷, some of which with service records overlapping the timeframe (1968). The Keyhole satellite program was real, beginning as the CORONA program in 1959 and using the Keyhole or KH designations from 1962 onwards, and it certainly targeted the USSR.⁸ The “Air Order of Battle” terminology checks out, and in modern times is now aided or performed by AI.⁹

She seems aware of the consequences of leaks, stating “Every person who is cleared and ‘read on’ for access to [Top Secret] information signs reams of paperwork and receives detailed training about how it is to be handled, no exceptions-and what the consequences will be if rules are not followed. In the real world, people with high-level clearances are severely punished for willfully violating such rules. So I did not carry away or mention any of this specific information” and then on the same page gives a very detailed description of a July 1968 UFO (or likely USO) satellite photo over the Black Sea that she and her superiors analyzed and reported upwards, she believes to the CIA. “The CIA insisted the object was an illusion caused by an imperfection in the film” even after the DIA sent the film to sensiometry and densiometry specialists who confirmed it was not.⁴

A lot of her work, unsurprisingly, centers around Wright-Patterson AFB. She claims to have been stationed at Wright-Patt in April 1993¹⁰, however in the same book she relays a story of William Jones and her not holding security clerance at that time¹¹. She claims to have taken personal photos of secret areas around the base, including “actual proof at Wright-Patt that UFOs do exist”¹ and buildings 620, 18, and 23¹². Many of the photos appear to be stills from a camcorder with date overlay March 18, 1994. The “actual proof” was in an unclassified display case near the cafeteria, presumably a reprint of a photo from one of the 701 unidentified Project Blue Book cases (Project Blue Book was run out of Wright-Patt).¹³ She was “admonished” by guards for taking some of her WPAFB building photos¹⁴, and believes her home was “divebombed” by a T-38 Talon supersonic jet on August 7, 1993 “a day or so” after they were published in MUFON of Ohio Newsletter #6¹⁵. Somehow she placed an ad in the WPAFB newspaper, the Skywriter, “requesting government informants with UFO information to contact” herself or MORA. Robert M. Collins, one half of the Collins-Doty government sanctioned misinformation comedy duo known as Condor and Falcon of The Aviary, allegedly responded and proceeded to waste Jones’ and Scott’s time.¹⁰ She was also “repremanded” for taking a photo of what she was told were anti-spy acoustic dampening devices on Battelle windows where UFO documents or materials may be stored.¹⁶

In Sacred Corridors, she thanks Dr. Bruce Ashcroft, “Wright-Patt historian and archivist” who invited her to meetings, discussed UFOs with her, and showed her around Wright-Patt, helping her “to understand much about UFOlogy.” There was a real Bruce Ashcroft in the Air Force, a Senior Historian in the Air Education and Training Command, who died in 2007 at Randolph AFB in Texas.¹⁷ In the 1990s, he was “Chief Historian at the National Air Intelligence Center, Wright Patterson AFB, OH” where he was part of the team who wrote the official Air Force’s Roswell Report.¹⁸ So it is plausable that she crossed paths with him at WPAFB in the 1990s at NASIC, and in fact she includes a photo of her with him in the cafeteria building 280¹⁹. However, downplaying the many UFO legends about the place, including Leonard Stringfield’s, she says “When I was inside, the part I saw looked like a regular group of offices.”¹⁴ Most of the rest of the book is recounting others’ stories and speculations about WPAFB, J. Allen Hynek, Project Blue Book, and Battelle.

UFO Experiences

Scott was a UFO experiencer herself, along with her sister Sue Postle. In 1968, while working at the DIA, Scott was driving around Boston with her sister.

“As we left the area, we had seen two objects. We had just driven by one that had been on the ground, around 50 feet from the car that contained light that went through a spectrum of color. When we passed it, the inside of our car lit up in green. I saw no light beam on the outside of the car.

The story begins very reminiscent of the 1991 Pierce Township firefighter incident (but green instead of blue).

Then we had parked to watch a large flying object. It had seven large square windows that were blinking in a sequence as it passed very slowly over us. It was close.

She had a camera up and ready to photograph it, when truck pulls over and presumably blocks the shot. The driver gets out and walks over to them.

[He] asked us what we were looking at. We would not say UFO around a strange man at night, but pointed at it and acted like it was a type of airplane. When I did this, he rotated 180 degrees in the opposite direction [from where the object was], looked up to the same azimuth, and said he did not see anything.

He did this twice, gave the ASL sign for crazy, and returned to his truck.

He stayed in his truck watching us. Later the object began seemed [sic] to go through a patterned sequence of actions and I drove into the interstate to turn the car around at the next intersection. He took off, drove right behind my car by a few feet, began to tailgate, and beamed his bright headlights into my mirror such that I was blinded. He definitely chased us; he stayed right behind no matter what I did-such as change lanes, speed up, etc. Even though he was in a truck, he kept up with us no matter how fast I accelerated. I thought for sure we would be killed, but was able to get away.

She speculates that the man’s actions were not a coincidence, that he knew where the UFO was and looked in the exact opposite direction. She thinks his actions “could have involved” a threat to national security given her position. Overall the event “may have lasted an hour or two, but its after effects continued for two days until the morning I went to work.”

She used this event to bring up the topic of UFOs to her named DIA coworkers, which is how she learned about the Black Sea photograph, which apparently predated her joining the Keyhole analysis program.⁵

In 1984, Scott and her sister formally reported their childhood experiences to CUFOS, eventually leading to her undergoing regressive hypnosis with Budd Hopkins.²⁰ It’s unclear if this included the 1968 incident.

Publications

References

Sacred Corridors, pp. 10. ↩ ↩²
Uncle: My Journey with John Purdue ↩
Featured Guest 2024 ↩
Sacred Corridors, pp. 198-199. ↩ ↩²
Sacred Corridors, pp. 202-203. ↩ ↩²
Defining the Future of the NRO for the 21st Century ↩
Air Force Aircrew Name List - C ↩
CORONA (satellite). Wikipedia. ↩
Global Air Order of Battle Monitoring ↩
Sacred Corridors, pp. 37-38. ↩ ↩²
Sacred Corridors, pp. 33. ↩
Sacred Corridors, pp. 16. ↩
Sacred Corridors, pp. 123. ↩
Sacred Corridors, pp. 35. ↩ ↩²
Military Jet Dive Bombs UFOlogist’s House. Government Harasses UFOlogists–only recorded example? ↩
Sacred Corridors, pp. 101. ↩
AETC historian Dr. Ashcroft passes away ↩
The Roswell Report: Fact versus Fiction in the New Mexico Desert, 1995 ↩
Sacred Corridors, pp. 121. ↩
Sacred Corridors, pp. 169. ↩

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