by Dava Sobel
Editors note: There's no better way to learn about the events at Roswell, New Mexico, than firsthand. OMNI reporter Dava Sobel made the journey. Her eye-opening investigation, and its unsettling conclusion, below.Flying saucers made their first official appearance in the summer of 1947. On June 25, Kenneth Arnold, a Boise, Idaho, rescue pilot working for the U.S. Forest Service, flew over the Cascade Mountains of Washington State, searching for a missing plane. He spotted nine disc-shaped craft, which he guessed to be moving at a speed of 1,200 miles an hour and at an altitude of 10,000 feet. When Arnold described their motion as resembling "a saucer skipping over water," a newspaper headline dubbed them "flying saucers." Almost instantly, believable witnesses from other states and several foreign countries reported similar sightings -- enlivening wire-service dispatches for days.
Within two weeks, on July 8, 1947, the United States Army announced that it had recovered a flying saucer from the New Mexican desert, near a town called Roswell. The morning after, the Army corrected itself: The "saucer" had been a misidentified weather balloon.
Thus began the infamous "Roswell Incident," the mother of all UFO scenarios. At first, it seemed to be a burst of excitement over nothing -- a story of "Man Bites Dog" that quickly faded into "Dog Bites Man." But over decades, the event at Roswell has been repeatedly remembered, reevaluated, and retold, so that it now boasts seminal importance in the annals of contacts with extraterrestrial civilizations.
According to several residents of Roswell who claim to be eyewitnesses, at least one alien craft crashed there that summer of 1947. However, they say, military and government parties -- including the Air Force, the FBI, and the White House -- intentionally covered up the facts. As a former employee of the local funeral parlor recalls, the humanoid bodies of the saucer's crew were autopsied at the Roswell Army Air Field Hospital immediately after the crash. Then their remains were flown to Dayton, Ohio, to the site of what is now Wright-Patterson Air Force Base, where they were frozen for future study.
Rumors circulated that one of the creatures had even survived the accident. It lived for over a year, sequestered and cared for in a specially built top-secret facility, before succumbing to an Earth-acquired infection.
Now, nearly half a century after the precipitating event, New Mexico Congressman Stephen H. Schiff has asked the General Accounting Office (GAO), which is the investigative arm of Congress, to investigate the incident.
Did the military act appropriately at the time -- or did it move to suppress information, spread lies, and silence the residents of Roswell, some of whom claim they received death threats warning them never to reveal what went on there in July 1947? GAO spokesman Cleve Corlett insists his agency is not investigating Roswell, as many students of the case contend. "We don't talk about our work till it's finished," Corlett said. But whatever the truth, thanks to publicity from Schiff and others, Roswell has spawned interest from many quarters indeed.
For example, a recent Showtime movie called Roswell, based on the book UFO Crash at Roswell, paints a vivid picture of charred aliens on operating tables, amid a Watergate-style cover-up masterminded by four- and five-star generals, scientists, super-spies, and Cabinet members. The film celebrates the twin themes of the Roswell Incident -- the arrival of extraterrestrial visitors and the paranoia regarding government conspiracy. With documentary verisimilitude, Roswell depicts UFOs as the vehicles that ferry aliens to Earth, and the governments of the world as the powers that conceal the alien presence.
At the opposite extreme, the U.S. Air Force has completed its own internal review of the events and allegations. Its "Report on Roswell," which was released in September 1994, identifies the so-called "weather balloon" as part of a once-top-secret experimental program, "Project Mogul," for monitoring Russian nuclear bomb tests. A page-one story in The New York Times of September 18, 1994, heralded this explanation as the long-awaited denouement of the Roswell Incident. Project Mogul, the Air Force and the Times agreed, dismissed the alien-spaceship tale as a modern myth. Proponents of the alleged saucer crash and subsequent cover-up, however, remain unconvinced by the Air Force account.
How good is the evidence on each side of the Roswell Incident? What really happened there? And if all that landed was a glorified weather balloon, why won't the legend die?
I came to this story prejudiced, as all journalists are, with my own preconceived notions. As the co-author of a book about the scientific search for extraterrestrial intelligence (SETI) through radio astronomy, I firmly believe that other civilizations share our galaxy, and may even be trying to contact us. But I do not think that flying saucers are landing here. The alien presence would have to be ubiquitous to explain all the claims of contact I have heard. Nevertheless, the Roswell Incident intrigued me because it was born practically at the moment of my birth, in June of 1947. Maybe Roswell was as real as I am. I mean, if the entire universe could happen once -- rise whole cloth out of one Big Bang -- why not admit the arrival on Earth of a lone flying saucer?
Part of me was wide open to that possibility when I started exhuming the incident's history. I read six books about it, along with miscellaneous reports on Roswell published by the Mutual UFO Network (an international contingent of UFOlogists). I read the Air Force report, of course, with all its supporting documentation, as well as numerous magazine and newspaper articles, plus back issues of newsletters devoted both to promulgating and debunking UFO sightings. I also viewed several hours of videotapes on the Roswell Incident, reviewed selected Internet files, and interviewed a dozen individuals on the telephone. Then I went to Roswell to meet some of the witnesses face to face and to see the place where the saucer is said to have landed.
Small Town In a Big Desert
To begin at the beginning, the Roswell of 1947 was a small town in a big desert, surrounded by acres of undeveloped land and sheep ranches stretching over the mostly flat terrain as far as the eye could see. At the south end of the business district stood the Roswell Army Air Field, home base for the fighting 509th -- the world's only combat unit trained to handle and drop nuclear bombs. About 100 miles west of Roswell, at Alamogordo, the first atomic bomb explosion had shot up its mushroom cloud just two years prior to the Roswell Incident. And although secrecy shrouded the activities at nearby White Sands Proving Ground, Roswell residents were aware that captured German V-2 rockets routinely penetrated the arid sky. What's more, Robert H. Goddard, the father of American rocketry, had moved to Roswell from Massachusetts, and launched 56 flight tests there from 1930 until shortly before his death in 1943. You could say that Roswell stood closer to outer space than any other town in the world.
The stories of flying discs that spread across the country in the summer of 1947 fell on receptive ears in New Mexico. Sheep rancher W. W.("Mac") Brazel overheard the talk in a Corona bar on Saturday night, July 5. According to his own later account in the local press, he wondered if the strange debris he'd found on the ground during his ranch rounds might be part of some such flying disc. He hoped it was. A prize of $3,000 had been promised by a national news outfit to anybody who recovered one. Brazel drove some of the shiny litter into Roswell and showed it to the county sheriff, who showed it to the Army base's intelligence officer, who retrieved the rest of the pieces back at the ranch.
That Army intelligence officer, Major Jesse Marcel, had never seen anything quite like the debris that lay in scattered scraps and tatters over an area some 200 yards wide. Though plentiful, it was so lightweight that Marcel and a helper could pick it all up and load it in the backs of their cars. Brazel, the rancher, estimated in a newspaper interview that the whole lot couldn't have weighed much more than five pounds. Although Marcel's description of what he had found did not appear in any press reports published at the time, he later recalled that the material bore no resemblance to any aircraft he had been trained to recognize.
"I saw . . . small bits of metal," Marcel told a reporter years after the fact, "but mostly we found some material that's hard to describe." Some of it was porous, he remembered. He also mentioned "stuff that looked very much like parchment," as well as long, slender solid members -- like square sticks, the largest of which was between three and four feet long. These pieces resembled wood, felt as light as balsa, and carried indecipherable markings that Marcel called "hieroglyphics."
On Tuesday, July 8, 1947, a press release announcing Marcel's catch was distributed to the local newspapers and radio stations by Walter G. Haut, then-public relations officer at the base. The Roswell Daily Record spread the word under a banner headline: "RAAF Captures Flying Saucer on Ranch in Roswell Region."
The story began, "The intelligence office of the 509th Bombardment group at Roswell Army Air Field announced at noon today that the field has come into possession of a flying saucer." It is not clear from the article who termed the debris a flying saucer. The words do not appear in quotes, and they are not attributed to either Marcel or to the base commander, Colonel William H. Blanchard. They are used matter-of-factly, as though such things would be well known to readers of the Record -- and indeed they were.
"After the intelligence office here had inspected the instrument," the article went on to say, "it was flown to `higher headquarters.' " Indeed, Marcel took the debris on a plane to Fort Worth, where General Roger M. Ramey identified it to Marcel and the press as the remains of a downed weather balloon carrying a radar target. The next day, in an even larger headline than it had used to announce the find, the Record reported, "Gen. Ramey Empties Roswell Saucer."
The Army's announcement of the "weather balloon" explanation ended the flying saucer excitement. All mention of the craft dropped from the newspapers, from military records, from the national consciousness, and even from the talk of the town in Roswell.
Thirty years passed with no further mention of the Roswell Incident.
Then, Stanton T. Friedman of Fredericton, New Brunswick, in Canada, rediscovered Roswell. Friedman had been working as a nuclear physicist (although he does not hold a doctoral degree in that discipline) for General Electric, Westinghouse, and other companies. He devoted his spare time to reading widely about flying saucers, including the reports of Project Blue Book -- the Air Force's official investigation, from 1952 to 1969, into UFO sightings.
"In the 1970s, when the bottom fell out of the nuclear physics business," Friedman told me in a telephone interview, "I went full time as a lecturer."
Friedman has delivered his lecture, "Flying Saucers ARE Real!," at some 600 college campuses and to many professional meetings. Although Friedman never saw a flying saucer himself, his work made him a lightning rod for people with their own UFO stories to tell. They would seek him out after his talks and share bits of information. Over the past 17 years, by following leads from such sources, Friedman has become the self-styled impresario of the Roswell Incident. He has ferreted out several self-professed witnesses, and he believes that the cover-up of the crash continues today at the highest levels of secrecy within the federal government, although his evidence for this claim is hotly contested.
Talk Radio
Friedman received his first important Roswell tip in 1978 while appearing on a news program in Baton Rouge. The station manager mentioned that his ham radio buddy -- a fellow named Jesse Marcel -- had once handled the wreckage of a flying saucer.
Intrigued, Friedman called Marcel the very next day. The former major had retired from the Army and was working as a television repairman in Houma, Louisiana. Friedman ascribes great weight to that initial conversation. Writing about the encounter, and describing himself in the third person, he gauged its import as follows:
"Marcel described the material to Friedman over the phone, giving the veteran UFO investigator the first indication of the nature of what could possibly turn out to be the most important discovery of the millennium."
Friedman used his contacts to set up an interview for Marcel with the National Enquirer. In that 1979 interview, 32 years after the original discovery, Marcel said of the debris, "I'd never seen anything like that. I didn't know what we were picking up. I still believe it was nothing that came from Earth. It came to Earth but not from Earth."
Marcel continued to express puzzlement about the Roswell debris till his dying day in 1986. But he never called it a flying saucer. And he certainly never mentioned any bodies lying in or near what he had found. Nor did the original discoverer of the debris, Mac Brazel, ever claim that he had seen extraterrestrial aliens, dead or alive.
The Corpus Delicti
Friedman added that part -- the corpus delicti. The crashed saucer and its alien crew were the gifts of Vern and Jean Maltais, who attended a Friedman lecture, and stayed late to tell him a flying saucer story related by their late friend, Grady ("Barney") Barnett. Barnett said he had seen a saucer wreck near Socorro, New Mexico, where he worked in the 1940s as a government engineer. The Maltais couple couldn't remember what year the crash might have taken place, and Barney was long dead, so there was no way to find out. But they assured Friedman that Barney was much too upstanding a citizen to have fabricated such a tale -- complete with sunlight glinting off a great, metallic disc, some 25 or 30 feet in diameter. That was enough for Friedman to go on -- in his preliminary reconstruction of the events, the 1947 craft dropped some of its pieces on the sheep ranch near Roswell, then continued flying in a northwesterly direction before it crashed. Friedman contributed these insights to the first volume in the Roswell literature -- The Roswell Incident (Grosset & Dunlap), by Charles Berlitz and William Moore.
With the book's publication in 1980, the Roswell Incident took on new proportions. First it spread from the debris field on the sheep ranch to a site far away where Friedman thought the rest of the saucer must have landed. He put this "crash site" at Corona, about 90 miles northwest of Roswell. Since Brazel's ranch sprawled over desert that lay between the two towns, the "Roswell Incident" might just as well be called "The Crash at Corona." Indeed, Friedman later took this title for his own book, Crash at Corona, co-authored with Don Berliner and published by Paragon House in 1992. Friedman didn't stop at Corona, however, but continued westward, straight across central New Mexico for another 150 miles -- to a second crashed saucer site on the Plains of San Augustin. Here, just past Socorro, was where Friedman figured Barney Barnett's craft must have touched down.
Saucers Collide
Struggling to understand the connection between the two sites, Friedman pondered various possibilities: There might have been several craft in the area. Two could have collided in midair, sprinkling debris, saucers, and bodies in a wide swath. Or one craft could have crashed at Roswell/Corona, while another got shot down over the Plains of San Augustin by military fire from the White Sands Missile Range. There seemed to be enough room in the desert for almost anything to have occurred.
Friedman eventually found a live eyewitness who could corroborate his second site on the Plains of San Augustin. This was Gerald F. Anderson, a mere boy of five in 1947, who saw Friedman on a 1990 national television program called Unsolved Mysteries. Right after the show, Anderson phoned the network's toll-free number from his home in Missouri. He said he remembered coming upon the very craft that Friedman had mentioned, with its alien corpses ejected onto the sand, while out rock-hunting with his family.
"We headed straight toward it," Anderson later told Friedman in person. "There was a big gouge mark where it had cut a furrow across the arroyo. It tore up a lot of the sagebrush and there were fires smoldering here and there. "That's when my brother said, `That's a goddamn spaceship! Them's Martians!' "
Anderson's vivid memories of the hot, humid morning are stunning in their detail. Likewise his estimates of the distances between objects on the ground, and his total recall of the dialogue that engaged his father, his brother, his Uncle Ted, and his Cousin Victor. In all, Anderson's account, which fills six pages in Friedman's book, strains my belief to the breaking point. And I say this even though I know that Friedman had Anderson take a polygraph test (a de rigueur step in serious UFO investigations), and Anderson passed it.
Friedman, ever on the case, continued to look for another eyewitness to back up Anderson's outstanding memory. He never found one. Thus, Anderson stands alone against the attacks from other Roswell researchers, all of whom seek to discredit his testimony.
For example, Kevin D. Randle and Donald R. Schmitt, authors of two books published by Avon -- UFO Crash at Roswell and its sequel, The Truth About the UFO Crash at Roswell (in which the date of the crucial crash is corrected from July 2 to July 4) -- denounce Anderson's story. They summoned a forensic scientist to examine the 1947 diary purportedly kept by Anderson's Uncle Ted. This document, which supported Gerald Anderson's oral history, was duly found to be written on bona fide 1947-vintage paper. However, the ink upon that paper had not become available until 1974. "Clearly this was not a document written by Anderson's Uncle Ted," Randle and Schmitt conclude triumphantly in their new book. "Ted Anderson could not be reached for comment. He had died several years prior to 1974."
This is a recurrent theme in Roswell research -- the unfortunate disappearance of firsthand witnesses due to natural attrition. As the years go by, those who devote themselves to seeking the truth about Roswell face ever greater challenges from fading memories and failing hearts.
The Randle-Schmitt duo took on the Roswell Incident in 1988, thinking they could expose it as a hoax, or at least a harmless flap over something that never happened. Now, after six years and 25 trips to the town, they believe the claims that first struck them as extraordinary. As Randle told me early in our talks, "No mundane explanation fits.
"I'd be extremely disappointed if it turned out to be terrestrial," Randle later said of the Roswell debris, "but I'd accept definitive proof." Since no one saved any of the original debris -- at least so far as anyone knows -- Randle is unlikely to encounter enough evidence to make him deviate from his current career path.
A resident of Cedar Rapids, Iowa, Randle is a former Army helicopter pilot who flew over Vietnam. He has demonstrated a flair for fiction by writing some 70 novels (mostly science-fiction and men's adventure) in addition to his two Roswell texts and consultation on the screenplay for Showtime's Roswell movie. Randle looked briefly into cattle mutilations before finding his mètier in Roswell. Now he also hosts a weekly two-hour radio program out of El Paso, "The Randle Report," which covers the full gamut of paranormal subjects from past lives regression to the Bermuda Triangle.
When Randle and I met for lunch in Roswell, he chose the restaurant. And when we paid our separate bills at the cash register, he presented a special card that procured him free food from the establishment, in any amount, at any time. This hospitality, like his free room at the motel he recommended to me, is the way the townspeople thank him for his efforts on their behalf. Stanton Friedman may have put Roswell on the map, but Kevin Randle put it in the movies.
Randle's co-author, Don Schmitt of Hubertus, Wisconsin, once served as an assistant to the late J. Allen Hynek, founder of the Center for UFO Studies in Chicago (the first UFO group dedicated to scientific analysis of the phenomenon). Schmitt, who describes himself as a medical illustrator, actually works as a letter carrier for the U.S. Postal Service in Milwaukee, a position he has held since 1974. (This came as a surprise to many of his fellow UFO researchers, who simply were not aware of his "day job.")
Like Friedman, neither Randle nor Schmitt has ever seen a UFO.
Will the Real Trudy Truelove Please Stand Up
Having dismissed Gerald Anderson as "a hoax," Randle and Schmitt originally put their faith in the eyewitness testimony of their own Jim Ragsdale of Carlsbad, whom they found around Roswell on one of their research trips. Ragsdale said he was camping north of Roswell on the night of July 2, 1947 with a female companion, Trudy Truelove, when a bright object roared overhead and hit the ground. The couple hunted down the wreck that night and identified it in a flashlight's dim beam as a flying saucer, with alien corpses nearby. They returned the next morning, Ragsdale claimed, but couldn't get close because the place was crawling with military police who had cordoned off the area.
This scenario, presented early in The Truth About the UFO Crash at Roswell, includes an asterisk next to Trudy Truelove's name. I glanced at the bottom of the page, expecting to find the usual disclaimer about aliases made up to protect the identity of actual individuals. Instead, I read: "The story told by Jim Ragsdale has been well corroborated by various family members, including Clint Brazeal, Wendelle and Willard Ragsdale, his wife Mary, and his mother-in-law, `Grandma Lucky.' " Now I was not only being asked to accept the existence of Trudy Truelove, but also Grandma Lucky, who was soon joined on following pages by a matriarch called "Big Mom."
Randle rues the fact that Ragsdale has now aggrandized his story and has thus discredited his own testimony. As Randle explained at last October's UFO conference in Pensacola, "The story he [Ragsdale] tells now is much more exciting than just seeing the bodies in the distance. He's now talking about going down and trying to pull the helmet off one of the dead aliens and seeing big black eyes, which is not consistent with what we have learned about what the aliens look like."
I asked Randle if he could get me an interview with Ragsdale, but he pooh-poohed the idea. "Jim, last we heard," Randle said, "was living in a trailer near Carlsbad. He's from there. He's an irascible old man."
Meanwhile, another witness has come forward to fill the gap, adding a weight of new evidence to Randle and Schmitt's new book. His name is Frank J. Kaufmann, although he is called "Steve MacKenzie" in the book. Kaufmann served in the Army in Roswell until 1945, and then stayed on in some paramilitary capacity. He saw the craft firsthand, he says, when he took part in a secret search for it, accompanied by high-ranking officers on a reconnaissance mission through the desert. His name withheld and his face blurred for his first television appearance, Kaufmann pointed out the actual impact site during a Roswell segment of "48 Hours" aired on April 3, 1994.
Secrecy, or shyness -- or both -- still characterizes Kaufmann, who parcels out his story in installments, like a staged rocket. Nonetheless, he invited me to interview him in his Roswell home. Surrounded by his oil paintings of landscapes, he described the spaceship he saw as being shaped like a wingless airplane, not a round saucer. It was stuck at an angle in a sandy hill. Though still intact, it had popped a side seam, and through this portal he could see the bodies.
"I did everything in the world to try to block it out of my mind," Kaufmann said of the image that still haunts him. "I kept that secret till a few years ago, when Randle and Schmitt came to me. I made them wait a year before I gave them anything. I just told them a little even now. I just told them the outside version." I understood him to mean that he had more to reveal, but could not risk the consequences of telling all, and also feared being branded a kook.
Since Kaufmann offered no documentation for the secret group he said he'd belonged to, or of the debriefing where he was sworn to secrecy -- and how could he be expected to produce evidence of such things? -- I had to rely on my instincts to judge him credible or otherwise. As I listened to his account of the quickly deteriorating alien bodies, I believed his anguish to be real, though the story did not convince me the event had taken place. When he mentioned that he had personally spoken to Wernher von Braun (the Nazi German rocket whiz who brought the V-2 to White Sands) about the events at Roswell, he tipped the balance for me. I could not follow him that far.
Kaufmann is to Randle and Schmitt what Gerald Anderson is to Stanton Friedman. Strong ties bind each Roswell researcher to his star witness, forsaking all others. I have even heard the researchers attack each other's witnesses -- and one another -- with insults the likes of "flaming ass," "clown," and "liar." Within the community of Roswell researchers, angry contention surrounds the discussion of conflicting crash sites, the descriptions of saucers, as well as the number, condition, and appearance of recovered aliens. Try as Randle does to portray the dispute as a scientific debate -- on a par with paleontologists wrangling over the precise shape of a Brontosaurus head -- the rancor weakens the arguments on all sides.
Star Witness
The sole witness who remains everyone's darling is Glenn Dennis, a mortician at a Roswell funeral parlor during the late 1940s. Since Dennis never claimed to see the crashed craft, his story meshes well with all other accounts.
Dennis remembered that fateful July 4 weekend (now changed to the middle of the following week, according to his most recent recollections) as the time he received several unusual phone calls from the base mortuary officer. One inquiry concerned the availability of child-size caskets. (The aliens, all witnesses agree, were as short as ten-year-old children.) In another call, Dennis said he was asked about preservation techniques for deteriorated bodies, and also about the effects of embalming fluids on bodily fluids such as blood and stomach contents. Even more startling, Dennis recalled, an Army nurse at the base told him tearfully how she had been ordered by visiting doctors to assist at the autopsy of three mangled aliens. The nurse had been sworn to secrecy, and she made Dennis give her an oath that he would never reveal her identity.
Dennis, now vice president of the two-year-old International UFO Museum and Research Center in Roswell, no longer grants interviews with the news media. These days he speaks only to Karl T. Pflock of Placitas, New Mexico, who has interviewed him for OMNI in the article titled Roswell: Star Witness.
Pflock is a former employee of the CIA. While living in Washington in the 1960s, he became active in NICAP (National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomena) -- an early pro-UFO study group founded in 1956. Before moving to New Mexico, Pflock worked as a congressional staff member, and served four years, from 1985 to 1989, as a deputy assistant secretary of defense. He traces his lifelong interest in UFOs back to his own childhood sighting of one. He is married to Mary Martinek, a senior staffer in the Albuquerque office of Congressman Schiff -- the same U.S. representative who requested the GAO study of the Roswell Incident.
Pflock believes Dennis's testimony is the key to the conundrum in Roswell.
"I'm firmly convinced Glenn is telling the absolute truth as he remembers it," Pflock told me, after making short shrift of the testimony of other witnesses. (Pflock on Kaufmann: "His story has evolved over the years. How could anyone be comfortable accepting it?" Pflock on Ragsdale: "Ragsdale claims he and his friend saw the flaming craft drop out of the sky during a violent thunderstorm, yet local newspaper weather forecasts and reports for July 4 say nothing about significant lightning or thunderstorm activity in the Roswell vicinity.")
The key to the Dennis testimony, as revealed in his OMNI interview, is the long-lost nurse -- how he met up with her on base while aliens were being autopsied; how he met with this same nurse the following day over lunch at the Officers' Club on the base; and finally, how she vanished, never to be heard from again.
Indeed, Roswell researchers have claimed that five other nurses at the base also vanished -- hinting foul play or destruction of military records. However, all have since been tracked down by OMNI reporter Paul McCarthy (see the article titled Roswell: The Case of the Vanishing Nurses), and shown to have led eventful lives after the Roswell Incident. All except Dennis's nurse, who remains at large.
Dennis gave her name to Pflock as Naomi Maria Selff. But Pflock concedes that he has been unable to find any records of her presence at Roswell Army Air Field in July 1947 -- or anywhere else, for that matter.
"Similarly," writes Pflock, "no record of her family has been located. The search continues, but so far, she seems to have disappeared without a trace."
Another possibility is that all efforts to find her have failed because she does not exist. Or she goes by a different name. Los Angeles obstetrician Richard Neal, who investigates UFO events for a hobby, has been hot on Naomi's trail since 1990, when he learned her name from Friedman. In a recent conversation with Dennis, Neal told me, the mortician hinted that Naomi's last name wasn't really Selff.
"From what I gather," said Neal, "Selff was just a name to throw off the researchers." If so, the ploy has certainly succeeded.
Naomi by any other name aside, Dennis's version of the Roswell Incident is singular in regard to the atmosphere at the scene of the action. As he tells it, the Army base was jumping that July afternoon he first sensed something out of the ordinary. Dennis saw Army ambulances parked outside the hospital, chock-a-block full of strange purplish debris, and MPs milling about, even before he encountered the hubbub inside the hospital. But former public relations officer Walter Haut, Dennis's friend of 40 years, who was at his desk on the base that day, recalls no unusual activity whatsoever -- except for Colonel Blanchard's asking him to issue a press release about a flying saucer.
There's Even a Museum
As soon as I got to Roswell, I visited Walter Haut, now 72, and to all appearances extremely robust, clear-headed, and affable. I met him at the new International UFO Museum and Research Center, of which Haut is president -- and, as I mentioned earlier, Dennis is vice president. This museum, right across from the courthouse on Main Street, opened its doors in October 1992. It is the second such institution to take advantage of tourist interest in the Roswell Incident. The older (by six months) UFO Enigma Museum, on the outskirts of town, features a life-size diorama of the crashed saucer, complete with flashing lights, soft-sculpture alien figures in the sand, and a rifle-toting store mannequin in an MP uniform.
I was pleased that Haut spent two hours talking to me, since he is about as busy as he can be making television and radio appearances, granting press interviews, presenting after-dinner talks, and running the new museum, which is open every afternoon, and has already welcomed more than 44,000 visitors from all 50 states and 54 foreign countries. On broadcasts, he said with a weary sigh, he has been asked everything "except whether I wear boxer shorts or jockey shorts." On occasion, the local police dispatcher awakens him in the night to check out a reported sighting by a concerned citizen.
"I think 99.9 percent of the time such things are explainable," said Haut, who recently had to convince a young policeman that what he identified as a UFO was actually the bright star Sirius -- and that it appeared to be moving across the sky because the earth was turning.
I asked the obvious question: "Is Roswell the .1 percent?"
Long pause. I thought I saw Haut torn between his down-to-earth training as a navigator and bombardier, and his public duty as museum president.
"I would guess so," he conceded at length. "Maybe .005 percent."
On a Haut-guided tour of the premises, I was surprised to find two dozen copies of my book on radio astronomy, Is Anyone Out There?, prominently displayed in the gift shop, cheek by jowl with titles such as UFO Crash at Roswell, not to mention souvenir Frisbees, hats, T-shirts, key chains, string ties, earrings, and even guitar picks emblazoned with the features of dark-eyed aliens. (I bought three of these for my son, the gilt flying-saucer earrings for my daughter.)
"Walter, do you recognize my name?" I asked him, pointing proudly to the book's cover.
"Well, I'll be," he replied. "I don't think we sell too many of those."
Undaunted, I asked Haut about the original press release, without which there would be no Roswell Incident even now -- no matter how hard Stanton Friedman tried to breathe life into the event. The press release had generated the newspaper articles and wire stories that linked the U.S. Army Intelligence Office of the 509th to a flying saucer crash near Roswell. Those reports had given the Roswell Incident a greater reality than any other sighting report. Haut seemed to know this, too, for he had souvenir copies of the front pages of the Roswell Daily Record from July 8 and 9, 1947 on sale in the gift shop. They were the only genuine relics in the whole museum. "All my information came from Colonel Blanchard," Haut reiterated.
"When Blanchard talked to you about what to say, did he use the words `flying saucer'?" I asked. "Did he seem to be frightened?"
"I've got an experience coming up in the latter part of March," Haut said by way of reply. "They're going to hypnotize me."
"They" turn out to be Randle and Schmitt -- with help from the Center for UFO Studies, eager to plumb Haut's memory on the chance that anything else of note actually occurred.
"I do not remember the minute details," Haut told me. "I feel that I've had a pretty full life, and how the colonel passed that information on to me I cannot honestly tell you. I don't know whether he called me on the phone and said, `Haut, I want you to put out a press release and hand deliver it to the local news media. Here's what I want in it.'
"Or," Haut continued, "the adjutant might have called and said, `Haut, the old man's got a press release he wants you to pick up and take it around town.' "
When I pressed Haut about the authorship of the release, he answered frankly: "I cannot honestly remember whether I wrote it, whether he had given me the information and told me `This is what I want in it.' It was not that big a production at that time, in my mind."
I couldn't believe that. Wouldn't a flying saucer have been a pretty spectacular find?
"Well, there were quite a few reports of flying saucers at that time," Haut reminded me. "I had a multitude of hats I wore. I had all kinds of things to do. I asked my wife, when all this [the renewed interest in Roswell in the mid 1980s] started, `Do you remember me coming home and saying anything about it?' "
Her reply, he recalled, was simply no.
Conspiracy!!
Haut's spin on the events seems to take the wind out of the cover-up theory. In and around Roswell, however, people now believe in the cover-up conspiracy as much as any other part of the incident, sometimes mentioning "the government" and "the military" with rolling eyes and in hushed tones, as though they were the KGB. The clerk at the hotel where I stayed while in Roswell gave voice to this comparison: "We talk about the Russians," she said. "People should know the things that go on in our own country."
In books and on television specials, when the usual Roswell suspects are rounded up and trotted out, the likes of Lydia Sleppy and Frankie Rowe recite the threats they received from the FBI and the military police. Sleppy was trying to send a teletyped news report from the local radio station when the bureau interrupted her transmission and signaled her not to complete it. She obeyed and never complained till Friedman found her years later. Rowe tells how her father had been summoned to the crash site with other members of the Roswell Fire Department, and later told her he saw two body bags and one live "very small being" near the wreckage of some kind of flying craft. She subsequently heard rumors that the being was being taken to the base hospital, and that it walked in on its own. She couldn't divulge any of this, however, she told Randle and Schmitt, because "The Air Force or the Army or the military came up to our house and told us we could never talk about this. As far as we were concerned, the whole incident never happened."
These were two of the "witnesses" the Air Force and I chose not to interview. The reason: Neither one had seen anything firsthand. In the annals of Roswell research, however, a person who has heard a rumor about the incident may attain the status of "witness."
Anatomy of a Weather Balloon
A deft step in the cover-up purportedly occurred at Fort Worth Army Field, soon after Marcel landed there on July 8. According to Randle and Schmitt, Marcel spread out the debris on the floor of General Ramey's office, the better to see it all. Then Marcel and Ramey left the room briefly. By the time they reentered, accompanied by press photographers, the strange material had disappeared. In its place was a shredded weather balloon. Ramey, who has been accused of ordering this quick switch, summoned his weather officer, Irving Newton, to identify the weather balloon as a weather balloon. Then Ramey fielded all the reporters' questions so that Marcel didn't get to say a word.
In a telephone interview with Newton, who lives in San Antonio, Texas, General Ramey's weatherman assured me that nobody had pulled a fast one on Marcel.
"I remember Marcel chased me all around that room," Newton said. "He kept saying things like, `Look at how tough the metal is,' `Look at the strange markings on it.' He wouldn't have made such a big effort to convince me the thing was extraterrestrial if he thought we were looking at a weather balloon."
"But you knew it was a weather balloon with a radar wind target -- a Rawin -- no question?" I asked.
"I was adamant," Newton concurred. "I said I'd eat it with salt or pepper if it wasn't a Rawin."
Newton added that Marcel should never have been faulted for failing to recognize the balloon and its attachments, since he would not have come in contact with meteorological apparatus.
"There was nothing to it," Newton concluded of the debris. "I went back to work and forgot about it."
Something of a small cover-up seems to have taken place, however, sanctioned by the Air Force, in order to disguise the military purpose of the balloon.
On July 10, 1947, the day after the "emptying" of the Roswell saucer, a full explanation of the "flying disc" appeared in the Alamogordo News. It described a press briefing that had helped reporters understand what all the fuss was about in Roswell. The story included an elaborate description, plus photo, of the balloon-borne corner radar reflector that the Army believed had crashed on the sheep ranch. Elements of the description published in this article matched key points in the accounts of both Marcel and the rancher Brazel. To wit: The balloons trailed "paper triangles covered with tinfoil and held rigidly by small wooden strips."
Marcel had said the longest pieces of woodlike material were about three or four feet. The article said, "These corner reflectors . . . are about 48 inches across." Marcel had found something porous on the debris field, and everything lightweight. "It is very light and is towed by a synthetic rubber balloon made of neoprene," the article offered.
Such devices were being launched at Alamogordo and all over the nation, the article continued, for radar target practice. Thus the article gave the impression that the balloons were as common as kites.
Eyes Only: Project Mogul
In reality, however, the particular balloon equipment the Air Force now says landed at Roswell as part of the top-secret Project Mogul was not at all common. It was a train of 23 meteorological balloons in two 650-foot-high strings that were, in essence, a forerunner of today's spy satellites. It belonged to an experimental effort to monitor nuclear bomb tests from the air. Everything about Project Mogul, the Air Force said in its recent report, was classified top secret with the highest priority -- Priority 1A, on a par with the ultimate hush-hushedness of the Manhattan Project. And although Project Mogul ceased in 1950, after just four years of operation, it retained its top-secret status until the early 1970s. Even its name was a secret.
"I didn't know till three years ago it was called Mogul," confessed Charles B. Moore, professor emeritus of atmospheric physics at the New Mexico Institute of Mining and Technology in Socorro, who served in the New York University part of the project as its engineer. Whatever the name of the project, its raison d'etre, according to Moore, was the "tremendous concern" on the part of the United States that the Soviets were developing nuclear weapons for use against us, much like the ones that had ended the war with Japan in just eight days. Mindful of that danger, scientists in the Long Range Detection Program (eventually known as Project Mogul), tried to eavesdrop on the world for the telltale sounds of clandestine bomb tests.
Moore believes that both Blanchard and Ramey were ignorant of the program when they made their public comments about the weather balloon -- although they were probably informed after the fact. For this reason, Moore said, neither one of them should be accused of participation in a cover-up.
A Bus by Any Other Name
"If you see a bus and you say it's a bus," Moore explained to me, "it's still a bus -- even if it's being used to haul concrete."
The particular piece of Project Mogul that sparked the Roswell Incident, Moore thinks, was a test flight launched from Alamogordo on June 4, 1947. History of the project goes like this: The NYU group had tried to monitor an explosion at Helgoland, an island off the German coast, from Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. But when high winds prevented the launch of the monitoring balloon from Bethlehem, the Army Air Force scientists moved the operation to Alamogordo where they planned to track the balloons using the radar. To aid in the tracking, the NYU group took with them some special radar targets that had never been used before in New Mexico. One of the interesting features of these new targets is that they were reinforced with Scotch tape on which a pinkish-purple abstract flower design had been printed. Reportedly, the first targets with the new design had failed when they were flight-tested near the end of W.W.II, so a quick fix was devised for the later targets, using the only tape immediately available.
The first balloon train launched from Alamogordo was NYU Flight #4. Apparently, according to radar signals, it was lost over the town of Arabela, New Mexico, about 70 miles northeast of Alamogordo. Flight #5, launched on June 5, 1947, was tracked as well. Military records show that this flight ascended to 60,000 feet and then landed 26 miles east of Roswell.
Runic Designs
The runic designs on the tape seem to answer the longstanding question about the pastel-colored markings on the original debris -- Marcel's hieroglyphics, which had been described by other witnesses as "Chinese writing," "figures," "numbers in a column that didn't look like the numbers we use at all," and "different geometric shapes, leaves, and circles."
Credit for first tying the latter-day Roswell Incident to Project Mogul goes to independent researcher Robert Todd of Ardmore, Pennsylvania. Todd, originally a believer in UFOs, has abandoned 20 years' work as a UFOlogist in the wake of his discovery.
"I'm satisfied with Mogul as the solution," Todd told me. "I don't think Jesse Marcel had ever seen a radar target."
The Air Force, giving first credit where it's due to Todd, also acknowledges that Glenn Dennis confidante Karl Pflock, much to his credit as a researcher, independently came to the same Mogul-Roswell conclusion. Let the flowered tape fall where it may, Pflock still thinks Glenn Dennis is the real glue holding the incident together. Because in Pflock's scenario, the UFO that crashed and killed its alien crew may have collided with the ill-fated Mogul balloon -- or went out of control while trying to avoid a collision.
"Whatever the exact circumstances," Pflock concludes in his report, "an encounter between some sort of crewed vehicle and one of Charlie Moore's unwieldy monsters may have brought both down."
In other words, Mogul is not enough to account for the full-blown Roswell Incident. Thus the Air Force report, and the Times page-one story that announced it, have already been dismissed out of hand as "garbage" (Friedman's word) by aficionados of Roswell.
"I just have one comment about it," said Walter Haut, repeating to me what he'd already told the Times: "All they've done is given us a new balloon."
But I had a higher opinion of the Air Force investigation. It was clearly written and internally consistent. And when I questioned Lieutenant James McAndrew, the historian whose research supports the findings, he was more forthcoming than I could have hoped, and had more knowledge at his military fingertips than in all the books by Friedman, Randle, and Schmitt.
"About Frank Kaufmann," McAndrew interjected as politely as he could. "He has no records at St. Louis." McAndrew was referring to the National Personnel Records Center, the repository of all past and present military personnel records (the place where OMNI ultimately tracked down the five "missing" Roswell nurses). If Kaufmann wasn't on file there, then either his records had been destroyed in a fire that ravaged the place 22 years ago -- or he never really served in the Army. "The fact is," Kaufmann declares, "I did serve and was honorably discharged in October of 1945."
It didn't matter to me any more whether Kaufmann had ever worn a uniform. All I wanted was to see his alleged crash site out near the new Trans-Western natural gas pipeline. Kaufmann had warned me I'd never find it myself, and never make it without four-wheel drive. All I had was an economy-class rental car and a broken tape recorder. So I was very happy to discover a flyer on the bulletin board in my motel, announcing that the impact site near Roswell, "Home of the UFO Incident of 1947," was available for viewing. The pink paper showed a picture of a flying saucer with a phone number to call for information and reservations.
Hub Corn
I met Herbert ("Hub") Corn the next morning, as arranged, at a mile marker on the highway leading north out of Roswell. Corn, a cordial young sheep rancher driving a workhorse pickup truck with two herding dogs in its bay, had agreed to chauffeur me to the spot for $15. He asked me to sign a release, drawn up for him by a lawyer, agreeing that I would not hold him responsible for injuries I might incur from, among other things, "snakes, scorpions, cactus, lizards, and other wild animals" on the Hub Corn Ranch or crash site.
"You're joking about the scorpions, right?" I asked him.
"They're not a problem this time of year," Hub replied, smiling. "And my dogs'll take care of the rattlesnakes."
As we bumped slowly over the not-quite-road to the site, Hub told me he hadn't realized he owned the spot where the saucer had landed until he met Randle and Schmitt, who took Kaufmann's word that this must be the place. He seemed interested but removed from the event. It had happened long before he was even born. And he struck me as too savvy a rancher, too close to his land, to think that a tourist attraction -- even one of this magnitude -- would ever replace his real work of raising lambs for market and shearing sheep of their wool. Still, he's been improving the road in anticipation of the tour buses that will no doubt come this summer, especially during the first week of July, which Roswell Mayor Tom Jennings has proclaimed "UFO Awareness Week." In another two years, when the fiftieth anniversary of the Roswell Incident rolls around, who knows what the traffic will bear?
Hub stopped on a flat stretch, as close as he could get to the hill where "it" had happened. Unlike the great mesas that poke their flat heads far above the desert floor, this elevation was not at all outstanding. It looked too low to get in any low-flying aircraft's way, so far as I could tell, although it might break the fall of a crashing one.
We walked through the chayote and prickly pear, talking about sheep prices and flying saucers, until we reached the dried-out stream bed at the foot of the hill.
"What we really need is some rain," said Hub.
I stared up and down Roswell's field of dreams. I let myself imagine the storied scene in all its glory. With pleasure, I found that in that spot, the incident raised a few goosebumps on my flesh, sent a shiver or two down my spine. Predictably, I didn't see anything to set this spit of sand apart from the rest of the desert -- no vestige of wreckage, no markers where the bodies might have lain or the MPs could have thrown up their barricades. Yet, I felt happy and somehow privileged to be there, close to the heart of the mystery. "Even if this didn't happen," I remembered an author saying in the introduction to a novel, "it's true anyway."
(Originally appeared in OMNI Vol. 17, No. 8, Fall 1995)
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